Well Played 2.0 in the second book in the Well Played series, edited by Drew Davidson. In these series, different authors analyze the experience of playing different games. I chose Mario 64 because it is a game that opened my eyes to the magic of 3D adventures. In the piece I attempt to explain why the game feels so timeless and reflect on the reasons why it holds a special place in my heart. Hope you enjoy it!

Read it here.

Quick! Get those multipliers!

These bonuses disappear rather fast, which means that you have to act quick if you want to get those extra points. It also means that sometimes you spot a bonus, shoot a ball at it and watch it disappear before the shot reaches it.

So unfair!

Except it’s not. The game has the incredibly good sense of letting the bonus linger invisibly on the ball for a small period of time, so that the player will still get the bonus if it disappears while the shot is in mid-air – or if even if it it disappears just before the player takes the shot. The bonus might not be visible, but the audio and visual feedback remain.

No doubt that the spirit behind this mechanic is to be extremely forgiving with players in the social space. PopCap knows that there is no room in that space for unforgiving mechanics, and they clearly design their games (especially the Facebook versions) with that in mind. In turn the player, instead of feeling cheated, feels a sense of accomplishment for making the shot in the last possible second.

Speaking specifically to the Lairs, there were moments where the obvious “structure” of the levels you’re supposed to traverse in game terms melted away into completely organic environments, which I could then navigate intuitively. That happened in Uncharted 2 quite often, and it alters your brain function. i think that if I try to recall these places in the future, I might recall them as places I’ve been.

Pretend that you don’t mind the privacy issues or the fact that Facebook is easily one of the world’s biggest repositories of personal information.

Pretend that the Facebook future isn’t creepy. It’s exciting.

And then embrace the Facebook Card. Wait, the what?

The Facebook Card is surely coming. It needs to be in the works as we speak. I demand that its existence be more than merely a product of my imagination. The premise is simple: Facebook Credits have a potential of becoming an equivalent of PayPal. Everybody uses Facebook, so we are all only one click away from using Facebook Credits. If the point of sale at your local Starbucks is wired to the Facebook system, all you need to do is swipe your Facebook Card and pay with FB Credits. It’s no more complicated than using a gift card or a debit card.

First step toward the FB Card is then its approximation to the PayPal model. The Internet is quickly adopting Facebook Connect, linking your profile to comments on blogs and letting you “like” news stories all over the web. It would only make sense then that a checkout option for online purchases became Facebook Credits. Recharge the credits from your Facebook page and use them to pay for goods all over the web.

But, you might think, PayPal already does this and it has not managed to get widespread implementation on the “real” world – the physical world. However, Facebook is more than just the credits – it is already a very real, tangible part of our everyday life.

The number one reason to believe that Facebook could succeed in creating the new form of real-world payment is that, as I mentioned before, we already have a Facebook account. Give any user $5 in FB credits just for making their first purchase and you already have a big enough incentive for a big chunk of your user base to adopt, or at least try out, the payment system. Some companies, for example, are already  offering deals that grant Facebook Credits in exchange for follows and re-tweets.

Next up is Facebook Places. This feature is already integrated enough with mobile such that it is quite simple to “check in” to a location and reap a reward in the form of a discount or a recurring visitor deal. If my Facebook Card is linked to Places, then it can auto-check me in when I pay with it, give me the discount automatically and even tag me in a post in the process – granted that I gave it all of these permissions in advance. In turn the Facebook Places database will become much richer and its user base largely increased. Tasti D lite already does this with their rewards card, which automatically checks you in to Foursquare and Tweets on your behalf when you make a purchase.

After that come the marketing opportunities. As a customer, the targeted offers you encounter online will become exponentially more relevant. Retailers will be able to ask Facebook to target their ads at people who shop at specific locations or specific times, who spend an amount of money in a specified range, who travel a lot, have spent money on several US states, are tagged in pictures in specific European cities, have at least X friends in a determined age range, have children, are married, have been in a specific number of relationships, held their current relationship for at least a year of have spent at least 6 months without entering a relationship, users who log in mostly on weekends or that tend to drink draft beer in bars. You name it.

In other words, Facebook will be able to correlate your personal information, shopping data, location data, personal connections, close and not-so-close friends, page and article likes, tagged pictures and posts, games you play and much more and offer deals and ads that are relevant to one or more of these experiences.

I see the Facebook Card as the logical next step – the enabler for this outbreak. It is the perfect coming-together of Facebook’s latest initiatives: Credits and Places. It is also a platform to greatly enrich their databases with relevant user information that can be leveraged into revenue. And, on top of that, it is a direct line into becoming a solidified constant in our lives.

Can you see it coming?

Embrace it! Isn’t it exciting?

Let’s start with an exercise: imagine a game. It’s a card game. A card game you’re supposed to play in teams of 2 vs. 2, where points are wagered and each match, which consists of several independent games, is played to 24 points. A match can end in one game just as likely as it can end in 5, 8 or 15. It’s a game where cheating is allowed, and getting caught costs you points. It’s a game where you’re supposed to shout, where you’re allowed to curse your opponent’s whole ancestry, question his intelligence and mock his inability to beat you, bang your hands on the table and throw your cards face up when you’ve won a hand. It’s a game where the winner is the toughest, the smartest, the quickest and wisest. If you’re actually attempting this exercise, then most probably your imagination has imploded by now. Unless you’re from Venezuela or some other Latin American country – because in that case you know very well that I’m talking about Truco.

Truco is a very popular game amongst college students in Caracas, Venezuela. That’s where I grew up and so that’s where I first heard of it, but Its origins are more than likely traced way south, to Argentina. Truco is unlike any game you have ever played. Because Truco is, above everything else, the perfect distillation of Latin American culture into game form.

Not so long ago, I spent four months living in a European city. As a designer, I paid a lot of attention to the design differences that surrounded me – starting with the way the toilets worked and going all the way to employee behavior in amusement parks -, the question in my mind always the same: could I design for this culture? The answer would undoubtedly be tied to my ability to understand the thinking process of that particular culture. But what interested me most wasn’t the answer, it was the problem.

In a way, by looking at Truco I am trying to reverse engineer this problem: it is a game that no American designer could have thought of, as it is also a game that is shaped by the people who play it, a sort of chameleon game that takes on the characteristics of each culture. If a game of soccer is exactly the same from Buenos Aires to Leningrad, a game of Truco can be entirely different from my game table to the neighbor’s.

Truco is, among other things, the king of house rules, and every match inevitably starts with the setting of clear conditions and very likely develops at some point a discrepancy upon some obscure rule that got left out of the starting negotiations – most likely on purpose by one of the parties.

Truco must be played with a partner, and every game involves exactly 4 people. Open communication is essential and even though secret hand signals can be frowned upon by some, they are definitely allowed.

Truco is also a game of deception, not at all unlike Poker. In fact, the closest you can probably come to describing Truco in American game terms is that it is like Poker with a partner. Like Poker, Truco is at its best when playing for real money, or with real, tangible stakes of some sort. Also, if you think you’ve seen bad cases of taunting while playing poker, it is only because you’ve never seen a game of Truco.

In Truco, it is usual to metaphorically wager your opponent’s mom’s underwear.

At this point you might be thinking that Truco is an immature game – a game not really worth your time. But if you’ve ever been sitting down at the Truco table, holding a Perico and on the receiving end of an Espadilla-powered taunt, watching all those insults come at you and putting on your best thinking-very-hard-about-this face, then you know that is not the case. Because when that Espadilla is dropped, there is a surge of infinite emotion that flows through your heart and to your fingers as you pick up your card with one hand, lick your other one so that you can wet your forehead and stick your Perico on it for your now-inifinitely-ashamed opponent to bask upon. In the realm of Truco, you are not being immature – you are God.

What makes the game special, though, what brings it to the next level is that at its core it is an extremely smart and complex game. Truco‘s sometimes inexplicably complicated rules, mixed with its streetwise aura make it so that players usually find themselves on the scenario of trying to decode an extremely complicated play while making sure their opponent is not cheating, or of trying to solve relatively complex probability problems while being on the receiving end of an endless taunt precisely about their inability to reach a satisfying conclusion to said problem.

Truco is just one example out of many games of this type that populate the world. Some of these games can be taught to anyone and will make perfect sense to any stranger. But others, like Truco, have been so deeply changed by the personality of the region that they are basically designed for and by the culture itself. I wouldn’t know how to begin to explain the rules of the game to my non-Venezuelan friends; and it wouldn’t make much sense to do so, since a big part of the game’s magic are the murky areas where the different versions of the rules everyone knows don’t overlap. I will continue to associate Truco with my home country forever; and I’m happy knowing that if I’m sharing a Truco game with three friends (or strangers) then home can’t be too far away.

Even if I still have to pay for the ticket, if there is no deal or discount attached, if all it is is a letter with the announcement that the park is now open – I would still get the chills. Because a lot of us once upon a time wondered what it would be like to get a letter like that – what it would be like to set foot in the Hogwarts castle.

Universal – get on it!

A letter from Hogwarts

Bow in hand, my super hot archer-chick was standing there, looking at her adventuring party. A mix of races, classes and personalities. These weren’t just any characters, these were the dudes and girls that had stood by her as she kicked butts across all corners of a an entire continent. Her friends, her allies. And I could not care less about most of them.

The game in question is Dragon Age: Origins, which is one of those games that really make a point of the player exploring dialogue options and getting to know their party. And I did! I crafted pretty close relationships with the two party members that I liked the most. They told me their deepest secrets, I completed their special side quests and my character even forged a strong sentimental relationship with both of them: one romantic, one friendly. But me? I just did not care.

And as I finished the game and turned it off, I wondered why it was so easy for me to eject the disc, why these ultra-developed characters couldn’t do for me what the 2D sprites of Chrono Trigger‘s characters could. When I killed Morrigan’s mom, who turns into a freaking dragon, I was excited during the battle (it was a pretty difficult battle) and little more. But when I traveled to the past in Chrono Trigger to save Lucca’s mom, by heart was beating so fast that I almost got the code to stop the killer machine wrong.

My impression is that it has to do with over-developing a character. In Chrono Trigger, party members speak just enough for the player to get a good idea of their personality. All of them are honest, and none of them is pretentious in their development. They don’t have incredible, epic backstories. In Dragon Age, however, I could barely stand Alistair’s humor an hour after I met him, so I stopped talking to him. Which made him become even more obnoxious. And as far as backstories go, one is the bastard child of the king, another is the daughter of the most epic witch to have ever existed, the other used to be a bard, then became a missionary, now wants to be a bard again… heck, I would have added the dog to the party if I didn’t find the idea of my dog fighting at my side so ridiculous.

The risk with developing such rich characters is that all of them, because they are meant for the epicness of being part of your parties, will have strong personalities, intricate backstories and specific points of view. So, out of a room of 7 strong personalities, could you genuinely like 3 of them enough to hang out with them for 50 consecutive hours? Probably not. Yet you must if you want to play most hardcore RPGs.

This has led me to be increasingly displeased with the members of my parties in the RPGs I play (which, admittedly, aren’t that many). I can perfectly imagine the whiteboards in the design rooms, the spreadsheets filled with all of the character’s names and their views on different topics of the game. Maybe there’s even an email thread “What do you guys think Morrigan would think about the hero supporting this decision?“. And at the end, they come up with these very rich characters that at the same time feel hollow. A bunch of pixels and decision trees crammed into a virtual body. A party that falls into the uncanny valley.

These parties are so real, so planned, that they become unlikable. So yeah, Morrigan, I understand that you don’t agree with my wasting resources to save this dude so what’s that account to? A -2 to your “like me” meter? Sure. Sheesh, just give me Magus so he can be all quiet and smooth with his cape. Now that’s a dude I’d like to have in my party.

A place where a lot of these cultural differences become evident are theme parks. I knew from a visit to Disneyland Paris some years back that European theme parks were not the same as American ones – and I commented that to my friends on our way to Port Aventura, which is about an hour drive from Barcelona.

Some of the things that stand out the most. You’re not supposed to smoke in most of the park’s spaces, though everyone still does and nobody cares. They sell beer to guests and don’t ask for ID if you look like you’re old enough. Staff is extremely relaxed and not too concerned with everyone staying properly in line or standing exactly where they should.

Oh, and the Cookie Monster does not hesitate to pose with a beer glass.

Cookie Monster shares a drink with my friends.

]]> http://www.franciscosouki.com/designblog/2010/05/only-in-europe-theme-park-cast/feed/ 0 http://www.franciscosouki.com/designblog/2010/02/balli-plastici-presenting-feb-26th-italian-cultural-institute-in-washington-dc/ http://www.franciscosouki.com/designblog/2010/02/balli-plastici-presenting-feb-26th-italian-cultural-institute-in-washington-dc/#comments Tue, 23 Feb 2010 09:48:04 +0000 fsouki http://www.franciscosouki.com/designblog/?p=129 Balli Plastici will be presented in Washington DC at the Istituto Italiano di Cultura this coming Friday, February 26th, as part of the Fortunato Depero 50 exhibit.

The project was originally presented at the Museum of Art and Design in New York as part of the Performa 09 festival and has since obtained positive reviews from New York Magazine and the Art in America magazine.

You can learn more about the software we created and used to craft the performance here. You can learn more about the semester-long project here.

Be sure to check it out if you’re in the DC area!