I've been trying to figure out why the skill training in Eve-Online works. Not works in a general technical sense. That part is pretty trivial. But works as a game mechanic. That part is harder to pin down. Longish post. Read more below the fold.
On the surface, it actually looks not too far from the inestimable Progress Quest. You select the skill you want to learn. Say, “Missile Launchers, level 4”. The computer tells you how long this will take, and then sets about it. “2 days, 13 hours, 35 minutes”. And then does it. No further user input required.
No pressure either. If you get half way through, and say “Man, I wish I was learning Cybernetics 2 instead”, you just select Cybernetics. Your progress towards Missle Launchers 4 is saved. There is no penalty for switching as frequently or infrequently as you like. You lose nothing.
And thus are skills learned. No user further interaction required. Heck, you don't even have to be online as it trains. Players can (and often do) set up some complicated skill training, and then go on vacation, secure in the knowledge that it will be done when they get back.
For CCP, (the company behind Eve) this makes a lot of business sense. Since one of the costs of running a MMO is the bandwidth required to allow some crazy number of people to connect to your servers, if you can figure out a way where they can still feel like they're progressing, without actually using up bandwidth, then hooray! You've cut a cost!
The one seeming oversight in this is that you can't queue up skills. You can't pick a skill to train, and then another one to train when you're done. And while you can log in to their web page and see various stats about your characters (including what they're currently learning, and how long until they're done) you can't actually set new skills to learn from the web.
In fact, the only way to set a new skill to learn is to log into the game and set it. Of course, you can then log right back out again, but for changing skills, you have to be in the game, however briefly.
On the surface, this doesn't seem like much of a game. More like a minor mechanic in a larger game. And that's partly true. Skills feed in directly to the rest of the game of Eve, and underly almost everything you do. Without the appropriate skills, you can't fly ships, equip equipment, or manufacture goods. Nearly every action in the game proper has a tree of skill requirements behind it. In addition, many give passive bonuses to all manor of things, ranging from the strength of your shields, to the prices you get for selling things.
It's easy to see the game in flying your ship around and USING the skills you've learned. But what I've gradually come to realize is that, as passive as it seems, the act of learning skills is a game in and of itself. It's just harder to see because the game board isn't on the computer; the computer is just keeping score.
The revelation I've had recently is that the game the “skill game” resembles the most is actually Tetris. Except, the blocks are made out of TIME:
The optimizing part of my mind wants to be training skills as much as possible. In a very real way, the number of skills you've trained represents how “advanced” your character is. So it makes sense to try to always have a skill training at all times. And the optimum strategy then seems fairly straightforward: Whenever you finish a skill, you want to be there, ready to switch over to a new skill right away, since any time between when the first skill finishes, and the second begins, is “dead” time, that you're not getting anything for. (Which offends the part of my brain that loves to optimize, very much indeed.)
The problem, of course, is that the blocks of time necessary to learn skills don't align with the parts of my life when I'm around and available or willing to log in and change a skill over.
So I find myself with an interesting optimization problem. I have a number of skills in the game I can learn, each with an associated block of time. I might have some that take one hour, some that take 5 hours, some that take 9 hours, etc. And then I have to figure out (HAVE to figure out, the optimizing part of my brain demands it, in no uncertain terms!) how to align those in such a way as to line up with the rest of my life.
Like any person (who hasn't been consumed by the game utterly) there are certain boundaries that are inviolate.. I have to go to work most days. Sometimes I have to stay late. Sometimes I know I'll go out and hang out with friends afterwards. Sometimes I DON'T know I'll hang out with friends afterwards, but I suspect it might happen, I require 8-9 hours of sleep every night.
These things aren't changing. They are requirements that I'm not willing to sacrifice for the sake of a game. And they form a game board, of sorts.
“Ok,” my brain says. “We can work with this... So you know you won't be hanging with friends tonight because you want to work on your programming? Ok. Train the 9 hour skill, and change it when you get back. What? You're working late tomorrow? Set something that takes 22 hours before you go to bed tonight.”
And so on.
It really is rather Tetris-like when you think about in those terms. I'm given an irregular shaped board. I get an every-changing sequence of pieces of varying size. I'm rewarded for packing them together as tightly as possible. Except... the irregularly shaped board is my social life, and the game is played on a time scale that takes days or weeks.
It really is aimed squarely at whatever part of my brain loves tetris and games like it.
It makes me wonder, too. What other games could you build, that use something personal to the player as a sort of game board? I've heard about games that use the contents of your hard drive, or of random CDs, to generate levels or monsters. But this one feels unique because it's using things that aren't even directly connected to the computer. What other games could someone come up with that blur the line of “how far can a computer game reach?”
Neat stuff to think about at least, even if I haven't come up with any great ideas in that direction yet. It's still kind of inspiring to see how they managed to pull it off. I wonder if it was intentional.
No comments:
Post a Comment