Child’s Play, if you’re not aware of it, is a charity that gives video games, books, and toys to children’s hospitals. Any child unfortunate enough to be stuck in a hospital over the holiday season is low on optimism. A donation to Child’s Play isn’t going to cure a disease or get someone a transplant that they need, but it stands a good chance of making a sick child happier.

My wife and I have made this a holiday ritual since the charity was born in 2003, and it’s become one of our favorite parts of this time of the year.

Learn more at the charity’s About page, and when you’re done reading that, hit the main page to find your favorite hospital to support.

Please, be kind to some people you don’t even know. Even a little bit helps, and if you give then you will be awesome for doing so.

Child’s Play can make you awesome is from Groups of Words.

• Times Change
• Happy New Year and a New Design
• Ghostcrawler is Awesome
• Definition: Main vs Alt
• Death to Retail

Gúess.

Now, let me say this first: I’ve had enough experience with foreign language to appreciate that everyone doesn’t use the character set used by American English. I speak Spanish and a little German and Japanese. Many fine and wonderful languages use other characters. Mi hija es pequeña. I’m not talking about other languages at all, or the names that derive from the culture or history of other languages.

I’m talking about:

• Örion
• Vâlor
• Stêve

I groan every time I see one of these names. Is it just me?

It’s like everyone’s forgotten that these MMOs are basically text-muds with a fantastic graphics engine. Text is the heart of the mutliplayer experience! Your communication with every other player happens over guild chat, party chat, general chat, whispers. All text.

In a world where people sitting at a full keyboard still type for maximum efficiency:

• c u l8r
• o i c
• lol

… how does this extra typing work get in under radar?

Does everyone go out and memorize that ascii-code-136 is ê, that ascii-code-135 is ç, and so on? No! From the people I’ve talked to, they just don’t think that far ahead. They learn the codes for their name alone… to type when they’re making their character.

“Hey, I’ve got a friend who’d like to join us.”

“Cool, what’s the name?”

“Um… he’s gonna whisper you in a second.”

Because they can’t type the name.

“But how do you invite your husband to your group?”

“I never have to type it! He’s on my friends list.”

That sound is my brain popping.

I’ve talked to people who had to look up how to type the letters in their own name because they didn’t know how to type them.

Your character is a collection of experience you’ve had: stats, doodads, gear, whatever. Your character has a text name which people have to type in order to interact with you. Why are you going to increase the difficulty?

Request for Comments: I’m making a “global hierarchy of bad names” reference article, so please comment with some examples of bad names you’ve seen, and I’ll try to organize them. Not just swapped characters, but whatever gets under your skin in a name. Chucknorris, anyone?

Swâpped Letters in Namês is from Groups of Words.

• Bad Character Names
• Bad Guild Names
• Wrath Quickies
• Game Riding Shotgun
• Cooperative multiplayer overview

The multiplayer in RB would have been enough all by itself. Having my buddy over to jam on “March of the Pigs”? My wife singing “Call Me” at the top of her lungs? All of us laughing and cursing at how hard Boston music is to play and sing? You just can’t put a price on that.

(damn you Foreplay/Long Time! Daaaaaaamn Yooooou!)

But it’s not just the multiplayer–RB is simply better in every single way. The single-player game is better in RB. The note tracks are better. The graphics, the gameplay, the presentation, the customization, the buy-what-you-like content store, everything. I was blown away right out of the gate and the overall experience kept me locked for the months between then and now. It’s just more fun.

On a whim last night, I pried GH3 from the great videogame dusty-shelf-grave and gave it another try. You know what? Time has not been kind to GH3. Whatever nostalgia I felt was wiped out as soon as the cheesy graphics started up. Everything I remembered was true; GH3 is completely inferior. Even more so since I’ve been on Rock Band for months now. So the thought of Guitar Hero Aerosmith and Guitar Hero Def Leppard does nothing for me, even though I’m sure I would have fun in playing music from those bands. I’d rather buy the albums from Rock Band. And since I can’t have that due to exclusivity, I’ll just enjoy Nirvana’s Nevermind when it comes out.

I do enjoy the GH3 guitar more than the RB one (which is no big deal, since I play drums in RB). And there are maybe 10 GH3 songs that I desperately want on Rock Band: Barracuda, Even Flow, Rock and Roll All Nite, Ruby, etc. But that’s it. You don’t often see a competitor completely stomp the competition, but here you are.

I think that’s why Activision is desperately, blatantly ripping Rock Band for their own next Guitar Hero iteration. They might as well call it Guitar Hero: Rock Band.

Only Guitar Hero fans who haven’t tried Rock Band could still be fans of that game, and it’s just a matter of time before they do.

Rock Band is better than Guitar Hero is from Groups of Words.

• Cooperative multiplayer overview
• PS3 love
• Pixeljunk Eden is joy
• Fools, Silence, and Damage Reporting–supplemental
• Guild Strengthening via Personal Achievements

Then you somehow break it off. Whether you’ve extricated yourself via your own force of will or via external causes, you’re free of this person and you now have some ability to see this kind of situation coming again. When faced with future backsliding, eventually you either:

1. Realize that the number of seconds you have on this planet is finite, and perhaps regression sex-and-crazy this isn’t the best way to spend those seconds. You opt out from that person.
2. Let them back into your guild.

Big jump, but stay with me. I suspect that those of you who have walked both the dating road and the long-time guild member road see where I’m going with this.

You’ve got this guy, Bob, in your community who appears to be friendly/funny/talented and has learned to cleverly disguise his crazy. Bob knows how to sound aligned to the goals of your guild, because how hard is it to sound like that when said goals are likely written on your guild’s front page? Honestly, only the really thick people ever do anything stupid enough to warrant immediate kicking. Not Bob–he can seem like a good guild member… but at some point, you know from firsthand experience that he’ll will do one or more of the following:

• Feel justified in a broken give/take ratio
• Complain whenever they don’t get instantaneous service from guild resources, like officers and crafters
• Pick fights with people inside or outside the guild
• Beg for anything over /g, especially gold
• Be an embarrassment in public, like /trade, hurting your guild’s continuous recruitment efforts
• Make suggestions that involve a lot of work, not offer to help with execution, and then get pissed and complain
• Sow dissension
• Only participate when there’s a clear chance for personal reward/suggest large guild investments in their own personal improvement
• Speak in txtmsg like they’re not sitting at a keyboard (“y cant i come 2 ZA”)
• Link random people’s gear over /g with text-drool of how much they want that gear
• Tell Chuck Norris jokes or other completely played-out memes
• Freak out when they don’t get attention frequently enough

…or whatever it is that pushes your Button of Incompatibility. The fact that Bob is talented and/or funny and/or generous isn’t the question; it’s that he brings out the crazy in you. The experience of being in this Bob’s company makes the game unfun for you.

How do you personally deal with Bob? For me, a notice of silence followed by enforcement of silence works. “Bob, I wish you well but I’m going to do my best to avoid you.” No conversation after that is necessary. I’ve tried “having it out” and “an honest conversation”, but honestly an extended conversation about incompatibility, however you deliver it, isn’t necessary. You’re not going to enlighten this person. The equivalent of silence in MMORPGs is some variation of /ignore and refusal to group with this person. Do not break this silence for any reason. It works great!

If only it were that easy in MMORPGs.

The problem is that you’re in a guild. The pool of people around you on the server is mostly static and is certainly limited. Your friends in this guild–the ones whose company you seek out and that you’ve come to enjoy–are perfectly good people with the glaring exception that they don’t share your opinion on Bob. This person who you’ve concluded is a complete waste of your time, he doesn’t drive them nuts like he drives you nuts.

As long as Bob plays the game and you play the game, you’re going to exist in the same limited social circle. You’re going to be around him. You’re going to see him in the bank, he’ll be grouping with your friends. He might even still be in your guild! The only method of escape is server transfer, but that means leaving everything you enjoy about where you are. The vast majority of the time, this is an unacceptable solution.

So what happens? Drama, that’s what!

Now take this two way relationship that can happen between any two people and bring that to a group of ten people. Or forty! The odds of this happening between any two people is small, but the more people you add to the mix, the more likely you are that it’s going to happen. Add the variable of time and you can pretty much guarantee that it’s going not just happen to someone in your guild, but happen to you. No matter how good you try to be, drama happens.

This is why there’s always one thing you can count on in massively multiplayer games: Drama is Inevitable.

Drama is Inevitable is from Groups of Words.

• Guilds are not Businesses
• Officers should all have Tanks and Healers
• Return of the Mixed Blessing
• Everything is Always Moving
• Fools, Silence, and Damage Reporting–supplemental

That PS2 was good to us, both for that snowed-in weekend and the couple of years since. I’ve previously mentioned the number of cooperative multiplayer games that we enjoyed. The PS2 also had Katamari Damacy, one of the greatest games of all time. Also, any number of fighting games (Virtua Fighter/Soul Calibur), solid jrpgs (Disgaea), platformers (including the awesome and fun Ratchet and Clank series), video board/card games (cheers to Culdcept), and basically any single-player game you could ever want… as long as you could live without Zelda/Mario and Halo. Which we easily could.

(And as an aside, what’s the deal with Halo? The single-player game is completely average, and I’ve already played the Quake series and both the original and revised Counterstrike, which are better than Halo multiplayer. This is the same phenomenon that prevents me from enjoying any modern group-based reality show: I watched the first four seasons of The Real World during their original broadcasts. Everything else is a permutation or reaction to the original, with very little innovation. It just amazes me that in a world where Half-Life and its sequels exist that Halo can be that popular.)

So we got on the PS3 early, and it’s been even better to us than the PS2. Netflix plus Blu-ray plus excellent scaleup of normal dvds would have been enough to make it a good purchase. However, we’ve picked up a few games (Ratchet and Clank, Rock Band, Assassin’s Creed, Ninja Gaiden) that really make the system sing. There’s also the PlayStation store that has demos, downloadable content, and complete small games (Pixeljunk Monsters, Super Puzzle Fighter, Everyday Shooter) that are the perfect cost-to-joy ratio. It makes me smile when I come home from work and my wife is trying to rainbow a level on Pixeljunk Monsters.

And we got on PS3 early, before Sony dropped two things we’ve come to love:

1. Backwards-compatibility! So we still drop in our PS2 Culdcept and relax to old-school good fun. And I’m planning on picking up PS2 God of War 2 now that it’s a greatest hit.
2. Card readers. When I lost the cable connecting our camera to my computer, my early-rev PS3 had a card reader and USB capability that bailed us out. Not ideal, but got us by.

It’s an excellent media machine, with easy connection to my computer for browsing photos and watching avi’s. Going through your photo album on a big HDTV with company over was surprisingly satisfying. It’s my preferred way to show photos now. Also, Blu-ray won. The PS3 is the best blu-ray player in existance, and will continue to be so because of the frequent firmware updates.

People complain about the lack of a huge catalog of games, but honestly I’m a new dad, work a full time job, and have a WoW habit. I’m happy with a few excellent games.

PS3 gets a big thumbs up.

PS3 love is from Groups of Words.

• Cooperative multiplayer overview
• Pixeljunk Eden is joy
• Historicity and WoW
• Game Riding Shotgun
• The Offseason

The person who rides shotgun doesn’t have to focus on controls or the repetitive tasks that take up a lot of time on gaming. They focus on the big picture, missed details, and so on. If the game is something you’re both interested in, you combine to become something of a superplayer. For example, I can’t spot those hidden flags in Assassin’s Creed for the life of me, but she’ll pick out one that’s under a pile of hay, which is itself under a tarp… three miles away, through dense fog, around the corner. She spots the tiny corner of that flag, and we get closer to completing the game. In Pixeljunk Monsters, I point out that she tends to stand next to mobs, waiting for them to die, when she could be three steps away, upgrading a tower while she waited. And we get closer to getting a rainbow on that level. (Yes, you can play PJM with two players–and we often do–but when I get home from work and she’s playing, I don’t say, “Drop that and let’s play together.” I fix myself a drink.)

Game Riding Shotgun can be really fun, but the game has to be fun to watch, very well designed or compelling in some other way. So Assassin’s Creed is beautiful and has a good story, but a fighting game gets kind of boring when you’re not playing it, because it’s so repetitive. The original Disgaea had a really funny story and crazy fight animations.

In social games, there’s another angle. We started out in World of Warcraft with her riding shotgun. We designed characters together, chose which to play and where to level, which quests to do, and so on. (This is why most of my toons are women, and this is why I’m stuck with multiple high-level women toons now that she has her own account. I don’t know what everyone else’s excuse is.)

Probably the best benefit of someone riding shotgun in a social game like WoW is that our superplayer worked even better in conversation than it did in gameplay. Someone would speak (type) to us, and either of us could respond. I’m a fast typer, so the person on the other end didn’t know that we were two people unless we told them. So our superplayer ended up being 100% more funny than me alone. Our friends in WoW who learned that we were a “playing couple” became excited when my wife got a computer and an account. The downside for me was that when she got her own account, my perceived wit dropped by 50%. Well, maybe 55%. She’s pretty funny.

Riding shotgun has its benefits, and when there is a quality single-player game it can be a great time for both of you. I’m really looking forward to playing Portal with her game riding shotgun, as well as Disgaea 3 and trying our first Final Fantasy for the PS3, whenever that comes out.

Game Riding Shotgun is from Groups of Words.

• Pixeljunk Eden is joy
• Dynamic Duos
• Cooperative multiplayer overview
• The Pleasant Surprise
• Minipets are joy

After trying the beta, we were skeptical due to the amount of bugs. We didn’t have a lot of experience with beta versions, so we believed the company’s constant reassurances that they were ironing those bugs out. We figured this must be how it’s done. So my wife and I each got the Collector’s Edition of HGL, because the CE came with a minipet and we’re suckers for minipets. My best friend did, too. We’re all gamers, we were looking forward to dive into a new game that we could all play together.

Unfortunately, HGL sucked.

I could go into great detail explaining why it sucks, but to choose one iconic example, anytime you have around a 50% chance to lock up your machine (not your game, your machine) from ascending an escalator in the main city that you are frequently required to pass through… you should look into delaying the release of the game. This is just one problem of maybe 100 that were painfully obvious and stupid, and directly impacted gameplay. I started to keep a list, but gave up.

I’m sure there are many reasons that the game was released long before it was ready… no official word from the company, of course. From them, we got impassioned letters (now offline) to the community along the lines of “Seriously, we’re working as hard as we can to fix this!” However, their best intentions don’t mean that this pile of incomplete game fragments was worthy of trading for my perfectly functional pile of cash.

The game had frequent crashing, bugs of all kinds (gameplay, network, ui, game balance, controls, video, audio, you name it) that make it unplayable. An example: there’s a character class called Engineer which is the design cousin of a Marksman. A Marksman is your generic first-person shooter. The Engineer is just like the Marksman, except less effective but to compensate they get a robot pet whose equipment/upgrades vanish every time you log out… and a baseline pet has marginal utility. Whoops! Ha ha. They hadn’t got to fixing that by the time I left, which tells you something of the severity of other problems they had going on.

Meanwhile, the company continued to say tantalizing things about upcoming fixes (yay!) while trying to sucker people into their subscription scheme (what?!). Rule of thumb: don’t ask for more money until you’ve delivered on what you originally sold.

And speaking of the subscription: halfway through a horrible launch of an obviously unfinished game, with huge, obvious bugs that prevent the basic playing of the game, HGL comically barreled ahead with their first subscription event! This of course meant shutting off the world servers for a surprisingly long time because… something went wrong in switching on the event! On the bright side, due to lack of subscriptions (you don’t say!) they decided to make the first event free for everyone, not just subscribers. The event had something to do with Halloween, but one of the key parts was that you had to collect random pieces of crap to assemble into a new voodoo-doll minipet. Sweet! Let me give that a shot. Okay, I need 6, 3, and 1 pieces of different kinds of doodads. Hey, I’ve got my 6! Time passes. Hey, I’ve got my 3! End of game. Hey I’ve got 50 of what I need 6 of! These things stack in twos? What a pain in the ass. Time passes. Ok, I’ve owned a couple hundred of these things, and my inventory has to be cleared out all the damn time. Ok, I’m all set with this event, let me get back to the story… oh wait, I can’t avoid them? They’re everywhere! My inventory is at the mercy of voodoo doll doodads!

So there was hardly a part of the game that worked correctly and steadily. But wait, there’s more!

Never mind the broken game implementation, the company compounded this with broken game design. An example! As your character progresses, you can gain special abilities equivalent to talents in world of warcraft, and when you select certain abilities you unlock the ability to purchase even better special abilities. Pretty standard stuff. Unlike world of warcraft, however, these selections could never, ever be reassigned. Your character was locked into these choices for all time. Now, remember that the game was incredibly unbalanced in month one. Once they got over things like, you know, not crashing all the time and other core things, they were going to reexamine the gameplay and rebalance it. Part of this rebalance was an obvious reconfiguring/shuffling/overhauling the abilities… wow, so not only is it broken, but you’re telling me that I’m stuck with these beta versions? Gosh, I hope you give me a good character when you redesign me! The implicit answer is “This game is hardcore, just start over with a new character and then choose very carefully.”

Well, no. (By the way, are you crazy? I gave you money.)

And so, having seen the competition, my wife and I returned to the loving embrace of World of Warcraft, which is still fantastic and getting consistently better in virtually every way as it goes along. When I rebuilt/upgraded her computer and then mine, HGL didn’t get the reinstall. I’ve written off Bill Roper, Flagship Studios, Ping0, and of course everything to do with HGL. An amazing waste of money. In fact, this experience has become the hype cure-all:

“Wow, I’m really looking forward to D&D 4e,” I say. “Maybe I should preorder it.”

“You think it’ll be as good as HGL?” my friend says.

And I grumble while he laughs, and he’s right.

(Although I did preorder D&D 4e. Mearls for Overlord.)

Hellgate London sucks is from Groups of Words.

• Ghostcrawler is WoW Game Design Porn
• Minipets are joy
• Times Change
• Cooperative multiplayer overview
• Minipets are now weightless joy

My favorite cooperative multiplayer experience is probably old-school pen-and-paper roleplaying, which I could speak a nearly infinite amount talking about. But physically getting adults together on a regular basis is a limit function that approaches infinite pain. And my wife’s not into it.

Board games are a wonder of social, non-sport multiplayer gaming. My wife and I are down with BoardGameGeek, we own maybe a dozen excellent board games. We play them with our game-inclined friends whenever we get the chance, but unfortunately they require getting together in person, which is happening much less frequently now that we’re new parents. There are a great number of two-person board games, and we own and enjoy our share. Lost Cities is always a great time. The problem is that most two-person board games are competitive, which gets old faster than cooperative play for us. So while board games will always be an interest, cooperative video games get a lot more time.

The problem is that cooperative video games aren’t at all common. You can’t search based on it in any game engine that I’m aware of. You can occasionally search to find multiplayer games, but without the coop filter you pretty much get the ocean of shooters as your output. And on Gamespot, even with the coop filter you get an ocean of shooters.

We loved Baldur’s Gate: Dark Alliance on the PS2. The Gauntlet–style gameplay, done well, never gets old for either of us. We played straight through that game, as well as the crappy sequel and crappy knockoff that followed. Even crappy coop is good coop. Where’s a really good Gauntlet for my PS3? Don’t tell me that the crappy Rocketman is our best shot.

And yes, we tried Dark Kingdoms, as well as Lego Star Wars for the PS3. Actually, those two games failed for the same reason: poor camera behavior + coop + platformy jumping puzzles = utter frustration. The games were obviously designed for a single-player experience, and then coop was added on and mostly untested, because no human would suffer that level of frustration.

It’s not that the PS3 has no coop games. We’re loving Pixeljunk Monsters right now. The game’s so good that we’re going to purchase the expansion on day one of its release, and give a good look at the other games the company develops. Also, Rock Band is pure joy. We’ve got a two person band, and then a four person band for when our best friends come over. And it is so ridiculously fun.

There’s some good coop multiplayer on the PC, but unfortunately it requires the upkeep of two computers. We played through Titan Quest and the expansion. We tried Hellgate London, the horrible experience of which I’ll relate later. MMORPGs are excellent candidates, and World of Warcraft is the one for us. We’ve been playing it for years, and the game would never have lasted this long in our lives if we couldn’t play together. I wonder how much of these games is the social element; the ability to play with friends?

Why aren’t there more multiplayer cooperative games? Are me and my wife the only ones who love it? Or is our demographic that small? Are there other good duo or multiplayer games out for the PC or PS3 that I’m unaware of?

So game makers: chop chop! More cooperative games, please. My wife and I have money for you.

Cooperative multiplayer overview is from Groups of Words.

• PS3 love
• Rock Band is better than Guitar Hero
• Pixeljunk Eden is joy
• Game Riding Shotgun
• Dynamic Duos