Power is Power

or, On Information Management as a Game Mechanism

Power is Power.
or
Power¹ is³ Power².

Power¹ is the ability to express complex ideas. Power² is power -- buying power, the power of command, the ability to get more done. What does "is" mean? Well, see, it means "is." Try to keep up here.

I'm still playing Travian. As part of playing the game, I've developed a complex information-management system that lets me assess what's going on in the game world and perform actions in a fast, efficient manner.

Specifically, I've created a map of all the other players in a 21x21 grid centered on my village. Once a day, I copy that map (it's text in a monospace font) and update all the population numbers. This lets me assess who is growing and who isn't. Also, I add in markers indicating the race of the player at that village, what guild they're in, if they're still in Beginner's Protection (and therefore can't be attacked), and, if I have already attacked them, whether it was a profitable raid.

Good players in Travian have a city that is constantly growing in population. It's how you get more power (military power, in this game). Hence, it's important to assess how strong my neighbors are. If they're not growing quickly, then they're weak players. If they're not growing at all, then they're inactive and I can then raid them with impunity. If they're growing quickly and allied, then I definitely stay away.

It took me the two weeks that I've been playing the game to move to my current system. It'll probably be tweaked further. I started with a post-it note, with the populations of the villages around me; I was basically only indicating which villages were active (by hilighting the population with, um, a hilighter). Then I switched to a text file. Then I made the map larger -- it grew from 7x7 to 11x11 to 36x48 and then shrunk to 15x15 (with two lines of 8 characters per village) and now to its current 21x21, five characters-per-village format. The width fits just fine on my monitor, allowing me to have the game open in one window and the text editor open next to it, with no overlap.

Basically the process I went through was to record different statistics and find out which were important to me. I was also subtly tweaking how I was storing and representing the information to make it easy and effective to use.

And all along, I thought, "why doesn't the game give me this information already?" This is precisely the sort of thing that a computer program would excel at.

I don't really need all this extensive record-keeping. (What does "need" mean, anyway?) (And I haven't mentioned the spreadsheet that tells me who to attack next, either.) Luckily, it doesn't take long to manage. It's unlikely that past winners and other successful players keep these kinds of records. At one point I was playing four games, though, and in that case these sorts of records are essential. But if you're only playing one game, chances are you can memorize what's going on around you without much effort.

The nice thing about records is that you don't have to memorize anything, and places where your memory might be fuzzy -- well, you don't have to worry about that. You've got the hard copy to tell you what's what.

But what if the game tracked all this stuff for me? Then I wouldn't even have to bother. And other players would know, also, if the players around them were inactive, or growing slowly, and what race they were (at a glance, without requiring bouncing through a few pages), and if they were under BP (without requiring bouncing through many pages), and how many other local players were in the same guild, and at a glance where all the big-pop cities were.

What if the game gave that information to everybody? I'd have a much harder time extracting profits from my inactive neighbors; everyone else would know about them. My opponents would make fewer mistakes, increasing the challenge. The game would shift from being one of good information management plus some basic strategy to being almost all strategy. I'm reminded of Costikyan's comments on Campaigns for North Africa: the game accurately simulates matters such as where individual pilots are and how much water each battalion has, but who cares about that stuff? Generals have staff that worry about that stuff. Strategy is hard enough without also having to micromanage pilots and water.

Some games, generally PC sims, wargames, and the like, depend to some extent on making the player manage these resources. It's busy-work. It keeps the player busy, thinking he's doing something meaningful (and, indeed, if he botches it, his troops die). But it's not a great challenge; it's a puzzle within the larger game. It doesn't lend color to the atmosphere of the game and often also has no effect on the outcome of the game -- unless you fail at the sub-task.

I think a hodge-podge of activities can work. I really enjoy Transport Tycoon, even after all these years and despite it's toy-ness, because the collection of activities in the game fit the theme of building transportation infrastructure. The game isn't really about building an empire; that's something that happens while you play the infrastructure-building game.

This is a perspective that should help you hone your game. If all of your gameplay is related to things that the Chairman of the Board would never bother with, then don't make your player take on the role of Chairman. He's the Chief Engineer, or Architect, or what have you. The chairman plays with toys -- he sets his own goals. If you decided to make a game, make the player's role match. If the gameplay fits the player as an Architect rather than Chairman, then maybe your product would work better as a game rather than as a toy.

Sim City is definitely a toy. In later versions, you micromanage stuff like water distribution, and to some extent playing around with the transportation network was Architect-y, but the gist of the game -- zone and wait -- is a toy. It's like a giant ant farm. Set some parameters and watch it go. If you wanted to take that product and make it a game, I think the mechanics would have to change a lot. When you want to give the player goals, you also need to give him ways of achieving those goals, and the more direct the better.

If Travian made all my record-keeping obsolete, I think it would change the flavor of the game. Diplomacy would be a much more obvious aspect. With stiffer competition for farms, keeping farms alive and eventually bringing them in-house would be more important. Wars would be fought over inactives, since everyone would know what pieces were in play. Mechanics would have to shift to emphasize strategy, or else it becomes pure diplomacy. Or maybe diplomacy would be the major goal!

Is your product a toy or a game? Is your player an architect or a chairman?