Hello Monster!

All game designers (and their managers) have got to watch this (embedded WMV) video, where gamers sadistically torture their avatar — complete with mimic voiceover — with a surprising result.

…so what is a better time to jump on the bandwagon and link to a crazy fishing video?

Sample size : 12hrs, 8 servers

Shanghai is a massive and cosmopolitan city, evolving at an entirely audible rate. You close your eyes for five minutes, turn around and all the buildings have leaped up fifty feet. This is all known - it’s proscribed in little travel books. They tell you this if you take the time to read the fine print on the visa as you slam your way past the heat sensitive plague-cameras at Pudong airport. The cameras pointing too high to catch the average Westerner’s face, and not fast enough to catch the average Chinese sprinting between frames to be first in the queue. Many things are different in China, unless they are viewed with Chinese eyes. Or possibly Taiwanese eyes.

Team play in EA’s ‘Battlefield 2’ is different in China. At least, in Shanghai, this March.

For one thing, on the rare occasion that people actually use the in game voice communication, they speak in Chinese. Not the robotic Chinese pre-recorded samples, but real, guttural, snarling Chinese. But hardly anybody ever does, because compared to Western servers I have played on (a lot, all over the place), hardly anybody groups into a squad.

Hardly. Ever.

For those who don’t play the game - unless you are grouped, you can only use the in-game voice communication (VOIP) to talk to a commander - a mysterious all seeing God who can turn the tide of battle with a judiciously placed artillery strike or mercifully targeted cargo crate of supplies. Like most Western commanders, the Chinese commander’s brain is generally too swamped with information management to be able to devote adequate neural activity to moving his larynx, so they are generally poor company for conversation. Hurled insults yes, but short on content.

Battlefield 2 is basically designed for team play. It’s all about the squads, and the teamwork. The sense of camaraderie and genuine in-game advantage is best achieved in small groups, using the provided VOIP. Yes, you can go rogue agent or sniper; you can always slither your way up a ridgeline to dispatch some poor sap with your bowie knife, who was in turn sniping someone else from cover. Laugh insanely as his corpse tumbles, limbs akimbo down to the rocks and surf below. Sure, you can lay C4 all over your Huey then fly it into an enemy position, bailing out at the last second and drift down, trigger in hand - the perfect position for watching the ragdoll laden fuel explosion to follow. Sure these things have their merit - and even the occasional merit badge. Sure you can do it say, six or seven hundred times before it gets old.

But the game is best played in small, tightly knit groups of up to six. With a group comes cohesion, cooperation, redundancy… and medics (bless all of you). You become greater than the sum of your parts. You are a team. Heroics. Man down. Explosives. Smack talk. Cries of freedom, going ‘over the top’ etc. Don’t get me wrong - I’m not one of these yammering idiots always squelching the broadcast button with everything that pops into my head, but I am equally unaccustomed to holding my own on the battlefield without at least the occasional chirp or curse from my comrades. A typical exchange might be :

skankgav: ‘Hey man, nail that (expletive deleted) on the (expletive deleted) roof near the (expletive deleted) window he’s (expletive deleted) me again. I can’t (expletive deleted) stand his (expletive deleted)(expletive deleted) anymore’

[shots fired]

Squadmate Koninc: ‘No probs I (expletive deleted) killed that (expletive deleted) he is (expletive deleted) smoked!’

skankgav: ‘Hahaha! Awesome! What a (expletive deleted)!’

Squadmate Koninc: ‘Ha! Eat it, you (expletive deleted)’

That Western idea of the Chinese being a wholly communal society; that thing you see and hear all the time - the organization. The team work. The masses working towards a common goal - building dams, moving mountains and thronging together to overcome everything from the British to illiteracy. Throw it all out the window, a tiny, oriental one. In Shanghai, it’s sometimes an art deco one. Point is, in China as often as not, Battlefield 2 seems to be about solo play.

I expected the Chinese servers to be full of terrifyingly coordinated units, all playing some synchronized dance of death set to an inaudible but definable Maoist tempo. Some cultures occasionally work like this in bursts. To illustrate : I once went into a bar in Ohio in the late afternoon to get a beer after a long day of meetings. It seemed to my foreign eyes to be a fairly ordinary bar. Too much fluoro, foreign banknotes stapled to the back of the bar. As things got going, people were on the dance floor - your standard commercial tripe with a fat dance beat. Slobbering on one another after happy hour then fumbling for their car keys. A very American Friday night.

Then to my surprise, the music changed to be something like a country song - a dependable thrump thrump twang. Something the locals obviously knew well as they weaved into position. Without skipping a beat, the throng on the dance floor suddenly… self-organised. It was surreal. One moment it was a thrashing ball of meat and pantyhose, the next there were these neatly regimented lines and these people were actually dancing in step. I briefly checked my drink to see if I could spot the residue of a spike, for a moment I couldn’t understand what was happening.

These free wheeling Americans, these individualistic, random people were suddenly cooperating, arm in arm and sidestepping. Square-dancing. It was like watching bees, only line-dancing bees, the kind that stand up and reek of bourbon, sweat and cigarettes. It was like watching a Sony musical robot commercial in 2015. You know, the one where all their heads swivel towards you with cute polished faces, and black, perfectly rounded eyes, all in time to the music. But in your gut, you know that left alone in a dark room with you, they would all sprout vicious, serrated knives and move toward you like nitrous powered vampire bats.

It was a very weird scene.

This is how I expected the Chinese to be - the bit about the groups and cooperation, not the knives. I expected small collectives of telepaths, warring on one another with ferocious but coordinated intent. I expected teamwork, cooperation… victory. But what I got was a randomized spread - chaotic and almost entirely uncommunicative. On some of these maps, the Chinese were supposedly fighting the Americans on their own turf (in China, the Americans are also played by Chinese). Even I, a Laowai [foreigner], was feeling patriotic looking out across the verdant and smoking Chinese swamp. But I had nobody on my team to ask for ammunition, no one to share a chuckle over a charred corpse stuck to the flaming wreckage of a jeep. Nobody to help me take out that bastard -*-Xiang-*- in his damned tank on that hill.

They all had broadband, but if they had mikes they weren’t using them. They were in squads of one - or solo. A few people joined my squad after being poked. After my timid attempts to coach them from the silence over VOIP, I passed the headset over and asked a Chinese friend to lure them out with the odd encouragement, in case my accent was throwing them off. No dice. At one point I had three people materialize in my group for a few fleeting moments, after repeatedly spamming invitations to the soloists in the game. I was so excited I blurted ‘Hi there’ in English over the comlink. They all promptly left.

Intriguingly though, they left as a group. China is changing fast - faster than I am writing this. By the time this gets posted, they will probably have evolved. Its already more than 18 months now since ‘Rocketboy’ Yang wiped the floor with the American player ‘Fatal1ty’ 5-4 in Doom 3. Tournaments are popping up the world over, claiming to be the next version of the gaming Olympics, and its always the team events that get the crowds screaming.

I used to wonder if Blizzard ever had the time in WoW to gather all the stats from various shards and actually evaluate to see if there were consistent tactics in raids across servers, or even the way different servers used the terrain. How often did the Horde attack Ironforge? How many times did the Alliance try sneaking through a particular pass for a lightning jab at that Horde town or camp the Zeppelin? Were there (are there?) country based trends? In other words, do the French surrender every fight compared with say, the Koreans? I would be really interested to see some research, using something like the statistics from BF2 to evaluate how different groups think spatially, or cooperatively. The data is there - its all a bit freeform maybe, and not exactly clinical or orthodox in experimental design, but the data is there. You could spot the growing trends, the emergent behaviour.

You could tell, if, in those immortal words from ‘C&C Generals’ :

China is winning.

At the Living Game Worlds 2006 symposium, Will Wright’s keynote was largely about the other areas of design that game designers should learn from. One that resonated with me because of my industrial design background was… industrial design. As Will pointed out, the chair is the basic design object that designers test themselves on. It’s a pretty fundamental test in a lot of ways; it’s been done a million times so how do you do it better? Some designers don’t bother restricting themselves to a form that is recognisably a chair. Often, comfort or economic issues are ignored too but no matter how much you try to free yourselve from constraints, it still has to function as a chair. (more…)