In case you missed Part I, we are talking about how tabletop games (in which I lump most, if not all, pen and paper rpgs, miniatures, board games, collectible card games, etc.) take a great deal of care, planning and effort to convert them into fun video games. What was clear to several people was that I had missed the most important issue - the social aspect of tabletop games. It's an obvious obstacle that only some video games have bothered to even try to address, let alone actually overcome. As you may or may not be able to tell from the subject of this post - we are going to be delving into some fairly technical discussions of how to address the communication problems found in most tabletop conversion games and throughout the PC game space.

The way I look at, playing games is kinda like sex. You can have a good solo experience, but it’s usually not so great that you go around and brag about it to your friends. See, it’s just not the same as if you were to play with other people and have other people play with you. The tricky part of course comes from the fact that it’s hard to get someone else in the same room with you that is up for a good time. That’s where the internet always seems to come in, doesn’t it?

The biggest overall leap in terms of online experiences has come from Xbox Live - in particular the advancements made with the Xbox 360. In case you are still waiting to take the plunge and haven't experienced it yourself, Xbox Live allows you to easily see what your "friends" are doing, how they are doing compared to you and to easily join them in their current game sessions.

This is especially cool with Xbox Live Arcade games, which are always available without having to switch out discs and are geared towards quick "pick up" games that are easy to jump in to. Sure, the global leaderboards in every game are kinda neat, but just being able to compare your accomplishments in various games with those of your friends is a huge incentive to play more, communicate with friends more... competition is a great motivator, but cooperation is even more rewarding. Being able to get advice and give advice to your friends - verbally via the headset - provides a social aspect even to single player games like Oblivion on the 360. And when combined with cooperative play, it’s down right amazing. It's an addictive combination that keeps you playing games you would have long since put down, and makes you want to buy more games - the one all your friends are playing this week. From a developer's perspective, this kind of peer pressure is great! Microsoft has gotten so many of the pieces right on their platform that swarms of developers are trying to get their games on Xbox Live Arcade because even a simple game like UNO can make some serious bank when released into a community environment like Xbox Live. The problem is, us indie game developers aren't going to get our game onto Live Arcade until we get an audience for our games on PC's and Macs. So what are we to do? Where's the desktop equivalent of Xbox Live to be found?

While Microsoft has grand plans, great plans even, for Xbox Live Anywhere, there are some things we can do today on the desktop that can come close to matching the great social network of Xbox Live. You're reading this blog, you probably have an instant messenger client installed and you may have even dabbled with voice or video chat on your computer. Millions of people have WoW accounts. Obviously community building and social interactions are possible on the desktop, but take a look at the top selling casual games and see how many of them have great online, multi-player experiences? It's almost laughable to suggest it - yet look at UNO or Table Tennis on the 360. They are about as casual and simple as you can get... but Live adds whole new dimensions that make the game stand out from any experience available today on the casual game portals. What today's desktop games (particularly in the casual game space) are lacking, is community features that make it easy to jump into games with your friends, for you to compare your accomplishments with friends, and for you to easily communicate verbally with your friends - in and out of game.

Hmmm.. this is getting a little difficult to visualize what I'm trying to communicate. Let me give you a hypothetical.

Imagine that you just downloaded a Risk clone to your desktop. Now, when you start up the Risk clone, you are shown your friends who are online. Not just the ones playing the game, but even those who weren't, those that just happened to be logged into their gmail account or their favorite chat client. Imagine that you could send them a game invite, maybe with a voice message attached, that showed up as either an email or chat message that, when accepted, would launch a multi-player game without having to configure firewalls or send IP addresses around. Imagine that your Risk clone supported voice chat in game as well as text chat irregardless of what OS your friends were running. Sounds simple enough… right?

One of the best parts of tabletop games was that, generally, as long as one of your friends had the game, you'd be able to "play at his house". So why couldn't the video game invite also, say, give your friends a chance to play the game without having to buy the game themselves. Sure, there would be incentives to buy the game for themselves... but as long as they were playing with you, they wouldn't have to spend a dime. What better way to build community then to give the gift of game to your friends. Would you buy that game?

Well, one of the fundamental building blocks that you would need in order to put such a system in place is a communication protocol that provided presence, text and voice messaging as well as arbitrarily complex messages. That protocol, I firmly believe, is Jabber. It's open source, it's supported strongly by big companies like Google and Apple, and with the appropriate setup, can exchange data with proprietary protocols such as MSN or Yahoo! One neat thing about Jabber is that it's essentially just passing xml which makes it easy to send complex messages from peer to peer. There is also a great open source implementation of the Jingle spec which is great for passing voice, and eventually video using Jabber. LibJingle's source was released using a very liberal BSD-style license by Google, and you just can't beat that. I also have some ideas about how to handle "launching" the game from the invite, but I've got some research to do before I give away the details of how that will work... suffice it to say, that some of these pieces (just like leaderboard and authentication type systems) aren't going to be completely written for you, but also shouldn't require a huge investment in development either. The tools to build such a system are there, but developers must take better advantage of them in order to provide the same kind of social experience we had when we sat around the table playing D&D.

Chat, alone, ain't enough any more folks. Client/Server game servers by themselves are limited in their capabilities and aren't user friendly enough. We’ve got to spread the word about our games and make it easy to play with our friends. It's going to take work to build community features into your game, but with enough effort, video games can beat tabletops at their own game. Don't believe me? Pick up a 360. If it isn't the most addictive gaming experience you've had, then you can tell me "I told ya so". Just send me a voice message - my gamertag is onionroach :)  

-Andrew