Sid Meier's Memoir!

by Sid Meier's Memoir! (retail) (epub)

  “Well, when you flip a coin, each flip is unaffected by the previous—”

  “No, no, I’m not talking about coin flips. It was Horsemen and Warriors.”

  “Right. Totally different. Got it.”

  Again, emotions trumped logic, and we had to accept that. So we started taking into account the results of previous battles, and making it extra unlikely for too many bad (or good) things to happen in a row. We made it less random, so that it could feel more random.

  “Now are you happy? Anything else?”

  “Well, now, here’s a really weird thing. I had a battle, the odds were twenty-to-ten, see? And somehow I lost.”

  “That’s . . . the same as two-to-one.”

  “No, two is only one more than one, but twenty is ten more than ten. I mean, do the math!”

  So we added another “correction.”

  By the time Civilization V rolled around, we had decided that the feature wasn’t worth the hassle (though it did make a brief reappearance six years later in Civilization Revolution 2, which was largely built on the code base of its predecessor). Since then, Civilization VI has moved to an entirely new Combat Strength system that compares military units numerically rather than by ratio, and allows them to engage beyond a single skirmish. It wasn’t enough to listen to our players when they demanded to know the odds between spearmen versus tanks; we had to intuit what they really wanted instead of what they asked for. Feedback is fact insofar as it reveals how our game makes people feel, but after that, it’s our job to come up with the right solution to that problem. There are, after all, a lot of complex variables to take into account.

  * Achievement Unlocked: Expected Territory—Read the word “civilization” 125 times.

  23

  SOCIAL MOBILITY

  Sid Meier’s CivWorld (2011) * Sid Meier’s Ace Patrol (2013) * Sid Meier’s Ace Patrol: Pacific Skies (2013) * Sid Meier’s Civilization Revolution 2 (2014)

  AS PAINFUL AS THE FAILURE OF the dinosaur game was, it was made even worse by the birth of social media. Many of the earliest “weblogs” came from the gaming community, starting in 1996 when Doom developer John Carmack decided to convert his Unix .plan file—something most programmers used as a public to-do list—into a more conversational status update for his fans. Shortly after that, Rob Malda’s Chips & Dips tech blog changed its name to Slashdot, and by late 1999, it was clear to us that this new medium could be a powerful connection to our audience. Thus, the Firaxis developer blog was born, and the fact that we just happened to be firing up the quintessential Sid Meier game right at the same time was a sign from the heavens that we were definitely, absolutely on the right track with this decision.

  Clearly, it didn’t turn out so well. My first post was full of vibrant optimism, starting with a fond childhood memory of buying tiny wax dinosaurs at the fair, in which I insisted on visiting each coin-operated machine one by one to witness the injection molding myself. But by the fourth entry, I was down to only a few paragraphs, and by the seventh, I was telling the Disney Dinosaur anecdote without mentioning the game at all. Then six months of silence, before I had to write the awful “Oops, never mind” announcement, rendered even worse by the fact that I had learned my lesson, and could not talk about SimGolf as a worthy replacement until we were much closer to publication.

  Realistically, it was a small misstep, and we continued to fill our website with relevant, slightly-less-gun-jumping content from a variety of folks within the company. But I recused myself from any further blogging, as well as most of its later offspring. I’m not one of those people who thinks social media is representative of humanity’s downfall; it’s just not for me. I need my public spotlights to be kept in short, controlled doses. But it certainly seems to work for others, and by 2011, we thought maybe it was time for us to consider the field in the context of production, rather than communication.

  One ongoing issue with even the best multiplayer code was the fact that strangers on the internet tend to behave in weird, antisocial, or downright offensive ways. It’s a sad state of affairs when muting the speech channel becomes a given with online play. Most services offered a “friends list” function to help you build a team of coherent, sportsmanlike opponents, but the biggest breakout games in the last few years had been on Facebook, where the social component was the focus, rather than a corrective measure. Facebook’s saturation of mobile devices also permitted asynchronous play, meaning users only logged on to take their turn during spare moments in the day, freeing everyone to go off and live their lives in the hours between. This idea of drawn-out, cooperative gaming was unexplored territory for me, and therefore interesting, so I set out to design a version of Civilization that would fit into the massively multiplayer, 24/7 connectedness of our modern lives.

  Unfortunately, interesting doesn’t always mean successful. CivWorld had a number of problems, the biggest of which was the generally uncooperative nature of real people when put to the test. One of our major mechanics relied on players voluntarily giving gold to one another, which they pretty much never did. Another involved asking for help when you were in a bind, which we thought would foster positive feelings of altruism and community importance, but for the most part everyone chose to let their friends suffer. Worst of all, the centralized nature of the game meant we couldn’t just let it fade into obscurity—we had to officially shut the service down, this time with a full press release instead of just a blog post. Single-player games could be set aside or revisited according to the individual’s preference, but once an online game falls below certain participation levels, the financial reality dictates that it must be taken away from everyone.

  The mobile functionality of CivWorld was adequate, though, even if the social aspect had been a dead loss, and by now, we had also ported Civ Rev to the iPad with great success. There was something worth salvaging in mobile gaming, I thought, especially with its potential for smaller budgets and bigger risks. I’d acquired a taste for sprawling, blockbuster games almost by necessity, and still very much enjoyed working on the AAA titles that Firaxis produced. But my first love would always be the streamlined process of indie development. I was one of the few who could remember a time when no other way existed, and while I would never want to give up the advances we’d made since then, mobile gaming seemed like a viable way to recapture that experience within the safety of an established studio.

  And if I were going old school, I decided, I should go all the way. Before Civ, before Pirates!, even before submarine combat and wargames, there had been a red and white arcade cabinet with a pebbled plastic seat called Red Baron.

  Though Bill Stealey had obviously been the bigger plane fanatic, I did have a nonzero level of interest in them. When I’d flown to Switzerland as a child, a particular flight attendant had taken me under his wing, so to speak, making sure I was comfortable and unafraid as I crossed the ocean alone. First, he arranged for me to have a row to myself, so I could stretch out and sleep during the overnight portion of the trip. That was probably the nicest favor in retrospect, but as a kid, I was more impressed by the fact that each time he came to check on me, he would deliver a small piece of foil-wrapped chocolate decorated with a picture of a Swissair jet. I ate the first one, but after noticing that each wrapper featured a different kind of plane, I began saving them instead. The flight attendant was happy to indulge me, and by the end of the trip I had the whole collection, probably ten or more. I could have eaten the chocolate and just saved the wrappers, but it was better to have the whole thing. I had the sense, somehow, that they were useful—that I could accomplish something with them as solid, three-dimensional toys that wouldn’t have been possible with wrinkly foil bits. I’m sure I must have eaten them eventually, but I remember holding on to them at my grandparents’ house for several months at least.

  At one point I’d even had a real job involving airplanes. The summer after my junior year of college, my aunt and uncle in Switzerland told me about a computer progra
mming position at a nearby military contractor named Contraves. The owner’s wife was American, they explained, and he apparently had a soft spot for us—especially those of us who could read IBM computer manuals in fluent English. The job was mine if I wanted it. Their offices were in Zurich, which was about a thirty-minute commute from Bülach along the very same train line I’d been obsessed with as a child, and of course I was welcome to stay at the family homestead for as long as I wanted. Contraves focused less on aircraft and more on the antiaircraft systems that shot them down, but it was still within my interests, and their salary offer was surprisingly high for someone still in school. I decided I would look at it as a study abroad opportunity, and asked the University of Michigan to defer my final year of college so I could go work at Contraves through the winter. To be honest, I was mostly working on programs for the payroll department, but it still felt really cool to put a major international military contractor on my résumé, and I enjoyed my time there immensely.

  In fact, I might have even considered staying in Switzerland, and seen my career turn out very differently. Contraves would have promoted me to more advanced coding projects soon enough, and Bülach was no less charming to me as an adult. But there was a ticking clock destined to send me home: as a Swiss citizen, I was eligible for the country’s mandatory military service. Every male over the age of twenty has to endure a minimum duty of eight months, and remain in the reserves for many years after. Living overseas was a valid exemption, but it would be revoked after one year back in the country. For all that I enjoy simulated military games, I am decidedly not cut out for real ones. I had even heard rumors of a special battalion for Ausländer, or foreigners, which was presumed by officers to be both inferior and expendable. So just before my one-year anniversary, I said my official goodbyes and went home to America, where people like Bill could bravely take care of that sort of thing, and I could stick to entertaining them once they were safely back on the ground.

  It had been twenty-five years since I’d put an airplane in a game, and I felt like the subject was ready for a comeback. This time, however, I would do it my way. Sid Meier’s Ace Patrol would be a strategy game from start to finish, which meant, among other things, that the battles would be turn-based. Players would have time to consider each maneuver, and since the height of a plane mattered as well as its coordinates, they’d have to strategize across all three dimensions.

  Though turn-based flying was exactly the type of unconventional gameplay choice I had always been fascinated by, I did have one strong outside influence as well: a 1980 game by Alfred Leonardi* called Ace of Aces, which was held entirely within a matched pair of thick books. It was like a graphical Choose Your Own Adventure novel, where each page showed an illustration of the view from your cockpit, along with a list of possible maneuvers and corresponding page numbers. Turns in Leonardi’s game were paced, but simultaneous, with each player selecting their move and announcing together the page their opponent should turn to, until eventually, one appeared in the other’s crosshairs. It was quite clever, and proved that an aircraft game could be both methodical and exciting at the same time.

  I was pleased with how Ace Patrol turned out, but as our first exclusively mobile game, it did raise the question of pricing. Specifically, we had to decide whether to charge one upfront premium for the game, as was traditional, or try out the trendy new model of downloadable content, in which a limited version of the game would be given away for free and then subsequent levels would have to be individually purchased. If you were to ask a group of gamers their opinion on these so-called “microtransactions,” most would probably respond with a string of rude words. But the revenues tell a different story. Nexon, the company that invented the notion of small purchases within a free game, first used it as a Hail Mary pass for an online server that was about to be shut down for lack of subscribers. Membership predictably skyrocketed once the game was free, but more importantly, the new microtransactions dwarfed previous subscription sales, not only saving the game but increasing total corporate revenue by 16 percent in one year. A full 70 percent of Candy Crush Saga users have never paid a dime for the game, which is a higher rate than most free-to-play apps, yet it still brings in several million dollars a day. We say we hate it, but the balance sheets prove otherwise.

  I do think the idea of a free demo with the option to purchase the entire game is a fair one, and coin-operated arcades were engaging in microtransactions long before their current wave of popularity. But there’s no escaping the fact that many free-to-play games are predatory, especially when they target young children, or blur the line between upgrades and necessary content. There has to be a worthwhile product underneath, and a respectful, honest relationship with players about what they’re getting for their money.

  We experimented with different forms of the business model during both CivWorld and Ace Patrol, but found it hard to hit that three-dimensional sweet spot between player experience, reasonable compensation, and a gameplay design that supported both. When the players purchase the game outright, you can increase the difficulty gradually, adding new elements of complexity at a regular pace. But if you know that players will be forced to a crossroads of paying or leaving after the second mission, you may be tempted to throw in more difficult elements earlier, to prove there’s something worth hanging around for. In that case, however, you may lose other players who couldn’t be brought up to speed fast enough, because they assume the upcoming levels will be even harder. It’s certainly possible to do it right, but after a lukewarm reaction to the initial pricing for Ace Patrol, we decided not to drag out our learning curve any further. We released the sequel, Pacific Skies, under the classic paid-upfront model, and everyone was happier.

  While I was learning to embrace the quirks of mobile gaming, my son, Ryan, had been busy earning a degree in computer science from my alma mater, the University of Michigan, and perhaps unsurprisingly, he was now planning a career in game design himself. Aside from the prominent role computers had played in our home, Ryan had been exposed to the development side of the industry early on, often traveling with me when I had to go on press tours. I never taught him any of the principles of game design directly; I just explained them to interviewers, and he paid attention. He would never hesitate to let them know when their questions were repetitive, and by the age of eight, we couldn’t let him stand off-camera anymore, because he would jump in to recite all the answers himself.

  During college, Ryan had been president of an organization that sponsored intense competitions known as “game jams,” where participants try to create a working prototype within just forty-eight hours. I initially agreed to be a judge for their event, but soon decided it was more fun to participate instead. Game jams are like a mini-vacation: they offer the same freedom to explore any topic or genre, and there’s something satisfyingly pure about a no-frills, seat-of-your-pants creation. For the university students, I made a fairly standard maze game called Escape from Zombie Hotel!, but I’ve been known to get a little more bohemian when we run similar events at Firaxis. For the topic “Things Aren’t Always What They Seem,” for example, I created a colorful, blocky platformer, which eventually zoomed out to reveal that the level you were traversing was a famous work of art. It’s the perfect illustration of a rule Ryan probably could have quoted me on by kindergarten: Find the fun. Platformers may not be my specialty, but the idea of a hidden work of art just seemed to cry out for one. As with larger, more serious projects, I never try to cram something into a specific game template—I start with something that’s interesting all on its own, and figure out what kind of game it’s meant to be.

  The other risk in starting with a genre and working backwards, aside from a disjointed or unsatisfying game, is that a designer will end up making an obvious clone of their favorite game. Fortunately, I saw none of that during the University of Michigan game jams—one team used a sound studio mixing board for their controller, while another cast the player as a lion
eating zookeepers—but most designers these days have been playing videogames for as long as they can remember, and it’s easy to get stuck in a cycle of remaking the same ideas over and over. “Find the fun” doesn’t just mean take your topic and figure out what’s fun about it; it also means go out into the world and find a topic that’s never been turned into a game before. Then, once you find that topic, make sure you give it space to breathe, and keep an open mind about what gameplay style will highlight it best. You may end up hopping across Van Gogh’s face, or impossibly hovering midair while another plane makes their move, only to discover that both experiences are loads more fun than anyone would have guessed.

  * Achievement Unlocked: Share the Credit—Identify thirty-six other developers by name.

  24

  FUNNY BUSINESS

  Sid Meier’s Civilization VI (2016)

  THERE WAS A CERTAIN AMOUNT of culture shock when I lived in Switzerland during college, despite knowing the language. Well, I should say mostly knowing the language. My Aunt Edith and Uncle Fritz had two elementary-aged kids, and for the first couple of weeks they helped me reignite the Swiss neurons in my brain at a vocabulary level I could handle. But it took at least a month before I realized that I’d been addressing everyone with the informal pronouns reserved for children, rather than the respectful grammar used between adults. It’s hard to explain just how inappropriately intimate I was being with my new boss and coworkers, since English has no equivalent distinctions, but think of it like a drunk guy you’ve never met throwing his arm around you and calling you “bro.” Correcting me to my face would have been an even greater social transgression for them, so I remained the barbaric foreigner for much longer than I should have.