Leveling the playing field

Above: Capitalism, a love story.

Designing a multiplayer game has got to be tricky. With a single-player game, a player who finds the game too easy or too hard can usually make an in-game adjustment to suit his tastes. In multiplayer, that's not possible, especially in a game like Modern Warfare 2, in which new players are constantly rotating in. The risk is that players who are much better than average will tend to dominate, while players who are much worse than average will have a hard time competing. And that's not fun for anybody.

Developers generally choose from at least one of three approaches to level the playing field:

1. Match players by skill
2. Give help to bad players
3. Give incentives to good players

Matching up players based on their ability or rank always seems like a good idea, but it never seems to pan out in practice. Besides which, how are bad players ever going to improve if they aren't operating outside their comfort zone? The ideal situation, from a training standpoint, would be to constantly be playing against players one tier above you, if such a thing could be calculated. But you won't ever get to win in that case, either, even as you're improving.

Giving help to bad players is a good idea, but it has to be done delicately. Nobody thinks it's fair when the best player loses thanks to heavyhanded intervention by the game gods. How many times have you been cruising to a victory in Mario Kart, only to be undone by a succession of lightning bolts and purple shells? Often in games like that, it seems like being skillful is a detriment. What you want to be is second best, so you can zip past the leader right after Zeus strikes him down.

Incentivizing good play tends to work the best. In Modern Warfare 2, you earn XP for killing an opponent, but you earn more XP for killing him with a headshot. That's a nice touch. You're rewarded for being good, without being punished for not being quite as good. On the other hand, the killstreak rewards can seem like a case of the rich getting richer. It's not easy to get a killstreak long enough to call in the heavy artillery, and when you're still hanging out at the bottom of the learning curve, little is more terrifying than hearing the whine of your opponent's jump jet hovering over the battlefield. 25 kills in a row gives you the ability to deploy a tactical nuke -- if you can kill 25 people in a row without dying, you basically are a tactical nuke.

But the killstreaks are balanced nicely. They don't get out of hand. For one thing, I initially thought that you could only use one reward per killstreak -- i.e., call in your UAV after three kills, and your counter resets to zero -- but it turns out that you can use each killstreak ability as it comes. And the UAV is even persistent, after a brief cooldown. A big killstreak may be hard to come by, but even a mediocre player can occasionally luck into smaller ones, and it's nice to know they will be immediately rewarded.

Infinity Ward's other good idea is the deathstreak, lower-level help given to players who are getting killed over and over with nothing to show for it. Die a few times in a row and you're given the option to steal another player's class. It's a good way to switch it up when things aren't working for you. Die a little more and you might get the "last stand" perk, which lets you keep firing for a moment after dying. It's a smart way to keep bad players in the game without giving them an inordinate amount of help. If Modern Warfare followed the Mario Kart model, then the tactical nuke would come from a deathstreak.

Overall, the multiplayer is very well balanced. The best reap the biggest rewards, but the worst have a strong safety net. And for the rest of us in the middle, we are at least competitive, and who knows? Maybe the next care package will have that nuke in it.

Friday afternoon tidbits

The end of the year is coming up fast. I'm committed to a last-minute cram session, which includes, at the very least, Fallout 3, Prince of Persia, and Yakuza 2. Ryan keeps imploring me to give Castle Crashers a go. I may have to listen to him on this one. Either way, all this stuff is going to keep me very busy this weekend. What will you be playing?

-I don't know a single person who listens to Nickelback. Do you? I know an awful lot of people who are passionate about rock music, but not one of them would admit to liking this band. And yet, in an era when album sales and live attendance are down industry wide, the rock band that no rock fans like continues to sell out arenas and release multi-platinum albums. What this has to do with the news that Nintendo sold 2 million Wiis in November, I'll leave up to you.

-Well, I didn't get a membership card this year, either, but at least Slate's Gaming Club, the year-end roundtable discussion between Chris Suellentrop, Seth Schiesel, Stephen Totilo, and N'Gai Croal, linked to me. In two places! As it was last year, some excellent reading here from some first-rate writers. Next year, perhaps I can stand outside in the rain and watch them type, a single tear rolling down my cheek.

-Shawn Elliott's official reviews symposium lifts off soon, but the meantime check out a couple more unofficial entries from Gary Hodges and Daniel Purvis. I love reading how other people approach their work, and I hope it's true for them, as it was for me, that sitting down and thinking about these questions is a clarifying exercise.

-I may as well acknowledge that a few people have complained about the whole symposium thing, such as some guy on the QT3 forums, and PixelVixen707, who I should remind you is not a real person and is just part of a marketing campaign for a book. I don't understand the objections. People in every field participate in professional development courses, whether it's novelists joining writers' workshops, or tech dudes taking programming classes. How is this any different? I suppose if you presume that it's going to be a circle jerk, sure, there's not much value in that, but I'm optimistic enough to think that it will encourage some genuine self-reflection.

-There's also kind of a weird, but ultimately positive, take on it from Gamers with Jobs.

-I'm not a fan of the lists people make about the sexiest videogame heroines, or the top girl-on-girl kisses in gaming history, or whatever, but it's only fair that the Phoenix's Maddy Myers put together her list of the top 10 videogame studs of 2008. Can't even quibble with her top pick, really, even if he had some questionable genes.

Shell on wheels: Mario Kart Wii review

I don't want to pretend that my personal experiences prove any kind of general point about everybody else in the world. Well, okay. I do want to do that. So, anecdotally, it seems to me that everybody is underwhelmed by Mario Kart Wii.

I brought the game with me to a gathering of about a dozen people last Saturday. These are friends of mine going back over ten years, with whom I spent countless sleepless nights in high school playing Mario Kart 64 until we couldn't see straight. So after we played some single-player rounds to try to unlock all the tracks, we started in on four-player.

And stopped after two Grand Prixes.

I was a little surprised. The game sat there, idling at the character select screen, and nobody seemed interested in giving it a go. Not the hardcore gamers, not the casual players that have been such an integral part of the Wii strategy. Nobody saw the Wii Wheel and said, "I gotta try that!"

Then, our host brought out Rock Band, which we played non-stop until almost 2 AM. I don't know what conclusions to draw from this. We already knew Rock Band is awesome, and it's even moreso when you download some additional Queens of the Stone Age and Smashing Pumpkins.

Clearly, we're still into video games. But whatever allure Mario Kart once held for us seems to be gone. I'm sure we would have played it more if there hadn't been such an appealing alternative. I like the Wii version, almost unreservedly. I imagine I'll play it again. Still, whatever secret sauce used to bind its parts seems to have faded a bit.