Of course there were still regular computers in Japan, too. MicroProse had released translations of nearly every game since F-15 Strike Eagle onto Japanese machines like the MSX, FM Towns, and PC-98. Likewise, there were console owners in America who played English translations of games like Super Mario Bros. and The Legend of Zelda. But the culture of each format was firmly rooted in its respective country, and very few games successfully crossed over. It was like baseball versus cricket: you’d find fans of each worldwide, but rarely individual fans of both, and never professionals who played both, despite the relative similarity of their athleticism.
Mechanical differences did play a partial role in the divide, at least from our perspective. It was hard to replicate the subtle movement of a computer mouse with a console’s directional pad and floating cursor, or to fit as much text on the screen when console players typically sat several feet away. Personally, I don’t feel like the problem was mutual—we had more keys than they had buttons—but that’s probably not surprising given which half of the industry I work in. Plenty of people have argued that certain console games could never feel intuitive on a PC, and given our processing and graphical differences at the time, maybe they were right. Both have their strengths and weaknesses, and I’ve already acknowledged that I own at least as many consoles as computers.
But the embargo between the two formats couldn’t all be chalked up to controllers, as even games with simple interfaces often failed in their opposing market. It wasn’t until 1989 that MicroProse first attempted to convert Silent Service—which was by that point thriving in thirteen different computer formats—to the Nintendo Entertainment System. Western console owners were considered such a long shot that we didn’t even bother with a Japanese version, despite having translations readily available from the PC-98. If any Japanese fans were broad-minded enough to accept our game on the console, we would just have to hope they spoke English as well.
I don’t remember whether the NES version made any money, but my guess is that it didn’t, because we went back to ignoring the platform for the next several games. Even Gunship, which was successfully ported to five different computers in Japan alone, didn’t get a console release in any language. We eventually dipped our toe in the water a few more times—Pirates! saw a pretty successful conversion to the NES, and F-15 Strike Eagle II made a respectable appearance on the Sega Genesis. But meanwhile, the Super NES version of Railroad Tycoon was cancelled mid-development, and Covert Action went in the opposite direction and became our first port to Linux on the PC instead.
Only Civilization was successful enough to be ported everywhere, including the Super NES, PlayStation, and Sega Saturn. Yet still, universality eluded us, as Nintendo required several changes to the game in order to bridge the chasm between our worlds. We knew by now to expect a handful of tweaks concerning their tightly guarded reputation as a family brand, like when they replaced “tobacco” with “crops” in the Pirates! merchant system. No arguments there. And when they wanted to sub in the Japanese as a playable civilization, that made perfect sense, too. But then, things got kind of wacky.
In a normal game of Civilization, the opening screen was a swirling animation of astrophysics and volcanic activity. “In the beginning,” it read, “the Earth was without form, and void. But the sun shone upon the sleeping Earth, and deep inside the brittle crust, massive forces waited to be unleashed.”
Pretty epic, right? Nintendo did not agree.
“Long, long ago,” began the Super NES version, “humankind was divided into many tribes who wandered the Earth.”
Well, okay. That’s good, too, I guess. The lilting fantasy music was no match for the driving, suspenseful beats of our original theme, but maybe they were building up to it.
“One starry night, however, a very strange thing took place.”
Um . . . was it the first settler arriving on a 3 × 3 grid?
“A beautiful Goddess appeared before Tokugawa, the young leader of Japan. ‘Oh Tokugawa, I have a mission for you. Build great cities, and cause civilization* to flourish throughout the Earth . . . ’ ”
Whoa.
The rest of it was fairly harmless, just a kind of bonus tutorial about how irrigated land grows more food, and people like roads. But I was baffled by the localization team’s insistence that this bizarre animation of a blonde lady in an evening gown somehow improved the game. How can you claim “It’s good to be King” if you’re only doing it at the behest of some celestial being? Besides, I’d thought I was dodging controversy by leaving religion out of the game, and now they were trying to artificially insert it.
In the end, we took their word for it—mostly because we had no choice—and sure enough, none of the console reviewers thought the vignette was the least bit out of place. If a thirty-second wrapper of mysticism made the rest of the game more palatable to this particular audience, then I guess we could live with it. But the whole experience really underscored the fact that the cultural gap between console and PC users was about more than just buttons versus keyboards.
So, in mid-2007, when I made the announcement that I was going to design a console-only game called Civilization Revolution, the horrified outcry from our fans was not exactly surprising. Civilization II had made it to the PlayStation several years after we left MicroProse, but every Civ title at Firaxis—including Alpha Centauri, Civilization III, Civilization IV, the soon-to-be-released Colonization remake, and the secretly-already-in-development Civilization V—had all been exclusively for the PC. According to certain portions of the internet, we were betraying our fans, dumbing down the series, and/or pandering to the obviously inferior platforms of an obviously unenlightened group of gamers. They were furious. They were skeptical. But mostly, they were just afraid of losing something they loved, which made the whole ruckus seem kind of sweet.
They were also used to having their opinions taken into account, from the simplest fan letter to the 600-page “Official Suggestion List” that a diehard group of players printed out and mailed to us in anticipation of Civ III. The nature of our game inspires fierce ownership, so when faced with something new, our fans never hesitate to make their voices—and especially their displeasure—heard. But once it became clear that the console version was just another kind of Civ, and not the only kind of Civ that would ever exist again, everybody settled down.
“In fact,” admitted one reviewer, “because it caters directly to its platform rather than trying to shoehorn an unwieldy PC port into a console, it succeeds where others have failed.”
This was exactly what we’d been aiming for. It was, as we described it at the time, Civilization in an evening. Not everyone has eighty hours to devote to a single game, and there was no reason folks with greater work and family obligations should be left out in the cold. Cities were easier to build and expand, technologies developed sooner, opponents attacked earlier, battles were over quicker. The whole thing was actually developed on the PC, and we could have easily flipped it over to that side of the market—but it wouldn’t have been a success, because the gameplay wasn’t designed for the PC any more than the originals had been designed for consoles. Addressing an entirely new audience had given us more freedom than we’d had in years to determine what was and was not “supposed” to be in a Civ game. Did players really need an entire economic system of trade routes to manage between cities, in addition to everything else? Some of them certainly enjoyed it. Others got bogged down in that level of detail. Now, both types of player had a Civ game that met their needs.
The other feature that set Civilization Revolution apart was that we finally managed a robust, workable multiplayer experience, thanks to those same simplifications we’d set out to pursue. Officially, every version of the game since CivNet had offered multiplayer, usually as an expansion several months after the single-player version was released. But the truth is none of them ever worked very well. Between different types of PCs, different encoding methods, and different online services t
hat fans could connect through, there were too many variables to provide anything consistent. One early review noted that their multiplayer test had been conducted over “a distance of about 40 miles,” because the length of the wires actually mattered in those days. When players did manage to connect, the game’s complexity dragged the pacing to a crawl, especially during diplomatic discussions that were visible only to the parties involved. We offered multiplayer because skipping it would have appeared lazy, but it was never intended to be the primary experience of the game.
The world of consoles, however, was different. Multiplayer was not only a critical feature for that set of gamers, it was required by the manufacturers. Sony and Microsoft had invested in a hefty online infrastructure for both the PlayStation 3 and the Xbox 360, and they expected game developers to use it.
My first real attempt at programming online multiplayer—not counting a two-person tank prototype at MicroProse that never got off the ground because we didn’t want to host the servers—had been during Gettysburg!, and actually turned out quite nicely. The gameplay was in real time, so no one was ever stuck waiting for their opponent to finish their turn, and skirmishes were by historical definition always limited to two players. As with our single-player games, we knew the Gettysburg! multiplayer was good when everyone in the office kept setting aside their work to play it all afternoon. I’m not hugely competitive myself—the closest I get to trash-talking is a polite reminder that I’m their boss, so they should probably let me win—but when you hear folks gleefully taunting each other down the hall, and office mates cheering them on, you know you’ve hit on something special. Unfortunately, this set me up with some unrealistic expectations about how easy it would be to program the multiplayer for Civ Rev.
There are always two issues to consider when it comes to online play: lag and sync. The first is more recognizable and reviled by players, but the second is more destructive, and trying to improve one often causes problems with the other. In order to keep a game synchronized—that is, both computers agree about what is happening at any given moment—they must constantly pass data back and forth.
“I have fired my gun,” says one computer.
“Yes, you fired your gun,” replies the other. “You hit my target here.”
“Yes, I hit your target there.”
If the two games aren’t in sync, the data immediately dissolves into youthful sibling squabbles—“I got you!” “Nuh-uh, you missed!”—and the game crashes.
The easiest solution, which we were able to get away with in Gettysburg!, is to pass entire game-states from one to the other: “My soldiers are here, your soldiers are there, I’m aiming this way, you’re aiming that way, I have this much health, you have that much health, and I have fired my gun.”
“Okay, I trust you.”
Any disagreements would be overwritten at the very next data transfer. There might be a tiny jump on the screen as a soldier’s position was corrected, or someone died from a mystery bullet you never saw fired, but as long as things were resolved quickly, the game would appear smooth and reasonable for both.
But even with its simplified gameplay, Civ Rev contained too much data to share everything. There were army positions, economic numbers, happiness levels, food stores, truce agreements, terraforming . . . all multiplied by up to five civilizations at a time. This was why every previous Civ multiplayer had been decried as sluggish and unfair—a half-second freeze and a forty-five-degree rotation of a regiment was a forgivable glitch; a ten-second freeze and a cross-continent teleportation of that regiment was not.
The alternative, however, was risky.
“My soldiers are here, your soldiers are there.”
“Yes. We’ve moved one north.”
“We’ve moved one east.”
“We’ve lost one unit of health.”
“We’ve gained two units of food.”
“We’ve moved one west.”
“Wait—where were your guys again?”
To share just the changes to the board was more efficient, and allowed the game to run at an acceptable speed. But even the tiniest sync error was a game-ending disaster, because there was no way to recover hours of built-up changes from scratch. To make things worse, Civilization has always relied heavily on random number generators to determine everything from battle outcomes to subtle graphical variations. So I spent months and months rooting out sync errors, making sure that the random number generators for every possible scenario were being shared, or isolated, as necessary. The effort ended up being worth it after the game found an unexpectedly persistent following among online tablet players, but I’m still grateful that I’ve never had to repeat it. I’d like to say that’s because some brilliant programmer came up with a more elegant solution to the problem, but really all that happened is data speeds improved to the point that we could send entire chunks of the big games, too.
The interesting thing about random numbers, though, is that they’re not really random, or at least not in the same way that we tell you they are. When outcomes are truly random, people lose a great deal more often than they think they should. By definition, most of us are average, but we want to believe we’re superior, as proven by the simple fact that we picked up a videogame in the first place. It is not average to be a king, a tycoon, a ship captain, or any of the other delusions of grandeur we offer, yet we read the back of the box and say to ourselves, “Yep, I can do that.” This unrealistic but pro-fun narrative of exceptionalism is found in nearly all forms of entertainment. Rambo always takes out the bad guys, and Sherlock Holmes always solves the mystery. Professional sports is the only arena where we expect the majority to lose, and even then, the worst-performing teams are usually given an advantage in the following year’s draft. Whether spectating or participating, fans demand a sense of justice in order to feel satisfied, and randomness is the very opposite of justice.
Lessons of this nature had presented themselves throughout my career, but it wasn’t until Civilization Revolution that my eyes were opened to the full extent of people’s irrationality regarding random events.
We had decided it would be neat to display the odds of each battle on the screen, partly because statistics are fun, but mostly to address a particular issue that had turned into a running joke on the message boards. The problem stemmed from the fact that there were no guaranteed wins in any matchup—the odds might be incredibly long, but the underdog always had a shot—and this led to the occasional absurdity like a spearman from an underdeveloped nation defeating a military tank in battle. I maintain that it is theoretically possible, in the same way that 1,500 Swiss citizens armed with nothing but sticks and rocks defeated more than twice as many trained Austrian knights at the Battle of Morgarten; or how the outnumbered-five-to-one British triumphed against the Maratha Army at the Battle of Assaye; or when Yi Sun-sin of the Korean Navy defeated 133 Japanese ships with only twelve of his own; or that time when just 1,800 Croatians held off 36,000 Serbians for nearly three months at Vukovar.
It happens. And besides, guaranteed victories are no way to balance a game.
But we thought maybe it would help if we showed the players their odds before the fighting started, so they could understand that there were real numbers behind these unlikely battles, and not just a vindictive, petty AI.
We were wrong. Not only were they unimpressed by the long-odds evidence, they fought back even harder on the short-odds information they could now see.
“Sid, the game is messed up. I had this battle with a Barbarian, right? The odds were three to one—and I lost!”
“Well, yes,” I would agree. “Sometimes that’s going to happen.”
“No, no, you don’t understand. Three is big. One is small. I had the big number.”
“Sure,” I’d say, quite reasonably given the circumstances. “But look over here. This other time, you had the tiny little one, and the other guy had the big gigantic three, and you beat him.”
“That’s dif
ferent! I had clever tactics, a solid strategy, clean living, and a healthy diet—there are a lot of complex variables to take into account, you know.”
It didn’t matter how many different ways this conversation played out, I couldn’t convince our testers that it made sense for them to lose a three-to-one battle roughly one-fourth of the time. Past certain odds, people expected to win no matter what, but also to occasionally prevail if they were the underdog in the same situation.
And illogical as it may have been, we had to take their gut feelings into account. Nicholas Meyer, the writer responsible for the even-numbered Star Trek movies—the good ones, if you follow Trek fandom—once said, “The audience may be stupid, but it’s never wrong.” Around the Firaxis office, we have a similar saying: feedback is fact. If someone tells me a game was frustrating, I can’t possibly argue, “No, it wasn’t. You just didn’t know you were having fun!” They were frustrated, therefore my game was frustrating. Ultimately, it didn’t matter whether the Civ Rev players blamed their unlikely defeat on chance, skill, or designer malice. The resulting loss of fun was the same, and we had to fix it.
So we changed the actual odds behind the scenes, and made sure that the player would win any battle with odds of three-to-one or greater. This might have been unfair to the computer AI, but we never heard any complaints, and once players were given the advantage, they reported having much more fun.
“Sid. There’s another problem.”
“Uh oh. What happened?”
“Well, I had this two-to-one battle, and I lost. Which is okay, I know we’ve had this discussion. But right after that, I had another two-to-one battle, and I lost again!”
Sid Meier's Memoir! Page 24
