Stumbling Together: Knightmare Doom

[davidn]

Two videos in the same weekend? Madness! Blasphemy! Lawsuit! But this one was far easier than the huge Prince project - here, Quadralien and I play Doom Knightmare-style, as in the 80s programme where someone was put into a virtual dungeon and had to be guided to avoid falling down chasms, being cut up by giant circular saws or burned alive. Great times. In practical terms, this means that there's one of us with the keyboard, having to be guided by the other who has the screen. Can we play successfully like this? Not really.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dJ29d2FMGkI&hd=1

Comments

[premchaia_pre4]

Every time I see one of these, I feel like putting “normal” humans in it (along a specific axis) is like sending dolphins to do the hundred-meter dash on land. Or perhaps like QWOP. Yeesh.

I suppose people wouldn't find it as fun to try it with me, maybe. The first thing I'd do would be establish a vocabulary of procedure words and run practice calibrations on any continuously-valued controls. (Which is basically what humans do too when put in more serious situations! Except they have to put in a “training context” of some kind before their minds will accept it, for some reason or maybe no reason, but if you look at military and aviation radiotelephony, for instance… a big difference would seem to be that the continuous stuff often uses instruments instead, which is cheating here, and that's more obviously harder to manage because the continuous-sense calibration on neurons is really wonky and you can't just unwonk it by leaning on contrast enhancement (like you often can with discretely-valued distinguishers) because that fouls the very thing you're trying to fix up.) Which would probably make the person on the receiving end go “bwuh”. Or of course if I were on the receiving end I wouldn't get to decide that unless I could use an awful lot of feedback and have it acknowledged—that could be interesting in a different way…

[lupineangel.livejournal.com]

The biggest problem that I can immediately see is that in the original Knightmare series, the player was spatially and proprioceptively aware; they couldn't see the room around them, but they could use themselves as a reference point, so things like "turn round 180 degrees" or "take one sidestep to the left" were possible commands because they knew where they were now and where they had to end up to obey the command. With a game, you have no reference points other than those the game's giving you, so you can't judge 180-degree turns, or how many steps you've taken; you have to rely on holding the button for a certain amount of time, and even then, it's a very narrow window (say, the difference between holding for half a second and holding for two-thirds of a second, which isn't easy to estimate if you're not practiced at it). Even "keep going until I say stop" is hard to make work, because of the delay between the guide saying it and the player hearing it, processing it (hopefully accurately) and then acting upon it. A calibration and practice period would seem to be the most useful way of building a base to work with... but then there'd be less to laugh at in the videos when it all goes horribly wrong. :P

D.F.

[premchaia_pre4]

“Sidestep to your” is four sodding syllables long!

Depending on the scenario, I might start along the lines of:

• Move {left, right, front, back} (not “fore” because it's too easily confusable with “four”; “forward”/“backward” might work) [duration].
• Turn {left, right, up, down} [duration].
• Halt. (possibly “Stop”)
• Seeing ‹informative, foreshortened description of the area…›. Fin.

For an FPS I'd split “Move” into “Dance” (move chaotically but with a bias toward a particular direction, for helping dodge enemy projectiles) and “Straight” (move in a direction in a line; this is conveniently phonetically similar to “Strafe” for the sideways cases). Descriptions of enemies and the like would get similar shortened, unambiguous forms. If there's analog movement control, I'd add speeds, probably {slow, steady, fast}.

Durations can be calibrated to a set of fixed stops, probably starting from the controller end if there's two-way communication: request two or three gradations of each control and then have the sender represent the timings in those units. Continuous could be better, but the controller might have too much trouble keeping it linear. “along” can represent an indefinite duration until a halt request.

Now the tricky part is to do it open loop—where the controller cannot speak at all. Dare you take on this challenge? Bwahahahahahahaaa!

[lupineangel.livejournal.com]

I love the idea of Dance, for an evasion pattern; that's got to be included. We probably need to add "press" (to activate switches and such) and "shoot", as well, and come up with a single-syllable word for "keep shooting until I tell you to stop" ("spray"?). What about introducing "more" and "less" to allow for minor adjustments, if the player gets misaligned and the guide needs to encourage them to either repeat or undo what they just did by a small margin?

As for something that minimises time during calibration (for a more 'pick up and play' experience, rather than something that's had to be extensively mapped-out between the partners beforehand), what about setting up a system of 'taps'? Each tap on the key will move or turn you a certain distance; provided the player doesn't deliberately belabour certain key-presses, it might work as a basic small-scale movement system ("strafe three taps left, shoot, move two taps to front, turn two taps right, and press button").

In a game like Doom, though, I still think the biggest obstacle is going to be turning accurately. A guide who knew the levels inside-out might be able to speedrun some of them facing only one direction, but the player is still going to need to be able to turn to face enemies and switches and such. With no way to see how far they've turned already or what they're aiming for, I think that's going to be the bit that needs the most here-and-there correction.

D.F.

[premchaia_pre4]

I'm not quite familiar enough with FPS to schematize it well, most likely, but:

• Fire ‹count›
• Commence Fire [speed]
• Cease Fire
• Weapon ‹index›
• {Open Door, Close Door, …} (and other “atomic” gestures)

Expanding on perceptual feedback, prefixing them all with “You” might be a nice distinguisher, but the pronoun could be jarring, depending. “You see ‹short description›.” “You have ‹item name›.”

Using “tap” as a unit implemented directly as taps seems like it would both reduce the effective duty cycle of motion and induce controller strain that would lead to higher risk of error. Plus there's probably too much variance to begin with. Numeric units, if there's no need for wide range, should probably be omitted in speech in a fast-paced game, presuming delayed action is worse than inaccurately measured action. Directly multipartite numerics should probably be avoided if possible, to; they can usually be decomposed into multiple orders to be performed at the same time. Intonation and timing can signal breaks between orders.

Turning would need “fine adjustment” words. But don't say “just a tee-eeeny bit to the” because that's seven or maybe nine effective syllables long depending on how long you stretch out the vowel. I like “eps” as an abbreviation for “epsilon”, but “tick” or “tap” might be more straightforward and could replace the verb. Then:

• Again [verb] (repeat last order)
• Reverse [verb] (repeat last order in opposite direction)
• Double [verb] (repeat last order; the new “last order” has twice the extent)
• Halve [verb] (repeat last order in opposite direction with half extent; the new “last order” has half the extent; pronounced with an unvoiced “f” to avoid homophony with “have”)

“Tap right. Again. Open door.” You probably want abbreviated forms, and likely being able to omit the verb for more common elements, things like:

• Swing [linear duration] {left, right} [angular duration] (combination of “move forward” and “turn”; maybe “Go” or “Next” as the verb)
• Dodge ‹direction› [duration] (move, and then move back)

“(the sound of grenades) Close door, move back two. (seconds pass) Open door. Straight forward. (two enemies become visible) Halt. Weapon two. Dodge right slow, fire two. (both miss) Again. (one hit) Again. (another hit) Halt. Move left one, turn left two. (results in turning past a corridor toward a wall) Halve turn. (there we go) Straight forward.”