I am also trying to further disconnect from Social Media, because I don't see the point in just making myself angry for no profit. And what else does social media do these days? It sure as hell doesn't inform you of anything. So I have been looking for a habit to build to replace the habit* of popping on to X on my phone.
And I have found a great activity for both!
I recently picked myself up an Atari Pocket Player Pro, a little handheld device that was released for Atari's 50th anniversary by My Arcade.
Any time I need to take a quick brain break, instead of checking my feeds, I grab the gadget, and I play round of an old favourite like Asteroids, Warlords, Solaris, Yar's Revenge, or Missile Command. It takes me only a few minutes to have a satisfying round of Yar's Revenge, unlike a modern game it is easy to put down, and I will come out of it feeling happy and satisfied, rather than grouchy.
The Atari Design Philosophy
Atari games were very much designed by the limitations of the processors and screens available to the company for the games. The Atari 2600 (or in my case, the Colleco Gemini) had an 8-bit processor that is shamed by many modern dollar-store calculators, virtually no RAM, and no disc storage beyond the ROM. They were being attached by either a 75 ohm coaxial cable, or the two-screw 300 ohm twin lead connection to 1 800 TVL screen that may or may not be in colour.
- The games could not be long.
- They could not teach you how to play in-game, except by repeat failures.
- Graphics had to leave a lot up to the imagination.
- Simple packaging and premise had to do the work of inspiring that imagination.
- The play loop had to be simple; you only had so many inputs.
- Complexity had to be paired with elegant interface and execution.
- Above all, it had to be fun.
Of course a lot of the games failed or found ways around one of these. And a surprising number of them missed on the last point, but there were so many that were absolutely amazing based on those requirements.
Example: Yar's Revenge
Let's use Yar's Revenge as an example. Yar's revenge is a pretty simple game.
- You control a bug like avatar that can shoot slow-moving bolts in the last direction you were facing. Only so many of those bolts can be in flight and so you shoot faster if you are closer to your target.
- If you move off the top of the screen you reappear on the bottom of the screen at the same horizontal coordinate, and you appear on the top if you move off the bottom.
- There is a vertical band in the middle of the screen where you cannot fire your weapon and there is visual distortion, but you are safe from some danger.
- You are being constantly hunted by a seeking missile that moves slightly slower than you. It blends in in the middle band. It moves faster as the game advances. You blasts cannot harm it. It cannot hurt you if you are hiding in the central band.
- On the right hand edge of the screen is an enemy ship that, depending on the level is either stationary or slowly slides up and down about a half the height of the screen, never more than 1/4 of the way from the top or bottom.
- Occasionally the enemy ship makes a noise and a swirling bolt appears on top of it. You have a level-dependent time before that bolt moves at you very quickly.
- The enemy ship is surrounded by either a hollow semicircle or a solid block of "shielding" that you destroy in plus patterns with your shots, letting you punch holes in the shield. In some cases the shields blocks are constantly shuffling in a pattern, making the holes you create move.
- If you touch the ship at the wrong time (indicated by shifting colours), are hit by the seeking missile, or hit by the ship's occasional bolt, you lose a life. After four lives the game is over.
- You have a "cannon", that depending on difficulty is armed by touching an edge of the screen (right side in easy mode, left side in hard mode.) It appears as a swirling energy bolt the same size as your avatar on the left side of the screen.
- Once your cannon is armed the next time you press fire the bolt will rush across the screen from left to right. It can destroy you, the seeker, or the enemy ship.
The goal is to destroy the enemy ship by using your own blasts to carve away the shield (while dodging the seeker and enemy bolts) And once the shield is mostly clear you arm the cannon and use yourself as a spotter to place the blast where you know the enemy ship is about to be, fire, and get out of the way before the cannon hits you.
For a lot of players the only premise they had to work on was the spiel on the box which went something to the effect of: 'The Yars are a species of alien evolved from flies humanity accidentally took into space during the early days of space exploration. While they have lived in isolation for over a thousand years now, their species faces extinction from the evil Qotile invasion. Now they are seeking the help of a human to save their home: You.' (paraphrasing at best.)
It was enough to explain what the enemy ship is and why you're a bug. It gave a sense of the stakes, and turned the pixels on the screen into a pitches space battle.
Some release of the game also had a short comic book included in the box to help amplify those ideas. (Mine didn't include it.)
These did an amazing amount of heavy lifting to get a kid started in enjoying the game.
Having the shield you could destroy, but needing to prime and aim a hazardous cannon to finish the job meant that the game required you to change what hazards you were paying attention to, how and why you were moving around the screen, and what your present goals was several times in that 30 second window. That they all could be handled with a fire button and a joystick was an impressive feat of game design.
But the big thing about it all is that in spite of its simplicity it is joyously fun.
I suspect that the low bandwidth that comes from its elegance and simplicity is, in fact, one of the things that really makes it fun, too. I don't have to fiddle with menus. I don't need a lot of complex controls. The game's interface gets out of the way and just lets me keep working on honing my skills.
Bringing it Home...
"Okay, that's great, Brian, but last time I checked this is a TTRPG blog..."
Here's the thing, in sitting down and playing an excessive amount of Asteroids in the last week or so I came to get some insight into why I think I enjoy the OSR and Indie games that I enjoy,
They are doing the same things:
- They let the imagination do the heavy lifting.
- They package themselves in a way that inspires engaging in the imagination.
- They keep their mechanics simple so that the interface gets out of the way of play.
- They are deliberately working within strong constraints (in this case a small PDF or a few pages of content. as opposed to an 8-bit processor)
And also there is a certain wisdom in the design of many indie games that I appreciate in that they offer you just enough information on the specific setting or world that they have created to let you step into it without overwhelming you.
And like an ATARI game much of this is an actual limitation of the bandwidth available to them. A low- or no-budget RPG is not going to have its own hypertext SRD, character generation app, VTT support, and massive community of rules lawyers developing and sharing builds. Nor can they afford to be in toe-crushing 500-page manuals full of original art. They are the culmination of the spare time of a dedicated hobbyist, maybe with a little budget behind it. It is going to most likely be an 80-page digest-sized PDF with scant art, if it isn't a fold-out pamphlet or a 12-page 'zine.
I would say this has an effect on the way that such games are designed in the same way the CPU of the ATARI 2600 affected the way the games for it were made.
For Example: Cairn 2e
Cairn is a condensed OSR game that fuses bits of the best mechanics of Knave and Into the Odd. I can summarize 90% of the rules in a just a few bullet points and any TTRPG player will get me:
- Characters have 3 stats, STR, DEX, and WIL between 3-18 and a d6 of HP, which work much as a D&D character's.
- Almost all character generation, including class and starting gear is randomized.
- Most problems are solved by making d20 rolls under an apporpriate stat using typical advantage/disadvantage rules.
- Gear is limited by inventory slots equal to the STR score.
- Attack rolls automatically hit. Damage can be reduced to a d4 if the target has a good defence or raised to a d12 if they are surprised or vulnerable.
- When Hp reaches 0, ability scores are depleted instead.
- Characters can be deprived if they are encumbered, starving, thirsty, etc. which gives disadvantage on all rolls.
- Fatigue also takes up inventory slots each time a character does something that would tire them out.
- Armor reduced damage taken by 1 for each piece in inventory.
- HP comes back by having rest and water. Damaged attributes come back with extended rest.
- Magic is handled by spellbooks and items that take up inventory slots and may cause fatigue or require special rituals to recharge after limited uses.
- Monsters work with OSR stat-blocks.
There are a few small rules I'm skipping here, but this covers the majority of them in very short order. They are fast, easy to use, and don't get in the way of play.
What makes Cairn 2e stand out as a game is the world-building it does.
Cairn 2e takes the world-building and turns it up to eleven. The woods are described and divided into the Wood and the Roots, a terrifying underworld accessible by magically warded gates.
Characters are given backgrounds that speak a lot to the world they live in. While some, like Barber-Surgeon might fit in any medieval world, others are very good at defining the game world, like Hexenblades, Fungual foragers, and Fletchwinds. Reading the backgrounds and envisioning the world in which they would live together does an incredible amount of heavy lifting to put the world into focus.
Each background in turn has a number of sub-tables that do more to tell the story of the background than the one paragraph explaining it. For example the Barber Surgeon has d6 tables to explain "how have you improved yourself" which includes a number of manapunk bionics the Barber-Surgeon might have done on their own person. Not only would this make the Barber-Surgeon unique, but also suggests that Barber-Surgeons in the world of Cairn are Frankenstein-like mad scientists who turn themselves into monsters.
Which is great fodder for adventure design to say the least, and it doesn't need a gazetteer or a setting book to accomplish it.
It is also an elegant way to draw the players into the campaign world and to teach them about it from character generation onward without a lot of front-loading for the campaign. By the time a character is completely rolled up, they have already taken some steps into the game world.
Likewise, the youngest PC randomly gets an Omen as a potential jumping-off point, establishing the idea of omens, portents, and prophecies as part of the flavour of the game, giving the PCs are reason to go into the wood, and a hook the GM can expand on all in the same roll.
And sitting down to play Cairn, 1e or 2e is fun. I suspect for much that same reason. It gets out of its own way. It starts with your imagination, and trusts it to do a lot of the work and finds a lot of simple, clever ways to feed the players and GMs information, and ensures that it is easy to pick up whenever you feel like it and put it back down again.
Low-Res Gaming
I think there is something here: that games that limit the bandwidth the rules take and let the imagination do the rest whether in video games, board games, or TTRPGs make having fun with them easy in a way that modern video games, rules-heavy modern mainstream TTRPGs and the new wave of sophisticated boardgames don't.
Likewise, when you have relatively low complexity, the question "is there enough there to have a good time?" becomes one that has to be asked.
As a possible corollary, I suspect that that often as complexity increases often the rules become an end unto themselves the question of whether or not they are actually fun - or at least as to whether they are as fun as they could be - becomes less important. Instead there does seem to be a focus "Is the game is sufficiently sophisticated or innovative?"
I am, of course, not really telling us anything new here so much as framing it a little differently. But I think that it might be a useful way of understanding why the OSR and lightweight indie titles appeal to some gamers, while others prefer games like Pathfinder 2e or modern editions of Dungeons & Dragons.
And possibly to explain why small 'zine games like the ones HodagRPG or the Brazilian OSR guys put out are feel damn good to an audience of old Atari kids like me when they are just a couple of pages long.
And I think that if we explicitly as the question "Is there enough there to have a good time?" it might be a great tool for game design.
*My specialty as a life coach, aside from turning sexless marriages into very and happily sexually active ones, is getting rid of bad habits: and the first rule to quitting a bad habit is to replace it with a good one.
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