Apple Noms

This post is only loosely related to gaming, but it is delicious.

I dedicate my Apple Noms to Fallout 3, which I was playing as I figured out the dessert's details. (I was going to call them "Apple Bombs," but that name is already taken by a mixed drink.)

You are invited to enjoy them as I do, as a winter snack after a long evening of gaming.

Apple Noms
Dessert. Generously serves 2.

Ingredients:

• 2 large apples
• "nomshell" crust:
• 1 c. whole wheat flour
• 1/2 tsp. cinnamon
• 1/3 c. butter
• 1 tbsp. water
• "funpowder" filling:
• 2 tbsp. brown sugar
• 1/2 tsp. cinnamon
• 1 tbsp. butter

Instructions:

• Preheat oven to 350 F.
• Peel and core the apples, then set them aside.
• In a medium bowl, mix the flour with 1/2 tsp. cinnamon.
• In a small bowl, soften 1/3 c. butter. (I zap it for 30 seconds in the microwave.) Add the butter to the flour mixture, and use a fork to gently toss and mix until evenly crumbly. Toss in the water the same way. At this point, the dough should be crumbly yet moist, and it should form a clump when pressed together.
• Coat the outsides of the apples in the crust. Use whatever method works for you. I like to press pieces of dough to pie-crust thickness and tessellate them onto the apples.
• Use any extra dough to plug the bases of the apples, especially if you cored them all the way through.
• In the small bowl, mix 1/2 tsp. cinnamon with the brown sugar. Spoon it into the empty cores of each apple.
• Divide 1 tbsp. (refrigerated) butter in half, and mash the pieces into the apple cores as well.
• Dust the apple tops with cinnamon.
• Bake the apples in a covered glass or ceramic casserole dish for 45 minutes at 350 F. Then take the lid off and bake them for 15 minutes more.
• Let the apples cool for a few minutes before carefully lifting them from the dish.

Troubleshooting tips:

• If your dough isn't holding together, add water 1 tsp. at a time until it does.
• If your dough is too sticky, generously coat your hands in flour when applying it to the apples, and don't worry about the extra flour that will end up on/in the crust.
• If you use smaller apples, you will end up with extra dough.
• If the filling isn't filling the apple cores, add more brown sugar as needed.
• The final appearance of this dessert varies. Every kind of apple does something different in the oven. Some hold together perfectly, some seem to puff up, and others shrink inside their nomshells.

Variations:

• You can make your favorite pie crust and use it instead of the hax0red crust I use.
• If you are using a sour varietal of apple, mix 1 tbsp. sugar into the crust, and/or add more brown sugar on top once it is stuffed.
• If you use unsalted butter, add a couple of pinches of salt (no more than 1/8 tsp) to the crust.
• You can use lard or shortening instead of butter, but please don't use margarine. 
• You don't have to peel the apples, but if you don't, it can be tougher to get the crust to stick.
• This recipe can be doubled or halved.

Storytelling in Castle Crashers

I picked up Castle Crashers the other day. It's a well-made brawler with RPG and collection elements.

While various reviews mention Castle Crashers' simple story, the storytelling is well done. For example, at the beginning of the Marsh level:

You walk into the marsh and see that skeletons have killed a peasant. As you begin to fight the skeletons, two other peasants peek out from behind the terrain and watch your fight. They look at one another and nod, then leap out from the terrain and begin to assist you.

The designers could have just dropped in some NPC assistants; instead, they chose to tell a story that gave meaning to the NPCs' behavior - the peasants help you because you avenged the death of their friend. The game is full of little visual and gestural details that help the player understand what's going on - the sort of storytelling details that Scott McCloud writes about.

The game is also a good teacher - here's how you are introduced to sandwiches:

You reach a door that you cannot break open. Enemies run onto the screen intermittently, but steadily. Each time you kill one, it yields a sandwich that goes into your usable-item inventory. In fact, the unbreakable door itself is shaped like a sandwich. Everything points to the inevitable conclusion: try out one of those sandwiches, and see if you can't get the door open.

There are many good game design lessons to be learned from Castle Crashers. I recommend it.

Maintaining the Joy of Altruism in MMOs

Designers often rely on players' enjoyment of helping others when guiding them through their first steps in the game. New players may not yet understand XP or the advantages of leveling, but they do understand that the people around them need their help. First quests in MMOs often illustrate how the world is in danger; they give players the opportunity to assist while teaching them the basic mechanics of the game.

As players' time in the game wears on, they see more and more violent events. Many quests ask players to kill NPC animals or people. Art props in the game world often include bones and corpses, and less commonly, wounded NPCs.

My suspicion is that after a while, some players become inured to the violence around them, and become less likely to respond to pleas for help from the NPCs. At the same time, players learn more about how the game works, and discover how to direct their play experience towards the improvement of their characters. Some players become more likely to pick up a quest for its XP, gold, or gear than for the emotional reward of assisting the NPC.

If the joy of altruism could be maintained throughout a player's in-game career, it ought to provide for a more engaging experience. Briefly, here are a couple of methods that may help with this goal -

• Let the player see that they've changed the world around them for the better. Admittedly, this is easier to do, and more commonly found, in single-player games than in MMOs - but even a wave and a smile from an NPC can help them seem more human and less like XP vendors.

• Tell the story in a way that players understand. If a quest is too wordy, it won't get read, and if the story is too complicated, players will ignore it. Many games succeed by relaying the narrative with the help of the world itself.