Lost in a Spreadsheet with Frosting

I bumped into Grand Ages: Medieval when browsing discounted games on Playstation Store's summer sale. It's an empire building game by the German developer Gaming Minds Studios, released in 2015. What caught my eye in addition to the cheap price was the trailer video, its atmospheric music and feeling of exploration in a game world that can be influenced by the player. A true open world. On the other hand I was slightly alerted by the review quotes that described the game as "large and ambitious", having "lots of potential", and that it "certainly looks grand". These are roundabout ways to say that the game is lacking something. Is it too ambitious? Does it not reach its potential? Is the grandness only in the looks? Despite the warning signs I was thrilled by the promise and wanted to see it for myself.

My intention is not so much to review the game but to write out thoughts that the game's mechanics provoked in me. My goal is to raise points that may help discover ideas that could take this and similar games forward. This unfortunately tends to happen by diving into problematic aspects of the game and leaves the better parts of the game with less attention. For a proper review with a more positive attitude and less rambling you can have a look at this one by GameSpot in English or this one by Pelit in Finnish. Note that I haven't even tried the multiplayer mode, and that I mostly played the campaign and very little open play, so I sure haven't done the necessary research for writing a proper review. I'm only describing my experience with this game as a player, up to the point where I lost interest with the game.

An aerial view of a fledgling empire that consists of only one town, Sofia

Grand Ages: Medieval calls itself a real-time strategy game. Literally speaking it's true because the gameplay consists of executing a strategy by discrete choices in the form of issuing commands to units or towns, and because game time runs continuously, in real time, though it can be sped up or paused. However when I hear someone say "real-time strategy" or "RTS" the first game in my mind is StarCraft. Grand Ages: Medieval is nowhere close to that kind of hectic pace and heavy focus on fighting. It's perhaps better characterised as "real-time Civilization limited to the Middle Ages", or as "The Settlers with focus shifted from settlements into trade routes". In Grand Ages: Medieval the player makes important choices constantly based on numeric information such as the price and quantity of commodities, the amount of free workers in each town, weekly earnings and expenses, etc. I'd like to call it and other games of similar nature spreadsheet games, following Chris Franklin's rough division of games to "back-endy spreadsheets" and "spatial simulations". Check out his GGC 2017 talk "Platform Pressures and Perils".

Automation vs Player Control

It's a complex task to manage even a small civilization. In Grand Ages: Medieval you have to decide for each of your many towns which five commodities out of the total 20 they should produce. Each business may require one or two other commodities as input. The crux is to manage how the commodities flow optimally from town to town so that production doesn't get blocked due to lack of raw materials and so that you don't run out of money because one town produces a lot of expensive items that no-one sells to other towns for profit. The tool you have for solving this optimization puzzle is a limited number of traders. For each trader you can assign a trade route through select towns. The trader then travels the route endlessly, buying and selling commodities based on simple rules that you can tweak.

I haven't yet seen a game that managed to present a complex scenario like this in a way that didn't eventually swamp the player with detail and repetitive chores.

Speaking of games in general, an interesting act of balancing is how much the player gets to make decisions and how much the game's own systems manage things for the player. Give too much power to the player and he's very quickly knee-deep in managing the smallest details. Details can be fun but when you've solved the same optimization problem for five towns it's no longer fun. On the other hand, take too much power away from the player and put it into the game's own automation, and the player will get frustrated for the lack of control. Algorithms take away expressive power from the player and reduce his chances of making real choices. Taking an example from Grand Ages: Medieval, if one town needs 10 more coal to produce the pottery that I need to complete a mission, I would very much appreciate the possibility of ordering the transport of that amount of coal immediately and not have to wait for some trading algorithm to distribute coal evenly over all towns until my mission quota is met as a consequence.

Oh, nice! A trader happened to deliver much needed coal to Constanta.

Take algorithms too far and there is no need for the player at all. A long time ago when I was just learning to program games with a friend, we were creating a game that gave the player a number of islands with a couple of different resources, "golems" and "minerals" at least. Golems were used to populate islands, and minerals were used for building airplanes. A cargo plane could transport resources between the islands. If an island needed more minerals to construct a new airplane, an idle cargo plane would automatically load the goods and deliver them to where they were needed. The process was automated so far that the player only needed to command what kind of planes to build. Everything else happened automatically. It wasn't very fun to play but it was sure fun to implement. In my opinion, when developing a game (at least when you intend it to be played by others) the obvious question is: What is the main motivator that keeps the player playing? In our island airplane game we didn't think about this. The point of the game was to be a playground and a programming exercise for us programmers. It was fun to build a small world that made decisions on its own and let us observe how well the decisions turned out. The "game" that we were playing was the act of programming. When we saw a point of improvement in the automation, we'd implement a fix.

Grand Ages: Medieval doesn't make a blatant mistake like our island airplane game. But I have a flickering feeling that spreadsheet games in general could give players a much more powerful feeling of control. It's in how the player interacts with the systems of a game. Great user interfaces are difficult to design. In my experience games tend to aim for the atomic level of control instead of a more custom level which could support the game's hooks better. A typical example is the Lunar Rover idiom of open world games where just about all interaction with the large 3D world is done by running around with the player character. The player may have a higher level goal in his mind such as "I'll sell this loot at the smithy in the next town." He will then have to translate this goal into smaller sub-goals like "Gotta run east." "Turn left at the crossroads." "Better take a detour through the forest to avoid that minotaur camp." These the player has to break down further into atomic actions that mostly involve rather detailed manipulation of the controller that makes the player character move around. The level of detail the player has on his character's movements is astonishingly deep compared to the tiny contribution the atomic actions make towards the high-level goal. Also the amount of time the player has to spend carrying out these low-impact atomic actions is a huge part of total play time. The player needs to work hard to keep his higher level goals fresh in his mind.

Did I Play It Wrong?

As I played the tutorial campaign of Grand Ages: Medieval, I was occasionally puzzled by the pacing of the missions. Even though they were all pretty simple as one would expect of a tutorial, many of them could be completed in a matter of minutes or even seconds but some took me hours. I think my problem was that I didn't play strictly to the beat of the tutorial. It gives very concrete goals that teach you the mechanics of the game in small pieces. It's a good approach especially because these goals are tied into a story. What seems to cause problems, however, is that the game itself becomes difficult to manage as your empire grows from a few villages to many towns.

One mistake that I made was to build multiple new settlements early on. I ran out of money to develop these cities, so I had to spend many game years trading items in order to slowly accumulate enough money to establish a network of businesses that could produce necessary commodities in large enough amounts. During those years the surrounding cities that were in computer control grew quite a lot. When a later mission told me to capture a town with peaceful measures, the cost of these measures was very high compared to what it was earlier in the game when the towns were still small. To add insult to injury, I had already captured a town peacefully much earlier in the game when it was still cheap to do, but it didn't count towards the completion of this later mission.

Many a game year have passed bettering the art of trade.

To bring the point back to automation vs. player control, I see the pattern repeat here. The game world grew too large for easy manipulation. I was left with the old simple tools of ensuring the efficiency of my trade routes, increasing my income by honing the details. The game world, however, had taken a leap in its level of operation. The details that used to make a big difference no longer did so. My only option was to keep manipulating the details and to do lots more of it to keep abreast with the magnitude in which the game world around me was operating.

Scaling of Encounters

Another of my problems with Grand Ages: Medieval are the wild animals. There are random sites all around the map that contain good loot but are often guarded by bandits or wild animals. The first encounter I had was with a handful of bandits. They beat my scouts easily so I had to send in a troop of a hundred mercenaries to deal with the outlaws. This I found believable in the game's setting and a positive experience of playing the game.

The next encounter had me fight a pack of nearly a hundred lynxes. A hundred lynxes! Quick research reveals that the lynx is a solitary feline, so it doesn't ambush people in a clowder of a hundred. I'm used to seeing dragons and giant spiders gang up against heroes in fantasy games but Grand Ages: Medieval is very much based on the real world, which was clear from the very start of the campaign when I found myself in charge of Sofia in the Balkans in the year 1050.

The second bewilderment came from the strength of the lynxes. A hundred lynxes easily killed twice as large a group of my mercenaries. Even though mercenaries are the weakest military unit, I would assume they are carrying weapons! Much later in the game the same repeated. I found a large pack of wolves that quickly overcame a mixed military force of four hundred men armed with axes, spears and bows. At this point it started to look like the game is scaling its random encounters up along with the size of my empire.

My men are valiantly trying to clear a cave of wolves. It's a chaotic massacre.

I feel that random encounters are inherently a small thing. An encounter is local, it's not goal-oriented (i.e. it doesn't seek to destroy me, it just harasses me randomly), and it should be much smaller in magnitude than sieging a city. Therefore, encounters should remain small enough to overcome with just a couple of military units. However, in Grand Ages: Medieval encounters end up so big that you'll want to move all your military units together no matter where you go. Be it a siege, hunting down opponent units or clearing a cave of wolves, you'd better pack all the power you have.

I'd personally prefer my gameplay stratified like the couple of examples that I hastily sketched in the table below. I want the possibility and necessity of playing on multiple levels of scale. Grand Ages: Medieval only seems to have one level of scale, and it feels the best when the empire is rather small. There is not a good concept of "maintaining trade relations". Financially it doesn't matter if you sell commodities to your own towns or any other player's towns. Therefore, you don't need to pay attention to trade relations. It's only a nice help to be able to trade with a player when you yet don't own towns that cover all the 20 kinds of commodities. With combat it's much the same. No matter if you're clearing a cave of wolves or eradicating a competing empire, you'd always be moving your whole military force from one point of interest to the next.

Scale	In Combat	In Trade
small	random encounter	transporting goods to town
large	planned siege of a town	maintaining trade relations with empires

An example of a game with nicely stratified gameplay scale is Mount & Blade. You can work at the level of an individual, at the level of a military group, or at the level of an empire. Often you'll be mixing these levels but they all work on their own and don't get trivialized into the same thing. Combat is the focal point of Mount & Blade, and trade is in a smaller role. Anyway, let's try to sketch the levels of scale of Mount & Blade in a second table!

Scale	In Combat	In Trade
small	third-person combat simulation	picking up and selling loot
medium	riding on the world map	protecting caravans
large	coordinating a war with friendly warlords	???

Speaking of scaling encounters, a famous example of what can go wrong when difficulty is scaled with the player's progression is in The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion as WillLovesVideoGames thoroughly explains in his Oblivion 10th anniversary analysis.

The opposite is not without problems either. When enemy encounters don't scale with the player the resulting experience can be flat and repetitive. An example of this I recall from Mount & Blade: Warband which, by the way, is one of the games that have maintained my interest and respect for the longest time. The Mount & Blade games take place in an open world. There are basically two modes of play in the single-player campaign. The first mode lets you roam the world map with your troops. If you enter a location or meet with another army you can enter the second mode, first-person mounted combat, for which the Mount & Blade games are perhaps best known for.

In the Mount & Blade world map you will occasionally find a group of bandits. Different parts of the world have different kinds of bandits. Some of them are on horseback and others hide in woods. What's common to all of them is that they spawn endlessly. If you clear an area of bandits it won't take long until a new group of bandits is soon roaming about, looking for traders to raid. Because the first-person combat is so well done in Mount & Blade and because beating bandits is not the only thing you will be doing, the game gets pretty well away with the repetition of forever beating endlessly spawning bandits. But eventually the repetition does kick in.

Mount & Blade uses also another trick to fight the repetition. When an enemy group is considerably weaker than your own group, they will run away from you in the world map. Only if they consider you weaker will they try to attack you. This makes sense in the game world. Any group of bandits should have a sense of self-preservation and avoid attacking large armies on sight. This avoidance system shields the player from fighting the same menial fights over and over again. At least partially. You see, the bandits are not only after the player. They also raid friendly traders and villages. If you want to keep your own realm thriving you will need to clear out the bandits regularly because no NPC army is as good at it as you are. Hence you sometimes end up chasing after the bandits anyway.

Two lost forest bandits running for their life in Mount & Blade: Warband.

That's enough of Mount & Blade for now. :-)

The Safety of Tutorial Campaign

Grand Ages: Medieval has a campaign that tells a story and acts as a tutorial into the game's concepts. I think it's a good idea. I do like how the simple missions like "Build chapels" or "Conquer a town" are justified with pieces of story that bind together in a greater narrative. However, there are problems in some of the missions themselves. After the player's empire has grown to cover multiple towns there is little incentive to do anything. To keep the tutorial a safe learning experience and in the limits of the story, no other empire will attack the player. There are just about no meaningful events to react to. Towns do get their occasional plagues and famines but they dissipate quickly and don't have a long-lasting effect on the town and therefore prompt practically no action from the player.

Perhaps this means that either the story behind the tutorial should be much more concise (I did spend over a dozen hours playing it, a tutorial!) or perhaps it should have less of the safety of a tutorial and gradually unleash the game on the player. I had a slightly similar experience a few years ago with The Legend of Zelda: Phantom Hourglass on Nintendo DS. Far into the game, almost until the very end, the game kept throwing new gadgets at me. Each new gadget and new use of them was introduced with some kind of tutorialish task. It went so far that I sometimes got the feeling that the actual game would never start, that it's all just a long introduction to the real game that just wasn't included.

The tutorial mission wants me to declare war. So I click through the motions.

The player's realm in the campaign of Grand Ages: Medieval is able to stand on its own without the player's help. Traders keep trading and workers keep working. Therefore, the player's only interest is to complete the little missions as they are given to him one by one. The discrepancy then is that in order to, for example, conquer a marked town the player needs to get a couple of military units to the site and then just wait for a long time such as multiple game months. So, the bulk of the mission consists of just waiting for the siege counter to tick down to zero. If the campaign wasn't padded safely with tutorial cushions then this siege time would potentially be more interesting. Maybe another realm would attack the player and he'd have to reconsider the siege.

The root problem of the safety of the tutorial campaign, as I see it, is that there are no choices. The player only has a linear sequence of actions to carry out, give or take a bunch of routine tasks to maintain the desired state, for example by withdrawing select military units to recover in a friendly town before returning them to the siege. By removing the risk and surprise factor from the tutorial the game also reduces the impactfulness of the player's actions. Gameplay becomes more predictable and therefore less interesting. This might go for a short tutorial but as long as it is in Grand Ages: Medieval, the tutorial ended up being the bulk of my experience with the game. After I finished the tutorial I felt that I had experienced all there was to the game.

Structure and Freedom

Grand Ages: Medieval doesn't offer any other single-player content than the tutorial campaign and open-ended play. In open-ended play the player can set his own goals in his mind. The game doesn't impose any goals or rewards for doing anything in the game world. Well, there are some gates that unlock game features such as more powerful military units as you progress but I don't see it as rewarding the player for performing well but rather just part of how the mechanics work. There is an implicit obvious goal hinted by the open game description, "Will you, the ruler of a small town, succeed in rising up the ranks and ultimately becoming the emperor of all of Europe?" This single goal is apparently verbal only and is so distant that it's practically not a goal compared to for example quests in adventure games with their explicit fetch or kill quotas and rewards in experience and loot.

Open-ended games are an old concept. An early milestone is SimCity (1989). The point of the game is to build a city by using your available cash in zoning land and laying down necessary infrastructure like roads and police departments. You make your purchases and basically just watch how the game's city simulation builds houses in residential areas and builds up infernal traffic jams on the nearby roads. There are some scenarios that set you in charge of an established city that has some specific problem. The challenges posed by the scenarios seem weak because some of them can be solved by abusing the game's mechanics (such as bulldoze shorelines to never have floods). In the following video AS Andrew demonstrates the scenarios in the SNES version of SimCity.

I have played SimCity and some of its sequels a fair bit and I do find the concept charming. Thinking back, the appeal seems to be in my fascination of the game's simulation. Playing SimCity is a dialogue between the simulation and I, the player. I set up zones and build roads and the game answers by constructing shops and houses. The game spreads a fire in downtown, and I answer by constructing a fire department in a wasteland nearby. Eventually, though, the player learns to read the mechanics like an open book and the fascination wanes.

By the way, I just learned that the source code for SimCity was made open-source in 2008. Also a modernized (and more readable) C++ translation is available by the name of Micropolis. Cool stuff!

🏠 🏠 🏠

Let me return back from SimCity into games in general. It's important to me that an open-ended game provides structure in the form of goals that the player can strive for. It's not a contradiction to be open-ended and have goals. The point is to give the player freedom and means to pursue the goals with however he finds the most suitable. And maybe the player can also ignore the goals. Goals help to keep my interest longer than the mere fascination of having a dialogue with the simulation. Externally given goals are challenges. I might not be interested in growing the population of my empire to 100,000 if the game didn't dare me to do it.

I also find important that an open-ended game provides different settings (an element of literature) for play. A setting sets the tone of the play and may pose limitations on gameplay that force the player to adjust his strategy. This way the player can naturally explore different strategies and also has incentive for doing so. The classical failure to do this is to present the player with the whole world with all its mechanics and a leveled distribution of possibilities where to apply the mechanics. For example the world map might provide very little variation. Anywhere you look, places are accessible with the exception of mountain ranges or bodies of water that are still only minor inconveniences that force you take a little turn instead of the direct route. I feel that Grand Ages: Medieval suffers from this. It didn't feel different to play in the Balkans or in Scandinavia.

Making Sense of Data

An important thing in spreadsheet games is how the game presents the crucial numeric information that the player uses for figuring out what he should do. All the relevant information for a meaningful choice should be easily available. Making the information difficult to access only adds to the mental burden and frustration of the player. I'm talking about user interaction. Of course if the game is designed to give only partial information to the player then so be it.

Grand Ages: Medieval doesn't show me the numbers that I want to see. For example when I build or conquer a new town I need to set up trading routes so that the new town is delivering and receiving all the relevant commodities. Sadly, there is no view that would show me all the nearby trading routes or routes that deal in the commodities that are relevant for the new town. I can only observe trading routes one at a time, flipping from one to the next in a bog-standard dialogue. The routes become legacy information quickly because it's tedious to figure out what exactly was the purpose of each of them. I don't want to go change old routes because it's difficult to tell how that would affect the economies of the other towns along the route.

This much the game tells me about my own trading routes.

Let's look at the "Units and towns" info screen in Grand Ages: Medieval for example. It does provide many interesting bits of numeric information. "Highest workload" tells me how well this trade route is using its capacity. "Duration of the journey" tells me how quickly towns on this trade route can get their needs fulfilled. "Plunderings" tells me if I should clear out more bandits or wild animals near the trade route.

What I can't see is where the trade route is going. I only see its name and by that I'm supposed to remember which towns the route passes through and where they are located on the map. The game practically asks me to memorise part of its internal spreadsheet.

I also can't see details of the logic how the trader is making his automatic purchases. Grand Ages: Medieval likes to automate the actions of traders on their routes. Trading logic is based on an undisclosed algorithm that "buys excess commodities and sells them where they are needed" (as the game explains it). For commodities that are on short supply I can set priority delivery to any town. I can also prioritise businesses over people in how commodities are distributed. I can't, however, give these priorities per commodity. Therefore, I think that if I want a trade route to deliver all my coal to a town that uses it to produce metal tools then the route will also deliver all the grain to that town, leaving none elsewhere. I'm not sure about this because it's difficult to see what kind of trades are actually made on trade routes. I could also be wrong in my interpretation of the trading algorithm.

What I want to say with this is that I, as a player, am unsure how the trading algorithm is meant to work. Therefore, I can never fully trust that I've configured my trade routes sensibly. I also lack tools to observe what the algorithm is really doing. This leaves me with an uneasy feeling. I'm supposed to be controlling an empire but the decisions are actually made by an algorithm that may not do what I would like it to do.

Automation should be used to the max until there is a meaningful choice for the player. In trading routes the meaningful choice is on a higher level than setting a trade route to pass through certain towns. I should be allowed to trust that sources and sinks are connected appropriately. When a compromise needs to be made then the game should let me decide.

I'd like to see the game present me with a map that shows how commodities are moving around, given all current settings of all the trade routes. I'd also like to see at a glance on the map which commodities are on short supply and which ones have overproduction. This would make it easy for me to understand how to improve my trade routes. Instead of fiddling with the settings of individual routes, I'd like to be able to set goals and directives for the whole trading system of my empire. The game would then control the available traders to carry out the set goals. I'd be making meaningful choices by deciding which town is going to be on short supply of fish or where the surplus cotton should be offloaded.

In short, the trading interface could be improved by reducing the necessary memory load of the player and by giving him controls on a high level enough to match the broadness of the decisions he'll be making. Why isn't it like so? Maybe, just maybe, the developer, Gaming Minds Studios, thought it's not a video game enough if the player doesn't need to fiddle with atomic details. With an interface on a higher level the player would have a smaller number of levers and dials to manipulate and fewer occasions to need to do so. Perhaps a smaller amount of mechanical interaction means it's less of a game? I'd say the gaminess is more in the meaningfulness of the choices the player makes. It's not essential to let the player affect minutiae.

The Appeal of 4X

I played quite a lot of Civilization in the early 1990s. It's a landmark in the game genre that is sometimes called 4X, short for "explore, expand, exploit, and exterminate." My style of playing involved mostly using the "Fast Settler" cheat and maximizing production in every town. The Fast Settler cheat speeds up the construction of map square augmentations like irrigation. At the end of a turn you just reselect your settlers and repeat the irrigation command until the irrigation is done. It's a tremendous help for the player: Instead of waiting for many turns for things to get built, you get them in one turn.

Good old Civilization with two settlers doing their thing.

It felt very satisfying to build railroad into every map square, to place cities on the map so that every map square that provided useful resources was used by some city, and to build all the wonders of the world before other nations did. It was a perfectionist's dream. Looking back at it now, I don't think I could consider it really "playing" the game more than using the game's framework to do busy work and fulfill whatever personal completionist desires I might have had. I don't think there were deep meaningful choices when playing the game this way. Perhaps you could call it "solving optimization challenges." I didn't need to react to things by changing my strategy. I had a clear goal and a pre-set style of play. I needed to be better than the computer opponents from the beginning to the end and I did it by cheating and by loading a previous save if things didn't go my way.

I'm no longer that kind of player. What I'd like to see in my 4X games like Grand Ages: Medieval is clearly presented data and meaningful choices on a high level. Too often I feel like the tools a game gives me are like atoms and I'm supposed to build a civilization out of them. It's too much in the details and it partially prevents me from designing my empire. It's designed for the kind of busy work play that I tended towards in my early 4X experiences with Civilization. Now it just feels like I'm stuck with solving boring problems like where does Trondheim get their fruits when I'd like to be making higher-level decisions like how to trick a competing emperor to move his troops out of an important town so that I can capture it.

There could be so much more to being in charge of an empire than managing resources one barrel at a time. Take interpersonal relationships as an example. It's rare to see games attempt to simulate them but on a shallow, one-dimensional level of friendly-hostile. Also Grand Ages: Medieval has this. Other emperors have an opinion of the player, represented by a percentage, and any two emperors are always at one of the six levels of diplomacy: war, neutrality, transit agreement, trade agreement, alliance, and military alliance.

Occasionally other emperors propose little tasks to the player such as "We have a shortage of meat. Would you please bring us 24 meat? You'll get 17500 money and 10 point increase in my opinion." These tasks bring a refreshing change to humdrum resource management but are all too reminiscent of the dry and industry-standard RPG quest formulas. The thing I'd like to see improved is that the player is given meaningful choices. Formally, you have the choice to accept or decline offers like above. In practice, you always accept the task even if you're not going to do anything to complete it. Namely, one of your trade routes might trade the required items by chance, or maybe you'd like to arrange the trade yourself at a later time. In such quests I'd like to see the need to compromise and weigh multiple alternatives. Here's how I see it could happen: Another emperor could request extra resources to support his fight against a third party. Accepting the deal would bring the said rewards but also be a hostile gesture towards the third party. There, a choice of who to side with!

And why do these tasks appear only when the other emperors decide to call them out? The tasks are obviously based on actual needs in their towns (which by the way in itself is a great feature of Grand Ages: Medieval that makes the game world feel more consistent), so why don't the tasks get triggered when I spontaneously deliver goods that are in short supply? The standard RPG-like quest templates smell too much of manifestations of scripted systems instead of interactions with a living game world. Also Extra Credits has criticised RPG grind quests in their episode "Quest Design - I: Why Many MMOs Rely on Repetitive Grind Quests."

It's not to say that I don't like carrying out small tasks. I still find appeal in spotting a commodity on short supply and increasing its production in a nearby town. Solving such basic problems in a game world makes me feel like I'm setting things right. I can see the progress as the towns grow and as warnings of the lack of free workers disappear one by one. The difference between my current self and my younger Civilization self is that I know now that carrying out these little tasks is not all there could be. The game could present me with a better visualized display of its internal spreadsheet. The game could carry out many of these menial tasks and elevate the player's status from a henchman that tries to keep all the wheels rolling into an actual ruler that makes decisions on a higher level based on careful analysis of multi-faceted situations that are presented to him through carefully designed views that interweave tidbits of information from various game systems.

-Ville