Why Card Copying May Not Ruin Eye of Judgment
Eye of Judgment
I’ve been really stoked about Eye of Judgment since I heard about it and I still am now that it’s out. For those of you who haven’t heard of it, Eye of Judgment is a collectible card game (CCG) for the Playstation 3 (or is it PLAYSTATION 3) that allows you to view 3D renderings of your cards monsters and units and battle against the computer or other players online. It uses the Playstation Eye peripheral to view what cards you’re playing on the board and register them into the game world that is a virtual representation of the board. They also sell booster decks of the cards that you can purchase in game shops and such to make different decks. Wow that sounds complicated when I write it out. Perhaps this cheesy video will help.
Sadly, I don’t yet have a PS3 myself but I’m sure I’ll acquire one soon and this game is certainly putting the pressure on me. First you must understand that I’m a huge CCG fan and was once (and probably will be again in the future) a rather hardcore Magic The Gathering player, so I think about CCG games a lot and they’ve intrigued me for a long time. I’ve even got a game design I did for an online one sitting around that I hope to make one day.
Anyway this game sounds pretty great but I have heard negative aspects of how the game design isn’t that deep and the decks that come with the game are pretty bland so perhaps it’s not quite living up to it’s potential but it is certainly innovative and I’ll applaud that.
The Eye of Judgment Card Hack
The game only recently came out and some ingenious players have already figured out that they can hack it to be able to get any card in the game. Basically they scan the cards into their computer and print them out. This shouldn’t work and it’s an obvious method that the developers would have thought of before hand, and they did. You see they made some special “magical?” ink that they used to print the cards that the camera was supposed to detect, apparently though this doesn’t work at all and a normal inkjet printer can reproduce the cards well enough for the camera to recognize them and you can basically use any card and as many as you want using this technique. There’s more info on the printed cards here. It also looks like you may not even have to go through all that much trouble.
Obviously many people will think this is cheating unfair and such but I’m going to play devil’s advocate for a minute and explain why it’s not really that big of a deal. First of all any CCG designer worth his salt knows that your game has to be balanced under the assumption that all players will have unlimited access to your card base and therefore can (and will if it grants an advantage) play with the maximum number allowed of in their deck. The reason for this is because any hardcore fans of your game will go to any length to obtain exactly the cards they want for their deck and typically how difficult these are to obtain is irrelevant. This goes back to Magic and it’s limit of 4 of any one card in a deck, as I understand Eye of Judgment has a similar requirement, thus having all players have access to all the cards shouldn’t degrade from the entertainment and fun value of the game and will probably only put a hurt on the profit margins. Any big tournament level player of Magic typically doesn’t think about whether they have particular cards when considering what deck they want to play in an upcoming tournament.
Secondly, CCGs have a long tradition of proxying cards, proxying is the process which a player will take any mundane card write on it or otherwise mark it to indicate it actually represents some other card which they don’t actually own. This process originally necessitated because of the extremely rare power 9 cards and other rare cards in Magic the Gathering which can cost $1000+ each, obviously limiting them their accessibility to the greater base of players of the game and thus granting a somewhat unfair advantage to owners of these cards. Proxying Magic cards is a pretty standard practice these days and many tournaments even allow this practice for the older formats where the cards are much rarer, more expensive and hard for players to obtain because of the limited print runs of cards before the games popularity took off. Wizards of the Coast doesn’t allow proxying cards in any sanctioned tournaments however.
Now if you are considering playing Eye of Judgment online you must realize you will now be playing against players who have access to every possible card in the game in multiples. People will abuse this hack to gain an advantage because it is the nature of a player to take and use any advantage available to them, as Raph Koster tells us in Theory of Fun for Game Design
Ultimately the rules of the game change. No longer is it a game about collecting and skill begins to play a much larger role in the game in the long run since personal wealth and ability to acquire cards becomes a non-factor. What Magic has taught us though is that this isn’t really a bad thing and much fun can still be had when the game becomes a game of skill and less a game of chance, this is of course in theory as Eye of Judgment probably doesn’t have the depth and finesse that Magic has and ultimately the game design of Eye of Judgment and it’s ability to be a fun game will be the ultimate test.
It’s also possible that if they’re serious about this game they’ll figure out how to fix this with the next set or possibly even with some software update and the whole argument becomes a moot point until some fancier hacks are discovered. Either way this is an interesting story to watch.
If you are interested in CCG design then stick around I’ll certainly be discussing it more in the future. CCGs are one of my pet genres so I intend to come back to them quite a bit in future posts.
