Fate of the World

This weekend, I picked up Fate of the World, since it was sitting around on my Steam wishlist and fit my general price preference. It's a game about solving global disasters, centered around climate change. I think it is the coolest thing ever!

Ok, there are a couple potential flaws. First, the interface is complicated, and to figure out everything that's helpful to know, you have to poke around in it a lot. I had no idea it was possible to look at very specific statistics, like how well trained a country's agriculture workforce is, until I eventually visited the Steam forum about the game (about 3 tries into the second scenario).

Which brings us to the other "flaw" -- or, alternatively, feature I rather like. This game is hard. The downside, some less patient players may get frustrated and give up, I suppose. And I might not put up with this level of difficulty in just any game. But here the difficulty level is an excellent vehicle for the concept that the world is likely to develop a lot of problems as we ignore the environment and keep growing our world's population and commerce. It's not an easy job, even if you start working on it as soon as possible. It's challenging, but if you pay attention to everything, maybe do a little extra research, and you have a plan from the start, you can succeed in saving the world. It seemed like it's part of the point for the game to be hard. It wouldn't be a very effective piece of Eco-Awareness campaigning if it was easy.

The most important bit of non-obvious information: Biofuel can replace oil! But only if you ban oil worldwide from the global HQ (which you have to build beforehand.)

Even if you happen to disbelieve in global warming and feel environmentalism is nonsense, I'd say it's still a good turn-based strategy game. There's a lot of depth to it. And also a scenario where you get to be a villain.

What can we learn from an "easy" old WoW raid

This weekend, I went back into ICC, and it was the most fun I've had in months with WoW.

It wasn't a primary goal for any of us. The group I raid with has trouble fielding enough people anymore to reliably get a group going into the new raid content. Even when we do go to a new boss we've downed before, it's rough; there's none we can easily one-shot. Some more casual players have started to sign up, which would be nice for filling in the ranks, except that the regulars aren't overpowered enough to "carry" them and they don't have the gear or experience on these particular raids to hold their own, yet. I've been a little burnt out, just try to hang around and see if they need people. So, this weekend, I filled in for some no-shows, but we still ended up with only 9 people, so it was decreed: "Backup plan! Let's go to ICC on heroic. With achievements."

Now, I did a lot of ICC in the past. Enough to start to get tired of it, not enough to beat the Lich King. I'd not done more than a couple of fights on heroic ever. Most of the group, however, had been through most of it before on heroic, maybe once, and most had most of the achievements. I decided not to slow the group down by asking for thorough explanations of boss fights (unless I started getting us killed) and instead I just shadowed the other healer from 10 feet away (seemed like a good policy) and this led to one of the best experiences in a while.

I could play through a challenging boss fight, learning on the fly, and still win.

Do you know how long that's been? I mean, maybe it works on dungeon bosses, even some heroic ones. But it's our general policy in raids to look up the boss, run through the strategy in vent, and of course we still wipe at least a few times while everyone gets the hang of what to not stand in.

But here, we had fights which took several minutes. At times, we'd take a lot of damage. There are percentage-based mechanics in there, and on heroic mode, sometimes there's enough going on that someone eats one of the "one-shot" effects that would have killed them in the old days, but don't, since we're over-leveled. It was enough to wipe us on a couple of fights, but only once per each (except we didn't quite get the Lich King down -- it was deemed to be a better fight for the start of an outing than the end, when we were already past the usual stopping time.) There were fights when something went wrong, like the other healer died halfway through Putricide, and I thought we were all doomed (I surely couldn't track all the crazy effects going on at the start of the fight)...and then we still won.

So why was this so much fun?

• It still felt like a challenge, but we were succeeding more than losing. There was a sense that we would soon succeed, even if we messed up.
• We had the chance to recover from our mistakes and learn to do better, over the course of a single fight.
• It was new to me. ICC in the old days got to be rote. Go in, do things the way we always do them; the only variation was with weird group makeups or someone who knew a different strategy.
• It was about my skills, not my knowledge of the fight. I got to prove myself as a good healer, a good player, rather than a good researcher and memorizer. I felt more present in the moment, trying to figure out what was going on and what I should be doing.

This isn't to say that I find no value in raids as they are now. With a good-natured group, it can be fun to bash our heads on the wall, trying to figure out what different strategy will let us win this time. But when the first time you face a fight is when you are the weakest (due to gear and experience), there is no room to stand in the fire that kills you in two seconds, the parasites that spell certain eventual doom, the healer to fail to predict two big hits in a row. If you mess up, the attempt is doomed. That's okay in small doses for some of us who like a challenge. But if it's the only form of challenge we have, maybe it's worth looking at other kinds of experiences to design into a game like WoW.

Making games for women, or making women via games

In discussions of game design that takes gender into account, I see two directions of thought, but people don't always connect them or consider them together.

1. We can make games that women will enjoy. Thus, we can tap into a less-targeted demographic of potential gamers.

2. We can make games that will influence girls to grow up into strong/smart women. Teach them relevant skills and show them strong female character role models.

I think #1 is already coming to pass, with games from Zynga and Popcap allowing more players to sneak into the classification of game-player without needing to admit to being a gamer nerd. Newer statistics seem to show that the numbers are evening out.

I know people think about #2, along with other ways to get girls interested in science and technical fields, though I can't think offhand of examples of games that specifically are designed to get young girls to move in that direction.

But #1 is about accepting women as they are and trying to figure out what they want in a game. What is comfortable, and what is enjoyable for the average woman. #2 is a more feminist perspective, saying that the status quo should change, and we should try to figure out what in games will make a woman want a different path or focus in life.

Is one of these right, and one wrong? I don't think so, not inherently. It's good to accept people as they are, and good to offer outlets for relaxation or mental stimulation or socialization, or whatever the "average woman" seeks in a game. And it's also good to encourage people to learn new skills, consider all their options, and reach their full personal potential, whatever that may mean for them. There's room for both ways.

But maybe we can mix the thinking from both angles, and get wider adoption of a game with a positive influence. If we can draw in girls or women with gameplay that is enjoyable, and doesn't scare them away, but then include avenues for learning more traditionally masculine skills in a non-threatening way, then it's a double-win.

Gaming communities and the female perspective

I think community is a massive draw for female gamers, generally speaking. Why play World of Warcraft instead of a single-player RPG? The only reason is community. If I didn't have a community of friends already playing it, or a strong hope of finding such friends anew, I would never put up with the level grind. Storylines built to support a lot of people each being the only hero of the world are tough to make sufficiently compelling on their own. For single-player gameplay, I would take any Bioware RPG any day over soloing in WoW.

Women are taught, in our American culture and likely elsewhere, to value community. Or maybe it's simply more socially acceptable for us to stick our noses into other people's business and worry about their happiness. By no means are men barred from an enjoyment in or a focus upon community, but I am sure it is a highly important for most women.

From the feminine perspective, community does not mean score boards and bragging. Community means communication, cooperation, and caring. We enjoy having like-minded persons with whom we can talk. We often prefer to work together rather than compete. We get a kick out of feeling that we are taking care of people in some need (within reason).

Sometimes we brag about how awesome we are; I see this as a part of learning to fit in to a male-dominated community (when it happens in American culture anyway) because too often we women learn in adolescence to put ourselves down instead. Sometimes we get drawn into flame wars on message boards; I'd hypothesize this has a higher rate of occurring in defense of a friend, percentagewise, rather than in personal aggression, compared to male posters as a whole. But we get embarrassed about proclaiming ourselves to be the best -- many of us have learned not to stand out too far from the pack, and to be self-conscious about being in the spotlight.

One thing I notice in my own experience playing WoW is that women seem to gravitate towards communities that include other women. I read articles and comments talking about the one woman in the raid group speaking for the first time on vent, and the startled silence that follows from the rest of the raid. But for myself, I can easily spend 20 seconds and think of ten other women with whom I have regularly raided in WoW over the past couple of years. I've led 10-man and 25-man raids, switching off from night to night with a handful of other raid leaders, one of whom was another woman. Partly, I expect this concentration of women has to do with men convincing their significant others to play the game with them, and then couples start playing with other couples. But offhand, I can think of three of us who gravitated to the group while not being romantically involved with anyone. I think this may be because we are a group that is inclusive to women. It's more comfortable to seek out company where our kind is obviously welcome, because there are already examples of our kind present.

I notice a contrast in personality types across different groups of geeky women, as well. Some of the women I game with possess a raunchy sense of humor, and they will participate in sexual innuendo in their banter along with the men, or occasionally amongst themselves. Some (like myself) just ignore it as best we can, along with some of the more reserved men. One, from a more religious background, actively protests it and mutes offenders for herself. Then, when I've been to potlucks and gatherings for a Women-in-CS group, everyone is extremely polite and offers little reference to sexuality at all. That may be partly due to cultural differences, since there were international students, and shyness, since it was a less frequent meet up. But it leads me to wonder if gamer women who spend more time around gamer men -- usually inevitable in certain varieties of games, given the skewed gender population -- may pick up behaviors based on what the people around them are doing and saying. A group of only women playing the same kinds of games together since childhood might have a far different code of social acceptability.

A take-away lesson there may be: don't automatically expect a woman new to gaming culture (or new to you) to put up with things you wouldn't say in front of your mother, just because you know another gamer woman who goes along with it.

Another observation about womens' sensitivity to the content of banter and humor: nearly all of the people I have noticed expressing offense for chat content have been women. I can think of several of us who I know dislike hearing people use the term "gay" as an insult, or "rape" in a casual, humorous context. Too many of us have, if not personal experience, good friends who have personal experience being on the wrong side of the realities represented by that kind of language. Given statistics like "one in four women will be a victim of sexual assault in her lifetime," think twice before you declare your intention to "rape" the other team on a player-versus-player field. If you're trying to get women to hang out with you, it's probably best not to routinely make them think of painful memories or unjust scenarios.

Creating an accepting atmosphere for women may not mean giving up the traditional geek culture we know and love. Our student CS group in college had movie nights with Monty Python, MST3K, and assorted science fiction movies. It was still a male-dominated group, but I believe the several of us who were women still enjoyed ourselves just as much. We passed around the same geeky internet links, commented on Hitchhiker's Guide references, and by senior year, I felt very much in sync with the computer scientist geek culture. I remember one day, another student, a guy, walked into our CS class before the bell, spread his arms as he looked at the dozen or so of the rest of us sitting there, and he proclaimed, "My people!" I felt it resonate in my mind. Not all women may adjust to the same experience as easily, but some of us can find a sense of belonging in a male-dominated group.

Finally, it is community that drives women's acceptance or rejection of an identity as a gamer, and not all of that community is within your control as a game player or designer. If a girl's friends think it is nerdy and undesirable to be playing a game, that's a lot of peer pressure to overcome. Here, games like Farmville might do us (as "hardcore" gamers) a favor, as they provide a basis for some related behavior that might be more accessible to younger girls. If they see other people they like playing a game, of course they are more likely to try it out, or admit to playing it. But as long as gaming is "not something girls do," then only outsiders and rebels will publicly join in, or invest in a costly game purchase and subscription.

Granted, there is a draw to being a scarce commodity in gaming culture. It's fun to surprise people, show up out of nowhere as a skilled female player, and to hear that we are desirable and rare from a romantic perspective. For a little while. But there's potential for that to become draining, too. Being the only one of a kind isn't something I think most women would hope for in the long term. So if interested male parties should wish to help with retention of female gamers, I would suggest: treat us respectfully, and help us network to find other female gamers when possible. I'd like to meet more of them, myself.

Parent-friendly multiplayer games

I'm not a parent. I just have a lot of friends in MMO's who seem to be becoming parents. There seems to be a common pattern: the pregnancy, wherein everyone makes a lot of jokes about how the baby is already becoming an excuse for afk's and how we are recruiting new guild members through breeding. The birth, where the couple disappears for a time. The infancy, where the couple may return to sporadic playing, with some significant amount of unpredictable afk time. Then when it's a couple playing together, they tend to stop playing altogether, during the toddler phase. I'm not sure exactly what happens after that when it's a couple, but the cases where only one parent plays, we see that player come back once the child is old enough to not be watched closely every minute, or to follow a regular early bedtime.

In every case, a parent must be allowed to go away from the keyboard immediately, in case of emergency, or even the child requesting/demanding attention. Usually they have time to say something on vent or chat, "AFK kids!" In the guilds and groups I play with most, we like the people well enough to tolerate this, and we adapt as best we can, either continuing our dungeon run without them, or calling a break for the whole group, or both (if their emergency takes long enough).

As I get into the age range where a lot of my friends are having children, I see more and more of a potential market for parent-friendly social games. The housebound parents, I think, appreciate having a social outlet during naptime without trying to find a babysitter. And I want people making big MMO's to bear them in mind, so I can keep playing games with my longtime parent-friends and others with schedule restrictions. There are some basic issues to bear in mind when making games to support them:

1. Unpredictable play-time

Games should allow the player to come and go as needed. Sure, it's nice to try to be sure everyone's present when you get to the boss fight, or some cinematic special event. But sometimes it's not feasible, when the 2-year-old is bleeding profusely and the parent realizes a hospital trip is necessary, and he forgets to say so on Vent.

I'd suggest mechanics such as non-linear storylines -- don't require players to have completed X & Y quests before they can participate in Z, at least not very often, because if you have to go afk during Y, you won't always catch up before everyone else is in the middle of Z. Consider using semi-randomly generated, perhaps semi-reusable questlines. If someone jumps into the middle of a group's questing, give them a story blurb about what's happened so far with this group and begin including them in the activities & rewards as a late joiner. Try to set it up so they aren't excluded from going back and experiencing gameplay from earlier in the questline ever again, after participating in the later stages.

Also, scaling difficulty with group size: let the group leader choose a difficulty setting, rather than presenting challenges like "Can you do this 10-man dungeon with 8 people?" Instead, let the dungeon adjust itself for 5 to 10 players, or 9 to 16 players. If someone has to go afk, let them "pass out" and lie around on the floor, out of the reckoning of difficulty. Don't force everyone to rely on one specific person, but do allow them to be included and contributing when present. Offer equally challenging tasks for different general group sizes, so if you walk into a dungeon knowing 2 people are prone to sudden afk's, and 2 more people might happen to join in the middle of a run once the kids go to bed, you can include them all, rather than having to switch between something requiring exactly 10 people and something requiring 5.

Similarly, flexible roles -- if it is the only healer who keeps having to run afk in a game like WoW, you're in trouble. Let people easily change what they're doing to fill in, in a pinch.

2. Limited play-time

Multiplayer games should support players who can only play an hour every week in being able to play meaningfully together with players who play a couple hours every night. People change over time, and so do their schedules. But with the internet, those of us who build lasting friendships can stay in touch, and some of us would like to play with our friends who have different amounts of time to spend than they used to. This applies not only to parents, but anyone taking on new and different elements of life outside MMO's -- school, work, dating, personal projects.

See my post on levels for one aspect of how to address this -- grinding 85 levels before you can reliably play together is only going to hurt the occasional/casual players playing because they miss friends.

Also, prioritize the ability to jump in and start meaningfully playing together with other friends who are already in the middle of something. Don't make them wait for 5 minutes of travel time -- let them warp in right away, or after a brief orientation to what's going on.

3. Child-friendly games

Looking ahead, someday my friends who are parents of young children will become parents of older children. And those children may be interested to try playing the same games -- already, one young son plays WoW on a low-level, chat-blocked character. I don't know what I think this should mean; I don't have that much experience with children. All I know is that if you can rig it so that a guild of mature players can comfortably play in a way that includes children, and everybody still has fun, that would be nice for families. Good luck!

Mixing player skill levels

Sometimes, I like a good, challenging experience in a game, working together with like-minded players who have learned and practiced how to most efficiently play the game. I like to take on something that's a little too hard, and push my limits together with the rest of the group, and share in the rush that a group victory creates.

But in playing an MMO, skill is not my only criteria for making friends. I tend to gravitate in general to seeking out groups I know to be reasonably competent or interested in becoming better players. But sometimes, I like somebody because they make me laugh, and they fit in well with our guildchat, and enjoyably contribute to party chat. Maybe questing through the level grind was more tolerable because they were around for socialization.

Then, there are friends-of-friends. A guildmate convinces his childhood friend to start playing the game for the first time, and the childhood friend joins the guild. We try to include the newcomer, because we like the first friend, but longtime friendship is no guarantee of play style.

And family-of-friends. A mature guildmate, moved away from home years previously, finally convinces a parent to play. The parent gets into the game, but doesn't care for high-pressure activities. Another guildmate hears her 13-year-old nephew is interested and gets him to play on the same server. He makes a valiant effort to figure out what's going on and how to fit in to the group, but he's not as quick on the big picture strategy of the boss fights, yet.

Solutions

So, how can we make games that empower the people who just want to tag along and hang out together with the people who want to seek out challenges and push their limits?

I've talked this one over with Jeremy, who has ideas about letting the skilled players generate extra bonuses to help the less skilled players, which I think is a good idea. A "catch-up" buff that helps a weaker player to be more effective, but doesn't give much bonus to a skilled player who is pushing the edge, could go a good ways to helping solve the problem.

I also like to see different kinds of tasks in a fight. All of the tasks must be accomplished, perhaps each by one or two people, but some are harder than others, or more challenging to learn. Think of the Flame Leviathan fight in WoW: each player gets to ride in a particular type of vehicle and operate different kinds of machinery.

Personal achievements, mixed in with group achievements: sometimes, you'll have the group that is full of like-minded, serious players who enjoy a group challenge, but sometimes, there's only a couple of those and several who are present because they like the first couple. Make some options for each case. Whole group pushing; individual accomplishment; one or two individuals enabling the achievement for the group. (WoW does have a variety of these in its current incarnation, which is nice.)

Flexible group makeup: Make it possible for people to play in the styles they enjoy. If there's a harder or higher stress role, don't make it vital to have 3 or 5 of that type of player in a 10-person group to get through the content. Or, allow people to try it out but rotate out of the job before getting burnt out.

Avenues for private practice and learning: It's rough to learn how to heal or tank or crowd control for the first time at a high level in a live group setting. If individual failure means doom for the group, there needs to be a way for players to learn how to do it right at their own pace, if they want to branch into new personal skills.

Caveat

I don't think these ideas stand as absolute rules. There is some value in the experience of patiently trying to learn how to work together as a group, consciously distributing roles based on who can handle them best, failing together and finally succeeding through communication and practice. Players who aren't as skilled can learn to become more skilled, and when we help them get there, there's that shared pride in accomplishment. But I think it's still valuable to keep an eye on how to enable players to play with whatever friends they have playing the same game, regardless of their respective skill levels.

Levels are dumb! (Especially for multiplayer.)

Okay, I will admit that levels have a degree of value. I grew up loving jrpg's, Final Fantasy and so on. Part of the reason for this was that I had a terrible fear of Game Overs in Mario types of games, so when I was 4 or 6, I remember I would ask my mom to play Mario so I could watch, rather than playing by myself. With Final Fantasy, here was a type of game that I could play with careful strategy rather than relying on twitch or jumping skills. And best of all, if I ran into a monster that was too hard to kill, I could always go back a little ways and level up, and then come back, and it would be easy. (This was before I developed much of a taste for challenge in gaming.)

Levels give you a way to represent and track character growth, as the character runs around learning to fight better (or beat challenges in a non-fighting game). This is useful, as a designer, because it gives you a way to say, "This character is level 20, so they're probably tough enough to go in this dungeon with level 19-20 monsters. Let's send them here." It's useful as a player for the same reason, and because (if you're not at a level cap) you can always get to be more powerful without becoming a more skillful player. And of course, it helps space out the rate of learning how to use new skills as a player, when you only get one every so often.

But a few years into playing MMORPG's, I finally realized: I hate levels. They are a terrible system.

Problems

The biggest reason I say this is that they prevent me from playing with the people I want to play with, when I want to play with them. Look at WoW. I have one or more max level characters, and it's all about gear. There is nothing built into the game to support me in having a challenging, fun experience working together with people still going through the level treadmill from 1-85, unless I happen to have a character close to their level to play with them. All I can do is run them through dungeons, which is only particularly interesting for the scenery and the loot, and maybe the novelty of initially learning how to most efficiently solo a low level dungeon while not letting the lowbie die too much.

So meanwhile, the person is left to gain levels alone. Or, in my case, the past few times I've leveled a character, I always have found one other person to play with constantly, because I cannot stomach grinding levels alone. It's so boring alone, when my primary goal in it is just to reach the maximum level! We agree to never get more than one level ahead of the other, if at all, and we leave most groupings of quests open to play through together. Otherwise, we cannot productively do the same thing at the same time with our characters.

Then, when the new character finally reaches max level, the (small, close-knit) guild springs into action. Dungeon time! Everyone bands together to suddenly try to drag the new character into teamwork, after levels and levels of solo work. Sure, once in a while, the new person has experience running dungeons with random groups of people as they leveled. But often it's requiring a new set of team-based skills to be learned all at once, along with suddenly being judged by min-maxers for not having optimal skill rotations. The leveling game, then, makes the social, teamwork game harder to transition into. And for some of us, the teamwork is the entire reason why we play MMO's.

But during the leveling itself, the part that makes me angry is that these arbitrary numbers tell me that even though I happen to be online at the same time as these three other friends with whom I would be ecstatic to play together, I cannot play with them.

It's not just MMO's, either. I've run into this same problem with Neverwinter Nights and Borderlands. I start trying to save extra copies of characters as I level up, so that I can always hope to be able to play with any friend who is in the middle of a campaign. (And then I overwrite my highest level character and can't find it again, but that's what I get for messing with the files.)

Solutions

Granted, there are some attempts at mitigating these kinds of problems. Sidekicking (CoH) and mentoring (EQ2) are certainly better than nothing, allowing people of different levels to meaningfully play together. But then, when I played EQ2, and had a character slightly higher level than a chain of guildmates who kept going through their 30's, so I could mentor them and play at their level, I got awfully tired of that one zone with the faeries after the 5th time playing through it on my same character. Sidekicking, or bringing a lower level character along with your high level character, might have more potential, but as long as the game is built to have a level progression, there is a danger that the low level character will skip all the low level content and be bored with high level by the time they get there.

Or, consider some of the Bioware RPGs, or Xenosaga, where monsters' levels scale with your characters. Levels are only meaningful in terms of character specialization. Can you replace this in an engaging way with increasing character specialization and NOT increasing character strength, so that there is still something to work towards, but it won't create artificial barriers to playing with friends?

A game like Dragon Age also has a benefit of being non-linear. So with a multiplayer version, there is potential to say, "I'm going to save the forest area to play together with you later -- don't go there yet!" Or, "I haven't been to the mountains yet, have you? Let's go." With a whole world (or universe) to choose from, rather than railroading players down a set track, there should be more room to create engaging experiences for groups of players who don't exclusively play together all the time. Of course, there is a challenge in making some cohesive story, so players don't feel lost and confused or forget what else they were working on -- but I get that way in WoW with its partially-linear questlines. Some kind of journal system to tell you stories recapping what you've done might help there.

Then there's games like l4d, which I haven't played yet, but I've seen played, and I get jealous of the ease with which I see people jump in and join their friends. People don't seem to mind not having levels in these games. But it's more of a skill-based game, which excludes a different set of people, and that's worth considering too -- how can you make a game that supports people who aren't as skilled working together with skillful players, because they are friends and like hanging out playing together? That may be another topic...

What if you had an MMO without a vertical leveling system?

Let's imagine a futuristic setting, with space travel and mechs. Your character can go up in military ranks, or in piloting ranks, after completing training exercises and certain kinds of missions, and then gets licenses to use different kinds of technology. Now you can control the biggest robot type allowed on the next planet over. But you still need people to sit in the arms to control them, and people to sit in the turrets on the top. Those tasks don't require as high a skill level, either in- or out-of-character. So, a beginning player can join in with the experienced one and contribute in a meaningful way.

Without working with the more experienced player, the newbie can't access the mission using the biggest robot, but there is still the hope of someday trying out something new -- being the robot pilot -- upon gaining more training and experience. Yet, without extra companions, the robot pilot is not nearly as effective, because she cannot control guns or arms. And even if characters are overqualified, they can still choose to fill the old role of gunner, when a gunner is what is needed. Perhaps highly experienced gunners can learn new tricks, too, maybe an ability to warn away less hostile creatures by shooting near them and not at them, but it doesn't mean their bullets hit massively harder -- it's still the same equipment.

All your successes can still be tracked and counted up. Consider the driving force of achievements on the xbox, Steam, WoW. Is this not enough motivation to get players to work together enjoyably to accomplish things? Consider faction increases and their shallow effect on interacting with NPCs in WoW -- it's still kind of cool to see an NPC greet you by name. Can we expand on that gameplay? And it shouldn't be hard to help the player keep track of how many times they have run through a certain type of mission in a certain location, and what role they played when they did.

Ultimately, I can see why character levels are a handy game design tool, but I believe it costs much more than it's worth to continue to allow its inclusion in multiplayer game design. It'd be nice to see some more alternatives soon.