Barotrauma

[droqen]

Barotrauma is a pseudo open source (?) Space Station 13-like game that's selling on Steam for $49.99 (cad). Lots of copies, too. As of this posting it has 33,689 reviews.

[droqen]

So, what's it doing?

Barotrauma has players managing buffers, many overlapping buffers that impact one another. Examples of buffers players are managing: the health of their body, the power in their ship, temperatures of various machines, oxygen in tanks, oxygen in their bodies, oxygen tanks generally available on the submarine, ammunition, repair status of various machinery in the ship... This is all just from playing the tutorial.

Buffers are interesting because they generally have no negative impact while they're in a middle state, meaning you don't need to maintain them constantly, but you do need to maintain them somewhat periodically, if they are steadily moving towards a failure state.

Some examples of buffers and their failure states...
1. Health = too little and you die. (Possibly having less makes you function less well, so not the best example.) (Likely there is a pre-death state, unconsciousness, as well as other pre-death states, partial incapacitation.)
2. Temperature in a machine = Machine runs fine until it overheats
3. Ammo in a gun = Gun fires until it is empty
4. Oxygen in tank = You can breath until it is empty
5. Oxygen tanks available on submarine = Another softer buffer, as these dwindle it becomes harder and harder to find a full oxygen tank. Eventually you won't be able to find one at all but it's kinda like toothpaste in the toothpaste tube: There's likely always a little more in there somewhere, it just becomes more and more costly to squeeze it out.

There are many opportunities for players to play with buffers, in particular in ways that allow for human error to come out and cause problems...
- Manual control will allow you to make buffers fill a little faster, with possible errors. e.g. Repairing something has a manual option, but if you mess up the manual timing, it makes repairing slower.
- Expend one buffer to fill another. Power is the obvious example.
--- An interesting example is filling a supercapacitor 'too fast'. This causes its temperature to rise, creating a new buffer to manage in exchange for filling a different buffer more quickly. As long as you manage that second buffer correctly (i.e. prevent the machine from overheating & catching fire), your buffer control is enhanced.
- Allow a buffer to manage itself automatically. This is toggleable manually, so you might forget to auto-manage a buffer because you do want to manually manage them sometimes.

There are other parts of the game. Aiming and shooting is common. Manual movement, etc.
Much of the submarine control, and social interaction, seems to be about pushing buffers around, setting up buffers (and flows) correctly. If you screw these up, it has impacts on other players, and you may end up fixing each other's mistakes, or getting at each other's throats about each other's mistakes (the tutorial tries to place these dominoes in place gently).

I'd like to play some Barotrauma to see what it's like in action.

[droqen]

Communication, specialization - Other games have done this before, there are softer/harder ways to do it.
See Overcooked- Anyone can do anything, but limited time/space means that it's faster for someone to handle something if they're already there.
See Spaceteam- Each task can only be done by exactly one person

Specialization produces a need for communication; players communicate available tasks to those who can do those tasks

Splatoon (Salmon Run) does not produce much of this type of communication although there is some slight specialization.

I think the pattern has two core components
"There is a problem and I can't solve it efficiently (or don't want to do it?), so I must communicate"
"There is a problem and I want you to do it (maybe you want to do it?), so I must communicate"

Hmm. There's also limited attention VS limited awareness, which are really part of the same thing. The purpose of communication is to convey something that the other person doesn't know... Sometimes communication loses that purposes, you might tell someone something they already know (by accident? on purpose?). What is being communicated? The fact that a problem exists, or the feeling that someone isn't going to deal with it, and wants you to do deal with it? The feeling that you have a task to do, regardless of the assigner?

[droqen]

hMM. above links also to "COHABITATION"