I don't know how people come up with their stories but I can tell you how I come up with mine. I don't start with scenes or characters or settings or genres. I start with a tone and a theme, because those two things provide the guiding light as I try and uncover everything else.
When applied responsibly, a theme can give a work of fiction its center of gravity, and can make the experience feel meaningful and open to interpretation in a pleasing or thought-provoking way. When applied irresponsibly, a theme can make a work of fiction feel condescending or didactic, like you got tricked into taking a call from a telemarketer.
A theme ought to be omnipresent but subtle. If the audience can identify the theme easily then it's too over-the-top. If there's unanimous consensus about the theme then it's also over-the-top. A theme is like the body language of the work. It should give a strong impression to those paying close attention while operating on a subconscious level in most cases.
A theme is not a moral. It's an open question, not a conclusion. It needs to be an open question because an entire work of fiction needs to be created in its service. In thinking about new stories, I like to think of themes in a journalistic way. My responsibility as the writer is to fully explore a given theme, to provide the audience with a wide breadth of relevant information which can be used to draw various conclusions.
The tone of the work may inform the theme, or vice versa. The combination of the two create the identity of the work, a subject I'll explore in more detail in my upcoming GDC 2012 talk about creating atmosphere in games.
The story I wanted to write for Bastion was intended to explore the theme of overcoming regret. The tone I wanted for it was bittersweet but not sentimental, cautiously optimistic and ultimately hopeful but still melancholy at times, something that felt real rather than sappy but still could be suitable for almost all ages. The characters, events, places, and various little details all came about in support of these ideas. The theme ended up serving as my map. The tone served as the directions from the starting point on that map to the end point. I knew the starting point and end point early on. Plotting the course is what took the longest amount of time, mainly because I didn't write any in-game content before we had playable levels that needed to be written.
I don't like spelling out the theme like this but the game's been out long enough, and besides, it's a broad enough theme to where spelling it out doesn't really matter. The theme in and of itself is too broad to be susceptible to judgment. I think that's the mark of a theme worth exploring.
You'll notice that the theme I chose is simply "overcoming regret", just two words, as opposed to something like "in life we all need to learn how to let go." One is a theme, the other is asinine. Because I'm not Aesop, I will never, so long as I'm blessed with the opportunity to continue to create games, ever inflict my morals on you. I have my kids for that. Besides, if the theme I chose could be reduced to a fortune cookie sentiment then it isn't strong enough to bear the weight of a story worth telling.
The theme of a game's story ought to be the theme of the entire work, or vice versa, however it all comes together. If a game's story has a theme that's not supported by the play experience itself, the game threatens to feel disjointed and leave a sour taste with the player. In Bastion's case, the game was always going to be about building the world around you, an aesthetic idea and a design idea that naturally extended to a theme. The idea of building gave rise to the idea of rebuilding, which gave rise to the idea of overcoming regret and this post-disaster story about a few survivors (and other creatures) dealing with what happened in their own way.
All of the different game systems ideally should support the theme. With this in mind, in Bastion we tried to solve for some problems that can induce a sense of regret in other role-playing games, such as when you get the sinking feeling that you chose poorly when developing your character. In many RPGs, you're asked to make half-blind choices about character class or perks and stats. Halfway through the game you find yourself wishing that you chose differently. This can create incentive to replay the game but it can come from a negative place. In Bastion, we offer the player complete freedom to customize their character all the way through. Our difficulty system, via the Shrine, works in a similar way. We don't make you choose the game's difficulty before you've had a chance to play it and get a feel for it.
There are other smaller examples. When you run out of health and get defeated, you have the opportunity to "carry on", get back up at least one time and keep fighting. It's just a system of extra lives, superficially no different from the convention used by countless old games, but in Bastion I think it takes on a different connotation for some players as they see the protagonist character struggling through one situation after another.
Then, when we present players with the game's climactic, expressive choices, those are the only moments where there's no turning back. I think this is self-evident in the choices themselves, and thankfully we got a lot of good feedback from players saying they gave pause in those situations for quite a while, deciding what to do. I'd like to think that almost everybody who reaches those moments in the game ultimately makes a firm decision, not the wishy-washy I-don't-know kind but the kind that feels satisfying and cathartic even if not exactly good.
So, why would I want to write a story about an unpleasant subject like regret anyway, especially for a game that seems to have the trappings of a hack-and-slash action RPG romp? One reason is because I don't want to waste people's time with meaningless game experiences. Another reason is that this theme is important to me for a bunch of reasons I could only articulate through the story itself. I think regret is a universal feeling experienced by almost everyone from a young age. The depths of that regret vary from one individual to the next in a profound way, but on some level there is a shared experience, even among those who've suffered no real losses, who've had it pretty good overall. Me, I'm the sort of person who's spent (or wasted, depending on how you look at it) a lot of time re-playing various scenes from my life in my head, wondering about alternative outcomes. This is typical but I think I have an acute case of it. Setting aside whether it's healthy or not, I accept that it's a part of me, and it's the reason Bastion's story is what it is.
Thanks for reading, and may things turn out all right for all of us in the new year.
Saturday, December 31, 2011
Monday, August 22, 2011
Unveiling the Possibility Space
Revealing the scope of a game should be, I think, a seductive act by the game for the player. Not that I know anything about seduction, but I think I've seen it done properly in movies at least, and read a thing or two about it. Seduction means leaving a lot to the imagination while drip-feeding reality in tantalizing doses. There is a sexuality there usually but it doesn't need to be there. A car can be seductive. So can a game. Even an E-rated game, get your mind out of the gutter.
The game I've been working on is now out there, most of the reviews are in, the first-week sales have happened, all that. I can talk about it freely, though if you haven't played it yet, please don't read on unless you're OK with having aspects of it spoiled. Thankfully the game got a generally good response from players, and I'd like to talk here about one of the major reasons why I think it worked for those people. Sure, we worked to craft the discrete elements of the game to a good level of quality, everything from the tuning of the game systems to the art and music and writing and so forth. But I think the essential structure of Bastion is very important to its potential to have an impact on the player.
We said during development that we wanted for the game to present to the player an ever-growing series of gameplay-expanding choices. Part of this involved keeping the player in the dark about the extents of the scope of those choices, culminating in a series of climactic narrative choices designed to feed back on the entirety of the player's experience up to that point. We had to not only continue introducing new elements of play from beginning to end, we also had to do it at slightly irregular intervals such that the structure itself resisted becoming predictable in a negative way. The desired effect is for the player to feel a sense of wonder and intrigue. When you fully understand something, you cannot wonder about it or feel intrigued by it any longer.
Concluding the game with a pair of purely expressive choices, whose gameplay impact was implicit but not overt, was to me the ultimate way of subverting – in a hopefully interesting way – all the gameplay choices that had come before. Up until that point, you'd been deciding what to build, which Spirits to drink, which weapons to use, which upgrades to buy, whether to invoke any of the Shrine idols, and so on. Hopefully, then, the last thing you'd come to expect at the end of the game – especially in a game that appeared to be driving toward one specific outcome – is to have to make an expressive choice about what to do with the world you've been playing in. It's a world you've either grown attached to or haven't grown attached to, and the choices at stake are meant to encompass that entire range of experience.
Bastion is built on this idea of the gameworld slowly unraveling. Every aspect of it. The world unravels almost literally. The story unravels. The game systems come online one by one. There's no telling how many game systems there are in total when you begin play, and in fact, we deliberately mislead you several times about the extent of the game's scope. We make you think you're almost done with the story after several hours, then we introduce another system around upgrading. And when you're almost done with that, we introduce the endgame act. Only when you're about to reach the endgame do we explicitly tell you that, yes, you're about to go into the final area. But even there, the final area is substantially larger than previous areas and has several new kinds of gameplay beats in store. To top it off, once you've finished the game, then we unlock a whole second play-through with more new content. We structured the game this way to keep the experience feeling fresh within the constraints of our scope.
While I think this type of slow-and-steady-burn worked for us, I'm not about to suggest it's beyond reproach. A game needs to prove to its player as quickly as possible why it's worth playing. One way to go about this is to reveal great depth straightaway, such as by rapidly exposing complex game systems. A classic example of this is the character creation screen in a role-playing game. In Icewind Dale, an excellent old computer RPG, I spent probably a good two hours just making my party of characters before ever beginning play. The character creation system was just so rich with possibility. These days I think it's more fashionable to keep stuff hidden and not scare away the player with too much information up front. That's fine, but finding the right pace at which to reveal new elements of play becomes all the more important in those cases. I'm not sure that proper pacing can be taught, because it's resistant by its own nature to being reduced to a formula.
So then, if you're a game, keeping some of your best ideas hidden away for your later stages is arguably a risky proposition. In fact, by doing so you are implicitly accepting that some probably rather large percentage of your players will never see that content. In Bastion's case, we invested heavily in the ending, by scheduling a bunch of time for a bunch of unscheduled stuff, because we wanted to do everything possible to make sure players who finished the game felt rewarded for their time and effort. From a clinical production perspective maybe this was a bad decision. One could argue that we should have disproportionately focused on only the early levels in this fashion, because more players would see them. The reason this mindset is wrong, to me, is because it ignores who the game's audience really is.
Say you're an author writing a novel. The idea that you'd short-change the ending because not many readers would get that far is deplorable. You need to have faith that your readers will get there, ought to be focused on providing every reason for them to get there. Then you save the best for last for these people, because you owe them. They're the ones you're writing for. As for the ones who don't make it, sure it's probably your fault they gave up, but you can't just go in assuming they won't stay interested because that would make you a hack.
The game I've been working on is now out there, most of the reviews are in, the first-week sales have happened, all that. I can talk about it freely, though if you haven't played it yet, please don't read on unless you're OK with having aspects of it spoiled. Thankfully the game got a generally good response from players, and I'd like to talk here about one of the major reasons why I think it worked for those people. Sure, we worked to craft the discrete elements of the game to a good level of quality, everything from the tuning of the game systems to the art and music and writing and so forth. But I think the essential structure of Bastion is very important to its potential to have an impact on the player.
We said during development that we wanted for the game to present to the player an ever-growing series of gameplay-expanding choices. Part of this involved keeping the player in the dark about the extents of the scope of those choices, culminating in a series of climactic narrative choices designed to feed back on the entirety of the player's experience up to that point. We had to not only continue introducing new elements of play from beginning to end, we also had to do it at slightly irregular intervals such that the structure itself resisted becoming predictable in a negative way. The desired effect is for the player to feel a sense of wonder and intrigue. When you fully understand something, you cannot wonder about it or feel intrigued by it any longer.
Concluding the game with a pair of purely expressive choices, whose gameplay impact was implicit but not overt, was to me the ultimate way of subverting – in a hopefully interesting way – all the gameplay choices that had come before. Up until that point, you'd been deciding what to build, which Spirits to drink, which weapons to use, which upgrades to buy, whether to invoke any of the Shrine idols, and so on. Hopefully, then, the last thing you'd come to expect at the end of the game – especially in a game that appeared to be driving toward one specific outcome – is to have to make an expressive choice about what to do with the world you've been playing in. It's a world you've either grown attached to or haven't grown attached to, and the choices at stake are meant to encompass that entire range of experience.
Bastion is built on this idea of the gameworld slowly unraveling. Every aspect of it. The world unravels almost literally. The story unravels. The game systems come online one by one. There's no telling how many game systems there are in total when you begin play, and in fact, we deliberately mislead you several times about the extent of the game's scope. We make you think you're almost done with the story after several hours, then we introduce another system around upgrading. And when you're almost done with that, we introduce the endgame act. Only when you're about to reach the endgame do we explicitly tell you that, yes, you're about to go into the final area. But even there, the final area is substantially larger than previous areas and has several new kinds of gameplay beats in store. To top it off, once you've finished the game, then we unlock a whole second play-through with more new content. We structured the game this way to keep the experience feeling fresh within the constraints of our scope.
While I think this type of slow-and-steady-burn worked for us, I'm not about to suggest it's beyond reproach. A game needs to prove to its player as quickly as possible why it's worth playing. One way to go about this is to reveal great depth straightaway, such as by rapidly exposing complex game systems. A classic example of this is the character creation screen in a role-playing game. In Icewind Dale, an excellent old computer RPG, I spent probably a good two hours just making my party of characters before ever beginning play. The character creation system was just so rich with possibility. These days I think it's more fashionable to keep stuff hidden and not scare away the player with too much information up front. That's fine, but finding the right pace at which to reveal new elements of play becomes all the more important in those cases. I'm not sure that proper pacing can be taught, because it's resistant by its own nature to being reduced to a formula.
So then, if you're a game, keeping some of your best ideas hidden away for your later stages is arguably a risky proposition. In fact, by doing so you are implicitly accepting that some probably rather large percentage of your players will never see that content. In Bastion's case, we invested heavily in the ending, by scheduling a bunch of time for a bunch of unscheduled stuff, because we wanted to do everything possible to make sure players who finished the game felt rewarded for their time and effort. From a clinical production perspective maybe this was a bad decision. One could argue that we should have disproportionately focused on only the early levels in this fashion, because more players would see them. The reason this mindset is wrong, to me, is because it ignores who the game's audience really is.
Say you're an author writing a novel. The idea that you'd short-change the ending because not many readers would get that far is deplorable. You need to have faith that your readers will get there, ought to be focused on providing every reason for them to get there. Then you save the best for last for these people, because you owe them. They're the ones you're writing for. As for the ones who don't make it, sure it's probably your fault they gave up, but you can't just go in assuming they won't stay interested because that would make you a hack.
Sunday, June 26, 2011
Power Fantasies and Their Problems
For a short time in college I considered enlisting in the military but you have to understand my mind was in a very dark place then. I got over it, though I still find shooters and military-themed games fascinating. What boggles my mind, though, is how wrong most of them are about why I want to play them. It's as if they think I think being a soldier is this thrilling and glorious experience. At least Modern Warfare got it right when it killed me in a nuclear blast.
This isn't one of those complaints about there being too many shooters, though. Instead I bring up shooters to make an observation about games that are power fantasies, and some of the problems inherent to that style of play.
For the most part, a power fantasy is what it sounds like. It's the idea that if only you were a better more capable person. Games allow us to play as characters with abilities far superior to our own. God of War, Halo, Ninja Gaiden, Gears of War, Batman: Arkham Asylum, Devil May Cry, Assassin's Creed, Mass Effect, and The Witcher are all examples of power fantasies in games. Such games naturally fall into the action adventure, shooter, and role-playing genres, because power fantasies tend to revolve around dominating one's opponents, and these genres revolve around combat.
Identifying a Power-Fantasy Game: Themes vs. Systems
I think power-fantasy games are characterized at least as much by their thematic and fictional content as by their gameplay systems and player interactions. For example, take the old laserdisc arcade game Space Ace, which is by all means a power fantasy about being a sci-fi action hero. The gameplay itself consists of reflexive button presses and memorization. Just dial in the proper button sequence, and you get to watch a cool cartoon unfold. Games like this are where quick-time events came from. The same format could just as soon be used for a game based on Schindler's List. So then you'd have two games with identical gameplay, but only one would be seen as a power fantasy. Not sure what people would make of the other.
Spy Party designer Chris Hecker offers a succinct argument against power fantasies on his blog that got me thinking about this themes-vs.-systems distinction. In Bastion, the game I've been working on, I wanted to avoid creating the tone of a power fantasy. For example, the protagonist character is someone the player is intended to feel for rather than envy. On the other hand, aspects of Bastion's game systems can be likened to those found in power-fantasy games -- it's a combat-oriented game in the action role-playing genre. Does that mean it's a power fantasy in spite of my intentions? Of course not. The narrative and thematic substance of a game sooner defines its character as being a power-fantasy or not, rather than the genre or the gameplay systems.
To illustrate my point, take ICO and Shadow of the Colossus. These games revolve around conventional gameplay challenges, including relatively straightforward platforming and combat systems. You run, jump, and kill things in those games in a manner that's comparable to games like God of War or Assassin's Creed. However, I don't think many would consider ICO or Shadow of the Colossus to be power fantasies. The emotional content of those games gives the experience of overcoming their challenges a nuanced and contemplative feel.
Problems With Power Fantasies
I don't want to make power-fantasy games for a variety of reasons that have little to do with how common they are. Rather, it's because I think power-fantasy games have three inherent, thorny problems I would like to avoid:
Problem 1: Risk of creating emotional disconnect or sense of inadequacy in the player
In the typical power-fantasy game, the player's skills will initially not be aligned with those of his character. You're controlling a character who is far superior to you.
This can make the crucial first experience with the game feel dissonant or off-putting. In Uncharted 2: Among Thieves, which I think is a stunning and well crafted game overall, if you don't know how to sneak around as well as Nathan Drake knows how to sneak around, then there's a good chance you'll get flustered in one of the opening sequences. There's no explaining why Nathan Drake is suddenly incompetent in what should be a routine mission -- immersion is broken and you're reminded that you're just a poor schlub playing Uncharted 2 and failing at it. In The Witcher 2, my favorite game so far this year, the outstanding exposition and beautiful world can likewise come grinding to a halt as soon as the actual gameplay starts and you realize just how lethal the world of the game really is, and how lousy of a swordsman you are in spite of how proficient your character is supposed to be. You lose empathy for your character because you never experience having to go through what he went through in order to be good at his job.
Some games get around this type of problem through smart use of exposition or flashbacks. I thought the first hour of Assassin's Creed 2 wasn't as exciting as the rest of the game but at least it let you work your way up to earning the ninja-like skills of the protagonist. Most of the time, though, if a game is inviting you to be the badass then it's going to have an awkward learning curve, either nakedly easy or too hard.
Problem 2: Design limitations of an inherently powerful protagonist
If you're playing a game in which your character is very powerful and versatile, then not only is the game going to be harder to learn than it probably needs to be, with tons of front-loaded tutorial, it also won't leave much room for growth. Or it'll be some kind of nongame where you give minimal input, like Space Ace. Ironically, all this undermines the basic appeal of a power fantasy, which is to have a growing sense of superiority.
In Grand Theft Auto IV or almost any of the games derived from that series' template, you start with the power to wreak all kinds of havoc inside that sandbox world. You might work your way up to faster cars and deadlier guns than what you have access to right from the start, but in spite of the open-world scope, the sense of character progression is naturally limited. This is especially true of games set in the real world. In games like God of War, you start off extremely powerful but there's still a sense of progression as you move from superhuman to godlike powers. But in a military shooter, where you're a man with a gun, you don't expect to gain new abilities, and in 99 out of 100 such games, you don't. Realism.
Role-playing games have a traditional solution to these problems, by making the player start off as a nobody and gradually letting him grow his powers while his notoriety in the gameworld grows through the fiction. Even still, RPGs are notorious for their complexity, often front-loading far more game systems than the player ought to be concerned with at first. And most RPGs still are power fantasies from a fictional point of view.
If you're not making a power-fantasy game then you have far more latitude when defining your protagonist character. The player doesn't always want to be the badass, does he?
Problem 3: Limited emotional range
When a game is a power fantasy then it occupies a narrow and limiting emotional range. Power-fantasy games can be about justice, revenge... and, that's about it.
Look at the long list of games I've cited above and try and point to ones that aren't about justice or revenge.
Justice and revenge are age-old themes, deeply ingrained in human nature. The emotional range associated with these, I'd say, tends toward the aggressive and the negative. Some of the best works of fiction in the history of fiction have concerned justice or revenge. But these themes aren't everything.
Of course there's a whole slew of other themes and corresponding emotions that games can explore. It's an oversimplification but ICO and Shadow of the Colossus are games about love more so than they are about justice or revenge. By successfully applying an alternate thematic spin on conventional action adventure tropes, these games stood out as unique and provided unique and memorable experiences.
Power-fantasy games have a lot of things going for them. That's why so many of them are made. Games that attempt to solve the problems I've listed here have plenty of their own problems, including, I suppose, having a potentially more-limited appeal than power-fantasy games do. Even still, when thinking about the kinds of games I want to make, I'd much rather take my chances with exploring relatively untapped thematic territory than trying to attack head-on some hundreds of different games I hold in very high regard. I've tried that before and didn't like it as much.
This isn't one of those complaints about there being too many shooters, though. Instead I bring up shooters to make an observation about games that are power fantasies, and some of the problems inherent to that style of play.
For the most part, a power fantasy is what it sounds like. It's the idea that if only you were a better more capable person. Games allow us to play as characters with abilities far superior to our own. God of War, Halo, Ninja Gaiden, Gears of War, Batman: Arkham Asylum, Devil May Cry, Assassin's Creed, Mass Effect, and The Witcher are all examples of power fantasies in games. Such games naturally fall into the action adventure, shooter, and role-playing genres, because power fantasies tend to revolve around dominating one's opponents, and these genres revolve around combat.
Identifying a Power-Fantasy Game: Themes vs. Systems
I think power-fantasy games are characterized at least as much by their thematic and fictional content as by their gameplay systems and player interactions. For example, take the old laserdisc arcade game Space Ace, which is by all means a power fantasy about being a sci-fi action hero. The gameplay itself consists of reflexive button presses and memorization. Just dial in the proper button sequence, and you get to watch a cool cartoon unfold. Games like this are where quick-time events came from. The same format could just as soon be used for a game based on Schindler's List. So then you'd have two games with identical gameplay, but only one would be seen as a power fantasy. Not sure what people would make of the other.
Spy Party designer Chris Hecker offers a succinct argument against power fantasies on his blog that got me thinking about this themes-vs.-systems distinction. In Bastion, the game I've been working on, I wanted to avoid creating the tone of a power fantasy. For example, the protagonist character is someone the player is intended to feel for rather than envy. On the other hand, aspects of Bastion's game systems can be likened to those found in power-fantasy games -- it's a combat-oriented game in the action role-playing genre. Does that mean it's a power fantasy in spite of my intentions? Of course not. The narrative and thematic substance of a game sooner defines its character as being a power-fantasy or not, rather than the genre or the gameplay systems.
To illustrate my point, take ICO and Shadow of the Colossus. These games revolve around conventional gameplay challenges, including relatively straightforward platforming and combat systems. You run, jump, and kill things in those games in a manner that's comparable to games like God of War or Assassin's Creed. However, I don't think many would consider ICO or Shadow of the Colossus to be power fantasies. The emotional content of those games gives the experience of overcoming their challenges a nuanced and contemplative feel.
Problems With Power Fantasies
I don't want to make power-fantasy games for a variety of reasons that have little to do with how common they are. Rather, it's because I think power-fantasy games have three inherent, thorny problems I would like to avoid:
Problem 1: Risk of creating emotional disconnect or sense of inadequacy in the player
In the typical power-fantasy game, the player's skills will initially not be aligned with those of his character. You're controlling a character who is far superior to you.
This can make the crucial first experience with the game feel dissonant or off-putting. In Uncharted 2: Among Thieves, which I think is a stunning and well crafted game overall, if you don't know how to sneak around as well as Nathan Drake knows how to sneak around, then there's a good chance you'll get flustered in one of the opening sequences. There's no explaining why Nathan Drake is suddenly incompetent in what should be a routine mission -- immersion is broken and you're reminded that you're just a poor schlub playing Uncharted 2 and failing at it. In The Witcher 2, my favorite game so far this year, the outstanding exposition and beautiful world can likewise come grinding to a halt as soon as the actual gameplay starts and you realize just how lethal the world of the game really is, and how lousy of a swordsman you are in spite of how proficient your character is supposed to be. You lose empathy for your character because you never experience having to go through what he went through in order to be good at his job.
Some games get around this type of problem through smart use of exposition or flashbacks. I thought the first hour of Assassin's Creed 2 wasn't as exciting as the rest of the game but at least it let you work your way up to earning the ninja-like skills of the protagonist. Most of the time, though, if a game is inviting you to be the badass then it's going to have an awkward learning curve, either nakedly easy or too hard.
Problem 2: Design limitations of an inherently powerful protagonist
If you're playing a game in which your character is very powerful and versatile, then not only is the game going to be harder to learn than it probably needs to be, with tons of front-loaded tutorial, it also won't leave much room for growth. Or it'll be some kind of nongame where you give minimal input, like Space Ace. Ironically, all this undermines the basic appeal of a power fantasy, which is to have a growing sense of superiority.
In Grand Theft Auto IV or almost any of the games derived from that series' template, you start with the power to wreak all kinds of havoc inside that sandbox world. You might work your way up to faster cars and deadlier guns than what you have access to right from the start, but in spite of the open-world scope, the sense of character progression is naturally limited. This is especially true of games set in the real world. In games like God of War, you start off extremely powerful but there's still a sense of progression as you move from superhuman to godlike powers. But in a military shooter, where you're a man with a gun, you don't expect to gain new abilities, and in 99 out of 100 such games, you don't. Realism.
Role-playing games have a traditional solution to these problems, by making the player start off as a nobody and gradually letting him grow his powers while his notoriety in the gameworld grows through the fiction. Even still, RPGs are notorious for their complexity, often front-loading far more game systems than the player ought to be concerned with at first. And most RPGs still are power fantasies from a fictional point of view.
If you're not making a power-fantasy game then you have far more latitude when defining your protagonist character. The player doesn't always want to be the badass, does he?
Problem 3: Limited emotional range
When a game is a power fantasy then it occupies a narrow and limiting emotional range. Power-fantasy games can be about justice, revenge... and, that's about it.
Look at the long list of games I've cited above and try and point to ones that aren't about justice or revenge.
Justice and revenge are age-old themes, deeply ingrained in human nature. The emotional range associated with these, I'd say, tends toward the aggressive and the negative. Some of the best works of fiction in the history of fiction have concerned justice or revenge. But these themes aren't everything.
Of course there's a whole slew of other themes and corresponding emotions that games can explore. It's an oversimplification but ICO and Shadow of the Colossus are games about love more so than they are about justice or revenge. By successfully applying an alternate thematic spin on conventional action adventure tropes, these games stood out as unique and provided unique and memorable experiences.
. . .
Power-fantasy games have a lot of things going for them. That's why so many of them are made. Games that attempt to solve the problems I've listed here have plenty of their own problems, including, I suppose, having a potentially more-limited appeal than power-fantasy games do. Even still, when thinking about the kinds of games I want to make, I'd much rather take my chances with exploring relatively untapped thematic territory than trying to attack head-on some hundreds of different games I hold in very high regard. I've tried that before and didn't like it as much.
Tuesday, May 10, 2011
One Thing at a Time
Hey, I'm back. My writing work for Bastion is complete and the game is nearly finished. How well it finally turned out will be for the public to decide, though what I can say is that it's very much the game I wanted it to be. Everyone on the team is feeling good about where we ended up. Now that I have a bit of hindsight on the process, I'd like to comment on three principles that helped me construct the narrative. There won't be any story spoilers here, but approach with caution anyway if you're looking to play the game with no preconceptions.
It was important to me that Bastion have a rich and interesting story for the sake of players who (like me) care about story, while at the same time making concessions for players who don't care about story. This was not a matter of trying to make everyone happy. It was a matter of trying to create a good story for a game, by approaching it from the perspective of "no one cares about your stupid story," which I feel should be the baseline assumption if you're not a famous author or working with a famous property. People really cared about what the story was going to be in The Matrix Reloaded, but they had no expectations for the story in the original Matrix film. The original Matrix needed to work hard to get people to care, which is part of the reason why it's so much better than its sequels. In games, people are liable to care even less about story since there's a lot more to a game than its story.
This "assume no one cares" approach was manifest in several principles that I tried to stick to, which I'll explain in more detail below. They are:
Goal-driven story: An interesting story often is a complex or nuanced story. I wanted to strike a good balance with Bastion's story and layer the complexity so that it's there for people who care to see it, while the surface story remains simple and clear. Players have a lot they need to keep track of – not just story but also the game's systems and mechanics, which are in constant demand of attention. I didn't want the story to feel indulgent or like a comprehension test. I'm sure you've played games where you lose track of what's happening in the story and never get on board again. One such game happens to be my favorite game so far this year, called Tactics Ogre: Let Us Cling Together for the PSP. It's a beautiful and complicated game, with a huge cast of characters and an elaborate plot, but as engaged in it as I am, I have trouble keeping all of the factions and political maneuverings straight. I'm approaching the end of the game now and couldn't summarize the details of the story to save my life. I still enjoy it a lot for its tone and world but I wish key parts of it were presented more clearly.
One of the ways in which Bastion's story is kept simple is that the cast of characters is not enormous, and the player goal is specific and persistent. I used to work on real-time strategy games, where each mission tended to have unique objectives, sometimes multiple objectives. I also used to play a lot of massively multiplayer games, whose quests tended to have their own fictional conceits. I found in both cases that many players of these games tended to tune out the story reasons for these missions or quests and just wanted the game to "bottom-line" what needed to be done. This wasn't because they were lazy, and wasn't even necessarily because the stories of these games were bad. It just got difficult to keep a complicated story straight while also having to parse new gameplay objectives.
Maintaining a constant "object of desire" for the player to pursue doesn't have to over-simplify the story of a game. Instead I think it can create a strong framework on which to layer a rich narrative. One of my favorite examples is the original Metal Gear Solid, which has the best story of all the games in that series. The plot, on the surface, is simple: Solid Snake, a secret agent, must infiltrate a military complex in order to rescue the head of a weapons research firm and discover whether the terrorists occupying the complex have nuclear capability.
That's it. It sounds like a totally straightforward premise for a spy thriller. But if you've played Metal Gear Solid, then you know the story takes an almost ridiculous number of unexpected turns. What helps drive you forward as you face off against cyborg ninjas, one-handed pistol-wielding sadists, and minigun-wielding tank-driving shamans? The goal remains the same. No matter what insane situation you're in, you're still after the same thing, and the game's briefer characters do a good job of reminding you of this.
God of War is another one of my favorite examples. You're trying to kill the God of War. The story has much more to it than that, but you don't have the moment in God of War where you wonder, "Wait, what am I even supposed to be doing?" Unless you're stuck on a puzzle, but that's a subject for another day.
Immediacy in storytelling: One of the reasons exposition has such a bad reputation is that it's often used to describe things that are disconnected from the matter at hand. You end up feeling like you're waiting for the story to get out of the way. Yes, Star Wars has license to open with a text crawl explaining what's happening in the world. This type of technique is best avoided in most cases, yet games do the equivalent of it all the time. Characters have long conversations about characters who aren't there. Cutscenes tell you why you should care instead of letting the gameplay make you care. You're given mission briefings about how important certain things are and how you must not let this or that happen. It's all just talk. None of this has an impact on you, and you see right through it, especially when you're playing a massively multiplayer game and you know it's just window dressing for another bit of quest loot.
To avoid this problem, story in games should concern things that matter to the player, rather than matter to the story. In Halo, you crash-land on the Halo and need to find a way out before you're hunted down and killed. Though there's a backstory around trying to defeat the Covenant and save the Earth, none of that matters to you in the original Halo, and besides, these are things that no human being can relate to. In Halo, you're just trying to get out of a bad situation. BioShock is set up in much the same way. Out of this World and LIMBO are set up in much the same way. Being stranded in strange worlds not only makes you feel empathy for the protagonists of these games, it compels you to press forward and find a way out.
In the case of Bastion, the story deliberately raises some key questions about the state of the world right from the beginning: Why is it shattered, why is the land reconstituting as you walk around, why are you being attacked by things called Squirts and Gasfellas, why is a narrator telling the story as you move through the game, and so on. Thanks to the game's narration technique, these questions come up right in the moment the issues begin to affect the player, rather than before they're of any concern or too long after. I don't tell you that there are strange creatures who want to hurt you before you face them. I don't tell you about the state of the land before you see how it looks for yourself. By not explaining away these things before the fact, I stand the best chance of piquing your curiosity and using exposition as it's meant to be used, rather than bombarding you with detail that's important to me as a writer but maybe not so important to you as a player.
Revealing the emotional range of the story: This is an idea derived from Robert McKee's story seminar, in which he points out that it's a good practice for the author to show the emotional palette of his story early on. This may sound like terrible advice on the surface. What if you have some amazing plot twist all planned out, why would you want to give that away?? But this advice has no bearing on something like that. All it's saying is to avoid jarring emotional manipulation of the audience, not even for the audience's sake but for your own story's sake. To paraphrase McKee, if, for example, you have some sort of serious drama and then try to deliver some comic relief in the final act, what's likely to happen? The audience won't laugh – the story hasn't trained them to expect to laugh, and any attempts at humor will likely feel awkward and out of place. On the other hand, if there were humor in the story early on, later attempts at comic relief would be more likely to succeed.
In other words, if the story gives evidence to the breadth of its emotional content early on, the audience will have an easier job of following along as the story unfolds. This does not need to come at a cost to the story's richness or complexity. One of my favorite movies, Fight Club, I think can't be accused of simplicity yet does a masterful job of defining its emotional palette quickly. The self-depracting humor and raw darkness of that story are all present from the start. The story moves into shocking and unexpected territory, but when you look back on it you realize that the groundwork was there. Maybe Fight Club isn't the best example of this since that third act really is crazy. Perfectly good examples are movies like Iron Man and the original Pirates of the Caribbean, each of which I think did a great job of creating a specific tone and sticking to it. Maintaining tone does not mean being monotonous if you have a rich tone.
In Bastion, it was very important to me to establish the emotional palette of the story quickly, especially considering the story is delivered in large part through the use of voiceover narration. I needed to define the narrator's character in addition to defining the gameworld itself, and I do this using a range of emotional content that should ultimately feel consistent to the narrator and therefore to the game. If I did my job properly then you should get the impression that the narrator's telling of this story is important at least to him. You should quickly gain a sense for the depth of the character and, hopefully, find him intriguing enough to want to keep listening as well as keep playing. Each thing the narrator says near the beginning of the game is in service of informing you both about the state of the world and, indirectly, about what kind of man he is. And by virtue of that, you get a feel for the game as a whole, from its tone to its story themes. The narrator's character grows from there, and my responsibility from that point becomes fully delivering on this first impression.
In conclusion, I kept in mind these three foundational techniques so that I stood the best chance of making Bastion's story something hopefully-worthwhile, without confusing players who just want to know what's going on and why they should care. I wanted to waste none of the player's time in coming to grips with what was interesting about the story. If I could do this well, I figured maybe the story would convert some of the players in the don't-care category into players who do.
It was important to me that Bastion have a rich and interesting story for the sake of players who (like me) care about story, while at the same time making concessions for players who don't care about story. This was not a matter of trying to make everyone happy. It was a matter of trying to create a good story for a game, by approaching it from the perspective of "no one cares about your stupid story," which I feel should be the baseline assumption if you're not a famous author or working with a famous property. People really cared about what the story was going to be in The Matrix Reloaded, but they had no expectations for the story in the original Matrix film. The original Matrix needed to work hard to get people to care, which is part of the reason why it's so much better than its sequels. In games, people are liable to care even less about story since there's a lot more to a game than its story.
This "assume no one cares" approach was manifest in several principles that I tried to stick to, which I'll explain in more detail below. They are:
- Structure the story around a clear, consistent goal.
- Avoid attempts to engage the player about things not happening onscreen in that moment.
- Suggest the emotional range of the story early on.
Goal-driven story: An interesting story often is a complex or nuanced story. I wanted to strike a good balance with Bastion's story and layer the complexity so that it's there for people who care to see it, while the surface story remains simple and clear. Players have a lot they need to keep track of – not just story but also the game's systems and mechanics, which are in constant demand of attention. I didn't want the story to feel indulgent or like a comprehension test. I'm sure you've played games where you lose track of what's happening in the story and never get on board again. One such game happens to be my favorite game so far this year, called Tactics Ogre: Let Us Cling Together for the PSP. It's a beautiful and complicated game, with a huge cast of characters and an elaborate plot, but as engaged in it as I am, I have trouble keeping all of the factions and political maneuverings straight. I'm approaching the end of the game now and couldn't summarize the details of the story to save my life. I still enjoy it a lot for its tone and world but I wish key parts of it were presented more clearly.
One of the ways in which Bastion's story is kept simple is that the cast of characters is not enormous, and the player goal is specific and persistent. I used to work on real-time strategy games, where each mission tended to have unique objectives, sometimes multiple objectives. I also used to play a lot of massively multiplayer games, whose quests tended to have their own fictional conceits. I found in both cases that many players of these games tended to tune out the story reasons for these missions or quests and just wanted the game to "bottom-line" what needed to be done. This wasn't because they were lazy, and wasn't even necessarily because the stories of these games were bad. It just got difficult to keep a complicated story straight while also having to parse new gameplay objectives.
Maintaining a constant "object of desire" for the player to pursue doesn't have to over-simplify the story of a game. Instead I think it can create a strong framework on which to layer a rich narrative. One of my favorite examples is the original Metal Gear Solid, which has the best story of all the games in that series. The plot, on the surface, is simple: Solid Snake, a secret agent, must infiltrate a military complex in order to rescue the head of a weapons research firm and discover whether the terrorists occupying the complex have nuclear capability.
That's it. It sounds like a totally straightforward premise for a spy thriller. But if you've played Metal Gear Solid, then you know the story takes an almost ridiculous number of unexpected turns. What helps drive you forward as you face off against cyborg ninjas, one-handed pistol-wielding sadists, and minigun-wielding tank-driving shamans? The goal remains the same. No matter what insane situation you're in, you're still after the same thing, and the game's briefer characters do a good job of reminding you of this.
God of War is another one of my favorite examples. You're trying to kill the God of War. The story has much more to it than that, but you don't have the moment in God of War where you wonder, "Wait, what am I even supposed to be doing?" Unless you're stuck on a puzzle, but that's a subject for another day.
Immediacy in storytelling: One of the reasons exposition has such a bad reputation is that it's often used to describe things that are disconnected from the matter at hand. You end up feeling like you're waiting for the story to get out of the way. Yes, Star Wars has license to open with a text crawl explaining what's happening in the world. This type of technique is best avoided in most cases, yet games do the equivalent of it all the time. Characters have long conversations about characters who aren't there. Cutscenes tell you why you should care instead of letting the gameplay make you care. You're given mission briefings about how important certain things are and how you must not let this or that happen. It's all just talk. None of this has an impact on you, and you see right through it, especially when you're playing a massively multiplayer game and you know it's just window dressing for another bit of quest loot.
To avoid this problem, story in games should concern things that matter to the player, rather than matter to the story. In Halo, you crash-land on the Halo and need to find a way out before you're hunted down and killed. Though there's a backstory around trying to defeat the Covenant and save the Earth, none of that matters to you in the original Halo, and besides, these are things that no human being can relate to. In Halo, you're just trying to get out of a bad situation. BioShock is set up in much the same way. Out of this World and LIMBO are set up in much the same way. Being stranded in strange worlds not only makes you feel empathy for the protagonists of these games, it compels you to press forward and find a way out.
In the case of Bastion, the story deliberately raises some key questions about the state of the world right from the beginning: Why is it shattered, why is the land reconstituting as you walk around, why are you being attacked by things called Squirts and Gasfellas, why is a narrator telling the story as you move through the game, and so on. Thanks to the game's narration technique, these questions come up right in the moment the issues begin to affect the player, rather than before they're of any concern or too long after. I don't tell you that there are strange creatures who want to hurt you before you face them. I don't tell you about the state of the land before you see how it looks for yourself. By not explaining away these things before the fact, I stand the best chance of piquing your curiosity and using exposition as it's meant to be used, rather than bombarding you with detail that's important to me as a writer but maybe not so important to you as a player.
Revealing the emotional range of the story: This is an idea derived from Robert McKee's story seminar, in which he points out that it's a good practice for the author to show the emotional palette of his story early on. This may sound like terrible advice on the surface. What if you have some amazing plot twist all planned out, why would you want to give that away?? But this advice has no bearing on something like that. All it's saying is to avoid jarring emotional manipulation of the audience, not even for the audience's sake but for your own story's sake. To paraphrase McKee, if, for example, you have some sort of serious drama and then try to deliver some comic relief in the final act, what's likely to happen? The audience won't laugh – the story hasn't trained them to expect to laugh, and any attempts at humor will likely feel awkward and out of place. On the other hand, if there were humor in the story early on, later attempts at comic relief would be more likely to succeed.
In other words, if the story gives evidence to the breadth of its emotional content early on, the audience will have an easier job of following along as the story unfolds. This does not need to come at a cost to the story's richness or complexity. One of my favorite movies, Fight Club, I think can't be accused of simplicity yet does a masterful job of defining its emotional palette quickly. The self-depracting humor and raw darkness of that story are all present from the start. The story moves into shocking and unexpected territory, but when you look back on it you realize that the groundwork was there. Maybe Fight Club isn't the best example of this since that third act really is crazy. Perfectly good examples are movies like Iron Man and the original Pirates of the Caribbean, each of which I think did a great job of creating a specific tone and sticking to it. Maintaining tone does not mean being monotonous if you have a rich tone.
In Bastion, it was very important to me to establish the emotional palette of the story quickly, especially considering the story is delivered in large part through the use of voiceover narration. I needed to define the narrator's character in addition to defining the gameworld itself, and I do this using a range of emotional content that should ultimately feel consistent to the narrator and therefore to the game. If I did my job properly then you should get the impression that the narrator's telling of this story is important at least to him. You should quickly gain a sense for the depth of the character and, hopefully, find him intriguing enough to want to keep listening as well as keep playing. Each thing the narrator says near the beginning of the game is in service of informing you both about the state of the world and, indirectly, about what kind of man he is. And by virtue of that, you get a feel for the game as a whole, from its tone to its story themes. The narrator's character grows from there, and my responsibility from that point becomes fully delivering on this first impression.
. . .
In conclusion, I kept in mind these three foundational techniques so that I stood the best chance of making Bastion's story something hopefully-worthwhile, without confusing players who just want to know what's going on and why they should care. I wanted to waste none of the player's time in coming to grips with what was interesting about the story. If I could do this well, I figured maybe the story would convert some of the players in the don't-care category into players who do.
Thursday, March 24, 2011
Not Dead Yet
I've been working on Bastion all this year. I'm only taking a break now because I'm building a bunch more audio, but at this point we think we can see the light at the end of the tunnel. Our path is set and we've been in execution mode these past months. For me personally it's involved a good deal of level design work and a lot of writing. It's been the most rewarding work I've done since I got started working in the game industry.
That said I don't want to say too much more about what I've been up to with the game since it's close to being finished and I don't want to give anything else away at this point. If people find the result of the work to be interesting then I'd love to talk more about the goals and process behind it after it's had a little time to settle.
One thing's for sure -- the response the game's been getting based on the 20-minute prologue has been everything I could have hoped for and more. The game is a summation of many key elements and the integral contributions of each individual on the team, though given the narrative focus of this blog and my own focus on that work, it's been great seeing the positive reactions to how we approach story, exposition, and writing in games.
That said I don't want to say too much more about what I've been up to with the game since it's close to being finished and I don't want to give anything else away at this point. If people find the result of the work to be interesting then I'd love to talk more about the goals and process behind it after it's had a little time to settle.
One thing's for sure -- the response the game's been getting based on the 20-minute prologue has been everything I could have hoped for and more. The game is a summation of many key elements and the integral contributions of each individual on the team, though given the narrative focus of this blog and my own focus on that work, it's been great seeing the positive reactions to how we approach story, exposition, and writing in games.
Thursday, December 23, 2010
Death and Games
Video games weren't always dominated by power fantasies. In fact I think the rise of the male wish-fulfillment Hollywood blockbuster of the 1980s, in movies like Rambo II and Commando, is what led video games down a similar path with stuff like Rush 'n Attack and, well, Commando. But even before this shift, games were still concerned with death, a trope that players young and old could always identify with. In Space Invaders you die. In Pac-Man you die. In Donkey Kong you die. In Pole Position you don't just lose the race, your shit fucking explodes and you die.
The noted screenwriting instructor Robert McKee says that stories are a metaphor for life, when he explains why people are innately drawn to stories. I think games are a metaphor for life. This is the reason games don't need stories to be interesting, because in essence it's all the same.
Many games are literal and so they depict death. The player fails by causing his player character to die in some fashion. Yet, for the vast majority of games, death is handled in a lazy, conventional fashion. It's strange when you think about it – something as serious as death, treated with such disregard as game death. What's the last game you played that handled death in an interesting way, that didn't act like the last 20 games you played by giving you a gameplay hint and respawing you at the last checkpoint? Death in games is nothing but a bit of inconvenience. Or when games neglect to put checkpoints close enough, it's a source of frustration, a poor design choice. It's almost never something profound, something complicated, something scary -- you know, like death.
Most games don't even deliver on the promise of immortality. You have unlimited lives in military shooters just because whatever. Just like Afghanistan in real-life. Super Meat Boy, a ridiculous and funny and awesome game, has a more thoughtful approach to player death than virtually all the self-important AAA games this year by having a late-game cutscene where the villain gets frustrated by Meat Boy's propensity to keep respawning whenever he's killed. Meat Boy just kind of shrugs, almost apologetic for his immortality. He can't help being the way he is.
Why should death even exist in games? Death used to exist in games because games needed a mechanism to punish failure. Today more and more games are becoming more and more lenient about failure, because they want more players and want to eliminate frustration and only keep pleasure. It's to the point at which failure becomes almost impossible in certain games, and yet as a player you're still expected to believe that your character is in mortal danger. What's the point?
My main point is this: I think if a game is going to have death in it, then death in the game deserves careful consideration as part of the design. I am not OK with games thoughtlessly borrowing the auto-respawn-at-last-checkpoint design one after another. I want games to treat death with dignity, or disrespect, to make me fear it or laugh at it, to make me think about it or even want it, but I'm sick of games thinking it's something I don't care about as a player. If you don't think I care about it then don't put it in the game, or if you're going to put it in the game then do something interesting with it.
Here is a short list of games that have done interesting things with death.
- In the Fire Emblem series, which I love dearly, death comes swiftly and permanently. These are character-driven strategy games in a fantasy setting, but death isn't just an inconvenience in that setting as it is in most fantasy games. A character who dies in the game is gone forever after speaking his or her often-tragic dying words, and you'll be left to wonder how his or her story might have resolved. Players end up restarting entire missions to prevent character deaths, but at least it's a choice. Few games make me value staying alive quite like Fire Emblem. Other strategy games like X-COM and Jagged Alliance have done similar things, I just think Fire Emblem does it even better by building up its characters so well through its rich storytelling.
- In the Soul Reaver series, you are the immortal vampire-wraith Raziel. Your body can be destroyed but not your spirit. When you "die" in the game, you sink into an alternate version of the world, a spirit realm filled with pathetic lost souls you must consume in order to regain your corporeal self. Some of the game's puzzles involved having to traverse both instances of the world to reach new places. Raziel is a tragic character who would like nothing better than to rest in piece, so the game subverts expectations around video game death on multiple levels.
- In the arcade games Ninja Gaiden and Final Fight, both featured rather graphic "continue" screens showing your character bound and, respectively, about to be eviscerated by a spinning razor or blown to pieces by a bomb. You have 10 seconds to insert another coin to continue playing and prevent this fate. It was a cheap but effective play on the player's emotions. There was something base and manipulative about it, and for that reason I should hate it, but something about it was so playful that it worked well for these games. I'm sure it helped them earn a bunch more quarters, and as cheap emotional plays for player's time and money go, it was way cooler than FarmVille telling me to adopt a homeless orphaned crippled baby seal or whatever.
- Braid is a game about what if you could move forward with the knowledge gained from failing while erasing the failure itself, so its handling of death is very interesting.
- The officially-old massively multiplayer game EverQuest placed severe consequences on player death, often representing hours of lost time or even worse. In a worst-case scenario players could die in such a way that their corpses, which held all their belongings (representing potentially hundreds of hours' worth of questing), were impossible to recover. As a result, I imagine that fear of death in EverQuest probably approximated a real-life fear of death for some of its players more than any other game. MMOs have since repeatedly loosened the reigns on death penalties in order to reduce frustration / heartache and make themselves accessible to wider audiences, but EverQuest achieved something special in its time.
- ZHP: The Unlosing Ranger vs. Darkdeath Evilman... look I'm sorry it's Japanese OK? I haven't played this game yet but it's on my short list in no small part because of its fascinating, funny, upbeat take on player death. It's a game about the inevitability of disgraceful death at the hands of a hopelessly powerful enemy, yet your character has the ability to reincarnate and begin anew with greater potential for advancement than his past self.
- Last year's Demon's Souls reminded me a lot of EverQuest's corpse runs. Death came swiftly and often, and carried a heavy price of essentially all your money and experience, though the game gave you one chance to try and recover the lost goods... and did that ever make you take things slow and steady, take the time to learn the environments and the encounters. The best part was seeing apparitions of other players dying and seeing messages left by other players, warning you of impending dangers. The sense of a solitary-yet-shared experience was amazing in that game, like being trapped in a dungeon with other survivors and naturally joining forces to try and survive.
- In Diablo II and its hardcore mode, death was permanent. Hit a lag spike going into Duriel's lair in Act II and that character you'd been building up for the last two weeks would be gone. Similar feelings to Fire Emblem – you felt a healthy respect for the possibility of death, an appreciation for how it could come at any time, would have to make peace with the shocking reality of it. I loved hardcore more.
- In Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time, the character has a Braid-like ability to reverse time (in fairness the game came out well before Braid), and in addition to that there's a narrative layer in which the character is recounting his own story. When the player character dies, the narrator says things like "That's not how it happened," justifying why a respawn mechanic exists in that game, justifying why the game was pretty easy but nonetheless exciting because you wanted to know how it all worked out in the end. It was excellent.
- In Counter-Strike, death was often shocking and meaningful. Here was a shooter where you couldn't just respawn. When you died you sat out the rest of the round. You were failing your whole team and all you could do was watch as the rest of your boys probably get killed because they were down a man. Death has never felt more meaningful to me in a shooter as it did in that game, so much so that I was never much of a Counter-Strike player. Of course most shooters trend away from this type of consequence, and yet Counter-Strike continues to be extremely popular, because it gives people reasons like this to become invested.
. . . .
In the game I'm working on, we don't want you to die, but I want you to know it's possible to fail if you play in a careless fashion, if you ignore danger. If you do run out of health, you'll have at least one more chance to carry on from where you left off in any given sequence, which we think encourages players to push forward more carefully if they started getting a bit lazy or sloppy in their play. It works as a literal wake-up call. Our reactive narrator will also have different things to say about the player character getting knocked out in each of the game's sequences, and will say different things depending on whether or not you fail, so we at least acknowledge the possibility of death in this fashion – we keep track of it and respond to it.
We struggled for a while with what to do about player death in the game, and were tempted by systems that would eliminate any penalty whatsoever because we didn't want to force people to repeat lots of content if they didn't want to. I think what we decided on is a good solution for our game, and I'm glad we arrived at it through thoughtful exploration and iteration rather than just taking the existing conventional checkpoint solution and calling it a day. I also like that our solution maps to the aesthetic of our game. In Bastion's world, death may be an inconvenience that can be prevented. At the very least, the narrator of the story does not seem to take death very seriously, as you can infer from the trailer. Part of the reason for that is, as you can see, that I don't think game players take death very seriously either.
Let me know what are some of your favorite examples of games that treated death in interesting ways.
I also wanted to take a moment to thank you for reading. Since I started this blog in March, I've succeeded in making the types of preoccupations expressed here into a key part of my job. I love what I get to do everyday and look forward to creating a game next year that's going to deliver on some of the ideas I've expressed here over the months. Happy holidays and here's to a good year for games in 2011.
The noted screenwriting instructor Robert McKee says that stories are a metaphor for life, when he explains why people are innately drawn to stories. I think games are a metaphor for life. This is the reason games don't need stories to be interesting, because in essence it's all the same.
Many games are literal and so they depict death. The player fails by causing his player character to die in some fashion. Yet, for the vast majority of games, death is handled in a lazy, conventional fashion. It's strange when you think about it – something as serious as death, treated with such disregard as game death. What's the last game you played that handled death in an interesting way, that didn't act like the last 20 games you played by giving you a gameplay hint and respawing you at the last checkpoint? Death in games is nothing but a bit of inconvenience. Or when games neglect to put checkpoints close enough, it's a source of frustration, a poor design choice. It's almost never something profound, something complicated, something scary -- you know, like death.
Most games don't even deliver on the promise of immortality. You have unlimited lives in military shooters just because whatever. Just like Afghanistan in real-life. Super Meat Boy, a ridiculous and funny and awesome game, has a more thoughtful approach to player death than virtually all the self-important AAA games this year by having a late-game cutscene where the villain gets frustrated by Meat Boy's propensity to keep respawning whenever he's killed. Meat Boy just kind of shrugs, almost apologetic for his immortality. He can't help being the way he is.
Why should death even exist in games? Death used to exist in games because games needed a mechanism to punish failure. Today more and more games are becoming more and more lenient about failure, because they want more players and want to eliminate frustration and only keep pleasure. It's to the point at which failure becomes almost impossible in certain games, and yet as a player you're still expected to believe that your character is in mortal danger. What's the point?
My main point is this: I think if a game is going to have death in it, then death in the game deserves careful consideration as part of the design. I am not OK with games thoughtlessly borrowing the auto-respawn-at-last-checkpoint design one after another. I want games to treat death with dignity, or disrespect, to make me fear it or laugh at it, to make me think about it or even want it, but I'm sick of games thinking it's something I don't care about as a player. If you don't think I care about it then don't put it in the game, or if you're going to put it in the game then do something interesting with it.
Here is a short list of games that have done interesting things with death.
- In the Fire Emblem series, which I love dearly, death comes swiftly and permanently. These are character-driven strategy games in a fantasy setting, but death isn't just an inconvenience in that setting as it is in most fantasy games. A character who dies in the game is gone forever after speaking his or her often-tragic dying words, and you'll be left to wonder how his or her story might have resolved. Players end up restarting entire missions to prevent character deaths, but at least it's a choice. Few games make me value staying alive quite like Fire Emblem. Other strategy games like X-COM and Jagged Alliance have done similar things, I just think Fire Emblem does it even better by building up its characters so well through its rich storytelling.
- In the Soul Reaver series, you are the immortal vampire-wraith Raziel. Your body can be destroyed but not your spirit. When you "die" in the game, you sink into an alternate version of the world, a spirit realm filled with pathetic lost souls you must consume in order to regain your corporeal self. Some of the game's puzzles involved having to traverse both instances of the world to reach new places. Raziel is a tragic character who would like nothing better than to rest in piece, so the game subverts expectations around video game death on multiple levels.
- In the arcade games Ninja Gaiden and Final Fight, both featured rather graphic "continue" screens showing your character bound and, respectively, about to be eviscerated by a spinning razor or blown to pieces by a bomb. You have 10 seconds to insert another coin to continue playing and prevent this fate. It was a cheap but effective play on the player's emotions. There was something base and manipulative about it, and for that reason I should hate it, but something about it was so playful that it worked well for these games. I'm sure it helped them earn a bunch more quarters, and as cheap emotional plays for player's time and money go, it was way cooler than FarmVille telling me to adopt a homeless orphaned crippled baby seal or whatever.
- Braid is a game about what if you could move forward with the knowledge gained from failing while erasing the failure itself, so its handling of death is very interesting.
- The officially-old massively multiplayer game EverQuest placed severe consequences on player death, often representing hours of lost time or even worse. In a worst-case scenario players could die in such a way that their corpses, which held all their belongings (representing potentially hundreds of hours' worth of questing), were impossible to recover. As a result, I imagine that fear of death in EverQuest probably approximated a real-life fear of death for some of its players more than any other game. MMOs have since repeatedly loosened the reigns on death penalties in order to reduce frustration / heartache and make themselves accessible to wider audiences, but EverQuest achieved something special in its time.
- ZHP: The Unlosing Ranger vs. Darkdeath Evilman... look I'm sorry it's Japanese OK? I haven't played this game yet but it's on my short list in no small part because of its fascinating, funny, upbeat take on player death. It's a game about the inevitability of disgraceful death at the hands of a hopelessly powerful enemy, yet your character has the ability to reincarnate and begin anew with greater potential for advancement than his past self.
- Last year's Demon's Souls reminded me a lot of EverQuest's corpse runs. Death came swiftly and often, and carried a heavy price of essentially all your money and experience, though the game gave you one chance to try and recover the lost goods... and did that ever make you take things slow and steady, take the time to learn the environments and the encounters. The best part was seeing apparitions of other players dying and seeing messages left by other players, warning you of impending dangers. The sense of a solitary-yet-shared experience was amazing in that game, like being trapped in a dungeon with other survivors and naturally joining forces to try and survive.
- In Diablo II and its hardcore mode, death was permanent. Hit a lag spike going into Duriel's lair in Act II and that character you'd been building up for the last two weeks would be gone. Similar feelings to Fire Emblem – you felt a healthy respect for the possibility of death, an appreciation for how it could come at any time, would have to make peace with the shocking reality of it. I loved hardcore more.
- In Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time, the character has a Braid-like ability to reverse time (in fairness the game came out well before Braid), and in addition to that there's a narrative layer in which the character is recounting his own story. When the player character dies, the narrator says things like "That's not how it happened," justifying why a respawn mechanic exists in that game, justifying why the game was pretty easy but nonetheless exciting because you wanted to know how it all worked out in the end. It was excellent.
- In Counter-Strike, death was often shocking and meaningful. Here was a shooter where you couldn't just respawn. When you died you sat out the rest of the round. You were failing your whole team and all you could do was watch as the rest of your boys probably get killed because they were down a man. Death has never felt more meaningful to me in a shooter as it did in that game, so much so that I was never much of a Counter-Strike player. Of course most shooters trend away from this type of consequence, and yet Counter-Strike continues to be extremely popular, because it gives people reasons like this to become invested.
. . . .
In the game I'm working on, we don't want you to die, but I want you to know it's possible to fail if you play in a careless fashion, if you ignore danger. If you do run out of health, you'll have at least one more chance to carry on from where you left off in any given sequence, which we think encourages players to push forward more carefully if they started getting a bit lazy or sloppy in their play. It works as a literal wake-up call. Our reactive narrator will also have different things to say about the player character getting knocked out in each of the game's sequences, and will say different things depending on whether or not you fail, so we at least acknowledge the possibility of death in this fashion – we keep track of it and respond to it.
We struggled for a while with what to do about player death in the game, and were tempted by systems that would eliminate any penalty whatsoever because we didn't want to force people to repeat lots of content if they didn't want to. I think what we decided on is a good solution for our game, and I'm glad we arrived at it through thoughtful exploration and iteration rather than just taking the existing conventional checkpoint solution and calling it a day. I also like that our solution maps to the aesthetic of our game. In Bastion's world, death may be an inconvenience that can be prevented. At the very least, the narrator of the story does not seem to take death very seriously, as you can infer from the trailer. Part of the reason for that is, as you can see, that I don't think game players take death very seriously either.
Let me know what are some of your favorite examples of games that treated death in interesting ways.
. . . .
I also wanted to take a moment to thank you for reading. Since I started this blog in March, I've succeeded in making the types of preoccupations expressed here into a key part of my job. I love what I get to do everyday and look forward to creating a game next year that's going to deliver on some of the ideas I've expressed here over the months. Happy holidays and here's to a good year for games in 2011.
Tuesday, November 23, 2010
Closed Narratives in Open Worlds
I liked open-world games a lot better back when they were just called role-playing games. Maybe I couldn't mow down pedestrians with a car in Fallout or Ultima VII, but I still could go wherever I damn well pleased and do whatever I wanted, even if it meant breaking the rather strict laws of the respective gameworlds. The thing is, I felt like those games fully supported my actions no matter what I did. Such games fed back on the entire breadth of my gameplay choices. Ultima VII was not a game about being good or evil quite like Knights of the Old Republic, but it always let you do evil just so you knew it was there as an alternative, just so the temptation and the option for it were always there. You didn't have to be good, you chose to be, and that gave weight to your actions in the game.
My problem with today's open-world games – and by this I really mean the Rockstar Games genre, because as a collective of studios, Rockstar really has single-handedly defined this genre in recent years – is that their narrative content is increasingly conflicting with their gameplay. Their gameplay says "do whatever you want when you're not playing a story mission" while their narrative says "watch this character's story unfold." From a narrative standpoint, these games have become the Western equivalent of the glory days of the Japanese RPG, the days of games like Final Fantasy VII. Except those games have long since fallen out of vogue.
In those days, your reward for overcoming a gameplay challenge of some sort was a bit of noninteractive story. This was a wonderful structure as just about anyone can attest who played one of the well-regarded Final Fantasy games back in their heyday. You became attached these ensemble casts of crisply defined, empathetic, interesting characters and through your actions as some disembodied turn-based combat specialist you were able to help them reach the end of the line of their respective stories. I'll never forget some of those characters. Their stories benefited from the linearity of the structure and the lack of player control during story scenes. If I had control over the Dragoon Kain's choices in Final Fantasy II, I wouldn't have turned traitor against Cecil in the first place, and I would have inadvertently negated one of the game's more interesting subplots. Or if I had a real choice as to whether to remain a Dark Knight or become a Paladin as Cecil, well... I had no complaints about being something called a Dark Knight at a time when RPGs almost always cast me as a pure and noble hero.
Today's open-world games such as Red Dead Redemption and Grand Theft Auto IV are presenting these increasingly lavish tales with huge casts of characters. I like what they're trying to do with their stories. I finished this year's Red Dead Redemption on the promise of a deeply satisfying ending, and in the end it totally delivered. However, the strength of these games' characterizations is adversely affecting the way I play. I don't like the freedom of choice that the gameplay offers me because most of the choice runs counter to what my character would actually do. Red Dead's John Marston is a good-natured man with a dark past. That the game lets me wantonly slaughter people in the streets in exchange for some petty cash and a slap on the wrist just feels all wrong, and I find only the absence of entertainment in it – not because I have a distaste for violent videogames (if I could drink videogame blood I would), but because I don't like when games give me lots of ways to break my own suspension of disbelief, especially when they do an excellent job of getting me to suspend my disbelief in the first place.
Along these lines I just couldn't bring myself to rampage through GTA IV's Liberty City like I could in Grand Theft Auto III back in 2001. It's not that the novelty was gone, because it was absolutely there. GTA IV seemed like such a great playground in which to be some horrible, horrible crook. But Niko Bellic isn't that guy. He's a guy who's trying to help his Mom and find his cousin a nice girl. He doesn't mow people down on the sidewalk.
I played and enjoyed both of these games and the lengths they took both to create vividly detailed clockwork worlds and relatively serious, relatively thoughtful stories. I'm just saying that the two halves of the games – the story part and the open-world structure – didn't mesh for me, so in both cases I found myself actively trying to ignore the peripheral content and beelining through the story missions with a feeling of "I hope I don't break anything" along the way. In effect, I made myself play these games as linearly as possible.
I'm not suggesting these games should have been strictly linear, as the reception to the recent Mafia II is a good indicator of how a not-insigificant number of players do expect open-world gameplay systems from a game with any superficial resemblance to other open-world games. (There are also exceptional cases like Batman: Arkham Asylum, which supports a broad range of actions from the player, pretty much all of which seem internally consistent to the game and its famous starring character.) But I do find it strange how the open-world genre has evolved, when older examples like GTA III didn't have the same problems. GTA III and its silent protagonist let me decide what sort of man I was, whether I was the sort to drive on the sidewalk on a busy intersection or take care to only shoot the bad guys, or somewhere in between. In that game I truly felt like I was in an open world. Today's open worlds may be bigger and more detailed but they feel a lot more restricted to me, because I can't bring myself to ignore their stories.
My problem with today's open-world games – and by this I really mean the Rockstar Games genre, because as a collective of studios, Rockstar really has single-handedly defined this genre in recent years – is that their narrative content is increasingly conflicting with their gameplay. Their gameplay says "do whatever you want when you're not playing a story mission" while their narrative says "watch this character's story unfold." From a narrative standpoint, these games have become the Western equivalent of the glory days of the Japanese RPG, the days of games like Final Fantasy VII. Except those games have long since fallen out of vogue.
In those days, your reward for overcoming a gameplay challenge of some sort was a bit of noninteractive story. This was a wonderful structure as just about anyone can attest who played one of the well-regarded Final Fantasy games back in their heyday. You became attached these ensemble casts of crisply defined, empathetic, interesting characters and through your actions as some disembodied turn-based combat specialist you were able to help them reach the end of the line of their respective stories. I'll never forget some of those characters. Their stories benefited from the linearity of the structure and the lack of player control during story scenes. If I had control over the Dragoon Kain's choices in Final Fantasy II, I wouldn't have turned traitor against Cecil in the first place, and I would have inadvertently negated one of the game's more interesting subplots. Or if I had a real choice as to whether to remain a Dark Knight or become a Paladin as Cecil, well... I had no complaints about being something called a Dark Knight at a time when RPGs almost always cast me as a pure and noble hero.
Today's open-world games such as Red Dead Redemption and Grand Theft Auto IV are presenting these increasingly lavish tales with huge casts of characters. I like what they're trying to do with their stories. I finished this year's Red Dead Redemption on the promise of a deeply satisfying ending, and in the end it totally delivered. However, the strength of these games' characterizations is adversely affecting the way I play. I don't like the freedom of choice that the gameplay offers me because most of the choice runs counter to what my character would actually do. Red Dead's John Marston is a good-natured man with a dark past. That the game lets me wantonly slaughter people in the streets in exchange for some petty cash and a slap on the wrist just feels all wrong, and I find only the absence of entertainment in it – not because I have a distaste for violent videogames (if I could drink videogame blood I would), but because I don't like when games give me lots of ways to break my own suspension of disbelief, especially when they do an excellent job of getting me to suspend my disbelief in the first place.
Along these lines I just couldn't bring myself to rampage through GTA IV's Liberty City like I could in Grand Theft Auto III back in 2001. It's not that the novelty was gone, because it was absolutely there. GTA IV seemed like such a great playground in which to be some horrible, horrible crook. But Niko Bellic isn't that guy. He's a guy who's trying to help his Mom and find his cousin a nice girl. He doesn't mow people down on the sidewalk.
I played and enjoyed both of these games and the lengths they took both to create vividly detailed clockwork worlds and relatively serious, relatively thoughtful stories. I'm just saying that the two halves of the games – the story part and the open-world structure – didn't mesh for me, so in both cases I found myself actively trying to ignore the peripheral content and beelining through the story missions with a feeling of "I hope I don't break anything" along the way. In effect, I made myself play these games as linearly as possible.
I'm not suggesting these games should have been strictly linear, as the reception to the recent Mafia II is a good indicator of how a not-insigificant number of players do expect open-world gameplay systems from a game with any superficial resemblance to other open-world games. (There are also exceptional cases like Batman: Arkham Asylum, which supports a broad range of actions from the player, pretty much all of which seem internally consistent to the game and its famous starring character.) But I do find it strange how the open-world genre has evolved, when older examples like GTA III didn't have the same problems. GTA III and its silent protagonist let me decide what sort of man I was, whether I was the sort to drive on the sidewalk on a busy intersection or take care to only shoot the bad guys, or somewhere in between. In that game I truly felt like I was in an open world. Today's open worlds may be bigger and more detailed but they feel a lot more restricted to me, because I can't bring myself to ignore their stories.
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