I felt very fortunate to have attended the Electronic Entertainment Expo last week, same as I've felt every single other year at the show since it started in 1995. The main difference in my experience this year was that I really only saw just the one game I came there to demonstrate, so I spent mornings and nights catching up online on everything I missed. And looking back on all those many great-looking games that were shown, the one I wish I could have seen if I could pick just one is Journey, from the makers of Flower -- primarily because that game is pursuing a goal I happen to care about very much, which, as creative director Jenova Chen puts it, is to "tell a story without using any language" (source). Wordless storytelling is a minimal and powerful technique that's well explored and understood in other media, ranging from all-ages movies like WALL-E to blood-soaked manga like Lone Wolf and Cub, yet in mainstream games it's gone out of vogue due to our industry's focus on technology and content storage. After all, why would we remove words from our games when our storage media let us cram in more words than ever? Jenova Chen and team at least recognize that this isn't a rhetorical question. Wordless storytelling won't be a first for Journey (Chen's already done it very well with Flower), so I'd like to talk about other cases where this has worked well in the past, and why. I'm not advocating for it as a path most games should take, but then again if more games would just shut up, it wouldn't be the worst thing.
When I think of great wordless stories in games, the first example I think of is the 1987 arcade classic, Double Dragon. On the surface its story seems like the worst kind of gaming cliché: a pretty girl is kidnapped, so her boyfriend takes matters into his own hands by beating to blink-away-death everyone who stands between him and her (video). The difference with Double Dragon, as in all great things, is in the details: One of the thugs in the opening scene is wearing a yellow jump suit and carrying a machine gun; there's a tricked-out Trans Am in the protagonist's garage, and the building he emerges from bears the name "English Tear". These details gave the world a sense of depth for its time, inviting interesting questions. Double Dragon is one of many games where you're supposed to save the girl. But it's the first such game that made me wonder why she got kidnapped in the first place. It's the first action game I ever read anything into. These guys didn't kidnap this girl because she was pretty. They did it to get back at you for something.
There's more to Double Dragon. You can play the game simultaneously with another player, and if the two of you survive to the end, the grand twist is that the two of you must end up fighting each other to win the heart of the girl you were working together to rescue. There are no words used to express any of this (except a poorly translated you-win screen at the very end), yet it conveyed a complex relationship -- a good old fashioned love triangle, in an action game whose story was delivered without any language. The mechanics of Double Dragon were incredibly satisfying to me in their day, but it was the story, with its perfect expository scene and great endgame sequence, that makes the experience of it unforgettable for me. I've appreciated the power of wordless storytelling in games ever since then.
Other games even before Double Dragon's time were doing similar stuff. Several years prior, Prince of Persia creator Jordan Mechner created an amazing computer game in Karateka, considered the first game with cutscenes in it. Karateka has a similar rescue-the-girl premise as Double Dragon, and likewise went to surprising lengths at building up its characters in what was a relatively simple game. The difference for me was that Double Dragon's story connected the player to the inciting incident of the story -- we see a girl take a hard hit and get hauled off moments before our character emerges, whereas in Karateka, our hero shows up in a separate scene after we see the fair princess get locked up in a cell. We don't empathize with the Karateka protagonist as quickly as we do in Double Dragon because there's less of an implied connection between the player character and the girl, and less of a sense of urgency to get her before something terrible happens. Nevertheless, Karateka and Double Dragon were the '80s equivalent of blockbuster action games, and they pushed the envelope in terms of cinematic storytelling in the medium. The reason they didn't rely on words, I guess, must be at least partly due to the technical constraint that there was no easy way they could have. But by having to give exposition and establish a setting and a mission without being able to use any words, these games delivered story in a far more elegant way than most modern games do. I think those techniques absolutely are extensible to today's games and could be used to tell the sorts of deeper, longer stories that today's players expect.
Elegant storytelling is conservative storytelling. Scenes should be enriched with as much subtextual meaning as possible before words are used to give any of it away. The more space and time needed to establish characters, places, and motives, the more the story runs the risk of becoming bloated and getting in the way of the gameplay. I don't mean to overgeneralize, mind you, since some of my favorite narrative experiences in games -- from Ultima V to Metal Gear Solid to Planescape: Torment to Fire Emblem -- happen to be very, very wordy. But I have a deep respect for games that can immerse me into the experience without having to talk me into why I should care.
For example, that game Journey evidently takes inspiration from Shadow of the Colossus, which is a relatively more recent example of a game that delivered most of its story, including its own very strong expository scene, using very little language at all (video). And somewhere in between these two cases was Super Metroid, one of my favorite 16-bit games, which features an amazing endgame sequence that's rich with action and emotion yet goes over without so much as a word (video).
I happen to think players generally deserve more credit than most games give them, both in their capacity to learn and use complex overlapping systems and in their capacity to infer meaning. Occasionally there's a game like Braid or like Myst that invites players to explore with barely a word of explanation, and such games have a way of capturing fiercely loyal audiences. Because absolutely everyone, young and old, likes to feel smart. Conversely, absolutely no one, young or old, likes feeling condescended to. And so, games that express silent confidence in the player's ability to pull details out of the scene pay their players a great compliment by giving them the benefit of the doubt that they'll understand what's going on even though there isn't on-the-nose dialogue there to explain everything away.
Of my written work that's been published, most has been published online, with too little regard for length. Having hard constraints -- whether it's for an author working in print or a game developer limited by time or technology -- can bring about good practices that come undone when those same constraints disappear. Then it takes years for games like Journey to come around to reintroduce old ideas for a new generation. But you know? Works for me.
Wednesday, June 23, 2010
Tuesday, June 8, 2010
Knowing vs. Growing Protagonists
In recent years more and more games have made me feel like an actor who doesn't know his lines in the middle of a performance. The set dressing changes but the experience is the same: For a while, everything is happening according to the script, until we reach the point where I start screwing up my part. Pregnant pauses and awkwardness ensue. Failure in highly scripted games feels almost embarrassing, like failing to solve a simple puzzle, because the star's performance as the hero/soldier in these games isn't even intended to be challenging.
I think all this is a byproduct of what happens when games are chiefly designed to fulfill a particular power fantasy for the largest number of players, even at the expense of giving those players the ability to relate to the situation. There's an inherent dissonance to playing a realistic-looking game as a highly experienced character of some sort -- a spy or a supersoldier or whoever -- when you yourself don't know how to perform actions that should be second nature for the protagonist character. And judging by the trends, mainstream retail gaming's answer is to reduce difficulty, automate, and front-load lots of contrived training in order to ease you in. This feels like formula. So what does it take to provide a genuinely different and affecting experience in a mainstream game at this point? I think the answer is closely linked to the design of the protagonist character, and his or her persona, abilities, and relationship to the world of the game.
It used to be more common for games to ramp the player's abilities. Classic games like Metroid and The Legend of Zelda demonstrated how compelling it is to start off as a character with great potential but limited ability and gradually gain access to a wider variety of powerful moves. This achieves a few things: It gives the player incentives to continue exploring, knowing that the next cool ability may be right around the next corner; it allows for intricate level designs that make the much-maligned concept of backtracking seem palatable if the player is later able to traverse areas in surprising new ways and faster than before; and it provides a natural ramp for a game's challenge and difficulty, by allowing early encounters to be simple and later encounters to be tougher and more complex. I love games that have these qualities, whether they're Castlevania: Symphony of the Night or Metroid Prime or Batman: Arkham Asylum. But it seems to me they're less common now than they used to be. I don't think this is because this type of structure became unpopular. I think it's because the pursuit of realism in games (or rather the idea of "superficial authenticity") became relatively more popular.
If you're a supersoldier or a spy, you're what I'd call a "knowing protagonist", someone who's been training your whole life for this mission of a lifetime you're about to go on. The world of that mission does not support the idea that you'd somehow gain an incredible new ability during the mission, since you're already at the height of your prowess. You might find an experimental weapon or some cool new gadgets, and you might ride on vehicles or have to go through a level without killing anybody or something. But the pressure's squarely on the level design and possibly the story rather than on the ramp-up of player abilities to keep you engrossed. On the other hand, if you're somebody like Link, a kid with humble origins but a lot of potential, you start off with nowhere to go but up and you're what I'd call a "growing protagonist". As well, having a gameworld that's more imaginative than real opens up opportunities for Link or others like him to grow in power in a dramatic way.
A protagonist character with humble beginnings doesn't have the natural, superficial appeal of an already-experienced character such as a tough-as-nails supersoldier or an unstoppable assassin. But by starting out strong, these types of characters naturally and severely constrain the internal logic of the gameworlds they inhabit, forcing designers to front-load play mechanics and put all the pressure on level designs and story to keep things interesting. Max Payne, Master Chief, Markus Fenix, and Soap MacTavish all start with the same exact abilities they end with -- the guns change, the scenery changes, the story changes, but the moment-to-moment gameplay basically stays the same the whole time. I love the games these guys are from, too. But their games have influenced two whole generations of similar stuff that seemed to muscle out many of the Links and the Alucards and the Samuses, in favor of more true-to-life and arguably less interesting characters and worlds.
Reality-based games may be a big draw for mainstream developers or publishers, but reality imposes some really awful constraints on games. For instance, how do you teach a player the basic rules when you're also trying to make him believe that he's that badass supersoldier looking tough on the box art? The two goals are almost contradictory and yet almost every action or adventure game faces the challenge of building immersion while teaching the player how to navigate the environment.
Some games manage very clever solutions. I loved playing as a Russian grunt at the beginning of Call of Duty 2, learning to throw potatoes like grenades because grenades were too costly for the Soviets to train with. What a fantastic bit of exposition. Running the training course as the new guy at the beginning of Modern Warfare, while an obvious solution on some level, also worked well to draw players into the experience while making them empathize with the protagonist character -- even a silent protagonist like Soap MacTavish. After all, Soap was going through exactly the same thing as the player -- learning, training, trying to fit in. By the time Modern Warfare 2 came around, Soap was no longer wet behind the ears, so developer Infinity Ward did something brilliant by making him a nonplayer helper character (at least when we first meet him) and once again cast you as someone still learning the ropes.
Batman: Arkham Asylum also did a fantastic job of justifying the player's learning. Batman is a perfect example of a character who should be at the height of his power at the beginning of a story, unless it's his origin story. But in Arkham Asylum, developer Rocksteady Games justifies making him a "growing protagonist" by telling a story of a routine Batman mission that happens to go pretty badly wrong... leading to Batman being physically unprepared for what's to come and having to scrounge up additional tools from the Batmobile, his secret Bat Cave, and so on. Batman's growth is further expressed by his suit becoming more and more tattered over time -- he physically appears more experienced by the end. The moments where Batman gains new powers in the game feel pretty forced from a story perspective, but they enable the open-ended structure and that immensely satisfying feeling of having escalating powers and abilities.
A protagonist character's status in his world at the beginning of a game is the foundation for the internal logic that structures the player's progress. If you start off as a supersoldier, there's not a lot of room to grow. You might succeed against all odds, but no one's going to promote you if you're already Master Chief. Or if two hours into the experience you already have your own team, your own spaceship, and carte blanche to do pretty much whatever in the galaxy as in Mass Effect, then no wonder you're going to wind up feeling a bit let down by the shallow systems governing character progress -- there's no real room to grow, not within the constraints of a "hard science" world where you start out on top. On the other hand, in BioWare's own Knights of the Old Republic, your character dramatically gained power, becoming a Jedi and gaining all its perks at record speed... something that felt almost suspiciously too good to be true until the game's big reveal that completely justified your character's remarkable ability to grow in power. Of course, the role-playing genre tends to heavily revolve around the concept of character progression, but almost any kind of game can use fiction to justify and support progression of the player's abilities and a smooth ramp of the complexity of the game rules.
So, coming back to the question posed at the beginning: How to satisfy the mainstream power fantasy while avoiding the dissonance of having the player's lack of experience with a game collide with the protagonist character's strength and know-how? There's no formulaic answer, of course. But games that work hard at this problem I think tend have tighter internal logic, more empathetic protagonists, and a stronger structure than games that just assume you want to be a supersoldier and that you're OK with a few minutes of obligatory tutorial at the beginning even if it has nothing to do with the plot. Assassin's Creed II is a good recent example, a game that had a ton of natural appeal through its fantasy of becoming a cool-as-ice assassin stalking through the back alleys of rennaissance Italy -- but you had to earn your way into that role, learning the ropes as you went along. I didn't like the first couple of hours of that game as much as the rest (I'll come back to this when I write more about exposition), but I think playing through the "origin story" of Ezio made the brunt of the experience of that game all the more rewarding.
In short, I think it's a good thing for a gameworld to justify the protagonist character's ability to change during the course of the game. If I could make whatever game I wanted, I'd make one with a protagonist character who has a significant capacity to grow throughout the game, as a reflection of the player's own growing familiarity with the game rules.
I think all this is a byproduct of what happens when games are chiefly designed to fulfill a particular power fantasy for the largest number of players, even at the expense of giving those players the ability to relate to the situation. There's an inherent dissonance to playing a realistic-looking game as a highly experienced character of some sort -- a spy or a supersoldier or whoever -- when you yourself don't know how to perform actions that should be second nature for the protagonist character. And judging by the trends, mainstream retail gaming's answer is to reduce difficulty, automate, and front-load lots of contrived training in order to ease you in. This feels like formula. So what does it take to provide a genuinely different and affecting experience in a mainstream game at this point? I think the answer is closely linked to the design of the protagonist character, and his or her persona, abilities, and relationship to the world of the game.
It used to be more common for games to ramp the player's abilities. Classic games like Metroid and The Legend of Zelda demonstrated how compelling it is to start off as a character with great potential but limited ability and gradually gain access to a wider variety of powerful moves. This achieves a few things: It gives the player incentives to continue exploring, knowing that the next cool ability may be right around the next corner; it allows for intricate level designs that make the much-maligned concept of backtracking seem palatable if the player is later able to traverse areas in surprising new ways and faster than before; and it provides a natural ramp for a game's challenge and difficulty, by allowing early encounters to be simple and later encounters to be tougher and more complex. I love games that have these qualities, whether they're Castlevania: Symphony of the Night or Metroid Prime or Batman: Arkham Asylum. But it seems to me they're less common now than they used to be. I don't think this is because this type of structure became unpopular. I think it's because the pursuit of realism in games (or rather the idea of "superficial authenticity") became relatively more popular.
If you're a supersoldier or a spy, you're what I'd call a "knowing protagonist", someone who's been training your whole life for this mission of a lifetime you're about to go on. The world of that mission does not support the idea that you'd somehow gain an incredible new ability during the mission, since you're already at the height of your prowess. You might find an experimental weapon or some cool new gadgets, and you might ride on vehicles or have to go through a level without killing anybody or something. But the pressure's squarely on the level design and possibly the story rather than on the ramp-up of player abilities to keep you engrossed. On the other hand, if you're somebody like Link, a kid with humble origins but a lot of potential, you start off with nowhere to go but up and you're what I'd call a "growing protagonist". As well, having a gameworld that's more imaginative than real opens up opportunities for Link or others like him to grow in power in a dramatic way.
A protagonist character with humble beginnings doesn't have the natural, superficial appeal of an already-experienced character such as a tough-as-nails supersoldier or an unstoppable assassin. But by starting out strong, these types of characters naturally and severely constrain the internal logic of the gameworlds they inhabit, forcing designers to front-load play mechanics and put all the pressure on level designs and story to keep things interesting. Max Payne, Master Chief, Markus Fenix, and Soap MacTavish all start with the same exact abilities they end with -- the guns change, the scenery changes, the story changes, but the moment-to-moment gameplay basically stays the same the whole time. I love the games these guys are from, too. But their games have influenced two whole generations of similar stuff that seemed to muscle out many of the Links and the Alucards and the Samuses, in favor of more true-to-life and arguably less interesting characters and worlds.
Reality-based games may be a big draw for mainstream developers or publishers, but reality imposes some really awful constraints on games. For instance, how do you teach a player the basic rules when you're also trying to make him believe that he's that badass supersoldier looking tough on the box art? The two goals are almost contradictory and yet almost every action or adventure game faces the challenge of building immersion while teaching the player how to navigate the environment.
Some games manage very clever solutions. I loved playing as a Russian grunt at the beginning of Call of Duty 2, learning to throw potatoes like grenades because grenades were too costly for the Soviets to train with. What a fantastic bit of exposition. Running the training course as the new guy at the beginning of Modern Warfare, while an obvious solution on some level, also worked well to draw players into the experience while making them empathize with the protagonist character -- even a silent protagonist like Soap MacTavish. After all, Soap was going through exactly the same thing as the player -- learning, training, trying to fit in. By the time Modern Warfare 2 came around, Soap was no longer wet behind the ears, so developer Infinity Ward did something brilliant by making him a nonplayer helper character (at least when we first meet him) and once again cast you as someone still learning the ropes.
Batman: Arkham Asylum also did a fantastic job of justifying the player's learning. Batman is a perfect example of a character who should be at the height of his power at the beginning of a story, unless it's his origin story. But in Arkham Asylum, developer Rocksteady Games justifies making him a "growing protagonist" by telling a story of a routine Batman mission that happens to go pretty badly wrong... leading to Batman being physically unprepared for what's to come and having to scrounge up additional tools from the Batmobile, his secret Bat Cave, and so on. Batman's growth is further expressed by his suit becoming more and more tattered over time -- he physically appears more experienced by the end. The moments where Batman gains new powers in the game feel pretty forced from a story perspective, but they enable the open-ended structure and that immensely satisfying feeling of having escalating powers and abilities.
A protagonist character's status in his world at the beginning of a game is the foundation for the internal logic that structures the player's progress. If you start off as a supersoldier, there's not a lot of room to grow. You might succeed against all odds, but no one's going to promote you if you're already Master Chief. Or if two hours into the experience you already have your own team, your own spaceship, and carte blanche to do pretty much whatever in the galaxy as in Mass Effect, then no wonder you're going to wind up feeling a bit let down by the shallow systems governing character progress -- there's no real room to grow, not within the constraints of a "hard science" world where you start out on top. On the other hand, in BioWare's own Knights of the Old Republic, your character dramatically gained power, becoming a Jedi and gaining all its perks at record speed... something that felt almost suspiciously too good to be true until the game's big reveal that completely justified your character's remarkable ability to grow in power. Of course, the role-playing genre tends to heavily revolve around the concept of character progression, but almost any kind of game can use fiction to justify and support progression of the player's abilities and a smooth ramp of the complexity of the game rules.
So, coming back to the question posed at the beginning: How to satisfy the mainstream power fantasy while avoiding the dissonance of having the player's lack of experience with a game collide with the protagonist character's strength and know-how? There's no formulaic answer, of course. But games that work hard at this problem I think tend have tighter internal logic, more empathetic protagonists, and a stronger structure than games that just assume you want to be a supersoldier and that you're OK with a few minutes of obligatory tutorial at the beginning even if it has nothing to do with the plot. Assassin's Creed II is a good recent example, a game that had a ton of natural appeal through its fantasy of becoming a cool-as-ice assassin stalking through the back alleys of rennaissance Italy -- but you had to earn your way into that role, learning the ropes as you went along. I didn't like the first couple of hours of that game as much as the rest (I'll come back to this when I write more about exposition), but I think playing through the "origin story" of Ezio made the brunt of the experience of that game all the more rewarding.
In short, I think it's a good thing for a gameworld to justify the protagonist character's ability to change during the course of the game. If I could make whatever game I wanted, I'd make one with a protagonist character who has a significant capacity to grow throughout the game, as a reflection of the player's own growing familiarity with the game rules.
Wednesday, May 12, 2010
Three Dimensions of World Design
One of the greatest, most influential game companies of all time is Origin Systems, which faded into obscurity during the second half of the '90s. But for a while there, Origin was at the forefront of the medium, specifically with the Ultima and Wing Commander series. I think it was in Ultima VI, the latest in a streak of outstanding games, when I noticed Origin using a succinct and fitting slogan: "We create worlds." They weren't kidding. To this day, Ultima and Wing Commander are among the most fully realized and, for me at least, memorable videogame worlds. These settings supported any number of games and other extensions ranging from novels to feature films. Unfortunately, someone failed to defend the integrity and quality of these worlds somewhere along the road to fortune. However, the string of failures leading to these franchises' demise ought not to diminish what they succeeded in doing in the past. Especially since the total number of memorable, unique gameworlds is relatively small.
I want there to be more, whether I make them or you do.
Think of your favorite gameworlds as I thought of Ultima and Wing Commander: What do they have in common? In my case, on the surface it seems as though the medieval fantasy world of Ultima has little in common with the futuristic-yet-modern-feeling world of Wing Commander, and to be sure, the best games in these series didn't come out of a formulaic process. But I do think these and all other successful, original gameworlds share a certain structure in common, and here I'm going to illustrate its triangular shape.
I think anything that qualifies as a successful, original gameworld can be expressed in exactly three dimensions. Two dimensions is too few, and four is generally too many for a gameworld intended to be enjoyed by a large number of people. When I say dimensions, I mean specific overarching traits -- these are not genre statements like "science fiction", but are broad-stroke characteristic statements, such as "on a space station at the beginning of the 21st century." In other words, each of these dimensions must be a valid, reasonable answer to the question, "what are the essential properties of this gameworld?" Moreover, the gameworld must make good on each of these dimensions, by developing it in an artful way and to a sufficient degree, to the point where the author could, if he so chose, answer any player's questions about how the world works. The version of the gameworld that we experience as players ought to be the tip of the iceberg.
Let's walk through some examples of what I'm talking about, starting with the game series I already mentioned.
Ultima -- Ultima's world of Britannia has the following dimensions:
Now let's have a look at Wing Commander before moving on to more modern examples so I stop sounding so dated.
Wing Commander -- The world of Wing Commander is:
Gameworlds can change form over time, though the evolution process is dangerous. Later Wing Commander games attempted to replace the second trait about humans fighting cats, by introducing a new antagonist faction. These attempts were not very successful, so deeply ingrained were the Kilrathi in the world design. The same thing happened to Star Wars when they expected you to care about the Trade Federation in Episode I. It's not Star Wars, because Star Wars is essentially about a rebellion versus an empire, and the world loses something important when that dimension is replaced by some other dimension.
Once in a while you get a truly inspired gameworld out of a shooter. The go-to example is:
BioShock -- Its world of Rapture is:
Now let's speedrun through a few others:
Halo --
Fallout --
Starcraft --
S.T.A.L.K.E.R. --
Super Mario Bros. --
Demon's Souls --
Most gameworlds are bland. Typically they have only one or two dimensions. Ninja Gaiden is one of my favorite Xbox games but the world of the game makes no sense -- it's a modern or near-future world filled with ninjas and demons and ancient lore, and that's pretty much it. Being a relatively open-ended game that encouraged some degree of exploration, it could have benefited from a more well-defined world, such as the Legacy of Kain series' ancient and troubled land of Nosgoth. (But then, Ninja Gaiden is so good as an action game that this barely even matters.)
There are also those games that seem to have memorable gameworlds, when they only have memorable characters. God of War. Tomb Raider. The Legend of Zelda. These gameworlds defy the kind of deconstruction I've explained here by lacking a sufficient number of specific, defining traits. It's because their real defining trait is their protagonist character -- which, as with Wing Commander's ensemble cast of pilots, can count as one of the gameworld's three dimensions. But if you remove the character from these games, the world loses any distinction. You can't have a Tomb Raider without Lara Croft. You can't have a Zelda game without Link. And you can't have a Half-Life game with a wise-cracking protagonist rather than a silent one -- then you'd have Duke Nukem. As for my earlier examples, with the possible exceptions of Halo and Super Mario, those are worlds that are arguably defined by their own characteristics, rather than by the characteristics of their protagonists. The upcoming Halo: Reach has practically proven already that Halo is bigger than Master Chief. And the world of Super Mario Bros. is so iconic at this point that it can even withstand not having Mario in the spotlight, as we saw in last year's Bowser's Inside Story.
The point being: Unique gameworlds must be created intentionally, as a cornerstone of game projects that merit such an effort, in the service of game experiences in which the world itself is intended to be a major attraction.
I'm not advocating for all new games to try and create bold new worlds. If exploring and interacting with environments and their inhabitants are not integral parts of the game experience, then the game experience likely does not need to take place in some sort of unique world. A unique world may even be somewhat of a distraction, as in Zeno Clash, an awesome and inspired game whose world design is so out there that I feel as though it might have pushed away some players who really would have liked bashing in bird brains, which is really what the game boils down to. A more-traditional fighting game such as Super Street Fighter IV invests heavily in its characters and backstory, but not in the world itself -- the characters may be memorable but the backdrop matters less. A modern military shooter like Battlefield: Bad Company 2 likewise invests in its characters because the world itself is the modern world, and the game benefits from bringing players the familiarities of that world, from the weapons to the destructible environments. But certain game genres do benefit from or arguably require original gameworlds, and their creators bear the responsibility of crafting these worlds with the same care and attention as they put into their graphics and game systems.
What I've described here is not a formula, it's the form of the result. It's creatively bankrupt to attempt to create a gameworld by deriving or mixing and matching three different properties. But do think that one way to gauge a potentially promising world design is to identify its three primary dimensions, and then to make sure that each of these dimensions is fully explored in the context of the world and its stories. This thought process and the associated writing work has been useful to me at least, in my own attempts at outlining various gameworlds I'd want to build or be in.
I want there to be more, whether I make them or you do.
Think of your favorite gameworlds as I thought of Ultima and Wing Commander: What do they have in common? In my case, on the surface it seems as though the medieval fantasy world of Ultima has little in common with the futuristic-yet-modern-feeling world of Wing Commander, and to be sure, the best games in these series didn't come out of a formulaic process. But I do think these and all other successful, original gameworlds share a certain structure in common, and here I'm going to illustrate its triangular shape.
I think anything that qualifies as a successful, original gameworld can be expressed in exactly three dimensions. Two dimensions is too few, and four is generally too many for a gameworld intended to be enjoyed by a large number of people. When I say dimensions, I mean specific overarching traits -- these are not genre statements like "science fiction", but are broad-stroke characteristic statements, such as "on a space station at the beginning of the 21st century." In other words, each of these dimensions must be a valid, reasonable answer to the question, "what are the essential properties of this gameworld?" Moreover, the gameworld must make good on each of these dimensions, by developing it in an artful way and to a sufficient degree, to the point where the author could, if he so chose, answer any player's questions about how the world works. The version of the gameworld that we experience as players ought to be the tip of the iceberg.
Let's walk through some examples of what I'm talking about, starting with the game series I already mentioned.
Ultima -- Ultima's world of Britannia has the following dimensions:
- Set in a medieval low-fantasy world based on the European dark ages
- Teleportation-style travel is possible between this world and ours, as well as within this world
- The world is governed by a strict and ancient moral code
Now let's have a look at Wing Commander before moving on to more modern examples so I stop sounding so dated.
Wing Commander -- The world of Wing Commander is:
- Set in the Milky Way galaxy in the relative near future when spaceflight is common
- About a war between humankind and a race of cat creatures (not as embarrassing as it sounds)
- The war is waged by pilots whose personal lives intertwine with their battles
Gameworlds can change form over time, though the evolution process is dangerous. Later Wing Commander games attempted to replace the second trait about humans fighting cats, by introducing a new antagonist faction. These attempts were not very successful, so deeply ingrained were the Kilrathi in the world design. The same thing happened to Star Wars when they expected you to care about the Trade Federation in Episode I. It's not Star Wars, because Star Wars is essentially about a rebellion versus an empire, and the world loses something important when that dimension is replaced by some other dimension.
Once in a while you get a truly inspired gameworld out of a shooter. The go-to example is:
BioShock -- Its world of Rapture is:
- A fallen underwater city
- A place where genetic mutation is done purposely and has druglike properties
- Set around 1960 in the not-too-distant past
Now let's speedrun through a few others:
Halo --
- Distant future setting beyond the reaches of the known galaxy
- War between humankind and a fanatical high-tech alien collective
- Mysterious ring-worlds that are ancient weapons
Fallout --
- Post-apocalyptic America in the near future
- The culture of the world was "locked" in the not-too-distant past in an ironic way
- Morality is subjective in a society without law
Starcraft --
- Distant future beyond the reaches of the known galaxy
- War between humankind, a fanatical high-tech alien collective, and a voracious alien hive
- The war is waged by soldiers whose personal lives intertwine with their battles
S.T.A.L.K.E.R. --
- Post-nuclear-meltdown Chernobyl set in the near future
- Radiation has created horrific mutants and strange anomalies
- Opportunists and others with little to lose explore the region for its riches
Super Mario Bros. --
- Surreal and whimsical world where human characters don't fit in
- Comedy-violent interactions in which no one ever really gets hurt
- Lots of anthropomorphic inanimate objects, such as clouds with eyes
Demon's Souls --
- Dark gothic medieval setting following a societal collapse
- Ancient gods and legendary warriors are reborn with newfound powers
- A prevailing sense of purgatory in which there is no release for the dead
* * *
This type of deconstruction is tougher for certain gameworlds, sometimes because they have so much going on in them. The world of EverQuest was a hodgepodge of every fantasy trope. It worked great for a while, but EverQuest started losing people when it started expecting people to care about the fiction -- none of the EverQuest spin-off games were particularly successful because the world lacked cohesion. Kingdom Hearts scored a lot of points by featuring recognizable Disney and Final Fantasy characters, but again, the world itself was difficult to describe. The world depended on its audience's preestablished familiarity with its supporting cast of characters, like a videogame version of Who Framed Roger Rabbit.Most gameworlds are bland. Typically they have only one or two dimensions. Ninja Gaiden is one of my favorite Xbox games but the world of the game makes no sense -- it's a modern or near-future world filled with ninjas and demons and ancient lore, and that's pretty much it. Being a relatively open-ended game that encouraged some degree of exploration, it could have benefited from a more well-defined world, such as the Legacy of Kain series' ancient and troubled land of Nosgoth. (But then, Ninja Gaiden is so good as an action game that this barely even matters.)
There are also those games that seem to have memorable gameworlds, when they only have memorable characters. God of War. Tomb Raider. The Legend of Zelda. These gameworlds defy the kind of deconstruction I've explained here by lacking a sufficient number of specific, defining traits. It's because their real defining trait is their protagonist character -- which, as with Wing Commander's ensemble cast of pilots, can count as one of the gameworld's three dimensions. But if you remove the character from these games, the world loses any distinction. You can't have a Tomb Raider without Lara Croft. You can't have a Zelda game without Link. And you can't have a Half-Life game with a wise-cracking protagonist rather than a silent one -- then you'd have Duke Nukem. As for my earlier examples, with the possible exceptions of Halo and Super Mario, those are worlds that are arguably defined by their own characteristics, rather than by the characteristics of their protagonists. The upcoming Halo: Reach has practically proven already that Halo is bigger than Master Chief. And the world of Super Mario Bros. is so iconic at this point that it can even withstand not having Mario in the spotlight, as we saw in last year's Bowser's Inside Story.
The point being: Unique gameworlds must be created intentionally, as a cornerstone of game projects that merit such an effort, in the service of game experiences in which the world itself is intended to be a major attraction.
I'm not advocating for all new games to try and create bold new worlds. If exploring and interacting with environments and their inhabitants are not integral parts of the game experience, then the game experience likely does not need to take place in some sort of unique world. A unique world may even be somewhat of a distraction, as in Zeno Clash, an awesome and inspired game whose world design is so out there that I feel as though it might have pushed away some players who really would have liked bashing in bird brains, which is really what the game boils down to. A more-traditional fighting game such as Super Street Fighter IV invests heavily in its characters and backstory, but not in the world itself -- the characters may be memorable but the backdrop matters less. A modern military shooter like Battlefield: Bad Company 2 likewise invests in its characters because the world itself is the modern world, and the game benefits from bringing players the familiarities of that world, from the weapons to the destructible environments. But certain game genres do benefit from or arguably require original gameworlds, and their creators bear the responsibility of crafting these worlds with the same care and attention as they put into their graphics and game systems.
What I've described here is not a formula, it's the form of the result. It's creatively bankrupt to attempt to create a gameworld by deriving or mixing and matching three different properties. But do think that one way to gauge a potentially promising world design is to identify its three primary dimensions, and then to make sure that each of these dimensions is fully explored in the context of the world and its stories. This thought process and the associated writing work has been useful to me at least, in my own attempts at outlining various gameworlds I'd want to build or be in.
Tuesday, April 20, 2010
Narrative Recognition
The narrative of a game should exist only to make the act of playing feel more meaningful, by giving context to the game's systems and scenarios. Even a simple narrative implementation can make a game feel more significant. The simplest and best example I can think of is Space Invaders, the iconic 1978 arcade game whose entire narrative is so conservative, it's limited to the two words of its title. The high concept of defending Earth from evil aliens combined with those expressive-yet-abstract shapes encroaching toward the bottom of the screen to create what's probably the world's first "epic" videogame. But if you took Space Invaders and changed only the name, maybe to something more literal like "Shoot the Sprites", the high stakes wouldn't have been there and players' imaginations wouldn't have run wild from it. The mechanics would have still been great for their time, but I think the narrative is what brought them to life. Space Invaders isn't a typical example of a game narrative, though there's at least some fictional context there, whereas a lot of games have none. It's OK for a game to have little to no narrative, it just better have some truly outstanding mechanics. Tetris might not have needed narrative, but Myst and Puzzle Quest did.
For these and other games that choose to provide the player with a fictional context, one of the best techniques they can use to draw the player into the experience in a profound and memorable way is to anticipate the player's emotions and expectations about the play experience itself, and recognize them at appropriate times through narrative feedback. 'Narrative recognition' is the shortest term I could come up with to describe this simple and practical technique. It does require some daring on a writer's and designer's part, though like everything else we do to avoid mediocrity, it's worth chancing. Today, as many games have grown more literal in their presentations, the minimum requirement for the player's imagination has diminished. However, for anyone responsible for crafting game content, the ability to imagine what's going on inside the player's head at any given time, and use this to spark the player's own imagination, continues to be key. Autoaim systems and other adaptive-difficulty tricks can make up for players' skill differentials, but I'm referring to the skill of interpreting a player's feelings beyond those of pleasure or frustration, which cannot be gauged as easily as how many health packs he's used or how many headshots he's scored. This is a skill that can only be cultivated from playing a lot of games, observing a lot of players playing games, or preferably both. And I think it's essential to crafting well paced experiences in a certain tone, especially if wit or humor is integral to that tone.
Think of a game that felt deeply personal to you. I bet you're either thinking of an incredibly time-consuming or competitive game with social elements like World of Warcraft or Counter-Strike, or the sort of game I'm writing about here -- the kind that recognized your expectations as a player and fed them back to you in a surprising, insightful way. The feeling you get from this is the videogame equivalent of meeting someone with the same favorite band as you.
Sometimes you're lucky to get this feeling early on in a game, such as in Half-Life 2, when in the opening scene, a professor is hammering you with exposition, leaving you free to explore his office... where you'll more than likely knock over one of his computer monitors, causing him to interrupt his speech and chew you out for not paying attention. It's a great little moment. The designers knew you were gonna screw around in there, and placed that little trap for you. In almost every shooter before Half-Life 2, you can bunnyhop like a moron in the middle of even the gravest of monologues. But in Half-Life 2, this opening scene informs you that you have a real presence in this world beyond just the presence of your guns. The rest of the game didn't have such moments in it but the placement of this very first one was important to quickly immersing the player in a world rich with detail, and setting an expectation for bits of comic relief amid all the sci-fi seriousness.
There are dozens of other examples, though on some level it's surprising there aren't more. In Uncharted 2, relatively early on there's a sequence in which you're introduced to the grenade-throwing mechanics. Nate Drake is well-positioned behind cover as a bunch of thugs bear down on him. Fortunately, a box of grenades happens to be in arm's reach. So of course Drake, speaking for the player, quips something like "well isn't this convenient", referring to the unlimited grenade box while acknowledging the cliché, subverting it, and turning it into one of the game's great self-referential moments. Without that little bit of nudging-and-winking dialogue, the scene would have been just another grenade-throwing tutorial.
Minor cases like that can be surprisingly poignant. In the classic SNES role-playing game Chrono Trigger, someone at some point makes the joke about how the protagonist doesn't talk much, a profound moment that for the first time points the spotlight at the silent-protagonist trope common to so many games. This same joke then appeared seemingly in almost every other game with a silent protagonist (including Half-Life 2), so it lost its impact after the umpteenth time, but the first few times it was great.
On the other hand, Saints Row does a brilliant job of subverting the silent protagonist cliché by having the protagonist blurt out some sort of ultra-offensive Silent Bob-style one-liner when you least expect it, just when the story has convinced you to start taking it seriously. It's legitimately funny stuff.
Then there's Max Payne, in which the hero once dreams he's a killer inside a videogame, in one of the game's most surreal and memorable moments. This too became a tired idea as more and more games fed you the line about how "this isn't a game", hoping you'd never heard it before. No More Heroes gets it right, by breaking the fourth wall on several occasions towards the end, conceding its own ridiculousness in moments that drive the game's self-effacing charm through the roof. 'This is a game' is No More Heroes' message, delivered playfully and perversely, at the height of the player's investment in the story.
Narrative recognition doesn't require breaking the fourth wall. Another one of my favorite examples is in The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, in the excellent Dark Brotherhood quest line, where you've decided to become a contract killer and work among a surly bunch of assassins who don't take kindly to newcomers. Just as you finally grow to like them and earn their respect, you receive a secret mission to kill them all. It's timed perfectly. You kill scores of things in this game but none are tougher to put down than those guys in the assassin's guild, because the designers made you work for their affection, made you feel attached to them, and only then asked that you turn on them -- a move that's made less despicable knowing that you're all following the same strict code of conduct.
There are simpler and cleaner examples than this. In the original Halo, the option to invert the controls for looking up and down is couched as part of a diagnostics test at the beginning of the game, when you're learning about your special armor. A lesser game would have thrown this option into a menu and not integrated it into the narrative. But the makers of Halo figured correctly that the last thing a guy like me would expect was a fictional justification for inverting the Y-axis on my controller. All I expected was to be bored by a tutorial.
What do all these games have in common? They have in common these crafted moments designed to anticipate exactly what the audience is feeling about the game at a particular time, and feed back on those feelings, sometimes merely by acknowledging them. I know you're frustrated. I know you've done this before. I know you don't think you care about these characters. These types of concessions can have a real impact. Narrative reversals are integral to storytelling -- I'm referring specifically to when the game narrative is used to reference the act of playing, not the story itself. Such acts of recognition are at the center of effective game narrative. They're among the most meaningful ways for a game to communicate with a player. One of the best feelings in life is getting what you want without having to ask -- at a restaurant, at work, in a relationship, you name it. Games have the ability to provide this exhilarating feeling using narrative techniques.
Characters and gameworlds that tend to correctly guess at the player's feelings and feed back on them are the best kinds. They're typically bound to games that don't break when you push at their boundaries, as when you knock over that monitor in Half-Life 2, realizing you can knock over all sorts of shit throughout the entire game. Games like that let you explore the upper limits of the constraints of their rules. In last year's Demon's Souls, one of the first characters you meet in that oppressive and bleak gameworld is a cynical ghost of a man who's given up trying to escape. He more or less calls you a fool for attempting to do better. It's straight-up reverse psychology, and it's fantastic. Here's a game that knows it's challenging. Why shouldn't the world have characters in it who've become frustrated by those challenges? Not only does it fit the fiction, it affirms the player's own first impressions about the game. That ghost is a pretty sympathetic character. But then, if you want to kill him for being such a noob, you can go right ahead and do that too, says Demon's Souls. That game covers its bases, which is partly why its audience likes it so much. Those who gave it a chance tend to make a deep connection with it, because its designers knew you were going to have to fight for every inch in that game, and anticipated and fed back on the range of emotions you'd feel along the way.
Most games with a narrative component can and should have moments like the ones I've mentioned here, because their designers ought to be concerned with what gives their game its distinct tone, as well as the likeliest emotional dispositions with which their players will approach any given scenario. This happens when designers think of players as individuals rather than as groups. When games speak to you on a personal level, when you experience one of those rare but great moments of recognition and reflection while playing, that's not coming from some guy following up on data from a focus test or gunning for the sci-fi shooter market. Instead, it's coming from someone trying to reach you, with the confidence -- the presumptuous authorial arrogance -- that he knows what you must be thinking at a certain time. How dare he? And yet he really is speaking to you in that moment, through his game.
For these and other games that choose to provide the player with a fictional context, one of the best techniques they can use to draw the player into the experience in a profound and memorable way is to anticipate the player's emotions and expectations about the play experience itself, and recognize them at appropriate times through narrative feedback. 'Narrative recognition' is the shortest term I could come up with to describe this simple and practical technique. It does require some daring on a writer's and designer's part, though like everything else we do to avoid mediocrity, it's worth chancing. Today, as many games have grown more literal in their presentations, the minimum requirement for the player's imagination has diminished. However, for anyone responsible for crafting game content, the ability to imagine what's going on inside the player's head at any given time, and use this to spark the player's own imagination, continues to be key. Autoaim systems and other adaptive-difficulty tricks can make up for players' skill differentials, but I'm referring to the skill of interpreting a player's feelings beyond those of pleasure or frustration, which cannot be gauged as easily as how many health packs he's used or how many headshots he's scored. This is a skill that can only be cultivated from playing a lot of games, observing a lot of players playing games, or preferably both. And I think it's essential to crafting well paced experiences in a certain tone, especially if wit or humor is integral to that tone.
Think of a game that felt deeply personal to you. I bet you're either thinking of an incredibly time-consuming or competitive game with social elements like World of Warcraft or Counter-Strike, or the sort of game I'm writing about here -- the kind that recognized your expectations as a player and fed them back to you in a surprising, insightful way. The feeling you get from this is the videogame equivalent of meeting someone with the same favorite band as you.
Sometimes you're lucky to get this feeling early on in a game, such as in Half-Life 2, when in the opening scene, a professor is hammering you with exposition, leaving you free to explore his office... where you'll more than likely knock over one of his computer monitors, causing him to interrupt his speech and chew you out for not paying attention. It's a great little moment. The designers knew you were gonna screw around in there, and placed that little trap for you. In almost every shooter before Half-Life 2, you can bunnyhop like a moron in the middle of even the gravest of monologues. But in Half-Life 2, this opening scene informs you that you have a real presence in this world beyond just the presence of your guns. The rest of the game didn't have such moments in it but the placement of this very first one was important to quickly immersing the player in a world rich with detail, and setting an expectation for bits of comic relief amid all the sci-fi seriousness.
There are dozens of other examples, though on some level it's surprising there aren't more. In Uncharted 2, relatively early on there's a sequence in which you're introduced to the grenade-throwing mechanics. Nate Drake is well-positioned behind cover as a bunch of thugs bear down on him. Fortunately, a box of grenades happens to be in arm's reach. So of course Drake, speaking for the player, quips something like "well isn't this convenient", referring to the unlimited grenade box while acknowledging the cliché, subverting it, and turning it into one of the game's great self-referential moments. Without that little bit of nudging-and-winking dialogue, the scene would have been just another grenade-throwing tutorial.
Minor cases like that can be surprisingly poignant. In the classic SNES role-playing game Chrono Trigger, someone at some point makes the joke about how the protagonist doesn't talk much, a profound moment that for the first time points the spotlight at the silent-protagonist trope common to so many games. This same joke then appeared seemingly in almost every other game with a silent protagonist (including Half-Life 2), so it lost its impact after the umpteenth time, but the first few times it was great.
On the other hand, Saints Row does a brilliant job of subverting the silent protagonist cliché by having the protagonist blurt out some sort of ultra-offensive Silent Bob-style one-liner when you least expect it, just when the story has convinced you to start taking it seriously. It's legitimately funny stuff.
Then there's Max Payne, in which the hero once dreams he's a killer inside a videogame, in one of the game's most surreal and memorable moments. This too became a tired idea as more and more games fed you the line about how "this isn't a game", hoping you'd never heard it before. No More Heroes gets it right, by breaking the fourth wall on several occasions towards the end, conceding its own ridiculousness in moments that drive the game's self-effacing charm through the roof. 'This is a game' is No More Heroes' message, delivered playfully and perversely, at the height of the player's investment in the story.
Narrative recognition doesn't require breaking the fourth wall. Another one of my favorite examples is in The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, in the excellent Dark Brotherhood quest line, where you've decided to become a contract killer and work among a surly bunch of assassins who don't take kindly to newcomers. Just as you finally grow to like them and earn their respect, you receive a secret mission to kill them all. It's timed perfectly. You kill scores of things in this game but none are tougher to put down than those guys in the assassin's guild, because the designers made you work for their affection, made you feel attached to them, and only then asked that you turn on them -- a move that's made less despicable knowing that you're all following the same strict code of conduct.
There are simpler and cleaner examples than this. In the original Halo, the option to invert the controls for looking up and down is couched as part of a diagnostics test at the beginning of the game, when you're learning about your special armor. A lesser game would have thrown this option into a menu and not integrated it into the narrative. But the makers of Halo figured correctly that the last thing a guy like me would expect was a fictional justification for inverting the Y-axis on my controller. All I expected was to be bored by a tutorial.
What do all these games have in common? They have in common these crafted moments designed to anticipate exactly what the audience is feeling about the game at a particular time, and feed back on those feelings, sometimes merely by acknowledging them. I know you're frustrated. I know you've done this before. I know you don't think you care about these characters. These types of concessions can have a real impact. Narrative reversals are integral to storytelling -- I'm referring specifically to when the game narrative is used to reference the act of playing, not the story itself. Such acts of recognition are at the center of effective game narrative. They're among the most meaningful ways for a game to communicate with a player. One of the best feelings in life is getting what you want without having to ask -- at a restaurant, at work, in a relationship, you name it. Games have the ability to provide this exhilarating feeling using narrative techniques.
Characters and gameworlds that tend to correctly guess at the player's feelings and feed back on them are the best kinds. They're typically bound to games that don't break when you push at their boundaries, as when you knock over that monitor in Half-Life 2, realizing you can knock over all sorts of shit throughout the entire game. Games like that let you explore the upper limits of the constraints of their rules. In last year's Demon's Souls, one of the first characters you meet in that oppressive and bleak gameworld is a cynical ghost of a man who's given up trying to escape. He more or less calls you a fool for attempting to do better. It's straight-up reverse psychology, and it's fantastic. Here's a game that knows it's challenging. Why shouldn't the world have characters in it who've become frustrated by those challenges? Not only does it fit the fiction, it affirms the player's own first impressions about the game. That ghost is a pretty sympathetic character. But then, if you want to kill him for being such a noob, you can go right ahead and do that too, says Demon's Souls. That game covers its bases, which is partly why its audience likes it so much. Those who gave it a chance tend to make a deep connection with it, because its designers knew you were going to have to fight for every inch in that game, and anticipated and fed back on the range of emotions you'd feel along the way.
Most games with a narrative component can and should have moments like the ones I've mentioned here, because their designers ought to be concerned with what gives their game its distinct tone, as well as the likeliest emotional dispositions with which their players will approach any given scenario. This happens when designers think of players as individuals rather than as groups. When games speak to you on a personal level, when you experience one of those rare but great moments of recognition and reflection while playing, that's not coming from some guy following up on data from a focus test or gunning for the sci-fi shooter market. Instead, it's coming from someone trying to reach you, with the confidence -- the presumptuous authorial arrogance -- that he knows what you must be thinking at a certain time. How dare he? And yet he really is speaking to you in that moment, through his game.
Tuesday, April 6, 2010
Proper Villainy
Considering how many games exist for the promise of bringing you exciting action and adventure, it's a shame how few of them have memorable villains. Like a good story in general, a proper villain can help motivate a player to push his way through a game, past the difficulty spikes and through the inevitable rough patches, by adding meaning and context to the game mechanics as well as the promise of more variety and surprises. There are a few reasons why villains are hard to do in games, but games like Portal, Legacy of Kain: Soul Reaver, Final Fantasy VII, System Shock II, or even Super Mario Bros. and Mike Tyson's Punch-Out!! are evidence of why investing in a proper villain is worth it.
One reason there are so few proper villains in games is implied by the word itself: The concept of villainy is kind of dumb. It's not how the world works. In reality, what happens is that when two people want opposite and mutually-exclusive things, they enter into an antagonistic relationship. Villainy is just an extreme form of antagonism where, most often, either the antagonist's motives are not rational or simply not well-developed. Videogames' misguided attempts at villains usually hinge on grandiose schemes such as destroying the world or other sadistic, evil acts. They're bad guys who overcompensate for their flat desires with huge lifebars. But it's impossible to relate to their motivations so these villains are doomed to obscurity. Instead, a proper antagonist gets under your skin and makes things personal in a way you could understand, even appreciate. Portal's GlaDos, despite being a machine, has the attitude of a spurned lover taking passive-aggressive revenge on a relationship that's slipped from her grasp. In Super Mario Bros., Bowser wants the Princess just as much as you. It's ironic that inhuman characters such as these turn out to be much easier to empathize with than the dime-a-dozen megalomaniacs waiting for you at the end of most games. But that's the key -- if the antagonist is impossible to empathize with, then he's just another villain, and more than likely doesn't have the substance to be memorable as a character.
There's a more-practical reason why it's tough to have a proper antagonist in a game, which is that most games in the action or action adventure genres are designed around kill-or-be-killed scenarios, leaving little room for character development. When they present you with an antagonist character and a combat situation, one of you needs to be defeated and it's not going to be you if you keep trying. So then, either the antagonist is knocked out of the game or you get the cliché of the antagonist escaping just in the nick of time, or even worse, the one where he beats you up in a cutscene after you kick his ass in-game. What many games do to counteract this is they present you with a hodgepodge of disposable antagonists, in the form of different boss characters and such. But the narrative consequence is that the forces of antagonism in the game are diluted. Unless it's Metal Gear Solid, the story likely doesn't make time to develop most of these characters, and the artists and combat designers have to carry the burden of making them interesting when the fiction should be holding up its end of the bargain.
Conversely, the reason why games like Portal, System Shock II, BioShock, Batman: Arkham Asylum, and even Punch-Out!! succeed with their antagonists is that their stories are structured around an ever-present-but-physically-inaccessible antagonist, someone you're always aware of but can't get to until the climax of the game.
If a gameworld cannot support the idea of an ever-present but physically-inaccessible antagonist, then the burden is on the enemy faction to be empathetic, assuming this is compatible with the aesthetic of the gameworld. The enemy faction or factions you're fighting -- the various goons that populate the gameworld and are the predicates of the gameplay -- might as well be interesting. There's really no downside. And giving them empathetic qualities is a good way to make them interesting in most cases. In Geometry Wars, the evasive little green shapes are the best, most memorable enemies in the game because they have an empathetic sense of self-preservation. In Halo, the little Grunts freak out when you kill one of the Elites leading them into battle. In Panzer Dragoon Orta, the hordes of enemies forcing you to dodge a hailstorm of bullets panic as you gun them down, making you think about what it must be like to be on the bad guys' side in a shoot-'em-up. In Plants vs. Zombies, the zombies are sincerely hungry for brains -- you'd want to give them your brains if you didn't need them. Since most traditional games revolve around violent conflict, in these games, the forces of antagonism ought to express empathetic behaviors, even in the strict confines of a combat encounter. It's totally doable and relatively inexpensive in many cases, just the cost of writing and audio in many cases (plus a high premium in scripting, animation, and artificial intelligence for all the shooters out there). Even F.E.A.R.'s genetically cloned supersoldiers in their full body armor show a shred of humanity in their final moments simply by saying "Oh, shit...!" as you strafe around the corner in slow motion with your shotgun drawn.
While memorable antagonists are rare, antagonists are some of the most memorable characters in games. That's because they often present far greater opportunities for character development than protagonists do. Look at games like BioShock and Portal, whose protagonists primarily serve as vessels for the player to immerse themselves into the experience, yet whose antagonists are extremely well-crafted, remarkable characters. Part of why the combination of invisible-protagonist and ever-present-antagonist works so well in these games is that, when the climactic moments of the story crop up, the antagonists' escalating actions feel very personal. And when these highly motivating personal affronts are coming from characters whose own motives you can empathize with on some level -- characters for whom the old "we're not so different, you and I" speech goes without saying -- you're more likely to be playing a game that's going to stick with you after you're finished playing it. Which are the kinds of games I most like and most want to make.
One reason there are so few proper villains in games is implied by the word itself: The concept of villainy is kind of dumb. It's not how the world works. In reality, what happens is that when two people want opposite and mutually-exclusive things, they enter into an antagonistic relationship. Villainy is just an extreme form of antagonism where, most often, either the antagonist's motives are not rational or simply not well-developed. Videogames' misguided attempts at villains usually hinge on grandiose schemes such as destroying the world or other sadistic, evil acts. They're bad guys who overcompensate for their flat desires with huge lifebars. But it's impossible to relate to their motivations so these villains are doomed to obscurity. Instead, a proper antagonist gets under your skin and makes things personal in a way you could understand, even appreciate. Portal's GlaDos, despite being a machine, has the attitude of a spurned lover taking passive-aggressive revenge on a relationship that's slipped from her grasp. In Super Mario Bros., Bowser wants the Princess just as much as you. It's ironic that inhuman characters such as these turn out to be much easier to empathize with than the dime-a-dozen megalomaniacs waiting for you at the end of most games. But that's the key -- if the antagonist is impossible to empathize with, then he's just another villain, and more than likely doesn't have the substance to be memorable as a character.
There's a more-practical reason why it's tough to have a proper antagonist in a game, which is that most games in the action or action adventure genres are designed around kill-or-be-killed scenarios, leaving little room for character development. When they present you with an antagonist character and a combat situation, one of you needs to be defeated and it's not going to be you if you keep trying. So then, either the antagonist is knocked out of the game or you get the cliché of the antagonist escaping just in the nick of time, or even worse, the one where he beats you up in a cutscene after you kick his ass in-game. What many games do to counteract this is they present you with a hodgepodge of disposable antagonists, in the form of different boss characters and such. But the narrative consequence is that the forces of antagonism in the game are diluted. Unless it's Metal Gear Solid, the story likely doesn't make time to develop most of these characters, and the artists and combat designers have to carry the burden of making them interesting when the fiction should be holding up its end of the bargain.
Conversely, the reason why games like Portal, System Shock II, BioShock, Batman: Arkham Asylum, and even Punch-Out!! succeed with their antagonists is that their stories are structured around an ever-present-but-physically-inaccessible antagonist, someone you're always aware of but can't get to until the climax of the game.
If a gameworld cannot support the idea of an ever-present but physically-inaccessible antagonist, then the burden is on the enemy faction to be empathetic, assuming this is compatible with the aesthetic of the gameworld. The enemy faction or factions you're fighting -- the various goons that populate the gameworld and are the predicates of the gameplay -- might as well be interesting. There's really no downside. And giving them empathetic qualities is a good way to make them interesting in most cases. In Geometry Wars, the evasive little green shapes are the best, most memorable enemies in the game because they have an empathetic sense of self-preservation. In Halo, the little Grunts freak out when you kill one of the Elites leading them into battle. In Panzer Dragoon Orta, the hordes of enemies forcing you to dodge a hailstorm of bullets panic as you gun them down, making you think about what it must be like to be on the bad guys' side in a shoot-'em-up. In Plants vs. Zombies, the zombies are sincerely hungry for brains -- you'd want to give them your brains if you didn't need them. Since most traditional games revolve around violent conflict, in these games, the forces of antagonism ought to express empathetic behaviors, even in the strict confines of a combat encounter. It's totally doable and relatively inexpensive in many cases, just the cost of writing and audio in many cases (plus a high premium in scripting, animation, and artificial intelligence for all the shooters out there). Even F.E.A.R.'s genetically cloned supersoldiers in their full body armor show a shred of humanity in their final moments simply by saying "Oh, shit...!" as you strafe around the corner in slow motion with your shotgun drawn.
While memorable antagonists are rare, antagonists are some of the most memorable characters in games. That's because they often present far greater opportunities for character development than protagonists do. Look at games like BioShock and Portal, whose protagonists primarily serve as vessels for the player to immerse themselves into the experience, yet whose antagonists are extremely well-crafted, remarkable characters. Part of why the combination of invisible-protagonist and ever-present-antagonist works so well in these games is that, when the climactic moments of the story crop up, the antagonists' escalating actions feel very personal. And when these highly motivating personal affronts are coming from characters whose own motives you can empathize with on some level -- characters for whom the old "we're not so different, you and I" speech goes without saying -- you're more likely to be playing a game that's going to stick with you after you're finished playing it. Which are the kinds of games I most like and most want to make.
Monday, March 29, 2010
The Three -Mations
I consider a game's story to be the subset of narrative content authored for that game, which the player interprets to have some coherent meaning. The meaning does not necessarily need to be placed there purposely by the game's creators, it just needs to be perceived by the player through the intuitive pattern-matching we conduct as we go about trying to find meaning in all things. Story is just one of many types of feedback games can employ in response to the player's input. Thinking of story as another form of feedback, I think, is the key to tapping its potential in games -- as well as the key to integrating it into the design process in an appropriate way, while mitigating risk of the story derailing or constraining the design.
Game feedback, in general, provides information, confirmation, and affirmation. Story is no exception; I can draw an analogy between story and user interface design. In God of War III, a big spinning "O" button next to a prone enemy carries a specific, almost Pavlovian connotation: Here lies an enemy that you can savagely murder if you get close to it and press the corresponding button. The UI prompt is a reward, affirming your combat skills; it confirms the availability of a unique set of killing moves; and it informs you of the input required to access those moves. Good interface design in games is contextual and just feels right, in this fashion, because it's closely linked to player input and the affordances of the interface match the aesthetics of the game in general or the input in particular. Think of "You Are Dead", the game-over screen in Resident Evil. It works like a consolation prize, not a punishment. It's a pretty good screen.
Linear noninteractive game narrative tends to be ineffective because it's disconnected from the player's actions. However, there are numerous games with lots of noninteractive cutscenes that are still considered to have outstanding stories in them. These games range from Grim Fandango to Metal Gear Solid to Mass Effect. How is it that these examples break from the popular player-elitist idea that linear story is a bad thing for a game? The answer is that, in addition to having these lengthy story sequences in them, these games do the important small stuff too: inform, confirm, affirm through the story.
In Grim Fandango you can share your balloon animal shaped like Robert Frost with various characters, leading to unexpected comedy. In Metal Gear Solid, a character called Psycho Mantis looks for saved data for Castlevania: Symphony of the Night on your memory card, breaking the fourth wall as he points out your gaming preferences. In Mass Effect, you can shoot one of your party members dead if you don't like the way he's acting. By affirming the player's actions in these types of cases, these games inform the player of a wider-than-expected possibility space of interactions, which the player later confirms (or does not confirm) through additional interactions along the periphery of that space. These are examples of story working at its best. It's supported by a rich linear narrative in all three cases, which cushions these smaller, more-important story moments in deeper meaning. The result is three very different yet rewarding experiences that share in common a story-driven structure, where the player's input is acknowledged via story mechanisms and not just interface prompts as in God of War III. Nor are these games' stories simply playing out without respect for the player's actions, as is the case with many games reviled for their flashy noninteractive stories.
Animal Crossing is another excellent game that uses these types of techniques but does not have story in the traditional sense, because (following my first statement) it has no coherent meaning behind what happens in the story -- except for the thinnest possible premise of "Tom Nook gives you a home loan and eventually you pay him back." The game has the perfect amount of story for something whose underlying meaning concerns the simple pleasures of life. But even though Animal Crossing would never be considered a game story on par with Grim Fandango, or Metal Gear Solid, or Mass Effect, it is just as effective in its application of game-story principles. One of my favorite examples of this is in the game's clothes-making mechanic, where you can "paint" clothing patterns and put them on display in the local clothes store. This type of player expression is very common in games, which routinely let you change your character's hairstyle, paint your car, and so on. However, Animal Crossing takes these types of systems a step further by affirming your efforts, as when you find one of your town's animal residents wearing that shirt you made and complimenting you for your artwork.
Games rarely go to the trouble of confirming, let alone affirming, this type of player expression, as though we're all so confident in our ability to express ourselves that we don't want the world to judge or acknowledge our efforts. But, if you'll forgive another one of my analogies I've been meaning to commit to writing, think for a second about what happens the day after you get a new haircut. Either you're fishing for (or at the very least you're open to) compliments on your new look, or, if by some chance you're someone who knows her hair looks excellent, I figure you at least expect people (even just certain people) to notice the change. Conversely, you'd feel bad if no one noticed or seemed to notice. Doesn't mean you want to be fawned over in the way certain games vomit praise on you for your basest actions, like a mother indulging a spoiled child. You're sharp enough to observe subtle cues, as when someone who never once paid you a second glance does a quick double-take. And what a rush that is. Story in games should serve this end. All it really needs to do is acknowledge the player's input in a way that seems to give meaning to the player's actions, by being personal or specific or both. It also doesn't need to use a lot of words or cutscenes to accomplish this.
Game feedback, in general, provides information, confirmation, and affirmation. Story is no exception; I can draw an analogy between story and user interface design. In God of War III, a big spinning "O" button next to a prone enemy carries a specific, almost Pavlovian connotation: Here lies an enemy that you can savagely murder if you get close to it and press the corresponding button. The UI prompt is a reward, affirming your combat skills; it confirms the availability of a unique set of killing moves; and it informs you of the input required to access those moves. Good interface design in games is contextual and just feels right, in this fashion, because it's closely linked to player input and the affordances of the interface match the aesthetics of the game in general or the input in particular. Think of "You Are Dead", the game-over screen in Resident Evil. It works like a consolation prize, not a punishment. It's a pretty good screen.
Linear noninteractive game narrative tends to be ineffective because it's disconnected from the player's actions. However, there are numerous games with lots of noninteractive cutscenes that are still considered to have outstanding stories in them. These games range from Grim Fandango to Metal Gear Solid to Mass Effect. How is it that these examples break from the popular player-elitist idea that linear story is a bad thing for a game? The answer is that, in addition to having these lengthy story sequences in them, these games do the important small stuff too: inform, confirm, affirm through the story.
In Grim Fandango you can share your balloon animal shaped like Robert Frost with various characters, leading to unexpected comedy. In Metal Gear Solid, a character called Psycho Mantis looks for saved data for Castlevania: Symphony of the Night on your memory card, breaking the fourth wall as he points out your gaming preferences. In Mass Effect, you can shoot one of your party members dead if you don't like the way he's acting. By affirming the player's actions in these types of cases, these games inform the player of a wider-than-expected possibility space of interactions, which the player later confirms (or does not confirm) through additional interactions along the periphery of that space. These are examples of story working at its best. It's supported by a rich linear narrative in all three cases, which cushions these smaller, more-important story moments in deeper meaning. The result is three very different yet rewarding experiences that share in common a story-driven structure, where the player's input is acknowledged via story mechanisms and not just interface prompts as in God of War III. Nor are these games' stories simply playing out without respect for the player's actions, as is the case with many games reviled for their flashy noninteractive stories.
Animal Crossing is another excellent game that uses these types of techniques but does not have story in the traditional sense, because (following my first statement) it has no coherent meaning behind what happens in the story -- except for the thinnest possible premise of "Tom Nook gives you a home loan and eventually you pay him back." The game has the perfect amount of story for something whose underlying meaning concerns the simple pleasures of life. But even though Animal Crossing would never be considered a game story on par with Grim Fandango, or Metal Gear Solid, or Mass Effect, it is just as effective in its application of game-story principles. One of my favorite examples of this is in the game's clothes-making mechanic, where you can "paint" clothing patterns and put them on display in the local clothes store. This type of player expression is very common in games, which routinely let you change your character's hairstyle, paint your car, and so on. However, Animal Crossing takes these types of systems a step further by affirming your efforts, as when you find one of your town's animal residents wearing that shirt you made and complimenting you for your artwork.
Games rarely go to the trouble of confirming, let alone affirming, this type of player expression, as though we're all so confident in our ability to express ourselves that we don't want the world to judge or acknowledge our efforts. But, if you'll forgive another one of my analogies I've been meaning to commit to writing, think for a second about what happens the day after you get a new haircut. Either you're fishing for (or at the very least you're open to) compliments on your new look, or, if by some chance you're someone who knows her hair looks excellent, I figure you at least expect people (even just certain people) to notice the change. Conversely, you'd feel bad if no one noticed or seemed to notice. Doesn't mean you want to be fawned over in the way certain games vomit praise on you for your basest actions, like a mother indulging a spoiled child. You're sharp enough to observe subtle cues, as when someone who never once paid you a second glance does a quick double-take. And what a rush that is. Story in games should serve this end. All it really needs to do is acknowledge the player's input in a way that seems to give meaning to the player's actions, by being personal or specific or both. It also doesn't need to use a lot of words or cutscenes to accomplish this.
Sunday, March 28, 2010
The Gift of Torment
Released with no fanfare in December 1999, Planescape: Torment was one of the best games of the year largely on the strength of its one-of-a-kind story about immortality and human nature. Even though it wasn't a commercial success, I believe it's one of the most influential role-playing games of the last decade and ideas it pioneered have since found their way into much better-known games (mostly from BioWare), such as Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic and Dragon Age: Origins. Apart from the overall quality, size, and depth of the game's ambitious story, on the surface Torment was basically just another Infinity Engine game, a "total conversion" of Baldur's Gate with a weird cast of characters and an awesome voice cast. But even though Torment relied on the conventional mechanics of the time, I believe it introduced a radical idea that's had a profound influence on story in Western RPGs: player dialogue with subtext.
In other words, Torment is the first RPG to introduce player intent into dialogue, which may be contradictory to the substance of the dialogue -- it's a game in which you can say one thing and mean another, and use this to deliberately lie at times, by means of the authored choices presented to you.
In a typical RPG, you might be asked by a character to retrieve an item, and tell that person "Yes, I'll do it" even if you as a player don't really know if you're going to do it or not -- probably you just want the quest logged in case you stumble upon it. You don't think about these types of interactions, and, as evidenced by the completely disposable text content for quests in games like World of Warcraft, they do little to build a meaningful connection between you, your character, or the gameworld. But in this same type of situation, Torment typically would give you at least two options: "Yes, I'll do it" (Truth) and "Yes, I'll do it" (Lie). And it would fully support these choices -- lying would affect your character's moral alignment, leading to other changes in gameplay. But even when it didn't really matter whether you told the truth or not, the game made you stop and think about what you were saying.
I remember encountering this type of choice in the game for the first time and feeling frozen in my seat -- never before had I considered my options so carefully around a straightforward dialogue choice. Some previous RPGs, such as Fallout, might have let me play as a smartass, who might make a sarcastic quip instead of answering a question directly. But no game prior to Torment made me feel like I could, if I so chose, look another person in the eye and lie to him with a straight face.
Plenty of RPGs before and after let you play as morally evil characters, letting you randomly kill people if you want, usually just after saying something terrible to them. But this type of psychopathic villainy, while potentially exciting for a little while, tends to feel hollow because your ability to empathize with your character rapidly breaks down as you start massacring entire towns and looting people's corpses for their boots and gold. It's out-of-character and not the "right" way to play, even if it doesn't outright break the game. On the other hand, in Torment you could do some really deceptive, scheming stuff simply through talking to people -- and it made you feel connected and close to that evil, because everyone knows what it feels like to lie, and in Torment you have reasons not to be up front with everyone you meet. As well, the option of lying made the default act of telling the truth feel more consequential. By letting you get inside your character's head as well as your own head, Torment created such a strong connection with players like me.
It took years for anyone to improve on Torment's basic idea of letting you determine your character's intent and not just the content of his speech, but the Mass Effect games finally took this a step further through their system of subtext-driven dialogue. In those games, it's genuinely exciting to see the protagonist act out your dialogue choices, because you don't know exactly what Shepard is going to say or do -- you tend to just pick the emotion or intent behind the outcome you want, and your reward is seeing Shepard act it out faithfully, in most cases. The basic consequence of this is that dialogue sequences tend to be worth watching and listening to, something that's rather important for a game that's bothering to have tons of story content.
In other words, Torment is the first RPG to introduce player intent into dialogue, which may be contradictory to the substance of the dialogue -- it's a game in which you can say one thing and mean another, and use this to deliberately lie at times, by means of the authored choices presented to you.In a typical RPG, you might be asked by a character to retrieve an item, and tell that person "Yes, I'll do it" even if you as a player don't really know if you're going to do it or not -- probably you just want the quest logged in case you stumble upon it. You don't think about these types of interactions, and, as evidenced by the completely disposable text content for quests in games like World of Warcraft, they do little to build a meaningful connection between you, your character, or the gameworld. But in this same type of situation, Torment typically would give you at least two options: "Yes, I'll do it" (Truth) and "Yes, I'll do it" (Lie). And it would fully support these choices -- lying would affect your character's moral alignment, leading to other changes in gameplay. But even when it didn't really matter whether you told the truth or not, the game made you stop and think about what you were saying.
I remember encountering this type of choice in the game for the first time and feeling frozen in my seat -- never before had I considered my options so carefully around a straightforward dialogue choice. Some previous RPGs, such as Fallout, might have let me play as a smartass, who might make a sarcastic quip instead of answering a question directly. But no game prior to Torment made me feel like I could, if I so chose, look another person in the eye and lie to him with a straight face.
Plenty of RPGs before and after let you play as morally evil characters, letting you randomly kill people if you want, usually just after saying something terrible to them. But this type of psychopathic villainy, while potentially exciting for a little while, tends to feel hollow because your ability to empathize with your character rapidly breaks down as you start massacring entire towns and looting people's corpses for their boots and gold. It's out-of-character and not the "right" way to play, even if it doesn't outright break the game. On the other hand, in Torment you could do some really deceptive, scheming stuff simply through talking to people -- and it made you feel connected and close to that evil, because everyone knows what it feels like to lie, and in Torment you have reasons not to be up front with everyone you meet. As well, the option of lying made the default act of telling the truth feel more consequential. By letting you get inside your character's head as well as your own head, Torment created such a strong connection with players like me.
It took years for anyone to improve on Torment's basic idea of letting you determine your character's intent and not just the content of his speech, but the Mass Effect games finally took this a step further through their system of subtext-driven dialogue. In those games, it's genuinely exciting to see the protagonist act out your dialogue choices, because you don't know exactly what Shepard is going to say or do -- you tend to just pick the emotion or intent behind the outcome you want, and your reward is seeing Shepard act it out faithfully, in most cases. The basic consequence of this is that dialogue sequences tend to be worth watching and listening to, something that's rather important for a game that's bothering to have tons of story content.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
Posts
