Quality of Universe

I really like analyzing IP franchises for the kinds of stories they support, and the kinds of cultural baggage they are weighted with.

By "IP franchises" I mean things like Star Wars or Lord of the Rings or Mass Effect: universes that can support many stories. Universes with a lot of fanon. I guess it includes things like My Little Pony and Adventure Time and such, but I do try to limit my analysis to universes I've actually witnessed. I don't try to guess at the sorts of stories and baggage MLP carries, since I've never seen it.

When I say that a universe can carry a kind of story, I don't mean that it's the only kind of story that can be told, just that it's the kind of story the universe is best at. For example, Star Wars is best at stories of redemption and combating darkness - internal, systemic, or universal. Star Trek is best at stories that explore the breadth and diversity of life and culture. Both have other kinds of stories in them, but their iconic stories are of those types.

I've always analyzed universes like that, and I've enjoyed how those stories reflect on fanon. Star Wars has a fanbase very dedicated to the original movies because the fanbase wants stories like those: stories of fighting against darkness. Later movies had a weaker focus on that. If you read the expanded universe stuff, you can see much of it sticks very close to the core stories that Star Wars seemed best at, and nearly all the fanfiction does. Fighting darkness is very compelling, no matter where the darkness is found or how it is embodied.

Star Trek, on the other hand, has many fans but they rarely highlight the same seasons. I think this is because the best story type is "exploring diversity from the point of view of white bread mainstream culture", and that's a story type that evolved with each season along with cultural norms. So you get attached to the seasons that were closest to your cultural norms, and therefore tickled your concept of "diversity" most.

It's really fun to think on this level, although a lot of the thoughts are guesswork. You can certainly disagree with this kind of analysis, especially if you were struck differently by the same universes I've described. But one thing I have started to notice is that these universes, these franchises, they are more than just the stories they can support. They are also the baggage they bring with them.

What made me really start to notice this was the rapid-fire discussion of Mass Effect, Star Wars, and Super Mario happening on Twitter recently. All of these franchises have baggage.

Baggage isn't inherently bad. For example, Star Wars has light sabers as baggage. If you tell a Star Wars story that includes Jedi, it's going to include light sabers, and you're going to have to keep in mind that the Jedi can, you know, cut anything apart in a flash. It'll weigh on your mind and constrain your story, but that's not necessarily bad and, like all creative work, the right constraints can actually fire you up.

Not all baggage is as intentional as light sabers, though.

The easiest example of unintentional baggage is deeply ingrained sexism and racism. Especially with older universes, there's a lot of passive assumptions about sex and race. For example, Japanese game studios are still struggling to stop being total creepers in how they treat characters like Peach and Samus. American companies aren't doing much better, with the new Star Wars featuring a grand total of one new woman into the cast.

Racism is also part of the culture of many universes. Not introduced on purpose, but just incidentally as part of the culture of the developers that they failed to properly account for. Fantasy settings tend to have this worst.

The older a setting is, the more sexist and racist it tends to implicitly be. For example, in Tolkien's works, the good guys are all European white men. Whether Tolkien was racist or sexist isn't the point: the setting has baggage. Unless you actively rebel against it, it'll creep into every related story. This limits what cultures it can appeal to: as time passes, what we are willing to put up with changes, and that kind of exclusion is less acceptable.

More modern universes tend to be more inclusive, but they use a technique that will, in the long run, be equally problematic. This is the "generic diversity" approach.

As an easy example, in Mass Effect the human species is represented in a fairly diverse manner, especially in the later games. Decent spectrum of color, decent gender ratio, even a steadily increasing diversity of sexual preference.

However, this isn't a situation where a woman's point of view is represented, or a Hispanic point of view, or a gay point of view. Instead, they are all given the default point of view of the developer. That is, they are all written as straight white men, and most of the intercharacter relationships among the human cast are relationships straight white guys have, with the focus on the kinds of strife straight white guys tend to have with each other - that one coworker who's racist, for example.

All of the cultural pieces actually relating to being female, or black, or gay, or religious, or homeless, or poor - these are all given to aliens.

This doesn't mean the aliens represent the point of view of these cultures, or the people who have these issues. Nope, they still don't have much of a word in these games. Instead, the issues can still be treated in the same way as they have been for decades, just now people have a harder time calling you out on it because you've changed out the faces.

Not only is this lazy, it's also not very good at keeping up with the changing culture in the real world. The Asari and the Quarians both carry a lot of aging sexist and/or racist baggage with them. In time, those species will need to be completely reinvented to stay acceptable, let alone relevant. In fact, you can already see that happening with the Asari, whose representation grasps at dozens of different straws, some more unfortunate than others.

Although I say this is lazy, it's still 100x better than the exclusionary settings of last century.

Anyway, that's my own opinion on the matter.

Survival and the Compromised Base

Recently I played a game called FarSky. This isn't a review of FarSky, but instead about an idea it inspired.

Originally I wrote a long, meandering essay on the hows and whys of this idea, but instead I'll save you some time and just present it straight-up.

You live at the bottom of the ocean. You have a science fiction backpack - it's an electrolysis machine that can put out quite a lot of atmosphere, limited only by battery life. You can recharge batteries from any power source, or deploy a very long thermal wire to float high above, and sit still for a long time. Of course, as long as you have battery power, the backpack can keep you breathing, but the real use of the backpack is to fill up aquatic bases.

You can make an aquatic base out of anything. Shipping containers. A cave. A sunken ship. An abandoned research base. Sunken houses and vans, if they aren't too rotted. Subways. Any place that is vaguely airtight. Activate the backpack and pump air into it. If there's holes, the water level will stop dropping at that point and you'll need to patch them to put more air in. If there's multiple rooms, maybe you close the bulkhead and fill one room at a time, slowly conquering the base bit by bit.

The issue is that you're not really very useful. All you really do is fill things with air and patch small holes. You can't drag heavy things around, or mend a shattered window, or cobble together a bed, or grow plants. You need NPCs for that. And, of course, the NPCs need some place with air to stay.

Not all locations are created equal. Like most survival games, as you become better-equipped you'll want to move further afield, into areas with unique new resources. Unlike most such games, the bases aren't completely stable. While there is some advanced tech to help scrub a base's air supply, fundamentally they only have as much oxygen as you put in using your backpack. That means that you'll want to keep your NPCs consolidated to just one or two bases, or you'll spend all your time running around refilling your bases rather than exploring. So as you march onward, you'll need to abandon one base and move to another in a new location. Fortunately, as long as there's decent resting stops along the route, the NPCs will happily drag all the stuff in the old base to the new base.

The early part of the game will be mostly to get you used to the idea of moving around the ocean, finding small places to fill with air, acquiring one or two NPCs to help you with basic crafting. You tag resources you find in the open ocean, the NPCs will go fetch it and bring it home, allowing you to steadily get a grasp on how that sort of thing works.

But the gameplay of expanding into a base is the heart of the game. Reclaiming a base room by room, patching the cracks you can patch, sealing off the rooms with larger holes. Creating an airspace, moving your NPCs into it. Having them patch up the holes you can't handle, arrange the furniture. Going out to find things like shipping containers or vans, tagging them for recovery, and then attaching them to your base to steadily expand it. Making your base larger has purpose even if you don't plan to put any more stuff in that space: every additional airspace volume you add is more time the base can go without being refilled.

The NPCs have classes, tiers, and levels. For example, an NPC might be a retrieval specialist, able to quickly move large objects. Or they might be a craftsman, capable of building furniture. An electrician, capable of repairing or creating complex devices, including tools other classes might need. A plumber, capable of sealing up holes and creating infrastructure for things like toilets and showers. Many others.

Levels steadily increase as time passes. The higher someone's level, the faster they accomplish tasks.

Tiers are based around quality of life. If someone is living huddled in a shipping container, they aren't going to be capable of doing much work. But if they live in a vast base with all the amenities, they'll be able to create masterpieces rivaling anything that was created on land.

Hopefully the framework of the game is becoming clear. A cycle of expanding into bases, improving existing bases, scouting for resources, getting NPCs, and shuttling NPCs between bases.

I think this could be really compelling, but the flavor would need to be managed well. You'd want to create an environment where swimming around felt really compelling. You'd want the steady way you convert a base to feel heavy: you go from swimming in these rooms to walking in them, little by little. You'd want hanging around with NPCs to feel relaxing and interesting, so you feel like these are people you would enjoy being stuck at the bottom of the ocean with.

Hm. I'd love a game like that. Maybe I'll program something like that someday, because the basic concept is a powerful one that isn't really explored much.

There are games where you cobble together bases, but it's typically just attaching individual pieces and then they work. This is being inside the base and steadily filling it with air one room at a time.

Violence in Sci Fi Construction Games

There's a lot of cool games in the pipeline these days, and a lot of them are about building cool things in scifi settings. The problem is, they all then universally talk about blowing things up with the things you built.

That's really a bad call.

Combat is not compatible with the sort of internally-focused construction games these people are building. We've become so used to adding combat to everything that people have forgotten to think about whether combat is a good fit. I think the reason most designers seem to lose track of whether combat is a good fit is because they are used to customization rather than construction.

See, in most space combat games, you can customize your ship. Add in a better laser, change how much energy is going to your shields, restock on missiles, and stick in a better engine. Customization is fine for a combat game, because it's fundamentally the same as equipping a character. You are changing how your ship relates to the world around it: improved firepower, faster speed, more cargo, whatever.

But with a lot of these new games, you aren't simply customizing a ship. You're constructing it, brick by brick. For example, in Space Engineers, you build a ship out of Minecraft-style bricks.

These ships are built with combat in mind, because uh... because... ... well... uh... lasers are cool?

The problem is that this kind of construction is an internally-focused system. The end result of weapons, shields, engines, and other combat stats ends up feeling very forced, because the actual construction of the ship is about making a ship exist. This is not about making a ship relate to the outside world, it is about making the ship exist in its full complexity, with all the walkways and landing pads and sleek planes and whatever.

If you just care about how it relates to the outside world, you end up with a very ugly optimized ship. It feels wrong and stupid-looking. Even if you do that, the combat is never very interesting because it is too, well, too realistic. Things get damaged arbitrarily. Things resist arbitrarily. It's hard to tell how much damage you're doing. It's hard to tell how much damage you're actually taking. There's too much noise introduced by the extremely fine grain of detail that everything has.

You really need to consider whether your game is about customization or construction, because construction is not compatible with external challenges.

When you're building something where each piece relates to specific other pieces in direct ways, the challenges need to be about THAT. This trap moves a person towards that trap. This walkway connects that hall to this warp core. This wire hooks that light to this power source. That building creates a certain amount of cash but annoys all other buildings within 200m.

But there are base-building games that are externally-focused. For example, every RTS.

An externally-focused base-building game looks the same as an internally-focused game at first glance. They share a lot of similarities: putting things down in specific places, managing resources, and so on. However, an RTS base is not very internally complex. The buildings don't relate to each other very directly, but instead only indirectly through resource production and consumption. Where you choose to put them is more about the constraints of the map and your guess as to your enemy's tactics, rather than having to place them to directly relate to other buildings.

You could argue fine points. For example, you could argue that a combination of turrets and walls is sometimes used, and those do physically relate to each other. Similarly, you could argue that something like a goo field directly relates to other buildings. In the end, the line can be a bit vague, but I don't think anyone would argue that building long lines of walls is the core gameplay of Starcraft.

Putting aside the sometimes blurry edge cases, I would argue that internally-focused construction games are inherently a bad match for combat gameplay. Combat boils your avatar's performance down to some stats, while complex construction is focused on exactly the opposite.

Interstellar Archaeology

My friend ran a KickStarter about space and time being insanely vast. Most scifi compresses both space and time, but he wanted to show it in the proper scale. Me too! It inspired me, and I spent a lot of time thinking about it. And I decided that my contribution to this theme would be interstellar archaeology.

No matter how many millions of years your society has, it's just a tiny blip. You will never meet another living alien species. Even if you live for a million years on a million suns, you won't meet them. Space is too big, time is too vast.

But you can meet them. As long as you don't mind them being dead.

So this is a game about archaeology, about discovering ancient, lapsed civilizations and digitally recreating them to live anew in a huge simulation. You aren't part of a civilization yourself: humans have "ascended" and you're just kicking around exploring the galaxy for a few million more years until you get bored of it. And you've decided to search the universe for dead civilizations and bring them back to life in your personal computer, manage your own universe that is chock full of alien species and civilizations. Maybe trade info with other ex-humans that are still kicking around.

The mechanics of finding and studying ruins is not what I want to talk about. Instead, I want to talk about how to seed them. An algorithm for creating dead civilizations.

Now, one way to do this is to simulate the civilization and come up with a big stack of places they went and things they did. However, this has the serious downside of being dull as paste. We would like the players to actually be interested in what happened, and that means humanizing it. Here's what I've come up with:

If you search a given place for archaeological clues, you have a chance of finding a random clue from a random time period. Say, you discover a 100,000 year old derelict space ship caught in orbit around a moon.

There are two keys to what this ship "means", archaeologically speaking.

The first key is that the ship uses "compatible" clues. So if you are aware of a colony on a nearby planet from 2 million years ago, perhaps the ship is related to that. If you are aware of a colony from 110,000 years ago 20 light years away, maybe the ship is related to that. But the timing involved is important: if the ship is related to the 2 million year old colony, it certainly couldn't have come from it. Instead, it must have been searching for it, well aware of its age and likely demise.

That brings us to the second key: the archaeological find is not categorized by where it is from or what it belongs to, but instead by mission. This gives players a strong hook to get interested. Usually, where they are from will arise pretty obviously from their mission. Moreover, as the mission emerges, archaeological seeds are laid for the player to discover elsewhere.

For example, there is a million-year-old colony nearby. Is the ship involved with it somehow? There is a 110,000-year-old colony 200 light years away. Is the ship involved with that somehow?

We don't simply determine where the ship is "from" or who built it. No, we care about the mission. Is the ship related to the million-year-old colony? If so, what was its mission? To reach the colony, almost certainly. Why would they have wanted to reach the colony?

Well, not to put too fine a point on it, but we don't know why. The player doesn't know either. All they know is that the ship had that colony in the last surviving star chart.

There's not a whole lot of research the player can do aboard the derelict, because it is truly ancient and basically just a jumble of floating rust particles. All the player can really do to follow the lead is to head for that colony. At least until some new information tells them what to look for in this ship.

Maybe this player doesn't even know there is a colony there, just this star chart. Either way, when she searches for events ~100,000 years ago, she finds an archaeological event that was seeded by the discovery of the ship. What is it, exactly? Well, like the original discovery of the ship, it's largely random. She discovers that (rolls dice) a seed vault was stolen.

A seed vault from an ancient civilization was stolen?

There's a lot of ways she can go from this. One is to read into the million-year-old colony more, since she's obviously going to discover it exists given that its seed vault was stolen. However, she can also keep concentrating on the seed vault.

It automatically works its way into the mission parameters of the ship that stole it. They were going to the ancient colony... for seeds... and they got them. What? Why?

We need to come up with a driving response, so the algorithm looks up all possible explanations in the dictionary and decides there was a genetic plague on the 110,000-year-old colony, and they needed 'pure' ancient DNA samples to fight it. This, in turn, plants several more archaeological seeds. One on the 110,000-year-old colony - evidence of genetic collapse. One on the ship: evidence of the seed vault.

These missions can keep expanding, but a key point is that this isn't a one-player game. This player isn't the only one working with this set of facts.

Another player lands on the 110,000-year-old colony and searches for clues related to it. Since he's in the right place and searching in the right era, he discovers evidence of the genetic plague. He doesn't know quite what it is, though: a massive ecological collapse off some kind. The chain itself knows that a ship was launched with a specific mission because of this catastrophe, so it spawns an event for the new player to discover: the construction of a fleet of ships to try and find pure DNA. This seed of a space exodus is planted with the discovery of the ecological collapse: it generates only when needed.

The new player can discover this event by continuing to search in the right place and time. Rather than discovering the location of the originally-discovered ship, this player instead finds star charts pointing to dozens of planets. Each of these planets is then allocated a "phantom" of the originally-discovered quest line. If the player goes to search one of those locations, it will randomly determine which elements to clone from the original quest line. It might have a million-year-old colony. It might have an event 100,000 years ago where someone stole seed banks (or attempted to, if there was no colony spawned). It might have a ship lying derelict nearby.

Even if the original player gets sidetracked and never finished fleshing out what happened to the originally discovered ship, their progress lives on in the phantom missions descended from that work. And, as people stumble into pieces of the missions, they will usually be able to track the missions back to the homeworld. Many people will become familiar with the way that colony was destroyed by the plague, and their desperate final missions to save themselves. As they explore that time and space, they will discover more and more details about who these people were, what they were like, and what happened afterwards and before. These facts will be easier and easier for subsequent players to discover and, in turn, creating digital recreations of these people and this colony becomes easier and easier.

So the basic progression is like this:

1) Discover something. It will relate to existing discoveries via a mission template, and will create new clues to partially fill in that template.

2) Discover clues spawned as part of a mission template. This will spawn more clues filling out the mission template or spawn pre- and post-mission events. The more interesting/sensical clues will be discovered first, creating a sort of filter to weed out the worst randomness.

3) Research pre- and post-mission events to create echoes of the partially-filled-out mission template. This will allow for events/civilizations to become big and spread between players.

4) Connect clues/events to clues/events from other chains that happened in the same place and time. This will allow civilizations to become dense and have coherent culture/items/event chains.

In the end, the civilization is not formed by a series of algorithms determining how they expanded and what tech they had. Instead, it is determined by a random events being connected and amplified. The hard part is creating the unique content elements such as alien race design, ship appearance, and so on. The second most hard part is writing up a set of adaptive mission templates.

Anyway, that's my idea.

Backstories are not characterization

I find that the biggest pitfall video game RPGs suffer is that the characters are pretty static and shallow.

That's because the depth of the game is in the fighting. The character personalities, lifestyles, and beliefs don't evolve, but their levels, stats, equipment, and inventory does.

Think about it: in Dragon Age, you have a bunch of reasonably interesting (if very stock) characters. DA is one of the few games to really highlight intercharacter interactions. Not only do you actually have a camp where everyone hangs out and they try to sell you for-pay DLC, but while you're wandering around the characters will usually chat amongst themselves. Out of all of the RPGs you can get, this is probably the one with the most intercharacter interactions and character arcs.

However, even then it is incredibly bad at it compared to even the most poorly-run of tabletop games.

The problem is that the way we interact with characters is via interactive dialogs. This is a terrible way to do it. Firstly, because we don't have a personality, so it's hard to contrast them against us. Secondly, because the fundamental concept of a dialog tree and relationship end states is awful.

As an example, look at the characters in Dragon Age. Alistair is a templar that is secretly a high prince. Morrigan is a total jerk that is inheriting an exotic form of blood magic while living in a forest. Wynne is an elderly mage that has been secretly resurrected by a spirit that isn't supposed to exist.

Dialog is really the only way to get to know these characters, and the dialog engine is a branching tree. So when you talk to these characters, you slowly learn their stories bit by bit as the game progresses. However, the backstories are literally just grist for the dialog wheel. Since you can only get to know them through dialog, you need to have scads and scads of dialog.

If you remove their backstory, what happens? Your labyrinthine dialogs vanish.

Does that make them worse characters?

Not really. In fact, I would argue it makes them better characters, because it allows them to shine without being caged by their pasts. BUT. You can't get to know them through dialog trees very well at all.



Think about the memorable characters in movies and books. Han Solo didn't have any backstory beyond "I need money and I have a space ship". Frodo and Sam didn't have any backstory besides "We grew up in a farming village". Even characters that did have backstory, such as Vader or Luke, didn't have giant discussions about it. Instead the backstory existed to drive the plot, not the characters.

Movies and books understand that backstories are not characterization.

These characters grow on you because of the way they interact with each other and with the world, not in describing their painful pasts. It may be that they do have a scene where they tearfully recall something, but it's not the primary means of characterization and you could even argue that their backstories are allowing them to express their character by how they deal with the past rather than actually defining their character in itself.

We don't really do this much in games, because we like dialog trees.

Dragon Age's chitchat method was really good. We got to see all the characters defining themselves relative to each other, often in very delicately constructed ways - like the way Alistair was gently spoiled, and how Wynne took some joy in being motherly but just as much joy in snapping the preconceptions of youth. Almost none of this had to do with backstory, except in a few situations where the backstory gave a topic of discussion and the two people could define themselves relative to it as well as each other.

And... that was beautiful. It was very good.

...

Then you talk to them and it's like EXPOSITIONEXPOSITIONEXPOSITIONloyaltyquestEXPOSITIONEXPOSITION okay, choose whether I'm your friend or your lover.

ARRRRRRRGHGHHGHHHH.




Dialog itself is not the problem. As you can see, I like dialog when it's not mistreated. The problem is that video games abuse dialog horribly, and that needs to stop.

1) Dialog is not monologue.

Nearly every time you talk with a party member in an RPG, it's not a dialog. It's them talking while you either nod or shake your head. While you can certainly pound home the other person's most basic personality traits by what they are willing to say, they don't have any opportunity for give and take, no opportunity to define themself in relation to your personality except in the most primitive ways.

2) Dialog is not interactive.

If the player gets to choose how to respond during a social conversation, you've made a mistake. There are no meaningful choices to be had there. Even in real life, we rarely pause to decide how to respond to a social interaction, because we already have a good feel for the sort of tone and subject matter this relationship is comfortable with. The only pauses we really see are when we're totally blindsided or when we're trying to come up with something new to say. And those can be considered actions, rather than lines of dialog.

Because of this, I recommend you make the player choose ahead of time. For example, "assign two adjectives to each party member as you meet them. These will determine how you interact with them. You can change this at any time."

3) Interaction should not be centralized.

Perhaps the most core problem is that everyone is interacting with you, and you alone. Even if you did have a personality, it would be quite a limited spectrum of contrasts. Dragon Age's strength comes from the interactions of their characters with each other. This allows you to use a much greater palette and get a much more nuanced picture of who the characters are.

One way to make this happen in an RPG is to not have a primary avatar. This used to be popular, but has fallen out of style recently. Maybe we could bring it back.

Another way to happen is to make the interactions between the other characters the primary social interactions, and interacting with the player a very secondary kind of interaction. For example, if you play a spirit or a starship or something while everyone else is an adventurer, they'll have a pretty basic but deep relationship with you while having a very nuanced relationship to each other.

4) Interaction should not be dialog.

Who needs dialog? Well, okay, dialog is not a bad way to have characters define themselves, but it's vastly over-rated.

Sam and Frodo, for example. Sam's character is defined more in how he relates to Frodo: his loyalty and courage shine through in all the details. He sets up camp, carries the heaviest loads, watches for danger, urges Frodo to act more safely, and so on. Some of this is reflected in dialog, but much of it is reflected through either actions or simple body language. Imagine if, in Dragon's Age, Alistair continually stared at you and would step between you and any vaguely dangerous-looking NPC as you wandered through towns, and even insist on opening shop doors and going through first?

Or even just imagine that he would push you off of traps or help you out of them.

Some of this would be difficult to pull off because of the mechanics of how the player plays the game. Usually players want to dash from point A to point B at maximum speed, and there's not a lot of room there for body language or interactions with the environment. But I'm sure a clever developer could come up with some way to do something, like how Dragon Age has chitchat that works fine even if you're dashing at full speed through very dull caves.

Anyway, this relates to some ideas I have on how to script characters - especially randomly generated ones - but I think I'll go over that some other day. I'd also like to talk about the evolution of character relationships and characters themselves - I think the paradigm we've got now is pretty crappy and overly confining. But you can sort of see where I'll go with that by thinking about how a game with no player avatar would run if the characters could get into relationships with each other.

Hm. Lots of thinking to do.