Machinima as Gameplay

I've been thinking about how to let players create context-conveying content. Obviously, players should build physical content - space ships, maps, etc. But it's hard to explain what is cool about a space ship or a map if that's all that gets shared. Players need another option, another kind of content: procedural.

Procedural is a bad word, because it normally means "algorithmic content" such as roguelike dungeons. In this case, however, I am talking about purposeful changes over time. Processes. Maybe I should call it routine..ual... routinual? Ritual content? Probably best to call it "behavioral content" or "operational content".

Machinima is already a big thing, but it's normally outside of the game. Even if you record it while playing the game, such as a Let's Play with a story, the content itself is outside of the game and cannot really be distributed inside the game. The closest we've gotten in the past is with The Sims, where you could share photo albums.

If we bring it into the game, we can allow players to record something, and then we can chop it up and play it back as content allows. Duplicate it, move it, alter it to fit a scenario.

As an example, let's say you're playing something like Space Engineers or Kerbal. You create a ship with dozens of docking bays, all identical. You can get in a fighter, hit "record", and then record yourself approaching and landing on a docking bay. Now, whenever you or the game wants, a similar fighter (same basic bounding box, same basic thrust capacities) can come in on the same vector and land in precisely the same way.

But because the game understands the context of the objects, the game can easily flag specific locations and relationships. The point where the ship touches the bay is automatically considered the critical element. Other bays with the same layout and flagged as being the same thing can therefore automatically adjust the flight profile to perfectly match their position and orientation. This means, with no extra work, any bay can have a fighter come in and land automatically. And, if you cut and paste the bays, however many more bays, all of them can have fighters come in for a landing.

I want you to really imagine how powerful this is. Imagine you're just playing Space Engineers for the first time. You build a space station with some landing bays, and then you shakily pilot your starter ship over to a bay and park it. Now the game will instantly be able to have any ship of roughly that size warp in and shakily pilot over to your other bays. Noticing this, you cut and paste your bays, creating a massive wall of bays.

And now, there are fleets of small ships scuttling in, eager to stop in. They all line up and slide into place, many so distant they're like a swarm of butterflies.

Moreover, this behavior automatically links into other behavior. You notice that sometimes huge motherships will warp in and disgorge shuttles of the proper size. That's because when you build a carrier, you record the behavior of the shuttles leaving. They then become their own entity and can therefore pick up behaviors related to shuttles. It's a simple logical chain: your station allows for shuttles to land, these motherships have shuttles, therefore these motherships can use your station.

On the other side, things keep chaining. Once they've landed, the ships can chain into new behaviors such as trading, repairing, refueling, passenger exchange. Each of these is fueled by whether you've recorded the process in the machinima engine. And if you haven't, you can always turn it to "request mode", where they will request you to do something, and you can record machinima of it right on the spot with them.

Suddenly, the universe is alive. You've tapped into the shared behavioral engine.

We're using machinima as gameplay.

It's not just floating in the ether, either. Exactly how you land will depend on the layout of your ship, the size of the docking bays, and other gameplay considerations. When you record the machinima, your max acceleration and bounding boxes will determine the kinds of ships that are considered fit for the same behavior. And you'll also want to rig the behavior into a smart system - for example, point small ships towards small bays, but allow them to fill larger bays if your small bays are full. Set trading prices so that you can adjust the price without rerecording the behavior, or even adjust prices automatically based on supply and demand.

Basically, we've gone from just creating a ship to also creating the space and time around the ship, and the operations of the ship. These allow us to tie everything together - everything from a lot of different players. We can even embed mods into this, if we frame mods in the right way.

Normally, machinima is used for narrative content. You tell the story of two dudes on a road trip using the Space Engineers engine. By adding context that doesn't exist within the framework of the game, you make the game seem larger.

By allowing machinima sharing and reproduction within the game engine, we also allow for that. Not all behavioral recordings result in a significant in-game statistical change.

Sure, landing a ship and trading are valuable in-game functions and the behavioral recordings for those are likely to be spartan and utilitarian. But you can do so much more: record crew wandering around your ship, going to bed, changing shifts, eating in the canteen, bullshitting in the halls. Record conversations and missions that have nothing to do with any statistical in-game thing, but give your crew and ship uniqueness: when someone contacts your ship, the captain will pop up and be a specific person asking about specific things and telling a specific story about a specific ambush in a specific place.

Moreover, behavioral recording can be modded just like normal content. If we forget to make medical treatment a thing, people can mod in some new animations and record themselves interacting with various medical blocks in various ways and - poof - we have a new block with new functions that NPCs can automatically interact with. Tie the statistical operations of the block into the machinima, and you can actually have real function. The medical bay has a function for treating illness, and you can trigger that function during your machinima, meaning that playing that behavioral tidbit will actually treat illness. Conversely, anyone with an illness can automatically search for behaviors to play and for blocks in the area that will allow them to perform the behavior.

I think this is an interesting idea.