A Sense of Place

So, I really like games with a sense of place. Some days, I think it's the most important part of a game, more important than how the game actually plays.

But only some days: the vast majority of games don't give me any immersive sense of place.

I asked around on Twitter, and nobody chose the same places I did. They all had very different priorities. And it's clear that game devs share their priorities - especially clear, given half the respondents were game devs.

What they mostly liked was a sense of scale. Mostly cities with epic vistas and large scales.

I sure do like pretty cities, but that's not what keeps me coming back to a game year after year. I'd like to talk about what I like in cities and towns, try to nail it down so that I can build it myself.

So, let's start: one video game city that keeps luring me back is in Bloodlines.

It's not big. It's not beautiful. The design is blunt and uninspired. It has no redeeming qualities as a city or a piece of art.

But... I keep replaying the damn game, and a big part of that is how much I enjoy being in the city. There's a little fizz beneath the city that instantly smashes me into the game and keeps me there.

I think that's a good hint. Since there's not much distracting epicness, I can focus on the one thing I want to see more of, even though it's just a fizz.

Pace in Place

In most games with cities, the cities are subordinate to the wider gameplay. The city might host missions or objectives, but living in the city is not an objective.

There are games where the city is the main gameplay. For example, in Crackdown. Surprisingly, this seems to be even worse for my little fizz: it reduces the city to a mechanic.

The experience of being in the hubs in Bloodlines is different.

You are living in the city. Or... unliving, I guess.

You're existing in the city.

Your struggles in the game are simply struggles to continue living in the city. You end up fighting dangerous battles against ridiculously overpowered enemies, but the point is that, at the end, you'll get to go home and take a nap and then tomorrow you can maybe visit your friend downtown. Even the end boss is literally chosen by you deciding what kind of city you want to live in!

Over the course of your adventure, you establish a life in the city, with friends and coworkers and maybe someone to date.

You also get to know the city a bit better. Although exploring the city isn't really the point, you do explore it while you roam around trying to make a life for yourself. There are plenty of things to find - a few topological secrets, like the back entrance to the the pub. A few new people with new missions, such as Ash in the cemetery or the truck vendor that wants you to clear out a parking lot. A few areas that are locked and you'll have to remember later.

The pace of discovery feels right to me. In many video game cities, you explore to find random treasure baubles scattered around. But in Bloodline's cities, you search to find new people with fun new missions, new shortcuts, new locked doors you'll unlock later. You never feel like you came here just to get a mechanical reward: if you go into the back alley, you won't find $5 in a treasure chest. You will find a skeevy guy that wants you to clear out a parking lot.

In a theoretical modern remake, you might feel compelled generate these missions on the fly. But you'd have to be careful: the point is to make a life for yourself. When I clean out the parking lot, the skeevy guy not only gives me a reward, but becomes a better vendor. If you were randomly generating missions, you'd still have to make sure the rewards are about better living... and I don't need more than one skeevy guy selling me stuff.

If you look at the missions in these cities, nearly all of them are about living in the city. Either getting you established, or making the city safer for you, or making friends and allies.

Even though all the NPCs are barely functional weirdo jerks, they somehow become your barely functional weirdo jerks. Mission after mission, day after day.

Counterexample

The most obvious counterexample is Stardew Valley, or any similar game. They are about building a life, but in the most mechanical way possible. You literally build your life: more farmhouses, more crops, more ore, more machines. But the town is not really part of that.

The NPCs are rigid and inflexibly forced into your life. You cannot be allowed to alienate the shopkeep because there are no other shopkeeps. You cannot work for or against the mayor, because there are no other factions. There are few NPCs, and they largely exist to fill specific roles in the gameplay. Dating is the exception, but usually you can only date NPCs with no critical role, and therefore they have no actual place in the town. Moreover, you can typically only date one of them.

Although you can make friends, there's no particular change in the way the game feels, or your lifestyle.

This doesn't mean the games are bad. It means those games aren't what I'm talking about right now.

Extending That

If I were to imagine a game where this little fizz was turned into a torrential waterfall, we would need to punch the Bloodlines up without Stardewing it.

A big part of it is that the city is largely not interested in you. They don't like you, but they don't dislike you, either. If you want to make a place for yourself, that starts with proving yourself to them in their own personal corner of the city.

This is in stark contrast to most game cities, where the inhabitants are intended to pull the player into the game world and narrative. The NPCs in a normal game might welcome the player, or be hostile until a plot point, or they might just talk incessantly about whatever the main plot element in the area is.

These are all the wrong choice if you want to feel like you are making a life for yourself.

This doesn't mean they can't do those things. But the main purpose is make the player figure out how this person fits into their life in the city. Maybe the player decides they're a threat and sabotages them. Maybe the player needs their friendship... for now. Maybe they want to date this person, or just want them around as business partners or something.

And, along the way, the NPCs can be welcoming or hostile or exposit endlessly. But regardless of that, the player knows this is a person that will impact their life in the city, and they have to decide what kind of impact that should be.

Easy example from Bloodlines: when you meet the two-faced bar owner, she's friendly... but you know she can't be trusted, because you haven't earned a life here. Similarly, although the anarchists are unfriendly, you know they can be turned around and made friends if you can earn a life here.

If you're considering how to structure your missions, this is a good thing to keep in mind. Not only in terms of how the initial encounter goes, but in terms of the final outcomes: the player's goal is to be friendlier, sabotage, charm, alienate - therefore, those should be the possible outcomes of the mission, rather than choosing something like a "renegade" or "paragon" ending.



The design of the city itself is also important, because living a life means being in a place.

This doesn't mean the city needs to be beautiful or epic, but rather that these NPCs need to have lifestyles and locales. They have their life in the city, just as you want to have. By choosing who to rely on in what ways, you get an echo of these lifestyles.

This was one thing that really, really worked in Bloodlines: all the NPCs were vampires, meaning they literally don't have day jobs. Whenever you meet them, they're doing whatever they've decided to dedicate their life to, and that includes the lifestyle they've chosen. From the poolhall relaxation of the anarchists to the overly formal, excessively expensive meetings with the town boss, none of the vampires are ever portrayed as simply filling time with sleeping or working a day job. They are always living their life. Unliving their death. Whatever.

Contrast this to games like Fallout 4, where the only thing that defines your settlers is their day job.

Establishing a lifestyle is not something which has to be scripted. It would be relatively easy to randomly generate NPCs with specific lifestyles and specific methods of fitting into your life. But it would be difficult to randomly generate them in the right variety: NPCs come in packs, and often a pack of NPCs will have similar lifestyles and offerings, but subtly different ones.

If you do generate randomly, you'd need to think in terms of generating teams of NPCs rather than individuals that happen to be in the same place. There are a lot of fun scaffolds for this, such as the five-person hero team, but they'd all need to be adapted in order to make sure that the player has something interesting to gain from each one, and perhaps a reason to prefer specific members of the team over others.

All of this would need to be reflected in the construction of the city.

That in mind, the team should probably have a good time hanging out together in places that suit them. If their lifestyle together doesn't seem fun, that would poison the well: the player wouldn't be interested in fitting into their life. There's a lot of different kinds of fun: an annoying overlord can still provide a good lifestyle if the player thinks being rich and powerful looks like fun.

Near Misses

There are a number of cities that make me allllmost feel the fizz, but it fizzes out.

One set is the Citadel and your hub ships in the Mass Effect series. The first impression is very good, but it doesn't end up panning out because you aren't trying to establish a lifestyle. It's about already having a lifestyle, and getting to live it.

That's not bad! I loved hanging out with my buddies. But I never got to choose how people fit into my life. They were written in or out of my life at the scriptwriter's convenience, and that left me unable to get that fizzy feeling.

Most such modern RPGs give that same "alllllmost" feel, like Dragon Age.

Another example is The Sims. While I can choose which characters fit into "my" lifestyles, I can't get a feel for the city. Their lifestyles are encapsulated in their individual homes, and nobody is really integrated into the city.

Even if I go into the city and people are around, I know it's not really an integration. Their existence or lack of existence wouldn't change the feel of the city any.

There is one other example I wanted to talk about: Skyrim (or the modern Fallouts). These have lots of cities of varying size and shape, all stuffed full of NPCs that have opinions and lifestyles.

These cities create an itch I cannot scratch. Their characters have lifestyles and want me to help them, but doing so doesn't lead anywhere or provide me with a life in the city, because there's no reason to have a life in the city. If I decide to track down and kill the weird cultist... nothing changes.

While I do replay these games frequently, I typically spend less and less time being social in cities, more and more time doing other things. Being social doesn't really lead anywhere.

It does in Bloodlines. It always leads to a new life in the city.


... anyway, I wonder whether anyone else feels like this.

It might just be me.

Two Agencies

So, my friend and I have been discussing Alpha Protocol, which is an unforgivably samey game with extraordinarily shitty moments, but that's not what I'm here to discuss. Instead, I'd like to talk about agency.

That friend, and many others, are willing to forgive the crap and give a positive review because the game features a fair amount of agency, most notably through dialog options. Of course, the game has a linear plot which doesn't change (and, frankly, is bad). But they still rave about the agency.

It was at this point that I realized our definitions of agency were very different.

Most of these people seem to mean "immersive agency", where the agency exists specifically to lure you into the game. We've called this "illusion of agency", but I think that term is misleading. It's real agency, it's just that the agency doesn't really affect the game much. This is easy to see in any game which gives you "choices". Most of these choices result in either a very short term major change, or a very small long-term change. For example, if you save the princess, the guards won't attack you in this level OR if you save the princess, she exists afterwards, you can talk to her, she'll give you a magic bean.

Immersive agency is apparently very effective on many players. I find it infuriating because there's always a "best path". Even if the writers go out of their way to make the choices "equal", as a particular person, I judge the different choices according to my preference, and usually there's a best choice and two incredibly dumb choices. For example, if you're allowed to date any of the three possible romantic characters in the game, one of them is obviously the one I like best, and offering the other two might as well not exist. For me.

Because of this, to me immersive agency always feels like random added-on failure conditions, rather than agency. Best case, it feels like a reason to replay the game, but even then, it still won't feel like agency to me, it'll feel like a slightly different linear plot.

My definition of agency involves affecting systems. We'll call it "systemic agency". Systemic agency is when your choice affects the long-term play of the game. For example, when you choose to attack or not attack Greece in Civ, and in turn both your future and Greece's are very different.

This is hard to script because of the very wide branches: choosing to kill or save Magus in Chronotrigger, for example, required a fair amount of programming. And still it only mattered a little. It's rare for plot-based games to have much systemic agency because plots aren't systems: the writer is the system, the plot is the product. In order to give the players access to that system, the writer has to imagine what the player might do ahead of time. This is why most games that offer you plot agency only offer you immersive agency: tiny details that make you feel immersed, but don't matter much and can be easily scripted.

I like systemic agency. I understand it's hard to put in plot-based games. But immersive agency always hits me the wrong way.

So when I play Alpha Protocol, I see a linear plot with a lot of arbitrary failure conditions where everyone else sees a detailed and interesting series of choices. What they see may rescue the game from the bargain bin of samey play and shitty bosses, but what I see does not.

Please, somebody, give me systemic agency in a plot!

Agency is Not Enough

I've been thinking. Here I talk about how rules are essentially gluing agency to content, and it's a very powerful concept - I've started up a new game to test a system of semi-rules, see if I circumvent the normal flaws that rules have by focusing on simply gluing agency to content in every conceivable way.

But I quickly realized something in the planning stage: it's not simply content and agency, at least not the way they are normally described. Simply pushing around images and concepts doesn't have any punch to it.

It's the nature of agency, I think. Agency isn't just the capability to change things: it requires a level of emotional investment. It basically requires them to care about the universe you've given them agency in, most especially over the specific characters you've given them agency over.

How to lure players into caring about your universe is a long post - I know, because I wrote it just now. Way too long. Suffice it to say that a big part of it is using the tiniest little interests of the player and hammering them, weaving them into content and agency and expanding them into a full-grown universe.

For example, every child is delighted the first time they realize they can move the little space ship around the screen. They quickly realize that if something runs into them, they don't get to move the space ship around any more. That's all it takes: the rest is simply using those tiny little entryways into their mind and turning them into a superhighway. It doesn't have to be gameplay: the classic RPG uses appealing cultural norms in much the same way.

It's not exactly gluing agency to content: it's getting the player to value the content. And it's just as important.

Choosing Choices

Three.

Well, okay, there's no magic number. But I like the number three. That's how many choices I try to give whenever players hit a non-skill-based moment.

There's a lot of these moments in a lot of different games. Choosing whether to take a left or a right in a dungeon. Choosing whether to save someone or rob them. Choosing whether to buy a sword or a bow. Choosing what building to build, what party members to take, and so on.

What I mean by "non-skill-based" is kind of iffy. After all, there's skill in equipping your party or building a building or even choosing left from right. But it's not the primary play skill. Whereas the primary play skill needs to be deep and diverse, secondary choices are usually less about skill and more about personal preferences. If there is a best choice, then why offer the others?

These choices are very important to a player's sense of agency - his sense that his choices affect the game world. The going idea is that a player should be able to do as many different things as he wants. This leads to games like Grand Theft Auto, where you can run around and go just about anywhere whenever you want. Of course, this has side effects that you may not like.

First: Because you are offering such a wide ability to choose, you are essentially turning that facet of the game into a primary play skill. In GTA, knowing where things were and how to navigate the map was an important play skill, unlike in most other games, where navigating the map is simply a way to get a breather between today's plot event and tomorrow's plot event.

Second: For various reasons, navigating space/plot in a freeform manner generally results in an extremely shallow set of results. The typical response to this is to seed the map with random fun stuff that has little to do with long-term play. A nifty weapon, a fun comment, a shiny car. These things reward players who decide to participate in the shallow (but broad) play you give them without actually requiring complex long-term play changes.

Third: Has high development cost.

(See? Three choices of poison. I like three.)

Taking the "cheap" way out, and giving them only a few choices, is generally a more effective way to actually give players agency. A good example of this is a game where you can choose out of three approaches to any given problem (typically, stealth, fighting, and magic/ranged/social). In this case, even though the end results are essentially the same (beat the level), the ability to choose an approach gives the player a lot of agency.

Of course, the "cheap" way comes with its share of problems.

First: Insufficient options. A lot of times, the choices you offer will simply not appeal to a player. This is especially true of dialogue trees. Trying to provide choices to please everyone is a bit like trying to lift a couch with a toothpick. Even if you're incredibly skilled, the method is simply not suitable.

By making options "in-game" rather than "breaking the fourth wall", you can reduce this problem hugely. For example, offering weapons in-game and letting the player choose which weapon he wants is much better than asking him whether he wants to be stealthy or brutal.

Second: "Gilded Cage" issues. When a player is made to choose from too few artificial choices or artificially restricted in some way, it really steals away the agency and can be very irritating. This is especially true of dialogue trees. Every drawback is especially true of dialogue trees. :P

Some games try to provide a huge number of options while either making them all equate to the same few choices or while making the vast majority of the options so obviously unappetizing that nobody would choose them. This works pretty well for live games like tabletops where there are no such things as saves or second play-throughs, especially because if they do choose some wacky thing, you can always make stuff up. But this is difficult to do with a computer game, since players will often try everything and quickly figure out that you're offering meaningless choices.

You can reduce this, to some extent, by using the same "in-game" techniques explained above.

Third: Exponential growth. Given two or three distinct choices that have different results, you quickly run into The Branching Tree of Doom. There are effectively three ways to keep this from getting ridiculous. You can have choices have numerical rather than plot results. You can have choices lead to different paths that always go to the same endpoint. And/or you can have some kind of algorithm for determining outcomes based on any given choice, which minimizes scripting by adding ridiculous amounts of engine programming.

Anyhow... that's basically it.

Ahhh... I said I was going to link it up to social games and MMORPGs but, you know what? I'll have to do it in a different essay. This one's already too long.