I just saw a bundle of indie games, all quite polished, none of which I own. I played their little demo reel videos, and initially each excited me... but then they showed the gameplay, and I kept losing interest.
I'm sure these games are quite good, but I suddenly find myself completely uninterested in games that want me to... well... to do things.
For example, there's Bollywood Wannabee, a very interesting-looking game... except it appears to be a mission-based skill game. And my thought was "hm. I really don't want to play like that." And there's an adventure game, and a shmup - "hm. I don't really want to play like that."
So I thought about the games I actually want to play. Saints Row, Gone Home, Kerbal... they're all open. You exist within a game world that has structure, yes. And there are probably some missions and some progression that you can follow. But the games are very hands-off. They're okay with me not doing anything. In fact, all three reward me just farting around doing nothing. In their own way.
I'm beginning to think that may be the "genre" I have started to like above all others. The "Hey, hi, how ya doin, take yer shoes off" genre. HHHYDTYSO.
I'm not interested in doing what the game wants me to do. At least, not at the pace it wants me to. Maybe it's because I've drifted away from the target age, but my tastes no longer line up with the game designer's intent. The designers tell me I should want to do this particular level now, and try to get a good score. Or, hey, choose any level - but they're levels we designed and the point is to get a good score. Do as we ask!
And... it doesn't gel with me any more. I don't like it any more.
Make something for me. No, wait, it's okay if it's not for me. As long as it can accommodate me. Something I can live in. Something I can pick up and shape as suits my tastes.
Kerbal lets me. Saints Row lets me. Gone Home lets me. They're about as different from each other as you can imagine - tone, play, genre - but they all let me go at my own pace and do what I want.
Gone Home is obviously the most limited example, since rather than letting me do whatever I want, it simply lets me do the few things it is able to do... but whenever I want at whatever pace I want, and it includes several "depacing" elements such as songs you may want to just sit around and listen to.
Saints Row doesn't have unlimited freedom - the game is still about the stupid stuff GTAlikes are about. But I can take it at whatever pace I like, wander the city if I want, dress up funny if I want, play around with the car if I want. The missions are the dullest part of the game to me.
Kerbal has vast amounts of freedom, of course, allowing me to build practically anything, especially with mods. And I know that, if I reaaaalllly wanted to, I could make my own mods. I am free to play as I like.
Of course the line is blurry. For example, does an Elder Scrolls game offer me enough freedom?
Honestly, I don't think it does. Too much of the personalization in an elder scrolls game is tied to the core fighting loop, and the loop is boring. I like that I can wander wherever, but the core loop keeps intruding. This is sort of like how Saints Row IV keeps popping up cops whenever I land clumsily. It gets in the way of what I actually want to do and forces me to deal with whatever the game designers thought I would want to do.
Give me freedom, please. Let me play how I want to play. A well-crafted game means little if it insists I play some childish skill game instead of getting to be in that world as I prefer.
And if that seems like it would neuter your design... how neutered were Gone Home, Kerbal, and Saints Row?
These games all have something to say, something amazing to let you experience. But they invite you in and let you figure it all out at your pace.
Think of a game not as a lecture to be strictly attended, but as a clever friend you haven't seen in years.
Showing posts with label immersion. Show all posts
Showing posts with label immersion. Show all posts
Thursday, August 29, 2013
Monday, August 05, 2013
Magic Circle
Some of you may recall a time when all the conversations about game design seemed to be about the "magic circle" and "immersion".
A little while after that, those terms became unpopular.
I think we need to bring them back. Actually, I think they became unpopular because anyone who can read trends knew damn well the games industry was trending against them with the rise of casual games. But trendy or not, I want to bring them back.
See, back in the day, most of the times I disliked a game, it was because either the gameplay got stale or the story had a gaping hole in it. Both are a loss of immersion.
Easy example: FFIX introduced a character so loathsome, so like essence-du-Jarjar, that I got deeply annoyed every time it popped up on screen. I wasn't thinking "what an annoying character". I was thinking "what the hell were the developers thinking?" Shortly thereafter, I stopped playing.
Similarly, in Tales of the Abyss, a major plot point involves blaming a seven year old for something that A) was prophecy and B) he wouldn't have done if anyone had ever bothered to tell him anything or even treated him vaguely nicely. Again, such a worthless story hole that I lost all respect for everyone. Shortly thereafter, I stopped playing.
But, boy, I long for those days. These days, the awkward story and horrible gameplay of top-flight games is still just as awkward, if not more so, but I rarely get too upset at it. Because now there's a new contender: directly breaking the "magic circle" to try and rope the player into some more publisher-advantageous situation. Usually, in-app purchases. Hoo boy, I say "a new contender", but what I mean is that the Tiger Woods of immersion-breaking showed up and is just making every other immersion-breaker look like a child.
For example, remember Sleeping Dogs? As GTA-likes go, that game was best in breed. Interesting setting, excellent level design, fun gameplay, interesting characters, decent dialog... the game only had one flaw for me. On literally every screen aside from the actual gameplay, there was a scrolling marquee: "Log in for the REAL Sleeping Dogs experience (TM)".
Every screen.
And this excellent, super-immersive game... just kind of slipped away from me. I never logged in. Maybe they just wanted to share high scores, and not to sell me pricey DLC. Who knows? It doesn't even matter, because the "magic circle" was broken. My immersion slipped away every time I hit the menu button, every time I hit a loading screen. Even though the game was excellent, I was losing interest and eventually stopped playing about six hours in. It was just too hard to get into the swing of things when the game kept telling me that I wasn't playing the real version of the GAME THIS IS A GAME WE WROTE IT WORSHIP US PLAY IT LIKE WE DEMAND YOU TO THIS IS JUST A GAME STOP GETTING IMMERSED POKE POKE HEY ARE YOU LISTENING.
That's how it felt.
I picked the most extreme sample - the best game with the smallest amount of "magic circle" breakage. It was still enough to destroy the game for me.
Most games are significantly worse, especially AAA games. Obviously, it's all inherited from casual games. And a lot of people will say that casual games kind of changed the culture to make it acceptable, so now it's acceptable. But the thing is, I never bought that excuse. Even in casual games, it's distracting and makes me want to stop playing. I like casual games where I can play the game fully immersed.
As an example, Triple Town. An excellent and immersive casual game... until you run low on moves, at which point it breaks the magic circle and tells you to buy more moves (along with other upgrades). It should be noted that this was when I lost interest in the game.
"Don't you hate paying for stuff? Isn't that the problem?"
Well, no. Trophies are just as bad. When a casual game starts popping up trophies, I'm basically done with it. It's sabotaging its own magic circle. That was the downfall of Farcy 3 to me: three different kinds of popup trophies. So a great game was brought low by magic-circle breaking... even without asking me for any money.
Sure, asking for money tends to be worse... but that's because the implementation tends to be a lot more aggressive. That's because money is involved: the developers or publishers want it to be more aggressive so they can make more money.
With me it backfires, but I don't know whether that's true of a lot of people. Obviously, there are a lot of people who are fine with the "magic circle" being broken. Trophies as standard practice make that obvious, as does the success of in-app purchasing. But I think maybe it's time to consider that people may not know what they need. Many of these practices abuse gambling disorders and addictive mindsets rather than actually providing an interesting game. Maybe there is a way to make money by offering a good game, rather than by making your game crappy but addictive.
I also think maybe it's not as straightforward as it looks. I think there probably are a lot of gamers - the vast "silent majority" - that don't buy into this distracting trophy-and-IAP stuff. However, they might buy into a game that is properly immersive. The question is - how can you make money off that? Off me, to be specific?
First, I guess we should talk briefly about "magic circles" and why I keep putting quotes around the term.
In brief, the "magic circle" is a concept where the rules and scenarios of the game define a reality that is different from the rest of the world. There is a clear line - this is within the game, that is outside the game. It was a concept very much in vogue for a year or two, but then everyone realized that it's far too simplistic to represent the actual situation that games create. Personally, I wouldn't be so quick to dismiss it. While insufficient, I think it's a good starting point.
I think the heart of our discussion isn't about "how to make money using the magic circle", but instead "how to put money inside the magic circle". This is why secondary currencies are so popular. Buy the secondary currency with real money in one brief moment, and now that currency has been put into the game world and can be spent without breaking the circle. People talk about how those kinds of intermediate currencies "trick" the player into "mis-estimating" the "actual cost" of a transaction... but I think it's simpler than that. They simply lower the barrier. If the money exists in the game, you can spend it in the game.
If the money doesn't exist in the game, then the quality of your game is a barrier to spending money. The better your game is, the less likely a player is going to want to break the magic circle and screw up the game. So, conversely, crappy games may actually have an easier time getting players to spend outside money, because the player is okay with "surfacing" and breaking the crappy "magic circle".
It's certainly possible to put things inside the circle, but it's also possible to put things outside of a weak circle where players are okay with surfacing for it. For example, every multiplayer game has expanded the circle to include many players, lobbies, and so forth.
If you think of these games as a series of gears rather than a magic circle, you might see how this is done. There is one gear, small and fast. This is the gameplay itself. Very immersive, very deep. Alongside it is a larger, slower gear. This is the lobby and scoring system, where you can show your enthusiasm, set up new matches, alter match parameters (such as what you are wearing) and so on.
The two gears drive each other, serving two different needs. The small gear drives the large gear, yes. In turn, the large gear offers a valuable stop-off. While the large gear isn't very interesting or immersive on its own, it's almost painless to go from the large gear to a real-money store due to the shallowness of the circle. Similarly, switching between the gears is much less painful than jumping directly from the match to the outside world or visa-versa. The power of the core game gear keeps the large gear spinning even though it doesn't have much power itself.
You don't have to take this geared approach, though. Several "massively single player" games have come out - Dragon's Dogma, Dark Souls, and so on. Most of the things that would be in the large, slow gear are made almost entirely automatic, and handled within the game itself. Can you monetize it? Maybe, if you can put monetized currency in that primary game.
The core concept here is that in order to monetize a game without alienating me, you have to monetize it without breaking the "magic circle". There are, in my thinking, three basic ways to do this. Just to recap, they are:
1) Charge before I play. Classic method, yes, but also useful for expansions, renting servers, etc.
2) Create a gentle gradient to the outside world by "gearing" your game. It has to be really gentle. Generally, a store accessible from the slowest, shallowest, most meta part of the game.
3) In-game currency fueled by out-of-game purchases. However, this is excessively easy to screw up. Your core gameplay loop can easily be damaged by it, in addition to the less tangible risks to the "magic circle". It is very easy to use an intermediate currency and still break immersion all the time.
Anyway, as mentioned, it's clear that many people don't have a problem with all this un-immersive stuff. I may be an outlier.
Or I may be more common than you think, and we're a market that everyone is ignoring.
A little while after that, those terms became unpopular.
I think we need to bring them back. Actually, I think they became unpopular because anyone who can read trends knew damn well the games industry was trending against them with the rise of casual games. But trendy or not, I want to bring them back.
See, back in the day, most of the times I disliked a game, it was because either the gameplay got stale or the story had a gaping hole in it. Both are a loss of immersion.
Easy example: FFIX introduced a character so loathsome, so like essence-du-Jarjar, that I got deeply annoyed every time it popped up on screen. I wasn't thinking "what an annoying character". I was thinking "what the hell were the developers thinking?" Shortly thereafter, I stopped playing.
Similarly, in Tales of the Abyss, a major plot point involves blaming a seven year old for something that A) was prophecy and B) he wouldn't have done if anyone had ever bothered to tell him anything or even treated him vaguely nicely. Again, such a worthless story hole that I lost all respect for everyone. Shortly thereafter, I stopped playing.
But, boy, I long for those days. These days, the awkward story and horrible gameplay of top-flight games is still just as awkward, if not more so, but I rarely get too upset at it. Because now there's a new contender: directly breaking the "magic circle" to try and rope the player into some more publisher-advantageous situation. Usually, in-app purchases. Hoo boy, I say "a new contender", but what I mean is that the Tiger Woods of immersion-breaking showed up and is just making every other immersion-breaker look like a child.
For example, remember Sleeping Dogs? As GTA-likes go, that game was best in breed. Interesting setting, excellent level design, fun gameplay, interesting characters, decent dialog... the game only had one flaw for me. On literally every screen aside from the actual gameplay, there was a scrolling marquee: "Log in for the REAL Sleeping Dogs experience (TM)".
Every screen.
And this excellent, super-immersive game... just kind of slipped away from me. I never logged in. Maybe they just wanted to share high scores, and not to sell me pricey DLC. Who knows? It doesn't even matter, because the "magic circle" was broken. My immersion slipped away every time I hit the menu button, every time I hit a loading screen. Even though the game was excellent, I was losing interest and eventually stopped playing about six hours in. It was just too hard to get into the swing of things when the game kept telling me that I wasn't playing the real version of the GAME THIS IS A GAME WE WROTE IT WORSHIP US PLAY IT LIKE WE DEMAND YOU TO THIS IS JUST A GAME STOP GETTING IMMERSED POKE POKE HEY ARE YOU LISTENING.
That's how it felt.
I picked the most extreme sample - the best game with the smallest amount of "magic circle" breakage. It was still enough to destroy the game for me.
Most games are significantly worse, especially AAA games. Obviously, it's all inherited from casual games. And a lot of people will say that casual games kind of changed the culture to make it acceptable, so now it's acceptable. But the thing is, I never bought that excuse. Even in casual games, it's distracting and makes me want to stop playing. I like casual games where I can play the game fully immersed.
As an example, Triple Town. An excellent and immersive casual game... until you run low on moves, at which point it breaks the magic circle and tells you to buy more moves (along with other upgrades). It should be noted that this was when I lost interest in the game.
"Don't you hate paying for stuff? Isn't that the problem?"
Well, no. Trophies are just as bad. When a casual game starts popping up trophies, I'm basically done with it. It's sabotaging its own magic circle. That was the downfall of Farcy 3 to me: three different kinds of popup trophies. So a great game was brought low by magic-circle breaking... even without asking me for any money.
Sure, asking for money tends to be worse... but that's because the implementation tends to be a lot more aggressive. That's because money is involved: the developers or publishers want it to be more aggressive so they can make more money.
With me it backfires, but I don't know whether that's true of a lot of people. Obviously, there are a lot of people who are fine with the "magic circle" being broken. Trophies as standard practice make that obvious, as does the success of in-app purchasing. But I think maybe it's time to consider that people may not know what they need. Many of these practices abuse gambling disorders and addictive mindsets rather than actually providing an interesting game. Maybe there is a way to make money by offering a good game, rather than by making your game crappy but addictive.
I also think maybe it's not as straightforward as it looks. I think there probably are a lot of gamers - the vast "silent majority" - that don't buy into this distracting trophy-and-IAP stuff. However, they might buy into a game that is properly immersive. The question is - how can you make money off that? Off me, to be specific?
First, I guess we should talk briefly about "magic circles" and why I keep putting quotes around the term.
In brief, the "magic circle" is a concept where the rules and scenarios of the game define a reality that is different from the rest of the world. There is a clear line - this is within the game, that is outside the game. It was a concept very much in vogue for a year or two, but then everyone realized that it's far too simplistic to represent the actual situation that games create. Personally, I wouldn't be so quick to dismiss it. While insufficient, I think it's a good starting point.
I think the heart of our discussion isn't about "how to make money using the magic circle", but instead "how to put money inside the magic circle". This is why secondary currencies are so popular. Buy the secondary currency with real money in one brief moment, and now that currency has been put into the game world and can be spent without breaking the circle. People talk about how those kinds of intermediate currencies "trick" the player into "mis-estimating" the "actual cost" of a transaction... but I think it's simpler than that. They simply lower the barrier. If the money exists in the game, you can spend it in the game.
If the money doesn't exist in the game, then the quality of your game is a barrier to spending money. The better your game is, the less likely a player is going to want to break the magic circle and screw up the game. So, conversely, crappy games may actually have an easier time getting players to spend outside money, because the player is okay with "surfacing" and breaking the crappy "magic circle".
It's certainly possible to put things inside the circle, but it's also possible to put things outside of a weak circle where players are okay with surfacing for it. For example, every multiplayer game has expanded the circle to include many players, lobbies, and so forth.
If you think of these games as a series of gears rather than a magic circle, you might see how this is done. There is one gear, small and fast. This is the gameplay itself. Very immersive, very deep. Alongside it is a larger, slower gear. This is the lobby and scoring system, where you can show your enthusiasm, set up new matches, alter match parameters (such as what you are wearing) and so on.
The two gears drive each other, serving two different needs. The small gear drives the large gear, yes. In turn, the large gear offers a valuable stop-off. While the large gear isn't very interesting or immersive on its own, it's almost painless to go from the large gear to a real-money store due to the shallowness of the circle. Similarly, switching between the gears is much less painful than jumping directly from the match to the outside world or visa-versa. The power of the core game gear keeps the large gear spinning even though it doesn't have much power itself.
You don't have to take this geared approach, though. Several "massively single player" games have come out - Dragon's Dogma, Dark Souls, and so on. Most of the things that would be in the large, slow gear are made almost entirely automatic, and handled within the game itself. Can you monetize it? Maybe, if you can put monetized currency in that primary game.
The core concept here is that in order to monetize a game without alienating me, you have to monetize it without breaking the "magic circle". There are, in my thinking, three basic ways to do this. Just to recap, they are:
1) Charge before I play. Classic method, yes, but also useful for expansions, renting servers, etc.
2) Create a gentle gradient to the outside world by "gearing" your game. It has to be really gentle. Generally, a store accessible from the slowest, shallowest, most meta part of the game.
3) In-game currency fueled by out-of-game purchases. However, this is excessively easy to screw up. Your core gameplay loop can easily be damaged by it, in addition to the less tangible risks to the "magic circle". It is very easy to use an intermediate currency and still break immersion all the time.
Anyway, as mentioned, it's clear that many people don't have a problem with all this un-immersive stuff. I may be an outlier.
Or I may be more common than you think, and we're a market that everyone is ignoring.
Wednesday, November 19, 2008
Cityscapes and Immersion
It sounds silly, but one of the things I enjoyed most about Mirror's Edge was the menu sequence. The city in the background was beautifully done, and the music was perfect. I've always had a thing for cityscapes, even if they're only fleeting: the intro for Megaman and Streets of Rage, for example. The games had nothing about cities in them, but I liked the intro sequences. Don't even get me started on Blade Runner.
There's something very vibrant about a cityscape that vanishes when the game actually starts. Even if the game is about the city, such as Simcity, it doesn't contain the same feeling of potential and vibrancy.
So I was thinking about what kind of game could still give that kind of feeling. If we zoom in, we can get the same kind of feeling from unique things in the city. Not simply traffic patterns and police stations scattered in among the commercial zone, but unique bits: what makes this police station different from other stations? Why does the foot traffic linger at that particular toy store? Why is that particular person unique?
You can see it in games like Assassin's Creed, Crackdown, and even City of Heroes. There is an inkling that THIS roof is particularly interesting, or that the crowd is interesting, or that any number of other bits of city are interesting. However, these all tend to fall flat if you get close: the crowd is just a milling of identical NPCs, the roof is a nice enough view, but gets boring instantly, the graffiti is fun as background noise, but if you actually look at it, it's one of five designs repeated a thousandfold.
I think that one major reason for this is because video games are not particularly immersive. We talk about immersion, but one reason we talk about it so much is that we're really pretty BAD at it. Video games are marginally okay at immersing us in a "flow" sense - getting us involved in the mechanical rules and so forth - but they're pretty bad at getting us immersed in a more classical sense. Movies are much better at it, because a skilled director will draw our attention to immersive details, such as a unique piece of graffiti, an interesting view from a roof, a crowd that contains real individuals...
A big component of these tricks is that they calibrate our judgment by showing us what "people" think and do (even if those people are imaginary). Sometimes this is extremely straightforward: they simply show people thinking, doing, and feeling. This is especially common in children's shows (and scifi), with their hundreds of close-ups on people's smiling or unhappy or angry faces. As the audience matures and learns the thousands of cultural clues, the directors simply linger on those cultural clues instead of the faces proper.
For example, we know how to feel about dingy underlevels of the spaceship in Alien because the director uses the same cultural clues we've learned about dingy industrial areas. He then plays it up by focusing on the interactions of the workers, showing how THEY feel about the place (and the crew above them). Using these cues we can also judge the lower levels strongly, and when the fight starts raging down there, we feel a lot more immersed.
Video games often use these methods, although usually pretty clumsily. However, they are very limited by camerawork. The only ways to zoom in on someone are to either have a cutscene and take movie-like control or to have pop-up portraits. Neither of these is ideal: one is extremely limited, the other makes the game into a non-game, however temporarily.
But if we acknowledge that this is something we need to implement, we can use our limited methods to give judgment clues a lot more adaptively and precisely, perhaps (in the long run) even better than a movie director.
For example, lets say you're playing a game where you're moving around a city, similar to Assassin's Creed or Crackdown (or Mirror's Edge if you could actually move around the city). When you discover a particularly nifty place, you stop for a moment to enjoy it. But there is no real sense of immersion, nor any reason to dally, so the enjoyment quickly wears off and you move on.
But what if there was someone with you up on that neat rooftop, someone who could say "wow!" and thoroughly enjoy the view? In a movie, that's what would happen: the actors involved would stand at the edge of the roof and look around, and we would mirror their judgments. In a video game, that doesn't happen. But it could.
In theory it could be our own avatar that does these things, but assuming you have any kind of direct control normally, I think that stealing control away would BREAK immersion rather than reinforce it. So we are more or less limited to having another character present.
There's no reason it has to be human. Maybe it is - maybe it's your sidekick, or your girlfriend, or whatever. But it could also be an AI, a ghost, a memory, a flying dog... they don't have to be human, they just have to make judgments that we can agree with.
Pacing is an issue, too: most modern games are paradise for people with no attention spans. If we're deeply engaged in the rules and mechanics of a game, taking time out to think about how pretty the view is would be distracting.
On the other side of the affair is the difficulty in actually getting characters to judge things in a way that aligns with the things our player wants to judge. In a movie, this is easy: the audience is damn well going to judge whatever you point them at. In a game, it's more difficult, because you can't point the bastards. You can't even rely on where they point themselves: in a first-person shooter, I might be running along looking down the street, but as a player I'll be noting the cool sunlight effects in the corner of the screen. If a character behind me pops up and says, "wow, this street sure is dirty!" I'll reply, "durrwhocares?"
Add on to this the difficulty of actually getting characters to have the breadth of judgment required, you've got quite a feat. After all, these characters will have to be able to not just comment intelligently on a nice view, but also have to feel immersed in that view. Then, ten steps later, they've got to be equally immersed and judgmental about, say, a traffic jam. Or a man wearing a pink tutu.
I think it might be possible to do this to some extent, although I'm not sure how suitable it would be in any modern game. These days, all the games we play are horribly egocentric and impatient: the city doesn't exist, it's just an excuse to provide us with city-themed levels. We don't like slowing down to smell the roses because we've been trained to think in terms of advantage, and there isn't any in smelling roses.
I'm not sure that the characters' judgment clues would actually MATTER, either, since we don't often consider them to be worth thinking about. They inhabit a lesser world and are obviously not intelligent beings, especially if we save and load and replay this mission a lot. It might be necessary to radically change that in order to make this sort of thing work.
...
I guess that's my rambly essay. What do you think?
There's something very vibrant about a cityscape that vanishes when the game actually starts. Even if the game is about the city, such as Simcity, it doesn't contain the same feeling of potential and vibrancy.
So I was thinking about what kind of game could still give that kind of feeling. If we zoom in, we can get the same kind of feeling from unique things in the city. Not simply traffic patterns and police stations scattered in among the commercial zone, but unique bits: what makes this police station different from other stations? Why does the foot traffic linger at that particular toy store? Why is that particular person unique?
You can see it in games like Assassin's Creed, Crackdown, and even City of Heroes. There is an inkling that THIS roof is particularly interesting, or that the crowd is interesting, or that any number of other bits of city are interesting. However, these all tend to fall flat if you get close: the crowd is just a milling of identical NPCs, the roof is a nice enough view, but gets boring instantly, the graffiti is fun as background noise, but if you actually look at it, it's one of five designs repeated a thousandfold.
I think that one major reason for this is because video games are not particularly immersive. We talk about immersion, but one reason we talk about it so much is that we're really pretty BAD at it. Video games are marginally okay at immersing us in a "flow" sense - getting us involved in the mechanical rules and so forth - but they're pretty bad at getting us immersed in a more classical sense. Movies are much better at it, because a skilled director will draw our attention to immersive details, such as a unique piece of graffiti, an interesting view from a roof, a crowd that contains real individuals...
A big component of these tricks is that they calibrate our judgment by showing us what "people" think and do (even if those people are imaginary). Sometimes this is extremely straightforward: they simply show people thinking, doing, and feeling. This is especially common in children's shows (and scifi), with their hundreds of close-ups on people's smiling or unhappy or angry faces. As the audience matures and learns the thousands of cultural clues, the directors simply linger on those cultural clues instead of the faces proper.
For example, we know how to feel about dingy underlevels of the spaceship in Alien because the director uses the same cultural clues we've learned about dingy industrial areas. He then plays it up by focusing on the interactions of the workers, showing how THEY feel about the place (and the crew above them). Using these cues we can also judge the lower levels strongly, and when the fight starts raging down there, we feel a lot more immersed.
Video games often use these methods, although usually pretty clumsily. However, they are very limited by camerawork. The only ways to zoom in on someone are to either have a cutscene and take movie-like control or to have pop-up portraits. Neither of these is ideal: one is extremely limited, the other makes the game into a non-game, however temporarily.
But if we acknowledge that this is something we need to implement, we can use our limited methods to give judgment clues a lot more adaptively and precisely, perhaps (in the long run) even better than a movie director.
For example, lets say you're playing a game where you're moving around a city, similar to Assassin's Creed or Crackdown (or Mirror's Edge if you could actually move around the city). When you discover a particularly nifty place, you stop for a moment to enjoy it. But there is no real sense of immersion, nor any reason to dally, so the enjoyment quickly wears off and you move on.
But what if there was someone with you up on that neat rooftop, someone who could say "wow!" and thoroughly enjoy the view? In a movie, that's what would happen: the actors involved would stand at the edge of the roof and look around, and we would mirror their judgments. In a video game, that doesn't happen. But it could.
In theory it could be our own avatar that does these things, but assuming you have any kind of direct control normally, I think that stealing control away would BREAK immersion rather than reinforce it. So we are more or less limited to having another character present.
There's no reason it has to be human. Maybe it is - maybe it's your sidekick, or your girlfriend, or whatever. But it could also be an AI, a ghost, a memory, a flying dog... they don't have to be human, they just have to make judgments that we can agree with.
Pacing is an issue, too: most modern games are paradise for people with no attention spans. If we're deeply engaged in the rules and mechanics of a game, taking time out to think about how pretty the view is would be distracting.
On the other side of the affair is the difficulty in actually getting characters to judge things in a way that aligns with the things our player wants to judge. In a movie, this is easy: the audience is damn well going to judge whatever you point them at. In a game, it's more difficult, because you can't point the bastards. You can't even rely on where they point themselves: in a first-person shooter, I might be running along looking down the street, but as a player I'll be noting the cool sunlight effects in the corner of the screen. If a character behind me pops up and says, "wow, this street sure is dirty!" I'll reply, "durrwhocares?"
Add on to this the difficulty of actually getting characters to have the breadth of judgment required, you've got quite a feat. After all, these characters will have to be able to not just comment intelligently on a nice view, but also have to feel immersed in that view. Then, ten steps later, they've got to be equally immersed and judgmental about, say, a traffic jam. Or a man wearing a pink tutu.
I think it might be possible to do this to some extent, although I'm not sure how suitable it would be in any modern game. These days, all the games we play are horribly egocentric and impatient: the city doesn't exist, it's just an excuse to provide us with city-themed levels. We don't like slowing down to smell the roses because we've been trained to think in terms of advantage, and there isn't any in smelling roses.
I'm not sure that the characters' judgment clues would actually MATTER, either, since we don't often consider them to be worth thinking about. They inhabit a lesser world and are obviously not intelligent beings, especially if we save and load and replay this mission a lot. It might be necessary to radically change that in order to make this sort of thing work.
...
I guess that's my rambly essay. What do you think?
Wednesday, June 25, 2008
Conan! Review
Okay, here's the Conan review. Short version: I hate it. Less short version: totally typical MMORPG.
There are a few flaws in Conan. Let's work our way up to the killer ones, ignoring the standard fatal flaws of treadmills and high population density.
3
The smallest flaw is that everyone has more or less the same body type. While they were kind enough to let everyone set their physical parameters, the parameters are barely noticeable. For example, the women can be anything from a busty, skinny girl to a busty, slender girl.
They have a slider specifically for boobs... why does it only vary the boobs between C and F cups? They have a slider for arms... why does it vary the arms from geek to slightly fit? Whatever happened to muscular? The weird part is that the girls all have very strong shoulders, even though at their most powerful their arms barely fit the frame. Skinny magician girls look silly, with ten foot wide shoulders and boobs like cannons.
Giving players the ability to make unique characters is good, I agree. However, it's important to remember that people are going to be identified by their gross characteristics: we don't get many close-ups of other people in these games. Gross characteristics: that's body shape, color, and what they are wearing. Keeping to "preferred" levels of variation isn't going to help a whole lot. Everyone might as well just choose a haircut and a face, like in most other MMORPGs.
2
I have to say that Conan has the MOST balls-to-the-wall introduction stage of any game I've ever seen. Every single hero was kidnapped, memory wiped, stamped with a parasitic seal, and washed up on shore to be entangled in a plot involving armies and gods both.
EVERY SINGLE HERO? Tens of thousands of them?
Wow! That's kinda fucking daring, ain't it? It's instancing taken to the extreme, I guess.
I suppose it's Standard Operating Procedure, but... on such a scale. It's breathtaking. And dehumanizing. And RP-breaking. It's like they took one of my major hates - an unchanging world that you can't affect at all - and injected it directly into the pores of all I hold dear.
It's made worse by the fact that, as a MMORPG, this game is full of the other people at all times. Which makes no logical sense at all, since in "real life" it would take me about fifteen minutes to round up enough of us, say, "Hey, we've all been screwed over by this lady!" and then we'd all go off and kill her. It'd be about half an enemy for each of us.
There's definitely no sense of being at all special or interesting.
1
To me, aside from the endless treadmilling, the biggest flaw in the Conan game is this:
Where's the low fantasy?
A low fantasy setting is more than just torchlight and big-chinned men who are evidently completely immune to chafing. I mean, sure, that's a part of it.
But a low fantasy setting is more about being isolated with no resources. It's about bashing through challenges with low cunning, physical power, and a good deal of awesomely choreographed brutality.
At no point does Conan go up to Ye Old Armor Vendor and buy himself a better suit of armor. If he changes clothes, it's because the old ones were ripped off him by his last encounter, whether horrible monsters or adoring women (or adoring monsters and horrible women). As a matter of course, nobody wears heavy armor anyway, since metalcraft is primitive and the jungle is too fucking hot for that crap.
At no point does Conan walk over to Joe's Vendatorium and swap out his broadsword for a slightly shinier broadsword, handing over some coin. Conan spends coin on ale, women, and getting his ass robbed. He uses the same sword until it breaks. Then he uses his goddamn HANDS.
Conan does not collect discarded armor, and if he picks up his enemy's weapon, he'll drop it again once he's rammed it down someone's throat. He will happily collect tiger teeth and small gems... but he doesn't carry around five bowls of rat stew, eighteen jugs of mead, twelve stolen kilts, and a handful of dessicated hands.
Conan does not fight by swinging his sword left, then waiting a moment and swinging it right. He fights by cutting someone in half in one swing. If they survive, or block, or evade, he punches them, picks them up into the air, and crushes them like a tin can that won't be invented for three thousand years. If a fight lasts longer than three seconds, it had better be against something the size of a house or involve weird magic.
Instead of being true to the IP, Conan is a bog-standard MMORPG. Their feeble attempt to create "deep and interesting combat" by letting you swing in any of three directions is... well, um, a feeble attempt to create "deep and interesting combat". It doesn't work, even when you have to play Conan Says for combos. It's only vaguely more interesting than other games', and certainly not in true Conan style.
The continuous buying, selling, and upgrading of equipment is retarded. It's the antithesis of low fantasy.
This is the most severe flaw I could find that was not treadmilling. It was one that probably would have made me hate the game even if they removed the treadmilling.
Of course, if they got rid of the treadmill, this flaw would naturally vanish.
But what would you fill your player's time with, then?
There are a few flaws in Conan. Let's work our way up to the killer ones, ignoring the standard fatal flaws of treadmills and high population density.
3
The smallest flaw is that everyone has more or less the same body type. While they were kind enough to let everyone set their physical parameters, the parameters are barely noticeable. For example, the women can be anything from a busty, skinny girl to a busty, slender girl.
They have a slider specifically for boobs... why does it only vary the boobs between C and F cups? They have a slider for arms... why does it vary the arms from geek to slightly fit? Whatever happened to muscular? The weird part is that the girls all have very strong shoulders, even though at their most powerful their arms barely fit the frame. Skinny magician girls look silly, with ten foot wide shoulders and boobs like cannons.
Giving players the ability to make unique characters is good, I agree. However, it's important to remember that people are going to be identified by their gross characteristics: we don't get many close-ups of other people in these games. Gross characteristics: that's body shape, color, and what they are wearing. Keeping to "preferred" levels of variation isn't going to help a whole lot. Everyone might as well just choose a haircut and a face, like in most other MMORPGs.
2
I have to say that Conan has the MOST balls-to-the-wall introduction stage of any game I've ever seen. Every single hero was kidnapped, memory wiped, stamped with a parasitic seal, and washed up on shore to be entangled in a plot involving armies and gods both.
EVERY SINGLE HERO? Tens of thousands of them?
Wow! That's kinda fucking daring, ain't it? It's instancing taken to the extreme, I guess.
I suppose it's Standard Operating Procedure, but... on such a scale. It's breathtaking. And dehumanizing. And RP-breaking. It's like they took one of my major hates - an unchanging world that you can't affect at all - and injected it directly into the pores of all I hold dear.
It's made worse by the fact that, as a MMORPG, this game is full of the other people at all times. Which makes no logical sense at all, since in "real life" it would take me about fifteen minutes to round up enough of us, say, "Hey, we've all been screwed over by this lady!" and then we'd all go off and kill her. It'd be about half an enemy for each of us.
There's definitely no sense of being at all special or interesting.
1
To me, aside from the endless treadmilling, the biggest flaw in the Conan game is this:
Where's the low fantasy?
A low fantasy setting is more than just torchlight and big-chinned men who are evidently completely immune to chafing. I mean, sure, that's a part of it.
But a low fantasy setting is more about being isolated with no resources. It's about bashing through challenges with low cunning, physical power, and a good deal of awesomely choreographed brutality.
At no point does Conan go up to Ye Old Armor Vendor and buy himself a better suit of armor. If he changes clothes, it's because the old ones were ripped off him by his last encounter, whether horrible monsters or adoring women (or adoring monsters and horrible women). As a matter of course, nobody wears heavy armor anyway, since metalcraft is primitive and the jungle is too fucking hot for that crap.
At no point does Conan walk over to Joe's Vendatorium and swap out his broadsword for a slightly shinier broadsword, handing over some coin. Conan spends coin on ale, women, and getting his ass robbed. He uses the same sword until it breaks. Then he uses his goddamn HANDS.
Conan does not collect discarded armor, and if he picks up his enemy's weapon, he'll drop it again once he's rammed it down someone's throat. He will happily collect tiger teeth and small gems... but he doesn't carry around five bowls of rat stew, eighteen jugs of mead, twelve stolen kilts, and a handful of dessicated hands.
Conan does not fight by swinging his sword left, then waiting a moment and swinging it right. He fights by cutting someone in half in one swing. If they survive, or block, or evade, he punches them, picks them up into the air, and crushes them like a tin can that won't be invented for three thousand years. If a fight lasts longer than three seconds, it had better be against something the size of a house or involve weird magic.
Instead of being true to the IP, Conan is a bog-standard MMORPG. Their feeble attempt to create "deep and interesting combat" by letting you swing in any of three directions is... well, um, a feeble attempt to create "deep and interesting combat". It doesn't work, even when you have to play Conan Says for combos. It's only vaguely more interesting than other games', and certainly not in true Conan style.
The continuous buying, selling, and upgrading of equipment is retarded. It's the antithesis of low fantasy.
This is the most severe flaw I could find that was not treadmilling. It was one that probably would have made me hate the game even if they removed the treadmilling.
Of course, if they got rid of the treadmill, this flaw would naturally vanish.
But what would you fill your player's time with, then?
Tuesday, February 05, 2008
Imagery
Although this blog is focused on game design, I have a lot of other interests such as art and music (and detective novels). One of the things I notice is that these other things can create a really strong "sense" that I don't see in games.
For example, if you look at a really great science fiction story, the whole thing revolves around a specific set of images. A faraway planet with a tremendous red sun, a scientist's lab with ten-foot beakers full of monsters, a battle between titanic space ships... these images account for much of the "punch" of the story, and each evokes a particular sense on its own.
This is true of most things that aren't games. While most movies, music, comics, and so forth are shallow crap, you can find plenty of examples that are deeply moving in some way.
But... I don't really see that in games.
There are a few games that try, but very, very few succeed. On the order of only two that I can think of.
There's a difference between this and making a statement. Plenty of games make a statement, but I don't care about that. I'm talking about making the audience feel something strongly from the game, not feel something strongly because of what the game says about modern life.
The more I think about it, the more I think that the answer lies in the dynamics of the medium - playing to the strengths of the medium.
For example, I can draw a nice picture of something. A faraway planet with a city of pyramids, say. My skill isn't the greatest thing since sliced bread, but I definitely feel that there is a sense there. A sense of the feeling I'm going for.
Now, if instead I choose to draw a comic, the same image has less appeal. It is much weaker to me, as if it's suddenly just a backdrop.
Well, that's because it is suddenly a backdrop. It's just one panel.
But comics can portray strong imagery, too. Not in the same way, and probably not the exact same things, but they can do it. They do it differently.
While an illustration works by filling out the page in a single, immersive moment, a comic's strength lies in the artist's control over the passage of time and space. So the comic would build a similar feeling using multiple, smaller, probably more focused images carefully arranged such that they "fill in" the overall imagery bit by bit, forming a strong, deep impression.
A movie or animation is similar, except that the artist has less control over the passage of time and space. This is in some ways good - there's a much finer grain to the passage - but is in some ways bad - you can't jump around as easily and clearly as a comic can.
Even simple changes like whether you use black and white or color (even what kind of color technology you use) changes your medium enough that you need to be careful when portraying your imagery. Careful to use the medium as it is best used, rather than as your habits dictate.
You can also make the argument that a momentary image in a movie or comic (a scene, roughly) is very different from the overall movie... but, again, I think that the overall movie depicts something using scenes in the way that scenes are depicted using shots and shots are depicted using lights and lenses and actors and settings.
The question is, why don't we see this more in games?
It's more than simply not having any artistic games. We have many artistic games these days, ranging from text adventures to RPGs even to action games. Most of these games suck pretty hard, though, and almost none of them give you a feeling. Instead, they simply make a statement. There is also an unprecedented level and quality of art in major titles, but, again, it falls flat.
I think the problem is that people are not using the medium. Instead, they are using the methods other mediums use.
For example, in Mass Effect, when you land on a planet it is gorgeous. It looks so good. If Mass Effect were a movie, you would be blown away by the beauty of these desolate landscapes.
But in the game, it means very little. You're busy driving your little truck over all sorts of bumpy ground, and you don't really get to look around much. The sky might as well be white static for all it matters.
It's like a comic: an illustration can be beautiful, but it's just a backdrop in a comic. Instead, a comic uses the ability to hop through time and space to structure a moment more fully.
The physical beauty of a game is just a backdrop. To make an image properly, you need to use the inherent strength of the medium: the way the game plays.
...
Problem is, moments don't last very long. A beautiful image isn't a ten-hour experience.
Of course, neither is a movie a single beautiful scene.
So... the next step, past The Marriage and Passage, is to use play bits in the same way that a movie uses scenes. Not exactly like movies use scenes, because games aren't movies and bits of play aren't scenes. But... similarly.
I think?
For example, if you look at a really great science fiction story, the whole thing revolves around a specific set of images. A faraway planet with a tremendous red sun, a scientist's lab with ten-foot beakers full of monsters, a battle between titanic space ships... these images account for much of the "punch" of the story, and each evokes a particular sense on its own.
This is true of most things that aren't games. While most movies, music, comics, and so forth are shallow crap, you can find plenty of examples that are deeply moving in some way.
But... I don't really see that in games.
There are a few games that try, but very, very few succeed. On the order of only two that I can think of.
There's a difference between this and making a statement. Plenty of games make a statement, but I don't care about that. I'm talking about making the audience feel something strongly from the game, not feel something strongly because of what the game says about modern life.
The more I think about it, the more I think that the answer lies in the dynamics of the medium - playing to the strengths of the medium.
For example, I can draw a nice picture of something. A faraway planet with a city of pyramids, say. My skill isn't the greatest thing since sliced bread, but I definitely feel that there is a sense there. A sense of the feeling I'm going for.
Now, if instead I choose to draw a comic, the same image has less appeal. It is much weaker to me, as if it's suddenly just a backdrop.
Well, that's because it is suddenly a backdrop. It's just one panel.
But comics can portray strong imagery, too. Not in the same way, and probably not the exact same things, but they can do it. They do it differently.
While an illustration works by filling out the page in a single, immersive moment, a comic's strength lies in the artist's control over the passage of time and space. So the comic would build a similar feeling using multiple, smaller, probably more focused images carefully arranged such that they "fill in" the overall imagery bit by bit, forming a strong, deep impression.
A movie or animation is similar, except that the artist has less control over the passage of time and space. This is in some ways good - there's a much finer grain to the passage - but is in some ways bad - you can't jump around as easily and clearly as a comic can.
Even simple changes like whether you use black and white or color (even what kind of color technology you use) changes your medium enough that you need to be careful when portraying your imagery. Careful to use the medium as it is best used, rather than as your habits dictate.
You can also make the argument that a momentary image in a movie or comic (a scene, roughly) is very different from the overall movie... but, again, I think that the overall movie depicts something using scenes in the way that scenes are depicted using shots and shots are depicted using lights and lenses and actors and settings.
The question is, why don't we see this more in games?
It's more than simply not having any artistic games. We have many artistic games these days, ranging from text adventures to RPGs even to action games. Most of these games suck pretty hard, though, and almost none of them give you a feeling. Instead, they simply make a statement. There is also an unprecedented level and quality of art in major titles, but, again, it falls flat.
I think the problem is that people are not using the medium. Instead, they are using the methods other mediums use.
For example, in Mass Effect, when you land on a planet it is gorgeous. It looks so good. If Mass Effect were a movie, you would be blown away by the beauty of these desolate landscapes.
But in the game, it means very little. You're busy driving your little truck over all sorts of bumpy ground, and you don't really get to look around much. The sky might as well be white static for all it matters.
It's like a comic: an illustration can be beautiful, but it's just a backdrop in a comic. Instead, a comic uses the ability to hop through time and space to structure a moment more fully.
The physical beauty of a game is just a backdrop. To make an image properly, you need to use the inherent strength of the medium: the way the game plays.
...
Problem is, moments don't last very long. A beautiful image isn't a ten-hour experience.
Of course, neither is a movie a single beautiful scene.
So... the next step, past The Marriage and Passage, is to use play bits in the same way that a movie uses scenes. Not exactly like movies use scenes, because games aren't movies and bits of play aren't scenes. But... similarly.
I think?
Sunday, August 12, 2007
Immersion
Ah, game criticism and academic discussion is advancing pretty quick. It's good to see.
But I always feel like these discussions are a little hollow. Because games are basically a set of rules and content, most discussions revolve around one of these two concepts. We're seeing more talk about balance, about reward patterns, about graphic style rather than graphics... we even see some commentary about the psychological "value" and "art" of games such as Ico.
But 99% of the time, they're talking about the game. I don't really think that you should focus on the game, because the experience is what the game is actually about.
A game can have shitty gameplay and still be very good. A game can have shitty art and still be very good. A game can have shitty balance and still be very good. It can be on tight rails and be good. Hell, it can have no bad guys at all and still be very good. This is because what experiences games provide varies from game to game.
I'm not talking about categories of play, or the four different kinds of player, or whatever other academic nonsense somebody has come up with today. Categorizing these kinds of things is worse than useless, because it implies boundaries where there shouldn't be any.
But it is worth remembering that your game is not a collection of rules and art. It's an experience that many different kinds of people are going to live through.
But I always feel like these discussions are a little hollow. Because games are basically a set of rules and content, most discussions revolve around one of these two concepts. We're seeing more talk about balance, about reward patterns, about graphic style rather than graphics... we even see some commentary about the psychological "value" and "art" of games such as Ico.
But 99% of the time, they're talking about the game. I don't really think that you should focus on the game, because the experience is what the game is actually about.
A game can have shitty gameplay and still be very good. A game can have shitty art and still be very good. A game can have shitty balance and still be very good. It can be on tight rails and be good. Hell, it can have no bad guys at all and still be very good. This is because what experiences games provide varies from game to game.
I'm not talking about categories of play, or the four different kinds of player, or whatever other academic nonsense somebody has come up with today. Categorizing these kinds of things is worse than useless, because it implies boundaries where there shouldn't be any.
But it is worth remembering that your game is not a collection of rules and art. It's an experience that many different kinds of people are going to live through.
Sunday, March 11, 2007
"Three Layers of Immersion"
I recently talked here about swamping and all sorts of other geeky things. Basically, it leads to this post.
On these forums someone posted a theory about "three layers of immersion" or "story". Unfortunately, my search-fu is weak as hell. It's one of the major posters, but I can't remember which one. I think he even wrote a PDF about it, but I never got to read it, so I'm running on some mentions he made a few months ago.
( I bow to Eric Poulton's search fu. It was "Arkaeyn", in this thread. )
It got me curious, so I've done some running with it - to the extent of testing it and brutally adapting it to my own greedy purposes. So, remembering that someone else came up with it (or something like it) originally, here's the way it runs:
You can split the experience of a game into three tiers. The lowest tier would be immediate experience - shooting the Nazi, buying a potion, leaping a pit. The top tier would be the long-term arcs - avenging your father, saving the planet, getting the girl, whatever.
The middle experience would be short term arcs: "Defend this one city", "get through the alien maze", "get the sword of Good Thoughts".
Obviously, the lines can get very blurry: is a four-hour arc in a twenty-hour game a top or middle tier? So, the distinction I came up with is this:
Layer 1: Moment to moment direct play.
Layer 2: Situations that direct the player's overall progression through first-layer situations.
Layer 3: Situations that direct layer 2 situations.
"Wow, Craig's doing more worthless theorizing."
Well, any theory should be useful, so I poked around and discovered that, yes, this theory can be very useful, especially in how it relates to LARPs, open-ended one player games, and multiplayer games of all varieties.
Which part? The second layer, of course.
The second layer controls swamping.
See, if your second layer is too loose, your content begins to melt together. All content will be judged simply as to how effective it is in moment to moment play (layer 1). If it can't be judged that way, it isn't judged at all. The second layer's purpose is to assign a specific value to all the things that have minimal or counter-purposes play value. Examples of this might be whether to kill or save villagers, whether to march on Rome or France, etc. It is also there to limit - or at least heavily tint - which content is capable of being judged, either by restricting access or making something more or less efficient than simple gameplay indicates. (For example: enemies weak against lightning, or lots of railgun ammo.)
All games have this second tier, but the second tier is a very muddy system as it stands. I'm sure there's a better way to think about it, but as it stands, level design, drops, subquests, primary missions, and many other kinds of play are various kinds of second-tier elements.
"Loose" second tier elements are level design, enemy drops, and so forth. Things which assign local values but don't provide real revaluation or direction. "Tight" second tier elements would be things like quests.
MMORPGs show this. WoW, for example, thrives on quests. A lot of its success relates to the fact that players take many quests and submit to their directions. This actually isn't as tight-fisted as it sounds, because it's not really an infrastructure for second tier elements. Instead of the game forcing players into certain activities, it's a loose web that allows the players to catch themselves. And if you don't like that kind of thing, you won't much like WoW.
Normally, tabletop RPGs have excessively tight second-tier elements. The GM says, "The old guy says to kill the monster in the labyrinth!" and the players say, "well, okay, not like we had anything better to do..."
I'm running a Star-Warsish game right now where I essentially did away with second tier elements. It's not the only reason I'm running the game (or the only thing I'm testing), but it fit in well. I was betting that the players would invent a second tier fairly easily. I was wrong. They did, but it was not something that came naturally or without a bit of pushing. It was a very "swampy" game - none of the content could be rated because there was no innate reason any of it was more important than anything else.
This rambling little theory is getting too long by half, so I'll cut my meanderings short. Er. Shorter.
Basically, when you're designing a game, you need to think about the second tier. And, like most things I do, there are three pieces to consider:
1) Level, enemy, power, and item design. Any given part of the game should be relatively unique as to what it looks like and the tactical options it gives. Make certain powers more inherently useful in some places and less so in others.
2) Quests. Allow the players to take missions. I would suggest even giving them occasional choices to do random non-major-arc-related quests, such as bounty hunting or saving a useless village. Every quest should have a different feel than the previous one in terms of pacing and all the piece 1 elements listed above.
3) Barriers. As the players progress through the game, the gameplay needs to slowly change to keep things spicy. It shouldn't be so much that any character is ever rendered irritatingly underpowered! However, giving your players an airship, or letting them learn magic when they didn't have any before... it's a very powerful tool to change the way they look at the world. It also lets you do radically new and interesting versions of the two earlier pieces.
Did you get this far? Does your boss know you're wasting time on this blog? Leave a comment!
On these forums someone posted a theory about "three layers of immersion" or "story". Unfortunately, my search-fu is weak as hell. It's one of the major posters, but I can't remember which one. I think he even wrote a PDF about it, but I never got to read it, so I'm running on some mentions he made a few months ago.
( I bow to Eric Poulton's search fu. It was "Arkaeyn", in this thread. )
It got me curious, so I've done some running with it - to the extent of testing it and brutally adapting it to my own greedy purposes. So, remembering that someone else came up with it (or something like it) originally, here's the way it runs:
You can split the experience of a game into three tiers. The lowest tier would be immediate experience - shooting the Nazi, buying a potion, leaping a pit. The top tier would be the long-term arcs - avenging your father, saving the planet, getting the girl, whatever.
The middle experience would be short term arcs: "Defend this one city", "get through the alien maze", "get the sword of Good Thoughts".
Obviously, the lines can get very blurry: is a four-hour arc in a twenty-hour game a top or middle tier? So, the distinction I came up with is this:
Layer 1: Moment to moment direct play.
Layer 2: Situations that direct the player's overall progression through first-layer situations.
Layer 3: Situations that direct layer 2 situations.
"Wow, Craig's doing more worthless theorizing."
Well, any theory should be useful, so I poked around and discovered that, yes, this theory can be very useful, especially in how it relates to LARPs, open-ended one player games, and multiplayer games of all varieties.
Which part? The second layer, of course.
The second layer controls swamping.
See, if your second layer is too loose, your content begins to melt together. All content will be judged simply as to how effective it is in moment to moment play (layer 1). If it can't be judged that way, it isn't judged at all. The second layer's purpose is to assign a specific value to all the things that have minimal or counter-purposes play value. Examples of this might be whether to kill or save villagers, whether to march on Rome or France, etc. It is also there to limit - or at least heavily tint - which content is capable of being judged, either by restricting access or making something more or less efficient than simple gameplay indicates. (For example: enemies weak against lightning, or lots of railgun ammo.)
All games have this second tier, but the second tier is a very muddy system as it stands. I'm sure there's a better way to think about it, but as it stands, level design, drops, subquests, primary missions, and many other kinds of play are various kinds of second-tier elements.
"Loose" second tier elements are level design, enemy drops, and so forth. Things which assign local values but don't provide real revaluation or direction. "Tight" second tier elements would be things like quests.
MMORPGs show this. WoW, for example, thrives on quests. A lot of its success relates to the fact that players take many quests and submit to their directions. This actually isn't as tight-fisted as it sounds, because it's not really an infrastructure for second tier elements. Instead of the game forcing players into certain activities, it's a loose web that allows the players to catch themselves. And if you don't like that kind of thing, you won't much like WoW.
Normally, tabletop RPGs have excessively tight second-tier elements. The GM says, "The old guy says to kill the monster in the labyrinth!" and the players say, "well, okay, not like we had anything better to do..."
I'm running a Star-Warsish game right now where I essentially did away with second tier elements. It's not the only reason I'm running the game (or the only thing I'm testing), but it fit in well. I was betting that the players would invent a second tier fairly easily. I was wrong. They did, but it was not something that came naturally or without a bit of pushing. It was a very "swampy" game - none of the content could be rated because there was no innate reason any of it was more important than anything else.
This rambling little theory is getting too long by half, so I'll cut my meanderings short. Er. Shorter.
Basically, when you're designing a game, you need to think about the second tier. And, like most things I do, there are three pieces to consider:
1) Level, enemy, power, and item design. Any given part of the game should be relatively unique as to what it looks like and the tactical options it gives. Make certain powers more inherently useful in some places and less so in others.
2) Quests. Allow the players to take missions. I would suggest even giving them occasional choices to do random non-major-arc-related quests, such as bounty hunting or saving a useless village. Every quest should have a different feel than the previous one in terms of pacing and all the piece 1 elements listed above.
3) Barriers. As the players progress through the game, the gameplay needs to slowly change to keep things spicy. It shouldn't be so much that any character is ever rendered irritatingly underpowered! However, giving your players an airship, or letting them learn magic when they didn't have any before... it's a very powerful tool to change the way they look at the world. It also lets you do radically new and interesting versions of the two earlier pieces.
Did you get this far? Does your boss know you're wasting time on this blog? Leave a comment!
Wednesday, January 31, 2007
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.
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.
Saturday, November 18, 2006
Idiot's Guide to GMing
Here's five pages of the Idiot's Guide to GMing, a book I'm not really writing. These five pages are a how-to on immersion. I hope you'll find them useful or, if not, tell me why not.
Talk to Strangers
(Google Documents has some irritating issues with non-HTML formats. Anyhow, looks best at about half window width. :P )
Talk to Strangers
(Google Documents has some irritating issues with non-HTML formats. Anyhow, looks best at about half window width. :P )
Saturday, October 14, 2006
Monkey See, Monkey Roll Disbelief Check
(I'm skipping a lengthy dissertation on fear. If you want to see a hint of what you're missing, here's a slightly outdated Doom III dissection. This essay turned out boring anyway. Argh!)
What's your favorite game?
Okay, unfair question. Nobody should have an answer to that. Here's a different one: what's your favorite horror game?
Maybe you're a Resident Evil kinda guy. Maybe you prefer Eternal Darkness. Maybe you have the good taste to prefer a System Shock. Maybe you picked something else - perhaps even something not normally considered a horror game, like Myst.
If you look at all the horror games you enjoy, you may notice that there is something fundamentally similar about them. Or, perhaps you can barely see the difference in the first place. Either way, you're right: there's something fundamentally similar about them.
Immersion.
Aside from the most primitive forms of shock, all the kinds of fear require the player to be immersed. A running gunfight is most terrifying when we're in danger. A freakshow of a cutscene is only horrifying if we care about what's going on in some way.
Immersion is the blood pumping through a horror game. The goal of every horror game is to sink the player into the setting so deeply he reacts forcefully to the mere sight of an enemy.
Breaking immersion is therefore the worst thing a game can do.
But "immersion" is a rather messy word. For example, I consider it immersion-breaking when my gun-weilding heroine can't simply blast the locked cabinet open. But others don't even notice. On the other hand, they might consider it immersion-breaking to have a health meter and ammo readout. I don't even notice.
What kind of immersion you're going for is a critical first thought a designer needs to consider before the alpha is even a twinkle in a programmer's eye.
If you want more of a "horror" game, you usually want to specialize your game to give maximum view with minimum combat effectiveness. This means a third-person view - can't shoot worth a damn, but you can see items and enemies creeping up from every direction while you're busy shooting the one spot on the wall without zombies. You're going for a slightly more "movie-ish" feel, so HUDs are out and complex stats are goners. This has the benefit of also reducing combat effectiveness, since players can no longer twink out. But you have to do very good set design, because the players are going to be interacting with it so much.
Of course, if you want more of a "terror" game, you want to specialize your game to give minimum view with maximum combat effectiveness. First person all the way: an intense, powerful view that makes it hard to look around a level (for monsters or stuff). You're going for a more "realistic" feel, so the character needs to be able to move quickly and be focused on things other than hexagonal keys and telescopes.
These aren't the only two choices, of course. But they are the most common.
Once you've designed your game to immerse the player, you have to avoid breaking that immersion on pain worse than death: unprofitability. Now, if you're doing a first-person "terror" game, you can break the setting immersion slightly without penalty. The layout doesn't have to make a terrible amount of sense, you can forego bathrooms, and so on. On the other hand, a third-person "horror" game can afford to screw up the kinetic feel a little bit more, say by making you unable to shoot out the glass between you and that hexagonal key, or by making combat somewhat uninteresting.
Their focuses are different, so their immersion is "directed" in a particular way. If the game screws up in its focus, it's very obvious. For example, Doom III screwed up. It was a terror game which screwed up the realism/kinetic feel. You couldn't use a gun and a flashlight at the same time, as the obvious example. More critical, the difficulty of the game was not immersive. (To be honest, this is because most of the game was designed to have gun OR flashlight, but ubiquitous mods made it gun AND flashlight.)
Either way you point it, there are some shared points of immersion. The most obvious is the plot. No matter what you do to immerse people in the action and puzzle sequences of the game, the plot exists separate. It doesn't require a special view type, or a combat engine. All it requires is some way of telling the player something. Cutscenes, emails, disembodied voices, s'all good.
Not every game has to have an immersive plot, but if you choose to try for one, you need to remember that you have now chosen an additional type of immersion. And now you have to struggle not to break it.
In a game whose plot is unimportant, you can make plot points that serve the gameplay but make no real sense. But not in a game where plot matters.
There are other kinds of immersion. Character development. Skill and metaphysics use. Character interactions. Team dynamics. Map building. Stealth.
Keeping things immersive gets exponentially worse with each kind of play you add. Stealth and combat? The player might be mostly stealth, mostly combat, or a mix, and those need to all be viable. Stealth, combat and teams? The player might be one of the three, mixes of two, or a combination of all three. Seven options rather than three. It gets steadily worse from there.
Each play type needs to not only be interesting and challenging, but needs to be available at every moment in every situation, including cutscenes and plots.
So, what's your favorite horror game?
I bet it focuses on just two immersions, maybe three. Probably one kind of game play and one non-gameplay shtick, such as plot or insanity or something. All the other things that could be immersive are deep in the background.
I guess the moral of this essay is: keep it simple. Every kind of play you add exponentially increases the difficulty of making the game good. Not just because you need more content, but because you need to manage immersion.
What's your favorite game?
Okay, unfair question. Nobody should have an answer to that. Here's a different one: what's your favorite horror game?
Maybe you're a Resident Evil kinda guy. Maybe you prefer Eternal Darkness. Maybe you have the good taste to prefer a System Shock. Maybe you picked something else - perhaps even something not normally considered a horror game, like Myst.
If you look at all the horror games you enjoy, you may notice that there is something fundamentally similar about them. Or, perhaps you can barely see the difference in the first place. Either way, you're right: there's something fundamentally similar about them.
Immersion.
Aside from the most primitive forms of shock, all the kinds of fear require the player to be immersed. A running gunfight is most terrifying when we're in danger. A freakshow of a cutscene is only horrifying if we care about what's going on in some way.
Immersion is the blood pumping through a horror game. The goal of every horror game is to sink the player into the setting so deeply he reacts forcefully to the mere sight of an enemy.
Breaking immersion is therefore the worst thing a game can do.
But "immersion" is a rather messy word. For example, I consider it immersion-breaking when my gun-weilding heroine can't simply blast the locked cabinet open. But others don't even notice. On the other hand, they might consider it immersion-breaking to have a health meter and ammo readout. I don't even notice.
What kind of immersion you're going for is a critical first thought a designer needs to consider before the alpha is even a twinkle in a programmer's eye.
If you want more of a "horror" game, you usually want to specialize your game to give maximum view with minimum combat effectiveness. This means a third-person view - can't shoot worth a damn, but you can see items and enemies creeping up from every direction while you're busy shooting the one spot on the wall without zombies. You're going for a slightly more "movie-ish" feel, so HUDs are out and complex stats are goners. This has the benefit of also reducing combat effectiveness, since players can no longer twink out. But you have to do very good set design, because the players are going to be interacting with it so much.
Of course, if you want more of a "terror" game, you want to specialize your game to give minimum view with maximum combat effectiveness. First person all the way: an intense, powerful view that makes it hard to look around a level (for monsters or stuff). You're going for a more "realistic" feel, so the character needs to be able to move quickly and be focused on things other than hexagonal keys and telescopes.
These aren't the only two choices, of course. But they are the most common.
Once you've designed your game to immerse the player, you have to avoid breaking that immersion on pain worse than death: unprofitability. Now, if you're doing a first-person "terror" game, you can break the setting immersion slightly without penalty. The layout doesn't have to make a terrible amount of sense, you can forego bathrooms, and so on. On the other hand, a third-person "horror" game can afford to screw up the kinetic feel a little bit more, say by making you unable to shoot out the glass between you and that hexagonal key, or by making combat somewhat uninteresting.
Their focuses are different, so their immersion is "directed" in a particular way. If the game screws up in its focus, it's very obvious. For example, Doom III screwed up. It was a terror game which screwed up the realism/kinetic feel. You couldn't use a gun and a flashlight at the same time, as the obvious example. More critical, the difficulty of the game was not immersive. (To be honest, this is because most of the game was designed to have gun OR flashlight, but ubiquitous mods made it gun AND flashlight.)
Either way you point it, there are some shared points of immersion. The most obvious is the plot. No matter what you do to immerse people in the action and puzzle sequences of the game, the plot exists separate. It doesn't require a special view type, or a combat engine. All it requires is some way of telling the player something. Cutscenes, emails, disembodied voices, s'all good.
Not every game has to have an immersive plot, but if you choose to try for one, you need to remember that you have now chosen an additional type of immersion. And now you have to struggle not to break it.
In a game whose plot is unimportant, you can make plot points that serve the gameplay but make no real sense. But not in a game where plot matters.
There are other kinds of immersion. Character development. Skill and metaphysics use. Character interactions. Team dynamics. Map building. Stealth.
Keeping things immersive gets exponentially worse with each kind of play you add. Stealth and combat? The player might be mostly stealth, mostly combat, or a mix, and those need to all be viable. Stealth, combat and teams? The player might be one of the three, mixes of two, or a combination of all three. Seven options rather than three. It gets steadily worse from there.
Each play type needs to not only be interesting and challenging, but needs to be available at every moment in every situation, including cutscenes and plots.
So, what's your favorite horror game?
I bet it focuses on just two immersions, maybe three. Probably one kind of game play and one non-gameplay shtick, such as plot or insanity or something. All the other things that could be immersive are deep in the background.
I guess the moral of this essay is: keep it simple. Every kind of play you add exponentially increases the difficulty of making the game good. Not just because you need more content, but because you need to manage immersion.
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