Recently there's been a bout of compelling games using very simple mechanics. In particular, I'm going to use the mobile Marvel Puzzlequest game and Battle Chef Brigade as examples, because both create compelling and narratively-dense games using match-3 gameplay!
Using simple gameplay to make compelling games is far from a new idea. Every game does this. An RPG uses basic math. A shooter uses simple moving and shooting.
But what we're seeing these days is something a bit different. The play is more emergent than ever, and the emergent play is more narratively compelling than ever.
Everyone tells stories about that time something cool happened while they were playing a game. The ten-person raid that almost didn't work out. The time you drove a jeep into an exploding alien. When you did five no-scopes in a row. These emergent moments are extremely powerful draws, to the point where many games (like Overwatch) attempt to automatically highlight cool emergent moments.
But you don't need expensive content or complex mechanics to create those emergent moments.
For example, I just had a fight where Storm, The Thing, and Juggernaut fought Spider-Man and two of those Spider-Man variants or clones or whatever they are. It was an epic fight. Storm was about to die, but The Thing stepped in the way, took the blow, and went down himself. Even while unconscious, he shielded Storm as she called down a hailstorm. Finally she went down to a web-swinging kick, and it was just Juggernaut against them. The hailstorm helped take out two of them, but in the end, Juggernaut and the last standing Spider-man were going toe-to-toe. Juggernaut couldn't catch him, and was ready to fall over at any second. In a last, desperate attempt, Juggernaut slammed his helmeted head into Spider-Man and they both went down. A battlefield of fallen heroes. Well, the villains were stopped, and that counts as a victory for the heroes, even if they're all unconscious.
Here's the twist: that whole battle was a damn match-3 contest. There were very few visuals - just some particle effects and a few generic superhero poses flashed up from time to time.
Still, it felt properly epic in my head, and it was probably the best time I've ever had playing a match-3 game. Would it have been better with more graphics? Sure. But putting aside the juice, the fundamental play of the game allowed this story to emerge.
Regardless of anything else, we want our gameplay to allow for that kind of emergent narrative. How do we do that?
Well, first is contextual elements.
In the Marvel game, the context is really easy: the various characters on each side of the fight. We are familiar with most of the characters, or at least their templates, and therefore we can easily picture how things are unfolding. Even the assists have a character attached.
In Battle Chef Brigade, the characters on each side certainly have context, but since you're always playing the MC, that's not really a factor. Instead, it's the ingredients and judges you learn to identify. This takes more time than Marvel's context, because we aren't really familiar with the elements in BCB, but it's the same basic idea.
Context is mostly established at or near the beginning of a match. You know who's fighting, who the judges are, which ingredients are available, etc. Context can change over the course of a fight as well, but the starting context is critical. Here I think BCB does well: the various statistical effects are incorporated into high-context items like fun pots and strange knives. The Marvel game isn't quite as good, since they're just called things like "blue/green boost".
Endings are important, and not just statistically.
In the Marvel game, the end of the battle isn't just a win/lose. There's also how many resources you expended, and how long injured heroes will take to recover. But more than the statistical elements, there's the question of how the victory unrolled. Who gave the final blow? Who fell, when? I don't think that the Marvel game plays this up as much as they could, but it would probably hurt their monetization if they tried to push this any further.
In BCB, the ending also isn't simply win/lose. You are judged by several judges each. This not only gives a final win/lose, but teaches you more about the judges and what you should serve them next time. In addition to that, the dishes themselves are fun. You've created the dishes out of high-context ingredients, and seeing those transform is fun. Put in a lot of eyeball monsters, the final dish is an Eyeball Saute.
How things end is the capstone of your narrative experience. If the arches are in the right spot, the capstone holds everything together and you get a great result. If the arches aren't right, or the capstone isn't placed, the whole thing collapses into rubble.
Although Marvel's game can give us great fights with cool endings, that's not the norm. Normally fights fizzle out without much of an ending. This is made worse by the fact that the difficulty is front-loaded: the ending is almost always the easiest part of the fight, when you have the fewest enemies and the most resources to deal with them.
This isn't universally crappy, though. The statistical results of fighting mean that a battle's conclusion feels real and solid even if the ending was pedestrian. For example, if you win without taking a hit, you don't have to heal anyone and can immediately move forward, and that feels pretty great even if you were a set of level 100 heroes against a set of level 3 baddies.
BCB punches up the endings a bit better, because rather than constantly bickering with the enemy, it's a race against yourself, a race against the clock. You can feel the ending getting closer and closer, and the tension naturally rises as you move into various phases of play, judging for yourself how much time you can spend in each phase. On the downside, the enemy isn't really in your face as much. Trash-talk, interfering on the hunting grounds, and so on might help to alleviate that distance, but in the end it is an indirect conflict.
There are a variety of potential avenues towards making something like Marvel's game have better endings, and it all involves building mechanics that pace the ending better. Some of those mechanics might be in-match, such as enemies gaining resources or hitting harder as they get injured or lose team mates. Some of those mechanics might be meta elements, such as a penalty for taking overlevel characters into battle against weak enemies. Either way, they're just imaginary, there's no way to tell how well they would work without trying them out. There is a risk of locking the player into overly strict progressions, which would be just as bad as ending on a fizzle.
Midgame Management is another important element.
When you are playing a match-3, there's a lot of focus on the nature of match-3 play. Not only do you want to line up 3s, you'd like to line up 4s and 5s and double 3s and cause chains and so on. If there's no time pressure (like in Marvel's game) hunting for the best move can be as slow and careful as you like. For games with a timer (like BCB), the focus is typically on smaller grids and heuristic approaches.
Both games make "tending" the battlefield critical. In Marvel, enemy heroes get to take a turn, so it's important not to accidentally leave them with a good move. Done well, you can even trick them into destroying their own attack tiles! While there are only a set number of colors, the weights vary: some times you'll need to absolutely set up greens to insure you can stop rocket attacks, while other times you may want to hunt down that fist icon on that yellow tile. By layering effects on top of colors, the fundamental matching stays the same, but the weight of each color or region of the map changes dramatically.
In BCB, you add all the colors yourself, more or less. With a smaller battlefield and self-chosen colors, you'd think it'd be easier to manage. However, they take a Threes approach: blue isn't always blue. When you match some blues, they turn into a bigger blue that only matches with other tier-2 blues. And so on.
Suddenly the smaller battlefield is not "easier" but "more cramped". Every match you make leaves you worrying about how you'll fit in the next ingredient, and whether you can afford to temporarily knock those two tier 4 blues apart so you can make a tier 3 red... or will the pot overflow before you can recombine them?
These are very different approaches, but they both work. One creates midgame management by adding layers of meaning to various tiles or colors, whereas the other creates midgame management by steadily adding in more and more colors as you make matches.
Of course, neither is completely focused on their approach alone. In BCB specific colors do have different weights depending on the judges or the main ingredient, and in Marvel's game you do get special tiles like criticals that pop up from time to time.
Either way, adding depth to the core gameplay is an important part of keeping the player engaged. Both in terms of adding a difficulty curve and in terms of making context pop.
For example, when you are adding in your ingredients in BCB, you're thinking about whether you can get them to congeal correctly... but you're also thinking about them as Things That Exist. "Should I add more eyeball?" is a question that has both statistical and contextual meaning, and your decision will change how you think about your dish.
There are many ways of adding depth, too. For example, in addition to everything else, in Marvel's game, whoever has the best "attack value" with a given color makes an attack when you match that color. This also leaves them on the front line, and they'll take any damage thrown at your team. This makes managing high-power attackers with low health a fun challenge which evolves over the course of the game as health values fluctuate.
Mix-ins are a big part of making simple gameplay support complex contexts.
In Marvel, your heroes (very high context) are given additional context by their powers. As you make matches, you earn points of various colors, and the various heroes have powers that cost points or are affected by specific colors in various ways.
The diversity of powers is enormous. For example, The Thing has a power where he'll step in front of squishier characters and also create protection tokens, only moderately affected by board state. Kraven the Hunter will diminish enemy tiles and steal mana if there's a lot of enemy tiles. Hawkeye can create a critical, or wipe out a row of tiles. Storm and Juggernaut both have a green ability to smash tiles: Juggernaut smashes more tiles, but Storm earns mana from smashed tiles.
These modifications are not technically part of the match-3 game. They're another game layered on top - they affect each other, but are separate kinds of play. The link between the two is quite tight in this case, largely because there's no time pressure, so the player can just sit and think for a bit about the various options.
In BCB, the alternate game mode is much more distinct: you go out into the wilderness and hack apart monsters for ingredients. Since there's a lot of time pressure, the modes only loosely interlock. That way the player can stay focused - trying to stir your food pot while hacking up a wolf would be considerably more stressful and difficult.
In an RPG you sometimes think of these sorts of things as the other play loop. Like, you explore a dungeon, fight random monsters, get treasure, level up - and each of these are distinct elements.
However, in these simpler games we're seeing, the mix-ins are literally mixed in. They weave in and out of the normal play loop. It'd be like if you leveled up mid-fight and had to choose exactly what bonuses to take before the fight continued. In a classic RPG this would be a bit weird, because the battle system is engineered to keep your whole focus the whole time, so bopping off to do something else for a moment would break your groove.
But with these simpler games, you can wander in and out of the main play without really losing too much focus, since a glance at the board will remind you of where you stand. Moreover, this wandering can be used to radically increase the context of the play and provide additional story beats. When Storm summons hail, it's Storm summoning hail. It's not just a statistical effect: your board and play state is now coated in Storm's story beat. Similarly, killing an eye monster and bringing it back to throw in your pot adds a ton more context to your pot, much more than if you just had a giant stack of eyes on a shelf to throw in.
...
I used match-3 games as an example, but I think this can be done with any kind of gameplay. You can even dissect existing complex gameplay as two or three kinds of simple gameplay mixed in - running and gunning is [running] and [gunning]. RPG battles are [initiative] and [math]. It's a fun thought, although I'm not convinced it's a good universal framework.
But it can be fun to analyze that stuff with this new eye. If your game is [initiative] and [math] mixed together, can you use the lessons learned here to punch up the context, the ending, the midgame management, and the mixin? It might be really interesting to try to create an RPG that's been re-engineered from scratch to focus on in-battle emergent narratives.
Anyway, those are my thoughts. What do you think?
Showing posts with label narrative. Show all posts
Showing posts with label narrative. Show all posts
Friday, January 12, 2018
Thursday, January 11, 2018
Designing Inhabitant-Centric Games
This is an example game design for a person-centric base-building game. Sort of like Rimworld, except the people are the focus and their stories feel more solid, like in The Sims. See the previous post for details of the why and how.
One thing we need to do is abstract jobs more than Rimworld and other base-building games do. If jobs are simulated in the same space and time as the home, then duties won't be very isolated. This means it's difficult to control the way duties work and the events they cause, and it also makes the duty time 'permeable' - people can swing in and out as they see fit. Those are all bad things.
Therefore, our first goal is to create workspaces separate from our home spaces. The two obvious approaches are out-map and in-map jobs.
Out-map jobs are simply duties that take characters out of the densely simulated home area and off to somewhere else. For example, a farmer leaves to tend the fields, which are not part of the same map. Or a superhero leaves to patrol the city, which is obviously not inside the secret base. These remote areas can still be managed by the player - setting up exactly how many of what fields are where, or what the patrol route is - but they're not simulated in the same space and the workers are not available to the people still at home. Of course, out-map jobs are also good in that you can change the remote conditions without needing to change the local conditions, or visa-versa.
In-map jobs are when the worker is still in the home space, but not being simulated as part of the home experience. This could be something like a woodshop - the worker is technically still on the map, but they aren't wandering around or chatting or worrying about whether they need to go to the bathroom. In a superhero setting, this could be researchers or radio support or training - anything that can be done locally and allows us to lock them into a set pattern for the day. The difficulty with this approach is that it doesn't naturally give a schedule - you can train whenever, you can research whenever, etc. That makes it a little harder to create scheduling frission between different jobs.
Obviously jobs aren't the only thing that matter in our design, but with this in mind, we know that a big part of our design will be outside the map, or at least abstracted within the map.
Within our densely-simulated space, we need to design carefully. The purpose of this space is to help build personal stories both in gameplay and in the player's mind. Most of the base-building games that are popular these days are meter-by-meter designs. This has many advantages, allowing the player to express themselves freely while also locking the player into topological challenges presented by both the initial setup and the player's own previous base-building choices. It's a good way to create opportunities for the player to freely create a base with a lot of unusual elements both incidental and purposeful in an attempt to optimize performance.
But that's a base-centric approach. If we plan to be people-centric, we need our bases to support story and context, both with game mechanics and in the player's mind.
What can do that?
Well, if we want to create context, then we have to make the inhabitants relate to the space with context. That is, the people in the world have to want to use the space in specific ways that produce familiar or memorable stories.
In The Sims, examples of this would be the bathroom. There are rules about exclusivity in the bathroom - it's usually one person at a time, but perhaps family can use it at the same time. You can create different kinds of bathrooms to give the player funny stories about how the bathroom works - for example, sticking a window in it facing the living room. The exclusivity rules are in-game rules that are familiar to the player and create good context, while the funny design alternatives are mostly in the player's head, but still create good context.
Bedrooms are similar: is it one person's room? A big bed for the parents? A crowded row of beds for a bunkroom? There are in-game rules about the effects of these things, but even more important is how the player has expectations for these things and feels a heavy sense of context depending on how it's built and the people living in it.
Public spaces like living rooms are equally high-context. These are gathering places where people get together. Sometimes in passing, sometimes to cooperatively do something (eating, watching TV, etc), sometimes to do different things in the same area at the same time (one person cooking, one person dancing). Public spaces are further leveraged by scheduled events such as parties and family dinners. All of the various ways people can gather have context, and the space itself enables those contexts while simultaneously creating additional context in all the ways it doesn't quite fit. For example, if your party can't easily get food, you get more context: hungry guests moving into the kitchen instead of staying in a completely open space, now standing clumped together.
All that said, The Sims still uses a meter-by-meter construction system. Well, there are some differences.
The Sims construction focuses on walls to a great extent. Most base-building games have walls that are one tile thick: meter thick walls! But The Sims has paper-thin walls, and this allows the player to carve up map quite densely and with ease. This packs far more useable space into the same size map. This may sound unimportant, but it's critical. Not only can you fit more, larger characters onto the player's screen at one time, but the characters are also substantially closer together, allowing them to interact more regularly and freely. For example, someone in the kitchen can easily chat with someone in the living room, whereas if the walls were a meter thick, that would feel more like shouting range.
These seem like small details, but when it comes to creating human context, human details like that matter.
The Sims also has complex standing positions. Rather than "one tile per person", people in The Sims can stand in arbitrary places and in arbitrary groups. Although I don't think The Sims uses proximity as a reflection of intimacy, this is an obvious use: people who stand closely are more intimate than ones that stand meters apart. Similarly, people who sit on a couch together are in a different social situation than people sitting on random chairs.
In short, a dense space that can be used by people standing in a wide variety of configurations. A dense space with variable publicness and utility.
Combined with our off-map jobs, this clearly reflects a focus on someone's home, rather than the more widely-scoped mixed spaces of most base-building games.
Classically base-building games have avoided being solely about someone's home. Statistically, the other aspects of the base are more interesting. But statistically interesting is not what we're interested in. Topologically interesting, yes. But we're simplifying the statistical aspect, and a very easy way to do that is to chop off all the job-related base-building stuff.
From here, deciding a genre is probably critical, since 'home' has a different meaning depending on the genre.
If we set it in the modern era, it'll be very Simslike, because we've basically reverse engineered the core features of that game.
A superhero genre would work well. A team tower or secret base would be our home. Our characters could have night patrols, daytime rescue missions, media reachouts, school, day jobs, investigations - those would be off-site. On-site abstracted jobs could involve training, radio support, research, crafting, etc. This would no doubt be an interesting setup, but there is a weakness in that superhero bases tend to be attacked. This isn't as bad as in most base-building games, because 90% of your assets are locked into your inhabitants, not your facility. Rebuilding or moving is cheap enough. But players would still focus on defenses, and that may be hard to make feel just interesting enough without taking over the game entirely.
A fantasy setting could go rural or adventurous. A rural setting would allow people to go off map for things like farming, crafting, etc. It would also allow for interesting long-term setups, since sending children away for years would not be uncommon. However, I'm not sure that the feel of rural fantasy life would make much of an impact on the player.
An adventuring setting could be fun, though. You could run a guildhouse. It would have a lot of similarities with the superhero idea, but missions would often take several days, and managing funds would probably be more important. The medieval lifestyle simplifies the living space considerably, and characters would be far more likely to have to spend their leisure time together instead of separately watching TV or whatever.
A sci fi setting might be fun. You could create a Mars base or something, with dome bubbles for inhabitable areas. Within each dome, only thin walls would be used for weight and air permeability, allowing for very dense space. The lifestyle of science fiction might not have much impact on the player, but sci fi is more flexible than fantasy, so it's possible to just make their lifestyles more familiar even if it doesn't really make too much sense in the setting.
Well, you could also do something like Firefly, where it's aboard a space ship. The problem with this is that space ships often have very heavy, environmentally-sealed areas. In addition, there's not really any "off map" to go to, meaning that our job management might be hard.
A fantasy sailing ship might be fun, too. Job management might be hard due to the lack of 'off map', but I think it could be managed.
There are a lot of possibilities. I don't really feel the need to push further down any given road right now, though. I'll just let my brain rest a bit.
What do you think?
One thing we need to do is abstract jobs more than Rimworld and other base-building games do. If jobs are simulated in the same space and time as the home, then duties won't be very isolated. This means it's difficult to control the way duties work and the events they cause, and it also makes the duty time 'permeable' - people can swing in and out as they see fit. Those are all bad things.
Therefore, our first goal is to create workspaces separate from our home spaces. The two obvious approaches are out-map and in-map jobs.
Out-map jobs are simply duties that take characters out of the densely simulated home area and off to somewhere else. For example, a farmer leaves to tend the fields, which are not part of the same map. Or a superhero leaves to patrol the city, which is obviously not inside the secret base. These remote areas can still be managed by the player - setting up exactly how many of what fields are where, or what the patrol route is - but they're not simulated in the same space and the workers are not available to the people still at home. Of course, out-map jobs are also good in that you can change the remote conditions without needing to change the local conditions, or visa-versa.
In-map jobs are when the worker is still in the home space, but not being simulated as part of the home experience. This could be something like a woodshop - the worker is technically still on the map, but they aren't wandering around or chatting or worrying about whether they need to go to the bathroom. In a superhero setting, this could be researchers or radio support or training - anything that can be done locally and allows us to lock them into a set pattern for the day. The difficulty with this approach is that it doesn't naturally give a schedule - you can train whenever, you can research whenever, etc. That makes it a little harder to create scheduling frission between different jobs.
Obviously jobs aren't the only thing that matter in our design, but with this in mind, we know that a big part of our design will be outside the map, or at least abstracted within the map.
Within our densely-simulated space, we need to design carefully. The purpose of this space is to help build personal stories both in gameplay and in the player's mind. Most of the base-building games that are popular these days are meter-by-meter designs. This has many advantages, allowing the player to express themselves freely while also locking the player into topological challenges presented by both the initial setup and the player's own previous base-building choices. It's a good way to create opportunities for the player to freely create a base with a lot of unusual elements both incidental and purposeful in an attempt to optimize performance.
But that's a base-centric approach. If we plan to be people-centric, we need our bases to support story and context, both with game mechanics and in the player's mind.
What can do that?
Well, if we want to create context, then we have to make the inhabitants relate to the space with context. That is, the people in the world have to want to use the space in specific ways that produce familiar or memorable stories.
In The Sims, examples of this would be the bathroom. There are rules about exclusivity in the bathroom - it's usually one person at a time, but perhaps family can use it at the same time. You can create different kinds of bathrooms to give the player funny stories about how the bathroom works - for example, sticking a window in it facing the living room. The exclusivity rules are in-game rules that are familiar to the player and create good context, while the funny design alternatives are mostly in the player's head, but still create good context.
Bedrooms are similar: is it one person's room? A big bed for the parents? A crowded row of beds for a bunkroom? There are in-game rules about the effects of these things, but even more important is how the player has expectations for these things and feels a heavy sense of context depending on how it's built and the people living in it.
Public spaces like living rooms are equally high-context. These are gathering places where people get together. Sometimes in passing, sometimes to cooperatively do something (eating, watching TV, etc), sometimes to do different things in the same area at the same time (one person cooking, one person dancing). Public spaces are further leveraged by scheduled events such as parties and family dinners. All of the various ways people can gather have context, and the space itself enables those contexts while simultaneously creating additional context in all the ways it doesn't quite fit. For example, if your party can't easily get food, you get more context: hungry guests moving into the kitchen instead of staying in a completely open space, now standing clumped together.
All that said, The Sims still uses a meter-by-meter construction system. Well, there are some differences.
The Sims construction focuses on walls to a great extent. Most base-building games have walls that are one tile thick: meter thick walls! But The Sims has paper-thin walls, and this allows the player to carve up map quite densely and with ease. This packs far more useable space into the same size map. This may sound unimportant, but it's critical. Not only can you fit more, larger characters onto the player's screen at one time, but the characters are also substantially closer together, allowing them to interact more regularly and freely. For example, someone in the kitchen can easily chat with someone in the living room, whereas if the walls were a meter thick, that would feel more like shouting range.
These seem like small details, but when it comes to creating human context, human details like that matter.
The Sims also has complex standing positions. Rather than "one tile per person", people in The Sims can stand in arbitrary places and in arbitrary groups. Although I don't think The Sims uses proximity as a reflection of intimacy, this is an obvious use: people who stand closely are more intimate than ones that stand meters apart. Similarly, people who sit on a couch together are in a different social situation than people sitting on random chairs.
In short, a dense space that can be used by people standing in a wide variety of configurations. A dense space with variable publicness and utility.
Combined with our off-map jobs, this clearly reflects a focus on someone's home, rather than the more widely-scoped mixed spaces of most base-building games.
Classically base-building games have avoided being solely about someone's home. Statistically, the other aspects of the base are more interesting. But statistically interesting is not what we're interested in. Topologically interesting, yes. But we're simplifying the statistical aspect, and a very easy way to do that is to chop off all the job-related base-building stuff.
From here, deciding a genre is probably critical, since 'home' has a different meaning depending on the genre.
If we set it in the modern era, it'll be very Simslike, because we've basically reverse engineered the core features of that game.
A superhero genre would work well. A team tower or secret base would be our home. Our characters could have night patrols, daytime rescue missions, media reachouts, school, day jobs, investigations - those would be off-site. On-site abstracted jobs could involve training, radio support, research, crafting, etc. This would no doubt be an interesting setup, but there is a weakness in that superhero bases tend to be attacked. This isn't as bad as in most base-building games, because 90% of your assets are locked into your inhabitants, not your facility. Rebuilding or moving is cheap enough. But players would still focus on defenses, and that may be hard to make feel just interesting enough without taking over the game entirely.
A fantasy setting could go rural or adventurous. A rural setting would allow people to go off map for things like farming, crafting, etc. It would also allow for interesting long-term setups, since sending children away for years would not be uncommon. However, I'm not sure that the feel of rural fantasy life would make much of an impact on the player.
An adventuring setting could be fun, though. You could run a guildhouse. It would have a lot of similarities with the superhero idea, but missions would often take several days, and managing funds would probably be more important. The medieval lifestyle simplifies the living space considerably, and characters would be far more likely to have to spend their leisure time together instead of separately watching TV or whatever.
A sci fi setting might be fun. You could create a Mars base or something, with dome bubbles for inhabitable areas. Within each dome, only thin walls would be used for weight and air permeability, allowing for very dense space. The lifestyle of science fiction might not have much impact on the player, but sci fi is more flexible than fantasy, so it's possible to just make their lifestyles more familiar even if it doesn't really make too much sense in the setting.
Well, you could also do something like Firefly, where it's aboard a space ship. The problem with this is that space ships often have very heavy, environmentally-sealed areas. In addition, there's not really any "off map" to go to, meaning that our job management might be hard.
A fantasy sailing ship might be fun, too. Job management might be hard due to the lack of 'off map', but I think it could be managed.
There are a lot of possibilities. I don't really feel the need to push further down any given road right now, though. I'll just let my brain rest a bit.
What do you think?
Monday, June 17, 2013
Rating and Enjoying Games
I'm having a rough time of it this week, because I'm playing The Last of Us. Like Bioshock Infinite, it is a shitty game whose gamey gameness and shitty story execution gets in the way of a beautiful world. Like Bioshock Infinite it's basically adulated by everyone. Everyone loves this objectively shitty game because it has a great world.
... Maybe this started with MMORPGs. Maybe they made it acceptable.
Anyway, I don't like these games, and a big part of why I don't like them is the story. I don't like the gameplay, either, and to me the two are linked... but let's focus specifically on the story as written rather than the story as ruined by bugs and horrific murders to make the game "fun".
I have come up with a five star rating system, which I hope you will enjoy considering. Every star is its own star, rather than just being part of a numeric total.
Star 1: Are you playing as the most interesting character?
Many games introduce interesting characters, then make you play as the grimdark white guy. Now, when we say interesting, we mean across several axes. Both the character's story arc and their actual gameplay need to be considered. Also, the constraints of the story and game must be taken into consideration. For example, you can't say that Marcus from Gears of War is a bad choice because you would rather play as a helicopter or an alien brood queen or whatever. You can only say that Marcus is a bad choice if there is another character that could go through the same game world and overall plot, but have a more interesting time of it.
For example, in The Last of Us, you play as the exceedingly boring Grimdark mcNeedsNewGoldfish. He is so boring and his character arc so trite that the only thing that makes him vaguely interesting is his voice actor. In this game I can say, without a doubt, that he is the most boring choice of main character. Both socially and in terms of gameplay, he has the most boring and typical interactions. Given the extensive reliance on instant-death failure conditions, stealth, and ranged sniping, I think almost any other character could have walked the same world and plot arc without straining credulity. In fact, it would have felt scarier and less annoying if you were playing as a child instead of a big strong man that instantly dies and respawns to try again all the time.
So The Last of Us gets no star here.
On the other hand, in Bioshock Infinite the character you play is Grimdark mcNeedsNewGoldfish. Although identical in basically every detail, he is linked into the story at a pretty deep level. The plot would have to be changed considerably if you were going to play as someone else, and his nature as the destroyer of the floating city requires him to be some kind of big horrible combat monster. On the other hand, several characters are introduced that would have been more interesting to play. The same game from the perspective of the broken old commander, the leader of the rebellion, or the giant monster-bird would have all been at least as interesting gameplay-wise and more interesting in terms of characterization and novelty.
So I would give Bioshock Infinite half a star, here.
Star 2: Are you playing the story?
Most games have a serious problem with story/gameplay segregation. However, in this case we'll let some amount of that slide. We don't need the player to have control over the story in all aspects. But what we do need is a story that doesn't clash with the player's actions. For example, in Final Fantasy VI, you can't stop the world of ruin from emerging, even if you win every single fight. But nobody feels personally offended that it happened, because it was framed such that the player's actions couldn't possibly have prevented it.
On the other hand, in Mass Effect III you keep running into Grimdark mcSelfinsertninja who always arrives and leaves in cutscenes, making your characters look impossibly inept and only escaping because the game literally prevents you from firing at him. This is building a story on false pretenses: if you have to ignore what the player would do or did in order to make your story beat work, it doesn't work.
In Bioshock Infinite the story really railroads you, but there's only a few places where I felt the game was ignoring me. In The Last of Us, it was the same way, although I've not yet beaten it and they could drop the ball. In both games, you are actually playing the story, rather than playing a game while a story is dictated to you. The gameplay often makes zero sense, but I guess that's par for the course.
Star 3: Is the story culturally relevant?
Games are not known for their cultural relevance. Most games are, to put it lightly, willing participants in our culture's childish weaknesses. Putting it less lightly, games tend to be sexist, racist, ultra-violent, nationalistic, Madonna-fetish horrorshows. Like, um, Bioshock Infinite. The Last of Us isn't quite so bad, as it has some very believable women, children, and POC.
You can argue that there's nothing wrong with telling those stories, and I'll agree. But one of the things a professional story-teller does is understand the culture they are giving the story to. They don't have to make every story a counterculture masterpiece, but they do have to understand the sort of things their target culture is going through. A good story echoes the culture in such a way that it touches a part of the audience they didn't really realize they had.
This is the reason so many older books and stories don't interest young people. It's not because young people are uncultured - it's because they are in a different culture. The version of Snow White where the witch dances herself to death wearing red-hot iron shoes was something that spoke to the culture of that era, but in our culture it tends to make people go "uh... who are the good guys, again?"
In terms of cultural relevance, both Bioshock Infinite and The Last of Us get half a star. They touch the popular culture with some interesting thoughts, but drop the ball by blindly perpetuating really boring white-bread machismo.
Star 4: Do people behave like people?
In many video games, people are only there to serve the needs of the story and be killed as required. They don't act like people.
Believe it or not, in most first person shooters, this is done well. While BLOPS characters have all the depth of cardboard, they are believable people. Most people also have the depth of cardboard, I guess.
On the other hand, in Bioshock Infinite only one person behaves like a person: the female lead. Everyone else in the game behaves like a caricature. Even if you argue for one of the zanier interpretations of the game world, it's bad writing. Nothing pulls me out of the game like someone randomly deciding to kill you because, um... you need to fight every single person you meet? So no star for Infinite.
The Last of Us had much more realistic people. I really felt these characters as people. They were pretty good. Even the faceless villains that you mow down because you're mysteriously incapable of climbing over a chest-high wall instead all felt like people. The only gotchas were the numerous bugs that resulted in people behaving in truly bizarre ways (strangling nothing, knocking over invisible vases, etc). But that's not a writing problem, that's a programming issue. So they get a star.
Star 5: Is the world immersive?
In both Infinite and The Last of Us the world was immersive. In fact, the only non-immersive thing about these games was their gameplay.
So they both get a star here.
...
So on my five-star story quality chart, Bioshock Infinite gets 3 stars and The Last of Us gets... 3 stars. That wasn't on purpose, but they come out roughly equal.
Notice all the things my stars don't include. Quality of writing. Voice acting. Coolness of plot twist.
Well, half of those are polish-related rather than part of the core story, and the other half are so subjective that they can't be rated. For example, I found Bioshick Infinite's "twist" painfully banal pseudo-philosophical fluff. So I don't include it.
Instead I explicitly frame the story in relation to the target culture and game, and ask questions about how well it performs in that specific situation. The answer for Infinite and The Last of Us is... better than average.
BUT THEY GET ZERO STARS FOR GAMEPLAY.
... Maybe this started with MMORPGs. Maybe they made it acceptable.
Anyway, I don't like these games, and a big part of why I don't like them is the story. I don't like the gameplay, either, and to me the two are linked... but let's focus specifically on the story as written rather than the story as ruined by bugs and horrific murders to make the game "fun".
I have come up with a five star rating system, which I hope you will enjoy considering. Every star is its own star, rather than just being part of a numeric total.
Star 1: Are you playing as the most interesting character?
Many games introduce interesting characters, then make you play as the grimdark white guy. Now, when we say interesting, we mean across several axes. Both the character's story arc and their actual gameplay need to be considered. Also, the constraints of the story and game must be taken into consideration. For example, you can't say that Marcus from Gears of War is a bad choice because you would rather play as a helicopter or an alien brood queen or whatever. You can only say that Marcus is a bad choice if there is another character that could go through the same game world and overall plot, but have a more interesting time of it.
For example, in The Last of Us, you play as the exceedingly boring Grimdark mcNeedsNewGoldfish. He is so boring and his character arc so trite that the only thing that makes him vaguely interesting is his voice actor. In this game I can say, without a doubt, that he is the most boring choice of main character. Both socially and in terms of gameplay, he has the most boring and typical interactions. Given the extensive reliance on instant-death failure conditions, stealth, and ranged sniping, I think almost any other character could have walked the same world and plot arc without straining credulity. In fact, it would have felt scarier and less annoying if you were playing as a child instead of a big strong man that instantly dies and respawns to try again all the time.
So The Last of Us gets no star here.
On the other hand, in Bioshock Infinite the character you play is Grimdark mcNeedsNewGoldfish. Although identical in basically every detail, he is linked into the story at a pretty deep level. The plot would have to be changed considerably if you were going to play as someone else, and his nature as the destroyer of the floating city requires him to be some kind of big horrible combat monster. On the other hand, several characters are introduced that would have been more interesting to play. The same game from the perspective of the broken old commander, the leader of the rebellion, or the giant monster-bird would have all been at least as interesting gameplay-wise and more interesting in terms of characterization and novelty.
So I would give Bioshock Infinite half a star, here.
Star 2: Are you playing the story?
Most games have a serious problem with story/gameplay segregation. However, in this case we'll let some amount of that slide. We don't need the player to have control over the story in all aspects. But what we do need is a story that doesn't clash with the player's actions. For example, in Final Fantasy VI, you can't stop the world of ruin from emerging, even if you win every single fight. But nobody feels personally offended that it happened, because it was framed such that the player's actions couldn't possibly have prevented it.
On the other hand, in Mass Effect III you keep running into Grimdark mcSelfinsertninja who always arrives and leaves in cutscenes, making your characters look impossibly inept and only escaping because the game literally prevents you from firing at him. This is building a story on false pretenses: if you have to ignore what the player would do or did in order to make your story beat work, it doesn't work.
In Bioshock Infinite the story really railroads you, but there's only a few places where I felt the game was ignoring me. In The Last of Us, it was the same way, although I've not yet beaten it and they could drop the ball. In both games, you are actually playing the story, rather than playing a game while a story is dictated to you. The gameplay often makes zero sense, but I guess that's par for the course.
Star 3: Is the story culturally relevant?
Games are not known for their cultural relevance. Most games are, to put it lightly, willing participants in our culture's childish weaknesses. Putting it less lightly, games tend to be sexist, racist, ultra-violent, nationalistic, Madonna-fetish horrorshows. Like, um, Bioshock Infinite. The Last of Us isn't quite so bad, as it has some very believable women, children, and POC.
You can argue that there's nothing wrong with telling those stories, and I'll agree. But one of the things a professional story-teller does is understand the culture they are giving the story to. They don't have to make every story a counterculture masterpiece, but they do have to understand the sort of things their target culture is going through. A good story echoes the culture in such a way that it touches a part of the audience they didn't really realize they had.
This is the reason so many older books and stories don't interest young people. It's not because young people are uncultured - it's because they are in a different culture. The version of Snow White where the witch dances herself to death wearing red-hot iron shoes was something that spoke to the culture of that era, but in our culture it tends to make people go "uh... who are the good guys, again?"
In terms of cultural relevance, both Bioshock Infinite and The Last of Us get half a star. They touch the popular culture with some interesting thoughts, but drop the ball by blindly perpetuating really boring white-bread machismo.
Star 4: Do people behave like people?
In many video games, people are only there to serve the needs of the story and be killed as required. They don't act like people.
Believe it or not, in most first person shooters, this is done well. While BLOPS characters have all the depth of cardboard, they are believable people. Most people also have the depth of cardboard, I guess.
On the other hand, in Bioshock Infinite only one person behaves like a person: the female lead. Everyone else in the game behaves like a caricature. Even if you argue for one of the zanier interpretations of the game world, it's bad writing. Nothing pulls me out of the game like someone randomly deciding to kill you because, um... you need to fight every single person you meet? So no star for Infinite.
The Last of Us had much more realistic people. I really felt these characters as people. They were pretty good. Even the faceless villains that you mow down because you're mysteriously incapable of climbing over a chest-high wall instead all felt like people. The only gotchas were the numerous bugs that resulted in people behaving in truly bizarre ways (strangling nothing, knocking over invisible vases, etc). But that's not a writing problem, that's a programming issue. So they get a star.
Star 5: Is the world immersive?
In both Infinite and The Last of Us the world was immersive. In fact, the only non-immersive thing about these games was their gameplay.
So they both get a star here.
...
So on my five-star story quality chart, Bioshock Infinite gets 3 stars and The Last of Us gets... 3 stars. That wasn't on purpose, but they come out roughly equal.
Notice all the things my stars don't include. Quality of writing. Voice acting. Coolness of plot twist.
Well, half of those are polish-related rather than part of the core story, and the other half are so subjective that they can't be rated. For example, I found Bioshick Infinite's "twist" painfully banal pseudo-philosophical fluff. So I don't include it.
Instead I explicitly frame the story in relation to the target culture and game, and ask questions about how well it performs in that specific situation. The answer for Infinite and The Last of Us is... better than average.
BUT THEY GET ZERO STARS FOR GAMEPLAY.
Thursday, April 25, 2013
War Stories and Power Rangers
A while back, I read something about the new XCom game. The guy (I don't remember who) said that, regardless of the mechanical changes, the new XCom game was great because it still allowed you to build emergent stories with your characters. The way that your characters operated in combat was easy to turn into stories in your head, as your badass Rambo held off half a dozen monsters against all odds before dying to a brain-eater. War stories.
At the time, I thought to myself "oh, I geuss I can see that." It's been bouncing around in my skull for a few months, though, and now I'm really starting to explore it.
It started with my exploration of the Power-Rangers-Spoof RPG that I created but never polished or finished. I came up with some mechanics for creating a unique fusion of teamwork and independence, and it seemed like it'd be fun. So I made a prototype, as you do. In the process, I learned way too much about Power Rangers. I'm not really a fan, so I didn't really know anything about them aside from the very basics. But it turns out that there's a lot of character development packed into the various seasons, at least if Linkara's summaries can be trusted. It's shaky and bumpy, but the character growth definitely adds to the show... even though some of it seems to be post-hoc rationalization.
I started thinking to myself about that XCom game that let you build your own stories out of the battlefield circumstances. I started thinking about how Power Rangers does something similar off the battlefield. You can't do the XCom thing in Power Rangers, because Power Rangers is a TV show, not a video game. Tactical complexity is sharp and easy in a video game, but on TV it's heavy and opaque. On the other hand, it's not so easy to do the out-of-combat narratives in a video game, because there's not really any mechanics that communicate it.
Fundamentally, it felt similar. The way a ranger will show up, drop out, get injured, recover, save everyone, fail miserably, be in the right place, be in the wrong place, pull out a can of whoop-ass... it's identical to the pattern you get when you reassemble the war stories from an XCom battle.
You can split both things up into the same basic kinds of progression made out of the same kinds of elements. Let's go ahead and explore them.
There seem to be two fundamental kinds of element: engagement elements and maneuvering elements. In XCOM, moving your characters is the maneuver element - and the enemies also move. In Power Rangers, the maneuver element is story beats. As you would move a soldier into position behind cover, in Power Rangers they would have a ranger go spying for monsters in the Abandoned Warehouse District. In the same way that you might open a door and find an enemy waiting for you, the ranger might find himself ambushed. In the same way that you might have a medic rush over to heal a soldier, a ranger might be encouraged and focused by a pep talk.
Of course, then you have the engagements, where the soldiers and rangers are actually in direct danger. In both cases, this is always strongly tied to the maneuvering that surrounds it. Both sides maneuver to keep conflicts weighted in their favor, delaying or accelerating them, gathering allies or obstructing enemies, moving out of sight, moving to see if there are enemies hiding, creating cover and safety, flanking to eliminate cover and safety. On the other hand, this isn't strictly one-way. There are many different kinds of engagements, and you may simply choose to use a different engagement if maneuvering seems difficult. The enemy is behind cover? Blow away the cover, or throw a grenade in behind.
The same kind of philosophy can be applied to Power Rangers. The different kinds of engagement don't map one-to-one with machine guns, sniper rifles, grenades, rocket launchers, etc, but they do have similar depth. Civilian fighting, basic suit fighting, enhanced suit fighting, mecha fighting, combined mecha fighting... while it's true that each ranger has a specialty, in most cases the engagement type is determined by how the group chooses to fight, rather than by which of the group steps forward. I think that's interesting.
The maneuvering is also very diverse. Since it's actually written rather than algorithmic, it probably doesn't fit as neatly into the kind of topological jockeying you get with XCom soldiers. What are the story-beat maneuvers which match "move agent 1 up to the trash can for cover. Agent 2 should angle for a look in through the window at range. Agent 3 should close and look through the window close-up"... it'd be a stretch to try and make the story beats mimic that precisely. But, on the other hand, they don't have to. Like engagement types, it's more important that the depth and connectivity to the engagements be maintained, not the precise methods.
One advantage we have when we're doing team-based engagement determination rather than unit-based engagement determination is that we can lose members of the team without losing any options. Aside from special cases, it doesn't matter whether we have all 5 team members or only 2: we can still fight as civilians, power suits, upgraded suits, or mecha. Sure, we'll have less power, but we'll have the same options. This means that members of the team can be tokens traded in maneuvering, which seems to be the core idea in story-beat maneuvers.
Rather than being concerned with topology, story-beat maneuvers are about who is with who. You don't creep up and look through a window: you send off a member to spy. You don't step on a trap and take damage: you get ambushed and captured. You don't take cover behind a trashcan: you stand your ground so that the other rangers have more time.
Without trying to clone the exact situations that the Power Rangers find themselves in, it's possible to create a maneuvering system which is still flexible. It needs to be unit-centric rather than team-centric, though, because stories mean more when they are about people. Even though engagements are about how the team decides to recombine and spend their shared energy, maneuvers still need to be individual.
The easiest solution is probably just to use the new XCom solution. Each team member's turn is maneuver-act, with some acts being engagements and some not. Similarly, as you level up you might find the actual mechanics slowly shifting. However, in essence, the idea of maneuver-act is a good one, sharp and clean.
Because maneuvering doesn't happen on actual space, it might be best to use "tagging" instead of "walking". So instead of telling a unit to walk X steps, you would tell a unit to tag another unit. Tag an ally to stay close to them, to engage when they engage. Tag an enemy to chase them, unlocking advanced attacks when you engage them. Every unit has two (or three, for tactical classes) tags, and they cycle. So you could tag an ally, and then tag an enemy on the next turn. You'd still be tagged to your ally, so if you then engaged the enemy, both of you would attack and be able to use advanced modes and techniques. Of course, if the enemy had double-tagged your ally, the enemy would have an even more significant bonus...
This is a simple method to create interconnectivity and topology from nothing. Moreover, your action phase after your maneuver phase offers a lot more options than simply "fiiiight!" You could shed an enemy's tag against you, for example. Or give an ally a pep-talk. Or scout. Or work on community awareness. Or pin an enemy down in a drawn-out fight that prevents them from tagging next round. Whatever.
The enemies have more or less the same rules, although they also have a bunch of other abilities. For example, some monsters might be able to kidnap a ranger in certain circumstances, or hold hostages, or depower rangers. These are usually related to acquiring a certain number of tags against noncombat targets, but in many cases the player can't even see those targets... or maybe even the monsters that did the tagging. So if a monster gets a turn and didn't seem to tag anything, maybe you ought to tag that monster and go a-spying before he digs up the depowering candle or whatever.
Other units and targets also exist - military bases, vulnerable townsfolk, suddenly-appearing secret labs full of magic crystals, ominous portals in the sky... the same tag-and-act method applies to them as well. In many cases you'll want to tag defensively so that you can defend them if the enemy attacks. This is where tactical classes are useful, because of their extra tag token. Of course, tags cycle, so you may end up holding off on tagging on round 4 so you don't lose that important defensive tag you put up on round 1...
In the end, the emergent topology and complex "who is teamed up at the moment" mechanics should result in the same kind of stories that emerge from games like X-Com.
This allows us to create stories in the same tense way that XCom combats do by using noncombat maneuvers as part of the overarching story.
... Now, what if you replaced the engagement conflict with a noncombat conflict?
At the time, I thought to myself "oh, I geuss I can see that." It's been bouncing around in my skull for a few months, though, and now I'm really starting to explore it.
It started with my exploration of the Power-Rangers-Spoof RPG that I created but never polished or finished. I came up with some mechanics for creating a unique fusion of teamwork and independence, and it seemed like it'd be fun. So I made a prototype, as you do. In the process, I learned way too much about Power Rangers. I'm not really a fan, so I didn't really know anything about them aside from the very basics. But it turns out that there's a lot of character development packed into the various seasons, at least if Linkara's summaries can be trusted. It's shaky and bumpy, but the character growth definitely adds to the show... even though some of it seems to be post-hoc rationalization.
I started thinking to myself about that XCom game that let you build your own stories out of the battlefield circumstances. I started thinking about how Power Rangers does something similar off the battlefield. You can't do the XCom thing in Power Rangers, because Power Rangers is a TV show, not a video game. Tactical complexity is sharp and easy in a video game, but on TV it's heavy and opaque. On the other hand, it's not so easy to do the out-of-combat narratives in a video game, because there's not really any mechanics that communicate it.
Fundamentally, it felt similar. The way a ranger will show up, drop out, get injured, recover, save everyone, fail miserably, be in the right place, be in the wrong place, pull out a can of whoop-ass... it's identical to the pattern you get when you reassemble the war stories from an XCom battle.
You can split both things up into the same basic kinds of progression made out of the same kinds of elements. Let's go ahead and explore them.
There seem to be two fundamental kinds of element: engagement elements and maneuvering elements. In XCOM, moving your characters is the maneuver element - and the enemies also move. In Power Rangers, the maneuver element is story beats. As you would move a soldier into position behind cover, in Power Rangers they would have a ranger go spying for monsters in the Abandoned Warehouse District. In the same way that you might open a door and find an enemy waiting for you, the ranger might find himself ambushed. In the same way that you might have a medic rush over to heal a soldier, a ranger might be encouraged and focused by a pep talk.
Of course, then you have the engagements, where the soldiers and rangers are actually in direct danger. In both cases, this is always strongly tied to the maneuvering that surrounds it. Both sides maneuver to keep conflicts weighted in their favor, delaying or accelerating them, gathering allies or obstructing enemies, moving out of sight, moving to see if there are enemies hiding, creating cover and safety, flanking to eliminate cover and safety. On the other hand, this isn't strictly one-way. There are many different kinds of engagements, and you may simply choose to use a different engagement if maneuvering seems difficult. The enemy is behind cover? Blow away the cover, or throw a grenade in behind.
The same kind of philosophy can be applied to Power Rangers. The different kinds of engagement don't map one-to-one with machine guns, sniper rifles, grenades, rocket launchers, etc, but they do have similar depth. Civilian fighting, basic suit fighting, enhanced suit fighting, mecha fighting, combined mecha fighting... while it's true that each ranger has a specialty, in most cases the engagement type is determined by how the group chooses to fight, rather than by which of the group steps forward. I think that's interesting.
The maneuvering is also very diverse. Since it's actually written rather than algorithmic, it probably doesn't fit as neatly into the kind of topological jockeying you get with XCom soldiers. What are the story-beat maneuvers which match "move agent 1 up to the trash can for cover. Agent 2 should angle for a look in through the window at range. Agent 3 should close and look through the window close-up"... it'd be a stretch to try and make the story beats mimic that precisely. But, on the other hand, they don't have to. Like engagement types, it's more important that the depth and connectivity to the engagements be maintained, not the precise methods.
One advantage we have when we're doing team-based engagement determination rather than unit-based engagement determination is that we can lose members of the team without losing any options. Aside from special cases, it doesn't matter whether we have all 5 team members or only 2: we can still fight as civilians, power suits, upgraded suits, or mecha. Sure, we'll have less power, but we'll have the same options. This means that members of the team can be tokens traded in maneuvering, which seems to be the core idea in story-beat maneuvers.
Rather than being concerned with topology, story-beat maneuvers are about who is with who. You don't creep up and look through a window: you send off a member to spy. You don't step on a trap and take damage: you get ambushed and captured. You don't take cover behind a trashcan: you stand your ground so that the other rangers have more time.
Without trying to clone the exact situations that the Power Rangers find themselves in, it's possible to create a maneuvering system which is still flexible. It needs to be unit-centric rather than team-centric, though, because stories mean more when they are about people. Even though engagements are about how the team decides to recombine and spend their shared energy, maneuvers still need to be individual.
The easiest solution is probably just to use the new XCom solution. Each team member's turn is maneuver-act, with some acts being engagements and some not. Similarly, as you level up you might find the actual mechanics slowly shifting. However, in essence, the idea of maneuver-act is a good one, sharp and clean.
Because maneuvering doesn't happen on actual space, it might be best to use "tagging" instead of "walking". So instead of telling a unit to walk X steps, you would tell a unit to tag another unit. Tag an ally to stay close to them, to engage when they engage. Tag an enemy to chase them, unlocking advanced attacks when you engage them. Every unit has two (or three, for tactical classes) tags, and they cycle. So you could tag an ally, and then tag an enemy on the next turn. You'd still be tagged to your ally, so if you then engaged the enemy, both of you would attack and be able to use advanced modes and techniques. Of course, if the enemy had double-tagged your ally, the enemy would have an even more significant bonus...
This is a simple method to create interconnectivity and topology from nothing. Moreover, your action phase after your maneuver phase offers a lot more options than simply "fiiiight!" You could shed an enemy's tag against you, for example. Or give an ally a pep-talk. Or scout. Or work on community awareness. Or pin an enemy down in a drawn-out fight that prevents them from tagging next round. Whatever.
The enemies have more or less the same rules, although they also have a bunch of other abilities. For example, some monsters might be able to kidnap a ranger in certain circumstances, or hold hostages, or depower rangers. These are usually related to acquiring a certain number of tags against noncombat targets, but in many cases the player can't even see those targets... or maybe even the monsters that did the tagging. So if a monster gets a turn and didn't seem to tag anything, maybe you ought to tag that monster and go a-spying before he digs up the depowering candle or whatever.
Other units and targets also exist - military bases, vulnerable townsfolk, suddenly-appearing secret labs full of magic crystals, ominous portals in the sky... the same tag-and-act method applies to them as well. In many cases you'll want to tag defensively so that you can defend them if the enemy attacks. This is where tactical classes are useful, because of their extra tag token. Of course, tags cycle, so you may end up holding off on tagging on round 4 so you don't lose that important defensive tag you put up on round 1...
In the end, the emergent topology and complex "who is teamed up at the moment" mechanics should result in the same kind of stories that emerge from games like X-Com.
This allows us to create stories in the same tense way that XCom combats do by using noncombat maneuvers as part of the overarching story.
... Now, what if you replaced the engagement conflict with a noncombat conflict?
Wednesday, June 27, 2012
Aji Again
I use a concept called "aji" when thinking about game narrative design. Here's a good explanation: Unlimited Hyperbole. That's ten minutes long, but the explanation is about seven minutes in.
I'm going to describe my version, but you can listen to his version if I bungle it. I think they're the same basic concept.
"Aji" is a term from the board game "go" (or wei'qi, baduk, etc). Very roughly, it translates to "potential". The idea is that you put down a few stones in a loose configuration. The idea isn't to finalize the capture of the area. You don't build a solid wall. You just put a few stones down in a good configuration. Then, when the enemy approaches, you can use those stones to support your response. That may end up being a solid wall, or a tentacle monster than destroys the region for everyone, or even an inversion, where you force them to waste turns taking those initial stones while you play lightly and aggressively elsewhere.
To me, plot in games is the same.
You put down a few elements in a configuration. You want the configuration to have good aji - good potential. As the players act, you want the initial elements to flex and bend but support the new elements that arise.
It is similar to go because the play style is similar. The player makes a move, the game makes a move. If the game makes too many moves, then the player feels either lost or stifled, depending on the situation. If the player makes too many moves, they feel like they are boxing air rather than fighting against an evil mastermind.
Now, Pinchbeck is probably focusing more on the idea of vagueness, of leaving things open to interpretation. I tend to focus more on the idea of pacing and player agency. But the two are, in my opinion, very tightly linked.
Establishing too much, too fast is a great way to lock the player into a boring, trite plot they feel nothing about. On the other hand, establishing just enough to make the player go "and then?" will keep the players interested and invested.
In games with a GM (tabletop RPGs), the lack of detail is a huge asset because it allows you to flex and turn when you need to. If the players aren't sure whether Darth Vader is a good guy or a bad guy, you can establish him as one or the other when play demands.
In theory you could do something similar in a computer game, but it would probably require a lot of scripting. But the vagueness and openness still pays off, because the player spends a lot of time thinking about the various possibilities.
That's my philosophy on narrative design in games. Put down pieces. Places, people, concepts - just a few. Allow them to be established as the player moves through your world, rather than trying to force them on the player. You only rarely need to spell things out - that's usually too slow, boring, and laborious.
It's really not that hard: it's mostly just a matter of self-restraint. I know you want to show off all the details of the cool bad-ass you invented. But don't. Or do it later. Let the player breath.
I'm going to describe my version, but you can listen to his version if I bungle it. I think they're the same basic concept.
"Aji" is a term from the board game "go" (or wei'qi, baduk, etc). Very roughly, it translates to "potential". The idea is that you put down a few stones in a loose configuration. The idea isn't to finalize the capture of the area. You don't build a solid wall. You just put a few stones down in a good configuration. Then, when the enemy approaches, you can use those stones to support your response. That may end up being a solid wall, or a tentacle monster than destroys the region for everyone, or even an inversion, where you force them to waste turns taking those initial stones while you play lightly and aggressively elsewhere.
To me, plot in games is the same.
You put down a few elements in a configuration. You want the configuration to have good aji - good potential. As the players act, you want the initial elements to flex and bend but support the new elements that arise.
It is similar to go because the play style is similar. The player makes a move, the game makes a move. If the game makes too many moves, then the player feels either lost or stifled, depending on the situation. If the player makes too many moves, they feel like they are boxing air rather than fighting against an evil mastermind.
Now, Pinchbeck is probably focusing more on the idea of vagueness, of leaving things open to interpretation. I tend to focus more on the idea of pacing and player agency. But the two are, in my opinion, very tightly linked.
Establishing too much, too fast is a great way to lock the player into a boring, trite plot they feel nothing about. On the other hand, establishing just enough to make the player go "and then?" will keep the players interested and invested.
In games with a GM (tabletop RPGs), the lack of detail is a huge asset because it allows you to flex and turn when you need to. If the players aren't sure whether Darth Vader is a good guy or a bad guy, you can establish him as one or the other when play demands.
In theory you could do something similar in a computer game, but it would probably require a lot of scripting. But the vagueness and openness still pays off, because the player spends a lot of time thinking about the various possibilities.
That's my philosophy on narrative design in games. Put down pieces. Places, people, concepts - just a few. Allow them to be established as the player moves through your world, rather than trying to force them on the player. You only rarely need to spell things out - that's usually too slow, boring, and laborious.
It's really not that hard: it's mostly just a matter of self-restraint. I know you want to show off all the details of the cool bad-ass you invented. But don't. Or do it later. Let the player breath.
Monday, October 31, 2011
Narrative Games Redux
If you're not familiar with the basic argument about the role of narrative (story) in games, this essay is not a good place to start. This essay is about a specific approach.
I'd like to talk about the idea of adaptive narrative. That is, a story which changes as you interact with it, and not with a dialog tree.
If you're like me, you've played Heavy Rain. If not, a quick summary is: the game has no real gameplay, it's mostly a giant branching path story where you try to figure out who the killer is. Spoiler: it's the one person who's definitely not he killer.
As games go, Heavy Rain is a bit of a bust, more like an interactive movie where you can choose which characters die, when.
If you're like me, you've played the old Blade Runner adventure game. There are several games where you are investigating a crime in something like real time, and the NPCs are also advancing in their own plots at the same time. Blade Runner is simply the oldest one I know about. Like most of these games, the way you can interfere with other characters' scripted timelines means that there are a wide variety of endings. Like Heavy Rain, it features not a whole lot of actual gameplay... but it's an adventure game, so that's par for the course.
If you're like me, you've played Catherine, known for its combination of box-pushing puzzle sections and fan service. If you haven't played Catherine, you may be unaware of its bar and nightmare plateau scenes, where you can talk to people, let time pass, and in general feel like you're impacting on their lives. Catherine has gameplay, but it could be replaced with any gameplay you care to name and nobody would notice: it has no relation to the story progression.
In my long history of failing to create adaptive narratives, I've tried many things. But I'd like to consider an approach based on these three games.
The core of the idea is that there are other characters, and they do things in some kind of (probably scripted) timeline. While time doesn't have to advance at a constant march, the point is that their stories advance when yours does.
There are three kinds of "inflection points" I'd like to consider. That is to say, there are three ways I'd like to let the player interact with the NPCs.
1) When the NPC's timeline brings them into collision with the PCs timeline during an event sequence. This could be happenstance (they rob a bank you happen to be at) or it could be that one of you is seeking the other out on purpose. Either way, the interaction offers a clear chance to change the trajectory of one or both characters. This is a common method used by branching plotlines today.
2) When the player, in his free exploring, sticks his nose into an NPC's life. AKA "sidequest syndrome". To be honest, I don't like this this method. Most games that use this method do not use it to radically alter anything, they are primarily subquests or only affect very minor characters. For example, the romance plots in Mass Effect, or the way you can try to free the slaves in any Jedi game ever. This is mostly distinct from type 1 in that they rely on the player exploring to the right physical place and then putting his life on hold to do some subquest.
3) Lastly, a subset of NPCs (and the player) can gather into one place when they are "off duty". These are quiet times in everyone's plot lines, and serve much the same role as a safehouse in a horror game.
In these sections, you can talk to a lot of different NPCs, perhaps in phases as the "off duty" time wears on. You will get to know them better as characters, and form a bond with them. There is also the option of interfering with their plotlines by giving them items, advice, or introducing them to other NPCs.
It's this "off duty" section I'd like to see more of.
Right now, most of our adaptive narratives are set around the idea of giving the player an illusion of freedom while, at most, offering them two choices. Basically, if you can imagine it, the current method is a lot of parallel lines that occasionally jitter slightly to one side or the other as the player bumps them.
The "off duty section" method is more like if those parallel lines converge - three meet here, five meet there. Then they separate and go back to being parallel. This has a lot of advantages, in theory:
A) Keeping up with the Joneses. Because the off duty sections are reliable as a heartbeat, the players can get updated on how the plot line of each character is progressing. It serves as a regular and centralized way to keep up to date with everyone. This allows for many plot lines to be active at once, and for a much longer period of time, rather than the short bursts of sidequests most games use.
B) Deflection as gameplay. By bringing everyone together, you can weave the plot lines in a regular fashion, such that the momentary lulls appear at more or less the same time for every character. The player then has to choose which characters will receive his resources and help, and in what way. So you take an ordinary set of simple branches, and suddenly there is choice and gameplay.
C) Closed-world. This system works great in a non-open-world game, where the player is not allowed to randomly wander into the NPCs' normal lives. In this way, a lot of the scenes and activities of the NPCs can be "just talk", rather than actually being represented in the game engine or with cutscenes.
That's my thinking. You?
I'd like to talk about the idea of adaptive narrative. That is, a story which changes as you interact with it, and not with a dialog tree.
If you're like me, you've played Heavy Rain. If not, a quick summary is: the game has no real gameplay, it's mostly a giant branching path story where you try to figure out who the killer is. Spoiler: it's the one person who's definitely not he killer.
As games go, Heavy Rain is a bit of a bust, more like an interactive movie where you can choose which characters die, when.
If you're like me, you've played the old Blade Runner adventure game. There are several games where you are investigating a crime in something like real time, and the NPCs are also advancing in their own plots at the same time. Blade Runner is simply the oldest one I know about. Like most of these games, the way you can interfere with other characters' scripted timelines means that there are a wide variety of endings. Like Heavy Rain, it features not a whole lot of actual gameplay... but it's an adventure game, so that's par for the course.
If you're like me, you've played Catherine, known for its combination of box-pushing puzzle sections and fan service. If you haven't played Catherine, you may be unaware of its bar and nightmare plateau scenes, where you can talk to people, let time pass, and in general feel like you're impacting on their lives. Catherine has gameplay, but it could be replaced with any gameplay you care to name and nobody would notice: it has no relation to the story progression.
In my long history of failing to create adaptive narratives, I've tried many things. But I'd like to consider an approach based on these three games.
The core of the idea is that there are other characters, and they do things in some kind of (probably scripted) timeline. While time doesn't have to advance at a constant march, the point is that their stories advance when yours does.
There are three kinds of "inflection points" I'd like to consider. That is to say, there are three ways I'd like to let the player interact with the NPCs.
1) When the NPC's timeline brings them into collision with the PCs timeline during an event sequence. This could be happenstance (they rob a bank you happen to be at) or it could be that one of you is seeking the other out on purpose. Either way, the interaction offers a clear chance to change the trajectory of one or both characters. This is a common method used by branching plotlines today.
2) When the player, in his free exploring, sticks his nose into an NPC's life. AKA "sidequest syndrome". To be honest, I don't like this this method. Most games that use this method do not use it to radically alter anything, they are primarily subquests or only affect very minor characters. For example, the romance plots in Mass Effect, or the way you can try to free the slaves in any Jedi game ever. This is mostly distinct from type 1 in that they rely on the player exploring to the right physical place and then putting his life on hold to do some subquest.
3) Lastly, a subset of NPCs (and the player) can gather into one place when they are "off duty". These are quiet times in everyone's plot lines, and serve much the same role as a safehouse in a horror game.
In these sections, you can talk to a lot of different NPCs, perhaps in phases as the "off duty" time wears on. You will get to know them better as characters, and form a bond with them. There is also the option of interfering with their plotlines by giving them items, advice, or introducing them to other NPCs.
It's this "off duty" section I'd like to see more of.
Right now, most of our adaptive narratives are set around the idea of giving the player an illusion of freedom while, at most, offering them two choices. Basically, if you can imagine it, the current method is a lot of parallel lines that occasionally jitter slightly to one side or the other as the player bumps them.
The "off duty section" method is more like if those parallel lines converge - three meet here, five meet there. Then they separate and go back to being parallel. This has a lot of advantages, in theory:
A) Keeping up with the Joneses. Because the off duty sections are reliable as a heartbeat, the players can get updated on how the plot line of each character is progressing. It serves as a regular and centralized way to keep up to date with everyone. This allows for many plot lines to be active at once, and for a much longer period of time, rather than the short bursts of sidequests most games use.
B) Deflection as gameplay. By bringing everyone together, you can weave the plot lines in a regular fashion, such that the momentary lulls appear at more or less the same time for every character. The player then has to choose which characters will receive his resources and help, and in what way. So you take an ordinary set of simple branches, and suddenly there is choice and gameplay.
C) Closed-world. This system works great in a non-open-world game, where the player is not allowed to randomly wander into the NPCs' normal lives. In this way, a lot of the scenes and activities of the NPCs can be "just talk", rather than actually being represented in the game engine or with cutscenes.
That's my thinking. You?
Saturday, October 09, 2010
Interactive Movies
I've always been a fan of Quantic Dream's aspirations. The games they create are always worth playing, if just for how unusual they are. For those of you playing at home, Quantic Dream is known for creating games that are interactive movies. Heavy Rain was the most recent one.
I think it's a genre waiting to unfold. But I also think that Quantic Dream's games so far haven't started the unfolding process.
When I play their games, I am happy to play them. But the instant I set them down, there's absolutely no draw to pick it back up. In fact, there's a barrier.
To me, this feels the same way as when I play a long, constructive game like Civilization. If I don't finish the game in one stretch, I start over. Trying to pick up a half-built world is no fun. All the details that kept you interested have faded. You can remember the big strokes, but there's not much emotional investment any more.
Of course, when I lose track of a Civilization game, I can just start a new, random game. With an interactive movie, that's not really the case. Starting over means retreading the same steps, and it gets more boring each time.
What I'm saying is that I love playing interactive movies, but they're like movies: you don't watch half a movie and then come back to it the next day. At least, most people don't, and it's not really recommended.
The techniques you use to establish emotional investment in a movie or world-building game like Civilization revolve around details. The good acting, the interesting setpiece, the particular way he talks about her, and exactly what that city is building right now. This works well, it really gets us going. But it fades fast.
Games that are intended to be dropped and picked up again use different techniques. The Gears of War and Halo goons don't have to have nuanced relationships and excellent body language. The draw is in the quick drop into gameplay. It doesn't matter what the details are, the algorithm of the gameplay is what brings you back.
Or, in the case of things like StarWars and Star Trek, setting. I think that strong settings feel like gameplay in some ways. A setting with strong, evocative points that all the details hang from seems easier to immerse yourself in, especially on repeat visits.
At least, that's my feeling.
What's in the future for interactive movies and story-games?
Well, I think we'll find they become strongly episodic, and the episodes will be very short - four to five hours. Maybe the episodes will be built and sold in distinct packages, but I think it's more likely that the engine that runs the game will know how to build the next episode based on what happened in your last episode, within the limits of the dramatic arc.
We already see this a bit in Heavy Rain, where the game's progression is radically different depending on exactly what your characters do. I think Heavy Rain accomplishes this through insane amounts of carefully scripted events, but our techniques for doing some of this generatively are steadily advancing. As they do, I expect the game to make very clear distinctions as to the game's internal episodes.
I also think that story games will have to be built around settings rather than stories. The stories are important, but I think that a really vibrant setting with very clear "centerpieces" (such as the Force, the Enterprise, Mordor, etc) will be what draws the players back in after each episode, and I think most games will lean that way.
The biggest problem with creating a game like this is what to do at chapter ends.
Players are notoriously unreliable. Some players will happily play for twelve hours straight, while others will only eke out maybe forty-five minutes. You can ask them how long they plan on playing - and I expect we will start to - but even that is only vaguely accurate.
The ending of a chapter is therefore something really irritating. If your player quits halfway into the chapter, that can still be salvaged, although it's not ideal. But if a player quits fifteen minutes before the end boss? Or what if the chapter ends, but the player wants to continue playing for another twenty minutes?
I think there are two solution, one for each of those problems. Here are my suggestions.
For chapters ending early, I recommend an adaptive progression. If your player breaks it off, then when he comes back, make sure there's at least an hour of chapter left, even if he quit literally at the final fight. This hour of chapter gives you time to reintroduce the player to all the tiny details that get the moment-to-moment emotional investment. Similarly, you have to assume that they have forgotten all the little details from the first part of the chapter.
I don't mean that Gloria is trying to level up her fireball, or that Sven loves Sue. I mean the emotional touches - Gloria's husky voice, Sven's nervous coin-rolling trick, and the way Sue struggles with her umbrella in the rain. You can't just rush back into the scene where Sven is declaring his love for Sue, you've got to re-establish both Sven and Sue as characters worth caring about.
The other side of the problem is the post-chapter play.
Done right, an ending will really kick you down. There's a feeling like you just want to sit quietly for a while. As gamers, we seem to discourage this feeling. These days, our games either never end, or have endings that immediately scoot us on into the rest of the IP. It's rare that a game ends with as much emotional force as Chronotrigger, Beyond Good and Evil, and so many other famous games.
I recommend that we do not allow players to instantly move on to the next episode. I recommend that there is a second type of play where the players basically play house. Allowing the players to do some neutral gameplay like walking around the town, designing costumes, and playing around with move sets will allow them to decompress from what was hopefully a fantastic ending.
SO, that's my prediction for the future of story games. You?
I think it's a genre waiting to unfold. But I also think that Quantic Dream's games so far haven't started the unfolding process.
When I play their games, I am happy to play them. But the instant I set them down, there's absolutely no draw to pick it back up. In fact, there's a barrier.
To me, this feels the same way as when I play a long, constructive game like Civilization. If I don't finish the game in one stretch, I start over. Trying to pick up a half-built world is no fun. All the details that kept you interested have faded. You can remember the big strokes, but there's not much emotional investment any more.
Of course, when I lose track of a Civilization game, I can just start a new, random game. With an interactive movie, that's not really the case. Starting over means retreading the same steps, and it gets more boring each time.
What I'm saying is that I love playing interactive movies, but they're like movies: you don't watch half a movie and then come back to it the next day. At least, most people don't, and it's not really recommended.
The techniques you use to establish emotional investment in a movie or world-building game like Civilization revolve around details. The good acting, the interesting setpiece, the particular way he talks about her, and exactly what that city is building right now. This works well, it really gets us going. But it fades fast.
Games that are intended to be dropped and picked up again use different techniques. The Gears of War and Halo goons don't have to have nuanced relationships and excellent body language. The draw is in the quick drop into gameplay. It doesn't matter what the details are, the algorithm of the gameplay is what brings you back.
Or, in the case of things like StarWars and Star Trek, setting. I think that strong settings feel like gameplay in some ways. A setting with strong, evocative points that all the details hang from seems easier to immerse yourself in, especially on repeat visits.
At least, that's my feeling.
What's in the future for interactive movies and story-games?
Well, I think we'll find they become strongly episodic, and the episodes will be very short - four to five hours. Maybe the episodes will be built and sold in distinct packages, but I think it's more likely that the engine that runs the game will know how to build the next episode based on what happened in your last episode, within the limits of the dramatic arc.
We already see this a bit in Heavy Rain, where the game's progression is radically different depending on exactly what your characters do. I think Heavy Rain accomplishes this through insane amounts of carefully scripted events, but our techniques for doing some of this generatively are steadily advancing. As they do, I expect the game to make very clear distinctions as to the game's internal episodes.
I also think that story games will have to be built around settings rather than stories. The stories are important, but I think that a really vibrant setting with very clear "centerpieces" (such as the Force, the Enterprise, Mordor, etc) will be what draws the players back in after each episode, and I think most games will lean that way.
The biggest problem with creating a game like this is what to do at chapter ends.
Players are notoriously unreliable. Some players will happily play for twelve hours straight, while others will only eke out maybe forty-five minutes. You can ask them how long they plan on playing - and I expect we will start to - but even that is only vaguely accurate.
The ending of a chapter is therefore something really irritating. If your player quits halfway into the chapter, that can still be salvaged, although it's not ideal. But if a player quits fifteen minutes before the end boss? Or what if the chapter ends, but the player wants to continue playing for another twenty minutes?
I think there are two solution, one for each of those problems. Here are my suggestions.
For chapters ending early, I recommend an adaptive progression. If your player breaks it off, then when he comes back, make sure there's at least an hour of chapter left, even if he quit literally at the final fight. This hour of chapter gives you time to reintroduce the player to all the tiny details that get the moment-to-moment emotional investment. Similarly, you have to assume that they have forgotten all the little details from the first part of the chapter.
I don't mean that Gloria is trying to level up her fireball, or that Sven loves Sue. I mean the emotional touches - Gloria's husky voice, Sven's nervous coin-rolling trick, and the way Sue struggles with her umbrella in the rain. You can't just rush back into the scene where Sven is declaring his love for Sue, you've got to re-establish both Sven and Sue as characters worth caring about.
The other side of the problem is the post-chapter play.
Done right, an ending will really kick you down. There's a feeling like you just want to sit quietly for a while. As gamers, we seem to discourage this feeling. These days, our games either never end, or have endings that immediately scoot us on into the rest of the IP. It's rare that a game ends with as much emotional force as Chronotrigger, Beyond Good and Evil, and so many other famous games.
I recommend that we do not allow players to instantly move on to the next episode. I recommend that there is a second type of play where the players basically play house. Allowing the players to do some neutral gameplay like walking around the town, designing costumes, and playing around with move sets will allow them to decompress from what was hopefully a fantastic ending.
SO, that's my prediction for the future of story games. You?
Sunday, January 18, 2009
Landscaping for Nonlinear Play
I thought I'd bring up this idea and see if it holds up in the light.
I'm a big fan of strategy games, especially strategy RPGs, but the most fun I have is when I can conquer the world in the order I choose. This is actually pretty rare: you could do it in Dune, in one of the Dynasty Warriors, Brigandine, and a few other games, but overall it's very, very rare to be given a map and told to get to it.
It's not the same as a space-conquest game like Masters of Orion! I'm not talking about a game where the main complexity is in the landscape. I'm talking about a game where the main complexity is in the game part, and the landscape simply gives you... an outer play loop. Control over your vector. You play the main game because of your strategic choices, rather than the strategic choices being the main game. And these games are rare.
I can understand that to some extent. While it's not particularly difficult to program, it does make the game flow hard to control. That means both difficulty balancing and difficulty making meaningful plot arcs. So these games tend to have a wonky, unbalanced feel at times, and they never have a plot more complex than "oh, hey, you're the new king of the world!"
Well, let's think about how we could potentially overcome those problems and give our players as meaningful a plot experience as in any linear game.
...
One method would be to divorce the plot from the strategic game. Brigandine does this to some extent: the various knights often have plot arcs which progress regardless of your tactical choices, although they sometimes halt until you accomplish a major strategic victory such as destroying a specific kingdom.
This is a simple idea where there are linear plots tossed into the nonlinear game, and they progress pretty much independently of the nonlinear part. This is simple, but it isn't very tightly connected to the choices the player makes, so I'm not a big fan of leaving it like this.
There are a few kinds of events we can use as "anchors" or "linchpins" for the character arcs instead of having them simply progress linearly. A few are obvious: taking or losing specific zones, killing or acquiring specific heroes, finding specific unique items, etc. However, perhaps the more interesting ones are ones which are not linked to unique game events but are instead linked to general game events.
For example, if your character arc goes one way if you're on the main team most of the time, or another way if you're usually relegated to the back. How about if it changes based on whether you're badly injured in combat, or after you make a certain number of kills? A certain number of consecutive victories or losses? And, of course, whether your buddy is on the same team as you most of the time, and whether your buddy gets injured.
Now the difficulty is the large amount of scripting required per character. It would be very difficult to script up the usual two-dozen cast, because each character would have dozens of pages of branching script!
You could use some of the cheap tricks I tend to use, such as making it so no characters actually speak at any point. That cuts the amount of work by about 90%. But, of course, how to make it interesting and comprehendable without dialog?
Another choice would be to try to create "landscaped" characters instead of scripted characters. This is basically just writing the main dialog sequences, then writing much more generic "connective" sequences (often not even character-unique) to allow the player to get from one scripted event to the next via any valid means.
Your savings won't be nearly as much, but you'll get a lot more nonlinearity for the same amount of effort.
As an example, you could write the love interest scene. But to reach the scene, maybe the player visits a romantic spot with her. Or maybe he gets critically injured in combat. Or maybe he rescues her from certain doom in combat. Or maybe he does something unspeakably nice. All of these things are nonunique, and the point is that the player can progress through the characters' arcs without adhering to a script.
Basically, we're abstracting out most of the linchpin/anchor events.
Hmmm.
I guess that's it.
I'm done!
I'm a big fan of strategy games, especially strategy RPGs, but the most fun I have is when I can conquer the world in the order I choose. This is actually pretty rare: you could do it in Dune, in one of the Dynasty Warriors, Brigandine, and a few other games, but overall it's very, very rare to be given a map and told to get to it.
It's not the same as a space-conquest game like Masters of Orion! I'm not talking about a game where the main complexity is in the landscape. I'm talking about a game where the main complexity is in the game part, and the landscape simply gives you... an outer play loop. Control over your vector. You play the main game because of your strategic choices, rather than the strategic choices being the main game. And these games are rare.
I can understand that to some extent. While it's not particularly difficult to program, it does make the game flow hard to control. That means both difficulty balancing and difficulty making meaningful plot arcs. So these games tend to have a wonky, unbalanced feel at times, and they never have a plot more complex than "oh, hey, you're the new king of the world!"
Well, let's think about how we could potentially overcome those problems and give our players as meaningful a plot experience as in any linear game.
...
One method would be to divorce the plot from the strategic game. Brigandine does this to some extent: the various knights often have plot arcs which progress regardless of your tactical choices, although they sometimes halt until you accomplish a major strategic victory such as destroying a specific kingdom.
This is a simple idea where there are linear plots tossed into the nonlinear game, and they progress pretty much independently of the nonlinear part. This is simple, but it isn't very tightly connected to the choices the player makes, so I'm not a big fan of leaving it like this.
There are a few kinds of events we can use as "anchors" or "linchpins" for the character arcs instead of having them simply progress linearly. A few are obvious: taking or losing specific zones, killing or acquiring specific heroes, finding specific unique items, etc. However, perhaps the more interesting ones are ones which are not linked to unique game events but are instead linked to general game events.
For example, if your character arc goes one way if you're on the main team most of the time, or another way if you're usually relegated to the back. How about if it changes based on whether you're badly injured in combat, or after you make a certain number of kills? A certain number of consecutive victories or losses? And, of course, whether your buddy is on the same team as you most of the time, and whether your buddy gets injured.
Now the difficulty is the large amount of scripting required per character. It would be very difficult to script up the usual two-dozen cast, because each character would have dozens of pages of branching script!
You could use some of the cheap tricks I tend to use, such as making it so no characters actually speak at any point. That cuts the amount of work by about 90%. But, of course, how to make it interesting and comprehendable without dialog?
Another choice would be to try to create "landscaped" characters instead of scripted characters. This is basically just writing the main dialog sequences, then writing much more generic "connective" sequences (often not even character-unique) to allow the player to get from one scripted event to the next via any valid means.
Your savings won't be nearly as much, but you'll get a lot more nonlinearity for the same amount of effort.
As an example, you could write the love interest scene. But to reach the scene, maybe the player visits a romantic spot with her. Or maybe he gets critically injured in combat. Or maybe he rescues her from certain doom in combat. Or maybe he does something unspeakably nice. All of these things are nonunique, and the point is that the player can progress through the characters' arcs without adhering to a script.
Basically, we're abstracting out most of the linchpin/anchor events.
Hmmm.
I guess that's it.
I'm done!
Sunday, December 14, 2008
Play and Story
I guess this is a rant. I doubt you've heard it before.
As time goes on and I build little demos and tabletop games, I find myself less and less interested in play. But in a really weird way. Lemme sup up.
I have noticed a huge difference in how I design tabletop vs how I design computer games. Here's an example of what I mean. I've designed several pseudo-star-wars games, both as computer game prototypes and as tabletop games (mostly RPGs).
When I design the computer game, I spend eons going over the play dynamics. "Well, how should light saber combat be? Just like so, using time-sensitive balance and yardeyaryaryar?"
When I design the tabletop game, I spend eons going over the, um, "narrative components". "Well, here, I've drawn a picture of the ambassador from Mrrhork, and his stats are on the back. He'll be useful because he's good friends with a rebel naval admiral and..."
Now, it's important to note that I'm not designing tabletops with common RPG mechanics. I'm not popping off to GURPS or d20 and pulling out some tired standard. I'm actually creating very new and strange mechanics for every tabletop game I make. But... but it's so easy. It takes maybe half an hour.
On the computer, it takes ten times that long just to duplicate freakin' pong, man. There's no time left for the story - I've spent all my time on trying to get the game to work in the first place!
The big factor at work here is that the interface for generating and executing rules for tabletop games is significantly simpler than computer games. IE, I write them down, then I remember how to do it. If it's vague or something I didn't expect crops up, I can modify them on the fly.
But! But!
But I hate using standard gameplay.
A big part of my dislike for the new Fallout game (which I thought was merely "quite good") was that they literally used the exact same system as for Oblivion. Even though the system wasn't very well suited to the Fallout theme. (I also disliked the world design, which was also inherited from Oblivion and had the same problem.)
Sure, they applied desperate patches and some varnish. (I'm SPECIAL. How cute.) But underneath it, we're looking at a recycled system. I can't stand that.
Its why I can't stand D&D or d20 or Gurps, either: these are systems that aren't designed specifically for the game the players are playing today. So I can't stand it. It feels like someone's trying to hammer a round peg into a Hulk-Hogan-shaped hole.
I want my gameplay to match the story (narrative elements, whatever). The game is a cohesive experience, and the idea that half of the game can be largely recycled from a completely unrelated experience is repugnant to me. So I quite literally cannot take a piece of gaming middleware such as Game Maker and make a game out of it. I hit a wall where I feel the grind between what dynamics the game needs to have and the dynamics that the middleware allows.
In some cases you can go digging, script up your specific gameplay system... but it takes just as long as making the damn thing from scratch!
It used to be that I'd make my little demos, focus on the gameplay aspects, and then drop them. But I'm having a really hard time doing that now, because I'm starting to really feel the missing half of the experience. It's like I'm arranging furniture in a house that has no roof or walls.
The horrible part is that this isn't a problem when designing tabletop games of any sort. Doesn't matter how hideously complex the game is. 200 page GM guide on time-traveling probability mathematicians? No problem, takes me a week. Board game with 500 illustrated cards? No problem, happy to spend the time.
But freakin' Tetris with a story, man? NO CAN DO.
Anyone else feel this way?
As time goes on and I build little demos and tabletop games, I find myself less and less interested in play. But in a really weird way. Lemme sup up.
I have noticed a huge difference in how I design tabletop vs how I design computer games. Here's an example of what I mean. I've designed several pseudo-star-wars games, both as computer game prototypes and as tabletop games (mostly RPGs).
When I design the computer game, I spend eons going over the play dynamics. "Well, how should light saber combat be? Just like so, using time-sensitive balance and yardeyaryaryar?"
When I design the tabletop game, I spend eons going over the, um, "narrative components". "Well, here, I've drawn a picture of the ambassador from Mrrhork, and his stats are on the back. He'll be useful because he's good friends with a rebel naval admiral and..."
Now, it's important to note that I'm not designing tabletops with common RPG mechanics. I'm not popping off to GURPS or d20 and pulling out some tired standard. I'm actually creating very new and strange mechanics for every tabletop game I make. But... but it's so easy. It takes maybe half an hour.
On the computer, it takes ten times that long just to duplicate freakin' pong, man. There's no time left for the story - I've spent all my time on trying to get the game to work in the first place!
The big factor at work here is that the interface for generating and executing rules for tabletop games is significantly simpler than computer games. IE, I write them down, then I remember how to do it. If it's vague or something I didn't expect crops up, I can modify them on the fly.
But! But!
But I hate using standard gameplay.
A big part of my dislike for the new Fallout game (which I thought was merely "quite good") was that they literally used the exact same system as for Oblivion. Even though the system wasn't very well suited to the Fallout theme. (I also disliked the world design, which was also inherited from Oblivion and had the same problem.)
Sure, they applied desperate patches and some varnish. (I'm SPECIAL. How cute.) But underneath it, we're looking at a recycled system. I can't stand that.
Its why I can't stand D&D or d20 or Gurps, either: these are systems that aren't designed specifically for the game the players are playing today. So I can't stand it. It feels like someone's trying to hammer a round peg into a Hulk-Hogan-shaped hole.
I want my gameplay to match the story (narrative elements, whatever). The game is a cohesive experience, and the idea that half of the game can be largely recycled from a completely unrelated experience is repugnant to me. So I quite literally cannot take a piece of gaming middleware such as Game Maker and make a game out of it. I hit a wall where I feel the grind between what dynamics the game needs to have and the dynamics that the middleware allows.
In some cases you can go digging, script up your specific gameplay system... but it takes just as long as making the damn thing from scratch!
It used to be that I'd make my little demos, focus on the gameplay aspects, and then drop them. But I'm having a really hard time doing that now, because I'm starting to really feel the missing half of the experience. It's like I'm arranging furniture in a house that has no roof or walls.
The horrible part is that this isn't a problem when designing tabletop games of any sort. Doesn't matter how hideously complex the game is. 200 page GM guide on time-traveling probability mathematicians? No problem, takes me a week. Board game with 500 illustrated cards? No problem, happy to spend the time.
But freakin' Tetris with a story, man? NO CAN DO.
Anyone else feel this way?
Tuesday, January 08, 2008
Building Your Past
I thought I had posted about this, but I guess not.
Some time ago, I ran a Jedi game. This was not a polite "we buy the rules from the licensed sort of folks" Jedi game. This was one of my "Bastard Jedi" games, which generally share a few keywords with the Star Wars RPG and not much else.
My previous Bastard Jedi games were built on the words "Jedi", "Sith", "Force", and "Droid". Otherwise, they were made from whole cloth. This time I went the opposite direction, gathering in staggeringly huge amounts of canon and picking the lamest parts. To the point where the game could not be played without a laptop constantly connected to Wookieepedia. (Notice, it contains spoilers!...)
Still, the game mechanics were very, very unusual and interesting. It would take a long time to cover them all, so I'll simply cover the character creation system, which is really the only one that has any bearing on anything I've posted recently.
First, a note on setting: this was after "all" the Jedi were killed by Clone Troopers, but I varied the setting a bit as to exactly what had gone down with the whole Darth-Emperor-Mace Windu thing.
Now, the character creation.
I got myself a hundred blank index cards and split them into four vaguely equal piles, each of which was marked with a suit. The suits stood for real concepts: race, tendency, experience, and survival (all the Jedi are supposed to be dead, remember?). A character was made of one of each.
For example, your race might be Bith, your tendency might be that you've always been especially good with a saber, your experience might be that you spent several years on a diplomatic voyage, and you might have survived by having been cut up quite a bit by a dark Jedi and left for dead (but you recovered and now have some cybernetic bits).
That's not a terribly coherent character, but even with this kind of nonsense you can see that you could connect the dots. You could build a fairly interesting character by filling in the holes: maybe you were sent on the diplomatic mission by your master, who thought you were too physical. Maybe you were attacked by a dark Jedi while on that mission.
Anyway, all of the things on the cards were things that could be. There was no danger of someone going "off course" and inventing a backstory that didn't fit into the universe and, more importantly, no chance of players just staring blankly at an infinite canvas of options. If I wanted, I could have just as easily swapped out the deck for a non-Jedi deck set in the same universe, or a Sith deck, or even a lost-little-droid deck.
All of the cards were more or less balanced. Even the races, which I thought would be hard to balance, were easy. I mean, a Bith? The cantina guys? Who wants to be a Bith? They suck!
Except it turns out that they don't. They've got all sorts of wickedly advanced senses and technological aptitudes. They don't need sleep, either.
It seems that I could not find a race that hadn't been made cool at some point. Welcome to Star Wars.
Anyhow, picking four cards at random doesn't leave you with a whole lot of choice, does it? You end up with something like the character above. While he might grow on you, chances are good that he's not who you would pick for yourself if given the choice.
Even increasing the number of cards to choose from isn't ideal: I let people draw six cards (and spend a character point to draw more cards if they wanted). Even that wasn't going to be enough.
So the real solution was to get your players into a group - five, six people - and have them all draw cards. Then they can freely trade with each other.
This Bith guy would be happy to trade his diplomatic mission to someone in exchange for, say, advanced saber training or a mission to a doomed world. He's also probably happy to trade his race off for something a bit more combat-happy. Someone else might have the "forbidden love" experience card, and they might try to get that "maimed by a dark Jedi" card, so they can have their forbidden love fall and maim them...
This also lets the players fit their characters together interplayer. Not just in terms of "we should have a warrior, a healer..." but in terms of "oh, look, we both switched masters! What if we swapped masters?"
I had two teams of five, and until I moved to Seattle, the game was going pretty well. The characters were deeply interesting, their interactions very slick. More importantly for a Star Wars game, their detailed backstories gave me great hooks to tempt them towards the dark side.
Anyway, this is to show that this kind of partially-generative backstory system is perfectly plausible. Obviously, if you're going to do it on a computer, you need to change it a bit... but, fundamentally, this is not a difficult way to do things and it can serve to introduce your players to the setting in a completely painless way.
Some time ago, I ran a Jedi game. This was not a polite "we buy the rules from the licensed sort of folks" Jedi game. This was one of my "Bastard Jedi" games, which generally share a few keywords with the Star Wars RPG and not much else.
My previous Bastard Jedi games were built on the words "Jedi", "Sith", "Force", and "Droid". Otherwise, they were made from whole cloth. This time I went the opposite direction, gathering in staggeringly huge amounts of canon and picking the lamest parts. To the point where the game could not be played without a laptop constantly connected to Wookieepedia. (Notice, it contains spoilers!...)
Still, the game mechanics were very, very unusual and interesting. It would take a long time to cover them all, so I'll simply cover the character creation system, which is really the only one that has any bearing on anything I've posted recently.
First, a note on setting: this was after "all" the Jedi were killed by Clone Troopers, but I varied the setting a bit as to exactly what had gone down with the whole Darth-Emperor-Mace Windu thing.
Now, the character creation.
I got myself a hundred blank index cards and split them into four vaguely equal piles, each of which was marked with a suit. The suits stood for real concepts: race, tendency, experience, and survival (all the Jedi are supposed to be dead, remember?). A character was made of one of each.
For example, your race might be Bith, your tendency might be that you've always been especially good with a saber, your experience might be that you spent several years on a diplomatic voyage, and you might have survived by having been cut up quite a bit by a dark Jedi and left for dead (but you recovered and now have some cybernetic bits).
That's not a terribly coherent character, but even with this kind of nonsense you can see that you could connect the dots. You could build a fairly interesting character by filling in the holes: maybe you were sent on the diplomatic mission by your master, who thought you were too physical. Maybe you were attacked by a dark Jedi while on that mission.
Anyway, all of the things on the cards were things that could be. There was no danger of someone going "off course" and inventing a backstory that didn't fit into the universe and, more importantly, no chance of players just staring blankly at an infinite canvas of options. If I wanted, I could have just as easily swapped out the deck for a non-Jedi deck set in the same universe, or a Sith deck, or even a lost-little-droid deck.
All of the cards were more or less balanced. Even the races, which I thought would be hard to balance, were easy. I mean, a Bith? The cantina guys? Who wants to be a Bith? They suck!
Except it turns out that they don't. They've got all sorts of wickedly advanced senses and technological aptitudes. They don't need sleep, either.
It seems that I could not find a race that hadn't been made cool at some point. Welcome to Star Wars.
Anyhow, picking four cards at random doesn't leave you with a whole lot of choice, does it? You end up with something like the character above. While he might grow on you, chances are good that he's not who you would pick for yourself if given the choice.
Even increasing the number of cards to choose from isn't ideal: I let people draw six cards (and spend a character point to draw more cards if they wanted). Even that wasn't going to be enough.
So the real solution was to get your players into a group - five, six people - and have them all draw cards. Then they can freely trade with each other.
This Bith guy would be happy to trade his diplomatic mission to someone in exchange for, say, advanced saber training or a mission to a doomed world. He's also probably happy to trade his race off for something a bit more combat-happy. Someone else might have the "forbidden love" experience card, and they might try to get that "maimed by a dark Jedi" card, so they can have their forbidden love fall and maim them...
This also lets the players fit their characters together interplayer. Not just in terms of "we should have a warrior, a healer..." but in terms of "oh, look, we both switched masters! What if we swapped masters?"
I had two teams of five, and until I moved to Seattle, the game was going pretty well. The characters were deeply interesting, their interactions very slick. More importantly for a Star Wars game, their detailed backstories gave me great hooks to tempt them towards the dark side.
Anyway, this is to show that this kind of partially-generative backstory system is perfectly plausible. Obviously, if you're going to do it on a computer, you need to change it a bit... but, fundamentally, this is not a difficult way to do things and it can serve to introduce your players to the setting in a completely painless way.
Saturday, December 15, 2007
Moral Choices In Games
In this industry, we're all very proud of our "moral choices in games". In KOTOR, you can be good or evil! In Bioshock, you can be good or evil! In Jade Empire you can be... polite or an asshole!
At least it's unique.
Anyway, as I mentioned last post, putting choice like this into games isn't really adding much to the game except a single replay. It's really just a single choice you make somewhere near the beginning of the game: good or evil? You're not going to change your mind halfway through.
So the ten thousand "choices" where you can choose to be evil or good are actually just crap. They aren't actually choices, because the player has already decided what his character's personality is, and he'll just keep choosing.
There are a few (theoretical) ways around this.
One is to make it so that as you progress, the more towards good or evil you get, the more the game increases the rewards for switching sides. There are a few issues with this, but my big one is that it means you'll probably get sudden betrayals that don't make a lick of sense. Darth Vader didn't just turn good at random. He had to be dragged back to the light inch by inch over the course of three movies.
Another problem with it is that this reduces good vs evil to a tangible number. You're good until you're paid THIS much to turn evil. I don't really like that idea: I think it will cause a lot of dissatisfaction.
Another method is to have a lot of axes instead of just good vs evil. How about honor vs means? Aggressive vs sneaky? Cheerful vs snarky? Small picture vs big picture?
The problem with this is one of swamping. Every axis is a single choice when viewed alone: the player believes his character is snarky and honorable. If they ever come up, that's what he'll choose.
But it would be very expensive to create feedback to remind a player what his character's personality is. When you have "good vs evil", it's easy to remember whether you're good or evil. But when your character is "good, cheerful, honorable, aggressive, small-picture"... the dialog isn't going to reflect more than one or two of those at a time. There will not be a strong sense of the character being centered around a specific concept. The player will feel a bit lost.
However, it's possible to cross-compare. Instead of honor vs dishonor and good vs evil, it's certainly possible to do honor vs good. Tangential rather than opposing choices. It's certainly possible to narrow down the band of how important a player feels honor is vs how important they feel good is. You can then set choices on the razor edge and let them wring their hands.
But, again, this is fundamentally a single choice: What's your ratio of honor to goodness? It takes a while to get the answer but it's still a single question. Also, once answered, the answer changes, since players who choose goodness over honor will automatically start valuing goodness more and honor less. It's actually an unstable equilibrium. So it's not even a question that has an answer: it's a question that devolves into slush the moment you answer it.
My favorite method of putting moral choices into your games is to use emotional investment.
It doesn't matter whether a player chooses to sabotage his competitor's pod racer or not. That's just dumb. But the classic superhero choice, on the other hand: will he save his girlfriend or the bus full of schoolchildren?
It's very possible to roughly keep track of how much time a player spends with given game elements (usually people). Then you can make the player choose between them. You can do weak choices with unimportant elements to make one of the elements more important, too, so this works out well.
On the other hand, this is definitely a game that has an END. You can't winnow things forever - the player will eventually say, "screw it, this is the only thing that matters" and then you've got a single choice again.
Also, you have to have a game which is largely able to generate plot in some way...
But here's another thought: sure, do good vs evil. But reward the player for the number of continuing plots that drag him each way. So if you're killing a thousand cops on this planet, that's dark side. But you're also helping a wookie, that's light side. Therefore, your character gets a bunch of extra Force points reflecting his internal strife.
I like that idea, but you have to be careful not to make it wholly transparent. A player shouldn't really think "oh, I need to do this evil so that I get some more dark side", but instead the plot should be described in a way such that he is more likely to take evil's path.
This means that you CAN be wholly light side for the whole game, but not only are you very weak, you are continually bombarded by descriptions that tantalize you to the dark side. The same is true if you decide to be wholly evil.
For example, a child is dying of a disease. You're painfully light side, so the description is "Looking forward, you see this child's path, should he survive, will destroy all life on the planet." If you're painfully dark side, it's described... the same way. :D
Anyway, those are my thoughts on the matter. Anyone else have any?
At least it's unique.
Anyway, as I mentioned last post, putting choice like this into games isn't really adding much to the game except a single replay. It's really just a single choice you make somewhere near the beginning of the game: good or evil? You're not going to change your mind halfway through.
So the ten thousand "choices" where you can choose to be evil or good are actually just crap. They aren't actually choices, because the player has already decided what his character's personality is, and he'll just keep choosing.
There are a few (theoretical) ways around this.
One is to make it so that as you progress, the more towards good or evil you get, the more the game increases the rewards for switching sides. There are a few issues with this, but my big one is that it means you'll probably get sudden betrayals that don't make a lick of sense. Darth Vader didn't just turn good at random. He had to be dragged back to the light inch by inch over the course of three movies.
Another problem with it is that this reduces good vs evil to a tangible number. You're good until you're paid THIS much to turn evil. I don't really like that idea: I think it will cause a lot of dissatisfaction.
Another method is to have a lot of axes instead of just good vs evil. How about honor vs means? Aggressive vs sneaky? Cheerful vs snarky? Small picture vs big picture?
The problem with this is one of swamping. Every axis is a single choice when viewed alone: the player believes his character is snarky and honorable. If they ever come up, that's what he'll choose.
But it would be very expensive to create feedback to remind a player what his character's personality is. When you have "good vs evil", it's easy to remember whether you're good or evil. But when your character is "good, cheerful, honorable, aggressive, small-picture"... the dialog isn't going to reflect more than one or two of those at a time. There will not be a strong sense of the character being centered around a specific concept. The player will feel a bit lost.
However, it's possible to cross-compare. Instead of honor vs dishonor and good vs evil, it's certainly possible to do honor vs good. Tangential rather than opposing choices. It's certainly possible to narrow down the band of how important a player feels honor is vs how important they feel good is. You can then set choices on the razor edge and let them wring their hands.
But, again, this is fundamentally a single choice: What's your ratio of honor to goodness? It takes a while to get the answer but it's still a single question. Also, once answered, the answer changes, since players who choose goodness over honor will automatically start valuing goodness more and honor less. It's actually an unstable equilibrium. So it's not even a question that has an answer: it's a question that devolves into slush the moment you answer it.
My favorite method of putting moral choices into your games is to use emotional investment.
It doesn't matter whether a player chooses to sabotage his competitor's pod racer or not. That's just dumb. But the classic superhero choice, on the other hand: will he save his girlfriend or the bus full of schoolchildren?
It's very possible to roughly keep track of how much time a player spends with given game elements (usually people). Then you can make the player choose between them. You can do weak choices with unimportant elements to make one of the elements more important, too, so this works out well.
On the other hand, this is definitely a game that has an END. You can't winnow things forever - the player will eventually say, "screw it, this is the only thing that matters" and then you've got a single choice again.
Also, you have to have a game which is largely able to generate plot in some way...
But here's another thought: sure, do good vs evil. But reward the player for the number of continuing plots that drag him each way. So if you're killing a thousand cops on this planet, that's dark side. But you're also helping a wookie, that's light side. Therefore, your character gets a bunch of extra Force points reflecting his internal strife.
I like that idea, but you have to be careful not to make it wholly transparent. A player shouldn't really think "oh, I need to do this evil so that I get some more dark side", but instead the plot should be described in a way such that he is more likely to take evil's path.
This means that you CAN be wholly light side for the whole game, but not only are you very weak, you are continually bombarded by descriptions that tantalize you to the dark side. The same is true if you decide to be wholly evil.
For example, a child is dying of a disease. You're painfully light side, so the description is "Looking forward, you see this child's path, should he survive, will destroy all life on the planet." If you're painfully dark side, it's described... the same way. :D
Anyway, those are my thoughts on the matter. Anyone else have any?
Thursday, August 16, 2007
Unequal Information
I've been talking about how computers aren't very good at context. It's really one of the biggest reasons that generated content is uninspiring: the computer doesn't know how to make a layered, subtle situation. Even the most basic first person shooter has remarkably complex contexts when you look at it in comparison to what a computer can do.
A huge part of context is unequal information. Not only between characters, but between the audience (player) and the characters or world. Sometimes the player might have more information, sometimes less. Both are common.
For example, in an RPG it is common to cut to the evil villains doing some nefarious thing - burning down a village or plotting to capture someone or something. The party members blithely waltz into the next town anyway. Although you know what's coming, the party members do not, creating a tension.
An opposite example is equally easy: in most decent FPS games, the main character has some kind of past... but you don't know much about it. It's revealed over the course of play, bit by bit, as it affects the world. The character knows things you don't know, and acts on those things.
For example, what is the Spartan's background? How about XIII? How about JC Denton? They often act in unusual ways or get in unusual situations due to their background...
Hell, even the old Super Mario Bros had this kind of information imbalance. It's a key part of making a story, and almost no story goes without it.
But there are no methods of plot generation which think in this way... at best, they think in terms of character goals. While a character goal is (often) hidden information, it's only a pale sliver of information imbalance. There are no algorithms that manage information imbalance.
I wonder if one could be built.
A huge part of context is unequal information. Not only between characters, but between the audience (player) and the characters or world. Sometimes the player might have more information, sometimes less. Both are common.
For example, in an RPG it is common to cut to the evil villains doing some nefarious thing - burning down a village or plotting to capture someone or something. The party members blithely waltz into the next town anyway. Although you know what's coming, the party members do not, creating a tension.
An opposite example is equally easy: in most decent FPS games, the main character has some kind of past... but you don't know much about it. It's revealed over the course of play, bit by bit, as it affects the world. The character knows things you don't know, and acts on those things.
For example, what is the Spartan's background? How about XIII? How about JC Denton? They often act in unusual ways or get in unusual situations due to their background...
Hell, even the old Super Mario Bros had this kind of information imbalance. It's a key part of making a story, and almost no story goes without it.
But there are no methods of plot generation which think in this way... at best, they think in terms of character goals. While a character goal is (often) hidden information, it's only a pale sliver of information imbalance. There are no algorithms that manage information imbalance.
I wonder if one could be built.
Tuesday, August 14, 2007
Component Plots
When you talk about "generative" or "adaptive" plots, you run into a lot of problems with implementation.
The common approach is to carefully script out every possible plot. I call this the "big atom" method - the "atomic" elements of your plot are chunks of plot that are often several levels long. This produces a massive "branching" problem, where the more influence you allow a player, the more scripting you have to do. Lots of games use this method, including the much-vaunted KOTOR and Deus Ex series. And they have it polished: they know a lot of tricks to keep the branching down and reuse script.
But the fact is that the method is limited because you have to specifically script out every element of the plot.
An approach a lot of people try is a "small atom" approach, where they create tiny, generic plot elements that are stapled together over the course of the game. This isn't used in real games, however, because context is a huge part of games and we don't really have an algorithm for that figured out. At best, the "small atom" approach creates a meandering, disconnected plot. Normally, it creates gibberish.
There is really no "medium atom" approach in common use. The closest we have is map generators in things like Diablo, where individual chunks of a dungeon are created, but they are arranged into a map somewhat randomly. This works decently for hack-and-slash games, but if you try to implement it for a plot, you end up with the worst elements of big and small atom approaches: although any given segment of the plot makes sense, over the long haul the plot is a meandering mess. And you have to carefully script every element. Although rare, this method has been used occasionally, usually by people like Chris Crawford.
Sure, there are steps you can take to make these systems a bit more palatable. For example, you can use a "big atom" approach for the base plot, but then use "medium atom" elements to determine how the player guides the "big atom" elements. You can even subdivide that to allow the "medium atom" elements to be guided by "small atom" events... Siboot uses small atoms with medium atoms to give some context.
Alternately, you can be vague, generic, or carefully insert the reasoning between plot elements, allowing players to think there is some mysterious force behind things or letting them come up with their own reasoning. This works best in games where you can hear the player thinking and then come up with actual reasons similar to (but not exactly equal to) the player's reasoning. A computer game could be built with this in mind, but it has yet to be done.
However, these are all dodges. The real problem with all of these approaches is that a computer doesn't know anything about context, and programming it to know something about context is, as of yet, unproven theory. The larger atoms basically let the writers create more context, to supplant the computer's lack of context. Of course, what causes the branching and the pain is the fact that context changes as the plot progresses differently... so the writers have to write more variants, and you end up with a huge amount script.
As far as I can tell, there are three ways to implement context that aren't simply changing the size of the "atomic" script or pretending to have a magic algorithm that "knows" context.
1) Player-generated context. If you supply tiny story atoms to players, they will be happy to assemble them into fully functional plots that make sense. Assuming some kind of massive player base, you would see something akin to the Sims' photo albums.
2) Level-generated context. Similar to having AI navigate a level by embedding pathing and waypoints, you can have a "map" of a plot and fill it in with chunks that are context-suited. If you know that there is going to be a lovecraftian demon as your end boss, you can focus on adding horrifying plot elements rather than adventuresome plot elements, and even have a pseudorandom beginning, middle, and end. This is similar to having "intelligent" atoms, but far more centralized.
3) "Long atoms". If you want context, why not build the context into the atom? If you have a lovecraftian demon as an end boss, you can make that plot element "cast back" a series of hints and foreshadowing, even call for suitable atoms to attach to those nodes. Similarly, if you accomplish a subplot early on in the game, it can "cast forward" the repercussions, injecting elements into the play at later moments without needing to "connect" to whatever elements are currently active. This is basically the reverse of level-generated context.
Thoughts?
The common approach is to carefully script out every possible plot. I call this the "big atom" method - the "atomic" elements of your plot are chunks of plot that are often several levels long. This produces a massive "branching" problem, where the more influence you allow a player, the more scripting you have to do. Lots of games use this method, including the much-vaunted KOTOR and Deus Ex series. And they have it polished: they know a lot of tricks to keep the branching down and reuse script.
But the fact is that the method is limited because you have to specifically script out every element of the plot.
An approach a lot of people try is a "small atom" approach, where they create tiny, generic plot elements that are stapled together over the course of the game. This isn't used in real games, however, because context is a huge part of games and we don't really have an algorithm for that figured out. At best, the "small atom" approach creates a meandering, disconnected plot. Normally, it creates gibberish.
There is really no "medium atom" approach in common use. The closest we have is map generators in things like Diablo, where individual chunks of a dungeon are created, but they are arranged into a map somewhat randomly. This works decently for hack-and-slash games, but if you try to implement it for a plot, you end up with the worst elements of big and small atom approaches: although any given segment of the plot makes sense, over the long haul the plot is a meandering mess. And you have to carefully script every element. Although rare, this method has been used occasionally, usually by people like Chris Crawford.
Sure, there are steps you can take to make these systems a bit more palatable. For example, you can use a "big atom" approach for the base plot, but then use "medium atom" elements to determine how the player guides the "big atom" elements. You can even subdivide that to allow the "medium atom" elements to be guided by "small atom" events... Siboot uses small atoms with medium atoms to give some context.
Alternately, you can be vague, generic, or carefully insert the reasoning between plot elements, allowing players to think there is some mysterious force behind things or letting them come up with their own reasoning. This works best in games where you can hear the player thinking and then come up with actual reasons similar to (but not exactly equal to) the player's reasoning. A computer game could be built with this in mind, but it has yet to be done.
However, these are all dodges. The real problem with all of these approaches is that a computer doesn't know anything about context, and programming it to know something about context is, as of yet, unproven theory. The larger atoms basically let the writers create more context, to supplant the computer's lack of context. Of course, what causes the branching and the pain is the fact that context changes as the plot progresses differently... so the writers have to write more variants, and you end up with a huge amount script.
As far as I can tell, there are three ways to implement context that aren't simply changing the size of the "atomic" script or pretending to have a magic algorithm that "knows" context.
1) Player-generated context. If you supply tiny story atoms to players, they will be happy to assemble them into fully functional plots that make sense. Assuming some kind of massive player base, you would see something akin to the Sims' photo albums.
2) Level-generated context. Similar to having AI navigate a level by embedding pathing and waypoints, you can have a "map" of a plot and fill it in with chunks that are context-suited. If you know that there is going to be a lovecraftian demon as your end boss, you can focus on adding horrifying plot elements rather than adventuresome plot elements, and even have a pseudorandom beginning, middle, and end. This is similar to having "intelligent" atoms, but far more centralized.
3) "Long atoms". If you want context, why not build the context into the atom? If you have a lovecraftian demon as an end boss, you can make that plot element "cast back" a series of hints and foreshadowing, even call for suitable atoms to attach to those nodes. Similarly, if you accomplish a subplot early on in the game, it can "cast forward" the repercussions, injecting elements into the play at later moments without needing to "connect" to whatever elements are currently active. This is basically the reverse of level-generated context.
Thoughts?
Sunday, July 08, 2007
Cooperative Storytelling, the Guide
I wrote the guide. I guarantee you might find it interesting.
Guide to Making Games Featuring Cooperative Storytelling.
Guide to Making Games Featuring Cooperative Storytelling.
Friday, July 06, 2007
Drop it! Bad dog!
Back when I first started running games, I was a bit of a control freak. I think most GMs start that way, especially if they're still in their mid teens when they start.
But it didn't take me too long (half a decade? Gah...) before I realized the joys of not being a control freak.
As time progressed, I began to define my own ideas more and more loosely, then just adapting to whatever the players put into the game. If you've done this, you've probably found the same thing I did: more cannibals make better soup. Or something.
Basically, it just comes down to time. The more freedom you give them, the more time they spend. I feel vaguely guilty when I find out that some of my players spent literally thirty hours each in one week on one game, when I spent about ten on the game in total... but guilty or not, the end result speaks for itself: the story is more detailed, more varied, more interesting, and more personalized than I could have possibly created even spending thirty hours a week on it.
There's something about people creating stories together. Maybe it's just that everyone has different areas they're good at, and by combining you can pick the best talent at the best moment for a more universally good story. Maybe it's sheer dint of time and effort. Maybe it's the way that players will feed off each other more and more excitedly the more time you give them together.
Likely, it's all of those factors and others combined.
But the end result is simple:
Stop writing your games!
All o' you combined are more talented than you are alone, and players like having some measure of control over the story. Most of them might feel nervous ("I can't tell a good story!"), but once they've gotten past stage one they contribute some of the most astonishing gems. Something to do with the fact that they don't look at storytelling the same way, I think.
I'm not saying you can't have a story. Hell, every game I run is seeded with plot elements and metaphysics, and even if I waltz away for a month and let it run itself, I find that the players pretty much act out the story I had planned. Except with a level of detail and breadth of quality that astound.
Now, you can try to do this kind of thing with D&D. Except you'll find that the only way to control the story in D&D is by the PCs having huge amounts of power, which basically turns the whole thing into a terrible wish-fulfillment thing that leaves all the players glaring at each other.
Like any kind of play, if the play isn't deep, the play doesn't entertain. You've got to have some method of controlling story elements. Something the players can sink their teeth into while they work with the story. Something that doesn't scare newbies, but is deep enough to entertain the experts. Simultaneously.
Most GMs don't have a clue what I'm talking about. Some of them - probably many of the people who read this post - are thinking in terms of Nobilis or hazily-remembered reviews of "Life with Master" or PrimeTime. A few may have actually played one of these games, or at least seen a rule book.
Well, I'm'a gonna write up a big "playing narrative" guide, because I'm sitting on all of those and a dozen more. And because I'm completely exhausted and burned out. Obviously, what I need to do is write up a post on how to do interactive narratives.
I hope you'll read and enjoy it. Expect it before Monday.
But it didn't take me too long (half a decade? Gah...) before I realized the joys of not being a control freak.
As time progressed, I began to define my own ideas more and more loosely, then just adapting to whatever the players put into the game. If you've done this, you've probably found the same thing I did: more cannibals make better soup. Or something.
Basically, it just comes down to time. The more freedom you give them, the more time they spend. I feel vaguely guilty when I find out that some of my players spent literally thirty hours each in one week on one game, when I spent about ten on the game in total... but guilty or not, the end result speaks for itself: the story is more detailed, more varied, more interesting, and more personalized than I could have possibly created even spending thirty hours a week on it.
There's something about people creating stories together. Maybe it's just that everyone has different areas they're good at, and by combining you can pick the best talent at the best moment for a more universally good story. Maybe it's sheer dint of time and effort. Maybe it's the way that players will feed off each other more and more excitedly the more time you give them together.
Likely, it's all of those factors and others combined.
But the end result is simple:
Stop writing your games!
All o' you combined are more talented than you are alone, and players like having some measure of control over the story. Most of them might feel nervous ("I can't tell a good story!"), but once they've gotten past stage one they contribute some of the most astonishing gems. Something to do with the fact that they don't look at storytelling the same way, I think.
I'm not saying you can't have a story. Hell, every game I run is seeded with plot elements and metaphysics, and even if I waltz away for a month and let it run itself, I find that the players pretty much act out the story I had planned. Except with a level of detail and breadth of quality that astound.
Now, you can try to do this kind of thing with D&D. Except you'll find that the only way to control the story in D&D is by the PCs having huge amounts of power, which basically turns the whole thing into a terrible wish-fulfillment thing that leaves all the players glaring at each other.
Like any kind of play, if the play isn't deep, the play doesn't entertain. You've got to have some method of controlling story elements. Something the players can sink their teeth into while they work with the story. Something that doesn't scare newbies, but is deep enough to entertain the experts. Simultaneously.
Most GMs don't have a clue what I'm talking about. Some of them - probably many of the people who read this post - are thinking in terms of Nobilis or hazily-remembered reviews of "Life with Master" or PrimeTime. A few may have actually played one of these games, or at least seen a rule book.
Well, I'm'a gonna write up a big "playing narrative" guide, because I'm sitting on all of those and a dozen more. And because I'm completely exhausted and burned out. Obviously, what I need to do is write up a post on how to do interactive narratives.
I hope you'll read and enjoy it. Expect it before Monday.
Wednesday, April 25, 2007
Social Simulation (Again)
I've been playing around with Inform 7, one of the modern text adventure platforms. Interactive Fiction, if you're looking to sound pretentious. Why Inform, rather than one of the other options?
Well, in addition to being free, Inform 7 has the most powerful engine - hands down - of the various systems. On the other hand, as is usually the case, it has a pretty bad environment. Unlike, say, ADRIFT, there is no easy-to-use GUI. Of course, if it had one, I wouldn't have been able to do any of the things I wanted to do: tradeoffs.
Anyhow, I've always said that you can't really test a social system on its own. You need a world to put social interactions in context. Which is why I keep gravitating back towards functional text adventure engines - not because I want to make a text adventure, but because they offer tons of functionality and a quick turnaround time.
I've whipped up a few tests, set in a zombie movie. I've learned some interesting things about character dynamics. If you're making a system that does social dynamics on the fly, here are some things you may want to try to account for:
1) Skill use. Normally, many people in any given fictional group have a particular skill. The geek, the jock, the girl that can fly, whatever. While not every character needs to have a skill, it is helpful because it allows you to make the player choose to give that character center stage. IE, the character chooses to use the geek when there's a geeky challenge, instead of you simply pushing the geek into the limelight.
2) Social role. This is a topic that people have approached from a lot of angles. I have my own opinions, but in essence the idea is that inside the group, every character has a social role they play: the irritating twerp, the respected leader, the weird guy. These roles then allow the characters to interact with other characters in an automatic, easy way.
3) Goals/arcs. On a code level, the difference between a character goal and a character development arc is extremely minor, so we'll lump them into one. The more central a character is, the more of these they will generally have. These allow you to algorithmically control a character's long-term actions, allowing them to be aggressive at times when it makes sense and passive at times when it makes sense.
Obviously, there are a lot of factors I could be mentioning: relationship tracking, social positioning, personality statistics, etc. But I find that these things are details which fall into place when you carefully cover the three core necessities. If you disagree, I'd be happy to listen to why.
Most social systems get really hung up on one of these three ideas, often throwing in a second as a last-minute thought. I am of the opinion that one or even two of these ideas are not enough. All three, even if each is done mediocre, is more interesting to me.
Unfortunately, to test it, you need a world. That's why I've been writing a zombie text adventure. Arrrrrr!
Well, in addition to being free, Inform 7 has the most powerful engine - hands down - of the various systems. On the other hand, as is usually the case, it has a pretty bad environment. Unlike, say, ADRIFT, there is no easy-to-use GUI. Of course, if it had one, I wouldn't have been able to do any of the things I wanted to do: tradeoffs.
Anyhow, I've always said that you can't really test a social system on its own. You need a world to put social interactions in context. Which is why I keep gravitating back towards functional text adventure engines - not because I want to make a text adventure, but because they offer tons of functionality and a quick turnaround time.
I've whipped up a few tests, set in a zombie movie. I've learned some interesting things about character dynamics. If you're making a system that does social dynamics on the fly, here are some things you may want to try to account for:
1) Skill use. Normally, many people in any given fictional group have a particular skill. The geek, the jock, the girl that can fly, whatever. While not every character needs to have a skill, it is helpful because it allows you to make the player choose to give that character center stage. IE, the character chooses to use the geek when there's a geeky challenge, instead of you simply pushing the geek into the limelight.
2) Social role. This is a topic that people have approached from a lot of angles. I have my own opinions, but in essence the idea is that inside the group, every character has a social role they play: the irritating twerp, the respected leader, the weird guy. These roles then allow the characters to interact with other characters in an automatic, easy way.
3) Goals/arcs. On a code level, the difference between a character goal and a character development arc is extremely minor, so we'll lump them into one. The more central a character is, the more of these they will generally have. These allow you to algorithmically control a character's long-term actions, allowing them to be aggressive at times when it makes sense and passive at times when it makes sense.
Obviously, there are a lot of factors I could be mentioning: relationship tracking, social positioning, personality statistics, etc. But I find that these things are details which fall into place when you carefully cover the three core necessities. If you disagree, I'd be happy to listen to why.
Most social systems get really hung up on one of these three ideas, often throwing in a second as a last-minute thought. I am of the opinion that one or even two of these ideas are not enough. All three, even if each is done mediocre, is more interesting to me.
Unfortunately, to test it, you need a world. That's why I've been writing a zombie text adventure. Arrrrrr!
Sunday, March 18, 2007
Test Report: Myths and Legends
This essay will only interest people who want to know more about narrative-building games.
I ran a game this weekend called "Myths and Legends". It was half LARP and half card game, like all of these. The game was intended to reverse this game's test - seeing if a game could exist almost entirely on that "second tier" of immersion. The "subquest" level. I knew from experience that the gameplay in these games was minimal, so that didn't need adjusting. I simply got rid of the "overarching plot", so that there were only subquest-level hooks.
The result was pretty predictable. The game, intended to run in the background over a forty-eight hour stretch (gaming weekend) ran in about thirty. At that point, too many of the players were sleep-depped out of coherence, spelling the end of the game. As expected, honestly: there was what amounted to a tiny con running in the background the whole time.
The game progressed fairly well. It was built on the idea of constructing and completing sidequest-style events. I made the "terrain" complex by using multiple eras you could visit and using some gating methods to mix up which players could be in which events. I let them use their "powers" to resolve events with each other in various story-riffic ways, and the resolution of the events allowed them to make more cards - both powers and new sidequest hooks.
Even with that level of complexity, the game's mechanics were too shallow to really hold the player: only the sidequests really drove the game.
The interesting thing is that although the game was exceptionally good at starting sidequests and directing aimless players into sidequests of their choosing, at some point the players formed a third layer - an overarching plot. The game was actually a hindrance to completing overarching plots, which is probably the reason the game died a little early.
But... but... the players formed third layer plots!
That's really important. I've been whining for ages about how I can't get players to form long-term plots. Sure, one or two players out of ten will come up with some kind of long term goal... but about 90% of these players formed extensive, complex, and frankly clever, well-done, long-term plots.
These plots weren't really suitable to long-term play, unfortunately, because they were "this is how it will happen!" plots rather than a "this is what we want" plot which has some slack built in. I tried to introduce the latter kinds of plots, and it probably would have worked if I had introduced them earlier... but they would have been my plots, and I would never have seen the rather astonishing synthesis the players did.
Because the plots were of the "this is how it will happen!" variety, trying to get the player to "play through them" is basically just torture, and kills the game. So, I either need to have a method of allowing players to finalize the plot without playing, or I have to find a way to make them construct "this is what we want" plots.
If I go with the former, I'm going to have to use some kind of "rebirth" method. Once you've done a plot, you have to change your whole outlook. A new character, or the same character in a new stage of his life, or something. That way the game can be kept fresh. Keeping these fresh, unattached characters from being sucked into the whirlpool of a more advanced plot might be necessary... and any way I run it there will have to be some kind of carryover...
If I go with the latter method, I have to isolate more exactly what caused the players to generate plot in this game so much more frequently than in the earlier games I ran. Something about the terrain having more dimensions of complexity allowed the players to twist in fun ways until they bumped into something that clicked. I think I increased the cohesion of the chunks that the players could try to assemble...
Anyway, it's still an irritatingly-paced game, so I may have to change the pacing, which will throw all my data off.
Hrm.
I ran a game this weekend called "Myths and Legends". It was half LARP and half card game, like all of these. The game was intended to reverse this game's test - seeing if a game could exist almost entirely on that "second tier" of immersion. The "subquest" level. I knew from experience that the gameplay in these games was minimal, so that didn't need adjusting. I simply got rid of the "overarching plot", so that there were only subquest-level hooks.
The result was pretty predictable. The game, intended to run in the background over a forty-eight hour stretch (gaming weekend) ran in about thirty. At that point, too many of the players were sleep-depped out of coherence, spelling the end of the game. As expected, honestly: there was what amounted to a tiny con running in the background the whole time.
The game progressed fairly well. It was built on the idea of constructing and completing sidequest-style events. I made the "terrain" complex by using multiple eras you could visit and using some gating methods to mix up which players could be in which events. I let them use their "powers" to resolve events with each other in various story-riffic ways, and the resolution of the events allowed them to make more cards - both powers and new sidequest hooks.
Even with that level of complexity, the game's mechanics were too shallow to really hold the player: only the sidequests really drove the game.
The interesting thing is that although the game was exceptionally good at starting sidequests and directing aimless players into sidequests of their choosing, at some point the players formed a third layer - an overarching plot. The game was actually a hindrance to completing overarching plots, which is probably the reason the game died a little early.
But... but... the players formed third layer plots!
That's really important. I've been whining for ages about how I can't get players to form long-term plots. Sure, one or two players out of ten will come up with some kind of long term goal... but about 90% of these players formed extensive, complex, and frankly clever, well-done, long-term plots.
These plots weren't really suitable to long-term play, unfortunately, because they were "this is how it will happen!" plots rather than a "this is what we want" plot which has some slack built in. I tried to introduce the latter kinds of plots, and it probably would have worked if I had introduced them earlier... but they would have been my plots, and I would never have seen the rather astonishing synthesis the players did.
Because the plots were of the "this is how it will happen!" variety, trying to get the player to "play through them" is basically just torture, and kills the game. So, I either need to have a method of allowing players to finalize the plot without playing, or I have to find a way to make them construct "this is what we want" plots.
If I go with the former, I'm going to have to use some kind of "rebirth" method. Once you've done a plot, you have to change your whole outlook. A new character, or the same character in a new stage of his life, or something. That way the game can be kept fresh. Keeping these fresh, unattached characters from being sucked into the whirlpool of a more advanced plot might be necessary... and any way I run it there will have to be some kind of carryover...
If I go with the latter method, I have to isolate more exactly what caused the players to generate plot in this game so much more frequently than in the earlier games I ran. Something about the terrain having more dimensions of complexity allowed the players to twist in fun ways until they bumped into something that clicked. I think I increased the cohesion of the chunks that the players could try to assemble...
Anyway, it's still an irritatingly-paced game, so I may have to change the pacing, which will throw all my data off.
Hrm.
Tuesday, January 30, 2007
Putting Together the Pieces
Player's brains are rather remarkable at turning crap into content. It's like magic. A good GM is also good at this, and the players and the GM can basically toss crap into a pot, stir it with their brains, and out comes a story.
If you're running a game, as a GM, you really only have two responsibilities: controlling pacing and providing new data.
Really, my specialty has always been in providing new data. Not only do I provide interesting data, I also have the ability to provide the right data to cause a cascade of players assembling data into something fun and useful. There's no better sight than to see a player's eyes bug out as he solves a piece of the mystery.
But the thing is, I think it's not actually a very important skill. First, since it really can't be automated for use in computer games, it just doesn't have the adaptability I wish it did. Second, players are so good at making structure out of crap that they really don't need such carefully considered data. Sure, higher quality ingredients make for better food, but playing is as much about enjoying the cooking as the eating.
Yes, it's possible to structure a game such that all the content you provide is structured such that players put it together in a specific way, at which point the next content you provide is simply what makes sense. This is called "telling a story". The pacing and progression of the story is so clearly defined that players simply can't accidentally wander off and require you to change your plans to fit their ideas. Most games are written like this, or in a similar way, where players will be in the right mindset when they choose to proceed (see Grand Theft Auto III).
There are about a million downsides to this, but perhaps the strongest issue is that it is almost impossible to have a multiplayer game set up with this kind of predictability. Players will start generating their own content immediately, talking with each other and doing some role playing. This will destroy not only the pacing you've got in mind, but also the story itself. The story won't connect with them strongly enough, because they've deviated from their set roles in it. (I've known several GMs who had this problem chronically - I think most GMs have it from time to time, when they grow to "love" a particular idea.)
However, when you have a group of players, they are happy to make their own content and incorporate it into the content you feed them. And, as I said, you can literally feed them random crap and use a simple feedback system to feed them more of the crap they seem to like. Eventually, a plot will develop even if none was intended. This apparently works especially well in pilot episodes of Prime Time, at least the ones I've participated in. Sure, in the end, it doesn't make a whole lot of sense and isn't very cohesive. But, damn, it was fun.
(I am going somewhere with this, as unlikely as it seems...)
Generally speaking, groups of three to five have the best success in combining content to make sense. If you have more players than that, it is generally best to split them into sections, even if they are running at the same time. Most successful LARPs do this - creating little "interest clusters" of three to five players, with one or two players who are interested in tying interest clusters together.
But the reason it works is the extremely high bandwidth of face-to-face conversation. There's a lot of data to be processed: the more pieces, the smaller they are, and the more diverse they are, the more computation it takes (average case) to find a "valid solution". Computation of this sort requires communication, and the higher the bandwidth, the more computation is allowed. Obviously, some people are better or worse at communication, some people are better or worse at computing, and people who know each other well tend to have more efficient communication than people who don't.
Over an internet connection, there is no bandwidth. Text does not communicate quickly enough. Even phone or video chat is a pale ghost compared to actually being there. So, by necessity, there is less of this kind of shared computation. The closest thing to it today is when someone creates something cool and posts it. And that's how games work, too: the developer creates something cool and lets you walk through it.
What they are doing is a mathematical inevitability. They are assembling the chunks to be fewer, larger, and/or less diverse pieces. This allows people to take them in extremely rapidly, with a minimum of communication... and a minimum of computation.
Sure, you can create a fascinating, popular, or mysterious thing which makes people think and laugh and pass it around. But you're not playing with them. You're letting them watch you play.
In other cases, players will still create team content. For example, guilds. They create them inside the constraints they are given, because having a shared reality makes communication more efficient. Even with the extra efficiency, it typically takes weeks or months before a guild really starts to have fun together. The communication is so slow that computation is stretched thin, pieces ooze together over minutes (or, usually, hours) rather than seconds. It works, but it works so slowly.
How can this be fixed? I can see two ways:
Can you make a game with fewer, larger, easy-to-fit-together "story pieces" that players can swap around, get together with, and work together on? For example, instead of having to carefully decide exactly who they are, give them a choice of three pre-defined characters?
Can you make a game where the shared reality is carefully defined to cause the most efficient communication over the limited bandwith you have? A game which either has new methods of communication specifically geared towards putting pieces together, or a game whose reality is designed so that interacting while in that reality essentially causes pieces to fall together - like guilds going on raids and optimizing loot?
Better yet, can you do both simultaneously?
Or did this post not even make any sense?
If you're running a game, as a GM, you really only have two responsibilities: controlling pacing and providing new data.
Really, my specialty has always been in providing new data. Not only do I provide interesting data, I also have the ability to provide the right data to cause a cascade of players assembling data into something fun and useful. There's no better sight than to see a player's eyes bug out as he solves a piece of the mystery.
But the thing is, I think it's not actually a very important skill. First, since it really can't be automated for use in computer games, it just doesn't have the adaptability I wish it did. Second, players are so good at making structure out of crap that they really don't need such carefully considered data. Sure, higher quality ingredients make for better food, but playing is as much about enjoying the cooking as the eating.
Yes, it's possible to structure a game such that all the content you provide is structured such that players put it together in a specific way, at which point the next content you provide is simply what makes sense. This is called "telling a story". The pacing and progression of the story is so clearly defined that players simply can't accidentally wander off and require you to change your plans to fit their ideas. Most games are written like this, or in a similar way, where players will be in the right mindset when they choose to proceed (see Grand Theft Auto III).
There are about a million downsides to this, but perhaps the strongest issue is that it is almost impossible to have a multiplayer game set up with this kind of predictability. Players will start generating their own content immediately, talking with each other and doing some role playing. This will destroy not only the pacing you've got in mind, but also the story itself. The story won't connect with them strongly enough, because they've deviated from their set roles in it. (I've known several GMs who had this problem chronically - I think most GMs have it from time to time, when they grow to "love" a particular idea.)
However, when you have a group of players, they are happy to make their own content and incorporate it into the content you feed them. And, as I said, you can literally feed them random crap and use a simple feedback system to feed them more of the crap they seem to like. Eventually, a plot will develop even if none was intended. This apparently works especially well in pilot episodes of Prime Time, at least the ones I've participated in. Sure, in the end, it doesn't make a whole lot of sense and isn't very cohesive. But, damn, it was fun.
(I am going somewhere with this, as unlikely as it seems...)
Generally speaking, groups of three to five have the best success in combining content to make sense. If you have more players than that, it is generally best to split them into sections, even if they are running at the same time. Most successful LARPs do this - creating little "interest clusters" of three to five players, with one or two players who are interested in tying interest clusters together.
But the reason it works is the extremely high bandwidth of face-to-face conversation. There's a lot of data to be processed: the more pieces, the smaller they are, and the more diverse they are, the more computation it takes (average case) to find a "valid solution". Computation of this sort requires communication, and the higher the bandwidth, the more computation is allowed. Obviously, some people are better or worse at communication, some people are better or worse at computing, and people who know each other well tend to have more efficient communication than people who don't.
Over an internet connection, there is no bandwidth. Text does not communicate quickly enough. Even phone or video chat is a pale ghost compared to actually being there. So, by necessity, there is less of this kind of shared computation. The closest thing to it today is when someone creates something cool and posts it. And that's how games work, too: the developer creates something cool and lets you walk through it.
What they are doing is a mathematical inevitability. They are assembling the chunks to be fewer, larger, and/or less diverse pieces. This allows people to take them in extremely rapidly, with a minimum of communication... and a minimum of computation.
Sure, you can create a fascinating, popular, or mysterious thing which makes people think and laugh and pass it around. But you're not playing with them. You're letting them watch you play.
In other cases, players will still create team content. For example, guilds. They create them inside the constraints they are given, because having a shared reality makes communication more efficient. Even with the extra efficiency, it typically takes weeks or months before a guild really starts to have fun together. The communication is so slow that computation is stretched thin, pieces ooze together over minutes (or, usually, hours) rather than seconds. It works, but it works so slowly.
How can this be fixed? I can see two ways:
Can you make a game with fewer, larger, easy-to-fit-together "story pieces" that players can swap around, get together with, and work together on? For example, instead of having to carefully decide exactly who they are, give them a choice of three pre-defined characters?
Can you make a game where the shared reality is carefully defined to cause the most efficient communication over the limited bandwith you have? A game which either has new methods of communication specifically geared towards putting pieces together, or a game whose reality is designed so that interacting while in that reality essentially causes pieces to fall together - like guilds going on raids and optimizing loot?
Better yet, can you do both simultaneously?
Or did this post not even make any sense?
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