Wondrous Random

One of the problems with generating content for games is that it always feels prosaic and dull.

So generative games are seeded with wondrous details. The generative content is used as endless filler.

Let's talk about wonder.

It's certainly possible to generate wondrous things. Here's a twitter bot that generates endlessly wondrous planets.

But these aren't suitable to put in video games. The biggest issue is the lack of interaction: a video game's strength is interactivity, right?

Let's consider sci fi, since I'm a sci fi nerd. So let's talk about a few wondrous moments, whether they're interactive, and whether these moments could be generative.

When I considered wondrous moments, I realized they are all either introducing us or bidding us farewell. They are transitions. They are exclamation points. They are a hello or a goodbye.

For example, a rocket launch is amazing. It's wondrous to launch a rocket.

But if we show every rocket launch in a game, the player will get truly bored no matter how pretty it is. See Mass Effect: Andromeda for details.

Instead, we would focus on the rocket launches that take place during notable transitions. When we are saying goodbye to a beloved planet and hello to the stars, that's when we put in a loving shot of the rocket launch. Even though the player has undoubtedly seen a million rocket launches in their life, this moment is wondrous because it comes at the right moment. Just when we're saying goodbye, just when we're saying hello.

Obviously, there are also things that are rarer. Ancient obelisks. Forgotten planets. Derelict space ships. Strange aliens. The sight of your ship being split in half while you're inside it.

These also have the most impact if they happen when the player is saying hello or goodbye. Timed poorly, these amazing things will feel as mundane as having to shut off your alarm and get up for work.

As an example of this, in Mass Effect you spend a lot of time discovering new planets. It's incredibly boring. Discovering new planets is boring! ... because it's part of your daily tedium.

On the other hand, in Stellaris you inevitably discover another alien star nation. This feels surprisingly powerful, because the game leads up to it with popups about how there's no intelligent life even though you're searching for it. Things are just starting to slow down for your star nation, you're ready for a change, and then BAM - a new civilization calls. And then another and another!

There's not much fanfare in terms of selling the illusion. A few lines of text before, one extra line of text afterwards. But because it happens at the right time it feels thrilling. Say hello to a new era!

Well, half the time the pacing is off. It's not a perfect game. But when it works, it works - even without the majesty of long edits and low camera angles.

Later on, discovering a new species feels dull and pedestrian. You're already in that era, and there's no transition happening, so it's dull and pedestrian.

So... let's discuss some techniques we can use to make this stuff shine.

Understanding the Phases of your Game
Rather than discussing how to generate wondrous things, the critical thing is when to generate them. By guiding the player through distinct chunks of game, you create moments where wondrous things fit, and even mediocre wonders will play well in those moments.

The difficulty is in making the chunks feel sharp and clear. For example, in Mass Effect you might go visit the Citadel and spend three hours doing side quests. This is a phase. But there's no "punch" to the beginning or ending of the phase. Mass Effect does play a little video of you pulling out of space dock, but it's perfunctory. It has to be, because the staging isn't heavy enough for the player to put up with more.

How can we build up these phase as things that feel real and heavy?

There are two factors here: the construction of the phase and the transition moment.

Constructing the Phase
The biggest things that add weight are events and characters tied to the specific phase, with a focus on them being left behind when the phase changes.

For example, if it's a visit to The Citadel, you can have the player solve various problems... but have the characters wait on the way to the docks to wave goodbye and say thank you. This doesn't interfere with the player - the player can just run right past - but it does make the player realize they're leaving a place that they've affected.

There are plenty of other, heavier ways. For example, the player knowing they'll never return makes those goodbyes more intense. The player knowing the place is about to sink into a fiery magma pit also punches things up.

Adding play on the exit is also valid: in order to get off-world, the players have to fight through the local thugs and decouple the dock lock-down locks. When considering where to put these kinds of fights, the answer is "before the wondrous thing" - so if our wondrous thing is the launch, then we want the fight to happen before launch, not in space.

If you're creating a linear game, this can all be added in manually. If we're talking about generating content, it's clear we have to generate these heavy elements. The wondrous launch isn't the thing we have to generate: we have to generate the thugs and the teary children waving goodbye and the battered old robots throwing flowers.

We have to generate the context. The meaning.

This is something people talk about a lot, but I think they generally discuss how to create long chains of content. Our focus is different: we don't need complex, evolving narratives. We need short, punchy narratives that fit within this phase of the game and have a clear "goodbye" state.

You Say Goodbye, I Say Hello
Transition moments can be on the "goodbye" side or the "hello" side, and there can be scenes between those sides.

For example, when we leave The Citadel we can linger on our ship going through the relay and let the weight of our passing slowly roll through us. Orrrrr we can show an exciting shot of us approaching a new planet, slamming aside the purple clouds as we burn down on a re-entry.

But we can't show both.

I mean, we do show both. But only one will count as wondrous. The other will count as just a long shot.

Which one do we focus on? Well, which phase is heavier? Is the phase part of a longer chain of similar phases?

For example, leaving The Citadel is usually not a huge deal, because it's a hub world and you visit it a lot. In general, goodbyes are going to be weak from places you're revisiting... unless it's the last time you'll ever visit them. The last goodbye from a hub world is extremely strong.

Similarly, if you are leaving a world exploration phase and immediately entering another world exploration phase, the goodbye is going to be weak and you'll want to play up the new elements with a strong hello.

In theory.

Either way, it's probably best to pad some time between the goodbye and the hello. In a video game, this usually consists of world map navigation, although that's less than ideal. Useful non-phase activities such as party chatter, inventory management, and so on are probably better.

Repeated Majesties
Whether you're generating them or seeding carefully-created content, you're going to have some kind of amazing thing in your universe. You'd like it to not get boring.

An example of this is the relays in Mass Effect. Ancient technology that lets the folks travel great distances without much effort! Amazing!

But in Mass Effect they quickly become so mundane you just want to skip any scene involving them.

Why? Because they are mundane. They are part of the ordinary play of the game. They are not at a start point or an end point. They do not say hello or goodbye. They just happen over the course of your day-to-day affairs.

That's fine, to an extent. Not every encounter with them has to feel magical. But we want the player to be aware that they're playing with something potent every day. So we should try to tie our transitions to them whenever we can. Rather than showing a rocket launch, we would show a relay launch.

They become a "staple wonder", used whenever we need a wonder but don't have any specific wonder in mind.

The issue is that you only have so much space for these. For example, our ship is, itself, a staple wonder. Loving shots of our ship are also a major repeated theme. But is there room for both the ship and the relay? It'd dilute the shots if you played up both the ship and the relay in the same scene: wonders need to be punchy.

There are plenty of times when the ship can be used and the relay can't... but are there any times when the relay can be used but the ship can't?

These are the questions I want writers and devs to ask themselves when they're designing their universe. Not "are relays cool/plot-important", but "when we show cool stuff with relays, are we getting in the way of showing other, more important cool stuff?"

Please note, generative elements can work here just fine. For example, the "deep monsters" in Dwarf Fortress could easily be re-used in different games rather than regenerated from scratch each time - until you defeat this one, you won't get a different one.

Epic Generation
OK, OK, what about actually generating epic, wondrous stuff?

Well, there's a few categories of epic stuff, and presumably they'd be generated with different systems.

For recurring touchstones such as "your awesome ship" or "the bloodthirst armies of Throckwoodle", those are likely to be specified by the dev, then slotted in as appropriate. As discussed, "generating" those is more like generating a reason for you to use them.

The idea of generating some amazing scenario is also appealing. How do you generate an amazing scenario?

Well, that's a book on its own, but in general you have to remember to make the "hello" connect to the play. The deeper the connection, the better.

In general: the hello needs to tell the player why they're here.

For example, let's say you roll the dice and come up with a pirate base on a mist-covered moon. The wonder is the mist-covered moon - it feels still and epic. But the players aren't here for a mist-covered moon. They're here to tangle with the pirates.

How do you set that up? Well, you can show a shot of the pirate base within the mist, or pirates on motorcycles in the mist, or whatever. You can have an event where the pirates burst out of the mist to capture or ground the players. There's a lot of options: a battered merchant ship half-lost in fog, for example.

These are not too hard to generate, because you can largely just use category matches. The fact that it's a foggy moon is not important to the algorithm: it's just considered "MASK category GRAVITY FIELD category", and so it would have the same set of options as if you were on a smokey volcanic planet, an acidic Venus, a snowy ice moon, even an artificial-gravity planetoid covered in silver clouds.

Besides making the hello introduce the play, it's also valuable to have the play reference the hello. For example, the pirates can explain that they set up base here because the mists are an excellent cover, or they can have tactics derived from the mists, or they can have problems and keep getting lost because of the mist, or maybe they have mutant winged wolves that the mist has created... again, these aspects don't have to make too much sense, as long as they're not actively nonsensical.

The other kind of wondrous event I tend to want to create are the action-packed transition scenes where things turn. For example, your ship takes direct laser fire from the megacannon and is ripped in half with you aboard, now you're staring over a spiraling debris field struggling to get to the megacannon before you run out of air. Or there's a chase in the jungle as speeder bikes race for safety. Or you have to trick the zorgblat to smash down the walls of the alien zoo so you can escape...

These moments are dangerously close to talking about "generative plots", so we'll leave them mostly in the background for now except for one important fact:

These are transition scenes.

This is a moment when you say goodbye to where you were and hello to someplace new.

And that's considerably more important than whether they are simulated correctly or whatever.

...

Anyway, them's my thoughts. Tell me what you think.

Character Checklist

I'd like to talk about how to write characters, especially for sci fi. There will be very mild spoilers for Mass Effect: Andromeda's first hours.

It's clear that the Mass Effect team wanted to up the representation in this game. The characters are more diverse, both major and minor. For starters, there are a number of alien lizard women that don't have breasts, pretty much a first in the genre.

Care was taken to try and slot people into "nonstereotypical" roles. For example, the religious zealot is your scientist. The butch lady is straight. It's clear they were really trying to make this feel inclusive while avoiding stereotypes.

Unnnnfortunately, they're not very good at it.

In science fiction, we're currently walking a new path. The concept of representation in sci fi is thorny, because sci fi was built around representing other cultures and ideals with aliens. When sci fi is aimed at a single group of people, that works well enough - your target demographic is the baseline, and everyone else is an alien.

This may sound reductive, but that's how it's generally been. This allows sci fi to take how the target audience treats those people, those ideas, those policies... and show it separate from the complex intertangling of the real world.

Even Star Trek, a sterling example of inclusion, did this. Although the crew had minority crewmembers, they did not represent the struggle of minorities: Star Trek was portrayed as being past that. They were representations without the real-world baggage.

Rather than include any racial tensions on the starship, the writers would put the racial tensions into a representative race. For example, making a species that is half white and half black get into racial wars over whether they where white on the left, black on the right... or visa-versa.

This works reasonably well when sci fi stories are aimed at a specific audience. But once the audience expands, it becomes clear that being represented in that way doesn't work so well. The tribulations of the Mass Effect devs have made it clear that people want to see themselves properly represented. Not as a weird alien or a paint job on a default character, but as someone with similar concerns and goals.

Basically, everyone wants a power fantasy about them.

Nobody is monolithic. Each person cares about a lot of things. This is why Mass Effect found itself with fans that weren't really represented. It has anemic racial commentary and somewhat regressive gender representation, but those people also found things they liked. Space ships, cool adventures, an epic battle, hot folks you could date...

Mass Effect clearly decided those people deserved better representation, and struggled to work in a more diverse cast. This seems to have backfired with Andromeda, whose representations are painful tokens that mostly highlight a clumsy writer rather than making people feel welcome.

To me, the problem is clear:

Representation is not one thing.

In sci fi, representation can mean "oh, we're past all the problems you're struggling with", or it can mean "oh, let's explore that concept, free from the complexities of the real world", or it can mean "oh, let's explore that with all the complexities of the real world in a new context".

Moreover, in a video game, does an NPC even count as representation? Can we say that we are represented if we are not allowed to control ourselves? Does a background character going through a personal crisis represent us if we also went through that personal crisis?

Or does it only count if we actually have control?

Whatever you think the answer is, I think it can be argued that we should try to "centralize" representation. It should be part of the player's experience, not just part of the background noise.

The obvious problem with this is that there are more experiences we want to represent than we can cram into one timeline, and many of them are contradictory. Our hero can't be everyone. They will always be an outsider to some group just by their inclusion in another group.

... none of this is new.

Sci fi has always been about including a lot of different experiences via abstraction. Normally, the experiences we want to include are coherent. They cohere around a core idea.

Our universe might revolve around the idea of right and wrong, like Star Wars. Experiences revolving around that concept naturally pop into the writer's heads and flow smoothly through the player's adventures.

For example, in the Knights of the Old Republic series, we can easily have an evil android, a 'gray' Jedi, adventures in balancing the needs of the many and the rights of the few, of balancing law and morality. These are issues which naturally arise from Star Wars' obsession with good and evil. They all integrate with the player's own story to some extent, usually through party members.

But it is more difficult to include things like race, religion, or gender. Since they are not hooked directly into good and evil, you have to force them to fit. Sure, it's evil to massacre people because of their race or religion, but there's not much to explore. It's just evil being evil because you need to send a message.

Thus the endless stream of bandits in so many games. Just evil for evil's sake. Can't think of any way to make them more interesting, because we didn't set up our universe right.

If we want to be more inclusive, we have to orient our universe around inclusive concepts. For example, the Federation is about all people coming together for a better future. Not just humans, but all sorts of aliens living their weird, extreme, exaggerated alien lifestyles.

That's not a very viable theme in this case, because there's not a lot of discussion. Race, religion, and gender in this kind of universe are just accepted. We're past the conflicts that arise from them: the answer is always "yeah, as you like, now let's go space exploring!" Or, alternately, "let's show the oppressor why he's wrong!"

This is not a situation I have answers for, but if I were writing a sci fi setting these days, I might base it around the idea of acceptance vs rebellion. Accepting people or things or situations - or fighting them. When do you side with who, and how much will you sacrifice to help people you'll never meet again and who aren't magical paragons?

When we want to add in representation here, it should flow relatively fluidly. There are endless nuances and complexities to explore - not just things like "evil people hate minorities", but things like systemic injustice, unstable societies, and the difference between accepting someone and fetishizing them.

We would be free to either lift situations wholly from our reality, or create abstracted situations that leave out the entanglements of the real world. Both would play well in this environment.

These situations would flow easily and naturally, and we would be able to write them without feeling forced or feeling like we have a checklist. I think you'd be surprised how often you would naturally write something that resonates with people Mass Effect has been struggling for years to even acknowledge.

Conversely, we would have a hard time talking about good vs evil. It'd feel very forced.

Even with this theoretical franchise, we are left with some complex questions. Can facets of humanity be represented by aliens? Do technological handwaves diminish the validity of real-world struggles? How much of our writing needs to be vetted and rearranged by people going through the real-world versions of our abstracted situations?

But I think it'd be a pretty good approach. Just need to figure out a reason why acceptance vs rebellion would be the founding principle of the universe: Star Wars has the Force, Star Trek has the Federation, dunno what I'd use.

Anyway, let me know what you think.

A New Sci Fi Game Genre

Games like Mass Effect and Knights of the Old Republic are fantastic games. I've replayed most of them a few times. Each time I do, I get drawn to something that's not quite in the games, something I can almost taste.

Not sensawunda or nostalgia, but a whole missing genre.

Let's design a Mass-Effect-style game with Star-Trek-like ideals.

Old Star Trek was about being a mature civilization in a universe full of amazing marvels. Basically the opposite of a coming-of-age story, Star Trek was about adults finding the universe contains unending wonders. This is not the theme of any RPG I know of, but it could be. We have the power.

Wonders
First let's focus on "wonders". To be honest, we already create wonders for the player in these kinds of games. We just don't play them up enough to have it register.

An example of this is Mass Effect. In this series you'll visit dozens of different hostile environments, hundreds of different classes of ships and space stations and planetary settlements. You'll see caves, plant monsters, psychics, ancient alien hive-minds driven mad by abuse, creatures so old they eat a galaxy of life forms in one bite, artificial intelligences struggling to work out how and if they should live, and so many more things.

Most of these sci fi RPGs and many horror games use the close-third-person camera. This tool is so powerful that I don't even think they know why they chose it. They chose it just because it always worked before... but there's a reason it's evolved to be such a core part of these games. It's the most powerful camera for showing us wonders and immersing us in amazing places.

1) We can see our window character. Both how they look in comparison to the area, and how they interact with the area/are interacted with by the area. Because we can see how our avatar compares, we know how to feel about the area.

2) We are still zoomed in pretty close. This allows us to make out all the details, as well as get a real sense of scale. When your camera zooms out too far, it's hard to feel like you're inside this wondrous place, and you can't make out any details of how other people feel about being there.

3) We can use standard cinematic techniques to draw focus and change mood. Slow pans, zooms, depth-of-field, shaking, tilt, and many more cinematic conventions can be flat-out stolen, and they'll work fine. Moreover, the camera is flexible enough that it can become first-person or bird's-eye as needed, giving us the best of all worlds.

By understanding the advantages the close-third-person camera gets us, we can play those up to create a more powerful and distinct sense of place, scale, and wonder.

For example, if we land on a world full of toxic electrical mists, our main character wears a heavy suit. We know it's a toxic environment because we can see our character plonking around in this heavy suit. Even the dialog has a tinny radio sound, and we can hear the KKkzzsshshhhh of sand blasting against our visor. We can punch it up by making the sound vary depending on the direction you turn, since the wind is blasting in one direction. When the electrical mist gets bad, we can see the flickering purple sparks on the skin of our suit, hear the radio break into static. We can even adjust the camera to a lower, hunched-down angle when the wind picks up.

Virtually every "amazing new thing" can be done using similar methods. If we discover a new species, how our avatar physically interacts with them will tell us how to feel about them. We can see how the locals react to us as we wander around in various costumes and deal with places built for creatures of alien proportions. If we find an ancient, damaged space station, we'll watch our avatar duck and crawl through shattered hallways, float across zero grav areas.

This is more work than just using the same walking animation all the time and simply making each level with new arrangements of the same meshes, but I feel like it's worth the price. A lot of the techniques can also be re-used - for example, the wind-blast sound pattern can be reused in the vents of a space station, or during a hull breach, or in a dock when a ship fires retro-thrusters, or even in a humorous way when your admiral is chewing you out for blowing something up.

Basically: if we radically increase the immersion of each new place, we can make each new place feel more amazing and new.

Adults
Those optimizations need to be backed up with some serious changes to how the game lets us interact with the location/have our interactions moderated by the location. This is where the "adults" half of "adults discovering wonders" comes into play.

We can argue over what being mature means, but for the sake of this design, let's say it means appreciating peace and life, and accepting that nothing is perfect. That is at the heart of a lot of my favorite Star Trek episodes, so that's what I'll be using as my measuring stick here.

That doesn't mean having a pacifist game. It might be possible to make one, but for now let's assume the game is still largely like Mass Effect or Knights of the Old Republic: you are fundamentally gonna get in a lot of fights.

How can we make maturity part of the game, despite that?

It's about allowing the player to appreciate the complexities of the places and situations they are in, and taking actions which take place within that complexity rather than just cutting everything apart.

1) Show people living in these places, show their joys and hardships, let them do things besides just sit around and repeat one line. It doesn't have to fit into a large algorithm or anything, it can be pretty basic, but focus on their concerns and their joys. Nearly all dialog, subquests, and exposition can be made part of some NPC's life, so obviously do that.

2) Show that things falling apart is bad. As lumpy as local society might be, anarchy would be worse. Ideally, show it in reaction to the player's choices: if the player takes too heavy a hand, chaos forms in the vacuum they leave. Many of the player's missions might be to try and help in places where this has already happened, which will keep it from being too blunt.

3) Party members. Have several party members along, or even have them comment over the radio. If each party member embodies one particular theme of the game (as is pretty common), they can comment on the things they see and the player will be able to easily understand the context of the comment. Of course, they can also drag the player into the local mess.

4) Recurring NPCs. Other mobile NPCs can visit many places and can bring their own nuanced chaos into the mix. Working with or around these NPCs and their factions can add a solid foundation to build on for the player's own nuanced interactions.

5) Refining choices. This one's a bit complex.

Basically, the first time you encounter a choice, you don't have much complexity to your response. But you keep revisiting the situation, and each time your options get more refined.

For example, a seedy space station has a problem as to whether it's being run by the locals or by the barely-inhabited planet below. When you first arrive, you can choose to side on one side or the other, or neither. You'll learn more as the situation unfolds, and your choices get more nuanced: you can try to put pressure on one side or the other to implement reforms or switch people of power in and out. You can gather intelligence and make surgical strikes or robust defenses. You can choose who gets a captured warship... even who gets to pilot it.

Writing these kinds of nuanced trees can be a little daunting, but there's methods that can help us out. We can lean heavily on either algorithmic or re-usable plot events, especially if we're making an open-world game.

We have to be careful, though: it's easy to end up feeling flat and formulaic if you lean too heavily on those approaches, and that would completely kill the tone we're going for.

In the end, the tone we want is one where the player can go anywhere in our universe, stop, and just enjoy the ambiance. Whether that means their squad of three is hanging out on top of a methane glacier, in the heart of their starship engineering section, or in a bar on any given space station. We want the player to think "this is a place worth protecting".

Or, at least, "it could be worse!"

Summary
There's nothing fundamentally new about these suggestions. Really, I'm just hoping to punch up specific facets that already exist in most sci-fi RPGs.

When those elements get punched up enough, a new genre might emerge. One about existing in a sci fi world, rather than murdering your way through one. But I can't see the end product right now.

I can see making wonders feel wonderful and adults feel mature, though.

I think that'd be a fun start.

Star Wars Review

Finally saw Star Wars. This will be me talking about it, because I'm sure everyone wants to hear my opinions!

Well, they might be a bit unusual.

First, though: spoilers ahead!

All the spoilers.

...

Force Awakens is by far the best film JJ Abram's ever put out. The movie is... not bad. The DP is great, the effects are mostly great, the actors are mostly pretty good, the sets are great, the music was fitting, and the directing has been carefully cut into pieces and arranged to be as unbad as could reasonably be managed. The writing is awful, but in an inoffensive way.

It is radically better than I expected, which is nice. It is... not bad.

Now, let's talk about some thematic stuff, because this is where the movie interests me most. Obviously, any thematic stuff is in here on accident or because JJ Abrams saw the cover for a book or something, but there's still some meat here.

First, the villain. I like him.

Now, let's be clear. The guy is a doofus. He's a pale shadow of Darth Vader. But that's the point! That's great! There's no way for a new dragon to step into Vader's shoes, and this is an open, in-world admission of that. I like the fact that the mask makes him look vaguely intimidating, but he's a snot-faced kid inside. I think that's fantastic. It fits in-universe as a scared boy stepping into radically outsized shoes, and it fits in the metafilm as an admission that nobody's gonna match Vader, and it fits in the mythology of the Force: villainy isn't born from strength.

I like the overall arc of him killing his father, and his father basically letting him do it. I think the progression was bad, the dialog was incredibly overweight, and the moment-to-moment writing/directing was pretty abominable, but the overall arc is fantastic. The idea that a scared kid needs to kill his father to prove himself, and his father just lets him? That's powerful. That's good.

Unfortunately, it's extremely hard to build a villain up from "scared little kid". It takes a lot of screen time to grow up, and they aren't going to give this kid that amount of screen time. So he's never likely to feel like a real threat. It's easier to work backwards: show a badass, reveal he was a scared little kid. Because of that, I don't think this villain will ever really work. This is especially true since they gave the heroes a massive power boost and brought them up to his level already, meaning that he has to grow substantially faster than the heroes, but with a fraction of the screentime.

...

The overall concept of the movie was good. JJ Abrams is no good, and everyone knows it. Forcing him to recreate the original Star Wars movie is a great way to keep him pinned and reasonable, and then you can rely on editors to save the film. A tried and true Star Wars approach.

Unfortunately, it doesn't make much sense. It undoes the original trilogy, and nobody in-world has any explanations or concerns about how it happened.

I understand that Disney needed to use their existing actors before they die of age, and that Disney needed to make a "return to Star Wars classic" movie. But I just can't accept this nonsense setting. You have to reaaaaally stretch to explain it, and even if you do, it ends with "and that means the original trilogy basically accomplished nothing."

The big bad is awful, just the least interesting villain I've ever seen. Clearly they just wanted the Emperor again, but it's really dull. It's made worse because it makes no sense. Where did this ultimate big bad come from? Everyone talks about him as if he's always been around, but that again degrades the original trilogy.

It's a very "Dragonball Z" plotline.

Now, I think it would be really interesting if the villain turns out to be making Kylo suck on purpose. The idea of training a Sith lord wrong in order to bring his fear and anger to a peak, then fixing the mistakes... is an interesting one. I don't think that's what's in store, but it could have been an interesting idea. Still, the villain is nonsense.

"But where are they supposed to find a villain if-"

Uh? Exar Kun? The backstory could have been "Kylo Ren was in training, stumbled across a Sith holocron, and OH SHIIIIIIIII"

I think that could have been equally compelling. And there's a lot of cool reveals built into that. For example: Kylo Ren keeps asking for guidance from a hologram. Then it's revealed it's just the holocron, and he's just searching it. There is no super villain Emperor equivalent: everyone just thinks there is, because Kylo keeps bringing them in to see this really intimidating holocron. And it's really good at administration: they ask it what to do, and the computer spits out an optimal answer. Everyone thinks it's a real person - maybe even Kylo.

This would be an amazing way to instantly level him up, a real Bates Motel moment. We go from thinking "how is this Sith Lord so bad at everything" to "HOLY SHIT HE'S HELD THE WHOLE EMPIRE TOGETHER WITH THE POWER OF HIS DELUSION!"

Look, if we're gonna talk about movies that Could Have Been, let's talk about the nonsense map. Of the many things in this movie that didn't hold up, this was a biggie. So, here's a simple alternative:

Luke's teachings failed, and Kylo was seduced by the dark side of the Force. Everyone was killed. So Luke goes in search of the original temple to try and find clues as to how to teach better. Fine, great. The original temple is in the galactic core. Nobody can get in safely without a map. Luke left R2-D2 behind as an anchor, to help keep him oriented and to "catch" his messages. R2 has spit out a number of map fragments over the past decade or so, but rather than saying "we can't pick out these stars", they say "we know which stars they are, but we can only get this far. We need the map for the black holes deeper in to get any further."

And BB8 holds the first piece. The one that just gets you started. The rest is already complete.

This offers a lot of cool ideas. Diving through stellar debris. The Empire - oops, 'Order' - trying to brute-force find a path by sacrificing ships. Our Jedi-to-be having to feel her way through an area that's drifted since Luke went through, using the same techniques he used. This is a good, concrete-but-not-blatant "following in his footsteps" analog.

Look, the movie could have been a lot of things. Thousands of people have given their suggestions on what the movie should have been or how it could have been made better. Adding mine to the stack is no big thing, but I did want to say one more thing:

This is the first sci fi movie in a while that made me want to write my own stuff. Not fanfic, but things with some of the same themes, or pieces inspired by the holes in this movie.

That makes this at least a successful sci fi film. I know the director is worthless and any new ideas were included on accident, but at least I was inspired.