Linear RPGs and open-world RPGs are not the same.
Linear RPGs allow the player to chew on things for as long as they like, then poke the sleepy plot into delivering the next big chunk of content. This has a lot of pros and cons.
From the dev's perspective, the pros are powerful. Since the content is gated and carefully scripted, the dev knows exactly who the player is playing, exactly who is in their party, exactly how strong they are, exactly where the plot is, exactly what they've seen and haven't seen. No matter how long the player spends on the Shining Plains, they can't buy anything better than a cutlass and a fireball spell.
In addition, the player has a very crisp trigger. They know how to poke the plot into action: fight the boss, cross the monster bridge, say "I'm ready" to the queen. This action is always very obvious and voluntary, and the player will trigger it when they are ready to experience the next content chunk.
These two things combined allow the devs to make sweeping content chunks. When you cross the monster bridge or fight the boss, things change. There's cutscenes. You're fighting your way out of a dungeon. One of your party members leaves, another one arrives. The world is blown up and there's no way back to where you started...
It can be precise and moving, because you know exactly what the player is doing and who they have with them. It can be big and bombastic because the player explicitly volunteered to go through it.
Open-world RPGs don't have these advantages, because the majority of the world is already available from the start. A player moving from point A to point C isn't really "volunteering" to experience a big plot event at point B. Hell, you don't even know who they are or who's in their party, not when you're creating the content.
Because of this, open-world RPGs typically have hundreds of tiny threads of content instead of large content drops. They also adapt the combat challenges by level-scaling.
Both of these leave the experience bland and featureless in comparison to a linear RPG with its more nuanced challenge curve and bombastic, personalized plot events.
Linear RPGs have downsides, too. The big, obvious one is that their appeal is limited. If you don't like the shoes you're stuck in or the way the plot is going, well, that's too bad. If you want to start over, you'll have to go back through the same shit again, there's no fast way to move through those chapters aside from being more efficient with grinding.
There have been open-world CRPGs since before "CRPG" was a term, but they only came into their own when computers became strong enough to convincingly render the world and its responses to you. This became a more reliable method of drawing the player in than the limited appeal of a carefully-written linear storyline.
Big, splashy, personalized stories were left on the cutting room floor... but I think it's a mistake to assume they're gone for good. Not only is there power in the stories they tell, there's power in the fundamental pacing of a linear RPG. The way the content unfolds is really strong.
What if we could come up with a new RPG subgenre that keeps that power but adopts the freedoms of an open-world approach?
I call it "nonlinear" RPGs.
Imagine if we were going to write Mass Effect as a nonlinear RPG instead of a linear one. The characters and stories would feel the same, but they would silently adapt to the player's choices. Not just "paragon vs renegade": wildly veering so that even the basic setups could be avoided or inverted. Maybe you play a smooth talker with a good record, and you convince the council to take immediate action against the Reapers and the traitorous Spectre. Maybe you play Han Solo, and just buy a crappy ship on your own and fly off to have carefree space adventures.
If it was an open-world game, these would be viable. You have that level of variability in the recent Fallouts, for example. But Fallout doesn't have the heavy "WHAM chew chew chew WHAM" feel of a linear RPG - it's more like wading through vanilla pudding.
In order to make stories adapt to your choices, you have to write variations for every choice the player can make. If you have one big story (like a linear RPG), the cost spirals out of control very quickly. So open-world RPGs use lots of tiny, independent stories. It gives the player feedback and tells them the game accepts the way they're playing their character, but because they're small and have so little effect on the game world, you can write their variants cheaply.
Fortunately, linear RPGs don't need that responsiveness nearly as much. The linear RPG already knows how you're playing your character: they provided it.
But... that's where we need to go to find the kernel of what comes next.
If we want a linear RPG to let the player play a wide variety of characters in a wide variety of ways, we need to have the game respond to those variations.
A linear RPG's "gateways" are always crystal clear. A boss. A bridge. A queen's speech. The player trips them whenever they decide they want to, and the game moves forward.
It's easy to create random events. It's even easy to chain them and thread them so you have repeating villains or escalating challenges. It's easy to make random maps and random subquests. (There, I just cut twenty pages from this essay.)
But what isn't easy is to make the experiences adapt to the player's choices and hit hard without being annoying.
Killing off a character or blowing up a place or putting you in a long dungeon sequence is really, really annoying if it isn't done well. It's not about build-up or epicness: it's about suitability.
In a linear RPG, the characters and places and factions all exist to tell a story. Each one represents a major arc or a piece of an arc in the fundamental pattern of the game.
In Mass Effect, Tali's character represents the attempt to take back your future from the mistakes of your parents. Garrus represents the failings of The System to deal with things, and the lure to work outside it. Wrex represents the struggle to provide a future for people that actively seem to not want one. And Liara represents blue nerd ladies that want to have sex with you.
OK, not every character is equally interesting, but they all have arcs that thread through the games and give you a gateway into the beating heart of the story line. The planets, too, represent tiny pieces of those arcs, allowing the arcs to exist in the game world concretely, instead of as a talking head. Factions like the Spectres and the Council also push the plot arcs along in a powerful, immersive way and create a multi-planet threat to hook things together.
And this is our method.
We aren't generating storylines. We are generating random content, sure, but it's anchored into the characters, factions, and scripted plot events that are the best our universe has to offer. Our random content offers a foundation, a stage for those core ideas to dance on.
One of the issues of open-world games is that the player can choose to be anyone, and it's very hard for the game to figure out what the player's self-image is. Thus the frolicking, daisy-picking assassins in Elder Scrolls games. The game tries to guess which plot arcs will be interesting to you by placing them in places those kinds of characters are likely to go.
But our games have a party, and our party members embody specific plot arcs.
If I'm interested in how the system fails us and what happens when we work outside it, I take Garrus. If I'm interested in the fate of the ancients, I take Liara. If I'm interested in struggling to build a future for people that don't want your help, I take Wrex. Not as a conscious choice, but because I am drawn to their characters right from the start.
Of course, the party structure of existing Mass Effect games wouldn't work, since you basically have everyone all the time and nobody ever leaves or comes back.
It's easy enough to replace that structure with one where the player only has a crew of three or four, and they frequently leave to go on some arc-related personal mission you can't help with. (Of course, you'll meet up with them later when the next piece of the arc comes around...)
This means our arcs have to be written with a bit of flexibility. While the core arc has a specific chain of events (for example, Mordin's plot involves rescuing a research victim, helping her, then distributing a fix), it should also contain a number of background events suitable for A) seeing Mordin repeatedly and getting to know him even if you don't trigger his join event, B) filling out random content with evocative situations (his commenting on the evil bug monsters, for example), and C) Mordin's background work after he's joined and then left and then is kicking around waiting to join again.
With these elements in place, the player would "naturally" be attracted to the local NPCs that seem the most interesting. Which will, of course, be arc characters suitable for adding to the party. Once the party is filled up (with maybe one spare), the others are too busy with their personal situation to join your team right now.
Don't choose to take Liara? Well, Liara will also show up in other space stations or on other planets, chatting about how she's chasing down a new lead on an old ruin. She may even have a small sidequest for you. And, if any of your party members leave for a while, you'll suddenly find she's pretty easy to recruit!
Now that your party is known, the next time you trigger a major content burp (fly to a contested star system, argue with the council, defeat a boss, etc) it'll be laced with the next arc events for your party of characters.
Not tiny drips and drabs, either: the next content batch is a big, bombastic event. A whole new set of planets, characters leaving and arriving, crashing your ship and fighting through a jungle...
This is also easy to mod. You can introduce additional characters with their own arcs pretty easily. Although the character arcs don't really overlap, they do exist in the same space: Mordin's arc introduces a mad science lab where genetic monsters are running amok, but it's inside a planet dedicated to Tali's next big arc element, where she's investigating the whole planet for suitability as a home world. Other elements are also laced in. Some are minor arc elements, some are completely random, but all can be laced together using a simple keyword system and a bunch of NPCs or audio tapes referring to other places. Those can easily be generated randomly.
Right now, we think of RPGs as either a world to play in or as monolithic stories. Instead, we might think of them as a bunch of opportunistic stories that piggyback on characters, factions, and places to assemble their setpieces.
... anyway, I cut about fifteen pages out of this long-ass essay. Hopefully it's not too hard to read.
Showing posts with label story. Show all posts
Showing posts with label story. Show all posts
Monday, June 20, 2016
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.
Monday, October 22, 2012
Perspective Changes and Gameplay
Recently I've become a bit obsessed with the idea of changing perspective as a gameplay mechanic. It probably started with Fez, and since playing that I've come up with dozens of prototypes based on the idea of the same data/situation meaning something different when viewed differently.
For example, I like the idea of a social base-building game where you can put other people's bases "behind" yours. So any gaps in your base are filled by the rooms in that spot on their base. Since rooms often need a lot of effort and support infrastructure, it's possible to put in rooms that would be impossible for you to build. In turn, they could put your base behind their base and, by coordinating gaps, you could both have a much more interesting base than either alone.
I also like the idea of a game where you continue to tell the story by folding or flipping the pieces of the story. For example, if the story begins with a castle, you might fold the castle to reveal the narrow, tall tower the princess is at the top of, or unfold it to reveal the knights and king of the castle proper, or flip it to show the dungeon and the evil vizier...
I also also like the idea of this book: panorama book (via Jenny Winder). The idea that the pages/elements you aren't using can fade forward or backwards to become support elements seems brilliant. More than a simple aesthetic, this also allows you to control which elements can simultaneously be in focus. This is important: normally, if you have two dozen elements that all play a role, the programmer has to take into account the many things they can do with each other, and the player has to decide to try to mate up various pieces. But if it is organized such that specific pieces can only come into focus with specific pieces, you can reduce the explosion of complexity and maintain an orderly flow without chaining the player down too much.
I'm going to try to think about how you might make story games using these techniques!
For example, I like the idea of a social base-building game where you can put other people's bases "behind" yours. So any gaps in your base are filled by the rooms in that spot on their base. Since rooms often need a lot of effort and support infrastructure, it's possible to put in rooms that would be impossible for you to build. In turn, they could put your base behind their base and, by coordinating gaps, you could both have a much more interesting base than either alone.
I also like the idea of a game where you continue to tell the story by folding or flipping the pieces of the story. For example, if the story begins with a castle, you might fold the castle to reveal the narrow, tall tower the princess is at the top of, or unfold it to reveal the knights and king of the castle proper, or flip it to show the dungeon and the evil vizier...
I also also like the idea of this book: panorama book (via Jenny Winder). The idea that the pages/elements you aren't using can fade forward or backwards to become support elements seems brilliant. More than a simple aesthetic, this also allows you to control which elements can simultaneously be in focus. This is important: normally, if you have two dozen elements that all play a role, the programmer has to take into account the many things they can do with each other, and the player has to decide to try to mate up various pieces. But if it is organized such that specific pieces can only come into focus with specific pieces, you can reduce the explosion of complexity and maintain an orderly flow without chaining the player down too much.
I'm going to try to think about how you might make story games using these techniques!
Tuesday, December 20, 2011
Exploring New Worlds
I've been thinking about exploring ideas.
I make roughly one world setting every two months - that is, a fully realized setting for a game or story. Drawings, descriptions, rules if it's a game, the works. It's fun.
One of the reasons I do it is because I'm curious to know how far a given concept can be pushed, and in what directions. This is the sort of thing that an author means when they say "I write SPECULATIVE fiction, not SCIENCE fiction!"
As you create these worlds, you find some things you consider to be real gems. See, designing a world isn't just making a world that holds together. The point of designing a world is to make a world that says things, that shines at people. Anyone can create a world where the politics of the elven kingdoms make sense... it's far more difficult to make a world where anybody gives a shit about the politics of the elven kingdoms.
I guess you could say that the point of a world is to clutch the human mind, not to be rigorous or clever or even interesting, although all of those are often helpful at keeping your grip.
So the more recent of my worldish creations have mostly been about providing a scaffold: clear marks and leads stretch across the world so that players or storytellers can follow (as loosely as they prefer) and see what the world has to offer. All the pretty and ugly things I came up with when I was thinking up things that followed from the basic ideas of the world.
Is there any kind of common understanding of this concept? This idea of worlds as a scaffold, as a guide book? Is there any forum for people who want to trade worlds and fragments and explore and write down what they find? A kind of improv storytelling where the idea isn't to do stand-up, but to explore?
Because there are many worlds, and many concepts. And even within a world of my design, there are things I didn't think of.
I make roughly one world setting every two months - that is, a fully realized setting for a game or story. Drawings, descriptions, rules if it's a game, the works. It's fun.
One of the reasons I do it is because I'm curious to know how far a given concept can be pushed, and in what directions. This is the sort of thing that an author means when they say "I write SPECULATIVE fiction, not SCIENCE fiction!"
As you create these worlds, you find some things you consider to be real gems. See, designing a world isn't just making a world that holds together. The point of designing a world is to make a world that says things, that shines at people. Anyone can create a world where the politics of the elven kingdoms make sense... it's far more difficult to make a world where anybody gives a shit about the politics of the elven kingdoms.
I guess you could say that the point of a world is to clutch the human mind, not to be rigorous or clever or even interesting, although all of those are often helpful at keeping your grip.
So the more recent of my worldish creations have mostly been about providing a scaffold: clear marks and leads stretch across the world so that players or storytellers can follow (as loosely as they prefer) and see what the world has to offer. All the pretty and ugly things I came up with when I was thinking up things that followed from the basic ideas of the world.
Is there any kind of common understanding of this concept? This idea of worlds as a scaffold, as a guide book? Is there any forum for people who want to trade worlds and fragments and explore and write down what they find? A kind of improv storytelling where the idea isn't to do stand-up, but to explore?
Because there are many worlds, and many concepts. And even within a world of my design, there are things I didn't think of.
Saturday, September 24, 2011
Superheroes
Spent a painful afternoon in the comic shop. Every week I hear worse and worse news about superhero comics (especially DC comics), so I finally went to take a look, courtesy of incompetent electricians disconnecting my computer again again again.
Superhero comics have always been an interesting topic for me, because even though I read them, I was never a tremendous fan.
But dismissing them as "male power fantasies" isn't... well, no, wait. I think they can safely be dismissed as that. However, they have filled a different niche in the past: they told stories of heroes embodying modern culture fighting villains that embodied modern culture.
Superheroes spent a long time competing for space with other paradigms that fought for the same niche: pulp adventure, space opera, noir detective stories. You might claim that superheroes have this fundamental staying power because they express some facet of our culture and ourselves in some particularly good way.
The truth is that superheroes simply outshouted the competition. The only thing superheroes have going for them is versatility: you can put just about any superhero in just about any story, with no real concern for canon or restraint. So that's just what they did. For a century.
Superheroes are a volume product. Marvel's invention of the "mutant" was a brilliant way to mass-produce iconic characters for every kind of story ever.
But, like any aging market, the superhero industry giants have failed to adapt and controlled their products too tightly.
As you will be aware if you've ever actually tried to do anything in the superhero realm, it's basically impossible. Your superheroes, even if you manage to find a name that was never used before (impossible), are probably breaking some kind of trademark regarding their suit or powers.
Moreover, the fundamental idea of the superhero is fading. From a character representing the heroic ideals of a modern culture, it's pretty clearly devolved into a simple power fantasy with fetish elements. Nothing shouts this louder than DC's pathetic reboot. DC's reboot also shouts that the industry is at the edge, out of time.
Some people want to save the superhero. I'd like to let it die. There are many new kinds of heroes waiting in the wings, but they can't come into play until superheroes have stepped down, especially since many of them would be considered superheroes and marginalized by that association if used now.
Superheroes have nothing more to say. They never really had much to say in the first place, although they have been involved in some pretty decent stories, especially when they cover topics such as racism and terror. Still, there are a lot of other heroes waiting to step in, let's go ahead and give the spandex-plus-accidental-superpowers a rest.
Superhero comics have always been an interesting topic for me, because even though I read them, I was never a tremendous fan.
But dismissing them as "male power fantasies" isn't... well, no, wait. I think they can safely be dismissed as that. However, they have filled a different niche in the past: they told stories of heroes embodying modern culture fighting villains that embodied modern culture.
Superheroes spent a long time competing for space with other paradigms that fought for the same niche: pulp adventure, space opera, noir detective stories. You might claim that superheroes have this fundamental staying power because they express some facet of our culture and ourselves in some particularly good way.
The truth is that superheroes simply outshouted the competition. The only thing superheroes have going for them is versatility: you can put just about any superhero in just about any story, with no real concern for canon or restraint. So that's just what they did. For a century.
Superheroes are a volume product. Marvel's invention of the "mutant" was a brilliant way to mass-produce iconic characters for every kind of story ever.
But, like any aging market, the superhero industry giants have failed to adapt and controlled their products too tightly.
As you will be aware if you've ever actually tried to do anything in the superhero realm, it's basically impossible. Your superheroes, even if you manage to find a name that was never used before (impossible), are probably breaking some kind of trademark regarding their suit or powers.
Moreover, the fundamental idea of the superhero is fading. From a character representing the heroic ideals of a modern culture, it's pretty clearly devolved into a simple power fantasy with fetish elements. Nothing shouts this louder than DC's pathetic reboot. DC's reboot also shouts that the industry is at the edge, out of time.
Some people want to save the superhero. I'd like to let it die. There are many new kinds of heroes waiting in the wings, but they can't come into play until superheroes have stepped down, especially since many of them would be considered superheroes and marginalized by that association if used now.
Superheroes have nothing more to say. They never really had much to say in the first place, although they have been involved in some pretty decent stories, especially when they cover topics such as racism and terror. Still, there are a lot of other heroes waiting to step in, let's go ahead and give the spandex-plus-accidental-superpowers a rest.
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?
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?
Monday, October 01, 2007
Your Guide to Creating Good Game Storylines
Lately, game storylines have sucked.
That's kind of unfair, I guess. Today's games have sucky stories because they have so much more capability - cutscenes, voice acting, cinematics. It took a lot less to have a good story a decade ago: just a few audio logs or a few dialog trees.
As an industry, we're stretching our wings and finding out that, in fact, we don't know how to fly.
Here is a ten-step guide to not sucking when it comes to storylines in video games. Obviously, this is not an advanced scientific study or some kind of holy truth. It's just what I think is a good idea.
Some of these details are what Hollywood writers are poor at, others are what game designers turned writer are poor at...
1) LET THEM PLAY
It doesn't matter what genre you are. This is a game, and that should be clear within a minute of pressing start. Your initial cut scene should never be longer than one minute, and preferably shouldn't exist at all. There's plenty of time for cut scenes: let us enjoy our game right now.
(Why does Halo 3 have a two minute initial cut scene?)
2) LET THEM PLAY, part the second
Keep cut scenes to a minimum. NO cut scene should be longer than two minutes. If it is that long, you need to split it and put some gameplay (and a save point) between them.
In addition, think about using non-intrusive methods. Asides are frequently all you need. There's no reason to have a cut scene where the characters go, "we need to get to the City of Monkeys". Just have one of them say it in the game engine. Takes less than half as long, doesn't screw up immersion.
3) LET THEM PLAY, part the third
Whenever you plan to switch modes (from play to a cut scene or just between play modes) make sure you have the player's permission. This can easily be done just by making it really obvious that going someplace or talking to a particular character will advance things.
Clear level endings or glowing markers are easy ways to do this.
4) CUT OFF THE NOSE TO SPITE THE FACE, PLEASE
Most game writers are not good dialog writers. They are concept thinkers: "it would be nifty if there were a species of aliens that could only survive while inhabiting photographs of naked women..." Not so good with the character details, because their characters typically simply say, "these species of aliens can only survive while inhabiting photographs of naked women... isn't that nifty?"
This leads to most games having dialog that is too on-the-nose. If you don't know what that means, don't fucking write dialog. Also, if you want to write exposition, don't write dialog. You don't have to explain... anything, really. Mysteries are usually better.
5) TOO MANY PEACHES, PEACHES FOR ME
On a related note, character design. Each character needs to be uniquely designed. That's something the industry is getting pretty good at. However, character design isn't simply visual: each character needs to speak in a distinct way, and each one needs to represent a distinct "flavor".
Think of characters as spices that you add to the "meal" of your gameplay and story. The right spices will make it taste excellent. But too often, character designs in a given game will all be the same spice. How often have you played a game where all the characters are chili peppers? You don't need fifteen different flavors of badass.
You also don't need fifteen different flavors of T&A. I don't mind sexiness (or sex) in my games, but try to show some respect for your characters. They have to feel alive, not like a barbie doll you stole from your sister.
6) HERE BE MONSTERS
Do not stick to the straight and narrow path from point (A) to point (B)oss. A world - and the people in it - only come alive when a bit of exploration is allowed.
Characters should talk about personal things, mention things that are outside the scope of the game. Levels should be designed to feel inhabited, although not at the expense of making them confusing.
Examples of this are clearest in World War II games. The soldiers in your squad feel painfully lifeless when all they say is "clear!" and "six o'clock!" That's why they frequently say things like "tank beats everything!", "I've... I've got a girl back home...", and "Gawd, Cookie, can't you make anything that doesn't taste like fewkin' Spam?"
This is all the flavor of the game. Meat is fine, but raw, unflavored meat?
7) A LITTLE CHOICE GOES A LONG WAY
Seriously, let your players make pacing decisions. Too many games force the player to have exactly N battles before the next plot point. Give your players a little freedom to dick around and really experience the world. At a minimum, let them get color commentary from random NPCs and see places that aren't directly plot related.
Don't worry about balance too much: let them work hard and get a ridiculous weapon, or waste two hours raising a chocobo. Just don't require them to.
8) IMAGERY
We've heard it before. Oooh, another end boss trying to destroy the world? Wow, another pack of alien invaders with superior technology? Sheesh, I've never seen a game with government spooks shooting at me...
There's nothing wrong with using the same basic plot. These basic plots give us a strong foundation to explore from, like making most of your characters humanoid: we can explore specifics and details without having to painstakingly establish everything.
But think of the plot as the meat of your dish. There's a thousand different ways to serve beef, and millions of things it goes well with. Similarly, your plot needs to be accompanied by strong images that really catch people's attention.
Evil villain taking over the world. The game feels radically different if it's set in primal Africa. Imagery is everything.
Pick a theme, pick a set of flavors, push it to the limit.
9) ABSURD RATIONALIZATIONS
Are good.
This is a game. Your primary game mechanic should also be your primary story mechanic. If your interesting game mechanic is that the main characters are superpowered mutants, then the plot should relate to superpowered mutants. It's kind of pointless if it's just a normal WWII game where you happen to have mutant powers.
By going out of your way to link the fiction of your game to the play of your game, you give yourself the freedom and power to explore that concept in a very directed way. For example, in Eternal Sonata, people only have magic if they are terminally ill. This lets the writers explore various people's reaction to imminent death in a wide variety of ways.
That's kind of a dark example. As a failed example, see Halo. In Halo, the Spartan is the main character. He's only marginally human and has this amazing supersuit. However, at no point in the games does the story really explore this: your enemies are always random aliens, your allies are always boring humans. Your suit never malfunctions, your enhancements never really matter except statistically. The fiction is disjunct. A failed opportunity to have a more flavorful story and more varied play.
10) THEME ME UP, SCOTTY!
Lastly, THEME. THEME THEME. Theme? Theme theme theme theme. Theme.
Theme theme theme? Theme.
That's kind of unfair, I guess. Today's games have sucky stories because they have so much more capability - cutscenes, voice acting, cinematics. It took a lot less to have a good story a decade ago: just a few audio logs or a few dialog trees.
As an industry, we're stretching our wings and finding out that, in fact, we don't know how to fly.
Here is a ten-step guide to not sucking when it comes to storylines in video games. Obviously, this is not an advanced scientific study or some kind of holy truth. It's just what I think is a good idea.
Some of these details are what Hollywood writers are poor at, others are what game designers turned writer are poor at...
1) LET THEM PLAY
It doesn't matter what genre you are. This is a game, and that should be clear within a minute of pressing start. Your initial cut scene should never be longer than one minute, and preferably shouldn't exist at all. There's plenty of time for cut scenes: let us enjoy our game right now.
(Why does Halo 3 have a two minute initial cut scene?)
2) LET THEM PLAY, part the second
Keep cut scenes to a minimum. NO cut scene should be longer than two minutes. If it is that long, you need to split it and put some gameplay (and a save point) between them.
In addition, think about using non-intrusive methods. Asides are frequently all you need. There's no reason to have a cut scene where the characters go, "we need to get to the City of Monkeys". Just have one of them say it in the game engine. Takes less than half as long, doesn't screw up immersion.
3) LET THEM PLAY, part the third
Whenever you plan to switch modes (from play to a cut scene or just between play modes) make sure you have the player's permission. This can easily be done just by making it really obvious that going someplace or talking to a particular character will advance things.
Clear level endings or glowing markers are easy ways to do this.
4) CUT OFF THE NOSE TO SPITE THE FACE, PLEASE
Most game writers are not good dialog writers. They are concept thinkers: "it would be nifty if there were a species of aliens that could only survive while inhabiting photographs of naked women..." Not so good with the character details, because their characters typically simply say, "these species of aliens can only survive while inhabiting photographs of naked women... isn't that nifty?"
This leads to most games having dialog that is too on-the-nose. If you don't know what that means, don't fucking write dialog. Also, if you want to write exposition, don't write dialog. You don't have to explain... anything, really. Mysteries are usually better.
5) TOO MANY PEACHES, PEACHES FOR ME
On a related note, character design. Each character needs to be uniquely designed. That's something the industry is getting pretty good at. However, character design isn't simply visual: each character needs to speak in a distinct way, and each one needs to represent a distinct "flavor".
Think of characters as spices that you add to the "meal" of your gameplay and story. The right spices will make it taste excellent. But too often, character designs in a given game will all be the same spice. How often have you played a game where all the characters are chili peppers? You don't need fifteen different flavors of badass.
You also don't need fifteen different flavors of T&A. I don't mind sexiness (or sex) in my games, but try to show some respect for your characters. They have to feel alive, not like a barbie doll you stole from your sister.
6) HERE BE MONSTERS
Do not stick to the straight and narrow path from point (A) to point (B)oss. A world - and the people in it - only come alive when a bit of exploration is allowed.
Characters should talk about personal things, mention things that are outside the scope of the game. Levels should be designed to feel inhabited, although not at the expense of making them confusing.
Examples of this are clearest in World War II games. The soldiers in your squad feel painfully lifeless when all they say is "clear!" and "six o'clock!" That's why they frequently say things like "tank beats everything!", "I've... I've got a girl back home...", and "Gawd, Cookie, can't you make anything that doesn't taste like fewkin' Spam?"
This is all the flavor of the game. Meat is fine, but raw, unflavored meat?
7) A LITTLE CHOICE GOES A LONG WAY
Seriously, let your players make pacing decisions. Too many games force the player to have exactly N battles before the next plot point. Give your players a little freedom to dick around and really experience the world. At a minimum, let them get color commentary from random NPCs and see places that aren't directly plot related.
Don't worry about balance too much: let them work hard and get a ridiculous weapon, or waste two hours raising a chocobo. Just don't require them to.
8) IMAGERY
We've heard it before. Oooh, another end boss trying to destroy the world? Wow, another pack of alien invaders with superior technology? Sheesh, I've never seen a game with government spooks shooting at me...
There's nothing wrong with using the same basic plot. These basic plots give us a strong foundation to explore from, like making most of your characters humanoid: we can explore specifics and details without having to painstakingly establish everything.
But think of the plot as the meat of your dish. There's a thousand different ways to serve beef, and millions of things it goes well with. Similarly, your plot needs to be accompanied by strong images that really catch people's attention.
Evil villain taking over the world. The game feels radically different if it's set in primal Africa. Imagery is everything.
Pick a theme, pick a set of flavors, push it to the limit.
9) ABSURD RATIONALIZATIONS
Are good.
This is a game. Your primary game mechanic should also be your primary story mechanic. If your interesting game mechanic is that the main characters are superpowered mutants, then the plot should relate to superpowered mutants. It's kind of pointless if it's just a normal WWII game where you happen to have mutant powers.
By going out of your way to link the fiction of your game to the play of your game, you give yourself the freedom and power to explore that concept in a very directed way. For example, in Eternal Sonata, people only have magic if they are terminally ill. This lets the writers explore various people's reaction to imminent death in a wide variety of ways.
That's kind of a dark example. As a failed example, see Halo. In Halo, the Spartan is the main character. He's only marginally human and has this amazing supersuit. However, at no point in the games does the story really explore this: your enemies are always random aliens, your allies are always boring humans. Your suit never malfunctions, your enhancements never really matter except statistically. The fiction is disjunct. A failed opportunity to have a more flavorful story and more varied play.
10) THEME ME UP, SCOTTY!
Lastly, THEME. THEME THEME. Theme? Theme theme theme theme. Theme.
Theme theme theme? Theme.
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.
Saturday, June 23, 2007
Cooperative Storytelling
Everyone likes to tell stories.
Many people think they don't, and many more think they are terrible at it. But I find that, given the right constraints and suggestions (choppertunities glarrrrrrghhhhh...) even the most uptight, unimaginative person can tell great stories. Or, at least, pieces of a great story.
When you get people together to tell stories, there are basically three stages. Each player moves through the stages at different speeds: some players need a lot of help, some players just need a little time to adjust to the situation.
The first stage is "bewilderment". In this stage, the player doesn't really know enough to try to tell a story. In this stage, the player is usually happiest to hear stories - to follow, rather than lead.
Giving the player a viewpoint and examples is the fastest way to get them through this stage. For example, "You're the pirate king, and those guys over there could use some pirate help..." or "you're the incarnation of joy, so keep that in mind as you play..."
The second stage is "immersion". In this stage, the player is part of the world. In this stage, they usually want to explore the world using their viewpoint, and they can be relied on to seek out new experiences and help direct events as their viewpoint (character) would.
Many LARPs and tabletops reach this second stage and stop. It's easy to design a game which uses the second stage, but more difficult to design a game which allows the players to get to stage three.
The third stage is "creation". In this stage, a player stops adhering to the viewpoint given them and begins to think about the world and its stories at a larger level. At this stage, they can be relied on to guide and create situations that try to make the world more interesting.
In order to allow for this third stage, though, a game has to let players make significant changes... which has serious drawbacks. And I'm not talking about content or any of that - generally, players moderate themselves very well as to what is acceptable storytelling or not.
No, I'm talking about the fact that the history of the world gets very deep. New players and slower players will be unable to keep up with the flurry of new stories, and the people who created the stories aren't going to want to tell them over and over again. This generally results in "writer packs" of three to five people working on their corner of the universe and basically ignoring the fact that everyone else lives here, too.
Moreover, I have never seen a game designed to let players be in any of the three stages without being hindered. I've designed games which are good for any one stage, but the rules make it hard to be in one of the other stages. This leads to a very uncomfortable unbalance as to how many players of each stage there are. I don't know the ideal ratio, if there is such a thing.
What do you think? Can you think of a rule set which lets players go through all three stages unhindered? Can you think of a way to bring in fresh blood without requiring a lot of overhead from the experienced players?
Many people think they don't, and many more think they are terrible at it. But I find that, given the right constraints and suggestions (choppertunities glarrrrrrghhhhh...) even the most uptight, unimaginative person can tell great stories. Or, at least, pieces of a great story.
When you get people together to tell stories, there are basically three stages. Each player moves through the stages at different speeds: some players need a lot of help, some players just need a little time to adjust to the situation.
The first stage is "bewilderment". In this stage, the player doesn't really know enough to try to tell a story. In this stage, the player is usually happiest to hear stories - to follow, rather than lead.
Giving the player a viewpoint and examples is the fastest way to get them through this stage. For example, "You're the pirate king, and those guys over there could use some pirate help..." or "you're the incarnation of joy, so keep that in mind as you play..."
The second stage is "immersion". In this stage, the player is part of the world. In this stage, they usually want to explore the world using their viewpoint, and they can be relied on to seek out new experiences and help direct events as their viewpoint (character) would.
Many LARPs and tabletops reach this second stage and stop. It's easy to design a game which uses the second stage, but more difficult to design a game which allows the players to get to stage three.
The third stage is "creation". In this stage, a player stops adhering to the viewpoint given them and begins to think about the world and its stories at a larger level. At this stage, they can be relied on to guide and create situations that try to make the world more interesting.
In order to allow for this third stage, though, a game has to let players make significant changes... which has serious drawbacks. And I'm not talking about content or any of that - generally, players moderate themselves very well as to what is acceptable storytelling or not.
No, I'm talking about the fact that the history of the world gets very deep. New players and slower players will be unable to keep up with the flurry of new stories, and the people who created the stories aren't going to want to tell them over and over again. This generally results in "writer packs" of three to five people working on their corner of the universe and basically ignoring the fact that everyone else lives here, too.
Moreover, I have never seen a game designed to let players be in any of the three stages without being hindered. I've designed games which are good for any one stage, but the rules make it hard to be in one of the other stages. This leads to a very uncomfortable unbalance as to how many players of each stage there are. I don't know the ideal ratio, if there is such a thing.
What do you think? Can you think of a rule set which lets players go through all three stages unhindered? Can you think of a way to bring in fresh blood without requiring a lot of overhead from the experienced players?
Thursday, June 21, 2007
LARP: Mixing and Matching
One of the basic methods of keeping players entertained in a LARP is to have them "switch off" their friends and partners: spend half an hour with the elf king, spend an hour with the space robot. Switch it up!
This has two results. First, it allows each character to have less plot, since they're only going to be exposing it to any other given character for a few minutes. Second, it allows the various plots and themes to be mixed together as the players problem-solve across a dozen meetings with half a dozen people. "The space robot needs a power source... and the elf king has that magic stone of power..."
Every LARP leans heavily on this "automixing" system, because it (A) feels efficient and (B) means you don't have to get your players to memorize a book before starting.
But there are downsides to this method.
First, it's not really very intuitive. Experienced LARPers know to talk to someone new every time they run out of things to do, but first-time (and even third-time) players tend to stand around looking flummoxed. While this can be reduced by pointing specific people to specific people at specific times, that makes the game feel less like a game and more like a play.
Second, it's extremely hard to predict. Who a player decides to get involved with next depends on proximity, charisma, energy, and whether a given player is busy. As far as I can tell, if you give them specific people to talk to, the game can be modeled to some extent... but the moment you rely on them going out and finding something to do on their own, CRASH.
Lastly, some people work really well together - they have a kind of chemistry.
If you're not forcing mixing, then these two or three players will bond together like glue, totally throwing off the factioning of your game. "Why the hell are the psi-cops working with the rangers?"
If you're forcing mixing, then you're going to lose out on their potential - players with chemistry can produce more immersive content (primarily for themselves) than any writer.
I've run a lot of "strong-story" games to explore this topic, and I don't think I've ever really gone into any detail on them before. So, this weekend: "players are better at playing your game than you, so shut up and let them."
But this post was to highlight a basic (but usually overlooked) component of LARP design. If you've ever played, designed, or run a LARP, take a look: did you see what I described?
This has two results. First, it allows each character to have less plot, since they're only going to be exposing it to any other given character for a few minutes. Second, it allows the various plots and themes to be mixed together as the players problem-solve across a dozen meetings with half a dozen people. "The space robot needs a power source... and the elf king has that magic stone of power..."
Every LARP leans heavily on this "automixing" system, because it (A) feels efficient and (B) means you don't have to get your players to memorize a book before starting.
But there are downsides to this method.
First, it's not really very intuitive. Experienced LARPers know to talk to someone new every time they run out of things to do, but first-time (and even third-time) players tend to stand around looking flummoxed. While this can be reduced by pointing specific people to specific people at specific times, that makes the game feel less like a game and more like a play.
Second, it's extremely hard to predict. Who a player decides to get involved with next depends on proximity, charisma, energy, and whether a given player is busy. As far as I can tell, if you give them specific people to talk to, the game can be modeled to some extent... but the moment you rely on them going out and finding something to do on their own, CRASH.
Lastly, some people work really well together - they have a kind of chemistry.
If you're not forcing mixing, then these two or three players will bond together like glue, totally throwing off the factioning of your game. "Why the hell are the psi-cops working with the rangers?"
If you're forcing mixing, then you're going to lose out on their potential - players with chemistry can produce more immersive content (primarily for themselves) than any writer.
I've run a lot of "strong-story" games to explore this topic, and I don't think I've ever really gone into any detail on them before. So, this weekend: "players are better at playing your game than you, so shut up and let them."
But this post was to highlight a basic (but usually overlooked) component of LARP design. If you've ever played, designed, or run a LARP, take a look: did you see what I described?
Monday, April 09, 2007
Boolean Choices
Last post I mentioned that boolean choices are bad. I also mentioned that all the drama engines I'd seen were doomed - they all use boolean choices. Patrick came around and said, "hey, they all use floats and stuff!"
The choices are boolean.
The most obvious example would be in a game like Knights of the Old Republic, where your choices are universally "do good", "be a spaz", and "walk away". These are not choices which give you any kind of expressive freedom.
More complex systems are growing more common. Patrick's full of examples: Storytron and Facade are two big ones. "They use floats!"
They represent an internal state with floats. But the choices the player can make are, in fact, brutally binary. This is a result of that plague on recent drama thinking: "verb thinking". Verb thinking is better than "noun thinking". Of course, getting stabbed in the shoulder is better than being shot in the face, too. It's like the difference between having the flu and having rabies. It was a good idea when it came out, but it's a dead end: it doesn't go anywhere. Now it just wastes time.
"Punch" is a verb. You punch someone and, like magic, the game runs a quick simulation. Relationship - 40 and anger + 10 or some such. It's boolean: a punch either happens, or it doesn't. "Punch" is either true or false.
Yah, have any of you ever been in a fight? There's about a million different kinds of punch, and they carry different meanings. If I punch you as hard as I can in the face, that means I'm so angry I'm willing to break my knuckles so long as you suffer. If I stick to body blows, it means I'm not willing to let this degenerate. If I throw some elbows or knees in, it means something else, and so on and so forth.
Every verb is like this. Kiss. Touch. Yell. Barter. Blackmail. Give gift. Play parcheesi. Dance in the rain. They are not true or false. It is not a question of whether you dance in the rain, but rather how you dance in the rain.
Crawford would have you use modifiers on your verbs in order to give them some kind of spin. "Punch very hard" or "punch calmly" or some such crap. Booleans stacked on booleans. Relationship - 10 * modifier. Useless. Bandaids on gunshot wounds.
Games are intricate beasts because they allow you to determine exactly how, between thousands of nearly identical choices, you want to play. In a manner so fluid you don't even realize you're doing it. These are skill challenges.
In an FPS: strafe left? Strafe right? Go straight for the health? Jump for the high ground? Here or a foot to the left? Can you dodge the rocket? Nothing's preventing you except your own lack of skill.
An RPG is shiftier, because an RPG really does boil down to hundreds of booleans: buy a sword or armor? Equip your healer or your mage? Go back to town to rest, or push on? Get that fireball spell when you level up, or that damage bonus? But these stack - a hundred boolean decisions stacked and all simultaneously in play, all the time.
Who is equipped with what. Who is at what levels. Whose stats are what. Whose condition is what. There are three or four viable strategies for each person every round, for a total of maybe a dozen viable options, all affected by the hundreds of choices you've made so far - and that's round to round. Outside of combat, there are hundreds of possible options for combat-affecting decisions. And, of course, you have to balance offense, defense, magic, healing, items, pathfinding through dungeons, lock-picking, whatever else is in the game: it's not just all frontal assault. Your equipment, stats, and other choices "communicate" on many axes, many levels.
And me? I still think the standard RPG has a pretty weak gameplay model. The choices are too transparently clumsy - hey look, a sword of kill shit + 5! That nobody bothers to export to the other town that only has pointy sticks! Like that's not made to layer on top of the hundreds of other long-term boolean choices I've made.
A drama engine? Bah-ha-ha! You get your choice between maybe two viable strategies any given round, and you have maybe three or four things that affect the outcome, tops.
Booleans. If we're talking in terms of bits, a drama engine's "complexity" isn't even one byte. An RPG? Maybe 32-bit? Depending on the RPG? A game like Quake or Valkyrie Profile or Final Fantasy Tactics, where timing, exact position, and complex recombination matter? Maybe 128-bit.
So, yeah, drama engines. Not enough expressive power using the methods they are using.
Forget your decision trees! Your choices communicate on more than one axis, so your choices should be able to move freely on those axes! Throw down the shackles of "verb thinking" and think with "sliding axis" thinking! Don't "dance"! Waltz! Shimmy! Do the twist! The robot! The hand jive! The tango. It takes more than two to tango, ha!
The choices are boolean.
The most obvious example would be in a game like Knights of the Old Republic, where your choices are universally "do good", "be a spaz", and "walk away". These are not choices which give you any kind of expressive freedom.
More complex systems are growing more common. Patrick's full of examples: Storytron and Facade are two big ones. "They use floats!"
They represent an internal state with floats. But the choices the player can make are, in fact, brutally binary. This is a result of that plague on recent drama thinking: "verb thinking". Verb thinking is better than "noun thinking". Of course, getting stabbed in the shoulder is better than being shot in the face, too. It's like the difference between having the flu and having rabies. It was a good idea when it came out, but it's a dead end: it doesn't go anywhere. Now it just wastes time.
"Punch" is a verb. You punch someone and, like magic, the game runs a quick simulation. Relationship - 40 and anger + 10 or some such. It's boolean: a punch either happens, or it doesn't. "Punch" is either true or false.
Yah, have any of you ever been in a fight? There's about a million different kinds of punch, and they carry different meanings. If I punch you as hard as I can in the face, that means I'm so angry I'm willing to break my knuckles so long as you suffer. If I stick to body blows, it means I'm not willing to let this degenerate. If I throw some elbows or knees in, it means something else, and so on and so forth.
Every verb is like this. Kiss. Touch. Yell. Barter. Blackmail. Give gift. Play parcheesi. Dance in the rain. They are not true or false. It is not a question of whether you dance in the rain, but rather how you dance in the rain.
Crawford would have you use modifiers on your verbs in order to give them some kind of spin. "Punch very hard" or "punch calmly" or some such crap. Booleans stacked on booleans. Relationship - 10 * modifier. Useless. Bandaids on gunshot wounds.
Games are intricate beasts because they allow you to determine exactly how, between thousands of nearly identical choices, you want to play. In a manner so fluid you don't even realize you're doing it. These are skill challenges.
In an FPS: strafe left? Strafe right? Go straight for the health? Jump for the high ground? Here or a foot to the left? Can you dodge the rocket? Nothing's preventing you except your own lack of skill.
An RPG is shiftier, because an RPG really does boil down to hundreds of booleans: buy a sword or armor? Equip your healer or your mage? Go back to town to rest, or push on? Get that fireball spell when you level up, or that damage bonus? But these stack - a hundred boolean decisions stacked and all simultaneously in play, all the time.
Who is equipped with what. Who is at what levels. Whose stats are what. Whose condition is what. There are three or four viable strategies for each person every round, for a total of maybe a dozen viable options, all affected by the hundreds of choices you've made so far - and that's round to round. Outside of combat, there are hundreds of possible options for combat-affecting decisions. And, of course, you have to balance offense, defense, magic, healing, items, pathfinding through dungeons, lock-picking, whatever else is in the game: it's not just all frontal assault. Your equipment, stats, and other choices "communicate" on many axes, many levels.
And me? I still think the standard RPG has a pretty weak gameplay model. The choices are too transparently clumsy - hey look, a sword of kill shit + 5! That nobody bothers to export to the other town that only has pointy sticks! Like that's not made to layer on top of the hundreds of other long-term boolean choices I've made.
A drama engine? Bah-ha-ha! You get your choice between maybe two viable strategies any given round, and you have maybe three or four things that affect the outcome, tops.
Booleans. If we're talking in terms of bits, a drama engine's "complexity" isn't even one byte. An RPG? Maybe 32-bit? Depending on the RPG? A game like Quake or Valkyrie Profile or Final Fantasy Tactics, where timing, exact position, and complex recombination matter? Maybe 128-bit.
So, yeah, drama engines. Not enough expressive power using the methods they are using.
Forget your decision trees! Your choices communicate on more than one axis, so your choices should be able to move freely on those axes! Throw down the shackles of "verb thinking" and think with "sliding axis" thinking! Don't "dance"! Waltz! Shimmy! Do the twist! The robot! The hand jive! The tango. It takes more than two to tango, ha!
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