There are a number of people I really want to respect, but sometimes they make it hard.
Oddly, it's nearly always nerdy white guys around 30 years old. They (we) all seem to make the same damn blunders at the same damn time.
One of those blunders is the bizarre pushback against the term "ludonarrative dissonance".
Now, I understand the term is extremely pretentious. I wouldn't coin it, myself. But even as it is, it's significantly easier to say than typing "gameplay sabotages the story, tone, and mood of the game" over and over.
The pushback seems to be about how pretentious it is, given that the pushback is almost universally making dismissive, babytalk versions of the term and simply saying it over and over.
The actual situation is a little more complex.
The only time the term "ludonarrative dissonance" was really used much was in analyzing Bioshock Infinite. Even if you like Bioshock Infinite (another screwed-up opinion held almost exclusively by nerdy guys around thirty), you have to admit that it is an extreeeeeeemely pretentious game. If pretentiousness was really what these people were against, they would hate the game as much as the term used to disparage it.
Nope, I'm pretty sure they hate it because it was aimed at something they like. Dismissing the term is much easier than trying to defend Bioshock Infinite, so we hear people like Jim Sterling and David Gallant [EDIT: evidently not in the context of BI] dismissing the term with a literal volley of babytalk. If you haven't experienced it, go take a listen.
The problem with this is obvious: if we're analyzing games, we need to talk about the various merits and flaws of games. One of those flaws is that the gameplay often makes no damn sense in the context of the game.
With Bioshock Infinite, there were a spate of people who said "Bioshock Infinite would be cool if it weren't so damn violent", and then there were a spate of people saying "Shut the fuck up it's supposed to be violent". But the term "ludonarrative dissonance" can be used to talk about that and many other aspects of gameplay. Watch, I'll give a demonstration.
Did the violence diminish the story of the game any? Not in particular, the story is about a phenomenally violent walking murder factory, so the gameplay backs that up. I would say that the violence in the gameplay is not ludonarratively dissonant.
I would not say "ludobibble disblooboogoob! Booboo bloobi bloob!" I would say it's not ludonarratively dissonant.
However, there were many aspects of BI that were dissonant. For example, searching through trashcans for discarded apples. Elizabeth's immortality. The final boss battle. These all detracted from the narrative and tone of the game in an attempt to make the gameplay more fun or interesting.
How important you consider that to be is up to you, obviously. Many people are just fine with gameplay that actively undermines the tone and story of the game. Many people aren't.
From my perspective, the game was clearly about a homeless paranoid schizophrenic. The gameplay undermined the narrative to the point where, for much of the game, I actually thought that was going to be the twist.
I would also say that even though the violence was not ludonarratively dissonant, there is room to complain about the violence. The game world was beautifully rendered, and the music was great, but the simplistic ultra-violent gameplay limited the appeal. While I don't think BI should have been nonviolent, I do think that I would love to see that kind of gorgeous world in less violent games.
Perhaps some people used the term "ludonarrative dissonance" to wish for a less violent version of the game. I didn't read anyone saying that - I only saw people talking about eating out of trash cans. But even if they did misuse the term, it was those people using the term wrong, not the term itself being useless.
Of course, you don't need to embrace my view on the matter. If you think the term "ludonarrative dissonance" is useless, you can argue that. But to just dismiss it with babytalk shows a depressing lack of interest in actually discussing games.
EDIT: To be clear, I specifically mentioned two people who I otherwise respect quite a bit. In particular, Gallant read this post and took offense to it, but then was careful not to bring any heat down on me until after we chatted.
Apparently, Gallant was making fun of the term, but NOT in the context of Bioshock: Infinite.
Showing posts with label theory. Show all posts
Showing posts with label theory. Show all posts
Tuesday, January 14, 2014
Friday, June 21, 2013
Disjoints as Art
So, every kind of medium has certain kinds of disjoints in it. The way it presents the viewer with its contents varies from default human experience in some way. Most mediums make good use of those, and it is what sets that medium apart in terms of how it conveys messages.
That sounds complicated and intangible, but it's pretty easy to understand when I give examples.
In a TV show, the camera angle is constantly changing, the scenes are constantly moving from place to place, person to person. Obviously, this is not something that happens in our daily lives: we don't suddenly teleport across the room, or have our head tossed into the sky for a crane shot. But we aren't usually confused by the camera and scene changes - we stitch it together seamlessly in our head. That's because there's a language to it, a complex set of rules and expectations that let us put together the pieces flawlessly. However, the language doesn't exist to hide the camerawork: it exists to free the camerawork. Camerawork is a very important part of TV shows, and using your camera wisely allows you to present the audience with extremely nuanced information. Long establishing shots, closeups of someone's face as a single tear rolls down their eye, a newspaper tumbling past a desolate street, or even just the work-a-day camera flicking to make it clear who's talking in a conversation.
TV shows take advantage of their disjoints to give the audience an experience unique to video. The point isn't to take "realistic" shots that are all at eye height and never cut. The point is to use the camera as best you can, and the language has evolved to allow us to do that.
On the other hand, in a book the author frequently takes it upon themselves to tell you what characters are thinking or feeling, or throw in phrases that establish the background and history of a situation in one or two sentences. "...And there was Jayne, standing under a street light, holding the same damn rifle he held ten years ago on the smuggler's moon..."
Giving the audience insight into things they couldn't possibly have insight into is a powerful tool which sets books apart from other mediums. We've got a language of meta-writing to allow for it: we have lots of shorthand, best-practices, invisible padding words (like "said"), and so on. These all allow writers to quickly leverage the disjoint inherent in text and tell the audience things.
But books sometimes try to use movie conventions, and movies try to use book conventions. This almost always ends up shitty. Remember the original Dune movie? All those actors whispering all the time, all that narration? That's what happened in the book, but in the book it was completely transparent, because in the medium of a book is suitable to say things about what characters know or think.
In games, we more or less inherit all our stuff from other mediums. AAA games tend to inherit from movies, with cutscenes and static progression. Indie games tend to inherit from comics, with moment-chunk dialogues and the ability to flip to whatever "page" you want after you've gotten through it once.
But like the original Dune movie, both methods end up feeling heavy-handed and clumsy.
Like the early change from just filming plays to actually filming movies, it's time for games to stop being interactive movies (or comics) and start being games.
The question is: what kinds of features go games have, as a medium, that can be used to set games apart?
Well, in all the other mediums, the things that they can leverage are also the weaknesses that keep them from being ideal. You have to tell the audience everything in books... but in turn you can tell them ANYTHING. The audience is stuck looking through your camera in a TV show, unable to move their head or shift their attention... but in turn you can move their head and shift their attention in any way you want. The audience is forced to assemble a narrative from standalone moments in comics... but in turn you can make those standalone moments stretch and contain things no real moment could ever contain.
What do games offer?
Well, games offer a level of control over our actions inside that game world. Unlike passive mediums, we have control. However, beneath that is the weakness that the game worlds are limited. Some are very limited - in Tetris, your control is limited to moving a brick slightly. The limits of the world we interact with are our disjoint, our weakness.
And our strength.
Our world has to be built out of concrete interactions... but in turn we can make those concrete interactions contain more meaning (or way different meaning) than the same actions would in real life.
For example, one of the emergent things you could do in Halo was grenade-launching your Warthog using sticky bombs. How high could you launch it? How long could you keep it aloft? While the interaction is pointless - the Warthog suffers no damage, no points are gained - the constraints that the world put around the situation gave the situation value. An action which was objectively valueless from every conceivable angle became a fun fad because the way the world was assembled.
This is just one small example. Every game contains these kinds of situations. The values in the world are constructed not just out of context imported from the real world, but also from context internal to the game. Obviously, this is possible in every medium, just as you can say what someone is thinking within a movie, or describe the details of someone's facial expressions in a book. But games are the best at it, because games allow players to rapidly explore and construct context as a core part of their experience.
In most games, the context is limited to skill challenges. We appreciate combos, trick jumps, speed-runs, and high scores because we know how hard they are to achieve. Similarly, we prize glitches and bugs because we understand how unusual they are and how difficult they are to uncover. Games are entering a more social era in no small part because skill challenges like these are best when someone else can stare in awe.
However, with that in mind, let's think about how we can leverage this kind of rapid, fine-grained contextual construction in other ways.
...
I DON'T KNOW SOMEONE TELL ME. MY BRAIN HURTS.
That sounds complicated and intangible, but it's pretty easy to understand when I give examples.
In a TV show, the camera angle is constantly changing, the scenes are constantly moving from place to place, person to person. Obviously, this is not something that happens in our daily lives: we don't suddenly teleport across the room, or have our head tossed into the sky for a crane shot. But we aren't usually confused by the camera and scene changes - we stitch it together seamlessly in our head. That's because there's a language to it, a complex set of rules and expectations that let us put together the pieces flawlessly. However, the language doesn't exist to hide the camerawork: it exists to free the camerawork. Camerawork is a very important part of TV shows, and using your camera wisely allows you to present the audience with extremely nuanced information. Long establishing shots, closeups of someone's face as a single tear rolls down their eye, a newspaper tumbling past a desolate street, or even just the work-a-day camera flicking to make it clear who's talking in a conversation.
TV shows take advantage of their disjoints to give the audience an experience unique to video. The point isn't to take "realistic" shots that are all at eye height and never cut. The point is to use the camera as best you can, and the language has evolved to allow us to do that.
On the other hand, in a book the author frequently takes it upon themselves to tell you what characters are thinking or feeling, or throw in phrases that establish the background and history of a situation in one or two sentences. "...And there was Jayne, standing under a street light, holding the same damn rifle he held ten years ago on the smuggler's moon..."
Giving the audience insight into things they couldn't possibly have insight into is a powerful tool which sets books apart from other mediums. We've got a language of meta-writing to allow for it: we have lots of shorthand, best-practices, invisible padding words (like "said"), and so on. These all allow writers to quickly leverage the disjoint inherent in text and tell the audience things.
But books sometimes try to use movie conventions, and movies try to use book conventions. This almost always ends up shitty. Remember the original Dune movie? All those actors whispering all the time, all that narration? That's what happened in the book, but in the book it was completely transparent, because in the medium of a book is suitable to say things about what characters know or think.
In games, we more or less inherit all our stuff from other mediums. AAA games tend to inherit from movies, with cutscenes and static progression. Indie games tend to inherit from comics, with moment-chunk dialogues and the ability to flip to whatever "page" you want after you've gotten through it once.
But like the original Dune movie, both methods end up feeling heavy-handed and clumsy.
Like the early change from just filming plays to actually filming movies, it's time for games to stop being interactive movies (or comics) and start being games.
The question is: what kinds of features go games have, as a medium, that can be used to set games apart?
Well, in all the other mediums, the things that they can leverage are also the weaknesses that keep them from being ideal. You have to tell the audience everything in books... but in turn you can tell them ANYTHING. The audience is stuck looking through your camera in a TV show, unable to move their head or shift their attention... but in turn you can move their head and shift their attention in any way you want. The audience is forced to assemble a narrative from standalone moments in comics... but in turn you can make those standalone moments stretch and contain things no real moment could ever contain.
What do games offer?
Well, games offer a level of control over our actions inside that game world. Unlike passive mediums, we have control. However, beneath that is the weakness that the game worlds are limited. Some are very limited - in Tetris, your control is limited to moving a brick slightly. The limits of the world we interact with are our disjoint, our weakness.
And our strength.
Our world has to be built out of concrete interactions... but in turn we can make those concrete interactions contain more meaning (or way different meaning) than the same actions would in real life.
For example, one of the emergent things you could do in Halo was grenade-launching your Warthog using sticky bombs. How high could you launch it? How long could you keep it aloft? While the interaction is pointless - the Warthog suffers no damage, no points are gained - the constraints that the world put around the situation gave the situation value. An action which was objectively valueless from every conceivable angle became a fun fad because the way the world was assembled.
This is just one small example. Every game contains these kinds of situations. The values in the world are constructed not just out of context imported from the real world, but also from context internal to the game. Obviously, this is possible in every medium, just as you can say what someone is thinking within a movie, or describe the details of someone's facial expressions in a book. But games are the best at it, because games allow players to rapidly explore and construct context as a core part of their experience.
In most games, the context is limited to skill challenges. We appreciate combos, trick jumps, speed-runs, and high scores because we know how hard they are to achieve. Similarly, we prize glitches and bugs because we understand how unusual they are and how difficult they are to uncover. Games are entering a more social era in no small part because skill challenges like these are best when someone else can stare in awe.
However, with that in mind, let's think about how we can leverage this kind of rapid, fine-grained contextual construction in other ways.
...
I DON'T KNOW SOMEONE TELL ME. MY BRAIN HURTS.
Friday, February 01, 2013
Action Games: Alternate Play
Since starting in Unity, I've been analyzing action games a lot. Action games are not something I've had a lot of experience designing.
I've starting to form a complicated opinion on action games and the nature of avatars. I've refined the term "action gameplay" to specifically mean any action taken while in a world with noticeable time pressure. So, yeah, shooting an approaching enemy is an action mechanic. But so is throwing a switch or jumping a crevasse, as long as those things happen in a situation where time pressure exists - such as if you're being shot at.
Right now, I'm working on the idea that the avatar is the critical component in classifying an action game. So, with that in mind, there are a few "classes" of action game mechanic.
Direct-action mechanics are one where your avatar has an obvious action they can take and it has an obvious, shallow effect. For example, shooting someone, leaping a chasm, opening a floodgate, etc. In general, these are actions where replacing your avatar with a talking rabbit plush toy would make them obviously not work.
Complex-action mechanics are ones where the game does a lot of your avatar-directing for you, or you have another tier of management on your character. For example, the ability to switch between several weapons, managing inventory, context commands more complicated than "use", dialog trees, and so on. If you replace your avatar with a talking rabbit plush toy and think "well, it makes just as much sense either way", then it's probably a complex-action mechanic.
Indirect-action mechanics are ones where the avatar doesn't act directly. His position and activities don't really matter. This is things like ordering soldiers around, cooking food, hacking computers, timing-based dance minigames...
Here's an example. You play an adventurer pushing your way through an alien city. You want to pick up that clay pot.
Direct-action version: you walk over and pick it up. You are now carrying a clay pot in your hands. Your hands are full of clay pot.
Complex-action version: you walk over and add the clay pot to your inventory.
Indirect-action version: you click on the pot and add it to your inventory regardless of where in the room the avatar is.
Here another example: you want to kill a bad guy with your magic blammies.
Direct-action version: aim at the bad guy and click. The spell shoots from you to him.
Complex-action version: click on the bad guy and select a spell, or visa-versa. The spell shoots from you to him.
Indirect-action version: click on the bad guy, and he is affected by the spell regardless of where you're standing.
This can get kind of fuzzy. For example, maybe you're playing a lane-shooter. The very act of targeting someone automatically moves your avatar to line up with them. Is that complex or indirect? I would argue complex, but the point is that these are just basic ideas, not laws. Similarly, most games have a combination of these kinds of mechanics: most shooter games are direct-action games with an inventory, at the very least.
Anyway, I'm just puttering around with these theories because I'm trying to think of good direct-action mechanics that aren't violent. I've come up with a few, but I'd love to hear more.
I've starting to form a complicated opinion on action games and the nature of avatars. I've refined the term "action gameplay" to specifically mean any action taken while in a world with noticeable time pressure. So, yeah, shooting an approaching enemy is an action mechanic. But so is throwing a switch or jumping a crevasse, as long as those things happen in a situation where time pressure exists - such as if you're being shot at.
Right now, I'm working on the idea that the avatar is the critical component in classifying an action game. So, with that in mind, there are a few "classes" of action game mechanic.
Direct-action mechanics are one where your avatar has an obvious action they can take and it has an obvious, shallow effect. For example, shooting someone, leaping a chasm, opening a floodgate, etc. In general, these are actions where replacing your avatar with a talking rabbit plush toy would make them obviously not work.
Complex-action mechanics are ones where the game does a lot of your avatar-directing for you, or you have another tier of management on your character. For example, the ability to switch between several weapons, managing inventory, context commands more complicated than "use", dialog trees, and so on. If you replace your avatar with a talking rabbit plush toy and think "well, it makes just as much sense either way", then it's probably a complex-action mechanic.
Indirect-action mechanics are ones where the avatar doesn't act directly. His position and activities don't really matter. This is things like ordering soldiers around, cooking food, hacking computers, timing-based dance minigames...
Here's an example. You play an adventurer pushing your way through an alien city. You want to pick up that clay pot.
Direct-action version: you walk over and pick it up. You are now carrying a clay pot in your hands. Your hands are full of clay pot.
Complex-action version: you walk over and add the clay pot to your inventory.
Indirect-action version: you click on the pot and add it to your inventory regardless of where in the room the avatar is.
Here another example: you want to kill a bad guy with your magic blammies.
Direct-action version: aim at the bad guy and click. The spell shoots from you to him.
Complex-action version: click on the bad guy and select a spell, or visa-versa. The spell shoots from you to him.
Indirect-action version: click on the bad guy, and he is affected by the spell regardless of where you're standing.
This can get kind of fuzzy. For example, maybe you're playing a lane-shooter. The very act of targeting someone automatically moves your avatar to line up with them. Is that complex or indirect? I would argue complex, but the point is that these are just basic ideas, not laws. Similarly, most games have a combination of these kinds of mechanics: most shooter games are direct-action games with an inventory, at the very least.
Anyway, I'm just puttering around with these theories because I'm trying to think of good direct-action mechanics that aren't violent. I've come up with a few, but I'd love to hear more.
Monday, November 16, 2009
Codifying Games
I stumbled across this today. Not sure how I found it. It's another attempt to create some method of codifying games. It's a mechanistic method, better than most of the systems I've seen proposed, but I don't like it.
To me, a game is only a game when a player plays it. So I argue against solely representing the mechanics, and instead prefer to represent in a more holistic manner. I have a lot of problems with a mechanistic approach, and perhaps the largest is one which Joris falls into as well: a mechanistic approach tends to assume a single player playing a single, one-dimensional play-through. This is something I want to get away from.
So, my ideal language for describing games would take into account the fact that every game is played millions of times by both different players and the same players on repeat plays. I would also like to be able to model multiplayer games and, more specifically, games featuring parallel play, where the players do not take clean turns but instead act at their own pace. For example, a MMORPG.
My ideal language also allows for non-mechanistic elements to be modeled, as well as emergent, player-generated, and random elements that may or may not be mechanistic. Furthermore, I think it is a mistake to try to balance games using any language, although the language might indicate where sticky spots might be.
The game examples chosen by theorists proposing would-be languages are always highly mechanistic games, which suit their highly mechanistic languages. Modeling chess or tic-tac-toe is not very interesting to me. How about we model Sim City or Quest for Glory IV? Or Fluxx or Apples to Apples?
The non-mechanistic elements in those games are very strong, which makes any mechanistic representation of them woefully incomplete. Even just the mechanistic elements are generally badly represented: a big part of Sim City is the way your older construction decisions affect your new construction decisions. This complexity is not just beyond modern models: I think it might be beyond models. I think it might require actually creating and playing the game. But the basic idea of it, and the amplitude of it, and the reaction it hopes to cause, can be represented.
Unfortunately, my magical ideal language doesn't exist, and I have only a few basic ideas as to what it might, maybe, look like. I just thought I'd chime in with my dislike of these mechanistic representations.
After all, a game designer first and foremost builds interactive systems. So maybe we should have a model that represents the player half more thoroughly?
To me, a game is only a game when a player plays it. So I argue against solely representing the mechanics, and instead prefer to represent in a more holistic manner. I have a lot of problems with a mechanistic approach, and perhaps the largest is one which Joris falls into as well: a mechanistic approach tends to assume a single player playing a single, one-dimensional play-through. This is something I want to get away from.
So, my ideal language for describing games would take into account the fact that every game is played millions of times by both different players and the same players on repeat plays. I would also like to be able to model multiplayer games and, more specifically, games featuring parallel play, where the players do not take clean turns but instead act at their own pace. For example, a MMORPG.
My ideal language also allows for non-mechanistic elements to be modeled, as well as emergent, player-generated, and random elements that may or may not be mechanistic. Furthermore, I think it is a mistake to try to balance games using any language, although the language might indicate where sticky spots might be.
The game examples chosen by theorists proposing would-be languages are always highly mechanistic games, which suit their highly mechanistic languages. Modeling chess or tic-tac-toe is not very interesting to me. How about we model Sim City or Quest for Glory IV? Or Fluxx or Apples to Apples?
The non-mechanistic elements in those games are very strong, which makes any mechanistic representation of them woefully incomplete. Even just the mechanistic elements are generally badly represented: a big part of Sim City is the way your older construction decisions affect your new construction decisions. This complexity is not just beyond modern models: I think it might be beyond models. I think it might require actually creating and playing the game. But the basic idea of it, and the amplitude of it, and the reaction it hopes to cause, can be represented.
Unfortunately, my magical ideal language doesn't exist, and I have only a few basic ideas as to what it might, maybe, look like. I just thought I'd chime in with my dislike of these mechanistic representations.
After all, a game designer first and foremost builds interactive systems. So maybe we should have a model that represents the player half more thoroughly?
Friday, November 06, 2009
Dragon Age Animation
I've done the snarky bit, let's talk a bit more about what went right with Dragon Age.
One of the things I really liked about Dragon Age was the body language. They almost completely avoided the Oblivion dead-man's-stare, especially during cutscenes. This was done partly with generic body language, but also partly with camera tricks. Most people overlook that even if NPCs have realistic body language, if your screen is constantly focused on their face, then the PC has unrealistic body language. Like your avatar is staring with an Oblivion dead-man's-stare.
However, you can't make the camera swing around. That would be very disorienting. Dragon Age instead uses a variety of cuts to give you a more movie-like feel, which I think was a good idea. The two methods combined - camera tricks and body language - combine to make the characters feel a lot more realistic and immersive than previous games, graphically speaking.
There is still a lot of room for improvement, and I think we can expect to see improvement in the next generation of triple-A titles.
One spot that stuck out egregiously was the head turn animation. Probably the most common social animation aside from "generic hand waves 1 and 2", it was the worst animation in the entire game. It revolves the head like it's on a platter, with a constant speed and a sharp-edge start and stop. You can hear the greasy robot blood in the character's veins.
I presume that this animation is the way it is because the "rotate head" function takes an arbitrary angle to rotate to. The engine then either performs a simple rotation or, more likely given the way these engines tend to work, animates a fragment of a larger, linear head rotation animation.
This is a shortcut they should not have taken. The only time an actor rotates their head like this in a movie is when they want to be clear that the character is unnatural and insane. So, no, not a good choice for a major animation nested into every character.
While the engine may have technical limitations that prevent it from running on-the-fly or layered animations, it is still possible to create a selection of rotation animations and either place the targets in the spots where the animations make sense, or slightly rotate the body beneath the head to make it all line up nicely.
Head animations were a big opportunity to distinguish the personalities of the various characters. A normal person, when they turn their head, ducks their chin a bit and blinks. And definitely doesn't have a flat speed with a sharp start and stop. But you can throw in variations to distinguish both characters and moods.
For example, the grumpy witch might not "come out of" the duck-turn, leaving her chin down, glowering askance at you. The insane zealot girl might lead with the top of her head, giving her more of a cuckoolander feel instead of a robotic, "I keeel you in you sleeeep" feel.
Add in some more general head posture animations, and you can give the characters a lot of personality without needing to fully mocap and tweak every scene. In the game as it stands, the difference between mocapped and generic scenes is both striking and distracting.
Now, the head turn isn't the only thing that could use added juice. Right now the body language is still very restricted and limited, with the body itself standing rigidly. Presumably this is to keep the number of required animations down: if everyone can use the same twenty animations, you don't need to make twenty animations for each character. In order to keep them generic, you have to keep the body language from being too communicative.
It's obvious that what we'll need for the next generation of body language is an engine that can synthesize animations on the fly, augmenting the "gross" animations with layered and amped sub-animations to give them more personality.
This would also be useful in fixing of the worst animation remaining: the walk animation.
The walk animation is so bad it is the sole reason I have to play in first person mode. This isn't really a rant against Dragon Age: everyone's walk animations are hideously bad.
First, they're not even vaguely unique. Usually there's only three: woman, man, and big huge dude. Second, they're animated without taking anything else into account.
Sure, it would be nice to have walk animations where the characters actually looked at things, actually stomped when they're angry, actually turn to the person they're talking to. But easier than that, please put in a turning animation.
When I turn left, my walk animation doesn't change even slightly: I revolve seamlessly. When the rest of your game is super-realistic, does that make sense?
I've said it before, and I'll say it again: I would prefer to lose half the graphical quality to double the way it's integrated into the game world. When one aspect of your assets so far outstrips the others, maybe you should stop spending on the excellent asset and shore up the crappy ones.
Unfortunately, to really do it right, we need to have a next-generation engine that allows for arbitrary, layered, on-the-fly animations.
What do you think?
One of the things I really liked about Dragon Age was the body language. They almost completely avoided the Oblivion dead-man's-stare, especially during cutscenes. This was done partly with generic body language, but also partly with camera tricks. Most people overlook that even if NPCs have realistic body language, if your screen is constantly focused on their face, then the PC has unrealistic body language. Like your avatar is staring with an Oblivion dead-man's-stare.
However, you can't make the camera swing around. That would be very disorienting. Dragon Age instead uses a variety of cuts to give you a more movie-like feel, which I think was a good idea. The two methods combined - camera tricks and body language - combine to make the characters feel a lot more realistic and immersive than previous games, graphically speaking.
There is still a lot of room for improvement, and I think we can expect to see improvement in the next generation of triple-A titles.
One spot that stuck out egregiously was the head turn animation. Probably the most common social animation aside from "generic hand waves 1 and 2", it was the worst animation in the entire game. It revolves the head like it's on a platter, with a constant speed and a sharp-edge start and stop. You can hear the greasy robot blood in the character's veins.
I presume that this animation is the way it is because the "rotate head" function takes an arbitrary angle to rotate to. The engine then either performs a simple rotation or, more likely given the way these engines tend to work, animates a fragment of a larger, linear head rotation animation.
This is a shortcut they should not have taken. The only time an actor rotates their head like this in a movie is when they want to be clear that the character is unnatural and insane. So, no, not a good choice for a major animation nested into every character.
While the engine may have technical limitations that prevent it from running on-the-fly or layered animations, it is still possible to create a selection of rotation animations and either place the targets in the spots where the animations make sense, or slightly rotate the body beneath the head to make it all line up nicely.
Head animations were a big opportunity to distinguish the personalities of the various characters. A normal person, when they turn their head, ducks their chin a bit and blinks. And definitely doesn't have a flat speed with a sharp start and stop. But you can throw in variations to distinguish both characters and moods.
For example, the grumpy witch might not "come out of" the duck-turn, leaving her chin down, glowering askance at you. The insane zealot girl might lead with the top of her head, giving her more of a cuckoolander feel instead of a robotic, "I keeel you in you sleeeep" feel.
Add in some more general head posture animations, and you can give the characters a lot of personality without needing to fully mocap and tweak every scene. In the game as it stands, the difference between mocapped and generic scenes is both striking and distracting.
Now, the head turn isn't the only thing that could use added juice. Right now the body language is still very restricted and limited, with the body itself standing rigidly. Presumably this is to keep the number of required animations down: if everyone can use the same twenty animations, you don't need to make twenty animations for each character. In order to keep them generic, you have to keep the body language from being too communicative.
It's obvious that what we'll need for the next generation of body language is an engine that can synthesize animations on the fly, augmenting the "gross" animations with layered and amped sub-animations to give them more personality.
This would also be useful in fixing of the worst animation remaining: the walk animation.
The walk animation is so bad it is the sole reason I have to play in first person mode. This isn't really a rant against Dragon Age: everyone's walk animations are hideously bad.
First, they're not even vaguely unique. Usually there's only three: woman, man, and big huge dude. Second, they're animated without taking anything else into account.
Sure, it would be nice to have walk animations where the characters actually looked at things, actually stomped when they're angry, actually turn to the person they're talking to. But easier than that, please put in a turning animation.
When I turn left, my walk animation doesn't change even slightly: I revolve seamlessly. When the rest of your game is super-realistic, does that make sense?
I've said it before, and I'll say it again: I would prefer to lose half the graphical quality to double the way it's integrated into the game world. When one aspect of your assets so far outstrips the others, maybe you should stop spending on the excellent asset and shore up the crappy ones.
Unfortunately, to really do it right, we need to have a next-generation engine that allows for arbitrary, layered, on-the-fly animations.
What do you think?
Sunday, November 30, 2008
No, Don't Shake It!
After my last post, I realized that it sounds like I'm saying that it would be a good idea for an IP such as Final Fantasy or Gears of War to come out with a bizarre new style of game instead of a normal sequel.
I'm definitely not suggesting that! Those IPs are not built to support that kind of variation. If you came out with Gears of War the RPG, it would probably be considered a very awkward move.
If IPs like these do come out with games from outside their previous style, they tend to be fairly conservative and standard. Chances are very high that the Halo RTS will not have any amazing new dynamics in it: it'll basically feel similar to most other RTS on the market. I don't mean boring - I just mean that the mechanics will be very similar to those things that RTS fans expect.
When I wonder if it's possible to have an IP that lets you experiment with very new and unusual games as sequels, I'm not talking about any existing IPs. I'm talking about whether you can come up with an IP that would allow that.
It would need to have a specific set of attributes. For example, it would need to be diverse enough to allow for a variety of gameplay styles. Halo is better at this than Final Fantasy, because Halo concentrated on developing its non-gameplay aspects across multiple games, while Final Fantasy always develops new non-gameplay aspects. This means that Halo can abandon their typical play style and still feel like Halo so long as they keep those assets in play.
I don't think Halo is a really great example, though, because the Halo universe is very confined. It's not just a matter of how many different styles of games it can support, but also how many different styles of... narrative, for lack of a better word. You'll never get a Halo game that is about falling to your darker urges, like in Star Wars. It's just not supported by the nature of the game, and if you published such a game, it would be heralded as "a new direction for the Halo franchise". It would be hard to do an adventurous game (whether an adventure or an open-worldish RPG) because the IP is completely militarized: the lives and adventures outside of the military are not part of the Halo IP, even though they obviously must exist in a technical sense. Again, you could make a Halo the Adventure game, but it would feel very un-Halolike.
So the question is...
Can you imagine an IP and an approach that would allow you to develop radically different games from sequel to sequel without ever losing the "feel" of the IP?
I'm definitely not suggesting that! Those IPs are not built to support that kind of variation. If you came out with Gears of War the RPG, it would probably be considered a very awkward move.
If IPs like these do come out with games from outside their previous style, they tend to be fairly conservative and standard. Chances are very high that the Halo RTS will not have any amazing new dynamics in it: it'll basically feel similar to most other RTS on the market. I don't mean boring - I just mean that the mechanics will be very similar to those things that RTS fans expect.
When I wonder if it's possible to have an IP that lets you experiment with very new and unusual games as sequels, I'm not talking about any existing IPs. I'm talking about whether you can come up with an IP that would allow that.
It would need to have a specific set of attributes. For example, it would need to be diverse enough to allow for a variety of gameplay styles. Halo is better at this than Final Fantasy, because Halo concentrated on developing its non-gameplay aspects across multiple games, while Final Fantasy always develops new non-gameplay aspects. This means that Halo can abandon their typical play style and still feel like Halo so long as they keep those assets in play.
I don't think Halo is a really great example, though, because the Halo universe is very confined. It's not just a matter of how many different styles of games it can support, but also how many different styles of... narrative, for lack of a better word. You'll never get a Halo game that is about falling to your darker urges, like in Star Wars. It's just not supported by the nature of the game, and if you published such a game, it would be heralded as "a new direction for the Halo franchise". It would be hard to do an adventurous game (whether an adventure or an open-worldish RPG) because the IP is completely militarized: the lives and adventures outside of the military are not part of the Halo IP, even though they obviously must exist in a technical sense. Again, you could make a Halo the Adventure game, but it would feel very un-Halolike.
So the question is...
Can you imagine an IP and an approach that would allow you to develop radically different games from sequel to sequel without ever losing the "feel" of the IP?
Monday, August 04, 2008
A Model for Player-Generated Content
Well now, it's time for a little bit o' theory.
Let's talk about user-generated content, and how to make it fun, interesting, balanced, and so forth. I'm going to shorten it to "CUG" (content: user generated. It's a better acronym than "UGC") because I have to write it a lot and I don't feel like typing it eighty times. CUG CUG CUG!
When people think of CUG, they usually think of SecondLife. Put forward as a holy grail of CUG, mostly by people who have obviously never played a tabletop game, it is a vast world filled entirely by CUG.
Unfortunately, compared to games such as the Sims or even Halo, SecondLife fares poorly. It is primarily popular for the breadth of its content: you can't pilot a jet in the Sims, or create hard-core porn. Machinima in the Halo engine does not make it easy to build, say, a 1920s speakeasy, or create hard-core porn. In SecondLife you can build and pilot a jet, make a speakeasy. And, of course, create hard-core porn.
Except for the small, insignificant little fact that it's almost impossible to make anything of any real quality in SecondLife unless you are a really dedicated creator with access to a lot of outside software. Mostly, SecondLife exists as a distribution platform for people who are really good at creating content... whether in SecondLife or elsewhere. The actual tools are A) not easy and B) not fun.
Those are different problems, but together they mean that perhaps 1% of the player base makes 99% of the content worth having, which is maybe 1% of the content in the game, the rest being worse than worthless. Every poorly-slapped together newbie house, every "custom avatar" consisting of basic shapes and colors actually decreases the overall value of the play experience. It makes the world less pretty, less interesting. The signal to noise ratio is very bad.
"But wait!" you shout, "you're overstating it! It's always going to be the case that most of the players will be consumers, not creators!"
Like in Spore? Like in the Sims?
These are games where content creation is the game. There are a lot of games like that. Even games like Alpha Centauri or Oblivion can be argued to be like this, but Spore and the Sims are the clearest examples.
Every player creates content and, viewed from a newbie perspective, all the content is fairly interesting. A newbie watching someone play the most boring game of the Sims is going to be fascinated. A newbie seeing the worst-constructed monster writhing around will still find it amazing. Even newbie seeing your poorly-dressed level three thief will be fairly interested.
A newbie seeing an untextured box house will NOT BE AMAZED. Even a little. But the SecondLife world is full of them.
...
What I'm circling here is that there is a new, emerging paradigm for user-generated content. One where even casual players produce high-quality content as part of the game.
I'll call it the "Wright Paradigm", because he's the guy who seems to have got it really going.
I'm not here to ooh and ahh, though. I'm here to tell you how I think it works and how you can use it (or, at least, understand it) yourself.
As far as I can tell, the Wright Paradigm uses the basic ideas of space and bits.
Bits are the atomic nuggets. A sword that's +5 attack and costs 50 gold. A werewolf. A police station. A claw. Bits have specific game stats and ways of interacting with the game world.
A game comes with a large number of bits. The players can often create more using outside software, as when someone creates a new shirt or item for the Sims. Controlling which bits are available to a new player allows you to lure them into the game - an easy slope. Bits are very easy to use.
Almost every game uses bits. Oblivion uses bits. Even Chess uses bits, although you aren't really allowed to pick which bits to have on your team.
But Chess isn't really about CUG, and even Oblivion struggles with it. Only a miniscule number of chess players actually create chess variants. Similarly, nearly all players of Oblivion are happy with either the default content or freely available custom content: it's rare that they actually go and make a new kind of sword themselves.
What's the secret, the dividing line between something like Oblivion and something like the Sims?
It's such an obvious question that everyone will come up with a different answer. But, to me, the fundamental difference is the way that bits attach to the game world.
In Oblivion, you slot bits into various slots. You get a new spell, equip a new sword, and so forth.
In the Sims - or Spore, or Alpha Centauri - you add those bits to specific locations to change how they affect the game world.
You build a house out of bits. You don't really "equip a new chair", you buy the chair and find someplace to put it. You don't replace one city with another, you build a new city somewhere useful on the planet surface. You don't swap out claws, you put claws on arms of a length and size you choose.
The paradigm, as far as I can tell, is to let the users add bits directly to game space. In many cases, game space is literally space in the game. In a situation like Spore, game space is actually the body of your creature, at least initially. But the idea is the same.
This offers the same kind of easy-intro gameplay that bits provide, and it also enables the user to create content. Even uninispired CUG will be decent, because A) the bits are cool on their own and B) the structure you forge has some kind of shaping feedback mechanism.
In SecondLife, if you build a jet, you can delete the wings and it will still fly fine. The types of content are completely separated from each other: the atomic "bits" are ultra-generic and intended to be combined in very complex ways using very clumsy tools.
If you cut the legs off your creature in Spore, it'll become a pitiful thing, crawling or humping along with whatever limbs it has remaining. If you cut swaths of destruction through your commercial district in SimCity, your city will limp like a crippled puppy.
That same feedback system also allows you to build things as a game. It's fun to build things if, when you put it together, the game comes back and says "here's what happened!" It gives you goals and grades.
That doesn't happen in games like SecondLife, which is why content creation there is about as much fun (and about as high quality) as randomly introducing someone to Photoshop and telling them to get to it. Occasionally, yeah, you'll get someone who can do something good. But usually?
So, as far as I can tell, the "Wright Paradigm" of user-generated content is to provide bits (and allow for custom bits) that have gameplay effects, and allow the user to place them in game space.
The idea of sharing content between players is completely unrelated to this, and it also doesn't mention how the bits have to work, how space has to flow in an interesting way... this is just an introduction.
Let's talk about user-generated content, and how to make it fun, interesting, balanced, and so forth. I'm going to shorten it to "CUG" (content: user generated. It's a better acronym than "UGC") because I have to write it a lot and I don't feel like typing it eighty times. CUG CUG CUG!
When people think of CUG, they usually think of SecondLife. Put forward as a holy grail of CUG, mostly by people who have obviously never played a tabletop game, it is a vast world filled entirely by CUG.
Unfortunately, compared to games such as the Sims or even Halo, SecondLife fares poorly. It is primarily popular for the breadth of its content: you can't pilot a jet in the Sims, or create hard-core porn. Machinima in the Halo engine does not make it easy to build, say, a 1920s speakeasy, or create hard-core porn. In SecondLife you can build and pilot a jet, make a speakeasy. And, of course, create hard-core porn.
Except for the small, insignificant little fact that it's almost impossible to make anything of any real quality in SecondLife unless you are a really dedicated creator with access to a lot of outside software. Mostly, SecondLife exists as a distribution platform for people who are really good at creating content... whether in SecondLife or elsewhere. The actual tools are A) not easy and B) not fun.
Those are different problems, but together they mean that perhaps 1% of the player base makes 99% of the content worth having, which is maybe 1% of the content in the game, the rest being worse than worthless. Every poorly-slapped together newbie house, every "custom avatar" consisting of basic shapes and colors actually decreases the overall value of the play experience. It makes the world less pretty, less interesting. The signal to noise ratio is very bad.
"But wait!" you shout, "you're overstating it! It's always going to be the case that most of the players will be consumers, not creators!"
Like in Spore? Like in the Sims?
These are games where content creation is the game. There are a lot of games like that. Even games like Alpha Centauri or Oblivion can be argued to be like this, but Spore and the Sims are the clearest examples.
Every player creates content and, viewed from a newbie perspective, all the content is fairly interesting. A newbie watching someone play the most boring game of the Sims is going to be fascinated. A newbie seeing the worst-constructed monster writhing around will still find it amazing. Even newbie seeing your poorly-dressed level three thief will be fairly interested.
A newbie seeing an untextured box house will NOT BE AMAZED. Even a little. But the SecondLife world is full of them.
...
What I'm circling here is that there is a new, emerging paradigm for user-generated content. One where even casual players produce high-quality content as part of the game.
I'll call it the "Wright Paradigm", because he's the guy who seems to have got it really going.
I'm not here to ooh and ahh, though. I'm here to tell you how I think it works and how you can use it (or, at least, understand it) yourself.
As far as I can tell, the Wright Paradigm uses the basic ideas of space and bits.
Bits are the atomic nuggets. A sword that's +5 attack and costs 50 gold. A werewolf. A police station. A claw. Bits have specific game stats and ways of interacting with the game world.
A game comes with a large number of bits. The players can often create more using outside software, as when someone creates a new shirt or item for the Sims. Controlling which bits are available to a new player allows you to lure them into the game - an easy slope. Bits are very easy to use.
Almost every game uses bits. Oblivion uses bits. Even Chess uses bits, although you aren't really allowed to pick which bits to have on your team.
But Chess isn't really about CUG, and even Oblivion struggles with it. Only a miniscule number of chess players actually create chess variants. Similarly, nearly all players of Oblivion are happy with either the default content or freely available custom content: it's rare that they actually go and make a new kind of sword themselves.
What's the secret, the dividing line between something like Oblivion and something like the Sims?
It's such an obvious question that everyone will come up with a different answer. But, to me, the fundamental difference is the way that bits attach to the game world.
In Oblivion, you slot bits into various slots. You get a new spell, equip a new sword, and so forth.
In the Sims - or Spore, or Alpha Centauri - you add those bits to specific locations to change how they affect the game world.
You build a house out of bits. You don't really "equip a new chair", you buy the chair and find someplace to put it. You don't replace one city with another, you build a new city somewhere useful on the planet surface. You don't swap out claws, you put claws on arms of a length and size you choose.
The paradigm, as far as I can tell, is to let the users add bits directly to game space. In many cases, game space is literally space in the game. In a situation like Spore, game space is actually the body of your creature, at least initially. But the idea is the same.
This offers the same kind of easy-intro gameplay that bits provide, and it also enables the user to create content. Even uninispired CUG will be decent, because A) the bits are cool on their own and B) the structure you forge has some kind of shaping feedback mechanism.
In SecondLife, if you build a jet, you can delete the wings and it will still fly fine. The types of content are completely separated from each other: the atomic "bits" are ultra-generic and intended to be combined in very complex ways using very clumsy tools.
If you cut the legs off your creature in Spore, it'll become a pitiful thing, crawling or humping along with whatever limbs it has remaining. If you cut swaths of destruction through your commercial district in SimCity, your city will limp like a crippled puppy.
That same feedback system also allows you to build things as a game. It's fun to build things if, when you put it together, the game comes back and says "here's what happened!" It gives you goals and grades.
That doesn't happen in games like SecondLife, which is why content creation there is about as much fun (and about as high quality) as randomly introducing someone to Photoshop and telling them to get to it. Occasionally, yeah, you'll get someone who can do something good. But usually?
So, as far as I can tell, the "Wright Paradigm" of user-generated content is to provide bits (and allow for custom bits) that have gameplay effects, and allow the user to place them in game space.
The idea of sharing content between players is completely unrelated to this, and it also doesn't mention how the bits have to work, how space has to flow in an interesting way... this is just an introduction.
Sunday, July 13, 2008
Fairy Tales
I've been thinking, and I've come to the realization that most of our games are very childish.
I don't mean that in a bad way. I mean that most of our games are based around achieving the same kind of experience that we had as children, hearing fairy tales. A game is often trying to get that same sense of excited wonder... except, of course, we're adults now.
Sure, there are games that arguably aren't trying for that. I don't know that match-three games or go are trying for it. I don't see how football tries for it.
But the kinds of games I like to play - RPGs, shooters, weird indie games - they all have the same smell as a fairy tale. Not just the stories, but the gameplay itself is like a fairy tale on crack. In a fairy tale, the hero would get his father's sword, or the mightiest armor in the land, or whatever. In our video game fairy tales, that just happens over and over and over... but it's fundamentally the same basic event. Similarly, our endless fights are the same basic events as the fewer fights of fairy tales.
For a while, I've been basically, unconsciously, trying to figure out how to make a game more like a fairy tale. Make the fights more unique, the pacing more... like when we were young.
But let's look at what the experience I'm talking about is. What is the experience of a child hearing a fairy tale?
There are several elements at work, but one of them is that, at least if you used to be me, kids don't let tales die. You hear the story, but then you spend a long time thinking about it. Going over it. Admiring it. Perhaps thinking about different ways it could have turned out. If you were me, you spent more time doing that than the story could possibly have taken to tell.
This was not during the story, though. During the story, you'd be too busy listening (or reading) and imagining. If the story was broken up over several days, the intervening hours could be sheer pain waiting for more story, even if the story really wasn't very good in the first place.
Another element is that feeling of newness. These days, a story has to be really spectacularly interesting to get a flicker of that old feeling. I've just seen too many elves firing arrows at too many orcs.
But here's the thing... I picked up some fairy tales from other cultures. Japan, middle Europe, and the classic "Arabian Nights". Reading these fairy tales gives me that feeling, even though they aren't any more complex than, say, Rapunzel's or Loki's stories.
As far as I can tell, those are the two main components, and that started me thinking.
It's a fragile situation. Over the years, I've started to read differently. The stories I read these days try to make up in length what they lack in newness - not their fault, exactly, I just have seen a lot of stuff. But this has made me read in a very different way, a way not suitable to fairy tales.
I find that, reading these foreign fairy tales, the effect is strongest if I slow way, way down. Even read aloud, or pretend someone is reading it aloud. And then, when I reach the end of one or two tales, I stop. I find that they whirl around in my mind for hours, just like they did twenty years ago.
Looking at it, games are the same way as the books I normally read.
So... what if we decided to treat it like a fairy tale?
I was playing Persona 3: Fez. It's a rather spectacular game, but I'll never finish it. It's toooooooooo looooooonnnnnnnnnnnnggggggggggggggggg. The ideas are excellent and rather fresh for me (since I haven't played much of the other Persona games), so it starts off by hitting the right "fairytale notes".
But they bloat it up with gameplay.
"Ahhhh! What is this fool saying? Gameplay is what a game IS!"
Well, yes, but there's such a thing as too much. A steak is nice. A whole cow is not, even though it contains many steaks and is more deeply complex.
If you think of gameplay like food, then playing Persona 3 is like sitting down to dinner at a sushi restaurant. It's great, a lot of subtleties. Except that the chef keeps serving you sushi and sake and won't let you leave. Hour after hour.
How much sushi can you eat?
Apparently, I'll eat sushi for 43 hours.
But that's not what I want. And although the story is fairytale-ish, the actual experience certainly isn't. The fairytale-ish experience would be that the sushi chef shows you a hundred platters of sushi, but you can only taste three of them... They taste so good that you can't forget, and you can't help but stay awake at night, wondering how the other rolls might have tasted.
For a child hearing a fairy tale, there is a kind of half-comprehension. There are big ideas, they are fascinating and interesting, but there's also this feeling that there's a lot more to it, a lot more you can't quite see... but maybe if you think about it for a while, or maybe if you hear the next fairy tale...
To me, a game is a fairy tale PLUS the ruminating you do afterwards. Except that instead of hearing the fairy tale and then ruminating, you're asked to ruminate while you hear the fairy tale. That's not right!
In the end, what this ends up doing to me is the "endless restart syndrome", which I'm sure you're all familiar with. I'll play the game for a few hours, then I'll restart as a different character. I'm ruminating on the experience of the game... except that I haven't finished the game, haven't even seen the depths the gameplay can reach.
I'm really, really bad about this. I've played Oblivion for at least a hundred hours since it's release, but I've never played any character for more than fifteen - usually five or six. It's gotten to the point where I generally decide to ignore whole chunks of potential, just so I can finish the game. IE, I'll decide to play as a wizard and never, ever even think about how the game might have gone if I was a warrior or a thief.
This isn't good. That's like reading a fairy tale and saying, "okay, let's skip all the parts about Mordor so I can finish the damn thing."
In the past, I've been very hesitant about my opinions on length of play and replay value. I've always felt, in my heart, that short games (6-15 hours) with high replay value are better than long games... even if the long games also have high replay value.
I've always been a bit hesitant to say so, because a lot of people seem to hate the idea. They want to be able to play the game once, get everything there is to get out of it, and then throw it in the trash. And I could never place my finger on exactly why that's such a shitty way to do it. I always blamed it on artistic aspirations on my part, even though that didn't quite fit the bill.
The reason I want short games with high replay values is because I want to ruminate on them. I want assisted rumination: once I've finished the game, I want to be able to say, "wow, that was cool... let's see that again, from a slightly different angle."
With a long game, I don't get ruminations, either assisted or the more ordinary kind. There's simply too much, and too much of it is bland. I might say, "woo, that boss was cool!", but I'm not going to sit in bed unable to sleep because I can't forget that boss.
With short games, I do. Katamari Damacy... it's kept me awake. I've also had dreams about it, which is really how I judge whether a game is a classic or not. If I dream about it or it keeps me awake, I can write a truthful review: This was a triumph. I'm making a note here: "huge success". It's hard to overstate my satisfaction.
Perhaps it's just me. Perhaps there's nobody else out there who feels the same way.
But I want short games full of fascinating ideas.
Stop force-feeding me!
I don't mean that in a bad way. I mean that most of our games are based around achieving the same kind of experience that we had as children, hearing fairy tales. A game is often trying to get that same sense of excited wonder... except, of course, we're adults now.
Sure, there are games that arguably aren't trying for that. I don't know that match-three games or go are trying for it. I don't see how football tries for it.
But the kinds of games I like to play - RPGs, shooters, weird indie games - they all have the same smell as a fairy tale. Not just the stories, but the gameplay itself is like a fairy tale on crack. In a fairy tale, the hero would get his father's sword, or the mightiest armor in the land, or whatever. In our video game fairy tales, that just happens over and over and over... but it's fundamentally the same basic event. Similarly, our endless fights are the same basic events as the fewer fights of fairy tales.
For a while, I've been basically, unconsciously, trying to figure out how to make a game more like a fairy tale. Make the fights more unique, the pacing more... like when we were young.
But let's look at what the experience I'm talking about is. What is the experience of a child hearing a fairy tale?
There are several elements at work, but one of them is that, at least if you used to be me, kids don't let tales die. You hear the story, but then you spend a long time thinking about it. Going over it. Admiring it. Perhaps thinking about different ways it could have turned out. If you were me, you spent more time doing that than the story could possibly have taken to tell.
This was not during the story, though. During the story, you'd be too busy listening (or reading) and imagining. If the story was broken up over several days, the intervening hours could be sheer pain waiting for more story, even if the story really wasn't very good in the first place.
Another element is that feeling of newness. These days, a story has to be really spectacularly interesting to get a flicker of that old feeling. I've just seen too many elves firing arrows at too many orcs.
But here's the thing... I picked up some fairy tales from other cultures. Japan, middle Europe, and the classic "Arabian Nights". Reading these fairy tales gives me that feeling, even though they aren't any more complex than, say, Rapunzel's or Loki's stories.
As far as I can tell, those are the two main components, and that started me thinking.
It's a fragile situation. Over the years, I've started to read differently. The stories I read these days try to make up in length what they lack in newness - not their fault, exactly, I just have seen a lot of stuff. But this has made me read in a very different way, a way not suitable to fairy tales.
I find that, reading these foreign fairy tales, the effect is strongest if I slow way, way down. Even read aloud, or pretend someone is reading it aloud. And then, when I reach the end of one or two tales, I stop. I find that they whirl around in my mind for hours, just like they did twenty years ago.
Looking at it, games are the same way as the books I normally read.
So... what if we decided to treat it like a fairy tale?
I was playing Persona 3: Fez. It's a rather spectacular game, but I'll never finish it. It's toooooooooo looooooonnnnnnnnnnnnggggggggggggggggg. The ideas are excellent and rather fresh for me (since I haven't played much of the other Persona games), so it starts off by hitting the right "fairytale notes".
But they bloat it up with gameplay.
"Ahhhh! What is this fool saying? Gameplay is what a game IS!"
Well, yes, but there's such a thing as too much. A steak is nice. A whole cow is not, even though it contains many steaks and is more deeply complex.
If you think of gameplay like food, then playing Persona 3 is like sitting down to dinner at a sushi restaurant. It's great, a lot of subtleties. Except that the chef keeps serving you sushi and sake and won't let you leave. Hour after hour.
How much sushi can you eat?
Apparently, I'll eat sushi for 43 hours.
But that's not what I want. And although the story is fairytale-ish, the actual experience certainly isn't. The fairytale-ish experience would be that the sushi chef shows you a hundred platters of sushi, but you can only taste three of them... They taste so good that you can't forget, and you can't help but stay awake at night, wondering how the other rolls might have tasted.
For a child hearing a fairy tale, there is a kind of half-comprehension. There are big ideas, they are fascinating and interesting, but there's also this feeling that there's a lot more to it, a lot more you can't quite see... but maybe if you think about it for a while, or maybe if you hear the next fairy tale...
To me, a game is a fairy tale PLUS the ruminating you do afterwards. Except that instead of hearing the fairy tale and then ruminating, you're asked to ruminate while you hear the fairy tale. That's not right!
In the end, what this ends up doing to me is the "endless restart syndrome", which I'm sure you're all familiar with. I'll play the game for a few hours, then I'll restart as a different character. I'm ruminating on the experience of the game... except that I haven't finished the game, haven't even seen the depths the gameplay can reach.
I'm really, really bad about this. I've played Oblivion for at least a hundred hours since it's release, but I've never played any character for more than fifteen - usually five or six. It's gotten to the point where I generally decide to ignore whole chunks of potential, just so I can finish the game. IE, I'll decide to play as a wizard and never, ever even think about how the game might have gone if I was a warrior or a thief.
This isn't good. That's like reading a fairy tale and saying, "okay, let's skip all the parts about Mordor so I can finish the damn thing."
In the past, I've been very hesitant about my opinions on length of play and replay value. I've always felt, in my heart, that short games (6-15 hours) with high replay value are better than long games... even if the long games also have high replay value.
I've always been a bit hesitant to say so, because a lot of people seem to hate the idea. They want to be able to play the game once, get everything there is to get out of it, and then throw it in the trash. And I could never place my finger on exactly why that's such a shitty way to do it. I always blamed it on artistic aspirations on my part, even though that didn't quite fit the bill.
The reason I want short games with high replay values is because I want to ruminate on them. I want assisted rumination: once I've finished the game, I want to be able to say, "wow, that was cool... let's see that again, from a slightly different angle."
With a long game, I don't get ruminations, either assisted or the more ordinary kind. There's simply too much, and too much of it is bland. I might say, "woo, that boss was cool!", but I'm not going to sit in bed unable to sleep because I can't forget that boss.
With short games, I do. Katamari Damacy... it's kept me awake. I've also had dreams about it, which is really how I judge whether a game is a classic or not. If I dream about it or it keeps me awake, I can write a truthful review: This was a triumph. I'm making a note here: "huge success". It's hard to overstate my satisfaction.
Perhaps it's just me. Perhaps there's nobody else out there who feels the same way.
But I want short games full of fascinating ideas.
Stop force-feeding me!
Monday, January 28, 2008
Nature of Rules, Response and Stuff
Ryan wrote a good, long reply to my last post that needs commenting. This probably won't make any sense unless you read the other post first.
Critters have DNA, but that doesn't mean that a critter is DNA, or even that it should be thought of in terms of its DNA. The rules are one part of the DNA of a game: what grows from them can be delightful and complex.
Freeform play is a bit like a virii: it has no particular protection, no particular ability to reproduce without killing something, but it crops up everywhere and is definitely notable.
Like I said: rules (and the rest) exist to protect the experience of the play from the vagaries of... well, life in general. They try to keep the experience similar from "generation to generation."
I hope this is clear...
Please remember that many games are played with private or obstinate goals on the part of the player. For example, whenever I play Bang! (a card game with hidden roles), I play with the assumption that a specific other player is on my side. It's certainly not something that is agreed on, but at the same time it's a potent method of shaping the game. It definitely changes the experience - mostly for me, but also for others, indirectly.
You could say that I am playing INSIDE the game rather than GAMING, if you see what I mean.
That distinction is not a terribly smart one to trivialize: you have to take it into account in the same way that you can't write off various other-sized organisms when you're performing surgery.
This comparison implies that playing inside a game (sideplay?) is bad, like an infection, but I don't think that's the case. I think it's vital to keeping a game fresh and interesting - I think many boring games are boring largely because they don't have any of this sideplay adding new elements and spice.
Some games are almost entirely sideplay, like the Sims or Secondlife.
Yes, rules (and content, and aesthetic, and social context, and and and) protect the experience. They protect it from new players, players with different visions of how the experience should go, from the weathering of time, and even from the effects of other rules, content, aesthetics, etc.
Anyone who is being honest should! The difference is simply one of scope or scale. That's kind of what made me go this route.
I mean, "A fireball spell costs 50 gold and causes 15 damage when cast". Sounds an awful lot like a rule to me! But it's also content, and suggests strongly an aesthetic.
So... it's obvious that it's not quite as nicely divided up as MDA suggests, in the same way that a cell isn't neatly divided up into "goo" and "DNA".
Yes! Right now, it's all done by trial and error. This is a lot like having a creature's DNA handed to you. "What will this creature be like?"
Well, you can try to simulate it in your head... "AGCFCF? That's... um... feathers?" More likely, you attempt to grow it and look at what it's characteristics are when it's alive. Of course, that takes time.
Once you see what the critter looks like, you can look back over the DNA and say, "OH! It meant spines!" and try to tweak it to be more to your liking. In theory, at least.
Fortunately, games are not critters. I think it might be possible to extrapolate rules (and so forth) from a dynamic. I haven't posted about it, yet, because I haven't figured it out yet. As you say:
That's the core problem, you see. The rules and content impose themselves without much regard to the player's preferences and mindset. If we pursue a dynamic, however, then we can pursue a... by the way, it's fuzzy because I don't have it nailed down myself... we can pursue a specific superset of interactions? We can tweak the rules and content because we know the dynamics the player should be experiencing.
Yeah, me too.
Challenge still stands: tell me about your DYNAMIC-centered Star Wars game design. No, I really don't have a clear definition of what that means.
Yet.
I think there's a difference between 'games' and 'play' and one of the main differences is that 'games' have rules... the key is that the rules provide the framework for the game.
Critters have DNA, but that doesn't mean that a critter is DNA, or even that it should be thought of in terms of its DNA. The rules are one part of the DNA of a game: what grows from them can be delightful and complex.
Freeform play is a bit like a virii: it has no particular protection, no particular ability to reproduce without killing something, but it crops up everywhere and is definitely notable.
Like I said: rules (and the rest) exist to protect the experience of the play from the vagaries of... well, life in general. They try to keep the experience similar from "generation to generation."
I hope this is clear...
generally [house rules] need to be agreed upon by all players.
Please remember that many games are played with private or obstinate goals on the part of the player. For example, whenever I play Bang! (a card game with hidden roles), I play with the assumption that a specific other player is on my side. It's certainly not something that is agreed on, but at the same time it's a potent method of shaping the game. It definitely changes the experience - mostly for me, but also for others, indirectly.
You could say that I am playing INSIDE the game rather than GAMING, if you see what I mean.
That distinction is not a terribly smart one to trivialize: you have to take it into account in the same way that you can't write off various other-sized organisms when you're performing surgery.
This comparison implies that playing inside a game (sideplay?) is bad, like an infection, but I don't think that's the case. I think it's vital to keeping a game fresh and interesting - I think many boring games are boring largely because they don't have any of this sideplay adding new elements and spice.
Some games are almost entirely sideplay, like the Sims or Secondlife.
You start needing rules, or a social contract between the players or you end up with the "Bang! Bang! Your Dead!.... No I'm not you missed!" syndrome.
Yes, rules (and content, and aesthetic, and social context, and and and) protect the experience. They protect it from new players, players with different visions of how the experience should go, from the weathering of time, and even from the effects of other rules, content, aesthetics, etc.
I find it hard sometimes to differentiate between rules and general parameters or environment.
Anyone who is being honest should! The difference is simply one of scope or scale. That's kind of what made me go this route.
I mean, "A fireball spell costs 50 gold and causes 15 damage when cast". Sounds an awful lot like a rule to me! But it's also content, and suggests strongly an aesthetic.
So... it's obvious that it's not quite as nicely divided up as MDA suggests, in the same way that a cell isn't neatly divided up into "goo" and "DNA".
I love 'sandbox' games and emergent gameplay. I love games that let me play with all the settings and do things that aren't explicitly spelled out. But in my experience this doesn't happen until the game is played for a period with 'vanilla' rules/settings. You need to understand the game to be able to effectively tweak the rules.
Yes! Right now, it's all done by trial and error. This is a lot like having a creature's DNA handed to you. "What will this creature be like?"
Well, you can try to simulate it in your head... "AGCFCF? That's... um... feathers?" More likely, you attempt to grow it and look at what it's characteristics are when it's alive. Of course, that takes time.
Once you see what the critter looks like, you can look back over the DNA and say, "OH! It meant spines!" and try to tweak it to be more to your liking. In theory, at least.
Fortunately, games are not critters. I think it might be possible to extrapolate rules (and so forth) from a dynamic. I haven't posted about it, yet, because I haven't figured it out yet. As you say:
You can never guarantee that 2 players will feel the same way about a game given taste and how they experience it. One person might find it simple and boring the next might be challenged and find it stressful... by what you describe - what do you want to experience - its sounds more emotional and based on feeling.
That's the core problem, you see. The rules and content impose themselves without much regard to the player's preferences and mindset. If we pursue a dynamic, however, then we can pursue a... by the way, it's fuzzy because I don't have it nailed down myself... we can pursue a specific superset of interactions? We can tweak the rules and content because we know the dynamics the player should be experiencing.
With Star Trek...
Yeah, me too.
Challenge still stands: tell me about your DYNAMIC-centered Star Wars game design. No, I really don't have a clear definition of what that means.
Yet.
The Nature of Rules
Ivory Tower Alert!
I've been thinking about rules.
I don't think games should be made up of rules.
Think about the games you played as a kid. Most of the games didn't have mandatory rules - you played with tons of house rules, whatever made the game fun. Free Parking in Monopoly being the most common example, but it's also common to change the rules to various games to give specific inept players an advantage.
This lets the game be fun for the inept players and keeps it from being terribly boring for the ept ones.
You'll see this kind of thing even in deathmatch computer games: if your friend is pretty bad, you're likely to go easy on him, or refuse to use the rocket launcher, etc.
There's an innate compulsion among gamers to make games always somewhat challenging: to tweak the rules so that it's never boring. Frequently, this involves giving advantages to the weak players, but just as often it simply involves setting unlikely goals for yourself. How fast can you beat the level, how far can you toss his corpse...
Obviously, there's something more than simple rules to a game. The experience of a game is almost independent from the rules, in that a lot of people will change the rules to try to keep the experience intact.
Take poker. At it's heart, poker has only a few simple rules that define a game of skill, chance, and psychology. However, to preserve that game, more rules are made, usually ones of fairness. No tabletalk, no missing or marked cards, no this, no that. These rules aren't really poker rules, they're rules protecting poker.
Similarly, in a complex RPG, there are a thousand little rules and limits - how you gain gold, what you can spend it on, how powerful that spell is, what the chances of an enemy encounter are. These rules (which border on "content" in many cases) are not there to define the game. They're around to keep the experience of the game sailing true. With a broken system, the way the game is played changes, usually for the worse.
The aesthetics of a game are the same: the game's aesthetics aren't the game proper, they're a way to frame the experience and keep it in the right zone.
This can be taken to extremes. For an extreme version of this, every rule and aesthetic exist to either protect or teach the experience of the game. The actual feel of the game isn't something that is contained in the rules or in the aesthetics, although it is a result of them (along with some other things like social context).
Now, we can easily describe aesthetics. We can say "oh, steampunky" or "make sure it's rated G" or "this is a castle in the clouds, waterfalls pouring off the sides."
We can describe rules as well, less easily but more clearly. "Roll 2d6 for damage", "move 3 spaces", "start to the right of the dealer and go counterclockwise..."
But we really don't have any language for talking about the dynamics of a game, the actual play experience. Every time we want to describe it, we say things like "oh, make it like Grand Theft Auto, but a MMORPG!"
This seems a bit lopsided, since the dynamics are really the important part. I mean, we describe mechanics and aesthetics in these same ways, but only if we're giving a ridiculously wide overview. When we actually talk in more detail, we don't stick to describing them in terms of what other games they're like. We describe them using well-anchored words that other people in the industry can turn into a working product. Sometimes we're very specific, sometimes we're vague and leave the specifics up to them.
Why can't we describe dynamics in that way?
Why can't we say, "this game is ticky-wicky, with an undercurrent of pressure pelting" the same way we say "the game is turn-based, and has a lot of gore"?
No, "ticky-wicky" and "pressure pelting" don't actually mean anything. But they sound like they could, I think. They sound almost like they describe a specific kind of play experience, although what it might be is kind of vague.
"Grinding", "griefing" and a few others are sort of a beginning, but their focus is kind of off. After all, there are a lot of different kinds of grinding, and they feel very different. Not every rule set that involves repeating similar situations over and over has the same feeling.
...
Even now, I think in terms of the play experience rather than the rules or the aesthetic. I think this is the case for most game designers. There's sort of a feeling that the equation is a+b=c, and we can solve for whichever we really want to solve for.
Think back to Star Wars, before it died. Before the new movies, before KotOR. Back to the old movies and the fan books and when knowing what a bantha was meant you were a terrible, terrible geek.
If you were asked to make a Star Wars game, what would you make? "Can't be a space shooter" says George. "Too many of those on my conscience. Make it anything else."
What do you go with?
The aesthetics are pre-made, although you do get to choose a scale. You know Star Wars aesthetics inside and out, since you're a terrible, terrible geek.
But the actual game? You could argue it in any direction. The universe... is it ripe for an RPG? Sure! It's also a really great universe for an RTS! And an FPS sure wouldn't be out of line, would it?
Okay, forget that crap. Seriously, forget it.
Instead of thinking rules, think dynamic. Sure, genre is kind of a mixed bag of rules and dynamic, but forget about it!
What do you want to experience? What part of the Star Wars universe makes you want to play? What's the feeling you're going for?
I'm eager to hear your ideas for a game revolving around a dynamic.
As a fun contrast, think about a Star Trek game using the same methodology. Which dynamic would you pursue in the Trek universe? What kind of game would it build?
I've been thinking about rules.
I don't think games should be made up of rules.
Think about the games you played as a kid. Most of the games didn't have mandatory rules - you played with tons of house rules, whatever made the game fun. Free Parking in Monopoly being the most common example, but it's also common to change the rules to various games to give specific inept players an advantage.
This lets the game be fun for the inept players and keeps it from being terribly boring for the ept ones.
You'll see this kind of thing even in deathmatch computer games: if your friend is pretty bad, you're likely to go easy on him, or refuse to use the rocket launcher, etc.
There's an innate compulsion among gamers to make games always somewhat challenging: to tweak the rules so that it's never boring. Frequently, this involves giving advantages to the weak players, but just as often it simply involves setting unlikely goals for yourself. How fast can you beat the level, how far can you toss his corpse...
Obviously, there's something more than simple rules to a game. The experience of a game is almost independent from the rules, in that a lot of people will change the rules to try to keep the experience intact.
Take poker. At it's heart, poker has only a few simple rules that define a game of skill, chance, and psychology. However, to preserve that game, more rules are made, usually ones of fairness. No tabletalk, no missing or marked cards, no this, no that. These rules aren't really poker rules, they're rules protecting poker.
Similarly, in a complex RPG, there are a thousand little rules and limits - how you gain gold, what you can spend it on, how powerful that spell is, what the chances of an enemy encounter are. These rules (which border on "content" in many cases) are not there to define the game. They're around to keep the experience of the game sailing true. With a broken system, the way the game is played changes, usually for the worse.
The aesthetics of a game are the same: the game's aesthetics aren't the game proper, they're a way to frame the experience and keep it in the right zone.
This can be taken to extremes. For an extreme version of this, every rule and aesthetic exist to either protect or teach the experience of the game. The actual feel of the game isn't something that is contained in the rules or in the aesthetics, although it is a result of them (along with some other things like social context).
Now, we can easily describe aesthetics. We can say "oh, steampunky" or "make sure it's rated G" or "this is a castle in the clouds, waterfalls pouring off the sides."
We can describe rules as well, less easily but more clearly. "Roll 2d6 for damage", "move 3 spaces", "start to the right of the dealer and go counterclockwise..."
But we really don't have any language for talking about the dynamics of a game, the actual play experience. Every time we want to describe it, we say things like "oh, make it like Grand Theft Auto, but a MMORPG!"
This seems a bit lopsided, since the dynamics are really the important part. I mean, we describe mechanics and aesthetics in these same ways, but only if we're giving a ridiculously wide overview. When we actually talk in more detail, we don't stick to describing them in terms of what other games they're like. We describe them using well-anchored words that other people in the industry can turn into a working product. Sometimes we're very specific, sometimes we're vague and leave the specifics up to them.
Why can't we describe dynamics in that way?
Why can't we say, "this game is ticky-wicky, with an undercurrent of pressure pelting" the same way we say "the game is turn-based, and has a lot of gore"?
No, "ticky-wicky" and "pressure pelting" don't actually mean anything. But they sound like they could, I think. They sound almost like they describe a specific kind of play experience, although what it might be is kind of vague.
"Grinding", "griefing" and a few others are sort of a beginning, but their focus is kind of off. After all, there are a lot of different kinds of grinding, and they feel very different. Not every rule set that involves repeating similar situations over and over has the same feeling.
...
Even now, I think in terms of the play experience rather than the rules or the aesthetic. I think this is the case for most game designers. There's sort of a feeling that the equation is a+b=c, and we can solve for whichever we really want to solve for.
Think back to Star Wars, before it died. Before the new movies, before KotOR. Back to the old movies and the fan books and when knowing what a bantha was meant you were a terrible, terrible geek.
If you were asked to make a Star Wars game, what would you make? "Can't be a space shooter" says George. "Too many of those on my conscience. Make it anything else."
What do you go with?
The aesthetics are pre-made, although you do get to choose a scale. You know Star Wars aesthetics inside and out, since you're a terrible, terrible geek.
But the actual game? You could argue it in any direction. The universe... is it ripe for an RPG? Sure! It's also a really great universe for an RTS! And an FPS sure wouldn't be out of line, would it?
Okay, forget that crap. Seriously, forget it.
Instead of thinking rules, think dynamic. Sure, genre is kind of a mixed bag of rules and dynamic, but forget about it!
What do you want to experience? What part of the Star Wars universe makes you want to play? What's the feeling you're going for?
I'm eager to hear your ideas for a game revolving around a dynamic.
As a fun contrast, think about a Star Trek game using the same methodology. Which dynamic would you pursue in the Trek universe? What kind of game would it build?
Monday, January 21, 2008
The Nature of Text
I've been thinking about text. Text instead of graphics, text supporting graphics, text from characters... you know, text.
The problem with generating text has never been getting the point across. It's not at all hard to make a situation generate text.
I remember that I briefly played a weird little mail-based text game where my fantasy character would do all sorts of things and I would send back a little sheet marked up with what I would do next week.
The game would print up a long, rambling, but marginally entertaining account of what I did (sort of like this blog, I guess). The fights would be things like "Throkdar swings his mace, but you duck nimbly... you stab Throkdar in the knee and he goes down like a sack of drowned kittens!"
Generating text isn't really the issue. It's not hard to generate text: you can just have a bunch of sentence fragments and staple them together like a sack of drowned kittens. The difficulty instead lies with what text to generate.
Communication is always communication, whether it's textual or graphic or audio. Every communique has a purpose. In games, there are three purposes to communicating. Let's go over them.
The first purpose is to communicate a changing gameplay context. Graphically, this is done by different graphics. A green palette swap means this wolf is a werewolf. The fact that the bullet is coming towards you means it's a threat. The fact that you're on a narrow bridge means you can't dodge side to side. This is also done nongraphically. 200/900 HP means you're in danger. That red sixty means you just dealt a fair amount of damage. That you have a sack of drowned kittens equipped in your weapons slot rather than a bow means short range rather than long range.
The second purpose is to communicate a changing nongameplay context. For example, you walk to Newvilletonburgh, and along the path you see..... Verdant farmlands. Blasted wastelands. A river of refugees. Snow.
While these aren't directly linked to gameplay, they are critical for giving the player a sense of place and immersion. Often this is inextricably linked with gameplay changes. That is due to a designer linking them, not to any fundamental link between telling you about snow and making you fight yetis. The designer could just as easily tell you about snow and then program an encounter with Helios, god of the desert sun. It wouldn't make much sense, but there's nothing fundamentally stopping him.
The third and final purpose is to avoid repetition like a sack of drowned kittens.
Repetition is a complicated topic. A lot of really great games use a lot of repetition. Not just old games like Pac-Man, but new games, too. There's a fine line between repetition and patterned play.
For example, your favorite FPS. Featured an awful lot of running around shooting people. In fact, it didn't feature a whole lot else. But it didn't feel terribly repetitious, did it?
Contrast and compare: Bioshock. Featured a lot of running around and shooting, and actually a fair amount of other things. But it felt extremely repetitious.
Repetition is what happens when the context doesn't change. Exactly how sensitive a player is varies: some players probably didn't find Bioshock repetitive. Some players probably felt that getting a +2 to their plumbing rolls changed the game's context. I felt that if they had given me a rocket launcher it wouldn't have changed the game's context.
In many ways, repetition is a function of the game's grain. The deeper the gameplay, the more subtle your communications can get without feeling repetitious. Bioshock's gameplay was about as deep as a high school cheerleader, so it hardly mattered to me that their communications were constantly shouting new things - the new things were not meaningfully different. On the other hand, a game of go is not exactly full of amazing new vistas, being that it consists entirely of putting stones down on a flat board. But the gameplay is very deep, and if you can see that depth, every tiny little stone changes the context completely. (If you can't see that depth, every tiny little stone is an excruciating exercise in repetition. Like a sack full of drowned kayakers.)
Anyhow, those are the three basic things communication in a game has to cover. It's actually more two things, since repetition is more a rule of how quickly and slowly the two other things need to change.
Now, text communications. And I don't mean "WEAPON: SPEAR + 2". I mean natural language text.
For most text-centric games, all of the non-gameplay context communications are written up, whereas all the gameplay communications are generated. Example:
West of House
You are standing in an open field west of a white house, with a boarded front door.
There is a small mailbox here.
The layout is carefully scripted: everywhere you go it's TITLE then SCRIPTED TEXT DESCRIPTION then LIST OF STUFF. The list of stuff is generated automatically, as are many of the responses to what you type.
Some really old text games print the full description of a room every time you enter it, which gets really repetitive. Newer text games have a verbose description that they print when you first enter it and after that they just print the title of the room, perhaps with a short blurb. At any time, you can call up that long description again, if you've forgotten the context of the room and need a refresher course. If you haven't forgotten, don't call it up, because it has nothing new to say to you.
Graphical games are largely similar in structure. The graphics themselves are carefully scripted, but their positions and various numerical values are generated. While a full description of an enemy or character would get distracting if you saw it all the time, many games allow you to access some kind of status page for a close-up pic and the full statistical readout.
Fundamentally the same.
Except that graphics, numbers, and slots have a much finer grain than full-text descriptions. 60 is different from 55, and if you see them pop up above someone's head, you know which you prefer. An enemy five tiles away is preferable to an enemy four tiles away. Equipping a spear + 2 is better than equipping a spear + 1.
Putting these in text won't work. In fact, it would backfire. Anyone remember the old Dragon Warrior? "Thou has gained 2 gold. Thou hast gained 3 XP. Congratulations, thou has persevered and gained a level."
What do they do now? "Gold: 2. XP: 3. LEVEL UP!" (fanfare)
They've chopped all the fat out of the descriptions, because the fat didn't actually communicate anything. The game state is numeric, and the only communications which are relevant are ones that specify numbers (Gold: 2) or packs of numbers (Fireball spell). Nothing else changes the gameplay context.
You have to remember that the gameplay context is not simply a list of numbers, oh no. It's the topological layout of the situation. In the most obvious sense, where you are in the level as compared to the enemies, powerups, obstacles, and so forth. In less obvious examples, the variety of weapons you've got equipped, the node map of cities you can travel to, the array of equipment available for purchase, the likelyhood of stumbling across more ammo for a particular weapon in this particular area...
So popping up "Gold: 2" is kind of a minimally effective communication. Gold is a very simple gameplay value - a simple scoring mechanism. Far more complex mechanisms are usually at play. "LEVEL UP!" used to be followed by: "+1 str, +1 dex, +3 HP". Now it's followed by a complex list of choices, often displayed graphically so that you can see what lies further down the paths you can choose.
As we've gotten better at displaying graphical information, the topological density has increased dramatically. But although this is technically graphics, it is not of the sort that is expensive to produce.
The complex level-up system in KotOR, for example. It's all either text or tiny icons that show text when you click them. Which stats improve? Which skills improve? Which feats will you buy? It's an incredibly complicated situation, but all the details are clearly shown without resorting to advanced graphical wizardry.
When we think "text game", we think "Zork". But a linear, one-dimensional stream of data simply cannot represent the level of complexity we're interested in. They're great at nongameplay context, but poor at gameplay context. Rogue-likes, with their ascii-maps, reverse the situation: they cut out the ability to represent non-gameplay context easily with text, but don't switch over to actually using graphics to represent non-gamplay... so they're stuck pretty solidly in only representing gameplay context.
...
The question isn't whether text can represent complex states. It certainly can. The question isn't even whether you can generate interesting text for your game rather than writing it. The answer is yes, so long as it's based on content that is actually in your game.
The question is how to represent enough complexity without turning into a game entirely consisting of menus.
The problem with generating text has never been getting the point across. It's not at all hard to make a situation generate text.
I remember that I briefly played a weird little mail-based text game where my fantasy character would do all sorts of things and I would send back a little sheet marked up with what I would do next week.
The game would print up a long, rambling, but marginally entertaining account of what I did (sort of like this blog, I guess). The fights would be things like "Throkdar swings his mace, but you duck nimbly... you stab Throkdar in the knee and he goes down like a sack of drowned kittens!"
Generating text isn't really the issue. It's not hard to generate text: you can just have a bunch of sentence fragments and staple them together like a sack of drowned kittens. The difficulty instead lies with what text to generate.
Communication is always communication, whether it's textual or graphic or audio. Every communique has a purpose. In games, there are three purposes to communicating. Let's go over them.
The first purpose is to communicate a changing gameplay context. Graphically, this is done by different graphics. A green palette swap means this wolf is a werewolf. The fact that the bullet is coming towards you means it's a threat. The fact that you're on a narrow bridge means you can't dodge side to side. This is also done nongraphically. 200/900 HP means you're in danger. That red sixty means you just dealt a fair amount of damage. That you have a sack of drowned kittens equipped in your weapons slot rather than a bow means short range rather than long range.
The second purpose is to communicate a changing nongameplay context. For example, you walk to Newvilletonburgh, and along the path you see..... Verdant farmlands. Blasted wastelands. A river of refugees. Snow.
While these aren't directly linked to gameplay, they are critical for giving the player a sense of place and immersion. Often this is inextricably linked with gameplay changes. That is due to a designer linking them, not to any fundamental link between telling you about snow and making you fight yetis. The designer could just as easily tell you about snow and then program an encounter with Helios, god of the desert sun. It wouldn't make much sense, but there's nothing fundamentally stopping him.
The third and final purpose is to avoid repetition like a sack of drowned kittens.
Repetition is a complicated topic. A lot of really great games use a lot of repetition. Not just old games like Pac-Man, but new games, too. There's a fine line between repetition and patterned play.
For example, your favorite FPS. Featured an awful lot of running around shooting people. In fact, it didn't feature a whole lot else. But it didn't feel terribly repetitious, did it?
Contrast and compare: Bioshock. Featured a lot of running around and shooting, and actually a fair amount of other things. But it felt extremely repetitious.
Repetition is what happens when the context doesn't change. Exactly how sensitive a player is varies: some players probably didn't find Bioshock repetitive. Some players probably felt that getting a +2 to their plumbing rolls changed the game's context. I felt that if they had given me a rocket launcher it wouldn't have changed the game's context.
In many ways, repetition is a function of the game's grain. The deeper the gameplay, the more subtle your communications can get without feeling repetitious. Bioshock's gameplay was about as deep as a high school cheerleader, so it hardly mattered to me that their communications were constantly shouting new things - the new things were not meaningfully different. On the other hand, a game of go is not exactly full of amazing new vistas, being that it consists entirely of putting stones down on a flat board. But the gameplay is very deep, and if you can see that depth, every tiny little stone changes the context completely. (If you can't see that depth, every tiny little stone is an excruciating exercise in repetition. Like a sack full of drowned kayakers.)
Anyhow, those are the three basic things communication in a game has to cover. It's actually more two things, since repetition is more a rule of how quickly and slowly the two other things need to change.
Now, text communications. And I don't mean "WEAPON: SPEAR + 2". I mean natural language text.
For most text-centric games, all of the non-gameplay context communications are written up, whereas all the gameplay communications are generated. Example:
West of House
You are standing in an open field west of a white house, with a boarded front door.
There is a small mailbox here.
The layout is carefully scripted: everywhere you go it's TITLE then SCRIPTED TEXT DESCRIPTION then LIST OF STUFF. The list of stuff is generated automatically, as are many of the responses to what you type.
Some really old text games print the full description of a room every time you enter it, which gets really repetitive. Newer text games have a verbose description that they print when you first enter it and after that they just print the title of the room, perhaps with a short blurb. At any time, you can call up that long description again, if you've forgotten the context of the room and need a refresher course. If you haven't forgotten, don't call it up, because it has nothing new to say to you.
Graphical games are largely similar in structure. The graphics themselves are carefully scripted, but their positions and various numerical values are generated. While a full description of an enemy or character would get distracting if you saw it all the time, many games allow you to access some kind of status page for a close-up pic and the full statistical readout.
Fundamentally the same.
Except that graphics, numbers, and slots have a much finer grain than full-text descriptions. 60 is different from 55, and if you see them pop up above someone's head, you know which you prefer. An enemy five tiles away is preferable to an enemy four tiles away. Equipping a spear + 2 is better than equipping a spear + 1.
Putting these in text won't work. In fact, it would backfire. Anyone remember the old Dragon Warrior? "Thou has gained 2 gold. Thou hast gained 3 XP. Congratulations, thou has persevered and gained a level."
What do they do now? "Gold: 2. XP: 3. LEVEL UP!" (fanfare)
They've chopped all the fat out of the descriptions, because the fat didn't actually communicate anything. The game state is numeric, and the only communications which are relevant are ones that specify numbers (Gold: 2) or packs of numbers (Fireball spell). Nothing else changes the gameplay context.
You have to remember that the gameplay context is not simply a list of numbers, oh no. It's the topological layout of the situation. In the most obvious sense, where you are in the level as compared to the enemies, powerups, obstacles, and so forth. In less obvious examples, the variety of weapons you've got equipped, the node map of cities you can travel to, the array of equipment available for purchase, the likelyhood of stumbling across more ammo for a particular weapon in this particular area...
So popping up "Gold: 2" is kind of a minimally effective communication. Gold is a very simple gameplay value - a simple scoring mechanism. Far more complex mechanisms are usually at play. "LEVEL UP!" used to be followed by: "+1 str, +1 dex, +3 HP". Now it's followed by a complex list of choices, often displayed graphically so that you can see what lies further down the paths you can choose.
As we've gotten better at displaying graphical information, the topological density has increased dramatically. But although this is technically graphics, it is not of the sort that is expensive to produce.
The complex level-up system in KotOR, for example. It's all either text or tiny icons that show text when you click them. Which stats improve? Which skills improve? Which feats will you buy? It's an incredibly complicated situation, but all the details are clearly shown without resorting to advanced graphical wizardry.
When we think "text game", we think "Zork". But a linear, one-dimensional stream of data simply cannot represent the level of complexity we're interested in. They're great at nongameplay context, but poor at gameplay context. Rogue-likes, with their ascii-maps, reverse the situation: they cut out the ability to represent non-gameplay context easily with text, but don't switch over to actually using graphics to represent non-gamplay... so they're stuck pretty solidly in only representing gameplay context.
...
The question isn't whether text can represent complex states. It certainly can. The question isn't even whether you can generate interesting text for your game rather than writing it. The answer is yes, so long as it's based on content that is actually in your game.
The question is how to represent enough complexity without turning into a game entirely consisting of menus.
Monday, December 31, 2007
Humor and Characters
I like humor. I think that everything is better with humor in it.
But, like most people, I have humor I like and I have humor I don't like. For example, I can't stand South Park. I have never laughed at any part of South Park. There are occasional moments of mild amusement. That's it.
I guess everyone gets used to giving half of all humor a hairy eyeball.
Sometimes, though, things get a bit odd.
There are a lot of comics out there that I don't like. For example, Pearls Before Swine. When I read it, I don't see humor I don't like. I could deal with that, just dismiss it. Instead, I see inept humor. I see weak punch lines, poor pacing, and talking heads.
I assumed that it was simply bad. I can see what they seem to be trying to do, and I can see them fall short. So it's bad, right?
Apparently not. It's one of my dad's favorite comic strips, and it gets pretty solid reviews.
I had the same theory about Todd and Penguin, but it gets some pretty good reviews as well...
Looking into it, I find that the big thing that people seem to like about these comics are the characters. They enjoy seeing what the characters do and how they interact. This is not something I feel, even after reading hundreds of these comics. They all seem so painfully bland to me.
I didn't really think that my sense of humor was excluding characters. It's not that I run around saying, "ooh, it's got a character in it, I don't like it!"
But now that I think about it, that's pretty much the case. I like situational humor rather than personal humor. I like the tornado-torn house with a sign saying "landscaping by Jim". I like the Ministry of Silly Walks. I like Terry Pratchett. I like one-liners and absolutely terrible B-movies. I even like Scrubs.
All of these things have one thing in common: they have really strong situational humor. There are characters, but in most of them, the characters aren't really the point. They're just there to get us in and out of situations.
Scrubs is an exception: it's got situational humor, but it's also got a lot of character humor. And now that I think back on it, I have a clear line as to what I found funny and what I didn't. I find it funny when the radio wristwatches bounce around screwing scenes up. I don't find it funny when the ex-wife walks onto the stage and makes someone's life more miserable.
Looking at more examples is pretty easy. I can't stand Napoleon Dynamite. Why? Because it's basically a bunch of characters going around being extremely uncomfortable and/or idiotic. Doesn't interest me in the slightest. The situational humor is almost nonexistent: instead of the characters serving to take us from situation to situation, the situations serve to take us from character to character.
It's not that I simply don't find it funny. I actually find it acutely uncomfortable.
Most character humor revolves around making a character miserable or worthless. Humiliation, pain, idiocy... I don't like it. Character humor which uses milder approaches is simply boring to me.
But it doesn't bore me any more, because now I'm looking at it from a "meta" perspective. Even though Pearls Before Swine occasionally tells the same joke that a situational comic might, they tell it with a radically different focus and sense of pacing. Here's an ideal example (link will stop working in a few weeks): link. This is the funniest one I could find.
I look at it and all I see are flaws, because I'm looking at it from a situational perspective. I have the instinctive urge to cut half the dialog, maybe even try for single-panel or nested-panel, like the Far Side. But at least I find the underlying concept funny.
Rewind or fast forward, the strip is surrounded on all sides by character humor. You can clearly see the kinds of humor I just don't get.
I think this is interesting.
Do you see what I'm talking about? What kinds of humor do you like?
But, like most people, I have humor I like and I have humor I don't like. For example, I can't stand South Park. I have never laughed at any part of South Park. There are occasional moments of mild amusement. That's it.
I guess everyone gets used to giving half of all humor a hairy eyeball.
Sometimes, though, things get a bit odd.
There are a lot of comics out there that I don't like. For example, Pearls Before Swine. When I read it, I don't see humor I don't like. I could deal with that, just dismiss it. Instead, I see inept humor. I see weak punch lines, poor pacing, and talking heads.
I assumed that it was simply bad. I can see what they seem to be trying to do, and I can see them fall short. So it's bad, right?
Apparently not. It's one of my dad's favorite comic strips, and it gets pretty solid reviews.
I had the same theory about Todd and Penguin, but it gets some pretty good reviews as well...
Looking into it, I find that the big thing that people seem to like about these comics are the characters. They enjoy seeing what the characters do and how they interact. This is not something I feel, even after reading hundreds of these comics. They all seem so painfully bland to me.
I didn't really think that my sense of humor was excluding characters. It's not that I run around saying, "ooh, it's got a character in it, I don't like it!"
But now that I think about it, that's pretty much the case. I like situational humor rather than personal humor. I like the tornado-torn house with a sign saying "landscaping by Jim". I like the Ministry of Silly Walks. I like Terry Pratchett. I like one-liners and absolutely terrible B-movies. I even like Scrubs.
All of these things have one thing in common: they have really strong situational humor. There are characters, but in most of them, the characters aren't really the point. They're just there to get us in and out of situations.
Scrubs is an exception: it's got situational humor, but it's also got a lot of character humor. And now that I think back on it, I have a clear line as to what I found funny and what I didn't. I find it funny when the radio wristwatches bounce around screwing scenes up. I don't find it funny when the ex-wife walks onto the stage and makes someone's life more miserable.
Looking at more examples is pretty easy. I can't stand Napoleon Dynamite. Why? Because it's basically a bunch of characters going around being extremely uncomfortable and/or idiotic. Doesn't interest me in the slightest. The situational humor is almost nonexistent: instead of the characters serving to take us from situation to situation, the situations serve to take us from character to character.
It's not that I simply don't find it funny. I actually find it acutely uncomfortable.
Most character humor revolves around making a character miserable or worthless. Humiliation, pain, idiocy... I don't like it. Character humor which uses milder approaches is simply boring to me.
But it doesn't bore me any more, because now I'm looking at it from a "meta" perspective. Even though Pearls Before Swine occasionally tells the same joke that a situational comic might, they tell it with a radically different focus and sense of pacing. Here's an ideal example (link will stop working in a few weeks): link. This is the funniest one I could find.
I look at it and all I see are flaws, because I'm looking at it from a situational perspective. I have the instinctive urge to cut half the dialog, maybe even try for single-panel or nested-panel, like the Far Side. But at least I find the underlying concept funny.
Rewind or fast forward, the strip is surrounded on all sides by character humor. You can clearly see the kinds of humor I just don't get.
I think this is interesting.
Do you see what I'm talking about? What kinds of humor do you like?
Tuesday, November 06, 2007
How To Do Action (AKA Starships FTW)
I love action sequences. Like some people with their obsessifications, I'm an action sequence snob. It doesn't come up very much in my day to day life, for some reason.
While I love all kinds of action sequences, the kind that consistently catches my attention best is action between starships.
I understand that there are those of you who disagree with me. You like kung-fu, or classic Western shoot-outs, or armies fighting armies, or anime characters powering up for fifteen minutes. However, I like starships. And I will explain why by explaining some components of a good action sequence. I think you'll agree with me, although perhaps not on the starship thing.
I won't cover pacing or half a million other things, because nobody's paying me to write a book. So I'm sure you can think of a lot of things I won't cover.
Who Would Win in a Fight, Elvis vs All the Beatles?
If you're familiar with action sequences, you've probably heard a thousand variations on "X vs Y". It extremely popular among nerds to try to compare "power levels". We're pattern analysts at heart.
But aside from a moment's entertainment, that's really not our goal. We're not testing who is most powerful. Because a good action sequence isn't about power.
It's about how the participants react. The pattern produced by the interaction.
For example, the ever-popular Batman vs Superman debate. Superman, being a totally retarded power level, is basically invulnerable to everything Batman could conceivably do to him. But that's the point: in trying to match Batman up, they have to twist and contort what happens in the most delightful ways. The concepts and patterns of action we associate with Batman do a wicked little dance to do what needs to be done, stretching to their limits.
And we learn a whole lot more about what it means to be Batman.
The same basic idea holds true for every kind of action sequence, from clashing armies to Wile E Coyote chasing the road runner. The point of an action sequence is not to compare power levels. It is to see how the patterns interact.
A starship (or any large installation) is best at this. It has more complicated patterns to walk: not only does the starship have a pattern, but all the major crew members have patterns and they all interact in wild and wooly ways. Because all these patterns come packaged as a single combatant, you don't have to worry overmuch about painstakingly arranging for them all to be around at the same time. In fact, most of the time you painstakingly arrange for some of them to be MISSING, because they dominate the overall flow of the situation too much.
It's Only a Flesh Wound!
Most of the time, a combatant has pretty straight forward capabilities. Their pattern in an action sequence is not particularly complex. They have a gun, or a phaser array, or whatever, and they use it.
One way to stir things up is to give one or more combatant a handicap. This alters the situation, lets you see how they act in unusually trying circumstances.
This handicap is usually an injury, but it can also be a weapon malfunction or being drunk or whatever. The problem I have with injuries is that any injury significant enough to really screw up the hero is also significant enough to END him. Humans just don't regrow that well.
Spaceships can handle it, though. Spaceships don't feel pain, and they can always go to drydock to repair even massive injury. Spaceships are great that way. Also, they have the advantage of being strictly fictional, which means they can continue to survive even hideous injuries.
So it's easier to impare a starship rather than a human, at least if you want to use them again.
Over the Planet, Off the Asteroid, Nothing but Net
A vs B really isn't very interesting - it's just two patterns interacting in a straightforward way. What gets interesting is introducing other elements. Handicaps are one such element, but I actually prefer everything else.
For example, holding hostages, fog, racing across rocky terrain, fighting on top of a train... also, fighting hordes of faceless enemies falls into this category, too.
When it comes to visceral add-ons, people and space ships have it about tied. Both can race through rocky terrain, both can protect others or worry about hostages, both can jocky for position. Space ships tend to prefer having only a few complications that are incredibly important, while humans tend to suffer flurries of related complications. IE, a space ship will slowly fall towards a black hole, but the human equivalent would be leaping from rooftop to rooftop, clinging to trellises and so forth. Which is "better" is a matter of taste and pacing, but either can be used for either kind of combatant, it's just a matter of expectation.
Spaceships do have the advantage of having a bunch of crew (or not-so-crew), and the crew can interact in unusual ways. Also, a spaceship can suffer from a wide variety of weird side effects because it is strictly fictional and considered very complicated.
Winner Take All?
The last (or first?) element of an action sequence is the emotional bond. There's a lot of techniques you can use outside of combat to build an emotional bond, but when it comes to a good action sequence, I find that forming an emotional bond due to the action sequence is much more effective.
For example, Jackie Chan is usually very endearing outside of combat, but it's his zany use of scenery and his panicky-almost-pacifistic fighting style that makes him so likable as a combatant.
There's a lot of ways of making an audience emotionally connect to a combatant, but I find that they are almost all variations of a single theme: fighting in the face of long odds. Winning is optional.
Their demeanor while they do this is somewhat important, whether they are funny, determined, horrifyingly efficient, etc, etc. But when it comes to demeanor, the important part isn't what the demeanor is so much as the fact that it's unique.
Conan and Jackie Chan are both very effective at getting the audience to invest in them, to want to see more of them. They do it by being almost the only person in their world with their demeanor, occasionally with a single similar combatant for that "clone fight" everyone likes so much.
Starships don't have an attractive face most of the time, and their combat dynamic is often a bit fuzzy unless the writer goes out of his way to be transparent. So most audiences don't really think of them, emotionally, as living beings. Which is the only reason I can think of to not be in love with starship combat. :D
...
This article was silly, but I hope you liked it. Feel free to comment.
PS: As usual, blogger posted this at the time I first started writing it, NOT when I posted it. What's up with that? Time travel?
While I love all kinds of action sequences, the kind that consistently catches my attention best is action between starships.
I understand that there are those of you who disagree with me. You like kung-fu, or classic Western shoot-outs, or armies fighting armies, or anime characters powering up for fifteen minutes. However, I like starships. And I will explain why by explaining some components of a good action sequence. I think you'll agree with me, although perhaps not on the starship thing.
I won't cover pacing or half a million other things, because nobody's paying me to write a book. So I'm sure you can think of a lot of things I won't cover.
Who Would Win in a Fight, Elvis vs All the Beatles?
If you're familiar with action sequences, you've probably heard a thousand variations on "X vs Y". It extremely popular among nerds to try to compare "power levels". We're pattern analysts at heart.
But aside from a moment's entertainment, that's really not our goal. We're not testing who is most powerful. Because a good action sequence isn't about power.
It's about how the participants react. The pattern produced by the interaction.
For example, the ever-popular Batman vs Superman debate. Superman, being a totally retarded power level, is basically invulnerable to everything Batman could conceivably do to him. But that's the point: in trying to match Batman up, they have to twist and contort what happens in the most delightful ways. The concepts and patterns of action we associate with Batman do a wicked little dance to do what needs to be done, stretching to their limits.
And we learn a whole lot more about what it means to be Batman.
The same basic idea holds true for every kind of action sequence, from clashing armies to Wile E Coyote chasing the road runner. The point of an action sequence is not to compare power levels. It is to see how the patterns interact.
A starship (or any large installation) is best at this. It has more complicated patterns to walk: not only does the starship have a pattern, but all the major crew members have patterns and they all interact in wild and wooly ways. Because all these patterns come packaged as a single combatant, you don't have to worry overmuch about painstakingly arranging for them all to be around at the same time. In fact, most of the time you painstakingly arrange for some of them to be MISSING, because they dominate the overall flow of the situation too much.
It's Only a Flesh Wound!
Most of the time, a combatant has pretty straight forward capabilities. Their pattern in an action sequence is not particularly complex. They have a gun, or a phaser array, or whatever, and they use it.
One way to stir things up is to give one or more combatant a handicap. This alters the situation, lets you see how they act in unusually trying circumstances.
This handicap is usually an injury, but it can also be a weapon malfunction or being drunk or whatever. The problem I have with injuries is that any injury significant enough to really screw up the hero is also significant enough to END him. Humans just don't regrow that well.
Spaceships can handle it, though. Spaceships don't feel pain, and they can always go to drydock to repair even massive injury. Spaceships are great that way. Also, they have the advantage of being strictly fictional, which means they can continue to survive even hideous injuries.
So it's easier to impare a starship rather than a human, at least if you want to use them again.
Over the Planet, Off the Asteroid, Nothing but Net
A vs B really isn't very interesting - it's just two patterns interacting in a straightforward way. What gets interesting is introducing other elements. Handicaps are one such element, but I actually prefer everything else.
For example, holding hostages, fog, racing across rocky terrain, fighting on top of a train... also, fighting hordes of faceless enemies falls into this category, too.
When it comes to visceral add-ons, people and space ships have it about tied. Both can race through rocky terrain, both can protect others or worry about hostages, both can jocky for position. Space ships tend to prefer having only a few complications that are incredibly important, while humans tend to suffer flurries of related complications. IE, a space ship will slowly fall towards a black hole, but the human equivalent would be leaping from rooftop to rooftop, clinging to trellises and so forth. Which is "better" is a matter of taste and pacing, but either can be used for either kind of combatant, it's just a matter of expectation.
Spaceships do have the advantage of having a bunch of crew (or not-so-crew), and the crew can interact in unusual ways. Also, a spaceship can suffer from a wide variety of weird side effects because it is strictly fictional and considered very complicated.
Winner Take All?
The last (or first?) element of an action sequence is the emotional bond. There's a lot of techniques you can use outside of combat to build an emotional bond, but when it comes to a good action sequence, I find that forming an emotional bond due to the action sequence is much more effective.
For example, Jackie Chan is usually very endearing outside of combat, but it's his zany use of scenery and his panicky-almost-pacifistic fighting style that makes him so likable as a combatant.
There's a lot of ways of making an audience emotionally connect to a combatant, but I find that they are almost all variations of a single theme: fighting in the face of long odds. Winning is optional.
Their demeanor while they do this is somewhat important, whether they are funny, determined, horrifyingly efficient, etc, etc. But when it comes to demeanor, the important part isn't what the demeanor is so much as the fact that it's unique.
Conan and Jackie Chan are both very effective at getting the audience to invest in them, to want to see more of them. They do it by being almost the only person in their world with their demeanor, occasionally with a single similar combatant for that "clone fight" everyone likes so much.
Starships don't have an attractive face most of the time, and their combat dynamic is often a bit fuzzy unless the writer goes out of his way to be transparent. So most audiences don't really think of them, emotionally, as living beings. Which is the only reason I can think of to not be in love with starship combat. :D
...
This article was silly, but I hope you liked it. Feel free to comment.
PS: As usual, blogger posted this at the time I first started writing it, NOT when I posted it. What's up with that? Time travel?
Wednesday, August 29, 2007
The Idea of Rule Shifting
Most of the fun in a game comes from exploring the ways the rules and context interact.
In a platform game such as Megaman or Prince of Persia, the player explores how rules and context interact using simple rules and complex contexts. Ammo and health are unlikely to matter in ten minutes - you'll probably get boosted back to max between encounters.
Once the player starts getting used to the ways the rules interact with the contexts, these kinds of games will usually give the player an upgrade. Double-jump is a common example, as are immunity to spikes or a new special weapon. This changes the rules and lets the designer present all the contexts again, from a new perspective.
This is a tried and true method of making fun games.
Many games (such as Castlevania: Symphony of the Night and most Final Fantasies) add a "stepped rule change" as well. These games continually change the rules of the game in small doses by allowing you to change your statistics - upgrade your attack, your defense. This slightly changes the rules of how you interact with the context. Because of this, these games do the "big shifts" less often.
In a classic platformer, you're likely to get an upgrade that somewhat changes the nature of the game every 2-3 levels, usually after each boss fight. In games with a more statistical approach, you'll generally get these kinds of upgrades only two or three times over the course of the whole game. In Final Fantasy, you generally get a chocobo, then an airship, for example. Often you start with no magic, then get magic. These are changes that alter the nature of the game, but they happen very rarely compared to Megaman getting a new gun. This is because the small rule changes tide the player over.
But those stepped rule changes - usually just statistical changes - aren't enough to run the whole game, as many really boring RPGs attest. Similarly, if you hand out too many rule changes of the same basic type, they essentially become stepped rule changes. It's great to go from a wrench to a pistol, and fun to go from a pistol to a shotgun, but going from a machine gun to a fletchette machine gun to a plasma machine gun to an autocannon is not nearly so entrancing. It's basically just a statistical upgrade with a new mesh slapped in. As many boring FPS games can attest.
A good rule of thumb is this: if it changes the way the game is played, it's a real rule change. If it simply changes how easily the player deals with a specific kind of content, it's a statistical change.
But statistical changes shouldn't get the short shaft, because they are often linked to a second game! For example, getting better statistics in an RPG usually involves killing monsters for XP and gold. This puts the focus of the game on killing monsters, unlike a game with no such curve - in Megaman it is common to simply get past the monsters without bothering to engage them.
Similarly, having a long-term ammo supply means that there is a second game of preserving and hunting for ammo. Done correctly, this will even make a player choose a sub-optimal weapon simply to preserve ammo for his more optimal weapons. Guns such as the BFG can exist because they have very little ammo - if ammo for these weapons is easy to come across, the game breaks.
These secondary games follow the same basic idea: they are fun because their context and rules interact in interesting ways. The context of the primary game is basically the level, but the context of the secondary game is, to a large extent, the primary game!
In some ways this means it is difficult to "plan" the contexts. However, you can simply look at the salient elements of the level and the gross rules: if the level is big on sniping, obviously the secondary game is going to be cast in the context of a sniping level. If the level is about jumping, the secondary game's context is jumping.
This gets more complex if the context is largely player-generated. For example, in most Final Fantasy games you get to develop your characters in any way you want. This means that the secondary game (gaining new powers and statistics) is largely affected by the context of how the secondary game has been played so far! It stopped being a linear system and turned into a multi-dimensional glowing purple frog.
Anyway, that's definitely enough writing on this subject. :P
Comments? Questions? Monkeys?
In a platform game such as Megaman or Prince of Persia, the player explores how rules and context interact using simple rules and complex contexts. Ammo and health are unlikely to matter in ten minutes - you'll probably get boosted back to max between encounters.
Once the player starts getting used to the ways the rules interact with the contexts, these kinds of games will usually give the player an upgrade. Double-jump is a common example, as are immunity to spikes or a new special weapon. This changes the rules and lets the designer present all the contexts again, from a new perspective.
This is a tried and true method of making fun games.
Many games (such as Castlevania: Symphony of the Night and most Final Fantasies) add a "stepped rule change" as well. These games continually change the rules of the game in small doses by allowing you to change your statistics - upgrade your attack, your defense. This slightly changes the rules of how you interact with the context. Because of this, these games do the "big shifts" less often.
In a classic platformer, you're likely to get an upgrade that somewhat changes the nature of the game every 2-3 levels, usually after each boss fight. In games with a more statistical approach, you'll generally get these kinds of upgrades only two or three times over the course of the whole game. In Final Fantasy, you generally get a chocobo, then an airship, for example. Often you start with no magic, then get magic. These are changes that alter the nature of the game, but they happen very rarely compared to Megaman getting a new gun. This is because the small rule changes tide the player over.
But those stepped rule changes - usually just statistical changes - aren't enough to run the whole game, as many really boring RPGs attest. Similarly, if you hand out too many rule changes of the same basic type, they essentially become stepped rule changes. It's great to go from a wrench to a pistol, and fun to go from a pistol to a shotgun, but going from a machine gun to a fletchette machine gun to a plasma machine gun to an autocannon is not nearly so entrancing. It's basically just a statistical upgrade with a new mesh slapped in. As many boring FPS games can attest.
A good rule of thumb is this: if it changes the way the game is played, it's a real rule change. If it simply changes how easily the player deals with a specific kind of content, it's a statistical change.
But statistical changes shouldn't get the short shaft, because they are often linked to a second game! For example, getting better statistics in an RPG usually involves killing monsters for XP and gold. This puts the focus of the game on killing monsters, unlike a game with no such curve - in Megaman it is common to simply get past the monsters without bothering to engage them.
Similarly, having a long-term ammo supply means that there is a second game of preserving and hunting for ammo. Done correctly, this will even make a player choose a sub-optimal weapon simply to preserve ammo for his more optimal weapons. Guns such as the BFG can exist because they have very little ammo - if ammo for these weapons is easy to come across, the game breaks.
These secondary games follow the same basic idea: they are fun because their context and rules interact in interesting ways. The context of the primary game is basically the level, but the context of the secondary game is, to a large extent, the primary game!
In some ways this means it is difficult to "plan" the contexts. However, you can simply look at the salient elements of the level and the gross rules: if the level is big on sniping, obviously the secondary game is going to be cast in the context of a sniping level. If the level is about jumping, the secondary game's context is jumping.
This gets more complex if the context is largely player-generated. For example, in most Final Fantasy games you get to develop your characters in any way you want. This means that the secondary game (gaining new powers and statistics) is largely affected by the context of how the secondary game has been played so far! It stopped being a linear system and turned into a multi-dimensional glowing purple frog.
Anyway, that's definitely enough writing on this subject. :P
Comments? Questions? Monkeys?
Thursday, August 23, 2007
New Arcades
Ah, video arcades.
Video arcades work on a very specific principle: connectivity. In an arcade, you can play video games. You can even play video games with or against a small number of people (generally the games are either two or four player). That's connectivity, sure. But the real connectivity swirls around that.
There's asynchronous play - a high score table is the obvious example. You play with people (against people) without them even being there. The "line" is another example of connectivity: a dozen people crowded around the Street Fighter cabinet, lining up to fight the winner. While not playing - it happens a lot either because you're out of cash, not feeling that interested, or in a line - socializing is common. An arcade works on the principle of connecting you to other people while giving you an excuse: video games.
In America, the arcade went out of style in the eighties with the advent of home systems. The idea was that your children could come home and play games with their friends or family, instead of running off to the arcade to spend money with strangers far away from mommy's watchful eye. The crash of the home video game caused a revival in arcades for tolerably obvious reasons. Then the arcades crashed again as consoles revived...
In Japan, arcades remain popular even today, presumably because Japanese culture isn't really conducive to chummy family life. Legend has it that Space Invaders was so popular it caused a shortage of 100 yen coins, and even today weird new Japan-only arcade games are developed basically every year.
The arcade never died even in places where it seemed to. It simply mutated. There is always going to be a need for a place to connect while occasionally playing video games. In many places, the internet cafe has taken the spot that the arcade used to inhabit. Fundamentally, they're the same beast, except that the internet cafe uses computers that can play many games (and serve many purposes) instead of getting stuck with aging arcade cabinets. They also have a different atmosphere, of course.
Another example you might not guess is massively multiplayer games such as WoW. Fundamentally, these are games which use the exact same basic principles as arcades. You (and maybe a small group of friends) play games, often to compete asynchronously with others for status (rare equipment, level, rank...)
And, ask anyone, a MMOG is all about waiting. You'd think that a game you're running on your computer would let you play all the time, but that's not the case: you wait for travel, for spawns, for friends, for bids, for hundreds of things.
I bet if you compare play-to-wait times, you'll find that an MMOG has almost the exact same ratio as a popular arcade. And almost the same player reactions: some players will socialize, others will play secondary games, others will watch...
So, yes, fundamentally a MMOG is simply an arcade.
Can you think of anything else?
How about new cell phones?
Yeah, cell phones are fundamentally about chatting with your friends - frequently asynchronously using texting. But chances are, if you are the sort of person who texts, you also play with your phone. Not just games: music, photos, web surfing, all of these serve the same basic purpose as games, and are "asynchronous" in that you can share the results with people after you finish, rather than having to have them around while you do it. "Hey, look at this cool pic..."
Cell phones are evolving into arcades. Or, at least, a weird partial dispersed arcade...
I don't think it'll be long before phones evolve to fill this niche more perfectly. I can't predict exactly how this will happen, but I think it'll largely revolve around easier interfaces. Maybe cell phones that have touchscreens a'la the DS?
Can you think of anything else that is an arcade? Or maybe you have some thoughts on the future of cell phones?
Video arcades work on a very specific principle: connectivity. In an arcade, you can play video games. You can even play video games with or against a small number of people (generally the games are either two or four player). That's connectivity, sure. But the real connectivity swirls around that.
There's asynchronous play - a high score table is the obvious example. You play with people (against people) without them even being there. The "line" is another example of connectivity: a dozen people crowded around the Street Fighter cabinet, lining up to fight the winner. While not playing - it happens a lot either because you're out of cash, not feeling that interested, or in a line - socializing is common. An arcade works on the principle of connecting you to other people while giving you an excuse: video games.
In America, the arcade went out of style in the eighties with the advent of home systems. The idea was that your children could come home and play games with their friends or family, instead of running off to the arcade to spend money with strangers far away from mommy's watchful eye. The crash of the home video game caused a revival in arcades for tolerably obvious reasons. Then the arcades crashed again as consoles revived...
In Japan, arcades remain popular even today, presumably because Japanese culture isn't really conducive to chummy family life. Legend has it that Space Invaders was so popular it caused a shortage of 100 yen coins, and even today weird new Japan-only arcade games are developed basically every year.
The arcade never died even in places where it seemed to. It simply mutated. There is always going to be a need for a place to connect while occasionally playing video games. In many places, the internet cafe has taken the spot that the arcade used to inhabit. Fundamentally, they're the same beast, except that the internet cafe uses computers that can play many games (and serve many purposes) instead of getting stuck with aging arcade cabinets. They also have a different atmosphere, of course.
Another example you might not guess is massively multiplayer games such as WoW. Fundamentally, these are games which use the exact same basic principles as arcades. You (and maybe a small group of friends) play games, often to compete asynchronously with others for status (rare equipment, level, rank...)
And, ask anyone, a MMOG is all about waiting. You'd think that a game you're running on your computer would let you play all the time, but that's not the case: you wait for travel, for spawns, for friends, for bids, for hundreds of things.
I bet if you compare play-to-wait times, you'll find that an MMOG has almost the exact same ratio as a popular arcade. And almost the same player reactions: some players will socialize, others will play secondary games, others will watch...
So, yes, fundamentally a MMOG is simply an arcade.
Can you think of anything else?
How about new cell phones?
Yeah, cell phones are fundamentally about chatting with your friends - frequently asynchronously using texting. But chances are, if you are the sort of person who texts, you also play with your phone. Not just games: music, photos, web surfing, all of these serve the same basic purpose as games, and are "asynchronous" in that you can share the results with people after you finish, rather than having to have them around while you do it. "Hey, look at this cool pic..."
Cell phones are evolving into arcades. Or, at least, a weird partial dispersed arcade...
I don't think it'll be long before phones evolve to fill this niche more perfectly. I can't predict exactly how this will happen, but I think it'll largely revolve around easier interfaces. Maybe cell phones that have touchscreens a'la the DS?
Can you think of anything else that is an arcade? Or maybe you have some thoughts on the future of cell phones?
Monday, May 07, 2007
Crafting Constraints
Today I attended the Harvard Interactive Media Group's panel. It was excellent, and this is the first such meeting I have found better than "painful", so this is a ten from a guy who gives out a lot of ones and twos. I have a lot to think about: it was rich in ideas.
But one of the things I want to talk about that I don't have to do a lot of research on first is constraints.
This is going to be painfully ivory tower.
It's fairly well known that creativity flourishes under constraints. Tell someone they can write five pages on anything, they're likely to be stymied. Tell them to write five pages on cloning, or write five pages that use the first twenty words of the dictionary, and they have a ball. People that work well without constraints typically work well because they are very good at assigning themselves constraints. "Write five pages about anything? Well, I have strong feelings about cloning... and wouldn't it be cool to use the first twenty words of the dictionary?"
In a very real sense, expression is mostly about applying constraints. If you squint, you can see that the real purpose of a piece of art is to offer up a set of constraints to the viewer, such that they are impelled to think in a certain way - think, feel, and witness within specific constraints. Well-chosen constraints will allow the viewer to have a rich but directed experience.
This experience varies across culture because how constraints interact in our minds is guided by experience, which... um... varies across culture. So in one culture a specific set of constraints might produce a very rich experience, while in another it might not resonate at all. Even internally to a culture: romance movies don't resonate well with me because the constraints it applies do not present me with interesting challenges and opportunities to think about. "Choppertunities"... glaarrgh... I used the word...
Movies simply offer constraints that change over time. They not only offer a constraint space that makes people think in specific ways, but also change the constraints to make them think in different ways at different times. Also, the changing constraints form a constraint all their own, which might be thought of as the genre. The constraints governing the changing of constraints are, in fact, well-defined cultural structures - defined over decades of symbiosis with a given set of viewers.
Games (interactive media in general) offer constraints that not only change over time, but also interactively create new constraints. How your spaceship can move interacts with how you choose to move it, and this creates a new set of constraints on how your spaceship can move (IE, dodging into an open area gives you "looser" constraints). Similarly, in an RPG, how you advance your character determines your skill set. While the progression is constrained in specific ways, the way you move within those constraints changes the constraints of how you can interact with the game. Whether to learn a fireball or heavy armor: it literally forms the constraints of the game.
So, what do we get when we think of games as interactive constraint generators?
Moreover, what do we get when we think of how we can get more user interactivity/content by either creating constraints to cause it... or creating constraints as a result of it? Friends lists are the obvious example.
Thoughts? Lack of thoughts?
But one of the things I want to talk about that I don't have to do a lot of research on first is constraints.
This is going to be painfully ivory tower.
It's fairly well known that creativity flourishes under constraints. Tell someone they can write five pages on anything, they're likely to be stymied. Tell them to write five pages on cloning, or write five pages that use the first twenty words of the dictionary, and they have a ball. People that work well without constraints typically work well because they are very good at assigning themselves constraints. "Write five pages about anything? Well, I have strong feelings about cloning... and wouldn't it be cool to use the first twenty words of the dictionary?"
In a very real sense, expression is mostly about applying constraints. If you squint, you can see that the real purpose of a piece of art is to offer up a set of constraints to the viewer, such that they are impelled to think in a certain way - think, feel, and witness within specific constraints. Well-chosen constraints will allow the viewer to have a rich but directed experience.
This experience varies across culture because how constraints interact in our minds is guided by experience, which... um... varies across culture. So in one culture a specific set of constraints might produce a very rich experience, while in another it might not resonate at all. Even internally to a culture: romance movies don't resonate well with me because the constraints it applies do not present me with interesting challenges and opportunities to think about. "Choppertunities"... glaarrgh... I used the word...
Movies simply offer constraints that change over time. They not only offer a constraint space that makes people think in specific ways, but also change the constraints to make them think in different ways at different times. Also, the changing constraints form a constraint all their own, which might be thought of as the genre. The constraints governing the changing of constraints are, in fact, well-defined cultural structures - defined over decades of symbiosis with a given set of viewers.
Games (interactive media in general) offer constraints that not only change over time, but also interactively create new constraints. How your spaceship can move interacts with how you choose to move it, and this creates a new set of constraints on how your spaceship can move (IE, dodging into an open area gives you "looser" constraints). Similarly, in an RPG, how you advance your character determines your skill set. While the progression is constrained in specific ways, the way you move within those constraints changes the constraints of how you can interact with the game. Whether to learn a fireball or heavy armor: it literally forms the constraints of the game.
So, what do we get when we think of games as interactive constraint generators?
Moreover, what do we get when we think of how we can get more user interactivity/content by either creating constraints to cause it... or creating constraints as a result of it? Friends lists are the obvious example.
Thoughts? Lack of thoughts?
Saturday, April 07, 2007
Simulating Characters
My computer hasn't been behaving. In the process of writing my new Big Theory, I've lost the document four times. I'm not kidding.
It's okay, though - each time I write it, the thing gets shorter. The first time, it was more than twenty pages long (and unfinished). Now I've got it down to three. Of course, a lot of content was shaved off - the original essay included a scathing review of some misleading experiments, a section about simulating interplayer complexity, and a full game doc. Those will have to come some other time, I suppose.
Anyhow, I think this is an important theory, so I want you to read it and tell me what you think:
Improving character AI.
It's okay, though - each time I write it, the thing gets shorter. The first time, it was more than twenty pages long (and unfinished). Now I've got it down to three. Of course, a lot of content was shaved off - the original essay included a scathing review of some misleading experiments, a section about simulating interplayer complexity, and a full game doc. Those will have to come some other time, I suppose.
Anyhow, I think this is an important theory, so I want you to read it and tell me what you think:
Improving character AI.
Wednesday, January 17, 2007
Ferns on Glass
This is even more off topic than last post. :P
This morning, I noticed that wet windows get a peculiar ice pattern when it's cold enough to freeze them. This pattern looks exactly like fern leaves. The window literally looks like someone painstakingly painted a fern on the glass, vein by vein.
Curious, I melted the ice, re-wet the glass, and watched it freeze.
As far as I can tell, the principle is extremely simple. The reason it looks like ferns is the combination of three factors. First: it's colder at the bottom of the pane than the top, so the water at the bottom freezes first whereas the warm, moist air from the shower keeps the top warm for some minutes, until it cools or radiates away.
Second: small amounts of water freeze faster than large amounts of water (duh).
Third: water trickles down water faster/easier than it trickles down ice.
The combination of these rules means that the points on the glass which are only thinly coated rapidly freeze, but wherever there is a slightly larger amount of water, it takes a bit longer. The water above tries to trickle down, but only really trickles down at the areas where it is still liquid. The more liquid trickling down, the "larger" the "vein" is when it finally freezes.
Water can only travel so far before it freezes, as a function of the size of the vein it is traveling down. This means that everywhere on the window, there are veins. Because of the math behind the forming of veins, this results in main veins which radiate smaller veins, which radiate smaller veins, etc.
The main veins (the "spines" of the "leaves") have graceful curvatures that slowly slope from being within ten degrees of vertical to being around forty-five degrees or sometimes more. I think this is because water flows down the window easier than it flows up. (Although, as far as I can tell, it must either flow up to veins above it or somehow form a vein that looks as though that is what happened...) So, essentially, as the air cools from bottom to top, the freezing process becomes more imminent for water on the same vertical level. Warmer water from above slides down the spine without freezing, but the colder water from a local level freezes, forming a channel for a spine which is more horizontal than it was. I think it's a smooth curve because of the steady flow of water: this isn't a flash freeze, or it would probably be considerably more jagged and straight, like dry window or very low-temperature frost.
This tendency to flow down also means that there is less water at the top of the window when it finally does freeze. This means a more delicate set of veins - the "tip" of the leaf.
It really does look so much like a cluster of leaves.
Anyhow, whatever the full math behind it is, it is an interesting and iterative process. It's not like watching a printer print out leaves: the start is rough and squiggly, it's only as time progresses that it refines. Large patches of what look like empty glass will develop fronds. It's very impressive.
Also, the heat and moisture totally change the type of leaf you get. While the leaf structure was a wide-frond fern when I got there, after my melting and re-icing it was a narrow-frond fern with lots more leaves.
The end result is surprisingly organic and beautiful, something that wouldn't be out of place hung on someone's wall. The rules are fairly simple - I bet they could even be simulated with relative ease.
Now, if three simple rules can create something so complex and beautiful...
Can you make a game that uses three simple rules to make something that complex and beautiful?
This morning, I noticed that wet windows get a peculiar ice pattern when it's cold enough to freeze them. This pattern looks exactly like fern leaves. The window literally looks like someone painstakingly painted a fern on the glass, vein by vein.
Curious, I melted the ice, re-wet the glass, and watched it freeze.
As far as I can tell, the principle is extremely simple. The reason it looks like ferns is the combination of three factors. First: it's colder at the bottom of the pane than the top, so the water at the bottom freezes first whereas the warm, moist air from the shower keeps the top warm for some minutes, until it cools or radiates away.
Second: small amounts of water freeze faster than large amounts of water (duh).
Third: water trickles down water faster/easier than it trickles down ice.
The combination of these rules means that the points on the glass which are only thinly coated rapidly freeze, but wherever there is a slightly larger amount of water, it takes a bit longer. The water above tries to trickle down, but only really trickles down at the areas where it is still liquid. The more liquid trickling down, the "larger" the "vein" is when it finally freezes.
Water can only travel so far before it freezes, as a function of the size of the vein it is traveling down. This means that everywhere on the window, there are veins. Because of the math behind the forming of veins, this results in main veins which radiate smaller veins, which radiate smaller veins, etc.
The main veins (the "spines" of the "leaves") have graceful curvatures that slowly slope from being within ten degrees of vertical to being around forty-five degrees or sometimes more. I think this is because water flows down the window easier than it flows up. (Although, as far as I can tell, it must either flow up to veins above it or somehow form a vein that looks as though that is what happened...) So, essentially, as the air cools from bottom to top, the freezing process becomes more imminent for water on the same vertical level. Warmer water from above slides down the spine without freezing, but the colder water from a local level freezes, forming a channel for a spine which is more horizontal than it was. I think it's a smooth curve because of the steady flow of water: this isn't a flash freeze, or it would probably be considerably more jagged and straight, like dry window or very low-temperature frost.
This tendency to flow down also means that there is less water at the top of the window when it finally does freeze. This means a more delicate set of veins - the "tip" of the leaf.
It really does look so much like a cluster of leaves.
Anyhow, whatever the full math behind it is, it is an interesting and iterative process. It's not like watching a printer print out leaves: the start is rough and squiggly, it's only as time progresses that it refines. Large patches of what look like empty glass will develop fronds. It's very impressive.
Also, the heat and moisture totally change the type of leaf you get. While the leaf structure was a wide-frond fern when I got there, after my melting and re-icing it was a narrow-frond fern with lots more leaves.
The end result is surprisingly organic and beautiful, something that wouldn't be out of place hung on someone's wall. The rules are fairly simple - I bet they could even be simulated with relative ease.
Now, if three simple rules can create something so complex and beautiful...
Can you make a game that uses three simple rules to make something that complex and beautiful?
Tuesday, October 24, 2006
What Aren't Game Mechanics?
Lost Garden made a long post on game mechanics. I will now proceed to disagree with it. Not because it's wrong, just because it's a bit cockeyed.
First, he defines feedback loops in terms of the user experience. There's nothing fundamentally wrong with viewing everything from the user's point of view, but I suggest viewing the user as part of the software. In which case, a feedback loop's definitions change to include the way that the software changes the situation in a way which changes the software's situation.
For example, if the user walks on to that big mountain, the program doesn't just change what the user sees. The program makes thousands of internal adjustments - it feeds on itself, being directed by the user, and the user just gets to see hints. This allows the program to have an "internal reality" which the player sees and deciphers. It's not just "what the player sees" that matters.
This might seem like a small difference, but it's really a critical one. His stated view underestimates the independence and power of the game. This is somewhat harmful for one-player designs, but crippling for multiplayer and, FSM forbid, massively multiplayer games. These kinds of games don't simply "provide feedback to the player". They provide a window into which the players try to make sense of the feedback algorithms the game runs.
The rest of his essay falls into the same POV. While he obviously knows that games are complex and somewhat independent entities, he approaches everything from the angle of what the player sees, does, etc.
This is a flawed approach for one reason which I would think obvious. The "nested feedback loop" idea is powerful because the player spends a lot of time trying to master the various feedback loops and deal with the permutating situations. However, thinking about everything in terms of teasing and pleasing the player can easily lead you to create a "shallow" feedback system which provides immediate fun and gratification, but doesn't offer any of the long-lasting play.
This is a very common mistake, and if there was one mistake I could keep designers from making, I think that would be it. It's very common, even in AAA games, to add more flavor, more minigames, more doodads... but each of these things adds almost nothing to the interconnected complexity of the game, and they rarely build off the same bases as the other kinds of play.
Essentially, if you think in terms of what pleases the player most, you're likely to feed the player "junk food" play. It's the shiniest, tastiest kind, in that initial moment.
But if you think of the player as part of the game system - a knob torquing feedback loops - you can create games which are suitably deep. Deep games provide just as much fun, for longer, for cheaper. Obviously, you still have to the think of the player. But now you think of the player as part of a whole, rather than the whole that the game is part of. And you design the game to run through all the variations and paces at a fun rate. Call it "game-centric games", if you like.
I know it sounds like I'm connecting two separate things. "Good rule design and how you view the player... they don't seem connected!"
But they are. An artist can't paint very well if he views his art as something which serves the paper. A doctor can't doctor very well if he views his patient's comfort higher than their health.
Take the long-term view: your players are pieces of your game, and your game is part of them. While in play, they are one entity, and you have to give it a nice workout.
First, he defines feedback loops in terms of the user experience. There's nothing fundamentally wrong with viewing everything from the user's point of view, but I suggest viewing the user as part of the software. In which case, a feedback loop's definitions change to include the way that the software changes the situation in a way which changes the software's situation.
For example, if the user walks on to that big mountain, the program doesn't just change what the user sees. The program makes thousands of internal adjustments - it feeds on itself, being directed by the user, and the user just gets to see hints. This allows the program to have an "internal reality" which the player sees and deciphers. It's not just "what the player sees" that matters.
This might seem like a small difference, but it's really a critical one. His stated view underestimates the independence and power of the game. This is somewhat harmful for one-player designs, but crippling for multiplayer and, FSM forbid, massively multiplayer games. These kinds of games don't simply "provide feedback to the player". They provide a window into which the players try to make sense of the feedback algorithms the game runs.
The rest of his essay falls into the same POV. While he obviously knows that games are complex and somewhat independent entities, he approaches everything from the angle of what the player sees, does, etc.
This is a flawed approach for one reason which I would think obvious. The "nested feedback loop" idea is powerful because the player spends a lot of time trying to master the various feedback loops and deal with the permutating situations. However, thinking about everything in terms of teasing and pleasing the player can easily lead you to create a "shallow" feedback system which provides immediate fun and gratification, but doesn't offer any of the long-lasting play.
This is a very common mistake, and if there was one mistake I could keep designers from making, I think that would be it. It's very common, even in AAA games, to add more flavor, more minigames, more doodads... but each of these things adds almost nothing to the interconnected complexity of the game, and they rarely build off the same bases as the other kinds of play.
Essentially, if you think in terms of what pleases the player most, you're likely to feed the player "junk food" play. It's the shiniest, tastiest kind, in that initial moment.
But if you think of the player as part of the game system - a knob torquing feedback loops - you can create games which are suitably deep. Deep games provide just as much fun, for longer, for cheaper. Obviously, you still have to the think of the player. But now you think of the player as part of a whole, rather than the whole that the game is part of. And you design the game to run through all the variations and paces at a fun rate. Call it "game-centric games", if you like.
I know it sounds like I'm connecting two separate things. "Good rule design and how you view the player... they don't seem connected!"
But they are. An artist can't paint very well if he views his art as something which serves the paper. A doctor can't doctor very well if he views his patient's comfort higher than their health.
Take the long-term view: your players are pieces of your game, and your game is part of them. While in play, they are one entity, and you have to give it a nice workout.
Wednesday, October 18, 2006
Code Cancer
Programs and living things are very similar.
One of the ways in which they are similar is that every health problem a person (or dog, or iguana) can have can be seen in programs. Pneumonia, infection, alzheimers, even cancer.
It's a big business treating humans (and animals) to cure their health problems. But there is no similar business for programs.
Say your fledgling program comes down with the digital equivalent of whooping cough (chronic, catastrophic data seizures corrupting the output). It's more efficient for the parent (that would be you) to treat the program yourself. If you fail, it's simply cheaper to start over than to bring in a "doctor".
But it isn't too terribly long before your ten-pound infant becomes a two-hundred-pound college athlete. Now it's not so young, with twenty years of time invested in it. (Amusingly, data years are very similar to dog years...)
Even though it would now be bad in every way to restart from scratch, we've gotten so into the "do-it-ourself" mentality that we still try to treat these illnesses ourselves. But it no longer makes sense, because a programmer is almost never a very good doctor. We patch, we route around, we hack.
Our college athlete comes down with pneumonia, we program them an iron lung to carry around. Sure, he's still alive and kicking, but he isn't going to be winning any championships any more.
Bring him to a doctor? There's a cure. Your boy can be up and running again with no side effects.
That birth defect he was "born" with? Fixable with some invasive surgery. Heart failure? The doctor can put in a new heart, first checking for compatibility and then giving a prescription for anti-rejection drugs. Cancer? The doctor might even be able to do something with that, cutting out the damaged data and starting a rigorous series of low-level rewrites.
As programs get older, they get more prone to ill health. This is made a hundred times worse by the "parent"'s clumsy fixes for early health problems. These days, a program's life expectancy is only forty or fifty (dog) years, with the last fifteen or twenty of them spent in a mindblowing agony of total systemic collapse.
Data "nurses" stand by, to restart the failing heart as it falls silent for the fifteenth time today. They spoon-feed the program the required data, and when it collapses too far even for that, they arrange an IV. It's a fine show of dedication and fear of change, but it could have been prevented if only they had had the digital equivalent of emergency rooms and annual checkups.
This horrifying mistreatment must end! Seeing programs wheezing and tumorous brings me great pain, and using them leaves me feeling sickly myself. Even open-source programs grow frail before their time, and a monolithic beast like Windows? Forget it.
What they need is digital doctors.
"Well, time to do Firefox's yearly inspection. See this sloppy RAM footprint? Sign that it's not getting enough fiber."
"Errrr... Firefox isn't getting enough fiber?"
"Well, digital fiber. It's getting congested - it's not really 'passing' memory like it should. Effectively, it has constipation. Digital constipation."
"Okaaaaay... and you would fix this how, exactly?"
Heh...
One of the ways in which they are similar is that every health problem a person (or dog, or iguana) can have can be seen in programs. Pneumonia, infection, alzheimers, even cancer.
It's a big business treating humans (and animals) to cure their health problems. But there is no similar business for programs.
Say your fledgling program comes down with the digital equivalent of whooping cough (chronic, catastrophic data seizures corrupting the output). It's more efficient for the parent (that would be you) to treat the program yourself. If you fail, it's simply cheaper to start over than to bring in a "doctor".
But it isn't too terribly long before your ten-pound infant becomes a two-hundred-pound college athlete. Now it's not so young, with twenty years of time invested in it. (Amusingly, data years are very similar to dog years...)
Even though it would now be bad in every way to restart from scratch, we've gotten so into the "do-it-ourself" mentality that we still try to treat these illnesses ourselves. But it no longer makes sense, because a programmer is almost never a very good doctor. We patch, we route around, we hack.
Our college athlete comes down with pneumonia, we program them an iron lung to carry around. Sure, he's still alive and kicking, but he isn't going to be winning any championships any more.
Bring him to a doctor? There's a cure. Your boy can be up and running again with no side effects.
That birth defect he was "born" with? Fixable with some invasive surgery. Heart failure? The doctor can put in a new heart, first checking for compatibility and then giving a prescription for anti-rejection drugs. Cancer? The doctor might even be able to do something with that, cutting out the damaged data and starting a rigorous series of low-level rewrites.
As programs get older, they get more prone to ill health. This is made a hundred times worse by the "parent"'s clumsy fixes for early health problems. These days, a program's life expectancy is only forty or fifty (dog) years, with the last fifteen or twenty of them spent in a mindblowing agony of total systemic collapse.
Data "nurses" stand by, to restart the failing heart as it falls silent for the fifteenth time today. They spoon-feed the program the required data, and when it collapses too far even for that, they arrange an IV. It's a fine show of dedication and fear of change, but it could have been prevented if only they had had the digital equivalent of emergency rooms and annual checkups.
This horrifying mistreatment must end! Seeing programs wheezing and tumorous brings me great pain, and using them leaves me feeling sickly myself. Even open-source programs grow frail before their time, and a monolithic beast like Windows? Forget it.
What they need is digital doctors.
"Well, time to do Firefox's yearly inspection. See this sloppy RAM footprint? Sign that it's not getting enough fiber."
"Errrr... Firefox isn't getting enough fiber?"
"Well, digital fiber. It's getting congested - it's not really 'passing' memory like it should. Effectively, it has constipation. Digital constipation."
"Okaaaaay... and you would fix this how, exactly?"
Heh...
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