Tuesday, July 19

On Linearity

Cousin, it's a sandbox, and I say we go bowling.
    Oh gods, my computer.  It died.  Died so dead.  To death.  It's gone, I don't know what to do.  Everything, so dead.  Oh well, find a new way, I suppose.  A different way.  Wait a minute, different approaches?  That sounds like a clever intro to Linearity!
But seriously, it's dead.
    Linearity is a product of games really not possessing the technological freedom to allow players complex, multi-pathed experiences.  And though those were attempted, they rarely worked as well as they would come the days of full 3D gaming and the advents of min-maps and fast-travels systems, all of which made the necessarily unbearable traveling bearable.  But even come the huge worlds that stretch for countries with nary a loading screen in sight, the concept of nonlinearity is nowhere near universal.  Certainly, we must agree that parts of the importance and uniqueness of games is the ability for the participating audience to make choices, why not choices as simple as "I want to go here"?
    Well, because that's hard.  Really, that's what it comes down to.  Take a look at a movie, a book, an album.  In general, with extremely few exceptions, these are linear media.  They are meant to be experienced from front to back, the same way, every time.  Games, however, will almost never be played the same way by two people, and why should they?  Games are experiences, and experiences will always reflect the nature of those involved and the choices they make.  So what is it about nonlinearity?  Simply, writing a story to observe is one thing, but writing a story in which someone participates is something else altogether, and the art has not truly been yet mastered.  Are there good examples of linear storytelling in games?  Bioshock, Prince of Persia: Sands of Time, Zeno Clash, No More Heroes, and so on and so forth.
    But to understand the proper method and formula, let's look at a game with excellent gameplay that combines the linear and nonlinear.  Deus Ex, one of the all-time super-duper famous games people love to think about, with a sequal coming soon, merges together the different types of gameplay beautifully.  The game boasts a diverse skill system, not overly complex, but intuitive and navigatable enough to allow players to tackle the game's obstacles in a style that suited them.  Whether you prefer silent and stealthy, charismatic and charming, or a blazing-guns hoedown, the game allows you your fun.  It doesn't force a gameply style on you, but designs to allow for multiple solutions in every situation.  This is most certainly a valid and rewarding way to go about it.  It comes up when designing encounters for something like D&D, or any tabletop.  If you say to yourself "The player(s) must fight here," you've limited them in their experiences, and that's something we must always strive to avoid.  To prepare for all your players is a difficult and noble goal.  As a Dungeon Master, or as a Game Designer (Same thing in many ways, let's not pretend), your objectives include the enjoyment of your players.  To keep them happy, try to let them play the way they want.  They can affect the story, the game.  After all, they are a crucial part.
The match only burns from one end.
    Speaking of affecting the story, try to think of the number of games where you could decide the outcome of the story?  How did you decide the outcome?  If you look at one of the more prominent examples of players affecting the story, Fable, you will find, none too kindly, that your actions are not really the driving force behind the story's changes.  Rather, in Fable the choices you make are much closer to a choose-your own adventure book than the medium it pretends to lead the way for.  Affecting the story has to be made of real descisions, has to have a driving force behind it.  In games like Fable, every question becomes not "What is your morality?" or even something like "What is a man?" but instead "Would you like to be a dick?"  This is not a question normal people answer Yes to.  The "evil" options should appeal more to the weak-willed, be simpler and more of a personal interest than representing a clear(ish) greater good.  Infamous does this in a far too blatant way, but it's clear enough that it doesn't need much explaining.  Cole (the protagonist) is given the choice of saving one of two groups of people, and he must do it within a time limit.  Here are the two groups, are you wearing earplugs?  Your brain may melt.  One group is composed of six doctors, who are crucially needed in this now-post apocalypse, and the other group is: your girlfriend.  You can see which appeals to the inner Saint and which to the sinner.  But it is a good example: low effort, personal commitment versus high effort, personal conscience.  It's a question that causes many of us to force ourselves out of bed each day.
    You want to be able to let the player affect the story, but how do you do this?  Asking them how they wish to proceed is nice in that the player would always know what decisions they're making, but I find it's sometimes better to keep the player on their toes: let their gameplay choice help tell the story.  This goes back in part to a previous article (On Misinformation), but when I play certain games, I really don't know what the consequences of my actions will be, and that causes me to consider them much more.  Anyway, yes, gameplay.  Persona 4, for instance, does not ask "Do to understand this person?"  Instead, it sees how you react and has the characters react accordingly, yes with tangled dialogue trees and little else, but it asks you to care about the characters and make your own judgements based on what you know, and not on instructions.  Games like the most recent Fallout installments allow for more varied approaches that change the gameplay as well.  The difference between guns-blazing, diplomacy, and sneaky run-around is significant, and allows you to be the person you want to be, if not always successfully.  That is the basic answer, though.  Think about the mechanics your game has in place and how the player will, or could, or will want to deal with them.  See how you can manipulate the mechanics to incorporate those choices, and if you do it right, the story will follow.
    Well, now let's look at something less complex: Linearity in Level design.  The protagonist begins at point A.  You need them to be at point B.  You, the designer, are left with a conundrum.  How do you get the player to go to point B?  It's a very real problem.  Designers have implemented lots of methods of forcing you to get through their levels.  Fortunately for them, they are aided strongly by natural human curiosity and the original cause of playing video games to complete them.  Now, we need rely on this less so, since deisgners are able to give the player more complex reasons for getting to point B.  Try writing your level out as a story.  Try writing the player's journey from point A to B.  If at any point you say something like "Then they walk here," you will make a lot of people very upset.  Walking, by itself, is not gameplay.  Walking through a thin hallway in the basement of an abandoned house in serious need of construction as psychotic laughter plays quietly through the echoing stillness however, that is.  Now, things needn't be so extreme, but you get the idea.  Even when the player is forced to walk, make them experience that walking, involve them in walking, make sure they know that they're walking, and they are not bored by it in the least.
  Alright, so I've written this on a friend's computer in notepad, so forgive me if it's significantly shorter or longer than usual, I use a word count to keep me in check.  We'll see what I've done here, and when I can finally get another computer for myself.
Thanks for reading.

Tuesday, July 5

On the First Person

The First Person Shooter has been riding high for many years, to the point where many people are wondering where and when the seemingly endless stream of rip-offs and clones of popular shooter will end.  Answer: when something better than the Unreal Engine exists for another genre.  Seriously, if you’re making a shooter, Unreal is the way to go.  Anyway, I’m not here to speak about that, I want to talk about what is important about the first person perspective as a narrative tool.
If you want to find out why the first person shooter genre originated in the United States, watch this.
Right, on to narrative significance.
This article powered by Unreal.
The first person is how you and I see the world, it’s the perspective of a real person.  A little tunnel-visiony, but we don’t have constant surround-TV yet.  To have a game in first-person implies less that the player is assuming the role of an established hero, more that they are creating themselves within the game.  Naturally, there are some extremely detailed character creation systems, which allow you to create yourself as deep into the uncanny valley as you want to be.  But when you play a game in the first person, the implication is that it is you who is the protagonist of the story.
This may sound obvious.  You’re always the protagonist of the story, right?  It’s always you playing the character.  But the actor playing Hamlet is not Hamlet, and a player playing Master Chief is not Master Chief.  And yes, I know that literally, the player is not any character they play, but the choices Master Chief makes are not the choices of the player.  The choices of the Vault Dweller (Fallout 3), for instance, are.  There is no choice the character in Fallout 3 makes without the player making that choice themselves.  Bethesda also does this well in their Elder Scrolls series.  There are also games that adhere to this premise without a first person perspective, like Dragon Age: Origins.
This is something very important for developers to remember.  In God of War III, there are several moments where the camera switches to first person, most uselessly at the end.  I say useless, because truly, there is absolutely no sensible reason for it; the moment exists in a vain and pointless attempt try to make the situation more “hardcore,” which really does seem like the present day equivalent to the 90’s “extreme.”  It’s like a book switching from omniscient third to first person narrative in the last chapter.  A jarring shift of tone that will more serve to confuse the audience and attempt (and fail) to look arty.
Alien abductions and Native American
magic bird powers.
There are great things that can be done by putting the player in first person, Prey specifically uses the first person nature of the game to great extent, even while taking away most of the choices the player has about the character and even some of the events that take place.  The scenes earliest in the game are probably the best examples, where you hurdle uncontrollably through an alien abduction ship, never knowing what’s going on except that things are moving very fast, and not into particularly inviting areas.  It’s a wonderfully done and immersive sequence that really gives the feeling of being alone and near powerless on an alien death ship.  Scenes like this can bring games to life if executed well.  The key is for the designers to know the feelings they need to evoke in the player and to push those feelings by simulating a real-life experience.  A roller-coaster ride, for example.  Now put that ride in the dark, with screaming, and squishy, wet-meat sound effects.  Good, scary alien ship accomplished.
There is another game, one I mentioned last week, that I think botches some of what can be done with a first person perspective.  Zeno Clash is a first person brawler, a game style that, in the past, I’ve found to work about as well as first person platforming.  In the game, you play Gaht, a running possible-murder in a strange, tribal world.  The world begs for exploration and study, but you are given none.  The levels are so linear as to mostly eliminate the choice Gaht gets to make even in choosing where to walk.  It saddened me that such a fantastic aethetic couldn’t be more fully explored.  The brawling however, worked fairly well.  Like any first person game, it did suffer from some of the problems surrounding a limited field of vision, especially when huge enemies charge from the sidelines, but the brawling felt rewarding, like there was technique to be had, and it certainly kicked my ass once or twice.  The game has been described as very “visceral”.  That comes from it being first person.  Without being able to watch a bird-like man’s head slam against your knee, it just wouldn’t have that feel, and the game as a whole would be at a great loss for it.
I mentioned earlier the idea of the player filling the role of a hero, or filling the role of themselves being the hero.  It comes from a strong difference in the story telling practices, one new and relatively unique to games.  You are not the main character in a book (maybe you are in one or two, I don’t know), you are not the main character in a movie, but you are the main character in quite a few games.  Most of the time, when we tell stories, we tell them about someone.  Writers have created an almost limitless number of heroes and anti-heroes to choose from, and that person exemplifies or signifies something.  Their heroic quality is central to the plot, and is generally something the audience is meant to attach to and be inspired by.  When you are the hero, something very different occurs.  You are given choices, your decisions will not always net you the reward you wanted.  You as a person are making judgments and seeing the effects.  The first person is a great step in making us understand that this is what we do.
As a final note, I have been excited for Bioshock Infinite since I learned Ken Levine was back on board from the first.  The game this time has a vocal hero, known as Booker.  Not only does he talk, he has a love interest (or something), and will probably have some strong opinions about what he will encounter.  So, this leaves me with a question: wasn’t part of the first game’s greatness the ability to make our own clear judgments about Rapture and the political philosophies of all involved?  To what extent will a voiced protagonist remove that quality?  I trust the team, but I see a lot of the problems there could be. 

Tuesday, June 28

On Unique Aesthetics

Aesthetics is, in a simplified definition, dealing with the nature of beauty, art, and taste and with the creation and appreciation of beauty.  It’s the reason we like the colours in fireworks, even when they’re not celebrating anything, or why we like he look of interestingly designed buildings when we’re not architects.  The appreciation of aesthetic beauty is important to games, movies, comics, basically all art with a visual need.  There some games whose claim to fame is a visual aesthetic alone.  The best naturally are well-designed as well, but because that’s much harder for people to recognize on sight, the aesthetic becomes the most important.
Look at that.  How are you not
playing it right now?
Let’s look at one game you’d better have heard of: OkamiOkami is, in some ways, very reminiscent of games like Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, but its visual aesthetic was something so new and refreshing that people bought it on that merit alone.  Apart from it being a very well designed game with a great push for cultural learning, it got some people to realize the difference between high-end graphics and high-end aesthetic.
Okami is unique in the look of the world, and brings an uncommon character to play, Amaterasu, a wolf-god/sun-god/all-mother, which was great for players as well.  You see, aesthetics most certainly does not only extend to visual design.  Gameplay can have a great aesthetic as well, where it just feels good (a horribly subjective thing to say, I know).  God of War does this well, making the combat visceral and almost graceful, allowing players to feel fancy as much as they feel like a badass.  There is importance in selecting the right characters to support the aesthetic.
I’d like to go off a bit from just general aesthetics, since this article is titled “Unique Aesthetics,” and I’d like to introduce the Triangle of Weirdness.  Many of you probably know of the Triangle of Production, which states that when planning an event you may have two of three of the following: Cost, Time, and Quality.  Here’s an example of how it works: You can have a birthday party that has low cost and is high quality, but it will take a long time to organize; you can have a party that takes little time and has little cost, but it will be low quality; and you can have a party that is high quality and is ready quickly, but it will cost a lot.  Similarly, the Triangle of Weirdness has the points of Characters, World, and Activities and as a designer, you are allowed to choose one.  This exists to allow for interesting variations on types of worlds and gameplay styles while also ensuring players enough familiarity that they are not overwhelmed by the experience.  So, you can designer a strange, topsy-turvy world, like something in Zeno Clash, You can have odd characters, Grim Fandango (or nearly any of Shafer’s work), or you can have strange activities, like Portal.  Players will eventually understand and recognize what the pieces are about, at least if you’ve created a good and intuitive game.  The portal mechanic was a great creation that could be confusing at first, but became second nature by endgame.
I don't care what you think, the
Fonz does not belong in your game.
As you surely know by this point, games design is not level design, is not character design, is not world design, is not art design.  It is all that and more.  As a game designer, you must make sure that all these parts of a game, as well sound/music, writing, enemy design, etc., form into a cohesive group.  Obviously this becomes harder and harder to do the bigger the teams you work with and the bigger the budgets you get, but consistency is always, always important.  To go back to a game I mentioned before, Zeno Clash is a first-person brawler/shooter that takes place in a pseudo-tribal world with primitive weapons, grenades made from skulls, vicious animals, giant insects, and a soundtrack riddled with heavy, dark, drumbeats.  It understands itself and shows this with a unified aesthetic.  The world is weird, and while the characters are visually strange, they are not strange in what they do, how they talk, or how they act (save the Corwids, but I have limited time here.  Play the game).  You’ll never run across a character wearing a black leather jacket imitating the Fonz, and you’ll never see someone driving about in a jeep.  The creators kept their vision constant throughout the entire experience.  Even still, Zeno Clash does have varying environments and situations, they just all fit together.  Some other games with a great unified aesthetic: Shadow of the Colossus, Katamari Damacy, Silent Hill 2, New Super Mario Bros., Psychonauts, Bioshock, Myst, Plants VS. Zombies, etc.
Now, I only glanced over this earlier, but the key of the Triangle of Weirdness is keeping the experience familiar enough to your player to keep them engaged.  A game that’s too strange will through off players almost right away, if only because they can’t understand what’s going on.  It doesn’t matter how important the artistic statement you’re making is if no one stays around long enough to experience it, and yes, I truly, truly believe that.  By “keeping it familiar” I don’t mean bland or samey.  Innovation always has its place, the key is to present the control systems and world physics intuitively enough that they game is still playable.  I know people who have quit Minecraft because they weren’t really taught how to play the game.  I know, keep your hat on, Minecraft is great, I’ve played it way more than I should, but you can see how this is a detriment for the game and the potential players.  So design your game well, design your tutorial well, and if you do it right, you’ll design a tutorial no ever notices, and they can enter into your strange worlds more fascinated than discouraged, more interested than bored, and open to all the artistic statements you can make.

Wednesday, June 15

On Questing

The quest is a staple of gaming, whether video or tabletop.  It encompasses all the necessary elements a player needs.  It is a grand adventure, larger than life.  It denotes a setting unlike our own, a fantastical world in which the player is of the strongest, most competent there is.  It is an empowering feeling to know you are relied on by the common folk, terror to all the evil there is.  Or evil yourself, if that’s the ticket for you.  This article will focus more on the tabletop gaming world.
But the quest is not a simple, easy creation.  A Dungeon Master can not simply say “There are Kobolds in the forest.”  Even with the most clearly destructive and malevolent of enemies, there must be motivation, involvement, and flavour.  Each encounter, whether at first level or twentieth, should be memorable.  That stick-in-your-mind quality is what can separate a good DM from a great DM.
You know what
this means.
So what goes into a great adventure, a memorable quest?  Well, the first part you should always consider, and you probably have without knowing it, is the tone of the campaign or game you’re working on.  If your campaign has mainly light and energetic, or even funny, an adventure to apprehend a psychotic and deranged serial killer is not appropriate (well, maybe, but be careful).  Don’t just consider what your campaign has been up to this point, consider what it will be afterward.  What is the next adventure going to be like?  Think about jarring shifts in tone between adventures, shift gradually between feelings, whether between adventures/quests, or within the quest itself.
Once you know the tone of the adventure, move to the specific events and characters.  The standard for D&D is thirteen encounters per level, and you should definitely know the leveling rate for whatever game you’re playing.  Take a look at the area around your adventure.  Where can the players go?  Why would they go there?  The answer to that first question should be anywhere.  And while it can be hard, you have to avoid railroading them.  That sounds easy, but it’s more tricky than we realize.  For instance, you have zombies attack a town.  The players don’t instantly know where  the zombies have come from, but it’s a safe bet it’s the local cemetery, and most player know, at least experienced ones, that where there are zombies, there is magic.  They prepare to fight a mage and head to the graveyard without even questioning a single villager.  You may not have designed this to happen, but you didn’t design to avoid it.  Avoid railroading at all costs, let the players feel like they’re in control, it’s an amazing feeling to impart.
Also, consistency.  Don’t put Demons and Devils on the same team (in D&D) unless there’s a mighty good reason.  If the enemy is a thieve’s guild, use thieves and thugs, not Druids, usually.
You can never be this awesome.
So, you know what’s going to happen, where it’s happening, and all the ways it can happen, but you need to make sure it’s all interesting.  Colourful characters can be hard to achieve, but a lot of it relies on the performance of the DM, or the potency of the writer.  Be animated as an actor, use accents, mime actions, etc.  It really makes the experience come alive for the players.  In addition, you must be sure that you understand the motivations of the characters, especially whatever antagonist you’ve created.  Real people are not evil for the sake of being evil, they have philosophies, visions, and purpose.  Make sure you give them the respect that amount of thinking and work deserves.
So, when designing the events, you’ll always, always miss out on a choice the players make.  They’ll go somewhere you find completely irrational, completely pointless, and you haven’t prepared anything for that locale.  What do you do?  Well, hopefully you know what this area is like, and rather than just telling the player’s they’re on the wrong track, you can improvise (a DM’s greatest skill) and guide the players back on track.
In video games, you take a look at what’s out there.  Killing X amount of monster Y is all very well, but there is a world beyond that.  Guild Wars 2 claims that there will be actual consequence to the quest actions, but the specifics begin to depend on players forming parties, which is of course a point of MMOs, but further limits the options of soloing players, a slightly unkind measure (I like to solo in MMOs, just a personal preference).  So, beyond that, there is a challenge in finding something more to do.  Maybe something like running a patrol with a troupe of guards if solo, or instead of the guards if in a party of five or more.  This patrolling can fit several situations, like helping a farmer protect his farm, or protecting a group of refugees from traveling mercs.  That’s just one idea that keeps within a simple setup, but switching up the nature of quests is very important.  It can always get boring, fast.
So what else goes into a great adventure?  Unique locations.  A wizard’s tower is fine, but what if it’s half sunk into a swamp?  What if that ruin is still a holy training ground for dwarven monks?  You get the idea.  It’s about varying on the clichés that renews the formula.  Varying in the basic monsters makes them more memorable as well, giving an Ogre a huge jawbone to attack with is quite a bit better than your standard wooden club.  A huge scar on the mouth, or a black mirrored helmet really make characters memorable.  Awesome nicknames also help.
So, to give a great quest, you need to think it completely through.  Try not to throw it together last minute, don’t look to published adventures too much.  If there is something you can fin that inspires you, use it to no end.  For instance, I take a ton of my inspiration in writing, in gaming, from random words I see around.  For instance, just picking at random, a song title on my itunes: “Jaws of Heaven.”  Instantly I see a whole campaign around that concept, about the world being swallowed by what the people thought was their heaven.  Or “Becoming a Mystery” wherein the players can help an extremely talented thief and gain her as a friend, or they can try to capture her, and become legends themselves.  Find your inspiration, work for it, let it work for you.  That may sound ethereal and useless, but I promise it’s not.

Tuesday, June 7

On Villains

I will always take brilliant but evil over good but stupid, every time.  I love villains, I love creating them, I wish I could write every story solely with villains, and I like to think that it’s possible.  I love villains because they’re the characters most often representing change and progress, the intelligent connoisseurs of culture and history.  I’d like to bring up some interesting examples of “villainy” in popular culture.

Comic Books
Mmm, that's good elseworld.
By which I mean superhero comic books.  Most people do, but I do enjoy a large number of non-superhero comics.  Anyway, I find myself enjoying heroes, but those heroes are very much symbols of the stagnation of modern society.  They often claim to fight for the good of all people, and while we’ll ignore the good of all people being immeasurable and relative, they’re often stopping the most forward-thinking and motivated individuals in the world: the supervillains.
In terms of supervillains, think of someone like Lex Luthor.  He is supposedly one of the most brilliant minds in the world, and in stories like Superman: Red Son, we see how that kind of genius can play out.  There are villains who are basically fighting for the rights of their people, the only catch being that their people are not human, and therefore… what?  Not as good as us?  Some are much, much more competent as species and probably would do a lot better things with the resources we have, all considered.
No, I’m not turning my back on my race for the mole people.  I like the mole people, but they just don’t have a secure enough government system to succeed in our world.

Wrestling
I’m not a huge fan of wrestling, but I’ve seen a fair share, and I think it would be a lot of fun to write something for it, just because it’s in dire, dire need of an improvement in that area.  But what’s notable about wrestling is the concept of Heels and Faces.  Heels are the villains, Faces are the heroes.  Heels characterize themselves by generally dirty pool.  For instance, pulling a sledgehammer from ‘neath the ring and smashing faces (Ha!).
Anyway, and this does not exactly come from a reputable source, the Heels are wrestlers who seem to embody the older eras of wrestling.  Some of the most notable are older wrestlers, and in contrast, the Faces are the younger wrestlers, and appeals to the younger generation of fans.  The prime example is John Cena, who is so popular among the younger fans that he is basically unable to cleanly lose a match.
At Wrestlemania this year, The Rock will be returning.  The Rock is a symbol of the older era, and we’ll have Team Rock VS Team Cena, and this is a great event for fans, both young and old.  The young have the ability to support their great heroes, and to the children Cena is a hero, take on the legends of the past while the older generation of fans get to see their heroes brought back and face off with a new wave that represents a change many of them resent.  The writers are in a tough position with this, they can allow the older generation with the older, long-time fans rooting nearly entire for The Rock, to win, or the younger ones, possibly to become long-time fans.  Good luck, writers.

Video Games
Who are the villains of video games?  Well, in many more recent games, it’s whoever you, as the player decide.  In Fallout: New Vegas, is it Caesar, the NCR, or someone else?  In Dragon Age II, is it the Templars or the Mages? (Templars.  Mages forever!)  This trend is more recent, and I think something games should continue to shoot for, when a villain is necessarily.  The ability to choose one’s heroes and villains lets us understand our experience and learn something about ourselves.
The seething eyes of madness.

But what other kind of villains do we see?  Well, we see them from all over literature and other stories.  Everything from the story of the knight defeating the dragon to the jilted lovers.  Games have drawn on every kind of literature, but I don’t know if games yet to have a villainous trope all their own.  The ability to choose your enemy is important, but that does exist in other media, if in a less dramatic form.
There are even games that claim to let you play as the villain, but I don’t really feel it every comes across well.  Games like Evil Genius, Overlord, and games like the Fable series claim your need for villainy can be assuaged.  But none of them truly get across that ideal-borne journey against the archaic concepts of the world, none of them lead you in representing a “villainous” cause, and none that I’ve encountered really engage in a discourse on what villainy truly is.

Personally, villainy is just whatever you personally find disdainful, tempered by your opinions on the views and laws of society.  I really feel that the villains are the most interesting characters because so often in media they represent change in our world, and fearing change leaves us stagnant and unchanging: locked in what we could perceive as utopia.  But by locking ourselves in it, we defeat the cause of human achievement, which most “mad scientists” and “super villains” are all about.  They are the best of us, that we toss aside for fear of them.
I will always love villains.  If I had a superpower, it would be weather control, and I fly around in a raging storm, wielding the awesome power of nature against anyone who denied the truth of achievement and the need for improvement.  It would be a gloriously fantastical, if  gloriously silly, future.

Wednesday, June 1

On Podcasts

   Hey all, as a while ago I did a recording for a podcast as a guest with the fine trio of fellows over at rescuetheprincess.net, and the recording of it is now up.  You can watch the four of us blather endlessly about Bioshock here.

   Check it out, these guys are worth your time.

   Thanks for reading.

Tuesday, May 31

On Sequels, Part 2 - Continuity and Cliches

If you recall, last time I talked about three ways to create a fairly satisfying sequel, but what I want to talk more about to day is how sequels deal with continuity and sometimes fall into very cliché territory.  Sequels are sometimes planned from the very beginning, the first story existing as it’s own self-contained work, but leaving a couple dangling plot threads.  See: Star Wars, A New Hope.  At the end of Star Wars, Luke has gone through the hero’s journey, he’s left behind the regular world and entered that of the Jedi, he proved he does not need the constant tutoring of his master, and succeeds in defeating the great evil.  He is rewarded for his victory, and everything seems well.  But we know Darth Vader is still alive, we know that there must be the confrontation between he and Luke.  There is more story to tell, and it’s major story, but we get our happy ending and the initial plot finishes.  Think of how major a plot thread is left dangling by Vader’s existence.  Keep in mind, I’m not saying that’s bad, I’m saying it’s the right way to do it.
Too often, games, more than any other medium, leave useless, meaningless dangling plot threads at their ends, hoping to have the game end on a cliffhanger rather than a real dénouement.  To throw out a good contrast we’ll take .hack//G.U. (I know, bear with me), and Kingdom Hearts II (Already a sequel, I know, but this flaw is on excellent display).
In case you couldn’t guess from me discussing the end of these games, SPOILER WARNING.
I’ll start with Kingdom Hearts II, because it revels in exactly the problem I’m talking about.  Kingdom Hearts Duex has its own (mostly) self-contained story that you can play through without worry about what came before, although you may not get the full experience but whatever.  The ending kills all the baddies, keeps all the goodies, and only leaves a couple insignificant dangling plots that you probably don’t need to worry about anyway.  So what about after all that?  Do we see the characters return to perfect sunshine and smiles Island?  Is everything resolved and their life set back on track?  Actually, yeah.  OR IS IT?  No, not really, because we see the character get… gasp!  A letter from King Mickey, requesting their help.  It’s time for adventure again!  Everything is wonderful and the next game totally isn’t a cash grab!
Anime: The Game
On contrast, we have the end of .hack//G.U. Volume 1: Rebirth.  That “Volume 1” tells us very quickly that the game clearly will be headed for sequel territory, and we expect a cliffhanger ending.  And what happens?  We defeat our big bad, our character clearly grows as a person and finishes the initial task he set out to do.  Except during this journey we learned of an even greater enemy and a greater chain of events, bigger than just that character’s journey, although it’s still about that, too.  But at the end of the first volume, we see that element truly rear its ugly head, we end of a cliffhanger of possible death and we know that the story must continue from here.
The problem here has almost everything to do with stakes.  Kingdom Hearts has none.  We as an audience can be interested in what this letter from the King says, we can want to know about it, but there’s no reason to.  All of the villains we had any reason to care about are long gone, all of the character’s lives are happy, and no one event really lingers in our minds.  It’s like the writers were told at the very end of production “Oh, we’re going to make a sequel, write that in, would you?”  and all they could do was weep at their desk for 15 minutes as they realized either everything they worked on would have to be changed, or there would be a sad and meaningless cliffhanger for the next game.  .hack works in this area, because we already know all about the two villains we’ve had to deal with and will have to continue dealing with.  One is defeated to give us our ending, our climax, and the other exists to continue the story, to make us remember the greater threat.  More time is probably spent on the bigger enemy, and it gives us much more reason to give a damn about another game.
Oh Bioware, my love...  Come and take me away.
While that’s probably one of the biggest clichés for video game endings, there’s another problem entirely when it comes to continuity.  Games are in a unique position here, because other media only really needs to maintain specific story elements, whereas games are also under the burden of deciding what to do with their game mechanics.  Bioware takes a lot more flak than I wish they did for this, because with series like Mass Effect and Dragon Age, they appeal to a gamer culture that often tends to learn a system down to its very core.  So when Bioware talks about changing the gameplay and removing RPG elements, or changing the dialogue system, they’re going to receive criticism, one way or another.  For the record, I like the gameplay in Dragon Age I & II, though I prefer the dialogue method of the first.
Many people would say that this isn’t really a problem for games, changing an interactive element of the game doesn’t lead to continuity problems like changes to story can, but I disagree, and I think we need to pay more attention to how gameplay influences the feel of a game.  While Dragon Age Origin’s battles may have felt boring to some people, or had not enough applicable strategy, they were battles I could understand happening.  I turn to Dragon Age II and I see my character (Rogue) leaping unreasonable distance, teleporting around the battlefield, and attacking less by swinging a weapon and more by doing an improvised gymnastics routine.  Which is fine, I like feeling as awesome as that makes me feel, but those moments were extremely rare in the first game, limited only to moments when you defeated a particularly strong enemy.  It gives a large contrast in the feelings of the game.  In Dragon Age, I knew I needed that army to fight against the Blight, to deal with the Archdemon.  But In Dragon Age II, I feel I could take a few armies with each hand.  Again, that’s not a bad thing, but it’s something to be aware of.
If you want to create a sequel, ask yourself why.  Is it because you want to use the same kind of gameplay?  You better make sure you have hints of a new story in the first game, or think up an entirely new one, and always be aware of the feeling of your game.  The choices you make about what a player can do will ripple through every aspect of their experience, and thinking you can achieve the same feelings by making players have different experiences is just as flawed as it sounds.


Also: get the first version of the setup and rules for my board game, Elemental Gate, here.

Tuesday, May 24

Elemental Gate V 1.0

Hello everyone, I’m happy to present my first widely available work in progress, Elemental Gate, a 4 player board game.  Please give it a try and tell me how I can make the next version better, which I will post when completed.  There is an end to my work on this game; I’ve set my own deadline, and I don’t intend to waver from it.  When that day comes, it’ll be as done as it ever will, and I’ll have moved on to other projects.  But for the time being, please give some time to help me make Elemental Gate a truly good game.
You can get the game rules and setup instructions here.

Thanks for reading.

On Where to Begin

Well I talk a lot, and not just here.  I often have trouble shutting up in day-to-day life.  I’m told it can be annoying, but if you’re like me, you understand that some topics are just going to keep you going, and I don’t blame you at all.  But occasionally one must realize the sense in making sure they actually talk about the really important stuff.  If you’re like me, you’re not a successful game designer, working out of Ubisoft, Valve, or (One day, gods willing) Bioware.  You don’t have to put in the long hours and sleepless night designer are burdened and blessed with, and you don’t have a team implementing your ideas, helping you every step of the way.  No, if you’re like me, you have yourself, your friends, whatever game pieces you can pick up from goodwill, and a free video game creator program.
But maybe you don’t have that.  Gaming is a love of yours, so you have games, but you don’t know where to find the proper stuff to make games.  Well, I'm no aficionado, not yet, but I can tell you where I get my best help and all the pushes in the right directions.
What's that?  You don't want to study for
hours upon hours?  Aw, poor baby.  Let's
back up the Wambulance.
First off, let’s pretend you don’t have any programming skills.  Well, they’ll definitely be helpful later, so start learning yourself a language.  Game designers work more in Perl and Python than C++, so far as I’ve heard, so those may be your best bets.  In addition, to get started on game stuff right away, or more quickly, there is Game Maker (Windows) and Game Salad (Mac).
Actually, I should stop right here and tell you:  Watch this video.  Then watch the rest of their videos.  Twice.
Done?  Good.
Anyway, let’s say that you want to know some more specifics of design, you want something practical and detailed.  Know that almost regardless of what you decide to study, it will fall victim to an author’s bias.  You’re creating art, and art is always subjective.  The main two books I’ve enjoyed reading are Level Up!: The Guide to Great Video Game Design, and The Ultimate Guide to Video Game Writing and Design.  Level Up is a book full of practical game theory.  It’s a book that can get you to really look at individual bits of your game and analyze them thoroughly, whether you’re making a 1 player side-scroller or 4 player smash-up, Level Up can give the extra details you’ll want.  The Ultimate Guide is more tuned toward the troubles of making a game in the industry and understanding how game writing works.  I believe these two books work wonderfully together because of their very different goals.  The Ultimate Guide will give you an idea of how the aspect like art and writing fit into the design of the game, and Level Up gives the polish to that design.
But you don’t have the money for books.  Okay, that sucks, yes.  I know the feeling.  Boy, do I ever.  So look to the left of this post.  See that “Additional Reading” stuff.  It’s not there for show.  Those links represent some of the most helpful information I’ve found.  Design Robot is unfortunately on hiatus right now, and I’ve already plugged Extra Credits.  Gregory Weir has made some very fun and amusing games, and has a lot to say about the indie side of the gaming world.  David Sirlin’s site is your one stop shop for balancing your game and learning the psychology of multiplayer games.  Teaching Game Design chronicles a teacher’s tasks in bringing important design lessons to the world, and gives an experienced eye on the medium’s trends.  Lastly, the Game Overthinker.  I just like him, he puts up ideas I often find I conflict with (especially the idea that game creators are “toy makers”) but he does so in an intelligent and thought provoking way worthy of consideration.
So that’s a bunch of reading and listening to do, but you want to know what to do on almost no budget, with little programming knowledge and not enough skill to get your game ideas across in Game Make or Game Salad.  Well, there are a couple things you can do.  Practice writing Game Design Documents for your ideas.  Even if they never go anywhere, it’s good to show that you have the ability to write these sometimes very long winded, very thorough documents.  Try to write documents while imagining varying sizes of teams.  For instance, a team of 100 people or a team of 10.  Your games will differ quite a bit, and it will get you thinking about what truly matters in your game.
And in all seriousness, head to goodwill, head to garage and yard sales, head to Value Village.  Find old board games, whether all the pieces are there or not, you can get some parts to work with.  I’ve always found that actually having parts makes the process much, much easier.
That's right, play with these guys.  Nerds are a great
learning tool.  And let's face it: You are one.
Lastly, get your friends to play.  Gather them up to test out your game and let you know what they think.  Make sure they’ll be honest and open about it, and boy, make sure you’re able to take criticism.  If you aren’t, you’re in the wrong business, pal.  Also, understand that your friends are probably not game designers.  Try to separate the true problems of the game from the ones they complain about when they’re losing.  And of course, recognize that your game isn’t that good.  Probably.  Like every artist, you have to run before your can walk, and the critiques of others can always help you move forward.

Speaking of…

In addition to all this hopefully helpful advice, I’ll be doing another post in a few minutes to announce the first version of my board game: Elemental Gate.  This is a definite work in progress, and I’d be more than happy to receive all kinds of critiques surrounding it.  I’m already starting to twist and change aspects of the game, but I’d love to hear more if anyone’s willing to share.  Thanks to everyone who reads, and thanks to those who tell me why I suck.

Tuesday, May 17

On Chance

Sorry, been busy for a couple weeks here, moving and job searching in my summer home and whatnot.  It has given me some good time to ponder a new topic, and I think I like this one quite a bit.  It may end up a little longer than usual, so bear with me if you can.
Let’s start out with a game comparison.  Two games for the Game Boy Advance: Final Fantasy: Tactics Advance and Fire Emblem: Sacred Stones.  Both are turn based strategy/RPG games, though there are obviously a large number of differences between them.  In both, a display window will open when you decide to attack indicating your chance to hit and probable damage.  These are certainly a good indicator for the player, and despite their implementation, have never thrown me out of the experience because I’ve always loved to feel like a general making calculated decisions in an epic war.  Here’s where the most important difference lies: If FF:TA says the character will deal 12 damage, that character could deal anywhere from 6-18 damage, but if in FE:SS the display says 12 damage, the character will always deal 12 damage.
Still awesome, play it.
There is a fundamental flaw in what Tactics is attempting to do with this display and the actual specifics of the attacks that are dealt.  Surly, the purpose of the display window is to allows the player to think their attacks through and understand the effectiveness of their strategies.  But the unreliability of the information hurts that immensely.  As Yahtzee put it “… when you put random chance into combat mechanics, all strategy has been thrown out the window, then scraped off the ground and used to pick up the broken glass.”
So we reach the meat of the article: the presentation of chance.  I don’t mean things like the chance of you understanding a puzzle or the chance of hitting a hammer-on in Guitar Hero VS Rock Band.  No, what I’m talking about are the chances players depend on.  You won’t see this in all genres.  A grenade is never a dud in Modern Warfare, for example.  The place I find this is most visible, and most prevalent, is board games.  Try to remember the board games you’ve played before: Trouble, Life, Candyland, there was no skill involved in those games, you were at the mercy of the dice (or spinner), almost entirely.
I don’t believe this should be the case, in board games or videogames.  Now, in board games it’s generally a multiplayer affair, which makes in more difficult to balance among four players without relying on chance.  I’m working on a board game right now, and it’s very difficult to even out every player without relying on chance.  So far, I think the best strategy I’ve found is to give the players the option of chance, to allow them their risks, but also make sure they have set numbers they can control more or fall back on.  This may sound quite complicated and yes, it will never be as easy as Life or Candyland was, but that doesn’t mean it’s impossible to learn or play smoothly.  The key is “Easy to learn, hard to master.”  That rule does not apply to itself.
But lets look at chance in video games a little more.  How about Mario Party?  I think that link sums up what a lot of people think about it.  I was once playing a game of Mario Party 8 (don’t do it) with some friends, one of whom was becoming incredibly angry because he felt like the rolls of his die were screwing him over at every turn.  he would lose all his coins, miss the star, fall on the red spaces, and so on.  He was swearing and sweating and just generally pissed off with the whole game.  Then the ending came and the game decided to give all three bonus stars to him, and so he won the round.  But he still wasn’t happy because he never felt like he did anything that made him win, and that becomes the important thing about chance.
It may be awesome, but it's in no way your fault.
If you’ve played Dungeons & Dragons, you can surly understand the fun of roll a natural 20, or the disgrace in rolling a natural 1.  It’s fun, and yet entirely based on chance, isn’t it?  No, because you can affect the outcome.  As long as a player has influence over their character and abilities, you can be fairly assured they will be more satisfied with their experience.
So, to go back to FF:TA, is it necessarily unsatisfying for its random aspects?  A little.  When it means the difference between a kill and another round, the chance has misled too far, especially in a game all about the tactics and strategy.  You have to understand the level of precision the players expect from the style of game and cater to that as you can.  The best games and board games are ones that understand the chances the players need to take, and implement them in ways that pray wonderfully on the player’s emotions or on tactical thinking.  A great example exists in the Battlestar Galactica board game, where the goal can be reached more quickly at the possible loss of vital resources.  Do you give your enemies the upper hand for a chance at nearing the end of the game and victory?  It’s a hard decision to make, especially when one of your allies isn’t an ally at all (Hint: Play it).
So at the end of the day, chance, like everything else, has its place, but it must be carefully applied.  In video games, it tends to need to be more behind the scenes so players don’t notice it, and in board games it’s the carefully applied unsure nature of equality, the element that gives hope to that one Risk soldier against an army of ten.  Chance is the dice roll that could save your life or end your opponent’s, and wherever it is, be sure the players involved understand exactly fits into play.

Tuesday, April 26

On Misinformation

Final Verdict: Ehh, it's alright.
I was playing Borderlands recently, wondering why I’ve sunk so many hours into it, when I started thinking more clearly about the game.  It Borderlands, you will notice that a number pops up every time you shoot an enemy, indicating the damage you dealt.  It made me think about the teaching most game designers receive, specifically the habit of making sure the player understands every action they perform and the consequences of it.  This can be easy to understand the logic behind; you want the player to know what they’re doing.  While this is true, I’ve found that my most compelling and immersive game experiences have come from situations where I don’t know exactly what I’m doing.  Oh sure, I understand the controls and basic setup, but the story, the effects of my actions, these are the unknowns that keep me invested and cause me to care about my decisions.
Looking back to the Fable games, you may remember the tag for the first was “For every choice, a consequence,” and that could be said to be true, but the problem was players could easily figure out what they consequences would be since it usually boiled down to “Kill this guy or don’t.”  Even actions like theft didn’t have any real consequence unless you were caught.
It is more in game like Dragon Age or Fallout that I find myself actually wondering about the choices I’ve made.  For instance, there is a point in Dragon Age Origins when you have the option of killing a woman to enact a magic ritual, or going to the Mage’s tower to ask for assistance there.  Clearly, killing her is not the preferable idea, but it will save the life of her son, and she is more than willing to do it.  At the same time, it would end a great threat to a nearby city, which has been plagued with undead attacks every night, and lost most of their population.  The question becomes: Do you take more time and cost possibly many more lives in going to the tower, or do you enact the ritual on the spot, saving the greatest number of people as quickly as possible?  I chose the latter, and afterward I realized because I wasn’t sure if there would be consequences for taking too long.
So it’s only because I was ignorant of the exact mechanics at work that I really cared about my actions.  If I knew the game wouldn’t impose a penalty for time (and I’m not telling you if it does or not), then my actions would have revolved around that, around the mechanics rather than the story.  The fine folks at Extra Credits made this point with regards to the binary morality issue; hiding the statistics would instead give us the feel that people hated or loved us based on our actions, not the arbitrary judgment of those actions.
This quality has only really come forward in the most recent generation of games, at least so far as I’ve seen, because now, with the medium developing and so many people pushing the artistry of it, it becomes hard to be sure what a game does or doesn’t have going on behind the scenes.  I’m sure that some people will be able to note the same sorts of effects from the past couple of generations, but I don’t feel I’ve really come across it until recently.
The main series can suck it.
Now, there’s a question of how far this method should go, certainly.  A player needs to know the controls, their objectives, and so on, right?  Sure, you may not know your ultimate goal immediately in a game, but it should reveal itself as the story progresses.  That last point, I don’t know about.  I think it’s a quality of linear storytelling and familiar tropes like the three-act structure that make us push games into the same style.  We’re unused to trying it different ways, but I can think of one game that lets the player find the real stories, and only gives tangential hints, leading to an experience you feel you’ve impacted and left truly for the better: Final Fantasy: Crystal Chronicles.
No, I’m not going to let up on this game, it’s one of my absolute favourites because it provided me with a strange, unique experience I haven’t forgotten.  And so we’re clear, every Crystal Chronicles game since has been trash.
FF:CC on the Gamecube received a lot of flack at the time for it’s multiplayer mode basically being a huge money-grab by Nintendo.  Surprise surprise.  But unfortunately, that meant a lot of the game got looked over, and unfortunately, this part was lost in the shuffle.  The game can continue for an absurdly long time, and the final goal is not contingent on getting to it, or really scripted events that need to play out.  The game itself is about experience, and the element that allows you to play to the end is a measure of your experiences.
This is where games really need to start exploring.  In many ways, it’s the same a great D&D campaign can be run.  A start point, a live, moving world with variable elements the players can impact, and an end point, far away, and contingent on the experience of the player, less measured in strength or cut scenes, but in a measurement unto itself. 
To create experience, we must experience ourselves and emulate.  The emotions, the relationships, the understanding and lack of understanding.  Not that we should strive for unparalleled realism, but we must recognize that not knowing the exact outcome of our actions is what causes to contemplate them.  Knowing them invalidates what truly may come of the experience, it negates any introspection once we see the consequences, and this is what games allow better than any other medium: the ability to look at your choices, your reasons, even when your action play out poorly, and wonder if you still stand behind it, if you are willing to re-evaluate yourself and your beliefs when confronted by their dark side, or whether you choose to hold fast and continue on a path you truly believe in, regardless of how it affect the rest of the world.

Tuesday, April 19

On Timing

Surly you’ve seen it at some point: that rapidly descending set of numbers pops into a corner of the screen, almost trying to hide as it ticks down the remaining seconds of your time limit like a gradually slowing heartbeat.  It can be a dreadful feeling, watching those numbers drain away.  Time limits easily add extra investment in the gameplay, it adds the necessity of speed to whatever challenges were already set on the player, and that sudden addition of difficulty can be a good surprise, or just annoy the hell out of your players.
Or, you could experiment with the very idea.  Time limits are a holdover from the arcade days, where the time left at the end of the challenge would award the player with extra points.  But after games went away from being about high scores and taking all of your mom’s hard-earned quarters, the time limit changed to being a challenge amplifier.  Because the mechanic was no longer about squeezing that money out of players, it started to be a bit more about experimentation.  Surprising  one of the earliest example of playing with the time limit mechanic came from a Spiderman game on the Genesis.
Spoiler: They both turn into giants and Spidey climbs
the Empire State Building like King Kong.
Spiderman VS The Kingpin gives the player a twenty four hour time limit to complete the game, shaving a couple hours for every death.  In the game, a bomb will go off at the end of the countdown.  Suddenly, the time limit becomes a gameplay mechanic and story element, which is almost always a good idea.  Since then, we’ve seen some much more interesting uses of time limitations.
Persona 4 (and Persona 3, haven’t played 1 or 2, since they haven’t been released in English) keeps track of the day of the year that the game takes place.  This doesn’t seem like much at first, but it does actively revolve around the Japanese school year and Japanese holidays, which is educational and interesting, so bonus points there.  The timer never indicates when the end of the game will come,  but the knowledge that a time limit is there does a wonderful job of making the player want to make the most of their life and the friendships they acquire.  Persona 4 doesn’t force the player to play the game a certain way, or within an actual time frame, since days last forever if the player doesn’t do an action that will end them.  Persona 4, however, does not handle its time limit perfectly.  Near the end of the game (and there at least three different endings, try to get the best one), time skips forward almost four months, just whizzing through the calendar with reckless abandon, which really caught me off guard, and was rather disappointing.  I’d grown amicable to my fake life, and I wanted to spend time with my friends, but the game denied me that possibility, in an act the game had never done before.  So, as an addendum to this and all things: Consistency is nice.
Another game one could look at for the same sort of time limit experimentation is, obviously, the Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask.  The three day time limit was a first for the Zelda games, and many players’ first interactions with a full-game time limit, or so it seemed.  Making such an uncommon mechanic not only prominent, but the focus of the game itself, especially in such a mainstream series as the Legend of Zelda, was a risky and off-putting move.  I love the game for it.
Time limits, from a writing perspective, are their own unique beast.  Trying to write one into a story is actually probably easier in video games than any other medium, since all one has to do is take the major conflict of the game and say to the player “If you’re not successful after this long, too bad.”  Take whatever the player is trying to do, since games are most certainly about doing, and make it have to be done within a certain time.  “The Archduke will conquer your country in seven months,” “the meteor will collide with the planet in 12 hours,” etc.
90 years, make your time.
The problem, then, is knowing how a player will react to a time limit being imposed on them.  I know people who flat out refuse to play Majora’s Mask because they wouldn’t want the timer hanging over their head, and I’d be lying if I said I didn’t feel the same way when the game first game out.  Like I mentioned at the beginning of this article, a fair number of players are not happy to see a time limit pop up, it can feel like a cruel judge staring down at you, letting you know your playing is substandard.  So how do you make the time limit bearable?
Well, there’s obviously the Person 4/Spideman VS The Kingpin method (that needs to be the name of something else, a psychology treatment or something), of giving the player a huge amount of time, so they only feel the crunch when it gets down to… well, the crunch.  But with the shorter time limits, I think giving the player some fair warning of the impending nature is good, if you simply wish to keep them happy, but the element of surprise is a great way to snap the audience into investment in the game.  The Metroid series would be great at this if they didn’t do it in every bloody game, especially considering the placement.  Defeat the final boss, a grueling, seemingly endless battle… you stand proudly, if bruised, over the ruin of your enemy’s empire.  Then, almost casually, a few numbers slip their way into view, and your heart takes a wholesome, two-footed jump into you gut.
Speaking of those numbers, should a player always know the time they have left?  Persona 4 technically doesn’t tell the player, and that works quite well, but for shorter limits, and even game like Majora’s Mask, the knowledge of the time limit is crucial.  I’m becoming more and more of a fan of hiding information from players, but I’ll get to that in another article.  For time limits, at least, they should know what they’re doing, and those little numbers, while annoying, need to be seen.
So, to cap it all off, let me discuss one last thing: implied time limits, situations in which the players are told they have a fixed time to complete some task, but the game actually lets them tale as much sweet-ass time as they wish.  I have never thought these were good ideas.  Which is to say, it breaks the player from the game entirely.  If the time limit isn’t real, or doesn’t feel real, there is no added pressure, no increase in conflict, and actually provides a bit of a decrease when the player can sit back and say “Oh, well, I have all the time in the world.”  If you’re going to make the story have a time limit, make sure the player feels it, understands it, and, maybe a teeny bit, fears it.