Tuesday, March 29

On Writing for One or Many

Being a fairly solitary kid, I never owned many multiplayer games, and those that I did own had the multiplayer as an attachment, and very rarely as a focus.  For instance, the multiplayer in Goldeneye was well loved, but the game was primarily a single player shooter, whereas Super Smash Bros. was about the multiplayer much more than the single player modes.
Multiplayer, especially online multiplayer, is becoming extremely popular as a way to squeeze longevity out of games with little on their own.  Writing a multiplayer game needn’t be terribly difficult either, utilizing options like the secondary character otherwise being computer controlled (Gears of War), or by making the other character only there in terms of gameplay (Halo), or writing an entirely different series of events based on the multiplayer option (Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory).  However, the best multiplayer tends to be human VS human, because facing down a computer with limited thought is one thing, but trying to kill an actively thinking human is another.
Can you feel her adorable scorn?
 That leads us to the problem of whether a game with multiplayer should have a single player mode with just as much effort put in, or as Yahtzee Croshaw puts it, “Every game should be able to stand up on single player alone.”  I like saying that, but again, it’s because I don’t have many friends, and when you start saying what art should and shouldn’t do then you’re going to get a lot of unkind glances from behind sunglasses and under berets.  However, the question of how to write a human VS human multiplayer game is an interesting one.
An article on The Escapist first brought this to mind, from an interview with Brink’s head writer, Edward Stern.  Brink is a shooter game coming May 17, set in 2045, when the icecaps have melted and the seas have risen, where mankind survives on isolated artificial islands.  Different factions vie for control and blah blah blah.  What is interesting is having the storyline play out for players who must choose different sides in this world.  I’m going to quote the interview directly:

"If you play the Security storyline, we've got credible intel that there is a bio-weapon lab. So you go, 'That's what that map is about,'" Stern said. "You play that [same map] from the Resistance side and they say, 'They're stealing our vaccine.'" Once you realize that vaccines are made from viruses, which could be used as bio-weapons, a simple mission suddenly has a lot of grey area morality that will hopefully engage players."

While this does have something to it, I found myself underwhelmed.  I thought perhaps this would be something marvelous, some method of letting players interact with each other and still create an advancing, interesting story.  It would be difficult, but it can be done.  I think we can actually look to Guild Wars II for some inspiration.  The game’s not out yet, so I’ll be going by what’s been said in interviews and press releases.  The basic idea is that the designers didn’t want the players to feel like they weren’t having an affect on the world.  Usually in an MMO, player hear of a farmer besieged by wolves, and must kill a specific number that are simply lounging about in a certain area.  But in Guild Wars II, the wolves would actually be attacking the farmer’s land, and the quest could be failed and the land destroyed, or the wolves driven back and the farm saved.
It is here that we see the potential.  If the different factions of a multiplayer game are entirely human, and can actually affect the game world, it can greatly improve players’ investment.  Separating the whole battle with an ethical question can make the fight all the more fierce, and leads not only to continued interest as the issue is quite literally battled out, but to some possibly beautiful poetic moments as players are locked in firefights and shouting back and forth through their headsets, not with a constant stream of swear and pseudo-slurs, but with intelligent rhetoric.
Like this, but with more assault rifles.
That’s… probably not going to happen, at least not to that extent, and I can already think up problems with that kind of system, like players only choosing one side, or mostly choosing that, making the game incredibly unbalanced.
But now, would this hypothetical game have a single player campaign to match its multiplayer?  Would any of its hypothetical budget even be allotted to the single player department?  Should it?  This is a dilemma impossible to equate with other media, since there really are no multiplayer movies or music.  Unlike the writing concerns of games, there’s really no place to look for even a starting suggestion.
I see no problem with games being solely multiplayer affairs, since the social gaming movement has proved that the methods can be used to great effect.  Extra Credits boasts that the free in-browser game Echo Bazaar accomplishes this quite well, if you’re interested.  I haven’t had time yet to give it a whirl, but I plan to at some point, if for no other reason than it’s steampunk themed.
But how to write a story for one player or many?  In games, especially MMOs, this could be akin to the Holy Grail.  I think the key is not, in fact, to try to make each character stand out.  In these situations, the player must be part of something larger, with the potential to be important.  Players, like all people, need a goal, some method to succeed not only in the society they’re placed, but something by which the can measure their own improvement.  For instance, players’ ranks could be not only determined by their prowess in combat, but votes from other members of factions.  Players less able at combat become medics or tacticians, to round out the entire force.  Team Fortress 2 is a blueprint for great design ideas.
So, not an entirely feasible idea right now, even with game budgets as bloated as they are.  The key to take away is the transfer of importance between single and multiplayer games.  Making the world feel affected by the actions of how ever many players there are keeps those players interested, keeps them wanting to do more.  It’s all fun and such to ricochet a sniper bullet eight times and take down a man around several corners, but the real meat of experience, in achievement, is change.

Tuesday, March 22

On Interactive Sex

Sex has been a great point of controversy in games, for what is basically their entire existence.  Naturally, it has been the point of controversy in other media as well, but those seem to have gotten past it.  Music, TV, movies, books, have all had their turn in the hot seat.  Right now, it’s gaming’s turn, and so far the general output of sexualized content in games has been mostly unhelpful.
How did we ever think THIS was a bad idea?
The trouble first really started in 1982, with a game many of you may have heard about, Custer’s Revenge.  For those of you with too good of taste to have ever looked to deeply into this thing, you play a crudely rendered General Custer who must make his way across a field bombarded by arrows so he could rape a Native woman tied to a cactus.  The Angry Video Game Nerd has done a review of older sex games, which is equal parts funny and educational, so I encourage you to check it out.
Since Custer’s Revenge though, games have endeavored to show sex in a more enlightened fashion.  There are, in fact, a large number of games with sex in them, such as Mass Effect, Dragon Age, Heavy Rain, God of War, etc.  These are all mainstream titles, and they all depict sexual activities, but only one was ever really called out for it, Mass Effect.  People complained about it being a porn simulator, but of course never saw what happened, or what the scene consisted of.  God of War was much more terse with its lone sex scene, and it was primarily there for a bit of extra experience and a re-tutorial on the Quick Time Events.
Before I get into the real discussion (strap in, this may be a long one), I want to pull a quote from Extra Credits, done by Daniel Floyd, James Portnow, and Alison Theis.  You can find a link to their videos on the left.  Specifically, I’m pulling this from their “Sex in Games” episode.
“… actually playing a sex scene will almost always feel gratuitous, the simulacra of that act just naturally destroys immersion.”
I think I understand where they’re coming from on this issue, but I don’t think the quest for making immersive, interactive sex is a wasted endeavor.  The first time we see sex in a movie is awkward and throws one from the experience, as is the first sex scene we read in a book.  However, all other media have managed to get past that first hurdle.  It could be that gaming, and the necessity of interaction, are what make it difficult, but I believe it can be pulled off.
The game I’ve played that got the closest to an interactive sex scene is Heavy Rain.  I know some people are loathe to call it a game, but that’s not what we’re here to talk about today.
Makes me want to write an article
about the Uncanny Valley.
Heavy Rain plays out with a control scheme specific to each situation the player is in.  There are various prompts that appear and the player chooses one to perform the movements of.  There is a scene about three quarters through the game where two of characters make out and enter a sex scene.  Or can, I haven’t seen it not happen.  You control your character right up to the point where they actually begin having sex.  For all its faults, this game is wonderfully immersive, and I think the control scheme is one of the better methods by which we could experience interactive sex.
I’m sure there are some people who are now asking the question of why we’d want to experience sex like this.  As I never stop saying, video games are about experiences, and should endeavor to bring the gaming audience the widest variety of experiences they can.  Sex is an emotional, primal, and fundamental part of human existence.  To deny its translation as a gaming experience would be, I believe, a profound loss for the art.
As for the place of sex in stories, it’s been on my mind a lot lately.  When a character has sex, that says a lot about them.  The why, the when, the how, that’s important to them.  Do they get emotionally involved?  Do they avoid relationships as much as possible?  These are more than questions about sex, these are questions about relationships. 
These questions help define a character, and the way they interact with others.  Often, it reveals a side of a character others do not often get to see.  For instance, in Dragon Age Origins, you can get a character in your party named Zevran, a very sexual character, and provides a sexual partner whether your character is male or female.  Zevran is a man who takes a very casual approach to sex, and often hits on the protagonist, leading the player to believe that having sex with Zevran will be consequence-free.  Later, the player find out that there is more depth to Zevran’s character.  He actually does become fairly attached to the protagonist, and will take it quite hard if the protagonist decides to end their relationship.  When this happens, he seems genuinely betrayed and seems, if only for a moment, to regret his choices regarding his sexual lifestyle.
Another point that I’ve found to be very effective is the implication of sex.  For instance, in Persona 3 and 4 there is the heavy implications of sex when the player completes that character’s Social Link.  Chie, happy together,” along with a voice over from that character.  I find, though I’m sure other people don’t, that this implies sexual intimacy between the characters, and makes their relationship so much more affecting.
Are you that shocked?
This is a game in which you can buy babies.
Alright, the last thing I want to talk about is the interactive sex that already exists between players.  For instance, playing the Sims online, or in Second Life are able to have their characters perform sexual acts with other characters.  In Second Life especially, they are able to even create specialized areas the are Sadomasochist dungeons, where players will go to role-play less conventional sex.  This is at least a step in the right direction, as it does acknowledge that sex is possible in games.  The sexual acts performed may not be perfect, or necessarily look realistic, but it’s clearly enough for the hundreds and hundreds that already play.  There are lots of things to learn from online games and the relationships people naturally develop in other settings, even one with few real consequences.
It is from the relationships of real people that we can create believable and real relationships in games, and I believe that those relationships will be able to go as far as any real one.  It may take some time, and it will take endurance on the part of the audience, the want to last through the first awkward shambling steps we take.  But if we can take our time, and give the first attempts the constructive criticism they need, we make it through the controversy that arises, and come out the other side with a vastly matured medium.

Tuesday, March 15

On Playing

Oh Lego, is there anything you can't do?
A popular mantra in writing, whether screenwriting, novels, comics, or poetry, is “Show, don’t tell.”  This is a simple idea, though very hard to pull off in an effective manner.  Often evoking emotions is much more effective when some of the most important things are left unsaid, but implied through character action.  It also serves to keep the story interesting.  Action and conflict keep people reading, or watching, or whatever, and not just ramping a burning car off the roof of a building rigged to explode, either.  Action can be two people sitting across a table trying to calmly eat dinner.
Anyway, games need a different mantra.  While “Show, don’t tell,” is still a good practice, especially in cutscenes or situations of exposition, but games are active.  You cannot show a game to someone and have him or her experience it as a game.  That’s why a better mantra for games is “Play, don’t show.”
This core concept may seem easy to comprehend, but for budding designers, and for writers especially, we’ve learned to tell stories that can be told or shown to our intended audience.  This is a linear approach to storytelling, and while gaming can and has taken that route for quite some time, there are greater possibilities unique to the medium.
If you’d be so kind as to let me indulge my inner over-analyzing English-major self for a second, I’d like to go back to a game I mentioned last week, The Path.  The Path sets up a purely linear objective (Get to Grandma’s house and stay on the path), but that is not how to finish the game.  The player must go off the path and deliberately stray from the linear narrative into a world without directions, without a Path.  They must find their own story, and explore a world in motion.  The game itself is a beautiful representation of a story that could only be told in a video game, and it’s even an adaptation of a story hundreds of years old.
This is the foundation to the advancement of gaming as an art form.  Gaming is far more accepted in this way now, but it has yet to produce the truly amazing cultural touchstones that lie in other media.  Which is not to say it can’t or won’t.  Obviously, I wouldn’t write a blog or talk so much about something I didn’t truly believe was capable of advancing not only art, but culture.  Interactivity is not viable in other media, and that means there are few with enough practice and time to truly utilize the tools games have at their disposal.
This came to me as I was reading through The Ultimate Guide to Video Game Writing And Design, and I was wondering how to show through play that the main character I am working with likes to vandalize billboards by painting over them.  How could I deliver this mission to the player without blatantly having anyone say “Go paint stuff on that billboard”?  I’ve been struggling with this idea for weeks, trying to figure out the best way to go about this.  Then I realized that I don’t have to tell or show the player what to do.  I can let them do it.  I can designer levels so they end up going where I want them to, I can have a prompt come up asking them to interact with the billboard when they near it.  I can let them create a pretty picture, and I can let them do it again.  This is what will start the game’s story.  I don’t want it to be a cutscene; I don’t want it to be a Tutorial.  If the game is made right, no one will ever notice the tutorial was there.
Now, onto dissecting the words of another famous game developer, David Jaffe.  You may recognize the name as the creator of God of War and the Twisted Metal games.  I remember when my interest in game design was just beginning to bloom, I watched the creator commentary videos for God of War (unlocked after beating the game).  Jaffe was focused, in a way I didn’t expect.  He knew what his character needed to be, and how to make him that, not only to characterize, but also to create enjoyment for the player.
I actually think I like him better in blue...
Jaffe, in a recent blog post entitled Shit or Get Off the Pot... called out “artsy” games as using “smoke and mirrors bullshit” to garner praise and adoration from not only the gaming public, but journalists as well.  His blog post is quite relevant to what I was just saying.  Jaffe points out that art does not need to loudly declare itself art.  I believe he’s right, but I understand the situation.  This is something that the Internet, and therefore a large quantity of the gaming community, has trouble with.  The Internet is well known for not being a place of subtle wit and high-minded, equal-opportunity debate.  It is a place where many people stick to their beliefs as strongly as possible, and that unfortunately manifests as those beliefs being shoved in your face.  As in everything else, we need to play this whole thing cool.
If we really want the world at large to accept games as an art form, then we need to let it be that art form.  We don’t need to talk about how games are like other media, how they have comparable stories to Kill Bill (my favourite movie) or Atlas Shrugged (a book I’ll probably never read).  What works for a book doesn’t work for a movie, which doesn’t work for a game.  The individuality of the medium has to be the focus of what makes that media great.  Watch a movie, make notes about how things done there could be done in a book, or compare a comic and movie, or comic and book.  Then take all of those media, and try to figure out how to translate gameplay into them.
We can tell people about games all we want, we can show people games all we want, but that isn’t gaming.  Until we have them playing, they cannot understand the medium, and cannot believe in it like so many of us already do. 

Tuesday, March 8

On The Interactive Medium

Today, a friend of mine posed the question, “Are tabletop games, like Dungeons & Dragons, better equipped to tell a story than video games are?”  I took a bit of time to consider this, since it pulled my thoughts to Will Wright’s (Creator of The Sims, Spore, and related games) recent statement that “Games are not the right medium to tell stories.  Video games are more about story possibilities.”  I’ll dissect that quote a bit later.  At the time though, Wright’s quote made me realize something I’ve been struggling to put into words:  Video Game are not about stories, but experiences.
Which is not to say a game need avoid story, or shy away from one.  Hell, we’re only just starting to see the beginning of the great stories that can be told in games.  But to really understand what makes video gaming different from reading or watching movies, we have to look carefully at the aspects unique to the medium.  In this case, there is one that stands above all others:  Video games are interactive.
It seems at first like an obvious statement.  Of course games are interactive, you can’t play something that doesn’t, in some capacity, play with you.  Even a child with a cardboard box is interacting, mostly through the child’s imagination.  But then we take that statement, “Video games are interactive,” and set aside.  There is no other form of media that can achieve the same level of interaction as Games, because it is the most basic, fundamental concept on which gaming is built.
To rope the article back on track, I answered my friend’s question with a “No.”  I have played my fair share of Tabletops and more than my fair share of Video Games, and I can confidently say that video games are better equipped to deliver experiences.  This may come as a surprise, since a video game is limited by the method by which we experience it, that is, through computer data.  Your experience is limited by what it is programmed to be.  But in a tabletop game, you are free to try anything, though your level of success will vary according to your character.  Not only that, but a video game is coded as it is, and that coding does not change, though some is advanced enough to recognize how one plays.  A tabletop is an active creation, at the will of the Dungeon Master, everything can change, so the game can be constantly modified to suit players’ wants.
So, a game built with experience limitations, and one built without.  Why would I argue for the restrictive one?  Because of immersive capability.  I’ve seen people get really involved in Dungeons & Dragons games, they care very deeply about the goings on and their experience, but whenever they want something to happen, they are doomed to look at a long sheet of numbers, do some quick math, and spit out a sum.  That process, that necessity of visible mathematics, prevents tabletops from going as far as a video game can.  In a video game, those numbers still process, the result still say what does and doesn’t happen, but now the player has no immediate indication that it’s there.  In a game, we do not have to calculate our experiences, that’s done for us.  We are free to experience as we are able.
In addition, not knowing all the rules to a video game can give us pause to consider our actions more carefully than we normally would.  As an example The Path.  This game has been out for a fair while, but I’ll put a SPOILER WARNING here and the cover image to the left for anyone who wishes to play spoiler-free.  The rest of you still here, play it anyway.
In The Path, you play as six Red Riding Hoods, and your objective is to find your Red Hood’s specific wolf.  Each girl has a different wolf to find, and with that wolf, a different way to die.  The only instructions are to go to Grandma’s house and stay on the path.  This is possible, and makes you lose.  Instead, you must head off the path and into the woods to find your wolf.  Your are only told the most basic of controls, and can never be sure of what consequences your actions may have.  This serves to make the game very tense causes the player to very carefully weigh their actions, especially when they don’t know that their objective is to die.
By throwing instructional convention for a loop, The Path gives players a more involved experience, using only some movement and basic “interact” controls.  END SPOILER WARNING.  Many games have the capacity to achieve this same kind of effect, but miss it by sticking to the idea that a player should be aware of the experience they’re having.  No person is able to say the with any certainty the kind of experience they’re dealing with until it’s over, and I feel that games should strive for the same.  Let the player experience, don’t tell them how to experience.  Let the experience a world their way, a story their way, as best as you can with the tools available.
“Games are not the right medium to tell stories,” said Will Wright.  In watching Wright’s TED presentation (go do it) on creating and experiencing worlds, and in his recent interview at CNN, I’ve noticed that he has come to a very clear understanding of what he wants from a game.  He wants to see a world he can impact and change, a story he creates.  Basically, he wishes for another world of complete experience.  The way he talks often makes it seem as if he finds a story-driven game to be somewhat beneath the open world concept games he’s created, but I would argue that he does not believe that.  Instead, he strikes me as a man who wishes to see the medium of games come into its own, to flourish as an art separate from all others.  He wishes to see games set themselves apart to force the popular world to recognize the medium and the unique aspects it carries.  For this, I share in his goal.  I can’t wait for the say when I can ask anyone on the street if they play games, and almost every single one will answer yes, and no one will judge the medium solely on its name.  Games are growing, establishing themselves as a new art, and to be here, now, as a new art truly begins to take shape, is a fantastical and breathtaking experience.

Tuesday, March 1

On Gating Mechanisms

Back from a very relaxing and satisfying reading week, thank you all for your immense concern at me missing an update.  Really guys, I don’t know how I’d go on without you.  Seriously though, I never expected many people to read this blog, so the real irony is that I’m being sarcastic to no one because I have no one.  Ah well, doesn’t stop me from writing about what I love.
This week: Gating Mechanisms.  Gating Mechanisms are a design trick to make sure of two things:  1) That you spend at least the standard eight to ten hours playing a game, and 2) That you don’t go to an area before the designers want you to.  It’s a method by which games can be more reliably paced, not only in storyline events, but in difficulty.  It’s a way to ensure you actually explore the game, rather than blasting straight through it.  I’m sure there are many examples you can think of right away, for instance, the Legend of Zelda series is all about Gating.  Most often, you’ll find it impossible to advance without collecting the next item in Link’s increasingly silly arsenal (See below).   That’s what these mechanisms do, keep you playing until you hit the next marker.
Not Pictured: Dignity
Zelda’s style is not the best way to do it.  If you’ve played these games, then you may have at some point asked yourself that question:  “Why is there a random hookshot point on that cliff face?”  Well, because the designers don’t want you going there until you’ve progressed far enough to have acquired the hookshot.  Something designers need to be able to keep track off is the player’s health and power.  For instance, you don’t want a first level WOW character stepping into the realm of the Lich King.  Therefore, they blocked access to that area until the player is of a level where they can survive.  In a similar vein, Halo gave us the Regenerating Health trope of recent shooter games, which proved a huge boon to developers, who are now able to predict the amount of health almost every player would have when entering a given area.  Knowing that makes it much easier to design a steady and sensible difficulty curve.  While shooter games work well on this principle, other genres can suffer, and so Gating Mechanisms are used to ensure the same thing.
More of a masterpiece than anyone
wants to give it credit for.
Like all game mechanics, Gating Mechanisms are best used when they blend imperceptibly into the story and gameplay.  The best example I can think of right now is Final Fantasy: Crystal Chronicles.  In FF:CC, you must pass through Miasma Streams: areas of a highly concentrated poison attuned to a specific element.  You must attune the crystal you carry to that same element to pass through, but the elements rotate every year, and the place where can attune your crystal does not.  This, unknowingly to the players, forces them to take different routes to complete their yearly quests and continue the story, causing them to explore and understand the world more fully.  There is a moment later on in the game that is another good Gating Mechanism, but I’ll leave you to figure that one out when you play it (and you should).
If you look at older platformer titles, or almost any game that goes on a level-by-level method (Call of Duty: Modern Warfare), then you can see that Gating wasn’t as necessary.  The designers knew that each level would start out close to the same, and the player could be depended on to often have completed levels with a mushroom or fire flower.  Also, the games were perfectly linear.  The start point was always the same, the endpoint was always the same, and so was the general path the player had to take, with a few warp-point-style exceptions.  This linear platformer didn’t need Gating.
On the other hand: Grand Theft Auto 4.  Great game, terrible use of Gating.  Rockstar was forced into using gating to give player something to shoot for outside of story or character progression: world progression.  This is the same reward used in MMOs, which we’ll get to in a moment.  The designers blocked of the bridges connecting parts of the city, and made it a near-death sentence to attempt to break through.  The police barricade could be well defined, but to have absolutely no connection between parts of a city is ludicrous.  GTA4 sells itself as a gritty and dramatically ‘real’ game.  Many aspects, such as car controls and their attention to detail (Future Article!) reinforce this.  Any city that needed to close down a bridge would open a tunnel, or a ferry, or some other method to make sure the citizens could get where they needed to go.  Worse, when the player sees that barrier, they know precisely that it is to stop them progressing.  Whatever excuse is given for that barrier being there four times is not going to even come into the player’s head.
One quick shot at MMOs before we wrap up.  MMOs, specifically WOW, are forced to use purely gameplay related Gates to corral the players, and they come in two forms.  The first is quite blatant, and that is the game flat-out telling the player their level is not high enough to enter an area like Northrend or Outland.  The other, and far better for possible story or other use is the strength of the enemies in a given area.  You must grind, you must stay and power up, just so you can see the next area.  This is one of many, many tactics a game can use to make you keep playing.
So, what are the bright sides to these last two problems?  GTA’s problem is something I think Rockstar ended up nipping in the bud pretty well in their western cowboy philosophy-fest (as opposed to their big city gangster philosophy-fest).  Unlike GTA4, the character is much less likely to run across these blockades, and the blockades themselves are more varied.  By phasing these Gates into the background the player might be pleasantly surprised, or better, not even notice when they unlocked a new area.  For MMOs, the problem is bigger.  Those games depend on players committing massive time to the game to keep up subscriptions (which I’m glad to see are disappearing), and as such, need to make sure the player has a need for that grind, endless though it may be.  MMOs more focused on story can give reasons for this Gating, and letting characters be more involved in the world itself would help immensely.  I’m interested to take a whack a Guild Wars 2, as it looks like this may be right on track with what they’re doing.
To summarize, Gating is an acceptable method of design, as long as it is handled with the care any mechanic gets.  Try not to make it obvious in implementation, but let the player fantasize about what lies beyond each gate if you want them to keep coming back.  Lastly, it’s okay to discourage a player with a small penalty for trying to bypass a Gate, but penalize too much and they’ll throw their controller away in frustration before you can even make them interested.