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.

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.