On Meaningful Death

Player death can be many things.  It can be the end of an extremely cathartic murder spree in Grand Theft Auto, it can be a temporary inconvenience in a 99-Stock match of Super Smash Brothers, or it can be the last thing that happens before a controller shatters into a million irreparable fragments on a wall.  Death can be quite funny (Monkey Island), a plot development (Demon’s Souls, Infinity Blade), and a major, infuriating setback (Castlevania: Symphony of the Night).

I said at the beginning of this blog (waaaaaaaay back in January), I want to talk about not just videogames, but tabletop dice and board games like Dungeons & Dragons, or even Candyland if I find something really amazing about it (I totally could, too).  At time of writing, I’m the Dungeon Master for three Dungeons & Dragon games, one in 4^th Edition, two in 3.5.  I’ve played many others, so I like to think that I’ve got a good handle on what I want from a tabletop role-playing experience.

Specifically, I want to talk about a character of mine, and how he died.  I was far more angry than I could’ve suspected I would have been, and after an hour or so of cooling down, I had to figure out why.  Why had this death bugged me so much?

I think it happened something like this.

Well, here’s the scenario:  Our group had just managed to kill a fairly powerful enemy, mostly thanks to my character’s planning ability and firepower (I’m not trying to say I’m awesome, this is statistically true), and after the fight, an argument came up between another player and I which resulted in me threatening to blast him with a lightning bolt.  I was then informed that I’d been sneak attacked by a supposedly friendly NPC and taken 69 points of damage to my (Max) 50 hit points.  Those of you who know D&D 3.5 and D20 Modern know this means instant death.

So I died, and I was angry, extremely angry, why?

It made everything I did pointless.  Not pointless to the party, but pointless to me.  To have such a massive victory and then die against something I truly had no way to see coming and no way to defend against indicated that I didn’t matter, and my contribution was ultimately meaningless.  This has led me to a very important note:

Character death should always be meaningful.

You can argue all you wish about how poignant my death may have been to the overall message of the game, but I’ll save space and assure you, it wasn’t.  There’s no time I’ve played with a DM capable of making a strong artistic message in a game, though I’d honestly love to.  What I mean by “meaningful” is not that it must always advance the story, but that the player comes away as satisfied as possible.  When a character dies, they should feel that the death was as awesome as anything they did in life, or depending on the style of game, extremely funny.

Despite what many artists will be more than happy to tell you, games need to be engaging.  Engaging in this instance means that the game makes them want to keep playing and reach the end.  The fastest way to turn a person off a game, is to make their playtime pointless.  Spending even a half hour on a dungeon in Dragon Age: Origins only to die to one chain lightning spell is not how to keep people engaged.

Now, in videogames, you can always make a death meaningful in the same way.  The key, then, is how much you set your player back.  If you’re not using autosaves in your game, put a prompt asking the player if they’d like to save prior to a difficult section, or leave minor check points along every level.  If you are using an autosave feature, keep it separate from the player’s own hard saves like in Fallout 3, and make sure you space them fairly close together.  And for the love of Schaefer, try not to make the reload after death a penalty itself.

For the record, this is the best
purchase I've made this year.

The reason I brought up Castlevania earlier should be apparent to anyone who’s played it, or has seen James Rolfe's Castlevania retrospective (which you should).  It takes an abhorrent amount of time from death to getting back in the game.  Cut the load times.  I don’t care what has to be done to the game, but after I die, don’t make it load longer than the level took to load in the first place.  Dragon Age, I’m looking at you.

Something else to think about is how to penalize death.  Gamers themselves are quite split on this issue.  Bioware recently announced that in their upcoming MMO Star Wars: The Old Republic death would take a little from the player, but not too much.  Unsurprisingly, they immediately began to receive flak from both sides, those who didn’t want penalties, and those who wanted steep penalties.

In the setting of an MMO, no penalty for death means no risk for players.  One could argue that having to travel all the way back to where you died is a penalty, but in the grand scheme of MMO playtime, it’s far to paltry to have any real impact.  The slight experience loss common to many MMOs ensures that the player feels the sting, but again, invalidates much of the work they’ve just done.

So what’s an MMO designer to do?  Well, I think they’ve so far done the best they can.  A loss of experience, something easily regained by the player, something made to keep them playing, and it keeps lower level players confined to the areas safe for them, making them level up not only to be able to complete the next big quest, but to get to the next big area.  It’s a psychological game, and they’re playing it quite well.

That said, here’s something to contemplate: Why must we fence a player in with obvious game mechanics?  MMOs are not above having a story, and game designers (some) are masters of some serious psychological warfare.  There are ways to keep player where you want them to be.  The Legend of Zelda keeps you where it wants you by just plain old not giving you the tool you need to advance.  While this isn’t necessarily the best method, it certainly works better than killing you if you step out of bounds, and actually facilitates exploration within the area you have.

Overall, death (or failure, however that may manifest) is a crucial part of making a game have weight and meaning, whether tabletop or video.  The key, as with all things, is to treat it right.  You can say artistic things with a player’s death, but the moment it stops being engaging is the moment it stops having meaning.

On Minimalism & Subtractive Design

There is much to be said about working with only the barest of tools.  Minimalist works give us art that can be beautiful in visual or aural simplicity, and the idea of stripping away everything superfluous can create very focused and tight works.

Minimalism is originally a term used in architecture, where the designs of a building are reduced until all that remains are the absolutely necessary pieces.  In games, it’s the attempt to get down to the fundamental aspect of games as an art form.  That is, interactivity.

Games are interactive by nature, and though I believe all art is the process of interaction between artist and audience, games are the only medium that truly focuses on that quality.  I believe this is one of the reasons we see many game artists rallying against the idea of cutscene heavy games.

Probably some of the best examples of minimalist game design come from Rod Humble, whose games you may find for free here.  Humble’s games only use the simplest of graphics and sounds, which only convey minor ideas.  It’s in play, at its purest form, that he attempts to portray an experience.  There are framing devices given by the games’ titles, which provide a bit of crucial context for the idea at play, but that’s all the context we get.

It speaks to me, man.

Because I work from a Mac, I can’t download Humble’s games, but I’d like to look at a similar game created by Gregory Weir over at Ludus Novus.  His game, Procrastination, is about as simplistic visually as games can get.  You can see an image from the game to the left.  If you want to play it for yourself and figure out what’s going on with the different coloured blocks there, go and play it before I tell you.

You play the game as the thick, light grey bar near the bottom, collecting the falling blue and yellow blocks.  The bar you are is just short enough that you can’t possibly collect both types of blocks at once.  The blue blocks represent the work you do, and the yellow blocks represent your procrastination.  You procrastinate to stay happy, and though work is less available at your most happy, it begins to fall faster the more you collect until your happiness gets too low.  Hard to work when you’re too used to the lazy life, hard to work when you’re already overworked.

If that last paragraph sounds complicated, it’s because Weir has created a fantastic relationship between work and pleasure, and has translated it into a frighteningly simple game.  And so we can all be certain I’m not making this up, or looking for more meaning than can reasonably be argued for: After the white bar at the top of the screen (time remaining) disappears, you’re treated to a scoring screen that lets you know how well you worked or procrastinated, with separate scores for the number of jobs completed, your productivity rate, and even your Ennui.

To finally come to the point, it is Weir’s intention here to create as purely an interactive experience as is possible.  This is Minimalism’s greatest value in gaming: to examine the core, unique aspect of the medium, stripped away from superfluous art, music, dialogue, or even much context.

A method related, at least in philosophy, to Minimalism in games is Subtractive Design.  Subtractive Design is best explained through representation.  Team Ico have done a wonderful job at providing two examples in Ico and Shadow of the Colossus.

If you don't have it, go buy it.  Now.

Shadow of the Colossus is about a boy trying to resurrect a girl.  More than that, it’s about the toll that his quest takes on him.  Look at the mechanics of the game: Sixteen fights with massive, seemingly impossible-to-kill creatures, and riding your horse between those fights.  Barely anything when compared to the vast array of mechanics in say, Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, but still one of the more critically acclaimed games out there.  That’s because when the creators sat down, they took the core idea of “Boy has a tough time getting back girl,” put it in a platform/adventure game type, and then tore away everything that didn’t need to be there.  There is no count for the number of arrows you have, no weapon degradation, just you, your horse, a grip gauge and a health bar.

They were able to polish the more subtle, and yet very important aspects.  The relationship you can develop with your horse, the slow blackening of the boy’s skin, the look and feel of every ruin you pass through.  All of these elements were given preference over giving you another weapon, or even an NPC to talk to.

With Subtractive Design, the question you should pose to any element of the game is: “is it necessary to help the core idea?”  If not, it can probably be safely cut.  Hence “Subtractive.”  Start with all the common elements of the genre, and cut until you have only what you need.  This is why we’ve seen health bars disappear from shooters, or the ability to carry a complete arsenal of guns.  Those elements detracted from the experience of hectic, difficult, and realistic warfare that the developers were trying to create.

Subtractive design allows for very tight and focused games, but it has its share of issues.  It means that during the creative process, there will have to be a very clear and succinct description of the game, and when perfect clarity is brought into play, it can be more polarizing, causing many people to figure out that they never liked the idea in the first place, and even more people to realize the game feels insubstantial on paper.

Ubisoft or EA, you have a vast number of tools at your disposal to refine any element you choose for the game.  But if you’re working from your bedroom, or from a University club (as indeed I am), then your budget of about zero dollars won’t allow you as much refinement.  Your options then become slim.

In these situations, I find it best to focus on what you have access to.  For instance, in your RPG, you may not have the money for long, fully animated cutscenes, but maybe your school has a drama program, and voice actors who will work for exposure rather than money.  Maybe you happen to have a dedicated programmer in the school who knows the Unreal Engine inside and out.  In situations like these, I find the best method is to morph your game to play to the strengths of your resources.  If in College or University, get those people on your team, because this is probably the latest in life you can still get them to work for free.

On Morality

Since Fable III recently came out, and I’ve had a good chance to play through it, I thought I’d revisit that popular (now fortunately less so) idea of binary morality in games.  Many reviewers, critics, and analysts have gone over some of the problems with binary morality, and out of all of them, I suggest looking at Extra Credits, which is a fantastic series anyway, why aren’t you watching it? 

This issue has only really been present in the console gaming mainstream since the overhype of the original Fable, when it became really visible as a selling point for a new wave of choice-based games.  I’m going to take a look at the morality displayed throughout the Fable games and how it has (or hasn’t) evolved, and take a quick look at some other games that do variations on the theme.

Face it: Evil gets the more badass crown.

I don’t blame Peter Molyneux for his over-excitement at the release of Fable.  The man genuinely thought that he’d implemented morality as the main gameplay mechanic, and his excitement was so great he promised a lot of things Lionhead Studios was unable to deliver on.  The development process of games is harsh and unforgiving, and while it got him quite a bit of flack, it was great to see someone so starry-eyed and enamoured in an industry so commonly full of brown and gray slop.

That said, I think Molyneux has yet to identify the core flaw with the morality system he has in place.  He’s trying to create a feeling of real effectiveness and choice using a binary system.  Binary morality does not exist in the world at large.  A specific person may see things as only good or evil, but that person’s neighbor will see things very differently.

Still, the Fable series is getting better.  Though not yet fully implemented, the games can be seen trying to interpret the player’s actions more liberally.  Early in Fable III, you acquire a set of heroic weapons your ancestor left behind.  These weapons change in design every time you increase their power, and viewing the weapon’s description will tell you why and how.  For instance, my badass war hammer said, “Your weapon has adopted a bronze sheen in response to the large number of Guild Seals (Experience) you’ve collected.”  This actually gave me a more personal feeling than I thought it might.  The game was in fact paying attention to how I played, even ever so slightly.

The main problem of the binary morality system is that the game makes judgments on the player’s choices.  I tend to think that good and evil are devoid of any real meaning, that they’re subjective concepts unique to each person viewing them.  But playing Fable is like arguing with an infuriatingly opinionated deaf man, and produces similar results. 

A great example of this is found in the latter half of Fable III.  A spoiler warning is now in effect for anyone who cares. 

After becoming Albion’s new Monarch, you’re given a slew of good and evil choices regarding the state of your kingdom, and you also find out that a horrid creature from beyond time itself is coming to destroy the kingdom lest you raise six and a half million Gold.  Naturally the “Evil” options get you the money you need, and the “Good” options make everyone like you, at least until they’re murdered by the aforementioned monstrosity.  The “Evil” options range from “reinstate child labour” to “drain a lake to mine for valuable minerals,” and the “Good” counterparts are “open a school” or “leave the pretty lake alone.”  I don’t care if you put this game on the CryEngine, that lake is not pretty enough to die for.

See, games with binary morality have to make judgments that always fit simply into Good and Evil with no middle ground and no space for other ideals like the pervasiveness of government control or propaganda.  This is why everyone complained in the first Fable that everything was either sunshine and rainbows or Hitler and Ming the Merciless; those cartoonishly ”evil” and “good” decisions were the only things people would commonly agree on.

Morality systems in games should, I believe, do more than give the player a chance to role-play basic decisions.  Instead they should provide an opportunity to look at our own decisions, and deal with the consequences as they come.  But Fable imposes meaningless value judgments on those choices, not letting the player deal with the consequences, but instead simply assigning the player a pair of horns or a halo.

There are games that do it better, and that seek to get around the issue by renaming the Good/Evil bar.  Fallout has the Karma meter and Mass Effect its Paragon/Renegade gauge.  These are better, as the give a more focused scope of what the game is about, but the binary problem remains.

So how can we use a binary morality to make better experiences?  These are just a few of the steps we can look at, organized in no particular way:

Don’t show it.  Get rid of any meter or other gameplay-style indication that what the player’s done is considered negative or positive.  Not having an omnipotent meter makes the judgment seem more the cause of the NPCs’ personalities, rather than that of some Director.  Next:

Vary these responses.  People are not uniform, and their responses won’t be either.  The sound of boos in the streets is fine for some petty thief, but the mass-murderer should probably have more impact.  Maybe some people hate you because you helped another group, then the group you helped would obviously like you, and you’d be revered in one area and detested in another.  Third:

Use factions.  These responses don’t need to necessarily vary with every single NPC, but using groups under a common banner can do wonders.  Fallout: New Vegas does particular wonders with this.  There is no way to finish the game with everyone on your side, and it’s great to get to make a choice between the different factions or going entirely for yourself.

Binary systems are certainly easier to design, program, and write than a more complex morality system, such as one based on the design of a colour wheel or dual axis chart.  However, it’s crucial to recognize that decisions, important decisions, are not easily made.  And in a game that truly offers choice, those questions will be no less meaningful and no more easily answered.

On Defining Characters (Through Action)

People are defined by what they do.  Games, unlike any other media, allow you to project your choices onto your character and actions almost always speak louder than words.  While dialogue is important, this article will focus on characters defined through their actions and their world.

A popular example of excellent characterization through action and gameplay is the popular pale angry man, Kratos from God of War.  Kratos is a violent, overpowered warrior.  His weapons, his attacks, his finishers, all of them identify him as a mad ball of rage and destruction.  And this was clear from the beginning, even before the player has force-fed his sword to a Minotaur for the first time.

Some things like this easily impress me, because I’m only now starting to learn all the ways to look for them.  So, when it falls to me to try to think of different ways to create a character’s identity through gameplay, I generally find it hard.  And why?  Well, because you have to look at what the majority of gameplay these days is made up of, or at least focused on: Combat.

There are plenty of ways to characterize someone through how they fight, but perhaps less ways to be wholly original, or feel original even.  Regardless, it can still be subtle and well done.  An assassin may have a small clip for his rifle, because he’s a precise and professional individual who shuns taking risks in lieu of a calculated and assured kill.  A beat cop may only use her nightstick and taser because she doesn’t ever want to be responsible for a death, and it makes her job more comfortable to worry less about the damage she inflicts.  Both of these are examples of characterization through just weapons alone, not even necessarily how they fight.  That same assassin may be useless in close combat, only effective at long range, unseen.  The beat cop may have taken a multitude of martial arts classes, and wields that same nightstick so deftly that is catches her enemies off-guard.

But what about pacifists?  Weak characters?  Characters who have no business being in combat?  Well, we can look at the first four Silent Hill games, the popular standard for oppressive and difficult melee combat.  These games reinforced the weakness of their characters by making them lousy at melee combat.  But let’s try another situation, where the character does not come across combat.  Not to say they don’t come across conflict, because conflict makes for interesting stories.  By combat we’ll say we mean trying to hit the opponent until they can no longer hit back (with fists, bullets, knives, psychic powers, a squirt gun, or whatever).

What about a game where the player can only communicate by sending out invitations to parties?  Don’t laugh, it could happen.  There’s a lot that could be said about the person sending out these invitations.

Here’s the scenario:

You play a wealthy billionaire, and since you’ve got such an exorbitant amount of money, you’ve decided to retire early and host a series of parties with some of the shareholders for your company.

You meet each one in turn, and decide whom you’ll invite.  You then design the invitations, which detail what the party’s attractions will be (open bar, genre of live music, lighting, appropriate dancing, dress code, etc.), and will have a very specific design.

Does your party featuring Vivaldi’s Four Seasons (not exactly dance material) have an invitation covered in pink swirls or gold leaf trim?  Is and open bar too cheap for some of your snootier attendants who also fault you for the Comic Sans font you chose?

Choose carefully, because if you lose these people and they pull their support, your company could lose precious stock value and collapse entirely.

The invitations, in describing the party, describe the character.  In the specific example above, you see how it would describe what you make the character to be, but even using something so innocuous as party invitations, you see what can be learned about a character.

But alright, that’s way too out there for your game.  You want a 2D sidescroller.  You want platforming, old school platforming with great characterization.  You don’t want to make Braid, or Limbo, you want something different.  Not to encase your meanings in symbolism, but to just have the character have a distinct personality, and you want to tell it through gameplay.  Fair enough.  Here are some questions to ask.

How high can your character jump?  How freely can they change direction in mid-air?  Assuming they wall-jump, do they flip of the wall in an elaborate somersault, or push off with both arms and a leg?  A character who runs with both of their arms trailing behind may be a free spirit, enjoying the wind in their hair, or they may have watched too much anime, who knows?  A character that runs bent forward, hunched over and as close to the ground as they can get, may be paranoid and always wary of their surroundings.  After you answer these questions, and probably with any design choice you make, always ask yourself “Why?”

The key is to watch how your character treats the world.  How they move, how they interact with it, will tell us a lot about who they are.  This need not always coincide with their manner of speaking and extent of their vocabulary (to which another article will be dedicated), and in fact the glaring inconsistencies can help create a full realized, three-dimensional character.  Maybe that beat cop from before is outspoken about her views on justice being about the bigger picture, but skulks around back alleys at night to catch some unfortunate souls enjoying a back-alley toke.

Try looking at the people in your everyday life, the ones you know and the ones you don’t.  How do they walk, how do they run?  Do they bob their head in time with their music, play air guitar?  When you begin to look at the different ways people can interact with the world, you can see the different ways a game character can do the same thing.

On Game Logic

Something that is important for gamers is called Game Logic.  This is when a player begins to recognize the mechanics of a game and how they’ll affect the world around them, without needing to be explicitly told.

Case in point: I was just replaying Spyro the Dragon, which was one of the series that game the original Playstation some lasting power.  I played the game to death in my youth, and I find it rewarding to go back and re-experience the simpler workings and design, but not so far as the eight bit era (though that’s lots of fun too).  A mechanic of the game is that Spyro has two attacks, a rushing charge attack where he hits enemies with his horns, or a firebreath attack.  There are also generally two axes on which the enemies of the game fall.  These are the Big/Small and the Armoured/Unarmoured axis.  Small enemies can be charged, big must be flamed.  Armoured enemies must be charged, because the metal absorbs the fire attack.

There were two points in the first few worlds of the game that made me stop and think.  The first was in a level called High Caves, in the third world of the game.  I came upon a number of large, beetle-like enemies covered in an armoured shell.  They didn’t look too big, but my attempts to charge attack were met with failure and pain. 

Later, I happened upon a fairy in a purple dress, different from the other fairies I’d encountered so far, whose main purpose was saving my game.  When I approached, the fairy kissed Spyro, who immediately turned red and let loose a bright red blast of flame.  I immediately knew that this flame would destroy those beetle-enemies I’d fought before.  It may me stop and think, “Why?”

It may seem obvious to gamers in general, and it is a simplistic example, but we recognize that Spyro turning red indicates a change in the mechanics of his character.  Someone who’d never come across the concepts of video games before may not make this kind of assumption, and its uniqueness to games makes me call it Game Logic.

The other moment was in the second world, a level creatively named Ice Cavern.  There were large, armoured enemies.  Enemies like this have come up before, and have always had a glaring and obvious gap in their armour.  But suddenly we come upon several enemies who do not.  It’s not immediately obvious to the player what to try, since the natural attack against large targets, even large ones, is a flame.

The solution is actually to charge attack them, knocking them a step or two back and off the edge of a platform.  It goes against everything the player has been taught and even the variations on those teachings already discovered in the first world.

It struck me as interesting, mostly because I spent twenty or so minutes trying to figure it out, and discovered the answer by accident.  I wasn’t thinking that Spyro the Dragon would be a game that strayed from formula like that, but I gave the game too little credit.  Though it may be simpler looking than many current generation games, it has some good principles of design.  But those are for another post.

The question that comes to me now is how important Game Logic still is.  Part of the point of it being called Game Logic is that it’s unique to Video Games, and yet with the trend of tending toward hyper-realism in games recently, it makes me wonder how much longer games will depend on Game Logic, and whether it’s a good idea to get away from it.

I don’t think we need to have Game Logic blatantly present in every game, but we do need to pay close attention to the medium we love, and the parts that make it unique.  Take a close look at the games you play, and see how Game Logic can be integrated in a subtle way, even a game going for hyper-realism in its mechanics and look.