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: Okami.  Okami 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.