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. 

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.