Archive for the 'Analysis' Category

Authorial Control in MMOs, and How Players Can Change the World

Published
on October 12, 2008
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I’ve written a little about authorial control on this blog, but never addressed how interactive storytelling can apply to the phenomenally popular, naturally static worlds of massively multiplayer online games. A blog post by Snipehunter on Dopass.com poses a question popular among players: How can MMO developers deliver control to players?

It’s impossible for a player to be immersed in a world where independent choice and exploration are untenable, writes Snipehunter, the alias of a game designer with experience on the MMO Auto Assault. To create the “illusion of reality,” MMOs need to give authorial control to the players.

The PvE aspects of World of Warcraft, Warhammer Online, and Auto Assault, Snipehunter takes note, are “basically a linear game… You’re guided, some might cynically say ‘by the nose,’ the whole way, with no encouragement (and in some cases active discouragement) to explore or make your own choices, along the way. For some players, I think, this amounts to having the game ‘happen to them’ instead of ‘making it happen.’”

In his blog post, Snipehunter reminisces on the more open world of Ultima Online. “I didn’t ask the game for a to-do list of chores,” he wrote.

“Instead, I decided for myself what my goals would me. ‘I’m going to get a boat’ or ‘I want to explore Avatar Isle’ were, in essence, the quests I wrote for myself. I went to that world specifically to be able to make those kinds of choices; to write my own experience as an adventurer in that world. I decided what my role and level of impact in the world was.”

Snipehunter said that this is the experience MMO players want when they ask for control. “Hand written quests and hand authored raids and events are a huge boon for MMOs,” he concluded. “They allow the skills of good writers and good designers to be leveraged to provide heroic experiences you can’t get in an open, true virtual world.”

As it stands, players can take the initiative to set up events like this, but there are no in-game tools to support the crowd of players looking for a role-playing experience. Interactive storytelling is about involving the player in the process of creating and populating a world, and Snipehunter’s idea, albeit simple, is a very good start.

The Journey or the Destination: What Makes Games Art?

Published
on October 8, 2008
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“Too often we are so preoccupied with the destination, we forget the journey,” goes that age old and oft repeated aphorism, one that critics of the artistic potential of video games should consider.

Games have not yet been accepted into the zealously guarded enclave of artistic mediums, and many avid gamers, including myself and an industry insider pseudonymed Matthew Wasteland, want that to change.

Most people in the video game industry, and many people who write about them for a living, hope for games to be taken seriously as art or literature. It’s just around the corner, we believe— the day the establishment flings open the door to us and lets us in, apologetic tears streaming from their eyes. ‘We misjudged you,’ they’ll cry, ‘Just like we initially misjudged movies, jazz, and prose poetry.’

Matthew’s column on GameSetWatch does not feed these sentiments, but rather explains why video games have been dismissed by critics outside the industry. I disagree with Matthew’s position, but its a well-stated one that offers a good opportunity to address one of the most common criticisms of games as a medium.

In his column, Matthew explores the problems of a game based on Herman Melville’s classic Moby Dick. “No matter how much freedom the player was given to navigate the ocean in his own self-directed way,” writes Matthew, “the predetermined story of Captain Ahab’s obsession wins out, and at the end of the game, Moby Dick destroys the Pequod no matter what happened in the intervening time.”

Matthew’s argument is that the fixed outcome of Moby Dick is what makes it so powerful. To simply follow the linear plot that works for the book fails to take advantage of the interactive potential of games, says Matthew, but to implement interactivity and allow the player to change the ending would take away its power.

This puts us in a strange bind: we’re either imitative of, and beholden to, the arts that preceded us (“if you want a good story, why not read a book?”), or we are unmoored in a postmodern haze, trying to argue that a quantum superposition of many possible outcomes is just as artful as a linear story (“this painting is a work of art and self-expression— but it doesn’t matter if that part is red or blue or green”). Neither of these options is fully satisfying.

Roger Ebert raises this same criticism — that art requires authorial intent, and the guiding hand of the creator must take the viewer down a set path to a pre-established conclusion and lesson — but I don’t agree with it. The journey is what moves us in Moby Dick, and it has the power to do so with or without the climactic destination.

Moby Dick is not a powerful story because of the final destruction of Captain Ahab; it’s power lies in the whaler’s obsessive journey, which would have destroyed him whether it succeeded or not. Ahab’s character is what makes Moby Dick art because his humanity makes the story’s grand themes resonate with and inspire the reader.

A Moby Dick game, to use Matthew’s example, would let the player speak directly to Captain Ahab and personally define Ishmael’s relationship with the crew. Interactivity would allow a much more personal experience with the story, one that would retain the grace of artistic satisfaction whether or not it ended as Melville intended.

Building a game with the power of Moby Dick is not about setting up plot points and an ending for the character to follow as if they were reading a book. Making an artistic game requires constructing an open-ended journey for the player which will be powerful no matter how she ends it because of the human characters she meets along the way.

In addition to his position with an independent developer, Matthew is a columnist with Game Developer magazine and runs a blog called Magical Wasteland.

Make Game Difficulty Work For You

Published
on October 4, 2008
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Game designer Daniel Boutros looks at how to give games a challenging difficulty without frustrating the player in a feature on Gamasutra. The article, originally published in Game Developer magazine, establishes two tenants for how effective levels of difficulty.

  • A player must always feel like the failure of a challenge is entirely his own responsibility, and not a fault of a poorly designed product.
  • “The player must understand how and why he failed, so that he can learn from his mistake and increase the feeling of failure being his responsibility.

Boutros traces the traditional method for increasing difficulty to Rare’s shooter GoldenEye, where higher difficulty levels simply meant enemies do more damage. “In the tough mode,” says Boutros, “the game becomes very classically rooted in trial and error, using memory play as the core consistent play type. The only way a player can survive with meager resources and a damage disadvantage is by trying, dying, remembering, and restarting.”

In other words, play through and die until you’ve figured out where every sniper is, know which doors hide enemy ambushers, and know exactly where to point your rifle to take them all out. That’s not fun, and it does not create an immersive experience.

Increasing enemy damage or numbers, charging AI aggression, implementing a time limit, and restricting player resources like ammo or health are the simplest ways to increase difficulty, but the easiest solution is never the best. Rather than simply doubling enemy damage, Boutros argues that developers need to integrate these techniques thoughtfully and budget time for testing and fine-tuning them.

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The Archetypal Hero in Video Games

Published
on September 13, 2008
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All of human literature, fiction and myth can be reduced to two archetypal plots: a man goes on a journey and a stranger comes to town. These basic formula are even more true of role-playing games, where the story must leave room for a main character who is controlled and sometimes even created by an unpredictable player.

The interactive aspect is what set video games apart from other media. In a traditional story, authorial control over a character’s disposition and history is absolute. Games follow the same structures and conventions of plot.

The most significant impact of these binary plots on gameplay is a reduction in the degree of creativity the player can exert over the protagonist, especially that character’s past. The man who goes on a journey must come from somewhere defined by the game’s creator; the stranger who comes to town is liberated from an established history, transferring responsibility for creating history from author to player.

Man goes on a journey

Scholar Joseph Campbell wrote extensively on the hero’s journey, that fateful series of events that drew mythic and modern heroes like Odysseus, Conan the Barbarian, Harry Potter and Luke Skywalker to epic adventure. The journey begins with the hero’s call, sometimes refused, and the crossing of the threshold. Guided by mentors like Obi-Wan and Merlin, he overcomes a series of trials, receives a boon, and returns home with boon in hand.

Because they must have a home from which they set out, these characters often have pre-established backgrounds that fit into the plot. Link starts The Ocarina of Time as a normal kid in Kokiri Forest, and Crono’s mom wakes him up so he can cruise the Millennial Fair in Chrono Trigger. In games where the player can choose the hero’s race, gender, and appearance, he becomes an orphan (Jade Empire) or an amnesiac (Knights of the Old Republic).

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‘Fallout 3′ A Modern Flavor For the Cult Classic

Published
on July 27, 2008
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The upcoming Fallout 3 can’t be just like the decade old originals, so get over it. But Bethesda, who got rights to the game from worn-down original studio Interplay, looks like they’re doing a good job of adopting everything that made the originals so unforgettable and putting it in a next-generation title.

Some have made a rabble-rousing hubbub over changes to the design. A shift in perspective from isometric to first person or behind the head, unkillable children, and a reduction in party size from four to two have all drawn venomous ire from the franchise’s cult followers.

Fallout 3 definitely looks different than its predecessors, which were rendered in 2D sprites and came out about a decade ago. Even as a big fan of Fallout, I don’t mind the changes and am happy with the new game’s presentation so far.

Fallout 3's protagonist wanders a post-apocalyptic town.

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While Franchises Top the Sales Charts, Have Hope For the Future

Published
on June 9, 2008
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It doesn’t look good.

Using NPD data, Forbes released a list of the top ten bestselling video games in the United States from the last 15 years. Here’s the list and unit sales, synthesized by GameDaily.

1. Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas (2004) – 9.43 million
2. Guitar Hero III: Legends of Rock (2007) – 8.2 million
3. Madden NFL 07 (2006) – 7.7 million
4. Grand Theft Auto: Vice City (2002) – 7.3 million
5. Madden NFL 06 (2005) – 6.65 million
6. Halo 2 (2004) – 6.6 million
7. Madden NFL 08 (2007) – 6.56 million
8. Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare (2007) – 6.25 million
9. Grand Theft Auto 3 (2001) – 6.2 million
10. Madden NFL 2005 (2004) – 6.1 million

Joystiq points out that if you combine the unit sales for Pokemon: Red and Blue, that game tops the chart with 9.9 million.

What can we learn from this list?

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Storytelling in Collectible Card Games at Man Bytes Blog

Published
on April 3, 2008
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Storytelling blogger Corvus at Man Bytes Blog is devoting his time this week to looking at the potential for story in collectible card games. They’re not the medium you’d usually turn to for a good yarn, but, as Corvus points out, a dedicated player can construct a narrative from a good game of Magic: The Gathering.

Corvus’ post yesterday raised the issue. “While CCGs ought to be an ideal storytelling medium, utilizing strictly gameplay mechanics to convey story, they aren’t presented or structured in such a way as to generally encourage this type of use,” he concludes.

“Perhaps it’s the need to invest a large amount of personal resources, both financially in acquiring cards and mentally in memorizing card-specific rules, that overrides their ability to transport the players to another storyworld without the added benefit of animated series and digital versions that take place within a virtual landscape,” Corvus added.

Magic, says Corvus, offered a traditionally hardcore game of rules and stats for a niche of gamers put off by a trend in roleplaying games towards character development and story. “Magic contained all the flavor of AD&D and none of the pesky plotline nonsense that was suddenly infecting the RPG world,” he adds.

Corvus’ second post looks at why card games like Magic don’t work as storytelling mediums. And his conclusion?

While any set of game mechanics can be treated as a narrative, there’s a tipping point at which the mechanics are so vast that the audience receives very limited returns for their application of narrative consistency. This isn’t a bad thing, it’s just a thing. Clearly, Magic has proven itself to be a phenomenon with strong cultural appeal and it has outlasted many of the pretenders to its throne. I cannot even fathom the Herculean task of maintaining game balance within such a vast system for 15 years.

Corvus offers an interesting perspective on an interactive medium that does not work for telling a story. I’ve never been into collectible card games, for the same reasons as Corvus. It seems that were they to become simpler and with more room for creativity outside of the rules, in the manner of roleplaying games like D&D, card games offer narratives just as valid.

Designer Adam Maxwell Sees ‘No Places For Writers In Our Industry’

Published
on March 20, 2008
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“Auto Assault” creator Adam Maxwell said that game writers are irrelevant next to designers in an editorial on Gamasutra.

“Writers do not dictate the way players interact with the world, nor do they dictate the way the player experiences the content that they themselves may create. These are the responsibilities of the game designer,” he wrote.

“Even when the writer has written the dialogue, decided the plot, created every character and conceptualized every setting,” it’s the designer who puts the world together, said Maxwell. “When it comes to playing the game, to interacting with the world presented within, a writer has no real power.”

This is in stark contrast to Denis Dyack’s opinions. Dyack devotes a while section of his “Too Human” team to content. Rather than releasing writers after the plot is set, as Maxwell proposes, Dyack has them work closely with the designers to ensure that their concept of the world is implemented and that art and gameplay supplement the plot.

Maxwell is ignoring the spirit of cooperative enterprise that makes games great.

He compares games to Hollywood, and agrees with Roger Ebert that “authorial control is not something native to video games.” Do directors have absolute authorial control? Absolutely not. Films are a team effort, produced with the work of hundreds of people on and off the screen. The director doesn’t turn actors and lighting engineers into puppets, but allows their creative input to become a part of the final piece.

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Mad Max-creator George Miller Turns to Gaming

Published
on March 14, 2008
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When I first heard that George Miller is working on a fourth Mad Max film, titled “Fury Road,” my first thought was, “Awesome.” When I learned that Miller was teaming up with God of War II director Cory Barlog to produce a Mad Max game for concurrent release with the film, I thought, “Even better.”

Prominent filmmakers, including Miller and Steven Spielberg, are flocking to the game industry, where cinematic products are becoming increasingly viable.

In a two part interview with Newsweek’s N’Gai Croal, Miller talked about his attraction to games.

“I realized that the kind of filmmaker that I am, I unconsciously try to make films that are as immersive as possible,” said Miller. “My cutting patterns and compositions try to exaggerate–well, not exaggerate, but try to enhance a kind of three-dimensionality and an immersive quality to my storytelling. That of course is what games do so well.”

Miller sees games as a more open way to explore a narrative. “Film is a pretty closed narrative–it moves along at 24 frames a second, it’s extremely linear, and in that sense rigid, whereas games bust that open. So in a way, with games being more exploratory, it’s closer to what a novelist can do in many way,” he said.

“It’s just another way to tell stories,” added Miller. “If you’re much more interested in games than movies, then you might enter the story through the game. Or you might enter the story through the film and move towards the game. It’s still the same story. It’s still the same characters. It’s still the same world. It’s just that you can approach the characters and the world from different angles.”

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Adding Stories to Sandbox Games

Published
on February 20, 2008
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“Civilization IV,” “Rome: Total War” and “The Sims” don’t usually make the Best Video Game Story list. Single player play in these expansive sandboxes generally boils down to a massive skirmish against computer bots, and the game ends not when you slay the last boss but when you check off the last objective.

Gamasutra has an interesting feature by Neil Sorens on turning the stale check lists and computer bots of sandbox games into user-developed storylines and characters.

“When a player creates a family in ‘The Sims,’ the resulting game — based on input from the player — tells the life stories of the members of that family,” writes Sorens. “Designers can and should do more to exploit these player-generated stories.”

The problem as Sorens sees it is that players cannot see the stories they naturally create in these massive worlds. Say you declare war on the Russians in a “Civilization IV” campaign. You might do so because the Russians are there and you have a big army in need of employment. Under Sorens suggestion, the game justify this campaign for some story reason (Russians killed your dog, you hate Commies, they abused people of your national religion, etc. etc.).

Sorrens advocates that story-driving exposition replace the bar graphs, charts, and reports that generally represent player statistics, achievements and attributes in big sandbox games.

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