Setting Boundaries [Editorial]
June 28, 2010
by Eric-Jon Rössel Tairne
Back in my review of Daniel Remar’s Hero Core, I ruminated on the game’s unusually dignified management of the player’s progress. After the first ten or fifteen minutes, nearly the whole map is available to the player; from there the player’s exploration is bound and guided only by the logistics of the terrain and natural risk assessment.
Since games have gotten complex enough to involve multiple action buttons, large persistent maps, and countless variable flags, developers have done their best to keep the player from getting too far, too fast; from wandering outside the proscribed zones where the designer has accounted for all variables, or feels that the player can safely wander without getting frustrated or confused. Part of the idea is to pad out the play experience, allowing the designer to spin a sense of scale and scope from a relatively small amount of material. Part of it is damage limitation, either for the player’s or the developer’s ostensible benefit.
Progress limiters
Most of the common methods to limit progress come off as either patronizing, disingenuous, or simply transparent. The laziest simply say “no” to the player’s actions or queries, and fail to provide any sensible justification. These limiters take away from the game’s sense of verisimilitude, in that the game’s responses to player action feel arbitrary rather than consistent and organic, and they also undermine a player’s attempts to learn and apply the game’s logic — which again robs the game of verisimilitude, in that without an intuitive grasp of the rules the player has difficulty growing past indoctrination phase and accepting the experience at face value.
The omnipresent standby is the unconvincing blockade. Nearly every game since the advent of the memory card contains at least one invisible wall, or line of police tape that the character should be able to just step over, or orange cone or chair that could easily be kicked aside, or other obstacle that any healthy person could climb over or under or through or wedge past. Especially galling is when non-player characters can easily do these things — or even the player characters themselves, when the game switches to cutscene.
The Legend of Zelda: Wind Waker is lousy with these moments, often to the point where the game point-blank talks back to the player. For the first third of the game, if the player tries to diverge from the expected path the game will yell back that the player is going the wrong way. The game rarely even provides a thematic excuse, like a pressing need to stay focused and beat the clock. For all its strengths, Silent Hill 2 often bewilders the player with apparently clear paths that the game deems inaccessible until the player trips some random story flag.
The end message is that the player’s ability to assess and respond to a situation doesn’t matter; the only thing that matters is what the game expects of the player at any given moment. This message leads to a mentality where the player’s pervasive question is not so much “What can I do?” as it is “What am I supposed to do?” Aside from going against the fundamental spirit of videogames, this mindset is counterproductive both to the individual game and to the broader medium. Whereas people have a desperate need for direction, they tend to hate expectations. Although in principle every game is an attempt to manipulate the player’s behavior, unless the game’s object is to make the player feel like she is being played, a game should at least maintain a pretense of player control.
A similar technique is to remove or limit aspects of the player’s fundamental control set until the game deems the player ready. In an extreme form you will find this in poorly designed tutorials, that lock away commands until the game has introduced them. When the tutorial is brief, as in Halo, this technique isn’t so bad. That game only takes a minute or two to explain, is forgiving in its instruction, and is simple enough that in that time it covers everything. Worse examples are games like Twilight Princess or Assassin’s Creed, that might take half an hour or longer to open up entirely, or Mirror’s Edge, which says “follow me” then in effect screams at the player for every error and throws the player back to the start with no constructive feedback. The result is that the player can go through the whole tutorial, and indeed much of the game, without understanding several key concepts. Result: the game comes off as harder and more confusing than it is, and despite huge pre-release interest it was a bit of a flop.
An offshoot of both the control and the path limitation is an overzealous or clumsy implementation of Metroid-style lock-and-key power ups. Even in the best cases this mechanism can be painfully transparent, and reduce a game to the block-hunting of Metroid Fusion. In that game the player is often stuck in a room, and left to find the single block that the current move set can destroy. Other games are reduced to a question of “Where do I find [X power-up] so I can continue?” When you get to the point where the player knows the precise solution to a problem and is merely waiting for the game to grant it, you have a recipe for tedium. Again the player loses immediate control over consequences; until the game concedes that control, the player’s every action is meaningless.
Again Wind Waker is especially weird in this regard; its inventory is filled with redundant or largely useless items. When an item does prove functional, its use is generally limited to a narrow portion of the game. Take the grappling hook, which covers the same territory as the hookshot; the only important difference is that you fire one at pegs, and you fire the other at circles. And the moment the game hands you another tool, such as the deku leaf or the boomerang, it forgets all about the earlier mechanics, leaving an inventory full of useless items and leaving the player to wonder why the game often ignores an equally logical solution to the one it expects.
Furthermore, Wind Waker ridiculously pads out the acquisition of these items, leaving the player to suffer through hours of inconsequential back-and-forth quests before the game grants access to the next interesting nugget of design.
Again, the justification for these techniques varies from overzealous hand-holding, out of paranoia that the player will be overwhelmed and reject the game as too difficult or complex, to simple pacing out of the game’s content, to an unwillingness to account for every possible consequence of the player’s actions. These are all poor excuses, and inevitably that’s what they come off as: affectations, designed to get in the player’s way.
Of Risk and Resource
Compare to the original Legend of Zelda, which lays its overworld and dungeons largely open from the start. I believe the player only needs two items (found in early dungeons) to explore the last corners of the overworld and two other items (each available from the start) to enter the remaining dungeons. Instead of locking the player away, generally the game uses psychology and resource management to keep the player on track. The woods and hills are dangerous, and so after some gentle prods most players will leave those areas until guaranteed a significant chance to survive, or to exhaust as few resources as possible. Thus as the player gradually increases in strength and ability, so does the player’s range of exploration and command over the environment.
Other games that employ a similar blend of risk and resource assessment include Dragon Warrior, Phantasy Star II, and Lost in Blue. In most of these, the risks and the resources are different. Lost in Blue is particularly clever, in that the player starts out weak and famished, and so needs to constantly watch the time and energy spent on his daily hunt for food and materials. Thus avoiding the traditional threats of violence, the player’s only real opponent is the environment — well, that and the player himself.
R&R progression also rears its head in Riven and Shadow of the Colossus, albeit in more abstract forms. In Riven, the player — an outsider — is only limited by a lack of understanding. As the player learns of the native culture, history, geography, and language, solutions present themselves as self-evident. Shadow of the Colossus takes a more existential turn by luring the player into questioning his motivation and purpose in relation to the game, thereby drawing a contrast between a search for meaning in exploration and a search for closure in completing the assigned tasks.
I’m going to take a dangerous proscriptive leap and say that R&R progression is the ideal and correct structure for a videogame. I’m not saying that we need any more Zelda or Dragon Quest clones. We’ve had more than enough of those, thank you. I’m saying that the narrative sensibility to these games — however that sensibility might manifest itself — is as pure as a videogame gets.
As a macro model of cause and effect, the Legend of Zelda overworld closely reflects the moment-to-moment dynamics of Ed Logg’s Asteroids or Centipede. It is a projection of the study of loss and consequence you get in every path not taken, in every jump misjudged. R&R progression is pure videogame, and until the end of time, whatever the genre or premise or ambition, anything meaningful to come out of this medium is going to in some way be rooted in this structure.
![Red Moon Rising… The Dishwasher: Vampire Smile [Review]](./Setting Boundaries [Editorial] DIYgamer_files/360-vampiresmile-110411-01.jpg)
![Jailbroken iOS App Cydia Store Hosts New Skirt Flipping Game (Is this Indie/Newsworthy?) [Opinion]](./Setting Boundaries [Editorial] DIYgamer_files/upskirt04.png)
Glad you liked it. Would you like to share?
Add New Comment
Showing 6 comments
Trackbacks
07/12/2010 04:25 PM
[...] Likewise, even in the closed system of a videogame there is only so much that a designer can draw, ...