pubs
So. Videogames tend to be built like videogames. People tend to play videogames like videogames — even if playing them that way hurts the experience. People go to great lengths to do stupid things in videogames just because they must collect every item, do everything that can be done, before they finish. And videogames know this.
Why is that treasure chest placed in that out-of-the-way room that no one has reason to go to? To reward someone who goes down there. Why do most people go down there, even if it’s clearly not the right direction? Not out of curiosity, but because they expect a reward. It’s become a task, almost. (Again, look at how RPGs tend to be made.) Some second-guessing is fun, if it’s clever and unobvious. Much of it is just tiresome. Everyone’s nodding, saying, “Yeah, we get it. We’ve been here before.” And yet there’s this unwritten code, that everyone’s afraid to break. It leads to leaps of logic like the player being expected to wander around and level up for two hours to beat a boss. That’s just plain fucking bizarre. Grotesque. Picture it, for a moment. What FUCKING reason do you have to do that?
Same for the perfectionist impulse, where you must collect everything — just because it’s there to collect. And the games now take way too much advantage of this, as a result of people reacting in that dysfunctional way to start with. It’s a natural compulsion, so the games treat it as if people actually gain joy from it. When it’s really more of a feeling of obligation. A quirk of mental chemistry, because the game presents it as a viable option. And now we’ve come to expect it so much that we become pissed off when we can’t finish a game with a perfect save file. Same with speed runs and sequence breaking for the sake of sequence breaking and all of this inanity that comes out of that stew of boredom, idle greed, and the natural human response to a lack of consequence.
Doukutsu Monogatari makes me wonder. It’s weak here, but. Perhaps a way to discourage, say, hoarding in a game is to make it so you can’t get a good ending unless you play it in a sane, non-videogamey way.
Silent Hill 2 also comes into this a little, as does the discussion about hardware — although you don’t really need advanced hardware for this. Not in a basic sense. I mean. Some version of this goes as far back as Ultima. Further, probably.
I don’t mean imposing arbitrary (or strict story-based) limits, of the kind we’re all so used to and annoyed with. Damn, I can’t get through this door because I have the Zippomat instead of the Gizmodrome. Or I haven’t given this item to this other character, triggering this plot event. So I can’t progress until I do it. What I mean is, sure — let the player do whatever he wants within the boundaries of the game world. Yet if the player is obviously behaving in a manner inappropriate to the situation, just because he CAN, or because he’s used to second-guessing what videogames are asking of him, it will result in — well. Not punishment, so much as consequences.
Someone else can come up with specific examples, I’m sure. As well as too many examples of when a game’s charm comes from exactly that freedom to put your trinkets in a row. Or from subverting the system (though that’s not what I’m talking about here, exactly; I’m all about subversion within the established rules — which is why I can appreciate Nippon Ichi’s SRPGs even as I am unwilling to play them). I’m just working in vague generalities. And I don’t know where they’re going.
What are the possible ramifications here? Is a lack of consequene for the player’s acting like a yo-yo, or like (simply) a gamer, part of why videogames are still so fucking adolescent? Clearly, a good portion of their existing audience — probably the most vocal and obvious segment — would do as well to grow up as the games they’re playing. How much are the two sides encouraging the current situation? What are the dynamics?
It basically is a question of motivation. In Shenmue, there’s such potential to get absorbed in the gamey nonsense — and some people do, and become lost and annoyed. For the most part, though, I just feel compelled to drink in the situation. Play it as if I’m living a life, rather than play it as a game. It’s actually rather boring if you try to second-guess it and to treat it as a typical videogame. I think maybe its fault is that there is little aside from boredom to dissuade the player from going all OCD and missing the point. If you linger too long, I hear that Long Di eventually comes and kills Ryo. That’s a long way out, though. I’ve never had to worry about it, even at my slowest poke of a pace. It’s likely boredom will drive anyone on by then; the only reason to remain, in fact, is to find out what happens if you don’t do what you’re expected to.
What might be an organic solution? I don’t know. You probably don’t want to wall the player in. As much as we like to make fun of it, the “But thou must!” mechanism is pretty omnipresent. It seems to me that it’s best to allow the player to make those bad decisions (sorry, Nintendo!), and to naturally wind up in an undesirable circumstance as a result. That’s the way we learn, y’know? On the one hand, don’t encourage acting like you have a mental problem — so if the player goes there, it’s his own doing. On the other, make him feel like a genuine idiot for behaving so erratically.
I think the latter would be most effective as an end effect, rather than a snap response to walking outside certain boundaries: the game cuts short, or the player gets a bad ending that shoves in his face all of the junk he’s done, or what-have-you. This would allow some leeway for the player to stray. No one’s perfect, after all.
Would a more immediate response help as an additional deterrent? I don’t know. Something in me says that this might just encourage a person, out of curiosity to see what else the game has to say about him. Any attention is a reward of some sort. And a lust for trivial reward is the main motivation for behavior lke this.
Perhaps the issue of motivation isn’t something that can be explained in a rational, mechanical way — since it relies so much on the ephemerals of emotion and tone. And because we all interpret our signals in different ways. The Zelda discussion seems to show that. What motivates me to explore Hyrule is much what would motivate me, were I put in Link’s position. What motivates some others is less experiential; more… baubly. It has to do with the gameplay mechanisms for their own sake, rather than to the end they were implemented to start with. With, in effect, how the game plays as a game. And that mentality has determined where the series has evolved as it has been refined, as it has with RPGs and so many other games.
I want to say that something’s lost here. It’s hard to define to people who aren’t tuned to it to start with, though. Or to explain why it’s so important. Hell, it’s a big part of the reason why I play videogames. And so, I expect, it is with many others before they become distracted or mis-trained because of the mental level that videogames so like to tap into. The feeder-bar level of gratification.
It’s seriously unhealthy, I think, where videogames are now. I think, in a manner, they promote and hone OCD and ADD-oriented levels of behavior and thinking. And although it might sound a stretch, I think that might be one factor in why so many gamers are such… insufferable fucks, to be blunt. And the sad thing is, this is gaming’s audience, so there’s a feedback loop. Games are developed for people who already exhibit these signs, and those games just promote them all the more.
Yet. Videogames can operate on a more human level. How much needs to come from the player, seems to depend on the game. For its time, Zelda promoted a much richer mindset. Myst and Riven piss off the core gamer demographic, which tries to approach them like puzzle games, even as they reward people who come at them looking for something more involving. And even Treasure’s games — say, Ikaruga and Gradius V — have a transcendent emotional quality to them, born out of their self-conscious design. They depend on the player’s familiarity with videogames, to make a grander set of statements about the medium itself, and the way we interact with it.
I guess the situation can be summed as follows:
Q: How do we get players to behave like human beings?
A: We motivate them on a human level.
Q: How do we do that?
A: That’s the key, isn’t it.
I was about to go on, and say something about discouraging unhealthy lines of thought — then it struck me how vague that is. More like discourage OCD and ADD-oriented thought strains. I would love videogames to mature enough to allow, or even encourage, the player to explore unhealthy modes of thought. Silent Hill 2 has a passive reaction to the player’s way of thinking; if the player behaves in a suicidal way, for example, the game decides that the main character went to Silent Hill to kill himself. A more tangible set of reactions might be interesting. Not sure how that might be achieved, though.
A while ago, I explored the idea of an emotional change in the player’s avatar, depending on the player’s actions. For instance, in an RPG, you, the player have the option to wander around and kill things, to grow stronger and more experienced and whatnot — yet you lose a bit of yourself every time you kill. A little bit of civility. Of humanity. And that will affect the way the avatar will interpret and interact with the game world. The more you kill, the more unpleasant the game becomes. The more hardened the character becomes, until he becomes something of a psychotic monster. The type who would just wander around and kill anything he came across, for no good reason. He will be treated as such, in-game. Most important, this can’t be seen from a clinical distance. It has to be done in a way that the player will grow uncomfortable with the way things are progressing.
I think Fable experimented with a bit of this line of reasoning, though it couldn’t take it far — so in the end it became something of a cartoon illustration of ideas someone else might want to reinterpret and implement more seriously in another five years or so.
That quality of discomfort seems the most important one, for barrier-building. As long as we’re dealing in emotions, anyway. Whether that discomfort be moral, ethical, fear-based, or just plain boredom and disappointment must, I guess, depend on circumstance.
Again, I would love to get to the point where it would be possible to make an effective Clockwork Orange of sorts; a truly transgressive experience. I’m afraid that’s not really feasible until we’ve established some barriers, though. Made them standardized. The most transgressive a game you can get at present is something like a Kojima game, which rebels against the assumed contract between game and player on a mechanical, on a conceptual level. That’s all nice. I don’t know if we’re really there until it will actually mean something to do that on an emotional level. And until gamers are accustomed to behaving like human beings, that’s not going to happen.
EDIT: Discussion continued here.
(Part 1)
I think the whole hoarding-reward thing is a hang on from the early days of video games where things where more based on points/competition than having a narrative. It’s as if in order to be considered a game, there has to be some sort of score or competitive angle in it, whether it’s a 100% completion rank or the quickest completion time. It’s not that I’m calling for an abolition of simple, score games – it’s just that we gotten to a point where there are two larger genres of gaming: competitive and narrative. At this point, narrative games are still attached to the competitive genre: Paper Mario 2 has you collecting badges or compiling enemy data and puts them in a gallery, even the Silent Hill series still has a grading screen at the end.
The Silent Hill series – particularly 2 – has always been my shining example of how to combine narrative and gaming. As you mentioned, the way a person plays the game affects the story. But also the gameplay ties into the narrative as well – Silent Hill 3, for example, is much more action-oriented than the previous installments, but that’s since the theme of 3 is aggression, whereas the previous two were about more “searching” themes like “Despair” and “Loss” (Ironically, if you give into the aggression and kill everything you see, you’re more likely to get the bad ending – just like the dehumanizing situation you describe with RPGs). One of the criticisms I heard about 3 was that you couldn’t explore the town, if you tried, you got a bit of text from Heather saying she didn’t have time to go wandering around. And this makes sense within the context of the story and Heather’s character – she’s a very direct and focused person who doesn’t want to waste time aimless wandering around a town when she just wants to kill the bitch that killed her father. I’m thinking the grammar of gaming contains interactivity and limits.
With that in mind, one may begin to wonder why they are doing certain tasks in a story-driven game. In RPGs, for example, it leads the player to either a plot point or, at least, an increase in their status to let them proceed. I’m currently playing Paper Mario 1000 Year Door, and I wonder what’s the point of me playing the Peach/Bowser parts, when it could just as easily be shown as a clip? The tough thing to do when making games is how to do it so it’s transparent enough to be challenging, but clear enough that it easily leads a gamer through the narrative. The catering to the OCD crowd ends up distracting from the story at hand – it contributes little to the story.
(To be continued…)
(Part 2)
(I apologize for splitting my rely in two – it must look real dumb – but this went past the character limit, and I really couldn’t edit it down any further. Which goes to show how much of a pretentious blowhard I am…)
Siren was an experiment that attempted to be competitive and narrative, and apply the “allow the player to make bad decisions and learn” you mentioned. It failed, at least I think, because it was too vauge and too punishing. It dropped you within a story with the same detachment given to the sprite fighting the Space Invaders. You are presented with a horror-movie situation with nothing but your wits and whatever you have on hand (usually nothing). But since Siren wants to tell a story – a character driven story, no less – it can’t get away with that punishing trial-and-error type of competitive gameplay. I got frustrated replaying each stage over and over, just trying to solve the damn stage/puzzle. And don’t get me started on the out-of-place items for OCD junkies that happened to contain information pertaining to the story. Games have to take into account the skill of the players, which determines how clear the leading hand of the narrative is – the problem of Siren is that it obscures the path to the point the hard-core audience – those compulsively aiming for the quickest time and what not – can really stand a chance at it. It’s like watching a horror movie where the hero is killed by the monster/killer within minutes. It’s more realistic but for the sake of telling a story, throw us some bones here. Even The Blair Witch Project gave the poor dopes some leeway.
It’s hard to do an anti-hero or have things go bad in a game, since players usually want to do the Right Thing, whether to “win” or get a happy ending. It’s making it seem less like “losing,” and more like telling a variant on the narrative. RPGs are the worst examples of flexibility in gaming narrative, especially the Final Fantasy series. For the sake of telling a story, it throws out interactivity. It gives you the illusion of control, but really, you’re on a guided track. In 9 this was glaringly obvious, as you could see where Square mechanically placed the plot points meant to make the story epic-er-ier. My ideal RPG would allow a player to choose a character, and have that character be the leader the narrative is told from.
Q: Should we get players to behave like human beings?
Or, to be more blunt,
Q: Will imposing [negative] consequences for videogamey behavior make the game more successful in the marketplace?
That said, I’m not entirely certain that what you’re getting at is even theoretically possible. People will metagame no matter how tight or how loose you make the boundaries. Let’s look at your cRPG example (though it applies equally to tabletop RPGs): were the character to even slowly grow harder and more socially distant, the player would notice this and takes steps to correct it (if it truly had a negative effect). Perhaps helping little old ladies across the street would make the character more likable — then the player goes out to kill ten monsters and heads back to town in search of little old ladies to help. Whenever there is some sort of mechanical advantage to a particular action, people will abuse it. Perhaps not on the first play through, but on the next or if they consort with others who have already noted these consequences.
The problem, if you must call it that, is the clear line between the player and the character. One might sit around the house and just stare at the TV in real life, but there’s no incentive in having your Animal Crossing character sit around the house and stare at the TV; and if there were, people would leave their GameCubes on overnight (while they slept) to rack up stats/XP. I don’t see how this separation can removed before computers become more intelligent than humans.
See, the issue here is psychology. Not forcing behavior, in a mechanical way. It’s in making it enough to the player’s advantage to be reasonable that he is unlikely to behave otherwise.
More important: Not so much to a material advantage as it is that the player will just plain feel uncomfortable doing things with no reasonable purpose.
thoughts
When done right, you don’t even need to say “But thou must!”. ICO, I think, has the best example of this. At one point, while you are separated from Yorda, you come across a boat. There is nothing stopping Ico from simply getting into the boat and sailing to freedom. In fact, you might even expect to use the built-in “pushing” controls to get the boat into the water. But you don’t, because leaving without Yorda is simply not acceptable. Yes, if you want to be a dink, you can go over and ensure that, yes, there’s an invisible wall there. But, if you’ve grown to care about Ico and Yorda, it’s not a boundary that needs testing.
Doukutsu Monogatari handles it in a manner you describe — if you choose to make the blatently wrong decision that leads to the bad ending, the ending text reads, “Either way, it made no difference to you.” The implication is that if you actually chose that path, you have not grown to care about the characters, and there is no point in you playing further. Your character, who you might have otherwise filled with your own emotions, must actually be a soulless automata for taking that way out. Again, this is a wall of sorts, but this one smacks you on the head for having to touch it.
And then there’s Disgaea. I’ve heard, though not experienced myself, that there are certain decisions you can only make if you’ve been enough of a bastard up until that point — killing your allies for EXP and such. Making the bastard-decision ends the game instantly. So. Your behavior does influence what choices Laharl considers making.
And then there’s Ogre Battle, which never let you make any decision without facing the consequences. Rushing into battle meant losing troops, while stalling reduced your end-of-battle reward. Slaughtering weak troops with your strong units cost you popularity, but not doing so cost you men. Sparing a villain earned you her servitude, but affected your reputation. And forget about letting a city be recaptured by the enemy. I think there were something like a dozen endings, some of which ended up with you as just another corrupt dictator.
There are always going to be pathological cases. I don’t think its needed to deal with them specifically so much as it is to stop rewarding that sort of behaviour and start encouraging normal players to behave in normal fashion.
Another thing I might not have made clear is that I’m speaking not so much about out-and-out prevention of action so much as creating an atmosphere where unreasonable action just won’t occur to me, as a player, or won’t seem reasonable. Or won’t seem interesting. Or will just feel bad.
An example I gave earlier is the relative lack of reward for exploring the nooks and crannies in Doukutsu Monogatari. When playing, I would tend to explore every tiny space I had no real reason to go into — not so much out of curiosity as because I expected something special to be there, to reward me for going out of my way. To my pleasure, I rarely got anything outside of the experience of having explored that area. I can’t tell you what a relief it felt like after a while. I continued to explore, though out of curiosity. Out of interest for how the place was put together, rather than out of a feeling that I’d miss something important if I didn’t hump every block.
It’s a simple step — just not rewarding ADD/OCD behavior in an overt way. Yet it helps to make the game feel fresh, and alive. I automatically pay more attention to what really matters, than to the game as a game. If you follow.
Sure, there’s no way to stop people outright from being idiots if they’re hell-bent on it. The idea is to give them no reason to behave that way, and maybe personal reasons not to.
That’s a… more economical way to put it, yes.
I’ve added to your discussion in my own journal, because my response grew too long and significant for a comment, and I do need something to fill that empty space.
My key point is I think I’ve identified the root cause of all this, and it is a known psychological phenomenon.
Hm. What about a game in which particular ADD/OCD behaviors were punished?
Say, a stat-raising game, in which certain stats have no effect on anything else in the game. Make them hard to increase — after all, they’re simply not relevant to the character’s life, so it’s natural that he would have to go out of his way to improve them. See what players decide to max them out anyway.
[Actually, something like this has been done -- Paper Mario 2 has a max level of 99, despite the fact that one can comfortably beat the game at level 30. Monsters give less and less experience as one gains level, to the point where each battle is only with one point of EXP. Players are thus forced to hunt an incredibly rare monster who actually still gives EXP into the 50's and 60's, or simply fight 100 battles against Goombas to gain a single level. While Disgaea has a ridiculous max level, at least there's still _something_ to do most of the way up.]
Or set the character on a side-quest to obtain some huge number of baubles, only make the character keeps losing them. No announcement is made when a bauble is lost — it’s as if it just slipped through a hole in his pocket, or got lost in a closet somewhere. Make it hard to keep track of how many and which baubles one has. Maybe put in some suggestion that the character simply doesn’t have the time or energy to waste on retaining/cataloging these things.
I wanted to comment in particular to your statement on RPGs, that levelling was a useless waste of time. I have to disagree with you there. I see the process of “leveling up” as a work/reward mechanic, and is one that I thoroughly enjoy when implemented properly. I’m not usually engaged in the psychology of why I have to attack one billion, same-looking slimes; I do it because I can level up, and few a sense of progress when I do so. From your comments you seem to hate this kind of “work/reward mechanic” but I see it as an incredibly useful tool towards enjoyment.
Consider a boss battle that is too difficult for the player to currently tackle. He could level up for 5 hours, and easily defeat the boss. But he could also level up for 30 minutes, and have a good chance. It’s up to the player how to tackle this situation; go overboard, and chance it. Depending on the risks involved (losing half your gold, losing all your equipment, etc.) their decision might change. I think this element is present, but underutilized, in present games.
I am also intrigued by your idea of a “psychological development path” in characters. I’d like to see a game where you couldn’t get away with just slaughtering every monster in sight, that eventually killing and violence would become “too easy” to the player’s character that certain options would no longer be present. I felt somewhat wrong engaging in combat every five minutes in KotOR despite my light side leanings; all the light side points meant was that I picked “nicer” reasons to engage in combat.
E.Megas linked me to this thingey here, and wanted me to make a reply. He’s wacky. So, heres what I think:
Yes, some games play on the short attention spans of their players, and some games play on the kleptomania of their players. And, more often then not, these things are listed in the bullet points on the back of the box. However, something like a “BUT THOU MUST” strikes me as one of those things where the publisher came down and said, your game is great, but it needs to be more interactive, and the programmers just insert the yes/no option to pacify their bosses. Its the type of superficiality where even I’d agree “You know what, anyone who would pick ‘No’ probably wouldn’t play this game in the first place.” Really, think about it, if someone just asked you to save the president from ninjas, and you just happened to highly trained in martial arts, would you say no? (Pretend its a president you like). By this very token, focusing on such an asinine question only ignores whatever greatness a game happened to have. Take something like FF8, where it had some beautiful settings. Anyone who will only consider the game on the junction system is someone who probably didn’t deserve to play it to begin with. And complaining about it without even playing it, thats an underlined wtf. At least say you didn’t play it because it got a bad review and your landlord just mugged you, or the ramen noodles ran out and you had to get more.
As for a game where it reacts to some of the choices you made and alters the gameplay as such, heres one of those bulletpoint features that every publisher and idealistic bigname designer wants. So, go play Contra:Hard Corps (Sega Genesis), and get your fill of it now, because in my experience its really just a novelty and nobody will ever do it better.
I’ve had a few thoughts about this.
I think what ultimately is needed is a total rethinking of development philosophy. The development philosophy of the day is what I’m going to awkwardly called “scenario-based”. Gameplay ideas, I’ve noticed, are usually conceived as scenarios; even when a clever gameplay idea is present it’s only in the context of there being a certain obstacle that must be overcome in a certain way; this design mantra seems to stem from Zelda; maybe the SNES version in particular. If when you are designing the individual episodes of your game, you are already expecting the player to behave in a particular way, and you start designing the world to be a shadow of that behavior, you are already lost.
Scenario-writing, as such, needs to shift its perspective to that of the actual gamer; which is to say, it needs to understand that your average gamer, by impulse alone, may try to do any number of things with the tools you give him, not just what you want him to do for this particular situation. Focus should start first on the player-character; what sort of things will be at his disposal, how he moves, how the player can interact with him, and how he can interact with his surroundings. And then, well. The scenario writer needs to think about psychology. Not just the player’s psychology, but the implied psychology of the player-character. These are murky waters, but bear with me. If a character has a main trigger button set to attack with a sword, well. We have a character who is probably inclined to attack things with a sword. If he runs, or if running is easy, then we have a character who is probably inclined to run everywhere. That’s the simple part. It gets more complex when you have to consider the full sum of the characters controls and abilities, and what sort of behavior players will potentially act out with their characters; and the more complex your character is, the more possibilities there are. At this point, you start designing your scenario not in expectation of but in response to the player character’s psychology; a good scenario will necessarily be multi-faceted to fit the character’s personality(ies). In any given situation, every likely strategy must be taken into account, and followed through to some sort of logical conclusion; at the very least, they must be paid heed, given some room to breathe.
There are few games I can think of that have this philosophy. The Metal Gear Solid series is among them. Maybe System Shock 2 and Deus Ex, or at least what I’ve played of it. Theif, at times.
I’m glad you brought this topic up. It’s been bothering me for years now and I haven’t found a good way to put it into words.