Tag Archives: emotion

The Song Remains The Same

Posted by under Uncategorized

It’s taken me a while but I finally tore myself away from WoW to start playing Eternal Sonata (Bandai/Namco, Xbox 360) today. I have been looking forward to this. It’s a JRPG set in the dreams of Frédéric Chopin as he lies dying of tuberculosis in Paris in 1849. And that is the kind of idea for an RPG that gets me really excited.

I mean that in all honesty. When I play a game I want to see things I’ve never seen before. Admittedly my usual taste in music is for stuff that sounds like a 70s analog synthesizer being fed through a wood-chipper covered in beeswax, while someone uses a sledgehammer to beat out the baseline on the Forth Bridge and someone else fires off the James Soane Collection of Badboy Kickdrums in the background. But Chopin’s dying dreams filtered through a Japanese sensibility, and interactive, from the same house that brought us Katamari and Xenosaga? Oooooo in approving and anticipatory tones.

Things begin quite promisingly. The first (game-engine-based) cutscene is beautifully animated and intriguing. The next one is also beautifully animated, is too long, and has voiceover that clanks more than Marley’s chains. The third one is about the same. But there’s a sense of atmosphere building, themes and mood, and a couple of (clanky) musical metaphors that bode well.

And finally the game itself begins, and I find myself escorting a young girl called Polka along a sun-dappled woodland path. It is very pretty. What’s that curious object sparkling over there? Why, it’s a save-point—how quaint! I am feeling quietly excited about the potential of the coming experience.

Suddenly Polka collides with something that looks like the mutant offspring of a leek and a pumpkin, and can’t proceed until she’s battered it to death with her umbrella, to the swelling sounds of a musical score that is almost completely unlike Chopin.

Then there are more leek-pumpkins. And a chest that someone’s left in a clearing, perhaps in tribute to the thousands of old-school RPGs with chests containing health-ups left in unlikely locations. And then more leek-pumpkins.

Ah well.

Dogs about towns

Posted by under conference, game design, narrative

Over at Extenuating Circumstances Dan Hon has already done an excellent job of liveblogging chunks of GaME 07 (Imperial College, yesterday) so I won’t duplicate his effort. I will say that it was a good day, the talks were of variable quality, and the stand-outs—as you’d expect—were David Braben talking about ‘Creating Games for the Next Generation’, and Peter Molyneux talking about ‘Emotion in AI’.

Braben swiftly junked the idea that better graphics, better sound and more realism are enough to make a next-gen title (as if the success of the Wii and the failure of Motorstorm hadn’t comprehensively proved that they’re not) and talked a great deal about The Outsider. So far as I could tell TO is a free-roaming open-ended urban game in the post-GTA mould, with two important differences:

  1. Game characters react to environment, context and behaviour, not just yours but those of other NPCs. Save a cop’s life, word will spread among cops that you’re okay.
  2. The game starts just after the assassination of the US President, and you may or may not have been the guy behind the rifle.

As we used to say at Bizarre magazine, “Money down.” I’m sold.

Molyneux did a re-run of his much-documented GDC talk about Lionhead’s next game Fable 2, only without the Powerpoint slides because he’d just dropped his laptop and without the game-sound because Imperial College couldn’t make the sound on an Xbox 360 work. Specifically, he talked about the dog. Every player of Fable 2 will acquire a dog. They won’t all be the same dog; they’ll start off looking different, and will grow to resemble their owner as the game goes on. As Molyneux put it: “If you turn out to be an evil bastard, you’ll have an evil bastard’s dog.”

(—Dan had left by this point and I did make a concerted attempt to liveblog the talk, but my laptop died half-way through, despite having been recharged over lunch. Thank you Asus, that’s why I pay an extra £100 for an extended life battery. Honestly, I tried. Sorry.)

The thing is, I went into the talk as a skeptic. We live in a post-Nintendogs world, and putting a cute animal into a plot to elicit player-empathy is a cheap trick. I was expecting to be unimpressed, and twenty minutes in I was a convert. Not an evangelist, mark you. I can see how this can work. I’m not saying it will work, but I think it might.

The dog is more than just a companion and a tool, which were my two fears. (Having said that, it’s a fine companion and tool. It’s been built around the intelligence and training AIs developed for Black & White, plus Molyneux’s Three Laws of Dogotics, and thanks to some nifty graphics work including animating the tongue, ears and tail separately from the main body, looks and behaves like a believable dog. It’s not under the direct control of the player, but of your avatar—this is something I’d been messing with for Frup the day before, in the context of ‘Dei-Ex-Mechanicae‘, which I will describe in a later post—so you make the avatar make the gesture for ‘Bad dog’ and it’ll react and learn from that. And yes, you can issue commands by whistling into the Xbox 360 headset. The dog will also apparently pee on the corpses of your enemies. Like I said, money down.)

But more than that, it’s a lens for the rest of the game-world. The dog is a path-senser, an enemy detector and will fight to protect you, yes, but those are all tool aspects. But game characters won’t just react to you, they’ll react to your dog as well. Even if you’re not a dog person, even if you regard the dog as a game-resource to be optimised, another useful bit of equipment that you don’t suffer encumbrance for… if someone kicks your dog, you’re going to object to that. Because it’s yours. And if Molyneux has got it right and you do feel a sense of emotion towards the dog, then you’re going to feel that kick yourself.

I don’t think this is the solution to the problem of getting players to react emotionally to their experiences in video games, but I do think it’s a start. Like I said a while back, we’re going to spend a long time taking small steps and getting things half-right. (Braben says that, in movie terms, it’s about 1930. I’d say it’s 1925. We’ve found our Keaton and our Chaplin. We’re still waiting for our Welles and our Hitchcock, and talkies.)

For example, I have worries about whether, in a narrative game with a fantasy setting, it’s a wise idea to have the game-element the player cares most about be a dog, and I said as much. Molyneux’s answer was as polished as the rest of his talk but gave me the sense that he’s actively thought about this and built compensating mechanisms into the game. Whether he’s built them into the narrative is another matter.

But… after all, this is a game where the player’s avatar can marry and have children, and we know there will be other dogs in the game too. Can your dog find a mate and have puppies? And dogs have a shorter lifespan than humans… multiple generations of dogs? The whole subject opens up a ton of possibilities, and if there’s one developer who can be relied on to think through the implications and do something interesting with them, it’s Peter Molyneux.

Having said that, if the dog turns out to be a prince who’s been transformed by an evil fairy, I’m going to go down to Guildford and pee on every car in the Lionhead carpark.

Things to do in game design #1: cheat

Posted by under game design, street games

(This post is a follow-up to “Things not to do in game design #2: cheat“)

Because it’s not about fairness or balance or level playing fields. It’s about the user experience.

Let me tell you about a game you’ve never played. It’s called StarPower.

StarPower was created in 1969 by R. Garry Shirts and published by Simulation Training Systems as an educational game for use in schools, colleges and training situations. It’s a face-to-face turn-based game for 18-35 people that models a simple market-based society. Players draw random counters from a bag and must trade them in order to make combinations that score points. High-scoring players get Square badges, mid-scorers get Circles, low-scorers get Triangles, And from the third turn onwards the Squares can change the rules, altering how the game functions and what players can and can’t do.

What happens, of course, is that the three groups stratify and insularise quickly and the Squares make rules that keep them in the lead and force the other players to continue to lose. The Circles work to consolidate their position in the middle and appease the Squares, and the Triangles begin to feel oppressed, apathetic—or angry.

StarPower is often used to teach historical and sociological principles like class stratification, the abuse of power, and the roots of popular revolutions.

Here’s the big secret-that’s-not-a-secret-at-all: the game is fixed. The draw of the counters is not random. Once the Squares have started to win they will continue to win. Once you’re a Triangle it’s almost impossible to move up a group. StarPower is, by all conventional standards of game design, broken.

In educational-game circles StarPower is a legend.

No matter how liberal the players, the Squares always take advantage of their position, and when the Triangles gets angry, often they get really angry. Though I’ve been unable to confirm it, a senior member of ISAGA once told me about a game of StarPower in an American university where a member of the faculty who’d become a Triangle became so overwrought about the state of play and the abuse of power he was witnessing that he walked up to a member of the Squares and stabbed him.

He didn’t attack the people running the game. He didn’t walk out. He became so involved in the experience that he actually stabbed another player.

How’s that for an emotional response to a game?

I admit that frustration, hatred and homicidal rage are not necessarily the emotions that we as games designers want to create in our players. But still, the designer of StarPower created a game that cheats and managed to focus the players’ resulting feelings not at the game but at the other players. I know I said that two paragraphs up. I’ll keep saying it until the implications sink in1.

Of course games cheat. Computer games have cheated since the original single-player Pong. Of course it’s possible for the computer to play a perfect game of Pong, implacably batting the pill back at you until you falter and miss. But nobody would have played it if it did. So it cheated and missed a few shots on purpose, and voila there’s the games industry.

Because it’s not whether you win or lose, it’s how you experience the game. Good experience means repeated plays, more quarters in the slot, whatever. I mean, if I only bought boardgames that I can win I’d have a much smaller collection than I do.

The most obvious contemporary example of cheating is rubber-banding in racing games: letting the AI opponents exceed their supposed top speed and performance so they can catch up with the player. Because racing on your own around a track isn’t nearly as enjoyable, particularly if your vehicle has forward-mounted weapons. Rubber-banding is occasionally frustrating but crucially the player doesn’t feel that the game is cheating. You may suspect it is, or treat the reappearance of an opponent with momentary disbelief, but did the game cheat or did you over-brake on that last corner?

On Friday I played Journey to the End of Night, an urban chase-game that’s essentially British Bulldogs with checkpoints. Players had to race across London via six checkpoints. If they were caught by a Chaser, they became a Chaser. I was a Chaser. Here’s the thing: we started chasing from the get-go, but we deliberately didn’t catch any players till checkpoint 3. Two reasons: too many chasers early on unbalances the game; and secondly it’s not as fun for the players to be caught. Of course, the players didn’t know they were initially safe: they still ran like rabbits (or in one case froze like rabbits) as we swept down on them, yelling. We were—or rather the game was—cheating, but it was a better game for it.

Back in the day when tabletop RPGs were still fresh one of the first big debates to rage was whether rules should emphasise realism or playability. The argument wasn’t just simplicity vs complexity, though that’s often the way it worked out: the perception was that the more complex the game, the closer to verisimilitude it was. There was even one game, The World of Synnibarr, that was so keen on fairness and transparency it insisted that after a scenario was over the GM should give the players his notes, and if they found any discrepancy between the game as written and the game as played they could claim extra experience points for each deviation.

Twenty years on and the argument’s dead, as is the realistic end of the market and thankfully The World of Synnibarr too. Nobody wants realism or player/GM balance in an RPG any more. They want something that models its genre in an interesting and amusing way, and that’s fun whether to play or to GM.

I’m not going to pretend that the roots of all good game design lie in tabletop RPGs—

Bwah hah hah ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha

oh, I’m sorry…

hah ha ha ha ha ha

heh.

—but every genre of games has lessons to teach and lessons to learn from every other genre. And tabletop RPGs, at least some of them, are very good at using rules to model their genre. So if you’re designing a racing game, what the player wants is racing, and racing needs opponents. If the game has to bend the rules to get them to catch up with you, the good outweighs the bad. Same reason that the player always starts at the back of the grid: it makes for a better game. Not necessarily a more realistic or believable one, but more fun in the long run.

…course, if you’re taking a long run then there’s no need for rubber-banding. Slowcoach.

1 Boardgames, or some of them, draw players in and elicit emotional responses possibly better than any other type of game. Kids kick boards over. I’ve seen a friendship end over a game of Junta. Cat’s parents, diplomats on a foreign posting, once played Diplomacy with the Russian ambassador and his wife: a furious row broke out between the two and they got divorced shortly afterwards. I suspect that the bloom was already off the rose there and the stresses of the game just exacerbated an already damaged relationship, but for the sake of the anecdote I’ll pretend it was down to the ever-tricky problem of controlling the Mediterranean.

 

The Secret to Evoking Emotional Responses in Interactive Media

Posted by under game design

I have four points:

1. I do not know the secret to designing interactive experiences that evoke emotional responses from their users.

2. Nobody else does either.

3. It’s possible to do it, and it has been done, and it will be done again, and it will be done more and more in the future as we get to grips with how this stuff works on people.

It is not going to happen in a single bound. There is not going to be a leap, a paradigm-shift, one particular game that everyone will point to and go, “There! That one! It is mature, intelligent, and emotionally true! It is the first truly great game!” What was the first great play? The first great novel? The first great film? You may have your opinions but there’s no critical consensus, only a lot of dull and drunken after-dinner discussions.

Instead we will have to spend the next ten years honing the techniques that work and trying some things that might work but probably won’t, and then we’ll spend the ten years after that building on what we’ve learned in the previous ten years, and then the ten years after that we will repeat the process, and so on indefinitely. Artistic development is not a switch waiting for some genius to flip it. Okay, there have been moments where someone did something for the first time and everyone slapped their foreheads and went, “Of course!” and copied it, like Filippo Brunelleschi creating artistic perspective. We’ve had a few of those: Dungeons & Dragons, Populous, Castle Wolfenstein. But they’re rare and unpredictable.

There are certain things that we understand a bit: building character empathy, for example. Current games designers tend to do this by (a) designing a character to be likeable, and then (b) exposing the player to them for a long period of time. (And often then (c) killing them to remind you that you liked them.) But if you want to see how to create an interesting, likeable character for whom you feel an emotional response in just a few lines of dialogue, look at TV adverts. Or you can look at Homer, who did the same thing in a different way for a different art-form almost three thousand years earlier. So clearly there are other ways to go about it.

Yes, as games designers we can learn from other forms. We can pick and borrow elements and techniques of creating character and narrative from movie-making, theatre, prose fiction, reportage, storytelling, even painting and sculpture, and we do. All of those forms have mixed and matched to become what they are today. But—and this is the belter—our medium is fundamentally different to their media. Our medium is interactive. And compared to that, if you thought the invention of cinema or the shift from classical art to impressionism were biggies then man, you have not yet begun to dream.

We are at an incredibly early stage of the evolution of the artform ‘interactive entertainment’—such an early stage that we haven’t even got a decent snappy name for it yet. (No, not ‘games’. Try again.) Movies have been going for a hundred years, and look at how many of them suck. Though that’s not an excuse for our failure to embrace emotion as a tool in designing interactive experiences, merely an advance warning for how many games are going to suck over the next century.

The point is, we’re only as good as the things we learn from, plus whatever we can personally add to the pot. We’re not good at mixing emotional responses and interactivity yet because we are building on what has gone before, and most of what has gone before has involved platforms, guns, absurdly overpowered cars, outer space, sports and/or massive damage. We’re not just learning, we’re still pioneering. It’s not going to be easy. It is going to take a long time, and a lot of work, and we will make a lot of mistakes along the way. But:

4. It will be worth doing. Oh yes, it will be worth it.