Tag Archives: game design

The Secret to Evoking Emotional Responses in Interactive Media

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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.

A synopsis, a manifesto and a question

Posted by under game design, narrative

To sum up the last two posts:

Will Wright believes that a player’s satisfaction from interacting with a videogame should be on a primarily intellectual level.

I’m not saying he’s wrong. In fact I’d say that this describes 99% of the games currently on the market, including several that I enjoy and recommend.

That does not mean that games should not attempt to engage a player on an emotional level as well. Games that do so successfully have enormous power and often enormous popularity and longevity.

The way to engage a player on an emotional level is through the effective use of characters, setting and story.

It is not until games regularly engage their audience on an emotional level that the “are games art?” debate will be of interest to anyone beyond games designers and a few academics.

You may, if you want, take this as a manifesto.

A question, more of a request really: what games do engage their players emotionally? Post ‘em in the comments, please: let’s make a list. Justify your choices; show working; use both sides of the screen. I’ll start with the four obvious ones: Nintendogs (Nintendo, 2005); Animal Crossing (Nintendo, 2001-2005); Final Fantasy VII (Square Co.,1997) and, of course, Planetfall (Infocom, 1983)

A second question, which I’ll get to when Amazon bothers to deliver the book and I bother to read it: is ‘flow‘ as defined by Mihály Csíkszentmihályi an intellectual or an emotional state?

Wrong and Wright

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…hell with it, I will write a reposte.

The problem we have, the huge great mote in Will Wright’s eye and also in the eyes of most of the people who have called him on his appalling SXSW keynote (see previous entry if you’re bewildered and lost), is that frankly the state of the art in CG storytelling sucks. It sucks to a colossal degree. So does what Will Wright considers to be ‘story’ in his games. But just because they’re the state of the art doesn’t mean they’re the zenith of what’s possible in the form. Once upon a time the Bayeux Tapestry was state-of-the-art art. We’ve come a long way since then.

(Why has nobody done a side-scrolling Bayeux Tapestry game?)

On the one hand we have the traditional industry-friendly state of the art: programmed story, ‘programmed’ meaning pre-programmed, inviolable and essentially passive. The only way not to experience the story as the designers envisaged it is not to finish the game. While side-quests, dialogue trees and occasional pieces of cleverness like Bioware’s use of the light side and dark side of the Force in Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic (2003) mean that not every player’s experience of the game is identical, the core elements of the story will be experienced in the same way and in the same order. And this is mostly because they will be explained in cut-scenes, which break the first rule of creating fiction: show, don’t tell.

In traditional media “show, don’t tell” means don’t explain stuff to the audience, let them understand it by seeing it in action—it’s the reason that voice-over is regarded as the last resort of the incompetent, because it’s inherently ‘tell’ and in 99% of cases it’s sloppy, lazy storytelling at its worst. Interactive medias add another level to “show, don’t tell”: play, as in: “don’t tell, don’t show, play”. In other words, don’t do your game’s storytelling in passive media, let the player experience it for themselves by actively participating in it—which incidentally doesn’t mean letting the player see if Gordon Freeman can jump onto a console while three NPCs explain the plot behind his back.

Unfortunately this kind of active participation in the game’s story as well as its action set-pieces will require a whole new set of storytelling paradigms, and as Wright correctly observed the state of the art in commercial games at least is still farting around with cut-scenes, which are inherently “show” with a fair degree of “tell”. Which is not what games are about.

On the other we have Wright saying that (1) stories in games suck because they’re pre-scripted, they’re told to you instead of told by you, stories are about empathy but games are about agency, (2) that games don’t really need story anyway, but if they do then (3) there’s a better way, his brand new paradigm, which he claims is based on the way that Spore will tell stories but which is an extension of the way The Sims told stories, and the way Sim Life told stories, and the way Sim City told stories. That is: by convenient accident.

There is no storytelling engine within any of Will Wright’s games. There is a built-in metastory in each one, a sense of irresistible progress which is more explicit in Spore than in any of his previous games since Sim Earth, which was an ambitious failure, but though I genuinely love the creativity that’s gone into the Spore demos I’ve seen, the vast majority of its gameplay—once your creature develops intelligence and enters the Tribal Phase—doesn’t seem to be much beyond Civilization. You’ll encounter other races and either make peace or make war with them, at various different technology levels.

And yeah, it’ll be different every game, in a kind of different-but-the-same way: the races will change but the progression through evolution and societal development will be essentially the same and unchangeable.

And while this is great and I’m sure will be several kilos of fun (more certainly than the not-dissimilar Sim Earth, which was a dog), it’s not a story. Wright has no interest in that. The metastory in Sim City is the growth of a conurbation, and while there are interesting stories to be told on that theme, profound emotional responses that can be taken away from a well-crafted narrative on that theme—see the works of Peter Ackroyd, Michael Moorcock’s Mother London, and Alan Moore’s Voice of the Fire—Sim City doesn’t try to go anywhere near there. If the game inspires any emotions in its player they are only curiousity, excitement, frustration and satisfaction, and those are the same responses that people have been taking away from every video game since Pong.

I mean, has anyone ever taken a bigger emotional response away from The Sims, other than a sense of loss when a favourite Sim dies? (And while that’s a valid emotion, does it happen for any reason apart from the time and commitment that you’ve invested in that character? Nintendo could just as easily have made children all over the world howl inconsolably by putting a lifespan on the puppies in Nintendogs. Making people cry by taking away something they like isn’t evidence of artistry, it’s a cheap trick.) Do people tell the stories of what their Sims did, their lives and exploits—stories beyond the “And her hair was on fire but all she could think about was how much she needed to pee!” anecdotes that used to clutter up the web? The Sims is no more a story-generator than a hamster colony is. And on the evidence so far Spore is more of the same, with bigger teeth, additional legs, weaponry and evolution.

Yes, there is a level on which the player can project emotions, values and personality onto their characters in The Sims, and doubtless they’ll be able to do the same in Spore. This is a lot of what my own work has been about: arranging elements so that players can build their own stories in their imagination or with a group of friends, and this is what qualifies me to say that Wright’s approach to it is a flawed patchwork.

To create a story—and, I would argue, to make the game-experience more than just fun—you need more than just characters and conflict: you need interesting characters and interesting conflict. Unless you’re prepared to trust to happenstance for your encounters to play out in a satisfactory order, you also need a degree of setup, structure and resolution. To create an enjoyable story with emotional resonance in an interactive medium you need even more than that: you need talent and opportunity. The fact that games can tell stories with the commercial and logistical constraints the storytellers have at the moment is great; that a few of them are emotionally involving, personally resonant and stay with the player long after the game is over is frankly a miracle.

The problem is that at the moment the industry doesn’t prioritise story because it doesn’t see how story sells units (and while games with compelling stories have been some of the biggest hits ever—Half Life, Deus Ex, the Final Fantasy series—they’ve also been some of the biggest failures—Shenmue, Beyond Good and Evil, Psychonauts), and therefore getting story into most games is a compromise. Let’s face it, the story content of the vast majority of games is built entirely around the set pieces, and it’s the set pieces that sell the product—in the trailers and the demos, anyway. It’s a lot like the story conference that Josh Friedman describes having with a major international action star:

INTERNATIONAL STAR: So…we have a bar scene first. Maybe…a bar fight? Six men against me…I’ll balance on a chair like this…take out all six…do my funny International Star thing…maybe drink their drinks…then we have some story bullshit…After that…I rescue this girl from…the whorehouse? Maybe bandits…I’ll do my funny International Star thing…like with this chair here…Then some story bullshit…and I find this other girl tied up…there’s a chair gag…then some story bullshit…

Will Wright’s games don’t have set pieces: they’re all about play. (Many of his games from Sim City onwards are described as ‘software toys’, meaning they don’t have an end-state or ultimate purpose—which unless you’re writing a soap opera is kind of an essential part of a story.) At any given point in a Wright game the player has their current position, and their awareness of the progress that led to that point, and a goal that may be short- or long-term, and a context for all their actions (“I am building a city/ant farm/nuclear family/civilisation”) and for Wright’s games and their players, that’s enough to make the experience enjoyable. They don’t need story. Other types of games do. Games as a form are still waiting for their Shakespeare but to dismiss the whole idea of story as an integral part of most games, as Wright did, is unhelpful at best and wilfully ignorant at worst.

The question is: is there a middle way? And could it lead to a better future?

And if you know me or any aspect of my career in games, or any of the games I’ve worked on, then you know my answer: I’m leaping up and down, tearing my hair out in bunches and screaming, “Yes! Yes! A thousand, thousand times yes!” Because that’s exactly what Once Upon a Time, and Baron Munchausen, and the forthcoming Youdunnit and the never-to-be-released Copshow (currently being cannibalised to create Frup) are all about: using archetypes and archetypal story structures to dynamically build the framework and skeleton of a story—a real one with a beginning, middle and satisfactory end, and characters and mutable plots—in such a way that the human imagination will fill in the blanks almost without the player thinking about it, and to integrate that within the format of any existing game-genre.

And while I’m not alone—Chris Crawford and his Storytron have been howling this same message in the wilderness for some years now—I am available.

Therefore and in summary, give me a job you bastards.

Wright (full of) Stuff

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I didn’t comment on Will Wright’s SXSW keynote about storytelling in games because I couldn’t find a good enough transcript of it to get a clear demonstration of which orifice he was speaking from. I was pretty sure it was the one he usually sits on, but I wasn’t 100% sure and so I didn’t say anything. I figured someone would do a better job of the job pretty soon.

It’s taken surprisingly long, but Borut Pfiefer of EALA has stepped up to the line and called Wright out.

Here’s the best transcript of the Wright keynote I can find, by the splendid Alice, who I last saw at dinner at the GDC I didn’t go to.

Here’s  Borut’s response.

Enjoy!

Things not to do in game design #1

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#1: Killing the player for no obvious reason

Example: Final Fantasy III (Square Enix, 2006) on the Nintendo DS. After you defeat Goldor the game does not progress unless you fly your airship over a specific point on the world-map. Since nobody will tell you this, you’ll probably spend a while exploring the world.

One of the things you find is a path leading into the interior of the right-hand continent, to an avenue of stone statues. You walk between the first pair of statues, there’s a crash and they disappear. Oho! You walk between the second: same thing. You walk up to the third…

The screen goes white
The ground shakes. Your avatar falls to the ground
The screen goes black
Caption: ‘The party has met an untimely end…’
Game over.

I realise that most of you understand this already, but don’t do that!

  • Never kill the player without giving some indication of why they died.
  • Either give them some warning that an insta-death awaits (in FFIII you don’t get this till you’ve defeated the next boss) or give them some way of avoiding it.

Why shouldn’t you do this? Because, as Simon Wistow observed, ‘girls don’t like to die.’ Novice players don’t like it either because they assume it’s their fault, don’t understand what happened, and don’t want to keep playing. Even I, with 28 years of CG play behind me, find stuff like this so frustrating that I shut off the DS and went and did something else. Killing the player with no explanation is fundamentally stupid game design.

Bad Square Enix. No Gysahl Greens.

Air play

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I’ve been in San Francisco. Not for GDC, which as far as I can tell exists only to provide column-inches for excitable bloggers, but for the wedding of Derek Pearcy, the former editor of Pyramid magazine, Origins Award-winning designer of In Nomine, and the man who did all the visual design for the original edition of my game The Extraordinary Adventures of Baron Munchausen. Derek is a bigtime Good Soul, and I wish him and his bride extraordinary levels of happiness together.

But this isn’t about Derek, Munchausen or GDC, it’s about in-flight entertainment systems.

If you’ve not travelled longhaul in recent years you’re probably still aware of the introduction of seat-back screens giving each passenger a choice of media to watch, but you may not know that most of them now have a selection of games to play. Virgin, one of the pioneers in this area, used to list 35 old NES games including F-Zero, Doctor Mario, Mah Jong, one of the Bonk games (though I thought those were all PC Engine) and an early Zelda, and those flights to and from Chicago used to zip by.

I hadn’t flown Virgin for a while, so when in November I booked our honeymoon flight to Costa Rica I did so with one eye to seeing what the games on the new V:Port IFE system (based on the Matsushita MAS3000 entertainment system) were like. It’s an update, yes, but hardly an improvement. The video-on-demand delivery is fantastic, with a library of films. The games are pretty much…. I suspect someone at Virgin went to a conference much like GDC and sat in on a session—just one—on casual gaming. Then they went back to the office, phoned Nintendo’s agents and cancelled their contract, then hired a bunch of hacks to do Flash-based colour-saturated knock-offs of every casual game they’d ever heard that people liked, via a half-hour research trip to Yahoo! Games.

So we have 15 titles: the Tetris-alike, the Solitaire, the mini-golf, several trivia quizzes (three of them networked across the aircraft but all of them painfully slow), and variants of Pacman (‘Cave Crunch’ my arse), Backgammon, Hangman, all image-heavy and under-playtested. There is Battlemail Kung-Fu, which Virgin has the cheek to claim was created for them, and a Who Wants To Be A Millionaire thing, but the rest are generics. I can’t find any solid information on which alleged ‘developer’ created these titles but I seem to recall it was some crew of jokers called Snap2, of whom I hoped never to hear again.

And I didn’t, until I stepped onto this BA flight. Here is the same Snap2 plus, unless my memory plays me false, many of the same games, only without the occasional flashes of originality in the Virgin line-up. Here’s the whole maudlin list of BA game titles:

  • Backgammon
  • Blackjack
  • Chinese solitaire
  • Crossword
  • Hangman
  • Keno (American for ‘bingo’)
  • Poker
  • Professional Gold Digger (Space Panic with atrocious level design)
  • Reversi
  • Slots
  • Solitaire

Depressing, isn’t it? What’s more, if you’re in Economy (which I was, as I’m flying on my own pocket rather than, say, the BBC’s—perhaps some of my friends at the BBC can tell me if the selection is any better up front) the games aren’t playable as the handset is fixed into the arm of your seat, not detachable like the Virgin ones which you can hold like a joypad. So the D-pad is 90-degrees out. Mind you, the control-keys and the 2002 copyright date might make one suspect ‘Professional Gold Digger’ wasn’t developed specifically with BA’s in-flight platform in mind.

Professional Gold Digger

(A little Googling suggests that Snap2 no longer exists—its former website is squatted—and its game assets are now owned by a company called NTN Buzztime Inc.)

Part of me is happy that games are seen as a standard component of an adult-oriented entertainment package. The rest of me is furious that these cut-price, outdated, badly implemented knock-offs are considered good enough. I am not exaggerating when I say that the games that came free on your phone are better designed and more enjoyable than any of the titles I’ve listed above. They are without exception shit.

What makes me doubly angry is that this is symptomatic. We’re living at a time when large parts of the games industry is acting with utter disregard to its history and heritage. The PS3 will be released in Europe without the hardware emulation to allow old PS and PS2 games to run natively on it. If you want to transfer game-saves from your Xbox to yout Xbox 360 you will need to buy $70 of Datel kit to do it—and even then you may not be able to play them because like the PS3, it does its emulation in software and many great titles won’t run on it. Nintendo offers arcade classics for download on the Wii but they’re not the originals, they’re the NES or PC Engine ports.

There is a huge wealth of gaming history out there, fantastic titles as playable and enjoyable today as they were when they were released. The Wii Virtual Arcade, the retro titles on Xbox Live Arcade and the continuing releases of retro collections from Atari, Taito, Midway, Sega and others shows that the market for great games of this vintage is far more than just nostalgia or curiosity. They might not fit the current niche-definitions of ‘casual games’ but these titles are more accessible and more stimulating than any of the current offerings. Yes, the graphics may be primitive but I have found that if the gameplay is strong enough then people will still play them. And if BA gave you a choice between Chinese Checkers and Chuckie Egg, which would you play? Which would you replay?

BA’s current seat-back entertainment system is, it must be said, last-gen. Virgin’s V:Port is delivering video-on-demand, so there’s clearly some actual processing power within each individual unit, and apparently their next-gen system, due to roll out later in 2007, puts a mini-PC into each seat-back. In the hands of a content manager with wits and imagination that opens the door to emulators for 8- and 16-bit machines, enough processing power to run a fair proportion of today’s indie games, Flash, demo levels of new titles, and more. They could talk to the likes of PopCap to put Bejewelled onto the system: best-selling games to complement the obligatory blockbuster movies two channels over. Not to mention that the games could be updated every month, like the other content in the system.

But I’m prepared to bet that won’t happen—not in a culture that thinks its customers are going to be happy with rubbish versions of over-played ‘classics’ and wonky controllers. They’ve given no thought to their games offerings for five years, so why should we think that’s going to change in the next five?

(More information on Virgin Atlantic’s in-flight systems can be found here, if you really want to know.)

Notes found in an abandoned directory

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TIPS FOR MEDIA AGENCIES ON WORKING WITH EXTERNAL GAMES DESIGNERS

(I jotted this about eighteen months ago, probably while on the Tube. I think I had the intention of working it up into a proper document and circulating it. Evidently that didn’t happen.

If you’ve got any tips that would fit in the list, bung them down below. If you know of any media agencies that would benefit from this advice, feel free to pass it on.)

1. If you’ve not done a game before, then say so. We will not laugh and point, but on the other hand we will not assume you understand basic principles that actually you don’t.

2. Stage one is to sit down with the designer and agree the development schedule, how much time there is to delivery, and how that time will be divided up. You should do this before you’ve even begun working out whether this is going to be a BAFTA-winning work of dazzling originality or another arcade knock-off with your client’s brand on it.

3. Whatever stage you’re doing next, do mention it to the designer.

4. Liaise closely with your designer. Yes, closer than that. Game design is an organic, holistic process, yet games designers are not mind readers. We need to know what’s going on in your heads, and you need to know what’s going on in ours.

5. You cannot speed up game development by throwing more staff at it. It may improve the quality of the end product (as long as the staff understand games, see point 1) but it won’t make it happen any faster.

6. If you employ a games designer and then don’t show them early builds of the game or consult them during playtest, you’ve wasted your money.

7. A credit would be nice.

Addendum 1: Know who you want. A games designer will design you a game. A games writer will work with a designer to plan and create all the plot, character and narrative elements of a game for you. A script writer will write the actual words that will appear in the game. The three do overlap but they are not the same and they get paid differently. Don’t ask someone to script-write a game and then expect them to design the games systems.

Gathering nuts in May

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The world is full of bullshit awards.

In a few days we’ve got the Oscars, where an Academy dominated by retired actors will vote for films in which other actors get to showcase their acting, and scripts and directors that showcase acting, and people will call foul because these films, these scripts, these directors and even these actors were not the “best”. That’s a value judgement. That’s not what I’m talking about.

On 8th February, the Academy of Interactive Arts & Sciences gave out its tenth annual Interactive Achievement awards, thirty reasons for the computer-game business to rent a dinner jacket and fly to Las Vegas. The big winners were Gears of War and Wii Sports and Nintendo had a good night all told, with two Lifetime Achievement awards and gongs for Brain Age and Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess which picked up ‘Outstanding Achievement in Story and Character Development’.

Now that’s a bullshit award.

Not a bullshit category, mark you. I think it’s fantastic that the AIAS respects and honours excellence in game narrative. But giving it to Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess is a joke because there’s precious little story in the game and literally no character development, whether you’re talking about the avatar or the NPCs. Nobody learns anything that changes their life. Nobody changes. Nobody matures. What story there is unfolds in wildly inconsistent info-dumps, mostly irrelevant to gameplay.

Link, our avatar, begins the game as an cypher and ends it as a cypher with a few more hit points. He has no personality and never says anything. Over the course of the game we learn almost nothing about him that we didn’t know at the start (lives in a treehouse outside a village, rides a horse, herds goats, has odd taste in clothes and a chest in his basement he’s never bothered to open), other than he’s got some kind of mystic destiny. All that he learns about himself, his past and this destiny is some new combat skills. His relationship with Ilia begins promisingly, then she gets kidnapped and loses her memory (hurrah for strong female characters, eh?) and Link has to find out what happened to her. When he does it turns out to be very boring, and she plays no further part in the story apart from a cameo at the end. Link ends up having a more meaningful relationship with his horse than with Ilia. Another potentially interesting character-arc, that of Prince Ralis, is left hanging after its second act. He doesn’t even get a vignette during the credits sequence.

As for the story, once you get past the fluff about the world of shadow invading the world of light, it’s two sequential hunt-the-magic-jigsaw quests. Link assembles one jigsaw (one piece per dungeon, of course), is immediately told that this jigsaw is no good, and must set off to assemble another one. At one point you do reach a place that promises to explain something about the ancient beings who set up the events that have caused all this mess, and who set in motion Link’s mystic destiny. What we find out there is that these people liked statues and built a lot of traps.

As a rich, interactive narrative experience, Legend of Zelda: Twlight Princess is a pretty good 3D platformer. Lots of jumpy-jumpy stuff. Sliding-block puzzles. A snowboarding minigame that made me intensely nostalgic for the one in Final Fantasy VII. And okay, I admit the sheer variety of activities (sumo, jousting, horseback archery, flying contests and even the fishing which a lot of people seemed to hate but really wasn’t so irritating) keeps one interested and amused. But that doesn’t make the game an outstanding achievement in story and character development.

There are, of course, side-quests. You can spend time finding every Heart Piece. You can hunt down every Poe soul to receive a reward. You can locate every golden insect in the world to make a small rich girl happy. These side-quests appear to be more important to our hero of mystic destiny Link than saving the world, since the climax of the game will wait indefinitely for him to complete these quests, and he can’t complete them after defeating the final boss. This makes no sense, either narratively or in gameplay.

And the background world is strictly generic: that weird and never-explained post-FF blend of magic, technology and every imaginable kind of terrain that makes no sense and doesn’t work. There is a community with two inhabitants, one of whom is the community shaman. There’s an oil-seller whose business is on a road that nobody except Link ever uses. And there are dungeons filled with vicious monsters that, if left in proximity, should have eaten each other. Maybe they don’t eat meat. Maybe they just hate Link. I know that by the end of the game I did.

I should say—and it may be obvious—that I’ve not played any of the earlier parts of the Zelda franchise. I suspect a lot of Wii owners won’t have done either. All I can report is that this game gives no hint of having more than twenty years of story and character behind it. Admittedly neither do the recent Sonic games, but then Sonic was never about either story or character, and I say that as someone who wrote two novels and two gamebooks about him in the early 90s.

So why has the AIAS chosen Zelda as the recipient of the award for ‘Outstanding Achievement in Story and Character Development’? The only other category in which it was nominated was Action/Adventure Game of the Year, which went to Gears of War. And it’s not a bad game, qua game, but if you go to any game shop and pull any CRPG from the last ten years off the shelf, there’s a strong chance it’ll have more story and character development than LoZ:TP.

So why this award, and why now?

I can think of two reasons. Firstly, the first 2-3 hours give the impression that LoZ:TP is going to have a strong narrative. The characters in Link’s home village are established with confident if broad strokes and it’s suggested they have roles to play in what follows, though most of them don’t. The storytelling is tight and there are hints of great mysteries to be revealed, though most of them aren’t. Although LoZ:TP is a game requiring 40+ hours to finish, for me to suggest that the Academy’s panel has only played through its opening chapters would be unfair. I have no evidence to support it.

That leaves the second reason: it’s a sop. LoZ:TP is groundbreaking, its control systems are brilliantly innovative, and it’s the latest installment of one of the most respected and commercially successful games franchises in the industry’s history. Clearly to a panel made up of industry players it should get an award of some kind, but the all-conquering Gears of War was equally clearly going to win its category, Action/Adventure. What else is there? Art direction? Sound design? Original music? I know, it’s a bit like an RPG and everybody likes Link, let’s give it Story and Character Development.

A brief summary for those who don’t know me: story and narrative in games and interactive media is my thing. It is the drum I bang, and I bang it relentlessly. It is acceptable for an arcade or casual game to have no story (note that story is not the same as backstory: the latter happens before play, the former during it. Many games have both; some have neither) but I believe absolutely that any interactive experience that aims to engage you for a single play-session of anything over an hour needs a coherent narrative. As games get more sophisticated, so should their stories and story-telling techniques. “Our princess is in another castle” doesn’t cut it any more. And yet that’s not a million miles from what the plot of LoZ:TP boils down to.

I call bullshit on this award.

If anyone from the AIAS judging panel—or anyone else—can tell me why LoZ:TP deserves this award for 2007, having better story and character than other category nominees like Dreamfall, please do. Otherwise I say it’s a sop, something for Nintendo to take home at the end of the night for a game that deserved a gong of some kind. That’s reprehensible enough, but the fact that they thought nobody would particularly object to a manifestly unqualified game like LoZ:TP getting the award for story and character development makes it doubly so, and casts a poor light on the rest of the Interactive Achievement Award winners, who in my experience deserve their trophies.

Meanwhile… a few posts back I described LoZ:TP as ‘gathering nuts in May’ and I’m going to stick to that summary. I’ll leave the last word to the excellent Rebecca Borgstrom, who observed that if you want to play a wolf with an intensely irritating rider, you’d be better off with Okami.

Comfort spaces

Posted by under game design

A few months ago UK Resistance, perhaps the finest gaming website in the world, launched what it called its ‘Blue Sky In Games‘ campaign. Boiled down, this said that the current crop of dark, gritty, nihilistic games are no good, and developers should go back to making games with blue skies like, for example, the works of Sega 1991-2002 with particular reference to Sonic the Hedgehog. I’ll come back to this, but I think that in this fine joke they’ve hit on something quite fundamental in the difference between games that are good, games that are great and games that become part of your life.

Let me ask you this: what’s the best games level you’ve ever played? Not the best level of the best game you’ve ever played, but the best single level, ignoring the rest of the game around it. Put it another way: what do you choose when you have twenty minutes to kill, not enough time to get stuck into any gaming proper but maybe time to play through one level of something, or just prat around in it for a while, having fun.

(Yes, fun. Remember when that’s what games were about?)

In 1992 Sega released Ecco the Dolphin for the Megadrive. It was a revelation: fantastic sprites and fluid animation, responsive controls, huge scope, Sega at the peak of its powers. It was also bastard hard. I reckon I logged fifteen hours on that game, though I never got beyond level four. Part of that was the aforementioned bastard hardness, but mostly it was something much more fundamental. Guiding a dolphin through mazes filled with enemies and puzzles was okay, but it was much more fun to stay on level 2, the open ocean, and just prat around being a dolphin.

Fast forward to the beginning of 2006. My father is diagnosed with inoperable cancer of the aesophagus. I take the news rather badly and retreat into myself (one of three traditional ex-public schoolboy ways of dealing with emotional trauma, the other two being declaring war on something and suicide). More specifically I retreat into my Nintendo DS and Animal Crossing: Wild World (Nintendo, 2005).

AC:WW is essentially a community simulator: a small, simple world that follows fixed rules, most of them to do with capitalism. The way to do well in AC:WW (“well” is an arguable term since the game has no stated goals, is open-ended and cannot be won or lost) is to establish routines. AC:WW plays in real time, so there’s a limit to how much one can achieve in a single day: once you’ve picked all that day’s fruit you can stilll earn money by catching fish, but if the shop’s closed then you can’t sell or buy anything. But there’s always something to do: interacting with the other residents, rearranging the furniture in your house, collecting bugs or going after an elusive rare fish. However the returns are diminishing, and playing AC:WW for more than two hours a day is a bit futile. (Nintendo has built a similar mechanism into another DS game, Brain Training: I have a future post brewing about the Ninty habit of replicating mechanisms from successful games, with particular reference to the influence of Pokemon on, well, everything.) Is it this inability to keep playing, the thwarted desire for more that keeps players coming back every day? Is it what kept me engrossed and immersed in AC:WW for roughly half a year?

In a word, no. But I did play it for half a year. Not in an obsessive must-get-everything way (my bug collection is woefully incomplete), but simply because I enjoyed the experience of being in the small town of Yarswood, interacting with its two-dimensional inhabitants and doing active things that affected the town and townspeople in an immediate and beneficial way. The environment was attractive and while there were still surprises to be had, they were all pleasant ones.

Animal Crossing became a comfort space for me: somewhere I understood, where I could safely hang out knowing that the worst news I was going to get would be that a townsanimal was moving away, or that a painting I’d bought was actually a fake. I felt occupied, busy and useful while in the game-world, and though there were still challenges and tasks undone, I felt safe.

It’s unusual to find a title like AC:WW where the entire game-world functions as a comfort space. Usually it’s a part of a game, one play-mode, level or map. But it’s not something inherent to all games, and why that may be is almost as good a question as what makes a comfort space in the first place. To put my original question another way: why have the Halo and GTA games inspired an entire community of scenery explorers, virtual mountaineers and digital spelunkers while other successful FPSes with equally detailed and varied worlds—looking at you, Unreal, Farcry and Black—haven’t?

I believe it boils down to one thing: these games, or these levels of games, are places where we like to be. Not necessarily where we like to achieve things and progress in game-terms, or where we want to sandbox and look for glitches: I’m simply talking about a part of the game we can either play over and over, or where we enjoy spending time. A blisteringly simple answer, I know, but it immediately begs the question of why we like certain game-spaces so much that we come back to them over and over again, often eschewing (good word) new experiences in favour of ones we know inside out.

For example, the first half of the underrated Oddworld: Stranger’s Curse (EA/Oddworld Inhabitants, 2005) is set in a hyper-stylised Old West populated mostly by chickens. Its landscapes and vistas are beautiful, the sun beats down from a cloudless sky and thistledown floats past on the breeze. It would be idyllic if there weren’t outlaw frogs trying to kill you. I can revisit it endlessly to explore its nooks and crannies and play through its boss-battles. The second half of the game, which is arguably more interesting in pure game terms, is darker and more dystopian, and doesn’t encourage you to hang around and smell the desert flowers. I’ve played through it once, and once was enough.

I believe that most comfort spaces in games are accidents. I think it’s very hard to design them, not least because different elements appeal to different players. Not all of my comfort spaces will appeal to everyone, nor my reasons for coming back to them, but here are a few reasons why a particular zone or area may particularly appeal to us:

Familiarity and repetition. The act of doing something familiar is enormously reassuring. Children never grow tired of hearing favourite books read night after night and you, you sad goober, how many times have you watched Star Wars? Doing something familiar in a video game like replaying a favourite level doubles the pleasure because it’s an active experience and yet—in most games—absolutely predictable. Beating a personal best or discovering a new secret makes us feel a little bit better and cleverer than before, and even finishing a favourite level for the umpteenth time reassures us that however the outside world may be treating us, some things are consistent and our ability to beat the game’s obstacles is one of them.

Feelgood characters. Sometimes we simply enjoy controlling a particular character. Often it’s a character with cool moves. Ecco, above, is a good example, as are the skaters from Jet Set Radio (Sega/Smilebit, 2000) and Jet Set Radio Future (Sega/Smilebit, 2002). Sometimes they have a tool or weapon we really like, such as the grav gun from Half-Life 2 (Valve, 2004).

Oo pretty. We like to be there. It looks nice, or sounds nice, or there’s a synergy of sound, visuals and gameplay that’s really lovely. How many times have I played through Rez (Sega/United Game Artists, 2001)? Too many, and at the same time not enough.

Ease of access. You’ve got to be able to get there easily. Usually that’s as simple as some kind of level-select or save-game, but with earlier console or arcade games it can present some problems.

Comfort spaces may seem antithetical (another good word) to the traditional idea of gameplay, which requires progression. In fact the idea fits with several facets of modern game design: the sandbox principle, in which players are given elements to play and experiment with; the side-quest, a diversion from the main game-narrative resulting in a reward of some kind, into which I will be inserting my boot when I get round to writing up my thoughts on Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess; and the post-Pokemon collect-em-all tendency in which the gameworld must be explored to find all instances of a particular set.

But those kind of challenges treat the whole game-world as a comfort space, and while that can certainly pull users back to a game, to “finish” it by doing, beating, killing or collecting everything, comfort-spaces are not about finishing a game. You may have conquered it a hundred times, you may never have got beyond the early levels, but there’s one bit where you’re comfortable and you’re going to do your own thing there for a bit. There’s something faintly subversive in the nature of a comfort space: the game wants you to move on to the next level, the next region or set-piece, but you’re not going to.

A comfort-space is not the same thing as a game that’s explicitly designed as a sandbox or a software toy. These are virtual spaces created for exploration and experimentation, often with catch-em-all quests and easter eggs to keep a player’s attention. They’re designed to encourage the sort of behaviour that occurs spontaneously in comfort spaces within games, though without the emotional resonance of doing something familiar, practised and much-loved.

That’s not to say that loading that archetypal software toy Sim City and tinkering once more with the teeming metropolis of Jamesburg can’t be a satisfying and reassuring experience. But comfort spaces arise at the moment that we become so familiar with a game that it becomes a software toy. The usual strictures of level-progression and game-narrative cease to be important and what’s left is the stripped-down essence of the game experience and our connection to it.

This sensation, this way of entering into a game by going beyond the experience of being a player, to almost become an inhabitant of the game-world, has a lot of crossover with Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s concept of flow. Both ideas are fundamental to the core questions of how and why we enjoy games, and I’ll be returning to that huge subject in future posts.

Are comfort spaces important? I think so. The whole idea of a comfort space, or of a game that we replay over and over again, goes against the design principles of most commercial releases. Within the standard revenue model a games company gets the same revenue if a player spends five hours or five hundred playing their product. The benefits of designing longevity into a title are small: one fewer copy in the secondhand market, goodwill towards sequels, the franchise, the developer or the publisher, the possibility of selling add-on packs. Yet our comfort-space games are the ones we remember most fondly and the ones that stay in our collections, and the ones that influence what we think of as ‘good’ game design. It’s not about challenge, or overcoming adversity, or the completion of a satisfying narrative. It’s purely and simply about finding a virtual space where we like to be.

At least, that’s the best reason I can find to explain why, when I booted the original Sonic the Hedgehog to get the screenshot I needed for the header of this blog and found myself at the start of the Green Hill Zone for the first time in maybe fifteen years, the only thing I could think was, “Oh wow…

…I’m home.”