With both Dead Space 2 released and Dead Space 2: Severed announced I have been thinking a lot about potential side-projects for my suddenly free evenings. Going through the processes of defining what sort of game I would make got me thinking more about my overall design philosophy and I hope to record a few of those ideas here.

The first goal in all of my designs is a sense of discovery or wonder. I owe a lot of debt here to Steve Gaynor’s blog, particularly his post Play. He lays this out better than I could and so I just refer you there. Through this sense wonder the player becomes invested or engrossed in the world. By creating a universe of logical if not realistic rules it is possible to facilitate this discovery.

The second goal is that of theme.  All good works of art have a theme or intent behind the creation. The creator doesn’t always have to spell out the theme, or there could be several interlocking in the work, but through themes and symbols we find meaning in art. This is something video games do very poorly and rarely. I would like to create a game that take the very simple theme of growing up and becoming independent and run that through all parts of the work. Thus not just the player will grow, but the world will change as time passes and characters within it will react to the both of these changing forces. Fable tried this but got lost, it became more about just providing choice, with no focused theme. A strong central theme should tie narrative, context and gameplay together. This would be a core part of the mechanics and the narrative. Ultimately the theme of the game should impact what the player does, how he/she does it, and what it all means.

My third goal does not stand solely on its own, but rather informs a few other design ideas. This is the concept of narrative density and creating a space where each distinct section has significance. I view a game like King’s Quest or Quest for Glory as much an open world as many modern sandbox games, just with a better content / square foot ratio. The potential of most MMO games to create a living, breathing world is hurt significantly by how spread out and hard to navigate the world’s are. If the narrative was compacted down into a smaller space where the player could interact with it better, the existing content would be more effective. This has gotten a bit off track, but I think things can be brought back to a point. Here we go: To create a living space it must be filled with characters and activities. A believable world is not a few hot spots of activity filled with empty space between like in most modern sandbox games. Since budgets are limited and content hard to create, using a small town location where every shop or house can be interacted with creates a better effort to reward ratio.

The forth goal is player choice. Now everyone wants this, but not everyone means the same thing by it. In my case, I think the player should be allowed to play the game as he or she sees fit. The player doesn’t need to create a character or a world or collect items or whatever for there to be player choice, it is in the mechanics that choice really matters. This is not to say that I am against narrative choice, I think that is more the narrative reacting to situations where the player has made mechanical choices. The idea here is that the virtual world has a set of rules and in each challenge the player is allowed to reach the goal using whatever means the world provides. There doesn’t have to be more than one solution (or resolution i suppose), but there needs to be more than one way of getting there. Ideally this all happens within the same family of systems like in Deus Ex or Vampire Bloodlines, but I don’t think that always has to be the case.

I hope to develop a better understanding of what I want from mechanics design by prototyping a few game ideas in the next few months. At the very least, expect this list to get refined and expanded in the future.

I was a speaker this year at the Vancouver Game Design Expo on Jan 24th. My presentation covered what I have learned about using horror effectively while working on Dead Space 2. The raw slides are attached here as a PDF. I will be doing future posts which will go into the topics covered in the presentation, but in more detail than I was able to fit in 30 minutes.

[Download PDF]

At the tail end of last term we entered TaxiCity into the FTW Competition. A few weeks ago the announced the finalist and to our surprise TaxiCity was nominated in two categories! Now all the votes have been tallied and we are walking away with the award for best student application, which really is awesome. The winner of best open data application and the overall competition, Find-A-Home, is far more complete in execution than our project., though I feel our concept is a more unique use of open data. TaxiCity really has garnered a lot more interest than I think any of us expected when the project began, and I hope it continues in the future.

In many cases, a rich narrative is created by having a complex main character and focusing on the intricacies of that person’s journey. Supporting characters will occasionally have depth, but more often than not are just a part of the evolution of the main character. The films I have screened for CG&FN recently fall into this category, Heaven and Dog Day Afternoon are both very focused tales, with the world as a backdrop for the main characters. This focus results in a story with a narrow breadth, but expansive depth, much like a well.

For static media this system works very well, the audience needs a character to follow and become invested in, change is easier to show when you are following an individual. With few exceptions (the films of Robert Altman comes to mind), most films and books do not feature an ensemble cast. In contrast to film, this approach does not work for most games because the main character is not fully under the control of the narrative. Creating a protagonist which the player does not exert some level of control over pulls the attention off of the player’s input and thus undermines the value of the interaction. A solution which RPG designers have long used is created a world filled with character, each of which has a relatively small amount of narrative. This creates a narrative that is very broad, but not particularly deep at any one point. There can be the same or more narrative volume, but less concentrated into individual characters.

Unlike the well of narrative above, this structure looks more like a lake in which the player can swim around. This encourages exploration and by placing narrative content within characters out of the players direct control, we avoid limiting the player actions to do world-building. Another advantage of this approach is that this narrative content is optional, providing the depth for explorers and not getting in the way of other players. This is not to say all games should use this structure (many of my favorite games do not), but when paired with the funnel concept of my Narrative Leeway post, I think this forms a good basis for creating an open-world narrative experience.

I think this is generally understood intuitively by those working in the games industry, but explicitly  categorizing successfully approaches is the only way to gain the understanding required to move narrative in interactive media forward.

]]> http://www.altereddreams.net/writing/narrative-volume/feed/ 0 http://www.altereddreams.net/writing/narrative-leeway-in-games/ http://www.altereddreams.net/writing/narrative-leeway-in-games/#comments Mon, 15 Mar 2010 05:53:16 +0000 Seth Marinello http://www.altereddreams.net/?p=1150 I have been thinking of something I am calling Narrative Leeway (the amount the plot is allowed to deviate from a predefined story), and I think I have finally condensed my thoughts down into something sensible. This all started when I was playing Heavy Rain a few weeks ago, and I am going to throw a spoiler warning here, I don’t go into details, but you have been warned!

Narrative choice is something most everyone in gaming thinks would be wonderful, but no one really knows how to implement. Indeed, this problem is doubly difficult, not only does adding choice to games require either additional content or addition gameplay systems, but telling stories through games is hard. Movies only have to entertain for 2 hours, and the pacing is mostly controlled, games can take over a day of playtime, spread over weeks or months. When a game IS able to tell a compelling story, as with Uncharted 2: Among Thieves, the game community is impressed. While Uncharted 2 was one of the best games of 2009, structurally the narrative was no different from the tradition linear stories we have been trying to cram into games forever.

Linear Narrative Progression in Film and Games (Historically)

Since the days of the arcade, game story has been crammed between linear game levels, with little deep connection between the two. Modern games as the aforementioned Uncharted and others such as Gears of War, Final Fantasy, and Metal Gear Solid, have just gotten really good at making the transition between game and story as seamless as possible. A game which claims to buck this trend is Heavy Rain, by Quantic Dream. Now, much as been said online about the quality of the narrative in Heavy Rain, and while that impacts the play experience, here I want to focus on the structure as I did above with Uncharted 2. I propose that the narrative leeway looks like an inverted funnel, channeling the player down a limited path to an ending with far wider branching.

Heavy Rain Narrative Leeway

This observation is based upon my discussions with other players and my observation of a second play-through of the game. Whenever I recount my experience playing through the story, the part which deviates from others experience the most is how the ending of the game plays out. Before the ending scene there is limited interaction between the main characters, isolating their narrative from the actions of the player is 3/4 of the other chapters. During most of the game, a player can miss content in a scene, or end things slightly differently, but this never changes the order or tone of the following scenes (with the exception of character death, which is possible, but only in a few sections, and even then, it is hard to die), meaning the plot always stays close to the core story crafted in David Cage’s head. One possible reason for widening the possibility space at the end of the game is because nothing has to come afterwards, the game is about to end and these branches don’t have to be very deep. Another is that endings are valued by both the player and creators. Any time we talk about branching and choice, the number of possible endings comes up. An example of this obsession is the brilliant but flawed Blade Runner by Westwood Studios, packing 13 separate endings, but with a linear buildup, much like Heavy Rain.

I believe this focus on endings needs to stop for several reasons:

1. Game are historically bad at endings, building up to a single climax worthy of 20+ hours of narrative is hard, doing it 2,3 or 13 times is almost impossible.
2. The ending comes at the end. If players want to shape the narrative, they probably don’t want to wait till the end to do it.
   • In fact, there is this problem where a lot of players never get to the end.

Rather than focus all this energy on creating different endings, I would propose looking at ways to expand the sense of freedom during the early stages of the game. The closer the game gets to conclusion, the more locked down the narrative gets, but this is OK because tension is rising and the player is going to be focusing on that and not exploring the world, which he/she has already had hours and hours to explore. This structure would look more like a proper funnel, allowing the player lots of freedom at the start, while at the same time always moving them toward a defined ending.

This is not an original structural design, but one I think is overlooked in narrative discussions because it doesn’t work well in film or literature. The genre which this is most at home in is the open world sandbox game, most modern GTA games can be fit into this model. One of the strongest examples of this concept is Deadly Premonition, which, while flawed as a game, is well crafted as a game narrative. It is able to follow this model by giving the player a large open world, but then constricting the area that is safe to travel in as the narrative progresses. Deadly Premonition inspired this little rant, and for that reason alone, I would recommend checking it out. Another game which I have not played YET but looks to have a similar open world/developed story combo is Yakuza 3.

In our quest for better story in games, we should perhaps look at examples great storytelling in games, and try to expand on that rather than continue to steal from other media so much. The stories games are good at telling may not be the same as ones in film, but let’s look at what makes games unique first, and get to the culturally significant part later.

This all leads into a discussion of what gives a narrative depth, which I hope to post later this week.

I have been working on TaxiCity since the end of January, but between getting the project rolling and the Olympics I haven’t had much time to update the site. This ends now!

TaxiCity is a Silverlight game created using open data from the City of Vancouver and the public Bing Maps API. Our team is working with Microsoft Government and David Eaves to create an engaging and interactive display of freely available data. In the game players will play as a taxi driver in Vancouver, picking up passengers and delivering them to key landmark locations in the city. Real world geometry creates the game map and the route tracking services provided by Bing will be used to guide the player to his/her destination.

Along with the game we are creating a generalized Silverlight game engine which we hope to release under an open source license when complete. Our tools for converting the open data into a game world will also be released so other citys or regions could be added in the future.

We are tracking development on taxicity.ca, which contains weekly builds of the game. Go check it out!

The New World was my 4th selection for CG&FN this term. Terrence Malick is visually one of my favorite filmmakers and The New World captures a sense of emotion which I feel is often lacking in mainstream film. It is also a showcase for the power of physical sets and real world settings, something I think we forget in the digital media industry. The New World might be considered a classic like some of the other films this term, but it is certainly worth a viewing for the cinematography alone.

Further Reading:

• bungie.org - bungie fan site
• Marathon’s Story – analysis of marathons story
• Pathways into Darkness – the predecessor to marathon & halo

Downloads:

[Marathon 2 for OS X] [Slides]

In collaboration with Global EESE, a student team at the Centre for Digital Media in Vancouver, BC has been working on an interactive simulation. The simulation intends to make vivid some of the future scenarios developed by Global EESE. The experience takes place in a 3D environment where the player is presented with a familiar scene set in the present day and a future scene set in 2032.

The future scenario manifests the worst outcomes of the present scenarios. Within the 3D environment are a series of characters with whom the player can interact. Through these conversations the player learns of the characters situations and perspectives on the environment. As the conversations progress the player makes certain decisions, influencing the characters to be more aware of the environment and potential risks. If the player successfully convinces the characters to be more aware they create a positive change in the future. The player can move between the future and the present as they complete puzzles and conversations to see the effects of their choices. When the game is completed a montage depicting the future sums up the consequences of the players choices.

The simulation was built in the game engine Unity using traditional game design methodology combined with the research and work of Global EESE.

The team at the Centre for Digital Media consists of artists, game designers, writers, and programmers.

My Role:

Our initial project assignment was to create a “vivid” and “human” representation of scenario data compile by the Department of Energy. To meet these needs I worked with our lead game designer to create the concept of Precipice. Officially I held the role of Team Lead on the project, but I also assisted in a number of other areas in addition to scheduling the project and integrating the work of team members.

A key component of our game is the dialogue engine which display the comic panels in sync with audio clips and text. We originally purchased a pre-built dialogue engine, knowing we did not have time to start from scratch, but it quickly became apparent we had needs that would require lots of customization. As the most experience coder on the team, I worked with the designer and art team to create the comic layout system and modify the dialogue file format to speed development of our specific product.

One of the greatest challenges on this project was the sheer amount of content we had to create, and I utilized my visual art skills to assist the art team in keeping on schedule. Working with our writing team, I designed all of the in-game posters, bulletin boards, and narrative artifacts such as the newspapers. I also created a number of the comic panels, following a style guide created by our art lead.

The last major component I created was the User Interface for tracking as players progress and displaying text on the screen. We had initially wanted a minimal UI, but through play testing it became apparent we needed more feedback in our game. Since everyone else was still working hard on getting content finalized, I took on the task of designing and coding the UI.

Precipice was an ambitious project, we started with global scenarios and distilled that information down into one 3D Café and 400+ comic panels in two time zones. Due to the level of skill and dedication the team brought to the effort, we were able to complete all major features and deliver a product the client loved without having to work significant overtime or extend our schedule. There remains, as with any project, many good ideas left on the cutting room floor, but I am proud of what we accomplished.

[Download]