Legacy skills through the Looking Glass.

I didn't know what he looked like either.

To a late 90's Looking Glass fan, the following quote from an interview about Dishonored would seem perfectly ludicrous:

http://games.on.net/2012/09/dishonored-interview-arkane-on-stealth-ai-player-choice-and-much-more/

GON: When I was talking to the guests, they all just started shouting at me to go upstairs immediately and check the diaries. So I resolved that I wasn’t going to do it, just to spite the game.

Julien: (laughs)
GON: Is that something that you find people doing? I expected the clues to be a bit more vague. Did you find this doing playtesting? Did you put it in because people didn’t know what to do?

Julien: Yeah. We try not to lead the player by the nose, but at some point we found that if we don’t give a little information, people just get lost and don’t know what to do. It’s just overwhelming. So we tried to add this element that gave just a hint, to help a little. But we try to do it as little as possible.

GON: It’s cool because there’s a lot of ways up the stairs, but it still felt a bit railroad-ey. What did people do before you put these clues in?

Julien: People would just walk around. They didn’t know what to do. They didn’t even go upstairs because a guard told them they couldn’t. They’d say “Okay, I can’t go upstairs.” They wouldn’t do anything.

Even from a modern vantage, it's easy to look at the above passage and laugh. But what's really going on here? Are players that stupid, or are a whole younger generation of shooter fans unconditioned to meet  to even modest exploration/decision making tasks?

I would say not likely--given there is a related and hugely popular set of sandbox games that revolve around exploring and deciding all you want. Something else is at work here. Is it the legacy skillset of current shooter fans working against them?

It's taken for granted that legacy skills (keyboard&mouse/two stick aiming) are required for first person shooters now, but what has now been completely bred out of an entire generation of shooter players is any desire to explore or not follow strict orders. I think a whole lot of young shooter players out there don't know how to play a single player shooter and not take shouted orders from a COD NPC Bro.


What do we expect, if it's all the diet FPS players have had for the better part of 6, 8 years? In COD and BF3, you get an abrupt mission over if you should deign to stop taking orders from your NPC comrades, sometimes even if you hesitate for a second. Shooter players are now conditioned to obey NPCs, in exchange for a jarring and sudden mission failed screen.

Taken in this light, the above quote seems a reasonable response from a tester. An NPC has just told me I can't go upstairs. I'm enjoying this game so far, do I really want to slog back through a load and the last checkpoint, just because I want to try, in utter futility, to push past my given bounds?

But in a game like Dishonored it isn't futile. You should be trespassing and trying to find your way out and around in spaces you're not usually allowed. The trick is to prompt the players who have been conditioned with swift punishment for straying off a linear path into accepting their widened freedom, and to encourage them to take advantage of it.

A small observation I know, likely not worth the space I've devoted to it here, but it struck me that legacy skills involve what you might also call legacy expectations: what kind of affordance have I been given in all the shooters in the past 5 years, and why should I expect any different of the game presently in front of me?
It seems to me a call to developers to take the poverty of modern linear shooters and reignite the expectation in players for better things, more decision making than which real-world analogous shotgun or LMG to pick for a multiplayer loadout.

There have been a lot of people pessimistic about Dishonored despite it giving every appearance of being a return to form for developers who have always believed in this kind of approach to games. I don't think it's fair to criticize them for having to re-educate a vast majority of their potential player base what it is like to call your own shots in a shooter environment.

Open world issues Part 3: trust and the player-driven narrative

I confess that every previous attempt to write this third installment has been met with some manner of derailment. Anyone unfortunate enough to have contact with me in casual conversation or on message boards on the subject of games will find me increasingly the ideologue. Any discussion about games seems to lead back inexorably to a few pet topics: the scourge of "cinematic" gaming chief among these, player agency and narrative.

As with the other two articles I hope that in identifying shortcomings in game design principles, in asking the right questions, I will have answers worth considering.

The player-driven narrative

The player in an open world wants to be in the driver's seat, literally and figuratively. I personally would like an open world to be just that: not an otherwise linear game whose mission order can be scrambled, but at the cost of endless shuttling to and from mission locations (AKA the pizza boy syndrome). As with GTA this is where the conversation always seems to turn back to cutscenes and movie-style story content because it is necessarily cost prohibitive and static. Either the movie conforms to the game (enormously expensive even to offer small choices in the main narrative), or the game conforms to the movie, which is how most games end up. Aspirations to "cinematic" games are a dangerous trap because in order to get those movie-like experiences we undercut what make games worthwhile on their own terms.
This suggests that cinematic-style high cost content--cutscenes and their related animation and voice work--have a higher impact on the quality and actual player choice than most people assume. If players and designers free themselves from the increasing fixation on the trappings of the disparate medium of film, likely it will be far simpler to allow the player farther-reaching choice and consequence in the game world.

Armed with ability

If we are to commit ourselves to greater player agency outside the bounds of movie-styled static content delivery, then we may find ourselves looking around for something to do. I do not criticize GTA's increasing emphasis on mimetic/lifestyle fantasy elements because there are fascinating, unique experiences allowable within that context.
An example I give that is similar to other stories I have heard about playing GTA4: once I had just fixed myself a sandwich but also wanted to play the game. I started GTA IV and then hired a cab to a mission destination across town, and simply did not skip the ride. It was an oddly inspired, unique experience to sit within the POV of the passenger, looking out on this well-realized virtual city traveling in real time, and eat a sandwich. While passive it was an experience I chose, one that made me reflect on various cab rides in cities in memory--unlike much of GTA4 it was not a movie-inspired element.
This is not to suggest that I want to play a slow boat to China simulator replete with various 1920s socialite passengers as the boat travels in real time (scratch that: now I do). But there are very strong elements in GTA, as with the other open world games, that are somewhat overlooked but do more than their share to immerse the player in the world.
Replacing the cinematic with the experiential would seem a critical step in vitalizing open worlds. Far Cry 2 is a game I otherwise enjoyed tremendously, but for the general shallowness of what I needed or could do within the visually lush environment. Tie my character further into the socio-economic fabric of the world he inhabits--not in order to simulate, but to create play economies, interactions with an otherwise static world.
In FC2 I am a mercenary who outside of the inspired malaria mechanic sought only weapons, ammunition, and morphine. What other needs or mechanics would serve to deepen both my immersion but also the playability of unique environs of the game?

Player input required

I would like to close with a contemplation of skill and performance. Not as an appeal for so-called "hard fun," or a return to outrageous difficulty ramps/endless trial-and-error gauntlets, but as an appeal for games to recover a capacity for the player to use their wit and intelligence. Both in rewards and in penalties.
Perhaps this marks me as too old-school of a PC gamer (or an inveterate hoarder) but I feel this is deeply intertwined with above concepts of agency, of choice. In order to let players be extraordinarily clever, I suppose it means you might have to let some players lose.
A story to illustrate: I remember playing Gears of War and first encountering the Hammer of Dawn weapon. It was enormously powerful, but clearly restricted by the vagaries of a weapon that called down an attack from a satellite. In the game Marcus can only carry two weapons, so it seemed a very clear moment of choice to me: do I drop the Hammer in favor of a less powerful gun that I can use frequently, or do I give up that second slot on the chance that later on I will be able to use the Hammer's enormous damage? I chose the latter--I was carrying two weapons of a similar performance profile so I decided it might come in handy.
Sure enough, it did come in handy later--but when I needed it there was of course another Hammer, lying conveniently on the ground just before an encounter with an enemy who could only be defeated using the Hammer.
I felt cheated. As a designer, I understood what had happened: if the player was to experience an interesting special encounter (we've got to get this enemy out in the open and then use the Hammer), they couldn't risk the player not having the weapon handy. But in making sure anybody playing the game had access to the Hammer when they needed it, the game also removed any sense of reward for my own initiative to keep the weapon.
Certainly I don't suggest that players just be screwed over with an unwinnable encounter without the Hammer--but couldn't the encounter (or similar encounter) be structured to reward cleverness or foresight, while still allowing other players an alternate, possibly more difficult solution to the problem? Say if you didn't keep the Hammer, you might still be able to whittle the Berserker's health down conventionally, or there might be another entertainingly "hardcore" method of dispatching it, like crushing it with a boulder.

 Choice needs to come with its own realm of variable performance. In order that there be real benefit to cleverness, to foresight, not all players can reap the rewards.
A positive example is in RE4, with the multi-part treasures: if Leon held off on selling what looked to be components of a larger whole, he'd make considerably more money later, once he had assembled all the pieces. Perhaps unsurprisingly, this element has been "streamlined" out of RE5. Sooner or later we'll get to "streamlining" most anything resembling a conscious decision or choice out of mainstream games, but it doesn't have to be this way.

***

To restate the above points: the essence of a game apart from traditional media is the player's interaction. The more a game allows the player to choose, to drive the story, the more it is a game and not a counterfeit of filmic experience.
If the player is to drive the narrative, he will likely require a greater range of possible interactions with the world--something to do that replaces the "cinematic" straitjacket of before--and these interactions will comprise much of the meat of the game, moment to moment.
If then the player is in the driver's seat and has an array of skills and interactions available, the final step in adding depth to the play experience is to take the training wheels off, allowing variable performance beyond rote or mechanical. Hope springs eternal.

Open world issues Part 2: the Bethesda model

Comments from yesterday's article prompted me to write a second update to discuss Bethesda's approach to open world games, since they're the other major player and take a markedly different approach worth discussing. We'll save the final discussion for where exactly we might like to pitch our own vision of an "open world" style game for a third installment.

The most obvious difference between Rockstar and Bethesda's approach to open world games is that the former makes action games and the latter makes RPG games. Where GTA has flirted memorably with light character mechanics with GTA:San Andreas, it's easy to see how far different the worlds are because of the RPG traditions of character creation and role assumption.
Not only am I naming and controlling the appearance of my character, the game assumes I am choosing a moral stance as well as preference for archetypal playstyles: warrior, rogue, or wizard, in the broad strokes, and all the flavors and subclasses in between.
As players we can assume much of the game/world content has been built to accommodate this spectrum of different player abilities and approaches. Tommy, CJ, or Niko we pick dress up clothes for but their stories are not ours; the traditional RPG focus of Bethesda's games assume a far greater stake in both role-creation and role-playing. We're expected to make decisions.

I explain the painfully obvious aspects of an action game character vs. an RPG character because I think it's important here in how their respective worlds are designed relative to player input. An action character has a set, narrow verb set but with generally greater resolution in those verbs, whereas RPGs take a broader approach, with a loss of fine resolution typically in action-style combat mechanics (though it's interesting here to note the hybrid forms in Mass Effect 1/2).
One key concern here is that Niko has no method to of interaction with other characters in the world, one to one, other than violence. He may play games, pay vendors for food or clothing, go on dates or hire a prostitute but these are only available contextually. Walking on the street with his girlfriend, his cousin, or past a police officer we are allowed either passivity or violence. This is why the otherwise incredibly well realized world of Liberty City seems so flat by comparison to much smaller-scoped, but more richly detailed games.  We may not encounter nearly as many citizens of whatever fantasy realm as pedestrians in Liberty City, but we can be assured we have at least some shallow, non-violent interactions with most of them.

 I am less an admirer of most fantasy settings; lesser still impressed when games lack an emphasis on finely tuned movement and combat mechanics, which I think has arguably been a weak point in Bethesda's games. So as with Part 1 I will use a post quote to enable discussion, this time from Internet scholar Liesmith:

    I think if you talk about the Bethesda model you should talk about the Daggerfall -> Morrowind -> Oblivion spectrum. Daggerfall is really innovative and provides a ton of stuff for the player to do, but it's overwhelming and specific towns + dungeons are bland because of the random generation. Still stuff like the item rules, where you trap souls and each soul has specific properties which it adds to your items, that's awesome and really ambitious.

Morrowind is a varied experience with really cool shit to do, and the best stuff is exploring a sweet ruin or tomb that no quest pointed you to, and finding a great sword or a book in dwarvish that needs translating. At the same time the quests are a lot of fun, especially since you have to seek them out rather than having them thrust upon you. It's a little scary at first though because gamers aren't used to so much freedom. Also fast travel is resolved in-game, with silt striders, teleport spells or boats.

Then Oblivion is a game that fails in exactly the opposite way as Daggerfall. In order to ease the new gamer's fear of the unknown and lack of direction, they made everything bland and introduced an insulting quest arrow. Fast traveling is similarly dumbed down, and at every turn it feels like they made the safe choices.

There's a lot to unpack here, but I appreciate him introducing a basic spectrum to talk about complexity of the world and correspondingly the emphasis each game places on the player's own will to conquer or explore. This seems consistent with what I have experienced of each title.
Daggerfall is almost punishingly vast in scope, perhaps crippled by overarching ambition for its period; Morrowind is a balancing act of reduced scope but greater specificity in how locations are realized; Oblivion narrows scope further for better graphical fidelity as well as ease of play considerations. Popularly speaking, it seems that Goldilocks picked Morrowind, though Oblivion was by no means unpopular.

Generally speaking I find that Bethesda's approach to open world design is a lot more winning than Rockstar's, in terms of response to a player's desire to play the game by their own rules. Least of all because of this sort of thing, again from Liesmith:

Also in Morrowind, you can kill everybody. This is a pretty crude measure of freedom but it's important. Some people will break the plot if they die, and it will tell you that you have done so after you kill the god Vivec or whoever. But it lets you keep playing because the main quest isn't a big deal.

I think this is an important element because of what it means about the overall character of the world and the designer's esteem of the player.
One of my greatest issues with the GTA experience is that the free play/story mission bifurcation makes me feel as though I am a child allowed to play in a consequence free environment until I decide to "behave" and do the story missions, and over time I'm rewarded with progress in the game world: more of the city becomes available, safehouses, money, etc.
 A game like Morrowind, by placing even important story characters "in the world" and at the mercy of the vengeful player suggests greater trust in the player's intelligence and desire to shape his own experience. If I begin my game and I decide I would like nothing better to do than to exterminate every character I come across, I could go a very long way toward this goal. This is a lauded feature of other classic RPG franchises, such as Fallout. Is this simply revealing how much we value mass-murdering in a game? Or is it an act of good faith by the designer?

To me it says the designers realize the player understands that if they kill the guy handing out all the quests, they're probably not going to be able to get to the golden castle high on the ridge that's at the end of all of this. Or maybe they will, but not the way they would have if they'd done the quest. But instead of considering this a gamebreaker and flatly disallowing it, it assumes that it's meaningful to the player that even quest NPCs are mortal; that there might be clever alternate solutions, ways to game the system.
In the end the game's respect for me as a player ends usually spells how much respect I have for the game in return. How much leeway as a player to do I get toward making my own fun?

How important is that to you as a player? Watch for part three for further discussion.

Open world issues Part 1: the Rockstar model

Many designers and players consider the open world design a kind of ultimate, one that trumps more traditional forms.
I would argue that this simply isn't true; if only on the grounds that no one genre or design style can trump all others. (Chess is likely not improved by changing the board from 64 squares to 128.)
Yet it remains a kind of holy grail. The success of Rockstar's GTA series seems to prove there to be a valid, stable model for open world game design. But how successful is it? Certainly it makes money, but I question the coherence of the structure. Not only do open world designs open up new and typically unresolved design problems, they inherit longer-standing design issues with linear games.

The main criticism of GTA was so well formulated by Internet Rockstar Dr.Pwn that I will quote the relevant post directly:

The actions of the player character in GTA4 can best be described as the actions of two separate characters, one who reflects the player's decisions during normal gameplay (run over a sidewalk full of people, kill a bunch of cops), and one that is unilaterally imposed through scripted sequences. (Look at Niko as he shows that he loves Kate. Look at Niko as he feels bad about crime.).The game privileges the "choices" of the second over the first, even when they're in direct contradiction. The game's insistence that the player character, say, loves Kate even when the player has indicated the opposite, makes Niko defined by player choice the "fake" one and the one defined by scripted interaction the "real" one.

And therein lies the problem. Few open world games truly commit themselves to the operative paradigm. What at first appears to be a coherent world in which the player has surprising free agency turns out to be rigidly separated spheres of "fake" and "real" play. Our player Niko, "fake" Niko, drives around, dresses, and acts as psychotically as he pleases, even on dates or outings with friends, where he might endanger their lives any number of times. He may only express himself in terms of infantile rage or excess, but here he is wholly under player control.
But none of this makes the permanent record. Cops shake their heads and say "aw, shucks" to the preeminent mass murderer of the city, who goes by the hospital to pick up his cousin Roman who forgives him for the tenth or so exploding or sunken car he was abandoned to.
 When we want to advance the story, we trigger a mission cutscene and re-inhabit "real" Niko, who despite being our player character we exercise little to no control over; it is as if the three hours or thirty hours we have spent running amok in Liberty City have not happened at all.

It says to the player, look: go ahead and have fun, but nothing you do will impact the true story of the game, which resides in the hermetically sealed parallel world of the story missions. Once the player acquiesces and begins a story mission, to their chagrin they are now in a linear, scripted mission with fixed consequences as one would find in any other game. And this is a "sandbox" game?
Despite the story missions taking place in technically the same world as the player's free-form antics, they are governed by the old rules. We watch cutscenes where Niko emotes in a manner often inconsistent with how we have played him. He wears the same clothes as our player-Niko, but otherwise might as well be an entirely different character. We are handed down the real story of the game in film-like format, though designers may stoop to allow the player ruling on a paltry MORAL CHOICE (please read Clint Hocking's revelant comments on this if you haven't already).

It is an elaborate charade stemming from the desire to emulate the entirely dissimilar medium of film and its emotional hallmarks. Except games are not film, and so the farther games move toward emulating film production, the farther player agency will necessarily close down.
It is exponentially prohibitive to create motion-captured, voice-acted movie-like content for all the many possible actions that player-Niko might choose. So instead of devising and building story content that might suitably conform to player agency, the designers choose instead to cripple meaningful player volition to conform roughly to that of film.

A typical scenario for GTA4 mission:
Introductory cutscene (1), which gives plausible set-up for what will invariably end as a chase sequence since Niko must kill NPC X. Player then drives to designated point, and is treated to/mocked with another short cutscene (2) where we meet colorful NPC X, who usually outwits Niko before we regain input control. At which point NPC X hops into a car or onto a motorcycle and is generally invulnerable to damage until chased successfully to another location, where he might taunt the player again (3). There we fight a number of armed goons, conjured ex nihilo, until finally we meet NPC X in yet another cutscene (4), possibly with the explicit prompt of a MORAL CHOICE to kill him or not, which means a short final cutscene to render this verdict (5a and 5b).
At several points during this mission a clever player might think of various ways to kill NPC X well before the end of the mission, but this is generally not allowed because how will the player A) watch the great cutscenes toward the end of the mission or B) know that he has a MORAL CHOICE in whether or not to kill him? (Nevermind the 20 or so dispatchable goons who stay alive as a result of NPC X and the player not arriving at the second location.)
I profess admiration for the incredible army that create several minutes worth of cutscenes that show up with every mission. But these nougats of film-like content are what hobble the player from making any serious choices for Niko; they are ultimately a trap.
Because once all that time and money is spent, those that are involved become increasingly unwilling to relegate the content to optional, possible outcomes of player choice. What if like many players I am singularly uncharmed by Kate and my version of Niko never voluntarily hangs out with her? Then we lose the entire ham-fistedly tragic arc she is involved in.
"No," says our hypothetical producer, "if we're paying for the voice-acting and the motion capture for all these sequences, they're going to be seen." Or if there points in the story where the player can make significant choices, they must be limited to key points, in order to keep costs down. Cutscenes, a technique that might have been initially deployed as an aid to player investment or immersion, ultimately end up crippling player agency.

Dr.Pwn (a real, accredited medical doctor and professor) continues:

I then looked at the "world" of GTA4 in a similar manner. Parallels can be found if one views GTA4 as an overworld, collection of mission-worlds, and number of scripted sequences (a scripted-world, if you will). The overworld is a flat, uninteractive, and basically empty place in which the mission activation beacons can be driven to by the player. It is neither host to nor reflective of any meaningful player action. The actual action (as well as all of the unique NPCs and conversations and objectives and such) are found in the missions. Unfortunately, these bear little relevance to the story, which is defined almost solely through uninteractive, scripted events. This isn't good and they should stop doing this.

I agree wholeheartedly. I'm not completely against games that rely heavily on cutscenes, but I want to make sure that they are not understood as the only and certainly far from the best way to make games.
 It is as if I am reading a book and am asked to queue up a DVD or youtube clip, at the end of which I return to the book. A novel that employs such a technique might be well regarded, maybe as an entertaining novelty, but likely not considered a superior example of the form by very nature of its reliance on another medium. This is how I feel about games with cutscenes: invariably most of their energy is going toward aping a
dissimilar form. The games I have fondest memories of employed cutscenes infrequently, if at all.

But what are the solutions? What might an open world game look like when we eschew cutscenes as both an emotional/story crutch? How far propagated might player agency become, and is there such a thing as giving the player too much influence? How do we activate the play space of an open world in a way that does not rely predominantly on canned, linear-style missions?

Tomorrow we'll look at the solutions we might plausibly consider to resolve these design issues. In other words "stay tuned," cutscene fans.