Mark – Page 65

Chess Lessons

March 16, 2004 By Mark Leave a Comment

Since my last post I’ve been seized with a desire to mentally and physically box up my life in the games biz and move on. Having jumped the gun on transitions before, however, I know it’s important to follow through on commitments, even if they’re only ones I made to myself. (Perhaps particularly if they’re only ones I made to myself.) Included in my pile of unfinished business are a few articles I’d always intended to get out, and this is one of them.

Mapping Story to Chess
Back in November Greg Costikyan posted a note on his blog about Chess. The main point Greg wanted to make was how valuable and instructive Chess can be to game designers. Here’s the introduction:

From a game designer’s perspective, Chess is an important game for many reasons. First, it is, at least to Westerners, the abstract strategy game par excellence; while the pieces have colorful names, it in no way can be understood as a literal military simulation, nor does Chess strategy have any value outside of the context of Chess itself. It does not rely at all on chance; it is not a solvable game in the sense of Tic-tac-toe; and it offers an amazing level of strategic depth.

Chess is important also because it is a perfect example of some highly important design techniques–and stands in perfect defiance to at least one idee fixe of modern game designers.

I agree with all that. I also think computerized Chess is important because it proves what we can do on the simulation side of the game design equation. Leaving aside metaphysical questions about man/machine dominance, computerized Chess proves beyond a shadow of a doubt that computers can not only host games, they can play games as well. (The implications of that last sentence are worthy of an article in themselves.)

What I want to focus on here begins with the next four words that Greg wrote, which comprised the heading of the first full section of his article:

Chess Has No Story

Now, the age-old problem with a statement like this is that it prompts a question: what does Greg mean by story? It’s a fair question, but in Greg’s defense it’s often asked in the games biz by people who want to parry the issue in order to keep their own impossible dreams alive. In fact, Greg’s next sentence speaks to that motivation directly:

Time and again, particularly when talking with people outside the field trying to understand game design, or with wannabe game developers, they want to begin the process by talking about story or character.

At the narrative level Greg is talking about, he’s right. Chess has no story in the way that most people think about story. Just as importantly, it’s precisely people who know the least about storytelling who inevitably have the grandest schemes about combining stories and games. Trying to educate or pin these people down inevitably leads to a more nebulous definition of story as they desperately seek to find some way to keep their fantasies alive.

Greg himself made a similar point, noting how easily story can obfuscate game:

The impulse is understandable, because in almost every other entertainment medium, story is where you begin. That’s true of film, fiction, and TV; and those who have looked over the shoulder of someone playing a videogame see something that, at first glance, may not look that different from film. Characters are doing things in a visual medium.

And for some game styles — adventures, RPGs, action-adventure hybrids like Deus Ex — story is indeed highly important, and a strong part of the game’s appeal.

You cannot, however, understand how games function if the first thing you reach for is story. You could use almost the same story in an old-fashioned text adventure, an Unreal-powered action adventure game, and a computer RPG–and the experience of playing each of those games would be very different indeed.

This point can’t be emphasized enough. Game design, and particularly the rules set that defines any computer game, comes first in interactive entertainment. And that’s just as true whether you’re creating a game based on a film as it is if you’re creating a work with no overt narrative. If you want to be a game designer, even of games that feature prominent narrative elements, you need to understand game design. It may not be your specialty – indeed it is not mine – but you must understand it and you must put it first.

Greg continued:

Nor is ‘story’ necessary to ‘game.’ Games can incorporate stories; some game styles depend on stories; but a game is not a story. To wrap your head around this idea, you might think about music. Many musical styles depend on story–opera, the musical, the rock-and-roll ballad. But many do not–symphonic music, house, ambient. Music, like stories, and like games, unfold in time, and you can talk about the ‘narrative’ of a symphony, using ‘narrative’ in a rather rarified sense, meaning evolution over time–but that narrative has not a damn thing to do with story.

Again, Greg’s right. Story is in addition to game in interactive entertainment, not integral to game. Just as putting a score to a movie augments the narrative, putting the right narrative elements (including music) to the right game mechanics can augment the player’s experience.

Greg next brought the issue full circle, back to the subject of Chess:

The best way, I’ve found, to make people pause and think again about the importance of story to games is just to say: What is the story of Chess?

Following Greg’s line of thinking, it’s clear that Chess has no story. Yes, like music we can describe a Chess narrative over time as pieces are moved in turn and one side seeks to defeat the other, but that’s not a work of fiction. I’m a storyteller, and that’s a hat Greg wears as well, and you’ll just have to trust both of us that there are entire structures inherent in creating a story that are completely absent in Chess. While there does seem to be some overlap between a fictional story and the move-by-move narrative of a game of Chess, manifesting any commonalities requires either diluting or mutating the meaning of story (as already noted), or adding some attributes to Chess to make it seem more story-like. For example:

Of course, a fellow I knew once responded by saying, “It’s a game about a war between two brothers…” Which made me pause and think again. Indeed, viewing Chess through that prism is interesting–but certainly most Chess players don’t think about the game that way.

Instead, they view it as an arrangement of pieces; the forces projected by those pieces; potential next-turn arrangments and what they would imply; and so on.

Ultimately the goal of Chess is rational, not emotional. Yes, emotions can come into play during a game, or between players, but emotions are not central to the experience. If they were, computers would never be able to beat humans at the game. Stories on the other hand are inherently emotional, and it’s only by imposing emotional constructs – such as the idea of warring brothers – that we find a way to morph Chess into a quasi-narrative experience.

Greg continued:

Chess is a game about understanding the projection of force, anticipating the moves of others, and working toward subordinate goals — removing opposing pieces — in pursuit of an ultimate goal — checkmate. Nobody is thinking about plot obstacles or character development when they play Chess.

Note that that’s true whether a human being is shoving the pieces around the board or a machine is making the moves. The combination of the board, the pieces and the goal of the game describes a contextual experience, and it is into that context that the player steps when they play. In fact, most of the compelling stories about Chess involve additions to that context, such as a World Championship hanging in the balance, or a history of personal animosity or theoretical disputes being played out over the board.

Greg concluded the section with this:

Some might object that this is true, but not relevant to digital game designers; after all, almost everything that gets published today has some kind of story attached to it, if only as a little backstory to provide some player motivation.

True–but if your understanding of the game is limited to story-as-game, then you will certainly never design Tetris, nor yet Civilization. It’s important to understand that the world of possible games includes whole continents where nary a story is told.

With that pitch-perfect summation Greg moved on to two other sections, talking about the emergent complexity and meta-game of analysis that are inherent in Chess. If you have any interest in game design I urge you to read and understand those sections. On the subject of how game and story do and do not interact, however, I want to draw your attention to an additional paragraph from the section concerning the meta-game of Chess:

By “strategic stability,” I mean that, at least in the early game, players can anticipate similar strategic situations each game, or at least in a high proportion of games. With Chess this is obviously so, since starting positions are identical with each playing. With Go, there is a bit more variability, since players may place stones in any board position they wish–but nonetheless, they start with a blank board, and the first few placements are vital to strategy.

In talking about the relationship between game design and storytelling Greg accurately shows that Chess – the game that has been most successfully implemented in the interactive medium – owes literally nothing to narrative structures. By doing so Greg suggests that the success of any given interactive product, and indeed of the interactive entertainment industry as a whole, hinges on the game and simulation side of the design equation, not on the narrative side. I agree completely.

But the question of bringing emotional involvement to interactivity is not synonymous with or even analogous to adding story to, or deriving story from, Chess. In fact, mapping story to Chess only analyzes the problem in two narrowly-defined dimensions, unnecessarily restricting the debate we need to have and the territory we need to explore. In the narrative x-axis, any individual story is a fixed (non-computable) construct designed to generate emotional involvement in a passive audience, which is clearly not what we’re trying to do. And while Chess is the most successful interactive game implementation in history, in the gaming y-axis the design intent of Chess also has nothing to do with creating emotional involvement from interactivity.

As I’ve written previously (see also my GDC Moderator’s Reports), what we need to learn how to do in our industry is to create emotional involvement from interactivity. Looking at how story and a given fully-realized game relate tells us nothing except about how those two specific constructs do or do not promote emotional involvement. Rather than look at the two-dimensional intersection of game and story in any one instance, what we need is a way to see how the basic building blocks of story and game can be used to create emotional involvement in interactive works, whether or not those works include a full-blown story.

The Z-Axis of Chess and Story
Greg’s mention of the ancient game of Go suggests a way we can analyze Chess relative to story in a third dimension, the z-axis being the degree to which the design elements of a given interactive product promote emotional involvement. Looking at the game/story problem from this perspective will also prevent us from making a mistake, which is to assume that if Chess and story have nothing in common and Go and story have nothing in common, that the degree to which Chess and Go (and other games) create emotional involvement is identical.

To begin, Greg’s definition of Chess above (projection of force, etc.) is a pretty good definition of Go, too, though winning in Go requires capturing more territory than your opponent instead of one particular piece. Still, both games feature a simple set of rules and objectives played out with simple pieces over a simple board. Although complexities abound during play, in no instance does anything remotely resembling a story arise. Despite these similarities, however, the games themselves are not identical, with Go being the far simpler of the two in terms of mechanics:

Go Design Mechanics
Go is played on a simple 19×19-line grid. There are two sides, traditionally black and white. Play involves each side alternately placing small stones of their own color on the grid-line intersections, the goal being to capture the most territory as the board is filled in.

Chess Design Mechanics
Chess is played on an 8×8 board of alternately-colored squares, traditionally black and white. There are two sides, each identical except for color (again traditionally black and white), with sixteen different pieces of six different types. Each unit type has its own distinct range and type of movement. The object of the game is to be the first to capture the opponent’s ‘king’.

While both games are relatively simple and have nothing to do with story or storytelling, they are clearly different in terms of design mechanics and design complexity. Upon closer inspection, although neither Chess nor Go contains a story, it turns out these games are also not the same in terms of their narrative elements.

While Chess is an abstraction of warfare, its abstraction pales compared to that of Go. Where Chess has named pieces, Go simply has stones. Where Chess uses two different types of terrain, multiple unit types and movement rules, Go offers only one of each. In fact, except for some faint possible suggestion in both games that the traditional use of white & black is symbolic of good & evil – which I discount completely – Go is entirely abstract, right down to its play mechanic and victory condition.

In Go, the idea of a land-grab between foes has been abstracted into an over-the-board battle for points of territory defined by two intersecting perpendicular lines. While the game does allow for the capture of the other side’s units, captures are simply another mechanism by which territory is gained. Now contrast this with Chess, where the point of the game is not only capturing a particular unit, but one that is personified as a king.

As Greg noted in passing:

….while the pieces have colorful names, [Chess] in no way can be understood as a literal military simulation….

It’s clear that the names of the Chess pieces do not relate to the game’s mechanics. What they do relate to, however, is Chess’s narrative context, and that is a key difference between Go and Chess. In Go you place stones on a board, and the only things those stone are suggestive of are stones. They don’t seem representative of armies or soldiers when you play, and they don’t have names that make you think of them as anything other than what they are: playing pieces in a strategy game. Chess on the other hand not only has personified pieces playing a variety of pseudo-narrative roles, but in sum those pieces evoke a medieval time period, suggestive also of a narrative setting.

Which raises an interesting point. If Chess has no story or narrative aspirations, why are critical pieces in the game – indeed both the most powerful and most important pieces – named after monarchs? For some reason the level of abstraction of the game mechanics has not been matched by the level of abstraction of the pieces names, as it easily could be. Instead of a king and queen evoking the 15th century when Chess migrated from the Middle-east to Europe, by now the game could easily feature pieces with abstracted names. The king could be called the ’eminence,’ for example, retaining the importance of the piece to the game’s design mechanics, but abstracting it away from the title of a monarch.

The point here is that changing the piece names in Chess wouldn’t impact the game one whit. Which again prompts a question: why does Chess include names of monarchs in a medieval setting? While it’s a stretch to say that Chess is about killing a king, or murder, or anything suggestive of a plot, the fact remains that the names of Chess pieces have a narrative connectedness to us that the stones in Go do not. It’s also a fact that these names are not integral to the game, which means we’ve kept them all these years for some other reason – something that doesn’t relate to or support the mechanics of the game.

One possibility is that it’s simply tradition, but if the mechanics of Chess could evolve despite tradition, why not the piece names? While documenting the causality of Chess’s evolution as a game is best left to the legions of academics looking to hang their hats in our new industry, I think there’s no denying that the piece-name ‘king’ adds something to the game of Chess that would otherwise be missing. It’s not a game mechanic and it’s not a story, but on some level it is emotionally resonant to us as human beings, which is why we’ve retained it all these years.

Think back to the response that was given to Greg, when he asked an acquaintance to explain the story of Chess:

It’s a game about a war between two brothers…

Now ask yourself if that answer would have arisen if the game in question had been Go. I would say it would not have, because there is nothing even remotely suggestive of a character in Go. It is both the king’s critical role in Chess as a game and the king’s piece-name that motivated an imaginative leap to the idea of the narrative of Chess being a war between two brothers. (Note also that even if you wouldn’t have made that leap yourself, and even if you think the leap is ridiculous on its face, you still do understand the leap.)

In the two-dimensional analysis Greg engaged in it’s correct to ignore this kind of suggested narrative. The proposition that Chess is a war between two brothers requires bringing other elements to the game that don’t exist in the rules, most notably the idea of a familial relationship between the pieces. Still, it’s not too hard to see other suggestive narrative features in the game, such as checkmate being equivalent to killing the king, which then becomes murder in a narrative context. By extension, if Chess does involve kings trying to murder each other, in a narrative context it makes perfect sense to ask what relationship they might have that could prompt such antipathy. Sibling rivalry is not only a logical answer, but also a popular one for plotting purposes.

As already noted, though, the point here is not to try to ascribe a story to Chess. The point is to look at how narrative elements differ between Chess and Go, and in this particular case the difference is stark. Not only does Chess have character-like units, but it turns out those character-like units allow us, with a little imagination, to ascribe plot and motive to individual pieces, if not to the game itself. While that’s of limited utility in Chess, it’s definitive of one way in which we might intentionally design other games that increase emotional involvement.

The idea that unit names in a game can be suggestive of characters in a narrative context is indicative of the fact that human beings want narrative elements in their games, even if they don’t relate directly to a game’s mechanics. To a game design purist this is crazy talk about unnecessary details, but I’m not a game design purist: I’m trying to figure out how to increase the likelihood that players will care emotionally about the choices they make in an interactive work. If choosing the right name for a unit in a game raises the player’s emotional involvement with that game even one iota, I want to know about it.

Because there is a demonstrable difference between the degree to which Go and Chess promote emotional involvement, despite the fact that both games are non-narrative, we can assume that Go marks one point on the design continuum of emotional involvement and that Chess marks another. From those two distinct points we can establish a line, and that line is the z-axis we’ve been looking for. Individually the two games have nothing to do with emotional involvement in a narrative context, but together they point the way. Adding more emotional involvement to a game design requires designing beyond Chess on the z-axis, adding narrative elements that do not detract from or impact the game mechanics, but which satisfy our inherent human desire to care not only rationally but also emotionally.

The Z-Axis and Salvation
While it would be fun (but ultimately fruitless) to streak off along the z-axis in search of a holodeck, I want to stick with Chess as the frontier outpost on the z-axis continuum. For those who remain unconvinced that the names ‘king’ and ‘queen’ in Chess hint at a narrative connection to the idea of character in story, consider this. While the modern traditional Chess set is relatively abstract, omitting faces and such, there is a long and powerful tradition in Chess of making imaginative custom sets. Usually thematic, these sets run the gamut from the wildly abstract to the representational, from comic to dramatic, from historical to fantastic.

The point here is that I’m not the only one who thinks Chess pieces are suggestive of character: everybody thinks they’re suggestive of character, including the people who play Chess the most. The less obvious but more important point is that within the mechanics of Chess there is a design constant called the unit, which – almost paradoxically – can be physically represented in infinite variations along the z-axis without negatively impacting the game’s design. From the point of view of the z-axis of Chess, any given Chess unit is actually a variable that can be changed or augmented without upsetting the piece’s utility or the game’s underlying design, provided the unit itself can still be identified.

In fact, this plasticity extends beyond the mere look of a piece. In 1992 a computer game called Battle Chess appeared, which featured units as animated characters. These characters walked or traveled across the board when ordered to move by the player, and attacked each other when a piece was taken (undoubtedly inspired by a similar game in Star Wars). By the same token it’s not hard to imagine units being given their own sounds or lines of dialogue or musical scores in a given game, and the same being added for any combination of attack animations. In fact, today that’s actually a good description of even the most pedestrian real-time strategy game.

But does any of that really create emotional involvement, let alone tell a story? Probably not, but it’s easy to see how such narrative connections could be strengthened. Portray the pawns in a Chess set as Little Red Riding Hood, say, and the knights as the Big Bad Wolf, add a few piercing screams and maybe you’ve raised the stakes. If you want more juice, maybe change the pawns to realistic-looking children and…well, you get the idea.

From seeing how Chess pieces relate to the z-axis it should be clear that the board relates to the z-axis in much the same way. Instead of black and white squares, the board could feature grass and sand, or squares that make sounds when you put a piece on them, or light up, or play music. Extending the concept reveals the squares of a Chess board to be no different on the z-axis than the levels in a shooter: they’re simply the spaces units occupy when the game is being played. As long as the depiction of the spaces doesn’t interfere with the game’s mechanics, it doesn’t really matter what the spaces look like or how many emotions they provoke. From that it follows that game designers who want to increase emotional involvement through setting and place should exploit this kind of plasticity for all it’s worth.

While some of these advances have already taken place, the problem from a game design perspective is that they’re not happening as a result of intentional design along the z-axis, which allows emotional involvement to be crafted in harmony with design mechanics. Instead, the narrative elements currently being used to induce emotional involvement are simply the surviving artifacts of countless failed attempts to nail full-blown stories onto games. Because this approach doesn’t focus on the proper goal of creating emotional involvement in the context of interactivity, but instead continues to emphasize story structure as the arbiter of emotional involvement, it not only continues to fail, but the appearance of any new advance will similarly be left to chance.

Evidence that this malpractice continues is available in abundance in the latest crop of shooters, many of which rely heavily on linearity that would have been openly derided only a few years ago. (See also here.) Because our industry now assumes a priori that getting the player to care about choices emotionally can only be done through the creation of a full-blown story, and because consumers are demanding more and more narrative context with their interactivity, the trend in single-player designs in particular is to offer little more than a series of narrowly constrained, puzzle-oriented missions in the context of a short film. While that does increase emotional involvement, it does so at the expense of the one feature that distinguishes our medium from any other: interactivity. Even more problematic is the fact that these conflicted designs represent the zenith of this design approach, suggesting that it may have reached an evolutionary dead end.

Designing for emotional involvement from the point of view of the z-axis, on the other hand, does not mean cutscenes can’t be used, or that shooters can’t have a mission-based structure. What it means is that instead of designing a game and a story in parallel – two distinctly different forms of entertainment that are mutually exclusive in their effects – we replace the idea of a story with the goal of emotional involvement.

Designing from the z-axis puts the design emphasis back where it belongs, on the game or simulation that is the core of the player’s interactive experience. At the same time it retains the end goal of story (emotional involvement) without saddling the design process with the limitations of narrative structure. Industry-wide, the importance of adopting the design point of view of the z-axis is that it forces us to put more effort into understanding the ways in which simulations and game design mechanics can make players care emotionally about the interactive choices they make. That, in turn, emphasizes and leverages the unique strength and attraction of the interactive medium when compared to any other form of electronic entertainment.

— Mark Barrett

Bread Crumbs

February 10, 2004 By Mark Leave a Comment

A few months back I got my annual e-mail announcing the upcoming GDC this spring. I opened it, looked at it, closed it, then deleted it.

A few weeks after that came an e-mail from a really great group of people that I’ve had the pleasure to dine with at the GDC for the past few years, announcing this year’s dinner location and menu. I opened the message, read it, closed it and never replied.

A few weeks later the renewal notice for my subscription to Computer Gaming World came in the mail. I’ve had a subscription to CGW for almost a decade, but I threw the notice in the trash, unopened.

A few weeks later I received some materials in the mail about the upcoming GDC. They went in the trash, unopened.

A few weeks later I talked with a good friend who’d just heard that his company was sending him from Europe to the GDC this year, all expenses paid. We’d shared a room in prior years to defray costs, and I knew I’d miss seeing him again, but I felt no pang of loss at not attending myself. Even the location, which I knew so well, seemed an echo in my mind’s eye. (Except for the little drive-up/take-out Mexican place a couple of blocks down from the conference center that I’d become enamored with.)

Somewhere along the line I began to think about these individual moments in sum, and I wondered what they really meant. Was I truly sick of the games biz, or was this just an emotional low after the letdowns I’d had the previous year? What did it all mean?

Honestly, I didn’t really know until by chance I happened to look at the Mission Statement here on my site, which reminded me why I used to like working in the games biz more than I like working in it now. I don’t know if I’ve reached any real conclusions about where all this is leading me, but I do know there’s a trail of breadcrumbs here, and I don’t think they lead back to interactive entertainment the way the business is right now.

As an antidote to this malaise, I involved myself in an entirely new enterprise over the past six months, during which time I was able to rise through the ranks in fairly short order and materially participate in one of the most amazing and important reversals of fortune that I’ve ever seen. I may write about the specifics later, although probably not, but two points about the experience stand out. First, it reminded me that I have been most successful and helpful when I trust my own judgment, rather than following someone else’s lead. Second, any time money becomes important to me, it probably means I’m not enjoying my work.

— Mark Barrett

Credit Where Credit Is Due

November 29, 2003 By Mark Leave a Comment

One of the recent credits I posted was for Aquanox 2: Revelation, the most recent game set in the undersea post-apocalyptic waterworld of Aqua. Here’s how I described the work I did on that project:

Revised and edited original translations. Rewrote several key characters late in revision process to meet localization needs for US/UK publisher.

The game was recently released in the US and reviewed in the December, 2003 issue of Computer Gaming World (p.144), where it received one star out of five. Among a host of other complaints about the game, there was this:

The writing jumps from overwrought exposition to hackneyed convention, including the jive black man and the coy Asian girl.

Well, guess what? That’s entirely accurate. That’s the way the text was originally written, and having worked on the previous titles I knew that’s what the developer wanted. They were going for a camp style, as they had in the past, and whether the reviewer didn’t get it, or we all failed to execute, that’s exactly what they intended.

Thinking now about the game and how it turned out I’m not really sure what I could have done to prevent the above sentence from appearing in that review. I know I did a lot to improve the humor and the general flow of the texts, which always suffer in translation, but given the original intent, the structure of the dialogues, and the game itself, I just don’t know if there was a higher goal to aspire to.

You can’t work in a creative business without laying an egg once in a while, of course, and in isolation this experience would simply be par for the course. My concern, as noted previously, is that the industry itself seems more and more determined to exist within constraints in which there is little to aspire to.

— Mark Barrett

Peer Pressure

November 13, 2003 By Mark Leave a Comment

In my years in the games biz I’ve been fortunate to enjoy most of the projects I’ve worked on. I’ve also enjoyed watching people have fun playing games I helped create, as I have enjoyed attending and speaking at conferences and evangelizing for the cause of emotional involvement in interactive works. All of that pales into nothingness, however, when compared with the peers I’ve come to know as good friends.

In working with and getting to know some very talented people, I’ve also learned that nothing motivates me to excel more than collaborating with people I respect and admire. It is a kind of peer pressure that I view as entirely positive, and I hope in your own professional life you get to experience the magnitude of satisfaction that comes from measuring up to the standards of respected peers. I know people give lip service to the idea that no amount of money or authority can compensate for such joys, but in my case – as demonstrated in the previous essay here – it’s actually true.

So today I want to take a moment to introduce you to two friends I’ve worked with on multiple projects, and grown to have a great deal of respect for. I also consider them important to the long-term health of our industry, which is another reason I think you should know who they are.

Lee Sheldon
Many of you know Lee from the lectures and talks he’s given at the GDC and other conferences over the past decade, and you know he knows his stuff. For those of you who don’t know him or his work, you can take a tour of his site.

Quite coincidentally, while I was working on a post about design basics a few months back, Lee sent me the first in a (now completed) series of articles he was writing concerning storytelling in MMORPG’s. What interested me about Lee’s point of view was that it mirrored my own: we’re simply not getting it done. We can talk about possibilities ad nauseum, but the bottom line is that as an industry we’ve made precious few gains over the past five years, and our inability to grow and compete with mainstream narrative entertainments is having a negative effect on our industry, and limiting our potential.

As Lee continued cranking out his essays I found his line of thinking in agreement with another essay I was working on, which made the case that it was time producers started hiring professional storytellers to actually do the storytelling in their games. Now, the usual caution on this point is that writers who don’t understand interactivity and game design can do more harm that good, and I agree with that. The problem is, designers have historically used that concern as leverage for doing the storytelling themselves, even if they’re not qualified.

My response to all this is that I started out as a storyteller and learned the interactive ropes, so I think others can too. I also believe storytellers will be able to learn about design issues and how they impact storytelling more quickly than designers will be able to learn how to do first-rate storytelling, and I think that argument has already proven out in film. Good screenwriters know the movie-making craft and process, but at their core they are good writers. And being a good writer involves some skills that are mighty hard to teach.

Okay, so what does this have to do with Lee? Well, here was Lee writing a series of solid articles about failed storytelling in MMORPG’s (specifically Star Wars Galaxies), and that suddenly hit me as patently absurd. There probably isn’t anybody on the face of the earth more qualified to tackle the issue of storytelling in MMORPG’s than Lee Sheldon, so what’s he doing on the outside looking in at failed implementations? But there’s more to the story.

See, before Lee was a gaming dude, he was a Hollywood dude, and his background even includes taking the lead on a soap opera or two. While that probably sounds a little old-school, can you think of another storytelling medium in which the demand for ongoing content is even remotely comparable? Soap operas, like MMORPG’s, are designed from the ground up to never end. They’re built to keep people coming back again and again, which is an awfully good thing to know how to do if you’re trying to run, say, a subscription-based entertainment service.

I have no doubt that at some point in the future a producer is going to think to themselves, “Gee, this online game thing is kind of like a soap opera, so maybe we should talk to some Hollywood people who know that territory….” The problem, of course, is that the people they talk to won’t know anything about games, which means the resulting effort – however noble and sincere – will probably fail.

So, if you’re putting together an MMORPG, and you want to deliver story, your first and biggest mistake will be not hiring Lee Sheldon. Sure, you can hire other people, but they’re not going to know what Lee knows about story, and they’re not going to be able to deliver the storytelling he can deliver. Which means instead of having customers who say, “Wow!”, you’re going to have customers who say, “You suck!”

And that’s why you should get to know Lee.

Jurie Horneman
Over the past eight years or so, if there’s anybody I’ve spent a lot of time talking design theory and practice with, it’s Jurie. Dutch by birth, Jurie has worked in Germany, France and now Austria, in a variety of capacities that almost always underestimated his capabilities and talents. Did I mention he speaks four languages fluently, not including C++ or Python? That’s the kind of smarts he’s got, and we’re not even talking interactive yet.

About a year ago Jurie joined RockStar, but soon after that he dropped out of sight. For a while I thought maybe he died, but it turned out he was the project manager on the XBox port of GTA3: Vice City. (This should be a warning to those of you thinking romantic thoughts about the games biz. Instead, think 2 a.m. phone calls about bug fixes.) After a little R&R, a transfusion, and some illumination from sources other than an electron beam, Jurie is not only back in the swing of things, he’s posting to his blog faster than I can comment. [Note: Jurie’s output has now exceeded even the pace of blogging, and he can be found on Twitter here. — MB]

While his posts are eclectic, he’s not a dilettante. Jurie knows a lot of the heavyweights in the business on both sides of the pond, he knows the core design issues we’re wrestling with, and many of his musings are concerned with the basic problems that our business is facing. Tag along for a few days and you’ll see what I mean.

— Mark Barrett

The Producers

October 9, 2003 By Mark 1 Comment

At some point while reading the following you’re going to think that what I’m really trying to do here is expand the market for my services. For the record, I’m not currently looking for work.

This essay is going to be a bit of a departure for me because I’ll be referencing (albeit anonymously) some people I’ve been contacted by or worked with. For most of you that won’t mean much, but there may be some readers who can connect the dots, so I want to make a few things clear. I have no reason to believe that the people I’m referencing are anything but decent, and they have never treated me less than professionally. If they owed me money they paid me, and they always took my calls. As a rule I don’t talk about my relationships with clients, but I need to make a craft point that springs directly from the business context of my work, so I’m going to bend that rule just a bit.

In January of this year I was asked to participate in high-level design meetings on a fascinating R&D project. Given the parameters of the project and my interest in emotional involvement it seemed a dream assignment, and I readily agreed to participate. The meetings were held in NYC, and were led by two people – one a biz-side producer, the other a design-side creative director. Although the premise was flawed, all the pieces were in place to do something truly exciting, and I had every reason to believe that we might truly raise the bar of emotional involvement in interactive works. [ Read more ]

Universal Design Basics

August 10, 2003 By Mark Leave a Comment

This may end up reading like a savage game review, but that’s not my intent. My intent is to point out that there are basic design rules and responsibilities that all of us should be embracing at this stage in the development of the interactive medium. If there are compelling reasons, these basic rules can and should be ignored in exchange for achieving specific effects, but I expect few such occasions to arise in mainstream interactive works, just as few mainstream novels need to break the basic rules of point of view to tell an entertaining story. For the purposes of this discussion, I am going to ignore such artistic or theoretical exceptions on the compelling grounds that most interactive designers who drop the ball do so not because they are trying to make rarified craft choices, but because they don’t actually know what they’re doing. (See also Failing the Artistic License Test.)

Dishonorable Discharge
The game that prompted this post was Medal of Honor: Allied Assault (MoH:AA), which is a first-person shooter set in WWII Europe. To be sure, I did have my share of fun playing the game, and there’s plenty the team got right. The problem is that much of what they got right was built on a faulty foundation that needlessly detracted from my play experience. While there has been plenty written about these design mistakes in game reviews, there has been little notice given to their root cause, or to how craft knowledge can help detect such basic mistakes at the design stage.

The first major flaw I encountered in MoH:AA was that enemy units could stand, kneel or lie prone, while my player-character could stand and kneel but not lie prone. This single aspect of the design not only destroyed my suspension of disbelief in the WWII setting, but it made me feel like I was actively being cheated by the designers. Getting caught in the open by a prone enemy sniper, or getting into a firefight with an enemy soldier who then went prone, was infuriating because that option had been denied me.

The second major flaw was the decision not to include a map with each scenario, even if the map only gave topographical or ‘last-known’ information. While a compass was shown at the top of the main screen, it’s function was completely superfluous because compass directions were almost never referenced in any meaningful context. Instead, the outer ring of the compass included a combination pointer/range finder that constantly indicated where I should go next, further revealing the compass to be the window dressing that it was. The design decision to omit maps that would have given me an objective sense of my surroundings, and thus would have made the compass necessary for gameplay, meant that I never took real ownership of any of the navigational objectives (Find X!) given in the mission briefings. Instead, by assuming complete responsibility for player-character navigation through a ‘Go Here!’ pointer, the designers crippled any imaginative involvement I might have developed with the player-character, with the setting, and with the mission objectives.

The third major flaw was the relentless emphasis on linearity, even when there was no need for it from a design perspective. While linearity in a shooter can help designers make sure players don’t become lost or bored, and can make it easier to anticipate where triggers should be placed for scripted events, linearity also negatively impacts interactivity (which is a synonym for player choice). Designers must be constantly aware of this tradeoff, and constantly work to keep the player from noticing when and how freedom of movement has been limited. Unfortunately, linearity informs almost every design decision in MoH:AA, right down to whether or not you can squeeze by a rock at the edge of the map, or slink behind a building next to, but not abutting, a perimeter wall. In almost every instance where the designers could have opened the map up on a micro or macro level, allowing me to explore or use even simple objects for cover, the choice was made to deliberately and needlessly force me into a gauntlet.

Universal Design Rule #2
Rule #1 in the design of commercial entertainment in any medium is simply this: Entertain. If you don’t provide the customer with fun (enjoyment), then no matter how complex or cutting edge your product is, it’s not going to sell. The interactive version of this rule is that if you don’t provide the player with something fun to do, then no matter how complex, cutting edge or interactive it is, it’s not going to sell.

All rules after Rule #1 deal with how entertaining products are created, and no rule is more important than Rule #2: Be consistent. The commercial success of storytellers in all passive mediums is predicated on consistency, and the need for consistency is constant whether a fictional world parallels our own or is wildly fantastic. Since it goes without saying that consistency is also critical in all rules-based processes, including simulations that run on computers, it should be fairly obvious that products that attempt to integrate storytelling and simulation will need to be consistent throughout.

Consistency is important because from the first moment an audience encounters a work of entertainment they begin building a mental model of the rules that define that work. For example, audiences watching a movie learn what the point of view is going to be, what the tone is (how humor and drama will be handled), what the internal logic of each introduced character is, and whether there are any fantastic ideas at play, such as aliens visiting earth, or human beings gaining super-heroic powers. Interactive users learn the same things about the fictional elements of the games they play, but their mental model also includes how the controls interface with the game world, what the game objectives are, and how the modeled (simulated) processes in the game actually function.

The main objective in creating a consistent mental model is to help the player embrace a world that does not actually exist, or to experience something virtually that would be too dangerous or expensive to experience in reality. The more consistent we are, the greater the likelihood that the actual techniques we use to communicate the experience will quickly become transparent, allowing the player to fully immerse themselves. By the same token, inconsistencies shatter the player’s suspension of disbelief, terminating any involvement save rational thought – usually along the lines of, “What the…?”

While the decision to break consistency may, in exceedingly rare instances (which you will in all likelihood never encounter even if you live to be five thousand years old) be a valid artistic choice, the decision to strive for consistency as a basic design goal is not an artistic choice. In any medium, consistency is essential to the crafting of commercial entertainment.

Consistency as Design Test
Let’s now imagine that the MoH:AA design team had had consistency in mind from the beginning, from their earliest speculative thoughts about what their game would become. How would that conscious awareness have affected the inconsistencies I mentioned above?

The moment the MoH:AA design team noticed that they were talking about having enemy units that could lie prone, while the player wouldn’t be able to adopt the same point of view, the options should have been obvious. Either they could have allowed the enemy units to only stand or kneel, making them like the player, or they could allowed the player to lie prone like the enemy units. (In a moment it will be clear why the game’s setting demanded that the latter choice be selected.)

Failure to act in this case was not a design choice, it was a design error. Not only did it destroy suspension of disbelief, make the player feel like they were being cheated, and generate negative comments in reviews, but in large part it forced commentary on those points. What is perhaps not apparent, however, is that acting to correct inconsistencies doesn’t just prevent problems or bring the design up to a minimum spec, it also confers positive benefits. In this case, allowing the user to go prone would have increased the tactical complexity of the game, encouraged the player to be bolder, and given the player an option besides instant death and reloading when they triggered a scripted ambush.

The moment the MoH:AA design team noticed they were talking about omitting maps, and only providing a compass as visual cover for a navigation beacon, the inconsistency between the period setting and the proposed navigation system should have been resolved. Yes, the argument can be made that MoH:AA was meant to be fun, not realistic, but that argument fails given the attention to detail in the rest of the game. Simply put, the proposed navigation system – an arrow constantly telling the player which way to go – was inconsistent with the level of detail and realism present in the simulation and narrative context.

Whatever the motivation(s) for the nav decision, it was a design failure. Providing the player with basic topographical maps would have aided navigation, added to suspense (“Wow, I have to get way over there…?), and added to suspension of disbelief by supporting the setting, as opposed to detracting from it. More importantly, an opportunity was lost to actually teach players how to use a simple topographical map to locate streams, mountains, ridges, etc. – putting the player not only in the situational point of view of a WWII soldier, but also in the soldier’s psychological head space. (Players who did not enjoy that aspect of the game could have been giving the option of enabling on-map icons and direction arrows.)

The moment the MoH:AA design team noticed that they were talking about making relentlessly linear levels for a first-person shooter, the inconsistency between the tactical combat simulation the engine clearly supported, and the linearity of the levels, should have been resolved. At the very least, the design team should have recognized that linearity in any form is a direct threat to interactivity, particularly if that interactivity is reasonably expected by the player. First-person shooters, by their very mechanics, allow for tactical freedom in virtual spaces, which means the edges of those virtual spaces need to be made as transparent (invisible) as possible. While the linear metaphor of a hallway makes sense in a building, relentlessly linear pathways through succeeding buildings, yards, fields and towns fail the transparency test.

Ideally the design team should have recognized that providing more open spaces (choices) for the player to explore (interact) did not have to increase the likelihood that the player would become bored or lost. It also did not mean that the design team couldn’t use scripted events, triggered events, or linear sequences: they simply had to work a little harder to control the access points to such sequences within the overall space. Consistency with genre expectations and with the inherent interactivity of the game engine clearly demanded less linearity in the level design, but not necessarily fewer scripted events. Making the levels almost exclusively linear in MoH:AA made it easier for the designers to script interesting moments, but it did nothing to make the game more fun for the player.

The Seduction of the Cinematic Moment
[Note: MoH:AA was developed by 2015, Inc. The first add-on to MoH:AA, Spearhead, was developed by what appears to be an in-house EA development team called EALA.]

After playing through MoH:AA I felt like I’d played another first-person shooter that could have been so much more than it ended up being. However, after playing through the Spearhead add-on (during which I actually flashed on both the coin-op game Galaga and an old monochrome Sierra adventure game) I have revised that opinion. Whereas I used to explain design flaws in narrative shooters on the basis of insufficient craft knowledge (as I did above), I now think that no longer fully explains the end products we’re seeing. Rather, I now believe that interactive designers are also being seduced away from the strengths of our medium by a mistaken notion of how cinematic moments can and should be created for the player.

I first coined the term ‘cinematic moment’ to describe something I witnessed while working as the mission designer on Fighter Squadron: Screamin’ Demons over Europe, a WWII flight sim. (I also mention that experience here, in a series of e-mails I exchanged with Chris Crawford on the subject of interactive storytelling.) What I experienced was an emergent cinematic moment that sprang not from a canned cinematic or scripted encounter, but from the combination of setting and simulation that defined the product. Specifically, while trying to shoot down an enemy fighter, an AI-controlled ally slashed between me and the plane I was chasing, firing his guns at a target out of my field of view. The power of that in-the-moment visual was literally chilling, and I recognized immediately that my obligation as a mission designer was not to script such moments, but to increase as much as possible the potential for such moments to occur on the fly.

What was interesting about MoH:AA, and particularly about the heavily scripted Spearhead, was that I found the less-scripted parts of the game much more fun than the pre-designed moments. Put me in a forest with a few enemy units throwing grenades at me, firing from behind objects, and chasing me if I tried to fall back, and I had a great time. Put me on rails and force me through elaborately-scripted sequences and I was honestly bored most of the time. (I’m not joking when I say that playing Spearhead often felt more like playing Dragon’s Lair: Battle for Berlin than a first-person shooter.)

As a designer with a heavy writing background who knows how easy it is to prepare an exciting, dramatic or humorous moment, I tend not to think too much about specific scenes that I would like to create in an interactive work. To me, that’s bass-ackwards, because I know no matter how compelling I make the moment in an interactive context, I can make if five or ten times more compelling in a movie or novel. It occurs to me, however, that many game designers – including the teams working on Spearhead, and, to a lesser extent, MoH:AA – don’t know this. Instead, designers of first-person shooters seem to be increasingly drawn to the excitement of authorially-controlled moments without regard for the damage they’re doing to the player’s experience.

It’s easy to see how this could happen, because it happens in all narrative mediums. People sit around, talking about a new project, and inevitably somebody says, “Hey, wouldn’t it be cool if….?!” Although most of these ‘What if…?’ ideas die an early death, some of them are actually cool as authorially-controlled moments, which means they’re probably also going to be cool to make, and cool to see when they’re done, at which time the critics and the fans might even describe them as cutting-edge cool, or >gasp!< groundbreaking cool. Add in the fact that the hardworking members of an interactive design team are often looking for fun and rewarding things to do while enduring two or three years of development, and there’s very little incentive not to go down the authorially-controlled road.

And who’s really going to complain? Most players like a good scripted sequence in an interactive product just as much as they like a good explosion in a movie. They don’t have the craft knowledge to discern how scripted events could be made less intrusive, more compelling, and derive more power through magicianship (faux interactivity), so they don’t perceive what they’re missing or giving up. Game mags love this kind of stuff because it looks great in the screenshots and it plays to the hardcore gamer who wants to test his high-end hardware. The marketing people love it because it’s something they can sell to the players and gaming mags, even if the game itself is no more interactive than a side-scrolling arcade game circa 1985.

Quiet on the Set!
The problem with all this is that we’re not talking about making interactive entertainment any more. What we’re talking about is machinima, which has nothing to do with player choice. In fact, from the perspective of interactivity, the difference between something like the half-track sequence in Spearhead, in which your job is to shoot everything that moves while your half-track careens across the countryside on rails, and the old 2D Space Invaders game, is practically zero. Yeah, you get to do it in 3D, but the thing you’re doing – shooting objects that are shooting you – is little different.

Ironically, we’re currently making games at at time when there is horsepower to burn, but we still seem to be spending too much time on eye candy. We’ve got graphics capabilities and CPU power and memory capacities that developers even two years ago would have cut off the pizza-delivery-person’s arm for, but that doesn’t seem to have encouraged designers to increase the complexity of the sims that underlie their games. Rather, what it seems to have done is encourage first-person-shooter designers to become directors, living out their machinima fantasies at the expense of gameplay.

And if game designers are becoming more like directors, the influx of writing talent that I always believed was necessary in order for our industry to become a truly mature medium might now only make this problem worse. Why? Because all writers are trained to exercise 100% authorial control in the pursuit of the effects they want to achieve, and an emphasis on machinima and scripting plays to that tendency. I’ve always said that writers coming to our medium need to understand the medium first, but what if the medium stops asking them to? What if designers are no longer saying, “Look, we need to figure out some way to put compelling narrative context around our interactivity,” and instead they’re saying, “We’re doing a scene where an iceberg sinks the player’s ship, so write a few sequences we can choose from.”

Writers who understand both storytelling and interactivity can help developers first and foremost by stressing that the goal is not one of simple drama, but one of integration. The player’s experience is the one that counts, and narrative efforts to improve that experience must not come at the expense of interactivity, no matter how cool a sequence might be when it’s triggered.

Deus Ex Machinima
Ultimately, as with all other mainstream forms of entertainment, our objective as creators is to get the player to experience interactive works in their head, not simply to watch them on a screen. While audience/player willingness to suspend disbelief can easily be exploited in pure passive and interactive forms, the integration of narrative elements with an interactive process presents a new set of technical challenges. Originally these challenges were met with an easily digestible mission/cutscene/mission structure, allowing the player a little downtime between frantic periods of button-clicking interactivity. Now, however, scripted moments are coming in the middle of periods of user control, often destroying the player’s imaginative involvement with both aspects of the medium.

The origin of this damage is that interactive designers are routinely putting the well-known narrative techniques of the film industry ahead of the simulations which underlie our products. This switching of priorities is not in the best long-term interest of either our medium or our customers, and we’re clearly not going to raise the bar in the interactive industry if we rely on the film industry’s bag of tricks in order to entertain. Jerking the controls away from the player and showing them a bit of machinima isn’t going to make up for failing to provide compelling interactivity, no matter how pretty the pictures are.

When Half-life came out it was groundbreaking, but it was also only half right. Half-life 2 is around the corner now, and I’m hopeful that the correct lessons have been taken from the original. The developers of Max Payne 2, a relentlessly linear third-person shooter, are also saying all the right things about using simulated processes (instead of scripting) to increase emotional involvement for the player, but given the nature of the original product it’s not clear how far they’re actually going to go, even assuming they have the skills to get there.

As an industry we have a complete monopoly on interactivity as a unique means of creating fun, and we need to remember how amazing that opportunity is. We need to continue to develop specific techniques that will allow us to integrate narrative context into our simulations, but we need to keep our emphasis on the interactive experience from the first stages of design through the end stages of production. Narrative context is simply one way of adding value to interactive simulations, regardless of how useful that context may be in attracting an audience or selling product.

Apology
In closing, a sincere apology to the MoH:AA team. Their work is better than most, and that I chose their game as fodder for the bulk of this note was due only to the fact that their game was actually worth playing. Clearly, sequences such as the first part of the Omaha Beach mission were inspired, and provided a sense of place that validated the use of scripted events.

— Mark Barrett

Limitations of Licenses

July 10, 2003 By Mark Leave a Comment

At the 2003 GDC, Warren Spector gave a talk entitled Sequels and Adaptations: Design Innovation in a Risk-Averse World. The gist of the speech was that working on a license doesn’t necessarily mean you can’t (or shouldn’t) innovate and create. Licenses are here to stay and may soon become the bread and butter of the industry (if they aren’t already), and developers need to deal with that.

After the GDC, Greg Costikyan posted a note on his blog about the lack of innovation in the industry. Reflecting on Warren’s speech, he said:

The writing is on the wall. And here we have my high-school buddy Warren Spector to confirm it: There in his keynote speech, telling us not to worry, just be happy. Drink the cool aid. Go to work for an in-house studio. Develop a licensed product. By God, Warren would be glad to do a Harry Potter game. What a lovely universe to work in. It’s the future. It’s the way things are. And it’s not so bad.

[You can read the full text of Greg’s rant, and Warren’s subsequent reply, here. Scroll down to A Specter is Haunting Gaming, then work your way back up.]

It seems to me they’re both right. The business reality is that more and more money is being thrown at developers for sequels and licensed titles. Content from other mediums is driving development of products in the interactive industry, because those more mature mediums are looking for ways to expand their hottest and most lucrative brands. The creative reality is that developers are taking on licenses in order to survive, which means they’re not innovating and growing the interactive industry itself. Which inevitably means we’re pushing back the day when mainstream audiences will embrace our medium for what it can uniquely do.

More recently, Jason Della Rocca, program director of the IGDA, posted a note on his blog about the relative success of licensed games versus non-licensed titles. Jason’s conclusion is that original games beat licensed games both in terms of critical quality and quantity of sales. While I hope Jason is right, and that publishers themselves will some day reach this same conclusion, I recently glimpsed another reason why licenses may ultimately turn out to be less attractive to our industry than they currently are.

My epiphany occurred while playing Enter the Matrix, the interactive game based on a license from the motion picture The Matrix Reloaded. After playing the game for a couple of hours, and watching my third-person, in-game persona shoot up the neighborhood, run on walls, and whoosh through the air in slow-motion “bullet time,” it hit me that most of what I was doing and seeing had been forced not by design decisions, but rather by the promise of the license itself. Unlike a ground-up interactive third-person title, Enter the Matrix began life encumbered by filmic conventions and film-related audience expectations, some of which were unrelated (or even antithetical) to a meaningful interactive experience.

(Whether the game as it stands is a success commercially or critically, or whether the developer could have made a better game facing the same constraints, is not at issue. What is of concern is that any developer working on any property licensed from passive mediums will necessarily face these same obstacles: obstacles that do not exist when developers work on original designs. Only products licensed from original interactive works, such as sequels and mission disks, avoid this problem.)

Consider for a moment the obligations presented by the bullet-time sequences in the Matrix films. Not only would any interactive product have to offer the player the same kind of eye candy, but legitimate implementation of the narrative idea behind the effect would involve allowing the player to elect when to slip into bullet time, as well as make that player choice meaningful within the context of the game. To the developer’s credit they accomplished both of these objectives in Enter the Matrix, but as I played I found myself wondering at what cost. How much of the budget and how much of the schedule had to be devoted to building a graphics engine capable of displaying on-demand bullet time? And how did that obligation change or preclude other features or elements of the original design?

Consider also that on-the-fly implementation of bullet time also limited the degree to which a roving or scripted third-person camera could be used to accentuate the graphics, or to emulate the filmic conventions of bullet time in the films. Is bullet time from a fixed perspective going to be as interesting and compelling as bullet time presented through cuts, wild camera angles and tight editing? Is any action sequence in any movie going to translate well under the same constraints?

And what about the loss inherent in translating filmed human beings expressing complex emotions (except for Keanu Reeves) into interactive products that are constrained by technological limitations in depicting virtual characters? How does an interactive developer get around that problem if the licensed material involves live actors? Even assuming photo-realistic avatars indistinguishable from filmed human beings, how can such avatars be employed in an interactive narrative context in anything remotely approximating the emotional power of a good movie, without ultimately turning the interactive product into a film itself? (Case in point: CGW’s review of Enter the Matrix specifically notes that the non-interactive sequences are actually the most entertaining part of the ‘game’.)

At its most basic, these problems are not about licenses at all, but about the differences between passive mediums and the interactive form. If we’ve learned anything over the past ten years it’s that many passive techniques don’t translate at all well into interactive works, which means that licenses from passive forms will inevitably exact a cost at the design stage. I believe this penalty is currently being vastly underestimated by developers.

(In a recent thread in the IGDA Writing Forum, I noted that there is almost no overlap between the ideas I have for original films, television shows, books and stage plays, versus the ideas I have for interactive works. Interactivity as a mechanism of audience entertainment is simply perpendicular to most passive mediums, and I don’t see that changing in the foreseeable future, if ever.)

So while Warren’s right – licenses don’t necessarily mean you won’t be able to be creative – there may still be a design downside to taking a license on, and particularly so if the license originates in another medium. Given that most licenses do come from passive mediums, and that the flow seems to be increasing, this would seem to be a significant problem.

The success or failure of licenses as a business model for interactive developers will ultimately turn on whether the cost paid on the design end is compensated for by the marketing tie-in that is any license’s raison d’être. If licensed products can’t leverage their brand against original interactive works over time, there will be little reason for the interactive industry to seek them out. And that may be the real silver lining in what could otherwise be a licensing Dark Age for our business: products based on licenses from passive mediums may simply be less fun and less interesting than original interactive works. (If this sounds far-fetched, apply the same theory to licenses going the other way, particularly from the interactive industry to film. Would you rather sink money into an original motion picture, or into a movie based on an interactive license?)

Years from now games like Enter the Matrix may simply be seen as testament to the difficulties of translating passive licenses into interactive products. At the same time, developers and publishers may begin to fund more original (and innovative) products as their first means of generating income, just as all other mainstream entertainment mediums do. If and when that happens, the interactive industry will have finally, convincingly demonstrated to itself that interactivity is unique, and that it is the most important thing we have to offer the entertainment consumer.

— Mark Barrett

Failing the Artistic License Test

May 27, 2003 By Mark Leave a Comment

There is nothing quite so fulfilling to me as creativity. I love expressing myself, and entertaining others, through a variety of mediums. I’m happy for others who enjoy the same pursuit, and I’m not above being a fan if somebody wows me – particularly when I know I could never do what they’ve done.

Those of us who do creative work that is intended to be sold, however, have a responsibility that goes beyond feeding our own creative jones. Customers pay cash money for our products, and they expect them to be, at the very least, competent. That’s an implicit tradeoff our customers make with us: we get the right to shoot for the moon as long as we promise basic technical and craft competence.

I mention this because my new issue of CGW contains reviews of a number of products that seem to have failed to meet this minimum level of competence. Leaving aside the names of the titles, here are the number of stars those products received, out of a possible 5:

4
1.5
3.5
1.5
3
3
1.5
1.5
2
1.5
4.5
1
3
2
0

It’s no wonder Jeff Green, the Editor-in-Chief, wanted to put A Load of Stink on the front cover of the magazine. Out of 15 products reviewed, 80% were average or worse (3 stars or less), and more than half (60%) were 2 stars or less. What’s going on?

Well, it could be a fluke, or maybe an artifact of the fact that most AAA titles tend to ship around the end of the year. Maybe weak products are being disproportionately shoved out the door in early summer precisely because nobody’s buying now. They’ll die a quick death, all the contractual obligations will be filled, and there will still be six months during which the completely-screwed consumer can be lulled back to buy one of those AAA titles.

But that’s not what I think. What I think is that most of those crappy games were made by people who valued their own creative experience above the entertainment experience of their customers. Read the reviews and it becomes clear that in some of these games even the most basic, established design conventions have been ignored for no reason, as if no one had ever designed a game in that genre before.

Admit it: you’ve played an RTS at some point, and found yourself swearing at the screen because the developers came up with their own interface, instead of ripping off the interface from Age of Kings. Or you’ve played and raged at a console 3D title in which you don’t have the ability to immediately orient the camera behind the player-character, as you can in most Nintendo titles.

Beyond the damage done when bad titles ambush unsuspecting customers, consider the amount of time and development money that went into those craters. How many decent games could have been made with the same resources, if only the designers had known what they were doing? How hard would it have been to find good examples of games that could have been emulated?

There was a time when creativity had to take precedence in all things interactive because nobody’d done anything like it before, and we all have our heroes from that age. That age is now over.

— Mark Barrett

Suspension of Disbelief Explained

May 20, 2003 By Mark 3 Comments

Also in my new issue of CGW was this quote, from Thierry ‘Scooter’ Nguyen’s review of IGI 2: Covert Strike —

“The fact that ex-SAS/current-IGI-agent David Jones gets constantly surprised by third-rate terrorists and inscrutable Chinese troops goes beyond suspending disbelief, and is just one of the litany of annoyances that plague IGI 2: Covert Strike.”

I understand what the writer intended to say, but the phrase ‘goes beyond suspending disbelief’ is a bit strained. In fact, about the only think I can think of that’s beyond suspending disbelief is slipping into full-blown delusion – which may be what happened to the reviewer while he was playing the game, but it has nothing to do with suspending disbelief.

For those who have heard the phrase before, but haven’t had it explained, suspension of disbelief is an unwieldy term used to describe a distinct mental state. Our normal mental state in life is to expect that the things happening around us are real: the sun rises and sets, the grass grows, the lawnmower shreds our toes if we’re not paying attention. Put another way, we believe in these things.

In contrast to Real Life, where you can lose your toes, fictional experiences are not real, and not believable in the same sense. We all know going into a movie theater that what we’re about to see is a mechanical charade that has been intentionally rigged by a bunch of people working somewhere else.

Most of the time we actively disbelieve the reality of a movie, up to and including when we take our seats in the theater. Amazingly, however, as the lights come down, we can still mentally SUSPEND our DISBELIEF and become imaginatively and emotionally affected by the motion picture(s) flickering on the screen in front of us.

What’s truly great about suspension of disbelief for us as developers is that audiences usually suspend disbelief willingly: we don’t have to talk them into it much. What’s not great is that it’s very fragile, and almost anything can disrupt it once we’ve created it in the minds of our users.

In the quote above the reviewer simply should have said that the problems with the game disrupted or shattered suspension of disbelief, making it impossible for him to entertain imaginative involvement in the work. Which is the real point: suspension of disbelief, once created, must also be maintained.

— Mark Barrett

Postal 2 Gets Posterized

May 18, 2003 By Mark Leave a Comment

My new issue of Computer Gaming World (CGW) contains a groundbreaking review of Postal 2. It’s groundbreaking because in the history of that venerable magazine, it’s the first time they’ve ever given a game zero stars. Zip. Zilch.

My great hope is that this marks a kind of game design nadir, and portends a general rise in the level of design standards. Hollywood has wrestled with issues like this before, and thankfully the market always tends to keep things from disintegrating into chaos. For example, Tinseltown went through a gore-fest period when new makeup techniques made open wounds believable, but after a while the audience became repulsed, and the industry backed away. Now such technology is usually only exploited in motivated contexts, such as the grisly opening sequence in Saving Private Ryan. (No, not the sequence with the perfectly framed breasts – the one after that.)

Maybe the deep-thinking philosophers at Running With Scissors will turn their considerable talents to actually making a playable game next time, instead of trying to set a record in the ‘Most Constituencies Annoyed by a Single Software Title’ category. In any case, I hope the design floor is now as low as it can possibly go in mainstream interactive entertainment, because we’ve already wasted too many resources trying to find that limit.

— Mark Barrett