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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

Filed Under: Interactive Tagged With: game design, game writers, interactive storytelling, interactivity, suspension of disbelief

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

Filed Under: Interactive Tagged With: interactivity

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

Filed Under: Interactive Tagged With: CGW, craft, game design

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

Filed Under: Interactive Tagged With: suspension of disbelief

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

Filed Under: Interactive Tagged With: CGW

Countdown Beatdown

May 11, 2003 By Mark Leave a Comment

I happened to catch a few minutes of a relatively new show on MSNBC called Countdown with Keith Olbermann, and guess what subject just happened to come up? That’s right, Violence in Computer Games. And wouldn’t you know, their special guest was a lawyer from Florida who seems to be everybody’s special guest on this subject.

Unfortunately I can’t comment on the lawyer’s attempt to lock this legal turf up for himself, because I didn’t pay any attention to what he was saying. Instead, I was riveted by the images they were showing while the host and guest bantered back and forth. The images were (I believe) from GTA3, playing full-screen with the interview in voice-over, and it only took my gamer’s eye a few seconds to spot the fly in the ointment.

Most of what was being shown was not goal-oriented gameplay, or even mayhem-oriented gameplay, but was in fact TV-segment-oriented gameplay. For example, at one point the player-character is standing over a figure lying on the ground, repeatedly beating the person even though they’re immobile, for what must have been at least ten blows. I’m not kidding when I say that if the player-character would have been wearing an LAPD uniform it could have passed for the Rodney King tape.

And here’s what I’m thinking while I’m watching this:

    Who’s playing the game? Did they go find somebody who had a copy and shoot them playing, or did they get their own console and film that? If they are shooting somebody else (not a staffer) playing, how much footage did they shoot? Did they ask the player (either directly or indirectly) to show them some of the more violent aspects of the game? Or did they just film somebody beating a dead body for twenty minutes?

And here’s what I’m thinking Ma and Pa Peoria are thinking while they watch the same thing in the comfort and safety of their living room:

    Good God! Anybody who’d make something like that deserves ten times the beating that poor bastard is getting!

Sure, GTA3 is a violent game, but how many games could you exploit in the same way? And to what extent is context important in whether or not people find actions offensive or not? If I endlessly bayonet a Nazi in Battlefield 1942, will I take the same heat that I would for endlessly bashing a cop in GTA3? If not, where can I get a list of all the mayhem that’s okay?

I mention this as yet another reason why we need a point person who can respond calmly to this kind of report. Without someone who can speak to the broader issues involved, we’re toast in the public eye because of only a few titles, and only a few aspects of those titles.

— Mark Barrett

Filed Under: Interactive Tagged With: violence

Quick – Move the Mouse to the Right and Press the Shift Key!

May 9, 2003 By Mark Leave a Comment

I’ve played through a good number of games lately, and I’m noticing a design trend I don’t like much. Specifically, games in modern and futuristic settings are routinely providing the player-character with a constant telecommunications link to NPC’s in other locations, ostensibly so the plot can continue without the player having to return to base for each new mission. Fair enough: I enjoy a well-motivated device as much as the next guy.

Unfortunately, this ‘in your ear’ voice-over capability is being used for a whole lot more than just advancing the plot. It’s also being used to cover for lack of a plot, lack of a coherent plot, bungled level design, and worst of all, for the player’s own exploratory inputs. The final straw for me was an early mission in Splinter Cell, in which I was told by an NPC in another locale that I needed to go through door X, climb staircase Y, and open door Z – which, it turned out, was pretty much the only route I could have taken anyway!

Now, maybe some of this is necessitated by the reach to a broader, less hardcore audience, but I don’t think even that kind of pandering is a good idea. Any player who bought Splinter Cell and managed to load and launch it should probably be given the option of exploring for a while before a voice-over helper tells them what to do. Wind Waker seems to do this pretty well so far, with Tetra only popping up to tell you something new, or to point out that what you’re trying to do is something you won’t actually be able to do for a while.

— Mark Barrett

Filed Under: Interactive Tagged With: game design

Setting Ascendant

May 8, 2003 By Mark Leave a Comment

I’ve played enough Wind Waker now to say categorically that virtual sailing has never been more enjoyable. While the fact that I can cause my little boat to jump out of the sea on command may take away from the purity of the simulation, numerous other aspects of the game more than make up for that quibbling bit of fancy.

As with many games, however, some of Wind Waker’s greatest joys are passive: a glimpse of some far-off vista, a coming storm churning a foamy sea, a craggy island jutting into a swirling cauldron of clouds. In such examples it is the setting, and not the game mechanic itself, that provides an emotional payoff, and I’m hopeful that setting is going to become a more important aspect of game design for just that reason.

As I mentioned regarding Morrowind in my last post, the right combination of detail, distance, and discovery can make a place seem alive and vital, and I think our audience really craves that kind of virtual experience. Given that movement in virtual spaces is almost synonymous with the core interactive mechanics of most 3D games, spending time and money to elevate setting returns benefits to core gameplay — and that makes it distinctly different from time and money spent on cutscenes or canned narrative elements.

— Mark Barrett

Filed Under: Interactive Tagged With: emotional involvement, interactivity, setting, wind waker

The Morrowind Experience

May 5, 2003 By Mark Leave a Comment

My main curiosity about Morrowind was whether the large scale of the world translated into greater immersion or greater tedium during play. Having played it extensively for close to a month I think I can say without equivocation that in this case more is more. Unlike any game I can think of, wandering around in Morrowind and bashing things for experience points gave me a real sense of place, and created an equivalent-sized mental space in my mind. Even better, I interpreted this space not just as distance, but as depth of setting.

Here are some of the things that I think helped create that effect:

  • Detail
    With the exception of the large mountains, there were no locations in Morrowind that seemed so similar as to reek of tilesets or recycled polygons. I don’t know how the world was created, or how much hand-crafting went into the placement of each bush and rock, but the simple fact that I never confronted a recognizable physical space in more than one location kept my suspension of disbelief intact.
  • Distance
    It’s a delicate balancing act, but in order to create a real sense of space I think you need to have areas of interest surrounded by a good deal of relative blah. Morrowind does this perfectly, and because most of the nonessential spaces are still unique, walking around in Morrowind just feels right. And while the game provides several means by which you can avoid having to walk to and fro on foot, quite often I found myself hiking simply for the pleasure of literally seeing the world.
  • Discovery
    One of the most basic and important techniques in interactive entertainment, discovery involves exploiting the innate human pleasure of finding things and seeing new places. In Morrowind, nonessential dungeons and monsters populate the landscape, making walks in the wilderness rewarding both visually and within the context of the game. For a narrative game, they got this about as right as I think you can get it: I never felt like I was on a treasure hunt looking for powerups, but instead felt like I was discovering ancient ruins, etc.

In fact, I got so wrapped up in just wandering and experiencing the world that I let much of the plotted story slip for a quite a while. When I finally got around to pursuing the story, the mechanics of language interaction that the plotting hinged on actually seemed constraining, and made the world less enjoyable. At one point I was forced into an action that I didn’t want to take because of the limited number of choices available to me, and it was only at that point that I really felt like the world broke down. I stopped playing soon after, but I do intend to begin a new game in order to experience the story the designers intended to tell.

The moral of the story, if there is one, is that Morrowind does an excellent job of simulated an interesting fictional space, and that that in itself was compelling for me.

— Mark Barrett

Filed Under: Interactive Tagged With: scale, suspension of disbelief

Zelda: The Wind Waker

April 29, 2003 By Mark Leave a Comment

I’ve only just begun this game, but I’m far enough into it to say one thing for certain: cel-shading is huge, and it’s going to make a big difference in how we feel about playing games. In fact, I think it’s going to go a long way toward making games more immersive and less mechanical, simply because it bypasses the tired textured-polygon look and feel. Moving around in Wind Waker is like moving around in a Disney movie, and it feels great.

In an article (pages 7-10) I wrote a couple of years ago I said that the next step in graphics would be the development of house styles, where the products from one developer would take on a certain look, just as the animation styles from Disney and Warner Bros. did. I don’t know enough about cel-shading to know how costly and labor intensive it is, but if it’s at least comparable to the mesh/skin process, I think it’s going to take off for exactly this reason.

— Mark Barrett

Filed Under: Interactive Tagged With: wind waker

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