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Driving Interactive Interest

August 23, 2011 By Mark Leave a Comment

Over the past thirty years or so, as computer and video games have become more mainstream, basic assumptions about the design of interactive entertainment have changed. In the early days, when the majority of the market was hardcore, designers aimed for more hours of play per title because longer games were in demand. (They often did so by rigging games with impossible battles and repetitive chores, but the demand for long games was real.)

Fifteen years ago or so the demands of the market began to change. Consumer research showed players in the aggregate preferring shorter and easier games. While hardcore gamers still existed, they now made up a much smaller percentage of a market that included casual gamers and people new to computer-driven entertainment. Presenting these customers with 100+ hours of hardcore (if not also tedious and unfair) gameplay made no sense, and ran the risk of alienating them from the industry.

Like mountaineers determined to cross another peak off their list, hardcore gamers tend to finish games no matter how grueling the experience. It’s a badge of honor and a way to differentiate themselves from the masses. Casual gamers, on the other hand, tend to explore interactive works like tourists, following their whims and interests for a few hours before heading back to the hotel for a nap. And according to a recent article on CNN’s Tech page, this sight-seeing approach is fast becoming the dominant response to interactive entertainment across all demographics:

“Just 10 years ago, I recall some standard that only 20% of gamers ever finish a game,” says John Lee, VP of marketing at Raptr and former executive at Capcom, THQ and Sega.

And it’s not just dull games that go unfinished. Critically acclaimed ones do, too. Take last year’s “Red Dead Redemption.” You might think Rockstar’s gritty Western would be played more than others, given the praise it enjoyed, but you’d be wrong.

Only 10% of avid gamers completed the final mission, according to Raptr, which tracks more than 23 million gaming sessions.

Let that sink in for a minute: Of every 10 people who started playing the consensus “Game of the Year,” only one of them finished it.

Computer and video games are not cheap to produce, and the best of breed — often called triple-A or ‘AAA’ titles — can be more expensive than big-budget films. Sinking previous development resources into a product most consumers will never fully experience might make sense if the expense was recouped through additional sales, but that’s a huge gamble in even the best scenario. Making the odds worse is the ugly fact that consumers are simply hard-pressed to find time to play and enjoy longer works.

  [ Read more ]

Filed Under: Interactive Tagged With: entertainment, IE, interactive entertainment, interactive storytelling, interactivity

Suspension of Disbelief Revisited

October 29, 2009 By Mark Leave a Comment

Earlier today the following quote appeared on Twitter (via Guy Charles and others), regarding Jane Friedman’s keynote interview at PBV:

Friedman on enhanced ebooks: “Vook is read and watch… I’m not interested in disrupting the reading experience; it’s sacrosanct.”

By coincidence, I ran across the following quote at almost the same moment while doing research for the previous post:

There are plenty of people who cringe at the cultural toll, who believe that the loss of books means losing the tactile, absorbing relationship with text we’ve enjoyed for centuries. MIT technology guru Nicholas Negroponte would like to remind them that people resisted indoor plumbing, too.

“They complained that if women didn’t do the laundry beside the river and at the fountain they would be alone, but other things started to serve those social purposes,’’ said Negroponte, founder of the One Laptop Per Child program, a festival panelist, and Deborah Porter’s significant other. “The reading experience is becoming more social. There are various ways of interacting on e-readers or computers, where people blog and use Twitter, and where the sharp line between the writer and the reader is going away.’’

I understand both of these perspectives, but relative to the functional merits of books they are both wrong, and both wrong for the same reason.  [ Read more ]

Filed Under: ~ Tangents Tagged With: e-books, e-readers, interactivity, jane friedman, suspension of disbelief

Taking Stock

September 9, 2009 By Mark 9 Comments

After three weeks of blogging and Site Seeing I definitely have a better handle on what’s happening out there, but I’ve also come to grips with the fact that I simply can’t keep track of it all. And that’s true even if I avail myself of all the latest tech, tech filters and social networks — which I would also have to spend a great deal of time reading about in order to achieve cutting-edge productivity.

(There’s a reason they call it the ‘cutting’ edge.)

In the end there’s too much to see and digest, let alone comment on, let alone act on. So it’s time to tighten the focus a bit, in anticipation of tightening it more in the future. Although this is an exclusionary process in some respects, I tend to think of it as irising in on something in the distance and pulling it into sharper focus. Simplification as zoom lens. Or sniper scope.

Traditional Publishing
I can’t really say the industry is dead, because it’s not dead. What I can say is that it’s broken, and I think everybody gets that. But I don’t think it’s simply broken relative to some newfangled process or advance (the internet), but rather that it’s inherently broken in ways that the internet is only now revealing.  [ Read more ]

Filed Under: Ditchwalk.com Tagged With: blog fiction, interactive storytelling, interactivity, Publishing, self-publishing

Summing Up

September 20, 2005 By Mark Leave a Comment

I’ve been working and living outside the walls of the interactive community for a year and a half now (maybe closer to two), and I have a few thoughts about the industry as seen from that distance.

Irony Abounds
Many moons ago the interactive world sneered at anyone who tried to use full motion video or other cinematic techniques to bring actors (and by extension, narratives) to life. That was back in the day when the processor was going to solve every problem, and we were going to be able to tell interactive stories on the fly. Because FMV was non-interactive – and inherently scripted – it was derided as an antiquated solution to a new-age problem.

Flash forward to today, and much of the talk in the IE community is about how GPU’s are spitting out dynamic scenes that look as good as film, and how scripted sequences are conveying the same force and power of the best motion pictures. And this is all being done with a straight face.

The awful truth is that most attempts to create real narrative interactivity have failed, and most of the techniques currently being used to deliver narrative force have been derived from the film industry. Sure, using game-engine graphics for cutscenes and scripted sequences provides cost savings over location shoots, safety during production no matter how crazy the stunts, and continuity with other graphics in the game, but the end product is still a movie.

Think about it. While a lot of the eye candy that helps sell the best shooters requires a processor, much of the narrative does not. Which raises an interesting question. How much of the entertainment value of a given successful title is due to algorithms, and how much due to the non-interactive authorial control being exercised by the designers? Even five years ago adventure game designers were derided for heavily scripting their games, while the case could be made that their craft knowledge is now more applicable and important than it ever was.

Years ago I wrote an article that talked about the need to focus on real interactivity, where choices determine outcomes, as well as the need to improve on magicianship, or the illusion of interactivity. In the intervening years, the one thing the interactive industry has really gotten right is convincing the user that a button click has determined an outcome, when in fact it is only revealing an outcome that has been pre-designed. Predictably, as products have tipped more toward these predetermined effects, the promise of interactivity – where each user would be able to make free determinative choices in a given environment – has waned. And serious commercial attempts to move past the current limitations seem to have waned as well.

Are people still fighting the good fight? Sure, but just as many people are faking the good fight, and there aren’t that many people in the industry who can tell the difference. If the industry continues to excel at magicianship, there may come a day when there is very little interactivity in any product, because it costs money to give the user choices and options.

Business models have firmed up, bureaucracies have calcified, and everyone knows where the sure money is so those are the products that get into production. The goal of providing interactive storytelling has been replaced by the goal of faking interactive storytelling, which probably isn’t a healthy development for an industry whose main selling point is interactivity.

Gatekeepers and Death
I was as interested as anyone in trying to advance the cause of narrative interactivity. But after having endured the disintegration of an incredible opportunity because of the blindness of that team’s leadership, I took a long look at the premise of leaving it up to others in life to determined when I would and would not have the opportunity to create. In the end I decided I’d much rather make my own stuff under my own direction, even if it was in another medium, than wait around to see if the fates would shine on me at the big table. I’ve just seen too many people grinding it out year after year, hoping that their self-absorbed boss or bottom-line company will give them a chance to show what they can do, and I don’t think that’s a healthy way to live if you’re driven by creativity. Unless of course you’re immortal.

Which brings me to my next point. Clearly one of the factors in all this is that I’ve gotten old enough that I think about how much time I have left to be productive, but that’s only part of the story. The main reason I can’t really trust the fates is that I just haven’t run across that many leaders and managers who understand that their job is getting the best out of the people they have, as opposed to getting what they themselves want out of the people they have.

That’s true in sports, too, where there are two kinds of coaches. The most common kind, by far, is the coach who has a system he or she likes. These coaches teach their system to their team, molding each crop of players into pre-assigned slots in the system, whether or not they’re ideally suited to those slots. The other – and much rarer – kind of coach is the one who looks at what each team member excels at and then builds the team around those skills and abilities. Unfortunately, I’ve been looking for that kind of coach most of my creative life, but I have yet to find one.

Caring About Caring
I remain convinced that the key to real mainstream success for the interactive industry is getting people to care emotionally about the interactive choices they make. That’s true for the illusion of interactivity as well as for real interactivity, but it’s emotional involvement derived from real interactivity that the industry needs to demonstrate. More than anything, users still want to care emotionally (as opposed to rationally) about the in-game choices they make.

If there’s a final irony in this for me, it’s that after watching millions of dollars get flushed down the toilet in the IE industry, watching failed designs get green-lighted due to incompetence, watching craft knowledge get trumped by ego, watching people with power and no talent abuse people with talent and no power, I ended up not caring about the industry. I tried to deny it for a while, but when I’m doing creative work I have to care about what I’m doing in order to do it well, and I didn’t have any reason to care about interactive entertainment any longer.

Next Steps
So, where to from here? As of today I’m about seventy pages into my first novel, and while I don’t know if it’s any good or not, I do know that I’m enjoying myself and feeling good about my work. I care about writing, and about what I’m writing.

I’m also learning the craft of stained glass, and I’m even doing a little drawing and painting, which I haven’t done in years. Chances are none of this will pay off enough to keep my head above water and I’ll probably end up driving a dump truck, but that’s okay, too. Provided the brakes work.

— Mark Barrett

Filed Under: Interactive Tagged With: interactivity, irony

Academic Intent

June 18, 2004 By Mark Leave a Comment

This is the text I submitted to the First Person project, which you can read more about in the post immediately prior to this one.

In college I took a run at academic criticism, including semiotics. I spent time studying films and writing them, studying fiction and writing short stories, and studying theater and writing plays. The most surprising thing I learned in my criticism classes was that most of the people sitting in the chairs beside me had no interest in making anything. They were there to learn how to talk about the medium they loved, not how to better create in the medium they loved.

To be clear, I have no axe to grind with anyone who enjoys debating the merits of any subject, from sports franchises to music to movies, but as a creator those debates do not further my cause. I need to know how to make things, and that means I need practical solutions and reliable techniques to draw from. If that be bias, then I would say it is the bias of the surgeon who needs scalpel and sutures to save the patient.

It’s no secret that academic interest in the interactive industry has exploded over the past few years, but there is a wrench in the works. As an expressive art form interactivity is still in its infancy, and one of the core problems in the medium – interactive storytelling – has yet to be cracked. Over the past decade myriad failed commercial attempts have provided a number of important lessons, one of which is that the core competencies of the interactive entertainment industry are not particularly suited to solving this problem. This necessarily led to a more theoretical analysis of how the problem might be solved, including research efforts at various academic institutions around the world. These academic research projects have in turn piqued the interest of academic critics in the medium, even though it is not yet fully formed.

Another more concrete lesson that can be taken from the failed interactive storytelling attempts in the commercial industry is that some things simply do not work. Many of these failed efforts were in fact valid approaches born of reasoned theory, which in turn helped define and describe the barriers we still face. Unfortunately, reading commentary from the academic world I sometimes get the feeling that these failed attempts are viewed more as serial stupidity than as the experiments I believe them to be. Like the NTSB reassembling and analyzing the scattered remains of a downed experimental aircraft, I believe analysis of failed commercial attempts at interactive storytelling can actually lead us to basic understandings about the theoretical limits of interactive storytelling itself, and I think the academic community is well-situated to begin that work.

I mention all this as preamble to my response to Janet Murray’s essay in a new book entitled First Person: New Media as Story, Performance and Game. I have read Janet’s essay three times now, and as a creator I must report that I can find nothing in it that is of use to me. This is not a criticism of Janet’s rhetoric or of her essay, but a simple fact. Moreover, as someone who has been wrestling with the issue of interactive storytelling for close to a decade, I can say with certainty that many of the issues Janet raises have already been encountered in the commercial interactive entertainment industry. My concern with Janet’s article is that she does not reference this considerable history in her own discussion.

For example, Janet begins her essay by proposing and defining a new term (game-story), after which she proposes a number of new ways of defining the medium as it exists today, and may exist tomorrow. That we have no common language with which to discuss the craft of interactive design, and in particular interactive storytelling, has been a recurrent problem. Doug Church first attempted to advance the cause years ago by codifying a number of Formal Abstract Design Tools for commercial designers, but in the intervening years we have made little headway. Within the academic research community the problem is exponentially worse.

Exacerbating this problem is the fact that turnover in the interactive entertainment world is high, meaning that every few years an almost entirely new group encounters and attempts to address the same craft-language deficit, with little or no success. (Anecdotally, I have seen this happen myself at least three times in the past ten years, and my fear is that the academic community – through essays like Janet’s – is now embarking on a fourth.) Worse, significant problems can arise when new definitions ignore (or are oblivious of) practical lessons that have already been learned.

For example, here’s Janet at the end of her essay, talking about ‘agency’:

But the more useful question is, how do we make a better cyberdrama? One criterion that I have found useful is the concept of dramatic agency. Agency is the term I used to distinguish the pleasure of interactivity, which arises from the two properties of the procedural and the participatory. When the world responds expressively and coherently to our engagement with it, then we experience agency. Agency requires that we script the interactor as well as the world, so that we build up the appropriate expectations.

On the face of it I think I know what Janet is talking about here, but I’m not one hundred percent sure. If I’m just reading her essay to be able to kick a bit of theory around, that’s fine. But as a creator looking for techniques that I can use to deliver interactive storytelling, agency presents two problems. First, there’s the implicit claim that virtual worlds can respond “expressively and coherently” to user inputs in a dramatic context, which as a creator I know to be extremely difficult to achieve, and almost impossible to sustain. Second, there’s the imposed constraint that we must script the interactor, which runs contrary to the freedom of choice that most people view as the main benefit of interactivity.

My point here is that in order to define and promote new terms like agency, we need to be clear about the concepts upon which those new terms are predicated. After a decade one would think that there might now be a universally recognized definition of what interactivity is, but there isn’t. My own, which has held up quite well, states that interactivity is choice which determines outcome, but the very fact that I feel obligated to say ‘my own’ makes it clear that we have not collectively answered one of the most basic questions facing our medium.

Now, it is true in the academic world, and in particular in the realm of academic criticism, that many of these problems are new. For that reason I certainly have no problem with Janet or anyone else attempting to codify the language of interactivity for the sake of analysis. If these efforts in turn lead to a more formal language that the industry itself can adopt, that’s all to the good. And it may in fact be that the academic industry’s inherent stability will provide an opportunity to establish the mature language of discourse that has so far evaded the more transient commercial industry.

What is not clear to me even now is whether that is the specific intent of Janet’s essay, or whether she really does mean to go beyond language to questions of craft and technique. If academics are going to be helpful in solving the interactive storytelling problem, I think it is extremely important for them to be explicit about their intent, exhaustive in their historical analysis and rigorous with their language. The danger in failing to do so is not simply that confusion will arise, but that academia will perpetuate the reinvention of the wheel among the transient student populations in the same way these issues have reappeared a number of times in the transient commercial industry. And from where I sit, as a creator, the last thing any of us needs is another generation of designers thinking they’re getting in on the ground floor of the interactive storytelling problem when they’re not.

— Mark Barrett

Filed Under: Interactive Tagged With: agency, criticism, Cyberdrama, First Person, interactivity, Noah Wardrip-Fruin, Pat Harrigan

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

Filed Under: Interactive Tagged With: computer games, Interactive, interactivity

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 ]

Filed Under: Interactive Tagged With: emotional involvement, interactive storytelling, interactivity, narrative design

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

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

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