A unique sensation, even without words.

In general, I’m quite skeptical of games like Journey.  In fact, I’m skeptical about all the games that come out of thatgamecompany.  Not because their products are bad, it’s sometimes the way they talk about their work that, I feel, belittles the idea and replaces is it pretentiousness.  So when I first heard about Journey, a year or two ago, I took cautious steps.  The best idea I thought they had was the communication (or lack of communication) between players.  Details were rough back then but the idea of not being able to communicate via voice or chat in an MMO like setting was mind-boggling.  Encounter another human player in a huge and sparsely populated landscape!!!  That was exciting to me.  It sounded like it would be hard to find people and if you did it was valuable but because you couldn’t communicate efficiently, it somehow strengthened that bond.  Loneliness really does push us out of our shells.  When I played briefly a few nights ago, that was the last thing I was thinking though.

More after the jump…

The biggest revelation that I had was the ability to tell a very complex story without words and very little character interaction.  We had some opening vistas where the camera panned across the desert and between each ‘level’ were some short movies with one mysterious figure but most of the movies were these murals and hieroglyphs coming to life.  These pictures began to crudely animate and tell the story of these red hooded people.  That was really put me on the edge of my seat.  I was immediately entranced by their history and wondering what happened to their civilization.  I was struggling to grasp for a sense of identity and trying to find where I fit into the equation.  Am I a visitor?  A savior?  Perhaps a survivor?  You can do a lot with words, but the work that was put into these animations and hieroglyphs is obviously monumental.

Regarding the other players, I did come across a few.  They were pinging and running around in the distance.  It was nice to see the screen have a unobtrusive glow to indicate where nearby players were, but I honestly did not give a damn about them.  I chose to avoid them and explore on my own.  We can’t discuss our role in the game universe just because we can’t.  For a moment, I felt the experience was spoiled because I knew that these other red hoods were other humans.  I read stories about the first people playing the game and they weren’t told anything about the other red hoods.  These first players assumed they were AI.  When they were told that they were actually humans connected over the internet, they were astounded.  I wonder if there is a way to preserve that moment of revelation.  I suppose a lot of people may have had it if they don’t read up on games too much.  Alas, being a game designer means I can see through or I learn about a lot of the tricks and behind the scenes.

I’m glad I bought the game.  I wasn’t expecting anything like this so I’m pleasantly surprised.  Will definitely take another look soon and invest more time into a session.

Game of all games

Wow.  Long time no post.  I think this will be the last longer form post since I’m just so terrible with it.  Usually start writing and have good ideas and then trip over said ideas.  So I’m going to try and write shorter things from now on.

So I just finished Mass Effect 3 and it was simply sublime.  The trilogy was an absolutely thrilling ride.  Each title surpassed its predecessor in all the best ways.  While the narrative vectors could have lined up a little better, it was a very well told story that uses surprisingly simple methods to create player empathy.  I cared so much about these characters.  Characters.  And that was all Bioware had to do.

And this has since been blown over a million times, but many fans are extremely unhappy with the ending that ME3 provides them with.  They want more closure, more choices, this and that.  I’ll admit that I’ve tried very hard to steer clear from these discussion until now due to spoilers but I’ve overheard the main complaints and I’d like to address some of them.

Obviously, the rest of this blog post will have tons of SPOILERS after the jump.

The following are some major arguments about the game’s story, ending, and the game in general.  I’ll indicate when they’re mine.

I Got the Shitty Ending

I have to strongly disagree with the people complaining that they got a bad ending.  It may not have been the ending that they wanted or expected, but I believe that given the vectors in the story—where some vectors are even summed to give you ending choices (war asset stuff)—play a part in shaping it.  As a min/maxer, when I was given agency at the end of the game to choose from the three ending options I paused the game and went online for ending spoilers and analyses.  I’m just that kind of player.  My gut reaction as I was listening to the ancient VI was to go with synthesis.  I felt that a lot of ME2 and most of ME3 did a good job at playing up the synthetic vs. organic and transhumanism issue.  There were some areas were vectors veered off on very different paths for quite a distance, but I think players would have been thinking about these issues for the majority of the series.  I think that the subject of tranhumanism is a very modern one and is being spoken about in almost every part of our daily lives.  Our mobile devices have become extensions of our personalities, interactions, and ultimately our minds.  To boil down the issue into a binary issue, there are only so many outcomes you can have.  I was not too surprised by the choices made available to me.

The thing that struck me was in the ending analysis that I read, I saw that the ending where Shepard destroys the Reapers without totally wiping out Earth and surviving at the end being deemed the ‘best’.  This is because it took the most readiness to achieve.  I had this option but it felt so wrong to me.  I looked at how much readiness I needed to get the ‘green’ ending and it was somewhere in the middle.  Yes, the min/maxer inside of me was going crazy but I submitted to the emotional side of me and chose what felt right.  I sacrificed myself, the future interactions with those I loved and loved me back, to end the cycle of suffering.  Each is a valid ending.  Based on the vectors, your EMS, your options at the end will be limited in some capacity.  I find this reasonable.  It’s a tree, so there will be flaws, but for the most part I think Bioware hit all the major points.

Some others complained that they did all the side-quests and still didn’t get a satisfactory ending.  Part of this might be because, like in my example, even the ending with the highest EMS requirement could still be unsatisfactory based on your own personal preferences.  On the other hand, many people underestimate how much is actually being tracked from game to game in the entire trilogy.  If you didn’t do some DLC in ME2, you’re boned.  It’s tragic since not everyone can afford DLC, but I felt it was also reasonable given that you can improve your multiplier by grinding multiplayer (not really grinding because multiplayer is actually quite good).  Now, if you’re a person who didn’t do DLC or didn’t play the previous games and just didn’t want to play multiplayer then you’re asking for a lot.  At first I thought that it was a lot of Bioware to ask of players to play multiplayer too.  However, it ended up being quite reasonable and I even was able to let the multiplier slide down to 50%.  No big deal.

What happened to everyone else?!

The three possible endings were also said to be unsatisfactory because we don’t know what happened to all the characters in your party.  This is somewhat of a conundrum since what makes the series such a good is its attention to building each one of these characters.  What I really enjoyed in the third installment is bumping into various people along the way, people like Thane (my favorite) and Kasumi.  While tangential and oftentimes heartbreaking, these little snippets gave me a lot of closure.  However, there is no such closure given to the prime party members like Garrus or Liara depending on which ending you choose.  It may seem like Bioware skimped on this, but given the circumstances of the end game I think it’s perfectly reasonable to leave these characters’ conclusions out.  All hell broke loose, Earth almost obliterated.  Shepard makes some kind of decision.  I feel that players should be able to draw their own conclusions on what happened.  The ending I chose (synthesis) just happened to show the characters I cared most about: Jeff, EDI, and Tali.  Not to say that I didn’t care for the others, of course I did, but I was able to infer what may have happened to them.  The chance to speak with everyone before you venture out into the end game sequence was particularly heartfelt.  The conversation Shepard has with Garrus was kind of cheesy but appropriately so.  Hell, what else can you say when you think you’re about to die?  That was enough for me.  I don’t understand why people can’t let go and let the story end.

And there are more but this just needs to go out at this point…

I'm fucking space galactic famous

I’ve been having a ton of trouble trying to write this post–it’s been several weeks now and I feel if I try to explain myself to the fullest I’ll figure out every problem there is with game design.  I think what I’m trying to tackle with the importance of characters is really about whether or not an NPC’s (re)actions are believable based on a player’s actions.  Originally, this post was about my difficulty in being immersed in Skyrim.  While the environments are vast and I’m able to get lost in them for several hours, it’s the little things like townspeople telling me about the mage college in Winterhold and I’m already the fucking arch-mage.  And let me tell you, when one NPC finally acknowledged that I was arch-mage I was simply ecstatic.

I thought about this problem more deeply and came up with something similar to Newton’s third law: For every action there must be an equal and opposite reaction.  For our purposes in discussing game design and narrative, I’ll call it the System’s Third Law.  If the player completes p set of actions, the system (any kind of feedback really, including NPC’s) must enact s set of reactions where s must be as reasonable as p (a very loose p = s).  For example, p = player becomes the arch-mage and s = town inhabitant tell player to check out the mage college.  Is s believable based on what occurred in p?  While it’s perfectly reasonable for the towns person to not know if the player is the arch-mage, I would assume that the player would rectify the mistake and it should never happen again.  But of course, this isn’t the case.  No one every knows that the player is the arch-mage.

At first, I thought this to be a problem with defining characters.  However, after ruminating for some time I realized that we must look at the system itself and investigate what kinds of p and s we can have and if the two sides are of equal weight.  There are many cases but there are many ways that s can become believable based on explanation and set-up.

I think in a future post I will systematically go through each possibility but I want to get my thoughts out there first: an expectation of s is created by p.  Everything is always caused by player action.  If I’m arch mage, I expect people to know it when they say anything about magic or just not mention it at all and not go against my expectations that if I do something then people should know about it… eventually.  An open world has these kinds of issues and must keep track of actions to adjust to appropriate expectations.

An linear or enclosed world has far less trouble in doing so, but that doesn’t mean the experience is less than that of an open world one.  It’s just harder to screw up.  For example, Mass Effect is a fairly linear game.  Choice comes into the equation when you can do loyalty missions and whether or not to complete them to that NPC’s liking.  Bioware goes to length to make it obvious of what is going to happen either way.  Therefore, expectations are tempered.  If I don’t do a lot of the loyalty missions then I won’t get backstory and have a harder time at end game.  If I do the loyalty mission I will get backstory but if I don’t complete it to the NPC’s liking then I might have a hard time at end game.  The possibilities are heavily constrained.  Although constrained, these quests are interesting to partake in and have a palpable effect on the state of the game and world.  Both axes of story and objective are aligned, which is fantastic.

The inspiration for speaking on this subject boiled down to being kind of bored in Skyrim.  The quests didn’t really impact the world in any huge manner.  To me they all look like islands operating in their small confines.  While each island is interesting to explore, the islands don’t really add up to anything.  The story that is.  On the other hand, we have the objective which is basically get as powerful as you can be and you can do that without dealing with any story by grinding a few things, which I of course did  The quests didn’t mean anything in the context of the entire world because they didn’t change anything and I made decisions that purely improved my avatar’s statistics.  I didn’t matter.  The quests didn’t matter.

The System’s Third Law is based on a system of action, expectation, and the system’s reactions that meet said expectation.  In Skyrim, much of my expectations were not met due to the incongruences between quests, world, and self (the avatar I was playing).  I want to feel important in the world that my avatar is living in.  I want to act upon it and see the results of those actions.  I want to be having a conversation with the system.  Not me standing on a top of a mountain shouting my lungs out at nothing (pun very much intended).

Bad example

I’m a min/maxer (yup, and I look like that guy!).  Any time there are skills, attributes, or variables that I can tweak I will seclude myself into a sanctum of focused insanity.  No matter how obscure my goals are, I’ll find a way to succeed.  My happiest min/maxing days were in Diablo 2.  Some goals included everything as quickly as possible.  Depending on the character, it might have involved being a straight direct-damage or area-of-effect/damage-over-time character.  There were so many knobs to tweak, so many avenues I could have gone down, but oh so many places where I failed and restarted characters.  If I had to bury each of my disowned avatars then I would need one helluva crypt.  I have fond memories of these times but as I reach out and study what new games are doing and even noticing what my own tendencies in play and design are, I’m realizing that the kind of experience I just described is becoming far less common

So much text... at least all the relevant info is there though, right?

It’s uncommon now because we’ve realized how utterly sadomasochist we were allowing ourselves to be.  So many exposed variables.  So many ways to fail.  I think part of the problem is an interface and usability one.  Yes, the ‘u’ word.  I don’t think we’re dying out, the obsession is always going to be there.  It’s the way in which designers allow us to execute and perceive our obsessions that is changing.  The days of getting led down a bad skill branch are no more.  I want to think that we’re smarter than that now.  But I don’t think we can even enjoy min/maxing anymore because the character stat menus are all hidden now.  Not to say that those cluttered things were good, it’s just that so much has been taken away for the sake of ‘usability’.  Sometimes, as a designer, we call this streamlining.  Usability.  We’ll throw out our metrics and point out that most people don’t understand what’s going on in those lists.I can sympathize with this design path, but only a little bit.

The major detractor of this style of play and the way that it exposes itself is the associated failures.  While failure in a video game is expected, funneling a player down into a spiral of possible failure from the very start of first skill point offered is punishing.  In this respect, elimination of the need to hard allocate points into skills is a natural step to take.  Some of the most anticipated upcoming games like Guild Wars 2 and Diablo 3 have gone this route and have bound skills to weapons and equipment to some extent.  Some other systems are based around unlocking perks like in Skyrim.  I’ve decided to travel this path as well in my own work.  It makes a lot of sense.  I don’t want to to force the player to respec their character or even create a whole new avatar when they accidently click on a skill they don’t want (IT HAPPENS, OKAY?).

A respec function offered in games usually comes at a heavy cost, as if it made it any different from creating a new character.  There is always a cost, there is always a punishment.With equipment-based systems, from what I’ve read, limit the number of skills used at one time or even have skills already associated with that equipment.  Swapping equipment meant swapping out a subset of skills.  I think Skyrim presents perks in a meaningful way.  While it’s mostly the same as Fallout 3, doing a particular thing and leveling that thing was more obvious.  Even though perks were laid out in a tree format, it hardly seemed to matter.

Streamlining these interfaces away from the heavy noded tree system is a first step in making the min/maxing play style more accessible.  In Skyrim, you can conceivably max our all skills and get all perks with enough work.  Skyrim isn’t the first game to do this but the idea is still quite revolutionary.  We’ve also seen min/maxing in other arenas of play, outside of statistics, in games like Diner Dash where performing actions was a form of min/max as a result of beating the levels most efficiently–with the most reward.  I believe that people are interested in the numbers if they are exposed in the right way, all systems can be distilled down to this level.  While Skyrim did a fine job at perks, accessing the actual data behind things like damage is purposefully pushed out of the way–very much to its detriment.

Armor rating and damage on the bottom right. Displays current and if armor is better or worse has delta values in parens in red or green.

As shown in the picture above, information like Armor Rating and Damage are displayed on the bottom right of the inventory screen.  I don’t think it’s anywhere else, please show me if there’s a place, and it annoys me to no end.  I want to be able to open up my character screen and see a summary of all my relevant statistics instead of digging through an inventory screen.  I need at least three mouse clicks to access either one of these things.Again, very important information is hidden away.

So many clicks away!!

Another thing I’d like to know about is if I have any buffs or debuffs on me at the moment so I can gauge whether or not my stats are being messed with.  Usually in a character menu it would list out all base stats and then have something in parentheses, which are then colored either green or red.  It’s just like accounting, it’s pretty reasonable.  Sometimes if you hover over those parentheses you’ll get a little box with a list of things that shows what is affecting your character.  Nope, I have to click and scroll in and entirely different menu altogether.

In an effort to simplify the play experience (thank god they don’t do much hand-holding, since when did games need to treat us like fucking babies?) the traditional min/max style of play is being pushed to the side.  It’s so hard to gain access to the important information I’ve just talked about.  It’s ridiculous.  Do I still play it?  Hell yes.  You’re not going to stop me, Bethesda.  However, you are denying a valid style of play with an attempt to treat us like children.  Many have complained about the UI in particular, but I can understand that it was designed to make it more familiar for FPS players.  It’s basically what Mass Effect did, and I’d argue they hardly had any useful min/maxing in that too.

At least in Skyrim there are other ways to min/max like training smithing and enchanting like I am so I can craft the best gear.  The state of the industry though is really driving a stake through this player niche because they’re too busy trying to make other people like it.  While it’s a noble goal and I applaud the effort, at least make information available and convenient to use.  Don’t bar the seasoned players from enjoying the product while attracting the new.  If you give me some numerical damage then I’m expecting to see that information in an easily accessible place with other useful things.

Hopefully Guild Wars 2 and Diablo 3 will allow us min/maxers to see the underlying statistics even though the point system seems to be done away with.  I want to be still able choose a loadout of skills that conveys a very specific strategy of play.  I want to be able to micromanage my actions to perfection.  I want to be able to easily explore the systems that the designers have carefully crafted and optimize it to my benefit.  Immersion doesn’t mean we need to hide the system.  That would be a betrayal to the game.

A story can be broken up into shorter parts like character interactions, scenes, and beats.  It doesn’t matter how you divide your story up, you just have to consider the granularity at which you do.  These smaller parts will eventually be added up.  Like in math land, when you add vectors together you also inherit direction and magnitude.  Our main idea is pointing due north, if we have a lot of content that’s pointing due south then I think we have a problem.  However, if something is going north-west or north-east then then you have to consider if its worthwhile to go off topic.  Sometimes going off topic is desirable to create tensions and suspense.  With that said, you’ll need at least 10 miles of content to reach the point where our main idea ends.  I say “at least” because the shortest path between two points is a straight line.  I don’t think any good story is as bare bones as a straight line, it’ll weave in and out of the main subject matter.  Maybe all the smaller vectors’ lengths add up to 15 miles.  That’s fine so long as it reaches the destination set out by the main vector.

There’s no absolute formula of how far you should deviate.  This is just a tool to evaluate your story and its components to see whether or not you should cut things out.  This analogy, of course, an be generalized for all kinds of editing purposes like whether or not you should include that game system or not.

Click on the category and you’ll see all the posts and terms.  I hope that helps!

I recently finished playing Batman: Arkham City and while it was a fantastic sequel, I couldn’t help but leave the game feeling a little confused.  In this post, I want to talk about something I call ‘vector’ and how I use to to tell good stories.  Arkham Asylum was much smaller in terms of actual play space, the square feet that the player can traverse.  That’s okay so long as that space is filled with content to discover and explore.  Like a page in a book, the sentences you read need to be interesting.  In Arkham City, there are many more pages but the sentences are still meaningful.  It’s just that while the novel is mostly about the Joker, I only get Joker content every couple of pages.  Instead in one paragraph I’m reading about Mr. Freeze, suddenly it’s now The Penguin.  The Riddler appears in parentheticals.

None of the vectors lined up.

It’s definitely strange to use a mathematical term to describe story, but as you know I’m the kind of guy to do such a thing…  A vector contains information regarding direction and length.  Let’s say we want to write a new story and have the main theme it revolves around.  The main idea of the story is already a vector, it wants to say a particular thing and wants to do its best getting to its destination.  It’s going in a distinct direction and its length is the length of the entire story.  Now we need to fill that story with details.  Every action, piece of dialogue, description, also has a vector.  We can look at all these smaller vectors and decide if they are pointing in the same direction of the main idea.

Let’s say the main idea is pointing north.  If some details seems to be pointing south, then those are grounds to remove those details.  If something is pointing east or west, then you should have a good reason why they’re there.  Of course, this is not to say that everything should be pointing due north and never stray from the topic at hand.  There is an art in providing tangential information to build tension.  But overall, once all these vectors are added up, they should basically be pointing to the same place–north.

The problem with Arkham City is that these vectors are shooting in too many different directions.  Part of the problem is that suddenly a significant portion of Arkham has become a jail with all the crazies roaming around.  Who would do this?  It’s the worst idea–the main idea is already flawed making anything in it hard to believe.  It’s a simple solution to include as many bad guys and plots as possible.  Victor Zsasz has nothing to do with the main plot.  It’s a completely isolated story.  Remove that shit!  Even the Catwoman content is ridiculous.  I wish I never installed it because every time Catwoman popped in I got angry.  I feel that there’s only one or two places that Catwoman’s story and Batman’s intersect in a meaningful and powerful way.  Make it a completely separate package!

Arkham City is diluted because the vectors of its details don’t all point in the same general direction.  It’s a pity because it’s a great game.  The mechanics, while maybe a little too familiar, are designed very well.  So no, openness does not mean inevitably mean dilution.  Like any story, you just need to observe your details and how they fit into the bigger picture.  In Arkham City’s case, the explanation behind the jail-city and the main content (the crazy Joker, Ra’s, and Strange plot) were hardly able to support its additional content.  The universe is falling apart at the seams.

Open games that do work though include Fallout 3 and more recently, Skyrim.  One reason why I think these games work so well is that the world is so large and that the main quest line isn’t the main idea in the game.  The ideas in both Skyrim and Fallout 3 are their worlds.  While Arkham is an important character in the Batman series, the story in Arkham City is about Batman being a detective.  That’s what Batman is.  Furthermore, the world is a very general thing.  The meaning and definition of that world is malleable, the player decides on their own on how they will experience and define it.  Therefore, the side-quests you decide to partake in are facilitating your definition and view of the world that you are wandering around in.  Because Batman comes with a strong set of vocabulary and tropes, the vector is clearly defined.  In Fallout and Skyrim, there are only simple plot devices that paint a vast picture.  The vectors for these kinds of games aren’t just a straight arrow, rather more like a shotgun.  That makes it possible to provide more meaningful content since even some tangential ideas will still fit the world model.  What it is to be Batman, what it is to be Arkham, and what can happen in that world is a far narrower palette than that of Skyrim and Fallout.

Arkham City not only has divergent vectors but it also does itself a disservice but not operating within the confines of the greater Batman narrative.  Batman doesn’t cater so well to an open-world experience.  There are just too many bells and whistles to accommodate for.  What kind of main story vector would make more sense than Arkham City?  It’s hard to imagine because Gotham City has been already defined, it wants a certain kind of vector to point in a certain direction.  Add too much divergent content then you’ll get something that is loose.

It’s hard a thing to do, creating meaningful stories within an expansive world.  I think the way to do this is to treat that world like a character.  Every story that takes place in said world is like an action that the world-character does, it should reveal something her.  Finding the place with trees in Fallout said something about the world–there’s hope somewhere.  Did stopping Zsasz define Arkham City?  I didn’t really care because Arkham City was just a bad idea in the first place, crazy is just happening and I don’t give a shit.  Arkham City was just a terrible character.

I think if we start doing this, the world will become a more coherent space to operate in–a believable character.  I’d love to experiment with this idea, maybe make an unreliable world/narrator.  Alas, these kinds of games take a lot of labor which I do not have

For a long time, especially when I was studying game design a
short year ago, I felt that games were just as capable as books to speak about the human condition and to present a story as well as the best movies and novels.  I fondly recount my time spent with games like Final Fantasy 7 but after replaying that game several years later, after a few months of not thinking about my master’s thesis project, it seems like my opinion on the matter has changed.  The storyteller in me has grown pessimistic.  Games are not the best medium to tell stories.  At least not on the level of complexity of, let’s say, a Haruki Murakami novel.

I understand that the initial presentation of these thoughts are going to be flawed and incomplete, but rest assured because I plan on discussing them further in the future.  Some ways I want to attempt to breakdown my thoughts is to dissect the varying components of a story and evaluate the required labor of each.  For now, I want to unload some thoughts onto the table.

I came to this conclusion rather recently after I saw a game from a group of former MFA classmates on the Student IGF submission page, something that I planned on doing with my own work.  After looking at their under-produced video, after reading their synopsis, I realized that what I had planned to submit and the reasons why it never happened was because that I was ahead of myself.  I wanted to tell a complex story about regret, loss, and inevitable loneliness.  This is not to say that telling a story about these things in a game can’t and doesn’t happen, it’s just that my story was embellished like I would embellish a piece of text.  Characters.  Dialogue.  Internal monologue.  This is the language that I understood when it came to story telling.  But my classmates’ submission was lacking in these embellishments.  It looked like a fairly abstracted game that took place in an completely unrealistic setting.  The ideas that they wanted to tackle, as described in their synopsis, only seemed to be loosely related to what I saw in their attached video.  This wasn’t a bad thing.  It actually worked in some strange and tangential way.  It was the smart thing to do considering the labor available for these kinds of projects.  To pull off the story I wanted, I would have needed a larger and more experienced team.

Examples of games that have the same embellishments as the best movies and novels do include the Uncharted series.  However, I first want to preface that a game that takes place in three-dimensional space requires a fairly realistic environment and characters to become believable.  A highly abstracted world of simply shaded walls and faces made up of polygons, I feel, is in some kind of strange uncanny valley.  This includes poor attempts at AAA graphics.  Motion capture, facial animation, environment modeling and texturing, it all needs to be done well.  The one issue with games that tell these kinds of stories is that oftentimes the story is the reward.  You perform a series of actions for the characters to finish telling their tale.  It’s best put in Michael Abbott’s piece where he describes Uncharted as a actor and director relationship where the player is the actor and the game is the director.  If the actor does not perform as the director imagines, the scene must be reshot.  It’s a startlingly accurate comparison, but I have no problems with it because the Uncharted series is amazing in its cinematic storytelling qualities.  But as Abbott notes, the possibility-space for the actor/player is extremely limited by the director/game.  It seems like these things are necessary to produce a story of that level of detail and sophistication.

However, on the other hand we have games like Ico and Shadow of the Colossus.  These are the art games.  These are the games with AAA production qualities, taking place in three-dimensional space, freedom of movement, etc… and are able to tell a story and tackle emotions on an even higher level than Uncharted.  How was this possible though?  My conjecture is that there was a trade off.  Instead of plot complexity (characters, setting, etc), there is a strong gameplay system and setting/situation where the player uses that system.  Uncharted was able to achieve plot complexity because of its obvious focus on directorship its cinematic qualities.  In my thesis, I too wanted plot complexity but didn’t have the artistic or technical support to make it happen.  This is not to say that that SotC was technically or artistically simple.  No, it just decided to do away with detailing cities, motion capture, and all the really fancy things.  Those behind SotC and Ico decided to tip the scales the other way.

So there seems to be several kinds of tensions between plot complexity and gameplay systems–maybe not between but depth of involvement in one or the other.  On one end we have games like Drop7 or Tetris where there is no plot whatsoever but its gameplay is extremely tight and you are immediately  immersed in the systems of play.  Perhaps you don’t even have any brain power left to process a narrative at that point.  At the other we have things like movies where there isn’t any interactivity at all–you are solely focused on following directorial/authorial cues.  I have these two things that I love fighting each other.  I couldn’t part with the two so I feel like that’s what happened with my thesis project.  Too much plot that needed the manpower to support it artistically and stylistically and a gameplay metaphor that was too forced and contrived to fit.  I don’t want to be pessimistic and say that games will never be able to hold high standards against these different  axes but that’s my thought on the matter as of right now.  The way I see it is that with today’s technology and innovation, we’re still at a give and and take situation.  I think I’ve been okay with this all along because I’m one of those people who say cutscenes are fine so long as they’re “done right,” another topic for discussion.  Will be able to consume and interact with systems at the same time as plot and story?  When will plot and story become the system?

The follow-up to this piece will likely look at academic works on how narrative and story are broken down into component parts.  From there, I would like to assign weights to each to be used with our magical scale.

I just read a post on #AltDevBlogADay written by acquaintance Eddie Cameron.  There’s nothing wrong with what he wrote, in fact I’m adding another perspective to what he’s written.  A very blunt one, I’m sure some generalizations will be made.  Most of the game industry does not understand what immersion truly means.  Better yet, we all have an understanding of what immersion is but they’re all just different–there are many different types: tactical, strategic, narrative, and spatial.  Our definitions are all different.  Going off of the link that Eddie provided, the definition of immersion I want to address relates to narrative content–the definition that is most inline with Murray’s Holodeck.

I may be biased because I have a writing background but I would stress that narrative immersion is by far the most important factor when people talk about this thing called immersion–I think that’s what most people are talking about when they say the word.  In the We Got This Covered list that Eddie linked to, all the games listed tell intricate stories as far as games go.  A quick Google search for “most immersive games” you will find, after skimming many threads in various forums, that the bulk of the games listed also have some interesting story that ties everything together.  This is not to say that game and other design components become unimportant (hey, I’m a game designer now!).  Far from the case.

However, if we take a look at a game magnificently designed game like Drop7 we can start to see how the general public and game developers define immersion.  If we take a quick peek at some of the reviews that people have given the game, they use words like addictive but none use immersive.  If you Google for “drop7 immersive” you only get John Sharp’s analysis on the meaning of Drop7.  It’s a beautifully written article and John Sharp is a smart guy, but I feel that he’s an outlier.   Sharp is a game academic and has thought about these things in great depth.  I want to address the bigger picture.  What Sharp discusses in his analysis is the strategic immersion that game systems can produce.  I bet that if I give a person on the street the time to play Drop7 and Mass Effect, they would say Mass Effect was more immersive.  While Drop7 is genius in its design, the collective we does not think it is immersive due to our hierarchic definition of immersion.  Again, narrative immersion seems to be the most important.

I don’t want to argue this point but if we designed a great story and had Drop7 as its main mechanic, perhaps we can get something that reviewers and players will deem immersive.  The opposite would occur if we stripped out and abstracted the main mechanic of Heavy Rain (listed as most immersive in We Got This Covered).  Imagine a blank screen that showed little icons of the controller that you needed to press.  There is a level of skill required so if you don’t press in time, you fail.  The example might not be great, definitely a quip against Quantic Dream, so let’s try another.  Let’s take the mechanics out of Mass Effect and abstract them.  You basically get something like Missile Command, you’re aiming and shooting at shapes on the screen before they hit you.  Is that immersive?  Most would look at Missile Command and turn back to play Mass Effect.

Let’s face it, our popular definition of immersion relies heavily on narrative framing and story telling.  It gives a system additional meaning that is easily digested, imagined, and interpreted.  At the same time, we expect more to be given to us in the heyday of AAA graphics, facial motion capture, realistic cloth and hair physics.  Am I blaming AAA?  Yes, I am.  Is it necessarily a terrible thing?  No, not really.  The bar is just really high now and you have to be very clever in order to meet the expectations of immersion since it never means the same thing.

[I wrote a digressing rant about motion controls here, cut that out]

Some strategies to approach immersion have included getting rid of HUDs and even getting rid of controllers altogether.  The Kinect has been out for a while and has the potential to get closer to physical immersion.  I think that the Wii did the best job at this.  However, I don’t think there many of Kinect games that are successful.  The only one that I can honestly take seriously as being close to physical immersion is Dance Central.  I’m actually dancing and that’s a good thing.  Do I want to make gestures to switch my machine gun in a twitch-focused game?  Do I want to make a slow and cumbersome slash with a pretend  lightsaber in what I imagine is a fluid and slick sci-fi battle?  No, I don’t want any of that.  This brings about another issue of immersion: realistic doesn’t necessarily better.

Gamers are steeped in tradition.  We are stubborn.  We are critical.  We whine about the smallest things.  It’s hard to please us.  Some of the time I feel like none of us know what we want.  That we’re stupid.  However, that’s the first mistake I’ll make.  As a developer, I can’t underestimate my audience.  Hell, I’m that audience and I too don’t really know what I want.  While I’ve been saying that narrative cohesion is the probably the most important aspect of a game (Uncharted 2 was amazing, yet it’s gameplay wasn’t incredibly innovative), think of the cream cheese frosting on a red velvet cake, but if the gameplay is below average then you’re losing the battle.  This red velvet cake metaphor may actually make more sense of this (or not).  The cake is the gameplay, but you’re not just going to eat the cake without the frosting.  That’s just kind of weird.  Drop7 is really good cake and a passable frosting–maybe it’s a little too sweet or a little too cream cheesey.  Uncharted 2 is passable cake, not too dry but not the moistest either, but the frosting is amazing.  Maybe this just means that we need a balance.  Maybe this means that a good frosting can mask the averageness of the cake.  But if that frosting is terrible, even if that cake is awesome we’ll still hate the guts out of it.