Tynan Sylvester

There are fundamental differences between games and life.

Games have defined boundaries. All the possibilities are known. Cause and effect are clear and well understood. Progress is consistent and tends to be permanent. You always know how to move forward, and you can always feel your progress.

Real life is the opposite of all this. There are an infinite number of possibilities. Cause and effect are almost always muddled, and frequently impossible to sort out. Progress is slow, random, often invisible, and frequently reversed.

There’s a fantastic book called Black Swan. I read it a few years ago. It crystallized a lot of ideas that had been floating around in my head for some time. It’s been a strong influence on my thinking ever since.

The basic idea is that unpredictable events – called black swans – are the most important factors affecting how the real world changes over time. It is human nature is to deceive ourselves with the idea of cause and effect through stories and hindsight. We like to think that we can track trends, see where we’re going. That the future isn’t an impenetrable fog.

In real life, nothing is predictable. Most of the things that will change our lives over the next 50 years don’t have names yet. Take the financial crisis. A year ago, what would people say if you told them that the low price of oil would be causing problems today? They’d think you were crazy. But it’s exactly what’s happening now. Oil-dependent economies are in trouble now that their product is suddenly worth so little on the market. They were bitten by a black swan, along with the rest of us.

Black swans are disturbing. They bother people, me included. I like to feel like I’m getting somewhere in life. Like I know where I’m going. I want to see the path. I don’t like seeing my progress reversed in my bank account, my learning, or my social life. I’ve accepted that growth in all of these areas is unsteady and noisy in real life. But it’s still annoying.

Games allow us to escape from the black swans. There are no black swans in Albion or Azeroth or Rapture. All threats are predictable and quantifiable, progress is measurable and permanent. We design games this way. Don’t hurt the player unless he really asks for it. Make sure the player knows what he’s receiving and what he needs to do. Draw a glowing line on the floor for him if you need to.

Perhaps this is one reason why people play games. People often say that games are escapist entertainment, but usually don’t say exactly what we’re escaping from. We’re escaping from the black swan.

No, not pictures of pasty developers with Cheeto-dust on their fingers. Photography of games. In games. We now have gameworlds with enough size, variety, and beauty that this is a meaningful concept. Don’t believe me? Just look here.

I played the X360 version of Star Wars: The Force Unleashed recently. In a phrase, it’s awesomeness buried deep.

One of the coolest abilities in the game is Force Grip. Force Grip allows you to pick up objects and people at a distance and move them anywhere on all three movement axes. The left stick controls the movement of the object on the horizontal plane, the right stick controls the movement of the object along a plane perpendicular to your camera. This means you can pick guys up and knock them into other guys, use big objects to crush people or sweep them aside, and push active environmental hazards around to destroy your enemies.

There is one spot in the game with big lasers on gimbals which you can push around with the force. Push the laser so it passes over your enemy and he burns up. Another level features huge flexible pipes which spout a constant stream of carbonite. Move the pipe so it sprays your enemies and they are frozen into a lump and dropped on the ground.

The whole thing is damn stylish. There’s nothing like picking up a stormtrooper, gently moving him over an open pit, and dropping him straight down. Or grabbing a trio of droids and slamming them into the ceiling, killing them and creating a rain of sparks and shattered glass from the destroyed ceiling lights. You can even pick up Jawas, place them gently in front of you, and punt them like a football.

The sad thing about all this awesomeness is that most people will never see it.

I work with pro game designers who finished the game without ever learning most of the systems. One of them even sat down and decided to spend some time to learn Force Grip. He went into the training mission and just played with Force Grip. He never got it, and eventually gave up. It’s hard. It took me hours and I have years of experience messing around with coordinate systems in 3dsmax.

I personally spent 80% of the game dying repeatedly when I would get knocked down and wait for my guy’s ragdoll to settle and for him to do his getting-up animation. Nobody ever mentioned that you can arrest your fall by pressing the jump button while you are falling through the air.

But I only realized that there was a combo system for lightsaber moves when I noticed all the combo control sequences listed in my character upgrade screen.

Train Me, My Master

Having deep, expert-level moves in a game isn’t inherently bad. The problem is when many people finish the game without ever learning to control it properly.

A lot of people probably never learned to use Force Grip at all, and never learned to do things with the lightsaber besides button-mashing.  They basically only played half the game.

The only training the game really gives you are a few on-screen tooltips to tell you how to do basic new moves as you acquire them, and a series of “training missions” which you can optionally activate. The training missions aren’t really effective, though since they’re all basically just simple 20-second challenges inside the same circular room. The tooltips are great, but they only tell you the bare minimum of what you need to know.

The game should have included fun, mandatory training sequences. It should have included an on-screen combo feedback readout. It should have had a default-on optional HUD element that tells you what each of your controls does in the current context, a la Assassin’s Creed.

Difficult Targeting Makes Puppies Cry

Another big quirk of the game is that your Force powers are targeted not by the orientation of your camera, but by the orientation of your character. The advantages are:

-You can change targets instantaneously by moving your character in any direction
-The camera can be fixed during boss battles
-They only had to make animations of your character casting effects forwards.

The disadvantage is a serious lack of precision causing constant mis-targeting and you will often be targeting someone off screen.

But, It’s Actually Pretty Good

Don’t let any of my bitching prevent you from getting the game. Consider this article a guide on how to enjoy Force Unleashed. Read the damn combo descriptions and learn to use the combos as you unlock them. Learn to use Force Grip properly. And for God’s sake, when they knock you down, mash the jump button!

It’s just so sad that most people will never get most of the game. And that’s Too Bad. If you’re making a game, make sure that the majority of the awesome stuff in it is accessible. Otherwise it might as well not be there at all.

This guy‘s all about having fun with the music. That’s natural creativity – more addiction than dedication.

Apparently, playing games can make you a better citizen. Maybe.

It’s obvious they didn’t have a game-conscious individual on-hand when they wrote the study. They seem to think Zelda and Tomb Raider are adventure games and The Sims is a simulation.

Still, it’s great to see some people doing game research on things besides violence. I know gaming throughout my childhood shaped my mind in many ways. Most of it was positive, but not all. I wonder what kind of person I might have been, in belief, habit, and pattern of thought, without the constant influence of all the games I played. Someone very different, I think.

Let’s talk about stories.

The Archival Story

Imagine this: you’re a historian in the far future. All of the records of our era have been lost.

One day, an archive full of records on population, births, deaths, hospital records, industrial output, temperature and rainfall records, election tallies, price records and migration records is found. It seems like a historical windfall. There’s only one catch: it’s all just raw data. Numbers, categories, and names. There isn’t a written sentence anywhere. No emotions or idea. No record of cause and effect. No interpretation.

Is this archive a story?

Emergence

A story is a sequence of related events. All games have sequences of related events, thus all games have stories. Even abstract games like Tetris have stories.

That time when you were about to lose and barely survived when that long skinny piece showed up? That was a story. What’s special about this story is that it wasn’t written into the game. It emerged dynamically.

There is something fundamentally different about experiencing an embedded, pre-scripted narrative versus an emergent narrative. When I’m playing Half-Life 2 and Alyx comes and saves me at the critical pre-scripted moment, it’s cool, but it doesn’t feel like it actually happened. I know that these events were pre-ordained. It’s similar to the difference between watching a war movie and watching a war documentary. Even if the events are the same, the fact that one is real makes it much more poignant.

When I’m playing Halo, though, and I’m gunning from the Warthog and we get hit by a missile and fly through the air upside down, and I manage to shoot a guy using a gun attached to a jeep which is spinning upside down through the air, that is really cool. Bungie didn’t script that experience. In a very real sense, it actually happened.

This is why I love emergent narrative. They happen within an artificial space, but they aren’t forced or invented. They’re true stories, and they feel that way.

The problem is that there is something very important missing from emergent narratives.

A Ledger is Not a Story

Let’s go back to the archive. Does it tell a story? The information is there, buried in the billions of data points. But a story is more than data points. The historian’s job is to sort through all this data and try to identify cause and effect relationships between the data points.

This is the kind of problem that games have with emergent storytelling. We have no historian. We don’t interpret anything or pick out relevant data. Emergent narratives in games tend to be shallow, confusing, anticlimactic, meaningless. The narratives tend to be short action vigniettes or data-heavy strategy reports. Never does a game emergently generate a clean narrative arc in the traditional sense of the word.

If you’re playing Civilization, your faction can conquer many enemies, resist invasion and cultural domination, trade, gain allies and betray them, and ultimately rule the world. But the game doesn’t emphasize the importance of key battles. It doesn’t tell you that a particular trade agreement needed to be preserved so that you could maintain your uranium supply and continue your plan to build an unstoppable nuclear arsenal that you can use to blackmail a particular neighbor. These causal relationships are all there, but all the work of interpretation is left up to the player.

There’s a really fascinating site called BattleReports.com that has a huge database of written reports about video game matches. Each report is a written and illustrated story explaining the events in the match. The cool thing about it is how much more interesting these matches can be with a decent interpretation than when simply viewed raw.

Connect the Dots

I think we should start trying to thread this interpretation into the game design itself. The game should tell a story together with the player so that the player understands what’s happening in the game. Every action and reaction should be imbued with a sense of meaning and emotional gravity, and should be connected to everything else inside and outside the game. We need to embed an artificial historian in the game,who can pick out meaningful data and cause-and-effect relationships.

Doing this with past events is called storytelling. If you are playing Civilization, and you are at war, and your enemy captures your uranium source just before you finish building your nuclear weapon, which leaves you defenseless against their onslaught, the game should tell you that you lost the war because you lost the uranium, which deprived you of a key strategic resource. As it stands, the cause and effect are there, but the player is the one who has to extract all the information.

We can also connect the dots into the future. This is about identifying important events as they happen. This is hard because the same event can be either world-changing or completely unimportant depending on context. In Starcraft, if a Marine dies in the middle of a massive, pitched battle, it’s not a very significant event. If that Marine is the only defense against an early-game rush of two zerglings, however, his death is a significant event because we know that it will leave the base defenseless, which will allow the zerglings to do significant damage before they can be destroyed, which will place the Terran player at an early disadvantage which will be very hard to reverse, likely causing him to lose the game.

Imagine a Civilization game where one of your allies comes to you and says, “You need to send troops to help me in my war against the Germans because if they capture my uranium supplies they will build a nuclear arsenal and end your nuclear world domination.” Imagine he begs or cajoles or threatens the player. That’s emergent storytelling, and I’m looking forward to it.

Internally, games are no more than computer algorithms for manipulating numbers. While you can have fun manipulating numbers and abstract symbols, most games go further and invent fictional labels for the numbers in the game.

In Medieval: Total War, individual nobles are given named traits which affect their abilities. For example, being Slow to Trust gives +1 to Personal Security, which makes it more difficult to assassinate the noble. Slow to Trust is increased by assassination attempts,  becoming Overly Suspicious, then Paranoid, then Completely Paranoid as more assassination attempts are made. At high levels, being paranoid improves a general’s Personal Security a lot, but also reduces his ability to command troops.

Internally, all that is changing when Slow to Trust is applied is the Personal Security value. The game makes it more interesting by attaching a label to this numerical property. The label makes it easy for the player to spin a whole story out of the general’s personality. There are some legendary examples of these types of player-generated stories written online. I highly recommend checking out Boatmurdered for an example of this.

Familiarity of the subject matter is also very important in fictionalizing part of the game. With a bit of prodding, you can extract a story from almost anything if the subject matter is meaningful to you. This happens best when the game events echo familiar interactions from other sources or real life. The simple game event is imbued with the meaning of the real-life event after which it is modeled.

The Sims, for example,  references real experiences which we all understand, and draws meaning from those external sources. Thus when Biff McStupid, your favourite Sim, cheats on his wife and she displays a primitive “anger” reaction, we perceive far more than what is on the screen. All the game did was run some canned character animations. Meanwhile, we imagine angry emotional outbursts, tears, screaming, gossip, mistrust, or the development of long-term personality scars. None of this stuff is actually in the game. The game just plants a seed in your mind. If you’re familiar with the subject matter, the seed will grow.

So try labeling your numbers with something that people will understand and relate to. It’s amazing how austere a game can be while still creating incredible stories if this is done intelligently.