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.

During the course of my research for another blog article, I came across this fairly hilariously deadpan FAQ on Medieval: Total War. The game has a character attribute system for nobles and generals. This part of the FAQ discusses the mechanics behind all the traits related to alcoholism. It’s fairly hilarious:

Social Drinker (Drink 1)– +1 Command, +1 Popularity, gained after 1 point of Drink
Gets Merry (Drink 2)– +1 Popularity, upgrade after 2 points of Drink
Steady Drinker (Drink 3)– -1 Command, +1 Popularity, upgrade after 4 points of Drink
Drunken Heathen (Drink 4)– -2 Command, -1 Authority, -2% Tax Income, upgrade after 8 points of Drink
Alcoholic (Drink 5)– -3 Command, -3 Authority, -5% Tax Income, upgrade after 16 points of Drink
Paralytic (Drink 6)– -5 Command, -5 Authority, -10% Tax Income, epithet “the Drunkard”, upgrade after 32 points of Drink

Drink has Sobriety as an antitrait, and a NoGoingBack level of 5 (there is no AA in medieval times).

Drink is not available to Middle Eastern cultures the Quran is apparently just that good, and there is no “Shisha” trait).

A general gains a point of drink on adoption or lesser adoption with 8% probability, or when offered for marriage with 6% probability. On coming of age, a general gains a point of Drink with 4% probability, and if a general’s father had one or more levels of drink, he gains a point of Drink with 30% probability.

A general belonging to the France or Denmark factions also has on additional 4% probability to gain a point on coming of age. Also, when a character marries or becomes a father, they have a 5% chance to gain a point of Drink. When a general suffers an assassination attempt, they have a 20% chance to gain a point of Drink.

Drink is also self-perpetuating. At the end of any turn, if a general has a level of Drink, they can gain a point of Drink with 4% probability. At the end of any turn, if a general is in a settlement with a brothel or better and has 100% of his movement points remaining, he gains a point of Drink with 5% probability, plus an additional chance at 5% probability if that building is a pleasure palace. If he is at sea at the end of the turn, he gains a point of Drink with 3% probability. Also, at the end of the turn in any settlement, if the general has 100% of his movement points, the game takes a random percent- if that percent is greater than 90, the general has a 1% chance to gain a point in Drink, Gambling, Arse, or Girls.

In other words, do not leave your generals in town with 100% movement points.

I attended Boston Gameloop today. It felt good to actually start connecting with some of the game development community around here. I just wish they hadn’t started the damn thing at 9 in the morning. I shouldn’t have to get up an hour and a half earlier on Saturday than I do during the week. So I was a little baked for the morning portion of the unconference. Observers might have described me as ‘catatonic’.

There were two key talks that I really took a lot away from. Alexx Kay, one of my co-designers at 2K Boston, did a great discussion on implicit worldviews in game mechanics. We talked about how in Civilization, unprovoked attacks on friendly nations are almost always part of an optimal strategy. What message do these mechanics send about the state of the real world? I mentioned that all the sims in The Sims 2 are effectively bisexual. What assumed, implicit message does that send to players? I think this kind of thematic deconstruction is extra interesting because it is something that is only possible in games. We’ve been analyzing themes in canned storylines forever. How many classical philosophers ever considered the worldview implicit in the rules of Chess?

The second talk generated some ideas that I’ll probably want to expand into an article here. It was a discussion about emergent narrative. My main point was that we don’t have a shortage of emergent narrative in many games (especially strategy games). The events themselves are all there. What we lack is a way to make the game interpret the events and connect the dots together into a story. All that work is left to the player, and I don’t think game designers really realized that anything was missing at all. More to come on this.

Game physics are big these days. It wasn’t until today that I realized quote how much further we could go.

Most games with physics model big stuff only. Boxes and bodies colliding and bouncing around. It’s all very nice. But what about really nailing the feel of small-scale interactions? We don’t have the computer power to really accurately model physics for lots of bodies, but I played a game today that tries to models a very accurate ballistics model for just a small number of shots and targets.

It’s JFK Reloaded, a game where you play as Lee Harvey Oswald and try to recreate the assassination of JFK. The game is supposed to be about recreating the three historical shots, and either proving or disproving the official story of what happened. My interest was in the after-report of what you do during the shooting.

After you play, you get a shot by shot summary of what you did, with a 3D view of the president’s car and a line tracing the exact path of the bullet as it penetrates air, metal, or flesh. The bullet may change trajectory slightly as it passes through part of a car or person. It may hit the same person several times as it penetrates several limbs. This goes far beyond modeling wind and bullet drop.

I think other games could benefit from having some real effort put into their ballistics and microphysics like this. Most people think of having more debris and crates flying around when they think of advanced physics. But what if we could just do the same stuff we do now, but more accurately?

It won’t massively transform the game experience, but it could lead to lots of cool little stories, especially if it is combined with some kind of system to record your shots and allow you to actually see the trajectories of your bullets. Hitboxes aren’t doing it for me any more.

Finally, here is a cool video of stuff happening in slow motion to show you some other applications of the microphysics principle.

Finally, some rather historically inaccurate versions of the JFK shooting as played in JFK Reloaded. Where everybody in Dallas was on crack. And another…

Patrick Lipo has an article up about making shooter weapons feel powerful. The fact that it includes actual videos from a number of shooters makes it a useful comparison.

We can never replicate the audio experience of firing a gun, because it is far louder than anyone will ever want to push their speakers to. Real weapons fire isn’t just heard, it’s felt. If you’re close to the weapon you can sense the compression in your chest. If you do this regularly, you will lose your hearing.

As game designers, we need to try to recreate the feeling of holding onto a piece of hot, precision-engineered gunmetal full of violently moving machinery and barely-contained explosions, whipping out fifteen lethal chunks of metal every second. Furthermore, we need to replicate this feeling in a dude sitting on a couch, with a game controller in one hand and a bag of potato chips in the other. It’s an interesting challenge, if one we can never truly succeed at

Back when I did Elemental Conflict, I considered weapon ‘meatiness’ to be one of the most important parts of the game, and spent a long time experimenting with different methods of making the weapons feel nice and throaty. Using some original methods, I got some pretty good results. I’ve been was surprised that many of these ideas have never appeared in any game since then. So, I present them to you now.

Reticle Snapping 

The first was to change the way the player’s target reticle works.

Most games have a static target reticle that is permanently locked in the center of the screen. Some games, like Counter-Strike, show the reticle expanding as you fire to indicate that your accuracy is decreasing. This is useful to help you understand why you aren’t hitting anything when your reticle is four inches wide, but it doesn’t do much to make the weapons feel visceral.

For Elemental Conflict, I developed a system whereby the target reticle snaps to a slightly different, randomized position whenever you fire your weapon, before sliding back to the center of the screen. As you fire continuously without a break, the reticle moves more and more with each shot, until you eventually it is flying all over the screen and you can’t hit anything that you’re not face-to-face with.

If you are a really good player, you can actually compensate for the reticle snapping by moving your point of aim. As you get better, you can compensate faster and maintain higher rates of accurate fire.

It felt great because every shot had that added kick of a moving HUD element right in your field of vision, and it communicated similar information as the expanding reticle system.

Weapon Model Snapping 

To make it feel even more physical, I also offset the weapon model by a small amount corresponding to the current target reticle offset. So when you fired at a high rate, the gun would begin to buck wildly in your character’s hands more and more with each shot, until it was very clear that you were just barely holding onto this screaming piece of metal.

This, combined with the moving reticle, gave a strong sense of holding a physical object which is imparting strong, hard-to-control forces into the world. Having fired a few machine guns since then, it does much more closely resemble the reality of how these weapons feel than the expanding reticle system.

The “Big Pipe” Philosophy

During the design of EC, I developed the philosophy of the “big pipe”.

In many games, it feels like you can only deal out damage in a trickle, even if you have thousands and thousands of rounds in ammunition in reserve. This feels like you’re pouring water from a huge tank out of a small pipe. It creates an irritating feeling of impotence. All you do is open your spigot as wide as it will go and pour and pour but nothing much happens. The tank never empties and nothing gets very wet.

Real life, and EC, have the “big pipe”. A modern military unit can easily exhaust all of its ammunition in an extremely short period of time. Modern weapons can fire at 800-1000 rounds per minute. A soldier carrying 300 rounds of ammo (ten magazines, quite a lot) could fire that all in under half a minute if we ignore reloads. Even with reloads, he can still unload it all in under two minutes.

That doesn’t matter, however, because a normal assault rifle will fail due to overheating long before then. Even a SAW machinegun requires a barrel change every couple hundred rounds. Very rarely will a real soldier be limited by his weapon’s rate of fire instead of his ammunition reserve.

So why do these weapons fire so fast? Because (among other reasons) if a moment ever comes where a soldier does decide to go all-out (say, he turns a corner and comes upon a group of enemies), his destructive capacity can be huge. It is unsustainable, but it is huge.

This is the “big pipe” feeling. It makes you feel like you have tons of power, but only spend most of your time without using it in order to conserve resources. When a tactical coup does happen, you can take advantage of it. Contrast this with the feeling of many games, where you pound an enemy as fast as you can at close range and it still takes him 10 seconds to go down. It’s like grinding him to death with a cheese grater.

To create the big pipe feeling in EC, I added a shoulder-mounted grenade launcher that allows a you to simultaneously fire your weapon and lob grenades at a very high rate. This created a very high limit for the destructive power of a single player. I could only balance it by making sure that you could easily exhaust all of your ammunition very quickly if you really ran EC weapons at full blast. If you do make that sacrifice, however, and accept being without ammo for the rest of the round, you are rewarded with the ability to launch multiple cluster-bomb grenades while firing a machine gun at 900 rounds per minute and simultaneously flying through the air on top of a rocket-powered booster pack.

You can see all of this in the second half of the Elemental Conflict video.

Real Power Versus Audiovisuals

The final point I want to add is that the feeling of a powerful weapon doesn’t only come from the audiovisuals. A gun with the best muzzle flash, sound effects, and impact animations in the world will still feel weak if it takes 20 point-blank hits to kill a weak-looking enemy.

I noticed this mostly in Bioshock, because there are many enemies in that game who are visually identical or very similar, with drastically different numbers of hit points. Fighting six weak wrench-wielding splicers with the pistol makes it feel powerful because you can gun them down in one or two shots each. Fighting one wrench-wielding splicer who has the exact same audiovisuals but takes 9 rounds to go down makes the pistol feel wimpy, regardless of the sound effects. I think this is part of the reason COD4 and Counter-Strike weapons feel so powerful. Every enemy goes down in the first few shots.

The Unreal Tournament Community Bonus Pack 3, for which I made the level DM-CBP3-HongKong, has been released! Check out the CBP3 website.

I’m happy to have been part of such an awesome project. It’s just sad that my time for random community project is now limited by my awesome new job.

I recently moved to Boston and began working my first full time job: Game Designer at 2K Boston. You may remember it as the studio which recently released Bioshock. Previous games include SWAT 4 and Freedom Force.

My favourite game of theirs was System Shock 2, because it scared me so much that I could barely play it, and when I did play it I would physically tremble with terror. Yes, I was much younger at the time.

This article was published at Gamasutra.

It’s amazing how little normal people will consciously register about video games. To us game freaks, they pick out the oddest things.

I built a new PC this Christmas. One of the first games I tried on it was Crysis. As expected, the graphics were incredible. Beautiful, lush jungles, fully animated grass and leaves, dynamic shadows and time-of-day, strong HDR. Anyone who is familiar with my older levels will know that I love this stuff.

I showed it to my father one day. “Check it out!” I said gleefully, certain that his jaw would drop at this incredible display of computational and artistic awesomeness.

Naturally, the first thing he noticed was that there were plants popping into existence as I moved around and the LOD system recalculated their detail relevance.

Naturally, I was aghast. Doesn’t he see? Look at the technological and artistic beauty of it all! Possibly the most beautiful real-time graphical simulation ever created was sitting in front of him, and all he noticed was the very minor LOD popping. I’m trained to deconstruct digital images and even I wasn’t registering those little plants swooping in and out of existence.

Obviously there was something different about how my father, a non-gamer, was perceiving the scene and how I was. I realized what it was some days later when playing Assassin’s Creed.

Continue reading →

In other news, I’ve been watching and judging a TV show called jPod on CBC. It’s also named after a Douglas Coupland book I read two years ago, called JPod. The book is good too. The show is – get this – about a bunch of game developers! It involves swinger parties, middle aged housewives with marijuana grow-ops, gay innuendo with Chinese mafia kingpins, and online trysts with twin Wal-Mart greeters. The first episode or two are a bit rough, but it really picks up after that. Seriously, guys, I love this show. It’s fresh, it’s quirky, it’s relevant, and it’s hilarious. Do whatever you need to do to watch it. There’s no reason this show shouldn’t be a huge in-joke in the games industry.