Results tagged “design philosophies” from Softcore Gamer

Brenda Braithwaite posted a very eloquent eulogy for the text parser as a method by which players can interact with games.

I am regrettably forced to announce the death of the text parser. It is a death that I suffer with great sadness and fond memories of its life. I am not sure exactly when it died.

It's really very nicely written, so you ought to visit her site and read the whole thing. I started to write a reply in the comments under her post, but it turns out I have a lot to say on the subject, so I moved it here. For anyone interested, here is my response:

I can't help but wonder what brought on this sudden funereal outburst. Did something happen that causes you to suddenly toll the death knell for text-based games? I'm especially curious because it seems a bit premature - or, at least, somewhat misleading.

All your points stand, and you have presented them beautifully. Text parsing was once the dominant modes of player interaction - at least within certain genres - and now it is not. I do not expect it will ever reclaim that position. The modes that replaced it are, frankly, more evolved. They are better suited to the things that are typically demanded of a user interface, and more accessible to a wider audience. These facts are unlikely to change.

But I hope you're willing to recognize that there is more to gaming than the mainstream. The fact is, today there is a vibrant community of text-based game designers producing interactive fiction. It's not mainstream, but that hardly makes it irrelevant. Modern IF frequently pushes against boundaries that most designers ignore: emotion and conversation models, narrative voice, dynamic plot, emotional agency. Games like Galatea, Photopia, Floatpoint, The Baron, Violet - these are games that all aspiring designers should play, not because they represent the dominant form, but because they demonstrate mechanics and techniques that are commonly absent from the traditional corpus.

I would argue, although this comes down to little more than guessing at future trends, that IF has the potential to be relevant outside the relatively small circle of designers and design-enthusiasts, as well. The audience for games is expanding, and I believe that when all is said and done, it won't be a simple bifurcation of the market into casual and hardcore camps. Art games - experimental games - are now getting more exposure than has ever before been possible. I would place your Mechanic is the Message series firmly in this category, along with a number of the interactive fiction pieces produced in the last five years. I believe the audience for this sort of game is growing, and will eventually establish itself as a significant segment of the games market.

(And Twitter may not be able to revive the popularity of textual interaction as we remember it, but I am far from convinced that we won't see a new sort of text-based game that enjoys success through modern technological trends. These phenomena are simply too new for the possibilities to have been thoroughly tested.)

But that, really, is neither here nor there. My point is that, although the text parser may have passed its heyday some time ago, it's hardly fair to call out its death while talented and hardworking designers are busy iterating against important design problems in precisely that format. To do so suggests that the work being done in interactive fiction today is irrelevant - merely a throwback to the glory days of text adventure games. Nothing is farther from the truth.

"Interesting Interactions" is a term that Jamie Antonisse coined last year - or, anyway, one that he used that I haven't heard anywhere else - and it's something that has stuck with me for a long time. It's a description of what modern mainstream video games don't do well. He was talking about Bioshock in the original context, but it's an industry-wide issue. And it's something that I come back to a lot when, for example, I read this article about the survival horror genre on Sexy Videogameland.

Leigh Alexander has had survival horror on the mind the last few days, which makes sense, I suppose, since she's been playing Silent Hill: Homecoming. I never really got into survival horror, as a genre, in games or cinema. I played a bit of Fatal Frame on the Xbox, and it was interesting, but it didn't really stick with me. I do love Shawn of the Dead, but that's really less a zombie movie than a romantic comedy with zombies. I did just buy a copy of Last Night on Earth, the board game, which I am super excited about trying out. But with few exceptions, survival horror is just not really my cup of tea.

So I didn't get particularly excited about Leigh's initial post about Silent Hill. (Although I admit I perked up a bit at the part where she talks about redefining genre labels, for survival horror games and role-playing games.) And I haven't even read her review of the game on Kotaku. But her follow-up today did catch my eye. Apparently, Leigh attributed some of the mechanics of the survival horror games of the early nineties more to technical limitations than deliberate design decisions, which inspired a response from producer John Tynes, of Microsoft Game Studios. Mostly, Tynes addresses this particular issue, stating that 3rd-person combat is a hard problem, but not for any technical reason. "We weren’t waiting for better chips to enable third-person action; we just had to keep iterating from game to game until we got somewhere that worked."

The really good stuff comes at the end, though:

The fundamental problem here is that videogames have not evolved past combat as their primary form of interaction. The branching-tree dialogues of the BioWare games is the only popular alternative route we’ve found to deliver meaty, game-defining (and game-filling) interaction. The evolution of the survival horror games towards a more action-oriented approach is for that reason: you can solve environmental puzzles, or you can have long, rambling conversations with agenda-defined NPCs, or you can kill things. I would posit that survival horror is not enhanced by long branching conversations with NPCs, so that leaves puzzles and combat. That’s all we’ve got so far in our toolbox for these kinds of games.

That, of course, is embarrassing. There are experiments in other directions, as with Fahrenheit/Indigo Prophecy. But for now, what console games do well is killing things, and when you look at the survival horror genre, it’s clear that its biggest weakness – without stepping outside the problem set they’ve defined – is in crappy combat. They’ve solved that now, and in the process have exposed the real failure: we don’t know how to make moody, atmospheric games that last 10-20 hours without stuffing them full of killing things. We have to step outside of the initial problem set of survival horror and ask how we can give players meaningful, game-filling interaction in a moody, suspenseful environment without resorting to combat. We have a long way to go.

I think this is a great quote. And I agree with Tynes: violence is old hat. For whatever reason - because it's simple, because it's intrinsically high-stakes, or because it's a form of fantasy fulfillment - combat is the form of conflict resolution that modern games have focused on, more than any other. We've collectively put a lot of cycles into the problem, we've gone through a lot of iterations on various approaches, and we've come up with some great solutions. That's fantastic. But it's not enough. Conflict is broader than violence; drama is more subtle.

(I'm reminded of the character Michael Scott from the American version of The Office, who said on his approach to improvisational acting: "What is the most exciting thing that can happen on TV or in movies, or in real-life? Somebody has a gun. That’s why I always start with a gun, because you can’t top it. You just can’t.")

We need to spend some of that energy developing solutions to the unsolved problems, the harder problems: compromise, debate, passive aggression, perseverance, leadership, wit, lateral thinking, personal growth, politics, love. These are all types of conflict resolution that haven't been explored nearly as much as combat. These are all interesting interactions. (And, to be fair, violence isn't the only sort of interaction that's been popular amongst game designers. Economic simulation has also been iterated on quite a lot, as have competitive sports - though combat seems to be explored the most, by a wide margin.)

Just to be clear: there are a lot of game designers out there who have experimented with interesting interactions, in independent games and in mainstream games. People have done great work in these areas, and are continuing to do great work. But we have to remember, as Tynes says, that we still have a long way to go. I'm not calling on anyone to stop putting violence in your games. But keep in mind, when you're designing, that there's a lot more than combat out there. Ask yourself if you're including an interactive element because it's the best thing for the design, or the easiest, most familiar thing for the designer. Sometimes it's good to get reminders about the more interesting interactions, so that we can work on solving those problems, too.

Over at my IMD blog. Link.

I've been having some serious trouble formulating a response to this post over at HardCasual. A couple days ago they called out me and the rest of the blogosphere for the way we've handled You Have to Burn the Rope. HardCasual's point is that YHTBTR is a "smart" game, like Passage, and that games journalists are making it out to be merely "clever," by which they seem to mean "good only for a cheap laugh." I've been reading HardCasual for a couple weeks now, and I like it a lot, but something about this rubbed me the wrong way. I do agree, though, that YHTBTR is worth a bit of deeper analysis.

Aside from being funny, what, exactly, is YHTBTR saying? It's an almost perfect example of a classic action-adventure puzzle of the sort you might find in a Zelda game. It's simple, but its simplicity shouldn't be overestimated. Under normal circumstances, a player would naturally spend a couple minutes jumping around bullets and throwing axes before he or she figured out how to beat the Grinning Colossus. The point, of course, is that these aren't normal circumstances, and the game takes every available opportunity to point out the solution to the puzzle ahead of time. Knowing the solution removes all - well, almost all; there's still some platforming that requires twitch-play - the challenge from the game.

What's interesting to me is what that leaves you with: this super-simple, ultra-short, minimally challenging game is a perfect test case for an experiment about the relationship between difficulty, accomplishment, and fun. I've played YHTBTR a dozen times now, despite the fact that there is very little reason to do so. One play-through is almost exactly like another; it's impossible to lose, and no significant way to win with style. There's no emotional build, and likewise no significant narrative arc. The credits song is catchy, but I've already got it as an MP3, so that isn't a great motivator. The only good incentive, as far as I can make it out, is an emotional burst associated with winning, even in the absence of a challenge.

Possibly I'm reading my own reaction all wrong. It's conceivable that the real attractor to this game is the relatively high production value. Certainly, YHTBTR is well polished. Its graphics are solid, its interface is very well designed, and its self-aware sense of irony is downright charming. But it seems to me that there is something about burning that rope; maybe not a feeling of accomplishment, exactly, but a sense of satisfaction, or at least completion, that provides some sort of positive reinforcement. Something which indicates that - or rather, reinforces my belief that - at least for some gamers, myself included, a game can impart a sense of joy that is unrelated to its difficulty.

Is this what Kian Bashiri was trying to way with his game? I don't know; maybe not. It's what I got out of the game. If you're interested in the author's intentions, there's an interview with him over at IndieGames that's worth checking out.

The problem I have with HardCasual on this issue, aside from the pretentious tone that they adopted and the fact that they seemed to spend more energy complaining about the blogosphere's reaction to the game than on their own analysis of it, is that the production of FAQ files and video walkthroughs is not counterproductive to the message of YHTBTR. In fact, from my perspective, it's an excellent demonstration of the game's lesson. Creating elaborate guides for this game simply reinforces the central point that the puzzle is not a significant challenge, and doing it with the evident joy expressed on blogs like Rock, Paper, Shotgun or my own supports the thesis that a game without a significant challenge can still be fun. I think the fact that these fan-creations were so quickly aggregated on the YHTBTR homepage is further evidence that, far from detracting from the game, these artifacts are very much in keeping with what the game is trying to accomplish.

This post started out as a review of The Baron and I had enormous difficulty writing it, for two reasons. First, because The Baron is a deeply complex game with many interesting features and powerful thematic elements that I did not want to spoil. And second, because reviewing games is not really what I'm interested in doing here. So instead of reviewing The Baron I will simply say, "The Baron is a deeply complex game with many interesting features and powerful thematic elements; you should play it," and then address a couple interesting points about interactive fiction.

I am not an expert on interactive fiction. Honestly, although I'm a fan, I have pretty limited experience. I only played a few pieces of IF last year, and of those the only one that provoked the same sort of contemplation as The Baron is Floatpoint. In these two pieces, however, I'm impressed at how well an in medias res approach to storytelling works. In each piece, the player is dropped unceremoniously into a complex and unfamiliar situation. In each, the first order of business is an exploration of the narrative space to answer some fundamental questions: Who am I? Where am I? What is my relationship to this place and to these people? What is my role in the world, and what is my goal? These elements of the story are authored, not left up to the player, but they have to be discovered or inferred by investigation of the game world. Certainly, this is not an approach common to all IF games; nor is it something that is likely to appeal to all players, although I love it when it is done as well as it is in these games. It seems a technique that is much less common in mainstream games, however, and although that may have something to do with the fact that IF is already a niche genre and therefore attracts more niche styles-of-play, I think that text-based games lend themselves more to this sort of technique.

Graphical systems, by their nature, are capable of conveying much more information at a glance than text-based systems. In games, this functionality is largely devoted to representation of space. In the typical 2D or 3D game, at any given time the majority of the player's screen will be filled with some sort of view of the world. Because of the visual nature of this representation, almost all information about the player character's environment is conveyed implicitly. In a 3D game, the player may have to swing the camera around to see things from a different angle, but he or she doesn't have to make an express effort to get an understanding (at least, a basic or superficial understanding) of the composition of the space surrounding the character. In contrast, the explicit exploration of space is one of the common processes by which a player interacts with a text-based system. In order to come to an understanding of environment, the player does have to make this sort of express effort to investigate elements of the scene. At the beginning of The Baron, for example, a basic look command will inform the player that the room contains a table. It's necessary to examine the table to discover that a framed photograph rests on it; it's further necessary to examine the photograph to find out what it depicts. This sort of interaction is not at all unreasonable in a text-based system, but no analogue occurs in a graphical system where the table and photograph are apparent in a cursory inspection.

It seems to me that this sort of spacial exploration runs nicely parallel to the narrative exploration that in medias res storytelling demands. In fact, in many cases the character and general backstory can be folded into the description of space and significant objects (including non-player characters) in the environment. In the case of the photograph on the table, examining the picture could trigger a memory or some other description that relates the character to the world. (This technique is used in The Baron, although not at this particular moment; I believe this sort of "folded-in" discovery is also employed in Floatpoint, along with more explicit exposition.) This makes the process of narrative exploration much more natural - or, at least, piggy-backs it onto a more natural process - to mitigate player confusion and frustration. In our graphical analogue, the player has no reason to explicitly examine the picture, since it is already visible, and therefore there is no place for secondary information to be accessed intuitively.

This idea of exploration is particularly interesting in The Baron because of the cyclical nature of the game. On the first pass, the player is exploring the physical space and the narrative space, trying to come to an understanding of the environment and the character. Subsequent passes are devoted to exploring the possibility space of user interaction, trying different actions and seeing what the consequences are; because of the cyclical set-up and the thematic focus on motivated action, this sort of exploration of possible actions becomes a central game mechanic over the course of multiple plays-through of the game. Using the process of choosing an action as a game mechanic in this way is another area where I believe the text-based interaction of IF has an advantage over graphical games.

The set of valid options may be just as limited as with a graphical interface, but the set of potentially valid options is larger. Usually, in a graphical interface, there will be a limited number of points of interaction (places to click, for example) and a limited number of types of interaction (items to use, for example). The set of potentially valid options is a combination of interaction types and points. This set may be very large, which could make finding a valid option non-trivial, but it is clearly finite and, moreover, can be easily enumerated. The set of potentially valid options in a text-input interface includes any imperative phrase the player can think of. Even if, depending on the sophistication of the game's text-processing system, this set is severely restricted by practical considerations, it is still usually much harder to enumerate than its graphical counterpart. (Technically, it is just as enumerable, but for the player - who usually doesn't know the extent of the set of valid commands - it is harder to process.) This can makes the player feel like he or she has unlimited options - at least until it becomes apparent the fact that a subset of the potentially valid options will not be understood by the system. This, unfortunately, is another inherent quality of text-based interaction, and I would say it is the major drawback and the reason that text-based games has fallen so far out of favor. And perhaps minimizing that particular player frustration is a reason to avoid text as an interface mechanism, but games like The Baron both prove that great experiences can come out of a text interface and remind us of some of the things we sacrifice when we make graphical games.

Game|Life reports that developer David Braben is claiming Bioshock and Halo 3 aren't next-gen games. Obviously this is an incendiary comment intended to stir up controversy and draw attention to Braben's upcoming "techno thriller" The Outsider, which I had never heard of before now. So, congratulations, Mr. Braben, mission accomplished.

Braben can make this statement because he's not using the generally accepted definition of "next-gen." According to his own definition, games "must give the player the chance to change the story beyond simply following a good or evil path" in order to qualify. I consider this an admirable proposition, in some sense - certainly, I agree with him that Bioshock and Halo 3 represent a traditionally linear sort of game design, which results in a fundamentally predictable narrative experience. This has advantages and disadvantages over a nonlinear system, such as can be found in, for example, Second Life, Civilization or Animal Crossing. I also agree with Braben that the industry could stand to see more exploration and innovation in the nonlinear game space. But the fact remains that, while Braben might consider this the criteria for creating a next generation game, no one else does.

In common understanding, generations are strictly defined and indelibly related to hardware cycles, and games are classified by the cycle during which they're released. For the most part, it's a clear-cut classification. Braben is clearly trying to redefine generations based on something other than hardware; presumably, as artistic movements based on universal design philosophies. Movements are similar to generations in that they're sequentially progressive - each iteration is a reaction to its predecessor. But I don't think that's an accurate description of the way games are developed. First of all, it would be difficult to pin down design philosophies that come anywhere near universal at a given time. There's simply too much variety in the industry. Additionally, even though one could argue that games are designed as reactions to previous games, there generally isn't a stable progression to it. Rather, a game's design is likely to include a number of philosophical precepts, each a response to a different (or, more likely, many different) earlier games.

The best way to classify games uses genres rather than artistic movements. Genres are relatively stable and tend to coexist rather than occur sequentially. Generally, games are well suited to this sort of organization, but certainly there are clusters or sequences of games within some genres that can be classified or analyzed differently - and, for that matter, there are many cases of games that straddle genres, or fuse them, or defy them. Genres are complicated, and a favorite subject of mine, so no doubt the discussion of how genres are differentiated and how games are classified within them will continue to be a common theme of my posts.

While I think all this is fascinating (and maybe that's just me), I suspect that Braben's intention isn't to imply a different sort of classification system for games. I think he's merely trying to use the phrase "next-gen" as a synonym for "cutting-edge" or "avant-garde," or maybe even "buzz-worthy." Which I don't think is particularly accurate, either. The claim that Bioshock and Halo 3 don't push the envelope is simply wrong, even if the envelope they're pushing isn't the same one Braben is interested in. Game design is eminently multi-dimensional, and these games, along with Portal, and others, no doubt, are breaking ground in one particular dimension of it: narrative context.

Certainly this is true of Portal, which hints throughout at the larger world in which the game takes place, and contains just the right amount of mystery to ensure the player is considering the implications of the things they are presented with throughout the course of the game. And that's for new players who are unfamiliar with the Half Life universe - for anyone who has played through that saga, Portal preserves much the same sort of mystery by hinting strongly that it exists within the established universe but being coy with details such as when it takes place and how it influences the larger world. I'd walk on thin ice to talk any more about Bioshock (although I have acquired the game, now, so expect more informed analysis in the future), but my impressions of that game lead me to believe it also invests heavily in the backstory of the setting. Details like the frequently-referenced dancing couple are excellent examples of a focus on creating a rich, detailed atmosphere as a backdrop that continually informs the plot - and may in some cases, I would argue, be a more important component to the narrative experience than the plot is. I'd also make the claim that Halo 3 plays a very strong hand in terms of creating and engaging the audience with a substantial backstory. For the past several years, Microsoft and Bungie have invested an enormous amount of marketing capital into accessories to the Halo franchise: a series of paperback books (that aren't about the main characters of the game), a pair of world-class ARGs (again, detailing events that occur outside the scope of the games), and two incredible television campaigns for Halo 3 (Neill Blomkamp's three part series and the Believe campaign, which are remarkable in that they do not show content from the game or deal directly with the plot or characters from the game). The purpose of all of these products, aside from obviously generating awareness and excitement for the games, has been to expand the Halo universe. I think it's also worth noting that Halo 2 broke from the original's precedent to detail the social and religious organizations of the Covenant, drawing the focus of the narrative away from the simple Space Marine story and instead swinging our attention around to the explore the political landscape of the game world.

Are these games the first in history to include backstories? Of course not. But they raise the stakes, elevating the idea of narrative context and carefully designed atmosphere and its role in game design to a new height, much as Braben is - I can only assume - attempting to do with nonlinearity.

So, to conclude, David Braben's disparagement of Bioshock and Halo 3 is without qualification baseless and completely out of line. I wish it were more unusual for a developer or publisher to make this sort of outrageous claim in an attempt to draw attention to themselves, but the fact of the matter is that it's a common and effective tactic. Certainly it has brought The Outsider to my attention, and I will be curiously following its progress from now on. Any attempts to experiment and break new ground in any aspect of game design is welcome news to me. We'll just have to wait and see if the game can live up to the significant promises its designer has been making.