Braid is a beautiful little puzzle game. The story, though, would have been a lot better if it hadn't been for all those walls of text.
Take out all those walls of text, and the story would be: Tim is a guy with time manipulation powers, who is searching for the princess. That story, even if it was all there was to it, would be quite enough to carry the game, and in the light of that story the ending would be very effective.
But no. Between each level we also have to have big blocks of text telling us about Tim's feelings towards the Princess, which are apparently set in the real world (with cafes and universities and cinemas) and not in the game-world of 2D platforms and bouncing hedgehogs and keys that open doors. Big blocks of text are the shoestring budget equivalent of cutscenes - they're just as non-interactive - and in this case they are as disconnected from the gameplay experience as they can be.
I enjoyed the story of gameplay-Tim and his quest for the princess and its eventual resolution. I didn't care at all about text-story-Tim.
Friday, 12 September 2008
Friday, 18 July 2008
Knights of the Massively Multiplayer Republic
So there's going to be a Knights of the Old Republic MMORPG.
I'm not sure how I feel about this. KOTOR is possibly my favourite game ever. It's a great RPG not only in the sense that it used pen-and-paper RPG mechanics, but also because it encouraged and enabled me to actually role-play my character. It's the first game that had me thinking not "What do I do to get the outcome I want?", but "What would my character do in this situation?" It had a brilliantly crafted, and very much single-player, story.
I worry that the things I really liked about KOTOR are the things that will transfer least well from a single-player to a multi-player game.
Here's hoping we'll see a genuine single-player KOTOR III someday.
(Incidentally, can we stop talking about 'an MMO' please? You're missing out the verb; you're basically saying it's a 'Massively Multiplayer Online'. I think MMOG is the correct term for all massively multiplayer online games.)
(Second incidentally: speaking of things that I'm not confident can be transferred to a new medium without losing their best qualities...)
I'm not sure how I feel about this. KOTOR is possibly my favourite game ever. It's a great RPG not only in the sense that it used pen-and-paper RPG mechanics, but also because it encouraged and enabled me to actually role-play my character. It's the first game that had me thinking not "What do I do to get the outcome I want?", but "What would my character do in this situation?" It had a brilliantly crafted, and very much single-player, story.
I worry that the things I really liked about KOTOR are the things that will transfer least well from a single-player to a multi-player game.
Here's hoping we'll see a genuine single-player KOTOR III someday.
(Incidentally, can we stop talking about 'an MMO' please? You're missing out the verb; you're basically saying it's a 'Massively Multiplayer Online'. I think MMOG is the correct term for all massively multiplayer online games.)
(Second incidentally: speaking of things that I'm not confident can be transferred to a new medium without losing their best qualities...)
Sunday, 13 July 2008
Psychonauts
What do you get if you put a brilliant story onto a game that is otherwise formulaic? You get Psychonauts (Double Fine Productions; 2005, Xbox, PS2 and PC). You also get a game that is praised by critics but has poor sales.
The core concept of the story is that you can project yourself into people's minds and face puzzles and enemies that represent their emotional problems. Doing so will generally let you get past an obstacle in the overall story, which is about a summer camp for psychics where a villain is stealing the children's brains.
Your character (Razputin) interacts with the game world in two main ways: platform-game jumping, swinging from bars, etc.; and the use of various psychic powers you earn at different points. Only some of these powers are really useful throughout the game; others only have use in specific puzzles.
The story is original, but the same cannot be said of the gameplay. The game takes the expected platform/puzzle game elements and uses the story to justify them, the blanket justification being that since the game takes place inside people's minds, things can work however the game requires them to.
You have a health bar and a number of lives, because platform games have to have to give you a limited number of lives, but here the lives are called 'astral projection layers' and the storyline excuse is that when you lose all these you are expelled from the person's mind. When you lose a life you respawn a little further back from when you died. When you lose all your lives you get a cutscene of being expelled, have to go back in, and then start a little way further back from where you would start if you had merely lost a life. So, basically, the penalty for failure is a bit harsher every fifth or so time you fail (you can get powerups to increase your 'maximum projection depth', i.e. maximum number of lives). I'm not sure how this is meant to make the game more fun, but you've got to have a limited number of lives, right?
(Incidentally, you still die and respawn and lose lives in exactly the same way even when in the 'surface world' outside of anyone's minds, which doesn't make sense with the explanation of what lives are. I was half expecting this to be justified at the end by revealing that you were in someone's mind all along, but no.)
You've also got to have things to collect, because platform games have to have things to collect, right? And psychonauts gives you tons of things to collect, all of which have storyline justifications, and none of which are really relevant to the story as a whole. YOu can run around picking up:
* 'Figments' of the person's imagination. (Since I'm inside their mind, isn't everything here a figment of their imagination?) Get enough of these and you get a small increase in power. They also help with navigation, since if habitually pick up figments, you know that any place still thick with them is somewhere you haven't been yet.
* Psychic arrowheads. These are the game's currency, letting you buy stuff at the camp store. In one annoying segment of the game, I had to put the main storyline on hold while I ran around the overworld trying to find arrowheads in order to buy the thing I needed to get past the next plotline obstacle - an obstacle which, incidentally, had no effect on the story and only seemed to exist in order to make me save up to buy the thing from the camp store. Bizarrely, you can find these both in the overworld and inside people's minds, and the latter ones, while presumably just imaginary, are still just as good at the camp store. Oh, and the camp store still functions as normal even when literally everyone else in the camp has been kidnapped and had their brains sucked out. Because you've gotta have collectable currency and stuff to buy with it.
* Psychic cobwebs. To collect these, you need to use a piece of equipment (buyable from the camp store), which means that collecting them takes five button-presses rather than just one.
* Emotional baggage tags, which can be united with the corresponding 'emotional baggage' somewhere in the same environment. Emotional baggage is literally a crying suitcase or something, a visual pun which is amusing the first time you see it but becomes old by the end of the game, especially when the mood of the climactic scenes are spoiled by the same old hatboxes blubbing away in the corner.
* Psychic challenge cards. These can be combined with psy-cores (buyable at the camp store, for arrowheads), to create psy challenge markers, which give you the same power boost that collecting a whole lot of figments would.
* Scavenger hunt items: random things dotted throughout the overworld. For hundred-percent-completionists only, as far as I can see.
* Brains in jars, in the overworld in the second half of the game. These were the only collectables with a genuine storyline reason, since they're the stolen brains of your fellow campers, and each one belongs to a distinct character you met earlier in the game. You get a small boost to max health for each one.
Phew!
The story is told pretty much entirely through cutscenes. Most of these are pretty short and inoffensive - if you're going to have cutscenes, you might as well make them short and ubiquitous, so that they seem like part of the texture of the game rather than an interruption. Mostly they appear when the player succeeds at a puzzle, and therefore act as rewards for the gameplay. A few of them trigger unexpectedly, sometimes only seconds after the last cutscene finished, which is a bit annoying. A few of them are over-long (I'm including the start and end cutscenes here).
Psychonauts is a good game, but not a great game. It tries to integrate story and gameplay in the easiest way possible, by writing in story excuses to make traditional gameplay elements make sense. That technique only works in a comic fantasy game like this one, in which you can just say 'things work this way because that's just how psychic stuff works'. It's not innovative; it's merely a very fine example of non-innovative game writing.
The core concept of the story is that you can project yourself into people's minds and face puzzles and enemies that represent their emotional problems. Doing so will generally let you get past an obstacle in the overall story, which is about a summer camp for psychics where a villain is stealing the children's brains.
Your character (Razputin) interacts with the game world in two main ways: platform-game jumping, swinging from bars, etc.; and the use of various psychic powers you earn at different points. Only some of these powers are really useful throughout the game; others only have use in specific puzzles.
The story is original, but the same cannot be said of the gameplay. The game takes the expected platform/puzzle game elements and uses the story to justify them, the blanket justification being that since the game takes place inside people's minds, things can work however the game requires them to.
You have a health bar and a number of lives, because platform games have to have to give you a limited number of lives, but here the lives are called 'astral projection layers' and the storyline excuse is that when you lose all these you are expelled from the person's mind. When you lose a life you respawn a little further back from when you died. When you lose all your lives you get a cutscene of being expelled, have to go back in, and then start a little way further back from where you would start if you had merely lost a life. So, basically, the penalty for failure is a bit harsher every fifth or so time you fail (you can get powerups to increase your 'maximum projection depth', i.e. maximum number of lives). I'm not sure how this is meant to make the game more fun, but you've got to have a limited number of lives, right?
(Incidentally, you still die and respawn and lose lives in exactly the same way even when in the 'surface world' outside of anyone's minds, which doesn't make sense with the explanation of what lives are. I was half expecting this to be justified at the end by revealing that you were in someone's mind all along, but no.)
You've also got to have things to collect, because platform games have to have things to collect, right? And psychonauts gives you tons of things to collect, all of which have storyline justifications, and none of which are really relevant to the story as a whole. YOu can run around picking up:
* 'Figments' of the person's imagination. (Since I'm inside their mind, isn't everything here a figment of their imagination?) Get enough of these and you get a small increase in power. They also help with navigation, since if habitually pick up figments, you know that any place still thick with them is somewhere you haven't been yet.
* Psychic arrowheads. These are the game's currency, letting you buy stuff at the camp store. In one annoying segment of the game, I had to put the main storyline on hold while I ran around the overworld trying to find arrowheads in order to buy the thing I needed to get past the next plotline obstacle - an obstacle which, incidentally, had no effect on the story and only seemed to exist in order to make me save up to buy the thing from the camp store. Bizarrely, you can find these both in the overworld and inside people's minds, and the latter ones, while presumably just imaginary, are still just as good at the camp store. Oh, and the camp store still functions as normal even when literally everyone else in the camp has been kidnapped and had their brains sucked out. Because you've gotta have collectable currency and stuff to buy with it.
* Psychic cobwebs. To collect these, you need to use a piece of equipment (buyable from the camp store), which means that collecting them takes five button-presses rather than just one.
* Emotional baggage tags, which can be united with the corresponding 'emotional baggage' somewhere in the same environment. Emotional baggage is literally a crying suitcase or something, a visual pun which is amusing the first time you see it but becomes old by the end of the game, especially when the mood of the climactic scenes are spoiled by the same old hatboxes blubbing away in the corner.
* Psychic challenge cards. These can be combined with psy-cores (buyable at the camp store, for arrowheads), to create psy challenge markers, which give you the same power boost that collecting a whole lot of figments would.
* Scavenger hunt items: random things dotted throughout the overworld. For hundred-percent-completionists only, as far as I can see.
* Brains in jars, in the overworld in the second half of the game. These were the only collectables with a genuine storyline reason, since they're the stolen brains of your fellow campers, and each one belongs to a distinct character you met earlier in the game. You get a small boost to max health for each one.
Phew!
The story is told pretty much entirely through cutscenes. Most of these are pretty short and inoffensive - if you're going to have cutscenes, you might as well make them short and ubiquitous, so that they seem like part of the texture of the game rather than an interruption. Mostly they appear when the player succeeds at a puzzle, and therefore act as rewards for the gameplay. A few of them trigger unexpectedly, sometimes only seconds after the last cutscene finished, which is a bit annoying. A few of them are over-long (I'm including the start and end cutscenes here).
Psychonauts is a good game, but not a great game. It tries to integrate story and gameplay in the easiest way possible, by writing in story excuses to make traditional gameplay elements make sense. That technique only works in a comic fantasy game like this one, in which you can just say 'things work this way because that's just how psychic stuff works'. It's not innovative; it's merely a very fine example of non-innovative game writing.
Sunday, 22 June 2008
Different types of non-interactivity
Sometimes I think I'd rather be tied to a chair with tape over my mouth than have to watch a cutscene. Let me explain.
It's occurred to met that there are two main ways for a video game to take control away from the player:
One way is to take away the player's control of the player character. This is what happens in a traditional cutscene. One minute I am making my character walk around, making him fight, and making him talk or at least triggering someone else to talk to him, all by pressing buttons. Once the cutscene starts, he walks and talks and fights without my having any control of what he does. Often (but not always) there will be a change of camera angle or perspective. While the cutscene is in progress, I'm engaged in a different activity: rather than playing a video game, I'm watching a movie, and generally not a very good movie at that.
The other way is to leave the player in control of their character, but take away the character's ability to act. My character might be tied up, or pinned down by rubble, or mind-controlled. Often I'll still be able to move the camera (or in a first-person game, move my character's head) but not affect the action that unfolds. Even though I'm not in control in any meaningful sense, I am still engaged in the same type of activity: playing a video game.
I think this is an important distinction, because the way in which the player perceives the non-interactive sequence is quite different. (Or at least mine is; I don't know about the rest of you.) In the second type, I still feel immersed in the game; I still feel like I am my character, and if I feel frustrated at my lack of agency then that helps immersion because my character will be frustrated too. In the first type, however well it is done, my sense of immersion takes a blow; for the duration of the cutscene, I am no longer am the character.
I started thinking along these lines because of a sequence in The Darkness that does both in the space of a few seconds. To start with, darkness tentacles appear and grab my hands, so I can't move (presumably there are more tentacles out of sight stopping me from walking), and I am forced to watch events unfold in front of me. Once the tentacles disappear, though, I am still not in control, this time because my character takes an action without my prompting. This was one of the few parts of the game that didn't really work for me, even though the action the character takes makes perfect sense dramatically and it's outside the normal range of actions the player can do. (And it would have been pretty creeping having an on-screen prompt telling me to do that.)
I know which type of non-interactivity I prefer. For me, the opening credits of Call of Duty 4, where my temporary character can only move his head as he is bundled into a car and driven to his place of execution, is worth a dozen flashy cutscenes where my character swings from chandaliers and guns down foes or whatever. That said, there are situations where a cutscene is appropriate and I would not want to ban them entirely from games. We would be limiting ourselves unduly if video game protagonists never performed activitities that can't sensbily be put in the player's control, and contriving to immobilize the player character every time we need to make them see something might remove their sense of being a hero. But I for one would rather be tied up and cackled at by the game's villain, than be moved around like a puppet by the game writer.
It's occurred to met that there are two main ways for a video game to take control away from the player:
One way is to take away the player's control of the player character. This is what happens in a traditional cutscene. One minute I am making my character walk around, making him fight, and making him talk or at least triggering someone else to talk to him, all by pressing buttons. Once the cutscene starts, he walks and talks and fights without my having any control of what he does. Often (but not always) there will be a change of camera angle or perspective. While the cutscene is in progress, I'm engaged in a different activity: rather than playing a video game, I'm watching a movie, and generally not a very good movie at that.
The other way is to leave the player in control of their character, but take away the character's ability to act. My character might be tied up, or pinned down by rubble, or mind-controlled. Often I'll still be able to move the camera (or in a first-person game, move my character's head) but not affect the action that unfolds. Even though I'm not in control in any meaningful sense, I am still engaged in the same type of activity: playing a video game.
I think this is an important distinction, because the way in which the player perceives the non-interactive sequence is quite different. (Or at least mine is; I don't know about the rest of you.) In the second type, I still feel immersed in the game; I still feel like I am my character, and if I feel frustrated at my lack of agency then that helps immersion because my character will be frustrated too. In the first type, however well it is done, my sense of immersion takes a blow; for the duration of the cutscene, I am no longer am the character.
I started thinking along these lines because of a sequence in The Darkness that does both in the space of a few seconds. To start with, darkness tentacles appear and grab my hands, so I can't move (presumably there are more tentacles out of sight stopping me from walking), and I am forced to watch events unfold in front of me. Once the tentacles disappear, though, I am still not in control, this time because my character takes an action without my prompting. This was one of the few parts of the game that didn't really work for me, even though the action the character takes makes perfect sense dramatically and it's outside the normal range of actions the player can do. (And it would have been pretty creeping having an on-screen prompt telling me to do that.)
I know which type of non-interactivity I prefer. For me, the opening credits of Call of Duty 4, where my temporary character can only move his head as he is bundled into a car and driven to his place of execution, is worth a dozen flashy cutscenes where my character swings from chandaliers and guns down foes or whatever. That said, there are situations where a cutscene is appropriate and I would not want to ban them entirely from games. We would be limiting ourselves unduly if video game protagonists never performed activitities that can't sensbily be put in the player's control, and contriving to immobilize the player character every time we need to make them see something might remove their sense of being a hero. But I for one would rather be tied up and cackled at by the game's villain, than be moved around like a puppet by the game writer.
Saturday, 21 June 2008
Video game 'trailers'
I've just seen a trailer for Call of Duty 5.
It's designed with some skill, and it looks like a film trailer. But really, what does it tell me about the game?
There is such a think as Call of Duty 5.
The graphics are kind of good, I suppose.
It's set in World War II at least partly in the Pacific theatre.
One of the weapons is a flamethrower.
That's pretty much it.
Although a video game can profitably make use of cinematic devides, a video game is fundamentally unlike a movie. A movie is essentially a series of images and sounds, so giving me a sample of those images and sounds is a fair taster of what the game will be like. A game is interactive. A non-interactive trailer will never be a fair taster of the final game in the way a trailer is for a movie.
Basically, the videogame equivalent of a movie trailer is the playable demo.
As well as not being interactive, the Call of Duty 5 trailer doesn't even give me any idea what the interactivity will be like. A guy in the trailer throws a flare into the air. Will I have a flare-throwing ability in the game, or is it something NPCs do in scripted events? There were aeroplanes blowing up: will I be able to shoot down planes wherever, or will they only go down when the plot calls for it? About the only thing it showcases is the game's graphics engine, and even that's assuming they used the same graphics engine as is in the game to render their little machinima war movie they call a trailer.
If you can't give me interactivity, at least show me what the interactivity will look like. Mirror's Edge is about as far from release as COD5 (both slated for later this year) and that has official in-game footage out by now.
It's designed with some skill, and it looks like a film trailer. But really, what does it tell me about the game?
There is such a think as Call of Duty 5.
The graphics are kind of good, I suppose.
It's set in World War II at least partly in the Pacific theatre.
One of the weapons is a flamethrower.
That's pretty much it.
Although a video game can profitably make use of cinematic devides, a video game is fundamentally unlike a movie. A movie is essentially a series of images and sounds, so giving me a sample of those images and sounds is a fair taster of what the game will be like. A game is interactive. A non-interactive trailer will never be a fair taster of the final game in the way a trailer is for a movie.
Basically, the videogame equivalent of a movie trailer is the playable demo.
As well as not being interactive, the Call of Duty 5 trailer doesn't even give me any idea what the interactivity will be like. A guy in the trailer throws a flare into the air. Will I have a flare-throwing ability in the game, or is it something NPCs do in scripted events? There were aeroplanes blowing up: will I be able to shoot down planes wherever, or will they only go down when the plot calls for it? About the only thing it showcases is the game's graphics engine, and even that's assuming they used the same graphics engine as is in the game to render their little machinima war movie they call a trailer.
If you can't give me interactivity, at least show me what the interactivity will look like. Mirror's Edge is about as far from release as COD5 (both slated for later this year) and that has official in-game footage out by now.
Call of Duty 4: Cinematic in a good way
When I finish playing a really good game, I don't want to do anything else right afterwards. I don't want to play the game some more - not right after experiencing the ending - but I don't want to rub the experience out of my mind by doing something else; I just want to let it sink in. I suppose you could judge how much I was blown away by the game by how long it takes for me to feel normal again. Normally it's just a few minuetes.
I finished Call of Duty 4 three quarters of an hour ago.
There are any number of things I could praise about that game, but one that struck me was that it was cinematic in ways that few games are.
It has no cutscenes in the conventional sense; it never takes control away and pretends to be a movie. (Okay, not never, but very rarely.) It never changes perspective from first-person.
The action of the game has setpiece after setpiece that makes it feel like a well-written action movie. It relies heavily on scripted events, some of which don't require the player's input to resolve them. But there are so many scripted events that they don't stand out. The whole game is scripted, but in such a way that I'm acting out the lead role, not watching.
Take the flashback sniper mission. I know it's impossible to kill my target in the flashback, because he's alive in the main timeline. I haven't experimented, but I'm assuming that as long as I aim approximately at the target I will get the same result - his arm gets blown off but he survives. Dialogue beforehand has told me that I have to compensate for wind and the coriolis effect when aiming over this distance - basically, that the bullet will not hit in the dead center of my sights. If it was possible to succeed, this dialogue would be telling me about complications to the normal gameplay challenge. What the dialogue is actually doing is providing an excuse for the bullet to go astray by a small amount in any direction, so that it can always hit in the same place the plot requres.
There is, basically, no gameplay challenge here at all. But how much more immersive it is than if I'd seen my character firing the gun in a cutscene!
The overall structure of the game also borrows from movies. There's a pre-credits sequence (pre-credits mission), and then there are the opening credits - but the opening credits are from a first-person perspective, and are even 'playable' in that you can move your head from side to side as your temporary character is manhandled about. Then Act 1 starts - the missions are divided into three acts - and you're in a different character and a different location, and it's not initially obvious how it relates to the opening sequence. I switch mission-by-mission between two main characters and a couple of minor ones, just like a movie might focus on different characters' overlapping stories. There is a sequence where my character has no possible way to succeed, but it's still playable and therefore immersive in a way that a non-interactive sequence could never be. There is a flashback, but it's a playable flashback. The end credits are probably the only non-interactive sequence of any length, and after that there is a playable post-credits cookie.
I'm rambling. I'm nowhere near understanding how it works, but its triumph is that it manages to be like a great movie without ever being less like a video game.
I finished Call of Duty 4 three quarters of an hour ago.
There are any number of things I could praise about that game, but one that struck me was that it was cinematic in ways that few games are.
It has no cutscenes in the conventional sense; it never takes control away and pretends to be a movie. (Okay, not never, but very rarely.) It never changes perspective from first-person.
The action of the game has setpiece after setpiece that makes it feel like a well-written action movie. It relies heavily on scripted events, some of which don't require the player's input to resolve them. But there are so many scripted events that they don't stand out. The whole game is scripted, but in such a way that I'm acting out the lead role, not watching.
Take the flashback sniper mission. I know it's impossible to kill my target in the flashback, because he's alive in the main timeline. I haven't experimented, but I'm assuming that as long as I aim approximately at the target I will get the same result - his arm gets blown off but he survives. Dialogue beforehand has told me that I have to compensate for wind and the coriolis effect when aiming over this distance - basically, that the bullet will not hit in the dead center of my sights. If it was possible to succeed, this dialogue would be telling me about complications to the normal gameplay challenge. What the dialogue is actually doing is providing an excuse for the bullet to go astray by a small amount in any direction, so that it can always hit in the same place the plot requres.
There is, basically, no gameplay challenge here at all. But how much more immersive it is than if I'd seen my character firing the gun in a cutscene!
The overall structure of the game also borrows from movies. There's a pre-credits sequence (pre-credits mission), and then there are the opening credits - but the opening credits are from a first-person perspective, and are even 'playable' in that you can move your head from side to side as your temporary character is manhandled about. Then Act 1 starts - the missions are divided into three acts - and you're in a different character and a different location, and it's not initially obvious how it relates to the opening sequence. I switch mission-by-mission between two main characters and a couple of minor ones, just like a movie might focus on different characters' overlapping stories. There is a sequence where my character has no possible way to succeed, but it's still playable and therefore immersive in a way that a non-interactive sequence could never be. There is a flashback, but it's a playable flashback. The end credits are probably the only non-interactive sequence of any length, and after that there is a playable post-credits cookie.
I'm rambling. I'm nowhere near understanding how it works, but its triumph is that it manages to be like a great movie without ever being less like a video game.
Tuesday, 17 June 2008
Spore creature creator
Look what I made with the free trial version of the Spore Creature Creator:
I'm not quite enraptured enough to buy the full creature creator right now, but the demo has certainly put me in a good mood about the game and I'll probably buy it when it comes out in September.
I'm not quite enraptured enough to buy the full creature creator right now, but the demo has certainly put me in a good mood about the game and I'll probably buy it when it comes out in September.
Saturday, 14 June 2008
The Darkness: Jenny
I've just finished The Darkness. (Yeah, it's a year old, but I've never been good at keeping up with new releases.) I thought it was a pretty awesome game, and more to the point, I think there's a lot I can learn from it.
(Spoilers follow about the first one-third or so of the game.)
For a start, the relationship between the Jackie (the player character) and Jenny. Video game characters have been rescuing their girlfriends from danger since Donkey Kong, but this has been the first time I've really cared about the girl as more than a token of victory.
It works largely because of the scene early in the game where Jackie meets Jenny in her new apartment and they sit down to watch a movie together. Importantly, this is not a cutscene; there is no break in ordinary gameplay. It is optional, but the option to stop it is labeled 'Get up and leave' rather than 'Skip'. I stayed, and got to experience the best moment of human intimacy I've seen in a game as Jenny fell asleep with her head in my lap. Although it's not exactly interactive, it's all still in the first person perspective and my sense of identity with Jackie was just as strong as in the combat sections of the game.
That moment impressed itself on my memory. Although Jenny doesn't appear very often in the rest of the game (unlike Alyx from the Half Life 2 episodes, for example), my character is always thinking about her, and because of the tender moment at the start of the game, I was thinking about her too. When she got kidnapped, I didn't think "Ah, so the PC's girlfriend needs rescuing, here comes the next mission." I think, "The bastards! They got Jenny!" and the sequence where I charged in to rescue her was all the more emotionally intense. I was experiencing Jackie's emotions in the same way that I experience the emotions of characters in a book or film or play, but with the added immediacy that an interactive experience and a first-person perspective provide.
And the important thing to learn is that all this was done in a quite simple way. There's that scene at the start, and then there are mentions of Jennie in character dialogue and in Jackie's loading screen monologues, but never so many mentions that it stands out. It's fairly easy to transform a plot token character who's just there to need rescuing, into a character that the player cares about. I hope more games do this sort of thing in future.
(Spoilers follow about the first one-third or so of the game.)
For a start, the relationship between the Jackie (the player character) and Jenny. Video game characters have been rescuing their girlfriends from danger since Donkey Kong, but this has been the first time I've really cared about the girl as more than a token of victory.
It works largely because of the scene early in the game where Jackie meets Jenny in her new apartment and they sit down to watch a movie together. Importantly, this is not a cutscene; there is no break in ordinary gameplay. It is optional, but the option to stop it is labeled 'Get up and leave' rather than 'Skip'. I stayed, and got to experience the best moment of human intimacy I've seen in a game as Jenny fell asleep with her head in my lap. Although it's not exactly interactive, it's all still in the first person perspective and my sense of identity with Jackie was just as strong as in the combat sections of the game.
That moment impressed itself on my memory. Although Jenny doesn't appear very often in the rest of the game (unlike Alyx from the Half Life 2 episodes, for example), my character is always thinking about her, and because of the tender moment at the start of the game, I was thinking about her too. When she got kidnapped, I didn't think "Ah, so the PC's girlfriend needs rescuing, here comes the next mission." I think, "The bastards! They got Jenny!" and the sequence where I charged in to rescue her was all the more emotionally intense. I was experiencing Jackie's emotions in the same way that I experience the emotions of characters in a book or film or play, but with the added immediacy that an interactive experience and a first-person perspective provide.
And the important thing to learn is that all this was done in a quite simple way. There's that scene at the start, and then there are mentions of Jennie in character dialogue and in Jackie's loading screen monologues, but never so many mentions that it stands out. It's fairly easy to transform a plot token character who's just there to need rescuing, into a character that the player cares about. I hope more games do this sort of thing in future.
Wednesday, 11 June 2008
Story vs gameplay in GTA IV
Over the weekend I completed GTA IV. Or rather I completed the story mode; I'm only at 65% on the progress bar but I really can't be bothered to go round shooting all the pigeons and whatever else I need to do to get 100% completion. I've done a couple of races and a couple of assassination missions and a couple of everything else, so I think I've experienced all the basic experiences the game has to offer, even though I haven't had all the variations.
What can I learn from it as a game designer? I think the game's clearest failing is that the story missions and the rest of the gameplay didn't fit very well together.
Firstly, the story was quite linear, whereas the wide-open sandbox gameplay is fundamentally non-linear. Secondly, the tone of the story doesn't fit very well with the tone of the sandbox game. The tone of the story was serious and dramatic, whereas the sandbox game is, if not actually comedic, at least more light-hearted and fun-loving.
I like to roleplay in games; I like to feel like I am stepping into the shoes of the lead character, and playing their part in the story as it unfolds. The story cutscenes and dialogue in GTA IV provided me with a very nicely realized character to play, so during gameplay I was thinking "What would Niko Bellic do?" rather than "What do I feel like doing?". But I soon realized that roleplaying in this way meant voluntarily missing out on the fun of the sandbox game. To start off with, roleplaying as Niko Bellic, I would obey traffic regulations unless I had a pressing reason not to; I would avoid stealing cars (I used Roman's taxi extensively in the early part of the game); and I would certainly not casually kill people (the first time Niko kills someone in a cutscene, he comments that he had hoped to avoid that lifestyle in America). A key part of Niko's character is that he did not come to America to be a criminal, but dragged into that life as it's the only option available to him. That's a compelling character, but in a crime-spree themed sandbox game roleplaying that character means deliberately trying to avoid the fun bits of the game.
So eventually I found my behaviour changed and I started thinking of GTA IV as two separate games. In the sandbox game, I stopped roleplaying entirely and just drove around doing fun things. Those fun things included missions, which I thought of as a separate game. The storyline applied only to that game-within-a-game, and not to the game as a whole. Sandbox-Niko had no real personality or relationships, and did things like steal multiple cars and drive them at full speed into a river in order to complete a stunt jump. Story-Niko committed criminal acts grudginly for money, and had relationships with other characters involving love and betrayal. In between missions, Story-Niko presumably obeyed traffic regulations and did grocery shopping and ate three meals a day even when he wasn't wounded.
Possibly the game as a whole doesn't suffer too much for having to be understood in this way. I still did feel moved by the story's dramatic moments (including the ending), and where it required me to make a choice I really did think 'what would my version of Niko do'. But I couldn't help feeling that I really had two different games here, and maybe they would be better played as such.
What can I learn from it as a game designer? I think the game's clearest failing is that the story missions and the rest of the gameplay didn't fit very well together.
Firstly, the story was quite linear, whereas the wide-open sandbox gameplay is fundamentally non-linear. Secondly, the tone of the story doesn't fit very well with the tone of the sandbox game. The tone of the story was serious and dramatic, whereas the sandbox game is, if not actually comedic, at least more light-hearted and fun-loving.
I like to roleplay in games; I like to feel like I am stepping into the shoes of the lead character, and playing their part in the story as it unfolds. The story cutscenes and dialogue in GTA IV provided me with a very nicely realized character to play, so during gameplay I was thinking "What would Niko Bellic do?" rather than "What do I feel like doing?". But I soon realized that roleplaying in this way meant voluntarily missing out on the fun of the sandbox game. To start off with, roleplaying as Niko Bellic, I would obey traffic regulations unless I had a pressing reason not to; I would avoid stealing cars (I used Roman's taxi extensively in the early part of the game); and I would certainly not casually kill people (the first time Niko kills someone in a cutscene, he comments that he had hoped to avoid that lifestyle in America). A key part of Niko's character is that he did not come to America to be a criminal, but dragged into that life as it's the only option available to him. That's a compelling character, but in a crime-spree themed sandbox game roleplaying that character means deliberately trying to avoid the fun bits of the game.
So eventually I found my behaviour changed and I started thinking of GTA IV as two separate games. In the sandbox game, I stopped roleplaying entirely and just drove around doing fun things. Those fun things included missions, which I thought of as a separate game. The storyline applied only to that game-within-a-game, and not to the game as a whole. Sandbox-Niko had no real personality or relationships, and did things like steal multiple cars and drive them at full speed into a river in order to complete a stunt jump. Story-Niko committed criminal acts grudginly for money, and had relationships with other characters involving love and betrayal. In between missions, Story-Niko presumably obeyed traffic regulations and did grocery shopping and ate three meals a day even when he wasn't wounded.
Possibly the game as a whole doesn't suffer too much for having to be understood in this way. I still did feel moved by the story's dramatic moments (including the ending), and where it required me to make a choice I really did think 'what would my version of Niko do'. But I couldn't help feeling that I really had two different games here, and maybe they would be better played as such.
A place for me to be opinionated
I am a computer game writer/developer, trying to become a better writer/developer. Lately I've found myself having opinions about games that I've played, so I've created this blog as a place to fire them into the aether in the hope that doing so will be more productive than keeping them to myself.
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