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.
Sunday, 22 June 2008
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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