quote: Original post by Oluseyi
The question was recently posed why games today aren't as much "fun" as the games of yesteryear. Ignoring the question of whether that is actually true, given that fun is subjective, or whether it isn't just nostalgia, I reviewed the games that I had played and found fun. Here's the interesting thing: they lacked substantial storylines.

I suggest that the definition of fun hasn't changed, the perception of what is fun has. This is in no small part directly the result of the obsession and proliferation of interactivity in it's place, as if it could ever be a reasonable substitute. Today, with phat graphics and AI and intricate and detailed modeling, we have made the mirror more important that how the magpie responses.

I want you take a moment and reach back and touch your inner child (you hardened soulless bitches) and remember that fun is a product of emotional responses to imagination and perceptual interpretation.

I am as guilty as anyone of the activists and advocates of interactivity, when back in the tech boom it was the magic witching word I used to sell interactive websites to people who though that was the path to e-commerce midasan touch. All it really did was show people that T-shirts and videos were as popular as they had ever been in the brick and mortar world as they were in the click world.

The notion they lacked substantial storyline may have been part of the breach of discipline writers and designers everywhere experienced when, fascinated with this newfangled toy named interactivity, a reliance on it as a subsitution for fun instead of the reality that it is an enhancement to fun was implemented with the zeal of an addict.

When diverging from the real rules of fun (or the context one can draw increasing the chances of the response of fun in the player or audience or reader for that matter) the game design community itself may have led the consumer away from what is really fun, to what is fascinatingly fun and engagingly fun for the moment. Engagement and fascination are subsets of fun, not a replacement.

There were some who were true to the faith, and simply devved simple games that were simple to diagnose the fun for, and produce subsequently. Some of these designers even used interactivity in it's proper context, that of a subordinate enhancer to fun, and had blockbusters.

But fascination and engagement prevailed, for the spell of interactivity was mighty, and tech was so in love with itself that it was blind to it's own weakness: that the value of thier products was measured in the mind of an ordinary human being, and not in the capabilities the ordinary human being had when using the tech. If this were not the case, no digital divide would exist. Further, tech made the assumption that everybody would jump on board the railroad gravy train towards the future, and amazing evolutionary things would occur. That only seemed to happen to the small percentage of the entire population who jumped on and stayed on, and even then they found themselves back at the original issue: our profound human crisis, whether tech exists or not. All things lead back to the source eventually.

Interactivists (interactivity activists) stayed the course, fascinated with the potentials of this new form of perceptual implementations, and continued to develop blockbusters based on the instrinsic value of a subset of the original deliverable of fun as a whole. Humans being what they are, besides stubborn and resistant to change, also displayed a modicum of intelligence (a truly remarkable instance, imo) in realizing at some basic level, even if they could not quite articulate it, that interactivity for it's own sake just didn't seem to have the same old zing as good old fun, the resident program in the human mind.

Thus, they rejected the poor substitute, with simple explanative rationalizations like, "I don't know, it's just not fun!" This left Interactivists and their marketing departments struggling for reasoning to fill this gap.

But it was a huge gap, and into it fell the entire breadth of the bubble, bursting as it went down. Today, some may argue that it was the last mile that blew the bubble, but I'll wager a fair part of it is to be attributed to the inability of interactivity to be a comprehensive substitute for fun.

The resistance to tech and interactivists only increased now that it's glory days had gone down in flame for the most part, and they continued to innovate faster frame rates, more interpretive AI's, and higher polygon counts too. Whoo-hoo.


Mooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo.

The battlefield has always been, and always will be the human mind. No wonder we are now rushing to get things "chipped" as fast as we can; we want to take back the control we thought we had with our amazing kathingamabob: interactivity. But instead we are trying to rewire perception itself.

Resistance is now so high (partially as a result of the economic downturn partially and perceptually being blamed on the fall of tech and it's mightly sword for profit and agent of global change: interactivity; whether true or not) that even though cell phones (more are being sold than computers mind you) are capable of amazing smart data manipulations, the vast majority of people still just use them to make a call, and take part in their dose of interactivity through interfacing with the mind of another human being. Fancy that. Interactivititus originalis.


With respect to storylines, their requirements never went away, they just went under the tires as writers and designers tried to take winged flight upon the updraft of interactivity, and story fundamentals got short shrift.

Most of you being programmers, will understand what I am about to say with respect to writing that I can tell you the vast majority of other people in other occupations will not, with perhaps the exception of attorneys and directors.

The reason most stories fail, and it's subsequent interactive adaptation known as a game, comes as a result of the failure to do one or all of the three following things: lack of development of the plot design, lack of development of the character's entityhood, or inconsistencies of scale.

Lack of plot design is a result of insufficient iteration diagnosis. Translation: you didn't think of every possibility within your world. In the classic "Game Design and Architecture" we learn of the tool called the "Interactivity Matrix" which is a spreadsheet consisting of all interactivity or events listed on one axis of the graph, and all gameworld objects on the other axis. Where the two have no effect on each other is a grayed out cell. This process has a two fold effect, one, it helps define rules, which have a major impact on gameplay itself, and two, probably have a big influence on production management or priorities itself.

Yet, a lot of people I have mentioned it to don't know what it is.

The analogy is, if you figure out all the potentials for your plot iteratively, the best dramatic or interactive potentials will reveal themselves, and subsequently, you game simply has another of several chances you can give it, to be better and funner.

Plot design is not complex (although this is modifiable depending on the type of story you are telling), it is just repetitive and requires a lot of patience. And, it is surprising in that the fifteenth time you have gone through something, but are evaluating it in a different context, something mildly surprising occurs: improvement. Incremental improvement is a process, not a goal when it comes to plot design. You want your story to be all it can be, because frankly, that directly relates to sales. Remember, sales are emotions. If you go through your story plot design too little, you risk melodrama instead of provocative drama, and market performance so eloquently indicates.

Lack of character design is just as barren, when the opportunity for empathy and suspension of disbelief are so critically important and possible when your character's feelings, POV, attitude, education, upbringing, even geneology can be utilized to take your player, or audience or reader into the zone we call in the theatre "the fourth wall."

It is the gap between everything you construct determinantly (though interactivity, visuals, audio, character and story) and where the mind of the player or the reader or the audience member fills in the gaps. This is the small degree of surrendering authorship writing classes never tell you about, because there is noting you can do about it. We tend to discuss only those things we can control, the vain and petty creatures that we are.

To think that our tightly constructed airtight characters, settings and circumstances would do anything other than elicit the feeling we intend would knock us off our pedestal in a second, and well, you know how we hate that aspect of life (even though it's the reality) and would rather forge ahead in denial that we are truly the gods that came after the ones we tore down before when we didn't get what we wanted from them. History does repeat itself.

We forget one thing. Individuality. Perhaps the ultimate interactivity. We cannot control intepretation. If we could, a group of people sitting in a circle whispering the same thing to each other from an original printed sentence would return an exact duplicate of the original value. Take about storing a value as a variable.

What we can do is control the context of intepretation by using psychological symbolism (adequately explained in a past issue of Game Developer magazine) that evokes mood that a range of emotional responses can be found in.

Let me give you some examples. Any Sidney Lumet film will gradually get less and less lit (not darker and darker as some may inaccurately conject) as it goes towards the end. You do the emotional math. What range of feelings do you logically and rationally right now feel you might experience as things got less and less lit (evoking the feeling [but not the reality] that things were getting darker and darker?).

These kinds of interpretational choices and usage are why you can legitimately send an assistant directory with six years of film school and a solid reel for a cup of coffee.

Scale is just as important. Most people blow scale because it is inexorably linked to plot design and character design.

In Death of a Salesman, the poor salesman Willy Lohman is losing his mind and eventually commits suicide. Yet that one last important sale that just might come through keeps hope alive all the way through what would from all appearances be a one setting giant monologue.

There is no question that this is an epic story, as the scale of the immediacy and closeness of the scenes and settings make each and every audience member feel like they are inside the mind (empathy for willy brings about the suspension of disbelief that Willy's problems are more important than the ones we brought into the theatre with us) of Willy, and when your suspension of disbelief makes you vicariously into Willy, what happens in his mind is happening in yours [otehrwise you are not really escaping validly] and that tremendous impact of Willy's failure to get the last thread of hope sale that drives him to suicide hits you so hard, that by the simple admission of another character that Willy "doesn't have to worry anymore" (this is a man who was a great salesman, loved and cared for his family for years, had everything going for him except the passage of time and the advancement of society and technology which ultimately led to cause of his demise) brings us such great relief at the denuoument, that there is no question that what can happen to Willy Lohman can happen to any one of us.

In fact, there is an old theatrical saying that seeing this play in a small theatre where you are closer to the stage is much more powerful than the exact same performace in a larger venue.

So, in terms of scale, we didn't need to see every stop on the road that Willy had made for fourty years, we didn't need to see every conversation Willy had with his boss about how he was one sale away from being sacked, even though the house was almost paid off, and the college money for junior was almost earned, and the life insurance premiums would be fully vested in just one more payment and everything would be allright because we could use the cash value of the policy to pay off the house and send junior to college.

None of that had to be shown at all, all Willy had to do was articulate that it was at stake in the story.

The play rarely, if at all I think, ever leaves the Lohman house kitchen. Scale brings immediacy, compels engagement and tightens contexts so tightly that attention cannot wander. This is directly resultant from plot and character design, and the aristotelian consistency of setting which has as one of it's rules scale. Thus, an epic can occur in a single small kitchen. Riven could have heeded this.

Scale is also illustrated in arguably the first Surrealist Film Noir and first made for television movie, "Requiem for a Heavywieght", by Rod Serling. Superbly acted by Jack Palance, it is the story about the fight for the championship by an aging fighter, who knows he only has one shot left at the title, and ends up realizing as he would rather be dead than lose his shot at the fame he's been cheated out of his whole life by crooked judges, corrupt managers, lucky punches and not thinking quick enough in the ring to take that knockout shot.

I don't think we ever see the actual fighting in the entire movie until about two seconds at the end when we see a knockdown (this was partially done because of censorship in those days, something all of you had better realize you must fight against always; seven headed hydra that it is).

But the soundtrack of the audiences roaring, the bell, the thunk of the leather gloves on the body, they all tell us a brutal fight is going on. This is verisimilitude at it's finest. You feel those punches though you don't see them because of the sound they make lets you know it's a solid blow.

Scale is surrealized with the mastery that Serling invented, and is a wise choice for a game designer to utilize in their toolkit when working out scale.

In the teleplay (that is what they were called back in the day) as the fight was in the early rounds, and our hero still had a chance, the trainer and manager hung out in the hallway very close to the action. The lights were bright, accentuated by the flash of the bulbs of the press cameras. As things got worse, we drew farther and farther away from the stairs leading into the forum, and the lights got darker, and the noises more muffled, except for the occasional thump of a well landed punch, which only drove the manager and trainer deeper into the hallway and their depression over the certain-to-them outcome. Once we reach the doorway in the hall to the doctors office, somewhat more than halfway down the hall from the stairs to the boxer's room, the doctor character appears, and shades the misgivings deeper by talking ominously about the cut the hero has, and how he might have to stop the fight. The manager prevents this by reasoning with the doctor. The doctor asks him if he is so confident in his fighter, why isn't he at ringside?

As we track farther down the hallway to the competitor fighters door, some of their party comes out to bet on the outcome and offer even more humiliating odds on the potential outcome.

By the time we get back to the hero's dressing room, dozens of minutes of screentime have passed, yet we have only walked down the corridor perhaps seventy five feet. The audience is not bored. They are riveted because their perceptions of time and space are being tweaked with so subtly, that these kinds of things are only noticed by the trained eye, in this day of mega-super-dyno-impact. It only takes a mouse to stampede a herd of elephants you know.

So, the reason that the significant percentage of stories, games and other media go unproduced or unpublished , is because these critical pre-production aspects are not given full and timely consideration, and the resulting content just doesn't cut it. People are too hot to start coding, or they think that feature interactivity on gameplay is so kewl it will somehow overcome basic shortcomings, if that even ever occurs to them.

My advice? You want to make computer interactive entertainment? Stop shortshrifting the most important part of the process. Coding is only 20% of game design. Do the duty on the other 80%, and you might not get overlooked.

quote:
"choke points."

Choke points do not occur imo if the other aspects of design get due diligence. There is a reason so many people hate writing, because plot design, character design and scaling are like writing code you know won't work over and over and over until it metamorphs into something greater than you believed you could do.

Everytime I have tried to guide somebody down this path, even people with a hundred thousand words or more underneath their belt, they have balked at the workload and time demand. Good creativity has as a component contemplation time. They are still working a second job, secure in the fact they don't have to risk enough for the dream because they have a fallback position. This is not why Cortez burned his ships when he reached the New World.

quote:
What do you think? Also, do you think it is possible to devise mechanisms that develop the "story fabric" in response to player action, so that a set of motives, premises and unresolved tensions are all that the game presents and the final outcome is completely dependent on user action?

Mechanisms for story fabric are possible through some sort of AI writer entity that prevents poor or illogical choices.

I have lived all over this great land, and have worked all kinds of occupations and have written all kinds of things. One thing is for sure, there is not a good story in everyone (despite what the resident entity may think of themself; there may be a historical narrative, but reaching entertainment quality is suspect), and a good story teller doth not make a good story writer. I suspect the same is true for games.

If you get back to the notion that interactivity is a tool and not the job, maybe we can get this industry out of regurgitoligical malaise.

Adventuredesign



[edited by - adventuredesign on June 18, 2003 1:12:20 AM]

quote: Original post by Oluseyi
You know, verbosity isn't fun either. When you write a passage that long that consists merely of your own thoughts on a medium as fluid as this one - and when you type those thoughts in a weird form of prose - it sucks all the fun out of reading these forums. How's that for irony?

Quite frankly, I skipped about 60% of whatever you may have typed. At a certain point my eyes just glazed over...

That's another reason for the dearth of fun in interactive media: damn writers getting in the way, their egos compelling them to dazzle us with their literary skill.

K.I.S.S.

Videogames are not like movies, designed to be absorbed in full in a single sitting. Neither are they inherently like television, filled with continuous episodic content. They're very fluid in terms of user consumption; sometimes you just want to get in a few minutes of a reflex/puzzle game to kill between 5 and 30 minutes. Sometimes you want to sit back and ponder a challenging situation and finally feel the elation of victory. Sometimes you want to call a bunch of friends over and just pound away at each other in competitive, "mindless fun" games. Does that mean that only one of these is deserving of a story? Is it possible to craft storylines that work for all these modes of use?

Sorry, I went to the dentist today and forgot I was high when I wrote that. However, when you ask such an obtuse question, it's going to take some wordcount to give a complete reply. And, for the sake of the point of you question, writers trying to be dazzling is not the answer to the question. Besides, it was a fucking great post.

[edited by - adventuredesign on June 18, 2003 4:42:30 AM]

I find a story to be a key factor in making games more fun. They (if they work) draw the player into a state where you are no longer pushing buttons but actually doing actions.
This is the reason I'm a console gamer. A lot of PC games (not to so all though) are less involving with only a premise. Also gameplay itself is more static too with popular games being ones with less involvment (arguably) like the Sims and Age Of series which have you control rather than act.
MGS2 is my personal favourite for its involving gameplay and story. The plot drew me in and thus made my actions as a player motivated as a viewer. What's wrong with watching a good movie? Also the gamepad used to many buttons and yet was such a brilliant control system that everything became a relex action.Plot can offer and excuse to set up a game, but it should go beyond that and enhance a game. Granted this is not true in all cases. RTS hardly require good plotting and even so by controlling many people the plot becomes less distinct without characters to identify with.

EDIT: Hey, the guy before wrote similar about MGS2. Great minds think alike eh?
MGS2 rules!!!

[edited by - Cypher Ae on June 18, 2003 7:55:48 AM]