Interactive Storytelling

Watch this movie from Call of Duty 4. Note that the player is in full control throughout the enitre movie, except while the helicopter is in flight when the player cannot move but has full camera control still.



This mission is called Shock and Awe. You may want to check out some of the other YouTube movies of this mission. Because the player has control over the character's movement, the second part can be played a variety of different ways. One of the interesting aspects of this that is not in the embedded movie is when the player moves close to the playground. You can faintly hear children's voices (there is a snipet of this at about 3:28 in the embedded video). Rather disturbing.

Interactivity is what sets video games and movies squarly apart. A movie is the same each time you watch it. A game's plot may always come out the same in some games, but your path to getting to that conclusion is almost always different. Also, you take that path. With a movie, you watch someone else take it. This is not to poo poo movies, but this is a key difference between the two.

Within in my favorite genre, Role Playing Games, there have been many attempts to make a truly interactive story. This takes many different forms, which is actually nice to see developers experimenting.

Example one: Fire Emblem, Path of Radiance. In this tactics game, death was permanent. If one of your units fell in battle, then the other characters would react and the story would change to reflect this loss. Garret cannot be the first one to leap and attack the enemy general if he died two months ago. This made me play very cautiously and heal someone if they so much as got a splinter. Very complicated to design, but quite successful.

Example two: Fable. Fable was an action RPG that claimed complete freedom. It was well received but got a little bashed for not really having anywhere near the amount of promised freedom. You could be a good or evil hero. However, the story demanded that your character save the world. It seemed more than a little contrived at times that this horrible evil man was being held up as the world's only beacon of hope. This system is known as a moral choice system, and they usually have this problem. In the end, this usually boils down to forcing the player to play through the game twice if they want to see all the content, or at least both endings. Sometimes the very end is the only difference.

Example three: Oblivion. Oblivion also was claiming large amounts of freedom. You could do evil things, or good things. However, I found that in order to be evil as per the game's designation, I had to join the assassin's guild. If I tried more conventional, and freeform, methods of evilness, that I would either have guards chasing me constantly or that everyone would flee in terror at my approach. You wouldn't believe how hard it is to buy arrows from a merchant who's tearing away from you at top speed, leaving behind only a trail of terrified wee. In the end however, the story doesn't change one bit if you are evil or good. So in this case, the story is completely ridgid with a nice layer of fake interactivity draped over it.

Giving the player control over the story is great. Player's love it when the feel they are actually making a difference. However, a problem arises when you do this: how do you handle sequels? Which ending do you consider canon? From my examples, Oblivion will have the least trouble with this. Only one possible outcome leads to easy sequel writing. Fable solved this problem by setting the second game far in the future. The bad guy was slain either way and (according to an in game book) "the records regarding the hero are muddled and conflicting". That covers their own butts by allowing for any way you played the game to fall under that description. Fire Emblem had the most problems, as you can probably imagine. Since they could not guarantee that any of the characters except the main one (his death was immediate Game Over) he was the only one they carried over to the next game.

The Mass Effect games have broken new ground in this area. They are one of the few games these days that allows you to directly port your character over from the first game. Several choices you made in the first game are mentioned in the second. Characters you pissed off in the first game are still mad. Anyone who died stays dead. This will continue on into the third game, as it was originally announced as a triliogy. Now, you will have the play your way through the first game to change your set up in the second and see all the possible differences.

And then you have games like Call of Duty 4, where the story doesn't change, but the player gets to truly experience what is happening in the world. Which feels more interactive to you?

 This one's for you Adoring Fan... though actually with him it was personal... VERY personal.

Art and Games - The Uneasy Relationship

Art and games get along for the most part. Art is in fact an integral part of every game these days. Without artists, there would be no graphics. Without animators, there would be no cutscenes. At very first, this was the way all games were.

In the beginning, there weren't any graphics drivers, so a console similar to that shown above was the only option for displaying the contents of your game. Eventually, we gained 8 hideous colors and one thing lead to another. This has lead us to the graphics of today where the goal of making things appear realistic appears to have largely capped out... for now. There was a time when we didn't think things would look better than this:

But, now that we've reached our peak (for the moment) artists, and designers, are looking for new things to try. And thus is born the "Arty Game". Most games just have art and animation to bring the world to the player. Some games though, are trying to make an artistic statement. Games as art, and if games are an art form in themselves, has been a topic of interest for some time now. Some of the arty games turn out really well, others do not. One reason for this is the key to game design. What should always be the first priority when making a game? Gameplay, what the player does. You can have a great story, wonderful cutscenes, and a beautiful world and few people will enjoy it if all they do is sit back and hit the A button to see the next thing. Games are not movies: games are interactive and movies are not. Where the arty game runs into trouble is when, in attempting to make an artistic statement, this rule gets ignored. The artistic statement may be brillantly executed, but the game sucks as a game, or at least has issues that could (and should) have been avoided.

Example: The Saboteur. As I understand it from what I have heard, not a bad game, but not really that good either. For those of you who do not know, The Saboteur is about an allied agent in occupied France during WWII. Clear sectors are normal realistic graphics, but occupied sections are presented in gray scale. The only colored things in these areas are you, your car, and the (very bright) red nazi banners. Driving around can be interesting as there is no transition from one style to the other. You can be standing on a fully colored hill looking down into a gray valley. In any case here is a video from someone playing The Saboteur. Feel free to watch as much of you want, but the time of interest is at about 2:55 until about 3:15 when he drives through a nazi controlled area.



You may be wondering what the problem with that is. Well, the problem is unfortunatly only hinted at as I cannot find a direct example of the problem, but take another look at it and consider the shadows. They're DARK. This is mostly because of the grayness of the area. This becomes a problem because when you're driving at high speed, as you often are in this game, you cannot see what you're driving into. It could be an evil nazi, or an old innocent french lady. You cannot tell if you are heading for a fence you'll break through, or a brick wall that will smash your car like a tin can. This then makes an artistic statement at the cost of gameplay. It doesn't ruin the game, but it does hamper it and adds another item to the list of problems people have with the game.

Now, let's shift to when art and gameplay get along very well. The best game I know of to have done this is Okami. The art and gameplay not only get along, they get married, have kids, and die happy together after thier 100th anniversary. Okami is not without issues mind you, the 18 minute intro sequence comes to mind, but the game makes an artistic statement and pulls it off very well. It comes to us from Japan and so is drawn in a manga style. Trees and rocks will be drawn in 2D but turn to make sure they are always facing the player. It works very well and looks very nice. It's not terribly realistic looking, but it's not trying to be and it seems to benefit from it. But here's the clincher, the player has the ability to draw things into the game. Being the Sun God the player has access to the Celestial Brush, which allows them to pause the game and paint on the screen as it was when they paused it. This provides a variety of effects: a stright line cuts things, a circle in the sky becomes a sun making it daytime, and a circle with a line coming out of the top if it makes a bomb. The player needs to use this in order to fight monsters, solve puzzles, and progress through the game. Here's an example of someone messing around with some of the powers of the brush. Notice how things flow, how the brush works, and the look and feel of the world. Like with The Saboteur clip, don't feel obligated to watch the whole thing, but the first minute should show you enough. (Also, note that the color is a bit washed out in the clip. Look up some Okami pics, though they are still washed out compared to seeing it on screen, they are better than the movie. The game is actually quite colorful!)



So, now it's your turn. What do you think? Are games an art form? Are they two different things? Is it a good idea to try and make artistic statements with them?

Take THAT bad game design!

Pandering to Your Audience

This is more or less a follow up to last week's discussion. The majority of the problem presented last week had to do with the developers vision clashing with what the audience was demanding. There are several problems in a situation like that, none of which have nice and easy answers. For one, the designer has a vision. It is his or her game and they should strive to make it as such. Second, one must know their target audience. Certain games will appeal to different people, and tailoring the experience to something they enjoy will make the difference between a "bleh" game and a blockbuster. Third, the audience knows what they want (or think they do). Since you will most likely never produce this game, they will never be happy with what you DO produce, this is a fact of all types of buisness. Finally, the problem that turns this all into a major problem, is that developers create expectations and when these don't get met the player feels cheated. The first three issues mostly just divide players into those who like the game and those who don't. It's this last one that causes the sort of outbursts Bioware is currently facing over Mass Effect 2. The "tame" sex scenes wouldn't have been such a big deal probably, if Bioware had not made such a big deal out of the ability to do so.

So, next up on the altar for disobeying its audience is another game I mentioned last week: Bayonetta. Again, I have not played this game and from what I've heard I'm not going to. However, the game resurfaced in my mind because of an article about it in my latest issue of Game Informer, who continue to send me free issues for some reason. They interviewed the director of the studio that produced the game regarding some questions that the game left them with. Several of the questions hit on the issue of sexuality, but they are blown off by the claim that the character Bayonetta was designed by a female designer and so she should pander to both genders and that she is sexy, but not vulgar. That last bit is an absolute lie as I understand it. But to move away from last week's topic to this week's, let's look at the Q&A that got me fired up: Q, "We liked the game's Space Harrier sequence, but that shooting seemed to go on for a really long time. Why is that?" A, "Hey, I don't think it is too long. (Laughs) I think that gamers of my era excelled at the ability to approach games in the vein of 'I'll find the fun in what I've been given,' and not 'You guys need to give me what I want.' Maybe I expressed my feelings of nostalgia for that era a bit too strongly. But even that is just one of the idiosyncrasies that make up Bayonetta, and I would be really pleased if you enjoyed it as such."

This just makes me want to smack the guy in the face. It comes across to me as being quite rude, he could have said the same thing and put it in a way that doesn't make me feel insulted as a gamer. As I tried to express with my quick overview of teh sexuality bit, the entire set of answers seemed rather rude. At basis, it looks like he's telling the player to suck it up and like what we hand them. Well, actually, that goes well with my belief that a developer should make their own game. But, if you alienate your audience, players are going to go elsewhere.

In the end, both sides have to be willing to give a little to the others demands. Give a little, not give in.

Bayonetta and her ludicrously long legs are not changing for your sake!

Sexuality in Games

You all saw this coming. It is such a delicious topic after all... no pun intended.

I pick this topic this week for two reasons. First, the recent game Bayonetta apparently has a shameless level of sexualization. That got the idea in my head, but then I came across another interesting tidbit. The highly anticipated Mass Effect 2 has come out as a sequel to the very popular Mass Effect. One thing that many touted as a high point of Mass Effect was the several possible romance paths which all ended in sex. For as much hype as there was, the sex was rather lame showing nothing of particular interest. Now there's Mass Effect 2, which also has several girls you can get in bed with. I'm not sure how this works out if you make a female character. But in any case there was a problem this time, people got rather mad at Mass Effect 2 for making the sex scene "far too tame". Apparently, this was one of the biggest reasons people wanted to get this game. To the developers credit, they told these people to more or less go to hell: http://www.escapistmagazine.com/news/view/98112-Mass-Effect-2s-Nudity-Level-Decided-by-Dictatorship

I'm glad to see that the developers arn't make serious changes to their plan just to make people happy, but there is a problem hidden here. The point of a game is to entertain the player, and part of that is listening to what the player wants and giving it to them (see previous post regarding sequels). The game suffers badly if the developers make it for their sake rather than the player's. Case in point: Too Human. But that is mainly for gameplay changes, not how steamy the bedroom gets. This makes me worry that most bought the game for the sex, not the game. Also, is Bioware is going to put only what they want to in their games, then I have to wonder why the sex is there at all. Well, the obvious answer is the age old standby that sex sells. But I take issue with this statement....

Ok, sure, sex sells and Mass Effect 2 may well prove that. But, if all the developers have latched onto it and so it is packed into everything, then of course it sells because it's in everything! It is a never ending cycle in that it appears to sell so it is packed in until it is the only thing that sells. Try making something without any sex in it, it may well sell incredibly. There are many players (and/or their parents) who find this trend disgusting and such a game would be eaten up by them.

To show how ingrained "sex sells" is, it is used as a tool to try and save a crappy game. My example: Age of Conan. This MMORPG is based on the Conan the Barbarian comic books and movies. I never touched the game, but it touted itself as a wonderous player versus player experience. This is largely why I avoided it, but apparently even those who adore PVP decided the game was awful and went back to World of Warcraft. So how did AoC try and get its lost players back? Sex. AoC is the only game I know of that has banner ads that state "More Death, More Slaughter, More... Cleavage!" Add to that the other banner stating, "Death never looked so good..." over a picture of a disturbingly well endowed girl and there you have it. It may get player to try the trial, but it's the gameplay that will keep them. The gameplay makes or breaks the game and that's what developers need to remember to focus on... unless they're making a Mass Effect game.

Ming Numara from Lost Odyssey

The most blantly sexy mage I have had in my party in years.