Come on, Dover! Move your bloomin' arse!

So each day I try to come up with a basic game design idea before I truly begin the day. This normally results in me standing in the shower mumbling to myself and finally giving up because someone already made Thief, and it is the F------- GREATEST THING EVER.

Right…

Anyway, so today I had an idea that I actually like. I first began thinking about how the number of verbs you can use in controlling Gordon Freeman is less than the number you have with most action figures. Especially with ones with pull-strings and voice-boxes. This lead me to thinking about creating a decision tree for an entire level of Half-Life or something and declaring to the world that we can do better. I can see this is going to take a while so, in the interest of actually making a point, let’s fast-forward to the point where I start trying to make My Fair Lady into a video game.

Now at first I envisioned a game where the goal was to take a low level Eliza and upgrade her to a status where she can be passed off as a duchess as the ball. I am not sure if the time limit would be enforced, but there would be a series of activities she could perform at the players direction, leading to various mini-games that would result in a certain improvement. The feedback could be given to the player by taking her out on test runs to various tea parties and such. This makes it so the player has to look more deeply at the game to figure out their status, not just look at a stat screen and be like, today we need to grind this ability etc.

This game is all well and good but is basically is a pretty mini-game collection and I hate that crap. I just don’t know where the long run interest would come so I tried to move on, with the same idea of creating a game about social climbing in British society, but without the constraint of the My Fair Lady setting. I was now reminded of DOA: Xtreme Beach Volleyball. Now you may laugh, but I really like some parts of that game, and it is not because of the blasted boob physics. The core of DOA:XBV* is all about learning the various girls tastes and hobbies, thus allowing you to gift them items they will enjoy in order to win their favor. This will let you build a stronger team over time for the action part of the game. The gifting section is supported by other little mini-games which earn the player money to buy more extravagant gifts. Now in the case of DOA they give you all of the information about characters via the manual, but in my social climbing game you would deduce it from conversation with various characters and the surroundings of their homes.

Before I go too far let me flesh out the game a little more. You would begin the game by selecting a main character and their companion. It could be any mix of male/female and the relationship could be either they are family, friends or lovers. This would change the game a little as the experience of 2 young women trying to climb London’s social ladder would be different from, say, a young couple. You have a friend come along because I needed someone for you to practice dancing with and generally to provide advice and stuff. The main character could, of course, be new to London and staying at a rich relatives house, with the relative providing that role, but I thought letting the player set things up would be more fun.

Now you would start with an invitation to one tea party somewhere. This would be a very easy event and it would be here that you begin to make contacts. The process of making contacts goes something like: engage a character in conversation, find out about them, raise their favor meter until they invite you to visit them sometime. Then they would be added to the players list of contacts and when at home the player would have the option of sending them telegrams, gifts or inviting them to events. Initially the player would face sympathetic companions, but later characters would initially not favor the player and thus they would have to learn how to impress the hostile person through information gathered from other people via gossip. Parties could be arranged, with the player having to select where to have the event, who to invite (invite 2 people that hate each other would be a bad bad thing).

I am not sure if adding monetary concerns to the game would make it too complex, I really want to focus on social interactions in the game, but doing that all the time might be too much. Perhaps the player would receive an amount of money based on their overall favor level from friends, with the option to play cards or go to the races or something to potentially earn more. I would also like to add some factors dependent on sex to the game, so a female player would get different reactions from young men (potential suitors). You would have to have the option of getting married, but overall the game would be much like Pirates!, in that you would simply be racing to become as famous and popular as possible before you have to “retire”. When one game is complete the player could start again with the children of their last character. Actual time in the world probably couldn’t pass, so there would be an endless stream of people living in the early 1900’s I guess. Well, it is a game after all. No one would ever make this game, but I wish they would because Hellgate London is boring me to death right now.

*I just had to add that I might be the only one who played that game because they thought the favor manipulation system was fun, but it really was pretty awesome. The second game is horrible though, they upped the boobs to the point where you just can't ignore it and I refuse to play that crap.

We walked arm in arm, But I didn't feel his touch

So Maggie Greene has an article over at Kotaku about sex in games and the maturity of the industry. Practically everyone, inlcuding myself, is guilty of ranting about sex in games, the need for the industry to grow up, put a stop to the boobs, blah blah blah. If you are not up to date on the current discussions online the article has links to the most recent relevant rants before it takes off. She makes one point about halfway through that I like (not suprising as I have argued this as well), mainly that right now we are stuck with mostly linear stories in games, so why not steal from movies until technology expands the possibilites with interactive media. Truely interative stories are certianly the utopia we seek, but it is going to be a while before technology and design can support it. As she notes, the ultimate solution to the problem of sex in games is better storytelling, although if you follow Ken Levine you will argue that what we need is better narrative in games and leave the telling to the world. Kyle has probably already skimmed it so about half of my readership doesn't need this post, but I thought of the above image and decided it needed creation.

Hello, I love you

I generally hate reading really long posts, so I am going to try and keep mine shorter from now on.

Recently there has been a lot of discussion about sex in games from all sides of the war. I won’t recount these events as you are probably familiar with the “report” on Fox News and the backlash which is still running through the tubes. Now I have to admit I have not played Mass Effect myself, but I have seen the scene around online and it goes no further than your standard PG-13 side boob type love scene found in almost every movie. And that is exactly the problem. It is almost a challenge to find a movie without at least some sexual undertones, but the second there is any mention of sex within a game the whole world explodes. This is not only keeping the adult market from making some amazing Wii porn games, but also holding back the development of games about human interaction.

As I mentioned last time, the actions a player is allowed to perform in modern games are limited to shooting, climbing on boxes and other such physical, violent actions. Obviously there are some exceptions, but we still have games about things and not about people. While this may be due in large part to the people making games (nerdy young men mostly) and technical limitations (see my last post), I think our societies attitudes also play a large role. Unless a game developer pushes violence to the point where it is gross (I am looking at you Manhunt 2), they can get away with pretty much anything. This is because we as a society seem ok with violence in media. As seen by the lack of upset over No More Heroes in the US, it is OK to slice hundreds of people half, spewing blood everywhere. Just, please, don’t sleep with the love interest you have been courting for a good part of the game.

This means that as long as games are limited to the traditional violent actions they will not be shunned by retailers and the mass media, making it safer to continue on our current path of basically non-stop “action movie” games. The problem is that people don’t just kill one another, but we do fall in love and we do have sex. In fact I would think we do a lot more rolling in the hay than mass murdering. I am not saying that humans spend all their time either copulating or killing, but try and find me a sitcom where there isn’t a sex episode. We aren’t going to get people games, our dramas and our chick flicks, until we can at least talk about sex in a game. First, though, I think the industry will have to prove it can portray women in a mature manner, but that is a topic for another time.

In your sad machines, you’ll forever stay

I will frequently refer to Chris Crawford on this blog, so it is probably important I explain that before things go too far. A few years ago it occurred to me that most of the games I loved as a child were essentially books which you had to work to get to the next page. I fell in love with these games because of the well defined worlds and characters, the humor or wit of the writing, and the thrill of unlocking something new. Even after I knew all the answers I could still replay them over and over simply because I enjoyed being in the worlds depicted so much. I suppose examples would be good here, so I am talking specifically about 1990’s LucasArts adventure games as well as Gabriel Knight, Quest for Glory, and Thief (Only the story of Thief is linear, and it hurts me even imply it may be lacking somehow). Other games which I have noted others having similar experiences with are FF7 and Chrono Trigger. Games with higher levels of interactivity, such as Morrowind and (I had said GTA here but I just can’t bring myself to do it, explaining why will be the subject of a post soon.) I have found I never complete. Left unscripted, current games can only allow for a very small range of actions. Most of these involve killing things in various ways. More interesting interactions requires following a script as we cannot fully simulate things like character conflict without over simplification. The more involved the story, the characters, and setting, the more linear the game becomes until you reach a slide show with some rest stops in puzzle land.

Just as a note, here I am talking about interactivity related to the actual narrative. Creating deep levels of interactivity in gameplay and throwing in awesome cutscenes between levels which have no direct relation to the actions of the player does not count as having interactive narrative.

Now I have not gotten around to Mr. Crawford yet, but I wanted to lead up to how I came about reading some of his books. After this revelation about the linear nature of games I began to wonder about a game which held a truly interactive narrative, one where the player was inserted in as a character in what was essentially a virtual world. This, it seemed to me, should be the ultimate goal of gaming and I felt I had been very clever in figuring this out. Then I began to look around online for any research on such an interactive world and came across the idea of interactive storytelling. As anyone who has read a few articles on the subject knows, Chris Crawford comes up a lot. It seems my great idea had already occurred to him, somewhere around the time I was learning the letters of the Alphabet. I refer you now to Wikipedia for an overview of what he has done and some links to current projects. (Link)

He essentially looked at gaming in the late 80’s and predicted the industry would end up where it pretty much has, in an endless stream of games providing the same basic forms of interaction. I recommend reading over what he has to say to anyone interested in game design as he has been thinking about questions the general industry is just beginning to ask for over a decade. The problem, though, is there are few solid answers to these questions. As he has noted, games today are about things, and stories are about people. For us to create interactive stories we don’t need complex physics engines but personality engines. What holds us back here became apparent to me a few weeks into my first A.I. class in college; even our most complex A.I. systems today are really just nested if/else conditions. There are tricks to make the conditions more nature, the product of heuristics or multiple values, but this just makes a binary conditional seem less so to the user, it paints the tunnel on the rock on the train tracks, but a painting has no depth. The other challenge facing interactive storytelling is the lack of natural language parsers. Until we can speak to the characters and they can understand us, there cannot be a truly interactive story, at least in my opinion. People have been trying for sure, the best example I have found is Façade.

I think in the short term we must look to something between the raw action of Space Invaders and the golden dream of a true People Game. Portal proved to the industry that a game without proper guns and a focus on atmosphere could win the hearts of the gaming public. Now we need to move beyond the physical puzzles of Aperture Science start trying to create games about ideas and thought. I am liking my inside the girl’s mind game idea from yesterday right now, but if you want a older example, see Chris Crawford’s own game, Gossip. We have our violence machines, our physics machines; we need to create emotion machines, engines of ideas and feeling.