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[unsilentwill]

This is a an oddly specific design topic I'd like to discuss, and be warned there is a fair  amount Nintendo fanboying and blatant nostalgia. Most of this is based on my childhood experiences.

I missed out on the arcade generation so my strongest memories of games are story driven. This usually meant that you the player are now the only 8 year old boy in some fantasy world who can save the world.  That's a pretty great game for an 8 year old kid, and a different experience from the Hobbit/Lord of the Rings, Narnia, Star Wars etc. where a ragtag group of weirdos save the day. You are alone, but that's okay because you are the hero. (Final Fantasy was unheard of to me I guess.)

Then something happened. A stranger creature showed up, then about a hundred more.


There was this world where it was perfectly natural to be surrounded by super-powered mammals each with individual strong personalities. Kids of exactly my age would pick a companion to train and grow with. Over time they would change and get stronger, learn new techniques, and together you would solve problems and make the world better. That sounds familiar actually...



Pokémon and Digimon shaped my view of games more than I'd like to admit. The focus of the animes seemed to be friendship at all costs, treating your personal creature with care and earning their respect, accepting change through their evolution,  solving problems, making friends, and making the world a better place. All lovely values for childhood. But the games were a different story.



Digimon allowed for a pet rather than an adventuring companionship, there was no world to speak of other than your own. They couldn't interact with the world other than pooping in it, and the friendship gained was about as strong as with a fish, which is an technologically and psychologically unique attachment however shallow.

There are serious discrepancies between the message and the gameplay in Pokemon, as you probably know. Pokémon Yellow shows this the best, where you can have the yellow bugger follow you around, just like the show. At the same time for whatever reason you are told "gotta catch 'em all", where instead of a handfull of strong creatures that you care about, you hoard literally boxes of caged animals.  And the ones you do use, even Pikachu, you fight them to the death to win at all costs. One of the only connections to the ideas of the show was a weird scenario where an over-leveled Pokémon has a mind of its own and doesn't listen until you have the right gym badge. The recent appearance of natures is a hand wave at this design flaw.
 


Fairly recently as Pokémon becomes retro, a solution to the problem was attempted in something called the Nuzlocke challenge. Permadeth is introduced into Pokémon as well as rules on how Pokémon one can catch. Extreme nerds such as myself think things like this are pretty cool, because you care about the creature you can lose, and the critical hits and misses seem to mean much more when everything is on the line, and Pokémon gets a system of "Heroes" with a narrative legacy of failure and sucess. Words like redemption can almost be accurately described to a successful Magikarp. The importance of death and loss in games is exemplified here.



Not so much here. The stranger in Pikmin has little incentive to care about sentient carrots, even though they represent a huge population on the new planet and show how this foreign world works. Permadeth exists here, and how!, but is nullified by simple clone without any traits or emotions. They even grow flowers and gain new strengths, but still the attachment found in Pikmin is more shallow than digimon and exists only because they are adorable.



Luckily the concept has evolved (pardon) over time. Friendship with aliens and monsters continues to be a strong theme in games and motivates the player in ways beyond self-service. In Mass Effect however, despite how lovely having strong independent (sort of) characters can be, they are more like party members rather than companions. This may come from the ability to directly converse with characters, or even the difference between childhood friendship and adult relationships I suppose...



I'm starting to ramble so I'll wrap this up. Where is this idea going? Well, Notch has added wolves/dogs to Minecraft, partially inspired by the dogs in Fable 2. They can defend you and  die because of poor path-fiding, falling down holes and whatnot. Also they teleport to you rather than having a life of their own, so to speak, because of chunk rendering issues. As a result most of us have them in a nice doggy spot in our house where they will probably remain forever. Some apparently young people have started on a "Pixelmon" mod which by all accounts may just be the most successfully designed Pokémon game to date.

So, what do you think? Are there other games which have given you strong experiences? Is this just a childish concept that should be forgotten? Do we have to wait for strong AI to allow for such partners? Tell me your thoughts!

[s0]

idk i used to be a huge pokemans nerd around the time when the red/blue versions first hit big and i dont think ive ever really had any "personal connections" with my pokormones

but then again i usually find it very hard to immerse myself in a game to point where i actually think of the player character as "me" or get "emotional" about things happening to characters in the game during the course of gameplay (story sequences/cutscenes are a bit differnt). i couldnt when i was a kid and it hasnt changed with time.

the only games where i have some sort of quasi-emotional bond with the in-game characters are: the sims, animal crossing, dwarf fortress

df is of course kind of a hardcore version of the sims (or at least thats how i think of it) but it has one of the problems you touched upon: there are too many characters to really care about all of them (even though theyre all as sophisticatedly simulated as sims characters). out of the 200 dwarves that will eventually populate your fort there are like 10-15 important ones you really follow. the rest are just faceless lackeys.

a bit tangential i guess, but i feel the underlying theme of your post is caring for vidgame characters on an emotional level so yeah...

[Sankar]

I always felt that Pokemon was, is, and probably always will be, a very very very misused concept.
I ALWAYS wished for the games to be like the TV Show.

Explore the world, face its threats, capture and train your "animals". Its a very simple idea, that deals with facing creatures that you really wish were at your side. Who didn't wanted to have a Tiger as a pet? or maybe a Giant bear.

But the games were so... "mechanical"
I don't know, they were about random battles and choosing the right abilities. So, I felt the game failed to explore the full potential of the franchise.
The "console" games got closer to it, BUT, they were just "side games" that lacked the power of a full fledged title.

Fallout 1 is probably, for me, the best "human + creature" experience. You find a dog and he follows you. That's it. You can't "talk to him" or "make him stop following you", he is extremely useful because he is fast and can do a lot of damage, and at the same time, since you can't "equip him", you gotta be careful to not kill him.

Digimon World was great too. There was a whole world where all these creatures lived and you had one, so you needed to take care of yours and to find a way to make it evolve.

Monster Rancher was very heart-breaking, waking up some day in the game world and finding out your monster has died was heart-breaking.


Bad AI, Bad Path-Finding can ruin any connection. If you are around creatures that die so often and you can't do anything about it, you just think of it as statistic.

I'm not a guy to be easily immersed in games, but, I always wished that Pokemon went deeper. and I love Fallout 1 dog mechanic. Its so simple and at the same time, so bonding.
Fallout 3 had a cool dog too, but it's just hard to deal with it. You never know if you enter a place, the dog will still be with you, if it disappears where you can find it, and etc...
 

[unsilentwill]

Yeah I don't think anyone got attached to their Pokémon, but I didn't get caught up in the catching all 150 thing, I only caught the ones that were interesting, which is impressive for how dumb of a kid I was. There was a lot of factors such as HMs that objectified the buggers.

Now the Sims is interesting, because I have never cared about those sprites. I think its because they were generally soulless and not very interesting until they were on fire.

But Dogmeat, now there's an idea. Having a defensive character meant that you relied on someone else besides yourself, forming a bit of trust. Now that could be key: imagine instead of whiting out after all your Pokémon faint, you have to run for your life. Okay, talking too much about Pokémon, this idea is supposed to be about any sort of gaming.

It should also be noted I've been watching a bit too much Doctor Who, which is this same concept in non-personal non-interactive form. Oh, and I'm upset with myself that I forgot to mention Papo and Yo as another possible success. Some other games to talk about are Ico and Shadow of the Colossus, or even Oregon Trail.

[FK in the Coffee]

I'd say Shadow of the Colossus definitely gave me the closest bond I've had with an animal in any other game.  Agro really become a true companion to me because of the complete lack of any humans or creatures around me (except for the Colossi, of course).  Maybe it's just because Team Ico are masters of their craft, but the emotion I felt towards a virtual creature has never been so strong as with Agro.

[Ego_Shiner]

i got a bit attached to some of my pokemon, but thats mostly because i played the game wrong (train my starter and ONLY my starter)

[gimymblert]

yes pokemon like the show would the most awesome thing evar

[Bree]

Back on topic, has anyone else been following Papo and Yo? The premise is quite interesting- you play as a young boy who lives in a favela with his "best friend and protector", Monster, who has a dangerous addiction to poisonous frogs. When Monster eats the frogs, he goes berserk, harming anyone in his way, including the boy. The game so far looks like a puzzle-action title where you use Monster's abilities and various other devices to change the game world and achieve your goal of finding a cure for Monster's frog addiction.

Another game I know little about that'd probably to the discussion here would be Majin and the Forbidden Kingdom. Plus, that giant monster's adorable.

[Xion]

I love the way Another World/Out of this World handled this issue. Every time my buddy disappeared I wondered when we'd meet again, and if he'd be okay, and if I'd be okay without him. Genuine delight upon reunion.

's been a while since I played though, and I never beat it 'cause the rom I had was bugged towards the end.

[SP9000]

This is something that hits very close to home for me, and I've actually been thinking about it a lot recently as I've been working through Pokemon Heart Gold.

When I was a kid, like a lot of kids who grew up when I did, Pokemon was my life.  I know that's extreme, but it really was.  At recess my friends and I talked about Pokemon or pretended we were Pokemon, I traded the cards, read the books and comics, we snuck Pokemon into every aspect of school we could, and when I got home I played Pokemon until going to bed. 

Now, when I hear this talking about how some of you wish the games were more like the show,  I cannot express how passionately I disagree with that.  Please note that I'm going to be giving my argument from nostalgia and my experiences when I was young. 

In my mind, the simple, formulaic approach of the game was what made the player create such a strong connection with them.  For one thing, the repetition of the games was very comforting to me as a kid.  I was a bit of a coward growing up, and I got anxious from the time I got home from school until my parents got home (about an hour and a half).  During that time I took great comfort in training whoever the lucky Pokemon was that I was working on at that time.  Despite having no in game interactions with that Pokemon, I loved it.

I'll give one example of how emotionally attached I was to this game.  I had a Togetic as part of my main team in gold version up until I stopped playing it.  I cannot remember which move it was, but he was trying to learn a new one.  Reluctantly, I got rid of charm.  I was always cautious to delete moves that a Pokemon had known for a long time because I figured that Pokemon had grown attached to the move after knowing it for so long.  Well, the same day I deleted it I used metronome with my Togetic and it turned into charm.  I took this as a sign that he missed knowing charm.  I literally cried after seeing that, and thinking of it now is even making me emotional. 

Recently, I just got back from vacation. It was a long car ride, so I brought my DS along for the ride.  I finally opened Heart Gold version which I bought last September and started playing it.  I cannot describe the feelings I experienced watching my Spearow, who I nicknamed MR. BEAK, following me around, and react as I talked to him.  For the first time in a long time, I felt emotional about a video game again.  I'm not sure players that hadn't played the earlier games for hundreds of hours as I did would feel the same way.  Just reading messages like "MR. BEAK is trying very hard to keep up!"... Man, I can't even explain it.  Sorry for getting all cheesy. 

Sorry, I kind of lost my point, but the concept of friendship in a game that Pokemon built for me was, and still is, unlike any game before or since.

I don't think this concept is in any way childish.  It's just that as we get older we lose the imagination that we once had.  Without the nostalgic factor that Pokemon has for me, it is almost impossible for me to really build a connection with my in game companion.  But who knows?  My point regarding the concept of friendship is that it isn't an element that can be forced.  Pokemon built it because it was so simple, charming, and free. I think it is an element of game design that deserves serious consideration, but I don't think it would work if the game tried to force it.

[Bree]

I gotta agree with ya, SP, one of my favorite things about HeartGold was having your little monster follow you around. I giggled like a schoolgirl when the game told me my Onix was rolling around in the grass.

I'm kinda curious, since I've never played Ocarina of Time, but what do people think of the relationship built between Link and Epona? If I recall correctly, you first meet him as a boy and after some basic training you get to use him later as an adult. I used to ride horses as a kid, and I'd love to see a game put more into that rider-creature dynamic- even small things like needing to feed your animal or being able to pet it.

Incidentally, Shadow of the Colossus allowed you to pet your horse, and the way that they handled the horse controls made it one of my favorite games ever. You can't just run off of a cliff while on horseback- Agro can and will refuse to jump if it's dangerously high. If he gets scared, he'll throw you off and run away, but he'll always come back when you whistle for him. He feels like less of a vehicle and more like a real breathing animal- it makes a certain scene all the more touching.

[gimymblert]

You tangentially nail it, who had grow with zelda OOt wanted a pokemon OOt

[Sankar]

I'm kinda curious, since I've never played Ocarina of Time, but what do people think of the relationship built between Link and Epona?

I player Ocarina of Time after it was released and, I have to tell you, the whole game was "pretty new" in all aspects to almost everyone who've played it.
I believe most people bought the N64 were SNES users, so you can pretty much guess the impact the game had. The Free-Roaming 3D Enviroment, exploring the world with your trusty horse. Everything was very cool, very new and had a great impact.

Now, I don't think Epona was very well handled by Nintendo. She actually was controlled like a car, you would control her directly and had 'nitros' to make her run (carrots), if she hit a wall you would need to walk backwards.
It was pretty cool to use her while using the Bow and Arrow, and riding on Hyrule field was great too. But all in all, you coulnd't use her in many places, unlike Agro who is right there, at your side, almost being stomped by a Giant Colossus.

So, in short:
Epona was very cool at the time because it was new, but I didn't bond with her that much. But all in all, I don't think we would've had Shadow of the Colossus if Zelda Ocarina and Majora's weren't released.

[Bree]

Thanks! It's interesting to hear your perspective on it- now that I think about it, those were similar to my impression of Epona in Twilight Princess (which arguably was a spiritual successor to Ocarina of Time). The on-horse combat was pretty fun, especially the epic jousting duels. One of my favorite little Easter Eggs in that game was that you could talk to your horse while Link was in wolf form. She didn't say much, but it was at least something.

[s0]

I sure am glad the Pokemans games aren't more like the show, i.e. full of obnoxious characters and lame, formulaic "humor."

Idk I LOVED Pokemon as a kid but for some reason I'm not nostalgic for it at all.

[unsilentwill]

Thanks. I think my point is just starting a discussion about the importance of emotional attachment, specifically friendship helping bridge the gap between reality and game worlds.

Getting down the the details this ideas becomes very interesting. Two ideasideas come together here: agency and artificial intellegence. Agency is a philosophic concept that is being looked at by neuroscience and I think is what spurs SP9000's emotions to be as strong as they are. Children have the ability to attribute causes and intention to objects or even shapes, everything becomes a strong character that they can react to. Here's a great video on the topic, part of an amazing series, starting at 11:55.

AI on the other hand is based on characteristics of the objects that project unique personalities. What comes to mind is a recent Radio Lab episode (a phenomenal podcast that I hope you have listened to) where the idea of talking to machines is explored, and to go back to the dumb 90s, so is the Furby. The Furby's built-in gyroscope(?) let it recognize if it was upside down, and if it was for long enough it would start to cry. This sort of reaction is altogether absent in most game characters I know. Having personal preferences and desires make them more alive, as noted in the Argo example.

Making Pokémon "obnoxious" is I think an important step, if I remember right Charmander was abandoned, Bulbasaur was a loner and Squirtle was a tool but part of the joy was watching each of them grow and work together rather than in the game where they always obey no matter what. But this thread is not about wanting to make the game more like the show, that's just an example of a series where the strong attachments could be made stronger with better design theory. Great stuff so far, so let's hear more theory!

Oh and Theo play Ocarina of Time right now, what.

[gimymblert]

Actually a best show to talk about is surprisingly digimon jap version, it was surprisingly subtle and "deep" in the treatment of character compare to pokemon, only because character grew up and shift interest as they left (pass?) their digimon "toy" to younger kids. I still prefer pokemon especially the first seasons.

Also I know a lot of player around me who never finished oot when they get epona ... not because it sucks, but they were stuck by aimlessly wandering in the "empty" hyrule field which was more fun to them than finishing the game! They still come back time to time to have ride in this unfinished save to ride, or replay (or make someone else do it) the game just to unlock epona.