Hahah, I know that talk. I love Jon Blow. Very, very wise designer.
He, uh, has lower hopes for the role of story in games. He sees the
potential of games in other areas. He gave a talk with the creator of
Miegakure at some event in the last few years. In that he described
things like orthogonality in design. The talk was called, "Truth in
Game Design" or something like that. Or maybe that was just the point
of it.
He contributed the most important phrase that he has given me in that
talk. It was something like, "games exist to deliver a truth." I used
to think, "games deliver an experience." I prefer his perspective.
He likes to talk about games as a vehicle for discovery, for both the
creator and the player. He says you should find something that is
true, represent that through rules in your game, then explore that
truth and see where it takes you. Game development is like a
conversation, not a plan-and-execution.
Some of that stuff isn't original... okay, whatever. No one is
original, but I liked it a lot. It did feel fresh, and I just like Jon
Blow.
Anyway, assuming you love Jon Blow too, I'll leverage that fact for a
counter-attack. There is nothing about a story that can't be
understood and deconstructed into its constituent parts. When a
screenwriter sits down and loses his(/her) mind for 6 months straight
over a script, he(/she) is going through some, definable, mental
process. He forms relationships between ideas in his head. Maybe he
goes out and gets some new experiences. At some point he expresses
them on paper, according to the restrictions of his contract (or his
initial impulse or plan or whatever), his understanding of good movie
form, and his understanding of the perceptions of others. Each
construction is a neurological event transcribed. One idea connects
with another, and another and so on. The writer screens these ideas
using some formula, then ends up with a script.
A story is a real thing. Ideas are kind-of non-tangibles; they are
very tough to define; they are context-sensitive. It's hard to explain
them to a computer. I mean the Microsoft Office paper clip avatar is a
testament to the inability of computers to understand what I want. Or
maybe that's just Microsoft.... But they do exist. You kind of have to
define an idea using other ideas, then those ideas with other ideas,
and around and around you go. But that's the way humans work, and
humans aren't that complicated... sort-of. We're 2% genetically
different than a chimpanzee? How complicated is a chimpanzee... oh
boy....
Games are systems. You create a system, explore it, then arrive at
experiences you could not have originally projected. Ok. Let's assume
that I can take any idea and transform it into its fundamental
components. That just takes some effort and experimentation. Then I
can project those parts into the game. If the rules from the
experience transfer, then the experience I had in mind is created.
The amount of work to bring an idea over (into the game) is
substantial. Creating an experience in a computer is an order of
magnitude more complex than creating it manually; that's game
development. But, once you do bring it over, the value begins to
multiply. Mr. Blow demands that all game development should revolve
around the uncovering of truth that extends from the properties of the
game you're developing. I agree with the intention of that
demand. Stories certainly contain some kind of truth. Ideas can be
measured. We have to generate stories. We don't even have a choice.
The idea of a non generatable story is just one of those things that
we say to ourselves because generating stories is so hard it puts us
face-to-face with the infancy of our collective understanding of
computers and design theory. Though that's definitely not a knock on
anything you said. We're just really bad at expressing our ideas, even
to each other, let alone to a computer. Creating great stories
manually is a high-power job. Generating them is like a free ticket to
insanity. Who wants that?
I'm not claiming I'll generate things that will rival great books, and
replicate regularily, but I think I can top the average man-made video
game story. Throwing in the high degree of player input that comes
with any great game, I'll get an even better story. Then I'll steal
the credit for all the heavy lifting done by the players until I
overdose on cocaine and stupidity.
Story and plot are different, yes. You say player-generated plot is
the way to go. Ok, maybe this is me misunderstanding
terms.... Consider FF7. I love that game. Any FF game before 13 other
than 11, and maybe not 1 will do. I played FF7 at literally the
perfect time in my life, like a lot of kids, so just assume that it
was incredible. In FF7 I felt a strong degree of control over what was
happening. The plot was largely out of my hands. There were a couple
of points where I could swing events, like controlling who I dated at
the Golden Saucer, whether I got picked by the gangster boss to be his
sex service, when/if I got Yuffie etc. Those things mattered, a lot,
but they weren't the core of the experience. The key plot points were
out of my hands. All the major things happen in a pre-scripted order,
with cutscenes and awesome things. In Skyrim for example, I control
the plot massively, sort-of.... Well, at least I get to control the
order of things. That game doesn't really have a plot to me. It was
more like a dungeon crawl in an art gallery. In FF7 I felt I had more
control over the story than I did in Skyrim.
Earthbound, Secret of Mana, Skies of Arcadia, FF7, they're all the
same; the plot happened, I watched. In-between major events I did two
things: explore and/or prepare-for/engage-in battle. The exploration
was my opportunity to control the pace of the game. In FF7 I chose how
I navigated the environment. As I walked to the edge of one screen, or
the invisible boundary of an area, the camera angle shifted, to
another, often well chosen, shot of me. I was directing the pace of
the cinematic. Maybe I was in a hurry, or taking-in the scenery, or
scouring for treasure and enterable rooms. In town I could choose who
I talked to, how long I wandered around for. I could risk triggering
the next event by hitting the action button in high risk
areas. Sometimes I would just run back and forth between two
screens. Sometimes I alternated between the decision-making required
for shopping and wandering. Sometimes I was compelled to move forward
because that's what felt right. By the time the next major event had
happened I'd invested a good deal more in the character since the
last major event.
Cloud performed the same animations over and over. I looked at static
backgrounds. I read some text that didn't change, some of it
twice. Maybe I missed some. It felt like it was me playing. It wasn't
my friend playing, it was me. I remember there was a guy who loved
FF. He was the only one I knew who did. He was older than me. I
remember him sitting down at my PC and handling the controls for a
bit, obviously more naturalized to the environment - I had just
started my game recently - and I thought, "wow, he's Cloud too. I
didn't consider that." Of course it was obvious, I wasn't
brain-damaged, but it still felt novel watching him run around as my
character. It wasn't an invasion of my privacy. He wasn't controlling
my story. He was temporarily telling his own in a game world that
looked just like mine, that I was moving around in 30 seconds earlier.
What does this mean? I have no idea. The power for a player to tell a
story is very strong, and he/she doesn't need much to do it. FF7
offered very little control. Really you could decide where you looked,
how long you were there for, and when you moved the story along. That
was it, that and fighting, a relatively simple mechanic. There weren't
any complicated algorithms. The computer didn't understand anything
about me. The game was designed just so that I could exercise some
control but never break from what had already been decided would
happen.
Earthbound made me feel like I was controlling a story. It was a lot
like Half-Life 2 in that way (I haven't played the original). Both
these games are good examples. In Earthbound I felt like I was
discovering the plot myself for most of the game. Half-Life 2 was a
little more obvious, but the flexibility in the approach to combat was
enough to make up for it. Also I was very young when I played
Earthbound. The Mother team just laid things out in such a way that
you were guided instead of fed. They populated the world with little
vignettes that massaged you into the correct mindset. It was like
undergoing suggestive hypnosis. You know it's happening when it is but
you don't care; you play your role.
There is a big gap between that experience and one that is totally
under the control of the player. One of the assumptions that the
Open-World RPG makes, typically, is that a player needs to be able to
do anything to feel like they're expressing themselves. But this isn't
true. A child who has parents that create no rules is often unhappy. A
child with too many rules is unhappy in a different way. The best home
has the right rules. Children need the structure that guide them to
the areas in life where they can express themselves and have a good
experience. The modern Western RPG is like the lax home, and the JRPG
is like the strict home. Every other game with a strong story
component pulls from one of these two poles. Minecraft has very little
structure, Dark Souls has a ton.
. Yes it's a complicated problem. I don't think it will take genius,
just uh... persistence, something like that, maybe a little more.
So here comes the kicker. One of the most compelling experiences you
have in gaming is when the narrative, whether loosely structured like
in Minecraft, or heavenly spooned to you like in FF13, lines up with
your personal experience in the mechanics. In FF6 for example, or "3"
on my cartridge, the game felt
so real partially because I had
control (in the same way I described having it in 7), but also because
the battles were so intense. I had never had to think and focus and
refine my strategies so consistently in a game before. I'd just sit
and sit and sit, and master. I'd grow, right in front of my own eyes,
with sweat slipping the controller in my plams, my eyes glued to the
screen, and my thumbs bouncing buttons like piano keys. I would
overcome what had seemed like an insurmountable challenge, through
ingenuity, persistence, talent, and growth. Through battles I related
to the characters in one critical way: struggle. I struggled when they
did. When the rest of the story played out I was so much more in-tune
with what was happening. When mechanics and plot combine, the
experience explodes. Players are story generating machines. They pour
creative content into their own imaginations and the machines in front
of them non-stop. There is a potential for story creation in games
that far exceed any other medium, because games are collaborative.
Aside, think about the power of mod communities. Woah, what if you
could harness and channel that into a single product? Right now it's
a wild-west with mods, or a Mr. Rogers with user-gen content
distribution.
Counter-Strike was a community creation. Hell, indies are a community
creation.
Okay. Where most games go wrong, when mixing story and gameplay, is
not lining up the feelings produced by one with the feelings produced
by the other. They just don't do it. It's not like it can't be
done. It just doesn't happen. Let me name a few games off the top of
my head who do do this... hmm, Zelda, Metroid, Mario. Uh
oh. Coincidence?
You know, players give excellent feedback about how engaged they are
at any given moment. There's a lot a game can do to determine how its
generated patterns are impacting the player. There's a lot of
potential there.
This is actually the kind of storytelling device that I think
you're talking about: Rules that involve interacting with characters
and the world, and a plot that evolves from that. But I think you'll
have a very difficult time letting a computer decide those
rules. Without some kind of authorial input on the rules of my story,
my plot becomes a lot less meaningful to me as a player.
I wonder what the best way to describe it is. What you've said isn't
inaccurate. The plot isn't something that generates out of
nothing. Minecraft is totally free-form. That's not what I'm thinking
about. The game I have in mind has a general structure. There are
transformations. Imagine you are a rock star putting on a concert. You
show up with a vague idea of what you are going to do, and you
improvise. You react to the crowd, you let it out from the hip. That's
where it's at. You still have songs, your songs have structure; you
just understand them well enough to bend them to your will only using
your intuition. There's no other way to be on stage, unless you're a
big giant loser.
The kinds of intuitive relationship you have with each piece of your
music can be coded into a game. The story will have structure and
flex. I'll shove in themes and ideas that I love, and the system will
find it's way from one point to the next, maintaining the
relationships that I built, and taking into account what the player
has to say. I wouldn't provide any more flexibility than what could be
handled by the AI.
Also, players will learn to compose music. ... oh shit.
The computer doesn't decide rules. I decide the rules. When you write
a script for a movie the first thing you do is spend a shit-load of
time coming up with ideas. I've read that 5-10% of the time in writing
a screenplay is actually writing the screenplay. Nearly all of the
time is pre-work, and the rest is revision. There's this mountain in
the writer's head that doesn't hit the page. The dialogue is just the
tip of the iceberg. Then the director, then the actors, then everyone
else interprets the finished thing. They take those iceberg tips and
build their own associations down into their own minds. At various
points things need to be brought together. The team communicates with
each other and the writer, looking for clarification on how everyone
perceives what he's written. They activiate all his unwritten
knowledge at one point or another. Ideas ripple out from his mind into
the rest of the team, until they're eventually hardened into a final
thing.
The writer has the ability to do rewrites. He can express his ideas to
suit different directors, or the various needs of a single one, and a
million other constraints that stream in. So much never makes it into
the movie. The writer in a way is a collaborative story teller. He
starts with a piece of a thing, a basic structure, then bends it to
blend it with input from the much more powerful voice that is the rest
of the team. What if his mind was in a computer? All the rules he
spent developing in his mind could be put into a machine. Then we'd
get the same result, except reproducible, digitally. Oh yeah....
Note. Writers have a hard time collaborating. You really have to
communicate with someone else to share script duties. The process is
too personal. Look at the diversity of film, the lack of
diversity. Script writing is hard. You don't see companies of writers
for a reason. They only work in teams for some tv shows, and those
come with a packaged structure. If you could illustrate your ideas in
a technical form, it would be possible for two minds to build a story,
or 3, or 4.... go, goo.
There will be a strong sense of authorial input. It will be possible
to generate predictable player behaviour and have the game play itself
if I wanted it to (say for testing). In other words, there will be a
definable median playthrough, from which every other play through will
vary from in some way. You can think of Doom as an analogy if you'd
like. In Doom, if you were to draw out a player progression graph, the
player's play space would expand and expand, climax, then contracts to
a single point, representing the next locked door, or necessary
entryway, then repeat. Imagine the same graph in n-dimensions with a
little more variety in progression. There are abstract "gates" in a
sense, that are defined in rough ways. Some things need to happen
before other things, and so on.
Mmm. Also, since everything is procedurally generated, the quality of
the graphics can be scaled dynamically and context-senstivitiely, if
that has any meaning to you, or anybody. Goodbye loading times.
This is turning into my diary.
Ohh, I'm watching that Jon Blow vid. I had forgotten, in this one he
fights for the potential of story-based games. He did a talk a year
ago - one of his most recent - where he seemed a lot less positive
about it, though a lot more confident in himself. It was also during
that talk that he gave the single best answer that I have ever heard
to how to make good educational games. The particular question was
framed as calculus I think.
Note, he talks a lot about mechanical experience and narrative
experience blending. He calls it story meaning and dynamical
meaning. Those are good terms too. His biggest knock is that it's too
difficult to predict the development of a creative product to stabily
develop a logical one beside it (i.e. software). A small change in the
mechanics can have sweeping interpretations by the player, totally
destroying the narrative meaning; and a small change in the story can
have enormous costs in re-developing all the code to match
it. Software implementations of creative ideas are exponentially less
malleable than ideas on a page... but they're exponentially more
productive once they stabilize. Oh the ironies....
The solution is to develop the story-line and mechanics in tandem,
retaining flexibility in both. Plan: find the best summary of the
desired experience, implement the minimal narrative and mechanical
structure to deliver this experience, repeat. Grow the experience out.
When I say procedural, I mean everything: the sound effects, the
music, the story, the animations, the characters, everything. 'Tis
necessary... well, sort-of. The alternative is just a lot more
complicated to talk about.
God, I love Daft Punk.
You know, I've never played a Metal Gear game. My god. Who am I?
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