Playing for Dramatic Effect

I’ve been hanging out in a Dragon Age discord lately (nerd), partially because I got re-obsessed with the storyworld, but also because I’ve been curious how others respond to and think about the games. One of my most interesting observations has been that some players, perhaps many, play this kind of game fundamentally different from the way that I do.

“This kind of game”: The Dragon Age games are role-playing games that allow the player to make hundreds of choices throughout the game that impact the outcome of various events and color the manner in which the central story unfolds. 

When I play these games, I tend to play a neutral-good character, which aligns with my general moral compass. “Well, others play it evil, that’s not that big of deal,” you may say. True, and you’re right. It’s not a big deal. The alignment or morality of our different roles is not a fundamental difference. But the reason why we may play those roles is.

At any given point in the story, I could make a choice that my companions will react to. My companions are all different characters with different moralities, motivations, and interests. Some will agree with me, and some will not. The game displays those changes: “Morrigan disapproves -5. Wynne approves +15.” There is a part of me that just wants everyone to like me, because, of course, getting to 100 is the best goal. Get that A! But this doesn’t typically overcome my moral choices. Even if Morrigan disapproves, I will likely still make the choice. In fact, maybe because she disapproves, I know I made a choice that more aligns with my own moral compass. My goal in that interaction is not to maximize my points with Morrigan – it’s to do the right thing. Sometimes I may play a character who is less of a good person, and I will make choices I think are consistent with that character. In both cases, I want to make the choice according to the moral compass of my character

Another reason I may make a choice is because I have an outcome in mind, and I want to try to make the choices that will lead to that outcome. Perhaps I can predict in a situation that there is a possibility of a neutral outcome, where no one dies and no one’s emotions overcome them. That is the outcome I want, and I will gauge the possible choices I have by whether or not I think they will achieve that outcome. This is more of a narrative reason for making choices. I want the story to go in a certain way, so I choose options I think will lead to that result. This could be that I want an event to conclude favorably for the elves, or it could be that I want to romance Morrigan (in which case, this may trump a “good” moral compass).
But there’s another reason for making choices that I had not considered.

While listening to players discuss the games on Discord, I noticed that frequently, they would mention that a particular choice would have the most dramatic effect. Someone may talk about their choices and say, “I chose to romance Solas, because I thought it would have the biggest effect on the story to come.” [Constrast with: I chose to romance Solas, because he’s a sexy elven scholar.] They don’t know what the effect is, but they value an effect of any kind more than no effect. The value to them is not the morality or the outcome, but the drama itself. “I play evil, because I think those choices usually lead to the most interesting outcomes.” Their reason is also a narrative one, but not directed. Their interest is in storytelling as such, storytelling defined as dramatic. Consider this conversation:

The players here are discussing a choice in Dragon Age: Inquisition. At this point in the game, the player is with two characters and they must abandon one of them in the world of spirits (where they will likely die). The two characters are 1) Hawke, the main character the player played in Dragon Age 2, and 2) a Warden, either a companion from Dragon Age: Origins or another. (This variance is due to the choices players can make in these other games. Thus, 3 of the 4 possible characters they see are likely to be emotionally significant to the player.

Above we see the first player saying that since their Hawke has lost everything, perhaps they will leave him behind also, just for the most dramatic resolution to that story. Lower, a player says that they can’t choose the neutral Warden, because it isn’t fun enough. Both of these rationales are directed toward the most dramatic effect. Next, a player says they made the choice because of what their character would have done, similar to my first reason listed above. And lastly, the final player makes the choice due to their reasoning about the storyworld and what they thought would be the best outcome for everyone, which is a decision made according to a moral compass.

I realized that whereas I play with an outlook toward how I want the story to go according to some moral compass, some players play for surprises. I want to resolve situations in the best way for all parties (usually this means having to persuade everyone to be less emotional, so max that Coercion skill asap), whereas they don’t really care what happens to everyone as long as it is interesting. The player above is willing to abandon themselves essentially, simply for the drama! They expect the game to allow them to experience an interesting, dramatic story, and they judge the game’s possible choices by their potential for dramatic effect.

I don’t mean to say I want a predictable experience. I still want my choices to matter, and I expect there to be some ambiguity in those choices (it may be the “right” choice, but it is difficult and/or has unintended consequences). But I don’t think about my play as a way to generate drama. I expect the drama to exist by virtue of the choices having been designed to be variably interesting. I expect that every choice has an interesting effect, and I do not judge those based on the extent to which they are dramatic. They are all dramatic; how they differ is in the particular quality or shade of that drama (moral/immoral, micro/macro, etc.).

I’m curious whether this observation would have any impact on how I would design these choices. Even before considering their motivations for choice selection, I would have thought that every choice needed to be interesting to some extent (or else it would not matter). Yet, I think a frame of drama rather than morality is a better way to think of choices, because it can avoid the trap of designing everything around a schema of good/neutral/evil (thinking SWTOR right now). It’s also a good reminder that some unpredictability is necessary in order to make choices interesting, even if the unpredictability doesn’t change the expected outcome.

On Office Hours

I’ve been diving back into my research, and with that expedition into that part of my mind, I have come upon many memories of my time in graduate school. I have some regrets, but not of grad school itself. I don’t regret getting sick (because no matter what they say, depression is not our fault). I don’t regret not trying to enter the faculty career track (I would have failed then, both logistically/physically and mentally). I don’t regret a heart-wrenching and monumental decision I made, one that looks clearly wrong from the outside, but was clearly right from the inside. (“All the alternatives were worse,” she says wryly.)

I regret not learning how to grad school until much too late. The prime example of this in my mind is office hours.

Not only was I a first-generation student, but I was homeschooled through grade school, and by the time I was an undergrad, I was a mother. At no time have I ever been a traditional student, so my models and norms of behavior come from odd places. The only thing I knew about office hours came from that scene in Indiana Jones, where a throng of horny undergrads mob his office door, shouting what are surely vapid questions. He avoids them by jumping out a window.

From Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (couldn’t find a high quality clip)

It wasn’t until my 2nd or 3rd year of graduate school that I learned what office hours are really for. I had a professor that term who everyone thought was, honestly, kind of a bitch. She was not kind, not helpful, not interesting, and not inspiring. It was probably 2-3 weeks before the end of semester when she emailed me and said that she was surprised and disappointed that I had not visited her to discuss my paper.

Imagine how perplexed I felt upon receiving this. You mean, it’s normal for someone to seek advice, even before they know if they’ve gotten something wrong? It’s acceptable to take up a professor’s time with probably-foolish questions, even when it’s not assigned? It’s encouraged to grapple with ignorance together; I’m not expected to solve everything on my own? Even this woman who seemed dismissive and annoyed by us was asking to help me. I remember it feeling like everything was less hard, the way you feel when your medicine works and you can get up and work without dragging chains along with you.

Jacob Marley in A Christmas Carol

After the amazement came embarrassment, and I felt apologetic. She must have felt that I thought I didn’t need her advice, that I was arrogant and dismissive of her expertise. Maybe all my professors had always thought that about me. In reality, it never occurred to me until then to visit a professor for anything more than a clarifying question.

Eventually, she was a member of my dissertation committee and probably the most helpful member on it. I think that she, more than any of the others, understood that I needed a kind of guidance that was different from most of the other graduate students. I think she was able to see that (most of) my missteps were due to nothing but an ignorance of culture and expectation.

Maybe even this regret is not my fault, but it’s hard to break the habit.

In Love with a Dread Wolf

I finished Dragon Age: Inquisition (again) and Trespasser (for the first time) this week. Somehow, every time I play this game, I fall in love with Solas. And I mean matter of factly. I don’t just have my character romance him as the game allows me. I actually feel love in my real self. This time, it was particularly strong, and I’ve been puzzled by it.

Solas is the kind of villain you want to forgive. In this way, he reminds me of Medea, and perhaps this is partly why he fascinates me so. Medea is a woman I sympathize with and perhaps cheer for as I read. Who among us hasn’t been mistreated by such a man, one who so cavalierly tossed aside the woman who loved him? She is a victim of injustice around her, yet a vocal advocate for herself. We side with her in her battle of words with Jason, and we also thirst for vengeance. But the vengeance she chooses is a vengeance that horrifies us. Like a ghost in the corner of your vision, you can almost understand her choice, and you almost want to. But never quite.

After 110 hours (this time) of playing this game with Solas at my side, I know him well enough to understand his choices and almost justify them, participate in them, in fact. The game is quick to remind me that, actually, destroying the world is bad and our only choice is to fight him. But for me, a female elf, it’s more complicated than that.

Long ago, before any history humans could remember, elves lived in a world where matter and spirit were intertwined. Wonders we can hardly imagine were everyday life. But what seemed like a utopia had that one flaw common to us all – the heart. The leaders became corrupt. They enslaved their own people, and eventually murdered one of their own because she was kind and caring to the people. But one person stood against those rulers. He created secret havens for escaped slaves, and he taught them how to fight for freedom. In time, he led a slave rebellion, but in order to overthrow the ruling elites, he had to cleave reality from itself, thus creating the world we have now. Earth, the world of matter, and the Fade, the world of spirits.

That Pyrrhic victory for the elves destroyed their world and way of life, but gave them freedom. It was a choice Solas says he made because “all the alternatives were worse.” To him, freedom is worth the loss of everything else. But now, that freedom too is long lost, and once again, elves are slaves to cruel rulers, silenced and sidelined for existing. A desire for freedom and a vengeance against the unjust is natural.  And this time, he doesn’t just want to give them freedom. He wants to restore the world that was to give them the perfect harmony with nature they had so long ago. When it comes time for him to say this world is also worth destroying to achieve that goal, I can almost agree.

Solas stands for the downtrodden. He is the hero of the enslaved, the silenced, the ridiculed, the mistreated. A person like this you may expect to be kind, but he is not kind. Nor is he cruel. Any action may be the right action if it results in a better world. When you bring a problem to the Dread Wolf, you may get an unexpected solution. He is too clever for a mundane response to injustice, too smart to not see around the corners. The world is grey for Solas, and even enduring love cannot shift his commitment to the freedom and happiness of his People at whatever cost.

Sounds noble, right? And he is. He is a loyal friend, someone who despises authority but respects a kind leader. Despite his dissembling, he has integrity, refusing to more than kiss his lover when she didn’t know the truth of who he was. He has regret for mistakes and a fierce devotion to knowledge.

So why is he a villain?

We think of the destruction of the world as necessarily bad because it inherently requires mass annihilation of life. You can’t simply remove the Veil, changing the very nature of reality, and expect many survivors, even if doing so in the interest of others. His plans only have room for his own People, and everyone else is as worthless as the dust they’re made of. Even his own life is of value as only a sacrifice for the freedom of the elves. It’s all so inequitable, you know. Why should the elves matter more than anyone else?

But I wonder. Has the status quo resulted in any less of a loss of life? Centuries of enslavement, violence, rape, disease, and murder. Residents of Thedas have been content to allow this and in so doing have allowed a mass annihilation to happen, slowly, over time. Have any fewer people been murdered in this slow march of apathy? Have we, in our disregard, shown that we think we matter more than others?

We aren’t uncomfortable with the number or the loss of life itself. It’s the optics we don’t like. It’s easier for us to look past the slow pileup of death. Our own world has poverty and disease, violence and murder in spades. Would we be willing to save them if it meant destroying ourselves if we had the chance? Or would we rather let the lives pass slowly, as through an hourglass, believing that one day change will come, believing we are doing as much as we can. Perhaps beyond optics, it’s simply that this time it isn’t in our favor. We are quick to say that you can’t value one life over another, so you can’t destroy the world for your own people! But we implicitly value one life over another by continuing to be content in a world of injustice. The lives of those we love hang heavier on the scales.

In some ways, perhaps Solas has the right of it. If freedom is truly an ideal above others, then the loss of everything else is of little consequence. For those who have been content to enslave or who have been implicitly complicit in silence, why would we choose their lives over those of others? Why do we think it is worse to destroy the world when we’ve been content to let the elves languish in their ghettos and die as slaves. We have kept the world from them, for no reason but selfishness. Why does it seem like Solas is worse than us for destroying everyone indiscriminately at once when we have done so with discrimination forever?

Perhaps it’s a false choice. I hope we can find a way to give us all a better world. But mostly, I just want to save Solas, because the lives we love seem worth more than others.

Cities on Wheels

The other day, I was about to take a long drive and wanted an audiobook to entertain me on the way. I opened up Libby, the hugely convenient Library app, and searched the sci-fi category. The most intriguing title of those available was one called “Scrivener’s Moon” by Philip Reeve.

Little did I know that this YA author is actually quite popular. Friends told me that one of his series is being made into a film directed by Peter Jackson. Pop culture and I don’t hang out much. But that aside, the story made me think of cities and nature and the naturalness or not of engineering.

One of the main themes in this series is that of the mobile city. It’s a tiered city that is built on enormous machines that power its engines and drive its wheels forward across the Earth. All of London, in this book, is being torn down and rebuilt as the first “Traction City.”

Confession Corner: I play a Facebook game

Remember back when all our mothers came on Facebook and started playing Farmville? Well around that same time, Zynga released a game called Cafe World. It was a game about having a restaurant, making various dishes, and keeping your customers happy. I played it for awhile, because I was fascinated by the trend of social games at the time, and despite cooking like once a month in real life, I loooove cooking in games.

That was over five years ago. Fast forward to today when the landscape has changed. Facebook games still exist, but they aren’t really a thing anymore. Now it’s all about mobile. And mobile isn’t about farms and clicking (ok, well, a lot of it is actually) – it’s about puzzles and math and beauty and “real” games.

Except if you take a look at my tablet, it has Monument Valley and Star Wars: Uprising and Fallout Shelter, sure. But it also has a group of little icons labeled “Cooking.”

Recently, I really wanted to play a simple cooking game again. There’s something so satisfying about setting a dish to cook, coming back a couple hours later, and making a whole restaurant of people happy with my amazing Jalapeno-Bacon Poppers. And what’s more, it feels productive (even though it’s not), and it consumes my attention for just long enough to stop any other stressy thoughts from entering my brain. Just get the ingredients, choose what dishes to make, let the pot boil, as the cheesy music plays.

It feels a little like the gift of a Lotus-Eater in that I can waste so much time and feel so peaceful doing it.

The game I’ve mostly played (though I’ve downloaded FIVE (5!!!) variations on the cooking sim) is Restaurant Story 2 by Storm8, a company that makes a host of simple Match-3 games, casino games, and various other little simulation games for mobile. I don’t think very many people play these kinds of cooking sims anymore – if you look on the AppStore, most cooking games are all variations of Diner Dash now. Apparently, peacefully cooking over time wasn’t frantic enough for most mobile users or maybe the crap is coming to its end.

“We feel like we are participating in a great social idea, but we are truly isolated and lonely, and in the end, we are wasting our time.  Our brains don’t naturally realize that what we’re doing is worthless, because these things are by their very design trying to trick us into thinking we are being productive and social.  I say kill the crap actively, because evolution can make mistakes.”

What keeps me coming back to these games though is the quest system. The reason I stopped playing Cafe World years ago was because they created quests (fun!) but made them impossible to achieve without spending money (not fun). I’m an achiever, and I want to have the satisfaction of achieving something on my own, so naturally this did not appeal to me. Now today, in Restaurant Story 2, there are occasional events that require you to cook or master certain recipes, acquire ingredients, and accomplish certain objectives by a strict end date. THIS GETS ME. It’s possible to achieve these goals, but only with some diligence. If you only log in once a day, you will end far from the goal. So there’s that push to succeed at a challenging (in terms of time management at least) but obtainable goal, and then the end reward, which is usually a new recipe to cook. Who doesn’t love new recipes??

I sometimes wonder if these things appeal to me so much because the path to reach them is so clear. In my real life, work is about strategy and decision-making in a changing landscape. Will my choices impact people’s lives? Yes. Will they help them? I hope so, but I don’t know. In my personal life, I’m constantly juggling health, family, desire, and sleep. I never quite feel like I’ve figured it out, but I’m always trying to get somewhere, get better, get smarter, get a break. To have a goal that I can achieve with just a little persistence feels so achingly good that I truly do feel some guilt for feeling it.

So yes, there’s my guilty gaming pleasure these days. I mostly share it to give a fuller impression of the kind of person who plays a game like this – not just your non-gamer (grand)mothers – but also to raise a little flag for those mindless social games that can still play a meaningful role in someone’s life to feel better about myself.

Handholding your Learning, or what FFXIV has to do with my (real-life) job

I’ve played games since I was a toddler, and I’ve been teaching either myself or others since not long after that. Games and teaching/learning are both intricately woven into who I am, so rather than try to separate them, I’ve decided to embrace this delightful marriage. I’m starting today by talking about Final Fantasy XIV in the context of education, technology, and the human process of learning.

Much of my educational work has recently centered on online learning, including massive open online courses (MOOCs) in the form of Coursera or edX, where millions of individuals take university courses for free. In these classes, video lectures guide students through content while quizzes and exams test their progress. What does this have to do with games? Well, if you’ve ever heard the term “theme park” applied (negatively) to an MMO, I’m about to explain just what MOOCs and other online education platforms similar to them have in common with MMOs.

Cities: Skylines has politics?!

Cities:Skylines is the latest darling to hit the PC market. Everyone, or just most people, is calling it “the SimCity we deserved.” It’s a classic city-sim with the familiar task of zoning land to balance residential/commercial/industrial demands, while keeping basic services operating in your city before it implodes due to your own negligence, or well, your own negligence, since there are no disasters in this game. It’s fun, has a robust modding community already, and scratches the city-building itch without all that EA bad feeling creeping in.

Where we’re going, we don’t need straight roads.

So what’s wrong with it?

It’s not that it’s wrong, necessarily, just that it has some political assumptions that are too simplistic. Yes, that’s right, a city-building sim has politics.

This is my dissertation

It’s raw and it’s ugly and I feel shame when I read it, but dammit, it’s mine, and I made it.

These ideas may not be presented as beautifully, as clearly, as completely as they could be, but I still think these thinks, and I would love feedback on them.

Story in, around, and of games is still my greatest love. 

I present to you:

The Princess Is in Another Castle: Multi-Linear Stories in Oral Epic and Video Games

On Proteus

I opened my eyes to a sea full of sea. Looking around, I spotted a faint outline of trees and made my way toward them. The island was lush, and I thought, full of life. Trombone-plants and horn-weasels dotted the landscape. Leaves fell, sun rose. Proteus is about many things, but for me, it was about life or the absence of it. It’s about making meaning because we must, because we can, because otherwise, we would close our eyes and stop.

In Proteus, life is all around you. Rushing down the hills, you find creatures who flit away, owls who fly off when they catch your glance, and dragonflies whirring and buzzing. The sounds of life are all around you. Creatures blow whistles and owls sing out their whoo in the night. The fireflies are bells and the lights a symphony. I saw gravestones and roses. Did I plant them? Had my family died here?

I found a house seemingly abandoned, but shut tight. Was it mine? I found broken trees that looked like castles, and totems of animals high on the hills. Had I built those?

I found drum-beetles marking the beat of their march through the muck. I found mushrooms who could jump further than I could. I couldn’t jump at all. In fact, I’m not sure how I moved. I moved through the water, but I didn’t swim. I moved over hills, but I didn’t walk. I came up to the house’s door, but I couldn’t knock. Surely there was something to find in this beautiful land. A path I had ignored or a side of the house I hadn’t tried. Perhaps there was some other island out to sea, and I was just on the wrong one.

My search for something ended in the realization that for all the goals I constructed, the names I created, and the stories I told, I was nothing. I made no sounds. Was I even alive? Why did I keep moving? Because there was nothing else for me to do. Why did I follow the stars? Because there was nothing else I prescribed enough meaning to. In an open world, waiting to be explored, I followed the signs. I needed the signs. The trombone-plants made their song and needed no signs. The horn-weasels hopped out their melodies and needed no signs. The stars, the stars, those malicious keepers of time, led me on to my eventual path into nowhere. Or so I could say. But really, I made meaning because I needed it. Because I lacked it. I made meaning because I wasn’t alive.

Post-mortem: Storydeck

Monday, Storydeck: Ella launched, a game project I’ve been involved in for awhile now. It’s a bit early for a post-mortem, but I need to parse and share some of the lessons I’ve learned through this project.

It began about 18 months ago when I met up with my collaborator Ian Millington and began throwing around my ideas. With his help and input, we went through a few different versions of the game and eventually settled on this simple rendition for iOS.

I started out wanting to make a game that experimented with the ideas in my dissertation in which I talk about storytelling in games and offer a model for narrative in games and some other media. Storydeck was a way for me to play through the dissertation, in a way, and understand the workings of story from a different perspective. It was also my first real design project. I played with game design when I was quite young, back in the days of BBS’s and door games (if you remember those), but I never completed anything until now.

There are a few lessons I’ve learned, so in an attempt to be organized for once, I’ll go through them one topic at a time. I’m writing this up mid-morning quickly to kind of clear my head, so this is hardly an exhaustive list.

1. Making a game to understand my own work

This seems odd to most of my dissertation committee and likely many others around me. The typical response is “what do you mean, you ’made’ it?” I think though it’s been one of the most helpful projects I’ve engaged in. I’m able to look at my model in practice, but not only from my perspective as a scholar, but also from the perspective of a designer, a writer, and a servant to my users. This is also very problematic though. How do I justify to my committee the time I spent on it? How do I write it up? How do I use it to communicate something when I can’t make them play it the way I can make them read the dissertation? (Or at least pretend that they have read it).

2. Users

I often tell my students that writing is a tool for communication and all the lessons we have about argumentation, clarity, and concision have the goal of communication in mind. I’ve learned through this project that games are a means for communication as well. This is I suppose a no-brainer, but I found myself making the mistake of thinking of the game as a construct I was creating. An object of study and little more. As soon as it reached the hands of others though, this is no longer the case. It’s now something that potentially communicates something. Whether that is simply an emotion or a story or some moral axiom depends on the game I suppose, but there’s certainly something there that I missed when I was designing this. And it’s the fact that games are a medium between myself and my users, among other things. What am I trying to say? And how can I use a game to say it? Am I succeeding? It’s not a matter of vocabulary or style – it’s a matter of those things in terms of game language. Mechanics. Art. Pacing. Difficulty. Objectives. Rewards. Etc.

3. It’s a game.

This may be the most obvious of all, but I’m reminded continually post-release that what I made is a game. It’s not a chapter in my dissertation or a piece of art on the wall. It’s a game. Yes, it tells a story and storytelling is much of the action, but underneath all that it’s a game and it needs to be judged as a game. Too often I focus so much on story, ever reminding others to be mindful that story is just part of a game and often inconsequential to the game, but apparently I need to remind myself that more often as well. I can tell stories in any number of media – why am I using a game to do so? What’s special about this? How can my story better highlight the game and vice versa? I tend to think of story as something existing beyond the text it is told in, but in the process of the telling, the medium used comes into being as well. A symbiotic relationship forms that can either be a healthy and beautiful mutualism or else an imbalanced and abusive parasitism. I need to be more mindful of the game as partner in that relationship.

4. Design

As my first finished design project, I learned so much about the iterative process and various questions I need to ask myself throughout creation. Ian always asked me, “Well, is this fun?” and I knew that was important and I did think of it, but I was so caught up in my own scholarly questions that I didn’t pay enough attention to what made it fun. It was fun to make. I was having fun and I let that take over my ability to judge whether the post-design engagement with the game would be fun. (For the record, I do have fun playing it! But, I needed to think more about this earlier in the process.)

But even more important I think, like I said in #2, I’ve realized that I’m somewhat a novice in this kind of communication. I may be a decent writer when I put some effort into it, but that is mostly possible from years of practice. I’m quite a newcomer to the art of design – this is exciting because it means I have so much to discover and improve on, but it’s also frightening in a way. At this point in my life, there are few things I love that I haven’t already put a lot of time into learning and improving on. Pushing myself down a new path like this is daunting, but also – thrilling. It humbles me and that is a bittersweet lesson I continually take pleasure in learning.