Is Design a Performance?

GDC was a few weeks ago now, but it’s taken me this long to finally edit and finish this post. Forgiveness begged.

At GDC this year, a couple of the talks I found particularly inspiring, the first by Ian Bogost. In his view, authorship doesn’t mean you necessarily tell a story – you simply provide the backdrop and allow the player to discover themes and meaning within it. His example is a poem by Ezra Pound, but it also hearkens back to what I posted last time. The author provides the location for adventure but what happens there is up to the hero-bard.

The apparition of these faces in the crowd; Petals on a wet, black bough. –Ezra Pound

Yoshio Sakamoto of Nintendo has a different philosophy about the relationship between authors and players. He sees emotion and experience as something to be constructed ever so meticulously. With his four elements of creation (mood, timing, foreshadowing, and contrast), he attempts to “control audience reaction“.

This terminology of an “audience” sparks questions. Rather than creating something for people to play from more of a gift or service approach, Sakamoto is performing for an audience. A design built for an audience versus one built for players is going to be very different, and one may not sound like a design for games at all. However, how much control do designers ever truly have and how much freedom do their players? Are players that different from an audience, albeit an interactive one?

These design philosophies are perhaps not as effective as they may appear. A carefully designed narrative flow that attempts to anticipate audience reaction can be thwarted by restarts, foreknowledge (from wikis or the like), mental state, environment of play, etc. An entirely abstracted one can simply result in confusion and frustration rather than providing the discovery and wonder the designer intended.

Bogost isn’t advocating a completely freeform approach, but he does speak of the author-designer’s job as one of creating “wonder instead of clarity”. The player’s job is more to excavate the author’s ideas and themes rather than to be told them. But are players qualified to be narrative archaeologists? Or rather, are there a few who do the dirty work of excavation while most wander through the museum reading wall plaques?

I’d like to think of myself as a narrative archaeologist, but I don’t actually think I am. Something like Oblivion which is very open and allows for freedom of experience leaves me feeling lost. I need some kind of guidance to allow me to fully enter the world and then have a meaningful experience. To go back to our archaeology metaphor, I need a ready-made site and the tools (coupled with A/C and cold beer) if I’m going to discover anything. An X to mark the spot wouldn’t hurt either.

Does this mean that players like me need an entirely scripted experience? No. There is still room for interactive cooperation between author-designer and player but it exists on a continuum between free-form and script. Creating something that is successful for such a broad audience is challenging, if not impossible.

Know your audience.

Advertisements

Modern Epic, Modern Odysseus

Sid Meier gave his keynote at GDC yesterday (a nice wrapup is here). At the end, he talks about how the very many genres and styles of games today can all be “encapsulated” in the idea of an Epic Journey. It’s the designer’s job to make this journey an epic (and fun) one.

To a classicist, the words “epic journey” cannot help but bring to mind dear Odysseus. There have been other epic journeys of course, Dante’s or that of Aeneas, but they have their little seed in Odysseus. He is the epic hero of journeys par excellence.

Odysseus is now enclosed in print. His journey, regardless of its many manifestations in sculpture, film, and later literature, is based in an unchanging text. We can read of him as often as we like, but the story isn’t going to change.

He didn’t start this way. Odysseus was a figure of oral narrative. He was a hero of the Trojan War who had his own skills (trickery, oratory, etc.) and his own particular characteristics and motivations as a character, but he was not a finished work, enclosed in a tomb of text. He lived. He was still being created all of the time. Bards could extend his adventures, add details to his character, create new relationships, etc. Depending on whom you heard a story of Odysseus from and which story it was, you could be meeting very different sides of this Odysseus character. In fact, you might only hear of him in passing during a telling of Achilles.

This ongoing oral process of literary creation is seemingly lost to our culture today. We read stories from books. The only oral ones we expect to be surprised by are ones involving monster fish. However, there still are individual representations of adventures that take place in the same narrative framework.

I speak of course of certain kinds of games, particularly RPGs and MMOs. In these, the telling of stories of heroes is not enclosed in text or any other form of media. It has its limitations of course – there is a lore of the world, there are set dialogue options, etc., but the player-author is free to create and tell their version of what happened when Arthas fell, for example, or when the gates of Dol Guldur were breached. It’s not really oral anymore – we use things like Youtube to tell our stories, but the method is very similar. The basic tale of the Trojan Horse isn’t going to change. The Trojans accept it, the Greeks jump out, Trojans die. Yet, you can tell this story from a multitude of perspectives, you can tell it with a myriad of different details, and you can tell the in-betweens of those plot points any way you like. In a game, we have that same freedom. Of course, the Citadel is breached, Sindragosa falls and then Arthas is defeated. But how that happens can vary. The stars of the story can be whomever you like. You get to create the hero. You get to tell his adventures. You are the one who narrates your version of the Epic Journey.

Instead of the designer’s job being to make the journey epic, rather, her job is to provide the framework for an epic journey. Just like Odysseus telling his adventures to his hosts in Phaeacia, the player today is the bard and the hero of their adventures. Homer just sits back and lets his character take the stage. He gave him the ship and the ports of adventure but what happened there was up to the hero himself. In fact, we never here the narrator’s version of these events. Homer tells everything through the mouth of Odysseus. How would someone else have told this story? Would it have been as good if Homer had made Odysseus just the hero rather than the bard as well?

Thoughts on Lore and Myth

For my work this term, I’m reading quite a bit about ancient myth as it relates to heroes and heroines. I was thinking today about how odd it is myth exists in a changeable kind of limbo. There is no Bible of Greek Myth (Amazon may differ on that point) that people can go to in order to check authenticity. I can tell a story of Odysseus; you can tell a story of Odysseus; Jimbob C. can tell a story of Odysseus. They do not need to be the same. Some things will not change – he will have a wife named Penelope. He will either be in the process of a journey, homeward or not, or he will be at some point expecting or reflecting on the journey. He will be wily and skilled in rhetoric. Aside from these core traits, your Odysseus and my Odysseus could have radically different lives.

For example, Homer’s Odysseus encounters a whole troop of troubles on his way home, but eventually he gets there. Dante’s Odysseus had no desire to go home and never does. His journey ends in Hell. They are unmistakably the same character though.

Perhaps we can look back now and see the big names of H and D and think they just had special powers for using mythical characters in whatever way they please. This isn’t the case though. Achilles had conflicting stories. Dionysus had conflicting stories. Antigone had conflicting stories. Medea was told in different ways.

Is it like Nancy Drew who has 3,000 adventures all while she is 18 years old? No, because her adventures don’t contradict each other. Is it like the many different Batmans depicted on screen? The many James Bonds? If a character in the Warcraft Universe suddenly did not complete his version of the return home, fans would be in an uproar. “WHAT?!?! Arthas NEVER had brown hair. HE IS A BLONDE!!!!” I can see it now.

What is it about mythical characters that makes them different from those in fictional universes? It feels like a kind of translation. We have freedom to interpret much of it though there is a certain underlying “true-ness” to each character. I may interpret Odysseus in a way that suits my treatise of Hell but his underlying Odysseus-ness is still present. He is more than just a character. He is a multi-faceted variety of ways his character could react with his world (our world?) and still remain him.

Primary Probability Stew

As I continue to contemplate the feature of post-primary narrative, I’ve begun to wonder just what place “primary” has in it at all. Of course, there is always a primary. Something must always come first. In games with a multipathed narrative though, what comes first may be different for everyone. I will continue to use Dragon Age: Origins as an example.

There are 6 entry paths available to the narrative in DA:O. These are the “Origins”. However, although there are these finite beginnings, they are able to be colored differently by the players themselves. The dialogue trees in the game offer different perspectives and responses from various game characters. Although in the Origin, the player-character is destined to eventually end up at the same place, they can do so with varied experiences. Rather than 6 individual primary paths, there are actually 6 probability clouds of primary paths. And this is only the Origin. After that, the diagram would get much more complicated.

How then do we analyze a primary narrative experience? Rather than working with traditional methodologies of narrative, we may need to create a theory that acknowledges a model of narrative that has little to no stable text or primary foundation. It can be argued that any text will result in different initial readings depending on the reader, but in those cases, there is a stable text common to all.

In a multipathed narrative like in DA:O, what is common to all? The narrative is a stew of variables rather than a string of constants. There are certain plot points which do occur for everyone, but they still offer multiple avenues of experience through player choice. Although we may all journey to visit Arl Eamon, what actually takes place there at his castle may be quite different for each of us. There are many possible intratextualities and many possible cross-references, but many of them could only come to light in particular post-primary experiences, in which case, the reader’s particular primary experience of the narrative would be greatly influential.

Does this then mean that a single reader could never fully experience the entire narrative? If some post-primary features are dependent on one’s particular primary experience (of which there can only be one, naturally), then a single reader could only experience those which his particular primary allows.

Are his experiences intertextually related to another’s? These are not separate texts that readers experience, and yet, they are different.

Don’t worry baby, it’s just a metaphor.

For my much-beloved (*cough*) metaphor class last term, I wrote a piece on Lord of the Rings Online and its use of the metaphor of morale in place of health.

The paper itself is quite long, but I wrote up a brief summary of some of the ideas that came out of the research discussion. The summary is over at LOTRO Reporter where I am starting a column on the Lore-Master class. If you’d like to read the original discussion (and even comment – it’s still open), head over to GoogleWave. If you need a Wave invite, email me (adaplays AT gmail DOT com).

Post-Primary Narrative: The Re-Encounter

My papers are finished for the term and I know I’ve promised summaries, but I just cannot get this topic off my mind.

When working on the Dragon Age narrative paper, I became captivated by the concept of post-primary narrative or a re-encounter with an already experienced game/text. With traditional text, some nuances may appear which were missed the first time, but no new words are actually read and there are no new speeches or revelations from the characters. In games, it is quite different. A second playthrough of many games offers entirely new experiences. Although the basic plot itself does not change, the perspective from which it is told may be completely opposite from the first and choices made by the player may actually alter how the plot is progressed. Even if one plays a second time from the original perspective, in many games, there is some element of chance which will alter the way in which the player experiences the narrative. Further, there are often areas or events which were missed the first time although present and which may be noticed a second or third time.

I have also been working on The Lord of the Rings Online, as many of you know, but hadn’t yet applied the thoughts of post-primary narrative to it and its genre. Players often complain about the fact that they must do the same thing over when leveling a new character or when completing dungeons or battles. They are actually experiencing post-primary narrative, but one in which there are very few possibilities of emergent narrative (that portion of narrative which is uncovered by other actions in the game and often requires multiple playthroughs).

The new skirmish system in LotrO highlights the presence of post-primary narrative in MMOs. In a skirmish, one experiences a particular event (such as the death of Mazog) a second time. Unlike a game such as Dragon Age, MMOs typically offer a single perspective (that of the player, regardless of player-character) and often have a lower element of chance. Under these conditions, it is quite difficult to have a new experience colored by the first:  a post-primary experience. Instead, they simply have a reminder of a former experience. We see Mazog say the exact same things at the exact same time as before. The only thing that may change at the end is how many marks (rewards) we get.

If MMO developers tried to further the possibilities available in their post-primary narratives, the player experience could be made much more engaging. There would actually be incentive to play through the game again, to re-encounter it. The current pervasive desire to skip to the endgame as soon as possible could be lessened, if not eliminated. Bioware’s upcoming Star Wars: The Old Republic will certainly have more obvious features of emergent narrative than other MMOs, since each class will have its own story to play through. These will surely give incentive to experience post-primary narrative, though I am not sure how much possibility for change there will be after the main plot is experienced. I’m looking forward to it though!

Dragon Age: When Narrative and Gameplay make Fun

I think I fell in love with Alistair the moment I came out of Flemeth’s hut and he was so happy to see me alive. I knew it was just because he was relieved to not be alone in the world, but I was still head over heels.

Narrative in a game has the power to be so much more than just a framework of a universe or a generic plot to satisfy the genre. Game narratives can help create emotional experiences.

In Dragon Age:Origins, superb voice acting, fabulously animated facial features, developed histories, and consistent moralities somehow combine into a magical, sparkling, non-vampire known as Character. Alistair is sarcastic, playful, good, strong, sometimes conflicted, always gorgeous, loyal, and … interesting. I gave him some kind of runic symbol and he looooved it.

Why? Why does he like runes? Maybe I just hadn’t spoken to him enough to find out, but I knew there must be a reason and I was going to dig it out of him – I was going to get to know him.

Alistair is just one example of great character design in DA:O. But, is that enough to make a great game? Couldn’t I just go read Tolkien or Jordan or Martin if I wanted a good fantasy character? (Shhh, let’s only think of the first few Jordan books – let him rest in peace.)

I could. I don’t need to play a game for good narrative and if that’s all I wanted, I’d probably read a book. But we play games because we also want to have fun. We want to act. We want to play and I firmly believe that no amount of even superb narrative will, on its own, make a good game. A good game also needs good gameplay.

What is about DA:O’s gameplay that’s good? How does it interact with the narrative to create a seamless “game-goodness”?

One of the ways is I think the game’s focus on moral choices. Not only do they influence how the story plays out, they also influence whether your party members stay and fight beside you. Some class specializations are only unlocked by certain moral choices. NPC interactions vary dependent on choices you’ve made that have influenced them. Some preferable choices simply can’t be made because you haven’t worked on your character’s cunning and Coercion skills. The entire game can simply not be completed 100% on one playthrough, not just because there are different class/race beginnings, but because you will experience different parts of the game dependent on the choices you make.

It's not what it looks like...

All right, moral choices, but how does that influence the buttons I push and my heartrate in combat? Well, it may not influence the buttons you push for your main character, but it does influence what buttons you can push for your other party members. As I mentioned, some may leave you if they don’t agree with you, but also, their own abilities directly match their character as developed through the narrative. Of course, Alistair is a tank. Of course, Oghren fights with a two-hander. Of course, Wynne is a healer. Etc., etc.

Sometimes, narrative may even help make up for less-than-superb gameplay. The dwarven main questline is too long by most players’ estimation, but we know Branka must be out there so we keep searching, and the longer we search, the greater the suspense builds. Had I been a real adventurer, I would have assumed the darkspawn ate her and went back much earlier than I actually did. It dragged on and was the only area I left partially unexplored. At the end, though, I was rewarded with great narrative and a good battle. It wasn’t just a dungeon crawl – it was an epic search for lost Paragons and legendary technology.

The game is fun for more than just Alistair (and his very dreamy…mm). It’s fun to fight in this game. It’s fun to find class specializations and new recipes. It’s fun to get new spells and discover spell combos. It’s fun to give gifts. It’s fun to hear my characters talk to each other. It’s fun to open chests and find love letters. It’s sad to see characters leave or die. It’s exciting to recruit someone new. It’s scary to fight the Broodmother.

I could go on and on. The important thing to see is that it is almost impossible to separate the threads of narrative and gameplay in this game. Either they are so fine, I just cannot discern the boundary, or else they are so finely done, they merge.