Justin Achilli - Justin Achilli -- Blog

Entries in dragon age (6)

Tuesday

26Jan2010

Shotgun Blog: Five Things

January 26, 2010

You don't pray to a saint, you pray with a saint. You're asking the saint to pray for you. Praying to a saint would make that saint an icon, which isn't what saints are. Saints, having led particularly holy lives, are especially effective in their prayers and have certain specialties, which is why you choose a specific one of them to ask their aid and attention.

A tiny werewolf, which dwelled duplicitously inside the hide of a possum.I saw a dead possum in the road on the way to work. Something about the way its shapeless carcass lay in the road suggested that something else was previously inside it, and had shed its possum costume and gone about its buisness. A very small lycanthrope, perhaps.

Sid Meier said that a good game is a series of interesting choices. When you make certain choices in most games, however, you preclude yourself from making other choices. Is part of a good game, then, deciding which choices you don't want to make, and using that information to inform the choices you do make, in a sort of prognosticative play? And is it possible to play by not playing, say, by choosing to "avoid all games of chance" or "stay out of the Molasses Swamp" by never entering Candyland?

My tepid romance with Dragon Age: Origins seems to be at its end. My interest fell off rapidly when I entered the Brown Kingdom of the Dwarves, whose undermountain kingdom (eight buildings you can enter) had ground to a halt, and only I could save it. Oh, how would these sixty dwarves, none of whom seem to have jobs, survive without my timely diplomacy? To tell the truth, I don't care.

I would love to read A Dance with Dragons.

Justin Achilli |

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Monday

11Jan2010

Presenting Information: Surprise the Character

January 11, 2010

I heard Tina Brown on the radio the other day and she said something about the practice of writing that is tremendously applicable to the pacing of games and presenting information therein. She said, and I'm paraphrasing from memory here, that diaries are mysteries to their writers.

Brilliant! Too often, the characters in a game seem to inherit the knowledge that they're in a game. They behave as if they know they have infinite lives, or are only a save away from a potentially doomed (or willfully stupid) decision.

I don't want to ruin the surprise for you, but soylent green is people. There, I said it.Turning that on its ear is an immersive way of hooking the player. Now, obviously, I'm not saying that you should kill your players' characters. But giving them a swerve -- showing them that though players have the luxury of being the most important character around whom the story is told, it's not all going to be a picnic -- makes players jaded by story immunity and standard protagonist badassery sit up and pay attention. Presenting the story in a manner that shows the characters don't know what's in store for them makes them a bit vulnerable, and that vulnerability makes them interesting. Surprising your character can translate directly into surprising your player, and surprise builds investment.

The death of Aeris in Final Fantasy VII is a high point of this technique. Granted, developers can't rely on this technique too frequently or it'll lose all of its impact or fall into the "screw you, player" category of bad design. That said, the killing of a playable character subverted all the previous wisdom regarding what makes for a character. Until it happened, you didn't know it could, and that's powerful. It was something the characters in the game didn't see happening, and transcended that, becoming something even the player couldn't anticipate.

Compare that with the way the Fire Emblem games deal with PC deaths: No buildup; if you die in combat, that's it, you're dead. The Fire Emblem series' strength is in its tactical gameplay, so it's not like it's shortchanging itself, but the fact that the series doesn't intend to tell a blockbuster story is what puts the emphasis on the tactics.

File under: Someone approved this.Execution is a matter of style, too. The swerve as a dramatic device can be done poorly, in which case the swerve is a dick move, or it can be done compellingly, in which case its arrival is a surprise, and a dramatically rewarding one. Compare the swerve in Halo 2 ("A psychic plant that nobody ever heard of before arranged this whole thing, and Master Chief and the Apostate Bug are puppets dancing on his strings"... uh, what?) and the truth about Flemeth in Dragon Age (spoiler preserved). The former just came out of nowhere as a bit of nonsense. The latter is sinister, and exhibits the price of power in that virtual world.

Now, realistically, you have to swerve your audience so that they're actually surprised for your surprises to be, well, surprises. If your swerve is "He's your father!" or "He's your brother!" your surprise probably needs a little more work. But even a few old standards ("She's not dead after all!") can still pack a punch when deployed in the appropriate moment or with enough panache.

Remember, too, that you want your swerve to pop. It needs to be exciting. Most importantly, it can't disempower the player. Informing the player that he's been manipulated all along is perilous, for example, because it means that the player's actions haven't been his own. Vampire thrives on this device, but that's because it gives players an opportunity to turn that manipulation back on its perpetrator -- and for vampires, revenge is a dish best served cold, so part of the setting is the opportunity to brood on that manipulation and really work up a vengeful head of steam. You're doing well if your players' response to your swerve is, "Holy shit. Oh, yeah? Well now I'm going to...."

Justin Achilli |

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Wednesday

06Jan2010

Presenting Information: Control Your Density

January 6, 2010

Often, one of the biggest problems with communicating immersive world lore is its density. With many very detailed worlds, the developer or writer bludgeons the player or reader with a dense block of text or long, unskippable cutscene that renders the world in a painstaking degree of detail that works more as a barrier to participation than it does a gateway into an environment.

You've seen this before. You've read novels in which the events of the tale don't happen until Chapter Two, because the writer spent Chapter One talking about the gods and the perilous political timber of the fractured nations and how blah blah blah happened even though it doesn't have anything to do with the what's happening now. That's all fine and good, maybe, for the writer to know, but does the reader need to know it? Hell, no. Look at Robert E. Howard's kinetic Conan stories -- the world emerges from the details we see in the story, not from breakaway paragraphs that get all up their own ass with intricacy and detail not at immediate stake. Beautifully concise and function, and it lets Howard commence to telling the story at hand. Look at Bioshock: Oh, shit; plane crash; things burning; there's a place I could save myself, maybe. And there it is. The story begins.
These are wonderfully simple introductions to the worlds at hand. The density of information is light, which means little obstruction to the player or reader entering the world.

Compare that with, say Dragon Age's intro video that's a passive history lesson, or Oblivion's introductory prison scene in which the emperor comes down and rails at you with another history lesson. Yes, history can be cool, but in an interactive environment, it needs to be interactive... I've said all this before.

Anyway, the density of information, especially in a video game, can (and perhaps even should, depending on the genre or game type) increase as the player gains experience with the game. The more facility the player gains with the game itself, the more engrossed with the story a fiction reader becomes, the more the developer or author can "turn up" the quantity of information delivered. The player/ reader gains more buy-in to the experience the more time he spends with it -- arguably, the player or reader Is "leveling up" his involvement in the experience.

The cool blue gradient is a symbol of your comfort. Enjoy.Ethan described this on Monday as a triangle. Upon your introduction to the game or story, you're at the narrowest point of the triangle. The more time or play you spend with the story or game, the greater the density of information you're able and wanting to handle. The reader learns more supporting detail, as does the player while she simultaneously assimilates more game features until the game reaches its full density.

The red indicates your boiling rage at being asked to master all this information at once, especially when a lot of it is crap that doesn't really matter to what you're doing.The alternative is the rectangle, in which the information density starts as heavily as it's ever going to appear in the game or story. This might be considered "hardcore," as you need to know all of the game features or story depth from the outset... but "hardcore" is the antithesis of "finding as many people as possible to play your game or read your story." It's not necessarily bad, it's just a limitation on how many people you're going to reach, because that entry point is so difficult to surpass. It's harder to assimilate all the information you're expected to understand immediately, and there's not even any guarantee that all of it is applicable.

Someone might be able to make an argument for a circle- or diamond-shaped experience, in which the player or reader gains easy entry, the game or story gains experiential density through the body, and then the experience tapers off. Now that I think of it, Twilight was like this for me: Easy to pick up, started gaining unwieldy mass, and then I finally put it down when I quit caring about it because the experience offered me nothing, no rewarding density. It was the most difficult "easy" 150 pages I've ever read. And then I gave up.

Justin Achilli |

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Wednesday

23Dec2009

Presenting Information, Part II

December 23, 2009

So, to follow up from the last blog entry, I want a solution to the problem of not wanting to read text dumps that break me out of the immersive game experience. But first, some caveats:

Not everyone cares, as evidenced by some of the comments in the previous entry. Ethan, for example, doesn't mind the text method of communicating information.
Not every game needs to worry about this. Games that don't rely heavily on the world don't have to bend over backward to convey that minimal world, and would indeed be worse off of they did. You don't need a cutscene in Tetris.

Look at that beautiful, subdued color palette. Why are you fighting the colossi? You never learn whether your actions are "white" or "black" — your motivation is similarly murky.With those two points in mind, how do you convey a world without a wall of text assaulting the player for 9999 damage? Before we get into specific techniques or game devices, let's talk about what we're trying to accomplish in a game. The enjoyment of a game is an emotional response. Specifically, in a "dense" game environment like an RPG, we're probably talking about having fun with other people (in a tabletop RPG or MMO environment) or triumph over adversity (in a single-player CRPG as well as tabletop and MMO RPGs). That is, the goal is the feel of playing the game, not the volume of information conveyed. (You can find more information on this particular theory of fun at XEODesign.)

With that in mind, two of my favorite adages become useful. Oh, hello, my darling soapboxes.

Work In Broad Strokes

Detail is the enemy. "Presenting information" doesn't have to mean "presenting a shitload of information." Building a world intended to provoke an emotional response is more like impressionism than classicism. We don't need every detail to let us feel — we only need to understand what you as a designer want us to feel. "The armor and architecture of this region allude to a rising trend toward empire" is enough to go on, provided you support us with cool art and evocative content. You don't need to break into an aside with 750 words about the accomplishments of the past four imperialistic kings whose actions have no bearing on the events of the game. Unless the goal of your game is completist world creation — which isn't eminently playable, so maybe a game isn't the best vehicle for such an undertaking — the aside runs the risk of pulling the player away.

The details exist to communicate the game experience, not usurp it.

Paragons of the broad-strokes method include Ico, Shadow of the Colossus, and Bioshock. D&D 4e rediscovered the joys of broad-strokes content, too. Sure, they have a ton of written support, but all of that support is very granular. I remember working on 3e projects that jumped through hoops to pack in masses of content, and 4e's efforts to fit core ideas on, at most, a two-page spread is refreshing. It gives me the room to create the emotional response I want without having to contradict something written somewhere that has thus created a certain player expectation.

Let the Player Do It

An amazingly powerful playable history sequence that epitomized the key moral story in Final Fantasy VII's world.In a game, I want to be playing. I don't necessarily have to save the world or have my character be a unique snowflake, but I do want my experience to be the core of the game. That is, all your world-built background information is meaningless if it doesn't have any relevance to what I'm doing and then let me do it. Games exist to be played, and the choices made in their context are the heart of the medium. So if history is important, let me play through a flashback sequence or pull me into a instance that lets me be a part of that history. Even if the end is a foregone conclusion, I will have at least played the history, as opposed to have been historied at. The player is an active participant, not a passive consumer.

Some of Dragon Age's content does this very well. The DLC that includes the recapture of Soldier's Peak has ghosts of the past replaying their doomed last stand, which communicates the world's history while allowing the player to participate in game activity. The flashbacks in Final Fantasy VII did this as well. For Vampire, the Transylvania Chronicles allow players to be present at key Kindred events, but the implementation was a bit heavy-handed and railroaded the players, so beware the pitfalls of having the players do it. Players need to be able to make meaningful decisions, which should have been emphasized more in the Transylvania Chronicles, for example.

Next time: Specific techniques.

Justin Achilli |

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Friday

18Dec2009

Presenting Information, Part I

December 18, 2009

Playing through Dragon Age, I'm surprised by how many books I've found. Similarly with Aion. These are both recent games, and yet, they rely on the old-fashioned text dump to immerse the player in their world -- and I use the word "immerse" there somewhat dubiously because that's not what reading a text dump does. Aion at least has a few cut scenes that present their content to the player, and these are done well, but outside these, they still rely on so much text. Dragon Age gives a few cutscenes happening in current events, but its backstory is presented almost exclusively in text dumps.

Having some sort of meaningful interaction with a creature like this is much more immersive than reading a text dump about her.Don't get me wrong. I'm not against reading or writing. As a guy with more than three million words in print, I understand the value of writing and text presentation. My problem is that a video game is an interactive environment, and printing words on a screen for me to passively consume is the exact opposite of an interactive experience. It's like going to a movie and watching a black screen while some music plays. If the medium exists to expose the player to multiple avenues of experience, what possible reason could exist to forgo all of those and, as the primary method of communicating the experience... send a player into a passive presentation? Especially with Dragon Age, where its fonts make reading on-screen laborious?

Information is at a premium in a video game. The developer's chance to make an impression is limited. It's in his best interests, then, to make those impressions significantly, and in the context of the game. Dragon Age does the opposite of this. It has numerous, numerous in-world instances of "you find a book," and then, to make use of what you've found, you have to take yourself out of the game to consume the information. To further muddy the experience, you encounter books as in-world items. That is, you obtain the things you need in-game (for quest completion, advancement, and so forth) in the same manner you acquire the things you don't need in-game. This has the effect of trivializing the "you found a thing" messages, because frequently, they notify you of a thing that is meaningless in the context of the game. So, in hoping that you'll go through and read their extraneous world material, they desensitize you to the actual experience of playing the game.

I know, I know. World lore has its value. The more detail that exists, the more real the world seems.

Except that's not always true. Especially in a situation like Dragon Age, when consuming the lore takes you away from playing the game, detail is the enemy. The fewer details, the better, and the better integrated the details are with the medium, the more the player will retain and appreciate them. Again, there's nothing wrong with text. But as I've said before, if you want to write a novel, just write the damn novel. The problem comes in the form of the designer trying to tell a novelized (or even sourcebook-ized) story in the context of a medium that's not a novel. All of this supplementary stuff is great... for a supplement. Oh, hey, look, here's a great place for support material.

In the next article to follow this one, let's look at some more interactive alternatives by which to communicate the experience of a game world. In the meantime, what games do you recall fondly for teaching you about their world by letting you interact with it?

Justin Achilli |

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