Justin Achilli

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...."