Quiet Technologies

This article is the last part of a series of two and continues from Evil gaming; When all roads lead to Rome, Part I.

Now, game designers (here meaning anyone at the creative end of the game development process) are intelligent people. Many of them are well versed in all issues concerning the creation of stories with interactive experiences, where players are both passive and active agents of the game plot. Meaning, players are inserted into an ongoing story and act accordingly, with those actions having the power to further shape the world and the story.

Interactive storytellers want to be able to produce stories that do not fall to pieces because the player character, until then a paragon of justice, decided to destroy an entire village of hard-working and good nature citizens. In other words, the Interactive Narrative Holy Grail is to produce an internally consistent narrative, despite the fact the writer has no influence whatsoever on the player actions.

But you may notice I emphasized they want to be able. This is so because good writers are fully aware of their current limitations. Interactive Narrative is an ongoing field of study and is largely an unresolved problem. I don’t want to bother you with the details. That’s not the scope of this article, neither am I qualified to do so. But, for any of you not aware of the problems, I can point you to what I consider some light reading on the matter: Ernest Adams lecture on the 2005 Game Developer’s Conference explores the current problems in great, but also accessible, detail. It’s an excellent read. Meanwhile, entire books have been written on the matter. I’ll be listing some of them at the end of this article.

But what I believe we all can agree is that, on one hand the barriers to the development of interactive narratives, permitting a game that gives true moral alignment freedom, are very real. There’s an honest and concrete difficulty in coming with such a game narrative. On the other hand, these obstacles are largely a product of our technological limitations, and much less of our writers’ creative ability to develop interactive narratives. Let’s go back in time to explore this angle…

Good technology is no technology at all

Wait, don’t leave! It’s a joke. You see, Pen & Paper RPGs are perhaps at the forefront of interactive narrative real capabilities. When it really shines and shows all the potential for great storytelling. Assuming the presence of a good Game Master (GM), the game world becomes the players’ oyster, and it constantly adapts and reshapes according to the players’ actions. Even in the presence of a plot-driven game.

When I bought the now widely recognized AD&D adventure The Temple of Elemental Evil, I was overly excited. It had been only 12 months on the shelves, but it had already gathered a following as one of the best adventures ever made for AD&D. As I read the game module in preparation to be the GM to a group of friends, it was easy to see why. The Village of Hommlet, the temple (alas, the game setting), the narrative buildup, the proposed climax, all read like a great adventuring book. And best of all, we could play it. We could immerse ourselves in this world and shape it to our will. It was summer. School vacations. We had all the time in the world.

Not long after we started playing the first playthrough, my players made a mess of it. I can’t recall the details, but it turns out I was constantly being forced to shape the non-player characters reactions, the plot timeline, even fabricate entire new sections to the plot, just to hold the story up and don’t let it fall apart and be forced to call it for the day. To make this short, 2 days after we started playing they were already well outside the adventure, some 50 miles away from the bloody temple, in a tavern flirting with the waitresses and picking fights with the customers. Damn them to eternal damnation!

Eventually, 4 days after we started playing, I opened the temple doors, let out the Horde, and everyone ended up playing a whole different game than what was intended. It was great fun too. That’s what they told me, oblivious to the fact they never played past the first page of the game module. Personally, I had mixed feelings; I wanted to separate their heads from their torso, as much as I agreed it was a lot of fun. (Things went a lot better in the second playthrough. And that was a lot of fun too.)

This, my friends, is the power of interactive narrative. And we are far from emulating it in video games. The ability to maintain a coherent storyline in the face of all adversity — if necessary by inserting new plot elements on the fly, or coming up with an entirely different plot — is currently an exclusive of the human mind.

In Pen & Paper RPG, there’s no “You can’t do that”. You can do it. And something has to happen because you did.

Good technology

The technological limitations, I believe, are obvious to you. We lack good enough Artificial Intelligence to mimic all the nuances of human memory and emotional response, and we lack enough resources in our computers to both process and store the huge volumes of data necessary to maintain living worlds. All necessary features, if we want to give gamers an open world where there are no physical barriers to moral alignment.

There is no questioning about the difficulties. The answers to these obstacles have been ranging from simply ignoring them and coming up with linear stories (the vast majority of games), to giving the illusion of freedom, and even to accepting and embracing those limitations.

Games like Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind give players the illusion. They present a main plot that is not even obligatory. A player may simply choose to walk around the game world doing other things and never touch one line of the main plot. They can advance their player character, buy a property, marry, commit a crime one day and save a village the next. On some games they even start as young kids and grow old. However, it’s only an illusion. These games still force players to well defined and preserved paths.

There are other games that simply accept the problem and work around it. Games like Jason Rohrer’s Sleep Is Death do not offer any sort of narrative. They present the players with the necessary tools to create their narrative while having someone else playing it; in a way, emulating the GM-Player relationship of Pen & Paper RPGs. But because of that, falling slightly out of scope from the object of this article.

And in the meantime the field of interactive narrative keeps on advancing, while the constant technological innovations keep chiseling through the wall that separates them.

People like Chris Crawford keep studying ways to bridge the gap between computers and the human mind in terms of storytelling, with projects like Storytronics, a complete engine to devise, run and play interactive stories.

Michael Mateas and Andrew Stern dabble in Artificial Intelligence while developing their project Façade; a real language parser and an emulator of emotional states and human relationships, in what could constitute a major leap to the current tree-based dialog technology used in about every computer game.

But currently all roads still lead to one place. Our games may offer multiple paths, but they eventually fail to give more than one direction. My own desire is that of better artificial intelligence, better compression algorithms, faster and more powerful processors, larger and even cheaper storage space. All serving more advanced methods and algorithms that store and manipulate world states and the historical context of those states, allowing for the game to create or adapt plots, based on a full knowledge of the world and in reaction to the player actions. As Ernest Adams once put it, “an artificially intelligent dungeon master” — a fully artificial and entirely competent dungeon master.

My wish is games that always have a story to tell, no matter what I do.

Other liabilities

Unfortunately the relationship held between publishers and game studios is not very friendly to innovation, particularly when this involves putting to practice untested concepts. It’s hard to blame publishers when game developers come to them with this great new idea that will revolutionize games and they turn it down. It’s all about business. If a formula works, business rules dictate it should keep being applied. I mean, they are just following the rules of the game. Risk assessment is hardly about managing risk. It’s about measuring returns.

Debatable assertions aside, this relationship has a tendency to slow down innovation, leaving it mostly for independent developers and the researchers themselves the task of applying new research; rarely, if ever, with the financial resources of a gaming studio backed by a publisher. This is not to say it doesn’t happen. But that it happens less often than desirable, which has been slowing down research, since this research needs to be applied to as a large number of different systems as possible and under different conditions and requirements, in order to be properly tested, measured and corrected.

But if publishers are justifiably concerned with market reactions, this also means that we gamers have a role to play. And perhaps we haven’t been playing that role very well. Yes, you heard me. We are also partially to blame; you and me and everyone else. We need to be more critical of our games. It’s easy to develop passions around the idea of games. But being critical doesn’t mean we need to stop loving the games we play. It means however that we put more pressure for better and more advanced games. We can still publicly sing our praises to them. But we must also always keep a critical mind and make a point of noting the developers where they fail.

Publishers will always be the first to hear about it. And as the consumer market shows its muscle, they will gladly oblige. It’s a win-win situation… well, following a series of probable flops, of course. But is it you and me that are paying the bill? So why should we worry?

It’s really no different from any other business — like computer engineering, or software development — where consumer demand is forcing innovation on a constant basis, sometimes under very unfavorable risk assessment reports. In the video game industry, consumers need to look past graphical advancements and be more exigent on other aspects. Like, oh I don’t know… not praising Mass Effect 2 for its freedom of moral choices, when clearly it reduces the whole concept of moral behavior to one of two choices. That’s bad storytelling.

The End

And so it is. There is a lot more that could be said. I didn’t dabble into other aspects I find profoundly flawed in current games and that deal with game designers own little faults: like this urgency to create player stats around moral behavior and the idea, that once you introduce moral choices into a game, every player action or decision must be weighted in moral terms. Another issue I would have liked to discuss was the insistence of many game studios to remain largely amateur in terms of storytelling, not hiring professional writers and relying instead on their assumption that anyone can tell a good story. They surely can. It just so happens that an experienced writer tells a good story better. And that’s a world of a difference.

I really would also have loved to talk about characterization. You see, all this talk about playing good or evil is really just a simplistic expression of a much deeper desire; many gamers want to experience their games as actors experience their movies. We want to be performers, but we also want to immerse ourselves in our games. We want to feel the world our player character is in and want to feel it as our player character would. We need to be playing more vivid player characters. But that needs the whole concept of moral alignment to be correctly introduced into games. Today that is the exclusive domain of non-playable characters. They are the ones with the deep and rich ongoing stories “feeling” their world and “acting” as its own.

These are all things that I would like to have talked about. But I’ve ran out of time and space to bring them. Paraphrasing Pascal, the reason I made this article so long is because I lacked the time to make it shorter.

All together, these things invariably make you feel you need to write a book  to be able to convey them in proper terms. But if there is one thing I know I’m not, is a writer.

Thanks:

To Mark Stephen Meadows, for allowing me to use his art. Mark — not a stranger to many of you — is a book author and artist. He’s also a software developer and co-inventor on a number of patents on Artificial Intelligence. He has also published a book on interactive narrative that I will list below. But he was not happy with being all those things and decided he also wanted to be a terrifically kind person (really, some people just don’t know when to stop). You can know know about his work at his homepage, and get to know him better on his Wikipedia entry and by following the links there.

To Ernest W. Adams and Chris Crawford, for their inspiration and reasoning into these matters. Their lectures, books and papers, constitute a wealth of knowledge and insight waiting to be explored by us all. It just wouldn’t be possible to gather my thoughts, otherwise.

Bibliography:

• Andrew Rollings & Ernest Adams, Andrew Rollings and Ernest Adams on Game Design, 2003 (at Amazon)
• Mark Stephen Meadows , Pause & Effect: The Art of Interactive Narrative, 2002 (at Amazon)
• Chris Crawford, The Art of Interactive Design: A Euphonious and Illuminating Guide to Building Successful Software, 2002 (at Amazon)
• Chris Crawford, Chris Crawford on Interactive Storytelling, 2004 (at Amazon)

Other references:

• The Narrative Design Exploratorium (http://narrativedesign.org/)

There are, I believe, two reasons for a player to want to play outside the traditional stereotype of the good guy; they either want to roleplay an evil, or otherwise bad, character or they wish to experience the different game challenges required of an evil character. Naturally, I’d expect that for most gamers the reason is a bit of both. But particularly to roleplayers, they expect the game to offer them the freedom to choose their own moral path.

Usually we look up to RPGs for this type of gameplay. After all, a genre that puts players in control of one or several adventuring party members and advances through what is hopefully elaborate, deep and immersive storytelling often bound to moral and ethical values constantly presented as defining features of the player character, surely seems the perfect setting to present to gamers the opportunity of playing the moral game and get the most enjoyment of the experience. We all have seen our share of RPGs which try to do this, when they present players with the opportunity to freely choose how their character(s) are morally aligned during the character creation process, or to build that alignment during normal gameplay. But does it pay off? Are RPGs really that good at allowing players to play an evil character, a wrongdoer, or a self-centered adventurer?

I say no. RPGs have been constantly failing in this area; despite the fact indeed they hold the most potential for this type of gameplay. The reasons however are not exclusive to one particular side of the fence. It’s is not just because game designers fail at effectively introducing this feature (although I think this is a defining factor). I believe it is also due to current technological limitations and an honest difficulty in introducing moral duality in a game. I’m exploring these ideas in more detail below and what I believe should be done about them.

Why isn’t it working?

One of the biggest problems game designers surely must face when opting with presenting a game mechanism that gives player characters moral freedom, is creating a compatible game plot. Saving the princess from the bad dragon is really not the type of game that allows an evil player character to shine. Although one can always find arguments otherwise, it will always boil down to saving the princess at the end of the game. And evil characters usually don’t go about saving princesses, when what they really want is to kidnap them.

But more to the point, plots often come in stark contrast with the advertised feature that players have an open world in front of them and can choose to play as they want. It’s really not very helpful that players can’t choose to support Teyrn Loghain from the very start of the game, agreeing that King Cailan was indeed an ignorant brat and deserved to die. We can stretch our imagination and eventually get to that explanation with one of the end game choices in Dragon Ages: Origin. But imagination is not enough. It won’t hide the fact that the game plot and main quest line constantly fought that idea, making it impossible to properly roleplay this choice during the game.

While we can argue there will always be a limit to how much freedom a player really has on a plot-centric game, that really is the point, isn’t it? A main plot usually forces a player to a predefined set of paths that, no matter how broad, really cannot fulfill the advertised feature of giving players total freedom.

In addition, outside the main quest line, games usually offer an extensive list of side quests, situations, and other interactive experiences. However these have constantly been very limiting in what a roleplayer can do with them. Players wanting to play as evil characters have been having a lot of trouble dealing with large portions of their games. A few of the side quests offer alternative and more fitting paths; that’s good. Others are indeed tuned up to their desires. But the vast majority of the game has them questioning if it’s worth all the trouble. And if they press on, keeping faithful to their player character moral alignment, they will face the last battle underpowered, under-equipped and bored to death by a drab gameplay experience. This if they are actually able to ever reach the last battle.

The lack of actual opportunities to roleplay as evil, or otherwise a bad person, is not really a true problem in game design. For all purposes, one can always develop a game that caters for this type of gameplay, leaving out the good guys. It becomes however a problem when games insist in advertising the ability for the player to choose their alignment and play accordingly. That they constantly fail to actually deliver this promise, I think warrants some discussion.

Easier said than done

In the next part of this two part series, I’ll be discussing the challenges in actually coming up with such a game and why this is today nothing more than a pipe dream, despite the best efforts. I’ll also present some aspects of current game design that I believe should be improved in this area.