What’s the Point of Limbo?

Since its release on XBox Live Arcade in 2010, Limbo has racked up awards and generated a substantial amount of critical writing. I didn’t have XBox Live when it came out, so I’ve been waiting on a PC port. When it finally came out on Steam late last year, I jumped on it. This turned out to be a disappointing experience.

Given the critical reception Limbo received, I expected one of two things. Either this would be a game that pushed some boundaries or a game that was remarkably well put-together. Limbo is neither. It follows well-worn traditions in art games, and its design lacks direction. It has a beautiful audiovisual style that tries to create a unique atmosphere, but other elements of the game undermine this atmosphere at every opportunity.

I could easily forgive the lack of novelty if the design were coherent, and I’d forgive the incoherence if it had something new to offer. As it is, Limbo is neither special nor well-crafted, though it feints enough in both directions to stand as an impressive achievement in artistic ass-covering. Its unusual visual style lets it be categorized as an art game at first glance, while its overall polish invites judgement by more conventional criteria. This is clever maneuvering that, if successful, lowers expectations in all directions. If unsuccessful, it offers the opportunity to fail in multiple ways at once.

I Am Bad at Interactive Fiction.

Here’s the thing about interactive fiction. I approve of it in theory. A genre with no graphics and huge freedom of interaction seems like the perfect platform for narrative experiments. I love Stephen Lavelle’s work with IF engines, like Blendings and Atopoesis, and I’ve heard great things about Blue Lacuna. But, to my shame, I’ve never been able to play an IF game for more than fifteen minutes without starting to bang my head against things.

The most recent victim of my inability to deal with IF is Michael Gentry’s Anchorhead, a Lovecraft-y mystery kind of thing that got a positive mention at Indie Games Blog. I really did try to give Anchorhead a fair shake, but… things went badly pretty quick. Instead of a review or anything intelligent, I’m just going to present a little diary of my adventures in Anchorhead. I suppose this will be something to point to if I ever need to explain why I don’t really talk about IF games.  Lots of big images and also swears after the jump. I’m not going to give a spoiler warning, though, because I did not advance in the game even a little bit.

Four Types of Videogame Tragedy

In my last post on tragedy, The Wrong Ending, I presented what I saw as an essential problem of tragedy in videogames: an ending where things go badly is often seen by players as wrong, and therefore in need of fixing. This makes it hard for a tragic ending to seem like a valid choice for players. I also promised that I’d be back to discuss some questions I raised at the end of that post:

So how do you get a player to pick the wrong ending? More importantly, how do you get her to do that and still care?

In this post, I’ll be discussing some games that pull off tragic storylines, with varying degrees of success, and how they fit into strategies for addressing the wrong ending problem. These strategies all boil down to addressing the problem of how to keep a player from trying to fix what they did wrong. The games I discuss are ones I’m familiar with, and by no means an exhaustive set, so please do comment with other examples and strategies that don’t fit these four types. Spoilers for both Mass Effect and both Dragon Age games, Fallout 3, and the indie horror Downfall follow after the jump, although I’ll keep them as ambiguous as possible. Dan.

Readings: Conflict Management

You know, in future, I should just be honest and go on hiatus during the work crush between mid-October and mid-December. Anyhow, I’ve got a bit of a links backlog to get through, so let’s get to it! This set of readings sees the player at war with the text, other characters, and the player character itself.

Choose Your Own Enemy, from Jay Barnson of Rampant Coyote, discusses the possibility of extending a morality system to shape the villain of a story in reaction to the hero’s actions. In theory, this could make the story more meaningful by presenting the villain as everything the hero opposes, or create a Batman/Joker scenario where the villain is a dark mirror of the hero. Its a clever twist on the idea of the hero’s actions affecting the story. More importantly, it’s a very gamelike approach to a classical storytelling trope. I’d love to see this implemented, even in a small way.

In Cinematic Action Gunplay, Sparky Clarkson makes the argument that the difficulty of Uncharted 3 hinders its presentation of the player character as an invincible action hero. Others have commented generally that the Uncharted franchise makes an awkward fit between its cutscenes and its gameplay, but this is one of the most cohesive arguments I’ve yet seen on why exactly that is.

Michael Abbot writes Who Needs Winners? on a subject quite dear to my heart (and quite common on my Twitter feed): the fact that differences in play styles complicate judgements that compare one design philosophy to another. This is a difficult question that game criticism needs to keep grappling with. We have to keep player variation in mind when developing critical judgements, but we don’t want to throw up our hands and yell WHATEVER FLOATS YOUR BOAT either. Abbot proposes a simple classification of game storytelling styles with different goals, which I think is a good start. Getting a sense of what different styles are and what they aim to do will help ground those critical judgements in the long run.

Just designing for a variety of player preferences isn’t necessarily the answer, either. In his piece on Skyrim and RPG anxiety, Rowan Kaiser digs into how, by trying to be open to varying play styles, the game makes any one of those play styles feel like the wrong one.

Following on the theme of player/game dynamics in criticism, Eric Swain of The Game Critique has a terrific post tearing into some criticisms of his criticism of Limbo, a game for which I share Swain’s lack of enchantment. Swain argues against defenses of the game that rely too heavily on unsupported interpretations in a reminder that, even with player variation, a game is still a stable text that puts constraints on the range of experiences.

Readings: Outside the Lines

Holy crap, I’m back! And I’ve even had time to read things! Here are some of those things.

First off, Kirk Battle brings his uniquely legal perspective to explain the difference between playing Magic on a tabletop versus a computer in a Kill Screen post called In Brief: Who Rules the Rules? He makes a convincing argument that the change of medium changes the nature of the game. It’s particularly interesting to me, given my recent curiosity about adapting the Amber tabletop system.

Meanwhile, the inimitable Mattie Brice has been strapping on her reasonable female armor and taking on the patriarchy on two fronts this week. First, there’s a piece at PopMatters about the tragic lack of male sexualization in videogames. It’s a good reminder that increasing equality in pop culture really isn’t about removing types of expression (the usual PC blah blah complaint) but about opening up types of expression that aren’t currently available. Also, boners.

And over at Kotaku, Brice baits the worst of the commentariat with Why I Don’t Feel Welcome at Kotaku. They promptly prove her point by coming up with (so far) 819 ways to say, “Jeepers! If the only community I feel accepted in starts openly including people who aren’t exactly like me, how can I be sure they’ll still accept me?!” Adult society continues to not give a shit about their cry-cry faces. If you visit the comment section, do bring a copy of @fireholly99‘s Sexism in Games Bingo. Make a drinking game of it, perhaps.

Finally, there’s a really interesting exchange going on between Brendan Keogh and John Walker about Modern Warfare 3. First Walker had a negative review of MW3 that went so far as to call it an “un-game.” Keogh responded with a defense that argued Walker was approaching the game wrong, and Walker re-argued his point in Why Modern Warfare 3 Remains an Un-Game.

What’s fascinating to me is that this whole debate seems to illustrate something Dan Cox and I have discussed regarding the designer’s “ideal player.” The core of Keogh and Walker’s disagreement is that Walker thinks MW3 is paced horribly and constantly blocks him from doing what he wants to do, and Keogh thinks it is paced magnificently and responds to his every desire.   I haven’t played Modern Warfare 3, but my suspicion is that, like the Halo games, it has been play-tested within an inch of its life to get that pacing calibrated perfectly to the behavior of the average player. Keogh has the good fortune to fall comfortably within that average; Walker does not. As a result, Keogh feels like a god while playing; Walker feels like a pawn being jerked around.

The really amazing thing is that it sounds like Walker is only slightly off the average. It’s not like he wants to throw down his gun and choose pacifism, or even choose his own strategy for each mission. The things that bother him are the timing at which an event triggers or whether or not he can open a door before another character arrives. Very, very small deviations from the ideal player the game is designed for. And yet, as Adrian Forest put it in a response to Keogh on Twitter, Walker “does not seem to have played the same game you and I seem to have played.”

That’s the peril of designing for an ideal or average player: someone’s going to get left out in the cold. At the same time, it sounds like people who fit that ideal can have a pretty rapturous experience. In any case, there’s an unusual amount of connections between the posts I’m linking today. How do you deal with deviations from the norm? What do you lose and gain when you choose to design for a specific kind of behavior?

Trapped in Amber

Last time I checked in with you guys about Mouthwash, I mentioned that I was no longer sure I wanted to use D&D-style dice rolls to determine skill effects, but didn’t know what to replace it with. On Twitter, Stephen Winson suggested I look into a diceless tabletop roleplaying system based on Roger Zelazny’s fantasy series The Chronicles of Amber. So I did.

It’s called the Amber Diceless Roleplaying Game, created by Erick Wujcik, and I was taken with it pretty much immediately. I read through the manual over the last couple of weeks and came away pretty intrigued by the concept. (If not by Zelazny’s books, which appear to be remarkably awful if the excerpts in the game manual are representative.) There’s a lot to the system, and much of it isn’t something I’m interested in copying. But I love how it handles determining the success of actions without using dice. Having read the manual, it’s actually both simpler and more nuanced than how it’s described in the Wikipedia page.

The Wrong Ending

So the blog’s been a bit on the sporadic side lately and, in all honesty, it probably will be until after Thanksgiving. My apologies! On the upside, something pretty grand has been happening while I was away. Dan Cox of Digital Ephemera, with the help of commenter Ari, has taken some rough ideas in my post on Moral Incentives and Story Structure and made something terrific out of them. In a series of posts  at his blog, Dan and Ari have been seriously tackling a question that I raised sort of tangentially: can a videogame be a tragedy? If so, how would you design such a game?

Some highlights from this rich discussion include What Happens Next, in which Dan takes on the issue of asymmetrical knowledge in tragedies, game-based or otherwise; Tragedy Drivers, which discusses some of the design constraints on a tragic game; and Flaws in Virtual Tragedy, which directly applies concepts from Aristotle’s Poetics to the debate. It’s all awesome stuff, go read it. A lot of what we’ve been talking about so far, both at Digital Ephemera and here, boils down to how interactivity philosophically clashes with the basic assumptions of tragedy as Aristotle saw them. I’d like to jump off Dan’s thoughts on asymmetrical knowledge and talk about some of the practical issues with designing tragic games.

The Next Step

Fuckin’ Shakespeare, I know. But this insipid nonsense represents an important step forward for Mouthwash, because Maryam (an NPC) is now capable of having goals: in this case, making Roni (the player character) happy and expressing her own emotions. She’s also capable of taking simple steps to meet those goals, provided she has access to a skill that will instantly produce the intended effect.

What’s going on in this exchange is that Maryam initially has the “make Roni happy” goal. Since she doesn’t know Roni’s emotional state, she uses a skill (Query Emotion) that will give her that information. Questions, when successful, have the effect of giving the listener the goal of providing the given information to the speaker. So when Roni dodges Maryam’s query with one of her own, Maryam now has the goal “express my emotion.” She does so, and is now happy because she achieved a goal. This also makes her old “make Roni happy” goal the new active goal, so she asks for the information again, and this time gets it: Roni is calm.

And that’s where things fall apart, because Maryam doesn’t actually have any skills that can make Roni happy. The bit where she says “Oh no, I’m incapable of making plans!” is just an error message triggered when the agent can’t generate any moves. (Roni ends the conversation by lying, but that’s not important right now.) This is a point in the development of this system that opens up a few questions, which I’ll be tangling with for the next week or so. Namely:

1. How should skill effects work?

2. Should I have a class system or not?

3. What’s the best way to handle AI plan-making?

Question #3 is going to take some trial and error more than anything else, so let’s put that aside for now. Questions #1 and #2 are a little more philosophical. I intended from the start to have classes in Mouthwash, but I’m starting to question that. There was a bit of talk on Twitter last night about Skyrim‘s abandonment of classes in favor of pure skill-based character development. It sounded like a good idea to me – god knows I’ve never played an Elder Scrolls game with anything other than a custom-classed character – and I started wondering why I was so stuck on classes in my system. I suppose I’d always thought of it as a way to organize skills and make the possibility space of character development less intimidating to a player, especially given that this is going to be kind of a weird system. But maybe that’s unnecessary, and I can get that organization with skill trees without putting up walls between classes?

The most urgent question is #1, as I’ll be working on it today. At this point, since I’m just testing things out, skills are always successful. But pretty soon I’ll need a way to make that success dependent on character ability and the situation. I’ve always figured that I’d use a quasi-D&D-ish system for skill effects. That is, there’s some chance of success for each action based on the stats of the speaker and the listener, plus any other buffs or debuffs in effect. But then I imagine a big conversation with more than two speakers, all with potentially conflicting goals and play styles, and I wonder if there’s not enough uncertainty in the dynamics of that system without dragging random rolls into it.

So, what do you think of classes vs. skill-based systems? Is there a good way to design a system that takes character stats into account without using dice rolls?  Let me know your thoughts!

 

 

 

A Mystery to Herself

Hey, so blog’s on hold this week after all due to personal matters. I’ll be back in a week or so. I’ll have a bit more to say about Mouthwash then, since I’ve actually made progress on the AI basics after a long stretch of brickwalling.  For now, I leave you with the observation that programming social behavior often produces weirdly poignant errors:

Readings: Dynamic Systems

Posting a day late due to some travel kerfuffles yesterday. For the record, and since I haven’t announced it before, here’s the planned schedule I have in my head: Readings on Tuesday, a Mouthwash update on Thursday (if there’s been progress), Short Reviews on Friday, and a feature every week but whenever. Next week will be another disruption in bloggery, since I’ll be at a conference, but I’ll be back and fairly stable after that. Anyhow, lots of good stuff this week!

My new favorite blog is Dan Cox’s Digital Ephemera, which had a great response to my post on moral incentives last week with All Games Are Comedies. Dan discusses how this all relates to why games struggle with tragedy (in the classical sense), a thread which is taken up by Ari and ~hellfire~ in comments here as well. It’s a meaty question.

The same blog also has an older post called Games Are Languages, from the epic Games Aren’t Clocks thread, in which Dan straight up starts analyzing games as finite state machines. This is so hardcore I can’t handle it. He ends on a point I disagree with, by arguing that the performance of a player through said state machine can be a work of art, but the state machine itself is not. Me, I have no problem appreciating the aesthetic qualities of a state machine, as well as a particular execution of it. I’d say that’s pretty much what I do here.

Justin Keverne has a very thoughtful post on a Framework for Systemic Storytelling (Part 2). I haven’t read Part 1, but this seems really solid to me. This kind of simulation-driven story space is something I keep arguing for, but I haven’t seen its requirements articulated quite so well before. Lots of interesting implications to chew over.

In The Constraint History of Digital Games, Chris Bateman writes about how hardware and social factors played into the development of game genres over time. As with the best of Bateman’s writing, it cuts past a bunch of silly holywars stuff to get to some practical reasons why games are the way they are.

Finally, the first part of Brendan Keogh’s article on a game jam in Brisbane is just a great, really entertaining read. I’ve always been curious about what it’s like to do one of these things, but they don’t seem suited to the “spend an hour sketching plans in comments, write ten lines, then thoughtfully puff on a cigar” style of games programming that I specialize in.