Immersion: Interest in Interaction

Because everyone seems to be doing one, this is my Avatar post.

Why do games have movies in them at all?

Come on, the “should games be movies?” debate has been cycled endless and endless, and the vast majority of developers  seem to have fallen into the “no” category.  But that’s missed the point.  Why do games even have movies at all?  I mean, if games were so great, we could just skip the cutscene development and story and all that and save money.  Games want movies for something.  Players want movies for something.

Avatar struck me because it’s #1 value seemed to be immersion.  Immersion.  You felt it deep and settle in.  Immersion is something game developers value a lot too.  And Avatar used a variety of the same tricks we use to get there.  Sets.  Lighting.  Sound.  Camera moves.  Artfully exposed setting background.  New graphical tech.  Sympathetic characters.  Acting.  Plot.  Tension and danger.

But our goals are different.  In movies, immersion helps draw the audience in so that you can communicate your ideas. In games, immersion helps draw the audience in so they can learn your ruleset so that they can explore and master your ideas.  There’s a middle step there.  And that middle step can be accomplished in a bunch of other ways too.  Maybe we can motivate you to learn and master rulesets because your friends asked you to, or because you get a prize, because it’s culturally significant, or even because your genuinely interested in that ruleset.

This is the key point though.  If you don’t have something better, then immersion is an incredible way to get people to interact.  Human nature seems to be genuinely less interested in interacting with what’s in front of them then in hearing a story.  Immersion is that strong.  So given a choice, every creator wants to have immersion, because (theoretically anyways) it doesn’t hurt your game, and it brings in a lot more people willing to listen.

But it’s ultimately something of a trick.  Unlike movies, games in the classical sense aren’t doing immersion to teach you something, they are doing immersion to get you to do something else.  It’s a betrayal of interest.  And games in the unclassical sense that are trying to teach you something through immersion are betraying that the interaction is important, when it’s really not.  And so critics and potential fans cry foul.

Is there a grey area?  A hybrid of both?  Of course.  As a rule of thumb, I find anywhere there could be a gray area you should live in the gray area.  There are plenty of examples of games that play both sides well.  Portal and Flower come to mind.  But understanding why immersion is being used at all is important.  Why there are movies in games.  Why multiplayer games seem like a different beast, why they don’t seem to focus on immersion in the same way.  Why people complain about games sucking people’s life away without returning any value, like a bad movie.  Often people fall for the immersion (or the rulesets!) and yet don’t receive or don’t care to look for anything on the other end.

Able to love Avatar and regret it at the same time.

Theory

All other things being equal, players will always appreciate stories more then interactions.

You can see it in the sales of the big games, the direction of the industry as a whole, the marketing, the proliferation of one-time content.   Bioshock 2 Game Director Jordan Thomas is focused on the narrative design, and let’s someone else completely handle the systems.  And this is pretty common.

Yes, you can fall in love with the interactions.  Yet usually it’s only after you’ve devoured the content, and gotten hooked by the initial fiction.

Yes, this makes me a bit sad.  But not too sad.  Different games for different folks.  And we can do both.

Replayability: A Game?

Steve Egan in the comments yesterday brought up such a good, common point that it deserved it’s own post:

I don’t see how replayability could even be considered part of the definition of a game. I say this as somebody who has to wait years before rereading a book, or games that rely on the static elements for a significant part of the experience, as I remember what’s about to happen as I’m experiencing the media.

Recently I took a look at what a game is and from my definition at least, Train is most definitely a game. That’s because my definition is, “A game is an activity with an agreed upon set of rules, that participating individuals act in accordance to, while in a state of play.”

This definition is pretty broad – activities in a “state of play” is hard to defined, and some would say cyclical.  Going for a walk, listening to a teacher in a classroom, perusing a forum, or attending a slumber party could all fit this definition.  Reading this post probably fits the definition!  If the number of participating individuals were 1, all that’s require here is the individual act within rules (they could have created) while in this nebulous state of “play”.

Defining a game is hard, and ultimately, it’s just language.  It only matters in how it helps us design.

The best definition I’ve seen is Chris Crawford’s: an interactive, goal-oriented activity, active agents to play against, in which active agents can interfere with each other. Or, in a series of dichotomies:

1. Creative expression is art if made for its own beauty, and entertainment if made for money. (This is the least rigid of his definitions. Crawford acknowledges that he often chooses a creative path over conventional business wisdom, which is why only one of his 13 games is a sequel.)

2. A piece of entertainment is a plaything if it is interactive. Movies and books are cited as examples of non-interactive entertainment.

3. If no goals are associated with a plaything, it is a toy. (Crawford notes that by his definition, (a) a toy can become a game element if the player makes up rules, and (b) The Sims and SimCity are toys, not games.) If it has goals, a plaything is a challenge.

4. If a challenge has no “active agent against whom you compete,” it is a puzzle; if there is one, it is a conflict. (Crawford admits that this is a subjective test. Video games with noticeably algorithmic artificial intelligence can be played as puzzles; these include the patterns used to evade ghosts in Pac-Man.)

5. Finally, if the player can only outperform the opponent, but not attack them to interfere with their performance, the conflict is a competition. (Competitions include racing and figure skating.) However, if attacks are allowed, then the conflict qualifies as a game.

But this doesn’t mention replayability!

I was actually surprised. Why do Sirlin and I consider replayability a core part of a game? I can think of 2 reasons off the top of my head. First, all the prominent games of history are replayable. Sports, chess, board games, children’s games, are all at their core replayable concepts. Second, rulesets that create interesting choices (another frequent game definition) seems to require replayability.

This is an interesting point.  Replayability is the fallout of interesting choices.  If the choices aren’t replayable, then they, by definition, weren’t interesting enough to explore.  If you can predict the outcome of all possible rule permutations, then you aren’t playing a game. The rules are trivial.

Without replayability, your game is boring.

Consider Tic-tac-toe.   Most would say it’s a boring game, but it’s still a game because it barely crosses the threshold of interesting choices.  You aren’t 100% sure the opponent isn’t going to make a mistake.  Most people can’t immediately see all permutations.  It’s the minimal threshold of competitive activity.

And yet it’s still replayable.

Steve, in his comment here, puts forward he doesn’t replay because he “has to wait years before rereading a book, or games that rely on the static elements for a significant part of the experience, as I remember what’s about to happen as I’m experiencing the media.”  He’s focusing on the experience – but as the quote itself suggests, the experience is medium-agnostic.  The experience could be a book, a movie, or a game.  In fact, the parts of the games he is interested in are the “static elements”, the things that by definition wouldn’t fall under the interactive ruleset activity at the heart of a game.  You wouldn’t say this sort of thing about Chess or Poker, for example.

If you aren’t interested in replaying the game, it’s likely you’ve completely mastered the key elements through repeated, skilled play.  Or, in the case of something like Train, the (still undescribed) game is serving to give you the experience the designer wanted, and is not as something to be mastered.

Put another way, Train, as a game, is replayable.  It’s just designed so no one would want to.

So, if the experience is the common criteria, why does this matter?  Because, unlike Train, the vast majority of games derive their experience from reinforcement of their choices.  From a design point of view, finding ways to make your game more interesting to replay means the player’s interactions with these choices are deeper, and thus more interesting.  If so, Sirlin and so many systems designers find replayability so important because it is a basic reflection of the quality of their designs.

Train: A game?

I’ve discussed Train by Brenda Brathwaite before.  After MIGS 2009, David Sirlin gives Train high praise, but asks “Is Train a game?”  It’s not replayable, and it puts a focus on presentation that is more associated with art then games.  I had the same initial thoughts, but I came to different conclusions.

First, while we don’t often have control over it in video games, presentation and the medium of play are very much a part of games.  David Sirlin’s own talk at MIGS on “Every Click Counts” tsks designers for creating unnecessary affordances.  We take controls and thus the controller into high consideration while designing.  Does thinking about the Wii controller make New Super Mario Bros less of a Super Mario Bros game?  Or Rock Band, which got to design their physical presentation in the guitar controller and clearly made a meaningful, accessible impact?  Other games show this too – professional sports has to be played in front of a crowd, for example, and special rules (the 7th inning stretch, say, or commercial breaks) are incorporated for audiences or television.  Are these less of a “game” for these things?  They are just different.

In particular, varying the presentation invites broader communities as well as broader meta-gaming to occur around the game.  Meta-gaming allows audiences to “play” mentally even if they can’t be competitive.  Meta-gaming allows people to learn from the game by watching and talking and exploring, not just playing in one defined way.  Checkers is a stronger game because it can be played online as well as physically, yet that’s a feature, not a required part of being a game.  Checker’s presentation is a design choice.  While usually it is common sense to go for the expansion of the presentation, restricting it has design value too,  and shouldn’t affect it’s “gamey-ness”.  For the people who can play, it is still a game and a meta-game.  With Train, there is just a much larger meta-game then is typical.

Replayability, Sirlin’s second question, is a trickier fish.  Most games today are hardly replayable, and I’ve argued in the past that this lessens them.  Historically, replayability is a core, undeniable aspect of a game.

I see too flaws here though.   One, many of these games are very replayable, if you consider the games to be shorter pieces of the overall experience.  A combo exchange in Street Fighter, a fight in Dragon Age: Origins, a traversal section in Uncharted 2.  If these pieces were just presented alone, we would consider them games – encapsulated mechanics, goals, replayable.  So why would the larger experience containing many such games not be a game?

Because they seem to have a different objective.

Consider puzzle games.  They contain these micro-games, usually in levels.  The play of these micro-games can be somewhat similar to, we’ll call them gamey-games.  But the goal is different.  Or RPGs.  A game like Android is an RPG and a board game at the same time.  It contains many aspects of the most classic euro-games: bluffing, strategic planning, action-value calculations.  Yet its core is in service of its theme, making the player forget they aren’t in a film noir Blade Runner.  And let’s not forget the host of games that use these micro games for story, the proud dukes of the video game market – platformers, adventure games, action games, single-player shooters.  All of these are focused more on narrative then on repeated gameplay.  At least until you look at their micro-games.

Should we throw all of these games out because they don’t elevate their microgames as their ultimate representation?  I don’t know.  I find it hard to believe that something that contains a game isn’t still a game, just as a game that contains art is art, from a base perspective.  It seems to come down to a big tent or small tent debate.

And rather, maybe it comes down to what meaning you’re willing to accept with your gameplay.  Sirlin calls the games he admires teachers of meritocracies built around skill.  Maybe that is their goal, their meaning, what they bring to the world.  But couldn’t other meanings from other games be valid, even desirable?  Why would we expect them to also teach meritocracy?  Couldn’t they teach perseverance or economics or logic?  Games seem stronger for having more possible meanings, not less, just as movies can and comic books have never managed to achieve in the public eye.

While not all these different types of games do honor to the medium they pull from, some, like Train, do.  Maybe that is enough to put down the debater’s cap and say “Welcome, what do we have in common?”

Bringing Interactive Storytelling to Industry

Here are the slides for my talk at AIIDE 2009 this year, on doing Experience Management with AI in games.  Many thanks to all those who helped me put the paper together.  It will be published in the AIIDE 2009 proceedings:

Bringing Interactive Storytelling to Industry – AIIDE 2009

Branching: Considered

Consider branching.

I claim today that what breaks the feeling of linearity, of only “branching” content in our narratives, what makes the games feel non-linear, is that a player’s action that can be used in a similar context to provide a different result.  We generally call this a mechanic:  mechanics can be repeated over and over to get the same result, but give different benefits depending on the context (typically the location, aka jumping puzzles, but could be time, player resources, anything).  Any time you can apply a mechanic and get a meaningful result, you are no longer in linear, non-interactive feeling, boring space.  That this usually leads to procedural/systematic solutions is probably an unnecessary leap, albeit a useful one.

This formulation requires that mechanics be bound by at least semi-consistent rules (which create resulting dynamics, nach).  The player can reason about these rules to predict results and make informed choices.  Otherwise, there would be randomness, chaos!, and it would feel non-linear, but not complex either.  Ah, the vagracy of complexity theory.  But yes, expectation says that if I can do something twice, I usually can do it in any context where it makes sense.

It is the intermixing of these rules throughout the different game contexts that prevents the “feeling” of branching.  The inventory items of old adventure games don’t break branching, and thus by this definition are not mechanics, because they are (usually) pure one-use lock and key.  However, repeat dialogue systems in the Sims are mechanics because they can lead to different (story) outcomes.  And the coins in Super Mario Bros. are not mechanics because they do not provide any (meaningful) result, except that 100 gives you an extra life, saving them.

Why define mechanics like this?

Because it defines a story concept and a story problem with a system design solution.  A well-studied, implementable design solution.  How do you prevent branching?  You create a generally applicable mechanic that the context creates different meanings for.  Mix and repeat until ready to serve.

(Edit: Consider KOTOR.  1 mechanic (good/evil), but still felt very branching, moreso because that mechanic was rarely meaningfully in play.  Compare to two other existance proofs.  I’ll let you guess the ones I’m thinking of.  P—————— and U———.

What is significant is the number of mechanics typically needed in these sorts of branching dialogue trees.  Or rather, the number of significant choices (made significant by however many mechanics necessary).  Network/Choice Theory would predict 2-3, which is the typical number for such games.  But I have a hard time visualizing so few being meaningful enough.  Maybe it is because the mechanics themselves aren’t powerful enough to make the decisions significant, not that the options are too few.)

Double-dose Crawford

Wholly whammies Batman!  First these videos from a documentary film on a conversation between Jason Rohrer and Chris Crawford, 2 “artistic” system designers from different eras, and then this deep conversation (pdf) between Chris Crawford and Mark Barrett on Interactive Storytelling.  Both interesting follows.  The video, in particular, is shot in an interesting conversational style that I haven’t seen before but really mirrors the kinds of discussions in life I enjoy having so much.  Must have been a real treat, and very inspiring to boot.

The Video Game Player’s Stare

You all know the gamer’s stare.  You’ve seen it in playtests.  It’s that one where the eyes glaze over, movement stops except for the hands, flow engages, and the person is out of contact.

It’s just a hunch, but has anyone actually watched video of people reading books or watching tv or movies?  I know when I watch people watch a drama series they freeze and just get the same expression on their face for hours.  Is this a universal phenomenon?

PS Or am I the only one seeing this stare?  It took longer for me to (fail to) find an image of this then it did to write the whole post! (Edit: Found! with the help of Nels)

Game Design: Helping People Fight Back

A couple of influences came together in an interesting way today, in particular this Radiolab podcast about “Choice”.  We’ve known for a long time that our unconscious minds can have more control then our rational thought.  Telling someone to evaluate someone while holding a warm cup of coffee makes them like them.  Telling someone to forget something makes them remember it.  Even smiling or getting someone to chat or help for even a second makes them likely to stay.  Hundreds of studies have shown, despite our beliefs, that we’re all, rather, predictable.  And there are even whole degrees out there on how to take advantage of that for personal gain.  Marketers, the easiest whipping boy but hardly alone, use such subconscious tricks to get us to do things that aren’t necessarily in our best interests, to use our emotional gut to overwhelm our rational brain.  It’s one of those flaws in capitalism we’re struggling with.  How I ended up with some many unopened games, I imagine.   Malcolm Gladwell has even gone so far as to say we might not have a conscious well as all.

But regardless, all these are tricks.  They rely on your non-awareness, or lack of emotional bias, about what’s happening around.  Manipulators are taking advantage of all of us, every day, to get us to do things that violate our self-interest and belief and benefit them.  Taking advantage of how we’re wired.

And that requires knowledge.  That requires an understanding of the systems in place, both to manipulate and to avoid being manipulated.  We know we are being taken advantage of, but we don’t know how, we don’t understand why it works.  By exposing that knowledge to us, exposing how they operate, we can better operate, respond appropriately.

The best way I know of to expose such bias is through games.  Games are simulations of systems that reward us for exploring aspects of ourselves.  Games can give people that self-awareness – just like mediation can expose you to how you relax, games can expose you to how you are manipulated.  This is not really a new genre for games, it’s a new goal, not necessary fun or even replayable, but a new reason to play.  Think of Train, of course, archetypical in its manipulation, but a learning experience about how people work, even touching on how such a thing could ever happen.  How you are converted, so to speak, from one bias (killing people is wrong) to another (just doing what someone told me to).   Resolving conflicts of interest, through gaming.  Such games might be packaged like “exercises”, moral or personal games like Brain Age that expose your internal or unconscious bias and help you develop a new rational or emotional bias in against that weakness.  Enjoyment that let’s you learn about yourself in the process, learn something about the world, think critical, think morally, think sharply.  And not fall for the trick the next time.  Exposing these untruths and half-truths could even force tricksters to rethink their approach, get more subtle or align better with our interests, and shape our culture towards something more direct, more honest, and more trustworthy.

This isn’t play for flow, or fiero, or social bonding, or immersion or art.  It’s not even play for classroom fact-retention.  This is play to make ourselves better people and to make society a better place.

Aesthetics Matter: Train

I heard about Train a few months ago and was just fascinated. Vague spoilers follow, and I really encourage you check it out first to really understand the full experience.  If you want a good understanding of the discussion and history of the game (with spoilers though!), I’d start with this Escapist article, and the description of her previous game about the consequences of the slave trade.