Game of Design

(I’ve been out of town for a bit, but a couple of weeks ago I discussed some of the initial PR around Valve’s upcoming co-op shooter. I’m going to turn this into a series discussing what I’ve learned about procedural storytelling, hopefully an area of interested and one of my passions and areas of game research.  I’ve unfortunately had little luck finding many experts in this field, so much of my work has relied on science techniques, trial and error, and analysis.  Forgive me if these thoughts are stale and don’t hesitate to point me in an stronger direction.)

This week, I saw this interview with Doug Lombardi:

“A lot of co-op games become very predictable and static after the first or second time you play through it. The AI Director is generating the population dynamically each time you play through the game. It’s also sort of monitoring your success rate and scaling the difficulty, based on if you’re doing well or if doing badly it’ll turn up or turn down, sort of, the action. And it’s also looking at pacing, which is something we found to very important in the creation of the Half-Life games. Trying to avoid too much combat and making the player feel sort of battle fatigued, if you will. Where they need to put the game down, instead we’re trying to schedule those breaks in the game… keep the game dynamically tailoring to the player’s experience whether it’s that difficulty setting, the battle fatigue and scheduling the pacing, etc.”

And I thought the AI Director was a great idea before! 2 thoughts: One, kudos to Valve for actually finding a way to do this. I’ve got a number of friends of there and it’s neat to see them working on this stuff. I’ve found procedural pacing control is still in it’s infancy, and in my experience most developers aren’t willing to take this kind of risk. Second, pacing is a word I haven’t heard in PR before. Why are they using a word associated with storytelling when story doesn’t seem to be the goal at all?  On some level, Valve wants to control the entire player’s flow through the experience, something that very few non-competitive games have done.  I have to admit my surprise to see this coming from the co-op multiplayer sphere rather then the single player realms that I have been focused on, but on reflection it makes sense. Why? I haven’t played Left 4 Dead yet, but to answer that I’ll have to compare it with the last comparable situation I can think of: Diablo 2.

In Diablo 2, a game designed for team play, there was a main game and then a replaying game.  In the runs through the main game, the experience was deliberately planned out, just as most single player games are. Even though it used dynamic spawning, it carefully followed the “easy-easy-hard” difficulty model to create dramatic arcs within the game and give the game a controlled pace and a tense experience. Co-op play increased the challenge a fixed amount, keeping the overall challenge static.  But once players had beaten the main game, they would continue playing by teleporting around and replaying the areas that would give them the best rewards, the “replaying game”. Since the fixed challenge throughout the main game is now too easy, the replaying game flow is designed to become player-controlled to accommodate the array of co-op team skills and character levels, despite leading to “farming” and losing all sense of story.And it was mighty fun! In fact, just like with World of Warcraft today, many fans don’t believe Diablo 2 really starts until you have beaten the main game. Diablo 2 showed that  variety, challenge, and pacing in the main game were not just the basic components of its narrative experience but key components of the game’s replayability, even after the designed narrative experience functionally ended. Players deliberately manipulated challenge, variety, and pacing to maximizing their performance, even at the expense of crafting dramatic arcs. Players, to wit, seem to prefer mechanically rewards, ie leveling up, rather then narrative rewards, but there are manipulatable controls that link the two.

This is significant because it shows a mechanic experiential benefit for storytelling beyond story, a game-y justification that players and designers are already engaged in. Diablo 2 players were taking control over challenge, variety, and pace. In a sense, these players were also creating their own player narrative alongside their maximally fun experience.  It was just a narrative the designers had to let go.  So if we choose to maintain these components it should keep the game replayable and cooperative and could also through a stronger narrative into the mix!  Left 4 Dead sounds like it’s taking a stab at this by addressing the following direct corollaries:

1. Players are bad at forming dramatic arcs in their play, so we should create the structure of them for the player.

2. Players will happily do things that destroy dramatic arcs, so we should not reward them for doing so.

And we are back to Doug Lombardi.  These goals both depend on pacing control.  Game structure is heavily based on controlled pacing - in that it requires some control over sequencing.  Rewards are directly linked to pacing, as seen in the psychological study of reward schedules.

Left 4 Dead appears to be tackling these goals using what I call “Encounter Scheduling”. On one hand, they are tracking the schedule of the players, their current narrative arc, and attempting to manage that using different numbers and difficulties of enemy spawns.  While the narrative here is probably quite primitive, it accomplishes the main goals, namely, building a cohesive line of play for the players, and providing challenge, variety, and likely tension as well.  In my research, I’ve found the narrative limitations here appear to be actually limitations of the game mechanics themselves, not the narrative form, and if the player has bought into the game this style feels quite comfortable.  Multiplayer deathmatches are a good example of similar simple narrative arcs and flows, bounded by their inherent mechanical depth.

Additionally, Left 4 Dead seems to eschew the traditional mechanics that break narrative flow, and consequently co-op replayability.  Level grinding seems absent, for example, as well as (hopefully) backtracking through “cleared” rooms to pick up items and player-created lulls caused by confusion or unfortunate design that suck the air out of most combat games. In the trailers, the game seems to constantly push you forward, encouraging you to engage with the narrative and the game mechanics it intertwines rather then “game” the story.

Narrative and the game mechanics it intertwines.  This startling statement is why I think we find the idea of procedural storytelling so compelling, why I think is likely to become a major component of future game designs and game art, and why I think Left 4 Dead could be so significant.

It’s worth pointing out that this doesn’t seem to be dynamic difficulty as we traditionally understand it, contrary to the press interview, and it brings with it a fair amount of innovation risk, so I’ll make this my starting point next time.  If the difficulty, a function of challenge over pace, is automatically being controlled by the procedural narrative, the “Encounter Manager”, what what satisfaction of accomplishment is ultimately being earned by the player?

The Queen of Interactive Fiction Emily Short posted some great writing tips over on her blogs.  I find IF construction fascinating, and their insights on the genre unique (as seen in Emily’s review of Portal).  Inform 7 is a great training tool if you’re an aspiring game writer, at least as a start.  The games are easy to explore too, and quite exciting and groundbreaking, a must if you haven’t tried them recently and you’ve got a few free hours.

This interview with Valve’s Doug Lombardi highlights Left 4 Dead’s AI Director, which I hadn’t heard of. Dynamic spawning is the first step towards the procedural storytelling I’ve been working on for the last couple of years. Finally some of this stuff is getting published.

Yes, dynamic procedural storytelling might ultimately never work. But, if you’ve played a pen and paper RPG you know it probably can. I’ve run these ideas through enough projects and models to feel it’s one of the next big story game revolutions, and these kinds of interviews get me all excited.

I know, I should write about it. Give me some time.

I’m in a defining mood this year, apparently.

For a long time I’ve thought there were two kinds of games, and they were approached in construction two completely different ways. Mechanics games are the mechanics driven, repeatable, shorter games, like Poker and Tetris, that derive their design from some new concepts. They are easy to spot - their PR tends to focus on these exciting new interactions. Story games are driven by their flavor. They are experience based, have a narrative arc and an ending, tend to steal their mechanics from mechanics games and polish them up. Their PR tends to focus on their characters and setting. Pretty much every big game you’ve ever heard of - Grand Theft Auto, Halo, World of Warcraft, Axis and Allies - is a story game. For a long time, I’ve thought this distinction was useful for the same reason that the PR is different - it helps you identify where you have to focus and what you have to succeed with.

But as time has gone on, this distinction has become less and less, well distinctive. It seems like the biggest distinguishing factor is no longer story or gameplay, it’s money. If your budget is over $500,000, you’re probably a story game. Portal by all rights should have been a mechanics game. It wasn’t. The prequel Narbacular Drop was. Portal was the polished up, story driven version, and it was awesome. We all loves us some story games. But we in the video game industry have lost something that still drives the majority of the market today. People love their simplicity, their mechanics exploration, and their replayability as well. Puzzle Quest, Bejeweled, and Solitaire are popular for a reason too. In a sense, story games are trying to transcend the medium, but in the process we can lose sight of where we started.

But we’re getting better. The key decision point I watch is when that “The End” screen disappears and we’re back at the main menu. If we’ve done our jobs well, story and mechanics together, players will pick “New Game” again every time. The ritual that has defined games for thousands of years.

Update: This blog reminded me of Soren’s Smart vs. Adversarial AI, and how it ties back into these concepts.  I’m thinking his Smart/Fun is directly tied to story games and Adversarial/Good is tied to mechanics games.  This model shifts most multiplayer games into the mechanics genres, which I think is all right.  Look at multiplayer game advertising.

In production, we deal a lot with story changes. It’s funny, because story is often one of the first things in the game to get created, but one of the last things to get started, and the last things finished. Chris just recently posted a survey that found 93% of game players require or enjoy story in their games. But, in the game of design, it often just gets in the way.

Why do so many game stories suck? In large part it’s because they’re the first thing in but the last thing out. I can’t tell you how many planning meetings I’ve sat through where designers have debated the finer points of a particular moment’s drama and character motivation while what the primary gameplay was going to be like was still up in the air. And most designer’s will be able to tell you exactly where each level is going to be before they’ve even gotten their hands on a playable prototype. Plus, hey, your executives would much rather hear about your cool story and see concept art then see your game. In the end, though, when you are pressed for time, these last things like story get cut back pretty fast and the drama just falls apart. As much as we may hate to admit it, games, and thus our game stories, are interactive (cutscenes excepted). Handling all those little quirks that comes with interactivity means getting it wrong the first time. And the second time, and the third time. Plus, if all this story was planned first, it’s probably not adjusted for where your game ultimately ended up, making it doubly hard to work with.

So what can we do better? I think it’s time we moved away from stories in a production sense. All you really need for most games is your setting. Everything else can be adjust and tune to better effect as you move through the process. But setting is critical. Think about your game’s setting for a moment. Setting impacts gameplay, sets tone, defines initial impressions, sets expectations, and communicates feedback to players, all without independently from your story. Picking a settings earlier is substantially easier and substantially more useful. Differentiating between story and setting so that you can determine story themes, arc, characters, and pace once you actually understand your game could make the difference between a story that gets thrown into cutscenes or one that evolved to match exactly what a game is about and what you have time to accomplish. Resist the urge to pick your story first! Store those ideas in a safe place. Picking your setting first and putting your energy into the game could get you all the way through pre-production and maybe even into production, giving your ultimate story the time it needs to find the best ideas and the best home in your game.

(Photo by user zeekslider from flickr used under the Creative Commons license)

Only a Game beats me to it and posts about whether we’ll ever see great game stories. I’m not sure I actually agree with him, but Chris is a superior writer and he’s bringing his experience to bear. I’ve consistently approached this problem from a game mechanics point of view rather then a writing point of view. Or more accurately, a writer’s point of view.

“It is unfortunate that there are no great game stories. It would be nice, when people ask what I would single out for excellence in game narrative, to have some quick and easy retort; some title I could comfortably pull from memory with the confidence of many days repetition. But alas, I am at a loss to find anything in the literary history of videogames thus far that aspires to greatness.”

This raises so many more questions then answers for me. Things to ponder. If we were to approach this critical then, what would greatness look like? Would it also by necessity be a great game? I have a sinking feeling Chris’ answer is no. It sounds to me like he’s describing games like the Quest for Glory and King’s Quest series - all timeless setups, popular if not interesting characters, and non-repetitive but limited gameplay. But then again, hardly anyone else cites those for writing either. I’m more frequently citing Planescape: Torment, which arguably only nails the characters.

Having just watched Seven Samurai I have to say, it’s a slog. The movie’s significant, but there’s a reason most people have never and will never see it. There isn’t a place for those kinds of movies in mainstream film either. It’s the indies where it’s at. And correspondingly, it’s the game indies where I’d look for this kind of story. In fact, indie genre of Interactive Fiction seems like a fantastic place to start. Some of the writing and drama within these modern text adventures has really impressed me. All Roads is the last best one that I’ve played, but now I’m dating myself. All the IFComp winners are worth checking out though, and they all play under 2 hours, so you really don’t have any excuses. They lend themselves directly to writing, so if that’s the best approach, that’s where it’ll start. I’m still not convinced though. You first have to sort out player narratives from stories for me. I’m not sure we can ever claim the writer’s authorial control.

With GDC coming, up, there’s been the corresponding talk about bringing story to games. I’ve worked in the field for a couple of years now, and the thoughts that keeps going through my head:

(1) Most everything that can be tried probably has. Several times. Companies have a lot of money, and people cycle through the industry fast enough. They just don’t publicize their failure.

(2) Games aren’t like stories. Games are like life. You make active situational choices that the world reacts to. You tell your friends stories about it afterwards over a beer, as a form of reflection.

They aren’t the same thing. When you play a game of Starcraft, you tell people a story about the results, not while you’re playing. If you recall Ninja Gaiden, the movies that bookended the gameplay play through our heads sequentially. We don’t replay the story in our heads with the gameplay meaningfully and accurately dispersed throughout. Just like we don’t replay the gameplay in our heads with the story in it.

It’s not impossible. Life has conflict, and drama. Meaning, and character. But our brains interpret it differently, and we have to respect that.

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