Monday, April 17, 2006

Games can scare me, but they have to immerse me first

So I finally started playing Fear. Cool game, great AI. I have to admit, I’m enjoying it. I can only play for a little while at a time though, there seems to be some kind of break with it for me. It’s fun, and the gameplay is pretty compelling. But there’s a problem… I feel like I’m playing a movie. The game is very linear, and while that’s not necessarily a problem as this game has gotten quite a lot of acclaim, I’m starting to really tire of this. And it’s not even the linear style, it’s the fact that it’s apparent. When it’s apparent then it’s difficult for me to become immersed. It happens every once in a while, but not for very long.

It’s almost as if the game itself was designed entirely separately from the gameplay and mechanics. This brought something to mind – I haven’t enjoyed a non Civ-style game in a quite a while. Half-Life 2, the new Prince of Persia, and especially the new Tomb Raider; these games all felt like an exercise: action story action story action story. There seems to be a serious break between design of story and the actual design of the game.

This reminded me of a conversation I had with Aaron Ruby a couple of months back while I was avoiding my intern duties at DICE. The meat of it started when he was answering questions about a reading they did from Smart Bomb (amazon link) that were related to gameplay. He felt like people were approaching games from the wrong direction and at the time I was really excited because I'd been tossing around the same idea. In fact, I’m pretty frustrated about it, it’s really starting to bother me. Our conversation went into a lot of depth about interactive theory and interface theory – and how the two are related – but I’ll spare you all that until later. Anyway, later an internet episodic comedy…. thing… about gaming called “Pure Pwnage” (located at www.purepwnage.com) summed it up pretty well. Sure, World of Warcraft is great, and casual, and addicting. But… it seems like everyone is playing World of Warcraft instead of trying to create games that have interesting, innovative mechanics.

Now I don’t actually think that’s true. But I do think that what Aaron and I chatted about is a really important part of the problem with current game design. It appears, to me at least, that when you got to Best Buy or EB and buy a new game you’re buying a story that harbors a game - not a game that harbors a story or that is a story. And this is a problem. A big one. This break between the story and the gameplay really hurts the interactive experience. Designing a film is not like designing a game. Neither is designing a book. Just look at the language – one does not design a book, one writes a book; one also writes a script. The experince of the reader (not player) is one of just that, an experience solely dictated by the author. The same goes for movies. As the creative lead for a movie (director/writer) or a book (author) you have complete control over each element of your media. Green is green and red is red. A murder may appear to be something different to me than you, but it is still a murder, and the story is still determined by you, as is pacing through it. Yes different things have different effects on everyone, but you still do not allow for any emergent narrative in a movie or book, whereas in every game that you give the player the ability to move you have an inherent level of emergence.

When you’re designing a game, you have control over all of the variables except for the most important one in an interactive system– the player. Effectively, this means that you also do not have complete control over the story – more specifically, you do not have control over the story that the player experiences. That is, unless you design it from the point of view of the interactive experience that the player might have. Otherwise what you have is a book that a player plays through, and during play it is dreadfully apparent that while you may shoot these guys differently than you did before you’re still playing within a framework that is not flexible. Half-life 2 is a fantastic example. The atmosphere in that game was truly compelling, I absolutely loved the first 10 minutes of it. The colors were great, it really did create the appearance and atmosphere – using a whole lot of film theory – of an Orwellian city. But after I started playing it I was incredibly under whelmed. It appeared cookie-cutter to me. Do this, do that, here’s your goal make it happen. You played as a character who had a story; but you were not the character, you just played as the character. The game did an absolutely horrible job of combining the gameplay and the story, and as such it felt like you were playing Half-Live 2 the movie. No room for anything new within the construct. and the story wasn’t even that good.

I hope we start seeing a shift. Hope hope hope.

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