Upgrade Your Reality

Sam & Max Episode 5: Reality 2.0 came out on GameTap yesterday. I also played it yesterday. This is only the second time since the series started that my schedule has been forgiving enough to permit me to play the game as soon as possible (the first being when it premiered back in November). I must say that the episodes just keep getting better. I seriously thought that nothing could top a 20 foot robotic Abe Lincoln saying, "In the name of Democracy... Bring it!". I was wrong. I could spout on for, well... minutes at least, about the dialog, the characters, the sheer joy in theepisodicness of the game. But I won't. I will, however, say that Jerry Holkins has love for the series, as that in itself may sway you to download a demo.

Instead, what I wanted to write about is inspired by the game's subject matter. Without giving away too many details, the story this time has our intrepid Dog and Rabbit crime fighters headed into cyberspace to confront the personified Internet herself. Yes, the Internet is a woman, so what? In the process they run into just about every game cliche they possibly can.


What really hit me was the ability of the game to produce interesting commentary on Internet culture and games in general. For the uninitiated, Sam and Max have a long and glorious history of subverting their mediums, mocking their own reality, and generally poking fun (and pun) at just about everything. By nature they are a verbose and sarcastic mirror for reality. Which makes them a perfect vehicle to express commentary about games from within the medium.

Which is interesting because Telltale Games are not attempting to create a new form of participatory storytelling. If anything, they are pushing for the renewal and rebirth of a more traditional means of linear narrative. The satire of their own medium contrasted with the effective fun of the game itself submits the argument that sometimes a game doesn't have to reach new heights of interactivity (whatever those may be) to be fun. You know going in that there is little direct agency provided to you (Sam and Max even know this). You have limited locations to explore, limited and pre-defined social interactions, and entirely pre-scripted and sometimes cyclical dialog. The episodes are not fun because you are saving Sam & Max from peril through action. However, slow and deliberate exploration, and the metered story progression, provide a backdrop of achievement around which the real rewards cluster themselves. The design team has populated the world of Sam & Max with so much lush detail, and humorous observation, that it is a pleasure to explore and fun to progress despite the lack of real agency. Your actions, however simple and repetitive, are necessary to dribble out the satisfying humour that the game provides and that is enough.

Traditionally adventure games relied of a reward cycle of puzzle/progression to provide interesting stimulation. Telltale has replaced these often complex challenges with much simpler ones in such a way that the reward they provide doesn't compare to digging around in the dialog trees and passive scenery searching for the next laugh. You are driven to progress because you know it will unlock more areas, more characters, more dialog, and thus more humour. The hard gameplay, solving the puzzles, has been replaced by the light gameplay of passive exploration. You want to explore what the characters have to say because what they say is the reward. Which makes this game a perfect vehicle for subtle and interesting commentary.

And at a game a month, six games in a year, that's a lot of potential commentary. With a game that only takes a few hours to play, and controls that anyone can understand, that's a large potential audience. It's an interesting way to make a game mean something.

Unique Snowflakes

It isn't a coincidence that all engaging stories are about someone. Sure, they often stray into the realm of being about something, but while metaphor and meaning are interesting they are not the meat of great tales. It all comes back to character, because character is where conflict and resolution lie. The draw of character is so powerful that many non-fiction writers use it too. The most compelling biographies, true crime novels, history books, marketing books, whatever, draw you in by creating or relating characters to you, or even go so far as to make you a character in their narrative. They build a sympathetic connection you are able to follow, tying you to the actions and motivations of the characters. The main character(s) become proxies for your own temporary escapism. We read to be transported which happens best when we connect to a character and, in some small way, become them.

Games with immersive storytelling in their core design usually depict the main character as a strongly defined individual or a faceless avatar. On one had you have characters with recognizable profiles, pronounced design, carefully written dialog, and even voice acting. The character is crafted to fit the role and each touch builds a better character. The idea is to create a strong link with the avatar by making it distinct and catchy — something you would want to emulate. The other hand holds the blank, generic, undefined, and sometimes unshown visage. There is minimal writing, and almost never any voiced dialog. By leaving the avatar as blank as possible the designer hopes that the player will imagine himself in the role, adding their own (possibly adopted) behaviors and reactions to the character to bring it to life. These techniques are amplified echoes of similar character development styles in traditional writing, but with a heavier focus on agency. The players are encouraged to become the characters, either by emulating the character given, or by assuming the role of the character left blank.

It is this agency in games that acts as a further step towards transparent escapism, when done properly. Rather than following along inside the character's head, or hovering, invisible, just over their shoulder, we take control. We inhabit their head, decide their motivations, direct their actions, and reap their rewards directly. Agency is the most powerful interactive story tool because the direct connection we have to the character can be exploited to create tension, conflict, and other story elements. Properly directed, and with a healthy dose of suspension of disbelief a game may even be able to induce self-reflection and internal change in the player. I'm getting off track. The question I want to address is: why is understanding character connections and motivations important for video games?

Focus and Intent

A book that is written from the perspective of a nobody who inhabits a world where nothing interesting happens is boring. No one would read it because there is no conflict, and our connecting character is uninteresting. Even books that claim to be about nothing, or have boring characters, are lying; the theme is a facade for the internal conflicts and meat of the story happening inside the outwardly boring world. I just want you to imagine the impossibility of a narrative that has no story, because nothing happens. Now we can make a small change and create story without altering our boring character: Make Mr. Boring a witness to interesting things happening to other people. Conflicts create interest, but notice that the focus is now on world (and people) that surround our non-character. The focus has shifted without our intended avatar changing. You can move the focus back to our boring guy by having the interesting things around him change him. With the conflict internalized again (even if the actual events are happening to a 3rd party), our relationship is now with our intended character again and nothing interesting has to happen to him directly. Notice that he also isn't as boring as he used to be. Of course this would make for a shit game.

In a story and character focused game (like most cRPGs, MMOGs, FPSs, and Platformers), if there is nothing interesting happening to your avatar in the game world then there is no direct action, and passivity makes for unsatisfying gameplay (hence all the complaints about cut-scenes). So games tend to be about exciting things happening to you. And because games are relatively immature (as a storytelling form), they tend to be about fantastic things happening to you. So you fight Hordes of Terrible Monsters and Save the World, or battle the Unstoppable Armada and Save the Galaxy, or travel through Impossible Worlds and single-handedly Save the Princess from captivity. You act and your heroic efforts turn the tide and save the day. You are special and important (the mantra of all good escapism, and most public schools), or you become so because to do otherwise would — we assume — be boring. This is the general motivating force behind most non-abstract games, from Mario to Shadow of the Colossus. The fiction is that you are the center of the world's attention, the sole hero. So what happens when you aren't alone?

Repeat After Me

HELEN
Everyone's special, Dash.

DASH
Which is another way of saying no one is.

One of the things I find absurd about many MMOGs is that they try to support a focused story and a core linear narrative. Everyone follows the same quests, does the same trials, fights the same bosses, gets the same loot (Corvus beat me to talking about this). You sit down, you load up, you log into a city where everyone is a hero or villain (can anyone guess which game I'm think of as I write this?). In fact the active, intelligent population is 100% special, with abilities far above the "norm" of society. Except the game isn't about living in a world peopled with superhumans (or Underwear Perverts). The narrative being told is about how your actions affect a world filled with normal, helpless people. Normal, helpless people that had to be invented. I find it bizarre that in a world where everyone has incredible power the majority of the population has to be created out of digital stuff. Special people wouldn't be special without everyone else. To support the player-as-hero infrastructure, the world has to be constantly refreshed and maintained, rebuilt and changed, so that the repetitiveness of the actual gameplay can be hidden beneath a thin, shifting veneer of self-important storytelling.

Jeff Freeman and Raph Koster have been recently back-and-forthing about rewards in a linear style MMOG. Their discussion has been mostly about how rewards are related to progress and prestige, and how those status symbols are corrupted by a system that allows people to purchase advancement. I'm more interested in Raph's later comments about the control developer's have over the feedback the game provides. In one comment he says this:

With the games we’re making now, people are mostly going around and doing stuff independent of one another. We aren't even measuring and then giving out prizes based on how WELL they slew the dragon — just that they took the ride.

Reaching New Depths

Eventually, video games will strive to new depths of creativity, interactivity, and (ultimately) storytelling. What that may look like is anyone's guess. It may also depend on how we play our games in the future. Games intended to be played alone may look very different from games intended to be played in community. Single-player stories can achieve incredible levels of pathos if we learn to use the tools of storytelling we have in new ways. Massive worlds may become interesting and sustainable if we learn to create balance and diversity that allows players to tell their own stories from anywhere inside the complex world of the game. Realism isn't something that the graphics designers have to worry about. Storytellers, world builders, game designers have to be reaching for new ways to make something real — tell something true — in the story-worlds that they are building, whether they are meant for one or meant for many.

Perhaps the greatest design change we can look forward to is the realization that different tools lead to different ends. As an outside observer I see a lot of time and effort being thrown at "problem areas", when oftentimes the answer isn't in the code. This is a common engineering design flaw which has bled into games through programmers (engineers of instruction sets) and designers (engineers of play structures). We see something that we think needs a particular solution and single-mindedly drive through hell and high water to find a solution. What we often miss is the beautiful and elegant solutions already around us, and the irony. I'll illustrate with a simple question:

Why are single-player games being designed to solve the problem of complex social interactions, while massive online worlds are being designed as linear stories with limited playable scope?

Grammatical

To understand what use a Grammar of Games would be, I’d like to take a walk through the use of grammar in other mediums. I’m treating this as a thought experiment, so please hold onto something; this might become a little bumpy.

How about a definition to start us off? Dictionary.com gives us this:

1. the study of the way the sentences of a language are constructed; morphology and syntax.
2. these features or constructions themselves: English grammar.
3. an account of these features; a set of rules accounting for these constructions: a grammar of English.
4. the elements of any science, art, or subject.

Notice that the majority of the definition concentrates on language. Particularly on the rules that can be extracted from it, or applied to it, to create consistency. Grammar is a set of conventions developed and applied to allow easy communication. Not only language itself (syntax, conjugation, punctuation), but also any subject matter with sufficient history to have developed definable elements.

So, based on this definition, games already have a grammar, or are at least forming one as we continue to deepen our knowledge of creating and playing them. Any time we talk about aspects of a game, gameplay, or design we are using our established grammar to communicate ideas. However, as games (and especially computer enhanced games) are relatively new, the grammar that we have is incomplete and ill-defined.

Shifting Sand

One of the fascinating aspects of language is how it changes over time. I’m not just talking about lexicological shifts – words are created or acquire new meanings or contexts over time, that’s a given. Grammar shifts as well. This can be seen most dramatically in they way that punctuation is used today, as compared to even a decade ago. While some of this is due to haphazard education, laziness, and apathy, some is purely a result of cultural shift.

Go ahead and pull out any given paper or essay that you wrote in school. Something written at the high school or post-secondary level. Compare the grammatical construction of that writing with your last blog post or e-mail. What do you differently online than you did on paper? These shifts in grammar are not just limited to the internet. As new forms of communication become the de facto standard the grammatical shifts leak into other means of communication.

In the digital community shifts such as these are accelerated. Think back over the last year or two of game design, gameplay, and the theories that hover around them. How many new ideas were put forward? How many terms bandied about, discussed, created, changed? How many theories of design toted, praised, rejected, argued? The list is a lot longer than the number of changes to punctuation created in the same time frame.

From Analysis

I do believe that we are on a solid path to developing a mature grammar for games – play and design. For instance, there are people who are dedicated to the analysis of gameplay. The goal, so far, is to understand how and why people play. This gives us a foundation for analysing what people enjoy and giving us meaningful feedback about it.

Without the language to describe the systems, and our interactions with them, it is impossible to separate the elements that work from the elements that don’t. By elements, please don’t think that I’m trying to define games as something that can be broken into Lego-esque building blocks for easy reconstruction and recombination. It is more chemistry. There are atomic building blocks, but also formula and restrictions that must be discovered and communicated. A mature grammar can be developed by deconstructing (to a point) existing formula to discover the combinations that went into the mix.

To Design

Grammar isn’t going to solve all of our big design problems. You can’t take the short story you wrote about dragons in the fourth grade, upgrade the grammar and spelling, and expect an award winning piece of fiction. Grammar is a support, a framework, and an ideal – it will not create on its own. Designers will forever be struggling against conventions, story, and play in an attempt to create something new.

It will, however, strengthen the core of design as we push for the edges. By applying our grammatical tools – structural analysis, play styles, gameplay notation – we can strengthen our work. This process will become akin to editing your writing. You go back over the work using critical analysis (proofreading) to find grammatical hitches. You add a comma here to create a necessary pause. Something gets re-written to remove ambiguity. An element replaced to create a deeper symbolism.

(…)

I think that I’ve wandered enough for one post. What I’ve tried to imagine is a series of tools, conventions, and definitions – a common grammar for games – that would enable us, as designers, to better understand and develop our work. I see it as incomplete right now (perhaps perpetually), but in progress. I see it as worthwhile to pursue and understand. Just so long as we don’t forget that it will not solve our problems, and it will not design our games for us.

Conventioneering

I have a great many “strong convictions” about conventions, or so I have discovered over the past week as I thought about this month’s Round Table topic. By “strong convictions” I mean to say baseless opinions about good design, how to achieve it, what works, what doesn’t, and a raft of other topics. It comes from knowing a lot of theory, but having little practice. In truth, I had a much longer and deeper post about conventions, user interface, and bringing non-gamers into a gameplay space. Lots of theory. Something I should probably stay away from.

I’ve also had my ass kicked by a strange combination of work, head cold, Animal Crossing, and Fraggles. The first two led me into not wanting to do much but enjoy the latter two. Also, Katamari. Hopefully more on some, or all, of these things in other posts… On with the conventioneering!

The first thing I’d like to do is forward a definition of a convention. A convention is an arbitrary pattern within any information space that is recognized and adopted by designers and users. Joel Spolsky refers to is as a “mental model” held by users and programs alike. If the mental models of two interacting entities match, then there is recognition and compatibility. If, however, they differ, there is confusion, frustration, and the need for at least one party to adapt. Invariably, the hard-coded model forces the other to change.

Conventions are a short hand in most design. They are a series of well recognized mental models that will provide a specific user-base access to your design. In UI, this is the 3D button, or the check box, or the underlined link. In games this is the right thumb-stick to move the camera, or the Tank-Healer-Assassin-Mage class system, or the Jump-On-Enemies-To-Kill-Them. If you use a convention, then your design can be understood with ease. If you subvert, invent, or break conventions then users must adapt to your system before they can fully use it.

Should conventions be used? Of course. Without conventional design there would be impenetrable barriers between technologies. People would never want new software, or hardware, or books, or music. Does using only conventions produce stale technology and design? Yes. Innovation demands new design, which leads to new conventions or adaptation of older ones. Are all widely accepted conventions representative of best methods? Of course not. Conventions are publicly agreed upon and are therefore often bloated and inefficient.

Can you do better? Should you try? I would have to say that sometimes you should. But mostly you shouldn’t. If you are trying to create something mainstream you need to use conventions that are broad, intimately understood, and easy to learn or teach. New conventions are none of these things. New conventions are for narrow audiences, cutting edge design, and the leaders of the pack. The middle 80% won’t go near your work until everyone else is doing the same thing. So how do you win? How do you innovate without alienating?

Saving the Baby

My first example of new design, focused on the mainstream, that appears to buck convention is the iPod. Apple’s little music player that could. But what makes the iPod so special? Is it sleek physical design, or funky advertising? Does success come from supporting software and media, or a brand name backing? I would argue that there is one thing that caused the iPod to stand above the competition, both past and present (excepting the Zune, jury’s still out on that one). Interface.

Apple innovated by adopting broad, and unused (by MP3 players of the time), interface conventions to make navigation easy. By utilizing the same principles as a dial, users were easily able to understand and better navigate the information provided through the touch wheel. By providing a familiar file system, and a large screen, the information could be clearly displayed. The difference between the iPod and its competitors became ease of use through a non-cryptic interface.

And this line of thinking follows into today, and games, through the Wii. By subverting existing interface conventions Nintendo intends to make video games accessible to a broader demographic. The controller is a remote, found in nearly every couch across America. Everyone from your 2 year-old nephew to your 96 year-old grandmother knows how to operate a remote.

The primary interface the remote provides is a point-and-click system. No more highlighting with the left hand and selecting with the right. Just point at the screen, and click. Even movement is a convention we understand far better than current game controls. How many people, when swinging a sword, or tennis racket, thinks about twitching their thumbs? It is easier to have the interface be the action.

Engineering has let us remove some of the layers of interface. We don’t need to invent new conventions to create new forms of digital play. Sometimes it is as easy as finding old conventions – hidden conventions – that make more sense. It is simplicity through better conventions.

Additional reading includes Joel Spolsky’s online book User Interface Design for Programmers. If the idea of creating an interface has ever scared you, confused you, or caused you to pull your hair out, then you should read this.