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Bad Ideas For Games That Aren’t Fun
It’s painful to watch as Theo Faron drags himself out of his jaded, selfish mire in the film Children of Men. His ex-wife offers him a chance to help her rebel cause, but he refuses until she’s also offering cash. Time and again he opts to watch his own back, until the stakes are so high, the values become so close to his heart, that he finally undertakes those outrageous risks and makes sacrifices for what he believes is important. This is a common strategy film uses for developing character: place the protagonist in a situation where his values are in conflict, and force him to make a choice. We are dragged along, wincing, as the protagonist makes mistakes and, in being honest with ourselves, recognise that we relate.
This column is part three in a series about the theoretical design of games that are valuable without being fun, just like all other media have Fun and Not Fun varieties, and the observation about how choice is used in a Not Fun film implies that by leveraging interactivity, games should be able to do even better. Shouldn’t a game be able to combine the structured fiction of a film with the simulation of real life choices and effectively become a safe playground for us to experiment with our limitations and come to terms with our character flaws? Already today you can choose to beat up old ladies in games and perhaps feel bad about yourself as she bleeds and crawls towards safety. This is wonderful, but as a choice it’s degenerate. Suppose there was more conflict of values, like you have to choose whether to go the extra mile just for some character’s benefit? Or sacrifice something so they won’t suffer? Then, would you find yourself making the same choices that you would in real life, and from the consequences the game depicts, learning something about yourself?
The playground is too safe. In real life people exhibit flaws because they are too proud, careless, selfish or cowardly, but those don’t apply in a game world. You know that the money isn’t real, the years in prison aren’t real, the scorn and hate isn’t real. You know that when you reload everyone will be alive again. You know your altruism will probably be rewarded anyway. It’s easy to be selfless, brave and tireless, and when you don’t feel like it any more it’s small potatoes to be as morally bankrupt as you want to be.
One solution is to avoid pitting the player’s resources against the game characters’, because the two exist in different value pools and don’t compare easily. Asking a player to fetch a lost book or pay some gold pieces is just asking them to play more of the game, so it’s an easy win-win if the fiction says they’ve made a noble sacrifice. Instead, we can pit the wellbeing of the characters against each other’s and have the player determine their fate. Take the hypothetical Hospital Director game described in last month’s column. The player must decide whether a frazzled doctor should be forced to take time off before he makes a mistake or whether he needs to stay on duty in case his pregnant patient goes into labour with her dangerous complications. In balancing the budget, the player must choose whether all the hospital’s underpaid and understaffed ambulance technicians should take a pay cut or whether to lay off just one and, if so, which. These situations are morally ambiguous, with no one right solution, and since the players’ own resources aren’t a factor, they can’t make a painless sacrifice to keep anything bad from happening. Hospital Director is shaping up to be a valid Not Fun game even though, unlike Children of Men, it doesn’t traffic in the player’s own character flaws.
It’s easy for the player to choose to suffer when it benefits game characters, and the flip side is even more revealing: when it is to the player’s benefit, it’s trivial to allow characters to suffer. When you steal and are shown the lamentation of the villagers, do you feel sorry? Does that sad face really stack up against a crate of ammo? Emotional attachment is sorely lacking in games, and if we were more capable of generating it, new horizons would open up. You could imagine the game where the player decides that assisting the rebels isn’t worth it, then feels bad enough to learn something about himself when his ex-wife is shot dead. You could imagine a game where it was reward enough for a character to express sincere thanks. Without emotional attachment, Hospital Director is a cold exercise in risk analysis. If the pregnant lady loses her child, you just think: “Hmm… I guess forcing the doctor to work longer hours would have been the more optimal choice.”
Characters in films are just as fake as characters in videogames. Neither exists. Why, despite the pivotal position emotional attachment has in game design, does film do so much better than we do? Are they better writers, or is there another challenge unique to our medium?
Randy Smith is the co-owner and game designer of Tiger Style, a new indie studio with an unannounced game in the works.
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Copyright 2006 - 2009 Future Publishing Limited, Beauford Court 30 Monmouth Street Bath, UK BA1 2BW
England and Wales company registration number 2008885
Ah now Edge comments section moves the philosophical understanding of the interactive medium forward. I hope Randy reads these comments, especially those last two. You have to be so painfully objective to get anywhere writing about games.
The suggestion that games are at an emotional disadvantage because of their player choice is an odd one. I don't think it's the choice that ruins it, it's that so much of the time the world your in doesn't really work. As much as people say GTA4 is living it's really like props on a film set, when you kill an old lady a family somewhere doesn't get terribly upset, none of those people go up those buildings and have jobs or needs like a sim...
Portal is a good example of a game with choice where the world reacts believably. As you sit at your keyboard, going through the puzzles made for you at Valve, and triggering the ingame computer's pre-canned mockeries, you're experiencing a kind of "I see what you did there with the irony" emotion as the story also uses you like a lab-rat. And then, character and backstory bedamned, your in-game company of all this time betrays you, lowering you into an incinerator. Now the only way to keep playing is to betray it, braking out of it's planned levels into a behind the scenes area prefferably designed by someone else entirely. Soaring emotions- guilt, anger, wonder.
Hinging the ability to keep playing on the player's decision to betray a character, lets all the confusion about "Who am I in this character?" fall away since you are now clearly united in view and opinion. You've been bottle-necked by an evil computer, chosen life and are now running on basic survival instincts. You've betrayed your guiding light of all this time, and it's not just in some cacky cutscene thrown over the top. Your choices make you one, and even though thousands of other people across the country have gone through the same motions, you're living it now. You are the character and your thoughts and feelings let you have your own legacy.
So, Issue 1: Identity:That question of "Who am I in this character" needs answering for filmic emotional attachment to work well. Bioshock works because It's like the character hasn't really started living his life until you get involved, and you can kind of "make of it what you will" about your new personage. Also you and your character have something in common: you are dropped into a demented world with rich idealogical creators. Players feel one with their character.
Issue 2: World behaviour: When you make a choice, a movement, it has to have realistic, (or atleast realistic in the boundaries of the designers zany world) consequences. In Portal, as you make your choice and the game reacts you attach emotionally because you can see that this reaction is how it would happen.
A simulation that wants to let us feel REAL human interaction is bound to never work because you know they are not human, watching them in the cutscenes, only the voice is real. You can get the overarching communication from the designer, as you wonder round shooting things, he/she had the floorplan a while ago and fiddled it... What was he/she trying to say. What can be done is the establishing of a nice big world with you and likeable characters, and then even if you can only talk to them in dialogue trees and most of the events happen in a cutscene, you still enjoy it and get an emotional attachment, like Gun or GTA. "Man, in that game, some shit went down." type thing, which is pretty much the same as with movies.
Also games aren't taken seriously as story telling mediums if you're an author or film producer, so we just don't have that many great writers. "videoGAME"... It's an inherently bad name for serious intellectual pursuits.
Another issue with emotional attachment in games is that at the movies you get to watch footage of real people, actors who are feeling the story running through them as they go. That's what makes the events "real" on some level. All these punks in the uncanny valley just don't have the same effect.
I think the other way around the problem of emotional involvement, alongside good story and realistic reaction to player behaviour, is to define the player's role more clearly right from the start. You could let your character have needs, wants, emotions, relationships and sensations all of it's own like a sim. And you get bunged in their head aswell, as the decision making microchip from our dimension inserted into their head. or the like. ahem.. In a menu you could change their facial expressions, body language, set preferences for how to behave to other sims no matter how your character actually feels.
The world could be a high quality free roaming area that can run in realtime for like a week. You'd drop out of the character and leave them running automatically through uneventful grocery shopping etc, but you'd drop back in when there was a choice that you weren't prepared for (like how to respond when being mugged), aswell as just defining a time when you want to play again and fast forwarding to then. You could have a circle of friends at the start, someone who wants to cheat on their girlfriend about half way through, Highly replayable. people who are trying to kidnap you, a big orc rebellion being organised and happening halfway through.
I think this is definitely a good path for RPG games like Oblivion to go down.
That's all if you don't want a game where you play as an angry molecule in the heart of the sun, searching in vain for your mother. Coz that's a kind of abstract expressionism that films can't provide. willy out
>>Why, despite the pivotal position emotional attachment has in game design, does film do so much better than we do?
Why do you think that? In my own experience I've felt as much, if not more emotional attachment in certain games than in movies. It just depends on the story's presentation in their respective mediums.
I think the only way to really explain my view is just to give an example and explain it.
>> It’s easy to be selfless, brave and tireless, and when you don’t feel like it any more it’s small potatoes to be as morally bankrupt as you want to be.
It's not easy if the game's not easy. Have you ever played Actraiser 1 or 2? You are the Master, benevolent diety of some hapless mortals. You descend from your heavenly palace to battle against the forces of evil that threatened peace. It's a damn hard game. The Master has to struggle very hard with great difficulty to protect his people.
I guess I'll list some spoilers here.
the scene can be viewed here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VKihwMIzkv4
In the final showdown against the arch demon Tanzra, an impenetrable force field protects his castle. There's no way around it, except... the Angels who serve you say that dropping the sky palace will penetrate it. So the sky palace descends and crashes through.
*this was basically your vessel for Stage Selection, but this aspect of the game has been weaved into the narrative. It's destruction seals the finality of the Final Stage.
In the background is the rubble of your stage selection and the bodies of cherubs. One of your angels is on his knees. He is cut down by a beam of light. His last words are "it was an honor to serve at your side", his halo fades, he's dead.
The Master walks further, it's the Angel who's gameplay feature is describing the stage you've selected. He is cut down by a beam of light
he says "it is not right to live in a world of fear and suffering, you have unselfishly offered your own life in battle* so others may know peace. People have placed their faith in your power, no longer fearing Tanzra. Master, the last thing I can do for you is give you some power"
*The difficulty of Actraiser 2 makes this statement more plausible. The Master (the player) has to face incredible challenges at peril of his life (the game's massive difficulty). But to get to this Final Stage, the player (the Master) has persevered against incredible odds.
The halo fades from the Stage Description gameplay feature.
The Master can now throw balls of light from his sword, this is a pretty incredible power up for Acraiser 2.
You now face the demon that cut down your loyal retainers, and fight through the grueling 16bit last stage favorite of "fight every boss you've beaten in a row".
Clearing that challenge, the Master sees one of his Angels.
He's the game save feature. He tells you that this is the final battle, if you, the Master, fall here, the world will die. He's cut down by a blast of energy
His last words are the password to go to the final battle. Even in death he performs his duty.
When you go to face Tanzra, something peculiar happens, your life/time/magic bar fades away
The screen is nothing but the Master and Tanzra facing off one on one. The game began with a battle between the two, and now you fight again.
Tanzra is defeated: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q8k4Avj8uPw
"Tanzra is Destroyed. The Master has dissapeared"
Peace reigns. A man tending his crops looks to the sky and whispers "thank you Master, for giving us good crops this year"
A woman prays "Master, please help me find someone special"
Even though the Master has dissapeared, he will be remembered forever.
while this text scrolls by, the background is of a statue of the Master. Over the seasons, years, eons it fades and crumbles.
This is the reward for you, the Master's struggle.
That is the ending to a 16bit action sidescroller. You're a hero and you fight demons. There was nothing particularly special about it's marketing, nothing shouted that it was a tale of morality and emotionally deep, it was being a cool hero and fighting cool demons in a damn great looking SNES game.
To me, that experience was more emotionally gripping than Children of Men. Children of Men is a good movie, yes, but it's no Actraiser 2, I don't really think they're that comparable, but in terms of "what was more emotionally gripping?" it was beating Actraiser 2.
Children of Men is a much more accessable experience though, you sit for two hours and soak it in. Actraiser 2 requires effort and investment, it recquires committment to get to the end.
Everything in the game comes together in the end. The game begins with features like stage selection, stage descriptions, and game 'saving' personified, as your sky palace and Angel retainers. These are common gameplay elements. Acraiser 2 in its final act 'kills' them off, these constants that make us feel safe die. This is a very unique abstraction in the narrative.
The story is simple, be the hero, save the people. It is a video game experience.
I believe movies pull the suckerpunches best in the best realised worlds. A well-realised world involves the script-writer, director, etc, knowing a lot more about the world than the viewer is ever going to see on the screen. This is why fully-realised movies such as Children of Men, Star Wars, and the Godfather, have the most moving and believable character twists. You don't want Anikin to go to the dark side, but you understand why he did and still empaphise with him; you don't necassarily want Al Pacino's character to be sucked into thecriminal underworld, but you can see the choices he made and why he made them that got him there,
The same is in games. Thplayer is going to commit him/herself to the characters they feel the most empathy for, in the world they feel the most attached to. I don't think it is a coincedence that the only games that have made me 'enjoy' unfun moments are Grand Theft Auto 4, Fallout 3 (The Pitt, to be precise), and Far Cry 2. Each of these games has a fully realised world and lets the player get attached to it, if they choose to.
My best example of feeling like this was certainly in the climax in The Pitt. When I had to make the choice of whether or not to steal 'the cure' from the slave traders. The character I was playing was a good-karma'ed character who never sides with slavers. Never. She is very anti-slavery. She wiped out everyone at Paradise Falls solely on principal. However, when it got to that choice in The Pitt (I won't spoil it if you do not know the choice I mean) I was so confident of what choice i would make, but then I disocvered what 'the cure' actually was, and I went against all my beliefs (as a player and a character) and sided with the slavers. I actually spent the next two hours just laying in bed before I slept, justifying my choice to myself. It wasn't a good feeling, but it was an amazing experience that made me reconsider my own values. No moment in any game has done that to me before.
Another point, is that I think too much of the responsibility is pointed at the designers. Does not some of the responsibility to feel attached to the character you play belong to the player? As a player, I intentionally allow myself to get very attached to the ingame character, to make choices that character would make, moreso than ones I would make. I make choices not to do something an easy way just because I can bug the AI, but to do it how the character would really have to do it. This could be something as smalla s walking in a town instead of running, or bothering to look at the npcs talking to me even if i don't have to. These are little things that jsut seem geeky, but it demonstrates a willingness, i think, to get more attached to the character. Certainly, the designers of games need to create worlds and characters that the player is more willing to attach to, and give nteresting narrative structures to take advantage of that attachment, but the player, too, needs to be willing to attach themselves. Do gamers need to be re-educated as to how to play games?
Wow... this comment wasn't a bad effort for a Sunday morning.
Great article. Loved how you chose Children of Men as your cinematic example.
To answer your question: "Why, despite the pivotal position emotional attachment has in game design, does film do so much better than we do?", I think this is due to the very element you expected would put games at an advantage: choice. The lack of choice in movies is what's responsible for these emotional 'suckerpunches'. I find that when I am extremely moved by a movie, it is often due to the protagonist making a decision different from the one I would have made myself.
Exactly what I was going to post.
This raises an interesting question: are games at an emotional disadvantage *because* of player choice? Characters in films, books, plays, etc., pull in the audience because of *their* choices -- and most often, as pointed out, by the choices they *don't* make, which creates the emotional pull from the audience due to either the character's flaws (which we may recognize in ourselves) or due to information the audience is privy to but the characters are not.