Can a Role Playing Game be a mirror of your soul ?

I used to find it difficult to kill innocent people, you know.

One of my earliest memories of having a profound gaming moment is of trying to kill a random NPC farmer in the original Fallout. I wanted to try Fallout's famous freedom of choice, where the world and storyline would adapt to choices you make (really adapt, not Peter Molyneux adapt) , so I just walked up this character going about his life and shot him in the kneecaps (V.A.T.S. is so much fun).

His response was game design genius. He immediately pleaded "Please! I have children! " It shook me. I reloaded a previous save, and left him alone.

A simple pre-programmed response from an NPC made me think deeply about myself. And I realized that, even in make-believe world of role playing games, I couldn't willingly hurt innocent people.

What followed was about twenty years of playing RPGs as a paragon of virtue. Ever the hero with a heart of gold. I would always take the "good" choice. Bend over backwards to make sure everything in the world was just peachy, doing sundry side quests that involved rescuing lost sons and daughters, brokering peace between warring factions to avoid senseless violence, refusing monetary rewards for helping poor farmers (of course, the XP was admittedly more useful) and so on.

Some of my favourite gaming moments from RPGs are the emotional payoffs from undertaking arduous and long, though entirely optional, quests just to do the right thing. Helping the ghouls by rrepairing the reactor in Gecko in Fallout 2. Taking the long trek the temple of Ilmater to purify Yoshimos heart and set his soul at rest in Baldur's Gate 2. Sharing a drink and chat with Letho at the end of The Witcher 2, simply because I was tired of all the bloodshed and wanted to avoid any more. All fantastic emotional moments.

Even if this meant forgoing all the cool stuff you got if you played as an evil character (lots of insane powers, equipment and loot in many RPGs is available only to evil characters), I still couldn't bring myself to make evil choices in games. 

And then something interesting happened.

Today, I am far more ambivalent towards the ideas of good and evil. I increasingly believe that it's all simply a matter of viewpoint, and what seems abhorrent to one set of people is perfectly acceptable to another. I hesitate to judge other people's actions (not in a graceful, Buddha-like way, but rather in a more shrugs-shoulders-and-gives-no-fucks way) because I looked deep into myself and saw a person just as fucked up as any other human being, capable of the very acts of pettiness and cowardice and foolishness that I was so quick to judge other people for when I was younger and quicker to jump to conclusions.

And suddenly, it's easier to be a bad guy. Or at least, a neutral guy who does bad things.

The superb ending to the Witcher 2, where you can choose to fight Letho to the death, or talk about things over a beer. Would I have played it differently today ?

Recently, when playing morally ambiguous games like Shadowrun Returns and Sunless Sea, I find that making gameplay choices that affect the game world in "evil" ways are no longer difficult to make for me. In Shadowrun, I play a consummate professional Shadowrunner - what's important is the contract and the mission. Anything that jeopardizes the mission must be dealt with - no time for moral judgements or thinking about consequences. I regularly refuse to help poor ordinary citizens because I don't want to waste time and resources that distract from the main mission. I go through with the mission even if circumstances emerge where I would previously stop and consider the moral aspects of going through with it. Now it's more important to honour the contract and pick up the payment. Because I don't believe the "good" NPCs anyway - my present world view that everybody is equally fucked up helps immensely in making these in-game decisions.

The way that I make choices in games has changed.

And that is most interesting.

Can role-playing games be a mirror of your soul ? 

Does the way I make choices in RPGs tell me at least a little about my attitude to life in general ? Does looking at how I play videogames tell me about what I am capable of in real life ?

Let me quickly iterate here that I only refer to games where there is a moral choice to be made - typically RPGs. I do not refer to games like Call of Duty or GTA which are so often called out as examples of games that influence or cause violent behaviour. That is not a debate I am interested in addressing here.

I am currently a few hours into another playthrough of Baldur's Gate - but this time I'm playing as a true neutral character. So my in-game choices look beyond simple black and white "good vs evils" morals into pretty much "I don't give a fuck about anything other than what is best for me right now "category. I help NPCs if I feel like. I don't if I don't. And I don't lose sleep over what happens to them - because I'm buying into the fiction that they are responsible for their own fates. That's my mind filling in the blanks in the explicit narrative of the game with whatever it likes - the essential fabric of buying into the fiction of a typical RPG world. You invest the world and characters with back-stories and qualities that aren't actually present in the explicit fiction - just so that the world feels more like a real world than like a film set. It's the way we play RPGs, it's why we enjoy them so much.

But what's interesting here is that we can fill in these blanks in whatever way we want. Because what goes on in the gameworld when your back is turned can be whatever you want it to be. Even the most bleak of worlds like Fallout can be imagined to be full of hopes, dreams, aspirations and goodness. Even seemingly prosperous high-fantasy worlds with lush forests and mighty cities can be imagined to be full of perversions, betrayals, pettiness and deceit. And whatever we choose to fill in these blanks with colours our experience of the game.

I don't know about you, but I tend to fill in the narrative blanks with qualities that I perceive in the real world. So earlier on, I used to look at every random filler NPC and assume that they are basically decent, honest, hard working folk. Now, I assume the same NPCs to be greedy, petty, mean and nasty. And this makes them easier to shoot in the kneecaps. Or at least, to refuse to help.

Even more interestingly, it applies only to random NPCs. Not to party members or team-mates. In Shadowrun : Dragonfall, I did a bunch of quests specifically to help out Dietrich, Glory, Eiger and Blitz. I actually got pretty attached to the squad (they're beatifully written charatcters) and was willing to go the extra mile to help them. Which again to some extent mirrors the way I feel about close friends.

The classic standoff with Urndot Wrex in Mass Effect. I tried my best to reason with him - but to no avail. Today, maybe I wouldn't bother and just shoot him and get on with it. I don't know.

The way I play RPGs has changed to reflect my changing attitudes to the world around me. I don't go out of my way to fuck with people in RPGs, but I no longer go out of my way to help them either. Ditto in real life.

Which makes playing RPGs scary as fuck. Because maybe, just maybe, like really good mirrors, they'll reveal things that I'd rather not see.

The most important game design lesson I ever learned

While we designers rarely ignore the mechanics based aspects of what makes our games fun and addictive (aspiration, progression, balance, storytelling etc.) there's one simple rule that I've seen ignored time and again, and indeed have been guilty of ignoring myself.

This one simple principle seems to be a common thread running through every successful (and especially addictive) blockbuster game ever made.

Here it is :

The action that your player performs most frequently should feel like fun all by itself.

To elaborate - the one (or two) things that the player repeatedly does while playing your game should feel juicy, satisfying and fun enough so that just simply performing this action hundreds of times even without any additional context should not become boring.

Let's test this hypothesis by looking at some blockbuster games across genres :


Super Mario Bros - running and jumping
The famously solid and weighty physics behind Mario's basic run and jump make controlling him extremely pleasurable. Just running and jumping around a level with Mario, even without any enemies or obstacles would still be pretty fun.

Diablo - clicking on an enemy
The famously visceral feeling you got when attacking a monster in Diablo - the hugely satisfying crunching, squishing and cutting sounds followed by great death animations - meant that you could just click on enemies all day, making it one of the most addictive games in history.

Candy Crush Saga - matching candies
Love it or hate it - there's no denying that Candy Crush exploded in audio-visual delight every time you made a combo. Every sound and animation is just perfect, and they string together beautifully so that making a series of long combos is a hypnotic experience - regardless of the score, progression and other gameplay mechanics.

Halo - shooting
Halo (or any other top FPS) gets the shooting right. The simple act of firing any of its guns feels solid, punchy and satisfying - the sound, the recoil animation, the overheat animation, the needler trails, all work together to make just shooting a gun a fun experience by itself, even if there are no enemies at the other end.

Farmville - harvesting crops
The core actions in Farmville are another example of using sound and animation to make addictive fun. Harvesting a bumper crop in Farmville is almost a zen-like experience - huge bushels of strawberries or pumpkins or apples (and gold coins) burst out of your screen at every click, giving your brain endorphin hit after endorphin hit.

Angry Birds - launching a bird
Like Super Mario Bros, this one is also all about physics. The superb sense of weight when you catapult different kinds of birds to their doom, with the hilariously perfect sounds, lead to an experience that never gets old, however ,many hundreds of times you repeat it.

Minecraft - digging and placing blocks
The satisfying whack-plink-thunk sounds when you dig through different kinds of terrain in Minecraft, and the comforting thud when you place a block down make the basic actions of the game feel fun and enjoyable. So hours and hours of carving out the terrain and building stuff doesn't feel like a chore - in fact, quite the opposite. It's an addictive, almost meditative experience.



Hmmmmmm. Most suspicious, yes?  The truth seems to be, regardless of genre, that the most successful games make the core action as much fun as it can be. So much that, when you're in the thick of the game, it becomes a trance-like, meditative experience.

I actually learned this the hard way at Zynga when we shipped Hidden Shadows. While we focused heavily on making the hidden objects scenes look great, writing interesting stories, tuning the economy to feel right and suchlike, we dropped the ball on one important thing. In our game (like in many Facebook games), the action that the player performed most frequently was in fact clicking on buttons (in the quests, the game's various menus and dialogs and so on). We failed to make the button-clicking a delightful experience - and this made the game, in hindsight, less addictive. My gut still tells me that a better level of UI polish would have made Hidden Shadows a vastly more successful game than it ended up being. Games like Candy Crush Saga and Farmville 2 get it right - and are more addictive experiences as a result.

To anyone making games today, I cannot stress this enough - isolate the core action of your game, and polish the crap out of it until it feels like fun on its own. Test prototypes that have just the core action and absolutely no other systems built around it - and iterate until these feel enjoyable to play around with. Your game will be better for it.

Madras Psychedelic - an Interactive story about weirdness, Madras and being lost in an alternate dimension.

For a while, I've been tossing around in my mind an adventure game I wanted to make about Chennai.

The first prototype is finally here - it's called Madras Psychedelic.

This prototype is a text-only (with a few pictures) Twine based interactive story in which I'm testing out the overall feel of the narrative. Check it out here : http://img.sonofbosey.in/game/Ep1.html

Maybe sometime in the future, I'll mock up something with graphics in AGS or something. But for now, I want to see if the narrative works. Is the world fun to explore? Are the characters fun to interact with? Is the story interesting enough?

So I'd love for you guys to play through this VERY early Alpha version and let me know what you think .

Here are some teaser images to give you an idea of what's in there :

Do play, and give me lots of feedback and harsh criticism. It's over here : http://img.sonofbosey.in/game/Ep1.html

Why we're so addicted to Flappy Bird

The success of Flappy Bird seems to have confounded a lot of people, who can't seem to understand why it's such a big deal. As a game designer, I see some very sound reasons (based on core design principles) why it's so darn popular and addictive, despite being so brutally difficult. Here's what I think :

It feels winnable

The objective of Flappy Bird is very simple - "Score 1 more point  than I did last time". That is all. No quests, no story, no faraway goals that seem unreachable or intimidating.

That doesn't sound so hard, does it? Surely you can do it?

Especially since you were this fucking close last time. Right? You only missed by a whisker. So you try again.

Play time is super short.

Each play lasts, for most people, about five seconds or less. Even the best players can't be playing for more than a minute. So where's the harm in trying just once more to score just one more point? So you try again.

Every small victory makes you feel Like A Boss.

Because it's so darn hard, scoring a single point gives you a feeling of epic victory and accomplishment. And the next epic win feeling is only five seconds and one point away. So you try again.

It feels fair

This is important - the basic physics and controls in the game feel solid and fair. So every time your bird falls to the ground, you blame yourself and your lack of skill. Not luck or randomness. So you still believe that you can beat it the next time. So you try again.

So by following four very basic design principles and implementing them well, the designer has created a game that is addictive. A game that people can't stop playing. A game that people talk about and get others to play. I don't think it's an accident - it is at its core a very well made game.

It isn't even the first of its kind - many recent games have achieved success by following the exact same principles. Super Hexagon, for instance. It's just that Flappy Bird takes these principles and distills them to their essence, cutting out even the most basic of embellishments, such as pretty graphics, music or a story. Which is why it works for such a wide audience. And which is why it will fade away quickly - because it lacks lasting value to anyone other than the most competitive of players.

The lesson here for anyone making games is this - the oldest video game design technique (one fun core mechanic tied to a high score ) still works very well.

Gamer Journal : Deus Ex, Rage and From Dust

A weekend spent fighting the evil forces of socialization and trying to get in some game time. Moderate success.

Here's the report :

Deus Ex : Human Revolution

Finally got to spend some quality time with the augmented edition I bought. Mixed feelings.

It's Deus Ex - so we do have an interesting story. The augmentation system seems interesting and well thought-out. The stealthing is pretty decent. The conversation / persuasion mechanics are also pretty cool.

But here's what I didn't like :

1. The gunplay is all over the place. The game bumps you into third person view when you're in cover, and back into first-person when you pop out of cover. This makes for some very awkward moments during firefights and leaves you scurrying about frantically. The whole cover / shooting system is poorly implemented, and the level design doesn't help - forcing you into situations where you can't play purely as an FPS, nor purely as a cover shooter. The entire combat experience is frustrating and clunky, and also unavoidable. Sure, if you're really, really good, you can sneak through entire levels - but you'll eventually come across a boss fight that you can't avoid. It's pretty bad design - directly impacting the core experience.
2. I'm about seven hours in, and the gameworld is unconvincing. Walking around Deus Ex's Detroit, I never got the feeling that I was exploring a city. It felt more like a movie set. Wandering around a gameworld, you need to feel that the world around you is real - the places and people should feel like they've been here for ages before you arrived, and go about doing their thing even when you aren't around. A living, breathing world. And there are plenty of games which do it perfectly well - Red Dead Redemption, New Vegas, GTA to name a few. But Human Revolution fails here. I never got any feeling other than the fact that I was exploring a game level with game characters. Perhaps sacrificing the free-exloration in favour of separate levels with loading screens may have lent a sense of distance between locations and fleshed out the illusion better ? But as it stands, Detroit in Human Revolution is simply too small and claustrophobic to be a convincing open world.

I'm about seven hours in, and I'm staying with it in the hope that it gets better. 

RAGE

Boy Oh Boy! I'm enjoying this one.

Got it running on my desktop - runs beautifully with everything maxed out on my Core i9 powered rig with a two-year old GTX 295 2Gig card, on Vista (yes, yes, I know). Sure - still has some random pop-in (but not nearly as much as on the lapop) and occasional tearing, but nothing that breaks the game.

It looks great, the world seems huge, and the gunplay and vehicle combat have a nice, solid (and slightly old school) feel to them. Which is kinda why I like it. RAGE isn't the most thought-provoking or innovative or cleverest of games, but it nails the fun factor. Driving around and killing things is great fun in RAGE, and isn't that what a shooter should be? It's the exact opposite of Deus Ex, in that it's a game that doesn't try to do too many things, but keeps it simple and does it well.

Five hours in - just reached Wellspring and completed a few quests. Loving it so far. Oh - and Wellspring actually feels like a real place - with personality, a history and a sense of life. Again, nails something that Deus Ex fails to do. Plus - RAGE has a (barely) hidden tribute to Fallout. \m/

From Dust

Just got started with this one - on XBOX. It's rather beautiful to look at, and features some interesting terraforming mechanics. Reminded me of an ultra-modern Populous variant. But I played only past the first tutorial level, and so can't really comment on how good the actual game is. More soon enough - plan to spend more time with this by the next weekend.

P.S. Stopped numbering the episodes. It was foolish to begin doing it in the first place. So hence. Er. Ah.

Gamer Journal Ep 4 - A tale of two FTUES

First Time User Experience, for those of you unfamiliar with the term.

Spent some time playing Animal Crossing : City Folk on the Wii. It takes about fifteen minutes to get through all the game's exposition and actually start playing. And a further twenty or so minutes doing mundane, boring stuff until the game finally lets you get on with it. Weird design decision for what is, once you get to play it, an engaging and entertaining game with tons of stuff to do.

Why wouldn't you show the player, right up front, all the cool things the game has to offer? The only explanation I can think of is that they designed it for children, and decided that young players need a little time to get used to the controls and other things before venturing deeper into the game. I can't help but feel that if this is indeed the case, then the designers grossly underestimated children's ability to learn.

However, my son did play, and didn't seem to get bored at all, staying with the game for many hours and enjoying it thoroughly. So maybe there's something in that.

While on the topic of first experiences, something I've been doing a bit of last week (and generally enjoy doing in general) is getting people to play Uncharted 2 for the first time, and watch their faces. Never fails.

In start contrast to games that start off slow and pick up momentum, Uncharted 2 simply throws you into the deep end (seemingly) with nary a word of exposition, and leaves you to fend for yourself. The first ten minutes is an exhilarating, thrilling experience that takes you right to the heart of the core gameplay within seconds of starting up, and sets a cracking pace that doesn't let up until the game ends.

Games like Uncharted 2 and the unforgettable Shadow of The Colossus (which starts off with a fight that would be an end boss in most other games) are pitch-perfect FTUEs - taking the player to the heart of the game within minutes of starting off, and showing off what the game has to offer so that players will be itching to see what comes next. These two games are perfect for introducing people to gaming - I've been using them for years, with very good results.

Gamer Journal Ep 3 : Everlands HD is a deceptively deep strategy game.

Spent a couple of hours playing Everlands HD on the tablet. It's a brilliantly addictive little strategy game - with gameplay that is far deeper than its cutesy animal fiction suggests.

Gameplay proceeds by placing pieces on a hexagonal grid and capturing the opponent's pieces. Each piece (animal) has an attack and defense power, and some additional properties like bonuses, initiative and powers. Based on these simple rules, Everlands HD offers an engaging and addictive experience. If you have a droid or iOS device, well worth a try.

A few design takeaways :

Fiction layer
Like most games, the fiction layer in Everlands HD has nothing whatsoever to do with its core game mechanics. If, instead of cute and colorful animals trying to rescue the forest, it featured marines, tanks and aliens in a bleak wasteland, the game would appeal to a completely different audience with absolutely no change in gameplay. Designers sometimes get too caught up in the fiction-gameplay dynamic and end up making games that lack tight focus. My take ? Nail the gameplay and you can always rewrite the fiction.

Winnability
Everlands HD is challenging but fair. You will lose repeatedly but always try again - because the game clearly demonstrates that :

1. You lost because you made mistakes, not because the game is unfair.
2. If you play more, you will improve.
3. If you play skilfully, you will win.

It's a design principle that makes for great games when followed.

P.S. This is the first reasonable length post typed out entirely on my tablet. Typing on the Xoom is pretty neat if you're using a cool little app called Thumb Keyboard.

Bigfatphoenix's Gamer Journal - Ep 2 : Cave Story, NOVA 2

Caught up with an old classic last week - Doukutsu Monogatari's astonishing platformer, Cave Story. It's an all-time classic, and the PC version is completely free, so you have no excuse not to try. Grab it here - and don't forget to install the English translation.



It looks like a fairly innocuous 2D platformer at first, but stay with it for a while, and Cave Story offers an excellent experience - an austere, surreal and emotional story that is quintessentially Japanese, rock-solid platforming mechanics that make it great fun to run around and shoot all sorts of weird monsters, and some very imaginative level design.

However, the take-away mechanic for me from Cave Story is the run-and-gun leveling mechanic. Your gun levels up as you rack up more kills, and starts firing off increasingly powerful kinds of blasts. However, take damage and it will lose levels, and get back to firing wimpy pellets. It's a mechanic that rewards 'being in the zone', something classic skill gamers will instantly recognize. You grow more powerful as you play more dexterously, evading scores of enemies and racking up kills. Lots of games do offer similar ideas - the special meter in fighting games, for instance - but the powered-up weapons in Cave Story are so much fun to use, it's a genuine incentive for high-skill play (Man, the return of classic skill gaming is something that delights me no end.)

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------


Also tried out NOVA 2 for Android on my Motorola Xoom. The Tegra 2 powered graphics make this unabashedly Halo-like FPS look pretty stunning. Take a look :

But crap controls. All three control schemes provided are simply too unwieldy on a tablet device, at least for me. It's clearly been designed for smaller phone screens, where I can see the twin-touch or the gyroscope controls working fairly well (due to the smaller screen real estate, as well as the device being far lighter) - but it's a horrible mess on tablets. I've seen a bunch of reviews on the Intertubes that rave about how great NOVA 2 is on tablets, but I simply cannot see why. I'll try again a few more times to get the hang of it and see if there's something I'm missing (also because the game itself looks like it could be a lot of fun) - but colour me skeptical for now.

A couple of points, then :

1. I hate on-screen analog sticks. They suck. They're a cop-out. Deal with it.
2. I'm not sure about shoehorning existing game designs control schemes from one platform on to others which use completely different control paradigms altogether. Shouldn't we be thinking "how do I make games that would be fun on tablets?" instead of "how do I put Halo on a tablet?" ?