04:14:35 <BongoBill> A game design thought. May I rap it at you?
04:14:49 <brontozara> sure
04:15:50 <BongoBill> So the kinds of games that people like to stick with are the games with an element of mastery - mastery of a skill, a system, or a space - that's used for inducing flow.
04:16:14 <brontozara> before f2p introduced the concept of challengeless reward, yes
04:16:34 <BongoBill> That mastery can only really be developed through practice. Repetition.
04:17:15 <brontozara> go on
04:17:41 <BongoBill> The challenge of game narratives, meanwhile, is that most stories are not about repetition. They're composed of singular events and are characterized by constant change.
04:19:09 <BongoBill> A story where the same thing keeps happening is usually following the structure where the thing happens twice - the minimum number of repetitions possible - and then happens differently the third time. The story establishes the concept of repetitions and then glosses over it in the abstract, but the game needs real repetition.
04:19:40 <BongoBill> (This, I think, is the tension behind the Nathan Drake problem, where nobody could kill that many people and remain so affable.)
04:20:45 <BongoBill> So the traditional solutions have been things like - make the bulk of the game, most or all of its interactive parts, be about the things that happen in between the significant events of the story. The significant parts of Mario's story are what he finds in the castle, but the games are about him running towards it.
04:21:19 <brontozara> games are also repetitive because it takes a lot of resources to make various game engines and varying the types of skill challenges tends to irritate players
04:22:17 <brontozara> like, imagine uhh wizard of oz as a game
04:22:33 <brontozara> 9/10s is just walk down a road and dialogue scenes
04:22:36 <brontozara> suddenly MONKEY FIGHT
04:22:41 <brontozara> WHAT ARE THE FIGHT CONTROLS
04:22:42 <BongoBill> The former can be overcome - the technical cost of varied gameplay does not exceed the artistic cost of the kinds of things currently made - but the latter is just another way of restating the idea that games are about testing mastery, and the faster it can be taught the sooner it can be tested, and that testing is flow.
04:22:45 <brontozara> HOW DO YOU PUNCH MONKEY
04:22:58 <brontozara> then back
04:23:17 <brontozara> then emerald city, more dialogue stuff, blah, witch's castle
04:23:37 <BongoBill> One-offs are not conducive to mastery, yeah.
04:23:39 <brontozara> do you fight witch with punches? NO YOU USE AN ITEM THAT'S JUST LYING AROUND
04:23:39 <brontozara> SO
04:23:40 <brontozara> UN
04:23:42 <brontozara> FAIR
04:24:16 <brontozara> but anyway
04:24:19 <BongoBill> Another traditional solution is in things like making the story be told only during the parts where the player is still learning new concepts, to supplement interest in the parts when flow is impossible (flow requires mastery). The game is still changing during this time, so it's natural for there to be a story. Then for mastery it tapers off into a low-context endless mode.
04:24:27 <brontozara> i take you're building towards an alternative?
04:24:54 <BongoBill> I'm just freestyling. Organizing my thoughts.
04:26:45 <brontozara> ok. also keep in mind
04:27:02 <brontozara> 1) gameplay and story usually are written in parallel rather than one coming from the other
04:27:06 <BongoBill> Still a third technique, that you see in some other things, is to have different threads of the story developing in parallel through different channels. The character going from A to B is what occupies the player's hands, but meanwhile you've got some other characters reciting their life stories via audio log or codec, so there's narrative development. I think this is just separation again, though
04:27:26 <brontozara> one of the few exceptions is Star Control, where the story came -from- the gameplay
04:27:47 <BongoBill> And even then, most of the gameplay of Star Control was flying your planet lander around picking up Uranium.
04:28:03 <brontozara> i mean the race personalities were all derived from their spaceship designs
04:28:14 <BongoBill> Ah, I see.
04:28:28 <brontozara> also
04:28:48 <brontozara> 2) most story expounding techniques in games come from either comics or movies
04:28:59 <brontozara> and books, which is even worse
04:29:35 <brontozara> all of those are linear
04:30:10 <brontozara> 3) it is considered extremely correct for a game to spend 40+ hours of the player's time, further cementing its status as an activity rather than a story
04:30:36 <BongoBill> Well, this isn't about linearity or non per se. I'm not heading towards dynamically generated narrative - though it is interesting to think about how e.g. a multiplayer game might be constructed to produce remarkable occurrences that people want to share.
04:31:30 <brontozara> if you just want plot organically delivered, i guess half-life games are the gold standard
04:31:55 <BongoBill> Games are played with the eyes, the ears, and the fingers. Eyes have images and ears have speaking, so it's natural to draw on the elements of the precedents of illustration and oration (the ultimate ancestors of comics, films, novels, etc.) - but there's no precedent for a kind of story that's experienced through the fingers.
04:32:57 <brontozara> also very few ways to send information back through the fingers
04:33:13 <BongoBill> Well, by "fingers" I refer to manipulation and feedback, not texture and temperature.
04:33:21 <brontozara> mhm
04:33:37 <brontozara> i suppose you enjoyed gone home
04:33:59 <BongoBill> Haven't played it yet, but I know enough of it to know it was going to be highly relevant to what I was about to say.
04:35:17 <BongoBill> So the idea of manipulation and feedback creating a story - the story becomes the act of discovery. Try something, see how it responds, deduce or induce the properties thereof. Manipulation and feedback suggest a structure of a mystery.
04:36:12 <brontozara> mhm
04:36:18 <BongoBill> Mysteries, puzzles - already pretty toylike, so the connection is obvious. But they're structured around those instants of revelation, not the methodical application of mastered skills.
04:36:48 <brontozara> there's some semi-crazy dude that was pissed off most games reduced essentially to spatial manipulation puzzles
04:39:19 <BongoBill> You can't quantify a mystery the way you can a skill. You could count the number of clues revealed, and which clues those other clues lead to - you can take the facts of the case and render them as a beautiful web of formal syllogisms. If you try to make that your whole game, you end up with Doodle God.
04:40:48 <BongoBill> Now, Doodle God was interesting to me. If you take Doodle God and make its basically arbitrary logical maze thematically more coherent and specific, you could come up with something rather beautiful. But there's not a skill there. No mastery, no flow. Unless....
04:40:50 <brontozara> which wouldn't be bad if humans were primarily visual thinkers
04:41:01 <brontozara> which is a funny point
04:41:27 <brontozara> humans primarily use visual sensory information but are verbal thinkers
04:42:00 <BongoBill> Well, the skill you'd be developing is the skill at anticipating the thesis of the artifact. The classic, Metroid-esque "Guess what the designer is thinking" "puzzle." Which suggests some very powerful rhetorical possibilities to me, but that leads in the direction of game-as-essay.
04:42:08 <BongoBill> When I was originally interested in game-as-story.
04:42:52 <brontozara> what about emergent solutions
04:43:32 <BongoBill> The didactic power of that structure is well-known; educational and persuasive games simulate some part of what they're trying to teach, and the audience discovers it by interacting with the simulation.
04:44:02 <BongoBill> The trouble with designing for emergent elements is that you still generally want to rely on proof that a solution will emerge.
04:44:27 <BongoBill> Prove that a solution exists. Some pretty heady math, though game designers might not think of it that way.
04:45:29 <BongoBill> To reconcile the need for a space that is solvable with the need for the solution to have symbolic meaning transferable to an outside context ("art") makes that a much more difficult prospect than the sort of contrivance that most works of creativity rely on. Which is fine.
04:46:59 <BongoBill> I suppose I'm looking for imitable models, here.
04:47:57 <brontozara> i dunno when you talk like that i feel like i'm sittiny on the nozzle of a big metal cylinder that reads YALE.
04:48:41 <brontozara> does meaning really have to be put in there
04:48:47 <brontozara> i mean people will find meaning in anything
04:49:18 <BongoBill> True. I'm thinking this more about the perspective of expanding the designer's toolbox than making a specific product, though.
04:50:39 <BongoBill> Jackson Pollock interested his audience less because of the content of his paintings and more because of their knowledge of how to interact with paintings.
04:50:55 <BongoBill> But there can really only be one Jackson Pollock.
04:52:04 <BongoBill> Emergence and authorial intent are hard to mix. Which is important to know, but right now my mind is leading me towards wanting something easy.
04:52:08 <brontozara> you won't find an engine capable of generating infinite interesting games as long as games are about interaction with unique engines
04:54:09 <BongoBill> When you talk about emergence, I am thinking of something like a generator that makes puzzles whose (multiple) solutions will feel varied to the solvers. Something that exists.
04:56:13 <brontozara> there are very few procedural generators that actually cause surprises
04:56:43 <brontozara> nethack will never make a room with pillars where orcs worship a demon, unless it was instructed to do so
04:57:09 <brontozara> even the "surprises" in dwarf fort eventually get seen 10, 20, 50 times
04:57:12 <brontozara> brb shower
04:58:05 <BongoBill> Right. Everything is designed. I'm not talking about how to make things that seem undesigned. Improving the design is more my speed. So I'd like to get off this emergence tangent.
05:00:24 <BongoBill> Choice is also a red herring. If a player has five options, the same designer designed all five consequences (whether or not they delegated it to an algorithm, which they also designed).
05:02:59 <BongoBill> The feeling of freedom is not incompatible with this either; it's virtually impossible to miss the first mushroom in SMB1. A designer can make things that are virtually impossible to not happen in the course of normal play, or literally impossible to not happen no matter how much the player tries to break the engine, and with skilled design these can be a sufficiently convincing illusion.
05:03:40 <BongoBill> (Side note: are game designers taught how to construct such contrivances, the way filmmakers learn about props and miniatures and CGI and makeup?)
05:07:02 <BongoBill> So everything is design. I'll restate the dilemma I started with: the designer is creating repetition in the form of a skill, system, or space that must be mastered, but sometimes she also wishes the artifact expressing that repetition to also express singular notions. And she wants them to support each other.
05:12:58 <BongoBill> So if the designer contrives it so that a certain singular notion will always transpire in a given challenge, and has multiple such notions arising from sequential challenges, that's flow supporting story, right? (Story supporting flow is easy; just present the mechanics in the form of an easily-understood metaphor, like a man with a gun representing navigating a dynamic simulated 3D space.)
05:12:59 <BongoBill> Except....
05:16:19 <BongoBill> In order to strengthen the story you want the player to notice its elements. And some elements of stories are very difficult to notice for someone deep in a state of flow. Drawing attention to them so that the story is clear means altering the presentation, which disrupts flow.
05:18:28 <BongoBill> Now, clearly one thing here is that, in practice, most games' central metaphors for their core interaction involves violence. You don't have to disrupt flow in order to make the player notice things that you've trained them to notice, but the whole reason this monologue is happening is because of ambitions to make stories that don't consist mainly of violence.
05:19:45 <brontozara> i'm not sure how game design classes go
05:20:16 <BongoBill> The old "we need mechanics modeling nonviolent interactions" chestnut applies. You can make flowy games about patterns of nonviolent interaction, too, of course - a recent example is Fire Emblem, where making your units talk to each other is a game mechanic that repeats often enough that I think there's mastery involved.
05:20:18 <brontozara> also violence is the very definition of a cheap audience-attracting trick
05:20:48 <brontozara> it's easy to model, exciting, and at the end you have less entities to worry about than at the start
05:23:29 <BongoBill> Violence would be popular even if it weren't convenient, and there's nothing wrong with that. ... I'm going to talk about Candy Box. Or A Dark Room, or Cookie Clicker. Y'know what's interesting about those?
05:23:46 <brontozara> is that rhetorical
05:23:49 <BongoBill> Lots, but it was a rhetorical question anyway.
05:24:25 <brontozara> candy box and dark room have the appeal of a game that starts very simple and adds complexity in unpredictable ways
05:24:32 <brontozara> and the general feeling it could keep growing forever
05:24:45 <brontozara> cookie clicker is more basic, you just watch numbers going up with some help from yourself
05:26:02 <BongoBill> They have violence in them but the core metaphor for the mechanic is more along the lines of being economic. They do, or at least they have the potential to do, this thing where you reach a certain milestone and suddenly your strategy has to change. While still drawing on the same skill. (The watching-numbers-go-up bit is not the relevant point, but it adds a certain aesthetic appeal.)
05:28:51 <BongoBill> Make these milestones a bit less jokey, a bit less strictly utilitarian, a bit more, y'know, storylike, and there is potential. The milestones are the singular points of the narrative, and they can keep changing without breaking flow....
05:29:18 <brontozara> yeah, it could work indeed
05:31:09 <BongoBill> Why are RPGs the story genre? It's because their heterogeneous mechanics (and long outer feedback loops) make it possible to have a violence metaphor alongside a conversation metaphor. Press A to attack the goblin; press A to talk to the villager. Can you simply stick more mechanical hooks into the nonviolent metaphor...?
05:31:47 <BongoBill> Maybe that'd just give you Planescape: Torment.
05:32:46 <brontozara> hm
05:33:36 <BongoBill> Perhaps the relevant thing to discuss is not how to mix flow with stories. After all, people seem pretty content with the rhythm of gameplay-cutscene-gameplay-cutscene, right? If the two usually have nothing to do with each other, maybe that's fine. Maybe the thing to look into is more sophisticated ways of constructing the delivery of the story. Consider Final Fantasy 7.
05:34:46 <BongoBill> This is a game where you have to go digging for the story. The solution to the mystery is stuck at the bottom of an optional sidequest in a village you never even have to go to. Or something along those lines. That seems like a pretty modest use of interactivity, but think about it.
05:35:34 <brontozara> also, the stop-go rhythm of a rpg battle fits well with dialogue
05:36:15 <BongoBill> This is not adventure-choosing; you don't get a list of what pages you might turn to. You have to intentionally manipulate the flowy world-traveler gameplay, which was designed to feel open-ended, in a particular way, in order to dispense this nugget of exposition.
05:36:23 <brontozara> mhm
05:37:17 <BongoBill> The story gives you clues about what manipulations will have particular results, and following those clues rewards you with answers and maybe more clues.
05:37:32 <brontozara> isn't that mostly phoenix wright
05:38:31 <BongoBill> Yes, although in an RPG, the artifact you're manipulating is continuous, not discrete.
05:39:38 <BongoBill> (Of course, all game technology is based on discrete math, but the human mind is easily fooled into thinking something discrete feels continuous.)
05:40:10 <brontozara> some 3d physics stuff is done with variable length frames already
05:40:36 <BongoBill> Even floats have finite precision.
05:45:01 <BongoBill> The most elemental interaction in games is the collision. Two elements occupying an adjacent or identical point in space (the space in question need not always be the one represented in two or three dimensions on the screen, but it's easier to think of it that way).
05:45:53 <BongoBill> If one of the elements is a bullet and the other is a spaceship, that's violence. If one of the elements is the player character and the other is a non-player character, that's... social? If you abstract social interaction as far down as you can physical interaction....
05:46:14 <brontozara> hahaha
05:47:14 <BongoBill> Hit Points are an abstraction equivalent to Social Link rank.
05:48:06 <brontozara> indeed
05:49:01 <BongoBill> You're playing with dolls. You can have them fight or you can have them kiss. Either way you're mashing together two pieces of plastic face-first and having a grand old time.
05:49:09 <brontozara> whee
05:49:21 <brontozara> someone on twitter suggested an animal crossing like interaction system
05:49:30 <brontozara> where you give npcs items to demonstrate actions
05:50:16 <BongoBill> That has a nice illusion-of-continuity feeling to it. You're not picking things out from a list; you're going out and finding the tool you need and applying it in the one specific way that makes it work.
05:51:37 <BongoBill> Majora's Mask. It's not just a matter of talking to the person. It's where and when and what mask you're wearing when you do it. The masks in Majora's Mask are a strong metaphor. But for a game whose story is about society, you still spend half of it alone, slaying monsters and pushing blocks....
05:51:47 <brontozara> hm
05:51:50 <brontozara> the masks -are- a good idea
05:52:06 <brontozara> majora really had a lot of novel ideas that were never redone
05:52:09 <BongoBill> Problem is, the dungeons are where the flow lives. The mechanic is traversal and manipulation of the environment.
05:52:53 <BongoBill> Animal Crossing - and for that matter a lot of the fairer F2P games - achieve flow with really long cycles. Your daily interactions, not those you do on the order of seconds.
05:52:59 <brontozara> mhm
05:53:48 <BongoBill> Man, I could sperg about Majora's Mask's masks forever. But not at this precise moment. I may be running out of steam anyway.
05:54:04 <brontozara> it's cool
05:54:09 <brontozara> you should probably repost all this in the forums
Author
Topic: Worst Stray Thoughts Ever (Read 66974 times)