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Level of interaction/abstraction in games: striking that balance
UncleSporky
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
This is going to be long and rambling and probably uninteresting in the end.
I've been looking at a series of gamebooks published in the 80's, now available for free online. The series is called Lone Wolf, and it's essentially a mix of Choose Your Own Adventure books and Dungeons and Dragons. It's a lot of fun, a simple yet functional system, and you all should check it out if you enjoy RPGs. (Use random.org to generate your random numbers.)
It got me thinking about what sort of interactions I find most fun in games. I really enjoy old books like Lone Wolf and CYOA, but when you look at it you're not playing very much of a game. You have two or three options at each juncture and not a lot of exploring or backtracking. However the narrative is much more cogent as a result of the limited options, and assuming the book is written well, you can perform some interesting actions you wouldn't be able to do in a console RPG or action game; or assuming you could perform those actions, they come across as unique and visceral rather than a canned animation. Cinematic, I guess. Can you call a gamebook cinematic?
Obviously video games and books are vastly different forms of media, but they are all getting at the same thing: storytelling, and how best to do that while engaging your audience.
One type of game that tried to bridge that gap between cinematic narrative and interaction was the FMV game of the early nineties. Essentially they sucked, but it was an interesting experiment. It was literally a Choose Your Own Adventure translated to film/game format. Maybe the best example is 1983's Dragon's Lair. You can leap onto the table or drink the potion; the potion leads to a comedic death and the table leads to survival and your next choice.
But while I enjoy a more interesting narrative, I am also a big fan of having a lot of options. I haven't played much DnD but it is precisely what I want: the illusion that I can do anything my character is physically capable of doing. It can be cinematic and interesting but you also have freedom. Quality text adventures and roguelikes also scratch this itch for me. While you can't do anything, and can't describe complicated actions like "make a flying leap and break through the window, spraying bullets all over the room," it still manages to provide a better illusion of freedom to me than most video games.
Part of this is due to a reliance on context buttons/actions. In a normal video game, you walk up to a door and there's a floating "A" on it, and when you push A you open the door, or perhaps kick it down depending on the type of game. In a text adventure, you can open the door, study it carefully, knock on it, look through the keyhole, break it down, lick it, apply ointment to it, the list goes on and on...and if the game is well-designed, some of those actions might actually prove useful. It's a shame many text adventures get mired in being puzzle games, rather than providing an interesting narrative to interact with.
Games like Morrowind/Oblivion begin to approach the sort of interactivity I enjoy. Now instead of looting potions from cupboards in people's homes, I can actually take the silverware and jars off their shelves and pawn it off. And they'll actually get pissed at me for doing so!
But how far can interaction with your surroundings be taken and still remain reasonable? In a shooting game, you don't want to have to tap a button to resist the kickback after every shot, and in a typical RPG you don't need to map every sword move a pro fencer would make to different buttons. This is more about abstraction than merely interaction. Games tend to assume your character is skilled and intelligent and can handle those sorts of details himself, while you tell him to simply attack.
As another example, some RPGs forgo walking from place to place, instead having a world map full of waypoint dots. I don't know too many people who are fans of this, as you lose the exploration of physically walking around a map. And at that walking-around level, do you prefer to walk around a condensed world map, where a step is a mile, or do you want to walk around in a real scale world? How much is too much?
Or to put it another way, how complex and detailed can we get without being convoluted?
To go back to the narrative I was talking about above, one of the difficulties of absurd levels of interaction is maintaining the story without being able to railroad the character through it. And depending on how many detailed actions you have to perform, you can miss the big picture, the broad presentation of an exciting moment. Seeing your character perform a complicated finishing blow is probably more exciting and fun than acting it out piecemeal with individual commands...right?
On one end of the scale you have the CYOAs, with very few options and a lot of abstraction, but a potentially more engaging narrative. On the other end, there are obsessive RPGs and roguelikes that can provide unprecedented simulation but can become bogged down in details and lack cinematic flair. As a side note I find it interesting that at both extremes you find plain text, offering in their storytelling both the most limited interaction and the most freedom.
What level of interaction/abstraction do you enjoy most in your games, and what changes could be made to our existing archetypes?
I've been looking at a series of gamebooks published in the 80's, now available for free online. The series is called Lone Wolf, and it's essentially a mix of Choose Your Own Adventure books and Dungeons and Dragons. It's a lot of fun, a simple yet functional system, and you all should check it out if you enjoy RPGs. (Use random.org to generate your random numbers.)
It got me thinking about what sort of interactions I find most fun in games. I really enjoy old books like Lone Wolf and CYOA, but when you look at it you're not playing very much of a game. You have two or three options at each juncture and not a lot of exploring or backtracking. However the narrative is much more cogent as a result of the limited options, and assuming the book is written well, you can perform some interesting actions you wouldn't be able to do in a console RPG or action game; or assuming you could perform those actions, they come across as unique and visceral rather than a canned animation. Cinematic, I guess. Can you call a gamebook cinematic?
Obviously video games and books are vastly different forms of media, but they are all getting at the same thing: storytelling, and how best to do that while engaging your audience.
One type of game that tried to bridge that gap between cinematic narrative and interaction was the FMV game of the early nineties. Essentially they sucked, but it was an interesting experiment. It was literally a Choose Your Own Adventure translated to film/game format. Maybe the best example is 1983's Dragon's Lair. You can leap onto the table or drink the potion; the potion leads to a comedic death and the table leads to survival and your next choice.
But while I enjoy a more interesting narrative, I am also a big fan of having a lot of options. I haven't played much DnD but it is precisely what I want: the illusion that I can do anything my character is physically capable of doing. It can be cinematic and interesting but you also have freedom. Quality text adventures and roguelikes also scratch this itch for me. While you can't do anything, and can't describe complicated actions like "make a flying leap and break through the window, spraying bullets all over the room," it still manages to provide a better illusion of freedom to me than most video games.
Part of this is due to a reliance on context buttons/actions. In a normal video game, you walk up to a door and there's a floating "A" on it, and when you push A you open the door, or perhaps kick it down depending on the type of game. In a text adventure, you can open the door, study it carefully, knock on it, look through the keyhole, break it down, lick it, apply ointment to it, the list goes on and on...and if the game is well-designed, some of those actions might actually prove useful. It's a shame many text adventures get mired in being puzzle games, rather than providing an interesting narrative to interact with.
Games like Morrowind/Oblivion begin to approach the sort of interactivity I enjoy. Now instead of looting potions from cupboards in people's homes, I can actually take the silverware and jars off their shelves and pawn it off. And they'll actually get pissed at me for doing so!
But how far can interaction with your surroundings be taken and still remain reasonable? In a shooting game, you don't want to have to tap a button to resist the kickback after every shot, and in a typical RPG you don't need to map every sword move a pro fencer would make to different buttons. This is more about abstraction than merely interaction. Games tend to assume your character is skilled and intelligent and can handle those sorts of details himself, while you tell him to simply attack.
As another example, some RPGs forgo walking from place to place, instead having a world map full of waypoint dots. I don't know too many people who are fans of this, as you lose the exploration of physically walking around a map. And at that walking-around level, do you prefer to walk around a condensed world map, where a step is a mile, or do you want to walk around in a real scale world? How much is too much?
Or to put it another way, how complex and detailed can we get without being convoluted?
To go back to the narrative I was talking about above, one of the difficulties of absurd levels of interaction is maintaining the story without being able to railroad the character through it. And depending on how many detailed actions you have to perform, you can miss the big picture, the broad presentation of an exciting moment. Seeing your character perform a complicated finishing blow is probably more exciting and fun than acting it out piecemeal with individual commands...right?
On one end of the scale you have the CYOAs, with very few options and a lot of abstraction, but a potentially more engaging narrative. On the other end, there are obsessive RPGs and roguelikes that can provide unprecedented simulation but can become bogged down in details and lack cinematic flair. As a side note I find it interesting that at both extremes you find plain text, offering in their storytelling both the most limited interaction and the most freedom.
What level of interaction/abstraction do you enjoy most in your games, and what changes could be made to our existing archetypes?
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Steam ID : rwb36, Twitter : Werezompire,
For example, there's a key point in Growlanser II where you can actually join the enemy army if you take a certain path, and questions that affect your Reason(your perspective on how the dead world should be remade), are all over Nocturne.
And if you check out the DS homebrew thread, there's a homebrew project to put the Lone Wolf books on the DS. (Flash cart required, of course.)
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
JRPG = Dragon Quest-style combat, LV-Up system similar to Etrian Odyssey, bizarre character classes.
Roguelike = Lots of randomly generated stuff so that the game has a high replayability factor. Similar structure (enter the dungeon, get as far as you can before dying, get some permanent items to help make your next trip easier if you leave before dying).
Choose your own Adventure = Dungeon exploration handled like a choose your own adventure rather than the standard tile based approach. Set pieces with special events will randomly show up as well.
So, good idea or am I just insane?
Steam ID : rwb36, Twitter : Werezompire,
I love the people who donated it in the 80s. Whoever they were. I killed so much time in those.
I think Heavy Rain is definitely one to watch.
On the other hand, sometimes I'm looking for a more arcade/challenge based experience, so I think that gaming really is more than just a storytelling medium. Yes, it has the capacity to tell interesting, interactive stories, but games can also engage the player in a way that simply telling a story cannot. See: Geometry Wars, WipEout HD, etc.
PSN ID : Xander51 Steam ID : Xander51
Sounds pretty cool, I would play it.
Yeah, the main problem with things like FMV games is the branching paths and the fact that there are only so many combinations of events you can play out until the "decision tree" becomes staggering. Which is why we tend to see games with few ways to change the story and a collection of ancillary events to play through.
But now that we have the storage capacity, it would be interesting to see a resurgence of FMV-style games with much longer and more interesting plots.
As far as games that don't attempt to engage the player with storytelling, yes, there's a time and place for those but essentially I am referring to RPGs and modern action games that have esentially as much storytelling as RPGs nowadays.
I guess what I'm trying to say is I'm a sucker for simulation but that is nearly the opposite of an engaging, cinematic story.
Possible solutions?
1 - Make choices mostly inconsequential so that the game is basically on one path. This is the route taken by most games. Your choices might have minor effects like skipping a battle or getting an extra item, but the overall course of the game is unaffected.
2 - Have your choices converge in the future. The destination is the same all around, but the way you get there could vary. This is something that happens all the time in the Lone Wolf books. Say, your task in the book is to break into a castle and retrieve a stolen artifact. In the beginning, you have the option of going through the front door or sneaking in through a secret entrance in the back. Both of these adventures could be very different at first, but in the end, they'll both converge into a common plot path to prevent the possible choices and situations from becoming overwhelming. It's a flow: things start to diverge and then they get funneled into common ground at which point they begin to diverge again and so on. And of course, this happens at the end/beginning of each new book in the series as well: you've completed your task and then the next book starts everyone off at the same spot.
3 - Make the game short. Most Choose Your Own Adventure books take this route. Each choice could result in widely diverging plot paths, however the story ends before things multiply out of control.
Personally, I think a mixture of all 3 could make a nice interactive story in just about any gaming genre you could name. Most choices will have fairly minor effects. Then there are some choices where you have 1 main goal, but you can choose different ways to accomplish it. Finally, you have a few choices that can drastically change the path of the game, but to keep the paths from getting too plentiful, the game is on the short side. For example, you might have 15 chapters in a game with each chapter taking an hour or so to play through, but in a single playthrough, you would only see 4 or 5 of the chapters depending on your actions. To keep the game from becoming too easy on subsequent playthroughs, you can have the player unlock a harder difficulty level each time they beat the game.
On a side note, I think I'm going to go with a straight text-based Choose Your Own Adventure with Dragon Quest style combat & stat building hybrid for my first game. Save the roguelike/random additions for a future game. Don't want to bite off more than I can chew with my first major project.
Steam ID : rwb36, Twitter : Werezompire,
Storytelling in games should, I feel, aim to be faily minimalist for the time being, reacting to the player's choices in the game world on a broad, vague level. The medium still isn't anywhere near the stage where it can carry off complex, epic plots with the conviction of films or novels.