Inexorable Loss vs Cut Scene Death

Like many others, I recently finished playing Passage, a great lifetime-in-5-minutes game by Jason Rohrer. If you haven't played it yet, follow the links and do so. It's 5 minutes and you'll probably learn a lot more from playing it than reading this blog. Feel free to read the artist statement from the download page too.

Playing this game brought me back to the discussion of whether or not games can make you cry. Back to the Aeris cut scene and talk of Floyd the robot. Many people believe that the Aeirs scene in FF VII was cheap, because they used a cut-scene to deliver the killing blow to the beloved character. They believe that all the emotional impact was built up through traditional non-interactive media, and that the tragic event happened outside the game world.

The problem with interactive tragedy then rears its head. We can't have a loss that the player can actively prevent, because he will inevitably restart the game from his last save and play until he keeps said event from occurring. On the other hand, taking control from the player is cheap, and feels like cheating.

Passage introduces the concept of inexorable demise. If you decide to take the love of your life on the journey with you, she will grow old alongside you and eventually die. You too will die, but many seconds after she does. The first time this happens, it's a shock. One minute she's there with you, the next she's gone, just a cold stone in the ground to mark her passing. I was taken aback by this and definitely felt sad. The second play-through is different though. Instead of shock at the end, you play the whole game with this pall of dread looming over you. You know you're going to die. You also know that she will die. It then becomes about the time you spend together and what you plan to do with it (Or you can spare her by choosing solitude, her existence frozen in your memory as a youthful ghost on the horizon).

I think there are a lot of possibilities here for gameplay in a more complicated setting. Not saying that Passage needs stuff tacked on to be good by any means. It's an excellent and elegant game distilling the essence of mortality and inviting the player to fill in a lot of the narrative and emotional details. I think this inevitability of loss could be incorporated in a larger game to give it emotional impact while taking away the desire for the player to reload the last save to avoid the tragedy.

A good argument against this idea is that it takes away control from the player as much as a cut scene, and could lead to apathy in the face of an insurmountable obstacle. So perhaps I've come full circle.

Reflection: Why the Indigo Prophecy Demo Was Better Than the Full Game

Being the Christmas season, I thought it'd be a good time to go off on a tangent about seeing the consequences of our actions unfold, It's a Wonderful Life style. What if I'd never met my wife? What if I caught that taxi and didn't bump into that vengeful mime (who stalks me to this day) while walking to work? What if I had sausage instead of bacon?

Games are all about choices. It's the interactive hitch that separates them from other media. The aesthetic of the choice and the mechanics that enable choices are being scrutinized more and more as the question of games as art becomes more of a hot topic.

I think choices are great. I'm all for stories that adapt to the player's whims and decisions and gives a sense of high and low level agency at every possible step. However, in longer form games it becomes increasingly difficult to tell if you really made a choice at all or if it was more of a Magician's Choice, with the developer leading the player along with the illusion of free will when all roads inexorably lead to the same place.

Enter Indigo Prophecy. Spoilers will probably be abound here, but the statute of limitations has probably expired for this title by now. I played the demo before the full game was on the shelves and I was mightily impressed. The demo itself encompassed only about 20 or so linear minutes of gameplay, but it went a lot deeper than one surface run-through.

For starters, you control 2 different parties. One group investigates a crime that the other committed. The cool thing about this device is that choices you made as the murderer are all echoed in the gameplay of the investigators. For instance, once you murder the poor guy in the bathroom (under hypnosis, so you're still a perfectly nice fellow) you can either run away or sit back down at the table you were at initially. There are many other more granular options to play out, but these are 2 high level choices you can make. If you sit back down and play it cool, maybe pay your tab before leaving, the investigators can find a blood stain on the seat when you play through from their perspective. This blood sample can be taken to a lab and used as a clue for catching the other character later in the story.

There are several other details like this, several of which are recounted in the line of questioning the investigators perform on the patrons of the restaurant. In addition to this, referring back to the bit about granularity of choices, you can take various routes out of the restaurant as the killer. Some lead to freedom while others will get you incarcerated. The great thing about the 20 minute demo was that I could go back and play this scenario over and over again and see what the different outcomes were. I believe there is still some degree of this in the latter areas of the game, but I never went back through them to see what different branches there were. It's worth noting that Indigo Prophecy does do a great job of supporting this level of exploration, if you're up to it, by allowing you to split off save games and breaking the whole story down into replayable chapters of 20-30 minutes. The problem is that A>The story as a whole didn't diverge much near the end and B>Even if it did, I'd never know unless I played through the whole thing again and made a mental note of everywhere I narratively took a left instead of a right.

This is the concept of Reflection. The ability of the player to know that what he's done is currently affecting the game world and perhaps what he could have done differently. It goes hand in hand with the concept of agency and the player witnessing as the game world acknowledges his existence. The trick is somehow telling the player when a choice has had repercussions without breaking the 4th wall or hitting him over the head with it. The Witcher handles this in the obvious (yet still interesting) method of showing a montage of the chain of events from when you made a decision up until the point that you're coming face to face with its consequences. This is somewhat heavy handed, but it gets the job done and it's one of the first games to bring these systems so explicitly to the attention of the player. The drawback to this system is it still doesn't enable you to go back and play through again to see what the differences are.

One 4th wall violating method could be to incorporate a non-linear save system. It would consist of a tree of saves. Every time you save the game, the new entry would appear below its ancestor, the last save before it, in a tree of sorts. The player could then freely travel up and down the tree and see where decisions were made and things that branched off from those choices. Perhaps some kind of data sharing feature could also be incorporated so the player could bring things from one save over to its sibling and take up play from there. This all could also be couched in a fiction that allowed for non-linear perception in the main character, bringing the system back within the 4th wall.

That's probably enough on this topic for now, as it looks like things are getting a bit rambly. I'll probably dredge this up again when I explore the concept of the short but deep game where choices like these are explored fully by the player.

Pac Man on paper, pt 1.

When I went to the GDC earlier this year, I got to attend the 2 day game design seminar during the tutorial sessions. One of the cool exercises we did was to replicate an existing digital game with a paper game of some sort, be it card, board, whatever. The idea was not to simulate said game, but to analyze the aesthetic of the game and strive to capture it through the mechanics of the paper game. Another takeaway was the concept of prototyping rapidly, iterating as fast as possible and playing with the game as soon as you had anything that could be considered functional. The idea was that you'd find out what was fun or not earlier and 'follow the fun', culling out useless rules and paring your design down to a lean machine.

The team I was on worked on a Mario Kart 'port'. I thought it was pretty successful and will probably post the details of it here at some point. After I got home, I started working on Pac Man. The first thing that sprang to mind was the flow of the game. The whole premise is this tenuous balance of managing your distance from the ghosts while eating as many pellets as possible. The more pellets you eat, the emptier the board. The ghosts on the other hand are trying to corner Pac-Man, but are also each trying to be the one to score the kill.

The design I came up with is a 4 player board game with 4 tracks, each radiating from a center point. Pac-Man is at the center since the whole world is relative to his position anyway. The bottom track represents the pellets in the maze. The other 3 are for the ghosts. I could have made 4 ghosts and may still, depending on balance issues. This is a preliminary design, and hasn't been tested enough to make anything final yet.

The Board
Each ghost starts at the end of his (or her) respective track, and the bottom track is filled with pellet cards randomly drawn from a stack. The stack will exclude blank pellet cards at first. Pac-Man's goal is to eat all the dots in the stack without losing all his lives (starting with 3). The ghosts' goal is to take all of Pac-Man's lives, with the most kills determining the victor.

In the 4 player mode, each player has a choice of action cards to secretly choose from and play face down. All cards are revealed simultaneously and the results ensue.

Pac-Man's options

• Evade
  All ghosts in play are moved back 1 square. The next dot track card is discarded
  
• Dots
  Take the next card in the dot track, place an empty dot card in the discard pile. There are a few different dot track cards with different effects.
  
• Advance
  Move 1 ghost 2 spaces closer

Ghost Options

• Advance
  Move 2 squares towards Pac-Man. Only one ghost can do this per turn, determined by rock-paper-scissors
• Flee
  Move 1 square away from Pac-Man
• Team
  Move 1 square towards Pac-Man along with other players that played Team. If no others played Team, don't move

Dot Track Cards

• 1 dot
  1 pellet. One of the many Pac-Man must eat to finish
  
• 2 dots
  2 pellets.
  
• 3 dots
  3 pellets.
  
• Power Pellet
  Changes the rules temporarily. If Pac-Man hits a ghost, the ghost is moved to the farthest point on its track. The power pellet lasts X turns, tentatively 5. Some added bonus might be added if Pac-Man eats a ghost as well.
  
• Cherry
  Pac-Man keeps the cherry cards, and can turn one in along with 10 dots to get an extra life.
  
• Tunnel
  If Pac-Man takes this one, all ghosts move back to the space of the farthest ghost from Pac-Man.

The Cards
At the end of a turn, when all movement is resolved, the dots in the bottom track are moved up with a new one being placed at the end. If the draw pile is empty, the discard is shuffled. The idea is that the pellets will be thin near the end, allowing for more evasion and fewer opportunities for Pac-Man to get those last remaining pellets. Not sure right now if this will be an appropriate feedback loop. Another idea was incorporating walls into the dot cards. There would be 1-3 walls, and these would shield Pac-Man from those directions in the turn that dot card was on 'top' of the dot track. This would have to be played with to see if it would keep things balanced or not.

Fewer players would mean a slightly different ruleset. With 2 players, the ghost cards would be randomly drawn, and the ghost player would get to assign them. Solo play could be accomplished with the cards being randomly drawn and assigned.

I have a couple of alternate ideas for rules to try out. One is the victory condition. It could be like Pac-Man Vs in that players trade out PacMan each time he's eaten and play for the highest number of dots. Another is that some of the cards (like Flee) are state based, and do different things based on whether or not a power pellet has been eaten.

I will make subsequent posts on this as I test it with more people and modify the rules accordingly.

Cards
Board