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.
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.
Labels: choice, game design, indigo prophecy, reflection
posted by Rich Wilson at 9:04 PM
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