Conversation RPG: Part 2

[part 1]

Following part 1 of this topic, a little more detail on the mechanics of conversationm, etc. I'm thinking more about integrating this mechanic into a larger game where communication is pivotal, but also a means to an end so the player has goals driving the conversations in addition to 'sandboxy' relationship building. Ultimately I want to simulate the feel of conversation without the specific details that would have to be written in natural language by someone then heuristically analyzed to make sense in the right contexts, otherwise (and probably regardless) resulting in often awkward and immersion breaking Frankenstein sentences.

Topics
Conversations will center around "topics". Pretty self-explanatory, a topic is what the conversation is about. This can be a person, place, thing etc. and the player and other NPCs will accumulate a wide variety of these over the course of the game. The idea is to provide a large variety of these to increase communication granularity while keeping them easy to organize and manage for the player. The first thing that comes to mind is categories. This will probably be a primarily meta structure only used by the player for organizational purposes rather than having much impact on the system itself. More exploration into that later.The following are the categories I've come up with. I think most conversation topics can fall into one of these groups pretty cleanly. These are pretty simple concepts and, as such, could be represented well by some iconic language for easy menu navigation.

• Current events
• news at varying geographic scales
• "the weather"
• People
• family and friends
• celebrities (ok, maybe not so "clean" as this could fall under entertainment below)
  
• Entertainment
• sports
• media (music, movies and TV, games)
  
• Specialties
• jobs
• hobbies

"Global" and "Local" could easily be modifiers for each category as well for more generic or more specific conversations. (e.g. Global weather could be about a hurricane in the Gulf of Mexico while Local weather could be about how windy it is today)

Emotes
I haven't really put much thought into the role of emotes in this system. I realize there are probably a lot of parallels between what I'm pieceing together and Crawford's work on Storytron, but I don't know if including "hit [a lot]" or "flirt [minimal]" is necessarily how I want to handle it. That might even be a different parallel system, or out of the scope of this entirely. Not sure yet.

Anatomy of a Topic
A topic itself comes with several subcomponents pertaining to the speaker as well as the subject.

• Topic content
  The actual meat of the topic. What it's about. This can be nouns like people and places as well as verbs like events that occurred.
  
• Associated topics
  These are the topics intrinsically tied to the main topic. If the main topic is an event, the sub topic could be the people that were involved or the place where it happened.
  
• Emotion
  This is the character's current emotional attitude towards the topic. This could get to be complicated, but it will provide the context for discussion of one topic between 2 people. It's the opinion that can cause arguments or form bonds of common interest.
  
• Passion level
  This is how strongly the character feels about the topic. The stronger they feel, the more fiercely they'll discuss a topic and the harder they'll be to sway to a different emotional stance.
  
• Knowledge level
  This is how much knowledge of the topic the character has. This can be used to inform others as well as perhaps aid in leading discussions or defending with logical arguments.
  

Knowledge and passion sort of counter one another. If someone passionate but woefully misinformed tries to argue a point to someone of a different opinion who's much more knowledgeable, the former could potentially be converted in his opinion. If his passion is too high, though, he might not listen to reason. Knowledge levels could also tie into other aspects of gameplay where the character has to accomplish some task that requires a certain level of information. I want to explore this dichotomy more and see other mechanical ways these two could interact.

Intent
Another facet in the presentation of a topic by a character is the intent. This is the micro-goal of the current conversation. This can probably change from moment to moment, but each exchange will have a purpose to serve as a catalyst for progression. A person with more knowledge in a topic could use "Inform" with that topic to increase another person's knowledge of it. Declarations could be simple statements of one's stance on a topic emotionally or knowledge-wise.

Some potential exchange intent ideas:

• Persuasion
• Inquiry
• Declaration
• Informing
• Interruption (? might just be a side effect of changing topics jarringly)
  

The next step will be discussing the game idea I'm thinking of including this in, as well as more practical implementation ideas with interface and everything. Maybe there will be more pictures to look at as well.

Coming up

• AI and topic usage/interpretation
• Emotional baggage
  
• Creating and obtaining topics
• Interface
• types of conversations (arguments & debates, etc)
• Character memory
• Probably more thought on emotes
  

Link Relay: Narrative and Interactivity

Interesting trio of articles on narrative in games that all reference one another. Mostly linking these here so I remember to read them all the way through at some point soon.

Brainy Gamer: Narrative Manifesto
Vorpal Bunny Ranch: Choose your own Lover
Artful Gamer: Narratives and Interactivity Still Misunderstood

Introduction to The Ferry: Short but Deep Webs of Causality

Summary

The Ferry is a brief but deep game of narrative exploration. The idea sprang up while I was playing Indigo Prophecy and I mentioned some of its founding observations in an earlier article on replayability. The space and time are both highly constrained. The setting is a ferry ride, probably across the English Channel or some other body of water large enough to support a ferry with the features I want to include. The player will be able to take on the roles of many of the passengers of the ship, each with their own goals and aspirations, each with their own impact on the events that unfold over the course of the trip.

Mission Statement
The idea behind this experiment is the exposure of gameplay depth through replayability. The time and space are restricted for two reasons. First, the constraints make it easier to develop the assets needed for all of the varying interactions and narrative options the player can explore through gameplay. The second reason for the constraint (in time, mostly) is to allow the player to quickly retread the story, taking different routes to see his impact on the narrative. This is further extrapolated by allowing the control of different characters throughout the course of play.

Multiple Personalities
Having the player inhabit multiple avatars that can coexist in a looping timeframe poses interesting design possibilities. The path I'd like to explore in The Ferry would have the player's actions 'baked' into the characters, so they behave as he did when the player takes on the role of a different character. If the player takes control of the Ship's Steward and walks from the bridge to the galley then to the garage, when he plays the second time as the Gilted Lover, he can watch the Steward travel to those places in that order, interacting with the world in whatever ways the player did.

Non-Linear Time
To accommodate the organization of different characters and the flow of time, there will be a track editor similar to non-linear video editing and animation packages. Each character will have its own track on the timeline. The timeline will be divided into 5 minute chunks. The player can jump to any 5 minute segment in control of any character he's unlocked thus far. As soon as he interacts with a character he previously controlled and disrupts its path from the way he controlled it that timeline will become locked from that point onward, with the color of the timeline reflecting this 'invalidated' state. The AI will take over from the point of invalidation, ideally trying to approximate the intentions of the player when he was in control (tech permitting).


Narrative Trajectories
The impact each character's storyline has on the others could be viewed sort of like the interactions in a particle collider. Each track intersects, and then multiple possibilities for each party involved scatter outward from the intersection. The more parties involved, the bigger the collision. The trick here is managing the outcomes in the pre-production phase by developing systems that are granular enough and potentially procedurally adaptive to accommodate the possibilities. That or examine the interactions and cull them based off of the ones with more fallout to manage than others.

Standard branching path through a narrative possibility space. NPCs have deterministic responses to player actions. Player's actions can have future repercussions, affecting choices as well as simply altering play. The meta bubbles here are pretty arbitrary scalewise and can represent anything from encounters to 'levels' to entire games in a series.

In the trajectory collision model, the inputs to an interaction can come from several directions since the actors involved can have player motivations. The outcomes for actors, likewise are non-deterministic since it can be up to the player to choose how to respond in the various roles involved. This could get quite hairy, even in the proposed limited scope of half an hour aboard a ship. I was working on a bubble-chamber like diagram for this, but it quickly got out of hand. Maybe that's telling me something...

First Steps
Aside from general brainstorming systems and spaces, the next step I plan to take is putting together a paper prototype. This will probably be nothing more than an RPG session in a fairly generic system (GURPS, bare d20). I'll throw in some of the roles I want to see included in the scenario, let people choose the characters, give them their 'motivation' and see what happens. The info from this will inform future decisions about just what affordances I want to give to players in this environment as well as if story ingredients are interesting and have flexible potential. I probably won't even include a map, but see what kind of environments the players expect and assume the boat will have.

Coming Next

• Verbs
  What does the player do, exactly?
• AI Considerations
  How to NPC characters react to input and alter behavior based on prior player input based on new stimuli? How can procedural behavior systems mitigate complexity?
  
• Interface
  More on the track view and how the player will be expected to navigate the space-time bubble.
• Motivations
  The character motivation system and tools for the player to decide how the character feels about others. Based on ideas from an earlier post.

Designer Identity

Talking with a friend recently, the topic of designer identity came up. More specifically, the topic of who I am as a designer, what do I stand for and want to make of this career. I think this is a critical question for anyone that wants to be successful in this line of work. By successful I don't just mean employed, either. It's (relatively) easy to drift along in a design role, taking whatever projects you can find and making ends meet. You can work at a port shop or shovel-ware factory, still get paid, still call yourself a designer. Don't get me wrong, I'd take any game design job over almost any 'normal' job that people do.

What I'm talking about is a focus, a raison d'être. Artists of any medium develop a voice in their work, and game design is no different.

My initial response was sort of knee-jerk. I stated I was about player choice and expression, falling more on the interactive side of the continuum where procedural narrative and simulations lie as opposed to linear narrative, cut scenes and point to point gameplay. Games are about player interaction, and the bias I chose epitomizes the very nature of our medium.

After the conversation ended I began to think about this response and how it rules out a lot of experiences I've enjoyed when playing games as well as experiences I'd enjoy crafting myself.

Looking at my project idea database, only 13 of the roughly 70 games fit the "simulation aided narrative" description, where the player can sort of sculpt the story to their liking. A large portion falls into the "player exploration" category where there's some large world(s) or system for the player to wander around in and discover. Then there's the "experimental" category, ideas that are just different from standard assumptions about games specifically and interactive systems more generally. Last are games that follow fairly conventional mechanics but have some specific theme I find interesting.

Looking at some of my favorite games, a lot of them don't really have player driven narrative or much player expression* at all. The short list: Psychonauts, Shadow of the Colossus, Braid, Portal, Mega Man, Zelda, Knytt. None of those even have as much as a branching ending. Some are exploratory, some are linear while others are less so. They are all fairly artistically cohesive and respect the player by providing well communicated design and few character stereotypes.

I'm discovering that I don't have as much focus as I think yet. I think focus comes in progressively narrower stages. In the beginning, 2nd to 4th grade all I knew was "I wanna make games! I wanna make games!" Now that I've been a designer for a few years I have the opportunity to step back and ask what kind of games I want to make, how I see this whole thing panning out over the next several years. I definitely know what I enjoy playing and things I'd like to see our medium accomplish. I want to be on the forefront of advancing our medium beyond the stereotypical teen male power fantasies and narrative drivel that stigmatize it. I want to see art asserted over profit.

Art over profit is tricky when you do this for a living. Side projects are a good way to vent creative energy in a risk averse business, but I think lessons learned there can be brought into the commercial endeavors. I also look forward to more exploratory experimental design in the mainstream, hopefully curbing the self-fulfilling cycle of games for male teens drawing the male teen demographic so we then focus on male teens ad nauseum.

* Player expression being the player's pseudo emergent use of granular systems to solve problems with their own 'voice' instead of enacting explicit solutions to problems and paths through environments. You could argue that anything interactive supports expression since a player can choose to jump over Goombas instead of jumping on them in Mario, for example.

The Grand Scheme

So here are some ideas I've been percolating for the blog. Just a heads up to what people can expect here over the next few weeks or months depending on my posting diligence. Also happy to have feedback on spinoff ideas or preferences people have for one topic over another.

Paper Prototype: Kart Racer
One of the ideas my team worked on at the Game Design Workshop a couple of years ago. Exploring it and expanding it, since I kind of liked the game we were building. Like the Pac Man articles, this will eventually include playtest data and sort of a behind the scenes of the evolution of the game, assuming it doesn't fall apart.

Paper Prototype: Communication
Game about the spread of information. It began as the player being a piece of information traveling from node to node.It's currently about the player setting up a network of nodes to propagate information. Updates will probably be made based off of my current reading of The Tipping Point as well.

Replay - The Ferry design, part 1
Exploration of one of my idea database games. Players can explore different roles and extensive replayability in an environment constrained in both space and time.

Emergence and the Simulation Uncanny Valley
Examining the tie between affordances, simulation depth and the uncanny valley. The more options you allow, the more that the small things you didn't include will stand out.

Episodes and Character Attachment
Does an episodic structure lead to closer player attachment to characters? Not sure if this topic has legs or not, but it interests me.

Design of Everyday Games
A series applying Donald Norman's design principles directly to game design.

Murder Simulator
Another game from the idea vault. Detective sim with procedurally generated crimes.

Dwarf Fortress Interface Design
Usability centered examination and interface overhaul on Dwarf Fortress, a gem buried beneath a scary pile of menus and ASCII characters.

Cog updates
Work in progress updates for a side project. Cog is an exploratory platformer along the lines of Metroid or Knytt but the world exists on varying scales that the player can access by inhabiting different sized avatars.

Dungeon Masters as Game Designers
Looking at the inherent skills and lessons learned while Game Mastering pen and paper RPGs and how these can be quite valuable as a game designer.

Cog: Introduction

So I thought, "Hey, wouldn't it be cool to do a recursive, sort of fractal exploratory platformer with nested avatars."



The game takes a sort of "Metroidvania" approach to world design: open, seamless, large. The added bonus with this design is that everything exists on various scales, 5 or so by the most recent design. Each "tile" of world can be broken down into a smaller tilemap, with tiles that can be broken down, etc. This won't be procedural or infinite, but instead part of a designed and (hopefully) well thought-out world.

The player gains access to these scales by inhabiting larger avatars. These super-avatars initially appear to the player as sections of the world that can be explored. When the player reaches a central "control node", he can take control of the larger character. The camera zooms out and the smaller capillary tunnels and platforms fade away LOD-style to reveal a bigger picture.

The video above was hammered together in TorqueX, which admirably handled tilemaps hundreds of thousands of game units across. There's no way I'd do a real game like that though. There will ultimately need to be some hierarchy based LOD mojo going on to keep collision and art from showing up at scales irrelevant to the player's current frame of reference.

At first I was pondering how to wrap a context around this inhabitation/scale shifting mechanic. The main character started as an alien ball of light and it magically took control of things. Upon a little further iteration I decided upon the concept of gears within gears and sketched up a corresponding, slightly more endearing character.

Everything's in a prototype/pre-production phase right now, and this could take a rightful seat alongside many other projects waiting in my design folder. Hopefully more to come soon.

The Design of Everyday Games: Introduction

One of the books that sits at the core of influence for me is Donald Norman's The Design of Everyday Things. It has nothing yet everything to do with game design. The book focuses primarily on things like teapots, doorknobs and telephone systems but the design principles apply to the world of interface and experience design in general.

I'm thinking about starting a series that explores the lessons learned in this book and applies them explicitly to game design, complete with examples both from the real world that the book addresses and from games that exhibit both dos and don'ts with respect to the principles and lessons taught in the book.

Some ideas that immediately spring to mind for topics are:

• Affordances and Constraints
• The 7 Stages of Action
• Conceptual Models
• Mapping
• Feedback
• Knowledge in the Head and in the World

More to come, hopefully soon. Someone tell me if this has already been done somewhere, like a GDC talk or something.

Buried Gem - Cryostasis

I came across this article in Next Gen a little over a month ago previewing Cryostasis, a unfortunately named horror shooter of sorts set in the arctic. I actually had to dig through my Twitter archive to remember what the thing was called. The cool trick is that the player can relieve the last moments of corpses he comes across. It sounds like a much more intense version of the data-logs from games like System Shock 2. In addition to reliving these moments, however, the player can change the past's future through his interactions with the world. My only hope is that this feature makes it into the final game (I'm looking at you STALKER) and it fulfills all my wildest hopes and dreams for gameplay possibilities.

Think about the narrative impact of stepping into the shoes of someone you know is going to die. This person isn't the protagonist, so it's actually not frustrating that you're put in this predicament. Depending on how much info the game gives, you might even know how this person died, giving the player a layer of in-joke foreshadowing meta-info that could color everything they do with those final moments( e.g. "Electric shock, guess I'll try and stay away from light sockets").

If the designers were so inclined they could really inject some heavy philosophy into this mechanic, either taking a nihilist view that your fate is sealed from the outset, or encouraging players to think about how they can impact larger systems even with little time or resources.

One thing that could be cool, but could lead to that live/die success/fail model is if the player could save the lives of the people and resurrect them in the present, giving himself another ally against the [cold, monsters, AI construct ??]. This could result in the endless repetition of trying to get a timed even correct and people saving and loading until they 'won' every subsection of the game, however.

So yeah, Cryostasis, lets keep an eye on it and see if it makes it to store shelves. If not, we could totally rip off that super cool mechanic for one of our own games.

article: http://www.edge-online.com/magazine/preview-cryostasis

http://cryostasis-game.com/