Identity: Interiors, Exteriors

Here are the plans for my next steps with the Relationship/Identity prototype.

Character Creation
A small bit of preamble for the player to establish some preliminary settings before entering the sim.

Gender
Symbolic abstraction of gender. Circle or square, I'm thinking.

Preference
Sort of a sexual preference where you choose one of the genders that your character will be attracted to. This will tie into more advanced relationship modeling later where characters can perhaps fall in love, maybe even have offspring? Don't know if reproduction throws noise into the message or not yet.

Attitude/Color
This will be your starting color. It represents your starting attitude/worldview/personality, and will be more of a part of your character than in the current version. More on this in the next section.

Internal vs External Color
The point of this exercise is to explore the different facades we use when dealing with other people, as well as the bonds that form between people that share a certain outlook on life. Currently, the player is a totally free agent, exempt from any kind of grounding since he can change his color at will. I'm going to implement an 'internal color' in addition to an 'external color' to represent your real feelings vs those you're projecting to those around you.

The external color will be bound by the internal, so you can only stray a certain distance from your true feelings. If you express a color other than your internal color for a while, your internal color will begin to slide towards the external one. This might be a constant gradual process so there will still be alteration if you're frequently flitting between different external colors.

At some point I'd like to explore the concept of chroma representing the purity of someone's convictions. As they glide closer to grey,

Familiarity
When the player first sees a new character they'll appear gray, completely neutral and 'colorless'. The more the player stays within proximity of a character, the more the exterior color will begin to show. I'm thinking about doing this one channel at a time (R,G,B) instead of fading them all in at once, just to delay the hue reveal so the player won't be able to adapt his exterior color at the first faint sign of color. This might be ridiculous though, and I'll play around with the fade in to see what feels right.

After getting to know a character for longer, the interior color will begin to show itself. Matching color with the interior color of a character might result in stronger bonds of friendship or romance. Still thinking about how much complexity I want to include in the relationship model.

External Influences
Dramatic events shape our perspective on the world. Getting mugged, surviving a car crash, losing a loved one, these can all color the way we look at things. My first pass at implementing this sort of phenomenon will be colored projectiles that randomly fire into the scene, re-coloring the first character they collide with. This character is changed forever, both internally and externally.

I'm beginning to wonder if keeping a dev blog this detailed is going to diminish the impact of the final product, or if it's better to put details out in the open like this for critique and feedback. Anyone commenting, feel free to chime in on this topic. Curious what people think.

I'm also looking into a better way to make this available to people, as I'm currently coding in an XNA framework and using a 360 gamepad, which makes for a decidedly unportable experience.

Identity: First Steps

I've begun to work more on the prototype for Identity. (Initial post here) I'd initially worked out the color picker interface with a moving avatar and then put the thing down for a while. I've since revisited the little fledgling game and added the characters you'll interact with.

Recapping from the first post, the NPCs are letters of the alphabet. This keeps things as simple as possible while letting the player remember specific characters pretty easily.

Each character is introduced to the world with a random color. This represents a personality type and general mindset. The character then has some basic directives.

• Wander around, looking for others.
• If someone is similar to me, approach them.
• If someone is very dissimilar to me, avoid them.
• If I'm around someone similar long enough, alter my attitude(color) to be more like them.

The player is perceived by these entities, but is otherwise a free agent. He can change his color at will, and they will act accordingly.

Once I got the basic attraction/repulsion/mimicry behavior in, I was able to watch patterns emerge. One thing that I expected was cliques. You'd get clusters of like minded people that would rove about, accreting others who were anywhere close to similarly minded. Unchecked, the system would stabilize in 2 or 3 major factions.

What I didn't expect was peer pressure. When I was able to go up to a small group, 1-5, I could easily match their color then slowly sway the group along the spectrum to whatever hue I wanted. With a large group, however, every unit was mimicking its neighbor, so I had a lot more competition for swaying a unit to change its hue. The tactic I usually ended up resorting to was physically pushing a character away from the group, then coercing it before it could return to the others.

My next steps will be to make the general behaviors more subtle, and to try and work in an influence stat, since some characters are more likely to sway others to their color than others.

Video footage below:

The Burden of Choice

Games are interactive systems. The fidelity of a player's choices determines the nuance with which he can affect and express himself within that system. This goes broad as well as deep. More verbs = more potential choices. More 'adverbs' means greater control over the specifics of any given interaction (e.g. maim vs. kill, flirt vs. marry).

While you could argue that more of either of these axes would make for a richer gameplay experience, I think there are ramifications to consider when constructing a possibility space and the verb set the player can use to poke, prod and explore that space.

Feedback and Consistency
Can the player form a model of the system in his head and use that to anticipate the consequences of his actions?

This is a fairly prevalent point in Norman's The Design of Everyday Things (¹). If the player doesn't have a clear idea of how the game world's components interact, he can't make an informed choice when acting on that world. For all the design work that might have gone into building the system, if that model is too opaque, the player might as well be using brute force trial and error to achieve his goals.

Harvey Smith addressed this at his GDC talk in 2002 on Systemic Level Design (²), and it was a real eye opener when I was getting my start as a designer. The idea is that you build a system with components that are granular enough to interact in interesting emergent ways and then maintain a strict consistency with the way these things behave. The more you frame your environments and scenarios around these consistent building blocks, the more a player can observe a scenario, form a plan and act on it, either getting the thrill of seeing his plan come to fruition or learning from his mistakes in a way that doesn't feel like the system cheated him.

Does the system acknowledge when the player is making a choice that impacts the state of the game world?

Games have differing levels of agency, the idea that the game is acknowledging that the player is acting within its world and is having some sort of impact. At the low level, this can be as simple as particle effects erupting from a surface as the player sprays it with gunfire. At higher levels, the player could impress a character in a dialogue exchange, resulting in an entire mission tree appearing at a later point in the game.

The issue that arises is how the player knows that his actions will have repercussions and at what agency level of feedback. Take GTA IV, for instance. The player can obliterate literally hundreds of people with no lasting effect on the game world. The game says "hey, you wanted to run over a guy, watch him crumple and bounce off of the hood of your car". During certain scripted sequences however, a large prompt appears on the screen giving the player the option to kill or spare specific individuals. In this case the game is trying to let you know your choice here will likely impact the narrative or mission structure of the game at a later date.

The thing to note here is that the game asks the player to step outside of system space to make the 'important' decision. The player doesn't really get to make the decision with his native tools so the whole arrangement feels artificial. The game implies that what the player can do with his standard interaction set doesn't really matter in the grand scheme, as major events will play out the same way regardless.

High impact choices like these are more sparse in narrative heavy games like the recent GTA games. This is because content is expensive, and generating branches of content that nobody will see generally gets a thumbs down from management types. More player driven games like Civilization or (yet again) Dwarf Fortress have a much more granular choice structure. Almost everything the player can do in these games has lasting implications that will sculpt the emerging narrative and interaction space down the line. Crawford touches on this a bit when he talks about Process Intensity (³). By leveraging the ability for the machine to generate content, you can often allow the player to explore a wider range of options as situations and locations you couldn't anticipate or wouldn't have time to build can be created on the fly by the computer. This is a bit hand-wavy, as there are many more details to building good procedural content, but it'll do for my purposes for now.

It's also worth mentioning that supporting inaction as a player option when he's using his native verb set is tricky. You're basically asking the player to walk away in light of instructions possibly to the contrary. An example would be person X telling you to kill person Y if you want his help. The player would probably assume this was the only valid option when the alternative is probably something like walking through a door or waiting around for a certain number of seconds. In this case the UI pop-up is alluring if you can't think of a clever way to contextualize the scene or provide some dialogue that doesn't seem too contrived.

Reflection
When the player is presented with the consequences of his choices, does he recognize the causal relationship?

Reflection is akin to feedback, but it's more of a retrospective thing. It's the ability for a player to observe the changes he's affected in the game world and recognize that he had an affect, as well as possibly gauge what might have happened otherwise. For these correspondences to be apparent to the player, the chain of events between cause and effect needs to be well presented. This means the event sequences should be fairly logical, easy to parse and that the time between cause and effect fairly short. I haven't gotten to play it yet, but I've heard The Witcher does a good job of showing the player the trail of events from A to B whenever he's confronted with the repercussions of his choices from earlier in the game.

If choice effects aren't made apparent, the player might as well be uncovering a prescribed sequence of events. Branching paths with subtle outcomes could just feel like a magician's choice (⁴) where the plot is predetermined but the player is given the illusion of a narrative rudder.

There are a couple of other ways that a player's choices can be presented to him in the context of the path not taken.

One option is a short but deep game cycle. Emphasis in this case is placed on replaying the game to explore all of the possibilities. The brevity of the game is to help make the development more manageable as well as allow the player time to check out multiple scenarios. I've posted a couple of times on this in the past(⁵)(⁶), and I think it's a model that should be explored more. Thus far, the most notable examples of this kind of idea come from Daniel Benmergui(⁷) and Gregory Weir(⁸).

Another idea is to facilitate the comparison of worlds and characters between players. Spore is a decent example of this, although the differences between user choices are primarily cosmetic and have little to no impact on the systems of the game. The Sims would probably be closer to a show and tell system of people demonstrating the range of possibilities the game has to offer to one another. Another good example is Animal Crossing. More than merely seeing how your friend's world diverges from your own, you can explore it with him and experience the differences firsthand, even bringing back parts of it to use in your own game world.

Paralysis
Does the player have enough information to make a choice from the available options? Are there so many options that the player can't make a clear distinction between them?

There's nothing more intimidating than a blank sheet of paper (looking at my post frequency confirms this). If a player is thrown into the thick of important decision making with little context, or simply given too many options at once, he can freeze up. Each option can either seem equally valid or vary in such minute ways that the 'correct' path is unclear. There's a good TED talk by a guy named Barry Schwartz that addresses this very issue. (⁹)

There are a few ways to mitigate negative side effects when presenting players with a vast array of options. One is to introduce verbs and player tools piecemeal, allowing the player to get comfortable with a smaller set of choices available at any given moment before adding more. Once the player gets used to the broader palette of options, he can begin to look at scenarios in terms of the available tools and proceed from there.

Another is to rely on stereotypes. If you have a set of commonly accepted attributes that the player is likely to be familiar with, you have a jumping off point for a broader range of options. If you give the player a choice of archetypes to start a game with, for instance, you could provide the standard fare as a base level. Thieves are sneaky, warriors are tough, etc. As the game progresses, you could offer more nuanced sub-classes of these characters that could refine the set of verbs the player is using as he plays. Your initial 5 or 6 basic classes that rely on general assumptions could blossom into 15 or 20 without rattling the player if you pace it right. The Elder Scrolls games do this pretty well by offering different ways to start. You can dive into the pool of options straight away, or you can let them ease you into it by choosing pre-made packages with pretty clear explanations on what to expect, in addition to the standard fare fantasy classes most people recognize.

I think a decent illustration of overwhelming choice is the Oblivion character creation system. At first blush, all the sliders that control every aspect of the character's face can be overwhelming. If the player has a plan up front however, usually something like 'I want to make my own face', then these tools become useful as a means to an end. From a bottom-up approach, however, the player can tell little difference between a 56% and 57% forehead-sellion-nose ratio.

Wrap Up
I'd intended on adding a section about user interface an accessibility, but it ended up leaning more on the side of usability design and not just about choices. The main take away from that was that the UI is not only the window the player uses to look in on the world within the game, but it's also his hands and feet. What is the interface (controller input, UI) telling the player he can or can't do? What information is being presented and what is being hidden behind layers of menus? All of these feed into the player's internal model of the system and how he thinks he can interact with it and what options are valued above others.

And that's about it. Just food for thought when you're constructing choice systems and verb sets in your games, and some of the implications different decisions can have on the way your game is experienced and understood.

References

1. ^{The Design of Everyday Things}
2. ^{Systemic Level Design slides:
   Harvey's site: http://www.witchboy.net/2002/04/
   My own pilfered copy to spare you a trip to Fileplanet}
3. ^{http://www.erasmatazz.com/library/JCGD_Volume_1/Process_Intensity.html}
4. ^{http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Card_force#Magician.27s_Choice}
5. ^{http://www.kongregate.com/accounts/danielben}
6. ^{http://ludusnovus.net/my-games/the-majesty-of-colors/}
7. ^{Reflection: Why the Indigo Prophecy Demo Was Better Than the Full Game}
8. ^{The Ferry: Short but Deep Webs of Causality}
9. ^{http://www.ted.com/talks/barry_schwartz_on_the_paradox_of_choice.html}

On Building Ships

A the risk of sounding a little cheesy, here's a brief mini-post to share a quote from Antoine de Saint Exupéry.

"If you want to build a ship, don't drum up the men to gather wood, divide the work and give orders. Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea."

I think this is a great project management philosophy that's pretty relevant to building games. I'm also reminded briefly of those whiny sailors in Black & White that I had to throw into the ocean.

That's all.