February 2010: Emotive Games

February 2010's topic, Emotive Games, was submitted by writer and game designer Sande Chen.

Sande writes:

How many times have we heard the question asked about games: "But can it make you cry?" Or in other words, does the game make you feel something? Can a game stir the passions just as much as a heart-wrenching movie? Some people say emphatically, "Yes!" Unfortunately, either I have watched too many good movies or I have just not come across a game that can successfully manipulate my emotions.

With film, I understand that there are many tricks of the trade to guide audiences to an emotional epiphany. I think about how rapt I was upon watching United 93 and how my stomach felt as I watched the events unfold in almost a documentary style. I myself was in New York City one month after 9/11. I recall the smoke in the air and the soldiers on the streets. Would there ever be a game that would speak to me in the same way?

• Do games have the necessary vernacular to tell powerful stories?
• What kinds of emotions can games generate in players?
• How do you make emotive games?
• What would you consider to be an emotive game?
• Is it even important for games to make players cry?
  

Sande Chen is a writer and game designer whose work has spanned 10 years in the industry. Her credits include 1999 IGF winner Terminus, 2007 PC RPG of the Year The Witcher, and Wizard 101. She is one of the founding members of the IGDA Game Design SIG.

Infinite Climax Action! (Part I)

In Part I of this article, game designer and artist Taekwan Kim explains how player investment and the feeling of game progression do not only rely on plot but can be created largely through skill development as well.

Recently Altug Isigan posted an interesting article about stagnating plots affecting the player’s sense of progression. He mentioned two axes of experience in that article: plot and time. In this post I would like to point out and further analyze the other crucial axis to the experience of progression (aforementioned by Josh Bycer) which Isigan somewhat neglected: skill.

The Hypothetical

Let’s take a look at that hypothetical example he gave concerning a serial killer as an illustration of stagnating plot which destroys the feeling of progression:

"An ill-minded man with a butcher knife in his hand secretly enters the bathroom of a young woman which, unaware of all this, is taking a shower. With a sudden move the man opens the shower curtain and frantically stabs the young woman to death. Just as he’s finished, he realizes that a neighbor, an old prostitute, has witnessed the scene. He immediately goes to the neighboring home and kills her. Just as he’s finished, he realizes that another neighbor, a middle-aged nun, has witnessed the scene. He immediately goes to the neighboring home and kills her. Just as he’s finished, he realizes that another neighbor, a young cheerleader, has witnessed the scene. He immediately goes to the neighboring home and kills her. Just as he’s finished, he realizes that another neighbor, an old cleaning lady, has witnessed the scene. He immediately goes to the neighboring home and kills her."

I would have to agree that such a situation is patently absurd. And yet, one wonders whether the inability of the game to harness the ridiculousness of the situation itself is what would cause a detriment to the experience, and not actually the repetitiveness and horizontal non-development of plot. Let’s consider the above scenario seriously; how can we make this into a viable experience? Such an exercise would help establish that a game can have progress even when the plot is purportedly stagnant.

Unstated Assumptions

An initial question: how deep would the “pure action” (as worded by Isigan) be in this game (or how much skill is there to be learned and how much does that skill level impact player agency)? If it is a simple matter of just running over to the victim and pressing a button without any challenge at all, that would actually fail in any game pretty much regardless of how amazing a plot has been applied.

Actually this assumption of a lack of challenge is really the greatest hurdle as well as the greatest boon in implementing the above into a feasible game experience. The severity of the actions of the player vis-à-vis the implicit assumption of the wildly disproportionate helplessness of the victims destroys any chance for credible suspension of disbelief. But if we destroy this to begin through the use of a highly satirical tone (we can satirize the player’s assumptions that the [conspicuously exclusively female] victims are helpless, for instance), the primary problem disappears.

Say, the old prostitute is actually an undercover vice cop; the middle-aged nun is a recovering former assassin; the young cheerleader turns out to be a supremely fit killing machine; the old cleaning lady wields a volatile cocktail of toxic household cleaners and knows the ins and outs of the building like the back of her hand; etc. These “victims” would each provide their own unique set of challenges and cause the player to develop/exercise considerable skill.

Admittedly, the suspension of disbelief (if you could call it that) in such a game would rely heavily on the efficacy of the satire/writing. But at any rate, if the game mechanics were compelling and deep enough, the player would become invested in developing his skills in negotiating them despite a redundant (in every sense of that word) plot.

That is to say, the other assumption in the hypothetical case above is that the feeling of progression relies almost solely on plot, which is not necessarily true in games. There is no doubt that good writing and plot pacing contribute mightily to the player experience (and would, in this case, make the difference between thoughtful feminist critique of male power fantasies in core games and slasher flicks, or irredeemable and actually misogynistic camp). But the point is that suspension of disbelief which arises from a properly developing plot is, in fact, not entirely necessary when player investment and progression is created largely through skill development.

Counter-Strike (CS), for instance (a game Isigan mentioned as containing “climbing tension”), has absolutely no plot progression to speak of (this is not to say it doesn't have a "narrative"). It’s the same story of disarming/planting the same bomb at the same bomb site, or rescuing/preventing rescue of the same hostages from the same locations over and over, round after round. Condensed in this manner, CS is really no less redundant, and actually no less absurd, than his example of the serial killer who kills one victim after another. It is simply that CS provides a high level of complexity and a large number of opportunities for variations (and thus improvements) in the execution of these same, repetitive ludic goals.

[This article originally appeared on Taekwan Kim's Gamasutra blog.]

Taekwan Kim is a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania, with a degree in Cinema Studies and a minor in Fine Arts. When not dutifully engaged in the study of gameplay, he spends his time crafting mods and drafting design documents, some of which can be found at his website: www.taekwankim.com.

Leveling Curves (Part II)

In Part I, game journalist Petter Mårtensson points out the relation between level caps and dominant business models in MMO's as they contribute to lengthen gameplay artificially. In Part II, he looks at the problems that are inherent in the leveling methods applied in MMO design and what changes we might expect in the future.

Despite being functional, the leveling system has a few problems built-in. While effectively being a gate that the player needs to pass before being able to fully explore the game, a gate that needs to be braved every time a new character is created, it's often completely arbitrary. In most games, the monsters that must be defeated for the player to get experience points scales according to the level the character is. While the character often gains access to a wider variety of abilities as levels are gained, the actual process of killing a level 50 monster is usually the same as killing a monster at level 1. The feeling of being powerful is created only by the fact that the monster you are killing now was impossible to beat 10 levels earlier.

It also has the possibility to gate players from their friends who join the game at a later stage, or gate them from a community that mostly sit at level cap already. While effective early on, the system can become a burden when the experienced players still manage to tear through top-level content and have to turn to lower level characters for things to do - and often complain about having to go through the process all over again. We, as players, are so used to leveling now that we can do it with our eyes closed and our hands tied behind our backs. We all know that the "true" game, as envisioned by developers, can usually be find after the leveling road has been tread again. We will complain about it when we have to go through it again, even if your game is completely new and it's our first character.

You then have a choice. Speed up the process, something that is often done these days as games grow older, or slow it down. Speeding it up means more people at level cap, meaning more people will tear through the end-game content faster. Slowing it down will attract the anger of the community, as a slow leveling curve is seen as nothing except a tiring grind (mostly because, 9/10 times that's exactly what it is) to keep people from leveling up too fast. And as the game grows older, the leveling-content needs to be kept as fresh as the end-game, consuming more developer resources in the process.

World of Warcraft is often hailed as the game which made the MMO genre much more accessible to a bigger market than the games that had gone before it. Now it struggles with its own legacy, forcing Blizzard to more or less "reset" their old content in the upcoming Cataclysm-expansion. A similar fate awaits the world of Norrath in EverQuest 2. While new MMOs, from Champions Online to Fallen Earth, still cling to the tested and tried levels, there's a risk that more and more players will find themselves bored with having to jump through the same hoops over and over again. Aion, NCsoft's latest MMO, found itself under attack for forcing people into a slow experience point grind, showing that an increasing number of players is starting to see through the level illusion.

It's a tricky situation. The levels are a part of our collective MMO psyche, players and developers alike. A brief look at the rookie channel in EVE Online, a game that does not use levels, will show many new players wondering how to see what level their characters are. It's a tradition that we've locked ourselves into and taking a step back and looking at it from a wider perspective - one spanning several games, not only the game we're currently playing or working on - can turn up a myriad of problems with it. The MMOs of the future will have to deal with it, in one way or another.

Now you have to excuse me, I have to go level my rune keeper in Lord of the Rings Online...

Petter Mårtensson is a games journalist from Sweden, specializing in (or obsessing over, depending on who you ask) massively multiplayer online games. Most of his journalistic work is published in Swedish, but his personal blog - Don't Fear the Mutant - is written in English.

Leveling Curves (Part I)

In the first part of his article on leveling in MMO's, game journalist Petter Mårtensson points out the relation between level caps and dominant business models in MMO's as they contribute to lengthen gameplay artificially.

To lengthen gameplay in an "ordinary" single player game, it can be as easy as copy-pasting corridors, enemies and sometimes even puzzles. But those games have a limited length of gameplay more or less built in, sooner or later they will run out of story or playable levels. The player will be done, the game will be ejected from the disc drive of whatever machine has been used and put back into the bookshelf. Game over, everyone is hopefully happy and satisfied.

Not so much for the MMO-player, or the MMO-developer. After all, a MMO is supposed to be played for a long, long time. Hopefully for many years, offering the player a world to move into. A MMO needs to be designed to be addictive, and even though the ethics of this design have been debated back and forth for a long time, it's a fact of life that every developer that wants to get in on the genre needs to take into consideration. It also means that gameplay must not only be stretched for a couple of hours, it needs to be stretched indefinitely.

But we already know this, if you've ever been in contact with an MMO (and seriously, I know that you have a World of Warcraft account, active or inactive, confess!) and thought about its design, you've considered it. If you've ever visited an official MMO forum, those cesspools of flames and trolls, you've seen fans bicker about running out of new things to do, new dungeons to conquer or content to tear through. It's all about lengthening gameplay, to keep people interested enough to keep the money flowing out of their pockets for the same game for months on end.

Let's say you're developing a MMO (everyone seems to be, these days). You have all kinds of great ideas, fascinating new mechanics and ways to revolutionize the genre. The only problem is that you know that if you let the players run rampant on your game, there's always the chance that they will play through it like a single player game. No matter how many quests, dungeons, raids, Player versus Player scenarios or deep economic systems you put in place, there just won't be enough to keep people occupied long enough for you to develop more of it. In short, you need to lengthen gameplay artificially, not by actual gameplay elements, but by gating the content you have. Keep those pesky gamers occupied elsewhere, buying you and your team time.

Luckily for you, there's already a tried and tested system that no one will even react if you use. Leveling. It's an awesome system, it's been around for decades in both computer and pen-and-paper RPGs, and almost every MMO ever released (with a few notable exceptions, of course) use it in one way or another. So put that in there, let the player start out at Level 1 and then have him/her quest or grind for experience points until he/she reaches your defined "level cap". Let the player feel like he/she is "growing in power", in order to get ready for the stuff waiting at the top - the mythical Holy Grail known as "end-game."

Petter Mårtensson is a games journalist from Sweden, specializing in (or obsessing over, depending on who you ask) massively multiplayer online games. Most of his journalistic work is published in Swedish, but his personal blog - Don't Fear the Mutant - is written in English.

Motivating Players in an Engaging Way (Part II)

In Part I, scholar Altug Isigan asks why not all motivational game mechanics are necessarily engaging and why they often feel like they are wasting our time. In Part II, he elaborates on how pure action can become a source of boredom and frustration if increasing tension is not taken into consideration.

The Boredom of Pure Action

Often writers and designers will confuse increasing tension with “pure action”. They will think that the more guns explode (the more swords are swung, the more people die etc...) the more tension we have. This is wrong. It is often the case that such scenes will only equal to progress in time, but as we've seen already, progress in time does not necessarily translate into a rise in plot. Actually in many cases it is an invitation to boredom and frustration. Consider the following example:

An ill-minded man with a butcher knife in his hand secretly enters the bathroom of a young woman which, unaware of all this, is taking a shower. With a sudden move the man opens the shower curtain and frantically stabs the young woman to death. Just as he is finished, he realizes that a neighbor, an old prostitute, has witnessed the scene. He immediately goes to the neighboring home and kills her. Just as he is finished, he realizes that another neighbor, a middle-aged nun, has witnessed the scene. He immediately goes to the neighboring home and kills her. Just as he is finished, he realizes that another neighbor, a young cheerleader, has witnessed the scene. He immediately goes to the neighboring home and kills her. Just as he is finished, he realizes that another neighbor, an old cleaning lady, has witnessed the scene. He immediately goes to the neighboring home and kills her.

We have a lot of “pure action” in this sequence. However, instead of giving a feeling of progress, after the murder of the first eyewitness the action feels like it marks time. The reason for this is that the action after the murder of the first eyewitness does not cause a rise in plot and brings stagnation to the story. The action causes progress on the horizontal axis (Time) only, but does not seem to contribute much to progress on the vertical axis (Plot). Expressed through a graphic, the storyline looks like this:


A lot of games seem to suffer from this problem. The repeating action does not contribute to a rise in the plot [1]. However, the problems that come when action does not help increasing tension get worse when the resulting stagnation is combined with a badly designed reward schedule. In that case, not just the story feels frustrating, but also the achievements that we unlock through repeated action fail to feel rewarding. This can have various reasons:

• the reward feels too insignificant or does not translate in any usefulness in regard to overcoming the game's challenge


• the system that prolongs to get the rewards feels arbitrary, inorganic to the conflict and/or biased towards the business model


• the reward is in a too far future and feels relatively insignificant because we can't see the immediate result of our actions.

Whatever the reason is, it is a very frustrating situation for a player since all action seems to be completely stripped from any meaning. In other words, failure in both increasing tension and meaningful/functional reward will be devastating for the player's experience and a sure way to see her quit playing.

Conclusion

Increasing tension is a very important quality of any good game. I tried to point out in this article how this quality requires player actions to be articulated under a causal chain that gradually brings more complexity to an initial problem. Motivational mechanics like reward schedules are an important part of games, however, their usefulness will be achieved to the degree the designer manages to shape them into a narratively compelling experience.

Notes

[1] The problem we describe here is not to be confused with another problem called 'weak story'. A weak story fails to produce tension because it fails to establish a conflict at all. Hence, the feeling that the story just marks time is there right from the beginning and lasts until the end of the story (if anybody ever plays it that far). Stagnation however can occur over certain sequences despite the otherwise very strong presence of conflict. The problem can be fixed by removing the scenes that cause stagnation. In the case of weak story however, the effort to fix the story must go into the creation of a stronger conflict, which is an intervention on a much more fundamental level.

Altug Isigan is a scholar at the Eastern Mediterranean University, Department of Radio-TV and Film, in sunny Famagusta, Cyprus, where he is writing a dissertation on narrative in games. You can read more of his work at his blog, the Ludosphere.

Motivating Players in an Engaging Way (Part I)

In Part I of this article, scholar Altug Isigan asks why not all motivational game mechanics are necessarily engaging and why they often feel like they are wasting our time.

It happens all too often that we lose our motivation exactly because of the mechanics that were supposed to achieve such motivation. I believe that one of the reasons for this is that game designers have too much faith in reward systems and do not tie them strong enough to narrative structures that foster a strong sense of game progression. In the first part of this article, I will address the concept of increasing tension in order to explain the forces behind a strong sense of progression. Later on, I will give examples from cases in which the increasing tension principle is ignored and what impact this has on player experience.

What Keeps Players Moving?

Increasing tension is one of the oldest and most valued principles in drama. It denotes the piling up of pressure on the protagonist during her struggle to defeat her opponent(s). Usually the pressure will continue to pile up until the story reaches a climax. The protagonist will be then given a relief through a solution which sets an end to the conflict [1]. We experience such pressure in casual games like Tetris and Zuma, or in more complex games like Counter-Strike, where we watch our team members being shot one by one until we are finally left all alone in an hostile environment with lethal enemies just waiting behind the corner.

Expressed through a graph, we can visualize increasing tension as something that works on the vertical axis and therefore is concerned with rise of plot. In other words, in order to have increasing tension it is not enough that events mark time (progress on the horizontal axis only), but their development must also equal to a rise in plot and translate into a further step towards the solution of the conflict.



Necessity (facing an inescapable threat) is usually what gives the story the momentum that makes the vertical axis work. The protagonist would keep struggling until the threat (or herself) is eliminated. Once the solution of the clash between protagonist and threat has been reached, the driving force behind the vertical axis is exhausted and the climbing stops.

The Scope of Dramatic Tension

This sort of dramatic structure can be installed over a variety of scopes. For example within a single act (or, within a scene) it would consist of

• the set-up of the character’s particular goal for that scene;
• the actions she carries out to reach the particular goal;
• the answer to the posed problem (whether she reaches the particular goal or not).

Typical examples would be game levels in Mario, Diablo or Medal of Honor. But we can observe the presence of such a structure on smaller or larger scales too. For example, the particular actions within a scene might have increasing tension: will I be quick enough to place this falling block into that slot? On a larger scale on the other hand (between scenes for example), it means that with each new scene, something is added to the problem that had been brought onto that level of complexity through previous scenes: the cup final in the Konami Cup in Pro Evolution Soccer has been reached after many tough matches and it's such a shame that our most important striker is suspended due to the yellow card limit he reached because of a stupid foul in the previous match.

These examples allow us to say that increasing tension is a matter of causality, of creating a causal chain that brings increasing complexity to an initial problem [2]. Motivation is firmly established within the necessity that the plot structure generates. The reasons that keep the player moving feel real to her. As a result engagement and immersion are reached.

Notes

[1] We should refrain from interpreting the word solution as something that must be in favor of the protagonist. Solution is first and foremost the logical extension to conflict, not character. Hence, an ending that sees the protagonist fail (like for example in the play Hamlet, in the movie Braveheart, or in the card game Solitaire) is a solution because it brings an end to conflict.

[2] It is essential that all new scenes are connected to the initial problem (the conflict); otherwise we witness a problem that is called deviation, i.e., the story goes into a direction that leads outside the initial premise. Typically, a spectator’s response to that would be that she can no longer tell where the story is headed towards.

Altug Isigan is a scholar at the Eastern Mediterranean University, Department of Radio-TV and Film, in sunny Famagusta, Cyprus, where he is writing a dissertation on narrative in games. You can read more of his work at his blog, the Ludosphere.

February 2010 Poll

Please vote for the February 2010 topic!

You'll see the poll to the right. The choices are:

• Multiplayer Economies
• Emotive Games
• Losing the Fun Factor (Topic has been re-titled "In Search of Old School Fun"
  

Please vote by January 19. Thank you!