This Game Isn't About You

Gaming has become extremely proficient at giving the protagonist, the player character, center stage and center of attention. NPCs all react to just about every thing the PC does. The PC always has particular goals available (and perhaps obnoxiously reminded from time to time of them). The PC knows everything about the landscape and eventually commands all of the potential of the world around him.

To some extent, this is what we want as both players and designers. GTA is eventually about running amok as a super-criminal and Saints Row would be less fun if it wasn't about mindlessly blowing things up in the name of game violence.

However, just as much of this feeling that world nauseatingly revolves around every action of the player character, comes from a lot of taboos that have accumulated over the years. These taboos come from an assortment of "market wisdom", designer idealism, and feature oneupmanship. Most of them have their place in gaming, and serve useful purposes most of the time, but to some extent some of these have taken a sort of religious fervor behind them, and it is easy to forget that all rules have exceptions.

I think the easiest historical example of the accumulation and inherent eccentricity of some of these taboos comes from the example of the maze: Mazes were components of adventure games from the start. The original Colossal Cave Adventure included the very template from which many original games gleaned how to do a maze. The Zork Trilogy can be seen as nearly one large maze partitioned into three games. For a time it was considered almost an unspoken requirement that all adventure games include a maze. Time passed and designers got tired of making interesting mazes and having a maze at all in an adventure game became synonymous as design elements in lazy or bad games. Eventually it became entirely anathema for a game to include one at all.

Some say that mazes simply ran their course and that there are no new ideas for mazes. Others say that players don't like mazes. But yet, simple 2D mazes continue to show up in activity packs and pen and paper sets. I find it curious that the taboo seems to have affected even the "casual games" industry. Where are all the maze casual games? There certainly seems to be an interesting disconnect in that mazes are the one pen and paper "traditional" game that does not seem to be widely represented amongst casual games...

The point here is not that I think that a game that should inspire the emotions of Nighthawks needs a maze, more that the taboos I'm about to mention seem to have, in their own ways, similar historic contexts. It is a useful allegory, I think. You can think of a desolate, lonely existence in a large city in terms of mazes of city streets and emotional complexes; neither of which care about you specifically.

To particular point: a challenging maze requires a certain amount of "found readability". Most game taboos and rules that have accumulated over the years are about forcing inherent readability as close to the surface and to the player as possible. Rather than asking a player to learn to navigate the structure of a maze, to find readability in the subtle differences between nodes, to make for themselves the map necessary to navigation, gaming has become somewhat single-minded about making sure that every player has access to the maps they need up front.

There are quite a few tools of readability that have, for some good reasons, become popular and nearly "mandatory": clear objectives screens, GPS, markers and goal-orienting paths. Certainly these devices limit player frustration, but they are all player-centric tools that shelter players from desolation and loneliness. It is a fascinating trade off between frustrating players and allowing players to explore truly alien environs.

Current wisdom is that players should never feel frustrations, that games should be as easy to grok as possible. In many ways it is a good trend. But frustration is an important emotion, and should not be overlooked as a powerful tool for storytelling. Certainly there are other things that can be done to compensate some: certainly we can do better with in-game street signs?

Imagine an urban sandbox without a map or a compass. Imagine quite a few NPCs and few that seem to even acknowledge your existence. Imagine not knowing your goals explicitly and trying to navigate a web of alliances and counter-alliances that seems to have existed before you started playing and doesn't exist for you to personally control by the end of the game.

Sure, a lot of player's are going to immediately come away with "less fun". You aren't going to hit an lowest common denominator demographic, and you probably can't do it as a huge budget affair [1], but certainly the audience for such a game is something larger than zero. Particularly if you can assuage your audience that the drama you are trying to create is worth the frustration they might feel trying to navigate it.

A Difference of Night and Day

We use the phrase "a difference of night and day" meaning a large difference, and yet the differences in video game terms are mostly cosmetic. Of course, balancing real-time-like time flow is a complicated matter: Players balk when businesses in game seem to follow actual schedules. Yet on the other hand no one seems to have figured out how to best represent those hours we humans actually spend asleep, or those hours we must spend between gaming sessions. [2]

Player characters seem to already exist as insomniac hawks, looking for something to entertain time at all hours of the virtual day. I think that to do the painting's emotion is simply a matter of trying to better contrast day and night. Give the players an option to sleep and let them be eaten by the anxieties of missing crucial clues if they don't spend some of the less active night whiling away a few hours as an insomniac in an all night diner.

I'd Build it if I Could

To be honest, I don't think that a game that yields some of these emotions is that far from being made. Given access to GTA or Saints Row it is possible to chuck out much of the gameplay, reaction AI and UI and write an urban drama about an insomniac alone in a crowd of people, whose major time to think about the world about him is the hours he might spend in a dive diner.

The stories are there for the writing, but the stages do not yet exist. Worse, perhaps, is that for now the producers don't exist either that are interested in paying for dramas that alienate potential audience members or that challenge the audience in ways that are taboo. Is it not perhaps a terribly irony of an industry about creating challenges that there is such a thing today of "too challenging"?