Oh boy, here I am again shooting far and wide for the sake of perhaps hitting something unexpected out there.

Once again, in an episode of particularly excellent tabletop roleplaying session, I was reminded of two things.

First, characters. Don’t ever resort to mundane characters, be they NPC’s or primary ones. Always incorporate stuff made for legends told later. Always aim for potential towards legends.

Second, as much as you want to design excellent gameplay, don’t let the gameplay break the game flow. Don’t force players to play the game mechanics when there’s a gameplay moment to remember either about to occur, or has already began rolling forward. It’s stretching the concept, but imagine gamemaster snagging character sheets (or availability of inventory menus etc) away from players when something sudden occurs. Things should flow from reflexes at such point. Drop everything and go into instinctive mode.

Sudden occurrence is a funny beast, as it makes us forget stuff we haven’t got programmed down into our spine and forces us to react with what we have at hand, with whatever we can come up with in a few seconds timeframe. If you go “Err……” and bell goes bong, your character very clearly froze because he doesn’t know his strengths yet and is about to get a deserved kicking before he is able to join in the fun accordingly. It’s also a light slap on players cheek – or dare I say learning experience? In situations calling for experience and mastery of character skills, that’s where you measure your character. That’s obvious, and has always been. I’m just advocating it should not happen solely in some damn sheet or a menu we stop to oggle at RIGHT WHEN SHIT SHOULD BE FLYING. Excuse my french. Just take the player further into the game, away from reading numbers and ponderous thoughts when he should be in a hurry and playing by feel. Yes, yes, game mechanics everywhere incorporate initiatives and such derived from your character stats, but what did I just say? What?

No, if you don’t remember a particular trait of your character that would be handy in situation, then your character just isn’t kickass enough to react with it. If your character knows that going for a nightly jog in those black woods full of bloodshot eyes is a good reason to keep a gun in hand, then all the better. He at least has the gun when suddenness jumps up and grabs his face when his player doesn’t expect it. Of course, if he is new to such circumstances, chances are he’ll pull the trigger and shoot in completely wrong direction. End result might as well be a companion character in same party who now carries a character trait called limp, because of a certain instance of a epileptic squirrel accidentally falling on some new guys face. It’s something to laugh about afterwards.

During the time spent with a character, you start remembering stuff he or she is made of. That’s obvious. When the player knows his characters individual traits, weapons, magical items and whatever by second nature, is it wrong if I claim that’s when – and only when – you could call your character experienced. Why not extend that backwards into game mechanics? Measure experience through survived moments of legend. WW2 fighter pilots marked their experience on their planes, didn’t they? They damn well remembered every moment behind each kill mark. Turn your character sheet from an excel sheet into a character memoir worthy of saving. You’re playing story, so you’re part of it and with every influence you force upon game world, you’re also writing it.

When the experience begins to grow measurable, it’s also when you connect with your character and it becomes dear and memorable to you, having gone through quite a bit of legends through mishaps, mistakes, victories and awesome saving throws. Like feminists in sixties called for women to burn their bras, gamers should burn their inventory and action menus or character sheets when they become just a part of game mechanic instead of game itself.  Obviously, all this is as much wrong as it is true, as different people enjoy different games. I firmly believe the wanted mood and atmosphere might have their say on game mechanics as well. If I, lone shepherd helping a stray puppy in woods come across a pack of undead Spetsnatz in the woods, first thing you would see me doing has damn well nothing to do with dices or inventories. I would very much prefer to incorporate such raw instances of reaction in games, seeing what happens after the initial smoke settles and brain is back in gear, even if it results in registering shit in pants and a dead puppy in hand for being handled as a club against improbable enemy.

In the game we played, characters left legends behind and game mechanics never rose to break the flow, even though they carefully churned their cogs and wheels underneath.

A day not too long ago I was playing Fallout 3, and while enjoying the game itself, I started to feel some distance between the iconic Fallout and myself. Or was it between the iconic world and Fallout 3 itself? Get off my lawn, you say. How could that be? It is set in that world!

After the obligatory self-study of “am I a bad person now?” sort, it began to dawn on me.

It is the viewpoint of our protagonist. Not the story with its flaws – that’s just a good overall scapegoat for elusive “wtf was wrong there? -observations one can’t easily put a finger on. Just the viewpoint.

Fallout 3 thrusted us into first person perspective, dropping us face first into the groundlevel with rabid dogs, madmen and fallen society at fingertips. All very close range, often running to our face to maybe shoot it off or perhaps to just eat it, and not in the partychick kind of way.
On paper, close personal sweaty action in Fallout world sounds good, but there seems to be a trap. It actually gets too personal. Player does not get a chance to distance himself from the world on personal level, whereas in previous Fallouts the distanced isometric view gave the player a wide look at desolate expanses, with close human factors essentially removed. It is easier to feel hopeless and alone there, death of ground itself overburdening your senses. First person perspective keeps you too aware and too busy and too there and now to see the forest from trees.
That contrast between how I experienced those games screams essence of Fallout world to me – it is a world of bigger perceived pictures, because individuals and tangible details have been burned off the face of the earth. To experience the broken world, you must look further into distance, lest you notice the remnants of humanity mixed in the sand under your boots. Every now and then a part of that world in pain comes around the corner and violence is exchanged or traded, but all that is part of the land, too.

Again, story itself is almost irrelevant to this basic feel of the world. I’m guessing it has to do with the amount of visual information versus some curious aspect of the game world. Wanted mood and feel of it, I think – you could make a Fallout game in first person, but it should feel and sound more dreamlike and rid of distractions we could keep ourselves busy with. Remove the chance to behave and react with things like in normal world, and we get the needed detachment and alienation. Feed the world with noises of inhuman world and clear absence of sounds from human life, remove visual cues of the same human life as we know it, force us to make choices that sidestep our learned behaviour and you’ll catch us with our pants in knots around our ankles. I urge you to play Defcon and compare your findings. Causes and effects ending in no resolutions.

Also, remember how Another World felt like when you played it for the first time? That game crept up your neck like a f*cking spider.

After nuclear fire, whole humanity is cleansed into an abstraction, a pieced-together non-person memory we can try to understand and let ourself feel something about. Actual individuals we come across are deteriorated into huddled masses in desert – not humans to relate with, not with our minigun ever-obediently waiting for our choice. They pose either a threat or means of survival.
In that sort of a world stories don’t carry weight, because story is always a human journey. A survived journey in a world that glows in the dark is series of events you didn’t die of, and that’s quite enough – they form a memorable half-story by themselves, regardless of the order you survive them. Play the world and become part of it.

Since everyone keeps asking me if I got laid off… There are still two editors writing for the-cow.net. So no, I didn’t. Spikey did.

It’s been a while, and I feel like a worthless punk for not writing since ages. Luckily, now that I got laid off, I have free time and a distinct lack of work stress and
I feel like some proper bloggery and ranting is in order.

Also, the original blog post about communicating game worlds to the player found itself amazingly an alternate home in printed form at Gamesauce magazine, so this kind of works as a live sequel as well. As always, you’re free to disagree, and I hereby encourage you to voice your opinions and thoughts in comments. I’m not writing down the truth, just my view of things as I feel about them right now.

I have this urge to rant about how wrong game developers are with faking humans. I mean that damned AI that’s almost a trope in itself these days. Disregarding the few very good examples out there proving that NPC characters can be done right, I’ll concentrate on the bad shit since it’s much more rewarding to fling around.

So, those rigidly moving robot-like depictions of humanity that developers try to make more human by adding more bones, more polygons, more shaders, more realistically simulated hair blowing in wind and more this and more that. Yet they still keep acting very much unlike human, while looking more and more like human. No, that gets just creepy.

More graphical fidelity you shovel on screen, higher it sets the bar for animation, facial expressions, voice acting, effects and .. well, anything. More it represents reality in our headspace, more we spot the inconsistencies and you can be sure they stand out and break that careful world construct. I’d rather see blocky graphics with fluid likeness of life infused all over than all the graphical provess with limited animation on those photoreal humans. Of course, gamers are used to the videogame looks and accept a certain level of “videogameness” as part of the media, but if you want to push the narrative limits of visual information, you need to have a broad vision to account everything it’s begging to be pushed with. Uncanny valley is most often associated with human realism, but in reality it looms over everything we’re able to associate with any close matches in our own experiences. It could be from our daily lives or from our favourite movies – object of association doesn’t matter. Just the very existence of association matters. If you try to deliver associable visual experience, it damn well should match as a complete package and not just as isolated masterworks of programming that’s easy to present as slides at GDC.

I honestly believe we could get away with less graphical fidelity, and instead the fake humans should pose at least a few common human traits, or flaws if you want to play dirty with words. Human flaw – or what makes us human from outside observers perspective – is how we react, mostly.

Yeah, I’m distilling observable “human” qualities to observed reactions, disregarding polygon counts and texture resolutions and other whizbang trickery engineer-driven development so commonly focuses on. You can have the world-class animation but keeping it alive is the hard part. We bang our toe, we break from being perfect beings (observed as rigidity!) for a split second, reacting with a sound, facial expression, and some gestural motions. We are animals, for a second. We come upon a closed door in unknown hallway and we react by glancing at the door handle, maybe trying if it opens. We are curious monkeys. We don’t just walk against it and tread the ground with futile steps against the collision. If the door doesn’t react back, we disregard the door and focus our attention elsewhere. We don’t have the patience of statues. If the leader of our group isn’t going anywhere, we start looking at some things, fiddling with others. We keep ourselves busy even when we’re idle by definition, by reacting with glances and manipulation of random stuff. We are playful children! Of course, by “we”, I mean a random bunch of AI posse following the leader, i.e. player. Remember, player observes you, the AI, and gets suspicious if you look real but act like a robot with four hinges and a three-line script for brain. Player starts to look at the videogame flaws instead of human flaws.

What’s human, anyways? Scratch that. What’s human in drama? We want to play (and make) games that brings a feeling of something larger we can lodge ourselves comfortably into. It’s a vague term in itself, but sense of drama is what we want to push into the undercurrents of gameplay – the communicable game world player “gets” without having to read it up in the manual. Rules of drama dictate the basics, and few of them could be considered here. Character has a goal, and is driven towards it with a motivation. We don’t have to go to deeper stuff with midpoint-slumps and conflicts with antagonists and so forth, because we’re not dealing with primary characters here. Primary character is the player, and that bastard breaks all our careful rulesets anyways. Player is the uncontrollable variable we hate to incorporate to our games. Anyhow. AI represents the secondary characters, and because gamestudios are so often tech- and sellingpoint/marketablefeature-oriented, AI – as a companion – is in most cases a blind, daft sidekick that stops to loop its idle animation when player stops, and will resume moving when player moves. Unless it gets stuck in obstacle, in which case you’re again playing with videogame flaws, not human flaws. ANYHOW. If you have AI companion throughout the game, or even only during parts of the journey, it should appear to have its own reasons to tag along, its own reasons to be suspicious of you, ambitions to play you for its own goals and even backstab you after calling you dear in the night. All that because that’s human. We’re mentally dirty, incomprehensible beasts with varying views of world and of each other.

Yes, it takes more care, more focus and more work to develop but in the end, wouldn’t it feel more rewarding than just witnessing next-next-generation shader tricks or ten thousand polygons more on-screen?

Which route do you take, technical or human?

It doesn’t take huge elaborate systems to bring a feeling of those things happening around the player, that sense of hidden layer beneath the more readily apparent game surface our player and world is limited to interact on. It’s that layer under game world where player can’t go, from where he should get this feeling of being subject to observation. Perhaps even a feeling of being judged, silently.

It’s in the script, in dialogue, in animation and in the AI system, with some thought to tie everything together.
We observe details consciously, but sums of details we understand subconsciously. Emotion is built from subconscious, no?