Frankly, it doesn’t matter if I’ve played it or not – the issues brought into play (ha!) are not unique to Rage, and apply to whole cartload of other games too. I’m just grabbing a muse and running with it, wrongly.

I remember when Rage was announced. It was very iD. Technical breakthroughs, innovations and pipelines that caress a hurting artist and make his/her life easier with megatextures and whatnot. Easier to build and paint massive, detailed and gorgeous worlds. That’s very, very important, in fact – if the toolchain bogs artists down, it bogs down the content. Period. It’s bloody hard to get the vision across and delivered if the tools hold you back, so it easily brings up the easy choice of cutting down on vision instead and keeping the coders busy on features instead of tools. Very valid from business perspective in a culture where the management walks down the hallways holding a shotgun in hand, in case of obstructive requests threatening the top-down task delegation and direct profit potential on screens.

It’s very linear game, that, played from a single person perspective. It has all the necessary savepoints and map levels laid out in advance. Open world it ain’t, not in most cases — few examples exist, and they’ve nailed it down. Valve and Thatgamecompany come to mind on top of their own game, doing their own thing by daring to fail internally when trying and pushing ideas across. No, I have no idea what the studio culture and working ways are at iD, but keep in mind I’m not talking about Rage or iD solely. This is widespread, so I’m happily generalizing and blaming everyone equally. Generally speaking.

Back to Rage. Yes. The review gives it the respect and merit for how much of an visual experience it is. Then comes the bad news that don’t surprise anyone anymore, except by their directness and frankness. We need painful and uncomfortable feedback like this, in the industry where every review is suspect to suspicion over advertisement dollars shining through on the same review site. We must be held accountable as well, not just reviewers.

Elsewhere, someone described how inviting and lush the world in Rage looks, how it looks like a living and breathing thing. From afar, I think he added. Invites to get closer and immerse oneself into the world, he continued. Haven’t heard more from him.

Yes, well. It certainly does have just about perfectly executed art direction and fistful of hard-ass visual styles reminding us of Mad Max and Fallouts and other favourites.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m an artist and thrive for graphical quality, but for the sake of all things dear and holy to the audience, it has to have the function and the reason. It must be the effect after a cause.

When I look at the world of Rage from graphical standpoint, yes, it’s bloody pretty. It runs at constant 60 frames per second on the 360 and flows like molten butter. Carmack is insane. Now here’s the kicker for me: I’d love to think of a world like that as the canvas for everything that really makes the world breathe. Canvas where the final color comes from creatures inhabiting it, each tangled in the sprawling storyline and cross-connections and interactions driving events and agreements and disagreements and love and war. Stuff you could potentially write a book about after playing through and running into plot twists and characters that develop, while the game engine churns out richly detailed lushness at natural flow to support the depth. Something to sink into.

At this point I should be following some rules of writing and offering clever counterpoints and fresh ideas to rectify stuff I present as issues. Yes, well..

… I draw blank, sorry.

I do have a thought about reviews and their relationship with the industry, though.

Reviews hold a power to potentially echo back into development of future titles, all the way to the initial business level when the project proposal is under scrutiny and compared to similar predecessors. If they’re skewed, it all rolls slowly down backwards.

I fear that in the future game projects include a sub-plan entitled “reviews” under master marketing plan, where key high-volume reviews are designed to highlight the game features that are most cost-effective to implement, made to match and support those tailored reviews. All laid out in advance, calculated and monetized. Games become graphical technological featurepiles that need to be separately gamified. Is that where the mainstream high-dollar triple-a industry is headed? Gamification is already a standard term, driving investors into tears of joy and older developers into tears of rage. Sorry, I meant discomfort. Monetization is also an already established keyword in game development. They’re mostly coming up when pitching games to investors, and I understand the need for common language of $$ especially when investors are coming from outside the industry, but when they really do sneak their way up into game designs themselves, it becomes a bit creepy for many.

We love doing games for all the potential they hold as we see them blossom and grow on our screens during development, not what they often end up as. After a project is done, it’s usually remembered as a series of war stories over a pint of beer. I’m sure artists, animators, coders, sound designers and leads at iD loved to see their vision shine, and they certainly deserve all the possible credit for their work. It sure is beautiful. I just worry about what gets left behind.

I mean to say, ahem, damn. Yes. This is how narrative and being-there experience and involvement and all the other once-vapour golden ideas will be done. By recognizing the need for them, and then shoveling resources at them like it was nobody elses business, because it’s not impossible unless you keep blindly listening to grey-faced suits who project future core targets based on what has sold in the past five years. Don’t look there. Future ain’t in the past, unless you take into account other mediums and forms of storytelling. Like, I don’t know, books or television series with people in them. Possibly interacting with each other. Ok, that was slightly on the trolling side but how else can it be said?

I’ve often heard how a properly done AI companion could feel like a buddy on coop-mode at your side. Watching the AI / NPC gameplay video, that goes right down the drain. Know why? Your buddy is never present.

Let me open that one.
When your best mate evar is playing alongside with you, you see only his actions and the resulting effects. Solved puzzles, blown guard towers, whatnot. What the videogame and the mission requires. However, when you turn to look at the guy or the gal you’ve spent your childhood with, falling in sync from trees and hitting the curb face first while barreling downhill with crap bicycles, you don’t see him/her. Just a badly animated videogame character that slides around and repeats the videogame motions.
No visual connection or context to tie with, nor personality shining through. Your bud can do just what the player character is limited to do, and that’s always in minority compared to AI characters who need to connect with at least the context of the story and dialogue when interacting with the player. Player model, who incidentally, stands proud and motionless like a big tree, deferred light glimmering in his normalmaps.
Point being, you can’t properly connect with a stiff slidey videogame construct that has less naturality to its movements than an average kitchen appliance.

Your NPC buddy AI companion thing is not limited, though. As in the gameplay video, he/she can project very human traits — constructed, of course, but if they’re triggered by the surroundings and situation, they can become human. They become something player can relate with. Almost human reactions, if you may. If there’s an underlying structure and balance between predictability and unpredictability, they start to give off a whiff of a personality behind the actions.

Of course, there are logistics underneath. Building personality through animation, context sensitivity, AI, sound design, dialogue and all the other cogwheels of the machine is a massive task and there’s no sense nor chance to populate whole game world with such characters. It’d be awfully nice, of course, but then designers and writers would break their heads trying to make the key characters stand out. The mass and weight of it just needs to be recognized and placed accordingly in the game, to have it impact the world and story.

In regular co-op, as fun and blast it may be, your best bud fighting alongside you isn’t going to humor you by sticking his head into a barrel and testing the echo for the fun of it. That’s not acting out in a world together. It’s more akin to perhaps scooting radiocontrolled cars around a track together. Bloody good fun, yes, but try and stick that into a narrative context and something’s gonna be missing, unless just watching events unfold from synchronized actions counts. Sometimes it does, but even then it has to be done from the get go with that in mind without shooting for what can’t be done. Recognizing the means, etc.

Of course, getting back to the gameplay video, nothing’s done right until it’s in the hands of everyone and receiving actual love and tears. So far there’s only a glimpse of gameplay video, and cynicism is easy. I for one try and be optimistic about this, as I take this bloody personally. Now, that camera and some of the strained sort of animation.. Ah, can’t have everything in one go, can I?

You see, we flock to Twitter to have followers. We dive into Facebook not exactly only to be in regular contact with friends – all 1500 of them – but to enforce them to follow us on our daily adventures. Myspace I won’t mention as it’s completely passé and therefore bad form these days.

Mundane mishap with bacon becomes an adventure for others to reflect upon when it’s written in an appropriately cynical and/or hurt and/or humorous manner. We thrive to be recognized and noticed, and by gods, if someone retweets our daily adventure further down the social pathways, we are accepted en masse, and what could be better than that? Have Justin Bieber answer “<3″ to you?

We post photos to Flickr not solely to catalogue them to ourselves, but to receive attention from likeminded strangers. Oh, we just want some love. DeviantArt I’m not even going to talk about.

After indulging in this outright whor- ..selfpromotion that’s quickly replacing the oldfashioned mirrors at home, we settle down on our always socially acceptable Ikea Klippan and grab the latest socially approved game console controller in our hands, or stand around waving hands as per the new trend. We engorge ourselves with arbitrary puzzles, ultraviolent birds or outright mass slaughter, whatever happens to reflect our current needs of latest trend.

Now, one of two things may or may not happen.

For the first option let’s assume we play a game, controlling a character we of course project our needs into, being psychologically weak bags of meat. Our surrogate waddles around the designated game world, doing whatever darkly deeds we make him do within the set limitations. Now, again, in this one thing, one or two further things result. Projecting his daily self (or his need to act like complete opposite of his daily self) into virtual adventureland, our gamer avatar creates a massive mishap and more often than not the surrounding random NPC’s do not reflect on it. Nobody comments “haha lol didnt know you could do that with bacon! is awesome”.

Experience feels detached, unless it feels to the player just like it does in Facebook and Twitter where nobody comments on your antics either, in which case it really is just very sad. Then, if they do react, it’s most likely one spoken line randomized out of list of three after which they fall back into their walkcycles oblivious to the event that should have changed their depicted virtual lives.

Come to think of it, how closely that also matches Your Daily Facebook Experience is just downright creepy.

That’s it. World goes on inside the very tubely shaped game, indifferent as ever, because the characters don’t have to guide you forward – merely provide some mood filler, provide the backstory piece by piece and preparing player for the next level in a subtle, non-intrusive manner.

“Oh, didn’t know bacon could do that. By the way, stranger with a nice face I place my trust upon, did you hear the uberkapitan of our oppressive alien enemy forces has been seen three blocks ahead of you, just now? Can’t imagine anyone would take the opportunity, really, these days. Won’t they think of the future of our children. Goodbye!”

Of course, it doesn’t matter if our player listened to the dead-eyed monologue of future events or not, since he’ll invariably end up three blocks that way anyways, and will end up shooting things until things go away in various fashions. End result is the same. Both ways, our player might feel a bit cheated and dirty for being treated cheaply. Also, the bleak pointlessness of heard-it-already monologues is the reason they get always skipped. They don’t really add anything for most players.

Second option is we get a permission to wander off the plot path into the wild blue yonder of sandbox, a prospect that terrifies the already shambled minds of story- and game designers.

In there, player actually relies on feedback to be kept on the plot pipeline, fending off the dreaded situation where player gets lost, out of sight of any story engine characters and plot points. Of course, rarely such possibility is allowed to happen – you are essentially kept on a steeply inclined surface with nowhere to go but in the generally correct direction.

In here, mishap with a bacon gets commented upon as you need to be coerced into deeper interaction with NPC’s in order to figure out your way. Of course, the bacon that caused your wildest mishap ever was most likely an important macguffin in which case all apparent freedom is just a logical series of traps to lure you forward. All very elaborately designed set pieces one after another to produce an invisible tube you hopefully run through, either straight and ignoring the outside world or zigzagging around to enjoy the inessential.

If a sandbox game world had no lures and traps and big pointing arrows, player would eventually slumber to stop, bored with nothing to do – just like in his real world, except devoid of social networking sites. THAT crap does not sell.

But I’m not really writing about any of that stuff.

What player loves to find in the game world is some sort of recognition and results from his actions. Only a few games have done a longterm cause and effect stuff for the insanely horrible convoluted mess they are to create. You know, stuff like burning a village down making you a bad guy in those parts AND forcing the locals into bitterer and poorer bunch of bastards, planting a tree and coming back in few years gametime to see it has grown, awwhowniceandcute, et cetera.

Of course, those games suffered from other anecdotal mishaps which took over the whole public view and ended up defining the games. Devs just couldn’t put the brakes on after figuring out a nice world to live in, and instead ended up with extra buggery people loved to laugh about.

What happened was social networks, viral, sharing funny screenshots and agreeing with critics to become a popular dude, you know. People happened. It’s why we can’t have anything nice.

Anyways, think about it. What’s important in my mind is that games should retain a tangible relationship with you through your actions. The world you return to after your TwatterFissbookSpace journeys have to feel familiar, with your own proverbial shoeprints all over. I say return to with italics to make a certain point. We return to home. We return to familiarity. We stick to our old shoes because they’re comfortable and they smell only because they’re full of ourself, as horrible as that sounds. We’re on buddy terms with the grime we leave behind. If the game feels like you have left your fingerprints all over, banged the nice old villagers daughter and got even his dog a lasting drug addiction, you’re immersed because shit has just got personal through involvement.

Maybe, one day on your neverending journeys, you return to the same village which you have forgot about in your 15 in-game years of exile and come across a bastard teenage boy NPC with certainly very familiar facial features. Oh, hello, world just dropped you a kiddo bomb and you can take it as a sidekick.

If real life can stab you with a loving knife when you’re not expecting, why shouldn’t game world?

Even better,your character starts an unstoppable aging process from that point on to bring out another “oh okay, let’s watch this one out” trap for the player to keep playing those extra 35 hours.

Then he dies next to his son, in whichever timely manner an old hero would die in.

Game ticks on without falling back to “End Unlocked! Here’s A Badge! New Game? Y/N” trope.  Slowly realize your thumb twitch on the controller jolted the old mans’ son who, by now, after accumulating experience with his battlehardened father, is now a formidable character of his own. Sense of involvement through heritage, hoo boy.

It all pans out quite smoothly as a concept. If there’s NPC party involved, you’re the logical next leader again and game flows on without breaking a sweat or beat. If NPC party disagrees, enter the short skirmish among buddies as a player tutorial to your new character skills.

Sure, it’s nigh impossible to create, but I can bloody well dream while running in my tubes shooting things that look different. Maybe next gen allows us to create stuff not as limited by hardware. Maybe next generation of publishers allows us to create stuff not as limited by quarterly fiscals.

On a sidenote, we’re still calling current gen next gen. What’s up with that? Why isn’t there anyone trol-.. prepping us for new stuff already?

“Oh hi, nice blog post, didn’t know you can write. By the way, stranger with a nice face I place my trust upon, did you hear your gaming hardware is well out of warranty and oh right did you hear there is this really cool video leaked where a character in a popular television show is playing a game that looks amazing and it’s something very nextnext gen looking and everyone’s talking about it online..”

We’ll know it’s coming when we scramble to share it to our massive entourage of people who knows us by our links only.

Meanwhile, have a look at none other than Salman Rushdie checking out in-game storytelling where you can deviate from plot path whenever you like.

First one I encountered was Braid, that has puzzles based on manipulation of time. The basic tool at your arsenal is the ability to rewind time. To move the clock backwards. Undo your mistakes, undo your deaths. This is coupled by environments where more complex time manipulation is available – objects that are unaffected by your meddling. Objects that are affected by the echo of your actions. Objects that are tied by your spatial location to their temporal position. And all coupled by the tale of you trying to find The Princess. Who is still in another castle. It’s a beautiful game, with perfect music and perfect graphics. Touching to the bone.

The second game is Eversion, which is a very classic platformer, where the objective is to find The Princess, and the way to do that is to collect all the gems in the worlds and complete all the worlds. And to be able to do that, you need to traverse sideways, altering your perception of things, entering darker and darker dimensions, where at first the clouds become solid, then time stops … then something seems to be after you.. it’s a sugar-coated game that starts with a H.P. Lovecraft quote. Should tell you enough.

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.

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.

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?

He discussed the reasons behind the cancellation of the show after only 6 episodes, major reason being how it was a show you had to watch. No, yes, really. A television show that was meant to be watched, failed for that reason. Thing is, average Joe and average Mary come home from work, relax on the couch, turn on the telly and zone out. They don’t zone into television or the surrounding social situation around them, but somewhere in the middle.

Police Squad! being a show where you had to pay attention to both see the hidden jokes and often see where the spoken humour comes from, you’d have to avoid blinking to get it all in the way its creators intended in good faith. No, average Joe and average Mary only pay half attention and need the cued audience laugh backgrounds to remind them to be amused while watching their fave sitcom while chatting on the phone. They need to be told the general gist of things without having to look actively, because they’re talking about how that wallpaper should be painted over. It’s all about not paying attention, as they sit down to be entertained after coming home from work, where they had to pay attention all day. Major point there. It’s a situation they dictate in their own terms, in their own personal surroundings, at their own pace.

Leslie Nielsen also mentioned the size of TV screens, and it’s worth mentioning here even when the home TV sets are growing larger each year. Small screen simply does not support background action. The visual jokes and semi-hidden slapstick moments in Police Squad failed to work on limited screenspace, but those same jokes shot Naked Gun movies into successful franchise. When they were blown up into the size of a damned wall, audience really did see. 

Of course, since The-Cow.net is about games as well, we all should now sit down and confer about the relationship of said observations towards games. On a high level, it’s about immersion. On low level, we’re dabbling with everything that delivers and communicates context and story to the player. It could be those soundscapes filling the room during tabletop RPG session, or carefully chosen backgrounds during dynamic camera edit on console action games, keeping the focus on foreground, or whatever. So, how to know what tricks to use? 

I’m so waddling into Alvanspace here, and it’s creepy in here with all the flotsam eyeballing me up. But here goes..

Let’s take regular tabletop RPG. Players know each other and there’s always off-game chitchat and generally arsing about, unless they’re hardcore system nitpickers everyone hates, but for that same reason, those spoilsports never get to play the really cool games with the really fun people, so we’ll just skip them. Anyways, all that reads as social situation during the play. On the other hand, the players arrived there specifically for the game, so that reads as paying attention since they’re so motivated to bother traveling a bit, et cetera. However, there’s very little for the senses – no visuality, no directly in-situ informative sound cues, no hints of an angry orc through bad smell, or so everyone hopes. All that is delivered to players through spoken narrative, with music etc providing mood in very broad and unintrusive way. Besides the differences in delivery, it’s very much like the average Joe/Mary mindset in front of television. Casual entertainment, if you may.

Console games? More in the cinema end of the spectrum. You go to movies, you end up sitting in darkness with all your attention focused, directed and guided towards the massive silver screen. You won’t miss a beat, and social situation happens before and after the flick. At home, you grab a game pad, holding it in your hands. It becomes a focusing element that keeps reminding you how you’re in control of something, so you concentrate. You use your hands, and that clicks lots of switches in your brain. Your reflexes kick into high gear, adrenaline pumps up and oh boy, your attention is in firm hold. You wiggle your fingers and it all translates directly into visual and aural situation that progresses on and on. That’s the key. You concentrate because you use your hands, the most used tools ever. They’ve been around as long as your brain, and they were the very first thing you ever figured out about yourself. So, in a way, the game connects with you in some scarily direct ways. 

Even if your buddies are there playing with you, social interaction (laughter, remarks, etc) all circle around the game and ongoing events in there. It’s a personal or shared zone, but zone nevertheless. You’re all connected to the game through tactile communication, for lack of better words.

Maybe that’s a big item in the list of questions on how to get tabletop RPGs more immersive. No draconian rules about not SOCIALIZING but PLAYING are needed, but maybe give the players outside influence to steer them into the wanted mindset. Immersion through surroundings is kind of out of question – I can’t imagine getting immersed into the game if there’s a big projector screen with some eerie symbolism flowing around, not to mention wizardly scenes from Harry Potter or whatever. No, RPGs are around the table, and that’s the visual context. Then again, handing the players some orc and elf figurines to fiddle with isn’t going to cut it either. I’m intrigued about involving some tactile immersion here, connecting the certain synapses like the game pad does. Some minimal physical involvement that doesn’t look or feel too out of place around the table. 

However, more I try to come up with something physical, I keep coming short-handed.

Given the realworld situation and surroundings where the game is played, there’s really no extra gadgetry that would help the players to dive into deeper end of world pool. And more I think about it while writing this, more I keep going towards the sounds used in conjunction with stuff happening around the table. Again. But alas, this time it’s much simpler and it will have tactile experience involved in a very important way!

Scenario-time! 

GM lets Joebob know he has a good chance to make a bloody good show with his next attack – but only if the dice rolls for his favour big time. It’s a potential show-off ending to a fierce battle, and even the music is off. Tense silence fills ears. Joebob takes the dice in his hand, aware of everyone watching, and Joebob ..

[GM hits a button hidden under the table, and slow heartbeat-like rumble that goes du-dum, du-DUM, DU-DUM begins to rise up into existence, dominating everything. Lights dim slightly, except the one that is pointed at Joebob and his dice]

.. stops for a second, hair standing up in his neck and wondering how the hell his teeth are clattering, and with a short sweep of his hand, he lets the dice fly. Dice hits the tabletop — and rumble stops right there, as if cut by knife. Dice number is checked, situation releases and then those lights return to normal, too. Game goes on, regardless of outcome. It wasn’t about the outcome in the end – it was the anticipation everyone wanted to play.

So, perhaps we can make the most basic gameplay controller, the humble dice more tactile to us, if we tie different elements to it. It requires some setting up, but hardly impossible for any GM with some dedication and sense of live dramaturgy. Include an event at the begin to set the players into game, and work the arc as you feel, as long as you give the players something to really feel about in the end. Even if one event clicks big time for players, they remember the whole game as very memorable. 

Tie it all together. I dare you.

I assume I will be hooked on this game for years to come, which is nice.

The older I get, the more I seem to appreciate the simple things like that. When you can simplify a large group of something in a game to just a large group of something and be happy about it. While games full of individuals are fun, it’s nice to be able to identify groups as well. And in a large scale games, even better so.

When people ask what my favorite video game of all times was, I answer Star Control 2 without hesitation (unless I’m feeling exceptionally nostalgic about some other game that very moment). A big great part of the affection has to do with the amazing job the designers did with the various races in it. The basic setup of the game is that there are these big evil Ur-Quan things that have pretty much subjugated the whole galaxy under their rule (read: They’re The Evil). Including the human race, who are now living under a slave shield, stranded on Earth. The only beacon of hope is the player’s Captain and his super-ship, who goes around the star-systems, meeting old alien allies who have turned hostile or gone into hiding, trying to convert them back to the good fight. And maybe make some new allies in the process.

The races (read: factions) in the game are wonderfully unique when compared to each others. They are made quite simplistic, so that they don’t have a huge number of defining characteristics. A big part is of course the speech-patterns and the way they look, but they also have quite a personality. Each race is like an extension of a very solid, vivid, coherent personality. There is the sycophant, the coward, the honor-obsessed, the angsty, etc. race. The race as a collective share the traits, but there might be individuals who are individuals, while still being part of the race. Each of the races have a couple of these character traits that they embody, and each have a very strongly defined society. They have their superiors and they have their political systems. They have their passions and they have their quirks. But, all in all, they can be discussed with caricatures. “Those hippie birds”, “The honor-obsessed kamikaze/samurai rodents”, “The communication impaired great old one fish” and so on.

And they have a wonderfully complex relationship with each other. No man is an island, so to speak. Even if in this case the men are alien beings that aren’t even remotely human. To quote something from the game:

“This may come as a shock, but the Shofixti are reborn. We have a Shofixti Captain here with us. Now do you believe?”

If this is being a true thing, there will be many changes.

But we are a species long wise in the ways of deceit.

Ye must be proving these words ye say, Captain.

Send the Shofixti to us as a way of proof.

Those were the words of the Yehat, a funny-looking bird-like race who lived and died by their code of honor. When they failed to protect their marsupial allies, the Shofixti, the whole race fell into despair, and only through the leadership of their queen, they managed to stay even semi-coherrent, and joined the Evil Side to forget the tragedy.

I’ll switch to tabletop roleplaying for a moment – You might have heard of a game called Vampire: the Masquerade, where they came up with a great mechanic that has been later dubbed the clubhouse system amongst friends. Every character belongs to a club. Membership is mandatory. A character can belong to a single club. And can’t change their colors. The vampires’ clubs in Vampire: The Masquerade were their clans. You get bitten by a vampire who belongs to a clan and you belong to that clan as well. There was an artist clan, there was a businessman clan, there was a rebel clan, there was a clan of ugly vampires. And that worked damn well. It was easy to connect with, easy to vary, twist, mirror and all that. You could make a vampire character that was a part of the businessman clan, who was a brute. You could make him as much of a brute as you wanted. But he was still initiated into the vampires through the a part of a proud and long tradition of businessmen. He was chosen by the businessmen to become a vampire, and thus he is defined by the clan even if he wanted to be defined by it or not. If he had been a part of the artist clan, the fact that the artists had chosen to turn the brute into a vampire would have mattered as much, or even more, than the fact that he’s a brute.

And it was easy to build political structures for the vampires. Every relationship was in the end defined by the clans – even if some vampire boss managed to rule his city so that all the different vampires from different clans were one big shiny happy family, if one of the clans’ big names arrived to the city, the clan members were more than likely to flock under his wing. And usually even this wasn’t needed for the players to talk about things like “Wonder what the Tremere (the magician clan of the vampires) are up to, we haven’t heard anything of them lately” or “If we want to go to the woods, we may need some help from the Gangrel (the half-animal vampire clan)”. Even if the whole local Gangrel population was a group of former zookeepers and biology professors, the instinct would be to run to them when planning a woodland trip, because “The Gangrel, they know the woods.”

Besides the clans, there was the division between “us and them”, the Camarilla and the Sabbat. In the early works, Sabbat was pretty much an undefined terror that was only very loosely described in the source books. Camarilla was the group where the clans belonged to and that had all the player characters in it. Later, Sabbat got some clans as well, making it equal to Camarilla and as playable. But before that, while there might have been political squabbles and backstabbing between the Camarilla clans, when it came to Sabbat, there was a nice solid threat that everyone hated equally.

White Wolf released several games in their game line after Vampire: The Masquerade, that tried to follow the same mold, but only Mage: The Ascension came close to managing a good, pure mandatory clubhouse system. With games like Werewolf: The Apocalypse, where the clubhouse you belonged to was determined by birth (thus there being no “why is this character part of our club” thing) or Wraith: The Oblivion, where the clubhouses were kind of odd and hard to point out, it didn’t just work. In Mage, the character gravitated towards one of the clubs because of the similarities in their worldviews, which made the club something that could be more easily thought through.

Now, exit the old White Wolf games and enter the next generation. The clubhouse system evolved there. Each strain of bogeymen (vampires, werewolves, whatnot) have not one, but two clubs they belong to. The club they are born into (this might be the vampire’s clan, or the fairie’s type) and the club they join (the vampire’s ideology, much like Camarilla or Sabbat in the old days, or the court of faeries the critter belongs to, or something like that). This creates a far more complex network of relationships between various factions, as each character is usually loyal to at least two external bodies. And as they say on the internet, “OMFG TEH DRAMA” when these two come to clashes.

But it’s taken something away from it all. Without the clear-cut clubhouses, the factions have become blurred, and it’s no-longer a question of wondering what the Tremere are up to, it’s a question of the individuals in that particular city. It takes away from the grandeur of it all to know that you’re most likely just involved in local politics than to be, through the clans, actually affecting something greater. To return to the earlier example of Star Control 2 – the fact that you were dealing with a real faction allowed something like the following to happen:

“All right, I’ll send over the Shofixti.”

We are scanning the separation of a vessel from yer fleet, Captain and indeed, its configuration matches that of a Shofixti Scout vessel.

This had better not be a trick, Captain!

We are knowing the power of a Glory Device, and if you detonate the weapon near us the price for you shall be dear, very dear.

The Scout has docked, and we await the pilot’s appearance at the airlock.

The atmosphere cycle is complete… the door slides open… and

AWK!! BRAAK!! YEEP!! IT IS TRUE!!! THE SHOFIXTI ARE ALIVE!!!

Look at that furred muzzle, those shining black eyes, the sweet claws!

Our children have returned from oblivion!!

But now we are faced with the cruellest truth!…

…We who have sacrificed our honor! We who have lain with our enemy!

WE ARE NOT WORTHY! WE ARE NOTHING!…We are less than nothing.

But wait! We are not Spathi. We are Yehat… OF THE STARSHIP CLANS!

We will NOT live this lie any longer!

Listen as I speak these words! If our Queen makes the dishonorable command

then it is THE QUEEN WHO HAS NO HONOR!

And a dishonorable Queen is NO QUEEN AT ALL!

We, the Zeep-Zeep, are the only Clan who remember the TRUE MEANING of honor we shall TEAR THE QUEEN FROM HER THRONE!

The two-thousand year reign of the Veep-Neep Queens IS OVER!

THE REVOLUTION HAS BEGUN!

Sorry. A bit carried away there. But if you’ve played the game, you know how much pathos that bit of text contains. I mean tha because it’s clear that the Yehat are a honorable race, and that they mourn over the loss of the Shofixti, it’s possible, that when the race (as an entity) is presented with a Shofixti captain, they will actually rebel against their queen. Not just go “oh well, me and Bob agree with this and think the system’s a bit bad now”, but have a revolution.

In old Vampire The Masquerade this sort of wholesome clan-movement happened a lot. One of the Camarilla’s clans actually got fed up with Camarilla and left. The Gangrel got fed up at some point with the system and decided they could leave it behind. Of couse a few individuals here and there stayed behind, but the Clan, the Club, as a faction, decided to call it quits. And when I spoke of how the clan defined a lot about the character, it came quite obvious at that point. If you were playing a Gangrel, you would be defined as “a Gangrel who stayed as a part of Camarilla” if you were one of those who didn’t want to leave.

While any game benefits from strong characters and individualism, I love to think that there is a huge benefit in being able to lump these individuals into generic boxes. Be it as simple as race “He’s a bugbear”, or profession “he’s an adventurer”, or something a bit more complex “He’s one of the people from the Northern Mountains”, it still makes cataloging the person when big wheels turn on the world. If you know the people from Northern Mountains have declared war, you have to make judgements about the people frrom NM whom you know.