Oh, this hits the goods in me.
I just got affirmation that my ramblings are not on the wrong side of tracks. I mean, Ken Levine of Bioshock fame recently floored the audience with the latest iteration of Bioshock franchise. He (ok, the team) didn’t do that by reinventing pixels, but by giving the artificial characters incentives, agendas and ability to act true to the context they’re in. Giving them, hopefully, traits and unexpected people personalities that make the journey from begin to finish a little less lonely tube affair. Well, in practice, it’s not that rosy but damn close as it’s not scripted into unconforming timeline. It rather tries to react to where the player goes, what he does and what’s around. Mirroring and angling the surroundings.

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?

Sound is half of the experience in movies, they say. Probably even more in other media, such as music video. Or radio, if it still exists – haven’t checked.

Sound is also a key player in how we experience our surroundings, draw context from and get important clues we don’t even realize. Like today, when I was happily exhausting the contents of my bladder the way guys do – standing up – and the blasted light went out. There I was, hands full of a tap that wasn’t going to turn off after all the coffee, and I couldn’t see anything. Blind as a bat. Turns out you can aim by sound rather well, and like bats do,  easily differentiate between different materials by the way they sound when .. Well, eventually, I fumbled my way back into light, in a fresh state of mind of having seen – or heard – things in new light again. Learning is a wonderful thing, and often keeps cleaning ladies getting butter on their bread.  Also, I’ve been trying to figure out what’s the key difference between the car I’m borrowing and my own (..at shop. Thank you, France), as I keep feeling curiously lost with the current car. After my wild mild water park adventure, I realized it’s the sound – too quiet and what I hear is too differently connected to the overall tactile feel, and I’m subconsciously expecting the connections from my own car. All wacko.

All this, in turn, made me wonder about audio backgrounds in games. Half-Life series are excellent in this regard concerning atmosphere, and just about everything from DICE concerning sheer intensity and psychological pressure. If you have a buddy with Battlefield: Bad Company, get him playing it and listen. That’s not a game you hear anymore, if you stop looking at it.

I’d probably get massive (and good) creeps if I was playing some Fringeish/XFilesish/Madsciencegonebad RPG with a soundtrack that took cues from Half-Life – lots of ambient creaks, rattles, scurrying sounds, everything that makes you jumpy of the next corner. How’s about it, Alvan? Ever thought of ditching music in favour of “ambient surroundings” with music coming in only at few key points where it serves intensity and emphasis, and even then on top of said soundscape, not replacing it?

In the bright future, tabletop RPG sessions are built hardcore, with a sound mixer guy who knows GM by heart and adjusts, mixes and changes the aural soundscape constantly .. Be the player group walking from thicker woods to a husky meadow, or surprise ambush by 500ft squirrels that murder light itself — the sound is always there, describing things and changes in local surroundings with language you never realize listening. I said it first.

This piece started out as an innocent “oh haha ur so rite fringe is sooo good lol” -comment on Alvans earlier post, right before it went on a binge and never returned home. It went out the window and came back as regarding videogames (surprise!) and how they somehow manage to fumble it all and be very videogamey, or in some cases, draw you in and leave you bleeding for more. Mostly, what makes them tick the way they do – for me, anyways.  And how this text will recklessly stumble right through the confines of whatever it’s supposed to be wedged between, oh, it’ll never apologize.

Notice I’m not treating all games under the same ideology, just those heavy on story (or depicting a notion of one, even if there’s none).

Context! There’s this thing called .. well, that. If I perform an action in a depicted world and it doesn’t reflect there, I get annoyed, miffed and irritated to bits. Example: You have this wonderfully graphic character you’ve paid attention to, guided him/her through the world that has presented him/her with new skills and whatnot. Then you walk against a wall and there it goes, stupid mindless videogame avatar doing a videogame walkcycle, standstill and unaware of the bloody brickwall scrubbing his face.

All of a sudden, your character is reduced into a representation of player navigation mistake. Ta-ta, it was nice seeing you, miss Believability and mister Immersion. Sorry about the stale wine. Oh, and if I change the world, I expect the change to be permanent and propagate with ripple effects, depending on how it affects other things / NPCs / whatnot connected with it in the gameworld.

Immersion in faked out world built using stiff-at-best mechanics is a bitch to implement. Mainly it becomes a swamp that has no bottom – as you hone in some important detail that colors the world that much more, it creates a dependency or requirement to do another to support it, and so forth. You’ll start to realize how much you miss on the real world when you begin breaking things to their elements. Just a moment in your own time, even if you’re not doing a thing. It’s insanely complex, and you can’t simulate it.

You just have to try your best to fool the player to think he’s immersed, when you’re just really drawing his attention away from flaws.

Walk, walk, walk, nothing out of ordinary, walk to a staircase and if your eyes are keen and lively, you might notice your character grab the handrail casually .. Or strum his fingers against the radiator in a room if he’s close enough. Glance at something, being natural. Something surprising happens – look! Nothing to act by, just birds taking to flight. Tilt your head slightly at a sound of distant rock falling. Little things your character should be doing. What you’d do. Context-aware.

Okay, bit thin cookie-cutter examples considering the depth of subject matter. However, it’s still about the context and how living and breathing the world around you seems. Everything should happen within context of the world and surroundings, and there should be parts of the world represented to the player even if they’re not important, or even required. As you, the player, observe the world, the world should observe you back, unashamedly. Giving you context when you don’t expect.

Think of the very moment your character is in. What’s happening in the world that doesn’t give a flying wack about your character, a pebble beneath the bedrock trying to make a change? What sounds does that world make? What defines the local space around him at that very moment? What does it look like? How it all bounces off of him? What gets sucked in? What’s the string that connects YOU there?

Say. How about a character that reacts to the player? Not a blind representation of your actions, but more like companion. Did you guide him to a thorny bush? Is he pissed off? Wait, what, did he just throw a rock up in your direction and shout obscenities?! Well, at least he still follows your mouse clicks. Maaaybe.. If you promise to behave. You find yourself in some strange semi-conversation, just without voice. Oh, you do get commented on, so tread carefully. Especially since it’s multiplayer. Other players companion character trots by, laughs with your char about the idiotic failure you, the player did just some time ago. Semi-public shame! But you’re so immersed in the living commentary of your actions in the world that you just stare, bewildered. Then you hear the other character taunt affectionally his player, as if he was a puppydog who just wasn’t housetrained yet. Characters momentarily take over and become the players themselves, just from outside perspective. It all becomes delightfully confusing, wondrous and profoundly different.

Would that create the necessary string between the player and world? Or something completely different? Could it be possible to build some multilayered insanitychains on tabletop RPG using this idea? I expect Alvan to wear some feathers and run to the woods to meditate on this.

Now, why the hell did I focus on character issues only? Why not hints of context and surroundings in Web2.0 where you, the social browser, need to know there are other people present, not just minute “lol my cat hiccupd” lines and some bling on screen? It’s not just games. How to drive advertisements deeper into people now that they’re so accustomed to them? Hell, these days marketing guys need to come up with  bloody big campaigns to launch a new advertisements. Jeeves, could you let me know at what point do we need to start figuring out how to sell ourselves the idea of real world around us? You know, with people becoming so superficial, shallow and black/white? What has made them so distant from it?

Meh.