For the last few weeks, I’ve spent the greater part of my free time soaking in the experience of Rockstar’s Red Dead Redemption.
It’s everything the critics say it is – beautiful, immersive, well-written, well-acted, epic, and in terms of the physical environment, incredibly well realized. Most agree that it does a better job in plunging you into its world than GTA IV or its previous incarnations.
Its not only the improvements on performance and rendering that make Red Dead Redemption more immersive than its predecessors, and its not gameplay in the single-player either. The reviewers who do address it are right to say they stick with what works in RDR… Grand Theft Horse, one might say.
There are two fundamental differences with RDR’s sandbox that makes it much easier to get lost in the simulation, and I would argue that these particular elements position it closer to Bully than GTA IV. Its not gameplay, its not graphics, its not technology or voice acting, its not writing – its the setting, and how it relates to people and violence, and the player’s interactions with both.
Although Red Dead Redemption is without a doubt setting the bar extraordinarily high in terms of realistically and compellingly rendering huge, wide open swaths of land that feels right, in a sense the GTA series is fundamentally more ambitious; ambitious to an extent that the experience becomes less sustainable – immersion as a function of authenticity becomes more difficult to maintain.
LIBERTY CITY
Grand Theft Auto IV was another incredible technical achievement. I had never experienced such a feeling of place and life in a simulated environment in the opening hours of its gameplay – and the referential, satirical nature of the entire place only increased the delight I felt walking its streets. This was a familiar feeling – they did the same with GTA III when it was first released, and San Andreas also captured a certain sense of life, space, and danger in its take on suburban Los Angeles neighborhoods.
What happens after a few hours go by in the game? The immersive quality of the simulation as virtual place starts to crack. The more a player delves into the world, the more the experience of this fictional, satirical, living city returns to the category of “game to be gamed.” As a virtual place, that not tied into the inherent mayhem of the player’s potential actions is ultimately hollow – a collage of facades, fake doors and storefronts, a Hollywood set.
How much more ambitious can you get than attempting to capture the life and activity of a major global city, and to give the player freedom to go wherever, whenever? If the illusion of authenticity as virtual place fades for some players (it did for me), what keeps immersion in GTA going is the time-tested sandbox gameplay, technology/rendering, and unparalleled writing.
My main point though is that the beginning of GTA IV doesn’t feel like only a sandbox, it feels ALIVE. You drive carefully(maybe), observe the locals. Listen to hours of radio shows. Sit and watch television. Take a stroll through the neighborhood. You take care of your car, park it nicely. Maybe take a girl to a show.
But by the end, you know it. You’re gaming it. The sheer amount of violence you’ve experienced creates a dissonance between Liberty City as virtual city and Liberty City as deathmatch map. You careen around corners, slamming into curbs and passerby. You dump a car into the river for the fun of it. Do whatever you want, and its fun, but its not quite as alive anymore. Whether or not this is developer intention is one thing, and it is fun – but still nothing in GTA feels quite so compelling to me as those first moments of feeling the life of the city.
BULLWORTH ACADEMY
If we compare Grand Theft Auto to Bully, we see a much less ambitious, but structurally similar setting to its parent series. It remains brilliantly written with the usual solid gameplay, but incorporating such a different setting that the player’s potential actions are dramatically different, while utilizing similar progression and narrative logic.
Bully takes place in a fictional New England town, where the prep school is its most defining feature. It is no metropolitan center, but it has its quirks, its neighborhoods, its alleys. The school itself is a microcosm itself of typical school-age social groups – still a satirical take, but one much smaller in scope.
You navigate the social landscape of the student body – try to get what you need from the geeks, try to impress the girls, fight off the bullies, harass the jocks, and so on – while slowly gaining access to more of the town itself, but don’t get caught breaking curfew, mind you. The protagonist spends his time avoiding townies, exploring the natural surroundings, participating in bike races, and so on.
Bully is a take on American adolescence that should resonate with authenticity to anyone who received a contemporary American education, in ways that GTA’s stories of car chases, shootouts, and gang wars does not. Nevertheless, in terms of gameplay logic and narrative progression, Bully is still GTA at school, minus guns.
Regardless, Bully felt much more alive and authentic throughout the entire experience, simply because there is less facade(actual and symbolic) in a more fictionalized and less urban space. There is no attempt to simulate the immensely complex social ecosystems of a major global city, or even the open countryside – instead just that of a little prep school and its environs.
By reducing the amount of effort needed to make an inherently social, massive environment compelling and visually striking in order to counteract the inevitable struggles with authenticity, time can be spent instead to fleshing out the personalities of the much more limited nature of the school, town, natural environment, and social groups.
Just as importantly, the actions the player takes may be fictionalized and cartoonish, but they don’t create a dissonance between the life of the area as virtual place and the mechanisms and meaningfulness of what the player is doing.
Ultimately its far less ambitious, but the game positively teems with culturally relevant authenticity and life.
NEW AUSTIN, ET AL.
Red Dead Redemption has taken huge leaps from GTA III, Bully, and GTA IV in terms of displaying the virtual environment. GTA IV had its vistas, but RDR has VISTAS with capital letters. It without a doubt recreates the initial immersion of playing GTA IV again – the place is empty, desolate, and unforgiving, but oh-so-alive.
Here’s where Red Dead Redemption has more in common with Bully than Grand Theft Auto, however. Though technologically unparalleled, in a sense New Austin and RDR’s other territories are much less ambitious environments than Liberty City. There are very few social landscapes to map. The suggested population is the tiniest fraction of that suggested by GTA. There are no blocks and blocks of storefronts, no floors and floors of apartments. There are no crowds of people going about their business on the streets, every day, all day. There is only the desert.
The characters, the writing, and the gameplay are still all on point, but nothing new. RDR feels better than GTA because less holes show through the facade; there’s less to simulate; there’s less to impersonate. The key was making the frontier feel like the frontier, and the less people are involved, the easier it is to do that.
Red Dead Redemption is GTA in a lawless wilderness, giving greater context to the violence which you inflict and suffer, and showing less set pieces of complex AIs to simulate which ultimately feels that much more authentic and immersive. Does it make RDR less ambitious? In that sense, yes – but the experience feels richer and more alive throughout the entire game.
DESIGN NOTES:
People and social environments are hard to sustainably convey authenticity with over the course of a long game. Unless you want to attempt GTA-level scope of writing, acting, rendering, technology, narrative, and gameplay, strategically limit social environments with deliberate settings to create less fractures to cover.
Violence can make a realistically simulated environment feel less alive, less real, and less immersive over time, unless violence is an intrinsic part of the setting.
“A short existential game about alienation and refusal of labor.
Or, if you prefer, a playable music video.”
I felt a trace of Tale of Tales’ The Path – in order to fully experience and “finish” the game the player is required to essentially do the opposite of what the character is told; the opposite of conventional designer-dictated narrative. “Don’t stray from the path” as “Get to your cubicle.”
One could play the game forever, but the monotony of the looping routine gradually becomes agonizing.
Suicide is a game element but is used in an odd way that can’t quite seem to decide if it wants to be reminiscent of “Groundhog Day” or “Moon.”
Some of the most memorable moments are those of player-initiated absurdity. Standing alone in a field in your underwear with a cow, while your idling car blocks traffic being one. Most of it involves being in your underwear, actually.
A curiosity about this “follow/don’t follow”, “do what i say” or “don’t do what i say to do” binary is that in the end, everyone can pretty much discern the ultimate intent of the game designer, following an initial mental re-adjustment, but again, that’s the point, isn’t it?
Are the only true player-subversions of perceived or actual designer intentions through cheating, bugs, or exploits, or is it in unexplored emergence? The latter is an exploration of systems and mechanics interplay, whereas the former can be supplemented with player-constructed narrative explanation? Narrative fallacy?
I found the game to be more contemplative than subversive, and ultimately bleak, but moments of beauty persist.
Is it so possible to shut into a box what “experimental” means for games?
If so – couldn’t an experimental game push the boundaries of what we consider a game at all? Something that pushes against the definitions of given categories and expectations we have for them – something more than just incorporating unorthodox or non-mainstream elements?
What makes an unorthodox element? Swink says that most experimental games toy with our core notions of reality and how it behaves – and thus how we expect things should behave in a simulated environment. Don’t all games do this, to some extent?
The question seems to be simply how far does it go – that is, does the sense of reality in the simulated environment match what FEELS appropriate once we’re immersed, regardless of whether or not our sense of what feels right IS right – and how central is the unexpected behavior to the game mechanics?
Portal, Braid and Shadow Physics all make use of a simulated reality that runs strongly contrary to that of our own experience – but still make sense and are consistent, once a mental check and adjustment is made.
Mario and Sonic make use of representations of characters and elements that also run strongly contrary to our own experience in reality, but we don’t see it as experimental. With a Fire Flower I can shoot a fireball out of my hand… and through the water no less. However this isn’t the central mechanic, and isn’t violating a principle of reality as core to us as the idea that time moves only forward.
Is a truly experimental game a not-game? Most experimental games are all still games after all – systems of rules, meaningful decision-making, winning, losing, progressing.
There seems to be a split between what people consider experimental – one side looking at unusual/brain-bending game mechanics, but still couched firmly within the framework of “gamey” principles – and the other looking at more experiential interactive experiences aiming for immersion, but not being games per se.
Jesse Schell gave a must-watch talk at DICE this year, encapsulating a lot of issues I’ve recently been thinking about. He starts on the topic of the rise of social media games and moves to discussing convergence of social/new media, technology, entertainment and so on through game-like constructs; essentially, gameplay being incorporated into everything else we do.
Part one of this post will outline my experience with one aspect of his talk – the rise of social media gaming.
DEVIOUS, DEVIOUS SOCIAL MEDIA GAMES
As Schell states in his talk, social media gaming – specifically on Facebook – got huge in 2009.
I recently took a month or two to do some research on quite a few – “X-Wars” games, Farm games, Pet games, Quizzes, Puzzles, etc. The ones I spent the most time on were Word Challenge, Farmville, Yoville, Mafia Wars, Cafe World, Country Story, Who Has the Biggest Brain, Geo Challenge, and Crazy Planets among others.
Spending so much time on these games pained me, greatly – and yet I still managed to find myself extremely, disturbingly, addicted. I have since broken my habit and am hoping to avoid a relapse.
My experience playing them consisted largely of performing progressively repetitive, task-based, time consuming chores; making up largely an empty gameplay experience, with the system constantly prompting me with its aggressive monetization models, as well as encouraging its its viral spread across my social network.
I can’t conceal my distaste at these strategies for addiction. And yet, again… I was addicted. Briefly, but absolutely addicted.
My experience was that gameplay consisted largely of creating a sense of compulsion and obligation to move on those tasks, and yet there is some fun to be had in these games, true. In particular I enjoyed Crazy Planets with its basic artillery (e.g. Worms) gameplay.
But overall, these were the feelings that these games brought up in me:
Do this! Share this! Share to your friends! Look at this sad kitty that wandered onto your farm! Give him to your friends! Don’t wait or your crops will go to waste! Get your friends to join you otherwise your mafia is too weak! Now spend some real money on in-game currency! Go go go! Be on our game, all the time! Otherwise your fake stuff will go to waste; all of it!
What’s the bottom line?
Here’s the thing though – it works, and it works WELL. All one needs to do is to look at Zynga’s numbers to know that. But is it sustainable? And what of now these highly polished gameplay conventions, now tried and tested in social media, making their way to previously uncharted territory for games? (Part 2)
I definitely encourage everyone to watch Jesse Schell’s talk if you haven’t done so already.
My boss often jokes that if a game was made after 1995, I’m not interested. Not exactly true, but…
A nice article from Evan Stubbs pointing out just how derivative most of what we are playing now essentially is.
“I believe there [are] still lessons to be learned by studying and playing the classics. I believe that it’s fundamentally important to have a strong grounding in the history in which one designs and writes; the twisted thing is though, I can’t explain why it’s important. Often, their mechanics are somewhat broken, their graphics pitifully archaic by modern standards, and their difficulty punishing; by comparison, modern games are a marvel of design, similar to comparing the Kitty Hawk to an A380. And yet surely, if it’s been done before, isn’t it important to know about it and understand how it was done?”
Keeping cartoon characters trapped in amber is one of the surest routes to irrelevancy. While Mickey remains a superstar in many homes, particularly overseas, his static nature has resulted in a generation of Americans – the ones that grew up with Nickelodeon and Pixar – that knows him, but may not love him. Domestic sales in particular have declined: of his $5 billion in merchandise sales in 2009, less than 20 percent will come from the United States.
“There’s a distinct risk of alienating your core consumer when you tweak a sacred character, but at this point it’s a risk they have to take,” said Matt Britton, the managing partner of Mr. Youth, a New York brand consultant firm.
Nintendo, Miyamoto, take note! Capcom, take note! “Keeping … characters trapped in amber is one of the surest routes to irrelevancy.” Mario and Link are not sacred! Megaman is not sacred! Give us something new, something relevant! These characters and franchises are sorely in need of some new ideas.
They’re still fun, but they’re safe, guarded. They aren’t moving games forward.
Right now Nintendo is caught between taking advantage of nostalgia (New Super Mario Bros. Wii) and presumably finding the best direction for the next big Mario and Zelda productions. If I were them, I would be pushing for a major reimagination.
I came across this Fumito Ueda quote as I browsed through a few recent articles on Gamasutra:
Gamasutra: All the games you’ve worked on are centered on a really important relationship, like with Ico and Yorda, or with the boy and the creature in The Last Guardian. What do strong relationships mean to you in your games?
Fumito Ueda: Well, there’s a significant relationship between the main character controlled by the player, and then the AI character — Yorda for Ico, the Colossi, and also the horse in Shadow of the Colossus, and in Last Guardian it’s the beast — but I don’t have an intentional plan or some big concept, or anything like this. But I think, maybe, I’m thinking that there’s something that can be said about relationships, between the AI and the player, that can only function in the computer entertainment world.
Compelling yet minimally presented character relationships are a memorable hallmark of Ueda’s games, the effect of which is made possible by the interactive nature of the medium. How could the player-AI relationship between Ico and Yorda be possible otherwise – where the player isn’t personally calling Yorda to grab his/her hand and run for their lives? Although to be sure, some gamers found her neediness irritating, I would argue that the atmosphere created by the simple moments of Ico-Yorda communication and interaction lead to something very rare in games. Very few titles succeed in having a similar effect.
I’ll hold off on rambling about this for the moment (and for Ueda’s games, ramble I indeed can), to bring up an ostensibly unrelated bit of game news; specifically that WayForward’s A Boy and His Blob remake has been released last week for Wii.
Its too early for me to comment on the remake, as I haven’t played it yet, but I’d argue that the original A Boy and His Blob on NES has a lot more in common with the aforementioned illusive qualities of Ueda’s games than one might realize.
GAMEPLAY-ORIENTED CHARACTER INTERACTION
Trying to draw a connection between A Boy and His Blob and a game like Ico or Shadow of the Colossus might seem like a stretch… but hear me out. This is bound to be a rambling post so bear with me…
Ueda’s character relationships are highly minimal in a sense: they are typically characterized by a lack of traditional narrative, and instead are built entirely through player action. Even when cutscenes are in play, they don’t aim to hit the player over the head with the relationships between the character – they are understated, simple, and serve only to direct player attention to issues involving advancement of the plot (which is minimalist to begin with).
Cutscenes illustrating the relationship between Yorda and Ico involve simply setting the context and finally at the end of the game, its resolution. Ico and Yorda can’t understand each other, but they’ll need each other. There is little to no narrative drama or complexity that isn’t equally matched by the drama created from playing the game itself.
What do I remember about Yorda? I remember holding hands, sitting down to save, coaxing Yorda into making a jump, calling her name to come to me. I remember running desperately to her as the shadows tried to hold me back, and pulling her up to safety. I remember her absentmindedly strolling and losing herself in her surroundings as I try to understand what to do next. I remember her fear as I try to defend her. This was truly the stuff of interactive drama, all told through the gameplay experience itself.
What about Wander and Agro? Why is it any different from Link and Epona; from the protagonist and dog of Fable 2? Wander’s relationship with his horse is much less complex and emotionally charged, some would argue, than that of Ico and Yorda. There is less of a protective instinct at play, less of a feeling of personal responsibility. In its place is a partnership of mutual respect – just as archetypal and immediately recognizable as Ico and Yorda’s relationship, but triggering different instincts and emotions in the player.
As characters, Link and Epona have a similar relationship, but to very different effect. The game continually illustrates their relationship through cutscenes, but the gameplay doesn’t reinforce the emotions that the narrative is meant to promote. Although expressed as a central character figure and is often supposed to tug at our heartstrings (“Look, he’s hurt his foot!”), in the game Epona fills the sidekick role, the tool of the player.
Additionally Epona is approached more as a traditional “game” element, rather than trying to express him as a living, breathing, thinking entity. If you have the means to summon him, he could be theoretically around the world somewhere, but he comes. He disappears and appears and there is little expression of realism in communicating that Epona acts like something approaching a real horse. Finally, controlling Epona is simply a matter of extending Link’s controls to the horse itself, with exceptions being digging in the spurs, and so on. Tilt the analog stick left, Epona turns left in response to the movement. But how is that functionally different from controlling Link himself?
At the start of the game, Agro also seems to be simply a tool for the player, but the shared experiences of fighting the colossi and wandering the landscape bring the player and Agro together. Although you control Wander, gameplay is a shared experience, in a sense. Rather than being an accessory to the experience, Agro is a necessity; dashing in and out of a colossi’s view, leaping onto Agro’s back as an enormous foot crashes down where Wander would have been. The sheer repetition of these events have a constructive effect on this formation of a player-AI bond. After Agro has saved Wander’s life for the 10th time, its hard not to appreciate him, and even harder to be unaffected by a certain moment towards the end of the game.
Agro, like Yorda, has a mind of his own. The player doesn’t control the horse itself, he/she controls Agro’s actions as they relate to the horse – pull back the reins. Give a little kick, or dig in the spurs. Lean back. By tilting the analog stick to the left, Agro doesn’t move – Wander moves the reins. Agro responds to Wander’s direction in a believable manner; protesting, or acquiescing accordingly.
The hero’s dog in Fable 2? Again, he’s approached as a game element – a feature to expand on the player’s experience, but not as something central to the game experience itself, despite what we were expecting out of the game. There’s no opportunity for the player’s relationship with the dog to grow beyond what it is at the beginning – he learns new tricks, he gets better at finding treasure and fighting bad guys, and so on – but no growth. Now this was still enough for me to be outraged at his fate in one particular ending of the game, but again – there’s no drama through the moments of gameplay themselves. The character of the dog is an accessory, a supporting role – made even more so by the lack of his (her?) centrality to the gameplay experience.
Now that I have outed myself as a rabid, possibly incoherent Ueda fanboy, let’s move on (back) to 1989.
DON’T FROWN, BLOB :-(
There is obviously much less to write about A Boy and His Blob. Its a simple, quirky, flawed game that manages to exhibit a nascent version of the same player-AI relationship that Ueda’s games are known for.
“Blobert” is extremely simple. He follows the player; he likes to eat jellybeans. When he eats a jellybean, he transforms, and later transforms back to his original blob form with a big smile on his … er … face. When he tries and fails to catch a poorly thrown jellybean, that big, broad smile transforms into an equally broad frown. Blobert wears his heart on his sleeve, and a few moments go by before the smile returns. Another jellybean helps ease the healing process, of course.
Simple, right? So what’s in common; what’s compelling? I would argue that the centrality of the AI character to gameplay, as well as the shared experience progressing through the game are where the similarities lie. You need your Blob, your Blob needs you. The early tech ensures that the entire experience of the character relationship is told through gameplay, not through heavy-handed exposition – it’s minimalist by technological limitation. Blob’s emotional expressions are effective through their simplicity; there is no attempt at raising the level of narrative to grasp at a cinematic quality that so many modern games try to emulate. Blobert follows you because he needs you, and you need his help in order to help him. Theres a simple honesty to the relationship that is unfettered by clumsy narrative – the game doesn’t attempt to be E.T., it lets the gaming experience speak for itself.
One could argue that there is far less drama in singular moments of gameplay than Ueda’s games, but the idea is the same.
Another thing: an area where these games have something strongly in common is a sense of isolation, of solitude. Ico and Shadow of the Colossus, through their minimalism, are incredibly lonely games to play. There are no friendly villagers to chat up, no quest-givers or merchants, in some cases, not even regular hostile encounters. A Boy and His Blob is the same way – there is the empty, quiet street, and the strange and dangerous caves below the subway lines. Finally there is the hostile and deserted alien world – no friendly Blobs to be seen. Isolation helps to drive the bonding process with the AI character – its the classic feeling of “two of us against the world.”
EMOTIONAL IMPACT THROUGH SIMPLICITY
What can the similarities between these ostensibly highly different games teach game developers in building emotional impact through AI-player interaction?
Simple, archetypal, minimal presentation helps to let relationships develop through gameplay, rather than cinematic narrative.
Don’t underestimate the impact of simple, everyday moments as player-controlled actions – holding hands, calling out to someone, and so on.
If scripted sequences are necessary to progress through the plot, use them to capitalize on what has already developed in the player through gameplay.
Creating a sense of isolation and dependency can be a powerful thing in building player-AI relationships through gameplay.
Quick thanks to Justin for helping me brainstorm on this topic.
DON’T FROWN, BLOB :-(
