An Overlooked World Building Problem

I was thinking about world building the other night at my girlfriend's house when I tripped over a huge (though maybe subtle) stumbling block to the creation of really immersive, deep worlds in video games. I was actually thinking particularly of Valkyrie Profile, a stellar game which doesn't completely suffer from the problem I'm going to talk about in the specifics of gameplay, but which does embody it in a larger sense.

The problem has to do with actions available to players. Namely that when world building, most game/world designers (particularly ones in the sci-fi and Fantasy genres) fail to account for the dichotomy between actions available to characters in the universe and actions available to the player. While compelling fiction that is mostly removed from the action is still a fine way to tell a good story in a game (or at least, it's worked out okay in the past), I've always been frustrated playing games where the world I'm inhabiting doesn't correspond to the world I play in. I actually think the Metal Gear Solid series shows off both the downsides of this and possible ways of handling it.

One of the best examples of this break between player and avatar abilities is almost any custscene from Metal Gear Solid: The Twin Snakes. The scene I remember most is when the player beats the boss battle with the HindD helicoptor. In the ensuing cutscene, Solid Snake back flips onto an inflight missile and then uses it as a pivot so he can get a better angle to fire back the killing blow at the helicopter. It would be an amazing segment in an action movie, but after a grueling boss battle where the player is forced to take cover and fire back at the right opportunities, it seems kind of insulting. Meanwhile, in MGS2 and 3 you can actively break the game's story-line by cleverly exploiting the situations in cutscenes.

For example, early on in MGS3, a boss who you'll fight later (The End) will appear, being carted around in a wheel chair. If the player skips the cutscene and has good enough aim, they can shoot The End in the head and kill him. This helps reinforce to the player that the world he's in is real, which is how we get to that sweet immersion spot. How do you know the end is dead? His boss fight is changed to the player fighting a bunch of random foot soldiers.

Is there a general solution? Well, I think it's just a matter of being more creative with the rules of your worlds, and accepting that your players will try to subvert those rules. Rather than trying to recreate a political intrigue story for an action RPG (which leads players to ask "Why can't I just jump villain x in an alley way?"), make they're inaction an explicit rule of the universe. Ghost Trick: Phantom Detective does a great job of this by explaining right from the get go that the player is a ghost who can only interact with certain objects in the world.

Mischief Makers is another great example of this. It stars a robot named Marina who can pick objects up, shake them, and throw them. The player doesn't feel robbed within the context of the story because that's all she can do. In fact Marina often attempts to use all of these actions during cutscenes, but usually fails to apprehend the person/boss/clancer.

It certainly takes more work, but I think the payoff is there. Game design is really about consistency more than anything else, and by unifying the actions the player can use and those available to people in the world, the game as a whole becomes more consistent and more intimately immersive.