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.

How Ghost Trick Solved the Adventure Game

A few months ago I finally managed to get my hands on Ghost Trick, which sells itself as an investigative game in the same vein as Pheonix Wright(with which it shares a creator). This isn't really a game review but I will say that ghost trick was certainly worth the money (granted I only paid $20 for it). The dialogue is pretty well translated, the story is really interesting and wonderfully convoluted (I guess that's something most people don't like though) and as far as I can tell, is logically consistent from start to finish. The art is great (except the horrendous box art), the music is great (even if it could use a couple more tracks) and possessing things feels great.

So the real meat of this post is why Ghost Trick is the secret genius of the DS-driven reawakening of the Adventure genre.

I didn't really grow up with adventure games. I was almost exclusively a console gamer, and stuck to action games. My first real adventure game was Myst when I was a wee lad but Pheonix Wright was when I really discovered the genre and began pursuing it. For the sake of narrative though, I'm going to use Pheonix Wright: Ace Attorney as a placeholder. I love this game to death. Because the actions available to the player are so limited, the game is able to put the player in the middle of several fierce courtroom dramas/verbal sword fights with a great backstory to lead up to them. The role of the player is to watch the story unfold, and sniff out contradictions (a whiff of which will send Pheonix into a crack-like frenzy). There aren't too many games that make you feel as smart as PW:AA does when you know what's going on.

But therein lies the problem. When the critical details aren't clear, you spend a maddening amount of time trying to figure out why the gun which obviously implicates the parrot isn't stopping the curry shop owner from talking (spoilers!(the spoiler is that that is not a spoiler)). Though I'm ashamed to admit it, I brute forced my way through more than one cross examination using the overly generous/easily exploitable quick-save feature. This is a common issue in almost all adventure games and completely destroys any immersion that's been established.

So now let's talk about Ghost Trick. Ghost Trick pretends to be about investigations (seeming very Pheonix Wright-ish), but it's a big lie. Ghost Trick is about haunting shit and saving lives. As a ghost, your power is to turn back the clock a few minutes and then try to possess things to prevent someone from dying. You push bowling balls off of shelves and turn on air conditioning units to move flags around to change the circumstances. Each of the game's levels is basically a small physics puzzle, with one amazing twist: There's no physics engine.

See the problem with Adventure games is that the conditions for progress are hyper specific despite a facade of choice and freedom. Hidden behind the veil of a realistic world with realistic characters and consequences is a set of finite and ultimately arbitrary switches. When you feel you have an answer that fits the situation, you go crazy because your set of level pulls doesn't match the one in the secret diagram. Games with physics engines have the opposite "problem". They can't cover every possibility because the situations are almost never exactly the same.

But that's where Ghost Trick triumphs! Whenever you make a guess at the answer to the physics puzzle, the reason it won't work is immediately clear. The ball doesn't bounce that high, the board falls too far, etc. When you restart a level you go back in time. Logically, every particle in the room is exactly the same as when you first saw it. Thus, the switches under the hood are reset just like the world whose representation you're interacting with.

I suppose the genius of it is presenting the fixed (digital, if you will) operations of the game space as physics (or analog) operations, then allowing the player to "rewind time", and close up any consistency issues that show up. This means that the player won't feel that something arbitrary and solvable outside the illusion of game space is preventing them from proceeding. It's an amazing solution to an old problem of gaming

I suppose it's hard to copy without ripping Ghost Trick off, but let's all at least give it the round of applause it deserves. Lord knows nobody played it.