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.

Thoughts on War in Video Games

Kotaku posted a short, sweet, but slightly useless editorial today. Useless mainly because the point of the article is a quick, delicious burst in the middle surrounded by more dancing than Step Up 2: The Streets. The article, written by a PhD on the eve of Modern Warfare 3 (sequel to the fastest selling game of all time), is lamenting the fact that most war games (or war in any media really!) reduces the horrors of war, the complexity of its consequences, and the politics which surround it to a bunch of guys playing paintball in a corridor.

To be fair, I would say that Modern Warfare 2 kind of approached this problem but it looks like Modern Warfare 3 is just going to recycle the same trick. I agree with the PhD though, war games barely touch the real consequences of war.

But this is really a criticism of games in general. As it stands, the consequences of your actions in any game are completely limited by the code the team was able to piece together by launch, which usually means consequences are limited to "it's easier to kill X". It's very hard/expensive to make a game that can even remotely model geopolitical interactions, environmental shifts, or technological innovation unless it's the full focus of the game. I think the best we've seen is a few RPGs (Persona 3, Persona 4) which manage to track the player character's social life and consequences in a relatively realistic way. It'd be nice if we had an action game where your actions had huge effects on the game's world.

I remember back in the day I really wanted to make an action game where you played a mercenary and you would take contracts for various battles in a fictional continent's history. The game would have unbelievable replayability because you could dramatically change the course of history. It was pretty baller, then Atlus published Spectral Force and I got the feeling the idea wasn't so great. But maybe that game just sucked (it WAS another generic anime tactical RPG like all of the trash NIS released after Disgaea, rather than a decent Dynasty Warriors or amazing Devil May Cry experience).

Anyway! I think what Dr. Huntemann really wants is what hilarious Faux-Game Designer Peter Molydeux once quipped: A system where you kill a soldier in Modern Warefare 3, and then see his son crying in the crowd when you boot up FIFA. But given that AAA game companies are still in the process of hiring one man to design hands, I don't think those kinds of reactive systems are going to get the Modern Warfare treatment for awhile.