Month: June 2009

Various playing

Recent playing:

Gregory Weir’s How To Raise a Dragon. It’s cute, but I find it in every way less moving than Majesty of Colors. Partly that’s because in Majesty of Colors I always had a clear sense of what my actions were going to achieve, whereas I was repeatedly surprised in HTRaD — sometimes I accidentally went someplace I didn’t want to go or killed a spare human by mistake. I suppose if I replayed the game over and over I’d get a clear sense of what all the options meant and be able to approach it with some sense of agency, but it didn’t strike me as sufficiently rewarding in content to be worth that kind of time.

Trial version of Jack Toresal and the Secret Letter. If you’re curious what Textfyre has done, it’s worth checking out. Notice the cool map (flip to the back of the book).

My impression so far is that I am indeed not the target audience: the story signals strongly about the secret revelations to come, which I suspect is for the benefit of young readers. On the other hand, it is recognizably Mike Gentry writing: solid prose, and if it’s not as dark as Anchorhead or Little Blue Men, there are still entertainingly observed bits, especially in the behavior of the characters.

Fable II, as suggested on the Must Play list instead of the original Fable. Played this through to the end, though because of its breadth I’m sure there are vast tracts of the game that I didn’t see on a single playthrough. In general, I liked it pretty well: the combat was well designed, I never got too lost, and (most important, from my point of view) there were very few points where I felt I was being asked to do tedious grinding in order to get the next bit of story. I did get a little bored performing jobs for money, but fortunately there are other ways to earn income that turn up pretty quickly, so the jobs were not a big part of my play experience. The grinding and sense of wasting time is what usually makes me give up on an RPG, so in that respect I count Fable II as a big winner.

As storytelling, it was an interesting experiment: the design attempts to combine an open sandbox world (in which you can take on any ethical allegiance, marry anyone, set up various types of career, etc.) with a fairly linear main arc made up of several big quests. The end ties what you’ve done in the sandbox into the main story. It doesn’t quite work, but I think I can see what they were trying for. The problem is that the sandbox story always feels (at least to me) like it’s not nearly as important or real as the main arc, and because it’s so generic, any sandbox elements that get drawn into the main narrative are handled in the most cliche and melodramatic way imaginable. I’ll come back to this later because it deserves a full-length article.

One thing that did leap out at me, though: much has been made of the Fable series allowing the player to choose a good path and an evil path. I’ve seen the reviewers talking about the design choices here, but not that many talking about the actual content of the moral system, and to be honest, that bothered me a little.

Specifically: in several places Fable II appears to equate “good” with self-sacrificing, empathetic, principled action and “evil” with selfish, unsympathetic, and unprincipled action. The most “good” person you meet has strong non-violence principles (at least at first), while the most “bad” person is wholly and pragmatically out for himself. The gameplay consistently demonstrates that principles can be a bit of an encumbrance, but it still seems to frame them as desirable.

There’s a separate scale for corruption vs. purity, which might have added some nuance but in practice didn’t make a lot of sense to me. (You can get corruption points by eating meat or drinking alcohol, for instance; but this kind of lifestyle choice has almost no bearing on the main story or most of the gameplay.)

So in terms of aspects that affect the story meaningfully, the good/evil axis seems more to the point, and it seems very often to be handled in this one particular way.

This bothered me a bit, because it leaves out the whole question of judgment. Plenty of people believe strongly in a value or principle that turns out to be misguided; in the most extreme case this gives us terrorists. Moreover, principle and willingness to self-sacrifice aren’t necessarily the same thing. At several points the game seemed to come close to recognizing the complications. It hinted, for instance, that there were times when one might need to let someone suffer — contrary to one’s usual principles — in the short term, in order to accomplish one’s goals in the long run. But ultimately the simplicity of the good/evil axis hampered the game’s exploration of these issues because it provided a strong pressure on the player to choose an interesting extreme rather than the dull middle road, and (I suspect) a pressure on the designers not to punish “good” behavior too much.

As an exploration of morality, or even as a tool to allow the player to express his own belief structure, I think Fable would have been much more interesting had it not gone with “good” and “evil” but with more nuanced characteristics: principled vs. pragmatic, say, or self-preserving vs. self-sacrificing. And I would have left the lifestyle stuff out of it completely: the ability to make your character more corrupt and fatter by eating a meat pie, or purer by drinking water instead of beer, felt like a tedious public service announcement — one that had almost nothing to do with what the story of Fable II was about.

Finally, my review copy of the full version of Sims 3 has arrived. I’ve only played a couple of hours, and it’s clearly the sort of thing that takes a while to get rolling, but I do notice there’s a lot more complexity in the communication between characters than there was in the original Sims, and it seems to lead more directions than in the mobile version. So we’ll see how that goes.

Exercises in Generated Prose

What follows is an overview of some ways I7 can be used to generate more writerly prose, especially in the context of room descriptions. It refers to several extensions; of these, “Complex Listing” and “Plurality” are bundled with Inform and part of the standard distribution, but “Room Description Control“, “Tailored Room Description“, “Introductions“, “Assorted Text Generation“, and “Automated Drawers” are available from the I7 extensions site.

Continue reading “Exercises in Generated Prose”

Putting together a play-test

Recently read an interesting article by some Microsoft playtesters that suggests playtesting studies using 25-35 participants focusing on a single hour of gameplay, followed up with standardized surveys. The idea is that this could be done repeatedly during the course of a game’s development in order to drive gameplay improvements and then confirm that the changes have had the desired effect. This method contrasts with usability tests (an hour to two-hour interview one-on-one with testers, usually conducted with a group of eight or so) in that it is more statistically reliable though not so in-depth.

This is something I’ve been thinking about a lot lately.

Continue reading “Putting together a play-test”

Hall and Baird on Polti again

Have now had a chance to read more thoroughly the article I mentioned last post, Improving Computer Game Narrative Using Polti Ratios, by Richard Hall, Kirsty Baird.

The idea of the article is that the amount of drama in a game can be arithmetically calculated by counting the number of different Polti situations one can recognize in the game, then calibrating against the total number of events and the number of major and minor characters required to bring these events about. They further use these calculations to argue that games with no characters (“unembodied” games) may not reasonably be interpretable as stories. They propose that games in production should be improved by restructuring the story to include more Polti situations and to decrease the number of characters.

I’m in general pretty skeptical of anything that claims to be a recipe for narrative construction, but some are still more plausible than others. This one strikes me as especially doubtful, since the natural limit of the proposed equations is a story in which all 36 Polti situations are included in a tale with just two characters and a minimum of distinct events. A sense of fitness in the narrative development, thematic coherence, etc., do not enter into the equations.

The authors offer a sample revision of a game which does demonstrate concern for thematic coherence in that they eliminate a certain number of Polti situations at the outset, and they do arrange the game to convey a specific message; which looks like an acknowledgement that good narrative is characterized by something other than an optimization of their proposed equations, but they do not account for this theoretically. Nor does the article attempt to distinguish between narrative, story, and plot, though these terms are often treated as distinct in other game/narrative literature.

The most interesting part of the article to my mind is the part that suggests that story depends on how many situations the player recognizes:

We’re going to… initially propose the theory that if people can explain what is going on in terms of at least one of Polti’s units then the object that they are engaged with can be labelled a story.

Even this is a little vague, but let’s assume that by “people” we mean “the player”. This would suggest that a game’s emergent behavior begins to appear as emergent narrative iff the player can recognize the action as corresponding to some fundamental narrative element. But the article raises an important question at the end:

Do people in general (with an understanding of Polti’s units) detect exactly the same units in the same story?

This becomes even more pointed with something like The Sims in which the interaction of characters might be construed to be “about” any of a number of things: one can observe the apparent emotional content, but there’s no verbal dialogue. (This may become more complex and richer in Sims 3; I’ll come back to this point when I’ve had a chance to play the PC version rather than just the cut-down iPhone edition.)

Anyway: the point is that emergent behavior might be construed by the player as corresponding to different narrative elements depending on the kind of arc the player already thinks he’s building. (See: Alice and Kev.) On the other hand, the game has no way of “knowing” which situations the player is recognizing as narratively significant and thus no way of trying to produce episodes that follow (thematically or causally) on those the player has already recognized.

I wonder whether the process of narrative building would tend toward more coherent structures if the player’s interpretation were actually polled and then used to refine the character behavior model.

Whether Polti’s situations are remotely useful for this purpose, I’m not sure. But that’s a separate point.

More on the emergent narrative issue

Thinking about this more, and I ran across an article at gamestudies.org from September of last year, which seeks to quantify the narrative density of a game by how many Polti premises one might recognize during play.

I’m not sure I find this convincing, because it suggests that narrative comes in discrete chunks. What about pacing, development, arc?

But I’ve only had a chance to scan through the article so far, and need to come back to it later.