A short while ago I decided to grab an xbox360 finally. Of course I went with one of the 'hot' games, Halo3. I've been wanting a FPS again for a while and I've been through Pandemic's Mercenaries way, way too many times lately. So I started Halo3 and couldn't help looking at it in terms of the games I usually play and wondering what did, and didn't work for me.
First I have to say, I am enjoying the game. It is visually stunning, the AI is actually quite good, and it is mindless fun that I can relax too. Having said that, I also found it a very disappointing game in it's simplicity and linearity. For any given situation is was always fairly clear what the 'solution' was. If the situation was unusual then the needed weapon would happen to be nearby. Often there was only one way to do something,.. each area had one entrance and one exit, and clues were everywhere regarding which one you should be moving towards. There was little to no state-fulness between areas (weapons and vehicles reset back to designer intention), etc etc.
Compare this to a military sandbox like Mercenaries.. no real entrance/exits, multiple solutions to given problems, flexibility for un-anticipated solutions, state-fullness between missions so that you can prepare and keep things that are useful, etc etc. This usually works pretty well for me.
Yet, when I think about it, I can't stand 'puzzle games'. When I say puzzle game I am not necessary meaning mini-games where you have to solve some explicit puzzle. I mean any game where the designer integrates a problem to be solved... which actually brings me to my main point. Meta-thinking.
When one designs a game, there is always some meta-thinking involved. The designer HAS to think about how the player will interact with the world. For instance the designer probably wants to think about what they player would expect the left arrow to do when moving and thus move accordingly. This is just part of good interface design.
Beyond that though, designers often try to design 'puzzles' that involve the designer trying to guess how the player will see the puzzle, and more importantly the player trying to guess what the designer was thinking the player would think. Essentially from the player's perspective you have to figure out what the designer was thinking.
Now, in the real world when you are presented with a problem it usually has not been specifically 'designed', thus trying to solve it involves a good model of the real world and such. In a virtual (highly simplified and artificial) world this doesn't work. Which gets me to part (2) of my topic, emergent behavior.
Within this context, emergent behavior is what you get when you set up the virtual world well enough that the player can apply general-purpose problem solving to a situation rather then guessing about the designer's pre-conceived solution. This is where the games that tend to work well for me diverge from the ones that don't. Rather then having one or two solutions baked in, these games provide a sandbox in which the designer can challenge the player but does not have much control over how the problem is solved and thus it starts feeling more 'real world' to me.
It is never perfect of course. Even the most flexible games still represent a subset of the real world thus one still has to think about what the designer decided to include, how they implemented it, and how it is balanced.
Now I admit part of this is humans are pretty difficult for me to understand, thus attempting to meta-think someone who's background and assumptions I don't know is generally an exercise in frustration rather then enjoyment.
4 comments:
Nathan,
I enjoyed reading your article. I've seen very few people write on the importance of puzzle "design", or in fact the problem with the word "design" itself. Although many great things have been done with emergent worlds in games (TES: Oblivion is far more fun as a sandbox game than an adventure/rpg, for instance), one of the problems that always rears its head is storytelling. How do we tell emergent stories? What would an emergent story look like? Would it feel cookie-cuttered?
While I value emergent designs, I feel that there is a more middle-road route possible: artistic design. Instead of providing general models that the player must intuit or experiment with, the writer or game designer must do what good storytellers do: try to capture the general experience of life in the specific play of a game. In that sense what comes out isn't a formula for play that the player can sandbox with, but a tightly confined world that invites the player to 'natural approaches' to play.
>> In the corner of your eye the red orb flashes at you briefly, lasciviously, begging to be held. A stack of dusty books sits in a disheveled pile nearby.
> get books
>> You dig through the pile of books and a particularly leathery book catches your eye. As you draw away, the red orb whines and shatters. You shield your eyes from its crystalline fragments.
vs.
>> You are in the basement. It is filled with junk. You see: a stack of books, a red orb.
> get red orb
>> The orb explodes as you touch it. You are dead.
Well.. bad example. But you get the idea. ;)
@chris
Yeah, storytelling in a sandbox or other emergent behavior system is difficult. One has to somehow force the story via synchronization points of some type.
Unfortunatly the models I generally see deisngers follow fall under three catagories:
(1) Linear plot with checkpoints
(2) Pick your own adventure trees
(3) Multiple disconnected linear plots.
The first one has the problem that it starts feeling like nothing you do actually matters in game so you get a disconnect between gameplay and story.
On the other hand trees tend to produce simpler, shorter stories since they are so much more work and designers feel 'less in control'.
And the third option is just a more complex version of the 1st with all of it's advantages and disadvantages.
Long term I'm hoping to see a tighter integration between the story and the emergent engine and thus the story it'self can come in naturally, but I don't think we are there yet.
Heh. I wonder if one of the reasons (besides toolset) is so many designers come from QA, Art, etc,.. but very, very few programmers make it to that stage and thus design always ends up disconnected from technology.
Okay, sorry I'm so late to comment. It's been crazy getting Renown out the door to the testers.
So the theme here is... Do What I Would Do? Basically a reflection of a designers belief that a sandbox world needs to contain traditional gameplay to be of interest?
@Corvus
Hrm. how you you peeps actually maintain a conversation in this format? Guess I'm so used to LJ's threading mechanism that this just seems, primitive...
Anyway. What would I do? I would probably focus on having the environment tell the story rather then text that then gets mapped into the world. Breaking the story down into more discrete elements (such as a single character and their state-fullness based off critical events or ratios of things in the environment) also helps. The smaller you make these pieces the better then can flow into the environment.
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