Betterblog

Rambly, speculative, Sunday night blog post. Every interactive story is haunted by the ghosts of those choices not taken: and also, by every choice previously taken. Here's an academic sort of take on this and here's an enthusiastic one. This often means you've replayed the story, but it can also mean you've spoken to someone else who's played through, read an anecdote or a wiki, or seen a content glitch give you extra information. This produces some powerful effects, because you can know what might have happened in the halo of alternate playthroughs - but this is a semi-accidental product of treating it like a real story. So what kind of effects could we base deliberately on this kind of multiple, penumbral experience? A few sketches. Information that only makes sense in aggregate: This is a very transmedia sort of thing. We see the Red Constable paint his lodgings in pigs' blood, but we don't find out why unless we take a different route through his story - one that omits the pigs' blood ending. There's no way to fnd out what's 'really' going on without sharing informatin. Repetition as a sort of tone poem. A deliberate effect created through repetition: a mood or effect that doesn't work until you've seen the Stolen River rise three times and enjoyed the cumulative effect. Feedback story-tailoring. The simplest example of this is the visual novel with endings that are locked off until you've unlocked other endings. Metagrandfather Clock feedback. If characters make a point of different lines each time you go through, to show you different facets or alternatively a distinct story, that could be fun. Or unsettling. Oddly enough, GTA IV does something like this, with the repeated mission briefings. Something I've always liked. In Somoza's The Athenian Murders, there's an (entirely fictional) device called eidesis, which relies on embedding a message through events in the story that make no sense to, and are ignored by, the story's characters: events the reader can nevertheless assemble a secondary story from. (Ice-Pick Lodge's notorious Pathologic does something similar.) I don't know exactly how this would work. References to a red glow in the street, and a stench of burning, in three dozen unrelated choices. It becomes apparent eventually that there's an erupting volcano presented through eidesis, invisible except to multiple play-throughs. This is a special case of information that only makes sense in aggregate. I keep thinking there must be something else cooler to do with it. Our endgame strategy. One of the things that got me thinking in these directions. I can't say too much about that yet, of course... Other thoughts? Which ghosts should walk?    

I've never really learnt to be careful when I have a mike in my hand. Not because I'm some sort of rebel, just because I came to public speaking rather late. It's got me in trouble a couple of times before, but now I know to be extra careful when there's press in the room. Last Tuesday I spoke (along with Charles Cecil, David Varela, Adrian Hon - Patrick O'Luanaigh moderating) on a panel called 'New Stories, New Platforms' at Develop in Brighton. We had a fun natter about the way storytelling is changing and should change in games. I waved my usual flag for strong storytelling in social/casual games, and plugged Echo Bazaar and Varytale like a Dutch plumber. What I didn't realise is that next door our evil twins were running a panel called 'Are AAA games too long?', where they plotted the demolition of long-form CRPGs in order to fatten their wallets with the blood of real gamers... or something. You can read about that panel here: http://uk.gamespot.com/news/6324422/are-aaa-games-too-long ... The piece isn't too bad, actually, bar a rather cavalier attitude to context and a focus on the bits where I said 'fuck'. But the 16-page comment thread,where people tell each other how much they loved Planescape: Torment and casual gamers don't get it, is pretty sanity-blasting stuff. (note: most of FBG loves Torment.) To be clear about this. I don't have a problem with long games (Deus Ex, possibly my favourite AAA game of all time, is 40 hours or something). I do think that stories in games often bloat with self-consciously epic importance, partly because of our industry's colossal inferiority complex about being Real Art or The Next Big Medium. I think many AAA games would benefit from the developer being forced at the last minute to go in and pick two talky cut-scenes to excise. I think that audience patience with exposition is at even more of a premium in games than it is in films or books, and some developers still don't get that. Here's some things we actually said. Charles Cecil made the point that it used to be possible to assume everyone who played games was up for a 20-hour-plus marathon. Given the immense broadening of the gaming audience (social gamers, casual gamers, people with small children... my mum), this is no longer the case. Devs need to provide for a variety of different tastes. I jumped in and pointed out that games - particularly social / casual games - benefit from having microfictional, coffee-break-sized narrative chunks that people can enjoy as individual episodes without needing to commit to a whole arc... but which can then be layered up to make a series of larger narratives that more engaged or hard-core players can enjoy. Which, plug plug plug, is what we do with Echo Bazaar. I also stole Russell Davies' gag about Jason Bourne again and pointed out that 'roleplayer' isn't a binary flag. Nearly everyone engages in some degree of personal fantasy. We as game designers do well to cater to to the whole continuum of enjoyable pretending, from players who just about take the Big Final Branch in a CRPG seriously enough to think about it for five seconds, all the way through to players who agonise over every clothing choice and write in-character diaries. Even the most enthusiastic roleplayers know it's just a game really (or they have problems), even the most casual and dismissive non-RPers are imaginatively active in some sense (or they really don't have any imagination). It's all good. Let's support all of it. Oh, and I did the bit about fantasies of failure: that there's only so far you can go, creatively, with another successful bit of kingdom-saving, and that a lot of the best stories begin or end with something really appalling happening to someone. Not for everyone, no. But let's spread our wings a bit.  These are all things I've said before. I did also go off on one about Heavy Rain - that it's a shame to see all that ingenuity squandered on a hack serial killer plot, that it takes the wrong lessons from films, that it's meandering and flabby and would work better at half the length, that killing a player-character is about the least interesting thing you can do to fork a narrative. With hindsight I probably wouldn't have compared 'narratives that take the wrong lessons from films' to 'botched bastard things like the baboon Jeff Goldblum turned inside out in The Fly.' But it got a bit of a laugh. Anyway. I've now started getting unsolicited email from people explaining to me that actually, real gamers love long games, and it's bloodsuckers like me are spoiling it for the hardcore tribe. Once I've blogged this, at least I'll have a link to point them to. It's a bit rambling, isn't it? Sorry about that. Any questions, do ask below. Any newcomers, do please check the comments policy at the top right before you go weapons-free.

This month we're trialling a new way for players to obtain Fate via various advertising offers. You can find the offer wall on the Fate tab, under the usual payment interface. This is a fairly standard practice for browser games, and we hope it will provide our more cash-strapped players with a welcome opportunity. A few points we'd like to make clear: - The offers are provided by a third party. We don't choose them directly, but we do have some say over the kind of material that appears, and we can block specific offers that we consider inappropriate or objectionable. If you see something you don't like, let us know.  - Offers are not compulsory! If you're a direct payer, nothing has changed. And hey, thanks for the support.  - As mentioned above, this is only a trial. We'll re-examine the system in a month and go from there. In the meantime, do give them a try, and let us know how they work out for you.  cheers Paul PS: Exceptional Friends, we'll have some exciting news for you in the next few days. Stay tuned...  

We are accustomed to the fact that people we saw alive yesterday are still alive today. We remember the living and the recently dead with equal force. Sometimes it's hard to believe that the past is not a locked room that you could open if you just had the right key. You may have seen the trailer for Dead Island, Techland's upcoming zombie game ( http://www.quartertothree.com/fp/2011/02/16/the-best-three-minute-zombie-movie-youve-ever-seen ). My has it got a reaction. The reaction breaks down mostly into (a) damn me that's effective. (b) damn me that's well-produced, cheap and manipulative. And tasteless. At Failbetter Games we don't do video or animation. We barely do moving images. We're all about the full-contact text. But that doesn't mean we *object* to any of these things. When I saw the trailer today, it knocked me squarely into category (a), and a number of folk whose opinions I respect, like the estimable @jurieongames, into category (b). Spoilers below as to why, so watch it first if you don't mind possible trauma. A little girl dies in slow motion; there's sad music. That's enough to get softies like me tearing up on a good day, and it justly puts it in the dock for manipulativeness. (If like me you have a small daughter, you're automatically 50% more susceptible to these things.)I don't think that's the point, though, I think it just provides the necessary emotional momentum to go on and make the point. The point is that we are accustomed to children turning into zombies and, on a bad day, biting their parents. That's the whole zombie drama in a nutshell: the hostility of the familiar, the loss of those still present. And the trailer explicitly references zombie games as well as films - the sunny holiday location from DR2, the hotel from L4D2 - so you see all that ridiculous gore in the context of a gaming playground. It takes a shake of the bottle to make those familiar elements settle into a different pattern, and Techland have used the shuffling of events to that end. What particularly gets to me is the reversed sequence of the father rescuing his daughter, reconfigured into release and abandonment. You can do this in any medium, and the trailer isn't even interactive, but the medium that's best at this kind of narrative remix is games. That's why the hairs on the back of my neck are standing up, one by one.

[This is a guest post by writer-designer Elizabeth Shoemaker Sampat of Two Scooters Press, who produced the much-admired indie tabletop RPGs Mist-Robed Gate, It's Complicated and more recently Blowback.]I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that all games are simulations. Sure, they’re sexy simulations, where you can have adventures and do things terrible and wonderful that you would never do in real life. But the reason these games are so compelling is that they’re framed in a realistic way; though the actions or narratives may be wildly removed from what transpires in your day-to-day life, there’s enough comforting simulations framing the experience to give you a sense of something real.In a physically-simulative game, there are lots of little things that give the player an immersive and organic experience playing; the environment, artwork, and sound all work together in order to create tone and texture. The big thing that frames the experience, though, is the physics engine— the algorithms that dictate the actions and reactions of the world to the people affecting it.If you drop a ball in a game with a basic physics engine, it will hit the ground in the same amount of time, every time, and rest there. If you’re working with a more complex physics engine, the result will be affected by how hard you drop the ball, what the ball is made out of, what the floor is made out of, and the angle at which the ball hits the floor. Now, most people can’t do that kind of mathematics in their head to check the physics engine’s work, but as long as the reactions are satisfactory on a basic level, the surprise and causality will make the reaction feel natural, organic, and real.As I understand it, physics engines are a real pain to code from the ground up. That’s one of the appeals of text-based games with scripted narratives. You don’t have to mess with that stuff! Is it cheaper? Probably. Easier? That depends. Essentially, you’re trading physical complexities for narrative complexities, and that means designing an engine that emulates narrative physics.But Elizabeth! You say. Are we talking about simulating the experience of tabletop roleplaying— where your character can choose from an infinite number of actions, and then a real person chooses from an equally infinite number of reactions? Because we haven’t perfected artificial intelligence yet.Not exactly.In my last guest post, I talked a bit about an indie tabletop concept called Right To Dream, which is a distinct play style that some people see as an ideal. Of course, there’s more than one play style: Right to Dream is all about building a world to explore, discarding the parts that don’t fit your dream of how the world should be, and simply existing within that dream. The experience isn’t about changing anything; instead, it’s about learning what more is there, as opposed to changing the things you’ve already discovered.Another play style concept is called Story Now. It’s a very popular one: forget the pages and pages of setting material you have to learn before you start to play! Just start in the middle of a story. Start telling it. Affect the narrative, change the world, build an incredible story with your character at the center of it all. This is the kind of game that is extremely difficult to port to a scripted-narrative digital game: in order to give the player the feeling that they can affect the world, the game’s narrative physics have to be incredibly robust. Just as all of the different variables in how you drop a ball can lead to wildly different outcomes in a sophisticated physical game, the number of inputs and outcomes for a narrative game would have to be equally complex.There’s a fertile middle ground here; much in the way that many lapsed D&D players enjoy World of Warcraft because it scratches the same tactical/social itch, you can design a game that scratches the “Story Now” itch without being a slavish reproduction of that style of game.In my next post, I’ll diagram a Story Now engine, and talk more about how to emulate that style of play.

Jeff Vogel (who's been making fine, intelligent old-school CRPGs since they days when they were in fact new-school) says intelligent things that I agree with.    

The Ebert Affair: Ebert's grumpy post and the many, many responses from the gaming community. The (varied but interesting) pieces in this month's Escapist finally persuaded me to emit a blog post on the subject. For God's sake don't expect much insight here. It's more indigestion than anything. Let me summarise the argument a moment: Ebert: Games aren't art because I don't really like them. Gamers: Games are art because we really, really like them. Gamers (supplementary argument 1): Also, games are art because, Flower Braid Passage Bioshock the Path. Gamers (supplementary argument 2): Also, the definition of art is so subjective this whole argument is pointless. There were a wider range of responses than that (I like Troy Goodfellow's 'Are games art? most of the games I play are barely even games') but those were the bulk of it. What I find bothersome is the rather peevish tone of so many of the responses: like we (yup, I'm a gamer, it's 'we') are taking it personally. Why does it matter that much whether a respected middlebrow film critic thinks games are art? I think it's partly simple emotional attachment, but more, if games are art, it means I haven't wasted my time playing thousands of hours of mediocre shooters. I get the same cultural credit I would if I'd spent thousands of hours listening to challenging atonal music. The obvious gap in this rather cheering line of reasoning here is that if games are art then not all games are necessarily art, and not all games-which-are-art are necessarily good art. Tom Chick makes this point cogently but he's the only responder I've seen who's come out and said '*these* are examples of games which are *not* art'. A related point. Ebert said: "No one in or out of the field has ever been able to cite a game worthy of comparison with the great poets, filmmakers, novelists and poets [sic]." I haven't seen any of the responders take up this challenge. Never mind the comparisons to the big cultural monoliths, I haven't seen anyone step up and say, yes, [highly respected game] is a better treatment of [theme] than [minor work by respected, non-legendary artist]. I see roughly one puff piece a month that talks about how games are *going* to be worthy of comparison, but I've been seeing those puff pieces since the coming thing was hypertext novels in the nineties.  You know how they say fusion power is fifty years away, and it's been fifty years away since 1955? It's beginning to sound to me like gaming's Citizen Kane is five years away, and it's been five years away since 1990. I think we owe it to ourselves as gamers and game designers to ask *why* there seems to be less gaming art about the place than you'd expect, compared to other media. I think if we want to grow little beards and sit at the big table the onus is on us to provide an explanation. One standard rejoinder, and one that runs under the Ebert debate, is that it's because the Man is putting us down. I don't have much sympathy with this line of argument. Another is that it's early days for video games. I hear this point a lot. Kelly Santiago made it in the video that Ebert linked to: film started out as cheap thrills. But the comparison doesn't stand up. Pong was 1972. Melies' Trip to the Moon, Santiago's jumping-off point, was 1902. We're 38 years on from Pong. 38 years on from Trip to the Moon, we had Battleship Potemkin, Nosferatu, Metropolis, The Wizard of Oz. We had Hitchcock, Ophuls, Ozu, Murnau. Go on just a couple more years and you have Citizen Kane and Casablanca. There had been heavyweight, culturally respectable film criticism in the mainstream press for more than ten years. (At least in Britain, I don't know about the States, and I don't really know much about film criticism in Britain beyond blog blag level). And this is actually an unfairly flattering comparison for games: culture changes faster now. The gatekeepers of the cultural pantheon are a lot more liberally inclined. So what have we been doing with ourselves? A refined version of the 'early days' point is that tech has only just got far enough to open up real possibilities. But we had Colossal Cave in 1976. Text is all you need: ask Ebert's novelists and poets. With the honourable exception of the underground, commercially irrelevant IF subculture, this has gone nowhere. Most gamers aren't terribly interested. Approaching the tl;dr boundary, but I suppose having got so firmly on my high horse about this I need to make some conjectures about why myself. Another post when I feel the need to procrastinate further.

  Some of the icons in Echo Bazaar took a mere twenty minutes to create from sketch to site, while others - usually the simple ones - took many days.  The most extreme example of this is the little button that gives a tweetable postcard of your location, which took two weeks, fifteen iterations, one very unprofessional huff and a semi-serious threat to replace the existing art with a pair of luminescent green breasts.  And after all that, maybe five people clicked the goddamned thing. Anyway, I thought it might be fun (and pleasantly narcissistic) to run through the evolution of a single icon. Typically, the process starts with a brief from Alexis. In this case: “A wild-haired lunatic with eyes and mouth agape and a blood-dripping meat-cleaver. Sticky stuff dripping from his mouth. Expensive-looking clothes in disarray, evening dress maybe. Narcotic honey is the drug of choice downstairs. This gent has overdone it.” Which led to the following, somewhat crappy sketch (done in ArtRage on a WACOM pad): (Can I just say, I must have drawn a thousand top hats in the last three months? Thank you, I feel better now). Next we shift into Photoshop, tidy up the lines, cut out the crappy bits, resize and add a cutout filter. Practically everything in EB gets a cutout filter at some point, it gives images a lovely classic cartoony feel, and negates my tendency towards wavy, wishy-washy lines. Like so. Not sure what's happened to his nose here. Ah well, we'll put it back later. More clean-up and adjustment follows, and eventually we get an outline we're happy with. One of the most useful tricks I've learned on the Echo Bazaar crash-course is the usefulness of clear silhouettes in icons. If you stick a colour overlay on your image and you can't tell what it is, chances are it will be a lousy icon. In this case, it's relatively readable: Time to add some colour. We go back to the outline and remove all white with the magic eraser. Then we stick a new layer *beneath* the outline - this is very important for cartoony illustrations where you want to lay in big blocks of colour without losing the clarity of the black outline or going over the edges. A third layer holds shadows and highlights. ...and the nose seems to be back, which is nice. Incidentally, nailing the metal shine on that cleaver took ages. I looked at a lot of knives and daggers on Google, but eventually I just borrowed my girlfriend’s cleaver, stuck it under a desk lamp and copied. Finally, we add a background - just a simple gradient in EB's house colours (pale beige and slightly darker beige), resize and convert to a PNG. and that's the finished product. You can't really tell he's dribbling honey any more, to be honest. But he does look nice and mad.