Moving to the Next Passage

When a new art medium is formed, it is a historical trend for it to draw from the previous popular medium; movies were influenced by photography, just as games are now influenced by cinema. When a new medium peaks in terms of what it can borrow and learn from its parent medium, the new medium will start to develop its own unique traits. At their relatively young age, games continue to mature as an entertainment medium. They are closing in on how long they will need to borrow from cinema. If games wants to fully distance themselves from derived narrative structures and progress into its own golden age, games have to further realize the medium’s potential.

Even from the earliest days of Electronic Arts and Trip Hawkins, game developers have strived to create interactive experiences that could make people cry. It’s a valiant goal that aims to enrich the possibilities of video games on an emotional level. 

“Stop trying to imitate cinema and start utilizing the most basic aspect of games”

Unfortunately, the approach commonly taken by popular games is to rely on cutscenes. Titles like Heavy Rain and Metal Gear Solid are classic examples of games that are able to invoke emotion, but at the same time they are also two of the most cutscene filled games to have been released. Too many games use the cutscene crutch to hobble their way through their epic narrative. Storytelling in video games needs to stop imitating cinema and start utilizing the most basic aspect of games: interactivity. 

Games as an art form have the unique trait of being able to create meaning through the player’s participation. An emergent meaning is the differentiating factor between games and movies. The marriage of gameplay and narrative needs to be ubiquitous in the future of games before the medium can reach it’s golden age.

Indie games are currently at the front of discovering how to get games to this point. Arguably the most important game that aims to forward the progress of game narrative is Jason Roherer’s Passage. This short five minute experience provides no formal narrative structure, but instead relies only on its simple mechanics to create meaning. The player starts as a nameless character in an open world and scores points by traveling to the right of the screen and finding treasures along the way. Early in the adventure, the player may find another character to be their partner to travel side-by-side with. The married movement doubles the amount of points scored for traveling right, but also makes it impossible for the couple to reach certain treasures that are between one-character wide gaps. As the game continues, the characters show signs of aging with gray hairs and slower movement. The game’s most powerful moment comes in the form of death, when the player’s partner passes away and is replaced with a tombstone. Players then have to make the decision to either travel further past the tombstone to score a few more points or to spend their last few seconds by the grave waiting for their own death.

The experience of playing Passage resonates long after the player dies. Within its 5 minute span, Passage can provide an emotionally profound view of life, mortality and marriage. The game uses rudimentary systems inherent in all games to serve as the catalysts for the game’s narrative. There are no cutscenes needed to convey the game’s messages, because the use of the games’ basic mechanics creates the messages. Passage cannot be translated into a book or movie, the game’s meanings can only be gotten by playing it.

It’s time for games to take their final steps away from cinema. The path has already been laid out. Passage, created by one man with no budget, is a boiled down example of what the medium is capable of. Bigger triple-A titles need to break the mold of relying on movies to hold any emotional value. The golden age of games requires masterpieces that manage to be meaningful because they can only be games.

Post Mortem: Lymph

This post mortem was done for Lymph, my first game created while attending Digipen.

Lymph provided me my first experience as a producer on a game project. As well, Lymph was also the first game that I have worked on intended with an educational purpose.

3 Things That Went Right

1. Identifying Overscope in Pre-Production
   The team trimmed down the scope of the game in the early stages of pre-production. Keeping in mind their limited time frame, they decided to schedule their time for the creation of only the core essentials of Lymph. Further mechanisms were put on a wish list that would be completed if the project moved ahead of schedule.
2. Defining the Target Market
   Early on in pre-production, the team decided to create a game that provided an educational purpose for children. This goal helped guide many of the team’s design and development decisions. The team always considered how they could make the game more medically accurate while staying approachable for children.
3. Early Prototype
   By designing gameplay mechanics that were not easily comparable to other games, the team decided to build an early prototype of the game that would help test out their design. Doing this also helped the team establish a unified vision for the game. The prototype proved to be useful in providing an understanding of the game’s design to the team members.

3 Things That Went Wrong

1. Poor Schedule Management
   The team had the good start of creating a schedule from the initial stages of the project. Team members were scheduled to work during the same hours, but class schedule differences segmented the teams work hours. The lack of unified work hours meant that redundant work was often created, wasting valuable time. Having the ability to work the same hours would have been beneficial for the project.
2. Low Level of Communication
   As mentioned previously, the segmented work hours proved detrimental to the team. One of the negative effects of working separately was the low level of communication. Not communicating with other team members lead to development mistakes and design follies. The team needed to find some sort of efficient intermediary form of communication if solidified work hours was not an option.
3. Rush into Production
   Lymph was an existing prototype before it was introduced to the team. This lead the team to feel confident enough to rush into production after a quick pre-production phase. The negative effects of this were seen in the late stages of the project timeline, when design and asset oversights started popping up. More time could have been spent in the pre-production detailing out the deliverables of production.

A Lesson in Intrinsic Motivation

Creating motivation is an necessity that all video games require to be effective interactive experiences. Being the one entertainment medium that depends on user choice, games must ensure that users have incentive to confront the game’s challenges. Games can go about this in two ways:

1. Extrinsic Motivation
   Rewarding successful gameplay with collectible accolades

2. Intrinsic Motivation
   Causing the user to form their own motivations for completing the task

Each form has its merits, but intrinsic motivation should be considered the better of the two being that it is the stronger motivator and an efficient result of design.

Half-Life 2 campaign at launch was an example of a game that succeeded in creating intrinsic motivation. With no unlocks upon completion or additional benefits for restarting, HL2 managed to be a game that I found myself coming back to many times.

Intrinsic Motivation Defined

There are a few differing theories on why intrinsic motivation works. Some theorists believe that intrinsic motivation is fueled by the pursuit to enhance the perception of self. Others theorize intrinsically motivating activities are purely engaged in for the enjoyment that accompanies them. Although there are many theories, the common base idea is that intrinsic motivation is driven by positive emotion. Catharsis, self-improvement, and the yearn for acceptance all serve as powerful motivators that are inherent to humans and require no extra inducement. HL2 creates intrinsic motivation through several means.

Challenge as Motivation

Challenge plays two roles in the process of motivation: it is something users must be motivated to accomplish, and paradoxically it is also something that creates motivation itself. The presence of  realistic goals or seemingly accomplish-able tasks increases a user’s motivation to attempt challenges. HL2 and other games with good design all employ processes that create realistic goals. When players are presented with the “Gravity Gun” in the game, players are set in a safe and open learning environment that allows them to practice with the new tool. This provides the player time to understand the metrics of the weapon: its effective range, rate of fire, and visual feedback states. The learning environment comes with a variety of low-difficulty tasks to build up the player’s skill and confidence with the Gravity Gun. Immediately following up this crash course is “Ravenholm”, a level where the Gravity Gun becomes essential for the player’s survival. Failure in “Ravenholm” is severely punished by death, but because the player has built up their self esteem beforehand, these tasks are not overwhelming. Players are best motivated when they are faced with an optimal level of difficulty.

Recognition as Motivation

HL2 employs more blatant forms of motivation through the use of its NPCs. Whenever the player meets up with the supporting cast of characters, the main character receives verbal recognition of notoriety or fame. When the player accomplishes a task, nearby NPC’s will display visible or audible recognition. The cause-and-effect relationship between the completion of a task and praise received creates the positive emotion of satisfaction.

Fantasy as Motivation

Immersion plays a strong role in creating intrinsic motivation for imaginative players. If players can imagine their actions taking place in a real-life setting, the fantasy and conducive motivations become intrinsic. HL2 is set in a world that is very similar to the real world, providing a strong basis for believability. When the player receives affection from other characters, immersed players receive those positive emotions as well. If the player believes in the story and the universe, the goals of the character and the player become aligned and the player inherits the character’s motivations.

Control as Motivation

Control is the one unique feature that games have as an entertainment medium; it is also one of the strongest factors that promote intrinsic motivation. Whether it’s for single-player or multiplayer, HL2 creates clear cause-and-effect relationships between the player’s actions and the game world’s reactions. Player agency, the player’s belief that his/her actions have profound effects, creates reason and motivation for action.

Another conclusion that can be drawn is that the player’s feeling of control also creates a sense of responsibility to use that control. Control as a form of motivation can be expanded upon by varying actions. Players feel greater agency when they believe their specific actions provide results different from other players’ results.

Iterating on Community

The past few years have been a period of divergent growth for the video game industry. The millions made by social games have created a frenzy amongst big game publishers to venture out into the blue ocean and grasp at the “casual” market. The value of creating and maintaining a community around a game is now apparent.

No one foresaw the overnight success of social games. Zynga, the global leader and highest valued social games company garnered an estimated 30 million DAU (daily active users) with in the month of September. Last month, Cityville (Zynga’s most successful game) reached more users than 2010’s Call of Duty reached in the last year. The company’s ability to exploit Facebook’s userbase is how Zynga’s market valuation rose above that of game giants like Electronic Arts and Activision. It’s easy to foresee now that AAA games are heading to be more “social”.

Holding a game controller may not be universal, but wanting to be a part of a community is. At their start, Zynga did what triple-A studios didn’t: use the community to expand the game’s reach. Social games are the most successful on Facebook because of the already present communities. Zynga saw the marketing value of having one user tell a friend about a game, and designed systems to inhibit that occurrence. This user-to-non-user marketing is how the average Facebook games manages to break 10 million DAU every month.

Large-scale developers are expanding how their users can participate in the community. 2011’s biggest FPS games, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 and Battlefield 3 now have browser-based social services. Activision-Blizzard believes that social platforms like CoD:Elite “addresses the growing market shift towards social, casual and mobile gaming”. DICE commented on Battlefield 3’s social platform by saying, “social platforms for games will make a huge difference in how people perceive where the game starts and ends”. These sentiments will continue to grow in the industry.

The games industry is a naturally evolving medium; it’s well-versed in iteration and change. In 2009, EA acquired social games studio Playfish for an estimated $400 million. Two years later, Playfish’s first EA published game, Sim’s Social pierced Facebook’s top 5 games and ranked number two game in terms of DAU. Zynga is going public in July 2011 and will possibly become the highest valued games publisher in the industry. Games will continually strive to be more prevalent in today’s society. The adoption of the social games template is just another step taken to help grow the industry. In the metric of popularity, games can overtake movies, and in the metric of creating communities, games can be like nothing we’ve seen before.

Going to E3, courtesy of IGN

Hit the link to find out the uneventful beginning.
http://games.ign.com/articles/117/1171759p1.html

Follow the blog to see how this tragic tale will come to it's poignant end.
http://www.ign.com/blogs/bernardssregardss