Harvester on 9/12/2010 at 21:54

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Yeah it's weird that you can't choose to work overtime. But what I found weirder was the boss going "John, we need you at the lab, we might be on to something that could save the whole planet, but if you'd rather stay with your family and let the whole planet die, all righty then, that's completely understandable".

BlackCapedManX on 9/12/2010 at 23:54

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Which, okay whatever, but this is a homemade flash game, not some $100 million developers dream game, so complaining that the quality is poor is like complaining that your can't get 12 year old scotch from your faucet (or maybe you live some where more spoiled than the rest of the world...?)




Take this out of the context of gaming for a moment. If I were to say "a narrative that examines the intrinsic flaws of the character," say, in relation to a book or movie, would that also be a confusing statement? If so we might have a problem with fundamental communication. What I'm gathering is that one of the central concerns of this thread is that if you want to make a story where the character shows some semblance of, say, humanity, and hence all of the imperfections thereby implied, it's much easier to do outside the context of a game. In a novel it's very easy for a writer to compose a situation where a central character has to make some kind of grey morality choice, and then the reader just sits back and sees what happens. The problem here is that in a game, by giving the player the option of making that choice, it becomes considerably more difficult to construct a story where you can still pose ambiguous questions about what the character will do, and hence to accomplish something where you want to show said characters flaws while still allowing the player to have control.

This becomes far more difficult if the character is inclined to think outside the immediate concerns of the problem and look at a causal relationship that would only apply by thinking "I am playing a game." For example, in DXIW there's a section early on where you have to make the choice between stealing a prototype weapon and sparing the scientist who invented it, or killing the scientist and (according to the narrative) delay its procurement by a racist psychopathic army half a million strong. This is obviously supposed to be a moral choice: "do I steal the weapon for myself and spare one innocent life, or do I kill him and hopefully spare the thousands of potential victims of this weapon?" The problem, is that anyone who has played through the game knows that in terms of the game, there is no supporting evidence to show that killing him does jack shit to prevent the weapon from showing up very soon afterward in the game. So the typical gamer will think "well, I can not get blood on my hands, get a cool prototype weapon earlier than otherwise, and then get an additional reward relatively later on, and essentially get nothing if I kill him." That's what I mean by metagaming, and is typically how the word is used (with roots back to D&D, if not earlier... ages ago I played with a DM who offered XP incentive for not saying phrases in game like "I have 17 strength, so I can carry 120 lbs exactly,") and if you want to show the flaws of the main character in light of the story surrounding it, you have to somehow extract your player from the idea of thinking about things in a strict cause-and-effect reward system. DXIW obviously drops the ball hard here, if they really wanted to enforce the decisions about grey morality and difficult choices, they should've changed both subsequent narrative and gameplay points further in the game, i.e. having the weapon show up much later if you kill the scientist, or having people or news broadcasts talk about how innocents are being slaughtered en masse by a new threat if you don't (of course DXIW is nothing if not failed potential, but that's another story.)

All this aside, the point that "games are about winning" is profoundly idiotic. If you look through the history of gaming and say "Heavy Rain has essentially the same fundamental agenda as Chess" you're likely missing the goddamn point. If you're playing Deus Ex or System Shock 2 or TES games with an FAQ on your first playthrough because you want to ensure that you "beat it best," rather than playing for different kinds of experiences, then you're probably also missing much of the point and a whole hell of a lot of effort that the designers put into the game to be wasted on conditioned attitudes toward what gaming is. This is the kind of thinking that makes people like Roger Ebert make stupid claims like "video games cannot be art." (Which misses both the point of what art is, an an enormous slice of what contemporary, especially indie, game developers are doing.) To say of contemporary games, or as may end up being more precise "interactive media," are about winning, is like saying "the point of reading a book is getting to the end," and if people actually believe that then god help us all.

demagogue on 10/12/2010 at 00:55

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I've long been thinking about what sort of game can weave narrative and gameplay (what I always like to tie to the concept of modus operandi because "gameplay" could mean all sorts of things, but an MO is more clear... It's the basic motivation and affordance your avatar has to make progress in the game towards something; it's what Goggles is shooting a turrets or Garrett is hiding in shadows for, in each scene and across the whole game.)

And the genre that comes to mind is interactive fiction (IF) ... not really because of the gameplay mechanics themselves (which to be honest aren't really that powerful; you don't really get any more "verbs" of interaction than you could get in an FPS), but what's special is the norms of the community, and how readily gamers are to fit their goals, fit their MO into the "story", and how well some authors have been able to push the envelope. (P&C adventure games might be in the running too.)

Maybe my favorite example is Anchorhead, which IMO has been the IF that has most successfully made the player's MO throughout, in making gameplay decisions, also drive a credible plot. What the player is always acting for in each scene is also usually an engine that drives the plot forward. But for this discussion, the examples to focus on are ones where your PC has goals you wouldn't typically support (The (http://emshort.wordpress.com/how-to-play/reading-if/narrator-and-player-character/) Anti-Heroic PCs in this list, about 1/3 down, or "(http://ifdb.tads.org/search?searchfor=tag:evil%20protagonist) evil PCs" in this list), and the level of interaction isn't just shooting people.

One fun example is (http://ifdb.tads.org/viewgame?id=ywwlr3tpxnktjasd) Varicella, where the king has just died, his son is a waif, and you're a conniving minister trying to stage a coup and seize power, figuring out a way to 86 all of your competition before they 86 you. The whole standpoint of the entire game forces you to think of every decision in cynical terms of what screws the other guys ... in some cases you want to blackmail them, in some cases you want to win their trust so you can stab them in the back, and for a few you just want to off them the old fashioned way. (It helps that the PC is quite charming and witty about it all.) The engine of the plot is that you're always looking for the most cynical way to screw each person... The MO drives the plot. It's not just shooting them, it's figuring out their weak spot and going out of your way to specifically manipulate it.

Anyway, my point is if you wanted an example of how to make this sort of thing work, this is a model. There are gameplay techniques that slide the player into acting to advance the PCs goals, even villainous goals which they wouldn't choose to do on their own, and yet it's still a game where it's the player acting freely towards some end to make progress towards it, not just a glorified interactive novel that makes the progress for you.

BlackCapedManX on 10/12/2010 at 09:45

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But at the end of the day, the game is predetermined anyway, there are only so many choices a developer can offer to a player. You can take away the ability to make a choice, and present the characters actions in a cutscene or whatever, or you can let the player actively choose, but there's only so many available options, and eventually it still comes down to what the designer has presented for the player, which is just as scripted as it would be in a movie or novel.

I mean take God of War for example. The player is ostensibly "in charge," but you could watch a movie of someone playing the game and get essentially the same narrative effect, regardless of who's playing, a point which totally refutes the idea of player choice, because there simply isn't any. Or, going back to the DXIW example I used earlier, I remember ages ago in these very forums complaining that you couldn't "take a third option" and neither kill the scientist nor take the weapon, effectively stating as a player that you wanted the PC to take no part in petty corporate espionage, which, given that it was a secondary goal and not strictly necessary to progressing the plot, should have been an option. But again, here the developers were trying to force the player into making a morally ambiguous decision (and then of course totally failing in delivery, but that's another matter.)



Which, I guess fundamentally I can see your point, but what I'm arguing is that in practice it doesn't work that way. When playing (most) games it's not like you start with an endless sea of choices and then you hone down to what you want, but rather that developers are usually building up a number of paths, and each choice you make is essentially one of however many pre-described narrative arcs. Again, I can see why there's a conceptual importance in the division that you're describing, but I think in actual scenarios where the player describes what the characters choices are going to be with impunity usually lead to open ended sandbox games where none of the decisions feel like they have any gravity what-so-ever. Which again, is why I'm coming from the position that the PC, at best, will be guided through a number of narrative decisions that the player can chose from, but never really define themselves (other than in scenarios like the anitwalkthroughs on it-he.org, but there you are mostly making your own game by breaking what exists, and if any narrative arises it's usually very disjointed and hardly cohesive, obviously,) and that success in this endeavor comes not from letting the player have total control, but by carefully articulating the consequences of what control you do let them have.

Which, to bring this back to the OT, makes me think that presenting a flawed protagonist is still a matter of constructing a scenario around the PC carefully enough that the actions available to the player are all difficult or "non-heroic" ones. Afterall, this is just as much the case in real life, very often our decisions are sculpted by the situation around us in ways that are out of our control.



No, someone mentioned it earlier in the thread, and it's an argument I've heard before, and I think it's tremendously narrow minded and is essentially a way of excusing oneself from having any kind of meaningful conversation on the matter while still hanging around to bleat excessively. I had an argument to this effect ages ago in the Deus Ex part of the forums, where someone was trying to maintain that the whole point of playing the game was to win it and that replay value was moot, and while I don't want to hammer the point into a dead horse, if that's your (the proverbial you, not you in particular) incentive for playing a game like DX, then it's very likely that you're way off base.

Papy on 10/12/2010 at 14:08

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I agree showing excludes interactivity, but showing is only a part of what is communication. And communication, as a whole, does not excludes interactivity. In fact, effective communication is far more easy to do with interactivity.


There's black, there's white and there's an infinite number of shades of gray. The distinction is not binary at all.

Anyway, you have to understand that the game is neither about you or a character, it is about a situation and the emotion which could result from that situation. The character is an object, not the subject. You also have to understand that, in this case, allowing a bit of control to the player is a tool to draw his attention and so let him be more receptive and letting him understand more easily what is expressed by the creator of the game.


That painting was an analogy to make you understand that you are missing the point.


So everyone who liked this game are idiots and you, because of your superior intelligence, you are able to see the truth?

Emotions are the basis of intelligence. Emotions are a motivator to thinking. Emotions also change the way you think. Depending on how you feel, you will see things differently. Observing the same subject under the influence of different emotions will allow you to have a more complete understanding of the big picture.

The result of this is that in order to develop your intelligence, you have to let yourself feel emotions as often as you can. You have to seek things which provoke those emotions so you can understand more about yourself and everything around you.

The smarter you are, the more likely you are to accept cheap and transparent attempts at emotional manipulation as a good exercize, because the resulting feeling will allow you to develop your own intelligence.