Why I Love Jetpack Joyride But Will Never Pay For It

 

So I'm playing Jetpack Joyride on The Girlfriend's shiny new Windows 8 computer (Windows 8 - Like a cell phone, but it won't fit in your pocket!), and I get to thinking about how much the whole thing cost to make. Rocking soundtrack, gorgeous art, programming... My Google-Fu is too weak to find it the exact development cost, but it clearly wasn't cheap. And I've been playing it, now, ad-free, for about 2 hours. And the guilt starts my eye crawling down to the 'Purchase coins" button... And I balk.

The advent of free-to-play has done a lot of weird things to the gaming industry. Back in the day, it was simple - you gave some money, you got some game. Now, here are the models I can pull off the top of my head: the game dev gets paid in attention and future interest in products, the game dev gets paid in ad revenue per play, the game dev gets paid for the second half or last two-third of their game, the game dev gets paid before they even start development through Kickstarter, the game dev gets paid through in-app purchases.

That last one (the one that Jetpack Joyride uses) has a lot of latitude in how it can be applied. Cosmetics, extra in-game currency, bonus levels... They all boil down to one question: Can you 'finish' the game without ever making a purchase?

Of course, this means we have to define how a game is 'finished,' which is increasingly nebulous as mobile gaming's focus on pick-up-and-play has created a resurgence in arcade-esque endless games. Still, most games have some sense of progression, usually through the purchase of upgrades or the completion of achievements. Jetpack Joyride (where everything can be purchased with the in-game currency, which collects slowly, but not so slowly as to make buying things impossible) can be completed without making a single purchase. Which is good, I guess, because it avoids the upsetting bait-and-switch thing that happens when a 'free' game starts piling on inconvenience after inconvenience - which can, of course, be alleviated with a cash purchase, just as you're getting into the meat of the game.

Here's the problem, though: The major gameplay of Jetpack Joyride (which you should totally play if you haven't, it's an amazingly well crafted little thing) is collecting coins, and the major part of the game's meta-structure (that is, the system of persistent upgrades that gives you a feeling of progress) is deciding how to spend those coins. And the only way you can give the game-makers money? Buying coins.

If you think about it for a second, you'll see the paradox. If I want to compensate the game devs (and I do, because they've given me a lot of fun), I have to cheat myself out of some gameplay. I have to make some of my upgrade choices meaningless by filling my coffers with purchased lucre. It feels like cheating, and that's why I balked from, essentially, giving Halfbrick Studios a tip for the enjoyment their game gave me.

Basically, what I'm arguing here is that the free-to-play elements of a game should be disentangled from its progression structure (this is something that goes back to the Dead Space 3 "Pay for Crafting Resources" thing from last year - if earning resources is fun, then don't give me the option to pay to take away the fun, and if earning resources ISN'T fun - why is it in your game?). Include them, certainly, but in their own separate areas - cosmetic items are ideal for this. Hell, I'm even fine with selling levels, as long as you don't go crazy with it. But when games like Jetpack Joyride merge their for-pay elements with the in-game activity of gaining money, they're going to end up disincentivizing either gameplay, or paying. And a game this fun doesn't deserve either.

Short Fiction: Rogue-Ish

(I wrote this on a whim to show that I could write something fantasy-ish. It's short, but... I don't know, I kind of like it).

The thing about rogues is that they are, at the end of the day, profoundly roguish. And sure, that sounds great in the tavern. Everyone’s heard stories about the party that would have been chewed apart by scorpions at the bottom of a pitfall, if not for the tireless efforts of an auric-hearted rogue. Or of steel-eyed queens charmed into leniency (and out of lingerie) by a talented bard.

Sure, they were, technically, thieves. But, the stories always emphasized, FUN thieves. And when the chips were down, at the end of every story, wasn’t it always the seemingly traitorous rogue who came back to save you? A glint in his eye, aiming a crossbow bolt at your chest, but no! He was only shooting the orc behind you. He might steal your gold pouch, but he’d never stab you in the back to do it.

Which presents the question, Thak of Grimmeld, Warrior Lord of the Far Steppes, mused to himself as he lay bleeding to death on a filthy stone floor with a dagger wound in the small of his back: Who’s making up these stories, anyway?

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Glenn, as he had called himself, was the most roguish of rogues, if his own stories were to be believed. Despite his simple name and unassuming appearance, he claimed to have stolen more gold, platinum, and jewels than the combined efforts of years of work from the Steppe Horde raiders who had trained Thak in his youth. He claimed to be the assassin of The Unknown Emperor, which, Thak thought now, he probably should have been more suspicious about verifying. And Glenn had a reputation, one that, Thak’s wife, the ‘Virgin’ Sorceress Aurora, assured him, made him the ideal, trustworthy companion on their next venture: He had betrayed every single person he had ever worked for.

It had taken Thak some time to work through the logic of this benefit. The flask of mead he had consumed (paid for, of course, by Glenn [with money, of course, taken from Thak’s own purse]) had made the efforts doubly difficult, but eventually he had grasped Aurora’s points (while failing to notice that Glenn was, when Thak wasn’t looking, doing some grasping of his own):
 
    1) Everyone knew that in stories, the least trustworthy person could always be trusted. After all, the story wouldn’t be very interesting if it was just ‘The bloodthirsty psychopath turned out to be the murderer’, right?

    2) Who could be less trustworthy (and thus MORE trustworthy, by this new logic), than someone who had betrayed everyone he had ever worked for?

    3) This is damn good mead, isn’t it?

Persuaded by this iron-clad argument, Thak had found himself, the next morning, bleary-eyed and barely able to hold his fabled double axes, Krew and Krag, following behind Glenn and Aurora in pursuit of the fabled treasure of Mak Goughin, which Glenn had conveniently known the location of. Through his raging headache, Thak couldn’t help notice that his ‘virginal’ wife and the youngish rogue were walking closer than comfort would suggest was feasible. But he held his thick, fuzzy-feeling tongue, not wanting to give Aurora ‘paranoid jealousy’ as a weapon in their increasingly constant arguments. And so, as they ventured into the filthily-floored dungeon, he simply watched.

Not closely enough, it turned out. And so, he lay dying on the incredibly poorly kept stone floor of the dungeon, bleeding swiftly from the wounds in his back, one placed by Glenn with a merry laugh in his throat, and the other by Aurora, cold as a winter’s sunrise. Was the flickering in his vision the last of his life ebbing away? Or the guttering of the black, oily torches that illuminated the chamber? Or, possibly, the Lichstone he had stolen, years ago, from the Wizard Jandar, finally fulfilling its dark purpose and reanimating him as a murderous revenant bound to avenge his own demise?

It was that last one, happily. And as the last of his mortal existence faded away, Thak smiled at the thought that Glenn really, really should have done more research before seducing his wife and murdering him. But then, that’s the thing about rogues.

They’re roguish. That’s not the same as smart.

How Sadism and the Wii U Saved Gaming (Potentially)

Confession: My favorite Mario game is New Super Mario Bros. for the Wii. It's not the most polished or the most inventive, sure. It doesn't have the most beloved power-ups or the best level design. But it has one thing that has given me more joy than any other feature in a Mario game: multiplayer.

Not just "trade off when someone dies and every once in a while battle in a coin-collecting minigame" multiplayer. Not "Player 2 collects star bits" multiplayer. Not even "there's a separate battle mode and you can run around fighting in it" multiplayer. Real, honest-to-goodness, four-people-struggling-to-make-it-through-every-level multiplayer. And it was glorious.

 

And the best thing about it was that you could play it more than one way. Sure, you could be nice, with the more experienced players carrying the weaker ones through difficult sections, politely sharing power-ups, using teamwork to get the hard-to-reach star coins. And that's fine! Do that, you'll have a good time.

I'll be busy playing MY way - a brutal race to the finish of every level. Dirty tricks, hoarding of power-ups, intentionally throwing the others into bottomless pits. Nothing's off-limits, as long as one person's alive at the end to grab the flag. And the game's mechanics are perfectly built for this (power-up stealing, picking people up and throwing them, the way the screen scrolls), but without any explicit instructions to do so - the perfect recipe for building your own game mode.

 

(An aside: in 2006, my friend Nathan had the perfect ingredients for fun - an original XBox, a copy of Crimson Skies, and a projector. Dog-fighting on a big screen was, even with the muddy resolutions, suitably epic, but we eventually tired of the basic multiplayer modes, with their focus on combat over flying. And so we invented a new mode - a variation on the game's King of the Hill (where the player who holds a single flag on the map for the longest wins) with one key distinction: the player with the flag wasn't allowed to shoot. Instantly, what had been a fun-but-generic bout of dogfighting became a tense, exciting game of cat-and-mouse. Especially on the game's 'Chicago' map, with its just-wide-enough streets between towering skyscrapers, it was the perfect, player-created game of chase and be-chased.)

 

As previously mentioned, I spent some time with the Wii U last week. Along with NintendoLand, the other game I played (along with The Girlfriend, my friend John, and his wife Desiree) was New Super Mario Bros. U. Because I was (and remain) fascinated by the GamePad, I asked if I could play the game in what's called 'Boost Mode' - where 1-4 players play as normal with Wiimotes while the player with the GamePad uses the stylus to place blocks, uncover secrets, and stun enemies, ostensibly to help the players on their way.

Ostensibly.

Instead, it quickly became clear to my fellow players that I was using Boost for a different purpose - to turn every level into a maze of suddenly-appearing platforms, erratically moving enemies, and sudden death traps. I would do my best to block jumps, move power-ups out of the way, and basically take on the role of a cruel dungeon master. (I cleared this with my friends, by the way. Mostly. They appreciated the challenge! I choose to believe). The mechanics for Boost Mode are less clearly designed for abuse than the ones in the Wii game, but opportunities are still there. The platforms you can create with a touch of the stylus are the most obvious method of interference, but there are other, more subtle ways to play vengeful God. 3-Up blocks can be revealed by the GamePad player, acting as perfect bait to force players into traps. And a few levels have things like giant gearwheels that respond to the stylus's touch, allowing a savvy bastard to trap and crush his... opponents? Is opponents the right word? in between their gears.

 

As gamers, we've always dealt with the fact that no challenge from a video game can be as organic (and nasty) as one presented by a human. Part of the pleasure of tabletop gaming is the sense that you're playing 'against' an opponent who can tailor your challenges to your capabilities. The Wii U, by giving one out of the five players (what amounts to) a mouse and monitor set-up, has created an ideal environment for that player to mastermind gameworlds to provide more interesting challenges. (The free Rayman Legends Challenges App takes this even further than NSMBU, with one player having control of most of the features of the platforming world, moving them to help the platforming player traverse). This is fun in a platformer, but what if we pushed it further, applied it to genres like RPGs or puzzle games? Mazes drawn on-the-fly with the stylus. Enemy line-ups drafted from a pool of foes. All those tasks we've relegated to AIs and pattern-generation, back in the hands of a human because we finally have an intuitive way for them to control it.

I know, I know. People have been crowing about the 'potential' of the Wii U since it was first announced. But I feel like we're on the periphery of something great, a chance for gamers to interact like never before. New Super Mario Bros. U and Rayman Legends Challenges App are at the cliff's edge of embracing what the Wii U can really do when you trust your players to help you make amazing experiences, and I still have my fingers crossed that, sometime soon, someone is going to take the plunge.

Would I Lie to (Wii) U?

Finally had a chance to play with the Wii U when The Girlfriend and I stopped at my friend John's house on the drive across the country.

The thing that most appealed to me about the console (we mostly played NintendoLand, although John and I did fiddle for a bit with the Rayman Challenge App, which I might write more about later) was the way the asymmetric gameplay provided by the GamePad allowed for one of my favorite flavors of gaming: Deception.

I like lying. Telling a lie well, and convincing the people around you to act on its information, is one of the great social challenges that exist. Unfortunately, in most situations indulging in that challenge makes you an asshole or a sociopath, and the negative consequences almost always outweigh the benefits (insert witty comment about politics, business, and all other profitable lines of human behavior here.) Which is why some of the games I love most are ones in which lying is a codified part of the experience, where such normally vilified behaviors are encouraged and rewarded.

This can either be lying through game mechanics (the first example that comes to mind being bluffing in poker, although my personal favorite is Letters from Whitechapel, where one player is invisible and must cross a large game map while being hunted by trail-sniffing detectives), or through outright social manipulation (Werewolf and its cousin Epic Mafia are probably the best examples of this, where successful manipulation of the other players is a key strategy for both sides). It's fun to lie, because lying has stakes, and you're tricking the human mind, one of the greatest bullshit-detecting computers in existence. When you pull it off, the rush of adrenaline is incredible (I may have just outed myself as a psychopath).

Lying in video games has historically been much more difficult. Early games were played with two players on the same screen, meaning that secrets were impossible to keep, even if you 'totally for sure pinkie-swear' not to look. The only example I can think of with successful same-screen secret-keeping are the play-choosing modes in sports games, where the cursor can be made invisible so that the other player can't see your choices. Playing via network made this much easier, of course, leading to all sorts of games where controlling access to the other player's information was a key part of strategy (Starcraft and other RTS games that use fog-of-war come to mind). But there's something empty about beating someone over a network, about lying to them from across a hundred miles instead of being in the same room. It lacks... intimacy.

That's what made the Wii U so fascinating for me. Playing Luigi's Mansion in NintendoLand as the ghost (who is invisible on the main screen but visible on the GamePad), I had that thrill of sneaking up on someone, of misdirecting them and then suddenly striking. Trash talk (and communication between the other players) becomes a key strategy of manipulation and coordination. When playing as one of the non-ghost players, I had the thrill of anticipating the movements of an invisible foe and taking him down just as he was prepared to strike.

I've played a lot of games where people sitting in the same room never broke eye contact with the screen, never talked to each other. That's not possible with the games we played in NintendoLand; communication is key. The WiiU has the potential to change the way we game together, adding elements of social manipulation and teamwork to same-room gaming. If the software is there to support it (eh....), this could be a new dawn of the fine art of lying through games.

Walking (Dead) With My Girlfriend Finale: Keep that hair short, girl

The Girlfriend and I have now finished the last three episodes of Telltale's The Walking Dead (and then moved across the country to Washington, hence, the delay of this article), and I thought I'd get a few more thoughts down on the game. This article will contain a few spoilers, although I'll try to keep it as clean as possible. Still, if you don't want at least some elements of the game's story spoiled, read no further.

The thing that became clear, once The Walking Dead was over, was that it's not Lee's story at all. Lee is the protagonist, sure, and the games stick very closely to his perspective. But the actual story, the character who the player influences in the most interesting ways on their journey, is Clementine's.

There was a moment, after the games were over, when Shanna chastised me for being too honest with Clem. Indeed, anytime the option to sugarcoat or euphemise or lie to spare her young feelings was presented, I would argue strongly against it. "She's just a little girl," Shanna argued. "She deserves the truth," I would reply. We were having a sincere discussion about the best way to parent a child who was not a child, just a deft creation of 3D modelling and writing and Melissa Hutchison's excellent voice work. But Clementine felt real to us, and her opinions mattered.

When we chose to do the right thing, it was as often as not because we were worried what Clementine would think (and the game is brutal about inserting her into moments when the urge to do wrong is strongest). Her disdain is the worst punishment the game can deliver, because, thanks to her childish naivete, she never hesitates in opting for the "good," "righteous" choice. Sure, you can rationalize your actions (and the game's structure, which requires that Clem remain devoted to Lee, ensures that she'll at least partially accept your excuse), but the punishment for doing so is the sense that you've made a permanent influence on Clem's impressionable mind.

Telltale aren't the first people to realize that a child's judgment is an excellent way to make a player give considerable weight to their actions. It's easy, especially for jaded gamers, to treat fictional worlds like consequence-less playgrounds where the id can run free. This is all well and good if that's what you designed your gameworld to be, but it can absolutely wreck an attempt at a serious tone. By placing the watchful eyes of an impressionable being on the player, learning from their actions, it's possible to give normally sociopathic players pause.

The difference here, and the reason Clementine is so compelling, I think, lays in the fact that most games that employ this mechanic (Bioshock 2, The Witcher, and Dishonored come to mind) tie your influence on the child to some set outcome for the game. You are told, explicitly, that your choices had a concrete impact, that you've pushed this child to some specific life route. In short, you're given closure on the choices you made, assured that what you did 'mattered,' because in a video game you expect to be given a clear metric for the choices you made. But The Walking Dead's conclusion derives its poignancy and meaning from the fact that we are utterly denied our closure, our ability to see how we've shaped the future.

When the game is over, your ability to influence Clementine is gone. There's no jump cut to her as a heroic messiah or a blood-thirsty warlord, guided by your parting words. There's only a scared little girl, still trapped in a bad situation, and the hope, a hope which exists only in the hearts of the player (or players), that the influence we had on her will be enough to keep her safe. That we taught our little girl enough to make her strong and smart and healthy. There's no guarantee that it will, that all those "Clementine will remember you said that"s will amount to anything. We just have to hope that it was enough.

I think that's called 'parenting'.

Papers, Please, and the Joys of Being Mindlessly Amoral

In my gaming experience (now stretching, ugh, 24 years), I've portrayed: floating talking skulls, item shop merchants, sentient meat, a fake hacker, God, Satan, a Japanese death pinball, and a shrunken planet with a ray gun. It's STILL weird to be playing (and enjoying) a game about being an immigration checkpoint attendant.

Papers, Please, by Lucas Pope, is still in beta, but it's already compellingly playable. Set in the same post-Soviet dystopia as Pope's previous game, The Republia Times (in which your role was editor-in-chief of the state-controlled newspaper, ordered, at gun point, to keep the people happy and docile through story selection), Papers, Please is, mechanically, very simple. Potential immigrants step up to your window, give you their documents, and wait as you peruse them for forgeries or mistakes. If you don't find any, you take your giant stamper machine and CLUNK "Approved" on their passports. If they do, you reject them (or interrogate them to figure out the meaning behind the discrepancies). The heart of the gameplay is a series of very basic rules that you apply to every set of documents - are the dates right? The issuing country? Do they have the right visa? It's essentially a game of pattern recognition and anal-retentive detail-noticing, and with the wrong implementation, it could be incredibly dry. But somehow, here, it isn't.

A huge part of that is the interface. Almost everything is done in-game, with no need for menus. Your desk is your interface - you shuffle the documents around on it, pull out your stamping machine, fumble through your instruction manual. If you need an added feature (say, to search or fingerprint a subject), a button pops out on the desk. Besides a few opening instructions, almost everything exists in-game, and it gives your job a pleasantly tactile feel.

Adding to that feeling is the solid CLUNK of the stamping machine. It's hard to overstate how good it feels to CLUNK a document with a big, satisfying stamp. It gives a happy little climax to every encounter - CLUNK! Denied! Go away, forger! CLUNK! Welcome to glorious free state of Arstotzka, citizen! I don't know where Pope got that sound file, but it's the game's true star. CLUNK! I am seriously considering pausing writing this to play the game some more, just so I can get my CLUNK! fix.

This lady SEEMS on the level...

That joy in tiny detail, in the pleasures of executing bureaucracy, is what makes the game intellectually fascinating. Pope has done a lot of great work in making each immigrant seem unique through a very effective randomization system (along with several scripted immigrants who build up the 'story', so far as it goes during the beta). They'll praise Arstotzka as you let them in, or complain bitterly about having to travel though your hayseed country, or tell you a sob story when you ask them why they're trying to pass some expired bullshit through YOUR checkpoint. CLUNK! Bye, lady! Because, sorry, lady, but I'm on a timer. I could take the time to resolve your issue, but every time I CLUNK! my CLUNK!er, I get $5, and every night I've got to feed my family, pay my rent, and make sure the heat is on. Every day has JUST enough time for an efficient CLUNK!er to make enough to keep their son from getting sick and leaving their wife hungry, but it's close. Too close to spend a lot of time worrying about the people you're sending away unhappy.
 
That's the genius of Pope's game - it presents situations where empathy is called for, and then makes that empathy harmful, or at least inconvenient, for the player. For every second you spend asking someone for an extra document, or double-checking their fingerprints, you could just CLUNK! them and send them away, with you, at least, none the worse for wear. The game has scripted characters who offer more tangible moral choices, but the game's most effective moral lesson is that it's remarkably easy (and, in fact, kind of quietly pleasant), to turn off your humanity in favor of efficiency. (Or even patriotism! There's something about the game's bombastic, tuba-y soundtrack that gives me a certain pride in protecting my fair Arstotzka from these filthy, dangerous immigrants!)

But I don't like her face. Clunk!

"They're just video game characters, though," I hear you say. And that's the point! Papers, Please, even in its uncompleted beta form, with most of the story segments absent, functions as a beautiful simulation of how it feels when you stop treating people like people, and just as inconvenient, artificial things to be dealt with as quickly as possible. I can't wait to see what the final version can do.

CLUNK!

CLUNK CLUNK CLUNK CLUNK

Papers, Please is currently in beta, and can be found here. Release date for the full game is sometime this summer, and it'll cost REDACTED PLEASE PLAY THIS WEIRD LITTLE MINI-GAME TO LEARN GAME PRICE, ALL GLORY TO WONDERFUL ARSTOTZKA

Walking (Dead) With My Girlfriend Part 2: Less Choices, More Dying

The Girlfriend and I finished the second episode of Telltale's The Walking Dead last night, with the general agreement that, while still quite enjoyable, it was a step down from the first one. Elaborating on why would probably involve spoilers, which I'm striving to avoid with these posts, but I think there's a few points I can make before grousing at a bit more length about a fundamental problem I have with the games.

The biggest problem we had with TWD Episode 2 was that it made the illusion of choice that powers these games more obviously illusory, ironically by offering us more ostensible freedom. The first episode, which was focused on small locations and clear-cut dangers, constrained my possible 'safe' behaviors - the ones that wouldn't obviously get us eaten by zombies - and let us pick a few choices from what was left. The second episode asks much more general questions about which paths could or would be safer, but there's clearly no escape from the general flow of the narrative. Lee (the player character) makes several decisions that neither I or Shanna would, causing several moments where we were like people watching a movie, shouting "Don't go in there!" at the idiot protagonists. The episode clearly had a story it wanted to tell, but in telling it, it robbed us of a sense of agency. There are still plenty of choices to make in Episode Two, but the biggest ones (ie. 'Should we trust these people?') are taken out of our hands, and it makes the experience feel a lot more hollow.

 

Another problem we had (Shanna, especially), was a sense of being let down by the dialogue options in a way we hadn't been with the first episode. "Starved For Help" gets kind of dualistic, as you're pulled between factions in your group, and there (unsurprisingly) came a time when we were forced to choose sides. Afterward, during a conversation reflecting on that event, EVERY conversational choice said essentially the same thing - three different ways of denouncing the character we didn't side with. I guess you could see it as the game locking us in to supporting the decision we had made, but the fact is that none of those things were what we WANTED to say in that moment. It's another one of those times when the game failed to put us in Lee's shoes, and it breaks the sense of "What WOULD I do in these situations?" that makes the games so compelling.

That's not to say we disliked Episode Two. The plot was pleasantly twisty (if a little predictable), and most of the problems fell away as a climax pushed everything back into the tense, exciting "You have three seconds to choose or everyone dies, what do you do, WHAT DO YOU DO" sensation that we loved in Episode One. We'll definitely be back for the third.

 

I do have a complaint, though, about how the games handle something that game designers have struggling with for years - player death. It's probably not surprising that, in a game about a zombie apocalypse, the main character can die. I've died once in each episode (which, I'm not gonna lie, is a little embarrassing in front of your girlfriend), and each time the only thing that really gets killed is my sense of immersion in the game.

Hypothetically, death should be the worst thing that can happen in a game. You know, because it's... death. But in The Walking Dead, the moments where Lee passed away were some of the LEAST tense, because the consequences of it were so quickly reversed. You get a "YOU DIED" screen, and then time is rewound slightly and you get another chance. If I say something wrong in a conversation, it's a mis-step I might never recover from; if my throat is torn out, it's three button presses to get back on the right track.

But what's the alternative? Death erases your save file, Steel Battalion style? Unacceptable - nobody likes to have progress stolen from them. As gamers, we've always had to deal with the fact that, in life, death is the end, but in games, it can only be a setback, because we want to keep playing. Push a player too far, rob them of too much progress, and they'll just abuse savegames (if you let them) to avoid negative consequences completely. Take that away, and most of them will quit (the ones who don't are probably weirdos who play roguelikes, ugh).

 

If there's a solution to this, it's in exploiting the player's attachment to the other characters in the game. Instead of painlessly killing Lee, maybe every time he fails to extricate himself from mortal peril, one of the other characters is hurt saving him. Not killed - that would alter the story too much for the designers to keep the narrative under control - just hurt. Make them look more tired in cutscenes. Hell, maybe even build a sense of obligation between them and the player - "You're siding with HER after I was damn near murdered saving your ass?!" - that opens up new story possibilities or emotional connections.

If you're going to insist on having failable action sequences in your adventure game (and that's a debate, I think, for another time), they need to be invested with consequences that work WITH the adventure portions, not just alongside them. Make them part of the story, not just a quickly reverted sideshow.