Mass Relays, Magic Wands, and My Life as a Teenage Witch

It's my second week at Iris Academy. Things are going well so far; my roommates are nice, my magic classes are going well (even the ones taught by grumpy professor Totally-Not-Severus-Snape). But today, before class, all the freshman are lead to an assembly, where the senior class president addresses us and informs us that this week is Freshman Initiation.

"Fine," I think. A way to meet more students, find the beginning points for some relationships. Should be fun. Then an older boy approaches and claims me as "his" freshman, and I immediately bristle. It's not that he's got blue skin and wings; this is a magical school, after all, and I'm no racist. No, it's the way he talks. A mixture of dominance (technically in line with the whole hazing aspect of the Initiation) and conspiratoriality, a juxtaposition of barking orders and assurances that he's the only person I can trust. It feels, to me, like the opening salvos of something that could turn very unpleasant.

(Click on pictures to view them fullsize)

If I was actually a 15-year-old witch, maybe this line of bullshit would work on me. Luckily, I'm only pretending to be one (within the context of Magical Diary, a time management/visual novel game from Hanako Games). And my young witch, Lady Grantham, has absolutely no time for this manipulative crap. I refuse to take his hand to help me up, and when that provokes him into a commanding rage, I walk out, tell the professor I'm not participating in Initiation, and move on with my education. I never see him again, spending my year romancing the class troublemaker-with-a-heart-of-gold and trying to stay out of trouble with Not-Snape.

The choice to walk away from Initiation was, in terms of the game's structure, a huge one. The relationship with Damien (the boy in question) makes up a major portion of one of the game's paths (to the point where he stands prominently in the very center of the title screen). By washing my hands of the entire thing, I cut myself out of a large portion of content. So the question is: even with a successfully completed school year, can I be said to have "completed" Magical Diary if I HAVEN'T experienced Damien's path? I paid money for this game; am I cheating myself if I don't go back and play through as the kind of person who WOULD submit to Damien, if it means receiving more of the total story?

It's a problem inherent to any game in which the player makes meaningful choices - what about the road not taken? Part of the strength of games like the Mass Effect series is that they allow players to craft a world that's meaningfully "theirs" - my doofily good-natured, neck-bearded Paragon Commander Shepard has very little in common with your tough-as-nails, Earth supremacist Renegade FemShep - they have different backgrounds, different military careers, and they've made hundreds of different choices that have shaped the universe around them over the course of the games, pruning story branches and eliminating possiblities as they go. And this is exciting, because those choices are my primary means of interaction with the Mass Effect universe (combat being, essentially, a filler between dialogues, with no impact beyond "You got a Game Over/You didn't get a Game Over" on the plot), and the lasting consequences of those choices give the series a true sense of being reactive to the players (even if that reaction usually just takes the form of an e-mail in your inbox or a modifier to your War Resources). The game is taking my decisions seriously, and that means I'M more inclined to take them seriously.

But, on the other hand, decisions like this also add to a game's... *shudder*... Replay Value.

I came to hate the idea of Replay Value around the same time that I realized it's a nasty misnomer - when people use the phrase, they don't mean "How fun is this game to replay?" They mean "How many times do you have to play through similar iterations of this game to experience all of the available content?" The Mass Effect games are TERRIBLE if treated this way - most meaningful choices come at the end of long missions that play out exactly the same until the end, meaning you're receiving relatively little "new" content as you play through the same game multiple times. The first game, especially, shows more and more of its seams the more times you return to it, until the sight of Eden Prime or, God help me, the horrible, terrible, awful, really quite poorly designed Mako Tank sequences are enough to make me sigh and shut the game off, dreams of creating some cool new Shepard concept to play through dying in the face of tedium and very, very bad driving controls.

Magical Diary is less punishing in this regard - you can skip dialogue you've seen before, and the choices are diverse enough that a second playthrough offers a great deal of new material to explore. There's still that sense of spinning your wheels as you repeat the same introductory sequences over and over, though (and skipping dialogue tends to mute the emotional impact when I get to the new parts, diminishing the context they exist in). And in a way, it's worse, because the game has an achievement system that tracks various mutually exclusive story moments, meaning the game is actively incentivizing a complete exploration of all the choices available to me as a player. Which leads to another problem, one more fundamental to the way we play.

When I played as Lady Grantham (and Gabriel Shepard, and any number of other RPG heroes), I followed a simple rubric for my choices - I picked the ones that seemed "Right" to me. Essentially, I played the characters as though they WERE me - albeit me as a 15-year-old witch or a highly trained Space Badass. That's part of the appeal of choice-based games for me, seeing what I'd do in these fantastical situations and deep moral quandaries.*

But this system of choice is also extremely limited - there might be a little wiggle room in how I'd decide an issue, but most of my decisions (like walking away from Damien), were pretty clear. I could just play through the game as "Lady Grantham, except she made one huge decision differently," but it feels dishonest to me - it doesn't fit with the way the character acts in my head. So the choice is to either invent a new person to play as, one with fundamentally different choices and values from my own, or to make choices on a whim, simply attempting to find new outcomes with no concern for character consistency (there's something appealing about this idea, given that trying to figure out "What Lady Grantham would or would not do" is essentially me arguing with myself like a crazy person).

Both of these options are concerned with one of the harder-to-track components of choice-based games: Consistency. Real people are (generally speaking) consistent - they have control over themselves every waking minute of the day, and the ways they use that control add up to a stable identity. It's part of what makes them seem, you know, real. Game characters, on the other hand, only have moments of control every few minutes - usually when a dialogue choice is presented - and generally very little incentive to have those disparate choices jibe with each other (and there may even be incentives to act INconsistently - Shin Megami Tensei: Strange Journey comes to mind as a game where the neutral character alignment, which leads to the game's most positive ending, really just means alternately choosing between "Nice" and "Evil" choices to stay in the middle of the sliding morality scale). Most systems that try to address these mood-swing-prone characters are punitive in nature - a Mass Effect character, for instance, who vacillates between Paragon and Renegade responses will be locked out of high-level Paragon or Renegade dialogue options (usually the ones that have the greatest impact on the story). But most games, sadly, don't care about the issue at all.** If the player cares about consistency (and if you're trying to experience a story in good faith, you do), in most cases it's up to them to provide it.

To do that in Magical Diary (and the next few paragraphs follow a pattern I've established in many, many games that encourage replay to experience different choices), I need new criteria to make decisions with - ideally ones that lead to me becoming emotionally involved with Damien, since the goal of this second playthrough is to experience new content. So, in the interest of consistency, I decide this new character is as demure and lovestruck as I can make her within the choices presented to me, a sweet pushover who follows whatever orders she's given. I create a new girl, name her something nondescript, and start playing through the first several weeks of the game again, meekly acquiescing to whatever anyone says.

It feels fucking gross.

Worse than that, it feels fake. Maybe it's a failure in roleplaying on my part, but caring about the games I play, and the stories they tell, means I treat choices like they matter - and emotionally investing myself in obviously wrong choices makes me feel sick to my stomach. This isn't going to work (as usual - my Renegade Shepards always had a sappy tendency to pick more and more Paragon options the more uncomfortable I got with doing mean things to virtual people) - so I switch to Plan B: gaming the system.

I start making choices just to find out what the outcomes are. I intentionally limit emotional investment. I maintain 10 different save files in parallel, 10 witch-girls with the same name and incrementally different decisions. I'm not a role-player anymore, I'm a data miner. I'm not exploring one character's passage through a year at a magical school, I'm playing a video game where the goal is to find all of the content hidden within a matrix of choices.

In a way, it's fun, interesting. I'm learning a lot about the universe the game takes place in, and about the other characters. The only character I'm not learning about is the one I'm playing as, because she's not really a character at all. She's just a tool I use to make choices.

There's no grand point I'm driving toward here - play your games the way you want. I'm just recounting my personal experiences. No Shepard's ever mattered more to me, been as "real" to me, as the first one I saved the galaxy with. And I can't help wondering if I wouldn't have been happier letting Magical Diary be the singular adventure of one Lady Grantham, the prank-loving spitfire of Horse Hall. Because as it stands now, having sent Boring McNoname through a hundred different possible lives, no one more valuable than the next, it occurs to me that I've had a great deal of Replay, and precious little Value.




*One of my most moving gaming moments is from a choice in Mass Effect, actually. On the planet Noveria, you encounter the Rachni Queen, unintentional broodmother of the horde of mindless insectoid monsters you've been fighting throughout the level. The choice: Let her go, trusting her word that the slaughter was inadvertent, and that past wars were caused by miscommunication, not malice. Or kill her, ending the Rachni threat forever, at the expense of committing genocide on an entire sentient race.  If it sounds familiar, it's because the situation is an almost-direct lift from Orson Scott Card's novel Ender's Game, one of my very favorite books. (Card has become controversial in recent years for his less-than-tolerant stance on the morality of homosexuality, but Ender's Game, and its sequel, Speaker For The Dead, convey truly beautiful messages of compassion and humanism that have always resonated with me, even when their creator has failed to live up to those ideals.) Being presented with Ender's choice felt.. powerful to me, in a way very video games have managed to evoke. Sparing her made me feel, for a moment, really, actually happy.



** A few examples of this done right: Alpha Protocol (an adequate action RPG with an INCREDIBLE grasp of how to do choice-based consequences in a video game, I do not talk about this game enough, given my interests), boils all conversational choices down to three basic emotional stances (aggressive, professional, and suave), and then assigns the player an unseen reputation that subtly affects how people respond to them if they pick one option more often than the others. And Dragon Age 2, which uses a similar tracking system, except it uses it to determine which of three attitudes the player character uses in non-choice dialogues - brief asides, combat quotes, small things like that. It goes a long way toward making you feel like you're playing as a person, not just a choice-vehicle.

Some (Unprofessionally Speculative) Thoughts on Persona 4 Golden's New Social Link

Warning: I'm about to talk about something that, by necessity, requires significantly spoiling the video game Persona 4. As in, this is a mystery story, and I'm giving away the murderer. If you haven't played the game, and ever want to experience it the way you're meant to (and you should, it's excellent), read no further. Otherwise, meet me after the jump.

Writing By Me Over at Project: Ballad

I wrote another guest post for the writing portion of my friend Michael (aka the always followable @patchworkearth)'s comic, Project: Ballad. This particular piece is about games that employ deception to make the player question identity and the relationship between the player and the character (it meanders through Bioshock, Metal Gear, and the classic Interactive Fiction piece Spider & Web).

While you're there, be sure to bookmark and read the comic, which is now in full swing and is AWESOME. If you like the things I write, you'll like Project: Ballad - it uses the language of video games - and our relationship with them - to tell what's going to be an amazing story. Check it out.

Also, sorry it's so dusty around here, various illnesses and distractions have slowed my output. Should have something new for you (and by new, I mean an essay about a game that's a year old at this point) in a day or two.

The Best Lunch

On the western edge of Indiana there's a city that barely qualifies for the name. In its attitudes, its income, its ambitions, everything except its population, it's a town. Small-town Indiana, with all the initial whimsy and eventual dread that phrase inspires. I'm from there, not that it matters.

On a busy street in this barely-city, (Terre Haute, in case you're curious), there's a little brick building. Graffiti covers the walls, and the large block windows. The only decoration (other than that provided by vandals, I mean) is a large globe light next to the door. There is, definitively, no sign.

If the light is on, which it usually is if it's the early afternoon and it's not Sunday, feel free to walk inside. If you do so (you should, by the way), you will find these things:


1) Formica tables, some messily stacked with paper towels, books, magazines.

2) Maps, seemingly scavenged from abandoned schools, depicting various continents - some attached, haphazardly, to the ceiling.

3) A man.

If he is not waiting on customers, the man will greet you and welcome you to Harry and Bud's. He will make some small talk with you. He'll ask if you want still water, or carbonated. He'll ask you if you'd rather listen to classical or jazz.

And then he will ask you what you would like to eat. No menu will be offered.

I have no idea how wide his repertoire expands, though I imagine it's vast. But my recommendation is that you do what I did, and simply ask him to serve you whatever he cares to make. He will smile, ask if there's anything you can't or won't eat (mushrooms, in my case), and then, pausing to give you a choice of soups, he will disappear into the back.

You will sit, perhaps making idle conversation with a dining partner. You will hear noises from the kitchen, and smell wonderful things. And, after about half an hour, the man will reappear, soup in hand. And then he will bring you your bread (French style, delicious). And then he will bring you the meal he has chosen to make you.


Two plates, piled high with an incredible variety of food. I can offer you my menu, in the knowledge that yours will almost certainly be different, depending on his mood: Salmon cakes covered in sharp aioli. Tender, thinly sliced pork loin. Roasted asparagus. Eggplant torte. Savory crepes. Snow peas. Shrimp.

The man will offer you plates to move this treasure trove to for consumption, and, when they arrive, they will (if you are as lucky as I was) be covered in delicious gnocchi. You will realize, that in this tiny brick building in small-town Indiana, you have been served a five-course meal that would not look (or taste) out of place in a quality restaurant in one of the great cities of the world. And the man will stand there, calmly proud, and ask you if he can bring you anything else.

You will not finish the food (not if your stomach is even vaguely human, I mean), but this is no worry - you will be cheerfully offered boxes to ferry it back home. You will be laden down like a frontier explorer, except instead of hardtack or salted beef, your saddlebags will be full of flavorful, healthy, delicious wonders.

This is before you are offered dessert, mind you.


And when you have finished this meal (as much as your body can manage, that is), and after your boxes and boxes of succulent leftovers have been tied up in bags for you, the man will name his price. There is no "check," no itemized bill. Every meal costs the same.

$20 per person.

And, setting down the days of food you are leaving with, you will reach into your wallet and pay him gladly. If you're smart (and even barely understand the concept of gratitude), you will tip, and tip well. And then you will stagger out the door.

You will find yourself once again in Terre Haute. The people on the streets will be just as drab, just as beaten by life as they were when you went in. The building behind you will seem as unassuming and silent as before. But you will be buoyed by the knowledge that there are still secrets in the world worth knowing. Mysteries that reward the solver. And kind men and treasures hiding behind blank walls. The knowledge will, hopefully, be of some comfort.


The full stomach will probably help, too.

Improv.

My improv group, Ad Liberation, performed at the Indiana University College Comedy Festival this weekend, and had a pretty great time. We took video of the show, and I post it here on the understanding that you are in no way obligated to watch it, given that it is 30 minutes of recorded longform improv comedy. I enjoyed doing it, and like the shows we created, but I know it's not everyone's cup of tea (or box of spiders). [I'm the tall one with the unflattering beard.]

Real writing later this week. I'm tired.

Guest Post over on Project: Ballad

This is just to let people know that I wrote a guestpost about the way time passes in games for the blog of Michael Peterson and Kevin Czapiewski's upcoming webcomic Project: Ballad.

You can read it here, if you like it, drop me a comment on this post, or, even better, sign up for the site forums and let me know what you think.

While you're on the site, do yourself a favor and spend some time looking at the other stuff on there. If you like my writing, you'll certainly enjoy Michael's, too - he's done some great stuff on the way we explore the spaces we play in.

Plus, the comic proper starts on April 18 (my birthday, whoo!), and as someone who has read the first few pages of the script, I can say that it's going to be really, really great. Strongly recommend you check it out.

Off The Script: The Problem With Storytelling In Open-World Games

Niko Bellic quietly contemplates the futility of war, of the violent life he has chosen. He mourns the friends stolen from him by his enemies, the tragic losses he has accrued through violence and crime. In the end, his experiences have taught him only this: that the American dream is an illusion, impossible for anyone to achieve.

The next day, he steps out onto his balcony and fires indiscriminately at the streets below, trying to see how many cops he can get to follow him. He spends five minutes carefully throwing grenades, trying to get the angle just right to put one under a car. Then, he takes the ruined cars, shoves them into a big pile, and ramps his motorcycle over it.

Niko Bellic's a complicated guy. Which is to say, he's the protagonist of an open-world game.

"Open-world" games came to prominence with the adventures of one of Niko's predecessors in 2001's Grand Theft Auto III. Obviously, games (especially RPGs) have been presenting players with large worlds to explore for years, but GTA III was one of the first to allow us to interact with and explore a large 3D environment in real-time*.

I love open-world games. Love the freedom they allow me, love the ability to let my id run rampant, love the thrill of exploring beautiful, interesting worlds. I'll play them happily for hours. There's just one problem, and, for a nerd with my particular interests, it's a big one. Because the vast majority of open-world games are terrible at telling a story.

It comes down to a simple question: How do you effectively tell a controlled narrative when your game's entire philosophy is built around letting the player do what they want?

If you're Rockstar, and most of their ilk, the answer is Missions. Tightly scripted narrative missions, where your amazing game world becomes nothing more than the backdrop for a shooter (or driver or brawler) level. Where you go out of your way to curtail player freedom so that he or she can't "break" the flow of your narrative.

In case you couldn't tell, I don't care for scripted missions. They downplay the genre's strengths (freedom, exploration, player choice) and emphasize weaknesses (see: any Grand Theft Auto game that forces you to shoot for extended periods). Even when missions are well-designed or allow the player to do cool things, they emphasize what CAN'T be done during unscripted gameplay. Worse than that, they lead to scenarios like the one outlined above, putting the player's portrayal of the protagonist directly at odds with the designer's. In a novel, everything a character does is part of who they are - in Grand Theft Auto IV, the character's actions only "count" when the designers dictate them.

In essence, missions divide open-world games in two - there's the wild anarchy of the sandbox portions, where the player is given complete control of who their protagonist is and what he or she** does. And then there are the missions, where the designers tell the story THEY have chosen to tell, through cutscenes, required player actions, and scripted events. The protagonists of these two games share a skin and (usually) the same controls... but that's it. Instead of using their open worlds to tell a story, these games deliver the story as a separate gameplay experience.


Generally, when developers try to combat these problems, they do so by curtailing the freedom of the sandbox portions. This sounds bad, but it works surprisingly well at times. Rockstar Vancouver's Bully, which takes place at a boarding school, limits the amount of violence and destruction protagonist Jimmy Hopkins can mete out (both by punishing certain actions, and flatly disallowing others). By cutting off actions like violence against young children, Rockstar a) quiets moral watchdogs, b) establishes fundamental, playable aspects of Jimmy's character, and c) sets a tone for the game - one significantly lighter than that of their flagship series. Essentially, Rockstar uses Bully's limitations on freedom to enhance the storytelling by cutting off avenues the player could take it down if given more choice.


This can be taken too far, of course - there's a point of limitation where the question becomes "Why did we build an open world in the first place?" Case in point - Team Bondi's fascinating-but-flawed L.A. Noire. The game features a beautiful, vibrant recreation of 1940s Los Angeles - and precious little to do in it. The player's entire time in the sandbox portions of the game is spent driving to locations related to cases, or answering calls (which generally lead to ill-advised shooter segments). The player is controlling a by-the-book L.A. detective - one so by the book, it leaves no room for freedom or fun. The game is all mission, no sandbox, an open-world in name only.


Developers have taken the balance to the other extreme, too. One of my favorite open-world games, Crackdown, developed by Realtime Worlds, forgoes missions entirely. Instead, the player is given a set of objectives (read: people) to accomplish (read: kill). Optional objectives are available to make these goals easier to achieve, and the game strongly suggests an order to follow to make things easier, but most of the game's choices are firmly in the player's hands. There is no scripting (and, unfortuantely, precious little story). The game feels, in many ways, like a trial run (albeit an extremely fun one) for a more interesting game, one where the player's choice of what areas of the world to explore and engage with informs the story***.


Lastly, there are those open-world games that embrace the destructive anarchy of player freedom, that tune their narratives to work synergistically with the chaos and mayhem the average player unleashes when given the chance. First and foremost among these are the Saints Row games, whose plots and missions strive to be crazier and more over-the-top than the stunts and nonsense that the players get up to when left to their own devices. Unlike Niko Bellic, there is no disconnect between the behavior of Saints Row: The Third's protagonist, "The Boss," in scripted missions or open sandbox play - he (or she, or it) is always an energetically sociopathic mass-murderer.


Obviously, this approach limits the kinds of stories that can be told - but it HAS been used to great effect to tell interesting stories about bad people. Far Cry 2, for instance, uses player freedom to force you into the shoes of a potentially amoral mercenary in war-torn Africa. If your character is a heartless killer, it's because YOU chose to play him that way. By allowing the player to be a monster, it more effectively throws the consequences of monstrous behavior in the player's face in a way that would be significantly less interesting in a more scripted game.

Video games allow the player's choices to affect the course of the story in ways unprecedented by other formats. Open-world games in particular embrace freedom. I look forward to seeing games utilize that freedom in the way they tell their narrative, instead of confining it to the sandbox.




*I'm glossing over a lot of games here, because GTA III was the first game to pull this off successfully on a console - opening the genre to the vast majority of players. Bethesda, for instance, published Daggerfall, which contains a huuuuuuge (and mostly featureless) open-world in 1996, and the very weird Terminator (described, entertainingly as always, by PC Gamer columnist Richard Corbett here) in 1990.



**I wracked my memory for examples of female sandbox game protagonists, but the pickings were pretty slim. The only ones that come to mind are (optionally) The Boss in the second and third Saints Row games, and Jade from Beyond Good and Evil****. If I'm leaving anyone out, shoot me an e-mail or leave me a comment.



***The S.T.A.L.K.E.R. games generally also fall under this category*****, which made me wonder... Why are so many open-world games set in third-person? If I had to guess, I'd assume it has to do with the genre's console roots (at least as it's thought of today), and the discomfort in previous console generations with first-person views. But there also might be the fact that sandbox games emphasize exploration, and it's easier, I think, to engage with environments if you can see the figure you're moving through them. Just a random thought.



****EDIT: Twitter chum @patchworkearth, who posts excellent game criticism at the site for his soon-to-be-published, certain-to-be-awesome web comic Project: Ballad, pointed out quite rightly that Beyond Good and Evil hews much more closely to the Zelda model than the GTA one. Which begs the question: is a game that features a large, open, explorable world, with the player funneled into meticulously designed dungeons, a "sandbox" game? Or does the term refer more specifically (at least, in the methods I've been using in this article) to the urban exploration games that descend from Grand Theft Auto III? (Bonus reading: The slightly-surprising Wikipedia page for "Grand Theft Auto clone").



*****Okay, maybe I'm stretching a little bit here to include S.T.A.L.K.E.R., since they break the game's world up into individual zones. But I think they still count, since they're non-linear real-time 3D games based on exploring areas. Which.. I'm just going to keep expanding this genre until it includes Skyrim. And Super Mario Galaxy. And everything, ever. Then, and only then, will I be free.

But, seriously, the goal of this essay was to look at how you handle telling a story in a genre built around non-linearity. If I strayed from dead center of that topic to look at how other games handled the problems, or how they reflect on the sandbox genre... I can live with that.