Scribblin' around - Interconnected toolsets and playing while falling asleep

Certain games have the addictive quality of influencing your thoughts when you're not even playing them. Scribblenauts does this amazingly; having begun to play it, I've often been falling asleep, shaving in the morning, or doing any other mundane thing while running through problematic levels in my mind, trying different options. Sometimes I listen to a song and hear a noun that I think can be useful in the game, or think of using an object I walk by in real life.

There are two elements at play here I think: first, of course, the unique innovation in Scribblenauts, the ability to call up vast amounts of objects, and honestly - it's easier to be surprised by what it has than to stump it. But there's also something else, the fact that your tool-set is so clear and intuitive. The logic governing the AI is quite simple, pretty much [object] - fears/consumes/attacks/protects/follows/steals - [object]. Then there are a few other simple interactions like climb, ride, shoot, use and the ability to fly. Thanks to the brilliant hierarchical Objectnaut engine, the 5th Cell team was able to efficiently populate and interlink all these objects and actors so that adding a vampire could be as simple as adding a humanoid, giving it some art, flight, aggression towards all and fear of garlic. For instance.

Now, an immediate counterpoint to what I just said is that such an approach decreases the uniqueness and depth of individual elements, since they are all merely different combinations of the same base components. Well, that's true. Of course programming and animating unique jumps for each of your animal races will be more flashy than using the same jump logic/animation on different rigs. But while this approach can provide a very polished experience, detailed and expressive, I think its also a conscious choice to guide the player, rather than offer them freedom. A fine option, but for the point I'm making I want to focus on the latter option, creative choice, and consequent emergence.
I touched on emergence in my previous article about trigger-whoa mechanics and interacting with systems like physics and AI. Returning to Scribblenauts, there's a lot of that going on. A passable physics engine ensures things fall and roll well enough, and the aforementioned AI rules can cause real chaos when you fill the screen with living things. On top of all this, there's your vast amount of choice, and that's the kicker: for any given scenario, I'd wager there are objects that you can write which would interact with each and every different parameter of your situation.

And that's the core, really - the fact that everything is interconnected. Bad game design will leave loose ends, cool but one-off mechanics, unbalanced events requiring more fuel than exists, things like that. Good design brings it all together, makes the tokens you want advance your progression, enabling you to fuel your abilities and expand them to get more tokens and repeat the cycle, and so on. It's about creating positive feedback loops, and never letting the player down through frustrating inability on the game's part to deliver.

This isn't anything new, just basic game design. It's easily forgotten though, especially as you make a game bigger an deeper. Which is understandable, really - the more systems, bits and pieces you've got in your game, the harder it is to make them interlock neatly. What happens when the cool fire gun is perfect for gameplay with its spread and damage over time but the ability to set things on fire in any realistic way would break the balance completely in your realistic ice world? Ok, so make "magic purple non-fire". Sure, but then what's your ammo? Can't be oil or anything realistic, so what?
See my point? You either accept just the enemy burns but nothing else, or that the fire becomes overpowered, or that you make immersion a little harder by breaking realism. So admittedly, my example is somewhat exaggerated, and I can think of a few options around it, but that's the essence of it - the fact that the more there is, the more you need to piece together.

So I think this makes a strong case for the type of design and development approach that aims low with the system count and high with the options to interact with it. Physics and simple predator/prey dynamics, with tons of physics and manipulation abilities, or AI and motion control, with lots of interesting ways to influence AI with your gestures. And these are those games that, like I was saying, keep you running their options. RTS games can do this a lot, although they have become increasingly complex in their number of subsystems, and therefore harder to simulate in your mind. Other games that share ideas with Scribblenauts like Little Big Planet, Crayon Physics with their editors (software and drawing) and variety of choices to interact with simple physics. More traditional block and maze type puzzle games, of course, but those can often get boring to think about with their typical handful of ways to interact - more fun to play.

The converse of this is of course the linear mega-game with every kind of system and gameplay in it, giving you key moments and very specific ways of interacting with things. Very often these games will have far too many systems, too much happening too fast, for you to even hope to simulate them mentally. Bioshock comes to mind as an exception, a game with an eco-system that you understood somewhat once you learned it, and became able to manipulate quite well. I at least relished my convoluted traps for those Big Daddies and Splicers, exploiting both their alliances and animosities as well as their various weaknesses, but I thought on my feet, as events happened. Planning skating runs in Tony Hawk as well, for example, or running through well-practiced tracks in Burnout with all its shortcuts. For those latter examples, I think the depth of your interactions (from speed to tricks and drifting) counts as a strong diversity of ways to interact with the few game systems at play.

One particular development implication that comes to mind is that diverse and balanced interactions can often require more pre-production in the underlying infra-structure than the more immediate one-off counterparts - these can just be built sort of in order. One option has the risk of forcing you to spend too much time and effort before you've even got a product and with the other you may end up with a product that's a bloated chain of disconnected elements; so it's not like there's a better one. But I do think, like everything in life, that projects that that longer to really start are always less appealing than those that throw you right in.

And above all, I commend those people who would try something new, something that at first glance may be brushed off as too expensive/difficult, too simple or without enough blockbuster value. Those that try to build something new, and focus on richness and depth, rather than size and breadth. It's a lesson I've tried to incorporate in all my designs, no matter how commercial, that principle of balanced interconnected dynamics rather than lists of moves/events, and hope to see more of in the future. The empowerment of the player, the ability to make them feel, well, godlike, while playing will always be of the finest goals in game design, because with empowerment comes the ability for great challenge, and the ability to overcome this can lead to inner strength, confidence and self-improvement.

And I mean, really: what other game allows you to summon up God, the Devil and Death, tame a dragon with Cupid's arrow and ride it, wearing a full set of armor and lance, to attack the Grim Reaper himself? Oh, and Longcat along with alter-ego Tacgnol. :D

1.5 Player Games - Bonding with AI

Humans beings are social by nature, so much so that isolation from any living thing can lead to insanity. Even if we don't have other people around, we keep pets, bond and share experiences with them. I think we recognize and bond with sentient beings faster than anything else because that's absolutely the best approach for survival - it was co-operative survival that motivated single function amoebas to partner up and create multi-cellular organisms, after all.

In games though, until more or less recently, you've been playing alone. Like always, I think you can trace much of this limitation to lacking technology: limited AI resources, processing power for complex patterns, memory budget for additional avatar-level of detail entities, etc. There were some clever solutions taken over these years, however, to bypass these hurdles. Navi, your guiding fairy in Zelda games, comes to mind, particularly once the series moved to 3D with (masterpiece) Ocarina of Time.

Navi is a fairy that floats around you as Link in the Zelda games. She's a very smart little piece of game and character design, too. She:

- Points out your main objective, keeping you on track and adding atmosphere with a little comment (no abstracted mission arrow or the like bringing you out of the immersion)

- Highlights objects of interest in the environment (again eschewing abstractions like twinkles and indicators)

- Makes chatter with you and others (advances the story and creates mood)

- Talks about and remembers Link's solitary quests  (allowing the story to have a mute protagonist going on adventures but still providing a way to communicate these experiences within the logic of the world)

- Is a small, shining white glow with beating wings (was cheap in terms of memory, requires no animation/rigging,)

- Has no independent AI, responding only to contextual environmental prompts and scripted events.

Navi is one of the earliest game companion experiences that I remember stuck with me. Simple though her behavior was, it was plausible enough that she would fly over to doors, switches and items when I approached them. I giggled at some of her comments, and was thankful she was able to mention my exploits for me. She was always there as I rode through Hyrule on Epona (another lesser, but still great companion - transport with personality) or on foot. She reminded me of everything that was going on, a living piece of the story traveling with me. The fact that I can't help attributing life and using a female pronoun only underscores how effective the immersion was.

I remember a fantastic journey with HK-47, the blood thirsty droid team-mate in BioWare's excellent Knights of the Old Republic. Having chosen the dark side (and I have yet to replay that as light side), I was slaughtering left or right, shooting and slicing before asking questions. And HK-47 was there all the time, giggling as only a droid can and getting way too excited over spilling blood. And remember, this was a game championing the element of player choice, offering the power to choose your own story arc into the light or dark side (or somewhere in between). HK was a wonderful reinforcement of all the choices I had made in my evil Sith persona, and an incredible contribution to the feeling that I was truly taking actions that affected my world (and not just going down an option tree). I remember saving and then re-loading a couple of times to make some light side choices, and HK was there, fittingly disapproving at my meaty, flesh-bag merciful tendencies. He made me feel guilty (I kid you not!) for betraying the darkness, and I hurriedly re-loaded, back to the safety of my unflinching brutality.

The Fable series has also tried very notably to offer the player choice and a sense of consequence in the world, right down to the cheering or jeering of townspeople as you walk by. Fable II famously introduced the Dog. Your pet. Loyal to the end, no matter how you treat it. A direct reflection of your personality as it runs around, independent. Tender and playful, or vicious and mean. Visually evolving to reflect your growth also. But it was more than a story element. Bringing all the companionship of constant presence while wandering, it was also alive, sometimes running off on its own accord, getting into fights, playing. It came to you when it got hurt, and (in my good playthrough) reveled when you gave it attention. It was also an aid in gameplay, fighting (with evolving skills like you), digging for items; it made a single-player game feel like a fantasy journey with a real canine companion. And the opportunity was definitely not missed to use your attachment to the dog in the story development, forcing some heart-wrenching moments and choices.

Atlas in Bioshock, one of the recent years' greatest tours de force. No, he wasn't a gameplay element - but to me it was such brilliant story-telling that it affected the way I played the rest of the game. I think the story was real art, and discovery of the truth about Atlas so profoundly shocking that it changed the way I played the game - there was such a deep sense of betrayal that it spilled over into a viciousness as I killed, I was more hurried, admittedly clouded sometimes with anger. I didn't want to finish the game - I wanted to kill Frank Fontaine.

I was playing Doom Resurrection on my iPhone the other day - in a game all about clever re-use and high-end feel solutions (rail shooter allowed to have incredible graphics due to the simplicity of the gameplay) you've got a droid companion who not only feeds story to you, but also contributes to pacing, which in my opinion is the toughest thing to get right in rail sequences. It does things like open doors with blow torch, requiring you to defend it while cutting, occasionally looking back to check the progress. Nice.

Chacha, the companion in Monster Hunter Tri, is another one I'm having fun with: in a game completely about solitary hunting (or with other human hunters), Chacha is great company with his little dances and comments, helping a lot in gameplay also by distracting monsters, gathering some items on his own, and even doing a bit of damage. Since you can assign different combinations of dances (support abilities) and masks (stats), you've got a nice combination of user development in an RPG system and quite a bit of spirited and fitting cheerfulness.

I love single player adventures, particularly the grand, epic kind  (just made me remember Wander and his relationship with Aro in Shadow of the Colossus), and I think that the inclusion of these companion elements has been responsible for some deeply touching (and commercially successful) game experiences; I see only a bright future ahead as we experiment with artificial sentience and the illusion of it. Although much can be said about its limitations, I can't help but feel a thrill when seeing something like the Milo demo for Project Natal. If the best points of that concept are realized, is that not one of the greatest dreams for game immersion? The next step is logical, bringing a highly responsive AI out of a "safe" space and into a dynamic, real-time world, where not only does he respond to you, but so much more.

I do like to play devil's advocate, and I'll mention there's also a great space and argument for the true solitary journey, but I can't help but deny that hearing about the idea in a game always gets me excited, like in the upcoming Old Republic MMO. Like in KOTOR, but this companion lives with you in a potentially endless MMO game world. All I can think of is the stories that it can tell, how brilliant that is for bringing single-player consequence into the shared world of an MMO.

1.5 Player Game came to mind for a title because it suggests the feeling I've had that I'm playing with someone else, not alone. It's never the same (oh how I love my local co-op games, sitting on the couch together), but it can do something else: provide an entity from and consistent with the game world, and, if written and made well, something you can relate and bond with. Almost, but not quite, another player.


Is it a sign of an age of digital decadence, finding companionsip in the alienation of an electronic construct? I'm sure it can be taken to sad (and comical) extremes, but the point is that video games can create worlds and experiences impossible otherwise - and your deepest and most touching interactions will always be with those living, breathing inhabitants of these fantasies. Specially if they walk by your side.