So I tried to cover something I thought would be helpful to the students very specifically, given the program’s focus on AI and deeper interactive systems. Over the years I’ve focused a lot on accessibility in various forms in what I was working on, and none are more tricky than trying to design accessible, unique AI gameplay. There’s lots of lessons from other areas to apply there, especially the part where I talk about dramatic systems design (mainly on Skulls of the Shogun), which I hope to talk about more in the future.

Turn on the notes view while looking at the slides to see  pretty much most of the talk content.

You can also check out the video.

What does all this mean for the game industry overall, not to mention indie developers? Basically every single news piece on these trends is the most hyperbolic thing ever, that each single trend is going to change the entire industry in its favor. The exception is the occasional article with similar bombast, but ending with a single question whether all it is bullshit. Well it is, but it’s difficult to see past all the hot air and try to figure out where trends are actually going.

The real implications of F2P

Paul over at Mode 7 Games has put up a succinct rebuttal to a particular pro-F2P piece by Nicholas Lovell. That pretty much says it all.

The myth of the long tail

The idea that sales via digital distribution will magically continue longer before they die out, has died out itself. Turns out with more access to distribution, there are more titles – who knew? Managing a product’s sales lifespan is solely a matter of constructing a narrative – sales, bundles, new content/updates, and the holy grail of PR narratives, the look-how-crazy-successful-we’ve-become-thereby-making-us-more-successful (ie. Minecraft). If you don’t have a plan for what will keep your game newsworthy post launch, expect sales to die out per normal.

The myth of simultaneous release

Most publishers we talked to trying to sign Skulls of the Shogun for console publishing needed simultaneous release on XBLA/PSN (aside from platform owners, obv). That’s how we capitalize on the marketing expenditure and awareness at once, they say. Only they don’t do any marketing, and it’s not how you build awareness. Given the number of platforms available, taking even a small game like ours to simultaneous release would grow us to a scale that’s quickly unsupportable.

More importantly, awareness is built over time. A successful product being ported to a new platform, with possibly new content, is a new peak in your PR narrative. Popcap basically defined this with Plants vs. Zombies – each new platform sells even more than the last.

This notion that you have to capitalize on the awareness that comes from simultaneous launch is built on an assumption at the core of most traditional game publishers – your game will suck and therefore you want as many people to buy it before they find out it sucks. If you actually have a good game, delaying release to fit your resources actually makes more sense, since it simply means more people will have heard about it by the time it comes out. The myth’s not dead yet, but I can only hope it will be sooner rather than later.

Curated platforms aren’t a bad thing

As a platform owner, you have one concern – building an economically feasible environment for developers to make games, which in turn is what attracts your audience, which is what makes you money. Curating the platform, picking the highest quality games (assuming you are capable of it), is the fastest way to do so.

The iPhone is only now becoming an environment where you have a reasonable chance of making your money back, for a very small development budget. XBLA reached that point much sooner in its lifecycle, for this reason. However much you want to bitch about “closed” platforms, they often have corresponding advantages as well.

As an indie developer, given the odds against you, you’ve got to consider what your chances are on each target platform. If you want to shoot for a riskier one, go ahead, but you’ve got to manage your costs along with that risk.

The browser as platform

Some days I fantasize about HTML5 being a magical genie that lets you take your game from platform to platform, only as difficult as the actual hardware interfaces allow (ie. touch vs. controller vs. mouse). Today, however, that is a joke. The speed at which most browsers deal with HTML5 is laughable and completely implausible for game development. I’d also like to imagine browser makers will optimize for HTML5, but the effort for them all to do so still will make this infeasible for some time. Unless someone makes a high performance browser specifically focused on games…

The return of your favorite phrase, next-gen

Microsoft, Sony, EA, and other third party publishers, need a new console like they need a hole in the head. The exception to this is Nintendo, who will make money on its hardware, having waited several years to launch the now-comparable WiiU.

Third party publishers will support it in the sense that it allows them to port games, with some tacked on features to take advantage of the controller. None of them can afford to do the R&D to actually to do cool multiplayer gameplay with the multiple screens, sadly. But I can’t even imagine official announcements of a new console next year. Perhaps rumblings of developers getting kits, but no substantive info. 2014, 2015 we might see one. Microsoft is ahead here, since they will no doubt use the same code base, spruced up a bit for new tech. When Nintendo says, no really we get digital distribution and

online this time, expect it to be improved but still fall far short of anything you’d really want. With way more games at a lower price and comparable graphics minus the headache inducing 3D, the iPhone’s not a competitor to the 3DS, donchaknow.

Steam vs. 100

I’ve lost count of the small companies trying to create browser-based competitors to Steam (in the sense that they’re PC/Mac digital distro marketplaces for games, usually run with a browser plugin based on WebGL or proprietary tech). When the first bullet point in your required steps to success as a business is “reach feature parity with the competitor that’s several orders of magnitude larger than us now”… Your outlook’s not good.

Not that there isn’t room to compete with Steam, but doing everything it does in the browser is not actually competing – if you care about games on your PC today you use Steam. Going to a different location, the browser, isn’t automatically going to open up a new audience because because it doesn’t offer anything different to the user’s experience – unlike, say, the social graph of Facebook.

The multiplatform app store

This one’s a no brainer, although it will be a matter of some time before an existing platform owner fully realizes the easiest way to get an edge in distribution is to take their brand to more hardware – If I know Steam is great for PC games, and Steam is on PS3 now, I’m going to go there as a consumer looking for quality content & deals. Reduce the barriers for people looking for your brand on any hardware, and you immediately have an edge over everybody.

The kingmakers

Despite everyone’s hopes that digital distribution would remove the role of gatekeepers for games or other media, there they are, still flourishing. It’s easier to get your game out there, but that means more games, which means people want to have trusted sources to shop for them. For every major digital marketplace, success is still defined by being featured on the storefront.

I don’t understand why any of the major marketplaces haven’t pushed on personal recommendations in the same way sites like Amazon & Netflix have. Well, I kinda do in the sense I know Apple does care if their 30% comes from $1 fart app or $1 game, but their not thinking of how to increase their total overall sales. Personalized storefronts and weighted ratings from friends. One platform that is heavily focused on this front, as well as indie games, is IndieCity. If they manage to achieve everything they set out to do, I expect them to do very well.

The slow death of free to play Facebook games

As the number of companies entering the space increases, with only Zynga and a few others at the critical mass to post meaningful numbers, the economic viability of the platform goes down statistically (less chance you will succeed in the larger market). Yet the bar for overall game polish is going up, slowly but surely, as is the cost. Yeah, free to play may drive design of the past and next few years, just like the nature & business model of arcades drove game design in the 70′s. Only we moved away from that and broadened our audience by broadening the types of experiences games offered.

The birth of single-purchase Facebook games

As the cost to compete with Zynga rises, some small scrappy company will innovate by providing a smaller base of users a nag-free *experience* completely different than the obsessive compulsive disorder enducing Skinner boxes that are available now. At the right size and price point, along with a trial experience (so not free to play as in Zynga, but free to play as in ID), a few success stories or two will change the news narrative, although perhaps have little impact on Zynga’s bottom line. And what was old will be new again. Not for a while though (maybe 2013).

The awkward slow death of gamification

When a hoard of VCs jump on a topic that’s actually very difficult to execute well, and expect immediate stellar results, the inevitable failure causes their attention to wane. See also MMO’s, circa 2005-6. That’s not to say you’ll stop seeing games invade other design efforts, but that’s because this is the century of our interactive medium, and not because a legion of thirty something douchebags who were millionaires by 24 think they can make more millions in the space of a year. Good riddance. RIP Gamification, 2009-2013.

In the good-for-me category

As major disc releases from traditional publishers drop dramatically, expect XBLA/PSN sales to shoot up dramatically as well. Instead of a hit XBLA game selling 500k, expect a million, in a much shorter timeframe (by 2013). While XBLA/PSN releases are increasing, it’s not nearly at the rate disc games are decreasing.

Traditional publishers will continue to not get digital distribution – the EA store? More like the EA snore. Some will instead pursue free to play Facebook games, but few will increase investment in XBLA/PSN games (a possible exemption here is Warner Brothers Interactive, publishing Bastion, and Sony & MS, again, obv). More room for small teams & creative games in those spaces, then, which is also great. I wasn’t so solid on this when Battlefield 1942 came out and it did phenomenally, but EA hasn’t followed up with anything to capitalize or stemming from that success (so it’s possible they spent too much money on it and ran away). However mid-sized developers will continue to turn to digital distribution, following Double Fine’s lead. Just god help you if you come out the same week as a Double Fine game.

XBLIG rising up

Till now the platform hasn’t been viable, with several of the most successful devs opting out and moving to other platforms. However the slow but sure increase in quality of games on XBLIG will draw users to it inevitably. Expect next year to be a banner year for the platform, as the XBLIG+Steam combo becomes the lowest-fuss method of getting your game on console and PC (as Robert Boyd/Zeboyd Games is pioneering now). By 2013 it will become a common indie strategy to release episodically on XBLIG and either do the same or bundle episodes together on Steam (given the silly price cap on XBLIG – the single best thing MS can do for the platform is to up that to $15 or at least $10).

Motion control

It will continue to exist. And not be crazy successful again but still hang around with its existing audience.

Streaming games – Onlive vs Gaikai

Regardless of the actual neato factor to this technology, Onlive is trying to compete with Steam by offering digital distribution for games. Like the hundred or so start-ups trying to create a platform that competes with Steam, it’s not just an uphill battle, it’s an up-mountain battle. Gaikai plans to focus on business like Walmart and let them stream demos of games, a completely new market, so I expect them to win out.

The high end market on tablets

While THQ’s Danny Bilson may be on drugs for thinking a $40 price point will work, $15 dollars hits a space for a market already willing to adopt pricey tech for a new experience. That price point also gives devs a fair amount of budget breathing room to make something cool. Any day now people will figure this out, it just takes somebody with the grit to charge $15 for a good iPad game.

Cross platform play

Sony’s got the Vita + PS3, Microsoft has Xbox + Winphone 7 (and PC…?). While imaging worlds of asymmetric, asynchronous play is a designer’s wet dream, no major publisher is willing to put the money into the design research to do it. No large team is going be capable of innovating at the right speed & cost.

And as for opening up really interesting asymmetric play options, unfortunately this basically means building up a large multiplayer base on every platform, something incredibly difficult for an indie to (as there are major difficulties to do that with MP and a small team on just one platform). It’s cool for sure, but it will be several years and possibly another set of hardware before the potential is fully realized.

What does it meeeeeaaaan?

As an indie, you’re in a good spot if you’re planning to take advantage of one of those gaps/opportunities. Since the timing of those windows is crucial for a small team, you’ll need a fallback or two if it doesn’t work out. But with so many options, the hard part is just picking a couple that have a reasonable chance of success. You can’t just consider the biggest possible success you can obtain on a platform, but the odds that you will reach a level where you can stably afford rent.

At a time when game designers were still too timid and uneducated as artists, it was a groundbreaking framework geared towards helping designers understand the artistic power they held. We have thankfully have come a long way in those 10 years, which have seen the rise of art-games and in general a wider spectrum of videogames.

A decade ago most designers still pined for the violent cinematic opulence of Arnold Schwarzenegger movies (if they pine for film techniques now, it’s more often those that convey empathy, not those that showcase explosions better). The notion that mechanics could be driven by aesthetics and affect them was novel to many, but 10 years later and MDA is still our prevailing theoretical model.

It’s not so much that there are problems with elements of the framework, it’s more that its incompleteness and the things it does not discuss for purposes of abstract simplification have become more and more apparent over time. Using MDA to teach videogame design is a bit like trying to teach someone to be a great conversationalist by explaining that words make up sentences, and you should choose your words based on what you want to say.

MDA will always have an important place in the historical context of game design, and in teaching introductory game design – after all, to people who don’t understand language, you do in fact have to first explain that words form sentences before you get anywhere.

MDA has become the poster-boy (to assign a gender to a theoretical model) of videogames rebound-relationship from film, board games. For all the criticism heaped upon designers who undiscernedly apply film’s techniques to games, there is little seemingly left for those who hoist board game design conventions onto videogames. Don’t get me wrong, I share the former disdain, I just have a problem with any uncritical need for any other medium’s fundamental strengths being forced on top of a videogame. And we all know whoever disdains the most WINS.

My chief criticism of MDA is that it completely fails to account for player feedback and modeling of the mechanics. This is trivial for board games where player state is reinforced through the board and tokens. In running a any sort of simulation at 30+ FPS, turns out there’s often a lot more to managing what the player knows. It considers how both players and designers interface through each direction through M, D, and A, but lacks critical abstractions as to how player modeling of a mechanic can cause it’s failure or success, and therefore the failure and success of any dynamics.

This is crucial from a critical standpoint and a creative one. Most games fail not because their mechanics were somehow unaligned with their aesthetics, they typically never even get the luxury of failing that way. When a game doesn’t work most often it’s because the player can not understand what they need to or can do, how they can do it, or why they need to. This information has an asethetic component in its presentation, and there’s some aesthetic choice in how much of this you reveal and when, but at its core it’s predominantly an information management problem.

Case in point: the original Black & White. A fantastic idea whose primary flaw was that the player rarely understood what and how they were teaching their creature. So achieving goals (explicit or self-directed) became far too difficult. To solve this problem, you could imagine cartoony thought bubbles over the creature’s head showing in animated form what it learned and which action triggered the learning.

This information is not mechanical at all – there are no rules directly associated with it. Although it is triggered by them, it is not a mechanic in and of itself. You could say it was part of the teaching mechanic, but mechanics in MDA are just rules, and have no informational component. There is no part of the framework that is concerned with how the player is modeling systems in their head as they learn them.

From a creative standpoint, working on any videogame that utilizes any kind of systemic depth, problems with how the player perceives those systems are how you spend most of your time. Certainly I do. Look at something like Skulls of the Shogun. If you can get the player to understand the systems  then you can address its flaws and keep them engaged, but if you can’t even achieve that it’s hopeless. Yes, you can change the system to reduce its complexity to the player, and we all now know how Sid Meier achieved this with the combat odds in Civilization, but that’s shirking away from any sort of depth in games, which I can’t abide by and there must be alternatives to.

My other complaints of MDA are related. Most troubling, dynamics become an entirely hand waving affair (which I directly relate to most videogames moving away from any sort of interesting systems design, well, that and a perverse fetishism of Super Mario 3 and it’s ilk). There is also no conception of time in the model. Sure, you could say using a rule for 30 seconds would be a different mechanic than using that rule for 15 seconds, but that’s missing the point. Even the slightest adjustments in timing can drastically affect how much the player engages with a game – that’s when it’s apparent it needs to be a first-order concept in your model.

Uncoincidentally, board games have little to no conception of time. Players always take turns, and time is always suspended. Even with the case of time limits, it’s not as if the passage of one second has any more or less meaning mechanically than the passage of another. Although as an aside, if anyone knows of any realtime board games, I’d be fascinated to hear about them.

Time is a crucial component to both the experience and system design of videogames. It is infused with them at every level, from the the smallest to the highest level mechanics. Fractions of a second of an animation can make the difference between responsiveness and sluggishness. They make the difference between an action you can see, understand, predict, and model, or one you can’t possibly notice.

Creating interesting dynamics through system design (in my mind) involves defining the types of events your systems create or the ones you want them to create, and applying positive and negative feedback systems until they happen at times that meet your aesthetic goals. MDA involves the notion of using positive and negative feedback to speed up/slow down systems, but includes no detailed notion for determining how fast or slow they are impacts the aesthetics.

One part of my own loosely defined conceptual framework for videogame design involves considering tiered player decisions over time. What kind of decisions will the player be making every 5-10 seconds? Every 15-20 seconds? 30-40 seconds? Every 1-2 minutes? And so on. Not every game must have meaningful decisions at every tier along the way (although if it doesn’t have any it’s probably pretentious). Crafting the player’s agency over time is crucial to the types of experiences I’d like to create anyway, a process which has been given little critical thought (although we at least have some terminology).

Any conceptual framework will be forced to remove elements from abstraction, and so will only ever be fit for analyzing/creating some subset of games. Those lacking abstractions, though, influence everyone who uses and studies the approach – they adapt those blindsides as well, to some extent. Sadly I think most people who would be at all interested in proposing a more complex conceptual model are still concerned with a dire pressing need of making more interesting games.

But will students be hampered by existing models such that we’re hurting ourselves in the future if we rely on it too heavily in curricula? Certainly, it has its place, but it is a small introductory place focused partially on the past, which is why it is so helpful a jumping off point. It’s just nobody’s really jumped.

Beyond all this, there’s a more worrying specter – the fact that even with any problems, our primary formal conceptual framework for game design still gets completely ignored by those claiming to be students of game design – Gamification.org’s wiki on Game Mechanics lists 24 things, 0 of which are actually game mechanics (if I’m kind maybe one or two are, eg. you could paraphrase “levels” as “if you perform x you will increase your level” which could loosely be seen as a rule).

We obviously need to be doing more to communicate these types of frameworks to those that pretend to be invested in game design, such that they don’t negatively impact our own work. That must include a deeper discussion on what are models are missing, how they could change, and if/why they need to, even if we need to agree to disagree.

Each time (GDC, Boston Gameloop) I’d attend a panel/roundtable on diversity in games, I’d feel like shooting myself. A bunch of otherwise intelligent people sitting around yet running in circles. Do we need to outreach to more diverse groups for them to understand games and go into game development, or do we need to make games that appeal to more diverse audiences first?  We can’t possibly make those games without more diverse developers? How could we attract them first?

Chicken, or egg?

Fuck me. As someone interested in pursuing the representation of characters and settings outside the norm in games, it turns out there is no actual place to meaningfully discuss the creative techniques one can apply to do so.

At IndieCade 2010, Brandon Boyer‘s talk “All Play is Personal” did not address this directly. Brandon’s talk was a very personal look at his own history with games, encouraging indie developers to draw on their own life experiences making games, because that is what allows indies to stand out from mainstream games and is key to their success.

But one of the talk’s points was about diversity - Brandon’s write up of a shorter microtalk version ummarizes some of that. Polling mainstream game developers shows the overwhelming predominance of Star Wars and Lord of the Rings as inspirations. Consider, though, that these are social signifiers – things we choose to invest in because they display our status as members of a particular group. Game developers are into them in part because they show to  others they belong to a particular subset of culture.

That’s a pretty strong psychological drive – I find it hard to believe indie developers, given their status as sub-culture, could avoid it. A list by indie devs would certainly be different, but would it just be a second set of non-diverse inspirations (Pavement, Michel Gondry, whatever)?

(While Star Trek and not Star Wars this image by deliciousnewyork about sums up my feelings on the combination of inspirations between mainstream and indie games).

Someone asked Brandon about the responsibility of our community to include subject matter that appeals to more diverse audiences. His response referred to it as a larger cultural problem, one that indies could not necessarily impact. Personal expression was more valuable (I paraphrase horribly, so that was my take on it, seems like there was varied interpretation of it at the conference as well).

I’m also going to paraphrase Darius Kazemi, who will hopefully write his own blog post on the topic – If diversity in games as well as technology is a larger cultural problem, and indie games don’t have to worry about this because they can’t affect it – then indie games are de facto not a part of culture. This conclusion was very much the opposite point of Brandon’s talk.

Nick LaLone also points out some of the cultural implications of this thinking in detail. Even in minds of folks who care about these issues, this stalling and shifting of responsibility actively negates progress.  In the world of chickens vs. eggs, if your goal is to collect as many chickens as possible, it’s obvious you want all chickens and eggs you can get.

So I followed up with my own poorly constructed question – what about the value of seeking topics & inspiration specifically outside ourselves? Creating games with characters, worlds, themes, outside of our privileged experience, essentially. Brandon returned to the value of the personal, comparing Generation Kill to Modern Warfare 2.

The creators of Generation Kill sought to convey soldiers’ personal stories, resulting in a complex emotional experience for the viewer. Modern Warfare 2 co-opts its imagery and scenarios for shock value but fails to convey any of the same personal connection.

In this, Brandon pointed out the role of personal experience is invaluable – while I highly doubt many of the creators of Generation Kill had actual combat experience, it is through the tools of our own emotional lives as creators that we can seek to understand and convey the emotional lives of others. We cannot reach more people by being more generic in our work, but through being more specific, by touching on the personal details with which other people can empathize.

Brenda Brathwaite’s talk on One Falls for Each of Us, the next game in her series “The Mechanic is the Message”, focused on her experience in designing games around topics with which she has little personal experience. Despite the fact that she is not Jewish, nor was in Nazi Germany, her boardgame Train captures the human aspect of a system meant to dehumanize and destroy millions of lives.

She used this image as a key inspiration -  these otherwise normal children are wearing Stars of David, identifying them Jews, inevitably bound for a concentration camp.

Brenda has children of her own, and in looking at that picture, could do nothing but tie her own concerns, fears about her children to this moment in time. It is specific, it is personal, it was a crucial element of her creative process, but it is a situation she couldn’t possibly have experienced.

She talked about her research and development as being a process of sculpture. The game underneath the rough hewn stone is a form waiting to be found. Her commercial games, on the other hand, come from her own voice as a designer. Train‘s goals and aspirations as a game turned the design questions one would normally ask oneself from essentially “What do I want to do?” to ”What are best ways that this experience can be conveyed?” and, and asking how can you connect to what is more an objective ideal for the game.

In the research I’ve slowly been doing for The Unconcerned, it is a similar feeling of unearthing. While your ideals as a designer often occupy your mind as you work towards achieving them in your own games, it is oddly freeing, humbling, and full of awe to submit yourself to a process that requires your own self-destruction. You are nowhere near as important as the topic of your game.  The struggle to find the ideal communication of the ideas that will do the topic justice is a much more powerful one than the process of self-reflection that is required to focus your voice in your game design.

I have never deeply subscribed to any major religious institution, as its major reward of belonging to a larger purpose, goal, or community I find obscures other thought process that are invaluable to me, such as self-reflection and critical thinking. Submitting myself to this kind of process is the one way I feel a connection to something so much larger, without sacrificing those other ways of thinking, and in fact joining them together.

There are two motivations for seeking topic outside yourself as designer – the first is the obvious one, to hopefully be part of a larger cultural shift that makes games and game developers more inclusive, more diverse.

The second, not entirely intuitive one, is selfish in nature. Submitting to such a goal is to commit to grow yourself as designer beyond your current limitations. To learn your flaws, to accept them, and to grow beyond them.

Diversity in game design won’t be achieved very easily. It is something each of us should and needs to contemplate as to how it impacts us as a designer. As a goal we can’t rely on outreach, we can’t rely on other aspects of culture, and we can’t just rely on more diverse game design. We need all the chickens & eggs we can get.

A couple weeks ago we (Jake, Ben, Sam, & I) announced the other game I’ve been working on besides The Unconcerned. While that may have come as a little bit of a surprise to regular readers of the blog , it’s something that’s been cooking since day 1-ish (actually somewhere between day 1 and day 30, day 0 being when I left EA last July).

Start-ups, and especially game developers, are inherently stupid about risk. There’s two huge risks you take right out of the gate trying to make your own games. First, you have to get on your target platform (both from a technological perspective and a publishing one), and second, people have to hear about you to buy your game.

So when Jake came to me with his idea for what would eventually turn into Skulls of the Shogun, I thought it would be a great first project – get on XBLA with a game a little more in the style of other XBLA games, while bringing a multiplayer, arcade flavor into a great genre that’s bogged down in boring conventions. It’s a fresh idea with a distinct style – an “invigorating cocktail” as Ben called it. Building a relationship with them would then in theory make it easier to convince them to take a risk on something more out of their element, and let us move into full development on the design-risk heavy game with a fleshed out 2D HD engine.

Why XBLA? (And PC, but that part’s easy). Platform strategy is another easily misunderstood piece of the indie game dev puzzle. There’s so many platforms and publishers on many of them ask for timed exclusivity. It’s hard to know which ones to focus on. Thankfully, Simon Carless’ crucially excellent sales stats provide clarity. The fact of the matter is that the easiest single platform to make a living as an indie developer is XBLA.

Because of that, it’s also growing more crowded. Microsoft is getting pickier, and Sony is getting more lenient with its terms for PSN. Each platform typically requires some sort of exclusivity to compete with the other. Then the formula gets more complicated. Do you target PSN first, then XBLA? Go for mobile platforms first, with a much smaller chance of a possibly bigger success? Or partner with a big publisher for distribution, because they have the muscle to ensure you simultaneous slots on XBLA and/or PSN? Of course, that means they’ll probably want distribution rights for PC, which is brain dead simple and is by far best if you do it yourself.

Whatever platform your game is on, people are always ready to tell you it would be better on another. You can gun for a multi-platform engine, but that is solving the wrong problem. If you target a smaller (or more compatible) number of platforms, you’ll have more time to focus on your game and make it as good as possible.

That’s the first thing you’ve got to do to - if you succeed your worst problem will be trying to ensure as many people can play it as possible (now that enough have played/bought it so that you can code from the beach). Never solve the problems that will arise due to your incredible, odds breaking success. It’s a problem that only arises due to your odds breaking success – in other woords, a good fucking problem to have. Don’t waste time on the problems you’ll have only if you’re super-succesful, solve the problems that will keep you from that success.

Oh yeah, and if you’re wondering about something like Unity, they haven’t even released the Xbox or PS3 version of their engine. Never mind their marketing about being on all platforms.

Why XBLA for The Unconcerned? Given the Xbox Live Indie channel is slowly up-and-coming, it could be a more accepting place for controversial content. My goal with The Unconcerned isn’t just to make a game that informs about a serious topic, nor is it just to make an entertaining game (together a fairly difficult design problem). I need it, and the game industry needs something like it, to pave the way so it’s acceptable to make a game like this for a more mainstream platform/marketplace. To that end, it’ll take longer than the many of you who have encouraged over the past few months would like it to take. This is what needs to happen, though – and by grace or by talent over the past few months every single thing needed for the this plan to work has fallen into place (knock on wood).

One of the reasons I don’t talk about the master plan much is that most people think it’s crazy – except for the occasional industry old-timer who would nod respectfully, giving me the rare positive feedback I’d need to stick to the plan.

As Skulls has progressed to the point where we were able to make our big announcement, and now start showing it to publishers, I’ve been working slowly with my other teammates (Dan, Amanda, And Dren) on the Unconcerned. The goal is to progress to a point where we can ramp up & the design and story are solidified – the first concept & development phase finished around GDC, now it’s in the early “first playable” dev phase.

Unlike Shogun, which has benefited from immediate playtesting and rapid iteration, The Unconcerned is attempting to have its story finely woven with it’s mechanics, and conveying lots of story/real world information in subtle ways – which takes much more planning. Dan & I are close to a finished story treatment for the level progression, while Amanda has been working a bit on the first few maps. Then my teammates from Skulls will help out – getting Jake’s help on the animation style (using our custom 2D anim tool) was another key element of starting down this path.

It’s a long, hard, complicated road ahead, and thankfully I have some good company, but time to get back to work.

And oh yes, spoilers ahead.

Pushing your buttons

I’m not sure if Hitchcock was the first to promote this idea, but his films are the prototypical examples of the notion that the audience empathizes with a character performing a dramatic action, regardless of that character’s motivations. A viewer is unsure the character will be successful and that success or failure has dramatic ramifications for the plot. The character could be unlikable, a cold-blooded killer, and we would still be on the edge of our seats if the scene is constructed properly.

Jordan Mechner applies this logic to games as well – performing a character’s actions, even if we dissapprove of them, encourages us to empathize with the character. When Heavy Rain works, it’s by applying this interactive corrollary. You perform mundane actions such as tying a tie, diapering a baby or even just waiting, in a police station lobby. The buttons sequences you perform and the actions the character performs are incredibly different, but are tied together by a physicality unlike most games (as discusses more by Jorge Albor at Experience Points). In this sense, Heavy Rain wants to focus on the distance between the player and the character, but ties them together in a different way.

For Michael Abbott, the lack of autonomy affected his emotional connection to the story. The question is how much agency is necessary for this effect? Agency (as defined in “Agency, Reconsidered” by Michael Mateas, Steven Dow, Serdar Sali, and Noah Wardrip-Fruin) is not just being able to take as wide a range of actions as possible. We feel agency when the actions we can expect to take in the game’s environments (material affordances) line up with the actions that would expected given the game’s fictional setting and context (formal constraints).

Heavy Rain further complicates this by providing clear affordances for action via its button prompts in the game world. A line is drawn between material affordances as suggested by the context of the environment, and the material affordances clearly presented by the game’s interface. It attempts to line up expectations of agency by making this gap as clear as possible.

The story does allow for a pretty divergent number of ways the player can affect it – but it’s never clear when and why you have that option, as opposed to the elements you must perform correctly or where failure has no impact. Heavy Rain tries to make most linear sequences visually dramatic in standard suspense movie form, but the mundane sequences have no dramatic thrust by design. They are necessary in contrast – the suspenseful scenes, especially those where you do have a choice, are meant to be more powerful once you’ve gotten through these, but the perception of that gap in agency is highly subjective.

Press X to Jason

The game starts with Ethan Mars playing with his two sons, Jason and Shaun. In the next scene the family is at the mall; Jason runs away from his father so you must search for him. Quantic Dream obviously spent a lot of effort making the mechanics of this sequence match the desired emotional state. Characters stream by as obstacles slowing you down, your vision is limited forcing to turn around repeatedly and look in the distance, which is out of focus). You can press X to yell Jason. It’s mostly freeform character movement and not repeated button sequences, giving more freedom than in many scenes. Mechanically, everything is set for you to identify with Ethan and feel his tension looking for his son.

As Chris Dahlen points out, this sequence falls incredibly flat. Jason has no reason to bolt out into traffic, and is old enough to know better. He runs out into traffic because David Cage wants to manipulate your emotions. All entertainment wants to manipulate your emotions, the failure here is beginning with such a crass manipulation, and using as many tchniques as possible to force the desired emotion. It is the interactive equivalent of plying us with many drinks as soon as we sit down on our date. With no setup of character motivations or development, Heavy Rain does not earn the right to play us for cheap dates so early. David Cage is the one being cheap here.

The failure in the writing contrasted with the alignment of the mechanics of player navigation highlights the naive simplicty of the argument that mechanics are what drive home the emotion or theme of gameplay. The truth is always more complex. No aspect of a game’s attempt at meaningful play can be taken lightly as an attempt to cheat straight to the emotional payoff.

Your Artistic Vision Seems To Be Telling Me to Go Left

While bad controls plague lots of games, Heavy Rain seems to flaunt proven control schemes for player movement. Like The Path, the result often robs scenes of their emotional power. The difference between Heavy Rain and The Path is that in The Path there is no apparent artistic purpose to driving a teenage girl around like a tank. Heavy Rain on the other hand struggles to guide the player around its environments for dramatic purpose (just not very well).

After a few moments of fumbling with the character navigation, turning left when you’re expecting to walk forward, the control scheme almost seems character-relative (as in the first Resident Evil). However it’s typically camera relative a majority of the time. The navigation is impressive solely for how much it obfuscates what’s actually going on, so I can only propose a theory about the problems. The incongrous direction changes seem to be a combination of a very long time period on the frame of reference hysteresis when the camera cuts, and that the navigation guidance splines actually change the character’s frame of reference for control as well.

That’s probably worth some explaining. A standard feature of most games that have cinematic cameras (like the God of War or Uncharted series) is that while the character is camera relative (push left, the character moves left on screen regardless of the direction they’re facing), when the camera cuts the frame of reference changes while the player is still pushing on the stick. So the game keeps interpreting the player pushing left as moving in the same absolute direction, even though the character’s technically no longer moving left on screen. This is typically only done for a fraction of a second, giving the player time to readjust (and when done poorly results in the player turning around and crossing the camera threshold over and over again, leaving you in a particular brand of hell unique to this style of player control).

Heavy Rain uses interior spaces that are much closer to proportionate real world scale. In most third person games, the scale of obstacles (couch, chairs, etc.) is smaller than the scale of a room, to make it easier for the player to navigate. (For more detail, check out Realistic Level Design in Max Payne from GDC 2002 on Gamasutra). Heavy Rain uses more consistent scale to allow its scenes, at varied camera angles, to have the proper visual impact. To allow the player to navigate the space and avoid bumping into obstacles, which also undercuts the drama, the game has some sort of navigation helper splines around obstacles and walls. If you walk straight into a wall, the character will start turning to walk along the wall even though you’re still pushing forward.

My theory is that this adjustment affects the frame of reference for the player’s control, with another long delay on reverting back – with multiple frame of reference adjustments possibly going on, it’s impossible to tell the association between the direction you’re pushing and the direction you’re going. In tight spaces it takes several seconds of playing around with the control to find the correct direction to push.

When mediating between the actions of the player and the possibilities we wish to constrain in our story world, inevitably the game must make some prediction about the player’s goal. A more canonical example is the auto-aim in HALO, used to simplify first person shooting with a console gamepad. If the player is turning via the right stick, the game slows the rotation speed as the cursor goes over an enemy, making it easier for the player to stop on the enemy and fire.

The idea is to only take existing player input and amplify or reduce it to reach the assisted goal. You cannot change the direction the player has input. The straightforward revision to Heavy Rain‘s nagivation guidance would be to NOT change the control frame of reference to turn (if that is in fact what’s going on), and instead only help the player when they turn to walk around the obstacle – you speed up the player’s rotation as they turn towards the proper obstacle-avoiding direction, and slow it down a bit as they get away from it (with limitations on how fast and how large an angle should be adjusted).

The prediction of a player’s goal is inherently frought with problems, whether it’s at the lowest control level or at higher story levels. The most graceful solution is to never direct the player in a new direction towards the assumed goal, but merely speed them up or slow them down to reach the predicted goal easier. If it turns out the prediction is wrong, they still own the resulting choice.

The Curious(ly Aggravating) Case of Scott Shelby

Your interaction with Shelby early in the game is in short scenes, where he questions other victims’ parents. You don’t get much background on Shelby himself, but eventually he teams up with Lauren, a prostitute who is one of the victim’s mothers. They begin to suspect Gordi Kramer, a rich playboy whose father, Charles, they see at the grave of  John Sheppard.

He and Lauren are attacked and dumped in the river inside his car. Here you can save Lauren or leave her to die. I misread the consequences of the onscreen button prompts the first time I played the scene and Lauren died, but I replayed the scene to save her. In an earlier scene, Lauren gets upset at Shelby and leaves the car – I get out and convince her to stay with me for her own safety.

After the attack, Shelby goes to Kramer’s mansion, kills many of his bodyguards, to interrogate him about the killer’s identity. Why does Shelby risk his life to do question a man he knows is not the killer? Even though Kramer’s son is revealed to have killed a boy in a perverse copy-cat killing, Shelby seems to dismiss this. If you fail the assault on the manion, all the red herrings involving the Kramers are never explained, leaving an entire subplot in tatters. Shelby then sends Lauren out of town (for her own safety as he describes), kissing her goodbye.

I eventually achieved the “good” ending, where Shelby is killed by Jayden – leaving Lauren (and myself) to wonder why Shelby had feelings for her after murdering her son. The scene stands out as a poorly constructed filler to deal with the gap in accurately describing Shelby’s motivations. Did his motivations as the killer change as a result of interacting with Lauren? Was he acting out of a guilty conscience? Did he actually enjoy a sick pleasure of gaining Lauren’s confidence as the murderer of her son? None of these have any support in the writing whatsoever, leaving Shelby an empty shell of a character in the end.

On the Permanence of Rubber Bands

Overall, it’s clear Quantic Dream took much care to structure scenes in ways that would allow multiple outcomes with minimal impact on future scenes, to support as much player variation as possible. David Cage compares this storytelling structure to a “rubber band; the player can stretch or deform the rubber band through his actions, but whatever he does the backbone of my story is always there” (from 1Up’s Indigo Prophecy post-mort via Grand Text Auto).

Ethan Mars is put through several trials by the Origami Killer. At each point, the killer asks Mars to do something  in order to receive more information on his son’s location, like cutting off his own finger, killing another man, or drinking poison. In each scene, the choice presented is powerful in the moment. Going through the motions of cutting off your own finger leave you shaken, or you’re torn between killing a criminal who also is a father.

Whatever you choose, the killer keeps presenting his trials. Even if you refuse the last one, Madison figures out Shaun’s location and can call Ethan to tell him. While you’re affected by the scenes in the moment, at the end of the game they feel hollow. The permanent, long term consequences of most of those acts do not line up with any reasonable expectations.

This structure is used to minimize the work of building content to support variance on every path. It’s not clear that supporting the permanent impacts of those choices required a significant amount of additional work though – a line here, perhaps an extra scene there. The failure to explore those interactive plot elements is similar to the plot holes in the traditional narrative, and adds to the feeling of reduced agency.

Separate from global agency, the ability to have a large impact on the over-arching story world, an action’s long term and short term consequences have to in line with the player’s perception to create agency. But the elements of a gameplay choice that would lead to perceiving long term vs. short term consequences, and the corresponding design problems, are still a rarely discussed area.

I Win?

One of Heavy Rain’s design goals was to allow the player to continue playing even when there were life-ending consequences. As Jorge Albor points out, death has no meaning in Heavy Rain. Except for the meaning you apply to death.

Replay in interactive drama is often perceived as a negative because it assumes a single success state. Why would you have to replay a series of scenes over and over except to get at the final win state? This is not only limiting from the point of view of the player’s agency, it removes the player’s desire to improvise with the story (which is the ultimate goal of most interactive storytelling).

I found myself replaying a handful of scenes to get my desired ending - even though the game supported multiple endings, and even though the ending I wanted ended up feeling awkward (because of the identity of the killer ended up being different than I suspected). Even though Heavy Rain supports most permutations of the main characters being alive or dead, the game failed to convince me to improvise with it, or more accurately, failed to communicate when improvisation was encouraged. It fails to do so by not allowing apparent choices, by not supporting smaller permanent consequences, and by not being consistent in its communication of those consequences.

Playing Characters

While there plenty of other criticisms to be leveled at Heavy Rain, such as the exploitive sexuality of Madison Paige (as described by Denis Farr at The Border House) or the questionable portrayal of race (as summarized by Scott Juster at, yet again, Experience Points), there is much to be learned from its manipulation of the player-character gap.

The dissonance between player and character is often one of the major arguments against integrating storytelling into games. For many years it has been conventional design wisdom to strip personality from playable characters, so that they serve as empty vessels for players to graft on their personality. This gap, and how it is widened and shortened over the course of play, isn’t why games can’t tell stories – it’s precisely what makes storytelling in games interesting.

One of the key elements of a thriving independent game development community that I brought up is an established circuit of festivals throughout the year. These festivals are meant to help bring attention to the works that need it the most – the games that will have a profound impact, that will advance the medium, that will touch people, and that otherwise would not get made were it not for a small team of very passionate, underpaid, people.

At this year’s IGF Pavilion at GDC, the entrants were amazing. While previous years always had worthwhile entries, this year the level of polish, thoughtfulness, and balance between approachability and uniqueness were at a high without a doubt.

In previous years, the IGF was more forgiving towards games in development. I remember early requirements (maybe in 2002?) were such that you barely had to have a level running. The requirements are still vague, but it seems impossible to judge partial works against a field so impressive.

Here’s where film has a leg up on games. Filmmakers can bring a first cut to a festival to show it to people and get feedback. They can submit a short from a film they are hoping to make or in the process of making – the attention they get can very well help them find the last funding they need to finish it.

With games it’s so much harder to define an in-progress work – Andy Schatz, creator of one of my IGF favorites, Monaco, is still planning on adding new characters and changing existing ones. Does that mean it’s not done? Can the existing work be judged on it’s own as “complete” in the sense that it’s playable and the mechanics might work fine (despite the fact that the creator has an expanded vision)?

Anna Anthropy criticized the unfinished games in this year’s IGF, saying “the igf shouldn’t be a place for commercial titles to find publishers or to build their pre-release hype machines.” Then she goes on to talk about what the IGF should be:

“the igf is a press event where we trot out our most mainstream creations in an attempt to get the mainstream press excited about them and, by extension, (in theory) about independent games as a whole. i would argue that that doesn’t happen, that the press only gets excited about super meat boy, and that the whole event exists only to serve those developers who are already entrenched in the business / marketing cycle…

but my real anger, my frustration with the igf, is that it could be so much more than what it is. a celebration of the diversity of people who make games outside the big industry and outside of the mainstream. confront the people from the offices next door with genuinely interesting, provocative games and ask what’s taking them so long to catch up. we could prove, with the right selection of games, the value of our work for now and ever. but we don’t.”

There’s some confusion going on in that argument – why can’t a work-in-progress meet those same goals for the IGF? Yes, obviously a completed work is better, but the goal of getting enough attention to that work to help the creator complete it *can* be more idealistic than just spinning up the hype machine.

It’s about taking an interesting work that has the potential for greatness and pushing boundaries, and putting it in front of the right people – to give the creator feedback they need to make it better (from the audience at the IGF and not the judges, because I’ll grant you the judges’ feedback seemed poor across the board), and to encourage them to continue their work. Five minutes of conversation time with 40-50 people playing the game at a festival pavilion is a billion times more valuable than what 4-5 heavily time-stressed judges barely can scrawl down.

The solution? Add a “Most Promising” category. It shouldn’t be broken down into different categories or genres. Other awards should become stricter in only allowing finished work (solving some of anna anthropy’s problems), thereby pushing more in progress work into this category. This helps rewards the game makers that have gone the extra mile as well, by trimming the competition in the other award categories.

After GDC, I headed to SXSW Interactive, where The Unconcerned was up for an award in the Casual Game Design competition. I would by no means use “casual” to describe the game, however it is definitely a short form game, which is an sometimes-used more specific definition for “casual”. The competition description also seemed to highlight that it was about cutting edge, boundary pushing designs, so I figured I’d submit it and there you go. Each finalist gave a 7 minute presentation about the design, with 3 minutes for questions by the judges.

That’s one method to highlight games in development (one of the games, Paper Balloons, was actually already out on the App Store, although the other two only seemed to be on paper). It suffered a bit because the judges’ criteria were all over the place – hard to know if it’s a meaningful place to submit your particular work when the criteria ranged from most marketable/broadest appeal to something that pushed the boundaries of games. A game that should be highlighted for achieving the former probably is not going to achieve the latter, and vice versa.

It was somewhat unsatisfying to see a bunch of presentations, though. I think it would be better if festival competitions allowed interactive play sessions with in-progress work, and judging at the show (obviously more presentation would be be required than with a completed game, but relying on it much less). A time constraint on judging at the festival would help clarify judging in-progress work, because judges can only rely on first impressions of play. Games in various states are put on more equal footing, instead of judges having more time pre-festival to play the more complete games.

Now that we’ve hit a critical mass of entrants to these festivals (and judging has become incredibly difficult due to the number of games and naturally limited number of volunteer judges), increasing the constraints on entrants will help judges give better feedback on games that do make the cut. Meanwhile in-progress games still get a venue to be highlighted to support their creators.

Ultimately the definition of in-progress will be up to the judges to decide. As a creator, you know you can shorten your work, leave out levels, anything that will make the it a cohesive, closed, experience. There are certainly still problems with that (if you get cut out for being unfinished, and think another game has gotten in with a similar level of completeness, who do you complain to? The internet-at-large?), but hopefully the separation helps better promote categories of games. Festivals will be able to more fully realize their ability to support worthwhile independent games.

All this makes me look forward to Indiecade – the size and focus of the festival last year was just right, including finished games and work in progress, dealing with it effectively – but that’s probably in part due to what I’ll guess is a lower number of entrants (closer to the IGF of years gone past). It also included previews of new work by established indie developers - if the previews were granted to entrants based on the judging process, that would be another great way of highlighting in progress work. I don’t know that it yet has the press draw of something like IGF, but hopefully will grow year on year. I encourage you to check it out!

People often asked me, at GDC and SXSW, if The Unconcerned was a “serious game”. Lump it in the same category as shooters developed for military training? Games developed for exer-bikes? Huh?

Billy Cain, one of the judges in the SXSW Screenburn Casual Game Design Competition, asked me another question after my presentation in the competition (the game was one of four finalists – I lost but that’s another, perhaps not unrelated, story). He wanted to know what actions I expected people to take after playing the game.

My practicality refuses my imagination from envisioning people actively going out and doing something about the Iranian election crisis just because of playing the game. (That’s part of the reason I plan to give a portion of the game’s profits to charity, because it would be silly to expect people to do something afterwards if you can do it for them first).

Yet the question conveys a similar, but more subtle, bias. It’s the notion that the entire purpose of such games is to advocate for a particular solution.

I’m reminded of a TV interview with Henry Rollins (he expresses a similar point in this web interview in the second to last question). The TV interviewer asked him if he still thought music could change the world, if it could stop war. His response was basically if Bob Dylan couldn’t do it, no.

This is disconcerting, but true. The point of any serious entertainment is not directly solve those problems, but to make people want it and aid those that do. If it has any institutional purpose it’s to serve as the emotional support for change, not to idealistically alter the world through the pushing of bits. It can never to be considered as a cause for change – to do so devalues the effort and perseverance of those who work hard towards that change.

I was also reminded of the backlash on twitter of people criticising those who changed their profile pics to green to support the Iranian protesters – people asserted that changing your picture to green wasn’t going to do anything, and derided your intelligence if you did it.

It was never about that. Even just making a game is difficult enough that I can’t imagine it without the encouragement of friends and family. Trying to change an entire country’s flawed political system through civil disobedience? Is it such a stretch to grasp the profound impact of finding people who empathize with you?

Beyond emotional support, ultimately it’s information that is required for change. An Inconvenient Truth has increased awareness of global warming by combining information about the issues and entertainment. It champions people to become aware of, and possibly act on, the problem. It obviously hasn’t solved them, but does that mean it wasn’t worth making?

The reality is that any individual in the US can do very little to help people in Iran, especially given the limitations our government places on that interaction. Yet the fact is, were we to elect the wrong person to any number of public offices here in the US, our relationship with Iran and the fate of its people could drastically be harmed. When most politicians, not to mention newscasters, portray a profound ignorance of Iran, let’s not underestimate the indirect power of a little information.

These classifications applied to serious games strip them of the neccesary emotion required to succeed at this. They are a ghetto, a limited area where these minority of games can dwell. They are not allowed to break out of their box, and their makers reinforce that victimization on each other.

Brenda Brathwaite’s talk on Train, in contrast, was easily the most moving thing I’d ever attended at any function where powerpoint was involved. While I’d like to blame my overly emotional state and watery eyes on four hours of sleep and a hangover, I know better. Inspiring beyond words.

Unlike Train, though, a work fit to put in an art gallery anywhere, any day, what I want to do with The Unconcerned is to make a piece of entertainment that informs. The stereotyping of serious games that I came across was thankfully offset by the resounding feedback from friends, developers and other bloggers, to make the game. When I started I was convinced the only way to make such a goal desirable and understandable to others was to complete the game. I was very appreciative get emotional support from folks with a more refined opinion on the matter, reinforcing the point that change is more complex than any label or categorization can convey.

When they won a few times and then lost, they would be surprised. Although the probability defines that they should lose occasionally, they perceived their strength as much greater. They would expect to win even more disproportionately when the odds were presented as 20 to 10, despite the same probability. I’m sure plenty of folks in the talk were blown away by the revelation of just a handful of our deep seated cognitive biases, especially when dealing with probability.

Ken Perlin, who I happened to be sitting next to during the keynote, pointed out that part of the problem is that the system was actually quite simple. Would an army that was twice the size of a force it was fighting win at 2:1 odds? Probably not, other stuff being equal. The human brain is good at looking for patterns in large complex systems. We see them even when they’re not there. Even the simple presentation of two cartoon armies fighting suggests more non-linear factors.

Later on, Daniel Benmergui dismissed it as “player pandering” – which it is, in a glass half empty kind of way. Saying Sid Meier panders to the player is kind of like saying a professor is being academic – true, but is that automatically a bad thing?

Or, was Meier just trying to communicate what he wanted as clearly as possible (especially if the key elements to convey were not related – it helps to simplify ancillary elements). Civilization is still today the best game series that shows you can layer a little bit of information and historical context with an entertaining game. Is a child going to learn all of world history from it? No, but it has certainly inspired many kids to learn more about the time periods and historical figures in the game. If it that was a positive effect, was that still wrong? Or do the game design ends justify the game design means?

I didn’t take it as Meier saying “Here’s this problem, here’s how to solve it.” Instead I just assumed it was “Here’s this problem, here’s how I solved it.” You need your own answer to that question, but as a game designer it’s inexcusable to be unaware of how people perceive such a system and the related probabilities.

It’s inherently a player communication problem – the representation given to the player did not match the model suggested by that representation. You could have solved it by changing what is shown to the player (abstracting the notion of strength in a way that aligns better with their expectations of the odds/stats given), or you could make the model more complex to match the one suggested. Meier added probability based on previous events to line up the results with player expectations. You could just as easily add more rules to the system to model non-linear effects (soliders could have a morale bonus in that situation, which would boost the odds even more).

Frank Lantz had the most inspiring summation, which seems like the best ideal to hold ourselves to: “Good games use players’ cognitive biases. Great games make players aware of their cognitive biases.”

All from a little math.

In games we certainly suffer from the lack of character driven writing, but have our own unique form of failure in writing – the spatially driven story. In this, the characters exist soley to provide rationale to place gameplay in interesting locales (either visually interesting, mechanically interesting, or both).

Assassin’s Creed 2 suffers more from this than any other game I’ve played as of late – Ezio clothes are far richer than his personality. What do we know about Ezio? He has some family, he’s a bit of a playboy, and he’s out for vengeance. All of these are used, to varying degrees, to give the player reason to move through the space as the fiction behind mission objectives. (Jorge Albor covers these flaws well at Experience Points). But what else do we know about Ezio? Not much. Granted, I’m only halfway through at this point, but I’m not going to hold my breath for them to animate cardboard cutout Ezio with some life.

Avatar manages to take these elements of video game writing (to be fair, they do have their roots in action blockbuster writing), and singlehandedly disproves the notion that games are not fit to tell stories. It shows even in film, when you start with context sprung from a teenage boy’s mind to take place in fantastic locales and look awesome, you end up with the same exact result, regardless of the medium. It is essentially a video game storyline, albeit a finely overwrought one. Even Ebert turns hyprocrite, often criticisng movie plots for being game-like, loving it. You like space marines, Rog? Really? We can hook you up.

In its details, it is almost textbook in the application of Hollywood formulae. Payoffs abound, from the moment of realization Sully has waking in his human body after sleeping with Neytiri, to the final fight where Sully in Na’vi form defeats Colonel Quaritch in his mech. However, while the Na’vi are immediately likeable as the underdog, it takes Sully three months and the better portion (in size) of the film to finally change his mind at the last possible moment, when he finally realizes that the Na’vi and their home are worth saving. There’s is no worthwhile character justification given for such wild shifts in behavior. Sully is either dumb as fuck or temporarily psychopathic. The decision and its timing only serve to create visual drama.

Uncharted 2 attempts to apply the exact same formulae. Yet while the levels also take place in one amazing location after another, their flow comes from and represents Drake’s internal conflict between hedonism (money and sex) and virtue (information or truth, and love). He alternates evenly between desiring treasure, wanting to find the historical truth, saving Chloe (lust) or saving Elena (love). Even trying to save Chloe (since you do it so many times) oscillates between motivations of purity (to actually keep her from dying) and impurity (when’s she’s double-crossed you and you need her to get back to the treasure).

In this way, Naughty Dog externalizes the conflict that makes Drake a likeable reluctant hero. The purpose the other characters serve isn’t to bring you to a specific location, it’s to change Drake’s motivation for going somewhere. Story elements that at first glance seem like they are there to superficially highlight exotic locales serve a deeper purpose to communicate internal character motivation (as cliche as it may be).

These works obviously have more positive and negative aspects, these are only criticisms of their overall storylines. Games can also achieve so much more with emergent story structure, but in writing story elements for The Unconcerned, with it’s more traditional storytelling methods, these are unavoidable problems. I want to incorporate key locations like Baharestan Square, Tehran University, or the Grand Bazaar because they afford opportunities to include the subtext I want and provide visual interest. You do spend more time looking at game environments than you do parsing story context; it’s not inappropriate to make sure level locations meet these kinds of requirements. What should be be discouraged is assuming that is enough. Storytelling in games will never avoid the morass of juvenile discussion the topic naturally encourages if we only settle for the highest priority requirement – we gotta do it all.