So, to follow up from the last blog entry, I want a solution to the problem of not wanting to read text dumps that break me out of the immersive game experience. But first, some caveats:
- Not everyone cares, as evidenced by some of the comments in the previous entry. Ethan, for example, doesn’t mind the text method of communicating information.
- Not every game needs to worry about this. Games that don’t rely heavily on the world don’t have to bend over backward to convey that minimal world, and would indeed be worse off of they did. You don’t need a cutscene in Tetris.
Look at that beautiful, subdued color palette. Why are you fighting the colossi? You never learn whether your actions are “white” or “black” — your motivation is similarly murky.With those two points in mind, how do you convey a world without a wall of text assaulting the player for 9999 damage? Before we get into specific techniques or game devices, let’s talk about what we’re trying to accomplish in a game. The enjoyment of a game is an emotional response. Specifically, in a “dense” game environment like an RPG, we’re probably talking about having fun with other people (in a tabletop RPG or MMO environment) or triumph over adversity (in a single-player CRPG as well as tabletop and MMO RPGs). That is, the goal is the feel of playing the game, not the volume of information conveyed. (You can find more information on this particular theory of fun at XEODesign.)
With that in mind, two of my favorite adages become useful. Oh, hello, my darling soapboxes.
Work In Broad Strokes
Detail is the enemy. “Presenting information” doesn’t have to mean “presenting a shitload of information.” Building a world intended to provoke an emotional response is more like impressionism than classicism. We don’t need every detail to let us feel — we only need to understand what you as a designer want us to feel. “The armor and architecture of this region allude to a rising trend toward empire” is enough to go on, provided you support us with cool art and evocative content. You don’t need to break into an aside with 750 words about the accomplishments of the past four imperialistic kings whose actions have no bearing on the events of the game. Unless the goal of your game is completist world creation — which isn’t eminently playable, so maybe a game isn’t the best vehicle for such an undertaking — the aside runs the risk of pulling the player away.
The details exist to communicate the game experience, not usurp it.
Paragons of the broad-strokes method include Ico, Shadow of the Colossus, and Bioshock. D&D 4e rediscovered the joys of broad-strokes content, too. Sure, they have a ton of written support, but all of that support is very granular. I remember working on 3e projects that jumped through hoops to pack in masses of content, and 4e’s efforts to fit core ideas on, at most, a two-page spread is refreshing. It gives me the room to create the emotional response I want without having to contradict something written somewhere that has thus created a certain player expectation.
Let the Player Do It
An amazingly powerful playable history sequence that epitomized the key moral story in Final Fantasy VII’s world.In a game, I want to be playing. I don’t necessarily have to save the world or have my character be a unique snowflake, but I do want my experience to be the core of the game. That is, all your world-built background information is meaningless if it doesn’t have any relevance to what I’m doing and then let me do it. Games exist to be played, and the choices made in their context are the heart of the medium. So if history is important, let me play through a flashback sequence or pull me into a instance that lets me be a part of that history. Even if the end is a foregone conclusion, I will have at least played the history, as opposed to have been historied at. The player is an active participant, not a passive consumer.
Some of Dragon Age‘s content does this very well. The DLC that includes the recapture of Soldier’s Peak has ghosts of the past replaying their doomed last stand, which communicates the world’s history while allowing the player to participate in game activity. The flashbacks in Final Fantasy VII did this as well. For Vampire, the Transylvania Chronicles allow players to be present at key Kindred events, but the implementation was a bit heavy-handed and railroaded the players, so beware the pitfalls of having the players do it. Players need to be able to make meaningful decisions, which should have been emphasized more in the Transylvania Chronicles, for example.
Next time: Specific techniques.
I’m also a fan of the “optional detail” methodology. To your analogy, that would be where the viewer sees generally broad strokes, but if they come up and inspect closely they see lots of details. I think Exalted is a good example of this. You can run a perfectly fine game with no more setting information than “Realm vs. Solars” and make up the rest, and still get a good feel for the game world. But if you want, there is some very deep setting information that you can delve into.Related subject: level game mechanics detail in MMOs. In World of Warcraft, I feel like if I don’t know the crunchy numbers, build optimizations, etc. then I’m ineffective. I feel like I have to pour over Elitist Jerks if I want to be anything other than mediocre. And once I’ve learned it, they come out with a patch to change it all. In games like Champions Online, I have cool flashy powers and can generally kick some butt regardless of which path I take (though some combinations are better than others). WoW is all about gearing up, CO is all about looking cool… I want a game where I can look cool and have some awesome stories. Seems like they’re trying to do this with SWTOR, but I’m not going to hold my breath.
I feel I should clarify just a bit: I don’t mind reading books and blocks of text in a game, but I can also dislike it. It has to do with how the game’s pacing is handled. I mean, shit, I was technically “doing stuff” in KOTOR I for the first hour, but the game just imploded into slooooooooow navigation of dialogue in a sterile, dull city environment, and I never got further into the game. Just gave up and did something else. I hear it gets better, but I have a lot of games, many of which are good now!I do agree with you on the efficacy of playing through flashbacks and living through events that are important, and leaving all the world-building stuff as totally optional things that you can go through if you want the whole story. (The patient interviews in Arkham Asylum are another neat example of content that you can leisurely browse through at any time, or skip over entirely.) But I think that I like text as an important info dump when it’s used to control pacing that would otherwise be too frenetic or rushed without it. If I’m being immersed in a game, past a certain fatigue point exciting and dynamic things become useless, and I won’t remember them after I finish the game, either. Maybe I’m just old.
You know, you pegged the main thing I’m liking about the style of 4e. I never really put it into words, but I love that. It builds a sense of ownership, and it changes the experience every time. In older editions, I had difficulty with settings like Forgotten Realms, because everyone knew more than me (because I have a fucking life,) and it just got irritating to try to work with that. Now, the settings are thematic and stylistic, but not overly-detailed. I could give two shits what’s under Rock X1386. If it matters, I’ll make it up. The core rules give me that tool kit to work with.
Lore crawls have the potential to get as annoying as dungeon crawls. BioShock’s interesting because it manages to make both interesting at the same time. In nineties RPGs, there was some incentive to keeping up with the lore, if you played with the right people. In video games, sometimes there were important clues in books. Point is, there was gameplay there, of a kind.I haven’t seen an MMO yet where the lore mattered. It’s all just layers and layers of extra paint. There are designers who think that disguises limited interaction… mostly, they haven’t suffered through their own text dumps. Of course, most players haven’t, either, because players are smart and know that they just have to scroll to the bottom and click “accept.”One thing BioShock does right is put all of the exposition on audio. You don’t have to leave the game and sit in a diary interface or something to listen to it. You start playback, then keep going about your business.
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