Have you seen my god-king's perfectly symmetrical floating city? Sweet, right?

The setting fascinated me: a weird blend of Byzantine decadence, Oriental religion and unique mythology. While plenty of games reveal their world through in-game text (see Deus Ex; see the journal entries in SSI’s “Gold Box” AD&D games), Morrowind‘s books and scrolls were unique. They weren’t just one-radian knockoffs of medieval Western Europe, Tolkien with the serial number scratched out. It was esoteric and challenging. I loved it.

For instance, here’s half of the first Sermon of the Thirty-Six Lessons of Vivec:

He was born in the ash among the Velothi, anon Chimer, before the war with the northern men. Ayem came first to the village of the netchimen, and her shadow was that of Boethiah, who was the Prince of Plots, and things unknown and known would fold themselves around her until they were like stars or the messages of stars. Ayem took a netchiman’s wife and said:

‘I am the Face-Snaked Queen of the Three in One. In you is an image and a seven-syllable spell, AYEM AE SEHTI AE VEHK, which you will repeat to it until mystery comes.’

Then Ayem threw the netchiman’s wife into the ocean water where dreughs took her into castles of glass and coral. They gifted the netchiman’s wife with gills and milk fingers, changing her sex so that she might give birth to the image as an egg. There she stayed for seven or eight months.

Then Seht came to the netchiman’s wife and said:

‘I am the Clockwork King of the Three in One. In you is an egg of my brother-sister, who possesses invisible knowledge of words and swords, which you shall nurture until the Hortator comes.’

And Seht then extended his hands and multitudes of homunculi came forth, each like a glimmering rope through the water, and they raised the netchiman’s wife back to the surface world and set her down on the shoals of Azura’s coast. There she lay for seven or eight more months, caring for the egg-knowledge by whispering to it the Codes of Mephala and the prophecies of Veloth and even the forbidden teachings of Trinimac.

…

And so forth. Folks familiar with Judeo-Christian theosophy might recognize the diction of the Old Testament or Torah. Taking Biblical sentence structure and filling it with unfamiliar words helps expose just how weird the Bible is. The netchiman’s wife whispered the Codes of Mephala to the egg-knowledge gifted to her by Ayem, who changed her sex in a coral palace beneath the sea. Got it.

But that’s not the weirdest part!

Sup.

In the course of playing the main quest of Morrowind, you’ll come face to face with Lord Vivec, locked away in the city that bears his name. When you meet him, he will confirm that you are the Nerevarine, the reincarnation of Nerevar, and the only one who can undo the curse that afflicts the continent of Vvardenfell. But he also confirms something that you’ve probably begun to suspect if you’ve been following the in-game text: that Nerevar was once a companion of Vivec as well as the other gods of Morrowind, Almalexia and Sotha Sil. In fact, Vivec and the rest only became gods after uncovering the Heart of Lorkhan, the artifact that Morrowind‘s final villain, Dagoth Ur, is using to escape from Red Mountain. Prior to that, Vivec, Almalexia and Sotha Sil were councilors to Lord Nerevar, who ruled the island of Vvardenfell as a king.

That in itself is a bit of a twist: that the gods of Vvardenfell, the supreme rulers of Morrowind, were once just ordinary people. They only became gods because of a magical relic that they found in the heart of the earth. It makes the ritual and superstition surrounding Vivec seem a little silly: rather than the mysteries of faith needed to comprehend an immortal creator, it’s just the weird trappings of one guy.

The obvious follow-up question is: if Vivec, Almalexia and Sotha Sil got magical god-powers from this relic, what happened to their buddy Nerevar? Here opinions differ. If you ask Vivec or read what he told his priests, Nerevar suffered a fatal wound in the initial fight against Dagoth Ur. However, a sect of dissident priests within Vivec’s ecclesiarchy believe something different: that the tribunal killed Nerevar because he wouldn’t let them use the Heart of Lorkhan to become gods.

I've been doing push-ups and listening to Slipknot for a THOUSAND YEARS.

Two very different responses. You learn both of them in the course of the main quest. Neither of them changes the outcome, or even the nature of the world. Learning that Vivec was an ordinary guy who might have killed his liege does not smash the priesthood of Vivec in one humiliating blow. But it makes you, the player, regard everything different. Vivec is no longer the sage dispenser of wisdom, giving you the guidance you need to complete your quest and save the world. He’s now a canny manipulator, sending the reincarnation of his onetime king (whom he might have slain) to dispatch his enemy.

Those of you who follow Internet arguments between entrenched political camps will recognize this as historical revisionism. For those of you who lead happier lives: historical revisionism is the act of reinterpreting conventional wisdom surrounding some historical event or figure. Pundits and historians engage in it because people rely on history as a guide for what to do next. Changing the lessons available from history – changing the moral of the fable – can disarm one’s ideological opponents or add more weapons to one’s own arsenal.

To use recent examples from American politics: conservatives have spent years attacking the idea that President Franklin Roosevelt’s “New Deal” helped get the country out of the Great Depression. Some economists, like Harold Cole and Lee Ohanian, have argued that the New Deal actually prolonged the Depression, by diverting capital and labor through inefficient central planners (the CCC, the PWA, the WPA, etc) rather than letting it accrue to where it would be useful. Other historians have argued that the New Deal was a net harm to America because it legitimized near-fascist levels of government control over business.

On the left side of the aisle, historians like Howard Zinn sought to repaint America’s historical record as well. In A People’s History of the United States, Zinn made the case that the story of America was a story of common people, not elite leaders. It’s from Howard Zinn and historians of his school that we get the image of the Founding Fathers as white, male plantation owners. In defending his book from several critical reviews, Zinn wrote:

My hero is not Theodore Roosevelt, who loved war and congratulated a general after a massacre of Filipino villagers at the turn of the century, but Mark Twain, who denounced the massacre and satirized imperialism. I want young people to understand that ours is a beautiful country, but it has been taken over by men who have no respect for human rights or constitutional liberties.

I meant 'Bully' as an encouragement, not an imperative.

Note that neither side is making up facts here. Teddy Roosevelt did indeed congratulate Maj. General Leon Wood after the Moro Crater massacre, just as the PWA was an unprecedented level of federal intervention in the American economy. But not every history textbook emphasizes the same facts or draws the same conclusions from them. Historical revisionism is meant to challenge that.

The Elder Scrolls series is rife with this sort of historical revisionism. But let’s focus more on the most recent entry: the exceedingly popular Skyrim.

Skyrim sets the clock farther ahead than any of the previous four games. Four hundred years after the events of Oblivion, the Empire is no longer what it once was. The Imperial Legion and a band of rebels, the Stormcloaks, have thrown the province of Skyrim into civil war. Players who’ve been part of the Elder Scrolls series for a while might be intrigued to discover that they’re now a part of history.

It's a fixer-upper.

The civil war itself can be viewed as a debate between rival factions over the historical record. The Stormcloaks consider themselves faithful to Talos – the oath that you swear to the Stormcloaks calls on Talos by name. But “Talos” is the divine name for the first Emperor, Tiber Septim, in whose name the Imperial Legion fights. The war between the two is a feud over the legacy of Talos – what would the god-hero of mankind wish if he were alive today?

Other examples abound. In the first four games, Stendarr was the Imperial god of righteous strength and mercy. In Skyrim, however, the Vigilant of Stendarr wander the countryside and hunt down Daedric cults. The Mythic Dawn were a secretive cult that slew the Emperor in Oblivion; in Skyrim, they’re a quaint historical memory, preserved in a museum in Dawnstar.

Even the stories of the creation of the world differ, with humans and elves having different takes, according to in-game text. This is something of a rarity in the fantasy genre. Even if the characters in The Belgariad don’t know how the world was created, the author does. Ever since Tolkien and The Silmarillion, consumers of the fantasy genre have come to expect a certain knowability in their fiction. There’s no alternate narrative that says no, Melkor was really trying to liberate the Elves from Valar tyranny by destroying the Two Trees of Valinor.

History will validate me!

This isn’t to say that plot twists revealing deeper truths are foreign to fantasy video games. Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic is a prominent example, with a mid-game plot twist that throws all of the backstory into a different light. But that’s a very personal plot twist that tells you (the player) something different about yourself (the character). Elder Scrolls plot twists, such as they are, tend to tell you something different about the world a thousand years ago.

The Elder Scrolls series is also distinct in how much of its backstory is revealed through supplementary texts. You can make it through the entire game without reading any of the historical texts you find tucked on various bookshelves. Elder Scrolls is far from the only RPG to build out its universe this way, but I personally find the in-game text in Skyrim far more compelling than that of Dragon Age.

(In fact, the only series I’ve played that matches it for literary quality is Deus Ex, the latest incarnation of which I have on my shelf at home. I haven’t opened it yet, as I’m still busy with Skyrim)

I’ve written before about the next evolution in storytelling through videogames and I think the Elder Scrolls series is a forerunner in that direction. After games where none of your choices matter (platform games) and games where only your choices matter (sandbox games), we now have games where only your beliefs matter (interpretive games). You can play through the infamous “No Russian” level of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 by either shooting civilians or not. The level ends the same either way: your character gets shot in the head. The only variable is you: whether the slaughter of civilians shocks you, thrills you or leaves you a desensitized lump.

Similarly, your choice to play Stormcloak or Imperial – or to even take sides in that fight at all – says more about your interest as a player than your choices as a character. Both sides have similar missions: rescuing fellow faction members, capturing forts, laying and breaking sieges. Both sides have opportunities for warriors, rogues or magic-users to cause havoc. While completing either quest produces different outcomes, the game world will still be largely similar. All that changes is you, the player.

Watch the throne.

There is no definitive text that says which side is right: whether the Stormcloaks truly have the right to rule Skyrim, or whether the Imperials are the only hope for peace and prosperity. You have to make that call on your own as a player. In doing so, you’re engaging in historical revisionism of your own. In the hundreds of years prior to the start of Skyrim, were the armies of the Septim Empire a force for good or oppression? Are the Nordic traditions a source of pride or a dishonorable throwback? Your answer to that question – and you can find texts in game to convince you of either – determines the side you choose.

The opportunity to reinterpret history, though not rewrite it, puts Skyrim (and the rest of the Elder Scrolls series) in a rare place among games. It calls into question the role of you, the person holding the controller. Are you a player in a game or the author of a narrative? Skyrim has enough sandbox elements that it challenges the historical definitions of a “game.” There is no stopping point: there’s a main quest that you can complete, but the action keeps trucking after you finish. The “game,” if we can still call it that, continues until you set down the controller, just like a manuscript remains stable until you pick the pen back up. And when your actions shape the course of empires – empires that are documented either in the words of people you talk to or in books you find lying around – there’s a strong drive to leave that manuscript on a solid ending.

(Anyone else play through Morrowind, then pick up Oblivion, hear a rumor that the Nerevarine had headed to Akavir, and say to themselves, “I did? Er, I mean, he did?”)

Of course, in a game that’s rife with such historical revisionism, your enthusiasm to direct the path of history might be dampened. Who’s to say how future generations will remember you? After all, everyone you meet in Skyrim mentions how the Third Era ended with the death of Martin Septim, the last of the Dragonblood Emperors. No one mentions how your Redguard clad in enchanted daedric armor took on an army of dremora and even got in a few good licks on Mehrunes &$#@ing Dagon. Perhaps the Elder Scrolls are meant to encourage cynicism, not optimism.

Either way, by presenting a world with such rich history and giving players extensive option to make their own path in it, Skyrim forces us to reconsider our roles as game players and storytellers.

Related Posts

• Are You There, God? It’s-a Me, Mario!
• The Impact of an Arrow to the Knee
• Toward a More Perfect Build
• L.A. Noire and the Video Game Value of Work
• Episode 176: In A Gunny Sack behind The Bus Boy

Video games have been accused of promoting a wide variety of social ills: violence, misogyny, drug abuse, consumerism; the list goes on and on. One thing the medium hasn’t been blamed for, though, is religion (Spiritual Warfare notwithstanding). However, it could be argued that, far from being the devil’s way of enticing young minds to commit diabolical acts and scuff up their immortal souls, video games are in fact a Creationist plot to trick gamers into believing in God.

Don’t see the connection? Read on.

Does Mario Believe in Miyamoto?

Let’s say you’re an Italian-American plumber: you work hard, you’re close with your brother, probably you were raised Catholic. Your name is Mario. You find yourself in the magical Mushroom Kingdom, constantly besieged by a despotic , fire-breathing turtle, and you’re the only one capable of restoring freedom to the peace-loving fungi of this beautiful land.

Then this happens:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wBasfwkdSS4

Later, once you’ve finished saving the world and rescuing the princess, you and your brother Luigi are sitting around having a few beers and discussing your most recent adventures.

“It was incredible,” you say. “I mean, if anything had been just a little different – if those question blocks hadn’t been exactly where they were, or if there hadn’t been those Piranha Plants and that Propeller Cap inside but, let’s say, a Fire Flower instead, I’d never have been able to get those star coins! Everything was arranged so perfectly, so precisely. It really makes you think it was all put there on purpose, you know? Like it was designed.”

Luigi, ever the skeptic, replies: “But if things weren’t the way that they are, they’d just be some other way instead. Maybe in that case you’d be raving about how unlikely that was. Or you wouldn’t have known there was any star coin there at all and you would have just kept on going.”

The argument Mario and Luigi are having here is what’s known in philosophy as the Anthropic Principle. In one certain formulation, the Anthropic Principle puts forth the idea that the laws of the universe and the particular circumstances of our place in it seem so precisely modeled to bring about the necessary conditions for intelligent life – so fine-tuned that if any one element had been just a little different it would be impossible for human beings to exist – that it indicates a Creator who intentionally made things this way in order to bring us about in the way that we are. Basically, it’s an argument for the existence of God. That’s what Mario is proposing and it’s often referred to as the Strong Anthropic Principle. Luigi’s point is that the appearance of design is no proof of design, because if things were different enough that we couldn’t exist to observe them, we wouldn’t be around to notice. So we don’t exist “on purpose,” but since the universe happens to be the way that it is, it just happens to be possible that we exist too.

Variations on the Anthropic Principle as an argument for God’s existence vary from the ridiculous to the sublime. Remember Kirk Cameron demolishing atheism by appealing to the humble banana (ignoring that the modern banana is more or less the product of centuries of human engineering)? On the other side of the coin, there’s Benjamin Franklin’s often-misquoted statement: “Behold the rain which descends from heaven upon our vineyards, there it enters the roots of the vines, to be changed into wine, a constant proof that God loves us, and loves to see us happy.”

Co-conspirators.

The difference is that Kirk Cameron and Ben Franklin are making observations from within Creation and then trying to reason their way out of it – something that 18th Century Idealist philosopher and notoriously punctual celibate Immanuel Kant warns us not to do, though philosophers engage in that kind of thing constantly and, according to Kant, to the discipline’s detriment. All knowledge, he says, is based on experience; since we necessarily can have no experience of anything outside of our physical world (such as its hypothetical Creator), we can’t ever know anything about what’s beyond it – what Kant calls the Noumenal – no matter how good our reasoning.

So Mario and Luigi can debate theology until the Koopa Kids come home, but they can’t ever come to any certain conclusion because they can’t look past the screen – they’re trapped within their own perceptual world. We, on the other hand, sitting smugly on the other side of the Nintendo, know that Mario is actually correct. There is a designer (or, more accurately, a whole pantheon of them), that created the Mushroom Kingdom and everything in it, including the Super Mario Brothers themselves, and organized elements such that certain really cool stuff like getting star coins in elaborate ways should be possible.

From a philosophical perspective, the whole thing smacks of Creationism. On a subtle level, the structure of the game suggests that the complex arrangement of the gameworld – and by extension, worlds in general – is too perfect to be a coincidence; that it had to have been put there on purpose by an intelligent agent. What we may have here is a decades-old conspiracy of programmers, indoctrinating the youth to find design in every event, intention in every object.

Let’s look at some other games to see if more evidence of this Creationist plot can be uncovered.

Will Wright, Who Art In Heaven

In Spore, from Will Wright, creator of such addictive ego-trips as Sim City and The Sims, you take control of the evolution of your very own species – from microscopic organism all the way to technologically advanced, galaxy-colonizing sentience. Hailed in some quarters as a potential teaching tool for science, others criticized it – the evolutionary process in the first two stages of Spore bears little resemblance to currently accepted biology. In fact, Spore looks a lot more like Intelligent Design: The Video Game.

Spore avoids the biogenesis – or origin of life – problem by appealing to the panspermia hypothesis, which sounds like the title of a pornographic parody episode of The Big Bang Theory but actually isn’t (yet). The idea is that the basic building blocks of life on Earth arrived here billions of years ago from elsewhere in the galaxy, probably via meteorite impact. At the moment, this is as viable an explanation as any, considering that the other major hypothesis is that life arose spontaneously out of a so-called “primordial soup” – plausible enough but not technically a proper scientific theory, since there’s not yet any evidence that such a soup existed. Spore takes the safer route by pushing off the origin of life question – it came from outer space! – but leaves its earliest beginnings mysterious.

In the first part of Spore, the Tide Pool Stage, your creature begins its life as a microscopic organism in a game mode that’s sort of a hybrid of Pac-Man and Asteroids. Pac-teroids, if you will. Your little blob cruises around for a while trying to avoid things bigger than itself and eat things smaller than itself. Based on what it eats it gets “DNA points,” which you can spend between generations to make evolutionary upgrades to your species: add eyes, legs, mouths, shells or claws, and so on.

This, needless to say, is not what your high school biology textbook will tell you (unless you live in Texas). While Spore could be arguing for a Lamarckian view of evolution rather than a purely Darwinian one, with leaps in physiology from one generation to the next, the huge degree of personal agency involved in the development of your creature in Spore is suspiciously teleological. This is no Blind Watchmaker at work; this is a goal-driven process, the result of conscious decisions made by a higher power – namely, you – toward a desired outcome – the emergence of a conscious being.

Now, on one level, making an evolution simulator where the player just sits there and watches as mindless physical forces and arbitrary environmental conditions lead to the emergence of a species that survives by being successfully adapted to its surroundings – that would just be bad, boring game design. But on an ideological level, even if Spore isn’t trying to advocate for the intentional guidance of the development of life on this planet, it certainly seems to make a good case for the plausibility of Intelligent Design in principle. That is, Spore’s evolutionary mechanism doesn’t accord with the facts of world as it’s currently understood, but it does show how something like Intelligent Design could function under certain circumstances. It’s subtle, nearly subliminal, but it’s definitely there.

“Why On Earth Can’t You Get Ye Flask?”

The Point-and-Click Adventure was a genre that enjoyed its height of popularity in the late 1980s and early 1990s with games like the King’s Quest series and Day of the Tentacle. It’s now mostly been supplanted by games with better graphics and more immersive interfaces, but Telltale Games in particular still specializes in the form with games like the Sam & Max series, the new Back To The Future games, and Strong Bad’s Cool Game For Attractive People (“but you can play it too!”).

One of the main reasons for the Point-and-Click’s decline is the common frustration the player experiences when trying to do something with something they’re not supposed to, or when unable to figure out what to do at all. In a P&C there’s a finite number of obtainable items in the world and limited combinations of or uses for items that will actually do anything. The trick is getting the right items and then doing the right things with them to accomplish the task at hand and progress to the next puzzle.

From left to right: Sam, Max.

The P&C gameworld is one in which there’s a place for everything, and your job is to put everything in its place. Meaning that each object you encounter is there for a reason, and has its own utility and purpose that will go unfulfilled until you activate it with your human agency. The player character in such a game could reasonably come to the conclusion that not only will everything in the world with which it’s possible to interact, at some point, be absolutely vital to solving some problem, but also that, conversely, every problem that comes up will be solvable using only the objects that you have with you. Nothing is useless, and no problem is ever totally inextricable. In other words: there is always hope. Given enough time and the capacity for philosophical reflection, Sam and/or Max could come to believe that everything in their world has been provided by some powerful external force, some being that knows all their needs and provides the conditions for their satisfaction ahead of time. And Sam and/or Max would be right. Their world was created, and it was created just for them.

Isaac Unbound?

But surely not all popular video games submit so transparently to the Anthropic Principle?
Well, no. Let’s take The Binding of Isaac, an indie game modeled after the original NES Legend of Zelda – except you’re a naked toddler in Hell, your sole weapon your own projectile tears. Our friends over at Video Games Hot Dog had a discussion a while back about this game and how frustrating certain aspects of its gameplay can be – specifically that you can be thrown into a dungeon with blocked-off areas or locked doors but no possible way to access them, no ability to obtain enough bombs or keys to penetrate these obstacles. That’s because The Binding of Isaac incorporates Roguelike elements into its game design.

A Roguelike (named for the prototype of the genre, Rogue) uses randomly generated dungeons and randomly occurring items to create and populate its play space, so the size, shape, and contents of each level is inherently unpredictable. Thus you can be tossed into a basement with no keys, but every room might have a locked treasure chest in it. Maybe you’ll get a key from killing a monster and maybe you won’t. Chances are good that you’ll be forced to go through the level without any possibility of getting all the powerups contained therein.

You could argue that this element makes the game unfair and needlessly annoying. How hard would it have been for the game designer to make it so that there were never more locked chests or blocked areas surrounded by rocks than there were keys or bombs? But we’re also always complaining that life isn’t fair in exactly the same way, aren’t we? And if life isn’t fair, why should video games be? If any game character had reasons to doubt the existence of a Creator it would be poor little Isaac.

What kind of a God would allow this?

Except.

As you might have already guessed from its Bible-referencing title, Binding of Isaac is a game absolutely steeped in religion. Not just in its allusions and themes, but its very storyline hinges on overt revelation from God Himself, pacts with the devil, and powerups both diabolical and holy. The Deity is all over this game; as if to emphasize or punctuate the apparent arbitrariness of certain gameworld elements, that sense of being a tiny, scared creature that can’t possibly even begin to comprehend the external Powers at whose mercy he is, every pixel positively marinates in theology like the oozing blood of a sacrificed ram. Despite all that evident injustice, there’s no room for doubts: Isaac knows there’s a Creator, even if he doesn’t know why the Creator has made it so that Isaac has to submit to so much suffering.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RtsUmmCBCaQ

Because of its randomization, The Binding of Isaac is extremely replayable, and rewards multiple playthroughs with extra content, unlockable achievements, new playable characters, new bosses, and so on. There are bonuses for completing the game not just once, but up to ten times. But get this: the achievement you unlock following your sixth complete playthrough is called “Everything’s Terrible.” You finish the game for the sixth time and – congraturation! – “the game,” the game itself informs you, “just got harder.”

Now, what kind of a reward is that? Actually, it’s just the kind of reward you’d expect from a game created by … well, created by a Creator. The designer of Binding of Isaac made this game by drawing from his experiences growing up in a heavily religious household, and if he knows anything about religion it’s that the point of it isn’t to make life easier; it makes life more difficult, imposing rules and restrictions that may feel arbitrary but the comportment with which alleges to make success all the more meaningful. The Binding of Isaac is a meaningful game, and also a deeply metaphysical one. Its randomness, its ever-increasing difficulty, its ostensible unjustness, all belie a more fundamental primary architecture below the surface, an orderliness that introduces chaos on purpose so the player will be continually surprised and challenged, and therefore will remain motivated to keep going.

So basically, yes, video games are kind of a Creationist plot after all. There is at least one documented case of a person becoming a theist after playing Final Fantasy VII. But in what way could it be otherwise? After all, it’s impossible by definition to create something that has no Creator. Does that make secular art a contradiction in terms? It’s a fact that the human mind is inherently configured to see order and purpose where they may not exist. But is that tendency in us a result of mere adaptation – or intention?

[Could God create a level so tough that even he couldn't beat it? Or have we stared so long into the bottomless pit that the pit has stared back into us? Sound off in the comments! - Ed.]

Richard Rosenbaum is a writer from Toronto who edits fiction for The Incongruous Quarterly and Broken Pencil. He wrote a story about a punk band called The Oughts, which you can get from Found Press for just ninety nine cents (if you’re into that kind of thing).

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The recently released game Skyrim takes place in a landscape dotted with various cities, with each city sporting its own complement of city guards. These guards are a chatty bunch, frequently offering up unprompted dialogue whenever coming into proximity with the player. As one walks around the towns of Skyrim, guards will complement you on your actions, offer up opinions on the equipment you are carrying or make references to current events. On rare occasions, this dialogue ends up being unintentionally humorous – it’s not unusual to have one guard sternly warning you that any criminal activity will have violent consequences while, at the same time, his partner loudly admits that the swords they are carrying couldn’t cut butter. But for the most part it’s just background noise, something put into the game to make the cities seem more ‘alive’.

Still, there is one quote that seems to have stuck out in the mind of players:
‘I was once an adventurer like you… then I took an arrow in the knee.’

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yttRlNGkGSY

This lament, which is not spoken by any specific character, but can be heard occasionally from practically any generic city watchman, quickly exploded over the internet. Videos appeared online, message boards were taken over by endless references, and as proof that this phenomenon has truly arrived, it even has its own entry on the website Know Your Meme.

It’s not surprising that such a popular game, particularly one whose appeal is strongest among the segment of the population most likely to also frequent the web, inspired a meme. What is interesting though is, why this phrase? Out of the dozens of things that city guards will say, as well as the thousands of sentences spoken throughout the game by various other characters, it is ‘arrow in the knee’ that became an instant success.

The most obvious part of the appeal is that the idea of someone being shot in the knee is funny in sort of a twisted way. First of all, there’s a certain visual aspect to it. Note the word choice here – he took an arrow IN the knee. This calls up images of him standing there, holding his leg, while an arrow shaft sticks out of the joint. Also, although it sounds excruciatingly painful, it’s painful in such an excessively over-the-top way that it borders on absurdity. Humor has often been drawn from portrayals of excessive injury, and this seems to fall into that niche.

What is better - to be born good, or to overcome your evil nature through great effort?

Second, because there is a limit to the number of different things the guards can be programmed to say, but an infinite number of times that their speech can be triggered, the guards will by necessity start repeating each other. Theoretically, every guard in the game will tell you that they have been shot in the knee. This lends an additional layer of absurdity to the quote that most of their other sayings don’t have. While unlikely, it is somewhat possible that every guard in the game truly would be ‘a lot warmer and a lot happier with a belly full of mead’, and that not a single one of them are impressed by your ability to cast a few spells. But the idea that the police force of every single city in the game is made up entirely of former adventurers who all suffered an identical injury is nothing short of preposterous.

However, beyond the humorous aspects lies something else that resonates with players. Each arrow-crippled sentinel is a reminder of the dangers of adventuring, and its subsequent consequences. As brave warriors within the game, we like to imagine our characters as being nearly invincible. If we even consider the possibility of them being killed, it’s always in the midst of doing something glorious, like fighting a dragon or sacrificing ourselves to save a larger groups of people. The idea of receiving a disabling injury and falling into a quiet life in obscurity is a much crueler fate than any we’ve previously considered.

And a cruel fate it is. The world of Skyrim is populated by Nords, a race of fictional people that are pretty clearly influenced by the Vikings. This is a proud warrior culture, one who’s society embraces and glorifies battle. To stand around in a relatively quiet, uneventful city is not the life that most of them would embrace, particularly those who were inclined to become adventurers. Guards will talk enviously of their brother, who is off fighting dragons, while they’re stuck on guard duty. This frustration and thirst for combat is also a likely explanation as to why their response to just about any criminal behavior, no matter how minor, is to attempt to kill the perpetrator.

Stolen sweet roll. Let's move.

Not only that, but enlisting in the city guard results in a complete loss of identity in the most literal sense. City Watchmen are one of the few ‘generic’ type of characters in the game. Most residents of Skyrim have their own names, homes, and routines. If one of them dies, they’re gone forever. A family member might take over their job duties, but that person will never be truly replaced, and the world’s population is permanently one lower. This is not the case with the city watch, who all dress identically, have no name other than ‘[Name of City] Guard’, and are replaced in the game whenever one dies (apparently there are an infinite number of adventurers out there taking arrows to the knee). This sort of existence would be tough for anyone, but is especially cruel for someone who sought a life of adventure in order to make a name for himself.

Perhaps most troubling is that none of their previous injuries appear to be that serious. Being a city guard is a physically demanding job – they are required to be on their feet all day, walk around the city, and give chase to criminals. Each guard is able to perform these duties without difficulty, but even so, they are no longer capable of going on adventures. The line between well-known adventurer and anonymous city watchman must be razor thin that a seemingly imperceptible loss of ability is enough make the difference. One wonders how many other adventurers suffered the same injury, failed to recognize their slightly diminished capabilities, and ended up in the belly of a monster as a result.

Alternately, it could be that while the guard’s physical wounds have fully healed, psychological ones remain. As I mentioned earlier, getting shot in the knee with an arrow is a horrific injury, one that anyone who had ever experienced would probably go out of their way to avoid suffering again in the future. This could lead to hesitation, and in the heat of battle, hesitation could lead to death. In this light, the guards aren’t necessarily expressing bitterness with how their life turned out, so much as disgust with themselves for what they perceive as a mental failing.

More importantly, this arrow in the knee story affects players on a direct level. It’s not our characters that relate to the guard’s story, but ourselves. We live in world where catastrophic injury is just a car accident or unfortunate fall away. These events occur infrequently enough that we can put them out of our minds, but the injured guard is a reminder of the dangers that surround us in our everyday lives. And the threat isn’t merely physical – in a country where millions don’t have health insurance, and over 60% of bankruptcies are related to health care costs, the disaster brought on from an accident or illness may be financial. The watchman’s lament taps into a deeply buried fear that we’re all one arrow in the knee away from the poor house.

Part of why this makes such an impact is that the injury in question is fairly routine. While playing the game, I’ve been shot with arrows hundreds of times, and it’s a statistical certainty that at least a few of those have hit my character in the knee. Taking an arrow to the knee is an inevitable part of playing the game, just as certain routine injuries, such as twisting an ankle, bumping one’s head, or yes, getting into a car accident, are a nearly inevitable part of ours. Most of the time, like our game character, we’re able to shake off these events without consequences. But sometimes we’re unlucky – the ankle breaks, the bump on the head results in a long-lasting concussion, or the car accident leads to chronic back pain.

The guard who took an arrow in the knee stands out because he reminds us of our own fragility, and the fact that life-changing disaster is a constant reality of the world we live in. And while that’s scary, it also serves as a reminder to appreciate what we have now. This makes it doubly powerful. Remember, he was once like you.

[Are 99% of the soul gems concentrated in the hands of 1% of the jarls? Or does the availability of arthroscopic coverage in the Imperial system render Brad's observations moot? Sound off in the comments! - Ed.]

Brad Lawrence disparages old video games at his website Brad Hates Games and daylights as an accountant in Seattle.

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This has been going on for long enough that it’s blended into the background, but it’s an odd element of gameplay. Not every video game requires a build. Every time you fire up Super Mario Bros., or Sonic the Hedgehog, or Gears of War, you’re playing with the same character. Mario can get power-ups, becoming a different Mario than he was in the beginning – mushrooms to get bigger, flowers to spit fire – but these aren’t quite the same as different builds. There are no branching paths. The only decision in whether or not to get a Fire Flower is whether getting it would put you at risk of losing a life.

(Although one of the first NES games to offer different builds was the retconned, kit-bashed sequel to Super Mario Bros., in which the four selectable characters – Mario, Luigi, Toad and the Princess – had four different modes of play. Ahead of their time!)

In fact, when considered in light of the history of ludology, the entire notion of a build is odd. It introduces an element to gameplay beyond player skill or random chance: the effect of a tactical selection. The conceit of most competitive games is that all players are notionally equal, that luck has the potential to aid or afflict them all equally, that the rules are fair and that therefore the play of the game will be a sort of agon to determine who has the most skill. But now our two-dimensional playing field has a third dimension.

(I wavered back and forth on whether build should be considered a subset of skill, but I think they’re ultimately different. Skill means execution within the instance of play, but a build is something you settle on beforehand. You choose whether to go sniper or assault in MW3 in the calm minutes before launch. You choose whether to charge down an alleyway or take cover in the heat of the moment.)

The agon, for the newbies to Western classics, is the Greek contest of sport. It was typically associated with religious or civic festivals, where athletes, musicians and poets would compete in their chosen arts. Distinguishing oneself through competition was a pillar of Hellenic society. Like many aspects of the social order, the Greeks personified the competitive drive in the form of a god, also named Agon, represented in Olympia as a statue toting dumbbells.

All the n00bs sprinting for the rocket launcher.

We know that two competitors in a sport might come from unequal starting points, and that’s fine. Hell, that’s expected – that’s why we have the contest in the first place, to find out who is farther ahead! But what about more formal games, like board games or games of chance? Why would a more casual game give its players different starting positions, and why?

If we delve back far enough to find when unequal starting positions, or different builds, entered the ludological space, we find ourselves at wargames. War simulations have existed for as long as war, but modern wargames owe their patrimony to the Prussian army’s war simulator, Kriegspiel, and to “Little Wars,” H.G. Wells’ rules for playing with toy soldiers. Wargame enthusiasts collected miniatures, made up their own rules, and mocked up scale versions of historical battles. Since historical battles all had documented outcomes, and since verisimilitude is one of the chief concerns of most wargames, there were strong sides (whoever won in real life) and weak sides (whoever lost). You only picked the Confederacy in Avalon Hill’s Gettysburg if you wanted to start with a handicap, or if you wanted to indulge in a little historical revisionism.

In 1971, a group of Wisconsin wargamers who were recreating medieval battles decided to inject an element of Conan / Tolkien fantasy into their games. They brought in dragons, giants, wizards, halflings and elven rangers. Eventually these fantasy variations grew so popular that a couple referees, among them E. Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson, abandoned the small-unit combat aspect and focused instead on parties comprised of solo adventurers. This is when Chainmail, a packet of rules for medieval miniature combat, gave birth to Dungeons & Dragons, and from there the rest is history.

Computer roleplaying games were inspired by Dungeons and Dragons and aimed to simulate the same type of experience. Ultima and Wizardry (both 1981) let players design their own characters or outfit a party with different adventurers, which might be considered a sort of character gestalt. Final Fantasy popularized this style of game for the NES console. As video game RPGs grew more common, the notion of customizing a character before play began started to spread to other types of games. Hence we get MW3, about as far from a traditional JRPG as one can get and yet still spawning debates over custom classes.

Much more fun than rolling dice with other humans.

I lay out all this history in order to trace the origins of builds back to their root cause. Builds ultimately owe their existence to the wargame hobby. You can trace a direct line from the assault class of MW3 to the chit-stacked tables of Advanced Squad Leader. And understanding this ancestry is crucial. As any serious minis hobbyist will tell you, the chief purpose of wargames is to start arguments; the secondary purpose is to paint miniatures; replicating battles is the least of a gamer’s concerns. And the more important a build is to your game of choice, the greater the ratio of time spent defending your build in online fora vs. time spent playing that build.

Why do builds matter? And why do we get so defensive over our builds?

As I asserted earlier, builds are a new variable in determining the outcome of a game, with skill and luck being the traditional two. The more that the outcome of a game relies on builds and luck, the less it relies on skill. Final Fantasy sits on the far end of the Build spectrum, where your party composition determines whether you can complete the game in a reasonable time or whether you will summon all the strength a 9-year-old can muster and snap a wooden folding chair in half after yet again dying on your way to the Marsh Cave (at least, that’s what I’ve heard people do). Super Mario Bros. sits on the far end of the Skill spectrum, with almost no random elements: every monster appears on the screen in a predetermined location and every power-up’s location can be documented in stone.

Both your build and your skill matter in whether and how quickly you succeed. And both build and skill require you to make choices. But the virtues of a build are academic and the virtues of your skill are circumstantial. We choose our builds for reasons (whether good or bad) but skill dictates the choices we make in the moment.

A game that requires builds opens up the field of competitors to more than just the quick and the perceptive. Even with a perfect map dictating the location of every power-up and a timing of a boss’s attack patterns down to the microsecond, you couldn’t beat Ninja Gaiden just by sitting in your armchair and developing a plan. You still need the reflexes and coordination to pull it off. Not so with Dragon Quest. Games with builds introduce a new virtue for successful play: deliberation.

In this way, builds are an obvious benefit in game design. Anything that makes a game accessible to more players is all to the good. But builds aren’t perfect.

Builds are arrived at through reason, whether good reasons (a consideration of the merits and flaws of a given set of equipment) or bad reasons (d00d snipers kick @$$). Reason is an argument we conduct with ourselves. It’s a rehearsal for the argument that we might one day have with another person (“why do you keep picking sniper?”) or perhaps with our future self (“why did I pick sniper again?”). It’s a short step from reason to rationalization.

You can’t argue with skill, just like you can’t argue with success. If one chessmaster defeats another, the loser can’t take to the mics at a press conference and say, “The rooks just weren’t feeling it today.” And we tend not to argue with the outcomes of skill. But we can argue about builds all day long.

Choosing your build is like choosing your path in life, albeit the short, violent life of a video game. Choosing a given play in the heat of the moment (i.e., exercising one’s skill) is not quite as momentous a decision. But, like choosing a build, it’s a choice. It’s a choice we make based on the information available to us, directed toward a given outcome. So why do we get so defensive about builds and so nonchalant about skill?

This treads into realms of psychology where I get a little weak, but I think part of it comes from the very personal nature of builds. Everyone wants to win at a game. Everyone wants to be skillful. There are no debates over the merits of competent vs. incompetent players. But people choose different builds for vastly different reasons. Some people pick snipers because they like the feel of hiding in an artificial nest, knocking people off while remaining untouchable. Some people play wizards because they like calling up waves of elemental force with a gesture. Some people play healers because they like the grim resolution of being the party member everyone needs to call on when the chips are down. All of these are valid choices and none of those reasons stop the build from being useful. A build allows a player to express their personality while on the way to winning.

To argue with a build is to argue with a player’s personality. It says, “I think the things you like are wrong.” Not morally wrong, like pederasty, but incorrect. This is a really tough statement to grapple with, if taken seriously. Imagine if I picked an argument with you over whether you liked vanilla or not. Or whether your preference for vanilla invalidated you as a person. “Only boring people like vanilla.”

The punch line, of course, is that this sort of thing is frighteningly common, especially on the Internet. We take people to task for harmless aesthetic choices all the time. “How could anyone like [that band / that movie / that book / that video game / that build]?” It seems so obvious when it rolls off our tongue – or, more accurately, off our fingertips and onto our keyboard. But it stings deep when it’s directed at us. The reason should be clear: we identify ourselves through the cultural elements that we like, and to challenge our liking is to challenge our self-identity.

A build is a way for us to imprint our personality onto a video game. A sniper’s experience of MW3 is very different from the assault class experience; a healer’s take on WoW differs from that of a ranger. The game is a stable property, but it presents different facets to us. Because of this, gameplay becomes more personal: my experience with MW3 is more uniquely mine because I customized my class.

And yet a build is not purely aesthetic, like the color of your Mii or your XBox Live gamertag. A build is also purpose-driven. You choose a build because you think it improves your chances of winning. The build you choose will be informed by your personality, but the end goal is always the same. And so into this level of harmless self-validation we add a bracing dose of external validation. If you stat out a sniper and your clan keeps getting shut out, then either your choice sucks (reflecting poorly on your personality) or you’re not playing a sniper well enough (which also reflects poorly).

Builds, then, are not just a continuation of the personal aesthetic into the medium of video games, but an evolution. Finally, we can do more than just assert our preferences into a marketplace of ideas: we can test them against a dynamic opponent. Vanilla and chocolate go head to head at last. It’s a substitute for the tests of status in the ancestral environment, or the agon of ancient Greece, or the wargames of miniature hobbyists who seek to out-Napoleon Napoleon. My ideas about how to play are not just my opinion; they’re right and what’s more, I can prove it. My ideas can beat your ideas.

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The PC release seems like a good time to take a fresh look at the game, since it plays a lot more like an old-school PC title than a contemporary high-budget thriller, despite all the driving, shooting, fighting, mature themes and optional free-roaming.

In case you haven’t played it, here’s a video walkthrough of the first full mission for reference (spoilers for very early on in L.A. Noire):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Df7MeUaDjr0

There are a lot of detective games with arcade elements, but the game it most directly recalls for me, because of its aesthetic, painstaking attention to detail, focus on story, and the way it handles linear gameplay, is the 1997 Blade Runner detective game for PC by Westwood Studios (spoilers for the first mission of a game from 14 years ago):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=StdIBH50Gfk

Games like this have a few qualities that can seem foreign to players with expectations built around the larger body of video games — chief among them that the story progresses whether you do well or poorly, and you can play the game through to the end with only minor variations even if you get a whole lot of stuff wrong. This is very strange to gamers primarily influenced by The Legend of Zelda and its legacy (that is, most commercial video games) — where, even when a game is complex and open-ended, finishing it requires you, at least for the main storyline, to get everything right.

This latter way of playing has become second-nature to gamers, which says a lot about how video games have affected our psychology and shaped the way we look at the world, for better or worse.

More investigation, after the jump…

"Get on that GODDAMNED couch, so I can METHODICALLY QUESTION you!"

Picking the gum off my shoe

There are a few ways to play L.A. Noire:

1. Do your best on the fly, looking for clues at crime scenes and making your best guesses, maybe taking advantage of the in-game help, but mostly just playing at the pace of the story to get to the next cutscene.
2. Read or watch walkthroughs and do the things they tell you to get five stars on every mission.
3. Puzzle out the specifics of the cases, which can be surprisingly time-consuming and require a whole lot of attention to detail.
4. Focus on reading the characters’ faces and gestures, and use that to guide you through interrogations, rather than the evidence.
5. Brute-force everything, clicking on everything in every search and restarting each interrogation over and over again until you get it right.
6. Dick around, free-roam and do side quests and stuff.

Despite its Grand Theft Auto shell, dicking around isn’t as much of a focus in L.A. Noire as in similar games. As a police officer, you’re strongly discouraged from hurting innocent people, except when it serves as a dark reminder of the moral failings rotting out the utopian aspirations of postwar America (in which case, go crazy-go-nuts).

No, the LAPD doesn’t like you hitting people with you car. That takes a lot of the fun out of the signature feature of Grand Theft Auto games, which is driving around hitting people with your car. What, that isn’t why you play? Moving on.

The other options, though they will change the specifics of what you see and hear, will all more or less get you through the story. Sure, you get a star rating on every mission, which is some incentive to get things “right.” There are achievements, and who doesn’t love those? But these things don’t matter that much. It feels more like you’re playing a movie than a game, except when you run into the pernicious challenges that don’t yield to the conventional wisdom and playstyle of the greater body of video games — and the notable absence of “retry” on the interrogations.

The Video Game Value of Work

The most important thing in this image? The half an address.

The thing that surprises me the most about L.A. Noire is how badly brute forcing works.

(I learned about brute forcing from the A.I. menu of Chessmaster 3000, the 1000 better sequel to the then-futuristically named Chessmaster 2000 — which was in turn 100 not as good as Chessmaster 2100. But all that isn’t important right now.)

Brute forcing means trying every possible solution to a problem in a systematic way, knowing that one of them will eventually work — like trying all the numbers from 1111 through 9999 to open a bike lock, hoping everybody around you ignores you or thinks you are absurdly forgetful. Most locking and password systems are designed to make brute forcing difficult. It is one of the most time-consuming ways to solve a problem. It is an absurd way to buy shoes at DSW, for example, where the sizes and styles overwhelm even the most powerful supercomputers.

But in video games, brute forcing is almost guaranteed to work — rather than a problematic chore for cryptologists, it has become the major driving force behind playing most games, ostensibly for fun. Let’s act like algorithms for a few hours until dinner-time. Ah, leisure!

The real touchstone of brute forcing as leisure, which has influenced all others, was The Legend of Zelda. Zelda expected you to push every stone in the world in the hope it might move, detonate explosives everywhere in the hopes the terrain would decide to open for you (and the trust that, if it would be detrimental, it wouldn’t open), literally try to burn down every tree in the forest in the hopes of finding hidden money, and walk into every blank wall in the hopes you might arbitrarily go through it.

To me, Level 7 of the first quest of Zelda is where this notion took root — that you need to approach problems with the attitude of trying every possible thing, relying on the world around you to let you know whether you are right rather than your own intuition. Well before everybody used the Internet, word of mouth and word of Nintendo Power spread the truth of Level 7  — without it, even finding the level might have been unreasonable. Count the number of total dick moves the game pulls on the player in this walkthrough of the dungeon (from zeldanavigator‘s YouTube Channel):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1SKnZxZuWyA

First, you have to blow a whistle by a lake to dry up the water to get into the dungeon, in a game where textual help is sparse and cryptic and where whistles don’t generally dry up water as a matter of course. In the room where you get the map of the dungeon, the first thing to do is try to blow up the blank wall on the north side, which the map you just got clearly tells you goes nowhere. A room or two over from that, you need to bomb another blank wall, which the recently acquired and now thoroughly useless map erroneously tells you goes nowhere. Then of course you have to kill absolutely everything in the room before pushing an arbitrary block to go get an item you really don’t need, but which you are conditioned to find in every dungeon. Throughout, you nonchalantly fight a variety of monsters who are invincible until you brute force the right item to use, which is usually counterintuitive, at which point they become easy.

If this all feels normal to you, you’re not alone. It feels normal to me. I know by default to kill everything in a room before pushing on every fixed structure in order to see if I get an item I don’t really care if I need. It just happens automatically. It’s what I do at Chipotle most of the time.

The Flatfoot of Menlo Park

Wearing suits like that in L.A. in the summer? No wonder you perspire so much.

It might even feel scientific — it is, after all, how Edison found a commercially viable material for the filament for incandescent light bulbs, right? He famously tried everything from platinum to elephant skin.

The difference, though, is that Edison expanded on the work of the people who came before him, he didn’t start fresh assuming everything he was told was wrong. When somebody handed Edison a map, his first impulse wasn’t to throw it out — but to use it. A lot of Edison’s work was brute-force-ish, but the man knew how to hypothesize, and he knew how to use existing information.

The human mind seems predisposed to brute force thinking as a way of figuring out what is good to eat or safe to do — we try something, it kills somebody we love, we get a huge aversion to it and never try it again, and we write that down in meter and rhyme so we remember it and pass it down to future generations. Kosher and Halal laws are mostly this — records of good judgement drawn from experience, which is drawn from bad judgement. Don’t eat shellfish, because it can kill you. Understanding Red Tide isn’t important when you’re brute-forcing dinner options.

In that way, all of humanity, and indeed all of life, is a brute-force experiment — except, again, we are well-advised to follow patterns rather than assume what we already know is always wrong. And we don’t just remember the specific things that hurt us, we are drawn to patterns or themes, building into our ancestral stories and wisdom, as well as into our own emotional memories, guidelines and rules of thumb that will hopefully help others make better decisions in the future when they encounter situations that may or may not be new to the species.

In many video games, these two skills — the skill to figure out which guesses are reasonable, and the skill to build on the information you already have about a situation – aren’t just useless, they are actively counterproductive. A lot of the challenge in video games comes from the designers and developers picking smart moments to defy your expectations, prompting you to try the thing that you know isn’t supposed to work — to the point that players are conditioned it might be the best way to approach every problem. Perhaps it has contributed to a generation of contrarian curmudgeons who immediately look to what is wrong with any situation — which isn’t the worst point of view on things, but maybe isn’t always the best.

The real break with reality, though, far worse than what video games ask us to give up, is what they give us in return. They don’t just condition us to think it is stupid to analyze existing evidence to formulate a hypothesis, they convince you that if just work on something, even if you do it automatically and without critical self-awareness, even if that something that seems entirely useless by all your better judgement, the universe will reward you by eventually telling you that you are right.

Fancy meeting you here. Now tell me, where is the Eiffel Tower? And does the person who stole it like spelunking?

This is, unfortunately, not how the world works. There are spare few rewards for spinning your wheels with no plan as to how to succeed. The universe doesn’t drop flower pots on your head to let you know a V.I.L.E. henchman is around — you can rarely be so certain you are on the right track. Just see what kind of value you get out of opening every drawer in your office looking for secret papers, rather than asking the other people who work there what the most efficient way is to get what you need. And then ask yourself why you work in an office.

Oh, it’s useful to know how to brute force — even in L.A. Noire, a lot of problems yield to persistence, and it’s valuable to have a mindset available that can tolerate that kind of work when it is necessary. But even when you do find the answer, you need to be able to recognize it on your own. There is no chime that rings to let you know the doors have all opened and that pushing the third block from the left will now (and only now) open the way to the silver arrows.

Shamus and the splash zone

One discovery I made playing L.A. Noire was this way of thinking had entrenched itself in my mind to a much greater degree than I ever thought possible — being forced to pick a right answer without trying all the options in a video game has become physically uncomfortable. I want to click on everything. I want to try every option. By default, I don’t trust any of the knowledge I have about the situation, expect the game to try to trick me, and would prefer to walk around every scene in a systematic, looping pattern, clicking constantly, and follow that up by asking every witness every question and demanding every possible response.

However, despite the opportunity to replay the action sequences as much as you want without the burden of “hit points,” “lives,” or “permanent consequences to being shot in the face,” (and a bunch of other more familiar video-game stuff that has been sewn into this game to make it familiar like an Inception car chase) in L.A. Noire, replaying the interrogations is discouraged. You don’t get to go back and try other avenues of inquiry if a suspect reacts poorly to a threat — you deal with the consequences of whether you believed what the suspect said or not, and you move on.

To try an individual interrogation again, you have to quit the game, go back to the loading screen, then the title screen, then resume and back to a loading screen then back to your last automatic save point, all before you hit a different automatic save point. You’re welcome to replay the missions from the beginning as many times as you want, but each interrogation is meant to stand on its own, not giving you the option of brute-forcing.

Even in the old-school Sierra games, distant cousins of L.A. Noire many times removed, you are encouraged to click on everything, and if you click on the wrong thing and die, you just start over from fairly recently and click on everything again.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qzv8CfwM7Bc

The first time I realized I couldn’t go back and click on something else in L.A. Noire was a bit of a shock. It was a far greater shock when I realized it never told you what the right answer was supposed to be, even if you used intuition points (the finite amount of in-game help you get, which you can increase at a faster-than-normal rate through aforementioned dicking around with side quests whilst refraining from hitting people with your car).

This all shouldn’t be so shocking, because that is how it works in life. If you get something wrong, you don’t get told the right answer, and you don’t necessarily always get to try again.

And it’s not like clicking on the wrong thing makes you lose — you usually just suffer some minor penalty that will hit your star rating at the end of the mission but otherwise doesn’t stop the game from moving forward. The bad guy will still get caught, and whether it’s the right bad guy or not won’t depend much on you, most of the time. Things move on, and if it weren’t for the little “X” next to the question, you might never know you were incorrect.

It’s a far cry from a game that kills you over and over unless you position a bunch of mirrors in exactly the right order to direct the sunlight to a hidden switch. Well, L.A. Noire has that sort of stuff too, but it’s not the real meat of the game.

Where do you want to go today, Phelps?

The social force exerted by this sort of presumption urges us to see work in itself, independently of its wisdom or product, as a solution for problems and source of redemption — brute-force video gaming could potentially be seen as a technology of power, by which institutions strengthen their ability to make us work. They train and induce us to try and try and try in ways that would otherwise not be ideal for our own well-being.

I read somewhere — might have been in Michael Pollan — that the classic Microsoft slogan, “Where do you want to go today?” carries a huge presumption: that people ought to always want to go somewhere or do something, and it is never okay to be static or unproductive. This is admirable after a fashion, but there are ways in which it hurts us.

For me, it made me rush through cases in L.A. Noire, missing fine details, and not even realizing I’m supposed to be comparing addresses on automobile pink slips and watching for discrepancies in record books before I even start the interrogations.

Notably, I am not done with L.A. Noire yet (only just started on the Vice desk – impressed at how long this game is!), so perhaps it will change, but it already feels different from many games, and it’s unfortunate Bondi and Rockstar won’t collaborate again.

It is a mark to L.A. Noire’s credit that one way it feels most old-fashioned is in the very processes by which it plays — it really feels like analog, pavement-pounding, early-in-the-season-of-The-Wire detective work. Because in the City of Angels, human life is cheap, but the marriage of form and function in a solid product design, well, that’s worth killing for.

Or fifty bucks on Steam…

::jazzy terror chord::

Thoughts on this subject, or on games that exemplify one side or another of it? Sound off in the comments!

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I’m crouched on a rooftop in a Brazilian favela. My primary weapon is the FAMAS assault rifle. My secondary weapon is the SPAS-12 tactical shotgun. I’ve got a pocket full of Semtax explosives and flash grenades. And somehow, I have been stabbed to death five times in the past two minutes.

It’s not entirely due to my own ineptitude. These knifers have a few special abilities that make them slippery foes. They don’t show up on radar. They sprint nonstop. They can somehow stab me from ten feet away, and it’s an automatic one-hit kill. There’s four or five of them playing as a group, and they are like a clan of unstoppable ninjas.

Apparently Sean Connery was wrong: you SHOULD bring a knife to a gunfight.

“Seriously, they got me a few times too,” Neil assures me. “Don’t feel bad.”

Neil is a veteran Modern Warrior who has graciously volunteered to train me. And speaking of Sean Connery, Neil’s got a full-on brogue. It’s approximately 4 am in Glasgow. He’s got a night shift coming up the next day so he’s grateful for something to keep him awake. On the other hand, he’s often frustrated with the multiplayer crowd at this hour, which is mostly Americans instead of the Europeans he usually fights.

The American way?

“I don’t want to sound like a typical European, dumping on the United States,” he explains, “but Europeans play the game a little more fairly. Because I’m British I have this insane love for rules and sportsmanship. The fact that a knife-lunge can beat a shotgun blast is ridiculous but these guys don’t care.” I smile at this. It reminds me of General Cornwallis in The Patriot, with his stubborn belief that war should be fought by groups of men marching at each other across an open field. When Mel Gibson’s character launches a highly successful campaign of guerilla warfare, Cornwallis is horrified at how uncivilized it is. I don’t share Neil’s disdain; after all, these knifers are just playing the game the best way they know how. Actually, I find it kind of patriotic.

It’s 10 pm on east coast, and the servers are dominated by the best American players. Keep in mind this game has been out for two years (that’s like ten years in video game years), and since a more recent Call Of Duty game has been around since last November, the people who are still playing Modern Warfare 2 must REALLY love it. Before every match, everyone’s screenname and rank is displayed on the loading screen. I’m level 4. The second-least-experienced guy is level 27. Nobody besides me is venturing into this game for the first time; I’m the last of the noobs. I like to think that when Modern Warfare 3 is released in a couple weeks, it will be some clean slate where everyone will start out in a prelapsarian state of noobness, bumping into walls and shooting themselves in the face. But realistically, these hardcore players are going to be just as dominant. Everyone may start at level 1, but not everyone will be a noob.

This is what I have to work with.

Neil began the training session by helping me create a few custom “classes.” These are preset combinations of weapons and perks. For large, wide open maps, I use a heavy machine gun and a perk that makes the bullets hit harder. For smaller interior spaces, there’s a light machine gun and a perk that makes me a little faster. Creating classes had always seemed intimidating to me, but Neil explains it all really clearly and it starts to add up. Someday, I’ll have enough experience points to unlock better weapons, special scopes, and niftier perks. Unfortunately, to get those experience points, I have to kill a lot of guys who ALREADY have all the weapons and perks. Imagine if the first time you played tennis, they started you with one of those wooden rackets from the 1950s, and the only way you could get a nicer one was to beat the club’s resident pro.

But I should also mention in the spirit of full disclosure that even if I had the fanciest scope in the world, I might not be able to hit anything with it. Time after time, I spot my target and squeeze the trigger a split-second after my soldier crumples to the ground, full of holes. In Modern Warfare 2, it often only takes a couple bullets to finish you off; firefights are over by the time I can react. When I do get the jump on my adversary, I often miss him, which tips him off to where I’m standing so he can throw a grenade in my face while I’m reloading. In the back of my head, I know I need to keep moving. I know I need to crouch or lie down as soon as the first bullet whizzes past my ears. I know that when I hear a harrier jet hovering overhead, I should probably go inside for a while. But this isn’t a game where you have time to think. Neil can teach me what gun to use and walk me through every map, but at the end of the day I need muscle memory.

Here was the most instructive part of the training session. After I created my classes, Neil took me into a private match, where he ran around in circles so I could get the feel of various guns. “Don’t forget to trust your auto-aim,” he told me. “When you pull the trigger to aim, your scope locks on to a nearby target.” This is true in the campaign mode, but when I tested it, I realized there was no auto-aim for multiplayer. Neil was shocked. He really thought your scope locks in on a target. And I suppose after playing for two years, it kind of does.

A long time ago, someone told me that if you want to get good at picking up women you need to get rejected a thousand times. Each time it happens, you learn something, so you should welcome rejection as a necessary learning experience. Instead of saying, “I am going out tonight to get three phone numbers,” you should say, “I am going out tonight to get rejected ten times.” You’ll not only get a lot better at flirting and lose your fear of getting shot down, but you’ll have a better time.

I think about that while I’m getting knifed in the back, on my way to finishing the match with 3 kills and 12 deaths. “Nothing you could have done,” says Neil. “The guy would have got me too.” He’s relentlessly reassuring, perhaps worried that I’m going to get frustrated and go play Angry Birds instead. He needn’t be. The way I look at it, the more I get killed, the closer I get to not sucking. And by that measure, my first training session has been successful indeed.

Related Posts

• The Underserved Market for Video Game Personal Trainers
• Episode 176: In A Gunny Sack behind The Bus Boy
• Open Thread for June 10, 2011
• Episode 132: Written by Writers
• Episode 124: Strangely Apropos

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9WNSO8N5Pe8

A few more final thoughts:

In Starcraft II, the in-game resources are minerals and gas. The game constrains how much of these you can get, so to exceed these limits, you have to use out-of-game resources, like time and attention. The game doesn’t put the same constraints on your out-of-game resources, so you can get a big advantage in the game by bringing out-of-game resources into the game.

The life lesson here is, when you’re pursuing a goal, identify what game you’re playing, what you’re trying to accomplish and what the constraints on your resources are in that game. Then, you can look to push the limits and do better in that game by applying your out-of-game resources, which often aren’t subject to the same limits.

This is often more productive than seeing all resources as interchangeable, because that way of thinking about spending resources doesn’t focus as much on your goals and what you are trying to accomplish.

Thanks again to Joe Wade for playing Starcraft II with me for this one! If you want to play a game with me for illustrative purposes, email me at fenzel@overthinkingit.com. And if you have any examples of this phenomenon in your own life, or if you have a better name for this series, let me know in the comments!

Related Posts

• The North American Star League and eSports
• The Awful, Sexist Plot of Starcraft 2
• Thoughts on the Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear

This WILL be the highest grossing entertainment product of the year. Harry who? Transformers what?

Tis fall, that sublime liminal season when a young man’s fancy lightly turns to thoughts of pwning. Just as the summer is glutted with popcorn movies, video game developers tend to launch their “AAA” titles in Oct-Nov. (Even in these days when videogames are played more and more by adults, people tend to buy a ton of them as Christmas gifts.) And the biggest video games of all are first-person shooters. Call of Duty: Black Ops hit shelves last November 9. Within five days, it grossed over $650 million. After a month, it was over a billion. In other words, Avatar is no longer the highest-grossing Sam Worthington project (at least domestically).

These AAA first person shooters have spare-no-expense single player story modes. Black Ops was co-written by David Goyer, a screenwriter who worked on Batman Begins and The Dark Knight. The score was written by Hans Zimmer. In addition to Sam Worthington, you also step into the shoes of Gary Oldman and Ed Harris. These single player “campaigns” are probably my favorite things to do on my Xbox. Each mission is like a tiny Michael Bay film. The second level of Modern Warfare 2, which I still replay often, starts with you scaling a wall of ice. You infiltrate a Russian base, sneaking past the guards and picking off stragglers. Then all hell breaks loose, and you’re mowing down dozens of enemies while sprinting across a burning runway. Then you’re off on a breakneck snowmobile chase through the woods, bullets clipping the trees around you. Finally, you accelerate down a steep hill and jump over a huge chasm, skidding to a stop at the helicopter on the other side. All this takes about 15 minutes, and it’s a total rush.

But after the first week of release, it seems like no one besides me cares about the story. After all, it only takes about 10 hours to complete, max. What keeps people playing is online multiplayer.

The gentleman has found someone to shoot at. That's better than I usually do.

First person shooters allow you to compete online with friends and strangers, across many modes and many maps. For a lot of gamers, multiplayer is practically a part-time job. In the first 45 days that Black Ops was released, players logged over 600 million hours.

Even though I like the single player stuff, it gets old after a while, and competing against real people sounds like fun. But imagine if the first time you wanted to try basketball, they just threw you out on the court with the next nine people in the world who happened to be in the mood for a game that second. Some of them might have logged hundreds of hours on the court. Some of them might practice together every day. All of them would be better than you. Also, they are all wearing special basketball equipment, and you’re in your street clothes.

You would not score many baskets, you would not have much fun, and you wouldn’t make very many new friends. You might not feel like playing basketball again anytime soon.

That, in a nutshell, has been my experience with the multiplayer mode of first person shooters. I get placed into random games with people who have every square inch of these maps memorized. I take ten steps, then get sniped. I respawn, take another ten steps, then get lit on fire. I can see my team is trying to do something, but I’m not sure what I can do to help. Even when I manage to meet an enemy in a fair fight, I’m usually too slow to pick them off.

Think about how a single player campaign is put together. Designers spent months trying to minimize frustration while maximizing fun. One of my favorite descriptions of this process was in Wired magazine, many years back.

The room we’re monitoring is wired with video cameras that Pagulayan can swivel around to record the player’s expressions or see which buttons they’re pressing on the controller. Every moment of onscreen action is being digitally recorded.

Midway through the first level, his test subject stumbles into an area cluttered with boxes, where aliens — chattering little Grunts and howling, towering Brutes — quickly surround her. She’s butchered in about 15 seconds. She keeps plowing back into the same battle but gets killed over and over again.

“Here’s the problem,” Pagulayan mutters, motioning to a computer monitor that shows us the game from the player’s perspective. He points to a bunch of grenades lying on the ground. She ought to be picking those up and using them, he says, but the grenades aren’t visible enough. “There’s a million of them, but she just missed them, dammit. She charged right in.” He shakes his head. “That’s not acceptable.”

Contra has some nice flow. The challenge ramps up gradually, and the enemies attack in the same way everytime. If there was a multiplayer mode where you fought other Contra wearing a whole rainbow of pant colors, it would be a VERY different experience.

Game designers do not want their games to be boring, but they also don’t want them to be frustrating. They want their players in the “flow state,” constantly challenged but never overwhelmed. The game’s difficulty increases gradually from stage to stage, so you seldom hit a section that’s suddenly way beyond your abilities. And crucially, the enemies in a first person shooter will always attack in the same spots, in the same way. So each time you get killed, you learn something valuable about what to try next time. Eventually, you memorize the level, and you’re anticipating the enemies before they walk through the door.

Multiplayer, on the other hand, is unpredictable and unforgiving. You’re at a distinct disadvantage, because everyone else knows all the maps and strategies that will take you many hours to pick up by osmosis. Your opponents will not go easy on you because it’s your first time. They may target you even more once they realize you have no idea what you’re doing. And of course, there are the “perks.” As you play round after round, you earn points which you can then use to upgrade your character. For example, veteran players may not appear on your radar, but you appear on theirs. They might have weapons you don’t have. Maybe they can plant explosives, and you can’t. They might even be able to call in a plane to drop napalm on you. These perks are, of course, meant to be an incentive to keep playing. For me, it just feels like an impossible learning curve for the new guy.

In a way, the multiplayer mode of these shooters makes for a TERRIBLE game, because the difficulty curve is the exact opposite of what you want it to be. It’s the most frustrating right when you start. It’s hard for me to reconcile this with these games’ insane popularity, but I’d say it has to do a lot with social pressures. There are a lot of peer groups in which first person shooters are an important bonding activity. If all your friends are playing these games, the learning curve is worth climbing. It’s a lot like golf, actually. That’s another game that seems absolutely impossible the first time you try it (not to mention very expensive). But golf happens to be a great game to play with friends or business associates. Depending on who you are, your peer group might expect it, and so a surprising amount of people put in the hours to learn to hit a golf ball.

I searched for "video game boot camp," and I found this. Who thought this was a good idea? "Hey, you know what children think is really fun? Infantry basic training! Let's turn that into a video game!" Although if they got R. Lee Ermey involved, then I'm totally buying this.

But here’s a revelation I had recently: no one expects to get good at golf practicing on their own. You need a lesson to get you started. You need a teacher to show you the basics. You get a native speaker to teach you a new language. You meet with a personal trainer to set up an exercise plan. You sign up for a cooking class if you want to learn why your soufflés keep falling. After a couple of lessons, maybe you’ll be ready to practice on your own, perhaps setting up future sessions if you hit a wall and want to bring your skills to the next level. Sure, you COULD figure out these things on your own, but it will take longer, and you’ll probably learn some bad habits.

The idea of hiring a video game coach seems strange, but how is it different than hiring a tennis coach to help you with your serve? If you happen to play Call of Duty instead of tennis, I don’t see why you shouldn’t get a little advice from an expert. I want someone to come over to my apartment and help me power through the most overwhelming part of the learning curve. This person will show me the maps and their secret hiding places. He’ll (I’m assuming it will be a he) introduce me to each mode, and dominant strategies for each. He’ll help me pick equipment and perks that make sense for me. And he’ll play alongside me in live matches, so I can follow in his footsteps and see how it’s done. Here’s who I’m looking for:

• The applicant must play on the Xbox platform.
• He must hold a Prestige-level rank in either Modern Warfare 3 or Black Ops
• He must be willing to travel to New York’s Upper East Side
• He must be comfortable with me blogging about this experiment (I’m willing to change names to protect the innocent)
• For legal and weirdness reasons, I would really prefer that this person not be in high school

Multiplayer is always going to be really hard, and I will never be remotely good at it. But I want to at least figure out what the hell is going on, so I can find out how bad I really am. For that, I need a personal trainer, and I will pay this person for a few lessons (rate TBD). Who’s interested?

Related Posts

• Episode 176: In A Gunny Sack behind The Bus Boy
• Modern Warfare Basic Training, Week 1: The Last of the Noobs
• Episode 124: Strangely Apropos
• The Anti-Americanism of Modern Warfare 2
• Skyrim and Historical Revisionism

Exploration, ho!

Conversation Trees and Plot Trees

Last time around, I made a distinction between narrative exploration, moving through an unfamiliar space, and narrative discovery, finding something interesting. I claimed that, in plotty games, important moments of discovery are the ones that let us make progress in the game.  And I also claimed that players spend most of their time trying to make those discoveries.  The distinction between exploring and trying-to-discover is an interesting one.  In real life, and in most kinds of game, we do both at once. Nothing’s stopping gold prospectors from mapping a mountain range as they prospect.  Nothing’s preventing you from looking at the pretty scenery as you try to find your way to the end of the wizard’s mystical maze.  But in interactive fiction, where you’re literally forced to input one command at a time, you usually know whether you took each action because you thought it would help you solve a puzzle or because you simply wanted to see what would happen.  Lots of these games have a XYZZY command, as kind of an interactive fiction in-joke.  But very, very few games allow xyzzy to do anything useful or important.  Therefore, if you xyzzy, you are purely exploring.  If, on the other hand, you look under a bed, you are trying to discover.  Think about it — if it wasn’t likely that you’d find a key or something in there, is there a chance in hell that you would be looking under the bed?  Is there any sense in which that particular journey is its own reward, regardless of the destination?  And although it’s not as obvious in most other genres, the same division applies.  It pops up in the strangest places, actually.  Take fighting games:  do you not explore each character’s moveset, testing out low-jab, low-strong, low-fierce and so on, simply in order to see what they look like, before you try to discover how to effectively make use of the character?

When we start playing a game, or gain access to a new area within a game, we may spend a big chunk of time exploring for exploring’s sake.  (Great examples of this in gaming history include the first few minutes after you get the Airship in Final Fantasy, or the solid hour or so after you get the horse in Ocarina of Time.)  But this doesn’t last long.  Playing a full-length game takes dozens and dozens of hours, and most of these will be spent trying-to-discover.  When we fail — and if the game has an appropriate level of challenge, we will fail pretty often — we do some exploration instead.  If games were anything like regular fiction, it would work the other way.  Exploration would be the general condition of gameplay, and would inevitably (without special effort), lead to discovery.  And yeah, some adventure games at least aspire to this:  they try to make the game world so rich, so textured, that exploring it is most of the fun, and the solutions to the puzzles just fall into place organically as part of the exploration process.  But it’s an open question whether it’s ever been successfully achieved (maybe some of the Monkey Island games?), and it’s certainly not the general rule.  It might not even really be a good idea.  Part of the pleasure of playing a game is struggling against the game:  the exploration-first model I just described gives you nothing to struggle against.  This is one of the keys, I think, to understanding interactive narrative.  Exploration is only ever the consolation prize, and that’s a feature, not a bug.  (That said, games can sink or swim on the quality of their consolation prize… getting stuck in a game is a lot less annoying if your surroundings are rich and interesting.)

The other key is embracing the “But Thou Must” problem which has dogged interactive storytelling for generations uh, just about exactly one generation.  Computers do not allow truly free input — not unless you’re programming them, and arguably not even then.  When a computer offers you a prompt, you can only respond in a way that the computer will understand.  You can’t use the universal language of dance; you can’t type in French if the parser speaks English; you can’t use the keyboard if it’s a game played with a mouse.  When a computer gives you a prompt, you are limited to a certain number — perhaps large — of distinct responses.  Of these, one or more are “right.”  The wrong ones are not the ones that lead to a more depressing cinematic at the end of the game, nor even the ones that lead to a speedy death.  All of those might be “right” in narrative terms.  (Remember, the protagonists’s goals aren’t the same as the goals of the narrative!)  Rather, the wrong answers are the ones for which no meaningful response is programmed:  the ones that lead you right back to where you started.  If you choose these, you have not discovered the right way to move on in the plot.  And while it might be nice for the error message to be something more detailed than “But thou must,” a truly free conversation in which every possible answer has a fully realized and separate response would destroy the pleasure we currently take from videogames.  Conversation trees are not like real conversations:  real conversations cannot be navigated, real conversations cannot be “won,” because when you talk to a real person (as opposed to a programmed NPC) there is no puzzle-designer pulling the strings from behind, whose intentions you can reverse-engineer.  Reverse engineering those intentions, not role-playing as a Red Mage or an evil Jedi or whatever, is the main pleasure we take in videogame conversation trees  –  or at least, it’s the pleasure which is specific to gaming, the pleasure that we don’t get if we just hack into the game file and read the text without navigating the tree.  This means that conversation trees need critical objects and non-critical objects, real responses and “But thou musts!”, just like IF needs to have both pipes and doorknobs.

This seems obvious enough when the dialogue tree is contained within a single conversation.  But what if it’s not a conversation?  What if it’s a city?  I submit to you that there’s no effective difference, in gameplay terms, between a conversation with one character in which you can say several things, and a conversation with a whole room full of characters to whom you can say one thing a piece.  Or — as is much more likely — a room full of characters who say one thing a piece to you, when prompted, without your character saying anything at all.  This kind of interaction with NPCs is often derided as non-interactive, but is there a sense in which moving a cursor up and down a list of responses in search of the right line of dialogue, involves more interactivity than moving a character up and down a street and into and out of houses in search of the right sprite to talk to?  Most RPG cities from Final Fantasy onward (or indeed earlier — think Ultima, etc.) work like this.  Some characters give you significant clues about plot or gameplay.  Others provide pointless flavor text.  The standard line on flavor text is that it’s extraneous to gameplay — but this isn’t really true.  When you talk to townspeople in an RPG, you are partially exploring the game world, partially playing a game of “find the person with something useful to say.”  If every character’s dialogue was equally useful, this aspect of the game would be ruined.  So flavor text needs to be pointless:  it’s the branch of the dialogue tree that doesn’t go anywhere, and it’s important for these dead ends to be marked.

Ironically, all of your conversations with this guy turn out to be strictly linear.

And the same is true of plot trees.  The very first Final Fantasy game understood this.  The princess that you save in the first quest gives you a lute.  This is a critical object which lets you open the gate to the final dungeon.  The princess is  the only character who gives you something you don’t use pretty much right away… and, if you talk to her father after you rescue her, you’re informed that “the princess always worries about you,” making her the only character in the whole game, as far as I recall, who gives a damn about you when you walk out of the room. In the inventory system and in the dialogue, we find clues that our business with the princess is not quite done yet.  She never becomes important again in gameplay terms (if she ever was), but in terms of plot and theme she stays important in a way that Bikke the Pirate, Bahamut, and Dr. Unne do not.

What if every character that you saved told you to come back and see them?  Then the princess wouldn’t be special anymore.  The level of interaction in the dialogue makes a distinction between important and unimportant characters, just in the way that our notional Hobbit Text Adventure distinguished between the necessary pipe and the meaningless doorknob by letting you carry one but not the other.  When video games started out, they were astonishingly crude.  Since then, technology has developed astonishingly fast.  And with this has come the sense that the lack of depth and realization in early plotted games — the lack of useful explorability, you might say — is something purely dependent on the technical limitations of the systems those games were running on.  That adding depth to every segment of the game is always going to make for a better game.  But this fundamentally misunderstands the way that exploration and discovery work in interactive plots.  The depth and realization of the various aspects of an interactive world should be used to highlight the important parts for the player — to guide their attention to them.  The obvious corollary is that only important aspects of the interactive world should be given large amounts of depth and realization.  Aspects of the game that are not important should be made shallow, the better to guide the player to the parts of the game that they’re supposed to be paying attention to.   Within reason, at least.  For a lot of games, you want even the unimportant sections to be deep enough to sustain mimesis — but this is actually a subset of a more important condition.  Some games, especially serious ones, need to sustain mimesis in order to sustain entertainment.  Exploration should always have enough depth to stay entertaining.  We could probably say that depth is almost synonymous with entertainment when it comes to exploration, even when mimesis has gone out the window…  which means you want the unimportant objects in a game world to be as deep and well-realized as they can possibly be without the player mistaking them for the actual solution, i.e. the way to move forward in the game.

 The Well-Made (Video Game) Plot

Video Game plots, if they’re meaningfully interactive, have some features of the whodunnit, the whendunnit, and the dunnwhat. Like a whodunnit, the central question is presented in multiple choice format.  But like a dunnwhat, the question is basically what the protagonist is going to do.  Finally, like a whendunnit, the questions that the reader/player cares about are always going to be different from the questions that the character/avatar cares about.

In order for the interactive narrative to function as a game, there need to be “right” and “wrong” decisions.  In practice, there are usually several layers of this.  Most wrong are actions that the machine doesn’t even understand (like pressing left to make a choice rather than pressing A, or balancing the controller on you head or whatever).  Slightly less wrong are actions that lead you around in a circle:  ”But thou must!” responses, although often the circle is a longer and more enjoyable ride than that.  Least wrong are actions that meaningfully advance the plot.  And these in turn, in works with branching plots, are divided into the decisions that lead you into “good” and “bad” branches (here defined as more interesting and less interesting rather than good and evil, or happy and sad, although game designers usually make those synonymous).

The player’s experience of the game’s plot can be abstracted to exploration of the decision tree, and discovery of the “good” actions on that tree.  These processes are linked:  failing to discover the right choice will always mean exploring a wrong one. And in some games, at least, the wrong choices are designed to gently point you in the direction of the right one.  These are the games we can call well-made.

Might this guy have something interesting to say?

A well-made plot in fiction is one where the central mystery of the story can be figured out in advance by a smart and attentive reader based on cues provided by the text itself.  The same holds true of video games.  A game with a well-made interactive plot is one where the game itself leads you to the most interesting branches of the decision tree.  There are dozens of ways to pull this off, depending on the kind of game you’re looking at.  If it’s a conversation tree you’re dealing with, you can make one of the good choices contain a highlighted keyword the player will remember from an earlier conversation, or make one of the bad choices transparently inappropriate, or make the response to the wrong answer something that should prompt the player to offer the right answer.  But if it’s a game of “find the NPC with something important to say,” well-madeness is going to be a function of architecture:  either the character should be in a central location — on a throne at the end of a long vertical hallway lined with columns, for instance — or somewhere notably out of the way, but not actually hard to find, like at the bottom of a well.  If it’s a game of “optimize my character’s build,” it’s done by making the useful powers seem cooler than the useless powers, or more frequently by showing the math and letting the munchkins work out the percentages on their own.  And with any kind of game at all, you can always break the fourth wall:  ”Smoke your pipe to summon the wizard!”  The point is that an attentive player should be able to arrive at the solution by something other than chance or brute force.

Unlike the literary version, well-madeness in video game plots is a feature of the small scale, not the large scale.  It might be that we should think of games not as having well-made plots, but as having a number of discrete narrative puzzles, each of which can be well-made (or not).  Z doesn’t have to connect to A.  It can, certainly, and maybe it should, but this has more to do with thematic unity than with a sense of narrative fair play.

It should be remembered, of course, that a well-made plot is not synonymous with a good one. A well-made mystery novel can easily go wrong by giving the reader too many clues, so that there’s never any doubt who the killer’s going to be.  In video games, this manifests as hand-holding, spelling out in blatant detail what the right choices are and making all of the mazes into branchless tunnels.  These plots are still well-made, they’re just dull.  Making them less dull is a question of balance, and of preserving illusions.  If I guess the solution to a well-made detective novel, I have no reason to feel smart.  The author gave me all of the clues, after all!  But if it’s balanced well, I maintain the illusion that I put it together on my own.  If I figure out the right way to progress in a well-made game, I have no reason to feel like I’m good at playing it!  The programmers told me what to do.  But if it’s balanced well — if they mainly relied on contextual cues, and making the right choices look fun — I maintain the illusion that my actions are freely chosen.  A plot that’s both well-made and enjoyable falls into this sweet spot.

And of course, all of this only applies to video game plots that are interactive.  Many games have no plots at all.  Many that do have plots give the player no control over the plot whatsoever, limiting it to scripted cut-scenes at the end of certain levels (although we could talk about the degree to which the level itself, even in a side-scrolling platformer, has an elementary narrative goal of some kind:  ”find the exit”).  But although people often talk about the distinction between plot and narrative in gaming, there are cases where the plot itself is a game (which means that most pieces of entertainment software are actually several distinct but interlocking games — Super Mario RPG, for instance, has a rhythm game, a resource management game, and a game of narrative exploration/discovery, at a minimum), and when we talk about how well these are put together, we need to judge them by criteria of their own.

Related Posts

• The Well-Made (Video Game) Plot, Part 1
• The Video Game Plot Scale
• Toward a More Perfect Build
• The Well-Made (Video Game) Plot, Part 2
• Episode 147: How Did It Make You Feel when You Got Hit by The Kobold?

Narrative Exploration vs. Narrative Discovery

Yarr! There be Xanax in these waters!

Let’s say you invite me over to your house.  I will wander around the rooms, getting to know the space, rifling through your medicine cabinet (because I’m that kind of jerk), maybe even looking at the search history on your internet browser.  (I am also that kind of jerk.) I will encounter any number of objects as I do this, and as I do, I will discover what kind of person you are, oh Xanax-popping, Bieber-album-downloading friend of mine.   But most of my time will not be spent making discoveries.  Instead, I’ll be exploring.  Exploring is simply the act of moving around in an unfamiliar space and seeing what’s there.  Discovery is finding something important and unfamiliar.  What counts as important?  Well, it depends on what the searcher cares about.  Technically, I discover things every day.  The first time someone rowed up the Amazon, they “discovered” a new stretch of river every ten feet or so.  But we make a distinction between object and world. Most of the Amazon is just territory to explore, but if you encounter a new species of gecko, or the headwaters, or the Lost City of Gold… those are discoveries.

Crucially, I can’t discover anything that I know will be there.  (This is one of the reasons why we talk about explorers “discovering” places where other people have been living for generations, although ALL of the other reasons are straight-up racism.)  Finding Xanax in my friend’s medicine cabinet would usually constitute a discovery, but not if they have “Xanax 4 Life” tattooed across their navel.  By the same token, I can’t explore a space I already know well.  I can discover things in my own apartment if I forget that I have them, or if someone plants them there — like, if there’s a surprise cake waiting in my refrigerator, for instance — but I can’t really explore that space, because I already have a detailed  (though faulty, because cake-deficient), mental map of its layout and contents.  This common focus on the unknown is why we think of exploration and discovery in the same breath.  There are situations where I can discover, but can’t explore (the cake scenario), and situations where I can explore, but can’t discover (because there’s nothing out there), but exploration is often a precondition for discovery.  If I don’t go wandering around in the woods, I can’t stumble upon the clearing with all of the wildflowers.

Well-made plots hinge on discovery.   Learning the murderer’s identity in a mystery is (or should be) a big moment of discovery, as is the point where we realize the crucial facts about the serious dramatic protagonist’s psychological makeup, or what have you.  But a huge, huge part of actually reading fiction is about exploration. Not every detail of the plot is actually critical to the plot.  Few are, in fact.  Even in a detective story, which tends to be weighted heavily towards discovery, there’s an aspect of exploration as well:  the main character explores the seedy underworld, and then discovers who committed the crime.

In fiction, we need to put the big moment of discovery at the end, even though in the real world it might not work that way.  In real life, the detective might put together a strong circumstantial case early on, spend a few weeks more looking for the smoking gun, find nothing, and see the crook convicted on the strength of the circumstantial case anyway.  In narrative terms, that’s not satisfying.  There can be a steady stream of discoveries throughout the novel, but as you get to the end they need to be bigger and thicker on the ground.  By the same token, a story’s beginning will tolerate large swathes of directionless exploration in a way that the end simply will not.  And it’s not just detective stories where this matters.  If I actually am in therapy, I will probably continue to explore my psyche for months or years (or even indefinitely) after I discover the big issues shape my interaction with the world.  But who wants to read about that?  So in serious works as well as genre fiction, the beginning of the narrative tends to be weighted towards exploration, and the end towards discovery.  Note that in a classic whodunnit, ruling out a suspect is a major point of discovery — and so the curve I mentioned in Part 1, where you eliminate suspects faster and faster as you move towards the end of the novel, automagically gives you a structure with lots of exploration at the beginning and lots of discovery at the end.

So both detective stories and “standard” narratives depend on the combination of exploration and discovery.  And in both of these, we want exploration and discovery to be teleologically linked.  We want to feel that the important discoveries arise organically out of the protagonist’s process of exploration.  We want to feel that every wrong decision is bringing us one step closer to the right decision, right from the very beginning.  Otherwise when the solution finally does appear, it feels like deus ex machina.

On the other hand, Whendunnits (flashback-structured narratives where we know something will happen, and we’re just waiting for the hammer to drop), do not really tend to feature exploration and discovery in an important way, at least not within the narrative.  This is because the characters are unaware of the plot’s central mystery.  They can’t be trying to figure it out:  they can’t find the Xanax because they aren’t even aware of the medicine cabinet.  Here, exploration and discovery are things that happen to the reader, not the characters.  We feel that we are “exploring” the book (or film, or whatever) when we are not encountering the Big Important Event that we are waiting for, and “discovering” something when we finally encounter them.  But in this case there is no causal link.  The hundred pages of descriptive prose come before the critical action scene not because one leads to the other, but because we read books in order from start to finish.  Furthermore, the whendunnit depends in a very important way on the dead-end false start.  Before the car actually comes crashing through the window, it needs to make several premature attempts that fail.  You need narrative threads that seem like they’re going to lead to the big fated event, but which actually go nowhere.  They’ve got to go nowhere — reserving the important events to the end is how whendunnits build tension!  Which means that our “exploration” of these false threads is only mechanically connected to our eventual “discovery” of the real one.   Kill Bill is a handy example here.  Whenever the Bride squares off against one of the other Deadly Vipers, we know full well that she’s going to end up killing them.  Tension in this kind of showdown (like in other kinds of showdowns) depends on our not knowing when the fatal blow will be struck.  Every time the Bride takes a swing, then, we’re seeing one of those dead-end false starts that I was talking about.  These are important, and exciting, and in a very real way what the fight scenes are all about… but they aren’t necessary. In retrospect, they don’t contribute anything to the swing that finally does connect.  (Movie fights are in this regard quite different from real life fights, where wearing down your opponent is a real and important strategy.)

Of course, Kill Bill isn’t actually structured like a flashback.  We know how that plot will turn out not because we’ve been told, but because of the conventions of the genre.  As I mentioned in Part 1, almost any story has a meta-whendunnit aspect if we know the genre well enough.  If we know how things tend to work out in this kind of story, we’re going to be wondering when they will work out in that way that they do.  Interestingly enough, the whendunnit’s charactaristic separation of exploration and discovery appears here too.  It’s important, within the world of the story, for the detective’s exploration to lead to the big discovery that solves the murder.  But our external sense that a murder-solving revelation of some kind is “necessary” does not have an organic aspect.  It’s just how stories like that work.  They could work another way, after all, many stories do.

Exploration and discovery in video games

Is there a meaningful sense in which a piece of interactive fiction is a "video" game?

I’m super, super glad that text adventure games came up in the comment thread to Belinkie’s post.  Obviously, playing these games requires both exploration and discovery.  There’s a world to wander and explore.  There are also things to discover in it — most obviously the objects, which can be picked up, manipulated, and collected for points, but also discrete pieces of information about the game world.  So if I play King’s Quest III, for instance, “exploration” involves visiting every square on the world map, “discovery” involves finding the secret lever on the bookshelf (which in turn opens up a new wing of the Wizard’s house for exploration), or getting the porridge, or learning that you can crumble the cookie up in the porridge, or learning the desert on the west edge of the map simply stretches on forever and will kill you if you wander around in it for too long.   Neither one of these, alone, would make for a very satisfying game.  The flash game Doodle God presents you with a “discoveries only” model:  no world to explore, just a bunch of objects you can try to get to interact.  It’s kind of fun for a while, but it gets real old real fast.  For an “exploration only” game, well, may I direct you to Google Maps? Note that even these examples aren’t totally pure.  There is still something to explore in Doodle God — trying to exhaust all the possible combinations is more or less equivalent to visiting every square on the world map — and the good people at Google did slip an easter egg or two into the street view images.  But the exploration in Doodle God is faulty because the explorable space is boring, and the discovery in Google Maps is faulty because the ratio of goodies to dross is unacceptably low.  And both are faulty because they don’t relate the discovery to the exploration.   Exploring possibility-space in Doodle God only leads you closer to your next discovery in that you eventually run out of wrong answers — exploration and discovery are mechanically linked, but not organically.  And nobody finds the easter eggs in Google Maps by consciously looking for them. Either you find them completely by accident while trying to get directions, or you read about it on the internet, right?  From this, we can derive a couple of narrative laws of videogames:

•  The explorable space needs to be interesting.  Beautiful, funny, cute, ugly, all of the above, just don’t let it be boring.  Of course, you can’t make everything equally beautiful, or funny, or cute, or even ugly, because all of those will get boring eventually if you’re bombarded with them…

•  The ratio of goodies to dross needs to be pretty high.  Shadow of the Colossus, which contains only a handful of things and less information, probably represents something like a hard limit on this front. It’s a beautiful game, but you couldn’t get away with a game that had much less in it. (And of course to a very great degree, Shadow of the Colossus works because it’s an exceptional case.  If all games were that spare, it would get old.)  Of course the ratio can’t be too high either, or the goodies will cease to be goodies…

•  Exploration and discovery need to be somehow linked.  This deserves some further unpacking.

Of course, after I wrote this I learned that there really WAS an IF version of The Hobbit. Oh well.

One thing that separates video games from other kinds of narratives is that the player can partially control the pace of events.  In interactive fiction and its related genres, you usually have the choice of 1) moving on through the game, i.e. taking actions, advancing the narrative, and 2) lingering on the description.  In normal, non-interactive fiction, the author takes care of this for you.  Tolkien’s The Hobbit begins with an extended description of Bilbo’s Hobbit-Hole, and Bilbo himself, and Hobbits in general, which runs on for four pages before Gandalf walks over the hill and begins the plot proper.  This descriptive chunk includes the sentence “It had a perfect round door like a porthole, painted green, with a shiny yellow brass knob in the exact middle.” Now, if this were interactive fiction, you wouldn’t have to let it go at that.  You could, for instance,

X DOORKNOB

upon which you would be given a slightly more detailed description of the doorknob.  You could also X the door itself.  You could feel the doorknob, kick the door, knock and see if anything happens, walk down The Hill to Bilbo’s neighbor’s house and see what that doorknob looks like, and so on.  Any aspect of the environment can be explored in as much detail as you like, or at least as much detail as the programmers bothered to add.  None of this will advance the plot.  In fact, unless the author is feeling particularly ambitious (mobile NPCs are tricky — although the real Hobbit IF game did feature them, as it turns out), the plot will be frozen in place forever until the player either accidentally or intentionally does something to start it, which is to say that Gandalf won’t walk over the hill until you’ve taken some predefined action to trigger the sequence.  Ah, but what action?  If you have a copy of the novel handy, you’ll probably come up with the idea of lighting your pipe and blowing a smoke ring, but what if you don’t have the novel?  In that case, smoking the pipe to trigger Gandalf’s arrival is something you’re going to have to discover.  And this is potentially a problem.  After all, it’s not like smoking a pipe is generally a good way to summon wizards, or indeed to accomplish anything at all!  And it’s not an action that is likely to arise organically out of something like examining a doorknob.

This is arguably a design flaw.  The player is meant to be controlling Bilbo, not Gandalf.  At this point in the story, Bilbo is passive.  It’s very, very important to his larger character arc that he has not done anything to trigger or deserve Gandalf’s approach.  But we have to distinguish between Bilbo’s desire to do nothing and the player’s desire to progress further in the plot.  Only the player’s desire matters, in this case.  So although the game will make it seem like Bilbo is the one who is actually doing whatever we ask him to do, the exploration and discovery involved here are player’s, not the character’s.

This means that the game needs to communicate to the player, giving them hints on how to succeed.  The discovery that you need to smoke your pipe is unlikely to arise organically out of standard IF exploration commands such as X DOORKNOB unless the programmer has accounted for this possibility, which if they’re a good programmer they will have.  The description of the doorknob after all can be anything you want.  It could be, for instance, “Smoke your pipe to summon the wizard!”  Crude, perhaps, but effective.  Better is something which communicates this indirectly, maintaining the fiction that the game is really talking to Bilbo.  ”You don’t have time to look at doorknobs right now:  your morning nicotine craving is upon you!”  Even that’s a little obvious, although this early in the game, and with this arbitrary a puzzle, obvious might be fine. But you certainly don’t want every wrong answer to spell out the right answer for the player.  So it’s far more common just to use the description to indicate that the line of investigation has yielded all that it is going to yield.  If the programmer is in a thorough and snarky mood, X DOORKNOB might trigger the response:

“It is shiny, yellow, and made of brass. It is in the exact middle of the door.  I don’t know what else you were expecting.”

More likely, and more boring, is the standard brush-off text:

“You don’t notice anything interesting about the doorknob.”

Or worse still:

“I don’t understand DOORKNOB,” indicating that the lazy programmer hasn’t even bothered to train the parser to recognize “doorknob” as a noun.

All of these, though, have the effect of driving the player away from the fruitless examination of the door and closer to the right answer of smoking the pipe.  This is subtly different from the Doodle God example.  There, putting in a wrong answer only eliminates a single answer.  Here, we’ve eliminated a whole class of different doorknob-related actions:  we could have tried turning it, rubbing it, pulling it, taking it (seasoned interactive fiction players try to take everything), licking it, and so on, but none of these are worth bothering with if the programmer didn’t even put in an interesting description.

Of course, we could suppose that our programmer is a sadist.  In this case, the useless doorknob will have a very detailed description.  Every verb that the player can think of involving the doorknob will yield a meaningful response.  It will be possible to go back into Bilbo’s Hobbit-Hole, enter his study, and read Fuzznavel Brandybuck’s twelve-volume Encyclopedia Doorknobbica for further information.  This kind of red herring can be extended as long as the programmer likes, providing he/she is a bastard.

The inventory system is another way of communicating to the player.  One of the first things you do, playing IF, is to check what the character is carrying.  In our little imaginary game, Bilbo starts out with a pipe, tobacco, matches, and nothing else.  This might as well be a road flare:  after looking around a bit and maybe trying to take the doorknob, the door, and the Hill, most players will naturally try to smoke the pipe.  They can’t expect it to summon the wizard (or more accurately, to trigger subroutine GANDALF|SMOKE), but they can fairly expect it to do something.  After all, why else would it be possible to carry it?  Note again the possibility for confusing the player, either unintentionally or sadistically.  What if the player starts with a whole knapsack full of gewgaws, only one of which is useful?  Or what if it is possible to take the doorknob?  The poor sap will surely never put it down again.  “There must be a use for this doorknob,” the player thinks, as they dodge Orcs beneath the Misty Mountains.  “Any day now with the doorknob,” they think, as they stab spiders in Mirkwood.  “Please oh please don’t let me drop my doorknob!” they moan, as they cling to the barrel on the River Running.  And then — oh God, those poor fools — when they’re on the Lonely Mountain, and they run into a door for the first time since the start of the game, they will immediately fixate on the idea that they’ve finally figured out what the doorknob is good for, and obsessively try to figure out a way to attach it to the cliff face so that they can pull it open (not that that makes any sense), ignoring the thrush until it dies of old age.

Constraint, in IF as in literature, is really important.  One of the cardinal sins of the genre is the “guess-the-verb” puzzle.  You don’t want your player to get stuck halfway through the game because they tried to FLIP the switch instead of THROWING it.  One of the holy grails of IF, therefore, is a parser that thinks like a person does, i.e. one that recognizes the words FLIP and THROW as synonymous with regard to switches.  Typing “flip switch” and getting the response “I DON’T KNOW HOW TO SWITCH THE FLIP” is annoying, because an idiot child would know what you were really trying to do. Similarly, it is really, really bad form to mention an object in your description of a room, but then tell the player that the object is not present when they try to interact with it.  Don’t tell me that “I don’t see any phone booth here” when you just went on about the phone booth at length.  Don’t tell me that “I don’t know how to push the phone booth” if I tell you to push it:  pushing is not something you have to figure out how to do, stupid machine! These complaints are valid.  Both experiences can be intensely frustrating, and besides, if you only program the parser to recognize the input strings that will move you forward through the game, you’d wind up with a terrible piece of IF (and arguably a piece of F which is not properly I). But there’s an upward limit as well as a lower one.  A parser that could actually understand the entire English language, and would let you perform any physically possible action, would make for a horrible, confusing, borderline unplayable game.  The limits of IF are necessary, because they let you know when you’ve discovered what you need to do to move on in the game.  And this brings up a very important point:  regardless of what the game’s plot pretends to be about, the player can only want to progress further in the plot.  An IF game is like a series of locked rooms, where the goal in each room is to unlock the door into the next room.  Of course a room here is a metaphorical construct, quite distinct from the rooms you move through while actually playing the game.  It might be a literal room, or the emotional state of an NPC, or the character’s own emotional state, or a certain amount of money in the bank account… the point here is that you move around between these stations as if they were points on a map, once you unlock the appropriate door.  And unlocking the door means discovery, of course.  You want to discover the right sequence of events to move you further forward in the game.  And this is what fundamentally separates videogame storytelling from all non-interactive forms.  Relatively few videogames are murder mysteries, but all are narrative mysteries (if they have narratives):  perhaps the character is trying to save the Crystals from the forces of Chaos, or to destroy an experimental piece of power armor, but what the player is doing, in each and every case, is trying to reverse engineer the right sequence of events to move you further forward in the game.  And although there are some discoveries that have nothing to do with gameplay, most of the discoveries that the player makes will be of the “what to do next” variety.  Video game plots are usually dunnwhats, in that you know who the character is but need to figure out what to make them do.  However, unlike literary dunnwhats, the choices for potential action are rigorously constrained.  In this, it’s more like the basic model of a whodunnit, where you choose from a handful of potential solutions.

This has some interesting implications.

•  Discoveries in games are not neatly distributed in time the way that they are in normal fiction.  They can’t be, because you never know how long it’s going to take the player to figure out what to do next.  However, a good game will often make some kind of effort on this front.  Players have less patience for wandering around searching for clues when they’ve been playing for twenty hours already.  Take King’s Quest III again, once you get to the endgame in Daventry, the game’s map becomes almost completely linear and you’re already carrying all of the objects that you need to solve the remaining puzzles.  Much, much less exploration is required.

•  There is no one “big mystery” that drives a game forward from beginning to end.  Even if your game is a murder mystery, deducing the culprit’s identity is going to be a puzzle like any other — more elaborate and more interesting, possibly, but still just a lock that opens a door.   When you solve the kind of arbitrary puzzle that makes up the bulk of all IF games, such as, say, building a makeshift telescope out of a paper towel tube and a pair of thick glasses, you’re not thinking “Yes!  One step closer to taking down the whole Barksdale organization!”  You’re thinking, “Yay, I solved that puzzle!  What’s the next one?” (By the way, The Wire:  The Text Adventure would be off the hook. “It is pitch black.  You are likely to be robbed by Omar.”)

•  Barring a weird, meta example, the character in this kind of game will never care about the questions the player cares about.

But so far, we’ve been talking about these games in terms of discovery.  Just like normal fiction, video games balance this with exploration.

If you track back up to the various “discouraging” responses I invented to X DOORKNOB, you’ll notice that only the “snarky but thorough” response is effective from an exploratory point of view.  It’s clearly wrong, and lets you know that, but it’s fun to read anyway.  Ideally, you want all wrong actions to have a response like this.  Trying to take the doorknob and getting a response along the lines of “You can’t get ye doorknob” is a failure of the game’s exploratory mode… although a forgivable one, because really:  a doorknob?  Still, getting something like “The doorknob is screwed tightly into the wood of the door, and besides, you don’t feel like carrying it around” is much, much better.  Sometimes, these error messages are so much fun that players will actively try to trigger them, exploring purely for exploring’s sake.  (The same thing is going on in games like Out of This World and Dead Space when players try to collect the whole set of lovingly rendered death sequences.) But the main function of these messages is to soften the blow of getting the wrong answer.  Which is to say:  exploration, in games, is mainly a function of trying to discover something and failing.

And we’ll get into the implications of that more in the third and final part.

Related Posts

• The Well-Made (Video Game) Plot, Part 3
• The Video Game Plot Scale
• The Well-Made (Video Game) Plot, Part 1
• Episode 189: The Rut Not Taken
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