First of all, I apologize for the brief lapse in new posts. Work was hectic last week and involved a trip to New York. It was my first time in New York, and I wasn’t quite prepared for the scale of things or the sense of awe that a city so big commands. Upon leaving, I was struck by the urge to play SimCity, probably because the trip ended with a flight over the city on a clear night.

Where does the urge to build a city come from? Not sure, but I think it has something to do with the way cities seem to behave like organisms — constant while constantly changing. It’s not a new metaphor, but it is a brilliant dynamic to try to capture in a game.

Reflections like this leave me wondering about the relationship between story-based and open-ended games. SimCity doesn’t have a pre-ordained story. Indeed, Will Wright (the creator of SimCity) and others would tell you that the narrative value of open-ended games like SimCity is in the communication of events after the fact, rather than in gameplay itself. Even more, he would likely say that the best games are ones that possess the most narrative potential without dealing with a specific narrative (in other words, games that encourage storytelling among players).

The Grand Theft Auto series, though, is a nice example of games that accommodate sandbox play along with a directed (though branching) storyline. Some might call the story optional, but really it’s not. The size of your sandbox in GTA depends directly on completing at least some of the story.

Since I’m working on a story-based game, I feel compelled to address somehow the possibility of open-ended play in my game world. How I’ll do that remains to be seen. A lot of games resort to side quests, the search for hidden items and hidden bosses, etc. These are good options, but they are once-and-done activities. At a certain point, you can accomplish everything. Maybe that’s desirable, though. Stories always have a beginning and an end, so to some extent they can’t coexist with purely open-ended gameplay. Maybe the best answer is something like GTA or Will Wright’s upcoming game Spore, which I’ve heard him describe as goal-oriented gameplay designed to prepare you for the ultimate sandbox experience.

I can envision adaptive story-based games where the player’s decisions truly affect the world and the characters, but they are still some years away (D&D-based games like Knights of the Old Republic don’t quite cut it, in my opinion). In the meantime, I’ll continue mulling the issue while I build a virtual city to rival Manhattan.

A lot of people out there consider Final Fantasy VI (released in the U.S. as Final Fantasy III) to be the best Final Fantasy ever and one of the best console RPGs. While I haven’t played the game for at least a decade, I count myself among the adoring masses.

One of the things I enjoyed so much about Final Fantasy VI was the story. There were lots of characters with full story lines (and some without), the story went on forever and had a truly epic scope, which I always love, and it had a villain that everyone loved to hate.

Rather than bore you with a litany of things I like about this game, I will direct you to Blogging Final Fantasy, which is written by worthier nerds than I.

The point, though, is that compelling game narrative is a thing rarely achieved. The reason has been debated for some years now, and there are too many viewpoints to cover in a single post. The crux of the issue lies somewhere around the issue of agency. Agency is the sense of power or control that a player feels within the game world.

Most games attempt to tell stories using cut scenes, which by definition remove agency temporarily to convey some narrative material. This convention leads to the logical idea that gameplay and story are somehow opposed and cannot coexist. A story, after all (according to most definitions), exists in the telling of events, rather than the living of events, which is presumably what agency allows us to do within games–to live a series of events, however mundane. A game without agency is no game at all.

So is game narrative just a film narrative broken up by periods of gameplay? I don’t think so. There must be some deeper possibilities, but they may require adjusting our definition of narrative. Take Myst, for example. The “game” consists of puzzles, but these puzzles uncover a narrative, told through the two brothers, Sirrus and Achenar. Still, this narrative is not the story of the player’s experience — the player arrives after most of the brothers’ narrative has concluded.

Ah, but there’s the thing: in Myst, the player’s experience completes the story. The two brothers are locked in limbo until the player arrives to decide their fate (and his/her own). An unbroken sense of agency becomes necessary for the narrative, not opposed to it. What’s more, in another brilliant move, the makers of Myst made agency the ultimate goal of the game. The only reward for “correctly” completing the game is the continued ability to explore. An incorrect decision traps the player in a prison book and removes agency–the player can no longer move or interact with the world.

Narrative in games, then, perhaps lies somewhere between traditional storytelling and straight-up, means-ends gameplay. And maybe the quality of game narrative should be measured by how successfully compelling events can unfold without removing the sense of agency.

I played Metroid Prime 3: Corruption for the first time tonight. Aside from the usual “wow, this is really cool” effect of playing Wii games, two main things about the user interface struck me as very well done.

• First, the controls (of course). The running, aiming and shooting action all take some getting used to, but there are some very nice touches, like moving the wiimote toward and away from the screen to activate a door lock.
• The heads up display (HUD) is also really nice. Samus Aran of course wears a nifty space helmet, and the HUD actually looks like a visual overlay from inside her helmet. So instead of information sitting on the screen in some sort of omniscient way, it really looks like you’re seeing only what she would see. It’s also possible to make out the faintest reflection of Samus’ eyes in the HUD, which is a brilliant detail.

Ok, so the controls and HUD basically make up the whole user interface, but the sense of immersion is almost immediate and breaks rarely (most notably when she rolls into that little ball).

This of course leaves me wondering how to improve immersion in an RPG-type game. Standard RPG controls and HUDs hardly make sense at all, actually. How do you know how many health and magic points your target has? What do menus and hotkey bars have to do with making decisions in a real battle?

One answer is that the objective is different in FPS games than RPGs. FPS’s rely on first-person perspective and a direct connection between player and avatar. Often the in-game character’s face is never visible. RPG UI tends to be much more akin to omnicient third-person perspective in a novel, where the player assumes a god-like control of characters’ actions. Maybe these two kinds of perspective are just there for different reasons, to facilitate a different kind of immersion.

This to me seems like an easy out for RPG developers. I think most of the time the quality of immersion (and story telling) takes a back seat to the goal-oriented “game” aspect of things (why else would you need to see a number flash on screen every time you deal damage?). Some would say that’s the way it should be, but I’m not so sure.

So how do you combine the best of both worlds? I’m not sure yet, but my best idea so far is to have all my characters wear space helmets.