Presenting Information: Lore in Context

Tragically, you're still some kind of time-traveling sci-fi memory regression experiment instead of an actual historical agent provocateur.In Assassin's Creed 2, occasional information updates in your game lore library. You press a button that takes you out of play and into the info-dump screen...

...and it works.

This is one of the precise things I railed about Dragon Age doing, and yet it works in Assassin's Creed 2.

I'm not sure why. I've been thinking about it and the strongest reasoning I've been able to come up with is that it feels like part of what I should be doing. In AC2, I'm an assassin, so I'm supposed to be gathering information and compiling intelligence on my location, my allies, and my marks. In the context of AC2 gameplay, gathering information feels like something the character should be doing. In the context of Dragon Age, it feels like something the player might want to do.

The Ghouls of Brixton

Here's a game scenario I plan to run at some point soon. It's an intersection of history and horror, which I think is a lot of fun, especially because it's an opportunity to use some old Clash, Pogues, Specials, and Damned recordings as background music for the game session.

(For the record, I know Brixton's nowhere near Birmingham. I was just riffing on a Clash song title.)

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In late May of 1984, a night-mist rolled inland to Somerset, leaving in its wake a horror.

Few noticed immediately. Those who did, though, acted swiftly. Within hours, a small boat troop of SAS agents performed an insertion mission to Somerset, but only two returned. They were unable to make a final report, and could only rave about a cannibal bloodlust. Aerial surveillance of Somerset revealed innumerable corpses lying all about the city and surrounding landscape, many of which had been stripped of flesh.

Field research revealed that a blood-borne "entity" was to blame. Those "infected" became ravening monsters, losing all sense of self and self-preservation and seeking only to kill and feed on the flesh of fellow men.

The Prime Minister passed the Special Citizens' Act in an emergency session of Parliament. This measure gave Special Branch the authority to detain – or liquidate – any citizens suspected of having a connection to the disaster. Paranoia spread as quickly as the tragedy, and hastily built detainment facilities teemed with thousands of prisoners across the country. Special Branch arrested anyone and everyone, victims of the horror and suspected conspirators alike.

It wasn't enough. The horror spread too quickly. The detainment camps collapsed. Terrified people rioted, looted, and destroyed places suspected of being havens for the infected. The United Kingdom was a ruin.

The World Health Organization and the United Nations quarantined the island. International forces established three camps, one in Liverpool, one at Dover, and one in London, where they could evacuate those who proved to be untainted by the entity. A broadcast transmission implores survivors to make for the quarantine camps if they can make the trip.

You are one of those survivors, still clinging to life two weeks after the disaster. You and a few other individuals have convened in the basement of a block of council homes in Birmingham. The closest camp is Liverpool, just under a hundred miles away to the northwest. It's by far too dangerous a trip to make by oneself, especially since it's unknown what obstacles lie between here and there, but with the safety of numbers, it just may be possible.

Character Concepts

It's mid-1984 England. Before the disaster, England was a hotbed of unrest, where the rich got richer and the poor got poorer. Margaret Thatcher, the Iron Lady, led the UK's Conservative Party into the Falkland Islands conflict, against the European Union, and toward privatization that favored the already-wealthy and left everyone else enraged and disenfranchised. Working-class concepts are appropriate, as are the 80s English archetypes like skinheads, punks, goths, rebellious students, revivalist mods and rudies, displaced IRA sympathizers, soccer hooligans, and privileged children of wealthy families.

This is a survival horror scenario, so we'll be starting with utterly inexperienced characters. Build a stock, new character out of the rulebook, or give me a three-sentence character concept and I'll work with you to put it into game terms. Don't fret about inventory — it's just you and what you have in your pockets.



Presenting Information: Making Informed Choices

Fallout forced players to decide on skills or allocate points without seeing how those choices would affect how the game played.Over New Year's, I was playing a tabletop game with Will and Ned when Will said that he would estimate that the primary emotional response a player has when playing a computer RPG is regret. It sounds absurd, that an entire entertainment genre and medium are made up of predominantly negative experiences, but there's something to it.
In a computer RPG, it's inherent that once a player makes a choice, that choice walls off certain content. If you kill the prince, for example, you don't see the "didn't kill the prince" content. Unless the game is completely open-ended, it's impossible to tell a convincing story. Unless the game restricts certain content after certain player decisions, it's impossible to tell a plausible story.

Well, perhaps not impossible, but certainly tremendously difficult to the point of no one yet having done it. The greater point, however, is that something's being set aside that, as a player, I can't experience, and that's the origin of the regret. In many cases, replayability solves part of this, as you can always revisit that excluded content by coming back and making the choices that open it up to you, but, one, do you want to go back through and undertake the whole story again, including the vast amount that will be repeated content and, two, how do you know which choice to make that opens the previously obstructed content to you?

Being able to respec a character who already exists is a functional way of ameliorating regret at prior choices made without adequate information. World of Warcraft charges the player for the feature, while tabletop D&D 4e allows respecs as part of standard advancement.I think this is a problem. In particular, I think this is a problem when the story is elevated to a state of precedence over the game. That might sound weird coming from a guy who spent 15 years working on "storytelling games," but the distinction is in the medium. In a tabletop game, the gamemaster, as a participant in the game process, creates the relevant content on demand. It might not be available instantly, but in most cases, the gamemaster won't waste time designing the cult's lair beneath the wealthy socialite's estate if the group decides they want to hunt werewolves along the interstate headed out of the city. In some cases, the gamemaster will have that designed beforehand, but there's always an opportunity to reroute the story should the players choose, which isn't an option in a computer game with linear plot and progression.

For myself, even the process of character creation is often a source of regret. At the beginning of a game, when I'm asked to make a character, I'm making decisions the impact of which I can't possibly know. I haven't played the game, so I don't know if I'll enjoy the play of the fighter-type more or if a spy results in more interesting play. In some cases, entire swaths of content become unavailable immediately, as with the starting areas in World of Warcraft (which I can at least travel to as a character of a different race, but, as a noob might not have the knowledge that I can travel to those other areas).

Hence, the regret. I've been forced to make a choice, but I haven't been given the proper information to make it. Does something else exist as an option? What if that would have been a better choice for me?

It's odd to think that when a game ships, it does so with the developer's knowledge that a given player is never going to see a significant portion of it. It's a bit like buying a full tackle box but only needing a few bobs and lures -- why make the rest of the box's contents and bother putting them in the box? Granted, someone, somewhere is going to see the content that someone else doesn't, but there's something undeniably odd about releasing a product that the developer knows won't be used completely. As a player, I know those other lures and bobs are in the tackle box, and I want to use them, but by the construction of the tackle box, I just can't.

In most cases, I can research my options, such as by finding a FAQ or walkthrough or by asking a community of players. That's outside the game, though. That's not playing the game, that's an additional amount of preparation I have to do before actually playing the game. While certain hardcores might enjoy that bit of pre-game, that's not what your average player is going to enjoy.

The Fable series does a good job of teaching the player controls and world lore before her choices become a critical part of the game's flow.The challenge, then, and the way to manage this critical information is to design the game and the story so that the preparation occurs within the game environment and before the character makes a significant choice that affects what content the player participates in and what is held away from him. This may break immersion, but that's okay -- the very necessity of the information is because the player will be playing the game. It's not going to suddenly wreck an epic if a mouseover box tells the player his range increment will double, because he's already put the DVD in the drive and is manipulating the controller.

(As I write this, I've learned from @criticalhits that WotC plans to offer a solo D&D game that "helps generate [the] character while playing." That's a great idea, and an excellent example of introducing the player to game concepts with a progressive information flow. Fill in the blanks as to what you want to do and how you want to play as you're playing, as opposed to learning world lore and control schemes in a vast block beforehand.)

Shotgun Blog: Five Things

You don't pray to a saint, you pray with a saint. You're asking the saint to pray for you. Praying to a saint would make that saint an icon, which isn't what saints are. Saints, having led particularly holy lives, are especially effective in their prayers and have certain specialties, which is why you choose a specific one of them to ask their aid and attention.

A tiny werewolf, which dwelled duplicitously inside the hide of a possum.I saw a dead possum in the road on the way to work. Something about the way its shapeless carcass lay in the road suggested that something else was previously inside it, and had shed its possum costume and gone about its buisness. A very small lycanthrope, perhaps.

Sid Meier said that a good game is a series of interesting choices. When you make certain choices in most games, however, you preclude yourself from making other choices. Is part of a good game, then, deciding which choices you don't want to make, and using that information to inform the choices you do make, in a sort of prognosticative play? And is it possible to play by not playing, say, by choosing to "avoid all games of chance" or "stay out of the Molasses Swamp" by never entering Candyland?

My tepid romance with Dragon Age: Origins seems to be at its end. My interest fell off rapidly when I entered the Brown Kingdom of the Dwarves, whose undermountain kingdom (eight buildings you can enter) had ground to a halt, and only I could save it. Oh, how would these sixty dwarves, none of whom seem to have jobs, survive without my timely diplomacy? To tell the truth, I don't care.

I would love to read A Dance with Dragons.

The Joyous Toil

I'm back at earnest work on another full-length work of fiction (having not learned my lesson with Demimonde). Over the past several days, I've been gathering the scraps I had previously scribbled in various forms — longhand in Moleskines, pinned unceremoniously into ill-named Google Docs, two stubborn Scrivener binders — and assembling the thing from the morgue has been a great deal of fun. After having been at impasses with the idea for intermittent spells, it all just clicked for me the other day, and the rocky parts came together with the newfound glue of having a good time with it.

That's the shame of it. Too often, I find myself laboring under the effort of making it all work that I lose the ability to step back and just let it work. Because it will. Fiction writes itself, and the writer is just the conduit. As Steven King says in his wonderful On Writing, "Stories are relics, part of an undiscovered, pre-existing world. The writer's job is to use the tools in his or her toolbox to get as much of each one out of the ground intact as possible." I enjoyed On Writing more than any of King's fiction, in fact, and I'll sing the praises of its message to high heaven.

So as I sit here, stitching together the unearthed fragments of conversation between Misters Finch and Thrush, the bravado of the American Arthur Armiger, the bittersweet resolve of Rachael, the hubris of Prince Geoffrey of Avalonia, and the honest evil of Dr. Cross, I get excited to see what will come out of the ground next. I promised myself two thousand words tonight, and while I'm not quite there yet, I look forward to going back to the dig.