Starcraft 2 doesn’t blame you for anything

Real-time strategy (RTS) games are well-known for their steep learning curves.  The most important resource for players is their attention span—can they keep track of their economy, the army they’re raising, and the multitude of battles waging across the map?  Lag behind in any of those areas and you’ve lost the game.  They’re frequently unforgiving, too—I’ve lost more than SO MANY GAMES because of something I did (or more likely, didn’t do) several minutes ago. 

Still, I love them.  It’s no surprise that Jacob and I started Probably Entertainment after working on an RTS for several years, and nothing would make me happier than to release that first game. 

But before we can, I have to write a blog about stories in RTS games.  You can’t do anything if you haven’t first written a blog about it. 

Duh.

And what better game to tackle than Starcraft II?  The follow-up to the most popular RTS of all time, a game with well-loved and interesting characters in a compelling universe, a game developed by the behemoth Blizzard Entertainment, who never releases a game before it’s ready? 

So, yeah.  There are going to be spoilers.  Hear me?  SPOILERS. 

Let’s begin. 

In SC2, we follow Jim Raynor, the ex-marshall whose sense of justice is still intact.  He’s started drinking since the events of Starcraft, and he’s on the run—the Terran Dominion is after him for being a terrorist and holding a grudge against their leader, Arcturus Mengsk.  He can’t forget his love, Sarah Kerrigan, who Mengsk abandoned to the Zerg (terrifying bug aliens), damning her to become the Queen of Blades, the most terrifying bug alien of them all. 

Mmmkay, flawed character—deep regrets, powerful enemies, alcohol clouds his judgment—we’re off to a good start.  RTS games are about huge battles being waged, and our protagonist is connected to some of the most powerful beings in the sector—beings in control of huge armies.  It fits. 

As the story opens, part an ancient artifact is uncovered, and Raynor’s gotta catch 'em all.  Together, they may contain the power to keep the Zerg at bay, or even reverse the Zerg infestation of humans—

OMG like Kerrigan

—so collect them Raynor does.  Even though he’s not sure Sarah can become human again, even though reaching her requires an assault on an entire planet of Zerg, even though it means daring raids on secret Dominion facilities to steal enormous war machines, even though it means giving up drinking, Raynor…

Wait.  He did give up the drinking, right?  I think so.  It… didn’t really matter much to the story.  It’s not like he ever made a bad decision because he was drunk. 

Wait.  Raynor… never made a bad decision.  Ever.  Even when the two choices given to the player are “don’t burn all the people” or “make sure ALL the people burn”, the player can’t make the wrong choice. 

The fuck? 

If the player chooses NOT to burn the people, we discover that they weren’t infested by the Zerg and were being wrongly persecuted.  It’s a good thing you stood your ground and saved the lives of innocents. 

…but if we did burn them, it’s a damn good thing, because them buggers were infested!  Glad you can make the tough decisions and live with the consequences. 

Ah, right—consequences!  That’s what we’re missing with these decisions. 

To be fair, it’s tougher to make decisions matter when your characters are fighting with entire armies because the repercussions will vary more wildly.  You’re not just betraying one person—you’re betraying an entire culture.  They’ll remember.  Or switch out your verbs, and you’re ravaging, saving, befriending, or deceiving an entire population—and the difference between torching or defending a planet could play out in countless ways, as so many characters’ lives hang in the balance.  All of their motivations will affect the rest of the story, right? 

Unless you don’t… y’know… deal with that group of people ever again.  Then it might not matter anyway. 

(Here’s where I cough accusingly)

Well… maybe we reward players regardless of their decisions because it keeps us from compromising Raynor’s character—he’s a hero, after all.  He must remain noble, pure, decisive.  Y’know—heroic!  If he torched innocent people, he wouldn’t be a hero.  He’d be a redneck space Nazi, and even in space Australia, that’s bad. 

Except… why did we give him all those flaws in the first place if we have to maintain his image?  Why does he drink?  That’s not noble.  Why is he a terrorist?  That’s not pure!  And why reward decisiveness if you can’t be wrong?  If it's a story about redemption, about overcoming mistakes... why can't Raynor make a goddamn mistake at some point?  

Which is possibly the largest flaw in Starcraft II.  Raynor attacks the Zerg-infested planet of Char in the insane attempt to return humanity to the Queen of Blades.  He risks everything—his life, the lives of his crew, the security of all Terran-controlled space—for the possibility he can save Kerrigan. 

Good shit, right?  That’s a flawed character! 

Mmm.  Except that there’s a short arc in the campaign in which Raynor is shown visions of the future.  These visions explain that Kerrigan is the last hope for all living beings in the Koprulu sector.  If she dies, if she isn’t returned to her humanity—everyone is doomed. 

Which makes the assault on Char NOT insane—actually, it’s the ONLY sane thing to do.  Raynor isn’t flawed for placing love before security—Raynor is presented with cake.  Instead of ignoring it so the universe dies, he decides to eat it and make it human again, too.  The tension is completely undercut by knowing Raynor can’t fail, or else the franchise is over. 

And even before release, Blizzard had already announced two expansions. 

Two. 

Plus the subplot of Raynor’s old friend, Tychus, being contracted by Mengsk to kill Kerrigan is ruined by this prophecy.  If Tychus doesn’t kill Kerrigan, Mengsk will kill him. 

But we know Kerrigan can’t die. 

So… Tychus is gonna fuckin’ die. 

And Mengsk’s death threat deflates Jim’s choice to kill Tychus—that fucker was going to die anyway, so whatevs.  Can’t feel guilty about that one, Jim. 

As for SC2’s first expansion, Heart of the Swarm—it’s an underwhelming sequel, narratively.  Don’t worry, there aren’t any more spoilers—I’m keeping things vague, because Jacob’s not done with the campaign yet. 

Gone are the branching choices, perhaps because Blizzard realized they weren’t working.  Also, the story is a largely personal journey for Sarah Kerrigan as she struggles with her newfound humanity.  What does it mean to control the Zerg, a destructive force, now that she is completely free-thinking?  Can she turn murder machines into a good thing?  Can she face the monster she used to be?  Can she redeem herself?  

Sorry, those are my questions.  Blizzard doesn't really ask them.  

Well, she kills battalions of people right away.  But that struggle with her humanity is really… key.  To the… plot? 

Yeah.  It’d be nice if she had more internal conflict than how best to kill ‘em all, but it’d also be great if we had even the hint of a story exploring her flaws.  Something like Raynor’s (supposed) choice between his love and the lives of countless human beings.  Instead, we’re lacking any sense that Kerrigan’s choices affect the sector as a whole (she actually leaves the sector for a good chunk of the campaign), and the lives she holds in the balance are alien lives.  Not human-like aliens’ lives, not the lives of sentient beings—gross nasty creature lives, aliens who have evolved to overwhelm their foes by sheer numbers, aliens who win because they die mindlessly, on purpose, because Kerrigan tells them to. 

We don’t give two fucks about their lives. 

So what’s at stake?  Kerrigan’s not too worried about her humanity, so neither are we.  We don’t care about her allies, because they’re homicidal ants.  She leaves behind the sector we’ve always known, full of conflict and characters we love, so that she can continue to not worry about her humanity. 

She just wants revenge.  And she already got revenge in Brood War.  Kerrigan has single-handedly killed more characters in the Starcraft universe than anyone else, and her motivation in Heart of the Swarm is to… kill one more?  That’s the whole point of a campaign as long as the original Starcraft? 

But I’m forgetting about the prophecy saying she’s the last hope of the sector! 

Yeah.  So did Blizzard. 

*mic drop*

Super Fun Awesome Format - My First Real, Extensive Attempt At Designing A Game

I’ve been involved in playing Magic: the Gathering for over half my life at this point, and the game has greatly shaped the ways I think both as a player of games and as a designer of them. People have invented all sorts of ways to play Magic – there are a high variety of officially sanctioned formats, each with their own rules on how to build decks and which cards are legal to use. Outside that, players have homebrewed game types of their own. Cutthroat is a three-player variant designed to solve the common problem where two players gang up on the third. Emperor was designed as a multiplayer team format that allowed slow decks to flourish rather than be ganged up on. Two-Headed Giant was designed to be a multiplayer team format that encouraged building a pair of decks with interesting and powerful synergy with each other by having players on a team share their turn. Elder Dragon Highlander (now called Commander) was designed to promote variety in gameplay by increasing how large decks needed to be while decreasing how many of a given card you could play in a deck to just one.

Each of these formats is an exercise in game design – they all work off of a base set of rules (Magic’s) but put rules on top of it to encourage some sort of interaction or playstyle which doesn’t work otherwise. Part of why it works is because the game is so modular – deckbuilding involves putting all these disparate cards together to perform some task. You’re already creating something just to play in a given framework of rules – why not create a different framework of rules? I designed one of these myself, when I was bored and had more cards than what I knew what to do with. So was born Super Fun Awesome Format, a bizarre take on the game that opens up some unique rules interactions and strategies which couldn’t happen otherwise. So, what makes Super Fun Awesome Format interesting?

-Players start the game with 40 life and 10 cards in hand.

This is a step up from the regular 20 life and 7 cards. The additional cards allow you to have a few more options available at all times – this is crucial, because Super Fun Awesome Format has a wide variety of threats which all need to be dealt with in differing ways. The additional life makes games slightly longer – things in Super Fun Awesome Format tend to hit harder than in other formats, so having more life allows players to take more hits before dying.

- Once per turn, players may play a card from their hand face-down as a land with every basic land type.

In Magic, lands are a type of card you play which then produce mana. Mana lets you cast spells, so you need to play lands in order to do anything. Super Fun Awesome Format features few to no dedicated land cards, so there has to be some way of getting mana in order to do anything. I allow players to play regular spells as lands, which means that players never have to worry about having access to land cards. On the flip side, they do have to consider which of their precious cards they want to play as a land  - if it’s a land, it can’t do anything besides produce mana, so you need to be careful and use cards which aren’t very useful at the moment as lands.

- Once per turn, if a player has no cards in hand, they may play one of their lands as the spell it is face-down.

Here's where things start to get really interesting. I’ve noticed that being without cards is a huge detriment in Super Fun Awesome Format – the first player to run out of cards is at a huge disadvantage because they no longer have options and have a harder time affecting how the game turns out. Even though players draw one card per turn as per base rules, only having one card available to you at a time is difficult to fight through. So, if you have no cards in hand, you can cast your lands as the spells they actually are.

All those cards you’ve been playing as lands since the beginning of the game take on new purpose once you’re out of cards. Effectively, you can ‘store’ cards for later by playing them as lands, getting mana from them now and using them for their effect later once things get dire. What cards you decide to play as lands matter even more now – you keep yourself from accessing that card now, but can pretty safely have access to it later should you need it.

A few things to note – spells which force you to discard cards are relatively common, so cards being kept in your hand aren’t necessarily safe. Cards which destroy lands also exist, but are much less common – so spells are safer, though not impervious, as lands. Casting a spell this way means it’s no longer a land – it can no longer produce mana for you once cast. While land-casting helps to get out of tight situations in the short run, it hampers how much mana you have in the long run, which will hurt you later on. The decision to land-cast may be vital, but it is often painful and must be taken with a lot of consideration to how much you actually need the spell.

So far, the rules have been about making what to play as a land interesting – which exists in Magic, but is not nearly as large an issue in the regular game. Quite often, there is a clear choice of what land to play – not here. What land you should play is always a huge question, every single turn, and there are times where not playing a land when you can is a legitimate choice, far more often than would happen in a regular game of Magic.

- There is a common, shared library that all players draw from. The Super Fun Awesome Format deck is built beforehand, and does not adhere to the four-card maximum limit.

The shared library is the crux of Super Fun Awesome Format. It has also caused me more problems than any of the other rules, by far, because there are so, so many ways to go wrong with it. Deckbuilding is central to Magic – as a player, you’re trying to assemble a deck which does something, and does it well. Whether you’re trying to win as quickly as possible or through eventual, unstoppable force, deckbuilding is where most of a player’s decisions happen. How they want to play, how they want to achieve that goal, how they defend that goal from opposition is all a result of how they build their deck.

With Super Fun Awesome Format, I want as many different playstyles to be viable as possible. I want fast games to exist, I want slow games to exist, I want games where the main focus is whether a specific powerful creature survives, I want games that focus on fighting over who has more lands, and I want games that end suddenly through one player achieving a critical mass of resources. Most importantly, I want games which constantly shift focus – where what was important last turn was getting as many lands as possible, but this turn it’s about killing all those creatures that are about to kill me, and in a few turns could be about drawing a bunch of cards to try and piece together a more-or-less sudden win out of nowhere, and the most important skill a player can have is realizing when they should be shifting focus from one aspect of the game to another.

Making a deck which is capable of all that is, well, incredibly difficult. It’s been something like seven years, and I’m still tinkering with it. Super Fun Awesome Format has gone through a number of paradigm shifts over its existence, with what cards are and are not included, and how many of any type of card is available. The cards in the Super Fun Awesome Format deck are its lifeblood, and they ultimately determine how the game gets played.

Join me next time, when I talk about some of the problems that specific cards produced, what lessons these problems have taught me, and how those lessons might be applied to other, completely unrelated games.

Why difficulty matters in game narratives

I was playing through Half-Life 2 a few years ago, and I kept dying. 

It was near the end of the game, with alien tripods stalking around and gunning down everybody they saw—and I was seen.  A lot.  Riddled with energy blasts, killed, respawned, riddled, respawned, and so on, which got me thinking about the incredibly small likelihood of anyone correctly navigating the entire area without being seen.  And aiming every rocket perfectly to obliterate each tripod?  What are the chances that you’ll survive alien killing machines after taking down a military base, after surviving savage creatures, after breaking into a prison, after surviving other savage creatures, after outsmarting the military, after…

But Gordon Freeman did it. 

In the Half-Life 2 universe, Gordon Freeman never died—how could he?  They don’t have the technology to resurrect the dead.  No, Gordon Freeman dodged every fatal energy blast, claw, and shotgun in his path.  He’s such a badass that nothing took him down.  Even as players failed time and again—Gordon thrived. 

This may seem to create dissonance between the narrative and the gameplay, but I think the opposite is true—as players, we understand the world better because of the failure. 

Certainly, a game with well-paced difficulty is something to strive for on its own merits—it provides a superior experience to a game that’s too easy, or takes frustrating leaps in difficulty, or is all-around unforgiving—but what I’m claiming is that the difficulty of the game informs the game’s universe.  Half-Life 2 kills the player so often because the situation is unfathomably dangerous.  Multiple alien species hell-bent on killing you and everyone else on the planet?  Traitorous humans using the conquering aliens’ weaponry to subdue all dissent?  Of course you keep dying!  The challenges wouldn’t be believable if they were more forgiving. 

But where does that leave us with all dangerous situations in games?  Do we have to welcome high difficulty whenever we want believable violence in our game universe? 

Nope—just look at HL2 again.  We see plenty of other people get wasted by a single alien claw slice, but Gordon doesn’t.  Why?  He’s got the Hazardous Environment (HEV) suit.  Gordon doesn’t survive because the game is more fun if he’s a bit tougher—there’s an in-game reason for his durability.  Suits of armor or superpowers are great excuses for giving your player character a leg up against his foes, but so is the style of the game.  If your player character is a cartoon, he can safely take a beating without fear of anything more hazardous than a few birds circling his head.  This gives us a way to tweak the power of the character in relation to the world without making the world any safer for NPCs.  Everything’s deadly—but lucky you with your get-out-of-death-free card can survive a few extra blows in order to keep things fun. 

All of which is interesting, sure.  It allows us to marry narrative and gameplay without raising eyebrows—but can it do more?  Can difficulty enhance the narrative?  Can it provide both a satisfying gameplay experience and a more convincing story? 

I bet it can.  I’ve focused on death so far, but—SPOILER ALERT—staying alive isn’t the only thing people worry about.  Other things are difficult.  Y’know, backflips and stealth and turning your employer’s rant about why he should fire you into a discussion about the terms of your raise.  Those things are hard.  Why don’t we see more of that type of difficulty in games—non-lethal difficulty?  Situations where failure doesn’t lead to death, but instead to less-desirable circumstances? 

I’m not advocating for zero death in games—remember the first part of the article?  Death still informs the player of the harshness of the world, and sometimes people screw up badly enough it’s game over.  However, why shouldn’t players sometimes have to live with the consequences of their actions?   If they underperform, well… make them deal with an upset employer.  And what about players who succeed with flying colors?  Why not reward them more for doing a better job?  Otherwise, what’s to keep players from skating through life? 

(Second Life, apparently.) 

Let’s get to an example.  In most games, you’re completing tasks for other characters—they need you to go out and slay the beast, retrieve the treasure, do whatever.  And many of these tasks are binary—either you’ve completed them, or you haven’t. 

But what about tasks with varying levels of success?  Shouldn’t your employer notice that you did a great job and reward you accordingly?  Imagine that your employer hires you to infiltrate his rival’s fortress to retrieve a MacGuffin, and he wants you to leave as little evidence as possible.  If you go in guns blazing and slaughter everyone, your reward for grabbing the MacGuffin is smaller than promised because you just made your employer’s life much more difficult—his rival’s definitely going to seek retribution for all those dead guards, and he’s going to want his MacGuffin back.  Why would your employer reward you for bringing that down on him?    

If instead of murdering everyone you enter the fortress quietly and off a couple of guards who sight you, then return mostly unnoticed—well, your employer’s rival will know the MacGuffin’s gone, but he might not be as upset about it because he only has to hire a couple new guards.  He won’t retaliate against your employer with as much fury, which means your employer’s got a little more money to throw at you.  Good work! 

And then there are the players who will enter the fortress noiselessly, avoiding the attention of all the guards and not harming a single person while retrieving the MacGuffin.  They even have a decoy MacGuffin to replace the original, delaying the discovery of the theft.  And, and—they leave evidence implicating a rival faction in the burglary!  Now your employer won’t even receive any of the blame for this crime.  How handsomely will you be rewarded? 

Incredibly handsomely, of course!  And you’ll receive future jobs, higher-profile jobs that are more challenging (because you can handle them), and you may receive better funding for each mission so that you can tackle the greater challenges.  And sure, maybe you won’t perform as spectacularly because the difficulty has ramped up—but you’ve built up trust with your employer.  They already know you do good work, so a couple mistakes are forgivable. 

This system could apply to virtually any mission in any game—your employer wants the task done soon, so you get a higher reward for swiftness.  They want discretion, so you can’t leave evidence behind.  They want revenge, so destroy as much as possible.  They want to be feared, so maim your target and his family.  They want to be remembered as a humanitarian, so help as many people with their endowment as possible. 

These non-lethal challenges provide players with scaling difficulty—if they’re not great at stealth gameplay, then they can barely scrape by in a stealth mission and continue through the game.  They won’t get a great reward, but they won’t get stuck, either.  If they want to see what happens when they perform those stealth missions well, they can always try again on a second playthrough—look!  Replay value! 

They also create believable consequences for players.  Physics and high-def textures do a good job of making games realistic, but we need to tackle human psychology to take games to the next level.  Granted, these are simplified relationships, but we could provide more subtle modifiers to missions.  Your employer could look down on guns as cowardly weapons, and he might stop hiring you if you rely on your guns too much.  Or perhaps dialogue trees come in handy here—employers reward you depending on how much they like you.  If you keep irking them, don’t expect to keep working with them.  If you make them laugh and get the job done right, though—look forward to a lasting relationship.

Don’t forget that time constraint, either.  If you’re trying to perform missions for multiple NPCs, someone’s going to get tired of waiting for you to do your job.  Eventually, you’ll be left with only a few people that will work with you (or who you still trust to pay you for services rendered), which will change the end-game situation and lead to meaningful alternate endings. 

Because let’s face it—that’s how life works.  We try our best, sometimes we skate by, we like working for some people and give other employers the bird, we’re attracted to work that we’re good at, and we never achieve everything we’d hoped to.  Life is full of compromises—and maybe giving our characters the chance to fail a bit before they die would be a lot more interesting.  Let them grapple with that disappointment, let them lose confidence and have a hard time finding work because of it—and then let them enjoy the rapture of resounding success. 

And let’s not forget that other people are also grappling with the same issues, and vying for the same jobs, and trying to get to the top—and how much more interesting that makes life (and games). 

Next time!  

The Empire Surmises Back: can cerebral verbs work in video games?

What’s keeping video games from maturing thematically?  It’s not poly counts or set pieces—it’s verbs. 

I’ve said this before, haven’t I?  Games are predominantly about verbs of the body—running, jumping, shooting—instead of the mind—manipulating, lying, befriending. 

Video game stories lack complexity.  Yeah yeah yeah I’m generalizing, but how many times have you started a game as a weak dude, then gotten all the guns, and then you overpower the ultimate bad guy and save the day?  Plenty.  That’s because the verbs aren’t complex—they’re about reaching the goal by runnin’n’gunnin’, instead of dealing with complex characters in complex ways.  There’s no subtlety in verbs of the body—no surreptitious glances, no coaxing someone on the fence to join your cause, no intimidation—nor are you able to explore these subtleties within your own character by choosing neither good or evil, but the morally grey option instead.  And of course, we like situations in which there is no right or wrong choice.  Those are the best—what would you do when faced with an impossible decision?  Can you find a third way out? 

Some time ago I wrote about the value game writers would gain from having multiple protagonists in their stories (find it right here http://www.probablyentertainment.com/smatterings/2012/7/17/lifting-things-with-your-mind-game-design-and-most-important.html), and I’m revisiting it now because I’ve been listening to the Empire Strikes Back OST. 

Yeah, actually, I think that’s exactly why I’ve been thinking about this stuff.  Because that soundtrack’s GREAT.  Caps and italics, motherfuckers.  GREAT. 

While I will eventually get back to my thoughts on multiple-protagonist story lines in games, for now I’m really just returning to The Empire Strikes Back.  It’s a well-known film that I can mine for a surprising number of examples.  Because it’s GREAT. 

Luke’s journey consists primarily of cerebral verbs—he’s clearing his mind of thoughts, he’s listening carefully to a little green monster, he’s afraid of becoming Darth Vader.  These verbs of the mind are interesting, for sure—but first, let’s take a look at Luke’s verbs of the body to see if they address the film’s themes.  If they do, then why implement cerebral verbs at all?  We could make a thematically complex game while relying on physical verbs, which clearly work well in video games. 

I can only recall three major sequences in the film in which Luke uses verbs of the body: first, he’s mauled by a wampa; second, he crashes his snowspeeder and almost dies because he can’t unbuckle his seatbelt; third, Darth Vader toys with him like a chump before telling him to go fuck himself (with the other hand).  Whenever Luke’s not thinking, he’s moments from death. 

(no wonder I love that movie) 

Point being—there aren’t many verbs of the body for Luke, and the few he has aren’t interesting thematically.  They’re tense, they’re fraught with danger, but they’re not complex.  Luke wants to live.  He’s not choosing his life over his comrades’, he’s not trying to convince Vader he that can be redeemed, he’s not tricking the wampa into thinking he tastes bad.  He’s just trying to survive.  These moments are thrilling, but they don’t challenge the audience.  We’ve seen them over and over again, and if video games are going to mature, we need more interesting verbs—verbs which address the themes the designers want to express. 

On to Dagobah! 

This is the interesting stuff, right?  The eagerness of youth to change the world, struggling with the fear of failure, placing your faith in what cannot be seen.  Saving your friends when doing so all but guarantees your death.  Figuring out Yoda’s inverted syntax.  These are all verbs of the mind, and they’re fascinating.  This is the soul of the film—yeah, Han and Leia get all the action, but the really challenging material belongs to Luke on Dagobah. 

How do we handle these verbs in an interactive medium, though?  How do we make confidence a mechanic that you can feel?  How can we make the player feel the fear of inadequacy? 

The oft-used solution here is the dialogue tree.  I’ll tackle the dialogue tree in a future post, but for now, I’ll simply say this: it won’t work well here because Luke’s conflict is internal.  It’s less about convincing other characters what they should do than it’s about Luke’s personal struggle to mature.  How would we make that into a dialogue tree an inner monologue tree?  The player knows what he should do—he should learn to control his fear!  He should be confident!  He should become a Jedi already, dammit!  There’s no tension in the choices—it will only grow tiresome for the player to quickly cycle through the options until he finds the right combination that makes Luke learn to be an adult.  That’s not interesting—well, it could be, but I’ll tackle that in (still) another post about this stuff. 

Okay, so dialogue trees won’t work—what about gameplay?  It’s a game, after all—make this stuff into an interesting game! 

I’d love to.  In survival-horror game Amnesia: The Dark Descent, the protagonist is defenseless and scared out of his mind (literally).  He observes increasingly supernatural events, which lower his sanity.  As it drops, his vision becomes blurred and the player’s controls are affected, making the player feel helpless—and he basically is.  He can run and hide, or he will die. 

Scary, yeah!  Terrifying.  And Luke’s afraid of becoming Darth Vader, of not being skilled enough, of failing his friends… but… how do we utilize that on Dagobah?  If Luke’s nerves were tested on Cloud City, and the controls become flimsier and his vision narrows, that might be interesting (especially since he’s trying so hard to be brave), but… on Dagobah, it only fits Luke’s training in the cave.  This scene is relatively short (Luke walks through the cave for a few seconds, then faces Vader), and obscured vision and handicapped controls are most effective when they ramp up.  You’re worried, you’re tense, you’re anxious, scared, terrified, barely able to go on, petrified, oh god oh god oh god it’s Darth Vader, my lightsaber feels like it weighs forty pounds, I can barely keep up, I can hardly parry, that might be an opening, I cut off his head, thank god—oh no, it’s me!  I’m in there!  Am I becoming a monster? 

We’d have to lengthen the scene, possibly add in a few jarring images of what Luke fears will happen to his friends if he fails, add an initial encounter with Vader where you must run or else you’ll die (maybe because Vader tosses your lightsaber across the cave?) or else the scene won’t crescendo properly—but this is a possibility.  It could work. 

But again, it’s only one scene.  What about all of the training, the running through the forest, the one-handed handstand while balancing rocks with your mind? 

Oh!  We’ll do something similar when Luke is trying to concentrate!  As he’s distracted, we can make it harder to place the rocks, and he needs to keep track of his balance as well, and Yoda’s jabbering some sage wisdom with inverted syntax, and… wait, how do we track Luke’s distraction?  How do we show him trying to clear his mind? 

We could… well… I dunno.  The best solutions I have are pretty weak.  We could place distracting imagery on the screen, we could utilize quick time events to approximate Luke keeping his balance, he could need to respond to Yoda’s guidance, we could bombard the player with things to keep track of and blur the screen as he falls behind, lower the timers on the QTEs, make Yoda speak backwards so it’s harder to under… oh. 

But you get the point.  And sure, this might be interesting.  It might also be a string of un-fun and frustrating mini-games that the player has to slug through to get back to the rest of the game.  It has potential, though, especially given that (still) other post I want to write about this stuff.  It could be great if implemented well, and I’ll let you know what I think would help it along… later. 

The other solution I had involved the Kinect camera, mostly because that thing’s a little frightening, and why not let it read your mind and scare you while playing?  I mean, it might be cool to verbally respond to Yoda while juggling the other distractions… but letting it blur the camera as you become more exasperated (and it can tell that)—that  could also be cool, if only possible on a single platform at this point. 

But the blurring and such might be a gimmick—perhaps it’s enough to bombard the player with distractions?  We’d have to see.  Currently, it all sounds a bit oppressive—and not that dissimilar from the runnin’n’gunnin’ and flyin’n’gunnin’ of Han and company’s gameplay, which may simply escalate player frustration.  It’d be nice to find a solution that isn’t as mentally draining as the action sequences; players like to flip between mechanics so they don’t become fatigued.  These solutions are probably utilizing similar parts of the brain as traditional gameplay—and that’s not inherently bad, but I’d personally like a solution that felt more unique. 

And I’ll be honest—I think these solutions are a little lacking.  It’s an approximation of Luke’s trials, of the mental gymnastics he must master to become a Jedi… but what about the emotions?  Does feeling distracted actually make players feel inadequate?  After overcoming these obstacles, will they still feel underprepared for the rescue mission on Cloud City?  Will these challenges make the player feel like a Jedi-in-training, like someone arrogant but uncertain, loyal but brash, afraid but going anyway, dammit? 

I doubt it, but I’d love to hear what you think.  I might have other solutions to these problems, or at least slightly different approaches that better handle internal conflict—but it’s hard! 

And creating unexpected plots on top of it?  And turning choices which are poor approximations of emotional complexity into truly compelling gameplay?  And does this still have anything to do with multiple protagonists? 

You’re goddamn right it does! 

Next time! 

(and probably the time after that, and the time after that…)

Something Punny About Drafts

I'm finishing up my series on why asymmetry is excellent, what its pitfalls are, and how to use those to your advantage - see Fair is Fair, Too and It's Drafty In Here if you need a refresher!

Asymmetry is amazing for widening and deepening possible strategic interactions in games, but comes at the cost of tilted matchups, where players of equal skill do not have an equal chance of winning simply because one of their characters has an inherent advantage over the other. Drafting fixes that to an extent, not getting rid of the problem but turning it into a positive attribute of the system, where tilted matchups exist by picking your option set better than the opponent does.

The only requirement a game has to be draftable is that when picking your starting option set (we’ll call them characters), you have a number of reasonable choices to pick from, and you pick more than one character. It doesn’t make sense to draft a single character (second to pick would simply counterpick first, and that’d be that.) But if we pick 3, with players A and B picking in the order A B B A A B, there’s interesting dynamics going on – player A gets to make their first pick from any character they want, but player B gets to pick the last character which would work best against A’s team, and both players get to make two uninterrupted picks in a row which helps solidify our strategy uninterrupted (but not uncounterable.)

What’s really interesting is that drafting is naturally resilient to bad matchups. It won’t fix a character having a matchup so bad that it’s unwinnable, but slight imbalances get smoothed out because you can pick other characters which make your bad matchup less significant. An individual bad matchup matters less because there’s so much more going on during the game than that 1v1.

Even though draft resists bad matchups, which is a good thing, it’s still not immune to them. This is the real shining strength of draft, in my opinion – you can set yourself up for a good matchup, but you have to really earn it. When picking characters blind, without knowledge of what the other player/team is picking, one can get a good matchup simply through luck of the draw – you didn’t know what they would pick, they didn’t know what you would pick, and it happened to be tilted one way or the other. Whoops!

That cannot happen by accident in a draft. If I happen to pick a team of characters with a lot of mages, let’s say, then the opponent could easily pick a character that works well against magic users. It’s my fault for going with such an obvious strategy (that has such an obvious counter.) That’s no accident – you used your game knowledge to gain an advantage against me. Let’s say that I’m well aware that the mages I chose looked like a greedy team build with an easy counter, but I knew of a peculiar strategy or interaction with all the characters I chose that you didn’t know about. In that case, I’m rewarded through my game knowledge – you don’t know what I have planned, so you plan around the obvious strategy but not against the secret one. My knowledge, and your lack of knowledge, puts me into a great position there. I earned that position, my secretly good matchup against you, through knowing more about the game.