Monthly Archives: February 2005

So. Videogames tend to be built like videogames. People tend to play videogames like videogames — even if playing them that way hurts the experience. People go to great lengths to do stupid things in videogames just because they must collect every item, do everything that can be done, before they finish. And videogames know this.

Why is that treasure chest placed in that out-of-the-way room that no one has reason to go to? To reward someone who goes down there. Why do most people go down there, even if it’s clearly not the right direction? Not out of curiosity, but because they expect a reward. It’s become a task, almost. (Again, look at how RPGs tend to be made.) Some second-guessing is fun, if it’s clever and unobvious. Much of it is just tiresome. Everyone’s nodding, saying, “Yeah, we get it. We’ve been here before.” And yet there’s this unwritten code, that everyone’s afraid to break. It leads to leaps of logic like the player being expected to wander around and level up for two hours to beat a boss. That’s just plain fucking bizarre. Grotesque. Picture it, for a moment. What FUCKING reason do you have to do that?

Same for the perfectionist impulse, where you must collect everything — just because it’s there to collect. And the games now take way too much advantage of this, as a result of people reacting in that dysfunctional way to start with. It’s a natural compulsion, so the games treat it as if people actually gain joy from it. When it’s really more of a feeling of obligation. A quirk of mental chemistry, because the game presents it as a viable option. And now we’ve come to expect it so much that we become pissed off when we can’t finish a game with a perfect save file. Same with speed runs and sequence breaking for the sake of sequence breaking and all of this inanity that comes out of that stew of boredom, idle greed, and the natural human response to a lack of consequence.

Doukutsu Monogatari makes me wonder. It’s weak here, but. Perhaps a way to discourage, say, hoarding in a game is to make it so you can’t get a good ending unless you play it in a sane, non-videogamey way.

Silent Hill 2 also comes into this a little, as does the discussion about hardware — although you don’t really need advanced hardware for this. Not in a basic sense. I mean. Some version of this goes as far back as Ultima. Further, probably.

I don’t mean imposing arbitrary (or strict story-based) limits, of the kind we’re all so used to and annoyed with. Damn, I can’t get through this door because I have the Zippomat instead of the Gizmodrome. Or I haven’t given this item to this other character, triggering this plot event. So I can’t progress until I do it. What I mean is, sure — let the player do whatever he wants within the boundaries of the game world. Yet if the player is obviously behaving in a manner inappropriate to the situation, just because he CAN, or because he’s used to second-guessing what videogames are asking of him, it will result in — well. Not punishment, so much as consequences.

Someone else can come up with specific examples, I’m sure. As well as too many examples of when a game’s charm comes from exactly that freedom to put your trinkets in a row. Or from subverting the system (though that’s not what I’m talking about here, exactly; I’m all about subversion within the established rules — which is why I can appreciate Nippon Ichi’s SRPGs even as I am unwilling to play them). I’m just working in vague generalities. And I don’t know where they’re going.

What are the possible ramifications here? Is a lack of consequene for the player’s acting like a yo-yo, or like (simply) a gamer, part of why videogames are still so fucking adolescent? Clearly, a good portion of their existing audience — probably the most vocal and obvious segment — would do as well to grow up as the games they’re playing. How much are the two sides encouraging the current situation? What are the dynamics?

It basically is a question of motivation. In Shenmue, there’s such potential to get absorbed in the gamey nonsense — and some people do, and become lost and annoyed. For the most part, though, I just feel compelled to drink in the situation. Play it as if I’m living a life, rather than play it as a game. It’s actually rather boring if you try to second-guess it and to treat it as a typical videogame. I think maybe its fault is that there is little aside from boredom to dissuade the player from going all OCD and missing the point. If you linger too long, I hear that Long Di eventually comes and kills Ryo. That’s a long way out, though. I’ve never had to worry about it, even at my slowest poke of a pace. It’s likely boredom will drive anyone on by then; the only reason to remain, in fact, is to find out what happens if you don’t do what you’re expected to.

What might be an organic solution? I don’t know. You probably don’t want to wall the player in. As much as we like to make fun of it, the “But thou must!” mechanism is pretty omnipresent. It seems to me that it’s best to allow the player to make those bad decisions (sorry, Nintendo!), and to naturally wind up in an undesirable circumstance as a result. That’s the way we learn, y’know? On the one hand, don’t encourage acting like you have a mental problem — so if the player goes there, it’s his own doing. On the other, make him feel like a genuine idiot for behaving so erratically.

I think the latter would be most effective as an end effect, rather than a snap response to walking outside certain boundaries: the game cuts short, or the player gets a bad ending that shoves in his face all of the junk he’s done, or what-have-you. This would allow some leeway for the player to stray. No one’s perfect, after all.

Would a more immediate response help as an additional deterrent? I don’t know. Something in me says that this might just encourage a person, out of curiosity to see what else the game has to say about him. Any attention is a reward of some sort. And a lust for trivial reward is the main motivation for behavior lke this.

Perhaps the issue of motivation isn’t something that can be explained in a rational, mechanical way — since it relies so much on the ephemerals of emotion and tone. And because we all interpret our signals in different ways. The Zelda discussion seems to show that. What motivates me to explore Hyrule is much what would motivate me, were I put in Link’s position. What motivates some others is less experiential; more… baubly. It has to do with the gameplay mechanisms for their own sake, rather than to the end they were implemented to start with. With, in effect, how the game plays as a game. And that mentality has determined where the series has evolved as it has been refined, as it has with RPGs and so many other games.

I want to say that something’s lost here. It’s hard to define to people who aren’t tuned to it to start with, though. Or to explain why it’s so important. Hell, it’s a big part of the reason why I play videogames. And so, I expect, it is with many others before they become distracted or mis-trained because of the mental level that videogames so like to tap into. The feeder-bar level of gratification.

It’s seriously unhealthy, I think, where videogames are now. I think, in a manner, they promote and hone OCD and ADD-oriented levels of behavior and thinking. And although it might sound a stretch, I think that might be one factor in why so many gamers are such… insufferable fucks, to be blunt. And the sad thing is, this is gaming’s audience, so there’s a feedback loop. Games are developed for people who already exhibit these signs, and those games just promote them all the more.

Yet. Videogames can operate on a more human level. How much needs to come from the player, seems to depend on the game. For its time, Zelda promoted a much richer mindset. Myst and Riven piss off the core gamer demographic, which tries to approach them like puzzle games, even as they reward people who come at them looking for something more involving. And even Treasure’s games — say, Ikaruga and Gradius V — have a transcendent emotional quality to them, born out of their self-conscious design. They depend on the player’s familiarity with videogames, to make a grander set of statements about the medium itself, and the way we interact with it.

I guess the situation can be summed as follows:

Q: How do we get players to behave like human beings?
A: We motivate them on a human level.
Q: How do we do that?
A: That’s the key, isn’t it.

I was about to go on, and say something about discouraging unhealthy lines of thought — then it struck me how vague that is. More like discourage OCD and ADD-oriented thought strains. I would love videogames to mature enough to allow, or even encourage, the player to explore unhealthy modes of thought. Silent Hill 2 has a passive reaction to the player’s way of thinking; if the player behaves in a suicidal way, for example, the game decides that the main character went to Silent Hill to kill himself. A more tangible set of reactions might be interesting. Not sure how that might be achieved, though.

A while ago, I explored the idea of an emotional change in the player’s avatar, depending on the player’s actions. For instance, in an RPG, you, the player have the option to wander around and kill things, to grow stronger and more experienced and whatnot — yet you lose a bit of yourself every time you kill. A little bit of civility. Of humanity. And that will affect the way the avatar will interpret and interact with the game world. The more you kill, the more unpleasant the game becomes. The more hardened the character becomes, until he becomes something of a psychotic monster. The type who would just wander around and kill anything he came across, for no good reason. He will be treated as such, in-game. Most important, this can’t be seen from a clinical distance. It has to be done in a way that the player will grow uncomfortable with the way things are progressing.

I think Fable experimented with a bit of this line of reasoning, though it couldn’t take it far — so in the end it became something of a cartoon illustration of ideas someone else might want to reinterpret and implement more seriously in another five years or so.

That quality of discomfort seems the most important one, for barrier-building. As long as we’re dealing in emotions, anyway. Whether that discomfort be moral, ethical, fear-based, or just plain boredom and disappointment must, I guess, depend on circumstance.

Again, I would love to get to the point where it would be possible to make an effective Clockwork Orange of sorts; a truly transgressive experience. I’m afraid that’s not really feasible until we’ve established some barriers, though. Made them standardized. The most transgressive a game you can get at present is something like a Kojima game, which rebels against the assumed contract between game and player on a mechanical, on a conceptual level. That’s all nice. I don’t know if we’re really there until it will actually mean something to do that on an emotional level. And until gamers are accustomed to behaving like human beings, that’s not going to happen.

EDIT: Discussion continued here.