I haven’t addressed roleplaying games directly on Ludus Novus much. At first glance, they don’t fit in with video games all that well, and several times I’ve used them as a contrast to video games. However, there’s a distinction that I can make that I think makes them seem less distant.

When people say “roleplaying game,” they are usually referring to a rules system, often combined with a setting. To be clear, I’m referring to “tabletop” or “LARP” roleplaying games here. Dungeons and Dragons. Cthulhu Live. Traveller. Each of these seems so much broader than, say, Half-Life 2. While HL2 only offers one storyline, D&D is limited only by the Game Master and players’ imaginations. However, I think that a better analogue for a video game would be a roleplaying campaign.

I’ve run my short “one-shot” campaign, “The Dead of Apartment 4C,” three times. Each time, a different set of players has run through roughly the same plotline, just like each person who plays Half-Life 2 experiences the same potential narrative. The campaign uses the Fudge system for its rules, and I as Game Master have been the referee. For Half-Life 2, the Source engine is its rule system, and the player’s computer or console is the referee. Roleplaying games and video games look a lot more similar when we match a video game title to a roleplaying campaign rather than a system.

After the break, I’ll do a quick runthrough of some of the RPG theory I’ve picked up.

In its traditional form, the roleplaying game campaign is a collaborative narrative created by a group of people, with one person in the role of Game Master and the rest in the role of players. Each player controls a character in the game world. The Game Master describes the world, decides the precise result of player character actions, and controls all non-player characters. Both the GM and the players use dice to add an element of chance to events.

This is only the traditional form, though. The only part of that description not subject to change is the definition of an RPG campaign as a collaborative narrative. Everything else differs from system to system and from group to group. Independent RPG creators tend to be the ones pushing the boundaries, and the most popular online gathering place for them is The Forge.

The moderator of The Forge, Ron Edwards, has done an incredible amount of work to attempt to define and analyze the roleplaying game. Out of the Threefold Model, which divides RPG gameplay into Drama, Game, and Simulation, he created the GNS Theory, which describes three essential behaviors of RPG players: Gamism, Narrativism, and Simulationism. Finally, he created the definitively-named Big Model which subdivides and defines the experience of an RPG to a dizzying level of detail. I’m not sure the Big Model is entirely complete or concise, but it is interesting to look at, and it has relevance to all forms of interactive entertainment.

Fundamentally, though, the majority of RPG gameplay seems to take place in the traditional mode. A Game Master either acquires or invents a setting and potential narrative, and players each create characters to play through it. The essential difference between tabletop RPGs and video games is that video games almost universally isolate the player from the author of the work. If a video game developer can respond directly to a player, it is usually in the form of a sequel, expansion, or content pack that is fundamentally asynchronous. The Game Master, however, can change the game on a whim in response to her players, even modifying individual statistics in mid-battle to better suit the play experience. It’s a fundamentally synchronous form of interactive entertainment, and thus its authorship is almost always more personal and social than video game development.

Indeed, if every game was a huge open world, you would soon find yourself growing bored, or at least overwhelmed as you struggle to find time in the day to explore sandbox after sandbox. After hours spent in the hustle and bustle of Liberty City or Tamriel, a game with clearer focus and a set beginning, middle and end can be just what the doctor ordered, providing some experiences that total freedom just can’t manage.

Sterling’s got a point: open games that allow for actual player agency over the path of the plot do tend to have inferior pacing and emotional impact when compared to games with a linear plot. However, Sterling falls into a common trap when it comes to game design: just because they tend to be inferior doesn’t mean they can’t manage to provide that pacing. Game designers just don’t pay enough attention to it. More after the jump.

When I write a short story, or come up with the plot for a linear game, pacing is involved in the process as a matter of course. I choose, usually consciously, exactly when a given event will occur. Pacing is always in the front of my mind, because I can see how far along the scrollbar is in the window where I’m writing up my plot outline. When I split my game up into levels, I know that Ravenholm, for example, is Level 6, so I can foreshadow it in Level 5.

However, a potential plot of nonlinear game is at best a partial ordering of events, and so pacing seems to be impossible to implement. After all, if I don’t know what order in which events will occur, how can I make sure they have emotional impact? It’s not as easy to do as with a linear plot, but it’s not at all impossible.

When I construct the outline for a nonlinear work, I am placing implicit constraints on the plot. Let’s use Morrowind as an example. By placing the god Vivec within a solidly locked palace, I can reasonably expect that the player will not encounter him until she is given the key. This builds suspense throughout the game, as the player slowly understands the story and nature of the gods of the Tribunal.

“But,” one might argue, “isn’t that just a linear plot in disguise? If the player must have the key, and the key can only be attained near the end of the main quest, then doesn’t the emotional impact stem from the linearity of that part of the plot?” Good point. But in Morrowind, the Palace of Vivec can be opened without the key… with enough effort. At any time during the game, with sufficient skills and/or spells, the player can unlock Vivec’s abode and visit him. This requires a significant amount of effort, though… which means that the player has both recognized the palace as an important location to visit, and has worked hard to gain access. Thus, the emotional impact is maintained despite the challenge being essentially nonlinear.

The plot in this case is constrained by the rules of the game world while not being forced into a linear path. By keeping in mind the effects of my design decisions on the player’s potential plot paths, I can encourage experiences that are just as good as those in a linear game. Myst’s plot consists of six segments, the middle four of which can be traversed in any order. However, the player’s experience is still strong, with the gradual realization that Sirrus and Achenar are not hapless victims, but instigators, and the final reveal where the player finds out what actually happened to Atrus.

It’s not the case that non-linear games lack focus and have fuzzy pacing. It’s just poorly focused and paced non-linear games that do that. Linear games can be quite good, but they typically don’t take advantage of the unique quality of interactive entertainment: its interactivity. I can give the player agency over the game’s plot without removing my authorial control over her experiences. It just requires me to keep in mind that pacing is just as important for non-linear games as it is for linear ones.

In Episode 5, I discussed the difference between short form and long form video games and interactive fiction. I compared certain games to short stories and novels, but I didn’t discuss the third well-known form of artistic writing: poetry. A poem is a work of language where the properties of the language itself — rhythm, sound, and imagery — are as important (or more important) than the words’ literal meaning and the narrative content of the work.

When I think of “poetic” games, where the form is as important as the content, I think of Tetris. Tetris is a game with a very simple narrative: pieces are falling, and must be organized or else the game ends. The story isn’t very important. What stands out about Tetris is its feeling and gameplay: the imagery and form of the game. The excitement of the race against time, the satisfaction of clearing a row, and the imagery of building a wall and tearing one down, where any hole is a flaw.

“Phyta,” by Abraham Parangi, is a poetic game.

The player controls a sun, of a sort, guiding the growth of a dark viny plant. The plant tends to grow toward the black, geometric sun, sprouting leaves, as the viewpoint moves ever-higher through a hazy, dusty world. Tiny golden creatures flit about, one at a time, above the vine. Until the vine entangles them, and draws them downward, to further fuel its growth.

As Parangi states in the game’s description, this doesn’t feel entirely right:

Your goal is to catch, ensnare, or otherwise trap the little golden flying things. Not that you have to. I prefer to let the things go, personally.

Indeed, the golden creatures struggle to escape, seeking any tiny crack in the vine’s tangle, even burning their way upward through the mass as the game progresses. It’s futile, though; with enough persistence, the vine surrounds them, and they fade away, causing the vine to split and grow more wildly, and the dark sun to grow larger and more complex over the course of each “wave” of creatures.

The game is open to interpretation, but it made me feel uncomfortable, similarly to how Shadow of the Colossus made me guilty for killing the majestic Colossi. The dark vine is under the player’s control, but only barely; the player has no control over when one tendril stops growing and another one sprouts. To me, it felt like I was barely directing a malevolent thing, an overgrown carnivorous plant that left behind a trail of dense, tangled darkness. As the sad guitar music played, I empathized more with the struggling, desperate golden things than the hungry vine.

There’s no true conclusion to this game. Once the vine has grown to a certain level of convolution, and the golden creatures can burn their way through almost fast enough to survive, the game just continues, providing a new, identical creature when the previous one dies, as the plant grows upward through the murky sky.

This is a game about growth. Growth at the expense of all else. It’s sad and beautiful.

Games like Tetris and “Phyta,” games with little narrative but strong gameplay and imagery, are important, I think. Like poems, they can communicate more directly with the emotions and are more purely interactive. They are more about play than about story, more heart than mind. They can be about organizing and clearing away, or they can be about growing and consuming. It’s important with all the discussion of narrative and player agency and character development to remember that video games and interactive entertainment are on a fundamental level about interaction and how that interaction affects us.

Games to check out, in alphabetical order:

• “Everyone Loves Active 2″:

  an “arena shooter” in the style of Every Extend or Everyday Shooter, with a cool “curved shot” mechanic and gorgeous painted-by-your-actions graphics.

• “KrebsWelte”:

  a game where you jump around and blow holes in the procedurally-generated levels to find the exit. And buy guns and allies. Oh, and it’s by cactus, easily the most efficient game developer ever made by science.

• “MMORPG Tycoon”:

  Does what it says on the tin. A decently complex simulation of MMORPG design, with cool neon graphics. A bit intimidating.

• “Mujakwi” (or “Space Game: Mujakwi”):

  Explore the universe. Shoot stuff. Collect valuable owls. Explode. I like how it lets you preview the size, difficulty, and lucre levels of planets you generate.

• “Night Raveler and the Heartbroken Uruguayans”:

  a cute web game where you’re the relationship fairy… as in, the one who ends relationships. Don’t worry, though! It’s all for the sake of love.

• “Rescue: The Beagles”:

  a tiny-pixeled minimalist game where the player manages resources like owls and parachutes to rescue puppies.

• “Self Destruct”:

  one of those damn “bullet hell” shoot-em-ups I lamented in my last episode. But the art is cool, and it was fun for the seventeen seconds I managed to survive.

• “sin(Surfing)”:

  a geeky oscilloscope-surfing game that plays like Tony Hawk crossed with Excite Bike. Great chiptune music and cool graphics.

• “Space Cat on Mutant Planet”:

  a procedurally-generated exploration game! I’m quite partial to exploration games, where you’re looking around a world for stuff. This one feels unfinished, but there’s definite potential. And explosions.

And now, the best titles of the competition:

• “Faith, to a certain Degree”
• “King of Public Transit”
• “Night Raveler and the Heartbroken Uruguayans”
• “The Germinator”
• “Because it’s fun, Fay”
• “Elephantastic”

The Player-Author Contract
1. The work can be played by the player.
   • Violated by games which are unexpectedly incompatible with the player’s system.
2. The entire work can be played by the player.
   • Violated by “game-breaking” bugs as in Battletoads and Pac-Man
3. Through playing the work, the player can affect the progression of the work.
   • Subverted by “Rameses“
4. The events in the work are governed by a set of rules.
   • Violated by some Choose Your Own Adventure games
5. The rules of the work do not change without warning.
   • Subverted by Karoshi 2.0
6. Any player failure can be avoided by player actions.
   • Violated by really hard games.
   • Subverted by I Wanna Be The Guy and similar games and custom levels.
7. The author provides some goal that the player can pursue.
• Violated or subverted by Noctis.
8. The player can evaluate progress toward a provided goal.
   • Let me know if you know a game that violates or subverts this!

Also see Without a Goal: On open and expressive games by Jesper Juul.

The music for this episode is “Broken (DURDEN version)” by DURDEN and featuring Trifonic & Amelia June, and is available under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 license.

A few weeks ago, Jesse Venbrux, creator of the previously-discussed Karoshi games, released a short interactive piece called “Execution.” Not really a game, “Execution” is a quick subversion of what video games typically are and a subtle comment on the thing that the form is currently obsessed with: killing.

The impact of the game will be stronger if you play it at least twice before clicking through to the rest of the discussion. It should take you about five minutes. I’ll wait.

…

Done? All right. In case you just skipped ahead, here’s a quick summary: a man is tied to a pole in a dim room, with tumbleweeds blowing by. You see him through the scope of a gun. You are instructed that you have a choice. If you press ESCAPE to quit, you’re informed that you have won. If you shoot the man, he dies, and you are informed that you have lost.

And if you restart the game, the man is still dead.

As Anthony Burch points out, “we as gamers know that our second chance, our extra try, is but a single quickload away.” If I want to find out what happens if I kill a Little Sister in Bioshock, I save my game, choose “kill” instead of “rescue,” and then restore my save once the cutscene is over. The choice has no permanent consequences. Even Rogue-likes, which maintain a “bones file” recording player death stats and don’t allow the restoration of a saved game after PC death, don’t really change in a fundamental way in response to player actions.

But “Execution,” a piece with only one choice, records that choice in the registry, an arcane and frightening place that is a mystery to most of its players. And so your choices in your very first playthrough can change the game forever.

In most video games, player agency extends only to one linear path through the game. The player’s choices only affect the game world if you choose to let them. There exist multiplayer “persistent world” games, but I don’t know of one that lets a player enact major change, presumably to avoid one player “ruining” another’s experience. However, in “Execution,” the player not only has the agency to affect her current playthrough, but every subsequent playthrough of the game. It’s unclear whether the player character is the same from one playthrough to the next — the piece is too simple to tell — but the fact that each playthrough definitively ends but affects the next is very unusual.

The central choice is also interesting. It’s never told who the man tied to the post is, or why the player is aiming in his direction. From the title “Execution,” one can assume that he is being punished for something, but it is not obvious whether that punishment is unjust. From the fact that the player loses if she shoots the man, we can assume that the man’s execution is, at the very least, out of proportion with his supposed crimes. And that is an implied message of the game, as well: that death is a serious and permanent consequence of killing, and that the man’s death is a loss to his executioner.

I’m sure I’ve complained in the past that our games are fixated on killing. An overwhelming majority of video games either revolve around killing large numbers of entities or revolve around a poorly-masked substitute for killing (what do you think happens to Goombas when you step on them, and how do Robotnik’s robots feel about the animals inside being freed?). The most striking thing about these deaths, beyond their prevalence, is their triviality. None of these deaths matter. They, for the most part, are either interchangeable cannon fodder or horrible evil bosses. Even in the games that offer a more ethically gray killing experience, one press of the “quickload” key will resurrect the dead.

But in “Execution,” there is only one person to kill. He is defenseless. And once you pull the trigger, he will never come back.

What was N’Gai referring to when when he mentioned “classic racist imagery?”

He was talking about The Brute.

The Brute caricature was created in the U.S. in the post-slavery era, and it portrayed every black man as a dangerous animal–dangerous because he was no longer controlled by slavery.

Like Harris, I don’t think that Capcom or the people who made the trailer intended to seem racist, or imply that black folks are monsters. The fact remains, though, that when dealing with situations like a white guy going to Africa and killing a whole bunch of black folk, the author has a responsibility to be really, really careful about how the work presents its content.

Harris offers in a later post a way that the trailer could have avoided its problems:

There are all kinds of ways you could shuffle those images around, but the central element of the trailer [should not be] the mob–it [should be] the unbearable agony of becoming a zombie. And the people in village are the innocents. They’re not ominous. They’re victims.

Do the trailer that way and Chris Redfield isn’t going in to fight a bunch of black mobs who are portrayed as disturbingly sub-human–he’s fighting the horror, the unspeakable horror, of men who are undead.

When Return to Castle Wolfenstein depicted Nazis experimenting on people and turning them into undead monsters, it specifically did not portray the monsters as baby-eating Jews. The developers evoked the horror of Nazi experimentation without turning the subjects themselves into monsters; indeed, there’s nothing stereotypically Jewish about the resulting creatures, and they are clearly under Nazi control.

In making this trailer, the authors failed at their responsibility in approaching their delicate setting without implicitly celebrating racist colonialism. There are any number of ways in which they could have done better: I personally would be interested to see one in which the black villagers were bleached by the zombie plague. A game about a white guy killing black folks turned into white monsters who terrorize the other black folks wouldn’t be free from the danger of racism, but it would certainly generate a more interesting view of the situation than a white guy killing black monsters.

Games are art. Artists have a social responsibility to try and prevent their work from promoting or encouraging ideas they believe are evil or undesirable. Art is a major factor in how we see the world, and games, with their immersive qualities, can be more effective than most in shaping those views. No game is going to turn a healthy individual into a murderous racist, but it certainly might reaffirm racist views in people who play it.

Joakim Sandberg has just released Noitu Love 2: Devolution and I highly recommend you check it out. You can pick up the demo for free, but it’s worth the $20 for the full version. It’s the answer to a single burning question: what would happen if you made a platformer that properly incorporated both mouse and keyboard? It gives three perfect answers. Click through for the discussion and minor spoilers.

Noitu Love 2 is the sequel to Noitu Love & the Army of Grinning Darns, which is a quite competent beat-em-up platforming game. NL2, however, incorporates the mouse, and becomes something much nicer. The main character, Xoda Rap, has the capability of dashing to any enemy the player clicks on, and repeated clicks attack repeatedly, keeping Xoda floating in midair as she destroys enemy after respawning enemy. This gives an amazing feeling of mobility and speed. The action is frantic and fast-paced, and would be great if it just ended after the uncomfortably difficult final boss. It took me about 90 minutes to reach that point. I’d put the expected time of that mode at one to three hours.

It doesn’t end there, though. Completing the game with Xoda unlocks a new player character: Rilo Doppelori, the sometimes-antagonist of the Xoda story. Rilo gets minor changes to the existing levels (she fights Xoda where Xoda fought Rilo, and she gets a different end boss earlier in the game), but what’s great is that she has an entirely different mouse-based control system.

Rilo uses a rocket launcher, and this is a typical click-to-shoot affair, like several shooting platformers I’ve played. She has a secondary ability, though, that’s reminiscent of Sandberg’s earlier Chalk and the boomerang mechanic in the later Zelda games. You lock on to multiple enemies while holding the right mouse button, and then release it to fire a beam at them that’s stronger the more enemies are targeted. It’s interesting playing through the same game with this different scheme, and the new end boss incorporates it well.

But that’s still not all. After beating the game as Rilo, you get a third player character: Almond, the lovable, vulnerable abductee that serves as Xoda’s intercom boy. And Almond gets a third control scheme. The player fires at enemies and reloads with a scheme that feels like a light-gun game, while Almond mostly huddles under a shield and scoots around on his stomach. The most amusing part is that Almond is a terrible jumper; in order to navigate the levels, the player must actually pick him up with the right mouse button and drag him around the screen, like a patron in the Roller Coaster Tycoon games. The same levels, the same enemies, but a totally different feel.

I’m still in the process of playing through as Almond, but this game already impresses me on its versatility. It’s like a set of variations on a theme; it’s like Sandberg asked himself, “How else could I have designed this?” and ran with it. I’d love to see this done more. The later Castlevania games, with their alternate PCs, come to mind, but those games are so very long that playing through again feels like a chore. With this short yet sublime game, however, it’s fun and fresh and quite interesting.

At the outset of the game caring for your little Sim happy requires your full attention. Just keeping it fed, clean, and employed is an exercise in strategy and planning ahead. As you progress, the Sim acquires items that make filling those daily needs easier. The more you accomplish, the less there is for you to do. By the time your Sim has made it to the top of their occupational ladder, they have become self-sufficient and you’ve effectively put yourself out of a job. There’s nothing really left for you to do but watch.

He wasn’t responding to me, but I think I’ll pretend he was. There are two constraints going on here: the constraint of actions, and the constraint of goals. At the beginning of The Sims, the player’s actions are constrained. She can only buy one or two varieties of each class of item, she can only build a small home, and she has few options in terms of friends and relationships. The player’s goals, however, are many: because she does not have a working home set up, each of the Sims’ basic needs is urgent and difficult to satisfy.

As the game progresses and the Sims advance in their jobs, more resources are available, and the player’s actions grow less constrained. She has a choice between any number of items for each situation, can afford to expand the home, and has any number of options for entertainment and advancement. The player’s goals, however, reduce in number. With the problem of the Sims’ basic needs all but solved, the endgame of The Sims becomes a struggle for a few goals: perhaps career advancement, perhaps a happy marriage or kids, perhaps some other aspiration. As the number of actions increases, the number of goals decreases.

Bringing this back to Yume Nikki, the topic of my original post: Yume Nikki starts out with most of the actions available, but with either zero goals (because the player hasn’t a clue what she is supposed to do) or infinite goals (do whatever you want!). And these don’t really narrow. Sure, there’s an overriding implied collection goal and an apparently depressing ending I didn’t get to, but that’s not what the game is about, in my opinion. It’s a game about atmosphere and exploration. In the same way as, for example, Knytt, the game says, “Go out! Find stuff!” Unlike Knytt, however, Yume Nikki has no helpful “stuff indicator” or unity of setting to assist the player.

Think of your typical video game, where you are presented with a very small number of options at the beginning. Usually, you can access only a few areas, and can do a limited number of things. Even in a “sandbox” game like The Sims or Grand Theft Auto III, you are limited by resources. You can’t afford to build all your buildings at once; you need to start with an infrastructure and work up to the football stadium. You don’t have a machine gun and a hotrod; you need to start with a few missions and make some cash, unlock abilities and areas.

But with Yume Nikki, the whole game world is open from the beginning, with only a few more options granted to the player as she progresses. I found it absolutely overwhelming. I could go anywhere, and as a result I felt powerless, because I didn’t know where to go first. I would wander aimlessly until I found something new, but that something new didn’t point me in a new direction; it was just yet another option to add to my staggering list.

The establishment of goals via the restriction of player action serves to guide players through a game. In The Shadow of the Colossus, an enormous amount of the game world is open at the beginning, but there’s always a guiding beam of light to tell the player, “This is something you can do to advance the game.”

The freedom of Yume Nikki is interesting, but it was ultimately too daunting to me. I like freedom in games, but I also like enough structure that I can always find something to do next. In the end, I didn’t have the patience to even enter each of the twelve doors. I wandered through about eight before I stopped playing.