The Quest for Quests: Part Eight (Enumeration 2)

You may want to start this series with part one, two, three, four, five, six or seven.

I would argue the primary function of failure in games is pedagogical: failure is used to demonstrate in a learning situation that you are approaching a problem in the wrong way - or simply lack sufficient ability in the skills required for play. This means we can draw from the large body of work when discussing failure in games.

In the pedagogical sense, there is no failure state while playing a game, except one where the player is unable to or discouraged from learning further - that is, switching the game off. The loss of a life, or permadeath in roguelikes, is merely a behavioural stick to go with the carrots of shiny lights and loud noises. Interestingly, research seems to indicate that dying in a first person shooter actually causes you to relax, which points to a model of tension while learning, relief when freed from the requirement to learn, that fits this learning-based argument. I find it helpful to break down pedagogical failures into two distinct types: failure to learn, where the player is unable to acquire the skills necessary to progress in the game; and failure to engage, where the player stops playing because they have no incentive to play further.

Note that failure to engage doesn't always simply result in switching the game off. Another possibility is that the player stops playing the game that the designer intended: by artificially limiting themselves by deciding that the some of the rules fall outside 'acceptable' or 'believable' behaviour. One example I am particular fond of resulted in the player feedback "I feel like I'm cheating". This is sufficiently different from vanilla failure to engage, because it can result from the player buying into the fiction of the game too much, but usually this results in elevated difficulty, rather than a failure in the strictest sense.

Cheating itself is an example of failure to engage. Cheat codes and 3rd party tools break down the magic circle of the game as designed, but still allow play - just not on the level playing field of the original design. In fact, both cheating and artificial honesty are sufficiently different from failure to engage in the game at all, that they are better termed 'failure to play by the rules' - whether those rules are underexploited, or ignored. If you think these two approaches should be separated out, consider the difficulty that experienced poker players have in playing with a complete neophyte: much of high level poker play is predicated on a mix of bluffing and rational behaviour that a player unfamiliar with the game will be unable to adopt and therefore can be as disruptive to play as someone cheating outright.

But there are clearly issues with failure that move beyond the framework of simply training and engaging the player. I've already discussed failure to win - where we agree within the magic circle of the game that one player has won, but another has lost, accompanied for the losers by some sense of psychological defeat and (in competitive games) lack of financial remuneration; and the failure of choice - where a game system is understood to the point where there are no non-trivial choices to be made.

There is the necessary condition of identifying as soon as possible that the game has entered an unwinnable state. The player may have lost items which are pre-requisites for puzzles later in the game, or lack sufficient resources in order to survive confrontation with the remaining enemies that they encounter. This is again a magic circle based argument, because the actual player experience may still be an enjoyable, learning-based experience, and the blame for the game continuing in this state doesn't fall squarely on the player - it is as much the responsibility of the designer to detect when a game should have ended. I'll label this type failure to finish.

Reloading a game from an earlier save is a type of failure: failure to honor outcomes, that is distinct enough from failure to play by the rules that it warrants its own category. A reload still plays within the game rules, but effectively the player is exploring all possible outcomes of those rules in order to get the preferable choice. The reload can on one level be seen as a cheat tool but a game supported one, in the same way that trying all your letters in a space in iPhone Scrabble to see what is accepted as a valid word is a way of cheating that is completely supported by the software. But it is also a way of constructing a preferred narrative, or merely an alternate one, that itself be construed as valid play - the roguelike Save Scummer takes this to a logical extreme.

Within the magic circle of the game, it is possible to see a thousand incremental failures - death through a thousand paper cuts of lost strategic units. The failure to honour outcomes is as much a way of playing the metagame of choosing which loses to accept within the game. The reaction of many players to a game like Fire Emblem shows that players strongly resist the idea of losing assets that they identify with. This suggests you should design the game so that assets are clearly disposable - by procedurally generating them, for instance. X-Com seems to strike the right balance: the soldiers are clearly expendable, but by naming them, it is possible for the player to begin to begin to identify with them should they survive for any length of time.

There is, through ambiguity, design failure or deliberate intent, the opportunity to create a 'failure to be consistent', which can occur both within the game rules - most commonly board games, and actual play. The masocore genre prizes this as a success rather than failure, and some game designers include deliberate rules ambiguity to make agreeing to the rules of play a fundamental part of the game itself. Likewise, the player can be their own arbitrary god: fair one minute, fickle the next.

Finally there is a failure best termed 'failure to have a sequel'. Games engage the player in a way that constructs not just a narrative within the game, but a whole metanarrative of conjecture, supposition, fan fiction, back stories, promotional material, web sites and wikis, both canon and non-canonical. Players are embedded in this larger narrative, choosing to accept or reject this additional material, but also construct it by the choices they make as they play the game. If a game is not financial successful enough to have a sequel, or the intellectual property becomes mired in complex legal entanglement, or even the direction chosen for the technical sequel does not match the player expectations, then this type of failure occurs. Games are unique though in the way that the player choices must also be honoured or ignored in the sequel: a few (Deus Ex: Invisible War, and Morrowind) are sophisticated enough to posit that all possible outcomes a player was capable of making, in fact occurred.

We move to another brief interlude in part nine, before pressing on towards our goal.

The Function of Narrative in Games: A Theory

Looking at the balance of narrative vs ludology in game design, I keep thinking about what it is that narrative does. I’m not especially interested in the ‘effects’ of narrative on the player so much as the ‘function’ of narrative. That is, what role does narrative have in the process of playing of a game?

The simplest and most compelling theory is narrative exists to help the player continue playing the game. Narrative does this by encouraging the player to have an emotional investment in the story, by tying together a series of potentially unconnected events and places (the ice level, the fire level), and giving perceived value to repetitive actions. This overarching function of narrative at any point in the game has two immediate goals: telling the player what actions they need to do next, and reminding the player what they have already done.

Telling the player what they need to do next can take the form of a quest diary or journal that a player can refer to at any point. It becomes increasingly important as the complexity of games has increased. Introducing the 3rd dimension immeasurably increases the difficulty of navigating the playing space, as does other ‘realistic’ effects: dust, clouds, smoke, and moving the colour space towards brown, wet and reflective increase the requirements of filling your levels with shouty men standing where you need to be, pointing at things you need to shoot (This is epitomised in the single player campaigns in the Call of Duty series of games). In this sense, to rephrase Clint Hocking, if the best we can achieve with narrative in games is to prevent the screen scrolling to the left, then we have failed to use it to its full capability.

Reminding the player what they have already done is in some sense less critical: it helps with the elimination process for figuring out where to go and what to do – but the necessity of repetition in games may confuse even this issue. But it ensures the player knows what they can do – what capabilities they have at any point in time. More importantly, this aspect of narrative is what carries the emotional investment of the game – because it reminds the player if nothing else of the time they have already spent playing.

But what the narrativist debate in games is actually about is less the function of narrative, and more that this narrative experience requires an externally agency for it to be effective - an author, who provides the narrative to the player through cut scenes, traditional story telling mechanics like dialog and literally dropping story text, in the form of diaries and recorded messages throughout the game space.

My experience with roguelikes suggests external agency is not a requirement. Narrative exists in roguelikes in two forms, in a similar ‘what I’ve already done’ and ‘what I have to do’ form (it would be disingenuous of me to omit the fact I’ve chosen a narrative theory that provides this correspondence). The ‘what I’ve already done’ consists of after adventure reports (AARs) and day in the lifes (DiTL) written by players of roguelikes and posted to the forums and shared with other players. The ‘what I have to do’ form consists of a check list of items that have been learned by repeated play as necessities for successful progression in the game.

Narrative in this sense is a user generated experience – but other narrative forms are equally user centric. Literature provides this by mimicking the internal voice through the process of reading; film, television and first person shooters by superpositioning the viewer over the camera location. Games do this by creating a space where a set of psychological needs can be replicated and fulfilled. The difference between traditional narrative and games is that with games the player is not only required to read the narrative, but must make decisions to propel it forward.

The simplest narrative is takes the ‘and then’ form – perhaps told by a child. ‘And then we went to the park. And then it was raining. And then there was a red ball. And then I fell down.’ We are remarkably adept at constructing a compelling internally consistent story from this sequence of statements. But if I was to ask you come up with the next statement in the sequence of events, you’d immediately pause. You’d need to consider the likely sequence of events (was this child’s care giver there, were they seriously injured, is there a hospital near by, does someone have a phone) and provide a statement that follows consistently. That in itself is not difficult. But where the current gap with games occurs, is that you must not only consider a whole set of information, the game designer must have anticipated all of this criteria as well, and provided for the set of decisions you are likely to make. The correct answer, of course, is ‘And then Zoe helped me up.’ – it’s a retelling of a game of Left4Dead.

It is the gap between the decision making capabilities of the player, and the game rules built by the game designer that makes narrative problematic. We overcome this game through repeated play, as I suggested, through learning the rules of the game and improving our skill in navigating the game space. But linear narrative fails to provide a supporting framework for repeated play: ‘And then we went to the park. And then we went to the park. And then we went to the park. And then we went to the park.’ is a far less interesting a story. We focus a lot more on the exceptional events than the everyday. But we need that everyday framework to ground this in – reread the first example with the insertion of ‘And then zombies attacked.’ as every second sentence to understand how this framing helps understand context.

I firmly believe that roguelikes have solved the narrative 'problem' through permadeath: which forces the player to experience this repeated play, while focusing the mind of the designer on how to provide sufficient variety with each play through to make the experience unique. The roguelike narrative of a single play through is united, I’ve argued elsewhere, by the meta-narrative of repeated interesting and hopefully unique failure which guides the player’s learning of the rules of the game. The player overcomes essentially the same challenge over and over, as the player improves in their ability to use the resources they have, over an ever changing, ever escalating topology of surmountable obstacles. It is no coincidence that this also describes Shadow of the Colossus, a game which has been widely lauded for its synergy of game play and narrative.

This meta-narrative theory, replaying the essentially the same game over and over but with harder to solve problems, can help explain the strength of genre in games – when you move from Doom to Half-Life to Far Cry 2 you are not so much playing new games as replaying the same game again with more complex variations. And it can help explain why some narrative devices from other media fail to survive the transition to gaming.

Imagine you are a designer of a first person shooter which has included a successful widely read writer from the beginning, lauded for the previous work he has done in this game genre. Not only has he developed the plot, character designs, history and many script elements to support the kind of exciting, perhaps revolutionary game experience you are looking to produce, but he’s included a plot twist about a third of the way into the game which introduces and provides a coherent explanation for an innovative game mechanic element which features for the remainder of the game. How do you market the game?

In the example I’m thinking of, you go out, and demonstrate at every possible opportunity how the new game mechanic works, giving the media footage and press material showing off the technology, and help them inform and educate the gaming public. Forget the fact that this completely destroys the plot twist for anyone who has the slightest interest in the game: in fact, you’re setting this up so that someone playing the game will spend the first third of it wondering exactly when this mechanic kicks in.

This is comparable to the Wachowski brothers before releasing The Matrix holding press conferences explaining how the machines jack people into their power plants and the BTU output you can expect from an average adult male. Instead, the brothers chose to run one of the most innovative, audio only campaigns creating heightened anticipation of a movie property which had not yet proved itself, to ensure that the first viewing of their film leaves an indelible mark on the audience. The gaming equivalent I’ve referred to: Clive Barker’s Jericho.

From a traditional narrative perspective, the marketing decision made by the makers’ of Clive Barker’s Jericho makes no sense. The twist, a movie staple, works because subverting the expectation of the audience doesn’t suddenly cause the movie projector to fail, or the surround sound system to break down. But subverting the expectation of someone playing a game can result in this complete mechanical failure. If the player doesn't know where to go next, or what they can do, the game can fail.

In this light, it makes perfect sense to spoil the twist in favour of explaining how the mechanic derived from this twist is used in game. While this is a matter of conjecture, I'm am sure early on in user testing, the need to introduce the character switching mechanic to the audience as early as possible was identified and the marketing approach derived rationally from this. Clive Barker is intelligent enough an author to have deliberately designed the narrative twist which introduces this mechanic. He merely made the mistake of breaking the unwritten rule that any narrative twist should never affect the game play (See Metroid, Metal Gear Solid 2, Bioshock, Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare etc. for examples upholding this rule).

Similarly, the absence of a falling climax or denouement in most game narratives, much lamented by game critics, is easily explained when viewing the game meta-narrative as an escalating series of repeated actions.

The unreliable narrator is another narrative staple from more traditional media. GLADoS from Portal is the best example of developing an unreliable narrator in a gaming medium: in fact, you are explicitly set up early in the game play to be shown her unreliability by being told by her you cannot complete a puzzle, in direct contrast to the expectation that completing puzzles allow you to progress. But when presented with the twist and after having been trained throughout the game to use the available tools to avoid destruction, it is still incredible to see the number of people who fail to read the situation, and proceed calmly to their death when ordered to do so (I too am guilty of this mistake). Only the game over screen rescues you from this misinterpretation.

So if these traditional narrative techniques fail to translate readily to the gaming medium, what tools can we use successfully to empower game narrative? That's part of what is so exciting about the medium - we are still in the process of building tools and exploring their utility. I'm going to suggest two that are successful: ownership through naming and resonance. Undoubtedly there are many more.

Mortal thrills

Another brief note in the ongoing series of brief notes about how I'll get around to writing an article on failure in games. An article in the February issue of the journal Emotion points out that death is now seen as a pleasurable respite from the tension of playing a game, as opposed to the penalty of failure. This particular article has floated around the blogsphere over the last couple of days, but I suggest you read the original text to see how the lack of permadeath in FPS games leads death to become a euphoric interlude between stressful killings.

When I die in Unangband, I experience the not entirely satisfying feeling of a cold skeletal hand gripping my clammy heart, as the overconfidence drains from my body in shock. How do you feel when you die in roguelike?

Freedom to Fail

I had mentioned previously that I was planning on writing an article about failure in games. It turns out that most of the article is getting written by other people instead: Only A Game features a great piece on the Freedom to Fail.

At this rate, I'll just end up with one paragraph with a collection of links. Much like the one you're reading.

The Death of the Level Designer: Procedural Content Generation in Games - Part Two

(You probably want to start with part one of this article).

4. Instancing of in-game entities

Most games hide the enemies faces. This is a natural consequence of the fact that humans naturally look at faces to distinguish individuals, and designing or video capturing a new face for each potential enemy in a game can be a long and exhausting process. Consider a game engine that is automatically capable of generating a large number of faces based on a set number of parameters. This possibility is used to great effect in various MMORPGs such as Eve Online, where it is important to distinguish players from each other. Procedural content generation would be the next logical step - where each enemies face is randomly assembled by picking a random value from the allowed range. You'd end up with good looking and ugly individuals - mostly ugly if the random face selector in Oblivion is indicative of the results.

But this is not just limited to individual faces. The Massive program used by Weta in Lord of the Rings does the same for whole orcs, elves and other races. Again, individuals are selected from a base design template that is then varied from one to the next. When will we see this technology in-game? Well if Project Offset is anything to go by, soon. The first sneak peek video released showed a large number of instanced goblinoids of various shapes and sizes getting shot by a crossbow and turned to ice within real time in the game engine (The fact this video is now no longer available on their site does not bode well for this feature).

Any why stop at goblins? Borderlands has instanced guns - apparently close to 500,000 different types of them, as well as other equipment types. By combining instanced guns and enemies, you ensure a virtually unique stream of opponents for the player to encounter. This can also be used to cut down on the total art assets required for the game. If you have different in-game statistics for small, medium and large individuals, you can increase the number of potential encounter types - much like World of Warcraft does with it's cookie cutter but with different paint mobs.

5. User mediated content

You can go one step further than SpeedTree, and instance all the game vegetation, so you'll never run into the same tree twice. This particular example is useful for two reasons: firstly, it's often used in first year comp sci courses to demonstrate fractals and procedural techniques, but also because Stanford are now offering a user guided procedural content generation system called Dryad to assist people in exploring the possibilities of virtual worlds. Dryad allows you not just to create trees, but it serves as a template for all possible trees, and guides you towards 'high-quality' trees within that space, based on other user choices.

This mechanic is very similar in concept to that used in Spore. Rather than directly exploring the procedural content options by using random selections, both Dryad and Spore provide the same procedural frameworks of a PCG to allow user generated content to be rapidly created without deep technical know how. The face composite selection mentioned earlier that MMORPGs use is a similar mechanic. These rely on the user's perception of beauty or interest to guide procedural selections.

This process is extremely powerful. Google uses the ESP Game to label images for search using this kind of distributed intelligence. The concept of "Games with A Purpose" is the ongoing academic project based on the ideas of Louis Van Ahn, who noticed that games can be a great motivating force for otherwise repetitive and uninteresting activities. The concept of user generated content when combined with PCG allows the created content to be tuned by intelligent feedback, compensating for the main weakness of PCG in that human intelligence is only indirectly in control of what is produced. The players in effect become the censors of what are appropriate and inappropriate choices (The issue of censorship and procedurally generated content vis-a-vis a procedural hot coffee is another great topic - one I've briefly touched on before).

6. Dynamic systems

S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl provides the best modern example of the variety that a dynamic AI system can provide in a static game environment. It's A-life system procedurally creates enemies in previously vacated areas, and ensures that no two encounters, even after a reload of a saved game, will ever proceed in quite the same fashion. Oblivion promised a similar revolution with it's Radiant AI system, but the majority of the dynamism was scaled back to prevent a rapid depopulation of Cyrodiil - a problem that suited the atmosphere of S.T.A.L.K.E.R. more than a fantasy world.

To call dynamic AI a procedural content generation system may feel slightly revisionist - but the elements of unpredictability through a range of possible options fit the scope of what procedural content generation delivers. More importantly, it imparts the same benefits and problems. A dynamic AI system allows the developer to cut down on time required to develop step by step AI scripting and allows them to focus more on the high level goals. But at the same time the system must be robust enough to cope with the game-space and handle the same contingencies that plague PCG based systems. A S.T.A.L.K.E.R. developer's diary highlights the issues they experienced tuning the A life system.

Other dynamic systems in game, such as weather and music are also being explored. Brian Eno is producing procedurally generated in-game music for Spore, and other games have used dynamic changes in music based on the player circumstances to great effect. Dynamic weather and a day/night cycle are starting to feature in games, such as Crysis, which again perturb the possible in-game states by providing a significant unpredictability to any encounter.

Facade is an experimental game which provides another dynamic system which is procedurally controlled - that of conversation. The individual snippets of conversation are not procedurally generated, but the ordering and topic transitions are controlled; and human language is flexible and context dependent enough that listeners will often fill in additional meaning to randomly adjacent phrases, particularly when cued by previous attitudes. Facade occurs within a limited space, and an emotionally charged scene, to try to emphasize these cues, and has yet to see a wider adoption of the same processes.

Speech synthesis and natural language generation are nearing levels of sophistication to be used in computer games. Note that natural language comprehension is more difficult - the best that can be delivered at the moment are heavily context dependent deciphering, or as contextual cues. But a game is a controlled enough a domain where both of these techniques may be useful.

7. Procedural puzzles and plot-generation

Many game plots are little more than dependency graphs, which a sequence of actions must be performed in a particular order. At the simplest level, procedural content generation can be used to change the door codes and other individual puzzle elements to prevent a user from getting the information off of a game FAQ website or other source of information. And as Raph Koster points out in a article delicately titled "You Are All Cheaters", the use of these out of game information repositories are game-breaking in that they stop the game being played in the way it was intended. Similarly, puzzles can be extended by making multiple parts of the dependency graph randomly placed (e.g. moving the key that opens the door to a random accessible location).

But procedural generation can do more than just make puzzles harder to solve. It can potentially give an infinite number of ways of solving a puzzle. This is an important point. In one way, failure within a game can be construed as consuming a certain amount of game content (A point I'll discuss in more detail in another article). Procedural generation of content ensures that there is an infinite amount of content to be consumed. In most games, "if at first you don't succeed, you fail", as GlaDoS puts it succinctly. But games like Rogue, which have the harshest penalty for failure - restarting the game - the fact that no two games play the same way makes the real cost for failure virtually zero. If you die in Rogue, you don't have to repeat the identical game elements in the way that you would if you fell off of a platform near the end of a level in Mario, or just before a check point in Halo.

This is even more important for games that have a fixed narrative. Narrative is consumed in a game much the same way as content. Having different multiple endings is a way of extending the narrative so that it is worthwhile playing at least twice. But why have multiple endings? Why not have multiple beginnings? Why not make every single plot point significantly different from game to game? Procedural generation of plots is a way of extending the life-time of a game significantly beyond that of a single play through. [Edit: It sounds like this complexity of plot branching features in Mass Effect, but in a non-procedural manner].

By making plots dynamic, choices will take on real significance. Suddenly no individual (except the player) is indispensable. Conversation trees will take on real meaning, where it is truly possible to offend or impress anyone. The threat of death will hang over any NPC - and the necessity of resetting the game in certain non-failure states will hopefully be lessened (although the negative reviews of Fire Emblem suggest otherwise. Maybe it is a natural human need to not want to lose anything of value you have invested time in). The dynamic AI director in Left4Dead suggests that pacing, another important game element, is amenable to procedural techniques.

In part three, I'll look at what ways I suspect PCG will be used in the future.

Death Penalties

I was going to write a larger article on the penalties for failure in various games, but someone seems to have beaten me to the idea. I'll probably still go ahead, as the article is focused on MMORPGs and doesn't really cover the full scope of what is possible.

I'm also still trying to track down an article on heroism in games I remember reading - which discussed heroism in computer games with reference to Red Orchestra. If someone could point me in the right direction, it'd be much appreciated.