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Will Wright's Dream Machines
Mike writes "Will Wright writes in Wired Magazine, primarily centering his focus on imagination, how it affects the way we play games, and how it is affected in turn by the games we play. From the article: 'Games cultivate - and exploit - possibility space better than any other medium. In linear storytelling, we can only imagine the possibility space that surrounds the narrative: What if Luke had joined the Dark Side? What if Neo isn't the One? In interactive media, we can explore it.'"
We can explore any aspect of the story that the developer already thought up and wrote code for ...
Religion is a gateway psychosis. -- Dave Foley
A lot of role-playing games have long foresaken the idea of allowing characters to choose the course of events. Instead, many plot elements are made obligatory so that the gamer can see the fancy CGI that the team put so many hours into creating. An early example of this trend is Final Fantasy VII, but the more recent example that really takes the cake is Final Fantasy X where pretty much all the free-roaming and ability to identify with the main character--the traditional strengths of the genre--where tossed out with unpleasant results.
Back in my day we were happy with a ball of aluminium foil and a pizza box.
We didn't need any of these newfangled vi-jeo games.
A lot of games are becoming more and more linear. On the other hand, we're also getting more Truely Open-Ended games. Personally, I think some publishers would want to avoid an Open Ended game due to replyability. It could lower sales of Newer games. Kind of like the way Arcade Games are made harder to keep you puttin' in the Quarters.
Even in the most linear stories, traditional media has to work very hard to make a reader/watcher feel the tension of the main character's choices. We are desensitzed to the classic hero position -- "Choose right or die." It takes an extremely talented writer to really make you worry. But even in the most unoriginal and linear games, you are in the hot seat and you can *die* if you choose wrong. This is especially try of nethack/moria roguelikes, where death doesn't just mean load up the last save point. It immerses you in a story. Games have emotional power -- I hope to see more developers use them to tell a story and not just see pretty pictures. Cinnamon
It all sounds great, but someone has to produce all this content. Given what I've seen from MMOs I don't expect to see the kind of experience described in the article within the next decade or two. Developers don't have the resources or desire to invest in that sort of venture.
While there are plenty of people out there with plenty of imagination, there are many more who lack it and as we all know the vast majority of companies are very averse to risk. If you're going to invest millions in a game you want to be sure it's a tried and true formula which will provide a reasonable return on investment.
And when it comes down to it some people simply want to tell their story. They don't want to dream up alternative futures; they don't want Luke to join the dark side in their story.
Quit yer yappin' Will and give us some Spore!
-- If you try to fail and succeed, which have you done? - Uli's moose
Oblivion
IMO The elder scrolls has provided the sort of open ended user directed gameplay described here better than any other single player game or series.
"It's a rapid cycle of hypothesis, experiment, and analysis. And it's a fundamentally different take on problem-solving than the linear, read-the-manual-first approach of their parents."
That's not a generational issue. That's a preferential issue.
As for his "possability" world. Free-form doesn't always lead to an enjoyable game. In fact the better games guide the player subtly.
What if Neo isn't the One?
Then the credits woulda started rolling right after the oracle told him he wasn't, halfway through the first movie, and we'd have all been spared an hour, and 2 crappy sequels.
Sometimes fanfics are better than games (or anime) because they explore the endless possibilities of the games they're inspired in.
But yes, I like games with multiple stories. Imagine that in say, FF-X you would be able to get involved with Rikku instead of Yuna, and you could see different scenes about it and the story evolved...
That would be great for Square-Enix games, for a change.
I consider it a given that eventually games will become more about enabling third parties (or "modders") to easily tell stories to players in real time. i.e., online games will become more like pen and paper RPGs with a real life game master sitting there making up the story as you go along. So when you ask that witty magician why you can't just break the lock on the chest instead of going up the mountain and fighting the dragon he actually has a real answer because there's someone in the background ready to supply that answer. How will you possibly afford to pay all these people to answer inane questions all the time? You wont. They'll do it because they enjoy seeing a thousand different player's reaction to their story.
How we know is more important than what we know.
Just watch a kid with a new videogame. The last thing they do is read the manual. Instead, they pick up the controller and start mashing buttons to see what happens.
Heck, I must have been one strange kid then... Usually the very first thing I'd do was read the manual, especially the background story. My cousin or my friends on the other hand didn't. Never really thought about it, but I always figured I was the normal, albeit somewhat brainy type, and the others were just lazy or dumb or something. Now it appears I was the weird kid, and they were the normals...
Just out of curiosity... How many of you guys actually read the manuals to each and every piece of hardware or software you ever bought? I assume the proportion of anal retentive manual readers in the general population is somewhat elevated here in our beloved slashdot community. ;)
Install windows on my workstation? You crazy? Got any idea how much I paid for the damn thing?
To me there is nothing worse than going into a game knowing that I can change absolutely nothing about the outcome and my options are I will either reach the predetermined static ending, or I won't.
Linear gameplay in titles that are intended to be immersive and have some depth (which means I'm not bitching about the lack of story branching in Tetris) is really a waste of the medium. When I spend my $50-$60, the last thing I want to do is be tricked into thinking that there is anything I can do to impact my environment if there is one, single conclusion to pursue. I suppose my respect for Peter Molyneux was truly diminished when I submitted a question to an interview with him prior to the release of Fable. I wanted him to elaborate on the freedom the player would have. He replied by saying that it was an RPG, and of course you would be expected to follow the story the way it was laid out in front of you and there was no getting around that.
While he had over-promised a great deal with his claims about Fable's ability to allow you to change the world you inhabited, his comment (when taken with his earlier discussion about your impact on the world) betrayed a fundamental lack of understanding about what a good structure for such a game was. Let you pretend there is this vibrant, ever-evolving world, yet clamp you to the rails when it comes to your destiny? The inherent contradiction seemed to pass right over his head, and not surprisingly right into the face of many gamers who were unfortunate enough to buy it and ended up disappointed.
Then there is Warren Spector's assessment of the failure of Deus Ex 2 which was that the gamer was given too much choice. Not that your actions meant absolutely nothing, and the entire idea that you were having any impact on anything was just a complete fabrication, but that you were given too much choice. In DX2 you could do any mission, betray anyone and every opposing faction would instantly forgive you every time. The different factions often turned out to be the same entity, and anything the player did would bring them to the same point at the very end of the game where you were given a menu of what ending you wanted. Ah, yes...too much choice. That must be it.
Creating a linear game will always be cheaper than something with true depth and possibility. The added coding, art asset creation and debugging (especially the debugging) makes taking the easy way out so tempting when you know that you are probably still going to sell plenty of copies of your title if you go with the safe approach.
Then there is also a segment of the gaming community that gets absolutely perturbed at the thought of open-ended games. They despise games lacking any rigid path and demand that the few truly non-linear titles out there surrender to the dominant trend. It's truly a peculiar phenomenon. There is an endless stream of JRPGs flooding the market that present you with no choices and cutscenes longer than The Lord Of The Rings trilogy that are truly going-through-the-motions affairs. Constant feedback and rewards for minimal thought. No question of what you should do only "How will you do this assigned task that you have no choice in doing?"
There are trully very few RPGs and none of them have ever been released on a console to my knowlege.
RPGs are more like Morrowind, System Shock, Deus Ex, or Planescape: Torment.
God damn that link is good.
How we know is more important than what we know.
The fact remains though that gaming is a medium, much like TV, movies, or radio, whether something is linear or free roaming does not necessarilly make it a good game. Morrowind is considered by many to be a fine piece of gaming history, and I admire its ambition...at the same time I don't enjoy playing it simply because of its lack of focus...there's too much to take in, too much to do, too much to see...thusly I often end up wandering lost and alone, cursing the lack of guidance.
Similarly you have stuff like Final Fantasy which arguably has too much focus, there's no fun in an RPG if you simply hold a direction button for 45 minutes with some random battles chucked in (if they were at least fun then I wouldn't mind so much), if I wanted fancy CGI with no gameplay I'd go watch Advent Children.
In the end there's scope for all points along the spectrum and all of them are probably equally valid because games can be art and should therefore be judged subjectively as well as objectively. In that way I can respect Morrowind for its vision and creativity, whilst at the same time being allowed to dislike it because it doesn't suit my taste.
This whole aspect of linearity vs freedom is one that is often lost in the mix, and increasingly it seems to be assumed that freedom = good game, remember that all good books are entirely linear and only have one set ending, same with movies, some leave little to the imagination, others let you do the work instead, surely the same should be true of games?
Why did you bother posting a comment about Final Fantasy in a topic that had absolutely nothing to do with Final Fantasy?
These types of comments piss me off. Console RPGs and pen and paper RPGs have nothing to do with each other, just as console RPGs and the PC RPGs you're talking about have nothing to do with each other. Morrowwind was way over rated, and Deus Ex and System Shock weren't even RPGs. Planescape: Torment, however, kicked ass.
... are the ones that try to mirror the DM vs Player environment of PnP Role-playing such as Neverwinter Nights. You need a content creator that can create new content on the fly, or else you can only work with what is pre-set, at this point in time anyway. Although the NWN DM engine has nowhere near the amount of content dexterity that a PnP DM has, because you still need to prepare content before the player "sees" it, even if it is a few brief moments before the player gets there. With a vocal medium, you are creating content as you speak.
Blessed are the 1337, for they shall pwn the earth.
At the time, I thought: Brilliant; if the game has bugs, no problem, it's just a "feature".
But now I think that actually, exploring the official, authorized, documented limits of a game or other toy to see where it acts in ways that the designer did not intend (...or at least, will not officially admit to intending ...) can be as important a part of its play value as what you are "supposed to do" with it. For example, in AoE, making armies do stupid little dithering dances or carving forests into naughty words may be the same sort of unauthorized fun as dressing GI Joe in Barbie clothes or testing whether Bert or Earnie can fly the farthest.
--- Attorneys Assisting Citizen-Soldiers & Families -
You can play the game multiplayer and have game masters. GMs can control characters and monsters, spawn things, etc. Combined with the quite powerful level designer, you can make your own stories for players to carry out, and then control them as they do.
Not sure how well it works, I never had the patience to get an NWN group set up.
-box? -manual? -disc? anyway? when you can just download your games. Ingame tutorials, such as NPC characters (see fable, neverwinter nights) that provide instruction work way better than manuals anyway. In certain games (GTA) you find playgrounds, environment such as a shooting range that allow you to practice with items in the game without causing harm. Besides, I couldn't hardly read the god of war manual that came with the game anyway because of the brown letters on a yellow background, speaking about usability.....
...what matters is what you like, not what you are like...
You mention Star Wars or The Matrix on Slashdot...it's going to get ugly. 800 cubicle geeks with father figure issues crying about how Nethack was the greatest thing since silicon was created, and 700 people backing them up with crappy Family Guy quotes.
My Mind Is Rewired. Is Yours?
Interactive media promotes the idea of fanfic, just on a graphic level.
If you can read this, it means that I bothered to log in.
Thank the heavens!
...', and many more posts of the same ilk follow. I'm so glad you said that.
When I read the post title on the front page, I thought that the comments page would be a horrific cross-fire of mangled misinformation about Morrowind and Fable.
Thankfully, the first post reads 'We can explore any aspect of the story that the developer already thought up and wrote code for
The only truly non-linear games are ones that, as it's been said in posts previous to this, to have some kind of content generator behind the scenes. A real life example would be a particularly imaginative DM who takes the scenario book and rests his bowl of Doritos on it while weaving amazing tales through sheer imagination.
The only possible parallel in computer gaming terms, that I've found anyway, would be a particularly vibrant Addventure, with multiple users buzzing and making sprawling trees of dizzying amount of possibility. (That's not counting the direct computer based parallel to the DM example above: the PnP RPG via Forum)
Until computers can do that, non-linear isn't going to be that great.
Also, I'd like folks to play Spore, and then those crafty Swedes to get into it and find the base rules under the hood, and then we can all go 'Ahh. These critters a'int procedural, they're precalculated imported creature part-sets, categorized into broad sets and parameterised to create many permutations'. That would be pretty amusing.
Sure, all games have some limitations, such as where the content ends. For example, to take a game which did offer a GM mode so people weren't only limited to the single-player story, you still take your "Vampire, The Masquerade - Redemption" character to Toronto or visit the Kremlin, for example, because those maps don't exist.
On the other hand, some still offer a lot more possibilities. E.g.,
- some games do offer different ways to solve a quest. It's not complete freedom, but it _is_ more than a book or movie allows. E.g., in KOTOR you could help a Romeo and Juliet kind of couple marry by having their families reconcile, or have them run away from their homes, or ruin their romance and break them up, or even cause a wild-west style shootout where everyone dies. E.g., in Fallout 2, take the Navarro mission for example: you could get in through the back door and do a stealth mission, or you could get yourself recruited (getting a weapon and armour in the process) and use diplomacy and cunning to get the job done, or go in with the guns blazing and see if you can take out the twin plasma turrets before they wipe you out. Or various combinations or possibilities in between.
- there are games which don't actually have a story, but are a playground with a bunch of toys and some rules. E.g., most of Will Wright's games, since this topic is about him. You can very much explore scenarios like "what if I don't care about schools, but just build a bunch of houses surrounded by industrial areas" in Sim City. Or in The Sims you can use those virtual characters as actors to enact whatever scenarios you can imagine.
- there are games which are moddable enough for someone else to fill in whatever aspect of the story is missing. One example is Neverwinter Nights. And with games being more and more often scripted in Python, that's getting even easier. In some cases you can not only script the characters, but actually change the game system itself. E.g., I've actually used up one vacation to change the very combat rules and the way stats work in "The Fall: Last Days Of Gaia," plus add a bunch more craftable stuff, just for my own enjoyment.
Or to take The Sims again, that's pretty much the best example of a game which got modded to heck and back, in _spite_ of EA's lack of support. Maxis never actually released modding tools, their script compiler or even bytecode specs. Some people had to spend months reverse-engineering it all, for those mods to be even possible. And to add insult to injury, the last TS2 expansions went as far as to warn people that mods could interfere with the normal game, and "helpfully" offered to disable all user-scripted content.
Still, some of the scripted stuff was nothing short of amazing. E.g., someone scripted a better "buttler" kind of NPC for TS2 than Maxis's one from TS1. Better yet, it allowed such scenarios as having one sim work for another family, which TS2 as shipped didn't have.
But on the whole, I think he's talking more about a principle, than saying you get complete freedom. Games _could_ and frankly _should_ allow one more freedom and room for creativity than a book does. Even if they can't allow any possible scenario ("what if Luke joined Jabba as a henchman and led a life of crime? What if he bought a fertile farm on some remote planet? How much money could he make that way? Can he become the richest entrepreneur in the galaxy?"), they can allow a lot of minor branches along the way.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
We can explore possibilities even on traditional media. The way to do this is called "fanfic". Sure, most of them are crap, but the ones that aren't are typically far superior to their source material. And sometimes the crap ones are too ;).
And then there's the category that reads like it was translated from Japanese to English word-by-word with a machine, and once you get past the sentence structure makes it clear that the author had taken something stronger than alcohol before writing it. For whatever reason, Tenchi Muyo seems to be particularly plagued by such stuff - possibly because the original series was pretty weird already.
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
Wil and others have given a lot of press to user-made content, with games like Spore and Second Life usually given as prime examples. But frankly, I don't think user-made content will take over gaming any more than fanfics have taken over literature, or blogs have taken over journalism.
The fact is, populism aside, there are some people who are simply a lot better at creating content. And if we're just relying on them to create content for a lark in their spare time, we're really hurting the community. Those people SHOULD be paid, cultivated, and allowed to grow in their craft. Having the most popular spaceship model in Spore would be nice for the creator and all, but wouldn't it be even better to have the creator working for a game studio full-time, honing his abilities and working with other pros?
As for the idea of AI gamemasters that can improvise the story to fit your whims... not going to happen ANYTIME soon. It's hard for an intelligent human to improvise cooperative storytelling with satisfactory results, much less a computer.
For the gay gun-arm fetishists among us, you could even date Barret in his sailor suit.
Kinky.
"You can either have software quality or you can have pointer arithmetic, but you cannot have both at the same time."
Nethack has a mostly linear series of dungeons you go through, but most of the levels and items you encounter in them are algorithmically generated... and what's more, there are so many different combinations of items that you're constantly discovering new ways to do things.
I think we need something like that, except, in place of just many combinations of item usage, we could have algorithmically generated character interaction, generated dialog.. I think that'll be the key to busting open the range of storytelling possibilities.
I think the problem a lot of people have can be taken from the term open ended. For something to be truly open ended, there will be an infinite number of possibilities for potential endings. This is damn near impossible to code and create without some level of human interaction on the other end to go "Oh crap we're out of Mtn. Dew....uh you save the kingdom and ride into the sunset." I think what Will is talking about is games give the ability to explore other possibilities, not INFINITE possibilities. RPGs like Morrowind, Arcanum, Fallout, etc etc give you the ability to do several different things and make choices, and react to things. There will still be an ending, and it may be the same or different, but the ultimate ending isn't exactly what matters. HOW you dealt with the change does. An example of this outside of the digital gaming world, and into the analog...I've done a lot of tabletop DMing for several different systems, ranging from D&D to Vampire to Exalted to Shadowrun. I know where the ultimate ending will be for most of these games. I'll usually make 2 or 3 endings based on choices that have been made by the players, and they will reach those endings even if they decide to "turn left" as the saying goes. The fun for me is putting things in that question the morality of players, and seeing how they react and watching them explore their own morality. A few examples of things that have had surprising endings... Is it right to kill the person who commits evil acts for the person they love? Is it noble to persue corrupt, evil power to use it to do good? Is sacrificing yourself to save others noble, or just a coward's easy way out? All of these questions I raised through scenarios, but ALL of these questions have also been asked in video games, and grappled with by me. Just like in the games, in my adventures they still wound up saving/sacking/enslaving the kingdom, but the end didn't matter. What mattered was how each idea was dealt with.
Looking at the current state of things, I'd say we're far from it being "given" that games will become just tools for Dungeon Masters and the like. Only a small set of games have actually released tools powerful enough for developers to modify. Unless the code is released, all you're doing is modifying the artwork and some weapon characteristics ala BF1942. I think if anything, creativity and flexibility are being given up because the publishers don't want to take risks on things that won't sell. They want a proven formula every time so they can make money.
Even more, games are so complicated now that it takes a while to produce modifications. By the time those mods are released, gamers have moved on to the next flavor of the month. The gap between independent modmakers and paid developers is growing rapidly. And worse, if people don't modify a game then the economics of the thing becomes unrealistic. If people don't use your tools, why are you going to the trouble of making it so moddable? I think one thing will be most telling in this regard...if Valve keeps the Source engine around and incrementally improves it over the next 5-10 years, then we know it's an economically sound model for development. If they ditch it for a whole new source code base, then we know modding will eventually be a fringe benefit. Before you go ahead and tell me it's an obvious software design principle, remember the marketing tactics and game journal articles that always feature a game developers "newest and greatest engine." John Carmack throws out his codebase for each new game, and he's been doing it how long?
Because I can get that far while the game is installing and patching.
But really for most games these days do you need a manual? If you've played civ 1-3, civ 4 isn't that different, and what is different is helpfully covered in a short little section of manual titled something handy like, "differences for veteren civ players."
The world of warcraft manual was shockingly useful considering most MMO manuals are a waste of paper. But even still, if you've played one MMO you've played them all. You probably don't need a manual to start playing.
Slashdot Patriotism: We Support our Dupes!
Albeit briefly:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Empire
In Dark Empire, which is set shortly after Timothy Zahn's trilogy featuring Grand Admiral Thrawn, Palpatine returns from the dead in the form of a spiritually-possessed clone body and successfully turns Luke Skywalker to the dark side of the Force. Palpatine is killed many times throughout the series, always returning in a new clone body. However, he meets his "final death" at the end of the series. Luke is turned back to the light side by his sister, Princess Leia.
While what you're saying is true in a macro sense, the truth is that games are becoming more evolutionary in their gameplay. Spore, while being a forefront leader (from what all accounts are saying) uses other-player-created-content to populate the worlds you create. Therefore, no developer had to design your world. You and friends did it on the fly.
Think of it like a big box of Legos. A developer needs to make the Legos and needs to make them interoperate (put the nubbins and the spaces in them to link), but does not need to create every possible variation of construction, to have an entirely malleable game. It's just a matter of the more pieces you create with interoperability, the larger and more diverse that player created content can become and unique to each user.
The entire point of Will's article is exactly the opposite of what you've written. The old-school way was to say "you can do and go and interact with what I've created only. Otherwise we get off track and potentially buggy." But now, developers are starting to get the idea that players really dig doing their own thing. Crafting in MMORPGS, user-created content in the Sims, and now, with Spore, it's this whole "we give you the pieces, you build the worlds" idea.
In terms of game design, it's really much more radical of a notion than ever created before. I think he's a genius actually, whether or not Spore works well. This is definitely the direction of much of Gaming right now, and he's one of the forefathers of this idea that the player's imagination can lead design.
Overlooking the obvious, has anyone seen the Spore demo yet ? That's what they're talking about. All of you have played SimCity or The Sims at some point ? That's what they're talking about. They're talking about games that let you do whatever the interface provides, with very few rules or restrictions. Not much of a pre-scripted story or bulletized goals, just a free-roaming environment for you to play in.. play like a kid, using a few props and a double-dose of imagination and creativity.
:P
The magic of this style of gameplay is that you become attached to your game as it is your own creation. When you build a city in SimCity, it's YOUR city. YOU designed it, and YOU named the various neighborhoods. You might even have various opinions about your virtual neighbors through the news flashes and economic relationships.. these things aren't real, they're pictures on a screen, numbers in a budget dialog, but they come to life within the depths of your imagination.
When's the last time you got emotionally attached to a rocket launcher ?
-Billco, Fnarg.com
(Assuming an end of ESB conversion to the Dark Side)
Well, depending on whether Luke decided to side with Daddy, Palpy, or try and take over the galaxy himself, we could have seen some awesome Dark Side fights and elaborate superweapons being used indiscriminately.
Unfortunately, coming up with a game that allows these possibilties would take a hell of a lot of work and imaginiation, something that is lacking in big market games these days. But hey, as long as Luke gives up his life as a whiny hippy and there's no Ewoks, I'd be happy.