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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
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
RPGs are generally designed to be an evolution of movies, although the length lends more towards books. You tell a predefined story and allow the gamer to interact with it. His descisions really play no part in the game. Even the massive Morrowind (which I attmittedly never finished) has a pre-defined ending. So do the KOTOR games. The closest we usually get to open ended gaming are (suprise suprise) the types of games Will Wright and Maxis have created. The Civ games have obvious conlusions, but theoretically you can rule your kingdom however you want. Lionhead studios made some interesting efforts with Black and White and Fable, but even there you only have a set number options. MMORPGs probably have the most potential for hugely nonlinear gameplay, but sadly when you hit the level cap there's only so much endgame material. Until you turn the philosophy of Wikipedia into a game, you're stuck with some degree of linear gameplay.
I always read the manual on the way home from the store as a kid. wasn't quite as good as actually playing the game, but it would hold me over till I got back home.
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.
I used to read the manuals back in the day when they were actually worth reading. At the late SNES/early PS1 days is when they suddenly became nearly worthless black & white pieces of garbage. That's when I stopped looking at them.
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