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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.
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
-- If you try to fail and succeed, which have you done? - Uli's moose
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.
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.
You should take a look at what Will Wright is actually working on before making a broad statement like that. He knows what kind of crappy spiral MMOs are taking, he's trying to innovate beyond trying to get the outfits skimpier and the blood shinier:
0 420559198&q=spore
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=837260333
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?
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.
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?
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