The gaming industry has taken a number of its cues from film. This is not a slight (in the slightest); as an initial influence for narrative form, gameplay pacing, and general presentation, the role of movies have played a significant part in the development of video games. A number of the industry's most popular and enjoyable titles have a great deal of cinematic qualities to them, one of which is the Call of Duty series. Call of Duty has always given players very tightly-designed set piece battles interspersed with in-character/perspective narratives in a manner which, for the very first title in the series, seemed heavily influenced by HBO's Band of Brothers miniseries. Then there are games like Quantic Dream's Indigo Prophecy and forthcoming Heavy Rain which place the foundation of their game design on emulating the experience of cinema through a very limited and constrained set of player actions. These games are, quite literally, interactive movies that ideally take the best aspect of a movie and combine it with the most enjoyable features of a video game. In practice, these games are typically interesting for a single play-through (if that) and allow for minimally-interactive gameplay over a sub-par cinematic experience.
Emergent
gameplay
is a game design methodology which severs the gameplay management power
of
narrative, making a video game and its narrative presentation more in
line with the benefits of an interactive medium. It is a method of game
development which allows game
designers and developers to craft a game world and a set of rules and
constraints by which a player's actions are governed. The thought (and
hope) is that a unique and consistently fresh and interesting game will
spring within the game world from the
mechanics by which it is governed. The impetus for this is that a game
which is governed by its mechanics (and maybe
its micro-narratives) is one which serves to empower its players and
inspire creativity through experiment. This stands in stark contrast to
having the will of a designer govern the path and intent of
the player on a situation-to-situation basis, an emergent or open game
design places the player within a world to define and experience their
own fun.
A game which is wholly designed around the power of
dynamism and emergent mechanics is one where a player is his own
gameplay experience director; a player manages pace, narrative,
difficulty, and any number of other components which make up the
specific game. The game's
designers abandon total authorship in favor of promoting interaction
through player creativity and experimentation. In order to make this
methodology work, though, a given game must have a thorough system of
game mechanics which has the ability to actively promote and encourage
player interaction in meaningful ways while dynamically balancing the
game world. It is, in a sense, an economy or ecosystem of "fun." It's
an approach to game design
which results in a true gaming sandbox, turning the game into what is
classically understood to be a "toy" rather than a video game. The
difference between these two terms can be seen as nothing more than a
linguistic bait-and-switch, but there are some who consider the
contrast to be a legitimate differentiation: a video game is a game
which provides discrete objectives in a traditionally authored manner
and a toy is an interactive sandbox with "no real point."
Labeling
a
video game as a toy (which often seems to be used
in a derogatory sense) then leads to the informed
sect of the gaming mass asking: where's the game? This is a question
that serves as a plague for the existence of truly open-ended games
like Keita Takahashi's recent Noby Noby Boy. Noby Noby Boy, quite
literally, gives its players a playground in which gamers can just
experience the game mechanics working in harmony with each and the game
world as a whole. If you're unfamiliar with the game, I suggest watching a random
person play around with the game (the game's site is unique as well).
It's almost completely incomprehensible, but it's clear that that the
game has some sort of ecosystem in which the player is an agent of...
destruction? The purpose and intention of the player's character
erm--thing is left entirely up to the player's
discretion. Noby Noby Boy is, in this sense, one of the truest examples
of a dynamic, emergent game design; however, there is no proper economy
of gameplay mechanics. It's a playground where there is no repercussion
for player wrong-doing, no presented reasoning for advancement, no
rewards for experimentation beyond the absurdity of the basic
situation; in short, there is no real reason to play or continue
playing Noby Noby Boy. And that's a problem.
Video
games aren't toys, but video gaming as an entertainment medium already
present players with a number of toy-like qualities such as the
promotion of player creativity and experimentation such as the kind of
player ingenuity that flourishes in the confines of something like
Spore's creature creator. Games can also provide an open playground for
entertainment like the aforementioned Noby Noby Boy or, for an example
that is representative of the traditionally-held notion of a video
game, Real Time World's Crackdown. The problem lies with the fact that
video games are not toys. Toys are something that are real, persistent,
easily accessible, and provide an instant gratification and tactile
response for people. People of all ages are drawn to the allure of
toys, especially ones which inherently promote creativity such as LEGO
and Play-Doh; there is no complex instruction manual (unless you're
going for a specific LEGO model) or no confusing interfaces or control
mechanisms, the toy is just there for playing. Games have no such
luxury of simply existing in our common, shared
physical space; they're complex pieces of software that are designed to
be as entertaining as possible but typically have a high barrier of
entry in terms of console or PC hardware, monitor or television,
controller or keyboard/mouse, and the actual twenty-to-sixty dollar
game itself. And after all of this, it's not enough for a game to
simply present itself as a toy.
Where the completely
open-ended gameplay of Noby Noby Boy went wrong is in its inability to
present its players with meaning, purpose, and profundity. This is an
area where the cinematic influences in video games have very positively
influenced game
design: the message
model of meaning. Constructing a game world governed by the
most well-balanced system of mechanics and then filling it with all
manner of interesting micro-narratives will mean absolutely nothing on
its own. A player can approach that world with no semblance of emotion
or purpose and subvert the intention of every developer and designer on
that hypothetical game's development team because that player has no
reason to willingly submit himself to the game or become immersed in
its world. It's in following a cinematic method of storytelling, then,
that games have squeezed out their model of narrative presentation.
Which is a topic unto itself, but the notable aspect for this piece is
the way that cinematic storytelling imbues meaning on a player's
actions in games.
Consider
Naughty Dog's recent Playstation 3-exclusive action/adventure game
Uncharted:
Drake's Fortune. In a lot of ways, it's a very safe,
by-the-books game. It has a scruffy-looking and witty main character,
his older and more experienced wise-cracking sidekick, and a cute and
precocious romantic interest. In this game, the trio are involved in a
multi-locale trek to uncover the secret of Sir Francis Drake's fortune
and the whole story has this very Indiana Jones-like atmosphere and
whimsy to it (despite the main character killing
thousands of people over the course of the day).
What was remarkable about Uncharted was not its plot or its gameplay,
but rather it was the game's ability to infuse its entire cast of
characters with more personality than most games ever approach for even
a single lead character. Every cut scene in Uncharted was a reward for
the player completing a segment of gameplay and these cut scenes
expounded on the life and depth of each character in such a way as to
continually build upon each character's meaning and contribution to the
game. Every time a cut scene aired in the game, the player was drawn a
bit more into the world of Uncharted through the game's leading man and
woman. And when the player is drawn more to his in-game avatar, every
in-game action is more impacting, every scenario is more meaningful and
understandable, and the integrity of the game design is strengthened.
At
this point, the goal becomes allowing for the creation of an open-ended
game with its emphasis placed on the emergent scenarios produced by its
game design to reflect the same sense of meaning and purpose in its
dynamic sandbox as a game as heavily authored as Uncharted. To a large
extent, Maxis had a great deal of success with The Sims series in this
regard. The Sims games are primarily sandbox gaming experiences that
charge players with the sole goal of running a successful household of
sims. These games have the mechanics to promote a game design which
consists of surprisingly deep strategy gameplay while simultaneously
allowing players to treat the game as nothing more than a high-tech
doll house. The Sims manages to create exigent circumstances solely
through the nature of its source material: if there's something that
every gamer in the world understands, it's the pressing needs and
minutiae of the daily life of a human being.
The
Sims fosters the kinds of player
narratives that, as of now, are the most intriguing form of
narrative to be told within the gaming medium. That is, if we as game
developers don't want to rely on the method of storytelling dictated by
years of film and cinema, then fueling a dynamic narrative that is left
up to a player's interpretation may be the best option. With the
exception of maybe a really well-done cut scene here and there, the
most memorable aspect of games that players tend to take away are of
the "scored the winning goal in the last remaining seconds" variety.
These are stories that players can construct from in-game events and
mechanics that may or may not line up with what a design would expect a
player to experience. In a game like The Sims, a designer would
anticipate a player growing attached to one of his sims and then that
sim dying from a chance oven explosion in the kitchen. What a designer
may not necessarily expect, and what a player would potentially find
endlessly hilarious and intriguing, is that a player can starve a sim
to death by isolating a sim from the rest of the family and then going
into building mode and build walls around that sim and isolate him from
the in-game resources and social growth he needs to survive.
If
only it was simple to "open up" existing game genres and fill them with
an economy of self-balancing game mechanics. Far Cry 2,
for example, has some of the most brilliantly designed and implemented
combat I've seen in a video game in years. Players are given their
tools of destruction and then are, in the short term, tasked with the
elimination of enemies. The game populates the world with various
factors: grass, huts, ammo depots, propane tanks, and so on. The way
that combat unfolds is dependent on all of the game's
mechanics working together to create a dynamic, unpredictable
combat scenario that generates a player narrative that is a combination
of what the game's designers intended and what the net yield of the
system of game mechanics created while the player worked to resolve the
combat situation. And as well as Far Cry 2 worked to create these
emergent gameplay experiences, the game took an
enormous development team years to create; over
it's forty-three months of development, the team size peaked at 65
people for year one, 105 for year two, and an astonishing peak of 268
individuals for the third and final year of the game's development.
Does
an emergent game design work on both a small and a large level? Noby
Noby Boy, despite its inability to create intent and purpose, works as
a very well-designed playground where its players can just experiment
with a working ecosystem of mechanics. As this model of game
progression scales upwards, though, the challenge in properly
developing, balancing, and testing is sure to rise at a far faster rate
than that of a more traditional game.
Putting the reality of
development complexity and cost aside, the real question becomes: do
players really want the power (responsibility?) to play a game and
determine what they find fun within a given playground? Video gaming's
adoption of a cinematic flair for storytelling has led to games which
possess a number of movie-like qualities, but no one would ever argue
that a game like Call of Duty 4 is bad or not enjoyable because of it.
For the high price of an average game, though, we should be offering
players more than a heavily-authored single-player campaign that is
only interesting for one play-through.