To be a
super hero, or to be Batman? To be a cowboy, or John Wayne? To be a vampire,
or Dracula? To be a wizard or Merlin. It makes a huge difference in a
kid's life. It defines the rules and limits of the game. To play a superhero
means you get to make-up whatever powers you want and be your superhero.
To play Batman means to follow out a script and rules that are known and
accepted by all. "You can't fly! Batman doesn't fly!! Do it right!"
These are the decisions we make all the time in designing our games, but
do we really think about the impact it has on the imagination that get's
invoked when our work boots up? In this week's Rules of the Game, we'll
dive into the land of projection… who are we letting our players
be when they stop growing up?
There are four classes of characters that are used in game development:
- Iconic
- Generic
- Specific
- User Created specific
1 - Iconic
"Alex, I'll take Symbols for 1000." "The answer is... the dog, the boot,
the iron, the racecar, and the top hat."
"What are the pieces in Monopoly, Alex?" What are these pieces really?
As I'm typing now, I get the idea that the top hat was supposed to represent
the big business man, the iron was the housewife, the racecar was the
young jet-setter, maybe the boot was the working man, and god knows what
the dog was, but the fact is that none of us cared about that as kids.
We just had our favorite piece and that's who we were for that game. What
deep psychological archetype does the little chomping cheese dude represent
in Pac-Man. Nothing. These all have their meaning created entirely within
the context of the game. We like them because we've been Pavloved to by
playing and loving the games. And, because there is no hint of a real
"other" in them, it is easy for them to become us. (If that last sentence
didn't make sense to you, go get Scott McCloud's book, Understanding Comics.
I've recommended it before. Read it. It's important. Trust me! Just go
out and buy the damn thing already. Sheesh… your mother and I try
and raise you to listen.)
2 - Generic
When you play Missile Command, who are you? You're the missile controller.
You're not, "Lighting Bob, Missile Controller from Mars," you are just
yourself in the that vocation. You're not prentending to be someone
else, you're just doing something different. By necessity this was the
case in many of the early games since the graphics were so simple and
the overhead for extra back-story graphics was so high that the games
had to be designed with simple shapes that required the players imagination
to fill in the detail. Us crusty old-timers look back on those as the
equivalent to radio before televison. The question is, are we being old
fuddy duddies, or was there something there that was actually lost?
3 - Specific
Dragon's Lair. The game world's big shift came with the appearance of
Dragon's Lair. Here was a game that was all pick-a-path, pre-rendered.
(Actually, it was animated frame by frame and laid down on an interactive
laserdisc.) No question who you were. You looked a specific way, you acted
a specific way, you were Dirk. Actually, it may have started much earlier
with the Infocom
games. I don't remember if they assigned you a name and physical characteristics
or not. But the on thing that stays through the haze of my fading memory
is that when you were playing those games, you were seeing their world
through your eyes. With Dragon's Lair, you were controlling a character
that was obviously not you.
These extended on and on, almost as an outgrowth of back story. Your characters
in Street Figher II had personality and their own way of fighting. Duke
Nukem's "Hail to the Chief, Baby!" was all his. And Laura Croft has allowed
the creators a chance to sit in on the casting sessions on their own big
screen movie for god's sake. The most egregious game series in this area
is the Wing Commander series, an unholy hybrid that has become more back-story
then game.
4 - Self Selected Specific
When D&D first came out it was unique by being the first popular game
where you created your own character. The race, profession, even psychological/moral
direction was all set by the player. That character was theirs and they
had a personal stake in how it grew and evolved. The earliest role-playing
games on the computer allowed the same thing. You would even select the
appearance from a Mr. Potato-Head approach to selecting the graphics.
But as time has gone on, even the official D&D game titles have started
giving just a few specific choices for characters to select from. Why
is that?
Free will vs. Determinism
Given that people sometime desire to be their own superhero, why have
we been drifting away from that direction?
1) Ego: Back-story overrun/Cut Scene Over
There is something very attractive about creating a character that lives
in people's minds. The world is full of game designers right now that
want nothing more in their lives than to create some equivalent of Laura
Croft. Also, as mentioned in one of my previous columns, the art
departments are loving the wonderful world of
cut-scenes. These are much easier to do if the player's characters
are predictable. Take Final Fantasy VII as an example. They could never
have done the cut scenes they created if the player had been able to create
their own character. Actually, thinking about it, that's not true, it
just would have been harder, and require that cut scenes be rendered on
the fly rather than at home on the SGI.
2) Laziness: Specific choices mean less graphic creation/flexibility.
Within the game itself, if there are only 3-4 possible characters, it
becomes much easier to create the sprite graphics. Otherwise, a full on-the-fly
composting system is required. Diablo did this well, so that when a weapon
changed, it often changed the player's graphics on screen. This requires
both programming and additional art asset work. It's much simpler from
a development perspective to limit the player's choices.
So what do we do?
As you may have been able to tell by my tone, I have some specific feeling
about this particular issue. I don't mind people making the decision to
be specific about limiting the character choices, if that is what they
really believe will be the most fun for the user. But the trend I've observed
over the last 10 years is to make that same choice, but for all the wrong
reasons. I have a very hard time now finding a D&D style game where
I can really chose my own character. And I miss that, I really, really
do. I love Batman, but I'm tired of playing him all the time. I want to
make up my own superhero... one that can shoot things from his eyes, move
really fast, do some unknown martial art s move and fly into space without
a helmet. Why? Cause getting to play with my imagination is more
fun than playing in yours, at least for me.
Just trying to be me (with eye laser beams).
Unemployed
with a Theater Degree from Brandeis back in 1984, Ben Calica has been
making a living in the computer and gaming business in various incarnations
since then, Including: Founding Editor of New Media Magazine, First Toys
Editor for Wired, one of the few single boys to write for Parents Magazine.
Product Manager for the multimedia authoring system, SuperCard Director
of Production for CyberFlix; (design credits on Lunicus, Creepy Castle,
and conceptual design for Skull Cracker) Product Manger for the ill-fated
modem for the Sega Genesis, the Edge, for AT&T [which, by the way,
we decided stood for All Tiny Testi---maybe I'd better tell that another
time]; Worked for NeXT long enough to get into real good argument with
Steve Jobs; And recently was the guy behind Apple Game Sprockets...
He did a bunch of work on interactive drama (wrote script for MacWorld
CD-ROM game of the year in 1993), before he decided it just didn't work.
Spends a lot of free time now lecturing on multi-player/virtual world
stuff. For a day job he works as Director of Product Development for ThinkFish,
an artistic rendering company that recently merged with Viewpoint Datalabs.
He could show you the secret desktop software he's working on, but then
he'd have to kill you.