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How "Fishing Girl" Restored My Inspiration

You might have noticed I haven't written anything in here for a while. While part of that has been down to changes in my personal life, my general malaise towards the games industry has played a part as well. It seems no amount of academic study or criticism will stand a chance of changing the tune of developers. Neither the brunt of the developers nor the core consumers see the need for any change to the current slew of brain-dead titles, nor do they have any desire to push back the boundaries of our understanding of interactivity. In short, there just didn't seem to be any point any more.

It was to my great surprise, then, that I saw a game appear on Xbox Live's Indie Games that, for once, was not a zombie-infested murder marathon. “Fishing Girl” was a cute little game with a simple one-button gameplay mechanic and low-key lo-fi graphics that managed to appear distinct from mainstream titles without falling into the trap of looking “obviously Indie”.

What struck me – and inspired me - was not just the simplicity of the gameplay and the graphics, but the wonderful use of story. Fishing Girl's premise is simple – two creatures are in love. One is suddenly separated from another by a stretch of water. You take control of this creature, and can earn coins by catching fish. By upgrading your fishing rod and line, you can eventually catch the other piece of land with your lure, and reel it in, pulling the two creatures back together – but the game does not tell you this. As a player, I felt that I had come to the conclusion of pulling the other piece of land towards me of my own accord. This is the holy grail of interactive writing – a fixed ending that feels emergent. It also perfectly displays a natural ludo-narrative resonance. Many larger, more complex games – including those worked on by established authors – use story as a trope or machina. In a similar fashion to the way in which a TV character might suddenly reveal an otherwise unrelated (and often unlikely) hobby or past experience that just so happens to be useful in the show, all too often our games rely on a complex plot to explain the minutia of the gaming mechanic. Fishing Girl demonstrates how a simple, natural and easily understood story can flow simply into a supporting gameplay mechanic, and how this can lead the player to a conclusion without having to directly tell them what to do.

For all the discussion that goes on today of branching vs fixed narrative, and of the possibilities and technical limitations of a truly emergent story experience, a game like Fishing Girl comes as a shock to the system, and leaves me wondering if perhaps crafting an emergent, story-based interactive experience is like learning to fly before we can even crawl. Perhaps the better solution to creating a deeper interactive experience lies not in the player carving their own solution, but in creating a single, unchanging solution that flows so cleanly from the gameplay that the player doesn't feel cheated or slighted by their inability to change it.

An Experiment In Games Design - Designing to Music

With my recent discussion of designing to a user's "feeling" and the emotional side of an experience, along with my lust for experimenting with game designs, I thought I'd set myself a new challenge: adapt a piece of music into a game.

For this purpose, I chose a piece I know very well and am a big fan of: "Inní mér syngur vitleysingur" by Sigur Ros. This particular piece's lyrics are unintelligible to me, so I'll be working purely from my personal interpretation of the musical elements of the song.

Here's a Spotify link if you'd like to hear the song.

My first impression of the song is always a sense of triumph - to me, it is a song for marching past crowds, with your head high. The most noticable thing that happened at this point was that I instantly began picturing the action on-screen (albeit in a rather vague fashion), which made me run quite close to the "cool stuff happens" school of design.

I took the idea of marching triumphantly, and combined it with the imagery I was associating it with: people cheering in unison, parades, confetti, fireworks. This led me to a game mechanic I knew well - the challenge of herding.

And thus "The March Of Triumph" was born:

March Of Triumph

The player plays a character returning to his home town triumphant from a great victory. Or perhaps he's just having a really, really good day. Who knows. Whatever the situation, he has somewhere to go, and he's marching there with his head held high. As he does this, he spreads cheer to the town around him - flowers grow, rubbish clears away, and everything is brightly coloured. Thing is, this town is filled with miserable, sad people who stare at the ground all day. They spread their misery everywhere, killing plants and spreading muck around.

The player must march triumphantly through the town to his destination within a set time limit. As they pass the glum, depressing inhabitants of the town, passing close to them will cause them to "catch" your happiness. They'll brighten up, cheer up, and start marching with you.

Thing is, they're fickle - if at any point they look out and can only see misery, they'll get depressed again.

Cheer up enough people and the player can unleash a little happy flourish, sending out a radial burst of super-happiness that'll attract the attention of depressed people who aren't even looking - as well as setting off chain reactions of flourishes in your followers, and just looking incredibly happy and joyful.

The aim of the game is to reach your destination within the time limit and with as many happy followers as possible. The game also tracks how "happy" the city looks after each march.

Overall, I think the game mechanic is derivative - its a cross between snake and lemmings, really - but it does stand a good chance of not only being fun, but communicating my intended emotional experience to the player.

What this shows is that, while I was onto something with the genesis of an idea from an emotive experience, there is something to be said for prototyping and tinkering with gameplay mechanics. In my opinion, the solution is to take concepts such as this to prototypes as rapidly as is possible, so that the mechanics can be tested and tinkered with - ultimately even discarded if they don't work.

I'm also pretty sure a large part of the design came from my recent gameplay experience (I've had nothing to do for two days but sit and play Saint's Row 2, endlessly, for hours on end). I do wonder, given how large a part the city plays in the concept of the mechanic, if playing something else recently might have given me a different setting, and thus a different game mechanic.

I quite enjoy these small challenges, and will be continuing to set myself to them when I have spare time. I hope others will join me in the weekly challenge over at http://gdchallenge.wordpress.com/ .

More On Design From Feelings & A Look At Adaptation

Recently, I wrote on my blog about how I like to approach a game design - by focussing on a "feeling" of an "experience" that I want to communicate to the player - and I thought perhaps I should expand on some of those points.

Firstly, on reflection, I do rarely begin with just that "feeling". Often, I'll begin from a mechanic or narrative concept, like most other designers. When I do, however, the first thing I do is pare that thought down to its core feeling, what it is that makes that experience feel the way it does, and ask "how should the player feel right now?".

Once I have a handle on that, the next step is to ask "Why does the player feel this way?", which leads into "what can the game do to enhance/promote this feeling?". This is where this particular design methodology becomes a little flimsy, because I then have to begin building a game mechanic without anything to go on but a feeling - which, most of the time, means borrowing game mechanics from other games.

For an example of how this can turn out, check out the prototype I produced a few months back, "Balloon Balloon". (I swear, I will get back to work on it in a month or two!). This began, as you can tell from the blog entry, as a picture, then a poem, before finally becoming a game concept.

What makes this system both advantageous and challenging in development is in communication to the team. While I developed Balloon Balloon by myself, I have since spoken to an artist about it - and without a core "this is what happens" pitch, I just had to show them the picture & poem and explain my choices for the design mechanic and hope that they could get on board - but art history is filled with examples of multiple interpretations of a piece. Getting an entire team rallied around a single "feeling" is something I wouldn't want to have to do.

The idea to try developing a concept in this way wasn't entirely born from the Balloon Balloon experience. I also took a stab at one point at attempting to adapt a short story - in my case, HP Lovecraft's "The Shadow Over Innsmouth" - into a game. I realised that, while adaptation from paper to cinema might be as simple as working out what bits of the story work visually and what bits don't, then reworking appropriately, history has proven that taking a single, solid narrative and inserting interactive sequences doesn't make for a proper adaptation. For this project, I took the approach of imagining what the protagonist/narrator of the story was feeling during the story, under the assumption that the author would expect us to feel something similar to this in the reading. By doing this, I ended up with a concept that was entirely different to what might have come about from directly translating the events of the story.

(for those interested, the design itself was lost - along with my 4th year dissertation - when I lost my precious USB pen, but it was roughly thus:

Entitled "Shadows Of Innsmouth", the game is set in the late 70s, when the player plays a young aspiring architect on his way to his first major pitch without any grand inspiration. Due to a travelling issue, he is forced to make a 24 hour stopover in the town of Innsmouth, a fishing town frozen in time for 50 years, and which hides a disturbing secret behinds its odd and unique architecture. The player was tasked with wandering the town for a day and a night, searching for inspiration for his project - but with every revelation (he could speak to townsfolk to get more information on the strange architecture around the town) he risked losing his sanity. The player's progress was marked by the main character's sketch pad, which would fill with ideas as the player collected inspiration.

I felt the experiment was a failure - although I was proud of the design, and thought it would be fun, it represented more of an interactive story experience than an actual game, mostly due to the linear nature of the narrative. I'll post on interactive stories vs games at a later date.)

I would think that game designs need not begin from a feeling as such, but if there is a point to take from this concept, it is this - at some point, the aim of a game is to deliver an experience of some kind to the player. When considering your core mechanic, it pays to sit and consider what the primary emotions involved in that experience are. You then have to do what people in almost every great creative enviroment do - what William Goldman called "killing your darlings". You have to look objectively at everything you're adding to the game and ask "does this promote or stand in the way of the core concept I am trying to communicate?". If the answer is that it stands in its way, acts as a distraction, or effectively works against that feeling, then - even if it is fun, even if people enjoy it, you have to question its effectiveness and worth to the game. After all, I like zombies, but do I need them in a romantic comedy? Perhaps, but you wouldn't add pirates to that film, or a terminator, even though those things are cool to see in a film. You only add what contributes to the pure experience you are trying to convey to the player.

Genesis of a game design, and the "schools" of design methodolgy

If there is one question I need to find the answer to before I can be comfortable working in development again, its this: what is the basis of a good game design? Where does one start, and what progression does one take?

From my perspective, it seems many designers subscribe to what I would refer to as the "Cool Stuff Happens" school of game design. They begin with an idea of something happening on-screen, and work from there. This would be the attitude most people begin with when tranistioning into the industry - hence the slew of "you play a grizzled new york cop/toughened space marine/hardened mafia boss" designs. The game mechanics are built around this - "he steals a car to escape, so we need a driving mechanic" etc.

The problem with this attitude is that it skips almost everything that makes interactivity unique as a genre - it bolts game mechanics on to a narrative-based, mostly-visual experience, and as such stands little to no chance of innovating in those mechanics, or even ensuring that those mechanics are tailored to the overall experience of the game.

A more sensible approach, and one I imagine plenty designers use, is to come up with a new gameplay mechanic and build a gameplay experience to surround it. This is an interesting way of working, but I have to question its ability to truly capture the potential of our interactive digital medium as a whole. It could be that a game built around one simple mechanic becomes very gimmicky. This is a very old-fashioned way of working. Board games are often built around a single gameplay mechanic, and to produce a game in a similar manner would seem to imply that what we are striving for is little more than a fancy, glitzy board game.

The school of design I would like to experiment with would be that of beginning with an overall "feeling" I wish the player to have from their experience and finding ways to leverage that experience onto the player using gameplay mechanics. I do fear that this could lead to too much time spent "borrowing" existing gameplay mechanics, but I feel that this is the system that would unlock the most of gaming's true potential, and achieve more ludo-narrative resonance (a subject which I really must write more on in the future).

Looking at existing games in this context, it is interesting to see how they stack up.

The Grand Theft Auto series seems to mostly have been based on giving the player an experience of complete, unadulterated freedom. Much like sitting a small child on a large play mat marked like a city (such as the one I had as a small child) and giving them toy cars to play with (as my parents did), the first thing players did was to begin moving the cars at high speed, smashing them into one another, and tearing up the city in a most unrealistic manner (as I did, complete with brrrrmmm noises - both when I was a small child with the play mat, and as a young adult playing GTA for the first time). This, I feel, is why people are often so torn on the subject of GTA IV - the game aimed to leverage the same mechanics to tell a slow, structured tale, which felt at odds with the experience those mechanics were tailored to deliver.

The term "survival horror" would imply that Resident Evil 4 was attempting to create a sense of tension and panic within the gamer, and the gameplay mechanics seem to support this - an awkward, vision-restricting camera might seem like an odd choice, but it kept me wondering about what was just out of my view. Restrictive ammunition in a game so heavy on its combat mechanic might seem like a bad choice, but it made me think carefully about every shot I took. What I am curious about, however, is why "survival horror" games have a combat mechanic at all. That seems at odds with the experience - if the experience is intended to be one of creeping fear, why let the player fight back at all? Surely conquering an enemy quels fear?

I believe that, by starting a game design from the more esoteric angle of the "feel" of a player's experience, we can achieve far more in gameplay than we could by making cool stuff happen on screen. Of course, I appreciate that we work in a competitive industry that is very much about shifting units from store shelves - and you can't always encapsulate a player experience on the back of a game box. I'm also aware that we have to always be sure to keep the player experience vague, and design from an overall "feel" perspective rather than direct the player's actions and behaviour. After all:

"[Games] are at their best when they say something about the player, not the designer." - Will Spector

But if handled properly, a game design beginning from the overall "feel" of a player experience could offer a chance to innovate and adapt gameplay mechanics to our needs, and create a deeper and more meaningful experience for players.

On Jenova Chen's "Flow In Games"

I was recently directed to the work of Jenova Chen - a work I had heard of numerous times, but somehow managed to skirt around until now.

http:///www.jenovachen.com/flowingames/

While the body of work discusses the apllicability of a dynamic difficulty system - and does it very well, I might add - there is one small passage that I took some umbridge to:

"Unfortunately, like fingerprints, different people have different skills and Flow Zones. A well-designed game might keep normal players in Flow, but will not be as effective for hardcore or novice players. ... To expand a game's Flow Zone coverage, the design needs to offer a wide variety of gameplay experiences"

Before I explain my issues, I'd like to say that if there was research done on the subject which I have somehow missed, I apologize. I'd also like to add here that I found Chen's work to be brilliant and inspirational - I tend to sound very harsh when criticizing people's work, and I don't want to give the appearance that I have anything other than the utmost respect for Chen. If it had not been for his work, I would not have had the thoughts laid out before you - and I lay them out for the sake of promoting discussion on game design and advancing our collective understanding of it.

That being said, I don't think that different players need necessarily have a different Flow zone, or that the game must adjust to cater for them. This is a simple case of logic - the only way in which a player can be classified as "Hardcore" or "Novice" is in their experience of a particular type of game. Surely if a game is unique enough not to be an expansion of an existing game, players will not be able to so readily transfer their skills?

Far Cry 2 - so often my go-to game for design examples these days - implemented a number of new and interesting elements that create a rather unique experience. Fire propogation had been done before (Alone In The Dark), as had convincing AI (too many games to mention) and weapon jamming (an example escapes me for the time being). Yet putting them together created a unique experience - what Clint Hocking referred to as a "series of systematic failure". This was intended to deliberately kick the player out of the compose/execute cycle, and keep them constantly thinking and reevaluating their actions.

This created game-specific thinking. The player's success or failure didn't depend on their experiences in previous games, or (so heavily) on their abilities to weild a controller. The most prevalent issue in their success or failure was their understanding of the game's mechanics, and how they reacted to this.

Interestingly, by offering a variety of different ways in which the player can approach any situation, and by using a large number of variables in the gameplay mechanics, the game really does offer an abstract form of difficulty adjustment - players are free to play the game as stealthily or as recklessly as they like - but neither is "easier" or "harder". The player has the many choices Chen describes, but I don't believe that they will appreciate those choices based on prior gaming experience (or lack thereof).

Where Chen, later in his report, says that a system which assesses the player's progress and adjusts the game to suit would be marred by players who might get lost in other activities within the game world (such as performing suicidal stunts in GTA, or endlessly jumping around in a 3D Mario game), I would have to ask the question of whether or not this should be something that we accept as part of a game. Yes, it might be fun, and no, a player should not be restricted from seeking out a fun experience that they see within a game, but if there is something fun to do in a game, should it not be integrated into the central gaming mechanic? If it clashes with this, has the game not failed the player? Is this not a prime example of the game's core mechanic failing to capture the attention of the player? Has the player not broken out from the game's "Flow" mechanic, and then created their own (thus proving that ours was not good enough)?

Chen's point, of course, still stands - it would make the game worse if taking a moment to perform a breathtaking, fun, but ultimately suicidal leap in GTA resulted in making the game easier, but I felt it needed to be addressed that such things should not be accepted as a standard in design. In the case of GTA it goes to show a major failing in the GTA series - making us care about the death of our central character in a character-driven story-based game.