Culture Clash

(June 2004)

Reality Panic

Adapting to increased determination

2004 stands to be a watershed period in the evolution of determinist gaming. For years, games have been bound by constraints as accepted in the game world as gravity is in the real one. You cannot, for example, solve a game challenge in a way not expressly identified to the game itself as a solution. You cannot knock stationary objects over. Points of entrance and egress are usually limited to doors. These and other rules have become so much a part of the game experience that most long-time players accept them without question and make no attempt to circumvent them, because they assume that such an attempt would be pointless. But suddenly the rules are changing.

Until now, game-changing has been an evolutionary process. But the arrival of new technologies, design techniques, and levels of interactivity - physics, emergence, nonlinearity, advanced AI, etc. - are for the first time coming at such a rate that gamers can't assimilate one new opportunity before another appears. It's especially challenging for veteran gamers who have been playing since the days when these rules were even more rigid, and when they changed, they changed slowly. Pre-DOOM barrels didn't explode when shot, but gamers soon learned to use the new tool to their advantage. The same goes for any number of past emergent or technical advances in the way players could approach game challenges. But the ability to make barrels explode is pretty simple stuff compared to, say, the emergent (i.e., unscripted and improvised) ability set a fire on one side of a building, drawing bucket-wielding AIs away from the other side in order to take advantage of their absence.

These new techniques and technologies are a pure good for the science of game development and for the art of gameplay; they'll just take a while to get used to. Most gamers I know still knock over trash cans and giggle when playing Max Payne 2 because realistic physics are still an unexpected treat. Physics technology is a means to an end - Havok and other tools make increasingly emergent behavior possible: thanks to middleware tech like physics, we suddenly have the ability to do things in games that have until now been available tools only in real life. The only drawback to these exciting new advances is that for the first time, there is a disconnect between what gamers think they can do and what they really can do.

At a GDC lecture on game narrative, Warren Spector told a story about tester behavior during the Deus Ex: Invisible War QA process. At one point, testers approached a T intersection: to the right were laser tripwires and gun turrets; to the left was a locked door; and directly in front was a (usable) window. He said every single one of them, without fail, went to the right. One can imagine how frustrated developers must occasionally get when they watch gamers consistently employ Neolithic problem solving tactics when modern development tools make much more advanced techniques available.

But developers are on the inside looking in; they know what you can and cannot do within the parameters of their game because they made it. Ironically, inexperienced gamers are likely to adopt emergent or improvisational methods more rapidly than longtime gamers because they're not trammeled by a perception of rules which no longer apply. A newcomer to gaming is much more likely to break the window and crawl out, or to dominate a spider bomb and blast the left-hand door open, because it wouldn't occur to them that they couldn't. Veteran gamers don't realize - yet - that it's now possible to open a locked door even if you don't have the proper key.

Games still can't recreate perfectly realistic problem solving scenarios, and they probably shouldn't try. In the unlikely event that Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time took place in real life, scampering past traps would be only one, and possibly one of the less desirable, approaches that the Prince might take. Why risk getting sliced to ribbons when you can stuff a rock into the gears of a blade trap? Why spend hours rearranging mirrors to open a metal grate when a trip to Ahmed's House of Bolt Cutters would reduce the challenge to seconds?

Yet allowing the player to sidestep the nature of the game experience would be self-defeating. Games are not intended to precisely simulate life. They are more like dreams or movies, so limits should and will always exist. It's just that games of yore lacked the technical prowess to support any solution that was not hard wired, and the culture of gamers grew accustomed to that. Now it must get used to its newfound freedom, and that takes time.

For developers, the first step is to work with ludologists to aggressively examine and implement determinist and experimental gameplay techniques. Gamers will eventually get used to the new "rules" of what they can and can't do, but it will take longer this time since the shift is so fundamental and powerful. In the meantime, developers can encourage early adoption by adding clues that express the availability of more advanced problem-solving techniques. Invisible War supported vast new freedoms without defining or exemplifying them. Thus most people played through the game blissfully unaware that they had overlooked creative new approaches to challenges.

There is a natural conservatism inherent in people. Revolution is opposed because of its capacity to render unrecognizable something that was once familiar and loved. But there is also a strong capability for acclimatization in human beings. Developers must not grow discouraged if it takes gamers longer than expected to adapt. Adapt they will, with a little hand holding from the games themselves. Once we become accustomed to the realism revolution, games will draw that much closer to the final goal of purely machined reality, handcrafted to suit the will of a human creator.