Category Archives: Video games

Meaningful Narrative Decisions in MMOs

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So I’ve been playing the Web Game Echo Bazaar a lot lately and this sparked some thoughts about narrative design & story in MMO Web Games and common game design standards.

First off let’s talk about classic Role-Playing Games for a minute here. The key thing in many tabletop RPGs is the story; they’re all about telling a story together. They’re at their best, when the individual player has to take meaningful choices that shape the ongoing story. What makes these decisions so strong is that they are irreversible. Whatever you chose you have to live with, which will make you think more about how you play and act.

This is something that’s usually lost in video games. With the (expected) ability to save and load previous states of the game, a story decision loses much of it’s weight. You can decide one way, see the consequences, then load and chose the other options. This somewhat “cheapens” the decision because it makes it possible to evade the results of your actions. Games can somewhat work around that by delaying the consequences of an action. That way, by the time you hit the consequences you’re not as likely to go load a very old save game.

However the persistent and shared worlds of MMOs can help here. Actually it’s both a boon and a curse when it comes to narration. A boon since load/save features don’t really work with persistent worlds (and aren’t expected) MMOs have the potential to have meaningful narrative decisions. It’s not quite that easy though. The curse of the persistent world is that with so many players sharing a space it is difficult to create a story that feels unique and that can have any impact on the world, since it shouldn’t inconvenience the other players and their story.

That’s where Web Games (and Echo Bazaar for that matter) come in though. Since these don’t represent a shared “physical” virtual space, the stories can feel a lot more intimate.

Echo Bazaar does quite a good job at this, presenting you with a wealth of narrative bits that you can choose to create what seems to be your own story. For example there are often options where you have multiple “tasks” leading up to one final decision.

Here the decision feels like it has much more narrative weight, since you can’t just go ahead and do it differently. Well at least that was what I thought when I first took one of these decisions. Unfortunately though this is greatly weakened by the fact that these composite tasks (multiple jobs leading to one decision) can be replayed for a while, allowing you to do the same thing over again.

So to put things in a nutshell: MMOs have the potential to present really meaningful narrative decisions to the player since decisions can be final.

Agree? Disagree? Debate!

Browsergames Forum Talk (+ more GDC)

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The Browsergames Forum in Frankfurt, Germany will be in a few weeks (on November 5th adn 6th to be precise) and I’ll be there with a short talk on the topic of monetization. I’ll be speaking with my MMO colleague Volker Boenigk and the title of our talk is “Qualities of Virtual Goods”. It’ll run for about 25 minutes and you will be able to catch us on Saturday, the 6th November at 10:30. I’ll use the opportunity to take one of the segments of my planned GDC 2011 talk and present it to an audience. To give you an idea of what we’ll be talking about, take a look at the abstract I’ve sent in to the conference organizers.

This talk will present the audience with a system of attributes that most Virtual Goods possess. The chosen properties are primarily responsible for the users’ perceived value of an item and can directly be affected by the game design and visuals. Knowing about this system and the attributes is the first step in systematically improving the value of your items and overall repository of premium services.

By examining how this system applies to our daily business at Gameforge we will give some practical advice on real world application. To top off the talk, we will be using the developed properties as a foundation for some tricks and methods to improve the monetization of your own free-to-play game.

And having mentioned the Game Developers Conference talk above here’s a small update on that topic: Unfortunately my submission for the Main Conference was declined (*sad face*). However I’ve resubmit my proposal for the Social & Online Games Summit and I’m hoping that there’ll be some room for me in there. (*happy face*) Wish me luck.

GDC Talk Submission

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I’ve just submitted my proposal for a lecture at 2011’s GDC in San Francisco. In line with my day-to-day work of consulting external studios, the talk will focus on how to monetize free-to-play games.

It’s titled “Big Bucks for Bits and Bytes“. Let’s hope they’ll green light it. I’d be thrilled to share my experiences and ideas with other game designers.

Gambling and Strategy

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I’ve been thinking a lot about strategy games lately, partially for work and partially for private stuff. And while thinking (and talking and listening) I’ve come to a conclusion that a big part of strategic or tactical decisions is a sort of “calculated gamble”. I just quickly wanted to put this out there and see if I can get a discussion and some other viewpoints.

What I mean when I say gamble is that you start out with some sort of finite resource, be it military units, goods, space or money. Then you’re presented with an option: You can risk some of your resources and attempt something that would gain you even more resources. Say you could attack your neighbor to raid his cities, risking your units to increase your resources. This risk is essential. If there’s no risk involved, no chance of losing something, then the decision becomes a no-brainer. Clearly you will take the riskless option to improve your situation, I mean who wouldn’t?

So about that risk… where does it come from? Well it’s simply there because the outcome of your decision is not known beforehand. Propably because you most do not possess perfect information about the situation. Maybe you don’t know how strong your target’s defenses are or if he’s got friends protecting him. Even if you do know all there is you might still not surely know the outcome since there’s a random element involved. So to get more information and to be better at gauging the risk you could try to spy out their units – or you could simply build the biggest army possible, going in blind in the hopes that you’ll just steamroll over your opponent.

So in essence strategy is: you are presented with a certain risk/reward option. You’ll first try to understand the risk, then if neccessary try to minimize it before striking. However in the end there should still be a certain sliver of insecurity before you make the gamble.

Vancouver Game Design Expo 2010

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A guest post from Olaf Schroth on the Vancouver Game Design Expo:

On April 10 and 11 2010 the fourth annual Game Design Expo 2010 took place in Vancouver. The event was hosted by the Vancouver Film School (VFS) which has a strong course program in gaming and features speakers including Armando Troisi, Lead Cinematic Designer on BioWare’s runaway hit Mass Effect 2, who discussed the game’s approach to interactive narrative, and United Front Games’ William Ho, who explored user-generated content through the lens of the highly-anticipated PS3 title ModNation Racer.

Other speakers included creative movers from the legendary California-based developer Obsidian Entertainment (Alpha Protocol), Blue Castle Games (Dead Rising 2), Propaganda Games (Tron: Evolution), and Big Sandwich Games (Sky Pirates of Neo Terra). The day ended with an industry panel hosted by Electric Playground’s Victor Lucas called “The Future of Gaming.” For this blog, I would like to report about two of the presentations, first about Armando Troisi and in a second post, about a fascinating approach to designing architectural spaces for Dead Rising 2.

Troisi: Bioware Roleplaying Games (RPG) – It`s all about choice
According to Troisi, the four Bioware Design Pillars are Story, Exploration, Progression and Game Play and through the course of every game, the player will cycle through these four elements multiple times. Thus, story always comes first for Bioware and Troisi focused on the Bioware way of storytelling.

The “how of interactive narrative”: It is all about choice and how game designers add interactivity into narrative space. That is what makes games as a medium different from movies. In the following, Troisi picked three key design elements that Bioware developed to tell a modern roleplaying game story.

Mass Effect 1 and 2 are “objective” rather than classic “subjective” RPGs
Troisi and his team broke with some holy RPG rules – they replaced the “Subjective”, i.e. the player IS the avatar, through the “Objective”. You are not the avatar anymore, but Sheppard has his own motivation and the player becomes a voyeur watching Sheppard acting on his own. I only remember a Pen&Paper Round where I as a GM started playing somebody`s character, telling how he reacts and that player got really upset. However, Troisi still kept “The Agreement” in order not to completely upset players.

The agreement means, the player should still have the choices he wants and Sheppard`s actions should be predictable with regard to the players’ choice. Troisi showed a scene that didn`t make it in the final version, where the player decided that Sheppard should bargain with a trader and instead, he completely screwed him. Which was funny but not part of the player agreement.

The Bioware “Dialogue Wheel” is an element of interface design to control an “objective” character
An important design element of the GUI is the “Dialogue Wheel” which was so successful that Bioware used it in (the subjective) Dragon Age as well. The player has always the same six choices in the same location so that he intuitively knows which reaction Sheppard will take although the player cannot choose Sheppard`s exact words like in a classic subjective RPG.


Continuing the Mass Effect story across three games: It`s the little differences
An important requirement for ME2 was that it was designed to continue the players` decisions from ME1. 100 pieces of information were taken over, impacting 700 plot hooks (!) in ME2 and many of them were really small and simple. And the best – your story will continue in ME3!

For example, Troisi showed how some ads are changing depending on whether you rescued the Citadel council in ME1 or not. According to Troisi, they put a lot of effort into such small things that maybe 2% of all players will ever see – but these few feel really rewarded. Interestingly, later presenters opposed the Bioware approach and emphasized that they want all players to see everything.

Quick-time events as a way to give the player a choice without interrupting the story
Finally, Troisi justified the so-called “Quick-Time Events” or “interrupts” (reminds me of MtG) they invented for ME2 as an instrument to give the player a choice without disrupting an intense scene. Interestingly, ME2 never gives you both paragon and renegade choices, because “doing nothing” is always an alternative choice as well.

User tests had shown that players were already overstrained with three choices under this time pressure. Like the verbal paraphrase, the quicktime scenes include visual paraphrases, e.g. Sheppard loosening his knuckles in combination with a renegade option means he will get very physical soon…

See part 2 of my Game Design Expo post for a look into the spatial architecture (not information architecture) of Dead Rising 2. Where Fosters and Co. could learn from the Undead…

Related links

Miegakure

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Miegakure is a four-dimensional puzzle platformer. And when I say four dimensional, I don’t mean to use the 4th to refer to time or something equally lame. No, another actual spacial dimension. As far as I can tell the in-development game is played in three dimensions and at the push of a button one of the dimensions can be exchanged with another one. An intriguing concept and worth to watch for the mindbending spaces it is bound to create.

I won’t pretend to know how this is supposed to work but it certainly is interesting. Here’s a video that might help