I recently managed to re-acquire the Xbox 360, giving me the opportunity to try out Fable 2 between classwork.
Thus far I have yet to perceive any narrative choice systems at play whatsoever--and I don't mean that in the sense that they're subtle, I mean that in the sense that I feel like no matter what I do it won't make a difference to either me or the world around me. I feel detached and uninvolved with this game and its story even though it practically waves the element of player-choice in my face--and I'm even aware of a major decision-arc having passed by.
The first part of the game involves the player as a homeless orphan living in the gutter with his sister. It's got a Dickensian aesthetic. To make a long story short you have to do five quick jobs to earn a few pieces of gold, and each one has a good or evil equivalent. Depending on whether you did the good or evil version most of the time, after a ten-year flash-forward you'll re-visit the town and find that it's either flourished or languished, with your five mundane errands apparently having meant all the difference. It's laughably implausible and patronizing. The choices have little to no context, and there's very clear "right" answers to each of them.
Policeman: "Hey kid. Find me these five missing warrants and I'll give you a reward."
Me: "Okay!"
Bad Guy: "Hey kid! Give me those warrants or I'll make you regret it!"
Me: "Convincing offer, but I've got a guy offering me gold over here."
Bad Guy: "I'll give you gold too!"
Me: "Aren't you the guy who keeps trying to rape my older (still underaged) sister?"
Bad Guy: "Yeah, but what of that?"
Me: *is already handing the policeman the warrants*
This is roughly the most interesting and most heavily weighted choice of the bunch summed up, and it's clear to see why it's so weak. The rewards are equivocal, so I can't evaluate it from a practical standpoint, and from a narrative standpoint one of the characters is bland and has no context and the other has an extremely negative context. Even if I don't care much for my sister, he threatened to hurt me, so I'd rather the policeman arrested him. The only reason I'd ever want to deal with him (I don't even KNOW his name, he's so forgettable) is if I were just curious about what happens if I give him the warrants instead.
Even so, can't the policeman get new warrants anyway? It seems to me the court's approval of these criminals' arrest is a bit more important than the piece of paperwork. How is it that my failure to peel these flat, pressed pieces of wood pulp from the gutter and hand them to him results in the entire city becoming a crime-ridden heap?
Many of these choices fail to carry weight due to logical holes and presentational problems like these. The actions themselves, in this instance, anyway, are so mundane as to be meaningless, and the characters aren't remarkable or interesting in any way. What's more, I'm playing Fable 2--the sequel to the game with the "Hero's Guild." I know that I'm going to essentially be a Dickensian superman as soon as the prologue ends, I know from the back of the box that I'll be fighting 15-foot tall earth troll things, so petty threats aren't a very good deterrent coming out of the average street-thug with one of the generic re-usable street thug models. I also know I'm not going to get to pick what the reward gets used for; I'm specifically raising the 5 gold to get the music box that I have to get for the story to move on; so I'm denied a decision that actually matters to me and completely disinterested in how I get the gold, whether or not I'll ever get more, or where I'll get it from. I'm forming no attachments to either this neighborhood or any of the characters in it because I know that after these five errands I'm not going to be coming back here--the narrative that's evolving will just be cut off at the knees.
Here's my proposed alternative: instead of playing the crook up as a stupid child molester who can't make a deal to save his life, let's play him up as an actually likeable, charming kind of criminal, like Jack Nicholson's character in The Departed. Make him like an uncle to the little street urchins, give him a name that I can remember, and a unique appearance. Make him seem generous even though he's keeping most of his profits to himself. Make him look like a clear threat to the law, a lord of the streets. Have him talk pleasantly with me the first time I meet him as I wander into town instead of talking about how he wants to rape my sister. Make my sister like him, too.
Now, let's meet the policeman, find out about his thing with the warrants for his gang... and maybe witness a murder from the crook. Spare no blood for the little children, you're not sparing it in the rest of this game. The evidence that he's not a good guy has to be really clear after I'm conditioned to like and sympathize with him so that the policeman has a clear argument for why he should be locked up--even if he has no quarrel with me.
Now I've got an interesting choice. Give the warrants to the policeman and put a man who I like behind bars, or give them to the crook and let him roam free to continue spreading corruption around town. Positive versus Positive instead of Positive versus Negative, and now there's a discernible consequence that will have personal, far-reaching consequences on my character's world. When that crook gets out of jail ten years later to reclaim his gang, he'll remember me--but the town will be in a better place, maybe even not be a slum anymore. Or, when he becomes king of this town, he'll remember me too--but the town will be in worse shape than it was before. I don't need to re-play the game to understand it or appreciate the magnitude of those changes--and that's good. A discernible choice that carries clear magnitude is a lot better than a series of cryptic, mundane choices. Working in the context of characters I know I'll be seeing more of carries a lot more magnitude than ones I know I won't see or interact with ever again.
I'll write more on what I think of Fable 2 later. Next time we tackle mission structure and exploration.
Showing posts with label game. Show all posts
Showing posts with label game. Show all posts
Sunday, October 10, 2010
Monday, July 12, 2010
Ludography Analysis: Shadow the Hedgehog
My professor probably raised an eyebrow seeing this game in my ludography. Shadow the Hedgehog is well-recognized as a mediocre if not outright terrible game, showcasing a lousy camera, lousy level design, lousy storytelling, and lousy tacked-on gun and vehicle mechanics. Even among Sonic fans it's regarded as where the series jumped the shark, suffice it to say that its attempt at being a "darker and edgier" look at the Sonic franchise and its ham-handed efforts to explore its lead character's ambiguous morality failed to impress anyone. However, it still bears some examining as Shadow is nothing if not a remarkable example of every possible pitfall in developing a branching story progression.
In Shadow, the chestular character (Shadow) has just recovered from the events of Sonic Heroes, where he was inexplicably found in a capsule after what was supposed to have been a certain demise in Sonic Adventure 2. His memory of all those events and his entire past completely erased, he sets out to find out who and what he is. Just as he does so, aliens drop in from out of nowhere and their leader, Black Doom, claims to know everything about him, saying he'll reveal everything about Shadow's past if he helps him find the chaos emeralds.
The game progresses through stages in more or less the traditional Sonic fashion; every level is a run through an obstacle course to the finish line as well as a war zone, with Black Doom's alien hordes battling humans and Shadow caught in between trying to decide who to support. The player is presented with three goals--"hero," "dark," and "neutral," each of which results in completing the stage. Neutral can be described as simply reaching the end of the stage while "hero" and "dark" concern themselves with more specific challenges, like killing all aliens, killing all humans, collecting specific objects, et cetera. All three are mutually exclusive.
Depending on which of these goals players choose to complete the next stage they play will be different, with the player moving along a grid corresponding to how good or how evil they decide to play; the central path is totally neutral, the lower path is totally good, and the upper path is completely evil. Whatever path Shadow takes, he's eventually forced to make a choice at the final stage, skewing him towards a "good" or "evil" version of one of the game's many end bosses and one of multiple different possible endings to his story. The game very literally branches in one direction or another at every stage, presenting the most literal and most visible interpretation of a "branching narrative" in any game.
Very clear pitfalls are demonstrated with this decision-making paradigm. The architecture forces the developers to contrive some "good" or "evil" equivalent goal in every level but the ones farthest to either side. Additionally, not every progression makes any kind of narrative sense, with disjointed locations tied together by the weak premise that Shadow just magically teleports between them and plot elements frequently raised and forgotten along any particular route. Several paths, for example, simply drop the premise of Black Doom's invasion completely in favor of a storyline that adopts series mainstay Dr. Robotnik as the main villain, changing premise mid-game. Depending on what the player decides to do Shadow may meander down this alternate plot for a while only to return to the Black Doom storyline inexplicably at the very last stage with no reasonable explanation. A few paths have some logical connection, but many demonstrate glaringly obvious inconsistencies, like Shadow suddenly finding himself in space after spending the entire rest of the game on Earth. These disjoints in staging and plot are often accompanied by considerable disjoints in characterization as well, with Shadow following a plotline where he believes himself to be a robot clone of himself and then suddenly changing his mind about it as if he'd never undergone any of that character development at all.
These disjoints and inconsistencies are characteristic of the worst-case scenario of the branching narrative scheme. Yes, it does branch and react to the player's decisions, it does present a significantly different level flow based on those choices--IE, there's significant consequences--but it also produces a largely incoherent story fraught with irrelevant and contrived episodes and inconsistent characterization. Furthermore the actual player choice element is highly repetitive and extremely shallow, effectively boiling the decision-making down to picking a different door at the end of each level.
Because of the inconsistency of the game's episodes the sense of causality is also very shallow, with players being unable to reasonably predict what the consequences for choosing the "good" or "evil" path at any given time actually are or what kind of level they'll be led into next. It doesn't give the sense that Shadow is making decisions that affect the course of the game's narrative (IE who's winning and who's losing the aliens vs. humans conflict) so much as the sense that he's literally taking different paths through the same narrative, moving through different sets of events running parallel to one another in different locations, with his presence at those events having no impact on what happens in the story whatsoever until the very end.
This may come as a shock coming out of a post-Dreamcast Sonic game, but it's all a very unsatisfying and downright clumsy choice scheme showcasing very probably every pitfall there is to developing a decision-making paradigm for a game. The polarized values lead to highly inconsistent characterizations and narratives, the over-development of the grid system enforces more possibilities than the developers could account for, and every single stage is forced to contrive goals relating to these alternate paths that very frankly don't always mix so well with the forward momentum of a Sonic game. In fact, in order to compensate for the fact that very often it's impossible to go backwards and search for items the player may have missed, the developers had to incorporate a teleporter at the end of each stage that would loop players back to the beginning. If this isn't an effective illustration of how morality is definitely not a one-size-fits-all-games decision-making paradigm, it's at least an effective illustration of exactly how not to build one. In the future we'll definitely see echoes of some of the problems highlighted here, most particularly character inconsistencies, overly consistent, un-engaging choices, and lack of foreseeable causality, but not to the degree where we see all of these in the same game.
In Shadow, the chestular character (Shadow) has just recovered from the events of Sonic Heroes, where he was inexplicably found in a capsule after what was supposed to have been a certain demise in Sonic Adventure 2. His memory of all those events and his entire past completely erased, he sets out to find out who and what he is. Just as he does so, aliens drop in from out of nowhere and their leader, Black Doom, claims to know everything about him, saying he'll reveal everything about Shadow's past if he helps him find the chaos emeralds.
The game progresses through stages in more or less the traditional Sonic fashion; every level is a run through an obstacle course to the finish line as well as a war zone, with Black Doom's alien hordes battling humans and Shadow caught in between trying to decide who to support. The player is presented with three goals--"hero," "dark," and "neutral," each of which results in completing the stage. Neutral can be described as simply reaching the end of the stage while "hero" and "dark" concern themselves with more specific challenges, like killing all aliens, killing all humans, collecting specific objects, et cetera. All three are mutually exclusive.
(Above: Level grid from Shadow the Hedgehog)
Depending on which of these goals players choose to complete the next stage they play will be different, with the player moving along a grid corresponding to how good or how evil they decide to play; the central path is totally neutral, the lower path is totally good, and the upper path is completely evil. Whatever path Shadow takes, he's eventually forced to make a choice at the final stage, skewing him towards a "good" or "evil" version of one of the game's many end bosses and one of multiple different possible endings to his story. The game very literally branches in one direction or another at every stage, presenting the most literal and most visible interpretation of a "branching narrative" in any game.
Very clear pitfalls are demonstrated with this decision-making paradigm. The architecture forces the developers to contrive some "good" or "evil" equivalent goal in every level but the ones farthest to either side. Additionally, not every progression makes any kind of narrative sense, with disjointed locations tied together by the weak premise that Shadow just magically teleports between them and plot elements frequently raised and forgotten along any particular route. Several paths, for example, simply drop the premise of Black Doom's invasion completely in favor of a storyline that adopts series mainstay Dr. Robotnik as the main villain, changing premise mid-game. Depending on what the player decides to do Shadow may meander down this alternate plot for a while only to return to the Black Doom storyline inexplicably at the very last stage with no reasonable explanation. A few paths have some logical connection, but many demonstrate glaringly obvious inconsistencies, like Shadow suddenly finding himself in space after spending the entire rest of the game on Earth. These disjoints in staging and plot are often accompanied by considerable disjoints in characterization as well, with Shadow following a plotline where he believes himself to be a robot clone of himself and then suddenly changing his mind about it as if he'd never undergone any of that character development at all.
These disjoints and inconsistencies are characteristic of the worst-case scenario of the branching narrative scheme. Yes, it does branch and react to the player's decisions, it does present a significantly different level flow based on those choices--IE, there's significant consequences--but it also produces a largely incoherent story fraught with irrelevant and contrived episodes and inconsistent characterization. Furthermore the actual player choice element is highly repetitive and extremely shallow, effectively boiling the decision-making down to picking a different door at the end of each level.
Because of the inconsistency of the game's episodes the sense of causality is also very shallow, with players being unable to reasonably predict what the consequences for choosing the "good" or "evil" path at any given time actually are or what kind of level they'll be led into next. It doesn't give the sense that Shadow is making decisions that affect the course of the game's narrative (IE who's winning and who's losing the aliens vs. humans conflict) so much as the sense that he's literally taking different paths through the same narrative, moving through different sets of events running parallel to one another in different locations, with his presence at those events having no impact on what happens in the story whatsoever until the very end.
This may come as a shock coming out of a post-Dreamcast Sonic game, but it's all a very unsatisfying and downright clumsy choice scheme showcasing very probably every pitfall there is to developing a decision-making paradigm for a game. The polarized values lead to highly inconsistent characterizations and narratives, the over-development of the grid system enforces more possibilities than the developers could account for, and every single stage is forced to contrive goals relating to these alternate paths that very frankly don't always mix so well with the forward momentum of a Sonic game. In fact, in order to compensate for the fact that very often it's impossible to go backwards and search for items the player may have missed, the developers had to incorporate a teleporter at the end of each stage that would loop players back to the beginning. If this isn't an effective illustration of how morality is definitely not a one-size-fits-all-games decision-making paradigm, it's at least an effective illustration of exactly how not to build one. In the future we'll definitely see echoes of some of the problems highlighted here, most particularly character inconsistencies, overly consistent, un-engaging choices, and lack of foreseeable causality, but not to the degree where we see all of these in the same game.
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