Fable 2: First Impressions

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.

Rubric, Defined/Refined

In my paper I detailed my rubric, citing four aspects that define a good narrative choice system. Here I'll explore the rubric in greater detail.

Each game starts at 0 points in each of the categories listed below. For every strong or reinforcing element that the narrative choice system showcases, it gains a point. For every bad, broken, or contradictory element, it loses a point. Systems that have negative points are clearly detracting from the games they're a part of, while systems that have positive points are clearly either defining or enhancing the games they're a part of and systems with close to zero points aren't adding or detracting anything and are therefore superfluous with respect to the category at hand. The potential problem with this scale is that there could be a system that performs really well in one aspect under a specific category but fails miserably at all the others; as such the different aspects that gain or detract points must be recorded for careful subjective evaluation.

Narrative Integrity

This refers to a narrative choice system's ability to tell a good story. Factors at play here include:

• Character growth and development.
• Reinforcement of the game's themes/motifs.
• Dramatic tension.
• Narrative Pacing.
• Narrative Consistency.
  

Gameplay Integrity

This refers to a narrative choice system's involvement as a game mechanic. Factors at play here include:

• Balance; whether or not the narrative choice system imposes itself in favor of one play style or another.
• Imposition; the opposite--whether or not the gameplay makes narrative decisions for the player.

Discernability

This refers to a narrative choice system's ability to satisfy psychological elements of the human decision-making process; IE, maintain interest through creating realistic dilemmas and choices. Factors at play here include:

• System's ability to generate consequence and remind players of past choices.
• System's ability to manifest risk using one or more of the following: ambiguous preferences, multiple actors, or limited knowledge.
  
• System's manifestation of identity mechanisms (Experiential Learning, Categorization, Recency, Social Context of Others) to enforce player's identity.
  
• System's use of identity influences (modeling, cues, experience) to give players tools to piece together their identity.
  

Personalization

This refers to the player's satisfaction in the narrative choice system's ability to allow them to personalize their experience; how unique a given playthrough is from the player's perspective, and how much they feel like their involvement made a difference. Factors at play here include:

• Impact of decisions on player's perception of either their own character, the game's themes, or the narrative as a whole.
• Player's ability to define and maintain one or more identities for themselves within the game world.
• Player's ability to define relationships with other characters within the game world.
  

Supporting Factors

This refers to additional support from outside sources such as reviews, articles, and metascore, which don't necessarily refer to a single one of the above categories but nevertheless provide some grounding. Factors that will be consistently referenced here include:

• Metascore; 70+ = 1 point, 80+ = 2 points, 90+ = 3 points.
  
• Review feedback from 4 major reviews (IGN, Gamespot, GameInformer, Edge) and 4 minor reviews (The Escapist, Kotaku, GameCritics, Destructoid). These reviews will be evaluated for content rather than score, the specific aim being to identify consistencies in the reviewers' remarks on the narrative choice element specifically.
  

In Defense of Choice

One of the things it seems I need to establish for my cynical professor is why choice is even a relevant element of storytelling in games. To paraphrase his point of view: choice in narrative doesn't really matter because most of the time people play through a game once and have no frame of reference for what it would be like had they made all the other choices anyway. From their perspective, it's still a linear narrative with a beginning, middle, and end.

Frankly I've struggled with trying to understand this myself, being that there have been plenty of totally linear games and narratives that I've enjoyed immensely. In fact, I tend away from a lot of games that involve branching narratives, not because I don't see the appeal but because it tends to deny consistency in character development.. or having character development at all. I like Commander Shepard of Mass Effect fame as much as the next guy, but at the same time she feels like a hollow vessel for the player rather than a real protagonist. 95% of her dialogue is questions. "What're you doing here?" "What can you tell me about your family?" "What can you tell me about the Geth?" "Any idea where they might be now?" "How many licks does it take to get to the center of one of those things, anyway?" There's clearly meant to be some significance to this character with the game centering on her to the point that the game's antagonists all obsess over the threat she poses, but at the same time because the developers don't want to take any control over her actions and even her thoughts away from the player she undergoes absolutely no growth and exhibits almost no personality traits outside what attitude the player chooses for her at any given time. This seems contradictory, but in an odd way the player-controlled character in this instance is actually more of an automaton than the non-player characters. This makes it really difficult for me to relate to her, see her alleged significance, or even understand what themes the game is supposed to be centering her story on. In theory the player really doesn't care about this, simply perceiving Shepard to be themselves and filling in all the blanks left by the script, but the storytelling methods of Mass Effect are so explicit there's almost no room for imagination to speak of.

Class 6 Log - Amazon Sucks

Spent the class going over other students' theses. Not exactly any remarkable new revelations about my own thesis yet, though looking at other students' bibliographies does give me at least one or two new sources I can look up.

Amazon's taking their sweet time sending me the texts I ordered. This could be quite bothersome depending on how much research I need to present next week. It is worth mentioning that most of the texts I've seen so far (apart from the ones I've ordered) cover decision-making under pressure, suggesting that those are the most important decisions that we perceive. I can say this: for the most part, no game I've played has had the element of pressure or consequence added to its decisions, they've been mainly cosmetic character interpretation-type decisions. The question here in designing this paradigm will be how to develop a causality without making this an un-doable project.

Brainstorming: thesis topics

I've taken the time to think on potential topics I can cover, and mostly it came down to a fistful of subjects that I've continually criticized throughout my study of game design and observation of the digital gaming industry and its recent trends. In general I think there's lots of room for improvement on all fronts--more realistic development expectations, better, more natural scriptwriting, et cetera--but these three things are probably the most thought-out and tangible and probably the most reasonable projects for theses, and definitely the ones I've been most able to connect to concepts outside of gaming. What follows is a brief overview of those topics and my rationale and possible plans for each of them.

1. Player Choice and Branching Narrative
   There's been a big push lately for non-linearity in games in one fashion or another, either in the form of open-world or "sandbox" games or else in the form of branching narratives that give players limited degrees of choice based on some kind of decision-making rationale. As I see it, though, these decision tree systems have been defined by a short list of pioneering titles, severely limited in the subject matter they explore--usual by some kind of morality-based system. Literally, when I see game developers talk about putting "choice" in their narrative, they almost always say "moral choice," as if that's the only rationale for making choice that exists.
   
   That seems like an awfully generalized blanket statement, but when you think about recent releases you start to see this is pretty much the case. Mass Effect, inFamous, Bioshock, Fable, and most other games that tout choice as a way of paving the way through the narrative focus on some kind of morality system, which I think is a real waste, first because I don't think that's how people really make choices, and second because morality is incredibly restricting, instantly dominating all the themes of whatever story it becomes a part of.
   
   What I see here is a need to identify other rationales and techniques for developing decision-making paradigms in games. What do people really think about when they make a major choice? Threat assessment? Resource management? Long-term versus short-term benefit? More to the point, what kind of decision-making paradigm would be something that the storytellers could use as a tool as opposed to something that forces the storytellers to work around it? How could we use decisions to create more engaging games as opposed to simply creating the illusion of control? These are the questions that this thesis would seek to answer.
   
   The research: Psychological texts on judgment and decision-making and general cognitive psychology.
   
   The project: Most likely a game of some sort showcasing the new decision-making paradigm. Engines I could work with: The Oblivion toolset, the Neverwinter Nights toolset, RPGMaker, Adventure Game Studio. All very limited, very dated pieces of technology that aren't liable to impress prospective employers, but at the very least they could get the point across...
   
   
2. Alternative Storytelling Genres and Game Mechanics
   The game industry has come under a lot of criticism for applying itself to a very narrow set of storytelling genres, usually falling under the header of one action-adventure formula or another. Gameplay genres are well-defined (perhaps too well-defined) and very broad, of course, but it's nearly always fighting and action that's being explored, and less often do we see comedies, mysteries, or dramas. Companies like Tale of Tales and Quantic Dream explore the possibilities outside this genre, and certainly we've seen an abundance of interactive adventures, dramas, and mysteries like Phantasmagoria and Ripper, but in a way all these designers are almost flat-out ashamed to be making games. They openly state that game mechanics in the traditional sense would be more of a distraction than something that could drive or enrich the experiences they try to create. They make "interactive films" or "interactive paintings," colored by their envy of other mediums' perceived sense of legitimacy and establishment.
   
   But we've seen games explore alternative genres. We've seen bona fide games explore comedy, mystery, and drama before. Battlestar Galactica: The Board Game is a political drama; Clue and Scotland Yard are mysteries; Kill Doctor Lucky and Munchkin are both comedies; and all of these games, while their presentation does a lot to create their individual senses of flavor, achieve all this entirely through mechanics. That, if nothing else, is solid proof that we can develop games in alternate genres--we already have, just not in the semi-cinematic, explicit storytelling-driven form we've come to associate with digital games, but rather in the procedural, emergent form of board games. All we really need to do is find a way to bridge the gap, then do it.
   
   The research: Story/narrative structure and narrative genre formulas, as well as a long ludography of board games.
   
   The project: Likely a board game, followed by a digital adaptation of the board game's mechanics plus a more explicit story structure. This... could be a pretty hairy, really ambitious project, for as much as it could prove.
   
   
3. The Rhetoric of Game and Level Design
   This is far and away the least most tangible of the three theses I'm considering, but it's also the one that's the most dear to my heart and the dream that made me want to study game development in college in the first place.
   
   In examining other mediums--poetry, literature, film, photography--we can always identify some kind of rhetoric. Poetry has rhetorical devices like synecdoche, anaphora, and alliteration; filmmaking has a number of camera and editing techniques; whatever the case they have some subtle means of using the medium's own substance, be it words on a page or composition of an image, to subtly make its audience resonate with whatever message is trying to be communicated or whatever story is trying to be told.
   
   But what about digital games?
   
   Games certainly have a lot of things that can be manipulated in terms of mechanics, interface design, and level design; but there's no consistent rhetoric or terminology that developers--and maybe more importantly, students--can reference. Certainly I can think of games that do employ their medium meaningfully; Half-Life 2 is nothing if not a masterful manipulation of the player's perception of the story through level design, and I've frequently expressed an admiration for designer Hideki Kamiya (of Okami, Viewtiful Joe, and Devil May Cry fame) and his ability to create games whose very mechanics instantly evoke the unique character and visual style of his works. More often, though, developers tend more towards arbitrary decisions and challenges for challenge's sake instead, the technical element of trying to make even a passable game being more than enough to occupy their time.
   
   The goal of this thesis would be to get a start at developing some rhetorical terminology for game and level design; some kind of taxonomy which we could use to be more purposeful in the way we build our games. I'd try to research existing rhetorical or literary devices and find the game or level design equivalents, then illustrate them through my project. The trouble here: how can I prove a project like that? How can it come off as being more than just "look! I made a level!"?

We'll see what my classmates and my professor have to say about these. Hopefully I'll get some suggestions that'll help me hone in on one of these topics and make it something doable.

Class 1 Log

Our first class was spent in simple introductions and quick overview of possible directions for our theses. Not much to say so far, though it did become clear to me that clarifying the way I state my topic is going to be a big challenge. I have an "everything is relevant" point of view that tends to bring me down tangents when I speak, and I nearly brought us into a debate about moral choice systems while trying to relate about general decision-making.