The Beautiful Road: A Writer’s Guide to Putting Gameplay First

Notes from a CGVW talk by Dave Kosak, a Blizzard quest designer, at UC Irvine on February 22nd 2012. Original talk called "The Beautiful Road: A Writer’s Guide to Putting Gameplay First" delivered at GDC Online 2011.
TLDR: When gameplay comes first, story-telling must make it beautiful, not suffocate it. There are different ways than text to convey story and characters.

The problem

Games can be story-driven (RPG or interactive fiction), gameplay-driven (Blizzard's "gameplay first"), technology-driven (early games on Kinect, or to show off a 3D engine like Crysis), or money-driven (Zynga). How can stories be included in gameplay-driven games?

Looking at other media, telling a story requires different amounts of time: books take 10 hours, movies 2 hours, sitcom episodes 20 min. Books are walls of text, movies have long scripts, and sitcon episodes have at most 3-page scripts.
In MMOs, it's hard to display walls of text: there's a limited amount of screen and UI real-estate, and players have a limited amount of attention. Players can pay attention to the story most in calm solo exploration, slightly less in group quests, even less in dungeon raids, and nearly not at all in intense PvP.

In Diablo, the core gameplay activity is kill -> loot -> sell -> repeat. Content designers should not obstruct the core activity, e.g. with cutscenes during game action. Instead, content designers should enhance the core gameplay activity. If gameplay is a road, content should be beautiful flowers on the side of the road.

Brevity is key. Example: the Red Dead Redemption mission called free the captured sheriff. When the player sees this line popping on the screen, and the minimap showing markers for sheriff, outlaws, and nearby weapons, she figures out herself what to do first: she could go save the sheriff, kill outlaws, or look for a powerful weapon. Moreover, the quest becomes an answer to the situation presented to the player: why has the sheriff been captured? Which kind of person is the sheriff?

Telling a story without a wall of text is possible through:

• dynamic level design
• dynamic environment aesthetics (changing to reflect quest progression/completion)
• events triggered when player arrives
• hints in NPC or enemy dialogues

Characters

Character geometry: balance between too few traits = cliche, and too many traits = too complicated + boring + harder to understand. Example: Sylvanas Windrunner is persistent, protective, and hard-hearted. When she becomes undead, all her traits are even more accentuated. Other example: Han Solo is cocky, scoundrel, and egocentric.

Interactions with other characters and the background of the character let us know, without the need for a wall of text, a character's traits. Ex: Han Solo leaves his friends when they need him, Luke meets him in a shady place, he owes money to Jabba.

Quirks are not traits: quirks are minor and only serve to further individualise a character. You can find a list of traits there.

• 1-dim characters: enemies or minor allies. Ex: Hungry ogre.
• 2-dim, with 1 expected and 1 unexpected = interesting: quest givers and companions. Ex: elf druid who is protective (expected) + violent (unexpected).
• 3-dim: franchise characters such as Arthas = cocky + practical + naive. Only and exactly those 3 traits make him pick Frostmourne. When he turns undead, naive becomes power-hungry.
• 4-dim: Freeman's character diamond. Often leads to contradictions between traits, also called masks, which can either be total pretense (clown pretends he's happy but is actually depressed), partially revealing, or representing a character's aspirations. Used in marketing personas and novels.

How to compel people to a character: Cf Writing screenplays that sell:

• sympathy
• jeopardy (we want Indiana Jones to survive)
• talent/good at what they're doing
• funny
• heroic/noble
• independent/do their own thing/own quirks
• artistic/admires beauty (ex: Sherlock Holmes plays the violin)

Cliches can be used as a shortcut to establish a character. When established, take the cliche, and throw it away: Her eyes were as blue as the sky can become Her eyes sparkled like saphires on black velvet (jewels give a refined connotation) or Her eyes were the same milky blue as my mother's eyes were before I killed her (surprise and suspense!).

Social status shows differences between high-class people (smooth movement, complete sentences, slow speech, direct eye contact) and lower-class people. Body language also works. Cf the movie 300. Changing status generates interesting dramatic situations. Ex: the boss has high status at work, but when he's back home, he's low status obeying his wife.

Fundamentals of Game Design, ch 15: RPG

Inventory can be:

• a grid where player can position items in empty cells, like in Diablo 1 or 2
• one ore more simple list(s) of items, with an eventually limited number of slots, like Pokemon's backpack
• items have weight, and the inventory is limited to a certain weight, like in Baldur's Gate

Functional character attributes = characterization attributes (stats: DEX, STR, INT, ... skills that change unfrequently, a class system pushes players to specialize) + status attributes (XP, different classes can have different amount of XP required per level (e.g. Baldur's Gate), but players should know it when they pick their character).

Instead of having levels giving sudden bonus, we could have no levels and stats would increase directly proportionally to the XP. After all, levels harm immersion. However, levels add achievement goals and let players spend regularly newly-acquired points in skills they choose.

Skills

Spells can cost mana/SP, or they could just disappear from caster's memory until she sleeps (a la Baldur's Gate/DnD). Unpracticed skills could gradually decline in efficiency, while frequently used skills could get "mastery" bonuses (like for WoW's crafting skills). Or the opposite: frequently used skills could eventually wear out of power.

Skills can be learned right away when levelling up, or when a skill point is spent in them, or the skill could be obtained from an NPC ("training" with masters), or from other players/NPC by watching them do the skill (e.g. the creature in Black and White learns spells after they have been performed a few times in front of it).

If a character has 10% chance to unlock a door independently of the previous tries, then the player will try until the lock eventually opens. Then the 10% chance only slows down and annoys the player. Instead, the better at unlocking doors the character is, the faster the door will be opened. If the lock is too complicated for the character's unlocking skills, then the door unlocking progression bar simply does not increase.

Stories and quests

If the overall story is "save the world", then give meaningful reasons why the character would be ready to do side-quests like delivery boy. Good example: helping a hermit to find his lost dog because the collar hides a key to an important door that the player needs to take. Bad example: helping a hermit simply to get XP, or just to help him out by pure generosity (but really, players are not solving NPC problems by pure generosity).

Anyway, stop writing stories about saving the world.

Boss and Climax

In theatre, plays are composed of 1 to 5 act(s). An act can also be used for major sections of other entertainment, such as film, television, variety shows, music hall, and cabaret.. Similarly, traditional platform game levels can be compared to scenes and fighting a boss the end of an act. In Super Mario 64 for instance, when Mario gathers enough stars, he can meet Bowser. Interestingly, "playing" the comedy follows the same rythm and breaks as "playing" a game. To achieve climax at the end of an act in the game, the death of a boss may be eventually followed by a cinematic scene. Actually, the following cinematic scene also helps the game designer launch the player on a new part of the story or recall the final objective and how to achieve it: "You have collected a new artifact, congratulations! Remember that to reach the bad guy, you need 3 more. You can find one here [blinking red dot on the map]".

According to Clive Thomson in a wired.com article, a boss battle is the most mythopoeic part of gaming. Bosses stay in players' minds, and players often compare bosses, share their "favorite boss list" (as this gamespot thread shows) or exchange startegies. Players really like to talk about their game. As a consequence, players really like the boss system: a poll from The Escapist (N=129) shows that to the question "boss battles: yay or nay", 90% of the players answered yes and 10% no. I have previously detailed how boss monsters in a given level of Doom II or Dildo Tank become normal monsters in the following levels as the player has learned how to beat them. As an example of how much bosses can impact players, the Cyberdemon and Spiderdemon, the most impressive and powerful monsters that could be considered as bosses in Doom II, make noise when they move. From a game design perspective, the aim of the noise in Doom II might be to scare but also to warn the player. I think the noise contributes a lot to the "post-traumatic" state of mind the player is left after having played Doom II. As a player promoting the game to his friends writes, Before too long, you may realize that you're actually becoming quite paranoid, or even frightened because this game is very intense. At this point you should probably take a break, because I don't want to get sued if you have a heart attack.. Similarly in Plants versus Zombies the player receives a letter from the evil Dr. Zomboss. While all the letters previously received from the zombies were stained with misspellings, the perfectly-spelled one from Edgar Zomboss (see screenshot below) shines with a very formal register. The player undeniably wonders what is going to change as a zombie that can spell words correctly enters the game.

Shadow of the Colossus (SotC), a very poetic game from 2005 praised for his atmosphere and original design, contains only bosses. As it can be read in the wikipedia entry for SotC, the game is unusual within the action-adventure genre in that there are no towns or dungeons to explore, no characters with which to interact, and no enemies to defeat other than the colossi.. Beating each colossus requires its own strategy, but I will write about that later...
I strongly recommend the SotC OST.

I can hardly imagine a game with no boss. Games rely on a story, and the plot usually contains a conflict between the hero and his/her/its opponent(s). Just before the situation is brought back to normal (ie resolution), the player has to take part in a rising action to finally face the climax which consists of fighting the disruptive element(s). As the events happening to the hero are unusual, the player feels like he/she has to help the hero/heroine. This involvement can be seen at the back of kids' cereals box: the maze-games usually say "Help this guy find the exit" or "How is this girl going to find the solution?". For computer games, some NPC asking for the hero's help such as Toad in Super Mario 64 also make the player feel he/she is needed. Anyway, in the end, when the hero's task is done and everything comes back to normal (ie Falling action), the player can let the hero/heroine in his/her world and stop playing. But how can the plot of the game end if the player has no final disruptive cause to address? Killing the "bad guy that controls everything evil" seems an obvious solution, but multiple-endings games like Arcanum allow the player to choose his/her own solution. As a gamefaqs.com author writes, you can even skip the last boss fight, if your have maxed Intelligence and Persuasion. You can engage in a philosophical debate with the boss, and convince him that his plan is morally wrong. While the game provides the plot, the player should be the only one to decide how to solve it.

[Literature] Death matters: understanding gameworld experiences

by Klastrup in 2006, located on ACM portal

Motivation and methodology

To fully understand [virtual] worlds in their complexity, we need to study the combination of a navigational fictional setting, a given world system and its design, the possibilities of performance and interaction within it, and the social interaction in and about the world, which forms the player's experience of a particular world. The motivation of the author is to understand the many factors that help create a sustainable experience of "worldness" in order to improve online games in general. Even though the author acknoledges that within the humanities, no tested methodologies yet exist for the study of particular gameworld features, she argues that virtual death, under certain circumstances, is not just a question of game mechanics, but is a pivotal element in the social and visual design of the worlds. Klastrup also notices that designers prefer to follow genre conventions rather than break the rules and "innovate" death. Therefore, she suggests designers should consider different ways to implement death.

Game design perspective

Player versus designer: According to the author, how death should be implemented from a game design point of view is an important matter. She gives several quotes that players have left on her survey website (the website used to be death-stories.org but seems currently down) and also quotes from designers such as Richard Bartle. Bartle argues in his book Designing Virtual Worlds that some tedious aspects of the real world that players do not want to experience act, unfortunately, to set up [...] enjoyable aspects that they do want to experience.

How to stage death: Klastrup explains that in virtual worlds, death is everywhere: my avatar dies, other players' avatars die, death happens to everybody. Death is made permanent by the players' corpses which serve the purpose of conveying the concept and existence of mortality. However, by shortly placing avatars "outside" the game itself with no possibility for powerful action within the world, players are reminded that they should be wary of death.

Grinding to become a hero: virtual heroes can either be cast as "winners" who, through a combination of strength and skills are able to slay dangerous mobs or as "group servants" who are willing to offer their lives in order to save the group. A player wrote Every time I died, I would repeat "doesnt matter guy, keep it up.". Klastrup concludes that mastering when and how to die will make one a better gamer and death help define what and who [players'] characters will become.