Quests - Howard 2008

Quests: Design, Theory, and History in Games and Narratives by Jeff Howard, in 2008.

History of quest games

Year	Game	Innovations
1974	DnD	GM as referee, quests taken from Celtic, Norse, and Arthurian mythologies.
1976	Adventure	on computer, first RPG, network play
1983	King's Quest series	cut scenes, music, multiple endings, optional puzzles, and side-quests.
1985	Ultima IV series	virtues, colors, and classes are related
1986	Zelda series	quest status screen shows the player's progress, first action-adventure game.
1999	EQ	proliferating tasks rather than a single main quest
2004	WoW	lore quests, the never-ending war theme is a bleak scenario not particularly conductive to meaningful gameplay: failing a quest is not problematic.

Intro

Campbell's "Hero's Journey" consists of separation, initiation, and return. The individual builds himself, as found in medieval romances. In games, the initiation phase is lengthened and repeated, since it has most action.

A quest is an action that is meaningful to a player. It's also called a "mission" in games with a modern setting.

Ludologically, a quest has goals and consists of searching a functional meaning: a key opens a door, therefore the player should look for a door. A sword kills monsters, therefore the player is expecting to encounter enemies soon. Once meaning is found, the quest is over.

Narratologically, a quest has a story. The story and the lore motivate and immerse the player in the task.

But actually, meaningful quests come from striking a balance between too much action and too much narrative, while keeping in mind the big picture of the game's meaning. Except for XP and loot, why is that quest important to the player? What satisfaction does the player get by doing that quest? Here are some clues:

• Impact on the world: achievement, gaining power, learning about the lore, altering political or moral balance, or changing relationships with NPCs
• Back story: motivation to learn what happened before or what is going to happen after the quest is over.
• Lore: themes and ideas encoded within the world, such as religion, politics, landscape, objects, or challenges. "The world itself is the puzzle", and the player shows his opinions by playing the game.

Symbols should be tied to game mechanics. For example, in Ultima, completing a quest requires understanding the world's allegorical meanings: some colors are associated to a class and a quality (red = warrior = valor). Obtaining a part of a relic should open a door or provide a new power

In the end, the player may quest to make the plot progress, improve his avatar, or to try out fun gameplay. Ideally, a quest should combine the three, but it gets tricky in games where the player is allowed to pursue quests in the order he wants.

Spaces

Both macro and micro levels should guide the player towards the general direction to go to. Both should create a sense of progression and convey a meaning by their layout.

Micro level: balancing exploration and challenge. Tiered spaces such as towers or crypts are easy to navigate: traveling towards the highest or lowest level ensures challenges and rewards. Mazes with a sort of structure also work. There should also be disorientation elements such as traps, secret doors, or dead-ends, as well as obstacles standing between the player and his goal.

Macro level: quest hubs. Hubs are known and relatively safe places such as cities or campgrounds where the player is given quests and has to return to complete them. Hubs are surrounded by several quest locations. WoW has breadcrumb quests to encourage exploration, but no main quest; that makes the world seem disconnected and episodic. See the Morrowind map: the player starts on the periphery of the world, and travels clockwise from hub to hub until Ghostgate at the center of the map for the final encounter.

Dreams within games create initiatory spaces: the avatar can be changed into an animal, a ghost, or an older self, but remains controlled by the player, increasing the sense of immersion in the non-dream game world.

Characters

Cf Propp's dramatis personae at the beginning of theater scripts: characters are not defined by their traits, but by their actions: villain, donor, helper, or hero.

Dialog: keep it short, and let players have choices. yes/no selections are too simple: add a reason to add meaning. Example: NPC says "Take this money as a reward to save my kids". Player should not simply be given "OK", or "accept"/"refuse", but rather "I don't need money to save kids" (which shifts the player's alignment to lawful good) or "You don't have to give me the money - I'm going to kill you myself" (evil, and eventually summons the guards).

One quest per NPC is rare in modern RPGs.

Quest types

Name	Description
fetch	find an object and return it to an NPC
delivery	give an object to an NPC
dungeon crawl	go to certain points of a dungeon - and get loot on the way
escort/protect	usually an NPC, but could be a fellow player too
kill/combat	the most loaded with meaning: killing a peasant is very different from killing a demon. Opponents have to be obstacles to the plot

Objects

Most objects that the player collects are useless (sold to NPCs for money) or functional (healing potion, armor). But certain objects can motivate quests if they are:

• needed but missing,
• loaded with symbols,
• relatively powerful,
• fun to use (eg cast a random skill),
• with a distinct appearance (eg the Tatoos of Planescape Torment)

Sometimes, these objects only are MacGuffins: they are unimportant in themselves but motivate and unfold the plot.

The rod of seven parts: make a story from the whole and powerful artifact, break it apart, and spread the pieces around the world. The story follows naturally, and the players discover the meaning of the quest gradually. It also encourages exploration. Micro-level example: the 3-headed flail from the De'Arnise Hold in Baldur's Gate 2 requires the player to fully investigate the whole castle, and not just go directly to the boss.

There are varieties of ways the player can get an object: looted, forged, stolen, summoned by a sacrifice, or found in a chest at the bottom of a cave. But the way the player gets in possession of an object should give clues about using that object. Examples: a mace loot from a giant should require lots of strength. Frostmourne, given by the Lich King to trick Arthas the paladin, is obviously cursed.

Challenges

Tie the quest presentation to the world map and the log book. The logs of completed quests must give clues about the next quests or where to find them.

Conflicting goals make interesting choices. For example, in Ultima IV, the avatar gains compassion points by not killing 'good' characters, and gain valor points by never backing down from a fight. Interesting choice arises when the player is attacked by a 'good' character. [But what the player chooses (ie the player's opinion) differs from why he was given the choice in the first place (ie the meaning of the game).]

See also: hero's journey.

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.

[Literature] Fundamentals of Game Design, ch 12: Level Design

Level design = determine level's initial conditions, pacing (stressful or calm, genre-dependent) challenges, win/loss conditions, cut scene locations, aesthetics and mood (lighting, color palette, weather, special visual and audio effects, music, ambient audio), through tools.

Level design process

1. Determine level features: events, objects, NPC
2. Plan the gameplay: layout, challenge areas, win/lose conditions. Plan also the art: textures, styles, moods, ...
3. Prototype: requires that the game engine is at least partially working. Use mockups to place triggers and document what sets triggers off (= rigging).
4. Keep reviewing (with other people) and refining the level's size, pacing, objects, triggers, NPCs, and aesthetics.
5. Hand off the level to the art team with requirements and documentation.
6. Integrate visual and audio art assets, bug fix, and tune.

Guidelines

• tutorial = included in the first levels of the actual game (not as a side) = hands-on learning. Start explaining the most used features one by one. Disable unused features to avoid confusing the player. Explain UI elements and point at them visually (blinking or glowing). Let player go back and try the tutorial examples again. Allow the tutorial to be skipped.
• vary pacing within a level
• after player surmounts resource-consuming challenges, player should be given resources to come back
• avoid things that do not make sense/inconsistencies
• scope: do not get too big, adapt levels to team's capacity
• do not show all the challenges to in one level - introduce features gradually
• know your audience
• atypical levels should be optional: either they break suspension of disbelief or the challenges are foreign to the genre, and are therefore not exciting for players who like the genre. Atypical levels should be unlockable, hidden levels, or side missions, but not in the main progression.
• inform player of short-term goals
• be clear about risks, rewards, and consequences of decisions
• reward for skill, imagination, intelligence and dedication
• reward a lot, punish a little
• The AI is here to lose
• provide multiple difficulty settings
• action games: vary the pace/players must be able to rest
• strategy games: reward planning, give advantageous locations but let the player find them
• RPG: allow character growth and player self-expression
• sports: verisimilitude
• vehicle: reward skillful maneuvers
• construction and management sims: provide interesting variety of scenarios (= initial conditions and goals)
• adventure: challenges consistent with their location and the story
• artificial life: offer a lot of interactions between creature and environment
• puzzle: give time to think

Layout patterns

Pattern	Indications
open	player's movement has no constraints
linear	works well with linear stories
parallel	works well with foldback stories, shortcuts possible
ring	mostly only for racing games
network	maze, good for explorers, hard to tell a story because the path is quite free. If all major spaces are connected, then exploration is easy: it's good for FPS deathmatches.
hub and spoke/star	start at center, challenges and rewards in branches
combination	many kinds of games!

[Literature] Game Balance ch7 - Advancement, progression and pacing

My notes from course 7 of the Game Balance class of Summer 2010, by Ian Schreiber.

Progression is ...	in games that are ...
absolute	PvE/single player
relative to other players	PvP/multiplayer

Flow has two problems: different player audiences have different skills, and players learn throughout the game.
Balance = overall game difficulty, does not solve these problems. Balance only matches audience expectation.
Progression/Pacing = keeping the player in the flow zone. As player skill increases, so do challenges. Progression ensures the game ends in the time frame said by the box (1min for arcade, 40h for RPG, etc.). If the game is endless, then progression = end-game rewarding structure(s).

When transitioning from mid- to end- or elder game, the objectives change from progressing to something else. Game designer has to find something for the player to do. Ex: WoW guild raiding or making your house cute in Farmville/Sims. Problems: some players may like the progression game but not the elder game. The power gathered during progression game should be available and enjoyable during elder game.
Tips:

• As playtesters test the game, they become experts => the game gets tuned harder => make the game easier at the end, and/or keep some playtesters for the end.
• Let players adjust the difficulty themselves (more challenging but also more rewarding levels or adjusting the difficulty level at any time). In PVP, difficulty adjustment should be voluntary (handicap, resources at the beginning, ...).

PVE

Perceived difficulty = (game power challenge + game skill challenge) - (player power + player skill), with:

• Game power challenge = stats (doubling opponents HP makes the game harder)
• Game skill challenge = new enemies or better AI, direct challenge to the player's skill (you need to play better) and not a player's power (you need more hit points to win). A game designer can control power-related, but not skill-related components of difficulty.

Large luck component or shallow mechanics: a short increase in player skill as the player masters what little they can at the beginning. Then skill plateau (player is as good as she can ever be). A minute to learn, a minute to master. This is the design of educational games (where skill is not the priority).

Giving practice zones where new weapons or powers are acquired makes players learn/increase their skill faster. Skill gating = progressively harder challenges, guarantee that if players complete a challenge, then they are ready for the next. Skill gating != practice zones.

Psychology: “reward schedule” or “risk/reward cycle”: you don’t just want the players to progress, you want them to feel like they are being rewarded for playing well. Reward not too rarely and not too often. Many small rewards are more efficient than a single big reward. Regular rewards = bad. Reward for something players were looking for (otherwise the game seems too easy) and not for a random event (eg "inflict exactly 123 dmg"). 3 kinds of rewards related to progression: increasing player power, level transitions, and story progression.

Increasing player power

If the most fun toy in your game is only discovered 2/3rds of the way through, that’s a lot of time the player doesn’t get to have fun. How do you actually keep the player engaged when you've given away all the cool toys early in the game? One way is if your mechanics have a lot of depth, you can just present unique combinations of things to the player to keep them challenged and engaged. Warning: this is really hard to do in practice. You can also use other rewards more liberally after you shut off the new toys: more story, more stat increases, more frequent boss fights or level transitions. Also, toy upgrades.
Better shorten the game than have it too long and boring.

Level transitions

Each level takes a little bit longer than the last: fast progression at start engages player into the game, later levels can be longer because player wants to know the end of the plot.

Story progression

Story really IS a reward. There should be a match between story complication/climax curve and the difficulty curve. Ex: tutorial = exposition scene, miniboss = rising action, final boss = final climax. Final boss should not be as demanding on player skill as kill 10 rats.

Pattern: do not reveal the story only during level transition; instead, revealing additional background story immediately after a fight (even an easy one) makes players feel like they earned it. (But do not do that all the time otherwise it becomes predictble!)

PvP

Acquiring more power than opponents = primary reward. PvP has more options to play with than PVE because everything is relative, there's no defined level/stats to reach to be "strong".

negative feedback loops => more power when behind and less power when ahead => best player alternates => depends on opponents, no one is left behind (ex: Mario Kart with dynamic difficulty adjustment).
positive feedback loop => more power brings more power => best stays best => independent of the opponents, game ends faster, bad start is deadly (ex: League of Legends).

	positive sum	negative sum	zero sum
Definition	sum of all player resources increases over time	players lose power over time. Goal = lose power more slowly than opponents.	fixed amount of resources on the table
Example	Catan, Agricola	Chess	Poker
Positive feedback
Negative feedback			Solution: Each player spends time in the lead before one player's final blow ends the game.

When both players have realized who is going to win, the game should end quickly.

Flair, learning and visuals in Wario Land and Wario Land II

Wario Land and Wario Land II are two Gameboy (and/or Gameboy Color) games from 1994 and 1998 respectively. They have a few features I found worth an article.

Flair, or Get smart

Think outside the box

Very fancy mechanics such as breaking the fourth wall happen during boss fights, such as the one with Psycho Mantis. In Wario Land and Wario Land II, the player has to break the wall of the level very often in order to collect coins or find a path to the end of the level. At first sight, this breaking the level could have a negative influence on the magic circle. But in practice, it just rewarded the player for thinking harder about exploration. It certainly did not give the level an impression of open-sandbox-world because the breaking could only happen once in a while, and not everywhere. But it added fun and rewarded the searching player nicely.

In fact, the feeling of a destroyable world was nearly never felt in the two games, except a few times such as during the Wario Land battle with boss Funfun.

In the first level of Wario Land II, the player can choose to stay asleep in doing nothing. This lets Wario sleep and opens a branching in the story. It took me quite much time to figure the way to unlock the alternate story branch, because doing nothing was not an intuitive way to solve a problem. But I found it very funny when I saw Wario concluding the level still sleeping (middle screenshot), while he is usually congratulating the player for the money and treasures he gathered (right screenshot). So it was not frustrating and somewhat rewarding to see this scene happen.

Monster infighting

Monster infighting is tricking enemy monsters into fighting each other. It happens in Doom and (apparently) 70 other games. There is also a little trace of monster infighting in Wario Land, but it is more rewarded than in Doom. Mostly only Pouncers (heavy falling spiked cubes) and Pikkarikun (a cloud throwing lightning bolts) could turn other enemies (such as the small Pirate Gooms) into gold coins. Unlike Doom, there was a strategy for each of Pouncer and Pikkarikun to use them as "infighters". For Pouncer, the Gooms had to be thrown under it when it was up. For Pikkarikun, Wario had to be protected under a floor and a Goom had to pass between Wario and Pikkarikun.

Learning design

The game design = learning design talk by Gee at FDG2010 is illustrated very often in the two games, but particularly well in Wario Land II. The Big Kamukamu (a fish) boss encounter, for instance, is a check that the player can make his/her avatar swim well enough to kill the boss.

As usual, most bosses strategies deal with dodging their attacks, finding their weak point(s) and attacking at the good time. Most have three phases, the third one killing the boss being the hardest and the most intense. However, there is a learning-by-the-example phase before two bosses: Awabo (a bubble) and Ghost. Before those two encounters, Wario sees Captain Syrup, the final boss, being imprisoned by the boss. It ignites a bit of schadenfreude from the player towards the Captain. However, the player is warned: the way Syrup is kicked out is what Wario must avoid when he fights.

Visuals

Except throwing enemies, burping is the only ranged-attack (first on the left). Japanese version of Crazy Wario is actually Drunk Wario, and Penguins throw beer mugs (second). Surrealism (third). Typical Japanese TV entertainment color shades? (fourth)