Character Erosion in Game Design

If a game is going to allow your character (in this article, "character" is used loosely to describe any avatar that the player controls, be it a person, a vehicle, an abstract shape, or whatever) to change over time, it almost always follows a process of construction.  At the beginning your character is at the nadir of their capability which increases with the passage of time and the completion of objectives.  RPGs are the most obvious example with their highly structured systems of levels, stats, and gear that demonstrate numerically the continually increasing ability of your character to overcome the obstacles he is presented with.  Indeed, levelling up and growing in capacity is one of the things that draws so many players to the genre.  This is evident almost every other popular genre of game that features a changing character.  Action game characters accrue more powerful weapons and skills, RTS and 4X cities develop improved technologies and units, and so on.

This makes perfect sense of course.  Games are primarily escapist fantasy (sorry Tale of Tales), and achievement is something that's fun and motivating.  However, I'm quite intrigued by the narrative, mechanical, and stylistic opportunities that could be afforded by taking the opposite approach: one of character erosion.  Instead of beginning with very little ability to overcome obstacles and growing, what about games where the character begins at the peak of their power, and only decreases over time?  A game where the only place your character can go is down would have a pretty profound effect.

A bad time for your gun to break.

One of the things that is continually lauded about the Survival Horror genre is its mildly erosive quality.  All the most acclaimed games in the genre like System Shock, Silent Hill, and the earlier Resident Evils focus in large part on managing highly limited quantities of important items like ammunition and health.  Every time you fire your gun or take a hit, you use up a substantial portion of a finite resource.  This is taken even further in System Shock 2, where all of your weapons are subject to degradation over time and, without maintenance (which also requires the use of consumable tools), are doomed to eventual malfunction and destruction.  However, these games are still mostly constructive, giving the player access to better equipment and more resources over time, eventually allowing them to build enough of a stockpile that they feel more confident by the endgame.  Imagine how much more intense a firefight would become in SS2 if you knew that not only did you have a limited supply of bullets for this encounter, but that you were never, ever going to find any more.

Better make those count, because you're not ever getting more.

This brings me to Valve's Alien Swarm, a sadly unknown cooperative action/survival game that's free to anyone with Steam.  At the start of each level, all players select equipment, and are then forced to ration it for the remainder of the level.  There are no ways to replenish ammo which is always in very limited supply, and reloading with bullets left in a magazine wastes them.  Health kits are limited to the medic class, and once again there are only a small number available with no way to restock.    The game is quite hectic and you are never as capable again as you are at the start of the mission.   Its not uncommon to have multiple players out of bullets and resorting to clubbing at waves of monsters by the end of a level, and every heal has to be prioritized and triaged due to the set number of medkits.  Because of these factors, Alien Swarm feels almost unbearably tense at moments, more so than it's cousins Left 4 Dead and Killing Floor can hope to achieve due to their constructive model of increasing capability.

Leaving base mechanics behind, what about character erosion in the narrative sense?  I've long been a fan of Jack Monahan's Gausswerks Design Reboot blog, and I feel that he and I share many of the same sensibilities about game design and particularly the implementation of meaningful narrative connected to, rather than on top of, the mechanics.  Of particular interest are his reinterpretation of Clive Barker's Jericho and his truly sublime concept for a Deus Ex prequel: Laputan Machine (He actually conceived of the DX prequel as a duology consisting of both Laputan Machine and a sister game titled Flatlander Woman.  Flatlander Woman is also more than worth reading, but only Laputan Machine really digs into narrative erosion.)  Both the Jericho reboot (henceforth JR) and Laputan Machine (LM) focus on unavoidable, irreversible decay of the characters' states as they endure continued abuse.

^ All your friends.

In the original Jericho, one of the game mechanics revolved around a priest character being able to resurrect dead squad members, but there were no consequences for this.  In JR, each time a squad member is ripped back from the afterlife, they leave a small piece of themselves behind.  They continue to function mechanically exactly as they always did, but each successive resurrection makes them lose a little bit of vitality and personality, until eventually you are left with soulless revenants, still capable of fighting but devoid of all humanity.  In game terms nothing has changed but the manipulation of the narrative layer adds a penalty to having your characters die which is altogether more effective than any purely mechanical one.  This one shift radically alters the tenor of the entire game.  JR is no longer a bombastic action/adventure story, it's now a game about using people up until there's nothing left of them, and continuing to use them some more.

LM rather cleverly couches its erosive elements in the appearance of construction.  As Gunther Hermann acquires mechanical boosts to capability via cybernetic augmentation, his mental state and self image deteriorate proportionately.  Similarly, using your "upgrades" reinforces his dissociation from humanity, dragging him closer and closer to the monster that he has become by the time Deus Ex begins.  This is, I think, an especially intriguing concept as it forces players to question what is the real measure of fitness in the game. Is it the mechanical benefit provided by Gunther's augs, the ability to overcome physical obstacles that is the normal gauge for a game character?  Or is it his sanity, something less tangible and less conducive to "fun" gameplay in the traditional sense?  Either way, LM sets up a catch 22, as increasing one decreases the other, forcing meaningful erosion of some sort to become a defining element of the game experience.

So what do you guys think?  Is a game predicated on erosion something you'd want to play?  Or do you play games to achieve things, rather than lose them?

Addendum:  It just occurred to me that Shadow of the Colossus, possibly the best game ever, is so great in large part because of its narrative erosion.  The player figures out early on that what he's doing can't possibly be good, yet you keep helping the character do it all along.  Each time he kills a colossus the deed quite literally stains him, enshrouding him in black tendrils of what may as well be pure evil and leaving him looking more disheveled and weary each time.  SotC is, after a fashion, a chronicle of the character's downfall, an experience of mounting guilt and foreboding that builds up to a terrible failure rather than a triumphant victory. This is the thing everyone remembers about it, and the reason everyone loves it so much.  It is also a great example of erosion.

The Red Spectacles

Mamoru Oshii's "The Red Spectacles" has to be pretty high on the list of the most underrated films of all time. Despite Oshii's international acclaim, it has remained mostly unseen and almost entirely misinterpreted. It's bizarre cinematic style, unintuitive narrative structure, and tonal dissonance make it a difficult film to process, and an almost torturous one to extract meaning from. Yet the rewards for perseverance are so great that I cannot stress enough the necessity of your finding this movie immediately, watching it, chewing on it, and then repeating the process a few times.  The trailer can be seen here, and if it looks even remotely interesting, you should look into it.  Fans of David Lynch will be particularly pleased, I imagine.

I'm also attaching an essay I wrote about "The Red Spectacles" for a class I took on crime in Japanese literature and film way back in my freshman year of college. The thesis is more or less irrelevant, so ignore all the parts about criminality, but I feel like the analysis of the film is still reasonably worthwhile as a close reading.

Analysis:

Mamoru Oshii’s “The Red Spectacles” is not a typical detective story of the type that we have primarily focused on in class. Rather, it is an abstract investigation of what “criminality” really means. In the world of the film an oppressive, totalitarian regime has ground the citizens of Japan into the dirt, and the people’s only hope for salvation rests in the myth of Koichi, a fugitive hero from an earlier era for whose return they wait. Unlike the majority of crime stories, which vilify the criminal, “The Red Spectacles” casts Koichi as a revolutionary idealist whose opposition to society is not a failing on his part but a commendable, even necessary reaction to the degeneration of the country in which he lives. The film suggests that though several people, the main character included, have come to the city claiming to be Koichi, even believing that they are him, he has never actually returned to Japan. The real Koichi fled the Kerberos and deserted his friends when the chips were down. In reality, Koichi was no hero. Yet so desperate is the need for a hero that the people create one out of this shadowy figure and enact his role over and over, seeking to bring change; the idea of this “criminal” figure, willing and able to take on the government, is all that sustains their hope.

In the years following the Kerberos revolt and Koichi’s flight from Japan, the country has fallen to pieces. The film does everything in its power to reinforce the stark hopelessness of life in Japan under the iron fist of the new order. As soon as the film jumps three years ahead, to the present day, there is a significant shift in the visual style. Whereas the first scene was in vibrant color, the future is shot in a sort of muddy sepia tone with harsh, high-contrast lighting that casts long, dark shadows. The streets are barren, devoid of human life and scattered with refuse. Everywhere there are posters with the haunting face of a young woman, recalling the classic image of George Orwell’s “Big Brother.” A thin layer of grime seems to cover everything, and the buildings are invariably run down, yet there is a disturbing sterility to the city due to the extreme government censorship and control. At one point, Koichi goes to see a movie. When he enters the theater, the soundtrack of a war film is clearly audible, complete with explosions, gunfire, planes flying overhead, and the shouts of soldiers, yet the screen shows only a still image of the girl’s face from the posters. All fast-food restaurants have been shut down, as they were seen as a breeding ground for dissent, and have been forced to go into operation underground as soba speakeasies.

The Kerberos, the icons of the old Japan, had a strong association with dogs and dog imagery; their name comes from Cerberus, the three-headed dog that guards the gates of Hades, and they were known as the “watchdogs of hell.” The new Japan, by contrast, is filled with cat imagery. Fliers with pictures of cats are sprinkled on the streets, Maneki Neko are seen in many of the film’s locations, and cats are often heard meowing in the background. This creates an instantaneously antagonistic dichotomy between the protagonist and the government. After all, dogs and cats are frequently thought of as mortal enemies. By emphasizing that the new era is an age of cats, the film shows that this is no longer a place welcoming to Koichi or his ideals. It also implies a bit about each, as cats are known for their aloofness and their calculating minds, while dogs are known for loyalty and heart. Koichi is poisoned by eating food with a cat label, while Midori later rescues him by poisoning the guards with dog-branded noodles. The two factions are not just opposed, but they are absolutely incompatible. The things that sustain one are toxic to the other.

One of the film’s more jarring aspects is the frequent use of bizarre, highly inappropriate broad comedy in scenes with no call for it. For all intents and purposes, “The Red Spectacles” is a serious film about serious issues, and yet it does not shy away from having Bunmei, the face of the evil Cats, burst into an impromptu mambo for seemingly no reason, or having Koichi become incapacitated by explosive diarrhea that he is unable to relieve because there is a goldfish living in the toilet. These moments appear at first to make absolutely no sense, but when given more thought, they add a great deal to the dystopian atmosphere. These sequences are horrifying; they are completely out of place, and as such, they illustrate the ignominy of life in the new Japan. Under the new regime, the city has a bad sense of humor and a bad sense of timing, and its people are unceremoniously stripped of their dignity. This motif reinforces the total ugliness of the city, and why it has to be changed.

This is life as the man-who-is-not-Koichi sees it. While it may not be the objective truth, this sepia-toned wasteland of oppression and decay is his vision of the world around him, and it demands action. In this world gone wrong, the only way to truly be a hero is to be a criminal as well. The law is wrong, and so to follow it is also wrong. The myth of Koichi speaks to a higher ideal that transcends the petty rules and regulations set down by the Cats. This makes him a criminal in the literal sense, but also forces the viewers to question their conception of criminality. The Kerberos were shut down because they were firmly committed to the ideal of justice, rather than the prosaic law of the land. They answered to a higher power than the government, cared about things more important than the rules laid down before them. In their eyes, (and the viewers’) it is the Cats who are the criminals in the truest sense, as they are the ones whose actions led to the massive corrosion of Japanese society that the Kerberos fought to prevent. Even though the protagonist is an enemy of the law, he has righteousness on his side, which is something that Bunmei and the Cats cannot claim.

Ao and Midori are eventually beaten down into joining up with the Cats, even at the expense of their pride, because they see no alternative. In the movie theatre, Bunmei shows the main character tapes of Midori and Ao’s lengthy, sorrowful confessions where they admit to their crimes and express a kind of forced remorse for the actions they took as members of the Kerberos. Their apologies are stilted and monotone, clearly the result of force rather than any sort of sincere regret. They still do not believe that their “crimes” were crimes, but they don’t know what else they can do but play along. And indeed within the city there is no alternative, because there is no power strong enough to challenge the Cats. But Koichi, with his illegal armor, represents the power to defy the government and set things straight.

What makes Koichi so special and makes him a legendary figure that inspires the common man to action is that he is, at least according to the myth, the one man who never gave in, who never surrendered his personal agency and human dignity to the machine. His refusal to surrender his ideals, even when opposed by the monolithic totalitarianism of the Cats, has transformed him into a symbol, and because he still has a suit of Kerberos armor, he is a symbol with teeth. To the people of the new Japan, Koichi represents individual responsibility and choice allied with the strength required to see it through. He bows to no man, choosing to fight on alone against impossible odds rather than simply accept that his time has passed, and the Protect-gear gives him enough power that he could possibly succeed. Even though this vision of Koichi is wrong, as the main character’s realizations at the end of his dream would suggest, it is what the people need, and so it does not really matter. The downtrodden citizens of Japan need a hero to believe in, a possibility for salvation in a world on the brink of collapse. It is because of this desperation and this longing for a better tomorrow that average people will take on his persona and set out to right the wrongs they see all around them.

In the end, the main character comes into the city, adopting his own romanticized vision of Koichi as his persona, with a suitcase full of red spectacles. The glasses are worthless on their own, but like Koichi himself they are emblematic, as they mirror the glowing red lenses on the eyes of the Kerberos armor. These glasses, with the associations they hold, could be the beginning of a revolution. By distributing the glasses to the people, the main character would be, in a way, giving them all pieces of the Koichi legend to call their own, symbolic suits of protect gear that they could use to throw off their chains and fight back against their oppressors. Hope is what the Koichi legend is all about, and by metaphorically making the people into Kerberos soldiers, the main character could have given them all the hope that they need.

And while he failed, he is not the first, nor the last to walk this road. As Bunmei opens the suitcase in the hotel, he asks how many times they will have to go through this before he finally recovers the lost armor. As the protagonist’s body is dragged out of the building, the girl whose face adorns the posters hails a cab, and enters. It is the same taxi driver who quoted Shakespeare to the man-who-is-not-Koichi in his dream, and he quotes The Tempest, saying “’We are such stuff as dreams are made on.’ What kind of dream is the one you are going to meet, miss?” She puts down the phone and smiles, as she fades slowly out of the sepia grime and into brilliant color, her scarf the same intense red as the glasses and the armor’s lenses. The girl, who watched the main character from the walls everywhere he went, was not an agent of the Cats’ oppression, but his guide, the soul of the city leading him on his journey to make things right again. And now, as the cab drives off towards the airport, she prepares to meet another dream, another would-be Koichi, and guide him on his way. It does not matter that this man, this incarnation of Koichi has failed, because Koichi is not a man but a dream, a dream that lives on in the hearts and minds of all the people. Regardless of how many Koichis Bunmei kills, more will come to take their places, until eventually their work is done. Koichi is an idea, and as Allan Moore famously says in his great dystopian novel V for Vendetta, “Ideas are bulletproof.”

Heir to the Throne

One of my pet peeves is seeing how readily people bandy about the term "Lovecraftian" without really having much of an understanding of what that means.  So long as there's a tentacled beast or two and maybe some implication of dark sorcery, you've got yourself a Lovecraftian tale.  You can probably blame Chaosium for this superficial notion that the Mythos is somehow about the monsters (or that the "Mythos" is a coherent entity that's about anything, really), but wherever it originated it irks me to no end how badly it sells HPL short.  All the squamous shamblers and writhing protoplasmic beasts are but window-dressing.  At its heart HPL's body of work is about something much more subtle and infinitely more sinister: the limitations on human understanding.  It's about the universe being bigger and stranger than you can possibly conceive of and not playing by any of the rules you think it does.  It's about there being a thousand layers that stretch out above and below the reality you think you know, omnipresent but unknowable and mostly undetectable.  Things are emphatically not as they seem but, having only human intelligence, you will never truly know them as they are. Instead, you work as best you can with the tiny fragment of reality you perceive until something forces you to recognize that all the things you know to be inarguably true, from the properties of angles to the colors of light, are nothing more than a sham you've constructed to keep yourself from going mad.  The inscrutible, extradimensional and extratemporal creatures that populate these stories serve first and foremost as illustrations of this central tenet, examples of the awful things that continually lurk just behind the world we see.  Lovecraftian horror then, is cosmic horror.  The fear is of the universe itself, its workings completely beyond reason and knowing, yet hideously alive with continual action we can never truly fathom.

That said, there really is only one author I can think of whose work is truly, sublimely Lovecraftian.  This man is of course Junji Ito.  Hailing from the other side of the globe and working in a graphic medium immediately contrary to Lovecraft's own love of the indescribable, Ito could hardly be a more unlikely candidate.  Yet he more than anyone else I can name captures the same essence of pure cosmic dread.  Like Lovecraft's own the world of Ito's tales is a place with caverns beneath the surface, teeming with mysteries and evils that strike at us from the most mundane and unassuming of angles.

His most famous series, Uzumaki, is perhaps the ultimate example of this.  The story revolves around the town of Kurouzu slowly being overwhelmed by spirals.  Spiral shaped items, both man-made and natural, become objects of obsession for the townspeople as strange spiral-related phenomena grow increasingly common over time. The devolution is almost imperceptible at first, but it continues unabated until all aspects of life there are dominated by the unrelenting spiral that refuses to let any of its captives escape (naturally by ensuring that all paths out spiral back into the center of town).  This, my friends, is the real fucking deal.  The source of fear is a curvy line, perhaps one of the least threatening things known to man.  And yet in Ito's hands, spirals become legitimately terrifying, not least because of their abstraction.  The spiral is not a living thing or even an entity of any kind, it has no motivations.  It is simply a shape yet somehow its insidious reach extends throughout every aspect of life in the town, finally dooming the citizens to a bizarre and inscrutable fate.  It is never established why or how this happens, it simply does.  Yet the strangely methodical progression of the spiral's infiltration and destruction of Kurouzu bespeaks a certain order behind the event.  Here, we find that most Lovecraftian of sentiments; that there are strange and malevolent (or at least detrimental) forces at work around us at all times which, when they cross our paths, reveal to us the madness that bubbles under the thin veneer of normalcy we see.

Then there's one of my favorites:  The Enigma of Amigara Fault.  This short story could have come from the pen of Lovecraft himself.  A landslide reveals a vast number of human shaped holes in the fault line of a large rock shelf.  People come instinctively in from miles around and begun to be drawn to the different holes, each person discovering a hole perfectly shaped for them.  One by one they are compelled to enter the holes at which point they disappear and are never seen again.  Their fate remains a mystery until a hiker discovers another fault on the opposite side of the mountain with corresponding holes, each one vaguely humanoid but horrifically distorted and malformed.  The story is perfect in its chilling ambiguity.  The holes have been there all along, waiting within the mountainside, yet somehow each is tailored to a specific present day citizen of the area.  When confronted with the holes, they cannot resist the lure that calls them out into the unknown.   No one knows what occurs inside the mountain or why, nor will they ever know, yet the grotesque fate of the missing people is sealed all the same.  The mounting pile of questions with nary an answer in sight serves only to intensify the alienness of the unconfrontable evil that lurks behind and inside even the most prosaic of things.

You can download Amigara Fault here: http://www.mediafire.com/?gr3cuhpr1raraf1

If you like it, I recommend buying some of Ito's longer works.  Uzumaki and Gyo are both completely worth your time, and available in paperback from Viz Signature.

The Other: A Storytelling Game of Alienation

Nicholas Dowbiggen's "The Other" is a free, extremely rules-light take on the horror RPG that is more or less entirely unknown, but deserves wider appreciation. Inspired by the kind of haunting, psychological dread characteristic of the Silent Hill series of games, "The Other" is almost entirely focused on the steady mental degradation of its characters. Certainly, this in and of itself is nothing particularly new. Call of Cthulhu and its venerable sanity system have been compelling would-be paranormal investigators to suicide and madness for more than 20 years. The thing that is so compelling about "The Other" is the total primacy to this idea. While sanity is important to CoC, it is simply a part of larger equation, and more often than not has a way of becoming little more than a secondary hit point system. In "The Other," the psychological state of the characters is the only thing that matters. All other elements are seen through the lens of your mental decay. The question isn't so much whether you have the skills to pick a lock or aim a gun, but whether you have it together enough to do so, and how the increasing pressure reveals new aspects of your character.

Each character has three Progression Stages, emblematic of their decreasingly rational methods of response to the formless evil that pulls the strings behind their world. Each Progression Stage has a number of Threshold Notches (3 for the first, 2 for the second, 1 for the last). Whenever the player loses a roll against the Other, they go down a notch, crossing into new stages as appropriate. Each stage describes the overarching attitude of the character, which changes as the stress increases. The stroke of genius comes from the fact that character creation consists entirely of a 3 page psych evaluation that the player hands in to the GM, who then creates appropriate progression stages for the character, which he keeps hidden until they come into play. So, much like in reality, the players don't really know how they're going to respond once they snap, and the ramifications are much more personal and character driven than CoC's "run screaming" or "go catatonic" sanity effects. It also contributes to mechanically aided character development, as each progression stage reveals something about your character's unconscious mind.

On a similar note, each character has a Stress-Perception Symptom and a Repression Symptom which are unknown to the player but shape the way that the game plays out. The Stress-Perception Symptom is a buried truth integral to their personal story that they must cut through the Other's machinations to uncover. More interestingly, the Repression Symptom is a lie, something important that they believe to be true, but that is in fact a self-deception they must overcome.

The combination of the Progression Stages and Repression Symptoms makes every character delightfully unstable, creating one of the few roleplaying experiences I can think of in which the players themselves are unreliable narrators. I cannot stress highly enough how cool this is, and how much more conducive it is to genuine horror than pretty much any other system I can think of. When a game forces you to question not only the world, but your character's perceptions of both himself and the world around him, you know you've found something special.

Sadly, the blog on which this game was originally posted has been reabsorbed into the seething froth of primordial darkness, but I've put it up for download here: http://www.mediafire.com/?tc5q4m97v144sty.

If anyone plays it and wants to share experiences, I'd love to hear how it went for you.