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.
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| 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.
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| 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.
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| ^ 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.
I really like the idea of a trade-off system within games, like the one you reference with LM. I don't think a total and complete erosion system would be that enjoyable, because I feel as though the game would have to counterbalance your character's erosion by making the game more flat-lined throughout its progression. Rather than facing tougher baddies, you face the same baddies in a weaker state. And frankly, that doesn't sound as interesting to me; I like the idea of new challenges coming from enemies that you have to kill in different ways rather than similar enemies that you can't hit as hard. So perhaps there could be a combination of erosion/leveling up that did impact game play. Like imagine an RPG that gave you points to level up different skills/characteristics, but the sum of these figures could never be above a certain number and at a certain point, increasing one skill would take away from another skill--perhaps in an unpredictable manner.
ReplyDeleteBut more to the point, I very much agree with you about the game's erosion system engaging you on a moral level even if the mechanic doesn't immediately impact gameplay. Your example of Shadows of the Colossus is an excellent one, especially since it takes place in such a stark environment that there's little else you can do other than complete the task that's been handed to you. Perhaps some such system could be included in an FPS that focuses on team combat even in a single player mode: your team members assist you in the game, but you get to know them over the course of the game and build a sense of camraderie, which takes a "hit" whenever the team members get injured or die. The gameplay gets harder, but you also feel a greater sense of isolation and loss within the game itself.
(This is Baird--for some reason blogspot isn't remembering my google account)
Baird,
ReplyDeleteI've long felt that one of the greatest examples of Shadow of the Colossus' genius is the moment that comes for every player, some sooner, some later, when they realize that the only way to "win" the game is to simply not play it at all. Even though I feel like Tale of Tales are a little too prone to overstatement in their discussion of game design, The Path (http://tale-of-tales.com/ThePath/) also does this extraordinarily well, and serves as another great example of the kind of morally erosive design I'm talking about. Check out the demo, it's free, and it should be enough to illustrate the subtle ways in which it manipulates and inverts standard game conventions to create perhaps an even more immediate experience in which "winning" and "losing" become highly muddled. It may well be fodder for a future post.
I also feel like your FPS example is awesome, mostly because it takes the idea of nonmechanical moral gameplay out of the realm of "art games" and into something commercially relevant, which is kind of what the industry needs most. We have all these games that tout their ethics systems, but they're almost always poorly implemented and uninteresting. The Bioware model (KOTOR, Mass Effect, Dragon Age, etc.) sucks because it pretty much boils down to "Are you a huge dick or are you perfect?" with no nuance, and then represents it with Dick Points and Awesome Dude Points. It's too mechanical, and not really engaging on any real emotional level. Bioshock looked like it was going to be on the right track with it's Little Sister thing, but that ended up sucking too. Prerelease they made a big deal about how you would be able to kill these little monster kids to get the resources you needed to survive, and it would be all emotionally scarring to do so, but if you chose to save them instead to you'd be really starved for ADAM and the game would be a lot harder. That sounded cool, since it was essentially the same trade-off thing you mention in Laputan Machine. You can trade a mechanical benefit for an emotional one, essentially choosing to intentionally be worse at the game to feel better about it, or vice versa. Totally erosive and also surprisingly realistic in that often the only reward for doing the right thing is knowing that you did the right thing. Then they went and fucked it up and made it so that not only was the kill/save thing handled in a pretty uninteresting way, you actually get MORE rewards from saving them than from killing them, albeit later down the line.
Far Cry 2 actually pretty much uses your dead war-buddies idea, and it was one of the finer points of the game in my opinion. You're a mercenary in a war-torn african nation, and you can rescue other mercenaries that you find around the world. Once you've rescued another merc, sometimes they'll come to your rescue as well in the midst of an intense firefight, or appear to drag you to safety if you're downed in a battle. They could have used better writing and AI to really make them come alive, but you still start to get a connection to these guys as you haul eachother's bacon out of the fire time and again. If one of the other mercs goes down in a fight you can heal them with your medical supplies, but if you're out or they just take too many hits, you're left only with the option to either abandon them there to bleed out in the bush or at least make their deaths relatively quick and painless. The first time I had to mercy-kill one of my companions, a guy who had covered my back through countless hair's-breadth escapes and jobs gone south, I felt a surprising sense of guilt and loss as the camera panned away and the solitary gunshot echoed across the savannah. If done better with more engaging characters and a stronger dynamic, I think this could be incredibly effective, and would be enough to sell me on a game I would otherwise not be interested in.