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Verb Restriction vs. Immersion
By Corvus | September 2, 2008
I don’t think it’s too much to ask my player to accept the premise and situation of the story she is in, and to behave in a reasonable manner.
–Jimmy Maher
After spending a good 20 minutes trying to edit my thoughts down to a comment-sized chunk on Mike Rubin’s blog post the other day, I decided to just give up and write a full-on post exploring the ideas I was trying to express.
It’s an interesting idea to think about–this relationship between designer, protagonist and player (I prefer, and will be using, storyteller, story and audience). Most video games are firmly built upon the storyteller’s idea of how the story should be told. This is most often true of games where the story’s protagonist has a clearly defined identity outside the audience’s whim. I imagine, like many literary authors, game designers might feel a bit protective of their creations. The idea that once their stories are placed at the mercy of the audience, they’ll be treated to any number of indignities, and possibly forced to unfold in unexpected directions, must drive them a little crazy.
The result of this tension is typically audience verb restriction. Audience verbs are the actions the audience is normally allowed to control. In a typical FPS these verbs usually include run, duck, jump and, of course, shoot. Many FPS games add a contextual verb, use, that pushes buttons, flips levers, initiates dialog, etc. Add some RPG elements and the verbs increase exponentially, with verbs for magic, inventory management, item use, conversation, skill use, experience application, and on and on. Many action games contextualize the jump verb so that it becomes several verbs–backflip, scale wall, long jump, etc.
Regardless of how many verbs the game provides, it is not unusual to reach a point where the storyteller decides it’s time to take over the story and restrict the audience’s control over these verbs. This is very frequently done with cut scenes. If the storyteller doesn’t want the audience killing the story’s primary opponent during an early meeting, they only appear in cut scenes until the final battle. The same often applies to meeting friends. It’s easiest, and seemingly less jarring, to pull these interactions into a cut scenes rather than grant control over the protagonist’s actions and simply ignore the audience’s futile attempts to subvert the intended story.
Conversely, sometimes the storyteller wants to impress the audience by showing them what the protagonist is really capable of–when the constraints of game balance and level design don’t hold them back. This most often has the effect of making the audience feel like the provided audience verbs during gameplay are the restricted verbs. How many dull melee combat games feature cut scenes with the protagonist wielding their sword with a style and power not available to the audience in the game itself? How many licensed IP games feature their protagonists performing incredible feats not available to the audience in gameplay? Too many, if you ask me.
Half Life thumbed its nose at this convention of cut scenes and simply turned certain verbs off during gamplay. Most notably, point your weapon at a friendly character and the verb shoot is simply turned off. In Half Life 2 you can even see your protagonist lower his weapon–a nice way of communicating to the audience, in-game, that shooting friends isn’t within the storyteller’s understanding of the story. Adventure games dating back to Zork used this same tactic, providing responses like, “That doesn’t do anything,” or, “I’m not putting my lips on that,” when the audience attempted to use verbs in non-useful ways.
I find the quote from Jimmy Maher that I included at the top of this post to be very interesting. I find myself nodding in agreement, but then I realize that it could almost be interpreted as placing the responsibility for “playing nice” entirely on the audience. And that, I do not agree with. Neither does Jimmy, actually, as his comments on Mike’s post reveal. Jimmy feels, as I do, that our job as storytellers, is to draw the audience into the story so completely that they have more interest in seeing it through than they do subverting it by performing unexpected and undesirable actions.
I will even go one step further, however. If the storyteller’s story contains violent audience verbs such as shoot, then it is imperative that the storyteller provide context and consequence. I’ve written before on the need for context for the violence in our games. I was thrilled in Assassin’s Creed when Altair is asked how his methods differ so dramatically from those he condemns. And when one of his assassinations has a direct and negative effect on his ability to navigate the environment for the rest of the game, I was even more impressed. I only wish they’d taken the concept of consequence further. Every death, particularly unnecessary ones, ought to have had a measurable impact on gameplay.
In our effort to make games more accessible, more enjoyable, we have begun to do away with “game over” screens and the need to restart levels. On the one hand, I applaud this effort. Punitive game design ought to be a relic of our past. The financial and platform excuses for this style of design are far behind us. On the other hand, we are increasing our focus on story (bravo!) without paying attention to important storytelling elements like consequence and context (boo! hiss!).
Obviously, I’m not suggesting we punish the audience by ending the game every time they perform an undesirable action. But I am saying that there’s no good reason to protect the unfolding of the plot to the extent that we dictate player behavior. If the storyteller provides violent verbs and the audience chooses to kill key characters, then the plot cannot continue. That doesn’t mean the story cannot continue. The storyworld continues to exist, only the protagonist motivation is gone. It won’t be long before the audience realizes that playing within the unstated rules of the storytelling experience will reward them with a compelling story. And then it’s up to the storyteller to make good on that promise.
That’s all the time I have for now. Later this week I’ll be addressing another of Mike’s observations in his post on the complexity of context-appropriate responses when every player verb matters.
Tagged:storytelling, verb restriction, video games. | 11 Comments »
September 2nd, 2008 at 10:10 am
Just on your second last paragraph. It reminded me of Morrowind (and the same might be the case in Oblivion) where, if you killed a central character in the main quest you were informed that you had “cut the thread of fate” or something of that nature. At this point the player is asked if they wish to continue playing within the world. If you do so you are still able to experience the many joys of Morrowind that exist outside the central story arc but ultimately miss out on the most developed narrative within the game.
September 2nd, 2008 at 10:52 am
In the Bethesda game "Morrowind" you could kill anyone you wanted. There were two possible consequences:
-> If guards were nearby, and you were the one attacking, they would chase you (and they were strong…)
-> If you killed a key character, you could still play, but you got a message telling you you had just severed a strand of Fate, preventing you from completing the quest to its end (and creating a bleak future, etc)
September 2nd, 2008 at 11:35 am
FPS games are interesting since they’ve traditionally been pretty short on verbs. Half-Life barely has a “talk” function, it’s pretty much run, jump and shoot – although “grab” has become much more important lately.
Deus Ex sought to change this as well as maintain mroe of a story world if you played with killing one character versus another. I’m interested to see where Mirror’s Edge manages to take the genre as well, although it might more than a lot of subactions on the normal ones.
September 2nd, 2008 at 1:18 pm
I’ve spent quite a bit of time considering the role of the audience and whether there should be a tacit agreement that they will stay “on message” but an ideal situation would be one where the audience never had any desire to deviate into outlandish behaviour.
However I feel that is unlikely to happen. All games are simulation to some degree, and when put into a simulated world it’s human nature to play with the limits of that simulation and see how far it will bend. This seems likely to continue at least until simulated environments become more commonplace and well defined.
I don’t think the only choices should be restrict player actions so they can’t break the plot, or stop plot progression if a key character dies. The real world is full of redundancy, it’s never the case that only one person has the vital information or can provide the specific service that is needed. They will be competitors for that service, backups of that information, people they shared their secrets with. If the player kills that a plot specific character, they should still be able to forward the plot but will have to now work out how for themselves; find that friend, visit that competitor etc.
September 2nd, 2008 at 1:53 pm
@Gerard & Modran Wait a minute–Morrowind had a central plot thread?
@Josh There were point where Deus Ex had difficulty interpreting your actions. They didn’t restrict the verb, but they did nullify the result.
@Justin Why should we expect people to follow what we consider to be the natural thread and theme of a video game when so many of us spend our lives bucking those same expectations? I think you’re right about the temptation to test a simulation. It’s a perfect sandbox reaction, if you ask me.
I agree that redundancy is a viable solution, but I feel it depends on the scale of the world and plot. Most of my large-scale game design concepts utilize redundancy and “how swappable” elements (for want of a better term at the moment) to enhance replayability and to better respond to the audience’s choices.
I don’t think it works with every situation, however. If the audience manages to kill the big bad in the first act, it would seem cheap to simply replace her with another big bad that had identical goals and methods. If it didn’t seem cheap the first time, it certainly would the second time. Or the third.
September 2nd, 2008 at 1:59 pm
To be honest, I’m not entirely sold on my notion of a “Gameplay Contract” as it stands.
I’ll admit my specific example was tied to very closely to Deus Ex, and it is not necessarily one that would scale well. However as a starting place it merits consideration.
September 3rd, 2008 at 12:44 am
I wrote a somewhat lengthy response to this on my own blog. At first I hesitated to spam your own comments section to link it, but what the heck, that’s what the blogosphere is for, right?
September 3rd, 2008 at 5:26 am
@Jared Excellent! I’ll do you one step better and provide a direct link to the post:
Don’t Do That!
September 3rd, 2008 at 12:38 pm
And there were times DX could have just nullified the verb. “Use Water” only has so many uses in a story.
September 3rd, 2008 at 9:56 pm
[...] Elrod has one of those “Oh yeah, makes sense, I agree,” kind of posts, under the notably unflashy title “Verb Restriction vs. [...]
September 3rd, 2008 at 9:57 pm
And I’ll do one step better than that and actually link to your post on my blog entry. D’oh!