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Fable 2: Emotaphors
By Corvus | November 10, 2008
This morning’s Fable 2 post is an expansion of the comment I left at the Brainy Gamer on Michael’s recent post about the expression wheel–the UI interface for accessing the social expressions, or emotes, within the game. In essence, Michael feels the array of canned animations with which you entertain, or alarm, the residents of Albion is “a significant and unfortunate flaw.” Michael goes on to criticize Fallout 3‘s more traditional stilted puppet-characters and their dialog trees.
As might be evident from my praise of Fable 2‘s social exploration in my last post, I’m not entirely certain I agree.
For those of you who might be unfamiliar with the mechanics, let me recap. Your Fable 2 hero is the silent type. Very silent, in fact, and she never ever speaks–not in the game, not in the cinematics. Makes noises, yes. Delivers intelligible dialog, no. Instead, over the course of the game, she learns various emotes, all of which can be called up via the right bumper. The emotes are broken down into categories–Rude, Scary, Social, Fun, and Flirty–and include Thumbs Up. Victory Arm Pump, Seduce, Extort, Point and Laugh, etc. In any given social situation, a selection of emotes is made available to you on the D-Pad for easy access.
Although there is considerable variance in how different NPCs react to different emotes, it’s still pretty easy to find yourself standing in the middle of a city, pumping your arm, dancing, and whistling for the amusement of an admiring crowd of onlookers. And since more admirers equals more fame, and more fame equals more admirers… well, after a bit of emo-grind, you find yourself at the top of the social ladder and all the available romantic partners–including ones you’ve not interacted with directly–have big red hearts floating over their heads, indicating they’re ready to get married.
Michael’s (and, to be fair, other people’s as well) contention is that these silly little emotes, all presented on a wheel, are too shallow of an interface for a supposedly complex social simulation. The idea that farting or belching in public could pave the way to betrothal is a bit too much of a stretch, I guess. In fairness, I can see their point. On the other hand…
The primary focus of this blog, and my professional pursuits for that matter, is the idea that game mechanics communicate story. In order to do this entirely successfully, I argue, each mechanic must intentionally represent a relationship within the narrative framework. This can be a simple and direct representation of a character’s relationship with the physical world revealed via movement rate, jump height, etc. It can also be a more abstract, metaphoric if you will, representation. Many RPGs with good and evil paths, including Fable 2, stray into this area–using changes in appearance to reflect your character’s relationship with their society.
When I saw how Fable 2‘s emote wheel worked, I recognized it as an excellent example of abstract representation. I do not for a minute believe that your hero’s expressions are meant to be taken as literal actions, but as metaphoric expressions of deeper social interactions. When viewed this way, the individual canned animations take on a deeper significance and you begin to realize how complex a tool set the expression wheel really is. Tool set is a good term for it too, as, rather than saddle each NPC with a static dialog tree that endlessly repeats every time you interact with them, the Fable 2 NPCs have a much broader array of responses to draw upon, which leads to the sorts of situations I discussed in my last post.
Another potential strength of the system is what it says about heroism and fame. The quests you choose, and the decisions you make while performing them, do have an effect on the game’s population. Your fame increases, people feel more strongly about you, and your physical appearance changes, which also impacts how people feel about you. However, to truly make an impact on the populace, and to reap the rewards of discounts at shops and frequent presents, you have to actually pay attention to, and manipulate, your public personae. A selfless hero might slay a cruel bandit and keep mum about it. People will be appreciative, but they won’t be quite so adoring–so shamelessly in awe. But spend time making a connection with them, or bragging to them, or intimidating them, and suddenly they’re deeply invested in your behaviors. It’s not, as I showed with my eager-to-please villain, so much what you do for a living, but the effort you put into the relationships with people around you that counts.
The problem with this system, if one can be said to exist, is that it’s too easy to exploit–leading to instant fame or infamy in exchange for a few minutes of publicly madcap behavior. It could be argued that this is a problem the player needs to correct by approaching it in a “less-game-like” fashion, but I’ve never been a big fan of blaming the audience, so let’s dig just a little deeper.
If the social simulation element of Fable 2 is meant to be more metaphoric simulation than game, then perhaps the effect of the expressions shouldn’t have been so weighty and transparent. On the other hand, this might have the effect of people not seeing the results clearly enough and early enough, becoming discouraged, and not participating in it at all. The clear visibility of people’s impressions and the strong effect each emote has sends clear signals to the players. Like much of the rest of the game, this seems to have been a huge part of Lionhead’s goal–forgiving and fun play throughout.
No, I don’t feel that minimizing the effect each expression has is the right answer. Perhaps increasing the quickness with which people become disappointed in your repetition of individual expressions, or making them more quickly bored with standing around watching you at all would be the answer. The NPCs already voice displeasure if you repeat an emote too frequently, but their irritation doesn’t seem to last. If anywhere, this is where the system lacks depth–the NPCs are weighted too heavily towards love and fear and apathy or self interest seem to hold a minimal place in their psyches. Of course, Fable 2 is a world designed to explore being a hero, not an average citizen, so perhaps that isn’t such a terrible flaw.
Tagged:emote mechanics, fable 2, storytelling. | 8 Comments »
November 10th, 2008 at 7:49 pm
Heh, I imagined you’d consider looking at the emotes in Fable 2 symbolically, rather than as literal actions your character is undertaking. It’s a very interesting idea (and it makes the emoting less silly and game-ish), but if it is supposed to be a metaphorical action, that’s not communicated visually very well.
Granted, that might have been the only option since most players would probably fine the idea of metaphorical emotes unprecedented at best. I’d be quite curious about what a game that embraced this idea fully and obviously would look like.
November 11th, 2008 at 5:16 am
I’ve had a game design in mind for a while that pushes all interactions into pure metaphor using facial expressions and iconography. It’s also a procedural murder mystery game. Someday I’ll learn to code well enough to put it together.
But the question got me to thinking–the actual problem with Fable 2‘s emotaphors is that they are one sided. Only the hero uses them and all the NPCs use language to express themselves. This serves to reduce the impact of the emotes, making them silly.
November 11th, 2008 at 3:42 pm
It upsets me that the amount of renown granted to the player for bragging and acting the hero/fool to their peers is dwarfed by the renown granted for finishing certain plot segments.
I think that this undermines the social focus on the game. The result is that building a persona is based more on which quests the player accepts than how they interact with other characters.
November 11th, 2008 at 4:10 pm
I think that actually makes sense, Spencer. For comparison–we don’t tend to judge political figures by how they treat their neighbors, but the world shaping deeds they perform.
The social element of the game is merely a backdrop. If my original villainous hero were judged solely on his clowning, it would completely undervalue the despicable acts he’d performed. I’m already a bit tweaked that the repercussion for the Oakfield massacre was so minor.
November 11th, 2008 at 4:31 pm
I thought about that. I think you’re right to an extent (though I’d say that, for many people, the ‘political’ acts of politicians are less important than who their friends are and what they look like).
Is the social element of the game really just a ‘backdrop’? Forgive me if this was wrong, but I inferred from your reaction to my post on the golden path that you thought otherwise. If it is merely a backdrop, though, then I consider that an unsatisfactory state of affairs, given the difficulty we have in separating the main quest from the social interaction, and the game’s weak plot. Even its ending focusses our attention on the social side of the game.
And Oakfield is an exception, because, in that quest, you were interacting with the town’s inhabitants. Think of the lonelier quests. They’re great fun, but that they’re granted so much ‘renown’ weight seems to unbalance the game, in my mind.
November 11th, 2008 at 4:42 pm
Yeah, backdrop isn’t the right word is it? Regardless, it’s pretty evident that word of your deeds, even your lonelier quests, somehow makes it into the public consciousness.
While my own RPG system has an explanation for this phenom, I have the impression there are people lurking about Albion, spying on everything I do.
November 11th, 2008 at 6:17 pm
I also think the social interaction is reflective of the quest structure, but still quite a separate thing. I’d more say that the game has a traditional, albeit forgiving, linear RPG structure with a large social sandbox in the middle of the playground.
November 11th, 2008 at 8:34 pm
The social sandbox is really quite fascinating. It’s more than a backdrop, at its best usages in the game, but it still is not (and is not meant to be) much more than the stage or the theater building in which the story unfolds. To complain that the individual social interactions are too simple, I think is to misunderstand the intent that such things are possible and even perhaps useful in guiding more personal relationships with the story at large… The intent is not to be a Sims game with RPG quests, but to be an RPG game with Sims-style “social mini-game/sandbox”, and I think for the most part Fable 2′s is quite fitting, and indeed I saw it proficient for my experience in the game, and I’m not sure just yet if there is more/less I would have done were I to try to design the concept myself.
But then I’m still slowly compiling my thoughts on Fable 2 for a blog post of my own. I got seduced into several late night marathon sessions of the game and now I’m trying to convert the aftermath of the “bender hangover” into fuel for my own analysis of the game.