Wars of Worldcraft

Usually my posts are entire­ly abstract, meant to enter­tain, inform, irri­tate or enlight­en, but thus far I have avoid­ed prac­ti­cal affairs. For the most part, video games are either enjoyed or they are not; an expe­ri­ence is gleaned, or it is not; but role­play­ing games are some­thing else entire­ly, for the play­er, cer­tain­ly, but espe­cial­ly for the man or woman behind the metaphor­i­cal, and often lit­er­al, cur­tains. Today I am step­ping into the role of the advice-giver, for I have dis­cov­ered that per­haps I have some prac­ti­cal, ser­vice­able wis­dom to pass on in this arena. I became aware of this in a con­ver­sa­tion with a friend last week; I sat down and decid­ed to ham­mer out a set­ting for my new cam­paign in one sit­ting and thought it was going extreme­ly well, and since he was cur­rent­ly in the throes of world-birth him­self, he asked me for a few tips.

Below is my answer to him, and I’ll also elab­o­rate a bit on cer­tain tech­niques that I have found use­ful in craft­ing a set­ting, and include some inter­est­ing idio­syn­crasies that will prob­a­bly be less help­ful and more curi­ous, as I run through how I gen­er­at­ed the wiki con­tent for my most recent set­ting.

The Concept

My mind is a pret­ty use­ful organ­ism, and one of the coolest things about it is that it works even when I’m not choos­ing to think. And one of the most impor­tant tech­niques I’ve dis­cov­ered has to do with reign­ing the left brain in before it begins to orga­nize things that don’t exist yet, which can help one avoid cer­tain urges that I’ll get into in a bit. First I need­ed a start­ing point.

So I sat down and began by com­ing up with a name for my city, which I had already decid­ed would be a city with sig­nif­i­cant links to the Shadowfell, which is basi­cal­ly a mirror-universe born from the shad­ows of the “nat­u­ral” world. About that time, I also began look­ing for appro­pri­ate gloomy city art to inspire me and include on the wiki. That’s when I stum­bled over this pic­ture in my library.

And that sparked a ton of ideas. It strong­ly remind­ed me of Venice, what with the canal in the mid­dle of a city, and what I knew of Venice (pret­ty much from Assassin’s Creed 2 and Casino Royale, right?) I liked, so I went with it for a frame­work. But what would I call this dark Venice-like city? I began throw­ing sounds togeth­er until I found some­thing that I liked; I hap­pened upon Threshing, which I liked because of its ‘sh’ sound, like in hush and flush, which evoked the prop­er feel, and because it involved the sep­a­rat­ing between wor­thy and unwor­thy, the val­ued and the chaff. I want­ed this place to sound like the sort of place where the chaff of both Akana (the “nor­mal” world) and the Shadowfell tend­ed to accu­mu­late, and, because I didn’t want my city to just be a par­tici­ple, I went with Threshingfall, which both sounds good and has some obvi­ous sim­i­lar­i­ties to the word “Shadowfell.”

I then turned to do some research on Venice, specif­i­cal­ly focused on its hey­day in the mid-1400s to the mid-1500s, when it was one of the two great city-states of Italy, its art scene was begin­ning to flour­ish, and the Medici fam­i­ly was ris­ing to promi­nence. I was most­ly just look­ing for broad fla­vor, though; after all, I didn’t want to be over­ly con­strained by Venice, I want­ed it to serve as inspi­ra­tion. And I fig­ured that Assassin’s Creed 2 already rep­re­sent­ed a great deal of the fla­vor I want­ed in my game, and they’ve usu­al­ly got their his­to­ry pret­ty good, any­way.

Next came a deci­sion; I knew that I want­ed the events of the last short game I ran to be impor­tant, in which daelkyr had invad­ed Sigil and forcibly removed the Lady of Pain’s mem­o­ries, thus tak­ing con­trol of Sigil for them­selves, but I also knew that I want­ed those events to be back­ground infor­ma­tion. Refugees from Sigil would have made their way to promi­nent “gate-towns.” That meant using the Outlands, and the Planescape Outlands were some­thing that always rang a lit­tle hol­low to me. I loved the ideas of gate-towns, but the Outlands con­sist almost sole­ly of gate-towns and a lot of open space. The open space struck me as fake, bor­ing, and point­less. Instead, I decid­ed to adhere the gate-town idea in the “nor­mal” world, cut­ting out the most­ly empty Outlands alto­geth­er and giv­ing the cos­mol­o­gy a solid anchor: Akana, a world I have worked with in the past. But I want­ed to tell a new story, with a com­plete­ly dif­fer­ent fla­vor. The eas­i­est option was a new con­ti­nent, the south of which was still called the Outlands and was ruled by a series of city-states, much like parts of 1400s Italy. I then decid­ed that Threshingfall, given its pla­nar impor­tance and links to the Shadowfell, would be the cap­i­tal of the league of city-states, mak­ing it a slight­ly more charged polit­i­cal envi­ron­ment.

So these details gave me a solid basis to work from. Usually, I would have begun struc­tur­ing the city, decid­ing what races lived in which dis­tricts and wield­ed influ­ence, and bal­anc­ing it all in my mind. I went with the oppo­site.

Using the Sub-conscious

Whenever you’re work­ing on big men­tal projects, it’s not hard to get dis­cour­aged at the daunt­ing amount of work you have to do, to get lost in speci­fic themes and details, and to start miss­ing the forest for the scree. While prepar­ing for a D&D cam­paign is prob­a­bly not the most stren­u­ous activ­i­ty you’re going to be putting your mind through, you can eas­i­ly be over­whelmed by its con­cep­tu­al size and spend a lot of time spin­ning your wheels and brute-forcing your way through its cre­ation.

I want­ed to try a very dif­fer­ent tech­nique. Once I had Threshingfall, and had writ­ten a lit­tle poem express­ing the mood I want­ed the city to express, I sat down and start­ed to write.

Instead of focus­ing on the needs of a city and approach­ing this cre­ation from a stand­point of struc­ture or real­ism, I elect­ed to let my mind wan­der and just float past names and images. I record­ed each idea that had some poten­tial. I did focus on themes I want­ed my city to express, but I wasn’t yet caught up in actu­al­ly fit­ting any­thing togeth­er; I didn’t need to, all of that would hap­pen on its own. In that way, the Crimson Academy, Bleak Alliance, Villain’s Market and Den of Drakes was born. I had some rough images for what these orga­ni­za­tions or places were like, but I want­ed to hold every­thing loose­ly so that I could keep on com­ing up with diverse ideas.

I had never used this tech­nique with set­ting gen­er­a­tion before, but I found it excep­tion­al­ly pro­duc­tive, pri­mar­i­ly because when you’re hold­ing every­thing loose­ly you don’t have to com­mit to any­thing right away. If one con­structs a full “thing” in one’s cam­paign set­ting, then it starts to limit other pos­si­bil­i­ties for the set­ting. For exam­ple, say if I sat down to work on Threshingfall and decid­ed that there was def­i­nite­ly a group called the “Lurking Shadows,” and pro­ceed­ed to spell out how they were famous thieves led by a dwarf named Gary Oldman, but Gary was actu­al­ly inter­est­ed in even­tu­al­ly build­ing a giant super­weapon from the gems the Shadows were steal­ing. Where would I go from there? Well, I don’t know if this is uni­ver­sal, but my left-brain would kick in; I’d be think­ing of orga­ni­za­tions that oppose it, and any other group or image I came up with that involved thiev­ery, gems, a dwar­ven lead­er or a super­weapon would be dis­card­ed pret­ty much imme­di­ate­ly.

However, if I have loose images of what this orga­ni­za­tion is like (say, they are thieves, but what is more impor­tant is their elusive-yet-famous nature, and their goals extend beyond sim­ple thiev­ery), then those speci­fic ele­ments that might shut me off from other pos­si­bil­i­ties stay safe­ly unformed until I have a whole mess of ideas that I am simul­ta­ne­ous­ly work­ing with.

Of course, with some of the names I come up with, I don’t have any images at all. I just attach it to a theme (such as order or cor­rup­tion, any­thing that I want to have a role in the many nar­ra­tives I could string through the city), and let it sit. Those are actu­al­ly my favorite, because my mind works bet­ter when its solv­ing a puz­zle than when it’s just try­ing to “pro­duce” some­thing, and try­ing to fig­ure out why a police force would ever be called some­thing like the “Severed Legion” is pret­ty much just that. Approaching it like a puz­zle makes a game out of world-building, too; if set­ting cre­ation becomes tedious, then try­ing to fig­ure out a “solu­tion” to a self-imposed puz­zle makes it refresh­ing­ly fun again.

Basically, the roots of my pro­posed method are this: sit back and allow the right-brain to play and tin­ker with­out get­ting too emo­tion­al­ly invest­ed in any­thing but names, themes and images. It allowed me to come up with nat­u­ral struc­ture with no traces of arti­fi­cial bal­anc­ing and in which no power-group was obvi­ous­ly a respon­se to anoth­er. I think that Threshingfall appears more organ­ic because of that method of ini­tial “play” and cor­re­spond­ing refusal to hold any­thing tight­ly.

As for actu­al­ly fill­ing in details, there’s no rea­son to stop “play­ing.” I strong­ly encour­age you to avoid cre­at­ing a hard-and-fast method of explor­ing the details of such orga­ni­za­tions or coun­tries (for instance, if you always start­ed by deter­min­ing the name of it’s most prominent/powerful lead­er and record­ing its goals/population). That makes your cre­ativ­i­ty run through speci­fic chan­nels, and you’ll be miss­ing out on the pos­si­bil­i­ty of star­tling insights and wast­ing time on details that, while sig­nif­i­cant for some of one’s cre­ations, might not be sig­nif­i­cant for each.

Storytelling Post-build

I’ve cov­ered the tech­niques that I used to gen­er­ate this cam­paign set­ting, and so now I’d sim­ply like to touch on a few speci­fic goals or themes that I explored after the major­i­ty of the set­ting was built and talk about how I’ve decid­ed to imple­ment them, par­tial­ly because I think they’re damn cool and want your opin­ions on how to pull them of as well as I want to.

First of all, I want­ed a way to both encour­age par­tic­i­pa­tion in the wiki (so that my play­ers were active­ly con­tribut­ing to the world, as well), and encour­age them to take a hand in the alter­ing the nar­ra­tive. I did these through ESPs, which are a bla­tant rip-off of the Serenity RPG’s Plot Points. ESPs offer play­ers the chance to active­ly change the story in minor ways (either to throw a lit­tle bit of chaos into the mix, ben­e­fit the char­ac­ter, or insti­gate a whole new sub-plot), as well as give them­selves a lit­tle mechan­i­cal advan­tage, by pro­duc­ing mate­ri­al for the wiki or mak­ing inter­est­ing character-choices in play. I’m con­fi­dent that these things can only make the game bet­ter.

My sec­ond idea, which I am quite excit­ed about, occurred to me while I was pon­der­ing how to write the Adventure Log record­ing each session’s activ­i­ties. I like being a lit­tle cre­ative in such records, sim­ply because it allows me to con­tin­ue flesh­ing out parts of the world that the play­ers may never encoun­ter in-game but can still add to their under­stand­ing of how the world works, or even where their char­ac­ters fit into the world.

I decid­ed that it would be fun to present the Adventure Log as the attempts of a schol­ar over thir­ty years dis­tant from the “start” of the cam­paign to deter­mine the truth of the sto­ries sur­round­ing the play­er char­ac­ters, whom he refers to as the Emissary and the Emissary’s com­pan­ions. This means that the play­er char­ac­ters have undoubt­ed­ly had a strong enough impact on the city that a slew of exag­ger­at­ed sto­ries will even­tu­al­ly be told about them. This also means that I get to play with a few ideas, such as exam­in­ing just how dis­tort­ed and muddy the work of his­to­ry can be (espe­cial­ly in a 1500s where magic runs ram­pant), and exam­in­ing how peo­ple become the heroes and vil­lains of the future. It will also allow me to fore­shad­ow in inter­est­ing ways and cre­ate doubt in the player’s minds regard­ing the actions of their heroes.

It then occurred to me that I could extend this trope by actu­al­ly incor­po­rat­ing it into the game. What if, at the begin­ning of the first ses­sion, I hand­ed each char­ac­ter a name, race, and occu­pa­tion, and we role-played through the first deliv­ery of this accu­mu­lat­ed historical/truth-parsing doc­u­ment? I thought this was an excel­lent idea for a cou­ple of rea­sons: First, it allows me to re-cap the events of the last ses­sion at the begin­ning of each new ses­sion in an inter­est­ing way that involves play­er par­tic­i­pa­tion. Second, it allows play­ers to com­ment on the actions and ideas of their own char­ac­ters and oth­ers’ char­ac­ters out­side of the game prop­er. Third, it allows me to cre­ate an inter­est­ing tale of intrigue that spans over thir­ty years. Oh yeah, did you real­ly think that I would stop myself at just hand­ing out names and occu­pa­tions? I intend to slow­ly give them more infor­ma­tion about their “mod­ern” char­ac­ters that starts to con­nect in odd ways with things that are hap­pen­ing in the “actu­al” cam­paign. Now admit­ted­ly, this is risky as hell, but if I can keep my wits about me it very well might be one of the coolest things I’ve ever done in a game.

It THEN occurred to me that I could val­i­date the ESPs given the lens through which the cam­paign is being told; specif­i­cal­ly, if the char­ac­ters that the play­ers are play­ing in the “mod­ern” time-period are experts on the “heroes” of the tale, then they can occa­sion­al­ly inter­rupt the read­ing with their own insights into the story. Perhaps that’s why our intre­pid schol­ar is read­ing his account to these peo­ple first; so that they can offer cor­rec­tions or chal­lenge his con­clu­sions. For instance, if an ESP is used to alter a character’s attack roll, then I, the DM play­ing this “schol­ar,” has got­ten some­thing wrong. One of these other noble­men or women (play­ers) will step in and say, “No, that doesn’t sound like some­thing Cyril would do. In fact, I have heard about this bat­tle; I know for a fact that he burnt out the man’s brain with a sin­gle spell. I remem­ber that detail quite clear­ly.” And I, the hum­ble schol­ar, will acqui­esce. If it’s a story mod­i­fy­ing ESP, then it is an excit­ed addi­tion: “And of course, this is when the Queen of Adders could not find it in her­self to kill Tolderoy’s broth­er after all, because Tolderoy had awak­ened the last spark of love that her fetid heart could muster.” At which point I, the schol­ar, would say, “That’s a roman­ti­cized ver­sion, but close. The Queen had a moment of inde­ci­sion, and final­ly acted to slay the broth­er, since he was, after all, steal­ing affec­tions that were meant the Queen.”

I think that these sto­ry­telling tech­niques will be fun on their own, but will also serve to illus­trate just how tan­gled and com­pli­cat­ed Threshingfall real­ly is. I don’t think that these meth­ods would work with a set­ting that was larg­er and less con­tained, nor in a cam­paign that wasn’t built to facil­i­tate politically-charged sto­ries.

In Conclusion

I’ve cov­ered quite a bit in this arti­cle, and, as always, I’d love to hear your opin­ions on the tech­niques that I pre­sent­ed and the ideas I’ve got to make this cam­paign unlike any other! You’re also total­ly wel­come to steal any of these things, so long as you give me cred­it when you post them any­where pub­lic, online or off. Well, until next week, ciao!

On the Plurality of Worlds

One of the great things about the human imag­i­na­tion is that, as well as com­ing up with ideas for use in the real world or con­jur­ing up fic­tional ele­ments (such as a child’s imag­i­nary friend), imag­i­na­tion can cre­ate an entire uni­verse or world, straight out of whole cloth.

This power is some­thing I have always admired in oth­ers and cher­ished in myself.  Imagination ren­ders us into gods, with uni­verses blos­som­ing from empty fir­ma­ment to spread and grow on paper, or film, to take root in the mind of oth­ers.  This per­sonal Genesis fas­ci­nates me, and pro­vides end­less enjoy­ment.  Some like to tell sto­ries, as do I, but I am not con­tent with this alone.  I like to build worlds.  Worlds with all the detail of Tolkien’s, oft-imitated, never-equaled, land­scape of sword­play and sor­cery that has become the tem­plate for almost every other fan­tas­tic fic­tion since, the ‘stan­dard fan­tasy set­ting’.

I also like to explore oth­ers’ worlds, such that the back-story of a game alone can inter­est me enough to pur­chase it.  Examples of this include games like Genesis Rising and Demigod.
Video games have a unique capa­bil­ity in what I will here­after refer to as “world build­ing”.  With this new medium, all the visu­als, sto­ries, and voices of your world are on screen.  Now cin­ema, too, can pro­duce these, but the inter­ac­tiv­ity of games allows the player to ‘live,’ how­ever briefly, in these worlds, to step into the armored greaves or mag­netic space boots of the char­ac­ters onscreen.

One per­sis­tent trend in games con­tin­ues to bother me.  This trend is what I call the ‘codex’ method of back­ground.

For exam­ple Dragon Age, while an excel­lent game, con­tains a ‘codex*’, lit­er­ally referred to as such: An in-game ency­clo­pe­dia of the world’s char­ac­ter and back­ground.

Other exam­ples include Mass Effect, small sec­tions of Dead Space, Dungeon Siege 2, any instance of a “time­line” sec­tion, a la Halo Wars or Chrome Hounds, Alien vs. Predator: Extinction, and Metroid Prime.  This last one is a par­tic­u­larly egre­gious exam­ple, as to acquire any infor­ma­tion, the player must scan a liv­ing enemy, stand­ing there like bait.  This is poor immer­sion.  Background should not be bor­ing text.  Background should be inte­grated into the game­play both in the story/plot and the mechan­ics and art, not tacked on as a user man­ual (see Homeworld).  Encyclopedic descrip­tions of set­ting should have ended with text-based adven­ture games.  When the tech exists to ren­der things like Cronos in God of War 3, the hair of a brute sol­dier in Halo, or, say, this scene from Drakengard 2.  What excuse is there for rely­ing on sim­ple text to con­vey any detail of the scene or nar­ra­tive of the story?  This is related to long expo­si­tional rants in movies and huge explana­tory blocks in nov­els.

If done incor­rectly, such details remind me that, while inter­est­ing, this world I inhabit is mine. Mine to save, and mine to influ­ence.  Games, even the good ones, inad­ver­tently solid­ify you or your char­ac­ter as the pri­mary mover and shaker in the game. Fable 1 & 2 are offend­ers here, cast­ing some ran­dom farm boy/street urchin as the world’s main agent of change. Sometimes this makes sense, such as in sequels, when your char­ac­ter has gained con­sid­er­able sta­tus from sav­ing the world or Fable 3, where you play as the crown prince of a large sov­er­eign nation. Such a per­son should have def­i­nite weight on the world stage.

However, some­times it is that much more engag­ing to real­ize that the world is filled with other names. Names that also affect the world, names that may be big­ger than you are. BioShock does this well (yes, I too, have been bit­ten by the BioShock bug).  Through the game’s grisly scenery and the scat­tered audio logs, the player’s dis­cov­er­ies begin to shed light on Rapture’s last days. There are also lit­tle asides, such as the machine that rewards you for select­ing Big Daddy (if you have played the game through to the end, you will know what I am refer­ring to). This is not so much back­story, how­ever, as it is plot.  It is action that involves you, and that you have a role in, how­ever small.  Plot is impor­tant, no doubt, but it is not the sub­ject of this dia­tribe, rant, or what-have-you.

Integration of the world-building woven into story, as it should be, is real­ized in the Lord of the Rings. I dis­cover Middle-Earth through the actions of the char­ac­ters, the places they visit, and the peo­ple they meet. Where you first learn the his­tory of Middle-Earth is where you should, inte­grated into the main events within the story and plot.  Tolkien skill­fully makes allu­sions to the fic­tional past, as well as present asides that only serve to enrich the set­ting with detail and a sense of con­sis­tency (I hes­i­tate to use the word ‘real­ism’ in this case).

Although Dragon Age: Origins failed by using the “Codex” approach, as did Mass Effect, both of these sto­ries also offered steps in the right direc­tion. In Dragon Age: Origins, this step is taken by Leliana, a red-headed tale-weaving rogue and bard, whose tales taught you a lot about Ferelden, the set­ting of this game (although it should be noted, only one of mul­ti­ple coun­tries in the larger world of the Dragon Age series). “I love sto­ries far too much to keep them to myself,” she says, and through lengthy con­ver­sa­tions, you can dis­cover a bit more about Ferelden’s his­tory, as well as the his­tor­i­cal moti­va­tions and expla­na­tions of con­tin­u­ing events. The past influ­enc­ing the present, just like in our world. That is the cor­rect way to inject such details.

While some games would not be helped or hin­dered by all this addi­tional back-story or “fluff,” I think that some­times a game needs not just char­ac­ters, but a world for them to inhabit. This is opposed to what seems to be the stan­dard fare, where a world is built around and specif­i­cally for a char­ac­ter.

Instead, world build­ing requires set­tings and “fluff’ beyond the present story, a world that allows for mul­ti­ple tales, and in the best cases, demands that more be told. The eas­i­est exam­ple is to cre­ate a past, to detail a world’s his­tory, to show how the past leads up to the present, but this is only a small part of the suc­cess­ful exe­cu­tion. As I men­tioned above, good world build­ing demands that sto­ries go on with­out the char­ac­ters, whether these other sto­ries occur before, after, or pos­si­bly dur­ing the story that is being told now. Action should be occur­ring both on and off the screen, with mul­ti­ple events hap­pen­ing simul­ta­ne­ously. Sometimes it is reward­ing to see these ele­ments shift and react in response to the player’s actions, other times it is awe-inspiring when you are reminded that you rep­re­sent but one man/woman/alien in a much larger world.

Mass Effect 2 has a good exam­ple of this: on Illium, an alien city, you will often hear news­reels detail­ing polit­i­cal events, cul­tural exhibits, and eco­nomic trends.  Occasionally, Commander Shepard’s (the char­ac­ter you con­trol through­out the series) actions will be men­tioned, and the choices he/she makes will be reflected in the greater nar­ra­tive of the world. Other times, this fea­ture is used to cre­ate fore­shad­ow­ing, hint­ing at mis­sions yet to come. These asides, while often humor­ous, remind you of the vast­ness of the galaxy, a galaxy, you, the player, must save.

Mass Effect 2 has another great exam­ple of behind-the-scenes expo­sure. On the planet Tuchanka, in a dark bunker, you find two native Krogan. They have a con­ver­sa­tion that is a won­der­ful insight into their lives, lives that Shepard has no con­trol over, but are a part of his/her world nonethe­less. Originally, I was going to try to find a video of this, but it seems YouTube does not have videos of this speci­fic con­ver­sa­tion, so I will try to sum­ma­rize it as best I can.

All right, these aliens, the Krogan, are infected with a dis­ease that makes all but one out of every 1,000 babies still­born. The Krogan are a war­like race that spends its days in inter­tribal feuds. The females have their own sep­a­rate neu­tral clans that house chil­dren born to fathers from many groups. This way, rival clans will not seek them out and kill oth­ers’ heirs, as any one of the chil­dren could eas­ily be theirs as well.

When you enter the area, two of these Krogan are talk­ing, and one men­tions that when vis­ited by the females, he saw a child he believed to be his own. The sec­ond con­grat­u­lates the other, but the first Krogan focuses on his feel­ings for the son he is not allowed to raise, that he will not get to watch the whelp grow.

This is a won­drous insight into ‘some ran­dom Krogan’s daily life’. It’s a rather heart­felt exam­ple that serves to drive home a large thread of the Mass Effect story, but the aside in of itself is a won­der­ful reminder of ‘the world beyond’ or ‘the action off-screen’.

Done cor­rectly, such world build­ing can instill a very organic and dynamic soul into a care­fully crafted world, a world that can, and should, tell dozens of sto­ries as time goes on. Done poorly, it can reduce a won­der­fully detailed land to ency­clo­pe­dic bore­dom. At worst, such minu­tiae can seem to be noth­ing more than smoke and mir­rors, extra­ne­ous details that are waved before the player in the hope that poor story craft­ing will be ignored.

Go forth and forge worlds, fel­low geeks!

–

*In case you were inter­ested, codex is an Aztec word. The Aztecs kept long detailed books, often vibrantly illus­trated, bound together with rope. The codices (the plu­ral form) were metic­u­lously detailed guides and man­u­als on par­tic­u­lar sub­jects. These sub­jects ranged from a sin­gle reli­gious rit­ual, long cre­ation myths, texts on mil­i­tary strat­egy, lessons from a promi­nent politician’s career, and, a favorite it seems, “Why you should never mess with a pow­er­ful empire that prac­tices human sac­ri­fice”, where the power and might of the Aztecs was put on all gory dis­play. Particular detail was given over to the many hor­rid ways that the priests would dis­mem­ber you. Isn’t his­tory fun?

Going the Distance

In one of my previous posts, I intro­duced the idea of dis­tance. I haven’t stopped refin­ing my under­stand­ing of the con­cept since then, and so today I’m going to share some of my thoughts regard­ing its ram­i­fi­ca­tions and inves­ti­gate some incred­i­ble artis­tic pos­si­bil­i­ties that gaming’s nat­u­rally low level of dis­tance opens up.

To that end, I am going to begin by iden­ti­fy­ing an impor­tant func­tion of art that is often simul­ta­ne­ously a sig­ni­fier of qual­ity art: the cri­tique of struc­tures and styles of thought, and the offer­ing of a fun­da­men­tally dif­fer­ent per­spec­tive. I am going to stand on the back of my post on art way back when, as well; read it if you haven’t already, because I think it is quite good, and I see no rea­son to trek back over the path that I've already laid down.

Art That Burns Down Your House

Art is a slip­pery thing, and its traits are noto­ri­ously dif­fi­cult to define, but what I have to say here shouldn’t be too con­tro­ver­sial. I sug­gest that most fan­tas­tic art causes us to revise our knowl­edge of the world, as opposed to just telling us what we already know. In other words, good art is rev­e­la­tory, if not to us then rec­og­niz­ably rev­e­la­tory to an other. Art tends to smudge con­tem­po­rary bound­aries, and art often plays a part in the re-drawing of bound­ary lines. Dickens chal­lenged aspects of indus­trial London’s social struc­ture; Van Gogh painted a world of such vibrancy that changed the way we view starry nights; any poet worth any­thing offers star­tling insights about the nature of an expe­ri­ence, draw­ing con­nec­tions so per­fect and sub­tle that we can’t help but see and feel dif­fer­ently about his or her sub­ject.

An artist, and an artist’s work, must often destroy some­thing in order to offer a new view, or the expe­ri­ence, when it becomes art, must involve a revi­sion of one’s per­spec­tive. The “vic­tim” can be as sim­ple as genre con­ven­tion, or as com­plex as a mas­sive social and cul­tural assump­tion about the state of the world, but gen­er­ally speak­ing good art will crack a viewer’s under­stand­ing of the world, even if just a lit­tle and just to make space for some new, minor insight. Good art changes the way we view the world.

A piece of art need not engage with social issues or time­less human strug­gles in order to reveal. A great deal of poetry does just fine by exam­in­ing a sin­gle, intense expe­ri­ence. In fact, the video game medium, like poetry, is uniquely capa­ble of ren­der­ing intense indi­vid­ual expe­ri­ences. Where video games most clearly diverge from poetry is in “reader agency,” and in ideal length. Poetry shares insight; the author takes the reader by the hand and inves­ti­gates a sin­gle (or small series) of thoughts and images, but it is ulti­mately one, pre-determined path. The reader does not have agency, even though the reader’s expe­ri­ence of the poem will be unique. Video games (as they exist now, due to both indus­try and styl­is­tic expec­ta­tions) are more suited for length­ier inves­ti­ga­tions of broad expe­ri­ence, sim­i­lar to what one would find in a novel, and yet the focus on a sin­gle avatar char­ac­ter resem­bles the merg­ing of “author” and “reader” that occurs in poetry. This is par­tially because agency has a lot of impor­tance in sto­ries that fea­ture char­ac­ter devel­op­ment, and giv­ing that agency to the player can be an incred­i­bly pow­er­ful expe­ri­ence.

However, as I noted before, not all games have such lofty aspi­ra­tions, and they don’t need to. For instance, the inter­ac­tive expe­ri­ence found in Guitar Hero is enough to make the player feel a lit­tle bit like a rock god; its a huge por­tion of the game’s appeal, dis­cov­er­ing that you’ve got bits of Clapton or Hendrix in you, then caper­ing about and show­ing off in front of friends. Guitar Hero offers lit­tle nar­ra­tive trap­pings; any nar­ra­tive is mostly pro­vided by the player, or by the social con­text in which the game is being played. But what is there is enough to place the player in the shoes of a gui­tar player on stage. Is it enough to spur a revi­sion of per­spec­tive? I sus­pect yes for some, no for oth­ers. Art isn’t nec­es­sar­ily uni­ver­sal.

World-view and Art

To focus this dis­cus­sion a lit­tle more closely on the sub­ject of video games, it is worth address­ing what makes video game art dif­fer­ent from any other form of art. The cur­rent state of video games means that the tar­get demo­graphic are young American or Japanese indi­vid­u­als (mostly American males on our side of things; Japanese mar­ket is a little bit more complex), at least for the sort of high-profile, A-list games, which, inci­den­tally, is where most of the devel­op­ment dol­lars for push­ing the bound­aries of the medium are likely to be found. This is not to say that star­tling games-as-art won’t be found else­where; in fact, one could make an argu­ment for cer­tain Indie games as some of the most influ­en­tial and star­tling exam­ples of games-as-art in the last few years, but gen­er­ally speak­ing those games have bud­getary lim­its that form an insur­mount­able wall in cer­tain areas of devel­op­ment.

What this means is that the most high-profile games that have the most poten­tial of reach­ing the sta­tus of being good art are also intended to be appeal­ing to the young American male demo­graphic (so they can sell, so the game pub­lisher gets a good return on their huge invest­ment), and the pri­or­i­ties of those pur­suits are some­times mutu­ally exclu­sive. This means that cer­tain risks are down-right dan­ger­ous for pub­lish­ers, and that cer­tain per­spec­tives and tropes within game gen­res become vir­tu­ally uni­ver­sal.

This can be prob­lem­atic for video games, since pre­sent­ing the same per­spec­tive over and over again can get stale, and can thus ham­per the qual­ity of the over­all expe­ri­ence a game can offer. Here’s an exam­ple: When was the last time you encoun­tered a first-person shooter that doesn’t place you in the shoes of an American or an American ally? Now, most FPS games are made in America (I will just ride on the coat-tails of Extra Credits here), so there’s good rea­son why game devel­op­ers make their pro­tag­o­nists fit that mold. But pre­sent­ing the pro­to­typ­i­cal everyman/hot-blooded-American tough guy with a heart of gold/granite with­out fail means that the expe­ri­ence has become a lit­tle stale.

I’d like you to play a quick game of pre­tend with me, so bear with me and with­hold judg­ment. The American FPS pro­tag­o­nist is a tried-and-true model, so let’s do our best to invert it; what if an FPS had you play as an insur­rec­tion­ist fight­ing the American or pseudo-American forces? This could make for some inter­est­ing art. Imagine intense sce­nes of war­fare, punc­tu­ated with the ills that a large occu­py­ing force nat­u­rally gen­er­ates. Homefront made an attempt at work­ing in sim­i­lar themes, and I have no idea how suc­cess­ful they were, but I think we can all agree that it’s a lit­tle strange that the insur­rec­tion­ists in their story are Americans.

Let’s take this one step fur­ther: what if an FPS fea­tured an honest-to-god Muslim insur­rec­tion­ist? What if the game tried its best to real­is­ti­cally por­tray the effect of an American occu­pa­tion on Iraq? I’m going to ignore the fact that a polit­i­cal storm straight out of hell would con­sume this project and, in all prob­a­bil­ity, result in actual vio­lence, and focus only on the “game” here; the real­ity of the mar­ket and the soci­ety isn’t exactly what I’m focus­ing on here, though it is impor­tant to the dis­cus­sion. Such a game need not take sides, nor actu­ally sup­port vio­lence, but rather seek to human­ize inno­cents and the “enemy” side of the con­flict. The impor­tant part of such a game would be to recast cer­tain arche­types and char­ac­ters, caus­ing us to con­sider the assump­tions we have about such char­ac­ters, and thus about such peo­ple, even if our con­clu­sions are the same. That’s what good nar­ra­tive art does. Of course, this is an extreme exam­ple, and there’s a great spec­trum of other expe­ri­ences the player can have between the Terrorist game and the FPS games of today.

A game need not even be a first-party title or have a high bud­get to encour­age this recon­sid­er­a­tion (though it can cer­tainly help). The game Spent is a phe­nom­e­nal exam­ple of a sim­ple game that pro­duces empa­thy and under­stand­ing of a life that is some­what alien to most middle-class Americans. Regardless of soci­o­log­i­cal out­comes, such a game reveals a dif­fer­ent sort of life to the player, and that alone can make it a wor­thy expe­ri­ence.

On a side note that is par­tially related, one issue that video games rarely (never?) tackle is reli­gion, or if they do it is through a sur­ro­gate, non-existent faith. It’s a strange deci­sion, espe­cially since a character’s nation­al­ity is hardly ever up for debate and in some cases actu­ally implies faith. For instance, it is a fact that every con­flict in the Middle East right now, and every con­flict por­trayed in games, has reli­gious over-tones, but games have failed to engage with it, prob­a­bly because it is a risky endeavor. I under­stand, but would also note that some risks are worth tak­ing.

In Conclusion

I have just scratched the sur­face of inves­ti­gat­ing how the rev­e­la­tory power of art dif­fers or is the same in video games. I’d love to hear your opin­ions on what I have writ­ten here (and I’m sure you’ve got some, some of it’s a lit­tle volatile), and am espe­cially inter­ested in fur­ther sug­ges­tions along the same lines. What big themes do you think are absent in video games today, and what themes are well-represented? Why do you think that is?

Novelty and Mastery

So, a while back I said I was going to write a three-part series on Dragon Age II and things like enti­tle­ment, but as I’ve repeat­edly tried to draft said arti­cles, I’ve real­ized that they mostly amount to me whin­ing a bunch.  So, very briefly, here is a sum­mary of the salient points I was going to make:

1. Gamers: if you want games to be art, don’t com­plain when devel­op­ers do things you don’t expect them to do.  It’s only not very good art that only caters to what you want and never attempts to expand your hori­zons.  If, how­ever, you only want games to be enter­tain­ment, then, you know.  Carry on.

2. Gamers: stop whin­ing all the damn time.  Seriously.  You sound like chil­dren.  Remember the stat that the aver­age gamer is 33?  No one famil­iar with the aver­age forum post is likely to believe that sta­tis­tic.

3. Companies (I’m look­ing at you, EA): while we under­stand you have to make money in order to make games, don’t turn out half-finished games hop­ing to pull a fast one.  You don’t hurt us, mind, but you do hurt your­selves and your fran­chises.  And you also look like jerks.

So, with those points said, let’s move on to what I really want to talk about now: the con­cept of inno­va­tion, pri­mar­ily inspired by Portal 2.

The Catalyst

Last week I finally got around to replay­ing Portal 2, and for the sake of this arti­cle, I am going to take it as read that the game is very, very, very good, both as a puz­zle game and as art.  I’m pretty sure this is an uncon­tro­ver­sial state­ment, but if you hap­pen to dis­agree, com­ment below and I’ll be happy to dis­cuss the point– I’m not going to waste a lot of time preach­ing to the choir up here in the main arti­cle, though.

So, upon fin­ish­ing Portal 2, as I began to think about what it was that made the game so great, I real­ized some­thing: the game, for all its bril­liance, seems to do rel­a­tively lit­tle to inno­vate in the form.

It is far from stag­nant, but it gen­er­ally sticks to the tried-and-true for­mat Valve has used for sev­eral games now: strictly first-person, silent pro­tag­o­nist, a “less is more” approach to plot, no (or at least very few) real cutsce­nes, and a prodi­gious amount of detail.  Further, while there are sev­eral novel mechan­ics not present in Portal 1, most of these come from an exist­ing inde­pen­dent game whose devel­op­ers were absorbed into the stu­dio.  (This was true of the base mechan­ics of the first game, too).

In short, the game doesn’t really seem to do all that much that is new, yet it’s nearly-universally regarded as bril­liant.  This seems at odds with the way we usu­ally talk about inno­va­tion as being a nec­es­sary part of a good game.  Games which do not bring any­thing new to the table are “stale,” or “tired,” we say.  We desire “fresh,” “new,” and “novel” con­cepts.

This seems, then, to raise a few prob­lems.

1. If games need to do new things in order to be artis­ti­cally worth­while, how can we under­stand games like Portal 2 to really be good?

2. If games must do new things in order to be artis­ti­cally worth­while, does this mean that a game’s artis­tic value is entirely depen­dent on its posi­tion in time?  Does the same game become bet­ter or worse entirely because of its con­text, or is there any­thing we can under­stand to be purely objec­tive about a game’s qual­ity?

In other words, what is it to inno­vate?

This is obvi­ously a pretty big ques­tion, and I’m hardly going to be able to deal with every piece and sub­tlety it deserves.  Further, it has to do with a lot more than just video games, and as such, much of this post will be pretty applic­a­ble to any artis­tic medium.  But I think that there is a quick dis­tinc­tion we can make which will help us begin to answer these ques­tions.

This dis­tinc­tion is that between what I will call inno­vat­ing for­ward ver­sus inno­vat­ing upward.  Or, in slightly more palat­able terms, it is the dif­fer­ence between nov­elty and mas­tery.

(As usual, it is impor­tant to note that this is not a hard dichotomy– many games and other works of art are very good at inno­vat­ing in both direc­tions, though some def­i­nitely prefer to empha­size one over the other.)

Novelty, or Innovating Forward

Strictly speak­ing, this is prob­a­bly what the word “inno­va­tion” really means.  To aim for nov­elty in a work of art is to aim for new ideas, ideas which have not been done before, to “think out of the box.”  This, I think, is what is usu­ally meant by “inno­va­tion.”  These new ideas can be tech­no­log­i­cal advances, advances in form, or any other kind of push for­ward.

Novelty is about break­ing the rules, and allow­ing the artist and observer to expe­ri­ence new things which were not pre­vi­ously con­sid­ered options in art.  Many of the artists, com­posers, and writ­ers we revere most are known at least pri­mar­ily for their con­tri­bu­tions to nov­elty.  Good works which aim at nov­elty aim to push bound­aries, and great works of nov­elty shat­ter the exist­ing rules and par­a­digms, all the while mak­ing us won­der why we ever imposed such strin­gent rules in the past.  Novelty is impor­tant because it pre­vents art from becom­ing stale or stag­nant, and it is gen­er­ally excit­ing, and fre­quently icon­o­clas­tic.

The trou­ble with focus­ing on nov­elty, of course, is the risk.  New ideas are untested, and while some are bril­liant advances, oth­ers are dead-ends.  Further, even if an artist does cre­ate a new idea which works very well, its first few incar­na­tions are likely to be halt­ing and awk­ward, as the artist strug­gles to come to grips with the ram­i­fi­ca­tions of the idea.  Thus, while most of the great works of nov­elty are valu­able in and of them­selves, (Beethoven’s Symphony No. 5 and Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai, though quite novel, hardly sac­ri­fice qual­ity to that end), oth­ers are pri­mar­ily mem­o­rable for their effects on the out­side world, rather than their own intrin­sic qual­ity.  As an anal­ogy, we revere the Wright Brothers not for mak­ing a par­tic­u­larly good air­plane, but for the act of mak­ing an air­plane at all.  As air­planes go, the Wright Flyer is pretty lousy.

Novelty is fre­quently empha­sized in game devel­op­ment, and with good rea­son.  As we are still very much in the ado­les­cence of gam­ing as an artis­tic medium, there are a lot of fun­da­men­tal ideas we still need to sort out.  We are barely learn­ing how to com­mu­ni­cate sto­ries well in the medium of video games, and are only at the very out­er­most edge of the sorts of won­der­ful ways this medium can be uti­lized for artis­tic expres­sion.  As such, most of what we need are good, new ideas.

Also, let’s not get too full of our­selves, it’s a lot eas­ier to sell a game with a slo­gan like “new and excit­ing com­bat mechan­ics like you’ve never seen,” than “com­bat mechan­ics that are exactly the same as the last sev­eral incar­na­tions of the series, but slightly pol­ished.”

The dif­fi­culty we face with con­stantly empha­siz­ing nov­elty is that we fre­quently end up with games that are full of a lot of good ideas, but aren’t ter­ri­bly well-executed.  I have played a lot of games lately (L.A. Noire, Metro 2033, Alan Wake) which, though full of great new ideas, fail to hold together when viewed as a coher­ent whole.  The new ideas them­selves often need much more atten­tion, or are, in some cases, so novel and inno­v­a­tive that the artists who had the ideas have no idea how best to employ them.  We end up with a lot of games that are inter­est­ing as mile­stones to mark the begin­nings of ideas, but rel­a­tively few games that will stand the test of time as truly worth­while expe­ri­ences out­side of their imme­di­ate con­text.

The dark side of nov­elty, of course, is that it’s addic­tive.  It’s fun and excit­ing to break the rules, and this leads to the cre­ation of nov­elty for its own sake in art.  That’s the sort of behav­ior that results in ran­dom, non­sen­si­cal “per­for­mance art” pieces that serve lit­tle pur­pose beyond sim­ply being odd or novel (note - I'm not saying every performance is nonsensical!).  So far as I know, no one has sat, naked and cross-legged, in the mid­dle of Times Square with a baked potato bal­anced on his head while a woman plays “Scotland the Brave” over and over again on an ill-tuned bag­pipe for three straight hours.  That would cer­tainly be novel.  But it would prob­a­bly not be ter­ri­bly worth­while if there was no thought behind it.

That, of course, is an extreme exam­ple, but the point holds in games, too.  It is impor­tant to remem­ber that nov­elty is not an end-in-itself.  When one exper­i­ments with new ideas, the goal is to find bet­ter ways to com­mu­ni­cate ideas or cre­ate expe­ri­ences.  The goal of think­ing out­side the box is to allow your­self to see things from a dif­fer­ent per­spec­tive, thereby enabling you to notice details or con­cepts you might have missed.  It’s not that there is some­thing inher­ently more valu­able about the out­side of the box.

In this way, nov­elty is forward-moving inno­va­tion– it takes the medium into new and inter­est­ing places, and opens up new ways of expe­ri­enc­ing games.

Mastery, or Innovating Upward

Johann Sebastian Bach is not a com­poser gen­er­ally asso­ci­ated with inno­va­tion or nov­elty.  Bach did not really intro­duce new forms of music into the baro­que lex­i­con, nor did he sub­stan­tially change the types of instru­ments usu­ally used in baro­que music.  Towards the end of his life and after his death, he was regarded as being some­what old-fashioned when com­pared to the new and excit­ing “clas­si­cal” style.  Bach, in short, is not par­tic­u­larly famous for break­ing the rules.

What Bach did do is take the exist­ing rules and forms of baro­que music and use them to pro­duce most of the best exam­ples of that style of music in his­tory.  No one before or since has shown such utter mas­tery of the forms of baro­que music, and it is dif­fi­cult to imag­ine that any­one ever will.  Bach, then, did not break the rules or push music for­ward, as such.  Instead, he explored and unlocked the true poten­tial con­tained within the exist­ing ideas — pushed them upward to greater heights than they had yet seen.

I believe this should be under­stood as a kind of inno­va­tion, because while you would not say that Bach gen­er­ally did things that were novel, exactly, nei­ther could you say that he was stag­nat­ing the form.  He pushed music to great things, and stands pretty much undis­puted as one of the great­est com­posers of all time.

We value this brand of inno­va­tion because it allows us, gen­er­ally, to have deeper expe­ri­ences than those con­cerned purely with nov­elty.  Observing or inter­act­ing with a mas­ter­ful work of art may not always be as ini­tially excit­ing, but by choos­ing to worry less about how to break the rules or where to push the envelope for­ward, the artist can focus instead on cre­at­ing the deep­est, purest expe­ri­ence a given set of rules or con­ven­tions allows.  In other words, while it is def­i­nitely good that not all poetry needs to be in son­net form, the son­net can be used to pro­duce won­der­ful works of art.

Focusing too much on mas­tery is not with­out its draw­backs, how­ever.  It is a rel­a­tively short step to go from “obey­ing the rules of the son­net is a great way to write poetry” to “all poetry must be writ­ten in son­net form.”  If a medium or a cul­ture focuses too much on mas­tery with­out any room for nov­elty, it will even­tu­ally stag­nate.  After Bach, there were really only so many more things that could be done with his con­ven­tions.  It is rather unlikely any­one is going to write a bet­ter baro­que chorale.

Gaming, as I men­tioned before, does tend to focus on nov­elty over mas­tery, and I think that makes sense.  Many of the rules and con­ven­tions of gam­ing are so new and untested that it makes sense to keep try­ing on new ideas.  But it is nev­er­the­less help­ful to some­times take a step back from the arms race and sim­ply use the tools one has to pro­duce some­thing like a great work of art, and that’s the sort of game Portal 2 is.

Portal 2 isn’t per­fect.  For one, there are a few too many sweep­ing envi­ron­ments with lit­tle to do other than “look really hard for the one patch of con­crete you can por­tal to.”  (Though I think “there are too many pretty things” is a pretty good prob­lem to have.)  I don’t exactly mean to sug­gest that it is the apoth­e­o­sis of the cur­rent first per­son puz­zle genre, or that it ought to be under­stood as a Meaningful Game (though I think it maybe stands a bet­ter chance at that title than most).  That said, it is very hard to imag­ine what Valve could have done to make Portal 2 sub­stan­tially bet­ter.  For while it does not seem to push the medium for­ward that much, it cer­tainly shows mas­tery and inno­vates upward by using Valve’s con­ven­tions about as well as we’ve ever seen them used.

Upward mov­ing inno­va­tion, then, or mas­tery, seems to be the process of tak­ing pri­mar­ily exist­ing rules and cre­at­ing the best work of art one can out of that sys­tem.

Conclusion

As I said before, these are not hard, strictly-delineated cat­e­gories.  Most games that inno­vate do so in at least some of both ways, and many of the true greats in art simul­ta­ne­ously restruc­tured the way peo­ple viewed the medium and show­cased excel­lent exe­cu­tion of the new ideas they spawned.

So, I wish to con­clude with a few bul­let points.

First, that nov­elty is not an end-in-itself, that for­ward inno­va­tion must be done with pur­pose, and not just for kicks.

Second, that you should never be afraid to try out new ideas if you think there is any chance the new ideas will bet­ter serve your ends than the ones you’re com­fort­able with.  Gamers: remem­ber that you are not enti­tled to games remain­ing exactly the same, and never chang­ing the for­mu­las you like.  Developers should be free to try new ideas with­out fear­ing con­stant screech­ing of fan­boys at every change.

Third, that even as we strug­gle to push the medium of video games for­ward through the intro­duc­tion of novel ideas and con­stant for­ward inno­va­tion, occa­sion­ally it is good to take a step back, look at the tools we have cre­ated, and show­case the won­der­ful things we already know how to do.  Games like Portal 2 may not reshape the medium the way Doom or Super Mario Brothers or World of Warcraft did, but they do show­case the great things that artists can do with games, even as they help pave the way for the next great works of art.

–

Postscript:

I had intended to work in a link to this arti­cle, but the para­graph in which it was to reside has since been proven unwor­thy.  So, though it’s not imme­di­ately rel­e­vant to this topic, it’s about Portal 2, and it’s an inter­est­ing ques­tion.  The blog on which it was posted is also very much worth check­ing out– the author had some very inter­est­ing and intel­li­gent things to say about games, and I find it par­tic­u­larly inter­est­ing because he fre­quently talked about rac­ing games, a genre with which I have lit­tle expe­ri­ence.