Strategy Games and Theory

[M. J. Young]

Scott--

I don't think we agree on simulationism. Most of us here would say that the game you describe as "narrative" is almost certainly simulationist--it's about discovering a world and a story that someone else created. That can be and often is very immersive, but it does not need to be. Narrativists, as defined by the man who coined the term, are focused on creating their own story by posing moral/ethical/personal questions and then providing their own answers to these.

That is something which to date computer games have been unable to directly facilitate.

As long as I'm briefly defining terms, gamism is driven by the desire to prove yourself against the challenge, essentially a quest for glory, for doing better than you did last time, or better than the next guy, or better than anyone thought you would do. You can play gamist in a lose-lose situation like Call of Cthulu by holding out longer than anyone thought possible. It could be said to be about showing off. It doesn't require that you actually want, expect, or plan to win--only that you play for the fun of doing well.

I hope that helps.

--M. J. Young

[contracycle]

Wyldkard, I saw some anti-gamist stuff in some of your previous threads and thought then that you were missing a trick.  You should exploit this valid play goal, although I am specifically using the forge sense of the term.  You may say the purpose is not "winning" but "experinecing", but those who are experiencing will experience the desire to win - because otherwise, as you mentioned, people come home dead, and there are all sorts of social and emotional ramifiactions.  What you should do is channel these energies into appropriate venues so that the contribute to the overall structure of the game proper rather than undermine it.

[F. Scott Banks]

Yeah, anti-gamist probably came from my short-order definition where I equated gamism to "powergaming".  And by powegaming, I mean playing with utter disregard for the full game experience (particularly the game experience of others) in order to "win".  

Gimme big sword, gimme loot, repeat.

Having reread the GNS articles, I have no problem with gamism as it's expressed here.  Playing to overcome a challenge is not only a valid goal, but pretty much the crux of videogames.

I think that the inherrent emotional attatchment players feel towards their characters is something we try to weave into the game.  Ravien pointed out a lot of gameplay possibilities by simply working child-rearing into an RPG.  Suddenly the focus shifts from "me" to "them" (actually, they're both "me", but because the game runs your kid until they reach the age of consent, it's easier...emotionally...to think of them as a seperate entitity).  We've definately looked into the possibilities of this unorthodox game mechanic and it's the depth of those possibilities that get us all tingly.

I don't think too many RPGs try to involve the player's emotions into the game.  There have been moments where there's an emotional reaction to what we see onscreen (Aerith...I'll never forget you), but not many games give you a choice to be genuinely good (as opposed to making descisions that are the opposite of "bad") and profit from that with emotional rewards.

When your kid wants to be a Mage because their daddy was one...now that's just keen.  When your kid wants to be a thief or a necromancer because mommy was a ranger and upholding the law keeps mommy from coming home...that's gotta sting a little.  If not emotionally, it's gotta be damn annoying to undo all the thievery and necromancy once you finally get to take the reigns.

How can I teach my kid to heal when they've spent all those years dissecting corpses for the foul humors within?  If they were really determined, then they may have a necromancer's familiar (a fetish) and that will corrupt any magic they try to wield.

So...emotionally or mechanically, we do have a reward system.  Maybe it's more subtle (or deeper...I'm not sure which end of the pool this swims at), but I can see that it is a network of rewards or penalties and that makes the game, "gamist".

But...like Mike said, that's not bad.

So...where do we get into strategy?  I guess this counts a little because it's planning ahead for a desired outcome, but I was thinking military descisions and things that your underlings might do behind your back or despite your explicit orders.

[Mike Holmes]

OK, I think we have a much better idea of what you're looking at here, now.

A quick note, we try to be egalitarian, and say that the Powergaming subset of Gamism is also valid, though perhaps a somewhat radical end of the RPG spectrum. Certainly this sort of play happens in TT RPGs as well. It does ignore some of the potential of the media, but that can probably be argued for any style of play. Narrativism, for example, could be said to be missing out on the challenge of play.

Simulationism is tricky, and hardly anyone agrees on what it is precisely. Given that it's not really all that relevant to the discussion here, I think we can leave it out. Instead we can talk about things like how much detail you want to get into.


So, to get back to the original question of the thread, it seems at this point to boil down to something like "How does strategy affect the differences or similarities (optimally) between the gamism style of powergaming, and other forms of gamism where the simulation elements are of higher priority?" Is that about right.

Note that you make a dichotomy between the Sims and Doom. Note that "Sims" is short for "Simulated Persons" or somesuch. To a large extent, the issue you're coming up against is that of Pawn Stance vs Actor Stance. In the first, you manipulate your character like a pawn in chess, only concerned about making the best moves, not at all (in the most extreme cases) with how plausible the move is. In the latter, you consider the plausibility of the move. In a CRPG, usually the idea is that the moves are so finite, that if you merely make the game a good simulation, that the best moves, tactically, will be the most plausible ones.

In fact, one problem of CRPGs in this regard is a problem with many TTRPGs, which is that the system doesn't consider huge areas of the human experience in terms of modeling something. Most prominently, they allow the player to be the conscience of the character. Which means that, since the player doesn't experience any real ramifications of their actions, the character can act very implausibly.

Before I go any farther down this track, I should point out that there are completely separate ways to approach this that will avoid these problems altogether. What I have below is the method neccessary to "heal" the rift between the sorts of gamers you seek to reconcile. But, for example, some games promote author stance - wherein you move your character like a pawn, but then come up with a plausible reason for the move. This has tons of advantages, namely that you now have the player on your side in ensuring that the moves are plausible. The problem with Actor Stance in this regard is that the player can assume that problems with the simulation are part of the "physics" of the world, and do implausible things because the engine lets them.

But this is all somewhat a tangent. How do you allow Actor Stance to follow the plausible? Or force Pawn stance to look plausible?

Well, first, you have to model in ramifications to the character as ramifications for the player. The one that does exist in most of these models is that if your character does something tactically unsound he may end up dead. This is fine, generally, because it does make the player play the character with plausible tactics (as long as the tactical engine itself is plausible).

But it has some very large limitations In most games dead means, at worst, a setback. In Final Fantasy, for example, only a Total Party Kill means any real setback, otherwise character "death" means a small loss of resources (in fact, a laughably small loss). Some games are harsher about this - the "Rouglike" games, in fact, try to ensure that a dead character stays dead. No resets for them. Interestingly, however, there are very simple hacks that get around this, and very few people actually play with the ultimate price solution. This means two things - first, death isn't really an impediment to anything, and second, players don't want death to be an impediment. The fact that the games are how they are is a response to players wanting death not to derail their games.

This tells us that we should not put death in as a "penalty" condition to start. There are many other ways to penalize players, and death needn't be one of them. I'm not just talking about death substitutes, either - yeah sometimes if the setting is right, it's fun to have death mean teleporting back to base to start over again in a new clone or something. But, again, that's not really effective as a deterrent, and further people see it as a crock. Why not instead have realistic penalties - and ones that last permenantly? Actually, the loss of resources that death entails in FF is actually in many ways more interesting than the problems of death (well, if the resources were actually problematic in FF).

The real problem with death as the penalty mechanism is that you have to make all bad decisions result in potential death to make them stick. For example, why don't we steal from Lord Brittish in Ultima? Anyone? Because his guards are the most kickass monsters in the game, right? Because, unless you can win, you'll die in the attempt.

And herin lies another problem - the character is only limited to the extent that they can be killed by something. If the game allows powering up (and what CRPG doesn't), then eventually the character becomes immune to the repercussions of implausible actions. So, precisely at the point where the characters can handle Lord Brittish's guards, they kill them. No consideration about the guard's families, or the morality of killing them - no, they're standing in front of more resources that will make us strong enough to win the game. So they have to die.

The solution to this is all very simple. Why don't the Sims kill each other? Interestingly, it's not because the system makes it hard to do - I think they can and do murder each other occassionally (I could be wrong there). But it's either because they're just not programmed with that possible behavior - which isn't valid because you can't do that in a TTRPG and it's unrealisitcally limiting anyhow - it's because the sim has no incentive to kill the person off. In fact, in most cases they have some counterincentive.

It's not enough simply to fail to put rewards behind implausible acts. That is, not putting treasure behind Lord Brittish's guards isn't enough. It's entirely plausible that guards would guard something, so you can't avoid this sort of thing plausibly. No, you have to take a positive step in incentivizing the right acts.

Why is it that people do not rob banks? I mean, everyone wants more money, and as the man said, "That's where they keep the money." So why do we go to work when we could rob banks. Is it because we might get killed? Well, yes, there's that possibility, but in reality very few people who rob banks are killed in the process. Is it because we might go to jail? OK, now we're getting closer, but still, not quite right. Second degree murders are very common in comparison to first degree murders, because the person in question doesn't consider the ramifications at the moment of the act. No, generally punishement deterrents can't be counted on solely to stop crimes.

We don't rob banks because we're taught that it's wrong to do so.

There's an old joke that makes a different point than I intend, but it's still on topic here:

If murder were made legal tomorrow, would you go out killing people?
(And the punchline is "Corporations would.")

The thought here is that corporations don't have consciences. But people do. Again, the problem is that in a RPG, or CRPG that the player is substantively disconnected from the character. As such, he can basically act like a sociopath, acting without regard for what happens. After all, it's not real people that are getting robbed or killed, so the player can't be concerned.

Or can he?

The solution to the problem here is to penalize the player for going against the behaviors that the character would plausibly be canalized into. That is, the player only gets to act as superego - to use the Freudian model - and not the Id or ego. So, yes, you can have the character kill Lord Brittish's guards - and then the congnative dissonance of the act will destroy your character's ego, and the character will slip into sociopathy. See Unknown Armies for how to accomplish this mechanically.

But that's not enough. Alone this just puts the character back to where they were in all other CRPGs where the effectively sociopathic player (literally he cannot feel for the NPC in the game), runs the character. So we need something more. A simple way to go is the "Sorcerer" solution where the player can lose their character to madness. This has some of the same problems of death in this circumstance, however.

No, the real question is what's the downside to being a sociopath? The problem, and why most get caught eventually, is that being a sociopath means not having any social network to help you through things. What's missing in all CRPGs and most TTRPGs are the positive effects of having family and friends. Hero Quest makes this painfully obvious - the friendless just lose, lose, lose.

So the solution is to ensure that the character has something to lose by behaving implausibly. See, if the character actually has no friends, and no family, and no respect at all for his culture and society, then it's really not all that implausible to go robbing banks, is it? Give the character these things. In the sims, they actually hit on this somewhat - character happiness is based on their families happiness, etc. And I believe that this does translate into effectiveness as well (they work harder, make more money).

But this all assumes that there's some other goal out there - money, or power. This is the real crux of the problem. If the goal of the game is to just get more of these things, then no matter what, you'll always have the same problems with this sort of modeling. What one should have, instead, to meld these two forms, is a goal of character happiness.

- Spoiler Alert -
In the roguelike game Omega, you can power up to the point where you're killing gods, and eventually come to a point where you face the ultimate enemy, The Void (or something like that, it was represented by the Omega symbol, the end of all things). I spent a couple of months playing this game, and eventually I had killed everything many times over in the game, and the only challenge left was the Void. I faced it over and over and over, and could not defeat it. It seemed to have infinite hit points, and pretty much instantly killed you when you faced it. Nothing you could obtain changed that fact, and nothing that I ever discovered could destroy the Void.

I can't say that the Void is undefeatable. I thought about hacking the program to see what made it tick, to see if it had some weakness. But as it happens, along about the same time, I was playing up another character for kicks, and noticed that there was one thing that I'd never done. In town there was this "real estate" shop where you could buy a house. I had always assumed that if you did this that a door would appear on some building in town, and that you could go there and store stuff for free (I think you could pay to store stuff safely elsewhere). Thing is that it cost 50,000 GP to do so, which seemed exhorbitant - so I'd never done it. Well, just to see what would happen, I had the big character go back with his pile of loot, and buy a house.

Well, the game says that the character goes off to live in his home, retiring from adventure there to live happily ever after - the game actually ends. I think this is how you win at Omega. I think the lesson is that power has to have a goal, or it's pointless. And what better goal than living happily ever after.

- End Spoiler -

The point is that you need to give the character some real goals that don't involve power. Oh, sure, gaining power can be important in the pursuit of these goals - maybe you need 50,000 GP to get a retirement home. But the thing is that as long as these goals involve the character's values, and those values are set plausibly, then the character cannot behave implausibly on his way to his goals. What good is it to steal your father's gold, if in the end your goal is to buy you all a retirement place. Won't you alienate your father, and thus void the goal immediately? You can't even rob a bank, because your father would disown you if you did. No, if the character has values that are linked to the people he knows, then he suddenly has all the incentive in the world to act in a plausible fashion.

This, I believe, is the key to making "winning" and "plausibility" mesh together.

Mike

[F. Scott Banks]

http://www.darkshire.net/~jhkim/rpg/theory/fashions.html#cinematic

I probably shouldn't use the term "action" RPG.  Seems the proper term is "cinematic".

[simon_hibbs]

So...where do we get into strategy?  I guess this counts a little because it's planning ahead for a desired outcome, but I was thinking military descisions and things that your underlings might do behind your back or despite your explicit orders.

So strategy is the co-ordination of multiple actors in the game, whether those actors are controlled directly by players or are automated in some way?

Simon Hibbs