Long time lurker, first time poster....

The other day I was introducing gns to my best buddy, who learns better by example than by reading essays. I decided to use the example of my favorite adventure game, an old DOS title called Mission Critical, mainly becuase we'd both played it. Turns out it fits nicely....

Danger, science fiction ahead. You have been warned.

It starts with an opening cutscene that serves to explain why you're the only survivor on board the starship after a battle. First you must solve puzzles disguised in ship repairs necessary to save the damaged vessel. As I did this, I spent time walking through decks, looking at things, interacting with the computer....none of which is necessary to complete the game, but the myst style interface with rendered transitions and the attention to detail were an obvious draw. I'd say exploring the ship and it's logical design was to me the best part of the game. Of course, you have to figure out just what this 'mission' is, go down to some planet and complete it. The second half of the game is heavy on story, with decisions that influence the outcome but no opportuninty to stroll around. After some revelations about the political situation, it ends with a clever message about the rise of AI.

So, if you paid attention you should have caught each element in there, altohugh I won't pretend to know what I'm talking about if someone corrects me on misuse of something. You can see my lean toward situation-based exploration. So, did I get it right or am I committing a grievous sin by taking gns outside of the hobby for which it was designed?

Hi there,

And welcome to the Forge (posting, anyway)!

With all due provisos about computer games vs. role-playing games, aside, I think this one example is pretty on-target, as you've described it.

The key point that emerges, for me, is that each of the GNS-specific activities is segregated from the others. No wandering during the decision-making! No wandering or decision-making while you work the puzzles! That segregation is - again, as you've described it - clearly enforced by the design of the adventure ... and I think there's a reason for it.

Best,
Ron

As a computer game developer, I am finding GNS offers a pretty damn good framework for analysis of design decisions and their consequences in regard to player behavior. I'd be interested in discussing this topic further if anyone would like to do so.

Best,

Blake

Discuss away, mister. Frankly I think computer games could use a little more analysis of what people like and don't like, whether or not gns is the tool for every situation. Okay, here's another example, although a bad one....My friends have pushed, prodded, and generally nudged my to play chronotrigger. They think it's such a great game, but I can't stand squaresoft and it's clones becuase of the gamism. Sure, there's a great story to some of them....hiding...somewhere. But the incessant combat overrules everything else. Not that I don't like combat, I just don't like being forced into anything. Believe me, if you don't fight at every opportunity to level up, you're at a disadvantage later on. Another thing about chronotrigger is that it supposedly has a dynamic storyline (it does), but options have good and bad answers, and the followup question usually loops infinitely back to intself until you decide to go along, with the added unknown later punishment for wanting to do something different. All I wanted was to admire the scenery before I got whisked off to yet another stock location. I've played too many games where locations were locked off except when they were in your quest itinerary. Okay, end rant. Honestly, though, I'd like to hear more good examples of this. Maybe it'll wander off-topic for an indie rpg forum, but I have a way of making that happen in any situation.

Oh, something I forgot to add about Mission Critical-perhaps insignificant, but I liked it. During a short combat sequence (in a combat sim that's a game within a game) you have the option of bypassing your tactical weaknesses by putting the game on easy and the computer plays itself. It knows how to use your side's advantages and wins every time, so you can get on with the exploring. Or, if you want a tactical challenge, crank it up to hard. Now I can explain this in terms of satisfying different gns goals. Thanks, Ron!

My opinion is that the underlying principles of GNS retain their entire validity in making the transition from role playing games to computer games. As a model for the players' decision making at the instant of play, GNS works just fine for computer games.

The problem with applying GNS to current computer games is that there is no known way for a computer system to act upon Narrativist player decisions in a way that meaningfully supports the player's Narrativist goals. In games where the computer system is primarily a passive conduit or referee between human players, this is merely a design issue to be worked around, but in single player games it's the 500 pound gorilla standing in the way of "interactive (meaningful) storytelling" through game play. Or, in fact, any form of solitaire computer I(M)S whatsoever, whether or not game play is involved.

Issues that are directly comparable to GNS distinctions pervade computer game design and play. For example, a clear G versus N or S preference can be seen in players' decisions of whether to play with or without "cheat" codes or hint books.

Stories of literary merit can be and often are incorporated into computer games as pre-existing stories that are revealed through play. In a role playing game, this is considered railroading and hence not effective support for Narrativist player goals. (Branching doesn't help much, for reasons I can discuss in detail later if anyone's interested.) Or, computer games can provide blank slates on which the players create their own stories, by direct decision-making and/or through player filtering of random events. This allows Narrativist decisions to be acted upon and even Narrativist goals to be accomplished, but the player is doing most of the work, with the computer assisting primarily in defining the range of subject matter and presentating the results in a cool way. What's not possible at present is the kind of "Narratively active/reactive" world that a GM and/or group of players can provide to support each other's Narrativist goals in a role playing game.

I've recently, as a result of many insights gleaned from the Forge, come to regard this in an equivalent alternate light as a protagonism problem. Neither the embedded story nor the blank slate simulation adequately protagonizes the player-character. In fact, in different ways, they both inevitably deprotagonize. And players (especially new potential players not already habituated to the quirks of computer games) do perceive this as a problem, even though they don't have that term for expressing it. They wonder why Superman always dies when they play him in a computer game, but never in the comic books. When they "get stuck" they don't take up the challenge of analyzing what they did wrong and fixing the problem; they stop playing, the same way they'd stop watching if the picture froze during a TV show.

One interesting area of study is the application of illusionism in computer games to blunt the overt deprotagonization without attempting true interactive narrative. This is currently guided by quirky tradition. For example, racing games routinely implement a mechanism causing all cars behind the player's car to go a little faster, and all cars in front to go a little slower. This keeps the action "close" in a wider range of eventualities that it otherwise would be. (Without this rule, a less skilled player will be out of sight behind all the opponents most of the time, until a particular skill threshold is reached, at which point the opponents will no longer present any challenge at all.) Yet an action game in which the bad guys do a little less damage when the player-character is in bad shape, in an attempt to keep the player-character alive until a more appropriate climax point, would be considered heretical. And some things just haven't been tried. I don't see any technical reason why general-purpose Hero Points, or even SAs and SA-based modifiers, couldn't be implemented in a computer game. (The former could simply take the place of "lives," and omit the constant representation of the player character dying and then being restored. The latter would be more complex, but clearly doable.) Without being associated with true Narrativist story creation, these mechanisms would be a mere shadow of their role playing versions, but they'd be improvements nonetheless.

Please don't see this as a rant against computer games. I love computer games. I play computer games. I design and build computer games. But I do find it heartbreaking that so many computer games so often don't deliver what they promise, in ways that new potential players easily perceive but experienced players and designers are blind to. Does it matter that acting adventurous in a fantasy adventure game will get you not only killed but mocked for your stupidity by experienced players who already understand that the keys to success in an adventure game are caution and patience? Does it matter that computer games so often simultaneously reduce your effective options to a single action or two, while pretending that's not the case, resulting in the common experience of getting "stuck"? Does it matter that so many players find it more fun to play computer games with the game play disabled, by using cheat codes or hint books? As a habituated player myself, it doesn't bother me much. I love the games anyway. But as a designer it bothers me a lot.

My (literally) lifelong search for solutions has taken me to many strange and wonderful places -- including here.

- Walt

I'll have to reply more later. We're in crunch mode to get our SP version of Enigma: Rising Tide out the door in the next week. I think Walt has hit the nails right on the head, though - bing-bing-bing - and I certainly have had the same musings about the use of SA or Hero Point style mechanics for computer games. I look forward to picking this topic up again in a few days.

Best,

Blake

All I can say gentlemen is Amen!

After a gruelling marathon of (absolutlely beautifully rendered) monster ranching, in Final Fantasy Ten, I can tell you that if I never see another fricken Chimera Brain, it'll be too soon. The deprotagonization is thick on the ground. When you make a mistake and die, you learn to ranch more before moving on. Til you get to the point where you are always ahead of the curve, and never in any danger. Such that there is never any challenge from even a Gamist POV. Very much so, the game is rigged to give you a stimulus/response regimen designed to be more addictive than crack, yet less satisfying than...Palladium.

If there is anything that I as an individual can do to help in the crusade to make CRPGs more intelligent, please, let me know.

Mike

Monster ranching? Seems only time I've seen that, strictly speaking, was in DungeonKeeper...

I just wanted to offer an of a game which I thought had a really good stab at the explorationist stuff, and which carried it all out through clever Illusionism. This was Another World, written by a French group, several years old now, really just a platform game with a superb quantity of colour.

Basic plot: while tampering with a cyclotron, Our Hero is zapped through time and space and finds himself in a strange world, mostly black blue and beige.

Problem one: zapped through time and space, yes - to a safe place, no. You are underwater and may drown or be grabbed by tentacles from the bottom. Trial an error teaches: swim for the surface pronto.

On the surface, small inch-worm critters with a nasty poison hook are jump obstacles, and where it starts to get a bit cunning. This "level" takes place over three screens, and requires a long run to the right leaping over the leeches while, in the background, a black "lion" can be seen bounding from rock to rock. As you avoid the two screens of leeches, you arrive at the third screen to see the "lion" arrive and charge you. You have to run back through the three scenes you just covered, do a running jump onto a swinging vine, which causes the "lion" to miss its pounce and tumble. This gives a clear run to the right again, but the lion is too fast, and just as you are crossing the middle of the right-most screen a dark humanoid figure emerges from the cover of rocks and zaps the lion with a bright beam. You look at each other for a moment, and then he zaps you too.

Point of the story is the way that foreshadowing is used (you can see the lion while you are handling the leeches) plus the use of gamist segment as plot advancement. The frenzied bit of button-thrashing as you deal with the sundry threats means you are taking completely by surprise when
the humanoid figure(s) emerge and zap you, which is just really the cut-segue to the next scene. OTOH, you do have a clear sense of having been saved by these mysterious figures, because the fairly long lion-chase has amped up your fight/flight response and its clear the lion is faster than you anyway.

Another World suffered, in the end, from the game-play being overly brutal. In one infamous scene, you had to navigate a warrend of steam pipes, at risk of falling too far or being steam burned to death, a very tough hand-eye level that advanced nothing. By contrast, clever use of context and set dressing means that when you stage the inevitable escape from captivity with an alien buddy, you understand what he/it says/must be saying despite it being totally unintelligible. In this regard, the tightness of the gamist devices in plot developement terms gave a great illusion of being in a very alien, dangerous - and yet comrpehensible - place.

contracycle wrote: Monster ranching? Seems only time I've seen that, strictly speaking, was in DungeonKeeper...

Well, I had it under the name Another World... but maybe its like movies, different names in different places. Depending where you where, you might have seen "Leon" or "The Assasin".

It was very linear... thats why it reminds for of illusionism. There was only one and exactly one sequence of moves to get through any given scene, and scenes had no variability. But, even though the graphics were pokey by comparison, I had a much more interesting experience than with any number of forgettable high-glitz graphic fests. This was becuase both the liner framing and the graphics used were very focussed on specific scenes which had specific effects.

The closest I've seen to what you describe Mike is Morrowwind. It is not entirely free form, but because of its enormous size there are several different paths you can follow and switch almost freely between.

So far I've found
1) Join the Imperial Legion, go on missions based on being a soldier
2) Join the Imperial Cult, go on missions based on being part of the official church of the Empire. There are at least 3 different routes in this one depending on ones skills...healer, guardman, and something else.
3) Join the Thieves Guild, an Imperial guild at war with the local crime syndacates.
4) Join the Mages Guild: a mercenary guild for mages
5) Join the Fighters Guild: a mercenary guild for fighters.
7) Join the Blades: a secret intellegence organization working for the Emperor
8) Join one of several different local "houses" which may or may not support the empire.

Or you can eschew any of these and just roam around hunting and killing stuff.

There is an overarching plot line but it seems like you can ignore it or resolve it in several different ways.

Like I said its not completely "do anything" and the NPC interactions are too limited to make the game really interesting if you completely ignore the main branches, but its closer than any other CRPG I've found.

Oh, and how you resolve the missions is somewhat open as well. I've been given a couple missions where the obviously desired solution was Kill person A to get item X. In the one case I used a magic potion to make person A like me so much she voluntarily gave me item X, and in the other I bribed person A for it.

Reminds me of the text-dungeon game Omega. And a PBEM strategy wargame from Llucky Llamma games called...I forget...but it had a jillion little sub-quests (and the usual goal of conquering everything). Hm.

Mike

Ok, here's a thought. I read a column on rpg.net, I forget where, that postulated what our rpgs and computer rpgs should do. A division of labor of sorts. The point was that when dnd came out way back when, computer games in their current form mostly didn't exist. Now a computer can crunch numbers much faster than a GM, and with pretty decent graphics. No more ascii art dungeons. It's also much easier to explore a rendered setting than to get you and your GM's imaginations on the same page with every detail. So, what is an independent rpg publisher to do? Well, just what a computer can't. That's right, narratavism. Guess that explains a trend around here....

I should probably credit the page I stole this from, but I can't find the url. Ah well. At least I happen to know what narratavism is, wheras the original author went on for a page trying to find a word for it.

Interesting thought. There are, naturally, a few complications to the "division of labor" idea, I believe.

One is that, in GNS theory, all three elements are normally present in every game. Just because Narrativism isn't prioritized in a game doesn't mean it isn't missed when absent. So even G or S players might have good reasons (and this isn't the only one) for preferring tabletop role playing over computer games.

Then there's the vast Simulationist domain. Even very early computer games running on very early computers were more than adequate for the Gamist aspects of play (to be more precise, they were well able to react appropriately to gamist player decisions, at least within specific circumscribed domains, wherein the limits of the domain are part of the challenge.) Even modern computers and software are not yet adequate to react appropriately to Narrativist player decisions. The progress observed in the past few decades has been in the Simulationist area. Early computer games were poor simulators with very limited and unsatisfying exploration potential. Current computer games allow a lot more exploration -- to the point where I'd call them about equal overall to a live gamemaster.

Equal but far from equivalent; their rough equality comes from both having great strengths and glaring weaknesses relative to the other. When it comes to presenting visual (and now auditory) landscapes, the computer wins hands down over the GM. When it comes to resolving the actions of those physical phenomena that are included in the simulation, the computer wins. When it comes to handling creative player actions that fall outside the game designer's prediction ("I set the roof on fire to distract the guards"), the computer fails utterly. When it comes to playing the NPCs, the computer makes a noble effort but unfortunately just plain sucks at it. (This may change in the future; "believable characters" controlled by advanced AI is a subject of research at many universities and a few private companies, e.g. Zoesis, but progress has been glacial). The virtual worlds of computer games are still either very small or very limited in variety compared with the virtual worlds a GM can offer, though improvement on the computer's side has been steady.

While GNS theory neither makes nor supports any claim for the three modes of play falling into any value hierarchy (no mode is aesthetically superior to any other), there is clearly a progression between the three modes in how much computational power is required to satisfyingly interact with player decisions in that mode. Providing gamist challenge is well within the computational capabilities of even old computers; providing narrativist creativity is well beyond the capabilities of current computers; providing simulationist exploration is in between, such that each incremental advance in computer speed and media capacity results in improvements.

Overlooked in this analysis (and somewhat blurred by the existence of multiplayer computer games) is the strong difference in the social context of computer game play versus role playing game play. Even a strong Gamist might understandably have a strong preference for being challenged by a live person sitting at the same table than by a digital abstraction created by a computer game designer. Even a strong Narrativist might understandably find the convenience of solitaire computer game play (perhaps with hint book in hand to blunt the deprotagonization) outweighs the games' shortcomings. So even though one might predict from this analysis that, for example, strongly Gamist play would become less prevalent in role playing games as those players are more likely to have been attracted to computer games, I suspect this would be hard to see in the data if the appropriate data existed. (And even if it were observed, it would be hard to prove that CCGs weren't the real cause.) I think, therefore, that it's likely that the "division of labor" between computer games and role playing games as different kinds of social activity will far overshadow any division falling along GNS lines.

- Walt

Picking up on what Walt said, there are many good reasons why a gamist player might find computer role playing games deficient in comparison with a live referee. The big one in my mind is options.

The early CRPG's (mostly text based, some with still-shot graphics and rarely sprite-driven moveable characters) were extremely linear. That is, you had to do this to solve that, and then do that to solve the other thing. When the game presented a problem to you, it wasn't looking for a clever solution; it was looking for the game designer's solution.

Obviously there has been improvement over the years (and not all of the early games were entirely guilty of this treatment). But there is still inherent in the CRPG the inability of the referee to evaluate the potential of a novel solution to a problem. Hypothetically, let us imagine that we are crossing a river. The system has been programmed, perhaps, to allow you to swim or pay the ferryman or travel thirty miles down stream to cross the bridge. But is there an option to build your own boat? What about a raft? Can you cut enough wood to create a floatation device, and use that to help you swim across? Can you build your own rope bridge (I've done it IRL) or a simple dam? The game can't possibly be programmed with everything that every player might think to do in every situation. It of necessity must limit the player to those options for which the game designer has prepared responses.

The live referee is in a very different position. If you told me you were going to try to cross the river by building a hot air balloon (as one of my players recently did to cross the mountains), I would be in a reasonable position to assess what the probability was that you could succeed in doing this with the materials, information, and skills you have available, and so give probabilities. The computer game could only error and ask you to try something else--even if it's quite obvious that you have everything you need to do it successfully.

So even gamist objectives are often better served by live play, particularly for those gamists who use brains to win.

--M. J. Young