Deus Ex Machinatio

Dragon Age and Narrative Structure (Part 2)

Yesterday, I wrote a love letter to Dragon Age and its storytelling. Today I'd like to bring it home and talk about what we in the ARG community can do to achieve the same narrative power -- and some things we can't do, or can only do with great difficulty.

Moral Ambiguity 

Does the classic ARG or transmedia experience have the capacity for creating decisions charged with moral ambiguity? Of forcing the players to pick sides in which neither one is strictly correct? As it happens, yes, we do indeed. At their best, this tension creates powerful controversy that drives an experience to new heights of drama. 

Weephun's betrayal of the Sleeping Princess in ilovebees springs to mind as one such moment, followed by the Mann Act II vote in the Beast. These were unforgettable decisions. Indeed, we have a rich tradition of requiring players to navigate tricky waters of who to trust with what information. 

And sometimes, as with life and as in Dragon Age, an ARG manifests unintended long-term consequences -- even from decisions you didn't know you were making at the time. In Dragon Age, how you handle one particular conversation with Alistair changes his personality subtly but significantly for the rest of the game. In Perplex City, the players unwittingly helped a murderer get to his victim, which kicked off the Helena Frye cycle -- meant to be an exercise in ambiguity from start to finish; she was a double agent, but was it on behalf of the police or on behalf of the shady religious cult?

That's not to say that you always get intense moral ambiguity from an ARG. But examples aren't hard to come by -- which means we're on the right track, from a narrative point of view. 

Meaningful Choices 

The choice framework in an ARG is fundamentally different from a traditional video game, because you aren't restricted to the few choices preprogrammed by the developer. In an ARG, the sky's the limit. The players can theoretically make any decision they can dream up. 

Indeed, it's theoretically much easier for an ARG to offer choice than a video game. Providing a meaningful choice in a video game means the dev team has to create an ever-increasing tree of content. Each additional branch makes it increasingly less likely that any one piece of content will be seen by any one player; you get diminishing returns on your development resources, the more choice you offer.

The classic ARG doesn't need to create a vast volume of content for paths not taken, though. In a pervasive online experience, the developer can create or adapt content on the fly, altering the course of the game to accommodate unexpected plot twists and player decisions. This is the ARG at its finest. 

We ARG writers and designers often lie awake nights trying to think of how to handle every conceivable choice, because the ones the players make will often be those you didn't think of (and therefore plan for). Murphy's Law would say they always make the decision you didn't think of! Yet you, as the developer, have to find a way to roll with it, even if that's to say "sorry, but no," gracefully and in character.

That said, providing the opportunity to make a truly meaningful choice on an individual level in an ARG is very, very hard. (And here I link to Dan Fabulich's fantastic post on what it means to provide a meaningful choice, anyway.)

It's a question of scale. The classic ARG is a community-played experience. It's easier to offer a meaningful choice to a few dozen people than it is to offer a meaningful choice to hundreds of thousands, when everyone plays in the same instance of the game. 

So how do you do it?

Methods

Dragon Age is a single-player experience, so you don't need to be concerned about the choices other players are making. They simply don't affect you. 

There's an increasing movement toward creating single-player ARGs, too. Fourth Wall Studios and their Rides platform have made great strides with this. The ability to track a single player's progress through the game and serve content accordingly definitely gives agency back to the individual player. And it makes the game about the player, whereas in most ARGs, the individual player is supporting cast -- which in turn robs the experience of impact. 

But it also increasingly locks you into the same branching problem that classic video games have; a single-player experience needs to be preprogrammed from start to finish. And you do lose the collaborative community play ARGs are famous for.

In a classic ARG, you have two basic options for providing meaningful choice points: allowing individual players to make meaningful choices on behalf of everyone else (like Weephun); or allowing choice based on community consensus (the Mann Act II vote). (The secret third option is to provide the illusion of choice, where none ever truly existed; this is a dirty secret I should address at length another day.)

There are pros and cons to each approach.

Allowing a single player to make a meaningful choice on behalf of the community is amazing for dramatic tension, especially for your decisionmaker. But it means that you're actively removing agency from the bulk of your players. Weephun chose to betray the Sleeping Princess (or if you prefer, chose to be truly loyal to the Operator); but thousands wouldn't have, and were forced to play a result not of their own making. Is that a truly meaningful choice, then? Hard to say.

Consensus-building and voting allows more players to have a voice in the outcome. But the polling mechanism can rob us of drama. The act of voting in an online poll is something we can do frequently and casually. And there's still a risk that the choice won't feel meaningful on an individual level, particularly if your scale exceeds thousands of users. If the vote is on a morally ambiguous topic, and you can incite tension in the community around it, then it becomes a more powerful narrative vehicle. But it's not a mechanic that will serve every game.

There is still another way... but it can get expensive. You can provide choice of alliance. Create a morally ambiguous choice: Red team or Blue, for example. Then build out a game structure that accommodates these individual-level choices in the context of communities of players working together in opposition, where each single player can make a contribution on the team level, but the drama plays out primarily as the result of the conflict between teams.

This requires some pretty solid player management, and for a large player volume, a technology build that tracks individual choices (just like a single-player game would). But it also creates a dynamic situation where players can make individually meaningful decisions, and yet aren't restricted to predetermined branching.

Conclusions

Design is hard. Even the best of intentions can be difficult or impossible to execute, due to limitations of budget or time or skill or scope. The design process is rife with those meaningful choices I keep talking about -- a delicate balance of opening some doors and closing others.

But assuming the basic goal is providing compelling narrative... we've gone pretty far, and we can go further yet. Dragon Age shows the best the single-platform video game has to offer to date. Let's see if we can top it, shall we?

Dragon Age and Narrative Structure (Part 1)

I've just finished my first play-through of Dragon Age: Origins. Oh my heavens I cannot express how much I love this game; it should be telling that I'm actually talking about playing through it again at all. As a general rule, I hate watching reruns, I rarely reread books, and once I'm done with a game I'll think of it fondly, but I won't go back to relive the glory. 

But I want to go back to Dragon Age. And not just because I have a mad crush on Alistair, whose endearing combination of sweet, funny, and kind of awkward reminds me of... well, of my husband, actually. (Shh, don't tell him!)

Playing Dragon Age again could be a substantially different experience, depending on what I put into it. Almost, but not quite, like playing an entirely different game. That''s because the game is an exquisite work of craftmanship on the part of the writers. I need to play it again to see how the trick was done, to know how it works, to do it myself.

This is the rare gem in the game world:  a game that presents to you meaningful and morally ambiguous choices, which effect the outcome of things small and large through the rest of the game. It has sparkling dialogue, deep characterization, and it delves into racism and takes strides toward gender and sexuality inclusiveness with uncharacteristic grit (though that's been covered extensively elsewhere.)

Let's take a look under the hood and see what we can learn, shall we? There will be spoilers ahoy, so beware.

Moral Ambiguity

In the world of Dragon Age, it's rare for you to see one clear, correct path forward. But this isn't the Fable faux-choice of two basic modes to play the game, the "good" mode and the "evil" one. No, these are true dilemmas, where there is never a win without a loss. Every choice you make, as in life, opens one door and closes another.

An example, from early in the game. I played through as a mage, because... well, because I'm like that. Something about hurling lightning from my fingertips appeals to me.

In the mage origin story, you're almost immediately confronted with such a moral dilemma: your best friend is accused of practicing forbidden blood magic. He is soon to be punished for it -- forced to participate in a ritual that makes him functionally a robot. He asks for your help escaping.

You have to make a choice. You can help him, or you can turn him in. But do you trust him? He's already been deceiving you on one front... he's been engaging in a forbidden romantic liaison. Might he not also be deceiving you on whether he practices illicit magic? But can you really allow the self to be removed from your best friend, a repugnant punishment at best? Anything you choose to do is a gamble and a betrayal. Do you choose friendship or justice, knowing that either may be flawed?

These choices crop up again and again. Who do you trust? How much mercy do you temper your justice with? Does it change if it affects your relationships with those around you? Do you choose what's you've been taught is morally right, what you believe is right in your heart, or what's needful in the moment? What if the life of a child is at stake? What if it's the life of your beloved? 

(On that note: Playing through the ending as a female Warden in a relationship with Alistair is vastly more compelling romantic drama than I have seen on film or in text since... ever. More powerful than the same story on any other medium, because it is me grappling with the potential consequences, and me making the final call.)

The stories that touch us deepest are the ones that look at people making these morally ambiguous or personally difficult choices. This is the heart of drama. This is quite possibly the greatest weakness of games writing. 

Creating Meaningful Choices

And yet this should be the greatest strength for stories in games. That's simply bringing the interactive, isn't it? The place where games should naturally excel is in allowing you, the player, to make choices that feel significant in the moment. 

This is the alchemy of gaming. This is its power. A game introduces an interesting plot point, and increases its power an order of magnitude over other media. Because it feels like it's happening to you, and not a character who you might be entirely sympathetic to, but who you are not actively driving.

Games are, by and large, filled with clear and simple definitions of good and evil, or hard-wired choices where one path leads to certain death. You rescue Zelda or you lose the game. You kill the zombies or you die. The moral judgements you are called upon to make are often peripheral, or few. That's if you even get a choice at all -- often the only choice you get is simply not to play the game.

But Dragon Age doesn't just put you in the position of making choices; these choices have genuine ramifications throughout the course of the game, in how people treat you, in paths opened or closed, in long-term consequences. The amount of writing effort that has gone into this game is just mind-boggling, and I feel like I need to buy a round for the team because they did such a great job on such a monumental task.

Methods

The specific technique Dragon Age uses appears to be limited branching. For many of these knotty moral choices, you're ultimately fulfilling the same basic game mechanic no matter what you choose. In the mage origin, that's going through the motions of helping your friend escape -- either out of legitimate friendship, or because you're forced to through the political machinations of your mentor. Maybe it's destroying a criminal cartel on behalf of a politician, to give your chosen ally additional popular support -- but which ally is up to you. 

It's a clever way of repurposing the same content. You create a different charge of meaning based on a fine web of intentions and consequences that exist mostly in the mind of the player. You'll clear the same dungeon, but do you parley at the end or do you just kill? Well, that's up to you. And changing the meaning of your actions depending on the choices you have made creates a depth that is frankly impossible in non-interactive media.

This is where games should shine. This is where all interactive media should shine! And yet so few experiences have the overarching depth or sense of choice found in Dragon Age.

In the next part of this blog post, I'll take on the ARG angle and examine what we as writers and designers can emulate from Dragon Age, and grapple with the particular problems we face that make it more difficult to provide a player with meaningful choices.

This post is continued in Part 2.

Beyond the Brunette, New and Improved!

If you missed my talk at SXSW this year, I've got great news for you -- the full audio of the talk is now online, so I called in a favor from the diversely talented Jim Gramze and arranged for him to magically transform the slides and video into one beautifully orchestrated whole. Behold:

ARGs and Women: Moving Beyond the Hot Brunette from Andrea A. Phillips on Vimeo.

It's almost as good as being there! Except you won't be able to see my rockin' steampunk gloves this way. Too bad for you. 

If you're in the market for something a bit more low-key than this, you can also just listen to the audio, available from SXSW, and the original Keynote slides plus my notes are still on Slideshare. 

I'm really proud of how the talk went, and am always happy to take the conversation further. Let me know what you think!

Beyond the Brunette Online

I've put my slides up from SXSWi 2010 for my talk, ARGs and Women: Moving Beyond the Hot Brunette. I'm not embedding it here, however, because the slides are pretty worthless without my presentation notes, and I haven't worked out a way to get show the slides to display in the way I'd prefer. It's harder than it needs to be because I have embedded video, and Keynote's cutting off a bunch of pie charts when I export to PDF. Grrr. At any rate, I highly recommend you be sure to click on the "Notes on slide 1" tab before you start going through the show.

I do believe SXSW is planning to put up the audio of my actual talk at some point, and when that happens I'll try to put the slides and audio together in a single, perfect show. Until then, we'll all have to settle.

An Open Letter to the SFWA

Dear SFWA, 

I'm a professional science fiction writer, but I'm not an SFWA member. I don't meet your membership criteria. That makes me very sad. 

My projects are games -- specifically alternate reality games. Even traditional video games, however, are not an SFWA qualifying market. I've gone to the SFWA website and stared at the application form more than once, trying to find a way to massage my body of work into something that fits, but I stop dead at fields like "Length (words)" and "Date of Sale." They just don't apply to me.

The SFWA is purportedly considering admitting game writers into their ranks. Please, please do. Game writers may be working in another medium from your norm, but we have common interests all the same, and would benefit from co-mingling our communities. Game writers, like print writers, wrestle with questions of characterization and theme, pacing, tension, plot. Many of us also work on a freelance or per-project basis, and are concerned with copyright and contracts. There is strength in numbers, so our strength would add to yours.

Like many other game writers, I've earned a place in the SFWA. Many of us earn a respectable living and reach more than respectable audiences -- we are professionals. And games are indisputably a realm where science fiction reigns. Game writers have created worlds with crazed AIs, biotechnology gone horribly wrong, or terrible demons. I've written extensively in an alternate universe with a society structured to reward intelligence.

But am I a published writer? Ah, there's the rub. By SFWA standards, I'm not. My work amounts to hundreds of thousands of words of text, to be sure. But to make an alternate reality game, those words are turned into video or Tweets or websites. While screenwriters with professionally produced scripts are welcome in the SFWA, there simply is no way to account for somebody like me, or my fellow game writers.

It wouldn't be an easy job for the SFWA, defining what games qualify and what don't. It's easy to know what counts as a professionally produced script. It's easy to know who's published with a qualifying print market. You can make clear-cut lists of criteria for these things. But how do you qualify a game, or worse, a transmedia project? Almost any definition will exclude someone deserving. Size of the production company, project budget, dollars earned by the writer? So many words of dialog, so many minutes of cut scenes? 

Even aside from that, in the games industry, credit is often murky. The byline of a short story, a novel, a film, tells you who was the principal contributor. But in a game, sometimes a writer doesn't get credited at all. Sometimes the writer is credited for another role they also played as a designer or producer. And sometimes, especially in my circles, there are so many writers working on a project that it's hard to know whose hand was guiding the wheel. But these are solveable problems, and solving them would benefit us all.

I know it wouldn't be easy for you to admit game writers; and harder still to admit writers like me, who are even more removed from clear-cut criteria. I have no publisher, as such; just clients and contracts. Who is the 'publisher' of a Tweet, or an email, after all? My work lives on the internet. But I'm still a professional science fiction writer, and I long to participate in the broader community of my peers. I urge you to find a way to admit, if not transmedia writers like me, at least mainstream game writers. We are all the same. And games are growing fast, so fast; look to the future. Isn't that what science fiction is all about?

Love,

Andrea

Deconstructing Farmville

I started playing Farmville a couple of months ago, as a part of my continuing education in games and game design. The surprise? I'm still playing it. And I even ponied up some of my own cash to keep Zynga running. (If you like a creative work, it behooves you to support the people who made it, right, kids?) 

It's not like me to play a game for more than a few weeks. Treasure Madness and Packrat? Ancient history. Kongregate keeps me coming back for twenty minutes a pop, but I hardly ever play the same game twice. Oh, sure, Clockwords, Chain Factor and Boomshine all kept me for a while, and I might still play from time to time, but it's nothing like the dedication with which I play Farmville. So what is it about Farmville? What makes it so special? The answer is that it absolutely nails all of the things I like best in a casual game.

1. Multiple goals. For those of you who don't already know, Farmville is at its heart a very light, easy resource management game. You have a limited amount of land and money, and it's up to you to work out how to use them to get what you want. Better, it's up to you to decide what you want. Farmville offers experience points and levels, achievements and ribbons to earn, and sets of objects to collect. You can play to make the coolest 8-bit image on your farm, play to master all crops, or change from one goal to another depending on your mood. The more things there are to do, the more likely it is any given player will find something that floats their boat and stick around.
2. No penalties. You might be able to lose Farmville, but you'd have to work really hard at it. The only limited factor is time -- you need to harvest crops before they wither. But you know how long that takes, and the time between ripening and withering varies from 2 hours to 4 days, depending on what you planted. And even if you neglect and lose all your crops, you're unlikely to have lost all your money. If you have managed to burn through it all, you can always visit neighboring farms to earn a little seed money for your next crop. I don't know about you, but I play games to relax. For me, keeping the stakes and pressure low works way better than ticking clocks and hordes of zombies shambling toward me. And I don't imagine I'm a special flower, unique in my gaming tastes.
3. Effort is always rewarded. In Farmville, you get out of it what you put into it. It's just like the grind in Warcraft, an invigorating contrast to the uncertainties of real life. In Farmville, as long as you keep trying, you'll keep moving up. This is the secret sauce that makes World of Warcraft the behemoth it is, and one of my foundation principles of game design.
4. Shiny new content. Farmville is very much not a finished product. Zynga's developers are constantly unrolling new features and virtual items, holding limited-time events, and refining the interface. The game hasn't been the same from one week to the next since at least Halloween, when I began playing. And a lot of this content has limited availability -- you can plant forget-me-nots and buy moose right now, but they'll be gone again in five days. (But something else will come along.) That keeps players coming back; there's less chance to become bored if there's always something fresh.
5. Collaboration, not competition. The only rivalries here are the ones you make yourself. But Farmville's social mechanics encourage you to not only play yourself, but to get your friends to play, and to play more often. There are objects you can only receive if a friend has sent it to you, and collections you can only complete by interacting with a friend's farm. The more friends you have in Farmville, the better you'll do. Peer pressure to play is a subtle but powerful thing.
6. Value for money. Farmville lets you buy FV money with real dollars, not to be confused with the lesser gold currency. FV money lets you buy some things that you might otherwise have to save up scads of gold for; but there are also animals, objects and other incentives you can only get with FV money. The game is very cleverly designed to show you the advantages of paying Zynga for play without being a spammy pest about it. They put the incentives for paying in front of you, but they aren't shoving your nose into it. Their method works.
7. Low time commitment. This is the kicker. I can play Farmville for ten minutes in the morning, for ten minutes every couple of days, or I can spend all day planting 2-hour raspberries, visiting my neighbors' farms, and rearranging my orchards and flocks. And if the phone rings, or my kid spills Goldfish all over the floor, or I remember it's time to make dinner, I can walk away and come back later. (See point 2, No penalties.) I wish more games were like that!

What about you? Are you a Farmville fan or foe? Are there reasons I've missed that you think make it so successful, or do you think I'm completely off base? Let me know what you think!

Hot Brunettes at SXSW

It should come as no surprise to any of you that gender in gaming is something a spend a lot of time and thought on. And in fact it's the topic of my proposed talk at SXSW this year: ARGs and Women: Moving Beyond the Hot Brunette.

Let's cut and paste my description, shall we?

ARGs are often trotted out as a shining example of woman-friendly games. They boast unusually high rates of female developers and players, and a slew of kick-ass female leads. But if you dig a little deeper, are they just the post-Buffy version of Princess Peach, always needing to be saved?

If that sounds like something you'd be interested in hearing, then please, go to the SXSW panel picker and give me a big ol' thumbs up.  

 

I'm by no means the only interesting panel submitted, of course. My friends at Six to Start have some proposals in, and Brooke Thompson has a fantastic and selfless write-up of several panels beyond her own submissions.

It's going to be a great conference this year, any way you slice it. Hope to see you there!

Ah-CHOO!

The next game at Routes is up: Sneeze!

I can't claim much of any credit for this one, so it's not bragging to say it's a fun little chain-reaction game covered with a gooey layer of snot. I've made it all the way to level 10, but not yet cleared it, how about you?

Introducing Routes

For the last several months, I've been working with Oil Productions on a project for Channel 4 education in conjunction with the Wellcome Trust. That project is Routes, and I'm thrilled to tell you that we've officially launched!

   

Routes is a very ambitious project, incorporating elements like casual gaming, television, competition for prizes... and more. (See my Breeder up there? Oh, the pride!) I'll naturally have a lot more to say about Routes when the run is over; it wouldn't do to play out my hand now, would it? 

Meanwhile, sign up, explore, invite your friends. It's going to be a great ride. Promise!

Movies vs. Video Games

In part 3 of my series on ARGs and the Economy, I had a throwaway comment about finding the differences between movies and video games, and what that means for ARGs. I actually wrote quite a bit of this at the time, but cut it out so I could focus on the main point (it’s the money, honey). And so here’s my take on why video games are growing like gangbusters and movies aren’t. 

For starters, there's a basic difference in the value proposition you get from buying, say, Left 4 Dead, and going to see The Dark Knight. It's easy to speculate that it comes down to dollars per hour of entertainment. We could generously say TDK at $8 a ticket and a 3-hour run time is $2.60 per hour for one person, and conservatively Left 4 Dead at $60 for a 30-hour player experience is about $2.00 per hour for as many people frequent your living room. (TDK isn't quite as long as all that, though, and the play time for Left 4 Dead is theoretically much higher.)

But that's not how people decide how to have fun in the real world. The more important differences have to do with the qualitative nature of the experience being delivered. 

Video games are active. This is the difference most people get stuck on; they think people want an active experience and not a passive one. I'm actually not so certain this is true; from time to time, I loves me a good passive experience. Read any good books lately? I think it comes down to personal preference, and even the same person doesn't always prefer the same kind of experience. Still, consumers are getting more and more accustomed to having some control over their leisure experiences, and it would be ridiculous to ignore that. Even TV has bent to this, the result being American Idol-style shows where viewers vote for a winner at the shallow end, all the way to the Heroes and Lost extended immersive experiences at the other end of that scale. 

Video games are social. Whether it's rocking out with the whole family in Rock Band, running a high-level raid with your best guild buds in World of Warcraft, or making fun of your sister who can't get the bomb to the right spot in Super Mario Galaxy, games are at their best when you're playing with somebody else. Whispered comments aside, we're strictly socialized not to socialize at the movies. When people are hanging out with their friends, they don’t just want to interact with the experience; they want to interact with each other, too. 

Video games are convenient. This point doesn't get nearly as much airplay as it deserves. When you go to a movie, you're stuck with the movies they're showing, the times they're showing them, and whatever seat you can find. If you get a text message mid-film telling you a flaming meteor just destroyed downtown and you hurry to see the spectacle with your own eyes, you're not going to be able to complete your cinematic experience without laying out another eight smackeroos and starting over from the beginning. A video game is there when you want to play it. You don't need to go out in inclement weather, you don't need to worry about being late and not getting a seat, you won't be sitting through twenty minutes of previews and commercials, and you can pause the game if you need to go look at the meteor-devastated downtown. Or, you know, have to go to the bathroom. 

So there are some basic and very instructional differences between what the movie offers and what a game does. I've said before that ARGs are active, social, and convenient by nature; but that's not entirely true. Actually, ARGs fall down quite a bit on the "convenience" metric, for several reasons. Which I will address in... a future post!