Tag Archives: game design

What I Learned from Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney

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ace_2For the past four months, I’ve been playing Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney on my iPhone, ever since Russell convinced me to check out its conversation and interrogation system. I haven’t finished (or really even started) the fifth “bonus” case, but I’ve played enough to babble about it for a bit.

If it looks like a game and acts like a game…. Let me be clear up front: I’m not entirely sure that Phoenix Wright is a game. As I played it, I discovered that it was part of a genre of visual novels, which I had previously been unaware of. Through the course of play, it’s pretty clear that it’s hard to deviate from the pre-existing storyline, and most of the choices aren’t really choices aren’t really choices at all.

And yet.

In the courtroom scenes, you have the chance to make five mistakes before the case is thrown out of court. At a basic level, this means that your choices do have consequences, and it is possible to fail (even if the odds are, in all honestly, pretty damned low). Outside of the courtroom, you’re really just pushing things in the right order to get enough evidence to get to the next courtroom scene, but once you’re in the courtroom, you have to be careful how you proceed. So it’s half a game, and the half that is a game is pretty easy.

But this opens up some interesting questions: if a game is, say, half cutscenes (I’m looking at you, Final Fantasy XIII) and half gameplay, isn’t that the same question? Why is Ace Attorney a visual novel and Final Fantasy XIII a game? Is it the percentage of time that you can interact – if so, Attorney has more actual interactivity, I think. Is it how much your decisions matter – in that case, FFXIII certainly has a lot more smaller decisions, but Attorney is less forgiving of errors when you have a decision that matters. I could probably spend an entire post just deconstructing both games and sorting out how much “game” is in each, but the more immediate take-away that I have is that Ace Attorney feels like a game, even if it’s not clear whether its a game or not.

Rewards are awesome, even if they’re just flavor. Like many Japanese games, Ace Attorney is over the top. Without going into too many spoilers, the game is a courtroom drama that shamelessly mixes in supernatural elements and wildly campy characters. Everything is incredibly melodramatic, right down to the overblown “OBJECTION!” that Phoenix shouts out for even the most minor presentation of evidence.

And yet, every time I know I have the right piece of evidence against the right piece of testimony, I feel a little thrill when I hear “OBJECTION!” It’s a little “ha!” of victory to me, and just when I think I’m getting tired of hearing it, the game trots it out at just the right moment. The wildly exaggerated looks of shock and defeat on the witnesses’ faces also makes me smile, and keep me playing. Both elements reward my play. They aren’t +1 swords or more cash to put into my virtual pocket, but in some ways I treasure these rewards more. I feel like the game is telling me “hey, you figured this thing out, so here’s something awesome just for you.”

Then again, I like mysteries, and really Ace Attorney is just an elaborate murder mystery, so it could be that I’m wired to like these rewards more.

Stereotypes can have depth. Once you accept the strange logic of Ace Attorney (like the fact that every case ever has to be resolved in three days), many of the characters are actually quite stereotypical: the aloof prosecuting attorney, the spunky kid sister, the dim homicide detective. But as you spend time with each of these characters, they start to grow on you, even if they don’t get any less stereotypical. They express their concerns, hopes, and interests, and at some point you look past the fact that the detective’s name is “Gumshoe” and start caring a little about who he is. The writing is surprisingly good, even if it’s not a collection of wild turns and ground-breaking characterization. The story isn’t innovative or amazing, and the dialogue often comes across as a bit stilted and forced. But Ace Attorney isn’t trying to be any of those things – it’s just putting out a really solid story, and it works.

Who can learn from this? This game is almost entirely conversation and story, so it’s a great way to study those elements (even if the writing is much, much longer than is typical for most games). It’s also great for people looking at how to pace a purely narrative reward structure. You can pick it up for iOS, Nintendo DS, or the Wii.

Heist! Notes

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Heist_titleSometime around December of 2009, I jotted down some notes for a roleplaying game about heists and con games. It was called Heist!, and I sat on it, waiting for some time to flesh it out.

Recently I picked up the Leverage role-playing game, and it was… very familiar. I certainly can’t say that I “stole” the ideas from Leverage or vice-versa, but I suspect that since I know many of the people on the team that it was more a case of us thinking about similar things around a similar time.

So I decided to post my raw notes (warts and all) so show this interesting case of parallel development. Enjoy.

The Three Questions

What is your game about?

Heist! is about a group of professional thieves who decide to work together for one big score. The idea is to replicate the ups and downs of heist movies, as well as the tension that occurs within such teams of criminals.

What Heist! is not about is pitting the Gamemaster’s criminal designs against the intelligence of the players, nor is it about elaborate planning beforehand by the players. While the thief characters have already worked out a detailed plan, what that plan actually is comes from the organic play of the players and Gamemaster during the course of the game.

How is your game about that?

The focus of the game is on five different styles of crime – most everything else is either a modifier to those styles, or subsumed into those styles. Every thief will have a style they’re very good at, some things they’re okay at, and one style they’re bad at, to reinforce the idea that all of the thieves are specialists.

What behaviors does it reward or encourage?

Tactically, players will be given a bigger advantage (a chance to roll more dice) for trying to move a particular obstacle into their thief’s strongest style. Also, players will gain benefits for intentionally making certain obstacles more difficult for themselves and others. The balance between tactics (playing to the character’s strengths and making obstacles more difficult) reflects the rapid shifts in fortune that you find in heist movies.

Making a Thief

Styles

Each thief in Heist! has access to five Styles of crime – some of which the thief is better at than others. All meaningful actions in Heist! fall into one of these Styles.

The Brain: The Brain approaches theft by thinking tactically and pitting his mind against others. He is best at making plans, outsmarting people, and other mental Conflicts.

The Burglar: The Burglar is best at the physical act of theft. He is best at stealing, athletics, and other dexterous Conflicts.

The Con Artist: The Con Artist specializes in swindling people. He is best at lying, manipulation, and other social Conflicts.

The Hacker: The Hacker focuses on computers and other technical devices. He is best at breaking into computer systems, bypassing electronic locks, and other technical Conflicts.

The Heavy: The Heavy gets things done by shedding blood and physical intimidation. He is best at fighting, shrugging off damage, and other physical Conflicts.

Each player starts off with five numbers to allocate to the Styles – one 5, one 4, one 3, one 2, and one 1. A 5 means that the thief is best in that Style – it’s what he’s known for. A 1 means that the thief is terrible in that Style.

Assets

Each thief also has two Assets, some benefit that doesn’t relate to stealing or crime. An Asset can be a job, a trait, or some other specialty. Examples include “PhD in History,” “Expert Driver,” and “Good with Numbers.”

An Asset allows one free reroll of any dice use in a Conflict that the Asset is relevant in.

Flaw

Nobody’s perfect. Along with Assets, each thief has one noteworthy Flaw – something that they will never be good at. Like Assets, the Flaw doesn’t relate to stealing or crime directly, but it should have the potential to come up during a heist. Examples include “Notorious Coward,” “Bad With Money,” and “Alcoholic.”

Any Conflict that relates to the Flaw automatically fails, but the player gains a point of The Plan if the failure is significant.

The Plan

No team of thieves goes after the big score without an elaborate plan. Creating the plan and going over and over it gives the team an edge during the heist. Every thief on the team starts with 1 point in The Plan. They can gain more points during the course of the heist, or they can spend them for various effects, after a brief description of how the effect is part of the overall plan.

Why I’m on the Team: The thief can refresh a Style back to full once per Conflict.

Just What I Needed: Some aspect of the heist turns out to be in the thief’s favor. The player can insert a minor detail into the heist (subject to Gamemaster override).

It’s All About Me: Sometimes the thief makes their own plans, which can screw another member of the team as a result. The player describes how their own plan screws another member of the team. The thief gets a free reroll in the Conflict for each point the target loses from their highest Style. In exchange, the target gets the point of The Plan spent by the thief.

Time

A heist is comprised of various Scenes. A Scene can be comprised of one or more Conflicts. Conflicts are comprised of one or more Exchanges.

Conflict

1) Determine who is involved.

2) Determine intent of each party.

3) Resolve an Exchange (see below).

4) Compare Style points. If any are zero, character no longer able to participate.

5) Determine if unresolved intentions. If so, back to 3.

Exchange

1) Pick a relevant Style.

2) Roll one d6 per point in Style.

a. Each 4, 5, or 6 rolled is a success.

b. Reroll any non-success dice using reroll ability (asset, weapon, etc.)

3) If both fail, nothing happen. If one character succeeds and another fails, loser loses a point in Style he used. If both succeed, more 6s wins. If still tied, both lost a point from their Style.

4) Reassess the conflict.

Exchange Permutations

1) Asset allows one free reroll per Conflict.

2) Weapon and specialized equipment allows one free reroll per Conflict. (Powerful weapons do +1 Style damage)

Multiple Participants

All roll as normal, but defender only rolls once. If one character wins against defender, lose 1 Style as normal. If multiple characters win against defender, lose 2 Style. Does not stack.

Armor

Protects first loss from a particular Style (phantom box).

Exchange with environment

Style is Difficulty.

1 = Easy. 2 = Normal. 3 = Hard. 4 = Very Hard. 5 = Damn Near Impossible.

Zero Style

When character is driven to zero Style in an Exchange, due to anything but an injury, he is Bested and out of the conflict. Any injury moves to Fallen.

If character is driven to zero Style in an Exchange due to injury, he is Fallen. Any injury after that is Dead.

All characters return all zero Styles to 1 at the end of Conflict.

All Styles are replenished after a night’s sleep.

Caper Pacing

First phase contains easy obstacles where each specialist can shine – designed to wear them down a bit.

Second phase contains moderate obstacles that aren’t necessarily tied to specialties – the thief has to con, the hacker has to fight, and so on.

Each job has a number of Big Obstacles that equal the number of specialists. Its Style is related to the specialist and is ranked at 5 – this is the reason he/she was hired. Players can decide that a certain obstacle is now his Big Obstacle – it was always part of the plan. If he does, it now becomes a BO, and works appropriately.

Once all Big Obstacles have been overcome, they’ve got the Big Score. The rest of the game is now Getting Away With It.

Phases

· Get In (low-to-moderate obstacles)

· Overcome The Big Obstacles

· Get Out (moderate-to-high obstacles)

Creative Fights

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SONY DSCThe past week of discussion on Vampire 20th Anniversary Edition reminded me of this topic, but I’ve been meaning to talk about it for a while now.

I’m certainly no stranger to debate and discussion. I don’t have any formal training in debate – I can’t tell you what the Latin for “I called you a motherfucker” is, for example –but I have been in my share of conversations in which I have one opinion, someone else has another one, and we’re trying to sway each other.

I’m also no stranger to having these kinds of conversations in my job. When I worked at Procter & Gamble, the company encouraged employees to challenge processes and think of new ways to be more efficient or to produce better results. The culture of innovation wasn’t as omnipresent when I worked at the Washington University School of Medicine, but in my particular department I was given a fair bit of leeway to bring up new ideas and try new things. Sometimes I got my way, and sometimes I didn’t, but most of the time the conversation was completely in the realm of objective factors – this will save us a certain amount of money or that amount of time, or that will allow us new functionality that would bring more value to the company.

When I started working at CCP, I found that the company also encouraged employees to self-motivate and find new ways of doing things (sometimes to a startling degree). In fact, just yesterday I was in a meeting, and said that if there’s one thing I’ve learned at CCP, it’s that everyone has a fucking opinion.1 So, naturally, I’ve been in a lot of conversations where one side is trying to convince the other of something.

Quick side note about actual fighting. While I haven’t personally been in a screaming match at work about work things, it has happened. People can get really passionate about their work, and some people deal with that by using volume. At most, I’ve been a little curt and grumbly, but I titled this post “creative fights,” and I stand by that.

The reason why brings me back to my original thread – in a creative company, you can have meaningful debates on not only the kinds of objective matters that I mentioned above, but also on purely subjective ones. Just yesterday, I had a lengthy debate with someone about what word we used to describe something. I have had discussions about the angle of a particular piece of artwork. I have argued with people about dice mechanics because of how they felt just as much as how they worked at the table. And while I try to avoid it, I have told my freelancers that I’ve changed their words just because I like my way better and for no other good reason.

The more subjective the topic, the more the conversation moves from “debate” to “fight.” You’re not really exchanging information for a more detailed understanding of the nuances of the problems; you’re slinging opinions back and forth until someone gives in. That doesn’t mean that subjective opinions can’t have objective nuances (such as the time I discussed the aesthetic impact of a website with the designer who was trying to make sure it hit certain thresholds for color-blindness), but at some point, an opinion has to change in order for the project to move forward. In my personal experience, 95% of these fights are resolved amiably, either through synthesis (“Okay, I see what you want, why don’t we try something that answers both of these problems?”) or voluntary retreat (“Well, you’re the boss, so let’s try it your way.”) Also, a lot of fights are often resolved by trying it out both ways and changing the subjective problems into something that can be objectively debated, usually through a prototype or a draft of some kind.

The one thing that took me a long time to wrap my head around is that this is normal. There are very few creative things that I’ve argued about that haven’t been somehow improved by the argument. I know that the person I’m arguing with is just as passionate to see this project succeed, so I end up not caring quite as much whether I win or lose, because at the core we both have the same goal – to make the project better. This is why a writer has to move from fearing criticism to embracing it – if someone isn’t annoyed or update at something you’ve done, maybe your work isn’t engaging them enough to care about its faults. (This does tie back a bit to my post on analyzing the sting of criticism, now that I think about it.)

Of course, people are people, and we all get wound up in trying to be right over being productive, and in the heat of the moment it’s easy to lose that focus. Even harder (because game design is an unholy blend of art and science), once in a while you get those strange situations where one person is having a subjective argument, and the other one is having an objective one. This happened to me recently – without going into details, I thought I was having a discussion about how something felt and what it implied, and the person I was arguing with thought he was having a discussion about objective facts as he saw them. Because I thought I was having a creative fight, I kept pointing out how things felt wrong and the implications of the topic, while he kept bringing up the faults in my logic. It did not end well.

Let me circle back to the Vampire project. In case you weren’t aware, we’re doing “open development” for the book, where Justin and I post drafts from parts of the book and we collect feedback on it. I’ve gotten a lot of conflicting and sometimes aggressive feedback on some of my chunks, but I’ve been loving every part of it. With every conversation, I know the book is getting better. It’s maddening and crazy and time-consuming and repetitive and sometimes even just flat-out irritating, but that’s what the process is about. Iteration through conflict, and success through iteration. And I love it.

If you find yourself in a creative fight, try to keep things about the project, not the person. If you find the conversation has stopped being productive, walk away from it or try to get to something objective, like a prototype or an action plan. And above all, try as hard as possible to remember that the person you’re fighting with wants exactly the same thing you do – to make the best project possible.

  1. And yes, I said “fucking.” To the President, even. It’s just that kind of work environment. ↩

What I Learned from “Echo Bazaar”

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echobazaarBefore I get into Echo Bazaar, I want to talk a bit about the past “What I Learned” posts – “what I learned about ‘What I Learned’,” if you will.

I learned that a lot of people read those posts, and that while I had thought that this blog was primarily read by people who like writing and role-playing games with a few video game players, the reality is that I’m being read by a wide variety of people, and that I’m getting a lot of traffic from the “video game content designer” side of my fence. It doesn’t seem like I’m getting a whole lot of people sticking around here and chatting or becoming regular readers, but a couple of times now, these “What I Learned” posts have been linked on GameBanshee.com, and that’s caused a huge spike in readers, and prompted some conversations outside of my blog. Other people outside my company in the video game industry have mentioned reading them. (And yes, despite all my caveats, I got some flack on my stance on “The Path”.)

I admit, that surprised the hell out of me, and caused me to rethink my approach. Thus far I had been approaching things as “some dude just starting out in video games that might have some interesting thoughts for a handful of people,” and not “representative of a major video game company that might have his posts minutely examined by hundreds of people”. At the end of the day, it doesn’t change much of anything, but it does mean I’m writing for a different audience than I originally thought I was, so I suspect my approach to these will be subtly different. But more importantly, I’m hella pleased that people find these posts enlightening and worthy of discussion, and I will continue to do them when I have something insightful to glean from a recent game I’ve played (which won’t be restricted to video games).

So. Echo Bazaar.

I’ve been playing this for a year, I think. I was kind of holding off on talking about what I’ve learned because I was waiting for the inevitable point where I get bored with the game and stop playing, but that hasn’t happened. I don’t play it intensely, but every morning part of my work ritual has been to log in and take my actions before starting with the rest of my day. It seems like the game comes up in conversation more often than not around the office and around the Internet. And yet, on the surface it seems to be just another Mafia Wars clone. So what have I learned from Echo Bazaar that I didn’t learn from my (brief and uninteresting) run with Mafia Wars?

Non-linear storytelling can work. This is something I’ve been thinking a lot about, and even though I’ve looked at things like roguelikes and other games that stitch together random elements into a cohesive story, this is a great game that not only does it well, but very clearly shows the underpinnings of that style of storytelling to the players. The conceit of having a deck of “storylets” is strangely compelling, especially when you start to see patterns over the course of several cards. While I ‘m sure other games do this as well, this one is great for game designers because a lot of the moving parts are right on the surface.

States of failure are interesting. Something else I’ve been thinking about. While I haven’t actually died in the game, I am reliably informed that dying is interesting. However, I have gone insane from nightmares several times, and while it is indeed a state of failure (I have to stop working on whatever I had going on for a couple of days), time spent insane ends up adding to the overall experience.

Decisions have repercussions that I can see before they come. While many games are set up to have a player’s decisions resonate throughout the game, this one makes it a goal. There are several qualities based on decisions, such as being Sentimental or becoming the Friend of Demons. As the quality increases in value, you start to see storylets that relate to the value, but that you can’t quite unlock. At first, I thought this was bad sorting on the part of the software, but I soon realized that the game was helping me to set goals – I want to play in that cool story, so I need to increase that certain quality. Then the game gives me terrible choices to help me increase said quality. And sometimes the story I wanted to unlock also does terrible things. Which makes me feel all the more like it was my choices that made these terrible things happen.

Multiplayer doesn’t have to mean simultaneous. One remnant of the Mafia Wars style is that you can give gifts to other players. However, in Echo Bazaar this sometimes comes at a cost to you, or to the gift receiver, and it’s not always clear which will pay the price. Further, sometimes you need something another player has in order to progress. While I don’t feel like I’m necessarily playing the games with other people at my side, I do feel like I’m able to pop into my friend’s home for a quick cup of tea (or, more often, to share my terrible Nightmares with them).

They talk openly about their design. As much as I could go on about this game, I really don’t need to. The design company, Failbetter Games, has a blog that often digs into the guts of the game as it’s evolving. While I don’t agree with everything (naturally), it’s a great collection of design discussion that helps puts even more context to the already transparent game mechanics.

The (Chaotic) Evil Empire

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Eddy at ICC 2001For once, the picture on this blog post is actually relevant to what I’m talking about. The guy in the center is me ten years (and probably forty pounds) ago, playing my Brujah Anarch at the International Camarilla Conclave. More importantly, that’s me ten years ago playing in Vampire: The Masquerade, a part of the World of Darkness. Now, I’m the World of Darkness developer for the new WoD RPGs. One of the many things that means is that I’m helping to make more game material so that more people can make more memories like that for themselves.

But that LARP isn’t some isolated incident in the past, a wistful look back to the time when I used to game. Last night I played in a Sabbat-focused Masquerade LARP. Last weekend I made a character for a Dark Ages: Vampire game. The weekend before that I played in a different Masquerade LARP (this one centered around the Camarilla and the independent clans). I may be making the games, but I’m still a fan and still a player. I love Masquerade and Requiem (and all the other games) with different levels of passion and intensity, but I do love them.

A couple of weeks ago, Mike Mearls posted on the Internet about Dungeons & Dragons. Now, many people post about D&D on the Internet, but Mike is the Group Manager for the D&D Research and Development team, which is probably a title roughly analogous to my own. He posted his love of the various editions of D&D, and some of the sentiment he expressed mirrored a lot of my own thoughts about editions wars, so I didn’t think much of it except for giving Mike a mental fist bump before moving on.

Then Russell posted about the fan reaction to this:

There are, however, those who doubt Mike’s sincerity. He’s just making nice for the Pathfinder players, they say, in order to lure them insidiously into his brand-new gingerbread house D&D products. The ones that look like candy, but are soaked in cyanide. And WoWcraft.

There’s more, and I suggest you read it, but Russell’s zeroed in on a point that’s bugged me for a while: folks like us don’t get to be in charge of projects like this without having a shit-ton of passion for these games specifically, or for games in general. We’re not corporate drones designed to kill everything that’s awesome in gaming. Quite the opposite: in every interview for a game design position I’ve given or received, at some point there’s the question of “what games do you play?”

And it’s not just Mike and Russell and me. I play D&D with my boss once in a while. The president of CCP North America has an ongoing game. Our CEO once chatted with me about the best way to go about becoming the Prince of Reykjavik. Every time a new video game launches, the office will be full of people talking about it the next day. Some of the guys in the kitchen staff have a Requiem tabletop game. Even people we’ve hired from outside the game industry who don’t game seem to become gamers before too long.

So it’s hard for me to look at something that someone like Mike Mearls wrote and find any malicious design behind such a passionate love letter. It’s hard for me to attribute negative corporate decisions to faceless “suits,” because there aren’t many in most of the game companies I know. Granted, there are more and more businessmen in the video game industry as it continues to make (and spend) a staggering amount of money, but more often than not someone who works for a game company probably owns a set of polyhedral dice or a video game console and uses them.

Game companies might be more chaotic than we should be at times, but we’re probably not as evil as some folks think we are.

My Advice? Stop Listening To Advice

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stopsignYou.

Yes, you. The prospective writer or game designer. The one with over 500 unread blog posts in your RSS reader. You.

We need to talk. Have a seat. Would you like something to drink? No? Okay.

Look, this isn’t easy for me to talk about, but I think you need to hear it. I’m not sure how to break this to you gently, so I’ll just be honest.

You need to stop spending all your time reading advice on writing and game design.

Don’t get me wrong. I totally get it. It’s hard not to find joy in Rob Donoghue’s mellow vibe. You get caught up in the frank nature of Gareth Skarka’s blogs. You laugh at the dick jokes and poop references that Chuck Wendig sprinkles into mad ramblings about writing. You have Will Hindmarch and Jeff Tidball and dozens of others pumping into Google Reader or Twitter, and you love every word of their sparkling, wonderful advice.

But… well, let me tell you a story.

Back before Al Gore invented the Internet, I would collect books on writing advice. I knew I wanted to be a writer, and I had written a couple of things that got some attention, so I decided that I needed to prepare to be a Real Writer. I was poor, so I couldn’t buy many books off the shelf, but I would scour library sales and used book stores, and over several years I ended up owning dozens of them. I would read and re-read each one, knowing that if I inhaled their advice often enough, I would eventually reach a point where I would be ready. I could accumulate the lore of Those Who Had Come Before, and be able to stride among them, a giant among artists.

And yet, during the entire time I was collecting books, I wasn’t writing.

Now that we have blog and microblogs and Facebook and podcasts and whatever, it’s easy to get fresh advice every hour of every day. You could spend hours reading and listening to advice, also learning from Those Who Have Come Before.

But I’ve been skimming those sites too. A few months ago, I saw you post that the blog on characterization was perfect for the first chapter of the story you were working on. A couple of months ago, the Facebook thread on setting was also perfect for that first chapter. Just last week, you were thrilled to learn how world-building would be just the thing for… your first chapter.

When are you going to work on that first chapter?

If you want to write a book, do it. If you want to design a game, make it happen. If you want to just read advice and appreciate what others have to say, that’s cool, but stop deluding yourself that you’re just waiting for that one last piece of advice to make your story or your game perfect before you start.

Because that perfect advice doesn’t exist. It won’t happen. The only thing that will get you writing and designing is to close the browser and open the word processor.

Now, see, don’t look at me like that. I know you’re mad, but it’s for the best. Let me explain.

If you never start, all of this advice might be Important, with a capital I. You might need that piece on dialogue cues, or there might be a place for that thought on resource management. So you become paralyzed, trying to hold it all in your head, trying to absorb it all.

But really, advice is best used when you’ve already done something. You reread chapter four and find that the romance subplot feels tacked on. Your character creation chapter reads like stereo instructions. You’ve called one character Robert and a different one Bob. You have a specific problem, and you need advice on it. That is when you go to the Twitternets and the Faceblogs. You’ll find the right piece of inspiration, the right piece of advice for your problem at the moment. Or maybe you won’t, but you’ll figure it out. That’s when the collective wisdom of Those Who Have Come Before will propel you, instead of inhibiting you.

For now, though, I think you need a break. Cut all your advice-lurking cold turkey, and focus on creating. Rob and Gareth and Chuck and Will and Jeff (and I) will still be there, ready to help you. We like helping and sharing knowledge, but we can’t help you write your book or make your game. Only you can do that. And it’ll be brilliant and terrible and inspiring and hateful and innovative and derivative. But it’s yours.

And then, you can give us some advice.

What I Learned from The Path

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ThePath-Box

Continuing through my queue of games that I’ve learned from, here’s what I learned from playing The Path. (Special thanks to Link Hughes for buying a copy for me, even if he mocked me later for playing it.)

Before I dive into this, The Path is really one of those games you absolutely love or absolutely hate. I’m going to be upfront: I didn’t enjoy it. I know this game is quite the darling in the indie video game scene, and that’s awesome – I wish Tale of Tales the best of luck in continuing to make games that work for them and their audience. I’m not their audience, but as someone keenly interested in the design of games and other interactive media, I can and will play things I don’t like to learn from them. So if you’re gearing up to leave comments or send me emails telling me how I should have loved the game, save us both a lot of time: I don’t love it, and probably won’t no matter how much you tell me I should have.

“Artistic” should not trump “game,” nor should a game mean we don’t need to be artistic. Video games are still a young medium, and for the medium to grow and evolve, we need to explore more artistic expression in games. I’m not refuting that at all. However, an artistic expression that ignores the fact that this is an interactive medium is just as bad as a non-artistic expression that ignores that this is an interactive medium.

I had this frustration when I played the demo of The Graveyard. Sure, I got to move the main character around, and that led to some stuff happening, but really, I was just there. The game had its story to tell, and I was only the vehicle for the game to tell that story to me. While The Path is better about trying to embrace its game elements, it does them in such an ironic way that it almost feels ashamed to be a game.

And I get that, too. There’s a lot of baggage that comes with the word “game,” and in order to evolve, we have to move past that. But if we’re embarrassed about our chosen medium, then others will wonder why we’re embarrassed by it, and we won’t progress. And The Path feels like it really doesn’t want to be a game.

Old stories still have power. The conceit of The Path is a vague retelling of the story of Little Red Riding Hood. And it really works here – I was able to quickly get a lot of information through the symbols and language of the game, without a lot of prompting. Dog-like paw prints on the screen told me that maybe the Big Bad Wolf was coming, which was probably bad. A location called “Grandma’s House” immediately tells me that that’s probably where I need to ultimately go. This is something more visceral than a license or an adaptation – this is using the language of common myth and legends to communicate a staggering amount of information in a very concise space. This is something I would love to see more of, instead of endless windows and pop-ups.

Interface needs to balance storytelling and approachability. The interface of the game is… difficult. I was willing to accept a lot of difficulty for this experience, but at one point in the game, the character only takes one step if you hit the W key, and she does so very, very, very slowly. I spent five minutes hammering on W just to get to a building I could clearly see in front of me. I understood that the idea was that the walk to the house is meant to be difficult and painful, but the threshold from “communicating experience via gameplay” quickly moved from confusing to artistic to fucking irritating in short order.

The same is true for any style of game, I think. A role-playing game that is meant to be fast-paced and exciting shouldn’t have lumbering dice rolling or excessive record-keeping. A board game about exploration should have an expansive board and a feeling that every space has something meaningful to discover. I always look back to the original Deadlands as a great example of flavorful gameplay with using poker hands to cast magic spells – for a game about the Wild West with weird elements, it gets you right into the world through the act of gameplay. But when the flavorful gameplay interferes with the act of actually interfacing with the game, it’s a problem.

Unreliable narrators can work in games, but we haven’t found the right balance yet. The Path starts off with two rules, and if you follow them, you lose. It’s a bit of a shock, because we rely on games so much to communicate the concept and world of the experience to us. To realize that the game is not wrong or flawed but actively lying to you is extremely disorienting. It’s very similar to unreliable narrators in literature, and I think it’s one of the concepts that translates well from one medium to interactive media. But The Path lets you realize that it’s lying, and then just shrugs and keeps its mouth shut. You’re left with aimlessly exploring – which isn’t a bad design, but in this case a game with open exploration needs an even stronger interface than usual. I have another game with unreliable narration in my queue (The Void), so I’ll be able to see if this is a specific failing of The Path or if it’s a concept that’s still gelling in interactive media.

Gameplay doesn’t have to be comfortable to be entertaining. After I played this, I got into a couple of rants with (sympathetic) co-workers about it. As a horror writer, I understand that sometimes our entertainment can (and maybe even should) be uncomfortable. A good horror movie should make us squirm, and there are some great movies that I loved and will never watch again. Games cannot and should not be exempt from this. But “uncomfortable” does not mean “boring,” and I don’t think games as a whole have found that line yet – as designers, we still err on the side of “entertaining.”

All in all, I think The Path is an important game. I am glad it was made, and I think that people really interested in pushing the boundaries of video games should at least watch some videos of it or borrow a friend’s copy for a few hours. And like all important things, it invites divisive opinions and sparks complicated commentary. But at the end of the day, “important” is not the same thing as “good.”