Today I was watching Star Trek: Enterprise. It’s something of a sociological tradition to watch Star Trek. Nowhere else on television will you find a show so caught up in pushing Marxism with such positive spin. The show has gone on for so long that it’s more likely to watch an episode to demonstrate a point of almost any social theory. Science Fiction, in general, tends to push this envelope of thinking what it might be like to live in a different type of reality perpetuated and reinforced by different thinking from different systems of government. Ursula LeGuin’s novel The Dispossessed is probably my favorite example of this strength in science fiction.
The unfortunate thing is that science fiction also houses a tremendous amount of things that eventually found their way to association with the gamer stereotype. But this is for another time. As I was talking about Star Trek, the thing that brought about me thinking about it was two different things, the last enterprise episode I saw and the Kobayashi Maru incident in both the original series and the new J.J. Abrams movie.
The Enterprise episode I was watching involved finding a decimated starship that was brought on board the enterprise. The interesting thing here was when they began examining the ship, they found that it was far more spacious on the inside than it was on the outside ala the book House of Leaves. They had crammed a series of sizable corridors into what was essentially a tiny closet.
This set into motion a series of aliens coming from out of nowhere to take the ship. Rather than giving the ship back to an overwhelmingly powerful species, the captain essentially gives them the finger and tells them to fuck off, each and every time. The reasoning here is that they had figured out that the ship had something to do with a story arc that involved a “temporal cold war” that was being waged throughout the general star trek time line and the captain wanted more info about it rather than play the puppet as he had in any number of the time traveling inspired episodes.
The second incident is the Kobayashi Maru from the Star Trek cannon and the new movie. This is an unwinnable situation that Star Fleet puts their commanders through in order to prove to them that not all situations are winnable and to see how they are handled. Being that he is Kirk, Kirk found a way to win by reprogramming the scenario completely and thus win the unwinnable. He’s Kirk, what are you going to do.
These two situations make me think about the effort of programming a video game. In a traditional game, there has to be a “game related” way to solve a problem. In order to defeat Dr. Wiley, I have to kill all of the things guarding a piece of the key in order to finally get at him. In order to find the right target in Assassins Creed, I have to follow the pieces of the key to the place where the target is. In order to get through all of Shadow of the Colossus, I have to defeat each piece of the key in order to free the God thing that causes the game’s end. Games can typically only solve issues in one way. Later games have tried to add more ways to do things (Bioshock), but these end up being more novelty than actual methods. You are always putting together a metaphorical key that ends up as the thing that opens the lock of the last boss or the ending.
I am getting back to a thing I keep writing about and around, something that Ian Bogost writes about in Racing the Beam, namely, the limitations of the console and the programs that make it go (chapter 1).
“Whatever the programmer takes for granted when developing, and whatever, from another side, the user is required to have working in order to use particular software, is the platform…Little work has been done on how the hardware and software of platforms influences, facilitates, or constrains particular forms of computational expression” (2-3)
What would it take to program the freedom needed to let the commander of a star ship take whatever action they deemed worthy and make it not look like a choose your own adventure? What would it take to program the ability to just reprogram a game to more effectively meet the user using it?
If you were to program the kobayashi maru incident into a game, what would it look like now? Well, thinking about how games are, we can see that Kirk would need to wander around the Starfleet areas gathering “secrets” and doing a stealth mission that involves trying to sneak around Spock and reprogram the mission. You could also convince or seduce women to reprogram the mission for you (but that wouldn’t be very Kirk like with having other people do your stuff for you). Or you could play a mini-game involving a series of Dragon’s Lair inspired button presses and a final reward of reprogramming.
But each of these methods are a means through which 1 game would have to follow, multiple modes would seem jumpy and strange (SEE: Resident Evil 5). Programming all of these to interact simultaneously would involve a certain amount of programming that doesn’t seem possible to do quite yet, or just might be possible but not really experimented with. Even huge games with huge amounts of players are essentially a gathering of text based quests that can be done one way or through one method of doing.
I would suppose that I am talking about freedom but there is more to it than that, there is not a method for this as games do not move or want to act in this way. In order to program freedom into their games, the fundamental nature of the video game would have to change.
A lot of people say that video games are trying to emulate the movie. They want the video game to be an interactive movie. While I would venture to say that an interactive movie would be just that, a movie you interact with or in, there is a growing tendency for a video game to be built around the idea of a movie. You see characters come in and hit their marks, say their lines, the characters do their stunts, and the scene is wrapped with a cut scene.
It sounds neat and tidy until you begin to think of the main character’s action. Instead of being able to follow the path of the main character based on what I feel the main character should be doing with their time (via interaction with the movie), I am met with following a path through a series of button presses or mashes and ending with a cut scene meant to drive a story I have absolutely no control of. Any modicum of control in games that have been “innovative” or “amazing” amounts to choosing through a sophisticated version of “choose your own adventure”.
This argument has existed for ages; I would call it the Illusion of choice argument. You have multiple endings that seem to be based on a continuum of bad or good. However, the resulting ending is based on the sum total of 1’s and -1’s you’ve acquired. So, while you may feel like you’ve had any number of choices, the false dichotomy of 1. Good and -1. Bad, ends up being nothing more than a test in the latest Cosmo or Facebook test, you are not Daniel-san, but Master of the Kobra-Kai Dojo, sorry…or congrats!
“If you behead this guy, turn to page 17”
“If you choose to let him live, turn to page 240”
There is no choice there. It’s akin to the choice of, “step on this bug?” “Give back the guy’s wallet?” Punishment happens only if the game requires you to be absolutely bad or absolutely good but even then, the amount of quests versus the amount of good or bad points you need is typically balanced in favor of, “half ass it and you’ll be fine.”
So we return to the captain of the Enterprise show, Scott Bakula. Here, Bakula has decided to keep the golden goose no matter the cost. He’s tired of being taken advantage of and is willing to pay the price. He manages to fight off a wave of ships and manages to make a bomb when things look like they aren’t going his way. He’s not going to let people take advantage of him without paying the ultimate price. In the end, two of the alien species begin to fight over who gets to take the ship from “the future”.
You see this a lot in board game based simulations. Take for instance, Carcassone.
I can play the game how I choose. I can play to win and go for as many towns as I can while working for dominating farms, roads, and churches, or I can play to screw the other players. I can place pieces so that cities are never finished, I can place tiles near cities that finish other player’s cities. This is not the illusion of choice, it is choice incarnate. The amount of ways to play the game depends on my understanding of a situation and the means I have at my disposal. Yes, this game also takes place in a closed system and the story is mostly lacking, but it is the mechanic that is important.
Movie based games need to take a cue from games based on board games. Playing along a linear path with a few forks in the road is not the same as looking at the pieces I have available, at the resources I have available, and using them as I see fit. To properly emulate this Star Trek scenario in Enterprise, I would have to be able to choose to end my game at any time because I believed what I was doing was right and suffer the consequences of it. There are no consequences that are uncontrollable in a video game because all of them are accounted for. If I fail, I die, if I do the wrong thing, I die, if I do an evil thing, my morality meters slips. There isn’t a consequence that I can choose to take that doesn’t have consequences that aren’t already accounted for. It is here that video games, the consoles that drive them , and the software that steers them, need to work.
3 comments:
This wanders a bit, and I'm not a Star Trek afficianado, but I like where you ended up going with it. I know you're not willing to go there, but this pretty much looks like a call to unshackle at least a portion of AAA game development from the constraints of trying to tell a story. I actually think we're really close to being able to make a sizeable, maybe small city-sized game world with autonomous agents and a story that evolves naturally based on NPC preferences and molded at intervals by events that take place roughly based on what you've chosen to do, but people don't really seem interested in it.
Glad somebody else thinks Bioshock is a hack job, too.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_2dO-LqGaD4#t=3m06s
As Warren Spector puts it "Games are at their best when they are saying something about the user, not the designer".
Games are not interactive movies. Interactive movies are interactive movies. They're kind-of games, but when you want to stretch logic like that, movies are games too. Especially art movies - those movies that are open to interpretation. If I interpret a movie one way, you interpret another, have we chosen our own movie adventure?
Games that realize the potential of gaming also allow us to express ourselves in the way we play them.
What I would ask, then, is whether or not a game should be designed with a singular purpose or concept in mind. I like to approach game design with the idea of putting across a sensation or experience to the player - but doing so by presenting the player with an environment that allows the player to explore, express and - more importantly to learn through experience.
@Simon
It's wandering a bit but the wandering is a bit intentional. More and more, I feel like a singular, complex argument is on the tip of my tongue but I need to adjust certain perspectives so that I can finally make the whole thing. I would like to call out AAA design but yeah, it seems as though any sort of academic influence is met with an amazing amount of apprehension (and for good reason given there isn't a solid amount of good works to choose from).
I would love to see what you describe, Simon, in that I think that it is what players of video games probably want but don't really realize they want it. If they didn't want it, Fable 2 wouldn't be a success, for example.
It's one game but is trying to head in a direction of player freedom but is based on player direction only in so much as player is disconnected from the world at large with exception of their deeds and morals.
@AlanJack
This is a dangerous argument and central to the "Science Wars" in the 90s (and I guess is still being fought). If multiple interpretations of one thing are multiple realities, in this case multiple games, then a large variety of things shouldn't make sense to everyone. For me, Mario would be an asshole trying to ruin a lizard's day by taking his shallow girlfriend home whereas others would see Mario as a Hero rescuing Peach as she is in great peril.
Post-modern arguments never made much sense to me in that they seem to want to say something of the relative nature of things but only go so far as to include some things in interpretation and not others. Further, the thing being interpreted isn't changing and it's a reality for the user, not for multiple people. The game is still the game, Mario is still Mario, nothing changed.
Basically it comes down to, is it relative to what? Interpretation as game play or movie watching comes into trouble when you ask what it is you're interpreting. For this movie, it exists as it is given that it will never change, it is the reality and it cannot be changed (much like scientific reality). I cannot express myself in a game other than by doing things that cause a game over on purpose.
Your last statement is the argument that drove this post. It's a series of feelings and references that i've been exploring for the past month and want to write into a much larger piece. Video Games have potential to unlock from the traps and confines of movies and board games, but designers are creating more walls around video games than they are trying to tear them down.
Games can be interactive in that my actions could determine a whole slew of things, this is sort of where games are headed. However, unintended consequences cannot be taken into account. There are only consequences inside of a game that are accounted for. I'd like to turn your statement around and give players tools and background, areas already explored, and then allow them to do as they see fit, however they see fit.
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