Game Play (unfinished)
The principles of game play which I’m looking for are a reaction against all I see as wrong in modern video games. So let’s set out what these are:
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Superpower: the player character has some special powers or skills that other characters in the game fo not have.
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Special status: the player character is ‘the chosen one’, ‘the hero’, or even just ‘the Witcher’ from the very beginning, without having done anything to earn those titles.
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Boss fights: some non-player characters have special, and specially strong, combat repertoire, and block progress in the game until you overcome them.
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Psychokiller: completing the game necessarily involves beating many, many other characters in combat.
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Slaughterhouse: the main way to interact with other characters is to kill them.
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The Script is King: everything is scripted. The player either can’t diverge from the script, or if they do, will find no interesting content.
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Dumb and dumber: non-player characters, even important ones, have extremely limited vocal repertoire.
Of these, the last two, I think, are key: they are the root cause of the other problems. In fact, to take it further, the real key is the last. We talk a lot about ‘Game AI’, but really there’s nothing remotely approaching artificial intelligence in modern games. Non-player characters do not think; they do not learn; they do not reason; they do not know. They speak only from the script. And they speak only from the script because of the fetish for voice acting.
Death to Dum-Dum
As I’ve argued elsewhere, repeatedly, we can now generate a wide variety of naturalistic speaking voices, and have them narrate text. Now of course there’s great deal of information conveyed in human vocal communication in addition to the words – of which emotion is only an example, although an important one. Generating voices with the right tone, the right emphasis, for different situations may be harder than I anticipate; there may be an ‘uncanny valley’ in which generated speech just sounds uncomfortably off.
But it’s a trade off. For possibly less than perfect vocal performance, you get the possibility of much richer repertoire. You get not only the possibility that non-player characters can talk about the weather, or gossip about their neighbours, or give you directions to local places of interest. You get the possibility that a non-player character’s attitude to you may be conditioned by the fact that they’ve heard that you stole from their second cousin, or that you killed an outlaw who’d raped one of their friends.
Suddenly, they can have attitudes about things that happen in the world, opinions about major political figures in it, about their neighbours, about you the player, which are not scripted, which are emergent. When they learn new information which conflicts with something they already knew, their attitudes will change, as that new information is integrated. Intelligent behaviour will emerge.
And with the emergence of intelligent behaviour comes the emergence of possibilities for negotiation, for diplomacy, for dynamic, unscripted, friendships and romances. Which means, there are things you can do to interact with every non-player character, even ones who are not ‘plot’ characters, other than just kill them.
And as new gameplay possibilities emerge, as new stories emerge organically out of the dynamically changing relationships between non-player characters in the world, the need for scripting decreases.
The problem with scripting is that it greatly limits player agency. The story can only have one of a few predetermined – literally, scripted – endings. This is clearly expressed in a review of Red Dead Redemption 2 which I recomment to you; but is equally true of almost all other games.
Dynamic side quests have fallen into disfavour, because, when they’ve been tried in earlier generation games, there were too few possibilities, and they became repetitive and boring. I don’t believe, with the wealth of compute resource we now have, this any longer need be the case. On the contrary, I think we can now dynamically generate a wide range of different, and differently complex, side quests. I think, in fact, that these can emerge organically from the structure of the game world.
Death to Psycho-Killer
If the main way a player can interact with non-player characters is to kill them, and if the player doesn’t have a systematic combat advantage over non-player characters, then it’s going to be a short game. This is why players in many or most video games do start with a systematic combat advantage, and that combat advantage tends to increase over the course of the game as the player becomes more proficient with the combat system, and acquires better weapons, armour and combat buffs. This in turn means that to keep combat ‘interesting’, the game has to through larger and larger armies of ‘bad’ non-player characters against the player – a fault seen at its worst in Dragon Age 2.