Articles

NOMEN: THE MAKING OF A COMPUTER GAME

by Jakob Steen Madsen

Preface:

Why would I want to go about writing something like this? Trying to take an entire subject as problematic as the production of computer games, and cover it in one single file. The idea seems rather ambitious. It is anyways what I intend to in the following, to the best of my abilities.

I found the dropping quality of computer games, seemed to reach a point where someone needed to address the issue. I assumed it might as well be me. I have, after all, had considerable experience as a consumer, it might be helpful if someone like myself tried putting myself in the producers situation, and look at the do’s and don’ts of games-production.

Especially the problems surrounding mmorpgs and adventure games. These two seem to be the types of games demanding the most from the producers, and the ones most dropping in quality these days.

Nomen is the game title I would use for the game I am dreaming about creating. A lot of work has already been done on its concept development. Nomen is more a world, than an actual game. The game would develop in a life simulation fashion, and most of the content would be added by means of GM and playerbase contributions. The concept is to make a game that would function more as the ultimate tool for playing gamemasters (GM), and the actual events would be handled 90% by volunteer players selected by application screenings. The tools these GMs would get would be limited according to trust and proven talents. There would be a top theme, which the producers would keep control of, and major political and economics shifts could and would be handled by the original game creators. The rest would be a matter of maintenance and content moderation. This document has the title from this game concept because the content that follows is based on this game of my dreams.

Obsession:

The most important thing in computer games is obsession, and how to make the player obsess about the game. This might not be very politically correct to attempt to insert into a game, considering the whole addictiveness and the problems from ludomania. It is however the goal of any good entertainer to enthral their audience. The more immersed in the game the player gets, the more successful the game is. A game has to take the part of a storyteller, and follow the same classic rules in that regard. There are only minor differences to game production, and these are all related to the medium, and the concept of interactive entertainment.

So how do we go about adding obsession to a game? The first part would be to define the state of mind the gamer is supposed to enter when playing. Robert Washburn terms this state as the State of Disbelief. This SoB is a state a person listening to any fictitious and entertaining story is putting himself into so as to receive the undiluted story. The state is actually related to a semi-hypnotic state, and this also explains how it can lead to the states such as obsessive behaviour. The spellbinding of the audience is all about suspending belief, and leading people into a new world and a different reality. As Washburn points out the game producer is already at an advantage from the fact that the player has decided to give the game a chance by investing time and money into it. The audience is listening!

The art of not saying, is a well known phenomenon in horror movies. The idea of letting the viewer create the missing parts is extremely effective. The reason is that letting the brain fill in the blanks makes the experience of alternate reality more real, because it is actually so much more in line with what we do in everyday life. So using this to its full extend in games will be a great tool for immersion. Don’t give away a plot or solution, give a lot of clues and pointers instead. There is rarely any need to paint the entire picture of a situation and delve in explaining things. If a game is holding on to the rule of reality most situations are recognizable and can be self-explanatory. You rarely need to tell a player that is placed in a locked room with bars on the window that he is now in jail and needs to get out. These facts are rather obvious. The same rule goes on the effects side of games. The trend is that we have to see everything, and meet as many characters as possible, it seems. This is all just a waste of production time that could be used elsewhere. Always try to see if there is a way to let the player fill in blanks, and figure things out with a minimum of effects. Creating an entire scenery for something that could just as well be handled by a small cut scene, or by a “mail” or “phone” setup, is a big waste of time and effort.

Attention focus is an important part of storytelling, and even more so in computer games. Your attention focus is always first and foremost on the next subgoal of the game. Clearing a stage, or solving the next puzzle all these things shifts during the game, and with each of these shifts the player is emotionally moved. The player gets the sense of progress, and of accomplishment. The better the rhythm of these shifts are, and the better the sense of achievement, the better the gameplay will be. Some of the rules that apply here are exemplified to perfection in the horror genre of movies. This mainly because the emotions are racing up and down, and back and fourth all through these movies. Horror, relief, compassion, hate, disgust, and attraction to name a few the palette of emotions in these movies are rather unique.

In summation the way to attain the state of obsession in the player, that will keep them glued to your game, we have to successfully place him in an environment that makes him enter a state of disbelief. This is where he ignores his normal reality and forgets all about his normal agendas. Most players are rather well accustomed to this, and actually know how to survive it, and not actually forget totally to eat and sleep. Although there have been a few myths about players actually forgetting these with a fatal result, the myth of the nymphs powers are relived in our times in this way. The other part of hooking the player is to grant him some sort of pseudo existence in the game, and identify with the main character (his avatar). This alter ego has to be advanced through the different mechanics of plot and character developments. Whether you advance a story or the characters abilities or some other part of the game, the effect is the same. The player gets the sense of achievement and this creates immersion. He is no longer just passively being entertained, he is taking part and becoming the avatar. Personally I would term this as some sort of Avatar manifestation. The more the player identifies with his avatar alter, the more he is manifesting it in the world.

The Rule of Reality

I have come to the conclusion that the biggest problem in games today is the missing rule of reality. It shocks me to see how often realism suffers in the game genre. I am not suggesting that games should be “realistic” as such, without monsters and laser beams, games wouldn’t be much fun. My point is that the rules governing these games, and the turns of plotlines etc. is rarely paying respect to logic and realism. The rule of realism would ask that all games tried to make as many elements act on realism and simulation rules when possible. The whole history of games would tend to support this, the popularity of simulation games in general, and the popularity of FPS games like Rainbow Six and similar high realism action games. Some might disagree and claim that the story and the entertaining is more important, they would say that games with high-speed action like Doom and similar would suffer if you added realism. I would not entirely disagree with that, but the issue in that case would be the problems with concepts like mortality, time, and risk. I would not be suggesting gamers should have only one life, or that death should always be around the corner, neither am I suggesting that games should be realistic in their time movements. All of these things need to be balanced for the specific games, to give them entertainment value. My point is that disregard of realism will tend to give players a push beyond their disbelief tolerance. It might seem cool that you just pick up weapons in spawn points in the game so you can get on with shooting the opponent, but it shifts the game into a sport like state, and strips it of all characteristics of simulation. These games become all sporting, and seem more akin to a Jane Fonda instruction video, than with a motion picture. It wouldn’t demand that much from the game designers to shift the game back into realistic ranges, you could simply add a location that was an arms locker. The difference might seem small, but from a game immersion perspective it is actually huge.

The hole goes even deeper. Many people out there will actually be very well aware of the importance of the rule of realism. Anyone that has played more than three sessions of a pen & paper RPG will know about some of the pitfalls in gaming. There are actually extensive writings about these issues, and my advice to game designers for the future would be to read as much of these roleplaying guides they can get their hands on. Experiences in pen & paper are extremely good at pointing out some of the issues that actually is causing the current game problems. Among the good examples is the “Monty Haul” adventures, and its correlation to the mmorpgs game and economy inflations. The “Monty Haul” is the term used for a game master that is way to nice with his payouts. The GM gives way to much experience, reveals the simple plotlines way to fast, and overflows your inventory and cash balance to the point of bursting. A game with such generous GM will become dull and meaningless rather fast. The value of great items, money and solving mysteries is lowered considerably. This inflation of the game takes you to the top of the food chain so fast that the view is spoiled. Maxing out and attaining superhuman strength and extreme wealth is sort of an ultimate goal, and being taken to that makes it hard to keep any motivation to play the game. A good game needs to keep the player wanting more, and always make sure the game is challenging his abilities just as much as he can endure. This is where the feeling of accomplishment is at its highest, because you actually overcome the pressure. To compare being placed in a desert with a single canteen of water and a rusty knife, where the canteen is holed and loosing the life giving drops, is much more interesting albeit the frustration. If a challenge is tough but manageable, the sense of success is so much higher.

Reality is always the best measure for many reasons, the most important might be accessibility. A game biased towards realism in all other aspect then the “supernatural” will be extremely easy to get accustomed to. This intuitive access due to the realism makes a game more long lasting, and you will rarely have any complaints on the quality or content, because whining about realism is sort of pathetic. The only potential problem with added realism is where it breaks the flow of the game. Just like in the movies it wouldn’t be a positive addition if the characters were seen going to the bathroom, or brushing their teeth all the time. It would however be ok to see it maybe once to point out the realism, which brings me to the general rule of avoiding repetition. Repetition breaks the immersion, and thus clearing a game of any sort of tediousness is one of the easy ways to greatly improve any game.

In the past games have been rather limited on realism, unless they were actual simulators. This will change a lot in the future, the high powered machines we have today is able to handle extreme complexity and huge amounts of data. The finite state machine coders will be able to creating convincing worlds, with balanced ecologies, sociologies, and economies. Games with well-balanced finite state machine will be very popular. There is still a lot of ground to cover but we are getting there. Preferably some sort of standardized system would aid the finite state machine coding a great deal, so programmers wouldn’t need to build everything from scratch. Just like physics rules in 3D engines, something similar would benefit the entire industry if made in regards to ecology, sociology and economy. Especially the economy would balance things, which many previous games are suffering a lack of.

Open-Ended Games:

Games are moving from the closed linear thinking into the more open-ended area. In this way games are more and more starting to reflect and mimic reality. Sitting down watching a movie, and judging it as a whole is all rather nice, but in the case of really great ideas and stories we often end up with a feeling of wanting more. This is what results in the rather pathetic flooding the market with sequels that are of mediocre quality at best. There are exceptions, but as a rule the continuations are poor, and rarely even very well connected to the originals. The relevance is that they point out peoples need for open-ended stories, and continuity of stories. In short, they want the unsafe world of a Never Ending Story. This is what draws people to the world of mmorpgs, and in most cases they deliver this rather well. More games will slowly adapt this mode, and I doubt there will be many games not going into online version left a decade from now.

Even the current state of developments could use even more radical thinking. Some have already taken steps into the frontier of future games. Games co-created with the players and the community they build. Games opening up for such contributive systems will be very long lived indeed. With a game platform that can easily be upgraded, and that is in principal using a platform independent database that could easily be moved onto a new code, a whole new style of games will develop. The relevant data, is the world states, items location , and character information. These are all interdependent, but should be independent of the core code. This would make it possible to retain the same world but continue to upgrade the quality of the game in regards to sound and graphics. Who knows maybe such a world would possibly end up becoming a full sensory virtual world in a distant future. The latter would only be possible in a game with extreme lastability, and with a very close to zero game and economy inflation. This game would have some seriously well-balanced parts, and a great range of sinks and consumptions. Actually the FSM would need to be rather close to real life to have such lastability, but it is possible.

The vision is clear, if a game is totally open and without end it will have the potential to live on ad infinitum. The challenge is such a game is adding mechanisms that control the game content, but even this might not be very hard, mainly because players would be able to handle a lot by their interactions and contributions alone. The real issue is to make the “ultimate” finite state machine that can handle the reactions on all the player actions. When the complexity reach a critical point the world should take on a life of its own. This phenomenon is well known among programmers and people working with life simulations. When the simplified game theory models can be applied to a game environment the rest should be only maintenance. Maybe I am dreaming, and have moved to far into the future on the latter statements, but I actually suspect much of this is already out there, but in shards that just need to be collected and glued together.

Sources:

http://www.grumpygamer.com/2152210

http://www.oldmanmurray.com/features/77.html

http://www.justadventure.com/

Planned additions:

A brief history of games.

The Conception of a game.

The Production of a game.

The Marketing of a game.

The product developments of a game.

The Death of a game.

The Finite state machine standard.

Copyright.
Jakob Steen Madsen 2004-11-25
Concept Developer