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The other day, a friend and I were discussing the introduction of a respec option in patch 1.13 for Diablo 2. It’s a familiar point of contention; my friend’s reaction towards this was decidedly unenthused. As for me, well, this was the only change I requested on Blizzard’s forum post for player suggestions for 1.13. The feeling, of course, is that such flexibility cheapens investment. But mechanistically speaking, it’s really just a trade-off between “the two sides of progression” as Mr. Bycer discussed in his post last week—investment in time versus investment in tactical skill.1 
Similarly, this same friend is not a fan of Guild Wars, though I find the ability to tailor one’s build to meet a shifting challenge to be extremely satisfactory. My understanding is that permitting greater agency in the player’s capacity to alter his strategy allows the designers to achieve more tactical depth as the game design is freed from the need to allow a single unchangeable build to be viable for the whole game (a flattening in which one size needs to fit all).
Such a situation existed in Diablo 2 prior to 1.10. The problem was that the difficulty bar for any given area was set by the least effective build for that area, which meant the challenge was significantly reduced for the most effective build for said area. These builds, then, essentially became the only builds you made to do those areas. But Blizzard’s response to this in 1.10 was to increase the overall difficulty and change it so that, for the most part, no single build was universally effective. No longer could an Ice Orb sorc solo Bloody Foothills in an 8 player Hell game, for example.
This made sense at the time as Diablo 2 was always a time investment over skill investment type of a game.2 But without respec, the effect was actually an exacerbation of the problem in that it made builds even more singular in their usage by locking their efficacy into very specific (immunity based) areas of the game (read: everyone plays hammerdins and smiters in pve). As well, certain areas in Hell became completely inaccessible to certain builds—a problem magnified by Act 3 mercs being rendered more or less useless.
At any rate, I mention all this because the problem is equally relevant to narrational navigation: you can’t respec a narrative progression3, and the answer to solving the problem of having only a single “correct” solution to a ludic challenge does not necessarily lie in restricting player flexibility/agency even further.
Moral Predictability as Player Agency
Critics often decry the moral predictability of games, and not without good cause. But moral predictability serves a very specific ludic role: it gives the player agency over an unpredictable narrative. Since narrative progression cannot be respecialized, in order for the player to have (or at least feel he has) agency, either the narrative events or the moral consequences need to be predictable. If agency is to be maintained, the alternative is to make the game narrative redundant or completely linear and fully delegate agency to the ludic aspects of the game.
To clarify, it should be noted that moral predictability does not have to preclude narrative complexity and unpredictability, as can be seen in the example of Revan in Knights of the Old Republic. As well, there is considerably more leeway for moral vagueness in narrative events that are not a result of player choices as such details are outside of the player’s agency to begin with. Even further, moral predictability does not have to mean that moral decisions are rendered trivial.
For example, most difficult moral choices in Dragon Age are actually straight forward: you know something bad is probably going to happen down the line. What makes them difficult is that you are asked to make a ludic sacrifice if you want to keep the “bad stuff” from happening. So for instance, if you’ve been relying on Morrigan as off heal and dps or crowd control, losing her before the final battle can be a pretty big deal. Thus in the context of invested interaction, a morally predictable choice can still be a complex and involved one.
Moral Predictability and Narrative Range
It is frequently noted that games usually provide only a single “correct” moralistic solution, with the effect being that the designer’s values are imposed upon the player. But there is equal danger for the imposition of the designer’s will when the player is not allowed to make an informed choice.4 This is a sleight of hand akin to the mechanical device of the cheating AI. Either situation can leave the player feeling like he is restricted to rock or scissors in a game of RPS.
Moral predictability in player choices is like scouting through the fog of war that is an unpredictable narrative progression. If you eliminate the player’s scouting ability, you are eliminating the player’s capacity to make an informed decision, therefore flattening of the range of unpredictable narrative outcomes which can occur without alienating the player. In other words, all possible results from blind decisions need to be satisfactory, or risk losing the player’s investment. They don’t have to be, but railroading the player with unsatisfactory consequences is a dangerous proposition. The last thing we want is for the player to be held responsible indefinitely for something he had no control over.
That is to say, if a designer makes both narrative outcomes and moral consequences opaque, it must be recognized that the designer is asking the player to cede his agency in both axes of player expression. This in itself is fine, but pursuing such a design is a risky venture of balancing the player’s inherent trust that the player’s actions are not entirely in vain against the imperatives of the narrative. The risk can be taken, and sometimes to great effect. But the designer should be careful that the player’s trust is not stretched too far (at least, not during the course of the game), or the player will leave the game.5 And given that the threshold of fairness differs from player to player, the delicacy of this calculation should not be underestimated.
Agency and Investment
One could say to the above, well, what about a game like Vampire: The Masquerade–Bloodlines? Morality is, for the most part, taken out of the picture there, and yet the narrative can still be unpredictable, right? Not exactly. While the game narrative is quite opaque at times, in all of the narrative events which permanently affect the player’s investment, the player remains fully in control. For example, the true nature of Tourette isn’t exactly obvious, but the real decision making doesn’t happen until the revelation is made. Likewise, all of the possible choices in the finale are quite blatant in their consequences.
The challenge for the designer, then, is to give the player all the necessary information without eliminating the difficulty posed by moral decisions or destroying the revelatory nature of storytelling. This is, to be sure, a tall order; separating game world morality from player choice morality, or narrative predictability from moral predictability, is a hard task indeed.
In the end, the level of player agency in a game is ultimately a stylistic preference. A cheating AI does not necessarily result in automatic player disenchantment/disenfranchisement, for example. And actually, it is the fight to gain greater agency which creates investment to begin with—agency itself is often (if not always) the reward of gameplay. When there is no more agency to be won, a game ceases to be fun. So limited player agency is a good thing: too much agency and there is
nothing more to be gained, which destroys player investment (the question, “what’s the point of trying?” cuts both ways
with either too much or too little agency).
Finally, game narrative agency and ludic agency are not always one and the same, though such cases usually dictate either that the game narrative exists only as an excuse for the game mechanics, or vice versa.
Footnotes
1 In many ways, it actually is a cheapening of the player’s time investment. This is always a difficulty with games that reward time investment more than skill investment. Once a task is allowed to take less time to accomplish than it used to previously, veteran players can feel cheated (thus some of the vocal complaints about changes in WoW’s leveling time, which in this case is directly linked to actual money). However, the two “paths of progression”, of course, do not occur in isolated realities; there is skill involved in figuring out how to make best use of one’s time, and likewise it takes time to develop skill.
2 Which explains the changes in the current patch to Fire Enchanted monster explosion, WilloWisps damage, and Iron Maiden. These are changes that make Hardcore more palatable as something of a counter to respec.
3 This is not always true. For example, the player can take an Open Palm path for the whole of Jade Empire, but then take the presumably Closed Fist ending at the very final point of the game. However, such a choice was interpreted by some players as flippant and cheapening all of the preceding moral choices in the same way that introducing respecialization affects time investment.
4 On a related note, there’s a certain perception pertaining to moral complexity which I believe needs mentioning. The division of a game world into purely good and evil is obviously simplistic. But perhaps what is not so obvious is the reactionary (that is, opposite but equal) simplification that all actions are inherently selfish and nothing is ever actually good. Both are simplified abstractions, and the designer who chooses to impose the latter should not be mistaken in thinking that such a design is any less an imposition than adherence to the former. I mention this not to discuss the nature of morality (whether the latter is actually a simplification is admittedly debatable), but to note that strictness in either worldview can be experienced as an artificial limitation of the player’s agency.
5 cf. Issue 230 of The Escapist
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In Shadow of the Colossus, when you lose your horse, it's terrible and miserable, but you can't do anything about it. Life is full of those moments. Moments in which, despite everything you did, you lost, or you lost something. Yes, it's those moments that make us want to reload the game to escape the terrible consequences, but in life you can't reload, and games should reflect that. Predictability in some decisions is fine, but taking it away sometimes can actually add a lot to your game.
I think you alluded to this when you said that predictability is ultimately a preference, but I didn't see you make this point anywhere on the article, and I thought it should be made.
I guess it might have come across that I was arguing that games should be morally predictable (once again, my apologies for shortcomings in my communication). But my argument was merely that moral predictability (in relation to narrative unpredictability) has a ludic function in serving player agency, and denying this agency can endanger player investment if done carelessly.
A couple of points in particular struck me:
1. "... all possible results from blind decisions need to be satisfactory, or risk losing the player’s investment."
Agreed. As an example, there is an apparently simple choice the player can guide Alistair into making about halfway though Dragon Age: Origins that -- with no warning -- winds up having a major impact on both the story and the gameplay near the end of the game. When I reached this decision point I discovered that it was not possible to achieve my story goal without losing all access to an interesting section of game content. Alternately, if I opted to open up the gameplay content, the story took a turn that I found unacceptable.
Is it desirable to force this kind of sacrifice on players by design? Is it even acceptable? It appears to break the proposed rule that all possible results from blind decisions need at least to be acceptable (even if not equally desirable) to the player.
2. "... the designer who chooses to impose [the reactionary (that is, opposite but equal) simplification that all actions are inherently selfish and nothing is ever actually good] should not be mistaken in thinking that such a design is any less an imposition than adherence to the former."
Again, I agree. Choosing to define a gameworld's story choices as a Manichean system ignores opportunities for morally ambiguous characters, whose complexities can make them more interesting as characters than paragons of virtue or vice. But choosing to define the narrative landscape of a gameworld solely as "shades of gray" with no moral component destroys opportunities for heroic storytelling.
I'm reminded of how Hollywood cycles between heroic and anti-heroic stories. The gritty "noir" movies of 1930s-era culture gave way to the "white hat / black hat" Westerns of the '50s. These in turn provoked the archetypal "Dirty Harry" movies into the mid-1970s, from which we were rescued by heroes like Luke Skywalker and Indiana Jones into the '80s. It wouldn't be surprising to see computer games, as they finally develop into a mature vehicle for telling stories, follow a similar pattern of reflecting the need for moral clarity versus a need for moral freedom -- whichever is predominant at that time in the culture that produces these games.
Mr. Stewart, I know exactly what you are talking about with Dragon Age. I think such situations are like the Zodiac Spear in Final Fantasy; how is the player supposed to know? It's very frustrating when you are punished for sticking to your in-game identity by not being allowed to stick to your in-game identity.
That said, I do believe, though, that shying away entirely from potentially unsatisfactory results can also be something of a flattening of design. How can there be pathos if there is no hamartia? It's a difficult question in games since allowing player choice means there never has to be a tragic error unless the player wishes to commit one. And who wants to willingly commit a damning error?
Perhaps the more relevant question is, how do we incentivize the player into making such an "error"? A potential answer then: by allowing the player stay true to himself. I believe Oedipus Rex could work as a game in that Oedipus always makes the morally correct choice with the information he has--he remains himself until the end. Again, it's a difficult balancing act of providing an avenue or axis of expression which still allows the player to be satisfied with the identity or narrative progression he has built in a game.
Interesting analysis of film morality by the way. One wonders how much such portrayals are reflections of their times: Depression era noir, Post-WW2 era westerns, Vietnam era Taxi Driver type films, etc. etc.
@Taekwan
Perhaps one of the simplest ways is a potent "or" choice. For instance, you enter an area and something happens that forces you to chose between two party members (aka mass effect). Alternatively take advantage of the players short attention span. In an RPG many conversation options just get bypassed for whatever the player believes is the fast route to whatever they desire. Simply adding a conversation item that gives the player the information they need to make correct choices allows for error to occur, simply because some players won't read it. Now this doesn't need to be absolute (it's pretty harsh if you HAVE to read everything), the question or the option in which failure is likely could still be guessed. But players who rush in and intimidate the guards going "hehe my intimidate is really high", might all of a sudden find themselves in a really tough fight, whereas if they'd paused for a moment and learned the guards where some elite sect who feel no fear then all this hassle may have been avoided.
Oh also +1 for mentioning Guild Wars. It should be mentioned that variability to that degree makes pvp in guild wars a far more interesting metagame than something like WoW.
About your intimidate example, this reminded me of a moment in Neverwinter Nights 2 where, to my knowledge, no matter how high your persuasion is, the check fails. This seems to be an example of letting the player remain true to himself, but still automatically saddling him with an unsatisfactory result--it's actually not letting the player remain true to himself at all. And the experience is not necessarily positive. It's basically setting the player up for an impossible task (and not in the Tetris kind of way, but in the pick one of three options but actually all three options are fail cheating AI kind of way). So the question of making hamartia desirous will require the following consideration--how do you make it Tetris impossible and not cheating AI impossible? It needs to be eminently fair even if tragic at the same time. Something like the conclusion to Hitchcock's Vertigo.
Mass Effect is an interesting example as well, actually, especially given the dial system they implemented where the choice on the top right is almost always going to be "good" and the choice on the bottom right "bad", and all the choices on the left side of the dial being the extra info you're talking about--which gives the player a great deal of agency or confidence in dialogue navigation by making things really blatant. It's also interesting in that the text for the dialogue options don't actually correspond directly to what the PC says, which slightly offsets what could potentially be exceedingly boring dialogue navigation since the choices are made so obvious. It's a system worth considering if both narrative and morality are going to be opaque.
Also, man I must have sunk ridiculous hours into Random Arenas in GW. Too much fun.
That's really quite strongly on the designers side, there's a difference between, making a task harder than it had to be and "setting them up to fail". It's also usually a good idea to break the player out of that same tedium they get stuck in. If "persuade" can get them through every situation then players stop reading and just look for the "persuade" option. Reminding them from time to time this isn't always going to work is a good idea (especially in an RPG, even if you can argue someone sideways you shouldn't be able to make peoples beliefs just change instantly all the time). In fact sometimes it's best to let it work...in a bad way. Perhaps going through that door the guard was in front of was a bad idea. Maybe convincing the thief to give you what he just stole causes the guards to chase you.
Ultimately if your aim is to have the player navigate dialog meaningfully (which we must accept will alienate some gamers) then you need to capture their attention. For this reason Mass effect with no points in charm or intimidate was a much more interesting game. Trying to get what you wanted with no clear cut choice makes conversation meaningful, and playing true to character is still possible but with less clear cut chances of success, and at no point will such and approach cause irreparable harm.
Also;
"So the question of making hamartia desirous will require the following consideration--how do you make it Tetris impossible and not cheating AI impossible?"
Is a bit of a fallacy, the potential for a mistake already exists in Tetris, simply because a player is ignorant of the pieces that will be available beyond their next piece, as such any mistake made is meaningless and has little to do with a "character flaw". Similarly Vertigo's ending is one of tragic irony that has nothing to do with direct choice. Removing the irony, that same accident becomes meaningless, and comes down to pure chance. That sort of punishment for a choice (that could not be predicted in any way) would be viewed quite negatively by the player who chose it unless there was an exceptionally clever build up prior to the choice that added a new layer of meaning.
I suppose after this long winded reply, what I'm trying to get at is there is a large difference between having information and an alternative choice available and not read, to having a set of blind choices. The former feels like a mistake, the latter feels like a player has been blindsided. Ultimately how badly you punish certain choices really comes down to the message and preface the game has been building upon prior to the choice being made.
Also, I think my point about Vertigo was misconstrued, and I would have to argue against your assessment of the film's ending: it has nothing to do with irony and everything to do with tragedy. There's absolutely no reason for the ending to happen except that the protagonist is obsessed with repeating a fantasy; it has become a part of his person, and character is fate. If he could have given up his obsession/defeated his character, he could have moved on, and the prophesy did not have to be self-fulfilling. There is nothing predetermined about it except that the protagonist makes it so.
In this sense, the question about "Tetris impossibility" is about the difference between player driven decisions and immutable, top down decisions. There are situations in which a player choice is meaningless because no matter what the player does, he will fail--it's a meaningless failure because the player can do nothing about it. This does not engender player investment. The "Tetris impossibility" I am discussing here is that yes, the player will eventually fail, but that's not the point. The point is to get as far as one can in the fight against failure. Most Tetris variations have a cap on the dropping frame rate, so theoretically it actually is possible to play Tetris forever--or at least, until the player's endurance runs out--and failure, like a game of FreeCell (which is almost always solvable), is basically always a matter of miscalculated player decisions. In this way, it is a meaningful impossibility as the player can constantly strive to improve upon his previous performance--the game is imminently fair. The question is how to harness that drive towards defeating failure to create a tragic but satisfying/fair narrative.
As for the entire Vertigo thing; It's the equivalent of being blindsided, if the player was to play out that scene then they would have artfully manipulated their conversation to the point they were at, it would be deep and it would be meaningful, and then they would be robbed by a cheap (yet tragically ironic) accident. While tragic and artful in film form, this would not be a good experience during play instead the end result is meaningless and discordant in game form, it's the major difference between spectating and participating, in the former one is able to view irony and tragedy quite clearly while in the latter the two are only accessible through hindsight.
It's interesting you mention blindsiding though, because if, for example, all of a sudden the top right button became a renegade choice and the bottom right button became a paragon choice, that would completely be a blindsiding despite it being an "avoidable penalty" if they just read the text. It's a sudden changing of the rules or expectations which is not necessarily fair to the player. If the player expects that a persuade option is a diplomatic or peaceful/good dialogue choice because it actually has been for the majority of the game, but then all of a sudden it's not for this one dialogue, that's unfair blindsiding.
I'm not so sure that, if Vertigo were a game, it's ending would necessarily result in player alienation either. It would if there was no choice for the player but to go up that tower. But otherwise--if the player could actually just walk away and leave the matter be as the protagonist in the movie could have--it would be an example of a narrative in which the protagonist, though subject to forces outside his control, is mostly the cause of his own undoing. His drive towards a false sense of closure actually prevents that from ever becoming possible. In an archetypal or classical narrative sense, it is actually the only logical outcome. The audience who is watching knows it's going to happen--at least something *terrible* is going to happen--there are all sorts of cues given through cinematic language which make this very obvious. There is a slight lull just before the final event which seduces the audience into a false sense of security, but other than that the ending is really entirely predictable. It is horrifyingly tragic, but at the same time extremely satisfactory in that the inevitable is suddenly proven to be true, and the mix of these feelings is what makes the ending so effective.
At any rate, that's what I mean. How can we use the player's own drive to provide a tragic ending which is actually logical or predictable, and thus fair. There's a good youtube video (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ih_ZPaUvGDM) featured in an Escapist article of a guy playing I Wanna Be the Guy in which he finally manages to reach the last part of a level only to walk into this giant hand that pops out of a tree and takes him out. He knew that hand was there because it animated at the start of the stage. But he managed to walk into it nonetheless in his relief that he finally got across the middle part of the level. His immediate reaction is more dismay at his own failure than it is frustration with the game. This example is more tragicomic than actually tragic, but it gets across the kind of "Tetris impossible" experience I am talking about.