Breaking
the Rules
(Ernest Goes To The Movies)
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The
Matrix:
ten on style but is it credible?
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So what
about science fiction like The Matrix? SF breaks rules all the
time. How do we decide which ones we can get away with and which we
can't? To start with let's again distinguish between fudging for the
sake of gameplay and creating a premise that flies in the face of known
science. Fudging is Ok. Impossible premises may or may not be Ok; it
depends on how much you're expecting the audience to swallow. One thing
that is not acceptable is that anything goes. That's one of the problems
I have with Superman - his powers seem to be extremely elastic, and
in the movie he even reversed the flow of time. Nope, sorry, they lost
me there - if he could do that, he could fix anything and everything.
On the other hand, a time-honored SF technique is to break only one
rule and then see what happens. H.G. Wells did it wonderfully in The
Time Machine and again in The Invisible Man. His protagonists
were fully human and subject to all human frailties, but one could travel
through time and one was invisible. His novels explored the possible
consequences of possessing these powers - sobering in the former case,
tragic in the latter. I would suggest that you adopt a policy to break
no more rules than you have to. The more rules you break, the more unbelievable
and even ridiculous your game becomes.
The other thing to look at is how egregious the violation is and whether
or not it's already familiar to the audience. Take hyperspace, for example.
Most spacegoing science fiction stories depend on some form of faster-than-light
star drive. Einstein's special theory of relativity seems to prohibit
this in normal space, but that doesn't preclude us postulating hyperspace
or wormholes or some other kind of gimmick that does an end run around
him. Audiences are used to this, and you don't have to be specific about
how it works - in fact, it's better if you're not. Han Solo talks about
"making the jump to hyperspace" and that's all they need to
know.
However, you need to avoid things that the audience is going to find
patently absurd. Hyperspace is not patently absurd because there's nothing
in our everyday experience that explicitly prohibits it. I find the
idea of farming humans for their body heat patently absurd, but I imagine
most of the people who watched The Matrix didn't give it that
much thought. In The Andromeda Strain, Michael Crichton postulated
a life form that contained no proteins. Here I'm out of my depth. Biologists
probably think this is hilarious, but I'm not educated enough to know,
and so it doesn't bother me. But it didn't ruin the movie since it wasn't
central to the plot. The key discovery in The Andromeda Strain
(spoiler coming) was that the organism could survive only within a very
narrow pH range - the balance between acidity and alkalinity. That's
entirely believable, because Earth organisms have similar limitations.
When you do fantasy or cartoon-style games (and I put Sonic and most
other action games in that category) then you throw away the rulebook.
Magic exists, dragons breathe fire, and bears carry birds around in
a backpack - whatever you want. That doesn't mean there are no rules,
just that you have to write your own. They still have to make sense
in the context of your world, and you still have to avoid causing the
player to throw down the controller and shouting "Bullshit!"
You can challenge the player; you can frustrate the player (within limits);
but you should try not to do anything that will anger him and above
all, earn his contempt or disgust. Computer games are fantasy worlds
where rules are made to be broken. But know that you're breaking them
- think about it - and then choose wisely which ones you break.
Ernest
Adams is an American freelance game designer currently living in England.
He was most recently employed as a lead designer at Bullfrog Productions,
and for several years before that he was the audio/video producer on
the Madden NFL Football product line. In a much earlier life
he was a software engineer. He has developed on-line, computer, and
console games for everything from the IBM 360 mainframe to the Playstation
2. He was a founder of the International
Game Developers Association, and is a frequent lecturer at the Game
Developers Conference and anyplace else that people will listen
to him. Ernest would be happy to receive E-mail about his columns at
ewa@earthling.net, and you may
visit his professional web site at http://members.aol.com/ewadams.
You can read previous Designer's Notebook columns at http://www.gamasutra.com/features/index_designers_notebook.htm.
The views in this column are strictly his own.
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Matrix: Style vs. Plot
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