Authors: Alicia Fortier, Alexander “Droqen” Clair Tseu Martin, Tanya X. Short, Alexei Pepers, Kaitlin Tremblay, Linsey Murdock
This paper is offered as a lens for you to (re)consider your game systems and how they might benefit from disobedient agents.
Our focus for this paper is on how the game and its agents or systems can be disobedient towards the player. This is a tricky balancing act; often in games players have the expectation of total control, and to undermine that can be very provoking. We offer a lens of analysis and understanding of how different forms of system ‘disobedience’ lend a distinctive depth of flavor to a game – like a unit that refuses an action (instead of failing it), or a creature that prioritizes its own needs over a player command.
This paper serves as a tool for reflection on where you might want to prepare for flexibility in your input-output systems in ways that can have the most impact to create the appropriate illusion of disobedience and related benefits. As most senior designers and producers have experienced, flexibility can be very difficult to add to systems later in production; it is thus in our advantage to scope and plan for the appropriate types of disobedience as early as possible.
This paper can also give collaborators a shared language and reference points to deepen their reflection when discussing how creature behaviour might better-support the game’s pillars and intended player experience.
In short, disobedience is when an agent acts against the player’s expectation of control.
Player control is one of the most fundamental and common aspects of games; through carefully related input and output, designers create the impression that the player’s actions are controlling some part of the world.
We expend a great deal of energy meticulously building up this impression, and players reciprocate, learning the ways in which they are allowed to control the world.
Disobedience only exists in contrast to this expectation of control: anytime we introduce disobedience, we are choosing to subvert a deeply embedded element of gameplay and game design.
Disobedience is an act of intelligence; only a thing with agency can disobey. Disobedience both creates and depends upon this illusion. When a system or agent disobeys, it is inviting the player to believe in its autonomy, but for the strongest chance to succeed disobedience cannot stand alone – other notions of personhood, identity, and agency must work together with it.
Disobedience runs counter to clockwork predictability. It only exists within contexts where the player has been convinced they will be obeyed. Without the expectation of obedience, there can be no perception of disobedience.
This paper focuses on the enrichment of disobedience via actions, generally via game mechanics. We are deliberately not exploring:
As enriching as the authors of this paper believe disobedient agents can be, we also want to caution against either overuse or coming with mismatched expectations.
Namely, disobedience:
If you’re interested in further exploration of the pitfalls of disobedience, see the appendix at the end of this report.
The following five benefits can be deployed in different intensities and approaches, depending on the direction and needs of your game:
Disobedience can be used to help put your game’s obstacles in a richer emotional context, making challenges and consequences more meaningful and evocative.
Reframing an obstacle to be stemming from an uncooperative character can be more compelling than a pure motor or endurance or intellectual test. Consider: would you rather grind encounters to get the special key drop to unlock a door, or instead complete some tasks to build up trust with a wary door guard who initially refuses to speak to you?
Consequences for failure can also be made more dramatic and meaningful when disobedience is integrated into the result. For a unit to be stunned or put to sleep and therefore physically unable to complete a task is less evocative than losing control of that unit because they’ve become upset, defiant, or mutinous.
Disobedience can provide surprise and delight, when used to subvert fairly common player expectations of pure control and predictability. If all the other soldiers are saluting dutifully, the one that’s rolling her eyes is the one that the player will be drawn to.
Since the player generally expects compliance from the agents in most games, disobedience manufactures many ways to subvert their expectations, which is a fertile ground for humor. A character incredulously refusing to follow a dangerous order is reasonable from a self preservation standpoint, but is still well positioned to give the player a moment of surprise, given how commonly NPCs follow any command they’re given in other games.
This extends to a darker form of amusement, schadenfreude. To be amused by someone else’s misfortune requires perceiving and empathizing with that thinking other who has gotten themselves into a bad situation. Disobedience gives us space to imagine emotional interiority, which can lead to that delight and empathy, whether affectionate or mocking. A rookie in X-COM panicking and rejecting the player’s commands, only to run out of cover and be immediately shot dead, can be a darkly comical moment of “well, what did you think was going to happen?”
Many games have themes of agency, power, and control, as these are extremely resonant stories that can be told through interaction and systems. Thus, exploring themes of when and how agents are obedient (or not) to the player’s will can further multiply the impact of those mechanics on these themes.
Because of the nature of commands within disobedience, it’s especially useful in surfacing dynamics of control. Folding disobedience into your mechanics can foster coalescent meaning between the narrative themes and core game mechanics.
Disobedience is a concept with many different aesthetic flavours that can lead to very different meanings, and depending on the theme of your game will be appropriate and enriching to different degrees; from something bratty and light-hearted to gory and mutinous. See the Flavours section below!
By providing contrast and unpredictability to agents, the texture, pacing, and variety of experiences within the game can be increased dramatically.
Agents with different levels of obedience or flavors of disobedience can create contract and greater variety. This will add meaning even to those agents who are fully obedient, increasing their interiority as well.
When performing rote activities, inserting some disobedience can change the player’s approach from session to session, breaking the routine and creating a more improvisational or strategic challenge.
The primary draw that we had towards disobedience stemmed from its benefit of being a powerful ingredient in creating the illusion of personhood (the feeling that a game contains a willful, thinking individual). A disobedient agent can potentially display richer, more believable personhood through apparent autonomy and motivation. This non-enemy, with their own motivations distinct from the player’s, may become an entity the player can empathize and emotionally connect with.
Let’s face it: players know the characters and creatures in your game aren’t “real”. And yet, players want to suspend their disbelief – and agents in a game that accept your commands unflinchingly are simply positioned more as ‘things’, or possibly creatures you own. Neither is nearly as inspiring as a creature that surprises you with its own will and ideas.
If/when you want the player to connect emotionally with a character or creature, it is in your interest to give that agent texture and subvert the player’s expectations. Even if narratively the agent may argue back, this show of defiance must be reinforced in gameplay, otherwise it risks ultimately feeling meaningless, flattening their personhood into mere pawns.
One of the aims of this paper is demonstrating the breadth of opportunities to apply disobedience to suit different design goals in different situations. The most important step when you’re considering whether or not to bring some disobedience into your game is to look at the range of potential benefits derived from disobedience, as well as considering which of the many available flavours, to determine which are the best fit for your intentions.
We can, however, identify some general signs of when your game might be well positioned to integrate some form of disobedience:
Analysing and discussing disobedience is rooted in the interpretation of game mechanics, narrative and player response. These are not objective nor prescriptive categories; rather, these flavors serve to describe different tones of disobedience. Each flavour can be implemented with more or less intensity.
Our menu:
These are not exhaustive; they serve as inspirations and examples for you to describe your own flavor of disobedience appropriate for your game.
🎨 Give each flavour section a different colour, box it off, indent it or something – create a sense of separate sections all flavoured differently.
Sometimes creatures or acting agents in games directly disobey or stop following a player’s expressed or internal commands or goals in such a way as to be motivated by self-interest. This often comes across as “brattiness”, or a petulant refusal to do what it was asked because it would rather do something else, or it has a limited patience for putting up with the player’s commands.
Taking Breaks
In Palworld, players can assign specific Pals to do work at their base while the player is out exploring, capturing more pals, doing combat with world bosses, etc. As players embark on quests and adventures elsewhere, they receive updates about what their Pals are doing at the base, such as completing the assigned task. But sometimes those updates reveal that Pals have stopped performing their assigned tasks and instead are taking a break or having a meal.
Pals taking breaks is a predictable part of a system where autonomous creatures are asked to work. Rather than working non-stop, Pals are given a sense of self-interest by deciding when and how they take breaks, based on the level of their “sanity”. Pal’s sanity will drop if they don’t have good food to eat, if they don’t have someplace to sleep, or if they don’t have the right type of work to do. A drop in sanity will cause Pals to take breaks by eating, sleeping, or engaging in sanity-restoring behaviours if available, such as relaxing in a hot tub.
The sanity mechanic for Pals as workers is also coupled with Pal-specific traits. Some Pals have traits such as “Serious” or “Artisan”, all which increase the speed at which Pals work, where traits such as “Slacker” decrease work speed. Other traits such as “Bottomless Stomach” cause Pals to become hungrier faster, which also increases the rate at which Pals want to eat, causing them to stop working. This coupling of sanity and traits creates a feeling of individualism for Pals, enhanced by their ability to disobey your orders to work if the confluence of their traits and sanity deem it is time for self-care.
A Pal relaxing in the hot tub instead of working (Image credit to Lords Of Gaming)
This type of disobedience enriches the player experience through a variety of vectors, including:
Whether or not the agent is voluntarily disobeying the player has a large impact on the player’s emotional reaction, and one flavour of involuntary disobedience is stress, fear, or panic. When a normally obedient agent breaks under pressure, this offers great opportunities to raise the stakes for the player whose actions led to this high-pressure moment. Involuntary disobedience also better positions the player to feel sympathy for the agent and deepen their connection to the agent by helping them past this tense moment, as opposed to needing to override an agent’s self interest.
Vectors that impact the suitability of this flavour include:
Fantasies of Leadership and Command
When agents act out a player’s will perfectly they feel less like independent agents taking orders, and more like extensions of the player’s will. By introducing fallibility, a distance is created between the player and their agents. The emotional valences of fear and panic are especially suitable to put the player into the role of the cool-headed leader who can remain focused and direct in order to shepard their agents to victory.
For example, in the X-COM series the player’s role is that of a hardened military commander organizing special agents to resist an alien threat. Soldiers can enter a panic state under especially stressful conditions such as witnessing an ally’s death, causing them to stop following player commands and take their own (often disastrous) actions. These moments emphasize the feeling that while the soldiers are competent, they need the management and command of their fearless leader in the form of the player, allowing the player to experience feelings of superiority and discipline that resonate with the hierarchical military themes of X-COM.
Nurturing and Soothing
While in X-COM this flavour of disobedience is not likely due to a desire to comfort, because of the player’s role as a hardened military commander enforcing discipline in their troops, there are other situations where seeing an agent exhibit fear and stress provokes a strong emotional desire to comfort and soothe.
In The Last Guardian, the player is a young boy bonded with Trico, a creature with puppy-like features that many players find emotionally compelling. Trico emotes heavily and can react to challenges with fear and stress, one example being glass panes depicting eyes which Trico freezes up and avoids, preventing progress. The player cannot progress until they remove these eyes, caring for Trico’s emotional needs. This caring moment of addressing Trico’s fear-motivated disobedience is a way to feed the nurturing or parental flavour of bond the player has with Trico – in a way that wouldn’t have the same tone if Trico’s disobedience stemmed from stubbornness or impulsivity.
In-game narration from The Last Guardian makes it clear that Trico’s disobedience is motivated by fear (Image credit to Polygon)
Notably, in The Last Guardian director Fumito Ueda’s previous game Shadow of the Colossus, there was a similar type of disobedience where the player’s horse Argo would display fear towards the Colossi and try to flee from them[source]. This was partially to serve a gameplay purpose of giving the player a chance to step back from a fight and adjust their strategy, but also contributed to an unexpectedly deep bond players felt with Argo, which was then a direct inspiration for Fumito Ueda’s depiction of Trico [source.]
Building on Player Stress
Stress modeling systems trigger when in-game situations become especially dire, meaning they come into effect when the player is facing difficult challenges. Having an agent in-game demonstrate panic and hopelessness can resonate with or even enhance those same feelings in the player, making those dramatic moments even more compelling.
An example of this is Darkest Dungeon where the player controls a band of adventurers who each have a stress level to manage, similar to their health bar. When an adventurer gains too much stress, they will usually gain a status effect that imposes penalties on their effectiveness, as well as giving them a chance to disobey player commands.
Darkest Dungeon’s encyclopedia describes how the effect of high stress includes different behaviours, along with stat changes
Managing stress is such a major element of the game that these moments of disobedience are not so surprising or evocative as in other cases – the stress level and status effects are visible to the player and are stats to manage, not a sign of interiority of the adventurers. Where it does suit the game well is in the tone – as a thematically dark game dealing with tropes of madness and horror, the ways that stress accumulates and breaks the will of adventurers lines up with when the player is pushing their luck or confronting monstrous creatures, giving it that resonance between the agent’s response and the player’s emotions.
The main pitfall to this consideration is that since this disobedience is coming in a high-stakes moment, it’s especially prone to player frustration (see the pitfalls of Undermining Player Control and Inscrutable Actions.) In X-COM, players complain that the limited ways for players to predict or prevent panic and the disastrous effects it can have make it overly frustrating, and some have modded the game to remove panic or make the consequences less severe.
Description of the Realistic Panic Behavior mod for XCOM 2, which removes the most punishing types of soldier disobedience due to panic
The latest evolution of the modern X-COM games, XCOM 2: War of the Chosen, significantly revamps the panic system to be closer to games like Darkest Dungeon where soldiers have visible negative traits related to fear/panic, and managing those traits and stress is a system with more hooks for the player to engage with. Broadening the system in this way reduces the emotional components of shock and stress the player feels when a soldier suddenly goes into a panic, making for less memorable moments but a greater sense of strategic fairness. At the same time, it adds extra personality to soldiers via differing fear-response traits. This type of tradeoff demonstrates how by tweaking implementation details, a disobedience system can impact player experience in different ways.
In most of these flavours, there’s a goal of deepening the player’s connection to the disobedient agent. Elements like fear, ignorance, and self-interest leave room for the agent to share the player’s goals or at least not directly oppose them, even if circumstances cause them to act against the player. There are, however, cases where it’s desirable for the agent to disobey the player in ways that feel like mutiny or betrayal. Games with this flavour are usually darker in tone, where this type of disobedience supports themes of conflict and power imbalance as the player tries to maintain control over agents who at times actively resist that control.
Pushing Away from Empathy
One example of this flavour is Frostpunk, a city-building survival game that aims to force the player into making hard choices as a leader. Social disorder is a core mechanic in the form of Discontent, a bar that increases when the inhabitants of the city are unhappy with their living conditions or the player’s choices as leader. As Discontent rises, the player faces events where the inhabitants riot and force the player to address their needs or face further negative consequences. When Discontent maxes out, the inhabitants rise up and overthrow or execute the player, ending the game. Instead of focusing on tending to agents or helping them past temporary weakness, Frostpunk expects players to be wrestling with an unruly populace, providing solutions like public execution of dissidents, forceful suppression of protest, and theocratic rule. By positioning the disobeying populous as mutinous and limiting the player’s ability to react with empathy, the game can attempt to put the player into the headspace of making morally compromised situations that they wouldn’t otherwise.
Themes of Revenge, Punishment, and Paranoia
Another example of a game exploring similar themes with a similar mechanic is The Shrouded Isle. In this cult management simulator, the player must sacrifice villagers regularly to keep the cult functional, and tries to select cultists whose traits are the most problematic. These traits are hidden by default, meaning the player must uncover whether an agent is causing a poor outcome due to bad luck on a roll, or due to secret disobedience. Along with this individual disobedience, cultists belong to family clans that will rebel if not appeased, and the cult as a whole also has an Obedience stat that must be kept above zero or the game will end immediately. The combined effect of all these mechanics is a feeling of slowly losing control as you constantly are betrayed and betray others in turn, which aligns with the tone of the game and gives the player a more novel emotional experience than other management games.
All the members of your cult have a trait that will work against you, whether you know it or not. Do you sacrifice Preben as punishment for a previous theft? Zayna’s positive trait makes them valuable for now, but will you be betrayed by the revelation that they have a powerful hidden negative trait?
(Image credit to Polygon)
Of all the flavours we examined, “impulsiveness” or “creativity” is one of the few that feels positive in tone, with an agent independently coming up with their own “idea” of what to do.
The cult following of Dwarf Fortress as a lifetime project to create an infinitely complex simulation is legendary, and one of the community’s favorite signifiers of dwarf autonomy is when they are in a ‘strange mood’ (‘fey mood’ being the most common and basic of the strange moods). This occurs when a dwarf has an irresistible urge to create something, and they are lost as a worker until permitted to satisfy this urge. This mechanic is so beloved by the community that it was chosen as the name of their publisher’s officially sanctioned meet-and-greets with the primary creator Tarn Adams, who himself is said to be creating the game Dwarf Fortress while in a fey mood himself these past years.
A dwarf in Dwarf Fortress taken by a “Strange mood”, occupying a workshop.
Breaking patterns of control
Whether or not you believe Dwarf Fortress created the ‘colony sim’ genre, its Fortress Mode certainly typifies many common qualities, including dozens to hundreds of independently-acting agents, the player having godlike control to order and endure without their own avatar, and a clockwork clarity to its cycles of resource accumulation and consumption. The player fantasy of extensive and deep control is largely indulged, with the key exception of agent autonomy: as in many builders, the player can specify what to build and who has what job, but not who exactly will do what at any given time.
Thus, when a particular dwarf falls into a strange mood, it’s mildly frustrating because:
Offering clear benefits
There are material benefits to assisting the dwarf in following their impulse. It makes the dwarf’s mood very positive for some time, and the dwarf colony then has the created artifact, which was theoretically one of the best works that an individual dwarf could make with their relevant skills.
The artifact itself is highly valuable, generally better at serving whatever purpose it has (such as artifact doors being indestructible), and gives happy thoughts to dwarves who see it. The act of creating an artifact also boosts that dwarf’s proficiency in the relevant skill to the maximum level. Supporting a dwarf through their fey mood is therefore a huge potential benefit – though it still has room for disobedience and disappointment, as if a dwarf might choose unsuitable materials or choose to make a less useful object. A diamond-studded corkscrew made of the finest steel will boost a fortress’ wealth, but isn’t exactly the best use of that steel.
Communicating inner state
As useful as the artifact crafting system is for players, the true benefit to the game experience is that the player can watch the dwarf’s mental state as a journey through the ‘strange mood’ process, from when they begin having the impulse, then decide what to make, begin making it, and finally feel satisfaction or frustration from un/successfully creating their dream work. Each stage is communicated in the interface, with consequences befitting an autonomous agent, as a microcosm of a deeply simulated world.
Resistance and Disagreement
Sometimes a player’s desire runs counter to the ethos of a game. But from a practicality standpoint you don’t wish to straight-up block the action completely. This flavour can often be found in narrative contexts where NPCs express disapproval towards player actions. As this paper aims to focus on non-narrative expressions of disobedience, an interesting example is Neopets, where when the player chooses to give up a Neopet they are met with resistance that they must insistently push back against before the action is finally allowed.
In Neopets you are tasked with caring for your Neopet by feeding them and giving them medicine and toys. You adopt them and name them; they are supposed to be loyal friends. So when a player wants to swap out their Neopet for a newer model, this runs counter to the fundamental importance of the emotional responsibility of owning a pet.
Confirmation steps as intentional friction
While in many games you’ll have a confirmation screen as an error-management step, in Neopets the error screen additionally serves as social pressure to reinforce the gravity of the decision you are taking. This doesn’t just make it harder to take the action by mistake, it also makes it harder for the player who is intentionally trying to take this action.
In older versions of the game you would receive multiple back-to-back pop ups imploring you to reconsider your action and describing how disappointed and sad your digital pet would be. The final button had to be clicked five times before it would take effect, displaying new discouraging phrases with each click. In modern versions the pop-up has been simplified, but there are many steps that clearly signify that your actions are deplorable (if technically viable).
Your number of slots to own different Neopets is much smaller than the number of possible pet species and used to be even more strictly limited to just 4 pets. Players who want to try out different species or make different customization choices therefore have a legitimate reason to want to free up slots by discarding Neopets they’re no longer as interested in. Mechanically, the Neopet slots do behave like an inventory and can be filled and emptied via the Neopian Pound, but the way the game reacts to an attempt to use the system in this way is a strong discouragement.
The screen to start the process of giving up a Neopet uses the phrase ‘Abandonment’, and describes people who discard their pets as cruel and irresponsible. This is clearly not a neutral action; it is something the game explicitly disapproves of.
Even though there are mechanically sound reasons to abandon a pet, by emphasising the in-world emotional tenor of the decision and creating friction, the game clearly expresses its disagreement with your decision. It also makes it all the more laudable to adopt a Neopet rather than create a new one from scratch.
If the player continues to reinforce they want to take this action, they get further discouragement, as well as sad and cruel button prompts for picking which Neopet to give up. Just getting to this screen unlocks a new icon for the player to use in the forums labelled ‘Dr Death’
Resistance lending greater emotional weight
It would have been just as easy for Neopets to not offer any mechanic to giving up a Neopet, forcing the player to give pet ownership the weight that the developers wish them to. This approach of making the action available to the player but then pushing back against it and treating the player confrontationally has an effect of pushing more players to follow along with the intended experience, but without totally losing access to players who are insistent in wanting to play with different values. It also adds moments of emotional intensity to players who wrestle with the choice, whether they follow through with it or not.
Sometimes creatures or acting agents in games appear to be complying with a direct order, but are unable to execute on obedience in such a way that feels or looks like disobedience. While technically complying, the incompetence of performing the command generates many of the same feelings as “pure” disobedience: frustration, humour, resistance, and a general increase in personhood.
Obeying Too Well And It’s Annoying
In Ark: Survival Evolved, tamed dinosaurs can be given a variety of “whistle” commands. These commands instruct tamed dinosaurs to perform different actions autonomously, such as foraging, attacking, breeding, or following the player character. Certain whistle commands have levels of qualifiers in them. The “follow” command has three levels of qualification: follow at a close distance, at a middle distance, at a far distance.
Whistling for tamed dinosaurs to follow at a “close” distance involves the dinosaurs doing just that: following directly on the heels of the player character. Obeying the command strictly often involves the dinosaur bumping into the player character, getting ahead of it and blocking navigation paths, or, as with certain flying dinosaurs, soaring around the player character’s head so closely as to obstruct field of view, interfere with harvesting, or other actions. The dinosaur is obeying, but doing so in such a way that feels disobedient through its inability to perform the command in any other way.
A megalodon swimming too close to the shore while on a follow command, thus having to do a headstand to properly fit in the shallow water
Obeying Too Well And It’s Dangerous
Another example of incompetently obeying an order that feels like disobedience is when whistling commands for tamed dinosaurs to attack untamed dinosaurs. Terrestrial dinosaurs being told to attack aquatic dinosaurs or flying dinosaurs involved my terrestrial dinosaurs attempting to do so by any means possible, including wading into water and drowning or pathing up cliffs and hills and getting lost or attacked en route by another, more powerful creature.
A Direwolf unable to path out of the water it’s in
Obeying a Foolish Order
Sometimes a player will give an order that is technically valid, but really isn’t a good idea. It may be an accidental input, it may be a failure to account for part of the situation, or it may be a lack of understanding of how the system works. While we often try to cover these cases with safeguards that will warn the player of the outcome and ask for confirmation before going forward, there can be a lot of personality in letting an agent fully embody the “obeys without question” mindset, blithely executing on unwise commands.
The Pikmin series draws a lot of emotion out of the way that Pikmin follow the player’s commands without hesitation, even if it leads to their doom. An especially fun recent example is in Pikmin Bloom, a mobile game where the player can ask Pikmin to fetch an item and bring it back to the player. This all plays out based on physical distance and real-world traversal time, and the hyper-obedient nature of the Pikmin means that they will readily set off on a journey whether it’s around the block, or a 15 hour trek to Iceland. Reframing a standard mobile-game wait timer as the visual progress of a little guy running across the world is much more delightful and satisfying, and gives some players the incentive to let a poorly thought out command play out instead of simply cancelling it.
In a story shared on Reddit, a player was waiting for a flight at LAX and asked their Pikmin to fetch a nearby apple. The Pikmin didn’t make it back fast enough and the player flew to the other side of the country, turning the pikmin’s short errand into a month-long journey. Rather than cancel the expedition, the player shared their amusement and enthusiasm, the Pikmin having endeared itself to them with its incompetent but loyal actions. (Source – Reddit)
This type of disobedience enriches the player experience through a variety of vectors, including:
Let’s take a moment to consider a counter-example, a series in which characters are presented as increasingly compliant and obedient: Animal Crossing. This shift to perfect compliance undermines the perception of character personhood and autonomy, but offers other benefits.
Early Animal Crossing – High Friction, High Personhood
In the early Animal Crossing games, villagers would leave without warning, could steal random player objects, and would build their houses anywhere they wished (even if it meant destroying a player’s carefully tended flower patch.) This disobedience could be frustrating, but also gave emotional highs and lows to the life simulation aspects of the game. A friend moving to another city, a petty feud with a neighbour, and a new housing development messing with your local greenspace may not be the life experiences that players would first choose to replicate in a game, but they put the player in the role of being a member of equal standing within a community of fairly autonomous NPCs.
🎨 CHANGE BACKGROUND COLOUR OF QUOTE AND IDEALLY BEHIND IMAGE, TO SEPARATE THE PERSONAL STORY FROM THE MAIN BODY
“I still remember when Alfonso moved into my original Animal Crossing village when I was a kid, building his house right on top of the flower garden I’d carefully arranged and been tending. I’d take out my frustration by hitting him with my net, but he never was willing to move out. Even now, when I see him show up in newer games, it brings back my childhood grudge against this goofy alligator.”
– Alexei Pepers (Image credit: Animal Crossing Wiki)
Exchanging Autonomy for Control
Over time, the Animal Crossing series’ characters and world have been designed to have fewer and fewer disobedient impulses, along with losing their meaner or more confrontational dialogue lines. The villager moving-out process is an especially notable example, as it went from fully outside the player’s control, to a system where the player would sometimes be able to convince a villager to stay, until finally in the newest Animal Crossing at time of writing (Animal Crossing: New Horizons (2020)) a villager will never leave without permission and can simply be denied their stated wish to fulfil dreams away from the player’s island.
At the same time, the growth and change of the town itself has become more predictable, less chaotic, and ultimately under the player’s control. Animal Crossing: New Leaf is the first to position the player as the mayor of the town instead of just an inhabitant, giving them customization options for the town itself, such as placing bridges. By Animal Crossing: New Horizons, the player can fully terraform their personal island.
Animal Crossing: New Horizons’ Crushing Bluebear’s Dreams
🎨 CHANGE BACKGROUND COLOUR OF QUOTE AND IDEALLY BEHIND IMAGE, TO SEPARATE THE PERSONAL STORY FROM THE MAIN BODY
“Bluebear was my favourite. She was one of my original villagers and her blend of sweet and hidden darkness made her my in-game best friend. Playing during the start of the COVID-19 pandemic also meant I spent a lot of time with Bluebear. Seeing her was a highlight of booting open the game. As 2020 wore on and Animal Crossing continued being a lifeline to friends and community and a sense of routine during lockdown in Canada, so did Bluebear’s importance to me.
So when Bluebear one day spontaneously asked if it was okay if she left the island to pursue her dreams of being a singer, I panicked. Of course I wanted her to go off and fulfill her dreams! But also seeing her around my island was such a highlight for me that I couldn’t imagine what playing the game without her would be like. I’d be so lonely! So, after much agonizing and debate, I decided: it’s just a video game. It’s not real life. I’ll tell Bluebear to stay because I need this game as a place of comfort right now.
So I told Bluebear no.
And, while visibly disappointed, she complied. She stayed. And I felt so guilty. Every time I’d boot up the game and see her walking around the island, I thought about how I selfishly asked her to reject her dreams. My guilt made me stop playing shortly after. I felt terrible. The control of making my villagers do exactly what I want felt like a monkey’s paw curling. I would’ve loved if, in response to me saying no, Bluebear yelled at me. Told me it was unfair. Stopped being my friend. Moved out anyways. But instead I got compliant Bluebear, sadly wandering the island while I guiltily stopped playing.”
Many players are appreciative of the villagers’ new compliant natures, but something has been lost along the way, too. The Animal Crossing games of today are more about player expression and creativity with maximal control, rather than about existing in a world as an equal with agents that have personhood and autonomy. This is even clearer in the spin-off game Animal Crossing: Happy Home Designer and the New Horizons DLC, Happy Home Paradise, both of which drop the simulation elements entirely and focus only on creative expression.
As a mental exercise, we invite designers to wonder: what would be gained or lost, if the next version of Animal Crossing had more mischievous, disobedient impulses? What else might need to change about player expectations, to support and reinforce this different vision of the Animal Crossing experience?
Hopefully, this paper has convinced you that disobedience might enrich a game through different benefits to the player experience, as well as give you an idea of a few different flavours of disobedience that have successfully enriched games in the past.
Disobedience does not suit every game, and is often implemented as a flourish or exception to an already-functional system. However, the extreme commonality of control, power, agency, and personhood themes in games implies it may enrich more games than it is currently deployed in. When well-implemented, disobedience can add texture, surprise, humor, and challenge, while reinforcing everything your systems and mechanics are already trying to accomplish.
Players are always in conversation with the game’s designers, and disobedience can be a moment of friction that makes that conversation even more apparent. Many approach game design as a way to give players a series of interesting choices, and through that lens, disobedience can add interest and meaning to otherwise banal choices through heightened illusions of personhood and willpower.
Whether your characters and creatures are plotting a conspiracy or just rolling their eyes, we hope their disobedience can give your player a moment of delight that would be impossible through purely predictable adherence to expectations.
Godspeed to you and your agents of defiance.
Topic: Player Agency & Control
Topic: Personhood
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While discussing positive examples of disobedience in game design, we also found it valuable to discuss counter-examples – cases where disobedience detracted from the game experience, or failed to help achieve stated design goals. While we still believe that disobedience is a useful tool in any designer’s toolbox, we want to draw attention to some common pitfalls that a designer risks falling into while building a disobedient system. Taking a hard look at your game holistically and considering whether any of these pitfalls apply before designing further will help ensure this technique is being leveraged in the appropriate scenarios.
Are you sure you’ve clearly articulated your goals before pursuing them?
Many designers say they want a world that “feels real” as a dream or vision, and disobedience could theoretically be a reason to support that — “real” autonomous agents don’t perfectly obey you, after all.
However, “feels real” is in itself a problematically vague concept. Do you mean that your world is “internally coherent” or “extremely detailed” or “ecologically viable” or “worthy of suspension of disbelief”, or something else entirely? Disobedience can help with some of those concepts, but could actively hinder others – for example, the hidden interiority and greater range of action that agents gain when made disobedient can introduce noise that make it harder for players to pick up on patterns that are meant to evoke internal coherence or ecological relationships.
Ensure you know in what way your game experience would benefit from disobedience before pursuing it. We do not recommend designing disobedience as one among a potentially infinite array of complexities simply for its own sake.
Does the player expect to have the final say?
Disobedience and player control are opposing forces. If the player is incapable of having a level of control with which they are comfortable, especially over things that they need or believe that they need to have control over, they will become frustrated.
To help avoid this, give the player actions to make progress, or improve their situation. If disobedience is blocking one course of action, you can show the player other courses of action, or help the player understand how, in retrospect, they could have avoided this outcome. The disobedience will still likely feel like an inconvenience to tolerate (the player likely felt that they had very good reasons to want the agent to behave a certain way,) but it will feel less ‘unfair’ or arbitrary.
However, in genres where the stakes are high and the player expects their agents to be subservient, be aware that any amount of disobedience may always be a detriment to your player’s experience.
Is the cost of disobedience worth the benefits to the player?
It’s also important to know just how much an act of disobedience costs a player in terms of wasted time, loss of resources, worsening of tactical situations, etc. If an NPC has a chance of taking a minute long coffee break instead of starting on a crafting task, this is likely annoying, but not a huge cost to a player. If, however, an NPC has a chance to covetously steal an item they’re working on crafting, and that item may be extremely rare in a way that represents hours of player investment to gain, then that high cost removal of player control will provoke a very strong negative response.
If the player can actively work to prevent or alleviate acts of disobedience, this can create an even deeper sense of control and mastery in the long-term. This in turn requires extremely accurate perception of the agent’s disobedience, which leads us to…
Does the player know that the disobedience is taking place?
The player must be capable of perceiving the act of disobedience. If they do not understand the cause/effect, the invisible disobedience decomposes into randomness.
To avoid this, telegraph the outcome as the result of an agent’s explicitly disobedient action. If a soldier misfires due to stress, or if a worker decides to take an unscheduled break, label it as such.
Does the player understand why the agent disobeys?
If the agent becomes too annoying or frustrating, or its actions are too incomprehensible, the player may stop empathizing with them and feel they are disobeying “randomly” or “because the game is broken.” Player empathy is, at some level, a player choice. A designer cannot always guarantee that the player will empathize or assign agency, despite our best efforts.
Some ways to avoid or mitigate this:
For example, the townsfolk of Against the Storm can be assigned to a workplace, but frequently and effectively unpredictably take “breaks” from their assigned work, with no regard for the player’s wishes of urgency or consequence. The action itself is immediately apparent even if the character is still traveling to the break location, and the interface uses a relatable ‘coffee cup’ iconography for instant readability, even though this action rarely involves any beverages at all. In fact, the tooltip generally says “resting by the fire” — the developers opted for a more easily-empathized icon over a more accurate one.
In Against the Storm’s UI, on the left you can see the topmost blue-faced “Harpy” character has a coffee cup to signify taking a disobedient break from her work, and on the right she has returned to the work of making coats.
Does this integrate well with your existing game, or act as a purposeful point of friction?
As with any mechanic or flourish, it’s important to ask: does your game really need this? Or is this tempting specifically because it sticks out in contrast to what you’ve built thus far?
Verify the benefits also suit your overall game. Making agents appear more autonomous or challenging or textured isn’t always helpful for your overall player experience, even if you avoid the pitfalls above.
Does the player’s ability to react to disobedience suit your themes?
We’ve discussed some of the flavours of disobedience and what feelings they can provoke in the player, along with what kinds of themes and interactions they are well suited to. We’ve also mentioned ways that the player can react to disobedience – comforting an animal until it’s willing to move forward, going back to base and forcing your Pal to get back to work, sacrificing a problematic member of your cult, or biding your time until your soldier’s panic wears off.
All of these mechanics have their own impact on the emotional experience of the player and thematic resonances, alongside the feelings provoked by the disobedience itself. In the example of crushing Bluebear’s dreams in Animal Crossing: New Horizons, the distress came not just from Bluebear asking to move away, but from how it felt to overrule that disobedience and force her to stay.
To ensure that your disobedient system is supporting your player experience goals, you must consider all related elements, not just the precise moment of disobedience.