Enriching your Game with Disobedience
Authors: Alicia Fortier, Alexander “Droqen” Clair Tseu Martin, Tanya X. Short, Alexei Pepers, Kaitlin Tremblay, Linsey Murdock 🤔How to Use this Paper 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. What is Disobedience? In short, disobedience is when an agent acts against the player’s expectation of control. 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. Agency 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. Not Including This paper focuses on the enrichment of disobedience via actions, generally via game mechanics. We are deliberately not exploring: Beware: Pitfalls of Disobedience 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. Benefits of Disobedience The following five benefits can be deployed in different intensities and approaches, depending on the direction and needs of your game: 🌋 Challenge 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. 🍌 Humour 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?” ✒️ Themes 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
Notes from the Boundaries of Interactive Storytelling
Observations and resources for game designers seeking to tell stories in highly dynamic games Workgroup Members Introduction Our group discussed techniques, approaches, and common obstacles around interactive storytelling, specifically with regard to combining interesting and highly dynamic gameplay systems with effective and coherent storytelling. Game designers have used games to tell stories since the dawn of the medium. While we continue to make advances – and dynamic storytelling in games has become quite sophisticated in some cases – we feel there is still significant unexplored potential for better integration of story and systems in games. This paper discusses several approaches, case studies, lenses, pitfalls, and obstacles related to interactive storytelling. Games referenced herein are not meant to exhaustively represent a particular approach or technique, but rather merely to illustrate by example. Storylets and Dynamic Casting A common storytelling technique in games is activating bits of narrative content, such as scenes or individual lines of dialogue, based on conditions, such as the state of the game world or previous decisions made by the player. This technique is often referred to as storylets, for scenes, or barks or reactive dialogue, for lines of dialogue. This section describes some considerations around this approach, using storylets as an umbrella term for both. While there are devils in the details, storylets are easy to understand and to get started with, both for authoring and in terms of technology. See Short (2019b), Kreminski (2018), and many blog posts by Emily Short. Fallen London is perhaps the game best known for the use of storylets. King of Dragon Pass (Dunham 2020), Age of Wonders 4 (Kusters 2023), and Crusader Kings 3 (Crusader Kings 3 wiki) all make use of storylets-type mechanisms to trigger narrative scenes based on gameplay outcomes. Hades‘ narrative is entirely driven by a rule-based bark system, with an impressive variety of conditions being taken into account (Korb and Kasavin 2021). One can build a perfectly fine storylet system by selectively activating static, fully pre-authored content; indeed, this is what many reactive dialogue systems do. See Ruskin (2012) for an excellent talk on how to build such systems. However, it can also be interesting to adapt the content to the game state at run-time. An approach used by some games is to cast existing characters into roles of injected scenes, which are authored in a partially character-agnostic way. This means scenes become more flexible, and can even be reused. Reactive dialogue systems operate on content with a much finer granularity – lines, instead of scenes – and because of that, to our knowledge, nobody uses dynamic casting here. Skyrim‘s Radiant Story fills out “aliases” of people and places into stories (Nesmith 2012). Wildermyth has a “Library of Plays”, where each play has a cast that it needs, and roles have requirements and scoring functions (Austin 2021). Watch Dogs: Legion selects or creates characters for its reusable recruitment and revenge missions (Horneman 2021b). While this is a simple technique conceptually, it does add a reasonable amount of complexity. All references to characters need to go through a level of indirection. It is no longer possible to refer to “Jimmy, the kidnapping victim from the warehouse mission”. Instead, one might refer to “the character who plays the kidnapping victim from the warehouse mission”. And if you also dynamically cast locations, you might not be able to refer to a warehouse either. In Watch Dogs: Legion, locations for systemic missions were selected at run-time using a weighted picking algorithm, and the appropriate gameplay setups were activated when needed. Some of the complications of this approach are discussed in Horneman (2023). Dynamic casting can also complicate localization, for instance because characters’ gender pronouns are unknown before run-time. See below for more on this. It is possible to end up in situations where simple approaches to the role requirements mentioned above run into increasingly convoluted edge cases. Typically, a tag-based system can get you far to express requirements such as “This person needs to have a military background” or “This person needs to be from a particular culture”. See Horneman (2017) for some considerations regarding the use of tags. However, simple tags alone start to break down when you need to express things like “These two roles should be close relatives”. At some point it becomes worthwhile to look into AI knowledge representation and constraint solving techniques, or to reconsider the scope of the system. Case study: Pacing in Animal Farm The problem: How do you structure your content selection so that (even if you’re drawing from pools of apparently similar modular content units) the result demonstrates some narrative structure? Some potential solutions: Case study: Finding the Narrative Corners in City in Silver (Fallen London) The problem: Make a very wide range of player options feel good and narratively productive. The player had been allowed to create cities with different politics, aesthetic styles, physical locations, and leadership; the challenge was to create gameplay that reflected all of these choices in both large and small ways, presenting daily life as well as bigger happenings in this city. The player could also push the City towards certain menace conditions of unrest or resource depletion. Some solutions: Drama Management Things happen in systemic games, often as a consequence of the player’s actions. Because these actions are not under direct control of the game designer, the right thing does not always happen at the right time. This can diminish the intended emotional impact of the game, or cause unwanted frustration and confusion. Game developers and researchers have invented a range of techniques designed to address this, including dynamic difficulty adjustment, drama management, or experience management. In this section we will use the umbrella term drama management. While we look at it from the perspective of interactive storytelling, there are many games that dynamically control the player’s experience in video games even without a strong focus on story. Such techniques include: Some games use more complex and explicit systems for this. The best known
There is No Wheel: A Framework for Creating Emotionally Resonant Game Mechanics
Group Contributors Abhi, Chandana Ekanayake, Rayla Heide, Steven Lumpkin, William Chyr, Xalavier Nelson Jr Introduction At Polaris 2024, our group set out to build a shared framework for helping designers create emotionally resonant game mechanics, especially in novel contexts. In our efforts to do so, first we established some vocabulary, then looked at existing tools for considering emotions. Following that, we developed a set of questions that a designer can ask themselves to help in working through the process of creating a new emotionally resonant mechanic. Along the way we discovered a wealth of existing games that serve as exemplars in the field in each context we examined. In this paper, we attempt to lay this out in such a way that designers reading have access to our thoughts and methodologies; ultimately, we’re hopeful this framework will be a valuable tool to you in creating new emotionally resonant mechanics, or digging deeper into the emotional valence of the mechanics and systems you’ve already built. Vocabulary and Framing In order to have a more productive discussion, we first wanted to align on a shared vocabulary and framing; we came to this primarily because we wanted to make sure we drew our boundaries clearly. Our goal here isn’t to provide a definitive definition for these terms- in fact, our conclusion was that “these terms probably mean what you think they mean,” so please default to that if our definition rings hollow for you. With that said, the definitions we landed on for the purposes of our discussion are: What is a game mechanic? A game mechanic is a rule that guides player actions (as expressed by reliable reactions to inputs), or an interaction between two or more systems that results in changes to the game state. Some examples of game mechanics that fit this definiton: What is an emotion? An emotion is any instinctive or intuitive visceral mental reaction. Especially for our purposes as game designers, generally this is a reaction of the player to the game, its mechanics, and the contexts in which the player experiences them. Our group noted that it’s common to have difficulty naming (or even, sometimes, feeling) emotions! Pretty quickly we realized that there is, in fact, a wheel- and that emotion wheels can be an extremely useful tool when exploring novel emotionally resonant mechanics. A tool like this can help us slice down into the genuine intent we’re trying to communicate: Are we trying to instill a sense of dread? Or panic? Isolation versus abandonment? The Framework Our goal was to develop a framework that allows designers to think about the mechanics they put in their game, both more critically and with more context than they otherwise might have. We approached this task from the perspective of “What questions in what order would be most helpful for designers to ask themselves to generate novel emotionally resonant mechanics?” Early in our discussions we recognized that mechanics don’t exist in a vacuum. Pushing the left stick away from their body doesn’t necessarily inherently convey emotion to the player (though we’ll discuss later some circumstances in which specific mechanics can). Rather, emotion arises from the dialogue between the mechanics, their contexts, and the players themselves. When seeking to develop a novel emotionally resonant mechanic, the first place the designer should look isn’t at the mechanics themselves, but at the contexts around them. Theme What are the themes of your game? First and foremost, step back and think about the themes of your game. Survival and desperation in a dog-eat-dog world? The bond between siblings, and the power of grief and death? Perseverence in the face of frustration, and the value of learning how to overcome new challenges? Your game’s themes are a rich initial source for inspiration into the kinds of emotions that you may want to convey- or at least those that will be easy to do so, or resonate well with the rest of your experience. Theme can certainly be emphasized through contrast as well- in a game entirely about leveraging violence to navigate the generational conflict between two groups, the moment of offering the player the option to put down their weapon in order to instead carry a wounded enemy can be extremely powerful. Consider asking yourself the following questions around theme as you explore your game’s mechanics and emotions: A few games that really lean into their themes in evoking emotions in their players include: Emotions What emotions do you want to convey? The second crucial step in this framework is to get clear about understanding the specific emotions you want your game to convey to players; knowing these makes it much easier to adapt them into your mechanics. In helping focus on the full range of emotions you want to convey, it can be especially powerful to focus in on significant inflection points in your game, moments in which what the player’s been exposed to previously becomes recontextualized. Identifying the emotional change the player has to experience at that moment can help you identify the emotions the player should be experiencing (and perhaps growing accustomed to) prior, and after. Looking at the full journey the player has to take and mapping emotions to it can help you make sure your game has a rich emotional palette of complimentary experiences. Note that where emotions are concerned, specificity can be extremely powerful! Often, as designers we can tend to try to make our experiences generic in order to resonate with a wider audience. In actuality, our group discussed finding in our work that the more specific the emotion you’re trying to convey, and the mechanic you’re engaging to convey it, the more universal and relatable the experience is to all players. Once you’ve identified a specific emotional moment you want to invest development effort into, consider asking yourself these questions: Some examples of specific emotions from specific games: Mechanics What mechanics are in your game? With a strong understanding of your game’s theme and the
How To Design Collective Decision-Making Systems
JC Lau, Elaine Gusella, Ian Schrieber, Daniel Cook 1. What is this all about? If, as Sid Meier has famously said, “a game is a series of interesting decisions”, then a co-op game is a series of interesting collective decisions. We define a “collective decision” as a situation where some kind of decision must be made by two or more players together, with each player able to influence the decision and the result is a shared outcome. Think of it as “decision-by-committee.” When building multiplayer co-op games, designers encounter a wide variety of decision-making mechanisms that they can implement in their games. Yet there is very little written on the topic. Certainly one can find lots of real-world discussion on voting or election systems, but in practice these are rather rare in games. Game-centric decision-making systems don’t look like politics as taught in school; instead they look like how an adventuring party in an MMO decides which direction to walk or which quest to initiate. What is this not about? We are intentionally limiting the scope of this paper to collective decisions among players in games. While collective decisions do exist outside of games (examples include political elections, deliberating on where you want to go for dinner, and making group decisions about the direction of the game that your dev team is making), and the lessons in this paper may very well have applications in those other areas, we won’t be addressing those at this time. Structure This paper is composed of three parts: 2. Reasons to design decision-making systems Prevalence of decision-making systems If you are making a cooperative game, you’ll be by definition including decision-making systems. These come in many different flavors, not all of which might be obvious at first glance to be a decision-making system. But they’ll be there if you look. Some systems include: There are very few decision making systems that are purely norm-driven. Often what we see are naively designed mixed systems that have unexamined underlying structures that drive player behavior in predictable ways. This results in frustration or toxicity. Avoiding Frustration Why would you choose a mechanics-driven system over a cheaper-to-implement norm-driven decision-making system? Making decisions together is frustrating and designers can use explicitly designed mechanics to mitigate frustration and reduce churn. Player desire for self determination is a source of frustration In the Self Determination Theory (SDT) framework, players are intrinsically motivated when they can self determine their path in life. By contrast, frustration is the emotional state that comes with being blocked in our attempts to reach or achieve goals that we believe we should be able to attain. In the context of games, frustration arises when players cannot effectively make or act on the decision they have made due to a variety of barriers, such as limited time, insufficient resources, or other factors preventing them from doing what they have decided. Some versions of player frustration are: Coordination Frustration Group decision-making forces individuals with non-aligned goals to interact with and depend on others. This inevitably creates a coordination challenge which can trigger various forms of self determination frustration. Or, as Sartre says, “hell is other people.” Coordination is a great thing when it works! It is how groups of humans maximize resources in a zero sum situation. This is the basis of human civilization and is supported by a whole bunch of complex cultural and biological processes unique to humans. However, it isn’t easy. Individuals need to build trust, create a shared set of social norms around language, process and actions. This happens slowly, with repeat interactions, over time, within a small group. A very common coordination failure is choice denial: Suppose you are given a choice within the group. You make that choice (exercising your autonomy), but then that choice is denied due to the decision of others (autonomy and relatedness invalidated). For example, if a player had a strong opinion about which boss to fight, but that desire was overruled by the rest of the group, that would result in that player being frustrated. Digging deeper into this example: This failure is more common in low trust situations with open social affordances and poorly defined social norms. Notably, these are also the hallmarks of norm-driven or naively designed mixed decision-making systems. Player toxicity is bad business Over time, as frustration builds, players engage in unhelpful corrective actions–that is, toxicity or problematic behavior. They may seek to enforce complex norms on new players. Or, they might ostracize or other players who aren’t meeting their individual goals or needs. When players experience heightened levels of frustration (especially around interacting with other players), they are more likely to address this friction themselves by quitting the game. This decreases retention, kills your player population and puts the entire game as a business at risk. Conversely, reducing friction in player interactions lowers frustration and the player bounce rate. Furthermore, money talks. Designing decision-making systems that lower player friction also means that other business decisions that hang on player engagement are also affected, such as projections based on daily or monthly active users (DAU and MAU). Simply put, the less friction players experience from other players, the better for both player engagement and the game’s business needs. Our goal in this paper, then, is to offer heuristics and recommendations on designing systems that can reduce frustration. This will lead to better retention and overall better player experiences. 3. Overview of the DECIDE framework Within every collective decision, there exists multiple phases and subsequent choices within each phase. By naming and defining each phase, we can break down a complex decision-making system into its component elements. This is known as a ‘decision cycle’. We call the model of decision cycle that we examine in this paper the DECIDE framework. The phases of this framework are as follows: A framework with tunable elements There are many generic decision cycles out there such as OODA and we’ve borrowed many of their features. The main benefit
Expanding Player Impact in Social Spaces
Rosa Carbó-Mascarell, Andreia Gonçalves, Chelsea Howe, Natasha Miller, May Ling Tan Goal This paper aims to explore the variables and design decisions that go into creating games where players can impact each others’ experiences. This paper favours pro-social solutions that enable high-risk mechanics and provides development recommendations that mitigate risk factors to get the most value out of social gameplay – for players, developers, and businesses. It is important to acknowledge that this is an ongoing and developing topic, and more work needs to be done to ensure our social spaces are vibrant and safe. Why is this Important? Overall, we believe that social gameplay benefits players, developers, and the broader world. Promoting more methods and avenues of prosocial self and group expression increases the retention potential of a game. In a study of adolescents, creative self-expression is shown to lead to increased self-esteem, extraversion, and openness to experiences. Students when encouraged to be creative in expressing themselves were found to have more energy or enthusiasm, more ingenuity or mental openness, as well as less negative affect or nervousness. From a report published using game data extracted from Steam Workshop, the retention potential for UGC-based games is 64% higher than games that do not have UGC after only 2 years. At the 5-year mark, that chasm widens to 90%, showing how player creativity is a force multiplier to engagement. Not to mention, they also show a 23% revenue advantage over non-UGC titles. UGC games showing a 90% retention over the span of 5 years over games that do not. Image credit GameDiscoverCo. Games continue to increase in society’s mindshare and are a popular location especially for younger generations to socialize. 70% of Gen Z are interested in socializing in in-game worlds beyond gameplay. Creating better communities and safer social spaces creates kinder, more collaborative citizens for the future. Eliminating toxicity not only creates healthier communities, it also reduces the churn and negative experience that good actors may experience. This benefits developers, as does the increased sustainability of having players create their own engaging content for each other. We see social content boosting KPIs like engagement, virality, and retention when handled with care and intention. Defining Player Impact A player’s ‘Impact’ in a social space is any action that can be observed and witnessed by other players, as well as any change or modification to the world space or gameplay that other players will experience or be affected by. Players can directly ‘Impact’ other players with features like player-to-player collision, or indirectly ‘Impact’ by building a wall in the world that other players will collide with. Examples of player impact Overwatch spraysTemporary decals that are applied over the walls for players in the match to see. Sky message boatsLeaving messages for others to read if they choose to, as well as being able to react to those messages. Minecraft buildingRemoving and adding blocks to augment the space where you and others play. Shooting in GTA 5 OnlineShooting and killing players makes them lose money and have to respawn somewhere else. Player impact in this paper aligns with the concept of social affordances, as described in this Lost Garden article. The paper notes that “By eliminating the bad aspects of humans interacting, you often also remove many of the good parts” – which will be the focus of our exploration. We want to start the conversation on how to responsibly increase player control; fostering creativity and enabling social collisions without compromising player safety. Archetypes of Social Spaces Most social spaces cluster around five major archetypes, each of which has different standards of interaction and impact and different associated risks/rewards. The success of each space can be achieved when the affordances and positive feedback provided are informed by the goals for the space and the frequency and depth of social exchanges that players can have within them. In modern and large-scale games, it’s common to find more than one of these types of spaces. Note: These are just the most common archetypes when looking at the current landscape of games. With this paper, we hope to equip you with the tools to create these by following best practices, as well as expand on them by modifying assumptions or creating new spaces. We can categorize these archetypes based on trust level (from strangers to friends) and their access restrictions. Lower-trust spaces require higher security and consent measures to mitigate potential risks. Factors of Risk and Reward As each game might have differing needs, the following is a framework through which a designer can assess the benefits, risks and mitigations when introducing a feature. Mechanical These factors are part of the social feature itself. They directly affect the amount of risk and reward when players interact or engage with the feature. Degree of Game Impact The extent of change a player can affect in a space, on gameplay, or directly on another player when using a tool or feature afforded by the game. Questions to ask: Benefits of a higher degree of impact Risks of a higher degree of impact Creativity and longevity of the game due to more UGC and emergent social play Stronger feelings of player autonomy and investment Possibility of creating disruptive/inappropriate content, causing permadeath, trapping other players, destroy others’ content. Conflicting individual goals that cause unintentional overrides/wiping out of others’ content Impossible to prevent even with more closed affordances, as players can still use combinatorics to create negative content (e.g overlapping player sprays to make offensive content in Overwatch) Aspiration – What are some successful examples of this? Why aspire to do this? Examples of player ingenuity in Minecraft (masterpieces that players make), pixel painting on Reddit, and player creativity in Animal Crossing. This higher degree of impact allows players to modify the world into habitable spaces that others can experience and visit. Scale of Impact The far-reaching impact stemming from the actions of a single or group of players and defined by how many people are affected by the