The 1-to-1

This is something I wrote a year or two ago, that I am putting here for my records. Enjoy.

It covers a couple of concepts that I find interesting, and would like to put in my designs. It covers a wide range of things. The most important concept focuses on how the player’s actions should affect the game-world. This topic is a very important one. Designers often get this one wrong.

Co-existence in an ecosystem

An entire ecosystem. Beatles scurrying from prying hands that are forever scanning the ground in bursts of hungry delirium. The trees and the mountains, the predators and the prey.

Actual bodies interacting beneath the surface. Workers have lives and the pressure of daily routine and bosses leaning on them adds up. Any system, such as a crew, exists in a balance. If you press down hard in one area it fluctuates in another. Even if the spotlight of the story shines on a small area, the superstructure that defines the world continues to change. Characters are affected by the changes endlessly and their reactionary behaviours will always be shown or insinuated by the story you tell.

You have to make sense of their world. Place the characters in there, give them a series of events that fit together to respond to, and have them respond in a way that gives them an interesting and consistent personality – one that fits together in your mind as clear and reasonable.

Problems that reflect reality

What if – just work with me here – I wrote a game about characters who had _actual_ _fucking_ problems. Like problems that actual people have to solve on a regular basis. I can’t even imagine what these would be and I deal with them on such a regular basis. This is what media does. I suppose I can always read about these sorts of things in the papers, in history, in every piece of literature and television I know of. I just have to look for the clarity under all the garbage.

Sisko has to let go of the chase for a defecting subordinate, who fooled him and his entire crew. He’s been pulled off the case. He has skills and the respect of his peers and subordinates  but sometimes that’s not enough. He’s not good enough for the task. He had plenty of opportunity to get his ducks in a row, time he used to implicitly gloat through his confidence to his friends. But it apparently wasn’t enough. All around him the signals were there. He should’ve seen them and he didn’t.

That’s a real problem. There’s many in Star Trek.

Creating the gap (personal/player motivation)

Mind the gap. There’s a gap between a player’s expectations of how the game should progress. And then there’s the reality, imposed by a beast or some other obstacle. The environment changes and creates a rift in the player’s mind. He wants to see a resolution.

What is the greatest assumption, the most powerful idea a player wishes to grasp onto? I think it should be personal. I think it should be global. I think it should encompass who the player is and what he values. Harmony and companionship.

I value solitude, and the struggle for brilliance. I dream about all the people I care about, and (potentially) will care about, and my ravenous desire to exist in their service. I live out my beliefs straight from my core, and light up the world with my passion to do what’s right for them.

When I’m alone in my imagination I feel bravery and focus. I think about the windy struggle to survive in a frozen landscape. The elements wear me down but I continue to survive. I have no indecision. There’s just freedom, and I push on. I’m calm. I’m aware. I don’t complain. I’m becoming one with nature. I forget about the trivialities of life.

Maybe the player wants to be together with his ideals – my ideals. He wants what I want. I lay it out for him. Clear-headed competence. His goals are simple.

Then he wants to retain social position among his peers. He wants to command a certain amount of respect, to be listened to, to be accepted for certain aspects of his personality. He wants them to sometimes do as he says, occasionally laugh when he makes mistakes, to have certain expectations of him and to always look at him like he actually exists, that his opinions and expressions are real and personally significant to them for their nature alone.

He wants to be a part of something, for real, as himself. He wants to become part of an event, and reach its conclusion and have a story to remember. He wants to live.

The event becomes a part of him. It becomes a part of others that he respects and listens to. It becomes a part of the world he lives in, and feels permanent in a way. It opens doors for possible futures and can never be repeated.

The 1-to-1

I love the idea of a 1-to-1 between a player’s emotional and technical output and the game world. Everything is recorded, nothing is left out.

The imaginary world of nerds and introverts that evolves over a gaming session is difficult to build. It requires practice and directed motivation. And it’s necessary for comprehending a game. How does a Mario player link together his playing attempts, into a story that has his personality carved into it? By keeping an active record of what happened inside the game and inside himself. He links the screen to his imagination and creates a fictional reality to participate in.

Non introverts don’t have the fictional reality skill. They need practice in order to develop it. And in the duration of practice they need guidance and training wheels to prop themselves up. Something has to present the fictional story to them. They need to be able to see and hear outside of themselves what hard-core gamers have always felt inside.

The hard-core need to hear and see what their compatriots have always felt in genres and experiences they’re not as familiar with.

If I want to build a game that’s complex and engaging and that anyone can play, I have to show everyone how to play. This is done through the “1-to-1”. The player internalizes that relationship then I move on to more advanced material. Slowly I internalize everything that has to be in-order to understand how to approach and enjoy the game.

The 1-to-1 is significant. It gives me the freedom to build a world that encompasses and focuses on whatever is worthy. There’s a lot in the universe to be inspired by, and the 1-to-1 opens the door to all of it. I can go out and scavenge for ideas at any time. But first I’ll look within myself.

It’s hard to write straight from the heart. Assume the character is involved in some sort of conflict. He desires to exist. As he does so the world wears on him. His stamina drains. Snow piles on his head, the winds steals his strength. He has to keep moving or freeze to death. The warmth from nearby shelters beckon to him. But they’re often far away and too insubstantial to serve for a long time. The rains come, and he becomes stuck in the dark. He feels himself feezing in the blackness, blind, with the fading sense of who he is in the world.

The avatar represents you as an individual  If it dies, the game is over and you restart somewhere new as somebody else. Though the residue of your past experience stays with you, and textures your next journey. Maybe your new body rises from the ashes of the old, or is grown from a plant that absorbs it’s essence. You are similar to your old self, but time has passed and your abilities are not the same as they were. Much has to be redone, and you have to do it better or suffer the same fate. You live with your mistakes. They hinder your progress, and in proportion to their significance. Even death is no escape. The severity of your failure is indicated well. And it is emergent from the principles of play already obvious to you. The consequences of your behaviour are natural and not surprising, and they are always interesting.

You desire mastery over the environment, enough to be yourself confidently. You want to engage in the actions that are needed for survival, and do so with clarity, elegance and intuition. You desire control over the situation, to control it in your own way, and succeed clearly where others might have failed, and where you might have failed before. You want the sense that what you are doing is really you, and that you exist in that world. “Throw whatever you’ve got at me and I’ll take it down. My spirit desires more. I’ll conquer, and ravage, and skate through whatever you have.” You want to feel that the world is yours, because you can handle it, and you can handle anything else.

Well-defined challenges

What problems does the world present asking you to master? What elements of your intuition does it tax? What kind of situations is it like?

Is it careful study and resolution? Is it problem-solving and dedication? Is it the endurance of doing a good job so many times that any problem begins to crumble?

I think it has to do with my own pursuits, the things that matter to me the most. I obviously want to pursue a problem tirelessly, eating away at it in the tiniest of fragments until I finally break through. I want to use all of my senses to become one with the problem. I want to be overwhelmed with difficulty and overcome all odds.

And I want to study. And I want to dance carefully, watching an entity unfold before me, learning from it, and striking at its heart. I want to absorb patterns and shapes and ethical arguments. I want to bend to the will of the world. And then I want to control it.

Maybe I want to think about what it is that I want to engage in?

Thinking about logic puzzles, interpretation of artistic expressions, movement, memory, spatial relations, timing, individuals, animals, nature and animals, societies. Start with the simplest. Why? Because simpler is easier. And maybe simpler challenges allow me to prototype a world of challenges more quickly.

Zelda uses spatial reasoning to navigate: throw a variety of enemies at you, gives you ways to counter-attack, and allows deduction of likely points to head to next. It offers timing and movement patterns to platform and combat across an area, and adds tone and spatial segmenting with color and design. One space looks different from another to indicate its relevance and to create identity. You are engaged in all of these things simultaneously. An experience is controlled by altering the variables of each construction. Re-tracking pads it sometimes, but also offers re-use and small mental activities during, and after, the gain of familiarity.

Mario’s challenges are found in the same sort of timing, positioning, and spatial reasoning problems used in Zelda. But they are more varied and nuanced, and their execution is more expressive. You, as a player, have a desire to express yourself in the most personal way, and this desire is given to you with methods inherent in the way Mario moves. Elegant motions are obviously interesting when executed, and they give more control to the player through the mechanics already available. Proper play is rewarded with further proper play (and easily dispatched challenges). The power and appeal of precision jumping becomes obvious simply by doing it, and enemies serve to accentuate it; they are like punctuation on Mario’s sentences. You already have a desire to say something. The enemies and interactables only confirm that what you’ve said was worth saying. That’s game design. Holy shit.

What is it that makes Mario like that? You’re given by the game tools to express yourself in many ways. The most interesting expressions require the most control. And they double as the most effective ways for defeating enemies and passing challenges. The variety of choices are expressed inversely by the design of the levels, which are simple to look at and complicated to explore. You’re left to figure out the nuances of the game on your own, not like doing that is hard; you’re always repeating the basics.

You want the player to do something.

Naruto, Star Trek, Sherlock Holmes, Band of Brothers, The Wire.

War and micro social-systems

Nog relays commands. Sisko gives orders. Dax drives during this while analyzing and determining the best flight pattern. It’s a ship in space, rolling with the wind.

What’s so interesting about things happening simultaneously? Being drowned in the decisions of your peers. Layers of stuff coming at you, building to a crescendo.

Grow to lead a team in a war. Gain the skills necessary to combat, manage, communicate, and all-around affect the behavioral patterns of everyone you command, report to, and interact with. Learn to form and maintain true dependencies with your fellows. Be responsible for the integration of the team(s) you command. Be prepared to lose your station, your status, your team, and anything that can be gained.

Execute hunts and pursuits.

Garak and Worf travel together to uncover the mystery of the Cardassian help message through dangerous waters. They encounter a surprise (amidst the development of their relationship) that spells big news for the people back home. Kira and Dax argue over interesting details of pregnancy, taking sides that reflect themselves well. I wonder about how the news will reach them, if it will reach them, and how they will react. They each have a personal stake in the safety of the two travelers  and both a personal and professional stake in the safety of the station and quadrant. The whole cast threatens to mobilize. There’s a great deal of tension in the air (my air). Levels of interactivity and influence square off against each other, and the possibilities run through my mind. This is exciting. A plot-line built well on the fundamentals of characters, setting, micro- and macro-situation.

Action/RPG game combinations

Samurai surgeon. Mario meets Prince of Persia controls. Shadow Complex / Metal Gear Solid meets Ninja Gaiden in 2d. Monster Hunter meets Pokemon meets Devil May Cry / Assassin’s Creed.

Imagine wandering a massive world, exploring it’s sights and properties, waiting to encounter clues that will allow a hunt to begin. You and your companions prepare for battle, or for further investigation. You travel to other lands for information on your prey, or acquire resources in-order to overcome it. You spend days living among its special relatives in it’s home land. You eventually become well-prepared and make the ascent to it’s home, carrying everything you own. You study the beast’s behaviour and mind, coming to grasp both it and its environment. You master any of your necessary skills. then in flashes of brilliance you bring pain to the animal. It comes closer to falling under your control. It doesn’t come easily, not at any point, and you must rely on much of your past experience to succeed. When you do succeed, your reward is great, and your journey becomes clear. You see what led you here and feel proud of your conquest. You bear the marks of your excursion, and travel on to find new ones, hopefully more challenging and sprawling than the one you have just completed..

There’s a great deal of technique in bringing a creature down. It’s massive, and I’m small and capable. I want to be technical, and brilliant, and on the tips of my toes. When it becomes cold I blaze bright hot, bringing love and justice to the world.

Ninjas are fast, and they’re agile, and they swing from the appendages of the world like it were a jungle gym. It’s a “toy” the ninja seems to say. “And I’ll play with it until I’m satisfied, and it’s substance is gone.” They fight monsters and baddies, and the boredom of solid routine. They are disciplined at being impulsive and elegant  And they slice up and through any obstacle and friend that greets them.

Assassin’s are ninjas with a darker style and firmer punctuation.

Go. AIs, puzzles, problems, tests, to bring a regular player to an expert, efficiently, effectively, and with balance. Animations, HUDs, sound effects, overlays, and commentary to expose the story behind a match to an inexperienced spectator.