Over on his blog, Coyote has stepped into the “drama discussion”, using movies as a basis. I can’t agree with that, because there’s a big difference between the movie hero and the game hero.
Let’s take Indiana Jones. He comes in from the start as “The Complete Hero”. He doesn’t spend half the movie cracking heads off rats to improve his whip skill or helping little old ladies find lost pets for brownie points. He is already accomplished.
However, RPGs always start us off as the level-one wimp, and the entire game is set around our characters (or party) building up to heroic stature so we can defeat Foozle at the end.
Since Indy doesn’t have to build himself up, he instead must display his toughess by absorbing physical punishment that would kill a real person or put him in ICU for months. But with a night of rest and some minor medical attention, Indy is good to go.
We also take hits, but happily we have magic healing to keep us on our feet. And we’re not even as tough as Indy, since our characters need more and more hitpoints just to stay alive.
The alternative to “The Complete Hero” is “Underdog Makes Good”. The cellar sports team (pick any sport you like) that finally pulls together and wins The Big Game. Or The Wimpy Kid Who Learns How To Defend Himself.
We also start off as underdogs in almost any RPG. However, we must endure endless combats and trivial errand-running to reach our goal. That is certainly work enough; why make it any more difficult?
We should also remember that movies are usually over in two hours or less, where games take much longer than that to complete. Extending this time by throwing more obtacles in our path would frustrate more than excite.
What we need - as I’ve said before - is less fighting and errand-running, and more interaction with people. A failure of some kind there could open a new story line, rather than just calling for a “reload and try again” situation.
That’s what designers have to look at, and that’s what they have to incorporate if they intend to have “failure” in their games. Otherwise, it’s best to leave things as they are and not add a new layer of frustration to their products.
Although I definitely follow (and agree with) the last two paragraphs, I’m not sure I completely understand everything before that and the point being made.
Where does a hero like Luke Skywalker fit in? He certainly did not start off as the accomplished hero, and had to learn different skills, overcome various adversities, and so on to become the legend that he is.
That is certainly work enough; why make it any more difficult?
What’s the implication here?
I mean, if you followed the failing path in Wing Commander (which they did away with in later games), did the game necessarily get harder? Not that I recall. I know it would take you longer to get the cooler ships, but I think the missions may have been easier.
Part of my concern about the “save game problem” is that games ARE being made harder to compensate for what I’ve heard refered to as “Save Scumming.”
But the point is well-taken: When you are in a gamer mindset, is the part of your brain that appreciates “good story” turned off (or turned down)? I think there’s some human psychology at work there… people tend to recognize and respond to pain much more strongly than reward. A small loss might yield a bigger win, but people will remember the loss.
I do think it is something that needs to be experimented with more.
With the 1.3 update to The Witcher, a new module was included called The Price of Neutrality. I liked the way they handled failure there, or maybe you could say they redefined it since even if you won you lost. You had a choice to make and whichever one you made you were going to fail at the other objective. I don’t want to give away any endings, but there was no real winning in the good defeats evil sense, whichever choice you made had consequences.
Rubes, quite so about Luke. Most action heroes, though, do come “complete”, so to speak, because they are adults.
The thing is, heroes in movies have a different set of obstacles to overcome than we do in a typical RPG.
Coyote, yeah, pain lingers, pleasure evaporates. But I think it really comes back to wanting success in games because real life has its own failures that we can’t erase with a reload button.
Yeah. Learning writers are instructed to pretty much torture their characters. It’s a hard enough thing to do as a writer. But as a player - our angst threshold is much lower.
Thus my contention that you are never going to have a masterpiece story - judged by traditional, linear-medium standards - in a videogame.
Taking the Indiana Jones example - he suffers failure after failure in the first movie. He loses the idol in the beginning of the movie twice, barely escaping empty-handed. He gets beat up a LOT, gets Marion’s bar burned down (though that was *a* victory), fails to protect Marion from being kidnapped, recovers the Ark only to have it taken from him, tries to steal the plane that will transport it and fails, suffers setback after setback in his attempt to steal a moving truck (but eventually prevails), and loses it again while on the ship. And he accepts capture.
That’s a LOT of failures that would never have happened if Indy could have restored from a saved game.
But there’s a fundamental difference between games and linear storytelling media. Being a participant is a truly different experience from simply watching the events unfold as a passive member of the audience. And I guess that’s the area that needs to be explored.