Video Games are Real

Category: Caleb’s Game Devlog

Thoughts on Game Development and Game Design. Expect quick-thought blog posts, scripted videos, and even podcasts. If you want to learn my philosophy on video game development, this is a great place to start (and end).

  • Are Unskippable Cutscenes a Games Usability Issue?

    Are Unskippable Cutscenes a Games Usability Issue?

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    There are probably not many facets of video games more contentious than the cutscene, the short, or sometimes very long, scripted cinematic scene that, from the player’s perspective, is either a necessary piece of emotional connective tissue keeping the player tethered to the narrative or just an unwanted speed bump along a highway otherwise filled with hi-octane action. The ham-fisted solution to these opposing views is to give players the ability to skip the cutscene. Players who want it can have it. Players who don’t want it, can leave it. But as with all things related to usability, the design intent and the player perception must be taken into account. Not to mention, developers must consider the technical implications of modifying cutscene behavior. It’s not as easy as cutting out the scene.

    Player Perception on a Skippable Cutscene

    First, let’s look at the player perception angle. If given the option to simply skip all cutscenes, players may perceive that the cutscenes aren’t important, and therefore their confidence in the game’s design direction is compromised. Their reservoir of goodwill starts to deplete. Alternatively, a skipped cutscene could lead to confusion about the game’s narrative, which also could reduce player confidence in the game’s direction. The thinking would go, “why would a designer include such an intrusive yet ignorable element?” There’s some dissonance between what the game wants of the player and what the player thinks the game wants of the player.

    Technical Reality of a Skippable Cutscene

    But, skippable cutscenes, beyond just being potentially bad in practice, isn’t even possible in practice, much of the time. Video games are all smoke and mirrors, They’re just an hours long magic show where rocks are hollow and the world outside your narrow vision cone simply doesn’t exist. Cutscenes are just another pawn in the birthday party magician’s sack of tricks. For example, cutscenes are sometimes used to keep the player engaged as the game loads. In this case, they simply cannot be skipped, at least not until a certain amount of the game has been streamed in.

    Horizon Zero Dawn: What’s outside the vision cone does not get rendered.

    So if unskippable cutscenes can possibly cause player frustration. And skippable cutscenes can possibly cause player frustration. And cutscenes that are skippable midway through can possibly cause player frustration. What’s the solution? The obvious solution is to create cutscenes that are so captivating that a player happily watches them. But that’s not a reality. Different things captivate different players in different ways.

    Games Usability and a Skippable Cutscene

    First, we have to understand a bit more about how cutscenes impact game usability. Players should always be able to perceive that the system, the game, is functioning. Loading spinners, or throbbers, are a good example of this. Cutscenes can be problematic because they can reduce this transparency. These days games can look so good that players may not know a scene is a cutscene until they try to skip it. So, why not add a loading spinner. For aesthetic reasons, these types of cutscenes that mask game streaming likely shouldn’t have a giant loading spinner in the corner.

    An example of a loading screen spinner/throbber. You’ll just have to trust me that the ring in the corner is spinning.

    Perhaps game designers can leverage conventions from other, familiar interfaces. Google’s material design uses a determinant linear progress indicator which is fairly unobtrusive and could make for a good game loading indicator at the bottom of a cutscene. But I’m a games usability guy. I’m not a designer.

    A determinant linear progress indicator

    One way some designers have attempted to address this dissonance is to provide feedback when an impatient player presses a button in an attempt to skip the cutscene. Sometimes designers flash an “unable to skip cutscene” indicator. This works because it tells the user that the system is functioning but that they have to wait a bit. This gets even more potentially frustrating for players when games sometimes allow cutscenes to be skipped and sometimes don’t. The inconsistency causes unnecessary friction. I’d argue it would be better if the player knew why they were unable to skip the cutscene. Maybe “Game Loading. Unable to skip cutscene.”

    What if the cutscene is story relevant, and therefore possibly essential to the designer’s intended gameplay experience? How do you force a cutscene while also giving the player freedom? It’s a tough call, but ultimately designing around player freedom is probably the way to go. I’ve seen some games handle this by including summarizing banter between characters immediately following a cutscene. In cases where the player character has an NPC companion that was featured alongside in the cutscene, the two could comment on the content of the cutscene as the player is moving the character toward their next goal once the cutscene has passed. This way a cutscene-hater can still get the gist of the narrative, enough at least to stay invested. Good game design also reinforces recognition rather than relying on player recall. In our case, this could mean that mission names and descriptions are robust enough that a player need not watch a cutscene.

    In the early days of cutscenes, fully rendered cutscenes, rather than in engine cutscenes were all the rage. Sure they were visually jarring to the player, but we largely didn’t care because “holy crap that looks real!”. But they were impressive from a technical perspective. Not only that, but I argue they also were helpful from a usability perspective, in a strange way. The unlikely benefit to this visual incongruity between polygon-filled gameplay and smooth-rendered cutscene is that players easily understood that cutscenes were different, they looked way more impressive than the gameplay, and therefore players understood, even without overt feedback, that different rules were at play. The inability to skip a cutscene made intuitive sense. Also, remember that rendered cutscenes were still new, so many players didn’t want to skip the cutscenes because, “holy crap that looks real”.

    Yes, actual gameplay looked way worse than this cutscene in 1996.

    But now with most cutscenes happening in-engine, the visual fidelity alone between gameplay and cutscene isn’t different enough for players to let game designers get away with forcing us to watch the cutscenes, at least not without a system status indicator of some sort. It is true that the cinematic nature of cutscenes sometimes still project a sense that the rules of the game are different, but I’m not confident that’s enough.

    All of this may be moot soon though now that two of the three major consoles have SSD drives. The much faster data streaming capabilities with SSD drives means cutscenes may not be required for hiding loading screens anymore. This is a shame to me, as I personally enjoy most cutscenes, but the beneficial trade-off is that if game designers do include a cutscenes in a world in which loading is so quick it’s essentially imperceptible, I’ll know that the cutscene is intentional and for narrative purposes. And so, as a player, I’ll have greater confidence in the design direction of the game. Seeing a cutscene will be like seeing a rug in your neighbor’s living room and knowing it’s there because it actually brings the room together and not because it’s hiding a vomit stain from that time when Frank’s aged tuna salad culinary experiment turned out exactly as you’d imagine it would.

    Credits and Mentioned:

    Music credits

    • Bossa Antigua by Kevin MacLeod, Link: https://incompetech.filmmusic.io/song/3454-bossa-antigua, License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
    • Pump by Kevin MacLeod, Link: https://incompetech.filmmusic.io/song/4252-pump, License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
  • Why Can’t I Ever be the Bad Guy in a Video Game?

    Why Can’t I Ever be the Bad Guy in a Video Game?

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    When I play a game that allows narrative choices, I always default to the white knight role, the honorable do-gooder, the kind of guy who kills only with kindness, the kind of guy who stands up for those who cannot stand up for themselves–paraplegics mostly–the kind of guy who saves damsels and his pennies, then donates those pennies to progressive causes that fight to eliminate the damselfication of women.

    And when all that do-gooding is done goodly, and the credits have rolled, I’ll sometimes go back and re-play the game using a set of forced limitations as part of, what I call, an Asshole Run. This is a playthrough of the game in which I make non-white knight choices. I choose not necessarily the wrong choices, but for sure the choices that are most objectively the meanest. And to this day, I’ve never actually completed a full Asshole Run of any game.

    Is being mean simply not fun? Are video games bad when played through a bad-guy lens?

    I’m not going to pretend that all of you wrestle with the same morality that I do. Some of you may find it equally as easy to play the bad guy as the good guy, and so this post isn’t a comment on your moral imperatives as a person. You ARE a bad person. No further comment necessary. Just kidding. In fact, I’ll talk a bit later about a paper I recently read that offers the idea of Moral Management and moral disengagement which helps explain why you can be bad in a game but good in real life. And we all love academic papers. So, look forward to that!

    But first, I’ve got to acknowledge what many of you are probably thinking: “Not all narrative choices in video games are so black and white, bad vs. good. Choices often have both positive and negative consequences.” While that’s absolutely true, I’ve found that in MOST games there’s still a narrative push toward the “good” ending, and signposts along the way often point in that direction. Take Fallout 3, for example, and the choice between blowing up Megaton and its citizens, resulting in a much better life in terms of wealth and living conditions for you, or saving Megaton which nets you a much smaller monetary reward and a paltry shack to live in, but you didn’t, you know, murder a ton of people.

    If I say “oops” does that mean I’m still a good guy?

    Assuming you, the player, have come into Fallout 3 with a sound moral compass Fallout 3 reinforces that moral compass by first presenting you with the plight of the Megaton citizens. Megaton is, despite its drab appearance, a utopia of sorts. Its citizens—a mix of well-meaning ghouls, genuinely helpful law enforcement, and a chatty bar owner—are all generally respectful of one another, and are even mostly respectful of the cult members who worship an active atomic bomb located in the center of the town. Most players will experience—and importantly develop a sense of affection for—these friendly citizens BEFORE meeting the outcast character who seeds the temptation to eventually blow up the entire town for riches. The player is primed to think of Megaton as a good place, as a place worth protecting. You can choose to kill a bunch of people for wealth, but the game clearly doesn’t want you to do that. The player can make any choice, and both have positives and negatives, but it’s clear the game encourages you to make a specific choice.

    There’s a larger consideration here, though, when it comes to a wide range of narrative choices. Game developers must, at some level, define what they want the player to do and therefore the choices available to them. Even games without binary choices, truly open-world, sandbox games that purport to allow the player freedom of choice and action, those games are still limited by the universal gaming constraint that if a game isn’t programmed to allow you to do something, then you can’t do that thing. Human beings cannot comprehend infinity, so there’s no way a human being will be able to program infinite choices and the infinite conclusions implied by them [1]except with self-learning AI, yes, you are correct Pedantic Joe, but self-learning AI is seeding by a human, and currently there are debates about the ethics of AI, which further proves my point).

    Narrative-driven sandbox games generally have an ending, and because of this gamers assume, even if subconsciously, that their play decisions during gameplay are in service to that end. This implies a right and wrong choice at every step, or better yet a correct and incorrect choice at every step. Every choice is in service to an eventual end. In the case of multiple endings, marketing materials and fan communities often speak of the “good” ending, which isn’t always reflective of the moral good, but in most cases it is. Players strive to save all characters in Until Dawn. Killing Taro Namatame or failing to find the true killer in Persona 4 initiates the bad ending. In The Witcher 3, players are encouraged to push Ciri to make her own decisions, to respect her own desires, in order to get a good ending. Otherwise, Ciri dies. Cue the bad ending.

    This is true, though less restrictive, even with MMORPGs. The goals of those games often aren’t necessarily about a single, final ending, and are more focused on shorter gameplay loops with more flexible states, but even with those the ethical binary is there, I believe, under the surface, constantly telling us that our character, our party, or even the game itself has a right choice among several wrong choices. Consider this: in an RPG when a decision prompt appears for you to make one of several narrative choices, do you read all of the options and make a choice, or do you push any button randomly. If you read the choices, you’re already mining the game for clues as to what the correct choice is for your character and situation, and the correct choice is often the one that keeps you on the path of the morally good conclusion or at least grants you access to tools and abilities to push you further on that path.

    Even when games offer multiple paths and multiple endings, they aren’t ever really limitless. Game publishers will sometimes market their sandbox games with hyperbolic promises. Minecraft has used the phrase “limitless possibilities,” for example. And we, as consumers, are okay with that because we understand that those claims come with the implied caveat that, but, really they’re not limitless. It’s understood that our actions and choices will be limited to what the developers have allowed and the end states that the developers want.

    Yeah, but no.

    It’s interesting that consumers allow this type of hyperbolic marketing. I don’t see it with other products. A jar of peanuts literally has to state that it contains peanuts. I understand that food allergies are much more serious than a player’s frustration with lack of actual, total freedom, but still the flexibility we allow with video game marketing is kinda crazy. And I’m not even talking about the use of mid-production vertical slices as marketing materials. “Fake” scripted game demos can be important, as they help focus a development team, a group of individuals with different aesthetic sensibilities, on a shared vision. But they shouldn’t be used as marketing materials.

    The point here is that games have fundamental limitations in terms of scope, and because of that developers must make choices about how to keep a player interested and engaged. Tapping into a moral goodness is one way of doing that.

    Now, I have to acknowledge that I know not everyone believes in a universal morality, that humans may not be hardwired toward ethical behavior. It’s a classic nature vs. nurture argument. Are humans inherently good or is our goodness entirely a product of our environment? I’m not smart enough to answer that question, so I’m operating under the belief that humans tend toward goodness in most situations. But if that’s where my thoughts ended, this post would have been over a long time ago: humans are good. Doing bad stuff is hard. The end.

    But it’s not that easy. Not only are there plenty of bad people in the world, but stuff that would be considered evil in most situations in real life is easily rationalized in video games. Killing human proxies in video games is basically the point of most video games.

    This brings me to that paper I mentioned earlier. The paper, titled “Moral Choice in Video Games: An Exploratory Study,” is about the idea of moral management, which is the idea that disengagement cues are embedded in the game narrative which play off the player’s desire to reach the end state. In other words, the game’s ending, and the player’s drive to see that ending, supersedes all else. Any moral alignment that the player brings to the game is effectively ignored during the play session as long as the game’s mechanics, narrative, and motivations align. This is the true essence of an RPG, one in which the player fully abandons their own morals to truly play a role.

    There are problems with this, of course. The paper references other scholars who insist that in order for the game to even present a situation that allows moral management, the game must assume the players are coming to the game with some sort of moral alignment to begin with. But assuming moral management is at play, are we any closer to understanding why I have a hard time being an asshole in games? If moral disengagement is a thing, why am I immune to its effects?

    Actually, I’m not immune to the effects of moral disengagement. Using Fallout 3 as the example again, I kill plenty of ghouls and raiders and super mutants and feel fine with it. That’s moral disengagement at play. Killing those things is in service to an end state. If blowing up Megaton and its citizens was the only way to finish the game, I would happily do so.

    So, I suppose the real question is, if an end state is guaranteed, why do I feel compelled to make morally good choices to get there? Maybe it’s as simple as “doing good makes me feel good” and I like feeling good. I didn’t need an entire blog post for that conclusion.

    There are still some interesting situations worth exploring, though. I find that when I play games with friends, the Asshole Run is easier. Is this because there’s an audience that I feel like I’m performing for? I’m turning the game into more of a spectacle than a journey? The idea of deindividuation may be at play here. This is the idea that in group settings I’m subject to the group’s morality more than my own. I talk more about deindividuation in my blog post titled “Why Are Some Online Gamers So Mean?”

    The Asshole Run can also be difficult because often the game itself obscures which path is the most assholish. The game doesn’t generally show me the results of an alternate choice, so I’m left wondering what could have been. This is especially problematic when both choices seem equally moral and amoral.

    Then there are games like the first Life is Strange in which the character herself second-guesses all of your choices. That’s just mean.

    Also, what if the game itself doesn’t present the moral dilemma overtly? Take Super Mario Bros, on the NES, for example. That’s just a game about traveling through the Mushroom kingdom, breaking bricks to rescue a princess from an evil dinosaur monster. Seems morally straightforward, right? But consider the fact that those bricks you are breaking are actually imprisoned Mushroom Kingdom citizens. Really. This is canon:

    So, are the coins that come out just their calcified hearts?

    This means you are ostensibly murdering thousands of innocents on your journey to rescue one princess. All the coins and power-ups that spew from broken bricks is moral disengagement at play. How can it be bad when the game encourages me to do it?

    So, to the question of why do I have such a hard time completing an Asshole Run, the answer is probably pretty straightforward. I’m a morally good person playing games that generally encourage morally good behavior. So what can games do to make me act otherwise? They can offer paths that make moral disengagement easy, but I’m not confident such a path is sustainable. I don’t know of any successful game that actively encourages 100% amoral behavior for its entire narrative? Can you think of any? List them in the comments below.

    Mentioned

    Music credits

    • Bossa Antigua by Kevin MacLeod, Link: https://incompetech.filmmusic.io/song/3454-bossa-antigua, License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
    • Pump by Kevin MacLeod, Link: https://incompetech.filmmusic.io/song/4252-pump, License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

    Footnotes

    Footnotes
    ↑1 except with self-learning AI, yes, you are correct Pedantic Joe, but self-learning AI is seeding by a human, and currently there are debates about the ethics of AI, which further proves my point)
  • Quitting Video Games is Hard but I’ve Learned to Embrace it OR Why Beat a Video Game?

    Quitting Video Games is Hard but I’ve Learned to Embrace it OR Why Beat a Video Game?

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    After 35 hours, I quit playing Hollow Knight. This wasn’t an easy decision.

    Quitting a game used to be easy. In fact, quitting used to be THE WAY to finish a video game.

    See, the idea of actually seeing a game through to the credits is a relatively new concept for me. When I was young, growing up in the NES, Super NES, and Nintendo 64/Sony PlayStation era of consoles, completing a game was a mythical endeavor, like hunting bigfoot.

    Game credits were an elusive mystery bordering on so abstract as to be ridiculous. I’d play the same first level of Skull and Crossbones or Kiwi Kraze or Karnov over and over, never once considering that players were meant to progress further. Sure, I’d heard stories of a level two. But a level three, four, or heaven forbid five, well, that’s just make-believe nonsense grandmas cough up between racist rants and half-gumed pudding with medicinal flavor names. Mmmmm Ovaltine Tapioca flavored

    Those hidden power fists never helped, Skull and Crossbones game!

    And eventually, much like my grandmother, the façade that video games were unbeatable died. Sometime in college, I think, probably between seeing the end credits of Grand Theft Auto 3 and the end credits of ICO, I was struck with the realization that for a few months at least I had been playing games with an intent to actually beat them. That goal just sort of seeped into my gamer mindset without me realizing it.

    Playing a game was suddenly no longer just playing a game. I had to have beaten the game to claim that I’d played it. But eventually, sometime after college, the willingness to leave a game unbeaten, unlike my grandmother, returned from the dead.

    Recently, I’ve been thinking a lot about why I’ve now become so comfortable with letting a game go unbeaten. Why am I so easily able to refuse the physiological pressure against unresolved mission lists? Why can I put down the latest AAA zombie killing first person shooter?

    Quitting a game before it’s completed is actually not easy for the easily influenced human brain to do. In his book Getting Gamers: The Psychology of Video Games and Their Impact on the People who Play Them, Dr. Jamie Madigan cites self-determination theory as a driving force behind mission completion, and therefore game completion. He says that people engage in voluntary behavior (like play) to the extent that it scratches three psychological itches:

    1. The need to feel competent at what you’re doing (Competence)
    2. The need to feel like you have meaningful choices when deciding how to do it (Autonomy)
    3. The need to feel connected and related to others in the process (Relatedness)

    So maybe I quit a game before completion when it fails to constantly satisfy self-determination theory, when the game itself fails to motivate me.

    But there’s more. Quitting isn’t always about a lack of interest in the game. Quitting can also be about a wealth of other options. I can only stare at the rows of unplayed games on my backlog shelf for so long before one of them eventually persuades me to give it a try. And once that new game is in, the old game I just quit is hard to go back to. Even if the new game is worse, I’ve already committed to stopping the old game, so I’m much more likely to drop the new one in favor of another new one then go back to the old one. That commitment is another strong psychological force. Our brains have an amazing ability to make us feel good about the decisions we’ve made.

    But even then, isn’t it the lack of the first game’s ability to motivate me that’s even allowed me to entertain playing a different game? Isn’t the original game’s lack of quality still at fault for me quitting?

    Possibly. But I do also have to consider that I’m just not good enough at the game to finish it. General conversation about video games tends to position difficulty as central quality. Even easy games are defined as, well, I just naturally described them as “easy.” This makes sense as “games” are thought of as a competitive endeavor, and competitions are events of skill where, even though individual participants judge ease on their own, competition, skill, and degree of difficulty are inextricably connected.

    But video games reflect such a wide spectrum of genres now that I’d love to see discussions of difficulty stop being the norm. Annapurna Interactive, for example, publishes some of the best games I’ve ever played and most of those wouldn’t even reference difficulty as a descriptor because those games aren’t interested in challenging a person physically; they are more concerned with offering an emotionally interesting experience.

    Some genres do, though, embrace difficulty, and that’s okay. I put 35 hours into Hollow Knight, and loved every single minute, until one boss encounter proved too difficult for me, so I quit. Nobody would call Hollow Knight a bad game.

    But then I have to ask myself, if the game truly delivered on self-determination theory, would the difficulty no longer be an obstacle toward completion? Would I have pushed through the tough boss fight if the game delivered perfectly on motivation by way of competence, autonomy, and relatedness? I beat Celeste. Is it, therefore, a more successfully crafted game than hollow knight?

    Of course it’s not that easy. Of course I have to consider that a person’s taste in games, and perhaps their measure of resolve related to self-determination theory, is subjective. And it pains me to consider that. I want to believe in a world where nothing is subjective. Subjectivity, I want to believe, is just magic that science doesn’t understand yet.

    And I understand that’s a stupid dream. Both because it’s likely impossible to attain even if it might be conceptually viable, and because that would be a shitty world. Imagine a world where the science of motivation is perfectly understood and ubiquitous among video games. Everyone would be compelled to complete every game, meaning we’d all develop crippling game addiction or we’d recognize that possibility and swear off games entirely. The nuance of game experience would be eradicated.

    I don’t want to live in a world without video games. I love playing video games even if I don’t finish every one of them that I play.

    So, I could quit playing a video game because it’s too hard, or because other video games pull my interest away, or because the game I’m playing is just bad or boring. And over my life I’ve waffled from only ever quitting a video game to the opposite extreme that every video game must be beaten.

    But now, I’m at a happy point where I see quitting a game not as a problem but as recognition of the discord between me and the ideal player that the video game requires. Quitting a game is a reaffirmation of the wonderful variety of humanity.

    Music credits

    • Bossa Antigua by Kevin MacLeod, Link: https://incompetech.filmmusic.io/song/3454-bossa-antigua, License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
    • Raving Energy by Kevin MacLeod, Link: https://incompetech.filmmusic.io/song/5029-raving-energy, License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
  • Are Video Games Good at Comedy?

    Are Video Games Good at Comedy?

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    Are video games good at comedy yet?

    More precisely, are video games good at comedy in their own right. Of course video games can make us laugh. Steam has an entire category dedicated to funny video games. But most video games that make us laugh do so in ways that other mediums can also. The writing in video games, or the situational articulation of characters and scenes, these things make us laugh when we watch TV, when we read a book, and so of course they’d offer the same with video games. Nobody is going to argue that the Trashopedia entries in Donut County aren’t worthy of their own mock Mitch Hedberg album. They are. I’ve never laughed so hard when playing a video game.

    But the humor with Donut County’s Trashopedia and Undertale’s incessant puns and Psychonaut’s slapstick gags is humor that’s possible across many different mediums. I want to know if video games have truly carved out their own methods of humor.

    First, let’s start by defining humor and therefore giving us a way we can objectively measure whether or not something is funny, or at least as much as we can given the subjectivity of humor. My favored theory of humor, the Benign Violation theory, itself allows for subjectivity. So, there’s no getting away from the fact that what makes me laugh might not make you laugh, but the Benign Violation theory at least helps us categorize things as funny or not, even if the result of that humor isn’t an outburst of laughter.

    So, the benign violation theory basically states that something is funny when

    1. it violates some norm or expectation
    2. does so without hurting anyone, and
    3. both the perception of the violation and of the non-threatening nature of the violation happen simultaneously

    When it comes to humor by way of writing, the text sets up the expectations and then violates it with a punchline. Or take this poop-shaped coffee mug, for example:

    The coffee mug is generally a banal part of your morning routine. The poop-shape violates this norm. And nobody has been killed. Even if you find this particular joke in bad taste, it’s still easy to understand why it’s funny.

    Video games are unique. We’re connected to a video game by an input device, one that maps our thoughts to the actions we see. As we press buttons the feedback changes our approach, our input changes, and the loop continues until we arrive at a win state. No other entertainment medium offers this level of malleability. No other medium wants us to stretch and shape the product to an end while the product stretches and shapes us to that same end. This reciprocal molding is what makes video games uniquely immersive. And this contract between game and player relies heavily on a firm understanding of the ruleset. Most games literally tutorialize to the player. Books don’t tell you how to read. Movies don’t tell you how to watch. Video games tell you how to play. And this simple fact, I think, is why video games have trouble being humorous in their own right.

    When I press up on the d-pad, I expect the player character to move up. When I press the R2 button, I expect the gun to fire. If that doesn’t happen, and I get shot instead, I don’t laugh about it. Why? The act certainly violates the expectation. But, in the context of the game, it does hurt someone. Me. My progress as the player, the reason I’m playing the game, has ended. Success depends on the game itself following the rules it’s requiring me, as the player, to follow.

    So how do you benignly violate expectations with a video game?

    The most straightforward example I can think of is during the intro tutorial of Portal 2. A robot chauffeur named Wheatley greets you as you wake from a long stasis. Testing for resulting brain damage, Wheatley gives you a simple command. You just need to speak. The game primes you for relief. If you honor the instructions, you’ll discover that your player character is not brain damaged, as was expected, and in fact can follow instructions perfectly, therefore subverting those expectations. However, this happens…

    The punchline is a clever subversion of expectations, even when those expectations already seem to be subverted. This degree of layering and subverting expectations is difficult in any medium, but really shines in this video game example.

    This subversion of the expected control scheme is, as I see it, the primary way video games currently use their unique offerings for comedy. A common flavor of this approach are games that make lack of control a primary feature. Gangbeasts, Octodad, and Human Fall Flat are all examples of this. Limbs are controlled independently, and forward momentum carries the character far beyond what game players have come to expect with most games. These games provide humor by defying the player to play them well. It’s not surprising then that these games are generally pretty forgiving with their lose conditions. If I am punished for the lack of control, then the violation is no longer benign.

    Similar to the ragdoll approach of those games, the recent trend of simulator games manage to use a game’s intrinsic qualities for humor. Goat simulator, for example, promises to allow the player to simulate the life of a goat, which is mundane, and is humorous simply by nature of that juxtaposition. I expect a game to give me interesting experiences. Chewing cud in a petting zoo is not interesting. Therefore, benign violation. However, like Portal, Goat Simulator then subverts that expectation by encouraging the player to do things that are decidedly not goat-like.

    Surgeon Simulator takes the opposite approach by suggesting that the game will let you experience something that requires immense skill. Then it subverts that expectation by limiting the player’s control to absurd levels. That a surgeon cannot control his own fingers is the humor.

    West of Loathing is an interesting example of video games doing comedy. While most of its comedy is applicable to other genres, one very unique way the game subverts expectations is with its art book. Video games sometimes come packaged with booklets full of concept art for the game with the expectations being that the reader will be guided in a visual chronology from sketch to concept to final rendering. But West of Loathing is a game with a stick figure motif, so the art book instead reduces the fidelity of the art over time rather than increasing it.

    The art book for West of Loathing is hilarious

    When will video games consistently use their own intrinsic properties for comedy? Will it ever happen often enough that awards are given at big award shows for video games that do comedy right? Will class be taught at universities about comedy in video games?

  • What Remains of Edith Finch is Pregnant.

    What Remains of Edith Finch is Pregnant.

    Pregnancy in media is godhood with responsibilities. Pregnancy binds people. Pregnancy arrests potential. Pregnancy promises potential. Pregnancy can both incite a life-changing journey and can stifle an in-progress journey. Pregnancy is magic. And pregnancy, much like a gun, is cheating.

    A gun is an unearned power shift. A story should survive by its characters, but a gun puts too much power into the hands of an undeserving character. When I read a story with a gun I’m primed to look for the narrative weaknesses that made the gun necessary. In the episode titled “Email Surveillance” of the sitcom The Office, Michael Scott ruins an improv class by pantomiming a gun at every possible opportunity. Not surprisingly, none of his classmates want to be in scenes with him.

    Use of a gun in a story must be handled with grace. It must be earned. Of course certain genres such as action movies and war dramas demand forgiveness. When everything is a gun, the gun is nothing. But outside those exceptions, a gun must be respected.

    The same is true with a pregnancy. Imagine two characters who hate each other. One pulls a gun on the other. Suddenly, the entire story is about the gun. Imagine these same two characters, but one reveals her pregnancy. Suddenly, the entire story is about the pregnancy. These two characters could be sitting atop a melting glacier, minutes from being swallowed by a shark and suddenly their own imminent death is less important than the potential of a future generation. Atop the shrinking block of ice these characters no longer fear their own death, they fear their inability to care for the unborn child. A last minute rescue spawns a shared smile, one that silently commits to the health of the child over the second chance they’ve been given to extend their own lives.

    Edith’s pregnancy, which results in her son Christopher, is earned. It’s subtle. It exists before the start of the game, and therefore is part of the player character rather than a simple addendum. Most importantly, Edith’s pregnancy represents an escape route from a family imprisoned by a curse. Christopher is the only surviving member of the Finch family and can commit to ending the family lineage.

  • What Remains of Edith Finch is Ambiguous.

    What Remains of Edith Finch is Ambiguous.

    Any interview with Creative Director Ian Dallas will include three things: 1) the interviewer’s pronouncement of her favorite character in What Remains of Edith Finch, 2) the interviewer’s demand for closure regarding that favorite character’s death, and 3) Dallas’s refusal to comply with the question.

    It’s quite amazing how consistently present these elements are. It turns out, ambiguity makes people uncomfortable. And Ian Dallas doesn’t like people[1]okay, this part probably isn’t true. See, What Remains of Edith Finch is a video game about openness and interpretation and building a mythos. A concrete What Remains of Edith Finch is not What Remains of Edith Finch. But this reality doesn’t stop fans of the game from begging Dallas for resolution.

    Dallas himself will claim that his reason for holding back on absolutes is because even he doesn’t know for sure how the characters die in the game. Generally, when I hear creators distance themselves from answers in this way, I assume laziness. Shouldn’t a creator be responsible for his creations? Sure, art, and therefore the artist, isn’t required to provide answers, but I do feel that when pressed the artist should be obligated to defend the art.

    But with What Remains of Edith Finch ambiguity—and therefore discomfort—is the very point [2]okay, so maybe Dallas does hate people. This game  is the rare case where a work’s purpose is to expose ambiguity and does so by trafficking in the ambiguous [3]how very meta. But why am I okay with a dodgy artist here but not okay in other settings, like when my response to a question at an author reading floats among variations of “it’s up to you”, padded out with several words ending in -ism that aren’t so much meant to answer the question but to shroud the answer as a reaction to pressure[4]Yes, I’ve endured many of these. Author readings are usually painful to sit through. Likely my own readings included.

    I think I approve of Dallas’s dodges because What Remains of Edith Finch is crafted toward the ambiguous rather than being ambiguous as a point of existence. The world and the characters are defined (unambiguous) so that the narrative ambiguity can resonate. By comparison, with the bloated, masturbatory works of our aforementioned author-ism friend, the audience’s inherent questions are “…question(s) without a path toward an answer” and are “…abstract, non-objective, and simply exploratory.”[5]Yep, I just quoted myself. That’s probably just as bad as being an author-ism

    I won’t deny that the line dividing interesting ambiguity and masturbatory ambiguity can be temptingly dotted at times. It’s easy, especially for amateur creators, to plead philosophical depth in the face of concrete questions Thankfully, we have professionals like Ian Dallas and Edgar Allan Poe to show us the way.

    I won’t get into the details of Poe’s short story writings here. Just know that his stories are often described as strange, hallucinatory, weird, and mysterious. Poe leverages ambiguity for a specific effect. In the article “Ambiguity as Aesthetic Strategy: Edgar Allan Poe’s Ambitions for the American Short Story” Wanlin Li says:

    …ambiguity actually works for Poe’s purpose, since it strengthens authorial control by way of forcing the reader to grapple more with parallel interpretive possibilities. In other words, in cases of ambiguity, Poe seeks the unity of effect not at the level of stable meaning, but at the level of making the reader aware of instability.[6]JNT: Journal of Narrative Theory 48.2 (Summer 2018): 165.

    Poe, just as Dallas would do, doesn’t actually want the audience to determine which of the parallel interpretive possibilities are “correct,” but rather he wants the audience to accept that parallel interpretive possibilities are possible.

    So when Dallas deflects questions about the true causes of his character’s deaths, he’s perhaps not dodging. He’s moving out of the way so you can see the rest of the possibilities.[7]Though, I do believe Dallas has a version of absolute resolution locked away in his brain. He just knows that to expose it would mean toppling the delicate intent of the game. He’s created … Continue reading

    Footnotes

    Footnotes
    ↑1 okay, this part probably isn’t true
    ↑2 okay, so maybe Dallas does hate people
    ↑3 how very meta
    ↑4 Yes, I’ve endured many of these. Author readings are usually painful to sit through. Likely my own readings included
    ↑5 Yep, I just quoted myself. That’s probably just as bad as being an author-ism
    ↑6 JNT: Journal of Narrative Theory 48.2 (Summer 2018): 165.
    ↑7 Though, I do believe Dallas has a version of absolute resolution locked away in his brain. He just knows that to expose it would mean toppling the delicate intent of the game. He’s created something that drives people crazy, and he has the ability to put those people at ease, but if he does this, his creation dies. Not an enviable position. (see, even I’m not immune to demanding resolution)
  • What Remains of Edith Finch is Questions.

    What Remains of Edith Finch is Questions.

    It wasn’t until a few months after first playing What Remains of Edith Finch that I understood the source of my infatuation. I assumed my love related most strongly to the game’s narrative focus, and perhaps that’s still true, but then the question becomes “why is the narrative focus so alluring?” Because I’m a writer? Maybe. Because I’m a human and narrative is central to my sense of belonging? Maybe. But it’s a video game. Why is narrative so important? Why don’t I care instead about the game’s mechanics? Or the game’s sense of progression? Or the sense of accomplishment that a player is meant to feel when playing a video game?

    That few-months-post-play epiphany hit me hard. The source of my love lies with the game’s ability to ask interesting questions (see the seven questions above).

    Any form of narrative entertainment (examples: novel, story, movie) should aim to interest a reader by posing questions alongside the promise of answering them. A question without a path toward an answer is abstract, non-objective, and simply exploratory…in a word: dull. The questions don’t need to be answered by the product, but the audience must be properly motivated to search for an answer.

    True, some audiences will be more willing to search for an answer and will be less dependent on the author to provide direct guidance. This is the balance authors must maintain. Do I give too many answers and risk insulting the reader’s intelligence? Or do I hold back answers and risk being inaccessible? Do I write a Goosebumps book or do I write “Infinite Jest?”

    Video games, given their traditional reluctant embrace of narrative, haven’t often been forced to prioritize such interesting questions. Rather, the questions video games have been charged with posing are superficial questions of curiosity and puzzle solving more than narrative fulfillment. What happens when I push this button? How do I defeat that boss? Can I walk off this cliff? What happens when I move to the left when the game wants me to move to the right? It’s no wonder then that John Carmack once dismissed story in video games: “Story in a game is like a story in a porn movie. It’s expected to be there, but it’s not that important.”

    To be fair, games have come a long way since John Carmack’s famous dismissal, and he himself has even walked back a bit on his statement: “This old quote still pops up, but I caveat it today — there are undeniably lots of games where the story is the entire point, and they can be done well.  I do still hold that the most important games have been all about the play, not the story.”

    And is caveat is reasonable. It’s probably true that when we examine the history of video games, the evolutionary landmarks of importance most certainly reference mechanics more than narrative. Mario was originally called Jumpman, not Can Only Afford One Set of Overalls Because of Alimony Payments from a Messy Divorce Man.

    What I think has happened is that game developers have learned that strong narrative provides a strong motivation for players. Games do not need narrative. But they are often better off with it. As games get longer and demand more time from players, a developer can lean heavily on mechanics or aesthetics or simple curiosity to keep a player interested, or a developer can lean heavy on narrative to keep a player interested, or a developer can mix these elements to keep the player interested. No matter the concoction, the developer’s job is to keep a player interested.

    What’s important, I think, is that often players don’t explicitly verbalize the questions they have. I’ll step back into a novel example (heh) first, as novels are objectively narrative focused.

    The first line of Chapter 1 of Moby Dick is simply:

     

    “Call me Ishmael” [1]I know this isn’t the first line of the book. The book begins with two introductory sections that could easily be ignored, and I think most people do

    Three words and three times as many questions:

    1. Why should we call you that name? Did you change your name? If so, why did you change or name?
    2. Why is it so important that you announce your name immediately? Are you famous for something? Are you trying to be famous for something?
    3. Who is Ishmael talking to? The reader? Am I being set up for an oration of a grand adventure?

    These questions will seed a good narrative as long as the narrative delivers on the promise of answers. This balance of posing questions then teasing the reader with an answer then posing more questions, then more teases is what creates a narrative, and as long as this cycle is handled by a skilled writer, the reader will exhaust the entire novel and leave satisfied.

    A question is a byproduct of interest and so becomes the impetus to investment. Humans love solving problems. Therefore, a question posed is an invitation to adventure.

    So, back to What Remains of Edith Finch (finally, I know). From the very beginning of the game, I’m asking questions as a result of my interest. One of the first examples of this question > tease > question cycle is when you (as Edith) look to the ground to see a missing person’s poster. From the distance, you cannot read the words or make our the portrait, but you recognize the ubiquity of the poster design.

    Who is missing? Why are they missing? Why is the poster on the ground?

    So you step close enough to read the words.

    This person has been missing for years (answer to: “Why is the poster on the ground?” It’s old). Is this person related to me? Was he ever found?

    Then Edith’s spoken commentary notes that the person is her brother. So you venture further and quickly learn that a lot the Finch family is gone (dead). As the player, you are encouraged that you may learn the circumstances of Milton’s disappearance, so you continue.

    This cycle happens over and over throughout the game. And the biggest question of all, is there a Finch family curse, never fully gets answered, but the player is satisfied because this tension is exactly the point of the game.

    Damn, What Remains of Edith Finch is good.

    Footnotes

    Footnotes
    ↑1 I know this isn’t the first line of the book. The book begins with two introductory sections that could easily be ignored, and I think most people do