“They’re all males in the game. We usually try to avoid the females because what do you do with a female Turian? Do you give her breasts? What do you do? Do you put lipstick on her?”

That comment reveals an extremely limited view of sexual dimorphism. Sadly, this is exactly what James Cameron did for the intelligent aliens in the film Avatar. In that film, which went to great lengths to feature biologically plausible aliens, the female aliens, called Na’vi, did in fact have breasts, a nonsensical decision in the context of that film. Our own Vince Keenan facetiously remarked “It’s because they’re lactating mammals.” What a bizarre conceit for an alien race!

photo credit: jurvetson

Compare this with the take presented by Kristen Perry, responsible for the design of the female charr in Guild Wars 2:

“It really didn’t make any sense to have boobs on a charr female, particularly with all the effort we took to make her sleek and fierce. We thought they should have no breasts at all or at least hide them under some fluffy fur. Above all else, we needed to be true to the race, of course! […] I gave them a choice: either be subtle and downplay the breasts [...] or go full-on realistic. Yes, that’s right —none or six!!”

That the debate was between “none or six” demonstrates that critical thought about how to show sexual dimorphism in this race was given. In this case, the male of the species had already been designed for a previous game. Despite this limitation, when the time came to design the females, the artist did not just add female human secondary sex characteristics to the male charr. Because of this, a more unique, interesting, and sensical creature arose.

To arbitrarily make our invented species map to humans is to ignore the fascinating diversity of life on this planet, as well as our own creative potential. Penguins, blue whales, peacocks, hyenas; these animals all have wildy different degrees and expressions of sexual dimorphism, both from humans and from each other. Even working within the technical restraints of needing to match human rigging, as in the Mass Effect games, aliens could be made to map the sexual dimorphism of any of the above species, rather than implicitly following the pattern of homo sapiens.

The design of a species’ sexual dimorphism also tells players about the reproductive strategies of that species. The reproductive strategies of a species inform our understanding of its society. Male angler fish are dwarfed by their female mates, whom they fuse with, becoming reduced to little more than gamete factories. Male deer, who are polygynous, lock antlers with other males to compete for breeding access to females. Peacocks endanger their lives growing and grooming vast plumage to impress peahens. Female sperm whales live together in pods with their young, while mature males spend most of their time wandering the oceans alone. Male honeybees only have one set of chromosomes, and the queens are the only fertile female females, which, in a fictional intelligent species, would map very neatly onto a three gendered society.

Ours is a creative industry. We can imagine, manifest, and make plausible, fictional races bearing little or nothing in common with our own physical appearance. We can do the same with the genders of those races, and we miss a tremendous opportunity to explore new ideas by failing to do so.

First, allow me to wish you a belated happy new year on behalf of the entire Chromed team. We’ll have regular updates in this space as production commences on March 32nd.

2011 will go down as a critical year in my personal evolution as a video game player, in that I finally bought a console and played a video game. The title that compelled me to make the leap was L.A. Noire. I was squarely in the demographic sweet spot for this hugely ambitious project, spent dozens of hours lost in its textured recreation of mid-20th century Los Angeles, and ended up writing multiple articles on it, including a game review for the Film Noir Foundation’s magazine and a noir review for Continue, a brand new gaming magazine. (The latter piece is now available in preview form.) In short, I liked it a lot.

The game couldn’t possibly live up to the fanfare trumpeting its fidelity to historical detail and its advances in motion capture technology. Still, I was surprised by how quickly L.A. Noire seemed to fall off the radar. It merited only a passing, somewhat negative (if accurate) mention on The AV Club’s list of 2011’s best games, and didn’t factor into Slant’s roster of the 25 best at all. (Seriously, Slant? There were 25 games better than L.A. Noire this year? Would it have placed in the top three dozen, at least?)

My gaming education didn’t stop there. After consulting with friends I dove headlong into the rest of Rockstar’s repertoire, buying Grand Theft Auto IV and Red Dead Redemption as well as the original Portal.

Number of these games I’ve played to completion: zero.

It’s not for lack of trying. I began with Portal and marveled at the game’s wit and the ingenuity of its puzzle design. Then I reached one level where I quickly sussed out what I needed to do to advance. The only problem: I couldn’t actually do it. I consulted playthroughs, confirmed that I was right, took copious notes and still couldn’t get the job done. I haven’t gone back to it in months. No doubt my Weighted Companion Cube wonders whatever became of me.

RDR was the one game I was told that I, as a huge fan of westerns, would adore. Herewith, my inner monologue as I played the game.

“Why did I ride out here again? What mission is this? Oh, right. I think I’m supposed to — COUGAR!”

End scene.

GTA IV was worse. I tossed my controller aside very early on when I realized that my mission was to take a deeply uninteresting NPC on a date — and that I had to learn to bowling in the process. I can now conclusively say that of all the activities that can be replicated on an Xbox controller, bowling should be fairly far down that list. Along with RDR’s horseshoes.

The problem that many players had with L.A. Noire — the tightly controlled storyline that kept pushing you relentlessly forward — was what I valued about the game. I liked knowing where I was supposed to go next, what case I was investigating. The sideline street crime quests provided welcome respite, but were just that: sidelines. Put me in a true open world where I could do whatever I wanted and I became impatient and then bored. If I’m going to drive around with the radio on or hang out in a bar, I’d rather do those things in real life with friends. In a game world, I’d prefer to spend my time hunting down the Black Dahlia’s killer.

Perils of being a late starter, I assumed. Then I read this Overthinking It piece following the release of the PC version of L.A. Noire and had my eyes opened. Aside from the author sharing my appreciation of the game’s vivid recreation of the methodical and occasionally plodding nature of police work, he also points out how L.A. Noire forced him to unlearn behaviors learned through years of game play.

One discovery I made playing L.A. Noire was this way of thinking had entrenched itself in my mind to a much greater degree than I ever thought possible — being forced to pick a right answer without trying all the options in a video game has become physically uncomfortable. I want to click on everything. I want to try every option.

Turns out I was looking at it backwards. I began with L.A. Noire, a game in many respects tailored to me in terms of setting, mechanics and tempo, and assumed that was how games were supposed to be. But if veteran gamers can appreciate what L.A. Noire does well and make adjustments, I can do likewise. After all, it should be easier for me. So at some point I’ll return to Red Dead Redemption, saddle up again and send John Marston back out into the badlands. It’ll give me something to do while waiting for “The Consul’s Car,” the one L.A. Noirecase I’ve never played, to come out on Xbox. Assuming that ever happens.

photo credit: twm1340

Artist and designer Josh Foreman has argued in an article on Gamasutra that we as game developers lose something as our growing experience and expertise make us increasingly and irreversibly aware of the mechanics of games. We reach a point where we can no longer believe in Oz; after all, we are the men and women behind the curtain.

Let me first note that I agree with Mr. Foreman’s rejection of the cynical stripping of games to mere Skinner Boxes. It is my view that to construct software explicitly for the purpose of maximizing dopamine release in its users is no longer game development but deliberate exploitation. I acknowledge that all subjective human experiences have a discernible, even if not presently known or understood, biological cause. Despite this, the experiences that we as game developers provide our players with are valuable in of themselves. Put another way, there is value in the act of playing, even if the release of equal amounts of dopamine (or whatever neurotransmitter you prefer) can be effected by more direct means.

That said, I disagree with his conclusion. The change in perception that experts undergo is a mark of growth. It does not diminish the beauty of what we see, but rather enhances it. To quote Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, “Mediocrity knows nothing higher than itself, but talent instantly recognizes genius.” Likewise, as we increase our understanding of our craft, we are better able to grasp the fine details that separate good games from great ones. True, our knowledge allows us deeper understanding of the mechanics behind the games we play, but this augments rather than diminishes our sense of wonder. As laymen, we can only appreciate the end result; as experts we can now also appreciate the process behind it. Games and indeed all things that are the result of complex processes become more wondrous as we come to understand those processes, because we become aware of the greater wonder that they are a part of.

I encourage future game developers and my peers who are feeling melancholy not to view our place behind the curtain as giving up on the joy of playing games. We are adding to our experience the marvels behind it.

The height of electronic entertainment circa 1980

As soon as I heard the name Electronic Detective, I knew I had to have it. It didn’t hurt that the “computerized who-done-it game” was endorsed, right there on the box and on TV, by Don Adams. (For the entire generation of gamers that has no idea who Don Adams is, he played secret agent Maxwell Smart before Steve Carell did.) Then there was the game itself, an elaborate plastic console that I coveted because it reminded me of the answering machine from the title sequence of The Rockford Files. (For the entire generation of gamers that has no idea what The Rockford Files is, it’s TV greatest private eye series, created by Roy Huggins and Stephen J. Cannell. Last year there was an aborted attempt at a reboot produced by Steve Carell.)

Start up the game and you hear gunshots, followed by a chintzy digital rendition of Chopin’s “Funeral March.” Behold the boot-up sequence in all its glory.

One of the game’s twenty characters has just been murdered. The other nineteen are now suspects. They’re all depicted on Rolodex-style cards with illustrations that could have come out of Mad magazine. (For the entire generation of gamers that has no idea what Mad magazine is … oh, to hell with it. That’s what Wikipedia is for.) The depictions of the characters prove that Electronic Detective was a pre-PC game in every sense; you’ve got a red-faced ex-cop named Mickey O’Malley, and the only Hispanic figure is, naturally, a flamenco dancer.

What follows is essentially a simple logic puzzle. You ask questions of the suspects, receiving answers either as letters or numbers. You track their replies on a “Case Fact Sheet.” Only 100 of them came with the game, so I kept my handwriting small to reuse them. When you’re ready, you make an accusation. Get it wrong and, in an intriguing attempt at motivation in law enforcement, you yourself are shot.

Words cannot describe how much I loved this game. I didn’t play through all 130,000 possible scenarios (according to the game’s instructions) but I’ll bet I came the closest to doing so.

Yes, it was primitive, and seems even more so having played through all of L.A. Noire’s nuanced interrogation sequences. Yes, it was formulaic. Most games are. The ritual is part of the enjoyment. Electronic Detective did have one advantage. It made allowances for the Eureka moment. If you thought you knew who the killer was, you could vault to the end. Whether it was based on careful questioning, a hunch, or the fact that you’d played this particular scenario before, you could input your guess and wait for either gunshots or sirens.

In mystery novels, knowing or strongly suspecting who done it doesn’t impede my enjoyment provided that I like the characters with whom I’m keeping company and the world that they inhabit. That’s our goal with March 32nd, to create an environment that players want to visit that’s studded with mysteries large and small. But every once in a while, we’re going to try to let you solve one at your own pace. Because everybody likes to feel like Columbo.

He was another big TV detective, by the way.

The general rule of screenwriting is that one page of script equals one minute of screen time. But there are multiple routes through our story, and the program we’re using to co-write and map this thing isn’t screenwriting software. The screenwriting programs out there aren’t built to handle the linking and cross-indexing necessary to keep all our playable options in some sense of order. Our program can. The only downside? The program doesn’t have a fixed window size; it adapts to whatever size rectangle you stretch the screen. What we need to get a sense of page length (and thus playthrough time) is the fanatically rigid, unreasonably inflexible page layout of the screenplay.

I volunteered to port a scene into Final Draft and see what came out the other side. I took one of the eight major sequences of the first episode and set about adapting it to the language of the screen. It was not an easy translation.

Here’s the thing: as I’ve said before, there’s only one way through a screenplay: start to finish. It’s not meant to accommodate options. You don’t include alternate endings or optional scenes. You spend your time mulling over the choices and deciding on a firm and unbending single path through the story. There’s no room for side quests or cul-de-sacs.

Except that that’s exactly how March 32nd is built — not just choices and alternate routes here and there, but everywhere, several times per scene. And as I discovered, each individual permutation had to be transcribed into a format that did not want to adjust to it. The scene thus wound up looking like a Choose Your Own Adventure, jumping around to vault over choices to connect with others farther down the line, occasionally circling around to retreaded territory. It was a beautiful, maddening jumble.

What I wound up with was a scene that would have made any assistant director beat me to death with his walkie: a 50-page scene. More specifically, an un-breakdown-able (it’s a word) 50-page scene with a playthrough time of 7.5 to 11.5 minutes. Yes, I did emerge with the approximate runtime. Hooray.

This wasn’t a particularly action- or choice-heavy scene, either. What I can tell you is that it takes place in a restaurant (SPOILER!), and that from the moment Jake walks into the door to the moment his food arrives, there are over 300 ways for the scene to play out — 300-plus ways for Jake to reach his sandwich. (Not that there’s a sandwich.)

Over three hundred ways to play the scene up to that point. And that’s not including additional factors such as optional objects and which (if any or all) are interacted with, the effects of time and date, and everything from the arrival of the food on. That’s enough to kick the permutations over a thousand per scene. And this wasn’t a heavy scene.

I remember laughing when someone at the office mentioned a video game script that topped over 600 pages. I laugh no more, as that’s the equivalent of only twelve sandwich scenes.

We put more than 300 people through their paces in our portable green screen studio, giving them the chance to step into the world of March 32nd and potentially be a character in the game. Why not check out a memorable audition or two?

Plenty of press stopped by our booth, and we talked their ears off about what we’re up to. The Escapist’s Mike Thompson called March 32nd “one of the strangest, most intriguing titles I’ve seen in quite some time.” More coverage is coming, and we’ll link to it here.

What’s next for March 32nd? A playable demo, regular updates from the entire team, and Episode 1 early next year. Watch this space to stay in the loop.

What this movie lacked was a belief in its characters’ agency, their ability to choose their actions. Given that human agency is what drives most narratives, this leaves us with a story that bellyflops. In Sucker Punch, choice and freedom are represented by Babydoll’s ability to insert herself into pre-made genre fantasies … these are costume changes, not narrative development.

Movies are wish fulfillment.  They live and die on audience investment in the protagonist, the surrogate self the audience imagine itself as.  But if I believe the protagonist doesn’t actually have the power to affect her circumstances, why am I watching?  How can I care?  We get enough of powerlessness in the real life day to day.

Balancing character agency with narrative necessity is a tricky thing.  From my years as an RPG gamemaster, I can tell you that a lack of character freedom is one of the easiest ways to have a campaign fall apart.  There are key pieces of information your characters need if they’re to make informed decisions and understand  your story.  But if your players feel they’re being railroaded—that regardless of whatever decisions they make, a preset outcome is unavoidable—you’re going to lose them.  At best, they’ll lose investment in the story; since their decisions don’t matter, they’ll start playing to amuse themselves rather than pursue the goal of their quest.  At worst, they’ll stop playing entirely.

The ideal is to have the choices your players want to make be the same as those you need them to make.  It’s more than just presenting your players with X number of ways to react in a situation, especially if all options ultimately lead to the same result.  That’s the illusion of free will.  Very quickly, players will learn their decisions are irrelevant and don’t have consequences.

Take any path you want! No, not that one.

The key, again, is investment in the protagonist, the window through which the player enters the game.  A player who is truly keyed in to the character, who recognizes and has bonded with the protagonist on some level, will make decisions that advance the story as well as the character’s personal arc.

It’s the approach we’re taking on March 32nd.  The options presented to Jake at each decision point are always appropriate to the character, whether or not the choices are wise or relevant.  Jake’s free to make mistakes.  And he will.  If he has to take a few lumps to work his way through the story, hey, that’s his—and your—choice.  And while there are set events in the game that Jake must and will encounter to proceed, the presentation of the events varies greatly according to the decisions Jake made getting there.  The world adapts to incorporate Jake’s choices.

No, it’s not exactly free will.  All games have boundaries.  But within those boundaries, Jake, the protagonist—and by extension the player, the audience—will never lose the ability to determine his destiny.

photo credit: AlishaV

A little over a month ago, we held auditions for our teaser and demo. We sat at a table on one side of an ample conference room, and watched a parade of talent perform excerpts of scenes we’d written so far for March 32nd. It was a revelation. Presto—character! Voile—story and world!

The destination for dialogue is the mouth that speaks it, and there’s some kind of magical thing that happens when you hear it manifested by a voice. It is, of course, very gratifying to hear it spoken out loud, but it’s also extremely useful in terms of analyzing the work. You can instantly hear if the dialogue is authentic within the context or not. You can get a feeling for continuity and believability of character, or quickly identify where it feels there’s a lack thereof. Even inconsistencies in structure and story often become apparent. How a character speaks and the vocabulary they use can indicate their economic status, their age, their educational level, their mood, among other things. Where a character pauses, what a character ignores, when a character falls silent or interrupts contribute to the authenticity of that character. Dialogue is the most indicative element of character, and character is the root of story. For a narrative-driven game like March 32nd, dialogue is key.

The experience at auditions was so valuable, that we decided to use this kind of method prior to locking our scripts. We sit around the table–the writers–and we divide up the parts. Even though none of us are actors, we can still glean a lot from trying to speak the lines ourselves, and from hearing our colleagues grapple with it.

We’re making our March 32nd demo for PAX right now. In the words of Mary Shelly’s Dr. Frankenstein—it’s alive! And I must say, what a magnificent monster it is.

The only time in history the frilly shirt has been manly

The appeal of the game lay in its infinite replayability and in the unenclosed nature of the narrative. The game was very much a precursor to the open-ended RPG. But unlike a multi-pronged RPG, you weren’t steering towards one of a set number of scripted endings. In fact, you never quite knew when your game was going to end, or whether that ending would be desirable. More on that later.

After choosing your nationality (you could be English, French, Dutch, or Spanish), the whole ocean (well, the Caribbean, anyway) opened up to you to explore and/or plunder. You could take the safer route of a privateer if you chose. There were incentives to so; you were granted safe harbor in your nation’s colonial ports, and you had the chance to marry a lady of good standing and become an upright citizen. But there were also incentives to attack your own flag and become a terror of the high seas — more plunder! Higher profits! Arrr! You really could do whatever struck your fancy. Go ahead, attack that 60-gun galleon. You’ll kill off most of your crew, sure, but it’ll end in one hell of a sword fight.

Engarde!

These days, when you play a new title, you pretty much know when you’re approaching the end of the game. Your inventory (if you have one) is full, you’ve discovered and equipped all the weapons, and the narrative is escalating towards a climax, an obligatory confrontation with antagonist who’s been dogging your every step since frame one. Not so in Pirates. The ending of every game was uncertain. Would you retire willingly, or wind up in prison? Would your crew mutiny from bad treatment or greed and strand you on an island? You could never be sure. Late enough into a game, any battle could be your last. And that led to a tension that most game titles can’t create, because you honestly didn’t know how much more time you had. Kind of like life.

And here’s an even more remarkable thing: when your game ended, the game didn’t. I should clarify. When the game ended for your character, the game didn’t end. You just made a new pirate, started on another ship, and began a new career buckling swashes.

The real star of this game was its world, the Caribbean. Even rendered as it was in the constrained graphics of the 1980s, there was no mistaking that. The world did not exist just as a framing device for the protagonist’s story, a path for his or her progress. A lot of games feature the protagonist as the only real character in the world; the world exists for the player to save or conquer. Not so in Pirates. If you go down, the world wouldn’t even notice.

The original Arr!P.G.

Big decisions happen without your input. Nations go to war and sign treaties, and ports and colonies change hands. Alliances are made and broken. Rival pirates go tear-assing through the same waters, and may plunder a target port before you. Other events are always in motion. In short, the world does not center around you.

The whole effect this creates is that you are a visitor and guest in this world. The complete lack of defined levels, the openness of the map, and the random nature of ship encounters and world politics make every trip through the game a unique experience. And this isn’t even the game Sid Meier is best known for, which is testament to why he’s one of the titans of video game design.

photo credit: Diane S Murphy

Demos are an important part of marketing games. Players (rightly) want a chance to try games before they decide to make a purchase. Putting out a demo that showcases the strength of your game will make players want to buy it, and then everyone gets what they want. Clearly then, having a good demo is important, both for developers and gamers.

This is something of more immediate interest to all of us here at Chromed, since we’re hard at work getting a demo of March 32nd ready for PAX 2011. A decent amount of our time is being spent trying to decide how best to showcase March 32nd, and I made some rather impassioned arguments at our last meeting. Vince suggested that I write a post on the topic, so here we are.

Some developers release unique content for their demos. I envy their schedules. While some amount of new content will need to be created, given the different context, it’s quite another thing to invent a new scenario to present to players. This can be effective, since it allows you to create a playground in which players experience a distilled experience, with only the strongest aspects of your game on display.

The new content route isn’t always available, and may not be the best choice even if it is. Re-purposing game content for a demo isn’t a bad way of doing things, either. You can still pick content that showcases the strengths of your game, and your development resources will be going toward final game content. Of course, iteration may still occur on that content, but gamers won’t feel betrayed if the game changes between a demo and the final product. After all, the game was still in development when they played the demo.

There are pitfalls to be wary of. The first level of a game isn’t necessarily the best level to use as a showcase, for a number of reasons. Actually playing the game will feel redundant to players who played the demo. They have to play the first level twice to progress, which can feel like a chore even when the game is good. Additionally, early levels often contain tutorial content, both explicit and implicit. The appropriateness of such techniques in the context of the game itself is a separate topic* but in a demo, tutorial content is generally inappropriate. The goal of the demo is to get the player hooked on your game. The goal of a tutorial is to teach the player how to play your game. These goals are generally at odds with each other. Players will be most engaged with a game once they know how to play it, and begin utilizing the full set of mechanics to progress.

It may seem that I’m describing a Catch-22. Tutorials provide the player with the knowledge to get the most out of a game, but they’re not appropriate in demos, where the goal is to engage the player as much as possible as quickly as possible. Part of the reason my recommendation isn’t a Catch-22 is that key word: quickly.

In a full game, the amount of time the player spends in a tutorial is brief compared to the amount of time they spend playing the game. In a demo, tutorials can quickly consume a substantial portion of a player’s time. This means that their first and a large portion of their total experience with your game is devoted to one of its least engaging points.

I generally find it preferable to put players into a scenario in which the absence of detailed knowledge will not hinder their play or make it likely that they will lose. Give players a brief amount of time in which they are relatively safe to explore the controls, then let them loose. You may find it beneficial to give the players artificially advanced power, either by providing them with mid-to-late game abilities or by tuning the stats of the player and enemies to favor the player more.

This approach provides players with an experience in which they are able to quickly play your game as they will (hopefully) be playing it when it is released. It gives them a more representative sample of game play, still emphasizing only the strengths of your game, and increases the chances that they will walk away with a thrilling victory — along with the associated positive feelings toward your game.

*One I intend to explore in another article in the near future.