“Content” in games: sign of a lost plot

  by Simon Woodward | 15 Aug 2007 | Permalink | Everything Else

I’m a big fan of PC games because of their richness – the high definition screen, the sophisticated input devices and all those gigabytes of hard drive space let games producers build incredibly rich, explorable environments. It’s a great thing to be released into a new environment and left to figure it out and explore its paths with minimal clues provided. For me, the learning curve isn’t a necessary evil at the start of a game, it’s one of the game’s main raison d’etres.

I recently bought the sequel to Half Life II, whimsically called “Episode One”. While still gorgeous, it’s a single pathway: You start in one location, and there’s only one pathway to follow with a fixed set of things that’ll happen to you until you reach the destination. It’s a scripted experience, except that they didn’t tell you your lines. The whole purpose of the game is to figure out what the correct responses are to the game’s scripted events. It’s like a Disney adventure ride, and it leaves me utterly cold.

When playing a game I want a big, interesting world to wander around in. I want big spaces and narrow tunnels, high tech installations and slums. I love to poke around in places that pique any explorophile’s interest: nuclear reactors, underground missile silos, moon bases, military encampments, fallout shelters. The old Doom screens were masterpieces of this. They were mazes in the proper sense, networks of passageways with hidden switches and (for the time) amazing landscapes, monsters leaping out of hidden doorways and secret stashes of booty and equipment to be winkled out.

I suppose what I’m getting at is that I like my gaming experience to be more free-form than scripted. Real-time strategy games are quite good at this: being presented with a map, a catalogue of units and capabilities and some way of earning currency with which to buy said units, you’re left alone to build an army and defeat your opponent. This is loads of fun: exploring all the units and what they can do, figuring out the best strategies and being able to do whatever I please ticks a lot of the “let me explore” boxes, but the maps are just too small: once you’ve won the campaign you move on to another map with a new opponent. The multiplayer aspect is more about conflict than social interaction; I really like RTS games, but in the end I move on from them looking for something more.

The massively multiplayer aspect of the MMO games is deeply compelling. I love having all these people running about in the game with me, and being able to explore these huge worlds is great. I think that the MMOs have missed the larger audience, though, because of the mindset that the only way to get ahead is to invest more time. I don’t have (or want to spend) fifteen hours a week to build up experience points, doing mindless quest after mindless quest and eventually achieving some pinnacle of achievement that in itself is just another scripted event in a long sequence of scripted events.

I think we’re ready for a revolution in gaming. Games need to become more free-form, and the only way to have them be less scripted is to reduce the dependency on developer-created “content”: all these scripted sequences and highly controlled events have to be reduced in scope and number.

I have a fantasy of a game world that is controlled by rules, seeded with a starter population and buildings and then just left to run. What happens in that world would be a function of the behaviour of the players in it and a large random element, and within the rules of that world I could do whatever I liked, in whatever order I liked. The main storyline of the game (alien civilisation invades, whatever) could be lightly scripted, but there could be any number of totally unscripted subplots that just grow out of the side effects of the game world’s controlling rules and the players’ actions.

Now that would be worth exploring!