On her blog Creating Passionate Users, game developer and author Kathy Sierra has often written about the need for products to create an “I rule!” experience for their users. And at their best, the web’s most popular apps do just that: Facebook makes us feel more connected, Twitter more popular, Basecamp more productive.
Those products are designed primarily for utility. For products that are meant to entertain, however, the intended reaction is less “I rule!” than “That rules!” We might get lost in the action of a movie or empathize with the protagonist of a novel, but the experience doesn’t need to leave us feeling more powerful for it to be compelling.
Part of what makes game development so challenging, I’ve recently realized, is that games can provoke both types of reactions. Intuitive and responsive controls, a steady increase in difficulty, a satisfying conclusion: these elements add up to an “I rule!” experience for players. Story and aesthetics, on the other hand, are key to provoking a “That rules!” reaction. The difficulty isn’t just that we need to worry about both goals when creating games; the goals themselves are sometimes at odds. Games that spend too much time in cutscenes, for example, risk making the player feel like a passive observer no matter how well written and rendered they are. And satisfying the player’s desire to rule often places constraints on the stories that we can tell or how we tell them: an unexpected death can be a powerful moment, but not if it causes the player to quit the game in frustration.
Considering the need for games to strike a balance between “That rules!” and “I rule!”, it’s not too surprising that some have trouble seeing games as art. Done well, a game is both art and application, art and not-art — and that’s one of the things that makes creating a good one so rewarding.
I like this. (And loathe cut scenes.)
One thing it brings to mind is the question of what “the game” is. If we’re talking about a classical game, then it’s all about the ruleset and it’s up to the player to both actively engage the rules in order to get the desired outcome.
In an rpg or other “cinematic” game my sense of things gets blurrier as the game-product expands into setting. Setting sells but also changes the nature of the player’s engagement from active participant to performer/observer of a mobile piece of the setting (the character). There’s nothing at all wrong with this, but it means Facebook (in which we perform our online personas) will always be differently immersive from Farmville (in which we grow the rules-based farm).
The word “risk” in your post struck me as very interesting here somehow. Farmville is a zero-risk game I think. The only thing that can go wrong is that progress is lost if you stop playing for awhile and then come back. But I might be wrong!
That’s a good point about the blurring of lines. It isn’t just that throwing one lever makes it more difficult to throw the other; it’s that throwing one lever has an effect on what the other lever does. In an RPG, the “I” of “I rule!” often ends up being a persona, which isn’t the case with all games. It’s not unusual to hear someone refer to “my character” when playing World of Warcraft, but that would be pretty odd if we were playing chess.
I haven’t played Farmville much, but it does seem like a pretty low-risk experience. Part of its appeal is that if you follow the steps laid out for you, you’ll continue to succeed. That said, I believe some social games penalize you if you stop playing them or don’t play them often enough. I’ve heard stories (possibly apocryphal) of Happy Farm players staying up all night to prevent other players from stealing their crops. The trend in games might favor the carrot of achievement, but I guess some still bring out the stick of punishment.
There’s also social risk in Farmville: will I disappoint my friends by failing in my steadily-developing duty to supply them with fresh gifts, fertilizer, and the help they need to build buildings that require cooperative effort? And will I keep my farm a beautiful space, or allow it to lapse into an embarrassment by failing to provide it constant attention? When you play Farmville, your farm slowly becomes a semi-public space, with rituals you originally enacted for an “I Rule!” purpose (advancement of your farm and capabilities) transformed into duties necessary to support the aforementioned online persona.
A bit of an exaggeration, but only a bit.
These are great points. I especially like the notion of social risk involved in meeting cooperative goals — the idea of not “letting down the team” or friendslist. “We” rule.
How does Bastion play into this? I know you guys have some serious look-and-feel going on and am looking forward to that, but these kinds of questions present an opportunity to look at player management.
D&D seems to almost always be about “I rule” with a variable side order of “that rules.” In my experience it’s a matter of starting out better at various things than you are as a weedy 9-year-old and then becoming even more of a badass. Dungeons aren’t built for ooh and awe; they’re built to plunder!
On the other hand, the setting-heavy “art” school emphasizes the cut scenes and gives the players super powers as a way to sit at the big table – “I rule” because “this rules” and I am there. And the Stanislavski White Wolf school worked somewhere in between, but I think ended up failing to make the players feel special within the setting … if anything, the games ended up making the players feel special as players in a way D&D hasn’t really done since the tournament years. In the World of Darkness, I was cool and special because I was into the World of Darkness; in fact, my character was most likely oppressed and unpleasant.
Gaming criticism has gotten a little “heavy” for me lately so I’ll hang off on the Kafka quote about how “in parable [game] you lose because in reality you have won,” but it might be too late for that now, actually.
You can be proud of yourself as a chess master or even in your vampiro-thespian abilities. I bet you can be proud of your Warcraft character. Can you be proud of your D&D chops? What does that mean, these days?
I’m a little distracted, obviously. Trapped in the empty studio now waiting for the movers to finish the living room. Thanks!
Actually this is roughly a 10 x 10 room I’m trapped in. You see an apple-green chamber, 10 x 10 on a side. Two doors on the west, one on the east. There are only two power outlets here. Track lighting.
I’m hoping we will be able to take advantage of a little social pressure in a positive way, without pushing too far into the team sports realm, or even the indignant cries of party members at the occasional “LEE-ROOYYYYYY!!!” moment. Your group will perform a lot better if you show up to take action, rather than having the player AI take over (as it will do little besides basic self-preservation); beyond that, group performance will increase if you a) understand the capabilities of other party members and foes, b) position yourself well in combat, c) make good decisions about when to use your more powerful special abilities, and d) communicate and coordinate well with the group when in the middle of a challenge. So those are a lot of variables by which you can rule by making the larger group rule… or fail yourself and others. But I think we are being pretty careful to limit the impact of any one of those variables, and giving the players a fair amount of wiggle room, so that it’s not as if the whole party must work as a well-oiled fighting machine in order to have success.
This is one of those topics I need to write more about: the more an RPG tries to push players towards optimal mechanical performance, the more it limits their ability to perform well socially or as dramatists. Good, fun acting is rarely about being perfectly badass; fallibility, morality, humor, and so on rely on having some “play” to succeed. The same socially: is it fun to take orders and establish firing positions like marines, or is it fun to make wisecracks and have some chatter around the dinner table/chat room? These things are at odds with each other, and so you if you want to have room for the social and dramatic fun, you have to back off a bit on your demands for mechanical prowess. That’s going to be less fun for those who are (somewhat unfairly) called power gamers or munchkins, so you have to strike a balance, or (better) create opportunities for each gamer mindset to find a home somewhere your game.
The player AI sounds fascinating.
This sounds like more of a (mechanical) performance-based environment than a social improv MUSH, so any “acting!” will probably be a fun player-dependent bonus. Nothing wrong with that!
I would tend to argue that the “acting!” gets in the way of optimal performance instead of the other way around — after all, if you’re too busy monologuing about your lousy childhood to exploit the tactical situation, you’re unlikely to get the same win ratios as someone who’s methodically focused on the (mechanical) performance objective.
Maybe a crass way to describe the difference is that the “actor!” (and God knows I’ve erred on this side myself in the past) *chews* the scenery in order to highlight his place in the setting, whereas the power gamer *eats* the scenery in order to harvest bumps. Each is getting a different “I rule” experience at the expense of the setting. Others are more content to just watch the scenery unscroll and say, “that ruled.”
Good things to think about for my purposes! Thanks guys….
Bombasticus, I’m working on a new post about the different forms of “we rule!” that Derek’s post made me think about, and the “acting” versus “playing” forms of ruling are exactly what I’m mulling over. They do seem to be mutually exclusive of each other to some extent–a WoW raider serious about progressive raiding isn’t going to be worried about whether his character’s arachnophobia should be decreasing his competence against the spider boss, nor would his teammates appreciate him playing that encounter “in-character” by /cowering in the corner during the entire fight. On the other hand, a munchkin/rules lawyer tabletop player may not be seen as the optimal partymate for a group of gamers who are injecting a lot of player-based narrative into a gaming session. Which one is getting in the way of the performance of the other seems to depend on the perspective of the player as much as anything.
Good stuff!