An Approach to Holistic Level Design

[Music] okay I think I'm going to get started soon um uh hello everyone I'm Steve Lee uh this talk is called an approach to holistic level design um before I get started I'd like to remind everyone to turn off your phones and and make sure you fill in your review forms after the talk um especially if you stayed in from the last talk I think you need to uh leave the room and and make sure you uh at the end of The Talk this is make sure you get scanned so that you can receive the notification to review the talk finally if uh we're looking fairly forward but if in general it's cool if you can sit closer to the middle so it's easier for people to sit down if they enter during the talk and uh also yeah there's no filming allowed after like the first 5 minutes of the talk I've been told okay um so a little about a little bit about me I've been a level designer in the industry for about 10 years now

shipping these four games uh the first one in the list is a an open world action driving game uh but since then I've kind of deliberately made Moves towards uh firstperson games and uh games with an increasingly kind of holistic approach to level design uh in terms of how I see it um that satisfy a particular set of values and particularly the last two uh Bioshock and especially this h two um which are games that belong to the Sha known as immersive Sims which I I'll touch on a lot I'll kind of uh yeah discuss a lot of ideas kind of connected to that genre um so one thing to bear in mind is that while I hope the ideas I talk about in this uh presentation are kind of relevant to many kinds of games um I should say that these three games are three of my favorites of all time and they kind of uh you know this talk is very much informed by their sensibilities okay so what do I mean by holistic level design uh the dictionary says uh you know it it will talk about how holistic thinking is generally about

seeing everything every part of a design in terms of how it affects the whole and how the whole can be much greater than the sum of its parts uh my favorite summary of this idea is is a quote from this great book called 101 things I learned at architecture school which isn't a level design book but I recommend it to all level designers it's got a lot of stuff that's very that has very strong parallels to the uh the creative process and that kind of thing um the quote is about the nature of beauty and it goes like this uh beauty is due more to the harmonious relationships among the elements of a composition than to the elements themselves and needless to say I think this is often very true of level design um so speaking of the elements of a composition these are the three elements I'm going to talk about um in games which are well refer to which are presentation gameplay and story if you just kind of categorize the all the different parts of games into these three main pillars and note here that by presentation I generally mean all the kind of audio visual output of the game

and uh so like graphics and sound and everything the player sees but also like text and stuff like that and I'll get into a while later um now these B big three elements kind of are all you know very important in their own right all deserving of like talks dedicated each of them but uh this talk is specifically about how everything works together so I'm going to focus on topics that emerge from the relationships between these things instead of the things themselves so to explain what I mean by this um between these of gameplay and presentation I'm going to talk about these concepts of affordances and intentionality between uh the way we present things in story emerges this idea we refer to as World building and finally uh between gam playay and story you know emerges this idea of interactive narrative and all that kind of thing so uh yeah so this is a talk to kind of highlight and summarize these things and give a few tips on what we can do to apply them in our level design so first up uh affordance is an

intentionality two concepts which emerge from this relationship between gameplay and the way we present things I'm going to talk about affordances first and then use that to lead into the concept of intentionality because they're very strongly uh connected so affordances is this term that is generally considered to come from the world of industrial design a great book to read about this is uh this one the Design of Everyday Things by Don Norman and a classic example of affordances in ction is the design of door handles um so if you look at this photo you can see two doors and uh the one on the left should be pushed the one on the right should be pulled and uh the problem here is that the uh the handles for both of these doors look the same and also they both look like they should be pulled so you can imagine how um you know people will approach the door on the left and intuitively pull it instead of pushing it and look like a bit of a fool um so here we can say that the affordances of these door handles on the left are very poorly designed because they're misleading

um by contrast here are some much better door handles where the the push panel on the left clearly affords uh P being pushed in a way that kind of contrasts with the one that should be pulled and indeed the in this case uh the affordances are so clear and strong that you could remove the text from these these door handles and use them anywhere you know in any country and people would just intuitively use them correctly and that's the kind of goal of affordances is that you you know it's about communicating how things work intuitively and we can talk about this as form conveying function to use kind of industrial design lingo and designing affordance as well is a crucial part of Designing anything that is used by people um and of course this includes games and level design uh so what kind of affordances are we talking about when it comes to level design uh this is a screenshot from an early mission in dishonor 2 um edge of the world uh not my mission I'll talk about mine later but um you know so in a fully realized kind of immersive 3D game like Dishonored the most obvious importance is is in in first person

level design in particular a visual and they're conveyed through things like layout and lighting and all this kind of stuff all relative to the players's view as they move through the environment so you know some of the main importances we're talking about are like the presentation of the players navigation options in relation to their goals and their obstacles and we you know we design layouts partly to present options to the player about where they can go and what they can do and in the case of Dishonored we we deliberately add a lot of verticality to allow the play is to reach higher viewpoints which you know afford a great a much better view of uh the situation um finally within that layout we have like you know a bunch of specific interactive objects that we add um that afford particular gameplay opportunities you know these can be bottles that could the player could pick up and throw to distract guards or doors that we encourage sneaky players to peek through the key holes and that kind of thing to spy on people in this screenshot we have a street speaker that's hanging above the streets and that the player um can shoot down to

distract uh guards and that kind of thing and we also employ this rule that every wall of Light which is the obstacle in the far end of the screenshot um every wall of light is connected by a cable to its power source and so it affords following that cable and uh using a panel you know reaching the power panel to uh disable the wall of light and uh I mentioned that every wall of light follows the rule because uh it's important that these kind of lowlevel gaml affordances uh like this are all consistent uh for example it's it's important that we're very clear about you know all kind of lowlevel interactions like whether a door is interactive or not uh or whe whether this glass can be broken or not and that kind of thing and this this screenshot here is above is about how um at Arcane it's it's forbidden to use the same measures for a non-interactive door as an interactive one because you know we we really want to make it clear so that players don't just kind of only find out that it's a non-interactive one when they've walked up to it um and you know

when they try to use it so we tried to establish a very clear visual language like non-interactive dos being physically blocked by things that are always used in this in this world in this district and you know and on a higher level the the fiction of the world like like Dunwall and Cana it there you know there's a reason why there's there's always kind of disease and stuff like that because it justifies buildings being abandoned and closed down and and kind of justifies these level design requirements that you know we don't we can't have every door be interactive right um so yeah we Tred to establish a clear visual language and then stick to it so players can learn uh consistently about how things work and then act with those with that information um as well as those kind of low level affordances uh there are lots of kind of broader higher level ones to consider too U such as commun communicating to the player how broad the possibility space and how much agency they have you know there's there's no there's no use in kind of Designing a big uh complex level for of different stuff if players don't realize

that it's non non lineer while they play so uh this is a screenshot of the Dust District which is my mission intoa 2 and I I worked on this with level architect Kristoff lefor uh we knew that the the the mission kind of fundamentally revolved around two factions and a choice about helping one over the other so one of the first things we talked about was reflecting this in the layout at a high level and uh presenting the two factions at a very clear Junction and hopefully this this kind of not only makes it very clear that there's a big choice to make and that it's a fundamental part of this Mission but also you know we hope that it allows the player to look at the layout from this perspective and uh kind of visualize and intuitively understand how different this Mission can be based on their choice um another heavy lifter when it came to high level affordances and exposing the size of the possibility space and that kind of thing uh was the briefing with Megan near the start of the mission and uh the task updates that come afterwards um at the end of the day

the the dust district is quite a busy Mission with a a lot of stuff in it that we that we could potentially talk to the player about and you know let them understand but in the end we we kind of we were very deliberate about which information we convey to the player and which stuff we kind of hint at in a vague way and which information we just don't give the player at all so in one category you know there's this there's the crucial stuff about the mission that the player needs to know like you know there's two factions uh this this is the choice you can make and we you know we want to be explicit about the fact that it will change the the future of Cara and you know change the endings and that kind of thing um in kind of the second second category is stuff that we we talk about in vague terms and hint at um kind of you know such as the the fact that you can find a solution to the Ginos loock which is the thing you need to open to progress to the to the next mission you can find a solution without helping the factions in fact if you find out how and we just tell the player that that solution exists but we don't tell them where it is or even what it is and we leave that to players who want to explore and finally we have a bunch of stuff about the mission which we

deliberately don't talk to players about at all you know things like um the fact that you can find corvo's old home in this Mission um and things like that but also uh there's this huge thing which is that you know you can skip the entire Mission by solving the gindos lock on your own and it was important to us that we didn't tell the player about this at all we we actually um kind of iterated on the dialogue in the briefing and uh you know kind of tuned the the text and the task updates to make it well sorry the uh information for the objectives and stuff we deliberately triy to Hype it up as something that is really like nobody's done it like nobody in kaker has ever solved this puzzle um to kind of you know make it seem like this big thing that is like this um impossible obstacle you know um but then at the same time we we want we positioned it near the start of the mission so players would find it on their own and Discover it on their own um so like it was important to us that we just didn't talk to the player about this at all and let them Discover it on their own so if

you're making nonlinear levels it's really worth thinking about how and how much you choose to be explicit about the size and the content of the levels possibility space we want players to understand the situations they're in but without giving so much away that we spoil surprises and uh we don't want to spoil the genuine experience of like exploration and Discovery fortunately we've Dishonored by making levels that are very nonlinear and very dense uh we're in a cool position where we can promise a lot to the player by telling by being explicit about the mission but then hopefully deliver even more to kind of uh you know surpass people's expectations that we've established um one final thing I wanted to talk about in regarding in relation to affordances is this kind of running Joker or recurring idea that players don't look up in in level design and uh the thing is that while um players looking up has become kind of slightly trickier since uh the big kind of mainstream market moved towards consoles and controllers um you know we kind of know that this isn't true in the case of

certain games uh for example in Dishonored you know players look up all the time because they're in a stealth situation and they're very mobile and we teach players that being in High Ground is very safe and it's very uh useful for like surveying the situation um to take another example players look up in Titanfall especially multiplayer because like they're always looking for opportunities to run on walls they're getting sniped out from rooftops and of course there are like 50 foot robots blowing things up so you're going to look up all the time in that game and kind of on a more momentto moment basis you know players look up when they go up a staircase they look up when if they're if they're in a small room but there are cables hanging from the ceiling um a pipe above the player gushing water onto the floor would make them look up uh maybe if they were in a dark room and the only light source is above them they would naturally look up at the the light source so the lesson here here is the lesson here is that when players aren't looking up the problem isn't like players players or the human nature or anything that it's actually like affordances that have kind of emerged

without us knowing perhaps um you know and if if the players aren't looking up it's either like maybe we can redesign the uh the way we present the situation they're in to kind of teach them to look up or perhaps we're fighting kind of higher level affordances where the game maybe the rest of the game has taught them that this isn't a game where you need to look up and people are kind of like just running with that higher level affordance from the rest of the game um so the reason I uh talk about affordance as because of how they relate to this other part of the top topic which is player intentionality and because affordances are crucial to facilitate this idea of player intentionality just going to take a quick set um this idea of intentionality in games uh seems to have been coined around 1997 I think partly by Doug Church who did a talk under an essay on gamma Sutra called formal abstract design tools which you can still read online and a book by Janet Murray called Hamlet on the Hol deck which kind kind of explored this in terms of narrative

an interactive narrative so there's lots of fancier definitions that you can Google of this but my version is that um acting with intentionality is making conscious choices with specific goals and expectations in mind and this might sound like super basic like something we can take for granted that players are just naturally doing all the time when you play a game um but it's often kind of not the case and often because of kind of maybe uh slightly one key choices in the level design and that kind of thing so here's some examples of weak intentionality that we kind of probably all experience at some point um you know being lost and trying to find something to do or trying to figure out what's going on is of course not really acting with a strong sense of intentionality just kind of wandering around aimlessly um kind of further more doing something without knowing why you're doing it but only because either the game's UI has told you to do it or because it seems like the only thing you can do or because you think it's what the designer wants you to do or you know

that that thing where you find a lever in a game and you pull the lever because it's a lever in a video game and you're always supposed to pull levers in video games that's not acting with intentionality that's kind of lame right and uh finally like twitch reacting to certain surprises is not really you know if if a monster jumps out at you from behind a door you've just opened it's more of an instinctive response and not an intentional kind of you know uh choice you know so that doesn't really count as uh intentionality as far as we're concerned and the thing is is that uh enabling player intentionality is at the heart of all immersive Sim gameplay and the way that systems and level design is approached to us this is the whole point of uh you know presenting these gameplay challenges and stuff to the player so uh you know this is why in Dishonored um you know the all of the the game playay mechanics and abilities are revolving around this idea of giving the player unique and combinable powers like blinking and bed time and all this stuff that encourages players to come up with their own ways of solving problems

and overcoming obstacles and going back to this screenshot of the edge of the world mission in Des 2 all of these affordances that we were talking about are trying to present the player uh in you know information about their situation so that they can understand their options in relation to their goals and formulate a plan and then act with intentionality this concept of intentionality is so important at arane that as a level designer if you suggest uh a gameplay challenge or an optional puzzle that seems like it's kind of lacking intentionality at any point of the way the idea will just be rejected like it's it's just bad level design as where as far as we concerned and we wherever possible we probably slip up sometimes but wherever possible we always want the player to be acting with intentionality by default so to break the concept down a little these are the four things that I think uh players need in order to act with intentionality first of all is Choice the presentation of a choice uh second is motivation you know having goals in mind the third one is information that they

Garner from clear and consistent affordances and finally you need time to process that information you know you can't pressure the player too much uh in order to you know and kind of distract them from the information that they need to have and with those in mind um here are some ways of uh facilitating intentionality first of all it's the clear and consistent affordances that I've talked about um second of all it's this uh it really helps if you present the player with higher level and longer term goals in instead of kind of drip feeding them low level tasks like look over here and walk in that room and press this button it it's it's way cooler to just give them um you know a higher level objective which they can find their own solution to and of course this is how Dishonored always works it's it's you know the textbook Dison mission is you're at this part of the map and somewhere on the other side of the map is some bad guy you got to kill and uh it's up to you how you do it and it's up to you to explore and find your own Journey towards that goal um finally is this um idea of player driven pacing and player

initiated action um you know it's just it's generally again it relates to the idea that players need time to uh kind of uh take in the information and formulate a plan it's just way cooler if you can find ways of giving the player space to like you know act intentionally and with this in mind we can consider it a kind of a four-step cycle of a kind of a gameplay cycle um I'm not sure who originally came with this came up with this to be honest it's been mentioned in other talks um GDC like by Clint Hawking Nels Anderson Forest ding have all talked about this um but yeah it can be useful to consider this Loop um is something that the player continuously goes through as they play so if we start at the top with ob observing you know the player is taking in information about their situation and then they use that information and combine it with their their goals and their motivations to form a plan then they execute the plan and then perhaps there's a four fourth uh step where they kind of react in perhaps instinctively

to maybe the plan not going to uh as they thought it would or like reacting to some kind of uh emergent kind of situations that arise from it and then they go back to observing of course and there's just constant cycle of taking in information formulating plans and acting with those plans in mind and of course Stealth gameplay is particularly good at emphasizing this Loop um you know um it's built into stealth games that the player starts in a hidden state where they then have time to think and explore and and analyze the situation and then formulate an intention before they reveal themselves and they have to start thinking in a more kind of dynamic way uh and as I said before we uh in Dishonored we we use a combination of play player mobility and verticality in our layouts to empower the player to reach safer High higher places that give them more time and a better perspective for their observation and planning phases uh but a crucial Point here is that you don't need to be making a stealth game to to kind of facilitate intentionality uh this is a screenshot of of Doom 2 on

the left which I I love dearly and Doom 3 which I was a little bit less keen on and uh Doom 3 the thing was partly um because of it's moved towards a scary horror game kind of vibe uh it had a lot of monsters kind of popping out of nowhere and and you know trying to eat your face and that kind of thing and uh often it would like teleport monsters behind you after like doing something arbitrary like picking up some ammo or pulling a lever or something like that and this kind of works for the horror vibe that that it was going for but the a kind of Flip Side to this is that this Reliance on frequent surprises uh where the player has no way of knowing what's going on until it's in their face um it has a side effect of killing a lot of the players's ability to act with intentionality and it's kind of reduced to very shortterm Twitchy responses to things that they didn't expect now uh Doom 2 generally had you know some of these surprises too sometimes you would open a door and a pinkies like in your face and that kind of thing but as well it also offered way more situations where um you know the player was in a

much bigger area where they had time to consider the situation and always choose which weapon they wanted to use against these set of monsters I've seen and also in the screenshot on the left which is from uh a classic level called barrels of fun um it would even use setups where enemies were facing away from the player so it was almost like a they they managed to find ways to almost Implement a kind of stealth like approach to the game where you can you know you can see the situation before anyone even knows you're there uh a final point about intentionality is that um it affects how players perceive linearity in level design uh generally I would say if if linearity feels bad part of the reason at least is often because the intentionality is kind of lacking or a little weak um I mentioned earlier that Half Life 2 is one of my favorite games of all time one of the things that people often praise it for is this idea that it makes does a really good job of feeling a lot less linear than it really is and uh I think there's a lot of reasons for this an an engaging story with

well-written characters helps a lot um but yeah like I say intentionality I think explains some of this as well um the thing is here is that valve have play tested their level so much and iterated on their affordances uh so much that in general they've they've managed to align what the player wants to do with the thing that they have to do and so even though the game is linear it really feels like you're doing things without knowing why or just because the game told you to um on a similar note portal is even more lineer than half left to and yet generally speaking you know very few people complained about it being lineer it's because even though there's usually only one solution to progress you know being a puzzle game and all um the player has given the time and the freedom and just the right information uh to constantly experiment with the portal gun with intentionality in order to solve that solution uh one way of looking at it uh might sound kind of goofy but I I was thinking about how the more linear your game is um the more you you could kind of say that your job as a level designer

kind of has parallels with what the guy is doing in the Inception in the sense that you're trying to present kind of design and present situations in such a way that players will naturally learn and want to do the thing that you want them to do but they will feel that it was their idea all along and if you get this right generally speaking linearity stops being a problem but if you get it wrong you know the players kind of jolted out of their experience they're kind of conscious of of the artificiality of the experience and and they'll reject it you know they they won't be as engaged as a result so the overall point here is that you know whether your game is linear or nonlinear uh intentionality is pretty crucial and fundamental to the gameplay experience I have a little uh note to myself about taking a sip of water here so that's what I'll do um okay so number two of the three big topics uh which emerges from this relationship between the way we present things and the story um is this idea of World building uh I

mentioned earlier on you know games like halflife and Bioshock and Dishonored you know these are all games that are praised for like this very rich Vivid sense of place in their world building and to be honest a lot of this is kind of outd Direction stuff and high level story stuff which uh especially if you're in a big company you won't really have a hand in uh kind of you know playing with yourself but I think there's still a lot you can contribute on a lower level uh in order to kind of add to the World building so with this in mind I'm going to present these kind of three little goals for World building which is to create a world that feels unique uh cohesive and meaningful and uh with those tips uh sorry with those goals in mind are a few tips so number one is that uh I suggest that World building must always be specific uh I mean this uh both in terms of like being detailed in in the kind of the kind of ideas you're presenting and not just being vague ideas of like it's the future and there's war and C operations like if if that's all you present then you you might be

establishing genre but you're not really building a specific world and Fin and the other thing is that yeah like I said the idea must be the more specific to your world that this idea is like this particular games world and not like all Sci-Fi games or allw games or whatever you know the more you're building a a particular thing because you know people can only judge your world based on the things that are unique about it or those are the things that will stand out the most and uh you know one thing is here that it doesn't necessarily mean that everything has to be completely original um Harvey Smith our creative director on dis 2 he talked a lot about um in interviews and stuff about um well he used Kiran gindos as an example of how he's kind of quite a well-used archetype in this kind of game he's kind of a crazy Evil Genius scientist guy um but by layering details and specificity on top of this archetype he tends uh you know he turns the character from someone who could who could feel like a bit of a cliche into someone who feels unique enough to contribute to this world and the world building you know so to run

through those examples you know our crazy evil scientist guy happens to look like this weird love child of like Nicola Tesla and Prince uh you know he he builds robots and gives them his own voice which is a bit weird and you know when he's test with like securing an important building he does it with this super obscure puzzle the gind daslu um as a way of kind of reving in his own intellect and finally he he you know he lost his finger and thumb in an industrial accent and he has this bionic thumb that he can smoke like a pipe and it's just you know these details might seem kind of trivial on their own but Al altogether they add enough specificity to the character to make him stop feeling like just kind of a Trope or whatever um and becomes unique enough to cont contribute to the World building with that kind of stuff in mind I tried to populate the dust District which was my mission um with scenes that help build the world and tell tell stories that feel specific to the Dishonored universe and also to this this particular District which has its own unique story so just to run them run

through them quickly like this uh on the left is a scene about the inside the the black market which is kind of a you know video game shop where you can go in and talk to someone and uh spend your money on nice items and things um but I didn't want it to just be a pure gameplay thing uh so I added this scene where howlers who were like the the crime Mafia like style faction um they're harassing the shopkeeper for protection money and supposedly kind of claiming that they're protecting them from the overseers who wouldn't agree with the fact that they're selling magical stuff like bone Champs and stuff in their shop um the scene in the middle is this uh scene where overseers are executing civilians for breaking their kind of um religious principles and doing things that are considered impure and forbidden again which is this kind of an idea that's quite specific to their ideology and it's kind of fleshing out them as a faction and on the right there's a scene where inside the over overseer Outpost where an overseer is mercy killing a friend and over overseer after he was mortally wounded in a fights with Howers

and uh you know through the way it's done and the way they talk about it I hope that it reflects a special kind of discipline and conviction that is that characterizes the way the overseers think and so all all of these things are supposed to kind of um you know convey information that is specific to these factions in this district and this game um so yeah in general World building is uh it should be as specific as we can make it uh the point number two was that we should always be World building you know like try not to see it as something where you kind of uh off the critical path you have like a small little room with some World building stuff and then you go back to the gameplay where you're shooting monsters like try and if you can try and approach every idea in your level as an opportunity uh to to build the world you know every NPC you place or you can talk to every objective or side quest every every kind of piece of loot that you place in a meaningful position could be you know can develop the world uh in in some way so try and look at all of these things as opportunities I've got a couple of kind

of small examples of this is just that um in uh in the dust District this this building on the uh on the right the one in the red um originally this was just like a facade like an empty building with no interior that you couldn't go into um and at some point I I realized that it would be really useful to open up the building so you can go in and you know so to present the player with more navigation options around this area and we could have easily made this just like another generic abandoned Apartment but instead like through the way we we did the kind of set dressing and appropriate placement of Loot and by adding a note for the player to read we tried to tell a story about someone who used to live here but got kicked out by the overseers when they were kind of moving into the territory and you know invading on on the area so it's just a small example of how something that could have been just this generic empty room we we used even that to tell a story and uh similarly with a room inside the overseer Outpost um you know I knew that from a game play an exploration point of view I wanted a

room with Juicy loot to pick up um and again we we tried to find a way that is specific to kind of not only justify it in the world but to you know build the world of it so we made it into a room where the overseers are confiscating things that kind of break their religious principles and so we uh we chose to add like bone chams and stuff like that in there to support this idea um and the third third point is about World building particularly in this kind of game maybe and maybe not for all kinds of games but it's it's good to be if your world building says things about the people in the world um world building is a form of Storytelling and stories are always about people um in film there's a great example of this uh in Children of Men uh which I really recommend if you haven't seen it um in in which the World building is always about people and and what would become of us in a world where hope is kind of fading away um and practically every shot of this movie the background and am me on S and all that stuff is is speaking to us about how this loss of Hope would change our society you know

it would change like the role of police uh people's political values like attitudes to immigrants and that kind of thing and even our attitudes to suicide in this case um in games the the classic example is BioShock where you know every part of its world is trying to tell and support this idea of um how a society might crumble if people were you know relentlessly pursuing progress in this Rand and objectivist kind of way um one little thing I really like in the game Metro 2033 which is this kind of post-apocalyptic uh game um is this decision to show a child playing with a toy car inside the player's Hub area with an adult watching over him um it feels quite memorable and appropriate and meaningful in the context of this particular game because it symbolizes how people in this world aren't just killing the monsters cuz monsters are bad but they're they're trying to save uh the future and build a future for their children and it supports the game's kind of recurring ideas and themes that are reflected throughout the game and in its branching endings and stuff

about how survival in this world is about more than just like fighting and defeating enemies but it's also about holding on to like our wisdom and compassion and empathy during kind of dark times so you know it's a simple idea but it resonates with the particular themes of this particular game and World um and for me in the case of Dishonored you know in my head it's the world is uh generally about like power relationships and Corruption and this idea that everyone depending on their place in society is kind of either screwing somebody else over or being screwed over by somebody else and of course it's the lower class citizens who get screwed the most so for example in the dust District um which is kind of like this lower class area near the kind of a mining District um we added this uh kind of wooden weird wooden kind of raised Street structure that people have built uh in response to the dust storms and environmental problems that have been caused by the dukee and so they've kind of been figuratively

pushed on the ground by the problems caused by the the people in power but also they're kind of Trapped literally in the middle of these this ideological fight between the two factions and this street is placed in the middle of the map in between those two hqs and so it's supposed to be something that you know more than just look looking cool it's meant to be a symbol of uh you know something that is unique to this the story of this district and its people and support the broader themes and the tone of the soned universe in general this idea that people are being victims of the people above them essentially um so yeah to summarize you know um three points one point number one was World building must be specific uh Point number two was always be World building and don't just see it as a kind of extra thing and point number three was uh you know the importance of saying things about people in your world or relating to human ideas in general um and the third part is uh how am I doing with time oh the third part is interactive narrative this idea that emerges from the

relationship between inter interactivity and story um so one little disclaimer here is that this is a huge topic that I should not be trying to tackle in 15 minutes but uh I'm going to try and hone in on one or two particular ways of approaching this topic that are kind of resonate with me personally and that I kind of think are a big deal um I realized that um everything or most of the stuff I wanted to say related to this idea of Show and Tell um and specifically the fact that in the context of um interactive narrative in particular I I don't think this is a really good phrase for us to to kind of use as a guiding principle and I think we should be careful about it um it's useful for a lot of aspects of level design like the World building stuff in the sense that it encourages people to think about communicating stuff visually and in the world in front of the player which is cool um and not you know not just using cut scenes and Big Blocks of text and stuff like that but my my

argument would be that specifically in in in terms of like interactive narrative only show showing and telling things is just not the full thing we should we need to do more than that um and the reason why this phrase is kind of problematic is because we've lifted it from passive mediums like uh films and novels and uh you know which which don't need to worry about interactivity at all so with that said like I think we can get somewhere that's more useful to us if we look at what this phrase means to those mediums rather than focusing on the phrase itself um so to explain what I mean by this like um in film show don't tell is uh generally about this idea of telling the story using the unique strength of the medium which in the case of film is moving pictures and editing between them in a way that creates dram and you know evokes ideas um in literature by contrast show don't tell is about the idea of writing in a way that evokes ideas and drama in the play the reader's mind and Imagination um you know so instead of

like simply telling the reader things like John was very sad when he said goodbye or like old abandoned playground had a really creepy atmosphere we need to write in a way that evokes these ideas instead of just like throws them in the rudest face um so if we take those two key Paths of uh those kind of ideas we have unique using the unique strength of the medium and evoking drama and ideas in the audience's mind and personally I think pretty much every every game that is kind of interesting from an interactive narrative point of view does at least one of these things well um you know some games kind of naturally lean towards one or the other but yeah it does one of them I find and so first of all you know a couple of a few examples of using the unique strength for the medium um to me like the idea of uh well of course in in infective uh media interactivity is the unique strength of the medium and combining uh you know inter activity with narrative naturally leads us towards this idea of empowering

the player to act with what I'll call narrative intentionality I talked about intentionality earlier but mostly in terms of like gaml and gameplay goals but here we're talking about the idea of you know giving the player the information and the time and the opportunity to make intentional choices but with narrative goals in mind and not just gameplay ones I also mentioned how Dishonored and immersive Sims revolve around intentionality and this kind of goes for Nar intentionality too at least in dison's case especially like um so like in Don's uh case um narrative intentionality is kind of built into the game at a systems level in the sense that every NPC in the game can be uh you know you can either sneak around them or you can deal with them non-lethally or you can murder them horribly of course and we tell the players that this will change the story in the world and certain scenes in the game and the endings and that kind of thing and so what this does is it transforms like a simple what would be a simple gameplay Choice into an opportunity to act and

express narrative intentionality every time you encounter an NPC that's kind of that's the kind of thing we're into um going back to the dust districts um one of the main things that appealed to me about this particular Mission when I was kind of given the mission to work on uh is that its premise revolves around this idea of choosing a faction and how and making a choice that will affect the endings of the game so you know the the mission the unique thing about the mission is this act of narrative intentionality kind of built into the whole premise of the mission um and with that kind of thing in mind you know I mentioned uh in the world building section these three scenes that I Tred to develop the world with in some way uh but another kind of aspect of it is that I I deliberately designed them to um kind of encourage the player to act with intent narrative intentionality so you know two things about these scenes is that first of all they're not just scenes that you watch uh I'm not just showing and telling story here these scenes are deliberately designed to be interrupted and interacted with and they all have like extra lines and scripting and stuff

beyond the main scene um in order to react to certain choices that the player can make um and secondly these scenes are there to present interesting dramatic situations which invite the player to interact with narrative goals and values in mind and not just gameplay ones you know as far as I'm concerned whenever I can make a player make gameplay choices as they're moving through a level with narrative goals in mind and not gameplay ones it's kind of more interesting and you know cooler and more immersive and that kind of thing and so yeah when any opportunity I can do uh take to do that I kind of try and take it um so that was about you know using the unique strength of the medium which is agency and how that leads to narrative intentionality um if we take a look at the literature's take on this phrase we have this idea of evoking dram and ideas in the audience's mind and uh yeah I've got an example of this I got three examples of this in the first one is like a kind of lowlevel in the- moment kind of thing it's a bit of a pet

peeve of mine um when like basically when something very dramatic and perilous is happening to the player character but in the game it's it's presented as a cut scene so control is taken away away from the player just before it happens and so while the character is thinking oh my God I'm in Peril the player is thinking oh it's a cut scene I can relax I don't have to do anything and it's the complete opposite of what the character is supposed to be thinking um so it's just like you know I'm I'm bit sensitive to this it always drives me mad um by contrast this example this scene from Uncharted 2 where you're navigating this collapsing building when the helicopter is blowing it up um is you know kind of a a crazy extreme expensive example it's amazing um but like the cool thing here is that Nathan Drake is kind of crapping his pant and thinking oh my God what am I going to do and the player is hopefully figuratively cropping their pants and thinking oh my God what am I going to do and so they perfectly they put spent a lot of money and time to align the players Thoughts with the character's thoughts in this dramatic

situation you know it reminds me of this phrase by quote from Frank CER who's like a a filmmaker from the 30s I think who talked about how he he made mistakes in drama I thought drama was an actors cried but drama is when the audience cries and of course you know we can we can take that idea and and apply it to games because we want the players experience to be these dramatic highs and lows and not just something they see on the screen uh my second example of evoking ideas is this um classic pick up the can scene from Half Life 2 um for anyone who hasn't played it um well first of all shame on you you should really play Half Life 2 it's really good but secondly it's um it's basically a tutorial for the player for picking up and interacting with physics objects but what's cool is that the level designer used it um as an opportunity to allow players to act with a Nar narrative intentionality you know between they when you pick up the can the game tells you that um you can either put it in the in the trash can or you can throw it at

the combined guy's head and you know this choice between obeying and rebelling is is is a narrative thing you know that the players going to consider when they uh you know go through this T tutorial but an extra cool thing about this is that these two particular choices these this idea of obeying and rebelling basically sum up like the the The Human Condition of people in the world of City 17 you know every citizen here is struggling with this choice of whether or not they should obey and conform or resist and rebel and so by being oppressed by the combine directly and making this Choice yourselves um the player relates to their plates essentially and relates to them as as people and so when you come up to this scene later in the game you don't just shoot the baddies because they're buddies in a video game but you naturally side with the civilians because you relate to them and you naturally oppose to the combine based on a personal interactive experience that came before so even though half left 2 story in game plays is pretty linear and stu um to me it still qualifies as you know solid immersive interactive uh

storytelling because it's it's very smart about emotionally involving the player in the ideas and themes of the story and my final example is uh might be a surprised to immersive Sim people Cu uh people generally immersive Sim people don't aren't so keen on this game um but I think this particular scene is amazing um so near the start of the game uh this it's establishing you as the main character this fa in a game about losing your child and desperately wanting to save them and doing anything to save them and uh you know in you're out in the garden play fighting in this kind of very M dramatic Star Wars kind of way and then you know uh as with most of a lot of heavy rain um it's a sequence of QuickTime events where you know you have a prompt to press the button on screen and uh you know like you have based on whether or not you succeed or fail at this the game shows you a different animation essentially now the interesting thing here is that if we follow our play our kind of gamer instincts to just try and

win the sequence we end up being a super douchy dad in the process and uh this scene like I've watched a lot of playthroughs of this on YouTube and stuff and it's really good at making players realize this as they play and change their the way they play based of based on this kind of narrative desire to play the role of a good dad and so it's cool because it's like you know the subject of subtext of this scene is quite Grand in the sense that it's uh you know it kind of reflects this the fundament nature of becoming a parent in the sense that when you have a kid you know it's like it changes your life in a way that means that succeeding in your own kind of selfish terms is no longer the priority and that's what this whole scene is about conveys interactively um so yeah it's a great example of how we can take even something that seems kind of basic and binary um and typically trivial as is like pressing a button in time but use it to kind of interactively evoke some fairly big ideas about the story and about life in general even and all of this is inside the player's mind without explicitly telling them anything which

is awesome so uh to summarize um yeah these are my three points about narrative interactive narrative know number one was striving to do more than just show and tell wherever possible number two was empowering the player to act with narrative intentionality and or you know depending on your kind of game we can try and think of ways to evoke drama and story and ideas in the player's mind and not just on sh on screen uh and so we're close we got a couple of minutes so yeah to wrap up um as a closing thought I I thought about this particular section of a book called understanding Comics by Scott McLoud which is a super smart book that I recommend to everyone um uh it's kind of written to uh educate people and change people's perspective on Comics but I think it has the effect of doing this uh you know changing the way we look at pretty much every medium and I really recommend it to everyone if you like this kind of thing and you know don't worry about reading the Tex on the panels here but like this in this section of the of the book he uh he

talks about how Comics used to and perhaps still do uh suffer from people assuming that because Comics are a medium made of pictures and words that you can just take a great artist and a great writer and kind of just throw them together and you you've got a great comic and of course in reality if you just put nice words on nice pictures you only end up with something that's pretty like a shallow form of a comic um that doesn't really utilize the true magic of the medium and you know the experience of reading a great comic doesn't just come from the the combination of these two things but it's like it's completely defined by this art forms particular set of special relationships between words and pictures and uh of course like you know the whole point of this talk is to talk about how level design is kind of the same thing or at least it's one way of looking at it and I think we've all played games before where these three elements you know the gam playay and the story and the graphics and the world or whatever um they're all good individually but they don't seem to kind of gel so well um you know not they're not really working together and uh to me

when games and level design are at the peak it's all about how these things work together you know for those familiar with the genre um known as immersive Sims that I talked about um to me this these this approach and this set of ideas says a lot about um to me explains a lot about what the immersive part of immersive Sim really means um you know and to me these ideas aren't just extra nice little things to sprinkle on top of your your gameplay and stuff um to add flavor to the player EXP experience i' I'd go as far as saying that these kind of games uh with these kind of games and and the kind of games I'd like to see more of these things are the player experienced you know these these three ideas are what the player is thinking about all the time um you know so I I would argue that the individual pillars of gameplay and graphics and story and all this stuff um they're kind of just means to these ends I would I would say uh you know to be honest I'm not really sure that everybody will agree with that but uh I would hope that you know if I can encourage anyone to uh take this kind of perspective with level design I think it

would be a cool thing and finally on top of that as level designers when we work with other disciplines you know like artists and writers and and creative directors and stuff I think the more we can discuss and establish these kinds of ideas as shared goals between departments uh the better and more interesting and the cooler our games will be and that's it thanks for listening I hope it was interesting [Applause]