Asking the Hard Questions: Morality in Narrative Design

[Music] hello everybody Welcome to my talk asking the hard questions morality narrative design have you guys all had your badge scanned yes good that makes the life of the purple people a lot easier so my name is Yana sha I currently study game design and production at the nhtv Brea apply University of applied sciences in the Netherlands I've got a lot of opinions on a lot of things and especially on narrative design and the way we use games to tell stories so that's what we're going to be talking about for the next 20 minutes but wait I just mentioned a really bad word I'm a student so why should any of you listen to what I have to say well for one we all start somewhere and the other thing is that being a student sometimes has it per has its perks when it comes to games and the big thing is that students pretty much run on passion alone because we don't get paid and we have really unhealthy

diets and all that energy needs to go somewhere and the great thing about that is that as a student I can fail safely my ability to pay my bills at the end of the month does not depend on the success of what I'm currently making so that means that I get to try a lot of things that as an actual developer would cost me and other people a lot of money so these are three games that I've made in the last three years and I've picked these three projects specifically because each of them taught me something about um about narrative design and the way we ask questions even if not all of them qualify for what we would describe as kind of a story-driven game so let's talk about the things that I've learned three of them the one and the first is branching isn't all that great so this game's called sunborn I worked on that with just about 20 people for 14 work uh working days it's currently still in development so I can't tell you all that much about it

but the but the important details are I was a narrative lead with one more dedicated writer on it and that about depending on the time of production for five other people making assets for it it's a Sci-Fi game uh it's an exploration game and although we only ask one question to a player we had over a dozen different endings so basically what happens in sbor is that we have no wait that's the wrong slide so basically what happens in someone is that we have a spaceship crashing into the sun there's six people on board three are already dead you can save two and it's up to the player if he wants to save any of them so that's how we end up with that configuration of uh of multiple endings and the problem with working on a game that branches this hard on a single question is that it can be really unrewarding one it can be unrewarding to the players because they kind of feel cheated that there's so many options but they only get to pick ones um and it also can be really unrewarding for the people playing uh uh for the people working on on it cuz remember we're students we're not getting paid I had a team running on

passion alone and it can be really really frustrating to work on something knowing that it's going to be optional students don't like to do optional work so I had to constantly walk up to people and say like hey so this thing is not on the critical path but can you please make it super nice for the one person who's going to see it and the other thing with branching is that it can be really hard to get right because all options need to feel appealing for there to be a choice at all so with over a dozen different ending I had to make sure that each of them feels desirable or in our case undesirable because we wanted our player to feel like they picked the wrong one no matter what and this really occurs in any uh situation where you have a branching storyline this is a twine game I'm working on and it's it's pretty tame compared to what I've seen other people do with that tool and still it can be really frustrating work on because I know that everything in the lower half of this picture is optional I think a player needs to complete about five of those boxes and need to write all 20 or

30 that there is and I need to motivate myself to do that somehow so the other thing that I found out is that working with con with context and narrative isn't all that great either so this is human parade and I made that with three other designers and one artist during this year's Global game gym so in 48 hours and it's a puzzle game powered by arduinos which basically allowed us to make buttons out of anything as long as we rra tin foil around it um but we only ever play it in a very supervised kind of of arcade setup so what happens in human parade is that a player is given basically 10 actions like laugh or complain or take a selfie and they're mapped to one of these weird devices they on the table and then they're getting put into into Quick situations like here in the screen we have compliment the man and you have 10 seconds to find the right action and use the right button to do that so granted this game usually takes a lot of explanation when people first see it they see the table they see the screen and they don't know what the uh what the connection between the two years and

that can be really really frustrating if you have that in a narrative driven game because we when we play human parade we have the luxury to stand next to our players in the room every time we set that uh set that up that's a luxury you usually don't have in regular game development you cannot sit next to your player and say no this is what that question uh what that line me no this is what you should do and players need to understand their actions but close super supervision isn't impossible if we do supervise our our players to closely and I've had that happen to with human parade we tell them what to do we don't show them what to do and that's pretty much the biggest sin you can commit in any story and player choice cannot happen in a vacuum there's always some context to fill that void of we want our story or our interaction in the game to make any sense and then the third thing I learned is that people aren't all that great you can't trust players you don't know them so a year before human parade we made the lery of Solomon this was me and four

other designers and it's a horror themed board game played solely by candlelight so what happens is you're playing Five teenagers who summoned a demon and depending on the role you're dealt your objective revolves not either killing or protecting other players and uh the mechanics are pretty simple because it all relies on the candle light there's a demon on the board if you stand in the shadow you're dead and then depending on what your role is that might be a good or that might be a bad thing and what I've noticed with this game is that whenever we play it with friends it gets much much more tense than it when than when it's played in a group of strangers we had one play test group where a guy was really happy that he died because that meant he couldn't reach his goal anymore his goal was to protect everyone on the table but when he died he was like well I can't win anymore either so I can just do whatever I want now and went on a head hunt to uh to start killing all the other players and he didn't care that he couldn't win anymore it was way more fun for him to do that because it forced him to interact much more so these three lessons are pretty much

what I've learned and I don't know do they really tell us what to do with games branching isn't all that great context isn't all that great people aren't all that great does that mean we can't tell any stories at all because those are pretty much the pillars that we usually build stories on well I think each of them is actually a strange uh strength if we look at them a bit more closer so let's start with branching and why it isn't all they that great or as I like to call branching play a choice do as I make you wish because pretty much a lot of contemporary games rely on having a story and having an impact on the choices that player makes as as a main interaction we kind of tell players they can do whatever they want in these world and that is going to change the flow of the events and of the scenes when really half of the time it doesn't and the problem with it is that although we although we want our players to be in control we as developers need character consistency our characters last for

really lengthy experience in times we have protagonists that go through four or five games of 20 hours each um in some of the more severe cases and at and on the other hand protagonists also serve as a manifestation of the player within the world so we can't completely control what a character what that protagonist does if we want to allow our player to role play but we also can't leave it completely open open because then they're just going to flip-flop between two personalities and not feel like a character at all so what we usually do as Developers really break down our protagonist into keywords into Arch types to avoid that Randomness and to avoid breaking our our character halfway through a cut scene so as a developer you would find those kind of arch types and those those keywords you've settled upon in your gdd or in your character Bible and as a player you usually find them in the SAT screen where I can look down and say like okay if I spec 10 points into strength and I could live that war ax before then I then I assume that I can pick pick up the soul in this scene or if I spec all

my points into Charisma I'm going to assume that people do what I want them to do in the dialogue scenes and my big problem with that is that once you start pushing these kind of binary qualities into a dialogue system you get that dread dreaded little good versus evil bar that we have around Shepherd's face here right now so my problem with good versus evil is not that it's a bad conflict good versus evil is a pretty good way to track what your what Your protagonist is usually what we do is assume that good is kind of a nice person who helps people and evil is someone who just does what they please and tries to burn down a few buildings on the way down um the problem that I have with is with it is that we're trying to put a number on it good versus evil as a con as a conflict translate into a lot of settings it can work in a lot of story genres it can work with a lot of protagonists but once we start trying to quantify it although it gives us something useful to work with in gamepl it pretty much pushes our players to make really strange decisions

and quite honestly the last time it worked was in Star Wars period and here's why because Star Wars as a franchise is set up with a very very clear evil and a very very clear good side and then a big gray spectrum between it and every character you ever meet in the in the movie franchise of Star Wars places somewhere on that scale and can be described through their alignment so we have characters like Palpatine who are really really bad and then we have characters like Yoda who are really really good but and arguably the most interesting are probably characters like Han Solo who who don't quite know where they fit yet or characters like like Darth weather where if you watch all six movies it's basically a story of him going from one end to the other and then going back and consequently we get these two games that basically break Star Wars in the most perfect way by saying okay we're going to construct a story that plays only in the middle part and we're not even going to look at the two Extremes in the world we're we're going to throw Great Character after Great Character after Great Character after you and you have to figure out where they stand and the way that works in the

game is that the protagonist pretty much gathers points for either being a ji or being a Sith of the dialogue system so you pick a dialogue option it says plus five good guy or plus five evil guy and the com combat mechanics are gated by these points but what's really beautiful about it is that Knights of the Old Republic was one of the last uh of the last few games were being neutral didn't mean you were weaker in combat if you look at more uh sort of slightly newer games that have a similar mechanic where you gather points you have a scale and then it unlocks combat bonuses if you play neutral you just don't get the bonus points whereas in nights of the Republic the way it worked was that the morality actually guided the resource flow so if you are very if you're very much leaning to what's the is side that meant that un that using S Powers was very cheap using Jedi Powers uh was very expensive whereas if you on the neutral both were about the same price so there was a gameplay reason to play neutral not just a storytelling one in most games what you will find is the only

play uh reason to play neutral is because at some point during the tutorial I said yeah I'm not going to pick a s side I'm going to stay neutral and then after 20 hours you notice that you're weaker than if you'd picked one of them and the other thing is that with Star Wars this system is based on the story world everything in Star Wars abides to that rule whereas in most games it doesn't and the other beautiful thing is that inste that this is actually visualized everything abides to that rule so your companions have the same scale as you if you flip through the character portraits in Mass Effect or in Dragon Age you're going to notice that in Dragon Age only the companions have them because it's because it's about how much they like you in Mass Effect only the protagonist have has them whereas in kns of the Republic the whole point was that everyone has a scale and if they like you you can influence theirs but they were already placed in that alignment systems before they ever met you so to me that's the great Pitfall of of games that these days try to try to ask big questions but then color code for you is that there's

never a reason to play neutral there's never a reason to deviate from the beaten paths you picked in the first five minutes it really is more of a fashion and not a lifestyle choice and that pretty much leads us into into our next question also and context why it isn't all that great so if I can't change the world don't make me pretend like I do Telltale does that a lot obviously Telltale comes up in pretty much every talk you do on morality and game design these days and the reason is that all of their games are marketed as something where you have to make hard choices and because they reduce the gameplay so much that there's only dialogue left and I think that's a very good way to do it because it really breaks down uh it breaks apart this idea of I need to be strong and I need to have a cool story and just say no no you're you're strong or you're weak we decide that for you you play the story but still they have their issues I mean my favorite among them is probably the Wolf Among Us because it was the only one where just through the setup it didn't bother me that my choices didn't have any impact at all because the w Among Us by Nature it's a crime story

you know how crime stories end at the end you find out who did it and you can't find that out in out in the five minutes cuz otherwise there isn't a story and you also can't change who did it because he did it in the beginning so in that game I wasn't really upset that I would that that I knew I would hit the same key points if I played it a completely different way because it was just it was in the IP and it was in the franchise and still it fell into it fell into that hole of the feedback loop that I think hinders a lot of the great story storytelling that we could do because W Among Us like many tell te games reminds you when you did something important so it basically tells me what whenever I did whenever I said something that another character is going to remember and is going to reference later and by that it takes the impact away from the next from the next three lines that come because if I see that pop out like okay I'm safe for two minutes now I can click whatever I want and it takes the stress out of it by placing specific value on specific dialogue lines and I think that's really sad in a game that did try to make me stressed by giving me a timer

to pick my lines so again that they way better in my opinion is the banner Saga because in the banner Saga you usually get really little feedback on what you do we're used to giving feedback to our players in in contemporary in contemporary games every button press we have to go like yes we noticed you press that button everything you do yes we noticed you did you did something here's an animation animation for it whereas in traditional storytelling media we pretty much accept as an audience that we don't always get the answer to a question right away if I read a book and I read two pages about a about a character picking which way to take as a as a crossroad I'm not expecting to find out on the ne next page why that whether path he picked was wrong or right I'm expecting that to be revealed in three uh in three chapters down the line or perhaps in the next book if I'm unlucky whereas in games we pretty much try and always tell our players right away what uh what they did what's going to happen and why this is good or bad we try to reward right away and that's not really how choices work

in real life if we try to make hard choices they're hard because we don't know what will happen next and in games usually we have all the cards laed out for us so Banner Saga kind of drops you into this really Bleak fantasy world where there isn't much hope left but it's a new IP it's a new franchise it's not walking dead where you're just well it's Walking Dead I know it's going to go horribly wrong and I know how and I know why because I've seen this franchise outside of a Telltale Game I've seen it in comics that's seen it in uh uh in the TV show I've seen it in marketing material I think with fresh IPS in the time of uh well SQL fetishism of this in Industry we can try a few things because our players don't quite know what to expect next and banner Saga does that all the time I mean I had moments in this game where I was stressed about every choice coming up and they come up about every 5 seconds because I had no clue when which minor conflict would grow into major one and Which choice would come back later because someone figured out they didn't like what I did there there's no right

or wrong way to play a tell game or to play these kinds of games there's no right or wrong way to play a game like paper's please no matter what you do there's always going to be someone disappointed you can try and be the good guy and not please everyone or you can try and be the evil guy and then not be respected by everyone but one way or another you'll always wonder and I think the way these games achieve that is by putting the emphasis on the moment and not revealing the uh the bigger picture right away or not alluding to it constantly they try and Venture off the beating path by not rewarding the uh being extreme in fact Banas Saga or tte games they don't even reward you picking a dialogue option they don't give you like plus five plus here minus there it's just there you take the dialogue option because that's what you do there's no there's no big reward in a a player pressing a button they have to find out if there's going to be one along the way and I think if we strengthen the conf uh the context of the choices we ask our players to make we can for that kind of ambiguity in in

the questions we ask a lot more but still players are people and they AR and players as people aren't great at all so if we look at modern media I think one problem we have is that there's an inflation of physical violence you look at a show of Game of Thrones and there's a beading in the first 5 minutes so that sets the bar that tells me what inconvenience or tragedy in this in this kind of world is going to be like and that's the bar I need to hit every time now that I that I want to have attention Peak so in games we do that naturally as well especially in RPGs if a combat system is the main part of gameplay that's fun then yeah you're probably going to do some killing in the tutorial and the problem with that is is that we run into a situation where every tension Peak we do is either a character being saved or a character being killed and I'm guilty of that as well I just told you I wrote a game that is all about picking who lives or dies

but in my case it was going to be a short game and it wasn't going to have a sequel if we open the first five minutes of a of a game and you're already picking picking these things I'm expecting to be doing that for the next 30 30 hours of this game and for the next three games that come into uh that come into this franchise and in my opinion there's a pretty easy way around that which is pitting people against actual people I think way too often in games we don't consider that multi player games can enable stories too competition or cooperation with another human being has a completely different impact than cooperation or uh or competition with an NPC like I said earlier if I spec all my points into Charisma I'm expecting that NPCs do what I want but if I'm playing with actual people well you've probably all had a situation where you really wanted that player to play that one card and they didn't because perhaps they were little brother and they were trying to get uh to get you to lose the game so

real players raise the stakes without raising kind of the without raising the tension that you need in the story because suddenly you have pranks you have Bluffs you have the joy of doing something nice just for the sake of it if I do something good to an NPC in a game I'm probably going to get a reward going to get money or I'm going to get an item or I'm going to get a cute cut scene if you've ever tried to be the helpful support in this game you probably won't get rewarded because you're playing with actual people and they don't really care and still while I was ready uh while I was writing this talk I was trying to think about the nicest thing someone had ever done to me in a game and it was a match of League of Legends that we had lost we knew we were losing it um and another player kept refusing to surrender just because because he wanted to play two or three more minutes with me to me that was way nicer than anything I'd ever seen in a cut scene and I've never felt so guilty about leaving someone to die in a single

player game either if I leave someone to die in Mass Effect I know they're going to be gone for the next 10 years of this franchise running if I leave someone to die League of Legends they're gone for 50 seconds but they can complain about it in the chat box and I know that's an actual human being missing out on 60 seconds of playing a game and I think that's the big issue with us pushing character death into all of our big choices is there really a point in me ever choosing the evil option if I know that keeping this character alive might perhaps at some point lead to a funny line in a sequel or in a DLC or in a later Quest is is there any point in playing evil one the only way for me to play evil is to completely dep poize the playing field and I think it's okay to sometimes tell our players that they have to be the good guy and that they have to be cooperative and that they can't hurt the other player and I also think it's okay to sometimes tell our players that they can't be cooperative that they have to be the competitor that they have to be the Rival I don't need to give a player a gun to find an enemy a ball is enough

and if we go for those more subtle themes if we try and look outside of the box of well Darth waer is evil because he blew up alderon then I think we can find a lot more themes to explore and to play with and to make our choices more ambiguous than do you kill character a or do you kill character B if you present me with that choice and then the next one is well do you give your lactose intol intolerant friend the scent with with the cheese or the sausage I won't think about about it much cuz I just killed someone 10 seconds ago I don't care if he eats a sandwich he can't eat but if that entire game never had a killing scene to begin with if you play with the smaller tragedies in life then I think we can find a lot of themes that haven't been explored in games set and that can enable us to do things that haven't been done so what lessons have we learned well let's try to reevaluate the way our stories Branch because sometimes it's okay to admit that this is a fashion not a lifestyle Choice you're making here sometimes it's okay to do a game like uh like The Telltale stories

well we know from the beginning that we won't change any of the bigger outcomes but we'll but we'll make the experience our own through the dialogue options we're given and let's try and consider a player who flips between the the extremes let's try and consider a player who doesn't want to always pick the blue option let's try to consider a player who actually wants to think about it and who lends in the neutral part let's try to give them something that advances the game as well and let's try to reevaluate the themes that we work with understand your world first and then construct a story with it there's certain story worlds there's certain franchises that work with really drastic themes others need subtlety there's certain genres where you can get away with things that where you get that you get punished for if you're working in a different Jia and please just just stop overusing physical violence you hit diminishing Rec Returns on the impact and meaning of your tension Peaks and I think that's an issue when we're trying to tell stories that last longer than the M 90 minutes of a summer

blockbuster and reevaluate the single player status quo I firmly believe that multiplayer geners offer numerous way of doing really dodgy things to people just try thinking about stealing a car in Day Z versus stealing a car in GTA and having a player hunt you down for 30 minutes trying to get it back so I think modern settings like the dystopia we see in movies or the survival gen that emerged with games like DZ like Unbound can bring out the worst in people and the best and those are the memorable moments that we're looking for those are the stories we're trying to enable people to tell so thank you for your time and your attention I think I took too long and we don't have time for questions or can we take one or two sorry [Applause] [Applause] ask

later okay um you mentioned um Dragon Age and everything with a morality bar and no no there's a friendship bar yes and I remember in playing drug Age 2 um I had some where I was friends with others I was Rivals with and some that I was neutral with but I had a relationship with them I had a whole thing with them but I was neutral because sometimes was good sometimes was bad but developing for that how would you do that because it would be a third story with that um uh with that character so it would be extra budget going into it okay so the question is how do you develop for that third option and well you just said it be aware that if you give me through three choices you need to develop three choices within your budget I think the trick is trying to step away from a clearly binary

system always and trying to think about how can I do something that's in the middle of these things that is it uh that still feels appealing I think 80 days did a really good job at it by not tracking two stats but four pretty much they didn't say you're good or evil they said I think it was patient and impatient and then polite and impolite so you basically had you had a slightly more complex system in that and that me and that meant that it opened up the room for them to do to do more interesting interactions with necessarily uh blowing their budget just by branching more otherwise I'm very sorry for holding you in that room too long [Applause]