Ghost in the Machine: Authorial Voice in System Design, 'Frostpunk' & Beyond

[Music] welcome to my gdc talk ghost in the machine autoreal voice in system design and i hope you are well in those bizarre times and yes the microphone is duct taped to my face so let's go with the topic at hand and let's start with the basics who am i my name is marzafiak currently i'm a creative director at unsure studios but for the past five years i worked at 11 bit studios as a game designer senior game designer lead game design and different things working among others on frostpunk i did the society part of frostpunk which we are going to discuss briefly today and i also had some you know indie adventures and that kind of things but

you did not come here to listen about me so let's get to the topic at hand what is this authorial voice this authorial intent that we are going to discuss and this is actually the embedded world view of the creator that is manifested in his work and it can be transmitted through few different means through the style through the perspective to the point of view and for the tone but the concept is that the experience of life for any one of us it's not the same and the work we are created we are creating throw through our unique lens kind of showing our inner workings and our perspective on everything and of course as this time codes from leech elite russia theory there's a lot of uh discussion if the

authoring that is conscious or subconscious if the author has any control over over it but here let's take it at face value because this is not a lecture about literature theory and we are going to talk about games and also you know so let's look at it uh through some examples from other medium then games then we'll get to the games we'll discuss it on the games but let's start with a movie and with a book starting with the catch-22 as you are probably aware this is a book about war one of many books about war one of many books about world war ii but this one is kind of special because many of the books tell the heroic stories and how the war is sometimes the necessity and how as it brings the wars it also brings the

best in people but catch 22 is the different book the authorial voice is quite strongly ahead in there and is a unique perspective at least at the time about how nonsensical and how violent and how pointless war is and the same with everything is all right with us the book sorry the movie uh on the left it is not about war but some of the indie developers will tell you it that it is about war us this is a movie about developing games about developing an indie game but is extremely different in tone and different in how it portrays some things than indie game the movie and again i hope you can see that there is the same subject like whoa and making indie games in those two things but the authorial voice doctoral intent the experience that is

being told is vastly different and that is kind of the point let's look at another example here we have two paintings both of them are showing the wall both of them are showing atrocities of war because both of them were created to kind of show how cruel and horrible is war but we can see how vastly different is the lens of pablo picasso and how vastly different is the lens of francisco goya and at the time both of those paintings did did a huge thing like people really resonated with that that this is how the brutality of walk looks and if you look at those the right they cannot be more different but this is that kind of of transformative character of us embedding our own view of the world into the things that we are doing

and also this is such a devouring his own children and it is here be because i kind of love this painting and we don't know what the authorial intent was of it we don't know why france painted it it it was never to be seen perfectly publicly but it is and i find it kind of fitting in terms of a game designer devouring his own game design but that was just a tangent let's get back to the thing so the editorial voice itself it's a matter of communication we are communicating and we are communicating through the things that we are doing and sometimes the catch is that we do not do it consciously but about that in the moment first let's kind of get go through the idea the games are like that so how does it work in games how the authorial intent manifests

in games and this is for future lectures not this one this one is 30 minutes but there's also the question of whose authorial intent is it especially when we are talking about not small indie games that are made by two four five people but are made by companies of ten thousand okay we are not on that level of uh size of companies but you know companies of more of a couple hundred people whose authorial intent is that but just leaving it as a nugget just you know stuck to that you can think about it later if you would like so how does it work in games how those things manifests and of course we've got the most obvious channels the story the written down plot points that are exactly the same for every player and a very powerful tool to do that especially in those movie-like games those really thrive on showing

what they are trying to tell you through those story bits which are then dressed in wonderful acting voice acting animations but uh the story it's the same like with movies story is a great transmitter great well way for the editorial intent and another example is this collision the game that really clearly states for its story to through texts through the static bits that do not change what is the world view and what they are trying to say and they are very conscious of that which is great and visuals as you can imagine as story is a kind of a parallel to a book but of course we know that writing for games is vastly different than writing books but the parallel exists the visuals is a great parallel parallel to paintings and you know the usual flat not a dynamic kind of art style so

once again this picture speaks a thousand words and what is wonderful almost also with communicating with art that it is not bounded by the limits of our language because both visuals and in a second audio are things that can communicate things that we cannot say still how we depict certain characters how we depict a certain situations visually show our view of those situations show our view of those characters because it's our choice or our game director still not that discussion the view of that thing because the simple decision of what characteristic of the character we are going to enlarge and draw the focus to showing what in our mind is important about that character and this is our authorial intent conscious or not so here hellblade

wonderfully uh visually and wonderful game entirely communicating in that aspect and on the other hand a vastly different kind of expression still extremely uh extremely successful and extremely clear on what is trying to say through its visuals and as i already pointed forward there's also the audio and here i'm talking more about the sound design but of course it also applies to music it allows us to convey some authorial intent when we are describing something so here we've got one great example of audio design showing space from the point of view of fear and being terrified and this is a game that you know you need to change your pants afterwards because it is so nicely done and the audio design makes a lot of dot and on the other hand space exactly the same topic

can be vastly different and can be a place of wonder and curiosity also thanks to its audio design like in case of outer walls but outer wilds sorry two similar naming games outer wilds so that's all good and dandy but there's that unique part about medium so what with the mechanics are mechanics a way of communicating things or are they just for fun as you can imagine from the you know talk title i have my agenda in here but in a moment before we will jump to that let's start with defining a vocabulary and some you know quick brief theoretical background so we are talking about the same thing because as you know there are many lenses and many different approaches that you can look on design through so

to have it all clear let's go with the brian's upton uh definition from the wonderful book the aesthetic of play so in this talk i'm going to conceptualize game design and game as a free movement in the system of constraints a quick summary for those of you who are not familiar with that highly recommend getting familiar with that the free movement in a system of constrain is a approach that looks at the game as a set of states and those states if you are talking about chess for example every single combination of positions of different chess pieces is a different state and what the player does is he moves freely through those states so we as designers designing for example uh the rules of how the chess pieces move and what is the dimensions of the port are dictating what are what kind of states

the game will generate right so we as designers we create rules those rules generate states and the player themselves walk through those states in that free movement in the system constraints so just to sum it up game consists of states that are created by us this is the bare minimum that we need from that slide and another liar of that is that not all games are similar i know this is not something groundbreaking but not all games are the same and look on the let's look on them from one perspective let's look on them in terms of how big of an impact basic mechanics have of have on the narration and when i'm saying narration just to be clear i'm not saying

at the fixed plot points i'm talking the whole story the whole experience that is played in the player's mind while playing the game because due to the interactive nature of our medium between two players almost always that narration will be slightly different [Music] and why it will be different it will be different through the smallest of decisions that may not change how the game is perceived but still the narration is slightly different because we decided to kill someone from the left and not someone from the right but using that kind of logic we can look on the games of over in those two axes so on the x-axis we've got the impact of low-level mechanics on the narration itself and the y-axis is how different those narrations can be out of that game so how different

stories will be created from players to play his head right how different how much difference there will be in the meaning itself and also left lower corner we've got the movie-like experiences those games that are have a quite similar narration in the head of all of the players the low-level mechanics do not have a big impact and almost always the narration is more or less similar reached the same ish it's only those mundane details that no one cares are changing from player to play then left corner left upper corner we've got the branching narrative the low-level mechanics for example in which are free do not care so much from the narration it does not matter how you are killing the monsters it is uh important what kind of decisions you made you make in a important plot point

moment so it's a classical branching narrative it is extremely effective to create the ownership of the story in the player but it is also extremely pricey because there's a lot of content that you have to create and on the right side we have games that take a lot of its own narration from the low level mechanics so upper right corner we've got the anecdote kind of generators so the rim wards the dwarf fortress and the power of those stories is that they are uniquely personal the usually stories of disaster and everyone dying your little colony kingdom but still it was your way of them failing and it came from a very very low level mechanic and how you played but the thing is those i'm not sure that that kind of anecdote generators are the best to convey certain meanings if

you want to convey a more complex idea it would be harder with that kind of games and that brings us to the last category that i at this moment find the most interesting and this is those mechanical stories so the game over on the higher level have quite strong idea that they want to convey but how that narration develops is quite unique to the player because it comes from those low level mechanics so this is i hope how frostpunk plays this is how her story plays because the outcome of that story for all of us is more or less the same but all of us had a quite different and a unique experience how we got to that point and i think this also made this quite powerful but what i'm why i'm bringing it now because in terms of speaking through the mechanics it is more important to look of on that kind of subject when you are more on the

right of this graph and not on the left [Music] so that is the end of intermission let's get back to the topic at hand mechanics do they convey something and in my opinion authorial voice manifests in all state generated by the mechanic so our world view our view of certain experiences is embedded in them and not directly because they are generated by the rules but still authorial voice manifests manifests in state generated by the mechanics and also this is the tricky part the game designer is responsible for all of the states that can be generated by the system and in more than the obvious way because of course we are

we are responsible for all of them in terms of them being engaging and interesting choices but we are also responsible about what those states are saying but there's a small little thing there's a little caveat because outside of normal states there are also interpretation states and those states are mostly connected to what the player is imagining what will happen next and there's a lot of a lot more of player participation in creators creating of those states so due to that we cannot be responsible responsible by the uh responsible for them because there's always that one person that will look on the rock and think about genocide and this is not on us but the other states that on us but no one cares like

this sounds like kind of academic sort of scientific thingy but the thing is as the medium is getting older and older players also as an audience get more accustomed to reading the games in more than only surface levels they start to look at games and they start to look at what the games are saying through the mechanics not only for the story bits and we already had few examples of that we had the rim world queer woman controversy the situation in here was that there was a certain worldview embedded in the mechanics of those games how homosexuality and sexuality of characters worked and the thing is the discussion there it was no no it was only for fun but it is not like that we are speaking through our systems and it's okay because i'm not here to tell you you know this is the only right way

this is the police thought kind of approach no just what is important is to know that we are saying things and the same for many years what was with video game romance because if you look on the purely systemic side of video games romans from the old days those are vending machines for sex just like that you throw in good answers and compliments and eventually the sex will fall out and i hope that this is not how relationship works and this is not how romans work but those systems were implying and were saying that this is how it is it was for fun it was for simplification but players are starting to read those things and we are also more aware that we are saying those things through those systems and it was the same with frostpunk frostpunk actually

hit thingy through its balance because it was balanced through a really european-centric approach and as so when it was received by the chinese players it was quite weird for them how we balance certain things because for us some things were no go for them they were okay we were not fully aware that we were saying that thing from that you know quite fixed perspective so to go into a little bit much uh little bigger details let's go through the case of frostpunk and what are you willing to sacrifice for gameplay and let's look like that kind of authorial voice thinking thinking of what we are saying is impacting the game design just to put it a little bit in context frostbunk is a survival city uh building game with a strong society component

so what is important for our story is that if your workplaces are not heated your people will get sick and eventually if they are sick and not treated an amputation may happen so we were playing around with that amputation happened but the idea systemic idea behind that was when an amputation happens that little human in frostbank is taken away from the force from the workforce so the player has less resources on that side so that would be a strong enough incentive to hit all of the places but as the time progressed we found out that actually um that's actually the amount of people that the player has to distribute among workforces is not a problem he has more people than workplaces so that kind of

incentive was not a thing it did not work so we started to discuss what can we do and as i was responsible for the society uh i was like okay let's look at this idea let's look of all of the systems that we can what we can poke and stick together to have a stronger incentive for the player to eventually hit those places so a bigger penalty connected to the amputations as we already had a system and that was connected with the discontent and hope we started to play with an idea that those people those people without those limbs may have a chance to commit suicide which would have a ripple effect because this is something that has a ripple effect on the community so this way the player would have stronger incentive outside of moral one to hit those places and do not make that happen so implemented that mechanic played around set a percentage

i still did not feel the penalty enough so i tweaked the numbers played again tweak the numbers played again tweak the numbers played again tweak the numbers played again tweak the numbers played again now it was working and the tester was like yeah yeah i feel the incentive and i looked in the config and every person after amputation every day had a 50 chance to commit suicide and now a problem or else because it worked mechanically it was engaging but this was not a world view that i held and this is not something that i wanted to say in that game as this is a semi-realistic game so eventually we scrapped that idea and we walked a entirely different system to have that kind of a penalty we added a special kind of discontent where there were different humans were different people are not part of the

workforce we added protests we added a lot of additional context to put it a lot of additional content to put it in a correct context because that was important and to offer that kind of interesting gameplay and eventually there was even a law about allowing people with amputations to walk in different places to have the prosthetics for them and this is the moment for you know self tap and all of that but the thing is not only the systems are the problem but before we go there this was not only such a problem in frostbunk we touched because this is a society game we touch on many different subjects and some of them are really sensitive some of them are really important some of them are everyday experiences of other people and you cannot treat those things lightly

for the sake of entertainment itself so for some of things we just cut them out because there was not enough time to kind of you know do it the right way so the best way was to cut it out and as i'm saying not only the systems are the problem because math itself is embedded with meaning when you are balancing a system when you are balancing laws when you are saying how much of people will be mad about one law and another you are showing your view of the world because there is no such a thing as an objective algorithm on an objective balance you are picking what kind of laws is more uh making making people more angry and less and that decision comes from your internal values and it's for all of those things there is no such

thing as no no objectively this is the thing that should add plus five this is everything that should add plus one so it is the balance is also the expression of your personal views and sometimes those are mundane things you think that the sword is a better attack thing than an axe but sometimes it's bigger things like do you think that immigration makes the higher crime rate go higher or does not impact them at all and just you know those things are expression of your personal views even if you don't want it so you can imagine how different of the game this war of mine would be uh if for example the food was planted this is a stupid idea but this is a depiction of war through the lands of people who made this war of mine and the mouth in there is that depiction of what they think the world is right

but of course not all systems are like that and not all systems require care in those terms you can have a fully abstract game like opus magnet and there go wild those systems will tell only the story of your imagination about an abstract system of chemical bonds and that's all you don't have to be worried but when rooted in reality and when showing reality you show your view of the reality so when designing on balancing remember that you are also talking because your authorial voice as a designer and as an auto is embedded in this balance and is embedded in those mechanics and just you know be aware of that because you can say the most silly thing just be aware that you are saying those things

so i wish you great gdc also happy pride month because i'm recording this in june and goodbye [Music]