Player-Driven Stories: How Do We Get There?

[Music] and Hudson and thanks for coming to my talk entitled player different stories how do we get there you'll see a link here the slides are already available so don't worry about taking pictures or trying to copy everything down you can just go to that site and that link is also on the last slide so don't worry about scribble in it now unless you leave in the middle anyways about me real quick I started my career at ion storm Austin where I worked on deus ex invisible war the ps2 version of Deus Ex and thief 3 then I went to Midway Austin where I worked on a open-world action game that was cancelled when Midway started to go under after that I moved to 2k Marin up in the North Bay where I worked on Bioshock 2 and the new exocomp project and I recently moved to LucasArts where I'm making a new game with Clint Hocking and Matthias worch quick spoiler alert here yeah that's a good picture of them quick spoiler alert Here I am going to discuss some stories and games and if you haven't played these games you might consider these a

spoiler so those games are Red Dead Redemption more wind deus ex passage and portal there's a little title slide before each of these so if you want to close your eyes and cover your ears if you haven't you know played those games go for it so yeah quick you know quick overview of the talk first I'm going to talk about the problem as I see it with story and games right now talk about a goal we should be striving for some common stumbling blocks and reaching that goal look at some possible solutions along with analysis of how you know certain games have tackled those types of things and finally of course some closing closing thoughts so let's jump right in the problem that I'm putting forth is that games really aren't taking advantage of what makes games games which is interactivity were often copying these Hollywood linear stories and just kind of moving the player from one cutscene to the next or from one scripted sequence to the next and kind of telling these linear stories that frankly would be told and up better in other mediums whereas in games we do have the advantage of that interactivity and can be telling games that are more about you know what the players doing and letting

the player actually build and construct those narratives the interactive elements of games are often you know simple and unengaging when compared to the cutscenes that you find in games you just shoot a bunch of dudes and then go fall in love and a cutscene and go back to shoot a bunch of strangers so basically right now players aren't driving the story even if the character that they're playing is and like I said this is something that we and our medium have a unique ability to address because we do have that element of interactivity so I'd like us to try to you know make stories are a little bit more specific to our medium and and the question of what we should be aiming for the goal I'm putting forth is a story in which the player makes influential decisions that create a unique narrative that's not prescribed by a designer and I want to call it a couple words there that might seem obvious but the first one is influential what that means is that the choices are meaningful they're not just short loops they're not cosmetic they actually fundamentally change where the story is going in the game the second one is create which means that these choices actually generate new story events it's not just choosing linear branches that have been you know picked by a designer but again you're creating new story content new story events and

finally the word is narrative this what this means basically is that we need to be creating a coherent series of events over time that hang together is an actual story as opposed to a bunch of little micro interactions that don't really have any you know long-term benefit that's what a story is you know long build ups and releases of tension and blah blah blah all that good stuff we'll get to it later so yeah when we try to create stories like this you know we need to understand what people strive for what do people want in their lives and what do people want for happiness because if we are trying to give them worlds in which they can create their own stories we have to understand what motivates them and so when I started looking for a framework to talk about that I came upon self-determination theory which is basically a theory that's been studied for about 30 or 40 years now it's been verified you know independently and born out again and again in experiments and it basically says that when people are seeking happiness or well-being they're looking for three primary things they want autonomy competence and relatedness to talk about autonomy first that

basically means being a causal agent within your environment it means being able to simply make decisions that matter make choices that affect what's around you since that's very similar to a term that I'm sure we're awful more familiar with called agency for the purposes of this talk I'm actually just going to use the word agency because again it's just a more familiar term but they mean equivalent you know things and so just want to call that out at the start competence is exactly what it sounds like it's being good at something it's being able to have your you know affect your environment in a positive way and that something games actually do very well at least in game play you know a lot of games are about skill mastery and competition and those things but again it's not something that we really bring into our stories very often and the last one is relatedness which is simply the desire to interact with and connect to and develop relationships with other people pretty basic human desire remember these three words because I'm going to be calling back to them a lot during the talk agency confidence and relatedness it might not come up on the screen but you hear me say them a lot so try to keep them in mind so yeah with those in mind

let's let's talk about our original goal again I actually wrote this definition for a previous version of the talk where I used a completely different psychological framework that's not as good as this one and it's weird because I had those three words call it out last time and I realized that this one actually they map better to this new self-determination theory than my old talk so it's kind of a nice little surprise but the first one agency influential decisions ie what I'm doing matters what I'm doing has meaningful change in the environment that I'm in the second one is creation and that maps to competence which is basically if I'm good at something if I'm interacting well with my environment that actually creates new events like that confidence that I'm developing as a player feeds into the story and finally narrative and relatedness stories are about relationships with people and those dynamics that you know happen over time so we'll go into depth into depth on each one of these but we will start with agency and specifically the concept of disparate agency which is kind of where I see a lot of games going right now where you've got the player who has a pretty limited set of abilities when compared to what the character he's playing is doing in a story and

basically the agency that the player has within the game is actually a subset of the characters agency that he's playing and so when it comes to the story it's almost like the story is subtly telling the player who's sitting on his couch with the controller you can't do anything that really matters in this world that you're inhabiting right now you know the big stuff we're saving that for the super sweet scenes and we're saving that for the cutscenes not kind of stuff like that and the stories were you going to get that compelling content and really your job is to just keep an avatar alive to get to the next trigger to the next cutscene so so that in mind what should we be striving for pretty simple right unified agency basically creating worlds in which the player and the character have all the same impacts on which the character you know and the play can both affect all systems and relationships in the game and giving the player agency across all of the game we need to get rid of you know as many player excluding dynamics and mechanics as we can and you know if there's a particular motion you're trying to put into your game figure out a way to express that mechanically don't just think about the next you know cool cutscene or scripted moment that you're going to try to evoke those emotions

with because you want the player to feel those for himself and not necessarily watch that character he's playing on the screen experience them player verbs should really affect you know even the mid and high-level parts of the story and the player basically needs to speak the language of the narrative with his actions so let's look at an interesting example of a game that has done some of this didn't quite get there but it had some really interesting things to talk about that game is more wind it's a game where the player has an incredible amount of agency across the game all sorts of crazy customization and powers and everything else like that and a perfect example is the main quest giver who I'm gonna butcher his name Caius cos aids I think I didn't really listen to how they said it in the game because I played this like five years ago but he's basically the main quest giver in the game and he gives you you know all your objectives and goals in the early part of the story he's the central you know guy to guide you through the story that said and morrowind you do have a really high level of agency in the world and you can kill anyone including the main quest giver of the game so if you actually kill this guy this little message pops up at the bottom of the

screen that's really really awesome and it says with this character's death the threat of property prophecy is severed restore save game to restore the weave of fate or persist in the doom world you've created and it's really cool because this is like an accessibility feature like they're just like hey dude this is your game this is your world this is the choice you made just want to let you know you can't finish this story but if you want to keep playing go for it like they didn't make you reload the game they didn't make him invulnerable you know they didn't make him always you know kill you and overpower you they were like look just letting you know dude if you want to keep playing go for it so it's really cool that they allowed that sort of agency within the world unfortunately the story you know ultimately couldn't compensate for that level of agency on the players part and it did break the main narrative and so you did lose a lot of you know cool content going to the game but it makes you ask why didn't they take this further more wins actually a game that could have tolerated a lot more variance and more in the narrative because you know it's basically got a player with extensive verbs that are map very closely to what the you know characters in the world is

interacting with have so there's a lot of parity between the player and those other agents in the world a lot of customization there's alliances you can be in good or bad with different groups you can kind of shape the world around you and it's also a game that relies on text so it's as you can see it relies on text a lot even in conversations and not a lot of VO so it would have been pretty cheap for them to anticipate a lot of this stuff and let you the story react to more robust ways so it's a little disappointing they didn't go further with it but I at least you know applauded them for letting you keep playing and just kind of letting you know what's up as almost like I said an accessibility feature so killing that guy was really goofy it wasn't like a sweet cutscene it was like a the combats actually not that great more win and so he's kind of chop wood on him for a while and they it falls over and that's kind of it but I don't know that's necessarily a problem you know you might ask why not turn that into a super awesome cutscene or do whatever instead it's popping up a little text box and the thing I realize is that players are willing to put themselves into an experience if you give them that level of agency and don't add meaning to systemic interactions in ways that you

didn't anticipate and you know they'll accept a huge drop in fidelity when it comes to you know allowing them to make more meaningful decisions in the world you don't have to pay everything off with these super deluxe cutscenes or you know scripted moments or whatever players will add that meaning themselves so hold that thought about agency I'm gonna come back to that but first I want to talk a little bit about why I think we haven't been able to deliver as much agency and why this problem is actually getting a lot worse recently and that that issue is the concept of chasing reality Oh Pat's laughing I'm sorry dude you worked on co-op not the single-player it's cool I'm not making fun of Smurfs or conviction it's actually really fun cool game I really enjoyed it but in this scene at the very beginning of the game you're basically interrogating this guy in the bathroom and if you look the fidelity the scene is amazing it is phenomenal you can crash his head into the mirror and you know breaks the sink if you crash them through the stall door there's a guy in there taking a dump and he's like I get out of here did and like

there's all kinds of stuff that happens but the thing I realized it kind of made me depressed when I was playing that because I was like man it took so much work to do this and it means there's one outcome because when you start to you know have this arms race of fidelity that games are getting into at least in the triple-a space it just gets more and more expensive to create the same sort of story content as we were creating you know five years ago and it ultimately is really limiting agency because the more expensive it is to do one thing that means that you're less likely to do two or three or four different options in a given story scene and even branching stories you know and something like a Mass Effect even those are limited by manpower how much how many of these you know discrete branches can we make so you know I'm branching isn't really true agency you're still choosing a from a number of linear paths so ultimately it's you know troubling to me because as fidelity goes up agency basically goes down and the question is do we really need this level of fidelity in this level of it you know we do need higher agency but do we need this level of fidelity to create emotionally

compelling content and I'd say no because like I mentioned before players are willing to trade off a significant amount of fidelity to you know have more agency in the game and feel like that world is reacting to them a little bit more so so let's break down what goes into a scene like that and see if we can find some solutions on how to do this stuff a little bit more smartly so I'm using the word cutscene here by the way I'm it's just a handy shorthand but please don't think that I'm just ranting against cutscenes in this talk this also goes for any sort of really scripted you know objective design or the kind of game where you're just moving from trigger to trigger and watching stuff happen and just moving along a linear path all that stuff falls under this it's just cutscenes the sort of the most you know dramatic example of you putting the controller down just watching and having literally no agency so that's just sort hand here but anyways we look at what goes into this we've got you know obviously vo custom writing environments modeling and animation you know pretty high-level breakdown no need to explain too much here but let's take a look at

you know how far you can go when you start to strip these elements away and still create an emotional experience this is the game passage which is I don't show of hands who's played this and you might play passage oh my gosh so this is a really sweet game it's really awesome it's a five minute game about life and to me personally I gonna speak for myself it was more emotionally compelling than Mass Effect Alan Wake all these big story games I liked both of those games a whole lot so I'm not making fun of them again but the important thing about passage is it's super simple super low fidelity and the mechanics in the presentation actually define the story in some really interesting ways so I'll do like a quick run-through here basically it's a game about life you're this little dude on the left and you start on the left and you're only verb is movement I'm really glad they put this on the iPhone because the little d-pad makes it easier to talk about this movements your only verb and that's how you make choices and your fidelity is low enough that the mechanics in this game are the story so you start on the left and you start to move across the screen you know

going through your life and time passes and they do a couple of clever things here for example if you notice on the right side of the screen it gets really garbled and blurry that's the future and the further out the future gets the less certain it is and you don't know where you're going to be in 20 years and and it's a very simple mechanical representation of that that you just you grok it instantly you playing you're like oh yeah so you start walking through the world and you meet a girl you get a little closer to her and you just walk up to her and fall in love movements the only verb you simply express that intent very simply I want to fall in love with her by the way a little call back to relatedness one of our friends from the self-determination theory so you meet up with this girl you join forces and you start to move through life together and as you notice as you move through life you start to move from the left side of the screen to the right side sort of demonstrating this is I'm you know moving through my own timeline and you notice that the future and the past start to become both kind of blurry because as you get in the future and have less life you know kind of more what's coming and the past and the memories start to fade and there's a number at the top that starts to

increment and show your age and stuff like that and you start to move through life and get old and you get even older your hair fall out your hair turns gray and you guys are sort of an elderly couple moving through life and again this is simply movement just moving these guys across the screen slowly and watching these changes happen it's novio there's no anything else and then one of the saddest things in a video game ever happens she passes away and you turn into this sad old man who's got no hair and they do a really really powerful thing they simply reduce your movement speed so the very end of the game you just start moving half as fast and you don't need to see the guy cry you don't need to have a message on the screen you don't need vo you can just tell he's moving half as fast he has nothing to live for he's just guide the end of his life the love of his life has died who's been through this whole you know life experience with and he started going through life alone and that tombstone moves into the blurry past with everything else that's gone and you get to the end of the screen and you die and that's the whole game and it's incredibly powerful when you play it you know the simplicity of it and and the

simple verbs of simply moving through the world it makes you think about these things you're looking at the screen and you're thinking about your own life and your own relationships and your own friendships and it's amazing but another really cool thing about it is again movement is your only you know verb here and if you start the game over or start a new game and you walk up to the ground you say you know what I'm gonna go it alone you just walk around her you just don't walk up to her and you can start to go through life yourself and the same kind of thing happens you move from the left side to the right side and the future gets more and more sharply focused in the past fades in the memory your hair falls out you get old and then you die at like half the age you don't turn into the old man you don't slow down you simply go go go alone and die and it's really really sad and you know you don't kind of have to explain how profound that is and what the implication is there it's just a really simple way to express these complex emotions that come with living life and it's a very very powerful game I'd encourage you to play it it's on every platform imaginable so let's quantify passage real quickly against those elements we talked about

vo there's none custom writing there's none modeling by my count there are five models there's the man the woman the middle-aged man the old man and the tombstone I'm going to be generous and call the tombstone a model animation there's three by my count the man the woman and the old man and the environments obviously are very little level of fidelity now I'm not sitting here contending and saying that passage is a reasonable triple-a game that you could put in a box and so for $60 but I did want to demonstrate these you can really move players with a very you know low level of fidelity if you're trading off and giving them agency and allowing them to sort of fully inhabit that experience as opposed to you know watching a scripted series of events so let's move back to the triple A discussion and free these elements from cutscenes or scripted moments or whatever you want to call them and consider them one by one and see if there's things we can do to use them more efficiently because ultimately the goal should be let's take all the things our disposal you know really good vo and really good writing and really cool environments and all these wonderful things that we have at our disposal now let's think about

how we can use them more efficiently so that we can enable more agency for players and create a larger possibility space and create worlds that can react to players a little bit better so first one up is vo basically isolated if you can just because you want to have vo in the game doesn't mean that you have to also have a really sweetly lip-syncing model and you know animations and cool cutscenes and cool camera angles and all that stuff like that there are ways to just simply put the vo into the world without all those attendant costs lots of games do that kind of thing Triple A games data links in Deus Ex or radios and Bioshock the voice coming over the speakers in Portal don't you know as you consider these things don't assume that you have to do it to the fullest degree think about clever ways to get more in the world because if you do it for cheaper you can do more of it and you can react to more different you know scenarios from the player custom writing if you can systematize that writing a little bit and sort of make it react to a little bit more generic of events and I don't mean make the writing generic and sucky and you know still have lots of flavor and cool characters and all that but basically just make it to where it can react to a series of events you

know character is mad at you character is happy character is pleased character is confused stuff like that that might seem a little bit egregious at first because you want to have every scene crafted and you know had this awesome awesome dialogue for every possible thing that could happen but again players if they feel like the game is reacting to what they're doing they will accept a much lower level of fidelity in the but if they simply feel like the game noticed what they did they're not going to say oh that sounds like a generic response I remember playing System Shock 2 it was pretty clear that they had three or four like generic lines of show and saying I've uploaded some modules good job for when you would complete an objective and you heard the same lines over and over in the game but it always happened whatever you did something cool that you felt you should be rewarded for and so you never were like wow they're using that stupid line again you're like sweet yeah like they noticed awesome it's it's a it's a good feeling so try to systematize your your writing where you can which of course frees up your vo and also try to isolate the writing as well just because you wrote something cool doesn't necessarily mean you have

to have it voice acted and present it on a model and animated and lip synced and all that stuff like that there's lots of games right now that are doing things that are really interesting with sort of making your writing stand on its own so you can have games like you know Costume Quest and stacking which are two really cool games on xbox live right now they've got a little bubble when people talk and they just put text on the screen and if you can just afford to put text on the screen that lets you do a lot more of it and you know make stuff that really you know reacts some more situations you can also use Simlish like the sims head or this might be a stupid example but whatever voice synthesis you know like people like oh it's not good enough it's not believable human characters then don't make a game worse coming from human characters like make robots or something or make computers that talk because it would sound okay for that because it sounds like a computer so like you know think about how you can extend your writing and make it to where you can get more in the game for cheaper costs for environments try to reuse where you can there's sort of two reasons for this if you can use gameplay spaces for your story scenes

and allow the story to occur in spaces the players inhabiting otherwise in gameplay then number one you just have more real estate and you have more time to simply build more game environments for playing the game which is which is great but also a lot of times games will have sort of hero scenes you know not about heroes but sort of like really sweet looking environments that are really carefully crafted for story events and players can tell in the back of their minds that the fidelity of those areas is higher and it's a subtle way again of the you know game saying hey the stories where the really cool stuff happens we built a special suite you know in house with the helicopter outside of it or whatever and that's where it's going to happen in it's a little subtle disc to the player again saying that like the story is important you're not so if you can reuse those spaces and just be you know sort of cost-conscious with it then again you have more opportunities to you know allow for more more agency on the players part next one modeling basically just use some restraint here don't model story only characters that only exist in cutscenes because that's a pretty poor use of

resources either try to figure out how those characters can be in the gameplay and you know take part in that world that allows the player to have unified agency or find other ways again for that story character human okay maybe they are calling you over a radio maybe they're emailing you reading emails is a really fun thing to do in games do comic book style cutscenes so that you can you know use a pretty cheap drawing of them as opposed to 3d but again think about how you know if your intent is this character says this don't just immediately assume okay then we got to build out the huge excel sheet of all the you know dependencies that go into creating a huge character think about clever ways to have people communicate and it doesn't have to be vo I'll talk about some examples of that in a little bit and animation pretty much hand-in-hand with modeling the less models that you have to animate in those scenes than the more animation you can do for just making a gameplay better which you know we make games so that's cool so when you look at all these individual individual elements you know try to use them separately and/or efficiently and ultimately use them in ways that give the player more agency but the key thing is this own your

choices like don't look at how you can be cheap and scramp and be like ah the animation doesn't have to be that good for the scene or you know I maybe we can get away without lip-syncing because players will definitely recognize if you're trying to do a cheap version of something that's done really well and like you know Call of Duty or some like really high polished high fidelity game they will recognize that and they will think you're cheap and they will know it so instead of doing that find a version of you know a cheaper storytelling method that you can own and and really make cool here's an example of that from infamous which is a this from the beginning of game so it's not really a spoiler but they basic at a really cool style for their cutscenes so I'll show that here while sliding into unconsciousness somehow I don't know hear the voices of the died thousands crushed by falling buildings burned and fires Trish lost her sister almost lost me Zeke was always there so I'm not sure

that I wake up outside the city foul party so they gave you a lot of information in that scene they established the timeline this is the beginning of the game the hero he's unconscious he's apparently been affected with some weird electrical powers there's people being killed and burned out in the city there's all these disasters going on the players got a girlfriend named Trish whose sister died the hero was almost died and he's gone on you know death's door and he has this loyal friend named Zeke who's sure that he's going to come back to life they got that across in like 15 seconds with 2d art really really stylish but more importantly they owned that style they said we're gonna do something that's cheaper the vo was completely isolated there was no 3d modeling there was no animation that it uh you know long list of stuff they isolated the vo use it as a voiceover used this really cool 2d hand-drawn style and when I saw that as a player when I popped that disc in I was like wow that's really neat that's interesting I really liked this game it did something different you know I'm saying like it they embraced it as

opposed to just trying to find a cheap way out so please keep that in mind because I'm not saying just like try to you know pinch those pennies I'm saying simply consider where you're you know development resources are going and if there's ways you can do stuff and really cheap but also really cool ways then go for it another game that did this was portal used a lot of those similar things I talked about the voice you know from the antagonist character simply comes over loudspeakers in the environment so they can very quickly write and record stuff and just play it to the player through a you know convention that's established in the world and they also have a lot of environmental storytelling where instead of having to create all these scenes animate them blah blah blah blah blah you come across the remnants of things that have happened in the past that are static scenes and it's actually more engaging for the player because you're trying to solve a mystery you're trying to puzzle together what's going on you know there's a little crack in the wall what's back there like it's actually engaging it's not you don't sit there thinking like man I really would have wish I'd seen the soldier kill that guy you're like wow what happened here you know it's it's actually cool it's it's it makes it more engaging but it's also very economical and that's just the

storytelling methods but another thing I want to get back to is that we've sort of left competence behind from that self-determination theory so I want to talk about that a little bit basically the gameplay of portal was defeating these really cool geographical puzzles you know like you're trying to figure out how do I get from one side to the other and you're always constantly thinking in terms of geometry geography and your own abilities and how you can defeat each of these test chambers and the story of the game is thinking about how you can use your abilities to escape this facility it's a macro version of what you're doing in every level of the game so the micro and the macro were unified what you were doing moment to moment second to second as a player was directly in line with your motivations as a character and those you know they never broke from first-person they never you know tried to inject story stuff that didn't fit with that motif and basically you felt like what I'm doing every second goes along with what's going on in the world and what my story is so a really nice way to allow the players competence the players skill as

they're playing through the game to contribute directly to the narrative another scene is the companion cube which if you haven't played you basically have this special cube that you've got you know the games all about taking these cubes and putting on different switches to make doors open and stuff like that and there's a particular level where you have this this cube that has a heart on it and the you know disembodied voice over the speaker's tells you it's your weighted companion cube what's this and so you go through the whole level and it's one of the longer more complex levels in the game and you grow that you create like an actual legitimate attachment to this box this with a heart on it like it there there's not that's it like there's you don't need a video that's that's the companion cube and at the end of the level there's a twist where the disembodied voice makes you kill your companion cube and it's the only way to proceed and like gamers like you know you're looking at like I can't mmm and it's a [ __ ] it's a box so but but it's really great because they

use really economical storytelling devices and you know it again a used the core verbs it's the player picking up putting down solving puzzles all of that stuff was completely unified and yet it was a really powerful moment now it's not a perfect example of a player driven story which I'll get back to that concept I promise it's not a perfect example of a player driven story because ultimately there was only one outcome but it does you know ask the question would it have been more expensive that much more expensive for them to allow for more possibilities in that story it really wouldn't because again because you know it's it's disembodied vo it's simple player verbs it's a static object it's not that I'm knocking valve for not doing that because that's portal is a beautiful game and every sense and systemic story just simply wasn't a priority for them on the project but it does demonstrate an interesting possibilities we could again it's a triple-a game by one of the best publishers in the industry or developers industry sorry and you know used some very simple devices to make a very cool scene happen so again keep that in mind there are ways to do this where you don't have to you know talk about

writing your little failed novel into a video game so again the interesting thing is that the confidence your players competence in portal was the story it was your ability carrying you through that narrative and so when you take that sort of story relevant competence and you combine it with agency an achievable level of fidelity like the stuff we talk about being more economical with you know the tools that you have available to you then you can start to create emergent story outcomes without a heavy content burden so let's talk about that connection just a little bit more game mechanics and the story they need to be implement game mechanics and character interactions need to be implemented as you know mechanic or sorry let me start there one more time because I can't read my slides game mechanics and story need to be communicating seamlessly and so you want to implement your story and character and actions as systems so the player you know generated story events and the computer generated story events occur at the same level the player should not distinguish a difference between what I

did and what the world did in any sort of way because at that point they're just looking at how the world works if there's no rift between the fidelity of the story and the fidelity of the gameplay then the player perceives those things at the same level and they become one experience so let's talk about some ways you can do that and some examples from games that have that have accomplished this one example is conversation systems and games if they have not only story utility but also you know bartering or gameplay utility and you know if social interaction is part of the game then that simply becomes something the player perceives as a system in the game and just one of the things I do so sometimes I talk to people because I want information sometimes I just want some you know knowledge about the world sometimes I'm trying to you know buy my way through a guard post and bribe this guard sometimes I'm buying something from someone but if you can get it to where all of the story and the gameplay are funneling through the same system and you should have many of these systems in your game but this is one example if that's all coming through one system the player simply sees it as this

is how the world that I'm in works and so they don't start to do you know distinguish between this is a story scene this is a gameplay scene and these things are you know at opposite ends of the spectrum another example these games that use sort of abstracted representations of story content and expose those elements as game systems so for example notes that you find in World of Warcraft when you loot a body that gives you a quest usually in that game you go talk to a character and a you know bubble comes up that describes the quest you hit except you've got it but every now and then you're out in the world and you kill a monster and you go to loot it which is something you do all the time it's just a game system it's a game mechanic and there's a note and you're like that looks curious and you open it the same way that you would open a lockbox or you know one of those pearls you find on the beach and stuff and it pops up the quest thing you're like wow I found this thing in this dudes pocket and whoa it's mysterious it's a quest I'll accept that and it goes in your quest log and all of a sudden you feel like I was out in the world and I did something and I picked something up using this system that I use all the time and found a little neat little story bit and now I'm on a new quest and it's a really interesting way

to sort of mix it up for players and also again integrate that story a little bit more into the gameplay through a simple existing mechanic another example of that is hacking in a game like Deus Ex players simply say you know if you invest in hacking you're like I can hack stuff sometimes I'm going to hack a security station to turn off a camera to make it easier to get into this you know guard outpost sometimes I'm going to hack an ATM to steal some money sometimes I'm going to hack someone's can pewter to read their email and that kind of runs the gamut of you know gameplay to story relevance when you read those emails you get insight into the world and it doesn't feel you know cheap you actually feel like you're invading you know their their privacy a little bit and getting but you know into the stories of the bad guys and it's also by the way a cheap way for text and writing to be isolated like we talked about in a way that allows the player to absorb information without again creating these super expensive cutscenes and whatnot so the player simply says I can hack stuff and i hack different things for different results but sometimes that story and sometimes that's gameplay and

they don't really perceive that difference that much because it's simply how the world works and I want to take a quick detour here because I'm talking a lot about systems and a lot about mechanics and a lot about systematizing things and all that stuff and I want to be very clear that I'm not trying to make everything super bland and make everything just boil down to ones and zeroes and say that we shouldn't be creating really awesome interesting fictional worlds I love that stuff I really think we definitely should be creating those worlds we should create fascinating worlds with vibrant characters because that's where players want to go they want to step into a scene like that and find out what's around the corner this isn't about removing fiction or flavor or personality from your games this is simply about removing a really prescriptive linear narrative from your game so you want to create worlds that are really interesting where the player wants to interact with different people and different elements and tell his own story and explore and all that stuff you want to create all that stuff it's just about not necessarily making it a completely linear narrative within that world so just want to make sure I was

clear that I'm not saying just make everything bland and make it all just you know these little 16-bit indie games so let's look at a couple games that have actually expressed key story moments through mechanics and the first one I was just talking about I'll talk about Deus Ex and this is the scene where you find Paul Denton back of the apartment he's your brother and you're at his apartment and you're getting ready to get raided by the bad guys and so you walk up to him you're like hey we got to go and then the bad guys beat on the door and they're like come out come out and you're like [ __ ] man we got a roll and he says oh I'm hurt I can't make it you say I can't just leave you here and he goes run don't worry about me don't be a fool just go and then the guys break in and there's a firefight and there's Paul he gets up and he's fight and you have a choice am I gonna stay in fight with my brother or am I gonna bail cuz he said get out of here save yourself that's a heroic thing for him to say what do you do so and you know one version of this you head out the window like a coward and in the in the next level you find his dead body because you left him to die you left him to his fate you know like crap when I made that decision which wasn't you know

a press X or Y to do whatever it was a you know using the verbs of the game movement combat conversation when you made that decision those results came out again in the game you found that body through exploration but let's roll back the clock a little bit back to that scene in the apartment what if you did fight your way out with them and you go out in the hallway and you're brave and you stand beside your brother and you kill everybody and you know it's a very heroic moment you fight your way out to lobby and you guys survive in the next level in the same spot you find him alive you're like wow that's awesome I made a choice as a player and it played out in the game and more importantly that choice was expressed seamlessly through mechanics it wasn't again like a big choose you know X or Y to make a decision or a conversation tree or whatever you've got these systems like combat and navigation and conversation and these data links that you know people will talk to you from and you simply took in your environment and made a call right there in a very heat of the moment you know decision and you lived with it even you know the results of that decision were fed back to you

through those same means you've got data links about you know where your brother was you even discovered his fate either a dead or alive by exploring hostile territory and playing the game and you came across it in one of the rooms that you hacked your way into so it's all very unified ultimately though it wasn't again a example of a true player driven story because it in the game it was a sort of short loop it was mostly cosmetic I didn't change the narrative for the you know long haul of the game and didn't meaningfully open up new branches or anything like that so it's not a perfect example of a true player driven story but it does show that core mechanics can let players you know express intent seamlessly because Paul was just another guy fighting in that firefight with you and you just followed him and stayed with them and that's how you made your decision or not Nick's example want to talk about is Red Dead Redemption this is just a huge spoiler so if you haven't played this game you know beware but despite the fact that you know in traditional rock star style Red Dead is a very very sort of cutscene heavy dialogue heavy character story heavy

game it had some very very powerful moments that were expressed through mechanics if you played the game you remember riding into Mexico you know you're riding through the desert on your horse like you always do or when you're training your son to hunt you're going out and doing the same hunting verbs you did as a player and when you see him do it it's like really touching because you feel like you're actually teaching him something and one example of this I really want to dig into is the Deadeye mechanic which is basically it's bullet time it's a way that you know as a player you can initiate a mode where it goes in slo-mo and you can tag different you know three or four maybe even five if you're really good guys and then when the slo-mo releases you boom boom boom shoot them down you know like a you know Wild West kind of kind of gunfight so here's an example of the Deadeye mechanic experienced players can place the shots individually to devastating effect so that's what the Deadeye mechanic is and now we're going to look at the endgame cutscene at this point John Marcin who's our hero has sent his wife

and kid off to safety and he set kind of at his own personal Waterloo he's surrounded by federal agencies in his barn and it's come to you know dust showdown in the game so here's the last scene of this part of the game

now that's 90% cutscene and 10% gameplay but though that 10% of gameplay was brilliant because as you play through the game you've probably gone into Deadeye hundreds of times and you knew instinctively what the system did what it was capable of and what the outcomes would be you knew that you could if you're really good maybe you know peel off like five guys before they got to you so when you stepped out there and the game forced you into Deadeye and you're surrounded by 20 people you panicked yourself not for him yourself because you identified so closely with that viewpoint and with what was happening right there and you said oh my god my competence as a player this isn't enough I'm doomed I'm dead oh [ __ ] and that all went to your head you know and it's in a flash and you realized viscerally in a way that really identified with that player exactly what was going to happen and you knew it and they you know they sold that sense of despair and finality through using that mechanic better than any cutscene could

have you know the rest of that cutscene looks great it was cool and it's a wonderful thing to watch but inserting that Deadeye mechanic into the middle of it made it so powerful so yeah you just felt like I am doomed with him you felt like you were gonna lose that not watch him lose it so it's a very very powerful example especially if you played the game up to that point of how mechanics can be used to really heighten the emotional impact of a story moment even if it is a scripted story moment like that so to wrap up the discussion of agency and fidelity and competence which we've been talking about for a while I want to talk about a quote from my friend JP lebreton who was a level designer in Bioshock he was a lead level designer on Bioshock 2 and in general is one of the smartest dudes you'll ever meet talking about games and this is from an article he wrote on Rock Paper Shotgun about Deus Ex Oh sort of like a little retroactively retrospective series they did last year and the quote is this the capitalized word that comes to me now is fidelity I ponder how incredibly difficult it would be to make a game like Deus Ex for a major publisher today reasonably

advanced for 2000 today it's clear DX's simple environments and primitive people enabled both its scope and its depth our standards have risen in some ways but are they unequivocally the right ways I love that I'm in love with that quote like I want to kiss him on the mouth every time I read that because you know when you look back at Deus Ex now people joke oh yeah the characters look terrible and the voice acting was actually kind of bad but people are joking like it's sort of like you laugh about a little bit but like that doesn't diminish the experience in any way so so think about that and you know when you're building games don't just assume that we have to do things in the fanciest way possible and consider how we can give players more agency and let them be more expressive and use our you know abilities in smarter ways so we talked about giving the player unified agency we've talked about trying to find a manageable level of fidelity by using those elements you know in in more intelligent ways more efficient ways that are still stylish and cool and we've also talked about you know how the players confidence can contribute to stories but that only covers the

mechanics half of this discussion how are we going to create actual stories out of those sort of lessons we've learned as developers there we haven't addressed relatedness yet so let's come back to our friend here which again is the desire to interact with or connect to or develop relationships with other people if we just have unified agency and a competence that contributes to the narrative we've likely created a new problem that I think of as system soup which is basically saying that like yeah this games really reactive the player can do a whole bunch of stuff but it's just this series of flat interactions that have no resolution it's just a bunch of just you know a moment-to-moment type stuff that over eight hours doesn't amount to anything it's just a little it's a toy box which is fine but you know good stories come from peaks and valleys and relationships that resolve over time and increasing tension and conflict and all that you know great stuff that you can look at in any sort of screenwriting book or whatever so how do we how do we solve that how do we go from the system soup into allowing the system's we've created to actually create a narrative that

mean something overtime we have to look at the chaos that we've created with these uncontrolled systems and figure out how to bring order from that chaos how to understand what's there but but what kind of order are we looking for what has meaning the game that you're making needs to understand and respond to key interactions and comprehend meaning it needs to you know understand the times when events culminate in turning points that resonate with the players the other things like you know in a traditional story the death of a lover or parting with a friend leaving home for the first time having your life saved you know all the major moments you know finally having that big conflict with your mortal enemy how do we do that well first off the game has to listen to what the players doing and figure out what the player's actions means that's step one which is basically discerning meeting and I'll use a cheesy little graph here to talk about sort of understanding the qualitative value and quantitative impact of a given gameplay interaction in a game so here's a graph very simple good on the right evil on

the left and amplitude which is basically the impact of the event so let's put some points on here just to demonstrate what we can you know try to get from a series of interactions first giving a homeless man food it's a nice thing to do it's like a three but it's a homeless dude he's probably not super important in the story so it's only a two on the amplitude scale snubbing the mayor at a party not really a big deal it's not super you know you didn't murder the guy but he's also an important guy so still a 5 on the amplitude scale cuz he's gonna remember that so that has a different sort of quantitative value killing a dictator that's pretty sweet because he was oppressing a whole nation of people and you've you know freed them from oppression and it's you know really big deal because it affects not only you in the story but also you know a whole nation so that's a pretty sweet like good big event opposite in the spectrum killing your best friend terrible thing to do it's evil to kill someone and it's also super bad because you know we one would assume that your best friend that's relationship that's been built up over 10 20 30 however many years so

basically if you have a game that can that can understand these individual events and understand what they mean and understand the value and the amplitude of these events how do we have that have an effect over time and basically what we have to do is take those assigned values those events that the game can understand and apply them to long-term relationships and you know allow series of events to develop an understanding of a relationship and basically a database somewhere for example you know if you do a lot of nice things to another character in a game healing them or join them in a firefight or giving them food or whatever that could develop over time into a friendship and then once the game understands those relationships and understands sort of that that relationship database that you're building as a player with your actions not what the story is defined for you but you you have expressed you know through your intent as a player through these systems you can the game can start to react in proportion to the strength of those relationships so what's an example of a game that understands the

meaning of events over time is able to create gameplay out of those player created relationships and there's actually a lot of really good examples of this this is civilization 5 but it's probably true of most strategy games and basically this is actually a solved problem it's pretty fundamental to strategy games that all of the entities be that players Ori eyes have all of the verbs so there's our unified agency again let's not forget that and they all have the same abilities and they track relationships over time and let those relationships feed into decisions so attack means oh my god now we've gone hostile you know that would be sort of you know up and on the left on our chart back there and you know that becomes a war and maybe you sign a peace treaty but it's tenuous because you know that that war is still lingering that hasn't yes still in the database somewhere or an alliance or you know factions all that stuff that's a big part of strategy games now it's not terribly emotionally compelling because strategy games are generally played you know from isometric view and you're not relating two characters on a you know you know daily basis or a moment-to-moment basis and

there's a lot of exposed math and so they're not really making it into an emotional state of affairs but that's really a matter of presentation that's not saying that you can't do this sort of relationship tracking under the hood so it's worth asking you know how could that proven backbone of relationship tracking be ported to a game with more traditional characters and subject matter and when the relationship is there characters in the story should be able to take advantage of it and express what's going on behind the scenes and you know our human way and this is heavily connected to that level of manageable fidelity we talked about before the challenge is deciding you know how to reasonably feedback these moments and you know that is a big challenge with human characters hopefully some of the techniques we talked about can get you a leg up there in terms of isolating your vo or finding a really cool storytelling style that isn't as expensive but one approach is to basically you know you know what the verbs are in your game you know what the player can do you know what the big moments are gonna be that's gonna be different for every game but you understand what the players capabilities are because you're giving him those verbs so that probably means that you can understand what some of the

biggest things that he could do is and so let's say you were to take your top 5 events that the player could do that you know you under would understand to have big impact and just create a suite of reactions kind of like we talked about before of like happy mad angry surprised confused stuff like that and basically have a suite of reactions expressed however you know make sense in your game that are waiting for the players inputs this is not branching but it's more like a switch board where the game is saying they're listening and they're like okay player did this connect it to this one player did this connected to this one and basically listening for the players doing listen for the players intent and then connecting it to the right response from the game and if you have you know that suite of reactions you know on cue queued up ready to go waiting for the player to poke you know the systems that's significantly different than story branching because story branching is taking a series of predetermined events and giving the player finite choice whereas if the game is listening and waiting to react and feedback then you know that that is allowing a lot more expressivity on the players part and again when we go back to that relationship tracking we talked about

you know you can understand if it you know like if it's the homeless guy versus the dictator or your best friend you can understand the amplitude with which to feedback you know so you could have happy but doesn't really care happy ecstatic or angry but you know there's kind of miffed versus oh my god I'm going to kill your whole family like you could have degrees of you know those reactions and basically just have those sitting and hopper waiting you know for the for the player to poke the system and so you can feed it back appropriately that's the beauty of agency and emergence right and if the system has you know a reaction at the ready then if we use that kind of unified for the we talked about so for example a series in Deus Ex of data links that are waiting for one of maybe 10 things the player could do you know ultimately you're gonna have to pick a finite list so at least try to you know take your best guess but then you can kind of combine that robust relationship tracking that is a solved problem again and the story delivery methods that you know resonate with the player and again allow for those emergent outcomes so track you know tracking and learning that is a solved problem we just have to apply these known solutions to you know new

territory in terms of presentation and making it more human if you are making a character about human let's not make too many assumptions but how does that create a narrative is that all it takes and know I think there's a final piece left because that at least lets us understand what the player has placed value in and respond to actions related to that but stories still need structure they need a beginning and milling a beginning and a middle and an end and they need form so let's take a look at a really really simple example of this everybody recognizes this is a simple three act structure and what that is is basically just time and tension over time dramatic tension rises and falls and like any good story you basically you know have moments where a big relationships resolve and you have falling action to give the audience a break and then you build up the tension over time and you have your climax at the end and then you quickly fall off and and finish the story that's pretty standard this is a perfectly good example to work with so if you have you know a game that can track the players actions and understand how those actions

create relationships and know the kind of timeline that we want to start feeding those relationships back on and you know seeding events into the system then how does the game make that happen and to do that you have to create moments you have to understand enough about the player that you can force those issues an example of this is let's look at the movie Jaws this should be pretty familiar to everybody you've got your characters you've got chief Brody you've got Quint and you've got this big shark out in the ocean that's eaten people and you know so these guys go out on a boat and they're gonna hunt for this shark and they have some initial encounters that are scary but don't resolve that's a little spike and then it falls back down and then you start getting into the the heavy stuff at the end where Quint just eats it or gets eaten I guess and and then of course the final showdown between Brody and the shark you basically want to you know and this when you're talking bout creating moments you want to take that time line that you agree that your story's going to occur and simply try to inject major moments at appropriate times and this is not to say that you pick what those moments are in fact you definitely shouldn't what

you should do is basically again peek into those relationships that the player has invested in over time and say hey if this is the end of you know this is in act 3 this is our big shebang let's pick you know the biggest relationship the players got and find like the most opposite thing we could do or a big twist or whatever like you can actually quantify this stuff mathematically and say we want a big bang let's pick one of those big relationships and do something interesting with it again based off those verbs that the player has so it's going to be different for every player and you probably don't want to have an exact schedule on your you know timeline of when these events happen probably build some variants in so it's not the same you know and and repetitive sort of chronologically as the player replaced the game but in general you can have an understanding of what kind of Ark resonates with players and resonates with audiences without necessarily mandating exactly what those moments are and the key thing is when you do inject those moments into the game when you do say hey it's time for a big event that's the best time to listen and build your relationship data because you know when the players under pressure and reacting to extreme circumstances you're gonna find out a lot about who that player is and where their allegiances lie do they

fight with their friend do they run do they turn on somebody you know all those kind of things so that's a good time to listen so you sort of are benefitting yourself and helping to feed back into that database you know by by injecting these big moments into games one example of those big moments I'll talk about is actually some I know pretty well because it's Bioshock 2 a game I worked on and the story of the game revolved around the player who was a Big Daddy and his little sister named Eleanor and her mother dr. Sophia lamb is kind of a triangle they were kind of fighting over Eleanor and Big Daddies and little sisters also had a mechanical relationship in the game Big Daddies could adopt little sisters there were more than one in the city and you could pick them up and you could save them you could kill them you could exploit them to try to you know gather resources for your own powerup and so it was sort of a relationship that was not only narrative but also mechanical in the game and then you had Big Sisters which was the sort of larger character there who were little sisters who had grown up and in Bioshock 2 they

were lamb the enemies personal sort of assassin force or personal protection force and so every now and then Big Sisters would come attack you and this is you know really an example of how game systems and story systems were very closely tied for example how you dealt with the little sisters over the course of the game and gameplay defined what story outcomes you got at the end of the game you know what ending you got so it's basic example of the story and the theme and the relationships and you know the gameplay very closely tied together now how do we use that to create moments like we were just talking about what we were doing under the hood and was every time you dealt with a little sister we had a point value for that if you ignored them that was zero if you killed them that was I don't remember exactly there's like a five if you saved them that's a different number and if you exploit them that's a different number so we sort of had put a monitor not monetary but numerical value on how you interacted with those in game play and then we had separately a schedule where we said hey we want to have some sweet boss fights with these big sister characters who are you know the most

fearsome you know combatants in the game and they are sent after you by Sophia lamb who cares about the little sisters that you're interacting with so there's a story and a gameplay connection there and those fights happened not on a story schedule it's not like we build a bunch of battle arenas and said at this point you know this thing happens in the story and you go in and boom you know we did that like for the intro fight because you have to introduce mechanics but over the you know meat you know meat of the game the bread and butter it was all systemic and so we basically had this schedule and we said whenever the Thresh you know whenever the player reaches a threshold and dealing with little sisters based on how he's doing it so it's gonna be different for every player because some players ignore them some players kill them all some players save them all whatever any combination of that math once it reaches a certain threshold you know say 10 points or whatever that was we'll send a big sister after the player and we actually did a lot of work on AI side to make sure the big sisters could fight you anywhere it wasn't like there were certain arenas or anything else like that no matter where you were and what you were doing you could be in the middle of another boss fight it didn't matter it was purely systemic so we made it so that this event could happen at

any time and so as the player started defining his relationship with those stories / gameplay characters those characters you know the big sisters with a deep connection to the story and to the theme interacted with the player based on the player's actions over time in a way that no designer ever authored or set up so over the course of the game we listen to how the player was interacting with these we agreed on this is about how often we want these to happen if you're doing you know these different values and we sort of just took our hands off the system and said hey let's let the players decide when these things happen as with most examples here it's not a true player driven story example because you know we didn't take it all the way if you saved all the little sisters for example you couldn't cause the big sisters to revolt against lamb or anything it wasn't like a full ecosystem where we closed the loop but it still was an example of you know taking those sort of tracking and learning and discerning methods that are found in strategy games and applying them to a more sort of emotional first-person type game more traditional triple-a game so that said I think that's seeding the system once we've done all that under

the hood work and and trying to create those moments actually kind of is the final piece of the puzzle to creating these and we are almost out of time so I'm gonna do a really quick recap game stories aren't taking advantage of interactivity we're copying other mediums are telling linear stories that players and our audience are not contributing to we should be creating stories in which the player makes influential decisions that create unique narratives that aren't prescribed by a designer and if we use the interactivity that's unique to our medium and look at what people want in their lives and apply those desires to our goal then we can start letting players affect every part of the world's that we're building for them we've got to give up this arms race of fidelity that's lemming our ability so badly and instead look at how we can use the tools at our disposal disposal in smarter more efficient ways that allow us to give our players more agency and ownership in the worlds we're creating and if we own our choices and create systems that allow our gameplay to communicate seamlessly with our narratives then we can start to understand what the player's actions mean and from that data we can build

relationships and those are relationships that we can manipulate in a way that forms a cohesive narrative that's full of moments that means something to our players based on their own choices and their actions and if we can do those things and we can create stories that are possible only in our medium and players will make those stories their own so if we as developers can get out of our own way and create worlds in which we're asking our players to be the authors then we really do have a chance to create meaningful player driven stories thank you very much you