Starting Off Right - How the First Five Minutes Draw Players In - Extra Credits

Hello again. Please join me in welcoming back our old pal, Miel who will be rocking the tablet for us today. In the world of AAA games and really most other games too at this point, it's become common wisdom that your game lives or dies based on the first 5 minutes. These first 5 minutes set the tone for the rest of the game. They determine whether you forge ahead excited to play whatever comes next or if you simply let the game languish in your Steam library next to all those other titles that you'll get to someday. These first 5 minutes set up expectations for reviewers and often color how we see the experience as a whole. If we're biased in favor of something because of a strong intro, we actually see the whole experience in a better light. We end up giving it the benefit of the doubt based on that first impression. So, how do you create an intro that really draws people in? Well, there are basically three ways most games do it. Either they sell you on the narrative, they hook you with the mechanics, or they wow you with spectacle. So, let's start off talking about narrative, and I'm using the term

here very loosely. Basically, to cover anything you experience rather than do. It can mean the story that you're going to be playing through, the world you'll be playing in, or maybe the tone of the piece. One of the most commonly used and very powerful narrative hooks is the element of mystery. It works especially well in games as it's inherently interactive. Something mysterious calls on you to explore or uncover. It requires interaction rather than just observation. So, you'll find that as an interactive medium, mystery is one of the most common tools games use to hook you. Think back to those games you've played where the narrative elements of the intro really gripped you. Usually, there's something odd, unusual, or out of place. Something to make you wonder what's going on or think maybe there's something more happening here. Examples like Shadow of the Colossus or Silent Hill 2 are obvious, but look at the juxtaposition of the outside of Rapture and the inside. Or heck, look at the car sequence in the first Modern Warfare. Bastion, Indigo Prophecy, Final Fantasy X, Braid, Assassin's Creed, Ico, Journey. I could do this all day, but you get the point. Lots of great games suck you in with something mysterious because human curiosity is such a powerful thing. In

fact, it's one of the reasons that the Amnesia trope is so common. It's pretty easy to create a mysterious situation if the player doesn't even know who they are. Surprisingly, on the flip side, trying to do an intro that really sells the player on the characters is remarkably difficult. It's something I often see young designers who have a desire to deliver narrative experience try to do, but it's really tough to put enough characterization into the first few minutes without bogging down the experience. Unless you have someone like the narrator in Bastion whose voice performance alone makes us curious about the character, it's very tough to grab the player's attention with characters alone. On the other hand, selling the world the player will be stepping into is also a common narrative hook. If you've ever played a game and known after only a few minutes that this world is a place that you want to spend time in, they've successfully sold you on the narrative in the intro. For James, Dark Souls and Demon's Souls knocked it out of the park on this front, but he often finds that in post-apocalyptia or grim cyberpunk futures. The key here is to really understand what's compelling about your world and not to hold back. Do you have one vista or set piece that can perfectly encapsulate just why your world is such an amazing place to be? Don't be afraid to use that up front. Dark Souls and Demon's Souls sold the

loneliness of that world from the moment you took your first step. Okay, so that's narrative. Now let's talk mechanics. Again, I'm using this term very loosely here to mean anything you do rather than simply experience. This can be showing you an awesome new gameplay feature or letting you see the incredible feats you'll get to perform. Symphony of the Night's a great example of this as the designers understood exactly what players wanted out of their game and used the intro to let them know boy, are they going to get what they came for. You want to fight Dracula? Got you covered. You want to be an indomitable monster hunting badass? Check. You want to tear through creepy critters while piling up loot? Done and done. The whole sequence from Richter to fighting Death is simply there to show you how cool the game's going to get so you don't quit during the early grind. Now this may not have affected you consciously, but try to imagine if Symphony of the Night didn't have that intro and just began with a level one Alucard at the castle's front gates. You see what I mean? The key here is to really try to drill down and understand why a player would want to play your game, and then deliver that in the most highly concentrated, super saturated experience you possibly can. The first God of War is still one of the best examples of this. The ship, the Hydra

fight, that was awesome. They showed you exactly what you were going to get to do in this game, and exactly why it was cool in the first 5 minutes of play. Even more impressive, they did it without using any contrivances like taking away your powers the way Symphony does. Remember when we talked about tutorials way back when and how you shouldn't front load your tutorial, that you should space it out across your game as needed, hopefully without the player even noticing. Part of the reason for that is that you don't want to kill the pacing in your intro. What makes the God of War 1 introduction so incredible from a design perspective is that they found a way to simplify it so that for 5 minutes you could feel like the God of War without even knowing all the commands and abilities that'll keep you feeling like a badass for the rest of the game. For 5 minutes they were able to distill the essence of God of War into something totally approachable for a new player. This is what you want for a mechanics based intro. And that brings us to the final method, spectacle. Simply put, spectacle is anything that makes you say, "Whoa." In general, these introductions tend to be the type that hold up the least over time as they tended to be a little more dependent on cutting edge technology, but that doesn't mean that it can't do a phenomenal job of getting our attention

at the time. Remember the way Final Fantasy VII started with that big pre-rendered cutscene that blends right into your characters hopping off the train? That was an amazing spectacle at the time. Today, not as much. Spectacle can be anything we find spectacular in real life. Cascading explosions, gargantuan creatures, monumental buildings, grand armies, or sweeping beasts, or it could just be something completely novel. Sometimes this novelty can be found in the details or the graphics. Remember the way the fire and the water looked after the plane crash at the beginning of BioShock? That was pretty incredible at the time. Sometimes spectacular novelty can be found in a system like watching your custom creatures come to life in Spore. And sometimes it can just be something so gonzo and out there that it defies description, like the many art styles of El Shaddai. So, now that we've gone over each type of intro and what makes them effective, I'd like to talk about a particularly handy tool for your intro building arsenal, in medias res. We've discussed this storytelling technique before. It means in the middle of, and it's traditionally used to describe anytime you're thrown into the middle of a story, rather than at the beginning. The most routine example is when game starts you in the middle of the story

they aim to tell, and then flash back to previous events. Used to great effect in The Usual Suspects, and also seen in Spec Ops: The Line or God of War, which itself borrows from history's most famous example, The Odyssey. But in medias res can also describe anytime you're thrown into a story already in progress, like in Star Wars or Gears of War. Perhaps gaming's greatest example of this would be Final Fantasy Tactics. The entire game is framed in a form of in medias res as the fictional historian Al-Ishtam J. Dirai attempts to uncover a huge historical cover-up by the church. And then, as they start actually telling you the tale of those events, they throw you into another layer of in medias res with the attack on the temple, followed by flashbacks to earlier events. The advantage to in medias res is that it tosses you right into the action. There's no build-up or prologue, it just jumps right to the good bit. What makes this especially powerful for games is that jumping into the middle means we get right to the doing. It allows us to skip all the exposition that would normally come before. It also lets us hop right to a bit that's going to be exciting, where the characters are going to be powerful and are already busy doing the things that really show off why the game's worth playing. This makes it fantastic for a mechanics intro, and

often lets us get straight to spectacle as well. But in medias res is also inherently mysterious. By definition, the player doesn't fully understand the situation they've been thrown into. So, in the right hands, this can be a powerful tool to introduce your narrative as well. Now, before we wrap up, there's a few last things worth mentioning. First, intros are by no means limited to just one method of getting your attention. In fact, the best often deliver on at least two of the three we mentioned. Second, I've started to notice a trend where games sandwich in back-to-back intros, using a series of what I'd consider intro sequences to highlight each of these different features. BioShock had three intros. Modern Warfare had at least two. Fallout 3 had the section inside the vault, and then that first destroyed area you wander into, which is the intro to the world. I'll confess this isn't something I would have ever thought of doing, but it's hard to argue with the results. So long as you've got a game with the meat to back it up, putting in a few hooks seems pretty effective. So, yeah, I think that's enough about the first 5 minutes. I'll see you guys next week.