The Identity Bubble - A Design Approach to Character and Story Development

[Music] so i'm mateus voice and I'm a liaison at LucasArts I'm not in visceral games anymore as you might have seen in the in the schedule so I'm currently working on an unannounced game at LucasArts with Clint Hocking and Kent Hudson but obviously I can't talk about that yet so these are some other games I did work on I really want to thank all of you guys coming to this talk on a Friday morning because fight among it warning at GDC usually feels like you know Saturday or Sunday morning during regular times it's I figure the only way we can really deal with this is to just [ __ ] own it right acknowledge the fact our mental state is probably like that of a six-year-old right now and I'll pretend it's Saturday morning to me that means watching Saturday morning cartoons right maybe we can do this why people are still filing in and getting seated so grab some breakfast and actually do if a cartoon here that I want to watch while everybody's piling in see if this works

no sound but hey my Pony Express staff you'll ruin my pony fresh dancer not to mention five years of therapy get out of my room geez what a grump he should really try to find some outlet for those negative feelings it looks like all the inks disappeared now get out of here hey you fixed it I

guess I forgive you now sometimes I do stupid stuff and I don't even know why as if my body were being controlled by some demented sadistic puppet master well we all feel that way sometime already so this talk is called the identity bubble and I build it as a design approach to character and story development on a deeper level it's actually about what you just saw in a video it's about identity concepts and games understanding them and using them to full effect and more specifically to talk about motivation and how writing for games is different from writing for other media and I figured I could have felt slide after slide with examples of bad game writing bad game identity in fact I did that at one point but I realized that really only have to give you one example and that's from a game that I worked on like four years ago which was layer so a layer had this huge disconnect between the player and the player character as I was playing the game I didn't believe while in the mission I didn't believe in the reasons

why I was doing things and it culminated in this mission I think somewhere halfway in the game were your bomb being the supposedly evil city and the player character that you advertise go native of Gaston he's totally into it except as the player I've already realized that's exactly the wrong thing to do those kind guys aren't evil at all and that mission felt completely flat so this is some more personal talk because ever since layer I've been looking for help in this area and I think the problem we have in this industry is that we don't even seem to be able to agree on what the actual problem is right or so what I've come to realize or think is that it's not a singular problem there's actually two distinctly different approaches to character creation and both have their own philosophical baggage attached they don't have their own ideologies which makes it kind of difficult to talk about the subject right because it's kind of divisive I'm probably gonna split the room right down half the male half whatever you know I'm gonna split the room right down the middle because you know where every fallout it's a final fantasy whatever [ __ ]

number they're up to for every portal there's an uncharted - all right in both cases there's very very different approaches to player identity so what I'm going to try to do here is dig up the commonalities like I know if the foundation that these games are based on and try to reconcile those different identity approaches into something that hopefully we can use as a framework so I'm going to do this in five parts in part 1 I'm going to establish the net identity range it's going to be the square that captures both extremes of how we may choose to author play identity and part two is going to look at double consciousness understanding it and seeing why it makes writing for games different from other media and then hopefully using that knowledge to create some good player identity and that's what part three is going to be about I have three specific examples kind of showing you how we can use those lessons and then part four which is actually wedged into part 3 because it kind of flows in there it's about mostly enforcement what it means and how we can use it to make better stories then part five is going to be takeaway and we're going to see if we can learn some

lessons from all of this so we're going to talk I want to start by talking about identity approaches and to do that we should talk about avatars so the thing we all know that we use avatars to enter game world right and it's usually an abstract concept but Ultima the beauty of Ultima was that it's actually an awesome example of exactly how the school of thought looks at the player avatar relationship right boots of play has a definition for this and it describes the ever Chinese identity approach as quote a puppet an object for the player to manipulate according to the rules of the game I think we all easily understand what that means we treat the Avatar as a lifeless puppet as our extension into the world and then we project ourselves onto this puppet puppet doesn't have any character traits or opinions of its own it's literally that of the player so this analogy works really good for games with weakly defined characters all right and usually these games put a really high premium on high agency and on the player story so in my identity range I'm going to put it

on the left side right over there and while it is a very common approach to play identity especially early on there is this doesn't tell the whole story right especially recently there's this exactly opposite approach where we use strongly characterized fully fleshed-out avatars who have their own motivation and the own backstory but Nathan Drake right I mean he's not really a puppet yes Abby so often I play him but he talks he sets directions he had some cutscenes he goes up to the girl a lot of stuff that I have the best the player don't actually effect so that's a completely different approach to authoring player identity and we need to understand that one as well so great metaphor I have found for this approach comes from Nick Montfort and its fullness met from this essay reading the player character and it was published in this book second person so what Nick Montfort is saying is that the player is steering the avatar like quote a sort of vehicle from which the world can be seen and otherwise experience this character both constrains us we have to remain in the vehicle and also opens our possibilities we can use the

vehicle to get around and even affect changes in the world so what I love about this analogy is that it completely visualizes how an active cinematic experience like inshallah to works alright I'm sure the two is very strongly structured it's locking a play into this very specific story progression so if you visualize this structure as a road network which is connected by tunnels which of course represents the story cutscenes in a structural points that structure the experience we can see that we're driving Nathan dragged across the road right that's him driving right there and it shows us that there is some choice and expression that we have to in play but it also shows us the limitations all right we cannot drive off the map and whatever our can we choose to and our progression is predetermined it's always gated by these tunnels which connect each piece of the road so in our identity range we're going to put vehicles on the opposite opposite opposite side right here and I think these are two really good cornerstones to anchor our spectrum so regardless of how we look at it if it's the player exerting as well on a puppet or it's a player driving a vehicle to an experience the one thing

we have to always keep in mind is the player and avatar always remain separate entities this is something that rules of play calls double consciousness it's this idea that players even when I fully immerse in an experience are always aware of the fact that they're playing a game and then in playing a character they're always manipulating an artificial construct what's interesting about this is that the player himself establishes this double consciousness right because he makes the choice to enter the magic Circle off the game he chooses to push a site part of his identity that were prevent him from enjoying or acting appropriately within the game so in a way the player willingly turns himself into schitzophrenic and he willingly submits himself to all these different voices which different points of views and different agendas which are all whispering inside his head so this is probably the key to this topic as game writers and game designers we need to understand our consciousness and this knowledge is out there it's in multiple books it's a multiple GDC talks the reason I think what we still don't really seem to have an institutionalized knowledge in this industry is because

it's a little bit difficult to understand because double consciousness is multi-layered it's kind of like a dream within a dream within a dream and even in this lecture we have to drill down into the concept not once but twice so if we take deeper into double consciousness at once we get to Gary fine and the book shared fantasy so this was a book that was written I think even in the 70s it's about real-life tabletop RPG groups but it applies to digital games as well and can we find splits double consciousness well the chronology is wrong here but we can say he splits double consciousness into three parts of identity the players experience when they're playing a game so we have the character this is the fictional character embodied by the player you know Olga the dwarf or whoever he chooses to play then we have the player so this is the player himself acting within and exploring the framework and the rules of the games like rolling dice and you know actually understanding the rules and using them then we also have the person and this is the player as a person with life demands which which we

push aside while we're playing right we're trying to immerse yourself in a girl a talk or whatever but they're never forgotten because if I have to leave at 6 p.m. and have to catch a train that's always going to be somewhere on the back of my conscious so let's this inherent ambiguity here right on the one hand we have the player actual the way we usually talk about the player and what he does but you also have this identity frame player so what I'm going to try to do for the rest of this talk to avoid ambiguity is to what call Gary finds identity partner player and whenever I'm talking about the player actual I'm gonna try to call him gamer so we have a distinction right there let's see how well I because there was totally in going in me as well like saying player so in psychology I guess we call these frames it's the character frame the player frame and the person claimed and these are those suits of wynia induced voices that was talking about which are whispering to the player inside his head all right these are voices they want to be satisfied they have their own goals they have their own motivation and if you want to know how to motivate somebody hard to keep them satisfied we

need to know what defines them right how we actually hook into them so this is where we drilled one level deeper into double consciousness and where it gets a little bit weird doesn't get weird because of this guy this is Harvey Smith he's the co creative director at Arkane studios in Austin and last year had the good fortune of doing a lecture on environmental storytelling with him but before that 2006 I believe Harvey did a talk called the imago effect but she loved a lot of material so far actually has been based on I can open up my eye to all of that so on this talk Harvey psychoanalyzed Gary finds identity claims and he came up with a more detailed list we could call these frames as well because it was all incredibly fractal but then we would have frames inside frames so what I'm going to try to do is call Harvey's list fragments so these are Harvey's identity fragments and you can see him on the screen right here so if we take this list we just slightly adjusted we can map Harvey's identity frames back onto finds identity hobbies identity fragment and we can map

them back onto a finds identity frames and we come up with something like this maybe where we have the character which is the fictional protagonist of the game and he might be based on a literary pop of mythic archetype then we have the play and this is the play himself solving problems and completing tasks so this talks about moment to moment game player I'd really type motivational Loops pure games pretty much the reason why we start playing them and we have to play with a sense of skill level and reputation and I'm using this to kind of map his sense of mastery and his progress as he's going through the game kind of tracking how far along we are in the entire game and then we have the player who just brings primal emotions like fear anger and various other things into the experience so character and player exist within the magic circle of the game right when we're playing the game this is that needs to be there then we also have the person who usually exists outside magic circle so we have to we have the person as a player with a sense of skill level and reputation but I don't want to talk too much about that we're gonna

ignore that one but we do have the person who has a perceived sense of idealized self all right we all like to see ourselves in a certain way we all aspire to be somebody so this is who we want to be or how we think other people perceive us and of course we do have the self as a person with life demands who has to catch the bus at 6:00 or various other things that just define our life so we're going to ignore the person frame for the time being all right I mean this is double consciousness deconstructed all right this is your player when he's playing the game but because the person exists outside the magic circle and it's gonna make it a little more difficult to figure out the concept and talk about them I'm just gonna forget about them for the time being so the concept behind the identity bubble is just reconciling those identity fragments and this idea that we can imagine identity in games as a bubble in which character and player followed along and identity doing place maintained or when the character and the player for him Swift in the same direction right but as soon as one of them lags behind or starts floating in a completely different direction the bubble pops and identity is lost so

what's important to me is that this identity bubble needs to be maintained because we have to do that both doing one time right we have to keep reinforcing identity as we're playing but this also includes development I mean to me writing for games means cooperation between writer and designer for the entire duration of development we can actually see that right here in the bubble because we have a representation for both the writer right he's down there caring about the character and for the game designers as well who are up there and caring for you know the actual player experience so this practice of hiring a writer towards the end of development just to write the story doesn't work and more importantly writing or hiring a writer who doesn't understand player identity is gonna open this huge can of worms and well hopefully that you can use this talk to you know teach some people so because I think we all on us in this room we all understand this I mean at least intuitively but it doesn't really protect us from an executive coming in and having hire this famous comic writer

something like that so every time that happens we can't need to figure out how to deal with that and I think one way to actually do that you know if you are in the situation is to just very quickly talk about what makes writing for games different from writing for the media like my high level summary is actually very simple games are participatory and movies and books are reflective let me show you what I mean by that so there's many media linear media all right this is a movie and in linear media motivation is creating a character frame like it's created over there I will check the ring tomorrow this is propelling the entire experience forward so now we have the player which in this case it forces the viewer and he's observing the characters actions on the screen alright he's doing this right here this is the reflective part the viewer compares his own values his own frame of reference to the depicted situation so meaning Arai emerges because the viewer is engaged in his internal dialogue about what's happening on the screen right like in this case he's edging further on go

Frodo but he's also reflecting on himself he's gone you know what if I was a hobbit I could do exactly the same thing I wouldn't succumb to the ring so it's kind of selfish or you know we're testing ourselves so see if what's going on on the screen would be true for us as well this is actually very straightforward we're looking at the flow of consumption that's going on here and it's pretty straight and we've mastered this over thousands of years there's a bunch of experience you know like the neverending story here which played with this character of your relationship and kind of interesting ways but ultimately this experience is always reflective that's awesome except that games don't work that way actually work pretty much oppositely games are participatory we're looking at motivation in games what it's created in the player right over there I mean that's the reason we play game so I'd we want to drive the action we want to express ourselves we want to lead what becomes tricky is that now we want to use storylines and character motivation to fictionalize the players goals so all of a sudden we're creating motivation over here as well so now the player starts reflecting on the characters

actions until we realize wait a second why am i reflecting actually am the character so I don't know what the [ __ ] does that mean so we have this duality all right motivation is created in one identity frame there's a different identity frame we used to fictionalize as motivation and we need to figure it out so without of this is a very use player right and we've all been there I mean we've all had this nagging feeling of why am I doing this again right it's this feeling of not really feeling like it driving the action of not really understanding why the character is doing something not really caring about the avatars motivation so there's actually term for this for this hollow feeling of this feeling of disconnect that clean hulking came up with a few years ago similar is I guess he's a kind of questionable character the way I put this up but clean called this feeling ludonarrative dissonance alright it came out of talking about Bioshock so ludonarrative dissonance is something that we as designers and writers create when we don't understand

player identity right we open this roof between player and character and we don't even understand it's there and we don't know how to manage the problem because it is a manageable problem and that's what the identity bubble is about or it's just this expression of the problem it's the idea that we have to keep all identity frames aligned by somehow hooking them together so they keep drifting in the same direction and keep the bubble from popping and the way we do this is by controlling this identity gap being aware of it and then doing something about it so there's three examples of how this can be done that I want to look at so those are soaking them together what's nice about it is that all three examples coincide to this with this identity range that we established earlier what's important to know about this range is that it's completely analog alright I mean your approach might be wedged somewhere in the middle you might not be making a pure puppet or pure vehicle game you might be the poor crash-test dummy like somewhere in the middle but so free approaches I want to talk about is to either create what I would call ludonarrative parity or ID using a

puppet avatar we might be using a hybrid approach using something like complimentary Gold's which goes somewhere in the middle or if we want to use a strongly characterized avatar well we might have to change the player's expectations of why place the game in the first place and we do that using mythic archetype so I think the best way to talk about this is to just look at examples for each case here and then once we're done hopefully we can find some commonalities and then specific tools and takeaways so we should start by looking at puppet games not this puppet game unfortunately it will be awesome I'm talking about these kind of puppet games right the idea behind Lula narrative parity is to align gameplay and story goals so closely that the players agency is synonymous with the game's narrative progression and anybody has looked into this topic knows exactly which game I'm going to use now as an example it's gonna be pull up but it's a great example of luda narrative parity so I'm not here to analyze portal and horde

creates gameplay per se right countless people have done that before me I just want to show the game engages the different fragments of player identity so this is me playing portal alright so when I'm playing portal what I want to get to GLaDOS alright because that means I finished the game I do that by finishing its touch tamer right which means solving all the puzzles in each chamber with the gameplay mechanisms provided to me now for all of this GLaDOS keeps talking to me and keeps dividing me created creating the sense of anger and a sense of indignity as she talks to me edging me on to get to the very end of this and while killing that computer [ __ ] right because she needs to die so if we compare this to what the avatar wants to do my name is Chell by the way but that's not important what's important is that you didn't probably didn't know that and her name isn't important right well let's sure wants to get to GLaDOS because she wants to get out of this [ __ ] up situation that she's in right she wants to be free so she does this by finishing its test chamber which means solving all the puzzles in each chamber what the tool provider to her and to all of this GLaDOS keeps talking to her she keeps

dividing her which reinforces this anger and the sense of indignity that's been inflicted to her capture giving all the righteous fury to get to the end and kill that [ __ ] computer which right so both examples are pretty much identical that we markedly similar so important there's never an identity gap because the game maintains ludonarrative parity what it means to play the game is exactly the same thing as what means to be Chell in that situation so play an avatar United in a situation while incarcerated by a sadistic computer alright and they have this overwhelming urge to escape in the hope of sticking it to Clara in the end so the player knows exactly what it's like what it means to be the avatar what his or her motivation and how to act on that motivation that's the important part we're here so we're looking at the identity bubble here we see this ludonarrative parody right because player and character pulling each other long over identity frames are working towards exactly the same game the same goals so the bubble never pops this for me and that entity is strong

the fictional jealous own person I guess but in gameplay terms she's identical to the player if we are looking at the writing of Portal doing the entire game GLaDOS as commentaries addressing player and character alike alright there's no gap and the brilliance of portals writing beyond just having really good characterizations all that stuff is that it's constantly reminding the play of the shared situation right it's constantly keeping these identity frames aligned every time GLaDOS addresses Chell or the player whatever it reminds them that they're both the same and it kind of starts hooking these frames together again even though they might have drifted apart a little bit so Lulu narrative parity works in Portal I think mostly because it's both based on primal motivation alright it's something we inherently understand something we don't like there are near objectives in Portal you know laid off talks at us but mostly every goal in the game flows from this primal motivation of getting to the end things get a little bit trickier when we want to add external like more nuanced motivation something with bigger ideas and if you want that to drive the story

progression but now we're talking about this duality that I talked about earlier right but we motivate one identity for him with gameplay but then another identity frame is used to contextualize that motivation somehow so one way we can deal with this problem is complimentary goals all right we want to weave the players identity into the core gameplay loop and to me fallout 3 is a great example of this follow 3 and follow 3d avatar him or herself is also an empty vessel I think even more so than in portal because we can customize our avatar right both statistically and visually so portland's gameplay is driven by the player it's his motivation to explore the world for resources it's the draw of systemic advancement which just means you know gaining levels and that kind of stuff I mean that's why we play the game when we pick it up that's what we expect the problem is that this systemic exploration doesn't drive Fallout 3 story alright because that goal is introduced externally over here in the care it's follow please um pre off that story goes the avatar wants to find her her

dad and once she's successful she wants to help him on his quest to bring clean water to the wasteland so this opens up this identity gap if we don't deal with it because those goals they're not fundamentally to our own fallouts gameplay mechanics right and beyond experience points which I guess are a motivator helping my dad on his quest doesn't really reward me on a systemic level Sonne the identity range followed forth somewhere right in the middle right it's a puppet that the player completely control to eject himself on but this puppet does have this pre authored backstory which establishes fundamental gameplay goals so fallout 3 deals with the setup well when it comes to base motivation in a very clever way because it establishes the father very early on in as an instrumental figure in the game of life like he's literally the guy who teaches us how to deal with the world he delivers all the tutorials when you beginning followed me growing up and he teaches you how to walk how to jump

gives you a name and all that stuff so once the dad goes missing we actually care about its fate a little bit because at least we know him and he's helped us but that only takes us so far once we are out of out on our own and we in the capital the wasteland and the world is our oyster and there's tons of open-world points of interest which are available to me and I could do whatever the hell I want so this point Paul needs to do more to maintain his identity bubble making sure that the characters quest match the players arm gameplay actions so it does this by making them player and character actions fundamentally complementary alright as a player building up an RPG character and a post-apocalyptic wasteland means what it means scrapping and exploring all right I'm going around I'm finding [ __ ] I'm digging it up I'm killing guys as a fictional character looking for my death somewhere in the wasteland in an post-apocalyptic world well I mean scrapping and exploring because I don't want to die and I'm looking for him I'm just digging up the entire wasteland so

we create alignment right here and it's not little narrative it's not parity right but hominid Ludo narrative harmony because the characters identity is mirrored games fundamental systemic play actions but even if the player doesn't care about finding her father she still kind of follows the story anyway because you know she does it by automat automatically but exploring the wasteland so the spatial exploration of the wasteland which ties together all the other gameplay mechanics oops play on character identity frames together and we see this right here in the identity bubble so the player explores to go and power the character exposed to find her father and every time we enter a new location even if you're off the beaten path we are reminded of our story ball I've actually talked to somebody I think last year who told me he sidestepped like 60% of the main quests because he completely ignored it and just found his dad by accident somewhere where he's actually hiding like way off the beaten path and I think that's awesome alright I mean we didn't destroy the

story in any way we were playing the story the entire time it's just our player story and we managed to play it in a way nobody else did so this is exploration and we're fundamentally weaving the character identity into play actions but I think that's actually something else that holds together this identity bubble and fallout and it's something you might not expect in this context it's the American dream if we're looking at what followed please gameplay arc will you represent it's actually the typical store of the American dream its reacts to Richards it's coming from nowhere and going somewhere all right you have to freedom or what you want to do and there's a promise of prosperity NYX and success if you do it right the Skywalk level 20 is the limit right but the sky is the limit and that promise is expressed in the character and in the player equally I'm sorry I lost my slides here I mean a character enters the capital wasteland is nobody working away up to the top

that's the player we're grinding we're putting in all the hard work we do in fetch quests and all the stupid little stuff you do not AG games all the hard work and you know we're making something out of ourselves so there's alignment right there and we're both going in power equally what's cool about it is that it wins the person frame back into the picture alright I mean I kicked him out earlier because the person frame wasn't needed it just made it easier to understand how to deal with it but this is where we can bring it back because there's a person if we're talking about the American Dream and how we know about it well it's something that we know as a person right it's something that we want to believe in it's something that's very prevalent in our culture so we're playing an activity like follow three and this proves to ourselves that all these values that we hold dear that we want to believe in they might actually be true you know I'm not a dishwasher I came in like 13 years ago I didn't start washing dishes but hey maybe I can become a millionaire too and playing something like that well it stays with me right after I stopped playing it

actually transcends the game it reinforces our beliefs and this is something that's gonna become more important as we go on so I actually want to explore this in more detail before we come back to the third example right here so there's my former Bob my former boss at legend Bob Bates who's sitting right over there he did a talk in 2005 called into the woods a practical guide to the hero's journey and he presented this idea that just like other media by the way quote games are essentially worth reinforcing activities and I believe the players tend to choose the kinds of games that we affirm their own personal lists and code so Bob then goes through this talk or the first part of the talking Accords to who is who of the psychological world to show that the reason why we consume media is a way to reaffirm our own personal belief systems of the world and it's the reason we have fairy tales it's the reason why small children watch Disney movies until they can recite them backwards so he isn't my wife watch Sweet Home Alabama about a hundred times because it was reassuring her that mr.

Wright was out there somewhere just waiting for well then she met me but that's a different story um it's the reason you guys can't get enough of die hard and the reason I literally watched the San Francisco Giants when they were 2010 World Series like 20 times I have it on DVD and I have a subscription because that was [ __ ] cool I mean my hometown Warriors my San Francisco Giants were bringing home the World Series trophy it's the most important that we enforce our views of the world and we gain psychological well-being from this because it's comforting to know that we can trust in our beliefs so one thing goes on in the August 8th games with reinforcing entities what he says is that for some it might simply be the need to bring order out of chaos for them Tetris is a fine way to reassert that belief but Tetris can't reinforce the belief for example that it is better to have loved and lost than to never have loved at all if we want to reinforce deeper more complex mas which in turn kraang can create deeper and more satisfying gameplay experiences then we need to turn the stories so

reinforcing worse tickets are perceived sense of an idealized self right over there in the person frame which you might be able to see and we see this in fallout 3 like fallout 3 is an interactive way of we living the American Dream and you're actually building and you're shaping yanma so for follow three I would argue that if we're looking at the identity bubble that this myth of the American Dream and how fundamentally it's anchored in all identity frames unify this identity bubble and pulls everything together and I can actually make the same argument for portal if you want to go back to it because portal and it's very core is a monster in the house story you know we might say it's a retelling of the labyrinth of Minos but I think like this situation from saw might resonate more all right I mean I still remember the first trailer for soil was just a bunch of footage and in the end it just says this is [ __ ] up and I believe that I mean this I'm so deeply afraid of a situation like this where I'm trapped by this nihilistic monster that the reason why I'm watching saw is because I want to steel myself and I want to reinforce

this belief that if I'm in some situation like that I would be able to survive it's also about making you appreciate life and all that stuff all right but portal is more humorous in the way it tells its story but fundamentally it's actually exactly the same story it's a nihilistic monster and finishing portal reinforces exactly the same belief but it does so interactively this might be pretentious but I actually believe that that's what we do and stuff so I ignored the person for him up to this point because it wasn't part of the magic circle you know it wasn't required for working identity bubble I think we can completely ignore it and create just games which aren't Grossmont like games that are fun for their own sake so we were able to hook together the player and character without the person I am without its help but that said we should seem that engaging the person with it's you for positive reinforcement can actually add meaning to our play experience so that optional nature I think changes now because we're going to talk about vehicle games I'm going to talk about uncharted 2 specifically and I think

when I see how important this person is going to become the thing I've already talked about the fact that uncharted 2 is pretty much the exact opposite from something that fallout 3 like both in structure and also in its identity approach right it's an active cinematic experience highly structured destroy story driven games of strongly offered characters who constantly speak for themselves they actually set goals in propeller to story forward and so on so the for everything we've seen so far with such a strongly characterized avatar we've pretty much automatically open Pandora's box right there all right I mean we're opening this identity gap in the middle right there because with every self-motivated unexpected step that the player didn't initiate and that the character takes character and player gonna start with thing apart right it's how to feel a sense of agency when your destiny isn't driven by your own actions but the on-screen character just keeps doing his own thing so the connection between player and character I think it's gonna be stretched very thin it

might even snap at times alright go away so I think this is where the gamers understanding of myths like his collective unconscious can come in and hold everything together and the reason this works in the first place well it's explained in box talk right we consume media to reinforce belief so what I believe then is that the gamers identity expectations actually different for these kind of story different games when we've seen how far all three lets us build our own myth in an interactive way which is awesome for a medium because it does something different but there is this traditional way as well while we're watching movies for example it's going on somebody else's journey I mean and I think many players are going to willingly sacrifice agency or their player story to experience this kind of journey and we might call it booth we call if the other one is called myth building I'm with shaping right we're going on somebody else's journey and we're driving him through the experience more like a vehicle so what this does is flipping around the way we create motivation in games like up until now I've always stressed that motivation should be created in the in the player

now if we turn this around we're putting the player in a frame of mind where he doesn't mind not following Nathan Drake well because he wants to be nation dragged right no snake and Drake maybe not personally but he's watched so much in the Anna Jones movies that he knows exactly what this journey is about right guess what he wants to be Indiana Jones he wants to be Nathan Drake so this is wish fulfillment all right and all games cater to this on a basic in some shape or form on a basic level but this doesn't mean that it actually solves anything unless we execute it perfectly like I don't want people to come away from this thinking well we just create a strongly characterized avatar based on a mythic archetype and we're closing the identity gap it's actually quite the opposite I mean this is where most bad stories come from in our games because we keep acting like these guys instead of these guys and as a result we keep creating this Canada instead of this so I didn't work on uncharted 2 the guys who did did some awesome presentations last year on the

development of the game so once again I'm not here to analyze how they actually made the game I just want to show how all of this fits into the idea of the identity bubble that's all the thing is that gamers play games like Uncharted 2 because they want to experience what it's like to be Nathan Drake all right and they understand this long list of archetypes that is based on most notably probably own Quatermain and Indiana Jones so it's developers then we engaged the perceived sense of rdls self-identity fragment alright the player sees qualities of himself in the character like Nathan Drake and then he looks to opportunity to reinforce this belief by playing the game so the game is expectations of how this game should play out are very much shaped by its inherent knowledge of the underlying story all right so we need to create a story that actually follows those rules if I was to sum up an Charlotteans narrative or like the rules underlying of just three screenshots I could use Raiders of the Lost Ark and the Last Crusade this is pretty much the story so

uncharted 2 is a road movie it's a story in which the journey is more important than the destination and the fun thing is that it actually works in uncharted 2 favor because well the same goes for the gamers agency expectations all right the journey is probably more important than unlimited expression so analytic understanding of the story is the glue that's holding it all of this stuff together you know what biases a little bit of leeway because the journey isn't actually quite as unpredictable and unexpected as we think it might be I mean we know we're going to get to Shambhala in the end right the question is how do we get there and in fact the one time identity didn't work for me and uncharted 2 is when Nathan Drake was trying to end the journey he was like some when the Himalayans and you're saying you know I've had enough I knew that wasn't sure that was the one time it actually didn't work so on top of this then only that Naughty Dog comes in and invest an ungodly amount of attention to actually land play and character as well I think one of them is what a naughty dog called the gap in one of those talks this idea that for each unexpected obstacle that we're falling

in the players way well it wife's had all the information about the journey it levels the playing field it actually puts player and character on the same page because the information of what's ahead is actually wiped out the other thing they do is that when Nathan Drake does set a direction like it says we have to go over there it's always tied to a landmark so another player can dig his teeth into that he can drive the action towards that landmark because he knows exactly where he's going so all of this already brings character and player closely together but it's very low-frequency it only happens like every 30 seconds or 30 minutes or something like that right so we need to do even more and this is very similar to what we saw in Fallout 3 we also have to hook character and player together by fundamentally weaving the characters identity when to what it means to play the game into the core gameplay actions so Nathan Gregg is a treasure hunter at heart all right the play act out this character trait by searching for hidden treasure all over the place Drake is clever he has a knack for unraveling

historic mysteries and this is a trade that we act out is the player when we're solving all these puzzles now he's doing it but we're doing it with him and finally a drag is where he was forceful and I think that's fundamentally walking into the games to bursal gameplay because we always get around situations nobody else was able to pass we always find the most clever way to get somewhere so on a base level I'm sure the 2's gameplay actions are all geared towards reinforcing Nathan Greg's character all right and they all gear towards making this guy very happy like when the plays this game he knows what it's like to be Drake all right he almost feels like he's Nathan Drake which is what he came for so there's a very high level of identification here but well identification isn't a great term because I don't think it quite expresses what it means to play this game what I want to call him instead is identity absorption and this is a term that's coming from understanding comics it's a concept where Scott McCloud talks about the fact that when we're driving a car we always remain a separate entity from the car and we understand it right but

we often become so immersed in the driving experience that we start talking about the current first person we start saying oh my god he hit me he's he's cutting me off well guess what Nathan Drake is a vehicle right he's a car so I think exactly the same thing is happening right here we don't become Nathan Drake but we absorb his identity I think that's a good explanation of how we actually laid to a very strongly characterize ever tell at this if I had to like state the design goals for both of these identity approaches I would say the public avatars are about creating high agency and vehicle avatars about creating high identity absorption and that's the reason why uncharted 2 works all right so I hope these have been very diverting examples right how how we're actually creating player identity and hopefully you've seen the underlying identity concept to double consciousness and all that stuff showing through so I want to finish this talk but just looking at some advice some things that we can come take away from this so before you even writing the story just ask yourself the question what does it mean to be X what does it mean to be

this character and then try to fundamentally express that identity in gameplay because this way like this feeling of character is constantly reinforced because the players gameplay actions keep well I keep aligning these two consciousness all right I mean this is not something where we just establish a hook between two identity frames and then nest a hook together these are impulses that we send those frames are always going to slowly drift apart so we have to keep sending these little own pulses that keep poking them back together and if your character identity is fundamentally anchored in the gameplay actions they just keep doing this at a very high frequency just to show you how important is contrabass I want to look at Bioshock 2 so this is my disclaimer that I really like Bioshock 2 weren't this is the one game or it was an awesome game but it had a really bad feeling of player at entity because what Bioshock 2 puts me into the role of a rogue Big Daddy alright so I played Bioshock 1 and I have a very very clearly narrowly defined idea of what Big Daddy stands

for there these badass protectors of those little girls and then Bioshock 2 comes along and it's very schitzophrenic on this archetype all right on the one hand many of the core gameplay actions treat me like I am a human player I'm eating [ __ ] cream cakes and drinking coffee and even though how light does it go through the helmet to replenish my health on the other hand the game is expecting me to feel and sometimes act like a big Daddy that's the overriding motivation actually to get to the end of the story but then it presents with the choice of being able to harvest the little sisters which once again is completely out of character so as I'm playing my airship - I have this really inconclusive treatment of the character's identity and I think it's that's like freaking needles into the identity bubble at a very high frequency all right because the moment-to-moment gameplay is communicating some one thing but then the overall story is communicating a completely different direction of what the character is about so every time I need a queen cake or harvest a little sister character and players are just drifting apart a little

bit more and Bioshock 2 was awesome but I think like at the third level or so I just it had lost all sense of identity for me because I didn't know what it meant to be a victory but the main lesson I want you to take away from this is just this understanding of double consciousness like with the character play on person model and hobbies miss identity frames which then form each identity fragments which form each of this frame so I think most of bad game writing 99% whatever can be treated back can be traced back to just treating games like you're writing for the media so hopefully you're able to explain to people why you shouldn't be doing that and then I just hope to have imparted some concepts like some language we can use to come back and actually talk about games and about identity approaches like if you know about the identity about this identity range well you can actually see where the games we talked about fallen is identity range alright and there's a bunch more examples which all just kind of show show you where they belong we can even use it to show how the coach change between different games like the last game I worked on is dead

space too well dead space one it's very much on the left sided space do comes along at the voice it adds a lot of cutscenes and that kind of stuff too to Isaac Clark and it for it's much more into the vehicle category resistance was very similar where the approach changed between game one and two and we added the voice and all of this has been very much about action games right because that's what I work on you can actually use it for other genres as well like rock band like the main rock band experience is all about building your own walk hood but rock bands Beatles is all about reliving somebody else's journey it's the vehicle rock band and I know Guitar Hero is dead now but there's even a distinction right there between rock band and Guitar Hero because well Guitar Hero was always about reliving like collecting all of these rock stars and playing as them all right so that's where the difference was there so we can create a similar chart for the mythic quality of various games all right with building with the creation and with recalling once again we got those games that we talked about in this talk and

there's a whole bunch of other games that fall into the spectrum as well so if you've been tasked with coming up with a story a character for game it's some click closing thoughts on that figure out what kind of game you're making are you making a puppet game are you making a vehicle game are you making something in between all approaches are valid I subscribe to a certain philosophy but you know in the industry all of these approaches are valid but they're gonna guide what you should and shouldn't do and you need to understand this if you're gonna make a puppet game it might be nonlinear it's gonna have an emphasis on a player story it's gonna be about the player allowing like building his own life they might not be cutscenes because I think that would take away control from the player and it's very much against that concept if you're making a vehicle game well it's probably gonna be highly structured and it's gonna be linear and it's gonna have an emphasis on if we call you might be able to use cutscenes you probably can you can use pre-offer character um traits and you can use those traits to propel a story forward so I think puppet games are easier generally when it comes to

just the identity approach they're gonna be much harder on various other levels so if you are making a vehicle game be very careful be hundred percent sure you understand what getting yourself into because I've kind of danced about the issue but if you are making a vehicle game you're making a [ __ ] talking car all right and those talking cars might have been awesome in the 80s especially where I come from but you know they can be annoying they can even be completely unnecessary right I mean just imagine you're driving on highway 1 and you're witnessing this beautiful sunset over the Pacific Ocean you're just sitting there appreciating it and all of the sudden you hear this voicing ah look at that beautiful sunset and you realize [ __ ] I'm sitting in my car my car talking to me and I'm not sure of this remark really enhance the moment all right I mean it should probably be appreciated and experiencing quite appreciation so you can do this of course I mean this is a very personal decision I'm just trying to point out that every time the character expresses a sentiment and that's not shared by the player while you're widening the

identity gap right you're making drift apart so finally understand the underlying worth of the game and this is especially important when you're creating a storage open game like with a vehicle character it's actually imperative so you must identify and execute underneath that the game will be based on or it's going to feel aimless the player won't really know where it's going and it's going to feel Hollow and of course this lecture can dive into the subject for pretty much done now but if you are looking for some further reading I suggest the late Lake Snyder's book safe the cat goes to the movie which I think I'm the Uncharted 2 team used as well so both types move building games like fallout ride almost week hauling experience I gunshot I have merit and I think players seek more equally but for completely different reasons so as a designer you need to understand the distinction between those types and then take the differences into account when you're designing a game but when it comes to monthly enforcement I really believe in that all right and I believe in it because I'm a game designer and game design is kind of a black art there

aren't very many fundamental facts I can hang my head on like it's up to all of us here to come up with our own belief systems about what makes games work and what doesn't work and we might even go out and we're looking losing the media landscape with finding various psychological tests texts because you know we want to reinforce that belief who might come to specific GDC talks because you know what if they tell us what we believe in it's very comforting to know that you can trust in your own beliefs so this right here is my belief system and player identity you know hope you found it useful maybe you can even make it your own but no matter what thanks very much for coming so we have about 10 minutes for questions if you do have a question please use the microphones and I want to remind you again to please return those feedback forms I never bring a pen so what I've been doing recently I just used my fingernail to even just like circle whatever you like it's gonna be

helpful so yes if anybody asked questions please

all right so the question is just do a belief that we need to use very primal motivation to actually achieve this ludonarrative parity and do we need to use something that's more vehicle game to achieve something like well what kind Hawking's talking about so I'm not going to disagree with clean talking cause he's my boss and I don't actually want it to express that at all what I'm saying is that if you do have a primal motivation something that a caveman understands it's very easy for the player to understand how to act on that motivation I don't have to explain it at all if you do want to express hope in a

game and you want to anchor that systemically or duty or whatever it's going to take much longer it's going to take much more explanation it's actually going to explain to you how those gameplay systems are tied together or one I think this is I could talk about this for like two hours but I'm not saying it's impossible in fact I think that's what we should go I'm saying in the current landscape in the way I mean just looking at the games we have right now it's gonna be pop it's difficult all right and it's gonna take you hours and hours to actually establish the framework actually getting the player into the world of the game to understand how we might act on duty it's gonna take you several hours just to establish the duty in the first place because all is inherent understanding that defines us in the world right I'm going to feel duty to my country because I've lived there for 35 years I need to cram that into at least two three hours or whatever in the game to actually get to the point where that matches what would be going on in the real world well that's more what I was

trying to say yes so the question is am i well Louisa is Louisa my I'm taking an academic approach or seemingly academic approach to this because we're lacking like that kind of language as an industry and honestly I'm just doing I'm just talking about it I think what's really humbling when you're doing these kind of talks is that everything you want to talk about actually is expressed someone rules of play right we do have all this academia and it's out there all the information is out there the way I talk about this just is kind of colored by that if I'm finding these kind of things in woods of play if I'm finding it in shared fantasy which was written by academics to a varying degree at least that gives us language at least this gives us a certain way to talk about stuff so yes

little narrative parity is not something I want to say more than five times having to same with reinforcement just has a [ __ ] th at the end has been a real chore just talking about in this talk but I mean if that's language we can use you know to come back next GDC and start talking about the concepts then I'm all for that so that's where that comes from mm-hm one finger goes into something that can Hudson talked about on Wednesday night actually everybody can look it up he was talking about exactly that how do we get gamer or player derive narrative and what are some he'd like he talked about it for ten minutes how he takes something that's in a high triple-a production like high-value cut scene and

how we might be able to get around that so I think there's various ways we can go about that like the one thing I want to mention Ken was talking about arm use voice in synthesis synthesis all right I mean you might not have an human character you might have a computer or something so if you need to generate large amounts of text or voice or whatever build your story around that so we just have to be clever about it I think that I mean I love uncharted 2 dead space 2 very much goes in the same direction I think it's gonna be a road there are we gonna wear ourselves out at some point because we have to keep piling and piling and piling on top and what we're doing by this we're not even creating something that's inherently new to our medium it doesn't really play to our strengths the only thing we can do and then experience like that this be a movie but interactively so I think that adds a little bit of meaning on top of it because you know we've actually done something we've actually taking the ring to model and so that's just watch somebody doing it but it's like a delta of 20% or something on top of it so I

think as the future goes we need to go to more of a fallout experience we need to go into something that's more complementary ludonarrative parity stuff like that no it's I'm not trying to say sorry if that's how it came along then I just did a terrible terrible job um now the way we get to this identity bubble it's expressing what the story is about in gameplay actions that's I mean that's a simple answer we need to make sure we know what it means to be that character and what it means to be their character what his motivation is about needs be expressed in game play because otherwise you're completely floating on two different tracks

[Music] what as I love Buddha legend for the reason that when it comes to identity like what I'm doing in the game is totally expressed in his identity right there's this complimentary match the entire time I Modi I know what it means to organize an army so the entire game is about organizing an army in a slightly different context so that part is cool my honest answer would be don't hire Jack Black right I mean it's the same problem you're going to have I like Jack Black but it's the same problem you're going to have when he does kung fu panda or something like that can I see a panda or do I see Jack Black doing that I mean unless you really engrossed the player in the experience and making forget forget that it's Jack Black and you know if that's really like a sticking point that's

really important and I would say well go to an anonymous voice actor I don't know if that's an awesome answer but I mean that's how I would I think it's so personal right some people can't see past Jack Black although people are gonna think it's awesome because Jack Black actually stands for something he actually involves the person in a way because I understand what he stands all right he's all about walk appreciation stuff like that so for other people who might have worked perfectly yeah okay I think one more question Thanks yep I didn't I ran out of time I mean I think I'm looking at this this is an awesome model for modeling addiction all right like if you do create a strongly characterized avatar like a vehicle game more or less and let's say he's well

he's an alcoholic right and the only well the way you play the game you need to make sure it has to track so at the very end not like the Burton tracks but at the very end you can either you're gonna go through the story regardless but you're gonna put him in the loony bin you're gonna turn into somebody's completely you know a raging alcoholic or you actually allow him to slowly get off that the way you do that then and I think that's what Bioshock 2 specifically fail is you make that a value choice which is asymmetrical make sure that you give the player a lot of systemic value for drinking more and more alcohol alright so if he goes through the game drinking more on my alcohol it's gonna turn the player character the avatar into this alcoholic which is bad but it's going to give him a lot of benefit on the other hand if I want to play the game in a way that it's actually gonna heal this guy from alcoholism and I'm still going to get to the end but it's going to be much harder to do well that's the other part let's know that's the value choice right there so I think we're going to find like I don't know what the exact distribution was for the little sisters I mean what's the problem with Bioshock was that

ultimately harvesting or not harvesting the Lu sisters was systemically exactly the same but I think that's where you start do it you know that's where you start you then go into a room and ask how many people turned him into an alcoholic how many people try to maintain this equilibrium and how many people just said you know what I'm gonna be good I had to put in much more work but hey guys I'm [ __ ] angel because you know I went to all this hardship because my digital character you know came out and he got back his family and did all that stuff yeah thank you very much enjoy the rest