 |
Does static info work anymore?January 2nd, 2008 |
The short answer is “no.”
One of the interesting questions that came up in the discussions on cheating is basically the issue of whether you can have a game design that limits information flow, in today’s Internet-based social gaming world. Does it make any sense to have games that rely on hidden static info?
Keep in mind that by saying no, you’re effectively throwing out a huge amount of types of games. After all, designers don’t want to invest in making gameplay that is designed to be circumvented. All static content puzzle-type gameplay goes out the window. So do many forms of narrative gameplay, since spoilers are rampant. That’s a lot of types of gameplay to lose.
Many of the counter-arguments to the idea that walkthroughs were cheating were based on the idea that “you still have to kill the mob.” But we also don’t necessarily want to land in a situation where killing the mob is it, especially when the lore is one of the chief attractions of WoW, IMHO.
It’s possible to model info within a game system, but it won’t be what we actually recognize as information. We can easily give an in-game token or flag that is “this character has heard bit of info XYZZY.” But at that point, info becomes just a fetch-and-carry — the worst and simplest sort of quest. In fiction-writing, we speak of “plot coupons” to collect, and all agree that’s the worst sort of plot; it often makes for a poor quest as well.
So is there a middle ground between plot coupon/key and completely static puzzle? Probably, though I don’t quite know what it is. One possible way to think of these is in terms of cryptography; you could think of the plot coupon as being like a one-time pad — the flag uses the character itself as part of the “pad,” so it is guaranteed unique. On the flip side, of course, plain old static data is not encrypted at all.
It seems that in some ways what you want is people to know some of the info. You don’t want them to know the solution to the puzzle. But perhaps the general approach. I am reminded of the old InvisiClues hint system for Infocom games — incremental info release.
Consider these sorts of puzzles:
You go to Bubba, and he tells you, “24. Now go to Buffy.” When you talk to Buffy, she says “what is 6 x 4?” You then have to tell her “24.”
Keep in mind that the math problem here is a stand-in for any sort of puzzle — a “press the buttons in sequence” puzzle, a “pick the right door” puzzle, a “choose the right conversation branch” thing… The strategy guide tells you where Bubba is, where Buffy is, and what to tell her or do. You could skip Bubba altogether. In fact, it’s possible that you did accidentally, which can put a damper on the narrative flow.
To fight that, we use flagging, which is kind of the default right now.
You go to Bubba and he tells you, “24, now go to Buffy.” You go to Buffy and she says, “I see Bubba told you the answer to 6 x 4.”
The strategy guide now tells you where Bubba is and where Buffy is. The solution now is just rote, though. You don’t have to “solve the puzzle” (meaning, do any math). The narrative flow is excellent, though, because we get to deliver whatever we want. Of course, since there is no puzzle-related content in the narrative, it is pure window-dressing. You probably don’t bother reading it.
(Sharp readers will have noticed that the step of “find Buffy” is itself potentially a puzzle of one of these sorts. If you have a waypoint right to her, well, then, it’s a plot coupon. You are pushed through the walking process to get to her, but it’s just rote too. The puzzle of “find Buffy” has been elided from most modern MMOs because”finding” is regarded as a tedious sort of puzzle most of the time. Note that it doesn’t have to be.)
There is an interesting extension to this one that some quests do:
Bubba hands you a token that says “24″ on it, and tells you to go to Buffy. Buffy takes the token and says “Ah, the answer to 6 x 4.”
The main difference here is that you can give the token to someone else. It enables a sort of “information economy.” You “lose” the knowledge of what 6×4 is, and someone else gains it. It can be traded for money.
OK, so what’s a sort of half and half solution?
You go to Bubba, and he tells you, “4. Now go to Buffy.” And Buffy says, “What is 6 x your number?” In this scenario, the 4 is different for everyone. When you come to the puzzle, it is tailored to you. The strategy guide can’t give you the answer, but it can give you, well, a strategy (“use multiplication!”).
This is akin to what happens with combat in a quest chain. “Kill the vampire blocking the way to Buffy!” is essentially a half-problem, because half the puzzle is what your capabilities are. The vampire is the “6″ and you provide the “4.”
There’s interesting stuff you could do mixing this with the “info as object” thing. What if there were not one token to gather, but hundreds, and you assembled some of them as a poker hand, so to speak?
You visit Bubba, and he gives you the violet leaf. You visit Boffo and you get the purple leaf. There’s blue and red and green ones out there too — a whole rainbow. You visit Buffy, and she says “Violet plus the pink I have… and the purple means addition. Using additive blending, what’s the final color?”
Now, part of the trick to using this sort of gate is that the stuff that you bring to the challenge has to be pretty diverse. It can’t be a simple limited set. It effectively has to be a repeatable problem with statistical variation. In effect, it has to be a game system now, and not a puzzle. The different color leaves is not very different, from a game grammar perspective, from bringing different classes or equipment to a fight.
Making a game for every quest is a tall order. But a bigger question is whether you can find a game system that fulfills the “quest itch” — after all, the people who quest are often doing it because they enjoy the puzzle-solving process. An exercise to go through might be to take a classic adventure game, like Zork, maybe, and try to find “game’ equivalents for each of its puzzles.
You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.
No exploring really necessary. I am not sure that is “a good quest” by definition. It’s barely quest-like at all. If you know exactly where to go, why not just get teleported? If you know where to return to, why have to walk? In CoH you can just use a phone. 
[...] have no idea what he means by that, but I’m confident that he agrees with me. Go read his entire article and then come back. You’ll appreciate my smaller words and smaller concepts. I guarantee [...]
[...] Cheaters, the lot of you! I normally disagree with him pretty strongly, but I’ve found these two posts by Raph Koster rattling around in my head quite a bit this morning. I agree with the cheating [...]
[...] has an interresting post about game design, where he talks about different puzzle and questing techniques that game [...]
[...] Raph had a post that got me thinking. All of my games feature some kind of information system. That’s a bit misleading, though. All games are entirely about information processing. [...]