Indie is less

Dorkly Bits: Mario is Too Mainstream

Kellee Santiago, dreadful Avatar of VGA

I do have a sense of humour. I swear. Trouble is, I'm not sure it's twisted enough to fathom the magnitude of ludicrousness we've been exposed to.

It's a bit my fault. I took another look at the whole "games ain't art" affair, and noticed that our dear Kellee Santiago played some prime role in it. As far as I cared about what I initially considered a non-event, I hadn't noticed that Ebert had done more than replying to a few comments amongst the thousand that got posted in response so his bold statement.

Perhaps it's just me, but there's something that I don't get. There's a broad range of more knowledgeable and experienced professionals on the topic of video games than Mrs. Santiago. Yet, for some reason, she retained Roger Ebert's attention. Perhaps because she approached him with a degree of assumed authority on the topic, as some sort of ambassador for the whole industry.

For the sake of being honest and complete, I did go through the video which supposedly got the upper hand on Ebert's initial bold claim. In a way, the dogma she shines into our optical sensors is nothing more than a mere continuation of what I highlighted some months ago, in thatgamecompany sucks at making games.
Let's not kid ourselves here. It's possible, initially, that Ebert didn't give a damn about Santiago, but since he may have been told to watch this video wherein this unknown chick started talking about his so erroneous initial reaction, he may have realized that in order to avoid looking passé and still be considered relevant by the young artsy plebe, he had to indulge Santiago's appetite for attention, even if at the price of conceding on a variety of points. Not wanting to be ostracized, he may have weighed the pros and cons and considered there was something to gain by abdicating a tad, even if it meant pushing forth someone he didn't know and probably didn't care about anyway, but may have thought to be seen as someone of importance in the video game industry. A disastrous assumption, for sure, if it were true.

The irony would be that next to Sony's money, Ebert's own move did propel Santiago to such heights of influence and importance.

The thing is, until recently, after having widely avoided the whole Roger Ebert shitstorm, I never noticed him almost entirely recanting from his former outburst against gaming in his article of July 1st, 2010, notably as a reaction to a video by K. Santiago (TEDxUSC - Kellee Santiago - 3/23/09).
I learned of that video and this sort of exchange thanks to an article she wrote after Ebert's own first reaction to her video, which he posted on the 16th of April 2010 (that was Ebert's second post in his trilogy if I recall correctly, the first article being his most famous statement against games being art).
Sorry, what?

If you're lost, don't bother. Just focus on the video, because this is another amazing thing, really. Another ballad in the sanitarium park, trying to keep pace with Santiago's incoherent and aimless wandering.
If you don't believe me, just get that video playing. Notice how she points out that immensely popular games such as North American football, chess, baseball and majong are appreciated, but are not art; a conclusion perhaps solely based on the *cough* analysis *cough* of their rules, or the observation of the mesmerized and cheerful crowds enjoying those games:

Truly baffling.
This is where we confirm that what she thinks defines art in a video game essentially has very little to do with the game part. She says that such games have elegant and rich mechanics and they surprise us (without complexity, the outcome is easily guessed and there's no gratifying pleasure).
Note that this is precisely why these games are still played and considered good. It is an odd thing that she doesn't realize that the games she helped create have very little of those pleasant and complex mechanics. As I said back in September, their games are poor.

Let's also consider that with the definition she picked from Wikipedia (sigh), she'd have no reason to keep aforementioned sports games out of the art category. Here is the definition as it appeared on Wikipedia's old page, from the 15th of March, 2009:

Art is the process or product of deliberately arranging elements in a way that appeals to the senses or emotions.

So now you see that with that kind of definition, sports have no reason to be refused the status of art.
More dramatically, we can ask ourselves how the hell can anyone take her seriously after that?

What is going on right now is probably of a gravity not properly understood by the whole industry.
Time's ticking! In the United States, beacon of the somewhat crippled occidental world (for which Capcom recently reshaped its own spirit to better suit the "needs" of playdom as it is understood on the other side of the ocean), and with the support of Sony's money and prestige, you are possibly contemplating the birth of a new odd creature:

The Avatar of Video Game Artsism (VGA).

Honestly, I'd rather not be bothered by such petty matters, but it would be a considerable mistake for us not to focus our attention on such affairs with the highest seriousness possible, as there is nothing petty here, much to my own distress. On the contrary!
What still keeps me from really doubling efforts to challenge this rising doctrine with the full might of someone truly concerned about the safety of the industry to which he belongs, is that nagging question about if she's really understanding that what she and her pals are doing is wrong, and if she has really thought about it to begin with!
But, well, does it really matter if she didn't? What's done is done, and this theoretical stance seems assured to blossom. Until we do something about it, or until it collapses onto itself.
Can one adopt a different approach to a problem solely on the premise that one individual, who is progressively taking part in the shaping of a next generation of video games, is a fully conscious person or just another reckless artsy hipster?

I think Santiago is of the second breed. See how Jenova Chen almost has taken a back seat. His biggest problems probably being that he's Asian and not so fluent when it comes to speaking in front of the cameras.
But let's not digress too much on him. After all, he's not going to have much of the impact I foresee Santiago having on the industry. Eventually, Chen is going to remember what made him love video games when he was a kid. Plus he's not looking as concerned about feeding his ego as much as Santiago is. Especially since she's been given (probably unwittingly in some respects) the required attention-ramp-boost.

Now let's get back to that video, shall we?

Don't lose time with that Waco Resurrection "game". It's obviously a bad one. You can skip that part.
Fast forward to the moment when she speaks about Braid, a much hyped game on the indie scene. Why?
Honestly, the mechanics are rather limited. The time reversal function feels gimmicky after a while and does a so-so job at masking the rest of the game's lack of substance, which aside from poor platforming design, seems hellbent on spoon feeding you with shit and moral nonsense like some drunk monk shouting from the top of some mighty horses.
Who really cares about the "message"?

So we move on. Then there's some self pimping. Flower is a boring game, thank you. By Santiago's own admission, it wasn't even conceived as a game, and its useless interactivity wasn't even part of the concept's core.

But really, the worst is to come.
At 9 minutes 4 seconds, precisely.

The lady doesn't realize that the evolution of video gaming akin to what cinema has experienced has already happened. In her world, the games before the Braids and Flows were primitive, necessary steps towards greater video games. With barely veiled derision, an entire golden era of talent and genuine creativity is nonchalantly dumped into a mass grave, as a collection of derelict material comparable to the clumsy and early reels from the documentarian era of a medium in its infancy, an age of rushed works and cuts: something you only look at with a kind eye while demonstrating as much respect as humanly possible towards embarrassingly raw pieces belonging to protohistory.
Transcription, verbatim:

[...] As the medium of film and its audiences grew, audiences' expectations also grew and shifted as well. And then more films beca... err... were made that then filled in the... the emotional spectrum of the medium. And when it comes to games, our emotions don't change. The same kind of games we played when we were children just don't work for us anymore and now we have a generation of gamers who're grown ups themselves... and starting to wonder if there's something more to games. Could our games be more serious? Could they reach higher levels of joy, to ecstasy? Could they reach deeper levels of sadness, to catharsis? And we're seeing now these games as exploration into other parts of the emotional spectrum, and then these games are being rewarded by audiences in high sales figures and critical acclaim.

And then she goes on talking about how the medium of interactivity can be very powerful. Isn't it just lovely, coming from someone who precisely worked on projects where art, as vague as it was, took complete precedence over interactivity? And not just interactivity in the general sense, but a specific one, which allows people to respond to rules of games?

Now, remember the bit about how sports games, even those clearly less intense on the muscular side of things like chess and majong; they are not art. That one was quite funny because she didn't really explain why, nor what she understood as art. Right, she did, with a laughable Wikipedia quotation.

Can you see why I just can't stand what she believes in? It's not the person who rebuts me, but what's in her head, and the fact that she rose to such a position of importance despite deeply nonsensical opinions about the industry she works in.
The TED's motto seems to be "let's hand a mike to people who rarely get that chance, so they may express their opinions on varied topics and eventually reach more people than they naturally would if left alone."
Sure. Now think of all the missed opportunities... of never having to hear her asinine and pompous claims.

I'm not too concerned about the concept of art. Defining it might be as hard as defining matter. What I won't tolerate is any piece of silliness used to support either side.
It's just too sick to consider that chess may become art if only someone were to disrupt the power and efficiency of the game's mechanics by adding a whole range of animated colours and decorative sets all around the board, starting with some touchscreen for one, with every move followed by a melody, modified by the way each player would lift, transport and deposit the next pawn, tracked by some motion sensor.
Can you imagine? Can you?

- Hey Frank, you know what? I'm done with that game. I've grown tired of chess. Been there done that. It's boring these days. Boring and too crude, if I may say.
- But I thought you loved chess.
- I do. Well, kinda. I should say I did. But I also grew up. We need to set this game above this stagnating cesspool of primitiveness we've been used to for far too long.
- I'm not sure I'm following you...
- It's very simple. We're adults, we've played this game for ages, but as humans, we need to diversify our experiences, explore wider ranges of emotions. Right now, this game is not artistic.
- I beg to differ. I think your silver and ivory model is a rather fine piece of...
- You didn't listen to me. This is not art. You're focusing on some irrelevant makeup. This game has to evolve. It's unbelievable it hasn't yet! It's an absolute shame. We can't take it for what it is anymore.
- Why?
- Because it's not serious and deep enough, and we're better than that! As adults, we cannot accept to play the limited version we have before our eyes.
- Huh. Assuming that you do know what you're talking about, just how do you plan making that happen?
- Think! It's simple! See, for example... pick that queen of yours. Now, instead of merely changing its position from this square to... that one over there... why not take this opportunity to enhance this displacement and move the piece around by making graceful loops in the air? These artistic and deeply meaningful moves could symbolize the eternal cycle of death and reincarnation, as posited in Buddhism.
- Oh I see. That is definitely more artistic than I thought.
- It is, isn't it?
- I'm starting to get your point.
- Thank you.
- However there's a caveat. A typical game would stretch in length because of this added density of... err... beauty, sense and depth. I know chess isn't the fastest game in the world, but do we need to make it even slower?
- I understand your concerns. It's absolutely clear that if we want to cross a boundary, we do have to be bold. We may have to tweak rules, otherwise we'd have little chance of getting the attention of real art connoisseurs. Besides, we're trying to make this game less boring, not more soporific.
- I think I see where you're going. So you believe we should simplify the rules?
- Yes. In fact, we may have to rethink the board itself! Too many squares and too many pieces means too many permutations. We're talking about relaxing, enjoying the moment, after all. From that perspective, thinking hard isn't good. It's a form of effort, which is another term for soft torture, really. Quite the antithesis of what we seek to achieve there.
- That makes sense. May I suggest something? While we're at it, shouldn't we remove that timer?
- Oh yes, absolutely! We don't need tension.
- Tension would certainly ruin the experience.
- Indeed, it would.
- And... do you have a name in mind yet?
- No. But I know that we need something that sounds inviting, smooth and smart.
- Ah. Let's try... Flying Pieces!
- Mmm... no, too obvious. Besides it sounds like this is about throwing stuff across the room. But I like the idea of flying the pieces above the black and white board in some stylized fashion, like if the pieces were extensions of our souls carried over those dichromatic fields, as part of an uttermost transcendental experience. Let me think... Magpawns!
- Mag-what? You're sure of that one?
- Absolutely! It's a conflation of magpies, for the colours and the flying, and pawns, for the game.
- Of course! That's wonderful! You're quite the bright man when it comes to playful things!

Superb dystopia, don't you think?
The worst part of it is that I can't even guarantee that we will always be spared that kind of stupidity.
In essence, this is exactly what Kellee Santiago is aiming at, and I can only hope that her opinions will never prove influential.

Anyway, I think she really can praise Ebert's name every goddamn day with abandon, now that she has gotten more attention than she deserves.
I wouldn't be surprised of hearing about how she printed and pinned Ebert's article to her bedroom's wall. One of the most prized trophies of all times, for those who have a misplaced hard-on for blathering about games being art.
After all, as she put it with all the necessary emphasis (not mine, word):

April 16, 2010 unexpectedly became a new watermark in my career as a game maker – Roger Ebert wrote an article about me.

Woop-tee-doo!

She, who can't even explain why Flower is a game, pretends being qualified for lecturing Ebert on why games are art.
One word: pathetic.

Perhaps Ebert failed at describing art, but Santiago certainly failed at describing games. So let's call it a tie.

Oh, I almost forgot: Santiago. Just shut up, will ya?

Day of Lolz

It's been a while since my last DoL page (and in fact, the whole series). Nothing satirical or gritty to find here. Merely mockery. Mockery of the stupidity that's spread around about video games, or erected while diverging from irrelevant matters.

• Take UGO. They think they also have their own games as art page of ten most fitting titles. Check those games, really. Everything is in there. All that is wrong regarding this topic is perfectly aggregated, be it the obvious fallacy of thinking that "nice looking = art", to sissy things such as Flower, to the obligatory (yet excellent) Shadow of the Colossus, to the super hit Red Dead Redemption otherwise the page wouldn't be legit. *sigh*
  If these idiots want to be so serious about games, why have they such trouble talking about games as sport, and thus deriving towards professional gaming?
  ...
  Not smart enough for them?
  
  
• Now, Gamasutra, who ten to be quite pretentious at times and who have, above all, a tendency to consider that if it doesn't speak English, basically, it does not exist. Yet these people, espousing the stances of self-anointed clerics of what is art, which presupposes the capacity to recognize some form of originality and strong cultural diversity and then welcome it, don't really give a damn about modest and indie games made outside of the Indebted, Ruined Commonwealth n'Glishland. They only have eyes of the Swedes whose men's last manly thing they still have for them is their blond and translucent beards and their boldness to scream their gender theory at the face of all Europe (while being incapable of maintaining their population relatively ethnically coherent). Portugese, Russian, Chinese, Japanese, Indian, Italian small products? Never heard of. Analyzing arcades? Nope. Why the bias?
  
  
• And finally, some random post on some equally random board (The Ghetto). There are times when you just can't avoid it. I mean, the trail of hater/gushers all brewed hot by the antics of Insomnia.ac's Icycalm (or something KirkAsgard, name borrowed from a real philosopher but I'm sure that's total coincidence :]). So I poked my head into that mess of opinions (I know, I should restrain my curiosity) and halted on some anon's positions on life and morals, and the following piece of his post really got me rolling me eyes:
  
  

  There are plenty of altruistic "masters" too. For example, Bill Gates is devoting a large portion of his fortune and efforts towards various charities.

  
  Sure. Foundations and all that. He must mean... aside from tax evasion perhaps, other boosts to the pharmacological industry and support to Monsanto and their paramilitary activities?
  As for altruism, we rarely see that in fact, and one could say that altruism found in the masses could be the expression of higher altruism from people who didn't achieve higher status in the society despite their potential. Still, only leaders (or masters) can really make any altruism meaningful, as they actually face the hostile world with wide open eyes, and thus can make the best choices.
  

Some stuff about Mario Bros and the Wii version

Be sure not to miss those three pages!

Snippet:

Mario Couldn't Jump At First

Iwata
In this interview, we're going to talk about New Super Mario Bros. Wii, but rather than diving straight into a discussion of the new title, I'd like to begin by talking about Mario's roots. There will of course be a lot of readers who know all about this, but I think there are also people who are completely in the dark about how Mario began.

Miyamoto
Yes, you're right.

Iwata
Shall we begin by talking about the period of Mario's initial conception, when he was known as "Jumpman"?

Miyamoto
Sure. Now, this is something I've been asked about in hundreds of interviews, so I'll make it quick! (laughs) In the Pac-Man1 era, there were a number of games that were really popular in the video game arcades. Nintendo had released titles such as Sheriff2 but none of them quite achieved the level of popularity where you could call them hits.

thatgamecompany sucks at making games

I've been trying to get more information about what the core leaders of the studio named thatgamecompany had in mind when it came to video games. There's a variety of material to browse, and one source I found interesting to check out, since rather easy to go through and simple to understand, was a short video.

Here is something interesting. Pay attention from 1:26.
Some anon from SuperHyperTurboWhatever asks Kellee Santiago, co-founder and president of TGC, the following question about Flower:

Why is it a game? Why is it not a meditation tool?

Santiago's "answer" is most revealing:

Well, because we approach our projects, erm, from a creative standpoint. [cut] From that starting point, erm, will lead to something totally unique and different and why we don't start necessarily with mechanics, we start with this idea like with Flower [cut] the feeling of being in a huge field of flower (something) what that's like, and it feeds the art direction, it feeds the music which through mediums like film, we know how to do that, and there's that added component of interactivity, so we really view it as a complete experience with all those elements working together to... to communicate concepts through the medium of video games.

If there's something that hasn't struck you yet, then let me help you get it. The point is how painfully obvious it is that she cannot explain why their product, Flower, is a game to begin with. The same actually applies to Flow and, soon enough, Journey.
There's just a basic admission that interactivity, and only interactivity, was an added component.
However, interactivity alone doesn't make a game.

The reason behind her failure to explain why Flower is a game is because it's a poor one from any gaming perspective. It's an interactive experience with a pinch of what may pass off as rules.
There's basically nothing about complexity, mechanics depth and any form of real challenge.
That they wanted to make a relaxing experience is a good thing, but let's not fool ourselves into thinking that they made a game just because they call themselves thatgamecompany.
They didn't.

They are going backwards, with visuals taking way too much importance over what makes a game memorable and enjoyable on the long term, which is quite ironical considering how the highbrow plebe loves to spit at the GPU monkeys for their sole love of amazing graphics that make their latest overpriced hardware melt down.
The playing experience is so poor that it turns out to be a superfluous addition; "an added component" as Santiago would say.

Well guess what? You don't "add" such an element, as an after thought, in order to obtain a real game. Mechanics are not the pinch of salt you add at the last minute in your recipe. It's a core part of what you're brewing. It's an essential and primary asset of what defines a functional game.

The very fact that they were more concerned about the musical and visual experiences rather than the playing is all the proof we need.
She was asked a very simple question. Why is Flower a game, and not a meditation tool? Yet, of all that she said, she fatefully and precisely ended describing a so-called meditation tool, if you can call it that. Even the mention of interactivity didn't cut it. It would seem that she just doesn't understand what makes a game at all.

What baffles me most is that she's already been given enough spotlight and some soap box to stand on so as to lecture people now! Essentially, a non-remarkable exercise wherein she parrots what she's read on Internet and the few bits borrowed from Rules of Play. Why the hell is she even given a microphone to waste people's time with such useless matters?

Flower could have been a great game if there had been real play mechanics in it, all those pieces that do engender subjugating gaming experiences. But flying across some random landscape left and right, then doing a 180° turn and going the other way while colliding with petals and flowers... what the hell is that? Their quest against violence is ludicrous! The envelope is all about pretense: you could have made a game where you're flying above a green landscape and collecting energy cores that would let you grow powerful nodes that expand your empire, with the same triggered elements of growing structures and others being destroyed, and the "message", if there had to be one, would have been completely different without changing anything from the scant mechanics. The varnish cracks so easily, it's quite pathetic.
In a sense, she and her friends didn't think the game. They merely followed a social trend and wanted to bring this pollution to the gaming industry.

My opinion about these people will change the moment they'll stop pretending making real games, and from the moment the press will stop praising them for what they are not. Then, and only then, I may show them some respect for the artistically creative minds they seem to be.
Until then, let's continue hurling feces at 'em.

Nonsensical Interactive Boredom (NIB)

Nonsense.
That's all there is about Ernest Adams’ article titled The Designer's Notebook: Sandbox Storytelling.
The more I read about him, the more he just looks like a fraudster to me, a self appointed theorist on game design and video games as a whole.

We have this return of the "emergence" boner. This time, it’s not about something as vague as gameplay, but about story. The claims is that a story has to emerge from a game on its own. The concept is already stupid if only for the fact that assuming what Adams describes would be interesting, it is fundamentally impossible to produce such a thing in any reasonable amount of time, unless you develop the game at Foxconn (and I'm not even sure about that either).
See:

Back in 1995 I gave a lecture at the Computer Game Developers' Conference in which I identified several problems with interactive storytelling. I reprised those ideas a few years later in a Designer's Notebook column called Three Problems for Interactive Storytellers. At the end of both the lecture and the column, I suggested that instead of trying to tell stories, we should build worlds in which stories can happen -- worlds in which players live a story of their own creation. The industry didn't have a term for it at the time, but what I was proposing was sandbox storytelling.

In sandbox storytelling, the idea is to give the player a big open world populated with opportunities for interesting interactions. The player isn't constrained to a rail-like linear plot, but can interact with the world in any order that he chooses. If the world is constructed correctly, a story-like experience should emerge.

Suppose the player has just moved into Rome. He can join any group of supporters, just as we can support any sports team today -- but with a difference: the factions often rioted, and there were bloody fights in the streets. What this means in practice is that an NPC who belongs to the faction that the player chooses is an ally, but if the player replays the game and chooses a different faction, the same person is an enemy. No need to write two stories or design the character twice; drama naturally emerges from the situation itself.

OK. You should, if possible, if bearable to your senses of self preservation, force yourself through his article.
His theory, if we can call it that, is full of holes. Let's go through a couple them, shall we? (It doesn't matter if you're overweight, they're so large anyone can fit through.)

I suggested that instead of trying to tell stories, we should build worlds in which stories can happen -- worlds in which players live a story of their own creation.

The meaning is simple: authors shouldn't try to present any strong narrative, and get rid of meticulously conceived tragedy. Well, regarding the later, video game authors haven't really gotten there yet, but there's hope, although it's largely a topic that runs in parallel to the making of a game. The narrative, after all, is always an option to the creation of a game, and the mere presence of enthralling agon will amply suffice.
Now, perhaps it is not obvious to Adams, but it's been known for quite some time that in the hope of allowing the audience to attain catharsis in classicism (and even beyond), you needed to have a well-knit story, and no one builds such a story out of the blue, on sheer fruitless whims, by counting on randomness and no emotional drive.
Let's also be clear here : there have been very few games that could claim having taken a player by the hand to the point of reaching the typical theatrical catharsis. This because in general stories suck.
Besides, the narrative needs to be dissociated from the mechanics. Stories are only there to provide a reason for a series of challenges to occur, no matter their nature. Many games completely do without them. In essence, stories barely have anything to do with a good game since they're only achieved through cutscenes, perhaps because the true purpose of a good game is not to provide a deep and enthralling story, but top notch level of interaction, and one could make the point that players are more entitled to play games with good mechanics rather than with good stories. In fact, we have about 30 years of video gaming to prove that.

Let's just repeat that once more: a great game could easily completely do without a story at all.
The mythical video game catharsis, the one wherein you'd be deeply concerned about the fate of the avatar you control, has yet to see the day, and it's rather easy to figure out that this could only happen if the full range of human emotions were allowed to be channeled through an avatar you'd control. Which means an advanced form of virtual reality, which is absolutely not needed for a good video game, and certainly not attainable anytime soon.

Let's contemplate this situation for a moment and ask ourselves if the emotions we'd feel about something in the game would be the result of game mechanics, or the mere reproduction of real life narratives which the complex game would allow to happen in a virtual reality, therefore defeating the point of doing it in a game, since aside from crunching the head of a giant dragon or racing down a cliff on the back of a rocket, which you can't really do in real life, all that would further the triggering of human emotions would be interactions which already exist in the normal world, the physical one.
Let's be clear. Adams is not a visionnaire. He is just confused about the distinction between a fake reality and a good video game. That is all.
You may spend a lot of time building up the XP of a character (like through mob smashing and random grinding) or try to avoid Pacman being eaten by some ghosts after more than a hour of play, but all you will be in the end, once the avatar gets its butt owned, is just pissed off.
That is all.
If you ever were to fall in love with some video game character, that would only happen because of cutscenes, which precisely defeats the idea that it's the game -a bunch of clever mechanics- that makes you interested in the character.

The problem is that E.A. is asking for a true story, for drama and tragedy, with a spin : such material should not be the fruit of any author, but of the machine.
Essentially, what he wants is a virtual world so rich of intricate commutations and interesting people to interact with that you can actually start an interesting story out of nowhere, at any time.
This has more to do with losing your own real life in a maw of evolved The Sims clones than playing video games, and it greatly disregards the fact that an involving story requires a certain (read high) degree of mastery in story telling, which machines won't have in any foreseeable near future.

I can't tell how I get tired of designers chasing that pink unicorn, be they talking about ever growing story branching or emerging stories.
If they continue that way, at some point, real video games will clearly form their own older category of highly interactive and competitive entertainment and we'll see the rise of blurbs of interactive drama or something similar, perhaps best titled Nonsensical Interactive Boredom.
I can easily tell you that we're also nowhere there yet, and I'm not sure to be willing to get any closer anyway. Competition is essential to gaming, not storytelling.

The industry didn't have a term for it at the time, but what I was proposing was sandbox storytelling.

It's not an accident that what we find the most in sandboxes is cat mess.

In sandbox storytelling, the idea is to give the player a big open world populated with opportunities for interesting interactions.

Interesting interactions don't require a story, even less creating dramatic ones.
Hence GTA. Pick a plane and here you go. No "meaningful stories", just exploration, mindless experiments and plain unadulterated fun.

The player isn't constrained to a rail-like linear plot, but can interact with the world in any order that he chooses. If the world is constructed correctly, a story-like experience should emerge.

He means a shallow one, for sure. He already knows that the main problem is one of manpower and time. How the heck can he even ask for any such rise to happen next year?
Clearly, he is no visionary man, he's just a lunatic with no grip on reality.
This is not anticipation!
A man who anticipates the evolution of a current system or society also shares a strong pragmatic view of the current world as it is and doesn't expect more of it than can actually be obtained. He thereby knows that what he's looking for is a projection in a far away time.
Ernest Adams is not that man. He's saying that developers should do it, despite acknowledging that it's currently impossible, in such a way that it's presented as a counter argument from the opposition more than a truth.
The obvious effect is that it conveys the idea that it's a mere opinion, one that he doesn't agree with.

Not everybody thinks sandbox storytelling is a good idea. The year after I gave my lecture, Bob Bates gave his own lecture at the 1996 CGDC called "The Responsibility of the Author."

One of the things he said was, "[Open-ended environments] may be fun to explore, but they do not fulfill the obligations of a story. There is no beginning, middle, or end. There is no pathos, no human drama, no greater truth to be gleaned from the hard-fought battles that the characters wage."

Bob recommended that we use a linear series of open environments instead -- what we now call a multilinear or foldback story, in which the player is compelled to go through certain choke points in the plot line.

What Bob probably was too polite to say is that Ernest Adams was just sprouting gibberish.
Also, here comes the foldback bit I wondered about.

However, Bob was assuming that in an open-world environment the player would have to go find the plot, and all she would get is a disconnected series of events. I think Bob was expecting that the plot events would be tied to specific locations, and if the player could experience them in any order, they would have to be unrelated to each other.

At least, Bob's plot would be his plot, the one that he took some time to properly build, the one which he could tie some precious cutscenes to. A plot which can hope to be complex enough because the human mind is quite superior to a machine in this domain.
Crafting a decent plot requires being capable of abstraction and passion. When did you see that in a chip-set, again?
So tell me, mister Adams, how do you expect a machine to deliver?
I guess he doesn't, but won't admit it. That would ruin his position and most likely hurt his feelings and his reputation.

He goes citing the shortcomings of GTA in that department (a linear story in a sandbox game) and then speaks of The Sims:

The Sims offers sandbox storytelling after a fashion. It gives you a world with a lot of stuff in it, and simulated people with varying personalities. As the player, you can make them interact and generate a (somewhat) story-like experience. Because the Sims don't speak English, most of the storytelling goes on in your head, but that's all right. You can make your own machinima, caption or record voiceover for it, and upload it to YouTube.

First of all, there's something terribly disturbing about this statement. It just sounds like he's wishing video games to become like some real TV crap festival. Let's have some meaningless bots simulate absurdly boring and pathetic plebe-issues of daily life. Let's create some depreciating tension out of thin air.
Secondly, he's making up the story in his mind because there's nothing complex enough going on in the "game". He has to add his own substrate of drama so to get something interesting out of this chain of non-events.
What makes him think that anything more complex could possibly happen, even if characters could somehow speak English like a human could?
How can't he realize that if he wants to get something remotely enjoyable, he'll need AIs capable of making jokes, saying "I love you" for real or hating you... and we may not want to get to the point of a machine hating you, do we?

Computer role-playing games give the player a big open world, but rather than providing a single story, the world is full of quests -- essentially, disconnected subplots. I love Western RPGs, but they don't have quite the same feeling as a story with one plot. They're more like the legends of Hercules, or any other ancient hero who appears in several unrelated stories.

So how do we make an open-world game in which the player can roam around, yet still feels as if he's taking part in a story? First, as I said, we have to abandon the idea that the player will experience the plot entirely through exploration.

Easy. You make him the hero and have him stick to the story. Otherwise, you're just a random pawn who will get squished in the background of some random battle and your death will be of no importance on the main plot.
In fact, isn't it funny how he is asking for a compartmentalized main plot now? I thought the stories had to build themselves!
Can't he make up his mind?

Now you'll excuse me for the rather huge chunk that follows, but I think it's quite golden:

In the typical adventure or role-playing game, all the plot events are player-dependent; they don't happen until the player finds them and makes them happen. By using constrained environments, we can make sure that the player finds them in the right order. The problem with a plot consisting entirely of player-dependent events, as I explained in the original lecture, is that it feels mechanistic: the whole world just sits around waiting for the player to do something.

If you make the plot entirely player-independent -- that is, it goes forward no matter what the player does, even if he does nothing at all -- then the player tends to lose the game a lot. He's not where he belongs, or he hasn't done what he needs to do, when the dramatic climax occurs.

The trick in sandbox storytelling is to build the plot with a combination of player-dependent and player-independent events.

Keep things flowing no matter what the player does so the world doesn't seem static, but don't make it flow so fast that the player gets behind and loses the game (unless the plot is about finding a time bomb). Put a moderate degree of pressure on the player to act, but reduce the pressure if the player is on the right track.

In a sandbox, exploration itself can't advance the plot -- so instead, use a combination of the passage of time (that's the pressure) and player activity: meeting people, solving puzzles, making decisions, overcoming challenges. Change up the pace from time to time.

Sometimes James Bond is exploring at his own pace (he's master of the situation) and at other times he's desperately running away from bad guys (they're masters of the situation). Then he gets away from them or shoots them and he becomes master of the situation again. Of course, not every game has to use a lot of pressure. You can let the player have a very relaxed experience if you want to.

In itself, it is not stupid, but am I the only one realizing that it's going literally against what he advocated for at the beginning of his article, and isn't it an admission that Bob was right, minus the time-flexible main plot?
You know, this whole topic about how the story should emerge all by itself?

On the other hand, if you want to push the player through the story, then you have to ask why he's just wandering around. If he's wandering around because he's lost or confused, that's your fault.

OK, no more emerging story I guess. If the story can emerge in a free-roaming game, how the heck can you get lost as you can actually start a new meaningful and fantastic story at anytime, anywhere?
Sounds like backpedaling, but isn't really, as you'll see next. It's just a silly contradiction, one he's bizarrely never called on in the comments section (nearly 30 comments of drooling arse lickers).

The designer Chris Bateman wrote a chapter called "Keeping the Player on Track" in the book that he edited, Game Writing: Narrative Skills for Videogames. In the chapter he talks about funneling: various tricks for helping the player find the "spine" of the game. In an open world you can't use the landscape to forcibly funnel the player back to the plot, but you can leave various signs and clues around. Get the book for more information.

Did someone say funneling? Sounds intuitive. So tell me, guys, why do you keep going with confusing terms such as "multilinear" or "foldback"?

Another question people sometimes ask is, "In an open world, how do you prevent the player from seeing something early that he's not supposed to see until later?" The question is rooted in the assumption that everything that the story needs will be physically present in a static game world from the beginning -- as it usually is in adventure games and Western RPGs, where the story is mapped to locations.

But we're not mapping the story to locations, we're mapping it to time and player activity. The answer is simple: don't put an object in the world until it needs to be there. In the Grand Theft Auto games you can't destroy a car in Mission 1 that will be needed in Mission 3, because the car simply isn't in the game world at all in Mission 1.

You obviously don't want cars suddenly popping into existence in front of the player's eyes, but you can bring a car out of a (formerly) locked garage. The player can't be in more than once place at once, so you can do all kinds of things behind his back.

Right. We're not making a location-based narrative, even if we know the car will have to come out of somewhere that's necessarily... somewhere, and we also know that you'll have to drive it somewhere else, either to pick someone else in particular or to crash it into some local drugstore that's the lair of a drug lord.
Adams has just invented the story that takes place nowhere. It doesn't matter if the object isn't right there off the bat. It will be there anyway. Look, just like in classicism, when things pop into the one single place of action at given moments of time. Location is important in a good narrative, and the more work put into the choice of the location and its aspect and relation to the characters or the plot, the more powerfully it serves the plot.
Besides, if you want to make your mission rather epic, I suppose you'll probably go look for picking up a plane instead, which rather narrows the places where you can find one, and I suppose that if the plan is to crash one into some tall tower, preferably the tallest one to crack the score, choices will suddenly appear to be very lieu relevant.


Now, you want to see what kind of extremely exciting stuff we should start to put into games? The sort of quests that should appear anywhere?

Find the buried treasure.
Find the buried treasure before somebody else does.
Find the time bomb.
Find people rather than objects.
Police procedural.
Infiltrate a large open area from any direction.
Escape through hostile territory from somewhere in the middle to the edge.
Root out the criminal gang.
Resistance.

Most of which will suck big donkey balls if there's no decent story attached to them, no stellar plot to drive each phase of such missions. Otherwise, that's just going to be absolutely tedious. Just like in MMORPGs. Of but I guess that's exactly what he wants after all.

To make an experience story-like, you have to avoid too many repetitive or random (unrelated) events. (See my column Dramatic Novelty in Games and Stories for more about that.) If you read a thriller set in World War II, it doesn't consist of shooting an endless parade of identical Nazis; every situation is unique. This means that your sandbox has to be full of all different kinds of things, not just a lot of the same thing.

This is probably the strongest argument against sandbox storytelling: it's expensive and a lot of work. But unlike rail games, if you construct the world carefully enough, the game will be highly replayable. Different paths through the world will offer different experiences. Nor do they need to have the same objective or ending.

Yeah, at some point in time, swap Soviets for the Nazi.
Mmm, nice.
Just as I said, what he's looking at is nothing more than the miserable quests you get to complete in MMOs, even those that pretend being different and richer like in the latest KOTOR.
And of course, the guy is just giving you a list of very obvious quests to add to your boring game so as to increase its replayability; that is, to increase the repetition of drama-less menial tasks.
Seriously, what do you think could make the game that replayable? Changing the skins of the NPCs? Changing the quantity and some attributes of the enemies of a given zone.
No thanks, I'll pass that kind of replayability.

For several hundred years the people of Rome gave their allegiance to one of four factions that supported chariot racing. The drivers wore colored clothing so people could tell them apart, and the factions were named the Reds, Whites, Blues, and Greens.

Suppose the player has just moved into Rome. He can join any group of supporters, just as we can support any sports team today -- but with a difference: the factions often rioted, and there were bloody fights in the streets. What this means in practice is that an NPC who belongs to the faction that the player chooses is an ally, but if the player replays the game and chooses a different faction, the same person is an enemy. No need to write two stories or design the character twice; drama naturally emerges from the situation itself.

Unbelievable. He almost managed to sell me the concept of switching sides so some random NPC now belongs to the enemy faction, so you can kill him.
No, just kidding. What's so ground breaking about that? Isn't the problem that he's also imagining a story that will never happen, just like he did for The Sims?
How will allying yourself to that guy or killing him become an interesting, say *cough* meaningful *cough* story if there's no intricate plot to support and heighten your decisions?Oh wait, the CPU is going to do it.
Ernest Adams should stop being a cyberpunk addict and get back on good ol' Earth.
Not to say that this kind of stuff has already been made in countless games.


Oh, by the way, did you notice? The story emerges.
Yes, it's that time again.
I guess he just can't decide if there has to be a main plot which the player is free to ignore because it sucks and finds it more amusing to ride horses through forests and windows, or if the plot is supposed to grow out of thin air.

That's just not serious.

There was a famous film noir called The Naked City that was later adapted into a TV show. At the end of the film, and every episode of the TV show, the narrator said, "There are 8 million stories in the Naked City. This has been one of them." Try building your own Naked City, and see how many stories you can get in.

Poor Ernest. If only each episode of The Naked City had ended reminding him that each story was written by someone, perhaps we wouldn't be reading such painful nonsense...


Now go watch any of the following movies: Nirvana, Avalon or The 13th Floor, for starters.