How to Build a Better Apocalypse

okay so the basis of this talk how to build a better apocalypse there's a reason why so many games opt for post-apocalyptic settings and this isn't just to do with macho survivalist fantasies which is the kind of common assumption particular from outside games that's basically what we're all about so this talk is about the more complex reason why we find that dovetailing and how it's been optimized for and what it can tell us about all aspects of game design and at the center of that is an argument for the fusion between content and gameplay which have always traditionally been quite separated in the last few years we've seen that more and more games starting to find traction with the idea that these things are very very holistically intertwined and understanding how those two things can confess and work very very tightly together leads inevitably to a better game design and particularly in the last few years we've seen games that have dealt with the idea of apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic settings with a subtlety and a depth that previously hasn't really been there and I want to talk about those games and they're worth examining in detail looking at the specific tools and techniques they're using one of the underlying principles that go on in there with the particular focus on how they use to bootstrap up immersion and emotional investment in the gaming experience to much higher levels and this doesn't just relate particularly to post-apocalyptic game of course we're talking primarily about action-adventure titles and they rely very heavily on a common set of gameplay design tools and content design tools which find a particularly kind of high-water mark in these types of games so although we've been talking very specifically about post-apocalyptic gaming I think there are lessons we can pick up from this very kind of a quite diverse group of games and apply back outwards to to to other types of game design that are all focused primarily on the idea that the player being in a world and having some kind of narrative art experience so that's what we're gonna do we're going to go through a sort of a bunch of different steps looking in specific tools as we go along and then try and bring it all together at the end and make a case for why we can learn a lot from this and ok so let's talk about the end of the world actually we're kind of not obsessed with the end of the world because obviously if the world ends there's no well to play your game in women talking about post-apocalyptic fictions we're talking about particularly the collapse of the known but in a way that we continue to be immersed in so it's not as radical as something like halo is kind of big space or attics because the power of the fiction of any kind of post-apocalyptic scenario is based around the intimate local knowledge of the world which we currently live in so fiction like Cormac McCarthy's the road is powerful because we know the world has ended if we don't know the world has ended we don't have the same kind of emotional investment in it so this is a critical part of a definition of what we mean when we're talking about post-apocalyptic fiction many games are very very apocalyptic in their themes but a smaller number of post-apocalyptic I'll just quickly explain a bit more what I mean about that it might sound a little bit like splitting hairs but actually narrowing the field lets us focus on a smaller number of games which means we can get to a level of depth faster oh I'm having to take in a huge number of kind of surface details so and for example half-life 2 is not opposed to propel it again it's got an alien invasion occupation it's a science fiction fiction but particularly doesn't focus on this idea of the world actually having ended is more about an occupied environment similarly resident evil isn't post apocalyptic because there's no influence of a global catastrophe and the situation in Resident Evil is primarily about containment and risk from resolution silent hill's closer you could argue that there is a kind of very personal apocalypse going on there and that's quite a critical definition because that kind of anti is very very closely to the way that content and mechanics are fused in a lot of post-apocalyptic games is this focus down on the personal investment in a global situation the other thing which is really kind of a critical about that is is that we are talking about this interplay between a kind of a catastrophe which is on a very very very large scale and actually it's that playoff between the fact that the catastrophe is so large-scale that it's impossible to deal with its magnitude which again is unlike kind of more traditional science fiction like Mass Effect or Halo where you do you can see the borders of the catastrophe in those games in something that's more post-apocalyptic it's much more about the innate and kind of inability to grasp all aspects of what's going on at once that kind of is a cornerstone to have officials operate weirdly the same goes for braid and actually if you go on Wikipedia in search of post-apocalyptic games one of the titles which comes back is Sonic the Hedgehog which i think is an tastic I don't know quite how that happens better yeah the idea of using the road and Sonic the Hedgehog to me is incredibly appealing so this specifically human angle this this personal loss in the scenarios is really important Gears of War for all its bombast attempts to bracket the large-scale events within the notion of individual catastrophe and loss and that's hugely hugely important and that's something which many games have been trying to do and we can really see that and maybe the last sort of five years particularly this idea saying what's the personal investment what's the personal involvement how do we humanize this by looking at small acts and we're going to look very specifically those small acts as we go on and the point is is that it radically changes the way in which long-term goals and conflict resolution are dealt with because we start moving away from this idea of resolving a kind of a very large-scale conflict or finding a large-scale solution to actually having a very small scale resolution within a larger environment I explain a bit more what I mean by that as we go on but I think the simple kind of basis from there is kind of saying by definition in a post-apocalyptic game you cannot save the world because it's already ended and that puts us in a very very different position in terms of what it is the players going to do and how they're going to feel about what they're going to do the world's already been lost the argument has already been been under played so this is our kind of like key points of definitions about what we're gonna talk about is going to help us focus the games down in a post-apocalyptic world we are surrounded by traces of the lost world this is critically important we must be aware of what's been lost we don't have any emotional power the loss is permanent it can't be reclaimed it doesn't matter what you do it's gone it's already happened this is mostly manifested with a permanent and radical loss of life Society comfort hope and basic means of survival and when we start thinking about it in those terms it starts becoming clear how this very neatly dovetails with the kind of game play tricks that we want to pull with players all the time which is usually about taking something a world which has apparent complexity but representing it in such a way to the player that you can have a very very simple structure of action and feedback and life is not altered by this event it's reduced by this event this is not about society being built from the ashes there is no ability to rebuild it's gone already and this is this is permanent and there's a highly personal angle events are filtered through their effect on individual the individual is thrown right to the center of what is going on and that's a fundamental aspect of it there's no global actions anymore so yeah in the defining distinction between post-apocalyptic gaming in other forms is pretty simple in a post-apocalyptic game the worst thing that can happen already has happened and that's the world you enter into there is no a sphere of localization is really really important we're talking about small actions searches for humanity and meaning in the face of overwhelming global catastrophe what's interesting about this is it's very very hard to kind of reconcile that with the kind of macho survivalist fantasy angle which apparently is what we all do because if you're basically dead and you're just trying to eke out as much time as you can before you die which is the inevitable end point because the world's ending there kind of aren't any heroics anymore and if you're asking the player to undertake a situation where there are no heroics and there is no wins date at the end of it that changes kind of flips the normal kind of understanding of game fictions on its head so what's going on why is it something that is so inherently so bleak appealing to a large number of players because it is a bleak thing we're talking about so Ron kind of going in also a psychological anthropological about this I'm going to make another argument and what I'm going to say is that the post-apocalyptic games are probably the best examples at the moment of where story and gameplay mechanics fused highly into a holistic whole they're incredibly immersive and powerful it's because those two forms really come together and it really exposes the Sham these are separate things and should be dealt with separately and and the power comes from that kind of that that holism so let's go into some details what I'm do is just cover a few of specific kind of things that we tend to find in these games and talk about how they're done and why they should be so powerful but before we do that I just need to say there's a couple of assumptions going on in what we do this which is the way I kind of understand all games and it's probably worth doing that because then if you don't agree with those you can save yourself half an hour and leave thinking I'm talking garbage so firstly there's a contract between a player and designer the central to managing the expectations of the player specifically for looking at system shortfalls so helping the player understand that a game can't deliver everything and being happy with what it can't deliver and not looking at the edges not worrying about invisible walls and doors that you know can't be open with a crowbar or rocket launcher it doesn't really matter what the details of this contract are but they have to be consistent persistent and fair and isn't matter whether it's a llama Tron or Red Dead Redemption that's that holds for everything this contract can be broken that's usually where games breaking usually where the experience falls down that can happen by both game mechanics and game fiction you can screw up either of those things and your record player but any entertainment experience of any form is that best when this contract is created very quickly is upheld for the duration of the experience and every aspect of the experience is built to optimize the contract wherever it can so fundamentally that experiential contract is key and for me in terms of any form of game design or any form of game development everything else is basically irrelevant apart from upholding that contract there is nothing you should be doing in game design or game development whether is coding AI graphics sound whatever is going to be unless it's targeted on maintaining and helping that contract be as strong as it can it really is kind of an irrelevance which is not saying it's all irrelevant it's just about sort of the target so these are the design tenants were going to talk about and now we can talk about isolation we're going to talk about reduced heroics we're going to talk about the survival grind simplified society's invention and reward ethical extremes the beauty of destroyed known and the spiritual dimension and we're going to try and get through those fairly quickly so isolation let's talk about isolation in a lot of games you spent a lot of time alone unless you're playing a multiplayer game was I put that on one side at the moment what's interesting about a game like dayz though is you are playing a multiplayer game we spend most of your time alone and what's really interesting about dayz particularly is it kind of matured and the lone player experience if you're new to dayz became more and more and more difficult because Murder Squad started camping and taken over on the service which meant that the vast majority of new players never made it off the spawning Beach because they'd get sniped and you kind of had this weird situation we have a multiplayer game where actually the last thing you want to do is meet another player which is a really fascinating situation to go in I'm going to choose to play a multiplayer game or I really hope I don't meet anyone to me is absolutely fantastic now that really ties in the kind of whole kind of like zombie apocalypse ties in because in a world like this everyone's dead no one's left isolation is a fundamental aspect of that fiction as well so we have an immediate kind of way of dovetailing these two things together this has significant advance just for tech you need a less AI you need less rendering you have less characters going on it's kind of it can be empty emptiness is something which is a lot cheaper than fullness and that's good for us obviously it also has implications for design as well because if you are 'shy reducing the number of encounters with other people in the space it makes every single one of those encounters ramp up artificially insignificant and that's really really important to us we can kind of look at that in terms of stuff like 2d design in 2d design emptiness a massively powerful tool and manipulating significance the reason why the Google homepage is so phenomenally brilliant is because there's hardly anything on it because like at least 70% of the screen is white which focuses your attention hugely on the objects that are there so designing the space designing the lac designing the vacuum becomes a really really powerful part of designing the thing you design the background as much as the foreground it's okay to represent an empty desert in a post-apocalyptic world because the lack is a feature which means you can focus your attention in design terms it means you can worry less about competing elements of course because you don't have as many competing elements because you simply have less elements and you're supporting the fact that there is less stuff going on with the game fiction you're presenting but it also means that the details become artificially ramped up in significance and meaning for example going back to Daisy in Daisy a can of beans means more than a radio aerial which means we flip the kind of normal visual signals on his head if something's big it's less interesting to you we're actually looking down for things that are very very very small which changes the way the player conceptually navigates around the space it means that they're looking for detail if the details are looking for are fairly mundane they're not brightly colored they're very small it means the player has to look more closely it means the player has to move more slowly and mister player has to move more carefully so every single environment becomes kind of weirdly richer because it becomes more important because you're always looking for the small hard to spot thing the focus shifts to detail it slows the player down it alters the way that the player plays and the other thing that happens is that when you actually do see someone then a much more complex kind of relationship goes on with them because every other player in Daisy is a potential ally or they're a potential threat or they're a potential tool so in a situation like this looking out and going well you've got the choice you could you could save them you could jump in to help them you put yourself in danger or if you shoot them you could then shoot them let the zombies eat them and then going like their beans later but if you do that you've only got one gun against the next wave of zombies you come across as opposed to two of you working together it's a really really super interesting emotional position to put the player in because you break down the normal kill-or-be-killed reflex into something where you're not presenting clear-cut cases of what relationship you should have with other liars you also have a situation something like Daisy where you know that if you fire a shot you bring zombies to you so actually you end up in a weird situation where you end up sort of holed up in little corners watching other players die around you not out of any kind of voyeuristic stuff but because you kind of know if you help them you'll die or if you help them they might turn around and shoot you in the head the moment of help them because they're trying to steal your beans they're very interesting very complex kind of thing going on there there's a weird kind of a correlation as well between Daisy and journey and the way they handle multiplayer as well their journeys got a much more simple kind of people you're not having to go through that kind of complex stuff with it but journeys based around the fact that you feel an overwhelming emotion when you see another player because it's so empty again you artificially manipulate the significance of a single object through that isolation which is an incredibly powerful thing and and first-person shooters particularly of always been driven by the idea of the lone survivor the isolated avatar but then normally what they've had to do is then displace throw stuff at you to keep you occupied they assume that actually you need this kind of constant kind of plot where orange feed of drip in your eyes whereas actually what's happening with games like Daisy journey is they're kind of going if you take all that stuff away if you take all that stimulus away then actually the moment one thing happens then it becomes as important as 50 things happening and that's a kind of attention which is really interesting to do it's a really powerful emotional States with the player in being alone is emotionally powerful there's no two ways about it and the emptiness manipulates significance so you can use what's not there to alter the way the player reacts to what is there as opposed to having to give them stuff don't give them stuff and they will start ascribing meaning to the things which are there loneliness is under exploding games but has proven potential it's still something which we still can make a lot more of it's definitely getting better and a post-apocalyptic scenario is kind of innately hardwires in these ideas of isolation and being alone is part of the fiction it's very very easy when you pretend that kind of fiction stays two-player and you're not going to meet anyone for the next three hours you don't have to justify why they would why they would happen the biggest point about it though is that it creates this idea of ambiguity and scope around individual encounters that if you only actually have to present five characters well as NPC's in a six-hour game every single one of those carrots is going to feel unique you're not gonna have this idea where your grinding through kind of like multiple enemies it's not saying you have to have any more complex AI for example but because the player doesn't meet the same things happening again and again and again and again and again they have less chance to understand the pattern that's going on in the game design so actually can be a really really powerful tool for without really doing any extra work making each one of your encounters feel more you need okay talk about reduced heroics and this is a much more kind of a avatar focused thing really if in a situation where the the kind of the world has been destroyed then ya actually have anything to save you can't do anything big the player is still going to undertake actions of course and we still want that to happen but we're actually talking about changing the goals a little bit and saying we'll rather than actually having to represent kind of you know huge kind of global things going on we understand what they are monsters they want to feel like they have achieved and that achievement doesn't have to be scaled to that kind of level and the other thing which that achievement doesn't have to do is it doesn't have to scale according to the game and so as the game progresses the achievements don't have to get bigger and bigger so it's kind of a myth we operate around that they kind of like the goals have to get bigger the what the player choose has to get bigger and I'm not convinced that's the case at all then it has to happen that way at all we can actually completely separate those two things out provided the player is able to emotionally invest in what they've done and feel like they have achieved there's no reason like in dayz you don't have to account beams can be as significant as a as a kind of like an office complex exactly the same principle occurs to the kind of feedback of goal and resolution as well we can make the player focus on the can of beans rather than the big red area and that's really useful because it means we don't have to scale up into that kind of 3/4 of the way through a game the fiction collapses completely because it over scales itself it drew demands drama in terms of mechanics and feedback the world can't support that the story can't support that and it kind of collapsed into being this this big huge crazy thing games like I am Alive allure stalker Cora Pripyat just don't bother with this stuff they keep it small all the way through and it's really powerful and it still works and it something to really learn from those games really the major goal in the sort of the post apocalypse para scenario if you go back to something like the road there's only really one thing the characters in the road try and do and that's stay alive for another hour and if you got that it's going back in a way to kind of like old-school survival horror in a way but if all you're trying to do is stay alive there is an inevitable a sort of innate reward in just gameplay extending for another ten minutes and we can make more of that the other thing is is that if we actually reduce the heroics down to simple actions that we can identify with as human beings we import into games anyway our social understandings our understandings of physics and everything else so you know games rely on this kind of schema all the time we kind of know the difference between a car and a cardboard box and we don't expect a big of the car but we understand to pick up the cardboard box we import that knowledge into the game most of the actual goals that we do in games when we actually undertake and kind of actions to resolve the conflicts they move further and further and further away from what we actually know as people we might just about have an abstract concept of pulling a trigger probably most people don't have a concrete concept of either pulling a trigger or killing someone they almost certainly don't have any concept of killing hundreds of people and they probably don't have any concepts at all about kind of like crowbar into death a huge alien baby but there are things which they do understand and some of the I'm alive which is really really interesting I mean I'm a parent anyone else's the parent knows looking after a child is an incredibly powerful thing and we can identify with that and even if we don't have kids we have parents and we remember being short and we know that means a hugely hugely powerful recognizable identifiable thing to do it's not downplaying fantasy but it's kind of saying if you really want to get into a deep emotional connection with a player asking them to do something which they know and understand emotionally is a really really powerful tool so localized heroics the small acts of kindness and drama and heroics that we do every day you see kind of like constantly around you are really really really powerful tools they might be mundane actions but that doesn't make them boring if the situation is extremely the situation is extreme like a post-apocalyptic world doing something very very simple like managing to open a can of beans can be hugely powerful so we shouldn't ignore the small the small can be yet really kind of like give you a lot and it's logical really because if you are talking about this idea of changing the players focus from the big to the small then it also means that the kind of the steps which it takes to achieve that can kind of be shrunk down in scale as well so something we should be really obvious and easy like opening a can of beans could be something which takes hours of gameplay you have to find a can opener and the can opener is in a lot to cover and how to find a key in this kind of stuff which feels very sort of like churning and grindy when you're sourcing yes I've got to find the key card to open the key to press the button and that magically will turn off the fourth film which allows the spaceship to escape it's really kind of grinding mundane and gameplay but if you're placing it in this kind of context where you're saying yeah but you don't have a can opener and you're going to starve to death in 45 minutes then actually trying to get through a locked door ceases to become grindy and it becomes a really big target even though actually what's required to represent that target is not huge the actual cost development cost of representing that target is not massive because we're Anoop y elating the player's significance focus as opposed to having to do that within the system and so and I am alive like any other the game like this you'd actually do anything different in mechanical terms you do without the other game you till you pick up an object and move it somewhere else you find an object to do something to another object you have a child on your back you changes the graphics and you move from one place to another it's kind of capture the flag and bomb runs again and again and again and again but using the fiction to manipulate the players understanding of those mechanics which is you know an old trick but it's amazing how it still isn't getting the same kind of traction that are very probably ought to but these are small acts in in you know a there's a point in I'm alive where you go hunting for someone's inhaler and when you find the inhaler giving me inhaler and you feel like a king at that moment and all you've done is done that picked up an object and somewhere I found a key card and I've open the door but you understand it because it's something which is meaningful on a human level I'm equally in Call of Pripyat the M the goal of Call of Pripyat is to find out why some army helicopters of crashing at the end of it you find the troops that have crashed and you figured out how to actually get them out of the zone and you'd get them out the zone and it's great too the game ends and you can take a big big climax in the [ __ ] Oh what you do now we go home yeah let's go home and they got the helicopter and they go home and I first played it I remember sitting there and thinking you can't do that that's not climax that's not a resolution but it's kind of brilliant as well because the more we think about it when we think yeah they didn't have to save the world they just wanted to go home to their families like most of us want to do at the end of the day and if we were put in a situation where we couldn't do that that would be like the world had ended for us and the other great thing about that it was really really clever is it means they don't have to change the world so in terms of sequels they didn't get into a situation where you know if you're producing a game and you have to build to a massive dramatic climax that means you have to throw everything that's good about your world at that climax because we've all played games where you go off you're holding back for the sequel and usually those payoffs then tend to be pretty crappy but also in developers getting start in another situation if they throw everything at it and I'm thinking like Bioshock Bioshock 2 you leave no other good story to tell about rapture because you've thrown it all at the first one and then you're in a big problem if you want to them roll around to the sequel call a Pripyat they left the zone utterly unchanged at the end of the game which is really powerful if you then want to roll that IP forwards the IP is just sitting there because they changed it from having to resolve the zone to having to resolve the personal situation within the zone and there's a real lesson in there about managing sequels and we know it works outside post-apocalyptic games as well heavy rain is brilliant when it's doing small acts and is for me less brilliant when it's trying to do big stuff playing with your child in a garden is Universal losing your child is a universal fear needing your inhaler is universal Universal is powerful and I think the other final point on that is represent the interior so try and get into the character's head the characters heart those kind of states that's what really matters that's what people are really engaging with and that's what gives us that emotional connection to the game is that kind of sense of identification so it's easier to identify with someone who basically is like us than someone who isn't okay let's kind of accelerate a little bit now to whether I did from that last section staying alive and expanding it so if you start from a position with the player you say right you're dead how long can you last that's how arcade games work yeah as the basic principle of most arcade games is you will die at some point you have to extend your life until the point where you die we don't tend to apply that very much into kind of narrative eyes games action-adventure games but actually it's a really interesting thing to do as well survival horror is all about that kind of resource management and kind of trying to make players feel like you are dead unless you do something about it as opposed to you are becoming more powerful and you're a resolving this big outer conflict is a really kind of again interesting emotional state to get the player into Thomas group of frictional games are spoken a lot about this in Dark Descent about how the the idea behind is how you make the player feel like they're going to die all the time without ever actually killing them and interestingly John Romero is a very very similar thing that was kind of the design principle behind doom had you constantly make the player feel like they're utterly screwed without ever actually making them out to reload the game you want to take them up to that emotional edge and just sit them and hold them there and that's really the target we're going for these kind of games this kind of fiction really works well without because of course there's another kind of natural dovetailing that goes on recision other world is ended to a basically doomed that's it you're going to starve to death you're going to have radiation poisoning all you can do is extend as far as you can it means that you're pushing the plane naturally in terms of the fiction to that edge anyway and you're justifying those kind of actions those kind of activities Metro 2033 is really interesting for this so in Metro 2033 you've got thing called Ranger mode which is makes the game much more extreme but isn't just making more difficult it changes the way in which the the objects of mechanics work so in Ranger mode you massively boost the damage and massively would reduce the amount of ammo available in the environment so every single bullet becomes much more significant I'm alive does this as well usually only have one pitting and one bullet and I am alive and you're bluffing half the time so that kind of grinding for survival ceases to be then about the accumulation of large numbers of objects which is really really powerful in terms of things like managing and inventories but also in terms of meaning that you can keep the player's actions relatively you kind of ramp down if you give the player a rocket launcher what they can expect to do in the world changes if you give the player sort of like four hundred bullets then you know they're going to act like they've got four hundred bullets if you give the player one bullet they're going to behave in a very very different way and you can kind of manipulate the significance of what's going on that way and the librarians in Metro 2033 a really really good example of this they're just bullet sponges I didn't even realize you could kill them until the third time I played the game you just empty round after round after round after round after round of ammunition into these things and eventually you give up and run away but the point is you leave that encounter that firefight worse than when you started it and you don't feel good about having killed a librarian if you manage to kill one you feel bad which is completely unlike something like a Big Daddy where Big Daddy has a massive visual payoff if you kill a big Daddy and buy a shot you're rewarded for it if you kill a librarian in Metro 2033 actually probably you've done something stupid because you've got less bullets to go on with then you should just run away so this idea of kind of changing it from I have to accumulate as much ammunition as I can so then my ammunition will get bigger my guns will get bigger the enemies will get bigger the visuals get thicker everything gets bigger all the way all the way all the way all the way and again you kind of end up this point you tip over the edge but if you have something right so you're saying well now you can have three bullets in this entire game that's it and there's going to be one enemy in this entire game it's just as emotionally powerful it's just a significant there's no heroics it's just this desperate conservation of resources and try to encourage the player to move away from traditional kind of like ways of engaging with doing stuff and actually changing the way in which they view the world and they they kind of like react to to what's being presented in the world and again although it's really tough kind of design thing to pull off it feels like the payoff is really really worth it and we're not kind of exploring that payoff enough one of the other things which can go on particularly something like range meeting in metro is that you can finish a firefight and kind of look down and know that you're dead and actually there's no way you can make it to the next station you might have like a hams with ball bearings and even though you kind of know in your head somewhere that the game probably won't let that happen that it will do something to save you that moment of thinking I'm [ __ ] is really really really powerful and games don't do it enough because you can gauge it a really really tight level and that's that kind of engagement is what everything is and like when you get to a point in Summerlin Metro where you find like a ball bearing on a corpse one ball bearing and like it's Christmas I found a ball bearing it's one thing incredibly powerful and it's just keycards that's all it is rather than actually thinking of things like ammo as ammo we're thinking of stuff like ammo as key cards these become individual resources the number of them is so reduced that rather than just grinding through this accumulation of stuff each thing becomes more significant and that seems to make sense in terms of design and development because we don't want to just be throwing assets at something because they cost money we want each asset to mean something so why not ramp up that significance of every single individual item make it feel unique and make it feel meaningful drive items by functional significance make sure they have to have a meaning in the world because again if the world is empty and the world is ruined then that one thing it's about the emotional significance that are a player attaches to an object is much more important than this kind of just accumulation of stuff desperate players are engaged players the player is desperate they will focus in what's going on if you give them loads of stuff and you're really nice to them no just going to that the kind of Halo drill which I do quite a lot and you know how to play nice players can take you being a bastard to be a bastard they like it okay at the end of the world things will be simpler we want to talk about the politics of survivalism so survivalists withdraw from society and they stockpile weapons and beans and this kind of stuff primarily because they think society is too complicated and it's full of liberals and philosophers and nasty people like that and things should be simple where you just shoot and eat in fact basically that's it the nice thing about a post-apocalyptic society is that that kind of stuff is a lot easier to represent in AI than complex social interaction right which we all kind of know is a real tough thing complex social interaction so if basically all you have to do is basically accumulate enough bullets to kill people to survive that's a lot easier to represent it also means that it's very easy to represent in terms of game fictions it means you can keep things really really simple and you've got a great justification for why you should do that rage is great I mean rage is fantastic because it's like you know meteorite smashes into the earth destroys everything but before then it was really technologically advanced so we have all the technology but we don't know how to use it anymore means you've got this great way of kind of playing with stuff where you can have anything you want in that world but yet you can have no society capable of understanding it scientifically so you don't have to do any of the complex stuff but you get all the cool stuff which is a really smart design fiction to work with and it breaks down into tribes and alliances and gangs you don't have to have kind of complex politics or negotiations you just have to have kill or be killed it's Deathrays 2000s Mad Max it's it's kind of easy to grasp we know it we recognize it from other places fallout is kind of more subtle and complex than rage but basically it's not actually that much more subtle or complex it's still the same basic principle if you strip society back and present a much more simplified society which has much more minimal channels of input and output socially and again you focus everything down you don't have to produce as much but you focus the players attention on significance where you want I mean you know fallout is still a place that's full of extremists and political tribes and stuff like that and what's really clever about fallout is they fake social complexity really easily they have stuff like in in Fallout 3 you have the kind of like the the ghouls and racist humans kind of subplot way you know the girls the enemies and then you find out personally the people that live in the nice plush tower the bad people and you help the girls and kinda get you just get back some forwards it's just you know it's just deathmatch but because the fiction supports the deathmatch you can buy into it it lets you engage with it in a very very easy way it kind of hands you those kind of hands you all the cars unless you'd less you kind of play with it which basically halo 2 with more text boxes but the fiction fakes the complexity and because you can engage with the fiction because you have that association you take on something that is inherently quite simple and you make it complex in your mind in your emotional reaction to it and mutants obviously mutant zombies are wonderful for AI because mutant zombies are stupid and just do what you want them to do and you don't have to have them having any kind of like social interaction particularly but you do create an opposing force of human society you create a sort of a threat that without having to do anything and we can put this really simply by just looking at these two slides and you know it's as simple as that really and metro takes it further metro doesn't even try and represent all society but it actually gives you these snapshots he's incredible vignettes of life after the end of the world which are all the more powerful she spent so much the game alone and then you're surrounded by people crammed into these really really small situations but actually all you're hearing when you're in stations in metro a tiny little actions someone can't get medicine someone's grandfather's ill someone's pig has shat in someone else's tent and they're upset about it it's very very very small very simple things that again we humanly identify with so a really really high extent and that's why it's kind of it's powerful you have these people huddling together in the darkness the really other really important thing about Metro which goes back to the book which is based on isn't the people in the station's are terrified of what's outside the station stations like tunnels dark tunnels empty stations full they can't tell you anything about the world they have no understanding about the world either so you put the player in a situation where there is no Cortana figure there is no God who knows what's going on and that again changed the relationship of the player has because there is no one to help them through there's no one to say this is if you do this and this and this this then this is what will happen which is a traditional NPC role in games you always have the God NPC who's usually not visually represented katanas the kind of classic example who goes and now if you go and do this this will happen in you go through and you can do it and then something else happens removing that figure and saying no one in this world can tell you anything more than you know means that we create ambiguity in the world and it means we can start doing stuff as designers and saying well we can pretty much do whatever we want in the tunnels outside those stations because nobody knows what's goes on in there anyway these are just vignettes of kind of frightened Huddle's and that's you know that really helps us with that player designer contract because it means we can kind of we can do what we want and really we want to do what we want in a way that the player is going to accept and but getting rid of complex representations is always a good thing and kind of simplified societies help us do that but the known world is retained we still understand it we still identify with it because these people that we kind of know under taking actions that we recognize okay and very very simply and players love tinkering this is kind of the oldest truism in the book in game development if you give players a bunch of stuff and let them tinker they're usually happy we like grinding we like putting stuff together turning junk into gold is a really really really powerful thing fallout is brilliant at the turning junk into gold turns junk into ammunition and everything else you kind of have this sense of everything you look at is a potential currency which you can use again that's a really kind of powerful thing because what you do is you're taking really boring mundane known objects that you would normally scatter like to try to surround your game world to just give it dead and you're increasing the significance of those things and making those things individually actually feel like they have a really powerful meaning so appealing to that kind of repurposed tech that collector kind of sensibility in the gamer is a really really important thing okay we are now running out of time so let's push forwards and tied in with the reduce society let's talk about ethical extremism so the first time I found myself in stalker killing for bread and trying to work out a way in which I could kill someone for bread without using any bullets because I was running out of ammunition and without them actually being able to fight back so I didn't have any bandages you kind of know you've crossed the threshold and you're in a really different gameplay space now that's a really interesting thing games nobody put us in a situation where it's kill or be killed and that's kind of how they justify the kind of the mass kind of slaughtering games if you're not doing the kind of Deus Ex dishonored you can choose to be good or you can choose to be more bad but actually if you choose to be good you're undertaking pretty much exactly the same things just with a different cutscene it has no actual ethical meaning killing or not killing apart from possibly a couple of kind of like minor branches and that's a very different and kind of not as interesting thing as what goes on in the game like stalker or actually if you want to go right back you can make a stuff like in bungees original first-person marathon we'd have oxygen-free levels where you're going to die and you're on a ticking clock anybody have to run from oxygen station to oxygen station stalker does the same thing you will die of radiation poisoning or you'll bleed to death or you'll starve to death unless you keep moving so you have to engage in act but it's not about throwing zombies at you that will kill you unless you shoot them it's about saying the entire world will kill you unless you move forwards in the game it is just a matter of time which is taking an arcade model and bolting it onto a narrative game in quite a subtle and quite interesting way and in a way it kind of gets you out of the dissonance that you have with characters like Nathan Drake we're quite few people like a drone style from them style games I said this is really interesting dissonance with Nathan Drake funny charismatic every man we all love Nathan Drake he's just killed four hundred and fifty people without breaking a sweat that's weird he's a psychopath he shouldn't be funny and charming he's nuts because he isn't in a situation where it's kind of you know it's that kind of killer we kill throwing at it compared to stalker we're in stalking you're saying to the player you have to do this we're not going to force you to kill these people you're going to die unless you do but not immediately so actually what you're doing is murder deal with that that's a much more interesting emotional situation to put someone in you're not letting them off the hook whether you can smother them and choke them and drop them on the floor nicely and drag them into an air then you're killing them you're going to kill them and it's murder and you need to deal with that again it's about kind of changing that kind of emotional significance in the game and signs to play we're going to for sure to engage with their actions and they spot we're going to place you in a fictional world where this is the reality of everyday this is how you stay alive because you are dying from the moment that game stars you're dead unless you do these things that's much more interesting ethical dimension for me to go into than basically saying in the next second a stroke will kill you unless you shotgun it in the face which is kind of boring and we don't want board gamers because it's been love being Skinner pigeon button clickers so this idea of an abstract non immediate threat we can use that to drive behavior we don't have to have immediate threats all the time we can have a world which is set against the player as opposed to having specific agents that are set against the player and that change is the way they do make the player deal with karma don't try and represent karma players have their own ethical dimensions and stuff it's really nice to teach at university and we used to do look at games in the game design course and we used to at least make the students will play fallout lots and would always go through marchers and say right how many people played evil how many people play good in four years of running that course not one student played evil they all wanted to be good they wanted to be the hero and they hated stalker because they just thought it was grossly unfair that they were forced to do things they didn't necessarily want to do which was really weird because they'd have no problem playing stuff like quake where they were doing exactly the same thing but the significance of what they were doing was shifted and changed so you can use that kind of fiction to change that kind of behavior and that's that's that's really interesting to me all right two more things and we can wrap up and do some questions and let's talk about Apocalypse porn for a bit an abandoned building porn and that kind of stuff which basically is a huge amount we kind of deal with that of games beautiful things are still drive gaming spectacles still drives gaming to a large extent particularly with these and that's a good thing I love this kind of stuff I think stuff like enslaved Crysis 3 these are really beautiful games and that kind of spectacle I think is a really important part of playing them it's really important because it's not it's a very very immediate reaction that you have very visceral reaction you have with the game spectacle and scale are amazing for just getting you kind of hooked in to what's going on and what's really important about these kind of games is that the way they do is they present things which you know again they take these enormous scales but actually what's important about your connection with them is the fact that these are vistas and views kind of like big spectacles but actually it's about the personal relationship you have with them a destroyed city but a city that you recognize which is being destroyed it's more emotionally powerful than a kind of a big alien thing you can get the spectacle from so like a big alien environment but you don't know it so you don't have quite the same thing of going I actually that was I can understand that people lived there I can understand that life took place then the game doesn't need to do very much to nudge that further in you but actually then if you can take that kind of thing and say and now let's like counterpose that with a very small intimate detail and abandoned shoe a child teddy bear it very very easily and quickly fires off again that emotional commitment stuff and while there is definitely a kind of an aesthetic ization of destruction going on with all of them there's also about this kind of stillness and this this kind of weird intimacy and very very small type personal kind of thing that's going on that you kind of get to that combination of saying the beauty of what you're seeing played off against the game trying to constantly nudge you into understanding the awfulness of what happened again creates a really interesting emotional tension if you can pull that tension off you've got to play in a really really interesting space where they want to look but they don't want to look because when they look they feel and that's what you're trying to get with them we shouldn't underestimate that the power of using kind of very simple spectacles to achieve that kind of emotional depth and it is you know kind of it was also kind of eye candy and that's fine and when we made dear Esther for example I mean I still kind of believe that because it was quite different a lot of players kind of struggle with the pace of the game because the game was so beautiful because the world which with Rob Brisco built was so beautiful people would look at it and they'd look at it for long enough for the game to kind of catch up with them and sucker punch them in the momentum and take them through now if it wasn't as beautiful I don't think it would have worked as well would have lost more people in the first three minutes and that comes down to pure spectacle of understanding the the kind of power of visuals reaching to people at quite an emotional level and we should kind of like invest in that for sure journey is quite an interesting case this is well journeys exceptionally beautiful and journeys Beauty helps journey deliver the gameplay experience whilst players might still be looking at the beauty the gameplay experience has got its hooks in and that's a really powerful thing but the fundamental thing is that we shouldn't see architectures functional we should see architecture is emotional spaces we can steer and change people's emotional responses by putting them in those spaces and that fact that play off between very big and very small is really important all right last one and the spiritual dimension this is cryostasis which I love which is one of the oddest games ever made and everyone should play and it's just really really deeply weird and gets weirder and weirder and weirder as it goes on and the reason you can get away with getting weirder and weirder and weirder which goes on because you start softly think okay something's happened at this level and then you start kind of understanding but actually you have no idea what's happened the world might've ended it might not have ended you might have died you might not of Nod you don't know but because you go into this space of uncertainty and ambiguity the game can start doing things all of a sudden it's the point where I can't actually tell you what happens at the end of cryostasis but when I first played it my jaw hit the floor and it's what I cannot actually believe you've just done this this is insanity but I loved it and I lapped it up because all the way through the game had been training me and saying where you are what's going on now at the moment it's not necessarily real because the world might have ended and if the world ended who calls the shots you can't you can take all those important understandings of physics and society and all that stuff we've been talking about but actually now we can start bending those and playing that and obviously you have kind of situations like in in Metro the ghost sequence which is for me one of the most amazing moments in game narrative and a mechanic design we simply walk down a tunnel and see ghosts and echoes of a society which has been there and even though you kind of you kind of take monsters and mutants on the chinks we've seen them all a million times but seeing kind of groups of people just muttering and going about their business is is really creepy and eerie because it doesn't feel like it's your belonging again because there's no actual kind of like a kind of feedback response to it there's no kind of achievement nothing you can do particularly it's just there but it kind of feels wrong but what it really does I think from particularly with metro is it makes it very very poignant that you kind of go I'm seeing ghosts I'm seeing people I can't do anything I can't save them I can't resolve this I just have to kind of watch these things play out in a way which is quite sort of weirdly upsetting in some places well I'm quite soft about shooters which is a very weird thing saying but it's really hard emotion to create that idea of poignancy and i think the reason they can get away with is because they do this this idea of going with the world's ended we can start reinventing those rules we've given you a bunch of rules we'd let you import your understandings of the world we played with those a little bit but actually we can kind of do what we want and that's a really again really interesting case of whether fiction justifies a load of mechanic's design that you can start playing with the player however you want it'll be really weird living through the end of the world reality's faltering you can change the rules that's quite important and that gives you a lot of freedom as a designer so and I just want to end by reading a short kind of a treatment of the kind of ties all of those things together really and and sort of suggests a game experience that could be had if we play with all those that that hopefully will provide some kind of way of illustrating and that kind of stuff so it just bear with me and imagine this if you can we're alone for long periods of time the loneliness is punctuated at a regular intervals by encounters which are characterized by high levels of tension and anxiety as we can't predict generic behavior or levels of threat we end up killing allies because we're afraid they want our equipment I feel saddened when we kill even those who are trying to kill us because they're so few and we feel pretty lonely and we force back to isolation again we pass through a settlement we track down a thief who'd escaped with a blanket and the settlement never asked what happened to him instead we get water for return the letters stay for a while an old man sings a song we have remember it's the only time in the entire game we hear music they can't offer anything else so we move on and never see them again we use the plastic bottle from the water they gave us together with duct tape and a cigarette lighter that we traded for an ammunition clip to fashion a flamethrower with some decanted white spirits we loot from the body of a man who'd been drinking it because he ran out of water we used to flame through her to avoid being eaten by rats we see ghosts flitting around the summit's of the skyscrapers and we took an old couple into following us into a basement using them to satisfy the hunger of the ghouls who lived there we can run faster than they can all we want to do is go home there are no heroics anymore even the simplest act is fraught and lengthy our award for scaling a building is a rotten can of beans but we're so pathetically grateful because it keeps us alive for another game play our on a different occasion we sneak through the dark and steal a gas mask from someone they're dead without it we don't need to fire a shot we feel a weird mix of elation and guilt later at the game's climax we offer our shoes to a child so they can cross and broken glass without risking an infected cut we spent 2 gameplay hours trying to get the shoes a pair of shoes meant more to us than all the ammo the game had to offer and when we gave them to the kid in that final moment we felt like we'd saved the world and after all that we get home it's a burnt-out wreck no one's there everyone's gone but it doesn't matter we've made it home and we've retained what humanity and dignity we could along the way we're getting there we're actually really close to that kind of experience which feels much more like a book experience or a movie experience when you start putting all these pieces together from these games I start getting a sense that actually we are chasing that thing down that really elusive thing where we're not offering traditional rewards when offering traditional relationships between mechanics and fiction but we are kind of actually optimizing that relationship and saying we can use the world which we create to make that contract with a player really tight and really honed and we should looking for every opportunity to do that sure it's not fun in the traditional sense but some days in mario days and some days and not mario date and more and more people are looking at producing darker fictions and saying there is an entertainment in a darker fiction we do want to play out those rules we do want to try and understand how we might operate how we might think how we might relate to those kind of situations and what's really powerful about the post-apocalyptic setting is that it says this is all about how you might relate this is not about the global this is not about the epic this is about individual people dealing with tiny local events and just trying to make their way through for another half an hour or so so that's it really I'm gonna leave you there can hopefully have a bit of time to take some questions and hopefully some of that's been useful thank you so that they don't has any questions at all hi so I agree talk by the way one of the things that always been bugging me in a post-apocalyptic world it's something that's very morbid it's very very really makes people depressive but hopeful at the same time these kind of situations inspire very dramatic and drastic situations and most of the time you're caught in a situation of doing something that you would never even want to consider or think about doing it for your own survival where do you stand on the perspective of things like you have to probably kill someone to get a bullet but what about when you have to actually hurt a woman or a child or an animal or an in defense lets a human being that nowadays in society is such an extremely controversial thing you wouldn't ever deer dare to do something like that what how would you stand on that it's such a powerful thing but such a controversial thing at the same time I think we're right so it's about the kind of this thing of ethics of making people commit acts that they wouldn't normally commit I think the danger with games is letting players off the hook doing that because actually we commit kind of appalling acts left Ryan syndrome we kind of don't even notice that we're doing it I think generally it becomes from this this this kind of thing of the immediacy of kill or be killed you have to do this now all the game finishes we have to reload and I think we kind of we've moved a little bit getting around that from having stuff like karma bar saying we will represent to you how good or evil you're being and then you can do that and I really hate karma bars because I think you can kind of go oh I am 35% evil and if I you know do this then I'm 37% evil and it's just ridiculous because I really thing like that I think um giving the player time and space to think about what they're doing is consider what they're doing and not presenting it as a kind of an immediate kill-or-be-killed actually means that you are in a kind of a weird situation you cannot if you're going to ask the player to do things which are socially reprehensible you have to deal with the fact that you are enabling people to undertake and play out that act and you've just got to deal with that as a developer and make the decision of whether you feel ethically comfortable in letting a player to commit an acts which you feel is ethically or morally horrendous and you have to be able to justify why you're doing that and I think what we're kind of moving towards more as developers and what you see in these games more is less the assumption that it's just pure fantasy and I don't kind of buy particularly the kind of stuff about this is this has bad kind of social kind of like outcomes if you allow people to commit violent acts and stuff like that but I think what you should do is say am I happy with arson the player to do this and can I accept the fact that some players will do this just because they just want to play it out or they'll have no connection to I think what we're trying to do is get players to consider their actions and I think for a player to consider their actions you have to ramp back the immediate kind of light you have to respond you have to respond you how to respond so you have to given time to think about what they're doing and know that you feel comfortable with it as developer I guess cool thanks a lot hi that was a really good talk um one of the things I've noticed in a lot of post-apocalyptic games is that the world is very depressing obviously and everything's kind of gone to crap but there's still that notion of humor and there's still that like very weirdly comic sense to it I was wondering if you could comment maybe slightly on that yes they come to questions about and kind of humor the dark humor of the end of the world I think it's one of those things which is defining makes us human though isn't it it's kind of like laughing in the face of catastrophe and I think what's really it's good that that is kind of you find that kind of inevitability in there but kind of it again it's that thing of saying this is what we're really trying to do is we're trying to use the big to relate to the small we're trying to make players feel humanly connected to what's going on around them and I think that kind of kimura yeah it's it's it's one of the most things which is most humanizing is kind of humor it's also one of the hardest things to pull off as a game writer I think it's it's so hard to to kind of get that stuff in there so I was playing a Crysis 3 the other day and what really surprised me broadsided me about Crysis whose I really emotionally engaged with the kind of the key NPC and psycho who is now he's been further you know they're all in these alien kind of nano suits and he's been cut out of his and he's going got old and he's creaky and he puffs after you and can't climb trees and can't kick doors down and stuff like that and it's kind of it starts you off thinking it's kind of funny she's up at the door knees going good I trying to click it open then you come along with your alien nano suit and rip the door off and go oh let me and it's kind of ha ha but then you kind of go it's not ha ha right it's really sad but it kind of is and it kind of isn't and I'm so I was like I'm playing crisis and I'm having an emotional reaction Wow you know it's kind of cool yeah I think it's really hard but if you can do it I think it's small moments of human intimacy and I think humor is one of the most powerful and one of most hard to pull up and it's the usual thing the more powerful it is the harder is to pull off and that's why you gotta weigh in for those big targets and try and actually do it but yeah thank you thank you great Todd thanks a lot I was writing a little bit recently and talking with something about it that surrounded like a very difficult moral choice in the game and the person said well this doesn't sound very fun and I said I don't really know that it's supposed to be a farm I just wanted to get your comments on this sort of balancing a you know evoke an emotion than player versus like having fun which may be an awkward situation or you know for the player and so my take on fun is that games of the only medium where we obsess about whether something's fun on art and then I think pretty much every other medium you kind of go well Hamlet's not fun and stopped it being you know lasting 400 years you know plenty of films are really bleak and dark plenty of books are really bleak and dark you have to separate fun from engagement and if you can't separate from from engagement you're never going to make a sophisticated media experience because it's just crazy it's like saying you know you can kind of hear I mean you kind of you see in films you know you get kind of you sit there and you're watching a film that's really really great and again at this point the producers stepped in with the test audience and the end suddenly is happy and you can't go how did that come from I think you have to kind of trust that people want to people want to experience all levels of human reaction to situations which is you know and most media is going right back to kind of cave paintings is an exploration of what it means to be human in the world and being human in the world is not limited to being fun so the idea that actually you can't engage with stuff on this as far as this is Luke really so yeah I think it's just it's just a hang-up we have to get over and it's not saying games all have to be diagnosed um games have to be fun it's great I love playing fun games but you don't have to do it at all yeah and people will take it I think we're getting to a point where we're actually finally kind of a to kind of turn the corner of going what players will take stuff they're really happy for you to play around they're really happy to be messed with they're really happy for you to force them into different situations and actually the thing which I think is most important for us to kind of get how trances they're really happy to think they want to think they want to feel they don't just want to be sort of like punched in the face repeatedly and so I think we're heading in the right direction yeah thanks a lot I think we have time for like one more question yeah you spoke a little bit about the contradiction like the macho macho fantasy I was worrying if you had any insights about just the lone fantasy a post-apocalyptic universe sorry I don't mean the Ballona fantasy yeah yeah okay so um yeah I think I mean I think part of the interest of this kind of scenario is again it comes down to this thing of the what if what if it was me and I think there's quite a deep-rooted kind of anxiety probably he said without a psychology degree in being human about what if I was alone what would that feel like we are incredibly social creatures it's like behave and it's such an extreme situation to think yourself into and I think any kind of post-apocalyptic scenario I think one of the reasons were those kind of fictions are popular is because they enable us to try and get a window of understanding on what that might feel like I think most the traditional model particularly of say shooters is that you are alone because you are a god and you become increasingly more godlike and you move away and actually when you look at kind of FPS avatars a lot of effort is invested to separate them from humanity to make that enable that transition to happen so you might be alone but you're all powerful and I think it kind of flips in the other direction or actually people are kind of still going with that kind of apocalyptic stuff there is a degree of fantasy about it but I think it's maybe tied into something that's even a little bit deeper than that of going well what if I was alone and I think that's really much more interesting emotional space to explore of going but what if you're alone and powerless what if actually you couldn't do anything what if you do to that I think and we need to use fiction to with all those types of things I think it's again like I've got a kid and seeing him start to sort of ask those questions and try and understand well what does it mean when I'm the adult and I have to take responsibility for my actions we need media to explore those aspects of being human that we can't explore ourselves in our daily lives I think it's very tied into that if that answers a question um I think we're at time oh yeah we're good we're good yeah okay thanks if you look at a world like John Carpenter's Escape from New York City where you kind of have a tiny apocalyptic piece in a bigger world that has not ended how does that change how will you work with that setting what would be different from what you just described okay so the question is about having kind of like a kind of a micro apocalypse within a world which hasn't kind of change which is it kind of like so like resently before kind of presents there's like this village is screw this with the rest of the world is basically okay and I don't there's anything I think you can still apply an awful lot of those techniques I think you can still talk about refocusing the player on small actions small objects you can still talk about increasing isolation and vacuum to artificially boost significance and that kind of stuff I think what the kind of for me the kind of underlying thing which is in there in a lot of these types of fictions is about saying it's gone you can't walk outside it you can't if you travel far enough you won't reach the edge of this so you have to look to now you have to look to to what's going on but you don't achieve that having to look to now and having to look to the immediate through throwing things out the player you do it through saying you haven't got anything else it's literally you know it's a wasteland out there you've only got what's happening right now to you in this space so I think it's a conceptually different framework but I think the kind of the the tools which are being used can still be applied of saying this is you know don't let the player accumulate too much make every individual instance mean more look for the emotional connection with everything that happens rather than the functional connection use the fiction to justify the acts of the player how to give them time to space to think and feel about what they're doing and don't let them off the hook and don't make them earn their rewards and it's kind of in a weird kind of way it's coming back kind of like old-fashioned arcade game design you know make a man it but we want them to emotionally as opposed to kind of point based on it I guess so maps across I think that that change is that idea that there is no this is it what you have right now that's all you've got which of course is amazingly powerful for a game well design because you don't actually want the player to consider anything other than what you've given them so right that's it cool thank you all very much coming

Channel: GDC

Views: 38,130

Rating: 4.81531 out of 5

Keywords: gdc, talk, panel, game, games, gaming, development, hd, design

Id: wrB1fZ7v17c

Length: 60min 25sec (3625 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 16 2016