Systemic level design for emergent play– Harvey Smith at GDC

Emergent play seems very powerful to me. Something about the verisimilitude of characters imbued with goals left alone to achieve them really speaks to me. I think it's a sense of "Hamlet on the Holodeck" -- emphasis on the holodeck. However, our best contenporary example of that is the Sims, which forms micronarratives but no coherent story. Even from a ludic stand-point, I doubt such a free range of actions makes sense for much gameplay. So clearly, constraints are key.

Smith's talk is about that kind of balance, especially necessary for our imprecise mastery of artificial life. He diagrams a method that can employ modern best practices in software engineering to great convenience and effect. Things that are the same should behave the same by default, then get any special modifiers (environment, mood, motiviation, etc) added on. This is especially handy for inanimate objects. This is essentially Crawford's ratio of interactive excellence from The Art of Interactive Design (85), where the number of accessible states over the number of conceivable states should approach 1 for best results. Avoiding depicting doors that can't open (Prince of Persia, I'm looking at you!), and otherwise usable items that are actually just part of the background is a great start at reducing those conceivable states. Especially when some ledges are graspable, others are walkable, and others just painted onto walls for effect (and instant death when you try to jump onto them). And why can the Prince pick up a fallen foe's saber, but not a bow?

The challenge and need for balance comes from narrative considerations. To avoid "toy-like" environments (Sims etc) the player needs to be led/driven/coerced through some series of events/levels/whatever... because we construct narratives linearly, and if the designer cares what narrative we put together, then she cares what order we see these events/levels/whatever in. Even if we withdraw to a purely ludic point of view, challenging gameplay often calls for a change in states, increases of difficulty, or introductions of novel items. The challenge is -- how much of a special case are these?

From Smith's POV (and I too remember Deus Ex fondly), besides the software engineering benefits which I can affirm, his principles give direct benefits to the player. A sense of immersion in a consistent world. This allows for plan-making, understanding, and achievements. On the other hand, you still have those "one-ofs" that are required (for some definition of required) and stand alone as de facto special cases anyways, getting none of those benefits. And emergence, while creating powerful "second order consequences," is too unreliable to count on for important narrative events.

I think we need to find some formal constraint language for controlling emergence.

Prince of Persia: Rival Swords

So I'm watching Pat play Super Mario Galaxy on the Wii. A couple of Mario's new moves really surprised me. I say surprised because they were actually fairly familiar. One move allows Mario to jump against a wall, hang on, then jump higher against the opposing wall, and so on, all the way up a "chimney" (close walls). When he's close to the edge of a narrow walkway, he hangs off the edge. I think Mario would feel right at home in the Prince of Persia universe, except for his awkward tendency of trying to jump on his enemies heads rather than slash at them with a saber. Oh yeah, there's the same awkward third-person camera angles you get to fiddle with.

I was struck by an obvious but still enjoyable sense of nostalgia playing Prince of Persia. It evoked distinct memories of being back in grade 6 at middle school playing the original (game, perhaps not version -- I don't know if it was a port) Prince. I remember how the Prince skidded to a halt when you stopped running, how he whipped out his saber when you had to fight, the 8-bit spikes at the bottom of pits and all the rest. In that sense this Prince hits home in just the right way. Lots of new toys, but enough of the original to pull in original players. I haven't played the others in this new series, so I can't really say anything to series fatigue, or how well the overall story line plays out.

The most applicable reading from last week would be Jenkins' 'Narrative Architecture.' I admire how he tries to carve that pragmatic middle ground where the narrative aspects of games are allowed to be relevant and designers are allowed to try improve their presence in games. Prince is a game that's had quite a lot of environment design done, in order to create a real-seeming backdrop. However, since this is a puzzler, much of this is static, as opposed to, say, Assassin's Creed's more life-like crowds of native speakers. Nonetheless, the sense of exploring these ruins in a land and time far away is a good one to nurture, as it directly strengthens the believability of the puzzles and traps that await you.

Your NPC foes seemed somehow lackluster. That's likely a result of playing on easy, and I kept wondering silly things like why the archers didn't have backup swords anyways. On the other hand, when I say lackluster I refer to more than their fighting prowess. Their presence in various places is definitely just as scene-based as the traps etc (ie you have to accept that as a trope of the game, it doesn't make sense except as a predefined problem needing a solution). They also seemed strangely deaf, and even if you messed up the stealth kill of one guy, his partner would still be oblivious. Strange, but since I like to notice AI behavior in games, it seemed noteworthy.

It also seems worth noting that Prince is a game that doesn't want emergent behaviour from its NPCs. While some games with systematic level design can afford to have its NPCs act on their motivations and move around levels, Prince absolutely requires this almost-cinematic level of precision to a well-accomplished scene. Having all the guards decide to meet in one room to defend the castle would bypass that entirely, as well as probably trigger most of the traps. :)
Oh narrative ambitions. What will happen to you when we give computer characters goals and amibitions?