Thoughts on Detroit: Become Human

By Thomas Grip

Quantic Dream learns with each game, and adresses their issues with new features. But with new features come new issues, and lots of juicy design lessons. In this blog post I will talk at length about affordance, then touch upon branching and themes.

Intro

It has been a while since my last design blog, and I felt it was finally time to write one again. And since I just played through Detroit: Become Human, that’s what I decided to write about.

First off, let me say that I quite liked the game. I had issues with how they tackled some of the themes (especially in regards to robots), and felt they could have taken some aspects of the world they created more seriously.

What made up for the so-so narrative bits were the production value (such as some very cool environments), and the myriad of exciting scenarios. It’s not an easy feat to create scenes that are not just narratively compelling, but also engaging play-wise – especially not in the sort of story that Detroit tells.

On top of this, the branching and the choice possibilities in Detroit are insane. It is a lengthy game, taking well over 10 hours to complete, and yet as the story unfolds there is a constant stream of differences that all depend on your previous choices. Everything to how crime scenes change to how characters make remarks depending on how you played some previous scene is amazingly well done. The scenes are constantly constructed from a wide array of options, but everything flows together into a coherent whole. Other branching games, such as Hidden Agenda, have a much more jarring presentation where the inserted lines and cuts in the flow are obvious. In Detroit, flow flaws are basically nonexistent.

So, it is fair to say that production-wise Detroit is quite a achievement. However, the game starts to stumble as it tries to be just that – a game.

Just like with previous titles from Quantic Dream, Detroit tries to be what is essentially a playable movie. Mixing film and games gives rise to all sorts of interesting design decisions and issues – issues that are hard to see in other games. It is clear that Quantic Dream are aware of the flaws they have had in their previous games, and there are a bunch of new feature that try to address the issues.

But with new features come new issues, and lots of juicy design lessons. In this blog post I will talk at length about affordance, then touch upon branching and themes.


Affordance

The first topic of this blog is how Detroit: Become Human handles affordance. The game takes place in one of the most challenging environments there is design-wise: inhabited real-life spaces. Spaces that contain a bunch of everyday items, such as drawers, pictures, tools, televisions, coffee cups, keyboards, clothes and so on and so forth. These are all objects we are not just accustomed to interact with – we also have expectations of their usage. As a player, you need to be able to figure out what objects you can interact with and in doing so you are constantly battling your ingrained notion of how these objects ought to work.

In Heavy Rain (2010), Quantic Dream’s earlier game, the only way to figure what you can and cannot interact with is to carefully check your surroundings and see if an interaction icon pops up. There are some objects that signal pretty clearly that you can interact with them, such as a corpse at a crime scene that you are able to examine. A design goal for a game should be to be able to use your intuition to figure out what sort of items you ought to be able to interact with – but the Heavy Rain never lets you train that intuition. Obvious objects are more an exception than a rule, and thus the player’s optimal strategy ends up being doing a brute force search of the room to try and locate all the hotspots.

So why is this bad?

There are two main issues with not being to identify points interaction. The first one is that it lessens the game’s sense of immersion. The second is that it doesn’t allow you to properly “play” the game. Detroit has some tricks up its sleeve to reduce both of these, but before we get into that it is worth to discuss just what is so problematic with these issues.

Immersion

Let us first go over the issue of immersion.

In order for a player to feel immersed in an environment, they need to internalize the surroundings. This is something I have covered in other posts, but basically it means that players need to actively take a part in the fantasy. And in order for a player to feel present inside a virtual world, they need to have what is called internal representation.

While it may not seem like it, real life also operates on internal representation. You don’t simply “see a chair”. The act of seeing a chair triggers all sorts of data about chairs: what their physical properties are, what you can do with them, what are your available actions and so forth. All of these combine into the actual sensation that there is a chair in front of you.

Here comes the issue. If you play a game where looking at a chair lacks any situational data, the player’s mental representation is empty. They fail to build any vivid fantasy for the virtual scene that the game tries to build. In turn the player is unable to place themselves, as in their actual selves, inside the game world. When games fail to take this into account it results in a world that doesn’t feel very immersive.

Play

Secondly, the gameplay issue with affordances is that the player lacks the ability to plan. I have gone over player planning and why it is so important for good gameplay in a previous post, but let’s do a quick recap: we don’t play games by just reacting to stimuli that the games send our way – instead, most of the gameplay takes place inside our heads. We survey our environments, go over long- and short-term goals, and decide what set of actions are the most optimal to reach said goals. The longer and more accurate plans a game allows the player to make, the better it will feel to play.

As a clear example, let’s compare a moment playing Dragon’s Lair (1983) to a moment in Civilization (1991). Civilization is filled with possibilities and room for planning. Dragon’s Lair on the other hand is just a linear path where you can only get good by memorizing a specific sequence. This is not the most fair example, but should illustrate the primal differences.

Games like Heavy Rain and Detroit, as well as classic adventure games, rely on putting the player in a real-life situation and making that the core of planning one’s actions. Taken at face value, it’s somewhat easy to understand what your options are when trying to find shelter for the night, because it is all based around elements that we know from real life. It’s much harder to know what to do during a laser-wielding vampire bat robot attack.

The issue is that the real world is incredibly complex, and a game cannot possibly recreate all the alternatives that a person could think of. This means that even though you might intuitively make up a certain plan, you can’t be sure whether the game will actually support it or not.

Solutions?

The main trick of Detroit, and Heavy Rain before it, is to simply make each scene feel like a movie scene. It gives the player a feeling for how the scene ought to evolve next, and how the character(s) ought to react. So the player gains their affordances not from how they view the scene, but how they imagine the characters (and to some extend the director) doing it. On top of that, the very cinematic structure pushes a narrative that makes up for the lack of immersion.

The player’s feelings here depend a lot on how they play the game. If they play as if they are the protagonist, these problems can become quite severe. It is a lot less damaging if the player views their role as a director. Then they are distancing themselves from the game and viewing the whole experience differently. Most of the discussions I bring up in this post are mainly centered around the former playstyle where you actively take on the role of a certain character.

Therefore, imagining yourself as the character in Quantic Dream games doesn’t really hold up – especially when the player is supposed to have a more lengthy interaction. In Heavy Rain it is easy to fall into optimizing behaviour and do brute force search to see what you can interact with. This sort of searching turns what is supposed to be a realistic environment into an abstract play field. Heavy Rain also has real trouble giving you a sense of your options. So, most of the game is played based on moment-to-moment reactions rather than deliberate planning. More Dragon’s Lair than Civilization.

It is clear that Quantic Dream know about these issues, as Detroit does quite a lot of things to try and fix this. The two major ones are explicit hotspots, and quest lists. The hotspots that pop up make it feel like a “batman mode”, where the time stops and the environment gets a line-mesh overlay. When in this mode, all nearby possible interactions display glowing icons. On top of this, all of the character’s short term goals are displayed as well, including those that haven’t been unlocked yet. Detroit also shows various goals, and even characters’ feelings, as big in-world text throughout the game. This gives the player a better idea of what they are supposed to do, and what are the available tools to achieve their goals.

Problems

The problem is that these new features don’t really try to fix the underlying problems of affordance. They are more like crutches, propping a flawed system. In a perfect world, these systems should be used as a sort of tutorial for the player. Once they get a better sense of how the game works, they should be able to stop relying on them, and instead rely on their intuitive understanding.

What happens instead is the opposite. The further you get into Detroit, the more prone you get to use these systems. In my playthrough of Detroit I used the “batman mode” quite sparingly for the first few hours – but as time went on I used it more, to the point where I almost stopped trying to intuitively parse the environment at all. Why? Because if I didn’t use it, I was more likely to miss hotspots and tasks, and therefore not get everything I wanted from the scene.

In the end, this style of play actually made me plan more. But all of this planning was happening in an abstract realm. I was playing a game of “choose from explicit options given to me by the game’s designer”, rather than actually making decisions based on the world that was presented to me. This often lead to weird situations where I did tasks that I didn’t know existed (eg. go look for a bag I didn’t even know was there).

Worse still, it made me act less like the characters I was supposed to be playing as. Detroit features a fair bit of detailed crime scenes that I was supposed to search, but because of the crutches I never tried to analyze the scenes as an actual detective. Instead I was simply searching for abstract hotspots. To make matters worse, the game often told me just how many hotspots there were to find, making me feel and thing even less like a detective.

The important takeaway here is just how important it is to find a way to create a game that actually makes the player engage in the game as it is. Detroit is not the only game that uses this kind of crutch, it’s quite common. And it is not always bad, either. For instance in Metal Gear Solid you have exclamation points pop up over soldiers’ heads when they spot you. However, they key difference here is that it adds information to the scene that is already in front of you. There are actual character models, sounds and so forth that play into the scene.

When you try to design crutches, you need to make sure that they supply something extra to the fantasy. They shouldn’t act as a substitute for the game’s actual world.

The magic of narrative

It might seem like I didn’t like the gameplay in Detroit – but the fact is that I found it quite engaging. I think this is really interesting. Despite all of the apparent flaws in the system, it still felt like I was part of the narrative. This was especially true for the detective work. The same was also true in the 2018 Call of Cthulhu game. There the detective scenes were even more simplistic, almost like playing a basic “hidden object” game, and yet I found them strangely compelling.

How is this possible? I think a lot of this is in line with the 4-layer approach that I’ve written about before. The foundational thinking with the 4-layer approach is that when you put any gameplay in the context of story, doing that gameplay feels like playing a story. Detroit does a lot of things right when creating this sort of merger between systems and narrative.

First of all, Detroit is very good at setting up the context. A scene always starts with some sort of cutscene (“cutscene” feeling like a weird word in an interactive film game, but working as a distinction in this context), that lays out the story reasons as to why you are doing the investigation. So when you are essentially searching for hotspots, the whole setup makes it feel as if you are doing detective work, even if you are not mentally embracing the detective role.

Secondly, when you find a hotspot, you always get information that has something to do with the narrative. The actual value of the information varies a lot: sometimes it’s useful and sometimes it’s just techno babble. But in all cases it feels like narrative feedback. When this is combined with the explicit – and very gamey – feedback that says you just found one of the three clues, it feels more like progressing a case than fulfilling abstract game requirements.

Finally, when you manage to find all the clues, the abstract (game-y) accomplishment always comes with some sort of narrative reward. For instance when searching a corpse, you get to view a reconstruction of what happened to this person. In many other cases you may unlock a new dialog option. And in every case you feel like completing the tasks makes you progress the narrative. So, even though the gameplay is abstracted, you still feel like you are inside a story.

The power of holism

On the surface all of this feels a bit like cheating. But I think that’s the wrong way to look at it. Instead it’s something to be embraced.

In fact, on our journey to progress the storytelling potential of games as a medium, I am of the position that trying to do it without any form of “cheating” is a dead end. All entertainment is based on fooling your audience. Illusion is an essential part of the craft. The trick is just to cheat in such a way that it goes unnoticed.

What feeds into this illusion is the fact that humans tend to be bad at understanding why they’re feeling something. As an example: one tends to find a potential partner more attractive when drinking something hot while around the person. That is because hot drinks activate responses similar to arousal, eg. increasing the blood flow. The brain just tends to attribute these responses not to coffee, but to the potential partner, tricking you into thinking you are feeling aroused.

In a similar manner, when you feel accomplished for finding one of the three abstract hotspots, that feeling gets entwined with the detective narrative. These two parts get mixed into a single whole, and that whole becomes a compelling experience. It is worth to note that both sides can help the other. The narrative makes simple gameplay feel exciting, and the feedback on the other hand can make flawed narrative feel compelling. It is larger than the sum of its parts in the purest sense.

You can get an especially good sense of how this two-way feedback works when the system starts breaking down. I find that this can happen quite a lot in Detroit’s action sequences. There the narrative stops being the focal point, there are less narrative rewards upon success, and the input gets less clear (as it is merely about split second reactions). As long as the goals and actions are easily identifiable, eg. hiding and closing a door, the narrative-system symbiosis remains in place. But once it turns into blocking and returning punches, the player (or at least I) get distanced from the action. It becomes more of an abstract challenge than a piece of interactive storytelling.

So in a way, the increased abstraction actually works for Detroit’s benefit. By showing some numbers going up, and clear objective pointers, the game manages to add a more concrete feedback loop. As explained above, it also comes with issues, but also gives the game more opportunities for narrative-system symbiosis.

Detroit uses the symbiosis to simulate all sorts of situations, often with quite pleasing results. What stood out for me was an interrogation scene with a stressed-out android, and a scene where I had to make sure a police officer didn’t become too suspicious of my character. The success of those scenes came from mixing simple, gamey systems together with narrative in a holistic manner.

If you want to dig deeper into various ways to achieve this sort of merging of elements, Detroit is an excellent case study. Since the scenes featured are quite diverse, the ways of combining systems an narrative vary, and the results vary along with that.

Improvements?

While there are many interesting aspects about the game, it does have lot of room for improvement. I want to discuss that a bit.

Detroit relies heavily on increased abstractions (such as the aforementioned hotspots and objectives), and I don’t think that’s the right way. I find it better to try and achieve the same kind of affordance by using a story-like world. It is not the abstraction per se that allows to combine systems and narrative, but the player’s understanding of cause and effect.

Using abstractions also comes with a lot of issues. In my opinion, the biggest issue is the negative effect on immersion. If the world the player navigates is just filled with simple, systems-specific abstractions, the player can never transport themselves into the world.

At best, the actual rendered world (environments, characters etc.) just becomes narrative background. Instead as a designer, you want the world’s elements to be what the player uses in order to be an active part of the game. The aim should be for the player to gaze at a rendered scene, and have a mental model of all the interaction points and how these can be used for various plans, as I have written earlier.

Just compare a scene from Detroit…

...to a scene in Super Mario Bros.

In Detroit, I am not sure what things I can interact with, nor how they would affect me. From just looking at the world as-is, it is impossible to make any sort of concrete action plan. On the other hand Mario is very accessible, at least to anyone who has ever played the game. You can easily see every object, imagine how you can interact with it, and plan your progress accordingly.

The sort of readability that a Super Mario game has is what you want as a game designer. The thing to learn from Detroit is that you don’t need incredibly complex actions in scenes to create an engaging narrative. In fact, the actual gameplay can be simple and “dull” – as long as you are able to combine it with a narrative. However, there would be a huge difference if the interactions you partake in are grounded in the game’s world, instead of just being abstractions.

There are obviously other things to improve, especially the player’s ability to plan. But as a first step, I think having Super Mario level of affordance in the game’s world would be a huge improvement.


Branching

Now before I end this article, there are two more topics I want to cover. The first of these is branching.

Before making Detroit: Become Human, Quantic Dream made Beyond: Two Souls (2013). This game took a slightly different approach to the idea of a game as an interactive movie – especially when it came to branching. The game’s story had a ton of different ways to play out, but as recounted in this article by Press X to Story, it went mostly unnoticed by players.

It feels like Quantic Dream really reacted to this because damn, they are now really pushing the branching angle. There is a node tree at the end of each scene, there’s visual cues when conversation subjects unlock, there are lists of things you could do, the latter scenes obviously change, and so on.

And it really does feel like the open story and the branching matters. Especially interesting are the node maps. In the maps, all the choices you could have made are laid out, but the ones you didn’t make in your current or previous game are blanked out. At first I really didn’t like it, but the more I played the more it grew on me. It seems like it had a certain ad-hoc effect, and I can still sort of feel it. Remembering a scene often feels cooler than actually playing it. To me, the Detroit showing you potential paths I could have taken make my choices seem more compelling, when viewed in retrospect.

This might feel a bit like a cheat. But as discussed before, cheating is how entertainment works. Still, a part of me wonders if Detroit could have handled it in a more subtle way. Sometimes it felt like too much to get all the possible courses of events shoved in my face. I would have liked it if the would have treated the overall branching as it did the special dialog and changes in scenes. But at the same time, I wonder if that would have given across the feeling that the story was indeed open-ended and had tons of options – as Beyond: Two Souls failed to convey.

The best way to get away from the trap of being overly explicit is to, as explained above, up the level of affordance. In a perfect scenario, the player should know about the ways the scene could have gone simply by having mentally analyzed the scene. For instance, Civilization doesn’t need a node map at the end of a round for the player to know that there are many other ways things could have gone. This is not the most fair comparison, as I don’t think it’s possible to make a storytelling game that is as systemically driven. But it does give you a sense of what sort of feeling games could strive for.


Themes

Given that Detroit deals with a few themes similar to SOMA, it feels like I need to say something about Detroit’s themes to close this off. It would be too much to go over all aspects of the game, so I will just focus on one: robot and human similarities.

I think the game would have been a lot more thematically interesting if the robots didn’t look so human. Instead I think it would have been much better if they looked like the robots from the movie I, Robot (2004), or perhaps something out of the Boston Dynamics lab.

Right now it’s just too easy to sympathise with the robots. It would be much more fun if the player started the game thinking the robots did not deserve any rights, and the thinking would evolve throughout the game.

The robots’ thinking is also too human. Again, it would be much cooler if they felt more alien in how they handled their emotions and so forth. There is actually less neurodiversity between humans and robots in Detroit than there is among real humans overall.

For example, right now it doesn’t make much sense for a player to want for Connor to stay an obedient robot. The story pretty clearly pushes the player to want Connor to become a deviant (a robot free from human masters). If the Connor had looked a bit more spooky, or had weirder ways of thinking, it would have made the choice less obvious and forced me to think more about my alternatives.

It would also seem weird that people would want to buy servants that look so human. People can already feel bad for a Roomba, let alone something that looks like a fellow human. It would make more sense for the robots to actually look like robots.

I know that Quantic Dream wanted to show off their facial animation tech, and make sure it was easy to relate to the protagonists. But the point stands: a version of Detroit with robots that are clearly not human would be damn interesting to play.

Thoughts on Five Nights at Freddy's

I have seen many people saying Five Nights at Freddy's is simply a jump-scare fest. While the game does rely a lot on jump scares, I think it's wrong to dismiss it just because of that. There are a number of aspects of Five Nights at Freddy's that I find really interesting and I think it's worth exploring them.

Here are my top take-aways from the game:

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No traversal

Just about all horror game games revolve around the protagonist moving around. It's a core part of the game. Not so in Five Nights at Freddy's. Here the player is unable to move around at all. Instead, the game is all about observation and seeing how other creatures move about.

As I've said in a previous article, traversal can be problematic. So it's very interesting to have a game that solves those issues simply by ditching the entire concept. The lack of traversal also helps the game to have a more nightmarish feel and further simplifies the gameplay (more on that later).

Great use of sensory deprivation

In my previous post I talked about how it's really helpful to put the player in the right mood by not overwhelming their focus. Five Night at Freddy's is excellent at this. The game is so simple and there really isn't much for the player to do apart from observing. This means that you have plenty of mental capacity left over, and all of that is put into simply being worried. This fuels all sorts of paranoia.

Tight connection between story and mechanics

While the setup is quite silly, one has to applaud just how connected the systems and narrative are. As the background story of the game is told you also learn how to play the game. They are really one and the same. There are very few narrative games where this is true and it means your mental model of the game is almost entirely built in narrative terms.

Obscure mechanics done right

At first it's almost impossible to figure out how the animatronics behave and you simply have to rely on intuition. The thing is that your intuition is pretty good at letting you survive, but not so good that you start understanding any underlying systems. When you hear particular sounds, you'll want to close the door or turn on a light, and in many cases you are doing just the right thing. But as these intuitions are not based on simplistic systems, you are driven to mentally model the various creatures as living things. Just like the previous point, this makes your mental model much more story-like.

Death and jump-scares combined

In Five Nights at Freddy's there is always a jump-scare right before the game ends. This weaves a very tight connection between "failure" and "being spooked" allowing these things to reinforce one another. This really helps to increase the tension as it provides feedback both in terms of mechanics and by giving you a painful experience. This makes you not want to fail at the game, which ramps up paranoia and other things described earlier.

Focus on anticipation

Five Nights at Freddy's is also unique in that it puts all of its focus on the things that happen before an encounter. This is quite rare in videogames where much of the gameplay happens once a monster starts coming after you. But in most horror movies and books, much of the narrative revolves around what happens beforehand. This makes sense, as a lot of fear comes from anticipation. Just take a look at movies like Ringu, where the entire story is build-up for a proper encounter in the end.

This game works pretty much like that. When the game goes your way, you never encounter the monsters. In fact, the moment there is a monster encounter the game is over. I don't think any other game has done a better job at emulating this way of building up a horror story.

Dynamic horror situations

Finally, the game is also great at causing moments of horror to emerge from its systems. Five Night At Freddy's doesn't script specific situations, but it sets up systems which will allow them to occur naturally. To me this is one of the foundational aspects of really good interactive storytelling. My own favorite moment:

It was just a few hours before the night was about to end, and I was getting really anxious. I heard a footsteps but couldn't really figure out where they were coming from. I scanned the camera feeds and couldn't see anything. The sounds died out and an eerie silence replaced it. The night was almost over and I saw that my power was nearly exhausted. I decided to a small amount of it just to make sure that nothing was outside the window. The moment I turned on the light I saw this rat creature, just staring at me. My entire body froze.

In that moment it really felt like I was taking part in a horror movie. I built up most of the tension myself and then it was a dynamic system that made the crescendo happen. It felt amazing.

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Five Nights at Freddy's is far from a perfect game, of course. My biggest problem is that it gets boring fairly fast. The scares stop being scary after a while, and once you understand how the systems work your mental models becomes a lot less interesting. For me it took a less than an hour before I felt I'd had enough of the game. Much of that hour was really, really good though.

It's also worth noting that I've written this about the first game. I've played two of the sequels, but didn't think they were as good as the first.

In any case, if you haven't played the game yet, I highly recommend doing so. It's great while it lasts and there's a lot of great to design to inspire you.

Mental Models

The reality that we sense in front of us is a fiction created by our brains. A host of modules process information in various ways and the end result is a mental model of the outside world. Knowing how this works is crucial to game development as the shape of these mental simulations has a huge effect on how a game feels and plays.

Look around the room or the place you are currently in. It certainly feels like what you are seeing is really there, right? However, that's not really the case. Reality is in fact made up by subatomic particles that constantly exchange various force particles amongst each other [1]. What you think of as a chair is really just a collection of particles that happen to form a temporarily semi-stable configuration. The reason why you see it as a chair only has to do with how your brain chooses to process the various data that it collects through its senses.

In the previous post on presence I mentioned how the brain is made up of modules, each of them having their own specific purpose. The results from these various modules are then used to form a collective image of your surroundings. For instance, there is a particular module that recognizes faces and, if damaged, it can no longer recognize people - the person affected will only see an object made up of some hair, a nose, two eyes and so forth. Recognizing individual people will only be possible if they have a particularly stand-out feature, like a large beard. Apart from that, all faces will look alike to this person. The normal flow of information is broken and something that most of us take for granted, an intrinsic part of our reality, is no longer present.

This is an extremely important point and it's essential to fully grasp it. It's not as if people who lose the ability to see faces still really see faces but don't "recognize" them. This is the good old "homunculus in the head" fallacy. When you look at the world around you, you are not really seeing details. You are being fed a stream of information and that stream contains things like "that is a chair", "the chair is made of wood", "that is the face of your mother", and so on. If the brain module that does the processing needed for a particular piece of information is damaged, it's not like your "mental view" remains the same - information is what your mental view is made up from. To get a better idea of this, look at this image:

When first looking at it, most people see this image as simply a collection of dots. But if you look carefully for a bit you will see the form of a dog appearing. Once you have managed to spot this dog, it becomes impossible to unsee. Your brain has gone from interpreting the image as a collection of dots to seeing it as a dog. If you were to lose a brain module this process would be reversed. What was once an image of a dog would turn into a collection of dots. The dog would not still "be there" - it would be erased from your perception of reality.

Your view of reality is not what reality is like, it is a mental simulation based on interpretations of data collected by your senses. You are really living your life in a sort of virtual world that the brain constructs for you [2].

This doesn't mean that your view of reality is a complete lie, though. It is still based on things that do exist and is a crucial tool for getting around and being able to make decisions. Even though a chair is a made up concept with no basis in reality, it still is very useful. It tells you something about what to expect and what your options are. For instance, if you are presented with either sitting down on a chair or on a pile of broken glass, your mental simulations are invaluable and can quickly give you pretty accurate estimates of what sitting down on each of the alternatives would mean. Note that these mental simulations are not confined to a single aspect of an object. There are things like shape, materials, current light conditions, the physical dimensions, emotional attachment, ownership and many other things that are all connected to an object. When you focus your gaze on an object, that is what you "see" - not some crystal clear pixel-by-pixel representation.

This array of properties is not always correct, though. For instance, if you try and pick up a carton of milk that your brain has modeled as filled (=heavy) and it turns out to be empty (=light), you will lift it with way too much force. But most of the time, because of the practice you've had at experiencing reality, your brain is pretty good at providing a good simulation.

Contra (1987)

Let's move on to games. When you are playing a game, you are not playing the game that is presented on the screen. You are playing the game that you are currently modelling in your mind. The brain turns clusters of pixels into abstract icons (eg "a power-up") and then attaches all sort of concepts to them. Just in the same way as it does when you encounter a chair in real-life. The modules in your brain use pre-existing knowledge and experience from interacting with the game and build up a mental model of how it is all connected.

The best example I know of this is from Brian Upton's book "The Aesthetics of Play". In the book he presents the example of navigating an environment in a game. What doesn't happen is that the player bumps into every wall and object, trying to figure out the bounds of the simulation. Instead the player analyses the scene in front of them and then mentally figures out a path to follow. This means that there is a lot of gameplay that takes place inside the player's head. In fact, unless the player is actively trying to test the systemic bounds of the game, almost all gameplay happens within the player's mental simulation of the game.

What all of this means is that is that we should be less concerned about the data (images, sounds, etc) that we send to our players and focus more on the sorts of mental simulations it gives rise to. This is an extremely important aspect of game making, and it has far-reaching consequences. No matter how much more realistically you render an object, it doesn't matter if the player's mental model chooses to represent it as something else.

The mental model is closely linked to our ability to anticipate. This is something that happens in all kinds of media [3]. For instance when watching a film and a character steps on a banana peel, we predict that they will slip and fall. As we see the foot approaching the banana our brain is already simulating possible outcomes and various filmic tricks, such as editing, are based around this happening in our minds. All mediums rely on this, but creating anticipation in games is extra tricky because of interaction.

In order for us to work with this we need to learn how these mental models are formed. There are three basic ways in which this happens: by using built-in knowledge, extrapolating from past experiences or learning through experimentation. These three modes complement one another, but it is useful to start by looking at them one at a time.

Built-in Knowledge
This is what our brains come equipped to deal with when we are born. They're essential to a human and you can pretty much assume that anyone playing the game will have them. Basic things like shape, lighting, perspective and so forth are all part of this category. It also includes behaviors like how pouring the content of a large glass into a smaller one will cause it to overflow, rotation of 3D shapes and how objects ought to act if you drop them. Social things like facial expressions are also part of this sort of knowledge. The facial expression connected to disgust is universal, hardwired, and does not depend on mimicking.

The one thing you need to realize about any built-in knowledge is that it's extremely hard to break. It takes a lot of effort to convince a person that dropping a ball will make it fall upwards. It is basically impossible to make a person intuitively see a mad face as a positive response. This is all hardwired knowledge that comes with equally interesting pros and cons.

If you can tie some basic functionality of your game directly to some built-in knowledge then it will instantly come off as intuitive to any player. For instance, if you want the player to feel disgusted by an enemy it's good to know that disgust is a disease-avoiding behavior. This knowledge allows you to trigger built in responses and also suggest what sort of events and interactions will strengthen a mental model that gives rise to feelings of disgust.

On the contrary, if your gameplay relies on something that goes against built-in knowledge, you either need to be prepared to spend a lot of time building the proper mental model or to ditch the concept altogether. Sometimes it is of course OK to break the rules, but remember that conforming to built-in knowledge is what makes a world seem believable. And if you want to focus on evoking basic human emotions, this basic believability is crucial. Without that you also lose a bunch of connections which are foundational to our emotional world.


Past Experiences
This is a huge area and it includes everything the player has learned throughout life. It is also something that can vary culturally. What I will focus on right now are two parts of this: past experiences with games versus past experiences with real life.

When you are first presented with a scene in the game there is a ton of stuff for you to process. If you see a red barrel and you have played games in the past, there is a big chance that you will think the barrel will explode when being shot upon. This interpretation relies on more than simply having encountered this specific object before. It relies heavily on what sort of game you are playing (point and click behaves differently from a quake-like shooter), what actions you think are possible (can you shoot it?), and so forth. So players come in with a lot of expectations and preconceptions on how things ought to behave. All of these will not just change how the player feel about the game, they will directly affect how the player think the game actually is like.

A monster can either be a horrible threat that you wanna keep away from, or it can be the source of what makes the game fun in the first place. The view the player takes directly affects how they behave and also has a long reaching effect on the experience of playing the game. For instance, in our game Penumbra the player has the ability to use weapons but they are very weak and inefficient. For players that interpreted the game as one where you'd best avoid any monsters, this worked great and they used the weapons as a last desperate effort to escape - as we had intended. Their mental model was one where the weapons and monsters were just like in real life. For other players the game was interpreted as a one where you could fight back. For these players it didn't work at all. The weapons felt frustrating to use and the monster was an annoyance. Their mental model was based on how videogames usually work. Despite interacting with the same system, seeing the same visuals and hearing the same sound, these two types of players experienced radically different games.[4]

To combat this in Amnesia: The Dark Descent we started the game with a quick notice on how the game was supposed to be played. This, together with other design changes of course, made a huge difference in how players approach the game. Unlike built-in knowledge, things learned from past events are quite malleable and it is possible to adapt them according to new situations. Which leads us to the final foundational way in which mental models are formed.

Experimentation
From the moment we are born (and possibly even earlier) our brains are hardwired to analyze, generalize and make assumptions. Whenever we encounter a new object we try it out in a variety of ways (squeezing, chewing, throwing, etc) in order to figure out what it is like. We then store that information and pull it out whenever we encounter a similar object. Everyone who has been near a small child knows about this process, and so does everyone who has played an unfamiliar game.

As noted before, the moment we see a scene from a new game, we make a whole load of assumptions of what everything is like and how it functions. But it is not until we get to interact with the scene that our assumptions get confirmation and are cemented. Unless the game is similar to another game we've already played, we know that we have new lessons to learn. These first impressions are crucial to how the rest of our experience is shaped [5]. This is why the opening of a game is so important. If a player gets the wrong idea about something it can be really hard to get rid of that faulty mental model.

Once the player interacts with something it will tell them about some aspect of the object. For instance, if they can pick it up or not. The player will then try to generalize this knowledge, often by using pre-existing information. So if a glass bottle can be picked up, they will assume that it's possible to pick up plastic bottles as well. Furthermore, if you throw a glass bottle and it breaks, it means the player will assume that everything made of glass is breakable. And so the experimentation continues as the game is played. Every new aspect is connected to other things the player already knows and an increasingly detailed mental simulation is built. The next time the player finds a bottle lying around,  a lot of attributes will be assumed the moment it comes into view.

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The basic gist of the above shouldn't be too surprising, as it's pretty basic stuff. But the key thing to remember here is that these are not just things that form opinions. They form actual reality for the player.

To be able to look at an object and assume a bunch of attributes is what makes the world feel alive. It allows the player to use their hardwired brain faculties to explore, interact and make plans. The world might be rendered using toon shaders and feature talking rabbits, but if it allows for a rich mental model it will feel "real". Remember, it isn't about the objective facts of what you see (eg a teapot using highly realistic PBR-based shading), but what processing it gives rise to.

In order to make this happen, you can't just put objects and interactions into a world at random. The player must be able to explore the elements of the world, and in doing so they must be met by a consistent set of rules. The brain doesn't have an infinite amount of resources, and will therefore optimize when possible.

So if an object looks like something found in the real world, but you are unable to interact with it, it will not be given any further attributes. As it isn't of any importance, it will simply become part of the background. In a similar vein, the simplest explanation will also be used when possible. If there are ten keys lying on a table, but only the one that unlocks the door can be picked up, then players will stop modeling these objects as any sort of real keys. They will instead be seen as quest items, possible to pick up when it is convenient for the designer. When there's no consistency of any sort, the player's brain will just skip trying to do any modeling and rely on direct experimentation when needed (trial and error, basically). In these cases, players will have a very fuzzy mental model of an object and the object won't feel very "real".

An important aspect of this is that it's not always a bad thing that the brain optimizes away things. For instance, if you are making a simple shooter you don't really need to take any wall ornaments into account. You should just focus on the overall layout and the positions of the monsters. Everything else is a distraction.

It is, however, crucial to keep all of this in mind. There may be many cases where you don't want the player to optimize away certain objects. If you want the player to feel like the environment is a real place, you really need to make sure that as many details as possible can have intricate attributes in the player's mental simulation. It becomes even more important for characters where you want the player to model internal emotions, needs and goals. If your goal is to make the player feel like they are encountering real people, you want those people to be part of their mental model. This is what it means to make something feel real and alive.

All of this doesn't mean that one's goal should be to model everything in as detailed a way as possible. In fact, in many cases this may be counterproductive. Details could mean the player makes more assumptions, leading to the structure being more fragile and more likely to crumble. Keep in mind that all we want to worry about is the end result - how the player perceives the experience. The actual content - images, sounds and so on - that we send to the player is just a means to an end.

It's at this point where narrative-focused games become very different from classical ones. In a classical videogame, it's almost always a good thing for the player to learn the systems exactly as they are. The better the player understands how all the underlying mechanics work together, the more competently they can play the game and the more fun they will have. Narrative-focused games are different. Here we often want to suggest a lot more than what is in the systems that we have at our direct disposal. Pulling this off requires a collection of tricks where the common thread is to try and make the player do the hard work. I will go over these tricks in future blog posts.

Next week there will be a discussion on how systems and story come together to form a mental model and more discussions on the most common pitfalls and opportunities when designing for mental simulations that feel alive.


Foot notes:
[1] It is actually much more complicated than this as your current reality is a sort of vertical slice of a much later Hilbert space where everything is modeled as waveforms.

[2] And even the idea of a "you" is a mental construct. Check the previous blog on presence for some discussion on this.

[3] Brian Upton goes very in-depth into this area in his book.

[4] The game was not this evenly divided into groups, but the general gist was this kind of behavior.

[5] There are a lot of psychological reasons for this such as the ultimate attribution error and anchoring.

Evoking Presence

Playing a videogame can put you in a state where the borders between your self and the character gets blurry. This is one of the major differences that sets games apart from other mediums such as films and literature. When creating games, evoking this feeling of presence is worth trying to achieve. 

Before starting on the concept of presence, I need to discuss why it's so important to dig deeper into these aspects of games. This is not really needed in order to explain presence, but I think it is vital to know why it is so crucial to gain this deeper understanding.

I have talked about the concept of an "idea space" and how developing a game is basically about navigating this space. The most important concept that I want to get across is that developing a game is like going on a journey. You have a starting point and an idea of where you want to end up. When making a narrative game, having a clear focus on the goal is extremely important as there'll be many occasions when you need to go against what has the greatest gameplay benefit in the short term in order to reach a better end result. But given that you can't choose your next step based on what gives the largest boost to "fun", what do you base your decision on? How can you achieve a high degree of certainty that you've made the right choice?

You do this by having rules and principles that you follow. A simple example of such a principle is to ensure that gameplay makes sense within the story. It might be more "fun" from a short-term perspective to give the player a flying unicorn, but if that seems silly within the story then this is a bad decision. However, it's not always that clear-cut, and since you can't simply "follow the fun" you need other things to guide you.

Evoking the feeling of presence is such a principle.

So what exactly is presence? Well, it isn't the most well-defined term, but for our needs we can define it as something like "How much the player feels like they are present inside the game's virtual world". One way to measure this is to test the player's unconscious reflexes and see if these react to events in the game. For instance, does the player flinch if an object comes flying towards the screen? It's simple, but not the only way to measure presence. A more important aspect, in my opinion, is to evaluate to what degree the player feels they are their on-screen character. If the player views an in-game threat as something that is bad for them personally, then it means the sense of presence is high.

Silent Hill 2 (2001)

I remember playing Silent Hill 2 with my wife 6 years or so ago. As the intro sequence was over and she headed into the woods, she started to feel quite shaken. She went on for a minute or so and then eventually exclaimed that she couldn't play it any longer. The game was just too scary. So I took over the controller and suddenly she didn't feel as scared any more. I now decided to conduct an experiment and handed her back the controller. The moment she started controlling the main character she got scared, and again refused to play for more than a minute or so. This is quite interesting. Her feelings towards the game were quite different depending on whether or not she was holding the controller.

This is a great example of presence. When my wife held the controller she was no longer just a spectator of a scary narrative, she was the protagonist in a horror world. This sense of presence changed her view of the game drastically, and I believe this is what makes it a core component of creating good interactive storytelling [1]. So, understanding this phenomena is paramount in becoming better at making this sort of games.

To understand what it is that happens here, let us take a look at an experiment.

In order to conduct this experiment you will need a screen, a rubber hand and a hammer. You let your subject place their hand on a table and then place the rubber hand next to it. The screen is placed between the two so that the subject can only see the rubber hand.

You now start to stroke the rubber hand and the subject's real hand in the same place at the same time. Once you have done this for a while the subject will start to feel as if the rubber hand is their own. You can now test this sensation by quickly grabbing the hammer and slamming it on the rubber hand. The subject will now, as an unconscious reflex, pull their real hand out of the way. You can see a video of it all in action here:

This is quite astounding. By just using some very simple manipulation you are able to change a person's mind in such a way that they think of a rubber hand as their own. You don't even have to use a hammer to test it. You can even threaten the rubber hand with a knife and see that the galvanic skin response (palm sweat basically) is the same as if it was the real hand that was threatened. There has really been a change in how a person perceives their body.

A bunch of similar experiments have been made by Henrik Ehrsson, above, who has managed to get people to have out of body experiences, by putting them in the bodies of mannequins and using very similar techniques to the ones explained earlier.

So why does this happen? In order to understand this you first have to understand a bit of how the brain works.

It is common to intuitively think that inside our heads sits a little man, a homunculus, who receives all of the input picked up by our eyes, ears and other sensory organs. When you start pondering this idea, it's obvious it's not the case - it just begs the question of how the little man is able to see, and you end up in an infinite regression. What actually happens is that there are a bunch of different modules in your brain that collect and process various data. This data is then sent onward for more processing or used as a means for decision making. There is no one thing that controls the brain. It's all controlled by a bunch of different computational systems, each receiving different input and being able to give certain output. Marvin Minsky's "society of mind" is a very good description of how it all works.

So what happens in the rubber hand illusion is that the input you get from your eyes overrides the kinesthetic sense. There is a sort of feedback loop going on between the constant sensation of being stroked, combined with the visual confirmation of seeing it being stroked. This provides a slight conflict with the kinesthetic sense, but the brain has to make a decision and decides to treat the hand as actually being the rubber hand.

Your sense of self is not set in stone. It's something that is highly malleable and is under constant evaluation. At any moment, the brain relies on the information that it has available in order to form the concept of your self. The entity that you refer to as "yourself" is really just a mental construct that's useful in making sense of the world, navigating it, and taking decisions. Most of the time it's fairly accurate and gives the right picture, but as we've seen, it's not always the case. It can be hacked.

This is where games enter the stage - because this sort of self-hacking is exactly what games do. When your current mental model of your self incorporates your in-game character, an approaching monster will make you feel afraid. This is extremely powerful and something that makes games very special. When you press down the button or stick that makes the player move forward, you instantly get confirmation that you are making a character move. Volition turned into action becomes a feedback loop and this causes your brain to change its view of your self.

In books and movies there is no such feedback loop. Information is only presented to you. In these media you are a spectator that watches as events unfold. But in a game you are an active participant who causes events and where things happen to you personally.

This is what presence is all about! And for me this is the core reason why interactive storytelling is so exciting. You are no longer just a passive audience but an active and present participant in the narrative. Being able to achieve a strong presence is a fundamental building block in an interactive narrative.

So does this mean that Virtual Reality is the ultimate device for doing interactive storytelling? Well, it is true that VR has a lot of potential to create presence. For one, it adds two senses, balance and peripheral vision, to the mix, It also allows a natural feedback loop to occur by looking and seeing the view move about. There is no denying that VR does things that games on your standard TV or monitor cannot. However, what is crucial with presence in games is what sort of activities it allows you to be present in. VR can increase the sense of presence when it comes to just standing and looking around. But I am not as convinced that VR will be as suitable for more complex narrative actions. For instance, a drawback of VR is that the game can't really seize control of the camera - something that allows many games to provide contextual animations. This and other tricks are things that are effective in making the player feel present in story events. We used this a lot in SOMA in order to give philosophically complex events, such as the body swap, a more visceral feel.

Obviously if you use the VR medium to its advantage you can elicit responses that wouldn't be possible otherwise. But what it all comes down to is that different mediums can do different things well, and that it's not a case for VR always being better at conveying presence.

I am not bringing this up to be dismissive of Virtual Reality - I think it's a very exciting field. I go over this in order to make it clear that a sense of presence is not just about recreating our normal way of being as accurately as possible. Ways to convey presence can take many forms, but what they all have in common is that they hack our brain into believing it's partaking in something it's not.

This also answers the common question whether or not a first person mode is better at generating presence: sometimes it is, and sometimes it isn't. Sure, we normally see our lives from where our eyes are situated. But this is really just a helpful mental model. Remember, there is no small man in your head that is witnessing everything. It is all just modules that process information in various ways. If it wanted to, your brain could construct your sense of reality from a third person perspective. This is in fact what happens during out of body experiences. The reason we don't use this version during everyday life is because it is not the most optimal one. We cannot see everything that happens around us, and therefore it makes more sense to just let vision be modelled as if seen through the front of our face.

So really, the output from a game is just a stream of data that gets injected into our brains. The brain will then process the data and model the world accordingly. A third person viewpoint is just another way to be presented with that data. Sometimes it can be advantageous compared to a first person one - for instance when showing damage to the protagonist. This is something we normally get as a signal of pain, but as that is not possible [2] in a game, you can trick the brain by having the onscreen character limp and show big disgusting wounds on their legs. So again, it all comes down to different approaches being suited for different things.

So the sense of presence is a brain hack, and it can be done in different ways. Then what exactly are these different ways?

I will now go over a few basic principles that will help you maximize your sense of presence. There is a lot more to be said about these, but right now I'll just summarize the most important aspects. I'll go over each of these in more detail in another blog post later on.

Intuitive controls
The most important principle is to make sure that the controls can't be overly complicated. What we want to achieve is a feedback loop where the player thinks of something and then sees it happening. We want to make a connection between the onscreen character and the player by connecting volition with action. This won't happen if the player is too focused on pressing specific buttons.

In order to achieve a strong sense of presence, the controls need to be established as early as possible and be used for all future actions. Every time the player has to learn new ways to control their character, or has to look down on the controller to make sure they are doing an input correctly, the feedback loop is broken and presence is weakened.

A good example of a game doing this correctly is Limbo (and the more recent Inside). The player is taught the controls during the very first minutes of gameplay, and from then no new controls are needed. Instead the existing control scheme is used in intuitive ways to provide many different sorts of actions. This makes the player-protagonist connection very strong and I think it is one of the game's big success factors.


Constant Feedback
Once you have the player-protagonist feedback loop up and running it is important to keep it up. If the player just sits with the controller in their lap watching as things happen, the feedback loop will be broken and their self will no longer be extended. So it is important to keep the player busy. It is especially good if you also make sure the input has a good correlation with the movements that you are doing. For instance, moving the mouse to look around creates a nice feedback loop, but if you just press a button in order to accomplish a complex manoeuvre you will not feel as present.

Experiments show this clearly. As soon as you stop stroking that rubber hand the illusion start fading away.

This is one of the reasons why we have the physical interaction in Amnesia. Not only does it allow for some interesting analog actions (such as peeking out from a closet), it also makes sure that the players are feeling a sense of presence as they open the door, pulling a lever and so forth.

Consistency
In order to hack our brains there needs to be a good pattern to follow. The key feedback loop has to do with desiring something and then seeing it happen. But in order for this to actually work, the thing that you want to happen must actually happen. If you press the jump button and the character doesn't jump then there is not a connection any more. In fact, this becomes a negative stream of data to the brain which brings about the conviction that you are in fact not controlling the on screen character. The same rule also applies to interactions. The player will base their actions upon what they are currently seeing and what they know about the world. And if that set of beliefs is not accurate, then the player's volition will fail.

This doesn't just apply to actions that you input, but also to those where you don't. It is really annoying if the character does some movement without you having provided any input for it. A game that does this the right way is Assasin's Creed. Here the player's character jumps without the player providing input, but it feels good because you press down on a button as it happens (hence willing the action) and jumping is sensible and handled in a consistent manner. Presence is maintained. However, the game also fails miserably at times and the characters can start jumping when you really just wanna walk close to a wall. In these cases the sense of presence is severely weakened.


Realism
Finally, it also very important that things feel real. By this I don't mean that things should be photorealistic. But it is good if things happen according to how they are anticipated to happen, and that forms take a shape that make sense to us. In that way, the brain can more easily process the data using existing methods. For instance, presence works better when your character is walking like a normal human and not running around like some freak (as is the case in games like good ol' Doom). In the same way it's positive if as many of the actions as possible feel close to the ones we experience in everyday life.

Experiments can clearly express this by showing that it is much harder to make the subject feel as if the table belongs to them, than it is with the rubber hand. However, a super detailed hand doesn't matter as much. The most important aspect is that it looks pretty close to a real hand.

Exactly what sort of level of realism required is hard to say. A good thumb of rule is that you should try and have enough room for the brain to fill out the details. If you go with overly photorealistic there will be too much focus on that, and you'll end up with a problem similar to the uncanny valley [3].

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Back to where I started. Now we have four new principles that we can follow in order to navigate the space of ideas. So instead of just trying to go with ideas that give us the most fun gameplay, we can instead try and get as much presence as possible. What is good about having principles like these is that we don't have to be able to directly playtest the amount of presence added, we can instead just rely on making sure the game fulfils the requirements for creating lots of presence.

Obviously you'll need to test at some point. A principle is not an absolute truth. But it allows you to plan further ahead and gives you more confidence to tread into uncharted territory. If you can see that a certain path through idea space means that the underlying goals of evoking presence is met, then that's a good indicator you're moving in the right direction. Of course, presence is not the only thing you need to work on, but it's a fundamental part of creating an engaging narrative experience. If your game is going in a direction where the principles are not met, then you might be undermining any other features intended to accomplish interactive storytelling

That's it for now on presence. There are more details to be explored, but those will be brought up in later blog posts. Next week, I will be going over something called the Mental Model. This will go deeper into how we as humans create a virtual representation of both our selves and the world, and how this can be exploited for making better narrative games.


Footnotes:
[1] This is how I see it and where I personally want to take games. There are other ways to approach digital storytelling. For instance, you can see the player's role as someone who controls how the plot and pacing flows, and so forth. There is really no best way of doing it. But in order to get somewhere I need to take a stance, and games that puts the player in the shoes of another character are the ones that I find most interesting. Therefore, this is the direction that I want to explore. People who feel otherwise are welcome and encouraged to follow other paths.

[2] At least not without special equipment and not being afraid of a painful gaming experience.

[3] This is a huge subject and very interesting, but will have to cover it in a future blog post.

Traversal and the Problem With Walking Simulators

To keep the player focused on the game's world is crucial to every game creator. While the player is traversing a space this is even more important, but at the same time harder to achieve. So how do you keep your game interesting and avoid turning it into a walking simulator?

The Wizard of Oz. Dir. Victor Fleming. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. USA.1939.

This blog post is based on a conversation that I had with Brian Upton at GDC a few weeks back. Most of the basic stuff here comes from the discussion with Brian, then I have added my own ideas on top of them.

Our basic problem was stated as the following: Where is the fun in simply going from place to place?

This is a problem that is very unique to games. In a movie we rarely see a character actually going places. Instead we witness the intention of going to another place, possibly see the mode of transportation, and then we're at the destination. Unless narrative-related hardships happen along the way, we never see the character actually traveling. Why? Because it simply isn't very interesting.

Games work differently. In games we have to show every single step that the player takes. There are a couple of reasons for this.

The first, and the most obvious, is that it's very hard to know what the player's intent is. When you enter a car in GTA, the game can't possibly know where you're supposed to be going. You have to express your will by actually driving your car where you want it to go, every inch of the way. When a game features cuts, like in fast travel systems, it's all based upon the player first expressing their will to go to a certain place.

In games we want the player to take on the role of a certain person. If a game simply decides where the player will go when they enter a car or start walking, that aspect is violated. There are a few games that do it, e.g Thirty Flights of Loving, but these games are usually short and made in a way where this phenomenon becomes a part of the gaming experience, or they simply contain very little player agency overall (e.g. interactive games like Heavy Rain). In this aspect, traversal is more than simply "empty travel time", it's a crucial expression of the player's agency, cementing their role as the protagonist.

The second reason is a bit more subtle. As mentioned, part of what makes games interesting is the expression of will. To achieve this, the player must know what they are able to do within the game's universe. In a movie, a character can reach for an object we've never seen before, or exclaim "I saw that shop on my way over!" despite the viewer never seeing it. This isn't possible in a game. In order for a player to know a game's possibility space, both in spatial terms and in terms of what actions are available, they need to familiarise themselves with it. They have to go through the boring process of walking about in order to form a mental picture of the surroundings. If they don't, they can't possibly know what their options are.

However, this activity is not very interesting at its core. Sure, it's fun to look at fancy environments for a bit, but after a while it gets tiresome. Most games solve this by introducing some sort of activity to the player at this point.

Sonic: Lost World (2013)

In a platformer the player always has obstacles of some sort to get past. For instance, pits to jump across or objects to avoid, During moments of traversal (when the game is not meant to pose a direct challenge) these are not very hard to get past. Still, they do require some attention. So when you are going from A to B and not really accomplishing much, you are still involved in a basic muscle task that relates directly to the game's world. This means that part of your brain is actively engaged in the activity at hand.

Think of how you sometimes zone out when you perform an activity at a certain level of difficulty. For instance; driving, knitting, or just walking rugged terrain in the woods. This is the same thing - you are engaged just enough not to get bored by the traversal.

Metro 2033 (2010)

Another way of doing this is by making use of our sense of anticipation. This is how stealth, tactical combat and horror games work. When walking towards a door you are not simply engaged in the activity of walking. You are also constantly thinking about what might lie ahead. "I need to make sure I don't make too much noise", "What might attack me from behind that door?", "When I get to the door I need to make sure I sweep the room for hostiles", and so on. So when walking, you're also engaged in the activity of planning ahead. You're still in the game's world.

Virginia (2016)

However, a walking simulator lacks this sort of engagement. Walking forward is just a matter of pressing down a key or stick. And unless you are my dad playing a game, this doesn't pose any sort of challenge at all. Your brain is basically unoccupied and the chance of your mind starting to drift is very high. Instead of being immersed in the game's world you might start thinking of what to cook for dinner or something else that is totally unrelated to the experience the game wants you to have.

I know there are some people who argue that "walking simulator" is not a fair name, but because of this issue I actually think it is quite appropriate. What happens during traversal is quite closely linked to the core of the game. In a 3D platformer your activity during traversal is still about platforming, in a horror game you are on the lookout for danger, and in a walking simulator - well, you are simply walking.

This doesn't pose a problem to everyone who plays walking simulators, and I think the "trick" is to put yourself in a sort of meditative state where you simply block out any intruding thoughts and just focus on the essence of being in the game. One way of achieving this is through stuff like music. It's one of the reasons why The Chinese Room's titles have been so successful. Their amazing music often becomes front and center during these moments of just walking, and by doing so keeps the player in the world.

Still, I think this poses a problem and it's something that anyone making a narrative-heavy game needs to think about. It's similar to how scenes are constructed in movies. If a scene simply starts and ends on the same note then it falls flat and gets boring. Just like some walking simulators can get away with just walking, some movies can get away with this for a portion of the audience. But that doesn't mean it's the best way to approach the problem. In the same way as film scenes thrive on there being dramatic motion, so should games try to find an interesting activity to tie together all of the traversal.

If you are making a game that uses a classical game mechanic, then this doesn't pose a huge problem. But it's when you want to go off the beaten path and try something different, especially when the focus is on storytelling, that this becomes crucial. You need to consider: when the player is simply walking around, what keeps their mind in the game's world?

In one of our upcoming super secret games, we want to explore new ways of telling a story through gameplay. This makes the issue of traversal really high on the list of things we need to make work. A key component for us in solving this has been to focus on what sort of fantasy it is that we want our players to partake in. The trick is then to make sure that our players focus on this fantasy at every single moment. We want to make sure that the players are preoccupied with things that relate to this fantasy, and that these actions require their attention.

The way we intend to do this is by packing the environment with narrative- and gameplay-important information. The more of this information the players have, the easier it is for them to create plans for overcoming upcoming obstacles. On top of that, the information changes over time, so players need to keep up this mental exercise even when entering previously visited locations. The crucial bit is to avoid making this procedure too difficult, as it would otherwise be exhausting in the long run. It should lie at the sweet-spot where it becomes barely conscious, coming into full focus only when important, when new information is discovered. On top of this, the information needs to be interesting in itself, not simply dull collectibles or similar. As I mentioned earlier, it is important that this task reinforces the player's fantasy.

I know this sounds a bit fuzzy, but going into greater details would be too spoilerish at this point. It's also worth pointing out that this is still in an early state, and we haven't had time to see how well it works when put in practice.

So, this is far from being a solved issue. But by simply recognizing it and gathering modes of attack, it feels like we've taken steps towards a solution.

Thoughts On Inside and Playable Stories

It is easy to view Inside (2016) as "just" a puzzle game with nice graphics. Many seem to overlook how incredibly good the game is at letting you play a story. Inside manages to craft an engaging narrative through gameplay in a way that few other games do. I think this is quite the accomplishment, and I've seen way too little written about it. The playable story is what I love about Inside, so it's what this essay will be all about.

To start things off, it's important to explain what this narrative aspect of Inside is all about. It's very easy to only see narrative in very concrete things like dialogue, the text you read, or in film-like cutscenes. However, when talking about stories in games, we have to stop thinking like this. Instead, we should consider what sort of narrative we experience as we actually play. After all, that's what interactive storytelling is all about.

To make this distinction clear, let's compare Inside to another puzzle platformer. For this discussion I'll pick Unravel (2016) since it's recently released and has many similar aspects to Inside. I don't aim to prove that Unravel is a bad game by any means - I liked it quite a bit myself. It just lacks a number of the narrative elements that Inside has, and by comparing the two, it should be clearer what it is that Inside does so successfully.

Instead of relying on a connecting story to tie things together, Unravel is built more around "flavored mechanics". You have a range of objects that you can interact with and all of these are somehow connected to the environment you are in. For instance, in a level taking place in a garden you can push apples around and use them to get up to otherwise unreachable places. But while these things are nicely woven into the graphical style of the level, there isn't really any narrative connected to them and they don't tell you anything about the game's story when interacted with. Neither are these objects, or your interactions with them, an important part of the narrative that unfolds as you play. They are simply there to serve the central mechanics of the game.

Inside (and Playdead's earlier game Limbo (2010) for that matter) is very different in this regard. The various objects that you interact with are not only part of the world visually, they are key parts of the narrative as well. Interactions that you take part in at one point in the game will be of great importance to later events.

To make this clearer, let's compare how both games start out:

Unravel (see clip here):

Yarny exits a house and enters a garden. He  is surprised by a couple of butterflies, and then runs out of yarn. He lassos a length of string so it gets stuck on a sundial, and by tugging the rope he manages to tip it over. This lets him gain access to more yarn and he can continue moving forward. A box of flowers is in the way and he climbs over it. Two buckets now stand in his way, and by using some tricks with his yarn he manages to get past those as well. There are more obstacles in his path, and by throwing out a piece of string and letting it attach to some glowing objects, he is able to swing across them. He eventually gets to a tree stump that can only be got past by throwing out strings of yarn and swinging forward.

And the game continues like this. It should be pretty evident how, story-wise, nothing really interesting happens. The game simply presents a sequence of obstacles for the player to get past. Also note that there are a bunch of things that doesn't make a lot of sense. For instance, why are all the conveniently placed pieces of yarn spread out across the world? And why does Yarny simply not just run around a lot of these objects? In terms of playable story, this game is quite weak.

Again, let me make it totally clear that this does not make Unravel weak as a whole, nor does it mean the game is totally devoid of story. For instance, Unravel has a lot of thematic connections between the photos you can find and the art of the levels. But this is also why Unravel is so interesting to compare to Inside. For while Unravel has story in it, almost none of it is playable. And focusing on playable storytelling is what Inside does best, and what this essay is all about.

Inside (see clip here):

The boy jumps down from some rocks and enters a dark forest. He comes across a fallen tree lying across a chasm and carefully balances across it. Further down the path he comes to a blockage with barbed wire and climbs through it. In the distance a truck can be seen and as the boy comes closer he starts sneaking. It is clear that the boy doesn't want to get spotted. Inside the truck he gets a quick glimpse of some weird figures, but before he can make out what they are a man shuts the door and the truck drives off. 

The boy travels further into the forest; mysterious metallic pods are scattered in the background. One of the pods has a light turned on, and next to it stand two men. As the boy gets near, the men hear him and turn on a flashlight. The boy must now hide behind a rock so the men don't spot him. Eventually they leave and he can continue. He now comes across a long wall with barbed wire on top of it. Someone is obviously trying to keep people out. Various junk is scattered around the wall, and by pushing an old fridge up next to the wall, the boy manages to jump across.

And, for most of the time, this is how Inside continues. Unlike Unravel, there're a lot of interesting story events in this sequence. The protagonist is also an active part of the story, climbing past two obstacles, both of which make it very clear that we are entering a restricted area. So not only do these small puzzles give us an idea of the story (that we are closing in on a place we are not supposed to enter), but by being the one that manages to get past them, the player also becomes the one that moves the story forward.

On a purely mechanical level, there isn't a lot of difference between Inside and Unravel, but the framing of their mechanics is vastly different. From the very moment the game starts, Inside paints a vivid narrative and makes the gameplay a core part in it.

Here are some other examples how Inside manages to craft a playable narrative:

At one point the you come to a platform near a large body of water. A man arrives in a submarine and as he climbs up a ladder, you need to hide. Then at the right moment, when he is distracted talking to a college, you can sneak past and steal the submarine. All of this is framed as a puzzle, so the player must be the one that realizes the man is a threat and that the submarine can work as a means of escape. It's not a very complicated setup, but it makes a big difference in terms of perceived narrative. If the next level had simply placed the player in the submarine, without any playable section in between, the player would just have experienced a change in gameplay. By making the transition (stealing the submarine) into part of the gameplay, the player gets to be an active participant in the transition of the narrative. The player gets their personal story to tell: "I sneaked past a man and stole his submarine". This is a lot more powerful than simply having something like: "And when the level started, I was in control of a submarine". Inside is great at crafting these sorts of transitions. A submarine ride is not just another type of level - it is a new part of a narratively coherent journey.

Another great example is the pig encounter. This scene starts as the player walks past a seemingly dead pig, only to see it twitch. The pig then rises up and starts chasing the player. From this section the player will learn that there are parasites that can take control of animals, which is a bit of lore that will be of great importance later on. The player learns most of this through play. The pig's aggressiveness is apparent from the need to avoid it. Pulling out the the larva is something the player does through gameplay, and doing so results in the pig becoming friendly and thereby usable for a puzzle. So the two core ingredients in this lore bit - the different behaviors of the animal, and the worm causing it all - are both deeply rooted in the gameplay.

A final example is the imitation puzzle. Here the player finds themselves dumped among crowd of mindless "zombies". These have been controlled to walk in line and are forced to perform various tasks in order to (or so I at least guess) check that the mind control has been properly imposed. The only way for the player to survive is to act along according to orders, effectively becoming a zombie themselves. Again, this also lets the player discover a bunch of story through gameplay. And not only that, you also get to step in the shoes of these zombie people. In all it is a really neat way of bringing the player into the game's world.

One could argue that this isn't anything new. Point-and-click adventure games have had this kind of gameplay for decades. You are faced with a puzzle that is directly connected to the story, and in solving the puzzle you move the narrative forward. But the big difference (and a big problem with adventure games, I think) is that the player lacks a lot of agency. Most adventure games (especially the ones of the point-and-click variety) thrive on constraining the player both in terms of what actions are possible and how they are carried out. In a point and click adventure game the player merely suggests the sort of action that should be taken, and it is then up to the game to determine whether it will allow it or not. For instance, if the player wants to enter a cave, the protagonist might respond that she doesn't feel like it. On top of that, the structure of these games is such that it can be very hard to guess what actions are possible. Actions that seem possible are often not, and actions that were possible in one situation is not in another. Because of all this, I have never felt that I properly played a story in a adventure game. I always felt more like a semi-active observer.

Side note: This is not the only reason why playable stories are problematic in adventure games, but this essay would go on for too long if I were to delve into that. If you are interested in finding out more about this, I have written about it here.

Inside is very different though. In this game you basically have control from the beginning until the very end. There are a few cases where you lose control of your character, but all of these make narrative sense. For instance, you lose control at one point when the character passes out and so on. Inside doesn't even feature any loading screens; from the moment the game starts until the bitter end, it is one continuous narrative. The game also features extremely intuitive controls and has a really good set of affordances. Because of this, you're almost always sure what actions are possible. This gives you a great sense of agency, strengthening the feeling that you are the one moving the story forward. Combined, these two things make a world of difference in how the playable narrative is perceived in Inside compared to a point-and-click adventure game.

Side note: A lot of the lore in Inside is extremely vague and ambiguous, and one could argue that it makes the game's storytelling worse. However, apart from a bit about premise at the end, I won't discuss that in this essay because it doesn't feel very relevant. While there are some instances of vagueness that help the game a great deal design-wise (such as how some levels are connected), for the most part it is not a crucial ingredient. If the developers wanted, there's a lot of lore and background information that could have been much more understandable, without much difficulty development-wise. It's pretty clear to me that the vagueness in Inside is a conscious choice by the developers. Because of this, it feels better to just focus on what Inside does best: storytelling through play.

One thing that makes all of this come together is the adaptive animation and action system. When the boy is in a place where he needs to sneak, he is animated in a way that makes this very evident. Because of this, the game implicitly tells the player what sort of things to expect, and the player can shift their mindset to match that of the boy's. In a similar fashion, the game also changes what actions are possible to performing depending on the current state of the boy and the game world. The best example of this is when you pick up a torch and use it to keep aggressive dogs at bay. The boy will automatically start waving the stick when a dog is near, and this lack of control feels totally OK to the player because it matches what they would like to happen. Partly, this is possible due to just mentioned adaptive animations. The other big factor is the setup of the situation itself and the previous hour or two of training the player has had in expecting actions to subtly change depending on the state they are in. On top of this the game also creates a credible setup that constrains the torch to a small, closed-off area. This makes sure that the player can't get it into another place where it feels like it could be useful, but where the action is not supported by the game.

Another interesting part of Inside's storytelling is how it handles its "cutscenes". Instead of taking away control from the player, these cutscenes take place in the background, allowing the player to keep playing as they occur. This is a pretty common trick in games, but what sets Inside apart is that these background events can often be dangerous if the player is not careful. For instance, if the boy gets spotted by some people in the background they'll chase and capture him. This provides a certain "realness" to the background events, and instead of just being some sort of decor they become a proper part of the game's world.

In order for the active narrative in Inside to work at all, the game obviously needs some gameplay. To achieve this Inside has settled on using puzzles.  Now it's worth asking the question: Why puzzles?What is it about puzzles that make them so suited for a game like Inside? At first this question sounds a bit weird. Inside is a puzzle platformer, so obviously it has puzzles. But that's only if we see inside as "just" a puzzle game. If we instead approach it as a game with a certain story in mind and with the goal to tell it in an active fashion where the player is always in control, then the question isn't as trivial anymore.

There are two main reasons why puzzles are such a good match. One is that they allow the game to implicitly force the player into taking part in certain activities. The other is that puzzles allow the player to make mental plans, which is a crucial factor in making the gameplay feel good.

Using puzzles in order to "trick" the player into doing certain actions is something I've written about before here and here. In summary the core idea is that a puzzle allows the designer to direct the player's behavior by crafting a puzzle in way where the problems, goals and solutions make the player go through with the desired actions. The crucial part is that the player doesn't feel like they are pushed along a trail, the idea is that the player should feel as if they came up with it all on their own. They should feel as if they chose to act in a specific way themselves, even though it was exactly what the designer intended. When this works, you have, for narrative purposes, a great puzzle. Any time it feels like you need to guess what the designer is thinking, or are being handheld along a set course, you've got a bad puzzle.

In order for it all to feel like you're part of the a narrative, it's vital that the sequence you take part in feel story-like. If all you do is solve one sliding puzzle after another, it won't be a very interesting narrative to take part in. You have to have actions that are story-like. This is a big problem when a narrative game relies on combat for the core gameplay. While combat systems allow designers to set up scenes that make the player behave in a certain fashion, there is only so much story you can tell about taking down hostiles.

Puzzles on the other hand are much more versatile as they don't rely on a central mechanic in the same way as combat does. A puzzle is simply a framed problem for the player to solve. It doesn't rely on a set feedback loop or on particular system dynamics. The player just needs to know: the boundaries that are in place, that the problem is solvable, and what goal state to strive for. As a player you are constantly on the lookout for these things, and this works as the core mental play state, in the same way as "locate enemies and neutralize them" does in combat-oriented gameplay. This allows for a game like Inside to set up all sort of story-like sequences and have that be the core of the experience.

The other aspect that makes puzzles such a good way of making playable story is that, if done right, it allows for a lot of planning.  The sort of planning that we are after here is not just grand strategy like you get from a game of Civilization. Rather, the important bit is that the player is able to look ahead and plan their next course of action and then, to a high degree of accuracy, be able to execute those actions. Crucial here is the ability to, by glancing at the environment ahead, forecast what sort actions are possible to perform, and what the result of doing them would be. I wrote about this a bit in an essay about Until Dawn (2015), where it hit me that the inability to plan is a critical reason why many interactive movies don't feel like proper games. This was especially evident in Until Dawn as due to its reliance on multiple characters and a "anyone can die at anytime"-setup, it sometimes allows for quite a bit of planning. And when it does, it has a big effect on how the game feels to play - it suddenly feels much more like "proper" gameplay.

Because of this, if a game aims to have a narrative built around its gameplay, it is crucial that planning is allowed. Puzzles can allow for this, but it doesn't come automatically as it would in a game about combat. Just recall the discussion above on point-and-click adventures; while based around puzzles many of these games lack the feeling of having "proper" gameplay. A fundamental reason for this is something that I've touched upon earlier: point-and-click games often suffer from a lack of consistency. It isn't possible to know ahead of time what you will be able to do and how the world will be affected if you do. These games often rely heavily on constant trial and error as you slowly discover the boundaries for each specific scene. Compare this to a game like Super Mario World (1990). which I think we all can agree has "proper" gameplay. When you come to a new area in this game, you can instantly mentally simulate what courses of actions are possible, even if there are elements you have not seen before. For instance, if a new monster has spikes on, you can be pretty certain that you won't be able to jump on it. Much of the time, point-and-click adventure games just lack this coherency, and the gameplay suffers from it.

Inside, on the other hand, is much better in allowing for planning. When at its best, you can enter a totally new scene and still have a pretty good idea of what options are available to you, what you need to do and get plausible ideas on how to achieve it. This is when the gameplay feels at its best. In other cases a new area can be more opaque (in terms of possible actions) at first. But as you do some simple trial and error you get a grip on how things work, and you can quickly start making plans based on that. This initial trial and error is impossible to get away from entirely, even games like Super Mario have it, and when used correctly it can be for the better. Figuring out how things work is a fun thing to do and for a game like Inside, plays a crucial part in the experience. Problems tend to arise when this trial-and-error becomes an integral part of the moment-to-moment gameplay, or when it interferes with the control of the player character. For most of the time, Inside avoids these issues and maintains the ability to mentally plan ahead and execute your actions. This is central to what makes the game fun to play.

When the story-connected puzzles and the ability to plan comes together, Inside works amazingly well and it feels like you are playing a story. This is the part of the game that I absolutely love, and there are way too few games that manage to do this,

However, things are far from perfect in Inside. While the game is filled with moments of utter brilliance, there are also plenty of times when things don't work. At these times you are pulled out of the game's world and narrative, and the game feels much more like your standard puzzle game. These moments are well worth discussion as it shows what things to look out for, and suggests ways in which we can take playable stories further.

Despite being a fairly short game (around 4 hours) Inside hasn't manage get rid of all the filler material. Time and time again the game throws you a puzzle that is similar to one that you have already completed and that, more crucially, doesn't provide anything interesting story-wise. The reason these parts exist is fairly straightforward: coming up with new and clever puzzles that fit the story is really hard and time-consuming. I doubt Playdead added these sections because they thought they were perfect as is. Instead, they were probably just the, at time, the best and simplest ways to solve certain issues like pacing, gameplay set-up for tutorial-purposes, and so on. Whatever their reasons for being there, they stick out like sore thumbs and degrade the story-like feel of the experience. If you want to make good narrative through gameplay, it's crucial to minimize moments like these as much as possible.

This is far from a simple problem, of course. It's also something I've written about in the past here. The difficulty of building story-connected puzzles stems from the fact that there are so many different threads that need to fit together into a coherent whole. One approach to tackling this problem is to break it into many smaller, more manageable parts. My own suggestion for a solution is based around having a framework that helps you build your moments in a layered fashion. This approach, which was developed together with Adrian Chmielarz, is called called 4-layers. It's just one possible way of solving this problem, and there are bound to be other ways to address it. Whatever the solution is, it's important that any filler material is removed or changed, so you constantly have a feeling of being inside a story.

For most part the world of Inside has a sense of reality and coherence to it. The buildings, machines, and vistas all have an otherworldly feeling to them, but it still feels like a proper place and you could imagine people actually inhabiting the world. Crafting a world like this is key to making a good playable story. The goal should be for the player to mentally represent the game's environments, characters and objects, not just as thin façade, but as actual things. The player should imagine not just what is on screen, but what kind of things might lie beyond, and to consider it all as one big world. It's when the player start thinking like this that they stop being an observer of the story, and instead become a part of it.

In order to pull this off, it must be possible to take the game seriously. For instance, if the player comes across a hatch, they should be allowed to wonder: "why is this hatch here?" and there should be some sort of plausible explanation to be found. Because if the player can't do this, the game stops taking place in a living, breathing world, and instead is degraded to a simplistic play space.  No matter how fancy the graphics and animation are, in the end it is the player's imagination that brings it all to life.

It's easy to believe that we take in reality "as-is" and what we perceive and feel is this unfiltered flow of information from our senses. This is far from the truth. First of all, our sensory organs are heavily flawed and various systems in our brain need to make up for this fact. For instance, our eyes can only have clear focus on a small part of our field of vision and have to constantly move around to scan the full field. Despite this, we perceive vision as if we have a clear picture of everything in front of us. This is all basically due to the brain guessing what it should be like in the blurry patches. So the raw data that comes in is severely lacking and we need to make up for this. The way this is done is by learning rules of how the world ought to work, and then extrapolating any accessible information to get a full picture. It's not just vision that works like this, but every single one of our senses (note that these go way beyond sight, smell, hearing, etc. and also include things like balance and sense of time).

Secondly, the information that comes in from our senses is not very valuable in its original form. At its very basic level, vision is just a list of dots and a value of how bright each one is. On its own this doesn't tell us anything. In order for it to be useful it needs to be processed. The human visual system first breaks the information down to things like borders and shapes. When this is done, it can start recognizing certain patterns and eventually figuring out what sort of objects are in front of us. Before we get a conscious experience of what's contained in our field of view, all sorts of work has to be done. This work uses data not just from what we can see, but also takes into account all sort of other related information. A simple example of this is the checkerboard illusion:

Squares A and B are the exact same color (check here for proof), but seem like they're different because one of them is lying in shadow. The brain has taken into account the green cylinder and its shadow when evaluating the squares, and similarly any other related information will alter how the final image is perceived. And do note that we're just talking about the "pure" act of perception here. When you want the player to feel as if they're in a living, breathing world, that's something which takes place at an even higher level, relying even more on correlating information. The end result is that everything which you put into your world affects the final perception of it.

As stated earlier, most of the time Inside does a good job at this. But there are a few moments where it doesn't work very well. For instance, at a couple of places there are pressure switches that open doors and control various machinery. Given what sort of people are supposed to work in the building and the level of technology they have, this doesn't really make sense. This makes it very hard to take these pressure switches seriously. Instead, you end up thinking of them as abstract puzzle devices. This is okay from a gameplay perspective, but if you want to make a playable story it's quite problematic. The player can't form an interesting and coherent narrative from using these devices. They have to go from "I am living through a story" to "I have to solve a puzzle that the developers placed here" and they are pulled out of the narrative aspects of the game. The world is no longer "real", but just a convenient place for puzzles to take place. The boxes that can be triggered to shoot into the air pose a similar problem, and there are a few others like this.

In order to have the best possible playable story, it's crucial to keep these situations to a minimum.

Another related issue is the trial-and-error gameplay of Inside. Now, in Inside, just like in Limbo, having the player killed a few times before completing a puzzle is key to how the game is supposed to play. So it doesn't feel entirely fair to point out a very intentional core feature of the game as a problem, but nonetheless, if the goal is to make a good playable story, trial and error pose a problem. The reason for it being a problem is rooted in how the player perceives the game. As I stated earlier, the final perception of a game is the combination of a lot of different data. The goal is for the player to think of the game as "real", but a designer will always face a problem: the game's world is an imperfect simulation. The trick is to never let the player notice this fact and it's here that trial-and-error becomes an issue.

There is one important rule all magicians have: never show the same trick twice. Why? Because on the second go, the audience know what's coming and is much more perceptive to all the tricks they'll be using. Almost all magic tricks rely on either false premises or misdirection, and it's rare that these will work as expected twice in a row. Games work similarly to this. For instance, the dog that's chasing you in Inside is not a real animal - it's just an animated mesh controlled by some relatively simple code. But if you show it to the player in the right way, they'll see it as real. However, every time the player gets to replay a section, they'll notice more and more discrepancies. The player will have additional information about the underlying mechanics that drive the dog, and this information will feed into their final perception of the whole scene. Repeat the same sequence enough times, and the dog will go from a "ferocious, dangerous beast" to "gameplay object that needs to be passed".

On top of that any fiction requires a certain suspense of disbelief. The player must be a willing participant in the events that unfold and have a certain level of roleplaying for it all to work. This is active work for the player's part and if they choose not to do it they will see the experience as "just a game". Trial-and-error wears down on the player's stamina; their ability to concentrate falters and they will become increasingly unwilling to roleplay. Not only life-or-death scenarios have this effect, but puzzles can too. If a puzzle is too unclear, or just too complicated to execute, the player can be forced into a trial-and-error loop that erodes the immersive qualities of the game's world.

Overall, Inside does a good job making sure that this doesn't happen very often, and that's despite the game's focus on trial-and-error scenarios. It seems to me like the developers have been more conscious about this issue than in their previous game Limbo as most challenges are fairly easy to complete on the first few attempts. But from time to time you do get trapped in trial-and-error loops, and since otherwise Inside is so good at crafting a playable story, it's extremely interesting when it happens. Pretty much all games have this issue, but in Inside it is especially evident as to the sort of narrative issues that it causes.

It's worth bringing up that trial-and-error is not always bad. Sometimes this type of gameplay is crucial to get the right type of behavior from the player. It needs to be clear to the player what sort of things to fear and having a life-and-death puzzle challenge is really good at this. Forcing the player to redo certain actions until they do it right also teaches them what sort of play styles this game favors. This can often be crucial to the player's enjoyment. For instance, if the player doesn't understand when to sneak, and can just sprint through stealth sections, a large part of the experience is lost. Finally, trial and error can also force the player to take the world more seriously. For example, the above mentioned background cutscenes are made more palpable by having certain gameplay effects on the player. The player learns to view things happening in the background as not just fluff, but crucial to their survival. In the end, this makes the world seems more real and increases the sense of being inside a life-like world. Keeping a fine balance here is key, and more than most, Inside does an excellent job.

Another important thing worth mentioning is that Inside doesn't have any superfluous actions. Pretty much any action that you can do in the game, every box, lever, button, bridge and so on, has a gameplay purpose. This has a huge benefit for the puzzles, as the player will always be aware of what the constraints of any situation is. They can just ask themselves, "Can I interact with it?" and if the answer is yes, then they know it will be needed in order to solve the puzzle. This allows the game to have lots of "out of the box"-type of puzzles without coming off as overly frustrating. Since the constraints are so narrow, the player is bound to come across the solution sooner or later. This makes the aforementioned trial-and-error-loops less likely to happen and you get a better narrative.

However, all is not perfect with this approach. By making the game's world all about gameplay, it also removes a certain sense of authenticity from it. As explained earlier, what creates the final perception of a game is all of the aspects taken together as a whole. Inside doesn't let the player freely explore the world, and because of this you lose a whole swathe of information that could have improved the overall perception. For instance, the player could learn more about the inner workings of the machinery or get a better understanding of its various inhabitants. Inside's interaction focus also forms a player role which is all about overcoming whatever puzzle is in front of them. While the player, in a certain sense, does explore the world of Inside, this is more of a side effect. The mechanics of the game almost never encourage the player to explore for pure, intrinsic reasons. Apart from a few scattered secrets Inside constantly revolves around solving the current puzzle at hand. This gives a certain sense of the whole world revolving around the player, and takes away the feeling of the place having an agenda of its own.

Side note: Adrian Chmielarz has a great article on how the most immersive games around all treat the player as an intruder. It is well worth a read as it goes over a lot of the issues that you can find in Limbo. Read it here.

A particularly big problem that arises because of Inside's straightforwardness is that the game's spatial representation suffers. When you go through a game, or any location really, you continuously build and update a mental model of the place. At first this mental model will be very sparse and lacking, and you won't really have an intuitive sense of the place - it just "exists". But as you traverse the world you start to understand how everything is connected and your mental model goes from being very simplistic to actually becoming a virtual representation of the place. It's when the mental model becomes sufficiently detailed that a world starts feeling real. As an example, compare quickly riding a car through a town and actually living there for a few days. In the former it's just scenery; in the latter it's an actual place. Not having this mental model is big problem in Inside. You always quickly pass by the various locations and never get to know them spatially. As such, the game's world never forms a cohesive whole in your mind. And without a proper mental model of the game's spaces, the final perception of its world suffers.

Again, just like the trial-and-error design, this is a bit of an unfair critique. The walk-forward-to-progress mechanic is part of the core of what kind of game Inside is. But that also causes issues to arise and it becomes easier to pinpoint narrative shortcomings.

Finally, another thing that that I think is worth bringing up is that Inside never properly introduces its protagonist. Early on there's a bunch of stuff done to get better a feel for the character we are playing, such as animations and the deadliness of the world. But there's never a shred of information as to where the boy is heading and why he wants to go there. This becomes problematic when your brain tries to weave a cohesive narrative through the game. At some points there are concrete urges that push you onwards, such as trying to escape some danger. In these instances, a story-like sequence will form in your mind and the journey feels like a proper narrative. But at other times there's no intrinsic reason for you to push onwards, and you only do it becomes the game tells you to. Once again, the makes the game go from playable story to a "just" being a puzzle platformer.

It's obvious that the developers intended for the boy's background to be vague, but I think they could have provided some more information. At least Limbo has "Uncertain of his sister's fate, a boy enters Limbo" as a description, which at least gives us a clear goal: "find your sister". Inside has "Hunted and alone, a boy finds himself drawn into the center of a dark project," instead, which lacks a clear motive. And playing the game, I can't remember that I ever felt drawn towards something from a narrative perspective - the game itself compelled me to move onwards. It's fairly obvious that the developers intended the premise to be vague, but I think it's damaging to the game as a playable story. When we have a proper premise we can latch onto it is much more easily to create meaning around the various events. It also gives the player directions on how to roleplay and as a direct continuation of that helps enhance the perception of the game as a whole. A good example of this at work is the opening to to Last of Us (2013), where first a cinematic and then a playable sequence gives us a great setup for the character we are about to play for (most of ) the remainder of the game.

Note that Inside is far from a failure in this aspect. As I mentioned earlier, the animations and general setup helps a lot in setting up the character. I just felt the game left a bit more to be desired. And I find it annoying how many games skip over the the intial setup and start the game without any real sense of who you are playing. Interactive storytelling relies heavily on roleplaying, but without any defined role to take on this is very hard to achieve. Because of that I thought it was extra important to point out.

And that sums up my  thoughts on Inside and playable narrative (for now at least!). While I might have come off as a bit harsh at the end of the essay, it's worth making it clear that I still think Inside is an amazing game. In terms of being a playable narrative Inside is really great - sometimes even genius - but that doesn't mean it's the best way to do things. As I've hopefully outlined in this essay, there's a bunch of stuff that can be improved. But it's also evident to me that Inside is on the right track. If we want to make proper interactive stories, Inside shows the way and is one of the best examples that currently exists.