Navigating the Space of Game Design

Designing a game spawns an endless set of ideas - ideas that need to be sorted. In order to do this, you need a method of evaluating them. The following discusses five different gameplay models - ways of thinking about game design - that can be helpful in choosing between ideas, and how they affect the final game.

I've previously talked about how games are, when it comes to narrative evolution, "too much fun for their own good". I've also given a specific example of this by comparing Resident Evil 4 and 7 and shown how development focus can make a huge difference to the final game. But one place where I think I've been a bit vague is that I've been talking about a position taken during development. "Games are too much fun for their own good" is not a value judgement about games in general. It's all about the effect this has when creating a game. This is an incredibly important distinction to make. While you can debate forever over fuzzy subjects like "is this a game?" and "what is the purpose of games?" it's a fact that your intentions during design will have a huge impact on the final result.

When designing a game, or doing anything creative for that matter, you are basically navigating a space of ideas. At any point there are a bunch of decisions that you could be making and you need to base these decisions on some sort of plan. How you come up with this plan will be highly dependent on your values, processes, restrictions and so forth. What all this boils down to is a need to constantly evaluate the project's current state and adjust its trajectory.

For a long time, the general advice in game development has been to "follow the fun". But this is far from the only way to evaluate a project. In this post I'll present a few different ways to go about it. Take note that it is very uncommon for any project to rely purely on a single method. Different aspects of a project usually require a slightly different mindset.  It is however very common to base the majority of design decisions on one type of evaluation.

Super Mario Bros. (1985)

Classical Gameplay
Let's start with the most common way of working in game design: to follow the fun. When working in this way you normally try to find a good "core loop" that provides the basic engagement factor for the game. The rest of the development is then spent enhancing this core loop in order to make it as engaging as possible. This could mean that new mechanics are added on top (e.g. crafting or levelling) or that the core design is tweaked until it generates the most fun possible.

When creating a game like this, you can usually start by figuring out what works and what doesn't early on. It's also possible to hand it over to playtesters early, and to have continuous testing throughout development. The art and story are often also heavily based on how the gameplay works.

FarmVille 2 (2012)

Metric-Based
This is the sort of design that you see a lot of in free-to-play games and it's incredibly common in mobile games. Here the goal is not to make the game as engaging as possible, but to set particular goal metrics, and then tweak the game to adjust player behaviour so that the metrics measured reach those desired goals. Sure, you are often looking for a certain amount of fun in the game, but when it comes down to it, no matter how much fun a certain decision creates, if it doesn't produce the right change in metrics, it is a bad choice.

When making a game like this, testing on users is paramount. You often want to release the game as early as possible and then start tracking things like retention rate, daily active users, and churn rate. The better numbers you get, the better the game matches your goals.

Braid (2008)

Deep Mechanics
While both of the above methods put some focus on constantly asking the question: "Is my user having fun?", this type of design takes a different route. It's quite unusual for this to be a major evaluation method, but games like The Witness (2016) and the upcoming Miegakure do just that. In their talk "Designing to Reveal the Nature of the Universe Jonathan Blow and Marc Ten Bosch (creators of the two previously mentioned games) lay out this way of thinking about the design. Quickly summarized it's all about taking your game's mechanics as far as possible. This makes it different in that it is no longer about creating maximum engagement. Instead, it's all about maximizing the depth of the gameplay. When following this design you really want the game to squeeze every possibility out of your core mechanics.

Just like with classical gameplay, you want to start with the core loop, and you also want people to test early and regularly. When it comes to art and story, they are only there in order to enhance the gameplay. The main goal is not to aesthetically please your viewer, but to have the art and the story that are best at conveying the mechanics to your user.

Beyond: Two Souls (2013)

Classical Plot
Another way to go about designing a game is to just view it as a standard story. Your utmost concern is to make sure that the end experience works in terms of classical ways of structuring film, books and other traditional storytelling media. When creating a game like this, you generally start out with a script and then develop the gameplay in order to support what that document says.

The interactive movie genre is something that very strongly uses this model. It is also very common in RPG games, which can be said to interlace this with sections of more classical gameplay. There are also many adventure games that mainly adhere to this approach when evaluating progress.

SOMA (2015)

Narrative Driven
This is the approach that we at Frictional Games are following to the greatest extent right now. It is also the approach that this blog mostly refer to as a way of crafting better narrative in games. In this type of design the goal is to make the activity of playing the game produce a certain type of experience. The goal is to maximize the efficiency in which the intended experience is delivered. For example, in a horror game, the goal might be to make the player as scared as possible.

In this case you normally start with some sort of emotional or intellectual experience that you want to convey. After that you add features, both gameplay, story and art-wise, in order to make this experience come across as clearly as possible. What stands out when compared to other approaches is that there is no core feature, such as gameplay or plot, to fall back on. Instead you have a fuzzy goal that you are trying to reach, and many different parts of the game are needed before you can evaluate whether it works or not. Because this often requires a lot of high quality content, playtesting is made relatively infrequent compared to other approaches.

It is this approach that I believe is the future of interactive storytelling. We can only get so far by focusing on classical gameplay or storytelling techniques.

It's worth noting that these types of games by no means need to be story-heavy. A great example of this is the game Duskers (2016), as explained in the creator's GDC talk. While the game started with a classical gameplay approach, it later put a ton of focus on delivering a couple of core pillars such as feelings of isolation and realism. Because of this I think it is a good example of using a narrative-driven approach for development. The game is by no means a pure example of this approach, but it is an excellent example of how different it can make a game.

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That sums up the approaches I wanted to cover today. I am sure there are other approaches, but these were the ones that felt most interesting to discuss.

As I said earlier, it's very rare that a project will rely solely on one of these methods of evaluating progress. For instance, no matter how much fun it would be for Super Mario to have a shotgun to blast goompas with, it would never feel fitting to add it. But if you put aside stuff like that, a game like Super Mario bases pretty much all of its decisions on the Classical Gameplay approach. It therefore feels fair to say that it is a game developed using that approach.

I also want to make it clear that there is no best way to develop a game. All of these approaches have their pros and cons, and what it all really comes down to is what sort of game you want to create.

Hopefully these examples should make it more understandable what I mean by "narrative-wise, games are too much fun for their own good" and development being a navigation of an idea space. Consider how different the paths taken during development will be depending on the approach chosen. Some paths will be filled with constant confirmation that you are going in the right direction. These are often the ones you are most tempted to use. Other paths require long treks through uncharted territory and are filled with uncertainty. These are often less tempting, but can also lead to very interesting and unique results.

Now for some examples on how the evaluation process can have a huge effect on how a game turns out.

The first example is the sanity meter in Amnesia. At first the sanity meter was thought of as an important gameplay detail and it was evaluated through a Classical Gameplay lens. However, it started to become clear that the approach was clashing with our wish to have an immersive and very scary game. The lowering of sanity would often become annoying and it was very hard to balance it in way that meshed with our other goals.

Up until then we had focused on making the sanity as much "fun" as possible, and we could have continued down that route. However, due to our discussions, we chose to take a different approach: we asked ourselves what would benefit the intended experience best. This made us consider the whole sanity as an "atmospheric device" instead and we dropped a bunch of related features. The game took on a very different shape because of this and we continued to use the same narrative-driven approach for other things, like monster encounters.

The second example is from SOMA, where we from the beginning were very focused on the narrative-driven approach. This took a lot of different shapes throughout development, but one of the most prominent ones was that, once the prologue was over, the game must be a continuous first person experience without any camera pull-outs or cuts. The reason for this was that we wanted a narrative experience where the player could get a sense of what it was like to "switch" consciousness. This caused all sorts of issues during development, most likely making a few passages, gameplay-wise, less fun. But it was vital to get the right experience across and without this, and many other similar decisions, the game wouldn't have been the same.

This should hopefully have given a sense of the many ways you can search between in the space of game design ideas. I also hope it's given some more depth to my two previous entries on connected topics. (Check them out here and here).

It should also have given an idea on just how uncertain the narrative-driven approach is when compared to other ways of evaluating. Because of this, I think the need to understand how our medium works is much greater than it has been before. Next week I'll try and help with this by talking about presence, one of the key aspects when crafting a narrative-driven game.


Notes:
I am not 100% sold on the name "Narrative-Driven", but I'm unsure what works better. I thought about "Experience-Driven", but that felt too broad. For me narrative is (as explained here) all about the emotional journey the player takes when playing through the game. It is a very holistic concept and not reliant on plot details or how much "fun" gameplay is. This feels like it fits well with the point I want to get across. However, the name could be very misleading to people and I suspect I'll get at least one comment where someone is upset with the article because of it. That said, I don't expect to use the term a lot and the categorization here is really just to better get the idea of "games are too much fun for their own good" across, so it should be fine.

Resident Evil and the power of narrative context

By putting the player in a situation where's there not enough space to move or to aim at the enemy, gameplay can quickly grow boring. But when combining gameplay with narrative and context, you can turn this into an even more immersive experience 

Resident Evil 7 came out a couple of months ago and was generally perceived as being "back to form", even called one of the best games in the series. What really stood out to me was that it felt like Resident Evil had returned to its roots in telling a compelling narrative, and using that to power the experience. In order to unpack what I mean by this, let's first consider the first Resident Evil game (1996).

As I guess most of you know, the first Resident Evil was heavily inspired by Alone in the Dark (1992), and the whole setup is basically ripped from there. Now the problem with Alone in the Dark is that it is extremely clunky. The controls are slow and not very responsive and the fixed camera angles makes it hard to get a good idea of your surroundings. Resident Evil improved a bit on this, but most of the basic problems still remained. Compared to a game like Doom (1993), the game's combat is a lot less engaging.

Resident Evil attacks this problem by wrapping the game's events in story. Consider the first encounter you have with a zombie:



 
You enter a room, see someone sitting on the floor. It turns around and reveals itself. Argh! It is a zombie eating on a corpse. You pull out your gun, shoot the zombie a couple of times, and manage to kill it.

The combat in this scenario is not very interesting in itself. The room is small so you cannot move around much and the clunky controls don't help. You can't really decide where to aim, either. You basically just have to turn your character in the right direction and press the attack button until the zombie eventually dies (or possibly you could just run out of the room). From a pure gameplay perspective this is quite dull. But when it's wrapped in a narrative context it suddenly gets very exciting. In fact, the clunky controls and limited camera angles work to the game's advantage here. They make the players feel like they're not in control, which gets directly projected on the situation at hand - the approaching zombie. A tense and scary situation arises.

This is the power of narrative context. By wrapping gameplay actions in storytelling the experience that emerges exceeds the sum of its parts. Taken solely on their own merit, the gameplay mechanics don't feel very engaging. But when used in the right environment they work far better at providing the intended experience than using the more streamlined controls of Doom.

This isn't the only thing that keeps Resident Evil working as a game. Another big aspect of it is the resource management, which is a great help in making the game engaging over longer periods of time. But again, it works so well because of the world it is placed in. Making sure that you have ammo and healing herbs is not just a numbers game. By playing it in the world of a zombie-infested mansion it turns into a survival scenario which makes it a lot more exciting [1].

Over the years, Resident Evil has distanced itself from the narrative context, and focused more on improving the gameplay mechanics. Resident Evil 4 (2005) is the biggest step in this evolution.

Resident Evil 7 picks up where the first one left of and puts, once again, lots of focus on the narrative context. First of all let us consider the combat of Resident Evil 7. Here is a typical combat scene:

and here is one from another contemporary action game:

Titanfall 2 (2016)

As you can see there is a lot less fun for the player to have in Resident Evil 7. The aiming is imprecise and the space doesn't allow for a lot of movement. But all of this works in the favor of the game. Once again, we can't just analyze the gameplay on its own. We have to take into account the context in which it happens. Here is where Resident Evil 7 has plenty. For instance, the first enemy that you encounter is your girlfriend turned mutant, who is now attacking you with a chainsaw. Sure, the combat is quite awkward, but that only fuels the desperation of the situation. This scene wouldn't be nearly as good if the player was able to circle strafe, and had explicitly defined mechanics for avoiding incoming attacks.

The first half of the game continues like this, with many of the hostiles not being run-of-the-mill monsters, but characters with personalities. You're not just taking part in generic combat encounters - you're taking part in narrative moments. This is a huge improvement compared to basically any of the previous Resident Evils and, in these moments, the game honestly has one of the best implementations of horror combat in any game released. And all of this is due to not simply focusing on making the combat as fun as possible. Instead the focus is on combining context and mechanics in a way that gives rise to the desired experience.

How well this works becomes apparent when you start encountering the "mold monsters". These pop up without much introduction and serve as the generic enemies throughout the game. Almost none of these encounters (the path to a girl's bedroom is a great counter example) have any sort of narrative setup, and the monsters are mostly there in order to assure that the player keeps occupied.

The final third of the game makes this even clearer. Now the player mostly just encounters these generic monsters, and the game starts focusing on the gameplay instead by giving you more weapons and other offensive gadgets. Viewed from the lense of a survival horror experience, the game greatly suffers from this shift in focus. An important thing to note here is that the game doesn't drop its storytelling ambitions. The last half of the game has a lot of story-stuff that it shares with the player. The problem is that the player is not put in any interesting narrative situations. Instead you have your documents to read, or cut scenes between the combat, but you're never part of the storytelling like you were in the first two-thirds of the game.

It's also worth bringing up that it's not only combat that Resident Evil 7 wraps in a narrative, it also does this with its puzzles. For instance, there are a few instances when puzzles are put there by another mad inhabitant of the house. And while these puzzles themselves are nothing out of the ordinary, the context makes them a lot more exciting. You are not just solving abstract riddles - you are trying to outsmart one of the game's antagonists.

So why don't we see more games that has this kind of focus on narrative context? I think the biggest reason boils down to the fact that, at their core, games are simply too much fun. I wrote about this in a blog post last week. The gist of the argument is: when you can choose between making gameplay more fun, and improving the intended experience, focusing on fun gameplay provides a more straightforward path.

When you have a fun core loop you can test out your game using abstract shapes and temporary assets. The same is not as true for games that rely heavily on narrative context. You can imagine how the game will play out if all the proper assets were there, but you can never be sure. It isn't possible to hand out a half-finished game to testers and expect to get proper feedback. On top of that, the aspects of the game that make or break the experience are often very costly. A big uncertain investment is needed and it takes a long time before it can be evaluated. The temptation to fall back on the good old reliable "classic gameplay" is very strong indeed.

Building these games works very different from games where the focus is on a fun core loop.  But the benefits can be huge. I don't think anybody will argue against the claim that Resident Evil 4 and 7 are very different experiences. One focuses on following the fun, and the other on creating a certain experience.

Resident Evil 7 is by no means the perfect horror experience, but it contains some truly exceptional stuff. The things that all stand out are heavily reliant on the idea of narrative context. To me it seems like the game has just dipped its toes into this though. As I explained in my post on games being too much fun, to go further down this route is not an easy mission. But if we are to evolve the videogames medium and provide stronger storytelling experiences it is the only way to go. The many signs pointing in this direction, some of them apparent in Resident Evil 7, makes me even more confident in this.

But we can't just stumble blindly along this path, hoping to bump into greatness. We must scout the territory and see which route seems like the most promising. Finding how to do this is what this blog will continue to explore.


Footnotes:
[1] The case of the resource management is not as clear cut as the combat one as it has a much better gameplay core going on here. In fact there are games like Desktop Dungeons that use a similar mechanic and bases its entire gameplay around it. So while the narrative context is an important factor here, it is not nearly as important as it is for combat.

Videogames - too much fun for their own good?

As a medium videogames have been kidnapped by their easily-achieved engagement. Simple gameplay is so much fun on its own that storytelling has never been needed in order to draw an audience. Compared to films, the element of storytelling is seldom elevated in videogames. Is it time for a walk down that lesser-known path, leading to better narratives in videogames?

When the first films appeared 120 years ago, they were shown under amusement-park-like conditions. By peeping into a Kinetoscope, the audience (one by one) were able to get a short experience of moving pictures. For instance, as in Fred Ott's Sneeze, by W. K. L. Dickson (1894), anyone willing to pay could watch an engineer sneezing.

As you can imagine, these clips felt pretty boring quite quickly, which led to an immense pressure to make moving pictures more interesting. The first step was to find something more fascinating to film than a sneezing engineer. In the late 19th century, a steam engine arriving at the train station fell into this category, as the Lumière brothers proved in L'Arrivée d'un train en gare de La Ciotat (1895).

But there's a limit to how many moving objects people are interested in seeing on film, as well as in ways to top previous experiences. There was a need for something that caught the attention of the audience, something that would make them come back for more. Enter - narration!

The first attempts to tell the audience a story built upon simply filming theatre plays. At the same time, film developed into its own medium, and filmmakers started creating new tricks suitable for film, which increased the audience engagement in the story. This is when a lot of interesting things started happening. For instance, filmmakers realized that not every part of the plot had to be filmed. By simply implying actions and events, the audience would still keep up with the story. Film editing became a crucial part in tinkering with the narrative, and storytelling in film evolved greatly.

Let's compare this to how games work. This is what one of the very first video games (Pong, 1972) looked like:

Contrary to the first attempts at film, this game is still quite fun to play. In fact, there are still new games being made based on Pong's gameplay.

Flag N Frag, by EDEVOX

Obviously this version has a lot of new features and graphical decoration, but it still relies on the same concept as the original game. This differs widely from the evolution of films. No one would consider making a film based on the same concept as Fred Ott's Sneeze. There is just something inherently fun about interaction that makes an old game like Pong still worth playing. This is not just true of the very first games and films; if you compare works like Pac-Man (1980) and The Birth of a Nation (1915), the former stacks up far better.

Dealing with video games it was pretty clear from day one what the interesting thing was - playing is simply fun! The medium itself presented new ways of making gaming even more fun, which were being used in all possible ways. Compare this to a scenario where a similar evolution took place in film production. The film equivalent would be movies still being all about watching small clips [1] and most of the effort during the last 120 years would had been on extending this aspect. In the games industry, this is the progress that basically took place.

Before I continue this post I need to clear up a term. When I talk about "the fun of interaction" I mean a very specific case of gameplay where you have a core mechanic that you base the whole experience around. Examples of this are: shooting spaceships, jumping over chasms, avoiding incoming hazards, leveling your RPG character and so forth. This is the type of gameplay where the aim is to make it feel as "fun" as possible. Even if the graphics are just made up of simplistic shapes, this sort of gameplay remains very engaging. I will henceforth refer to this as "classical gameplay" in order to differentiate it from other forms of gameplay (e.g. exploration, anticipation of monsters, dialog, etc). I also need to make it very clear that I think the future of the videogame medium lies in interaction and play, and we should not strive to remove this - quite the contrary. With that said, let's continue.

From a pure classical gameplay perspective there is nothing wrong with focusing on the fun part of gaming. Most of what we currently see in the videogame world is there thanks to this focus. However, it has held back videogames as a storytelling medium. In movies, it's crucial to get the storytelling aspect right as you really don't have anything else to fall back on. Sure, there're always blockbuster movies that can make the audience overlook so-so storytelling by offering a visual spectacle. However, these are the rare cases. The vast majority of films relies foremost upon having good storytelling, and it's needed even in order to make spectacle work. The narrative, however corny, still has to be front and center. Not so for video games; as long as you get the core gameplay working, the audience will be happy.

Storytelling which is just added as a sort of extra spice has long been the standard in videogames. In fact, most attempts of storytelling often feel like they get in the way of the classical gameplay. Not only is storytelling something that isn't really needed; it can even worsen the experience by acting as an impediment to classical gameplay. From this perspective, it's no wonder storytelling has had a tough time to progress in videogames. For a long time, it hasn't really felt needed and has been seen more as a hindrance than an opportunity.

This sort of thinking still permeates game development. "Make sure your core [classical] gameplay gets done first" is one of the most basic pieces of advice given to any aspiring game developer. And once you get that basic classical gameplay working, only then should you try and make your story fit into it - if you need a story at all, that is. It's important to note that classical gameplay-wise this makes a lot of sense and is a fundamentally good thing. If you're aiming to make your games as much fun as possible to play, getting your gameplay loop working first is a wise move. It also makes sense from a commercial perspective, since classical gameplay is the easiest way to get the audience's attention. Narrative-wise though, this is far from an optimal strategy.

Historically there have been two game genres of note that have resisted this trend: adventure games and horror games.

Adventure games share the same issue as movies: the core gameplay isn't that much fun. The players basically (through text or using a mouse-based interface) give commands that a character might carry out for them. And unless there's some sort of greater context involved, this gets boring quite quickly. One way of fixing this is to put more effort into the storytelling. When the character you are indirectly controlling is part of an engaging narrative, it becomes a lot more fun to control them.

Despite this, storytelling-wise, adventure games stopped evolving quite quickly [2]. There are a bunch of reasons for this, some of which I outlined here. Another especially important reason is that almost all adventure games revolve around puzzle solving. They haven't really given up on their game legacy. The player can always go into "I am just doing this for the puzzles"-mode, and thereby avoid much of the game's attempts to tell a good story. So we're back to the initial problem - classical gameplay standing in the way of progress in narrative.

Horror games take on this issue from a different angle. This is one of the few (possibly only) bigger genres where classical gameplay turns into a nuisance. The most basic example of this is: if monsters are too much fun to encounter, they stop being scary. So horror games have been forced to tone down on one of the core engagements that has been a cornerstone of many other types of videogame. By giving up on the most fun part of the medium, the genre had to turn to something else in order to keep up the engagement level - storytelling. Many horror games - Silent Hill is a great example - feature clunky combat, and much of the time it is more stressful than fun to encounter enemies. But by offering a story that ties into the player's actions, you can take something that is not so much fun on it's own and turn it into an very engaging experience.

To convey horror by purely system-based means is hard, and therefore a narrative is crucial in order to provide the right experience. However, crafting these sorts of experiences is also hard, especially if the storytelling is supposed to carry the heaviest burden. As a way of making up for this, instead of putting more focus on the narrative aspects, horror games have always added all sorts of other systems to provide a basic engagement loop. In the end, this is what made the golden age of the PS2-era horror games come to an end. When the genre started to stagnate, Resident Evil 4 came about, putting all focus on gameplay and becoming a huge success.

Resident Evil 4 is an amazing game on its own, but it really did a disservice to the horror genre as a whole. Just like we have seen in the past with classical gameplay being the cornerstone to fall back on, the horror genre ended up doing the same. And with it much of its narrative-based ambitions never got a chance to properly evolve.

What this all leads me to is the following: When it comes to storytelling, games are inherently just too much fun for their own good. I think the problem comes down to being stuck at a local maximum.

What I mean with this is that as you are developing a game, you will come across a bunch of ideas that you can choose to follow. There will always be a lot of tension between getting the game's gameplay and storytelling to work. Scouting the territory of the possible design choices, the ones where the gameplay wins are the ones that will almost always come out victorious. Following the path of narrative-focus will almost always decrease the perceived engagement. Think of these gameplay-focused solutions as going upwards towards a peak, and the story-focused ones as going downhill into a valley.

But that doesn't mean that focusing on gameplay is optimal in the long run. It just means that given the solutions at hand, most of the time, the best one will seem to be the ones with gameplay-focus. There could be another, much higher, peak further away, but the only way to reach it is through tough terrain and deep valleys. By this I mean that a method will not show its value until you let it evolve to a certain amount. But in video games the classic gameplay is so interesting on its own, that it's is unlikely anyone would want to make this journey.

I think that a lot of features of modern film have been sitting on a distant peak, but because the simple joy of the medium wore out so quickly, people have been forced to take this treacherous path. Video games have never been forced to do this, and this is likely why we, narrative-wise, haven't been able to evolve to the extent I think this medium is capable of.

Traveling down this path is not easy, and just walking it blindly will not generate anything useful. You will just end up lost but not found.

Heavy Rain (2010)

One way of approaching this problem is to take another medium as a springboard and to use all of its core engagement as a foundation to build upon. The best example of this is in interactive movies, which use film as their base and then build a game on top of that. This works fine at first, but you will run into similar problems as with normal games; you get stuck with a local maximum. These games rely on the language of films to provide the core engagement, and this is bound to break once you step too far away from those foundational aspects. And just as in games, every nearby path in solution space will give you a worse result.

Dear Esther (2012)

I think a much more fruitful approach is to break down games into their basic elements, and then start building from there - now with the core goal of achieving better storytelling. Games like Dear Esther have been great pioneers in this regard, and have shown how building engaging experiences without a lot of features, thought to be crucial, is possible. Sure, these sort of experiences are far from perfect and not everybody's cup of tea. But to dismiss them would be very foolish indeed. We are now starting to gather knowledge about what makes games tick in a way never seen before. Now it's time to figure out where to go next.

It is my belief that in order to make more progress, we need to start analyzing what makes games special and, instead of just applying these findings in classical ways, figure out new ways by which they can increase our sense of interactive storytelling. The path ahead will be harsh, unfamiliar, and filled with challenges, but at the end we shall reach a peak greater than what we have ever seen before.

Footnotes:
[1]: I guess one could argue that we are back to the good old days of Fred Ott's Sneeze with Youtube and gifs, but I don't think that is true. When people watched Fred Ott's Sneeze, they watched it for the "cinematic" experience that it provided, for seeing things recreated on a screen. But when we watch a clip of something silly happening, we are watching it for the sake of the event itself. People played the original Pong because it was fun to interact, and the same reason is still valid.

[2]: I am sure that people will disagree with me on this, but to me adventure games reached a peak, storytelling-wise, with games like Full Throttle and Broken Sword and it has not really improved much since.

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.

People of Frictional: Meet Fredrik, our executive producer!

Although it’s been awfully silent here for a while, all of the Frictional Games’ team is working hard on new things. Unfortunately, we can’t share anything with you at the moment, but yes - there’s two projects in the pipeline, and we are very excited about both of them

In 2015 SOMA was published after years of hard work, followed by the release of both SOMA and Amnesia: Collection on Playstation 4.

But everyone who’s ever worked on, and shipped a project, knows there’s a deep void that will present itself as soon as the confetti has landed and the champagne bottles are emptied.

This is when you need some magic in order to kickstart the team again. It’s time to start generating ideas, work on concepts and make sure everyone finds his or her place in the project. If you happen to have not only a producer, but an executive producer on board, this is the perfect time to make the most of it. And here’s where Frictional Games is lucky, because since late 2015, there is such a person on the team, and it’s about time to get to know Fredrik Olsson a little bit better.

So, who are you, really?

Well, I guess I like to think of myself as a fun-loving and easy-going guy who strives towards creativity on an exceptional level. Over the course of my career I’ve learnt, about myself, that I am not truly happy unless I am involved in something that sets out to break boundaries and creates something truly unique. Games have been one of my main interests ever since my father brought our first gaming console, an Intellivision (yes I am getting old!), into our lives already in my pre-teens. I immediately fell in love with games as a concept and it stuck with me and developed further through basically all of the upcoming technology generations (Commodore 64, Atari ST, PC, Atari Lynx, Playstation, PSP, PS2, XBOX 360 and now eventually PS4). I guess I didn’t see it at that time, but clear signs that I was destined for the gaming industry was already there in my early teens. In addition to the late nights playing games, I spent a tremendous amount of time learning the first version of 3D Studio (without access to a handbook or tutorials) and creating 3D art and animations.

At the age of 17 I started realizing that the gaming industry was where I needed to be and I started looking for the next step to realizing that dream. At that time however, educations focusing on game development was basically nonexistent, and my personal development went on a slight detour. Having spent 4,5 years at the University studying “System Science”, I got a job at the Swedish branch of Toyota’s forklift business where I quickly got the position of International Project Manager. My role focused on the implementation of system support for the order, sales and marketing processes of the European sales-subsidiaries of the company. Even though the experiences I had at Toyota was very challenging and rewarding it was eventually the high amount of travelling that made me leave. Travelling basically every week was taking its toll on me and more regional positions within that company didn’t seem as interesting to me as the more international ones. Feeling forced to look for new challenges elsewhere I quit Toyota and became a team manager and business consultant at a medium sized IT consultancy company in Stockholm.

It was after little more than one and a half year in the IT consultancy business that it happened. One of my old bosses and friends at Toyota got tired of hearing me talk about this idea for a game that I had carried with me from my teens, and he started pushing me into doing something about it. He probed me on the idea and business model and together we fleshed out a business case for it. We eventually reached a point where our technical knowledge wasn’t sufficient and in order to assess the idea from a technical perspective we brought it to one of my brother’s oldest friends and he, quite surprisingly, displayed a very strong interest in the project. Before I knew it, in the year of 2007, I had quit my well paid job in the IT consultancy business and, together with my brother’s friend, set out to pursue the strongest of all my childhood dreams. Together, with financial backup from my father’s small company and with the facilitation of offshore outsourcing in Ukraine, we created an online multiplayer turn-based football game (!) called Footballidentity based on the vision of being able to play the role of a football player in a realistic football world fully populated by other users. The project has been a hell of a ride and a character-defining experience, for me personally. It’s a truly unique concept and when we started out we had no idea of how it would be received by the world. But now 7 years after the initial release the thing I cherish the most is all the love and dedication we’ve seen from the community (even if it never grew into any huge numbers). It’s been amazing to see how something that was originally an idea for a game that I had dreamt of playing myself, managed to create some extremely strong and long lasting sensations for all those that gave this unusual 11vs11 player experience a shot.

In 2014 Footballidentity had turned quite out-of-date. The user-base had started deteriorating and we didn’t have the resources needed to continue develop and modernize it. Several investors were showing interest in what we had created. They were especially impressed by the very long lifespan of active users (many users are still playing since 2009-2010) and the size of the sharks (multiple users spent as much as 1000 EUR on additional features even though the game was free to play). In the end the uniqueness and lack of similar games resulted in none of the investors having the guts to invest in us and we had to face the music and realize that the game wouldn’t be going to the next level. So me and my co-founder decided to pursue new challenges (while maintaining the football game on our spare-time), and in May 2014 I took a job as a producer at Tarsier Studios in Malmö. This was an extremely interesting time as I, for little more than one and a half year, got to work with an extremely talented bunch of people, as co-producer (together with Media Molecule) on the Tearaway Unfolded project and later also a short period on, the soon to be released, Little Nightmares title.

In 2015 however, the opportunity to take on the role of Executive Producer here at Frictional arose and it was an opportunity I just had to pursue. The role and the character of the company felt like a perfect match for me. An environment where my personality and experience would come to be of best use and Frictional Game has been my home since the 1st of December 2015.

So, from having dreamt of working with games as a youngster, my career took a somewhat unusual detour before eventually landing me back in the environment where I’ve always felt I belong. You might ask if I ever feel that the 7-year detour was a waste of time, but I can honestly say that I feel the absolute opposite. Working in more traditional and mature industries (forklifts and IT-consultancy), in differently sized companies (from 8000 to 60 to 2 employees) and having started my own small studio have given me experience that I cherish an awful lot in my everyday work. I think it has played a big part in forming me into the person, employee and coworker that I am and a more “straight” career within the still very immature gaming industry would have made it a lot more difficult to build up the backbone mentality and frame of reference that fuels my way of work and way of thinking, every day.

That’s my life story right there! I guess I could add to that by mentioning a few cornerstones that seems to always guide the way I approach work. The most distinct ones I’d say would be professionalism, creativity and humour. Professionalism; always try to do the very best you can and approach people with helpfulness in every situation, even if it might not always seem to be your responsibility to help out. Creativity; not only strive for creating something unique but also try and approach problem solving and opportunities with creativity and openness to taking new paths. Humour; I believe that a workplace where humour, joking and lightheartedness is regarded as unnecessary or even obstructive, is never going to reach its full potential. In my mind those aspects (without them going overboard of course) are key to establishing prosperous working-relations and good communication within a team, something that in turn leads to efficiency and quality in the long-run.

Tell us - what was your first impression when you started working at Frictional Games?

The same day as I started working at Frictional, the co-founder and creative director at the company, Thomas Grip, was going to give a talk about game design at an event here in Malmö. It was a perfect opportunity to get to know him a bit better so I decided to attend that talk. A few days after that I remember saying to someone that I felt I had learnt more about, and had gotten a much more interesting perspective on, game design during my first day at Frictional, than I had gotten in all those years running up to that. I’d say that’s quite an awesome (but rare) first impression when kicking off a new job! Those feelings have only continued growing from there, and that’s not only thanks to Thomas but also thanks to the brilliant, dedicated and often exceptionally strange minds of the rest of the team. I am not exaggerating when I say that I get amazed almost every day about the quality, creativity and efficiency that the team displays, whether it’s in concepting, environment art, design, writing or sound.

Another thing that struck me early on was the fact that the team seemed so in sync even though the whole team was distributed all over Sweden and Europe. Not only with regards to the daily routines and communication on Slack but also when it came down to the creative ambitions and mutual understanding of tasks and goals. From those perspectives it all felt a lot more like a well-oiled machinery than I had expected to find before starting. I felt that the only thing missing was a bit more structure, some clearer processes and a tad more transparency, especially when keeping in mind where the company is heading and the challenges that lies ahead.

Fredrik in the front, with parts of the well-oiled machinery of Frictional Games.

What can you say about the future of Frictional Games?

Frictional is going through a really interesting phase right now. The company is becoming a “two-project studio” with two projects always running simultaneously and seamlessly alternating between pre-production and production. Apart from having to grow the team slightly, something that has taken (and is still taking) a lot of our focus, there’s also a strong demand for a change in team structure. Instead of having one person master-minding basically everything from high level design down to specific level-design we are putting in place a structure with a dedicated leads-team (for high level design, story and art direction) and something we call task-forces (for level-design, scripting- and art-implementation). Responsibility and influence over the game is being distributed out to every part of the team (even though the leads team always have the final say) and we like to look at it as utilizing the collective brainpower of the whole team instead of only that of a few individuals. All of this might sound easy on paper but it does in fact create a lot of new requirements when it comes to processes, communication, transparency and knowledge sharing, and they all need to be fulfilled without smothering the awesome creativity that already resides within the team. It is safe to say that this is a challenge that’s not to be taken lightly, but one that will generate tremendous value if managed successfully. Being able to run two projects in parallel of course carries a strong financial value in itself, but more shared responsibility, multiplied creativity and a higher degree of communication and collaboration, is bound to result in an improved output both in quality and productivity. Not to mention that less dependency on specific individuals will make the studio less fragile.

What would you say has been the best thing that happened since you became a part of Frictional Games?

Well, many good things have happened since I started here ;) but if I had to pick one I’d probably say it’s related to some progress we’ve made when it comes to defining the company and what we want to become. A challenge we’ve been facing is the fact that the studio has been suffering a bit from a minor identity crisis. Even though some (hidden) guiding principles have been feeding the work of the studio for some time now, those have not been distilled, clearly defined and communicated as a vision. This has resulted in a certain degree of hybridism in our creations, something that has not only complicated development but also made it difficult to package and market the games. SOMA is the most clearly shining example of this as it sits as a mixture of horror and philosophy. The game has gotten it’s strongest appraisal not from the horror aspects of the game, but from the strong philosophical design, story and narrative. Perhaps the game would have been better off with a clearer focus on the philosophical theme. One might even assume that some people, who would have otherwise appreciated the philosophical theme, will never get to experience it due to them being discouraged by the horror stamp that the game has gotten. I’m happy to say that we’ve made some truly promising progress in this area lately. We’ve recently managed to nail down a clear vision (for the studio) that goes in line with where the studio has been heading and that vision is already fueling (and to some degree dictating) the direction of our ongoing development.

Hiring: Gameplay Programmer / Designer

At Frictional Games we love to make stuff that stands out from the rest of the crowd. Penumbra was a unique combination of horror, physics and adventure gaming. With Amnesia we redefined what horror games can be and helped to kickstart the Let’s Play phenomenon. In SOMA we explored deep subjects in new, unsettling ways. We aim to continue this trend and we’re now looking for another Gameplay Programmer / Level Designer to join our ranks. This is full-time employment, working from home or from our soon-to-be-established hub-office in Malmö. Applicants must be living in Europe and be prepared to move to Sweden in the near future (if you are not already here).

Working with us, your core duty will be to collaborate with artists and other team members in order to design and craft immersive worlds and experiences. At Frictional we do not simply rely on the core mechanics to carry most of the game. What makes or breaks our experiences is the care giving to the all specific level elements. Making sure these are top notch, both in design and implementation, will be your main duty. This includes everything from level layout and pacing to designing and implementing puzzles and smaller events.

Here is a rundown of some of a few more specific tasks you will find yourself doing:

• Design the layout of a level based on a high level summary.
• Come up with ways to convey certain story moments in the most efficient manner.
• Design and implement puzzles so they fit with gameplay, world and story.
• Script background events that sets the tone for a level.
• Implement gameplay systems, such as an inventory.
• Tweak AI to make it behave like you want.

These are far from the only things you’ll be doing when working with us. We’re quite a small team, and we like to see people dabbling with things outside of their expertise and constantly learning new things. The more areas of our development you’re able to take part in, the better.

Of great importance is that fact that you must be able to work from home. Frictional Games currently does not have an office; however, we are planning to set one up in Malmö, hopefully sometime during 2017. You will however decide for yourself how much you’d want to make use of the office, so it’s crucial that you are able to plan your day, take full initiative and work without strict guidance. Because of this, we allow a flexibility that you’ll rarely find in an office environment. 

The most basic requirements are the following:

• You must live in Europe and be prepared to move to Sweden in the near future.
• You are fluent in English.
• You have played a major role in the development and completion of at least one game.
• You have worked on a game that uses 3D environments.
• You are well-versed in C++, C#, Java or similar.
• You have a fast and stable internet connection.
• You have a Windows PC you can use for work capable of playing recent games (SOMA is a good test case!)
• You strive for structure, efficiency and clarity.
• You are extremely self-driven.
• You like working with varying tasks.
• Familiar with working in issue-tracking software (such as JIRA) or prepared to learn. 

Additional (non-essential) requirements:

• You live in or near Malmö or are prepared to move here.
• You have an interest in narrative games.
• You are good at writing, drawing or both
• You have an interest in horror and sci-fi.

If this sounds like the job for you, send your CV and Cover Letter to apply@frictionalgames.com now!