That’s another well duh moment. I’m not contesting that, nor am I presenting my views as an absolute truth (I hope).
As for computer games not catching up to tabletop games, is that a reason to give up though? I would stress that my views aren’t black or white, I do believe there is room for some of each and that both could benefit from either. It’s just a matter of balance.
And in CS, we probably have the best opportunities of all to realize some of that freedom, given that everything is just text, so if you want to go that route, more work would be the answer.
Now I’m sorely tempted to quote each fragment of your posts on this thread where you’ve said something clearly true and write “Well duh” after it. But that would be less than civil.
If you think I was just stating the obvious, then we’ve misunderstood each other. In your previous post, you’d said that where less sandboxy games managed to be fun, it was “usually” because they’d got the illusion of choice down, meeting the universal human hunger for liberty.
By contrast, I was suggesting that games where less choice is left to the player may be consistently (even “usually”) preferred by a different kind of reader, and speak to other equally well-recognised human needs.
You may well consider that a “well duh,” but if so, you might take a second look at how you write about your own tastes vs. what people tend to like thanks to tendencies that are “inherent in all humans”.
Heavens, no. Like I said, I have strong preferences for my tabletop gaming; when it comes to computer games I like both ends of the spectrum. I don’t want people to give up on writing the “as open as possible” games, not least because if they do, there’s no way I’m getting that strong AI tabletop-equivalent game when I’m 90.
But I wouldn’t agree that “balance” is necessarily the answer – sure, a totally on rails game is less fun, but if a game is closer to a novel or film, with defined MC and strong plot, I’d rather they stayed on that end of the spectrum rather than moving into the mushy middle. Nor do I think an Everyman playable character is improved by giving them a few set characteristics. That could change them from a window through which I enjoy the game’s world/plot/actual main character to a distracting annoyance.
It’s a huge amount of work even to produce a fun-on-rails game in CS. I agree that there’s an advantage to text games in terms of visualising the main character (you don’t have an avatar who will never look quite like you) but in terms of writing out all feasible choices, it’s a daunting task in any approach. And for an open-world dynamic, where you can always choose where to go whenever you want, CS has huge disadvantages compared to other ways of programming a game.
First of all, I’d like to say thanks for a few really good posts, Havenstone. Myself, I like both kinds of stories and I do agree with you about generic characters not being so generic too. Bioshock was also a good example to use, and that reminds me that I’ve still got to go through Bioshock Infinite. I think I stopped just after meeting Elizabeth, for no particular reason as I was enjoying it.
Now, I’d just like to address one potential issue I’ve noticed with some of the titles currently available, and sorry if you think this is off-topic (it is and it isn’t, as it’s still about authors making assumptions about the reader/player’s character):
Rather than there being a potential issue of authors setting a character’s background etc. before the story begins, there’s one I’ve noticed where an author assumes certain choices will be made because of previous choices and they lock options based on it (or do so because of the workload). For instance, play a ‘good’ character and you won’t be able to snap or beat someone up later on in the story. You simply cannot choose to do so, despite the option staring you in the face, ready for another reader to take simply because they’ve been rather . . . bad previously. It doesn’t gel with life in my view, as we’re all capable of snapping or making contrary choices.
In my own work, I have a calmness/temper dual stat. If your temper is high, I might reference that the character’s having a hard time controlling their temper, but the option to avoid lashing out is not locked and there’s no check to pass. I’ll simply adjust the text while making sure there is no lashing out. (Though that said, if the author feels they shouldn’t be able to stop themselves, then that’s all good. Just the option being greyed out is what I view as a no-no.)
Anyway, just something that I have seen irk people, options being locked when there isn’t an apparent reason (like lacking an item, or as in Jason’s Vampire series, lacking a certain shapeshifting stat etc. That sort of stuff.)
Granted, it potentially creates extra work, but I think it’d be worthwhile.
Edit: Oh, as an aside . . . talking about pen and paper, I’ve never actually played it, though I’ve played computer games based on D&D. I roleplayed on NWN back in the day. But even though it’s more freeform, wouldn’t it still apply that you’re going through the GM’s story? if they present a choice to go left instead of right, you’ll still end up where they intended, no? Or rather, the story is still set. They have a direction in which they want to funnel you. They just find it easier to adjust on the fly to account for player actions.
Now now, don’t be so touchy. Y’know, one thing I really don’t like about forums is that we’re expected to remember what we said in previous posts. What kind of conversation works that way? I can hardly remember what I did 5 minutes ago on a good day. I just tend to respond to what the latest replier said. And sure, if you believe my views to go one way, then some of what I say may seem like a contradiction, especially since I’m not always the best at expressing myself nor understanding the intentions of others. But to me, a conversation is as much about exploring my own feelings and views as it is about trying to bring my thoughts to others.
Just because something is inherent to humans (again, in my view) Doesn’t mean that there aren’t those who are content in their “cage”. Which is well, obvious to me. I don’t know why I seemingly have to repeat that I do not in fact see my view as the only one?? Isn’t the whole point of a discussion to bring forth your own views? Or am I missing something? I represent myself, and anyone who happens to share my views.
Perhaps you’re taking me a bit literally there, by balance I don’t neccesarily mean a 50/50 split. I mean whatever works for that game, be it 70/30, 50/50 or 5/95. So, yeah balance is perhaps the wrong word for it.
I would argue that freedom in an open world could be just as much an illusion of choice as any other. Even if you can walk for hours in endless plains, there are only so many locations that actually matter, only so many quests and questgivers etc. In a game like GTA, there are lots of distractions, and one could be argued to be playing the game even if one is just faffing about. But there isn’t really any progression happening if you do that. The story won’t end with you becoming the ultimate tennis player, or yoga instructor or something. The only story progression is through the quests. So play as you may, but the game won’t truly end or acknowledge your “progress” unless you do what the designers intended (in the case of GTA and similar sandbox games).
Of course, there’s a third thing conversations can help you do: explore others’ feelings and views. Well, duh – but actually, I’m pretty sure that both times you’ve said “well duh” on this thread, you’ve missed a chance to engage with a perspective that’s really substantially different from your own, and instead reacted as if it was something obvious that you already knew.
Yep, it’s definitely still an illusion, and will be until we get an AI good enough to turn GTA into a story where you can become the ultimate yoga instructor. I’ll write a response to DavidGil later on tabletop gaming and why that really can be a properly open, co-authoring experience.
Do you claim to know what’s going on in my mind? Because I don’t know what’s going on in my mind half of the time, so that’s highly doubtful. By engaging with you in discourse, I am effectively partaking of your views aren’t I? If I were to take everyone’s potential views into consideration when drafting a reply, it would be a wishy-washy mess that ends up saying nothing at all, and I don’t see anyone else being coaxed into operating that way. I’m gonna stop now because I feel we’ve drifted further and further away from the point.
If you want to discuss something other than your perceived views of me, that would be another thing. But for now let’s leave it at that.
Oh, no need, really. I just sort of left that bit at the end because people think it’s the holy grail (and it is), but there’s still a story that’s been set, in my uneducated view. There’s just much more freedom to leave the path. (Unless there’s no set campaign) And well, players are free to do what they want.
But yeah, I can easily imagine it being a good, properly open co-authored experience. Roleplaying on Neverwinter Nights was my favorite experience since . . . well, possibly forever. There was one moment I’ll keenly remember. My character annoyed the GM’s character and he teleported my character into a not so nice place. Thankfully, I managed to get out alive! I felt like messaging the GM to say ‘hey! what was that about?’
Still, if you want to leave the post, feel free to obviously. I just don’t want you to go to a lot of trouble, given I have a good idea of what it’s like.
I think what a choice of backstories lets you do is create characters with different motivations. Personally, I don’t mind so much having a semi-set character, like Commander Shepard, as long as I can also have the freedom to decide why they’re doing what they’re doing. Mass Effect did this fairly well, for me, but Dragon Age 2 was one which didn’t. Honestly, I did like the game, and I liked Hawke, but their background was so set that it felt like some options just wouldn’t make sense, and it limited the roleplaying.
I never had that problem. Troll-Hawke was fun and satisfying to play. And Shepard was a nice mix of the best Paragon and Renegade moments. She was a hero, but not a by-the-book hero, or even a very sympathetic one sometimes. It really did feel like it was my story, even though if broken down, with Hawke you got 3 personalities to choose from, and with Shep, well I suppose 3 as well.
One thing that’s kinda limiting in rpgs though, is how you have to appease your followers. A tendency I’ve noticed in CS games as well. Because that seems to be most people’s main priority, to keep your followers around.
Hawke’s background story was pretty loose though, no? She had a brother, she had a mother and came from a noble house… I think. Or wait, she was poor at first yeah? The noble house came later. I think. Plus some of the background you got to pick yourself, like if she was a mage and stuff.
Yeah, I agree that an author really needs to earn this. It’s not always irksome to me… but the game would have to convince me through terrific writing that my choices have accumulated into a character who can no longer realistically desire/ imagine/ act on certain things.
Course, I set the bar high because I’m a modern Western individualist, nurtured on the idea that we’re free at any moment to be whoever we want to be. From Aristotle until (say) some point in the 18th century, the average European took for granted a very different view of human nature: that actions shaped character which shaped actions etc., and that there was a momentum to that process which would eventually produce people who could no longer act in a way inconsistent with their character (for either virtue or vice). And there’s clearly a lot of truth to that tradition.
But I think if you want to represent that process in a game these days, it’s kind of got to be what the game’s about. About the kind of character you’re becoming, and the things that character would find thinkable or unthinkable. Or maybe about addiction, and how long you can flirt with something before it takes you over. If it’s not a central theme, the choice restriction will come off as arbitrary and annoying.
In a game which is about that moral momentum, though, I think the greyed-out choice could work well – that’s the point at which you the reader realize (and if done well, agree) that your choices about the character have added up to this. Seeing the unreachable choice would bring it home starkly.
Choice of Steampunk does it in a couple of places, I think, where you’re becoming a vampire serial killer, and if you’ve embraced it too enthusiastically you start getting greyed-out choices which confirm there’s no going back. But I guess that’s more of a Magic/Addict vibe than a “you can no longer see a puppy without wanting to kick it” one.
And lots of campaigns work exactly that way. If you’ll forgive an excursion into my backstory: I ran a weekly tabletop game for a few years in college (Adam and Ladybird from the CoG team were two of the players), and it totally started out like that. I had a big conspiracy plot in mind, which would culminate in the players being taken as slaves by a foreign empire (no chance of them foiling the conspiracy and evading capture!), which would lead to them being freed and going on a world-saving quest, etc etc. In the first couple months, there was also an elaborate “fake my death to avoid arranged marriage” roller-coaster plot for one of the characters. And I wielded my GM funnel ruthlessly at times to make that come together, even in the face of some player doubts (“maybe I should just go ahead with the arranged marriage after all, she seems cool”).
Anyway, the conspiracy was led by an evil noble family, and in particular a young bigoted mustache-twirler named Agerain who (in my story) had no function but to be an antagonist and eventually stricken down (yay!). Then my friend “Nina” begins to strain my funnelling capacities when he decides his character’s going to disguise himself as a member of the evil family and basically start acting as a co-antagonist alongside Agerain to all the other PCs, the better to figure out the conspiracy. “Nina” made the checks, so it worked, and suddenly the story has two sides in a way I’d not imagined.
The plot kept rolling, but with a Nina-shaped bomb planted in the middle of it. It detonated, critically damaging my funnel, on the day that PC “Atrix” chose death/revenge over capture in a duel, PC “Darren” chose to respond by losing his temper and treasonously attacking Agerain, and “Nina” chose to finish the job by cutting his friend Agerain’s throat (well earlier than I needed him to die for the conspiracy plot), all in full view of the party paladin who was clearly going to have to testify truthfully about what she’d just seen. These were all huge, consequential player decisions, entirely unanticipated by me, that sent “my story” reeling off the hinges.
So the ending of the conspiracy looked very different than I’d imagined it. I still shoehorned in some of the plot points that meant the conspiracy worked and they got taken as slaves; heck, I even resurrected Agerain so he could be killed at the proper time. But it all felt wrong, and left a bad taste in my mouth when it came to GM funnel-wielding. In retrospect, I should have let the story roll in a distinctly new direction from that point, keeping the bits of what I had planned that fit naturally with the player-chosen direction, and dropping the rest.
As the campaign went on, I tried to learn from that experience – starting when “Nina” decided that he had been wracked by guilt after betraying his “friend” and wasn’t going to kill the resurrected Agerain a second time, or let anyone else do so either! The idea that anyone could feel guilty about killing this toerag had never previously dawned on me; “Nina” gave the story and the characters dimensions and depth that I never would have. Agerain survived, eventually became a full-fledged NPC in the party of escaped slaves, served as a romantic antagonist rather than a murderous one, and ended up getting a measure of redemption.
I slowly started letting players lead the plot in weirder and more unanticipated directions. (Atrix: “We’re at the slave market? Well, I’m going to charm the Emperor’s personal representative, so that my buddy Darren and I, unlike the rest of the party, will be sold to the Imperial Palace.” And shit, now I’ve got to write the Imperial Palace so you two can try to escape from it – a subplot which I’d never imagined, and which ended up generating a bunch of my favorite game sessions ever)
Later I got to play in games with some other GMs who were great at improvising. And I learned more about running a game where basically the GM brings a world and a bunch of story hooks (not set plotlines) and the players bring a character each, and what emerges from that is a narrative that really is improvised and meaningfully co-authored by all parties, going in loads of directions the GM never imagined (as well as a few that she did, of course).
Or like you said much more succinctly:
And I guess all I’m saying is, that can really work, and it’s awesome. But I don’t expect computers to improvise well enough to pull that off for a few decades yet.
Sure, I can get behind that and, in my view, it’s largely true though I also share the same view that you do in that we can be whoever we want to be (though depending on what it is and who we are, it might be easier or more difficult). While there ‘may’ be the odd person who’s born a certain way, I firmly believe that for the vast majority of us, it’s our experiences that shape us. This could just be the writer in me, but I never used to be so jaded with people as I am now, for instance. But let’s say there’s someone who’s turned cold and such because of their experiences in life, that doesn’t naturally stop them from an act of kindness, even if it might be done for warped reasons (like taking someone in, an act that seems kind, but then you further delve into it and they won’t let the person leave for whatever reason. But on the flip side, being cold doesn’t mean they couldn’t do something for the right reasons)
Agreed. You’ve given me something to think about as well.
There’s no real problem with that, I think, as it’s more of an addiction. And given it’s a fantasy title, I imagine it’s hard to kick without help.
I’m going to PM you about this actually, Havenstone, which you hopefully don’t mind. I don’t want to take over the thread and earlier, I had a notification pop up about letting other people discuss the topic. But needless to say if anyone’s curious about what I’m PM’ing, I think it’s possible to get close to a sandbox experience with choicescript with having toyed around with doing so myself. It’s just that the work for one person would likely be too much.
Also, thanks for sharing your experiences as a GM. It was a good read.
On the other hand by the time they do, they might as well be so much more advanced than we that our new synthetic overlords can railroad us in any way they want, without us even realizing it.
Not to mention the myriad ways in which AI creativity and imagination could differ from our own, whcih we literally cannot imagine right now.
Indeed, it has now given me even higher hopes for XOR.
Just stumbled across an old thread where an actual author of an actual Hosted Game was quizzed on his approach to this – see it starting here and picked up here and in the following posts.
And all the opinions thus far. You can certainly learn alot from reading through reading another’s point of view on subjects like these.
As for my own prefs I will say I’m in favor of having a rooted history… BUT one doesn’t need to make this a fixed point but rather a foundation for future freedom. My own WIP’S have a deep rooted history whether I’ve written it or not it’s there but I’m proud that instead of limitations these past tend to open up the paths available… or at least I think so.
I’m not contesting that, nor am I presenting my views as an absolute truth (I hope).
Well, when they’re 
Thankfully, I managed to get out alive! I felt like messaging the GM to say ‘hey! what was that about?’