Later this month, however, I will be in St. Louis at the Popular Culture Association/American Culture Association National Conference. I’ll be presenting a paper that originated as a loosely-connected series of posts here about “The Multiple Appeals of Gaming.” Let me know if you expect to be at the conference and feel like discussing geeky things, as I have a tendency to do that when given the chance.

I’m with Kai on this one. I’ve been sitting on this post for months while I took care of some other things, but now that Mass Effect 2 has gotten me thinking more about inventory management, I figured it might be time to revisit this.

Shamus Young, the author of the article, points out that the big problem with game RPGs is that after a long enough time of looting enemies’ corpses and rooting through their homes, you have so much stuff to sell that you effectively have unlimited money. Shamus points out why such games allow you to get rich off stolen goods:

• We want to allow the player to loot bad guys. […] If you defeat someone with a better weapon, you should get it.

• We want the player to be able to sell the gear they collect. Managing resources and collecting “treasure” is a big part of the appeal of these games, and leaving out the trading means leaving out the fun for a lot of players.
• We want the shopkeepers in the game to pay reasonable prices for gear. It really is obnoxious to be the hero of the realm and have an NPC offer me three copper for my unicorn horn and turn around and charge me ten gold for a bent, rusty butterknife. […]
• We want shopkeepers to be able to do business with the player. Some games put a cap on how much value a shopkeeper can handle in a single transaction, or they give the shopkeeper a small pool of money which is replenished every few in-game days. These are intended to stop the player from unloading their entire haul in a single transaction, but it’s easy to exploit around these limits. If you want to sell all of your violently attained swag, you have to wait for their money to refill several times, or unload big-ticket items through a series of complicated trades. This limitation just encourages boring behavior. You must then choose between having fun and acting rationally as a character.

To consider an example, recall how these issues and limitations are apparent in Fallout 3. Just about any weapon, armor, or clothing on a character’s person can be taken from that character, whether by killing them or by picking their pocket. Inventory management is a major aspect of the gameplay; there’s even an entire skill, and skill-boosting items, for your ability to Barter. And while shop owners have a limited amount of currency to buy items from you, you can click a button on your controller to wait for them, or click on different locations on your map to travel from vendor to vendor. Even if you don’t game the system, you will end up rich beyond your wildest dreams eventually.

Shamus concludes, “There is no way to patch this economic perversion to have it make sense,” and so the best a player can do is “ignore the silliness and enjoy the game. The worst thing you can do is waste time over-thinking it.” That may work for players until game designers figure out a solution, but I don’t think it exempts designers and critics from brainstorming how to do this better. Concerns with how economics are handled arise from a conflict between gameplay and narrative immersion; can’t we make a working economy that plays with the narrative rather than working against it?

I think we can do just that. In-game economics could benefit greatly from considering what the purpose or consequences of looting might be, in a realistic sense. Considering one avenue, Kai suggested: “What about games that extend a line of credit to players?” When you stop to think about it from a narrative perspective, it’s a little bit creepy to search through the pockets of the first man you ever kill in self defense. Even in a post-apocalyptic wasteland, however, characters may need to make ends meet, and being in debt may be a good way to represent the purpose of looting. Kai elaborated a bit on the idea of a line of credit.

That’d give you:

• an additional drain on player finances, which’d keep you from getting rich (assuming you’re the average American spender)

• a way around forcing the player to endlessly grind at the beginning of the game to start getting the good stuff
• loan sharks and repo men, maybe even as player classes (pawn shops may or may not have a place in this world)

This is one elegant solution with great narrative implications. In Fallout 3, someone just gives your character a really sweet suit of armor right near the beginning of the game as long as you’ll run some errands for her. I could certainly see such a character (or a less sympathetic character in the next store over, with better inventory) offering an item early in a game on the promise that you pay back with interest—and then you really have to loot enemies for cash and prizes just to keep debt collectors and their bounty hunters off your back.

Along similar lines, it’s worth noting that Fallout 3 has food and water, but you don’t actually need to consume them in order to live; they simply replenish your health after taking damage, and they’re not the most efficient means of doing so. (You have access to weightless “stimpacks,” which you are unlikely to ever run out of.) One way to make sure you have a constant place to invest money is to actually require the player to spend money on food, water, even rent. I don’t suspect it would be fun to have to watch your character eating every meal, but I could imagine a system that regularly deduct from your cash (automatically or by prompting from an NPC). As you get higher in level, you might have to spend more to get better food or more luxurious living quarters, which might be healthier (e.g., giving stat bonuses).

Even beyond the purposes of looting, there could be discouraging or detrimental in-game consequences. In the comments to the original article, someone points out that if you killed every US soldier, you’d be rolling in weapons and money; Kai wisely responds:

• Even US soldiers are obviously very vulnerable to their enemies in the real world. This makes the risk-reward proposition of asset acquisition very different from real life. This could potentially, then, tie into the “death in gaming” conversation; what if combat is (almost) always a frightening prospect?

• In real life, if you killed a bunch of “bad guys” (e.g. Al-Qaeda, etc.), you’d end up with a bunch of weapons that you’d have a hard time selling off since they’d be illegal to own, generally speaking. And if you had a stockpile of these things? You’d be a suspected terrorist. Even vigilantes don’t have much of a good name in real life. (This, of course, is contingent on living in a world that has a) a legal system and b) weapons control.)

In a game world that responds to the PC’s actions, any number of consequences might occur that affect the economy (even including that people stop taking their valuables out into public when they find out that a murderous madman is wandering about, so the more you murder and loot, the less you get for it). And, of course, there are the realities of supply and demand; after you’ve sold a few dozen swords or guns to any given vendor, how much are you really going to get for the next dozen you bring in?

My first reaction to reading the article, however, was that the author neglected to consider that the most narratively coherent solution is probably a less forgiving encumbrance system. As a player, you want to sell hundreds of items worth of loot because the game lets you put it all in your “bag of holding,” as it were. Again, to use Fallout 3 as an example—though it’s certainly not the worst, offender, or even unusual in this regard—a bottle of beer has an item weight of “1.” The lowest-strength character, wearing no clothing, can carry 160 beers.

Real hindrances could enforce a more realistic economy. There’s no reason that a character in Fallout 3 should be able to carry around sixteen guns, four suits of armor, and the entire contents of a liquor cabinet. The easiest and most narratively consistent way to correct broken game economies is to limit how much the PC can carry, and factor encumbrance effects gradually. This would require the player to be more selective about which items are looted and carried.

Realistically, in a game like Fallout 3, this might allow for a weapon holstered to each leg, maybe another along your back, and perhaps a duffel bag or a shopping cart that slows you down, and which you’ll need to abandon as soon as you get attacked. And, while most games with an encumbrance limit simply define it as a hard cap, over which you can’t carry anymore items (e.g., Mass Effect, Dragon Age: Origins) or can’t move effectively (e.g., Fallout 3), it is possible to gradually slow the PC as they approach their weight limit, much as heavier armors do in Fallout 3. Such adjustments would discourage moving the game’s focus from saving the world toward running a salvage operation, but preserve the sense of realism and freedom to act that comes from the ability to interact with objects in the game world.

Some games already employ a more narratively coherent inventory systems, though they remain relatively rare. Dead Space, for instance, has very limited inventory management, allowing you to carry only a small supply of health packs, ammo, and air canisters, displaying inventory contents as a hologram in front of your character’s face. Alone in the Dark, meanwhile, literally showed how many pockets you had free in your jacket to fill with things. In each example, inventory management is entirely in-game, to preserve the sense of narrative immersion and the real threat posed by enemies: Looking at your inventory doesn’t pause the action, leaving you open to attack. I can’t speak for others players’ experiences, but I can vouch that these games had less “broken” economies; the limited supply of items meant that my character was less likely to be swimming in riches.

There is, of course, another approach entirely: Don’t let the player loot enemy corpses at all, as in Mass Effect 2. Your character still gets a cash bounty for completing missions and hacking other people’s financial records, but doesn’t acquire gear that can be sold. To some extent, it strains credibility when you can’t steal fallen enemies’ weapons, though there are narrative workarounds (i.e., the attacks you use on them cause them to disintegrate entirely, and it’s implied that the guns basically have the future equivalent of DRM, so you can’t use them without a fabrication license). The approach does help prevent the player from becoming ridiculously wealthy, however, without precluding the possibility of acquiring new items and upgrades.

As I discussed in my previous post, of course, efforts to de-emphasize—or even remove—inventory management and trading have infuriated many roleplaying game traditionalists. As games become more mainstream, these players are probably rightly concerned that the level of micromanagement they appreciate may disappear from games over time. Personally, I would appreciate seeing more games in the future that establish some balance between resource management and narrative credibility. The trick, I think, is to make micromanagement possible, but optional. Some games like the Dragon Age and Mass Effect series move toward this somewhat in allowing players to “auto-level” rather than allocating points and selecting new skills themselves. Too Human, a Diablo-like science-fiction game, had an option to automatically destroy any items you acquire that are beneath a certain level of rarity (which didn’t work very well for getting the best items, but seems on the right track). I wonder whether optionally automated inventory management and trading systems might scratch that micromanaging itch, while still retaining those players who are more eager to save the world than sift through an overstuffed backpack in a virtual pawn shop.

Regular readers of Geek Studies might recall that I use Mass Effect in a number of examples here because it represents a number of interesting developments in narrative gaming—and, of course, I really like it. Mass Effect 2 is quite similar to the original in that involves nearly as much player-chosen dialog as combat, though the latter system has been revised to play more like a Gears of War-style shooter. The game now has a greater focus on aiming over tactical use of super-powers, taking cover over dodging, aiming for enemies’ heads over shooting wildly, and—as turns out to be crucial in the minds of many—amassing “upgrades” over sorting through collected items.

Some players appreciate these changes. Others, however, point to them as a move to “dumb down” the experience for “mainstream” gamers. To many vocally upset fans on the Bioware forums, this is all evidence that “Mass Effect 2 is not an RPG.”

What defines a roleplaying game, or RPG? Years ago, I was chatting with a friend of mine named Kai, who was at that time a student at DigiPen, a major college for game design. We got to talking about how the Zelda games have been referred to as “action RPGs”: They tend to have a “real-time” combat system (in which pressing a button corresponds to an immediate response, like swinging a sword), rather than the “turn-based” system that characterizes most Japanese RPGs, like the Final Fantasy series (in which characters take turns to act, and actions are pre-selected from menus). I was interested to hear that turn-based combat was not a formally defining concept for RPGs in the minds of video game designers, so I asked Kai what did define a game as an RPG. His answer—”inventory management”—surprised me.

Inventory management refers to the process of sorting through items in a game to decide which are best to use and which deserve to be sold or destroyed. Mass Effect had a much-maligned inventory management system, in which the only real difference between most items was that some were better than others, and the ones that weren’t as good had to be manually disposed of, one by one. Some other games have attempted to reduce the abstraction of inventory management, though it still remains a generally narrative-breaking mechanic in most RPGs. In Resident Evil 4, for instance, your character has a “briefcase” that limits how much you can carry based on the number of things you have and their orientation; a decent amount of time is spent rotating things and dumping what won’t fit. The character model/avatar, however, doesn’t actually seem to have a briefcase on his person. Alone in the Dark had the least narratively disruptive inventory management of any game I know, as it involved simply looking inside your character’s jacket and seeing what was in each pocket. (And peeking in the jacket did not pause the game; enemies would continue to attack!)

How did inventory management come to be assumed to be synonymous with roleplaying games? The roots likely lie in the emphasis on the effectiveness of different kinds of equipment in Dungeons & Dragons, which is easier to translate into video games than the other defining characteristic of D&D: affording the opportunity to play a role, such as by providing the illusion of player choice in character actions. In this regard, Mass Effect is the quintessential roleplaying game series, providing options between what lines are spoken in dialog, whether to persuade others through reason or through violence, even how to manage a team in ways that determine who may survive a mission and who may not.

Personally, I enjoy Mass Effect 2’s new system—in which you “scan” new items for schematics, and then assemble new materials when you get back to your ship—for a few reasons. Mostly, I don’t appreciate spending tons of time in a game on “housekeeping” like deciding what to sell, but I appreciate that there are still options for upgrading items in the game that don’t challenge narrative consistency so much. In addition, while there are fewer named weapons and items in Mass Effect 2 than in its predecessor, there’s actually much more variety between weapons; rather than just being a question of one being better than another, now, you choose between rate of fire, strength, and accuracy, and the differences are very apparent in gameplay. And, as I’ll explore in a post following this one, not “looting” every enemy’s corpse means that you are not swimming in money, breaking the in-game economy.

I can understand how micromanagement of resources is an appealing feature of a game to many players, but in a game like Mass Effect, with its focus on cinematic storytelling, sometimes the details can get in the way of the narrative immersion. In my next post, then, I’ll be exploring this issue a bit further, examining how inventory management and in-game economics might be better handled to avoid narrative disruption.

As this technique becomes more commonly understood as part of the vocabulary of game design, however, it’s worth noting that recent games appear to be showing how heavy handed and poorly conceived the application of “violent gameplay to discourage violence” can potentially be.

The example getting the most press and critical attention now is probably Modern Warfare 2, which includes a scene the developers considered so disturbing that they give you the option to skip it entirely. This level, commonly referred to as the “No Russian” scene (stop reading now if you haven’t heard about the generic spoilers) involves playing as an undercover terrorist, and basically being forced to help real terrorists gun down an airport of defenseless people and innocent law enforcement officials.

As I said, though, this isn’t just an isolated example. It’s becoming part of the vocabulary of game techniques, an unofficially standard idea of how to engage players along a certain dimension. To consider a parallel example, see how Kotaku succinctly describes Hit the Bitch, produced by Denmark’s Children Exposed to Violence at Home, an anti-domestic-violence group:

We can see where they’re coming from; something akin to “No Russian” for the domestic violence scene. Make you do something horrible to better confront the horror. But the execution? It’s a flash game. Where you do nothing but smack a woman around. Comes across a little tasteless.

Where is the line between “tasteless” and “meaningful” in gameplay that’s meant to be disturbing?

I think a major source of the criticism directed at the “forced unpleasant violence” in these particular games is a relative lack of meaningful context. There really isn’t much breadth for critique in a little Flash game that involves beating up a woman. There is nothing engaging about it, and there’s not really a precedent for domestic violence in other games, so it’s not clear why a game seemed like the proper vehicle for such a critique. I could see this working if the target of the critique was misogyny in silly little Flash games themselves—see, for comparison, You Have to Burn the Rope, which is somewhere between a gag and a lighthearted critique on the purposelessness of game tasks. I get the impression, however, that this was supposed to be about the issue in at large.

Modern Warfare 2, meanwhile, is seeing some critical appreciation mixed in with the condemnation. I hear some describing the scene as truly disturbing and affecting, in a good, purposeful way. Part of the approval may simply be from wanting the game to work; we believe that games are capable of more affecting emotional experiences, and we want to celebrate those who at least seem to be trying. Beyond this, however, what seems to be leaving critics divided on this issue is that the “No Russian” scene is embedded in a larger narrative, but not necessarily as purposefully or coherently as it could be.

When people defend this scene, it’s largely in terms of the significance of the protagonist’s actions in service to the overarching narrative. By the same token, when some attack it, this often includes pointing out that the level right before this one involves something along the lines of a fun snowmobile extreme-sports extravaganza. And, as Nels Anderson points out, “No Russian” is only “interactive” insofar as you control the camera and certain character actions, for a little while. You can “die” and restart the level, but you don’t stay dead until the game designers say so. There is too much narrative incoherence for this to really work in context, at least for some.

I have to concede that I haven’t played Modern Warfare 2 at all yet, though I can’t help but contrast what I’m reading with my experiences playing Splinter Cell: Double Agent. On the surface, the narrative context seems identical: You are playing as a government agent in deep cover with a terrorist organization, and you are being asked to do reprehensible things. The big difference in Double Agent is that you actually have some opportunity to try to mitigate the effects of your actions. Saving people’s lives (and making it look like an accident) may jeopardize the terrorists’ trust in you, and could even jeopardize the lives of characters you may have grown to like. You may find yourself in something of a no-win situation, and you may or may not end up with the blood of innocent lives on your hands, but it sounds like it may do a better job of avoiding crassness or shallowness than Modern Warfare 2 by weaving the difficult choices into the entirety of the gameplay mechanics.

That’s not to say that disturbing and tragic scenarios in games can’t be presented linearly, forcing you down a dreadful path, but part of what made this work well in other games is the pacing and integration in the game as a whole. In Shadow of the Colossus, we realize we are on a path to tragedy only gradually, through a creeping, uncertain sense of dread, culminating in a moment of sadness and remorse. BioShock is another famous example of this in action; while the scene in question is indeed affecting, one of the most common complaints has been that the rest of the game didn’t live up to the promise of that scene. They made us hit the bitch, and we felt bad, but it didn’t leave us to reflect or give us the opportunity to respond. It made us let ourselves down by our own moral standards, and then it let US down. We’re distracted from the meaning by the disappointing gameplay mechanics, not unlike walking out of what could be a powerful film if only the guy in the projection booth could keep it in focus and the picture synced with the sound.

I’m glad to see that game developers are learning to say no to “fun,” to conceptualize games as capable of offering other sorts of experiences. I think it requires a deft touch, though. It still needs to be engaging. We must feel as if we can’t look away, can’t turn off the console; we must feel pain and fascination as awful events unfold before us. This is not the same as simply forcing us to play through something awful to get to the next “fun” part, or presenting something not-fun as if it were something fun, but devoid of a larger, apparent purpose. Creating such a game is surely challenging, but nobody ever said that art should be easy.

This post explores the last of these scenarios. I believe games can be designed in such a way that they preserve a player’s feeling of agency—allowing for emotional reactions other than what we could get purely as spectators—but also allow preserve engagement with a story by recognizing the distinction (suggested in my last post) between what games encourage players to do for narrative purposes and what games reward players for doing in the form of distinct assets or benefits in gameplay terms. Designers can and should sometimes make players want to do things for story-based reasons, not just for gameplay-based reasons.

Why make this distinction? Quite simply, the tension between these elements can lead to some fascinating and meaningful scenarios when handled well, and can completely break our sense of immersion and engagement when handled poorly. Let me give some examples.

In Bioshock, for instance, the player is rewarded for killing little girls. There is no more pleasant way to phrase this. If you find a “little sister,” a demented little girl who wishes death upon you, then you have the option to “harvest” a slug-like creature from her and gain Adam, the currency used to buy new super-powers in the game. However, the player is also encouraged to “save” little sisters instead of harvesting them. You don’t gain as much Adam, but you do get little girls thanking you and treating you like a good guy. If you’ve been harvesting them, eventually you see other, saved little girls referring to you as a “bad man,” and you are supposed to feel like a jerk.

This works for those of us who are actually interested in playing for the story. I know that some other bloggers out there wrote that they’d just gone ahead and killed all the little girls for the best reward possible, and claimed that the attempt to manipulate the player emotionally failed for them, but I think that has more to do with what we bring to the game than what the game brings to us. For me for and for some other players, the interpersonal interaction with those you save was reward enough, a way of recognizing the value in what we choose to do in-game, even if that value isn’t in the form of an asset.

And, in fact, if you “do the right thing” consistently, the game rewards you for it eventually—comparably to or even better than the rewards earned for being a monster. In some ways, this undercuts the idea of doing the right thing simply for the sake of doing the right thing, but there is still an implicit, almost karmic message in this. There was a distinction between what appeared to be “the best reward” and what we might otherwise feel encouraged to do, and the distinction was meaningful and purposeful.

Admittedly, however, the willingness to give up assets for reasons of narrative/character consistency can only go so far. If you’re actually cutting out content that people would want to play, you’re not just withholding rewards, but actively punishing players for “doing the right thing,” and the payoff seems unclear.

For instance, in Mass Effect and Fallout 3, you can build up persuasive speaking skills in a character such that you can get yourself out of combat situations in some cases. This is only very rarely desirable. Not only are you not getting the rewards you would’ve gotten for fighting, but you’re also being denied the fun of actually playing more of the game. You’re not excusing yourself from killing innocent folks, but usually you’re simply putting off battles against murderers, cannibals, and terrorists, whom you’re going to have to fight sooner or later anyway. You don’t feel encouraged to do the “right thing” because you’re actively missing out on narrative content and gameplay rewards, which isn’t as encouraging as getting to feel self-righteous.

What could make dialog-driven alternatives feel worthwhile in such games? The easiest answer, from a gameplay perspective, is to suggest some kind of gameplay reward. In a certain Fallout 3 quest, for instance, if you want to free a person from a certain gang, you can just kill all the gang members and get all their equipment; or you could non-violently resolve the situation and preserve the ability to use the gang later as a resource, selling them goods nobody else wants to pay for, or even getting a special ability from them.

By the same token, the non-violent route can be encouraged through narrative context. In this Fallout 3 example, the player might be encouraged to act non-violently because, unlike plenty of other gangs in the game, this gang is actually being quite welcoming and friendly, and the person you’re trying to “free” from them actually seems to want to be there. It’s easy to walk away from the situation feeling like there is a narrative payoff earned through dialog skills. Similarly, in Mass Effect, there is one fight in particular that can be skipped in a way that is much more satisfying than the fight itself, delivering a short but powerful cut scene. In these cases, encouragement and reward line up; you get rewarded one way for non-violence, and another way for violence (typically in the form of more experience points and whatever equipment your defeated foes were carrying).

It is, of course, much more work for game designers to plan a new path for every choice the player might want to take. Only very few developers have shown an interest in presenting this (or at least presenting a sufficiently convincing illusion of this). As the example of Bioshock shows, however, the differences between encouraging one set of actions over don’t always need to imply hugely divergent content. Sometimes, hearing little girls call you a hero—or a monster—may be encouragement enough in itself.

I found out about one such experiment through Nels Anderson, whose blog Above 49 got me thinking about this last trio of posts on the appeals of game narratives. Nels joined in a Far Cry 2 “permadeath” experiment led by Ben Abraham and Michel. Normally, when your protagonist dies in this game, you start anew from a “save point,” losing whatever progress you made since you last slept, completed a major mission objective, or passed by a tin on the wall with a floppy disc icon. The “permadeath” experiment is an attempt to experience the game in a more tense, dramatic way by deciding that when your protagonist dies, you stop playing the game entirely with that character. In theory, knowing that your character will stay dead, death will have some real meaning.

Even more interesting to me, however, is that Nels and company decided that if any of the non-player characters in the game die, they stay dead, too, without resorting to reloading form an earlier save. This is a real risk in Far Cry 2, as your protagonist meets “buddies” who will come to your rescue when you run out of health. Just when you think you’re dead, your vision blurs and darkens, and some associate you met in a bar appears out of nowhere to drag you out of battle, stick a pistol in your hand, and fight by your side. And, eventually, your buddy’s life may well be in your hands as well.

One might argue that this experiment is about making the game more like a traditional story, and less like a game of trial-and-error. Commenting on this experiment, however, Far Cry 2 designer Clint Hocking disagrees, suggesting that there’s a certain irony to this: “It is not the combination of Far Cry 2 + authored narrative irreversibility that is making the permadeath experiment meaningful to Ben and to others, it is the fact that he is able to manipulate the game to create this experiment that is bringing meaning.” (Careful of the spoiler in that link, prefaced by, “I’ll tell you what will happen.”) In other words, according to Clint, being able to fiddle with a game, experience it in terms of the appeal I have referred to as “tomfoolery,” is what makes us appreciate it more, not the appeal of the story itself, the feeling of loss you experience when your in-game comrades die in your arms.

I agree with Clint that this is part of the appeal, but I disagree with the dismissal of the narrative element. Partly, he’s dismissing this because he feels that war movies already handle the emotional “war buddy dying in your arms” moment pretty well already, and thus we may question why we should bother replicating that in games. The simple answer to this question, though, is that there’s a big difference between watching somebody else lose a buddy and feeling like we ourselves played a role in that loss. Movies can make you identify with someone else’s sadness, but, as I’ve heard others point out, games can make you feel guilt, pride, and other emotions based on your own performance. That’s worthwhile distinction in itself, and there’s no shame in stepping up onto the shoulders of filmmakers from time to time to reach greater heights with familiar tropes. It’s part of a process of exploring not just how games can do entirely new and different things, but how games can do the same things as before, but potentially better.

Nels’s and Clint’s posts got me to start Far Cry 2 myself in the last few months, and I’m finding it both fun and fascinating in the few hours I can steal for it here and there. I’m not good enough at it yet (my first play-through) to allow my own death to be permanent, but I have tried it both ways with my buddies, insisting upon irreversibility and reloading from recent saves depending on the situation.

Twice, I found it pretty affecting when I refused to reload, allowing my buddies to die, though I was definitely more attached to the ones who had actually saved my protagonist’s life already. In one case, for instance, I had been getting aid from a fellow who was really a selfish, deplorable arms dealer, but who had saved my bacon on numerous occasions, twice getting badly wounded himself. I didn’t realize then that three such wounds would be all he could handle. When I started pumping syrettes into him, I realized with a sense of loss that I wasn’t saving his life, but easing my compatriot into a peaceful death.

In another case, I brought my rescuer back from a mortal wound, after scrambling around a guard post to restock on syrettes to inject her with. Enemies were still shooting at us, so I tossed off a molotov cocktail as I made my way back to her crumpled form. My ally was saved, but only for a moment. She wasn’t quick enough to follow me to safety. That molotov spread faster than I expected, and she started screaming as the grass and trees around her were engulfed in flames. I tried to get close, but there was no button to drag a person out of a brushfire even if I thought I could withstand the heat. I watched her die, and I felt sad and frustrated—not the kind of frustrated from when you have to replay a level, but the kind from feeling helpless. And, reflecting on this, I found that really interesting.

I’ll admit it: The way I related this story later to my friends was told in the form of, “Oh my gosh, this was bizarre and hilarious.” That’s because it’s amazing that the game allowed this level of variation, detail, and disturbing content. As Clint says, part of the appeal of retelling these stories is in admiring how much variation the game allows for—but a great piece of the appeal of playing these stories, refusing to turn back time, is in the emotional experience itself.

That said, it would have been even more affecting when buddies died if I had been able to interact with them through any means besides taking bonus missions and being dragged out of fire fights. After one of them rescues your protagonist, you don’t even have the option to offer thanks. They just kind of stand there, looking vigilant, while you drive off in a truck. They are a tool, and it’s sometimes easy to treat them that way.

On one occasion, I did opt to reload from an old save to “protect” a buddy from my own carelessly thrown grenade. This one had never actually pulled my fat out of the fire, but I was hoping that he would start saving my life, rather than just giving me bonus missions, if I kept him around. He never did. When I had the chance to save him again later at the expense of others, I opted just to leave him. What’d he ever do for me?

In retrospect, I realize that it’s probably pretty telling that I only reloaded for the one I was emotionally unattached to. Before saving me, a “buddy” felt like a potential tool, a thing; after saving me, however, a “buddy” felt somewhat more like a comrade-in-arms. And if there had been some way to interact with them with greater depth, I suspect it wouldn’t take a life-saving situation for me to care just a bit more.

If Far Cry 2 does have some limitation in offering an emotional experience, then, I’d say it’s not through anything lacking in the ability to play with it like a toy, but with the depth of the narrative design. As Clint says, they are a “limited resource […] ‘disguised’ as a real human character”—much like in Grand Theft Auto IV, as observed by Duncan Fyfe. And, as a resource, there’s some expectation that they should be an asset, somehow rewarding to us. But good stories aren’t necessarily about winning prizes. Sometimes, we can feel encouraged to do something for narrative purposes without necessarily involving a reward (a distinction that probably deserves its own post, now that I think on it).

I don’t think that authorial irreversibility is the only way to encourage a more emotionally narrative in games, but my own experiences with Far Cry 2 suggest to me that perhaps we shouldn’t dismiss it so quickly. Some gamers are very concerned that irreversibility is what will drive Heavy Rain; the best David Cage can do is assert that he hopes to “convince” players that they should keep playing. I think that the trick here may be in making sure that wherever you lead players, you end up at something meaningful, purposeful.

Watching a buddy die in Far Cry 2 can feel poignant and meaningful, and it may even fit into some overarching game mechanic that I have yet to discover, not having finished the game. Letting your protagonist die in Far Cry 2, however, only has the meaning we ascribe to it ourselves, with nothing more than a “game over” screen offering to reload from our last save. It is pretty anticlimactic if you’re not doing the “permadeath” thing—and even if you are, as Nels points out. Any meaning that results from the death is entirely what we bring to it, not in what the game offers.

Irreversibility in narrative game design should not be something that players feel forced to do, but something that feels more emotionally satisfying to allow to happen. If the main emotion a game shoots for is “the thrill of victory,” irreversibility will not ever be desirable. Games need to reach for something more in order to encourage us to let our characters die.

Why not make up our own difficulty adjustments and imagine our own stories, then? Why not play “hardcore” or “permadeath” style, deciding that when our protagonist dies, it stays dead? Why not reject using the best weapons and skills available to our hero? Or, if a certain degree of variation is actually built into the game—such as the ability to play in a way that disagrees with our initial inclinations, perhaps as a villain rather than a hero—why not replay that way?

In fact, many gamers do just these things—and sometimes, I’m one of them. I had originally planned just one more post in this series on blending story and mastery appeals in games, but I’m going to have to spread it out over a couple more. In this post, I’ll discuss some ways I’ve tried to spice up replays by limiting my actions according to things that might make sense in the context of a story. I’ll discuss another recently blogged experiment in the post that follows this one, focusing on the narrative potential of irreversible actions. (And I’ll probably write another post after that, too, as I actually wrote this post on the next one months ago, and have new thoughts on these matters developed since then.)

Though I’ve tried replaying more than one game with an eye to enriching storytelling (back when I had time to finish games at all!), I’ll focus here on a couple experiments I tried with Fallout 3. In summary, I find that some experiments can indeed inject something new and interesting into a game, but more often than not, games that offer story-oriented appeals tend to let me down when I try to make up my own story, and sometimes even when I accept one of the story paths they actually offer.

I do face a hurdle right off the bat with such experiments. Playing a game that offers a story-oriented appeal means putting myself in a character’s shoes, and so taking on arbitrary limitations on my behavior often feels like going against the natural inclinations of a rational character. Why do anything but the most efficient thing to defeat everyone in the room? Wouldn’t you try to be as powerful as possible if you were trying to save the galaxy/the planet/the Wasteland/an underwater city full of innocent little girls? Why compromise?

The answer to that “why” may be found in the protagonist him or herself. The “permadeath” experiment is one way of attempt to graft another level of narrative into a game, but it requires an extradiegetic (or out-of-game) explanation for the alteration we’re imposing. I figured I’d try a few experimental gaming styles that actually kept my limitations coherent within the narrative, and the easiest way to do this may be to view arbitrary limitations as quirks of the protagonist. After all, games like Bioshock and Shadow of the Colossus have raised powerful questions in-game about whether the player should be questioning the morality of following orders and killing others without hesitation. They encourage us to ask whether efficiency and forward momentum are the only forces driving us. People aren’t actually wholly rational in their decision-making, but face moral and personal complexities.

Along these lines, then, one experiment I’ve tried is seeing if I can complete Fallout 3 with a pacifistic merchant. I made a character who stinks at combat, focusing on all the skills and perks that power gamers reject as pointless, like Barter, Fortune Finder, and Master Trader. I was determined to reach the (original) level cap and the end of the main quest without actually killing any fellow human beings. The game keeps track of how many people you’ve killed (on your Pip Boy), so it’s easy to be wary of this.

I found that this was indeed an interesting way of adding a new sense of challenge to the game after I’d already figured out how to decimate all my foes, and it offered some encouragement to try out some of the interesting perks that are functionally useless if you’re focusing on being a killing machine. (I don’t actually need to have Lady Killer and Child at Heart when my Speech skill is so high already, but what the hey, I’m playing a smooth-talking master trader with a fortune at his disposal. Why not stay “in character”?)

This is not an experiment the game was really designed to support, however, and it shows. Yes, you can go pretty far without actually being credited for taking someone else’s life, but no, you can’t make an omelette without someone in the kitchen breaking some eggs. There are a few scenes where may face serious problems unless someone around is willing to kill for you, which means you’d better have a hired gun to do your dirty work for you. For a little while, I even had two followers (through a certain exploit), which meant I never had to lift a finger when attacked.

Before this point, however, I faced some serious problems. Only my second or third foray into the Wasteland required some creative reinterpretation of my own pacifistic rules, as I got accosted by a group of armored mercenaries with a contract out on my life. I fired some “warning shots” into a car, and then ran away, “inadvertently” luring the AI-controlled enemies toward the burning vehicle just in time for it to explode and kill most of them instantly. I didn’t get credit for the kills on my Pip Boy—it’s not like I forced them to chase me past an exploding vehicle. The last of them chased after me on a crippled leg, however, so I just kept shooting guns out of his hand. He limped away in fear for just long enough to find another gun and repeat the whole exercise. Eventually I ran away from him and found someplace else to go for awhile.

The funny thing about this experiment is that the game is almost designed to let you do this, but not quite. Yes, you can focus your skill building in such a way that you are pretty useless in a fight, but no, you can’t really avoid fights forever. Perhaps that’s an appropriate message for a tough world like post-apocalyptic DC, a commentary about the brutality of the world and inevitability of kill-or-be-killed situations. Nevertheless, it ends up being taken to an unrealistic extreme that ruins any sense of narrative immersion. If Fallout 3 had really been designed to support the kind of story I was trying to explore with my character, warning shots might have had some effect on hopelessly outgunned opponents. It strains credibility that all hired guns would be so willing to die in the face of impossible odds.

On the other end of the spectrum, I’ve tried playing Fallout 3 as very evil. I know this isn’t an experiment for some—it’s actually built into the options offered by the game. And I really went all-out on this one, using it as an excuse to impose a number of limitations on myself and come up with far-out explanations for different abilities. My evil character would be also be a violent drug addict, only picking up stimpacks and looting corpses so he trade the goods for more Psycho, Jet, and Med-X. The “Mysterious Stranger” perk—in which a man in a trench coat occasionally appears to finish a fight for you—can be an immersion-breaker in some circumstances, but it makes perfect sense for a character who is likely to hallucinate. At first, he only healed himself with water and stolen food, but later, his taste for flesh grew insatiable, so he limited himself to blood packs (which healed extra thanks to the Hematophage perk), human corpses (eaten thanks to the Cannibal perk), and “Strange Meat” (acquired through fellow cannibals). He completed quests that required enslaving innocent people and killing everyone in not just one, but two entire towns, each in a spectacularly violent fashion.

This is one of those “experiments” that is actively supported by the game design itself, but I still found it unsatisfying (not to mention disturbing) because having a coherent narrative isn’t the same as having a meaningful one. Quite simply, the protagonist’s behavior—and not just the stuff I came up with—is reprehensible. The game even declared “You bastard” at one point, after choosing to kill a patient on an operating table—one of three results openly offered in a multiple-choice scenario. There’s no real reason to do such things other than the humor value of how wrong it is, the sense of experimentation in trying to see what you can get away with, or the sense of completeness in seeing content you’d otherwise miss. But there’s no real meaning behind it, no theme, no message, just action and reaction. If you’re looking for story-oriented appeals, there isn’t much to find.

Every other storytelling medium that provides a despicable protagonist does so for a reason. In movies about mobsters, for instance, even the most heinous actions can offer a sense of psychological complexity, thematic depth, or even old-fashioned, didactic moralizing. Granted, there is some disincentive to do horrible things in Fallout 3 in the form of interpersonal interaction. Assuming you have a heart at all in real life, for instance, you’ll probably feel like a jerk for selling a cute little kid into slavery (who proclaims, “I’m going on an adventure!”). Even so, that’s not really the same as making evil deeds purposeful or thematically meaningful in their own right, in terms of the story and world as a whole.

Admittedly, I have yet to finish the game with either of these experiments due to time constraints, so perhaps I just haven’t gotten far enough to really experience the ultimate payoff. So far, though, some aspects of these story-oriented replaying experiments worked better for me than others, such as coming up with diegetic (in-story) reasons to restrict the use of healing supplies. It does make the game more interesting and challenging when you don’t have hundreds of extra stimpacks around, and it can feel perfectly sensible to sell them if you’re putting that money toward something else. “Alternate readings” are relatively easy to apply when they don’t run against the core gameplay of combat, then, but they tend to fall apart when you’re not interested in killing people, or when you want such violence to have some narrative purpose in its own right.

In (what will probably be) my last post in this series, I’ll talk about another kind of experiment practiced by others: an attempt to infuse the death of the protagonist and its own allies with meaning.

On August 12th, I defended my dissertation, Geek Cultures: Media and Identity in the Digital Age, and passed with only a few minor requests for revisions. I’m currently looking into options for publication, but in the meantime, feel free to email me directly (jason @ this domain) if you’d like a copy.

So, finishing the dissertation probably means I’ve had plenty of time to blog, right? Well, not so much, but I aim to remedy that now. Shortly after the defense, I started my new job as an assistant professor in the Communication department at Pine Manor College in Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts (not too far from where I grew up, in Newton Upper Falls).

It turns out that designing and teaching three entirely new classes (plus committees and advising) is something of a handful, though certainly an improvement on the Morlock lifestyle that dissertation writing encourages. Now, in November, I’m finally getting to know the ins and outs of the new campus, figuring out what motivates and interests my students best, and carving out some time to do things other than course prep.

My new (academic) year’s resolution, then, is to get back to blogging. I’ll soon finish that three-part series, and I’m going to try to get back into the blogging routine at least once a week. I may not be doing new research on geekdom itself for the time being, but I suspect I’ll still have things to share for a while. Plus, I think you’ll find that my other research interests are plenty geeky in their own right. After all, someone has to babble on about the theories and usage of video games, web design, and science-fiction. I wouldn’t want there to be a shortage of voices opining on these topics in the blogosphere, so I now solemnly return to perform my duties.

I don’t know what the term for this type of play should be. Personally, I’d like to see it become more the norm for games with narrative pretensions, but it’s tough to pull off. Even story-oriented games seem to have a hard time pulling it off. And, notably, it’s usually absent in replaying a game. I’m not sure it has to be, though.

Replaying a game can rob it of this blend of narrative and perfectionist appeals, but not just because you know the story. Many of us re-watch movies we love from time to time, and those are the same every time we watch them; games, meanwhile, can actually offer different “stories,” from those explicitly presented in the paths they offer to those we make ourselves. No, the problem I’d like to focus on for now is how the way replaying a game can ruin the way that we enjoy a game’s story and realism because of the concessions made to challenge, rather than recognizing that mastery and story can work hand in hand even the second time through.

To be sure, replaying a game can offer its own sort of enjoyment in the sense of mastery it gives the player. In many story-based and role-playing games (like Dead Space, Prototype, and Mass Effect), there’s a “new game plus” option that allows you to restart the game with all the items and powers that you had when you beat it before. Why? Well, it’s fun to start things over feeling powerful already, and to build a character into something unstoppable. Sometimes this even fits into the story better than starting from scratch. Considering that the dialog in Mass Effect indicates that you already start the game with a reputation as an interstellar badass, it feels a lot more intuitive to start with a leveled-up character than with a first-level character who can’t even access most of its own powers and couldn’t hit the broad side of a barn with an assault rifle.

The problem, however, is that the second time through a game often feels a lot easier, or a lot more goal-oriented, and that throws the useful cooperation between story and mastery into imbalance. It becomes about making a beeline for where we know the best weapons and power-ups are waiting, skipping dialog just so we can get back to leveling, allocating points to be the most powerful at one ability, knowing that this means the game will be hyper-repetitive.

Fallout 3, for instance, doesn’t allow for “new game plus,” but it does become a lot easier to feel powerful when you restart it with a new character after learning the ropes. It’s fairly easy to carry around a huge supply of health packs, ammo, and money; to never worry about radiation poisoning; to max out all your skills; to wipe out a room of enemies with a series of laser shots to the head before any of them even get a chance to pull a trigger. Again, that can be fun, sometimes. But it feels fundamentally different from that first time you play, when you’re never sure what effects your actions will have, when there’s always a slight tingle of danger and thrill of the unknown.

This is where difficulty adjustment presumably comes in. The most obvious response is to suggest that you just raise the game’s difficulty from “Normal” to “Hard,” “Very Hard,” or “Insanity,” tempering your own invincibility. And sure, I do this myself. But that brings me back to the issue of game appeals: Raising the difficulty level preserves a more satisfying feeling of mastery, but often makes it much harder to enjoy on the basis of story. Sometimes the little things that signal to the player that this is a game can really pull you out of the story, like needing to shoot enemies in the head four times before they fall over, or needing to play conservatively because enemies can kill you with a single punch.

It’s telling that my examples keep returning to a sense of mastery or challenge in combat-oriented situations. This is because that is what contemporary narrative games tend to focus on, and what designers see fit to adjust in the difficulty settings. That isn’t all that contemporary games offer, however. They’re also about managing scarce resources, planning careful strategies, potentially even avoiding fighting whenever possible. These are things that often contribute to the sense of playing in a story, rather than a series of action-movie fight scenes. It would be nice to see these things highlighted in replay opportunities.

Sometimes, then, I find myself wishing for a kind of “new game minus.” It wouldn’t be the same as that first time you play because you’d still know so much of what’s to come. Still, there are ways to encourage the game to be played the way you can play it that first time through, with that sense of danger and the unknown, blending the mastery appeals with the story appeals. When I say I’d like to see a “new game minus,” I mean I’d like to see a replay option that makes the practices of “power gaming” itself less feasible, removing the power-ups, making even the skills and powers that seem less crucial feel worth developing in some way, encouraging the player to find challenge in systems other than (or in addition to) combat.

Again, take Fallout 3, for instance. Consider a mode where there are no more skill books or Bobbleheads to boost your abilities; you need to improve by gaining new levels (and recall that you can gain experience not just in combat, but by hacking computers, picking locks, completing non-violent quests, and discovering new locations). It’s a mode where damage isn’t strongly tweaked—because a head shot is a head shot—but where radiation is a real danger, healing supplies are harder to find, and the amount you can carry more closely corresponds to what a real human being could reasonably carry (e.g., the equivalent of a couple six-packs of beer instead of 150 beers). In other words, I’d like to see games get harder with a mode that makes them more realistic.

I know I’m not the only one who feels this way: Fallout 3 has a whole community of modders who put such variations into practice, but not every game can be modded. The fact that the game itself needs to be altered to see such ideas implemented is an indication of how rare it is that we see the appeals of storytelling and immersion treated on more equal footing with the appeals of challenge and mastery.

Does this need to be done for every game? No, of course not. I wouldn’t really care if it were there for games like Dead Space, which have a story element to them, but one that isn’t necessarily strongly integrated into the gameplay experience to begin with. The reason I want to see it in games like Fallout 3 is that the context implies that storytelling is kind of a big deal in the game as a whole. The quests present something like a narrative arc with actual attention to pacing and continuity. Dialog has its own front-and-center mechanic, with its own experience rewards. The protagonist’s personality is customizable, and his/her behavior has ramifications in terms of social interaction with other characters and other elements of gameplay (including who decides to attack you and which missions you have to complete at all). We are told that our actions mean something, with moral implications, beyond a straightforward life-or-death struggle. The game already hints to you that character, performance, and story are a major part of the experience, but it doesn’t necessarily follow through with it as far as it could.

The next obvious response to such concerns is that you, the player can always impose your own difficulty adjustments through arbitrary rules outside any the game has set for you. You don’t need to use all the health packs the game provides; you don’t need to traverse an entire game world through a click on a map; you don’t need to shoot every enemy in the head with the best weapon in the game; you don’t need to keep playing after your character dies, but can decide that your character is now dead. And, indeed, I have tried some such “imaginary adjustments” or “gameplay experiments” myself—hey, let’s aim for the legs this time!—but this presents some narrative distractions and frustrations of its own when the game isn’t designed to support such decisions.

My next post, then—the third (and tentatively final) in this series on how narrative games do (and don’t) encourage story-oriented appeals—will describe how we might actively go looking for narrative meaning in games. I’ve had mixed results with it myself, which is why I discuss this now in terms of what games actively to encourage us to feel. Not every game is a narrative game, and not even every narrative game really encourages us to treat the story as a kind of gameplay itself—but those that do are teaching us some new ways to think about narrative, and still have some room to explore how that could go further.

It’s very tempting to categorize players into “types.” Probably the most heavily researched typology is the one described by the Bartle Test of Gamer Psychology, which breaks players down into Achievers, Explorers, Killers, and Socializers. Some have contended that a well-designed game is one that offers content to satisfy each of the different Bartle types. This presumes, however, that play styles represent a diversity of characteristics among the players themselves, which kind of minimizes the influence that the game itself plays in guiding or supporting certain behaviors. If I may just quote Nels directly:

Rather than designing toward supporting each Bartle type, it might be the case that we need to provide the context and reward for a specific type of behaviour and then find ways to attract different types of players. Some of the most beloved games (e.g. Portal, Shadow of the Colossus, Mario) aren’t successful because they support a great diversity of behaviours, but rather because their context and the behaviours they encourage are harmonious.

As one who doesn’t design games, but studies them (and their players), this taps into an issue that’s been on my mind quite a bit in the last several months. More generally speaking, what do we gain by distinguishing between types of players instead of play styles? It may be useful to consider that different players bring different biases, interests, and levels of experience to each game, but it’s also important to recognize that the same person might play in different ways for different games. This was precisely what I found, in fact, in my ethnographic study of arcades (soon to be online; I’ll keep you posted), where some players explained that they play arcade games for different reasons and in different ways from how they play games at home.

Such complexities are hinted at, I think, in another kind of player typology, Mitch Krpata’s “New Taxonomy of Gamers.” Some of Mitch’s distinctions resemble Bartle’s, like in the duality between “Skill Players” (who play as Perfectionists or Completists, like Bartle’s Achievers) versus “Tourists” (who want to see and explore, like Bartle’s Explorers). As a proposed alternative to the “hardcore” versus “casual” distinction commonly used among critics, however, it also more explicitly recognizes market forces, such as in the distinction between “Wholesale Players” (who want games to be long to justify monetary investment) versus “Premium Players” (who want games to be short but excellent to fit into a busy schedule). Different games are designed in ways that satisfy different kinds of players.

As Mitch acknowledges, however, players can exhibit behaviors associated with other player types, such as when he notes that some games “have so much to offer my Tourist nature that I play them as a Perfectionist without even realizing it.” For this reason, I’m sometimes tempted to refer to Mitch’s “Taxonomy of Gamers” as more of a “Typology of Gaming Styles.” I find myself unsatisfied, however, with both this system and the Bartle types in their ability to describe what gets lumped under “Tourists” and “Explorers,” a type of play that likely has as much variance and nuance as the different reasons we play games for skill. Moreover, understanding such concepts as a “taxonomy” implies (even if unintentionally) mutual exclusivity between categories, when the best games may be those that don’t just support multiple styles of play, but actively blend them into working together.

It’s for this reason that I’ve long tried to describe gaming styles as a number of potentially overlapping styles or “appeals” rather than as something inherently tied to personality. Personally, I tend to play more like a Tourist than a Perfectionist or Completist, but some games encourage completist or perfectionist impulses so effectively—often by tying them into my Tourist-oriented goals—that I’m happy to play that way. In Fallout 3, I was sometimes willing to hunt down every bonus item in part for its own sake, and in part because this was also a means to explore the world and see new content. In Mass Effect, I was determined to get every Xbox Achievement in part because I wanted to play the game into the ground as a Completist would, and in part because I liked seeing the story from different angles, seeing the characters in different ways.

I think Nels’s idea—focusing on what a game encourages us to do based on social and environmental context—offers a really useful way of considering how to design overlapping appeals into games. I’d like to revisit this over (at least) a couple more posts in the near future, giving some specific examples of how this has informed the way I’ve approached (and pined for changes in) some games myself. In the meantime, I encourage you to read up on the Above 49 archive, as it is features some additional insightful musings.