What Happens Next?
In reply to this post over at keiron gillen’s blog:
What I wonder is… well, what about if someone didn’t bother at all. Make a freeform world like Oblivion and didn’t bother trying to build anything to prevent people breaking it. It makes it an open expression at the start of the game that you enter the world with the acceptance that you’ll be acting in a manner as you would in the real world. That is, you wouldn’t treat it as a game. Now the budget that a developer would have spent on trying to cover people acting in reality-broaching fashions, they concentrate entirely on improving the actual world.
Dungard on Cassandra, in his Neverwinter mod Maugeter, did something similar, if less so. Most of the buildings in the town you weren’t able to open. If you did, it said “Why would you want to open that?”. It’s true. How often do you go and open
a random door in town? It’s absolutely unreal. So, the logic goes, if you by your actions are breaking reality… well, screw reality. You walk up to the first person in the street and shoot them in the head? You’d never do that. Ever. Let the world not respond, as you’re not treating it with the proper seriousness.
Of course, I’m fully aware that part of the fun of games is acting in ways you never would normally. Hell – maybe most of it. But I’m wondering what a game could be like if rather than designing a game based around people who wanted to screw with the game, they designed the game based around the people who actively wanted to play it – how much *more* stuff in terms of things to do could you have? How more realistic AIs could you have when you knew the player wasn’t just going to shoot someone on a whim? And so on.
So put it like this: a hypothetical game has a 1 million development budget in terms of level designers. At the moment, about half of the work – as in 500,000 pounds – is spent on basic “Let’s stop this breaking” design. Would you be interested in playing a game that made no attempt at all to stop you breaking it if it would have twice as much effort on making an interesting, credible and more developed world?
It’s a wierd question to answer, because ultimately, I think the way we make choices in a game world is fairly similar to how we do in the real world. By this I mean that in both situations, the choices we make are generally dictated by the perceived consequences of those choices.
For example, if I wander into someone’s garden in real life, pick up all their pots and smash them to pieces, not only would I gain nothing, but there’s also a risk of bad things happening. The harmless and friendly old people living there would complain, and I would feel bad about them having to buy new pots. They might call the police, which would mean I could be chased, caught and punished, and if my mum found out, Hell would be unleashed. So I don’t do it. It’s clearly not worth it.
In contrast, I know that if I were to do the same thing in the Zelda world, I wouldn’t get into any trouble because the game has no law or police system to punish my actions, and none of the NPCs are designed to acknowledge my smashing of pots. There’s also a chance that the level designers will actually reward my destruction by placing some money or healing items inside the pots – so why wouldn’t I? As far as I’m concerned there’s nothing to lose, and everything to gain, so I do it every time.
Players will never act in a game world like they would in the real world, until the perceived consequences of actions reflect reality first – and for many kinds of games, this will never happen. Very few people want to play a Gran Turismo arcade game that crumples up and crushes the player to death when they speed into a wall, or a GTA game where we are taken away to a real jail for running over a virtual pimp.
I think a lot of the time, it really isn’t an issue of the player not taking the game world seriously enough – it’s other way round. We only appear to behave ridiculously in games because as far as the consequences are concerned, game worlds can be ridiculous places to be in.