Defining Environment Language for Video Games | Hacker News Reader

Defining Environment Language for Video Games

80.lv

77 pointsokket19 comments

Great article. I want to call out one point:

    > The more life-like a space appears to be, the more we begin to expect it
    > to allow for the affordances we have in real life. But games only enable
    > players the actions developers explicitly allow for and implement.
    > Unfortunately, that aspect of game development doesn’t scale with
    > computing power in the way art has.

This is one of the reasons I got out of the game industry. Schatz (and many game devs I've worked with) seem to take this as an immutable fact when, really, it is a choice developers have made. They decided to make games with realistic artwork and limited interaction. The realistic art is nice, but when everything is a polygonal shell with baked in lighting, then the set of things you can do with it becomes very small.

The computer doesn't force you to build games that way. The best counter-example I know is Minecraft. In Minecraft, the art is decidedly unrealistic, bordering on abstract. But, in return for that, the world is incredibly interactive. The entire world can be generated procedurally and freely remolded by the player.

When you play many games today, you will never ever do anything a level designer and game programmer didn't explicitly implement support for. You may fail to advance to the next scene if you don't push the right buttons at the right time, but the overall play experience is not too far removed from a film (and so many game designers out there have deep film envy). That's fine, but it's not super appealing to me.

In contrast, when I play Minecraft, I play in a world no one on Earth has ever seen, and I build things no one has ever built.

But many game developers, and especially producers, don't like games like that. One problem is that, like the film industry, big game companies are making bigger and bigger budget games. The main problem becomes controlling risk. A realistic on-rails game where the player works through a single scripted narrative is a controllable experience. You can reliably estimate how much players will like it.

With emergent and procedural gameplay, it's really hard to predict if the end result will be fun or not. For every Minecraft, there's a million sandbox games that don't have everything balanced just so to get it to hang together in that magical way (see: Spore, No Man's Sky). That's a risky bet for a producer deciding what kind of game to make next.

Mostly I'm just commenting to underline how much I agree with you, but I'll also add that a lot of people, when they're thinking about the experience of a game, are thinking about it just as if it were a movie-- such and such happens and the player has this or that reaction. This, I think, is generally useless, whatever the medium. You're just getting all enamored with talking to yourself about how great your work will be rather than working with what's actually there. But leaving that aside, it's particularly limiting with games, which are interesting for their possibilities and in which the audience has real agency within the work itself.

> a lot of people, when they're thinking about the experience of a game, are thinking about it just as if it were a movie-- such and such happens and the player has this or that reaction.

Yes! I look at it like this:

If you're telling a story about how you played some game, for many games, the story you tell is just the narrative within the game itself. The games I care about are the ones where the stories I tell about it are my stories.

> In Minecraft, the art is decidedly unrealistic, bordering on abstract. But, in return for that, the world is incredibly interactive.

Absolutely. But the flipside of this is that Minecraft has no story. It's sort of up to you as a player to do what you want and make your own adventure. Naughty Dog, on the other hand, is famous for their games' stories. I suspect interactivity and story are at odds. I also agree that the more sandbox-y a game is, the harder it is to make it compelling for a long amount of time.

I personally don't think one end of the spectrum is better or worse than the other. There are games with extremely limited interactivity (walking simulators) that I've had a blast "playing". I've also sunk a ton of hours into Minecraft.

“story“ only conflicts with game possibilities when you don't accept player created stories. Players will stumble through movie-like stories handed to them, but the stories they tell friends are more often about dynamic interactions within a framework (“i made my first house in minecraft over a period of weeks and then accidentally blew it up“).

Maybe I didn't express myself correctly, but I agree. I do think that player created narratives will be more personal and maybe more memorable but pre-made stories tend to be deeper and more intricate. And I don't think one is better than the other.

Sandboxy games definitely have more replayability. If I look at my steam stats, Medieval Total War 2 is in the lead, followed by Paradox grand strategy games, Mount & Blade, Skyrim, then things like Terraria, Rimworld, Stardew Valley, Prison Architect, Gamedev Tycoon, and so on. I have to go pretty far to hit something with a defined story.

The problem with games like Spore and No Man's Sky is not that they were 'risky', but that they were anticipated with the promise of being interactive but completely failed to deliver the interactive experience that was wanted. The games didn't have much gameplay, just canned 'rail-like' experiences in boring, repetitive environments. They pretended to innovate and produced the same old crap people already had.

But this all reminds me of another problem with modern game development. I have a certain deep love for tile-based, low-resolution old-school games. But most people seem to think that's entirely an artifact of nostalgia, rather than the fact that the world is simple and predictable in a way that maps beautifully to the control scheme. The world is not realistic, it's a grid. You control the world using buttons. That's a good relationship.

But every modern game comes out trying to pander to my nostalgia, and ultimately falls flat because what I want is a clean mapping, not some silly pretense of playing an old game again.

Too many cooks in the kitchen, and nobody cares what food is supposed to taste like anymore. They just know it needs "more ingredients."

Not sure if it quite captures what you're saying, but I'd put Dwarf Fortress up as an extreme example. I guess it's not first person, so that takes a bit out of the metaphor.

I built guard squads over decades, and an elite vampire squad, all decked out in glittering steel. Watching the captain die to an animated finger of a fallen comrade was one of the most vivid video game memories i have. I still have some vitriol for that pink 'Ñ' as well. In retrospect, it's kinda odd, being ticked off at a letter. But that letter represented the forces of darkness that slowly overcame and destroyed what i'd worked for weeks to build.

Have you read Matul Remrit? If not, you might enjoy it: http://www.bravemule.com/in50/

Reminds me of this tweet-video, which illustrates well the banality of a lot of """exciting""" movie-like gameplay:

https://twitter.com/robotduck/status/759529875992698880

It's a pretty shallow read of the game design. The video and longer piece he wrote miss that there only needs to be perceived peril for the sequence to be exciting. Humans also love to buy into the idea that something is way more dangerous than it is. The actual goal of that sequence is to amp the player up before they get into the next gameplay sequence proper. It's a piece of pacing and environmental storytelling.

Further making that sequence a gameplay challenge would almost certainly make it worse. It becomes a memorization game and would require repeat attempts, each of which would lessen the impact of the experience.

Personally, I treat high-budget AAA games as their own category, and appreciate them in their own way.

Consider e.g. Mass Effect trilogy. I absolutely LOVED those games, even though they were basically an interactive movie. They could've probably made ME as a visual novel, and the gist of the story would stay the same. Still, the form of the game was perfect, and was completely enjoyable as long as you didn't expect too much from it. It's not Minecraft in space.

The problem IMO is when game producers try to mix elements from other types of games into AAA movie-games. It fails, I think, because high-end AAA graphics are so hand-optimized that any attempt at giving players freedom of creation will start breaking stuff.

Mass Effect 1, at least, was most fun when you said to hell with the official objectives and just started treating it as a sandbox. I had so much fun using the sniper rifle from as far away as possible, or taking the mako places it really shouldn't have been able to go

I noticed in the buffer example's image the text

    ...et '*weapons-pistol-upgrade-only*]

That looks Lisp-inspired to me. Does anyone know if Naughty Dog still uses something Lispy to compile game data? (I'm not talking about writing the game engine itself in a Lisp.)

Yes, Naughty Dog's internal scripting language has always been their own Lisp flavor and I imagine that they use the same scripting language to define game data.

Racket http://cufp.org/2011/functional-mzscheme-dsls-game-developme...

For more along these lines (specifically about The Last of Us), I cannot recommend James Howell's in-progress critical analysis The Rootwork Bulding[0] highly enough. It discusses the affordances of the level design, and how the game advances the the Joel-Ellie relationship via gameplay.

[0]: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL7vAeDYh8SvShredLiTbO...

Like a HIG for 3d worlds and games. Very nice!

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