The Player is Always Right
I hope to write more about video games in the near future, but for now, I just want to point out this long, fascinating interview with some of the lead designers of BioShock 2, the forthcoming sequel to one of the two or three best games I’ve ever played. The bits toward the end about the team’s design philosophy — “Say yes to the player” — are particularly revealing in that they suggest that games succeed not by controlling what the player sees and does, but by presenting him with consequential choices.
Peter, you might investigate Braid as a study in subtle design philosophy stripped to very basic elements. That it works on a totally different scale to Bioshock makes the strong points the two have in common particularly clear.
— Berian James · May 25, 08:08 PM · #
Berian,
I’ve played the Braid demo, and read a number of interviews with its designer — I think he’s a little too dismissive of some games (the fantastic and innovative Half Life 2, for example), but he’s doing a lot to push games to explore new ways of creating meaning.
— Peter Suderman · May 25, 08:44 PM · #
The “consequential choices” are the important part there, in my experience (as a professional video game designer). And, in fact, you must control what the player can do, very carefully, in order to create consequential choices. What I think the Bioshock developers are saying here is that there are different ways of controlling the player, and some of them are more fuzzy and indirect than others. It’s not that the designer hopes that the player will exercise his freedom to not adopt a Little Sister. He knows that the game will be much richer and more interesting if he does adopt one, and he also knows that it will be moreso if the player has the feeling that he chose to. In simple terms, the player is free to skip it, but really the designer’s method of control here is not to be hands-off, but simply to use various in-game incentives to manipulate or cajole the player. With these incentives, the designer creates a very small set of “accepted” choices for the player to make—where the options the player can take are each incentivized with different rewards. These could be different in-game items, abilities, or different story threads. The fact is, a designer can’t create an unlimited number of consequential options for a player to follow. So he has to use multiple tools in his systems toolbox to eliminate some and “consequentialize” others.
To be honest, sometimes I think the “openness” of games like Bioshock is overhyped. The non-linearity of the game is really inherent in the game systems—mainly the character development and broad range of player abilities, which aren’t that original, from a systematic perspective, to Bioshock—and not as much in the content, or the “fleshed out world” of Rapture. I say this with the utmost professional respect for Ken Levine and all the folks who made Bioshock (and System Shock, which really set the pattern for Bioshock). Great games, but much of the “freedom” of it is an illusion.
— Chris Floyd · May 26, 02:30 AM · #
I wasn’t that impressed with Bioshock. Nice graphics and design but the enemy AI was weak. There’s something wrong with an FPS when your most effective weapon turns out to be a wrench.
Not in the same leauge as HL2, COD 4, Gears or Escape from Butcher Bay.
— Ali Choudhury · May 26, 06:04 PM · #
I enjoyed Bioshock, particularly the plot, but <a href=“http://gregsanders.typepad.com/blog/2008/01/quick-bioshock.html”>I wasn’t really that wowed by it.</a> I probably would have enjoyed it more had I listened to the games encouragement and went after the Big Daddies before the end. Basically they hadn’t done anything to me and wow the Big Daddy-Little Sister relationship was creepy I was hesitant to just solve it by violence.
I may have enjoyed the game more if I was forced to take them down because the mechanics would have been more fun. On the other hand, I might have spoiled on the series as I did after performing human sacrifice in God of War. Instead, I’m rather interested in checking out Bioshock 2 and like some of the ideas they’re discussing.
— Greg Sanders · May 27, 06:48 PM · #