I found an awesome article about a guy who is trying to play the open-world RPG Skyrim as a pacifist monk (watch the video after the break for more). In a game designed to reward strength and the ability to defeat opponents at any cost, he is making an attempt to complete the game without killing anything.
The game is versatile enough to support his attempt. One can use a calm spell to turn any ravaging man beast into a civilized, non-aggressive character. But, as expected, he has already ran into major challenges. Like most fantasy RPGs, the game prescribes the act of killing as a means of progression through the story. How can he "win" if he can't kill? In short, he can't.
He created his own game - his own magic circle - within the overarching game of Skyrim, but it's not compatible. By limiting his permissible choices and actions, he effectively prevented himself from completing the story that Skyrim tells. What can this tell us about game design?
I would like to suggest that game design in a game as open-ended as Skyrim should not require the player to adopt a particular philosophy about the virtual world he interacts with. There is no reason choosing not to kill should not be an acceptable play style. While it may not be entirely advantageous to do so, if one chooses to take the pacifist route, he will be able to experience a great feeling of accomplishment - a prideful one that is not just based on the challenge of beating the game without killing, but one that is elicited from taking deliberate steps to adopt a high degree of morality.
This, of course, requires the designers to implement mechanisms to make this possible. Perhaps the calm spell may be useful, but the pacifist game becomes monotonous if that's the only way to demonstrate morality.
In game theory, there is a branch of study called mechanism design, in which the designer of a game tries to influence the actors to behave in a certain manner by first using techniques to capture information about an actor, then discriminately using that information to influence the actor's strategy.
While it is not an entirely similar concept, I would like to see video games do a similar thing - capture more information about players to tailor the game against them later on. Understand what the player values, what actions he takes, what actions he refrains from - then offer large rewards (again, based on what he may find valuable) for deviating from the norm. There are countless possibilities, and every version of the game can be unique to each player. I have seen rudimentary versions of this in games before (think Fable), but even then, one's moral disposition is more of a label than a determining factor of events. And even if it does prevent or enable certain events from happening, they more often support the disposition than challenge it.
When games advance to the point that they learn about a player and create stories around the player to challenge his beliefs and worldview, video games will be finally utilize their interactive and computational nature in full.
- Jonathan Lipkin
- Jonathan Lipkin
The concept of not killing any enemies and trying to progress through Skyrim instantly reminded me of Tejada-Flores's article about "Games Climbers Play" where he discussed how climbers often handicap themselves by not allowing certain types of equipment or placing certain limits to rock climbing. This seems to parallel that Skyrim player's method because he handicaps himself by not allowing any enemies to be killed. This causes him to gain less experience and find fewer items to use. He does this to make the game more meaningful, whether to add a more challenging element to the game or perhaps for moral reasons, as the player briefly discussed how killing is wrong. The point that you bring up at the end of your blog post, how video games should gather information about a player and tailor the game against players later on reminds me of a concept in Ender's Game, one of the books recommended for the minor quest. In Ender's Game, there is an alien species, called "buggers", that must be defeated before they can invade Earth. These buggers are very intelligent and learn from previous battles to counter any threats, making them especially difficult to defeat.
ReplyDeleteThere has always been a debate on whether a game should be sandbox(open) or themepark(mostly linear), and the thing is, each genre caters to its own crowd. If Skyrim were to be entirely open for all approaches, it'd either have to be entirely objectiveless (with only optional minor quests) or have one of the most expansive storylines that must emulate real life. Now, the latter is very improbable for a game designer to create because of how much branching the storyline requires.
ReplyDeleteImagine starting out in Skyrim and having the choice to kill everyone immediately (even important quest-givers). This would eliminate all potential for the game to dive into its story because you killed the storytellers.
Imagine being able to tame all the dragons and just flying around having a grand old time.
Yes these options are fun, and the thing is! Skyrim allows that with Mods! However, if Skyrim's only purpose was to be a sandbox, they'd never have a story to tell for themselves. And in my opinion, Bethesda (the company) made the right choice in having a set MAIN story for the game with nearly infinite side-quests AND introducing the Skyrim Creation Kit, which enables easy Modding of the game for the shenanigans Good Guy Felix
Yeah Dustin, I agree. Enabling the capability to easily mod the game really adds another dimension to Skyrim. I'm sure there are people out there who are creating extremely high-quality content. I guess one of the ways to make up for a shortfall in artificial intelligence is to open the task up to human intelligence.
ReplyDeleteThe only problem with the mods, though, is that the people who download them may exhibit self-selecting behavior where they may not download a mod containing a quest with content that may challenge their worldview. This type of behavior is exhibited in many contexts. Regardless, the point is minor, especially pertaining to mods, and I believe the decision to open up a development kit to users was a good move by Bethesda to promote content that players actually want.
- Jonathan Lipkin