Not a new video, but I keep thinking about this video of a level in Call of Duty: Black Ops where the game goes out of its way to make the player think that he/she is playing a major part in driving the action forward, as well as as being constantly on the verge of failing.
Except you aren’t. Apart from two scripted moments, you can play through this 15-minute section without doing anything.
Question #1: is this wrong? Is it bad design?
I think there is an impetus to denounce this as overly slick, commercial and dishonest design.
But wait! Note how poorly this game example fits with some of the recent discussions (1 2 3) concerning the importance (or non-importance) of choices. I think we currently associate denials of player agency with experimental, subversive, art or personal games.
But Call of Duty probably rates among the games least likely to be described as “experimental”, yet we can also compare this video’s lack of player choice and consequence to some of the discussion of Proteus, whose status as a game is questioned on the Steam Forums, and defended vigorously as such by designer Ed Key.
Question #2: Are there honest and dishonest ways of breaking player expectations? Good and bad? Interesting and uninteresting? How can we tell the difference?
I think this is where a distinction between “game design” “experience design” “ludic system design” etc starts to become fruitful.
I would classify this as great experience design, and maybe not ludic system design at all. :) is it overall good game design? I haven’t played it but that would speak in my mind to “does it do what the authors intended?” If so then it is probably good.
I realise this is a little tangential to question 2, but since I’ve been exercised in giving policy advice recently…
Normally, when a consumer buys something, they have expectations as to what they are getting. If their expectations are not reasonably met, they can ask for their money back. If I buy a tin of yellow paint and it dries brown, I’m entitled to compensation.
If I buy a game, I have expectations as to what it involves. Should the designers deliberately confound those expectations, would this make them guilty of mis-selling? It doesn’t matter that I might prefer the result, any more than it matters that I might prefer my walls brown. If I bought something I thought was a game and it turned out to be something a “reasonable person” (as opposed to an elite academic) doesn’t think is a game, have I, the player, been cheated?
Saying I should expect the unexpected is not an answer unless I’m told beforehand (eg. by use of the word “experimental”).
If it leaves the players satisfied, it isn’t bad design. (Assuming that satisfying the players is the designer’s goal, anyway.) Ah, but what if it satisfies the majority of players, but leaves sufficiently savvy and experienced gamers unsatisfied? There’s a more general question about art lurking here.
Are there honest and dishonest ways of breaking player expectations? Definitely: the honest way is to make it clear that you’re breaking player expectations, and the dishonest way is to try to make it seem like player expectations are being met. The impression that I get from COD is that the designers are trying to break player expectations without letting the player know. Proteus is at least up-front about what sort of thing it is.
Can I be really really gauche and link to something I wrote that is closely related? http://psepho.me/2013/02/11/hot-space-in-proteus/
I think this question of what it means to take away interactivity is fascinating. One of the things I really liked about Proteus is that taking away some expected interactions allows space for other interactions to be foregrounded (like the responsive soundscape). It seems to me that CODBLOPS on the other hand takes away interactivity by stealth in order to achieve a more directed and controlled consumer experience — which, if it is an experiment, is clearly an experiment in marketing rather than either game design or art.
I’ve been making a distinction between “reflective” choices, where the player has input but it ultimately doesn’t matter to the computational system, and “structural” choices, where the player’s input does affect the system. Video games in general tend to have many reflective choices, where only a few of the player’s actions actually matter for progressing through the game. The experience is still interactive, but that interaction doesn’t have the implications that we expect with things usually called “games”. I think that finding the happy medium between the two extremes is essential to design. There’s a huge unexplored design space for interactive art experiences that I think can benefit from existing design knowledge, if we can collectively find how to repurpose it.
On another tack, the Call of Duty rollercoaster ride can be seen as an architectural dishonesty, whether in the functional or structural honesty of Mies van der Rohe, or Ruskin’s Truth in materials. Call of Duty implies that the player’s (violent) inputs are necessary for survival and that larger systems threaten the player, but the underlying process turns out to be scripted smoke-and-mirrors–the Eliza effect. Proteus, in contrast, has the same level of reflectivity, but its presentation corresponds to the underlying process.
I’ll also be gauche and point to something that Chris Lewis, Staffan Bjork and I recently presented that dovetails nicely with your question. We wrote about “dark patterns” in game design (see pdf here http://www.fdg2013.org/program/papers/paper06_zagal_etal.pdf) and discuss the issue of player expectations and understanding and how, in some cases, confounding them isn’t problematic (and how it can be at other times). Our focus is mainly on the intentions of the designer…
@Baf and Bartle You are arguing for a necessity of disclosure? It’s hard to say where the line is in practice – doesn’t even the most mainstream and genre-driven work tends to have small deviations from the norm?
Also, many people felt cheated by Proteus, yet I don’t think they should get their money back. (Most felt cheated for the fact that there is no goal; I was personally disappointed that it ends after the season cycle.)
@psepho Yes, certainly removing goals will cue the player into seeing new things.
I do feel that Ed Key was a quite unreflective about Proteus: It’s clearly an experiment that openly breaks with our (not just academics’, but people in general’s) expectations for what a “game” is … It also won numerous awards at game shows, yet Ed Key seems to think that he is subject of injustice when pointed out how Proteus breaks expectations. (Full disclosure: I was disappointed that it didn’t break *more* conventions.)
@Isaac I see what you mean. On the other hand I saw so many terrible “multimedia art” experiences in the 1990’s where people thought they could just fake interactivity… But perhaps it is a different time, now that there is more vocabulary for talking about game design.
@Jose Ah, “dark patterns”. That’s a good term. I need to think a bit more if I agree with you.
For all of the above, I think it was John Fiske who pointed out that when audiences are offended by art that breaks their expectations, the reaction is very similar to when someone breaks social etiquette.
I’m not arguing for disclosure, no. The problem with games is that designers can’t always tell players what they’re getting when they buy a game because finding out could be part of the game. What they do instead is covenant with their players that there are certain parameters within which the games will fall. If you make a game that purports to be about X and isn’t about X then you’re deceiving the players, whether or not you’re doing so for “artistic reasons”.
Example: “this is a game about knitting”. Players would reasonably expect that it contains a lot of knitting. If it doesn’t, they have a legitimate complaint. If it does, but also has people being stabbed to death with knitting needles, they also have a legitimate complaint.
There are several reasons that a designer can break a covenant. The ones that immediately spring to mind are:
– To establish where the boundary is. They have some activity on the borderline then punish it, in so doing showing where the border is.
– To show why the enemy is the enemy. The player is never asked to butcher babies but the bad guy butchers babies. This is why the bad guy is the bad buy.
– To make an artistic or political point. The covenant is stressed because in terms of narrative, your character is being stressed in a similar way. This must only be optional, though – you can’t oblige players to do it or you will actually be breaking the covenant.
– For evolutionary reasons. The player base has grown in maturity and so can be offered more mature gameplay that players 5 years ago wouldn’t have accepted. Likewise, the player base may have become less hard core and some expected features are removed.
– For commercial reasons. A virtual world is losing players and in order to stabilise it needs to change its gameplay or its revenue model. This is fine so long as players get enough warning.
So what I’m saying is that there are some inviolate expectations, which I call the “covenant” between designer and players, but within that covenant there are expectations which can be broken – and indeed must be broken if the game is to be any fun. Trivially, “I wasn’t expecting that to happen” is a breach of expectations by definition, but applies to the 1-in20 chance your army was going to lose; you weren’t expecting it, but you knew it was possible. With the covenant, you’re not expecting it because you believe it to be impossible.
Richard
@Richard It’s interesting to see the question of expectations codified in this way. Part of me wants to say that art is something that always transcends expectations, but that is probably overstating it.
Don’t you think it in practice (as in “if there was a legal case”) would be question of how to identify reasonable expectation? Do you ask a game store employee, an art critic, a Candy Crush fan or a Tale of Tales fan?