Linked Achievements

David Edery (whom you may know as the Portfolio Planner for Xbox Live Arcade) has an interesting post up about CliffyB’s announcement on Gears of War 2’s achievements being linked to things you did the original. 

This got me thinking about a concept that has so far been poorly explored, likely because there hasn’t been a good platform to launch it on until relatively recently.

If you recall the first time you saw Memento, there’s an experience of having an incomplete series of events handed to you.  You’re thrust into the middle of a series of events, and the logic of how you got there, and what’s going on, don’t become entirely clear until the end.  If you’ve ever read the Vlad Taltos series of books in the order they were published, you’ll experience something similar (or for that matter, read any other series of books with a sophisticated plot, out of chronological order).

It would be interesting to reproduce this sensation in game format - by having a series of games with linked content, as David describes.  Instead, however, of treating this content - hidden until certain events in a sequel are unlocked - as an easter egg, use it as the core of the design process.  Imagine a game where the central concept is the corruption of a timeline.  You play through the first game, thrust into the middle of a series of events, not really understanding what’s going on.  By the end of the first game, you have a grip on the immediate scenario, but there are a lot of plot holes.  Playing the second, or third game gives you a similar experience.  However, in each of these games, there are events you can trigger which will have causal effects in one of the other games, altering a timeline either before, or after the position in which you triggered it.  This effect unlocks further content in the other games, forcing you to go back to them and play that content.  The entire experience is understood only through playing all three games, and retracing what you’ve done with significant alterations.  Another alternative would be to run parallel dimensions at concurent timelines, so that the game mechanic would be the same, but instead of altering time, you alter space.

Creating a series of titles like this would be extremely high risk - if one of the titles doesn’t get made, the entire experience is ruined.  This is a risk that nearly nobody in the gaming industry is has so far been willing to undertake - and yet in other formats, notably television, this type of risk scenario is now common-place.  The risk could be mitigated by making the titles digital distributed at a lower price point through something like Xbox Live Arcade, and by using a common infrastructure such that most of the risk is entertained in the first title, and it will cost significantly less to make titles 2 and 3 (assuming a trilogy).

Now if only there were a large games company with significant financial backing that was trying to do something progressive and could afford to entertain some risk…

Unreliable Narrators

I love a good plot twist.  Unfortunately, most of the plot twists used incessantly in media today are not what one would call good.

The best plot twist is one that is implemented by leaving dangling threads in the plot and tying them into the twist later on.  The condition on this is that if the reader/player/viewer can guess the plot twist in advance – or is even aware that a plot twist exists – it can substantially dampen the plot experience.  The fun in the plot twist is in having all your assumptions shaken apart, being completely blind-sided.  If the individual suspects foul, they will begin concentrating on trying to detect the problem instead of experiencing your work.  Additionally, the twist needs to make sense and provide an eventual resolution to the plot.  This is where many ongoing TV shows fail – plot twists should exist by providing a plausible and coherent chain events that change in perspective because of new knowledge imparted to the audience.  Well designed twists occur by torquing the perspective of the audience, not the events of the plot.  This is where shows like LOST fail.  It’s difficult to construct an elaborate plot and continually shift the perspective of the viewer around in a way that provides a coherent narrative the entire time.  While it’s fine to answer questions with more questions, and some point you need to indicate to your audience that you know where you’re going with this and that it will all be resolved eventually.  Heroes does a much better job at this by keeping the arcs manageable – and writing out the entire outline ahead of time.

There is a powerful technique for creating an effective plot twist called “Unreliable narration”.  While it has been in use in books and film for decades, it has made very little traction in the realm of video games.  The underlying premise of the technique is that the player assumes what the narrator is telling him to be true and correct.  At some point in the plot, you can force the twist in plot perspective by revealing that the narrator (who is often the protagonist) has not been giving an accurate depiction of events, for whatever reason.  I can think of only three games that have used the technique in this way (one of which is the metal gear solid series, which is so convoluted I’ll avoid it entirely).  Out of respect for people who may not have played these games, if you want to avoid spoilers you’ll stop reading here.  The first game is Final Fantasy VII, one of the most successful RPGs of all time.  Cloud Strife appears initially as former member of an elite group of military called SOLDIER.  Much of the plot in the first half of the game contains flashbacks to Cloud’s past, but these stories are dotted with memory gaps that make the story inconsistent.  Later in the game Cloud regains his memory and much of the earlier story is shown to be false.  A second and more recent example would by Bioshock.  In an extremely brilliant move by Ken Levine’s team, the narrator, a gentleman named Atlas who guides the character through the first two thirds of the game is shown to be using mind control on the player based on the keyword “Would you kindly”.  The reason it’s clever is because the player has to perform these actions to progress in the game anyway, and the keyword is very well masked in the dialog.  The ‘big reveal’ in the middle of the game shows that many of the events leading up to that point, comments left in audio diaries and such, completely turn about the assumptions the player has made about himself up to that point.  Atlas is shown to be con-artist who has been using the player via the above mechanism for his own ends.  In true con-artist fashion, Atlas uses social engineering techniques to establish a bond with the player, thus allowing the delivery of foreshadowing while at the same time minimizing the likelihood that he will be suspected as being an unreliable narrator.

If anything is clear from the above assessment, it should be that writing an unreliable narrator well is extremely difficult.  Even in literature, it’s not a technique that is well-executed often.  Nevertheless, some of my favorite movies use this technique to great effect – The Usual Suspects, Lucky Number Slevin, and Memento.  I’d like a more coherant breakdown of the tools for making effective use of the technique, and to see those tools used to improve the generally dismal state of Videogame plots.  Suprises are cool.

As a more wonky alternative, I think it would be interesting to play a game where the player was made aware that the avatar was actively lying to them and had to work around it as an obstacle by forcing them into logical contradictions or social situations where the truth would come out.  There’s a mechanic, would it be possible to build a game around that?