Tarot

When most people think of SPORE, they think of the character builder.  This is something which instantly jumps to mind, putting the power of Maya in the hands of the multitudes.  When I think of SPORE (and I suspect anyone who works in the industry), I think of procedural interaction.  There is some concern that many of the best and brightest new talent are being pulled into the vortex of Will Wright’s project, and that they will remain forever guarded within the boundaries of EA, shackled to a project which will be ultimately anti-climatic from a sales perspective.  I must admit, considering the continual delays SPORE has being enduring, much of the excitement it once evoked has somewhat worn away.

What I would like to see is the tools that make the procedural interaction of player-generated content possible be made available to the public, although I know coming from EA this is probably a pipe-dream.  Perhaps if sales are not what they would like them to be, EA would at least consider licensing the technology out.  To me, SPORE is a tech-demo (an impressive one) of that technology, and I think they’ve done a disservice to themselves by announcing it so far before it was released (and giving away much of the structure of the gameplay as well).  I feel like I’ve seen the game played in demos so many times now that it’s not fresh and exciting.  What I do think is exciting is the possibilities for the technology if it ever gets out into the world.

I’ve been playing the wonderful GROW series of games by Japanese Game Designer ON.  In these Flash-based games, the player chooses from a list of items (shapes, objects, elements) and places them into a world.  The longer each item exists on the world (in terms of turns), the more that item will grow.  The trick is that elements also interact with each other, sometimes in a positive, and sometimes in a negative way.  The purpose of the game is to place the items in such an order that they all grow to their maximum potential.  What is interesting about it is that significantly different things may occur to a given item depending on the presence and state of other objects at any given time.  While GROW is, I’m relatively sure, scripted with case statements, I wonder about the possibilities for the procedural technology behind SPORE if mixed up with Mr. ON.

Which brings me to an idea I tentatively refer to as Tarot.  Tarot Cards have long enchanted me (from a symbolic, not divinitory standpoint).  I suspect the presence of such items as Tarot cards, tea leaf reading, the I Ching, etc. in nearly every culture since the dawn of time speaks to a certain presence of the desire for symbolic interpretation in humanity.  This suggests to me that the symbols present in these mediums represent what Daniel Dennett would refer to as a “Good Trick”, although I’m not sure I understand exactly what the trick is.  What I do understand, however, is that Good Tricks can be exploited if you know how to hook into them.  Games are a fundamental part of the human condition for this precise reason, as they exploit evolutionary responses which have become prevelant everywhere in our species.

Tarot Cards are a method by which some game designers create free-association in order to generate story.  What Tarot would do is combine near ubiquitous symbols such as those found in Tarot or Jungian Psychology, and allow the player to apply them in a more direct way.  At the beginning of the game, the player would choose cards from a Tarot-like deck, either at random or by choice, and a game experience would then be proceedurally generated from those choices.  Content would have to be built in such a way that it was aware of possible interactions with other content, depending on the role it was to play.  Gameplay would still be built in a structured way,  so that the game would always be, say, an RPG, but the particulars would change with every game.  The challenge would be in building it in such a way that the particulars were always compelling, or even better, that one game would build on another.  It would be imporant that the game was not always the same, with the roles substituted, but the presence of one card versus another would radically shift an element of the game world.  The most correct selection of type of world would seem to be an open format, such as Oblivion, only more tightly constrained.  Elements of the game world would persist from story to story, but be gilded or tainted by the choice of cards in the initial sequence.

An additional difficulty would by in marketing this work.  Even if one could create proceedurally generated and compelling gameplay, it would be difficult to know what marketing approach would be best, other than perhaps the standard Peter Molyneux technique of “This is the best RPG ever made”.  Diverging too strongly from an established medium is generally not a good sales technique, but then if a medium is truely to be an artform, sometimes you need to put that on the back burner.