Who's in charge—the game designer or the gamer?
Making the player feel
like he or she is impacting, or even (ideally) shaping the story is sometimes called “giving the player a sense of agency,” or simply “giving the player agency.” This chapter focuses on ways to accomplish this—ways to help the player feel that he or she is playing the game, rather than simply being taken along on a ride.
A game, to a greater or lesser degree, helps guide the player's choices and determines the possible consequences of his or her actions. However, it's important to make the player feel like he or she isn't just a pawn in the story.
In Chapter 2.21, “First-Person Deepening Techniques,” we looked at ways a player could feel like he or she is impacting a game by creating (at least the feeling of) emotionally complex consequences to the actions the player takes in a game.
By feeling your actions have consequences, you feel you have an impact on the game. To the degree that impact is either real or feels real, it creates the sense that you're playing, to some degree, a self-created story.
However, there are many other ways of creating this feeling in a game.
At first it seems obvious that the player should be in charge of what occurs in a game, or at least the agent of much of what takes place. But in games that involve stories, or sequential missions, creating the feeling that the player is in change can become a challenge. For isn't the player following a path laid down by the game designers?
How much does the story happen to the player, and how much does the player create the story? Different games handle this question quite differently.
Every game, to some extent, is a self-created story. Even a game of chess is like a story with a beginning, middle, and end. And very, very rarely are two chess games identical.
When, in a game, you choose your weapons or your armor, you're playing the game differently than anyone else—so it's a self-created story.
There are some games, such as The Sims, where your impact on the game is extreme.[1]
On the other end of the spectrum might be Final Fantasy X. Many players were enthralled by both the rich fantasy story and the stunning visuals, but couldn't shake the feeling that they were simply being swept along by the narrative rather than really impacting the game. Sometimes it felt as if the gameplay's main function was to move you from one cinematic to another.[2]
Thus, there is a spectrum of impact a player can have on a game.
Games without narrative stories are the ones in which you can have the most impact: sports games, The Sims, and chess are examples. Playing with a big box of Lego™, with all the accessories, would be an extreme example. Your impact on the way the Lego is used and the possible outcomes is huge.[3]
On the other extreme, you could have a game with two different endings. A decision you make near the end would determine the outcome. Here you'd have an impact, but on the impact scale, it would be much less than in The Sims. You could also have other forms of impact as to how you accomplish your missions in terms of stealth versus combat, the weapons you choose, the abilities you use, and even perhaps the geographic route you select.
One form of game isn't innately better or worse than the other; many players enjoy multiple forms of gameplay. And so one form of impact the player can have on the game isn't innately superior. The more of a “real” impact you have in the game, the less there can be anything that resembles narrative story. The more the game contains a narrative story, the more your impact in the game resides in the smaller details, but not the overall direction and shape of the outcome.
One of the successful aspects of Grand Theft Auto III is the mixture of types of impacts the player can have on the game.
You can have significant impact when you jump into a cop car, chase down perps, and run them off the road. When you simply steal cars and run people over, that's also impact (literally and figuratively).
But of course, there's no story involved with these sections of the game.
There are also elements of gameplay that have more limited impact. For instance, if you run missions for one gang, rival gang members will start shooting at you as a result of your reputation spreading. But it's a much lesser degree of impact, for no matter if it was you or if it was I who played the game, if we ran the same missions, the same rival gangs would fire upon us.
GTA III skirts the feeling that you're being manipulated by offering many modes (see Chapter 2.16, “Plot Interesting Techniques”) by which you can accomplish the missions, or at least some of them. Are you traveling by vehicle or on foot? What weapons are you using? What routes through the city are you taking?
The extreme impact you can have in choosing modes balances out the more limited impact you have on the narrative. As the sales figures proved, many people found it an extremely appealing balance. Adding to the balance was the fact that at any time you could leave story mode (following the game narrative) and go back into the more free-form types of gameplay discussed earlier.
We've looked at a number of ways of giving the player the feeling that he or she can create his or her own story. Let's review that list and expand upon it a bit:
Multi-path structure, so that the plot actually splits
Different ways of accomplishing your missions
Choosing different weapons, armor, spells, and so on
Choosing different characters to play, with each role offering it's own abilities and choices of weapons, armor, spells, etc.
Different styles of accomplishing the mission, such as stealth or force
Giving a game with a story some additional non-story ways of playing, such as:
Optional side-missions
The ability to explore environments (and usually find something of potential use or acquiring skills or ranking that allows you to pursue either story mode or non-story mode activities more effectively)
Mini-games (games within the game), which can be quite creative in nature. GTA III and Vice City allow you to steal police cars and get assignments to track down and kill criminals; you can grab an ambulance and rescue people; you can cause mayhem on foot or in cars in numerous different ways.
Changing the game environment
Game design requires a series of tradeoffs. Mini-games are fun, but if you put money and time into building them, you need to take away money from some other part of the game. Is the tradeoff worthwhile?
Making a game fun depends a lot on balancing such factors as:
The degree to which a player can affect the game, or at least seem to affect it
The ways in which a player can affect a game, or at least seem to affect it
The ways and the degree to which the game guides or otherwise affects the player
The ways the game delivers both expected and unexpected events and consequences to the player as a result of the player's decisions
The types and amount of choices or actions available to the player at any given moment
The type and amount of weapons, spells, defenses, and so on available to the player at any given moment
When the player is performing a mission or even a small step within a mission, the amount and types of choices available to the player as to how to accomplish that small step or the entire mission
The degree to which gameplay is repetitive, thus allowing a player to either continue practicing a skill or enjoy using a skill he or she has mastered versus the degree to which gameplay is new. (Of course, repetitive gameplay can be used in a new type of mission or in combination with other forms of gameplay, to balance out the familiar and the new.)
Getting these balances right is one big task; injecting emotion and meaning into the mix to enrich the experience is another.
The two aren't unrelated. For instance, the player will care much more about how he impacts the story if he cares about the NPCs and about what happens to them, about his own role and what happens to himself, and about the world of the game.
[1] All games might be, to one degree or another, stories, but not all stories have beginnings, middles, and ends. Some, such as The Sims, could go on forever.
[2] This was problematic to U.S. players much more than to Japanese players. Why this was—the way the different cultures affect preferences in styles of gameplay—exceeds the scope of this book. But it is worth noting that the limited agency the game afforded wasn't, in general, considered detrimental in Japan.
[3] A Lego set is usually considered to be a toy, not a game. In fact, there are some game designers who call The Sims a toy for this same reason: Its gameplay involves the manipulation of (albeit very intelligent) building blocks. To these designers, it's a more advanced form of Lego. I won't try and define the difference between a toy and a game; different people draw the line at different places.
To make matters more complicated, people often create games using their toys, such as when a Frisbee™ (a toy) is used in a game of American football (substituting the Frisbee for the ball). Thinking about all of this could probably drive me mad, which isn't in itself a problem. However, I've already got enough of my own pet issues, quandaries, and conundrums that drive me mad, and I honestly don't have room for another one. This is why I'll choose to ignore this particular controversy of “game” versus “toy”and go into complete denial that it even exists.
I would note, though, that most people call The Sims a game, and we do live in a democracy.