Making it all hang together.
This chapter
deals with ways to make one part of a game feel connected to other parts that otherwise might feel separate in time or space.
It might seem strange to talk about connecting one part of a game to another. Is it really a problem?
I've experienced more than one game where the various missions seemed very disjointed, and the world they took place within felt fragmented.
In such games, the action may move from place to place, with new characters to encounter and new locations to explore. Newness is usually a good thing—it keeps the experience fresh. But continual newness of location and characters can, if mishandled, have one drawback: Sometimes it's hard to care much about a game's story if the characters and settings keep changing and there's little by way of a connecting thread.
The problem is not dissimilar to that in some road trip films that feel like little more than a string of disjointed incidents. Those road trip films that are the most engaging usually derive their emotional power from the rich relationships between the people taking the trip and their gripping Character Arcs.
But what if the game you're designing doesn't have a rich relationship between the player's character and an NPC? What will provide the Cohesiveness?
An example: NPCs in one part of the game have heard about your exploits in another part of the game and act toward you in a friendly or hostile way, based on your reputation. Or, they may simply remark upon it.
A kissing cousin to acquiring a reputation, the Hindu notion of karma is the idea that your positive and negative acts have long-range repercussions for your own well-being. Personally I tend to believe this, even though it takes a bit of time to prove.
For our purposes, Karma in a game is a Cohesiveness Technique. For example, if you help an NPC in one part of the game, and his or her friends or relatives help you later in the game, that's karma.
The flip side of this also applies. For example, if you kill the T-Rex early in the game, the other T-Rexes intuitively know this and come after you later on.
You can use this technique to create some interesting emotionally complex situations (see Chapter 2.15, “Emotionally Complex Moments and Situations Techniques”). For instance, imagine this sequence:
Early in the game, you kill Zack, a guy who was once good but who turned bad due to his financially desperate circumstances.
This itself is emotionally complicated to you, the player, if you know that he didn't want to be evil. And it's even more complicated if his desperate circumstances were the result of being robbed by someone else and weren't a result of his own mistakes, bad judgement, or him having taken stupid risks.
Later in the game, you meet Conrad and Megan, two friends of Zack. They don't know he's dead, nor (obviously) that you killed him. If you like Conrad and Megan—especially if they aid you in some important way or if they help you get through a dangerous situation—then you'll have mixed feelings about the fact that they don't know you killed their friend. Once again, you'll be in an emotionally complex situation.
If they then learn you killed Zack, they could get furious and try to kill you. Now you have the choice of either having to kill your friends, or run from them—in order to save them from your killing them, which is what would most likely happen if you fight them. Either of these choices—to kill them or to flee—is emotionally complex.
In the preceding sequence, I took a simple notion—Karma—and then added emotional complexity to it. I call this process Complexification. Later in the book, Chapter 2.29, “Injecting Emotion into a Game's Story Elements,” covers this in depth.
Having NPCs within the game's world know each other or know of each other, and talk about each other, is a simple way to create Cohesiveness.
For example, you come into a village. One of the NPCs worriedly asks if you saw her cousin at the village you just came from (and which was the scene of a large battle).
Give Your Game a Theme[1]
What's your story about? Let's say we are were doing a Buffy the Vampire Slayer game.[2] The game could offer many rich themes.
For example, Buffy's a human who can do superhuman feats. She possesses powers that most people don't. What if power is our theme? If so, then we'd explore that through the various missions and side missions.
Does one of her friends attain power that consumes her (the friend) and causes her to do evil? (This was done in the series.)
Does Buffy find that she can have the power to overcome demons… but lack the power to fix the relationship of two friends of hers whose love is on the rocks? (The idea here is that one can be powerful in one realm but not another.)
What if Buffy confronts Tanya, another slayer gone bad? What if Tanya offers strong incentives for Buffy to become evil as well (at least for a time). For instance, maybe by becoming evil for a period, Buffy can get some temporary abilities that would allow her to hopefully defeat the big boss at the end of the game?
In short, the game could be used to delve into the theme of various kinds of power, as well as the positive and negative sides of power.
The theme would need to be explored in the plot, the subplots, the characters, and maybe even the gameplay itself. We could explore it in gameplay by, on one hand, giving Buffy some special abilities that would be magnified when she's doing evil, while, on the other hand, giving her rewards for not doing evil. Let me explain:
Combining this idea with the concept of Karma from the previous chapter—when Buffy gains power in terms of special abilities (by doing evil for a short period), she loses power (influence) over her friends, who desert her, and whom she needs on her side to defeat whatever or whoever is the game's dangerous boss. So, when she gains one kind of power in gameplay (heightened abilities), she loses power in other forms of gameplay (her friends no longer fight alongside her).[3]
As discussed in Chapter 2.10, “NPC Rooting Interest Techniques,” some Emotioneering techniques are multi-functional, in that they serve more than one purpose. This technique is also a Motivation Technique, explored in the previous chapter.
One way to provide Cohesiveness is to take the various characters, locations, and events that at first seem disconnected and let the player gradually discover that there are larger relationships and possibly plot-lines tying them all together.
Before addressing games, let's see how the challenge has been handled in film and television. An example would be the hip, darkly funny (and very worth seeing) film, Go. It presents us with a number of teens in a variety of weird adventures. Gradually we see that their different plot-lines, which at first seem unrelated, eventually all tie together. Pulp Fiction, which seems to have been one of the inspirations behind Go, did the same thing. Shifting to television, the show Seinfeld also consistently interwove seemingly disparate plot-lines in a funny way. The film L.A. Confidential struck a serious tone as it tied together a number of characters and plots that at first seemed disconnected.
Here's an example from a hypothetical game: Let's say that, in the game, you've been collecting shards of colored meteors that have been splintering and falling to earth. These colored rocks, especially when they're collected in quantities, give you unique abilities.
Meanwhile, there have been sightings of alien craft that have been appearing in your vicinity with increasing frequency.
The rocks and the alien craft seem unrelated. Later, however, you find out the larger pattern: These meteors have been sent by aliens, who want you to develop your powers so you can help them in their approaching hour of need.
Continuity doesn't only have to come from external sources. In life, we provide our own continuities by applying skills learned in one part of our life to situations we find in another.
If you learn to swim underwater in one part of the game, and you need this skill in an emergency situation later in the game, this also creates Cohesiveness.
This, of course, is a technique already used frequently in many games.
Here's an example of this technique: You're trying to free the castle, which has been held hostage by a family of dragons.
You've got to go out and learn to slay other mythical beasts, improving your skills and knowledge until you're ready to assault the bionic flame-throwers themselves.
If, every once in awhile, you get news of the increasingly dire situation within the castle, that reminds you of the stakes and gives the game some Cohesiveness—especially if you care about one or more of the characters who are endangered.
If you're playing a Star Wars game and fighting the Empire, you've got a lot of Cohesiveness built right in. You've got a persistent enemy, persistent allies, you live in a universe where people in one part are aware of those in another, and so on.
But this isn't always the case in every game. If, in the game you design, you've got the player's character going on an adventure, particularly if it's an adventure that takes the player from one location to another on a kind of “road trip,” then sometimes you need to work to ensure that it all hangs together—i.e., that it stays Cohesive.
If the game offers you the chance to play different characters, even characters who don't “know” each other, and these characters go through very different types of missions, then the need for Cohesiveness becomes paramount.
Your life, no doubt, has continuity. That's because it utilizes many Cohesiveness Techniques. Although the number of Cohesiveness Techniques is quite vast, hopefully the ones mentioned in this chapter will serve as a strong foundation.
[1] The word theme can mean many things. Two ways it has been used in this book are:
A subject central to the story, explored from many points of view, with no conclusion made about the subject
A subject central to the story, explored from many points of view, with a conclusion finally made about the subject
Clarifications, instructions, and examples of how to do this were covered in Chapter 2.17, “Plot Deepening Techniques,” and Chapter 2.21, “First-Person Deepening Techniques.”
[2] I know that the TV series is off the air. Hopefully, you'll have caught at least an episode or two in syndication. I pick her for this example because the show, during its history, explored a wealth of themes.
[3] Would this exploration of power be Idea Mapping or Multiple Viewpoints? If it's an interesting intellectual exercise, it's Idea Mapping and it's a Plot Deepening Technique. If it causes the player to wrestle with moral and emotional issues, it's Multiple Viewpoints and it's a First-Person Deepening Technique. For an extensive discussion of these issues, see Chapter 2.21, “First-Person Deepening Techniques.”