“What we want in general from a videogame story is not interactive narrative at all, but a sophisticated illusion that gives us pleasure without responsibility …”
– Trigger Happy: The Inner Life of Videogames by Steven Poole
Be honest. You don’t care. Not really. All those characters that looked to you to guard their safety in one hazardous environment after another were all expendable. The times PacMan wilted into nothing because you didn’t spot the ghosts closing in. The times Vice City‘s Tommy Vercetti couldn’t quite evade the pursuing FBI because you didn’t find a getaway vehicle in time. All the times the Prince of Persia plunged to his death because you could quite get his jump right. And you didn’t shed a single tear of sorrow for any of them.
Sure, you might have yelled out in frustration, but that’s self-interest, not the same as caring for the character in question. As both the journalist Steven Poole and the academic Jesper Juul have independently observed, a key component of more conventional narrative forms like the novel and cinema is the very aspect of irreversibility. In other words, you weep over the death of Ali McGraw’s character in the film Love Story because you know she isn’t going to spring back to life and end the film tripping through fields of corn with Ryan O’Neal.
Most video games are not the same as films, novels, or theatre plays, at least not in this regard. If the main character, the avatar, ends up dead, then don’t worry; hit restart and play again. So, if you don’t care each time Sonic, Max Payne, or Mario ends up dead, then don’t worry; it’s not surprising. In the video game world, nothing is forever. This, from the viewpoint of the people who make games, renders the question of enabling player empathy very tricky. Why care about a character who, Lazarus-like, can be resurrected moments after some unfortunate demise? Like London buses, there’ll be another one in a moment.
How to make people care about video game characters has been exercising my thoughts a lot of late. I’ve spent the last few weeks putting the finishing touches to the script elements of an online game I’ve been working on. Not only do I have the blistered fingers to prove it, but I also have the indentations from an overly furrowed brow trying to solve the question of character empathy.
The project I’ve been working on is called the NOKs Collecting Battles game. The best way to describe it is as a kind of cross between Pokemon and the X-Men. The player gets to fight battles (and there are some mean fights) and collects various characters on their computer’s desktop. Not only that, but the player can then communicate with these characters by typing questions and responding to prompts from the character in question.
The game’s premise is that these characters have escaped from an alternate dimension and broken into our reality. In the process, they’ve brought a ferocious war between the Mindians and the Bodians, two titanic armies joined in a seemingly perpetual struggle to control the Multiverse (that’s like the universe, only bigger. Keep up at the back). In the forthcoming version of the game, the Mindians and Bodians are both searching for the so-called Ultimate Weapon, an energy force that can take the shape of any organic or inorganic form. Mindians and Bodians believe that possessing the Ultimate Weapon will guarantee their success in the ongoing war. Suffice it to say that the player will perform a pivotal role in the war’s outcome.
The characters themselves are an eclectic bunch. The Bodians’ Commander is a statuesque blonde woman called Nicole de Simone, who combines her role as leader of the Bodian army on Earth with a career as a transdimensional pop singer. Among her troops is a group of lovable-looking babies whose cutesy appearances belie an appetite for fighting in the game’s highly addictive combat zone, otherwise known as the Nuclear War.
Their Mindian adversaries are equally varied: the game features a group of fey-looking alien types who comprise the ‘Holy Family’, a Mafia-like collection of religious zealots who orchestrate the Mindian forces. These forces include the Troll Squad, a collection of gawky-looking and downright abusive fiends whose fidelity to the Mindian cause is questionable, to say the least.
The Mindians and Bodians are joined by various interlopers who haven’t joined up to either Mindian and Bodian cause, or at least won’t admit to it. These include the NokMan, a part-cybernetic rocket-charged Adonis who firmly resents the arrival of fellow NOKs into Earth’s reality on the logical basis that they’ll be bad for his Unique Selling Point as Greenwich Village’s resident superhero. And Lewis Carroll’s canny Alice gets another trip to video game land and assorted other Wonderland characters. Throw in some footballers, talking tanks, policemen, and DJs, and you have a postmodern melange of characters familiar from the last 40 years or so of video game history together.
The game is a comprehensive revamp of a title previously released in Israel by Atari. It’s been developed by an outfit called NOKs Technologies, which is now based in New York. The CEO is a man called Lior Messinger, who, in the age of email, MSN Messenger, and Skype, I’ve only had the pleasure of meeting once, during a fleeting visit to NYC. Lior is that unusual mix of an incredibly talented professional and terrifically nice guy, which has made our transatlantic conversations all the more fun. His team of designers, programmers, and composers are a similarly gifted bunch of individuals.
My initial task was to construct an overarching storyline that could connect all these disparate characters. An ongoing war into which the Earth is unwillingly thrust seemed a logical solution, one attuned to real-world events. At the same time, it was important for the success of the game to engender genuine emotions from the player towards these often bizarre characters.
NOKs Technologies’ solution to engendering a feeling of empathy with its numerous video game characters is an imaginative reinvention of a much older idea. Artificial intelligence practitioners and researchers are familiar with Eliza, a computer-based ‘virtual psychologist’ who gives the impression of intelligence without being intelligent. Via a text-based interface, Eliza asks her ‘patient’ a series of questions familiar from Jungian analysis. She shapes the responses you give in such a way as to make it appear like she’s listening. Of course, she isn’t listening; really, she’s just picking up on keywords in her lexicon, which makes you feel like you’re being heard.
Characters in the NOKs Collecting Battles game operate on similar lines. They ask you questions, and if you give answers they recognise, they supply a response that ought to make sense as part of an ongoing conversation. When the characters don’t recognise your response, they provide a padding answer before extending the conversation in an appropriate direction.
Over the last few years, the video game industry has become justifiably fixated on issues of characterisation. David Freeman’s book Creating Emotion in Games: The Art and Craft of Emotioneering (published by New Riders) explores practical ways of investing video game characters with sufficient depth so that the player will feel suitably engaged with the game. Interestingly, Freeman doesn’t downplay the role of plot but understands that plot is essential for adequately explaining the characters’ motivations, thus deepening our belief as players in their credibility. Video game storytelling may be a relatively new form of employment for writers, but many of the universal truths of narrative die hard.
But as Warren Spector, former CEO of the mighty developer Ion Storm observed, video game plotlines have got about as experimental as they’re going to get. The nature of videogame production and consumption renders games with myriad branching narratives whereby the player can choose from umpteen different paths that are financially uneconomical, technically unfeasible, and even aesthetically undesirable. Why bother developing huge chunks of memory-munching cut sequences a player may never see because she or he chose to pursue another branch of the story?
The plot progression in the NOKs Collecting Battles game is akin to a jigsaw puzzle. Each character imparts various pieces of information, and it’s up to the player to choose to believe or disbelieve. The player just needs to remember that the future of humanity rests on their shoulders. And this is the crucial aspect. Contrary to Steven Poole’s argument in his seminal book Trigger Happy, I would argue that the key to characterisation in video games is precisely connected to awarding the player some degree of responsibility in the video game environment. You only care what happens in the game if your actions have some opposite and equal reaction.
It’s only then that you’ll shed a tear.
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Colin Harvey will be discussing his work on the NOKs Collecting Battles game at the Mindplay conference at London Metropolitan University, UK on 20 January 2006.