There is nothing worse than trying to go to sleep on a mattress that is totally comfy except for one little spring rebelliously against its intended nature knifing you in the back reminding you why you wake up in the morning so grumpy. Books, films, and video-games all try their absolute best to get the engaging participant to be absorb, engrossed, and immersed into the construct of their narrative and style of conveyance. Video-games are still a relatively young medium in comparison to literature and motion-picture, but it has managed to overcome many problems to become a very engaging and celebrated art-form. However there are some problems that are still plaguing the medium even today, and we’re going to take a look at them. Here are the fundamental problems in Game-Design
Paralyzes by choice
This problem is one that exists more the in inclinations of the players game-play style. Many cult games like Ultima Underworld, System Shock, Thief, and Deus Ex; all start off with the player been presented with an immediate fork in the road. All produced by the industry legend; Warren Spector, who wanted the players to “stop, observe. formulate a plan, and engage.” The bewilderment that many ‘casual’ gamers encountered back in 2000 was that of being presented with a choice that was more critical than that of what gun you could pick up or when to use a particular power-up you had been hoarding. It was about crafting the experience you wanted, be as lethal as you chose, be the paragon or renegade you wanted to be, save the friend you loved, or liberate the people you swore to protect. In 2007 Fallout 3 blasted its way into the publics eye, and many players who weren’t familiar with RPG (role-playing games) at all, let alone the previous installments of the franchise were themselves immediately paralyzed by choice when they first took their first steps out of Vault 101 and stepped onto the overview to see Washington DC and a sprawling wasteland in which to explore, but because their gaming inclinations were to stay on the straight and narrow and follow the arrows to the objective, most players ran straight to Megaton and then completed the game within a day. The problem is that these players didn’t understand what they where being given, was it an FPS (First-Person Shooter) or was it a sandbox game? All though the concept of a Sandbox FPSRPG hybrid is now well recognized in the gaming field, the Paralyzes by choice issue, is still having some problems, due to our next entry.
Constrained self-amusement due to limited choice
When you watch a horror movie, you almost always scream at the screen shouting “don’t go in there you fool!”, but the character does anyway and malarkey ensues. In many video-games, we are forced to do things we don’t want to or aren’t given the freedom to do what we want to do. Granted the main goal of any narrative whether or not it’s interactive is to tell a story, and storytelling does require some constraints to keep the player going along a path toward the conclusion(s). But we’ve all wanted to shoot characters that we don’t like, and continue with the game without that character, we all want to go into the skybox (an area of the game-world that gives the impression of the horizon and greater scale to a location) but we can’t go there due to invisible walls. Even in games that offer multiple solutions like Deus Ex and Dishonored are much more linear than fans or the developers would like to admit. It isn’t that the choices presented are necessarily bad, but that constraint only serves to remind us that we are in a virtual world that follows unrealistic rules. Another problem with the choice problems gets really fueled and complex in the next entry.
The conversation problem
Doug Church of Ultima Underworld & System Shock fame was never satisfied with the conversation tree system implemented in games at the time. See https://gamerheadlines.com/doom-beat-system-shock-system-shock-shaped-doom-3/ for more details. Warren Spector of Deus Ex fame said that he’s never had to tell an actor to hold back emotion as much as Jay Anthony Franke who provided the voice of JC in Deus Ex. Warren said “you don’t want the character to be angry when you the player aren’t, he shouldn’t present any emotional bias towards anything, the player should be able to imprint their own opinions and emotional contexts on the words coming out of his (JC’s) mouth.” A solution that was presented in the System Shock & Bioshock games was to simply kill off every other character and keep the protagonist silent. The Mass Effect trilogy did its best to offer a complex dialog-tree that could present consequence to the players choices and allow for some emotional conveyance of the players prerogative. But again the player is constrained to a script, he or she cannot say what they want to say, ask the questions they want to ask, and they can deliver emotional context with what they say.
These problems are the fundamental issues that plague the development and immersion into a game world. There are other problems that are more caused by society and opinions, and I invite you to share and discuss them in the comment section below.
