XI – The Inevitable Post!

Tools for Creating Dramatic game Dynamics

We were recently given the LeBlanc document related to a games Uncertainty and Inevitability. It discusses how drama is a desirable quality of games and how it is a part of a games play content – it is a kind of fun. It also states how we cannot create drama, only the circumstances from which drama will emerge, which I half agree with but only due to the games that are solely based on storylines such as Heavy Rain, which is basically an interactive movie with immense control, similar in fashion to the battle books were you control were your character goes and what items he uses.

Aesthetic Model: Encompass our understanding of what drama is and how it occurs.
Dramatic Arc: Central conflict of narrative, creates tension that accumulates as story builds to a climax and then dissipates as conflict is resolved

What is dramatic tension? 

Dramatic tension is the level of emotional investment in the story’s conflict, the sense of apprehension and urgency with which we await the story’s outcome. It gives the story a sense of wholeness, that it is a complete work with a start, middle and end. All drama originates from conflict – in one form or another, in a game the conflict comes from the contest around which the game is built. For example, a story driven game has its drama in the character arcs, a FPS game has drama on its inherent conflict, kill or be killed etc. Dramatic tension is the product of:

•   Uncertainty: The sense that the outcome of the contest is still unknown, any player can still win or lose.
• Inevitability: The sense that the contest is moving forward towards a resolution, the outcome is imminent.

Without uncertainty, the outcome of the game becomes a forgone conclusion and the players become spectators.
Without inevitability the outcome of the conflict seems distant and players are given little incentive to invest their emotions in the contest.

Over the course of the game we expect the inevitability to increase and the uncertainty to decrease, the climax of the game happens at the moment of realisation, when the outcome is clear

Dramatic uncertainty is needed to create and on-going sense that the game is  a close contest and yet undecided,  uncertainty and inevitability are caused by different systems and mechanics such as a negative feed system which is used to decrease the gap between the leading players and the players that are falling behind.

However they can cause a game to stagnate as they remove inevitability, and so enter the positive feedback system which gives players in the lead an advantage, adding to the obvious outcome of the game and also ensures that the game does not take too long and keeps the players from losing interest.

There are two methods of applying these feedback systems;

• Force - Manipulating the state of the contest itself
•  Illusion - The game seems closer than it actually is

Pseudo Feedback, illusion and dramatic uncertainty 

It seems as though there is a negative feedback system in play, but in fact there is not. It is just the illusion of one, they can be implemented in many ways and here are a few of them listed in the document:

• Escalation: Score changes more dramatically the longer the game has been running, an example of this would be in Tetris, the longer you play the more points you get per line.

• Hidden Energy: creates dramatic uncertainty by manipulating players understanding of the score. It is easy to think of this as a starting resource, or a special item that can be used at any point in the game, using it early on can give that player the lead and it can seem as though they are doing better than the other, but factoring in the hidden energy the score is relatively equal.

• Fog of War: This is about the control of information. You cannot be sure of how well you are doing in comparison to the opponent until you discover what they have been doing under the fog of war. It keeps the score unknown, or repeatedly hides the score slowly adding more and more information until the climax is imminent.

• Decelerator: This is when the score gets slowed down, at one section it progresses slowly and once you are past that it continues as normal. It creates the illusion that the players are close, but whoever reaches the slow section first will also more than likely leave it first as well and then the score will return to its original form.

Dramatic Inevitability – Force

The largest classification of inevitability is the Ticking Clock under which everything else derives. It is the countdown that you see in every game, it can be the health bars in a fighting game, the resources and amount of units in an RTS game, the amount of pickups in a FPS game or a literal clock in any type of game. It measures a player’s progress through the game and gives a sense of how far the end might be, it is a matter of the player’s perception. 

Resolution

In this documents final pages it states how tension cannot rise forever, it needs to drop to give the player a sense of closure on the game, it needs to reach the climax, then change direction and fade away. Sometimes the resolution can occur in the meta-game, but there is still a resolution.

This was an interesting read, it gave insight into how we should plan the methods of progress through a game, it is hard to remember at times that these also apply to solo games against the computer. A lot of these topics will be used later in my computer games design course and also in my own personal projects.

SM – iHK

‘;..;’