Free Play

Kevin Parker from the April 2004 issue

(Page 2 of 3)

And while SimCity lags, the company that makes it has planned to join the individualist revolution by other means. Newsweek reported in 2002 that the designers of The Sims Online intend to "hand the economy and the governing structure over to the subscribers, so that each city effectively becomes a SimCity controlled by its players." This has not happened yet, perhaps in part because Maxis has met with unexpected difficulty preventing an explosion of vice, crime, and vigilantism in the new game's environs. But given the chance, would subscribers adopt laws like the strict zoning inherent in the original? And if they don't, will SimCity-loving high school teachers and urban planning professors patronize The Sims Online, or will they stick with its less democratic predecessors?

Environmentalism, technocratic planning, self-organizing systems -- every cause and school of thought with a cultural pulse and a few gigs of hard drive space finds promise in this new form. The socialist writer Barbara Garson has said she wants to "explain globalization...through a game." And Ted Friedman, a professor of cultural studies at Georgia State, writes that it's "easy to imagine" a computer game based on Marx's Capital, though he does not elucidate this vision for his readers.

Free the Gamers!

In theory, the easiest way to graft an ideology onto a game is through the story, as with the post-apocalyptic backdrop to Gore. In practice, it's not so simple. Facile analogies to the movies have concealed a deep tension between game play and narrative.

Storytelling has so possessed game design that, with the exception of sports, racing, and a few other genres, it is rare for major titles to forego extensive script and character development. But while stories can supply context and direction, they are told, not played. Full-motion video became reviled by many gamers in the mid-'90s for periodically butting in to tell unevenly produced story-snippets. Though visually striking, such vignettes tend to clash stylistically with game graphics. But the real downside is that they seize control from the player. One moment he is guiding the main character's actions; a moment later that power is frozen while a video clip plays. If the protagonist does something during the scene that the player would rather not have done, that is considered an acceptable cost of telling the story.

Like locked doors and other plot-regulating devices, such "cut scenes" chafe players who are ready for action. In his 2001 book Game Design: Theory & Practice, Richard Rouse III counsels developers to avoid linear design for a deeper reason. "If the player wants to replay the game again, that is fine, but the primary goal of non-linearity is to surrender some degree of authorship to the player." Linear stories are the governors of game worlds. They tell you who you are, what you seek, and how you might succeed. Players go along, some happily, others yawningly -- or they take control in the real world by turning the game off.

Yet there is a continual drumbeat for games to be more like movies. The intent is not simply to include more film clips, but to make gameplay itself more cinematic. Pressure comes from journalists reporting on game/movie deals, and from observers and game developers themselves, who for a variety of reasons see cinematic games as the next step in game evolution. One session at last year's Game Developers Conference was titled "Story and Gameplay Are One." Indeed, while many in the industry speak highly of nonlinear approaches, other reviewers and developers stress the importance of a game's story above almost any quality except "fun."

Whatever the shape of the theoretical dispute, today's gamers are finding new freedom from constraining storylines. The Sims, that dishwashing, interior-decorating, hot-tubbing juggernaut, offers no story to unify all the simulated shopping and flirting. (What stories do exist are entirely player-generated: Some people write Sims fan fiction.) The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind, the latest fantasy role-playing title from the publisher-developer Bethesda, was hyped in part because of the autonomy it grants players. Morrowind does have an epic storyline, but the player has unusual freedom to tackle unrelated challenges and even to ignore the main plot -- or to continue playing after the story has wrapped up.

Likewise, Microsoft's Freelancer is "speci-fically structured" to offer both a story and an open-ended universe. At least two games, Vampire: The Masquerade (Activision) and Neverwinter Nights (Atari), allow users to be "game masters" for groups of players, providing them with architectural tools and control of all game events save the players' own actions. This role was originally created by the gaming legend Gary Gygax for the original pen-and-paper role-playing game, Dungeons & Dragons. For his part, Gygax has said storytelling "has little or no connection" to role-playing games, which differ "in all aspects" from novels, films, and other narrative arts.

Finally, there is the top-selling game of 2001, the infamous crime romp Grand Theft Auto III, by Rockstar Games, which sets players loose in Liberty City ("America's worst city," the publishers say) to tackle the plot-advancing missions only when and if they want to. ABC's Nightline homed in on GTA3's graphic violence in a 2002 program pitting a 17-year-old gamer against a police veteran and a child development academic who was already sure media violence begets the real thing. By focusing on the superficial, they missed what is truly revolutionary about the game.

The players didn't. "The only controversy should have been explaining why it took the industry so long to design such a brilliantly free-form game," PC Gamer asserts. Robert Holt's review for National Public Radio stresses the depth of the simulated city. "Sure, there's a quest in there," he says, "but the larger world is what makes this such a rich experience." Interestingly, players begin both GTA3 and Morrowind in the role of a freed prisoner. Captive audience no longer.

Playing with the Real

Twitchy kids with little patience for stories are not the only kink in the railroad to cinematic game design. Realism has become an ever-present selling point in the gaming press and on game packaging -- not merely realistically rendered detail but a deeper sort of reality: a world with more consistent rules, more room for autonomous behavior, and therefore more resemblance to the outside universe. For games, "realism" means not only that graphics have leaped into fluid 3D but also that sound, physics, and character behavior have advanced in kind. Programmers of the 1980s added color to computer games, but they could scarcely anticipate sound reflection, complex friction models, and flocking behavior -- all now stock in trade for the industry.

Realism replaces micromanagement with player responsibility. Traditional designs have players guessing what solution the designer had in mind for each obstacle -- "a huge buzz-kill when playing a game," says Holt. Some newer games, sporting realistic physics models, simply set victory conditions and let players find solutions through trial and error, logic and innovation. Designers of free-form games cannot assume that all the players will solve problems the same way in the same order. Such a diversity of outcomes makes it hard to impart the cinematic touch.

Writing in Wired about such physics simulations, Mark Frauenfelder notes that most game objects "act as though they've been painted on a theater backdrop. If you try to use them, the facade falls down." But with real-time physics, players can use objects in ways they might try in the real world. Subjecting what was formerly scenery or props to believable interaction draws players in and gives them yet more control. It
can also lead to unexpected results. Frauenfelder cites the technique of "rocket jumping" in the popular 1996 game Quake (id Software): Players shoot a rocket at the ground and ride the shockwave to otherwise inaccessible heights.