Problem Solving! Dear Esther

Last time I was talking about Dear Esther and about how rules play and culture all fit into it's game space. Like I said, the game is award winning but that does not mean that it does not have problems. It is not a perfect game because of what the developers want to accomplish, and the the many limiting rules in place to facilitate the vision. Players have complained about the slow pace that the game moves and about how limited interaction with the game environment forces the player to break immersion. Most of all, players have complained about the lack of freedom that the game allows.

The argument is: if the players are able to interact with the game environment, the storytelling elements of Dear Esther may potentially be enhanced. Imagine moving about in the game's world and interacting with various things on the island in order to progress the story forward. While that may sound beautiful in theory, it may also create unintended side effects that would break immersion more than the lack or interaction already does. For an example, picking up an abandoned pendant to hear a vignette of Esther talking about her marriage to your character would be great, but what if the object you need to interact with becomes bugged? That same pendant would, instead of activating the vignette, cause your character to fall through the floor into an expanse of infinite white. While this is an extreme example, it is not unheard of for a bug like this to happen. Another argument against interactive objects is that the players themselves could unintentionally, or even intentionally, ruin the storytelling experience by finding ways to play with the world and items in it in a way that does not fit with the experience. Lets say that the very same necklace is an object that you could pick up. If you collide with the pendant while trying to move closer to it, there are ways that the amulet can go flying away due to game physics. That would produce not only an annoying bug/glitch/strangeness, but it would also break the narrative that the developers so masterfully set up.

All of these reasons point towards reasons to make the game as it was, but are there ways for the game to have interactive pieces while keeping the narrative experience as smooth as possible? My answer to this question is a definite yes. While there are many ways that interaction can interfere with the story and content present in the game, there are specific challenges that could actually be implemented that would make the game more immersive, and minimize the amount of times that you break the magic circle. One such type of interaction would be the use of something as simple as a flashlight. Your character is holding a flashlight, and by shining it on specific parts of the environment, you will hear the anecdotes and move the story onward. In order to keep the story moving, the player will not need to shine the flashlight onto anything specifically, but just turn it on in a given area to move the tale forward. Another example of a non-immersion breaking interaction is a touch system, where the player will see their character reach out and touch an object, such as a cavern wall, to activate the story script. The player would also be able to interact with water by touching the surface and seeing the ripples, interact with tall grass by running his hand through it, or tracing the chalk markings on a standing stone. All of these things would not have the problems addressed before, or at least minimize them, and would help add to the immersion of the game.



The magic circle is a term coined by Johan Huizinga to describe the activity of play. The players would enter a "magic circle" where all of the rules of "real life" would be null and void, while the rules of play/the game would hold sway. A famous section of Homo Ludens in which Huizinga tries to describe how the magic circle works is: a little boy is playing on the font of a row of chairs when his father comes and hugs him before the boy replies "Don't kiss the engine, Daddy, or the carriages won't think it's real." The boy knows that the train is not real, but wants to pretend that it is within the magic circle, but his father unintentionally "breaks" the magic circle, causing the boy to tell his father that the make believe train won't think that it's real. In the magic circle, the rules of "real life" do not apply, and only the rules of play exist.

Games, Games: Dear Esther

How do you make an interesting game? Or, to pose a better question, how do you make an interesting concept that translates well into a fun and playable game? The answer comes from many places, and according to many designers, from many varying inspirations. However, my professor, Eric Zimmerman, has laid out a general spread of concepts that would be useful to any game designer, outlined in his textbook Rules of Play. In Rules of Play, Eric talks about a variety of topics that relate directly to games, such as rules, play, and culture. Through the various topics, he gives designers a core set of concepts to make designing more of a streamlined creative process rather than a haphazard amalgamation of techniques.

Let's take a look at indie games. Many indie games are based off of experimental ideas, such as Minecraft's sandbox world or Dear Esther's story telling experience. The designers of these games make conscious choices to include or not include specific gameplay norms established by the AAA part of the games industry.

Dear Esther

Rules
Dear Esther abandons combat, platforming, and other forms of interaction with the game environment. The players are not allowed to sprint, to jump, to pick anything up, to swim, to fight, or to interact with the environment in any way except looking and walking. They are limited by these simples rules that cannot be violated in order to enhance the aspects that the designer wants the player to pay more attention to. The rules exist for the players. They exist as systems of emergence, information theory, game theory and more. All of these rules come together in context to help create the experience of.....

Play
As the players explore the deserted island in the only way they can, they listen to anecdotes and vignettes of various people and of your deceased wife, Esther. They find haunting and lonely beaches filled with the wreckage of ships and the bones of long dead animals. While they are moving and experiencing the island at the very deliberate pace set by the game, they find rolling but empty plains filled with strange standing stones. As the players hear the complement of melancholy violins, piano keys, and cello, they find immense, hollow caverns with glowing drawings on the walls. Play is not only an experience, but it is pleasurable and meaningful, it is a narrative, a simulation, and social.The experience is the entire island (read game), while the players take pleasure in seeing the vistas and listening to the music or hearing the anecdotes. Meaning is derived from the narrative and the simulation of exploration, while the players are social in their lives and talk about the game itself.

Culture
All of these design choices and all of the pieces of play come together to form the culture of a game. To quote Rules of Play, “No game is an island.” (503) Games exist to be played by many people, and even solitary games can be social because of the people playing them. Games are also not only a magic circle in which players can play and explore, because they are embedded within culture and society. Dear Esther was created as a mod and due to that, its community was an offshoot of the Half Life community. However, it quickly spiraled into something new and branched off and created its own culture, with people discussing the game’s narrative structure, the meaning of its narrative, and more. The culture of Dear Esther is rooted in the relationship between the game and the larger context of where, how, and when it is played.


Eric Zimmerman is a game designer and former CEO of the now dysfunct Gamelab. He has taught at many schools, including MIT and currently at the NYU Game Center as a founding faculty member. He also founded the Institute of Play, a non-profit organization that creates schools based on games and play as a model for learning. Eric has also written Rules of Play, a game design text book about the fundamentals of game design, and is currently using it in his class, which I am currently taking. I'd like to give a huge thanks to Eric for being so amazing, and inspiring me to take design head on and with a better mindset than what I had previously, and for teaching me a few of the many nuggets of wisdom that he has to share.

Dear Esther is an award winning indie game that is trying to break the boundaries of what a game is. It has polarized critics and players alike in a way that few game can with its abandonment of traditional gameplay elements and although many gamers hate it for the wrong reasons, others love it for the immersive storytelling experience that only a game like Dear Esther can allow. It was created from the culture of gaming and has opened up new doors for designers to explore, expand, and branch off into.
 

Hello World!

Hello ladies and gents, mutants and aliens, and all other unrepresented intelligent things out there in the universe!

My name, is Matt, code named TorrMercury, also known as Agent Darkwall, Lahyts, and a variety of other names. What I am here for, is something odd, something passionate, something amazing, and not quite believable. Can you guess what that is? The answer my good friend, is Problem Solving, but not in the traditional sense. Problem Solving to the Nth Degree is about solving, or at least attempting to solve, design issues in games. Meaning, GAME DESIGN!!!

Hopefully, I will be discussing many of the problems that video games, board games, and all sorts of other games that currently exist, have and need solving, and propose some solutions to them to hopefully solve the problem. However, in reality, and the more likely situation, is that I will be discussing design topics and learning about them through my ramblings here.

I want to learn and to share my experiences in the games field because it is something that I have wanted all my life to get into. From all sorts of opposition from my family, and from lots of scoffing and put downs from teachers and guidance counselors, I have pushed through and have entered into the realm of my dreams, and found it lacking. I love games, no matter what kind: video, pen and paper, board, sports, etc. I love them for the play, they study, the design, the escape, and more. Because of this though, I want to contribute back to what I love so much. I want to give all of the passion inside of me to a new creation. I want to do what Johan Huizinga would definitely agree with: give rise to new institutions and culture from play, and new play from institutions and culture.

I am merely an aspiring game designer, a student of the NYU Game Center, learning as much as I can about design before I head out into the wide world of gaming.

Are we ready, friends? L-l-l-let's begin!

TL;DR: I like games and designing them so I started a blog to talk about game design.

Johan Huizinga (1872-1945) was arguably the first true scholar of play. He wrote the book Homo Ludens (Man at Play) in 1938, and talked about play in its own context. He was a man that was ahead of his time, and a man who knew what he stood for and stood beside it to the very end. He was an anti-materialist and an anti-fascist. Homo Ludens was as much a reaction to the fascist and socialist/communist movements as it was an actual study on what play is. A huge shout out to this man, who inspired me to become a designer and to think about games as more than just something that I do for fun.

The NYU Games Center is a magical play in New York City, a part of New York University's Tisch School of the Arts, and a huge part of my life. It is headed by Frank Lantz, and features many prominent game designers and scholars as professors, including: Yesper Yuul, who wrote Half-Real and A Casual Revolution, and Eric Zimmerman, who wrote Rules of Play and designed Dinner Dash. A huge thanks to the Game Center for being the amazing resource and source of inspiration that it is.