Weekly Glitch: Basic Interactivity

For his first editorial, Lucas Hannon discusses basic interactivity within video games.

Interactivity is the single most important aspect of gaming – it defines and separates the gaming medium from cinema, literature and music.  It is amorphous and comes in many forms.  Today, I’ll be speaking about “Basic Interactivity”, its virtues, failings, and where we should go next.

 

Strip away all the particle effects and all the bullet-time sequences.  The quick-time events, bloom lighting and the cel-shading.  Take it all away for a moment.  Realize that at the root of its existence – a video game is nothing more than a program.

A program only as intelligent as its coding and only as particular as its primary functions allow it to be.  If you are to shoot, it will provide you a gun.  If you are to fly, it will grant you wings.  Subsequently, the tools given are always coupled with the means to operate.  When you press a button – the game responds and it’s a direct digital (and ironically – mechanical) reaction to your intended action.  The given response is just expected to happen for the user; if it does not, we lose connection with whatever message the game is trying to relay.  If it feels broken, incomplete or complex, it will detach us from the experience and invoke a negative aftertaste, despite the developer’s best intentions; sometimes the execution of a particular vision of character movement bogs down gameplay.

I don’t believe the definition of basic interactivity is limited to simple button presses, however; completion bonuses for a mission, chests in RPGs and control gimmicks all fall into this category.  These are shallow and simple to execute; it often gives the impression that they are introduced by developers to give a particular title the impression of depth.  Don’t get me wrong, I enjoy replayability in a title as well as an off-beat control scheme – I just feel developers often times sacrifice creativity for a quick cash-in, and the the gaming medium chugs along when it should be, in fact, soaring.

So what evolutionary steps can be taken to improve this medium, taking these simple concepts, without digressing to the tired-and-true methods of the past?  It should be noted that in order for the next step to be made, experimental gameplay methods must be put on the market and tested by a large audience.  Therefore, how can a happy medium be struck between “functional” and “experimental” when there is so much to gain by just copying and pasting?  To be honest, there seems to be even more to lose if a developer takes a risk, and such actions are usually made by small independent development teams that was created with the sole intent of doing so.

For starters, developers can take a look at “elementary” control schemes for inspiration.  One might argue that simplistic controls do not allow freedom of movement, which I completely understand – but would you honestly favor a complex and unintuitive one?  Austin spoke of a basic control scheme that is aesthetically pleasing to “touch”.  I believe this to be the evolution of basic controls.  When a game feels natural – when it appeals to our most basic of instincts – it strikes us as profound and genuine.  Prince of Persia appealed to both Austin’s and my tastes because the gameplay was smooth, fluid and it just felt right.  Although PoP was not a crowning achievement in any sense, it was a solid effort to create controllable movement that was graceful and beautiful.  Prince of Persia showed just how effective a ”tactically aesthetic” approach can be.

Another example is one you might not expect: Crash Commando.  For those of you that haven’t picked it up, it’s a 2.5D multiplayer frag-fest that contains many of the standard modes you would see in a first-person shooter.  It plays like many popular flash games – the left stick controls your character, the right controls your aim.  There is a jetpack that introduces another layer of movement (vertical) and also allows quick dodge maneuvers.  As the player starts to become comfortable with the game (especially in large matches), the shoot-dodge motion becomes second nature and the dormant, reflexive part of us takes over.  No longer watching your character in relation to the environment, the eyes twitch and scope out a means of escape, cover or opportunity.  The game map, along with grenades, bullets and vehicles, become a part of the player’s character – as such, the game becomes a part of the player.  In the real world, external reality is an internally created state based on sensory information.  Your distinct sensory experiences, although not part of your physical body, are an extension of you and allows repetitive actions to be performed without thought; we do not think of how to walk up stairs after the first few steps, we just do so.  Crash Commando succeeds in providing the player the subconscious illusion that he is “in” the game world (if only on an instinctual level) effortlessly, despite the fact it is comical in its delivery and presentation.  This due to the simple-yet-effective control scheme.  This is a very good thing.

Up to this point, this article has been trying to make a case on how developers can immerse players by intelligently mapping the human interface, and disingenuously assumes that the “basic interactivity” umbrella falls only on such.  Any game, regardless of genre or style choice, attempts to create a personal relationship between it and the player, which many times ends in failure.  I think this is neither due to the fact that the storyline, writing and VOs are bad, nor because the world does not represent a level of realism.  I also don’t believe we have become jaded, either.  I think these games fail, at least on a mechanical level, because they try to implement control gimmicks - QTEs, bullet-time and the like - all in an effort to portray the semblance of realism or, even worse, to ”spice up gameplay”.  All this does is further alienate the player from attaining a personal experience because we know what the developer is trying to do.  In short, it worked the first time. A control scheme does not have to dramatically change direction in an effort to give the impression of varied gameplay.  The single-player campaign in Halo 2 felt varied without relying on gimmicks – taking us to different locations, adding another playable character, expanding on driving sections and including “boss-battles” made the game feel epic and diverse and did so without the help of a micro-games peppered about.  As long as a game maintains pace in other areas, a single, solid control design will carry a player from the start to finish.

I think we are all familiar with Final Fantasy XII’s infamous Zodiac Spear “feature”.  The game, (with neither fore nor after warning) had four chests which, if any are opened before you get to a specific dungeon of the game, would not allow the player to receive the spear.  Oh, and the spear just so happens to be the most powerful weapon in the game.  Despite being a poor design choice from conception (and possibly the most extreme example of such), this trend is common in many games, particularly RPGs.  This kind of basic interactivity regresses gaming, as there is no way to even know the spear exists (unless you chose not to open any treasure chests up to that point) without going online or having a strategy guide handy.

If you want us to believe and become invested in a world, please do not include elements that force us to refer back to the real one.  This is true with RPGs, as well as any game that feature a completion bonus or ”rank” at the end of missions.  Admittedly, some games are more… well… gamey than others, but many narrative-driven titles can forgo these features without fear that they will not appeal to the mass-market.  Can’t we have a computer character tell us we did a good job, drop us a hint about a legendary weapon or hand us a gun the start of a mission, based on our performance the mission prior?  There are plenty of sneaky ways that a game can tell us how we did, or what we are to do.  Why do we need to be frequently reminded that we are playing game?  I see no movie, book or song doing that for their respective medium; save for fourth-wall breaking, self-aware parodies, it’d be a joke if they did.

These are arguments for developers that try to take the art of the game “seriously”; I’m not trying to make a case that the next Rock Band or Guitar Hero game shouldn’t have a HUD, or that the next Time Crisis should be ultra-realistic.  There is plenty of room for Tekken and Heavy Rain to peacefully coexist.  These are genuine suggestions for developers that have a projected profit margin they have to hit, yet still wish to pursue making games more interactive, and thus, immersive; in the end, there is no further point to which interactivity can progress than when you have the players lose themselves within it.

Next week: Advanced Interactivity - The Mind