Category: Mechanics

one dimensional

I’ve been utterly taken by the simplicity of Slayin (free to play online/download there; enhanced version $1 on the iTunes store). In its scope, gameplay, and literal definition, it is almost entirely one-dimensional. And this is what makes it great.

<I want to say at this point that “the game unfolds…” but don’t know what the one-dimensional analogue would be. “Extends”?>

bervquest

The player is constrained to a single axis of a scene viewed from the side; moving left and right represents the majority of your gameplay input. As the starting character, a knight, your facing is critical: from one side you are a relentless dealer of death, but from the other you are only meat to be devoured. Other than this directional movement, the only other option available to you is a short jump. You go up, you come right back down. There are no platforms, no skybound powerups. Any escape from that one-dimensional axis is short-lived. And so you move and you face and you dodge wave after wave of enemy, each calling for a slightly different approach. Bosses provide more complex patterns but your options remain the same. Take what little you have and handle everything they throw at you.

Unlocking the second character removes the jump button and the direction of guaranteed slaughter in favour of a spellcasting button that turns you briefly into an invincible and damage-dealing tornado. In the moments between bouts of tempestuous fury, you are made intensely vulnerable. Until your next whirl is ready, you can be harmed from any angle. Gameplay shifts dramatically, an entirely different nuance of timing and position is added to the still-single dimension of movement. Familiar enemies call for entirely new approaches. Forget everything you learned in knight school; you’re a wizard now.

Further deepening the experience are the intermittent merchants, offering slight alterations and improvements to the characters’ abilities. Extend your killing reach or add an additional effect; nothing will let you escape your plane, only survive a few levels longer. The third unlocked character, the knave, has a strange relationship with this merchant: with blades on both sides he collects money only to spend it on objects that increase the future money he will earn. Is this singular pursuit a clever microcosm of the game’s own singular focus?

It’s the thorough exploration of a simple mechanic that makes Slayin shine: a single set of constraints is imposed, then pushed against in every direction in an attempt to squeeze out all the hidden possibilities of the gamespace. It succeeds brilliantly. It is at once accessible, challenging, and rewarding on a number of levels. Would that more games knew their mechanics so well and explored them so thoroughly. Elegance is often born of simplicity and, in this, Slayin is the eleganst.

eleganst1 (l-gnst), adj.
1. Most elegant.

eleganst2 (l-gnst), n.
1. One who is the most elegant

to put a sword in my hand

Just over a decade ago, the game running constantly in the background of my mind and the one that I would rush home from school to play was Jedi Knight II: Jedi Outcast. The single-player campaign was forgettable (especially in comparison to its predecessor); what had me hooked were its online duels. Forgoing the more chaotic free-for-all arena fights, duel servers were set up to rotationally allow two players to duel, lightsabers only, while everyone else watched. The winner stayed to fight another round while the loser was swapped out with the next player in line.

For a time, this seemed incredible to me: switching fighting stances on the fly, moving/jumping/rolling all around the arena, and always keeping your finger primed to mash if you got into a saber lock. I was caught up in this simulation of swordfighting: the responsiveness, the dynamism, the viscerality of it all. I felt it was the closest I’d ever had to a “true dueling experience.” And then I realized the absurdity of it all. The best players were not good duelists, they were simply good at entering the button sequences required to pull of special moves and exploiting their opponents when they fumbled in doing so. When this realization settled in, I felt silly. Here I was, thinking I was experiencing the thrill of swordfighting when all I was doing was mashing keys.

But this isn’t an entirely fair assessment. What I had more accurately been doing was experiencing some of the thrill of swordfighting through abstracted engagement. A click of the mouse is a far cry from swinging a sword, but if the effect is the same (albeit in a simulated form) and its consequences believable, surely it’s not without some of that responsiveness/dynamism/viscerality that swept me up in the first place.

This week I’ve observed a similar pattern in myself playing Infinity Blade II. “I can dodge and block and parry and it’s all so intuitive and natural!” But still all I’m actually doing amounts to taps and swipes on this tiny device in my hands. Yet I’m excited by it: I’ve been given the opportunity to swordfight competently without any of the usual investment or risk. I’ve got enough options ready at my fingertips to feel like I’m responding smartly and dynamically to any given situation. And then I can watch someone else heft the weapon and take the hits and pretend that it’s me.

But it’s a delicate balancing act: take away too much of the player’s investment and consequence and they no longer feel engaged. Pile on too much of these and they feel overwhelmed. There’s a thin line to tread in simulating experience and what we want, I think, is to have the bulk of an experiential payoff available to us after a relatively trivial exertion of effort. This is why Guitar Hero caught on as it did: by reducing the guitar-playing experience to timing and button presses and tying correct execution to rock-out soundtracks, I can feel like a rock star without having to climb that ladder.

It might be “better” to actually learn to swordfight or to play the guitar; these real-world pursuits have auxiliary benefits that aren’t captured in game simulation, but it’s a whole heck of a lot less accessible. And what of the more fantastical? I’ll never have the opportunity to fight a dragon; that’s something I’ll only ever be able to enjoy through simulation. Perhaps, one day, when we achieve fully immersive virtual reality, I’ll have to reexamine this topic. But for now I am content with a little abstraction. Are they still games if they’re indistinguishable from reality?

consequential

Picking up the slightly older King of Dragon Pass the other day, I’ve been just delighted by the intricate relationship of all its moving parts. If you’re not the link-clicking type, the game is one of managing a clan of fantasy barbarians, guiding their larger governance decisions as they navigate a world of god magicks, tribal relations, and tradition. I’ve been drawn in deeply in part by its rich setting, but much more so by its patterns of delayed and often obscured consequence.

The game is very explicit in its presenting the player with choices to be made, but keeps its hand hidden as to where each choice will lead you. Many of the game’s internal calculations are concealed completely and I’ve found the best way to succeed is to understand the beliefs of my people and act intuitively based upon them. Does that not sound brilliant? This system forces the player to invest in the lore of the game and honestly think through each decision, not knowing if it’s a trivial one or if it will come back to haunt you several years down the road. This leads you, as a player, to justifiably feel as if each decision is a critical one.

Playing too Michael Brough’s (excellent) prototype 86856527, I’m reminded of how a well-made roguelike will force a similar gravity on a player. You must keep the rules of the world in the forefront of your mind as you make each move, else you’ll fail swiftly and irreversibly. What distinguishes the structure of King of Dragon Pass is how these rules are tucked away within the legends and the history of the world setting. Only by buying into your tribe’s religion and dogma can you hope to act in their best interests.

It makes me think about how educational games might improve upon their frequent block-of-text/minigame alternations. It’s not enough to force a player to regurgitate learned trivia; where meaningful engagement comes in is when a deeper understanding is required to progress. It’s a real art, though, to wed this with compelling and rewarding game mechanics. But King of Dragon Pass does this and I now know more about their fantasy barbarians than I ever learned about those of the real world. Perhaps it’s the roleplaying aspect of the game which provides the backbone for this investment: by requiring the player to get into the head of their avatar, the learnings are based less on the system of the game and far more on the content. A victory, perhaps, for games as storytelling devices?

What would this system of consequence look like applied to other genres? What if Mega Man’s every shot could be tied to some potential future consequence? Would they come back four levels later to haunt him? Would the player start to think about their actions? How could a designer obscure the system enough for a player to look beyond the obvious patterns and deeper into the world setting? Ha! Perhaps Mega Man isn’t the right vessel to support this. But for games with a rich setting and tomes worth of lore, forcing the player to act in accordance with the rules of the world — as opposed to the rules of the game — could do a lot for their buy-in as well as the lasting intellectual impact of the game.

back-to-front

Lately, I’ve been stuck on an idea.

Suppose you’ve got a basic elemental system: fire, water, earth, air, what-have-you. And say you can combine them, two at a time, for different magical effects, but that the order in which they’re combined changes the way they manifest. Perhaps priming with fire then finishing with water gives you some sort of steam effect. But if you prime with water, then finish with fire, maybe instead you get a scalding deluge. Or spin fire plus fire for a straight up flame jet. Those sorts of things. So, in choosing a limited set of elements to field, you open up a multitude of ways to affect the world and the players in it. And your action palette could differ wildly from that of the next player. Sounds like some fun potential.

But there’s just one problem. I have no idea what this looks like. Having spent far too long thinking about possible elements for inclusion, mapping out thematically consistent rules for interaction, and trying to imagine the best number of available vs. equippable elements, I’ve neglected to form any picture of what exactly these elemental combinations are being used for. Are these first-person duelling wizards, running around an environment and blasting each other? Or do these combinations open the way for 2D puzzle-platforming? Is this a MOBA of some sort? And how can I be sure that this isn’t all just an attempt to repackage Magicka?

In essence, I’ve built this up in the most backwards way possible. I’ve created a mechanic so far removed from context that it exists in a vacuum. Really, all I have is a slight variation on “spells do things,” which is, I’ll freely admit, not an entirely original idea.

So maybe, in keeping with my reasserted focus on doing, this would be best relegated to the sidelines for now. One day, perhaps, I’ll have need of a dynamic elemental spell-casting system, but until then my time might be better spent on something more fundamental.