Digital Adventures
Why is it so fun to go on a quest?
Recently, Lex Fridman interviewed Todd Howard which has sent me down an intense spiral of nostalgia for Bethesda RPGs, ultimately resulting in me installing OpenMW. Normally I'm sort of anti-nostalgic, I prefer to look at what we can do next rather than recapturing a feeling from the past. In this case however, there really aren't a lot of modern examples of a game that feels like Morrowind. In my view even Oblivion and Skyrim fall well short.
After also watching a 3 hour deep dive into Daggerfall (making me a world-class expert1) I've decided it also has the right feel, even if the visuals are somewhat... lacking. In the aformentioned interview, Todd drops a line about striving for the feeling of accomplishment in game design, that feeling of "I did it!" you get after going on a ridiculous quest for an obscure item you decided you need. As graphical fidelity and fluidity has increased we seem to be losing that quality of accomplishment in games. Practically, this makes sense, it takes an army of staff to produce a modern game and Bethesda is still a relatively small team considering the scope of their projects.
I am not here to tell Bethesda what to do, but if I was I would simply tell them to "make Starfield and Elder Scrolls 6 extremely good and also make them come out now". Instead, I've been thinking about the tension between a curated, stylish game and one that maximises freedom of agency. The more time I spend playing and making games the more drawn I am to games that let me decide how to play. Most of my favourite games are in this vein2 with a few standout curated experiences3.
My pet theory as to why I prefer freedom-maxi games is that the player gets to "finish" the design. Some assembly is required and ultimately the player decides the shape of their experience in real-time. You don't have to do what you're told, but you can. As I've matured as a creator, I've grown less attached to controlling the experience and interpretation of my own work. In fact, I've found it more creatively rewarding to leave space for the player. By smoothing down the rough edges you lose out on the tag-team dynamic between the development team and the end-users and design becomes a dictation of user action (as opposed to an invitation).
Despite the trendline through modern Bethesda games, Todd seems to agree with me. Bethesda as a studio still exists to emphasise the focus on player expression in their games. I love giving a user the feeling of being on an adventure, whether that's using a tool, a technology or playing a game. I personally think "good" experience design4 allows a user to run their own OODA loop rather than feeding them a list of rote instructions5. I want to inspire unscripted improvisational play, which is probably because that's the state I find most personally enjoyable. My favourite memories of games are "I wonder If you can do X..." and then, somehow, pulling it off despite the frustration and time cost. This touches the distinction between emergent narrative and scripted narrative and, of course, everyone's favourite game design buzzword: ludonarrative dissonance.
It's simple: there's no dissonance if there's no imposed narrative. Game design has been saved! Of course, in practice, it's not simple at all. There is a legibility and onboarding cost to any game that pushes to maximise agency. Most of my favourite games are also famously difficult to get into. On this note, last weekend we took WizardChess to a local games convention and there's nothing more humbling than watching members of the public try your game for the first time. This revealed a few insights:
Adults who only occasionally play games are very nervous about ''playing wrong"
Children are incredibly good at learning game mechanics
Experienced gamers™️ are most likely to skip all instruction and misunderstand our game
Indie game enthusiasts are some of the sweetest humans on the planet
After almost 20 years of it, I still love video games
WizardChess is a very open game, it encourages freedom in almost every dimension of play. The onboarding needs to take players into the world and headspace of playing the game, as well as showing them that they have real choices in how it plays out and that playing mindlessly gets you nowhere. The lasting impression I walked away with is that player preferences vary massively, and that's both fine and good.
Along with a preference for freedom, my design philosophy has also expanded to not really give a shit whether everyone "gets" what I'm doing. So long as some people love it6 then that's more than enough, even if they love it for different reasons to me! I've had a slow shift to this perspective over the past few years and I've enjoyed pushing it further with experiments like generative tokens on fxhash, where I can't even predict the final artwork a user sees.
I'm starting to doubt that I'll ever want to make a game with a linear narrative like The Thin Silence ever again. Who knows how my tastes will evolve, but WizardChess has shown me how much fun it is for your own creation to surprise you. I'm left wondering, just how far you can take that feeling?
Until next time,
Ben
Stuff I’ve been thinking about
📄 What is Good Within Social Networks
📄 Nothing is edgier than earnestness
🎥 Dr. Lex Fridman: Navigating Conflict, Finding Purpose & Maintaining Drive
By COVID standards, anyway
Minecraft, Factorio, Morrowind, Dwarf Fortress, Dicey Dungeons, The Outer Wilds, Fallout: New Vegas, Caves of Qud, Dark Souls, Ocarina of Time, Project Rainworld, Breath of the Wild, Elden Ring
Persona 5, Mario Odyssey, Fire Emblem: Three Houses, Nier: Automata, Doom (2016)
“Good” design in the sense that a “good” cup holds liquid and is easy to pick up and drink from, not a moral sense.
See: every onboarding checklist, quest log, objective marker etc.
Like the ~10yo kid who dabbed after beating the tutorial boss