Game design as art

Recently someone posted on the unity forums about a small game that they just released. They were already developing games outside of Unity since a long time ago and had started a fairly large project that they eventually grew past, completed and self published a successful multiplayer game, and have a large horror project currently in development (not with Unity).

The game they just released was a project for learning how to use Unity, their first unity project. All of this sounds pretty boring, like a standard story of a studio adapting Unity. What makes it special? Well, these guys showed me something completely new about game design, they are wildly different from everyone else. Their games have no score, no HUD, no projectiles, no obstacles, and no puzzles. They are crazy artists and they design games in which the *gameplay* is a work of art. They attempt to pull strings on the player and manipulate emotions with their games, like how a movie conveys emotion except in an interactive 3D medium. So how exactly do they do this? Well, I will use their recently released Unity game as an example. When you start it, you see an old lady standing in the entrance to a graveyard. You can control the old lady with the arrow keys, she walks very slowly. The camera is 3rd person and doesn't rotate, it only moves back and forth along the main graveyard path. This limits you so that you can only walk on that main path. As you walk forward, the lady will stumble and then start limping, using her cane to support her. It takes quite a while to reach the end of the path, even though it is just a few feet. When you reach the end, the lady sits down on a bench and a song plays in her head about all the people she knew who died, and a bunch of fancy overlays are rendered. It really is pretty effective and provokes emotions. So why do I care? Because it really surprised me how such a simple production could spin such a believable world that caught my attention and actually forced me to identify with a character. I don't think anyone has ever really identified with a character in a video game, that I know of. That is, until these guys came along. Their studio is called Tale of Tales, and here is a link to their blog.

So the idea of gameplay creating emotions and game design as art is present in my mind. What does this mean? Well, I don't know. Tale of Tales claims that all board games, casual games and hardcore games are all the same, they are just an abstract gameplay system with a theme tacked on. I sort of like them saying that, because one of my main beefs about games is just that: A game is its gameplay system and often nothing more. Hence, Halo, Quake and Megapixel are very similar games because their gameplay system is similar. I like Quake and Gears of War less because their "theme" is very gross and bloody, but I don't agree with people like Jack Thompson who say that playing games with violent imagery will turn you into a serial killer. If there was a game with a gameplay system that actually included emotions of hate and violence I would agree with Jack Thompson that that game is bad and possibly should be restricted or banned. Luckily I think it is extremely unlikely that such a game will ever be made.

Tale of Tales proclaims that "gaming" as we know it will die due to lack of interest because no new emotionless gameplay systems can be made, and no developers will step forward and introduce emotional gameplay systems. But I don't agree with them. The thing Tale of Tales isn't seeing and the reason I don't agree with them is the concept of “Pwnage”, being ridiculously good at games. Only geeks and "gamers" do it, but I see new ones being made every once in a while and I don't see them stopping. Things like korean starcraft, pure pwnage, ffr and other super-hardcore game communities will not stop. My reasoning is, being ridiculously good at working even simple gameplay systems is extremely fun, the same way climbing rocks or mountain biking is fun. I'm not really a hardcore gamer, but I've become quite good at some games like Dance Dance Revolution on either feet or fingers, Tetris, and twitch FPSes like Megapixel.

But I still care quite a bit about gameplay that manipulates emotions, because it is an exiting new concept that possibly unlocks a plethora of brand new possible game designs and offers the possibility for a new era in game design that would massively expand the market.

Another thing I thought about after seeing Tale of Tales was that a sort of game design dream I’ve had since about 2 years ago might actually be possible through emotion manipulating game play. Basically the game would be a tribute to the bone comic series by jeff smith and possibly some other good fantasy stories. I guess a genre description for it would be something like “Nonlinear Open World Story Driven Action / Adventure Game”, but that is where reality ends and the dream starts because Open World and Nonlinear don’t belong in the same sentence as Story Driven. The idea I had is to have almost all of the systems in the game be tweakable by a rules-based "god" AI that mimics what a storyteller does, and changes things to make the story more interesting.
For example, the storyteller will manipulate the characters in such a way that they almost get killed a bunch of times but never actually do die, because something comes out of the blue and saves them. Here are a bunch of pages of Bone where this happens:

Briar encounter

Crossing Tenen Gard

Another example of this is how the magic in Bone and most other fantasy stories works: It is often not controlled by the magical person, but is instead triggered on random occasions as a shortcut to get out of a dangerous situation. So in my game instead of having magic points (or any GUI whatsoever), crazy stuff like this will happen:

Confrontation of Pawan army

Creating as rich of a game world as the world in the comic book is impossible, but I think that a dynamic story in a game is actually possible after seeing what Tale of Tales has done and what they are planning.

Most likely I will never work on such a project, but its fun to think about.