Using Scene Flow in Video Games

A good, well flowing story scene usually contains six steps (you can break this mold, just like everything else, but since we are using these six steps, bare with me): Goal, Conflict, Disaster, Reaction, Dilemma, Decision. The point of these is to clearly point the protagonist at something, watch them fail, then watch them do something about that failure.

In a well written story, that doing something amounts to a new goal in which they no go towards. Even if the disaster does not full impede them, it still prevents them from reaching the goal. An example of conflict that is resolved but does not lead to the goal, is Mario stomping on a goomba. Though it resolved the conflict of what was happening then, it does not exactly get him to the end of the level. The game doesn't end at that resolution.

In a story, you would see the hero stop the bad guy from killing someone, but the bad guy would get away. So lets go into each step as it relates to passive story telling mediums.

1. Goal - The protagonist, or POV character in the scene (if you are doing a scene with the bad guy POV), wants something. This is what they are trying to accomplish in the scene
2. Conflict - This is something that is preventing the goal from occurring. The POV character is being stopped by this conflict, either self, person or environment, etc.
3. Disaster - This is the point where the character fails the goal. This should continue until they get to the end, at which point disaster is flipped. This does not equate to character death, but it should cause the current goal to no longer be viable.
4. Reaction - This is where the story flips from being about external factors and focuses in on the POV character. What does the Disaster mean to them and their Goal?
5. Dilemma - With the Goal no inaccessible, what are the choices presented to the POV character.
6. Decision - This is where the POV character decides on a choice presented in the Dilemma. They should choose the least bad choice of what to do next (in a comedy they would choose the worst choice).

Now, I'll go through these and break them down in parts and moments of a game. Lets try Mario 64. Don't forget, it may not have every aspect of this, and some of it (especially, the last 3, tend to be internalized with the player).

1. Goal - At the start of a level, Mario is presented with the goal, get to the star.
2. Conflict - The environment and enemies are stopping Mario from getting to his goal. This is not a disaster yet, because the goal is still within reach.
3. Disaster - This does not exist in the case of a Mario 64 level. It does occur though on the level of the player attempting to get through a portion of the level.
4. Reaction - This is the player's feelings at failing to get through a challenge.
5. Dilemma - These are the options that the player has after failing to reach the goal (in cases are catastrophic disasters, this may be restart from a previous save).
6. Decision - Again this is usually put on the player, they decide to keep playing, try their new tactic, or quit.

A good game level, will allow for these six steps to repeat enough times before the character has failed enough to make the goal something to cheer about, but not so many times, that the goal ceases to be viable.

Breaking the steps in half, reveals that the first three steps tend to be external, while the final three steps tend to be internal. This is true in both scenes and in gameplay. Switching back and forth between these moments is what allows the consumer (movie goer, reader, gamer) to keep interested in the product.

Applying this into an MMO scene, we can see where people have issues with quests and missions in MMOs. A scene in this case will be the quest. The issue with quests is that the Disaster has occurred already. The actual event that is happening for the player is that someone else has reacted to the disaster, experienced a dilemma, and found that asking the player for help is the best decision.

All of the internal player stuff is being done by the NPC. The decision of what to do about something is out of the player's hand. They are not making a decision about how to solve the disaster, instead, they are living out an NPC's decision. The only control the player has is rejecting the decision, which means that no quest, therefore no scene occurs.

To change this, The Old Republic tried making the player part of the decision making process. This works sometimes (Commando quest where the guy asks to kill the pirate instead of rescuing him). At these moments, the game succeeds in fixing bad questing.

Yet this step is not without constant and ever present failures. Quite often the game's dialogue options lead to no changes at all in what is going to happen as far as the decision goes. The issue continues to be that the more choices that are presented to the player as valid for progressing their story (not the game's story, but the player character's story of adventuring), the more time and energy and resources that get lost, and eventually the smaller the game will feel (though each play through would allow for countless choices, how far you could follow them would continue to diminish due to how expansive the choices would have to be).

So how can games allow for players to make the decision on how to deal with a disaster? One way would be more ambiguous quest directions. That means, that instead of killing 8 boars, the quest should be to thin their numbers in the forest. Then provide different ways for the player to interact with the boars.

They could kill them, trap them and sell them to a farmer or lead them away. The key is to allow the player to experience those internal steps: Reaction, Dilemma and Decision.

Scene info taken from Randy Ingermanson's website.

Questing revisited

Now, I’ve covered this idea a bit before, but we need to take a look at Public Quests as well as the idea of completely revamping the quest system. Tobold recently pointed out that either we improve the quest system or we replace it.

So aside from separating quests into different categories so that we can reclaim the true concept of a quest, what else can we add to the game? I suggest player generated Item requests (with rewards generated by the system), and a rework to public quests.

Some ideas are already in existence in different MMOs, and most exist already, but are all labeled quests or missions instead of being properly identified.

So lets break down the player’s Agenda: Errands, Item Buy Mission, Shared Missions, Public Missions, Missions, and Quests.

Errands: Quick one off events, mostly used to guide the player from one location to another. These would be the usual skip the text events. Rewards would be based on distance from origin, and would include unlocking Missions, small monetary reward and a small experience gain.

Item Buy Mission: This is a player generated request for materials. They pay an amount of money to place the quest. Anyone who accepts will have their chance to get the item increased by 40% until they finish the mission (canceling the mission causes them to lose the items). This is also a just check the map and go hack type event. The player will get a choice of items equal to the difficulty of the items requested based on number of items needed and the level of the enemies needed to get the items.

Shared Missions: This is much like crossover missions in Champions Online. The idea here is that if a friend can’t yet get a mission or has already completed a mission you can share the mission you are working on with them, so that you can work together. Doesn’t work with Errands, Item Buy Missions, Public Missions or Quests. Only standard Missions can be shared.

Public Missions: Unfortunately, in this area I feel a bit ignorant. I never played Warhammer Online, and Champions’ PQ doesn’t work very well due to scale (you need a minimum of X people to successfully accomplish the PQ and it just goes on a cycle instead of being triggered). Finally, I haven’t had a chance to try Rifts (I missed the free weekend). So, ultimately I’m unsure of what to change other than improve scaling and timing (if no one is present it should have an idle situation that can lead to a trigger instead). So we are talking about two states, an active state, and an idle state. There is no reason to cycle through if no one is there to experience it. As another step, it is important for Public Quests to have several pass/fail states, so that successful progression continues to change the area that the PQ is in, and failures set it back.

Missions: All missions (except Item Buy Missions) would have actively progressing objectives, some objectives would be open-ended or could present different options depending on how the player RPs his character (paladins/priests might choose to not kill a bunch of kobolds who were attacking only due to demonic possesion).

Quests: This is where things get interesting. The idea of a quest log holding hints that you choose to memorize. As you piece clues together you realize what your goal could be. You go to explore the area that is hinted at. You find something for you. You discover details, more hints. You go talk to someone. You get history. You get clues. I’m thinking along the lines of the girl who lost her dolly in Darrowshire for people who are newer, and how quests work in older single player RPGs.

Though this is only one aspect of the leveling gameplay, this level of improvement could really improve how people view quests.

Writers Repeat Themselves (Game Designers should too)

Quite often as I read through a book, I will notice that each paragraph will describe the exact same thing three different ways. As time has gone by, and I have read more and more books, I have noticed this repeating pattern. I believe the first time I noticed this was while reading Shakespeare.

Iago:

O, sir, content you;
I follow him to serve my turn upon him:
We cannot all be masters, nor all masters
Cannot be truly follow'd. You shall mark
Many a duteous and knee-crooking knave,
That, doting on his own obsequious bondage,
Wears out his time, much like his master's ass,
For nought but provender, and when he's old, cashier'd:
Whip me such honest knaves. Others there are
Who, trimm'd in forms and visages of duty,
Keep yet their hearts attending on themselves,
And, throwing but shows of service on their lords,
Do well thrive by them and when they have lined
their coats
Do themselves homage: these fellows have some soul;
And such a one do I profess myself. For, sir,
It is as sure as you are Roderigo,
Were I the Moor, I would not be Iago:
In following him, I follow but myself;
Heaven is my judge, not I for love and duty,
But seeming so, for my peculiar end:
For when my outward action doth demonstrate
The native act and figure of my heart
In compliment extern, 'tis not long after
But I will wear my heart upon my sleeve
For daws to peck at: I am not what I am.

Iago here, talks about how not all servants are loyal, and that he is not loyal. How he, like those servants who only pretend, is simply waiting for his chance to no longer be a servant.

Now in concept, we could simply leave this idea as is. We could simply follow the concept and apply three variations of phrasing to everything we write, and hope that imitation is good enough to make our writing seem adequate or, dare we say, even good.

For the most part, that would work out, but we need to capture the why of the action, or we'll be like those girls who never understand why to apply make-up a certain way, and end up looking like clowns instead.

So, is it important to use this tripling repetition all the time in writing? Or only during key moments, or important events? How about in a mystery, where you want the clue to exist, but to be forgotten until mentioned later? How about in instructions and directions?

I'm not sure if writing an entire novel in constantly repeating yet different sentences is a good idea. I've read a story like that, and about half way through I was frustrated and skipping the extra two sentences of information. Which after getting in the habit of doing, caused me to miss some scattered bit of info the author was trying to convey. So perhaps in such events, it might be better to only use the three step sentence when information is important.

What about in a mystery? By putting emphasis on something else, and having a single throwaway sentence for something of import, you may succeed in causing the reader to forget about the important item, and focus on what they thought was important.

How can this be used in games? How about in quest text? Quite often, people skip the quest text, as it is often pointless, and simply read the what the goal of the quest is. How about simply writing the goal where the quest text is. Followed by having the goal in the objectives section. Finally, you have it on the players HUD of active quests. This of course means that you have tell your story in a different way (I've seen videos of Cataclysm, where a few times, Blizzard has succeeded in changing quests to this form). This can make it difficult, as telling a story through gameplay is something that is not yet completely common.

So is there a way to use the repeating text concept in game design, to tell a story, where most people skip the reading? Are there games that have told a story without words or with few words?

Perhaps, you start with a simple quest, and you don't read the quest text and just do things. But, if those quests really do serve a purpose, you start seeing a pattern in what you are doing, even without reading the quest text. Just from the quest objectives you can start figuring out that hey, something is going on here. This means that you would have to have most quests NOT be kill 10 rats. You have to add another element, or even better, two more elements into the quest.

How about this: "Rats have been coming up from the cellar. There used to be an underground passage which was used during the occupation of the tyrannical orcs a while back. Looks like something new has moved into the passage ways. Perhaps, you would help me solve this problem? I'll make sure to reward you... appropriately."

First of all, the quest text itself mentions passage way and cellar and essentially going underground. Second, you would have updating or chain quests that would lead from one to the other. Is there more we can do?

In this case, we need to look at cut-scenes or things "like" a cut-scene to help tell the story. This would be the third step of telling a story three different ways.

So we can the quest to go into the cellar, where the quest updates to killing rats and we kill an arbitrary 10 rats. Once we kill the rats, we see one escape into another passage (the "cut-scene"). We follow, and see the passage ways that the quest giver was talking about. Now, we go deeper and explore. Now even without reading the quest text, we knew to go to the cellar, and because our objectives window is auto-updating, and we are seeing the rats escape down a passage, we follow and proceed with the quest.

Now, would you do this with every mission? Or only with important missions?

I would imagine that a developer would tier the significance of of their quests, so that as you go up in importance you have these additional steps taking place, to show the importance of these events. Perhaps even for the same reason that you would for writing.

Questing, how it should be

Over at Tobold's Open Sunday Thread, a discussion began about leveling up, and I gave my idea of breaking the current quest system into a 3 tier system, so that quests can feel more like Quests.

The three tiers would be: Errands, Missions, and Quests.  I'll break it down, and give some examples, based on the Human Starting Zone in WoW.

Errands - Rewards are based on distance needed to travel to get to the turn in.  Reward would be the unlocking of Missions or Quests, monetary (for delivery), with a small experience gain.  Typically Errands would be used to help guide a player, much like such “quests” are used currently.  Errands typically would not include killing 10 foozles.  Errands text would be minimal.

Missions - Rewards  are based on difficulty of the mission.  Rewards would include unlocking ‘next level’ missions, monetary or item reward, and good experience gain.  Though most “quests” would fall under a mission, the changes would be that a mission would have a more ambiguous goal.

For example:  “We’ve been having trouble with Kobold’s lately.  We’d appreciate your help in eradicating them from the grounds of the Abbey.”

Mission now says, Kill Kobolds near the Abbey.

You go and start killing Kobolds, algorithm kicks in and you’ve killed enough that they fear you and run away.  Mission updates to have you chase them down.

You follow them (UI helps guide you if you lose track of them or have to AFK) into a cave.  There it updates for you to finish the extermination (Paladins should understand that Kobolds, though sentient, are no better than rats).  You go in killing them, when you run across a demonically possessed crystal that has been driving them insane.  (note that the mission may not update).

You now either finish killing them all, or you destroy the crystal.  Destroying the crystal snaps them out of their possession, and you are approached by their leader for a peace treaty (at this point you can make a choice).  Mission is now over, and you go submit your report (turn in the mission and get your rewards).

These types of missions would replace 3-4 WoW quests.

Quests - These are overarching with a zone, dynamically updating (much like missions), and should be the MAIN storyline of the zone (with Missions providing supplementary stories to a zone).

Quest rewards are massive, magical items and large payments, large experience gains.  Typically you would have 1, maybe 2 quests per zone (though usually not at the same time).  Quests would also fall under Class quests, and Rep quests.

For example:  You have talked to the first guy you saw after starting the game, and he gives you an errand to speak with the Marshall.  The Marshall, gives you the quest for helping out around the Abbey (notice how open that statement is).

You start out by helping with a wolf attack (mission), meeting up with your class trainer (errand), destorying the Kobolds (mission), grabbing some grapes (errand), stopping the defias (mission), and finally killing the leader of the invading defias (end of mission, and end of quest).

The Marshall thanks you for all your help, rewards you, and gives you an Errand to go to Goldshire.