A few weeks back we were doing a panel at a con
And a really interesting discussion cropped out about: "What make us role play in games?"
And I don't mean the question of why we role play, like:
"What psychological need it fulfils?",
Although that would make a great episode too
No, I mean in the sense of mechanically
How do games get us to role play?
What sort of things do games do to put us in that, role playing state of mind?
Because not every game pulls that off.
Not even all role-playing games.
For a lot of us, in many of the games we play
We'll enjoy the gameplay, but we won't really get into character
We won't become the hero or take on their persona,
or make decisions based on what our character would do
Rather than on: 'What in-game consequences the decision might have.'
Why is that?
What drives us to build a tower of cheese wheels for laughs in a role-playing game like Skyrim?
Or to simply shoot our way through an FPS without thinking about what it might mean in the context of that world?
What makes it so that we might care more about the mechanical gameplay results
That we're getting out of our RPG character's skilltree, than about what it says about who our character really is?
Actually, maybe it's better to ask the question in reverse
What is it about other games that does make us get into character?
What makes it so that we'd rather choose the dialogue option that our character would really say
Rather than the one that would get us the awesome sword?
We've touched on this a little before when we discussed the difference between choices and calculation
And all of that still true
If you mechanically incentivise a choice
It becomes a barrier to players role-playing around it
If you list the choice as either a renegade or paragon
And the player knows that certain in-game abilities can only be accessed by earning a lot of Paragon or Renegade points
Then the player is going to be torn between choosing
"What's right for their character?"
and getting to play the game the way they want
Even having to stop and consider this choice will break the player's immersion
By making them confront the fact that they are indeed playing a game
Today, I'd like to come with this problem from a different angle
I want to look at the sort of things a game can do to positively encourage us to role play
Or to get into character
The first of these is a demonstration of consequences
This is the swift kick to the head that makes us think about what our actions mean within the game
For example:
In the very beginning of Deus Ex human revolution
There's a moment where you're told that you have to save a group of hostages
There's a lot of urgency in the dialogue, but if your head's not in that role-playing mode
And you're just playing in the way that most games have trained us to,
You know how this works
You have to rescue these hostages
The game's not even gonna to continue until you rescue these hostages
So you muck about
You look for all the hidden secrets that the game's trying to trick you into missing with that hostage thing
You flush all the toilets because...you can.
But, as you're stacking up a pile of tin cans, somewhere in the corner
BAM!!
An explosion ripped through the building
Those hostages are dead
And the game forces you to confront this
You're reminded that you let them die by not taking the urgency of that situation seriously
And all of a sudden, this world becomes real
The beginning of Chrono Trigger is another good example
Here, you're playing a JRPG and we've all been trained not to take the worlds of JRPG too seriously
You walk into people's houses, you steal their stuff, you break their pots, you rummage around in their trash
It's just how these games work
So you'll find yourself doing that here
Picking up treasure around the town, eating sandwiches that you just find lying around
But later a bunch of stuff happens and your character's put on trial
And all of the townspeople come out and testify as character witnesses
And if you want only smashed their stuff or stole their lunch
They're going to call you a jerk like real people would
This demonstration of consequences, this swift kick to the head
Gets us thinking about the game world as a real place
And gets us to act within it as such
And you only have to do it once
You only have to realign the players thinking one time from: "This is just a game" to
"Wait... what have I done?"
To make them far more likely to role-play
To act as they would act or as their character would act within that world
Of course, it's even better if the game confronts us with the ramifications of our decisions throughout the experience
But if that's too expensive a prospect from a development perspective
It's surprising how much effect we can get simply by jarring the player into thinking of the world of the game as a real world one time
The other thing that really gets us to dive into the role of the characters we play is the idea of permanence
Actions which are impermanent draw us away from the reality of the game
They present us with the temptation to trivialize the importance of our own actions
But actions which have a permanent and immutable effect on the world we play in
Force us to consider our actions more carefully
The simplest example of this is in dialogue trees
If you can go up to an NPC and talk to them over and over and over again to get them to say every
single possible line of dialogue, it may tell you more about the world.
But it's a very game-y unrealistic style of conversation, which makes it harder for us to dive in and role-play our character
Or consider the calendar system in the persona series
Each day you have a number of actions you can take and people you can interact with
But whatever action you choose
permanently sacrifices your ability to have spent that day in some other way
You've only got one year to spend in this world
And that makes the choice of how to spend each day and who to spend it with very important to you
It brings you into being the character rather than just playing them
And then, of course, there's death
If we can make death important in a game it makes the world more real
And it gives weight to many of our actions, drawing us in to role-play
And by this, I don't just mean permanent death
On the one hand permanent death feels like an obvious way to make the game world reflect reality
And to add weight to decisions
But permanent death can also sometimes be a problem when we feel like it forces us to reset the game
Because that causes frustration
And ironically highlights the game-y nature of the experience
If the game makes you feel like you should load a previous save and try to prevent a character from dying
In effect it's not really permanent death
But rather an alternate lose condition
If anything, that pulls you out of the role-play experience
If you can avoid that type of scenario though
Permanent death can be an amazing way to draw the player into the game world
But there are other ways to make death meaningful
And to have it act as an anchor to pull us into the living story were playing
I had one person at the panel tell me about playing gratuitous space battles
And there was a battle early on that he won
But his forces were almost completely wiped out
One single battleship survived to heroically win the day
For that player after that battle the entire game became about the story of this hero battleship
And its crew's desperate journey to survive the rest of the war
The game wasn't just about numbers for him anymore
Somebody else had a similar story about a time that they were playing pokemon
And taking on the challenge where if a pokemon ever gets KO'd you have to release it.
All of a sudden, he was the trainer
And the moment-to-moment play, the minor trainer battles between towns, became their own story
And there were some heroic Pokemon that survived and stuck by his side the whole way until the end
Where they sacrificed themselves for him when he needed it most
Heck when James played Fallout 3
He wouldn't let the dog die
And the whole game for him became a boy and his dog wandering the wastes
I even heard an amazing story where a fellow lost his memory card
And suddenly Spyro became a real adventure for him
He was racing to beat the game without a save to fall back on
Or any option of stopping to continue the adventure later
The experience took on that urgency he needed to live the adventure
This is just the tip of the Iceberg
but it's a good place to start
That sudden kick to the brain that forces us to think of the game world is a real place
Combined with the permanent aspect of play that don't just send us running for the reset button
Seem to be two factors that help really bring us into our games and take on a role within them
If any of you watching this have a great role-play story of your own
Please, please share it
I just love hearing these things
See you all next week
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