Linear vs. Freedom Part II: Mutable World

In the first part, I talked about was that the designers of games could cleverly craft their worlds so as to subtly (or sometimes not so subtly) guide players along the intended path.

Now I'd like to talk about way #2: Attempting to change the game world in reaction to the user's behavior.


This is almost never done. Games almost never do it. For the most part, game environments are designed as either static, unchangeable things, or in some cases (roguelikes, in particular) as randomly generated levels that are different every time, but consequently, usually fairly bereft of intentionally crafted puzzles or challenges.

Now, I have nothing against roguelikes. (Some of my best friends are roguelikes!) And the model of the world being fixed makes a lot of sense from engineering, asset-management, and scenario planning angles. The fixed world is nice because you get to draw maps, (which is fun) and means that players can talk to each other meaningfully about where they are in the game. It also means that you know in advance what spatial relationships exist between interesting things, and can manipulate them as needed. (Especially when it's useful to force the player to go through something before seeing something else.)

What I've gradually become convinced of is that neither fixed worlds, nor completely random maps are the final solution. Looking for a moment the pencil-and-paper role playing scene, it is telling that all of the conventional wisdom points GMs away from fixed worlds, or random worlds. (Which I guess are also fixed worlds, but from a different source.) In tabletop gaming, when stories work, it is frequently because the GM carefully adjusted the world, and the order of events, in such a way as to make a better story. The more that is fixed in advance, the less the GM can move around later to make a better story.

This works because good GMs know the same secret that stage magicians do: If you don't tell them what the trick is in advance, then you can change the trick as you go to whatever seems most appropriate. In stage magic, this is usually called a "magician's choice", or equivocation. In tabletop RPGs, it is usually called "good GMing".

In tabletop gaming, this sort of approach tends to lead to highly memorable storytelling and situations. So why can't the same thing be done in computer games? Obviously, the computer won't be able to approach the finesse or creativity of a good GM. But there is no reason that I can think of that a game couldn't adjust the world to make it more fun for the player.

The only places I can think of where I have seen this sort of thing done is in the Mars segment of Adam Cadre's Photopia, and maybe some weird, experimental stuff like Warning Forever.

Consider – When the player sits down, they know nothing about the world you're giving them to explore. If they explore east, and find a shrine where they learn how to double-jump, and then explore west, where they find some caves that require double-jumping to progress, they're likely to say “wow, that was lucky, good thing I went east first!”

But what is to stop the game from putting the shrine what ever place they go first? And the caves wherever they go second? The player doesn't know the map, except for whatever minuscule portions of it they have seen first hand. They don't know what is supposed to be where. Maybe some other player went south first. And found a shrine where they learned to double jump. And went north second, and found some caves where they had to double-jump to progress. Players are used to assuming the world is a fixed entity, but is there any reason that we as designers have to follow that rule?

What if the game, rather than operating on a fixed map, was instead set up as a series of things the PC was supposed to experience? Which the game would put on the map in order, as the player explored areas they hadn't seen yet? It would be sort of a quantum map. Any place the player had explored would be “locked down”. If they went there later, it would always be the same. But any place they hadn't explored yet was undefined until they went there, and the game would fill up the undefined spaces with whatever it felt like the player should see next.

The participants in Project Horseshoe this year described the player's experience as a “watery pachinko machine of doom”, but they seem to be approaching it from the point of view of predicting where the ball will land and how to design configurations to get the ball where it is supposed to go. My thinking is rather – It's a pachinko machine, so the ball is going to bounce off of things as it falls, but there is no reason we can't change the positions of the pegs as it is falling.

This kind of design would give us some fairly powerful tools to craft the flow of the user experience. Suppose that somewhere in the game, there was a boomerang. And there was also a boss, for which defeating it required the boomerang. If the locations of both of these things are fixed, then there exists a chance that the player will try to go to the boss before they have the boomerang, and then either be turned away, or fail. If the locations were mutable though, the programmers could know in advance that the player would have gotten the boomerang before they fight the boss, for the simple reason that the boss and his area won't even show up until the player finds the boomerang.

This could work the other way, too. Say the designer has some neat puzzle in mind, where the player is supposed to see the puzzle, and later find a key, and then remember to go back to where they found the puzzle. Say for some reason the designer wants to make sure that the player finds the puzzle first, before the key. This would give them a way of insuring that, and making sure the user experienced it as designed, rather than stumbling on the key, finding the puzzle later, and going “that was easy, I had the key laying around and it just went right in.”

Usually when games want to deal with things like this, they do it by blocking off parts of the map, often in arbitrary-seeming ways. (“Sorry, you can't leave town yet, the bridge is still under construction.”) This would give the player (apparent) freedom to wander wherever they wanted, and have no need to box them in because they didn't have an item required for the lands beyond.

There are dangers, of course. Player knowledge is the biggest one. If they knew that the game would always give them the “temple of the boomerang” on the 5th unexplored screen they went to, then it sort of destroys the illusion of exploring a world. Also, if they know how it is working, (or are just perverse) they can cause problems by various behavior patterns. For example, what would stop a player from running around and “Defining” the whole map, first thing? You might be able to work out some limitations, but ultimately, it would require some careful design on the part of the programmer to make sure the player didn't “fix” too many locations by looking at them, and thus restrict the game's abilities to place things in unexplored space by reducing the amount of unexplored space left.

Also, it there would have to be SOME limitations or the players could define an infinitely large world by just exploring indefinitely. Due to the constructed nature of it, save-game storage space would probably have to scale linearly, so this would not be especially desirable.

Finally, it would probably limit replay value, since, much like a magic trick repeated too many times, on a replay, the player would realize how it all worked, and it would become less of an exploration, and more about just trudging along until the game decided to trigger the next event. It would remove the illusion that the player could affect the game's pacing. The same logic that makes sure they can't go too far without getting what they are looking for would also make it hard to get it early.

I think a game set up like this could work. And would be an experience unlike anything else out there right now. But a lot of work needs to be done before then, and a lot of problems need to be solved and thought through. But still. Who says the world has to exist before you look at it?