WorldReactivity

Some of the stuff I was thinking about after reading Djordi’s treatment doc…

Reactivity 

What’s the first thing people do if they’re frustrated with the current chunk of gameplay in Grand Theft Auto, Fable, Fallout or Half Life 2? That’s right, they start using whatever the game has provided them, physical or verbal, to abuse the poor NPCs going about their meaningless, scripted day in dystopia! As soon as I got a spray can in GTA:SA I was tagging the face of every nearby Los Santos O.G.

Being an obnoxious asshole in video games excites our innate human desire to be free of all cultural restraints inhibiting our ability to exact any judgment we see fit upon our fellow men. When games support this depravity and provide reactivity to our actions that exceeds the general gaming watermark (i.e. NPC dies) the illusion of depth is increased.

Reactivity is not just important to the tangential sociopathic angles of the game. It should be there to constantly remind the player of the following things:

• He’s sexier than Jude Law.
• He’s mightier than Alexander the Great.
• Everything he does is or will become of paramount importance to most people in the game world.
• What he should be doing with his time.

In my experience it doesn’t take that much of this reactivity before gamers start labeling your product “more than a game.” Conversely, if your world is static, people will find the world less interesting.

Each of games mentioned above incorporates a lot of reactivity and have been widely recognized and applauded for doing so. A big chunk of the marketing for ‘Fable’ emphasized the reactivity of the world. Some of the most entertaining and memorable moments in all of these games comes from their tangential elements; GTA arguably gets by on the presentation of their reactivity alone.

For instance, in San Andreas I can walk up to every single character in the game and get several reactions. Most of them give dynamic reactions depending on what I do to them. If I’m part of a rival gang, they’ll start fronting. If I steal one of their homie’s cars around them, they’ll start shooting at me. The VO they use is varied, believable and entertaining.

Reactivity also provides bite sized pieces of character. It’s difficult for a writer to come up with *one* quality character, let alone hundreds, and on top of that expect their personalities to be modular enough to support player choice. At the same time, having a bunch of NPCs populate the world doesn’t really buy you anything if their only purpose is to walk in a line and die.

The Black Isle games often handled the problem like this: Player characters and progression critical characters received actual dialogs and the lion’s share of the writer’s attention, and everyone else used “Floating dialog”. Floating dialogs were one sentence responses, displayed above the characters head, in lieu of the actual conversation tree interface.

Floating accomplished several things:

• Removed the need to write a real character, dialog for every character model used in the game.
• Immediately told the player that the character would never have progression critical content for him to acquire.
• Incorporated simple, immediate reactivity for the player’s progress in the game.

Fable and Grand Theft Auto take this farther by pulling the reactivity out of text (where many will miss it) and putting it into visual, aural representation (where most will see it.) There is at least one animation and sound cue for every reaction allocated to a character, generally more.

In Fable, every character can do the following:

• Respond to each emote provided to the player. E.g.: laugh, cry, flirt, fart, etc.)
• Respond to the player’s general appearance. E.g.: what is he wearing, is he banged up, what kind of hair cut, etc.
• Respond to the player’s reputation. E.g. Good, evil, associated with a particular event, etc.
• Respond to a real time action by the player. E.g. Kick them, attack them with a weapon, make a boast at the boasting podium, etc.

These reactions took what was a fairly shallow RPG and made it appear to have a lot more depth. Reviews of ‘Fable’ repeatedly pointed to the depth of reaction afforded the player’s choices.

San Andreas does the same, with the exception of the breadth of emotes available to the player. It is not as responsive as ‘Fable’ is across the board (there’s a fair amount of repetition over time) but the initial impression it gives is that the world is highly responsive across the board.

This reactivity, I argue, is fundamental in establishing the vibe, character an emotional attachment to the world a game is trying to present. It’s one of key components that make the difference between players referring to “Liberty City” over “That urban starting area.”

This kind of reactivity provides a challenge for ‘Mercenaries’ given the nature of the world the player is exploring and his role within it. Problems include:

• Our POIs don't feel like "a world".
• With the exception of the Mafia garage, none of them have sub points of interest. The presence of mechanics like weapons shops and barbers in a game is another discussion but in relevance to reactivity they support:
• A way the player can get reactivity to happen. E.g.: Cut his hair, buy fancy clothes, get fat, etc.
• Places that have NPCs hanging out who can (but do not have to) have reactivity in context with this special location they’re placed at.
• The POIs serve as the starting points for game play but do not support any loitering or exploration. As such they lose emotional investment from the player. He doesn’t identify them with anything. There’s nothing interesting about this named area other than the short term visceral appeal (i.e. it’s snowy, it’s urban, it's weird etc.)
• The player is not interested in his reputation with the world but rather his rapport with the factions. Non faction characters only serve as a collateral damage decrement to his bottom line.
• With this we lose the opportunity to remind the player that he’s the center of attention.
• We don’t have the opportunity to establish any attachment with a character outside of those you meet in the HQs. As I made reference to before it’s pretty simple to provide bite-sized character through reactivity.

Without this focus on reactivity we lose one of the key reasons to provide an open world, something I believe is more important to the success of GTA than the concept of an open world in the first place. Our tagline “If you can see it…” is basically the game play provided in Halo 2, sans the large scale destruction. Developers like Bungie turn their focus away from a ton of destructive objects in the world because of the limits of production but I’m sure they also recognize that destruction without value has diminishing returns; the only buildings of real emotional involvement that you can destroy in ‘Mercenaries’ are the headquarters for each faction.

Reactivity helps establish attachment with the game world.

One thing that really intrigues me about a “Green Zone” hub for the player is that it would allow us to play up reactivity in a way that was more difficult with the North Korean setting. Instead of several faceless cities in a nation torn apart by foreign interest and firepower where the inhabitants are just surviving, our Green Zone could be our Mos Eisley, our Buccaneer’s Den. A thriving hub for all kinds of shady transactions and action with a community and clientele that is easier to form reactivity (and character) around.

There was a recent This American Life story about a “contractor” in Iraq and one of the details they focused on was this contractor’s reactions with other contractors in these hubs. He talked about how he knew where the other contractors would hang out, what they looked like, how they presented themselves and how each would respond to each other if they happened to be next to each other. I extrapolated this into my own imagination (and another piece about The Green Zone in ‘the Atlantic’ that I can share with you guys) about how the current Green Zone in Iraq operates, where the place would be teeming with these contractors. An entire sub-culture built up around this temporary island in the chaos with its own bars, weapons shops, brothels and shady deals happening at converted apartments and warehouses all over a small neu-city.

This is FASCINATING and we could provide this within the context of ‘Mercenaries’ while retaining the general concept that there’s a full blown war going on. After all, the Green Zone in the real world already provides a real world analog for the idea!

Matt Colville adds: I agree that this is very important, critical. One cool thing about KotOR was that a Good-aligned player could steal a Stormtrooper outfit, and see how people reacted differently to him. Some people suddenly feared you. Some people who seemed respectable a minute ago suddenly turned into fawning, butt-kissing snitches for the Empire. Using disguise and just walking up to people opened up a whole new experience and gave you a really interesting point of view you didn't have before.

I'm thinking about the way to do this and it seems to me we need a list of things people in the world "care" about. I don't mean, emotionally or spiritually, I mean a series of metrics we can track, like faction mood in Mercs 1.0. Then, we only need to know one or two things about the person you're interacting with (maybe just one; which faction they belong to) combined with the current value for these metrics, and then use something like the Chatter manager to give the illusion that each character is unique.

Here are some examples;

People in the world care about:

• The Local Economy
• How the Merc is dressed (disguise) a la KotOR
• The strength of the local factions.
• The reputation of mercenaries in general
• The reputation of your specific character.