That sound you hear is the thin ice cracking under this idea... I've become slightly obsessed with the idea of life stages that map to sweeping changes in a fantastical universe. The gist is that you'd freely wander the world and be able to discover "chapter triggers" that you could optionally activate. These chapter triggers would initiate dramatic plot shifts between NPCs, shifts in alliances and governments, and changes in your own character's hidden story. What this would look like is a normal game with a meta-game on top of it. You'd play freeform or do missions until you choose to access a character, place or a thing. Then the game would shift to the next chapter, jumping ahead months, years or even decades. You'd know about epic changes on the horizon through news and characters. In the normal game, you'd want to prepare yourself for these coming storms by gathering the resources you'd need to survive them. But the outcome would not be deterministic and predictable due to the swirl of characters and nations acting against one another.

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Optional chapter triggers would be things like:

• Choosing to go on a long trip (an interstellar voyage, sailing around the world, etc.)
• Choosing to settle in a town
• Going into hibernation
• Performing a meta routine (see below)

Meta-Routines These are like a macro action, something you'd do over and over again but for which there's not a lot of interesting gameplay. Examples:

• Searching for something or someone
• Training
• Hiding from someone or something
• Choosing to build something that takes a long time
• Scientific research
• Doing a mundane job
• Waiting for an event

The results of meta-routines are more fun than the actual process. So why not "skip to the good part?" If you chose a meta-routine you'd get a kind of fast-forward feature. During the routine, vignettes would pop up giving you some idea of what's happening in the world and allowing you to make macro-level choices to affect them. Your stats would also change as time went by, and you'd see the map change in phases from different camera angles. You could also drop back into the world to interact with these changes (expanded towns, NPCs with children, raised or fallen empires). Meta-routines would have a prerequisite to start (you need a place to train and a Will of a certain number, for instances). You could also only do them as long as certain vital resources (like money) lasted. I know people have thought about doing stuff like this, but what do you think of the possible implementation? Would you choose a meta-routine? Why or why not? Would you be interested in seeing the game world change in a dramatic fashion? Does the meta-gameplay sound more like waiting, or like it would actually compliment the normal gameplay? Thanks for any thoughts you might have...

Good idea, especially because it allows the player to live in "historical times" and feel that the world is living; usually we have just some pre-scripted changes. This kind of "fast forward" shouldn't be possible to do often though. It needs to be balanced, or players will keep on "forwarding" instead of actually playing.

I like it alot. I think you've missed a tigger though and that is consequence. Remember the topic on being marooned? This could be the ideal way to handle that.

You crash into a rouge planetoid and the time you spend trapped there is played out over a series of vinegrattes covering your surival on the planetoid during the months or years that pass before you are rescued. It could be intestesting if after spending 4 years trapped on a planet because of an "accident" you discover that everyone thinks you are dead. Do you contact your old allies? What if they had a hand in you being marooned? Or do you keep your identity secert and move about hidden waiting for the time is right and all old debts are settled before annonouncing your return.

If you could some how incorperate personality changes into the character as result of these events and find a way to incorperate character personality into gameplay that would be very interesting to see.

Hmm. This strikes me as being a SimEarth-type idea - neat in concept, but no fun to play. If the player would ever willingly skip years of normal game time, maybe that indicates a failure to make the normal game interesting/suspenseful enough? If a great story makes the reader want to read every word, a great game should make the player want to play every second.

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Original post by sunandshadow Hmm. This strikes me as being a SimEarth-type idea - neat in concept, but no fun to play. If the player would ever willingly skip years of normal game time, maybe that indicates a failure to make the normal game interesting/suspenseful enough? If a great story makes the reader want to read every word, a great game should make the player want to play every second.

Not necessarily. Some great books have periods in which very little happens to the main characters, but a great deal happens on a larger (national/global/whatever) scale. In such cases, it is not uncommon to have the literary equivalent to what Wavinator is suggesting, quickly bringing the reader up to speed on the current situation, just before things get interesting again.

I see no reason why this couldn't work in a game, provided, as threadbare pointed out, there's a means to balance the "fast-forwarding" to keep people from abusing it.

Perhaps the characters could have a limited life span, with all that that entails? Repeatedly fast-forwarding by say, training or building stuff could provide some benefits, but overuse would leave the player with a well trained but feeble old man as a character.

Another means of balancing the ability to skip long periods of time would be to provide plenty of interesting opportunities to take part in the current time, opportunities that would be missed if the player hibernated through them.

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Original post by fearghaill Quote: Original post by sunandshadow Hmm. This strikes me as being a SimEarth-type idea - neat in concept, but no fun to play. If the player would ever willingly skip years of normal game time, maybe that indicates a failure to make the normal game interesting/suspenseful enough? If a great story makes the reader want to read every word, a great game should make the player want to play every second. Not necessarily. Some great books have periods in which very little happens to the main characters, but a great deal happens on a larger (national/global/whatever) scale. In such cases, it is not uncommon to have the literary equivalent to what Wavinator is suggesting, quickly bringing the reader up to speed on the current situation, just before things get interesting again.

Well, I suppose there are books like that. Not the kind of books I read or write though. I like stories about relationships between individual, deeply-developed characters, not nations or planets. But maybe war-gamers would like it - my dad likes books and movies about the battles of WWII that I find painfully boring. But then again my dad's not a gamer. Gamers who are interested in the escapism/roleplaying aspect of an RPG are usually not the same people who are interested in campaign epics with a cast of thousands and a scope of decades or centuries. If Wav can decide on a target audience that would like both modes of his game, and like the combination of them better than either alone, then he should go for it; I just have the gut feeling that, as with most crossover genre works, most of the audience members will spend time wishing the game was more one thing or the other. As a general design principle, I think it's better for projects to focus on doing one thing great than doing a variety of things moderately well.

Just an opinion,

This sounds like a very 'Psychological' situation.

Gamers like games that involve them, the term 'suspension of disbelief' is as essential in comuter games as in books, movies or TV.

Sims, 'Birds Eye'/'God Mode', or 'Era'/'Strategic' games appeal to people who go for goals.

'First Person' and 'Story Line' games appeal to people who love 'one on one' competition; it is personal, fast, and they like it that way.

Many RPG's, like D&D, are combinations.

Most good books 'gloss over' trivial parts and background information.
Too much unnecessary information, and it's like food with too much salt, unpalatable. Too little information will result in poor 'suspension of disbelief' and disinterest. Equally bad.

Avoid plateaus as well, there is something both unnatural and unpleasant about the way 'D&D' handled Levels, very 'Digital', use an 'Analog' approach. I think you'll find it more successful.

If you want to implement this Idea, I would suggest some research into film transitions and techniques.(particularly fades)

It will help give you the balance you seek :)

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Original post by sunandshadow Well, I suppose there are books like that. Not the kind of books I read or write though. I like stories about relationships between individual, deeply-developed characters, not nations or planets.

It can be an effective means of conveying an over all idea where the subject matter is important and not a detailed account of the events. For instance consider a romance novel, where two characters meet fall in love, that love grows, and then a tragedy occurs and the characters are torn apart, and eventually reconcile. You include in detail of the start of relationship, how the two characters meet and fall in love. But the details of the growing love might not be very important to the over all story. So instead of going into detail about it, you gloss over it and condense those events into a few pages of romantic feelings, imagery, and fragments of happy memories. The specifics aren’t important as long you can convey to the overall tone of that period in time to the reader.

"The summer passed in an endless series of blissful days. The suns heat was only matched by the warmth of Claire’s embrace, and the nights where alive with sound of her laughter ring in my ears. Her constant smile and gentle voice filled me with a longing and sense of belonging that I had never known. Like time beneath the apple tree; when my head rested in her lap, her long hair cascading down her shoulders, while she bent low to feed me grapes and tell me her hopes and dreams. And when a tear formed in her eye at those thoughts, I wiped it from her face and promised to stay with always, as we made passionate love in the shade. That summer was the happiest time in my life, and if I could. I would have made those days last forever.”

That’s just an example of how this idea can be used in writing to describe a period of time where the emphasis in not on the specific events of that time but the meaning of that time.

And for those my example didn't appeal to. Rememeber Conan the Barbarian? Most of his life is covered in of the course of a few minutes without diminshing the signifigance of that period of time or weighing down the rest of movie with irrelevent details.

[Edited by - TechnoGoth on April 12, 2005 6:27:02 PM]

I'm not much on romance stories, I keep my romance at home, privacy is very romantic. :)

Again my opinion:

But, personally, I would avoid 'mind reading', even between lovers. We are back to suspension of disbelief again. You may turn off some of your target market, especially those of us who think Hollywood uses too many 'unrelated to plot' sex clips in their movies.

As for Conan:

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And for those my example didn't appeal to. Remember Conan the Barbarian? Most of his life is covered in of the course of a few minutes without diminishing the significance of that period of time or weighing down the rest of movie with irrelevant details.

That was in the intro to get you up to speed without boring you. Not that uncommon even in games. I think the proposed Idea was closer to the desert scenes ( like the Moses in 'Ten Commandments')where he wandered for an untold period without much happening or contributing to the story. This is also sometimes narrated for clarity.

Remember, Good poets never tell people what the poems really about.
As John Carpenter said " The scariest things can’t be put on film only conjured in the audiences imagination"(paraphrased)

The same holds true in games

:)

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Original post by Wavinator That sound you hear is the thin ice cracking under this idea... I've become slightly obsessed with the idea of life stages that map to sweeping changes in a fantastical universe. The gist is that you'd freely wander the world and be able to discover "chapter triggers" that you could optionally activate. These chapter triggers would initiate dramatic plot shifts between NPCs, shifts in alliances and governments, and changes in your own character's hidden story.

I just described in this thread link the way to get to a decision of a character as a function of their biographical makeup as an interrelationship to the storyworld as a whole, and this may be expandable to several levels of arcana were the significance, either behaviorally in scene, in action (as character affecting the world) or character arc developmentally (interactive experience changes character perspectives/alliances/alignment) that are the play choices that flip the trigger, so to speak.

The significance of the behavior or the arc would needs some sort of scale. This scale would be designed in parallel to the degree markings chosen on the arc describing where the character was when the story was opened, and where they end up at the end of the story problem solution. So, an example of this would be, in Doom II, you start with handgun, kill a few low level (conflict description entities) guards and get a shotgun. With shotgun you now can kill flameball spitting brown dudes. These are, because the Doom II character is so emotionally one dimensional [be pissed at aliens for taking over earth through dimensional wormhold, kill them all and save the earth] points plotted along the character development arc.

You would have to enmesh the character arc and the conflict resolution arc with the internal development arc of the character being the lowest arc description and the overall game world arc final conflict resolution as the highest arc. Relevant arcs such as:

- If I help one person (character change) = all his family ally with character goals. Each family member would have it's own attributes as an NPC for assisting the avatar/character.

- if I help this family (character change) = all his surrounding neighbors ally with character. This sends ripples through the village, but a condition is set it does not travel to other villages as good news, with a rule condition that you shot (character changes alignment) the neighborhood, and bad news travels fast as far, it would, but how far is determinism. So If one family member shot, family attacks/hides and plots against you. If family killed, neighborhood (as an array of entities with wide ranging characteristics of behavior, some of whom will take immediate hostile action, some of whom will take longer term, sinister style oppositional actions; this is a societal setting , so you can 'entitize' your way to ensemble/demographics heaven), If neighborhood killed, village aligns against you. If village helped or killed, region responds accordingly. This can be done up to a planetary scale, planetary system size, stellar radius scale, star cluster or grouping scale, sector, quadrant and so on to the limit of the scale you have described for the game universe itself. Describe arcs outward based on degree of good or evil character does (how henious or benevolent the player behaves generally; this can fluctuate), and set values for influence radius into community, and scale of behavior good or evil (how henious or benevolent this particular action taken by the player), setting values for how far this influence travels into it's relevant radius of influence according to preset normatives (the behavioral kind). This gives you all kinds of wicked fun choices and plot permutations, like, I killed this entire village, but this is a planet where violence is a act to be culturally appreciated, so I can have a lot of negatively aligned allies to put on my ship and take over here to planet in star location X,Y,Z, and let the melee begin, while I run around healing people because I need the political esteem as a saving hero here to influence the king when all my hidden melleers are dead in order to gain the object to move to the next sphere of intrigue with the proper tool of influence to work with.

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What this would look like is a normal game with a meta-game on top of it. You'd play freeform or do missions until you choose to access a character, place or a thing. Then the game would shift to the next chapter, jumping ahead months, years or even decades.

It would seem to me to appear as a normal as game (in terms of what we see onscreen is what we are actualizing), but the triggers of our particular behavior can lead to some immediate repercussions (either positive or negative, based on choice player makes and response array available to all given entities types within influence radius as a function of degree of action taken) or some longer term ones, where player goes to other side of galaxy and gets the, "We heard about what you did on Cygnus 37, asshole. No pie for you. Get off our planet or face the Wavitaur!"

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You'd know about epic changes on the horizon through news and characters. In the normal game, you'd want to prepare yourself for these coming storms by gathering the resources you'd need to survive them. But the outcome would not be deterministic and predictable due to the swirl of characters and nations acting against one another.

I suppose you could have traditional expositional devices like the radio playing or the entity conversing, but you could also have some sort of player awareness such as, "Well, these people are Adventurons, so, they will melee at the drop of a hat, and will drink all night and forget everything that they did, so I can count on them to not spread negative influence on me at all." These awarenesses could be created in biographical or setting oriented descriptive expositional tools of an array of design choices.

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Optional chapter triggers would be things like: Choosing to go on a long trip (an interstellar voyage, sailing around the world, etc.) Choosing to settle in a town Going into hibernation Performing a meta routine (see below) Meta-Routines These are like a macro action, something you'd do over and over again but for which there's not a lot of interesting gameplay. Examples: Searching for something or someone Training Hiding from someone or something Choosing to build something that takes a long time Scientific research Doing a mundane job Waiting for an event

This is a good description of what I was talking about above, but broken down to a level of character building (instrinsic), intelligence gathering (extrinsic but individually performed not as an active in game process, though technically, you are still in the game, but you are edugaming at this point), and what I will term as art imitating life meta-routines in which we all (hey now) wait an awful long time for some things to manifest, and can't really do anything about it.

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The results of meta-routines are more fun than the actual process. So why not "skip to the good part?" If you chose a meta-routine you'd get a kind of fast-forward feature. During the routine, vignettes would pop up giving you some idea of what's happening in the world and allowing you to make macro-level choices to affect them. Your stats would also change as time went by, and you'd see the map change in phases from different camera angles. You could also drop back into the world to interact with these changes (expanded towns, NPCs with children, raised or fallen empires).

And, it would be a game more like life. Where good things often take time, and we don't have all the power or control we would want. Novel approach, huh?

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Meta-routines would have a prerequisite to start (you need a place to train and a Will of a certain number, for instances). You could also only do them as long as certain vital resources (like money) lasted.

Ok, we're both working along very similar lines now.

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I know people have thought about doing stuff like this, but what do you think of the possible implementation? Would you choose a meta-routine? Why or why not?

It's like I was talking to you over coffee once about. Low res (from the interpretational, engagement and 'white noise intelligence')interaction, for when your poor neurons are tired from fragging. This has life long games written all over it.

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Would you be interested in seeing the game world change in a dramatic fashion?

In content descriptions of this scale, it's inevitable, so the question imo really becomes, is it a drip percolation of dramatic change or a volcano? As in screenwriting, audiences need rest points between highly emotional or viscerally percepted events, gameplay action contained within that percepted interaction processing.

I'd toy with the array of scenarios, to see what the mind of the user could handle all at once (playtesters responses), handle over the long haul (and I suggest the scale of your gameworld, the depth of the content and sophistication/simplicty of the onscreen interactive here and now all point to how long it will generally take to play your game, necessary for determining play value hence unit or subscription price) and then the best scenarios will surface.

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Does the meta-gameplay sound more like waiting, or like it would actually compliment the normal gameplay?

In a way, it reminds me of the commercial areas of EQ. It was about prepping for the game as much as going out with your new tools to play it, and people not only had a good time there, they prospered and paused and relaxed and refreshed all at once. You suggestion is different in the respect that this meta activity is not necessary so distinctly separate from the game loop, but is an activity undertaken in the gameworld while other events are unfolding as a result of triggers being tripped (as opposed to EQ, where other players and troupes were able to effect community based gameplay/victory condition factors outside of the programming) that send ripples through the intelligence decisions of the game as if it were a decision making entity itself, whether comprised of spheres of radius of decision influence choice derivatives or top level decisions (the player is a major force in the game now) and aren't you approaching the god game genre at that point?

Food for thought,
Adventuredesign

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Thanks for any thoughts you might have...