The Dunning-Kruger reticule

In my review panning Alpha Protocol, one of the many issues I singled out for complaint was the disconnect between the reticule and the actual position hit by my bullets. I've received a few comments through various channels that reflect a belief that I simply didn't understand how an RPG works. I think it's pretty obvious that I do; most of these comments display a fundamental misunderstanding of my complaint. The point here is not that when my character shoots there is a complicated set of calculations that decides whether or not I actually hit where I was aiming. Rather, my complaints about this are complaints about the interface, because the meaningless reticule adds a needless layer of opacity to the RPG system.

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What's wrong with Leanne

In my last post I mentioned the difficulty I sometimes have in connecting with characters that express values opposed to my own. Because a game is an interactive entertainment that requires the player to exert considerable effort in order to progress, it's important to make sure that the player identifies or sympathizes with the characters he's controlling. This is especially true of 40+ hour games like RPGs. You're spending a lot of time with these people, so they'd better be worthwhile company. Unfortunately, Resonance of Fate had a small cast I didn't enjoy spending time with at all. I found the personalities of the male characters, Vashyron and Zephyr, to be completely repulsive and tiresome. But the female character, Leanne, was problematic in a different way. It wasn't just her personality, although she's not the sort of person I'd generally care to hang around with. Leanne just made me sad, because she was so obviously a patriarchal caricature.

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Who wants to be Lloyd Irving?

Having explained what I thought was wrong with Infinite Space, I feel obliged to talk about what it did right. In this context I'm going to discuss something lots of other games get wrong, from my point of view. Let me start with the proposition that games express values. That may seem trivial to anyone who has played through twenty or so JRPGs with the same neo-luddite earth-friendly themes, but I'm actually not talking about that kind of expression. Games also have intrinsic values that are communicated by the kinds of characters that are chosen as protagonists, the way that the plot evolves around them, and the systems with which the player affects that plot. In marked contrast to many notable JRPGs of the last decade, Infinite Space values intelligence and pragmatism. Because I share those values, I appreciated the game more, perhaps, than its gameplay and plot strictly deserved.

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Who's in the party?

Along with the Vintage Game Club, I have recently been playing Chrono Trigger, a game widely hailed as one of the best console RPGs ever made. While the game has many attributes worth praising (not least the continuity of world and battle screens), I was particularly interested by its combination attacks. Almost any two characters that are in the combat party can combine their unique individual battle techniques into more powerful "Dual Techs". For instance, Lucca can charge Crono's sword with fire while he performs his "Cyclone" attack to create the "Fire Whirl" tech. Frog and Ayla can combine their weak individual healing skills into the "Slurp Kiss" that slightly heals the whole party. I think it odd that this approach has seen so little use subsequently, since it seems like modulating abilities based on party composition has great potential for infusing characterization into the combat mechanics.

Of course, most role-playing games, especially in the JRPG genre, give the player characters with complementary abilities or specialized roles, so that certain rosters are somewhat more effective than others. Having the characters explicitly combine their attacks is much less common, and is typically reserved for high-powered finishing moves, as in Kingdom Hearts II or Tales of Symphonia. Chrono Trigger differs from these games in that its combination techniques span a spectrum of opportunity costs (also, the animations are short). Some of them do require a significant investment of MP and can only be used sparingly, but others have a low enough cost that they can be used almost every turn. As a result, the shared abilities are almost as important as the individual abilities to the tactical evaluation of a particular party composition.

This had an interesting effect later in the game, after I managed to get Magus to join my party. Magus is a strong and versatile character with hard-hitting magic attacks of several different elements. Considering just his individual abilities he's a good character to have in the party. Yet, I almost never used him because he didn't have any dual techs at all. He couldn't increase his effectiveness by teaming up with anyone, and rather than give up the tactical flexibility, I left him out. It felt mechanically like he just didn't fit in with the party, an appropriate note because he is a major antagonist for much of the game. The mechanics of the game isolate him in battle just as the story suggests he would be isolated in the group.

This seems to me like the sort of thing that should be done more often. The enormous cast of many JRPGs means that most of the playable characters and their relationships never really get fleshed out, despite the hours of cutscenes. Why not use the combat system to do some of this work? Envision a set of party dynamics, and use the availability of combination attacks to illustrate those dynamics. If you imagine that Marle is jealous of Ayla and Lucca, creating friction in the group, express this by limiting their combos or making them less powerful. Then, when the player needs Lucca in the party for her fire attacks, the tactical limitations would encourage the player to respond by removing Marle from the combat group. The player's choice of party members remains an act of play, but through the manipulation of the mechanics it becomes an act of narrative characterization as well.

We can push this further by making the available combos respond dynamically to narrative. Events in the story that bring two characters closer could make new combination attacks available to them. When the relationship between two characters changes, the set of shared techniques could be adjusted to reflect the difference. This need not be tied to the planned story: a relationship system like that of Tales of Symphonia could be used to guide the evolution of combination techniques.

I've seen a couple of excellent essays (from Jay Barnson and Nayan Ramachandran) recently trying to dissect what's wrong with the JRPG and suggest ways that the genre could be revitalized. My own advice is to let the gameplay tell the story, too. Persona 4 and The World Ends With You both did this, in different ways, but you can still apply the lesson even if you aren't so unconventional. Use the gameplay of party dynamics to reinforce the story of personal relationships. Make "these characters belong together" part of the player's thinking in every phase of the game, and the stories of those characters may gain more resonance.

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You can't put a price on your soul

BioShock's most famous moral choice concerns the fate of young girls who are wandering through the undersea city of Rapture. The player gets to decide whether these girls live or die, and in a game that features a civilization built on the principle of laissez-faire one expects economics to play some kind of role in this decision. Many writers, however, have complained that it does not, and that the choice has too little of an effect on one's ultimate experience of the game. Leigh Alexander and Bonnie Ruberg, among others, have suggested that something more sophisticated is going on here, and in other aspects of the player's behavior in Rapture. The difficulty of resolving the rescue / harvest choice in BioShock by a cost-benefit analysis illuminates the little-discussed value of selfishness embodied by most gameplay.

Ludonarrative dissonance and the player's choice

Clint Hocking's famous critique of BioShock accused it of developing a case of "ludonarrative dissonance", or tension between the message of the mechanics and the message of the story. As he put it, the mechanics offer a "ludic contract" that tells the player to seek out power (in the form of weapons, ammunition, plasmids, and ADAM) in order to advance in the game. This contract encourages the player to adopt a philosophy of rational self-interest much like that espoused by Andrew Ryan, the founder of the game's undersea dystopia. The story, by contrast, offers a "narrative contract" that tells the player to help others (initially Atlas, later Tenenbaum) in order to advance. In Hocking's view, the player can choose to accept or reject the ludic contract by harvesting the little sisters (maximizing his take of ADAM) or rescuing them, respectively. However, because the overall narrative of the game is fixed, the player cannot really choose to accept the philosophy of rational self-interest, and the climactic confrontation with Ryan seems to ridicule the player for putting up with that limitation.

Subsequent discussions of the game took a curious turn, however, in that aspects of the rescue / harvest choice itself were accused of being the centerpiece of dissonance. Wes Erdelack's excellent discussion of ludonarrative dissonance is a case in point, although I believe this take on the matter originates with Jon Blow. The essence of the complaint in this case is that the story sets up the player's choice to save or kill the girls as crucial, the consequences of the choice amount to almost nothing in terms of the gameplay. Although the player obtains significantly less ADAM when he chooses not to harvest the little sisters, repeatedly rescuing the girls causes Tenenbaum to give him gifts containing additional ADAM, ammunition, tonics, and a unique plasmid. As a result, in terms of strict gameplay consequences, the choice the player makes with respect to the fate of the little sisters doesn't matter. In essence, the game doesn't allow the player to make a choice about the philosophy of rational self-interest because both options are compatible with that philosophy.

These discussions all assume that dissonance ought be avoided, but as Michael Abbott has noted, it has its uses. The odd discordant note may offend the ear, but it draws attention and forces the observer to consider the artwork more carefully. The seeming mechanical equivalence of choice may be the conceptual error of a foolish team, or an intentional effort on the part of the developers to make the player consider the conflict presented more carefully. If we interpret this dissonance in BioShock as signal rather than noise, BioShock indicts the value systems of games and gamers.

You are only a link in the great chain

The philosophy of rational self-interest lies at the heart of both kinds of dissonance in the game. Andrew Ryan intended Rapture to be a utopia with no governing principle other than man's own self-interest, and regards those who seek the protection of a government to be little more than parasites sucking society dry. He builds Rapture for himself. His primary antagonist, Frank Fontaine, embraces this philosophy in a more nuanced way. He too only acts in his rational self-interest, but rather than Ryan's reactionary hatred of charity, Fontaine sees the feeding and housing of the poor as a transaction in which he purchases loyalty. They are very different men — Ryan wishes to build a society, Fontaine aims only to plunder one — but their heuristics for moral decision-making are identical. Whether either of them fairly depicts Randian Objectivism is an interesting but ultimately pointless debate; their self-interested philosophy most resembles the implicit morality of video games.

Obviously I don't mean to attribute a moral system to games like Guitar Hero, but most games that feature a player-controlled avatar operate on a moral system much like Fontaine's, in which all the world is the player's for the taking. Certainly most games try to cover this with a veneer of a story that somehow involves saving the world, but this motivation rarely takes center stage in the player's mind. In almost every game in existence, the player is encouraged to kill everything he encounters and plunder every chest he sees in order to win the game. Role-playing games often acknowledge this, usually through some abstracted morality system as in the Fable games. Yet in these cases only the extent of the behavior is criticized, not the fundamental attitude. So long as a chest or trove lacks any obvious owner, the player will not be criticized for taking it. The primary value of these games is always selfish advancement motivated by hedonism.

"Never play a man for the short con when you can play 'em for the long one..."

In keeping with this value set, we expect our options in games to be clearly differentiated in terms of their utility with respect to our self-interest. Because this is not operationally true of the rescue / harvest choice, many players were frustrated or confused. This statement from Duncan Fyfe, is typical of the protests:

It's hard to understand why this is the case because it's such a fundamentally simple and classic philosophical debate. You can make the rational, self-interested choice to gain as much resources as you can from this one interaction. Or you can sacrifice/minimise your short-term reward in favour of long-term benefit. This is how it's presented to you and it's basic political philosophy. It's realism versus idealism. You'll get less Adam for rescuing the little sisters but there's the promise of a greater reward down the line.

The problem with objections like this is that delaying gratification doesn't put philosophical ideas into opposition at all. The debate over long-term benefit vs. short-term benefit is just an argument over what constitutes self-interest, or what is the more "rational" route towards actuating it. Reducing the rescue / harvest choice to long-term vs. short-term gains merely recapitulates the contrast between Ryan's short-sighted anti-altruism and Fontaine's "long con", but neither of those options entails a rejection of rational self-interest.

It's not the choice you make, it's why you make it

If you want the player to really consider the implications of the philosophy of rational self-interest in the rescue / harvest choice, there are only two real ways to do it. The first is to make the rescue choice truly oppositional to the player's expected self-interest, i.e. give him no ADAM or very little for taking this route. The obvious disadvantage of this approach is that the game now becomes highly skewed. Although the vita-chambers relieve difficulty in the typical sense of dying and thus being unable to continue, the game will certainly become a much more frustrating and challenging experience. A gamer who played through such an experience might come away with the impression that the game was designed to convey the idea that Ryan and Fontaine were right, that he should have chosen killing.

The other alternative is to arrange gameplay in such a way that "rational self-interest" no longer constitutes a reasonable standard for decision, and this is what the choice looks like. The point is not to give the player a way to reject the philosophy in the decision, but rather to draw his attention to the fact that this was such a large part of his decision-making all along. Rational self-interest cannot tell us what to do with the little sisters because both options fit this mindset. Thus, the arbiter of judgment is your conscience, as it is in real life. The fact that costs and benefits of the options you can take with the little sisters don't conform to our expectations about "moral choice" in a game invites us to examine the values that inform those expectations, and the ways in which games express or exploit them.

Games have implicit values — do as you're told, take what you will — that we might disagree with were we forced to acknowledge them explicitly. Because these values are both hidden and integral, it is difficult to force the player to confront them without a shock or a feeling of confusion. The dissonance in the rescue / harvest choice may be intended to inspire the latter. If so, then both the confrontation with Ryan and the choice for the little sisters are commentaries on the nature of video games. Despite the ever-increasing promises of freedom, games have always played you the same way Fontaine played Jack. And regardless of how you feel about Ryan and Fontaine, you have always played games as if you were them. BioShock elaborately displays the callousness and evil of these men, and through them, you. How do you feel about that?

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Get by with a little help from your friends

Fog blankets the sleepy little town of Inaba, hiding a secret and a killer. On rainy midnights, the televisions in the village show strange images of citizens who have recently disappeared. Days later, when the fog lifts, these people turn up dead. Only a small group of teenagers know the truth: inside the televisions lies a perilous world where the hidden aspects of a person's soul become murderously real. Someone is kidnapping the town's citizens and forcing them into that world, and only the main character of Persona 4 can save the victims and nab the killer. By himself, this would be impossible, but he has an amazing skill that guarantees his victory: he's a good friend.

The world inside the televisions of Inaba is crawling with monsters, and in order to confront the powers that are behind the disappearances the characters must defeat these creatures in turn-based battles. Alone, they'd never stand a chance, but the teen heroes of the game are assisted by "Personas", spiritual manifestations of their personality that have enormous power. The main character, named by the player, can acquire hundreds of these in battle or by "fusing" other Personas, thus gaining access to new abilities and stronger attacks. His friends, however, have just one Persona each, and that can only be obtained by traversing a dungeon and confronting their own souls in the form of a "shadow" born from the suppressed or disliked aspects of their personality.

The characters' shadow selves lack subtlety and nuance — one reflecting a young man's uncertain sexuality runs around in a towel and lisps outrageously — but they're not supposed to have those things. They represent the clumsy stereotypes common to the worldview of teenagers, and the oversimplifications of mass culture. In a game that depicts television's numbing effect as a world-obscuring fog, they're completely appropriate, though they can (and arguably should) make a player feel uncomfortable. Typical forms of teen angst, from jealousy to power struggles, inform most of the shadows' behavior, though the early dungeons are dominated by expressions of uncertainty about sexuality. Persona 4 also reflects on the inadequacies of its own medium in these dungeons. One of the game's antagonists is a disturbed, game-playing teen; his shadow takes the form of an infant cocooned in armor representing the hero of an 8-bit era RPG.

Persona 4 requires a significant time investment due to the level grinding in these dungeons. The relative ease of escaping and re-entering them means this can be discretized into play sessions lasting an hour or less, but the repetitious trekking through empty, uninteresting hallways to fight the same enemies over and over again will wear on many players. Losing your focus can lead to a frustrating game over, however. Like most Shin Megami Tensei games, battles really depend on correctly identifying elemental strengths and weaknesses. High-level monsters can be toppled easily if you know their vulnerability, but routine battles can quickly turn into disasters if the enemy exploits yours. Selecting the appropriate Personas and allies for a particular area or battle is a critical strategic task — the right friends make the difference between a long, difficult boss fight ending in victory and a short, frustrating boss fight ending in defeat.

Persona 4 also invites the character to develop relationships and explore problems outside the TV world through the social link system. In deference to traditional RPG mechanics, each key relationship has a "level"; by spending time with your friends and talking through their problems with them your relationship levels up, bringing you closer to resolving their problems. In terms of the game mechanics, your reward for success in the relationships is that you are able to create more powerful Personas. In reality, the social link conversations become their own reward. They're believably written, moving, and diverse, though the majority are built around repairing relationships or coming to terms with events or situations that cannot be changed. The main character makes a pretty good emotional facilitator, however, and in their culmination most of the social links give the impression that he's done something good for these characters just by listening to their woes and being supportive.

The mini-plots of these relationship arcs work better than the central story, which plods along predictably for the first 2/3 of the game or so, coming across more as an excuse for changing scenery and enemies than an actual mystery. Late in the game the pace picks up, with layers of double-crossing and deception that actually manage to elicit the feel of a caper. The eventually-revealed culprit (who the player must pick from a list in order to avoid the game's bad ending) manages to surprise, but this is only because the clues to the murderer's identity amount to only a few sentences of dialogue out of a game that can last upwards of 100 hours. As a result, forcing the player to choose the solution feels a bit unfair. Yet this reveal has its own reward; the story the culprit tells about his exploits gives the impression that he's someone who never faced down the dark parts of his personality. One gets the impression that all of this could have been avoided if he'd had a friend like the main character to help him.

Don't let Persona 4's demons and monsters fool you — this is a game in which the mechanics and story are built around the positive power of friendship. The main character supports his friends through hard times and tough decisions. In return, they fight beside him and give him the strength to fight on his own. All the creepy imagery and uncomfortable situations disguise a core message that comes straight out of an after-school special, and you'll only realize it when the game's warm (and yes, somewhat hokey) finale puts it right in front of your face. As the train rolls out of the station, you may find that the fatigue of Persona 4's long hours fades away, and you'll find yourself wanting to play it again, just to spend a little more time with your friends.

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Blog of the Round Table: Hero's Blade

For the February Blogs of the Round Table, Corvus asks us to take a design provided by another contributor for the January Round Table and build on it. The idea is to develop a similar theme or mood in this second game, without necessarily remaining true (or relevant) to the literary work that inspired the initial pre-make post. In that vein, I wanted to riff off Corvus' "A Lego Orange" with an eye primarily towards its endgame. At that point he's trying to get across a sense of disenchantment with a once-loved lifestyle, which is what I'm going for in this idea for an unconventional fantasy RPG called Hero's Blade.

Hero's Blade is set in a fairly large valley with a road running through it. There's a village at the center and several outlying farms, a forest area, and a few fields and streams. The player controls an older hero in the "grizzled ranger" mode, armed with an excellent sword and bow, good armor, and so on. The game begins as the Hero wakes up in the village inn, learning that he got a knock on the head during a landslide that has blocked the road at one end of the valley. Don't worry, he doesn't have amnesia. The road at the other end has recently been taken over by bandits, so he is trapped in the valley until the road is cleared or he removes the bandits. The game world should at this point be presented in desaturated colors, as if the player is looking at the world through a filter that gives everything a gray tinge. Other than this, the graphics should be standard realistic 3D stuff.

The inhabitants of the valley are all farmers and, with one exception, are neither willing nor able to fight the thieves on their own. The exception is a single character (who I'll call the Kid) who is eager to go out and get rid of the bandits. He (or she) should have similar armaments to the Hero, but of much lower quality. The Kid is a very unskilled and totally untrained fighter, but possesses the same set of combat skills as the Hero. Combat in the game is turn-based and perfunctory — as little removed from a classic turn-based model as possible. There are no magical items or magic users, no elemental strength/weakness system, no need for any kind of strategy. The Hero's abilities are so far above those of the bandits that one of them can only stand against him for a turn or two. He earns no experience from battle at all. By contrast, the Kid starts off as a pretty bad fighter and earns experience points and skill boosts as is typical for an RPG. The Kid is AI-controlled, aggressive, and foolhardy; the Hero's only means of controlling him is a command that can knock the Kid down and take him out of the battle for a few turns. If either the Kid or the Hero dies in combat the game ends.

Each turn of combat and each bandit killed desaturates the color palette by a certain fixed percentage. If the saturation drops below a certain level, the game whites out, then fades to a steel-gray color and ends. This cutoff applies without respect to bonuses based on relationships or locations (see below). Thus, a player can get a game over by walking into the cemetery.

While the valley has several places where the bandits patrol, the rest of it is fairly open and features no real threats. The Hero can converse with the inhabitants of the village and the farm, and can establish relationships with each (about 50 total). Early stages of building a relationship involve just talking with the inhabitants, using a conversation system that allows the player to convey an attitude towards the NPC. For the most part these NPCs will do their own daily tasks without seeking out the Hero. The exception is the Kid, who can never be found if you're looking for him, but appears immediately if you call him (using a button solely dedicated to this task in the open world). The Kid always shows up out of nowhere to join in or watch if the Hero enters a fight or does a job that might be related to fighting or adventuring. As the Hero's relationship with an NPC improves, the inhabitant will offer quests to the player, some of them minor and some of them more involved, but never requiring combat. Several characters will also offer jobs.

These side-quests and jobs should take be the focus of the development. Each job should have some depth of gameplay, so that it carefully rewards strategy and player skill. Also, there should be some degree of challenge to each of them. Similarly, each quest should have extended moments of interaction between the character and the world. For instance, if an NPC has a missing cow, the player's job will be to find the cow and then guide it back carefully by coaxing it along and constantly nudging it in one direction or another. The goal is to require continual input from the player during each of these quests while varying significantly from quest to quest so that the player is always engaged during them (as opposed to the combat).

The performance of each job or sidequest will be discretized in some way so that as the Hero does more of each the colors of the world increase in saturation. Similarly, each time the Hero "levels up" his relationship with one of the NPCs, he the world saturates. In addition, NPCs with whom the Hero has a very good relationship will boost the color saturation in nearby areas. Spending time near his friends will literally make the Hero's day brighter. Only the Kid does not have this effect.

Taking a relationship with an NPC to a certain level will cause the Hero to open up to the NPC, with the Hero revealing some of his past. These flashbacks should take the form of slideshows of images illustrated in striking style and vibrant color, voiced over by the Hero narrating the event from his life. The life events he narrates will take a variety of tones, appropriate to the history and nature of the NPC. However, each of them will have a sad epilogue. His old friends have all died in battle, the women he danced with in taverns across the land have settled down and forgotten him, he outlived his favorite horse, etc. etc. The image shown in each epilogue should use the washed-out palette from the start of the game.

Taking a relationship to a high level will also help keep the Hero from dying by whiteout. In cases where the game would normally end due to the color desaturation, a good friend can find the Hero and boost the saturation level back to safety.

All of this is meant to make combat an unattractive thing to do, but after every couple of days that the Hero does not find and fight a bandit in the valley, the raiders will become emboldened and attack the town. If the Hero does not decimate them, one of the villagers will be killed. On the day after the attack, any bandits or villagers killed will be buried in the town cemetery in a scripted event; depending on who is getting buried the Hero's attendance or non-attendance will affect his relationship with all the NPCs. In the vicinity of the cemetery itself (as well as the bandit hideout) the color desaturates by a certain fixed amount.

In addition to these spots, the color will desaturate at any spot outside of the village where the Hero killed a bandit previously. These will be easily identified because the bodies will persist, slowly decaying with time. In town, bandits killed indoors will leave permanent bloodstains. No matter how faint the rest of the world gets these will always be clearly visible; they will fade to black rather than white.

The population of bandits is finite, however, and once they get reduced to about a fifth of their initial number they will hole up in their little fort and start sending out individuals to burn farms or kill villagers while the Hero is too far away to help. At this point the Hero will be urged to attack their stronghold. If he refuses to go, the Kid will go by himself and die there; the game ends. If the Hero accepts, the villagers will contrive a way to make the bandits open their fort and the Hero and Kid will take them on. The "boss" bandit leader is only marginally more skilled than the bandits themselves.

After this fight, victory celebration, yada yada yada, the Hero is awakened one morning by the Kid, who says that he is going to leave the valley and adventure across the world. The player can choose either "I'll go with you" or "You should take my sword." For the first option, the Hero's better friends drop by and say farewell. The Hero will start to walk out of the valley with the Kid at his heels, and the player's ability to redirect his motions will gradually diminish. As they pass by the bandit hideout, the player loses control entirely. A few straggling bandits attack shortly thereafter, with both the Hero and the Kid being completely scripted. Each turn desaturates the view significantly, and when the bandits are defeated in the 5th turn or so the screen whites out. Game Over.

If the player chooses the second option, however, the camera leaves the Hero behind and starts to follow the Kid, who is not yet in the control of the player. The colors return to the same washed-out look they had at the beginning of the game. As the Kid gets closer to the bandit hideout, however, the palette becomes more vibrant. As he continues on past, the saturation increases. When the bandits attack, the player is finally given control of him; at this point the Kid is better than them by a fair margin. Each turn of combat increases color saturation, as does each kill. After he triumphs, the Kid looks away from the valley into the very bright and vibrant lands beyond. Heroic music; game over.

The thing I'm really going for in this idea is the weariness of the Hero. He's good at fighting, much better by far than anyone in the valley. Once upon a time he found combat thrilling, but now it's lost whatever luster it had. He's tired of killing, but he's trapped in a particular life by the sword. The desaturation of colors with each moment of combat and each kill represents his growing weariness and depression. The combat is intentionally made un-fun and un-rewarding to encourage the player to feel the same way about it that the character does. The life the Hero finds in the valley refreshes and revitalizes him, hence the increased color, and so the conversations, jobs, and sidequests should be made rewarding and engaging to encourage a similar feeling in the player. The Hero finds one last use for his fighting skills and then passes his sword along to the Kid, who resembles the Hero's younger self in his outlook. Or, the Hero allows his spirit to fade and consigns himself to an empty life he has grown to hate. The choice at the end isn't really about player input, but about asking the player to reflect on his experience in the game and correctly identify what the character values.

Obviously, I'm also tweaking a couple of things about RPGs here. A typical RPG would be about the fresh-faced Kid who has made a decision to go out into the world and have adventures, and this bit back home in the valley with the weak enemies would just be the first chapter. The pointless monotony of combat grind is also something I'm trying to get at with the desaturation and the first ending to the game. Of course, this could end up just being a collection of minigames with a story attached, but that might be refreshing in its own right.

Please visit this month's other entries:

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Power's joy and sorrow

I do not enjoy Fallout 3's Vault-Tec Assisted Targeting System, because I know what it does. I understand the goal of its slow-motion, dramatic camera angles, and sound distortion. The fountains of blood and gore, arms and legs and heads flying off from precision bullet strikes, speak to the worst excesses of action movies and gladiatorial combat. Death becomes entertainment for the hooting savage; the moral weight of murder disappears in the antigravity of bizarre ragdoll physics. In short, V.A.T.S. makes killing awesome.

But killing is not awesome, not ever, because each time it happens somebody dies. I know this, and so I do not like V.A.T.S. — on occasion I could go so far as to say I find it revolting. Nonetheless, I appreciate the system. Because of its staging, V.A.T.S. is more than a method of fusing real-time and turn-based combat — it is an integral part of the moral arguments of Fallout 3.

In Fallout 3, as with many other "Western" role-playing games, the player is an agent of moral choice in a world defined by the developers. In order to succeed, such a game must provide an engrossing context, compelling choices, and legitimate (not necessarily positive) narratives for the spectrum of available moral attitudes. It is not enough simply to have options. A game of this kind must have reasons, and a world worth making decisions in. In this regard, Fallout 3 largely succeeds.

Among other things, Fallout 3 is about war. The player character emerges from a sheltered Vault into the blasted wasteland of the D.C. ruins in search of his (or her) father. The world above ground has been shattered by a nuclear war; most of the buildings are burned-out shells or crumbling hulks of rubble. In the concrete jungle of D.C. proper, the debris has grown so thick that the only reliable way to move around town is through the old metro tunnels, and even those have mostly collapsed.

The intact buildings you do find are often tombs. Tiny skeletons lie on ruined beds, clutching worn teddy bears; their parents lie dead in the next bedroom, or in a bloodstained bathtub. Security robots blindly patrol the hallways of crumbling factories and office buildings, oblivious to the fact that their creators have long ago passed on, and there is nothing left to protect. Even most of the vaults are rotting sepulchers, their inhabitants long ago fallen victim to Vault-Tec's insane experiments.

The people who inhabit this world mostly live in shacks cobbled together from the metal hulks of the old world. They live off the barely-edible meat of mutated animals and the imperishable foodstuffs of the pre-war era. Some of them live off each other, some employ slaves. Their will to live is admirable, but the means by which they enforce that will are often less so. This is the Hobbesian state of nature in its full articulation, a small-scale re-enactment of the international chaos and resource wars that gave rise to the nuclear holocaust centuries before.

These features create a compelling context, true, but they also give the "good" character something to think about. None of it is pleasant, but it is war. Fallout 3 captures the lawlessness of the resource wars already occurring in places such as the Congo. There, children are even now being enslaved to mine valuable ores. In Afghanistan and other places, they are pressed into the service of armies and forced to fight battles they hardly understand. In these places the forces of order and government always seem very distant, even if their propaganda isn't. Fallout 3 is especially effective because it puts one of the world's great power centers on display as a shattered, irradiated shell, but the destruction of homelands and the ruin of societies are the universal products of war.

If that were all of it, man would never fight.

But that isn't all. There is the desperate struggle for resources, yes, that makes men fight. But a man can fight for what he needs without being evil. Without being good, perhaps, but fighting for his daily bread, if he must, does not make a man a monster. It is power that does that.

V.A.T.S. is about power, about the character's tremendous capacity to destroy. The bloody explosions and painful contortions of his enemies speak to the part of us that cheers when the gangsters get shot, when Arnie mows through a crowd of hapless soldiers. It is not a part of us that loves justice, but rather a part that loves strength. It is a part that loves the ability to mete out punishment, warranted or not. V.A.T.S. represents the seduction of power, and thus the draw of evil. Only a sick and twisted madman could love what war has wrought in the ruins of D.C., but anyone seeing V.A.T.S. could, just for a second, think that killing is awesome.

V.A.T.S., for all that I dislike watching it, represents one of the great strengths of Fallout 3, and may be its best articulation of the argument for war. V.A.T.S. presents killing as an empowering pleasure. The system is a constant seduction towards the joyous exercise of power, just as the elements of the game world are a constant reminder of the sorrow that comes from that exercise. And if the over-the-top gore and ragdoll physics turn you off, they give you something to think about nonetheless. Because even if you don't like V.A.T.S., somebody does, and that attraction plays a significant role in turning a good world into a wasteland.

If you are curious where I got the screenshot, I'm sorry to inform you that it is an actual photograph of Beirut taken in 2006. War never changes.

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The Attention-Deficit RPG

Last weekend I finished Namco-Bandai's Tales of Vesperia for the XBox 360, a game which delivers the "Tales of" series' characteristic action-chaos combat, lovely anime-flavored visuals, and little else. That's not how things begin: Vesperia presents a deeply unjust world and a genuine moral conflict about how to change it. The game's meandering, inattentive writing, however, leaves this initial promise unfulfilled. As a consequence the story is endlessly boring and deeply disappointing.

Spoilers follow, but trust me, there's not that much to spoil.

The world of Vesperia, Terca Lumireis, is politically dominated by an Empire that maintains its power through a monopoly on the distribution and sale of magical devices called blastia. Because Terca Lumireis is inhabited by numerous and exceedingly vicious monsters, blastia are believed to be absolutely necessary to survival: nearly all humans live in towns protected by "barriers" (there's no indication of how agriculture functions in these conditions). The Empire is very stratified, with a caste of nobles having crushing dominance over the commoners. As a result, many people choose to give up their citizenship and live in cities run by the Guilds. In tribute to MMO convention, each Guild is a group of adventurers with similar interests, not an organization dedicated to monopolistic domination of crafts and the exploitation of child labor. Blastia are exclusively artifacts that must be excavated, but all the world's archaeologists belong to a Guild, making the origin of the Empire's monopoly on the devices a curious and unexplored mystery.

The main protagonist of the game, Yuri Lowell, is a citizen of the Empire who once joined its corps of knights to try and redress the grievances of the common citizen, but left because he could not embrace their rigid adherence to protocol. By contrast, his childhood friend Flynn Scifo stuck with it and is now a celebrated member of the knights. Yuri has not managed to change the lot of the common man since leaving the knights, but Flynn hasn't had any success either. Like many RPG heroes, Yuri isn't able to simply stand aside when he sees injustice. Fortunately, he doesn't possess the excessive enthusiasm or angst typical of the genre. Rather, he comes across as a grounded individual, talented with a sword, who is profoundly dissatisfied with the state of the world and unsure how to change it.

In the course of the game, Yuri comes to a kind of answer, in that he murders two of the Empire's less redeemable officials, demonstrating his teleological approach to ethics. Flynn, pinch-hitting for deontology, acknowledges that the victims are criminals who escaped justice with the help of a corrupt system, but points out that if the system isn't transformed then it will just produce more untouchable criminals. Yuri can't kill them all. The story doesn't pick sides between the two men. Flynn achieves some good despite his inability to fully correct the system. Yuri, by contrast, is depicted as being cruel (especially in killing Cumore), and his approach is taken to its logical conclusion by the principle villains Alexei, who decides to get rid of the Empire by killing everyone in it, and Duke, who decides to correct a man-made environmental disaster by killing everyone everywhere.

The Guilds seem to be the natural alternative to the Empire, but as the history of the young character Karol illustrates, they don't have a system to support people who haven't found themselves. In the Empire such a person can at least scrape by; Karol simply gets abandoned. Moreover, the Empire manages to lurch forward even without an Emperor, while the Guilds descend into chaos after the death of the strongman who held them together.

You could do things with this, especially in light of the fact that the character Estelle is one of the candidates for the imperial throne (the worst-hidden twist of the game), but the social justice angle fades in the late game without really getting resolved. Instead, the endgame focuses on the side-effects of the blastia technology. There is an explanation for this, involving enough magibabble to make a Star Trek writer blush, but the primary upshot is that if the blastia continue to be used the world will be destroyed by a gigantic monster. There seems to be an pass made at a metaphor for anthropogenic global warming here, but it never connects because all the major problem-solving takes place off-screen, and nobody really seems to resist the destruction of their entire way of life... not even the ones who must literally die in order for the plan to work. Moreover, the connection between the social injustice of the Empire and the environmental destruction caused by the goods that give it power is never seriously explored.

If the larger dynamics get short shrift, then you would think that the characters would get a fuller development. Unfortunately, most relationships between characters are only lightly drawn, with the exception of that between Yuri and Flynn. Although he doesn't ooze angst, Yuri is a very calm, restrained character in most scenes. The breakdown of this control does a good job showing the connection between the two of them. Unfortunately, the writers frequently use Flynn as a tool to move the story along or magically solve problems, meaning that he must be an NPC. As a result, we are treated to only brief encounters.

The characters in the party clearly develop a sort of squabbling family relationship, with Yuri as the ersatz father, but none of the individual connections come close to that between Yuri and Flynn. Rita and Estelle clearly develop some kind of connection, but the strongest demonstrations in that relationship tend to get obscured by the plot. Yuri and Repede have a bond, but there's just no getting around the fact that Repede is a dog. Yuri and Karol begin to connect, but this sort of peters out after Zopheir Drifts. In every case, the development of these relationships is significantly hindered by the meandering of the narrative and the flatness of the character arcs.

In an RPG of Vesperia's construction, the purpose of the story is to keep the action moving between dungeons, to motivate the player to finish each dungeon, and to imbue important battles with emotional impact. This narrative has trouble with all three. One major problem is that each time a town is entered, the story stops dead as the player must wander around trying to find and talk to each member of the party. These conversations rarely move the story forward and often repeat themselves (more on this in a moment). Momentum is also drained by the fact that the narrative meanders significantly. There are times when you firmly know where to go next and why you are going there, but there are also too many times when it's not clear where to go or why you would bother going there.

The absence of a strong direction for the general plot also sinks down into the individual character stories, which I hesitate to call "arcs" because that would imply a trajectory that is nowhere to be found. Rather, the characters remain in stasis until a critical event, and then adopt a new stasis afterwards. The effect of this is to repeatedly begin the character's development. Estelle is indecisive and impulsive; Yuri and Judith challenge her to make a firm decision. This is fine the first time, but after this has been repeated for the fifth time it wears very thin. Then, after a particular event, this characteristic simply isn't mentioned again. It almost seems like the writers forgot that they'd already shown us a scene in which Yuri demands that Estelle decide whether or not to continue her journey, so they just keep treating us to nearly identical dialogue in town after town after town ad nauseam. Similarly, the fact that Karol is a coward gets repeatedly repeated until you'd rather stab yourself in the eye than suffer through hearing it discussed again. Then a particular boss battle occurs and suddenly he's not a coward anymore.

The repetition involved here would get to be dull and annoying even if there was any doubt about how Karol and Estelle would eventually turn out; in the absence of that doubt it is almost unbearably boring. Moreover, this kind of behavior flattens character development. There's no building of tension here, no character arc at all: the characters just stay the same until they abruptly fall off a cliff into a new state and are different. On the other hand, most of the characters never find that cliff at all. Yuri, Judith, Raven, and Rita all seem to make it through the story without experiencing any significant growth beyond the occasional clichéd revelation.

The inattentiveness of the writing really shows through in the vast collection of loose ends the story picks up from very early on. The motivation for Estelle to leave Zaphias with Yuri is that she has some warning she absolutely must convey to Flynn; once she leaves the city this is never mentioned again, not even when our heroes do at last catch up to him. The Knights become very well aware of Yuri's murder habit, but after a number of speeches about how he will have to face the consequences of his actions, from Flynn himself no less, no action is ever taken. Several of the characters form their own guild, but despite how important they make this obligation seem, nobody mentions it as they discuss their plans to go their own ways after the final confrontations. Then we have the essential abandonment of the social justice theme that dominated the early action, the biggest loose end of all. It's easy to overlook this if you're not paying attention to the story, but if the story only works when the player pays no attention to it, why have one in the first place?

The other main failing of the narrative in Tales of Vesperia is that it never manages to truly embody the actual antagonist. It is not Alexei who must be opposed, nor Duke, nor even the Adephagos per se. The system is the enemy, the entire way the denizens of Terca Lumireis have been living. An abstraction like that can't be engaged in combat, but one could assemble a cast of villains who represent the evils of that system, or who stand in the way of correcting it. The desperate chaos of the combat system would mesh well with such cathartic battles. Instead, Vesperia regularly forces you to defeat your allies in battle—the few systemic representatives it presents mostly die by Yuri's hand in cutscenes. Knowing this, you often feel like you shouldn't complete the current dungeon. Moreover, the largest boss battles seem meaningless, because you never confront the real enemy. The story makes these fights seem like empty exercises rather than important confrontations.

The consistent thread in all of this is a lack of care and attention. The constant repetition of character moments makes it seem like the writers forgot what they'd already done. The loose ends make it feel like they couldn't remember what they promised. The fact that the major themes never really get tied together, although it could easily be done, makes it seem like they just couldn't be bothered to put in the effort. So why should you?

Despite it's lame, scatterbrained story, Tales of Vesperia isn't a terrible game. The high-action, Smash Bros.-style combat works as well as ever, although the frequency of enemies in dungeons and the unusual difficulty of avoiding them turned the game into a bit of a slog at some points. The anime-inspired visuals are solid, the voice actors do an excellent job, and the score is lovely (if badly handled on occasion). Those aspects seem wasted, however. There's no reason to have an art department create an overworld, towns, and NPCs, no point to hiring quality voice talent, no reason to make anything other than battle music, if this lame tale is all you're going to use them for. You'd do just as well to excise those things completely, package up the battles and character progression into a rail-movement dungeon crawl and sell the whole thing as a combat minigame collection.

The greatest disappointment is that things didn't have to turn out this way. Tales of Vesperia has atypical heroes, some strong relationships, a genuine sense of moral conflict, and a setting that links aggressive social and economic injustice to environmental abuse. You could take those elements and create a deep, compelling story, if you paid attention to what you were doing.

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