Network now...BLOG
Is The Holodeck The Holy Grail?
I really do believe that interactions with characters are going to be a huge big deal in the future of gaming, a revolution that will permanently change things. I do not mean MMOs featuring new ways to communicate with real humans. Not cutscenes with superior rendering of facial expressions. Not dialogue trees with a kazillion branches. Instead, I mean the stuff I typically write about: some way to craft your relationship with an NPC with the same freedom you have when building your RTS base or attempting a combat tactic in an FPS. To arrive at moments between you and an AI character that are as wholly yours and unpredicted by the game’s creator as your wildest GTA story. Eventually, someone is going to get something right in an unprecedented way, totally nail a cultural nerve, and amass an enormous fortune, following which clones and evolutions will drive R&D further in that direction and beyond to nearby branches.
Imagine, if you can, this Holy Grail of gaming: you and Hicks are at an important decision point – is there time to double back and rescue Newt? Or do you need to sprint for the dropship and nuke the site from orbit? This is a heated argument, a battle of wills, and by carefully chosen words, body language and inflections you narrowly succeed in reaching your goal. Then you watch an amazing cutscene full of explosions and ricocheting bullets and aliens jumping out from behind barrels. Clint Hocking, bored and disengaged, wanders to the fridge for a beer until the next dialogue part comes along and he gets to play the game again. Here’s another Holy Grail game: you’re one of six people sitting around a dinner table chatting about their kids and their jobs at Microsoft. These are the experiences you’ve always imagined when dreaming of more character interaction in games, right?
I wonder: does anyone really dream of more character interaction in games? Or are they worried about it disrupting a perfectly serviceable and engaging game experience? If you believe in the potential like I do, then it helps to envision something that even reluctant players agree could improve gaming.
What good are characters, anyway? Consider JJ Abrams’ film Star Trek. We love it for the epic special effects and the rigorously believable ice planet ecosystems, but we also enjoy that tension between Spock and Kirk, set in a space adventure but still relatable. Perhaps we admire Kirk’s recklessness. Maybe it helps us explore the fantasy of acting out that level of hot-shit impulsiveness in our own lives. Now ignore for a moment that we have no idea how to support character interaction in games, what buttons you would push, or how to simulate the outcome. Instead, suppose that if you can imagine it, you can do it. Suppose we play not Kirk but ourselves in the Star Trek game, reckless if we choose, or a big brown-noser like Spock, or fill in the blank with any traits we feel like exploring. If you want to talk Kirk down from rushing headlong into a space battle, there are a few ways you might do it, if you play your cards right. If you get the idea to brag to Sulu about how many Romulans you can beat up, you just do so. The action sequences you wind up in afterward get resolved in a way that’s easier for us to imagine given today’s technology, and the full package is an integrated marriage between character and action. When you compare notes with your friend, it turns out they never realised you could engage Sulu’s competitive streak because they never provoked him correctly, but they found all these other cool interactions that you missed.
For the character stuff to provide that illusion of ‘anything is possible’ exploration, as opposed to ‘I found the Sulu minigame that the designers planted’ exploration, it’s important that both the situations and the solutions be emergent. Triggering Sulu’s interest in competitive Romulan abuse has to feel as much your own fault as getting chased by cops in GTA because they saw you accidentally run over a pedestrian. Figuring out how to back down from the competition without looking like a coward in front of your love interest has to feel as much an amazing feat of escape as ditching the cops with a daring vehicular jump over an opening drawbridge. Part of the appeal of a character-driven game has to be experimenting to figure out what you can do, and even inventing new things that can be done. Maybe think of it this way: for every cutscene in which your guy says or does something stupid you don’t agree with, instead you’ll get to fill in the blank with something else you’d rather have him do or say.
As we know, the holodeck doesn’t exist yet, and the conceptual problems are looking profoundly hard, so most of this stuff is still a long way off. But you’ve got to start with some examples of why it would be cooler to play a game with character interaction than one without.
Randy Smith is the co-owner of Tiger Style, whose first game, Spider, is available now for iPhone and iPod Touch.
Contact Us / About Us / Advertise With Us / BeltwayBlips / TechBlips / MassiveBlips / GamerBlips / FAQ
Subscribe To Edge Magazine / Corrections / Terms & Conditions / Privacy Policy
Copyright 2006 - 2009 Future Publishing Limited, Beauford Court 30 Monmouth Street Bath, UK BA1 2BW
England and Wales company registration number 2008885
Subscribe To Edge Magazine / Corrections / Terms & Conditions / Privacy Policy
Copyright 2006 - 2009 Future Publishing Limited, Beauford Court 30 Monmouth Street Bath, UK BA1 2BW
England and Wales company registration number 2008885
@Jason_Seip:
yeah, the thing i took from your post was that interaction is not just a physical, tangible concept, but also a mental one, and games have no prized posession over interaction, as anything can be interactive. so maybe we should look elswhere for unique expression.. not just following this singular line of thought in a linear manner.
characters are a problem for me, in games. i don't mind thinking about and controlling the 'player vessel', but when adding multiple characters, things get complex..and most games that do this make it feel like some kind of odd off-shoot of literature or fantasy novels, which is not the main direction i think gaming should be going in. NPCs and dialogue trees should be abolished if the designer is intent on pursuing a kind of fluid, real-time interaction.
i also cringe at realistic characters in any kind of game, looking all shiny and robotic with their uncanny valleys and dead eyes.
i think your idea of emergent character relationships is not redundant however.. it sounds interesting, but what motivates you to want to fully realize such a thing in the first place, and how do you relate that very real-feeling experience to life and being with people in the real world?
Stalker already is a big step in such a direction. Though emergent gameplay is the key, still story based narrative games will still be great like call of duty. And the real emergent game is Unreal Tournament 3 (With a very random human like AI) with no story other then what you do. This is my opinion.
It sounds like Randy is asking, "Is this really what we should be chasing?" The question seems like it would be answered, "Yes", by aesthetics, "No", by business; at least until the market begins to cry out for run-of-the-mill human interaction by out-of-the-ordinary characters in out-of-this-world situations. In other words, we can speculate on this question, but it seems to me that these questions get answered definitively only after the technology is available and we've begun to play with it, so to speak.
I think I see the point being made though. How valuable is it to be able to tell a knock knock joke to a Combine soldier? Would anyone be interested in discussing philosophy with Mario? It seems there would need to be a dramatic change in the kind of objectives and goals (and stories) a player takes on, in order to make that kind of interaction meaningful.
This article is mostly about the character interactions involved with a holodeck experience, but it made me think of some of the more practical concerns.
Frankly, I don't think the holodeck thing is going to come to pass, at least not the way we all envision it. It's exciting to imagine living our favorite games in a seemingly unlimited virtual reality that one can reach out and touch. I say "touch" because physical reactions to our behavior are needed and if there is no force feedback (whose source I could barely begin to postulate) then you're basically just playing Wii in a room or dome with images on all sides. I don't believe that's what any of us imagine as being a holodeck experience.
When thinking about how a holodeck might actually behave, and what problems arise when trying to support it, I like to take existing games and try to imagine them functioning in such an environment. For example, consider the God of War games. It would be thrilling to be Kratos in the midst of attacking mythological creatures, swinging your powerful blades in graceful arcs of destruction. But a multitude of questions arise: Are these blades physics-based, dependent on your own gyrations (with a little help from the game)? If you have access to a specific and limited set of motions, how do they get mapped to the human player who doesn’t, or can’t conform? People get tired jumping, running, climbing, and swinging their arms around – how is that compensated for by the game? How is damage to the player felt?
Thinking about such things makes it seem most likely that our holodeck experiences would end up being far more vanilla, like those of the Star Trek variety. We would walk around pretty environments, talk to the NPC natives, and generally act like tourists. Even so, the threat of injury haunts me. Have you ever played a game like Half-Life 2 in which a physics bug suddenly caused you to be instantly crushed by something so simple as a door or piece of debris? I have. I don’t care what “safety protocols” are active in a holodeck that is capable of inducing forces on a player, programming mistakes and calculation glitches happen and could prove fatal.
A more practical course instead, and again, this is all based on speculative science and guesswork, could be to tap into the parts of the brain that are involved in the dream process while sleeping. Think “The Matrix” rather than a holodeck. When dreaming, fully interactive environments and people (i.e. characters) are generated on the fly and, at the time, completely believable. The laws of physics are basically consistent with the real world, but malleable, which would be perfect for game environments. And players could perform amazing athletic feats for hours on end without getting exhausted. Even fidelity probably doesn’t matter, since an elm tree doesn’t have to look like an elm tree as long as the player believes it’s an elm tree (unless it’s tied into the game mechanics). There would need to be a balance between the simply suggestive elements of the game (like trees) and the controlled elements, such as level design.
Then again, if this is all to go on in our minds, one could ask if our own imagination isn’t good enough already. When coupled with gameplay, I’ve experienced a myriad of enjoyable game moments that never actually took place in the game. Take Demon’s Souls – I enjoy the hour or so after playing the game as much as I do actually playing it. I mentally replay the experience from what would be my own viewpoint as the warrior, the game free of animation and collision hiccups, free of jerky camera movements, and filled with NPCs that never repeat themselves and enemies who look me in the eye as we fight to the death. It’s great stuff, and I sometimes wonder if it’s necessary to actualize such experiences within the games themselves.