#09 Ways of Meeting Reality (and Overwatch)

"But to the wizard's eye there was a faint change, just a hint of transparency, about him"

Today I'll present to you further philosophical thoughts in a very phenomological way (at least that's what I'm telling myself), which will get us closer to an overall understanding of games. Furthermore, my Overwatch mission design will find its continuation!

Meeting Reality

We usually refer to the classical five senses when we're thinking of perception in our everyday life. Most sciences add some other senses to them: Various body sensations like hunger, stitching in your chest, or some higher level senses of sociality, agency etc. However in our everyday life we're talking sometimes in a broader sense: I can also perceive contents in my psyche: my thoughts, feelings, motivations, plans, memories - to make it short: All conscious psychic contents of my self.

Here I'd like to think of perception as everything that a consciousness perceives, including outer reality by means of the senses and inner reality, which are body feels and psychic contents.

A high-level distinction of perceptions.

As my little sketch remarks, reality to me is more than I perceive at a given time. This is simply based on my memories: There have been other phenomena that I experienced. A second note is about the blurriness of the categories I just introduced. We already have a hard time differentiating between e.g. moods in the psyche and feelings in the body. The inner/outer distinction however is relatively stable: The five senses are a quite robust categorization which is most likely in conflict with body feelings. We could arrange the categories on a line:

psychic        -        bodily        -        outer perceptions

This all is dangerously close to the mind-body problem, the question for the status of reality and all such things. Here, I am not interested in solving those problem correctly, I rather aim for a pragmatic theory that I can apply in practical contexts.

Before we can move on to games, here comes a strange thing: We are obviously not only able to perceive a part of reality, but we're also our acts are at that very same part. But can we not describe acts as mere perceptions aswell? No, because even if we're able perceive our acts, we are not able to distinguish between actor and observer: we're perceiving our psyche, body doing things, ever identifying as being them. It is the beauty of self-perception being at work here.

What I draw from this: We should action as a second mode of meeting reality next to perception. In either mode, were meeting that what we perceive as psyche, body, or perceived reality. It should be noted here, that we cannot act upon all things we perceive while the reverse is always the case.

On a side-note, in this whole discussion people with dissociative identity disorder are a philosophical interesting case. They prove that it is possible to have multiple perceivers sharing (more or less partly) one psyche, body and perception of outer reality. This raises further questions concerning the nature of perception as I described it - by which criterions is decided, whether a perception is attached to something or not? But this is a whole other topic and we, after all, are here to talk about game and quest design.

So, having such distinctions, how does it help with game and quest design?

Ways of Perception and Action in a Computer Game

If we know which perceivable inputs and causable outputs a human has when meeting a medium, then we can deduce the possibility space of design options for that medium. So let's think about the ways of perception and action that a computer game offer.

At this point one might think I'm finished after talking of the game in outer reality. But as I noted in post #02, already the unplayed game might be partly existing in the player. For computer games this may be true too: Think of an interpretation you bring into the gameplay that isn't defined by the rules: In Tic-Tac-Toe, for instance, you recognize adjacent colors as a cross without the rules having to tell you that.
An in a played game body and psyche are even more important: Your lung working faster in a horror game is part of the played game as is your plan for attacking that monster.

Basic Perceptions and Actions

I will begin with the perceived outer reality, to which we have perception-access by (usually) five senses: Sight, sound, touch, smell, taste. A computer game usually offers audiovisual output via monitor and speakers on the basic level, though haptic output is also possible, if a controller is used. In addition, the game time is also provided - the output of a computer game changes, and we perceive this change (or the lack thereof). We have action-access mostly via our hands: Clicking and steering by using keyboard/mouse or controller (in most cases).

In the body domain I'll locate feelings from various parts of your body: back, heart, stomach, shoulders, chest etc. Borrowing from psychosomatics, you might associate certain feelings with certain parts of your body: hurting back and shoulders - heavy weight, hurting stomach - not taking enough for yourself, etc. A less controversial correlations might be tense muscles - tense situation. Body-actions that are not on its border are things like tensing up or taking a deep breath.

The psychic domain encompasses, roughly speaking, cognitive and emotional contents/processes. On the emotional side we have (again, roughly speaking) moods and emotions while on the cognitive side there are things like thoughts/images/sounds, informations, meanings, goals, causalities, subjective time.

More Complex Ways of meeting Computer Games 

Some "basic" channels of perception/action were actually already not-atomic: A meaning, for instance, always needs a sign, whose meaning it is. We can easily imagine more complex abstractions, combinations and extensions of those basic perceptions and actions. I am sure the following list is incomplete, but I think it gives some interesting insights:

If we arrange notes over time, then we get noises, melodies, songs, soundtracks. The audio-time category thus is a quite important one. Even more important to computer games seems to be the spatial way of perceiving: The colors on the 2D-screen are interpreted as 3D-world. If we add time then we gain the movement of birds on our screen, flowing rivers or a dangling door. Audio-time and room-time together make up all of the output that most computer game softwares give to us - the game reality(ies) (or game program output).

Moving from outer reality to inner I realize that there is nothing I could say about body perceptions. Studying this would be interesting, especially regarding factors like feeling comfortable, having eaten/drunk enough, being fit, etc.

Gameplay could be defined as the combination of game program output and input (which is the player's performance). The perceived game system might be the mental model of possible player/machine actions, their objects and logical relations. A mental model is network-like collections of meanings. On mental models also the narration is based: An unveiling/producing/sorting of informations recognized in the game world and informations produced by player input to that world. Gameplay and narration typically serve as source for motivational forces, through e.g. narrative drives (helping that NPC) or gameplay goals (mastering that level). To all these things emotions can be attached. We might like a certain weapon's sound especially, we might get involved in an NPCs problems and a narration can feel like an emotional journey, maybe including katharsis.

Saruman has complex access to distant (timely and spatial) things by means of his eyes (input) being directed (output) at his palantír and bending his will towards the desired thing (output).

Perceptions and actions at body and psyche were harder for me to describe, since I'm neither a biologist nor does psychology have a unified model of the brain. So I will leave it at an attempt here.

Summary

Below you'll find a table sums up my thoughts:

Ways of meeting a computer game.

We now have talked about ways of meeting computer games, an interesting thing indeed, since it lays out before us the ways on which we can design games. Furthermore it allows us to locate quests more precisely when talking about games.

Here is my current quest-definition:

A quest is a series of connected events and goals, where subsequent event(s)/goal(s) are only revealed, when previous goal(s) have been reached or some event has happened.

Simply by looking up words from this definition it can be seen that quests are one of the more complex contents that can be found in computer games. According to the same measure quests are most connected with gameplay, game system, narration and motivational system.

As a final note: The pacing of a computer game could be defined as the arrangement of structure on any way of perceiving that game in relation to another way. Examples would be "involvement per progress", "narration per spatial unit", "feeling per audio second" or "input per game time".

With these interesting thoughts I'd like to finish the theoretical part.

Further Reading / Inspiration

https://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/author/KatarinaGyllenback/932286/

A lot of writings on the motivational/narrative/cognitive side of games; several posts on pacing.

Hannah Kümmel Pacing im Level Design (German)

The second of these two major motivators for continuing to think about the nature of pacing. This post, indeed, has its origin in a search for a definition of that word.

An "Overwatch" Quest

Now, where were we? A multiplayer narrative mission for Overwatch. It plays on the map "Eichenwalde" where four players will control Bastion, Torbjörn, Reinhardt and Brigitte, respectively. Behold the following table:

Character-centric narrative description.

 

You can see here how I explicated the relations between the narrative themes, the characters, their mission and the location. Note that, due to the gameplay-focus of Overwatch - even if this is a story mission, there is rather little space for narration. Many informations will be delivered by dialogue running parallel to gameplay. Here are the types of voicelines that would be said:

• Torbjörn, Reinhardt talking about "the old days", Brigitte making teasing comments
• Bastion recognizing something from the war days, Torbjörn translating, the humans discussing about it
• Overwatch Coordinator stating next goal, conversation about tactics among humans
• follow-up comments
• reactions to events in the world
  

These dialogue events need to be structured and specified further. Since the dialogues will mostly happen alongside progression on the map, here is an (unfinished) sketch of how it could play out:

A sketched mission design.

The corresponding list of goals/events would look somewhat like this:

1. Cutscene: Team is in "Brauerei Mittagskrug", the enemies in Eichenwalde know of their presence and prepared their defences. A portable electronic bomb has been dropped in the main square, it has to be captured and escorted into the fortress were the enemy's digital infrastructure is located. A barricade blocks the main road, the Overwatch Coordinator advises to take the right exit towards the "Zauberflöte".
2. Goal: Reach the electronic bomb.
   Dialog: After cutscene. Reinhardt makes comment upon Bastion being part of this mission -> small conversation
3. Dialog: Vista towards Stuttgart reached. Bastion remembers the city.
4. Dialog: First bottleneck reached. Torbjörn: Let's eliminate those enemies in front of the bakery!
   Goal (optional): Eliminate the enemies in front of the bakery.
5. Dialog: Bakery-enemies eliminated. Reinhardt: Comment on the lovely "Brötchen" of this bakery.
6. Dialog: Bomb reached. Brigitte: They sealed the gate! Overwatch Coordination: Search the three enemy groups.
   Goal: Search the three enemy groups for informations unlocking the gate.
7. Dialog: Enemies at the "Jagdhütte" eliminated. Bastion communicates something melancholic about animals being hunted in the forest. Reinhardt praises the valiance of the hunters of old. Torbjörn agrees, but not enthusiastically. Brigitte looks with wonder upon Bastion.
8. Dialog: The last of the three enemy groups was eliminated. Brigitte: Hopeful, to the gate! Torbjörn makes comment upon the craft of the nearby clock-maker. Reinhardt agrees.
   Goal: Excort the digital bomb into the castle.
9. Cutscene/Dialog: The bomb is behind the gate. A sniper appears. Torbjörn makes a grim comment.
   Goal: Eliminate the sniper.
10. Cutscene/Dialog: The armory is reached. Brigitte tells of a memory. Another sniper appears. Torbjörn makes a grimmer comment.
    Goal: Eliminate the sniper.
11. Dialog: Inside the castle. Reinhardt: Ahh! The halls of my fathers! That I have to reclaim them from them, of whom one is beneath us. Brigitte and Torbjörn rebuke him.
12. Dialog: Throne hall in sight. The remnants of Balderich and the throne are gone. Reinhardt and Brigitte react terrified.
    
13. Fight until timer is full (maybe 2min.): Bomb arrived at destination. A lot of enemies appeat. Reinhardt rages.
14. Cutscene: Bastion found the remnants. Reinhardt recollects. The enemy's digital infrastructure is destroyed. The mission is successfull.
    

With some iterations, this could probably be turned into quite a nice mission. But I will leave this design here, and move on.

Ideas for Feedback

• What are other ways of perceiving computer games? How do they fit into/build on the here defined ways?
  

• What else could happen in the castle during my Overwatch mission?
  

Conclusion

Time flies when you are having fun.

"'Still that must be expected,' said Gandalf to himself."

Again, I want to remind myself, that I set out with the intent to do quest design. For a quick moment, the thought of giving in, submitting to my ever-lasting stream of theoretical thought, was present. But, knowing very well the purpose of this project, I choose to, again, to use the power of rational decision - I keep striving for the practical.

Maybe I should try to not build a major part of a theory that is very interesting to me bottom up in the next article. We'll see.

In my analysis of the ways in which we meet computer games some bigger implications of previous definitions show. I declared that parts of the player are part of the game, but that means, that the player is also part of the medium. Now this is an interesting thought! In playing computer games - in fact, in many media, the player not only experiences designer content, but also parts of himself. Consuming media is - in many cases - self-perception aswell.

In my Overwatch mission this shows, for instance, in the decision whether the optional enemy group is fought instantly or later on when it becomes mandatory. It also shows in the understanding of the characters that are present here. Varying on the degree of previous Overwatch lore consumption, knowledge about Reinhardt and Co. might differ greatly and thus what is said here in dialogues might be understood in different ways too.

We have come to an end, again. Luckily, every ending is a new beginning.

I hope you have a good time!

#08 On Time (and Overwatch)

Maybe we still have-.. ... Time, Dr. Freeman?

Let's talk about time, then. It is a fascinating thing and a subject for many philosophical questions. But this won't stop me from trying my own take on it. I will present a kind of definition and add some other observations concerning flow/stillstanding, relativity and finally, where we find it in computer games.

The second part will be a quest design for Overwatch. I am looking forward to play around with those characters and places!

Time

Let us begin this small philosophy of time in games with some intuitive assumptions and thoughts.

• we experience something called reality (of which our thoughts, emotions, bodies and games are a part, so what I mean here encompasses inner and outer reality)
• we say the things we perceive in this reality exist
• we assume "we" exist, so there are multiple observers of the same reality
  

From this it follows that reality, in our intuitive understanding, is something objective, meaning not originating from one of those subjective observers. It seems as if there are windows in this reality, and to each window a continuous observation is attached, which is why a experience at all exists. But also, reality doesn't seem to vanish: Ever we are perceiving something, never is there nothing (until death?).

Time then, could be defined as that which shows itself in the continous existence of observation and reality. (Subjective Time)

If somebody posted it as a quote in the internet, then it's gotta be true:
Subjective time can become faster. Source.

But there is a more pragmatic definition we could do. Why would we want to do this? Well, for some applications it is rather difficult to do anything productive in reality with time as I explained it above. For example, think of sleeping eight hours without dreams. If you wake up, it won't seem as if eight hours, because you haven't been perceiving that much - the window was shut for some time, so to say. But in reality things have moved on in those eight hours: Your cat was on the hunt, the earth has rotated further, on the other side of earth people went to work. For someone managing a world-wide company thinking only in subjective time would be desastrous: Then he would have to assume that in his hours of sleep nobody could do anything. So maybe a more regular time definition is actually useful too:

Objective Time shows itself in the changes/durations that are happening in reality.

 

A pendulum clock measures time via the change created
by its swinging pendulum. Source

This is the time we find measured by clocks, calendars, music notes and so on. We take something changing very regularly (e.g. a pendulum or certain electron transitions) and claim: That what happens between one tick and another, that is a duration, a unit of time. This is not subjective time, because clocks in reality keep ticking, even if we don't observe them.

Some notes:

• Subjective time is able to flow fast/slow/stand still/skip in relation to objective time. This seems to fully depend on reality: How fast our thoughts are, in which state of consciousness we are, how crowded our perception is, in what mood we are, etc.
  
  
• My thoughts are inspired by presentism and Henri Bergsons philosophy of duration. I don't actually know if he and I make the same distinction, but he is an inspiration nonetheless.
  
  
• We could also assume that all these intuitions are wrong and instead we create all of "reality" by ourselves and there are no other "observers" and reality does therefore not exist while we're asleep (I'm referring to radical constructivism). While I don't think either side is right/wrong, I find it much easier to explain things with an intuitive perspective.
  
  
• We perceive structure in time (moments, durations, days, eternities, ..) in a very analogue way to how we structure e.g. visual (point, line, plane, texture, ..), performative (press, reach, wander, ..) or cognitive (meaning, statement, conclusion, mental map, ..) inputs.
  For each input "dimension" it would be interesting to think about whether the structure we perceive stems from differences in the input or from us, and whether we'd want to change things relating to that way of perceiving. (inspired by Kant)
  
  
• Time-Pacing is the ((un-)planned) perceived arrangement of structure in time. Based on objective time this might refer to the fact that a cutscene took 47 seconds of time. Based on subjective time this might mean that we think the cutscene took an eternity to watch.
  

Okay, enough of this serious philosophy! Now for some application on games and quests.

Time in Games and their Quests

Games, as I explained in previous posts, are two-fold. There is the unplayed game containing the materials and rules needed and there is the played game, which I'll define here as follows:

A played game is a process in which rules, materials and player input are used to produce player-perceivable output.

The game experience then encompasses everything in the players mind related to the played game (notably the perception of the played game).

Now, what times can we find here? First of all, we have what I call the global time, which is the time of our usual clocks, based on some atomic changes/durations somewhere. But then we also have a game time which is seen in the played game: It is, after all, a process in which things are happening, changing, moving. So if we're sitting in front of our favourite PC game, we might aswell track time by the change that has been happening while we started playing it - for some WoW-players this indeed might not seem so far-fetched. The third time is the player's subjective time where the measure is the continuity of the player's own experience. This ist not necessarily synchronous with game time of a game he's playing: Different player might experience time in games different due to personal mood, involvement, etc. Note that global time and game time are both objective times.

To make things more complicated, there can be different times in the fictional world of the (computer) game aswell. A day in the strategy game Europa Universalis may endure only a second, and sometimes time periods are skipped (e.g. fast travel) or past events of that world are presented (e.g. flashback). So we have a fictional time too, which is the point in time of the fictional game world we are experiencing. Due to it being fictional, we can do things with it that do not happen like that in reality.

At this point in Half Life 2, fictional time stands still - but game time is still running. Source

Using game time and fictional time can thus be used as a tool to influence the player's experience. The durations/changes that a game/quest designer provides via a game's communication channels can have a big influence on both kinds of time.

On the other hand - the player will always be author of game/fictional time too, since he induces changes through his actions. And, even more importantly, the subjective time of his game experience is defined by what is happening inside his mind - and some of the things happening there are usually out of control for a game/quest designer (what a relief!). Sure, we can predict the player's thinking by using psychological insights, but the thinking itself (or feeling, remembering, ..) will be done by the player, not by the game (being the game/quest designers proxy).

At last, if we design a complex game that is meant to produce things that we as a designer didn't think of (e.g. Minecraft), then we might give the computer or randomness credit for the thereby constructed changes/durations too.

With these thoughts I will end my theoretical inspection of time today. But, since it is such a defining aspect of games, you can be sure that there'll be more posts on this topic!

An "Overwatch" Quest

BlizzCon is near and I'm thinking of a mission design for Overwatch. Before getting into details, I did some research. Overwatch "is a multiplayer team-based first-person shooter" (Source) which is set in a world having some similarities to ours. The game resolves around the organization called "Overwatch", a higly specialized group of people determined to make the world a better place. The antagonists are the terror organizations called "Talon" and "Null Sector", where the former pursues conflict in order to strengthen humanity and the latter is an uprisal of the so-called omniacs. Omniacs are essentially the robots and AI's of that world, of whom some are treated badly by some humans. Overwatch itself was formed in response to a huge conflict between men and machines, the Omniac Crisis. Narratively, the game is heavily focused on characters and locations appearing in this world, because the characters are, who the players are playing, and the maps on which they play are part of that fictional world. But the main focus probably is gameplay: Strong flow experiences can arise through the dynamics happening in a match.

An overview of all heroes that are playble as of now. Source

Now how to do a mission design for a Overwatch? Luckily enough, the developers have thought of and implemented mission-like gameplay modes themselves.

Next to regular gameplay, the Overwatch Archives exist, currently a set of three missions where players play fixed heroes on a modified version of a regular map. Here are some aspects of those missions:

• you play as a team against various (at times special) AI-enemies
• a small story is told, grounded in the Overwatch universe
  
• downed teammates can be revived
• there is a lot of dialogue
• there is an intro, an outro, some smaller cutscenes and some scripted events
  
• the characters may have a special skin
• the map is modified into a more linear passage, audiovisuals are changed to fit the story
  
• objectives may be given by other characters over a radio
• goals are displayed sometimes on the top of the screen
• there are several stages to a mission
  

With the announcement of Overwatch 2, it was confirmed that the game designers opted to expand on that mission style of gameplay. They showed sneak peaks of the so called "Story Experience", of which later an almost complete playthrough was released: Link. I will gather some of my and the reporter's thoughts on aspects of the shown Story Experience here, but only those that are different/additional to the Overwatch Archive missions: 

• each mission has an intro, an outro, a boss battle, item usage, and talent selection
• as the map progresses, boxes are teleported in, where players can select an item
• the maps seem to be crafted specifically for the Story Experience
  
• there are multiple maps/levels to a Story Experience
• characters are fixed for each map
• there is a lot dynamic destruction in the environment
• what was good about the shown mission:
• lots of team coordination
• spaces prepared for battle
• spaces designed for the characters
  
• some aggressive enemy spawns
• interesting enemies
  
• other heroes appear in cutscenes
  

This provides a good framework for a mission design. Since creating a map is always quite demanding regarding time, I opted to choose an already existing one, namely Eichenwalde.

But first things first, I originally started with choosing the characters that I wanted to be a part of my mission. The criterions for choosing were few: There had to be a chance that they might embark on a mission together and it should be possible to tell something interesting using their dynamics in the chosen space. Ever since I read the Binary comic my interest in learning something about the relation between machine-sceptic engineer Torbjörn and nature loving war-machine Bastion had been kindled. From Torbjörn the step wasn't great to arrive at the warriors Brigitte and Reinhardt - one being his daughter and the other her godfather and a good friend of Torbjörn. In addition, this way we have one tank, two attackers and a healer, a mix that has been applied in the Overwatch Archive missions too. But now to the map: Since Eichenwalde is Reinhardts homestead where Brigitte and thus surely Torbjörn had been with him aswell, it seemed like a fitting place to choose.

In the mission I expect to discover some hints on the relation between the characters themselves, between humans and machines (represented by the three human characters vs. Bastion) and between the characters and the space they are going through. A fitting setup for a mission seems to be that Null Sector occupied the town and the newly re-formed Overwatch group, especially Reinhardt, seeks to reclaim it.

I'm thinking of adding a radio support - maybe Winston will check in in the beginning. But I have a feeling that this would rather disturb what I set up before.

Anyway, I think this shall be it for this week's post. Maybe I should split every quest design into a "research" phase and a "construction" phase - we'll see.

Ideas for Feedback

• Did I use fitting terms for the concepts of time that I described?
• Does my idea of subjective time forbid time reversal? (inspired by Chris Bateman)
  
• What should I take into consideration when making a mission design for a multiplayer shooter?
  

Further Reading / Inspiration

Henri Bergson, Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness

Serjoscha Wiemer, Das geöffnete Intervall (German)

Conclusion

It turns out that discussing philosophical concepts on a blog can be very laborious and enlightening. Laborious, because by formulating your ideas, you discover all your mistakes and assumptions. Enlightening, because you take the idea out of your head and force yourself to concretize them. In a way this is what this whole blog is about anyway. I'm kinda saying this everytime, but I feel like I'm getting closer and closer to practice with my theoretical considerations - I'm really thankful for that!

My quest/mission designs tend to fall short still, and this, too, is something I'm writing often. But it is necessary: Only by writing it down I'm admitting to this partial "failure" of my project so far: The focus is too much on theory in comparison to what I originally intended. And while I'm having fun this way, I still do hope to make this more of a practical documentation than it is for now. Anyway - I'm looking forward to continue my Overwatch mission design and who knows - maybe BlizzCon will give me some additional inspirations.

Until then - have a good time!

#07 On Beauty (and The Lord of the Rings: War of the Ring)

"A thing of beauty - will never fade away"

Today for something completely different. I tried writing of narration, but it didn't work out. So I changed my plans, did some catharsis-inducing activities and now I'll talk of beauty and in the end, I'll try making a beautiful quest.

A word of warning: This post contains mild spoiler (not story or gameplay-relevant) of Cyberpunk 2077's credits and a certain "effect" the game has (at least for me).

Why beauty?

Before I dive into my findings, a short appreciation of inspiration. I've encountered many things that I'd call "beautiful" - images, shapes, persons, landscapes, tracks, theories, poems ... and reflecting now upon these I realize that they all touched me, much deeper than other things did. If I encounter beauty, I am struck by it and I remain still, as if in hope that it doesn't pass, even though I know that it'll never fade away. I had this feeling when reading the last pages of The Lord of the Rings, when I learned of the uncertainty principle, when I finished my bachelor's thesis in theoretical computer science or when I saw a sunset while departing from Frankfurt an der Oder.

Sunrise over Słubice, photographed from Frankfurt an der Oder.

But the trigger that caused me to talk about beauty right here is found not in these examples but in Cyberpunk 2077. The song "Never Fade Away" of which the above citation is a part, is played as a remix in the game's credits. The game itself resonated with me many times in detail and definitely as a whole in the same way as the above examples: It is beautiful to me. What is special about this? Well, the game has a particular way of making you think about the things you experience (both actively and passively). And when the credits rolled, the placement and "mise-en-scène" of that specific song with its cited line made me consciously realize how I felt about that game.

Since then, I can't stop thinking about beauty and (here comes the appreciation) that is due to Cyberpunk 2077.

Beauty

But what now, is beauty. I spoke of beauty as a kind of feeling, perception, experience humans can have. It is a property we ascribe to things we perceive. It is clear that not all humans ascribe beauty in the same way. But it is also clear that there are some general indicators for beauty: The famous golden ratio, for one.

Here, I shall expand on another indicator. Browsing around, I discovered Hegel's notion of beauty and art (link) which integrated well into my understanding of things - I won't aim to reproduce Hegel's thoughts correctly, but rather explain how they fit into what I discussed on this blog so far. For Hegel, one basic philosophical unit is the "idea". The idea is the abstract, theoretical concept of some "thing". An idea in Hegel's sense has no form, it is neither thought nor word nor image. It is that what remains, the universal concept of something. If several minds think, write and paint of love, then maybe their thoughts, writings and paintings have something in common, this we might call the idea "love".

This distinction is the basis for Hegel's concept of art and beauty. If someone brings an idea (e.g. love) into form (e.g. by writing about love), then he can do this into-form-bringing in several ways. He could

• think the idea - then he goes the philosopher's way
• introduce the idea - this is the path of religion
• portray the idea - this is, what artists to

While I'm not sure whether I like the first too notions, I can go along with the third one. According to Hegel, portraying the idea is an "external realisation" of that idea in such a way, that "its essence and general principle" shines through. You could say such a portrayal has the task of conveying the idea's nature in a subjective way - a work of art does not need every observer to understand the idea behind it. An artist suceeds, if she manages to inscribe ideas in her work without differing from the idea's essence and if the inscription is perceivable by an observer.

 For me, this is a very interesting thought. It explains why I titled all those experiences listed above as beautiful: In each of them I can find an underlying idea that is resonating, shining to me. Take the ending of The Lord of The Rings. Here the idea of "passage" can be found. If you read the ending, you don't perceive it as an explanation of the concept "passage", but you will much rather think of the concrete story in your head. But the story at that point, through the departure of Frodo, Bilbo, Gandalf and the elves, has amongst others the theme of passage and thus the idea is able to shine through.

Still, I can not explain yet the nature of the "shining", "touching", "resonating" we experience when encountering something beautiful. I have an idea that includes the resonance concept by sociologist Hartmut Rosa and some psychological thoughts, on which I'll surely write when I get it all together.

Creating beautiful Quests

How can we make quests beautiful in the sense seen above? In order to answer this I'll first take some notes. In the above sense, beauty in quests would need...

• an underlying idea
• to be shining through the quest to the player
  

Furthermore we can state:

• the beauty should be considered by as many players as possible
• since the quest-experience is partly authored by game designer and player, beauty, too, may thus originate from game designer/player

I will first think about designer-authored beauty and then about creating play spaces for player-authored beauty (in both cases beauty-inducers would actually be the correct term, since neither game signs/actions nor player actions are beautiful until a mind perceives them as such).

How to integrate hegelian ideas into our game/quest and let them shine? Well, we could simply take an already beautiful realization of an idea, perhaps a thought, as a starting point. Or we could take an interesting thought, and make it beautiful in our game. We could start with an unspecified feeling, a mood. We could set a theme and not think too much about it, to let it guide our creative process in a more uncounscious way. What is important, is that the idea(s) permeate(s) as many aspects of a quest as possible, to maximise the effect of "shining through".

More concretely you could take the idea, theme, feeling into consideration when doing design decisions. Which game mechanics are used in what way in this quest? What could happen in this narration? Which spaces shall the player be put into? What is the audiovisual style? How does which character speak in this context? Thinking with that idea on many communication canals seems very promising. I think that the most important question at this point is the one for the balance between "not letting the idea be too obviously expressed" (than, to speak with Hegel, we'd become philosophers or priests) and "reaching all players". Luckily we already know of some techniques which can be used to let as much players as possible experience specific things while not formulating things in too obvious a way: Storytelling, playing certain melodies, textures/colors/lighting, providing certain mechanics, ...

On the other hand - creating opportunities for the player himself to create beauty is the second way of introducing beauty to games. Indeed, to refer to Cyberpunk 2077 again, there were many moments of calmness, of decision-making, of involved thinking in which my own expression as a player brought my own ideas in a beautiful form into the play experience.

Creating play spaces that afford introducing beauty as a player - how to do this? As with other space creation methods, the creator has to think about how the things he presents restrict/liberate/influence the one engaging with it. If we place an inaccessible high tower in the world and the player may optionally destroy it by setting flames to its grounding pillars, then someone who wants to access the tower is not able to express ideas related to this action. In the end, we give the player a semi-structured space to engage with, to express himself in. Defining the possible player actions influences, how the player is able to express herself. More importantly for us in this context, it influences what ideas he will be able to express.

Players expressing themselves and creating beauty. Source

A designer is thus able to think of player expression opportunities. Maybe a decision in a branched storyline, a crossing of roads, a choice of weapon skins, ... On the other hand he might think of systems that are too complex to understand the possible player expressions, giving much authorship to him: A sandbox with building materials; a sci-fi multiplayer universe with ressources, fighting materials and factions...

Quest designers who seek beauty might search for further approaches that aren't totally based on intuition. Cristopher Alexander's living architectural patterns seem to be close to my notion of beauty and it is close, too, to the concept of a semi-structured space (players = inhabitants, structure = buildings). Maybe there are some quest/game specific patterns of beauty that we could discover.

But now - for something not completely different.

A "The Lord of the Rings: War of the Ring" Quest:

I continue my previously begun quest design. In WotR, one mission type is "conquer", and it is this type that my mission will be of. We furthermore can inherit the good vs. evil theme from Tolkien's world, evil being characterized by shadow, fire, destruction, falseness, will to power. The good on the other hand is often white, green, peaceful, westwards bound, modest, wise, etc. Since we are playing the evil forces in this mission, I decided to try showing the beauty that the evil itself can have. In particular the elegance of dark shadows enclosing and taking over something good, the cunning plan realized in an elegant operation shall be highlighted.

Since WotR has a fixed set of possible actions and objects, a great part will be played by dialogue and level design. But I will use what is given to me, in order to let the gameplay express those ideas as good as possible. Since missions in WotR are tightly tied to the space they are played in, I will start with that: Below you can see how I transformed last week's sketch into a map prototype.

Map to my quest, made with the War of the Ring World Editor.

There are several things I considered while designing this:

1. We are in Mordor, and even though Sauron hasn't been here for a long long time, the earth still couldn't recover from his evil influence. All is grey and lifeless, formless hills are sticking into the air. The trees and grasses planted by the good people didn't really succeed in growing, only a few thin, bare skeletons are left. This is underlined by the dim, brownish light and skybox.

2. Over the years the good people slowly began to neglect their duties, leaving some watchposts and, beginning with "they won't come back anyway" they forgot about old passages, which, in the end, might be their downfall. Old ruins are standing on the hills, and instead of a minor army, a small camp with only a few guards is left.

3. The good people's camp is split into two parts: We have the main part in front of the gate, where the fortress, ressources, towers, smithy and barracks are standing. This is the most heavily guarded part, and if someone tries to come close to the gate, he'll probably get shot. It is due to the symbolism of the gate as sign of victory and guarding that here the camp's attention is centered. What is left of the original company of guards is mostly stationed here.

4. The second part is around the statue of Narsil in the back. Here tents for resting, the fair elven garden, and ranger/wilderness tent are located. The theme is regeneration and source of power: The statue has a magical effect and nature is most present here. But it isn't strongly guarded and this will probably be to the camp's vain.

5. The lord of the Nazgûl, his second-in-command Khamûl and a third black rider have stopped with a small troop in some distance of the Morannon. In comparison to many other missions, the black rider's are in relatively big presence here - a try at inscribing the "returning shadow" theme. By setting the small size of the evil forces against the big camp, further things can be interpreted into that: We'll have a small evil team being able to circumvent such a large camp - the good people have sunk far. The evil forces are in a large wide area - they represent freedom in contrast to the enclosed, walled in men and elves.

So much for that. Now how exactly is the quest going to evolve? Here is my sketch:

Starting at the evil forces' camp, a cutscene will come up.

Lord of the Nazgûl: The time has come for our lord to take seat again in his old fortress, Barad-dûr. Today we will open up the Morannon and lay dark shadows on the lands again. Build, and we will tear them down.

Goal Description:

The Lord of the Nazgûl has to survive.

(Optional) Set up your camp.
- Build an Orc Mound.
- Build a Dark Arsenal.
- Upgrade you Fortresss to level 2.

Look for ways into Mordor.

The dialog serves as a short introduction/arrival moment, such that the player is set into the right mood and gets a narrative incentive. The optional goals give the player the information that it is sensible to build a strong economy in this level. The scouting is hinting on narrative progression and will therefore probably be done later. If the player approaches the Morannon with some unit, then a voice line by Khamûl will be heard:

Khamûl: The gate, the Morannon. It is heavily guarded, breaching it is difficult - maybe one of the old mountain paths is not guarded that heavily?

This is obviously meant as a hint to the preferred path. If the player draws near to that path (on the bottom right of the map), then the player will hear the following:

Khamûl: The mountain path is un-guarded! Men, after all, have proven their weakness. The Elves are fading: We did not expect anything from them.

Lord of the Nazgûl: Prepare an assault and we will destroy them.

Mark "Look for ways into Mordor." as accomplished.

New goals:

Defeat the camp.
- Destroy all good buildings.
- (Optional) Follow the mountain path.

Now that the player has discovered all of her choices, she may do the attack. If she decides to follow the path, then we'll get another voiceline, when the lord of the Nazgûl is inside the valley on the bottom-right:

Lord of the Nazgûl: Foolish elves must have tried to grow those trees. We shall burn them, and rip down the towers they placed on these hills.

When the player passed through the valley, he may choose again to directly attack the main camp or head further. If he chooses to do the latter, his exploration will be rewarded with the easier-to-capture smaller part of the camp. Attacking this part first has the second advantage that the bonus granted by the statue and some replenishment options will be cut off for the good forces when the main camp is attacked. If the attack succeded, a final voice-line will be played:

Lord of the Nazgûl: The mouth of Isen rises into darkness again. The Morannon will be black, its towers shall stand until The Dark Lord himself vanishes from this world.

Thus the mission will finish. In hindsight I realized that I put the theme "decay" into this quest and its map aswell. I also have the impression that this quest might be a bit too short, and while I'm sure thre are some ways to fix this, I will leave it at that for now (this blog post is way longer than I thought anyway).

Ideas for Feedback

• According to my/Hegels concept of beauty, would ugliness fit as an opposite of this notion?
• To you see beauty in today's quest design?
  

Further Reading / Inspiration:

• Miguel Sicart: Play Matters, Chapter 5: Beauty
  Sicart examines beautiful player expression.
  
• Marie-Laure Ryan: From Narrative Games to Playable Stories: Toward a Poetics of Interactive Narrative
  A discussion of how computer game aesthetics can contribute to a good narration.

Conclusion:

To say that I got captured by the concept of beauty is a bit of an understatement. But such energy, motivation for doing something is definitely something of great value: It gives you the drive to actually implement things. Talking about Hegel's concept and mixing it with my intuitive theory led to a reasonable result for me. A working theory, but good enough to derive some useful practical instructions. I would really like to explore that "shining" and "touching" more - these are words I give to perceptions/feelings I have, but I cannot yet explain them.

Finishing a quest design in this series is always a good feeling, because I'm allowing myself to do something imperfect here. And even though we're still only at week seven from 52, I feel like I'm getting more confident in what I'm doing. Tolkien's universe, on the other hand, is just a place I'm quite familiar with and this, too, is probably a factor playing into this.

I'm excited for further posts, and while I'm thinking and working on them, have a good time!

#06 On Play (and The Lord of the Rings: War of the Ring)

Welcome to another blog post. Today I'll talk about play as a space for player actions and a quest design for one of my favourite (mostly out of nostalgia) real-time strategy games.

Also, last weekend the global game jam happened and I participated, so maybe you'll find here a post on the game I worked on in the near future.

Play

What is play? I understand play as a human activity: A collection of actions in a mode of engagement with the world. A "frame", as Bateson would say, in which actions and signs are not interpreted as being part of the real world. The more our play-actions are perceived by us as non-serious, the more "pure" the play is.

The play-frame is a semi-structured environment for us. It is structured by the signs/movements shown and possible actions given to us, but play is only complete, if a player uses his agency (=ability to act) to actually explore the possibility space of actions by doing, combining, rethinking, inventing things in this space.

Due to its non-serious nature, play may provide humans a safe space: A space for relaxing, self-expression, socializing, for allowing themselves to feel/think freely, and to experiment with ideas, sequences, identities etc. . Bernard Suits thinks play in its extreme form:

Suits reimagines the grasshopper as a philosopher who seeks ultimate goods-activities that are pursued for their own ends, and for no other reason. The laboring ants, preparing for the winter, are working for a purpose, but the grasshopper seeks only happiness for its own sake, and concludes that games are the way to this utopia. In an ideal world, he reasons, we would do nothing but play.

(Metagaming ~ Stephanie Boluk and Patrick Le Mieux)

Providing play-spaces to people may thus be a goal worth reaching.

How does play relate to (computer) games? Well, play needs an object, something to "play around" with. A (computer) game can be this object. Games are a possible structuring of play and they exist in the already mentioned two-fold way: Played and unplayed. Designing, developing and providing a computer game is thus providing people objects to play with.

At this point we can name one of the great conflicts that show themselves in gaming/playing: That of structure vs. freedom. If the possibility space is too big, the player gets lost and he will feel a lack of meaning. If the game is structured too much, then he might feel remote-controlled and unable to act. Game Designers are often concerned with the question of how to embed structures in games without robbing the player of his "play-feel".

Quests are one possible method to deal with this problem. Quests are structures that provide interconnected goal-inducers and events, but the in-between, everything undefined by the quest, that is an opportunity for the designer to allow play. Serjoscha Wiemer calls computer games an "opened intervall": Instead of being an unchangeable (closed) time intervall as movies, songs or books are, computer games computer games allow for intervention by the user. Thus, an important task for quest designers is the intentional not-shaping of steps in between the quest events and goals.

This will show itself in my quest design for today, too.

A "The Lord of the Rings: War of the Ring" Quest:

The Lord of the Rings: War of the Ring (WotR) is a real-time strategy (RTS) game that is set in Tolkien's well-known universe. Its campaigns, which we will expand here, consist of several scenarios which are only playable in a certain order. To each scenario there is a map and a mission: E.g. in the good campagin the scenario is in the Iron Hills-map, where Gimli and some dwarves fight orcs attacking the dwarven kingdom.

The main gameplay is on those maps: The player usually needs to raise a base based upon ressources gathered from food- and iron-sources. Buildings have different functions: There are e.g. armories (providing upgrades), towers (shooting enemies) and barracks (providing fighters). Next to base-management, the player controls various heroes and fighting units. By means of explicitly stated goals and triggered/scripted events (dialogues, animations) the story of the scenario is told. So, basically, each scenario has a quest that needs to be played through. Note, that the whole campaign is a quest too: There several goals (for each scenario) and events (new map(s) unlocked) telling a connected story (the war of the ring). For a more detailed explanation of the game mechanics visit this this page.

Campaign overview. Source: Link

Szenario gameplay.

My own quest design will be a szenario in the evil campaign. This will require a sketch of a new map and a quest to it, so I'll split this in two blog posts. When reviewing the evil campain (see the wiki) one notices, that the game features many scenarios like the "The Sacking of Minas Ithil (TA 2002)" which aren't part of the core "war of the ring" which took place from TA 3018 – TA 3019 in Tolkien's world.

In this tradition I'll add a mission called "Towers of the Teeth", playing in TA 1980. The towers of the teeth are called Carchost and Narchost, built on either side of the black gate of Mordor. Originally they were built after the of elves and men over the dark lord Sauron at the end of the second age (SA = second age, TA = third age) to closely monitor the country such that no evil could ever come back into Mordor. But since ca. TA 1050 Gondor got more and more into trouble, until eventually TA 1640 "Mordor is left unguarded" and 320 year later, in TA 1980, "The Witch-king comes to Mordor" according to the LOTR appendices.

Location of the Black Gate in Middle-Earth. Source: Link

The new mission integrated into the campaign map. Base map source: Link

I'd integrate the new mission right before the "The Sacking of Minas Ithil" and "The Pass of Cirith Ungol"-missions which play in TA 2000, TA 2002 respectively - in fact, it seems sensible to make "Towers of the Teeth" their direct predecessor as shown in the map above.

Choosing such a szenario has the great advantage of probably not needing to think much about assets or characters since there is already a map playing at the black gate in the good campaign and we can reuse the units available in the associated missions. Here is a sketch for a map where this mission might play:

The main idea is that the witch king, leading the evil forces, has knowledge of some secret paths leading around the black gate. Notice that I have incorporated a camp of good men here in order to make any sensible gameplay possible, even though this is contrary to the lore. This is a common pattern in such games and has been used multiple times in other missions of this game.

I already included some other landmarks such as a second ressource pool and a "special place" which often tells a little hidden side story. I also tried to sketch the layout in such a way, that it is similar to other maps in the game: A lot of corners and paths to explore.

Since time is running out, I'll leave the design for now. Maybe this will even be a quest design in three posts, we'll see.

Ideas for Feedback

• Are there examples for serious play?
• How could a more complex story be told with an RTS like WotR?
  

Conclusion

Playing around with "play" was a nice thing to do and it sets the scene for such wonderful topics as "structure", "narrative", "self-expression", ...

Making a quest design for WotR was rather unsatisfying for now: Introducing the game, thinking about mechanics, background lore, a mission and a map was a lot of frame-work. On the one hand here the advantage of labor division really shows, but I also notice that there simply is not enough time.

Nevertheless, a really rewarding thing to do. I will end my post here

Have a good time!