#31 Quest Items

 Shifting to some more - well - profane, or rather: 'classic' quest design topics. The first one in the line is quest items.

Items

So what are items in the first place? The wictionary tells me, it is a "distinct physical object" and, more specifically for video games, "an object that can be picked up for later use". I think I'd agree that in video games items are usually those which can be picked up and stored in an inventory. However it doesn't seem fitting to reality to say that every item may be used. So I'd go with:

items are distinct physical objects that can be picked up

This gives a good intuition for what is possible with them (some thoughts on meaning here are inspired by Jeff Howards book on quests (see below)):

• distinct implies that the player is able to perceive at least some of its boundaries, form and what else might be part of an appearance

  note, that this allows for an assignment of an equally distinct meaning to this item and also for the relative stability of that: nonetheless assigning different meanings is probably one of the more interesting things to do with items

• physicality gives items a very concrete existence, making them part of the spaces the player herself might pass through - it also forces certain aspects of appearance to be: a physical object needs a shape and a weight, for instance

  note, that this allows for literally embedding meaning into the game world: it is probably the basis to applied worldbuilding and environmental storytelling (see for instance this discussion of objects in the starting area of Cyberpunk 2077)
  

• lastly, the player is able to pick up items and possibly also discard them. well, assumed that the player herself is able to move, then she may then carry this item through the game world

  note, that this is a perfect setup of items as a storytelling device: we can assign the item a meaning and tell the player to carry that meaning through a game world - possibly even showing interactions between item and game world or item and avatar. this is an easy way to make a meaning durable
  

Items in TES IV: Oblivion. Source

The whole concept of items is thus a great way to provide an extra level of meaning relations for a game. The meaningful moving around of items is also quite useful in the context of characters or other agents: Being able to move items aswell, they can give them to players e.g. as a gift or reward, but they might also buy or steal them from him.

Quest Items

Now what are quest items? To answer this, I'll cite a classification made by Jeff Howard. It goes as follows:

1. The "lowest tier" contains items that are "largely useless" but give you "a sense of realism", so that which is known as clutter, junk or similar. Examples: garn, ashtrays, rotten tomatoes, ..
2. The second tier includes "functional objects" which may be used e.g. for boosts, fighting or special game world interactions (maybe a magic lamp uncovering past conversations) 
3. The third level is about quest or plot items. These play an essential role in the quest story or have "great magical power".

I'd like to disagree with the last definition and rather say that quest items are those, which are explicitely referenced by a quest system, "explicitely" meaning here that the concrete item is referenced and not "any sword" for example. This seems much more logical and useful to me.

Further Reading / Inspiration

• Howard, Jeff. Quests - Design, theory and History in Games and Narratives. Chapter 4 - Objects. Link. Has a big focus on the literary, quests, meaning and symbolisms.
  

• Sasko, Paweł. Lead Quest Designer plays Cyberpunk 2077! #1. Link. A big fundus of knowledge concerning mainly "storytelling, game design, quest design and psychology".
  

A Solarpunk Quest: Implementation Part 1

In order to actually implement a quest for a change, I downloaded inkle and wrote a system with hubs and dynamically addable, showable and deletable objectives. Then, I implemented the first half of the solarpunk quest from last time in it:

So this was nice and relatively easy. I'm thinking this might be a format in which I could also tell future stories here, instead of always leaving them in a non-implemented state.

Ideas for Feedback

• In which ways have you used items in quest contexts?

• Do you think my rather "quick and dirty" concretization of last post's quest design worked so far?

Conclusion

I am very satisfied with this post. It contained a theoretically inspired, but practical section on items and it featured an actual quest implementation (we haven't had those in a while ..). The link between them is missing, but I can live with that. For the future, I hope to continue with more such small-scale but worthy productions.

Until then, have a good time!