#27 Suspense

While we dived into enduring things last time, today I'm going to write about how to use those things which aren't there yet. It is about the feeling called suspense. Afterwards, I'll apply my learnings in an unexpected manner.

Suspense

That, of course, was a lie. But it showcases what I mean: The feelings that arise in an audience when there is an unresolved conclusion, a missing tone in a harmony, a foreshadowing, an interesting mystery.

On the designer side we're talking again about expectation management, about which I previously wrote a blog post. There I differentiated an expectational arc into promise, progress and payoff. The promises were divided into meta-promises (setting up the style of the work), world-knowledge (setting up the storyworld) and hypothesises, which are all expectational arcs related to how the story unfolds. One could say they are concerned with questions and statements such as:

• "What happens next?"
• "Probably X will happen"
  

This is what storytelling, to my knowledge, is interested in: The dynamics in the audiences heads while the story is told to them and of course - how to create which ones.

In my previous post I also wrote that "expectation management fundamentally breaks down to the gaps between":

1. how it really is - story
   
2. what informations are presented/revealed - plot
   
3. what is understood - player's mental model

Furthermore: "Storytellers [..] may use the gap between points 1. and 2./3. to make a story more compelling through interesting reveals at the right time (pacing) and subversions".

Now, one way of creating interesting reveals is to make a prominent and meaningful promise, dragging the progress slowly but steadily while keeping on promising prominently, and creating a final reveal.

I'd label the feeling felt while progress is building suspense. It is on the same page as moments of intensity, of "holding ones breath" or not being able to see what'll come next.

What will happen to the man? What is the kid's role?

There surely are other such patterns: I'm thinking of surprises, plot twists, the calm before the storm, a moment of rest and such things.

But for today, let suspense be me guide.

Further Reading / Inspiration

• #20 Expectation Management, link. The basis for this post, containing the sources to concepts like promise, progressm payoff and hypothesis

• The Building Of Stories, page 55 and following, link. A very nice explanation of what suspense is and how to create it
  

• Bordwell, Thompson, Smith: Film Art, Chapter 3: Narrative Form. Great book that consciously differentiates between story and plot, and builds its advices based upon that.
  

A Cyberpunk Storyquest - Writing Suspense

Searching to get something finished, I'll continue on the cyberpunky storyquest I began last time, hoping that such a smaller project will be finished more likely.

What will I do? I'll write. The moments I present here are those where I wanted to create suspension:

The sun is setting in my back
Orange lights - no, red lights chasing me
Black and red, devils forms
Accelerating, catching up, surrounding me
Their hatred is approaching me

My senses on alert
What is it?
1.) That smell..
2.) Them sounds..
3.) Those vibration..

 ...

The constant beat
Again, again and again
My body a flash of violet and silver
A fiery violet heart, oceans of anger
Waiting to be unleashed
We need to press on

You and me, my military friends
You'll drive me into my abyss, your abyss with your whips of steel

In the first case it's about withholding what it is, that's following the avatar (which is revealed when choosing any decision line), in the second case the player might wonder more intensively what his avatar is acually up to.

Ideas for Feedback

• What other patterns of expectation management (like suspense, twist, etc.) come to your mind?

• Are my writing samples not clear enough in their promise to be suspenseful?

Conclusion

This post had a very nice topic and leads into a direction that I'd like to pursue further. There are already several possible related topics on my mind.

There is a certain suspense to life itself too, I'm realizing. What will happen with me and those dear to me? Although I of course know of the parallel between plot/story and life, this thought never came to my mind before.

Granted, for me, a certain suspense does surround my next post.

Until then, have a good time!

#20 Expectation Management & The Witcher 3

 Today I'll introduce to you a perspective on the design of any experience - that is, of course in particular quest experiences. To be concrete: We'll look at expectation management starting from concepts adapted from fantasy author Brandon Sanderson. Through that lense I'll afterwards look on my Witcher quest and continue developing it.

Expectation Management

I guess, if I replaced this section with "The 20 best Memes on Tumblr today" and then a list of twenty cat memes unrelated to quest design, any reader would be at least confused or even consider stop reading this post. That is because I would have broken my promise of delivering a design-oriented explanation of a concept. The progress of the blog wouldn't match and so the payoff (even though maybe enjoyable in another context) would have no value here. 

However, memes integrated in the blog post in order to serve the original purpose - delivering on the promise - are allowed:

Sudden, unexpected moments and far-fetched connections
are the heart of many funny experiences (link to a corresponding video). Source

So setting up expectations and confirming/denying them in the right way is important - and can lead an experience to ruin if not done properly. Here'll list some types of expectations:

1) Promises at a beginning - I'll call them meta-promises - have a special place, as they need to give the player (reader/..) an introduction to tone, playstyles, genre, themes, arcs/plot and so on of the whole experience. In video games, this first section of promises is called the tutorial. In films we know of the "cold open", in books the "hero leaving the village" is almost a cliché. Or think about how the start of the portuguese ESC song immediately sets up the whole mood of the song.

2) A second subcategory of promises is world knowledge, with which I mean informations on places, political situations, past events (including what happened to the world while the story progressed!) and so on - everything produced by worldbuilding and -evolvement. If e.g. worldbuilding informations are given to the player, then he'll usually expect them to not be twisted too often. There has to be a basis, on which the whole dynamic of the story can evolve, and while the world might change, its inner rules should not.

3) Another subcategory consists of any hypothesis, a player belief about something yet unconfirmed - it is less about long-term but short-term expectations. Take for example a situation, in which a player approaches a medieval village where he can see from afar a house burning. He'll (albeit unconsciously) set up the hypothesis that something terrible has happened for the house inhabitants. Approaching the house this hypothesis might be confirmed by crying people or denied by the inhabitants telling him proudly of how they burned their home down to expel the demon dwelling within.

I think all of expectation management fundamentally breaks down to the gaps between

1. how it really is
2. what informations are presented/revealed
3. what is understood - player's mental model
   

In an ideal world the last too would be fully in sync. Level designers, for example, are mainly concerned with getting the player's mental model of the space in a state such that the player finds the existing, intended paths through the level. Storytellers on the other hand may use the gap between points 1. and 2./3. to make a story more compelling through interesting reveals at the right time (pacing) and subversions.

Let's evaluate this knowledge/hypothesises on my Witcher quest.

Further Reading / Inspiration

• Brandon Sanderson on Writing Science Fiction and Fantasy - Lecture #2: Plot Part 1 Link
  Here you'll find more on promises, progress and payoff.

• Paweł Sasko: Life, Love and Quest Design. Anatomy of Quests in The Witcher 3 Link
  From this video the idea of confirmed/denied hypothesises stems.
  

• Understanding your Level: Mental Mapping | Games Industry Talk with Max Pears Link
  

A "Witcher" Quest - Part 9: Expectation Management

I've continued writing on the quest design document which I began earlier. To be precise, I concretized the section "The Village" which happens directly after Alene and Geralt's meeting with Alvin. In particular, it comprises walking to the village and the introduction of the father, Aisker. At the end the most importnant decision of this quest has to be made - whether to get involved in family matters or not. Here are some screenshots of what I wrote (here is the full file):

You can see in these images how I played with the player hypothesis "there's something un-good behind Alene's story" after the meeting with Alvin, first giving the player a breather and then funneling him (while he progresses) into the tense and uneasy mood, escalating in the scene with the father (payoff). It is, by the way, this scene which I started implementing in a previous post in The Witcher 3.

Ideas for Feedback

• What are other/additional useful concepts concerning expectation management?
• How could I improve this funneling effect I intended for the section before meeting the father?

Conclusion

Managing expectations seems like a very important element of design in general. We can find similar ideas in Don Norman's books aswell, who is concerned with the design of "everyday things". And if I think about it, then you really have to ensure something very similar  for e.g. doors, portemonnaies or controllers: Their function has to match expectation.

I had already used this method kind of intuitively in my first QDD draft, so writing a new section with these things in mind now wasn't that hard. And I feel like this is were my heart wants to be - there is an excitement in preparing, constructing a quest with such tools. I'll try to continue down that path, so you'll probably see those topics in other posts too.

Until then, have a good time!

#04 On Experienced Games (and Assassin's Creed)

 Today I will try to examine more closely how player experience fits into the framework I have build so far. Consequently we will turn away from looking at how a game exist in our real world towards the subjective experience of a player who is faced with a game. In the second part I'll present a flaggy quest design for the first Assassin's Creed game.

The Experienced Game

 Unplayed games would be pretty boring to examine, if they were never played. In order to be played, we need a player: Someone who is able to do the player actions that I mentioned in the last post. The played game (e.g. the running video game software) has an interface through which certain inputs of the player are recognized and processed.

But describing these dynamics would still not account for the fact, that there is an inner view onto playing a game. Even if we trace information processing and decision making of the player back to the brain, we do not appreciate, what is going on in the inside: Describing what the player feels, thinks, recognizes etc. is (as far as I see it) not sufficiently doable with physical reality as we understand it right now. Another name for these "individual instances of subjective, conscious experience" is qualia. I will us the word experience, since this is the name which many designers use to denote the same (or a similar) phenomenon.

What does this mean for games and quests? It means that we have to differentiate between the played game as a system that is running in reality and the played game as it is perceived and acted upon by the player. 

Neither designer/player image nor computer image are my own.

In this beautiful graphic I tried to visualize some of the terms I introduced. The game "LEGO® The Lord of the Rings™" as object in reality exists in an unplayed variant on a CD (and as installation on my hard disk), but may also also exist in its played variant as a process in my computer's operating system. The informations and action opportunities presented to the player in the played game are one of the two pillars constituting her experience of the game. The other pillar comprises everything the player brings into the game herself - her current mood, her own goals concerning the game, her knowledge, her abilities, previous experiences, how she interprets the actions and informations that happen during play etc.

Let's return to my 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.

It now shows that I defined quests as part of the game object and as part of the experience of someone who reads/plays/designs them: While seriality, some events and goal-inducers may be issued by the running game object, events like player input or a change in mood and goals themselves are created in the player's head.

With these thoughts I proceed to Assassin's Creed.

An "Assassin's Creed" Quest:

The first installment of the Assassin's Creed series famously includes several types of flags which could (optionally) be collected. Besides being needed to archieve full synchronization these flags had no obvious meaning at all for playing the rest of the game. I will try to build a quest around (some of) these flags.

In the game the flags are distributed all over the maps, but every flag type appears only on one map (or even a specific district in it) exclusively. Many of them are placed in special-looking corners or places that aren't usually traversed by the player. According to the Assassin's Creed Wiki, the flags can also be interpreted as symbols of power: The different factions planted their flags in order to express their dominance.

This led me to the idea of local flag-quests: In this conception some districts/areas, which are controlled by certain factions, have a quest associated to them which tell a story of that area while letting the player gather those flags. I want to follow the idea of flags as symbols of power here: Main narrative of each flag-quest shall be the further dismantling of "evil" powers by removing the flags and thus reducing the faction's presence in the area.

However, looking at the current flag types and their numbers, some changes need to be made.

Source: Assassin's Creed Wiki

First of all, since we're playing an assassin, removing assassin flags doesn't seem very sensible. Maybe an alternative narrative could be constructed around that, but this shall not be the concern here. Secondly, most of these numbers seem way to high for a small story-quest to fit around them. So either these numbers (and the associated areas) need to be split up, or the number itself is reduced. For a game that is centered on its run and climb mechanics, 10 to 30 flags seem to be reasonable. Lastly the "Kingdom" is a bit of a problem for my concept: It consists of many different loosely connected areas. Maybe here, too, smaller areas with local rulers may be constructed but dealing with this shan't be of importance here either.

Now how could these flags be a more interesting gameplay mechanic instead of just being something to collect? Idea: Since the Assassin's Creed maps are essentially open worlds, quests would have the problem of guiding the player in the right places. One could place the flags of each flag-quest in such a way that they give the player an easy spottable hint of where the quest proceeds next.

I will stop here, and continue next time with building a concrete narrative in a concrete location using this basic idea.

Ideas for Feedback

• In what points might my analysis of the place of quests in relation to (un)played game and player be not valid or imprecise?
• Are flags suffiecient as a means to guide a player through an open world quest?
  

Conclusion

When I talked about player experience, I added the last piece of my understanding of how design, play, game and player relate to another on a bigger scale. These relations are, as I realized today, inspired by Jesse Schell's The Art of Game Design and Don Norman's Design of Everyday Things.

I also tried to make flag collection more interesting in Assassin's Creed and the approach of using it as goal-inducers with light narrative connotation seems promising so far. We (or I) will see next time, whether a concrete quest can be constructed to that in a sensible way.

Until then, have a good time!