#26 Durability and Impact

"Half a Century of Poetry"

Of late, I've been repeatedly thinking about why I actually write all these posts. Why did the bard Dandelion write all his ballads? Why do people write down all their thoughts into countless diaries, sheets of paper, books?

One answer to these questions lies in the concept of durability, I believe.

Durability

That, which stays with us, even though the world and we ourselves might change - that is durable, persistent, it endures. The divide between duration and change is at the foundation of time, as can be seen in a previous post of mine on this topic where I found two ways to define time:

• subjective: shows itself in the continous existence of observation and reality
• objective: shows itself in the changes/durations that are happening in reality
  

Note that actually both definitions formulate time based upon the dualism of change and duration. The second one does this in an obvious way, the first implicitly refers to that with the term of continuation - in opposition to non-continuation which essentially is change.

Impact

Those things that are not or slowly changing have a more unconscious, contextual, surrounding impact. They are a room of many lower perceptions, background chatters that accompany us. If something is there only for a short time, then it grabs our attention, stands out due to its movement - it is more punctual, more embedded in the main thread of our stream of consciousness.

** A valuable lesson for quest design is thus: Use the players budget of unconscious and conscious perception capabilities such that she and you can author her the desired experience. **

The division between unconsciously/contextually and attentively/consciously
perceived information can be found in this Inception poster: Compare the
trees/cars with the main characters and street.

For quest design this is actually one of the central things to mind, if I think about it. Let's look at a formulation of the nature of quests again:

a series of connected goals and events, where subsequent elements are only revealed, when a previous event has happened (which includes reaching a goal)

The important components of quests are goals and events, where an event describes a change and a goal describes a striven for change not having happened. But there is an extra layer to this that we may perceive: Recurring changes, so the same or similar changes happening. In such a rythm of recurring changes in a timeline durability is present.

One of the main tasks of the quest designer seems thus to build changes and durations. I think that merely showing something often and preferably to the players conscious senses makes the thing more outstanding to him.

** So a second advice I'd give my future self is: Across all the changes happening in a quest, keep showing those things which should be the driving components of the quest enacted by the player. **

Let's see, if I can use those thoughts in practice.

Further Reading / Inspiration

• Henri Bergson: Matter and Memory, see e.g. the corresponding wiki-article

• Totten, Christopher W. (2019) An Architectural Approach to Level Design. Especially the chapter on rythm, pacing and structure.
  

A Cyberpunk Storyquest

For a course at my university I've been developing a quest/progression system, which I presented earlier here on this blog. Because it seemed fun and to showcase the system in a more focused context, I transferred it to some kind of a interactive novel that has serious Cyberpunk 2077 vibes.

I enjoy those colors.

A feature added are sub quests: There are now certain nodes in which you can enter a sub sequence of nodes. Planned features are a sight radius of visible nodes, a visualization of different node types and possibly a fmod integration (that would be cool). Here I want to write a story-quest for that project.

In the story, the avatar is on the run through a city, experiencing several moments of thought, emotions and external events on the way. While the story progresses and branches, immersion in the character is more easy due to staying with him/her so long. Slowly, the characters motivations and intentions are unraveled, drawing the player into roleplaying (like, actually playing the role).

The story shall be composed of several parts, maybe short-stories, the initial one defined by two questions: What are we up to? Will we achieve it?

Unconsciously, the constant, goal-oriented running through the city shall be the main topic, that endures most of the time. Consciously meeting the city and the avatar's inner shall be of concern.

I'll write down the story in section summaries. A section looks somewhat like this:

You're running
Faster and faster
The neon city lights shining
oh so bright

Each of these lines will probably have a separate blend-in. But now to the structure:

• You're running in a cyberpunky city
• Something is on your mind
• There's violence nearby
• Keep going
• 1) Disturbed run
• 1) Wasted opportunity of showing your fighting-power
• Stop it
• 2) You efficiently and powerfully disturb the violence
• 2) An extra sprint is necessary
• The avatar believes in his/her rising
• Is being worth it?
• Is life worth being?
• Is love worth being?
  
• Numbness, no answer
• A moment of being tired
• Trotting on, but wait...
  
• That smell...
• 1) The smell of totalitarism
  
• Them sounds...
• 2) The sound of oppression
  
• Those vibrations...
• 3) The movement waves of militech
  
• Something's off - the pursuers?
• Turning up the speed
• Images of capitalistic force - an abyss:
• Let the streamlined winds of speed guide you
• 1) Muscles of steel accelerate, you sprint over the abysses air
  
• Touch the earth and ascend
• 2) Metal touches asphalt, hydralics press you into air
• A bridge is shattering, the first prophecy of machine fulfilled
• You take in all that is around you, rise up a hill
• There is the king, a tower of matte gray and silver-white pillars
• Determined reaching of the goal
  
• You throw the atomic warhead
• You run into hell's gate
• The explosion
• The aftermath
• The ending line
  

Implementing this in the system would be rather tiresome, since every separately blended in line would need an event that has to be set up and wired manually - without visual scripting. That's why I won't do this now. Another reason is that I've written only the outline here, but actually lines are only there until (including) "A moment of being tired".

Ideas for Feedback

• What other design principle might be formulated on the basis of the duration/change dualism?

•  The short story is intended to be rather fast-paced. Do you think the concept might work?
  

Half a Century of Poetry

Granted, I didn't write about durability right now out of interest alone (even though I (guess one perceives that) do am intrinsically interested). This post carries the number 26 in its name, which is the half of 52, which is the number of weeks in a year.

Meaning, my "one quest design a week" is halfway through. What remains of the first half? What will remain at all? / What durability will this blog's content have?

To answer the first question: Well, a small encyclopedia of preserved thoughts for one. As I stated in the conclusion of post #24, a motivation for this is probably in the somewhat self-expressive need for putting thoughts down, develop and synthethizing them. Communicating those things to others is rather a nice side-effect.
Secondly, a feeling of achievement is there. I've written 26 posts with theory and practical share and I'm proud of each of them (even though some are more dear to my heart). Many of the theoretical things have brought advancements in my own thinking about the topics. I know from those blog statistics that I'm not the only one reading my ramblings. I've received feedback one or two times, and it was positive. I've been able to use the posts to advance my other projects. And, most importantly, I feel more confident doing quest design.
On the other hand: I'm missing bringing a quest from idea to implementation here. I tried doing this with that Witcher quest, but I didn't even finish the design phase yet. Maybe this just isn't the right environment to do this.

What will remain at all? I strongly believe that the positive effects noted above won't fade away. Whether my practical goals will be achieved better, I don't know yet. I'm unsure if the blogging will continue when the project is completed - a casual post here and there might be something. I'm hoping to improve, solidify my quest design skills and reach a certain level of competence. Like, being able to quick and dirty design and implement a quest in a selected range of engines, given any idea.

Freedom of Thought         

I'm sure this won't be a work like Julian Alfred Pankratz viscount de Lettenhove's "Half a Century of Poetry", especially not in importance for the history of word in its world. But I do feel - for myself, I don't expect others to feel this - a certain beauty in this. A beauty of allowing myself to progress and express in my very own way - chosen based on freedom.

Conclusion

The tempo isn't fast and decreases in small steps only, but I think the rate of posts on time is drawing close to zero. I'm missing a post on pacing and rythms yet, might be that there's something coming from that angle. We might also meet endurance again if I say something about cycles in (between) game/gamer or if I would take a look at memory.

Writing about this is very fascinating to me, because it is so closely tied to matters of life and death - when I'm dead, my self no longer endures, or at least I think so. And what endures in my self while I live, that is, what is relevant to me. And if it shows in my consciousness, then I can inspect that.

Well okay. There was also that Cyberpunk 2077 inspired short-story-side-quest-thingy, where I wanted to inject some design principles. But I realized, that the injection doesn't work when planning the high-level sections, but only when doing the concretest work, e.g. writing lines and decisions in this case. I'd like to finish this, but I fear that I'm kinda not doing quest design then any more: That is rather operating on that higher level. Ah, to have a writer who'd do that for me.

Enough talk for this already (again) long and thought/text-heavy post. I'm thankful for you, unknown reader, who might have discovered/seen and read this. I hope you found something of value.

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!