"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.
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| 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.
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| 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.
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| 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!
