The driver of the truck peers out through the windshield as they race over the narrow dirt road, nervous with anticipation. They continue to press on as a fog descends around them, misting all but the closest trees. They listen to a howling in the distance as they close in on their location: a clearing at the finish of the road leading to a walking track.
The situation: 8:30pm on a Friday night, it is pitch black, and twenty-somethings are doing a final check on their packs before they start their descent. The mission: to get down the canyon, down the river and up the other side alive. The stakes have never been higher: Tropfest (a short film festival) is on the Sunday night, and they would like to go... in the event that they are not worn out. They also have work on Monday.
A few months ago, I went on a hiking trip with mates. When I say hiking, I mean it in the loosest feasible term: what they actually did was to walk down a god-awfully steep hill to a river, paddle/float/hold-on-for-dear-life down the river on inflatable mattresses (a.k.a lilos), and then walk back up a slightly less god-awfully steep hill.
Spoilers: they survived.
The query I found myself while floating down the river was "Why have I selected to do this?" The answer: "because it is fun". "Why is it fun? Is it more fun than playing, say, Mass Effect four, which you have desired to play for ages, and at last have both the game as well as a computer without ridiculous overheating issues for?" "Yes." "Why?"
And like that, this editorial was born.
It is still Friday night, and we are walking down the hill towards our first campsite. It is pitch black and the hill is steep. Loose rocks threaten to topple overburdened bodies over and down the hill. They each hold a paddle in hand. They are a mixed blessing: either being a great walking stick or a great pain in the ass when better handholds are around. As they inch our way down a winding ramp of loose dirt and rocks, I listen to a rock fall above me, then a crash. I swivel round to discover a flurry of movement as a miniature landslide of rocks, dirt, a fellow hiker as well as a paddle tumble towards me, knocking me off my feet. I manage to grab onto a rock and halt my fall. My paddle follows his down the hill. James, who has fallen, gets to his feet shakily. They is covered in dirt, cuts and scratches. His torch has split in, and it takes a quarter of an hour to find the pieces and retrieve the paddles before they move on.
Uniqueness
So what makes hiking and lilo-ing more fun than your average game? What is the difference between real-world fun and video-game fun? And can they learn from these to make better games?
In this editorial I will be going through aspects of fun which highlight these differences. First up: uniqueness.
There's types of uniqueness at play here, which I'll call lifetime uniqueness and crowd uniqueness. Lifetime uniqueness is doing something you have never done before: a new experience. I, for example, had never hiked in the dark, not to mention hiked down a stupidly steep hill in the dark. It was a new experience, not unlike using a portal gun, doing a level with reversed time or playing as Batman. Your body thrives on new experiences: up goes the adrenaline, finish before you know it: BOOM! Endorphins. BAM! Fun.
The issue is, of coursework, that most games rehash familiar gameplay: uniqueness is an attribute game developers often aspire to, but never accomplish. Unless a person has never played a specific style of game, its unlikely that the uniqueness of the experience will ever match that amazingly slow yet rewarding descent in the depths of the night, nor the liloing that was to follow.
Crowd uniqueness, on the other hand, is doing something that you alone (or only a little select group) have done. This is where our trip succeeds and games often fail: unless you get advanced copies or are basically faster at finishing games than others, the experience is not crowd-unique. Even in the event you do finish the game quickly, the crowd-uniqueness tends to disappear quickly. What is left is the ability to discover a matchless micro-experience: something that you, and you alone, have done. This is where individuals who like to break games or do speed runs find their endorphin hit, while the remainder of us (who, lets face it, are 'lazy' to do all that work in-game) can only hope to hit on that uniqueness by chance.
Unpredictability
It is Saturday, and we are floating down the Colo River with our packs on our lilos. We have spent the morning finding the best configuration of pack, lilo and person to prevent said packs from falling off said lilo at every passing fast. A pack on a lilo is about as stable as a psychopath, and the rapids are skilful at pushing us directly in to rocks. The result is often a dislodged pack, free-floating paddle and/or a person scrambling to right an upside-down lilo while avoiding the rocks they are hurtling towards. The river has already claimed a pair of thongs as well as a paddle.
It is now after lunch, and we are drifting towards a new set of rapids. By now, they know the drill: when you get to the rapids you suss it out to see if it is traversable. In the event that they think it is, they go down. Otherwise, they get out and walk around. Those of us who follow make a similar judgement, though I usually follow whoever's ahead.
I hit a rock at the lip of the rapids, grounding the front of the lilo. The back swings around as I push off the rock and I go over sideways. I manage to stay on, but my plan is ruined. The current pushes me towards the drop, but there is no time to turn the lilo around. I have option: to ride the drop backwards. With the weight of the pack on the back of the lilo, the current helps me to quickly re-orient, and I line it up perfectly.
I am a fair way behind coming in to this fast, though not at the back of the group, and all I have seen is the familiar red and blue of a fellow traveler heading down the left side. I paddle towards the left, anticipating the hard job of maneuvering through the rapids with tiring arms. As I get close, I see that these rapids have main sections, the second of which is a massive drop in the centre. I take a breath. It is going to take a small bit of paddling to get in to the drop cleanly, and both the rocks and the current are against me. I line up the first drop, and prepared myself.
For the next day as well as a half, I am forced to continue the trip half-blind.
. The lilo snags on a rock for a second and spins around. I am flung off the lilo sideways and fall in to the churn. I am buffeted by the current and brought over the third drop. Half of this time is spent underwater. By the time I surface, my pack, lilo and paddle are already downstream, and my glasses are gone.
Unpredictability. It is a hallmark of interactive entertainment: that each time you play, something slightly different will happen. Even if the general story of Half-Life four doesn't change, the way I deal with a strider will be slightly different to yours. Every game of minesweeper is different. And you never know which country will invent trebuchets in Civilization.
Yet for all of that, there is an inherent predictability to lots of games that the actual world basically doesn't have. This is an issue with lots of created works: narrative conventions become cliched and predictable, and twists become harder and harder to come by. Most of the time, the story will finish well, the bad guys get their comeuppance, and it is the third man you meet that did the crime. Games have an additional issue: to make sure that they are playable, games usually follow a predictable learning curve.
Needless to say, most of us walked around that.
Compare this to our trip: a river to raft down, with a series of rapids, separated by stretches of easy-to-traverse, calmer water. It sounds like a series of game levels, right? Except unlike a game, the rapids are not arranged in an increasing order of difficulty, with a boss 'rapid' at the finish. The toughest fast actually appeared in the midst of the Sunday: a beastly thing with a full two metres in height difference between water levels at the beginning and at the finish.
There is no reason that games cannot generate such gameplay challenges, yet how often does this happen? When was the last time a game character lost his glasses, leaving the player having to complete the remainder of the game in obscure blurriness? How often does gameplay change drastically and unpredictably halfway through the game? And when it does, how often does it occur within the heart of the run-of-the-mill gameplay itself, than within a disembodied cutscene?
Let's rewind for a second: is unpredictability out of reach of games? The largest surprise of the weekend was the loss of a pair of glasses, and the 'gameplay' challenges that this created for the remainder of the trip.
It is late on Saturday, and the light is beginning to dim. As fuzzy coloured splotches make way for fuzzy grey splotches, they cease and take stock on a steeply sloped sandbank. We have not hit our planned camping spot as they lost a paddle earlier in the day, slowing us down considerably. I have been taking the last leg of swimming, and my muscles are horribly worn out. With the falling light and my failing eyesight, the rapids have become treacherous. They select to camp out for the night on the sandbank. It is steep and awfully sandy, and we'll require to get up stupidly early tomorrow if they hope to make it to the finish in time.
Physicality
They set up our tarps and tents in an exhausted haze. Some of the others build a fire to cook dinner: I make icy mash with tuna, lacking the energy to wait for my food. I get in to my sleeping bag and sleep.
Physical hard work produces endorphins, and endorphins are a chemical kind of what they might term 'fun'. 'Nuff said. Whether games can properly incorporate this in to a story-based medium is something we'll find out as the Wii and Kinect receive a Move on (I am truly sorry for that...). So far. I'd say the jury's out.
The other aspect of physicality is in the building of skills that are applicable in day-to-day life. As much as games do generate sure skillsets that are useful in the modern world, there is a disconnect between the activity of playing and the actual skillset acquired. In comparison, the act of setting up tarps, learning how to navigate rapids and how to build a fire on a sandbank tap in to a primal require to know how to survive a zombie apocalypse.
In which case, Left two dead is probably the best game ever in this capacity.
It is Sunday afternoon, and we have been rowing steadily since the crack of dawn. We have been making lovely time, and at long last, they round the final bend. They get to the sandbank that marks the track out and cease for a late lunch as well as a rest, before beginning the hard slog back up the to the ridge. hours later we are at the top of the hill, exhausted but satisfied. We have made it out, and they start the long drive home.
Storytelling
There is something fun about being able to tell tales, something wired deep within the human consciousness. It is the reason story-based entertainment exists.
They miss Tropfest.
Uniqueness, which I talked about earlier in the editorial, is important to this ability to tell tales. The more matchless the experience, the more compelling the story. The more compelling, the more fun it is to tell.
How do games stack up here? well. Games let us tell tales: the high-level, constructed story that is given to us, and low-level, play-by-play occurrences that make our experience matchless. That is not even mentioning the gigantic scope for storytelling that comes with sandbox games.
While storytelling is similar in both real-world and game fun, it is of the most compelling forms of fun in both aspects. And as I finish my story of our two-day adventure, I cannot think of a better way to finish this editorial than with a reflection of the sheer power of the story. People do crazy things for a lovely story: the only query is, how lots of of them involve a controller?
Paul is the founder of Throw the Looking Glass, a game development company with the mantra of giving more real-world value to its players without compromising on fun or story. Go to http://www.throwthelookingglass.com for the latest news on our games, as well as articles and tutorials on game design and development.
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