You know what would make sense to blog about today? The presents I’ve received. That’s what I’ve done all previous years. So let’s not do that today, yeah? It’s nice not to be too predictable. Instead, let me tell you about something you will find blindingly obvious if you’ve ever spent more than 5 minutes contemplating game design: narrative-driven design.
In the beginning of December I was interviewed for the Danish Academy of Digital Interactive Entertainment, or DADIU for short – the national game academy, basically. It’s a collaboration between a dozen different Danish university-level educations where each place of education supplies developers for a certain role on each development team. The ITU supplies project managers and game designers, and the game designer position is reasonably popular compared to how many they accept, so they have interviews to determine who to admit.
During the interview I was asked to describe my favourite type of game. I did not hesitate to choose the Looking Glass Studios school of game design, which has given us such games as Ultima Underworld, System Shock, Thief, BioShock, even SWAT4, and of course Deus Ex. I wanted to explain what the fundamental design philosophy is that ties all these games together, but because I was extremely nervous, I made the mistake of describing it as realism. I told the interview panel that Looking Glass was all about creating a world with a structure and behaviour similar to what you would expect from the real world.
I quickly realised my mistake and struggled to recover from it, specifying that I wasn’t talking about graphical realism but the fidelity of your interaction with the world – toilets that flush when you use them, pool tables with balls that can be shoved around, computers with e-mail accounts you can access. But it was too late, the interviewers had misunderstood me and asked me what I would think about working on much more abstract games, leading into another line of questioning about my versatility as a game designer.
Only several days later did I grasp what I wanted to say during the interview: it’s not about realism, or with how much detail the game simulates the real world. It’s about placing the narrative at the core of the world design in particular and the game design in general. When you play Thief or Deus Ex or BioShock, everything is there for a reason – everything is motivated by the fiction. The point of this design paradigm is narrative consistency; you build a world rich with culture and history and characters and then you use that as the foundation of everything else.
This differs from eg. Bethesda’s (equally successful and admirable) design philosophy in that Bethesda seems more interested in feature density than narrative consistency. Consider Fallout 3 – what the hell does anybody live off of? Do they still eat 200 years old canned food? Why has nobody at least attempted to rebuild anything in all this time? How can any civilisation exist when the anarchic, murderous raiders outnumber everyone else by far? The important thing in Fallout 3 is that everything is interesting and memorable, and that there is a lot of it, not that it makes sense.
The design philosophy I’ve been “brought up on” is to establish the rules of the game world – how does it work, how is everything connected – and then refer back to that at every turn and use it as inspiration for the level design and the plot and even the basic game systems. Of course there’s a limit – even Deus Ex had painted-on doors, but as much as humanly possible, this philosophy is used to create games with worlds you can believe in. It ties back into that dreaded word, immersion – or presence, if you will.
Fallout 3′s inconsistencies are largely refridgerator moments, which is why the game can still immerse you as long as you’re playing, but the Looking Glass philosophy is about trying to eliminate those, so if you question why you found a sniper rifle and a pack of ammo on a balchony, you’ll be able to make up a reason without having to stretch your imagination too far. The danger is that the narrative consistency is taken so seriously that it begins to get in the way of usability or make the game less engaging, as was the case with the multiple names for the subway stations in The Nameless Mod. So far the professional developers working with this philosophy have managed to find a good balance, and after the feedback we’ve received on TNM, it’s something I’m keenly aware of myself.
I apologise if it seems like I’m trying to make a big deal out of a self-evident concept, but I failed to articulate this in my interview, and I’ve been wanting to put it into words ever since. It’s a pretty fundamental thing about my favourite games, it’s one of the many reasons Dragon Age most recently engaged me so thoroughly, and it felt like I should write a bit about it.
I did get accepted into DADIU though, and the first production will start April 26 and run for a month, at the end of which I will hopefully have another little game for my portfolio. For particularly good examples of DADIU productions, check out A Mazing Monk (a first year production) and Puzzle Bloom (a second year production).
Oh, and: Merry christmas 
Merry Christmas and congratulations on being accepted into DADIU!
I think the implications of what you write is important – if a game has high internal consistency, it means that the player is able to observe, analyze, and interpret the game world. If it’s the case for the entire game, the designer can rely on it – if it varies, he can’t.
This is important for some types of emotions – you need to be wrapped up in the fiction to be able to anticipate what happens next, and some types of narratives require this anticipation to make their full impact. But if the player can’t go further than the analysis stage with regards to much of the game world, before he concludes that there _is_ no grand internal consistency, most attempts at trying to anticipate things will go unrewarded…the player is trained _not_ to have expectations based upon what he sees around himself, and as a result, if the game designers ever try to rely on this they will find that the player no longer has patience for anticipation. Result: Narratives that could be supremely rewarding if given the proper attention will be more or less bumbled through by a player not knowing what to expect.
This is, for example, the case with fallout 3, where certain parts of it have a high degree of internal consistency, and where you will be rewarded for anticipation. Tranquility lane, the section leading up to where you meet president eden, finding pinkerton, etc. – those narratives grow stronger as you analyse what you see and dig in, whereas the narratives surrounding megaton, big-town and the vampires tend to grow weaker if you look at them too closely…
The conclusion is, then, that high consistency needs to penetrate the entire game, and not just be available at occasional points…but if it does penetrate the entire game, as is the case with Deus Ex and Dragon Age, the plot twists and conspiracies become so rewarding that the game becomes something special to some of the invested players, as a result.