This Monday, I got the marks for the Non-Fiction Theory and Analysis paper that cost me my christmas break. Since I wrote the paper in 4 days and had a terrible shortage of materials for it, I was pretty sure I wouldn’t get more than 7 for it, but I guess my invigilator was in a really good mood or something because I got a 10 (for all you non-Danes, the scale goes -3, 0, 2, 4, 7, 10, 12). That qualifies it for being put up here, so… you may download it via this link:

My Non-Fiction Theory and Analysis paper: Not Just Entertainment

As with The Simulated Story, this paper is in Danish, so has a very limited audience. I’m sorry I never got around to translating my other paper, but this one will definitely not be translated. I feel it’s significantly inferior to The Simulated Story. If it was graded the same, it’s probably because this one was handled by people who have no real competence within game studies. I had to really stretch the subject of the class to write about my chosen medium – games – and this time I chose to submit the paper to the teacher who actually taught the class, rather than somebody with knowledge specific to games. I guess these guys were more easily impressed by my gaming voodoo.

I gotta admit I found the paper quite a challenge. The class calls for analysis of documentary films, TV, or various forms of journalism or advertisement. It wasn’t difficult to come up with a way to stretch that over in the direction of games – serious games fit the bill pretty well, and a very good specimen, Global Conflicts: Palestine, was released last year by a Danish studio – but there’s very close to no academia written on the subject. And the material I did manage to dig up is mostly social sciences or economics oriented (how can we use games to sell our product?). I was lucky enough to have a Ph.D. dissertation written by the producer and game designer of Palestine, but in the end I had to grab some articles about documentary films and attempt to apply it on the game. The paper sort of automatically ended up being about whether or not this is a viable method.

I’ll spoil it for you. The conclusion is: Maybe.

This is a trend in the design of TNM: We deny you access to a lot of content based on your choices. Each main storyline has 4 maps that aren’t present in the other storyline, meaning at the very least you’ll be missing 4 maps on each playthrough, and a couple of these make up entire missions. Then there are the optional maps – the ones related to side quests, the ones with bonus stuff, the Corporate District sewers that you may never visit but in which is hidden a bunch of cool content… and that’s to say nothing of the dialogue, the background story, the characters etc.

TNM as a project turns 6 years on Sunday, and it’s pretty clear to see what took us so long. The more I think about it, the more I’m wondering if this is going to be the only project I ever get to work on with this much adaptive content. Consider it from an economic point of view: We have at least 20 hours of content, probably more like 25-30 hours. You can take your sweet time searching through our huge maps, talking to everybody, hacking people’s accounts, etc. Daniel has played for hours and hours and he’s not even completed the first of our five sections yet. In fact if you go straight through the game, focusing just on the main storyline, it’s only about 7 hours.

On a real game project with a publisher, a deadline, and/or a budget, the producer would not like the idea of making a game with that much optional content. The producer would especially not like the idea of downright preventing access to so much content depending on the player’s choices as we’ve done. Consider Mass Effect. Here you start by choosing a background and a psychological profile when you make a new character. Each background opens one minor side-mission. The psych profiles don’t do much except change dialogue, as I understand it, which the backgrounds do as well.

This is really neat, but it’s a relatively minor difference – on each playthrough you will only really be denied access to 2 minor side missions. Mass Effect is also a game with huge amounts of optional content – loads of side missions you don’t have to take and random planets you can explore plus all the background text it keeps adding to your codex. This is fine though, from a production standpoint, because it’s a major selling point and if the player doesn’t make use of it, that’s a deliberate choice on his or her part. Mass Effect is a sensible production, unlike TNM which is massively self-indulgent in almost every aspect.

I actually touch on this in the paper I’ve just turned in (which may soon appear here as a .pdf, though it’s somewhat mediocre). Palestine is a game which locks huge amounts of content depending on your allegiances – write for the Israeli paper and the Palestinians won’t talk to you, but you’ll get loads of information out of the Israeli. Write for the Palestinian paper and the Israeli shut up but the Palestinians will tell you anything. Try to stay neutral and you’ll get a mediocre amount of information out of each side. This can be defended in a game like Palestine because it’s a short game that needs replayability to sell, and furthermore it’s developed for use in schools with a whole class of pupils playing it and discussing it.

I remember Warren Spector once mentioned in one of his articles that Gabe Newell had been poking fun at him for designing games where any given player would only experience about 80% of the game. Gabe probably bases this opinion on Valve’s thorough datamining that shows a lot of players never even completed HL2:EP1 and subsequent playthroughs are rare. Even putting aside the question of whether this would change if players knew there would be new content to return for, this ultimately misses the point: The reason for making adaptive games isn’t to persuade you to play more than once to experience the whole game, but that the part of the game you do experience should be your part of the game. Knowing that your choices shaped the game gives you greater ownership of the experience, and it also makes discussion of a game more interesting: When you’re talking about HL2, it’s like you’re discussing a movie (“wasn’t this and that part awesome?”). When you’re discussing Deus Ex, you’re comparing how you actually played the game (“did you save Paul or did he die?”).

Nevertheless, the lengths to which we go in TNM to change the game with each playthrough would probably be unacceptable in a real production. We love doing it though, and I’d really love to do more of it in the future. But Warren’s 80% is probably more financially sound than the ~60% you’ll see of TNM on one playthrough