After you play the game, please fill out this survey to let me know what you thought:
Monday, May 21, 2012
The almost kind of close to final game
Our capstone presentation is on Wednesday, and our game is pretty much done(except for bug fixes, minor changes, etc.) For my research hypothesis, I am once again looking for people to play the game and fill out a survey. There are actually two versions that I am comparing, so please remember what your "Test Number" is! It pops up after you start Story Mode. Oh yeah, the mode I'm testing is Story Mode.
Tuesday, May 1, 2012
Theory: controlled nonsense is viral
Just a little more insight into my motivation for making a "connected mini-games game."
I think this phenomenon of viral nonsensical content is most prominent in video memes. Badger badger is one of the earlier examples of this; Narwhals is a newer, somewhat more nuanced song from the same author. In general, Weebl's Stuff is full of weird, surreal songs and videos that frequently go viral.
On YouTube, we find things like the Baman Piderman series, Don't Hug me I'm Scared, and almost anything by Don Hertzfeld (especially "Rejected").
In games, there are fewer examples, and almost all of them employ mini- or micro-games. Raving Rabbids raises a lot of unanswerable questions: Why are there crazy bunnies invading the world? And why are they obsessed with plungers?
Warrioware is a prime example of having a complete disconnect between the games and the events of the story, and both the story and the games are quite nonsensical. But I think that disconnecting the two completely takes away from the "controlled" part of "controlled nonsense," which seems important to me.
Perhaps the closest thing to what I'm trying to do in terms of nonsense/story balance is a free game called Keyboard Drumset Fucking Werewolf (gameplay video), which connects the crazy, weird mini-games into a crazy, weird story (that also matches the song the game is set to).
My theory about these "controlled nonsense" experiences is that they lure the brain into asking unanswerable questions. And since the questions have no real answer, your brain can't stop asking them, even if you do theoretically know that asking them is futile. Kind of like an earworm for the brain. The key, I think, is in the balance between the amount of nonsense to prompt questions like "but why?" and "but how?" and the feeling of underlying connectedness that keeps the player from dismissing the entire thing as, well, nonsense.
My goal is to make a game that keeps the player wondering not only "what the hell just happened?" but also "what caused this to happen?" and "what would happen if I did something different?" by providing many underlying systematic connections in a world that's on the surface divided into separate experiences. Hopefully, this will encourage them to keep re-playing the sequences in different ways to try to get a better feel for the systems that connect the mini-games.
I think this phenomenon of viral nonsensical content is most prominent in video memes. Badger badger is one of the earlier examples of this; Narwhals is a newer, somewhat more nuanced song from the same author. In general, Weebl's Stuff is full of weird, surreal songs and videos that frequently go viral.
On YouTube, we find things like the Baman Piderman series, Don't Hug me I'm Scared, and almost anything by Don Hertzfeld (especially "Rejected").
In games, there are fewer examples, and almost all of them employ mini- or micro-games. Raving Rabbids raises a lot of unanswerable questions: Why are there crazy bunnies invading the world? And why are they obsessed with plungers?
Warrioware is a prime example of having a complete disconnect between the games and the events of the story, and both the story and the games are quite nonsensical. But I think that disconnecting the two completely takes away from the "controlled" part of "controlled nonsense," which seems important to me.
Perhaps the closest thing to what I'm trying to do in terms of nonsense/story balance is a free game called Keyboard Drumset Fucking Werewolf (gameplay video), which connects the crazy, weird mini-games into a crazy, weird story (that also matches the song the game is set to).
My theory about these "controlled nonsense" experiences is that they lure the brain into asking unanswerable questions. And since the questions have no real answer, your brain can't stop asking them, even if you do theoretically know that asking them is futile. Kind of like an earworm for the brain. The key, I think, is in the balance between the amount of nonsense to prompt questions like "but why?" and "but how?" and the feeling of underlying connectedness that keeps the player from dismissing the entire thing as, well, nonsense.
My goal is to make a game that keeps the player wondering not only "what the hell just happened?" but also "what caused this to happen?" and "what would happen if I did something different?" by providing many underlying systematic connections in a world that's on the surface divided into separate experiences. Hopefully, this will encourage them to keep re-playing the sequences in different ways to try to get a better feel for the systems that connect the mini-games.
Story! - the long-overdue part 3 of the prototype analysis
A long time ago, I started a series of posts to analyze and record the things I learned from a playtest of the prototype of my game. However, I never finished the third post, which was meant to analyze the story of the game, and more importantly how the story was told and how people perceived it. This is that post.
I want Micro Missions to be able to tell stories in a very abstract, symbolic way, without using too many words or specific details about the story. This both helps the "controlled chaos" feeling of the game and makes generating dynamic stories much more feasible. But can I make stories abstract yet still basically understandable? Judging by the playtest, the answer seems to be: Yes, if I'm careful, and reinforce the right points of the stories in the right ways.
The last question on the playtest survey asked the respondents to "Describe what the game is about(story-wise)." I left this question intentionally vague to see not only how much people understood about the story, but how much they cared about it and wanted to write about it. The answers ranged from 3-word sentences starting with "idk" and mentioning a few prominent features like stick figures or chases to long, comical narratives which extrapolated the simple story into a true RPG epic. Most people, though, seemed to be content with understanding the gist of the story - chasing, defeating, finding treasure. This is exactly the kind of spread that I had hoped for, so I'm pretty happy with it.
I'm also extremely happy that more than one person was inspired to write down extrapolated stories. This shows not only that people's minds are working to actively fill in the details I left out, but also that people are having fun with the story aspect of the game.
Throughout playtesting different versions of the game, the most common points of confusion about the story surrounded the role of the mini-games themselves: why am I currently doing this thing? what did I just accomplish. So, the most important thing in terms of the story is to make sure the mini-games are book-ended by context: for most mini-games, there needs to be a cutscene that describes what's about to happen before the game, and another cutscene at the end that describes the outcome. The more these cutscenes are connected to the mini-game, the better.
For example, after defeating the bandit, the player is presented with a cutscene of a letter which gives clues as to the location of the leader. This confused some people, probably because not everyone is used to the somewhat typical RPG sequence of "defeat bad guy" -> "gain information(by looting his body for clues/letters)." Instead of implying that the letter was found on the bandit, it would have probably been better to show the bandit "dead" (or knocked out) explicitly before showing the letter.
When looking through the survey answers, I was pleasantly surprised by the number of people who identified the guy you fight as a "bandit." Pretty soon I realized that this was not because I was so great at drawing stick-figure bandits, but rather because I identified him as a bandit in the letter cutscene. Before this discovery, my goal for storytelling in Micro Missions was to use as few words as possible, to make the game more abstract and symbolic. But now I realize that words are very powerful symbols themselves, and being able to cause the player to associated a graphical symbol with a word is extremely useful for forming connections to the player's previous experiences. So now my goal is to use words in conjunction with visual symbols, and instead I'm going to try to avoid full sentences longer than 2-3 words.
I want Micro Missions to be able to tell stories in a very abstract, symbolic way, without using too many words or specific details about the story. This both helps the "controlled chaos" feeling of the game and makes generating dynamic stories much more feasible. But can I make stories abstract yet still basically understandable? Judging by the playtest, the answer seems to be: Yes, if I'm careful, and reinforce the right points of the stories in the right ways.
The last question on the playtest survey asked the respondents to "Describe what the game is about(story-wise)." I left this question intentionally vague to see not only how much people understood about the story, but how much they cared about it and wanted to write about it. The answers ranged from 3-word sentences starting with "idk" and mentioning a few prominent features like stick figures or chases to long, comical narratives which extrapolated the simple story into a true RPG epic. Most people, though, seemed to be content with understanding the gist of the story - chasing, defeating, finding treasure. This is exactly the kind of spread that I had hoped for, so I'm pretty happy with it.
I'm also extremely happy that more than one person was inspired to write down extrapolated stories. This shows not only that people's minds are working to actively fill in the details I left out, but also that people are having fun with the story aspect of the game.
Throughout playtesting different versions of the game, the most common points of confusion about the story surrounded the role of the mini-games themselves: why am I currently doing this thing? what did I just accomplish. So, the most important thing in terms of the story is to make sure the mini-games are book-ended by context: for most mini-games, there needs to be a cutscene that describes what's about to happen before the game, and another cutscene at the end that describes the outcome. The more these cutscenes are connected to the mini-game, the better.
For example, after defeating the bandit, the player is presented with a cutscene of a letter which gives clues as to the location of the leader. This confused some people, probably because not everyone is used to the somewhat typical RPG sequence of "defeat bad guy" -> "gain information(by looting his body for clues/letters)." Instead of implying that the letter was found on the bandit, it would have probably been better to show the bandit "dead" (or knocked out) explicitly before showing the letter.
When looking through the survey answers, I was pleasantly surprised by the number of people who identified the guy you fight as a "bandit." Pretty soon I realized that this was not because I was so great at drawing stick-figure bandits, but rather because I identified him as a bandit in the letter cutscene. Before this discovery, my goal for storytelling in Micro Missions was to use as few words as possible, to make the game more abstract and symbolic. But now I realize that words are very powerful symbols themselves, and being able to cause the player to associated a graphical symbol with a word is extremely useful for forming connections to the player's previous experiences. So now my goal is to use words in conjunction with visual symbols, and instead I'm going to try to avoid full sentences longer than 2-3 words.
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