The Very Opposite of an Airport
Irvine’s late afternoon sun made Sean’s reddened and tear-streaked face all the more vivid. “I tried to find them but I could only find three and this one isn’t white all over, it has spots on it,” he stammered, the stones cupped in his hand.
“Aw, that’s okay,” his father said. “You made a good effort. You did your best, and that’s what count–”
“No,” Sean cried, wiping some tears away with his fist, which was curled around the rocks. “I was supposed to finish it. I was supposed to bring you ten white stones from the backyard and I couldn’t–”
“Sean, I… I didn’t even know if there were ten white stones in the backyard when I asked you to find them. I was just giving you a quest to find as many as you could.”
Sean sniffled. “Really? Then why did you ask me to find ten?”
Drew paused; one of the things that was beginning to strike him about fatherhood was just how honest your kids kept you. “Well, when someone gives you a quest in a game, you automatically know it’s achievable, right? Because it’s been designed specifically so that players can complete it.”
His son nodded. Maybe this was all still a bit over his head, but it was better than talking down to him. “When I design a quest at work, I make sure it’s doable from the very start. For example, I’d go out and put ten stones down. And if it looked like it was taking a long time for you to find the next one, I would program the game so that it gave you a white stone around the next corner you looked.”
“So why aren’t there enough stones?”
“The real world is a different place, Sean. In the real world, people might give you quests that aren’t actually possible, and you won’t find out until you try to do them and fail. You might get a quest and do all the work and find out there’s no reward at all at the end. You might–”
“The real world is dumb,” said Sean.
“Don’t say that. Think of the real world as… think of it as a game too, but with different rules. A different kind of logic to it, that’s all.”
Sean dropped the stones suddenly and ran past him into the house.
“Hey– where’re you going?”
“Gonna play Pokémon,” he shouted.
“I knew we shouldn’t have let him start so early,” said Natalie, who had been listening. “Now he thinks the world is supposed to behave like one of your games.”
“He’ll learn the difference.”
“If you say so.” Natalie turned back to her book. As if Drew ever had, she thought.
* * *
That night, as they were getting into bed, Natalie said, “I’m surprised you didn’t say your quest for Sean was just designed poorly.”
“I probably would have thought that a few years ago, but I’ve been thinking lately… that the last ten years of my life or so has been about funneling people through these game worlds, making sure they cleanly get exactly where they want to go. It’s like I’ve been designing train stations, or airports. How do we make things as clear as possible? How do we give the players the experience that they want?” Drew sighed. “And a lot of it is just data-driven, just based on statistics. If not enough people are finishing a particular quest, we know something’s wrong. We check to see if the objectives are clear enough, if the combat is appropriate to the area level range, if the reward is commensurate to the effort it requires. But the stuff I was saying to Sean about the real world today made me think– what if there was a game with impossible quests in it, or quests with no rewards at all?”
It had been a long day, and Natalie yawned. “I don’t think anyone would play a game like that.”
“Probably not. It’d pretty much be the worst game ever. But the possibility of something like that is kind of interesting. Plot threads that don’t lead anywhere, areas you can never actually get to, promises that aren’t kept. Just… disorder, chaos. More than that: uselessness. Maybe there’s room for something like that. In architecture there are things called ‘follies;’ they’re just these quixotic, bizarre structures with no real functional purpose other than to be there, built by rich madmen. They’re sort of like the very opposite of an airport.”
“Oh, you’re a rich madman now?” murmured Natalie, turning to her side, facing away from him. “That’s news to me…”
“Heh, no. It was just a silly idea,” he said, before they both drifted off to sleep.
Stories | June 14, 2009
Reader Comments (15)
I wonder what would happen if City of Heroes player generated content didn't reward players? I.e., if it was just there for the playing?
Yeah, I think we have enough badly-designed games already.
Or it'd be like Assassin's Creed where saving the citizens from harassment will cause them to help you when you're in need. There is no immediate connection between effort and reward in that scenario.
Rather than not having rewards for effort, I'd like to see more delayed rewards for your effort, with the reward often coming from unexpected places at unforeseen junctures of storytelling. That'd have the effect of introducing chaos without forgetting that gamers, ultimately, play a game to be rewarded emotionally.
Seeing as there are hundreds of games with ultimately meaningless, yet incredibly time-consuming, side-quests that I've completed, I wonder.. Would I still have completed them if at the end there wasn't a carrot dangling on a string?
Yes, I probably would have.
The reward is meaningless, in the end. Only the quest itself matters. So bring it on, I say! Chaos and disorder await!
I find the STALKER games to be a great example of this reverse airport quality. Even so, it's not clear how many of its "broken" quests are bugs as opposed to the result of a variable-heavy environment.
However, not many are done intentionally, or very well (as in, their broken or just sadistic). Having them generated or designed as such would be a step up, although even when, like real life, a task is impossible or a reward isn't available, there are other things that make the task worth attempting - perhaps the possibility of reward, competition for a reward, or just that doing the task itself helps someone else for no gain (charity work is an obvious example). Intangible gains (experience, emotion, whatever), but still somewhat types of gains.
I am racking my brains but can't think of a good example of a well designed impossible quest which has really no rewards at all - nothing even badly designed really. It really is an unexplored area - I wonder when we'll get a game that finally implements filling out TPS reports as a job!
There are, however, plenty of games which provide terrible/dead end plot threads, inaccessible areas and empty promises. Usually manifests themselves more as plot holes, fridge logic, designer errors and so forth.
The final, optional quest in "La Mulana" is impossibly hard, promises a great reward, and...well.
A better example of a suspiciously impossible quest is "You Probably Won't Make It" By Jesse Venbrux.
The alternative is to give the player an airport. Give them so much freedom to solve the quest that they find a personal experience in their choice. But, even these have to reach a bottleneck to move the experience forward.
While it IS a step in the right direction, it's still a bit too much like a movie to separate a game as a distinct art. Real people's actions have unintended consequences. In a game, this usually boils down to a "Gotcha!" moment where you were working for the bad guys all along. What if the player was given their choice of a path to their goal, but their choice only took them further away from where they wanted to be?
Right now, games are heavily focused on task-reward gratification. They don't have to be, just like a painting doesn't have to be focused on a literal representation of a scene or object.
http://www.hdrlying.com/imported-data/2008/8/18/living-in-reverse-the-benefit-of-the-unreliable-narrator.html
There's surrealist games like Yume Nikki and LSD that provide an anti-airport experience, but there's also the NES Zelda 2, which, from what I've heard, intentionally misleads you (I've never played it).
There are a lot of other areas in the game where it's easy to get lost. Zelda 2 takes place in a vast and dangerous world where many key landmarks are hidden from view. It is definitely not an airport.
The reverse airport idea makes me think of two games in particular: Super Mario 64 and Goldeneye. The designers of both games have said that they designed the locations first and then came up with things for the player to do there. The result is a lot of seemingly useless areas, but also that you get the impression you are exploring a real space and not just being pulled through a carnival ride.