Creating the environment
You threw me into the arena, don’t be surprised that I plan to fight now.
During a conversation the other night with a fellow Final Fantasy XIV player, a statement was made: “It’s not the developers’ fault how players behave.” Which intrigued me, because it’s a sentiment that I see a lot, and one that makes logical sense. It’s also one that’s almost entirely wrong.
Obviously, developers are not coming into your house at night to tell you how the game should be played, or including notes in the instruction manual. Although that would be kind of funny from a perverse standpoint: “press A to jump, but don’t do it in level 3 because that’s not the right way to play.” But the developers are totally telling you how to play, and if you’re breaking the game or playing in a way that’s not fun for you or anyone, that’s entirely the fault of the development team.
It all comes down to the environment you create and what you encourage. Because that’s what tells you how to play the game anyway.
Telling Stories: Breaking into the middle
When I first went to college, I had a very simple goal: do better there than I had in high school. I had a sound guideline to help me establish that, as well. I figured that if my first instinct about what to do in any situation had resulted in acting the way I had all through high school, clearly the best course of action would be to gauge my first instinct and then do the opposite in any situation. Thus, when I saw a pretty girl and a guy chatting at the first meeting of the school’s anime club, I decided the logical course of action was to walk right up and invite myself to the conversation.
The result? Well, the pretty girl wound up marrying me and the guy roomed with me in college for several years and is still a dear friend. But that was lucky, since my behavior was so screamingly rude that I’m relatively certain I should have been sent to Behavior Jail. But of course, how else are you going to insert yourself in a social situation when roleplaying? Yes, there were dozens of other options open to me as a person in the real world, but if you see interesting roleplaying go down, how do you take part without making your character a rude, abrasive jerk?
Game companies feel like people
If game companies were more like cats, I think I’d like them more.
It all started when I was thinking about BioWare.
I like BioWare, if you didn’t know. I like them quite a bit. Sure, the studio has made missteps here and there, they’ve goofed up, they haven’t been as good as I know they can be. But the studio is trying. I realized that more than anything, they feel like someone worth knowing. Sure, they’re going to blow it occasionally, but not because they’re bad, just because everyone makes mistakes, and they seem to take their mistakes in stride and move on.
That, of course, led to me thinking about how many other companies feel like people instead of just machines made to take money. Yes, that’s what they are, but if the Supreme Court keeps insisting that corporations are entitled to all of the same benefits as individual people, we might as well start talking about these studios as people, right? It seems only fair.
Telling Stories: Catching up mechanically
When Final Fantasy XIV releases Ninja, it’ll be a nice day for me, particularly singe I’ve been playing one for the past four years. No, not through an unholy amalgam of abilities put on my bar in service to a rather strange overall cause, but in-character. My character should, by all rights, be dual-wielding and hacking things apart, then slipping back into the shadows. That’s her entire deal. This is not a bold new direction for her, it’s more like an acknowledgement of where she’s already been.
Of course, I’m also lucky insofar as this is a game where it’s very easy – encouraged, even – to swap between classes on a regular basis. The only setback this will pose is that I’ll have to put a bit of extra effort into assembling her weapon and armor sets, something I can probably start doing with the next major patch anyway. But it still raises the question of why she hasn’t been doing this on a regular basis before now. How do you handle it when the game finally catches up mechanically to the place you’ve already been?
Challenge Accepted: Fair’s fair
It might seem fair to gang up on someone until you get ganged up on yourself.
If you think about it, the whole idea of challenge being fair is kind of strange at face value. Games build unfairness into themselves by design. If your average Mega Man game was fair, the boss would be able to pause the game and use weapons on me to target my weakness. The bosses start out by being unfair by design, at that; they can jump higher, run faster, fire more complex attacks, and so forth. That’s not fair.
Of course, if the boss fights were fair, the game would be kind of boring. Imagine a game where every boss dropped as easily as the player character. It’d be fair, but it wouldn’t be fun.
Fairness is a nebulous concept, but it’s also a really important one when you’re talking about games. We talk about the importance of it over and over, about the difference between games that are really hard to beat but fair compared to those that are just plain cheap. But how relevant is that, really? Are we looking for fairness, or are we just interested in accountability?
Recent Work
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Chocobo Dash
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Eliot Lefebvre 