SCENES - A Game Design Vocabulary - page 48

these bursts have on the terrain of the level (each bullet destroys a small piece of dirt that it
hits). By the time the player grabs the crystal and gets out, she's learned quite a lot.
Subsequent scenes develop the relationship between these objects and the player's verbs that
were introduced here, by allowing the player to actually use these objects as digging tools and
weapons against other creatures.
Performance and Expression
Players should be able to make various choices about how to interact and move through a
game. But isn't it a contradiction to talk about designing choices for a player while at the same
time talking about how a scene should play out in a specific way? To talk about telling a story
when we can't predict what our lead performer, the player or players, is going to do? Storytell-
ing in games is like storytelling in theater: that's why we use the word scene .
In theater, we write a script, but the actor's performance of it is up to her. But we nevertheless
compose the shape of the scene. We give the player (another theater word) liberty to perform
a scene; this is where the choices come in. The choices that a player makes come from the verbs
we give her, so we have the ability to constrain and design what those choices are. A fiction-
alized ideal of the videogame is that it gives the player the ability to do anything, to choose
anything. There are games that aim for this kind of wish fulfillment and mostly result in weak
experiences, lacking cohesion and focus.
We create choices that serve our stories using the verbs the player has access to. Bioshock (2007)
is a game about rampaging through an underwater city and shooting objectivists; the player's
central verb is “shooting.” And yet, a critical part of the game's written story involves periodic
choices over whether to “murder” or “rescue” orphaned girls. This is a sociopath's idea of a
moral crisis: kill a girl to farm her for game resources, or magically transform her from a zombie
girl into a ruddy-cheeked white girl.
Aside from the absurdity of having to frame a “moral” choice as being between the furthest
possible extremes of human behavior, the deeper awkwardness of these choices is that they
have no connection to the rest of the game. They aren't made using the verbs that the player
has already been given to communicate with the game. The player is taken away from the
game and presented with an arbitrary choice: press A to rescue, press B to murder. What is
the relationship between these choices and the rest of the choices the player is making in the
game—exploring, shooting? There is none. Although the game acts as if there's a benefit to
“doing evil”—murder gives you more resources to spend on powers—it turns out that rescuing
them rewards you with even more resources later on in the game. Even the game's supposed
moral calculus undercuts itself.
I put a love story into a quick-draw game I made in 2008, Calamity Annie . Annie's verbs are
“aiming” and “firing” her pistol. When Annie flirts with her love interest, the player lights her
cigarette by aiming and firing (see Figure 3.10).