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Briefly: two porcupines huddling to keep warm during hibernation will freeze if
too far apart yet stick each other when coming too close together (with a
similar scenario occurring during sex). So there you have the two great quills
of love and dependency jabbing each other towards an uneasy balance.*
On the one hand you might try to think how the porcupine’s dilemma is
inaccurate (easy tiger, this is not a dissertation before a board of elder
zoologists), but it is more productive to use this dilemma to better understand
the dynamics of a single-player RPG. By an RPG’s dynamics, I do not mean how
the members of a group interact with one another. I use dynamics to indicate
the fluctuating party characters/player duality. Like the two dancing
porcupines, player and party merge and yet stay separate, jointly occupying the
roles of gamer and game.
With this focus on party dynamics in mind, it is hopefully safe to begin at
the most appropriate of places, the beginning, or party creation. When
creating a party the player might have a desire to “balance” the characters
according to previous ideas of what works best. In the days of the original
Final Fantasy, a “good” party might have consisted of a black mage, a white
mage, a fighter and a thief, or maybe red mages and black belts, or possibly you
just picked whoever, and started your adventure without giving the matter too
much thought.* Perhaps you had a vague notion that someone needed to be able to
toss a heal spell around, someone needed offensive spells and someone had to be
fairly adept at hand-to-hand combat. As games have progressed, this stasis
between sorcery and physical might has remained largely the same: two pillars
upon which a house of adventuring has rested. The best parties will tend to
maximize the strengths created when these two groups merge while minimizing
whatever deficiencies arise. By the endgame, your heroes tend to have advanced
to high enough levels to often negate your starting choices but that is not to
say choice should not matter. No game so far allows you to select a party whose
conflicting character personalities break it completely apart, forcing you to
start over again or assemble an entirely new group. Unexpected digressions in
games either appear scripted (the subquest) or lack spontaneity. But no
digression, as yet, can recreate the feelings inherent in the first time you
played an RPG. There is no way to wipe clean your slate and begin a game
without any preconceptions. During the first RPG you played there was no
accumulated knowledge of previous games guiding and/or impassively influencing
your actions. There were no clichés yet because everything was still new and
fresh. You can only discover an RPG might be “broken” by playing it over again
once you already know what to expect.
On the Benefits of Force Feedback
Static electricity serves as an example of forces coming too closely
together to achieve an unexpected shock- and it is the unexpectedness of the
relationship that can be the most rewarding. Allow me the luxury of a tangent,
or digression, if you will, without complaining that this piece has lost its way
(consider it an example that the unexpected can strike at any time, and at any
place). There are so few shocks in an RPG. I do not mean plot twists where the
good guy turns out to be the bad guy or the ultimate item the hero is questing
after turns out to be the exact means by which the villain destroys the world.
I am calling out the lack of excitement generated by a sudden jolt of unheralded
newness. Yes, yes, deny me the foreshadowing, cut out any and all harbingers of
imminent chapters, ghosts of future presents do not visit this scrooge and let
me bask in a prophecy of blindness. But I really hunger for neither an
interactive battle scene, nor a painting. Behold: I want party members to be
slowly stealing the group’s gold without any previous mention this might happen,
I want “purposeful” bugs that prevent me from doing something I otherwise should
have, I want untrustworthy narrators, and quests for items that not only do not
exist, but require traveling to places that will never be found.
And I want a main character who seems to be an extension of me, and then
has a personality of his own that effects my control over him, such as he will
not use spells during the opening volley of any battle, or a particular wound he
received due to my ineptitude at controlling him means he will not level up
unless I pay him with some alcohol. Along the same lines, I might have to bribe
my own party to get them to help an NPC in distress. After all, shouldn’t they
have their own morality, with their own viewpoints, beliefs and conceptions of
the world? Maybe they do not care to be forced to be good (or evil as the case
may be). Have some fun with the fact that I am a puppetmaster!
Ultimately the party dynamic I am “skewering” when too close together is
the outside player and his ingame party. They are one and the same and yet
oddly separate. The “I” of the gamer is like an inept, blind, crippled god in
the world of the party. I can control certain things; I could easily make life
better by not having them fight and just get wealthy or make merry, yet
sometimes I act insanely, asking them to fight the same monster over and over
again, or losing the way in the easiest of dungeons. What if after the third
wrong turn in a row, the main character stops, address me as an idiot and
demands to allow himself to move? I lean towards humor, but this relationship
could easily be taken into a more serious direction (for example whenever I
might allow a character to die while I still had a heal potion!). The meta
game, the game outside of the game itself, is a largely untapped goldmine
developers are collectively overlooking.
Tumbling further into the looking glass
We take for granted reliability (by definition, no?). We tend to think
we know more than we know and make judgments before we should. For instance,
believing how heavy an object is prior to picking it up just by looking at it,
only to then be surprised by its density. A priori reasoning has entrenched
itself in our thought process and, by extension, in RPGs themselves. When I
interact with NPCs in the world, choose topics of conversation, or pay for
items, I am doing this in the first person and I have no reason to doubt this is
taking place. By that I mean, as the character is an extension of me, when I
click on the option to say hello, I, through my character, am doing that very
thing. I have done this countless time before, with rules of consequence having
been set in my mind I have little reason to think might be broken. Unless there
is some dream sequence, when I do anything in the game world, I am under the
pretense that it is actually happening in the game world. This game world
exists, and I do not have to be caught up in proving its existence (at least not
in order to enjoy it). As I have played RPGs before, I have general
expectations and those expectations will by and large be met each time.
If I [b]were[/b] to think about proving the game’s existence, or if the
main character I control was to engage me in a debate over his existence, sooner
or later we might begin talking about one of Spinoza’s laws of metaphysics:
psycho-physical parallelism (certainly stranger things can happen). Without
digging too deeply, this law declares that the idea of a thing coincides
perfectly with the actual thing itself. Thoughts and actions just happen to
match up with one another. Or in video game terms, if I move the character
left, he happens to correspondingly move left in the game world. My thought of
him moving (my moving the controller) resulted in the physical movement of him
in the game world. Now a great deal can be gathered from a Spinoza-generated
defense of the existence of the game world, but I am actually laying this
foundation so that I can combat it. The system of control inherent in the
psycho-parallelism of the gaming world as I have characterized it (again, I move
the controller, therefore the character does what I want) needs to be liberated
from. I want a game that fights against this parallelism, and not just in terms
of locomotion. There are a number of games that play around with how a
character’s movement defies normal expectation. Movement might become sluggish,
the screen might swirl or go black, or controls might be mirror-imaged so that
up goes down and so forth, yet these are still limited to an extent no greater
than the sanity effects from Eternal Darkness. Ultimately, it is reliability
that I wish to detach from the parallelism. When my character is talking to an
NPC and there are dialogue options, or words I am reading/hearing, I want this
to not actually be what is taking place in the game. Still with me? Let’s say
I go into a house and have my character say hello, I read this and I read the
person’s polite response. In actuality (in the game world) and unbeknownst to
me, my character has just threatened this NPC’s life and has demanded money,
which is then given over to my character. My character now has cash I am
unaware of and is free to spend it without my knowledge. It is this point of
the character functioning without my knowledge I wish to pursue, to see who is
playing whom. There is ultimately an illusion of control when playing an RPG,
but I want this illusion to become the experience itself. Perhaps through a
posteriori reasoning I might eventually conclude when, and to what extents “my”
characters have acted on their own accord, after which I could enact
punishments/rewards to a similar degree as in a game like Creatures or other
virtual pet games if I so desire.
So what does the porcupine’s dilemma have to say about dynamics? Nothing
really. Actually the entire opening could be removed and this editorial would
not hobble along any slower. If anything, the opening serves to distract and
misdirect the reader, leading to false conclusions about where and for what
purpose this discussion meanders. So perhaps it should have been edited
out—unless the fact that it serves no inherent purpose is its purpose. In no
less obscured conditions, the RPG player is trapped in and by a comfort zone of
expectations. We often know what to expect from an RPG in certain situations,
and we depend on this, in that we seek RPGs out because we enjoy them. The
quality of shared characteristics dictates that if you enjoy one, you often will
enjoy another and probably many more. But in the same breath we are impossibly
far way from new experiences because of these shared characteristics and
disconnected from our characters because of the boundary that separates us from
the gaming world. To remain true to the form of RPGs and yet “virginize” the
player anew is no easy task I concede, as the developer would have to
continually remain one step ahead of the player, constantly creating new
experiences that subjugate expectation. Then paradoxically by allowing yourself
to be controlled, to be played, you could close the gap while avoid being
stabbed by experience (or preview). In this way, revelation becomes the reward;
for once I want to play a game and by surprised by its density.
The supplemental:
*Does this really happen? I do not know, clearly porcupines are capable of
reproduction. I did not create this analogy, but I find it useful in initiating
this piece.
*While many of the early games were simple enough in structure that balance
was not a necessity to beat the game, games tend to be designed with balance in
mind. Whether or not you consider a game to be “broken” if you can beat it
using the same character/spell/item over and over again is subject for another
day. It is important to keep in mind, though, that when you build your party in
a game, you tend to have a starting point of all the previous games you have
played because they share similar qualities.
*I have certainly not played all RPGs, if there are those that play off
player/party dynamics, by all means, share your wealth of knowledge.
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