Layering Indirect Controls to Preserve Immersion (Part Three)

Alrighty folks, sorry for the delay - I went to a free Vanilla Ice concert over the weekend and it kinda threw my tempo off.

Picking up from where I left off last week, making liberal, intelligent use of indirect controls in your games can be the difference between a good play experience and a great one. As I'm sure we can all agree, interactivity is the staple of our medium. Without the freedom of movement and action that videogames are known for you wouldn't be playing anything - you'd be reading or watching. But designing games to allow as much freedom as possible isn't always easy.

There seems to be a lot of pressure in the market to create "open worlds" and "boundless playspaces." This is a difficult task under normal circumstances. But what do you do as a small studio working within tighter schedules or on smaller budgets? Generating games that include enough gamespace to encourage free roaming and sufficient environmental assets to make that gamespace feel alive and believable is a lot of work. It is precisely in this type of situation that the intelligent application of indirect controls comes in handy.

So you want to build a world that feels big but isn't? One of the best ways to do that without making the player feel confined or "on a rail" is to layer indirect controls. This is actually good practice even for larger, more open games as what I'm suggesting is effectively hiding the edges of your sandbox beneath a big pile of contextualized hard and soft barriers.

Think back to inFamous. Empire City is basically a big sandbox bounded by either water or government anti-plague barricades. Both of these barriers I consider to be hard since there is no way to surpass them without cheating or otherwise breaking the game.

Solid walls like the government barricades in inFamous are functionally identical to invisible walls - the bane of all that is good and holy in game design. The difference for the barricades is all a matter of context. Rather than putting an invisible wall in the middle of one of the bridges leading out of Empire City, the folks over at Sucker Punch were smart and put up a barrier than is cloaked in narrative context - you can't get through the wall because there is a government quarantine in effect. This, in the mind of the player, makes sense.

Impassable water areas like the rivers in inFamous also function effectively like solid walls. Cole McGrath, person, should be able to swim, right? But Cole McGrath the electric man can't. Again, this barrier is given some believability through narrative context. Even better, using the rivers as a world boundary presents players with the illusion of choice - sure they can try and get across the water. It's not going to work out so well for Cole McGrath, but they sure can try. In some cases the water is only an obstacle that they have to get past in order to collect a blast shard, complete a mission objective, etc. But at the end of the day, all water in inFamous functions as a wall to keep players within the massive playpen that is Empire City. 

So we've established that providing context for barriers is a great way to trick players into thinking that the world is boundless beyond the area that they currently find themselves trapped in. But this still requires a higher level of suspension of disbelief than we'd like.

Another tactic would be to make it difficult for players to reach these hard boundaries in the first place by utilizing what I call moderate controls. Remember that our objective here is to put a bounding box around the world without making players feel confined. Moderate controls make it difficult (sometimes very difficult) for players to reach these boundary areas in the first place.

Keeping with the inFamous example, imagine that instead of starting at the outskirts of each of the islands that comprise Empire City you start playing in the middle. Now the outer edge of each of the islands is populated by really high-level monsters. From a gameplay perspective, it is now very difficult to even encounter the rivers or the government barricades because the effort of going from the interior of the islands to the exterior has increased drammatically. Those hardcore of us out there will no doubt try to push through these high-level mobs and see what's on the other side, but the majority of players won't even bother. To the majority then, it feels like they are staying on the island by choice and not by any hard constraints designers have placed upon them.

The final level of control layering is truly indirect - it involves using architectural techniques, environmental narrative, and subtle psychological influence to keep players away from even the moderate controls listed above.

So you're playing inFamous and you're about to dive headlong into this bounding circle of really tough baddies keeping you trapped in the Neon district. You're all ready to kick some ass and see what lies on the other side of that teeming sea of Reaper conduits and gun emplacements ...when you ping the map and see a blast shard off in the distance. You could go off and fight Reapers. Or, you can flex your leet completionist muscles and go pick up the rest of those blast shards you forgot about. Or maybe Zeke could get on the radio and tell you that if you don't stay away from the edge of the map, terrible evil will ensue. You know, distractions.

These are obviously awful, hamhanded examples, but you get the idea.

Soft controls are where the real artistry comes in - using camera angles, contrasting colors, and motion cues to influence the kinds of choices that the player makes - where they go, what they do, and when they do it - is a difficult task. Add in the careful integration of narrative into the mix - pushes and pulls, intrigues, and stress contrasts - and the effective application of soft controls becomes significantly harder to prescribe.

In my opinion, the effective use of soft controls is what separates the amateurs from the true artists - the Chris Nolans from the Michael Bays. And soft controls can be used as more than just another indirect control layer to trick players into thinking that the world is bigger than it is - it also applies to atmosphere, pathfinding, pacing, and any number of other things.

The ultimate goal of layering these types of controls is to make the play experience flawless. Players should never feel frustrated. They should never get lost. And, if possible, they should never be reminded that they are playing a game. Layering indirect controls is just one way to mitigate these issues.

That's enough for this week, true believers. Next week... Eh, I'll think on next week's topic and get back on the weekend.

Stay safe and keep the faith.

Peace!