Greetings Gearboxity dwellers, and welcome to another (well, second) edition of my perennial soapbox. Today I'm dropping sick rhymes about how to keep the player interested in what he or she are/is doing. I trust we all have our Gearboxity deputy decoder rings at the ready? Fantastic.
So, when I was around five years old (a fact that probably makes some of my fellow employees sick to their much older stomachs), a game called Super Mario Bros. came out on the Nintendo Entertainment System. Now, amidst all the turtle genocide and mushroom addiction, Mario plodded forward with a single objective that was candidly shoved in the player's face at all times.
"I'm sorry, but our princess is in another castle."
If Mario were a smarter out-of-work plumber he would have probably asked the tiny fungus midget people to be more specific. Then again, Mario couldn't speak for another fifteen years, and even then, it was just to say "Yahoo!" and "Itsa me, Mario!" Racial stereotypes never go out of style as long as you pick on Italians, I guess. The point I'm attempting to get at is that the player was aware of the objective far before he was able to accomplish it; they even cleverly used that understanding against the player when success seemed within grasp.
Fast forward twenty years. We should be way past that style of objective delivery, right? Allow me to paint a picture using the magic of text and imagination (cue xylophone.) Alright, so you got your trusty rifle at your side and you're running through an enemy infested desert city filled with all matter of ugliness and Jihad. You fire off a few rounds as you aimlessly run around dusty streets in an effort to get to the end of the level, firing off rounds at whatever gets in your way until then. Other soldiers run around you, shouting very basic nothings about how they’re firing at the top most left underside of the window, second from the end. You encounter a soldier crouched behind a wall, he has a flashing green arrow over his head. You've never met this person before. You walk up, and he turns and begins to yell at you. Damn, he sounds flippin' angry about something.
"Johnson! There you are! There's another hundred bad guys in front of us and they got four tanks and a helicopter. Here, take this dynamite and kill the crap out of that whole list. We're counting on you, Johnson."
Time out.
What about the twenty soldiers huddled on that wall with you? Are they just going to hang out, chow down on some Funyuns, and play Scrabble? And how come every time I walk into an area with an angry Sergeant crouched against a wall he tells me that I have to run out and risk my life doing the impossible, AGAIN. That’s not fair. What about one of the other four characters named Johnson? Can't they go instead?
The real issue with the above scenario is the character was never introduced in any way (or failing that, a very boring one) so the player doesn't have any connection to him. He's just something the level designer needed to tell the player what to do in their level. That's pretty much like having the director of a movie show up on screen for the first five minutes to explain all the exposition to the audience. It's not dangerous to take a little time and figure out an NPC’s motivations for needing the tasks done, or even taking the time to make a convincing argument as to why the character in the game has to do it in the first place. Want him to go Rambo? Then paint a grim picture of wounded soldiers who are outnumbered and surrounded and give him no other choice. Don't surround him with fifty soldiers and expect him to believe in your world of clearly broken rules.
Conversely, if I were to examine a game where Boss monsters were to be battled and slaughtered, I would paint a different example. You're a short young hero with a mammoth sword on his back (in size, not the extinct mammal) and you plunge headlong into a dungeon filled with spiders and adversaries of the lizard variety. After an hour of key hunting and switch… um… switching, you find yourself face to face with a bonafide, one-eyed boss monster. You figure out the puzzle to damaging him after a few minutes and then exercise the three hit rule to vanquish said cycloptical adversary. Why then, did that feel so empty? Why did he not feel scary at all?
Here's a different way to imagine both examples, even though they come from different games. Let's change angry yelling exposition dude to a loving father of a teenage son (obviously for the purpose of the short young hero game.) Keeping all the gameplay and level design intact, we could imagine a scenario where the Cyclops has been terrorizing the village from time to time and eventually kidnaps the teenage boy (for added effect, structure the beginning training section of the game to go fishing with the boy, or collect apples and squirrel carcasses or whatever.) This is over-simplified, but hopefully at the point of actually needing to venture off on the journey to fight the boss monster, you're aware and interested in your objective before it's even given to you. All other forms of media are really good at this. As story-tellers you need to focus on building tension before releasing it. That's the reason Hans Gruber is a great villain in Die Hard; he's interesting and has solid motivations. If you thought of that scenario as a video game, the player should be emotionally wrapped up in the objectives of the game instead of being dragged along by them.
Emotions are a powerful thing. As humans they drive us, as gamers, they enhance every little thing we do. So why not tap into them to motivate our game experience?
