Jul
28
2009

Lie to Them

Everything I say is a lie.

When we read books, we tend to think that the perspective we’re reading is telling us the truth. It’s not something we ever doubt; we make a subconscious social contract with the work’s narrator: we’re reading through your story because you’re our window into this world. We have no way of knowing whether the narrator is willfully or ignorantly lying to us, we just have to take their knowledge and sincerity on faith alone.

Albert Camus’ The Fall is the story of Jean-Baptiste Clamence as told by Jean-Baptiste Clamence through a series of interactions with a bartender at a bar in Amsterdam. To this man, Clamence tells stories of his life, his sins, his hypocrisy, his lies, and his general philosophy on life. There’s never any reason to really trust what Clamence says, but the readers, through the assumption of the role of the character to whom Clamence is talking, do. Why would he be lying about some of his most mundane observations and his deepest insecurities and darkest acts? The answer: why not? Clamence applies his own philosophy of universal guilt upon the bartender by, essentially, making him accomplice to a crime. Not for a particularly malicious reason, just to illustrate the absurdity of life.

The Fall is my favorite literary example of the unreliable narrator. A term which is much like it sounds: the point of entry into some fictional world is solely through a person who is willfully (or not) deceiving readers. A more well-known example of this device is F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, but The Fall resonated with me like few other books I’ve read. The concept of the unreliable narrator is superb; much like the arrow present in the FedEx’s logo, once you’re introduced to the concept, the reading and interpretation of every book to follow is tainted by the knowledge.

A similar concept is employed in film to the same effect. Jacob’s Ladder is the story of a Vietnam veteran coping with life in the real world after he gets back from Vietnam. Except it’s not. It’s the slow realization of the central character and the movie’s viewers that what we accept to be a shared conception of reality may be nothing of the sort. And when what we accept to be real and tangible is disproved, what’s left?

The manipulation of truth, reality, and sanity is one of those thematic elements that I’ve always loved exploring and consuming. Over the last couple of weeks, I’ve been trying to figure out a way to represent the sensation of distorted reality or the unreliable narrator through gameplay mechanics — the emphasis being on mechanics. Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty attempted to manipulate its players’ concept of reality, but it was solely through narrative devices. It made no attempt, to my memory, to actually alter any portion of the core gameplay which the player relied on up to that point in the game. And that, to me, seems to be such a critical portion in the implementation of this concept.

One of the inherent side-effects of manipulating a player’s concept of reality within a video game seems to be the inherent frustration attached to most of the ideas I’ve had thus far. Sure, a game could consider tangible objects to be completely different entities than the ones which are rendered to the screen. The problem comes when a player walks over a floor of spikes in a game that he thought was a field of lilies — that isn’t an intelligent manipulation of his concept of what is real, it’s a test of his tolerance for frustration. And maybe some level of frustration is inherent to the concept to begin with; when Tim Robbin’s character in Jacob’s Ladder is on the verge of a nervous breakdown because everything he believes is falling apart, anger and frustration is a natural response. It’s a logical response to the realization that what we see and hear may be radically different from what everyone else sees and hears.

That’s not an idea that is readily transferable to any game I’ve played or any design I have thought up. Tom Clancey’s H.A.W.X. (yes, I would not have expected to ever write anything critically relevant about this game either) attempts to make players rethink their understanding of the game by causing a major interface element to go haywire in the last half/third of the game. Instead of relying on technological elements to aid players in their execution of the game’s missions, players are called-upon to rely more on what they see and observe rather than what their on-plane computer tells them. Unfortunately, instead of playing more with this concept, the game just reduces the window in which a missile lock will persist, but it’s still a relevant design choice: make the player rethink the way they interpret the commonly unchanging interface that he/she typically relies on.

I provide no answers in this piece, only musings on a set of devices that I’ve always found fascinating. The benefits of successfully employing a design which calls into challenge everything a player takes for granted seems, to me, well worth the time spent exploring the idea.

This entry was written by Trent Polack, posted on 7/28/2009 at 12:57 am, filed under General and tagged , , , , , , , . Bookmark the permalink. Follow any comments here with the RSS feed for this post. Trackbacks are closed, but you can post a comment.
  • lawrie
    Great post - you raise some really interesting ideas. I've been meaning to read some Camus for ages, so I'll hunt down a copy of The Fall. Cheers.
  • Very interesting post. I could certainly see where it would be frustrating to change mechanics on the player in the middle of the game, so that previous knowledge of the world is no longer valid. But I think if it's done in short bouts it can work quite well; yes there will be frustration, but as long as it is temporary the player can work through it and say "hey, that was kinda crazy/cool!"

    The best example I can think of at the moment is the SNES Donkey Kong Country (old school!). I don't remember which version since I played all three quite a lot, but there were some levels with wind that would blow you farther to the left or right than normal when you jumped. One level consisted of a colored gas that made you jump super high and slowly, and another made you swim in the opposite direction you intended to go (so you had to hold back on the D-pad to go forward). These alternate-reality mechanics helped make the game more interesting, and since it was just a specific level you knew it would be over eventually if you had a hard time with it.
  • Eternal Darkness did this, of course. The protagonist was often driven insane by the terrifying things he saw. The player would walk his character into a room and strange things would happen, then there would be a flash and the player would realize the character actually never made it into the room but is still standing in front of the door.

    Schizophrenia runs in my family. For my cousin, hallucinations have taken the form of believing others are angry and yelling at him when they are not. In a game, experiences like that could be used to make a player unable to discern who can be trusted, who are enemies and allies.

    I have much milder schizophrenia. I've had hallucinations where my mind couldn't organize the patterns I was seeing into a meaningful image, so I saw one thing as something else. In gameplay, the player might see something falsely the first time and correctly everytime after that, creating the possibility that the player bypasses something useful (imagine fighting with a bat and realizing halfway through the fight there's a gun nearby).

    I've also had memory blocks. A few years ago, I asked my brother how he got the eggs in the frying pan to be all yellow. For about 5 minutes, the very mundane memory of eggs was trapped in my mind and everyone was looking at me like I was crazy. That frustration of hearing everyone around you identify reality as something other than what you're seeing it as... that's gameplay I haven't seen yet. It could be compelling gameplay if the character also saw some things differently than other people and was correct in those observations. Imagine a schizophrenic hero working to unravel a true conspiracy.
  • @Aaron - Wow that must be rather rough on you. Just reading about your experience is quite enlightening! I'd imagine that something to the extent of using a bat while realizing there was a gun the whole time or using the gun as a bat thinking it was a bat the whole time would provide such effect. However - and forgive me if I'm wrong in interpreting Trent's thoughts - it seems that the issue is more so in how the narrator or rather how the narrative is played upon so that the player must question their actions prior to committing to them.

    So in the case of the bat and the gun, self realization comes after the act has already been done. Now let's say you suffered from schizophrenia and you were the main character in Far Cry 2. One of your buddies is injured but due to your illness you're never quite sure of the object you're holding so while you think you're holding a syringe you might be holding a handgun. After you trigger the action will you know if you performed the appropriate maneuver either by seeing a pool of blood or your buddy is healthy once again.
  • callguinness
    The HAWX example doesn't seem to fit with my understanding of the unreliable narrator. It's just a changed mechanic no different from a gun jamming in Far Cry 2. The unreliable narrator does not change the rules, just hides or distorts the truth. And it's important to note that often a revelation will change our understanding of the story up to that point.

    I think if we apply this to games we have to think of the experience of playing, the interpretation and acting upon the rules, as being what is made 'unreliable'. Brenda's Train is the best example of a game that accomplishes this. The written rules never change, but the players are being deceived as to the nature and consequences of their actions. The final revelation forces fundamental re-evaluation of the way they are playing the game. What would be a modern digital game equivalent? I don't know if any exist. I can think of several possibilities. For example, Manveer recently suggested that actions in a game be made permanent through multiple play-throughs to allow for greater moral impact. What if you were never told NPC permadeath existed in the game until about halfway through? That would certainly get people to approach the game rules from a different perspective.
  • Unfortunately, witholding information like NPC permadeath is generally impossible with spoilers about stuff like that spreading across the internet like wildfire. Only the earliest players would be ignorant -- and perhaps not even them, since a game's review might precede its release and contain basic spoilers.

    But deep and far-reaching revelations can be great if the game is fun to replay. On replay, the player might re-experience many events with a different perspective or knowledge of where it's leading. Or the player's character could retain some knowledge from the ending, so that new dialog options and such are unlocked in replay.

    @Chris: As soon as the player experiences one event that proves his/her character unreliable, then realization is no longer after-the-fact. Your gun-syringe idea is a good example. If you thought you were healing an ally and then realized you shot him, you would doubt your senses from then on. The player's freedom of choice can grow as the player becomes increasingly aware of the unreliability of his character or others. The film A Beautiful Mind is a good example of how awareness of unreliability can empower free will.

    Dialog options can reflect impulses like paranoia and lying. The player is then given the option to reject those impulses. The number and variety of choices might increase through the game with the character's own self-awareness. A bonus of this route is that it gives the player the option to choose the poor impulses, despite knowing them as such... similar to choosing the insane Malkavian class in Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines.

    On the other hand, trust/distrust doesn't have to exist only at the story's end or throughout. It can come and go. If a great amount of time passes between one lie/hallucination and another, that experience might be forgotten and trust regained. One can also be led to blame lies and hallucinations on particular circumstances, to believe the problem will not recur in other circumstances. For example, if someone misled you in a business deal, you might not expect that person to lie to you in casual interaction as well ("it's just business").
  • callguinness
    That's another interesting possibility. Instead of NPC permadeath there's player-character immortality - in the sense of "new game +". It's Groundhog Day taken to the extreme, a 15+ hour game starts over with new conversation options, areas to explore, ways to solve puzzles. And then the second time you beat it, it starts over again with even more changes. And again, and again. A metagame develops online, perhaps slightly encouraged by the developers, where players tired of the game give their save files to strangers and friends who haven't played it yet. And then they pass it on to the next person in line.

    Or it's not even a traditional commercial release and only takes an hour or two to complete. Like Train, only one "copy" exists. It is a singleplayer game that can only be played by a single person at a time. Each person has six hours to complete the game before it is automatically deactivated and the activation code sent to the next in the queue.

    Anyway, off topic now, but thanks for the brainstorm fuel :)
  • @Aaron Yes I suppose it would be important to define - in the gun / syringe scenario - that it wouldn't happen all the time. You could even expand on that by attempting to control your condition by taking pills, such as the malaria.

    As for the dialog options, I'm not sure about this. I quote this time and time again just because I think it's really well put and an excellent point.

    "Ueda explained his dislike for conversations between characters, saying the repetition required to get the point across and remind the audience what's going on can hurt the game. Pagliarulo picked up on that point and said it's easy to run into conflicts when you're trying to make dialogue sound normal and natural but are also trying to provide players with all the feedback and guidance they need."

    So I can see the benefit of using dialogue however, I also fear that it might have to be 'overworked' or it won't come across ideally. But your point of having trust/distrust coming and going is a good one and it's something which could be portrayed through character actions. Especially in a title which enforces trust or distrust as a mechanic via gameplay.
  • The deal with H.A.W.X. that I didn't go into enough detail on is that the player's primary understanding of the game world was through the plane's targeting system and its designation of targets. When that is messed with, the idea is that the player's connection to the game world has been altered and, as such, he may not be interpreting entities the way that he was before. It's like limiting the player's more reliable of senses (sight) and forcing him to rely on his "trusted" ones.

    None of that is, of course, what ends up happening, but it was a cool idea in concept that just was not explored as interestingly as it could have been.
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