Playgrounds of the Mind

I admit to being something of a veteran of OKCupid. One thing I've noticed about online dating, one of the biggest pitfalls, is that the profile you see is necessarily not an accurate representation of the person behind it. I'm not talking here about people deliberately misrepresenting themselves: Even people who strive to be as true as they can in their profile will end up with little more than a sketch. There is a temptation for the online dater to see a profile, which always leaves something to the imagination, and fill in the blanks with their own ideals. That can lead to unwarranted feelings and overattachment, which can very easily lead to hurt, and certainly lead to a lot of the creepy behaviours we all have a car-crash fascination with when they're shared by the recipients on Twitter.

But what is a danger of online dating can be a benefit to video games. I often feel like this same phenomenon is precisely what makes Final Fantasy VII so dear to so many people's hearts. We have characters with double-digit polygons, who have no voices and communicate entirely in (poorly translated) text. These highly abstract characters are, by virtue of their technical limitations, necessarily playgrounds of the mind, where the player's imagination has a lot of freedom to fill in the blanks as they'd like, enriching their attachment to and involvement with the characters. In Mass Effect, my Shepherd is probably different to your Shepherd because of the way I customised her appearance and the choices I made in the course of the game, but Final Fantasy VII - whether intentionally or not - leveraged the most powerful customisation engine that exists: the human imagination.

Incidentally, this is a large part of the reason I didn't like Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children. Here we had a film that made Final Fantasy VII's characters suddenly startlingly realistic. The film told me what these characters looked like, how they sounded, and what their mannerisms were. It not only didn't allow me to use my imagination to fill in the blanks; it trampled roughshod over all the investment I'd put into engaging with the characters in the game. This is also why I never want to see a remake of Final Fantasy VII. I can't help but feel a remake would take a game beloved precisely for its abstraction and fill in the blanks for you, denying you the power of your imagination. Even Cloud's appearance in Kingdom Hearts - itself hardly a paragon of detail - felt like it diminished the opportunity for engagement.

In recent years, another game used abstraction to allow the player to fill in the blanks with their imagination, and its characters were beloved, if not by so many, at least as much as were Final Fantasy VII's. I speak, of course, of Thomas Was Alone, where, forget double-digit polygons, each character was one polygon. And although the game was fully voiced, it was narrated by King of Lovely himself Danny Wallace, rather than acted by an ensemble cast, which again took a step back from the level of direct representation. Mike Bithell has done (I assume) intentionally what Squaresoft did (I assume) accidentally, and created characters who invite the player to engage with them by using their imaginations to fill in the blanks, thereby creating involvement and personal meaningfulness.

This may also go some way to explaining the appeal of anime-influenced visual styles. Granted, that particular art style is not to everyone's taste, but to those who like it, it appeals not just because it has more kawaiis per desu than any other style, but also because anime is abstraction-in-a-box. It is a style that - at first through necessity, and then through design - has been honed to encourage viewers to get personally involved by filling in the blanks with their imagination.

All of this is not to say that abstraction is all you need. There is an art to abstraction. In Christine Love's Analogue: A Hate Story, for example, it is important that Hyun-ae and Mute are abstract enough such that you can engage with them using your imagination, but not so abstract that they can be whoever you want them to be. This was writ large in the sequel, Hate Plus. Mute died, which evoked similar feelings in fans as Aeris' death in Final Fantasy VII, but whereas in Final Fantasy VII, Aeris was taken from you by the big bad, Mute's death was a suicide. An act of her own agency transgressed the mental image of the character players had themselves built up. This was used to great effect, but it could just as easily (and was, by some quarters) be seen as a betrayal. "What has Sephiroth done to my Aeris?" became "What has Christine done to my Mute?" The dynamic of attachment and loss is incredibly powerful - too powerful for some players to deal with - but would have been a damp squib without the abstraction that allowed that attachment to form in the first place.

There is a storytelling principle called "show, don't tell", but I feel it's mis-worded, particularly for such a visual medium as video games. It's very easy for a video game developer to say, "Well, we are showing, and with tens of thousands of polygons in HD no less!" Yes, that's true, but the spirit of "show, don't tell" might better be explained as "imply, don't make explicit". Janet Murray, in her seminal book on interactive storytelling, Hamlet on the Holodeck, partially rejects Samuel Coleridge's notion of "willing suspension of disbelief", preferring instead the term "active creation of belief", and this is, I think, where I'm coming from. Creation of belief that does not engage the imagination is inherently less active.

If you're telling a story, and especially if you're making a video game, the onus is on you to give your audience something to do. And that goes beyond pressing buttons to control the action - your game's interaction with the player doesn't begin and end at their fingertips. It is, and must be, interacting with the player's imagination.

Is "free" not cheap enough?

This is primarily anecdotal, so it's perhaps not enough to draw any conclusions from, but it does seem in line with some rumblings from other corners of the internet.

The big news is that Christine Love's Analogue: A Hate Story has made its way to Steam. It's a visual novel about stumbling across a Korean colony ship in the far future, and, through interacting with the two AIs who are the only 'living' remnants of the crew, trying to piece together what happened. And it's good. Very good, in fact, but this isn't a review piece. I don't really do them.

It's not an instruction. It's not that kind of visual novel.

Before I even played Analogue, what really struck me was how enthusiastically I accepted the offer that I pay for it. The thing is, I haven't played Digital: A Love Story or Don't take it personally, babe, it just ain't your story, though I was certainly intrigued to read about them. But Christine Love's previous titles were free. Why is it that I never touched the ones I could get for free, but was very happy to get the one I had to pay for?

Perhaps GOG.com's Guillaume Rambourg has the answer. When he spoke to Rock, Paper, Shotgun last month, he made it quite clear that he felt a certain price point was necessary to "preserve the value of games". He kept talking about the value of games, but I think he meant the perception of value, which is a bit different. Nonetheless, as sceptical as I was, I now wonder if there isn't some truth to that. It's a criticism I've heard of pay-what-you-want style bundles, too: that they effectively devalue the games they contain.

Of course, the free-to-play model has been phenomenally successful for bigger publishers, with people paying piecemeal for in-game items and new gameplay. But it's easy to see that they expect (or, at least, hope for) my money at some point. A game that is just free with no strings attached seems to awaken some sort of alarm bell in us. Put into words, it would be something like:-

Why would it be worth my time if it's not worth my money?

This is, perhaps, a vindication of the frequent lament we make to non-gamers that games aren't just for kids. Kids have more time than money, so they worry about how much something costs. We're grown-ups, though (honest we are!): we have more money than time, and while we're glad to spend that money, we want to be sure that what we're spending it on is worth our time.

Part of it is that, as authorware becomes more accessible and more sophisticated, anyone can do it, and not everyone realises that not everyone should. There's no getting around it. If people can make bad games, they will, and over time we've built up this sort of association between 'free' and the baser qualities of amateurism. There's another side to that, too. Back when I was making music, I was all too familiar with the idea that one has to have confidence in one's work before one can justify selling it. I never had that confidence in my music (but if you ever heard it, you'd know why), and so it was always free. But if the creator of a work doesn't think it's worth selling, why should the audience think it's worth anything?

Of course, I don't know if Digital: A Love Story and Don't take it personally, babe were free due to a lack of confidence, but because I don't know, there's nothing really telling me that surmising that would be wrong. (And, oh! How wonderful it would be for a smarter person than I to look at how this phenomenon plays with Barthes' Death of the Author.) But clearly, somewhere along the line, it was decided that Analogue: A Hate Story was worth selling. And that decision made me think (much as I don't want to paint myself as easily manipulated) that it might be worth buying.

An interesting outcome is that I liked Analogue: A Hate Story so much that I definitely will check out Digital: A Love Story and Don't take it personally, babe, it just ain't your story. The game I had to pay for is effectively selling me on games I don't have to pay for. That is so the inverse of everything that is intuitive, it's quite wonderful.

Conclusions, then? Well, as I said at the beginning, this is anecdotal, so my conclusions aren't really anything new. Primarily, it might be crass for an artist to think about filthy lucre, but we live in a world where setting a price point is the best way to communicate to your audience that you think you've done something worthwhile, and if you don't demonstrably think it's worthwhile, neither will they. Secondarily, if you must release free games, try to make them somehow related to a game you're selling. Oh, and tertiarily (is that a word?), if your independent game is bad, don't release it. You're making all the other indies look bad. The hell is wrong with you? Or maybe you should release it so everyone can tell you how bad it is. It sounds like you need that. Who are you, anyway, and why have you made me digress from an otherwise positive post just to tell you how much you suck?

Ahem. It's not exactly a three-step plan to guaranteed success, but what were you expecting?