Patrick Dugan just made a recent post continuing the thread of the realities of indie gamedev. There’s been a recent rash of parade raining for the indie gamedev scene, starting with Jeff Vogel’s idie lament that I commented on earlier (and was recently linked to from Grand Text Auto). Patrick quickly recaps the observations made by Jeff Tunnell on what the proper expectations of success should be for indies. Jeff properly points out that average titles can only hope to break even, while only the really successful ones are profitable. The result: the market is actually not that different from nearly every other mature creative market where craftsmanship is plentiful (see movies, websites, books, music).

Patrick draws out a specific quote from Jeff’s post to hang his observations on: “Urban legend has it that the casual games market is dominated by 41 year old females.” Patrick’s response is to question whether or not this is something we should be afraid of, and if “this sort of alienated attitude is precisly why the industry is in the position its in.” This segues into a discussion on what types of games would appeal to the larger, broader market of consumers of entertainment, which eventually is answered by Patrick’s “drama game,” or what would traditionally be dubbed “interactive storytelling.”

I’ll admit that I’m nowhere near as well-versed in the facets of interactive storytelling as I’d like to be. I’ve read several of Chris Crawford’s books, but have specifically avoided his tome on the subject because I felt I got enough of a taste in his other books’ subtexts. I also spent a bit of time with Twisty Little Passages, but in the end found much of it to come across as simply “smarter,” less intuitive and less well-defined text adventures. Not to be condescending, but much of it does feel more like performance art via computer rather than entertainment, but to each his own. There’s certainly room for all forms of interaction at the game table.

While I appreciate Patrick’s enthusiasm for the drama game and its potential as a panacea for the industry’s woes of innovation, there’s still a huge barrier of acceptance to the purer “drama” games: mechanics. Mechanics are fundamental to interactivity; they’re the literal actions the user takes, the verbs of the back-n-forth communication between the user and the software. I think the reason we’ve not seen any real drama games is not for lack of trying; I think it’s a lack of a well-defined mechanic.

Facade has been recently highlighted as an example of this burgeoning genre. I’ve played Facade. I actually played it first several years ago as a judge when it was entered into the IGF. I rated it highly in innovation, but poorly in execution. Why? While I understood the concept of what they were trying to accomplish, the mechanics failed me as a participant. I felt as though I had no real impact on the unfolding drama; I no expectation of interaction. Sure, they would react to my hastily typed suggestions, questions, urgings or answers, but the immersion never caught and the end results never materialized for me. It felt like a forum flamewar on religion: folks were talking, I was talking, opinions and emotions were swapped and raised and lowered, my responses were quoted and acknowledged, but in the end neither side was moved nor was any satisfying conclusion reached.

I walked away from Facade with one overriding emotion: frustration. And frustration almost inevitably is a by product of poor mechanics in games. Frustration results from the player’s feelings of inability to affect outcome; I would argue that the purpose of games vs. other mediums is to provide a context where the audience, the player, can affect the outcome of the narrative. While I certainly interacted with Facade, it was not a pleasant interaction, nor was it a satisfying interaction.

Of course, there are plenty of comments on the game that are glowingly positive, some so much so that they reak of false praise in a vain attempt at elitism. Others seem to compliment it with the unspoken caveat of “…for a first game of its kind.” And I’d be the last to attempt to bash or detract credit from the developers who made the title; at a minimum it’s an interesting demonstration of what may be possible down the road.

Returning to my comments on mechanics: I think the difficult aspect of a drama game is that it is a game that centers around social interaction. This is certainly the holy grail of game development. The problem is that the only successful examples of social interaction occur when they’re actually human beings on the other end of the line (MMOs). This springs from two steep limitations: AI and vocabulary.

AI is the trickiest technical obstacle. There’s simply not enough computing resources to apply arbitrarily open-ended AI simulations to the process of social interaction. Even for a single character this is practically insurmountable, let alone the interesting web of characters that would compose a traditional drama. The only practical approach would be a heavy pruning of the possibility space which inevitably reduces the dimensionality of the characters. This is actually not too shabby a deal as most closed-form drama is built around largely static characters with a well-described personality dynamic.
For me, the more intersting obstacle is one of pure design, the vocabulary of the interaction. The interaction vocabulary is composed of three things: the players potential actions (mechanics), the softwares potential responses (dynamics), and the game objects (content, nouns) that are the subjects of either participants actions/responses. This vocabulary of verbs and nouns can be augmented with adjectives and adverbs, but these are largely aesthetics and automations and don’t significantly grow or shape the overal interaction (they merely streamline, accentuate or enhance the interaction, all good things for sure).

So, the vocabulary is the thing. It’s the ingredients for the recipe that is a game. Each genre usually has a particular vocabulary, with individual games largely tweaking just the adjectives and the adverbs. New hybrids are created by taking two genres’ vocabularies and combining them. Interactive storytelling, or drama games, really just have a vocabulary that speaks in terms of character motivation rather than character actions.

What’s this have to do with innovation? Well, writers on the subject of games are practically obligated to lament the lack of innovation. It’s part of their creed. But I think the term is thrown around way too much, and quite improperly. The writers often point at gameplay, at the mechanics, and point out how it’s no different than what’s come before it. I think this is the wrong expectation. If gameplay is mechanics is vocabulary, then what we’re saying when we ask for gameplay innovation is a different vocabulary. The problem is that we’re not all linguists.

Learning new languages is hard. I’ll not bother tracking down the facts right now, but I’m pretty sure it’s well-established that after a certain age learning new languages is expontentially more difficult. I’d also bet I could find some research that growing one’s vocabulary, even in your native tongue, is still a non-trivial task. It’s certainly not the standard entertainment exercise. But with games, if we’re asking players to learn our new, innovative gameplay, we need to realize we’re asking them to learn a new vocabulary.

Sometimes, learning a new vocabulary can be fairly easy. Incremental innovation, say turn-based to real-time strategy games, takes an existing vocabulary and adds a few new verbs. That’s pretty easy to swallow, and thus we see that kind of innovation quite a bit more often — I’d wager we see it at least once a year, which is a pretty decent rate if you ask me. But that doesn’t seem to be the kind of innovation most of the writers are looking for.

What they’re looking for are whole new vocabularies. And the problem is that it is very difficult to design languages. There may be dozens of computer languages, but they’re all variations on a few fundamental classes of languages (consider them dialects). There are hundreds of spoken languages, but huge swaths have common ancestory… and, oh yeah, they’ve been developed over many thousands of years by the amalgamated efforts of billions and billions of people.

What’s my incredibly long-winded point? Simply increasing our vocabulary is not the answer to our woes. I think the real root of the dissatisfaction is not in the vocabulary or its lack of innovation, but in the way the vocabulary is used. English isn’t a bad language, but if you only ever read it in the context of Kevin Federline’s lyrics, you may begin to wonder if you shouldn’t take up French. But that would be missing the point that there are significantly better uses of the vocabulary, the exact same vocabulary, when substantially better results.