An experiment in excessive freedom

[Wilbefast]

I have a lot of big ideas I'd like to see in Overgrowth, in terms of freedom and so on. Ultimately though if it looks nice and it's fun to play I reckon the team will have more than done their job, considering that there's only 4 of them. And John suggested a while ago that anyone who wants non-linearity should do a non-linear mod...

I'm not usually that keen on modding (it locks you in) and I do have a project I'm working on at the moment, but I'm doubtful OG will be released any time soon, so I've been thinking of perhaps using Overgrowth for an experiment when it is. The idea would be to design a game with truly non-linear progression. I want to challenge a few gaming conventions:


Narrative at the expense of interactivity

As I've said many times, most action games pretend to be movies: there's always a bad guy, and between you and him (or her) there are several hundred thousand nameless goons. The might be multiple endings, but the overall structure is generally the same.



Okay, so obviously if you have 2 choices n times, that's 2^n times as much more level, at least in theory. But why not, instead of having 16 levels connected in a linear manner, have 4 levels, each with 2 possible endings?



Technically you're still making the same amount of content, maybe even less, it's just that any given player won't see all of it in a single play-through, which doesn't look so good on paper. Still, it's something I want to try.
I'm confident these things will have been considered, but just in case they haven't, I wanted to throw it out there:

• The ability to choose the next level dynamically.

Failure, repetition, hostage content

I did a post about this a while ago. I sometimes think that this tendency, for games to make the player restart over and over again until they "get it right", is evolutionary baggage inherited from the arcades. Obviously back then it was simply the way you made money, but does it make sense now?



The guys making Amnesia talk about this a lot, and why it's a problem, but have never been clear about how they plan to do things differently. I've never played Heavy Rain but I think the idea of letting the player control a series of different characters, who can all die, is definitely something worth exploring.



Suppose the player has a certain number of lives, only each life is the life of a different character, and each time a character dies, you which to the next. When all the characters are dead, the game ends.



For this to work though, you need two things:

• No hard-coded "death = failure = restart"

Cut-scenes and dialogue options

I think games are far more effective as exposition than as a narrative medium: they're really good at setting the scene - far better than books which rely on words and the audience's imagination. Why then do so many games use dialogue to tell the player what their world is about? The brilliance of Half Life 2 is that you understand what's going on just by looking at world around you - the characters don't need to spend time dumping exposition on you.



Valve also succeeded in telling their story without once removing control from the player, except for a the few seconds and the beginning and the end:



But how do you give the player the ability to make decisions when there are no dialogue screens? Why, the same way in Half Life 2 you can choose between picking up a can and throwing it in the cop's face:



Scripting should make it possible to detect when the player has approached an NPC, but also whether the player character is armed, and whether they have a weapon drawn: all these factors contribute to giving the AI some idea of the player's intentions, and this enables the player to make decisions without breaking their suspension by having them select options from a dialogue screen.
In most games NPC are either completely harmless or will track you down until you're dead or they are - it'd be nice to see something more like the passive-aggressive combine.

• A way of detecting the state of the player's weapon, or lack thereof

Conclusion

There things may seem like bare necessities, but, well, they weren't supported for Lugaru, so I thought I'd just throw it out there in case they haven't been considered - after all, it's hard to think of everything that modders could possibly want to use.
So to reiterate, I'd like to see:

• No hard-coded "death = failure = restart"
• The ability to choose the next level dynamically.
• A way of detecting the state of the player's weapon, of lack thereof

Would you guys play a game like that? I'll give you a few ideas of what sort of thing I'm considering when I have a bit more time.

[The Happy Friar]

HL2's a bad example for freedom: the player made no choices, had no options, everything was predetermined, even how things needed to be done. The NPC's were stupid & useless (like the text screens in Doom 1 & 2) & the baddies were less intelligent them an Imp from Doom 3 (which got out of the way when you shot at it). In Super Mario you could choose to jump on a goomba or not, no different then throwing a piece of trash at a combine or not. HL2 is the computer equivalent of "Choose your own Adventure" books with only one option on each page. STALKER is a better example of what you're thinking.

But what you want could be done with stock Doom (the original) for the most part. Most games have always had the ability to branch out however the author wanted. They just don't. Hexen (released in 1995) allowed players to move non-linearly though levels. With Quake 2 you could move back & forth between maps with things you did in one map not only changing things in another but still changed in the previous map (Q1 did this to a much less extent with the starting hub map). The House of the Dead arcade games are 100% non-linear, your actions determine how you progress through the game, the difficulty & what you'll see. Remember, no scripting at all in those game & most of what you wanted was covered as far back as 1994.

HL1 is what proved 100% linear is what sells most. Before that things were hardly linear at all (but it could have 100% non-linear if Valve wanted, it just wasn't done).

I'm sure Overgrowth will let people do almost anything. I'm sure you could do all this in their older game (I don't know, don't own it). And remember, these things were never added in for modder support before, they were basic parts of the games design. All that's missing right now from overgrowth to get what you want is the end level conditions. Once that's in & you're allowed to place multiple ones then nearly anything can be done. But we've got an alpha that's no where near complete.

But the biggest issue with non-linear & different characters on death (which sounds like an excellent concept, I think some games even already do that) is that it's much harder to tell a story. The biggest reason non-linear gameplay pretty much stopped is because people got really upset when they messed something up way back when & couldn't win the game no matter what. Adventure games had this all the time. annoying, but just like your "death shouldn't equal fail", most players don't want consequences for stupid decisions, bad playing, laziness or not enough skill. They want to win as easy as possible (hence constant quicksaves & reloads which eliminated death = fail anyway). So people never finished the story, it was game over before they could finish it. A lot like real life.

Most games today have a much lower skill & thinking requirement vs games of 10 or 20 years ago. There's no need to watch a group of platforms for 60 seconds to figure out their pattern or you'll fall to death. There's no need to think about how to handle a possible situation or you'll wind up dead. Most of the consequences have been eliminated. It's making for some pretty boring experiences.

[Endoperez]

There's a problem with branching. You assume that two branches for any choice is enough. What if it isn't?
Most people are accustomed to playing heroes. Some might want to play arrogant, money-grabbing bastards but don't want to play homicidal madmen. Some will want to play the madmen.

That's three choices already, and having to have three different choices for every situation would increase the amount of work very fast. Would three be enough? What if it should be possible for the player to fail at his task, and still keep playing?




Which one is more important for you? Death -> restart or Failure -> restart?

The first one is much harder to work around that the second. Let's use a generic Final Fantasy-style RPG as an example. Death is when the player fights generic mooks, and loses - it was a pointless death. Death could also be the end if the player fought and lost against an optional boss, something that gives you goodies but doesn't affect the plot. Restarting should only lose you relatively little. There should be enough save points and autosaves that the player can't get himself so deep in trouble that he has no way out.


Failure in something plot-related is more interesting. The player might be too slow, or might lose an important fight, or screw up some minigame. However, if this is a plot-related event or quest or fight, things could branchhere! It's not a would-be hero dying unnoticed; it's THE hero going against the big bad, and beaten. He could be taken prisoner, left to die in a death-trap, get turned into a stone statue; his rival or love-interest or mentor figure or father or deity might turn up to save him, defeating the boss, whisking the hero away, sending the boss away, giving the hero hope (and the party full health and mana), and so on. The saver might die in the process, or survive, or get kidnapped.

These things ALREADY happen in games and movies. All the time. However, the player's (and the hero's) success has been decided BEFORE the fight. It should be possible to write those variables (IF the hero loses, THEN the mentor comes to save him) and add in enough references for that "branch" to not feel like an afterthought, WITHOUT ruining the game's plot. The players are still going to get the big bad, but perhaps things are now more personal.

That's branching without deviating, and I don't think it's been tried much yet. To keep with the JRPGs, imagine a game where there are TWO groups of heroes, one of which is going to save the world.
If group A overshadows group B by a huge margin and the player was a jerk, group B will help keep the armies of darkness at bay (Minas Tirith) while group A goes to save the day (epic duel to the death with Sauron).
If group A overshadows group B by a small margin and/or the player helped the other team, group B will win at Minas Tirith and will lead the army assaulting the boss's fortress.
If group B is near the boss and group A is losing, group B will join the fight at the last moment.
If the player made sure both groups stayed equal for most of the game, they might even join forces and assault the big boss together.

How many times the player failed in quests that directly affected the plot would decide which final fight you'd be at, and whether your team would be A or B.

[Wilbefast]

HL2's a bad example for freedom

That's because it's not an example of a game with Freedom: it's an example of a game without cut-scenes.

the biggest issue with non-linear & different characters on death (which sounds like an excellent concept, I think some games even already do that) is that it's much harder to tell a story.

I think it's a question of thinking differently about how you tell your story - it's more a question of designing a range of possibilities than a series of events. Obviously you can't force a linear narrative into a non-linear game or vice versa.

The biggest reason non-linear gameplay pretty much stopped is because people got really upset when they messed something up way back when & couldn't win the game no matter what. Adventure games had this all the time. annoying, but just like your "death shouldn't equal fail", most players don't want consequences for stupid decisions, bad playing, laziness or not enough skill. They want to win as easy as possible (hence constant quicksaves & reloads which eliminated death = fail anyway). So people never finished the story, it was game over before they could finish it. A lot like real life.

This is very true - I remember "King's Quest" would kill you if you'd forgotten to pick up that pin 4 hours back.

Most games today have a much lower skill & thinking requirement vs games of 10 or 20 years ago. There's no need to watch a group of platforms for 60 seconds to figure out their pattern or you'll fall to death. There's no need to think about how to handle a possible situation or you'll wind up dead. Most of the consequences have been eliminated. It's making for some pretty boring experiences.

They're trying to sell games to non-gamers - they want to make them as much like big summer blockbusters as possible. That said some of the older games were just plain obnoxious to play - take "Another World" for example: you were constantly being killed by things you couldn't possibly see coming. In my view this is bad design - I'm not interested in wasting my time replaying the same level 50 times:

There's a problem with branching. You assume that two branches for any choice is enough. What if it isn't?

Yeah, you need to be smarter than that - what I wanted to do was a simple example of how you can organise a given amount of content (each node represents a certain number of man-hours) differently. In actual fact you might be able to reuse many of the levels with slightly different dialogue.
In a perfect world you'd want to do away with scripting entirely and base the entire story progression on AI. This is more or less what you suggested in the latter part of your post: under the hood you have a number of "parties" (groups of individuals) with given sets of priorities, and depending on your actions they will may align themselves with you or your enemy:



This is often used in turn-based strategy games, but rarely in other games. Perhaps this is because you're moving armies around, not characters who might be expected to interact with eachother in a more meaningful manner than just murdering eachother (exchanging witty banter and so on).



The trouble with these games is they can come off a little devoid of personality. You might be writing the story yourself, which gives you a degree of connection and interest, but there are rarely any dramatic moments and there are no characters. Some games like Solium Infernum use random events to up the drama, but this games only manages to give its characters personality because they're other people. Generally they come across as robotic: what we need is better AI!

Which one is more important for you? Death -> restart or Failure -> restart?

They're the same thing really - anything that would conventionally force you to restart the game. In Lugaru though, death meant you had to restart: it was hard-coded. This is the case with many old games. Scripting failure is a lot more straight-forward.

[capn.lee]

a good way of getting around the death = failure thing would be a game where you played as an invincible character. all of your aims could revolve around protecting others. if you fail and allow people to die you don't restart the mission, you soldier on I always thought a superman game or a wolverine game would work using this, buildings are destructible and people die but you survive it all. you can only be knocked back, you can't be stopped.

[capn.lee]

HL2's a bad example for freedom

That's because it's not an example of a game with Freedom: it's an example of a game without cut-scenes.

pfft, only on a technicality, any time you're locked in a room while characters drone on hurling terrible exposition at you, regardless of whether you are allowed to change your viewpoint, it's a cutscene.

[Endoperez]

a good way of getting around the death = failure thing would be a game where you played as an invincible character. all of your aims could revolve around protecting others. if you fail and allow people to die you don't restart the mission, you soldier on I always thought a superman game or a wolverine game would work using this, buildings are destructible and people die but you survive it all. you can only be knocked back, you can't be stopped.

What would prevent the player from reloading from a previous point every time he made a mistake?

If people would want to do that, is there ANY reason to prevent it? In fact, is there any reason not to call it a UI problem (people are forced to work around the game mechanics in an awkward game), and fix it by implementing a save system? That's what Blizzard did with Diablo. They only kept the no-save mode as an optional difficulty level.


No-save systems can work very well. Some of my favourite games were enchanced by a system like that. However, they're roguelikes and other turn-based games, like Dominions 3. I'm just saying that if it's not implemented well enough, it will become a gimmick that gets old VERY fast.

[Renegade_Turner]

Wilbefast, my problem with your proposition is that you admonish against games denying people content in one point and then propose a multi-branching level chronology in another point.

Surely if the levels you played would branch out and you'd skip certain levels depending on your actions, wouldn't gamers feel more of a sense of missing out on something because they're doing something else? As in it would get to the point that to play every level you'd have to look up the necessary prerequisites which are required to get to a certain story/level branch.

Would that not just result again in it being the more hardcore gamers, i.e. generally the more skilled gamers who're more capable of reaching the latter stages of the game, which are still getting most of the content? It's generally the people who love gaming who are good at it because of things like practice and repitition, and it would generally only being the people who love gaming who would bother going back through a game to play that last story branch or level which he missed the first 4 times.

Thus Dara O' Briain's point about games would be pretty much the same thing in your version of events, only this time it wouldn't be that most gamers wouldn't have the skill to reach all areas of the game, it's just that the majority of gamers simply just would not be arsed doing so.

To me it sounds like it would detract from my enjoyment of the game, as opposed to if the levels had been available in a fairly linear chronology with a few non-linear choices which affect the different levels or areas. In the latter, I would actually play them all. In the former, the game would have to be offering something extremely irresistible to make me want to plough through it about 8 different times.

Also, how long of a game can you fit into such a set-up? The further and longer it branches, the more the work multiplies and stacks up against the developer. It's not very economically viable since generally any game which exceeds the price of 50-60 euro on release experiences a rapidly decreasing amount of sales due to the extreme inverse proportionality relationship between game price and demand.

And if you're thinking "Why is he putting it into the scope of an established market game developer?", then consider that, for an independant developer, winning the bread needed to continue doing what you love means making money at a steady rate somehow, and to create such a mass of content is even more of an improbability because there just wouldn't be the same manpower required to finish an adequate-length game in less than 5 years, and pre-orders aren't going to stave off the need of a steady job for 5 years. You don't want this to become Wilbefast Forever.

[CrapPunMode]Sounds more like Wilbepoor.[/CrapPunMode]

HL2's a bad example for freedom

That's because it's not an example of a game with Freedom: it's an example of a game without cut-scenes.

pfft, only on a technicality, any time you're locked in a room while characters drone on hurling terrible exposition at you, regardless of whether you are allowed to change your viewpoint, it's a cutscene.

That's a very good point. Half Life 2 has a lot of things like (A) giving you the choice of picking up cans and throwing them in bins or not throwing them in bins and (B) being allowed to wander around closed spaces while NPC's chatter away. However, it has both of these aspects of the game masquerading under the false monikers of non-linearity and a lack of cut-scenes.

Regardless, Half Life 2 kicks fucking ass.

*Stuff about saves*

I must admit it does get right on my fucking tits when games deny me the right to save whenever I want, or at least quite frequently enough.

Say what you want about providing a separate mode which disables the choice of saves or gives you a limited amount of saves like Resident Evil did with the typewriter thing.

When features of a game become annoyances which players would prefer a way to get around, THAT is bad game design.

Also, when games pinhole me into a situation without any way of improving my skills to defeat the opponent I'm faced with or complete the task ahead of me. Like really hard adventure games without hint systems, or fucking Chrono Trigger and its really hard bosses which made me stop playing at a certain point. There was a certain point where you were on some floating world and you're atop some mountain about to engage in a boss fight, and there's a chance to save right before the fight. If you die in the boss fight, you just go back to directly before the boss fight. No chance to go somewhere else and level up. Just either be stuck in the same place unable to beat the boss or restart the game.



....



Now that I've used up my Actual Contributions To Adult Conversation juices, I'm going to go back to some other thread and just rag on someone for being a spastic.

[Wilbefast]

a good way of getting around the death = failure thing would be a game where you played as an invincible character. all of your aims could revolve around protecting others

Funny you soon mention that...



...Coming soon

Would that not just result again in it being the more hardcore gamers (...) which are still getting most of the content?

You're absolutely right The same thought actually just occured to me. You think about games like "Pathways" or "Every Day the Same Dream", which are all about exploring every possibility: I highly doubt casual gamers will have seen everything they have to show.

Also, how long of a game can you fit into such a set-up? The further and longer it branches, the more the work multiplies and stacks up against the developer. It's not very economically viable since generally any game which exceeds the price of 50-60 euro on release experiences a rapidly decreasing amount of sales due to the extreme inverse proportionality relationship between game price and demand.[/color][/b]

I figured it wouldn't take any more work actually - the game would be length would be decreased logarithmically, the number of endings would be increased exponentially but the amount of content would stay the same. Essentially it's a different way of organising the game's content. I'm actually not suggesting Wolfire attempt this (they have enough on their plate scratch-building a game-engine), but I was considering giving it a try myself using something pre-built.

But I don't think Heavy Rain or Mass Effect are the future of games, because as you so rightly point out you can only do so much freedom when you're scripting every decision and consequence by hand. I am willing to bet that the Game Designers of tomorrow will be setting up parameters rather than dictating exactly what's going to happen. In other words, there needs to be an AI game-master: We can already see this emerging in the form of the AI Director in Left 4 Dead.

I must admit it does get right on my fucking tits when games deny me the right to save whenever I want, or at least quite frequently enough.

Well, I'm playing Deus Ex at the moment and I tend to spam quick-load and quick-save almost constantly. It's probably because you die so easily

It is an interesting point though, that Endo brought up: is there any difference between the game restarting automatically when the player "fails", and the player deciding to reload a saved-game because they feel that they've failed. For example, you might accidentally kill somebody in the aforementioned Deus Ex, and reload your game because you're trying to play through the whole thing without any casualties.

Then again, in turn-based games where mistakes aren't immediately apparent, you'll rarely load your game because you've made other progress in the meantime. In other words, it's important to delay the consequences of your actions.


I guess the problem with saves is that they make the game predictable, because you can effectively travel into the future and see what's going to happen. Or is this problem more to do with the fact that game stories are static (no matter how my branches they have, they still form a static structure), rather than dynamic? I wonder if Valve ever released anything about how their "Director" works...

[Zhukov]

I do not understand this love of non-linearity.

- Gameplay does no require non-linearization since it is already non-linear by nature.
- Stories are linear by nature.
All my favourite games (Half Life et al, BioShock, Portal) are ones that combine good non-linear gameplay with good linear stories.

With current means the closest we could get to a non-linear story would by a multi-linear story. Which seems to be what you are thinking of. I do not see the point in this. You would just be making a game that has to be played several times over to experience all the content. You might as well make several games with linear structures.

Most of those games that declare themselves to be non-linear (aka 'open world' or 'sandbox') end up having crappy pacing and gratuitous amounts of padding. Whenever I play these games I end up spending most of my time running about in an empty and boring world searching for the interesting bits. That is to say, the linear bits.

A game with a truly non-linear story would require the openness of a sandbox game along with some kind of dynamic behind-the-scenes drama engine. A sort of AI dungeon master. You mentioned the Director in L4D as an example of this. But when all is said and done, that's just a glorified zombie-spawner (which doesn't strike me being anywhere near as advanced as Valve would like to have us believe). A non-linear story would require a director that understands not just zombies, medkits and shotguns but also narrative, pacing, human interaction, suspense, emotion and... yeah, the list goes on. If you can can construct such a thing then you might as well build Skynet while you're at it, because that's the kind of intelligence we're talking about.

On the other hand I agree with you regarding arbitrary failure. I always liked how in Deus Ex you could completely screw up a hostage rescue and the game would continue. On the other other hand I disagree about death=failure. Death of the player character should mean failure because... well... because you're dead!

...

I wish I could word that a little more eloquently.

[Wilbefast]

the closest we could get to a non-linear story would by a multi-linear story. Which seems to be what you are thinking of. I do not see the point in this. You would just be making a game that has to be played several times over to experience all the content. You might as well make several games with linear structures.

Most of those games that declare themselves to be non-linear (aka 'open world' or 'sandbox') end up having crappy pacing and gratuitous amounts of padding. Whenever I play these games I end up spending most of my time running about in an empty and boring world searching for the interesting bits. That is to say, the linear bits.

What are you talking about? That's plenty eloquent Also very true - I remember the first Dawn of War game had a linear story, but the later expansion packs replaced these with a campaign map, and involved quite a bit of grinding. So yes, I absolutely agree, except...

Stories are linear by nature.

Stories are for books and films: linear mediums which ensure the audience experiences the entirety of their content in a specific order. Gameplay, as you pointed out, is non-linear, so in this sense Game Design is a lot more like Painting than Literature.
When you look at a painting you explore its contents in whichever order and to whatever degree you please. Sure, it might guide your eyes a certain way, have a message, make a statement, but it's not a linear, narrative medium.



To me games are the same: far more powerful as exposition than narrative. This is why I mentioned the opening of Half Life 2: it does a great job depicting an oppressive police state that you can, to a degree, explore and interact with.



In paintings, just like in games, some of your audience will not see all of your work - they'll just brush past, settling for a broad appreciation. Others meanwhile, will pride themselves in picking out all the little details:



Did you know Courbet puts a little boat in almost all of his seascapes?

But anyway, at the moment most games are more like "Where's Wally?" than Renoir, and I think they have the potential to be far more.



Hence this love of non-linearity.

[Endoperez]

A sort of AI dungeon master. You mentioned the Director in L4D as an example of this. But when all is said and done, that's just a glorified zombie-spawner (which doesn't strike me being anywhere near as advanced as Valve would like to have us believe). A non-linear story would require a director that understands not just zombies, medkits and shotguns but also narrative, pacing, human interaction, suspense, emotion and... yeah, the list goes on. If you can can construct such a thing then you might as well build Skynet while you're at it, because that's the kind of intelligence we're talking about.

AI Director is rather dumb, but it IS a promising system. It doesn't need to understand what it's doing - that's what the people using it are supposed to do. The AI director just has to recognize a situation. Intensity of fights isn't too hard to measure. Dialogue is written by humans any way, so the humans can give hints for the dumb AI.

The AI director handles pacing and human interaction as well as a zombie game needs to. The limited forms of interaction available (killing zombies, helping teammates) are analyzed to find if the players have been challenged yet, how well the players are doing and so on. The pacing of calm phase - aggressive phase manages to create a feeling of suspense and emotion. It can "react" to a player being hurt with a premade event, such as creating healing supplies for the player to find. Just because it's known from Left4Dead doesn't mean it can only ever be used for zombies...

[Zhukov]

But anyway, at the moment most games are more like "Where's Wally?" than Renoir, and I think they have the potential to be far more.
[Snipped to save space]

Okay, now I am intrigued. And confused. I think the analogy has gone over my head somewhat.

In the interests of clarification, could you perhaps name a few examples of that lean toward Renoir rather then Where's Wally?

[Renegade_Turner]

Well, I'm playing Deus Ex at the moment and I tend to spam quick-load and quick-save almost constantly. It's probably because you die so easily

It is an interesting point though, that Endo brought up: is there any difference between the game restarting automatically when the player "fails", and the player deciding to reload a saved-game because they feel that they've failed. For example, you might accidentally kill somebody in the aforementioned Deus Ex, and reload your game because you're trying to play through the whole thing without any casualties.

My problem with all of that is that you've based it on the pretext that allowing players to save and load whenever they want and to be able to foresee the consequences of the actions they have just taken is a bad thing.

You seem to be glorifying a gaming world where players are punished for their misguided actions through negative consequences and penalties. That they should have to continue on regardless and deal with what that means to them for the rest of the game.

Wait...that paragraph sounds like it's describing something familiar. Oh wait, that's REAL LIFE. If I get in a car crash and break both my legs and my neck in real life, fine, I have to deal with that, because there's nothing I can do about it. So I'll sit in my wheelchair. However, what is the point of, if the player does the same in a video game and becomes paralyzed, henceforth effectively forcing the player to combat all of his foes from the emotional and physical throes of a FUCKING WHEELCHAIR. Now if only the developers had provided a quick-save option so I wouldn't have to restart the bloody fucking game.

And the sad part about that last paragraph? You probably think that sounds like a good idea for a video game.

With current means the closest we could get to a non-linear story would by a multi-linear story. Which seems to be what you are thinking of. I do not see the point in this. You would just be making a game that has to be played several times over to experience all the content. You might as well make several games with linear structures.

This is a very valid point. What you're talking about is a bit like Half Life 2 giving the illusion of freedom of choice but still constricting players to a very defined path with minute decisions which, again, give that illusion that you're deciding matters.

However, in your sense, it would just be a game with about 8 different linear game paths masquerading as a non-linear game. It still wouldn't be non-linear, it would just be like offering 8 dfferent (exceptionally short) games, as Zhukov said.

It would be like, instead of just offering sausages and chips, you also offer either beans and chips, pork rashers and chips, and chicken and chips, and act like you have every possible food type that someone could want, despite only having 4 available options.

Where's the spaghetti bolognese dude? Or the lasagna? I'd be very disappointed if I was at your restaurant.

And what if someone comes along wanting fried shit in a steamed white wine and piss sauce? What do you tell them? You just promised that you'd have every option.

You're absolutely right The same thought actually just occured to me. You think about games like "Pathways" or "Every Day the Same Dream", which are all about exploring every possibility: I highly doubt casual gamers will have seen everything they have to show.

I'm in college so I wasn't able to download and play Pathways, but I played Every Day The Same Dream and that is some fucked up stuff. The ending was really striking. It had a resounding ring of Don't Look Back about it. I actually felt a chill down my spine when I got to the last scene and saw what happened.

I thoroughly enjoyed that game other than the monotonous opening scenes. I did enjoy going into work with no clothes on and being fired by my boss who only seemed to notice, rather hilariously, that I wasn't wearing a tie, regardless of whether or not I was wearing any pants.

The last run-through of the dream was very emotionally resonant. While at first I'd been going through the game in some sort of daze or stupor, repeating menial and trivial tasks, the second the final dream stage began and I noticed something was off, all that stopped. I was at full attention.

A sudden realisation struck me about how emotionally and physically disconnected I had felt to almost every other character in the world as I went through my meaningless day to day existence.

And, suddenly, I realise that the fact that there was no one there anymore made no difference, because despite being surrounded by people I had been alone all along.

The only moments of closeness you feel to anyone in the game are to a homeless person sharing something with you and petting a cow on the nose.

[Wilbefast]

You seem to be glorifying a gaming world where players are punished for their misguided actions through negative consequences and penalties.

It's not about punishing the player - read this. I don't agree with all of it, but there are some things I found interesting, and I'd like to know your opinion.

I played Every Day The Same Dream and that is some fucked up stuff.

Made me think of:



One day you wake up and suddenly realize that your entire existence is a endless repetition of menial tasks

edit: my god - I've just realised something! that whole game is a "mid-life crisis" simulator!