... I realized that I very rarely praise games in my blog. This made me think that I may be giving out a wrong impression: the bitter critic who hates everything and drinks vinegar for breakfast. While I am not completely ruling out that possibility, I certainly do enjoy some games - the shape of the "A" button got printed on my thumb after I played the awesome Mario Kart for Game Boy Advance during a trans-Pacific flight. Some of the Dreamcast games that I mentioned really target some specific parts of my brain - Jet Grind Radio is about as cool as it can get. But my problem is that, while I appreciate good design in games, I am sick of clones. Right now, there are about 5 to 10 different genres in videogames and everybody is doing basically the same. Notable exceptions are games such as The Sims and Seaman. As I previously confessed, I despise Tolkien and even if can enjoy good sci-fi, I am sick of finding aliens on my videogames. I would like to see some more reality in videogames -which doesn't necessarily mean realism. Games about human relationships (and NOT troll/salivating alien relationships) are definitively scarce. The reason? Well, there are many, but I think the most important is a cultural one.
Videogames, as simulations, need to model reality. If you want to model human relationships, even if you use fuzzy logic you will end up by quantifying emotions, which end up by creating games that may look like this: "I love you 7 in a scale of 10" or "Who do you love more? Mom or Daddy?". That's one of the problems when RPGs go in that direction. Romanticism and positivism are to blame about this. During the 19th century, scientists made sure that they measured everything. Everything was weighted, labeled and recorded. Romanticism reacted towards this and watermarked our perception of reality with the idea that emotions can not be measured. That's actually one of the problems that the team at Maxis had to deal with, since at the end, Sims have just 5 different traits. This rather small number is great for gameplay issues, but it's really hard to model sophisticated characters just by assigning numbers from 1 to 10 to their neatness or outgoingness.
Of course, the model of the simulation doesn't have to be explicit to the player. In other words, the computer could quantify the emotions of the characters without showing the variables to the player. Nevertheless, this "romantic curse" problem still persists -btw, I am not claiming here that we should quantify our perception of reality, I am just pointing out a culture issue that collides with our will to produce sophisticated social videogames.
Let's imagine that we have to "build" an RPG character. Right now, the standard is to use an interface based on sliders. So we move the "courage" slider to 7/10, the "magic" slider to 4/10 and so on. While this may work for an Elf named "Wandarf", it hardly works for some complex literary character, like, say, Emma Bovary. DISCLAIMER: I am not claiming here that videogames should become literature. I am just using literature as the best environment that I can think of for looking for complex characters. Anyway, creating Emma Bovary through a set of sliders would be kind of dumb. Would we give her an "imagination" value of 9 or 10/10? What about "intelligence", "sexual desire" or "reading skills"?
If we really wanted to define Emma Bovary we would probably need several thousand sliders -and actually, the system would be rather complex, with values that are interconnected. Definitively, a thousand dimensions may be good for the model, but way bad for gameplay. There are some possible paths to take if you want to deal with this problem. One would be, instead of creating your character, to rather make him/her evolve using artificial life techniques. Instead of defining by hand the characteristics of your character, you could "educate" him through a set of experiences. For example, selecting the movies he watched, the books he read, the songs he heard during his life, etc. This is a rather fuzzy, indirect way of achieving the character development.
Using the Sims' example, it would be cool if we could have a Sims school were we could train or educate our Sims by feeding him different content and also life experiences. The problem with this AL training of characters is to define how deterministic you want to be. For example, if during childhood your Sim was bitten by a dog, should he be afraid of dogs while adult? If you think as a game designer, the answer is sure, because that way it is easier for you to shape the behavior of your character. But as a sophisticated player who knows humans, you may see this behaviorist determination mainly suitable for very bad psychological class B movies. However, there is a role that, I think, has not yet been fully developped. I just said "to think as a game designer". What about a being simulation designer? Games are a genre that define a set of cultural expectations (you have to win, to lose, you have to solve a problem). Maybe -and just maybe- this century may break with this paradigm and create a more nuanced cultural product that doesn't necessarily follow the same rules of games.
Anyway, all this stuff may or may not deserve some further thinking (it's 3:29 am for godsake!). I will just, for the sake of conclusion, retain the notion of a character trainer for the Sims where we can indirectly shape his personality through manipulation of events and information during the character's past. Of course, these simulations would be EXTREMELY complex and right now almost everybody in town is focusing on putting more polygons into games and not more depth into videogame characters. And that's probably why I am not enjoying current games as much as I should.
