[MUD-Dev] [MEDIA] Finding an Interesting Middle Path in the RPG

[J C Lawrence]

Is this at core a variant of the stamp collector problem?

  http://www.ludonauts.com/archives/000057.shtml

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Finding an Interesting Middle Path in the RPG

I recently had a phone interview with Joel Taubel (lead producer at
Novalogic) for a production assistant position. Unfortunately I don't
think he's going to invite me to an in-person interview, but we had an
interesting discussion about Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic and
I wanted to post some follow-up thoughts about it here. Hopefully Joel
won't mind...if so, I'll take this down post-haste.

During the interview, Joel wanted me to talk about my involvement with
game studies, so I gave a brief rundown of a couple articles I've
written for this site. When I started talking about Motivation-Oriented
Design and some problems this approach reveals in many RPGs, Joel
mentioned Knights of the Old Republic as a game that seemed fairly
consistent with MOD principles, and I agreed (although it does have a
few nagging problems, such as loot you can steal without consequence,
not even for your Force-o-meter). He asked me what my thoughts were of
the game in general, and I mentioned a few things I liked, and some that
I didn't. One of the latter involved the writing, which I felt was a
little too blunt. Joel asked if I was talking about the quality of the
writing itself, whether that was too blunt, or if the moral choices
given in the game were too blunt. In fact I'd meant the former, but the
latter was also a complaint I had, and so we started talking about that.

I mentioned one of Matt Sakey's IGDA columns, the one where he talks
about the lack of morally gray choices in gaming. I noted how Knights
was lacking in this department, that there wasn't an interesting middle
path, and Joel countered with two responses: one was that nobody wants
to do or be the middle anything (I assume he meant that it just wasn't
interesting), and the second was that the Star Wars universe doesn't
really support moral grayness. I just nodded my head to his first point
(although this was a mistake), but mentioned Han Solo as a prominent
Star Wars character who starts off morally gray, and how you couldn't
really be a Han Solo in the game. The discussion got a bit bogged down
at that point, as I couldn't figure out how to support this claim, and
even vacillated on whether it was valid at all. (For the record, I
couldn't get any sleep the night before the interview and was basically
running on caffeine.)

Now, however, I think I've got it figured out. What's Han Solo's
motivation in A New Hope? Money. Wealth. Riches. Paying off Jabba would
be nice, too. But he doesn't want to be a bad guy, either. Han Solo
makes sense in the movie because he exists in an environment, a system,
where he can make a lot of coin, and this in turn gives him access to
other goodies. But Han Solo doesn't make sense in Star Wars: Knights of
the Old Republic, because while the player can get money, he can't do
anything with it besides beef himself up, and ultimately this is
subservient to the role he's forced to play as a good or evil man. There
is no system or outcome in place that could make money a major
motivation, thus depriving the game of an interesting middle path.

Tapping motivations traditionally difficult or impossible to have in
most RPGs, I think, will be key to revitalizing a genre that's become
increasingly stale, thanks to its banal, exclusionary emphasis on
good/evil morality and the typical situations that inevitably
result. Part of this can come from simply adding explicit paths to the
story, with the appropriate outcomes. The more interesting route,
however, will be to construct coherent, self-contained systems that
allow a broad range of motivations to express themselves, producing
(dare I say it) emergent outcomes. Here's hoping Fable lives up to its
promise.

Posted by Walter at 10:56 PM | Ludology
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--
J C Lawrence
---------(*)                Satan, oscillate my metallic sonatas.
claw at kanga.nu               He lived as a devil, eh?
http://www.kanga.nu/~claw/  Evil is a name of a foeman, as I live.
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