Agent + Behaviour

Players like the sense of controlling something, to change, build and manipulate things. Sometime just giving a little creative control to the audience will make a big difference in their gaming expierience. It does not necessarily have to be a sandbox game like Sims or Black and White to achieve it. Some players simply like to choose the character’s hair colour or pick their class for some aesthetic identity. They will feel more immersed into the character. (Eg. Character customization, skills tree in most of the new role-play games.) Customization will make the character that they create seem more meaningful and have something they can call their own. Games like Fable are a good example. Your character’s outlook will change due your moral decision-making and actions. Watching your character’s outlook and fashion change and how the villagers behave towards you as the story changes. It just fun to watch. I think it would be great to see more behavioural consequences that will affect the virtual characters in the future of gaming, like Fable and Skyrim. What happen is if your character gets bitten by a vampire the consequences will be your skin turning pale, eyes turning red, villagers will be scared to talk to you or try to hunt you down. It is great because not everyone will enter the vampire’s cave and get bitten. This random event did surprise me and gave more meaning and individualistic attributes to my virtual character. There is much potential in this style of gaming and I feel benefit gaming to do more things like this. Eg. Your character will lose one arm if you lose a main boss fight and then you will need to attach an artificial arm which will not function well under rain but has a higher defence. Even limiting their character’s outlooks and let the progression of the game slowly shape their style, like do they shave often, do they drink a lot of potions, do they got attacked a lot, etc. I think it is fascinating to see how your character changes by the actions/decisions you make in game and as such the world and NPC will behave differently to you.   

What’s more, I think creative control helps to bring audience’s attention into a world or object partly because of the responsibility it entails. They feel enveloped amongst the situations they are in and therefore they want to know more about what the outcome will be. It may as well be because of the curiosity of consequences, the unknown and the “path not travelled”. The audience will usually be more concerned about the stories or actions if they know their decisions do matter. Games like Dragon Age, Mass Effect, Witcher 2 are good examples of playing around with decisions and choices. It’s effective because players will talk more and share more about their “own” stories endings and evolution, much more so than linear story games and. They will also be questioning the other choices and outcomes sometimes causing them to want to replay the game to find out what COULD have been. This proven story can be fun when you can decide what is next. There was an old card game called “Once Upon a Time” produced by Atlas games in 1994. It is a game about making up your own stories according to the random cards withdrew and your friend can have a chance to interrupt you and take charge of the story. It is interesting because the story may not make sense but all players will be engaged in it, encouraging emotional investment. The same few cards can also create different stories each time you play. Furthermore, Simulation gaming like Sims, Harvest Moon and Minecraft gave even more in-game control to the player which is also extremely addictive to some people too. There is no story or main goal of the game, players just keep playing around in the virtual world, living out their own master plan. The cool thing is during their random actions the in-game AI actually starts to slowly shapes their own stories and goals. It is something new that games are doing more often now, and it has great potential to be even better in the future.

However, it may lead to unsatisfied outcomes due to player’s expectation. And constantly needing the audience to make choices will create frustration and annoyance in some players. It is important to know how to balance it because the old fashion sit back and relax storytelling styles are still great. The story structures are easier to control and story flows better. Too much freedom for players creates difficulty in players organization and the games are much harder to construct. Confusion and a sense of feeling lost will always happen if agency is badly designed. Basically, it is great to be in charge of something but not everything, it should not be as hard as real life and the outcomes should be surprising yet acceptable, then agency and behaviour will become fun.