Summary: Volition and Self-determination theory: Self-determination theory says that people flourish when they have: 1-Competance: feeling effective and masterful to what is relevant and important to them. 2-Autonomy: whole-heatedly choosing. Not about the freedom of potential choices, but the volition of wilful actualization of your own desire and writing your own story that aligns with you (about finding the right words and not having multiple words). 3-Relatedness: inter-caring and connecting to others and the world; belonging to and valuing each other's presence in your lives and being able to help or affect each other. Players want autonomy and not freedom. A person that gets married loses part of their freedom but gains volition. And so, autonomy is about having greater restrictions that we desire. We don't exactly care about the freedom to do whatever we want, but for these actions to have meaning to us personally (and freedom is only a usual means to that). Some games tend struggle with this (like sandbox games); you give players freedom, but what are you doing to give them volition? Some games give you volition as if in an amusement park: they give you multiple meaningful choices that you jump between for a sense of autonomy (e.g. GTA). Others give you a sense of identity and growth to feel competent (e.g. RPGs like Skyrim). Others give you an impactful narrative for relatedness (e.g. Mass Effect). And some mix between them (e.g. The Witcher; deep quests and activities like Skyrim, deep story like Mass Effect). The real question is: how do we create procedural and dynamic volition to keep them growing and make them more personal? The world must react to your personal choices and your choices must have consequences. An example would be The Nemesis System in Shadow of Mordor where enemies structure themselves based upon your actions and time; it makes the narrative feel like your story. Or maybe if you kill foxes and that leads to increased rabbit population which will lead to a greater sense of responsibility and intentionality. [addition] In general, it is possible that creating volition comes from aligning the player's choices and intentionality with a narrative that allows them to conquer challenges, write their own story, grow, and feel related with the world with no dissonance between them. This is commonly done in story-games like Uncharted where you identify with the character and see your volition align with theirs. Or when you are given a side-character that you care about like Ellie in The Last of Us and that makes your intentionality align with the narrative.
A nice example of the Procedural Volition is Heat Signature, a game with kind of a rogue-lite mechanics generating motivation for your each next character out of the failure of your previous one. Stuck on a ship full of security and the timer ran out? You’re now a spouse of your previous character seeking to free them (you get all of your upgrades back) and also playing that revenge fantasy.
Nice talk. Main takeaway: give volition in a game (i.e. give thing that players want to do). Ultimate goal? Procedural volition, through making player's choices matter and dynamically impact the game and the story.
you probably dont care but does anybody know of a trick to log back into an Instagram account?? I was dumb lost my account password. I love any help you can offer me
@Drake Maddox i really appreciate your reply. I found the site on google and im waiting for the hacking stuff now. Takes a while so I will get back to you later with my results.
Dude got blindsided by the worst questions that completely missed the point of the talk, and it was hilarious. The dude from spore being like "Actually spore was great, and awesome" instead of realizing the point that after you get to space the game is over, and you only get more out of it by restarting and now discovering more from that end point. You can keep playing but for what reason, so you stop, or restart.
1:01:30 Personally, I played Guild Wars for a long time and would act differently based partly on the character type I was playing as. Some of that was also skill and weapon setup, but my skill and weapon setup (and name choice and look) were direct results of my interpretation of the creature I had chosen.... so to me, some of my in game behavior (social towards other players - as well as pursuits and in game achievements) WAS a direct result of the character customization opportunity.... THAT is a study I'd like to hear about.
[Personally, I played Guild Wars for a long time and would act differently based partly on the character type I was playing as. Some of that was also skill and weapon setup, but my skill and weapon setup (and name choice and look) were direct results of my interpretation of the creature I had chosen.... so to me, some of my in game behavior (social towards other players - as well as pursuits and in game achievements) WAS a direct result of the character customization opportunity.... THAT is a study I'd like to hear about.] That's just roleplaying, D&D/JRPG style.
CRPG in general, and Divinity: Original Sin 2 in particular, do improve volition through adding more player's verbs. System-driven games like Deus Ex and old Thief games do this as well.
Classic Top-Down RPGs as well as immersive sims are not really open world games. First one relies heavily on text, which can get quite complicated when you look at characters who need to animate faces, move their hands and so on. Also they are bound by the possible story interactions, you can't go to any place and do whatever you want, you are bound by the boundaries of dialogue options. Second one almost always is set inside a Building of some kind - not open world. Only game that has succeeded in giving narrative choice, volution and everything, FOR ME (just my opinion) is ELEX from pyranha bytes. While it is graphically not the best looking game ever and combat is something you have to learn from youtube to enjoy because it lacks a proper explanation/tutorial - it is the only open world RPG which is not a full sandbox where none of your choices matter (it's the opposite, everything matters, you can destroy entire cities with some choices (and vanish all quests inside those cities)) and doesn't hold your hand. Meaningful, impactful choices (fully voiced) + complete freedom (you have to find quests/questgivers by runnig through the map and talking to random people) + non-hand-holding = Elex Haven't found another game of it's kind yet.
@@johnleorid Dwarf fortress is somewhat like this, though Adventure mode is still being worked on. Making a long story short, actual fantasy with procedural simulated creatures down to the muscles is very brutal.
I played 200 hours of NMS with my friends over the winter of 2022. We took a break once spring/summer came around, and found ourselves playing Valheim. I just booted up NMS post the Worlds I update and was immediately hooked. The way the world generates, the way the animals interact with each other, the art style of beautiful planets is just amazing. I like that they started adding paradise planets to early systems. It’s easy to dislike the game when you’re only on boring, barren planets. But once you get to a paradise planet, you really feel the impact that I think Hello Games was looking for. I’m hoping Light No Fire’s biomes are all of the “paradise” categories of planets in NMS.
My 30yr old definition of Autonomy is : In some capacity the ability to make informed decisions that provide a level of acceptance to the space and an organized consistent freedom that allows moral and personal independency. One that includes the foundationals of personification, narrative, mechanics on all sides of the design process. I agree that volition is a cap to the 3 tiers of recognition of self and the space one encompasses. I enjoyed the presentation, and am glad to see others utilizing the framework of mental balance to game design. I utilize it myself within my own system of design. Competency of a designer extends to the competency of a player to be sure and directly effects the play experience both isolated and repeated. Keep up the great work.
I've always thought the same but I couldn't put it into words, this GDC talk is to me the most important of all, it even predicts what would later happen to The Last of Us 2 in both the strengths of it's gameplay giving the player a lot of agency and the weakness of the story taking it away. Amazing.
Yeah. I agree with TLOU2 and I've loved how he explained why invested players didn't enjoy ME3 and how it basically ruined the previous experiences. I cannot replay ME because of that ending, but I wouldn't be able to explain it as well as he did... (and I've tried many times). I understood how and why it was broken from the narrative perspective, but only now I understand why I actually cared, so to speak.
I loved this talk as well. I would argue that TLOU2 case falls into a "can't make everybody happy" situation (since for me what the story did worked very powerfully, exactly bcs it subverted the expectations, making me do things toward the end that I didn't really feel like doing bcs of affection to the characters involved, both of them. And the emotional response from this was something more complex than "just satisfaction", because I think that's the whole point, the game doesn't want you to come out of it feeling "victorious" , but completely beaten up by what happened...which I found very, very powerful ) If you were referring to something else than I was thinking, of course maybe what I say doesn't really apply.
@@lorenzotosiart no I understand what you mean and I agree wholeheartedly, I love the game because the story is definitely one of if not the most powerful I've seen in a game but like the other reply said, I can't deny it gets in the way of me wanting to replay it.
37:44 crazy watching this in 2024. No Man's Sky went though a redemption arc, Star Citizen is still generally disparaged, and Star Citizen is... still in alpha
I don't think a game like Minecraft falls on the spectrum of narrative versus freedom because it's not that there's a core through-line that the player can complete either in a predetermined way or a free-form way -- there is simply no overarching objective at all and the player's volition and sense of purpose comes from what they themselves want to do with the environment and the tools the game offers. So I think there is a actually a fourth need outside of autonomy, relatedness, or competence, and I would call this, "expression": aspects of a game that allow players to be creative -- almost to be game designers in their own right as they use the game to make their own experience. The reason it doesn't appear in this presentations is because I suspect it is far more elusive than the other three, both to define and produce.
I feel that this is a very good place to start, but he seems to want to diminish the impact of being able to make choices that are outside of the intent of the game... vis a vis "players aren't really more engaged and satisfied whether they're playing the character they had complete freedom to create, or Geralt of Rivia, so long as they have volition in making choices" In my personal experience... I always engage more when I've got more freedom in creating or customizing a character. I always enjoy a game more when I feel like I have the option to do something other than what the core intent of the game is. Specifically he points out that Mass Effect is excellent at creating volitional need satisfaction and engagement...I went into it wanting a scifi game experience where I had agency over the game world... and I wasn't engaged. And also contrary to what he's stated is the core reason Skyrim is successful.... I never felt the RPG progression system was particularly worthwhile, yet I've played hundreds of hours.... not ever doing any part of the story or quests or anything really other than wandering around the wilderness, talking to people, reading books, etc. Literally the things he said in the first few minutes were not the reason people play these games. I certainly can accept that I may be an abberation in the numbers, but I do exist, and I suspect there are more people who really do just want a sandbox full of every possible activity under the sun in it. I also think he's ignoring the real reason skyrim was successful, and that's the modding community. If you want to do it, there's a mod somewhere that adds it to skyrim, and if there isn't, there could be, because you can do it. Right down to playing a completely different main quest in a completely different world that is entirely a tropical paradise instead of a winter blasted wasteland. I do agree though, that part of the problem isn't so much the kind of content that's in the game, but whether or not the player wants to do it. I get no more joy making leather strips than I get filing taxes, and I will more often look up the item id of material components, type in the developer command to get them, rather than actually making them with the raw materials I already have, even though its actually more effort, simply because I hate it slightly less. I enjoy the feeling of breaking the games rules more than I enjoy playing it correctly in that instance. But I think that's part of why I play games in general. I want to be put in a situation where certain things are expected of me, and I can readily ignore those expectations, with impunity. I like that Skyrim's main plot is so non-present that it feels like its not even there 99% of the time. I would still probably like it more if my choices did change the course of it though and that's another point in his favor... My only point is that... while he has a point, its only half of one.
I agree with you. Parts of this talk resonated, and parts of this talk felt specific to one type of gamer, and maybe his research is geared towards the widest commercial audience.. In a game like GTA, you have communities of players who just want to role play as members of society and tell collective stories. Of course he didn't mention social volition, and perhaps that is covered there. I have the same Skyrim experience, where sometimes I go in with a goal of only playing with knives, wearing tiaras, and adopting a dog and building the perfect house for him. I can't get invested in The Witcher because I have no investment in Geralt. To say it comes down to changing his shoe color feels shallow. In my eyes, it's about making a character I identify with who I will take through a journey and tell a story with.
I think you are right here. But i believe that it is hard to make a cohesive talk by trying to account for every player type existing. So I see that talk as an general overview of the topic but you need to apply it to specific games and their audience's motivation for better understating. And in general, this talk refers to SDT which is a huge topic by itself.
@@crimson1504character reaction is not what majority of people want you are a minority. Creating a character in your own image takes the excitement out of the game entirely. What is the point of having new characters if you can just change your own to whatever you want? You cannot change or give your character a personality either. Makes no sense.
"Players project autonomy in size" is the perfect encapsulation of many problems we see in open-world games, especially Ubisoft games. If people saw what a game was instead of what it could be when they see a map with markers, they would be less disappointed, and more critical when buying it.
*15:21* the audience collectively snaps back to attention after spacing out for a few minutes trying to comprehend how someone could mistake Ezio for Altair
I didn't really understand his desire for proceduraly generated volitional content that changed the activity structures and game world. (What the slide talks about at 45-46 mins). Does anyone have any good examples (real or made up) that would help me understand this? (other than shadow of mordor).
When you save or blow up megaton in Fallout 3, the world has reacted to choice, but he is talking about this on a bigger scale, this is why i felt fallout 3 & NV more engaging than Fallout 4
So I guess most fallout missions do a better job of mixing dense rpg game mechanics with alternate outcomes than skyrim did. It seems really strange he doesn't mention these games because from what I can tell they are the pinnacle of autonomous play compared to others.
That seems like an almost impossible goal that would only work in very enclosed games where you can't do much to begin with so the possible branching paths are few.... or games with low fidelity e.g sims, where you really write your own narrative.
The idea is that people have expectations that must be met in a fun game world. They must feel like they're having an impact in the world, or a narrative they enjoy, characters and story-lines that pique their interest and keep them engaged, character growth, progress and so on. These expectations are impossible to meet in a procedurally generated game world of near infinite to infinite size, because the amount of developer hours to create experiences on them with sufficient variety and levels of engagement would be as infinite as the world. The only way to tackle this issue eventually is to be able to create mechanics in the game that can take the reasons we play games, and generate them procedurally in interesting ways and fill a universe with reasons to keep exploring and playing and doing things. I would say that some glimpse of this could perhaps be seen in grand strategy games and turn based games, where a lot of the narrative of how the game plays and ends up is a result of AIs drudging along and shaping the world around you. In many of these games you will never play two games that follow the same paths, the same inter-entity relationships and so forth, despite a developer not curating the experience beyond starting conditions and mechanics/AI routines.
I remember playing Assassin'sCreed: I had the main story done and then some random NPCs offered me side-quests and I was like "why should I...? you don't have any meaning to me, even if you give me some money, I got everything I need" ~Biox
Yes I have the same with the square Enix Tomb Raider series. Some sidequest puzzles seem really good but Im just not motivated to play them. Sometimes I even would get into a sidequest by accident, and then would be disappointed because it didn't matter at all.
Have there been any exceptions to this? Perhaps Dark Souls, where the ‘side quest’ is simply to find and fight the optional boss. They’re fun in their own right
@@jeroenkoffeman9402 "Yes I have the same with the square Enix Tomb Raider series. Some sidequest puzzles seem really good but Im just not motivated to play them. Sometimes I even would get into a sidequest by accident, and then would be disappointed because it didn't matter at all." In a good game, the fun of getting to do the side quest should be its own reward. Like games with "Boss Rush" or "Challenge Room" modes, they exist just to give you more content to PLAY, even if they don't unlock anything or grant you an in-game item.
Emergent narrative is something that's being intensely explored especially in the indie games scene. I think it's the future of sandbox. Chance events of the game itself create memorable entities that serve the role of character, world and story. Create a toybox of ideas and a system that lends them logic. All you need is persistence of objects, consequence of choices, and content randomization.
That's why Eve works so well. The game itself has almost no narrative but it exists as a kind of permanent structure for you to engage with other agents in meaningful choices. Half the game takes place at a kind of meta level outside the game in discord and chat.
After seeing the Shadow of Mordor example and talking about procedural volition, it made me realize other games already do this. Namely games that let you make multiple characters. You can create your squads of soldiers in Xcom to take the aliens. Every victory and deaths makes it feel more personal because they're your guys. Colonists from Rimworld. Dwarves from Dwarf Fortress. Sims from The Sims. Your family members in Crusader Kings. They've done procedural volition for years and made it their selling point. No wonder they're called story generators. The first studio to successfully combine this with a massive procedural world will release the game of the decade.
The wisdom here is remarkably compelling. A book with akin insights promoted significant development in me. "A Life Unplugged: Reclaiming Reality in a Digital Age" by Theodore Blaze
Hes a psychologist and has some knowledge of video game design. Not sure what what Star Citizen is enough to understand your comment, but i can tell you this guy doesn't have a damn clue how game development works.
Wylie28 He was attacking this idea that you just procedurally generate star systems, rooms, dungeons, etc., as a game designer, and the massive sand box which result will in itself lead to satisfied players. Space games are especially seductive from this angle because they offer so much 'space' and thus so much potential 'freedom' to do what you want. He's saying that 'freedom' doesn't lead to satisfaction rather volition does. Choices must be meaningful or purposive and not just manifold. A world of infinite choices (freedom) but where each choice is as good as another is paradoxically a world with no freedom. It's very apt for what Chris Roberts is trying to do and why so many people have bought into it.
Games like Mass Effect 1 have less freedom but more volition than more open games like Skyrim. Take the character creator for example. In Mass Effect, your choices about which class to choose feel far more important than choosing where to put your points in Skyrim. Furthermore, in Mass Effect, you actually get to choose things like your character's backstory in ways which will have a bit of an effect on the game. Finally, even the purely cosmetic choices about how your character will look feel more important because in Mass Effect, you actually see your character talking so your decisions about how they look actually matter much more since you are actually casting a movie rather than choosing a face to put on a menu screen.
@@yawarapuyurak3271 It's patented by Warner Bro. But typically patents lasts 99 years, or something. Most things older than 100 years are public domain, but I know the "US" have begun "extending" patents, which is just so stupid. Edit: Was thinking of copyrights, patents is around 20, my bad. (and copyrights is around 70, but have also been extended before)
@@liva9994 that's just stupid. It only helps to monopolize something. Patents should be around 5, maybe 10 years in order to give a head start to the creator, but not so long that they can monopolize.
@@yawarapuyurak3271 Oh right, my bad. Well I was confusing it a bit with Copyright, but yea, around 20 years is a patent. But worth mentioning that if you're rich enough, you can extend patents by longer.
I honestly like games with almost no direction. I like to create my own narratives in my head and do whatever I want. I can only make it through 1 or 2 story missions in any game I buy honestly. For example in Ghost Recon Wildlands I enjoyed turning off the HUD and placing it on hardest difficulty. Then trying to make it from one corner of the map to the other without being caught. I pretended I had to chart through an enemy state and make it to an extraction point. I am really looking forward to Far Cry 5 map editor. Maybe I am just weird, but whateva!
I have had exactly the same experience with Far Cry 2. Highest difficulty and just traverse the map. There was a challenge in doing that, even without the missions (which I found very boring). Yet the speakers point still remain that the stories you created were enabled by the mechanics of the game, the NPCs you had to hide from, their movement patterns. If it managed to make you play through without using narrative as a clutch, it has succeeded as a videogame and has satisfied at least one need: that of mastery. And quite possibly self-determination, although that's a lot simpler for games that don't rely on dialogue choices and are open world. I don't know how much this second one applies to Ghost Recon Wildlands. In my own experience in Far Cry 2, me clearing out road blockades didn't do much, they always respawned. This enabled more gameplay, but also made me feel like I wasn't achieving anything (missions were more successful in doing that). Far Cry 2 had an awesome mechanic of companions who showed up when you were dying and helped you. Every once in a while you had to help them as well. Very little talk involved but still created strong attachment, and i think that fed the need for relatedness.
I dislike straight story driven games without a choice mostly cause they do the decisions instead of me. Especially when game has only the story inside and it fades away the core gameplay. Better watch the movie. Games like Mass Effect gives you ability to choose and it affects the game I agree that's why the best of this series are so epic.
I was thinking about this talk for a long time, and the best I could think of was a food metaphor where you give players a menu: Freedom: The menu has a thousand options Autonomy: The menu's options are distinct and impactful Volition: I want what's on the menu I think the key distinction is that autonomy is about the desire to make meaningful choices that impact the world. Freedom is about the quantity of choices available. It reminds me of sensory deprivation chambers, in a weird way. Humans have a real need to interact with and change the world, and when deprived of any contact with the world, we start to hallucinate things so we can interact. Some choices we make are really satisfying and make us feel like the main character in our life story, and some are so unimportant and boring that we forget we made the choice 5 seconds after making it. The choice to marry my wife had only a few possible outcomes, but has brought me lasting happiness and satisfaction, whereas the toothpaste I bought out of the 30 brands at the store was just boring and made me feel like I was in a documentary showing how boring life can be. Most of the toothpaste is the same.
I'm too old school for openworld games. I just want to go from A to B and pass through the linear narrative excactly as it was intented by the makers. When I get too much volition, the game get's too immersive for a simple entertainment product. I don't want to get consumed by a completely volitional world, I just want to play a videogame that renders me a carefully designed beautiful experience, instead of an endless "second life" experience where all my choices have an impact.
I agree - I like a mixture - like undertale or as you say something with a really satisfying story arch over a sensible time frame like inside. I guess this kind of experience is going to shift more and more into the world of indie games rather than mainstream games.
@@OliverWallaceStories Undertale gives players a lot of volition and agency, the game responds to even the most insignificant decisions from the player, and yet it offers a tightly designed experience shaped by you the player. Goes to show those things aren't mutually exclusive, and there's no reason to believe volition is a negative thing other than of course personal preference like the original comment said, and that not every single game needs it, like Inside, fenomenal game.
"I'm too old school for openworld games. I just want to go from A to B and pass through the linear narrative excactly as it was intented by the makers." The Legend of Zelda is open world and came out in 1986, same year as the original Metroid. You can prefer linear games but it's not a question of being old-school.
Honestly when I think of No Man's Sky, I think of Grass, Ocean, Life, Atmosphere and Universe. It's a beautiful game and I want to explore it. The size is just the icing on the cake. I have the same fascination with MS Flight Simulator 2020, I want to explore the beautiful world from an aerial point of view. Many individuals would be excited to explore the beautiful planet earth but not a planet like Jupiter which is bigger and probably flat and boring. In the fantastical world of No Man's Sky most planets have life.
The issue with increasing volition is that by definition your increasing power creep, look at long running action stories, DBZ and Naruto gets silly fast. A procedurally generated volition system would have to constantly be reducing the players power to build it up again. I can imagine your ship/armor being the thing that grows and then parts of it are destroyed, the issue it changes the psychological profile as noting won is kept for long.
minecraft's volution generation is correlated by how much you want to discover. after a few hundred hours, when you have read all the wikipedias, since you know all the game systems, volution disappears
@@arthurllorens172 Yet people play it for thousands. It's not just discovery, but also self expression and crafting (no pin intended) narratives as you build your world. It depends on how you play of course. But I wouldn't say discovery is the game's only strength.
Pretty much every game mentioned here neglected making actual gameplay for the sake of boring narratives (I am yet to experience a game that's actually worth it for the story).
Alright... so I'm like 5:30 in and already, while I agree with the basic concept of your model, you're missing some really, absolutely huge chunks when it comes to games here, and you haven't even touched on the central thesis yet. In particular, your ARC really, honestly, should be PARC, with the P being for Progression, as it takes precedence above all others and we already know that in game design. It's why so many games now have RPG elements, in particular those of gaining levels or stat increases. Seriously, it should be at the very start above all others because without it you DIE. I'm not even exaggerating. You can be perfectly healthy, well-fed, well-loved, everything's going great in life, but... if you have no progression, if you see no capacity for your life, your personal capabilities or whatever to improve over time, you will simply shut down and stop working. It's the core fundamental aspect central to humans being where we are today, and to hope. Without the hope of somehow in the future things will be better than they are now, if not for yourself, then for your children, you will not carry on. If you had your spouse of 50+ years die, then you probably can't even imagine what it'd be like for things to get better again, and that directly leads to the widow/er dying shortly after for often no real apparent reason. We know full well that, psychologically, the human mind zeros out whatever it sees on a regular basis as a new baseline level of normal. No matter how bad you have it, you'll grow used to it and it won't be a huge problem anymore, but this also means no matter how good you have it, you'll also grow used to it and you'll gradually grow dissatisfied because your baseline level of normal is always "not quite good enough" so you absolutely need progression, for things to become better than they currently are whatever they happen to currently be. This doesn't mean it has to be physical in nature. It's not necessarily a bigger car, more money, nor nicer stuff. It can be more family who loves you, or greater spiritual enlightenment, among other things. The buddhist monk is as much striving for more as anyone else, though they've corrupted the idea by thinking they're searching for less, but they're really looking to improve that spiritual enlightenment and they can't escape the human need for progression. As you've completely missed this in your fundamental setup, despite that it's by far more important than autonomy, relatedness and competency, and affects all of those things in a greater degree than they themselves do, it kinda means I'm already a bit iffy on the rest of this. I get the feeling I'm going to be picking apart the rest of this over the next hour, but yeah, this was too massive of an oversight to ignore given how drastically it has altered the way video games are developed and was completely left out of your basic model that you're basing the rest of this lecture upon. EDIT: About 23:35 in, the connection between "growth" and "competency" is finally listed, except that's really not where growth should be. Progression is seriously its own separate thing and isn't always tied to competency. You can totally add progression to a game without tying it to competency in any way at all, such as even just being given in-game currencies to purchase more skins or a bigger house with. This really should be its own, separate category.
23:05 Pardon me a moment. Just a sec. BWAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHAHAHAHAAHAAAAAAAA OH GAWD DID YOU REALLY JUST SAY THAT? Alright, I'm better now. I can breathe again. Wow. Seriously. NO. Skyrim has an absurd amount of hours played for the same reason virtually every other game with that kind of long term engagement has: it allows the users to create their own stuff. As in excessive levels of customization with modding tools. Go on, go count how many people still play unmodded skyrim. I can wait, shouldn't take more than the fingers on your hands. Yeah. Because skyrim as a base game is actually pretty lacking. What has people still play skyrim is what has people still play minecraft, or second life, or starcraft - you can just keep adding stuff onto it to do, and they add some more themselves as well. Every single person I know who still plays skyrim has the same complaint: it takes 3 dedicated full work days to reinstall it because they have 600 mods they need to install along with it. So what have we learned boys and girls? You're sort of close with volition, but your explanation here was awful. No, it's not the game world that makes skyrim still playable for so long, it's that you have to continually provide new experiences for your players, and if you let them produce their own experiences, then it will continually generate more for you... right up until you release your new game, or a competitor does. PvP games maintain this by having each new battle revolve around the other players you fight generating new content, and because as your skill level progresses you encounter different types of foes to face so you're always guaranteed something new... unless the game doesn't provide more content and you get stuck in a skill rut as most people do, in which case you'll notice first person shooters basically all have a life expectancy of 6-12 months, whereas League of Legends is still going strong because it keeps adding more stuff for people to do. So why did all of LoL's competitors die? Because you need a constant influx of new players and they didn't manage to do the two things required for that: lowering the skill floor and promoting the PvP nature by way of tournaments. And the fact of the matter is pro gamers go where the money is, so whoever has the biggest prize gets the pros, and the pros pull in fans, and then the fans play the game themselves and show their friends to generate more fans so you have a constant influx of new players. Skyrim isn't a PvP game, so it has to do this via giving the players the ability to add content to the game in other ways, namely modding tools, and then those players show their friends the neat new mod they just built and they keep playing the game because they keep getting new mods. If the game starts to grow stale, go pick up a dozen new mods and your problem's fixed. Graphics sucking because the game's almost a decade old? Better install a mod which updates all the models, animations and textures. Because you can do that. So no, I totally and completely disagree with your assertion at 23:05 entirely. I agree that YES, these are things that totally can be huge benefits, but that's not what makes skyrim popular today. It'd be like saying that people like listening to music, and that's why cars are so popular, because they have a radio in them. It's like... uh... yeah, that's... kind of a tiny, small part of a car, but that's not even remotely close to the primary reason why people use them.
You miss the whole point of his presentation, this is not about how the progression of the player but how to gives a meaningful progression to the player, just like he said at about 27:00: HOW CRAP TALI DIE WHAT I GONNA DO, answer: I'm gonna savescum because I love tali and without her the story is meaningfulness. This presentation is about this: don't gives player autonomy, gives them meaningful choice that they want or at least that they will adhere to, this way they will stick to your game and remember it after they finished it. As for the "things will be better than they are now, if not for yourself, then for your children", well this is crap. Even the few people that want that in the real world wants something else in a game, yes I agree they want a better future, but a better future for themselves, some peoples want to just destroy everything, some want to become the wealthiest dude on the planet, others want to become all powerful and so on. If you really thing that everybody want only one thing and that this thing is a better future for everybody, you are sadly just very naive.
Ubisoft makes a lot of boring, forgettable, near-identical copy/paste games. Sometimes they literally just copy the world map from one game and reuse it another.
Maybe I'm missing something here, but the only point he's made is that you need to give your audience an engaging and focused motivation for narrative driven games. And if you don't design around that, the quality of the game--and user engagement---will suffer. This is five minutes of content spread across an hour.
You did take the time to respond and give a more accurate breakdown so thank you for that. I appreciate the synopsis you gave, but I still have a difficult time reading this talk as anything but superficial. From a top-down level I'm not certain there's anything I'd change in my original statement. It can very easily be stated some motive is necessary for creating voluntary engagement. And as far as procedural generation is concerned, you're right that the speaker did broach the subject. But the reason why I didn't include it originally is that it's the same point, only reiterated. I disagree that this was an engaging talk, but that's subjective. If you think there's value in it then that's fine. I'm glad you and perhaps others took away more from this than I did.
Yes but this motivation to play a game comes from the opportunity to make choices and the feedback that those choices matter and make an impact on the world. That was the core message of this talk and yes it's only one line but autonomy is so important to the player's engagement that it deserves an hour of discussion to stress this :) And in that hour he provides examples of structures which help foster autonomy(volition) e.g. shifting narratives, dense RPG mechanics, meaningful impactful side quests, feedback. And tries to show us that when our yearning for autonomy isn't satisfied it irks us greatly in an attempt to just prove how important it is to design with that core message in mind.
The title is clickbait. He is not a gamer and his Mr psychologist attitude is slightly annoying. But he is right. He is so right. It is good the talk goes over his thought process and examples so you can understand it better and find wrong turns in his logic. Like, Witcher 3 is not a hybrid of Skyrim and Mass Effect. It is Mass Effect. This is mostly because Skyrim has nothing going for it apart from missions and an open world. It does not have a strong enough identity to be a part of a hybrid. I always say, structure structure structure and simulation! He showed that to engage the audience, you need procedural techniques. He didn't tell how to do it but at least it is a concrete goal if you want to undertake it. Also the trap of mind-reading was a very good insight for linear( and multi-linear) narratives which is why I prefer non-linearity and it also points to the power of gaming as a medium, you can defer engagement and results to the player and simulation.
Using "volition" as a synonym for "needs satisfaction"? Have children, your volition goes up? Your satisfaction goes up. but does your autonomy go up from having 4 kids?
Your volition goes down, but because raising kids is fundamentally your choice, your autonomy is intact. To put it another way, it was *your choice* to limit your own freedom by having children. Say you're in the middle of a game world. You have 360 degrees of choice in terms of which direction you want to explore in, but at the end of the day you can only travel in one direction at a time, so you must voluntarily forfeit all but one of those infinite possibilities. You lose that freedom, but keep your autonomy because you made the choice, not the game.
@@amanofnoreputation2164 "Your volition goes down" No, your volition goes UP, because you (presumably) WANTED to have children. Your freedom goes down, because you (presumably) find yourself obligated to take care of children and can't just randomly go out for several hours with your friends (and especially not your spouse/partner) on a Wednesday night whenever you feel like it.
Skyrim is from Bethesda, which is a ZeniMax subsidiary. Mass Effect 3 is from BioWare, a subsidiary of EA Games. GTA V is from Rockstar Games, a subsidiary of Take Two Interactive. Many of the games he used have no affiliation with Ubisoft.
This talk is full of nonsense. He whimsically points to other major titles from recent years, shows what's wrong with them, and then says why these things "work." These things don't work. They are here because the developers couldn't do better with time and money given. You don't have "structure" as a positive in an open world game, you have it there as a necessity because of technical and other limitations. The analogy about marriage is groundless and incoherent. The free choice to get married and the supposed loss of freedom seems more a personal statement than an ideological one as you gain some freedoms or privileges in marriage that you wouldn't get otherwise. The act of getting married, and upholding a marriage is 100% an exercise in free choice without constraints. This dude has rationalized, Stockholm syndrome style, why real freedom is actually slavery to constraints so long as the slavery to constraints is enjoyable! Yeah, no. This is designing in a way that fundamentally lies to the player and detracts from a game's value.
It's really not, his data set is massive and has predictive validity for commercial game success and has good test-retest reliability. You have armchair conjecture. Obviously development time and budgets provides constraints, but that's a limitation on linear games and is not a unique feature to open world games. He's trying to answer what to put in the open world not whether or not to have them
"The free choice to get married and the supposed loss of freedom seems more a personal statement than an ideological one as you gain some freedoms or privileges in marriage that you wouldn't get otherwise." If you don't think marriage is a restriction of choice, you are an alien who needs to do more research before you can blend in with the Earth Hu-man creatures.
The problem with this discussion is this is just designing games for the mainstream audience. Pretty much every space sim that exists shows that there are players that are perfectly fine without the game giving them "volition" to do something. In fact some players are turned off by this very thing and only play games that offer almost zero guidance or reason to do anything within the game. Designing games in the way contrary to this video is not wrong. Nothing about an entertainment product can be wrong. People enjoy different things. Some of those just have niche audiences. i find it interesting someone who bases his discussion in psychology fails to understand this.
That's not what he's saying. It's not about giving the player a checklist of things to do, or even directing their playstyle. I think it might easier to describe what he's talking about by describing a failure in 'volition'. In sandboxes a failure in 'volition' usually feels like the game is incomplete. For example maybe you build a spaceship and then when you go to fly it and you suddenly realise it has no purpose. There's nothing to shoot, there's no trading and to top it off it's limited in speed to 5m/s. While it was a lot of fun to design the ship. What's the point if you can't test your design? You could've had the same experience from just using a 3d modeling program. That's an extreme example, but I have played a lot of EA sandbox games in various genres that are almost this bad. The gist is when building a sandbox you need to meet player expectations and have enough systems to tie everything together. From that players will be able to derive their own goals.
What he is doing is trying to generalize an audience of people that want different things. Some people want the very experiences he says are bad. Its a stupid discussion. There is no wrong way to make a game. You can research what the mainstream audience wants, but you can never objectify entertainment product design. Ive seen the "x object has no purpose" argument many times. Whenever x gets removed or changed people complain. Why? Because they found something they enjoy doing with it.
Well coming from a Dungeon Master perspective, this talk actually strikes at something that a lot of newer DMs do wrong. They fill their world with random encounters/NPCs/etc from the rolling tables in the Dungeon Master Guide and then the game is OK, but to make it real fun you need to give these encounters/NPCs purpose. And that is something that I do not see in many of the new games. It feels more like they are just thrown in there to extend the amount of time you get when you play the game, and at least for me, that is not compelling.
Some gamers only play the game genres they like. In my case, there's a lot of titles I've never touched, even though they're famous. They just don't appeal to me. But as a game dev, I have looked into videos and articles about some of them to see why they are so popular.
Yeah, that's true too. Well, in my youth I did play as many games of the genres I like as much as I could (thanks to the power of simulators, haha). But now, I don't really have the time. Though, I'm still the kind of people that mostly sticks to his preferred genres. For example, I rarely touch platformers, unless it's to learn something...
He never said that linear game were dead, he just point out that "open world", "be who you want to be", tags sounds more sexy to customers than "play this "story", "guy", "whatever"", he also said that game like "the last of us" are also great to give players some Volition but it's way more tricky to do this. IMHO If you want to watch something more about how to give your playerbase a goal that they will achieve through they own means, be it linear stuff or more open story thingy, watch ua-cam.com/video/4mgK2hL33Vw/v-deo.html (this is also a GDC talks but from a writer point of view)
A teleshop salesman posing as a scientist. Trying to prove a theory by looking for evidence that supports it and building straw-mans out of points that are against it. He is talking about engagement over time in a roundabout way by explaining a forced model. His theory failed from the base assumption by thinking all players have the same goal when playing the same game. His model also only considers as relevant the ingame mechanics without even understanding their reason or function. It completely ignores other factors like controls, UI, community influence, payment methods, after release services. By his proposed standards Minecraft is a failure.
I Turned Off Gta 5 the moment it started throwing the N-word, Maybe It was a personal Conflict but as an Immigrant having witnessed both sides of the World... i found it to be quite Disturbing & Distasteful... To enable such a Narrative of Polluted Thinking, even in a Virtual Parody world of an American City... is something i couldn't be a part of... it was basically spitting in the Face of every Humanitarian effort that tries to Erase this Racial Line of black and white... The open world, endless arrays of models and characters... hundreds of hours of design & dev work... all of that meant nothing to me.. The game at this point wasn't Autonomous Enough for me... the Pillars of Volition Collapsed... because it Conflicted with my own Internal Narrative.... despite it being a Super-hit game & a technological Marvel and all... The only way to practice Volition was to turn the Damn thing off. Autonomy = Volition not Freedom ..... beautifully worded & can be applied to experiences beyond just games... im thinking about Societies, Nations & Religions...Thanks for making sense of this concept... It helped me understand my own brain & the game behind the Game. Regards
if you are relevant why would you read polygon? "i've gotten death threats" no one cares. also welcome to being an entertainer or public figure. "we can look at current games" with the exception of witcher, those aren't good games. it isn't that witcher is good, but i haven't played it and have no opinion about it. "shadow of mordor ..." was rated the worst game of the year. "i'm not a designer or an engineer" are you an accountant?
@@DarkenedVibe when i originally read your comment i found it mildly amusing. but now that i'm brought back to it by another poster a couple interpretations have come to mind. one charitable and one not. the charitable interpretation isn't really what you said, but if you basically meant "i hope you find a friend", you are a better person than i gave you credit. and that possible disgrace isn't something i can tollerate. to accidentally denougue others is subhuman, it violate my identity and most abashed of all i would be responsible for it. that interpretation is what causes me to reciprocate empathicly. for- for you to bring up a lack of friendship, would imply you were having some difficulty with it, and that is something i can help with, not that this is particularly timely. regardless, mastering decorum and sociality isn't particularly satisfying. so you need to determine if you are lonely, friendless, and whether you want help. i can teach you nihilism, which allows mastery of most skills nearly effortlessly, including those of social conduct, but if you are lonely it wont help. it helps friendlessness, and esteem, but not spirituality. it is cold, where there normally is the warmth of incompetance. the original way i took your comment back when you made it was that of an ideologue disclosure trying to evangelize an inferior point of view; the growth ideology. but only now with emotions dry, do i see the potential error in my perception. back then i realized "Hopefully you find a better self" is a great backhanded compliment, taken at face value. i laughed when i first read it. or perhaps when i misread it due to my mood. if you were trying to reach out for help, and i mistook your attempt to reach out as scathing wit, i must apologize. and to make amends i offer topical aid without qualification. if this is simply irrelevant from untimeliness, i wish you well all the same. and if my initial reading was correct, keep the fire burning. your quip is an excellent turn of phrase. if you want to go into comedy you are a good 30% there. i didn't say it then, but i hope you are not only proud of your conduct, and i hope you wear it on your sleeve. a great many people can't give a good insult, let alone put lingerie on it. keep your head high and strut, because you become the standards of your conduct. as for me, there is no potential for a better self. and no motive for a more sociable one.
I'm not a dev, but watching your conferences is my new favourite educational media. I always learn something I didn't expect to.
Maybe u should try ;)
Summary: Volition and Self-determination theory:
Self-determination theory says that people flourish when they have:
1-Competance: feeling effective and masterful to what is relevant and important to them.
2-Autonomy: whole-heatedly choosing. Not about the freedom of potential choices, but the volition of wilful actualization of your own desire and writing your own story that aligns with you (about finding the right words and not having multiple words).
3-Relatedness: inter-caring and connecting to others and the world; belonging to and valuing each other's presence in your lives and being able to help or affect each other.
Players want autonomy and not freedom. A person that gets married loses part of their freedom but gains volition. And so, autonomy is about having greater restrictions that we desire. We don't exactly care about the freedom to do whatever we want, but for these actions to have meaning to us personally (and freedom is only a usual means to that). Some games tend struggle with this (like sandbox games); you give players freedom, but what are you doing to give them volition? Some games give you volition as if in an amusement park: they give you multiple meaningful choices that you jump between for a sense of autonomy (e.g. GTA). Others give you a sense of identity and growth to feel competent (e.g. RPGs like Skyrim). Others give you an impactful narrative for relatedness (e.g. Mass Effect). And some mix between them (e.g. The Witcher; deep quests and activities like Skyrim, deep story like Mass Effect).
The real question is: how do we create procedural and dynamic volition to keep them growing and make them more personal? The world must react to your personal choices and your choices must have consequences. An example would be The Nemesis System in Shadow of Mordor where enemies structure themselves based upon your actions and time; it makes the narrative feel like your story. Or maybe if you kill foxes and that leads to increased rabbit population which will lead to a greater sense of responsibility and intentionality.
[addition] In general, it is possible that creating volition comes from aligning the player's choices and intentionality with a narrative that allows them to conquer challenges, write their own story, grow, and feel related with the world with no dissonance between them. This is commonly done in story-games like Uncharted where you identify with the character and see your volition align with theirs. Or when you are given a side-character that you care about like Ellie in The Last of Us and that makes your intentionality align with the narrative.
so useful, thank U! ❤❤❤
A nice example of the Procedural Volition is Heat Signature, a game with kind of a rogue-lite mechanics generating motivation for your each next character out of the failure of your previous one. Stuck on a ship full of security and the timer ran out? You’re now a spouse of your previous character seeking to free them (you get all of your upgrades back) and also playing that revenge fantasy.
Nice talk. Main takeaway: give volition in a game (i.e. give thing that players want to do). Ultimate goal? Procedural volition, through making player's choices matter and dynamically impact the game and the story.
you probably dont care but does anybody know of a trick to log back into an Instagram account??
I was dumb lost my account password. I love any help you can offer me
@Drake Maddox i really appreciate your reply. I found the site on google and im waiting for the hacking stuff now.
Takes a while so I will get back to you later with my results.
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Thank you so much you really help me out!
@Ezra Jaxson You are welcome =)
Dude got blindsided by the worst questions that completely missed the point of the talk, and it was hilarious. The dude from spore being like "Actually spore was great, and awesome" instead of realizing the point that after you get to space the game is over, and you only get more out of it by restarting and now discovering more from that end point. You can keep playing but for what reason, so you stop, or restart.
1:01:30 Personally, I played Guild Wars for a long time and would act differently based partly on the character type I was playing as. Some of that was also skill and weapon setup, but my skill and weapon setup (and name choice and look) were direct results of my interpretation of the creature I had chosen.... so to me, some of my in game behavior (social towards other players - as well as pursuits and in game achievements) WAS a direct result of the character customization opportunity....
THAT is a study I'd like to hear about.
[Personally, I played Guild Wars for a long time and would act differently based partly on the character type I was playing as. Some of that was also skill and weapon setup, but my skill and weapon setup (and name choice and look) were direct results of my interpretation of the creature I had chosen.... so to me, some of my in game behavior (social towards other players - as well as pursuits and in game achievements) WAS a direct result of the character customization opportunity....
THAT is a study I'd like to hear about.]
That's just roleplaying, D&D/JRPG style.
Procedurally generated narrative with meaningful impact on the game world? Why yes, Dwarf Fortress is built entirely on that idea.
True, but talking in adventure mode, as someone else mentioned, is rather like talking to a particularly boring database.
CRPG in general, and Divinity: Original Sin 2 in particular, do improve volition through adding more player's verbs. System-driven games like Deus Ex and old Thief games do this as well.
Classic Top-Down RPGs as well as immersive sims are not really open world games.
First one relies heavily on text, which can get quite complicated when you look at characters who need to animate faces, move their hands and so on.
Also they are bound by the possible story interactions, you can't go to any place and do whatever you want, you are bound by the boundaries of dialogue options.
Second one almost always is set inside a Building of some kind - not open world.
Only game that has succeeded in giving narrative choice, volution and everything, FOR ME (just my opinion) is ELEX from pyranha bytes. While it is graphically not the best looking game ever and combat is something you have to learn from youtube to enjoy because it lacks a proper explanation/tutorial - it is the only open world RPG which is not a full sandbox where none of your choices matter (it's the opposite, everything matters, you can destroy entire cities with some choices (and vanish all quests inside those cities)) and doesn't hold your hand.
Meaningful, impactful choices (fully voiced) + complete freedom (you have to find quests/questgivers by runnig through the map and talking to random people) + non-hand-holding = Elex
Haven't found another game of it's kind yet.
@@johnleorid have you tried the gothic games?
@@johnleorid Dwarf fortress is somewhat like this, though Adventure mode is still being worked on.
Making a long story short, actual fantasy with procedural simulated creatures down to the muscles is very brutal.
I am so amazed about this psychological side of games thanks for amazing videos
Wow, what a great critique of Starfield!
Also it gives you a sense of Pride and Accomplishment.
How is it supposed to give me a sense of Pride and Accomplisment, if I cannot buy it in Lootboxes?
Pride and accomplishment are parts of needs satisfaction.
I don't think you get the joke
I played 200 hours of NMS with my friends over the winter of 2022. We took a break once spring/summer came around, and found ourselves playing Valheim.
I just booted up NMS post the Worlds I update and was immediately hooked. The way the world generates, the way the animals interact with each other, the art style of beautiful planets is just amazing.
I like that they started adding paradise planets to early systems. It’s easy to dislike the game when you’re only on boring, barren planets.
But once you get to a paradise planet, you really feel the impact that I think Hello Games was looking for.
I’m hoping Light No Fire’s biomes are all of the “paradise” categories of planets in NMS.
Really nice talk. Focused on the information with some jokes sprinkled in. Keeps it fresh and makes it easier to stay focused. Good pacing.
My 30yr old definition of Autonomy is : In some capacity the ability to make informed decisions that provide a level of acceptance to the space and an organized consistent freedom that allows moral and personal independency. One that includes the foundationals of personification, narrative, mechanics on all sides of the design process. I agree that volition is a cap to the 3 tiers of recognition of self and the space one encompasses. I enjoyed the presentation, and am glad to see others utilizing the framework of mental balance to game design. I utilize it myself within my own system of design. Competency of a designer extends to the competency of a player to be sure and directly effects the play experience both isolated and repeated. Keep up the great work.
I've always thought the same but I couldn't put it into words, this GDC talk is to me the most important of all, it even predicts what would later happen to The Last of Us 2 in both the strengths of it's gameplay giving the player a lot of agency and the weakness of the story taking it away. Amazing.
Yeah. I agree with TLOU2 and I've loved how he explained why invested players didn't enjoy ME3 and how it basically ruined the previous experiences. I cannot replay ME because of that ending, but I wouldn't be able to explain it as well as he did... (and I've tried many times). I understood how and why it was broken from the narrative perspective, but only now I understand why I actually cared, so to speak.
I loved this talk as well. I would argue that TLOU2 case falls into a "can't make everybody happy" situation (since for me what the story did worked very powerfully, exactly bcs it subverted the expectations, making me do things toward the end that I didn't really feel like doing bcs of affection to the characters involved, both of them. And the emotional response from this was something more complex than "just satisfaction", because I think that's the whole point, the game doesn't want you to come out of it feeling "victorious" , but completely beaten up by what happened...which I found very, very powerful )
If you were referring to something else than I was thinking, of course maybe what I say doesn't really apply.
@@lorenzotosiart no I understand what you mean and I agree wholeheartedly, I love the game because the story is definitely one of if not the most powerful I've seen in a game but like the other reply said, I can't deny it gets in the way of me wanting to replay it.
Hey why is there a picture of me in this video? 8:16
37:44 crazy watching this in 2024. No Man's Sky went though a redemption arc, Star Citizen is still generally disparaged, and Star Citizen is... still in alpha
Was gonna comment the same thing. Also crazy that the same problems happened with other games. The more things change, the more they stay the same lol
I don't think a game like Minecraft falls on the spectrum of narrative versus freedom because it's not that there's a core through-line that the player can complete either in a predetermined way or a free-form way -- there is simply no overarching objective at all and the player's volition and sense of purpose comes from what they themselves want to do with the environment and the tools the game offers. So I think there is a actually a fourth need outside of autonomy, relatedness, or competence, and I would call this, "expression": aspects of a game that allow players to be creative -- almost to be game designers in their own right as they use the game to make their own experience.
The reason it doesn't appear in this presentations is because I suspect it is far more elusive than the other three, both to define and produce.
very well said
Yes! I thought you would say "creativity" but expression is equally accurate, I think. I think that need was entirely missing from this talk.
I feel that this is a very good place to start, but he seems to want to diminish the impact of being able to make choices that are outside of the intent of the game... vis a vis "players aren't really more engaged and satisfied whether they're playing the character they had complete freedom to create, or Geralt of Rivia, so long as they have volition in making choices"
In my personal experience... I always engage more when I've got more freedom in creating or customizing a character. I always enjoy a game more when I feel like I have the option to do something other than what the core intent of the game is. Specifically he points out that Mass Effect is excellent at creating volitional need satisfaction and engagement...I went into it wanting a scifi game experience where I had agency over the game world... and I wasn't engaged. And also contrary to what he's stated is the core reason Skyrim is successful.... I never felt the RPG progression system was particularly worthwhile, yet I've played hundreds of hours.... not ever doing any part of the story or quests or anything really other than wandering around the wilderness, talking to people, reading books, etc. Literally the things he said in the first few minutes were not the reason people play these games.
I certainly can accept that I may be an abberation in the numbers, but I do exist, and I suspect there are more people who really do just want a sandbox full of every possible activity under the sun in it. I also think he's ignoring the real reason skyrim was successful, and that's the modding community. If you want to do it, there's a mod somewhere that adds it to skyrim, and if there isn't, there could be, because you can do it. Right down to playing a completely different main quest in a completely different world that is entirely a tropical paradise instead of a winter blasted wasteland.
I do agree though, that part of the problem isn't so much the kind of content that's in the game, but whether or not the player wants to do it. I get no more joy making leather strips than I get filing taxes, and I will more often look up the item id of material components, type in the developer command to get them, rather than actually making them with the raw materials I already have, even though its actually more effort, simply because I hate it slightly less. I enjoy the feeling of breaking the games rules more than I enjoy playing it correctly in that instance. But I think that's part of why I play games in general. I want to be put in a situation where certain things are expected of me, and I can readily ignore those expectations, with impunity. I like that Skyrim's main plot is so non-present that it feels like its not even there 99% of the time. I would still probably like it more if my choices did change the course of it though and that's another point in his favor...
My only point is that... while he has a point, its only half of one.
I agree with you. Parts of this talk resonated, and parts of this talk felt specific to one type of gamer, and maybe his research is geared towards the widest commercial audience..
In a game like GTA, you have communities of players who just want to role play as members of society and tell collective stories. Of course he didn't mention social volition, and perhaps that is covered there.
I have the same Skyrim experience, where sometimes I go in with a goal of only playing with knives, wearing tiaras, and adopting a dog and building the perfect house for him.
I can't get invested in The Witcher because I have no investment in Geralt. To say it comes down to changing his shoe color feels shallow. In my eyes, it's about making a character I identify with who I will take through a journey and tell a story with.
I think you are right here. But i believe that it is hard to make a cohesive talk by trying to account for every player type existing. So I see that talk as an general overview of the topic but you need to apply it to specific games and their audience's motivation for better understating. And in general, this talk refers to SDT which is a huge topic by itself.
@@crimson1504character reaction is not what majority of people want you are a minority. Creating a character in your own image takes the excitement out of the game entirely. What is the point of having new characters if you can just change your own to whatever you want? You cannot change or give your character a personality either. Makes no sense.
"Players project autonomy in size" is the perfect encapsulation of many problems we see in open-world games, especially Ubisoft games. If people saw what a game was instead of what it could be when they see a map with markers, they would be less disappointed, and more critical when buying it.
*15:21* the audience collectively snaps back to attention after spacing out for a few minutes trying to comprehend how someone could mistake Ezio for Altair
First image is Altair, second Connon, but he talks about Itally and stuff (Ezio) haha.
I didn't really understand his desire for proceduraly generated volitional content that changed the activity structures and game world. (What the slide talks about at 45-46 mins). Does anyone have any good examples (real or made up) that would help me understand this? (other than shadow of mordor).
When you save or blow up megaton in Fallout 3, the world has reacted to choice, but he is talking about this on a bigger scale, this is why i felt fallout 3 & NV more engaging than Fallout 4
Think of it like making a computer generate the story for the game by itself without any need for humans to make a script.
So I guess most fallout missions do a better job of mixing dense rpg game mechanics with alternate outcomes than skyrim did. It seems really strange he doesn't mention these games because from what I can tell they are the pinnacle of autonomous play compared to others.
That seems like an almost impossible goal that would only work in very enclosed games where you can't do much to begin with so the possible branching paths are few.... or games with low fidelity e.g sims, where you really write your own narrative.
The idea is that people have expectations that must be met in a fun game world. They must feel like they're having an impact in the world, or a narrative they enjoy, characters and story-lines that pique their interest and keep them engaged, character growth, progress and so on. These expectations are impossible to meet in a procedurally generated game world of near infinite to infinite size, because the amount of developer hours to create experiences on them with sufficient variety and levels of engagement would be as infinite as the world. The only way to tackle this issue eventually is to be able to create mechanics in the game that can take the reasons we play games, and generate them procedurally in interesting ways and fill a universe with reasons to keep exploring and playing and doing things. I would say that some glimpse of this could perhaps be seen in grand strategy games and turn based games, where a lot of the narrative of how the game plays and ends up is a result of AIs drudging along and shaping the world around you. In many of these games you will never play two games that follow the same paths, the same inter-entity relationships and so forth, despite a developer not curating the experience beyond starting conditions and mechanics/AI routines.
I remember playing Assassin'sCreed: I had the main story done and then some random NPCs offered me side-quests and I was like "why should I...? you don't have any meaning to me, even if you give me some money, I got everything I need"
~Biox
Yes I have the same with the square Enix Tomb Raider series. Some sidequest puzzles seem really good but Im just not motivated to play them. Sometimes I even would get into a sidequest by accident, and then would be disappointed because it didn't matter at all.
Have there been any exceptions to this? Perhaps Dark Souls, where the ‘side quest’ is simply to find and fight the optional boss. They’re fun in their own right
@@jeroenkoffeman9402 "Yes I have the same with the square Enix Tomb Raider series. Some sidequest puzzles seem really good but Im just not motivated to play them. Sometimes I even would get into a sidequest by accident, and then would be disappointed because it didn't matter at all."
In a good game, the fun of getting to do the side quest should be its own reward. Like games with "Boss Rush" or "Challenge Room" modes, they exist just to give you more content to PLAY, even if they don't unlock anything or grant you an in-game item.
Great talk really helped in my design
Emergent narrative is something that's being intensely explored especially in the indie games scene. I think it's the future of sandbox. Chance events of the game itself create memorable entities that serve the role of character, world and story. Create a toybox of ideas and a system that lends them logic. All you need is persistence of objects, consequence of choices, and content randomization.
That's why Eve works so well. The game itself has almost no narrative but it exists as a kind of permanent structure for you to engage with other agents in meaningful choices. Half the game takes place at a kind of meta level outside the game in discord and chat.
Valheim has procedural volition, doesn't it?
Great talk. He doesn't understand what freedom is, but 99% of this was supper interesting.
i really appreciate the Funny Slides ... God bless the Internet ! Excellent presentation of a very engaging & informative Lecture. Kudos!
After seeing the Shadow of Mordor example and talking about procedural volition, it made me realize other games already do this. Namely games that let you make multiple characters. You can create your squads of soldiers in Xcom to take the aliens. Every victory and deaths makes it feel more personal because they're your guys. Colonists from Rimworld. Dwarves from Dwarf Fortress. Sims from The Sims. Your family members in Crusader Kings. They've done procedural volition for years and made it their selling point. No wonder they're called story generators.
The first studio to successfully combine this with a massive procedural world will release the game of the decade.
Fingers crossed it’s Light No Fire
This reminds me so much of what happens to people who win the lottery..
freedom goes up... and yet they feel lonely and unfulfilled :(
That is not true at all.
I'm here because of Jason VandenBerghe's talk in '16!
The wisdom here is remarkably compelling. A book with akin insights promoted significant development in me. "A Life Unplugged: Reclaiming Reality in a Digital Age" by Theodore Blaze
4:48 😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂 great vibe
Looking at Elden Ring, this has aged really well.
Looking at Dungeons and Dragons, this will age really well
Games like Rimworld or Dwarf Fortress are grest examples of includ inmersive storys with procedural design.
That Star Citizen bit might drive a lot of RSI trolls here claiming this guy doesn't understand game development 😆
Hes a psychologist and has some knowledge of video game design. Not sure what what Star Citizen is enough to understand your comment, but i can tell you this guy doesn't have a damn clue how game development works.
Wylie28 He was attacking this idea that you just procedurally generate star systems, rooms, dungeons, etc., as a game designer, and the massive sand box which result will in itself lead to satisfied players. Space games are especially seductive from this angle because they offer so much 'space' and thus so much potential 'freedom' to do what you want. He's saying that 'freedom' doesn't lead to satisfaction rather volition does. Choices must be meaningful or purposive and not just manifold. A world of infinite choices (freedom) but where each choice is as good as another is paradoxically a world with no freedom. It's very apt for what Chris Roberts is trying to do and why so many people have bought into it.
Games like Mass Effect 1 have less freedom but more volition than more open games like Skyrim. Take the character creator for example. In Mass Effect, your choices about which class to choose feel far more important than choosing where to put your points in Skyrim. Furthermore, in Mass Effect, you actually get to choose things like your character's backstory in ways which will have a bit of an effect on the game. Finally, even the purely cosmetic choices about how your character will look feel more important because in Mass Effect, you actually see your character talking so your decisions about how they look actually matter much more since you are actually casting a movie rather than choosing a face to put on a menu screen.
Worth mentioning that the "nemisis system" have been patented, so yay, go patents... =n= Just be aware, if you try to implement something akin to it.
do you know for how much time?
@@yawarapuyurak3271 It's patented by Warner Bro. But typically patents lasts 99 years, or something. Most things older than 100 years are public domain, but I know the "US" have begun "extending" patents, which is just so stupid.
Edit: Was thinking of copyrights, patents is around 20, my bad. (and copyrights is around 70, but have also been extended before)
@@liva9994 that's just stupid. It only helps to monopolize something.
Patents should be around 5, maybe 10 years in order to give a head start to the creator, but not so long that they can monopolize.
@@yawarapuyurak3271 Oh right, my bad. Well I was confusing it a bit with Copyright, but yea, around 20 years is a patent.
But worth mentioning that if you're rich enough, you can extend patents by longer.
@@liva9994 Damn, that's still a lot. 20 years of never seeing something like that? come on!
great speech
I want procedural generation to create a completeley new game every time.
44:35, 56:10
"33mg of freedom with 1000 planets"
amazing he got a picture of starfield development
I honestly like games with almost no direction. I like to create my own narratives in my head and do whatever I want. I can only make it through 1 or 2 story missions in any game I buy honestly. For example in Ghost Recon Wildlands I enjoyed turning off the HUD and placing it on hardest difficulty. Then trying to make it from one corner of the map to the other without being caught. I pretended I had to chart through an enemy state and make it to an extraction point. I am really looking forward to Far Cry 5 map editor. Maybe I am just weird, but whateva!
I have had exactly the same experience with Far Cry 2. Highest difficulty and just traverse the map. There was a challenge in doing that, even without the missions (which I found very boring). Yet the speakers point still remain that the stories you created were enabled by the mechanics of the game, the NPCs you had to hide from, their movement patterns. If it managed to make you play through without using narrative as a clutch, it has succeeded as a videogame and has satisfied at least one need: that of mastery. And quite possibly self-determination, although that's a lot simpler for games that don't rely on dialogue choices and are open world. I don't know how much this second one applies to Ghost Recon Wildlands. In my own experience in Far Cry 2, me clearing out road blockades didn't do much, they always respawned. This enabled more gameplay, but also made me feel like I wasn't achieving anything (missions were more successful in doing that). Far Cry 2 had an awesome mechanic of companions who showed up when you were dying and helped you. Every once in a while you had to help them as well. Very little talk involved but still created strong attachment, and i think that fed the need for relatedness.
I dislike straight story driven games without a choice mostly cause they do the decisions instead of me. Especially when game has only the story inside and it fades away the core gameplay. Better watch the movie. Games like Mass Effect gives you ability to choose and it affects the game I agree that's why the best of this series are so epic.
Damn, he straight up said people who value cosmetics are acting like children at 55:30.
Hi , im from 5 years in the future from when this talk happened , spoilers another space game disapointed fans and star citizen still isnt out
NMS is a success. It just doesn't have a climax. But then again, neither did Pacman.
I struggled for the first 25 minutes or so of this talk because I just don't have a good grasp on volition.
I was thinking about this talk for a long time, and the best I could think of was a food metaphor where you give players a menu:
Freedom: The menu has a thousand options
Autonomy: The menu's options are distinct and impactful
Volition: I want what's on the menu
I think the key distinction is that autonomy is about the desire to make meaningful choices that impact the world. Freedom is about the quantity of choices available. It reminds me of sensory deprivation chambers, in a weird way. Humans have a real need to interact with and change the world, and when deprived of any contact with the world, we start to hallucinate things so we can interact.
Some choices we make are really satisfying and make us feel like the main character in our life story, and some are so unimportant and boring that we forget we made the choice 5 seconds after making it. The choice to marry my wife had only a few possible outcomes, but has brought me lasting happiness and satisfaction, whereas the toothpaste I bought out of the 30 brands at the store was just boring and made me feel like I was in a documentary showing how boring life can be. Most of the toothpaste is the same.
The success of Eldenring threw the ideas in this talk into the trash bin
I'm too old school for openworld games. I just want to go from A to B and pass through the linear narrative excactly as it was intented by the makers. When I get too much volition, the game get's too immersive for a simple entertainment product. I don't want to get consumed by a completely volitional world, I just want to play a videogame that renders me a carefully designed beautiful experience, instead of an endless "second life" experience where all my choices have an impact.
I agree - I like a mixture - like undertale or as you say something with a really satisfying story arch over a sensible time frame like inside. I guess this kind of experience is going to shift more and more into the world of indie games rather than mainstream games.
@@OliverWallaceStories Undertale gives players a lot of volition and agency, the game responds to even the most insignificant decisions from the player, and yet it offers a tightly designed experience shaped by you the player. Goes to show those things aren't mutually exclusive, and there's no reason to believe volition is a negative thing other than of course personal preference like the original comment said, and that not every single game needs it, like Inside, fenomenal game.
"I'm too old school for openworld games. I just want to go from A to B and pass through the linear narrative excactly as it was intented by the makers."
The Legend of Zelda is open world and came out in 1986, same year as the original Metroid. You can prefer linear games but it's not a question of being old-school.
I think this talk hilights why I lost interest in breathe of the wild after beating the main quest. My purpose felt gone.
18840 Lemke Canyon
Tldr; don't make an ocean of content as deep as a puddle
Honestly when I think of No Man's Sky, I think of Grass, Ocean, Life, Atmosphere and Universe. It's a beautiful game and I want to explore it. The size is just the icing on the cake. I have the same fascination with MS Flight Simulator 2020, I want to explore the beautiful world from an aerial point of view. Many individuals would be excited to explore the beautiful planet earth but not a planet like Jupiter which is bigger and probably flat and boring. In the fantastical world of No Man's Sky most planets have life.
Kemmer Island
This is secretly a DND tal
The issue with increasing volition is that by definition your increasing power creep, look at long running action stories, DBZ and Naruto gets silly fast.
A procedurally generated volition system would have to constantly be reducing the players power to build it up again.
I can imagine your ship/armor being the thing that grows and then parts of it are destroyed, the issue it changes the psychological profile as noting won is kept for long.
Roguelikes and roguelites: reset player power and world every 25 minutes
You’re assuming that the only way to build volition is by power upgrades, which is false.
39:35 someone clearly hasn't played minecraft
minecraft's volution generation is correlated by how much you want to discover.
after a few hundred hours, when you have read all the wikipedias, since you know all the game systems, volution disappears
@@arthurllorens172 Yet people play it for thousands. It's not just discovery, but also self expression and crafting (no pin intended) narratives as you build your world.
It depends on how you play of course. But I wouldn't say discovery is the game's only strength.
@@justGoron That's interesting. Yeah, we could say that Minecraft generates volution for different types of people.
Lopez Brenda Jackson Shirley Thompson Sarah
It os just like in society. You are free, but you only have few concrete options and a bunch of false ones. Just like Social Theory explains.
i can be anything i want Reeeeeeeeeeee
Pretty much every game mentioned here neglected making actual gameplay for the sake of boring narratives (I am yet to experience a game that's actually worth it for the story).
What does he mean with at 5:50 when he says "It's not a 50 cent word?" Does he mean that it is not black-people speak?
Thank you for that yonas
Alright... so I'm like 5:30 in and already, while I agree with the basic concept of your model, you're missing some really, absolutely huge chunks when it comes to games here, and you haven't even touched on the central thesis yet. In particular, your ARC really, honestly, should be PARC, with the P being for Progression, as it takes precedence above all others and we already know that in game design. It's why so many games now have RPG elements, in particular those of gaining levels or stat increases.
Seriously, it should be at the very start above all others because without it you DIE. I'm not even exaggerating. You can be perfectly healthy, well-fed, well-loved, everything's going great in life, but... if you have no progression, if you see no capacity for your life, your personal capabilities or whatever to improve over time, you will simply shut down and stop working. It's the core fundamental aspect central to humans being where we are today, and to hope. Without the hope of somehow in the future things will be better than they are now, if not for yourself, then for your children, you will not carry on. If you had your spouse of 50+ years die, then you probably can't even imagine what it'd be like for things to get better again, and that directly leads to the widow/er dying shortly after for often no real apparent reason.
We know full well that, psychologically, the human mind zeros out whatever it sees on a regular basis as a new baseline level of normal. No matter how bad you have it, you'll grow used to it and it won't be a huge problem anymore, but this also means no matter how good you have it, you'll also grow used to it and you'll gradually grow dissatisfied because your baseline level of normal is always "not quite good enough" so you absolutely need progression, for things to become better than they currently are whatever they happen to currently be.
This doesn't mean it has to be physical in nature. It's not necessarily a bigger car, more money, nor nicer stuff. It can be more family who loves you, or greater spiritual enlightenment, among other things. The buddhist monk is as much striving for more as anyone else, though they've corrupted the idea by thinking they're searching for less, but they're really looking to improve that spiritual enlightenment and they can't escape the human need for progression.
As you've completely missed this in your fundamental setup, despite that it's by far more important than autonomy, relatedness and competency, and affects all of those things in a greater degree than they themselves do, it kinda means I'm already a bit iffy on the rest of this. I get the feeling I'm going to be picking apart the rest of this over the next hour, but yeah, this was too massive of an oversight to ignore given how drastically it has altered the way video games are developed and was completely left out of your basic model that you're basing the rest of this lecture upon.
EDIT: About 23:35 in, the connection between "growth" and "competency" is finally listed, except that's really not where growth should be. Progression is seriously its own separate thing and isn't always tied to competency. You can totally add progression to a game without tying it to competency in any way at all, such as even just being given in-game currencies to purchase more skins or a bigger house with. This really should be its own, separate category.
23:05 Pardon me a moment. Just a sec. BWAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHAHAHAHAAHAAAAAAAA OH GAWD DID YOU REALLY JUST SAY THAT?
Alright, I'm better now. I can breathe again. Wow. Seriously. NO.
Skyrim has an absurd amount of hours played for the same reason virtually every other game with that kind of long term engagement has: it allows the users to create their own stuff. As in excessive levels of customization with modding tools. Go on, go count how many people still play unmodded skyrim. I can wait, shouldn't take more than the fingers on your hands. Yeah. Because skyrim as a base game is actually pretty lacking. What has people still play skyrim is what has people still play minecraft, or second life, or starcraft - you can just keep adding stuff onto it to do, and they add some more themselves as well.
Every single person I know who still plays skyrim has the same complaint: it takes 3 dedicated full work days to reinstall it because they have 600 mods they need to install along with it.
So what have we learned boys and girls? You're sort of close with volition, but your explanation here was awful. No, it's not the game world that makes skyrim still playable for so long, it's that you have to continually provide new experiences for your players, and if you let them produce their own experiences, then it will continually generate more for you... right up until you release your new game, or a competitor does. PvP games maintain this by having each new battle revolve around the other players you fight generating new content, and because as your skill level progresses you encounter different types of foes to face so you're always guaranteed something new... unless the game doesn't provide more content and you get stuck in a skill rut as most people do, in which case you'll notice first person shooters basically all have a life expectancy of 6-12 months, whereas League of Legends is still going strong because it keeps adding more stuff for people to do. So why did all of LoL's competitors die? Because you need a constant influx of new players and they didn't manage to do the two things required for that: lowering the skill floor and promoting the PvP nature by way of tournaments. And the fact of the matter is pro gamers go where the money is, so whoever has the biggest prize gets the pros, and the pros pull in fans, and then the fans play the game themselves and show their friends to generate more fans so you have a constant influx of new players.
Skyrim isn't a PvP game, so it has to do this via giving the players the ability to add content to the game in other ways, namely modding tools, and then those players show their friends the neat new mod they just built and they keep playing the game because they keep getting new mods. If the game starts to grow stale, go pick up a dozen new mods and your problem's fixed. Graphics sucking because the game's almost a decade old? Better install a mod which updates all the models, animations and textures. Because you can do that.
So no, I totally and completely disagree with your assertion at 23:05 entirely. I agree that YES, these are things that totally can be huge benefits, but that's not what makes skyrim popular today. It'd be like saying that people like listening to music, and that's why cars are so popular, because they have a radio in them. It's like... uh... yeah, that's... kind of a tiny, small part of a car, but that's not even remotely close to the primary reason why people use them.
You miss the whole point of his presentation, this is not about how the progression of the player but how to gives a meaningful progression to the player, just like he said at about 27:00: HOW CRAP TALI DIE WHAT I GONNA DO, answer: I'm gonna savescum because I love tali and without her the story is meaningfulness. This presentation is about this: don't gives player autonomy, gives them meaningful choice that they want or at least that they will
adhere to, this way they will stick to your game and remember it after they finished it.
As for the "things will be better than they are now, if not for yourself, then for your children", well this is crap. Even the few people that want that in the real world wants something else in a game, yes I agree they want a better future, but a better future for themselves, some peoples want to just destroy everything, some want to become the wealthiest dude on the planet, others want to become all powerful and so on.
If you really thing that everybody want only one thing and that this thing is a better future for everybody, you are sadly just very naive.
Kids wanted only creature stage. Space was boring and tribe was meh
HE MIXED O\UP WATTCHDOGS 1/2 AC 1/2/3... WTH?
Ubisoft makes a lot of boring, forgettable, near-identical copy/paste games. Sometimes they literally just copy the world map from one game and reuse it another.
This is so relevant considering Botw and Totk arr both trash games that destriyed the identity of Zelda games.
People have said this for every installment of zelda
@@logickedmazimoon6001 no one accused previous zelda games npt bejng an actual game with story and lore continuity.
@@iflgames3245 it is an actual game with lore story and the whole series is known for its weird continuity, the whole linearists vs nonlinearists.
Maybe I'm missing something here, but the only point he's made is that you need to give your audience an engaging and focused motivation for narrative driven games. And if you don't design around that, the quality of the game--and user engagement---will suffer. This is five minutes of content spread across an hour.
You did take the time to respond and give a more accurate breakdown so thank you for that. I appreciate the synopsis you gave, but I still have a difficult time reading this talk as anything but superficial. From a top-down level I'm not certain there's anything I'd change in my original statement. It can very easily be stated some motive is necessary for creating voluntary engagement. And as far as procedural generation is concerned, you're right that the speaker did broach the subject. But the reason why I didn't include it originally is that it's the same point, only reiterated.
I disagree that this was an engaging talk, but that's subjective. If you think there's value in it then that's fine. I'm glad you and perhaps others took away more from this than I did.
Yes but this motivation to play a game comes from the opportunity to make choices and the feedback that those choices matter and make an impact on the world.
That was the core message of this talk and yes it's only one line but autonomy is so important to the player's engagement that it deserves an hour of discussion to stress this :)
And in that hour he provides examples of structures which help foster autonomy(volition) e.g. shifting narratives, dense RPG mechanics, meaningful impactful side quests, feedback.
And tries to show us that when our yearning for autonomy isn't satisfied it irks us greatly in an attempt to just prove how important it is to design with that core message in mind.
The title is clickbait. He is not a gamer and his Mr psychologist attitude is slightly annoying. But he is right. He is so right. It is good the talk goes over his thought process and examples so you can understand it better and find wrong turns in his logic. Like, Witcher 3 is not a hybrid of Skyrim and Mass Effect. It is Mass Effect. This is mostly because Skyrim has nothing going for it apart from missions and an open world. It does not have a strong enough identity to be a part of a hybrid. I always say, structure structure structure and simulation! He showed that to engage the audience, you need procedural techniques. He didn't tell how to do it but at least it is a concrete goal if you want to undertake it. Also the trap of mind-reading was a very good insight for linear( and multi-linear) narratives which is why I prefer non-linearity and it also points to the power of gaming as a medium, you can defer engagement and results to the player and simulation.
Yeah, it'll suffer all right. Perhaps he's heard of Minecraft?
Using "volition" as a synonym for "needs satisfaction"? Have children, your volition goes up? Your satisfaction goes up. but does your autonomy go up from having 4 kids?
Your volition goes down, but because raising kids is fundamentally your choice, your autonomy is intact. To put it another way, it was *your choice* to limit your own freedom by having children.
Say you're in the middle of a game world. You have 360 degrees of choice in terms of which direction you want to explore in, but at the end of the day you can only travel in one direction at a time, so you must voluntarily forfeit all but one of those infinite possibilities.
You lose that freedom, but keep your autonomy because you made the choice, not the game.
@@amanofnoreputation2164 "Your volition goes down"
No, your volition goes UP, because you (presumably) WANTED to have children. Your freedom goes down, because you (presumably) find yourself obligated to take care of children and can't just randomly go out for several hours with your friends (and especially not your spouse/partner) on a Wednesday night whenever you feel like it.
I love how all the games pointed out were ubisoft..
Skyrim is from Bethesda, which is a ZeniMax subsidiary.
Mass Effect 3 is from BioWare, a subsidiary of EA Games.
GTA V is from Rockstar Games, a subsidiary of Take Two Interactive.
Many of the games he used have no affiliation with Ubisoft.
This talk is full of nonsense. He whimsically points to other major titles from recent years, shows what's wrong with them, and then says why these things "work." These things don't work. They are here because the developers couldn't do better with time and money given. You don't have "structure" as a positive in an open world game, you have it there as a necessity because of technical and other limitations. The analogy about marriage is groundless and incoherent. The free choice to get married and the supposed loss of freedom seems more a personal statement than an ideological one as you gain some freedoms or privileges in marriage that you wouldn't get otherwise. The act of getting married, and upholding a marriage is 100% an exercise in free choice without constraints. This dude has rationalized, Stockholm syndrome style, why real freedom is actually slavery to constraints so long as the slavery to constraints is enjoyable! Yeah, no. This is designing in a way that fundamentally lies to the player and detracts from a game's value.
It's really not, his data set is massive and has predictive validity for commercial game success and has good test-retest reliability. You have armchair conjecture. Obviously development time and budgets provides constraints, but that's a limitation on linear games and is not a unique feature to open world games. He's trying to answer what to put in the open world not whether or not to have them
@@S590573 You can believe whatever you want.
"The free choice to get married and the supposed loss of freedom seems more a personal statement than an ideological one as you gain some freedoms or privileges in marriage that you wouldn't get otherwise."
If you don't think marriage is a restriction of choice, you are an alien who needs to do more research before you can blend in with the Earth Hu-man creatures.
@@scottlee600 Go play The Last of Us twice, then go play Fallout: New Vegas twice. There is a value in meaningful choices.
The problem with this discussion is this is just designing games for the mainstream audience. Pretty much every space sim that exists shows that there are players that are perfectly fine without the game giving them "volition" to do something. In fact some players are turned off by this very thing and only play games that offer almost zero guidance or reason to do anything within the game. Designing games in the way contrary to this video is not wrong. Nothing about an entertainment product can be wrong. People enjoy different things. Some of those just have niche audiences. i find it interesting someone who bases his discussion in psychology fails to understand this.
He did say some sandboxes work and he had not the time to get into those, though.
^ Yes he did.
That's not what he's saying. It's not about giving the player a checklist of things to do, or even directing their playstyle. I think it might easier to describe what he's talking about by describing a failure in 'volition'.
In sandboxes a failure in 'volition' usually feels like the game is incomplete. For example maybe you build a spaceship and then when you go to fly it and you suddenly realise it has no purpose. There's nothing to shoot, there's no trading and to top it off it's limited in speed to 5m/s. While it was a lot of fun to design the ship. What's the point if you can't test your design? You could've had the same experience from just using a 3d modeling program.
That's an extreme example, but I have played a lot of EA sandbox games in various genres that are almost this bad. The gist is when building a sandbox you need to meet player expectations and have enough systems to tie everything together. From that players will be able to derive their own goals.
What he is doing is trying to generalize an audience of people that want different things. Some people want the very experiences he says are bad. Its a stupid discussion. There is no wrong way to make a game. You can research what the mainstream audience wants, but you can never objectify entertainment product design. Ive seen the "x object has no purpose" argument many times. Whenever x gets removed or changed people complain. Why? Because they found something they enjoy doing with it.
Well coming from a Dungeon Master perspective, this talk actually strikes at something that a lot of newer DMs do wrong. They fill their world with random encounters/NPCs/etc from the rolling tables in the Dungeon Master Guide and then the game is OK, but to make it real fun you need to give these encounters/NPCs purpose. And that is something that I do not see in many of the new games. It feels more like they are just thrown in there to extend the amount of time you get when you play the game, and at least for me, that is not compelling.
He mixed up Ezio and Altair, and a couple other things about the games in the examples.
Clearly he's not a real gamer.
Not all gamers are game developers and not all game developers are gamers.
Some gamers only play the game genres they like. In my case, there's a lot of titles I've never touched, even though they're famous. They just don't appeal to me. But as a game dev, I have looked into videos and articles about some of them to see why they are so popular.
Yeah, that's true too. Well, in my youth I did play as many games of the genres I like as much as I could (thanks to the power of simulators, haha). But now, I don't really have the time. Though, I'm still the kind of people that mostly sticks to his preferred genres. For example, I rarely touch platformers, unless it's to learn something...
So? They're basically the same anyway. XP
Linear gaming is dead? Just try: A Plague Tale Innocence, and you will understand that it's just not true.
He never said that linear game were dead, he just point out that "open world", "be who you want to be", tags sounds more sexy to customers than "play this "story", "guy", "whatever"", he also said that game like "the last of us" are also great to give players some Volition but it's way more tricky to do this.
IMHO If you want to watch something more about how to give your playerbase a goal that they will achieve through they own means, be it linear stuff or more open story thingy, watch ua-cam.com/video/4mgK2hL33Vw/v-deo.html (this is also a GDC talks but from a writer point of view)
@@fitzolivaw758 thank you! I'll check it out
A teleshop salesman posing as a scientist. Trying to prove a theory by looking for evidence that supports it and building straw-mans out of points that are against it.
He is talking about engagement over time in a roundabout way by explaining a forced model. His theory failed from the base assumption by thinking all players have the same goal when playing the same game.
His model also only considers as relevant the ingame mechanics without even understanding their reason or function. It completely ignores other factors like controls, UI, community influence, payment methods, after release services.
By his proposed standards Minecraft is a failure.
I Turned Off Gta 5 the moment it started throwing the N-word, Maybe It was a personal Conflict but as an Immigrant having witnessed both sides of the World... i found it to be quite Disturbing & Distasteful...
To enable such a Narrative of Polluted Thinking, even in a Virtual Parody world of an American City... is something i couldn't be a part of... it was basically spitting in the Face of every Humanitarian effort that tries to Erase this Racial Line of black and white...
The open world, endless arrays of models and characters... hundreds of hours of design & dev work... all of that meant nothing to me.. The game at this point wasn't Autonomous Enough for me... the Pillars of Volition Collapsed... because it Conflicted with my own Internal Narrative.... despite it being a Super-hit game & a technological Marvel and all... The only way to practice Volition was to turn the Damn thing off.
Autonomy = Volition not Freedom
..... beautifully worded & can be applied to experiences beyond just games... im thinking about Societies, Nations & Religions...Thanks for making sense of this concept... It helped me understand my own brain & the game behind the Game.
Regards
if you are relevant why would you read polygon?
"i've gotten death threats" no one cares. also welcome to being an entertainer or public figure.
"we can look at current games" with the exception of witcher, those aren't good games. it isn't that witcher is good, but i haven't played it and have no opinion about it.
"shadow of mordor ..." was rated the worst game of the year.
"i'm not a designer or an engineer" are you an accountant?
If you're unhappy with your life you should do your best to take steps to better it. Hopefully you find a better self, and success along with that.
hope you're more reasonable now, read your comment and delete it
@@Rexodiak what a shitty thing to say. at least the other guy was condescending.
@@DarkenedVibe when i originally read your comment i found it mildly amusing. but now that i'm brought back to it by another poster a couple interpretations have come to mind. one charitable and one not.
the charitable interpretation isn't really what you said, but if you basically meant "i hope you find a friend", you are a better person than i gave you credit. and that possible disgrace isn't something i can tollerate. to accidentally denougue others is subhuman, it violate my identity and most abashed of all i would be responsible for it.
that interpretation is what causes me to reciprocate empathicly. for- for you to bring up a lack of friendship, would imply you were having some difficulty with it, and that is something i can help with, not that this is particularly timely. regardless, mastering decorum and sociality isn't particularly satisfying. so you need to determine if you are lonely, friendless, and whether you want help.
i can teach you nihilism, which allows mastery of most skills nearly effortlessly, including those of social conduct, but if you are lonely it wont help. it helps friendlessness, and esteem, but not spirituality. it is cold, where there normally is the warmth of incompetance.
the original way i took your comment back when you made it was that of an ideologue disclosure trying to evangelize an inferior point of view; the growth ideology. but only now with emotions dry, do i see the potential error in my perception.
back then i realized "Hopefully you find a better self" is a great backhanded compliment, taken at face value. i laughed when i first read it. or perhaps when i misread it due to my mood.
if you were trying to reach out for help, and i mistook your attempt to reach out as scathing wit, i must apologize. and to make amends i offer topical aid without qualification.
if this is simply irrelevant from untimeliness, i wish you well all the same.
and if my initial reading was correct, keep the fire burning. your quip is an excellent turn of phrase. if you want to go into comedy you are a good 30% there. i didn't say it then, but i hope you are not only proud of your conduct, and i hope you wear it on your sleeve. a great many people can't give a good insult, let alone put lingerie on it.
keep your head high and strut, because you become the standards of your conduct.
as for me, there is no potential for a better self. and no motive for a more sociable one.
@@morthim O wise sage of the internet, teach me the ways of nihilism
Now seriously, how does nihilism allows mastery of most skills?
i believe it can be done!