Patreon Letter: 31st December 2020

Hey everyone!

It is somewhat difficult to celebrate the ending of a terrible year when every material reality that made it so awful is in the process of getting exponentially worse, but still, goodbye 2020. Hopefully next year I shall be able to venture further than by back garden when it comes to going outside, but it's looking grim in the short term. Here's hoping the entire British economy doesn't spontaneously combust tomorrow.

Aside from the entire world falling apart and the collapse of the remains both my physical and mental wellbeing, it's not actually been a bad year for me. Like, the bad shit has happened to everyone, but a lot of people have it worse than I, and on the other side of the equation, AM has been an incredible podcast this year and I'm super proud. It's our best year and it's not even close, if you ask me. Sometimes everything comes together. And sometimes you have to cover G Gundam, Gundam Wing and 08th MS Team, in a row. You simply can't win 'em all.

Anyway the point is despite everything I'm proud of the work we did and I hope everyone reading this enjoyed it all too. Thanks for sticking around, sincerely. Hope you're doing okay.

Okay now onto the real letter: I played Jedi Fallen Order. And I was going to write about it for real but fifteen minutes after finishing I forget the entire game so that's not worth it. It's fine it's purely carbon neutral. Loads of incredible ideas and elements that it just kinda sketches out into a frictionless amalgamation instead of commiting to either platformer, souls game, metroidvania, tomb raider puzzler, all of which are great design templates. That piece writes itself. Please imagine all 800 words of it right now, if it pleases you. 

Instead, in the wake of finishing the game, I started tweeting about one of my least favourite trends of modern game design: the diagetic narration that functions both as tutorialising and signposting for the player, and came to the realisation that the codec from Metal Gear is absolutely fucking genius and has been done dirty by history. I wanted to expand all that into a short article about that because tweets are last decade. We're all going back to blogs. Warning, this is very rambly and also a very simplified narrative so I know there are exceptions, but I do think the core of this holds true as a way to look at this design progression. This is so extremely a blog.

The modern standard of narrative design weaving in character monologues with tutorials was truly cemented in the Uncharted games, but it's a total lie to act like those games invented them. Everything they did was an extension of games like Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time, just as one example. You can (and you know what, I will) make an argument that this traces back to Half Life, even though Gordon is silent. The throughline here is a form of narrative design that aims to be frictionless, seamless. At the time, due to its narrative focus, this was described as cinematic but I feel like that's pretty obviously a misnomer. Cinema - generally speaking, obviously there are exceptions - is defined by the cut. Half Life, Sands of Time, Uncharted, these are all games defined by continuity of space and time. Each area moves into the next, doing away with such childish gamey inventions as "levels," broken up often into chapters,  seamlessly interwoven with tasteful title cards. Half Life does this primarily with level design and some NPCs. Sands of Time frames its story with the famous explicit narration of its premise, so ends up more playful with its diagetic signposting. 

The reason Uncharted sticks out as the focal point for codifying this into A Thing isn't because it's particularly good at it, or that it has a really bold design idea, it is production values and focus testing. It is stories about how they'd mic up Nolan North while playing the game, and record his reactions. When Nathan Drake crests a ridge and says, out of breath, "just a little further, there's a rope on the left," or whatever, it works. The player knows what to do, the story moves on, it's all fine. It's a game about finding the one ledge to jump on and see the next pretty vista. Nothing is lost.

But.

This becomes so influential, that now this mode of design is literally everywhere, even though this genre of game that it was designed to complement does not exist anymore and hasn't for years.

Like, I am the JRPG enjoyer. JRPGs are very modal games. Either you're in cutscene, or walking on the overworld, or you're talking in towns, or crawling dungeons, or in a battle. This was, on console, seen as The Story Genre for a long time. I don't think the post Half Life mode of game storytelling is a direct response to this so much as it is a parallel development, but it definitely exists in opposition. It values different things. 

Which is why it's surreal on an elemental level that the Final Fantasy VII remake is all this. Like all the time. Every level flows into the next seamlessly, even the dungeons into the towns. The spaces are so contiguous to the point of absurdity, where before traversing space could be implied in the cut between screens, now you run all the way between plates in small loading corridors and it feels awkward and bad. As you navigate the dungeons Cloud and Co are constantly saying out loud exactly what to do, reacting to events in real time as they happen. Having short conversations on the long walks between encounters. Even talking to NPCs - you know, like a JRPG - has been replaced with overhearing long, fully voiced conversations that make you stand behind someone's shoulder like a weirdo.

It doesn't work. I like a lot of that game, but it's baffling as a design direction. Square's insecurity of no longer being the world leader in how you tell a video game story is palpable, and dragging it down every step of the way. Because this is still a 50 hour RPG! The dungeon puzzles are meant to be actual puzzles. The abstraction of the earlier games isn't just a technological limitation, it is the language by which these stories are told. You go into a town, you talk to a guy, and that guy says to you a direct line of worldbuilding. It's not how people talk, it is an abstraction of storytelling that feels far more natrual than walking down the train station platform hearing everyone talk to each other for 20 minutes with tortured references to the plot.

Its here that talking about this gets a little more complicated, because the counter-argument to my complaining is that this design exists for accessibility reasons. Developers want everyone who plays their game to finish it, so weaving in the signposting of what to do naturally ensures as little friction as possible, and nobody gets lost or has to look anything up.

Which seems at least hollow and misguided to me, and at most completely full of shit. Every AAA game now has this approach to its dialogue and signposting, yet also has twelve billion upgrade currencies, an ability tree the size of Norfolk, and a huge world map. Surely, if you wanted to make a game that everyone could enjoy and finish, you would simply make a shorter game that was simpler to understand, and primarily focused on narrative setpieces. Which is where this design emerged from. Separated from that context, it just means that every five seconds Cal Lightsaber remarks to himself which way to go, which is a cue to open up the map and see if you're able to go the opposite way, because you want to explore.

All of this long rambling brings me to the Codec, which in the context of the last fifteen years of watching this codified approach of modern video games develop, is absolutely genius. It was merely neat at the time, but now I find it absolutely revelatory. MGS games are about exploring spaces, and through that spacial exploration, finding items that allow you to solve puzzles and explore more of the space. Rinse and repeat. Sometimes those puzzles are bespoke environmental traversal sequences, sometimes they are boss fights. At any time, when the game wants to give you information as to what to do, a character will call Snake on the Codec and explain to Snake what he has to do. And crucially, at any time you don't understand what to do, Snake will call someone and ask. It is placed within just as much of a diagetic context as the Nathan Drake monologue, but it's never intrusive, it's almost always optional, and it's better at giving more direct hints when players get stuck.

In MGSV, you hear the same line of dialogue every time you see a fucking sniper. When the game thinks you're stuck it will tell you what to do. If you want specific context and advice hit the radio button and it will guess what you're asking about based on the context of what you're looking at. It's a tragedy!

Which isn't to say every game should have a codec placed within it, but instead that the total lack of consideration as to the way design elements interact with each other in 90% of AAA games is such a fuckin bummer. It's exhausting. Everything becomes a papered over mess, injected with needless complexity and systems so it is complex and grandiose enough to justify its scale and price, yet simultaneously sanded down of rough edges so nobody gets confused or lost. This is not accessibility, this is not consciencous design or genuinely thinking of the player. This is design by 4X marketing spreadsheet. And it is a direct result of the ludicrous amounts of money that modern AAA games are operating at. This is untenable, and this is only one lens looking primarily at one mechanic, but looking back over the past 20 years it's the marvel moviefication of games in real time. This could be a good spot to find some ingredients.

I've rambled enough. I hope this made sense somewhat! I have an existential crisis every time I play a big game and have for like five years lmao. There are still good ones, but I hope this piece makes clear that it's not just a case of Things Were Better Before, more that everythign being a soupy mess of contradictions is a result of the economic realities of game development. 

Anyway until this industry dies in a fire can I just ask Kojima to remember how he used to make games in the mean time. He was so good at it once! See you in 2021