Making bleak / tragic games?

Game Design and Theory Game Design

Started by Ketchaval May 29, 2005 09:16 PM

20 comments, last by pim 18 years, 10 months ago

2,476

May 31, 2005 11:21 AM

Quote:Original post by pim
I think the pen and paper rpg "Call of Cthulu" manages this great, and I would like to see the same thing in a computer game. You can shoot cultists and other humans, but don't even think about going after the big guys.. If you see something slimy or big then RUN LIKE HELL!!! Here you'll have to find other ways to beat them. You'll have to do research, search for scrolls, artifacts or things like that to find a way to send these demons back to where they come from. So it's a mixture of things you can kill with a gun and things you'll have to run from until you've got the proper means to get rid of them..

Yep.. would work also in a scifi-themed game, for example the HL universe: make the player feel very small in the gigantic otherworldly structures, where undescribable things float and utilize mind control, paralyzing "abduction" white light & other nasty tricks. Guns & shooting the ordinary troops mean in the end nothing then, since these are the source of oppression.

I think HL2 sort of went for this "otherworldly menace" approach in the Citadel levels, but still made the player far too powerful to convey this effectively, except for the excellent prisoner casket rides. Well, maybe in HL3...

Github: https://github.com/cadaver C64 development: http://covertbitops.c64.org/

WeirdoFu

205

May 31, 2005 12:26 PM

Personally, I feel that most people are too used to "Hollywood endings" There's always something positive, even if its open ended. Self-sacrifice is positive in some ways too. However, life isn't like that.

There are situations where there is not win-win solution. In the end, all you can do is minimize your own losses. In the big picture, you may very well still lose. Sometimes, it is false hope that drives people to attempt and try what they can. However, to a certain extent, in the end, everything may still turn out to be futile. Its really just one big moral dilema.

I think it would take some guts and skill to properly explore some of these things in games. You can have situations where you have to make choices between bad outcomes. For example, in a war torn region where food is scarce even to yourself, do you save a kid from starvation by taking him back to some military sponsored orphanage where you know he'll just be sent out to fight and most likely die on the battle field? Or do you share you food rations with him, knowing that you may both die anyways eventually, just from lack of food? Or do you let him just die there and move on with enough food rations to maybe make it across the border to where there is food. And realistically, this can actually happen.

Of course, the challenge is just how much of this can you put in a game without turning people away. It may turn out to be a rather morbid game concept, which probably won't fly in the majority market. But just the brutal realism, to a certain extent, may find you a niche. It'll probably be a bit more intense and nerve racking than survival horror, since, its pretty much just survival, mentally and physically.

Gyrthok

412

May 31, 2005 01:29 PM

Quote:I think the pen and paper rpg "Call of Cthulu" manages this great, and I would like to see the same thing in a computer game. You can shoot cultists and other humans, but don't even think about going after the big guys.. If you see something slimy or big then RUN LIKE HELL!!! Here you'll have to find other ways to beat them. You'll have to do research, search for scrolls, artifacts or things like that to find a way to send these demons back to where they come from. So it's a mixture of things you can kill with a gun and things you'll have to run from until you've got the proper means to get rid of them..

Martian Gothic was very similar to this. There were zombies that "Wake up" after a short while, and though the player can mow them down with guns, ammunition is extremely limited AND they get back up again afterawhile anyway. There was also these big Tri-thingies that would mow you over if you got in their way, so you had to find a way to get rid of them later on. The only problems with the game was that it as abit to linear in its thinking, so you had to pretty much follow a walkthrough-like path to get anything done.

Theif also did an alright job of feeling vulnerable as well. The player wouldn't last long in combat at all, so he was more motivated to get the f**k out of there and find another way of dealing with opponents. ;D

GyrthokNeed an artist? Pixeljoint, Pixelation, PixelDam, DeviantArt, ConceptArt.org, GFXArtist, CGHub, CGTalk, Polycount, SteelDolphin, Game-Artist.net, Threedy.

Madster

242

May 31, 2005 11:37 PM

Interesting. There are many questions raised implicitly.

One and the first I'll tackle is: do you really want a bleak game? I know I want, but let's go into detail a bit.
Movie comparison: Seven.
Now, I saw that movie, and after that ending, I left the theather very mad and depressed. Never watched the movie again. The ending really got to me. Yet, to whoever asks, I tell the movie is great. It achieves exactly what it set out to achieve.
If I was to play a game with a Seven-like ending, I wouldn't replay it. Not a happy thought.

Second: In a game, as someone said, we're talking 40 hours of bleakness. If you manage to make it work, you'll have one helluva depressed player. For more bleakness (and the explanation to tragic RPGs) check out some Japanese movies. As Hollywood has a tradition of happy endings, Japan (and China too I believe) has a tradition of bleak endings.

Back in topic, One game I found achieved this is Silent Hill 2. Spoiler warning! When you find Laura the knife girl, and you realise the monster you save her from, to her looked like her father trying to rape her, and then everything lights on fire and she goes "you see it too? it's always like this for me". (to whoever didn't get that, she lit her house on fire after the fact and in the process killed her mother. In the graveyard at the beginning she's looking for her.)

Now that is some bleak stuff. The endings have the same tone. I really liked that, but the more you enjoy it, the more it brings you down. Maybe you could have a bleak game and a cheer up ending? or a cheer up post-ending? Bleak endings do not always seem like a loss (specially when you see character growth), but leave you missing something. Then again maybe it's just a cultural trait.

BTW I totally agree with the explosives thing. They need to be taken more seriously. Also, grieving people in games (and irl) give me the creeps every time. I have no point anymore so i'll end this post :)

Working on a fully self-funded project

Iron Chef Carnage

1,845

June 01, 2005 12:14 AM

FOr a bleak ending that didn't quite make me hate it the way Seven did, take a look at Colossus: The Forbin Project. Awesome.

The new Dawn of the Dead remake had a neat double-ending, where you go into the credits with a sail-into-the-sunset ending, and during the rolling credits you get glimpses that show it to be a sail-into-peril ending, with a very tight spot at the end. Evil Dead managed something like this.

makeshiftwings

398

June 01, 2005 02:26 AM

Quote:Original post by Madster

Back in topic, One game I found achieved this is Silent Hill 2.

I was about to say Silent Hill 4. It's also very bleak; the main character is basically trapped in his apartment the entire game, and can only crawl through a hole in the bathroom into a weird nightmare world, or bang hopelessly on the door and walls trying to get people to hear him. Plus every level of the game is about some tragic event and usually ends with one of the few nice people in the game getting slaughtered. A lot of "survival horror" games maintain that feeling of helplessness and bleakness the whole time; games like The Suffering and Fatal Frame, for example. Most of them also have unhappy endings, though there is usually some kind of resolution: even if you don't "win", you should get something, like finding out who the killer really was, or what was really going on, or what the strange runes in the book really meant.

However, I think the audience for really bleak games is less than the audience for bleak movies/music. If you're watching a depressing movie, you usually feel like you have to sit through the whole thing to see it through to the end, which is an hour and a half. With a game that you have to play in multiple sittings, if you end up getting depressed every time you play, you might just give up. For instance, Requiem for a Dream is a really depressing movie, and I watched it twice, but if it was a game, I don't think I'd have the will to play through the whole thing if it just kept getting more and more miserable.

But of course there's the idea of moderation. Just because you're making the game "bleak" doesn't mean you have to strive to make it the most depressing, agonizing, heartbreaking event in the world. I think you can be very bleak and intersperse it with some dark humor and romance and come out just fine.

Madster

242

June 02, 2005 02:30 AM

Interesting, you mentioned bleak music and that made me think it over.

I know several people who listen to bleak music ALL the time, and love it. So I guess... why not for a game?

about the tone, yeah you could keep things interesting by making it a little light-hearted at times (not funny ha-ha but smallish grin funny), or having good things happen once in a while (the kind that gives you fuzzy warm feelings)

Silent Hill 4 was bleak too. If the voice of Harry T. was a bit less whiny I would have felt quite sorry for the guy. And his constant mumbling.

Oh something else! this might sound silly but if you think it over it makes sense:
The bigger a character is onscreen, the more you relate to it.
(of course, there are other factors too)
Simple!

because in our 3D world this relates to distance, and if you constantly see someone close to you, you wind up relating. Even if it's in a negative way. Remember that thing psychologists say about the size of the people in children's drawings? :)

So in order to develop attachment, you need the characters to stay close and figure a way to have them zoomed up. I've noticed that whenever I bring non-gamer friends to my place and there's a game with a character up close, they ask about it.
You gotta be able to make out their face at the very least.

Working on a fully self-funded project

WeirdoFu

205

June 02, 2005 09:20 AM

Probably some mechanics that would help....

- Close-ups of detailed facial expressions, which means we'll need expressive faces in game
- zoom outs that are just enough to see body language....something that requires good acting as well
- the proper camera angles can also show a persons emotions and inner turmoil (something like how hitchcock always uses a slanted camera angle when something weird is about to happen)
- being able to hear internal monologues or stream of thoughts of the character, if done right, can put you further into his mind set.

Just some common things to throw in. Bleakness isn't something that should just be in the script, its something that involves the entire atmosphere to be done right. Sometimes, even if the script isn't dark, the general atmosphere can drive the whole tone. Its kind of like how a good actor can protray a dozen different emotions just by saying the phrase "Thank you." in the proper fashion.

hoLogramm

170

June 02, 2005 09:38 AM

Maybe you should wipe out the whole family of the alter ego in the course of the game and let the player die too after defeating his evil. Or let his girlfriend, or long time friend die in the end.
I like those endings which leave you in a dark and heavy mood.

But letting the player die before he can finish his mission is really senseless because i probably do so 10 times in 5 minutes when playing ;)

Iron Chef Carnage

1,845

June 02, 2005 09:58 AM

Excellent point, hoLogramm.

Maybe one of the reasons we react so poorly to our character's death is the fact that his death has never meant the end of the game before. We've thrown him down holes, impaled him on spikes, fed him to monsters, riddled him with bullets and burned him to a cinder time after time after time. He always gets up, and he always tries again. It's the standard FFVII question: Why didn't they just toss a fenix down at Aeris? She'd been killed more gruesomely than that before.

So killing a player character as though he was an NPC (read: permanently) drives a real wedge between the character and the player. The second time through FFVII, did anyone get close to Aeris? No. She was meat on a stick from the moment you met her. Don't waste money getting her gear, don't waste time levelling her. She isn't really part of the team. She's a plot device.

If you let the story eclipse the player's role in a game, then the player will begin thinking like an audience member, and only identify himself with the characters that are going to see it through to the end. After all, I'm going to be in front of the TV all the way through the game. A character who won't match my endurance is not fit to be my avatar.

Making bleak / tragic games?

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