How important is setting?
A reading of this Anton Chekhov quote might suggest that everything that exists should have a meaning to do so. It’s certainly a literary and stage tradition to only introduce things that are really necessary for the audience to understand. That’s perhaps a limitation of those genres, since plays tend to be more about the acting, the characters and the story, and books aren’t a visual medium. Time spent building up the world is time away from making the plot get on with it.
At the same time, if the only things that are introduced are important things, the world can feel sparse and shallow. I’ve been playing the latest Ace Attorney game, the investigations of Miles Edgeworth. It’s a great game, better than the Phoenix Wright games in my book. Even so, there are only a few characters introduced in any given “case”, and it’s usually pretty quickly apparent who the guilty party is just because of the small cast and processes of elimination. It’s arguable that such is intentional, but it does make a story seem a bit overstreamlined (and too easy) at times. Also, when running investigations, you can only examine certain things, almost always relevant to the case. This is also intentional, I figure, since it keeps players on track instead of getting bogged down in unnecessary details that can be interpreted in different ways. It’s investigating on rails, but it works for what they are trying to do.
That TVTropes article rephrases the quote as “do not include any unnecessary elements in a story.” That’s fine for a medium where you can rely on the reader or viewer to fill in the visual and setting gaps, but what of these MMO things and other games where the world itself is a significant part of the art budget and production pipeline? It’s almost worth arguing that the world itself is a character, or each zone is a character. They certainly have their own personality in many games… if a place can be thought of as having unique traits and moods. They are certainly meant to be distinct and to evoke moods.
Crafting a world by hand is a daunting prospect. We can certainly use procedural content generators to fill in the world for us, but even that has technical and artistic limits. Even the real world is procedural, of a sort, but the complexity is orders of magnitude more than we usually want to bother with simulating. So, we have to decide the threshold of detail that we want to bother with for our window dressing.
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I like setting and backstory. I’ve always been that way. I wanted to animate for Disney, but found myself wanting to do the extra characters (stage dressing) and backgrounds more than lead animation. In high school, the few times my friends wrangled me into doing something social, I helped with stage setup and the school TV program. I spent a LOT of time working with computers and cameras trying to make some cool blue screen effects for the daily broadcasts. (It never worked out, but dagnabbit, we tried.) I’ve written game design documents that are 80% background and setting, history and sociology. I do more worldcrafting than anything else when I do my own creative work. To me, the setting is the backbone of a well-presented story.
Tangentially, that’s why I still enjoy watching Sleeping Beauty. That Disney film still has one of the most distinctive settings in animation history, and it’s far stronger for it.
Yes, yes, character really drives a story and makes the plot move, but if it’s not set within a framework that makes sense and is interesting, the story loses plausibility in my mind. I’ve been to a handful of stage plays in my life, some with intricate settings, some with sparse props. Inevitably, the ones with more interesting staging are the ones that I remember best. Let’s call it “immersion”, shall we? I want to believe that the play is taking place in a place that isn’t merely a platform with a few spotlights.
Of course, this need not always mean huge attention to intricate detail. Sometimes it just means some well-crafted props, often designed to have multiple uses with clever use of lighting and positioning.
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Back to games, then, we do a LOT of this sort of positioning and lighting fudgery. We reuse textures as much as possible, stretching our assets as far as we can. World of Warcraft is a crazily colored place, with a single hallway or tree having several color shifts. The Forsaken capital of Undercity is a colorful place, almost a circus of colors. Even though there are weird skulls and other trappings of Undeath, the place has an almost festive feel. For a bunch of undead grumps, the Forsaken really know how to liven up a catacomb.
A single hallway might shift color a half dozen or more times in the space of forty game yards. Upon closer inspection, though, each ten yards of the wall has the same exact texture, and that texture is even mirrored across each section from left to right. That’s how we get away with having a lot of building geometry without a huge texture footprint. We reuse stuff. To make it more interesting and keep the eye from seeing the pattern, though, we can layer vertex color on top of the texture or position things such that you don’t usually get to compare them in the same field of view. This segment of the wall might be green, that one is yellow, and that one is orange. Break them up with lighting tricks and darker pillars, and boom, it looks different enough that you don’t really notice the repetition unless you’re looking for it (and with buildings, there’s always some repetition in the real world anyway). Since you’re usually prowling the halls on your way to somewhere else, it’s not an issue; your mind just files it away as “different enough” and accepts it.
That’s the threshold we want; “different enough”, which translates to “interesting enough” to read as plausible. The real world is a varied, amazingly detailed place. We don’t have that sort of fidelity in the digital realm… though each “generation” does get more and more detailed (and more expensive to produce).
When you look at a shot of most game worlds from a bird’s eye view, you see the repetition in the ground textures. Sure, critters, trees and other plants, vertex color, lighting and assorted other effects break up the visuals, but we naturally see patterns. Zoom out enough to where the staticy fudge factors slip below our “immediate surroundings” bubble, and the patterns assert themselves.
Maybe we shouldn’t try to directly replicate reality. Toying with stylization can pay off big when you’re trying to sell a place. It need not be realistic, only believable.
In summary, then, I don’t think that we as world crafters have the luxury of only showing the important bits. What would WoW be like if the only NPCs present were questgivers? If the only towns were those with questgivers in them? If the only critters were those who you could slaughter for quests or super special loot?
Those level 1 rabbits or snakes? They are almost completely useless, but they help sell the world. Sure, you may see a wolf take one down randomly (very cool for setting the mood and hinting that mobs have a life beside being loot pinatas), but even that action is window dressing of a sort. The real world is full of moving parts that we will never get to, and that aren’t important to us in any practical way, and yet, they tell us in subtle, almost subconscious ways that we are somewhere real.
If the sense of place is even remotely important to us as game designers, we have to create and implement those things that have absolutely no use in our game world, other than setting the scene.
As with the special effects artists in some movies, it’s a grueling task, ultimately successful when it’s not consciously obvious to the end user. And yet, they will notice it if it’s missing, even if only subconsciously, and then wonder why they don’t feel immersed in the game. Birds in the sky, critters on the ground, gusts of wind… it’s all just so much window dressing.
And that makes all the difference.
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Edited to add: Since Callan invoked Tolkien in the comments, Syp’s recent article on the good Professor is highly relevant:
Tish Tosh Tesh 
Well Teshness, setting (and brilliantly done setting at that) was enough to make me play Jade Dynasty nonstop for 3 months. ^_^
It is truly, beautifully, utterly Wuxia. Even the music is beautiful.
Without that brilliantly done setting, what there is of the *game* would not be enough to hold me for more than 3 days, tops.
(Closest equivalent for Wuxia, in terms of an English concept would be Knight Errant Romances.)
Great article. Yup, making a virtual world or game feel alive takes details, love and and effort. And it what makes a game great, what nugget said.
Regarding Chekov… there is a golden starship model in the office of Admiral Quinn in Star Trek. I am sure STO players will not give up until Cryptic has added it to the list of player ship skins…^^
The most important thing is that there is enough to DO and see in each corner of the world. You can make it as big as you want, as long as it’s not too bland.
But I agree that a game needs more of the setting fleshed out…That allows the player to feel immersed, and puts them in control of their experience. Just, don’t get bland!
Life would be boring just with Chekhov’s gun.
If anything serves a purpose, their would be probably no excitement besides puzzling.
On the other hand, when exploring an MMO I usually feel sorry for the artists. They obviously spend a lot of time, creating many different mini-settings within the world, that serve no purpose.
To stay on familiar ground, if you look around Stormwind, you will find many, accessible buildings, having no use. There are many spots in the old world, that tell their own little story. A wagon with a broken wheel, a small hamlet in a lonely region, with two graves aside. My favorite spaces are beggars end, outside of Darkshire and the small hamlet at at the waterfall in Elwynn. Just head to your right, after you left Stormwind and look for a small path up the mountain, easily to miss.
I love places like these, but whenever I find those little masterpieces of art, I ask myself why the game designer did not use them. At least for a side story, colouring the daily live.
Supposedly, the Quest and Story writing guys work parallel to the artist creating the world. Therefore they simply do not know about these places or these are not finished, at the moment they are writing the stories.
I disagree. For instance, Tolkein is often called a world builder or that he created a whole world.
But look at every single element he introduces, relative to this sentence
‘do not include any unnecessary elements in a story’
All of the elements he brought in played their part in the grand story. They didn’t just meet some ents and “go cool, talking trees”, then wandered off. They played their part in the grander war.
You might call it setting building – but everything he brought in had it’s place. He didn’t just dash some birds around in the sky – when he mentioned birds circling, they were the evil ones spies.
Though I’ll grant that’s some of the magic of books – they can leave stuff to peoples imagination and just concentrate on the big stuff. In a game – yeah, well, what do we do about the gaps between the big stuff?
Personally I’d like to see ecologies, where you see a mother wolf dragging meat back to her cubs, then you see them grow, then you see them as an enemy in the world (instead of GAH, just spawning out of thin air).
Make that ecology one big threatening component of the larger story.
Kinda like real life!
Totally agree. I’m not a designer nor an artistic person but I recognise the value in “the things we don’t notice”. Just like how music and sound influences us greatly when watching a film or TV show, it all of the little background flourishes that takes a game from being OK to being great. I think it’s what people mean when they talk about ‘polish’ in games. Polish isn’t just about getting rid of as many bugs as possible but it’s also about adding in all of those little extra touches that help people buy into the world.
Callan, indeed, that’s the difference between literature and these pesky visual mediums. We can still rely on player imagination to fill in some of the gaps, and we can trick their perceptions into thinking there’s more detail than there really is, but it’s still very different from the way readers approach books.
Reading every word on the page, we imagine the peripheral stuff that interests us and the “interstitial” sort of contextual details. If the author were to describe all that, it would be interminally boring. In a visual medium, we have to have *something* there just in case the user decides to go poking around in those peripheral areas.
Readers and players are very different animals.
This is also why story in MMOs or even games in general is very different from a novel, play or even a movie. User control changes a lot of how you approach the creative pipeline.
Oh, and speaking of movies, CG movies and “real” movies are very different, too. When you’re filming live on location, you get a lot of “free” stuff in those peripheral views. You can set up a camera in Times Square and get a TON of free details in buildings, as well as cars and people milling around. If you’re doing a completely CG movie, you have to build ALL of that peripheral stuff, completely digitally. At some level, it *must* be procedural; there’s no other way to generate all of that in a human’s lifetime.
That distinction is crucial, and why worldbuilding, whether in games or in movies, is such a monumental task, and why we really have to get as many of those little extra details nailed down at least to a threshold of believability. We don’t get them for free, like we would in real life.
I think “the things we don’t notice” is an important phrase as we truely don’t notice a number of things that made difference in our presentation.
Tesh, if I understand you, your still just describing making something there. Like if the player decides to go down the alley, your not talking about putting anything relevant to the greater story conflict, your just talking about making a convincing alley.
I disagree. I think it’s pointless making a really convincing alley, if the player going there isn’t authoring a relevant part to the greater story. It’s just making a waste of time, albiet a really convincing waste of time.
In fact for myself, if the set wobbles and the alley is unconvincing, but I find uncle ben is there about to shoot up…wow, now that’s significant! Who knew he was a junkie!? And do you show your presence and try to stop him, or try and turn your back to this?
THAT is interesting! A really well rendered garbage can is NOT interesting.
Oh wait, if it has a physics engine attached to it, it is, judging from alot of forums I read.
To be honest, what I see in alot of forum goers is kind of like this, which I’m cutting and pasting from someone at the indie-rpgs.com
“- The person cannot distinguish between “hopping over a fence” and conflict, between “this guy meets that guy” and a decisive plot event, or between “dramatic close-up” and character decision-making
– The person cannot summarize any story in simple four-point structure (conflict, rising action, climax, conclusion) – they typically hare off into philosophical or technical interpretations, or remain stuck in narrating the first ten minutes of the story in detail
– The person will devote many hours (and can talk for many hours) to commenting on the details of the story’s presentation, either feverishly supportive or feverishly dismissive, but entirely uncritically”
All the little details do not matter. They are a garnish to a main meal which is apprecated, but doesn’t have to be there as long as there is a REAL hunk of meat on the plate to tuck into.
That or the garnish is confushed for a real conflict, or decisive plot point, or significant character choice.
To me, all the garnish in the world does not make up for any lack of meat.
But for alot of gamers I read, they want a profuse amount of garnish, but in the end, they don’t want any meat. Perhaps a rare few of them want a thin sliver.
One piece of meat I heard someone else suggest once, for gamers, is that there are two boats. One is on fire. You are on the boat that is not on fire. What do you do?
It’s the moral dimension that is the real meat – not a beutifully rendered sail, or having to fill out the pantry of the ship perfectly just in case the player wants to wander around in there.
Or so I passionately think.
Callan, there’s a difference between a game world that is meant to tell a story, say, Uncharted 2, and a game world that is meant for players to tell their own story with.
Yes, a good storytelling game needs to have a main dish of meat, as it were (and yes, blowing the budget on fripperies is a waste), but games where the player does the lion’s share of storytelling needs to have enough space to explore and things to do there. Those things need not all be connected, as all things in the real world aren’t connected.
Exploring is not the player storytelling. How many stories can you think of where the protagonist poked around in a cupboard, then he explored behind a house, then he climbed a tree, then he got down, then he waded through a stream…
I could go on and on with little things done, but my point is that these are just a series random actions – they don’t build up into a story that has a begining/problem, middle/dealing with the problem, end/some conclusion to how the problem was delt with. They are not story telling. There are millions of books out there that do not involve someone just exploring around alot. Exploration is just not the player storytelling, at all.
And I wasn’t talking about a ‘good storytelling game’ – it’s actually a recurring concept I lothe, given that a game supposes an interactive medium, yet here you are, presented with a story you can’t interact with and are just told it like you were reading a book. And there’s some pointless button pressing busy work to do between each time a story fragment is told.
I think it’s entirely possible for a player to make their own story each time they play the same game through (preferably the game records it, but apart from stats that’s not happening yet). Some people have even done it in chess, though it’s possible to make a game more conductive of it.
There is no need to be told a story in a supposed interactive activity. Nor does exploration and poking around a game world make a story.
On the other hand I’ve seen alot of people put in alot of effort making all sorts of game world assets, because they find it burningly important. So atleast they are making something – but treating it as story itself is like the guy who does lighting at a play treating the lighting AS the story. When really it’s just an appreciated garnish.
Callan, here’s one good example of players telling the story in a game that doesn’t have a “proper” dev-crafted story:
http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2010/03/24/pitchfork-media-a-portrait-of-wurm-online/
It’s possible, though it’s certainly not the sort of gaming everyone wants to bother with.
There was really no end to that play account, so I wouldn’t call it player story telling as it didn’t have the whole beginning, middle and end. But their chosen medium, the mmorpg, crippled them in that regard.
But I was reading a bit of the book ‘The road’ the other day. It actually has a bit where a guy just appears in an upper story window, shooting arrows at the protagonist and his young son, both coincidentally pushing a cart.
I was thinking more of fallout 3 when I thought of people crafting their own story each time through.
I think your trying to say either you have a dev crafted story or it devolves into, at best, being ganked in the woods.
I think devs can provide a structure that moves play from beginning and some sort of conflict set up by players, engages the play/middle, then the outcome, without the devs filling out the details of the story entirely themselves. They can just provide the spine of begining, middle and end. Players provide the flesh, and the lightening!
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