Danger vs. Damage

I promise that this will be the last esoteric thread I make for some time.

For a while now - and I mean many years - I've been trying to figure out what makes for a dramatic story, with respect to combat and warfare. I've watched many movies, played many games and read many stories, and I could never quite pin down why some stories made me believe the drama they were conveying and made me "feel" it much more than others, even though most of the stories I'm thinking about are inherently good. And I think I finally know what that is.

A good dramatic story centres around danger. More specifically, the feeling that the protagonists (whom we care about and want to see win) are in direct, immediate danger, and that if they make a mistake, they are going to suffer serious consequences. What determines whether a story will work for me or not, however, is if that story only informs us of that danger and possibly shows the danger onto third parties, or whether that story goes ahead and actually administers real, palpable and even final damage onto said protagonists.

A story that I can point to as a dramatic failure is - and keep in mind I actually like this movie - the story of the Expendables. For the amount of action, bravado and violence that movie displayed, it became very evident very soon that none of the protagonists were going to die or get seriously hurt, and that took a lot away from the drama. That's not to say that I need to see people die to believe it (I don't believe in the Countdown approach), but rather that the fact these people never suffered any meaningful damage "trained" me to simply expect that they never would. Few stories switch tone half-way through, and of those even fewer work.

To break habit, I won't talk about SRMTHFG! and instead pick Oban: Star Racers as a good dramatic story. This is a series which starts off the protagonists on a bad foot, and essentially carries them that way the whole way through, to the point where I was trained to expect the worst in every situation and fear the worst, as well. When I realised the story was not just prepared to go there, but in fact all too willing, the danger felt a lot more real.

The point of this entire contemplation, as posted here and not elsewhere, is to feed back into why I've struggled to find certain stories in City of Heroes dramatically compelling, and indeed why I fail to find so very many of them as "epic." By the nature of the game, and for the need to be fair to everybody, we can only ever face informed danger, but very rarely will we ever face actual damage, at least such that cannot be repaired by backing off and trying again. It's understandable why this is - it would suck to play in a persistent world otherwise. And I'm probably one of the staunchest detractors of failable missions as a concept.

However, I have picked up people's stories of what they found to be "epic" over the years, both from people I know and from people I've seen here on the forums. They usually involve a Scrapper rising to the occasion and cleaning hose when the entire rest of the team is down, saving the day from the brink of defeat or a Defender joining a team which was struggling for their lives and bringing unbelievable victory with his support. And in almost all instances I've personally seen these stories, people have told of situations where actual damage had been suffered by their team, and they were personally responsible for turning that around.

This may come off as idle contemplation, but at least I have an answer for why I so very rarely find team gameplay to be "epic" or "dramatic." Fun, sure. Engaging, of course. But fun and engaging in the same way Pac Man would be - it's a cool game. Narratively, however, team games have always taken away from that feeling of epicness, because the only way I can feel a situation is truly dramatic is for the game to hurt the players, and hurt them bad. And that's generally something game designers try to avoid as a common experience, simply because while it may be fun for the hero, it rarely is for the victims.

The closest I've found to a game that pulls this off is L4D2, and only because that game's built in AI has the tendency to grief its own players, and even in that game it's been frustrating far more often that it's been amazing. Yes, it's amazing to rescue your entire team from a Tank, but not nearly as amazing to be the one laying on his back, yelling "Can somebody give me a hand here? I can't do this alone!"

In a way, I just can't buy a story where the protagonists always suffering serious damage by the skin of their teeth all the time. It breeds a belief that nothing bad can ever happen, and that even when things look bad, something will happen to turn things around. Personally, I'm much more impressed with stories that do allow the unthinkable to happen and then ask the protagonists "Now what do you do?" Because, to me, protagonist magnanimous in victory is still less impressive than a protagonist tenacious in defeat.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.

I've been on teams that have been so crushingly efficient that I've found myself secretly wishing that something would go wrong, because mission after mission where noone's health bar goes orange, let alone red, can be boring after a while.

It's unpredictable though. I've been on teams that only really gelled and started working and communicating as a team after a near, or actual, brush with team wipes. On the other hand I've been on teams that completely fell apart after a single team wipe.

Even defeat can be epic, if everyone approaches it in the right way. I still fondly recall an 8 man mayhem mission that turned into a rerun of the final scene of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid because the team leader had his difficulty set way too high. The mission was a total disaster and a debt farm, but the brief moments when we were holding our own against what seemed like every cop and Longbow agent in Paragon City... that was epic in a way that no efficiently run Task Force could be.

I find the issue is one of direction.

A director of action sets the table, shows what's at stake, shows what needs to be done and then lets the action take a twist that allows the players to do it.

The ITF nearly does this and that is one of the reasons its popular.

The stage is not set in most of the game and it doesn't require a cut-scene to do it. The huge robots in the ITF. I would love to see those in the streets of Cimeroria ala Babbage in the Synapse TF. You put out the call a robot is stomping thru please help.

Now it gets personal. Most of the play is remote mash buttons and roll. But now let's have to ask for help! Or better yet let us prove our team is elite and able to handle this alone. The direction is there, set the challenge let the players develop it.

I want Aliens. I want screaming hordes of creatures that take me not to put me in a cell - they take me for food or to lay eggs in me. Remember the Dr. Vahzilok mission where they gave you the disease? What about a room similar to the layer cake cave but if you fall they can whisk you away and your team now gets to try and rescue you and you try and escape.

I think that is the problem we have is the direction is lacking and the cost of success is rarely there. People like the Protean arc because we get clones and one our clones dies for US. Personally, I would love to see the clones actually battling the hordes and fall at our side.

Have the AV fire an attack designed to kill us and they dive in to take the shot for us.

I think I dig. My two top characters are a heavily IO'd Katana/Regen Scrapper and a heavily-IO'd Night Widow. I can enter a room full of Rikti mobs, and indeed I do from time to time. But, once the realization passes that, Oh dear, I'm fighting twenty-odd guys passes, there isn't much there beyond wishing I had more AoE damage. Once I've weathered the Alpha and gotten the problem mobs out of the way, once I'm on my feet, it's little more than a numbers slog.

I dunno. I'm not saying we should have failable missions, either, but I think, perhaps, consequences for death should be more significant. Not as in, ramping up debt, because that really has no direct impact on gameplay. No, jails are one example, and I think we could do with two or three more, immediate ones, so that the next time three portals open up next to me, I'm terrified for longer than it takes to assure myself Elude isn't going to get overwhelmed.

Something I want to emphasise here is that I really don't want to make defeat more unpleasant, and I really don't want to make people afraid of being defeated. That we really aren't in this game is one of the major reasons I like it.

However, I do think that we could perhaps make defeat MEAN more, without specifically making it SUCK more. Jails, as I said, are a good start. They prevent you from having a fresh start, and at the same time save you a trip, which is both good and bad, but it still introduces a complication to defeat.

Moreover, City of Heroes tries to sideline defeat, like "it didn't really happen." You go down, but the game doesn't really acknowledge that. It just lets you teleport to the hospital and pick up where you left off. By being sent to a jail, the game will acknowledge that you were defeated and let you continue the story AFTER your defeat, rather than just backing you up a few frames before it and restarting the fight.

In a sense, it's the difference between a game which embraces player defeat and includes that into gameplay, vs. a game which ignores player defeat and just forces you to quick-load your last quick-save when you go down, which is what City of Heroes does, hand-wave narrative notwithstanding. It's kind of like the Happy Video Game Nerd's review of Nightshade, a game where you don't have lives, but are instead captured and put into James Bond like traps every time you go down, forcing you to escape from them. Go down enough times, though, and you're put in a trap you can't escape from.

This is more about storytelling than it is about game design, though. The only way to make people really fear dying is to make dying suck, but that just makes the game stressful to play, which is a bad thing. Hence why games and gameplay can rarely achieve this kind of dramatic tension, but at least a story can be written so that THAT can feel dramatic.

For instance, for all its faults, I got that feeling from Dead Space 2. This is a cruel, nasty, sinister game that has historically had no problem with disembowling, vivisecting and exploding sympathetic characters on camera, to the point where we're pretty sure that Isaac is the only one who's going to survive. So being given a support character I actually liked in Mass Effect 2 was REALLY heavy, because I knew - I KNEW - that the game had no qualms about having some guy flip his **** and gouge her eye out with a screwdriver. (SPOILERS: That actually happens, but she survives to kick his *** and makes it out alive, making Dead Space 2 AWESOME!)

As a final note, I point you to perhaps what is the darkest, heaviest episode of the PowerPuff Girls - Speed Demons. In a show that's ostensibly about lighthearted comedy and zany antics, this episode is the kind of story you scare your children with. To me, this is sort of the feeling I get in Recluse's Time After Time arc... Only it's completely ruined because I always have a safe line back to home base.

In fact, you know what I liked about the Shadow Shard even what back when? The fact that it felt like we were all alone in the wilderness, away from people, away from help, away from the support of a safe base of operations. Deep down the rabbit hole, as it were. Of course, the game can't suck, so you can't be stuck on the butt end of nowhere, never able to go back, or stuck in a post-apocalyptic future and unable to go back until you're done. But there is still a sense of danger and drama in the air when you're out and away from the safety of the city and the help of your friends.

I remember doing an Abandoned Sewers run with Zamuel after our Abandoned Sewers Trial, going from the centre out through the Boomtown exit. We knew we could not afford to fall, because if you fall, you go back to the entrance and you can easily step out that way. Scary not because dying would be BAD, but rather because it would be the easy way out and ruin the run.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.

Alfred Hitchcock and to a lesser extent Brian de Palma

Most big budget action movies with a big name actor/actress leave you knowing the result. Lots of big bangs and the hero gets the girl and rides off into the sunset...

With comicbook movies you kind of know that it'll (mostly) turn out ok in the end because the same story's been running for forty years so it's very difficult to convey a sense of "danger" when many of us have been reading Spiderman or the X-Men all our lives.

Hitch tended to leave the real danger unseen and that made it more chilling... the unknown is often more scary than the threat we know and de Palma would left-foot you from the very start. Remember Dressed to Kill... (for reasons other than the intro)? The main protagonist & star, Angie Dickinson, is killed very quickly - surprisingly, making you sit up and say "WTH?" Sadly the rest of the film didn't live up to it and it wasn't Sir Michael Caine's finest role (that was Get Carter IMO and in that you know he's on a road to nowhere but he is truly dangerous and even after the film's ended the audience knows he's exacted his revenge.)

In many ways, violence, explosions, blood and guts, often detract from the element of danger. The Damage outweighs the drama and often does the film itself a disservice by weakening the story.

"You got to dig it to dig it, you dig?"
Thelonious Monk

I hear you on this one, Sam. I truly do. There's a protective bubble that exists around some characters in fiction that leave you not caring about them because you know the script is protecting them.

I was having a very interesting conversation with a friend today about the most recent movie adaptation of War of the Worlds, directed by Spielberg. My friend correctly pointed out that the movie goes to pains to not only show the Tom Cruise character barely escaping by the skin of his teeth on multiple occasions, but also to be apparently the only human on Earth capable of common sense regarding car engines and noticing the blindingly obvious sign of the birds landing on the Martian robots.

Any story that convincingly conveys the possibility however of danger to any and perhaps all members of a story works particularly well. The Joss Whedon Serenity movie's most shocking death comes out of nowhere and suddenly puts the rest of the cast in jeopardy.

I don't agree that should always be the case, but something like this game where defeat normally means just a quick rez in a hospital pod, a sense of imminent danger and threat is hard to come by. Often the best way I've done this myself is by soloing and honestly forgetting to have wakies in my inspiration trays. You're on your toes when you're down to half your health facing an Elite Boss as a Scrapper, let me tell you.

But threat is best conveyed in strong writing, really. I don't think you need a mechanic to represent this fear of defeat or being hurt so long as you as the player are buying into the notion of precisely that. Compare the writing from say Armageddon and Deep Impact (two films with pretty much the same story) and note how Deep Impact makes the threat and the reaction to that threat much more personal and frightening, whereas Armageddon is more of a gung-ho action movie.

It's how the Westin Phipps arcs are reacted to so viscerally because his dialogue and his intentions are so well written that you want to hate him or conversely admire the depths of his villainy. I believe it's the impression you create here that determines the way you react to a sense of danger over some mechanic that lacks an emotional component. You have to care about dying in a video game environment, and a good story will do that every time.


S.