Notes on Randomness No.1

Encounters of the Random Kind

Sometimes we like surprises. Sometimes not. Randomness can be as exciting as it can be terrible. Getting something good that you did not expect, feels very good. Getting something bad that you did not expect, feels very bad. And that’s maybe even more true when the results are due to chance alone. And yet chance can be so compelling. In the right context, a dice roll can carry as much drama as a three-act tragedy.

Games and gameworld are often shot through with randomness. Designers can write chance into their systems to help determine what the player can do at all, who ultimately wins, who loses, who survives, who thrives, what is where, and what’s in this world at all.

In some genres, randomness rules more than in others. When we look behind the curtain of some aspect of the role-playing genre, for example, we often find some partly random mechanism at work. And that’s true even for wildly popular games with highly intentionally designed systems and fixed handcrafted worlds and environments. It’s even more true for games that rely on and experiment with procedural generation.

During the SNES, PS1, and PS2 eras, RPG’s were one way I passed the time in my wasted youth. And, though I had almost certainly come across the use of randomness in videogames before —one type of randomness common in that era made a strong impression on me. I don’t remember which game I was playing, I don’t remember where I was at—my own house or someone else’s. I mostly remember the confusion and surprise. I was making my character walk across an open field surrounded by pixelated mountains. And then a strange sound tore through the soundscape and the music changed. And then there was another scene, which looked as if the camera had zoomed in. And now a monster was standing in front of my character. A monster which, moments before, was utterly hidden, invisible, unknowable. And my child’s mind was just thinking whaaatt is this…. And, worse, the hostile creature was just too strong. I was not prepared for this. I was probably going to die.…no this can’t be happening. I tried to flee. The little coward on screen moved his legs as if running in place. Nothing happened at all. I could not flee. There was no escape. I failed to understand why they would list such a pointless action on the menu as an option. Maybe just to taunt me. I did not realize, at that moment, that even my desperate attempt at self-preservation was controlled by chance.

So my past self found out that randomness can be used to make monsters and fiends and other malicious things appear ex nihilo. The idea that there was some dark set of dice controlling what terrible things I would face in this world (or at least the darker unsafe parts of it) was strangely fascinating. Turn-based role-playing games of the era were largely dominated by this style of encounter design— random encounters.

As the player explored the wilder parts of the game, no threats, enemies, or monsters would be visible. And yet they were there. As you walked, there was some chance, with each step, that you would get into an encounter. You did not know when or what type of enemy or how many there would be. But on some step it would happen. At any moment, strange creatures could materialize out of thin air. Just to try to kill you and your friends. And sometimes they did.

Since most games somehow tied the chance of an encounter to the simple act of walking around, it sometimes felt like you were punished for moving. And if the encounter rate was too high or the algorithm too cruel—you began to dread each step. As a kid I would try to find hidden rituals that just might help avoid the encounters. Like just taking a step then stopping for a second then starting again. Or only moving diagonally. Or trying to hold down different buttons while I walked. Or opening a menu every five seconds hoping that reset some kind of timer. And sometimes, for awhile, I thought one of these magic rituals would work. I had overcome fate and could move at will, entirely unchallenged, around this world—but it inevitably turned out that it was just a good run. The run would end and then randomness would rule again.

(Though apparently there are exploits which do rely on some of these—my still too smooth child brain could not crack the code. The exploits which actually work often do so by resetting a type of counter. Some via step manipulation, others via menuing.)

In some games, the sheer number of encounters felt staggering. And it made their worlds feel like absolutely hostile hopeless places created by relentlessly malicious gods. If the gods of this world were benevolent, surely it would be a little less brimming with invisible fatal threats. Traveling through the wilderness to the next town could feel like a grueling gauntlet. And in some games, the encounters were almost truly random— the algorithm allowed an encounter to happen on any step in a hostile zone (or at any moment.) Some algorithms had no grace period or anything like it. And this was a horrible realization. I remember taking a few steps out into the wilderness, getting thrown into a battle, fighting turn after turn, almost dying, but ultimately surviving. The rousing battle music faded away and those familiar victorious sounds took their place. I felt relief wash over me as the game screen transitioned back to the world map and the landscape was spread out before me again. I took a couple more steps towards my destination—just to get immediately thrown into another godforsaken encounter.

And that is not a single memory. That is a category of memories. That have all blurred together. Kind of like the screen when you get into a random encounter. And sometimes, I swear, it was just one step.

In many games, encounters in an area were infinite, endless, limitless. So long as you kept running around on the screen, you would never stop getting into encounters. And this could be more than a bit depressing when you were lost for long periods or confused about what switch needed pulled. On the other hand, this limitless character of the system would famously allow an unbelievably persistent player to reach the max lvl of 99 in FFVII by running around the first area for 500 hours, as reported by Jason Schrier in this Kotaku article on the feat.

Infinite loops of encounters were theoretically possible in some select. In Phantasy Star, so I’m told, whenever you flee from a battle your character always takes two steps back. But said two steps could send you back into a battle from which you might flee and then take two steps back and so on. And ever since hearing that I have had a morbid impulse to find a copy and see if I can trigger an arbitrarily long encounter loop like this. In some games, the encounters were not tied to steps, but to intervals of time. Even standing still was not safe—the monsters would find you. Idle hands and devils and all that.

And, when I experienced it at it’s most oppressive pitch, I hated all this randomness and yet apparently loved it in equal measure—these were the games I kept playing and replaying, sipping, gulping, and firehosing them down days at a time. There was something fascinating in it all despite the frustrations.

Fortunately designers started crafting more sophisticated algorithms behind the random encounters in an attempt to make the experience feel less punishing and cruel while still feeling random enough to make things interesting. Often this meant sacrificing randomness in the purest mathematical sense— encounters could not occur on literally any step or at any moment. Grace periods were introduced. So some steps were less likely to have an encounter or even banned from having an encounter altogether. Encounter rates were dialed back. Some algorithms even capped the total number of encounters that could occur in a given area—if after ten fights in this room, no more encounters were possible. All those changes—lowering encounter rates, adding grace periods, capping encounters by area— made the randomness feel less cruel. A final way that the player can be made more at home with the randomness is by giving them some slight control over it. More on this in a bit, but yes some games do allow the player to modify the system behind the encounters

Beyond changing the algorithms and giving the player more control over the randomness, core elements of a game’s design can help make a random encounter system shine.

If a combat system bores us to tears moment to moment, then random encounters are not going to fix that problem and will probably make it worse. But when the combat system is challenging, brilliant, innovative, strategic (see Octopath I & II, FFX, FFX-2) or snappy, silly, and pleasant (see Super Mario RPG and Like a Dragon)—then the random encounters can create a space to just soak it all in. Sometimes wandering around getting in fights listening to those beautiful OST’s becomes essentially grinding for it’s own sake—like going for a swim. The goals pursued are little more than thin justifications for the activity of playing these little battle puzzles for an extra hour or two.

Designers quickly learned that a wide variety of visually and mechanically interesting enemies with different encounter rates can really bring out the best in these systems . Especially if some enemies are really rare and challenging or have unique puzzle-like quality or drop something exceptionally significant or certain enemies can be recruited/caught. In short, anytime we are going select what happens on the basis of a dice roll, that’s really only going to be interesting if interesting things can happen in the first place.

But why random encounters in the first place? What does this system add to the game that would not be there otherwise?

In a word: uncertainty. Not knowing something can be interesting in the right context. Greg Costikyan’s wrote an excellent book which is a kind of typography of the different types of uncertainty, about the role those types don uncertainty can play in crafting particular types of experience, and the ways uncertainty can just make a game a richer experience.

And one type of uncertainty is brought about by randomness in design. Random encounter systems clearly do create uncertainty. And about a few different things.

In most games that feature then, random encounters typically are limited to dangerous areas. These are often dark strange places like dungeons or catacombs or ruins or corporate HQ or maybe wild places like the forest or a cave or the tall grass. When you first enter a dangerous area, you don’t know what sorts of things you’ll be fighting , you don’t know their strengths and weaknesses, you may not know quite how powerful they will be relative to you. You don’t know exactly when and exactly where you’ll have to fight them (though you know it will be soon enough and in this general vicinity.) You don’t know, over the long run,  exactly how many fights you’ll be facing in this area before you get to your goal.

This uncertainty can make things interesting. It can create good or bad surprises. It can make it a bit more difficult to plan for every single contingency and so you just have to go into the area generally prepared— and sometimes that just won’t be enough. But you’ll die or flee and do better next time.

Suppose you had perfect information about these things before entering an area. Would that make things more interesting or less? You could plan things out better, but it’s not clear that would make for a better experience.

Consider randomizer mods for much beloved and well-worn games. Why do people like those? It makes something very familiar just a bit more fresh. It gives a longtime fan a chance to experience the game in a new way. And that’s almost entirely due to the way it introduces uncertainty into the experience. You don’t know the places things will be anymore. And random encounters build just a bit of that spirit into the game in the first place. Again, uncertainty can be interesting and introducing randomness is one way to achieve that.

Good surprises, bad surprises

So uncertainty is one thing they give us. And this uncertainty can accomplish different things depending on the overall tone, atmosphere, setting, and difficulty of the game. The ever-present possibility of a encounter can feel like a looming threat if the world has a dark setting or the difficulty is significant or both. But the possibility of an encounter could feel exciting and almost reward-like in themselves if the world is generally bright, unforbidding, or the fights are fairly breezy. Pokémon takes this approach. Or the mood can even vary from area to area in a game. Some of the games in the Final Fantasy series are not so tough, but often contain optional dungeons and wilderness areas where life is nasty, brutish, and short (for the underleveled or underprepared.)

A brief note: someone might say something like this now. “But isn’t output randomness supposed to be a strategy ruining feature of poor game design? And isn’t a random encounter system just a form of output randomness.? Take one step, nothing happens. Take another step, and now you have to fight a monstrosity that wipes your party. Same action, but very different outcome. All strategy is ruined.” Well, I would say a different sort of strategy is required to do well in chance heavy games, even if that randomness lies on the output side. And, in the end, for they type of single player experiences we’ve been talking about— it probably just comes down to taste. Some people like the randomness mixed in and some do not. To each their own. I’m just attempting to point out that random encounter systems can provide distinct type of ludic experience that may fit well with the artistic aims of a game overall.

Are non-random encounters strictly better?

Random encounters are assumed to just be an outdated design which was only used by designers of yore due to the limitations of the antiquated hardware they were dealing with. As a result, people talk about visible non-random encounters as if that is now the only sensible design option left for this genre.

So let’s contrast random encounters with the usual alternative. In a non-random system with visible enemy placement, enemies appear in particular places on screen. If you make contact with the enemy or their encounter box, a battle will begin.  The battle screen may be more or less the same as the area screen you were navigating around before (or not—there still might be a transition to a pretty different battle screen.)

The non-random system does things the random system does not (and vice versa.) It provides information and allows us to make choices. What information does the non-random system give us? We know where the enemies are, we know their type and, depending on how the representation works, the number of enemies or encounters in an area. The number known is usually the number of encounters on a screen because a single enemy character will stand for an encounter that turns out to include a number of enemies. And what can we do with all this information? We can make some choices. We can plan a path. We might be able to buy or equip some relevant items in advance that will help deal with the type of enemy. But the main choice is this: fight or don’t. Walk into the battle or walk around. That’s the freedom the visibility and the clear placement gives us. That choice is a simple one. But people seem to love when it’s on the table.

Controlling Chance

This may not sway anyone dead set against random encounter systems, but something close to this kind of (fight or avoid) choice is often built into games with random encounters. Designers have introduce quite a few different ways to let players control or influence chance.

First, there’s the classic ‘flee’ command. Once thrown in a battle you can usually try to run away on your first turn. That’s not exactly the same choice as fight or avoid—since you’ve already been sent into the encounter. Admittedly, in the PS1 days, burying this choice after the encounter had begun could be frustrating. Loading times on those transitions were significant. And, depending on the design of the mechanic, it might not always work. Sometimes fleeing/running is an action with no chance of failure, but sometimes not. But this classic command is still a way of introducing some player control over the encounters.

Second, there are many ways that games allow the player to adjust the encounter rate, dialing it up or down as they wish.

This can be accomplished through simple configurational options in the settings menu—like difficulty modes or an an encounter rate dial or slider. Bravely Default, its successors, and many of Square Enix’s remasters of their classic titles are taking this approach—several just let you turn the random encounters entirely off whenever you like. The configurational approach is a solid workaround for players who do not enjoy the battles or have grown tired of them and can make a game more accessible. Similar things could and are being put in place for many real-time games , easier modes and settings that allow people to bypass much of the combat to get on with the story if that’s what they are there for.

A number of classic and modern turn-based games give players control over encounter rate and encounter type—diegetically. Final Fantasy VI had equipable relics that modified the encounter rate. Other games build in armor or rings or herbs or spells that dial the rate up a bit or down a bit or down to zero. Another aspect of encounters that designers let players influence is the encounter type. Items, like sprays in Pokemon, might attract specific types of enemies or deter others.

A classic approach made new is present in Octopath Traveler II. Nighttime is scary. Videogames have always known this. That’s when the monsters come out. Or more monsters anyway. So in games with a day/night cycles, the night time often turns a somewhat friendly, even charming, landscape into a dark place overrun with vampires, skeletons, bats, demons, goblins, and other generic creatures of the night. See Simon’s Quest, see Ocarina of Time, see Minecraft, and probably a thousand others. Octopath Traveler II shares this mechanic. The encounter rate is low during the day and high at night. The encounters during the day are easier and the night fights are tougher; but the day fights yield less experience and rewards than the night fights. In a generous move, the game gives the player instant control over the day/night cycle itself—just press a button to swap from day to night or vice versa. No magical instrument required. And the game gives the player even more control over encounters by including the classic items, skills, and gear to further modify the rate and type of encounters.

And, at this point in the essay, it has to be time to bring up Hironobu Sakaguchi. He created Final Fantasy— a series which had random encounters and turn-based battles until FFXI. Thirty years since FFI and Sakaguchi is still working in the genre. And still using random encounters in the most recent games he has designed at his company Mistwalker. And he’s still experimenting with these systems and finding new things to do with them. Fantasian, a beautiful rpg with backgrounds that are irl tiny dioramas, came out for the Apple Arcade in 2021. Beyond the intensely charming dioramas, the game introduced a novel way to give the player some control over encounters. The game has a risk/reward mechanic that allows the player to bank encounters and save them for later—but you can only bank so many, bank too many and you have to fight them all at once. Basically, the idea is you have a magic monster jail box . You can send every monster you encounter to the monster jail. But once the jail is full, they are going to get you. It’s an intriguing idea and it works well. The point of mentioning these very recent games is just this: there’s probably a deep pool of currently unimagined ideas that could make them feel new. Turns out, random encounters can still be cool after all these years.

And everyone should love them just as much as they always hated them (unless they always loved them in the first place.) .

This note looked at one type of randomness in game design—one that is relatively limited in scope. There’s so much to be said about the role of chance in other types of mechanics and systems: accuracy, critical hits, loot, events, dialogue, and skill checks. And then the procedurally generated maps, dungeons, and worlds which will always inevitably lead us to the idea of the infinite game— which is either a dream or a nightmare.

Threads of Time

Around two hundred and fifty years ago, the critic and playwright Gotthold Lessing drew an influential distinction between the spatial and the temporal arts. The idea was, roughly, that a visual art like painting was very good at representing objects in space and a strictly verbal art like poetry was very good at representing events in time. Colors and shapes are fundamentally arranged in space; words are fundamentally arranged in time. Beyond that, Lessing held that neither medium was all that great at doing what the other was best at. Lessing’s arguments were presented in his work Laocoon: An Essay on The Limits of Painting and Poetry. He held that those working within a medium should make the most of its strengths and not try too hard to work against the grain. Let the spatial arts be spatial and the temporal arts be temporal.

Setting aside whether or not that recommendation makes sense, the distinction between the spatial arts and the temporal arts has been something philosophers and critics return to occasionally. It seems somehow too intuitive to leave behind. But the distinction has become a little more complicated as the years have gone by. New forms of media made some things clear that might not have been quite so obvious otherwise. Some media are almost undeniably both spatial and temporal arts. It was clear immediately at its birth that film, as a moving image, works in space and time and can represent each. So the distinction between the spatial and temporal arts cannot be an exclusive one. (See the chapter on Time in the Arts in Sean Enda Power’s recent survey book Philosophy of Time: An Introduction for more on Lessing’s distinction and the kinds of questions contemporary philosophers talk about regarding time and the arts.)

And certain types of games just as clearly have elements of both the spatial and the temporal arts as well. Videogames can depict a space and even put us inside that space to let us explore the places it contains. And games can do something similar for time. They can depict a time and also let us act inside of that time— some even let us explore or manipulate time. In temporal artworks generally, we experience events arranged in time, vicariously live through a particular stretch of time, and experience the specific way that time passes in this work. But in a game the temporal aspects of the medium can be altered and experimented with in new ways. This is so for two reasons—first, games give us agency and; second, games can simulate a world. In a game we can experience events arranged in time and represented as being in time like in a film, but we can also act in time, decide how to use the time we have, explore branching time or different events occurring at a given time. What we do with our time and the things we experience can be up to us in a way they are not in passive media. In addition to temporal forms of agency, a game can contain a world that has its own time—and this might run independently of the narrative or the player’s actions. There are simply more layers of time in games than in traditional media. As a result, designers have more opportunities for temporal experimentation . Here I’d like to trace out the different types of time in games and some of the ways those different types of time get woven together.

The Ordinary Concept of Time:

Sequence, Now, Passage

But we have to get clear about what we’re talking about, so let’s start with our ordinary understanding of time. For simplicity, I’m going to focus on three aspects of the concept. First, a core component of the idea is that of a sequence of events—one thing after another. This happened and then that happened and so on. Any event at all must fit somewhere in the sequence. This is what might be called the sequential aspect of time. Second, we feel like we occupy a particular moment in time, the present moment. So in our experience of a sequence of events, we seem to ourselves to occupy a particular place within that sequence at any given moment. We call this privileged moment ‘now’. And we intuitively believe that all events in time are either before or after now. The now splits the sequence of events in two. The events that lie behind it are in the past and the events that lie after it are in the future. Beyond its special position in the sequence, the now also seems to be closely tied to the third aspect of time I will pick out here: the passage of time. The now seems to be passing by. It’s this moment and will be the next and the next and on and on. And so the present seems to us to fade into the past and the future slides into the present. Time seems to pass and it seems to do so in that specific direction.

There’s an arbitrarily large amount more that could be said, but these three aspects—sequence, now, and passage— provide us with enough of an orientation to start talking about the different threads of time in games.

(I’m entirely bracketing whether or not these aspects of our ordinary understanding of time accurately characterize the nature of time as it exists in our own world.)

Types of Time in Games:

Ludic Time, Narrative Time, World Time

We can conceptually distinguish between at least three types of events and three corresponding sequences of events in games. These are ludic time, narrative time, and world time. Each of these sequences typically have a current state or now and also a kind of passage from one event to the next. These different time sequences are like separate threads that can be woven together. They collectively shape the overall temporal character of a game. So what are they?

Ludic Time

Ludic time is the order of events occurring in play. All games have a sequence of events that structures play.  It’s very clear in table top games and classic abstract games. First, white moves, then black. First, the cards are shuffled, then dealt, and then we take turns playing cards around the table. So ludic time can be thought of as an ordering of a particular type of event: our ludic actions. There is a right way and a wrong way things can go. We should take turns going clockwise around the table— and if we go in the opposite direction we are not doing it right. And the turns might have a more complex internal structure. They might be broken down into sub-components such as phases which are still essentially tied to specific actions the player takes in that phase of their turn.  These ludic notions specify a sequence of play.

Explicit time limits might be tied to some elements in the sequence (or might not). And although some phases in the ludic sequence involve no time limit— the character of these sequences still affects our phenomenological perception of the passage of time as we play. Design choices can clearly affect the pace of play. And the way play is structured can clearly influence how much objective time a play session takes.

That description of ludic time carries over to many video games such as turn-based games and digital versions of table top games. Ludic time is often highly structured and that structure is typically accessible and clear to the player. The player is the one playing the game and their actions have to follow the order the game requires to the extent that it imposes an order at all. But ludic time still exists in video games where play takes place in real time. But the sequences of play are governed by something different from explicit rules. Instead of rules specifying the order of play conceptually and verbally to players, we have subterranean programming and laws of the virtual world being simulated which structure our play. The underlying logic enforces which sequences of actions can be performed and which cannot— and how long those sequences will take to complete.  Instead of an abstract turn yielding an equally abstract action like we see in a board game; in video games, we often see a simulation of a physical action in virtual space. And the animations which represent this action take a certain amount of time—and this fact often provides the temporal structure of play. For example, in Dark Souls you cannot dodge roll immediately after you hit tbe button to swing your sword, there is a set of animations you have committed to and that you have to wait out. But in other games, similar actions and animations can be cancelled—so you can dodge right after attacking. And that give us two different possible sequences of actions—the cancellable and the non-cancellable. And this sort of difference is fundamentally a difference in the logic governing interactions in the game. These constraints determines which ludic sequences are possible. This sort of difference in the underlying logic of action can be found in so many genres of games and in different components of the way they play. Manipulating these types of constraints allows designers and developers to experiment with ludic time in a way analogous to the way table-top and turn-based designers can mess around the the flow of play by experimenting with turn-structure.

Narrative Time

Narrative time is the order of events occurring in the story/plot of the game if there is one. This is a complex notion. I have bundled two related ideas together under the heading of narrative time. There is an intuitive distinction between the order of events that ultimately occur in a narrative and the order in which those events are presented to the audience. This distinction goes by different names in different theories of narrative. I’m going to call the order of events in a narrative the ‘story’, as we colloquially say we tell each other stories, and the order that events ultimately happen in a story, the ‘plot’. Story is the order of presentation and plot is the order of occurrence. In literature and film, authors play with this distinction to generate a fascinating and confusing array of possibilities. In the most basic case, an author can choose to start telling a story at the beginning, then go on to the middle, and then wind up at the end.   This is a case where the order of the story is told coincides with the order of the plot.  The first thing we are told is the first thing that happens, the second thing told is the second thing that happens, and so on. Sometimes the orders might be inverted. The first thing that happens would be the last thing told; while the last thing that happens would be the first thing told. And skipping around in the telling of a plot seems to always have been around, for example, see what is labeled the ‘in medias res’ approach to openings. (Apparently starting somewhere in the middle warrants a Latin name for some reason.) The story begins by telling us about things occurring somewhere in the middle of the plot. The first thing we are told is, at the least, not the first significant thing that happened. Some stories begin with the ending or climactic event and then work backwards to show how things reached such a dramatic pitch. And this brief enumeration of the possibilities here does not scratch the surface.

So there are a vast number of ways that the sequence of the plot can be presented through the sequence of the story. And these presentational devices can be explored in games as well.  But to start thinking about narrative time, let’s focus on the idea of plot (as a sequence of events.) And, to make getting started easier, let’s first consider games in which there is a single plot (pre-written and embedded in the game before play begins) which unfolds at different points of progress in play. Even with a single plot the way narrative time progresses can vary widely from game to game. For example, many games reward the player with narrative progress after the player has accomplished specific goals or completed a level or area. Narratives might also progress in light of what the player fails to do: narratives can depend on our failures as well as our successes. Or if the designer wants to create a sense of urgency or inevitability they can tie the narrative progress to a timer of some sort, making the flow of the narrative independent of the player’s ludic progress.

And the way plot works in single plot games is somewhat similar to the way plot works in non-interactive fiction. In a book or film, we typically have a fixed and unique sequence of events that makes up the plot. The plot is just the one true sequence of events that happened in the fiction. And we read things under the assumption that the plot is there for us and is just patiently waiting for us to come to know it. And that plot is what it is. This novel has this one plot. We can reread the many times, but the plot stays the same. We may not understand the plot or fully comprehend it on our first or second or third readings, but the plot itself does not change—only our understanding of the plot changes. In a single plot game, we may fail to reveal the whole plot because we are not playing well and get stuck somewhere. But once we play well, we’ll play through the same plot everyone else winds up playing through.

This contrasts with the way that plots can work in a video game and other works that have interactive narratives (or at least non-deterministic narratives). Games can have multiple possible plots. They can have branching plots and open-ended plots. The plot in a game can be more or less fixed or it can be more a choose your adventure. From playthrough to playthrough, the plot can differ. There might be a fixed tree of possible branching plot lines, but which branches you go down is up to you. And some games allow us to affect plotlines in ways that are not captured by a series of discrete branching nodes for action that are presented to the player through dialogue or prompts or forced choices. Games also allow or forbid certain plot relevant events from occurring. Some games might allow for the arbitrary, accidental, unlucky deaths of main characters. They might be killed in act of random violence. They might walk off a cliff. They might run into the fires that you have light in order to protect them.

Others games don’t like so much randomness and choice messing up their intended narrative arcs— so these events are ruled out. Central NPCs have a plot armor that is truly invincible. I swing a hammer at the indispensable shopkeeper and the metal passes right through him. He is utterly unharmed. He does not notice my murderous intentions. He is apparently not disturbed.  A game can protect its narratives or it can expose it to chance or give free hand to the player to construct a plot through their choices.

But whether a game has one plot or many possible plots— designers must still make interesting decisions to make about the way narrative time will pass or unfold. The key design choices here are whether narrative time will be conditional on the actions of the player or whether they will be tied to other systems the player has no control over.

World Time

This brings us to the last type of event and sequence: world time or diegetic time. World time is the order of events occurring in the game which are governed by a model of time in that virtual world. For example, some game worlds model day and night cycles or the seasons or have a calendar or clock. These are systems that determine how time passes in a world.  Games can have more coarse or more fine-grained types of world time. Most games seem to have a very minimalistic sort of world time— in these worlds time is almost arrested, yet changes can still be observed and can occur due to our actions.  It is like the world exists in an eternal present. There are games whose world seems to exist within a time that leaves few regular traces on the environment. There is no day, no night, no changes of seasons, no high tide or low. The sun might be stuck in the same point in the sky and so the light is always the same. There is still time—events occur one after the other, characters walk around, waves crash ceaselessly on a shore. But it’s almost as if the place is hung up in a single hour of a single day—and all the actions that occur are compressed into it. And it’s strange because you might play the game for days of real time. And the narrative actions within the game’s world seem like things that could never fit into a single day’s worth of time.  The passage of time across wider stretches is not observed, but inferred. We must have lived through significant swathes of time in this world because we’ve been engaged in a project for so long or because so many things have happened in the narrative.

Then there are games with astronomical time— a time that is measured out in days, nights, and seasons. A sun and moon might be modeled in the world—we might witness the gradual changes in the sky and our surroundings. And often in such games there are fine-grained measures of time such as calendar and clock time. Many significant changes in the game can be tied to these. The seasons might bring unique events with them and limited-time offerings in the shops. We have such things in real life. We live through barrages of commercial items each season such as pumpkin spice lattes and decorative gourds and candy corn and eggnog. Some of these things persist in an untimely way in shadowy corners of supermarkets and dusty bargain bins . Peeps and candy corn and eggnog can be located with some effort outside of season.  And we’re also still somewhat familiar with the slightly less commercial aspects of the seasons: changes in the weather, the look of the trees, seasonal fruits and vegetables. We know about the summer beach trip, trick-or-treating, skiing and outdoor ice-skating. Some activities are only available within the span of a particular season like skiing. And that can make them kind of scarce and the season very exciting for the people who love those activities. But some events are really tethered down to a particular date on the calendar. If you didn’t get to dress up and go trick or treating with your friends on Halloween night, you’ll have to wait till next year. Games with fine-grained measures of time and constant passage can mimic these types of phenomena.

On the other hand, some games have a world-time that passes and leaves it’s traces on the places we see—but do not have clock time or a calendar. They have a vague time. A passing of time that must happen by exact rules, but this is not always apparent or obvious to the player. We know that night will fall eventually. We know that day wil come eventually. And unique events are tied to these temporal conditions. But the world time is never described to the player in terms of to explicit fine-grained measures of time such as 1:24 P.M. on Nov 22 2022 A.D.

Other games make world time conditional upon ludic or narrative events— so the world only shifts when certain events are triggered By the player. These worlds have a strange, halting time. The temporal phases the world goes through are sensitive to your actions in a way that time in our own actual world rarely is.

Bloodborne offers a good example of a kind of conditional world-time. The sky in the city of Yharnam (along with some other environmental features) will change as you progress through the narrative by performing specific actions. When you inspect an old skull, sunset turns to night and the moon is full and bright white. When you kill a giant ancient spider in a misty void under a lake—the moon turns into a bloodmoon. The player does something and the world-time gets pushed along.

Before moving on, it’s worth noting that world-time can be present in many different formats or media. It’s commonly implemented in video games, but some table-top games possess a world-time as well. It can be done, but it can be difficult for players to track and model any changes the passage of world-time entails so is often omitted by designers for ease of play.

The way world time is designed in a game can deeply affect the atmosphere and how the player interacts in that world.

Weaving Times Together (And Apart)

So there are at least three types of time in games: ludic time, narrative time, and world time. And these distinct times are like threads that can be woven together. We can get a better grip on them if we pay attention to where they come apart and where they converge. Ludic time is the order in which game events and actions occur.  Narrative time is the order in which events constituting the plot occur. A simple example can illustrate the distinction between ludic time and narrative time. A ttrpg might ask me the player to roll the dice at a particular point. This dice roll determines what will happen in the narrative. But the dice roll is part of ludic time and not part of narrative time. I roll the dice and my character makes a contribution to the story.  In video games, cutscenes often exist within narrative time, but not really within ludic time. It’s true that sometimes the narrative content of a cutscene might alter the ludic background—it might alter the state of the game and change which actions are possible. Things we could do before the cutscene, we can’t do anymore, and vice versa. Even so, cutscenes are frequently skippable and could often be excised from the complex artifact that is the video game without really affecting how the player interacts with the game, how play proceeds. By contrast, cutting out something like dice rolls or antes or a response phase of a turn in a card game could drastically alter how play proceeds and feels.  Dice rolls and cutscenes are examples that show how ludic time and narrative time can come apart. 

But there’s more. Here’s another point of separation: we can speed up ludic time without affecting narrative time at all. Many remasters of older turn-based or slower paced games (such as the mainline Final Fantasy games) are now including a fast-forward option that allows the player to speed up the gameplay—but leaves the narrative and cutscenes all in place.

Another point of separation is bit more common—the pause function (and menus). Which time do we pause when we hit the pause button (or go into a menu)? It depends. Sometimes you pause all the time-sequences. Sometimes only world time. Think about real-time with pause combat: the combat is ongoing and then stops when you pause— but you can still take all kinds of ludic actions such as changing gear, queuing up attacks, even using items and so ludic time continues. It’s interesting because games frequently use pause in a similar way —even if they don’t explicitly have what we call real-time with pause systems. Pause is a kind of time-out that advantages the player. The player gets to act, but the world doesn’t. Open a menu, threats get suspended, and we get an opportunity to think and do a few helpful things. Pausing world time while the player is in the menu is so common that we can be surprised when a game doesn’t do that. The first time you open up your menu in Dark Souls, you probably feel perfectly safe all of a sudden. And that’s because you assume the world is frozen—that the enemies are no powerless. But then you start trying to change your clothes and your probably get killed. And you eventually realize that the world didn’t stop when you were in your menu. There is no pause. Time runs on whether we want it to or not. The contrasting case is a game with a total pause. Many games render everything inaccessible to the player when paused. Everything on screen is frozen, nothing can be done by me or by the world. And so world time and ludic time are both stopped.

And some events that seem to be represented as taking place in the narrative, or at least in the game world, are probably not. In a turn-based strategy game like Final Fantasy Tactics the characters in a battle often dutifully march in place while I slowly think through my decision and select which actions I want to perform. I assume that the fact such and such character marched in place for three minutes is not a component of the narrative. It’s not canon. It’s represented on screen, but narrative time and world time have both been paused until the turn is carried out.

Still, one and the same event can be part of both ludic time and narrative time.  When I’m in control of my character and have him take his sword and swing away until he kills a giant wolf who is a significant figure in the plot— that action unfolds in ludic time. It takes up space there. It was constrained by the actions that can before and affects which actions can come after it. And that killing blow also exists in narrative time— it makes a contribution there. The wolf is slain and was killed by that particular action and it was killed at a particular point in the narrative which has been unfolding over the course of my playthrough.

In some games, every type of event is submerged in world time. There is no event occurring in the game that does not occur in the time of the game world. So consider an action game that has no menus and/or no pause. The world just keeps running and all my actions have to take place in the world time. By contrast, consider the real- time with pause and turn-based systems we talked about earlier. These systems allow ludic actions to occur outside of the flow of time in the world.

But even when every event is submerged in world time, that doesn’t mean that world time itself makes everything happen. Maybe the clearest illustration is in games that have an eternal now standing in as the world time. There are no seasons, calendars, and clock. No events are scheduled to occur by such and such a time. The only events that occur are brought about through the ludic actions of the player and the narrative scripted to follow from those actions. World time is there, but it exists as a barely noticeable backdrop for our actions. Further, a games’ world can have a world time that brings about visible changes in scenery, but the designers might have chosen to hang nothing of ludic or narrative significance on it. So we might have a world full of cosmetic visual changes that track day/night cycles or the seasons—-but no ludic or narrative events which depend upon these changes. Or designers can make world time critical for our play. World time can set the pace our actions must follow in ludic time. We can see this in life simulators like Stardew Valley or Animal Crossing. Different models of world times can change the way these games feel to play. The world time in these games can run in sync or out of sync with our own. In-game days can be as long our or they can run for about 10 minutes often the days, months, and years are highly compressed so time and the gameplay feel very accelerated. When the time is so compressed, it can almost feel like playing a montage—the fruits of your labor start to show up very quickly. When the time is in sync with our own, the eventual effects of our actions take a bit more patience to see (and even become peripheral to the experience of just inhabiting the space).

On the narrative side, world time can trigger events in narrative time: on a certain calendar day such and such important event will happen. And even when the world time has little impact on the way the game is played or the narrative— the way world time interacts with the environments in the game often enriches the place in a game world. A familiar place can take on a new aspect as the seasons change. This might or might not matter for the game’s core narrative or gameplay, but it can strongly affect the atmosphere evoked by a particular place.

So all that illustrated a few of the ways the threads of time can be woven together. And designers can combine and experiment with these time-sequences and the way they overlap and interact. Designers can be just as experimental with narrative time as an avant-garde film or modernist novel.  Similar types of experimentation can happen when they starting messing around with ludic time and world time. The sequences or proper order of ludic events in otherwise similar games can be reordered in different ways to alter the way the game plays out and the types of decisions the player is making, what information they have when making the decisions, and what the consequences will be. Experimenting with world-time can give play a distinctive tempo, open up certain narrative possibilities, and create unique aesthetic effects.

[For a more comprehensive look at the topic of time in games, I strongly recommend Chris Hanson’s monograph Game Time: Understanding Temporality in Video Games. It’s a very insightful analysis and looks at time in games from many different angles. Unfortunately, I did not know about Hanson’s book when I wrote this piece. I hope to come back and rework this a bit to note where Hanson says similar (or different) things about the topic.]

The First-Person

Some people have said things like ‘Games are the only artistic medium that can provide you with a first-person perspective.’ And something like that is probably true. Suppose I read a book, I watch a film, and I play a game. And also suppose that they are all adaptations of more or less the same story and so set in the same world. But I do not relate to the book or the film in the same way that I relate to the game. In the game, I can play a role in the story. I can be in the middle of things. I can partially shape the events that occur in this particular playing of the game through my choices and actions.  I can watch a soccer match from the stands or I can play on the field. In a sporting event like this, there’s typically a clear difference between the spectators and the players—even though players and spectators are both attending to the match in a way. And certain forms of art allow us to attend to one and the same “world” in different ways.   Non-agentive media give us a vantage on the world and the narrative that unfolds there, like spectators in the stands, and games allow us to act within that world and narrative, like players on the field. And so I could read about Ahab trying to kill the white whale Moby Dick, or I could watch Gregory Peck play the role of Ahab and see him hunting the whale, or I could play a game set in that world where I could play the role of Ahab and hunt the whale myself. In the last case, my actions somehow make it into the game which includes a world and a story that my actions might shape or alter. Not only are my actions altering the game, but I feel like my perspective is in the game. I am there in that world. And I am there as Ahab. And that’s interesting.

I can imagine reading a novel entirely written in the first person which focuses on a single character. The character thinks things like ‘I did this. Something happened to me. I thought that. I felt something. I wanted something., I loved this person. I hated this other person.’ When I read this, I don’t fall under the illusion that I myself did, thought, or felt those things. I do not feel that I am the subject of the story. I do not come to occupy, in any strong sense, the first-person perspective of the character within the story. These actions, these experiences, these thoughts and, these desires are not my own. I will always feel that I am observing someone else’s life. Reading a book like that might feel a bit like overhearing an extended monologue. Or it might feel like finding and secretly reading someone else’s personal journal. And it may be a very moving journal—but it never feels like reading your own journal. 

By contrast, games seem to let me take up a first-person perspective on the world in the game as I play. And games can do this because they essentially involve my agency. Agency and the first-person perspective are like two-sides of the same coin. The fact that I can act in a game is part of what makes it seem like I am “in” the game at all. When I play a game, I can do things. I can choose to do this and not that.  I can use this particular opening in chess instead of a thousand others, I can see the bet or just fold, I can pay the shopkeeper or walk out with what I want. When I do things in a game—even when I’m controlling a character that does not really resemble me—I feel like those choices and actions are mine. And, in some sense, they clearly are. I am responsible for them and their consequences.

And those actions of mine change the state of the game. Depending on the game, this means that my actions might change my prospects of winning, or the path of the narrative, or the surface of the game world, or affect the experience and prospects of other players. I do these things and I have to own them—for better or for worse. And this is one of the places we should focus in on in order to understand something interesting about the medium.

Agency introduces new aesthetic possibilities and one thing it introduces is the truly first-person perspective. This is one thing that distinguishes games from other, non-agentive, art forms. The first-person seems kind of special— but it is a bit difficult to pinpoint the aesthetic experiences it opens up. What experiences can we have when we take up the first-person perspective  that we cannot have from another perspective? When we look over our mental life, we find that there are uniquely first-personal states: mental states, emotions, feelings, and judgments.  These first-personal states are all dependent on or directed at myself, my actions, or some aspect of myself like my mood or my thoughts. The most intuitive examples might be pride and guilt. First, I do something, then I feel a certain way about it. If it was a good thing, I may feel pride; if it was a bad thing, I may feel guilt. A story can tell me about a character’s acts and the resulting pride or guilt they feel, but it doesn’t make me feel prideful or guilty. I may feel happy for them in their success or feel uneasy about their misdoings. And the way the characters feel about their actions may resonate with me in certain ways. But I had nothing to do with the things they did. In a game, by contrast, I can do something, recognize that I am responsible for what I have done, and then feel a certain way about it. So the emotions that arise from this sort of first-personal reflection are not quite the same as the emotions we could have if we were thinking about someone else’s actions.

If so, then we’ve identified a space that cannot be explored in non-agentive media. Designers have always been exploring this space in one way or another. And the ways they explore that space shift and become richer as the medium grows. For example, games have always sought to elicit certain first-personal emotions relating to challenge, success ,and failure. They often want me to feel great when I win and bad when I lose. And as the medium has grown we see more variations in the type of first-person emotions games seek to elicit in this context. Competitive games like sports or chess and many early video games like lightly themed arcade games were designed around that basic principal: they were intended to make me feel bad when I lost and really good when I won (or bettered my last score.) As games were set in ever more fictionally rich worlds, this sort of thing remained true. Often -losing means dying and that feels bad; winning meant living and overcoming a dangerous challenge and that felt good. The fiction is richer, but the core affective experience structuring our play remains the same.

But more elaborate fictions allow for another possibility: the winning feels good and losing feels bad hedonic structure can be overlaid with moral valence. Moral sentiments can be brought into the fiction—not only can you feel pleased when you reach your ludic goal but you might also be made to feel that you did the morally correct thing when you killed that dark lord and so saved the world. This moral overlay reinforces the hedonic structure at the heart of the game. Winning feels good on a purely instrumental level and is, according to the fiction, a morally good thing to do.

On the other hand, some fictions provide moral overlays that subvert the feelings arising from our play. The classic twist is by now well known—after a long struggle to reach the goal present in the game, I finally reach it, and then the fiction cruelly informs me that this was not such a good thing to do. In order to win, I might have to do something that is morally abominable in the fiction (though I may or may not know this at the time) and so feel regret and guilt when I win. Another status the designer might try to attach to the win condition in a game is moral ambiguity. And this happens sometimes in games after hours and hours of play— you kill that monster and that’s your crowning achievement, but then suddenly feel that maybe you should not have done that after all. You feel good that you were able to kill the monster, but don’t quite know if it was a good or bad thing to do. Winning is now sometimes followed by a question mark. Games have always let us revel in our own successes and made us hate our failures— and, through some of the dark arts of narrative, they can make us hate our successes too. They can call the value of their own goals into doubt.

Each of these aesthetic possibilities is unique and a worthwhile space for the designer to work within. I see no reason to think that one moral overlay is automatically superior to the others— there’s a time and place for (almost) everything. But the self-directed moral emotions that arise from our ludic actions, wouldn’t be experienced at all if we were not taking up the first-person perspective while we play a game. So the type of moral emotions we feel as we play can help us see two things. First, the self-directed moral emotions, in a way, count as proof that a game can provide a truly first-person perspective on a fiction. Second, the raw power of the self-directed moral emotions such as pride and guilt also illustrate the aesthetic power the first-person brings with it.

On Slow Travel

We often praise media for evoking ‘a sense of place’— for giving us some insight into what a particular city or town or patch of wilderness is like. Games are able to provide us with an experience of a place that other media cannot. This unique type of experience allows us to acquire a unique type of knowledge. And here I’d like to reflect on just why that is and the ways designers can focus in on this.

So how do we come to know a place? I mean really know it ‘like the back of your hand’. Seems like a fair bet that there is no better way to make you feel like you thoroughly understand a place than to actually make your way through its spaces. Not once, but over and over again —with many purposes and diverse routes—carving paths all through the place. Think of the way you come to know your way around a campus or a downtown or the bit of woods near your house when you were a kid . And think of the way you the roads around where you live and work.

And why do we do all that? Typically, we have to get where we need to be to get or do the things we need to do. And all these trips here and there teach us, test us, and, once we start consistently getting it right, show that we know our way about.

Most of the things in our world are located at different physical distances from each other. And from us. To get to something you want or need, you have to wind your body through all those spaces. You have to internalize the relations between the things in the world and the places you frequent. And the things themselves—you can only use them, access them, benefit from them— when you get within hand’s reach and grasp them. To talk to someone—to really hear their words and voice and reply back without a meaningful delay— we had to be within earshot.

That is how things have always been for us in everyday life—-until somewhat recently— and that is what still feels natural. This is, by default, how we expect things to work. Even though we experience it all the time now, there’s something strange about doing something here and something happening a thousand miles away. 

I’ve always remembered a passage that I found striking in Being and Time where Heidegger observes that technology often “de-distances” our world. The neologism sounds awkward, but the idea is intelligible. Some types of technology invert many of the natural spatial and pragmatic relationships we used to live by. It brings the far near— but it can also make the near seem far away or go unnoticed. A radio in the 1920’s might have carried the sounds of a metropolitan opera house into your living room. A telephone can bring a faraway friend close again. My television can allow me to spectate an event on the other side of the world, but, at the same time, it can make the room I am sitting in disappear. The internet can connect people from points spanning the globe in a single match of a game. This expands what is within our reach and is undeniably beneficial, but it also somehow disrupts the logic of our pre-theoretical everyday world. This sort of world without distances is somehow less intuitive. It is not the world we innately expect.

Whether or not any of this has much significance philosophically, it does seem to hit on something that is important in the creation of an artificial world like in a video game. When a video game positions itself as giving us not just a game, but a new world, maybe they should keep this in mind.

When the designer sits down and asks the question ‘How will the player get from point A to point B?’. They have a few options: navigating, ferrying, teleporting. They can make us make our own way from point A to point B— manually controlling our character’s movement through the space. That’s navigating. They can let us catch a ride from point to point—they can carry us away in a vehicle or on a mount or on a boat, which we do not control. That’s what I call ‘ferrying’—the player is not finding paths, they are hopping onto something else that already knows the way and so we can get to point B without knowing the way at all. But this can still be different from teleporting. When the player is ferried—we can still watch as we are carried through the world. We are in the back seat. So we see what’s outside the window, but don’t really come to know the path. You gain less knowledge, but there’s still an experience of the world around you. And that’s different from teleporting from point A to point B without really being anywhere in between. You hit a button and a brief animation occurs or the screen goes black and then you are in a new place. No experience or knowledge gained in the process—just the pure gratification of our desire to be somewhere else.

A designer can make us walk step by step through a world to get where we want to go and we feel that’s simply a fact about the world—some things are far apart from each other and that’s all there is to it. But by having us traverse the world in this more embodied way—yes a virtual body—, we come to have a much richer sense of that world, we come to know the ways the world hangs together. Or the designer can let us skip the slow going traversal and “fast travel” to exactly where we would like to go. And that saves us time, but it makes most of the world seem unnecessary, optional, superfluous. All that really matters then are the points of interest, the events in the world, the loot waiting for us in the places we teleport to. If you want the world to matter, don’t let us skip it.

The same probably goes for shopping, trading, inventory management, and all the things that you once had to do in a town or something like a hub. That’s the slow way: go to this place to do this thing you want to do—- because that’s the place it happens. Yes, it is always more convenient to let me do those things on the fly irrespective of my players physical location. But it is typically nonsensical and no attempt at any sort of diegetic explanation is made. These conveniences depend on so many deus ex machina which somehow bridge the menus and the game world. There’s also a kind of fast and slow socializing that is present in games. We can go somewhere to talk to someone or we can simply summon up a conversation with them at any point. Talking with another character is something that can feel strange when it seems like we are carrying around NPCs in our pocket as little convenient companions. It makes them less convincing as characters typically because it so painfully points out their true function to guide the player and even when they aren’t our guides— it just doesn’t seem like they have a lot going on. There’s little indication of independent agency. I mean how much time can you spend on standby following me around, just waiting for me to get an inclination to talk to you. (A separate issue is that players find these pocket NPC’s vaguely irritating due to other aspects of their design— namely the fact that they tend to interrupt the gameplay so often.)

Our time is limited so I understand the temptation to let us skip past the bare moments of traversal and back-tracking and going-to and fro. And yeah, I sometimes would like to skip these things—I will die one day after all. All I want to note is there will always be a trade-off: save my time, but lose a bit of the world. And in some games or virtual environments— it makes sense to make the trade. In others, it doesn’t.

This is often true of real life travel as well. I do not walk across the country when I go on a trip. But as travel speeds up, the surroundings fade away. Travel can make the environment we pass through become more and more low-res until it is almost abstract. When I walk somewhere— I cannot help but notice the environments around me. Same for biking or driving a car— but the environments become a bit more blurred and fuzzy. I still see them and live by them. I come to know their relationship to each other, the landmarks, the rough travel times from here to there, shortcuts that might make for a quicker route. And I still appreciate some of the textures around me. If I really want to see the country, I travel by car. We drive through the Appalachian mountains in the fall when the leaves turn, maybe ride out West one summer to see the desert places, or drive up the California coastline. The pace and the vantage allows us to take things in. And if I feel like I’m missing something, I pull over to admire the views, I stop here and there and get out of the car and explore a bit. When I travel by plane on a commercial airliner, the cabin becomes my focus. It is almost like a somewhat slow somewhat uncomfortable mode of teleportation. We start off in one city and wind up in another after spending a sufficient amount of time in a cylindrical metal object. The surroundings by and large are simply gone— except for the brief glimpses during takeoff and landing. The pilots still can attend to the surroundings and the world— but not us. And if the planes go fast enough, even pilots cannot immediately notice with their basic senses much of anything about the world they fly through. They rely on their instruments to mediate.

It is hard to nail down exactly what gets lost when we make travel too fast, when we introduce more and more de-distancing into our worlds. Here’s an attempt: the more ‘de-distancing’ a game has, the more abstract our interaction with its world becomes. Instead of living in and by the world and being forced to make use of your basic physical verbs and ‘body’ to do the things you want to do or get where you want to go,  you begin to use more and more unintelligible magic buried in a menu or artificial command. If we make the way we get around and get things we want, grounded and physical and even a bit cumbersome, then the world starts to feel like it has weight. The slowness is in fact an opportunity to experience these places. And it’s the only way we come to know the world like the back of our hand.

But we still do fly places in real life. We like to travel fast sometimes. And that’s because often when we take a trip we care more about the place we are going to rather than the stuff in-between. And that could be a difference between an artificial world and our own. The stuff in-between should just be better. Why make a world full of spaces of little interest? Just to make the interesting things seem better by contrast? There is an argument for this I can imagine— swathes of emptiness dotting a landscape may somehow make it seem like a world on its own— not a strange artificial place built just for us. This fact alone might make the world more convincing— less “gamey” in the pejorative sense. Which might be just to say that real worlds are going to have their boring bits. And worlds that want to seem real should have boring bits as well. Maybe or maybe not.

But we cannot come to know a world deeply by skipping all the boring bits. And it is hard to believe that a world really fits together unless we know-how to make our way around it.

[More on all this later— would especially like to talk more about traversal systems in many different games and how the large and small differences between them shape different experiences of the game world.]

A Sense of Place

Art can depict a place— and even provide us with a very powerful sense of that place. Videogames can do the same. But they can also let you play in that place. The place(s) can be simple disconnected levels or something more worth calling a world—a vast, rich, interconnected, textured place. At times it can feel like you are in the place and, after long hours, even like you have lived there. Games let you inhabit a place in a way that many other media do not. At the limit, this fact makes the place a part of you in a way that no other artform does. You know where you are. You know the shape of the world you’re in—what lies past that cliff, which roads lead out of the town , how to get to the other side of the kingdom. Many of the details that make up a place and even a fairly thorough geography of a world can be represented in other artforms—in novels, in films, in paintings— but, as you experience those artworks, you don’t make the place somewhere you really dwell. And that’s true even with some aids or outside help. You can study the maps that might come printed in a book series like Lord of The Rings or A Song of Ice and Fire. You might know that Winterfell is north of King’s Landing and that King’s Landing lies to the east of Casterly Rock. The novels tell you this explicitly and the tv adapation shows a map at the beginning of each episode displaying that fact.

But there’s no living map in your mind that could really guide your way around the world and the places in it. There’s no intuitive sense of what lies next to what at any fine-grained or practical level. I’ve read Sentimental Education several times and I still don’t intuitively know what monument Frederic is about to pass by as he walks down a certain street in Paris. But when you play a game— one that really makes traversal and exploration thematic—these are exactly the sorts of things you come to know. If you play Dark Souls for long enough—a game set in an entirely fictional world of Lordran— you will come to know the landmarks, the direct paths, the scenic routes, and the surprising hidden shortcuts. Things like: if you go up through that aqueduct you’ll be right back home at Firelink Shrine, or if you take that lift in Darkroot Garden you can run past a bunch of dragons (most living, one undead) to find the back way into Blighttown. You come to know all those terrible tragicomic places the merchants like to set up shop—usually somewhere out of the way, maybe hidden by some crates, or precariously positioned on a ledge surrounded by fatal falls, and there’s even one right in the middle of the death trap that is Sen’s Fortress. But you learn where they are at and how to get back there as quickly and as alive possible. Enough Dark Souls talk-for now… All that was just to illustrate how playing a game can make you into something like a local.

So yes games allow us to know a place in ways that other non-interactive (non-inhabitable?) media don’t. And this has some interesting consequences. Beyond just knowing a map and a world and the particular places and landmarks it contains and how to get around it— this rich practical understanding opens up what I call ‘place-based emotions’ or feels or moods. If you’ve ever left your hometown for awhile and eventually returned to visit—you probably felt a certain way. That sort of phenomenon is one example. Games can explore these feeling much more deeply than other media. They can evoke that feeling of homecoming, or the familiar, and also the feeling of being somewhere new, uncharted, unknown, and even the feeling of being utterly and completely lost. These place based emotions can only be conveyed to us in a second-hand way in other media. When we watch a film we can see a character feeling joy upon returning home. We can see someone else feeling excited or uneasy that they have entered a strange and unfamiliar land. But our feelings are parasitic on the character’s feelings and/or the situations portrayed. We can see the characters getting lost in a dark forest, but we do not feel lost ourselves. We do not feel any of these things for ourselves in other media. But in games it seems like we do.

The fact that games are agentive artworks makes this possible for a simple reason. You are the one who has to find your own way through the world. You have to get yourself from point A to point B and go through all the points in between. That’s something that cannot be imitated in non-interactive forms of art. The experience of traversal itself, the rich practical knowledge of particular places, and the place-based emotions are all inaccessible to us as spectators. They only show up through our agency, through being in and making our way around a world.

I think these things can be valuable and artistically significant in their own right. I’d like to continue to reflect on how different design choices surrounding traversal can emphasize different aspects of the relation between the player and the places they exist in.

[For more on this topic, see the post On Slow Travel]

Games and The Significance of Agency

In a book, a film, a play, a painting, a poem— events and actions are represented, described, depicted. Hunters tread through thick snow with their dogs, a woman pours milk into a cup, kingdoms rise and fall, old grizzled men wrestle with a giant fish or seek vengeance on a whale, a ragtag crew of samurai defend a village. And in all this I am a spectator. I can experience these artworks by simply taking them in: looking, listening, reading, watching.

By contrast, in a game I must do something to really experience the game at all. A game cannot be fully experienced without doing something—without taking part in it, playing in accordance with its rules and acting in its world. And if you can fully experience a work of art while doing nothing, then that is not a game. Agency and interactivity are fundamental components of any game. It is hard to overstate the importance of this fact. C. Thi Nguyen has recently argued that game designers work in the medium of agency and investigated the ways they can do so.

The project I’m taking up here is similar in spirit. These essays are going to be meditations on games, on what they can do best, on their limitations, and on their relationship to other media. If the idea of medium specificity and its value wasn’t now so controversial, I would join right In and say that I hope to shed a little light on what is specific to the medium. And maybe I will even defend that idea at some point—but for now I’ll just say I want to talk about what seems distinctive about games as an art form. We can do that whether or not it’s best to think about agency as the medium games are made of and without assuming that we can read off aesthetic properties or rules of an art form from the medium it works in. I think it is undeniable that agency is wildly important, and yes essential, in the experience of games. It is somehow at the core of that experience.

Intuitively, an art form that essentially involves choosing, doing, trying, and striving is better able to explore those aspects of experience than artworks that do not. And, upon reflection, we can see that there are many things we can feel only through doing something. And there are many things we can only know or know best through making choices and acting. I’ll call these mental states that seem to be rooted in agency, ‘agentive feelings’ and ‘agentive knowledge’ respectively. The landscape of agency is vast. If it’s true that games are unique among the artforms in their ability to explore this landscape, then we have a large territory to map out.

Just to give you an idea of what I mean by all this, we’ll glance at a few key aspects of agency that are familiar from everyday life. These aspects of agency are just the sort of things that games are so well positioned to take up and experiment with and harness as an art form.

Let’s start at the beginning: making choices. Choices can be big or small, deeply significant or relatively inconsequential. And life, for better or worse, is full of choices that must be made. What will I eat for lunch on my break, or what to watch on the couch with my spouse when we come home from work (I feel that’s one of the more significant ones), or where will I live, or what kind of job will I have. There are feelings and emotions that go along with the experience of choosing: the feeling of simply making a choice, deliberating between a set of options, even being torn between them, and then forming and holding an intention to do something.

Once a decision is made, then we have to carry the action out. We have to actually do something. We have to really run the whole mile or get to the next page of the book we picked out until we reach the end (or a pretty good place to stop.) And we have to sustain our efforts along the way and we feel a certain way as we do so. We might feel an unwavering resolve and commitment, or might feel fatigue set in and have to fight off the temptation to quit. We might love each moment of the activity itself or we might loathe it. Some actions are enjoyable for their own sake, others not so much.

And that brings us to the purely instrumental feelings that show up when we consider goal oriented actions and projects. We can experience a sense of achievement that comes with reaching a goal, we can have a feeling of failure or frustration when we do not do so. We become confident after repeated success and sometimes hopeless after we fail many times. Then there are the more morally-laden feelings and attitudes that emerge as we reflect on our choices and what those might say about our character: pride and guilt and shame.

There are special kinds of knowledge and abilities that we can acquire only through doing something ourself— through trying, failing, succeeding— maybe through long hours or even years of practice . Philosophers have talked for many years and in many different vocabularies about certain types of agentive knowledge— craft, know-how, phronesis, and competence or mastery of a skill. Each of these are rooted in action, practice, and performance— and are salient and easy enough to spot.

There are types of agentive knowledge so basic they are hard to notice. we come to know our way around our part of the world in large part by making our way around it. We live and act and work in a place. And once we know a place very well, like our hometown, emotions based in our knowledge of that place start to show up. There’s a certain comfort and familiarity and ease as we navigate around the place. There’s a feeling of unfamiliarity and a sense that we are entering unknown territory once we reach the limits of our knowledge— these can come along with a feeling of dread or a spirit of adventure depending on how threatening the new world seems. If you’ve ever left the house to go on a trip to a new place, as exciting as that is, you probably remember how it feels to come home. As you pull up the driveway or walk in the door, everything feels familiar again— a kind of relief washes over you.

Some of the things that surround us come to take on a special kind of practical significance: we understand and relate to them as things we want or need or can use to get what we want. We see them as having a certain purpose relative to our goals and desires. And we almost unthinkingly and effortlessly make use of a number of tools to do a lot of different things each day.

And then there is the social aspect of action: when we act, we either act alone or with others. So we might feel a profound sense of solitude as we take on a daunting project all on our own or a quiet contentment as we work away in our own little corner. Or we act alongside others. We might be co-operating or we might be in conflict. Co-operation brings with it many feelings and attitudes— gratitude, trust, and reliance. Competition does the same: conflict, resentment, and wariness.

That was a snapshot of agency in everyday life. These and other phenomena can be transposed into a game. Different games focus on different aspects of agency in order to offer us radically different experiences. This is the space that games can explore in ways that other media cannot. This is where designers are continually exploring. And this is the space that I aim to map out as well as I can in the essays here.

[I’m going to post quite a few brief essays on games— on their unique aesthetic possibilities and limitations. This first post is an introduction to the ongoing project. I hope someone finds something here helpful. I’ll go ahead and say that a few writers in particular have inspired my thinking on this subject: Bernard Suits, Jesper Juul, and C. Thi Nguyen. I cannot recommend their work enough. ]