Ekim's Gamer View: Interacting with Emptiness
Ekim, 2003-12-12

I'm not one that enjoys crafting to any great extent at all, but I do like to dabble in it once in a while. Partly because I like the fact that mmorpgs are often more about players creating content and driving an economy, and partly because I like to sit down and quietly do something on my own besides killing things. But besides underlining the fact that there is not much else to do to get a break from fighting, crafting also seems to make something else more obvious too: there's ever hardly any interactions with our surroundings.

Basically, it's often as if we're playing on a theatre stage where every prop is painted on a canvas behind us instead of being actual objects. Sure, they have a certain volume to them, we can see a chair and walk around it, we can sometimes jump up on it, but we can't interact with it, pick it up and throw it towards another corner. While using a chair as an example may be stretching things here, it's still an obvious item that some developers sometimes overlook. How many times have I walked through furniture! How immersive is that?

Without going into any extremes where every little piece of object from the large oak tables down to the lowliest spoon can be interacted with, I'd say that there's room for a good measure of immersiveness in making some more obvious things useable by players. For instance, AC2 has some mines from which you could harvest wood or stone and other crafting materials. In Horizons you can actually target a tree and start chopping wood from it. I guess other games do the same too, or did it in the past, but it's still severely lacking in most craft-centric games in my opinion. In any case, these examples are a big step forward from more conventional models in which you would walk up to an NPC and buy the things you need.

But we need more. Interaction with the environment greatly enhance the immersion factor. And you need such devices where crafting is concerned since it's usually considered boring to craft. To echo my esteemed colleague Dialogue from his editorial earlier this week: "The fun factor of harvesting in Star Wars Galaxies ran out pretty darn quickly". And I would even add that any game's crafting or harvesting also got boring just as quickly. Mini-games are good if they stay true to the spirit of the game. In other words it wouldn't be very immersive to play Space Invaders while your character chops wood from a tree in the middle of a fantasy land. There is a huge opportunity for developers to listen to gamers here, because this issue may not seem that important, but in fact it is very much part of the reason why some or even most casual gamers don't play their game anymore after three months. It's often at that point that the tedium of a game really starts to sink in, and that's when players decide to move on to bigger and better things.

Acting without inspiration

Beyond the crafting issues, there are instances where the game world will feel more static and informal than it really should. Things that can be used and interacted with go a long way in making a world more interesting and immersive, even if they don't really serve any purpose other than being fun to pick up and role-play with. A sword is as much a role-playing tool as a mug of ale is, although the two don't convey the same message of course. And a tree that can be chopped down by a crafter creates a dynamic environment that helps create a feeling that a player's action has some repercussions on the world that he plays in.

A player interacting with objects in a game is the same as a stage actor playing a role in theater. If the director doesn't give the actor some tools so that he can really impersonate the character he's supposed to play, then the actor will seem bland and uninteresting to the viewer. Giving the actor a prop or two, like a wig, or a special trinket that the character would have used in his spare time, will help him get deeper into the skin of his character. It doesn't need to be something that's visible to the audience, it just needs to be there for the actor. Although some players, like some great actors, can really create a role without any sort of external help, most of them will only get in their character's skin if they can feel the world around them. A player could pick up a strange looking trinket in his first few hours of playing and hold on to it. That trinket could then become a part of his character, and somehow enable him to create a role in that world. Because the trinket is from that world while he is mostly an outsider up until then. It doesn't need to do anything, it just needs to be there, and the player has to be able to pick it up in the first place. Because, like an uninspired actor that can't get to the bottom of his character's psyche, a player can't identify with a world where everything is bolted down to the ground.

In their current form mmorpgs have so little interaction between the players and their environment that it makes it impossible to even think of doing anything else other than fighting. Think about it: the only real interaction you have in most current games is with monsters. Even interacting with other players is almost completely absent as they mostly pass right through one another on the playing field. Although there are obvious technical reasons for limiting these interactions in mmorpgs, I can't see what is the reason for eliminating them completely. And as more and more upcoming games are claiming that they will have true role-playing tools, one can only wonder what these tools could be (because most of them don't mention the details), and if they'll really help us create specific roles to play with. Time will tell I guess.