Sonic flOws

Eh, what the heck!  Since y’all are posting blogs today and tomorrow, I figure I’ll write one too and maybe drum up some additional conversation.  I’ve been thinking about our conversation today on rhetoric and locating meaning in our play-throughs.  As Preston pointed out when we were talking about where to locate logos in games, there’s some in-game content that all players encounter no matter how they play.  I like to think of these as “choke points,” or locations in the game that contain key narrative and visual events that the designer wants all players to encounter.  A classic example of choke point is the Knuckles events that bring together the multi-tiered stages of Sonic the Hedgehog 3.  A stage like Hydrocity Act 2 (it’s a massive file, so it might break your internets, but check out the link for a full-sized map) is a massive network of chutes and stairs that can be broken down into three distinct tiers: top, middle, and bottom.  Like many stages in the series (for example, take a peek at the design of Sonic CD’s Quartz Quadrant), each tier offers players different challenges and rewards.  While the top tier is often (but not all the time) safer and more rewarding (offering either power-ups, rings, or special stages), it’s designed to be harder for the player to navigate so that she often finds herself dropping down to the middle or bottom tier.  The middle tier is, well, fair to middlin’ in both challenge and reward, but less troublesome to navigate.  The bottom tier, as you’ve probably already gathered (and especially in an Zone like Hydrocity, Chemical Plant Zone, Aquatic Ruin Zone, or just about any stage with water), generally offers a greater challenge and less of a reward, but this is to counter against newbies plopping into the bottom tier and simply holding right to beat the stage. 

In Sonic 3, the player is given the option to explore any of the tiers in any order that she desires, creating multiple possibilities for play that are ultimately reigned in by narrative elements that the designer wants every player to see.   You can locate one of these choke points on the first map that I linked by scrolling all the way to the right until you see a spikey blue ball with an eight in the center.  Here the player encounters Knuckles, who is once again up to his dastardly tricks.  While this offers a smooth transition between the experience of bolting around the vast expanse of Hydrocity to battling with Dr. Robotnik in close quarters, it also serves to flesh out the simple narrative for Knuckles (spoiler alert: he’s a real stinker).

Again, there are exceptions to this rule, and early acts in Sonic CD, Sonic 2, and Sonic 3 are designed to offer fewer tiers so that players get a handle on this system.  For example, check out the design of the very first stage in Sonic 2 and you’ll notice that the stage is broken into two distinct tiers.  The upper tier offers players a bit more of a challenge (those coconut throwing monkeys are absolutely the worst), but it also gives them two shots at the special stage (denoted by those little red and yellow posts with a splotchy white star in the middle), enough rings to grant the player an extra life (and bump their ring total well over one hundred—trust me, I counted…), and seven power-up monitors.  Compare this to the lower stage, which yields about sixty to seventy rings, no special stage signposts, and three power-up monitors.  Notice too the “choke point” that’s designed into this stage.  After the first time that the level splits into two tiers, both come back together right around a special stage signpost.  While players do have the chance to miss this signpost by going for the brief third tier that has three power-up monitors lined up in a row, the player needs to be skilled enough to jump over a relatively tricky yellow spring that will shoot her back down a tier.  This design ensures that all but the most skilled players will tag the signpost, which serves both as a reset point in case the player dies, and opens a portal to the special stage if the player has collected over fifty rings.  Much like the tutorial choke points that Erica mentioned in class, this one exists to ensure that newbie players will understand how signposts work, telling the player that these weird lookin’ metal things ain’t so bad.  This early design (which is echoed and elaborated on in the second act) forwards an argument not just about players’ skill level and the desirability of navigating certain spatial areas, it also suggests that games are an art of designing possibilities in ways that other mediums haven’t or are unable to explore.  Game design combines choke points with multi-tiered and massively branching environments to give the player room to play—enabling her to realize (or, if you want to get all philosophy of becoming/Henri Bergson up in here) actualize all sorts of different potentials that are nestled within the flora and fauna of each stage.  This is part of what Gee is getting at when he writes,

“Your Alucard is different than mine. Yours had a different trajectory than mine. The hero is thus not Alucard from the designer’s story or you the real-world player. It is Alucard-you, a melding of the virtual character, Alucard, and you, the real-world player who has steered Alucard on a unique trajectory through the game” (60). 

Rolling with Gee’s chain of reasoning, I like to think of games as an art of potentialities that, although they contain narrative choke points (the designer’s story), enable the player to also produce a narrative distinct from the designer or other players.   Many contemporary, big-budget games favor design sequences, such as your AI teammates shouting at you to quit lingering around and leap through this here door or Cortana instructing you to hop in an enemy Banshee and fly to another base, that attempt move the player through the game’s choke points as quickly as possible.  Oftentimes, these choke points are built around ritzy, glitzy, and just plain breathtaking cinematic sequences (as Alex and Erica noted when we were talking about the nuclear bomb in the first Modern Warfare) that attempt to keep the player hooked with eye-widening wow after wow.  This isn’t necessarily a bad design philosophy, and oftentimes it dazzles, but it can drastically linearize the possibilities that the player can realize while playing. 

This is what I find so neat about a game like flOw, which was Jenova Chen’s attempt to integrate his research on dynamic difficulty adjustment and Mihaly Csikszentmihalyis’ concept of “flow” (you can play the game for free at this link).  Although the game is a bit less polished than its PS3 successor, it does an excellent job (better, in my opinion, than the PS3 version) of using DDA to capture the feeling of immersion and focus that Csikszentmihalyis attributes to flow.  In his masters thesis (which you can download at the link above), Chen argues that “the difficulty of a game should change dynamically based on its player’s skill and performance.”  Sonic the Hedgehog presents what we might consider a simplified version of DDA in that the levels don’t transform to match the possibilities that the player realizes, but they still offer a chance to adjust the gaming experience based on skill level.  flOw instead reflects the realization of these different types of play, using a feedback loop to mutate the game world (both environment and creatures) based on the player’s behavior.  flOw not only provides a space for the realization of different possibilities, but one that openly acknowledges those possibilities and responds to them.