Verb Directions in Game Design

 A few months ago I looked at verb design in other media and as part of that blog post I briefly dipped into Magic: The Gathering, but ever since then I’ve wanted to revisit this part of the discussion and dive in deep on how Magic deals with expressing player and character personality.

So first, let me explain why. Magic: The Gathering is a combat-focused experience that expresses character personality through action verbs at a level of nuance and complexity I have never seen in a video game. Production demands of video games are more intense, so it’s harder for them to really explore the depths of this type of design. Unfortunately, even narrative juggernauts like Hades will have the complexity of personality only available in their main character. Even MMOs, games which are built with the same desire for expressivity as Magic, don’t ever give players the open expression space to really act in a way that’s unique to them or their character. I’m sure you can immediately think of many very compelling reasons why all of this is true, but I want to take this post to discuss how to push the envelope a little further while still remaining on a budget! So let’s dive in!

Magic cards exist on a game board. Any given card will belong to you, the player, or to an opponent. Your cards can be used to affect that opponent in some way, and in doing so, this card is acting outwards, which looks a bit like this:

All this graphic means is that the card is acting towards something. This is the most common expression of action a character in a video game can be given. Usually, this outward action just takes the form of damage. A character acts outwardly and damages something within its range. This is a standard attack design. Usually this attack will affect a target’s health and there’s no other target for your outward action, except to target some other object’s health bar.

Magic, however, offers multiple targets within an object. You may choose to attack an enemy creature card, an enemy planeswalker card, or the enemy player themself. Only attacking the player themself will cause damage to their health bar. However, despite only one option changing the health bar, all of these choices are valid in different circumstances. 

In the graphic, the green card can attack any of these three valid targets. Please note that the third target is left empty as a way of showing that the enemy player is what’s being attacked. This representation reflects how in Magic The Gathering, a player can only be attacked if nothing blocks that attack. Regardless of where the attack lands, though, the card will deal its damage to some other object and that will be the end of this attack action. 

This is not, however, the only interaction option available. Much like how Magic offers multiple targets, Magic also offers multiple interaction styles. Some cards can cause your opponent to discard. Discarding cards can happen from your hand, or from your deck, and this serves as a sort of alternative health bar. If for any reason there is no card in your deck when you have to draw a card, you lose the game, and so players may choose to build a deck which focuses on discarding instead of dealing health damage. 

I denoted this discard-based attack in blue because it’s describing an attack which is dealing damage to the deck, rather than dealing more traditional health point damage. It’s worth at least mentioning that there are other mechanics that could be included here, such as dealing poison instead of health damage. I don’t really need to be comprehensive to make my point here today, so feel free to fill in the blanks there with all the other ways a player might choose to win in MTG.

Now. So far we’ve been talking about combat damage being dealt in a standard means, but deck damage, also known as “milling” is usually done in other ways. Generally, this type of “damage” is done via abilities and effects. This could be “Pay X Cost and remove a card from the enemy deck” or “when this card comes into play, remove a card from the enemy deck” or any number of similar situations. Magic has learned to trigger its abilities in many different ways. Some cards may ask you to pay a direct fee, others may only happen once during a specific scenario, others may happen repeatedly on a timer. All of these are happening to the side of combat, outside of that order of operations.

So now we have two methods of interaction represented here. You can interact with Health, or you can interact with the Deck. You can interact Directly, or you can interact Indirectly. And these are just the options for a creature card. This same set of actions is also represented in the skillset available to the player themself. They can simply cast fireballs to do damage without the need of a creature, and the targets they may choose from are identical, though they of course will interact slightly differently, and player spells like this happen at a slightly different time in the turn hierarchy.

Now. We got super complicated. I apologize, and I’ll stop there with this part of the breakdown. 

Next, let’s strip things down again and go look into two cards and how they may interact with one another in a void.

We have two cards here. Let’s say one is attacking the other, or otherwise causing some effect to be applied to that other card. Regardless of what form the interaction takes, one of these cards is acting on the other. What does this defending card do in response? Well, what can we do with an arrow? I mean. It’s just a graphical metaphor, but… what could we do with this arrow in this graphic to say it’s not going to hit this other card? Well…. I could put a line in between these two cards, right? A line would say “There is something between these two, so the attack isn’t happening” and that would be pretty effective. In fact, Magic has a mechanic for this. It’s called Blocking. If I want to prevent a card from attacking me, I block the attack with a creature. 

So here’s my graphical representation of that. The top half of the arrow is blocked by the wall. I left a ghostly impression of it to show that it would have passed through, if not for the obstruction. I have now blocked the attack! Maybe I blocked the attack with a creature card, or maybe I blocked it with a spell or ability. It doesn’t matter. I blocked the attack. People who play Magic may be screaming “But you can’t target an attack like this!” because technically you can’t choose to attack a creature directly in Magic, but I’m not really concerned with the specifics of the rules here. The idea is just “my creature was going to do something to your creature, but you put something in the way, so I can’t”, and I only care about this abstract concept for now. 

What else can I do with an arrow? Well, I could bend it! Or point it at something else, if I didn’t want to visually bend it, but the result is the same: I can put the pointy end somewhere else. I don’t want it pointing at me, I want it pointed at you. Or your ally at least. 

 

What else could we do with an arrow? Could we make it longer? What does THAT mean? Well, I guess it means the attack went through the defender. In other words, the defender dodged. The defender just isn’t where the attack is happening any more. Now that pointy end is somewhere behind the target. In the visual language I’ve set up for these, I suppose that means the damage went to the player, but whatever. It’s somewhere else now, and sometimes that’s the most important thing.

We could also turn the arrow back on itself. Send it back where it came from. Or delete the arrow, and make it so it never happened. I could also make the arrow bigger or smaller, simulating changing its effect to be more or less powerful.

This graphic shows every way to alter an action. I may have missed a few, of course, feel free to leave a comment if you think you have another. Now. All of these graphical representations show a single action. Magic also allows you to respond to the response. In other words, I may attack, and you may redirect my attack back at my face, but I can then prevent the attack from happening, thus stopping myself from taking damage. Or I could redirect the damage back to you again. Or decrease the amount of damage. You can see where this is going. The above graphic applies to any single action, and each action can be responded to by another action, and the chain continues on until someone runs out of things they can do. This also applies to indirect effects, of course. My earlier graphic with arrows coming from the sides of a card could have all of these same effects applied.

Just for the sake of clarity, let’s make this a bullet list instead of a graphic. These are the ways to interact with an action:

• Ignore it

• Redirect it

• Block it

• Reflect it

• Empower it

• Weaken it

• Dodge it

• Prevent it

A reminder: These are methods for interacting with an attack. If you try to deal damage to me, I may use any of the above to try to stop that attack from affecting me. If you try and cast a spell on me, I may do the same. If you try and deal damage to an object which is important to me, I may use these same abilities to prevent that damage as well, I don’t necessarily have to be the target myself. That said, though, obviously it may change my ability to interact with your attack, if the target is someone or something other than myself. I may or may not be good at extending my protection to others. By the same token, I may or may not be good at responding to outside actions. Perhaps I’m only good at setting up actions myself. Aggressive types will focus on hitting big swings, right? They’re probably less good at responding to someone else’s action, but a more manipulative person might excel at only responding to actions initiated by others.

That brings us to our next discussion. What does it say about a person if they choose to interact in only one particular way? What does it say about them if they’re only good at initiating that first action? How about if they’re only good at responding to actions? What does it say if they can only apply these effects to themselves? What does it say if they can only apply these effects to others? To go to the earlier graphics, what does it say if a card is only good at dealing “Damage” to a deck? How about if they’re only good against planeswalkers? Or creatures?

Well these are starting to sound like classes in D&D. Paladins are great at applying effects which prevent damage to their allies. Rogues are great at dodging, reflecting, and redirecting attacks, but only when those attacks affect themselves. Wizards and Mages have spells that could do that reflecting and dodging, but which can affect someone other than themself. These essential verb building blocks that we’ve broken down in this article are the pure distillation of character action. By understanding the personality you wish to convey, you can choose particular interaction styles that suit the character. Magic’s secret to conveying depth in their characters is that they offer a game with a wide range of possible options at every level. The multiple targets I mention early in this article serve as expressive grounds for conveying character. If you want a character in Magic to come across as thuggish, you have it deal a lot of damage, and focus only on damage to health. If you make a thuggish character that deals deck damage instead of health damage, then that character becomes someone who would flay another’s mind for personal gain, a very different type of thug. Having multiple targets for any given action means your characters have more ways to express themselves. Even without multiple targets, however, you can still express yourself through the type of interaction you choose, whether direct, indirect, or etc.

But you’re not working on Magic The Gathering, you’re making a roguelike, or a strategy game, or a fighting game, or a FPS. 

Well, what is a bullet, except a direct outwards action? I’m acting outwards towards my target by shooting a bullet at it. What can my target do to respond? Can they redirect the bullet? Can they make the bullet weaker? 

What is a sword strike? Can your opponents parry and shift the target of the blade to go somewhere less harmful? Can the sword be blocked?

What about an alternative health bar? Can I attack your stamina gauge instead of your health, rendering you unable to move? Can I attack your mech’s heat system and overload your battery instead of trying to cut through your armor? Could I use energy attacks to cause your battery to explode instead? Where are the other systems I can target when choosing how my character operates?

When I said that I’ve never seen a game as nuanced as the narrative verbs in Magic, this is what I mean. In a shooter game all you get are various forms of outwards action with next to nothing that can be done to alter the attack. Overwatch is one of the very few games of that ilk which manages to convey character in this way. Overwatch also has multiple targets in the form of pushing carts or capturing points or whatever, though they don’t ever have more than one active at the same time, which is a bit of a shame (and yes, allowing that would make it a very different game, so it’s fine if that’s not the game they wanted to make). Overwatch, also,  is only ever concerned with dealing health damage to your opponents. You never have a capture point that demands you disable the enemy base’s shields, or that type of thing. Your focus is always in one direction, which streamlines the game, but removes any expressivity from the verbs.

Magic finds this streamlining by simplifying its systems to stay on budget. Magic says all damage from any source will deal simple number values. Most creatures deal somewhere between 1 and 5 damage total. Some deal more than that, but the bulk of the game is in the 1-5 range because low numbers are easier to calculate and deal with for the player. There’s no “1d6 damage plus 2d4 fire damage” type of interactions, every source of damage deals a simple, set amount, and all damage is identical. In games we avoid this simplicity in order to bump up the variety. You WANT video game damage to be more complicated, otherwise it gets predictable and boring. But what if instead, you put the interest back in via alternative targets for that damage? By changing the places where damage can be dealt, you are putting the focus on responding to action directed inward, something you don’t often have to concern yourself with in video games (with some exception for those games which have shields that you can redirect to be in front or behind your space ship, but even those never go very far to make it interesting).

Most games focus only on outward action. You are the hero of legend, this is your power fantasy, so the only thing that matters is how you act outwardly upon the world, and how the world responds to this outward action (usually by giving you gold and exp). Even the modern wave of games which give players more interesting, fantastical abilities (like the aforementioned Overwatch, or other games like Destiny or Outriders) usually only require a direct outward action in order to win, and focus entirely on dealing health damage until your enemies retreat. Very very rare is the game which demands that you redirect your opponents in order to win. Rarer still is the game that allows victory by only using redirection.

Imagine a video game starring one of these characters. What does that game look like? What’s the primary verb the character uses to overcome its challenges? What’s the progression as the character develops and grows?

These characters absolutely star in the decks they are built into in a game of Magic, yet how could we make them star in a game? These characters can’t replace the protagonist in Call of Duty, no matter how bland white dude we try to make them, because their abilities are too different at too fundamental a level. Making any of these cards a video game protagonist would require a wildly different approach to game design. I, for one, would like to play these games.

And that’s all for this post for now. I hope that’s given you something to think about when designing the gameplay for your game’s main character, or for when writing the character’s backstory once you’ve decided on their core verbs.

Thanks for reading!

Storytelling Through Skill Trees

 Humans are not trees. It’s a radical statement to make, I know, but try to bear with me while I explain this difficult concept! Humans, in fact, do not begin as a single entity and then branch out to catch the sun’s light. Instead, when we grow what we try to “catch” are various abilities, skills, and knowledge as a means of reaching a personal goal. No two of us are chasing the same sunlight. 

Which is my really obnoxious way of saying: Why are we so convinced that skill trees are a great solution to map character growth over time? If we look at evolutionary psychology in books like “The Pocket Guide to Polyvagal Theory” or “The Strange Order of Things” we find that psychology professionals have identified that organisms basically grow in whatever way they find the most success. Even trees and plants will change their growth patterns over time based on the resistance that they meet in their surroundings. So if all of the biological world is based on the concept of adapting to their unique stressors, why are we building all of our games with rigid skill trees? Why does my D&D character sheet require that I be a wizard or a bard or a fighter? Why do I pick my difficulty when I begin the game, and get locked into these systems? This stuff doesn’t fit our evolutionary needs. Adapt or die, these are the rules of the whole world. If your system doesn’t allow adaptation, then it incentivizes death. 

The common wisdom found in game design communities will, however, contradict me here. Players WANT to be a Bard because they don’t want to have to do a ton of research into building their character for a silly game they play twice a month on tuesdays. Figuring out the entire system just to understand how to build the most powerful character is an awful way for most of society to spend their free time (obviously some people do like these things, and more power to you! Literally!). People want to walk down a path somewhat mindlessly, and make a few choices along the way knowing that they will still have a good time in the process. This is a natural desire for each of us, because we want to feel like we’re good at things without having to spend our lives mastering those things. In fact, even in real life, most of us are unconcerned with becoming the most or the best, we’re largely just trying to figure out how to Make The Thing in the first place. The idea of becoming the best Thing Maker alive is absurd. 

Fortunately for us, we as humans have already spent boatloads of time and energy learning how to educate other humans in healthy ways, and to do so while they are quite literally incapable of understanding how to plan out a complex skill tree path. As children, we are placed into schools which teach us a set curriculum, and as we advance through our education we pick up skills along the way. Some of us will pick up more math skills than others, some will pick up primarily physical talents, and still others will focus on the arts. Often, we will pick up a set of skills society enforces upon us, which we do not find daily use for. How often have you or your friends complained about having to take that advanced calculus class, knowing your career goal is to bake cupcakes? How often have you been out with a group of friends and you break out that “party trick” you learned years ago but never had any specific use for because you learned it completely aside from whatever your core path was? We all have those “useless” skills that don’t come out as a daily occurrence because we thought they’d be worth it at the time.

The point that I’m making is that a person isn’t a collection of skills carefully chosen, but a collection of skills of which only a carefully chosen few are repeated. In other words, I like to design games, and so I write a lot about game design, and so people view me as a game designer. I’m also an artist, but I do that much less, so people view me as an artist much less. If your Cleric doesn’t also have a set of skills from when they tried being a Barbarian, are they even a real person? 

WWBJD?

First grade teachers will cover a generic set of skills we think are essential. Reading, Writing, Basic Math, etc. are all represented. By the time you reach 18 you have dropped any number of skills by the wayside. But we treat characters in games as if they start at the beginnings of a tree, and branch out as they go. Reality tends to work in reverse, where we start in the branches and funnel into increasingly-specific direction over time. If school were a skill tree, you’d start off with an extremely nonlinear pile of skill to choose from, and somewhere at the half way mark of the game, you’d finally have the 30 required skills to earn your certification as a Paladin. Once you’re a Paladin, you can officially dive into those deep Paladin skills that just would not be useful to anyone else. The “Paladin” class, in this example, acts as a signpost. It’s a guide saying “if you come this direction, your experience will look like this” and is a good way to direct people towards a specific goal. This concept has been proven to work so well that every school system on the planet finds some rough approximation of it, even if the details vary. So why on earth do we build games the other way around? Why am I choosing my class at the start of my character? Why am I locked in with lateral movement a near impossibility? And look, I acknowledge that multiclassing in an RPG is there to solve exactly this, but come on folks, we all know that’s not the same thing. In real life I don’t get a degree in art and then a minor in english and then only get to either be an artist or a writer for the rest of my life. That fluidity of adaptation is essential for human evolution and happiness both, and is something we should strive to include in our game design. And ok, saying all this is well and good, but how do we make it happen?

The key features of this evolutionary look at personal growth is that we start off general and end up specific after walking through a series of gates. This really isn’t unlike how Outriders handles its skill tree.

On the left we effectively have elementary education, then there’s a clear delineation where you can branch into a new path if you choose. Unfortunately, you’re stuck with only a few places where you can jump between the three trees in this image, so this works more like a D&D multiclass system where you can choose a new career path, but you’re defined by the choice you made when accepting that first job (our company LOVES lateral movement among our employees, just fill out these 6 forms and reapply after a minimum of 2 years in your current role and you’ll be considered for that pay cut!). The way humans like to work is to have a more open pool available. Mechanically, this would be more like drawing from a large pool of skills which get increasingly specific as you go along. For those familiar with CCG games, this is sort of like drafting a pack of Magic cards. You start with a broad pool of possibilities, but each choice you make narrows your focus down so that later picks become almost predetermined. Which sounds rather confusing, so let me make a chart to demonstrate that visually.

Let’s avoid debating how to organize those DnD classes, that’s not the point here. But the idea is the same regardless of how you structure things. On the left is a list of skills for everyone, and as you go right it filters down to be skills for each specific class. If we were to continue the Magic The Gathering example, the green box on the left would include cards of all kinds, then the next column represents when we’re given boxes of cards for each specific color, then next would be deck types, and the red on the far right would be boxes full of cards catered to popular meta decks. As you move from left to right, you go from generic to extreme specificity, just as you do when you progress from elementary school to college. Your development is along whichever path you like, and then once you reach the end you must prove you have achieved mastery. Is your MTG deck a “red” deck if you have 5 red cards in it? 10? In real life, if you want to be known as skilled in a particular area, you take a certification exam for that skillset. In other words, you qualify yourself as “a red deck” by proving that you have enough skills to use the term. In this skill tree, you do the same thing. If you want to call yourself a rogue, you have to have… let’s say 10 skills in the rogue tree. Once you have any 10 rogue skills, you are officially a rogue. Congrats! I don’t care if you have 25 points in wizard, or 45 points in paladin, if you have 10 rogue points, you qualify to call yourself as a rogue. 

This aligns much more closely to how we, as humans, expect to learn. There are goals to reach at the end of the path we’ve chosen, and it’s our task to reach the goal we choose. No two people will learn in exactly the same way, but generally you get to where you want to go. As opposed to the purely linear skill trees that we see in games like Outriders, or the ones we get in games like Path of Exile which start off at a particular class and then try to add the nonlinearity at the end, which is the opposite of how we humans learn and grow.

There is, of course, quite a good reason people tend to design games in this “backwards” way: People get overwhelmed by too many options. If you start off in the “Everyone” bucket, you have far too many choices at once, and how on earth could you ever possibly choose? Again, we look at developmental psychology for our answer. We don’t allow kids to choose the classes they take, we give them a set curriculum and they learn all of it. Once a kid knows more of what they like, we start to give them choices to make, such as choosing types of curriculum to take in high school (which sometimes takes the form of choosing blocks of classes, and other times in choosing entire high schools). Then we don’t let them fully branch out until college, once we know what they like. So in the above example, perhaps you could choose a class to start with, and then change that class at any time. If you choose, for example, Wizard, you would begin collecting skills within the wizard curriculum, moving from generic skills into magical skills, and if you reach magical skills and suddenly realize you want to pivot into a Warlock instead, well that’s fine because you haven’t reached the point where the skills required is different from a Warlock anyway, so no big deal. Once you choose Warlock as your new class, your current skill list is the same, you just have a new goal. If you choose to then become a Fighter, well you’ll have to start over from the physical skills list instead of the magical skills list, but at least you don’t have to relearn the skills for everyone! And already this feels much more like what it’s like to be a person going through a real education process, realizing that you want to learn something new.

The other aspect of this is what to do with unused skills, and to which I suggest limiting the immediate skill list you have, such as how you can only build a deck of 60 cards in Magic The Gathering. Then you take all the skills you’ve learned, apply the “build” you want, and there’s your character. This is also how we work in real life, we’ve all got those party tricks we can break out, but our core “build” is just the skills we use over and over in our daily life.

This guy gets it

But this isn’t an article about game design, despite how much time I’ve devoted to that so far. No, this is an article about narrative design. Mapping skill trees to human development patterns doesn’t add all that much to the game design process, but it fundamentally changes how we are allowed to tell stories in these games. Imagine you’re the child of strict parents who are forcing you into Paladin college, but you’ve always known you’re a Bard in your heart. Maybe you take night classes and dream of running off to the circus, maybe you only look onto Bard skills from a distance, but either way you have a problem: You don’t WANT to progress the way you have been. Now your skill tree is greyed out, and there’s only one path to choose. You can see the other roads, but they only bring you agony. You can never be anything but what you are. Life is awful. 

At least life was awful, until you met Him. He changed you. He showed you the way things could be, he showed you the world. He taught you a Bard skill! It was a simple one, but you have a skill point on that forbidden tree! How is that possible? Weren’t those other trees greyed out? Were they? Or could you have put those skills there at any time, if only you’d allowed yourself? Sure, your parents will be pissed now, but it’s not like they can stop you from learning, right? And maybe they’ll even tolerate a few skills, I mean it’s not like you’re at the real hard stuff yet, right? It takes a while before you can unlock those Bard-specific skills anyway, this is just a phase, you’ll grow out of it before then. Which, of course, you don’t. You get your first Bard skill and you’ve crossed the threshold. Your parents see this trigger and disown you. They know you have a Bard skill, and no son of mine will be a filthy Bard! Not under MY roof!

In this example we have a set of skills that unlock based on triggers reached by hitting a threshold. Then we have quests that react to those same triggers, your parents changing their dialogue based on if the boolean variable “hasBardSkill” has been flipped to true. It’s simple stuff, programmatically. What’s important, though, is that we have that natural movement from unskilled to skilled which matches human development. If you started off by choosing to be Paladin, and only ever got the chance to multiclass, this storytelling would be impossible. You’d already be hard-coded into your class from day one with no way out, and what is a story without personal growth and change over time?

But I’m not leaving it there either, because I drew the earlier connection to developmental psychology for a reason. Characters in stories have goals. In some cases, those goals have to do with reaching a particular location on a skill tree. In other cases, they may just want to be a different person in a more abstract sense. Maybe the character is a child who just really wants to be like Daddy, so they try to learn the same skills he learned. Maybe the person has anger management issues and needs to develop those skills, or maybe they’ve found themselves trapped in a life of crime and they want out. Maybe they are getting bullied and the only reason they care about the skill tree mess is to keep them from being hurt. People grow over time, at all stages of life. There is a biological imperative in all of us which tells us to keep adapting, even if many of us try to ignore it because we don’t want to believe that we can change, or because we’re simply happy where we are. In games we map this growth onto what we call a Skill Tree, but in reality what we’re mapping is the development of our own minds. If a person has a mental block against allowing themselves to become a particular type of person, something common among abuse victims, that might manifest as a greyed-out skill tree, as in my earlier example. A skill tree is nothing more than the path of growth a character is allowed to move along. If the path is linear, then that person is only capable of growth in a particular direction. If the path is open, the person is allowed to grow more freely. Which shape the tree exists in will determine the possible reality that will define the person. Or at least the reality they impose upon themself. What kind of person has a linear skill tree? What does that say about their political or religious beliefs? What kind of career might they prefer?

To offer an example, consider the film Easy A. It’s a romantic comedy where the protagonist feels invisible as a teenage girl in high school. Her goal is to be popular, and the moment she trips that “isPopular” trigger, her life completely spirals out of control. Sunk cost fallacy keeps her there for a while, but eventually she has to come clean and resume her normal life. She’s not trying to become a Wizard or a Barbarian, but she is definitely trying to learn a new set of skills in the Popular Girl tree. Those skills, however, cause her nothing but trouble and her story focuses on how she must quickly learn to adapt. As another example, look at the anime Mob Psycho 100. Mob is a psychic high schooler who must avoid using his powerful psychic skill, which is triggered by stress. He has the skill unlocked already, but wants a new set of skills over on the “Physical Skills” branch instead. He has found that the more physical skills he has unlocked, the more able he is to control his use of those psychic skills he’s so worried about. It’s all a great way of mapping depression onto verb use, and shows us how we can demonstrate a character’s personality based on what skills they have, and which ones they feel like they need. These are two examples, but just consider the stories you've read or watched. Consider how the protagonist uses their skills in a way that either helps or hurts their progress through the story. Consider what skills they have at their disposal and why they did or did not use those skills in that story. Try to imagine what their skill tree might look like.

Each of us has a skill tree full of nodes we’ve unlocked. Each of us has a set of skills we are willing to use, and a set of skills we are unwilling to use. If we were a videogame, our preferences and the walls we build for ourselves would all manifest as variations in the UI that presents our stats to the person controlling us. 

What class are you? What class do you not consider a possibility for yourself? Is it because that tree is in some way locked for you, or is it simply that you’d have to go too far back on your tree to switch to that other path you’d need to be on?

Hopefully that gives everyone something to think about. Thanks for reading! I’d love your comments and thoughts below!

My Learnings On Quest Design So Far

 Video games are built on the basis of choice. When a player is presented with a scenario, it is up to them how to adapt. Storytelling in games is based on presenting interesting scenarios and allowing interesting adaptation. The difficulties lie in that while we are accustomed to stories being recorded in linear fashion in the form of books or films, we haven’t yet mastered what it means to tell a story involving choice. Games are a young medium, and so we look to our elders for advice. Those elders, unfortunately, do not know how to walk our path, but they can teach of their own journey, and we can adapt from there. With this idea in mind, I’ve been studying how linear stories are told for the sake of better understanding how nonlinear ones might be. Recently I’ve done a series of articles examining linear stories through the lens of quest design. What is the quest design of Lord of the Rings? And then what is the quest design of a romantic comedy or a mystery novel? These questions are explored further in those articles, but in this article I’m summarizing the lessons I’ve learned. Please join me as I go on my own quest to better understand quest design in games!

One clear lesson has been that quests, as any other form of a story, come with a beginning, middle, and end. You must first accept the quest, then you must be on the quest for a while, then you must resolve the quest, either by turning it in or by giving up. Knowing that, let’s break down those different parts and their elements and examine them closely.

The first part of a quest is the acceptance of that quest. You can’t begin a story without someone accepting some element that will cause an increase in drama over time. Perhaps your character must pick up an enchanted ring, or uncover a magical castle that had been hidden away. Perhaps your story is more mundane, and your character simply accepts a rumor that has been spread about them. The methods for accepting a quest vary based on the personality of the character and the type of story being told. While one character might accept a quest eagerly, another might refuse the quest, but then later end up in a situation where they’re forced to reconsider. In each of these cases, there is some form of acceptance, directly or indirectly. So what are the elements of accepting a quest? 

• Accept the quest

• Refuse the quest, then accept later

• Refuse the quest, then be forced to accept later

• Refuse the quest

Those few options are the basics, but you may well be able to imagine others that could be on this list, I’m more interested in you being able to understand how to add to the list, rather than being comprehensive myself. So we have multiple ways to accept or refuse a quest here, but there’s another aspect of this acceptance/rejection of the quest. What is the specific method of acceptance? In other words, HOW is the quest accepted or rejected? In game design, we only consider something a quest when there is an explicit acceptance or rejection, usually in the form of a UI element. In other words, if you don’t walk up to a quest giver and say yes or no to them, it’s not a quest. However, I submit to you that any player choice can be the acceptance or rejection of a quest. As an example, look at the quest design in the romantic comedy, Easy A (which I dive into in more detail here). The protagonist of Easy A never accepts a quest, the drama of the film arises as a consequence of her telling a lie about her weekend plans, and that lie spiraling out of control. The quest was accepted, but only in the form of an action, the protagonist was not consciously accepting a quest. We also do this in games, we just rarely discuss them as quests due to that lack of conscious acceptance. Metroidvania games give players different abilities throughout their adventure, and once a player finds an ability, the world reacts by allowing them to access new regions, and there are entire schools of game design devoted to ensuring the player will accept those quests and go where the designer intends. In other games, such as Demon’s Souls, you will be given a quest as a consequence of your exploration, without the need of a new ability. When you open a particular door, a dragon will arrive to spray fire at you. There is an implicit quest built into this exchange, as the game is subtly offering you a chance to slay this dragon, even if not at the moment. In open world games like Guild Wars 2, you will often receive a quest simply for entering a particular region. When you cross the border into this area, a quest is assigned to you as a way of giving you something to do in that region. Other games might do this by way of a hub world, where you are presented with the list of quests associated with a region before you accept entrance to that region, such as happens in Mario 64. All of these are methods by which a player can accept a quest through their own action, without ever being forced to walk up to a quest giver. 

This act of being offered a quest breaks down into two parts. The method by which the quest is offered to you, and the method by which you choose to accept it. Here are some ways a quest might be offered to you:

• Interact with a character

• Interact with an object

• Gain an item

• Gain some knowledge

• Enter an area

• Use a verb

And here are some differing methods you may have of accepting that quest:

• Explicit binary choice (yes/no)

• Implicit choice (automatically happens as a result of the action)

• No choice (happens whether you act or not)

For some examples, think back to Super Metroid. When you get the Super Missiles, there’s an implied quest to go and open all the Super Missile doors. You can reject that quest in some cases, but progression is locked behind acceptance of at least a few of these. That’s an example of gaining an item. Super Metroid also uses Enter Area quests, which appear on your map when you trigger those sequences, offering a more explicit version of a quest to keep you aware that you’re moving forward, instead of relying entirely on implicit agreements. In Outer Wilds, the quests are all implicit, and locked behind gaining knowledge, as is the case in most mystery stories. You unlock new information and now you want to go somewhere to uncover yet more new information. These types of quests happen without any direct agreement and are sometimes required before you can progress, thus they fall into either the implicit or no choice categories. And hopefully that gives you enough to extrapolate from there, imagining other types of quests or just noticing how games handle these implicit and explicit agreements.

Sorry, Kaltunk, you’re obsolete, buddy….

Now that we’ve discussed the parts and pieces of accepting a quest, I want to move onto what happens once you’ve embarked upon that quest. In stories like Lord of the Rings, this is the bulk of the adventure and excitement, the ring wraiths trying to kill you as long as you carry the ring, the events that unfold along the way to the goal, etc. This is also where emergent gameplay happens, and where many interactive story designers will default to telling linear stories. As in these last two sentences, being on a quest offers interaction types that will break down a couple of categories, so let’s dive into those.

When you’re on an adventure, there are two different ways that adventure changes over time. There’s the internal struggle and the external struggle. The external struggle is the sequence of events which happen around you as you progress. In the case of Lord of the Rings, it’s the various armies and nasty creatures which Frodo interacts with on his way to Mordor. The internal struggle is the way the rest of that affects the way you interact with it. As time goes on, Frodo becomes increasingly hostile as a result of carrying the ring, and this changes how he perceives people around him, most notably his friends. The internal and external struggles are the throughlines which define a character and the story around them, and so modeling those things in your game is extremely important. 

External struggles break down as follows:

• Specific events

• Environments

• Mechanical stressors 

Specific events are the cutscenes and scripted sequences which happen along the way to your destination. They’re “story time” moments which tell specific, linear events that must be conveyed for the story to function. Environments tell the story of a particular region, if you need a forest full of zombie orcs in order to sell the threat of a nearby necromancer, this is all the ways you accomplish that. Mechanical stressors are things which fundamentally alter your interactions for a time, such as the vampirism system in Elder Scrolls or the covenant system in Dark Souls. These are external systems which alter the expression of internal struggles in some way, and which bridge the gap between the internal and external worlds. In other words, this is the one ring in LotR. The ring is an external object that causes internal stress on Frodo, and that stress changes how his personality is expressed. 

Internal struggles will list out slightly differently because internal struggles require external expression in order for the player to understand they exist. As such, it is that expression which may change in order to convey narrative, and that expression which is relevant to quest design. Here are some things which may be changed to express an internal mental state to the player:

• GUI changes/animations

• Character progression changes

• Mechanical interactions

A character’s internal struggles over the course of a quest will be reflected partly in their perceptions of the world around them, expressed to the player through the GUI. So if Frodo starts to see Sam as an enemy, you would have to convey that to the player by showing Sam as an enemy in your UI elements. Character progression systems reflect a person’s internal conception of self. If a character no longer sees a way for them to grow as a person, this might be shown via a lack of skill tree options. They’ve reached their peak and are still unsatisfied, until some new event reveals a new branch of that skill tree. Mechanical interactions are simply the way a character directly manipulates the world around them (otherwise known as the game mechanics). Altering any or all of these things expresses a change in the player character. Obviously, this has serious ramifications for user experience, so handle with care. Notably, this is also where the forbidden phrase, Ludonarrative Dissonance, comes into play since gameplay systems are invented without consideration for how they express character, but they’ll do that expressing no matter how little thought goes into it. I realize I brushed past this section super fast, but it’s a bit much for the scope of this article, and you can read some articles I've written in the past to see my thoughts.

The specific events that happen to the protagonist of a story change the internal workings of that character. This is how most stories are told in linear media, just think of how much Frodo changes in Lord of the Rings, or how much Luke changes in Star Wars. These characters are exposed to new ideas as they explore their worlds, and those ideas change how they view those worlds, as well as themselves. The changing viewpoint changes how they interact, and all of this can be modelled through gameplay as long as we understand how to connect the dots.

Scrooge's end-game skill tree is pretty wild!

The last piece of the puzzle is the resolution of the quest and the reward. While studying the rewards systems of linear media, I came to a very quick realization that in the vast majority of cases the character just wants the world to go back to normal. This is the hero’s journey formula, which states that the hero will go on an adventure and return home forever changed in some way. That change is the reward, and the act of going home is part of the quest. If you’ve returned home, then the quest is over, there need not be any further reward. In games, quests are often simply part of a whole experience, and we use rewards to motivate the player to keep moving forward, since there’s no real way to generate internal motivation easily when you’re doing something just for entertainment.

In the end, I can’t think of a useful way to list out possible rewards that are in some way narrative, because there’s just too many options, you can reward a player with virtually anything. This is also the part of quest design that video games are the best at, and I won’t pretend to be a greater expert than those people who’ve made RPG games all their lives. Basically, you probably already know how this works, I have nothing new to add. 

So we’ve now covered how to begin, end, and design the experience of a quest. I’d like to take this moment to walk through a few quests from different media, and an example I make up on the spot, all just to show how to use this knowledge. 

The first example I want to look at is the Lord of the Rings example, since it’s just a very straightforward setup for us, and one I assume most people reading this article will likely be familiar with. In LotR, Frodo is given the one ring by his uncle. Upon receiving the ring, nothing of note happens, it just sits in an envelope for a while until Gandalf comes back and tells Frodo he has to bring it to the elves. On the way to complete this task, it becomes clear that the ring is drawing the forces of evil to it. The quest to destroy the ring actually begins with the elves. Frodo is present for the discussion of the quest, and agrees to the adventure after hearing the details. This is an explicit choice, it may as well have been a yes/no at a quest giver. He has been given time to understand that as long as he holds the ring, evil will be drawn to it, and that he must walk the ring through the enemy camp if he wants to succeed on his quest. The core of the quest involves simply walking to Mordor, and the dangers inherent to that act, since his enemies can feel the ring and constantly seek it. If this were a game, the ring might increase enemy aggression range or something similar. The quest resolves itself by throwing the ring into the lava, which destroys much of the forces of evil in the process, allowing the world to return to its quiet, normal state. That return to normalcy is, itself, the reward for the quest.

The second example will be the 90s film, Matilda (based on a novel, but I’ve not read it recently enough to use it for this example, so I’ll focus on the film). Matilda is the story of a little girl who develops psychic powers as a result of strong emotions while trying to navigate the abusive culture into which she was born. She uses those powers to bond with her favorite teacher, and eventually gets herself adopted by said teacher as her biological family leaves the area to flee law enforcement. The “quest” of the film is to understand herself and her powers as she grows up in a culture that wants her to be someone she is not. She gets this quest by using a verb in the form of arguing with her father, resulting in her accidentally discovering her powers. She accepts the quest eagerly after this, though it is an implicit acceptance, there’s no one asking if she wants to be psychic. Once she has accepted the quest, she begins exploring her abilities by using them to gain advantage over bullies who had used their own strength to get into their positions of power. The quest is an exploration of all the different ways her new verb can be used, and the quest is resolved once she has upended the power dynamics of her society enough that she can put herself into a better situation. The structure of the film is much similar to a Metroidvania, in that she wanders around in various environments, exploring new powers as she discovers them. The reward for this quest is a life more accepting of who Matilda was from the beginning, as she befriends Ms Honey and eventually is adopted by her. 

So let’s do a hypothetical quest, for the sake of exploring these concepts in a game. I’m going to try to make choices that aren’t genre-specific so you can hopefully imagine a number of ways this story could be told. 

Let’s start with the acceptance of the quest. I want to do something I see a little less often, so let’s go with an offer and a rejection. In games that amounts to the player seeing the quest, and then ignoring it. So let’s have an NPC quest giver, but the player decides to click no on the window when offered. But I want to force them to accept later, so let’s say there’s also a powerup that they can get which is related to the quest. Since there are two methods of acceptance, let’s design the quest around an interaction that can happen regardless of how you have accepted it. Let’s borrow from the nazgul and say that as long as you have a special power, enemies are particularly hostile to you and chase you as you pass by (which translates to an in-game mechanic of merely increasing your hostile range with enemies, and maybe causing neutral enemies to become hostile). The quest itself will exist as long as you’re within a certain area, so let’s say a particular town. The goal of the quest is to find someone who can dispel the aura of hostility for you, and you accomplish it only by going somewhere new within the town. Once you complete the quest, since this is a game, you get an item which does the inverse of what happened while you were on the quest: enemies are less hostile to you.

And now to put some paint on this. If the quest is all about overly hostile enemies, and your goal is to reach an NPC which causes those enemies to become less hostile, let’s say this all centers around village rats. When you enter the town you hear about Farmer Maria’s rat problem. You speak to her, and she tells you that ever since she went out into the woods last week, she’s had a terrible rat problem. Everywhere she goes, rats come out of the woodwork to terrorize her, and she desperately needs your help. You tell her you’d love to help, but you’ve got a world to save. You leave the village and continue your quest only to be confronted by a rat, which you kill as it’s your main mechanic after all. Upon killing the rat, you gain a special status effect called “Hated By [Town]’s Vermin” which causes rats to spawn every few seconds. This completely disrupts your plan, so you go back to the village and speak to Farmer Maria. She tells you about a rumor that deep beneath the village, in an old network of caves, lives The Ratomancer. You go down into those caves and find your way to The Ratomancer. You speak and quickly find that he’s actually a nice guy who just thinks mice are cute and pretty neat, so the villagers long ago nicknamed him The Rat Romancer, and he’s lived here in shame ever since. Really, he’s just a lonely guy who wanted a friend, and he’s sorry you got caught up in his war with a neighboring cave wizard who’s been cursing passersby with cheese pheromones. He gives you a rat gland and says to apply it twice a day and call him in the morning if the rats come back. This rat gland works beautifully and now rats don’t attack you anymore! 

Systems-wise, this quest requires several reusable implementations, such as status effects, the ability to either spawn enemies near the player or increase enemy aggression range, and the ability to cause enemies to become less hostile to you. These systems could be reused for many quests for many uses throughout the game, but it’s definitely a matter of if they’re worth it for your production. Hopefully, though, you can see how all this can be useful regardless of the systems available to you.

By breaking a quest down into its component pieces, you gain the ability to program reasonable systems that allow for interesting gameplay-focused stories. By telling gameplay-focused stories, you lessen the number of explicit story moments you have to craft, cutscenes you have to direct, and overall improve the flow of your game. You may even save some production time, or allow yourself to make a more complex game with a small team. You may also stumble over all this and ruin everything, but I believe in you! Go forth and use these thoughts to inform your game design, and if you’ve got any thoughts on how I’m just totally wrong, feel free to comment below. 

Thanks for reading!