Let's Analyze

Meaningful Rewards

This is easily the core that gets talked about the most in the Monster Hunter franchise, and its certainly present in World. The idea behind this is that Monster Hunter offers the player a system focused on loot, rewards and rare item drops, sans almost all of the randomness those systems often come with. This means if the player wants rarer items, they simply need to fight rarer, harder monsters. Should they want to increase their odds of getting more of a rare drop, they’ll have to further master the game beyond simply killing the monster. A good example of this is getting monster tails, which can simply be done by cutting off the desired monster’s tail (which is easier said than done) or perhaps getting a certain monster’s horn by destroying said monster’s horn (horns which are by no means weak-spots, and put the player in a vulnerable position). Another example is a brilliant piece of mid-game Palico gear, that allows the player to swap out one of the Palico’s many support items in favor of an item that steals more monster parts, mitigating grind but also increasing the challenge. At its core Monster Hunter is a game that will make you work for whatever loot you want, but gives you clear non-random routes to get those rewards. It’s this hard work that makes those rewards meaningful; every piece of gear the player has tells stories of their hunts and achievements, rather than a single story of when they got lucky and a boss dropped the weapon they wanted from a randomized number on a predetermined table. The game also rewards the player in a variety of other ways, by rewarding story progress by slowly opening new mechanics, by rewarding their exploration with new camps to spawn at, by rewarding mastery of weapons by offering an ostensibly simple combat system with surprising depth. Nearly every other category I’m about to mention ties back to rewarding the player’s time and effort in meaningful ways.

The Player Skill vs Gear and Preparations Balance

This is another staple of the Monster Hunter franchise, that the player needs to juggle three important aspects to succeed in a hunt: Being skilled with their weapon (i.e. getting “gud”), having appropriately durable and deadly gear, and making sufficient preparations (i.e. eating food, and packing the right items) before hand. What’s brilliant about this triad is that the player is able to supplement one if they’re lacking in another. Did you totally forget to prep for your hunt, but are well geared and quick on the dodge rolls? You might make it out alive. Do you want to tackle a big monster, but don’t quite have the damage numbers or armor to make it work? Prepare well, bring lots of potions, and put your skills to the test and you might end up beating that fire-breathing T-Rex a whole lot sooner than the story intended you to. By offering the player a number of keys to success, players aren’t nearly as obligated to follow any particular one. Unlike many gear-based games, such as Bungie’s Destiny 2 (2017) , you’re not as limited by how much you’re willing to grind for competitive gear, and given there’s no real level-up system, your skills only improve by you as a player getting better at playing the game (see also: Meaningful Rewards).

Meaningful Player Choice

When we talk about Player Choice in games, we often think of karma systems, picking factions, and deciding what color lightening you want to shoot. They’re choices that are baked into the narrative and often draw from the rich tradition of “Choose Your Own Adventure” games, sometimes without keeping any of the spirit, flavor, or depth. However, Player Choice can apply to more than BioWare’s fantastical operas and Lionhead Studios’ hero simulators. In Monster Hunter World, the question of Player Choice boils down to time, style and preference. What monsters does the player want to hunt? Do they equip their Palico with the item that’ll help them get more loot or the item that might guarantee their survival? Which weapons, elements and gadgets suit their play-style the best? And which hat do they think looks coolest or offers the best bonuses? Monster Hunter World opens the flood gates on these questions by offering the player a cornucopia of choices in how they’ll spend their time hunting and what kind of hunter they want to be. It’s a kind of player choice that lends itself well to emergent story telling, and a more personal connection and pride of one’s avatar. This is emphasized even more in multiplayer, where one is allowed to essentially show-off all the choices and routes they’ve taken, while cooperating with others who have done the same. World does this particularly well as a result of the sheer volume of customization options. Whereas many previous Monster Hunters favored set-bonuses and more rigid builds to fight certain monsters, World seems to outright encourage the player to make their own build in the same way the franchise as a whole has encouraged players to pick the weapon that feels best to them.

Introducing Mechanics Slowly

It took me around 60 hours to get to Monster Hunter World’s end-game, and right up into that 60th hour (and even now at hour 82) the game not only had new mechanics to introduce, but new tricks to teach. It reminded me a lot of Monolith Production’s Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor (2014), a game with a treasure trove of mechanics and systems that were introduced slowly throughout the game’s entire length. Monster Hunter World does something similar, with the player’s hub and crafting options slowly expanding throughout the course of the story, instead of overloading the player with mechanics and options they won’t know how to best take advantage of yet. This lets the player understand and master each new mechanic, from the botanical gardens to palico safaris, before the next one is introduced. This makes the eventual task of juggling each of the player hub’s many vendors and mechanics come naturally to players who have reached end-game.

Cut-Scenes That Teach the Player

If you go back and watch nearly any cut-scene in Monster Hunter World that introduces a new monster, you’ll find that they give subtle hints and clues to the player, either about the monster they’re fighting (weak spots, elements, attacks, etc.) or about the surrounding environment (a memorable example is a cut-scene in the Ancient Forest that points out a cluster of suspended rocks that players can drop on monsters, a cluster I was totally unaware of before that point). This helps to make Monster Hunter World’s cut-scenes more than just flashy intros, but rather clever hints, and helps play into another one of World’s great strength...

Endless Depth

Perhaps “Endless” is an exaggeration, however Monster Hunter has always offered incredible depth and innumerable tricks and trades to learn. Firstly is the way in which each monster has its own ticks, weaknesses, strengths, routes, recoveries, etc, and essentially acts as a beautiful and deadly puzzle that the player slowly unfolds the more they hunt them. Now tack on to that each of the game’s 14 weapon types, all of which play quite uniquely and are full of unique and hidden cancels, combos, timing and tech. Tack on to that each of those 14 weapons’ many permutations and elemental strengths, and the massive list of armors and bonuses the player can take advantage of. This dizzying array of variation and learning is part of what makes Monster Hunter so compelling. The aforementioned balance between gear and player execution, paired with a cast of unique and distinct monsters is what gives this vast quantity equally vast depth. What World adds to this core formula is an equally varied and detailed environment and ecosystem, one that unfolds to the player in its own way. Pair this with the Scout-flies who attempt to make this vast and varied world more manageable, and a slinger full of varied ammo and tech, and World offers players the most elaborate hunting puzzle yet. In essence, Monster Hunter leverages a large number of options, variables and hidden information that all pair with each other in a deceitfully simple way (that is to say, that all of this variation boils down to “there is a monster and you must hunt it by dealing damage to it and not taking too much damage yourself”) to offer the player vast depth to explore and master.

Consistent and Compelling Live Updates

This is nothing new to Monster Hunter World specifically, but it bears noticing, as the excellent execution of things like login bonuses and weekly events are a large part of what sets Monster Hunter’s live features apart from those of games like Destiny 2. Firstly the game rewards you generously for logging in daily, giving you a useful item and Lucky Voucher, which the player can use on any quest to double their rewards. This is particularly helpful in mitigating grind, as players may opt to only login for one hunt per day, but are able to double their earnings from that hunt via the Lucky Voucher. This system is also balanced out by the cap of 5 Lucky Vouchers, to encourage players to use them daily instead of hording them for the end-game. Additionally Monster Hunter’s events are back and as rewarding as always, giving players unique feeling hunts for equally unique rewards. Unlike games such as Destiny 2, these events are literally weekly and give very specific guaranteed rewards for the player to work towards, as opposed to a random roll on a table of possible event items (see also: Meaningful Rewards).

Light-Hearted Flavor

This is something I hadn’t realized was important until a friend had pointed it out, which is that Monster Hunter is an ostensibly quite jolly game. The colors are vibrant, the run animation is still delightful, and the cat puns are omnipresent from the onset. It’s a game that’s deeply committed towards realizing its world, but isn’t concerned with that world being particularly realistic in any grim sense. It’s nice to see a game that manages to balance fun with a cohesive and imaginative lore, all of which is surprisingly grounded in nature. I’m reminded of other games with similarly jolly vibes, things like Insomniac Game’s Sunset Overdrive (2014) or Square Enix’s Final Fantasy series, but even those games either opt to not take themselves seriously at all, or use that jolliness as a preface to later more serious themes. Monster Hunter seems to do it simply because its fun, and it makes the world a greater joy to be in. Its clear from interviews that Monster Hunter as a franchise is built from the ground-up to put a smile of players’ faces, and the lore is merely there as a garnish, an afterthought, thus liberating the developers to make and imagine whatever they think would be fun and engaging. It’s this kind of liberated approach that would be nice to see more often in modern games, as its something fairly unique to the medium and in many ways at the core of what helped games like Nintendo’s The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild (2017) grow into what they are. It’s a kind of philosophy that doesn’t just put play first, it puts fun first, from aesthetic to mechanic.

The Nemesis

This will probably get its own Let’s Analyze at some point, however the diegetic and emergent introduction and usage of the monster Bazelgeuse is all at once masterful and terrifying. It’s an example of a phenomenon in games of having a ‘Nemesis’, or the thing whose sole goal is to ruin your day. In games, particularly games with fun or satisfying combat, it can become easy for enemies to not truly feel like enemies anymore. Instead they’ll feel like fun challenges, equal competitors, or even fodder to fuel the forges of your fun. The Nemesis breaks this cycle, in part by being incredibly powerful, in part by appearing when they’re least expected or least welcome. The Nemesis isn’t usually what you hunt, it’s what hunts you. Which brings us back to Monster Hunter World, where the Bazelgeuse will often swoop in and begin carpet-bombing your hunt just when you think you have things under control, or worse yet begin carrying off a monster you were hoping to catch alive. It’s a moment of intensity so high that it gets its own theme (even throwing in a light motif from Monster Hunter 2) , that will undoubtedly throw a wrench into any hunt. It’s an emergent way of creating a monster the player will truly loathe to see, and a clever way of keeping players on their toes during High Rank hunts and expeditions, utilizing that seamless world to its fullest. 

The Soundtrack

Not only is the soundtrack brilliantly adaptive, and full of endless personality (from the Rotten Vale’s choice of synth and organs, to the brilliant rework of Birth of a Hero) but its call backs to franchise motifs are often subtle and exciting. The choice of theming each area in the game with its own motifs and highlighted instruments isn’t anything particularly new, but is used to exceptional effect here. The winding Wildspire Waste favors jazz and guitar motifs, while the Rotten Vale focuses on fast strings, synth and booming percussion. Add to this the numerous variation of each location’s tune, depending on whether the player is fighting minor or major monsters, and whether they’re chasing, fighting or just arriving, and the music truly becomes as alive as Monster Hunter’s ecosystem. This further reinforces each location’s unique personalities and feel. Additionally, Monster Hunter soundtracks have always been particularly potent as a result of their grand orchestral nature and its a true joy to have those soundtracks shine outside of tiny 3DS speakers.

In Conclusion

To do this we’ll be breaking up these openings into a few categories:Storybook Style, in which a character in the world’s lore is recounting the world’s lore. Omnipotent Narrator, a similar method but less diegetic, with the narrator not apparently being a character in the game’s world, and possessing more knowledge than any one character might be able to. And finally Vignettes, in which a small scene is played to adjust players to the world without explicitly explaining any kind of lore. Obviously these categories are neither static nor all-encompassing, but it’s important to see how each method might be used effectively and what can be drawn from the strengths of each. For instance the Omnipotent Narrator tends to be the most information dense, while the Vignette is arguably the most immersive, and the Storybook Style is a kind of marriage of the two. For what it’s worth no particular method is truly better than the other, but each can play their strengths to different kinds of narratives.

We’ll also be breaking down our investigations by series and methods that are similar, finally concluding with some of my personal favorites which I find to be particularly effective blends. It’s important to remember I’ll be glossing over many of these pieces for the sake of time, as well as not strictly limiting this discussion to just the game’s opening (As will be the case with Final Fantasy VII as well as Bioshock). With that in mind let’s get started!

Vignettes

Vignettes can be strong thematic pieces, that help set the tone for the rest of the game. They give the player a broad sense of what their world is like. Is the world hostile or peaceful? Will the player feel surrounded or isolated? What’s the score like? And what themes will the player be expecting to encounter? An effective vignette also lets the players see new and unfamiliar words in context, hear personal thoughts from important characters and possibly get a taste for game-play.

Let’s begin by talking about the opening to Blizzard’s wildly popular space opera: StarCraft (1998) linked above. The vignette clearly establishes the Terran’s Americana sensibilities with the (presumably) diegetic track playing in the background of the scrappers’ clam. We see the ruin that war has brought to a cluster of space faring ships, and are introduced not first to soldiers, but the proverbial vultures picking their corpses clean. In a game ostensibly about war, it’s a grim opening full of death and the remnants of destruction only to be followed by more destruction as the once charming chatter of the scrappers turns to panicked screams. Yet these Americana tones help keep the game’s intro distinct against other dystopian grim-dark space operas. We’re introduced to the mercenary nature of the Terran, and the ruthless and powerful nature of the Protoss, all without expressly telling any of this to the player. It’s theming is also appropriate for a sprawling Space Opera full of betrayal, death and whole planets being taken as collateral damage. All of this in less than 3 minutes.

Yet perhaps this vignette’s strongest point is it’s music (as we in fact hear this opening before we see it). It’s a familiar hickish kind of tune set in an alien environment, only to be later replaced with a violent synth-heavy cacophony as the Protoss ship approaches. This further informs the player on the nature of each faction, through music alone. Going beyond the intro, the game’s score immediately dives into a full suite with synth, guitar, and operatic overtones, to set the mood for the game’s dense and evocative menu screen, and the grandiose story to come. This control over the score to tell a coherent story to the player is arguably one of the StarCraft series’ greatest strengths and honestly deserves an article of its own at some point. 

This intro is interesting to say the least. It comes from Bungie’s Halo: Combat Evolved (2001), and is somewhat of a mixed bag of effectiveness. Let’s start with just the opening 5 seconds where we’re treated to a beautiful shot of the two most important locations in the game: The UNSC Pillar of Autumn and the eponymous alien Halo. It’s a shot that marries a fairly standard (yet still quite well realized) visual of a human ship in space, with something wholly unfamiliar, alien and awe inspiring. 

Unfortunately the scene that follows is less interesting, and in many ways fails to capture the urgency of the situation. It features the quite calm Captain Keyes and the AI Cortana discussing if they got away from their enemy (which they quickly discover they did not) and how they had to make a ‘blind jump’ to get here. The scene is riddled with Sci-Fi jargon that isn’t difficult to understand, but certainly slows the scene down. That said this use of jargon can help acclimate the player to new terms and ideas, like the enemy being called the Covenant or the ship coming from a place called Reach, but terms like “a hole in subspace” serve only to make the scene more complex than it needs to be, and introduce the player to ultimately granular information (though the line itself, “no one could’ve missed the hole we tore in subspace” does help establish Cortana’s sassy nature).

Most importantly the scene feels like the aftermath of a small failed skirmish and and short breather, as opposed to the actuality of the situation: They’re fleeing a planet that has just been totally annihilated by their enemy and have just gotten one last gasp of air before discovering they’re surrounded. It’s the slow, calm, methodical pacing of this scene that does this greater context injustice. Is it atmospheric? Sure. Is it somewhat tone def to the shooter and segment that’s about to follow? Arguably, yes. 

We then cut to a much more urgent scene, of the UNSC soldiers preparing for the battle to come. While this sets a fantastic tone for the UNSC forces and serves as a charming intro to Sergeant Johnson (one of the game’s main characters), the pacing between scenes feels incredibly choppy. The way the scene pans on all of the brilliantly realized weapons of war the player will be fighting with helps build a visual lexicon of the UNSC for the player, but is ultimately undercut by the brooding scene preceding it. The tones of these two scenes, one of contemplating and subtle frustration, the other of bravery and daring, clash with each other in an intro that leaves the player with no distinct feeling about the game’s themes yet.

An interesting design choice, is that this second scene actually changes depending on which difficulty the player selected. The harder the difficulty the more visceral and violent the Sergeant's speech becomes, matching the increased carnage the player will need to face on higher difficulties (and essentially giving a more diegetic equivalent of the quirky difficulty sliders in old-school shooters like DOOM and Wolfenstein) 

That said, for an opening not much longer than StarCraft’s it feels remarkably long as a result of its density and the raw number of unexplained terms and characters that are thrown at the player. For a vignette meant to create a sense of urgency, the gameplay that follows (a brief diagnostics tutorial) seems like a distinct pace killer, after a cinematic already rife with tone issues.

An interesting phenomenon is what happens when this cinematic is taken in its greater context, or rather if this cinematic is taken less as an opening and more as a continuation from the events on Reach that preceded it. This slow brooding intro followed by a quick jolt to battle-stations feels more urgent and visceral, its choppiness and tone differences feel almost masterful, particularly if you’re coming to this game right after playing the much later realized Halo: Reach (2011). 

As far as strengths we might learn from this opening, the beginning 5 seconds certainly stand out, and provide evocative visual context for the entire game to follow. Additionally, it poses the question of whether a vignette should stick to a single strong tone, or perhaps intentionally muddy the water for the player. It’s arguable that this clash of tones in the intro is meant to show the UNSC as more than just gun-totting space marines, but also a calculating methodical group, and it does do a great job of setting up the characters of Captain Keyes and Seargant Johnson respectively (with Cortana getting more time to shine in a later cinematic). 

SquareSoft’s Final Fantasy VII (1997) may not be my favorite Final Fantasy, but it’s a classic for a reason, and I’d argue this opening is one of them. Not only does this set up the plot, theming, characters and important concepts before saying more than a single box of dialogue, it also carries an incredible amount of momentum that brings players straight to the game’s heart just moments after starting a new game.

We start with a calm long quiet panning view of the stars, that fades into a shot of (as-of-yet unnamed to the player) Materia, which is clearly magical and appears to be coming out of the ground. Additionally we’re shown Aerith, a main character and ancient descendant who is closely connected to the Materia in the game’s plot. Thus, 60 seconds in and the game has already given us some kind of context for magic, the cosmos/the stars, Aerith and an apparent connection between all three. Since these concepts are all major pillars of the game’s plot, visually establishing them early creates a base for the player when these concepts are later explicitly explained, and the details of their connections revealed.

Next we fade out as the music slowly builds, and we’re introduced to the dusky streets of Midgard and the game establishes what technology is present here, cars, street lights, etc. All the way until the music hits its climax, and the title drops to the background a foreboding city roaring with smoke. (Almost gives me Blade Runner vibes... Seriously if you haven’t seen the opening to that film go watch it- It’s so good I almost gave it a segment in this analysis)

No sooner does the player become accustomed to this vista than they are taken into a hectic train-station, where the player joins the terrorist group Avalanche as killing two guards at the station and rushing in to commence a bombing mission against Shinra. What follows is the players first steps into the game world, and an immediate encounter with enemies. No fade to black, no tutorial transition, just right into the game, with only so much as a single textbox indicating the player should follow, thus preserving the momentum and build-up of the opening.

It’s important to note that while this opening (much like Halo’s) features a peaceful mood followed by a frantic mood, Final Fantasy VII pulls this off in a far less choppy manner that also helps to emphasize the game’s themes. This is primarily done in the way the game carefully builds up it’s opening, starting in silence, then to the cosmos and magic, then to the city streets, and the roaring heights of midgard, and then as things begin to pick up, back to the streets bellow to the bombing mission (with the most clever cutting to its hissing wheels as they roll into the station). This builds up pace and momentum which the player then carries through the rest of the level, as well as drawing the contrasts between the peaceful cosmos and Materia, and the violent and cacophonous Shinra and Avalanche.

There’s also something to be said for this intro’s lack of any conventional tutorial, helping carry all this momentum and urgency further. The game not only expects you’ll know how to play it, but also expects you’ll know how to play it reasonably well, offering a solid boss fight at the end of this intro level (more on that in another article).

Before we move on to other methods, it’s worth mentioning the opening to Monolith Soft’s Xenoblade Chronicles 2 (2017) which serves to similarly build a visual lexicon for its strange and varied world, as well as give a fitting character intro to Rex and Gramps respectively. This intro does a fantastic job of capturing the exotic and wondrous nature of Xenoblade Chronicle 2′s world, as well as the quirky nature of Rex and Gramps respectively.

Another vignette worth mentioning is the multi-layered intro to Kojima Productions’ Metal Gear Solid 4 (2008). Which serves up commercials, speeches and even eggs depending on how far you want to stretch this ‘intro’. MGS4 is such a complicated beast that it’s difficult to give it a proper dissection in this kind of rundown, however what we can briefly take away is this:

Introducing your player to a world via that world’s commercials and marketing can create a strong sense of continuity and immersion while still being highly informational. (This is especially in the case of settings that center heavily on the role of corporations in their world). Additionally solemn speeches about war and whether or not it changes never seems to get old... Speaking of which:

Omnipotent Narrator

The Omnipotent Narrator knows all there is in a given game world, and is there to directly address the player and orient them for what’s to come. They’re never featured in the game, nor is their apparent speech to the player ever explained, but rather it’s a moment where the player is kept relatively unimmersed, so that they can dive into the game ahead with full knowledge of what is happening.

The intros to Interplay, Black Isle Studios, Bethesda’s Fallout series have become iconic in their own right, but also serve as an incredible example of how this style of non-diegetic and fairly direct introduction, can still be incredibly effective (We’ll be talking generally about all of the intros here, minus the fourth one, as it is diegetic). 

A slide-show of gruesome images help build a wide scope of the destruction war has brought to the world, both past and present. It echoes methods of war story-telling that dates back to the 1800s and are still just as effective today in video games. It faces players with the grim harsh realities of violence, as they’re set up to explore a world devastated by its ultimate escalation. It disowns this violence as being no more than senseless brutality in the name of various causes, but also hopelessly concedes its inevitability. It’s a bleak opening to an even bleaker world, setting up a universal theme of violence and destruction throughout the series. Ron Pearlman’s gnarled voice does great justice to these dark speeches and war-torn environments, and the quiet ambient score only further sets the mood for the player.

These reflections on the past of war also helps put the fairly information heavy openings in greater context, making explanations about Ceasers’ Legions or Vaults seem like pieces in a greater history of violence and war (Rather than brief explanations of the lore to the player).Of note is how Fallout: New Vegas (2010) plays for the best of both worlds, by pairing an establishing vignette of the Strip with the classic iconic “War Never Changes” speech that follows.

Another interesting note is how these openings and MGS4′s set up their world with a single rule that governs the rest of the game’s feel. For Fallout, that rule is that “War never changes,” war is inevitable, eternal, immutable, and the player is just another harbinger of destruction no matter who they fight for. Metal Gear Solid 4 painfully reflects that “War has changed,” that war has simply become a bottled proxy of a proxy, running off the lives of soldiers to oil a machine that aims to keep the world under control, “Genetic control. Information control. Emotion control. Battlefiled control. Everything is monitored and kept under control.” These sweeping statements work particularly well in grimdark settings, where bleakness reigns. Even the game that spawned the word ‘grimdark’, Games Workshop’s tabletop skirmish game Warhammer 40,000, opens with its own sweeping statement, “In the grim darkness of the far future there is only war.”

Beyond Fallout these Ominpotent Narrator intros tend to be particularly popular in the early days of video games, during the late 80s and early 90s. It’s a method that’s useful for games that emphasize gameplay and environments to tell their stories over dialogue, and games whose stories are relatively simple or intentionally vague (or technologically limited). The popular term “20XX” from the time is a great example of this, keeping even the year of these events vague, and only giving the most basic context for the players actions.

That said, despite their simplicity many of these intros favor showing pictures of the game’s setting (much like Fallout) to further set the mood of the world for the player. Capcom’s Mega Man 2 (1988) and SEGA’s Streets of Rage (1991) both feature urban sprawls to accompany this text, building a futuristic setting. In Mega Man 2, the music builds to a climax exciting the player as they’re told of the background to their heroism to follow. By contrast Streets of Rage, builds a somber atmosphere with its music, breathing life into the solemn setting of a city brought to its knees by gang violence.

QUESTION: What does a typical day for you look like in studying video games? What do you do on a day to day basis?

YAP: Well, in particular these days my schedule has been extremely varied. […] One of the reasons that I can’t remember is because I think what I do end up doing a lot is I’ll research video games by playing them very thoroughly, and try to figure out what sort of phenomenon is happening to them. […] So once I have a kind of understanding, what I’ll  do is I’ll compose a conference paper and try to submit it to a particular conference and then, if we’re lucky, if its good, it will get accepted to that conference and then I will travel to that conference to give the academic presentation on those research findings.

So, one of the reasons I’m so scatter brained at the moment is because I just got back from the Meaningful Play conference in Michigan and so, that’s like basically the exact opposite side of the world so I’m kind of like jet lagging by 12 hours I think?

So my life this year has been a lot of traveling to basically present my research findings and then now I’m settling back into maybe a long period of staying back in the research facility and just play games, try to analyze it, discuss with other researchers what’s happening. So there’s a lot of Skype meetings, there’s a lot of… how do I say this? Existential despair, that kind of stuff. 

QUESTION: On that note of the presentation you did, you recently did a presentation on the emergence in games, how do you think this concept has evolved over the years and why is it important, and could you briefly touch on what it is?

YAP: Yeah sure […] With games we can see emergence happening in two different kinds of areas, the first is emergent gameplay, where the players are finding interesting ways to play the game […] that are not intended or foreseen by the designers. So, I think one example that is in “Deus Ex”, there is a wall mine trick, that if you can shoot the mines on a wall and then you can jump on them and use them to get over walls you weren’t supposed to have gotten over.

Another one is emergent narrative, which is much more difficult to explain but that could take the form of a bunch of different things […] One of the games I recently researched on for emergent narrative would be “Papers Please” because it’s not a direct narrative, there’s a certain healthy level of ambiguity there with what’s happening. The game gives you a series of facts and then any sort of emotional or moral weight that you experience out having received these facts must come out of the player themselves. They’re not particularly or explicitly there in the design, but you could also argue that Lucas Pope, who made the game, designed the game in such a fashion as to trigger those moral or emotional responses.

QUESTION: How much do think that the supply and demand nature of the AAA industry has affected storytelling and emergence in video games?

YAP: It’s tough, ‘AAA’ games are a very nice title for a long and amorphous complex beast that has so many different kind of organs and triple stomachs and all this kind of stuff. What I mean by that is, there’s a lot of creativity in the AAA scene, but what we as consumers end up seeing in the final product may not exactly be the true creative vision of whatever team was making that game because it ends up being filtered […] I think AAA, fundamentally being such a large organism with so many different moving parts and people and concerns, ends up shaping a product that will safely sell sufficiently well and will hopefully be a hit. […]

I think it’s been a double edged sword. I think that simultaneously it’s difficult to compete with the AAA phenomenon and the industry itself. I think the good side of that is that in applying that sort of pressure on creative people it has forced them to get creative about the way they make games in order to express their creativity. So that’s where I think the Indie scene has been getting a lot of fuel from.

QUESTION: You kind of already answered this, so you think that Indie games are the solution to that stopping of creativity and its sort of the reaction to that?

YAP: I think yeah, it’s more of the reaction to that. I don’t know if it’s the solution […] There’s an appropriate space for both kinds of games, I don’t think that any particular person who enjoys the medium of games would want just one or the other. […] I mean artist, their art is very close to who they are as a person and to try to stomp on their art it’s almost like you’re stepping on their heart so, I think that they’re just trying to live, essentially.

QUESTION: In your own words you call games as the “New Digital Mythology” could you describe what that means, and what originally made you think that?

YAP: Until now Mythology has sort of existed, in pre-history we had an oral tradition before writing happened […] and then we have literature which basically perpetuates those stories and those values on to much more generations without the need for having to meet face to face. And as technology progresses we now have cinema and now we have the game.  […] I think that in all of these mediums passing a story on to another person is of course because it’s entertaining but because also this is one of the ways that humans pass on their values from generation to generation […] and why we value them.

Games are sort of the new digital mythology and what I mean by that is technology has created stories that are the most immersive and instead of you listening to the tale of a particular hero […] a game will actually put you into the shoes of a hero, you as the player become the protagonist and whatever lessons you might learn through the proxy of your avatar you can internalize more directly. […]

I realized when I was playing “Metal Gear Solid” […] I realized all the things they were teaching us to do in order to appreciate good literature were all present in that game in some fashion and to some degree. […] The next game that clued me off to that was “Ace Combat Zero: The Belkan War” it’s a flight shooter game, it’s not supposed to be known for its story, but it has one of the most impactful deep stories you’ll ever play and in a very subtle way.

[…] These are very important things that can have just as much of an impact as prior static media, such as literature and film and such we just have to establish how to appreciate those from an academic and ascetic standpoint and then establish what are the classics in our field. […]

QUESTION: Along those lines, based on your research, what are some classics you think you could name, I mean you already said Metal Gear Solid, would you consider that a classic?

YAP: Yeah definitely, it’s an interesting title because it’s extremely embattled, there are proponents, there are opponents to it and they all sort of pivot around the same point you know, overly long cinematic cut scenes and its gets to the discussion of ‘Is this even a game?’ I think it’s a very early attempt by a visionary game designer, who secretly always wanted to be a film director, but it works in his own way; only he could’ve made that game. It’s definitely a classic, exactly why it is a classic? I think the debate around it kind of hints at its significance in the game medium.

I also mentioned Ace Combat Zero, this is a game that I’ve researched extensively in terms of its branching narrative and I’ve written two conference papers on it and my master’s thesis was on it as well. […] I am kind of sick of it at the moment since I’ve researched the hell out of it, but that game is definitely on the classics list. […]

QUESTION: Kind of along these lines, what do you hope the industry and kind of society as a whole will gain from your research and video game research as a whole?

YAP: The very first thing is, I just want to show that people are thinking about games very seriously in a variety of different ways […] People who enjoy the medium of games I think are the first to recognize how important a medium it is for society, it’s kind of a no brainer to these people, to people like us where games have a certain potency in storytelling and entertainment value and can potentially spread to other importances as well. I think my work contributes to expressing that idea to people who are not already into games, who when you say game it only relates to toy or entertainment. I know that games have that inherent function, by design they’re supposed to be interesting, but I also want them to know that “Hey, like a book or a film these things are automatically considered to have deeper meaning and so do games.”

The second thing, one layer below that would be I want other researchers who are thinking about going into game design study and game studies, ascetic studies, like I’m doing, I want them to know that like, we’re out there. People are doing this, so if you want to do it to let me know […] I can be a resource in terms of how do fund games research, this is a huge problem and it’s not like the arts or sciences, it’s not a very well established field yet. […] There’s hope on the horizon […] I want people through my research to know, we’re trying to pave the road, we’ve only gotten so far, please come on and help us if you’re interested, I’ll show you how. Then of course in the future, the far future, in like the “Star Ocean” future I just hope that someone might read my book and use it in their essay. Yeah, those are my hopes.

QUESTION: Is there a particular piece of research that you’re particularly proud of? Or is the piece that you point to when you say “This is what I’m doing”?

YAP: I’d have to answer that in two ways… Yeah there is, the thing that I am most proud of in my entire career for video game studies is probably the PAX East 2014 talk on mythology in and of games. This was an interesting talk, cause it’s not my typical cup of tea. What I mean by that is, this was an advocacy talk at a convention, I’m usually used to talking in very dry terms and conferences. […] It’s not as fun as the convention, like PAX East was my first PAX and it was the first time I’d ever been with an audience of people who actually came into the room not needing to be convinced […] there was just a very good vibe in the room about the kinds of ideas we were trying to express. […]

When you’re trying to do graduate level research you’re working with things that often don’t have answers and when you go through your life for several years not having answers, which just depresses humans, y’know? And so when we went and did PAX that refilled my motivation gauge, like over the top, and I realized that people want this to happen they need this to happen and I better work harder, which was great! […]

In terms of actual academic, like hardcore boring stuff? I guess my most recent paper “The Concept of Player Side Emergence in Gone Home and Papers Please”. It’s an idea that’s still very much in its embryonic state it’s still very new, I’m not claiming anything in it, I’m just saying there’s these emergent narrative phenomenon in these two indie games and trying to match a concept to it that accounts for what observed. […] It was validated because not only did it get accepted to the conference, but it got one of the five top paper awards for that conference, so I was very much in shock, happy shock but, y’know. People at the conference were telling me “I don’t understand your idea quite all the way, but someone must find some value in it if they gave you the award” and I was thinking “Yeah, I guess that’s true.”  […]

QUESTION: As someone who’s studied both in the east and west, what do you think are some key differences or similarities in the way that video games and their narratives are treated.

YAP: One of the big ones, right of the bat, would be western game enthusiasts tend to value choice […] Player freedom versus linearity of story. So for example, when “Final Fantasy XIII” came out, it got really good reviews in Japan and good appraisal for the story in Japan and then when it went to the west it was kind of lambasted for its very linear gameplay and story. […] The west tends to favor those games that have a lot of choice and surprises. Japanese games tend to give surprises in different ways, like really hard to find Easter eggs kind of surprises. The Japanese are very much into their formal systems of telling a linear story, telling a story in a certain way. They really favor their conventions and their tropes, and they don’t even really view them as a bad thing. Y’know conventions and tropes aren’t necessarily a bad thing in a society that values uniformity, and it’s really interesting because through their anime, and through their manga and their games, it’s so crazy, it’s like a kind of response to their uniformity in real life, but when you play enough of these games you realize all of these games have a certain uniformity to them, their craziness is uniform in a certain weird ascetic way. […] Western games tend to just be all over the place, there’s all sorts of stuff. […] None of these [Japanese] developers seem to be extremely concerned about whether we’re making a game about more western time RPGs or anything, they just kind of treat genres as genres, without consideration for culture. […]

QUESTION: Would you that, then that whole mentality is a good thing or a bad thing?

YAP: That’s… it’s both.  […] The Japanese like to use this term ‘Galápagos’ because they can preserve their interesting uniqueness and their certain degree of awesome craziness by remaining ‘Galápagos’ like. At the same time by doing that they’re not inviting new things into the cultural gene pool. So, innovation takes on a very strange form that looks unique but feels like it has constraints. […]

There is something that’s been on my mind a lot the last couple of years, I went to GDC 2013 and I went to two panels back to back. The first panel was about increasing diversity in games, and the panel was female game developers and game academics, people who have tried to increase awareness about when you’re designing you game and writing your characters, try to include characters of multi-race, a lot of different genders, don’t get locked down into the tropes kind of thing. 

Right after that panel, in the very same room was the panel entitled “How to Break Into the Japanese Market” and the panelists were all big Japanese game company people, so a lot of people just stayed in the room, cause it’s really hard in GDC if lose your seat, it’s a big venue. So I just sat in the room, the next talk commenced and it was very evident that one of the panelists, I don’t want to say who because I think it’s a little bit incriminating but, one of the panelists a top-level guy in the Japanese game industry was basically saying:

“You guys, this is how you break into Japan. You gotta have a female protagonist with large breasts, cute face, not angry looking, not strong and angry like Laura Croft” which I found weird because I think Laura Croft was kind of like an east-west creation, but anyway. He’s like “Cute face, big boobs, not intimidating looking and then you will have a hit in Japan.” And the room was a gasp because we’d just come out of the diversity thing and we’re feeling good about it […] and then here comes this guy like “You wanna break out in Japan you gotta be sexist” […] I think it was very symptomatic and very telling and very true, because in Japan like the stuff that’s been going on recently with Tropes Against Women and Anita Sarkeesian and Zoe Quinn and all this GamerGate stuff… I think it would be very mystifying to Japanese readers, like “Why are we even arguing about this,” is what they’d say, “because that’s the way women are supposed to look in games”. […]

QUESTION: Let’s follow up on that a little bit, so how do you think that diversity both in sex and race and all those sorts of things, plays a role in the narrative in video games and that idea of emergence?

YAP: Let’s look at Gone Home for example […] Gone Home is extremely dear to my heart, and for very personal reasons, mostly because I’m the same age as the protagonist […] a lot of those 90s piece settings in the game spoke to me directly […] that was sort of a conscious decision. […]

Speaking as a former fiction writer […] who you are as a person is usually going to show up in very major ways in some fashion in whatever you’re writing even if you’re trying really hard not to do that. […] The player is ending up getting an emergent experience out of the game that is extremely reflective of who the developers were, but that’s me speculating, I can’t prove any of that.

QUESTION: If you had to introduce a non-gamer to the importance of games and game narrative, what are some examples of games that you would use and why?

YAP: Minecraft is the first one that comes to mind because for a person who doesn’t play games, I think it’s important to introduce them to a game that is not difficult to learn how to play, but difficult to master. […] If I could get them to play Minecraft and just play around with it for as long as they wish and then speak about it with them later […] I think that would be a very successful discussion that would convince that person that “Ok games are not just for fun.” I think there needs to be a play period and a reflection period for anyone to figure out any importance in games, unless you have that wonderful a-ha moment while you’re playing. […]

If you'd like to hear the full interview, including Chris' opinions on Mod Culture, the challenges indie devs face and speculation on the future of the industry, the entire interview can be listened to here.

Christopher Yap can be found at his website and on Twitter