Super Nerd Sundays Presents: Abstraction and Immersion!

Most games have pretty direct control schemes. In first person shooters they're almost always set up with a one-one ratio. You say turn right and you turn right without delay. You say shoot, you shoot. There's a lag time, but it's imperceptible, the lag of your brain telling your finger to pull the trigger. It's very straightforward and very effective. It does a good job of relating you to your character even if, as many have noted, your character is sometimes reduced to an ultra-masculine personification of violence who exists solely as a HUD weapon. But it also, to some extent, isolates you from your environment and the other characters. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, however. While it is a problem in games like the Call of Duty series where you are almost constantly functioning as part of a unit in this isolated state, games such as System Shock 2 and the original Thief series have used first-person perspective to great effect, putting it to work in crafting an atmosphere of suspense and horror.

Would that the same could be said of the modern RTS, with its direct command interface. The RTS makes players into god-figures, floating in the clouds far removed from the action, commanding toy soldiers to kill and die. The interface most RTSes use, another interface involving a one to one command-to-action ratio, actively fights immersion, removing players from both the units they command and they actions they are orchestrating. But some RTSes have worked to counter this.

The Mech Commander series, for example, did their best to both explain their UI and add unit persistence and progression to the mix to help commander associate with their troops. Myth and Warcraft 3 employed similar tactics to great effect. But the interface of most RTSes, where faceless troops accept orders from a stentorian voiced god in the clouds, fights any sort of relationship tooth and nail. Perhaps that’s why, as some game critics have pointed out, RTSes aren’t necessarily the best venue for telling a story or making players relate to characters.

Part of this might be the “camera in the sky” aspect of the genre, as much a product of necessity as an artistic choice, but for me a lot of it stems from the fact that my units feel more like tools than characters. They don’t respond to commands so much as they react to button pushes. But there are a few games that break these rules, and in doing so they manage to generate more significant connections with characters you otherwise wouldn’t care about in the least.

Overlord II does this exceptionally. It takes a game that would have been boring and makes it into something incredible. If you take away the indirect control scheme the game would be an incredibly poor brawler, but through a straightforward command system and by giving those little guys a hell of a lot of personality it actually makes for a really interesting experience.

If they were to blindly accept orders and carry them out with gleeful little sound bites it would be very hard to care about them. But because they don’t always react the way I expect, because they scream wordlessly and respond to every act of violence with spontaneous, wild abandon and joy I actually care when one of them dies. I feel compelled to run back to my tower and resurrect the little guy.

Part of that also might come from the minion-progression system and the adorable way they scavenge corpses for armor and arms, but a big part of it remains, for me, the way they respond to my commands. They feel, for all their buggy foibles, like a little army of Gremlins handed over to me to do my inane bidding. They transform a lackluster game into something I actually enjoy.

Republic Commando pulled off a similar gambit in a first person shooter. Technologically archaic by present standards and riddled with game play issues, storytelling issues and some of the worst examples of level design I’ve ever seen, Republic Commando should, by all means, be one of the worst first person shooters ever made. But anyone who’s ever played will tell you it’s an incredibly fun game.

The game only has a handful of weapons, several of which are just unpleasant to use (specifically the beam gun). The enemies are repetitive and many were poorly designed and implemented (is there anyone who doesn’t hate the salvage droids and actually feels frightened by them?). Even a few of the ones that are satisfying to fight don’t really fit into the Star Wars context (Fat Trandoshans? Fucking just use ugnauts. They’re already there). But Republic Commando is actually above Jedi Knight on my list of Star Wars games. How the fuck did this happen?

It’s because of my squad mates. Those loveable scamps, with their scripted dialogue, would normally annoy the living shit out of me. But they work on their own. They make choices, completely under the hood, that I don’t want them to make. 40 rushes in to combat and dies, 63 makes quips and occasionally does something useful and Sev and I usually kill most of the enemies.

I honestly don’t know if it’s coded or coincidence. I don’t know if its the memory loss onset by the heavy drinking that causes me to occasionally recognize their phrases as new or their behavior as spontaneous. I don’t care. It’s fun, and I like those three douchebags. I like them more than my own character, who I refer to as “the lame one” or “Lisa Kudrow” whenever possible.

Because they don’t always do what I tell them, and they goof off amongst themselves. Because 63 is my emotional barometer as a gamer and Raphael Sbarge does an excellent job voicing him. In fact, all of the voice overs (spare 38’s abysmal portrayal by Temeura Morrison who, for all the love George Lucas has languished on him, is still far worse an actor today than Jason Wingreen, the barely heard voice in Empire Strikes Back, was almost thirty years ago) manage to almost instantly make me relate to their characters. Sure, it made very little sense that a band of clones would all have different voices, but as I mentioned earlier alcoholism makes it very easy to gloss over these issues. If I didn’t drink heavily how would I be able to accept the inner workings of video games at all?

The personality that these little rascals possessed completely inverted the normal philosophy of self that first person shooter enforce, the idea that, as Half-Life so aptly displayed, you are just one man arrayed not just against the world but against all possible worlds, that your allies will, at best, be temporary, and will prove ineffective in any case. For once, in a first person shooter, I felt that I was part of a team, a fact owed entirely to a command system which, if I were a reviewer, I would call “touchy,” but as someone who genuinely loves games I can step back and call “accurate,” with teammates who obey my commands as often as they feel like it.

Quake Wars has a similar bot system, but a number of factors, ranging from the randomly generated nature of the bots to the relatively faceless nature of Battlefield games in general, makes Quake Wars ill suited to this discussion. However, another game rife with faceless units fits in perfectly: Dawn of War II.

In Dawn of War II you command legions of identically costumed minions and one more important minion who, try as he might, can never die. He’s a lot like Bruce Willis, but we’re largely unaware of how much hair he has. But your little minions do three things that most RTS units do not. They gain experience, they don’t squawk constantly at you and they respond through an almost inscrutable AI system. It isn’t great, and it certainly isn’t the most effective AI out there but it does help units move around the battlefield, adapt to new situations and utilize cover accordingly. It gives them a modicum of personality, but it doesn’t do nearly as well as the AI in games like Myth and the Total War games.

These are two games that took the abstraction of command to a wonderful place. Myth did it by using original systems of engagement and a projectile physics model which has yet to be matched by current generation RTSes (although Starcraft 2 seems to want to do so). And the Total War games use the command statistic of generals to take abstraction to a very interesting place. The morale system is also amazing, in its own right. That said, despite these features I never really felt a connection to the units that either of these games threw at me. Sure, I wanted my units to survive and gain in both titles. Experienced units in both games did more damage and survived longer. But I never felt the same connection to them that I do in Dawn of War 2, where I perceive each unit as an investment. Perhaps it’s the scarcity of resources or the strange mix of macro and micro management that the game demands, but I find the quirks of my DoW 2 units far more intriguing than the more game-impacting traits that Total War and Myth units display.

So perhaps there’s something to be said for scarcity. Perhaps the best games are the ones that offer the smallest number of units to command and have to develop an interesting mechanic for controlling these units as a result.

In Shadow of the Colossus you’re, for the most part, alone. You’ve got an opponent, occasionally, and you’ve got your horse. And your horse is, to put it lightly, kind of a dumbass. Whenever you truly need Agro to do his thing he’s never there to do it. It’s infuriating, and when you do have him acting exactly as you want him to you don’t really notice it. But I can honestly say that, in the last five years, there are only a handful of characters I love more than that horse. I actually cried when he fell off that cliff. I am a 25 year old man living on my own and I cried watching a virtual horse fall off a cliff. Because as infuriating as Agro was at times, I really liked him. He was my only companion in the landscape of the Colossi. He was my friend. He came to help me constantly. Again, I couldn’t discern the algorythms which seemed to dictate his patterns, but it didn’t matter. He was there, almost shapeless in the way of the Playstation II’s primitive graphics, and he was making me feel things I didn’t want to feel.

He made me feel sorrow when he fell from the cliff. And when he rejoined Mono he made me feel that I’d abandoned people simply by not being good enough, by not being as strong as he was. Watching that horse limp his way to my infant form (or to my magic baby, I’m still not clear on just what the fuck happened in that game) broke my heart. Every step was agony.

And I hated that horse. Fighting colossi he was all too often like another adversary, ignoring my directions and calls, fleeing at exactly the wrong moment and keeping his speed when it hurt my aim. Navigating with him was its own challenge, learning to pilot a purposefully unresponsive command system never being an easy task. But in the end I formed an emotional attachment to him. He was my friend.

He was my friend because he didn’t always do what I told him to. That’s an incredibly odd statement to make, especially in a gaming context, but when your underlings don’t obey you at all times it makes the occasions when they do all the more important. How is it notable that your flanking maneuver worked when there’s no chance for your own troops to break?

Does it matter that your orcs defeated their knights if it was simply a battle of numbers? Perhaps to some people, but those people are thought criminals, dead inside, and will never know true love. I just feel that abstracted control schemes, while certainly hit or miss, help generate a connection to a character and have a place in my heart. And they almost always help to make a game more memorable and enjoyable, even if they make it a hell of a lot harder.