Austin Grossman - You

“West, perhaps, across the mountains, maybe. If it matters to you.”

“I might be going that way,” you reply. You sound younger than you mean to, and you hope he doesn’t notice. The last thing you need is another father figure.

The scarred man stands up and says, a little too eagerly, “We’re walking that way ourselves. To Orenar, perhaps, before the winter closes the pass.” He wears chain mail, and the hilt of his longsword is wrapped closely with fine wire, a journeyman’s sword.

“A strange chance, but mayhap a fortunate one,” you add.

“I’m Brennan,” says the swordsman to the room, pausing briefly, as if we might have heard the name.

“Leira,” you say.

“Lorac.”

“Prendar.”

I can feel them even though they’re not real, they’re not even fictional characters. They’re simultaneously less and more than real characters. Less because they don’t have real selves. They don’t have dialogue, or full backstories. They’re just a bunch of numbers. They’re vehicles or tools players use. They’re masks.

But more because part of them isn’t fiction at all, it’s human—it’s their player half. It’s you. Or Simon, or Darren, or Lisa, or Matt. And I wonder what that moment is like for them, when they become playable. It must be like possession, like a person succumbing to the presence of a god or daemon. A trance, then a shuddering, as of flesh rebelling against the new presence. Then the eyes open and they’re a stranger’s. The new body is clumsy; it stumbles around, pushes drunkenly against walls and objects, tumbles off cliffs.

But what’s it like for the god that possesses them? There’s a little bit that goes the other way. The fleeting impression of living in their world, playing by their rules.

The Heroes swore to find Mournblade themselves and destroy it—swore by the great secrets, by the fifty-six opcodes, by the sixteen colors and three channels and four waveforms, by KERNAL, whose stronghold is $E000-$FFFF, by the secret commander of the world, whose number is 6,502.

They didn’t know the vow would follow them through a hundred lifetimes, through the end of the Third Age and beyond. Through seven generations of console, through the CD-ROM and real-time 3-D and graphics accelerator revolutions. For that matter, they didn’t know they were characters in a series of video games.

It was one thing to destroy Mournblade, but it didn’t have to happen right away, did it? It was hard not to think of what you could do with Mournblade’s long, black, soul-devouring weight in your hand.

It could have all kinds of uses, Lorac thought, calculating the to-hit and damage penalties he’d suffer using a class-inappropriate melee weapon. It could be a tool for redemption, or maybe for finishing the job he’d started. He could always decide when he got there.

Why not bring it back home to the folks, why not teach people a lesson, teach a lot of people lessons? Leira thought.

Brennan was in fact reasonably clear with himself that he’d think about destroying Mournblade only after he pulled it from the heart of the last son of Aerion. He thought about his sad father’s humiliation. That wouldn’t happen to him. Prendar had already thought out how many people he’d have to kill per annum to keep the thing going indefinitely—if there was one thing a game character understood, it was mechanics.

Brennan, Leira, Prendar, and Lorac were the characters, but you were the one who would decide what to do. You would come into their world, and your decisions would be the only ones that mattered. Why not take the sword, if that was allowed? Why not smash all the rules there ever were, and live forever if you could?

Afew weeks in, I sat down with the level designers to debug mission logic in the first third of the game. The question was, how do we keep the player involved in the story, and how do we make the story seem to unfold naturally around the player? As the players travel through the world, new plot developments must spring up seamlessly; nonplayer characters (NPCs) must react naturally to whatever players choose to do. A fiendishly complicated set of triggers, metrics, and tripwires would set the bits necessary to move all the scenery and cue all the NPCs in exactly the right way. Collectively, this apparatus was referred to as the plot clock.

Most of all, we focused on keeping the player from breaking the illusion of reality we were projecting. There were players out there who thought of nothing else, who took every game as a challenge to outsmart the designers and do exactly that—break our game. It didn’t take long before we developed a siege mentality. Everything became about containing players in their all-out assault on the bones of our alternate reality. They wanted, deeply and viscerally, to break our world, and we needed to make it bulletproof.

What if the player walks by and doesn’t talk to the old man? No one opens the gate until the talking takes place.

What if the player collects all the boulders in the world and makes a giant pile and climbs over the wall? Ask Lisa.

What if the player decides they don’t like the princess? Make the princess really nice so this doesn’t happen.

What if the player finds all the gloves in the world and takes them back to the store and sells them and the income is enough to buy a Sword of Nullification? A large supply of gloves depresses the local glove market, so the glove sale yields diminishing returns. Also, let’s reconsider the Sword of Nullification.

What if the player sets the store on fire, then takes everything when the owner is going into the “I’m near fire” AI behavior? The player can take the stuff, but city guards are set to hostile.

What if the player casts Genocide on all shopkeepers? Genociding any human type results in player death.

What if the player uses a wand of cold to freeze the sacred pool? Note: Sacred pool immune to cold.

What if the player casts Fireproof and walks through the flame barrier? Note: Change flame shield to force barrier.

What if the player teleports back past the doorway once it’s sealed? Teleportation requires line-of-sight.

What if the player drops the chalice into the lava? Chalice disappears, but we spawn another chalice at the altar.

What if the player does it again? There are infinite chalices.

What if the player jumps off the cliff and has so many hit points that they survive, and then they bypass the entire scene with the princess and they go on to the castle and don’t know what they’re supposed to do there, and the AI doesn’t have any kind of scripting for that? Put an automatic-death trap at the bottom of the cliff.

What if the player puts on a ring of fire resistance, casts Fireball, and the explosion hurls them over the wall, so they don’t need the key? Good for them.

What if the player summons a genie, stands on its head, wishes for another genie from a bottle, steps onto that genie’s head, and thus builds a staircase out of the level? Add genie bottle to the list of things you can’t wish for.

So he tells you to meet him in the cellar. Can’t he just walk to the cellar? Pathfinding.

So then when you leave the room we just teleport him to the cellar, and it’s like he walked there? When you pass a certain radius, yeah.

What if you double back? He’s already gone to the cellar.

But there’s no other exit. He should have passed you, but he hasn’t. Shut up.

What if the player kills the princess? We make her immortal.

What if the player kills the lady-in-waiting? We make her immortal.

Why doesn’t the player stay home and let the immortal princess and lady-in-waiting kill every single monster in the dungeon? Because the artists didn’t make any combat animations for them.