Tabletop Design Beat Half-Life To Its Legacy
Remap published a guest article by Matthew Weise, in which Weise argues that video game developers working on first person shooters took the wrong lesson from Half-Life, particularly around interactivity. It's an enjoyable article, and Weise makes a compelling argument, even if I don't have experience with either Half-Life or most of the shooters that were its peers or descendants. But what I do have experience with is tabletop role playing games, and I spent most of the article nodding along, thinking "Oh, this also happened with TTRPGs, but ten or twenty years earlier."
The article is behind a paywall (and I encourage you to subscribe to Remap Radio if you appreciate video games and podcasts!), so I'll try and sum-up Weise's points:
- In the late 90s, the CD-ROM boom pushes game developers to experiment with games, trying to find a way to either mimic or differentiate themselves from films.
- Many games opt to chase films by incorporating non-interactive cutscenes.
- In the FPS space, western designers resent cutscenes because they're non-interactive, but whether something is interactive or not doesn't appear to come down to "Can you make interesting choices in a game" and instead boils down to "Do you have control of the camera at a given moment in time."
- Half-Life comes out and eschews cutscenes in-favor of scripted events that trigger as you reach certain points in level geography or meet certain conditions. But because you have to hit specific triggers for the events to begin, it narrows the amount of choice you might have in the game compared to, say, a System Shock.
- This Half-Life model, that removes the ability to make significant choices in service of placing the player character "in" the scene, becomes the norm for a decade or more.
I don't have enough knowledge of shooters to really interrogate this argument, but I do know enough about tabletop games to recognize a similar arc there, one that started in the 1980s with Dragonlance.1 Building off of the design tendencies of D&D power couple Tracy and Laura Hickman, Dragonlance was designed around the idea that instead of creating their own characters to play D&D with, you would adopt one of the pregenerated Heroes of the Lance, whose stories were entwined with the published adventures. To accomplish this, though, the adventure was written with the expectation that players would perform certain actions at specific story beats, creating a linear narrative.
Dragonlance was wildly successful for TSR and D&D, and whether because of this success or because the ideas were in the gaming aether already, adventure design started to mimic this. By the time of the 90s, the primary way adventures were published was to present a linear narrative with instructions on how to ensure player's experienced every single beat. Choice was constrained in-favor of fronting narrative in an attempt to really immerse the player in the adventure. You still had choice, but it was a bit like moving a camera around while things happened around your character.
I started to get into tabletop role playing games at about the same time Half-Life released in 1998, playing games I wrote instead of ones purchased at a store. So I don't have a good sense of whether people were still enthused about this low-choice/high-immersion model, but certainly by the point Half-Life 2 released in 2004, The Forge and the OSR scenes were up-and-running and advocating for different ways of playing RPGs. The model that started with Dragonlance would continue - Paizo found wild success with their Adventure Path model of campaign! - but the space opened-up again. Per Weise, it would take shooter video games another decade or so before they began to experiment outside the bounds established by Half-Life again.
I don't really have anywhere to go with this2, I just found the parallel fascinating!
In all honesty, it probably started earlier than Dragonlance. I haven't read early Call of Cthulhu books and adventures, but whenever folks discuss them online I get the impression that they were narrative driven in a similar way. But in the dungeon-game spaces I lurk, folks point to Dragonlance as the start of this kind of design.↩
That's a lie. I absolutely could springboard off of this into how the low-choice model of adventure design is a safe choice, and therefore is the preferred choice of game publishers because it helps normalize the experience for a customer base. But it's eight-o'-clock in the evening as I type this and I don't have it in me to make a cohesive argument. Maybe I'll get to that in a separate post.↩