Last time on...

From Ben's Writing

I was thinking the other day---odd, I know---that it might be nice if the video game industry paid closer attention to the needs of their aging players. As much as I hate to say it, my memory---if it ever was worth anything---is starting to fade. For years TV shows have been kind enough to remind me of the critical details in the stories plot so far, but video games still have me resorting to writing notes, so as not to loose any precious clues. I'm not saying they need to add a full highlight reel, but it would be nice if they gently reminded me of some of the things I previously did in the game that might be relevant to my current position.

Like watching a season of a show in a row, this feature would be irritating if it started every-time I returned to the game, but if my previous saved game is dated beyond some threshold, it would be nice if it did a quick "last time on..." montage. Clearly this is not for everyone, but there are times when I leave a game, for one reason or another, for a month before I play it again; and trying to recover the narrative is next to impossible for any game beyond the most basic FPS. I would of course like to option to skip it as well, but that would not be such a difficult thing to add. The more interesting problem, would be how to capture and store the context required for the users last saved game.

A word of warning should be said here: I am not a game developer. I have developed a game, but I am not a professional, so I'll likely be making a huge number of incorrect assumptions here. I don't believe the are unreasonable ones, but the may be impractical ones.

Let's take the Zelda series as an example. I do this because, (a) I am familiar with the games, (b) I've had the misfortune of having to re-trace my steps countless times in many of the version, and (c) it seems to have a sufficiently complex enough narrative to require a system for managing what has and has not been done by the player.

With Zelda in mind, let's begin. Intuitively, it seems to me that we can consider a save game as a pointer to a location within the games' story board (maybe a graph). Sure, there are other attributes that must be considered, like items that have been collected, etc., but if we imagine a save game as a point within the games' story, it makes our discussion a little more fluid. Now, If the game engine knows where it is that the player is within this story, it seems reasonable to think it could also trace backwards along the edges the player has ventured, and provide a quick synopsis of what the player did most recently. This part seems easy.

The hard part, I think, would be to provide a meaningful synopsis. By this I mean, it seems like a tricky problem to provide a montage of the information that might be of particular interest given the players current location in the story. It would be easy to just enumerate the last few thing they did, but it may be the case that a critical hint for the current puzzle lays beyond the most recent events. I'm not saying the problem is intractable, it's just that it would require a little more book keeping, or a far more sophisticated story graph representation.

I can think of a simple constraint problem that would solve the issue: the game could match the players current accomplishments against the requirements of the upcoming problems, and determine any of the missing pieces. But this would require more information to be available, and may, in fact, give players hints or strategies, they may not have thought of on their own. It seems more palatable to only present the user with a quick overview of the things they did in order to get where they are. Anything beyond that might be left to a very nice-to-have help system for the gamers out there who just want to play through the game, without necessarily solving all the puzzles themselves.

So yeah, if you write games, I implore you, add this feature to your next title. My failing mind will thank you.