Anthony Clifton

As with most questions I ask or am asked, I’ll take the long way around to answer this one and talk about where Changed Earth is coming from before I talk about what it is.

Video game development can start from one of (at least) three places.

1. Game Play
2. Story
3. Technology

Each approach has it’s strengths and weaknesses, which I won’t discuss in detail here.

A lot of early video games were developed from the standpoint of Game Play.  Centipede, for example, had no story whatsoever.  You’re a little gun dude thing.  Bugs are attacking you.  You are destined to destroy them as long as you can until, inevitably, they destroy you.  It’s all about manipulating the track ball and learning patterns. But it’s fun even though the technology is very simplistic and there’s no story.

On the other end of the spectrum, a lot of recent video games are coming from the Technology point of view.  Company A says, “Hey, we have this new console that renders more polygons faster than anything else.  Let’s make a game that uses up all that capacity so the imagery is stunning, showcases our product and can’t be reproduced on anything else.”  There were a few DreamCast games I can think of like that, for example.  Or Company B says, “Hey, we have this new controller.  You wave it around and things happen.  We need something that would suck to play on regular controllers but is fun on ours.”  And, thus, Wii Tennis and Wii Bowling are born.  It’s all about using technology to make the game as immersive and natural to play as possible, bringing something like the real world inside the box.

Starting with either Game Play or Technology, there is no reason you can’t bring in the other approaches as the game is developed.  For example, games with great Technology like BioShock can also have compelling Story and innovative Game Play.  Games with great Game Play like Starcraft can still be built around great Technology and add Story elements to provide context.

There’s no question that the different approaches can be combined and, probably, should be.  The question at hand is from where the game started because it will have a big impact on how development proceeds.

My game, Changed Earth Worlds, is coming from a third place: Story.  I think that origin has some distinct advantages over either of the other two starting points, Game Play and Technology, in terms of creating something that people will enjoy and stick with over time.

First, I think that most human activity, at it’s core, is about narrative and story telling.  Even our internal thought processes and emotions are about the stories we tell ourselves about the world.  When the President speaks, he’s telling us a story.  When we watch or read the news, the individual segments are often called “stories” rather than “reports” as in “we bring you this story…”  When we emulate the actions of others, when we’re learning a skill, we observe cause and effect, order and outcome.  We record what we’ve learned as a sort of narrative in our memory, replaying it as necessary as we practice and master the skill on our own.

Honestly, I think what separates humans from the other animals is our ability to tell and assimilate stories.  Big cats don’t walk around saying, “well, I think I’ll go after that Gazelle today, I wonder if I should flank him or not.”  For them, life is not a story.  It’s motion, action, reaction, outcome.  Although I have no evidence of it, I think that’s why humans have developed communication far beyond other animals, not because we have some inherent need to make noises or signs at each other but because, just like we learned to use a stick as an extension of our arms, we needed those sounds and signs to get the stories out of our heads and into the world.  Language was a tool we developed for story telling.  Story telling or the need to do it came first, to my way of thinking.

Creating a game from a story just seems natural because it is natural.

Second, I think Story is more compelling to more people more of the time than either Technology or Game Play.  People will pick and choose the technologies and styles of game play they like or don’t, accepting or rejecting entire game (or any entertainment) genres out of hand simply because of how they are presented and how you interact with them.  Give them a controller that you wave around and they’ll either keep using it or they’ll put it down.  Present them with a game that works a certain way, for example a beat-em-up or fighter, and they’ll either catch on quickly to the combos or they’ll mash some buttons for a while and then move on.

But, if you present them with a story up front and base everything off that story, they will often get hooked by the story and stay with the game whether or not they prefer the game play or technology, just because of the nature of story telling.  A leads to B. B leads to C. And so on.  Human curiosity compels people, more often than not, to stick with a story once begun if for no other reason than to find out what happens next.  It’s how our brains are wired.  Even if they find the story frustrating in big ways.  Even if the story isn’t really going anywhere in particular.

I present Lost as Exhibit A.  As Exhibit B, I present that the vast majority of people who say they didn’t like a film did not walk out in the middle.  They stayed to the end.  And when, at the same time, they spent $4.00 on $0.25 worth of popcorn, it’s pretty obvious they didn’t just stay because they’d already spent the money.  They stayed because, if nothing else, they wanted to see how the story ended.

I think this is a great place from which to start a game, especially for casual gamers, because, even if they aren’t used to your style of Game Play or they don’t care about the Technology, they’ll still give it a try and adapt if necessary if the story seems interesting and entertains them.

There’s a caveat, however.  I think a lot of MMOs experience player churn because of inadequate story length.  If the developers only create two months of story for a game they’d like people to play for years, then the story is going to run out and players will be left grinding, senselessly killing things that weren’t particularly bothering anyone just to watch some abstract numbers increase on the bottom of their screen.  If the developers have not planned for more content well before it needs to be released, then the story quality will suffer as they go into crunch mode to complete it and add it seamlessly to the game.  All to often this fails and the game takes on a herky-jerky quality that is too difficult for casual players to follow

If you start from Story, then you have to make sure there is enough story and enough room for the story to evolve and expand over time to keep people engaged for as long as you want your game to exist.  Otherwise, the thing that drew them in will be exhausted and they’ll go look for another story.  To some extent, this is inevitable.  Stories have to end sooner or later.  They can’t go on forever.  People lose interest in them eventually or there’s just no more of that story to be told.

Nonetheless, by starting from Story, a developer, I think, has the best chance of preparing for a sustainable game that can last as long as the story warrants without running out too soon.  If story as added later in development, the risk of exhausting it too soon is simply too great.

In addition, there is a second caveat.  When developing story for a game or adapting one, it’s important to remember the difference between games and other media.  A game is highly interactive.  Players don’t just want to watch a story unfold like in a movie theater.  They want to participate in the story.  They want to be an actor not a spectator.  A story that meets this need needs to have enough space left over for additional characters, perhaps thousands of them, to play a significant role.  That’s why Huckleberry Finn Online would be a pretty narrow game as an MMO even though it might be fun as a single-player game.  Tom and Huck and the slave guy pretty much filled up all the space in the story that was available in a story about escaping down a river on a raft in the 1800s.  You can only fit so many hand-made rafts on the Mississippi River.

On the other hand, Mississippi 1860 might be a really interesting MMO with lots of room for all kinds of different characters.  Sticking with the classic RPG classes and opening up reality to a bit of magical realism, you can have the Charlatan (Magic User), the snake oil salesmen who happens to know some real but subtle magic, the Outlaw (Thief), who is as handy with a deck of cards as with his wit, the Medicine Man (Healer), a Native American fugitive who brings comfort as well as mystery, and the Law Man (fighter), who upholds the law with frontier justice.

Together, they might stand up, in a haphazard way characteristic of ragtag frontier groups, against some overarching threat to their way of life and even the very future of America.

They could pursue criminals for bounty for example or they might choose to help slaves find their way to the Underground Railroad and defend them from those who wish to take their freedom and lives.

Similarly, they might rob or defend banks, be or take down gangs of criminals and/or explore the West, looking for new opportunities for magic, combat and adventure.

In fact, to heck with Changed Earth Worlds!  I’m making Mississippi 1860 the MMO!!!

“On the cusp of Civil War, they joined together despite their differences to do what’s right and stand against those who would destroy the American Dream.  Mississippi 1860.”

Just kidding.

In either case, a story for an online game needs to have adequate length, depth and width, especially if the development of the game is driven by Story.  Otherwise, players will slip away unsatisfied.

To that end, I’m developing Changed Earth Worlds around a story universe I’ve been developing for several years called, unsurprisingly, Changed Earth.

For the past couple months, I’ve been writing Changed Earth fiction over at http://www.changedearth.com and via Twitter at http://twitter.com/ChangedEarth.  Writing via Twitter is a bit of a strange experience, an experiment inspired by the cell phone novels that have become popular over the last several years in Japan.  Writing via Twitter helps overcome the resistance to write, writers’ block, by letting me focus on just 140 characters at a time.  But it’s a very non-ideal platform for sharing narrative.

Nonetheless, I’ve been building some tools in Java that seem to help and, although imperfect, it seems to be working for the moment.

The Changed Earth multiverse is a world that has been torn apart, due to an unknown event called The Change, so that, instead of living by default in one shared universe, humanity has been divided in billions of subjective personal subrealities controlled by their conscious and unconscious minds.  Fortunately, it is possible for people to travel between these “little worlds” and even to enlarge them by joining together in consensus with others.

In addition, Changed Earth is a “collection” story.  Although the true nature of The Change is not known, it is known that billions of Core Fragments were scattered by it into each of the various subrealities.  By collecting these Core Fragments and assembling them, it is possible to amplify the effect of joining together in consensus, allowing the construction of Core (Consensus) Subrealities that are not only stable but shared by many people and much more easily controllable than single Fragment Subrealities.

These Core Subrealities are the best hope for humanity to “put the world back together again” so that everyone can live in one shared world.  As more and more people join them, the space they occupy becomes larger and larger, encompassing more and more of “reality.”

Unfortunately, as is always the case, people disagree about what that world should be like and, consequently, have divided into three factions, each trying to collect all the Core Fragments for themselves.  It is believed that whoever has all of the Fragments will control the nature of the resulting single shared universe as six billion realities merge back into one.

Even more unfortunate, ultimately the three factions will have to come into conflict because, to have all the Fragments, one faction will have to take the collected Fragments from the other two, by force if necessary.  War is thus inevitable.

The three factions are:

1. The East Village Alternative Metropolitan Subreality (EV)
2. The Downtown Metropolitan Subreality (DT)
3. And The River Bend Unincorporated Subreality (RB)

Because they each have fundamentally different worldviews, they also have different forms of government, culture and means of making a living.

The EV is primarily consensus based with it’s residents composed of various creative people and free thinking types: artists, healers and makers of things.  The DT is techno/democratic with residents who are scientists, business people and spies.  The RB is anarchistic, composed mostly of warriors, outlaws and traders.

Consequently, the DT is the most “high tech” of the three subrealities, very rigid and organized, the EV is conversant with technology and in some ways more advanced than the DT but lacks resources and planning while the RB is almost a sort of post-apocalyptic wilderness with very little technology but lots of strength and cunning.

In short, the DT is brains, the EV is heart and the RB is muscle.

I’d rather not say more as I don’t want to create too many spoilers for the ongoing story but I hope it’s easy to see how this story universe, developed long before I’d ever considered using it for a game, works very well as the basis for an MMO.

The story has length.  It’s going to take a very long time to collect billions of Fragments and there will be lots of obstacles, set backs and lucky breaks along the way.  In addition, when the Fragments are all collected, there is still a war to contend with even if the nature of that conflict is unknown.

The story has width.  With billions of potential worlds to explore, each with its own occupants who have their own stories and visions, there are plenty of adventures to go around.  In such a story universe, almost anything is possible.

Of course, in the stories I’m writing there is a main set of characters on whose adventures I will focus.  Their experiences will no doubt be pivotal to the overall story of Changed Earth.  But the story universe around them is so vast that players of Changed Earth Worlds will not be completely constrained by them.  Their stories will be a guiding force but game progression will by no means be micro-managed.

And finally, the story has depth.  Changed Earth is a multiverse full of personal demons made real.  In other words, it’s an engine for allegory, a rich well of events and choices to be tapped because it speaks directly to the human condition and, indeed, what it means to be human at all.

So, in conclusion, what is Changed Earth?  It’s a collection of fantasies, dreams, nightmares and fears, all made painfully real by a change in the nature of physical reality.

It is  SciFantasy, a story of fantasy with just enough science fiction to allow the suspension of disbelief.

It is heavily inspired by anime and manga, which I love, so that the stories can be both dark and joyful, festive and elegiac, tragic and yet hopeful.  It springs, I hope, from a deep well of folklore, archetypes and the collective unconscious.

It’s a place I want not only to tell you about… a lot… but also a place I want to share with you.

That’s why I’m writing stories about and also making a game so you can participate in those stories.  Hopefully, as I talk about it here on this blog, you will find the quest to build the game as entertaining as the adventure of eventually playing it.

In my next post, I’ll begin building the game starting where all RPGs must inevitably start, with the characters.