Writing about Grand Theft Auto

In light of the recent release of Grand Theft Auto IV, let me blatantly do a self promoting plug about two articles I’ve written about the Grand Theft Auto games.

The first one “To be or not to be in Liberty City” is a synopsis I wrote together with Henrik Bennetsen about the narrative structure and the impact of this on the gameplaying experience in Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas.

And the other one “Please do not walk on the grass” is a more magazine article version of the former. This one got some big time attention at the time of publishing as it was part of the first ever Carnival of Gamers.

Man those where the days… playing games all day and just turn out a small synopsis now and then about what I thought about them, spiced up with some highbrow references to other peoples’ work on narrative and immersion in games.

I sure miss those days.

Level Design Patterns

Today I handed in a paper on design patterns for level design. It’s a paper I’ve been working on on the side in the last 12 weeks. As this is a side project the scope is rather small, but it might very well be a topic that I’ll explorer further in future projects or in my master thesis.

I have made an analysis of these multiplayer levels from popular first-person shooters (FPS):

From Day of Defeat: Source:

• Kalt
• Donner
• Anzio
• Flash
• Avalanche

From Unreal Tournament 2004:

• Maul
• Two Tombs
• Grassy Knoll
• Double Damage
• Absolute Zero
• Bridge of Faith
• Electric Field

From Battlefield 1942

• Tobruk
• El Alamein
• Iwo Jima

And have from that analysis compiled what I believe to be common practices of development and have formalized these in Level Design Patterns:

1. Multiple paths
2. Local fights
3. Collision points
4. Reference points
5. Defense areas
6. Risk Incentive

Read much more about these patterns in the paper itself.

Download the entire paper here (PDF ~ 2.01 MB)

No man is an Island

As mentioned earlier, just before Christmas I handed in a paper about a study we did of World of Warcraft.

We were looking for the dynamic relationship between the behavior of the individual player and the behavior of the groups they participate in, and how they mutually influence each other.
We used Bartle’s player types and two theories from the field of Organizational Theory; Richard Daft’s Life cycle Model and H.J. Leavit’s Open System Model.

Our problem statement:

• When playing World of Warcraft, what are the key factors of the relationship between the player and the group?

To understand why players make certain choices regarding group structures, we will initially have to clarify how the game facilitates group structures and what types of players it is dealing with. We will therefore use the following questions as means to answer the before-mentioned statement.

• How are groups structured within World of Warcraft?
• Which type of players takes part in these structures?

Get the entire report here (PDF format)

Please do not walk on the grass

On how role-playing in “Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas” can be difficult

By Simon Larsen

Before you starting spamming the comment function with enlightening comments such as “GTA is not a RPG you idiot!”, let me explain what I mean with role-playing in a game like Grand Theft Auto (GTA);

It is correct that GTA is not marketed as a RPG, but in it you play the role of Carl Johnson¹ in his quest for correcting all the wrongdoings that has come upon him and his family. This, in it self, does not really constitute GTA as a RPG, since then all games would more or less be RPGs, but the sheer size of the game world and the freedom to roam around in this, creates a narrative vacuum that the player has to fill out by him/her self, very similar to “normal” RPGs. Furthermore you, as a player, are free to dress up Carl in more or less any way you find suitable and “pimp his ride” in various ways. On top of that you have the element of the fitness and sex appeal of CJ. These elements are clearly added into the game in order for the players to identify more with CJ, e.g. that they share the same goals and behave in a way you would prefer etc.

The overall story arc of the game is very well constructed but in some cases the narrative that the player is creating (though his/her (inter)actions) clashes very hard with the narrative that Rockstar Games has put into the game.

When I first loaded the game on my PS2, I was expecting the grandeur of the two previous games in the series, GTA III and GTA: Vice City, and Rockstar delivered. The game is bigger, prettier, sounds better and driving around in the game is just a fun as it was in the others. It has a great and better written story than the previous game. But this is also where GTA: SA goes down an unfamiliar path for the series.

In GTA III the protagonist was an unnamed guy with a gritty past, the plot was familiar in sense of “Goodfellas” kind of way. And again with GTA: VC the setting was instantly recognizable, everything from the Miami Vice inspired intro, the Don Johnson and “that other Guy“, the pink flamingos and every thing in between.

These two games worked perfectly, because the story was lose and the setting geared towards only one kind of storyline, so there was little difference in the story that Rockstar had put into the game and the story that the player developed while playing.

I would argue that the focus on a better and stronger story proved to be San Andreas’ Achilles’ heel. As I said, the story is better, no need to argue about that, but it is also tighter and more confined, therefore limiting in the way the players act out their “inner criminal”.

An example of this is in the first part of the game. Here you take on the “Doberman” mission, a mission that involves taking over some gang territory from competing gangs in Los Santos². The game explain very clearly how the game mechanics works in connection with this and before long you and your recruited gang members are out cruising in pimped-up lowriders looking for drive-by action³. Within minutes full-blown gang war is happening in downtown Los Santos.

The gang war game play element of SA is a nice little (mini) game in it self, but wear out after some time. And this is where the real trouble kicks in.

After I’d have taken over more or less the entire city of Los Santos and in the process developed my own story of CJ as being this “don’t-you-look-at-me-or-I?ll-shoot-you” kind of guy, that doesn’t take any crap from anyone (yes, really living out my inner criminal here) I decided to take on a mission I was more or less certain that would progress the story line of the game. And the mission did indeed progress the story, but in a whole other direction than the one I wanted.

The mission starts with a cut-scene where a crocket cop named Tenpenny⁴ back-stabs CJ. Since it was a cut-scene there was nothing I could do, even though my view of CJ had now become this before mentioned hard-boiled gangster that would blow the head of anyone trying to cheat him, even cops.

So there I was, thrown out of town, with no guns, no homies to protect me, no nothing. Just seconds ago I was the king of town, I was the guy with homies on every street corner looking out for me, I was the one everyone feared and few had live to tell the tale of.
Me and CJ where one, but no more. The bond between me, as the player of the game, and Carl Johnson was lost the minute he sat foot in the hillbilly town of Angle Pine… never to be found again.

I kept on playing the game, but CJ was no longer an important part of the game for me, now I was just looking for quick ways to complete the missions, earn money to buy property and scouting for nice cars to drive around.

After this “incident” I played the game in the way Rockstar properly wanted me to play it. The problem was that they had open up this huge game world for me and told me that I could do anything I wanted in. But in really they wanted me to act in a very specific way in it, and not walk on the pretty grass even though I could.

1. or just plain CJ among friends [↩]
2. the first of three cities in the state of San Andreas [↩]
3. note the deliberate use of “you” and “your” [↩]
4. brilliantly voice-acted by Samuel L. Jackson [↩]

To be or not to be in Liberty City

Looking closer at importance of the story arc in the emergent game world of the Grand Theft Auto series

By Simon Larsen and Henrik Bennetsen

Supervisor: Espen Aarseth
Course: Computer Game Theory – E2004

IT – University of Copenhagen
November 2004

THIS IS AN UNFINISHED WORK. It is only a synopsis that contains many unanswered questions.
DO NOT QUOTE.

See Liberty City and Die

Many games have tried to give the player the feeling of total freedom to roam around a living breathing game world before Grand Theft Auto (GTA), but few have had the huge commercial success these games had. At the same time the game has got mission that you have to complete to finish the game, so it?s basically a progression game.
In this synopsis we will look closer at these two terms progression and emergence games by examining the three last installments in the Grand Theft Auto series: Grand Theft Auto III (GTA3), Grand Theft Auto: Vice City (VC) and Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas (SA).

The question that is going to be addressed herein:

• Is the overall story arc vital to drive the playing experience forward because of the nature of the offline single player game that the GTA series is?
• Is the narrative vital to keep the player entertained and the get the player accept the setting?
• Could the game evolve into a game more in the form of e.g. Return to Castle Wolfenstein or Battlefield 1942?
• Or would GTA have had been a more fascinating game as a MMORPG?

Complexity

In any given part of the GTA games you can find periodic systems. If you for example stand still by a way side for some minutes the same cars will start to drive past you and the same dialogue will be spoken by the pedestrians in your vicinity.

Image 1: Four kinds of systems (Salen & Zimmerman, 2003, p. 155).

But on the overall scale of the game, nothing will be in a periodic state. There are too many random events occurring. This places the game in the complex system category. It is not total chaos since nothing in the game is completely random (e.g. you will never find Haitian gangs in the Cuban controlled parts of Vice City). It is in complex systems like these that emergence in the gameplay can become apparent.

Sandbox

You could easily write a walkthrough for the GTA games but hat would only cover 50% of the game, and all the different missions can be solved with a variety of different strategies.
There is a very well-defined story arc in the games that the player can chose to follow. The keyword here is chose, since it is not required for the player to do so, although some areas of the game will be locked to the player until certain mission in the story have been completed. Beyond that the player is free to pursuit any action he or she may desire¹. Jesper Juul (2002) defines two different types of games as Games of Progression and Games of Emergence respectively. So what exactly is GTA; a game of progression or a game of emergence? It is both.

Emergression

A new term might be need here: Emergression. Games that are both progression and emergent at the same time, but cannot exist without both being present in the game. In order to keep the player occupied and interested in the game, you will have to have some form of narrative to keep getting the player to accept the setting and drive the emergent gameplay forward. Without the narrative the game would still be highly entertaining but the average player would properly not spend more than 5-10 hours on it. When the first three “unique jumps” have been found and you have played taxi-driver for 10 customers, the game would become trivial and extremely repetitive.

Image 2: The emergence is increasing as you progress in the game (adapted from Juul 2004).

Platform

To avoid letting the game become repetitive you will have to have “a series of interesting choices” as Sid Meier would say or as Rollings and Ernest (2003) calls it “One or more causally linked series of challenges in a simulated environment”. The openness of the mission structure is only part of the equation that makes the GTA series such a successful formula. In the future the series might become a platform of gaming, where the game just establish the setting and then let the players live out their inner Godfather or Bonnie and Clyde without forcing any given story on the play. Then we can speak of simulations, as defined by Gonzalo Frasca (2001), when talking about GTA.

The breaking point stated by Selmer Bringsjord (2001) is also the need for a smarter AI. This begs the question: Will GTA develop into a multiplayer game or even a MMORPG? Is playing against other people the ultimate AI?

Player types

Another question is then; do the GTA series include gameplay for all of Richard Bartle’s player types (1996)? Gameplay for the explorers and achievers are certainly there. But what about the socializes and the killers? Well, everyone who has played the game, loves to talk to others how have also played to game² and the killers might find pleasure in killing innocent bystanders and pedestrians, and in the mission that requires killing of certain characters. Then again is it at all relevant to talk about player types in an offline single player game like GTA?

To be or not to be in Liberty City

It is clear that the emergent nature of the GTA games attracts a big crowd of gamers, but would the games have had the same commercial and critical success without the narrative to help the game progress? And this leads us back to the question of whether the narrative really is vital in an emergent game such as GTA? Would the story be apparent in Grand Theft Auto 7? Will it become a MMORPG?

This game series might very well eventually become the final battleground for the death match between narrativism and ludology. And the battle might never be settled. This is why we call for the coining of a new term. We use the term “Emergression”; for games that currently cannot exist without both progression and emergence.

• Are emergression games the future of gaming or a necessary step on the ladder?
• Historical perspective: Traditional games are often emergent, chess etc. Was narrativism a necessary step in the development of computer games, or just a sign of immaturity of the medium (e.g. something needed to ease the marketing of the games)?
• If we look back at GTA San Andreas in 10 years will we find it amusing that it was considered a very emergent game?

A critical look

Are GTA games really emergent? T.L. Taylor brought up the point at a seminar at Copenhagen University, November 2004, that you don’t actually use the emergence to advance in the game. So is this emergence really just a null event in the progression of the game? Something indisputably cool but essentially immaterial; like choosing the color of your car in a racing game.

• Can the game be played in a non-emergent manner and still be completed?
• Is completion the only goal when playing a game? How does this relate to Bartle’s player types?

References

All links checked as of November 2004. Not all are referenced directly in the text.

Books

• Holland, John H.: “Emergence: From Chaos to Order“. USA, Oxford University Press, 1998. ISBN: 0192862111.
• Johnson, Steven: “Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities and Software“. USA, Penguin Books, 2001. ISBN: 0140287752.
• Salen, Katie & Zimmerman, Eric: “Rules of Play: Game Design Fundamentals“. USA, The MIT Press, 2003. ISBN: 0262240459
• Rollings, Andrew & Adams, Ernest: “Andrew Rollings and Ernest Adams on Game Design“. USA, New Riders, 2003. ISBN: 1592730019

Articles

• Aarseth, Espen: “Quest Games as Post-Narrative Discourse” in Ryan, Marie-Laure (Editor): “Narrative Across Media: The Languages of Storytelling“. USA, University of Nebraska Press, 2004. ISBN: 0803289936
• Bartle, Richard A.: “HEARTS, CLUBS, DIAMONDS, SPADES: PLAYERS WHO SUIT MUDS“. 1996.
• Bringsjord, Selmer: “Is It Possible to Build Dramatically Compelling Interactive Digital Entertainment (in the form, e.g., of computer games)?“. GameStudies.org, 2001.
• Frasca, Gonzalo: “SIMULATION 101: Simulation versus Representation“. 2001.
• Frasca, Gonzalo: “Sim Sin City: some thoughts about Grand Theft Auto 3“. GameStudies.org, 2002.
• Frasca, Gonzalo: “Simulation versus Narrative. Introduction to Ludology” in Wolf, Mark J.P. (Editor) & Perron, Bernard (Editor): “The Video Game Theory Reader“. USA, Routledge, 2003. ISBN: 0-415-96579-9
• Juul, Jesper: “The Open and the Closed: Games of Emergence and Games of Progression“. 2002.
• Juul, Jesper: “Hvad spillet betyder: om Grand Theft Auto 3″ in Engholm, Ida & Klastrup, Lisbeth: “Digitale Verdener: De nye mediers ?stetik og Design“. Denmark, Gyldendal, 2004. ISBN: 8702023687
• GameSpy: “Bored in San Andreas“. GameSpy.com. 28th October 2004.

1. You could argue that the emergent gameplay elements are more apparent than the progression elements, but none are more important one [↩]
2. See GTAforums.com (http://www.gtaforums.com) for an example of this. As of November 2004 the forum had 50,000 active users that is discussion everything from mission solutions to unique jumps. The socializing is ”off-line”, so to speak [↩]

Postmortem of the postmortem analysis

This is a postmortem article of my postmortem analysis. This is almost as much meta as you can get.

Since this website re-launched and is now in English I’ve been writing some small articles on games and this is the first of the series.

It is as most postmortem articles from Gamasutra.com it is very intra prospective and very self criticizing, both positive and negative. But I leave the comments field open and any feedback is more than welcome.

First and foremost, this article is meant to humour you. You should not read this as serious academic writing. For that, look elsewhere on this website or on the internet.

So now we got that covered, I give you without further ado ;
Postmortem: The Gamasutra.com Postmortem Analysis

What went right

1. Took advice from people that where smarter than me
   I owe a huge thanks to Jacob Busk from InterActive Vision (and founder of the Danish IGDA Chapter), for convincing me to translate the analysis into English. If he hadn’t encouraged me to do so, I’ve properly newer would have.

2. Good debate on newsgroup
   When I first started researching for the thesis I started a debate on comp.games.development.design with the title “What’s wrong with game development today?”. The thread geared more than 150 replies from industry people around the world. Their responds and criticism became a great source of information.

3. Translated the analysis to English early on and putting in online
   Shortly after I finished my exams I translated the analysis of the postmortem articles into English. If I had waited longer it properly never would have gotten so much response as it did. The people that had discussed it on the newsgroup could still clearly remember the debate.
   It was never really a question if I wanted to put the translated analysis online or not, but I glad that I did. It generated a ton of response from around the world. The University of Jerusalem had it on their curriculum for a semester back in the fall of 2001, and companies from Spain, Czechoslovakia, Germany, South Korea, Australia, UK, and US e-mailed me back and thanked me for it.
   It really made the hard work worthwhile.

4. Making it free
   Before I did put it online, I toyed with the idea for charging 1 or 2 dollars for it. It was great that I decided not to. It would never have spread as fast and wide if I had. Even though 1 dollar seems as a small amount it would without doubt have hindered the spread of it.

5. Hitting a nerve
   At the time I wrote the analysis and the thesis, not much was written about the problems in the game development. The rising cost of productions and publishing was an emerging topic that was being discussed a lot. And it seemed that my analysis really hit a nerve, which i always great.

What went wrong

1. Phoned up a developer
   After I’ve had the thesis online for about a month or so, I looked at the log files from my website and could see that one specific developer (which name will remain undisclosed) had downloaded the thesis a lot of times. They had downloaded it so many times that they where outranking the second place by 30%.
   So I though I phone them out and ask for their opinion about it. That turned out to be a mistake. The man in charge was at first puzzled of how I’ve gotten this information and then angered by it. Even though I ensured him that this information would never be publish. So I never really got around asking him about the analysis and the thesis, I was just trying to control this fire that I accidently started. I’m sure that somewhere in the developer’s phonebook there is a black dot next to my name.

2. Released a version with a ton of typos
   When I re leached the English translation of the entire thesis in contained a ton of typos. There really is no good excuse for this other than I was working against a deadline (on another project) and wanted to get the translation out of the way. Unfortunately, when I finally discovered all the typos and corrected them it had already been downloaded over 6.000 times. Those people who read the first version, would properly never return for the corrected 1.1 version.

3. Not capitalizing more on the 15 kb of fame
   At the time when the analysis was first released (august 2001), it was mentioned on some of the major gaming websites in the world (GameDev.net and of course Gamasutra.com). What I didn’t realized back then was that I should have capitalized more on the 15 kb of fame that followed. My website was, at the time, very poor (and mostly in Danish) and I didn’t use the actuality of the news to knock on doors of game developers in Copenhagen asking for jobs.
   Maybe I should have.

4. Not translating the entire thesis to English right away
   It took over a entire year before I finally took / found the time to translate, not only the analysis, but the entire thesis into English. That was way too long. In the meantime a lot had happen in the game development world and some of my advice for easing up development problems was more or less out-of-date.

5. Not expanding / updating the analysis continually
   Another big mistake was, or is, that I’ve never expanded the analysis further. Thankfully Noel Llopis did. In his article from april 2004, he further reminisce on the points originally stated in my thesis.

Project data:

Publisher: Self publication.

Number of full-time developers: 1

Number of part-time developers: none.

Length of development: 4 months. And 1? month for localization to English.

Release Date: August 1, 2001 from the analysis and October 1, 2002 for the thesis

Development Hardware: Pentium III 450 MHz machines with 512MB RAM, GeForce 3 video card

Development Software: Microsoft Word, Microsoft Excel, Microsoft Outlook, Adobe Acrobat, Adobe Photoshop, Macromedia Flash, Macromedia FireWorks.

Project Size: Around 50 text files, and 50 image files.