Every time my cousin and I hang out we wind up in jail. Not on purpose, we just always get into a fistfight at a strip club, or ‘borrow’ a car at exactly the wrong moment, or take the short-cut through the park when old ladies are out in force perambulating, or whatever.

 

Then I get the bright idea to show off and ditch the cops, but instead I choke, and within a few moments we’re in a smoking SUV lodged eight feet above the ground between a church and an orphanage, or sprinting frantically for the river while squad cars effortlessly close in, or in some other embarrassing disaster. I used to worry that the string of jail dates would discourage my cousin, but he just keeps calling me with that same jovial enthusiasm.

 

So I have to imagine that he’s actually kind of stoked, that ever since I moved to town his life, which previously peaked only when glossy magazines under his mattress were involved, is finally exciting.

 

Do you remember your favorite personal anecdote about playing GTA III? Mine was this: I was crawling out of a burning vehicle just as a cop car in the distance was bearing down on me at top speed, spelling certain death, only to have it deflected at the last instant by a toppling telegraph pole which caused it to sail harmlessly over my head.

 

Harvey Smith’s favorite story from playing Thief was that he was nearly caught by a patrolling guard while trying to hide the body of a servant he had knocked unconscious, and he watched from his hiding spot as the servant, who he had been forced to drop abruptly, slid slowly towards a pool of water. He had to make a quick decision: rescue her from drowning, or remain hidden?

 

We carry these stories around like trophies because we know we made them. All seasoned gamers can instinctively differentiate between events that happen the same way every time for every player and events that came into existence only as a result of their particular choices and actions. The design term is ‘emergent narratives’, and personally I only disrupt my life for games that make them possible. The feeling of creation is intoxicating in a way that’s distinct from all other media, even if it’s hard to explain exactly why.

 

 

As a designer, you need three things to enable emergent narratives in your game. The first is to think of game design less as the experiences you want the player to have and more as the tools you want to give them and the situations in which you want to put them. This often involves letting go and not freaking out when players find valid alternatives to what you had in mind. As players, we know it’s fun to defeat enemies the way the designer intended but even more gratifying to defeat the designer. The second thing is game systems that interact to produce emergent behaviors, although that’s a big enough topic to save for a future column. The third is what I call ‘building up the scaffolding’, meaning adding interactive depth in the directions you want to support.

 

If I told my GTA III story to Rockstar, they’d probably say, “Duh, that was the whole idea.” Maybe they didn’t have my specific example in mind, but they built up the scaffolding of cop chases, car physics, and telegraph poles intending for things just like that to happen, and that’s why we bless them with our gratitude and enormous piles of money.

 

Interestingly, none of us on the Thief team would have predicted Harvey’s experience. The scaffolding of stealth, patrolling guards and body carrying was there explicitly to support the types of emergent narratives we often heard about, but other scaffolding was built to make the world consistent and believable. Unconscious bodies can wind up underwater, and we decided it would be lame not to support some response.

 

Thief’s emergent narratives were about sneaking around castles and walking on moss, which was never going to change anyone’s life. GTA IV extends its classic topics into something with more potential: making friends by boring down in minigames. However, I really do have to imagine how Roman feels about his frequent nights behind bars, because he never acknowledges it. If I told that story to Rockstar, perhaps they’d say, “Hmm… we never anticipated anyone would be lame enough to let that happen.” But they didn’t have to predict it; they just had to build even more depth in that direction. Why not support characters who respond well to dates that end in jail and others who are so unreasonably prudish they hesitate to put out if you get them locked up even once? My new friends could feel insecure if I always ditch them for someone else, or their fates could change if I introduce them to each other. If they aren’t already, our emergent narratives from GTA IV could be about characters in a way that’s never happened before. If only Rockstar had thought of that, maybe they would have scored that last Metacritic point.

 

 

Randy Smith is a lead game designer at EA’s LA Studio. His current project is a collaboration with Steven Spielberg.

 

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