The structures involved are always the same if you know how to find them. In this case Doom 3 has been criticized for the same reasons of SWG. It’s not my opinion, just read the reviews or the various message boards and you see that the complaints have a constant. Peoples don’t like the game because it exploits too much the same tricks: lights going off and monster-in-a-closet (or unending stream of cheap spawns, in Scharmers words). The redundant critique is that too many cliches become boring and annoying. This is true but we still need to know why. The answer, i think, can be achieved at an even higher level of generalization, where we can gather all Doom 3 faults in one, discover the real flaw generating all the rest and even finding analogies that become interesting even outside the genre. Because we discovered an “highway” that rules various form of arts, joining games and movies, Doom 3 and Star Wars Galaxies.
The fact is that in a game like Doom 3 you are really scared. A lot. The game is completely effective on this aspect. The first twenty minutes are mind-blowing, despite they are a rework of what made Half-Life and System Shock interesting. After some time this feeling changes. Yes, you are still scared, but the more you go on the more you feel scared AND annoyed. Because the fear becomes unjustified. Too many tricks, too many ruses. The same happens in a movie when a scary scene is matched with a very loud sound. Since the scene is weak you use a trick to amplify the potential, repeat the trick too much and everything will become annoying. Faked. The real strength of Doom 3 during the first twenty minutes is about the immersion. You feel the game. You feel the concrete fear because it’s HARD to part yourself from what happens in the screen. It feels real, the graphic and the light system don’t seem anymore “good coding” or “good graphic”, they are content. They are true. You don’t know what to expect to the game because you don’t know anymore the “engine”. You aren’t looking at the “box”, you are IN the box. So you are trapped in the game and you fear it because you become a real marine, in an underground base where everything could happen at any moment. This is mind-blowing for everyone but there’s a point where the magic is broken and where the fear effect happens along a lot of frustration and/or irritation. It doesn’t work anymore.
Where is this point? The point is when the player, or a spectator in a movie, begins to feel the presence of the hand moving the scene. The rule of the “third wall” exists from the theatre of marionettes. If you see the hands moving the marionettes you cannot enjoy anymore what happens, till the point that you cannot even follow the story. This is the same when the “fear effect” of a movie or a game happens just because of tricks. It’s not the repetition that makes the trick obsolete, but the fact that its reuse makes the player perceive the hand behind the scene. A stratagem is an intrusion. The director, or a designer, walks into the scene to make it stronger. It works, but if you start to repeat this and transform it into a perceivable structure, the magic is broken, the third wall is tore, the viewers don’t believe anymore to the magic and they begin to feel outside, looking at the shape of the box, anymore *inside* the box. You break the “suspension of disbelief”, the spectator finds itself outside the scene, it sees the trick, it sees what was on the mind of the director. He stops to enjoy and he starts to nitpick and criticize the experience.
Doom 3 starts to become extremely annoying NOT because the unexpected is expected. This is a side-effect. It becomes annoying because we know what the possibilities of the game are. We define better the shape of the box and we start to be able to look at it from the outside. A scene isn’t scary anymore because it happens in-text, but it’s scary because it *always* happens out-of-text. The “lights going off” could be a believable effect, in particular if it’s excused by an explosion or something, or because you really shoot at a light. But the continue reuse of “clever” spawns on your back is just an intrusion of a “third hand” that uses excuses to produce the fear. It’s not anymore the same situation to be scary, but it’s the trick. In a scary movie this happens when the loud sound becomes the only element producing the surprise. It’s not anymore excused in-text. It becomes artificial and, being this, it becomes a tool in the hand of a director, where, as a spectator, you begin to see even the hand holding it.
To summarize even more: the magic is broken when the fear depends directly on the artificiality. Not anymore in-text, but out-of-text. Not anymore telling a story, but forcing a behaviour directly.
This is where Doom 3 becomes SWG. I’ve wrote so much elsewhere of the original statement: “socialization requires downtimes”. The truth is that to achieve this socialization you need to sacrifice the gameplay. For Raph Koster this is way important because he doesn’t want a simple game, he wants to push the limit further and expand the potential. For him considering a MMOG as a simple game is like building a cage around it. You suffocate it. This is why the socialization MUST take over the gameplay, because it’s a crucial element for the game. Because it’s the true soul of what a MMOG is. And I agree with all this. The flaw happens in the execution, not in the goal. The error is in the approach. As you let the socialization take over the gameplay you break the frame. Again the third wall. In SWG one of the most obvious downtimes is about the combat. You fight and you accumulate wounds that cannot be healed. At some point you have to go back to a city, in a cantina to look at someone dancing or playing an instrument. This is where Raph applied a restriction to create a “space” for the socialization. The principle (error) is that the socialization is something else from the gameplay, so the socialization must happen at the expense of the fun (assuming that fun=gameplay). Long travels time, downtimes between battles, downtimes during crafting etc… those are all the product of a design aimed to create a “void”, a space where the socialization can take over. The design of the gameplay must accept a compromise to incentivate a completely different “side” of the game, the socialization.
My critique is that this breaks the third wall. In Doom 3 the moster-in-a-closet becomes unjustified, it’s about the hand of the designer using the game to produce a direct effect that becomes simply annoying, unjustified and irritating. In SWG the downtimes are all unexcused holes in the gameplay. They happen at the expense of the fun to produce a direct effect that, again, becomes annoying, unjustified and irritating. Because it happens, again, out-of-text. It’s the designer that modeled the shape of the game to produce an effect. This effect doesn’t happen anymore *in* the game. It happens follwing the will of an external rule: “socialization requires downtimes”. This can be translated into: “The socialization takes over gameplay rules”. But the gameplay/game is our frame. The game is NOT a face of something else. The game is the whole object.
Raph considers a MMOG like a medal with two faces. There’s the gameplay/game and there’s the socialization. To acheive both the design needs to accept compromises. If you incentivate the fun you hinder the socialization, if you incentivate the socialization you hinder the fun (or “socialization requires downtimes”). It’s a collage. Two different parts that need a whole lot of artificial tricks to be justified together and to coexist. This mess is, again, the result of an error in the approach. Because the “game” is the whole structure we are creating. The socialization isn’t an external part. The socialization MUST be a solid element *inside* the game iteself. Or as I wrote elsewhere: “You know, I’m so stupid to think that you can encourage the social interaction WITH the gameplay. And not without it.” In SWG the design is conceived ALWAYS out-of-text. It’s the product of really complex and interesting academic reasoning that never considers the context. The aim is to discover absolute rules that must have a value no-matter-what. Absolute. But by doing this they produce a *game* where this game layer is continuously tore to give a prevalence to the socialization. Breaking restlessly the third wall by applying an infinite list of excuses, stratagems and general artificial tricks to justify the game WITH the socialization.
But this doesn’t work, because right at the start, in the model, the socialization and the gameplay are considered two opposite faces. One hinders the other like the PvE hinders the PvP in other games.
This is the conclusion. Doom 3 and SWG have in common this behaviour of the devs to force specific behaviours by using artificial stratagems and without producing the design from inside the game, but outside it. It doesn’t matter how you “dress” the design by producing believable excuses. The players feel this artificiality. It’s way too obvious. The designers don’t let the game grow on its own, with its own needs and evolution. They don’t observe or experience. The game isn’t anymore game. The game is a “mean” to achieve an external goal, like producing a specific behaviour. A player is forced in and out of text continuously. This breaks every attempt at mantaining the third wall.
Raph’s goal is important and strong, it is focused on the specific qualities of online games and it’s where the real potential is. A game like CoH isn’t a good game because it utilizes this potential, it’s a good game because it renounced to the ambition. To follow the more secure and tested path of cooperative play. Where the goal is “simply a game”. At the same time if SWG is still quite strong it’s because of the quality of its ambition. It’s about the aim to be different, to offer more possibilities and expand the aim. To really use the potential that is new in the genre. To follow unexplored directions. But the design is still blind on too many aspects, there are basic mistakes in the approach and it’s fun to notice that these flaws happen on a general level that is common even outside this genre.