Recently, I’ve been thinking about how to create RPGs that aren’t centered around violence / combat. And that’s led me off on many different tangents of thought, one of which was this notion about power and influence.
Power is the ability to exert your will on the surroundings – to make the environment, people, places, things, respond to your bidding. The ability to control part of the world around you. Most games are about power. Some people have claimed that many hardcore games are all about fulfilling the “male power fantasy”… the ability to dominate and master the world around them, by proving they are bigger, badder and more powerful than anything the game can bring against them. It primarily exists in two forms in games. The first form is the ability to take direct action that becomes increasingly more powerful as you progress through the game (eg. more powerful weapons in first-person shooters, higher-leveled characters in role-playing games, faster cars in racing games, etc.). The second form is the ability to control more and more things as you progress through the game (eg. more soldiers and resources in strategy games, more objects and tools in simulation games, or even something as simple as more tables in Diner Dash).
It seems to me that most games fall into one or both of these paradigms – either make your actions affect the world more and more as you progress, or give you a wider and wider array of possible actions as you progress. All of this is predicated on direct control – you command, they obey. Often instantly. That’s what feedback mechanisms are for, after all. They let you as they player know that You Are In Control – that you have agency, that You Can Change The World with the push of a button.
I think this view may be limited.
I think the enormous popularity of social games are showing why it is limited.
Think about it. Just how powerful or how much in control do you feel in a social game? Heck, not just the ones on Facebook. Even real-life games based around social interaction, like Charades or Taboo. The point of the game isn’t about power or control. It’s about interaction… it’s about making connections – between people, between ideas and words, between perception and action.
It’s about influence.
Which led me to start thinking… what would an influence-based hardcore game be like? What would the mature form of social gaming turn out to be, ten, twenty years from now? So here’s what I know about influence:
- Influence is not direct. It is usually indirect in pursuit of its goals. I don’t tell you what to do. I persuade you that it’s worth doing.
- Influence is based on connections. It’s not about what you can do. It’s about who you know.
- Influence requires that the other party have wills of their own, that are distinct from yours. We control robots. We influence people.
- Influence often is closely linked to several other societal phenomena. Morality, social norms, public perception, ties of friendship, emotions, traditions, ideas. We make appeals to God, to tradition, to principles and laws, to the things that touch people’s hearts when we want to influence them.
- Influence requires that you care about something – either the agent you want to influence, or the result you are influencing them towards. It requires meaning to be created for an action to be taken.
Where do we find systems of influence working in real life?
We see systems of power operating in the military, science and technology, and in feudal governments (which perhaps explains why those themes are so common in hardcore games today). Command, control, conquer. Beat the game. Beat it HARD.
Systems of influence are built to connect, to persuade, to relate. You find them in religion, in politics, in the media, in the ordinary everyday relationships between family and friends.
In other words, everything that hasn’t really been addressed fully by (Western) games as yet. There has been, even to this day a decade later, exactly ONE successful implementation of a commercial game wholly based around interactions between family and friends. (I exaggerate slightly for effect… The Sims series certainly contains many more iterations than just one game. Nevertheless.) There are no decent games about religious or political influence – the ones that aren’t backed up by guns and assassins, that is. There have been many that have tried to incorporate sub-themes or minigames of influence into games about power (the Fable series comes to mind, as do many MMORPGs). But they sometimes feel like they’re trying to shoehorn influence in as an afterthought, rather than as a core mechanic. Or they’re trying to mix and match with power games, instead of strictly focusing on mechanisms for influence, and that dumbs it down. (Dragon Age, I’m looking at you.)
I wonder what would happen if a developer tried focusing on nothing except influence. A game entirely focused on persuading people or NPCs to do things, a game about understanding people’s motivations, a game about making the right connections between peoples, desires and ideas. A game about building relationships and meaning with agents that have a mind of their own – that you can’t overtly control, but you can influence. It would be a remarkably interesting game to play, I think. Any suggestions?
Tags: Games
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