Story, metagame and an interesting game mechanic

Big Sheep http://www.bigsheep.net/ sent me an email asking my thoughts on whether video games could contain complex narratives such that delivered in the film fight club, etc. The man will renounce the alchemy of code construction,see the light and dive headlong into game design one day, I'm sure.

Anyway, a very intriguing question. I won't go into my reply and our subsequent discussion here, suffice to say it was very interesting (!). We talked about abstraction/cubism/metagame, etc and while we talked about user/audience/developer/writer/character perspective I latched on to a favourite area of mine - externalised and internalised 'mechanics' and reward systems for player characters and NPC's.

Bringing the strands of cinematic tropes provided in films like Fight Club , and more stylishly in Cypher, together with videogame narrative and character development, I hit on the idea of a videogame character who exhibits different emotional states, or possibly psychological states in an uncontrolled manner. The different states determine which game mechanics are in operation and/or skills an attributes the protagonist might exhibit. The main thrust of the game is to discover how to control your character's states and use that information to survive or overcome some challenge.

As an example in a bog-standard ubermench-type game, learning to control and change the psycological state of the protagonist is essential in the latter half of the game when the character is falling out of a 5th story window. Flicking over to an animalistic state gives the player character added agility, giving him cat-like reflexes enabling him to survive the fall.

A more subtle example would be when being goaded to fight by a knife-holding man in a pub. If you allow the player character to continue to be goaded, he will erupt, possibly overcome the man but possibly die in the battle. Switching to a different, more placatory state allows you to keep calm and leave the pub alive and with some vital information.

This concept throws up many interesting ideas and connections, which I hope to return to at some point. What is interesting is that the game concentrates as much on the internal issues of the character as on the externalities - what the character does. Would that gameplay increase player immersion? What about the player-avatar connection? Lots of questions - I hope to go back and  recollect more about this idea and  develop it further in future posts.

I really enjoyed BigSheep's insight, perception and probing questions and hope to continue with the dialogue in the future.