I wanted to write about “the literalization of ludic elements” but that phrase sounds so obnoxiously academic that I nearly had a stroke while typing it. I really need to drop out of school—I’m afraid of what it might be doing to my poor, shriveled brain.
Anyway, what I mean by the literaliz—uh, the *above* concept, is that in games you have systems that verge toward the abstract and those that verge toward the concrete. Let’s focus on the idea of inventory management to illustrate this spectrum of abstraction.
On the abstract side of things, you have something like the inventory in a FPS like Doom or Wolfenstein (OG or modern, take your pick). In those games, Doomguy or B.J. Blascowics (the frikkin’ BOYS) can hold an absurd amount of weaponry in their…I don’t know…pockets? Since there is no real attempt at realism or inventory metagaming in those titles, there’s no need to systematize inventory beyond “Doomguy holds an entire armory in his magic satchel and you as the player can select whatever you need at any given moment.” The weapon wheel in these games is a metaphor for a dozen holsters bolted all around the Doomguy’s body (the added bonus of doing things this way is that you don’t have to portray these weapons on the character model in cutscenes).
“Where does he get all those wonderful toys?”
But in a game like Death Stranding (a game you should be ashamed to have slept on if indeed you did sleep on it), inventory management is concrete—it’s literal. Sam Porter holds virtually all of the game’s useable and deliverable items on his body. This is not a solely cosmetic feature of the game. It is the game (or a huge part of it at any rate). What items you make Sam carry, how heavy the items are, where you make him carry the items on his body, and what you do while he’s carrying them all come together to form a glorious interdependent and dynamic game system (that a lot of silly people thought was boring). Although you can upgrade Sam’s load bearing gear (which itself has weight and volume and must be considered in the grand scheme of inventory), you can never hold an unlimited amount of stuff. A fair amount of strategy goes into your delivery runs—this is a core aspect of the gameplay loop. You have to think about your stuff in real physical terms, not just as flat images that occupy little squares in a pause menu.
The fact that all of the items in Death Stranding are also physics objects in the game world only serves to further enhance the depth of the game’s inventory management system. If you get hit by an enemy and drop an item, it can go flying down the side of a mountain or get carried downriver by a powerful current. This isn’t just a throwaway feature to temporarily inconvenience the player. Retrieving items after you’ve lost them is also a big part of Death Stranding’s deep and satisfying gameplay loop.
Take a load off, Sammy.
Hopefully, I’ve done a good job of explaining the spectrum between abstract and concrete frameworks and hopefully you can start to think about how different games call for different systems along that spectrum. A game like Doom doesn’t benefit from an experience where you can only carry a few guns on your body because of weight restrictions. Just the opposite, the game relies on the player’s ability to select from an unrealistically wide variety of tools for a wide variety of challenges (see my upcoming post on “Turning Guns Into Tools” for more on this). On the other hand, the whole point of Death Stranding is inventory management. It would not make sense for Sam Porter to be able to hold whatever he needed, whenever he needed to hold it. Nor would it make sense for him to be unaffected by weight, terrain, and weather (and ghosts!).
Now that we have these concepts and examples out of the way, we can start talking about Arkane Studios’ Prey. This game does an amazing job of taking a more concrete approach to something that I suspect usually defies “concretization,” and that is: skill points.
Skill points are a staple of RPGs and Immersive Sims but have also made their way out into other genres like Open World games and oddly enough, FPS games like the recent Doom: Eternal. It seems that for the most part, little thought is paid to how skill points function in the in-game worlds where they are featured. Sure, lip service is paid to various forms of energy that imbue the player character with new abilities or technological processes that boost the player character’s stats. But at the end of the day, these systems usually skew more abstract, especially as they often need to feed into the larger concept of skill trees, which really don’t hold up to any real world interpretation beyond superficial terms (more on that in Skill Trees That Matter).
“Development (increases in individual statistics) often comes through the expenditure of abstract skill points given by the designer for solving individual problems or for solving enough such problems to go up an arbitrary level (the rewards model). In other games, development comes through the actual use of specific capabilities in game situations (the practice model).”
— Remodeling RPGs For the New Millennium, Warren Spector, 1999
Skill points and skill trees are arguably a simplistic, gamified representation of education and/or training. I imagine real life skill points would work something like this: you want to become a street brawler, so you go outside and pick fights with random strangers, and you receive a magic upgrade coin every time you successfully beat someone up. Suffice to say, this is not exactly how learning to fight works. But a game that tasks you with going to the gym or dojo everyday instead of actually letting you beat the shit out of people doesn’t sound like a good time had by all. Skill points help smooth out and shorten what would otherwise be a long, arduous process of learning how to defend oneself or learning how to pilot a starship (just floor it and aim for the empty parts of space!) or learning how to be a ninja cyborg.
But some developers have tried to move closer to a concrete expression of skill points. In the Elder Scroll games, your skills/abilities are strengthened through repeated and sometimes concerted use. This is a lot more like working out your muscles in the real world: you lift heavy objects so that you can…lift heavier objects. While a game like Crackdown doesn’t come quite as close as Skyrim in terms of its skill point system, it does task the player with finding specific types of skill points by performing corresponding types of actions. For example, the player obtains agility orbs—which increase jump power—by jumping around the world. We know that Michael Jordan did not get “Air” in his name by finding Air Orbs around the Bulls training facilities, but we can very easily understand the connection here. Jumping begets better jumping. Makes sense!
But Prey takes the concretization of skill points as far as it might have ever gone and not just for the sake of doing so. There is real gameplay utility in Arkane’s approach to skill points, which in Prey are called Neuromods, but more on that in a moment.
Jam that in your eyeball and learn to swim, motherfucker.
I hope it’s clear that Immersive Sims rely on immersion. And immersion comes, in part, from worlds that are designed in such a way as to make physical/architectural sense, from systems with predictable and emergent outcomes, and from objects that are tangible and that interact with the player and environment. In The Last of Us games, one does not simply dance over a floating health kit like one does in Doom. Players have to find the raw materials necessary to craft a health kit, then they build the health kit, and then they take the time to apply the health kit to Ellie or Joel in order to heal them. This happens, mind you, in real time. There are no pause menus in real life, after all!
(I am of course aware that the LoU games are not Immersive Sims, but they do have elements that facilitate a powerful sense of immersion in the in-game reality the player character occupies.)
In Prey, Neuromods allow you to upgrade your character—a neuroscientist named Morgan Yu—in many unique and impactful ways. This is achieved by spending the Neuromods on skills and stat upgrades across 6 different skill trees. Since Prey is all about choice and playing your own way, the player has the opportunity, over the course of basically the entire game, to shape their version of Morgan Yu into a character that comports with their play style.
Now, all that may seem like every other game you’ve ever played, but the difference between Prey and those games is that Neuromods are actual objects in the world of Prey. You don’t get them automatically, you aren’t awarded them arbitrarily, and they certainly aren’t these nebulously defined abstractions on a static screen somewhere. They’re real… (“real”). That is to say that Neuromods play a pivotal role in both the narrative and gameplay aspects of the game.
(While the Dishonored games do have runes that function similarly, they’re not quite as sophisticated as what we see in Prey. I am sure there are more examples of what I’m going to talk about below, but I can’t really seem to find them. Feel free to let me know if you have any ideas.)
You find Neuromods in Prey by exploring the world, helping NPCs out, killing things, and utilizing specific skills (granted to you by Neuromods!) to pry them out of lockers, gated areas, blown out airlocks, and derelict space shuttles. Again, this may sound pretty standard, but the key difference here is that you actually have to find them and pick them up. Totally radical, I know. This is because Neuromods, like so many other objects in Prey, are also physics objects. They respond to forces, to gravity (or lack thereof), and to all manner of alien fuckery.
You can also manufacture Neuromods via the Fabricators littered throughout Prey’s gigantic environment—the space station Talos 1. This Fabrication system, along with its complementary Recycling system, is yet another well-imagined and executed systems-based aspect of Prey. Without getting too in-depth on the Recycler/Fabricator system, let me just say that there is a section of Prey where the player gains the ability to manufacture skill points in a way that is almost completely removed from the concept of achievement. At this point in the game, as long as you have the raw materials, you can build Neuromods.
Make sure to pick up your items before fabricating new ones.
And this, I think, is where all these interesting ideas about skill points, concrete systems, and immersion come together in a truly ingenious way. When the player fabricates a Neuromod for the first time, they might be thinking to themselves, “if I just keep harvesting materials from the world, I can level my character up at an accelerated rate and blaze through the rest of the game.” But the folks at Arkane, of course, have an answer for that!
Once you start 3D printing out Neuromods willy nilly, you inadvertently activate the hidden DRM-protection built into their design. This effectively cuts you off from personal Neuromod manufacture for what can be a significant portion of the game. You can still find extant Neuromods lying around Talos 1, but you can’t make ‘em yourself, unless of course, you complete a sidequest to unlock the DRM-protection. The fact that this scenario is built on the foundation of interactivity—that is, the interplay between gameplay elements, in-game objects, and the game’s narrative—is, to me, an incredible feat of game design.
I can’t overstate how effective this method of literalization can be in terms of immersion. By allowing players to interact with perhaps the most fundamental aspect of the game in a way that isn’t just “gamey,” but rather in a way that feels true to the simulated reality of the game, Arkane is signaling to the player that their possibility space is at once expansive and grounded in rules that make sense. The fact that this kind of design isn’t done in more AAA games tells us something: it’s either incredibly challenging to build concrete systems or some devs aren’t trying hard enough.