This is the script that I ended up throwing away as there was just too many problems, but I am looking for feedback. I still have about a week or two's worth of edits to makes and mistakes to right. Let me know what you think of this script.
Arguments
Human beings have a deeply ingrained habit of passivity, which is strengthened by the relatively long period that we spend under the control of parents and schoolmasters.
That quote comes from a writer named Colin Wilson. The idea is that passivity is a learned behavior. It is learned through childhood when you are taught to eschew all wild ideas and thoughts. It is taught to you when you are told to sit down and be quiet. It becomes a habit when we start school and the novelty of life wears away and we come to realize that losing control over what we do from minute to minute will be our reality throughout the best years of our life.
This passivity must be learned in order to function in society. To function in an office, you cannot have people running around, singing songs and dancing in the halls between cubicles. Throughout our childhood and well into our adulthood, our intensity for life is stamped down upon by the shoe of society and ground into the dirt until we, like everyone else, learn the docile nature of polite society.
Perhaps this is necessary. Perhaps to have a well-oiled and functioning society, some amount of passivity is required of the population, but what does this ingrained passivity cause in us?
I believe that because of the nature of how we learn, we have come to depend on fast thinking or intuition. A teacher calls your name out of the blue, what is the answer? Learned intuition has you covered as it always has an answer at the ready, whether right or wrong, you are likely to say something.
On the other hand, if your curiosity gets the best of you, and you ask too many questions, you made be told to sit down. You may be told you are disturbing the class, or derailing the teacher’s well laid out learning plan. Education, oddly enough, is in many ways, discouraging curiosity, at least here in the states. As a result, I believe, we rely on our intuition much more often than we should for problem solving.
Daniel Kahneman the writer of Thinking Fast and Slow defines lay intuition and expert intuition as system 1 processes meaning they come from the thinking fast system, yet one comes from a learned expertise in a given subject, and the other comes from experience in tangentially related subjects, or biases. If true, that intuition is a lot like habit in that the brain is working automatically from memories gathered over the years. If this intuition fails us, we learn a new lesson, if the intuition succeeds, we learn a different lesson, but this is an automatic system, and in order to go from lay intuition to expert intuition, we will need to engage system 2 which is the slow thinking process.
I come to this conclusion, not because of something Kahneman said, but because of how he defines both systems. System 1 is fast, instinctive, and emotional, and system 2 is slower, deliberate, and logical. System 1, in order to learn how to adapt to unknowns, must receive feedback quickly and rapidly in order to learn, which is why we are able to learn control schemes so quickly if we are constantly exposed to problems that need to be overcome by using those mechanics.
This is also why a game like Sekiro takes a while to learn for some people as it is requiring you to learn four mechanics: attacking, deflecting, jumping, and mikiris in order to beat the game. The problem with this design, as said above, is the fact that intuition needs rapid feedback to learn quickly, and mikiri counters and perilous attacks don’t happen as often or as rapidly as say, a combo. The player learns these mechanics, as a result, slowly and over a long period of time.
System 2, on the other hand, is only engaged when intuition is either incapable of solving the problem, or curiosity is piqued by a complex problem. As an example, system 1 can solve 2+2 but it cannot solve 24*17. In lab experiments, researchers noticed that the pupil of the test subject would dilate when system 2 is engaged. They noticed that when the test subject had to multiply two sets of numbers in their memory, the pupils would dilate, three numbers would tax the patient and their pupils would fully dilate and their heart rate would increase. They noticed that when the subject had to hold 4 or more numbers, the pupils would return to normal. They knew that this was a sign that the subject had given up.
In these moments of intense concentration, test subjects suffer from what is called Perceptual Blindness. This blindness occurs when test subjects fail to see something that is obviously out of place in a scene simply because their attention was directed at a complex task.
So, if system two is engaged and taxed, and the player is essentially blind when this happens, it would reason that it would probably be a bad idea to engage both at the same time if it is even possible to do so.
Puzzles are often used to engage system 2. Take this example. You are running through a dungeon and suddenly you come to a choke point where progress is halted by a puzzle you must solve. There are 12 items, and twelve chests, each chest has an engraved plaque on it. The player may try to intuit his or her way through this puzzle, but with this many possible combinations, the player will be there a long time. They must engage system 2 to read the descriptions on each plaque and think through what certain words mean and how they relate to the items they are holding, but when they decide what item to put in the chest, it is usually intuition making that decision based on biases of past experiential feedback.
If this puzzle had pictures instead of plaques, all the player would need to do is look at the images and through pattern recognition, they could intuit their way through the puzzle, never engaging system 2 at all. If that is the case, it is very possible that a player could engage in combat while solving the puzzle at the same time.
Knowing all of this, system one could be seen as experiential and perceptual, and system 2 could be seen as introspective. When we talk about deep, meaningful experiences, I think we are usually talking about experiences that engage both systems at different times. A sort of roller coaster of fast thinking, and moments of slow, introspection.
THINKING FAST AND SLOW
Dark Souls is a game that makes curiosity a system. Even the game play and exploration ties into this player curiosity aspect. The player, in their state of ignorance upon entering the world of Dark Souls, is immediately faced with the ambiguity of it. The game opens with the player locked in a cell. A body is thrown in from above us. The body has a key, but who was that knight that threw in the body and why did he help us escape?
Now that our curiosity is piqued, and system 2 is engaged, we are more likely to explore our surroundings. That’s why the tutorial section of the game is just outside our door written on the floor because in this inquisitive state, where there are no threats around us, we are more likely to engage with the scribblings.
There are a few things to this game that inspire curiosity and thus, engage system 2 in some problem solving. Items are signified by a bright white glowing smoke. The reason it is so bright, so white and noticeable is because the developers wanted to draw the player towards items so that they could setup interesting interactions. If an item appears on the other side of a chasm, the player may spend some time looking for a way to access the other side. This sign posting can act as breadcrumbs leading the player to the next area. Items, in some cases, act as breadcrumbs and sometimes they act as a perfect setup to an ambush.
In a boss fight, this curiosity plays a factor in that we must examine a boss fight the way we would approach any problem in the game. For the curious player, we may see ways to use the environment to protect us, or see that the boss has a tell before they do a certain move that has killed us so many times before. The more obvious the tell in the early stages of the game, the better the chance the player will remember the danger associated with it. However, this is totally a system 1 routine. The player is receiving feedback and reacting to that feedback, learning patterns and so on.
Sometimes the key to killing a boss laid in the environment’s design itself, and whether it be climbing a ladder to do a plunging attack or looping the capra demon dogs up the stairs, the environments, in a way, were part of the mystery of dark souls and being curious about it often lent the players rewards through secret areas, and items hidden just out of view.
As the game progresses, the tells for attacks can become less obvious, quicker, deadlier, as the player becomes familiar with the game and its systems. They learn to watch the boss from a distance, to search for tells, to look for weaknesses in defense. Does the boss leave themselves open at any point in the fight and how many swings can I get in with this sword before I need to roll out of the way? The curiosity about bosses deepens the more challenging they are, and this is when the player may start to experiment. What would happen with this boss if I use this damage type, or throw this kind of bomb at them, or use this spell, and so on. If the boss is too easy, the player may never feel the need to experiment.
The curiosity will deepen even more as the player attempts to understand the world they are in, and in a game like Dark Souls, this can be done, somewhat, through dialog with NPCs, but where you will find more information are in the descriptions of each item you find. Each item, no matter how important, has some sort of background to it, and illuminates a bit more of the story world.
A books worth of material has come from people taking, what is essentially a broken story, and putting it all together into something that explains at least the past events of the game. But the focus of the game is us. Everything happens in this world because we have approached. The world of Dark Souls is in a state of stasis and until we enter the area, the events are doomed to repeat themselves over and over again without variation in an infinite loop of repetition. What we do in the game world determines the outcome, not some overlord that is pulling the strings. In fact, the antagonists of Souls games are much more passive than anything else and this might be the most important part of the world of Souls games, because we are given no reason to hunt down the lords of this world and take their souls other than a cryptic opening about becoming a husk.
Sure, it may seem it is a quest to end our curse, maybe even convinced that if we do not kill for souls, we will somehow become just like a husk, but there is never a threat of that. There is no danger to us becoming a husk. There isn’t a time limit hanging over our head, or a life count that ticks down every time we die. What actually pushes us through the story of Dark Souls is simply a curiosity, at first, to see what happens next. To uncover the mystery of that fantasy world. On subsequent playthroughs, once the mystery has lifted, we may be playing for mastery, but chances are we will still be uncovering new things we didn’t know existed in our previous attempt.
I mean to argue that in a game like Dark Souls, curiosity is key to its success and that sometimes it is not what is said that makes us curious as much as what is not said. That which is left out is the essence of mystery.
HOW PLAYER CURIOSITY DRIVES SYSTEMS
Gameplay Antithesis – LA Noire
In LA Noire you play as a beat cop who works his way through the ranks in the LAPD to eventually become a detective, investigating all manner of crimes, the most compelling of which are the murders.
I want to talk about crime for a minute in service to strengthening the curiosity argument. All manner of crime has a certain level of fascination to it. Most of this fascination comes from motive, but some are even compelling from an execution standpoint. Bank robberies for instance are inherently compelling just from the idea that someone could pull off the act with any kind of efficiency. Film has tackled these ideas from the impulsive, and explosive antics of Bonnie and Clyde, to the hyper organized and expertly executed robberies of a movie like Heat. Our curiosity lies in how the robbery goes down, and our curiosity is peaked when we believe that the robbers won’t get away with it, and a conflict with the police is imminent.
Murder is most compelling when it is a human interest story. People want to know who did it. They want the perpetrator to be captured so they cannot do harm to another innocent life, but it’s also interesting because we want to know what would possess a person to do something as heinous as take another person’s life.
Murder is curious because of our connection to it as humans. The survival instinct is strong.
LA Noire puts us into a world where not only are we investigating crime, piecing together clues, and interviewing subjects, it is seemingly embracing curiosity.
The only issue is that it holds our hands far too much. We are not allowed to fail. Our curiosity only leads to a success state, while our lack of curiosity leads to a fail state for which we will be forced to do the whole thing over again. In a particularly bad mission, you are quite literally forced to arrest the wrong guy, and I think this is a symptom of a larger problem. The game doesn’t actually want you to be curious. It actively fights against your curiosity because it doesn’t really reward you for it. In fact, at times, it punishes you for it. For instance, during an interrogation, a point in time where curiosity should be rewarded, if we ask a question, we must make an accusation. Which means that instead of the question being a way to dig for information, it acts as a point of no return.
This is bad because when you justify your question, you are basically choosing, right there on the spot, whether you think your hunch is right, and based off the things you know about the question, you either know the answer, or you don’t, and no amount of questions are going to get you any closer to understanding.
If you didn’t find the item, or talk to the person that confirms your question, you just have to take a guess. You could try reading the face of the suspect, but it is sometimes a crap shoot. The problem is, curiosity can lead you to a fail state or at the very least leave you feeling like you made a mistake, and the result is, you only ask the questions that you feel you know the truth about.
The game forces you to play it safe because if it wants you to find the info, it will allow you to find it. Just walk around until your controller buzzes. Rotate the object to win.
The criticism I often hear leveled on the game is that after a couple of missions, or cases, the game becomes a boring, monotonous game where you follow the same procedure over and over again, ad-infinitum like a video game version of Law and Order.
Nothing makes you curious in this game after the initial novelty of exploring a crime scene wears away and wear away quick it does, because the illusion of choice goes right out the window once you realize you can only do what the game wants you to do. The world, while seemingly real, is surprisingly free of any kind of life. Exploring it yields no meaningful rewards tangible or otherwise.
Risky behavior leads to possible failure, and the result is that player expression and curiosity is limited due to the expectations the game is placing on the player, not the other way around.
In fact, LA Noire is a prime example of a game’s linearity actively working against its potential. What the system does is make us expect something, and then it repeatedly delivers exactly what we expect and almost never deviates from the formula.
LA Noire rewards the player for their curiosity by allowing them to play more of LA Noire and when they fail they punish the player by making them play… More of LA Noire. A solution to this problem would have been to allow a player to fail and have there be consequences for that failure. The threat of convicting the wrong man, or having a criminal be found not guilty of a crime due to lack of solid evidence, constantly hanging over the player’s head would force the player to become more thorough in their investigations not because they have to in order to move the story forward, but because they want to be a good cop.
RESEARCH ABOUT PASSIVITY BECOMING A LEARNED BEHAVIOUR…
There are many ways to inspire curiosity in a player. Some games do it by hiding items in out of the way areas like Baldur’s Gate type games. If you wander away from your objective you may stumble onto an engaging encounter, or you may find yourself a stash of powerful weapons. In games like Dishonored, player curiosity is stoked as much by what is said as by what is not said.
In Dishonored 1 and 2, we are given small glimpses at different worlds, factions, and people’s lives through either cutscenes or through environmental storytelling. Dishonored 2 does a far better job of this in a particularly interesting side area in the mission to cure or assassinate Addermire. In the opening city area is an apartment that has become infested with bloodflies. Through the mechanics of the game we learn that fire is a good way to kill the nests and flies when we throw liquor bottles that burst into flames, trivializing them. Then we learn that dead bodies are great for luring flies away from areas when we witness a nest of flies attack and swarm a dead body on an upper floor of the building.
Then as we explore more, we find that there is a weeper who is responsible for this whole thing that has been cultivating the nests, and taking care of the blood flies. This piques curiosity in the immediate story, but throughout the game, this technique is used to great effect. What isn’t said through environmental story telling is told through the mechanics or through journal entries, letters and books found in the area. None of this is mandatory to the player, all of this is optional and completely missable, and because there is a possibility of missing these details, or just plain missing out on items like bone charms and runes, the chance of missing out and missing out PERMANENTLY entices the player to seek these things out.
