In The Click Of It: games about people

Sometimes I wonder why there are not more games about people. The first racing game I ever remember playing was Turbo (Sega, 1981). There had been racing games before it, but to my knowledge Turbo was the first game to use a simulated vanishing point and scaling sprites to give the impression of a three-dimensional view of a race track.

It also featured signs and other cars, a simulation of hills that concealed oncoming cars from view, and parallaxing landscape in the distance. As amazing as it was at the time, in the more than 30 years that have passed since then, racing games have become more sophisticated and complex by many orders of magnitude.

Ignoring the huge difference between modern 3D game engines and the clever graphical trickery used in Turbo, modern racing games include dozens of race courses, multiple racing modes, and hundreds of unique vehicles, each with hundreds of simulated parameters. Turbo had one car with what appeared to be three simulated parameters: acceleration and top speed, both of which were dependent on the third parameter, the high/low gear setting.

A modern racing game might simulate thousands of parameters for a given vehicle, and virtually all of them could be interdependent. Acceleration is not simply a function of gear selection and the vehicle’s horsepower, but also depends on (among other things) the total weight of the vehicle, which is in turn partially dependent on the amount of fuel in the tank. The simulation of wear on the vehicle’s tyres over the course of a race might affect the frictional coefficient between the tyre and the road surface. If the track has more right turns than left – or the opposite – tyre wear will be uneven and the difficulty of executing turns in one direction will increase over time at a different rate than the difficulty of executing turns in the opposite direction.

Now, we could go on talking about racing games and their sophisticated simulations all day. We could do the same for games about planes or cities, or for games about guns or armies – but that’s not what I want to talk about.

I want to talk about games about people.

Chris Crawford’s Gossip (1983) was an early precursor of The Sims.

A couple of years after Turbo achieved success, Atari released a game called Gossip (1983), designed by Chris Crawford. Gossip never made it into an arcade cabinet, and I have never played it, but from what I’ve read Gossip was similar to Turbo in the sense that it offered a very simple simulation of only a few interdependent parameters.

Rather than modelling the physical properties of its characters, it modelled the characters’ opinions of one another. The game tracked how much each character liked or disliked every other character, and how much each character’s opinion of the other characters changed based on their knowledge of the other characters’ feelings about each other. The player and the AI characters would exchange information about their feelings toward other characters (they would gossip), modifying the matrix of relationships. AI characters were motivated to minimise the tension in their relationships, which was basically the difference between an ideal steady state and the current state of the simulation.

Admittedly, this is a more complex system than that of Turbo, but if Turbo had simulated seven AI racers, each with a unique desire to see the race end with a particular finishing order for all eight cars, plus a player who wanted to be first, then the games would have been conceptually identical. So the difference between Turbo and Gossip is really not that large.

Yet in the 30 years that have passed since these two games were released, racing games have become several orders of magnitude richer and more interesting, while games about people have stagnated. With the exception of The Sims, I cannot name a single game that richly simulates dynamic interpersonal relationships and motivates AI characters to optimise the state of those relationships. The Sims is not to be disregarded, but it is a single game. Racing games are an entire genre. What’s more, vehicle simulations are important components in many other genres.

The interpersonal dynamics of Battlefield 4′s campaign leave a lot to be desired.

While it’s true that the vehicle simulation in Battlefield is not as sophisticated as the vehicle simulation in a racing game, it is still an important component of the entire experience. Napoleon stated that morale was three times more important than physical might in determining the outcome of a battle. Yet the simulation of interpersonal dynamics in a Battlefield game – which would affect everything from morale and unit cohesion to communication efficacy and robustness of the chain of command – is deemed irrelevant.

It’s clear that today we could not release a ‘game about people’ that overleaps three decades of design iteration and delivers a game that is to Gossip what Forza is to Turbo. The gap is too large. There are too many experiments to undertake and too many failures to celebrate along the way. What I don’t understand is why we don’t try. There is an entire genre waiting to be developed, the potential for the kinds of games we can make in this genre is enormous, and the potential cultural value of these games is immeasurable.

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