Postmortem: Carnival

Read a ten page sample here (pdf).
Read the full script here (pdf).

Summary

Carnival is a third-person action title featuring gun and melee combat with a dark setting and psychological twist. The game takes place in an eerie Carnival run by the evil Ringmaster, a greedy man who abuses his enslaved carnies.

The Strongman is the protagonist, a carnie who wants to escape the Carnival. He is an aggressive, violence-prone, muscled man who often has mood swings and need sedatives to keep him calm.
The Strongman is out for himself, but does have some allies and friends who help him in his escape. Carnies and other characters make multiple appearances throughout the game, and can help or hinder the Strongman's escape.

However, this entire Carnival setting belongs in the Strongman's mind. The Strongman is, in fact, a patient making his escape from an Asylum. Every character in the Carnival has an equivalent in the Asylum, as well as action, conversation, and location, for the Carnival setting is no more than a filter the Strongman experiences life through. Everything in the Carnival is a distortion, stereotype, caricature, cliché, or Hollywood image of all that the Strongman sees in the Asylum.

Carnival is a thought-provoking game created with the intent to turn the stereotyped violent videogame image into a deeper psychological experience.

Post-Mortem

Carnival is about America.  It is an observation on our society, a satire on our popular culture, and a political statement about our mental health system.  It strums your heartstrings while making you think.  It leaves you wondering whether the ending was happy, sad, or bittersweet.  It draws no lines between good and bad; between moral, immoral, and amoral.  It fills your mind with extraordinary yet believable characters.  On a technical level, it presents a new dialog system that seamlessly integrates into the gameplay.  On a cinematic level, it leaves you breathless.  On a gut level, it makes you sick, it makes you angry, and it makes you cry.

This was my first full-length game script.  While the act of writing the script took about 2-3 months, the idea for Carnival had been struggling to break free from my head for years.  The main characters came to me complete, yet incomplete.  Each one cried out to me, "Make me happy, please!", yet the loudest voice, filled with longing, with burning desire, became the protagonist, the Player Character, the Strongman.  He was not the character to whom the greatest injustice had been done, but he was the character that had the greatest itch to scratch.  I hope that wherever he is now, his itch is gone.

Carnival was a wonderful story to create and write.  I hope that you will take the time to read it, and I hope you find it as engaging as I do.

What Went Right

1. The Dual-World Story

I like to tell the story of Carnival by first explaining the Carnival setting, the characters, their motives, and the basic plot structure.  I appear to end the explanation, and receive a few grins, a few appreciative smiles, and more than a few contemplating faces.  Then I add in, as an afterthought, "Oh, yeah, this whole game really takes place in a mental asylum, and the Strongman is an hallucinating patient trying to escape."  Suddenly the contemplating faces are smiles, the smiles are grins, and the grins become cheers and shouts of "Holy shit!  Are you kidding me?!"

I like to tell the story that way.

Leading the Player between worlds and giving them just enough to put the pieces together is one of the strongest points in the game.  It also adds a level of depth to the Player's actions.  If the Player only thinks the Strongman is a slave in a disturbing world, s/he might have no problem setting him free, even if he is violent and dangerous, because the world seems "out there".  But if the Strongman is a mental patient, hallucinating his life, but still living in the real world, and he's still violent and dangerous, and you're helping him escape, you may just spend a few moments wondering if you're doing the right thing.

The Strongman just wants to be happy.  Is his happiness worth the danger you're putting society in by setting him free?  Well, at least you can rest knowing he might just change in the end.  Maybe.

2. The Dialog System

I despise dialogue trees.  They start off by putting text choices on the screen that break immersion, and it just gets worse from there.  Old dialogue trees were based on topics or sentences, like the Terminator deciding to say "Fuck you, asshole" off a list that appeared in his vision.  We aren't terminators.  We don't think about what we're going to say, we just say it.

New dialogue trees are almost worse.  They want to make it based on emotion, as if we can decide what emotion we're feeling.  Either we will speak angrily or we won't; we aren't actors, capable of faking emotions on a whim.  "Press X for the angry response, Press Y for the mopey response" just doesn't cut it, either.

The system I set up is simplistic on the surface, but it gets complicated fast, and leads to many possibilities.  You have an invisible "anger meter" that fills up or empties depending on the conditions, and the Player can indirectly effect the meter, even if s/he doesn't know it.  Later interactions with characters are also affected by previous conversations, and even can change depending on what the Player does mid-chat, since s/he has total control at all times.  Try to punch Magicko, and he'll remember.  Walk away from the Elephant Man, and he'll remember how rude you were.

In another game, this system might be improved by making a grid of emotions, rather than the linear calm/angry dynamic.  But to break this game down to its essentials, where anger is the emotion that carries the most weight in this world, I made a single variable that (while usually binary) provides an amazing amount of subtlety to the game.

While I am a little disappointed that I could not flesh out the mechanic to the nth degree, to do so would have made the script twelve times as long.  Ultimately, I am happy that this test case shows just how well such a system would work.

3. Story Meets Gameplay

I tend to find many genres disappointing because the gameplay has little or nothing to do with the story.  RPGs and RTSs tend to be the worst offenders, but shooters are often nearly as bad.  Often, story is segregated to cutscenes while the gameplay is just one disjointed puzzle or room of baddies after another.  As a new and unique artform, games have the challenge of mixing story and gameplay into a cohesive whole, but the form is simply too new to do it effectively.  There are many notable exceptions, but we should strive to make them the norm, not the outliers.

In Carnival, I tried to make the gameplay make sense with the story.  Gameplay affects story and story affects gameplay in an intricate back-and-forth, centered around the Anger Meter.  Gameplay makes you angry or calm, which effects how you deal with characters in the story, and treating characters differently directly affects the gameplay (in the climax of Act I, for instance, you have less time to steal the Ringmaster's keys if you can't get help from Magicko).

I think the cohesion between story and gameplay works in Carnival, and I spent considerable time making sure that it worked so well that the Player wouldn't even notice.

While I do also have cutscenes, I use them sparingly, and mostly for the purpose of rewarding the Player for completing each act, so that the Player feels they are a welcome break, not an annoyance to be sat through or skipped.  If I have done my job right, the Player will be glad to put the controller down for a moment.

4. Illusion of Choice

Carnival is a linear game, but the Player shouldn't notice.  Act I appears to be a sandbox (as small a sandbox as it may be), Act II appears to be a branching path, and only Act III appears linear.  This is wholly intentional, to make the Player feel more and more claustrophobic as the game progresses, siphoning the Player down to the inevitable conclusion, but having them feel as though it could only be that way, like looking back on a good novel--and not as though they were led by the nose to an obvious end.

The illusion of choice is ever-present in Carnival.  In Act II, the Player feels as though their are many paths to take, but they all reveal the same things in disguises.  Some are transparent choices, such as between the Bumper Cars or Go Karts, while others are more subtle and apparently different, such as between the Three Ring Tent and the Wax Museum.  Such choices promote replay value, but can also offer fresh perspectives on the characters.  On a first playthrough, few Players should even notice the Wax Museum, and opt for the obvious Three Ring Tent that's front-and-center, but curious Players with a sense of exploration will find the Wax Museum and feel as through their detective skills did not go unrewarded.

What Went Wrong

1. Too many themes

I have a bit of a scatterbrain.  Most of the time, this story wrote itself, and I had no internal editor or critic to tell me what should be kept and what should go.  The Strongman was such a complex character, being the victim of so much abuse, that it was difficult to describe every cause to his behavior.  He was not just abused by his brother or a dog or a sadistic cop, but he was also psychologically abused by popular culture.  This latter abuse was not properly explained; at least not as plainly as his physical abuse.  I had hoped the symbolism of his internal character, as well as the locales of the Wax Museum and the Haunted House, would be enough to display how popular culture, particularly Hollywood, had an impact on him and how he broke free from it at the end.

Someone asked me, "Why does he need a gun at all?"  Many reasons come to mind:  in reality, he is not as strong as his internal persona shows, so he would need guns; giving the Player the choice of guns, melee weapons, or bare fists was integral to the gameplay; but ultimately, the biggest thematic answer is simply "Because that is what Hollywood would do."  In movies, beefed up action heroes still use guns, and because the Strongman sees the world through "movie-colored lenses", he believes he is both physically strong enough to beat a man to death and still needs guns.

There were more questions raised that could have been answered if I had spent extra time explaining the pop culture satire, and pushing it into more areas of the game, but I think that it might be better (though perhaps impossible) to eliminate that entire aspect of the story, in favor of stressing the other, ultimately unrelated, themes.

2. The Sweetspot of Sickening

I have been told that this story is too vile, too disturbing.  I have been told that my points could have been made without having to go to such lengths as to make the Player physically ill.

Unfortunately, as I wrote the story, nothing was quite sick enough for me.  I am a desensitized youth, capable of watching Hostel without getting squeamish at all.  I have seen real suicides, murders, and lethal accidents caught on camera, which I forget I've seen not a minute later.

Part of the effect of this story was to make the Player squeamish.  If my target audience was desensitized youth, I had to go all out to hit them in the gut.  Their attention needed to be grabbed for the messages and themes to get through.  I needed to make a gamer culture of M-Rated shooter fans stop and realize what they are doing, realize that the violence in this game is not just a thrill ride, and does not just exist for the adrenaline rush.  That required the Player to remember that violence is something you are supposed to get squeamish over.  So I did everything I could to make the Player retch.

The only scene that was sick enough, to me, was the flashback audio of the cop pulling over the Strongman's father.  Nothing else made me feel literally sick but that scene, both as I wrote it, and every time I reread it.  I only wish every scene hit so hard.

But the ultimate problem with pushing the boundaries of taste so far is that I threaten to lose potential Players that are not comfortable feeling such disgust.  Most people don't play games to throw up.  People don't ride rollercoasters or drink booze to throw up, either; but occasionally, purging the stomach is necessary.  Today's youth need their stomachs purged (metaphorically, that is), and it takes a lot to do so.  Unfortunately, I wrote a game for the strongest stomachs, and as a consequence, the weaker stomachs will refuse to finish the game.

3. Not All Characters Are Created Equal

When I write version 2 of Carnival down the line, I will get rid of the Fortune Teller altogether and replace her with a better character.  I think that my cast of characters, for the most part, are each unique and interesting in their own ways, but there are a few characters that could use some touching up.  The Fortune Teller is just one example of a wasted character, whose only purpose is a critique of pseudoscience, which really has no place in this game.

I also would have liked to have developed nearly all of the characters more in the script, since they don't get nearly enough face time.  I would have preferred if the script and game were longer to accommodate more than just two or three conversations apiece.  This way, character deaths mean more (especially Barfy's) to the Player, and will pack a larger emotional punch.  Of course, doing so would have made the dialogue choices even more difficult to handle, and might have led to a more confusing script.

4. It's Not a Game

Because of the nature of the game script (multiple dialog options, etc.), a reader cannot get the full effect of the game as a Player would.  Despite my best efforts to make the script easy to follow, it may be confusing at parts, as the branches split and converge.  Also, because of the way the script is set up, the reader may need to hop back and forth between the main script and the character and location appendices.  As well, all suspense and revelation that should occur to the Player during the game is explained up front in the script.

Overall, the vision of the game becomes subject to the imagination of the reader, rather than shown to the Player, yet such a creation is nearly required to be played to be appreciated fully.  A title such as this is all but restricted to the budget of AAA game companies, and so Carnival can be no more than a demonstration of my abilities to write such a game, unless some developer goes for it.

Any takers?