Concepts of scale.

The Normandy Invasions. You may be more familiar with the tiny dot marked "Omaha".

Many of the updates on this blog have been about fairly personal things: connecting fictional images to real senses, fleshing out characters and internal logic, and so on. However, this update is going to deal with the other side: the effects of "zooming out". Many series, no matter their genre or setting, deal with worlds far larger than can be depicted on camera. Even in real life, the people we see and talk to make up only a tiny fraction of the world's actual population. The limits of empathy have been noted in the past - and again, this is something that happens in real life. How are we supposed to understand the scale in a fictional world? How are a world's creators supposed to make it feel as populated as it needs to be?

1) Size and Detail

A lot of shallow sci-fi or fantasy worlds are tiny both in terms of their area and their diversity. While there are certainly plenty of examples (like 99% of the planets in Star Wars), the one that stands out the most to me is the planet Ansion in the Star Wars novel "The Approaching Storm". Ansion was crudely divided into two areas: the "city" (as in, one city) and the "plains". The conflict that the protagonists were there to resolve was between the city-dwellers and the plains-dwellers. This resulted in the protagonists traveling the planet on animal-back to talk to local leaders and unite the clans so that they could hold negotiation meetings with the planetary government housed in the city. This was the entire planet: One city, and a lot of plains, and the plains are small enough to be traversed by an animal within a reasonably short period of time.

Ansion illustrates a lot of problems, but it also illustrates how those problems could potentially solve. Everything about Ansion is ridiculous (its small size, its two groups, the ease with which the protagonists can cross it) for story reasons. I don't mean that it makes sense in-story, but everything about the planet is designed as a place for the story to happen. In essence, a planet is a self-contained unit that holds enough stuff for the story to take place - nothing more, nothing less. So how would we get around this? This is where the idea of focus comes in: the longer you spend in a given area, the more things you're going to have to map out, and thus the larger it's going to feel.

For example, many planets in Warhammer 40,000 fall under the "planetville" category: the entire planet is one thing, and all the people who come from it look the same. However, one exception is the planet Armageddon, which was the subject of a lengthy campaign in real life, with 40k players all over the globe acting out moderated battles that contributed to a larger war. While Armageddon was still basically a limited planet (there was a jungle area and a wasteland area), the scale of the battles was greatly increased compared to "there's one fight here and then it's over". The length of time spent on the campaign made it actually feel like a planet was being fought over, and theoretically the amount of different areas would suggest some sort of geographic diversity (rather than the same four spots being fought over again and again).

This leads into a key way to avoid issues of scale: leave the rest of the area open. The need for protagonist-centered importance often leads to a small group of misfits saving the entire world single-handedly, but what this does is negate the contributions of everyone else in the world they're trying to save. Leaving hints or evidence of a world outside what the audience sees works better than definitively saying "no, only the protagonists are capable of doing everything, this is the only event occurring on this entire planet". However, this can lead into our next issue:

2) Room to Grow
Sometimes authors do try to avert the whole "things outside the audience's vision" concept. Sometimes they try to establish that there is, in fact, a larger force at work. Sometimes this works, and helps the audience understand that there's a lot more at stake than just the protagonists' success. Other times, it doesn't. The thing about solid numbers and figures is that they leave nothing to the imagination: there's this many, and that's it. Even if it's a big number, it's still a limited one.

Let's look at Ansion again. Would it have been so bad if the tiny segment the reader saw wasn't meant to be the whole planet? Probably. The issue that I have with it is that it takes this incredibly small area, with one city and a few miles of plains, and declares it to be the entire planet. This is inaccurate. However, if they'd gone the other way ("this is just one city and its surrounding area, but it's important because it's a starport") then it might have been more excusable - the whole planet is technically still there, we just don't need to see it. Here's the tug-of-war of importance: one's plausible, but humble, and the other is implausible, but important-sounding. Obi-Wan and Anakin help to save an entire planet! Who cares if that planet is so small it's barely a county? It's a planet!

Star Wars naturally provides more examples: there's three million Clone Troopers in the entire Republic army - despite the fact that the Republic constitutes a million worlds, and there's "quintillions" of Battle Droids to oppose them. Even an attempt to fix this fell short - the new number is "a million droids per factory per year", but the idea that there's only a few factories in the entire galaxy seems a bit bizarre (the fact that "Odds" was written by Karen Traviss, who helped provide the initial "3 million troopers" number is also a bit suspect). In a situation like this, the author must weigh the advantages and disadvantages of stating a solid number. The advantages are that the audience has a clearer image of what's at stake and the world thus feels more "solid" or "concrete". The disadvantages are that the world might feel more limited or constrained - especially if the number is inaccurate or unfeasible to begin with.

One thing I liked about the older editions of Warhammer 40,000 was that it had a lot of room to grow - there were countless worlds, countless regiments, countless everything. This had a very specific role in the meta-sense: everything could be "canon", no matter what. If you painted your own regiment of Imperial Guard, then that's fine - they're a regiment that's just as plausible as any of the "established" ones. If you made a chapter of Space Marines, then that's that - they're your chapter, and they exist alongside all the other ones. If a writer or player wanted to make some new characters or a new battle or even a new campaign, then that was okay. Even new species were occasionally acceptable, as shown by the various minor alien races that populate the galaxy. Warhammer 40,000 was a galaxy with very few limits, and this meant that anyone who wanted to contribute to the collective universe was basically free to do so.

However, at some point 40k started trying to get more into limiting the universe. For example, they started introducing special characters like Ursarkar Creed or Marneus Calgar - specific individuals who were meant to be used in a general sense. You're having a battle with your customized unit of soldiers and for gameplay reasons you bring along Commander Dante rather than making your own unit leader. This negates a lot of the personalization - it's no longer "your unit", because the gameplay rules changed the developing story dynamic. If one of those characters dies in your battle, it's not real - it's just a game. No way can they kill a major character off because he got caught up in some random battle. The whole setup now makes no sense, because it's less and less about your story as part of a larger narrative and more about "here are things that everyone who plays this can identify with".

3) Visualizing Scale

One of the underlying issues of scale is that it's simply hard to imagine or understand. There's a certain point where numbers just become "a lot" - what's the difference between one hundred people, one thousand people, and one million people? Sure, you can identify the number difference, but can you really visualize those differences? It's easy to imagine a battle for a village or a bridge or a beach, but it's hard to get a sense of size when an area is wide or open or sprawling. There's just so much "empty space" - fields, forests, city blocks - that it's much more visually compelling to find an identifiable point like a church or a chokepoint like a pass.

This is probably the reason for the aforementioned issue of planet size, or battle size, or any other "this should be bigger, but it's not" scenario. Fiction is primarily character-centric, therefore characters should handle the heavy lifting in a given situation. However, the amount of ground implied in a planet or even a large island is too much for a few characters to handle. Authors therefore try to find some way to make it about a single geographic location, so that the influence of the characters can be clearly established. It's true that small groups generally deal with smaller locations (you can hardly expect a group of five to handle an entire city), but the idea that "bigger locations = more important" results in errors in judgment.

While so far I've praised 40k in terms of scale, this point leads to one important issue: the Space Marines. The space marines canonically exist as 1,000 chapters that are each 1,000 strong - leading to a grand total of one million space marines across the entire galaxy at any given time. Unlike Star Wars, this is at least justified by space marines being super-powerful special forces, rather than cannon fodder. They can be used for special operations, assassinations, tactical strikes, or whatever other precise task can use a hard-hitting strike force. The imperial guard makes up the bulk of the Imperium's forces - the space marines exist as specialty troops and exterminators.

Naturally, this isn't always the case. There are plenty of examples of authors, players, and the game rules themselves treating Space Marines like "regular soldiers, but better". Space marines die in huge numbers because they're treated like normal infantry, rather than being deployed for the exact operations that they're best suited for. In "Steel My Soldiers' Hearts", an autobiography by Colonel David Hackworth, there is a scenario described where a company commander used a skilled sniper with 40+ kills as a standard rifleman. The sniper was killed, as many riflemen are. This was avoidable because his skillset, if used correctly, would have kept him out of harm's way while still being able to do damage to the enemy. A similar problem arises for the Space Marines - they're treated like normal soldiers when there's no reason for them to be, which results in them being killed in numbers far greater than necessary or plausible.

This is a scale issue because there's no way for the Space Marines to have the kind of numbers necessary for this. In one novel, the Salamander chapter sets itself up as "good guys" because they help defend a refugee convoy - a convoy containing millions of people. How did they defend that whole line? Yes, they've got better armor and weapons and reflexes than a normal soldier, but they're still individuals. This is like having a super-prototype mech and using it to guard a backwater base because it seems like the right thing to do. Not only is it wasting resources, but it's also insufficient to do the job no matter how advanced it is. The numbers are too small - you can't make up for that with "being tougher than everyone else".

Compare this example to most other works of fiction. The Salamanders were made to help those civilians not because it was sensible or effective, but because they were the protagonists. A similar issue arose in the Halo book "Contact: Harvest", where a single platoon of militia is basically used to guard an entire planet because of the need to have the protagonist, Sergeant Johnson, do anything of importance. There's no sense of how huge the planet is - it's the equivalent of a small town with five cops fighting off 20 guys, but the need for "planets = important" means that now it's a small town battle over the fate of a whole planet!!

So let's tie these three things together:

Size and Detail: It's better to develop a location as a combined aggregate of sub-locations, because it makes the world seem more diverse while maintaining a "smaller" scale.

Room to Grow: Leave some areas unexplored and some numbers not given, because it's easier to build on more parts to a whole when less things are forbidden or ruled out. Leave some room for creativity and influence, rather than stating that an entire setting works exactly one way.

Visualizing Scale: It's hard to picture larger numbers - so don't pretend you're using them. If your show or movie or game is about one squad, then have it be about one squad. Don't artificially inflate the importance of an objective if a more sensible, grounded one will do.

When it comes down to it, here's a solid, simple baseline: people connect with smaller groups. Larger groups are really just made up of smaller groups. Therefore, if you show off a lot of smaller groups, the connected effect of all those small groups will help make it feel like a larger group - because it will be. A company of soldiers is made up 75 to 200 soldiers, or three platoons and a HQ unit. Each platoon is made up of 16-50 soldiers, or 2-4 squads. Once you get down to the squad level, you've reached a unit that the audience can easily understand and connect with. As you build up the audience's knowledge of each squad, they begin to feel more like humans, and thus the audience comes to know the whole unit by knowing all of its components.

Analysis: Lost Planet

Lost Planet is kind of a weird franchise. It's simultaneously silly and sensible - there's a lot of stuff that doesn't make sense, but it's usually internally consistent enough for it not to be distracting in the long run. It's not realistic by any stretch of the imagination, but it at least puts a lot into the details. Like Star Wars, it's unrealistic in a grounded enough way that the larger issues don't matter. So, without further ado, let's examine the design and universe of Lost Planet.

Background/Setting
Lost Planet takes place on E.D.N. III, a frozen planet colonized by humans in the future. This colonization was interrupted by native bugs, the Akrid, who later turned out to be full of "thermal energy" (T-ENG), which can naturally be used as an energy source. In short, it's like an oil metaphor attached to the movie version of Starship Troopers: kill bugs, get money. Most of the planet's inhabitants are stranded colonists trying to make do with what they have, and maintain enough Thermal Energy that they don't freeze to death.

Thermal energy is interesting in that it serves as both a gameplay mechanic and an in-universe motivator. The goal of the factions in Lost Planet is generally to acquire T-ENG, but you collect it in-game to power your regenerative abilities (via an item called a "harmonizer"). In LP1, people basically need thermal energy to avoid freezing to death, which is emphasized by dead Akrids instantly freezing and shattering once their thermal energy has been spilled out of them. In LP2, there's levels in jungles and deserts, so the whole "thermal energy" thing makes a lot less sense.

The cutscenes indicate that there's always a need for T-ENG, and even big tanks of it will only last a few days - less if there's combat involved. The economy of  T-ENG is pretty weird, because going out and collecting it by killing Akrids often costs so much that it's not even worth it. However, in the immediate sense it's at least plausible - Akrids are full of T-ENG, you need T-ENG to regenerate or power mechs or whatever. It's a good connection of story to gameplay, but it doesn't make that much sense in the larger scale. On the other hand, the cutscenes at least admit that deposits of thermal energy are temporary, instead of having it be treated like a long-lasting sort of riches. It's closer to gasoline in Mad Max than anything else.

Equipment

The various factions in Lost Planet are a visually diverse bunch, but a general underlying theme establishes itself: they're all basically scavengers and rummage sale types. The Snow Pirates are generally the most sensible group, with thick parkas and heavy backpacks that use visual cues to indicate the dangers and nature of their profession.

Other groups combine certain sensible aspects with less explainable choices, such as the "Rounders". There's still a generally reasonable aesthetic, but there are a lot of choices that are clearly there to be distinct. This isn't a bad thing - in fact, it's justifiable as an in-universe choice rather than a designer one. These are, after all, vagabonds and mercenaries using cobbled-together gear. It's not entirely implausible that they'd make some choices that "just look cool", or wear clothes that are more stylish than sensible. Even the "Fight Junkies" have the look of Southeast Asian pirates, although the Jungle Pirates' chain obsession is a little bit weird to explain.

One weird thing about the transition from LP1 to LP2 is that in LP1 every person was tailored for the same environment: the cold. In LP2, the increased diversity of the environments means that a bundled-up Snow Pirate can end up in a jungle, and a stripped-down Jungle Pirate can end up in the arctic. This compounds with the Thermal Energy issue mentioned before - everything about LP1 was designed around the concept of "it's cold, survive in the cold", and then LP2 sort of undid that without really thinking it through.

Each character in LP/LP2 is equipped with a wrist computer used to connect to data posts and terminals for things like map information and sensor data. There's a lot of things about them that don't make sense (such as "why do the data posts pop up only when the player uses them? Don't the pirates in this base use them?"), but in general I thought they were a nice tactile touch even if they were abstracted a bit. It's not just "move your guy next to the base and press E", your character in-universe is actually doing something.

Characters
Each group or faction in Lost Planet is basically meant to be a "post-apocalyptic gang" sort of deal, with the exception of NEVEC (who are PMCs). There's a sense of camaraderie, loyalty, and teamwork, but it lacks the discipline and coordination of actual military units. This is because, well, they're not. They may have combat experience, but they're still bandits, pirates, and survivors, not actual soldiers. They take what works, or what they like, when it comes to outfitting. The only "uniformity" is group-to-group. There's still some chain-of-command, as most groups have some sort of "mission control", but it definitely lacks the stricter organization of an actual military, which also helps to characterize it.

The way casualties are treated is kind of disconnected. It's certainly true that people die in cutscenes all over the place, and most of the units you play as in LP2 talk about severe casualties, but it naturally doesn't count your in-game deaths as being part of that. This is weird considering that your characters in LP2 are basically anonymous anyways, although in certain stages there are recognizable characters even if you don't know who they are.

I felt the character animations in both Lost Planet games helped make them feel more "real" even despite the outlandish sci-fi nature of the game. There's a real sense of momentum when someone throws a grenade or rolls out of the way or whatever. It's a lot of little touches, sure, but when my snow pirate catches his grappling hook on a ledge as he falls, turning his startled slip into a rappel, it just helps make him feel like a person.

The main thing that's lacking in Lost Planet is damage response - the guns are basically a perfect example of "nerf". Bullets impact on the model and explosions knock people around. The Harmonizer is stated to help "regeneration", but it might as well be a shield or something considering what it effectively does. There's really no sense that damage is actually being done until a guy actually dies, at which point they fall over.

Mechs
The mechs in LP2 are known as "Vital Suits", and they're basically closer to powered armor than full "mechs". Most Vital Suits are basically guns attached to a pair of legs (like a walking tank), but some advanced models include arms and arm-based weapons (like a human-type). Vital Suits are feasible in that they serve basically the same role as infantry due to their relative size. They're smaller than a tank or other armored vehicle, and are able to maneuver in places that armored vehicles wouldn't. They might not be plausible in an engineering sense, but tactically they're at least filling a niche that can't be filled by tanks or jeeps.

Like other parts of the game, there's a lot of little touches to the Vital Suits that I appreciate. For example, weapons can be pulled off and swapped, because they're essentially modular. If you find a VS missile launcher in a shed, you can pick it up, bring it over to your VS, and attach it. If your VS is damaged, you can hop out and repair it. While this is fairly basic and you never really hold onto a VS for that long, it was still a neat "scavenger" touch that helped solidify the aesthetic produced by the rest of the game.

Enemies
The main enemies in the game are Akrids, the native bugs that are naturally full of a glowing orange energy source. This provides a tangible reward for killing enemies - they're full of the juice you need to live. In addition, Akrids, like most bug enemies, are basically innumerable. This means that every trooper can rack up a huge number of bug kills, even if they end up dying in the end. There's different kinds of Akrid, too, so there's a few that are large enough to be bosses or mini-bosses. This diversity establishes them as a threat, but also a threat that occasionally comes in smaller, more easily-killed versions.

The other main enemies in the series are, naturally, hostile humans. In the campaign, the difference between the players and their enemies is justified primarily by the Harmonizers, which convert thermal energy into increased abilities and regeneration. In LP1, only the main character has a Harmonizer. In LP2, the player-character teams have access to a less powerful version of that Harmonizer. The various goons and bandits of the Lost Planet world do not have access to Harmonizers, which means that they die in a few hits.

The reaction to death is kind of weird in general - casualties are acknowledged in cutscenes, but seem too common in gameplay to match up. There's a difference between "we lost four guys" and "our entire forces were wiped out because they refused to retreat or escape". The former is PvP, the latter is PvE. Even when the pirate enemies have superior odds and actually manage to kill the players, the fact that the players can infinitely respawn makes them a roadblock anyways.

Conclusion
Lost Planet is a pretty good "game setting": there's a situation that creates a dynamic, and technology/design that supports the dynamic. It's a post-apocalyptic "cobble together your gear" aspect plus a sci-fi "kill bugs by the thousands" aspect. It's definitely more on the "presentation" side than the "real/plausible" side, but there's a lot of little touches that make the world feel more believable. However, it's also pretty limited - despite the backpacks and ammo pouches, there's no mention of gathering food or water or anything other than T-ENG. It's not exactly a living world, but it's at least a world that's consistent with the gameplay. I'd like to see a sandbox game or a pen-and-paper game that takes place on E.D.N. III, because the arcade/action gameplay of the current LP games don't really use the setting to its full potential.

The Nerf effect.

It's fairly well established at this point that a lot of problems with believability come from a combination of limited sensory information and inaccurate depictions recycled by directors and developers who are themselves learning from false information. I've talked a lot about connecting "real information" to "fictional information" - taking sensory data you know about and connecting it to things that you don't. You might know what it feels like to be cut in the kitchen, but not on a battlefield. However, there is one real-life experience you've probably had that's similar enough to combat for it to be distracting information:

Whether it's specifically Nerf-brand plastic toys, or some other similar "not quite gun" (laser tag, water guns, airsoft, making pyew pyew noises with your mouth), the majority of childhood "combat experiences" are based off of these child-safe devices. The thing about these different play-guns is that while mechanically you might be going through the same "aim gun, pull trigger" routine, the differences make it alien in a way that your brain might not even register later. This comes up in a few different issues:

Tactile
One issue that a lot of gun-based media doesn't really get across is the weight and feel of a gun. An M14 rifle, for example, weighs eleven-and-a-half pounds when loaded. An M16, on the other hand, weighs a mere 8.79 pounds when loaded. A comparable Nerf rifle weighs 2.2 pounds. While newer firearms may be lighter and use a lot of plastic, toy guns leave out the important metal bits for obvious safety reasons (ignoring the whole "operational weapon" thing, getting accidentally hit by a chunk of plastic hurts a lot less than getting accidentally hit by something with metal in it). Looking up youtube videos showing how the gun actually works is a way to get around this; actually owning or shooting a gun is a better way, although this may not always be feasible.

The XM8 in general is an interesting gun because I think it could help to sort of bridge that gap: it's a plastic gun with metal and rubber bits on it, and that seems a lot more tangible than a gun with wooden furniture. It's made up of materials that you've probably dealt with at some point in your life, and that means that you can connect more easily to what it would feel like even if you never hold one in your hands. Of course, it's thick heavy-duty plastic, not flimsy "toy gun" plastic, but that's still something you might have encountered and can remember the feel of.

Impact
When children play with plastic guns, someone can be hit a lot, and the only way that it matters is if they know and acknowledge that they've been hit. The only damage is in terms of numbers, based on rules like "you can get hit five times before you're out", or "if you get hit, you have to wait ten seconds to play again". Sound familiar? Video games usually lack all the tactile sensations of being hit or wounded, even as a simulation, but for game reasons they DO enforce "you're hit means you're out". Of course, there are a few exceptions (Red Orchestra springs to mind), but this sort of thing is really the majority. Healing isn't so much recovering from actual injuries as it is restoring your health points, which is basically the same as saying "okay you're back to being able to get hit five times again".

In short, plastic guns and swords and whatever are able to communicate that "you've been hit" but nothing more than that for safety reasons. This is what gets across in video games: object A (the weapon or projectile) hit object B (the target) and now object B takes x damage. Things like "blood" are only really important as a gameplay effect: if someone bleeds, you've hit them, and that's that. Their model doesn't change or anything, it's just a special effect to indicate that your attack has connected. It's like a bullet squib - the bullet hasn't actually entered them, it's just impacted on the surface and caused blood to issue without penetrating their armor, clothes, or skin.

Swords are almost worse in a lot of ways, and it doesn't help that most modern fantasy sword designs look something like this to begin with. A game sword is a nerf bat - there's no actual damage inflicted, it's just that if the weapon connects then the model "takes damage". There's no real sense of momentum. It's even worse when games like World of Warcraft don't even really show the hit connecting - two models just swing at each other and deal damage. There are so many sparkly special effects in the way that you wouldn't be able to tell anyways. Games like Demon's Souls and Mount and Blade do what they can with weight and movement, but the fact that they can't show actual damage means that it's still just "my sword hits your face, you take 10 damage". There's no tearing of flesh or smashing of bones, because that's not possible to model. Even the upcoming Metal Gear Rising just sort of has people fall in half like watermelons or sacks of meat, because they can't effectively model the entire bodily system just so it can be awkwardly hacked up.

Heat and flame are similarly neglected by most media. Explosions in movies and games serve to shove people around. They don't have any heat to them, and they don't throw shrapnel. Flamethrowers in games generally just sort of add a "fire sprite" to people. Like gunfire, the model isn't complex enough to depict the interaction of fire with the human body, so it just sort of gets layered on top of it. Even the heat isn't really conveyed: even as soldiers scream and burn, the standard connection is going to be "slightly warm" and not "blisteringly, destructively hot". This is because you've been around warm things, but you probably haven't stuck your hand in a fire before - and if you have, you've pulled it out quickly, rather than allowing yourself to be constantly exposed to it with no way of extinguishing yourself.

Sound
Plastic guns don't do too much when it comes to noises, and most media doesn't convey how painfully loud real life guns are. If you were watching a movie and the guns were accurate, you'd actually probably turn the sound down. In fact, sound in movies and games is a lot like night in movies and games: if it was actually as loud/dark as it would be in real life or in-universe, we wouldn't be able to hear/see what's going on. In both cases, the audience can actually influence the media anyways (if it's too loud, turn down the volume, and if it's too dark turn up the brightness). A loud or dark environment is oppressive in sensory terms, and part of the issue is that you can't escape it - you just have to find ways to work around it or adapt. The HBO Miniseries "The Pacific" generally had some good scenes where things are properly dark and loud, but the downside is that, like real life, you can't really tell what's going on or who's who. Even promotional shots of those scenes have been cleaned up to be understandable:

"Fake darkness" can occasionally be averted, if it's a gameplay element to use flashlights or lanterns or what-have-you. However, the sound thing rarely is, because it's something that can cause actual hearing damage. Even if the sound levels were accurate, and voices were drowned out by gunfire and explosions, it's more likely that the player would adjust the sound levels or turn on subtitles instead of "basking in the experience". Even an accurate video can't capture it, for that reason alone. Of course, it's still possible to dramatically underplay gun noises - every gun in Call of Duty: World at War felt like it had a suppressor slapped on it, and don't even get me started on the popguns in Half Life 2. The most basic thing to remember is that a gunshot is basically a very loud crack, not some kind of unique noise. Media tends to try to make up for their inability to depict how loud it is by changing the sound itself, which establishes unrealistic expectations.

So to sum up, there are a lot of ways that movie/game weapons seem more like plastic toys than their real equivalents:

1) Weapons never seem like they weigh enough, or like they're solid enough. The audience is most likely more familiar with light, flimsy plastic/nerf weapons, rather than hard, heavy ones made of metal and wood, and weapons generally behave like props, rather than real machines.
2) Weapons only "impact", rather than "pierce". Therefore, the only important part is whether a projectile or attack hit or not. This is pretty much the same as how Nerf or Airsoft or laser-tag works. This is often justified by technical limitations.
3) The sounds made by toy guns do not compare to the sounds made by real ones, but guns in games sound more like the former than the latter. This may be due to the fact that "real" guns would actually cause hearing damage.

While some of these issues may be simply the nature of media, the "impact" aspect, I believe, could theoretically be fixed by a proper hitbox armor system. That is to say, when steel hits steel, it should act and sound like it. It should be a big deal that you've got a layer of leather or metal or kevlar in between "your character's flesh" and "the enemy's bullet". You shouldn't bleed if a blow glances off your armor. If it doesn't glance off your armor, the armor should reflect this. The armor has to be separate from the flesh, it can't just be "part of the character model".

In fact, one thing I liked about the game Vindictus is that armor could break during fights, but rather than just disappearing it would look battered and ragged and torn up - so it actually looks like your armor has taken damage, rather than simply shattering (as it does in Soul Calibur IV). After one hard boss, the whole group was torn up - and for the first time in a game, I actually thought "Woah, we look like we just got our asses kicked", which I had basically never done in a game before. Of course, the character models were essentially unmarred (though characters with low stamina will huff and puff until they regenerate it), but you take what you can get.

Vehicles and their crews.

Just as a uniform reflects the characterization of the individual wearing it, vehicles, too, can play a similar role. The use of vehicles in military games is almost ubiquitous for good reasons - both "realistically" and in design terms. Rather than just another piece of equipment, a vehicle is often an extension of its pilot or crew. This is true of civilian vehicles as well - compare your ideas of a person who drives a beat-up pickup truck compared to a person who drives a well-maintained sports car. The nature and design of a vehicle can help convey certain concepts to the audience, and historically this sort of spirit has been connected to the men and women attached to them.

Let's look at mechs, for example. What is a mech, in basic terms? It's a ground vehicle with a crew of one or two individuals at most. It can be customized with different weapons for different missions, although the basic role of a given mech is often the same. Mech-oriented media often focuses on the prowess of individual pilots, for better or for worse. There are two main types of mechs: The "Walking Tank" and the "Human-Type".

A "Walking Tank" is, despite the name, basically a helicopter or plane with legs - compare Battletech's Timber Wolf to a real-life Hind-D. They bristle with weaponry, often attached at the shoulders or on arms. Combat takes place at long range, and their armament reflects this: lots of mounted weapons, few "arms" and "hands". The name "walking tanks" makes sense in terms of its visual design, but the one-man crew invites a lot more comparisons to hotshot aircraft aces than the coordinated teamwork of an armored vehicle.

For example, in the intro to Mechcommander, the dynamic of each mech as a coordinated part of a tactical group is well established. Each mechwarrior has a callsign, not unlike those used by fighter pilots. Every pilot is in total command of his or her mech. The chain of command is present in the form of "the voice in your ear", but the appeal of the mech is that the skill-related aspect is all on the shoulders of the pilot. Series using the "Walking Tank" mech include Battletech, Steel Battalion, Chromehounds, Star Wars, and Warhammer 40,000.

Steel Battalion, in particular, is an interesting example. In terms of visual appearance, its mechs are decidedly closer to human-types, but in terms of how they actually control (via SB's major claim to fame, it's giant oversized controller), they're definitely walking tanks. Peculiarly, its upcoming sequel is changing the mechs to look more like walking tanks, when the new control system (using Microsoft's "Kinect" technology) seems like it would be perfect for a human-type mech.

"Human-Type" mechs are usually more like a giant person. Battles between "walking tanks" generally consist of them slinging missiles and guns at each other from long range, while battles between "human" mechs can be a lot more like two people fighting, with guns or swords or fists. The general concept of "the individual pilot" remains intact, though the comparison is much less like a fighter ace and more like a particularly skilled warrior (although the word "ace" will still be thrown around).

The type of "human" a mech reflects can change, though. In the original Mobile Suit Gundam, mechs are basically used like giant infantry. The...slightly less grounded Gundam spinoff "G Gundam" took advantage of this by basically having each mech be the equivalent of a martial artist. In general, though, a "human-type" mech is treated like a giant armored human, even if this doesn't really make sense with the visible control scheme (how do you use two joysticks and a control panel to swing a sword?). Prominent examples of the "human-type" include 90% of the things on this list.

The difference between these two concepts is based on the relationship of the vehicle to its pilot. A walking tank is unemotive - it's all up to the pilot to imbue it with any sense of "being". In contrast, a human-type is, well, basically a giant in armor. They swing swords, shoot guns, and occasionally punch each other. What may seem like a simple difference (they're both giant robots, but one's got guns mounted on it and the other holds guns and swords in its giant robot hands) ends up being the difference between a tank and a person. A walking tank is basically only useful for shooting things, because all it's got is guns. On the other hand, a human-type can do anything a human can, albeit on a larger scale. From a meta-design sense, a human-type is more versatile, but the walking tank has the advantage of drawing on more tangible concepts like joysticks and control panels.

The concept of a lone pilot versus a crew affects more than just giant robots, though. Mechs, helicopters, and fighter aircraft provide an example of a "minimum crew" vehicle. Tanks, bomber aircraft, and small gunboats have a crew of 3-10, and are "medium crew" vehicles. Large ships, from corvettes upwards, are "large crew" vehicles. The difference between these groups is a social one as well as a mechanical one: the crew of a vehicle is bound together by that vehicle. The intimacy of a group is dependent on their isolation together. While obviously cooperation is visible in any military group, for the crew of a vehicle it's much more stark. If someone screws up, they're all going down because of it, and they know it. Depending on the vehicle, though, the "crew" can be broken up piece by piece; a gunner on a bomber might die, or a loader in a tank might be swapped out. The crew is a unified unit (in that they are all combining their efforts to operate one vehicle), but is also identifiably made up of individual human beings.

"The success of the tank will always be greatest if the crew forms one solid team in which each member contributes his utmost to success." - Armored Force Field Manual FM 17-30

Despite being about traditional squads, "Generation Kill" included a vehicle dynamic because of the fact that each fireteam was mounted in a Humvee. Each Humvee thus had four individuals inside: the driver, two riflemen aiming out the windows, and the gunner on the pintle-mounted weapon. This created an obvious dynamic, and made the marines visibly closer. Most of the characterization naturally goes to the marines in the Humvee that the reporter is riding in, while everyone else plays a lesser role. We come to know these people as individuals because we spend time with them, and thus the marines in the same vehicle as the "point of view" character got a lot more screen time. At one point, the gunner of the "PoV" vehicle is swapped out with another - and thus we come to know this new gunner and gradually grow distant from the old one. Of course, the fact that everything in Generation Kill happened in real life makes this sort of a forced use of that dynamic, rather than a conscious attempt to create cast segregation.

One thing that I felt was unusual about Valkyria Chronicles was that, despite the importance of tanks in the game (it was even originally going to be called "Gallian Panzers"), the crews of the tanks are never really established. The player's main tank is commanded by the protagonist and driven by the protagonist's sister, but the gunner, loader, and so on are never really established (if they're even there). The nature of a tank crew seemed like a natural place to foster relationships, so it seemed odd that they missed out on that when they went to so much trouble to make 50+ soldiers for the platoon. They tried to connect the vehicle to its commander (Welkin for the main tech, Zaka for the light tank acquired later in the game), but by doing so they sort of messed up the logical dynamic. In general, there seems to be an aversion in a lot of media to "crew-operated" vehicles, perhaps due to the fact that they play what some would consider to be mundane, redundant roles.

Another dynamic that affects a vehicle's relation to is perception is the vehicle's "class" or "role". Obviously there's tanks, planes, ships, and so on, but in this sense I mean a tactical role within a given vehicle group. This can be identified as a speed/power tradeoff resulting in three classes: light (high speed, low power), medium (balanced), and heavy (high power, low speed). These can be connected to characters through the following archetypes: the fragile speedster (light), the jack of all stats (medium), and the mighty glacier (heavy).

The "light" class is used for one of two things: low-level cannon fodder or maneuverable artists. This is based on the emphasis of its "low power" and "high speed", respectively. For example, the Ace Combat games start you in planes like the F-5 Tiger or the Mig-21, and due to the balance system of those games, they're generally inferior all-around. In real life, this may be reflected by the fact that lighter vehicles are generally cheaper. However, in some cases these vehicles can use their speed to outflank and outmaneuver their larger, clumsier foes. The former, naturally, happens more often for disposable enemies and allies, while the latter is reserved for main characters. Some examples of "light-class" vehicles include:

- Light tanks such as the M3 Stuart, Panzer II, and BT-class.
- Tank destroyers like the M18 Hellcat (a powerful gun and high speed, but light armor).

- Light fighters such as the aforementioned F-5 and MiG-21.

- Corvettes and frigates.

- A-Wings and TIE Interceptors in the Star Wars universe.

- Light battlemechs in the Battletech universe.

The "medium" class is, naturally, balanced. Medium-class vehicles are military workhorses, able to carry out missions requiring speed or strength without complaint. Of course, they don't excel at those tasks, but they can probably get them done. They have more power than a light and more speed than a heavy; conversely, they have less speed than a light and less power than a heavy. They often make up the bulk of a military's forces due to their adaptability, and can be seen as the vehicular equivalent to a service rifle. As a non-protagonist's vehicle, their weaknesses are emphasized and they are generally simple, boring enemies; as a protagonist's vehicle, they're reliable and adaptable. "Medium-class" vehicles include:

- Medium tanks such as the M4 Sherman, the Panzer IV, and the T-34.

- Multirole fighters such as the F-16, the F/A-18, and the MiG-29.

- Destroyers and  light cruisers.

- X-Wings in the Star Wars universe.

- Medium battlemechs in the Mechwarrior universe.

The "heavy" class is the most powerful in terms of offense and defense, but the least maneueverable. In the protagonist's hands, it will destroy all enemies that come before it, because they'll be charging right at it with their dinky little underpowered guns. In an antagonist's hands, it will be slow and clunky so that the protagonist can casually circle around behind it and hit it in its weak spot. "Heavy" vehicles are also more resource-intensive than light ones, which often results in them just being straight-up better than comparable vehicles, weight issues aside. "Heavy-class" vehicles include:

- Heavy tanks such as the M26 Pershing, the Panzer VI "Tiger", and the IS-2.

- Air superiority fighters such as the F-14, F-15, and Su-27, as well as Ground-attack aircraft such as the A-10 and Su-25.

- Heavy cruisers and battleships.

- B-Wings and assault gunboats from the Star Wars universe.

- Heavy and assault battlemechs in the Battletech universe.

What do all these vehicles establish? In short, there's a hierarchy for depictions of military vehicles, just as there is a hierarchy for depictions of uniforms. "Light vehicles" are scouts, but they are objectively the weakest and cheapest, and thus can be thrown in large numbers at the player. "Medium vehicles" are balanced, and provide the bulk of enemy and allied forces. "Heavy vehicles" are slow and expensive, meaning they're rarer, but their slowness allows them to be flanked. Each has a weakness, but there's also a more direct system underlying it due to resource costs. Hence, any series that uses mechanics similar to this basic setup (such as anything on this list) will fall under that same dynamic.

An important aspect of vehicles is, like a fully armored human, they are not expressive. Therefore, the only chance the audience has to identify and "connect" with them is based on this kind of assessment. A light tank is either "cheap cannon fodder" or "technically skilled". A medium tank is "standard", "common", and "a workhorse". A heavy tank is "powerful", "elite", and "slow". The crew is going to be characterized accordingly, if they're shown at all. Like the civilian cars discussed earlier, the "type of vehicle" is going to color perceptions of its crew.

So to sum up what we've discussed so far, vehicles can be judged along two different axes: Crew Size, which determines the social dynamics of the pilots/crew, and Vehicle Type, which determines perception of its combat role and style. Now let's bring this into practice.

In "Sonic Boom Squadron", part of Reiji Matsumoto's animated compilation "The Cockpit", there are three discernible groups: The bomber crews, the fighter pilots, and the protagonist. The bomber crews are the largest groups, and their visual design is much less "noble" than the rugged, macho fighter pilots. They almost resemble stereotypes, perhaps to indicate their status as "weak" individuals, but this also makes them more sympathetic. The fighter pilots, both American and Japanese, are much more visually capable. They have the bearing and design of warriors, which is reflected in the fact that they are wholly in command of their vehicles, rather than being part of a larger crew. Finally, the protagonist is in his own group: that of a suicide pilot. As such, his design is closer to that of the fighter pilots, but his determination and patriotism (to a foolhardy extent) are emphasized far more.

The differences here are pretty clear. What is a soldier, compared to a warrior? What is a warrior, compared to a patriot? The character designs represent a perception of that. The bomber crewmen are weak individually, but operate as a group. The fighter pilots are proud and strong, with confidence in their own skills. The suicide pilot is brave to the point of insanity - even if his goal was just and righteous from the audience's point of view, he'd still be just a tad crazy. The combat role and style of the characters affects their characterization.

"Area 88" is another fighter-pilot series, but focuses on mercenaries fighting in a middle eastern war. What's notable about it in this instance is that while the protagonist pilots have a wide variety of planes, from F-14s to X-29s, the "generic" pilots tend to have a much more limited selection. Friendly mercenaries generally fly the IAI Kfir, while enemies fly the MiG-21. This creates a similar dynamic to the situation described above: both the Kfir and MiG-21 are sort of middling aircraft (at least as depicted in the show), while the protagonists' planes are better in ways suited to their character. "Ace Combat" generally has a wide range of enemy planes, but there's usually a few "standard" planes as you progress through the games. In Ace Combat Zero, the F-16 and F/A-18 are used as common "allied" planes, while the MiG-29 is the most common "enemy" plane. Enemy ace squadrons use more advanced planes based on their styles. This conveys the difference between the "standard" planes - the bulk of the military forces - and the aces, given more leeway in their choice of vehicles based on their flying style and performance.

Scaling up a bit on the "crew size" axis, we'll examine ships - a standard environment in most sci-fi universes. One of the features of the Dreamcast game "Skies of Arcadia" was the ability to fill different roles on the player's ship by recruiting crewmen from all over the game world. The effect of this was to have a ship where every role was filled by someone the player knew, at least in passing, because they had to be personally connected to their recruitment. Another franchise that uses large ships is "Star Trek". Because of the nature of the show, the  crew is naturally divided into their respective sections and responsibility (command, security, engineering, science, and so on). Everyone on the ship has a job, and that job is denoted by the color of their uniform. In general, the crew of a ship makes up a social dynamic as significant as any squad, circle of friends, or RPG party, although a ship generally leaves a lot more people open to being glossed over as "background characters" or "redshirts".

Of course, both of these examples focus on one specific ship - when other ships show up, they are not (and, usually, cannot be) given the same amount of attention as the protagonist ship. As such, they appear only as a metal shell, in some cases with a cursory examination of the bridge and the individuals working there. This is the difference between looking at a car and looking at the driver. One's an unempathic exterior, and the other's the person operating it - a person who can be empathized with. When you see a tank, you're not seeing a crew of three to five individuals with personalities and behaviors and histories - you're seeing a tank. It essentially performs the same role as a mask, but now it does it to a group rather than to an individual.

Crews can also result in issues of scale - that is, from the audience's perspective, not a logical in-universe perspective. As mentioned above, Star Trek spent a huge amount of time focusing on one ship. Other ships were generally scaled realistically to the Enterprise - a single enemy ship might be a considerable threat, and a battle between the two would be drawn out as different sections took damage and so on. In fact, "The Wrath of Khan" is nothing but that - two ships firing at each other, evading each other, and taking damage in different sections. Of course, trying to scale this up to the level of an interstellar war would be almost impossible, at least in terms of time demand, so when the Dominion War rolled around in Deep Space 9, we ended up with this whole sequence: ships exploding in one or two hits, clustering together like gnats. There's no way to actually draw the sequence out enough to make it plausible, but we need to show that there's a war going on - the answer, unfortunately, is to make them all incredibly disposable.

Similarly, the animated show "Legend of Galactic Heroes" has battles involving thousands of ships, which blow up in the background almost constantly. In this sense, the ships are destroyed as a single object. The countless complex sections that make them up and the crewmen that run them are ignored for the sake of depicting "a casualty". Of course, LoGH's focus on larger strategic and tactical battles, where characters often die (there's very few plot shields on the show), makes this more reasonable. Still, there's an established difference between "one ship exploding" and "one ship, full of hundreds of crewmen, exploding". It's an issue of scale, not just in terms of empathy but in terms of the audience being able to actually wrap their heads around how large or small a battle is supposed to be.

So let's sum up some points here to wrap up:

1: A vehicle can create social dynamics by creating (or ignoring) teamwork, depending on the size and requirements of the vehicle.

2: A vehicle's capability and status will reflect how it is viewed and characterized, and how its crew is viewed and characterized, depending on its role in the story

3: A vehicle's crew will be humanized from the inside, because you'll get to know them as individuals in a larger environment, but will be totally dehumanized from the outside, because you won't see anything but the vehicle itself.

Authorial influence and fiat.

The goal of this blog has been, and will be, to explore believability. This means that it looks at ways that a fictional world can be made more "real", in the sense that it's tangible and logical to the audience. However, there is one major interfering factor when it comes to the issue of authorship. No matter how logically or illogically a story is developed, there is one key rule that absolutely cannot be forgotten: what the writer says happens is what happens. It doesn't matter how little sense it makes, or how much: if there is logic, it is because the writer has arranged the story in a way that things make sense. If there isn't, it's because they didn't bother to arrange the story in such a way. There is no actual system of logic in play: it's all set up by the writer, regardless of the end result. Of course, the audience is free to make their own conclusions about the morals and lessons taught by the events, but the events themselves are orchestrated entirely by the author.

All of the updates on this blog - past and future - have the goal of making it so that the author has more tools at their disposal to create the illusion of reality. This is done to make that illusion more tangible and palpable so that the audience can maintain their suspension of disbelief. The less things that draw their attention to the fictitious nature of the enterprise, the less likely that this major issue (the fact that it is fiction, and hence it's all made up anyways) will be breached. But this is an optional objective - there are many writers more concerned with telling "the story they want" than worrying about consistency or logic. Can you stop them? Of course not. It's their story. If Karen Traviss (pictured left) wants to say that all Mandalorians are super-awesome warriors who are way better than every Jedi, then technically she's right - insomuch as she's making it all up anyways, and one made-up thing is just as true as another.

A writer is essentially on their own in terms of logic. There is no system governing what they can and cannot write, except in a meta-sense (censors, legal issues, etcetera). If they want something to happen, it is going to happen. This brings us to the issue of fiat (Latin for "let it be done"), a general term referring to things like deus ex machina or anything where something happens because "the author wills it". This is most obvious when there is a logical leap or gap and it's not bridged by anything other than the author saying it happened. However, if we examine the initial statement, then every single thing that happens in a story is fiat. The difference is separating the fiat that's logical from the fiat that's not - what's believable and what's implausible.

In an earlier post I compared the idea of enemies being plausible threats and/or beings in their own right to enemies being static non-entities who exist to be trampled by the hero. As you might guess, both things in this case come down to fiat: will the author portray it plausibly, or will they just go the easy route and make all the enemies stand still to get blown up? In the end, it comes down to how the author wants to show it. You can talk about plausibility and believability all you want, but the actual events are only influenced by how the author chooses to depict things.

No example shows this more clearly, in my mind, than Berserk's hundred-man battle. This is combat that is simultaneously difficult and trivial. Both of the protagonists have to block enemy strikes and counter in weak spots, rather than just blasting through them with no effort. There's a real effort to show that they're outnumbered, they're getting tired, and they're on their last legs. But at the same time, the enemies never bring their superior numbers to bear in a logical way, the protagonists get away with a lot of stuff that they shouldn't (at one point Guts waves his cape and this is enough to somehow knock crossbow bolts away), and ultimately the moral of the story is "The good guys kill a lot of guys who attack in a way that allows the good guys to kill them". The consistency of the situation is there for atmosphere, rather than to shape events.

This example is important to me because there's an attempt to have a logical, grounded system for the whole affair, but ultimately it comes down to "we need the good guys to survive and beat the odds, and the bad guys to all die messily". The plausibility of the scene is a speed bump on the road to Guts winning. There's a similar feel around the series "Gundam: 08th MS Team". The three main pilots are meant to be fairly normal, but none of them die even when the odds are against them. This is a good clip to illustrate what I mean: Shiro is a normal human who is forced to resort to a desperate ambush against his opponents - something that wouldn't happen in any of the other series - but at the same time he dodges gunfire from a mech, and then later he shoots down some tiny anti-personnel mines. He's superhuman, but not; he's really whatever the story needs him to be in order to survive. The "realism" of the show is part of the illusion, but in actuality he's going to win no matter what it takes.

This brings us to another key issue: the capabilities of a character will always be whatever they need to be. I touched on this briefly when discussing PvP/PvE, but here's the bottom line: measuring strength is always going to be ridiculous because the strength of a character is derived solely from the writer. If I write a story where I say "this character is a normal human but he can eat the sun", should you be impressed with this character? Would you be drawn to learn more about him and how his totally insane logical inconsistencies can exist? Well, there's no logic behind it. He can eat the sun because I, the author, said he can. That's it.

Now let's compare this to some actual shows and movies. I've touched on the later Gundam series before, but they really are a pretty good example because they rely on the audience being impressed by "this mech is powerful". What is there to be in awe of? The weapon is powerful because the designer made it powerful. Without context or drama, what is that "power" appealing to? Even with that one clip, they won't leave well enough alone and power it up even more. What does this accomplish? There's no tactile or experience-based viewpoint to actually approach the gun from, so it might as well be a sentence reading "this gun can blow up everything". Its power exists in a vacuum. Giant mecha can do everything from destroy an army to throw a galaxy like a shuriken, and what does it mean? It means that the writer said "and then the giant mecha threw the galaxy like a shuriken" - no more, no less.

This problem can almost be made worse if there's an attempt to connect to some sort of realism (although arguably all things try to appeal to realism at some level - more about this in a future update). For example, in the game "Halo: ODST", the player takes the role of an Orbital Drop Ship Trooper (essentially a futuristic paratrooper). The difference between normal Halo games and ODST is meant to be justified by the fact that in most Halo games you play as a shield-equipped super-soldier, whereas in ODST you are a normal guy. However, the grand list of things that changes about the game is this: you can no longer dual wield. Your health regenerates, your movement is light and quick, your guns are bolted to your frame rather than swinging wildly around, and you can punch through tanks. The aspect of "being normal" has absolutely no connection to the gameplay because it all exists as author fiat, and "author fiat" only wanted the player to be an ODST so they could expand on an element they thought was cool. The ODST, as a soldier, is exactly as strong as the game needs him to be. And yet there is a trope praising such characters on the basis of "it's more impressive because they don't have any powers", forgetting that the only power they need is the power of "the author wants me to win". Nothing else matters except that.

However, there is one method of storytelling that actually has the potential to overcome this hurdle: luck-based or skill-based gaming with a solid rule system to ensure fairness. This primarily takes the form of RPGs, but actual gameplay in videogames may also count. Games in general have a few distinct traits that can free them of the quagmire of authorial directorship:

1: The Game System Provides The Rules. One of the issues with authorship is the issue of consistency: an attack might not be enough to harm an enemy in one scene, but it is in another. The consistency of the story is up to the author to maintain, and if they want to ignore it there's nothing that can be done. Games, on the other hand, establish a solid system, and with the exception of cutscenes generally try to maintain that system at all times. If a character is low level, they're going to have these capabilities. If they level up, their capabilities will improve. In this way, the playing field can be kept consistent, if not necessarily level. A character will consistently be the same strength unless they take an action in-universe to change it.

An issue related to this is "real logic" versus "game logic" - that is to say, a game meant to represent some sort of "reality" (humans are humans, physics are physics) inaccurately representing that reality. One could also point to "higher-level" stuff, which suffers from the same "higher numbers = better than" mentality seen in DBZ or any other high-powered anime series. The difference here, to me, is that there's a concrete method of improvement and a concrete level of power. If you want to be high level, you have to earn your way there. If you're a low-level person and you attack a high-level person, you're probably going to lose. There's no arbitrary "well he's tougher than me in every way but I'm a good guy so I win" stuff unless, say, the player rolls a critical hit. This leads into the second point.

2: Events Change Based On Luck or Skill. Earlier with regards to Berserk, I mentioned that, in essence, the way combat was portrayed was unimportant because the end result had to be "Guts wins". In a game, it can all come down to either a roll of the dice (for most role-playing games) or the player's capabilities (for more direct action games). The gaming comic Knights of the Dinner Table actually has a lot of characters dying and campaigns failing as the result of bad rolls and bad decisions, which is perfectly logical and happens all the time in real D&D campaigns. The success or failure of the characters actually has a lasting impression, and this makes it far more tense because the story might actually change. You don't just get a do-over, you could totally screw up and all your characters could die and that's it, the story is over for them.

It's important to note, however, that the way an adventure is tailored and challenges are shown affects this. Oftentimes, encounters are "balanced" to provide an optimal combat threat. I don't support this method; I prefer a system where enemies are whatever type it would make sense for that area, and it's up to the players to analyze their chances. If they're out in the woods and they hear a hill giant approaching, it should be up to them to do something about it - either take it head-on (if they're confident), set a trap, run away, or try to hide. If the encounter's balanced, there's no real reason to do anything other than "fight normally"; if it's unbalanced, the players have to think on their feet and react to the monster as an event, rather than an obstacle. A hard encounter should be overcome with guile and cunning, instead of just not happening until the party's ready for it.

3: The Players Make Decisions And Direct The Course Of Their Characters' Actions. This is the point that's least universal - there are plenty of railroading DMs who want to put their players through "my story", and far more videogames that do the same thing. Still, in most RPGs the onus of activity lies with the players, often to the detriment of the DM who has to keep up with their pace. This freedom is shared with a lot of wide-open sandbox games, although video games are inherently limited by things like resources and design.

The importance of this freedom is that it makes the story much more malleable: it's the result of a logical (well, not always logical, but at least player-decided) train of thought leading to a rule-moderated conclusion based on planning, strategy, and luck. The more that the DM or developers say "no you can't do that", the less it's going to feel like the player has any influence on what's happening. In this case, the DM and developers represent "fiat": you can't do that because I said you can't, deal with it. To be a truly interactive, developing story, these restrictions must be minimized.

RPGs are naturally equipped to deal with this - unlike a computer, a human DM can adapt new material "on the fly" (or at least relatively quickly) based on consulting rules and stats in the book. If the players want to hire mercenaries, the books will probably have rules and tables for that. If the players want to build a castle, the books will probably have rules and tables for that. In fact, this aspect is why I personally prefer AD&D to newer editions - the lighter, less-intensive combat system means there's more time devoted to establishing background data and materials for the DM to call upon.

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I appreciate the stories generated by pen-and-paper RPGs and sandbox games because they're naturally occurring; a system was established, and the players let events happen. To me, it's much more of a "big deal" to hear about an expedition that nearly failed but managed to survive at the last second, or an X-COM recruit who managed to get off that lucky shot. These stories are more real to me because they operate under similar rules to reality, most importantly "success isn't guaranteed". In contrast, authored stories are, well, authored: what the author says happens, happens. If they're a good author, I'll be drawn in enough that it's not predictable and I can try to figure out what's going to happen, but in essence it comes down to what the author wanted to happen.

There's a term in fandom that I think is fairly important for this: in a series where many characters die, it is the author who "kills their characters". Even if a show or book or movie depicts war in an accurate sense, the characters who died are, in fact, killed by the author, because it is the author's decision whether they live or die. In the last, climactic book of the Harry Potter series, many characters died - but those characters lived and died because J.K. Rowling wrote them living or dying. She could have spared any one of them, and every one that died did so because she desired it to happen. Gundam director Yoshiyuki Tomino (pictured left) has actually been criticized for making series where characters are killed off frequently, despite the fact that most of these series are war-oriented. Structured rules take the decision out of the "author's" hands by making it up to the dice. War is fatal, and it may end up being random whether you live or die - but there's nothing "random" about an author, because the author's role is to govern the story, and they have absolute control over every aspect of it.

This is the base concept of what I'm trying to get at: no matter what, it's all going to come down to the author's decision. An author can kill characters off to try to achieve the "randomness" of war, and logically their choice will be justified, but essentially the characters who live and die are still chosen by the author. This is why internal consistency is so important: because the decision an author makes should be backed up by logic for the audience to become invested in them. Without internal consistency, each decision sits alone in a void, and the audience is essentially listening to a dictated list of events without any connection to why any of it is happening. The more rules the author abides by, the more "fair" their decisions will seem.

I constantly bring up Band of Brothers and Saving Private Ryan on this blog for various reasons, and to me there is one major difference between them: Band of Brothers is based on true events, and Saving Private Ryan is not. When a character dies in Band of Brothers, it is because it actually happened based on a logical system of events in real life. When a character dies in Saving Private Ryan, it is because the script called for them to die. Even if the death is done well and feels natural, it's going to be underscored by the fact that the death happened as part of the script, not "naturally". Perhaps, then, scripts should be built off of role-playing sessions? It's worth a gamble.

Accessible realism.

In creating "Red Orchestra", the WW2-themed mod for Unreal Tournament, the game's designers referred to the game's theme as one of "accessible realism". What does this mean? Many highly realistic, detail-oriented games are relegated to the status of "simulation", and are enjoyed primarily by enthusiasts of that field, rather than the general public. As such, they divert resources from things like graphics, sound, and other aspects that would appeal to the general public in favor of focusing on making the experience detailed and realistic. The goal of Red Orchestra, on the other hand, was to present a realistic form of gameplay that would also appeal to gamers as a larger group based on its merits and style - to balance these two issues.

In my analysis of Company of Heroes, I compared the game to "Men of War", a more realistic, but less accessible, real-time strategy game. Company of Heroes is by far the more well-known of the two, because it's a combination of realistic elements and a high-quality presentation. Men of War, on the other hand, has poorer animations, graphics, and sound elements, which makes it less exciting for the player. In short, a person interested in hardcore realism will likely prefer Men of War, but the average player will respond more positively to Company of Heroes, which is reflected in its higher sales and critical reception.

The Silent Hunter series is about as "real" as a submarine game can get, and as such it had a very loyal following of submarine and history enthusiasts. However, by Silent Hunter 4, the developers wanted to branch out their audience. They did this by improving the graphics (adding a lot of background details and "eye-candy") as well as making the difficulty system more dynamic and flexible, going from "really unrealistic" to "incredibly realistic". The idea was to attract gamers who wouldn't normally consider playing by eliminating some of the issues with the difficulty curve and mechanics that kept them away, while also making the game nicer to look at.

Still, one of the potential problems for this approach is that Silent Hunter's basic gameplay (a wide-open sandbox where ships and convoys patrol back and forth, leaving the player to decide their own goals) is enjoyable primarily if you like submarines. There's no advancement, at least not in the direct RPG sense. It's a game that's played if you enjoy playing games about submarines. There's nothing else to it. This is an aspect that has been criticized about the games, in the same way that Full Spectrum Warrior was criticized because you "don't learn any new maneuvers".

In fact, Full Spectrum Warrior is a good game to bring into this discussion. There are essentially two versions of the original FSW: the more detailed, but less "prettied up" Army version, and the more consumer-friendly Release verson. The Army version is actually included in the Release version and can be accessed through a code - it's got less visual quality, but more detailed gameplay that includes civilians and improved building mechanics. This can be identified as the major tradeoff and the intended balance of "accessible realism": detail versus presentation.

Detail refers to the amount of systems in play in a given situation. For example, in a flight simulator, a "highly detailed" game would include things like wind resistance, proper aerodynamics, and stalling. This would make the game more realistic and complex, but also give it a higher learning curve. In contrast, a more "arcade-like" simulator would start with simple concepts (pitch, yaw, loops, and so on) and then work with that. Another example would be the physics system in Dwarf Fortress. There are many things constantly being influenced, which makes it complex and realistic, and yet intimidating as well - since you can't just sort of dig haphazardly through the rock, the gameplay becomes more complex.

The dynamic difficulty mentioned with regards to Silent Hunter is by no means unique. There are many simulators, including IL-2 and Wings of Prey, that have a dynamic difficulty system. The concept is this: the more things you have to pay attention to, the harder the game will be. If you are playing Silent Hunter with infinite oxygen, you can focus on major tasks without worrying about oxygen levels. If you are playing Wings of Prey with arcade rules, you can shoot down enemy planes without worrying about running out of ammo or fuel. The basic concept may be the same, but there's less things for the player to worry about.

For example, with regards to Full Spectrum Warrior, it's easy to pick up on the basic gameplay: keep your teams behind cover, use smoke or suppression to allow your teams to move forward. The unrealistic parts of the game, such as the simplified ammo system and the fact that "behind cover = invincibility", allow the player to focus more solidly on those prior elements. If they were accurately included, then the player would have to juggle all those different elements. It's the difference between a tutorial mission and a trial by fire - you have to space out concepts and allow the player time to learn them at a leisurely pace, or else they're going to feel overwhelmed.

Men of War tends to provoke this sort of response: it gives you a lot of tools to use, but its presentation makes it so that rather than those tools being valid options for different situations, they're making things aggressively complicated by throwing a billion things at the player and saying "okay, sort them out while you're being shot at". In contrast, Company of Heroes only gives you a few things to worry about (mostly your larger system of resources), meaning that you don't have to interrupt your orchestration of an entire platoon to have one guy run out and get some more ammo for his gun. The question a developer must ask themselves is: what is the focus of my game? Is this low-level stuff worth exploring, or should I assume that the player would rather worry about higher-level tactics?

Having a complex game isn't bad, but it's definitely intimidating. In real life, the things depicted by most simulators are actually jobs - you have to go to school or train for weeks to learn how to do it, and the reason you would do that is because it is a profession. Learning how to play a "realistic" game can, therefore, be a huge commitment, and is anathema to the idea of "cheap thrills". However, the more things that are unrealistic, the less sense a game makes when examined under the light of its connection to real life. The more realistic a game, the more authentic an experience it provides, and the more it is capable of teaching the player in mechanical terms. Detail is, therefore, the logical arm of the game's believability.

Presentation refers to the quality of the game in visual and audio terms. Good design should allow the player to locate and use resources, and they should also make the player feel immersed in the game. Good graphics and sound design can mean the difference between a basic mechanical understanding ("I am being shot at") and an automatic emotional response ("Get down!"). It is the job of presentation not just to "look good" but also to convince the player that the world they are seeing is real, rather than simply being markers on a board or cutouts at a range.

Better graphics allow for better identification on the part of the player. For example, in Company of Heroes the brightly colored stripes on vehicles aren't realistic or even sensible, but their role is to help the player locate them and identify them. The same thing is also why there's a mini-map, and why a highlighted squad has circles under all its members. One of Men of War's problems, on the other hand, is that it's difficult to keep track of your troops because of the graphics design and quality. Red Orchestra tries to make the realistic difficulties of identification into a gameplay element. However, if its graphics weren't as good, things like draw distance and poor models would adversely affect the player's ability to identify targets at "realistic" distances.

Even in highly detailed games, a good production value can help with immersion. Steel Battalion is an XBOX mech game famous for having a custom controller that represents literally the entire dashboard, down to the windshield wipers. In such a game, something as simple as the startup sequence is part of the immersion. In Silent Hunter, the graphics are part of convincing the player that they're really in a submarine - everything from the crewmen to the detailing on the sub itself. Without convincing graphics, a "simulator" is just a training tool: it teaches the system, but it doesn't really put you there. Presentation is the sensory arm of the game's believability.

The conflict between detail and presentation is one of resources, rather than ideology. This manifests in two ways: hardware resources and developer resources. Detail and presentation vie for position in these two fields, and it is these fields that causes them to be at odds in the first place. Dwarf Fortress can help us illustrate these issues.

In Dwarf Fortress, the complex mechanisms covering every single aspect of physics in the entire virtual world are capable of slowing down powerful modern computers even though the game itself is done with ASCII characters. You could not replicate the experience with better graphics, at least not without improving computer processing technology. You could simplify the game to make it more feasible, but since a lot of the game's systems (not to mention charm) derives from these complex operations, it wouldn't be the same game. This is a hardware resources issue.

The one-man dev team behind Dwarf Fortress updates the game fairly frequently, but each update consists of more complexities, rather than, say, something to make the game more accessible. For example, he'll happily make lava physics more realistic when the game is still basically a mess in terms of controls. His work and coding makes the game more complex and realistic, but it does not make it better in terms of accessibility. This is a developer resources issue: time spent doing one thing can't be spent doing another, and budget spent on one aspect can't be spent on another. If the developers want to appeal to a mass audience, they're going to prioritize graphics. If they want to appeal to enthusiasts, they're going to prioritize detail.

Both detail and presentation are important to create a sense of immersion. The former is necessary for logical reasons, and the latter is necessary for sensory ones. However, developers often choose between one or the other, resulting in highly-accurate, highly-detailed games that don't draw in the user, or very attractive and visually stimulating games that don't have any basis in reality. Movies like Saving Private Ryan work because they actually have both bases covered. If Saving Private Ryan wasn't so gritty and accurate (except for the entire movie after Omaha Beach) then it wouldn't have been praised as highly as it was. The improved presentation was used to reinforce the details by making them more tangible and visible to the audience.

Therefore, I would say that instead of "niche games" only working towards total accuracy, they should try a little more to make it visually immersive, as has been done by Silent Hunter, Full Spectrum Warrior, and so on. If a game is totally accurate but has poor presentation, it will only be accepted by people who like the subject enough to ignore the presentation. If a game is totally inaccurate but has great presentation, it will be picked up by people who like the graphics enough to ignore the unrealistic elements. Presumably, the best option is to find a balance somewhere in the middle.