Insignificance versus Motivation

How do you keep people playing while trying to convey that you are nothing

The challenge:

The challenge here is finding a balance between making the player feel small, insignificant, like they don’t matter, without negatively impacting their motivation to play, their player agency, or making them feel like there is no point to even playing in the first place.

Working with a 5 minute time limit

Having a 5 minute time limit on the playtime of our game restricts us in a few ways. As explained below, relationships in a game take time to build. It takes time for the player to start really caring about other characters (whether human, pets, or some other kind of character). To first build a proper relationship and have that be the player’s motivation, will probably take more time than we have (it is probably faster if you give the player time to reflect on the relationship without the other character present, like in presentable liberty or portal 2). Curiosity however, can be imposed pretty much instantly, as the player starts asking questions like ‘What is this place?’ ‘Why am I here?’ or ‘What’s over there?”. This works pretty well with the fact that you can convey insignificance pretty much instantly with an environment that doesn’t care about the player character (whether its giant man made megastructures, or the wrath of nature (like the freezing cold or caverns filling up with sand), any environment that can easily kill the player without acknowledging their existence works well.

Methods:

Everytime you take away a player’s previous reason or motivation (e.g. the player wants to escape, you reveal that they can’t), you have to make sure their focus shifts in a way that gives them a new reason or newfound motivation (e.g. (part of) whatever made escaping impossible is out there and you can take your revenge, even if it costs your own life). To have this work, every new reason/goal needs to have a less positive outcome than the reason/goal they had beforehand (e.g. from saving a loved one to taking revenge on what killed them).
Let the player accomplish their goal, but in such a way where they don’t reap the fruits of their labour (e.g. they save all of humanity except for themselves but are now doomed to die alone). To have this work, the player must’ve had a reason to complete their goal in the first place, that they never met in the end (e.g. they wanted to save humanity so they could be with their partner again that they got separated from, they saved the rest of humanity but are now doomed to die alone).
This is focused on the environment instead of story: making sure the player is completely at the mercy of the environment. This is done by making the player unable to interact with their surroundings in a way that changes things in a meaningful way: opening doors is fine, but killing enemies isn’t. Opening a laptop to read an email, sure, but destroying rooms or buildings, no. This way, the player can learn about their surroundings and try to escape them, but not change things in a definitive way, which is a good element to use to convey insignificance.
Haven’t decided yet if this is a good method but Make your “reason” sacrifice themselves for you. So if you’re a couple, and your reason is each other, then one of you, the npc, can “fulfill” their reason by saving you, the player, which in doing so, completely destroyed your reason, since they’re now dead. This makes the player kinda feel like the entire world is against them, since they completely lost all reason to go on, but also have to keep going, since if they wouldn’t, the sacrifice would be in vain.
Alienating architecture, meaning, architecture that isn’t designed with the player character in mind. To quote Jacob Geller’s ‘Gaming Harshest Architecture’: “And the point you quickly realize isn't the gameplay or the story; it's the world. The world was not built for you. But you must survive it all the same.” and “Part of what NaissanceE gets across is that being dwarfed by architecture feels fundamentally different than being alone in nature. Nature, at least, isn't designed with a singular purpose in mind. Being lost in nature almost has a sense of solidarity to it. I didn't plan on being there, but neither did the trees or the grass around me. I, and everything else, are collectively alive and shaped by only the most general of plans. But there is no collective in NaissanceE. There's only this extreme alienation. The world feels massive and entirely designed and yet I had no place in it. All other life seemed to have been gone so long it barely made a trace on the architecture. It was like I missed the rapture, or something. Maybe everyone else left their bodies eons ago and so there's no reason for anything to be made for the organic. The game traffics in existential dread. I felt like an outlier on a graph that didn't even have other data points. There was nothing but axes left.” This feeling of being in a world that isn’t made for you, that you don’t belong in, that doesn’t care about you, leaves you with a feeling of existential dread and insignificance (hopefully).

Possible settings:

Cold, snowy, tundra/alaska-like. The neverending cold is a force that will kill you eventually, without even acknowledging that you exist in the first place. You’ll constantly have to fight it until the bitter end.
Space. The sheer vastness of space will make you feel incredibly small, because in comparison, you’re not even a speck of dust. The cold, the gravity, black holes, everything can end you without acknowledging you.
Caves/underground facilities. You can make these a lot bigger than they seem at first hand, with either fog or a lot of tunnels/passageways. If they’re manmade, it’s even more mind boggling to imagine that areas this massive have been built and dug out by people, just to then be abandoned and completely lose their purpose.
Mist/fog. It’s very easy to hide the true scale of something in the fog, by only making the player see part of something at first, and then either showing the thing in its entirety later or just relying on the imagination of the player of how big the whole thing must be.
The ocean. The ocean is kinda like space, in the sense that you’re not even a speck of dust compared to it and a lot of stuff will kill you without acknowledging that you exist. Drowning, hypothermia, whales that swallow you whole, big ships that will never notice you, the list goes on.

Motivations:

Love:

By making the player care about characters over time, the player will make actions and choices for those characters. The player’s motivation can purely be these characters that they love, which can translate into goals like ‘getting to see them (again)’ or simply just ‘doing something for them’.

Hate:

The other way around, making the player hate a character over time, works as well. The player’s sole motivation and goal can be killing the character or ruining their life. A good way to get the player to hate a character is for them to kill a character they love. In both cases, however, you’re using the player’s relationships to the characters. These take time to build.

Curiosity:

You can simply motivate the player by proposing questions and letting them figure out the answer by exploration. This isn’t enough for all players however, since some players want a more concrete goal than simply ‘answering the question’. Because curiosity as a goal/motivation isn’t very concrete, it’s usually a secondary goal/motivation at first, with a primary goal like ‘stopping the sun from exploding’ (Outer Wilds) or ‘escaping’ (SOMA). Though, when posed with enough questions, curiosity can become the primary goal and motivation of the player, while the previous primary goal has completely dissipated (like in Outer Wilds).

Morals:

You can motivate the player by making them ask themselves what the right thing to do is in a given situation, so they’ll handle accordingly. Like if you’re the only person in the world that can save humanity, you’ll feel morally obligated to try and give it your all, even if it may cost your own life. If you’re not the only person, and there are other characters who could totally do it as well, you will feel less obliged to save the world, because you’re not in a special position where everyone is relying on specifically you; anyone could do it.

Avoiding losses

Players hate losing more than they like winning.

Autonomy

Players like the feeling of being in control. Giving them a strong sense of control is a good motivator.

“Examples” (ramblings about games / movies):

Outer Wilds:

Before you reach the Sun Station, a lot of players’ goal is to prevent the sun from going supernova. Upon realising this is impossible, the focus of the player shifts to simply finding out what's going on. This happens because the game has, at the point of reaching the sun station, given the player enough leads and breadcrumbs to make them want to find out what is going on because of the feeling that there still is a bigger picture.

Besides that, the environment in Outer Wilds does not at all care about you. Tunnels fill with sand crushing you, tornados fling you around, black holes suck you up, the sun explodes (if it doesnt suck you in with gravity beforehand). It’s not a world made with you in mind: you just happen to have showed up and are now at its mercy.

Portal 2:

Before The Pit, the main focus of the game is to escape the facility and get revenge on Glados. However, when Wheatley goes mad with power and punches you down The Pit, you end up further behind then where you started. Only now you realize how insanely massive the facility truly is. Instead of being demoralized, your focus shifts to getting out of your new situation to get revenge on Wheatley.

SOMA:

In SOMA, you’re pretty much helpless. All you can do is run and hide, you have no way of retaliating. This means you’re pretty much completely at the mercy of your surroundings and the creatures within. Your first goal is to figure out where you are and why you are there, but you’re quickly told that you need to find the ARK and launch it into space to save yourself and humanity. The main plot point in the game is uploading someone’s mind into a robot, and the continuity that stems from that. The problem is that for the new robot you, it all seems like it worked perfectly. But the old you never stopped existing. If they were trapped, and needed a consciousness transfer into a new body to escape, only the new body would escape; the old one would still be trapped. This happens to “you”, the player, at the end of the game. While you successfully uploaded your consciousness to the ARK, by the luck of the draw, you’re still stuck on earth, while a new you is enjoying their time in the ARK. While you literally saved the continuation of the human race, you can’t help but feel insignificant when faced with being completely alone stuck on earth until you die.

SOMA also poses the question ‘what does it mean to be human?’ and if life is even worth it if you’re “not a real human”. At certain points of the game it allows you to erase brain scans of dead people, essentially making sure that “they” will never live again. You do this because you deem living in a state that is possible down there a worse fate than death. This is especially true when you consider life to be meaningless if it’s not “real”. However, you still continue to play afterwards and continue to launch the ARK into space, which does save humanity, but also dooms a lot of people to eternal life. If you consider this life in a simulation to be meaningless, isn’t this essentially torture? Frankly, while playing, this doesn’t really matter: this is the only hope humanity has left, and you’re the only one that can make it a reality. You automatically feel obliged to launch it into space.

The Long Dark

The Long Dark is the perfect embodiment of how messed up the cold really is. It’s a pretty difficult survival game about surviving in below freezing temperatures. Fires don’t always successfully start, wolves can attack you and cause you to bleed, fires burn you, there's not a lot of food or even usable wood, and the smallest mistakes can cause your demise. This is a great use of the cold to portray insignificance, while not negatively impacting the players agency. Even the smallest mistakes are made by the player after all.

Presentable Liberty

Presentable Liberty is kind of a weird game. For 99% of the game, there is pretty much 0% player agency. There seems to be no way to escape the prison you’re in. The only thing you can do is read letters from your friends and play shitty games on a fake gameboy. Everyone outside is dying of a virus. But the letters from your friends do still leave you with a sliver of hope. Maybe you’ll get to see them again, at some point. Slowly your prison cell starts getting filled up with gifts from your friends. Charlotte, one of the friends sending letters, really wants you to visit her at her pastry shop, but you can’t, since you’re in prison. On the final day, Salvador, your old friend that has been sending you letters, visits your prison with the intent to free you. But, he’s too late. Charlotte had been alone for so long that she ran out of patience and couldn’t take it anymore. She killed herself in the back of her pastry shop. 30 minutes later, Salvador turns off the generator of your hotel to set you free, but in doing so, electrocutes himself, killing him instantly. You leave the hotel through the elevator. Outside, you see a pastry shop. You walk over, and read Charlotte’s final letter. She’s sorry she didn’t have more patience. She left a cake for you on the table. Everyone’s now dead. In a way, they all died for you, while you sat helplessly in your prison cell. They succeeded in their goal, but in doing so, completely destroyed yours. Charlotte doesn’t have to be alone anymore. Salvador freed you from your cell. Mr. Smiley did all he could to keep you happy. And you, who only kept going inside the prison because of their love and their letters, because you truly cared about them and wanted to know how they were doing, are now free from prison. But, without all the reasons you had to escape. Everything that kept you going inside of the prison is gone now that you’re outside. This makes you, the player, feel utterly useless and it makes you wish they wouldn’t have killed themselves for you, but just let you rot in prison without a care in the world. Being the only one alive at the end makes you truly feel insignificant: all hope is lost.

In my opinion the most interesting part about Presentable Liberty is the ending. Right after the game explains that everyone outside is dead, including the two people that you spent 5 days getting attached to, pretty much your only reason for playing the game, it presents you with a choice: do you 1) leave the prison or 2) stay while Dr Money fixes the generator, and get the explanation for why you were imprisoned. Pretty much everyone chooses to leave the prison. But why? If you were motivated by love for the two characters, Salvador and Charlotte, there’s no point in leaving. If you were motivated by the curiosity of why you were stuck there, you *should* pick the option of not leaving the prison. You already know there’s nothing outside waiting for you, except for death and decay. But then why does everyone pick the option of leaving the prison? Loss aversion? Out of spite? Out of hope? Is it cause, even though you don’t know why you were imprisoned, your imprisonment was given purpose by protecting you from the virus outside. Also by giving the player a choice, that is already pretty much made for them (since everyone chooses leaving, that’s the obvious choice) you let the player feel like they have agency and that their time playing the game mattered because THEY made the choice to do something even though that really is the only sensible choice so it could've been left out.

NaissanceE

At the center of NaissanceE is its alienating architecture. You’re wandering through and trying to escape a world that isn’t designed for you. The scale of the environment often switches between really narrow and impossible large, way too bright or completely dark, and is just unconventional. You feel like you don’t belong there, because well, you don’t. There’s lights that move when you touch them to light the way, but they rarely ever go where you want them to go. Even running is unconventional, as you have to manually breathe to keep the running going.

Early concept

Part 1 (Beginning):

Story:

You (19M) live in an underground bunker with a roommate. It’s promised that on your 21st birthday you are taken up to the surface and set free to enjoy the beauty of the outside world. On the night your roommate turns 21, he gets taken out of your room and you decide to sneakily follow him in the dead of night.

Gameplay:

You get shown some text cards explaining your current situation (you’re 19, you’re being set free at 21, your roommate just turned 21). A grandfathers clock strikes 12. You hear a door open and voices (“come with me” etc.). You open your eyes and realise they forgot to close the door, and you get prompted to follow them. You walk through a long corridor with a door at the end. You push the button, but instead of the door opening, the entire wall slides open, revealing the daunting size of the megastructure you’re in.

Environment:

In you’re room, there are 2 beds, a bathroom with a toilet and a shower, a table and 2 chairs. There’s a calender showing the current day and year, and you’re roommates birthday marked on it. In the hallway, there’s painintgs/photo’s of what supposedly is the outside world you’re promised.

Part 2 (Middle):

Story

You quickly realize that they’ve been lying to you. You don’t get taken up to the surface, instead you are killed and farmed for food for the demons/people who rule the bunker. You see your friend get killed like this and continue on upwards to escape/put a stop to this. You find out through audio or text logs that there is no outside world left, everything is a barren snowstorm, which is why the demons/people need to farm humans for food. Eventually, you reach the top and escape the bunker.

Gameplay

Upon exiting the hallway, you reach crossroads. One path leads to the upper floor, one to the human meat grinder, and one to the demon complex. The paths to the meat grinder and demon complex are blocked off, but you can still see inside the meat grinder. The only way you can go forward is to the upper floor. Through 2 or 3 rooms you ascend in the structure.

Upon reaching the heavy duty exit door, you realise it’s welded shut (the demons locked themselves in) but you can escape through the air vents.

Environment

The bunker is huge, you can’t see the walls of it due to the fog in the distance (NaissanceE).

Part 3 (End)

Story

Outside you find yourself in a snowstorm that goes so far the eye can see. <Ethical dilemma>. The camera zooms out. There’s truly nothing left.

Gameplay

Upon exiting the structure, you’re presented with your dilemma. After making the choice, the camera pans up and zooms out, showing an endless snowstorm.

Environment

A blizzard in a snowy alaska like biome that stretches as far as the eye can see.

Possible dilemmas

(1): You find a switch that turns off all the power in the bunker. Do you hit it or not? Turning off the power would kill everyone inside, but atleast they would die thinking there’s a world outside worth living for. If you don’t hit it, every single one of them would realize that there’s nothing left right before they get killed, and it would continue the vicious cycle of the demons feeding off the humans.

(2): A very easy dilemma (Presentable Liberty). By just giving the player the option, even if there’s one obvious answer, it makes the player feel like what THEY did was important because THEY made the correct choice. It makes the player feel like they have agency without really giving them it.