How to make Faster Than Light more Human (and Alien)

Faster Than Light is such a good game in a lot of ways, but I’ve noticed something about it that bothers me. The morality of Faster Than light is… complicated. Your mission is at once simple and insanely difficult, get the top-secret information to the Federation without being caught by the advancing Rebels or destroyed by the many other dangers of the universe. Within the scope of this larger mission it becomes easy to justify actions for the greater good. You don’t have to give out fuel to stranded strangers. You don’t have to save people from a burning space station. You don’t have to intervene to attack slavers or pirates. Further complicating this is the fact that it’s unclear what the Rebels or the Federation stand for, the immediate moral conflicts seem more real than what the game tells you is the actual objective. Which you will probably fail at anyway.

Further complicating things is the fact that the game often doesn’t punish you for doing something morally wrong. Sometimes it does, but more often it doesn’t. This absence of a mechanic is in itself a clever choice, it gets across the feel of an uncaring and uncertain universe perfectly. Even better, the game is teaching you to behave immorally, something that could bite you in the ass later on. However, where this falls apart is with the emotional lives of your crew. Sometimes you will decide on a morally reprehensible course of action, and the game will note that your crew is not happy about this. This doesn’t translate into gameplay at all. This is where the game should take a leaf out of the book of Darkest Dungeon, and make it possible for your crew to get stressed out or angry.

The universe of Faster Than Light is vast, and everywhere you travel you meet with unrest, slavery, disease, piracy, asteroid field, former allies who turn on you, rebels who want to kill you for ill-defined reasons, and cool sounding tourist sites you don’t have the time to visit. This is not a place where going about your job should be easy. At the moment, the only way the journey changes your crew is that they learn new skills, which immediately becomes useless when you find an alien who already has that skill maxed out. This game mechanic treats your crew like objects. Like your ship’s weapon or shield systems they’re there to be upgraded and fixed when damaged. Wouldn’t it be more interesting if by making immoral decisions, you caused your crew to question whether they’re on the right side at all. It would also make your punishment for bad behaviour cumulative rather than random.

One place where these moral mechanics are really necessary is when you encounter slave traders. As depressing as the Faster Than Light universe is, slavers might be the most reprehensible thing in it. The only way to stop slavers is to destroy their ship, which is no solace to any slaves who were onboard. You can choose not to attack, or alternatively you can buy one of their slaves and free them to work in your crew. This raises all sorts of moral questions. If you buy someone, and they are expected to work in your crew, and you don’t have an option to take them home, are they really free at all? I’m not suggesting you should be able to keep slaves, and perhaps in this savage lonely universe an inevitably doomed fighter ship isn’t such a bad place to be. But I think you should have the option to return former slaves home, and if you don’t they could reasonable feel quite upset about that. Having every freed slave pull a genie from Aladdin on you is a little too neat.

These emotional mechanisms would really be amplified when faced with the tensions between alien races. There’s an event where a Zoltan ship is attacking a Mantis one and will soon destroy it. In theory, the Mantis are ruthless enemies, and the Zoltan are your allies albeit somewhat overzealous with their laws. However, in the unrest brought on by the Rebellion, the Zoltans are nearly as likely to attack you as the Mantis. There’s also a romantic appeal to joining the wild Mantis on the losing side, against the uptight Zoltans. This is a wonderfully crafted and instantly engaging dilemma. But what is really interesting about this situation is that no matter what you decide, the Mantis and Zoltan members of your crew are unfazed by you choosing between their two races.

Given that the Mantis are so warlike and dangerous, it would make sense if your crew generally felt uneasy about working with them. In another event a virus infects and destroys a member of your crew, one of the mechanical Enji. after you defeat an Enji ship trying to destroy the virus, it reconstitutes his body with the virus’ consciousness and joins your crew. While this new virus crewmember has excellent stats, this would undoubtedly trouble any other Enji crew. In theory the Enji don’t feel fear, and yet they have enough self-preservation to try and destroy your ship with the virus on, why wouldn’t they try to kill the virus crewmember out of fear of infection? And what about other emotions? Can the Enji feel love or grief?

There’s an achievement you can get when playing as a Kestrel Cruiser called the United Federation. It’s a major part of unlocking more advanced Cruiser designs. You get the achievement by having 6 crew-members from different alien races. At the moment, all this means is having enough money and visiting enough shops, until you have bought yourself the necessary crew. This, I feel, misses the point. Unity is hard, and the mechanics should reflect these tensions. We see this in the fall of the Federation which, the achievement implies, held up the ideal of unity ideals. In addition, most sectors of space you pass through do not belong to the Federation anymore, they are divided between the various alien races. Unity is hard, but as each of these races has something to offer, it’s something worth working for.

Should Themes Develop From Gameplay? Rambling Thoughts on Ludonarrative Dissonance

Spoilers for Crypt of the NecroDancer and Papers Please

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Something has bothered me about Crypt of the NecroDancer from the start. It’s a wonderful game that uses a really simple innovation, all movements have to be performed on the beat of a song, to add a sense of urgency and fluidity to an old fashioned 2D dungeon-crawler. Though the change is musical, in fitting with the title it made a game about movement. This is reinforced by an increasing number of enemies that not only move in odd patterns, but effect your movements too. Some pull you towards them or teleport you elsewhere, while others reverse your arrow buttons or create icy paths you can slide down. This all seems very good, so what’s the problem exactly? I didn’t identify what it was until I saw this Dan Olson video explaining the concept of ludonarrative dissonance.

 

Ludonarrative dissonance is a term used to denote a thematic disconnect or conflict between a game’s gameplay and story. For example, a game’s story may revolve around whether violence is ever acceptable but the gameplay involves copious headshots. The opposite of this is ludonarrative harmony, where gameplay themes carry into story and vice versa, when achieved this makes a game feel more wholistic. Dan’s response to criticisms of these concepts based on how we look at film, is to say these critical tools could also be applied to film as cinemanarrative dissonance. I think this is a valid tool to suggest but in suggesting it he seems to ignore the specific relevance of dissonance to video games. Films tend to come about because a director, who oversees and unites all aspects of a project, has a story to tell. Games still often emerge from gameplay elements alone, and arguably this is the best way to build a story.

The story of Crypt of the NecroDancer feels tired and staid, it’s the kind of story familiar to Roguelikes. This wouldn’t be a problem with your average genre revitalisation, but the gameplay is so dynamic it creates a major. The story is told largely through unskippable cutscenes, which after 10 minutes of dancing and dodging, seem to plod along. Largely they detail events remembered in the past, often giving your character a passive feel. The shopkeepers that can be rescued on some of the levels are utterly irrelevant to the plot, sacrificing a major possibility for more integrated storytelling. And the objective of trying to reclaim your heart from the NecroDancer fails to generate the same urgency as the rapidly climaxing music does, perhaps because he never shows up in the gameplay until the very end.

Towards the end of the game, story and gameplay come into direct conflict. Once you have beaten the incredibly difficult Zone 4, you are faced with one of the game’s toughest bosses. Dead Ringer is a fitting final boss in terms of difficulty, but in story terms he is not the NecroDancer but your transfigured father. You don’t know this until after the fight, which rather than acting as an effective twist removes the story stakes from the fight. Afterwards you have to have a second boss fight with the NecroDancer afterwards. Because you are now joined by your father you fight the NecroDancer in tandem, when one of you moves so does the other, and when one of you dies you both lose. The game has given you no chance to master this skill previously (this could have been changed if you had first fought alongside your father, then seen him transfigured, introducing a sense of urgency), so that you can master this new mode of gameplay the final boss fight is anticlimactically easy. In case it’s not clear I don’t think a game should follow a hard boss fight with an easy one as its finale. The generic storyline of Crypt of the NecroDancer has contorted the gameplay of the final levels beyond recognition, this could have been resolved if gameplay instead inspired story.

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What would a game look like if story stemmed naturally from gameplay? Perhaps something like Papers Please. The themes of its gameplay are monotony, desperation and messy human error. YouTuber HBomberGuy (who you should all go and follow immediately) argued in his Darkest Dungeon review that Papers Please has one of the best ludonarratives ever, because in obeying the games rules you learn to compromise your own morality, and these rules can easily be disobeyed. The genius of Papers Please is that it recognises that games inherently dehumanise human characters by making them subject to gameplay mechanisms, so it applies this to a real life situation where people are dehumanised by making you a border guard enacting arbitrary immigration rules.

However, Papers Please is not perfect in terms of ludonarrative dissonance. While it makes sense that the effect you have on strangers lives would not come back to haunt you, this should not apply to your family. While not punishing you for it, the gameplay actively encourages you to let some of your family die by allowing you to save money on food this way. The point of rejecting someone at the border is that you can reject them without punishment to make money at your job, the point is you can do awful things to someone when they mean nothing to you. But your family should mean something to you in gameplay terms, or else what are you fighting for in the game? While someone doing awful things just for their job is frightening because they have a banal motive, someone doing awful things for their family is more disturbing because it represents the perversion of positive emotions. And this distinction could have been grasped with more attention to the interaction of gameplay and story themes.