One of the nice things about games is that, unlike in real life, you can usually pretend that the world revolves around you.  I mean, I have tried on occasion in real life to take the view that I am the most important person in the world, but damn if the world doesn’t agree with me.

In games, however, there is no question as to who is in charge.  Mother Brain will patiently wait deep underground in Zebes for me to show up, those zombies will linger calmly outside the window for me to pass by before crashing through, and the Combine wouldn’t even think about attacking the rocket site until I am fully prepared. 

While it certainly can be nice to be the center of the universe, if only so long as my system is powered up, there are often times when games may be better served by shifting some of the focus of the story away from the player and back to the world itself.

There are basically two ways of centering a gameworld: Either on the player, or on the world (this, obviously, is only for games with worlds.  Tetris could care less about such matters).  In a player-centric world, things happen only when the player makes them happen.  The overwhelming majority of RPGs exist in this style, as well as most FPSes.  In a player-independent world, things happen regardless of what the player is doing, and this can have important effects on what the player encounters in the world.

Pick any Final Fantasy out of thin air, and you will have perfect example of the player-centric world.  In Final Fantasy VI, the Emperor and Kefka, after harnessing the power of the statues to raise the floating continent high above the world, won’t do a damn thing until the party shows up to stop them.  You can take your airship from Mobliz to Figaro and back a hundred times and nothing will change about that.  In Chrono Trigger, Queen Zeal doesn’t power up the Mammon Machine until you are there to see it, regardless of how many side trips to prod the Nu you make.

The passage of time in these games is completely dependent on the player.  Time is, in essence, totally irrelevant; nothing happens until the player makes it happen.  Pacing in the game is basically left up to the player, so there is never much pressure to move things along unless they want to.

On the other side of the spectrum are the games that feature a persistent flow of time, independent of the player’s actions.  I’ve only ever encountered a handful of games that function in this way, but they have all shown themselves to be quite memorable.

In Wizardry VII: Crusaders of the Dark Savant, your party travels the lands of Guardia, searching for the maps that will ultimately lead you to the hidden Astral Dominae.  As you travel the world, days and nights pass you by, showing that time marches on regardless of what you are doing.  Stuck out in the wilderness, your healers drained of magic and your potion bottles empty, you can watch an entire week pass by as you stop and rest to heal your weary team.

But what does it really mean? A day/night cycle isn’t a particularly clever bit of design if all it does is texture-swap the sky to a darker color.  Well, in Wiz7, it does much more than that.  Sometimes, after battling your way through a dungeon, weary with fatigue and ready to claim your prize, you find that someone has beaten you to the punch: the map is gone, with nothing but tattered wax wrappings left behind.  Not all is lost; somewhere out there, an NPC is hauling around that map, you can hunt them down and kill them and claim what is rightfully yours.  Or you could talk to them and negotiate for it, if that’s that kind of person you are.

Wizardry VII created a living world like none other I had encountered before in an RPG; the many NPCs that roamed the land lived their own lives and took their own actions outside of whatever it was I was doing. This by itself was nothing new to me; Ultima had a day/night cycle with NPCs that went about different routines depending on the time.  The difference in Wizardry was that, ultimately, it mattered to the path I took through the game. Share too much information with an NPC (a map location, for instance), and they might spread it to someone else.  If you then waste your time stomping around the woods for weeks on end, that other NPC might get the lead on you and you won’t find out until it’s too late.  NPCs would share information with each other, trade with each other, and occasionally even kill each other, all without player involvement.  Some events were still hard-coded to the player, but enough were independent that the game could play out entirely differently the next time you went through it depending on whom you talked to and when.

While a world that does not revolve around the player does add fascinating new layers of storytelling possibilities, it does carry some problems with it.  First and foremost, it is much more difficult to design a full narrative in this kind of system; you must build a branching storyline that takes into account many combinations of possible outcomes. Granted, within this framework, a designer would have lot of leeway in determining what comes down to matters of time and what doesn’t – not every action (or inaction) by the player needs to lead to a shift in the story.  In the example of Wizardry VII, there are still plenty of plot points that remain consistent regardless of how long the player takes to get to them; this allows a certain consistency in story while still layering the “living” world on top.  Star Control II as well, to look at something outside the world of RPGs, implements this idea in some aspects; during the course of your travels, depending on who you’ve talked to and what you’ve done, events can take place that you may or may not be able to influence – take too much time trying to console the Utwig, and you might discover that it’s adios, Pkunkos.

The key point here is that these kinds of experiences come down to choice and consequence. Obviously, losing the game is the most obvious consequence in most time-based situations (the Vault running out of water in Fallout, for instance), but having the game end is not particularly interesting from a story standpoint.  Instead, creating situations where the player is instead left to deal with consequences of their decisions.  In Suikoden Tierkries, when one of my troops tells me it’s absolutely vital that I get to a certain city before the enemy troops invade, it means nothing to me.  I can instead go run side jobs for (literally) two years of in-game time before finally dealing with the issue.  What if instead, thanks to my lack of urgency, the city was conquered?  Now instead of dealing with the defense of the location, I am instead in an entirely different section of story wherein I must retake it and deal with any other ramifications?  Personally, I think this would provide a much more dynamic, much more engrossing experience.

Perhaps designers worry about the difficulty of plotting out such a game, or perhaps they that the player won’t like dealing with a world beyond their control.  Perhaps they worry that the player will miss important events while they are out grinding levels for three hours.  Perhaps they should examine why the player needs to grind levels in the first place…

Shifting away from a player-centric world to something more fluid comes with definite challenges, but the possibilities inherent in it to create rich, dynamic worlds (with built-in replay value, as well), is a possibility that excites me.  When it is done well, it is incredibly memorable; and as it currently stands, so few games have done it thus far that I’ve got plenty of room in my memory for more.