pt. 1: coming of age RPGs
Sable is a coming of age RPG, a genre mashup that makes so much sense it feels stupid.
Theres an inherent ludonarrative assonance to the concept, you the player are thrust in to a new world that you are left to explore. Finding your place in the world is a natural consequence of constraints that the presence of a player puts on the narrative; you have usually never spent any time in the game world before booting it up for the first time, so naturally you're going to have to figure some shit out.
A common solution for this is the trope of playing an amnesiac, as in Disco Elysium, Fallout: New Vegas and Planescape: Torment (the crpg holy trinity), which does effectively evoke a sense of mystery and provide a good reason for all the expository dialogue. Another solution to resolving these constraints is by making the protagonist a child, to create a coming of age story. Take Sable as an example, you are the member of a small pseudo-tribal community in a desert filled with artefacts from an ancient technologically advanced civilisation. The custom in this society is that everyone wears a mask, which they choose during their gliding, a ritual everyone in the society undergoes when they come of age. The game is to complete this ritual.
Throughout the game you explore the surrounding areas on your glider and talk to their local communities to find out about the world around you as you decide your place in it. You decide whether you want the climbing mask because you really enjoy those challenges or the mechanist mask, because you found yourself gravitiating to the mechanists in the game. The game is really open, after the first half hour you can pretty much do anything in any order, its game design philosophy is compared to the new zelda games for good reason. Its simplicity is really elegant, Its really quite beautiful.
This is a genre fundamentally about a character who finds their place in the world, but what sets this apart in the context of a game, is that You the player are in the driving seat. You are given the space to try things out, to assume identities temporarily. If you don't enjoy the fishing minigame, don't become an angler, you don't need to engage with that part of the game to complete it because theres so much more game to explore, go climb a rock, become a cartographer, do anything. This makes the genre about the process of finding yourself more than anything else, you pick things up, you figure out what it does and then you either put it down or continue investigating.
This is to me the potential of a coming of age RPG.
pt. 2: a bad review of road 96
Road 96 is a game I picked up at the beginning of this week, intruigued by its concept. The game is set in an alternate US where things got so bad that many teenagers are trying to leave. There is one way out by land, along the titular road 96, and it was locked down for 10 years after a terrorist attack. The game loosely follows a rogue-lite structure, I wouldn't exactly describe it as such for various reasons but it has the main mechanic of repeated runs in a somehwat randomly generated series of scenarios. The reason I describe its "rogue-like elements" so loosely is because rather than a dungeon so typical of the genre the scenarios are scenes in a choose your own adventure narrative that are jumbled up every time you play the game. In every run you play a new teen who'se trying to cross the border, but you run into the same few characters whose stories interconnect, like in a Robert Altman film. I like this concept, I've seen the setting before(we'll get to it) but theres enough narrative and mechanical weirdness going on that I picked it up, sort of hungry for more coming of age RPGs.
I have problems with the games writing in parts and I find how it seems to dismiss one of the oldest political debate in history rather distasteful, but I don't really want to go into that because its not relevant to my larger point about this genre of game. The reason I bring this game up is because it makes a good case study in how not to make a game with these themes in this genre.
In our example of sable, we are put in a sandbox where we are told to "figure it out", this is not the case in Road 96, where we are given a clear goal. This does limit our ability to develop a character within the game to the extent that Sable does, but this doesnt exclude it from the genre. We can still figure out our relationship to our journey, for example the charcter you are playing in one run could be leaving for political reasons but another for familial ones, in fact a rigid framework like this could make a very good coming of age story that has more specificity than Sable, and that does seem to be what these developers were vaguely trying to achieve. Instead the game frequently gives you three telegraphed options for its "political" dialogue options: the reform option(signified by a ballot symbol), the revolution option(signified with a fist logo, the one that was popular around Black Lives Matter), and the abstain option(signified by a symbol of a bindle). The problem with this presented itself to me very quickly; of the three options you are given to roleplay as, one of them is embedded into the framework of the game you are initially told that you are playing.
Road 96 is somehow obessed with subverting the game it initially presents itself to be, like in inscryption or undertale, where this is part of the narrative. Though I'm not sure this is entirely intentional on Road 96s part, but lets take it that it is. What is the aim of Road 96? We'll start with looking at the achievements, as these provide a set of goals other than "reach road 96". I'd characterise the steam achievements to fall into roughly 3 categories. The first is that of plot beats; "meet Zoe for the first time", "make a hard choice crossing the border", "Discover Petria's fate"(I looked at a spoilerwall for this one, I haven't actually played the game this far), all kinda ambiguous achievements you get for moving the story along. The next category is what I call flavour achievements; "pet a cat", "add 3 rocks to a cairn", "collect all the tapes", these arent really interesting to me, theyre kinda fun though. Then theres a third category; "call home", "Help zoe escape the cops", and "call and donate to a presidential campaign". While not neccesarily at odds, the way the text treats its political options(especially how selfish the abstain/leave dialogue options sound) implies that these mark abandonment of the character and quest you are given.
We could also look at the meaning of its genre; to find your place in the games world. This worked so well in my beloved Sable after all. Somehow, the roleplaying mechanics of Road 96 don't feel condusive to exploring anything, or discovering anything. This is partially a problem with the world presented being a bit of an uninteresting farcical parody to the 21st century US, the evil president being a mashup of Bush and Trump and all, but this is also because everything is clearly telegraphed. Not every piece of dialogue affects anything, and the ones that do are telegraphed with the symbols I described earlier, accompanied with a message that says that "your choice matters". There can only be 3 flavours of political statement, and while I recognise the contraints of video game rpgs, having played the game for 6 hours I have not seen these choices come to a narrative end, or anything that would reasonably count as "mattering". This telegraphing doesn't allow the player space to discover the meaning of anything for themselves, theres no moment where you take a leap of faith in the narrative.
pt. 3: reflective control
putting road 96 down and moving on.
In the Score, C. Thi Nguyen writes:
"This is the special magic of games. We can try different games and see how they feel. We can hop between them. We can try out different scoring systems and constraint systems and see what we love. We can step into a game, try on that agency, and experience the action on offer. And then we can step back and ask ourselves if we want to play it again or something different. We can shift difficulty levels, change opponents. We can modify our games, adding contraints, changing the goals. We can explore, we can tinker, we can explode, we can create. Thats's because games are voluntary indulgences, and unlike the recalcitrant world, we can choose them and sculpt them to give us exactly the experience we desire and cherish.
Let's call this relationship reflective control"
While Nguyen's reflective control happens outside of the game, it happens within the text of a game all the time, especially for RPGs. Theres two other genres of game we can look to for really good examples of reflective control within a game; roguelikes and metroidvanias. In roguelikes, you can adjust your playstyle for every run, once you finish a game you can reflect and adjust accordingly. In metroidvanias, you can go explore somewhere else if an area is too difficult, or if we simply don't like it. Some areas are mandatory but the order in which the world is explored changes the conditions of play.
The traditional game has a single goal, be it free princess peach from Donkey Kong(or Bowser), climb celeste mountain, or reach New Vegas. Sable has a shifting goalpost by design, it is reactive to you and your wants for Sable. This is the beauty inherent to the side quest, and Sable more than anything I've ever played is entirely side quests. Most importantly, you decide when Sable ends. You can end the game after finding your first mask, or you can complete all of the achievements and return home then. The open world(which we can understand as an extension of the metroid game design philosophy), also allows for reflective control in Sable, if you want the climbing mask but are bad at climbing, you should go find some easier challenges, or level up your stamina before returning to the really difficult climb you were struggling with earlier. The ludonarrative is one of learning and growing, much like the experience of growing up.
The roguelike structure of Road 96 should also allow for more reflective control, every run allowing you to try different personalities and see the consequences of different actions. However this potential is left unrealised by the game as the promised consequences of your actions don't resolve within a run. It seems to me that the aim of road 96 is to subvert the game itself, and I don't know how this sits with me, it certainly feels less that the intention is less that the player character finds out about themselves. Rather, through this subversion of a narrative about rebelling/defecting, a conservative narrative emergence. It feels like the intented narrative is that you grow out of your rebellious teenage years, rather than growing into an adult.