Interview: Gamer Chelsea Levy on Compelling Stories and Villains in Games

In this post, I will be interviewing Chelsea Levy, who enjoys both digital and tabletop games in her free time. Chelsea and I will discuss story in  games. This post contains spoilers for Tales of Symphonia, Pokémon, and Final Fantasy Tactics Advanced.

Ada: Thank you for speaking with us today, Chelsea. My first question is about digital games. What's your favorite digital game? Tell us a little bit about why you especially enjoyed this game.

Chelsea: My favorite game was Tales of Symphonia. Not only was the game beautifully detailed and wonderfully designed graphic wise, it also had a captivating and beautiful story. You wanted to play the game multiple times to see all the multiple ways the story can go and what happens to the characters. They are developed characters that you seamlessly fall in love with and you are compelled to complete the story. It's an action RPG that broke away from the turn based style, and allowed a free roam battle field that was faster paced and easy to manipulate.

Ada: Are there any moments from Tales of Symphonia's story that you found especially memorable?

Chelsea: The game had a lot of plot twists. Characters that you thought were your allies ended up being some of your greatest enemies. After you are far into your journey to save your world, you find out that in order to save your world, you need to send another into despair.

Ada: Have you ever disliked a game's story? If so, what did you dislike about it?

Chelsea: Ever since the beginning of Pokémon there has always been the "bad team." Team Rocket was awesome. They made sense. In each game they need to up the danger and the bad guys become increasingly ridiculous. For example, Team Aqua and Team Magma have had some of the most poorly planned out motives. Aqua wants to make it rain forever making more area for water Pokémon to live. Which takes away from where humans, including them, can live. I guess they like submarines. Magma wants to erupt a volcano in order to expand the landmass for land Pokemon. Which would wipe out all human civilizations that were on the land. Not to mention the volcano was in the center of the main landmass so they would be covering land that already existed. The leader of Team Galactic wanted to eliminate human spirit. Plasma's leader wants to be the only person on the planet with Pokémon. Team Flare's leader wants to eliminate the human population because they were terrible. All Team Rocket wanted to do was be rich and steal stuff.

Ada: I agree. It seems like newer Pokémon games have a problem with forced villainy. Team Rocket's simplicity worked well for them.

Chelsea: They were criminals. It was simple. Everyone after is a maniac. There was a small jump from criminal activity to genocide.

Ada: It sounds like they need to take a more subtle approach when it comes to writing their villains. My next question relates to this concept. Have you ever played a game with an especially well-written villain?

Chelsea: Final Fantasy Tactics Advanced: the "villain" was a boy wanting to keep the town of Ivalice as a Final Fantasy-esque country to escape bullies, disappointment in his father, and be with an illusion of his dead mother. He was a villain with a lot of sympathy, and mostly a victim of his own naiveté. The only reason Mewt qualifies as a villain is because he finds out what is going on, and ignores it, willfully imposing his fantasy world on the town.

Ada: That's all the time we have for this interview, Chelsea. Thank you very much for your time! This was a great, informative interview.

Formatting Text in C++: Escape Sequences

We now have text games that provide our players with meaningful output, allow our players to make choices, and give our players more than one opportunity to input a correct response. Players might find the text in our text games too overwhelming as it is, because it is a large block of text. Our text game might benefit from a few well-placed blank lines, but we can format text in more sophisticated ways using escape sequences. Escape sequences change the way that output is formatted in cout statements.

Escape sequences begin with a backslash and are followed by another character. The backslash tells the compiler that an escape sequence is being used, and the character that follows the backslash tells the compiler which character to insert into the output. Escape sequences are placed inside of a string literal in a cout statement.

This chart shows several escape sequences that you may want to place in your text game, how they look in code, and how they look in output.

Escape Sequence Chart

Escape Sequence	Name	In Code	In Output
\n	Newline	cout << "1. Fight the evil worm.\n2.  Teleport away.\n";	1. Fight the evil worm. 2. Teleport away.
\t	Horizontal tab	cout << "What will you do?" << endl; cout << "1.\tFight the evil worm."  << endl; cout << "2.\tTeleport away." << endl;	What will you do? 1.             Fight the evil worm. 2.             Teleport away.
\”	Double quote	cout << "Hello world!" << endl; cout << "\"Hello,\" said the world."  << endl;	Hello world! “Hello,” said the world.
\\	Backslash	cout << "The save file is in C:\\  My Documents." << endl;	The save file is in C:\ My Documents.
\a	Alert	cout << "The computer beeped.  The AI knew about your betrayal.\a"  << endl;	The computer beeped. The AI knew about your betrayal. The computer will beep as this text appears on the screen.

Experiment with escape sequences until you find a format that works for your text game.

Interview: Game Design Student Ryan Mendenhall on Story in Games

In this post, I interview game design student Ryan Mendenhall on story in games. Ryan has some advice on writing a memorable story in a game.