One Month after Amnesia's release

Introduction
It has now been pretty much exactly a month since we launched Amnesia: The Dark Descent. And since the post on a week after release was quite popular, we have decided to do a new overview on where we stand now. This time we will mainly focus on the sales and give some more accurate figures on how things have turned out for us.


The big picture
So, with one month of data to analyze, how did things go? I think it can be summed up with: Better than expected on all accounts! As of today we have sold a total of 36, 000 units (including pre-orders, but excluding boxed sales in Russia), and our goal, which would determine if we would continue or not, were 24,000. Having met and exceeded that goal already feels quite nice. Frictional Games will live to create another game!

15,000 (41.7%) of all sales were in the form of pre-orders, which is quite significant. Part of the explanation for this is that there was a 20% discount during pre-orders and we also believe that people are more inclined to buy a pre-order. With perks such as Steam pre-loading, people seem to think it is worth putting up money before release. And since there is no pirate alternative to a pre-order, it is more likely that people will go through with the purchase (more on pirating later). In any case, pre-orders is probably something we will focus on more for our next title.


Platform specifics
Gathering an exact percentage of sales for Linux turned out to be a bit complicated. Purchases made in our store gets all three platforms, which is the only place to get the Linux version. The total amount of sold units in our own store is about 5000. Since we can connect some of these sales with steam activations and similar, we can make a conservative estimate of 2500 Windows users, leaving 2500 left for Mac and Linux. And since this this is the only store for Linux users, we assume 70% of these are Linux. This means 1750 sold Linux units, or 5% of the total sales.

Mac sales are a bit simpler to estimate, and given the estimates from above plus some other data, comes to about 8% of the total sales. The interesting bit here is that just taking the last week into account the amount of mac sales lie at about 12%. This probably means that the Mac market takes longer to penetrate and that Mac owners might be more likely to buy an "old" game. Unfortunately we do not have data regarding this for Linux, but assume something similar happens there.


Media and user response
As we said in the last post, the response from the media and users have been overwhelming to say the least. Right now, we have 86% at Metacritic, 90% from users on Gamespot, and so on. Considering it is a niche and story based game this feels extra nice (which, as Kieron Gillen points out on RPS, usually get lower meta-scores). We could not be any happier than we are with this response.

So how has this affected the sales? Well it is obviously impossible to say what we would have sold with worse grades, but what we can do is to see what correlations there are between positive reviews and spikes in sales. It turns out there is pretty much none. The only correlation we managed to find was with combined release of the Zero punctuation and Gamespot reviews. These were out very close in time and almost quadrupled sales compared to the previous days before (about 150/day to 600/day). It even seems like this boost still remains.

Apart from this example, it has not been possible to find any other correlations. Part of this is probably due to the noisy nature of the data; many reviews come out at the same time they overlap and it is not possible to discern individual contributions. However, when articles have been alone in time, there still have not been any noticeable spikes. One explanation is that it might be hard for people to find out where the game is bought, as our website is seldom mentioned in previews/reviews. This is especially true for the time before the pre-order became available at the major online retailers. Another explanation is that most reviews have more of a long term effect, instead of an instant sales boost. What this means is that reviews convince players that already know about the game to purchase it, instead of acting as a PR catalyst.

What reviews does do is to make other publications find out about you. Getting a review in a high-status outlet have meant mails from many other publications and convinced other media folk that the game is worth writing about. Thus, as mentioned previously, good review help sales in a long term perspective.


Pirating
Now it is time to discuss pirating and how this has affected us. First of all, it is quite easy to see that there are tons of torrents/shared files of Amnesia available. When we search the web to see if any news on Amnesia has popped up, almost 50% of the results go to a pirated version of the game. This is of course makes us sad, but it is also something one has to deal with when living in today's world. We are well aware that the same technology that allows pirating of our game, is the same that enabled us create the game in the first place. Without a fast Internet and a connected world we would never be able to work together or distribute our games. But this does not mean that we should just ignore piracy and it is important to figure out what kind of impact it has on us.

As I have said, the sales have been above what we had expected, but compared to the response we have gotten it still feels kind of low. For example, the very hyped Minecraft has gotten more than ten times the sales compared us. While being a vastly different game compared to Amnesia, there are some differences that are worth discussing. In terms of the amount of PR received, I would say that Minecraft is more well known, but Amnesia is not far behind. Google gives us two times the hits compared to them and a popular pirate site gives Minecraft double the distributors compared to us. We have gotten more reviews from popular outlets, Minecraft has gotten more viral-like PR. As I said, I think Minecraft has the upper hand here, but not by that much. Still, Minecraft has a over ten times the sales compared to Amnesia, which is a huge difference.

Our conclusion is that a large part of this is due to the lack of pirating in Minecraft compared to us. As I mentioned above, Minecraft has 10x the sales, but only 2x the torrent distributors. A Google search on the subject also turns up twice the hits for Amnesia. It seems like more people are pirating Amnesia and we think there are two main reasons for this. Both of them are related to the single-player nature of the experience.

First of all, once you have played Amnesia there is little meaning to play again. A person pirating the game and finishing it has no real reason to go back. So even if a player likes it and determines that it is well worth paying for, there is no incentive to do so. It is quite common to read on forums that people have downloaded a pirated version and say that they will probably buy it later. The question here is how many actually does this? Even if you really liked the game and want to support the developers, it basically feels like money down the drain since you get nothing extra after paying. This is not the case for a game like Minecraft where more content is released all the time and the game is designed to be highly replayable (and darn it for that, damn time consumer!).

The second reason is the lack of any proper protection. Not only does Amnesia not have any real protection from the start, there is almost no way for us to force people into buying ad-hoc. What we can do is to release patches, but this only affect people that have not been able to start the game, a small part of the user base. So once the game is out we are basically screwed and we can not do much to make people chose a legal over a pirated one. Minecraft requires a server connection and is constantly updated, effectively pushing people towards buying the legit version.

So what to do about this? One way is to create different kinds of games, where we can implement these sort of things. But that just feels wrong. A developer should not design a game based on how it can be protected and doing so can only lead to bad things for our games (to avoid feeding potential flames; this is based on what we want to do with our games, not what we think of others who might do this). What we want to continue doing is to create single player games that try to evolve the way in which videogames tell stories and evoke emotions. Another option is to expand our horizons and try other platforms. This is what we are currently looking into. We do not know what this will mean as of yet, but hopefully we can continue to expand platforms and not limit them.


Our situation
So what does all this money talk mean for Frictional Games as a company? The most positive news is that we have recouped all expenses from creating Amnesia. This is of course awesome, but it needs to be taken into account that we worked long days at a very low salary, using minimal expenses. Our next game will not be possible to do on a budget like that.

For the team, it is now finally back to more normal salaries. This still means that we are paid below, or just at, minimum wage (there is not an actual minimum specified by law, we just mean according to standards) here in Sweden though. We have made some calculations and if we were to increase salaries to normal levels, our current earnings would only last for a year and a half at most. We estimate that it will take at least two years to complete our upcoming game and there are more expenses involved than salaries for the five team members (check the credits for Amnesia!). So right now, we have to stick to having low salaries and see how sales pan out.

At the time of writing our daily sales are at around 350 units, but it fluctuates quite a bit and it is hard to see how it will be in the long term. I said in the previous post that the sales were dropping drastically, but this actually stopped a day or so after posting. Our hope is that it will end up at around 70 per day, as this means that the day-to-day sales would cover monthly salary costs. The money earned at launch could then be used for other expenses and perhaps help us reach more common wages. Very hard to say when a steady level will been reached though. For the Penumbra games it happened two weeks or so after release, but PR for Amnesia is still pouring in, so we assume at least another month.


Final thoughts
Hopefully this post has give some kind of insight into sales for a PC game and where Frictional Games stand now. We are really happy how Amnesia have turned out in all ways. While sales could have been better, people are still buying it and will hopefully continue to. If it stabilizes at a good level, things are looking very bright indeed.

We also feel that we finally can leave Amnesia behind us and start focusing on our next project instead. As this will be our first project where we know from the start that we can finance it ourselves, it will be very interesting to see what can be done. In all our previous games, we have mostly rushed through the production. This is will be the first time we can take our time and make sure that all is the way we want it to.

Exciting times lie ahead and we hope you all will follow us into the future as well!

What videogames lack: Deeper Intent

Tonight a watched a fantastic documentary called Dear Zachary: A Letter to a Son About His Father, and it was a true emotional roller-coaster ride. The film is a about a film-maker starting to make a movie in memory of his murdered friend, when some unexpected developments ensues. It is an experience, straight from reality, that swings you between laughter and heartbreaking despair. I urge you all to see it.

The reason why I want to bring this up, is because this movie has something that video games lack: it has been made with the intent to share something deep and meaningful. It is has not been made to create a fun experience or for commercial gain. It has been made from love and with a very serious goal in mind. The passion that was put into this movies seeps through every frame and it really brings the movie home. Kurt Kuenne, the maker of the film, has something he is truly emotional about and pulls no punches in driving that point home.

This sort of thing just isn't found in games. Almost all games start as some kind mechanic, which is then iterated until fun enough, and anything resembling a deeper meaning is slapped on afterwards. Sure, there are games like Shadow of Colossus, that strive toward creating a battle with gigantic creatures, or Everyday the same dream, which quite obviously go beyond its low-level mechanics. But these still lack the kind of emotional investment that is seen other media. I understand a film like Dear Zachary gets a lot of emotional weight from being a true story, but that is not the point. What I am after is the motivation that drove its creation, the passion behind making it and uncompromising attitude in the way which the meaning is brought forward.

The motivation I am looking for does not need to be the gut-wrenchingly sad story that Dear Zachary tells. It can be whatever emotional experience that lies the creator close at heart. Sad, funny, beautiful, aweinspiring, interesting, disturbing, educational, it does not matter. As along as the end goal is not just to give the player a fun past time, it is a step in the right direction. Screw developments in storytelling techniques, writing, facial animations, full body input, etc. When games are a made with only a fraction of the passion that went into Dear Zachary, the videogame medium is on the path towards true greatness.

(For those interested, two more posts discussing similar themes are found here and here).

On Game Length

Not too long ago, there was a coordinated blog effort with developers like Jonathan Blow, 2D Boy and more commenting on the length of games. The general consensus of these posts was that games should not be judged by their length, but if the experience feels complete or not. Something that we here at Frictional Games agree on.

Now that we have released Amnesia: The Dark Descent, game length has once again come into our lives. There have been several reviews of the game that have stated that the game's length, 6 - 10 hours, was a major negative. Especially considering that the game does not have any replayability (although that is up for discussion).

This has made us a bit concerned. A major goal with our games is to have no fillers, to have a game where everything is focused on creating a certain experience. Since we do not have combat in our games, there is no way to extend length in a simple way (like filling a room with enemies). Just about every minute in our games requires lots of time and effort to implement. If we are to keep on improving the quality of our games, 6 - 10 hours is pretty much the maximum amount of gameplay time we can create.

Especially now that the first week of sales, despite overwhelmingly excellent response, were only moderate (more on that here), this makes us a bit concerned. If 6 - 10 hours for a $20 game gives it a negative mark, what if we increase the price to $30, would this drastically decrease the positive response? Even more serious, this negative feedback on the game's length has made us having discussion topics like "how do we make this section longer?". We try to push this aside and instead focus on more important topics such as "how do make this section more engaging?", but it is still nagging at the back of our heads. Focusing on game length, is something I find can have very negative effect on a game's design (discussed a bit here).

With this background information, we would like to hear your thoughts on this issue! I have set up a poll in our forum here:
http://frictionalgames.com/forum/thread-4427.html
Please take your time and register and place your vote.

Also, please tell us what you think in our forum or here on the blog!

One week after the release of Amnesia

It has now been a week since we released Amnesia: The Dark Descent and I would like to go through some areas of interest. There is a a lot to say really, but I will try and be brief and only concentrate on the most important things.


Making the game available
This was the first time that we have had a game that would be simultaneously released for six different stores on the same day, so we were a bit nervous on how that would go. To make sure that all stores had enough time we sent out the game more than a week before release. This seems to have worked and all the stores had the game available in time for release.

Added to this, we also had a system for pre-order customers to get their download link, serial key and Steam key. Jens have tried this over a month before release and it was very well tested once released. The only problem was some mix up with keys and people loosing their mail, otherwise all went well.

In summary, we are quite happy how the availability of the game turned out and we actually expected there to be more unknown factors popping up and make our lives harder.


Press Response
We had already gotten a few previews and thought we had some idea where the reviews would land. However, reality turned out far beyond our expectations. There has some extremely positive response (as can be seen on the game's page and at meta critic) and we are extremely happy about this. From all the graded reviews so far, all but three have been 80+ (about half of these 90+) and interestingly two of the less positive ones had has a major complaint that there was too much horror in the game. Which in a way makes us happy as well...

We have also been able to reach out to a lot of media, and most major sites have covered the game. A bit disappointingly, a few sites that reviewed and covered the Penumbra games have not mentioned Amnesia. We assume this is because we no longer have a publisher and thus lack the proper channels. For the Penumbra games we handled very little of the marketing ourself and thus lacked email/contacts to many sites (we still tried to contact all media we could think of though).


Player response
Like reviews, response from player has gone beyond our expectations. We noticed this first at the release of the demo. We were unsure of how interesting it would be, but it was received very well. Since then, the name Amnesia has spread like wildfire across the Internets. I think there have been more videos, discussions, etc released at the time of writing than we have accumulated for any of the Penumbra games. It is also telling that the within 24 hours of release, pretty much all major secrets in the game was found out (it took much longer for the Penumbra games).


Piracy
I think the most alarming thing was that the game was available as a pirated copy 24 hours or so before release. This kind of 0-day release can be quite hurtful, as otherwise paying customers might be so anxious to play that they pirate and then forget to pay for it. Since we released the game online only, we were not expecting this and the source of the illegal copy was one of our review copies (with tracking info hacked away). We are not sure what to do about this in the future, but we will have to be more careful and perhaps not send out review copies to so many outlets. It could have gone a lot worse though as a the first review copies (of early builds) were sent out almost a month before release.


Sales
As many of you might already know Amnesia is a sort of make or break game for us. At the time of writing, we are very close to our "all is good"-goal, meaning that we are still in business (due to contractual stuff we cannot release any numbers right now)! However, there are a few "buts" to all this.

The response we got from the game is a lot better than we expected, yet the sales are only "good" according to our, much more modest, expected response. This makes us wonder what sales we would have gotten if the response would have been more like what we thought it would be. If this is our time in the spotlight, then a lot less noticed game would probably put us out of business. As it looks now, we still have to be quite careful in budgeting our next game (although much less careful than what we had to be with Amnesia). We were hoping a really successful release would makes 100% unworried about finances, but that is not what has happened.

Can we really judge sales from just one week? According to current graphs: yes we can. Even though reviews keep coming in from major outlets and we keep pushing out marketing material (videos, release of tools, etc) sales are dropping fast. Around 50% of our current earnings where made in less than a week and on pre-orders from before release. The sales where at the top during the last hour of the Steam 20% discount, and has since dropped almost exponentially, being pretty much halved each day. It will be really interesting to see at what level it pans out.

This is of course not all the income we will make from the game, but is still a bit discouraging when comparing to recent XBLA releases and similar. So why is not sales higher? Piracy? People waiting for future massive discounted sales? Game too scary / niched? Right now we have not got a clue, but hopefully it will become clearer further on.

Finally, as this was a multi-platform release, some preliminary sales distribution should be of interest. Around 90% was windows users, 5% Linux and 5% Mac. In defense of Mac and Linux we did concentrate our marketing efforts on the Windows user base.


Technical Issues
When releasing for PC, there is bound to be tons of technical problems, especially since we released for three different OS. So it is kinda surprising that it has not been that much. As with Penumbra, the number one problem has been OpenGL driver issues, something we unfortunately cannot control.

The largest single issue is probably the problems the ATI X-series and below range of cards for Windows. I'd like to add that we had tried it on a 9600 for a Mac successfully, but on Windows it fails due to various issues. In a way this is a driver issue too, but I think it might be some piece of code that it simply dislikes and I am hoping to fix it for an upcoming patch.

In general game issues, there have been less than expected too. There is the standard falling out of the map and physics messed up bugs, but less than we thought there would be. In-game crashes are also very few (most caused by some cache issues it seems), which is nice and we feel that the game is quite stable.


Game feedback
There has been a ton of feedback for the game and we try to read and discuss most of it. Discussing in detail would take up too much space so I will just take up two points, that I found extra important.

The main thing we will do for our next game is to skip any "forced" and incoherent mechanics. What I mean by this is puzzles that does not really make sense in the game world and break the immersion. An example would be the corpse-puzzle that forces the player to use very specific items to complete it. Trying to get rid of all these elements and further increase the feeling of being part of an actual world, will be one of our top priorities.

One of the main themes of the game, was for the player to slowly regain lost memories and to make up their mind about Daniel (ie their past self). While most still refer to the protagonist as "Daniel" (and not "me"), many players have really thought about the details discovered in a way we hoped. The game medium is so great for setting the audience at the center of the drama and force them to take a stance. It feels as if many people did this in Amnesia, and we hope to take this even further and on different subjects for future games.


Final thoughts
On almost all fronts, we area extremely pleased with this release. It has in many ways exceeded our expectations and it makes all the hard work, pay cuts, etc worth it in the end.

The most distressing thing is the sales though. Even though we are far from complaining, it feels like we do not have the financial security we would like to have, to truly be able to focus on making the best game possible. So what should we do? The things we have discussed include: Increase the cost of the game, doing a console port instead of Linux/Mac, do a less niche title and more. Now is too soon to make a decision though and we have to see how the coming weeks and months go.

Finally, I know I say this a lot but we truly mean it: Thanks to all who have supported us by buying the game, spreading the word, and what not. We hope you all will continue supporting us in the future as well! All of Frictional Games sends their finest regards and thanks for this support!

Editors are out!

Just wanted to notify all that the editor tools for Amnesia: The Dark Descent are out. These are the same tools that we used the create the game, so at a minimum you will able to do all that is done in the game.

All info is being collected here:
http://hpl2.frictionalgames.com/

I suggest you start by first downloading the tools here, then follow the guide here and finally start checking some tutorials.

If you have any questions about the editors, please use our modding forum found here:
http://frictionalgames.com/forum/forum-35.html

Happy editing! :)

NOTE: Only windows version released so far. Other platforms coming shortly!

Amnesia "Launch" Trailer

We just finished our "launch" trailer for Amnesia The Dark Descent. Watch here:



Now for a quick making of the trailer:

First of I started out making a text synopsis over the clips needed for the trailer. I had an idea of starting the video with a lynchian stare, that should set the mood for the rest of the trailer. My design process was then for me to lock myself inside a dark room, lie on the floor and mumble stuff while gesticulating in the air.

I then showed the synopsis to Jens and when he had approved after some smaller changes, I set Marcus and Luis to work with recording. I gave them descriptions on how I wanted the clips to be, they then recorded something, sent sample and I mostly told em tons of stuff to improve. It took a day and something like 5 - 50 retakes for each shot (one ended up not being used) to complete. We now had the clips!

One clip was missing though: Some fancy logo animation! This we could not do ourselves so I started looking for a company to do it for us. This turned out much harder than I thought! First finding a company was a pain; all I ended up finding where wedding photographers and the like. Nothing what we needed obviously. After some work I manged to find 19 different companies and mailed em. Three replied! All of which where fully booked or on vacation of course. But from one company, whose staff was on holiday, we got a tip about Atmospheres, a UK company that ended up doing the animation. I think it ended up very nice! Especially given the time and resource limits we had to give the company.

Jens now started working on the editing. This has caused us tons of trouble with all codecs and other crap that never works out as planned (blog post about it here), but Jens has started to master it now and is usually pretty quick. So he cut and mixed with the cut em together, which took half a day or so. I contributed with the graphics for the texts and some quote mining (a skill any dev needs to learn!). After some minor fixes, the editing was done!

Finally was time for Jens to put sound on it. You see, in order to get nice sound you do not keep anything from the original clips, and add new sounds for all. Otherwise you get all kinds of cut off sounds between cuts. It ended up taking Jens over three days to complete this (and is why "launch" trailer is not on launch). The final project file contained 52 tracks, each track having hundreds of sound samples.

Fun fact is that this process of design -> graphics -> editing (scripting) -> sounds is pretty much how we made levels in Amnesia!

There you have the story! Lots a work for a little over two minutes. Hopefully it will lure someone into buying! :)

Where is your self in a game?

Introduction
When you are playing a videogame, an external observer will probably say that you are sitting in a sofa or at the computer desk. But is this really where you are? When immersed in the virtual world of a videogame, do you still feel that you are sitting on a chair or in a sofa, staring at the screen?


An experiment
Before moving on, I would like you to consider a simple experiment. You can easily do it with the help of a friend if you got the right prop: a rubber hand. Put your own hand next to the rubber one on a table, and place a screen between them, shielding your own hand from view. Now ask your friend to stroke the fake and real hand at the same time, at the same place. Something strange will now happen. Your body image will change, and the rubber hand will become part of you. As your friend touch both hands, you will feel as if the feeling arise in the rubber one. All of a sudden, you will have made an external object, become part of your self!

With this experiment in mind. The question of where you are becomes more interesting. When playing a game, where do you transport your self to? Does it depend on what the game is about and from what perspective it is played from?

I think this is not only an interesting curiosity, but a very important part of the experience. Identifying where the player is when playing, can be very useful. And even more crucial, being able to "place" the player correctly is a very useful skill.


Spectator or something else?
Let's start simple and explore movies first. In movies there is no interaction, so surely you must be a spectator to every scene in a movie. A clear example of this, is when you see a horror movie and have one of those "don't go in there!"-moments. This clearly puts you in a spectator seat, treating the actor as a separate entity.

However, things does not get so polarized in other situations. Consider a gruesome torture scene or similar. These can get almost unbearable to watch and blurs the line between yourself and the actor. The reason why this is so is because of something called mirror neurons (here is a good video on the subject). What these do is to make you copy emotions from other people, replicating some of their sensations. One could even argue that they expand yourself, no longer limiting it to your own body.


Interaction added
Let's go back to games now. As we can see there are two forces at work: we can trick our brain into extending the body image and we have specialized neurons that copy other people's emotions. How these will affect us will depend on what type of videogame we are playing.

One of the major differences between games today is the viewpoint, ie first or third person. Does this matter? First person places you inside a character, putting your viewpoint where it usually is. This increases the feeling of being the character. In third person, you are removed from reality, and look upon yourself as if in some kind of OBE. This might make one think first person is superior, however, this only applies to the sense of sight. Another important sense is the proprioceptic one, which keeps track of your different body parts. When in first person, you see at most a hand or two, while in third-person gives you a full body image to copy. Third person can also give your mirror-neurons more to work with, like facial expressions. So depending on the kind of actions you perform, first or third will have a different feeling of being.

Also worth noting is how easily we shift between different states. For example, in Silent Hill 2, I feel very much connected to James when I run around town. Then when entering a cut-scene, I sort of float out of him and become distanced. I am no longer in control of the character and no longer part of him. Then when controls comes back I once more float inside him and the virtual characters becomes an extension of my own body again. This kind of movement happen in just about all games.


The roles we play
Now that we have explored how the self can shift position as we play a videogame, an interesting question arise: What is the player's role in these different positions? As videogames contain interaction; not only do you fee,l to various degrees, part of the on-screen character, you also control her/him/it. What does this make the player? Some kind of puppet master? An devil/angel on the shoulder? And more importantly, can the role assumed, change how the game is played?

In most games, you do not control all actions in a game, but mostly give general commands. You tell your character to jump, but not how much force to use and so on. You command a character to pick up an item, but have no control over any finer movements. This is not that far off from real life though, as most of your day-to-day movements are made without any conscious thought besides the thought of initiating them. This means that making a character jump by pressing a button gives you a very close connection. In these instances, you might feel like you are the character.

However, not all games have this close connection. Consider an adventure game where you just pick a destination for the character or choose between prefabricated lines of dialog. What role does this give the player? Some kind of guardian angle - a guiding voice inside the protagonist's head? Does this change the way that the player think of the character and how to interact with the game? Perhaps this role-assignment distances the player emotionally from the game's protagonist?

It is interesting that some games actually explicitly give the player a role. This is quite common in adventure games, where the protagonist might look at the player and directly address her. Do developers really consider how this can affect the placement of the player's self? I must confess I have not thought about this until very recently and have not heard of many discussing it.

I think it is very important to decide where the player is and what her role is. If this is not coherent than it might have a negative effect on how the player choose to interact with the game's world. If you know your role in the game, it gets easier to be immersed in it and know how to behave. This does not mean that the assigned role and placement of self needs to be the same throughout, but that it must be consistent with what needs to be done. A simple example of when this goes wrong is quick-time-events during cut-scenes. This can be very confusing at first, as you have just gone from being the character (in normal play mode) and gone to spectator mode (when cut-scene is playing). All of sudden you are required to control the character, something that is not coherent with your current role.

This shift in placement also explains why emotional moments can be hard to get right in cut-scenes. As you enter a cut scene you move over to "spectator mode" and all of a sudden you are no longer as connected to the character as before and do not care as much. JPRG:s like Final Fantasy 7 have it easier here, as the normal gameplay is more close to a "spectator mode" and thus the difference is smaller when entering a cut-scene. Same goes for a game like Heavy Rain. An important thing to note here is that contrast in position seem to play a huge role. When there is a violent shift in the location of self, it is very noticeable and the emotional connections are lost.

Finally, I also want to add that the same game, can have players assume very different roles to themselves. A good, although a bit extreme, example of this, is a recent Gamasutra article, where the writer let his mother-in-law play the new Sam and Max. The interesting part is that she did not release she could or should control the characters. She just assumed (probably from lessons learned from experiencing other media) that she should be in spectator mode. One should have this in mind when designing a game and tutorials for it, and not just assume that a player knows what role they play.


Our take on this
Location of self and the role of the player is something that I have not really thought about until we where developing Amnesia. I would therefore like to discuss how Penumbra and Amnesia: The Dark Descent differ in this aspect. As a lot of thought have gone into making the player become the protagonist in Amnesia, it has had a different focus compared to Penumbra.

In Penumbra, Philip narrated all the scenes, yet in normal gameplay the player very much was part of the character. As these narrations are very subtle, it gives a bit of schizophrenic impression. For example, at one point Philip comments that he does not like spiders upon seeing one scuttle by. What happens here is that we are forcing very specific emotions on the player who will either accept or reject them. If rejecting them, it means a large shift in the position of the self and Philip stops becoming a part of you. From being part of the world yourself, you are reduced to being a passenger inside Philip's head. As mentioned before, this contrast can be very bad for the immersion and the emotional connection.

In Amnesia, our goal is for the player to become the protagonist. This is vital for the story and experience as a whole. Because of this, there are never any words spoken, and there are no Daniel-subjective comments. We hope that this will place the player's self inside the body of the protagonist, and to think about what "I am doing" and not what "Daniel is doing". Our hope is that when you encounter facts about Daniel's past, it feels like your own forgotten memories. I know this is not an easy thing, and I am not sure many players feel this way. There is also the issues of adding smaller cues like breathing and heartbeats. Since these are actions that are not totally under our control, it is not incoherent to force them onto the player, but only if the player accepts it. Judging from player comments so far, there are people on both sides and having it in is a bit risky (we are actually thinking of having them optional in the future because of this).


End notes
There is a lot more to explore, but did not want to make an already long post longer. So consider this as just a discussion starter and a brief introduction on the subject.


Now I am really interested in hearing how you feel about this! What role do you feel that you play in different games? Please share your experiences!