LYING TO AND DECEIVING THE PLAYER

It's more that we just don't care about plot twists, they're not interesting to talk about because everyone agrees... unless someone seriously has an argument as to why they should never be used.

Generally, it's more annoying if you imply a player CAN do something, and then prevent it somehow. I think it's fun when I'm rewarded for exploring and testing boundaries by getting more of an impact on the story (or at least some swag).

I'm not sure I could offer any real advice on achieving it, since the question as-is is a bit vague.

author=accha
Basically, this is about branching storylines that are purposefully hidden and to be uncovered by players who seek out other solutions, and the only hints to these branches are... subtle, at least so that a player breezing through the game wouldn't notice them at all.

There was a bit in Persona 1 (dummied out of the US-localized PS1 version, but restored in the PSP version) around the 5 hour mark where you may or may not hear a person at school talking about The Mask of the Snow Queen. You can totally ignore this tidbit as flavor text and go on to the next objective. OR you can run around the area and talk to everybody again, trying to find out if there's more to the story.

After doing so, you'll eventually find out that the mask is hidden somewhere in the school's theatre room. If you go to find it, the Snow Queen is revived and the plot's focus shifts away from stopping its original antagonists to stopping the Queen. The party goes through different dungeons with different music, fighting different monsters. It's almost an entirely different game.

It's a bit obtuse (as JRPGs are), but it's an interesting idea.

All the bad examples of lying listed so far are bad simply because you have no way to tell that those people are lying, except by believing them and getting burnt. Which obviously sucks. Craze's example is slightly better because you could tell from the skeeviness but, as a one-time thing, you need to signpost it heavily so not very interesting either.

However, I have no trouble imagining a game where you know that some people are going to lie to you, and there are logical causes for it that apply systematically throughout the game, and uncovering these causes to make the right decisions is a real (if purely mental) part of the gameplay. Outside the realm of strict "detective" games, Pathologic is a great example.

It could also replace randomness and hidden information in terms of "risk management": you're not sure whether you are going to win this battle, not because of a RNG or hidden variables like an enemy with unknown moves or unclear AI, but because you have three conflicting sources of information, and you don't have enough clues yet to know which one to believe.

If you make it easy to identify what is true or what is false, you're defeating the point of giving the player false information. However, if you make the process of verifying the accuracy of the information non obvious, how do you make it fair?

Realistically, if the heroes hear a rumor, there are several ways they could go about investigating it. Go to a pub and ask the bartender if he has heard variations of the rumor. Go to a library and look up information relevant to the rumor. Try to trace the source of the rumors. However, none of those approaches are available unless the game creator implemented them.

Let's say the game creator makes pubs a good source for information. In that case, the player will cross-check every rumor with the bartender. Ditto if going to a library is a thing. If there are multiple approaches, the players will more or less go on a list and check them off for every rumor.

Of course, you can always omit having standard approaches to the investigation. You could simple give the players different pieces if information and then ask the player to use logic. However, using logic in such a situation in a video-game does in reality mean guessing what logic the game creator is using.

It's easier if it's non gameplay affecting rumors. You just throw the players a bunch of rumors and let them know that some are true and some are false. Then they can, if they care, wonder which of the rumors will be true and which won't as the game unfolds.

author=Hasvers
You're assuming that some pieces of info are just wrong for no reason, so the only way to know that they are wrong is to cross-check them - which is not a great design decision, as it involves doing the same thing (e.g. checking in the library) again and again.

I have made no such assumptions.

What I am suggesting is that there should be a reason every time someone lies, and this reason should be part of a consistent set of causes or rules that can be learned. "guessing the logic the game creator is using" becomes simply "learning how to play the game".

Obviously there should be a reason. However, if you make it consistent, won't it result in a similar situation with my checking the library example where the player repeats the same procedure? Or maybe that can be made interesting.

However, these don't have to be stupid abstract rules like in logic puzzles (e.g. the Dwarfs always lie except when they are underground), they can be part of the plot/setting, like figuring the motivations of the NPCs to get a feeling of who would lie, when and why. That's a major part of tons of social games: poker and other bluffing games, detective games and Mafia/Werewolf, and so on. That's also part of what the GM provides in any sufficiently RP-oriented pen&paper session.

"Get a feeling of who would lie, when and why" sounds to me like something that's likely to result into guessing the logic of the game creator. The NPCs may be individuals, but it's still one single person who decides what actions makes sense with what personality and situation. I'm also not sure that what happens in social games where people receives feedback from each other will work when you replace one human with a computer. In P&P games, the GM can give the players a result even if they uses an approach that the GM didn't plan for in advance. This is impossible in computer games. What we have is the equivalent of a P&P game where the GM has decided on specific approaches the players may take and absolutely no other idea will have any result.

author=Hasvers
In any case, I would love to see a game where handling information (true or false) is actually one of the main aspects of the gameplay. Except for Pathologic, I have the hardest time thinking of a game where this doesn't reduce to "talk to everyone, click on everything, and use every object on every other

L.A. Noire and Phoenix Wright are the best examples of this. They're games that are entirely about discovering and exposing people's lies. In L.A. Noire you play as a police detective and in Phoenix Wright you play as a defense attorney. The way these games do it is to have a bunch of dialogue with characters where they tell you occasionally conflicting information - and instead of having to flip a coin to guess which side is true, they came up with the idea that the player's goal is simply to notice and point out the inconsistency.

Each important fact your character learns is stored in a notebook (in PW each fact is represented by an item that the fact is about). When talking to a person, you have the ability to stop them each time they say something and submit a piece of evidence exposing the contradiction. They will then usually change their story, causing you to have to do this several times before completely exposing them as a fraud. Usually you expose the fact that they are contradicting hard evidence, but sometimes you're simply exposing the fact that they told a different story than someone else did - this isn't handled any differently gameplay-wise, it simply progresses the plot in a different way.

Each time you expose an inconsistency, the plot progresses a little. By the end of the case you will have discovered the truth.

A better example then: detective novels. If you've read a few of them, you can feel the general form that the clues and motives are going to take. This genre is unique in that every book is also a game, a puzzle that you can solve - you are not necessarily expected to, but the author is expected to provide you with everything you need to solve it, else it feels like they are cheating.

Sure, a lot of the genre tropes may feel a little contrived, but nothing so bad as to make the characters feel inhuman. And I maintain that it's pretty much the same as the creating-the-setting part of GMing - without the reactivity, sure, but the reactivity is supposed to respond to the actions of players, not to change the motives of the NPCs on the spot.

LockeZ> I will have to look up LA Noire, then! My problem with Phoenix Wright is that it's still basically a point & click dynamics: there is a precise order in which you must click on things and so on. It's still pretty close to the idea of having to double-check every single fact.
That makes it particularly infuriating when you've basically understood the whole case but you have no way of jumping ahead and delivering the one important piece of information.

I would prefer a game that only tests the actions that you take as a result of this information: for instance, you play a vigilante and you're free to kill whoever you think is the culprit at any time, even if you are mistaken (but you should also be careful not to be caught). You don't have a dev-defined series of hoops to jump through, only a set of actions that are always available and that you choose to apply depending on what you have understood.

Although it would be even more exciting to see this dimension of information handling added into a game of a completely different genre, where it would be new and unique; say a survival game, or even an RPG (where instead of reacting to a linear story, or even a branching story, you could take the initiative of trying to understand what is going on and who to beat up for great justice; open-world WRPG claim to do this, but basically they just have you follow along and do fetch quests and people never lie or someone else will tell you about it).

I do this! The biggest example is I have a dungeon where all enemies simply ignore all detrimental status effects and debuffs. The player can inflict blind and it'll appear on the enemy but it'll be just like FF6 where it doesn't change squat (at least, when the enemy attacks. Your characters are still as vulnerable to detrimental status effects and debuffs like any other dungeon).


Now to explain why that isn't complete and total bullshit! First most dungeons have their own additional rule while you're in the dungeon. For example the volcano dungeon gives a bonus to fire damage, fire attacks always inflict burn, and ice magic can't be used in it. This rule is more often than not up front told to the player when they check a dungeon out. Dungeons with a rule but which isn't told plainly to the user are simply marked as ??? Effect. So the player knows that there's something the dungeon will do but the game's flipping them the bird instead of telling them upfront what it is.

Second is that the the game will tell you what the dungeon's rule is, just not always plain and simply. One aspect of the game is information gathering. Grilling NPCs for information, completing side quests or dungeons, or sometimes hidden simply in plain sight are clues of varying quality (THE MYSTIC SWORD IS SOMEWHERE). For example for the asshole dungeon is that by doing a side quest for a former adventurer is he'll tell you that his last quest was to a vile dungeon filled with fiends that seemingly were vulnerable to his ailment magic but apparently not which lead to the end of his group's adventuring days (the exactly language used here will be trying to write, to be clear what happened without sounding absolutely awkward). The player can find another member of the NPC's adventuring band that tells you the name of his final adventuring dungeon. The player can combine the two pieces of information, a dungeon name and its rule, to know what's going on and plan accordingly. Ideally the information tidbits will be stored in a journal of sorts that I haven't entirely determined how it'll work. It might just be a chat log sorted by location->NPC accessible anywhere and leave the player to put two and two together.


The secret third way is the player uses meta knowledge based on the dungeon name and gets an idea what'll happen in there.



I'll never try to be an asshole with lying to the player and I'll give everything an attentive and cautious player needs to see through the deception. Hopefully it'll be interesting to the players if the game ever comes out (lol fat chance).

Feeding false information is an art. You need to make it perfectly convincing, sorta like a guy who is actually a spy/alien/changeling attending high school. The more his transcripts check out, the more convincing the charade and they less chance of being outed.

Likewise, if you're gonna deceive the player, you need it as elaborate as possible. Written history, religion, all kinds of backstory to either set up a realism genre or fantasy genre game. Then you pull the floor out from under them, and proceed to undermine either the reality itself, or the characters.
You can even do this a few times before suspension of disbelief wears out, for example:

-Start with the "real" world. A guy goes to work, etc. Have everything fit together logically.
-Introduce spies. The character can't trust anyone, but at least this world works under real world rules, right?
-Maybe it doesn't. Some/all of the characters have magic, they've just been keeping it quiet. Okay, so we now have a magical spy world, surely this is the world, right?
-The big cities? The technology? Nope. Humans are slaves to magical overlords, who use massive illusion to convince humans they are living in fabulous houses when in fact they are in huts, and elves have vast groves all over the place. Those humans polluted the Earth before, so elves are doing this to not take any chances.
-Nope. Not that either. Reality itself is just someone's dream. The main character wakes up in a white space or something. Usually, this is the final stage, unless you want to be really absurd and point at the screen or something.

(Btw, this example above, is basically The Matrix, with a magical bend instead a scifi one. That, and they totally screwed it up by having the first scene like that instead of starting with a perfectly boring world, and opening it up)