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GDC 09: Ubisoft's Clint Hocking talks intentionality, fault tolerance and the making of Far Cry 2.

In a talk called Fault Tolerance: From Intentionality to Improvisation, Clint Hocking from Ubisoft went over how to guide players, or not, in a game. The example was one he worked on, Far Cry 2.

Intentionality is a loaded word, and is best summed up as allowing the player to figure out the goals and how to accomplish them given a few tools and implicit rules. Doing this is a tough thing, player improvisation can often lead to odd results, sometimes even to failure. Letting people do what they want a little is good, a lot can be problematic.

An example of this was shown with a clip from one of Clint's former works, one of the Splinter Cell games. A player used a series of cameras to guide an NPC (non-player character) through a building, then convinced him to kick down a door while exclaiming that he wasn't a fool. The door was booby-trapped, and the flaming NPC was blown backwards into an open elevator shaft, and filmed as the flaming corpse hit the bottom of the shaft.

Intentionality is the whole idea that nowhere in the tutorials did this scenario come up, nor did the designers intend for this to happen. Ever. Really. But it is cool, and the player used the tools at hand to accomplish the goals, kill the NPC, that the designers did want. Instead of A -> B -> C, they got A -> R -> L -> C.

Far Cry 2's nine pillars of gameplay.

Far Cry 2 had nine pillars of gameplay during the design, and they lead to a lot of ideas for levels and intentionality. During development, there was something called HMR, Health, Morale, Repair, standing for the obvious things. They were based on infamy, basically people were afraid of your reputation. Enemy factions were affected by this and other things. The factors looked like this.

The level in development was planned out so that your character would get a mission to blow up a rail car containing petrol that the bad guys were selling to finance their evil deeds, and using the money to buy medicine for the troops. Blowing it up meant the bad guys lacked money, so their weapons wouldn't get fixed as much, and they couldn't buy anti-malaria drugs. When you did this, the succeeding enemies would have worse weaponry and lowered health, and you would gain infamy.

It would also draw a head enemy from hiding to see what was going on, and you could assassinate him. Of course, enemy morale would then drop in line with your infamy gain, and they wouldn't fight as hard. From there, there was a big battle. The plan was to let the player scout out the battlefield, plan what weapons they would need, and assault the enemy stronghold. Simple enough.

Another gameplay pillar was fire: you could set one in the African grasslands, and use it to flush people out, occasionally kill them, and provide you with cover. It also hurt enemy morale. The design plan was to have the player set fire to the grass near the bad guys, and go in under the cover of smoke picking off enemies. Since they were demoralised and weak, many would run, those that didn't would be easy pickings because of the malaria, and would have unreliable guns. Easy pickings for someone as infamous as you.