Three Design Lessons from Ken Rolston

The Elder Scrolls Online’s script producer Alexander Horn has penned a Gamasutra blog feature about the lessons he learned while working alongside Ken Rolston, known for his work on Morrowind, Oblivion and Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning, and plenty of PnP products. Here’s a snip:

The Rolston Switch

If you’ve played Ken’s games, you’re familiar with what I’m calling the good, old Rolston Switch. I’m sure Ken wasn’t the first person to think of it, but he’s one of the best at it. “It” is the element of surprise as a game design principle, or as he liked to say, “the joke.”

Quests should throw curveballs, rewards should not be quite what they seem, and the player should often ask “what happens when I do this?” with genuine uncertainty. It’s part sadistic prank, part creative accident. The process is simple, set up player expectations and then shatter them. What is interesting about the idea isn’t the idea itself but the results of its implementation.

The first is fun. As my brilliant wife Dr. Joan Jasak recently reminded me, a player does not interact with a game, a player interacts with a designer via a game. If this is true, then clearly the Rolston Switch is a fun experience for the player, i.e. your eccentric Uncle Ken is playing a practical joke on you. It is also an emergent experience for the player. This is real dialogue. It creates and strengthens the bond between player and designer.

The second is that it creates possibility space for emergent narrative. Now, some readers might feel that the opposite is true, that surprises in games are more likely to take the player out of the experience. But even though Ken was never afraid to lean on the fourth wall, the Rolston Switch is not the M Knight Shyamalan Switch; it’s not a simple reversal. It is closer to what Keats says about poetry, it “should surprise by a fine excess and not by singularity, it should strike the reader as a wording of his own highest thoughts, and appear almost a remembrance.” In this regard, the “joke” isn’t so much “ha-ha” funny, as it is funny “hmm.”

When you combine those two processes, (a player-designer bond and an unexpected experience that the player feels is theirs) emergent narrative is more easily achieved.