Maarten's Stairs

Ok, so a level designer who goes by Maarten Frooninckx posted an incredibly interesting conundrum on twitter about what to do with this particular set of stairs that he didn’t want the player to go up in a Counter Strike 2 map.

He got a lot of suggestions - I’ll try and illustrate them as we go - but some people had the same thought that I had for a Counter Strike-appropriate barrier: a child gate.

This picture is from an Amazon listing and it's completely insane I'm so sorry

Some had assisted living devices.

My personal favourite had a real-world example of an open-staircase saferoom, which I think was incredibly creative and grounded in the setting that he had established (a Spanish colonial mansion in the jungle).

But Maarten also got some interesting pushback from a game dev who goes by SarahJS, which led to this exchange:

I think this is incredibly fascinating regardless of what side of the discussion you fall on. For the record, I agree with Sarah one hundred percent, and I think Maarten’s response is incredibly telling about the attitude that is often brought to level design. 

For others this is a house with stairs that need to be blocked. For me, this is a situation where the reality of the asset - a multi-story house - sublimates the reality of the environment - that of a game. 

Here, as a functional part of a gameplay environment, the stairs and the second floor need to go. Like lmao look if I’m playing CS2 and I see stairs and a second floor, I’m looking up, because the existence of vertical space is a massive threat indicator in this kind of game. If we use the creative medium of Bright Red Circles, I can demonstrate where you are probably looking when you are interacting with this game as a combat environment.

I'm also not very good at FPS games but CORNERS and HIGH GROUND man come on

You can use as many lighting tricks as you want to drag my eyes away from here - unless you completely block my awareness of a potentially accessible high ground or remove it entirely I’m still going to look up at the flashing danger sign that says “look up”, and I don’t think this is a particularly controversial take.

But ok - Maarten might be using the CS2 engine to design a level rather than design levels specifically for CS2, that’s all good. So then we have stairs without purpose and a second floor without purpose; to me this means we still have a failure to imagine something that could exist beyond the multi-story house. Someone in this process has failed to acknowledge the creative corner that exists when you accept the reality of ‘a house’. You control the house: this house is exactly as real as a fucking Goomba, there is no inherent reason that this house couldn’t have a sunroof here instead of stairs, or be a one-story mansion that sprawls over hundreds of kilometers, or be tied to giant, stair-negating turbines that keep it suspended hundreds of meters in the air (the safest possible place for a Spanish colonial mansion to be).

In fact, if we are going to get a little freaky, there is no inherent reason to this house.

Battler, when I talk in RED it means the house is expanding 

I love this kind of stuff because I’ve dabbled in (UNDERPAID, NDA, I'M NOT MAD ACTUALLY DON'T PUT IN THE PAPER THAT I'M MAD) narrative design in video- and board-games and have encountered clashes in philosophy before: sometimes it benefits everyone for a writer to come up with a creative solution within the assets; sometimes it benefits the writer that the assets have been designed and fully exist to benefit the player experience; sometimes it benefits the level designer for the story to be fully fleshed out by the writer beforehand; sometimes it benefits the level designer that the assets make the level, where the story is clearly and plainly written for them by the self-evident existence of A Thing.

There are SO many answers to the question of 'why should this be here?' that come up constantly and in ever-changing circumstances during any kind of development - which makes Maarten’s reaction incredibly uncharitable by calling Sarah’s response nihilistic and boring! They’re right! The house is meaningless until you give it meaning! - but it is the kind of thing that asks a lot from the observer: where do your priorities lie? Do you want to benefit the player experience? Does it fit the narrative? Can it fit the narrative? Does the narrative fit what we have? Can I bend the player experience to fit what we have?

What’s important to point out here as well is that this situation isn’t just similar to being handed a piece of a level and being asked to narratively justify it - it’s… exactly that. This is crowdsourcing narrative - not level design - for a level that is in-development, using the responses as a way to fill in the gaps that the designer couldn’t (or didn’t want to) change. For the participating audience there is no difference between this house having stairs you can’t walk up or a big window you can’t smash or any immutable asset that is inconveniently getting in the way of playing the game. 

I would encourage you to look at your games as if every single piece of the environment was as up-for-debate as Maarten’s stairs. It’s so much more satisfying to look at how the technical and non-technical why’s of game- and level- design intersect than to just let yourself get bombarded with endless ‘correct’ decisions re; player guidance, map clarity, objective clarity, what houses are, what direction you run in a platformer etc. You are in an explicitly constructed environment!

Please, if nothing else, please question the nature of the construct!

Nothing exactly groundbreaking here from me honestly, I just thought it was interesting to think about lmao.