What’s this? Justin Marks says that artfully story-entwined gameplay is what major titles are missing? A man after my own heart.

Well, “entwined” is the editor’s word. In fact, what Justin was getting at was not that “story” ( some separate object from “game”) should be entwined with it. That’s pretty much what he says people should stop doing. Instead, what he wants game designers to do is to “start thinking about the gameplay as the narrative itself”. Instead of seeing the story as something to be added to the game, we should see that it is the act of playing that delivers the story to us.

Justin talks about how going on a date in GTA IV while packing a rocket launcher doesn’t affect the story whatsoever. This bit of inanity is an extreme example of a gameplay mechanic being incoherent with the story that the game is trying to tell. This incoherent mechanic has a function in the game’s generated plot, mainly to introduce inanity into the potential narrative (whether the developers intended it or not). To refer to Barthes (again, two posts in a row..), every function, “to varying degrees, signifies [...] even when a detail seems irreducibly insignificant, refractory to any function, it will nonetheless ultimately have the meaning of absurdity or uselessness” (The Semiotic Challenge). What this mechanic in GTA IV does to its story-tacked-onto-a-game is highlight that the story is in fact just tacked onto the game. Very post-modern, but not exactly praise worthy. I think this concept of coherence ought to be central to the act of designing a game if you want it to actually tell a story in an interesting way. You could make something incoherent, sure, but it has to be on purpose and for a reason.

Coherence can be simple, like making sure accurate WWII weapons are available in a WWII shooter. Games are already really good at this kind of coherence. Where they often lack is in having aspects of the game that are coherent in such a way that they enhance the way the game’s story is told. A good example of this second kind of coherence can be found in BioShock. The relationship between the Little Sisters and the Big Daddies is an important part of BioShock‘s story. That this relationship is made evident through one of BioShock‘s core mechanics, one that players can’t avoid if they want to become strong enough to progress in the game, is a visceral way to demonstrate this relationship. Having the Big Daddy initiate the Little Sister’s entrance into and exit from the level (the Big Daddy will bang on the Little Sister’s tunnel to wake her and get her to come out, and will eventually lead her back to a tunnel, offering his body as a stepping stool so that she can climb back in), that the Big Daddy follows her around the level, and that you must kill the Little Sister’s protective Big Daddy in order to get to her at all, all coherently reinforce this story element.

All three are just simple rules in the game:

But since these rules are coherent in just the right way, they also reinforce and shape the way the game tells its story. Coherence is a powerful storytelling tool.

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