I was familiar with Emily Short as an author of interactive fiction, but I just recently noticed her column at GameSetWatch called ‘Homer in Silicon’ where she “looks at storytelling and narrative in games.” Her most recent article is Playing the Reader.
Have you played hidden object games before? What’s interesting about them is that unlike most other casual games, hidden object games put a great deal of effort into their framing story rather than hyping their main game mechanic. I don’t personally recommend them, though I can see their appeal. Part of the problem, perhaps, is as Emily points out, “the interaction and the story usually have almost nothing to do with one another”. This lack of coherence in games is almost ubiquitous, and if coherence does occur, it’s often unintentional.
One of the complications in this whole coherence thing is that modern games are so complex, trying to build coherence into them can be a bit overwhelming. But by focusing on the hidden object games’ one mechanic, pointing and clicking to solve puzzles and advance the narrative, we can isolate what coherence means in this one case and maybe infer a heuristic for figuring out how coherence can be used in general to emphasize and better tell a story.
The key lies, Emily reasons, in matching what the hypothetical reader of a story would do while reading to what the player does while playing the game. This is consistent with our view that gameplay is the way in which a player experiences story, and so matching what a hypothetical reader’s behaviours would be to the player’s actual play helps, one would think, to ensure that the story is being told coherently. The reason puzzle solving works well in a game telling Agatha Christie stories is because her stories often “start out being very much like jigsaw puzzles, with pieces supplied one at a time and the reader [is] invited to fit them together.” The same mechanic wouldn’t work well with a game based on The Count of Monte Cristo, since “Dante doesn’t really spend most of his time scrutinizing furniture. His adventures are more about interpersonal manipulation.”
Simply and almost obviously put, a story that invites the reader to scrutinize clues and solve puzzles along with the protagonist is best suited to be coherently told by a game that has the player scrutinize clues and solve puzzles. Similarly, a game about manipulating interpersonal relationships would be best suited to telling a non-authoritative interpretation of The Count of Monte Cristo. The larger implication of this reasoning is, interestingly, that we can apply it to larger and more complex games.
Our heuristic, then, to discover how to coherently match game mechanics, environments, art, sounds or haptics to story is to ask the question: what do I want a hypothetical reader of my story to experience or do at this point in the story? and then conceive of game mechanics, environments, art, sounds or haptics that create that experience.
Once again, Ian Bogost changes the way I look at games. The first time was with persuasive games, and now with his latest article, The End of Gamers. I’ve argued in the past (not online) that games aren’t a medium. The reason for my conviction came from quickly considering the first couple of mediums that came to mind: print, photography, radio, film, etc., and then comparing them to games. I concluded that a game wasn’t a medium since one medium can pretty readily be translated into another. What’s written in words can be shown in a film, or vice versa. On the other hand, it isn’t possible to translate a film into a game. You can say your game is about Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith, but the gameplay itself is nothing like watching or even reading Star Wars episode 3. Instead of going into it here, I’ll just refer you to Jesper Juul’s argument.
The reason I don’t want to get into it here is because, well, I’ve changed my mind. My flaw was in having too narrow of a view of what a medium really is. As Ian points out, games are a medium of procedurality, of systems, a medium “that lets us play a role within the constraints of a model world.” Games are the medium through which the very procedurality of systems is transmitted, can be accessed, controlled and played with.
Once you fully grasp this concept, suddenly games aren’t just about either being entertaining or being serious. I think Ian says it best when he challenges us to “do with games what we do already, implicitly, with every other medium we use to create or consume ideas. We must imagine videogames as a medium with valid uses across the spectrum, from art to tools and everything in between.”
I’ve come to the point where I have to wonder why we still call everything in this medium a ‘game’, when that term implicitly connotes entertainment and basically just causes confusion or ruins the legitimacy of some interesting systems of play. Of course, I won’t propose or start using some new name, but there will either come a time when we will have to adopt a new name for this burgeoning medium, and ‘game’ will remain the name of entertaining systems of play, or else ‘game’ will need to lose its current connotations and come to express all interactive procedural systems, regardless of whether they’re just for fun or something else/more.
Raph Koster lists what he thinks are the two hardest and most critical skills for a game designer.
- Be able to see the game with no hint of artwork, music, sound, anything
[...]- Be able to see the game without any mechanics, any rules, any knowledge of how it should play
If you’ve been following the site so far, you might have an idea of where I think this is lacking. Namely, I’d like to suggest that there is a third critical skill a game designer should have.
- Be able to take an abstract story, turn it into a series of coherent plot functions, and design game mechanics, art, environments, audio and haptics that reinforce those functions and combine to tell that story through play itself.
Of course, if the game doesn’t have a story, then don’t worry about it. But that’s becoming less and less the case as the gaming industry matures. The reality is that story needs to stop taking a back seat to mechanics if games hope to tell their stories to their fullest potential.
And a great designer? They should be able to see all three in their head at once.
