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.
Spake gian mancuso, tagged as: epideictic,logic
