Welcome to part III of The Flaws of Narrative, Manifested, a look at Michael Abbott’s Narrative manifesto. Check out part I and part II, to see what I think about the rest of the manifesto. Keeping the best (and most difficult) for last, part III is dedicated to Jonathan Blow.
I don’t think there’s any other single person in the games industry today that’s more in line with my feelings on story and games than Jonathan Blow. That being said, somehow I feel that if ever we got together to talk, we’d end up disagreeing more than agreeing.
Jonathan Blow – Conflicted games
Well, let’s start with what we’d agree on, because ultimately that’s what’s most important.
First of all, game mechanics that are “disharmonious” with the story being told create conflict in games, preventing the game from really resonating with players. This is exactly in line with what I’ve said before on coherence in games. He gives the examples of how in BioShock the story tries to establish a ideological conflict between radical individualism and altruism by having the player chose between killing the Little Sister for personal gain, or saving her for…well, here’s the problem: saving her gets you half the personal gain, and every third Little Sister you save you get a bonus. In the end, the difference between killing or saving the Little Sister is negligible. The story wanted to say one thing, and for obvious game balancing reasons, the mechanics subverted that meaning. BioShock’s game mechanics establish a “dynamical meaning” (I’d go with “procedural meaning”) that conflicts with the meaning the story is trying to tell. Jonathan argues that every game mechanic has a meaning, whether intended by the designer or not, due to our natural inclination to attribute meaning to everything we encounter. Since we can’t avoid it, we need to start looking for it and training ourselves to design games with it in mind.
All of that aside, I figure where Jonathan and I will disagree is with small things like the meaning of “story”. I see story as an abstract choronology outside of any medium that can be any possible narrative about any possible thing, whereas Jonathan sees stories as those narratives that are worth telling. But really this isn’t an impasse, we’re talking about the same thing. I chose not to narrow what should be considered a story because I don’t want to inadvertently limit the power of what we’re establishing here. I think that even games that don’t try to tell stories can still benefit from the notions of “harmony” and “dynamic meaning”. Take what I’ve said recently about Team Fortress 2 as a good indication of a mainstream game without a “story” worth telling that still benefits from these concepts.
I expect that this is just one of the small quibbles we’d have because of our different backgrounds. I mean, he agrees with Gaynor’s panic over the inherent chaos and unpredictability of the player, and I don’t. But I figure ultimately we’d agree more often than we disagree.
Spake gian mancuso, tagged as: dialectic,epideictic
