If you want a great example of why a good story isn’t necessary for a game to be fun, take a look at Tom Cross’ opinion piece on Dead Space. I haven’t gotten around to playing Dead Space, but according to Tom, just about everything non-game is “carefully and stylishly unoriginal”. The characters are flat and uninteresting, the plot is completely predictable, and overall the game fails at establishing a truly frightening experience. That being said, Tom loved playing the game.
I think Dead Space is a good argument against laissez-faire story design: the point of view that believes that games don’t need a story, just interesting game mechanics, and that the goal is to have the game act as a vehicle for players to put themselves into a world where they can make their own story. It seems that the designers of Dead Space attempted to create a blank slate protagonist that anyone could relate to, hopefully facilitating the player’s desire to insert themselves into a fantasy world where they can create their own story. The problem is that from a plot perspective, a flat protagonist is uninteresting.
Isaac never speaks, and you never get any indication of his mood, other than that he doesn’t like dying. He wears a mask throughout the game and reacts to little. Apparently, this makes him relatable, because so many of us are demure, voiceless, deep space mechanics who constantly wear masks.
And because the main character is flat, the story that revolves around him lacks any emotional attachment or depth. But the game is fun, it has a good set of core game mechanics. What get Cross worked up is that the gamer in him enjoys the pure game, but because Dead Space makes an attempt at telling a story, his basic human desire for interesting and compelling plot drives him to feel annoyed at the same time. A game doesn’t need story to be fun, but if a game does try to tell a story, the lack of a coherent and interesting plot generates the slightest bit of friction during gameplay. It rubs us the wrong way. A game doesn’t need story to be fun, but if you do want to have a game that tells a story, make sure you implement that story’s plot properly.
The problem with Dead Space, aside from the mediocre effort placed in crafting a story, is that there is no care to implement game mechanics that best tell this story. The story and game mechanics in Dead Space are for the most part completely unrelated. On top of that, the reason the game isn’t as frightening as it could be stems from the fact that the space of possibilities afforded by the game’s mechanics simply don’t have a scare factor to them; they don’t deliver.
I’m not suggesting that every flaw Cross points out is directly related to a flaw in game mechanics and nothing else. But I do want to emphasize that every flaw, in part, does relate to poorly executed game mechanics. I find this last statement odd when considering that those very same game mechanics provide Cross with an “amazingly fun” experience. However, it does makes sense when you consider that games and stories are two completely different things. What makes a game fun and what makes a game tell a good story aren’t necessarily the same. But imagine for a second what would happen if they were the same. This is what coherence is all about.
Overall, though, I think the most fascinating part of Cross’ article is the following chunk of text:
[...] most people are focusing on how the tempo of that movie [Aliens] is similar to Dead Space’s gameplay. They say that this game is like Aliens, with its frantic action and small scares, and less like Alien’s slow creeping dread.
What “most people” are doing here, without even knowing that they’re doing it, is focusing on how the dynamic plot (telling) created by Dead Space’s game mechanics (and experienced through gameplay) is much more like the plot (telling) of James Cameron’s Aliens than Ridley Scott’s Alien. Fantastic. It’s good to see people intuitively catching on to this concept.
The “eye” or “camera” in video games (essentially the player’s viewpoint) has always been designed pragmatically to allow the player to play the game. Rarely has there been any consideration of what the viewpoint is telling the player about the experience, other than purely game-related facts. If I could make an analogy to film, the camera in video games today is used like it was by filmmakers at the dawn of the 20th century. They say, “here is the scene!”, and really nothing else. Similarly, in games the camera says “here is the game!”, and really nothing else. It wasn’t until the 1950s that different camera angles and the introduction of the jump cut started to be used to tell the story rather than just present the scene.
Corvus has a series of posts on the topic over at Man Bytes Blog. He believes that “by limiting our video games to this presentation, we’re limiting our ability to use the camera as an effective storytelling tool”.
Absolutely. We’ve seen attempts at adding interesting camera angles and even dynamic cut-scenes to games, and where these didn’t destroy gameplay by making the game impossible to play, they certainly did make the presentation of the game more lively, but ultimately their goal is still to show you the game. The only exception is probably the “establishing shots” that some games offer you when entering a new level or being faced with a new foe or puzzle. I believe looking to film for inspiration is a good starting point, like early film looked to theatre. However, it’s important to realize that the presentation of story in a game happens differently. Cut-scenes, dynamic or otherwise, can certainly take advantage of film theory to better tell what they hope to tell, but these aren’t intrinsic parts of a game.
If we want to consider how to revolutionize the use of camera in video games, we must consider them from a systems point of view. How do they function within the game’s system of play, what game mechanics govern their behaviour? By considering cameras as a functional unit, with rules and behaviours that, if coherently designed, can impart mood, atmosphere, character, emotion—that is to say: plot—then, it might be possible to discover our very own version of the “jump cut”, something that revolutionizes the way cameras tell stories in games.
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.
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.
Are you excited about Heavy Rain? You should be. Quantic Dream’s David Cage, the man responsible for Heavy Rain (and Indigo Prophecy/Fahrenheit) held a talk recently at the Cité des Sciences et de l’Industrie in France where he said basically nothing about the game … but did point out something interesting about games today, as reported by Francois over at Gamasutra:
[…] the base, primitive human feelings of fear, excitement, frustration, and aggressiveness – these, he claims, and not the more “sophisticated” emotions, all too frequently serve as the emotional backbone for video games.
The more subtle, social emotions such as love, empathy, joy, sadness, jealousy, anger and shame are frequently addressed in literature and cinema […] but are rarely successfully tackled by games.
But why is this the case? Well, consider the so called primitive emotions of fear, excitement, frustration and aggressiveness. The reason games are so good at instilling these emotions is because the act of playing a game, reacting often quickly and almost always skilfully in a competitive environment, will get these emotions going. But it’s easy to disagree with Cage and say that no, even simple games can make me feel love, joy, sadness, shame and anger. After a long battle I can come to love a certain weapon, or certain tactic. I can certainly feel joy over winning and sadness or shame over losing, and sometimes even anger towards an opponent or game mechanic.
But thinking like this misses his point. Cage’s “sophisticated” emotions are the social versions of love, empathy, joy, sadness, jealousy, anger and shame that you feel when interacting with other people, or in our case, fictional characters. They might activate the same area of the brain, but to Cage the latter are more worthy of our effort and attention because these distinct emotions are difficult to produce in people. That’s not to say that designing a fun game isn’t difficult. It’s just that making you feel joy over defeating Bowser is easy. Making you actually care that you saved the princess…well, isn’t.
