This one will be quick. Take a look at this quote from Chris at ihobo.com:
This is the nub of the issue here: a story can make you cry by empathising [sic] with the protagonist (or another character), but a game (when viewed as a formal system) cannot do this. It follows that the only way that a videogame can make you cry is by using narrative tools that have nothing to do with games as formal systems whatsoever. So even though, for instance, many people report that they cried when they played Final Fantasy VII at the fateful scene [...] the moment that actually brought the player to tears was a non-interactive cut scene. It wasn’t the game (in the systems view) that made them cry – it was the story – and there never was a question as to whether stories could make you cry.
I agree and disagree. His examples are true, in so far as the part of the game that makes you cry isn’t an actual, functional part of the game at all. So in his examples it’s never really the game itself that makes you cry. However, this overarching statement is shortsighted in that it doesn’t account for the possibility that a game’s mechanics could themselves be the ones communicating the story. And this is an important distinction.
If it’s safe to say that a movie made you cry because of the way it tells you its story, then it’s also safe to say that if a game’s constituent parts (units and rules) convey a story, then a game can make you cry.
Michael Abbott, catching on to this crazy confluence of ideas about games and narrative, has proposed a Narrative manifesto by quoting from some of “the most thoughtful and articulate members of the games community” on this very topic. I applaud the effort, and certainly feel strongly that our anti-status-quo way of looking at things needs a call to arms, but I can’t help but feel that the whole story and games thing is misunderstood. It’s not that the people that Michael chose to quote are wrong. What they say is true, but they miss the larger point, or muddle the concept of narrative in games. Rather than a manifesto for narrative in games, Michael has done a splendid job of collecting the kinds of viewpoints that serve to confuse the issue of narrative and games. Yes, I’m going to disagree with thoughtful and articulate members of the games community that are better known, better liked, better experienced, and hell, probably better dressed than me. I hope you don’t think me pompous.
Patrick Redding and Clint Hocking - Dynamic story architecture
Patrick and Clint are of the opinion that it’s all about the player and that the designer should just get out of the way and stop worrying about crafting a story: “the designer builds a system, but the player authors the story”.
There are hints of truth here, which is what make this viewpoint deceptively convincing. Designers definitely build the system, and players definitely act out their own story, but the key distinction is that the player’s story is constrained and controlled by the system. In that sense, what the player is actually doing is acting out their own plot to a pre-defined story.
The Sims is considered a powerful example of a game that lets players author their own stories. But really, what they create is a version of a specific kind of story: a story about suburban life, friends, love, marriage, getting a job, having a child, etc. The system of The Sims provides the building blocks necessary for a player to create their own version of this story, but they’re limited to the story the system provides. They can’t create a story about a Sim giving up their meaningless, commercialistic life, moving to India, joining an obscure religious sect and living out their dream of an ascetic life… until one day! Carla (from back home) finds you and begs you to please! please come home! … unless that’s an expansion pack I haven’t heard about yet? The reason players can’t write that story is because the building blocks that The Sims provides the player don’t include these potential story events. The “story” of The Sims is pre-defined by the game’s mechanics, by the system’s units and rules.
It’s in this sense that I believe designers have a whole heck of a lot of control over the story experiences of players. Absolutely, interaction and agency allow the player to affect the outcome of the game, and every player will experience a different “story” based on their actions, but all of this will happen within the confines of the system. They’re not really changing the actual story, that’s set by the system, what players do when playing the game is author the plot, or the way the game tells them the story. It’s like this: I can tell you the story of the Lord of the Rings over lunch, I can read it over the course of roughly 1500 pages, or I can watch it over the course of 11 hours and 23 minutes. Each telling omits, adds and even slightly changes the small details of events, but in the end it’s all the same story.
Just because there is an infinite number of prime numbers, we shouldn’t avoid looking for the Riemann zeta function; and just because genetic mutation is inherently unpredictable and chaotic doesn’t mean we shouldn’t pursue the limits of the theory of evolution.
Games make storytelling more complex since the potential variations on the telling are virtually endless, you might even have a branching story with multiple endings, and the player is inherently unpredictable, but in the end, no matter how you play it, you’re playing the story set up by the game’s mechanics, art, environment, sound and haptics. Once designers realize this distinction, they’ll be in a better place to realize how they can manipulate their game design to better relate a potential story.
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.
Ian Bogost has a new column over at Gamasutra called Texture where he makes the case for a tactile appreciation of games. From Go’s game pieces to bump mapping, to force feedback to games that “touch”. These touchy-feely, hard to quantify aspect of the games “are pleasures more subtle and confounding then the anonymous fun of solving a problem in a game”. But the concept of texture can be taken further than these simple tactile pleasures; a game’s texture can be used to relay plot.
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Yes, the “P” word. Allow me the benefit of the doubt.
Bogost briefly talks about how different meanings can be conveyed through force feedback: The tremor that accompanies gunshots in Call of Duty 4 alert the player to unseen dangers, the rumble of lose dirt beneath Link’s feet in Legend of Zelda: Orcania of Time signals buried treasure, and the pulse of your player character’s heartbeat in Silent Hill is an indicator of his current health. Interestingly, Bogost also adds to this last example that the heartbeat’s quickening pace as you get closer to death “instills fear”. This mechanic isn’t just an innovative, non-visual way to provide feedback to the player. It also adds something completely irrelevant to the game’s system of play, but quite remarkable to the game experience.
To take these kinds of textural effects even further, let’s take a look at Ico. For those unfamiliar with it, Ico is the story of a young warrior, Ico, who as part of his village’s tradition is taken to a mysterious castle. There, he finds a young woman named Yorda who he must save by helping her escape the castle without having her dragged away by shadow-like creatures. Ico also uses force feedback, but not for any game related reason. Ico can take Yorda by the hand to drag her along at a quicker pace. When they join hands a quick burst of force feedback reinforces this connection. The startling rumble of the controller mimics the startling physical sensation of a first touch, and the more you play, the more it comes to illustrate the tactile, sensual nature of their relationship, the trust and safety of holding hands. It can even come to signify the emotional connection of the two characters, reinforcing the emotional attachment the player starts to feel for Yorda.
This textural effect is pure plot. It comes to affect the way you feel, and is irrelevant to the game itself. But what if we wanted a textural effect that was more like the one in Silent Hill? Useful and evocative. Then let’s take the rumble effect in Ico a step further. Suppose that the controller also rumbled distinctly, sharply, when Yorda is attacked by shadow creatures, or if she is about to fall. The rumble would serve the useful purpose of giving the player feedback on Yorda’s well being, while the startling vibration would mimic the pang of fear and worry that Ico feels over her safety, emphasizing their relationship and again helping to reinforce the player’s emotional attachment.
What’s important to realize here is that all of these actual or suggested textural effects in Ico are basically irrelevant to the game’s system of play. Within the game’s rules, you have no choice but to care about Yorda’s well being since the player fails if she dies. Rumbling when Ico and Yorda join hands (or when she’s in danger) isn’t necessary to the player caring about Yorda, the player has no choice; but it nonetheless does add something remarkable to the game experience. These “added” textural effects are valuable because they enhance the way the game tells you its story. To borrow from Barthes, texture acts as a kind of indicial function, a part of the plot that establishes mood, atmosphere or gives character. Like a jump shot as opposed to a slow pan in a horror movie, the way you tell (show) the story adds to how the story is experienced. The jump cut will make the scene startling and ultimately more satisfying than the slow pan, although it doesn’t actually change the story in any way. Texture too is a way for games to establish mood, atmosphere or give character. These are tiny, aesthetic aspects of the way the story is told, yes, but ones that make the story richer for them.
