This is really an excellent talk by Richard Bartle on the topic of word building.

Intentionality and coherence: asking “WHY?” on a level that’s more than commercialistic or purely player oriented. It’s something you hear shouted on the fringes of game design, but it’s by-far not the prevailing opinion. It’s refreshing to hear this message come from someone as renown as Mr. Bartle.

Why is it that a Halo gamer will sit down and read a Halo novel, but likely wouldn’t want to read through a paragraph if it appeared on-screen?

I think the answer is more complicated than “I don’t want to read, I’m playing a game!” It’s not just that they’re different kinds of activities. The goal of both the Halo novels and Halo the game are to entertain you. Watching a movie isn’t the same as reading, but you’ve (I assume) all read the intro to Star Wars: A New Hope, or the subtitles in a foreign film?

Why are we willing to read these?

Because they’re (a) important, and (b) engaging. Text in games is rarely either.

Jonathan Blow first brought up the conflict between story and challenge back in November 2008 at MIGS. Blow describes the problem as a conflict where “the challenge part is trying to hold the player back and keep him from getting to the next segment. But the story part wants you to get to the next part in order to keep going.”  As of January 2009, Blow doesn’t seem to be any closer at resolving the issue. I remember when I first heard his argument; I was really taken aback by how blind I was to this obvious yet pervasive conflict. It stumped me, plain and simple. The solution isn’t to tell stories without challenge, or challenge the player without story. That doesn’t really get us anywhere. I’ve been thinking about it recently and I’ve come to the conclusion that instead of trying to tweak story or conflict individually, we need to look at the fundamental assumptions that put challenge and story into conflict in the first place.

Plot in games is almost always set up as a gated experience. The player is presented with a few plot points before a gate is reached, and the plot can’t progress until that gate is unlocked. To unlock a gate you have to successfully complete a gameplay challenge. If you make the challenge too difficult, the player will have to experience the same plot points again and again as they restart the challenge, effectively ruining the game’s storytelling. On the other hand, making the challenge too easy negates the thrill associated with challenge based gameplay. Interestingly, these two approaches mimic two different play styles. Some players play for the story, and when the game gets too hard resort to cheats and walkthroughs to get through it, or they just plain quit. Other players play for the challenge, will be bored unless they are challenged and see the story as fluff or context. There are of course several shades of grey in between—I think I fall in the middle somewhere—but what this divide really does is beg the question: what are we trying to do here? Is the addition of storytelling to games a misplaced fantasy? Should we be purists and acknowledge that what games do best is challenge us and that what other forms of media (film, theatre, comics) do best are tell stories?

I think this is a really easy argument to make, but it isn’t the one we should be making. Like with every innovative idea, it’s always easier to keep doing things the way we have always done it rather than change the way we think about things. Here too it’s the way that we think about story and challenge, our fundamental assumptions, that is keeping us back.

The first fundamental assumption we need to break is seeing story, or story progression, as a reward. This is the core of the story vs. challenge conflict. We create challenges, and we reward our players with story. If the player fails the challenge, then they don’t get their story. If instead the story is detached from the challenge and a supplementary reward is offered, challenge no longer impedes story. Take for example Calamity Annie, a lesbian fast-draw cowboy romance shooter with an old-school retro feel. The challenge is straightforward and amusing. Using your mouse you try to out-draw and kill a list of lone gunmen, and meanwhile an interactive love story is slowly revealed. Taking someone out rewards you with a bounty based on their difficulty, how quickly you drew your gun, and a bonus for disarming them (with a satisfying TING! as their gun flies away). The gameplay is unforgiving. You are given three lives and each new set of gunmen get faster on the draw. If you die, you start all over with a score of 0, but interestingly you can chose to continue the story from where you left it. You can enjoy the challenge while still experiencing an unobstructed plot. This may be all well and good for a freeware game, but this kind of implementation wouldn’t really work well in a AAA title. Plus, it reinforces the disconnect between story and game, which should be avoided.

Simply removing the association between gameplay progression and story progression doesn’t solve, in a satisfying way, the issue of the game stopping when the story wants to keep going. To get past the gameplay progression issue, we need to examine our second fundamental assumption: that the only correct resolution to a challenge is success. Game stories are likely the only stories where everything absolutely always goes the protagonists’ way (in an ideal play through). The reasoning is easy enough to understand. We’re here to entertain our players and ensure that they have fun. Losing is not fun, so losing is never an acceptable resolution. However, this assumption forgets that many of the greatest stories ever told have moments where everything goes wrong for the protagonist. In fact, you can reliably predict that at around the 1 hour 15 minute mark in any Hollywood movie, after everything goes perfectly right for the protagonist(s), everything will suddenly go horribly wrong. As much as I hate this cookie-cutter predictability, Hollywood uses it because it has consistently worked so very well for them in the past. Why would Hollywood, always keen to entertain and please its audience, introduce these negative feelings into all of its stories? Because it creates dramatic tension, it leaves you guessing, it brings you deeper into the experience and makes the final victory (or loss) at the end that much more powerful (if it’s done well, of course).

We as designers need to learn how to integrate failure into our gameplay and stories, and the biggest hurdle to accomplishing this is our third fundamental assumption: failure means death. Death itself is a tricky, hotly debated subject, and I freely admit that I don’t have all the answers; but I do think I can provide some insight by re-jigging the assumption in saying that it’s actually failure means punishment. Designers have been talking for years about not punishing the player to the constant consternation of gamers that love a challenge. I also don’t consider the simple removal of punishment the final solution, obviously, since I think we should let the player fail and feel bad about it (in the right way) to create dramatic tension. The key is in controlling the dramatic experience, which is something we’re not very good at because the tools and know-how aren’t out there yet. Our young industry hasn’t arrived at that point yet, but it’s getting there. It’s easy to imagine…

Imagine a game where, instead of having failure mean death, failure meant alternate, parallel plots and less reward. Imagine a game that could produce a fun experience even when the player fails every challenge while still progressing through the story, and an awesomely fun experience when the player succeeds at every challenge. It would require a masterfully designed game that changes the meaning of failure in the player’s mind. I’ll believe it when I see it is a perfectly acceptable reaction to this idea.

Specific implementations aside, the point of the post is this: If we want to beat the story vs. challenge conflict, we need to upend our fundamental assumptions about them:

• We need to stop considering story as a reward for the successful completion of challenge.
• We need to avoid thinking that success is a challenge’s only correct and acceptable resolution.
• And we need to find a way to avoid or improve on that classic game mechanic: failure means death.

Can it be done? Absolutely. I have some vague ideas, maybe you do too?

Christian Nutt has an interesting article on how Crisis Core: Final Fantasy VII has taken a small step forwards in meshing together gameplay and story. The innovative way Crisis Core tells its story with vignettes during battle through the Digital Mind Wave (DMW) system is definitely something to praise, and Christian does a good job of that.

But, I hate to say, it misses the mark on really getting passed the current gameplay/story divide. First, I’ll let Christian do all the work in describing how the DMW system works:

Most of the writing I saw (in reviews) was confined to confusion about the randomness of the DMW — it’s essentially a slot machine. When you hit onto the right combination of numbers you get stat boosts, powerful attacks, or even more impressive monster summons.

It also governs the leveling of your character, his special attacks, and spells. This is the bit people didn’t like: though it wasn’t actually random (since it masks a more-or-less standard experience point system) it appeared random, and that galls players.

[...]

As you fight battles, the DMW continuously spins, without your input, in the top left corner of the screen. When it gets close to making a beneficial match, the spinning reels zoom in to take over the entire screen.

Instead of fruit or other typical slot machine items, important characters from the game’s story populate the DMW; when you first encounter those characters in-game, they’re added to your DMW roster.

[...]

The DMW is affected by protagonist Zack Fair’s emotional state (hence the quote above.) The more intense his emotion, the higher likelihood there is of a match. When a match is made, that might be it — you just get a bonus.

But sometimes, a (very short) cutscene might play. This cutscene is always a memory Zack has of an important character of the game, and it’s always from Zack’s perspective.

[...]

When Zack remembers a particularly strong memory, he’s filled with strength to fight even harder. This is rewarding both from a story perspective and from a gameplay perspective.

I agree with Christian in that this game mechanic is definitely an interesting way for the game to present you with plot. This is a nice step forward. A method of telling story through game mechanics, as opposed to being slapped on top of them or jarringly stuck between the cracks, is always appreciated. But beyond this, what’s really interesting is that this game mechanic procedurally generates a plot in which the main character’s emotions conjure up vignettes of his past experiences which then influence the events of the present.

However, the reason this innovative step forward fails is because the game mechanics themselves are essentially built around a slot-machine-like system. Not only is this bad from a game design perspective, since rules should always be discernible in such a way as to not seem too arbitrary and frustrate the player, but it also implies (unintentionally) that emotions conjure up, like a slot-machine (??), past experiences to influence our daily lives. It’s the randomness and incongruity of the slot-machine mechanic that seems out of place. It grates against our gameplay and story expectations.

The reason Crisis Core doesn’t get past the gameplay/story divide is because, although it has an interesting system that innovatively introduces vignettes through a gameplay mechanic, the DMW system is inherently incoherent with the story being told. Emotions conjuring up the past and influencing the present suggests purpose, order, cause and effect. Randomness unhinges this feeling and makes the mechanic grating and annoying.

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.

I was reading an analysis by Daniel Cook over at Gamasutra that at first made me nod in agreement. Games have repetitious themes and often implement them in disjunction with or with disregard for their game mechanics. It’s good to see yet another member of the games industry catch on to this endemic problem and suggest a solution. But then a curious thing happens, Cook goes from talking about literary themes to what I’d rather call genre, but he keeps on calling it “theme”. Piracy in a work isn’t, as Cook assumes, a literary theme like “redemption” or “estrangement”. It’s a theme in the same sense that you can have a costume party with a pirate theme… but that definition doesn’t do us any good here. A literary theme arises from the interplay of plot, setting, character, conflict, and tone. According to Cook:

The theme you select directly influences how you present your initial skills to the user. By saying “pirates,” I turn on a particular schema in the player’s brain and a network of possible behaviors and likely outcomes instantaneously lights up.

“Pirates” here is more of a genre, a mental model for what is  expected of the structure and content of the work. It isn’t the same as a story about redemption, something much more intangible and difficult to communicate. But whatever you want to call it, mixing up this “theme” with literary themes only leads to a confused analysis of how themes and games interact. To implement a literary theme, let’s say redemption again, would require well thought out and coherent game mechanics that convey the essence of what it is to be a protagonist experiencing or delivering redemption. There isn’t a simple mental model for the representation of a literary theme, since these are generally aspects of the human condition that have confounded us since the dawn of recorded history.

I mean, okay, this kind of stuff is generally dismissed as quibbling. Getting into arguments about terms and definitions is usually the quickest way to say a whole lot of nothing while annoying the hell out of everyone. But, clearly defined terms are the only way we can have productive conversations. It seems everyone in this industry has their own definition of theme,  story, plot and narrative; and we wonder why no one can agree on what it means to have a game that tells a story.

Gamasutra was at Microsoft’s recent Gamefest and gives us this piece on How Valve Makes Art to Enhance Gameplay. And well, to me ‘gameplay’ is just another word for the way a game tells you its story. Okay, okay.. so Team Fortress 2 and Left 4 Dead aren’t exactly bereft with story. They do focus heavily on their game mechanics, and these are the primary reason why people do and, in the case of Left 4 Dead, probably will play these games. But that being said, what makes these games so much more than just their mechanics; what, in part, makes them a cut above the rest of the industry and helps make these games as wildly popular as they are isn’t just Valve‘s commitment to giving you fun mechanics, but their commitment to creating rich and interesting fictional worlds that mesh beautifully with those mechanics.

Team Fortress 2 “is over-the-top from a gameplay perspective – you can rocket jump, you can magically heal people. [...] Valve designers came to the conclusion that they should aim to match the game’s look to the gameplay.” So far here at Systems of Play we’ve talked about designing gameplay mechanics that are coherent with the story the game is trying to tell, but the opposite is also equally true: you can make story to enhance gameplay. TF2′s classes were given “grossly distinct physical shape[s]” not only to help differentiate between classes, but also to coherently reflect the classes’ main functions in the game.

I don’t mean to muddle art and story, but if you think about it, story isn’t just the “text” behind a work of fiction. Story is that abstract chronology that can be told using text, sound, images, environments, haptics and yes, even play itself (enactment). So in that sense, creating art in a work of fiction is to tell the story in a particular way. If you consider how The Joker has been portrayed over the years, you can tell that although the abstract story of The Joker has remained relatively the same, different ways of portraying him relate (tell) that story differently.

Although not mentioned in the article, Valve uses more than just art to reinforce their game mechanics. Different classes also have very unique voices and sounds that emphasize their character and their role in the game. Even each class’ “feel” (haptics) is coherent to their character and their role, with the Heavy feeling much.. heavier than the Scout. Valve even uses the environment to emphasize the fictional world:

for the red team we used predominantly warm colors – some grays, but they’re warm as well. We used natural materials such as woods and red brick, and angled geometry [...] Then for the blue team we used cooler colors, and industrial materials such as concrete and steel, and orthogonal forms.

That’s the whole lot: game mechanics, art, environments, sound and haptics; used coherently to emphasize TF2′s fiction, to tell TF2′s (albeit simple) story. Why does Valve make such great games? Look no further.

What’s this? Justin Marks says that artfully story-entwined gameplay is what major titles are missing? A man after my own heart.

Well, “entwined” is the editor’s word. In fact, what Justin was getting at was not that “story” ( some separate object from “game”) should be entwined with it. That’s pretty much what he says people should stop doing. Instead, what he wants game designers to do is to “start thinking about the gameplay as the narrative itself”. Instead of seeing the story as something to be added to the game, we should see that it is the act of playing that delivers the story to us.

Justin talks about how going on a date in GTA IV while packing a rocket launcher doesn’t affect the story whatsoever. This bit of inanity is an extreme example of a gameplay mechanic being incoherent with the story that the game is trying to tell. This incoherent mechanic has a function in the game’s generated plot, mainly to introduce inanity into the potential narrative (whether the developers intended it or not). To refer to Barthes (again, two posts in a row..), every function, “to varying degrees, signifies [...] even when a detail seems irreducibly insignificant, refractory to any function, it will nonetheless ultimately have the meaning of absurdity or uselessness” (The Semiotic Challenge). What this mechanic in GTA IV does to its story-tacked-onto-a-game is highlight that the story is in fact just tacked onto the game. Very post-modern, but not exactly praise worthy. I think this concept of coherence ought to be central to the act of designing a game if you want it to actually tell a story in an interesting way. You could make something incoherent, sure, but it has to be on purpose and for a reason.

Coherence can be simple, like making sure accurate WWII weapons are available in a WWII shooter. Games are already really good at this kind of coherence. Where they often lack is in having aspects of the game that are coherent in such a way that they enhance the way the game’s story is told. A good example of this second kind of coherence can be found in BioShock. The relationship between the Little Sisters and the Big Daddies is an important part of BioShock‘s story. That this relationship is made evident through one of BioShock‘s core mechanics, one that players can’t avoid if they want to become strong enough to progress in the game, is a visceral way to demonstrate this relationship. Having the Big Daddy initiate the Little Sister’s entrance into and exit from the level (the Big Daddy will bang on the Little Sister’s tunnel to wake her and get her to come out, and will eventually lead her back to a tunnel, offering his body as a stepping stool so that she can climb back in), that the Big Daddy follows her around the level, and that you must kill the Little Sister’s protective Big Daddy in order to get to her at all, all coherently reinforce this story element.

All three are just simple rules in the game:

But since these rules are coherent in just the right way, they also reinforce and shape the way the game tells its story. Coherence is a powerful storytelling tool.