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.

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.