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.

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.

Raph Koster lists what he thinks are the two hardest and most critical skills for a game designer.

• Be able to see the game with no hint of artwork, music, sound, anything
  [...]
• Be able to see the game without any mechanics, any rules, any knowledge of how it should play

If you’ve been following the site so far, you might have an idea of where I think this is lacking. Namely, I’d like to suggest that there is a third critical skill a game designer should have.

• Be able to take an abstract story, turn it into a series of coherent plot functions, and design game mechanics, art, environments, audio and haptics that reinforce those functions and combine to tell that story through play itself.

Of course, if the game doesn’t have a story, then don’t worry about it. But that’s becoming less and less the case as the gaming industry matures. The reality is that story needs to stop taking a back seat to mechanics if games hope to tell their stories to their fullest potential.

And a great designer? They should be able to see all three in their head at once.