[also posted on GameCareerGuides]

Do games tell stories?

Sure, text, artwork, voice acting and cut-scenes can all arguably tell or help tell a story, but how can you truly say that the game itself is telling the story? And by the game, I mean the actual system, the units and rules that create the possibility for gameplay. Is gameplay a form of storytelling? Maybe not in most games (to avoid the argument), but if we wanted to conceptualize gameplay as storytelling, how would we do it? And if we wanted to make a game that told its story well, what would it take?

In short, and I’ll go into more detail later in this article, yes: it can be useful to think of gameplay as a medium through which players experience a unique form of storytelling. Maybe you’ve experienced it yourself where for one brief moment everything—the characters, the sounds, the visuals and what you were doing—all seemed to click, and you felt truly engaged in the story being told. It’s something that many gamers have felt at some point, but that no one has yet been able to consistently reproduce. “It” eludes us not because we lack the tools to describe or evaluate it, but because it crosses so many fields and disciplines. Theories of fun and swords and circuitry, research into expressive AI and dreams of Hamlet on the Holodeck all bring us closer to understanding it, but none provide that one true holistic vantage point from which a game designer can envision how to truly tell stories well through gameplay.

A holistic approach to storytelling in games has to consider many literary and filmic concepts like story, plot, character development, cinematography, lighting, audiography and “editing”. But unlike film, a holistic approach must also consider the game mechanics and expressive processes that determine the above (no small feat), all the while recognizing that games are interactive, and have spatial and haptic dimensions. Is it any wonder that a holistic view of storytelling in games has eluded us for so long? The solution isn’t to mash the concepts together and hope for the best. Putting Steven Spielberg, Conrad Hall, Syd Field, Jorge Luis Borges, Chris Crawford, Nobuo Uematsu, and Michael Mateas into a room probably won’t produce anything worthwhile because they have no common framework on which to have a meaningful discussion.

To find that common framework, we have to go up the conceptual tree to find what all of these seemingly disparate disciplines share. And that shared concept is communication. Ultimately, they are all means of getting an idea from person A, across some medium, to person B. But that net might be cast a little too wide for our purposes. Storytelling is a specific form of communication, a form studied for thousands of years by that often misunderstood field of study: narratology (as it’s called today). But I’d like to ignore Aristotle for once and instead shed some light on the modern founders of narratology, the Russian Formalists, who a hundred years ago decided to analyze literature as if the stories it told were complex machines intentionally and purposefully constructed using “devices” or “functions” that serve particular purposes. It’s from this concept that we get the term “plot device”. This approach to understanding storytelling is interesting because today we use complex machines to intentionally and purposefully design and program functions that serve particular purposes in order to tell stories. Somehow, this conceptual similarity has rarely been noticed.

Unfortunately, after years of largely pointless “Ludology vs. Narratology” debates, narratology is seen as a dead horse whose body is periodically dragged out by articles like this one for yet another beating. Except that this article isn’t about using narratology to “understand” games, it’s about giving designers a framework on which they can use all of the tools in their toolkit, not just a few. Narratology is the foundation for a common framework that we can all use to set up and guide the shape and direction of ours stories; game design, cinematography, level design, artificial intelligence, art, sound design, etc., are the tools we use to create a story; and gameplay is the way we as players experience that story. So what is this common framework?

Laying the Foundation

Before describing the framework, we need to build a foundation of commonly accepted terms and definitions to stand on. One of the major stumbling blocks when it comes to talking about story in games is that we can’t agree on what “story” even means. It seems like everyone in this industry has their own definition of story, plot and narrative; it’s again no wonder that no one can agree on anything.

Meanwhile, narratologists has generally agreed on specific definitions of “story” and “plot” for about a century. Although “narrative” has some academic wrinkles left in it to iron out, for our purposes a (fuzzy[1]) definition is easy enough to come to. The basic theory goes like this: a narrative is a linear sequence of events through time where it’s said that things cause things to happen to other things. I think that’s generic enough. Whether we’re reading a book, watching a movie or playing a game, the way we experience reading, watching and playing is as a narrative. Games are experienced as narratives.

But that’s not really the useful part of the theory. What’s useful is the implication that whenever something is narrated to you—whenever you have a narrative—that narrative can be described as being composed of two simultaneous planes, like two sides of a coin: the “content plane” (story) and the “expression plane” (plot). The story is the abstract chronology of events and characters behind any narrative. That movie you want to see and spoiler you avoid reading refer to the same content, the same story, even if they tell it differently.

Plot, on the other hand, isn’t used here in the everyday sense of rising action, climax and resolution; the story arc; and all that. In this article, I’d like to take use a different definition of plot. To narratologists, plot is the order of events as they’re told, and plot devices are used to deliberately create certain effects, express certain meanings. The film Memento (2000, Summit Entertainment) starts at the end of its story, and scene by scene takes the viewer back to the beginning. The difference in Memento between “story order” and “the order that the story is told” is the difference between story and plot. Memento’s reverse chronology is a plot device used to great effect. Without the reversal, the film would arguably be far less effective in engaging the viewer and in expressing that sense of piecing together lost memories.

I hope the above helps clarify how we’ll be using the terms story, plot and narrative in this article. I’m not so naïve to think that I can change the way people talk about storytelling with an article, but I do hope that the basic concept that we can differentiate between what is being told (the story), and the telling itself (the plot) is now apparent.

The point? By using these definitions for story, plot and narrative we can deduce that since gameplay is experienced as a narrative, then gameplay can also be described as expressing a story by means of a dynamic plot. This deduction becomes important when considering famed literary theorist Roland Barthes’s argument[2] that every aspect of how a story is told can be usefully described as a plot device. The choice of words, the sequence of shots, the musical score and/or the visuals that express the story are all meaningful, whether that meaning is intended or not. For game designers, this suggests that every game mechanic, art asset, animation, environment, sound effect, musical score and haptic sensation is made meaningful through play. It isn’t enough to consider how a tweak in game mechanics or the placement of a door will affect the game’s playability; how will it affect the story?

Experiencing Story through Play

As mentioned above, it’s useful to describe gameplay in terms of story and plot. Not all games should be described this way, since a game for gaming’s sake has arguably no reason to worry about storytelling. But with the release of titles like Uncharted 2 (Naughty Dog, 2009) and Heavy Rain (Quantic Dream, 2010), it’s easy to see that good storytelling continues to be an important selling feature.

For games that actually do care about telling a story well, it can be useful to describe gameplay as the expression of a game’s story. In other words, gameplay can be usefully described as a system of both play and plot. Games dynamically produce plot as an emergent experience. When a player plays a game, their agency allows them to experience a different narrative with every playthrough, but importantly, not a different story. It isn’t the story that changes, it’s the plot that does. The story stays the same because, in games, the story is dictated by the game mechanics, art assets, animations, environments, sound effects, musical score and haptic sensations that make up the game. A game’s story materializes itself experientially through the interaction of its many parts. Worries over linear and non-linear storytelling are irrelevant. Gameplay is pseudo-linear at best, but describing stories in terms of linearity doesn’t bring us any closer to telling those stories better. Instead, we should consider that when a game is played, its plot—the expression of its many parts and possibilities—is emergent, dynamic, and never the same twice, and that because the parts and possibilities stay the same, the story stays the same even if the narrative is different. I’m sure that someone could make a polymorphic game where this isn’t the case, or that we could get hung up over stories with multiple, branching storylines, but let’s not pull hairs. Heavy Rain may have multiple endings, and The Sims (Electronic Arts) may have no true ending, but both can usefully be described as telling a story.

In fact, describing certain games this way can be insightful. For example, The Sims is considered a powerful example of a game that lets players author their own stories; except, that’s largely an illusion. In actuality, what players create is a version of a specific kind of story: a story about suburban life, friends, love, marriage, getting a job, having a child, peeing yourself in public, etc. The game mechanics of The Sims provide the building blocks necessary for a player to bring about their own rendition of this story, but they’re limited by the game’s space of possibilities. They can’t create a story about a Sim giving up his meaningless, commercialistic life, moving to India, joining an obscure religious sect and living out his dream of an ascetic life … until one day Carla (from back home) finds him and begs him to please! please come home! The reason players can’t author this particular 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 its game mechanics, art assets, animations, environments, sound effects, and musical score, and what players do when playing The Sims is bring about one of the virtually infinite (yet pre-defined) dynamic, emergent plots afforded to them through their interactions with the game’s space of possibilities.

But What about Characters?

I think narratology has an interesting and, importantly, useful way of looking at characters in stories. In narratology, characters in a story aren’t living beings that exist in a fictional world. They don’t think, they don’t have emotions, they don’t feel. Instead, they’re described in a purely functional way. Characters only exist because an author wants a certain action or event in their plot to take place. It’s a subtle change in perspective that constantly acknowledges the fictionality of the story, or in other words, that the way a story is told is a construction and not a projection of some kind of reality. To a narratologist, in Spiderman’s origin story, Uncle Ben doesn’t die at the hands of some burglar because one rolled lawful good and the other chaotic evil, or because the burglar had a higher agility score, or because the burglar had a bad day, really needed some cash and got careless. The reason Uncle Ben dies at the hands of some burglar is to provide the realistic motivation needed by the plot to satisfy the necessary causes and effects that lead to Peter Parker’s transformation into the friendly neighbourhood Spiderman we all know. Peter doesn’t decide to fight for justice because of the guilt he feels over Ben’s death; Peter doesn’t decide or feel at all. Peter, Ben and the burglar are just ink on a page or moving images on a screen, they don’t exist. As far as Spiderman’s origin story goes, the only reason why the characters of Ben Parker and the burglar exist in the plot is to provide a realistic reason for Peter Parker’s transformation from selfish mercenary to altruistic hero.

What does that have to do with game design? Well, what’s interesting is that game designers already see characters in a similar way. When designing gameplay, characters are just collections of functionality encased in mesh or sprite. Narratologists analyze what a character’s function in the plot is, and game designers determine what a character’s function during play will be. And this is where the two meet: once you know exactly what a character’s purpose in the plot will be you can start thinking about what game mechanics  best serve to fulfill that purpose. Or considered differently, when designing character AI don’t fret over simulating what they’re thinking or feeling, instead focus on creating behaviours that act as coherent plot devices that reinforce the story in meaningful ways.

Unfortunately, creating meaningful character behaviours is no simple task. Characters in many games are based on functional roles: hero, quest giver, villain, helper. These are the kinds of roles that narratologist Vladimir Propp discovered were pervasive in fairytales. When we find these character archetypes in games, they do indeed align their game function with their story function, but like most fairytale characters they’re also flat and boring. The game industry has been trying hard to move away from flat characters, but in most cases we don’t know how to approach creating that depth. Back story and cinematics can only go so far in establishing characters. What matters more is how those characters behave during gameplay. If their only role during gameplay is to be a mindless “helper,” then even the most masterfully rendered cut-scene will fail to convince a player that they’re anything but a flat character once the cut-scene ends. The key lies in creating in-game character behaviours that help reinforce their characterization and the story’s themes, and dynamically create moments for the player to experience the story you’re trying to tell.

Agency

So we’ve covered story, plot and characters, but there’s one more element to stories in games that all other forms of storytelling don’t have to worry about: the meddlesome player.

Player agency can bothers us when we think about it too hard. Giving some chaotic player free-reign in our exquisitely crafted world is exhilarating, but having to worry about how they might go against our intentions can be frustrating. Throw in a complex story and what you have in front of you is so sublimely complex that it just seems better to avoid thinking about both the story and gameplay at the same time. How can you tell a genuine story when the player can do whatever they want?

Yet, this way of looking at player agency ignores one basic fact: a player can’t do whatever they want; they can only do precisely what you let them do. If a player can take a game’s mechanics and subvert its story (bugs and exploits aside) then those mechanics weren’t well designed. This isn’t meant to be an insult, just a statement of fact. If every game mechanic is designed from the start to tell a particular story, then no matter what the player does within the limits of those game mechanics, the result should be the story that the game was intentionally and purposefully built to tell. Let’s take a step back and look at what this actually means in practice.

Let’s say an intrepid designer wants to tell a story about freedom, levity and reckless youth. She decides that a good way to tell that kind of a story is through a set of core game mechanics that revolve around flying. Flying: freedom, levity, recklessness—it makes sense. Unfortunately, she realizes during some initial design sessions that a player could undermine her theme of reckless youth by repeatedly smashing themselves into cliff faces and dying. The point of reckless youth is that you feel invincible; such an obvious vulnerability hinders that feeling. What should she do? Remove those dangerous cliffs entirely? Add artificial boundaries that bounce the player away? Insert an all too convenient excuse into the story? These design/story choices may solve the problem mechanically, but they would only serve to undermine or at least dilute the sense of freedom and recklessness she was trying to express in the first place.

Instead, her solution is to change how wall collisions are handled. When the player hits a wall, he will acrobatically bounce off, or by holding down the grab button, just latch on. Now that feeling of reckless invincibility is palpable. Even if a subversive player wants to ruin the story by smashing themselves into walls repeatedly, this mechanic acts as a plot device that ensures the game stays on message by taking “bad” player behaviour and making it nonetheless tell the story the way our designer wants it to be told. Rather than try to create a realistic simulation that panders to the flawed notion that players need absolute, realistic control over a system in order to feel immersed, our designer sees that the story’s needs outweigh the player’s need to feel they have the freedom to commit suicide on cliff faces. Immersion is important, but it’s also important to recognize the degree of simulation needed to preserve that sense of immersion.

These collision mechanics also avoid punishing the player as they learn to play. Not only does it help reinforce one of the story’s themes, on its own it’s also a sound design decision. Maybe near the end of the game our designer will remove this mechanic (accompanied by a credible story pretence, like a broken leg) because, after all, the invincibility of reckless youth is only an illusion…

The key here is that she had to face the fact that either (a) her game’s mechanics didn’t suit the story, or else (b) her story didn’t suit the mechanics. This may be a broad generalization, but I hope that it sparks a shift in perspective: if you’re telling your story in a way that ruins the story, then you’re not doing it right.

Conflicts and Coherence in Dynamic Plot

We’ve all played those games where the game’s story is trying to be serious, but the game mechanics make it ridiculous, or where we know what the story is trying to do, but we’re just not feeling it. A lack of coherence between story and plot, or story and gameplay, unless done for satirical effect, is the mark of bad storytelling. Let’s take a look at a game-related example. In Grand Theft Auto IV (Rockstar Games), the player can go on dates outside of the main storyline with four women: Kate, Alex, Kiki and Carmen. These side quests aren’t just there to be amusing; completing multiple successful dates with these characters will reward the player with tangible, in-game abilities (e.g.: calling Kiki will take three stars off your wanted level). All of them, that is, except for Kate. No matter how many successful dates you go on with Kate there is no in-game advantage. Because of the precedent set up by the other, similar side-quests, the effect is either that the player is annoyed by Kate or else avoids Kate completely.

In the story, on the other hand, Kate is the player character’s main love interest. What’s meant to be an emotional moment towards the end of the game instead comes off as ineffectual because an emotional attachment with Kate isn’t established during the course of actual gameplay. In fact, the gameplay is in conflict with the story, and acts against the story’s attempts at establishing this emotional attachment. If the game had gotten the player to like Kate through gameplay, the emotional moment would have been much more effective. This conflict between story and gameplay in Grand Theft Auto IV suggests two things. Firstly, gameplay becomes meaningful to the story whether the designer intends that meaning or not. And secondly, coherence is an important factor in making gameplay that harmoniously reinforces and enriches the story being told.

Coherence can be as simple as making sure that the units and rules in a World War II themed game somewhat accurately reflect our expectations of World War II. Most game designers are already skilled at implementing this kind of coherence (realism) into their games. But beyond this, designers interested in telling stories better need to start considering what kind of plot they want their game mechanics to create, and whether that plot is telling the story the way they want it to be told.

One example of this second kind of coherence, ludonarrative coherence (described variously by Clint Hocking and Jonathan Blow), can be found in BioShock (2K Games). The relationship between two non-player character types that populate the levels of the game, the Little Sisters and the Big Daddies, is an important part of the game’s story. This relationship is made evident through some of BioShock’s game mechanics, mechanics the player can’t avoid if they want to become strong enough to progress in the game:

1. A Little Sister cannot enter or exit a level without a Big Daddy.

2. A Big Daddy will follow his Little Sister.

3. A Big Daddy will threaten and push anyone that scares his Little Sister.

4. A Big Daddy will attempt to kill anyone that tries to harm his Little Sister.

5. The player cannot interact with a Little Sister until her Big Daddy is dead.

These simple interactions between units, their rules, the environment and the player are coherent with the game’s story. They are a visceral way to showcase the Big Daddies as protectors, demonstrating their unyielding dedication to the safety and wellbeing of their Little Sister. Without saying it orally, textually or visually, these rules procedurally communicate a strong relationship between these two units, reinforcing the story that the game is trying to tell. These rules can be usefully described as dynamic plot devices; together they create dynamic situations for the player to experience the story of BioShock.

No playthrough of BioShock is ever the same, but everyone who plays BioShock experiences the same relationship between Big Daddies and Little Sisters. Without these rules there would be far fewer opportunities for the player to observe and emotionally react to their relationship outside of an initial opening cinematic. Sure, these NPC behaviours are also sound design decisions—decisions which were likely made for reasons that have nothing to do with the story, but that’s the beauty of it: you shouldn’t have to sacrifice good game design for story.

Putting it All Together

So far we’ve discussed the foundation needed to establish a common framework, and the implications this foundation has on the way we talk about and understand stories, characters, agency and game mechanics, but we haven’t really established what that common framework is. The crux of it all comes in shifting our perspective. By seeing all of the various tools we use to tell a story as systems in their own right, systems of meaning that can be used to affect the way a story is told during gameplay, we can refine our perceptions to what matters most about each tool and how they interact when building an experience.

When building a house you might use hammer, it might be made out of steel or zinc alloy, it might be 12” long, it might also be useful for hanging picture frames, and all of these characteristics might be important to the person wielding the hammer, but when talking to the person working the bandsaw, what matters most is how these two tools interact with the raw materials available in order to produce a set of trusses for the roof. Whether we want to impart a certain atmosphere through lighting, a certain emotion through music, a certain mood through character art, or a certain reaction through game mechanics, all of these tools can be used well together if we holistically frame the game and all the tools we use to create that game as a system that communicates meaning through play.

Our task as designers and artists is to use that common framework to visualize a holistic blueprint, to know how to intentionally and purposefully use all of the tools in our toolkit to create a game that tells a story the way we want it to be told, and to understand how one tool interacts with another tool in order to create a game where the total sum of those meanings constructed and expressed by each individual tool comes together to form a singular, cohesive (or ironic) story as experienced through play. With a common framework in mind, artificial intelligence isn’t designed to accurately simulate cognition, but to create compelling story experiences; levels aren’t designed with the back-story in mind, but with an aim to meaningfully reinforce the story being told; and game mechanics aren’t just fun, they’re meaningful.

But after all that pomp, I do want to emphasize that we are already doing this today, to some degree. I hope many of you reading this article weren’t surprised by what was said and saw instead a reflection of your own thoughts. Many of the notions presented here come naturally, others need refinement, and so much has yet to be discovered. We still have a long way to go in perfecting our craft, and I hope the idea of a common framework based on coherently communicating a shared meaning will help get us there.

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?

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

I don’t think we should ever expect anything of the sort. Let’s face it, there shouldn’t be a right and a wrong way to play a game. If it’s within the limits of the rules, then why shouldn’t the player be expected to do something that conflicts with the story? The answer isn’t, I don’t think, in having sophisticated enough AI to respond to a player’s inanity and keep the fiction going. The work required is just too astronomical.

It may some day be possible, but until then there is a solution that can be implemented in games today. The answer is to have game mechanics that are coherent with the story being told. Instead of having “all player actions [...]  interpreted by the game within the context of the character performing the action (his or her personality and relationships) and the situation within the narrative”, the game mechanics can be designed to only allow player actions that are coherent with the story. If every game mechanic is coherent with the story, then any version of the dynamic plot generated when playing the game will be coherent with the story being told. That’s the key.

How do we do this? Well, I’ve mentioned character creation before. Instead of first coming up with the character’s history, personality, or even their name… craft the character based on the function you want them to have in the story. Once you’ve established that, create game mechanics that coherently express this function. It’s easier said than done, which is why you rarely see it. But it isn’t by any means impossible, it just requires some forethought.

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.

Check out parts II and III.

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.