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.

Over at Gamasutra they have a detailed and well researched piece on crafting compelling characters in video games. But I think something’s missing. It’s not that what Tychsen is saying is wrong, technically he’s just reporting his observations as he sees them. His honest goal is give people the knowledge they need to design better characters in games, that you can see. Unfortunately, the way he approaches what a character is dooms him to repeat the same mistakes that have lead game after game to implement flat, boring characters.

From a systems’ point of view, a character is just a unit within the game, with attributes, relations, statistics, and behaviours. This is Tychsen’s viewpoint, and it’s fine when creating a game for gameplay’s sake. But as soon as you introduce story, you need to look at characters in a different way.

[…]if the character is not interesting to play, the gaming experience will not be of a sufficient quality to motivate the player to continue player.

Fascinating characters can make a game and create lasting relationships with the player that keep them coming back for more – as is evidenced in the game series featuring characters such as Lara Croft, April Ryan, Max Payne, Crash Bandicoot and Sonic the Hedgehog.

First off, you could have the most interesting character in the world and it won’t save you from plain old bad gameplay. Consider the wildly popular and completely unsuccessful Sonic the Hedgehog franchise. I love that little guy, and I have fond memories playing Sonic games on my Sega Genesis, but I really haven’t enjoyed the 3D versions that have been coming out over the years. Sonic the Hedgehog is a character, yes, but moreso, he’s the embodiment of a specific kind of gameplay that I really enjoy. Take away the gameplay, and I don’t enjoy Sonic anymore.

And this leads me to my point: If experiencing gameplay is to experience a game’s procedural plot, and Sonic is the embodiment of that gameplay, then Sonic isn’t just a character but an actantial component of the plot.

Actants aren’t units in a story; they don’t exist and affect the fiction as agents, “causing” things to happen. Instead, actants only exist because you want a certain action in your plot to occur. It’s a subtle change of perspective that has you constantly acknowledging the fictionality of the plot, the fact that the story is a construction. 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 the money 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 fulfill Peter Parker’s transformation into the friendly neighbourhood Spiderman we all know. As far as Spiderman’s origin story goes, that’s the only reason why the actants of Ben and the burglar exist in the plot.

That’s interesting, you might think, but what does that have to do with game design? Well, like I said, Tychsen’s systematic approach isn’t wrong, it’s just lacking the depth needed to implement characters that are well rounded and feel like they belong in the game’s procedural plot. For that, you need to consider what that character’s actantial role in the plot will be. And this is where the two meet: once you know exactly what an actant’s purpose is in the plot, then you can start thinking about what game mechanics, attributes, statistics and behaviours best serve to coherently fulfill that purpose. The end result is a character that’s both structurally and actantially sound, the kind of character that really emphasizes the plot and brings your game to life.

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.