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.

Rubes over at The Monk’s Brew has a few thoughts on the tricky problem of trying to have a realistic protagonist that fits into the story… who is also controlled by an unpredictable player. The problem is of course that all too often a game’s mechanics will allow the playful player to do something ridiculous, something the protagonist would never really do. Should we just make a game and, as Jimmy Maher once said, expect the player  “to accept the premise and situation of the story she is in, and to behave in a reasonable manner”?

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.

This is part two of the Flaws of Narrative, a look at Michael Abbott’s Narrative manifesto. Click here to read part I.

If I were to follow Michael’s order, I would next comment on Braid‘s visionary designer Jonathan Blow, but since I basically agree with everything he says, that’s going to be a mountain I’ll climb in part III.

Steve Gaynor – The game designer’s role

Steve’s point of view is similar to Redding and Hocking’s (part I) in that he believes the designer should be largely “hands-off” and simply give players the tools they need to create their own stories.

I believe this is again an example of a viewpoint that sees the inherent chaos and unpredictability of the player, and without being able to see beyond traditional linear storytelling just gives up on story in games by pointing to the popularity of games like The Sims, or online worlds, where players create their own stories. My reply is basically the same in part I. 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. Again, Gaynor’s point of view isn’t wrong, we should definitely endeavour to allow players to experience richer stories that they feel are unique to their actions. It’s just that this view keeps us from fully considering the larger picture of storytelling in games.

L.B. Jeffries – Non linear reactive stories

Jeffries is definitely a wild-card, but I like that. I think it’s definitely by getting away from our preconceived notions of games and stories that we’ll make progress in this field. The application of tarot card reading, an ancient “storytelling” art, to storytelling in games is really fascinating, but isn’t the answer to the overall problem.

Jeffries suggests that just like tarot cards take advantage of our mind’s natural inclination to create meaning, to take chaos and enforce order on it, so too could these principles take the chaos of player agency and allow the player to infer their own meanings:

A series of reactions like someone crying for help if you shoot them or a dog following you if you feed it could be created in response to the player. Rather than worry about how these relate to some grand linear story, simply leave them as short vignettes that connect and relate to one another through A.I.

This, I believe, is a fantastic approach to storytelling in games, but it doesn’t need to come at the expense of a grander story. With enough forethought, the vignettes could easily combine to form a larger dynamic plot, or else help reinforce a dynamic plot told through other game mechanics, art, environments, sounds and haptics (yes, I will hammer you with this string of potential storytelling vehicles every chance I get).