Michael Abbott, catching on to this crazy confluence of ideas about games and narrative, has proposed a Narrative manifesto by quoting from some of “the most thoughtful and articulate members of the games community” on this very topic. I applaud the effort, and certainly feel strongly that our anti-status-quo way of looking at things needs a call to arms, but I can’t help but feel that the whole story and games thing is misunderstood. It’s not that the people that Michael chose to quote are wrong. What they say is true, but they miss the larger point, or muddle the concept of narrative in games. Rather than a manifesto for narrative in games, Michael has done a splendid job of collecting the kinds of viewpoints that serve to confuse the issue of narrative and games. Yes, I’m going to disagree with thoughtful and articulate members of the games community that are better known, better liked, better experienced, and hell, probably better dressed than me. I hope you don’t think me pompous.

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.

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.

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.

Ian Bogost has a new column over at Gamasutra called Texture where he makes the case for a tactile appreciation of games. From Go‘s game pieces to bump mapping, to force feedback to games that “touch”. These touchy-feely, hard to quantify aspect of the games “are pleasures more subtle and confounding then the anonymous fun of solving a problem in a game”. But the concept of texture can be taken further than these simple tactile pleasures; a game’s texture can be used to relay plot.

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Yes, the “P” word. Allow me the benefit of the doubt.

Bogost briefly talks about how different meanings can be conveyed through force feedback: The tremor that accompanies gunshots in Call of Duty 4 alert the player to unseen dangers, the rumble of lose dirt beneath Link’s feet in Legend of Zelda: Orcania of Time signals buried treasure, and the pulse of your player character’s heartbeat in Silent Hill is an indicator of his current health. Interestingly, Bogost also adds to this last example that the heartbeat’s quickening pace as you get closer to death “instills fear”. This mechanic isn’t just an innovative, non-visual way to provide feedback to the player. It also adds something completely irrelevant to the game’s system of play, but quite remarkable to the game experience.

To take these kinds of textural effects even further, let’s take a look at Ico. For those unfamiliar with it, Ico is the story of a young warrior, Ico, who as part of his village’s tradition is taken to a mysterious castle. There, he finds a young woman named Yorda who he must save by helping her escape the castle without having her dragged away by shadow-like creatures. Ico also uses force feedback, but not for any game related reason. Ico can take Yorda by the hand to drag her along at a quicker pace. When they join hands a quick burst of force feedback reinforces this connection. The startling rumble of the controller mimics the startling physical sensation of a first touch, and the more you play, the more it comes to illustrate the tactile, sensual nature of their relationship, the trust and safety of holding hands. It can even come to signify the emotional connection of the two characters, reinforcing the emotional attachment the player starts to feel for Yorda.

This textural effect is pure plot. It comes to affect the way you feel, and is irrelevant to the game itself. But what if we wanted a textural effect that was more like the one in Silent Hill? Useful and evocative. Then let’s take the rumble effect in Ico a step further. Suppose that the controller also rumbled distinctly, sharply, when Yorda is attacked by shadow creatures, or if she is about to fall. The rumble would serve the useful purpose of giving the player feedback on Yorda’s well being, while the startling vibration would mimic the pang of fear and worry that Ico feels over her safety, emphasizing their relationship and again helping to reinforce the player’s emotional attachment.

What’s important to realize here is that all of these actual or suggested textural effects in Ico are basically irrelevant to the game’s system of play. Within the game’s rules, you have no choice but to care about Yorda’s well being since the player fails if she dies. Rumbling when Ico and Yorda join hands (or when she’s in danger) isn’t necessary to the player caring about Yorda, the player has no choice; but it nonetheless does add something remarkable to the game experience. These “added” textural effects are valuable because they enhance the way the game tells you its story. To borrow from Barthes, texture acts as a kind of indicial function, a part of the plot that establishes mood, atmosphere or gives character. Like a jump shot as opposed to a slow pan in a horror movie, the way you tell (show) the story adds to how the story is experienced. The jump cut will make the scene startling and ultimately more satisfying than the slow pan, although it doesn’t actually change the story in any way. Texture too is a way for games to establish mood, atmosphere or give character. These are tiny, aesthetic aspects of the way the story is told, yes, but ones that make the story richer for them.

I think it’s fitting that the first post made on this site coincides with one made by Jesper Juul titled, Why Make Games that Make Stories?, since answering that question is exactly what this site is all about.

In a ripost to James Willis’ article “Making Games That Make Stories” for Second Person, Juuls asks the “ludological” quesiton: Why?

Why make games that tell stories? Well, in this tiny corner of cyberspace—where ludology and narratology make sweet, sweet love: a Venn diagram whose sets are related at a point, immeasurable, like lovers kissing with just the tiniest lick of tongue—we will try to answer it, or at least explore the possibilities.

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There will always be a place in our consoles, on our computers, (in my heart) for games that aspire to be great games and nothing more, games where “story” is just another word for context. Games for gaming’s sake don’t need a story, and so Juul has every right to beg the question: Why?

The answer’s simple. Because games have revealed themselves to be powerful storytelling systems. With each generation the stories and the storytelling get better. Why do it? Because games tell stories in a novel and engaging way. Why progress instead of standing still? Because we can.

I think the current situation of “game” vs. “story” is a non-issue. Unfortunately, the bad rap around “story” seems to be kept alive by the fact that a great game can have a horrible story and still be fun, whereas a horrible game with a great story is irritating and just plain not fun. So why put so much effort into the story at all? But this assumption isn’t completely accurate. A horrible game could never tell a great story, because the telling would be as horrible as the game. The story itself may have the potential to be great, but a terrible game will do a terrible job telling it to you. So it’s never the case that terrible game has a great story. In reality, only a well designed game call tell a great story well.

To touch another point in Juul’s riposte, let me agree and say that games aren’t stories. A game by any definition will never be a story; they are two distinct kinds of things (they share some characteristics only because they can both be considered systems and are both experienced linearly in time—like everything else). Stories in games are experiential, they are produced by the game through the act of play. To say that “no silver bullet will appear that allows any arbitrary story to be made into a satisfying game” is to miss this distinction, or miss the point of storytelling in games.

Stories can’t be made into games, but games can be made to tell stories.

The art of telling stories with games is one that many game designers flirt with without truly knowing it. It is a formalistic,  system-centric (read: ludological) approach to the act of storytelling (read: narratology) that, ultimately, has yet to be defined.

And that’s what this site’s all about. It’s that metaphorical space where ludology steals a kiss from narratology.. when no one’s looking.