Previously on Spectre Collie, I made the claim that action-oriented games like shooters and platformers and “action/adventures” haven’t yet lived up to their promise of rendering traditional adventure games obsolete. Conventional wisdom says that adventure games are great stories on top of lousy, illogical, frustrating, and boring gameplay, and therefore

Myth 8: If you could combine the stories and characters of the best adventure games with a style of gameplay that’s actually fun to play, you’d end up with better games.

But conventional wisdom is wrong and dumb. The problem, as usual, is that insistence on that division between “story” and “gameplay.” Whenever I’ve rambled about storytelling in games before, I’ve usually been talking about how purely cinematic storytelling techniques are clumsily grafted onto action games, the host game rejects the donor story, players get frustrated, and people come to the conclusion that storytelling has no place in videogames.

And it goes both ways: the results can be just as bad when a story-driven game is moving along with all the right character developments and plot twists, and then suddenly realizes oh crap we’ve had 15 minutes of solid cutscenes and we need to cram some interactivity in there. The message isn’t “story makes better games,” but “games with stories need to make the story and the game the same thing.” In theory, it should be impossible for an adventure game to have a great story but lousy, illogical gameplay, because a great story is inherently logical — there can be twists and surprises, but nothing that has you asking, “Where the hell did that come from?”

The appeal of adventure games isn’t that they can have complex stories, interesting characters, and detailed environments. For better or worse, those are standard issue in big-budget games these days; games as shallow, story-wise, as Quake and Unreal are now a rarity. The real appeal of adventure games isn’t in telling the player a cool story, it’s allowing the player to collaborate with the team to tell a cool story.

You’ll often hear fiction writers claim that at a certain point in the writing process, their original outline gets thrown out and “the characters decide where to go next.” You get a similar feeling in writing meetings that are going well. The story gains a momentum on its own, pieces fall into place, connections are formed, and new ideas are created. What if those numbers from the numbers station transmission turn out to be winning lottery numbers? What if the bad guy turns out to be the hero’s father?

Adventure games have a spotty record of capturing that feeling; some of my favorites have only one or two instances of its really coming together, and some don’t have it at all. But I’ve never seen it in done in non-adventure games. Games like BioShock and Half-Life 2 can have you immersed in a world and engaged in a story in a way that non-interactive entertainment simply can’t, but still, you’re always reacting to the story, never creating it.

Since I’m usually long on theory but short on actual practical examples, here are some examples from my favorite games to explain what I’m talking about:
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According to a report from Reuters (bolding mine):

“There is a time when it’s necessary to take the gloves off and that time is right now,” Palin told thousands of supporters at a rally in a sports arena in Carson, California.

Earlier at a fundraiser in Englewood, Colorado, she departed from her usual speech to question Obama’s character.

“Our opponent though is someone who sees America, it seems, as being so imperfect, imperfect enough that he is palling around with terrorists who would target their own country,” Palin said of Obama, also calling him an embarrassment.

Palin cited a New York Times story on Saturday that examined Obama’s relationship with Bill Ayers, a former member of the Vietnam War-era militant Weather Underground organization who is now a professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago. The Times concluded they were not close.

I’m now deeply regretting what I said earlier about Palin’s not being an idiot.

She should’ve stuck with the stereotype of the backwoods former newscaster who got in way over her head. Since the GOP is betraying its own supporters, rotting out the core of its platform in favor of Fox News-worthy talking points, you could feel some small degree of sympathy for her getting swept into that betrayal. And getting turned into a hot by horny conservative standards* mannequin parroting back the inflammatory nonsense the party orders her to.

But you have to be a special kind of idiot to be spreading crap like that. If she is actually “departing” from her usual speech, then she’s an idiot for believing that will fly. And if she’s not, but merely tossing in another attempt at muckraking her GOP handlers have given her to say, then she’s an idiot for not saying “I’m enough of a maverick to rattle off your prepared statements when they’re vague meaningless sound bites and empty promises, but not when it’s perpetuating a baseless smear, bless your hearts.”

This is the material of cowardly forwarded e-mails filled with the kind of stuff the GOP wants you to think, but they’re not allowed to say out loud. (”Hasn’t everyone noticed how he’s black? And his middle name is Hussein? How can we possibly be losing?!? Put our redneck uncertainty staff on full alert: give us everything you can to link him with Muslim extremists, stat!”) When somebody forwards you one of those e-mails, it’s kind of hard to get too angry, because they’re just gullible saps who’ve been horribly manipulated. But the person who writes the e-mail in the first place deserves your full scorn.

I think Governor Palin was better off just being an embarrassment.

* When considering the concept of “hot by horny conservative standards,” you have to remember that the desiccated husk that is Ann Coulter got all the attention she has by marketing herself as a “hot conservative,” and mysteriously, it worked.