On his blog, Raph Koster wrote an essay titled Narrative is not a game mechanic. His main point, somewhat over-simplified: a game’s narrative is not part of the player’s interaction with the game, it’s merely feedback for that player’s interaction. Whenever the narrative “content” outweighs the player’s interaction, that’s bad game design, because it ignores the strengths of games as a medium. Narrative-heavy productions may make for great experiences, but they’re not games.

Essentially, it’s the same arguments that have been repeated for years, but presented clearly and filtered through a more purely academic analysis. “Game stories suck.” “Games aren’t stories.” “If you put more emphasis on story than game design, you’ve made an interactive movie.” When I saw the essay linked on Facebook, I had to double-check the date to make sure that it was written recently and not pulled from the archives from 5 years ago.

I really don’t want to sound too dismissive, since Koster makes his points well, and it’s clear that the essay is more of a definition than an indictment. But I can’t agree with most of his assumptions or conclusions, partly because I think Koster uses an over-exclusionary definition of what constitutes a “game.”

A few days later, he addressed similar concerns with a follow-up essay: Narrative isn’t usually content, either. This one’s a bit harder for me to over-simplify, but essentially: he acknowledges that there is a category of games where the gameplay consists of piecing together a narrative, but says that the narrative is still being used as a resource, not a mechanic. You could change the individual pieces of narrative to fit any theme, but the actual game mechanics, what the player actually does with those pieces of narrative, don’t change.

That’s an insightful observation, but it still doesn’t do anything to address my problem with the claim that narrative isn’t a game mechanic. Most of my objections are rooted in his insistence that a “game” is by definition systematic, replayable, and deterministic.

If it were just a simple matter of definition, I wouldn’t really mind. He doesn’t use “experience” as a pejorative. He does use “interactive movie” as a pejorative, but I think we’ve all got a general idea of the distinction between a satisfying game story and an interminable series of cut-scenes interspersed with limited interaction. And if Koster were to say that, for example, a traditional adventure game was a great “experience” but not a good game design, then what’s the harm?

For one thing, it continues the tradition of drawing a clear do-not-cross line between “gameplay” and “storytelling,” which is bad for both. Back when I was working on narrative-driven games, I was looking for ways that games could be used to tell stories. But even then, I was starting to get more interested in systematic games, and I started to develop a greater appreciation for board game design. Now I want to understand how stories and games can work together.

Understanding how games work and how to design games as systems, instead of just cranking out minor iterations on the same set of established game genres, will only make for better games. There is one point that I agree with completely: it’s foolish to ignore or diminish the interactivity in a game, because the interactivity — the game design — is what’s unique to games as a medium.

But my main objection to Koster’s basic assumption is this: If you treat game narrative as nothing more than feedback, then your game narrative will never, ever be satisfying.

A digression about replayability

Most of Koster’s arguments reduce to the core problem that narratives aren’t repeatable:

There’s nothing wrong, to my mind, with using narrative as feedback. But we have to keep in mind that all that narrative and visual content is the expensive part of making the game. It is also consumable, whereas a systemically driven game system can provide many many problems to solve and heuristics to develop (and therefore fun to be had), with relatively few rules. Because of this, narrative content is destined to be expensive, short, and over.
[…]
You’re not going to get people to keep playing unless you keep releasing more content. This will matter quite a lot for any service-based game, be it MMO, F2P, social game, whatever.

I was a little baffled by his last statement, since “service-based” games are exactly suited to supplying more content. Downloadable content, in-app purchases, expansions, and sequels — an entire industry has been built on players wanting to buy more content. It’s very rare that these significantly change the game mechanics, and a lot more common that they provide more narrative. (For the simple reason that designing genuinely novel game mechanics is a lot more difficult and time-consuming than developing narratives).

Still, Koster insists that a systematic game that is indefinitely replayable is the ideal. That seems reasonable enough on the surface: if the player’s interaction isn’t meaningfully changing the outcome of the experience, then it would seem to be non-interactive by definition.

But consider a partial graph of a simple game, where the circles are the player’s decision points and the squares are the moments of feedback that lead to the next decision:

But whenever a player plays the game, he has to walk the graph:

The game itself is a system, but no matter how complex the game, the player’s experience with the game is always linear. Like a story. That’s just as true for the most systematic, abstract game as it is for the most linear, narrative-driven game.

You can never actually circle back to a junction point and make a different decision to arrive at a different outcome. Even if you go back to a saved game, you’re still arriving at the decision point with more information than you had the first time you made the decision.

I’d even take it a step further and say that because humans aren’t “stateless,” we can never truly replay a game from the beginning. Whether we’re re-rolling a character in an RPG or starting a new game of Tetris, our subsequent play-throughs are actually just a continuation of our last. Because this time, we know that enemy X is more vulnerable to heavy weapon attacks, or we’ve learned when and where is best to place the straight-line tetrominoes. All of our experience with a game lands on a linear timeline from the start of our first play-through to the end of our last.

I believe it’s a mistake to ignore that when we’re talking about good game design vs bad game design, to focus on an academic definition that requires replayability instead of looking at the player’s experience as a whole. I’ve got a board game called Macao that’s a perfectly enjoyable game, somewhat similar to Puerto Rico. It’s lightly themed, only slightly dependent on luck, and is primarily driven by a system of well-thought-out game mechanics (too many game mechanics, you could argue). I can’t imagine a definition of “game” that wouldn’t include it.

Still, I’ve played it exactly one time. I have no compelling reason to play it again as anything other than a pure diversion. Not because it’s a bad game, but because I feel as if I got everything I wanted out of it from my first play-through. It’s systematic, but I won’t get anything new out of interacting with its systems.

On the other hand, I’ve played Sam and Max Hit the Road at least five times, even though little has changed from one play-through to the next. It’s not just to watch the cut-scenes, either; I could go to YouTube if that’s all I wanted. Instead, there’s something inherently satisfying about putting the pieces of the system together and making them click, whether or not I’m still getting the “a-ha” moments of first discovery. Based on Koster’s definition, that’s just be a case of my getting excited about feedback. But I’d say it’s slightly deeper than that: it’s the interaction with the system that’s fun, just as much as that of a player going through the same course in a driving game even after he’s played it dozens of times.

To put it another way: I say what makes a game is the act of playing it. Being presented with a choice, deciding on one, and responding to that decision’s outcome. As long as the choices aren’t over-simplified, the knowledge that I could do it differently a second time has no bearing on how much I enjoy playing it the first time.

Weapon of Choice

All of my graphs above reduce the decisions a player makes — the inherent gameness of the game — to simple circles, each with the same weight. You could say that putting all the interesting decisions into what are effectively black boxes, and dropping them all onto the same line after the decision has already been made, ignores what it is that makes a game a game: the ability to choose between several different predictable outcomes.

Koster reminds us that our brains love feedback; it’s why slot machines are so profitable, and it’s why long strings of cut-scenes in a videogame can trick us into believing that we’ve actually accomplished something, even when we actually haven’t.

I’d make the claim that even more than the chemical jolt we get when we receive feedback, our brains love having the illusion of choice.

We hate the idea of choices being closed off to us. We love the idea that we’ll be able to explore every possible opportunity and get the chance to see every possible outcome. We agonize over restaurant menus, even when we know we’ll be back. We throw bachelor and bachelorette parties as a kind of wake to mourn a person’s decision to enter into a stable, committed relationship with only one person. We even value the potential of a choice as much as the outcome — the old expression reminds us that eating a cake means losing the option of having a cake to eat. It’s a big part of why we like stories, simulations, and games in the first place; they give us the chance to try out the choices we wouldn’t be able to make in real life.

The prospect of having multiple choices is so compelling, in fact, that we think of it as a virtue even when we’re not equipped to handle it. One of the terms you’ll hear frequently in regards to board games (and occasionally with video games) is analysis paralysis — it’s when a player has so many equally appealing choices available, she can’t decide which one to take. The best games circumvent this by introducing mechanics that limit the player’s choices at any given opportunity, scale the number of choices up or down as the game progresses and the player gets more information, or give context to the player so that some choices are more appealing than others.

So we love having plenty of choices with lots of possible outcomes available to us, even though we’re generally bad at predicting what those outcomes are going to be. And “anecdotal data” from my own experiences with games, and from reading and hearing other players’ accounts of games, leads me to believe that we value the potential of multiple outcomes more than actually seeing multiple outcomes.

I’ve heard plenty of accounts of players praising the Grand Theft Auto series by saying “I solved this mission using one method, but my friend solved it completely differently.” But I’ve never heard of players saying how great it was to successfully solve the same mission multiple times in multiple different ways. (I’ve absolutely no doubt that there are players who do exactly that; I would just categorize them as “completionists” and still say that playing the game that way isn’t the series’s main selling point).

And I’ve heard lots of accounts of players finishing BioShock, or any BioWare RPG that presents a series of binary good/evil choices, and then playing through again on the “opposite” path. But I’ve never heard anyone claim that it significantly changed the gameplay, or even that it was as satisfying as the original play-through. It’s more like my replays of Hit the Road — going back through a game I enjoyed, in an attempt to see what I missed the first time.

All of which leads me to conclude that it’s the player’s agency that’s most important. Koster says that

The bar that designers should strike for should include a rich set of systemic problems precisely because that is what the medium of games brings to the table. It’s what lies at the center of the art form.

That’s game design, which is the field that Koster is interested in. What I’m interested in is “interactive entertainment,” which is a combination of game design and storytelling, and therefore isn’t constrained by the definition of a “pure” game.

The appeal of a simulation is that it allows the audience to do both A and B. But a game, much like a story, has an end goal. What lies at the center of the art form is presenting the audience with the information to make an intelligent choice between either A or B, then showing the outcome of that choice. The act of solving the problem is what’s important, not the chance to see an array of alternate solutions.

The responsibility of the game designer is to present the player with a set of interesting choices. The responsibility of the storyteller is to make a sequence of interesting decisions and form a narrative from their repercussions. They’re not mutually exclusive. Anyone making a narrative-heavy game has to be good at both.

Press B Button to Ruin Game

So far I’ve side-stepped (I hope) the question of authorial control. All of the discussions I’ve read on that topic tend to be prescriptive: because games are by definition like this, you’re violating the integrity of the medium by doing that.

But I’ve played outstanding games that give the player absolute control over the storytelling (like The Sims). I’ve played outstanding games that give the player no control over the storytelling (like Half-Life 2). And I’ve played outstanding games that have no storytelling at all.

The only absolute must-follow rule is to be consistent. If you make a game with the intention of making the player the storyteller, then don’t impose narrative decisions on him without his consent (as in Grand Theft Auto 4 and a couple of unfortunate quests in Skyrim). If you’re making a game on the assumption that the “gameplay” is the focus, and the narrative is there solely to provide context and feedback for the game, then follow Koster’s advice: don’t let the narrative overpower the player’s actual interaction with the game.

In his example from Arkham City, Koster points out the problem of having a very small, very stupid game (turn camera and press A) followed by a huge cut-scene. But the problem with the Quick-Time Event isn’t just one of scale, but intent. It fails as both gameplay and narrative.

My interaction with the game is inconsistent with everything else I’ve done to that point: the A button doesn’t mean “leap through window and glide safely to the street below as the cathedral explodes behind me.” If I remember correctly, the A button means “jump.” And my interaction with the narrative is inconsistent with the story as presented up to that point: even though I’m ostensibly the Batman, and I could safely predict that I’d be walking into a trap, I was given no way to prepare for it or to circumvent it. I wasn’t an active participant in the storytelling; I was simply moving the character into place for the next cut-scene the designer wanted me to see. That’s not storytelling, it’s blocking.

Quick-Time Events happen when the developer wants to show the player an elaborate non-interactive cut-scene, but then feels the need to throw in some token amount of interaction because hey, videogames.

To fix the problems with the gameplay, you’d need to make the interaction more interesting and more consistent with the game as it’s been presented so far. Let me take any of the dozens of bat-gadgets I’ve acquired and learned how to use, and figure out a way to either defuse the bomb or open the window. That still doesn’t fix the problem with the storytelling, though. I’ve accomplished what I set out to do by making my way to the top of the cathedral, but I haven’t actually learned anything useful to advance the story; I’ve simply completed one in-game objective and been assigned a new one. In storytelling, you’re supposed to eliminate scenes that do nothing to advance the story. Even if they have cool explosions.

Sharing the Role of Storyteller

I’ve played plenty games that use narrative as feedback or “reward” for the gameplay. Solve a puzzle, get a cut-scene that introduces the next puzzle. Shoot a bunch of bad guys, get a cut-scene that introduces the next bunch of bad guys. It can be perfectly entertaining, but it’s still the least interesting type of interaction.

When Koster limits narrative to the role of just feedback, he also limits the amount of interaction the player has with the narrative: I’m making decisions in the gameplay that have little to no bearing on the story. He dismisses what I believe is most exciting about the potential of interactive entertainment: to create games where the gameplay is the story.

If you’re on board with the assumption that an indefinitely repeatable system with different outcomes isn’t required for something to be called a “game,” then it’s easy to see how a player’s walk-through of a game can be mapped directly to a plot-driven story:

Nothing particularly earth-shattering there; that correspondence is why game developers thought it would be a good idea to use games to tell stories in the first place. The interesting part is figuring out exactly how you map the game design to the narrative, and deciding how to divide the roles of “game designer” and “storyteller.”

First, you have to take the narrative and imagine it structured as an enormous game graph. (Or alternatively, start with your game design and assign narrative beats to it). Start with the setting, introduce the protagonist (the player), establish the protagonist’s goal (the win condition), and define what the protagonist can and can’t do (the rules).

Next, identify the significant plot points and translate them into decision points for the player. That’s the part that requires a familiarity with “pure” game design — determining how to present the player with a set of interesting decisions.

You could just stop there and turn the role of storyteller over to the player. Say that the player’s in charge of the decision points, the developer’s in control of everything else. In that case, the narrative is feedback for your game. I play a game, and when I accomplish an objective, I get to watch a moment in somebody else’s story.

Koster calls narrative a “parallel medium” to game design. But narrative is a lot more interesting when it intersects game design. To do that, I believe the developer has to share the role of storyteller with the player.

Earlier I said that a game designer presents the audience with a set of interesting choices, a storyteller decides among choices and pieces them and their repercussions into a sequential narrative. So in this case, the developer would have to:

1. Map the story onto a game graph
2. Walk the graph, deciding on a “best” subset of choices at each decision point
3. Encourage the player to reproduce the steps you took to walk the graph
4. Enjoy the accolades from your audience and your peers

My feeble attempts to translate this into the terminology of game design is making it sound more complicated than it really is. (It’s been almost two decades since I’ve been in an academic environment, so I’m not the best person to be talking about game theory). In the simplest, highest-level terms: turn the story into a game, “play” the game until you get the most satisfying result, and then encourage the player to replicate your play-through.

In the case of the Sam & Max games, it meant:

1. Figure out the narrative “arc” of the episode: typically opening, act 1, act 2, finale
2. Break that down into obstacles for the characters: getting into a room, getting past a character, searching for a key item
3. Since the games had only one solution for each puzzle, decide on the single funniest or most satisfying solution that we could think of
4. Putting context into the setup for each puzzle to make it feel as if our choice for the funniest or most satisfying solution was actually the best solution

Obviously, the magic happens (or doesn’t happen) in that last step. Adventure games are particularly susceptible to the “having to read the designer’s mind” complaint. But I believe that’s more due to the often ridiculous complexity of the puzzle solutions compared to the player’s actual interaction with the game, not the fault of the process itself. By which I mean: it’s kind of difficult to subtly suggest the idea “use sea slug on gong.” It’s not as difficult to suggest less specific things, like “this character is untrustworthy, you should check him out” or “that bridge looks rickety and is about to collapse.”

Most games do this kind of thing already, not just puzzle games. A huge part of level design is encouraging the player to do certain things instead of others: go this way, take this corridor, notice this object, climb on this ledge, get ready for the boss fight here.

Game stories do it as well, even though developers usually like to believe that they’re dropping huge unexpected plot development bombs on the player. In the Arkham City example: you’re Batman, heading to the top of an old building to meet the Joker, in the first 30 or so minutes of the game. Did any player, anywhere, not realize that he was walking into a trap? Instead of forcing me into a narrow corridor of cut-scenes and limited interaction, wouldn’t it have been more satisfying to reward me for realizing that I’m walking into a trap?

After the “read the designer’s mind” complaint comes the “interactive movie” complaint. If the developer is making all the so-called “best” choices for the player, then the player’s not actually interacting with the game. He’s just pressing buttons to advance to the next stage of the developer’s story.

But when you make a game that treats the narrative only as feedback or context for the game, instead of as an actual game mechanic, what you’re doing is making a non-interactive movie. It’s just one that happens to be separated by sections of interactivity. I get an objective, I kill a bunch of monsters, I watch the next scene of the movie to get my next objective.

That’s why I insist that a linear, non-systemic sequence of repeating decisions already made by a game developer can still be called a “game.” Because when it’s done correctly, the player’s doing exactly what the developer did while he was designing the game. During the design process, you start with a game state and a set of tools with predictable results, and then you have to decide “what happens now?” The “a-ha” moment comes when you decide “Of course! He should storm the rebel base!” Whenever I’ve hit one of those moments, it’s given me exactly the same jolt of satisfaction as when I’ve made a decision in another game.

If you were just to show the player a cut-scene, with the notice “New Objective: Storm Rebel Base,” then you’ve guaranteed that the player won’t get that same feeling of piecing together information to arrive at a decision. The narrative has no chance of being a game mechanic.

But if you give the player the exact same information of the game state, the exact same set of tools with predictable results, and an appropriately subtle nudge making the rebel base look like an awfully ripe target, then there’s a good chance he’ll get the exact same “a-ha” moment that the designer did. Assessing the game state, knowing the rules of the game, knowing the available moves, and making an informed decision about what to do next. How is that not a game mechanic?

I started a couple of times to write a review of The Elder Scrolls: Skyrim, but as time went on it became increasingly irrelevant (and this is on the scale of relevance that includes amateur blog reviews of videogames). There’s already such a surfeit of reviews, walkthroughs, parodies, and travelogues available that any review from me would do little to add or subtract.

But according to Steam I’ve spent over one hundred fifty hours in Skryim, longer than a lot of real places I’ve been to. It’s an outstanding game, and it’s joined the growing sub-genre of Games Good Enough to Make Me Angry.

Team Fortress 2 was annoying because it was so much better than it needed to be. Portal 2 bugged me because it took “feature-length” storytelling beyond the FPS and delivered a novel puzzle-based sequel with new mechanics and had an opening sequence that went past virtuoso presentation into just plain showing off. But Skyrim doesn’t draw attention to its art direction (even though it’s often astonishingly beautiful). And it doesn’t depend on spectacular set-pieces (although there are a few). Skyrim pissed me off by invalidating almost all of the assumptions I’ve made about open-world sandbox games in the past few years.

You’ve been having strange dreams, Outlander?

Playing Skyrim, I kept having unsettling flashbacks to Morrowind, my first exposure to the Elder Scrolls series. I played that the HellOblivion out of that game when it was released, but all memory of it had been buried under sandstorms (seriously, the entire last third of Morrowind is one interminable sequence walking through the desert during a sandstorm) and the lackluster sequel Oblivion.

But gradually, all those hours in Morrowind started to come back to me: I remembered that Bretons are good at magic, Khajit are cat people who make good thieves. I remembered jumping from rooftop to rooftop in a city building my acrobatics skill. I remembered making potion after potion and crafting ridiculously overpowered spells using the souls of monsters I’d killed. I remembered reading dozens and dozens of books scattered throughout the world. I remembered traveling from city to city on the back of giant bugs. More than anything else, I remembered being completely transported to a different world with centuries of history.

I’d saved the world, too, but I couldn’t tell you from what, exactly, or how I’d done it. Something about a prophecy. That’s a big part of why I’d dismissed open-world games as nothing more than diversions: completely engrossing while you’re playing them, but they evaporate as soon as the insubstantial main quest ends.

The Elder Scrolls games are all about world-building and giving the player near-infinite flexibility in creating his own character and his own story. So it would seem that criticizing Morrowind for building a completely immersive, memorable world but failing to deliver a compelling plot is missing the point. If anything, it’d seem to be a criticism of my own failure to tell a good story.

But that gets back to my core complaint about sandbox games: too often, they act as beautiful echo chambers. I’m not actually interacting with the game developers in any significant way; I’m spending hours telling a story to myself. (And a pretty tedious story at that, since videogame stories take place in real time).

And what’s annoying and tantalizing about Skyrim is that it’s full of instances that do more than that. They don’t form the bulk of the game, and they can be outweighed by the constant push-and-pull of a linear main narrative and an empty “do whatever you feel like” game design. But when those instances reveal themselves, they hint at how videogame stories are supposed to work.

Books: Check ‘Em Out

Here’s an example, left somewhat vague so as not to spoil it for anyone: while I was heading to my clearly-marked destination for some quest or sub-quest or sub-sub-quest, I wandered into a house. I killed a couple of lower-level monsters, and I found all the occupants of the house had already been killed. A new quest popped up: find out what caused the murders at this house. I wandered around, collecting the personal journals of the murdered occupants and reading them to find out what went down. They had clues telling me where to go next and where to find helpful potions or weapons along the way.

All of this is standard stuff, I had dozens of similar quests already in my quest log and had done countless more just like it in other games. (The first rule of creating a videogame world is populating it with characters narcissistic enough to document every detail of their lives either in journals or voice recordings). I followed the instructions, found the cause of the murders, and killed it. Boom, quest completed.

But then: I remembered a detail I’d read in one of the journals, a detail that had seemed like something of a throwaway. The game had already told me that I was done with that quest and could move on, but I decided to take a few minutes to role-play what my character would actually do in that situation. Without prompting from the interface, I went off course and followed one of the murdered people’s last requests as mentioned in a journal. Surprisingly, the game recognized it and rewarded me for it, with a permanent boost to my character’s stats.

Most of the discussion in support of open-ended games talks about “emergent storytelling,” but there’s nothing emergent about my example. It was a moment deliberately left by the developers for me to find, and they acknowledged me when I found it. But the key is that I was never explicitly told what to do. I wasn’t rewarded for following instructions, I was rewarded for understanding the story.

There are plenty of more conventional examples scattered throughout the game, where books give you explicit context for what you’re doing and what you should do next. There are also plenty of terrific examples of purely environmental storytelling. My favorite is wandering up to a burning house in the middle of the woods, exploring the interior, and finding a charred corpse next to a summoning circle and a spellbook describing how to conjure Flame Atronachs.

But the bulk of the storytelling in Skyrim uses the most conventional means possible: cut-scenes, dialogue trees, and books scattered about to give context to the world and to specific dungeons. And that’s fine, because Skyrim isn’t a storytelling game.

Its emphasis is on exploration and experience, and it seems that the design mandate throughout the Elder Scrolls series is: “Do everything possible not to interfere with the player’s experience.” The player’s free to take on the main quest at his own pace, or to ignore it altogether. The player can make his own weapons and armor as he sees fit, and then add (almost) any enchantment he wants, until his character is practically invincible. (Which invariably leads to complaints that the game is “unbalanced,” which is a silly thing to complain about in an open-ended single-player game, especially one in which the central story revolves around a mortal man who became so powerful he joined the pantheon of gods).

More significantly, the game avoids the usual binary good/evil morality choices and instead offers a multitude of completely linear quests. There’s frequently only one linear path through a storyline, and instead of choosing one branch or the other, you simply choose to follow the storyline or drop it completely. In most games, that wouldn’t be an option, but Skyrim has dozens of stories to choose from. In fact, it’s when the game tries to impose a more complex story on the player — when it forces a moral decision — that it starts to break down. There’s a sequence of events in the city of Markath that forces the player’s character into prison and into an alliance with one of the fellow prisoners. It feels the most structured of any of the storylines in the game; you can tell that the developers were trying to present a complex, multilayered subplot of political intrigue with its own warring factions and its own exploration of relative morality. But it ends up feeling the most artificial and frustrating of all the game’s storylines, because it breaks that central design tenet of player freedom (literally). The game just isn’t designed to give the player as much control over interaction with characters as he has with the rest of the world. In the rest of the game, when the player’s presented with an unsatisfying choice, he can simply choose to leave.

A Game of Drones

After all that, it would seem like I agree with Tom Bissell’s review/analysis of Skyrim on Grantland.com. He says that it’s frustrating when Skyrim insists on presenting its fantasy world via cinematics, long expository dialogues, and text:

Are we not at the point where dramaturgical incompetence in a game as lavishly produced and skillfully designed as Skyrim is no longer charming?
[…]
Dense expositional lore has no place in video-game stories — especially stories that go without highly wrought cinematics — and it seems increasingly clear that video games are neither dramatically effective nor emotionally interesting when the player’s role becomes that of a dialogue sponge. More simply put, the stories of Demon’s and Dark Souls are told in a way that only video games can tell stories. They don’t suffer in comparison because there’s no comparison to make.

But while I agree with the kernel at the core of Bissell’s argument — videogames are capable of telling stories in ways that no other medium can — I don’t agree that the more conventional storytelling used by Skyrim was clumsy or overbearing.

For starters, Bissell offers Demon’s Souls and Dark Souls as RPGs that don’t sacrifice their core “gameness” in order to establish a fantasy world. I must be in a completely separate circle from Bissell on the Venn Diagram of people who play RPGs, because I’ve tried Dark Souls and found it completely, almost offensively, uninteresting. I found myself dropped into the most generic fantasy world possible, and I was given absolutely no context for what I was doing, or why I should care. I refuse to believe that the solution to “bad” storytelling in games is to bury the storytelling so completely that I’m just wandering around, killing dudes because they’re there, and collecting experience points.

I also disagree that the more conventional storytelling of Skyrim was, on the whole, clumsy or overbearing. I enjoyed all of the storylines that I played (there are several that I still haven’t completed, even after over 100 hours), and they all ranged from above-average to quite good. The “main” storyline is obviously the one dealing with the reappearance of the dragons, and I thought it had a very satisfying, suitably epic and heavy metal finale that was cleverly inspired by Norse mythology.

I didn’t enjoy the Civil War storylines as much, although I do have to give them credit for making them more nuanced and less black-and-white than you tend to see in videogames. You don’t side with pure good or pure evil, since both sides are pretty much dicks, and the unabashed transparently evil characters are constantly looming in the background. (If the DLC doesn’t let me kill a lot of the Thalmor, I’m going to be sorely disappointed).

But calling the cinematics, dialogue, and expository text in Skyrim good or bad is completely subjective. Calling them unnecessary is less so.

Of course, Skyrim would no longer be Skyrim if it were to strip itself down to the spectral narrative simplicity of Dark Souls. No one, least of all me, wants the game to lose its special character. That does not mean the next Elder Scrolls game would not benefit from a measure of radical distillation.
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Like most who play Skyrim, I’m greatly drawn to these incredible environments because the act of exploring them becomes uniquely my experience. When I’m listening to and watching Skyrim’s interminable characters, I’m skipping through the same dumb cartoon everyone else is. Video games can tell involving, interesting stories — but they can’t do it like this. It’s high time we start thinking about another way or ways.

Here’s my biggest disagreement with Bissell’s argument: the storytelling in Skyrim is already inherently interactive, because the world-building and exposition are entirely opt-in. After the lengthy (and unfortunately, unskippable on subsequent play-throughs) opening sequence, the cutscenes rarely overstay their welcome. They give just enough exposition and information to give context and keep from degrading into “You. Go kill that dragon.”

For those of us who want more context and world-building, there are dialogue options, where we can ask most characters for more details on recent events and the state of the world. And for those of us who want to go all-in on the high fantasy, there are tons and tons of books detailing the history of the world, its leaders, and the various races. And many of the details are provided purely via background dialogue, like the amazing vocal performance of the devotee of Talos who rants/preaches in the square of Whiterun every morning. But none of it is required.

Contrast that with all the movies that have struggled to present a novel’s worth of fantasy world-building exposition. They’ve varied in success from the horribly inept (Ralph Bakshi’s Lord of the Rings) to the baffling (David Lynch’s Dune) to the pretty interesting (Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings). And even with the explosions and elf battles, the beginning of Fellowship of the Ring could seem like an information dump, even to those of us who’d read the books. A game can give the audience the option of saying, “Yes, I know this already; let’s move on.”

We’ve seen what happens when you take a complex fantasy world and give it a “radical distillation:” it becomes generic. There’s no shortage of elves, dragons, and wizards in videogames; it’s only via the Elder Scrolls’s stories of racism, political intrigue, lost races of dwarves, conspiracies, and dragon languages that this world distinguishes itself from hundreds of other Tolkien- and George R.R. Martin-inspired game settings.

So how to convey that to the people in the audience who choose to opt out of much of the storytelling?

Ideally, you do it through the gameplay. But I don’t feel that the focus of Skyrim is on killing dragons or even killing bandits, even though that’s what the player’s doing 99% of the time. The focus is on becoming completely immersed in a fully-realized world and having the freedom to shape a character however you want. And Skyrim only works as well as it does because it doesn’t impose too much on the player, instead relying on the “uncanny valley” effect — its stories are generally linear and its characters generally one-dimensional, allowing the player to extrapolate subtleties of character and cause-and-effect chains in the plot.

I believe Skyrim is on the right track. Even for those of us who’ve enjoyed the game’s conventional narratives, they’re not the most compelling parts of the experience. Skyrim works best when we’re given a sense of agency, allowed to stray from the static list of instructions and explore the world on our own terms. But more than that, it’s most compelling when we interact with the world and it responds.

All of us speak the language of games — even if you’ve never played a computer RPG before, you can’t proceed far in Skyrim without understanding how the game works. As such, we learn to control and throttle our interaction with the game’s storytelling. We learn to distinguish main quests from subquests; random monsters from the end-dungeon boss; significant books from ones just provided for color; and actions that are pure exploration from actions that will trigger the next big story moment.

I think almost all of the storytelling in Skyrim is competent, but it’s only when it breaks out of the predictable cycle of exposition-then-action that it excels. Staging a dragon attack on a city that I’d assumed was a “safe zone.” Having a random NPC in a tavern unexpectedly transport me to the other side of the continent and force me to retrace my steps. Giving me a quest reward that wasn’t on my list, a reward I wouldn’t have known about if I hadn’t picked up on a detail in a private journal.

You could punch up and trim down the dialogue of a cutscene all you want, but it still won’t resonate if the player’s been conditioned to think that the cutscene is just getting in the way of the real game to follow. It’d be the equivalent of trying to improve a roller coaster by making the valleys and lift hills more interesting.

What I’d like to see in the next Elder Scrolls game, and in all the open-world games to come that are going to build on Skyrim‘s success, is an attempt to blur the line between the main quest and the game. I shouldn’t feel as if I’m either furthering the story or straying from it and exploring, with the difference between the two clearly marked on my quest list and map. I should feel that the game is actually responding to what I’m doing, recognizing when I’ve done something that wasn’t explicitly asked of me, and rewarding me for it. And ideally, changing the world as a result of those actions.

It’d mean closing off some of the content, but Skyrim is the first game in years that I’ve resolved to give a second playthrough and then actually done it. I wouldn’t mind having parts of the game closed off to me. And if Bethesda has proven anything, it’s that they’ve figured out how to generate tons of content without its spiraling out of control.

The Radiant System as originally rumored was supposed to do a lot of this, constantly adjusting the world in response to the way you were developing your character. In one huge aspect, it worked: throughout my game, I always felt as if dungeons and random monsters were at a suitable level of difficulty, and that I was actually progressing and getting stronger. (Contrasted with Oblivion, for example, where after a certain point, you were discouraged from wandering, for fear of encountering a random bandit who had even finer armor and weaponry than you did).

The quest assignments, however, still felt noticeably computer-controlled. I didn’t feel as if I was interacting with Bethesda’s story, but with a random number generator. That’s the danger of relying too much on a “virtual world” to take the place of pre-generated content. I’d like to see the system expanded not so that I get infinite content — there’s already more content in Skyrim than I’ll ever see — but so that the content I do see is in response to what I’ve decided to do, not simply as a result of my checking an item off a To-Do list.

I wrote another article that went up on Gamasutra today, “Closing the Loop: Fostering Communication in Single Player Games”.

Like the last one, it’s kind of a continuation of a blog post on here, this time: “Saying Something”. The idea was to start with the most memorable storytelling moments from games I’ve played, try to figure out what it is about them that makes them more compelling than other media, try to figure out what they have in common, and then try to articulate that in terms of communication between player and game developer.

Did it work?

An article I wrote for Gamasutra went up today: The Brain That Couldn’t Die: Active Storytelling in Video Games. Thanks to Dave Grossman for the recommendation.

It was based on this post I wrote a while back about “don’t-go-into-that-room” moments in horror movies, but it’s fleshed out and incorporates some of the other ideas I’ve been going on about in regards to videogame storytelling. If you’ve been reading this blog for a while, much of it may be familiar, but I like to think I did a slightly better job of tying it together this time.