What makes the game work so well is its focus. That may seem like a weird claim to anyone who’s played the game or the demo, since the game has so many disparate components. It’s got a ton of melee combat, but it’s not really a fighting game. It’s got sections where you have to take out a group of bad guys without being spotted, but it’s not really a stealth game. It’s got jumping and maneuvering sections, but it’s not a platformer. It has you tracking down evidence, but it’s not a detective or an adventure game. And it’s got tons of cutscenes and character histories and objectives, but it’s not really a story game, either. More than anything else, the game is a Batman simulator.

When I played the demo, I was put off at first by the camera angle: it hovered, Bat-Mite-like, just over Batman’s shoulder, a little too close to be convenient, but too far away to be as immersive as a first-person view. In retrospect, though, that’s the perfect set-up for this game: you’re almost The Batman. You see and do everything he does, but you can’t quite get inside his head. (And for the record, the camera work has the same level of polish as everything else in this game: it felt natural within minutes, and there was only one moment in the entire game where I even noticed the camera at all).

The usual tack for licensed games is to take a cool character and then drop him into an existing game type; for Arkham Asylum, it really feels like they built a game around being Batman. It seems that at every point during the game’s production, the developers asked, What Would Batman Do? They took each of the iconic aspects of the character (and the Rogue’s Gallery) and built a gameplay mechanic out of it.

I’ve read reviews that call out one part or another as being particularly under-developed, but they’re kind of missing the point. One review said that the combat was a little simplistic, the combo system unnecessary, and button-mashing would get you through most of the fights against common thugs. Which would be true, except: You’re Batman. There’s no question he’ll beat up common thugs; he says as much in the game. The only question is how much of a bad-ass he’ll look like as he’s doing it, and that’s where the combo system rewards you. The better your timing and response, the more acrobatic and sophisticated his animations get, until he’s swooping across the room from enemy to enemy, busting heads, doing backflips, pile-drivers, flinging bodies around, and expertly and causally blocking thugs trying to sneak up on him from behind.

You can say the same thing for the “detective” work in the game. The reason this game stands out is because the developers stayed true to the character and remembered that he’s not just a martial arts super-hero. So you spend at least half the game in their special “detective mode,” looking for clues and targets for all the gadgets on your utility belt. But Batman isn’t really a detective; he’s the World’s Greatest Detective. His suit can pick up any kind of evidence, his computer can analyze and synthesize any compound, and he makes wildly improbable deductions to move the story along, just as in the comics. It’s not even “gameplay” as much as character building. That character building is reinforced in the pacing, which always reminds you that Batman doesn’t win based on super powers, or his martial arts skills, or his gadgets; he wins by being smarter than everybody else. He doesn’t act until he’s surveyed the situation and figured out the best possible solution.

And that is exactly where the problems start to creep in. I enjoyed the hell out of the game, and I wouldn’t hesitate to call it the best videogame I’ve played this year. But there are a few pretty significant problems. First is the whole Killer Croc section, which didn’t work for me on any level. I respect the developers’ attempt to change up the gameplay and present something different, but it seems like a decent idea that fell apart during execution. Even if you get past the tedious and repetitive clue-gathering portion of it, it ends with an action sequence that just breaks all the rules of fair play: the villain springs up suddenly, you’re killed instantly if you make one mistake, and you’re forced to run along a fairly narrow platform towards a camera so that you can’t see where you’re going.

The “tedious and repetitive” complaint is my second biggest problem with the game: it belongs squarely in the Bowser school of game design, whose motto is “if it’s fun once, it’s super fun if you do it three times.” You spend almost all of the game traveling from one mini-boss to the next, which in itself isn’t a problem, since so much of the Batman story depends on his fantastic villains. But each of those boss fights requires you to do one semi-clever thing, and then repeat it two more times. And the game’s so obsessed with this structure that even when it does something really novel and interesting, like your first encounter with Scarecrow, it shoots itself in the foot by making you go through the same thing again twice. Three-shot boss fights are a standard structure in games for a reason: they take advantage of the 3-act play structure with a set-up, build-up, and climax built in to each confrontation; and they strike a decent balance between cleverness, skill, and challenge. So its repeated use here doesn’t ruin the game; it just keeps it feeling very gamey and prevents it from becoming a genuinely original experience. (Incidentally, I kept thinking that Batman could’ve avoided half the problems he ran into during this game if he’d just remembered to bring his gas mask).

But the “killed instantly if you make one mistake” complaint leads to my biggest problem with Arkham Asylum. I had a brief discussion about the game with someone on Twitter (Philip Kollar, assuming he doesn’t mind my calling him out), after he complained about the “trial and error” tedium in Arkham Asylum and stealth games in general. I responded that it wasn’t supposed to be a case of trial and error, because you weren’t supposed to die. Instead, it was reinforcing the idea that you should think before you act. If you play the game correctly, I said, then you would have completely surveyed the scene and figured out a plan of attack, before you even get into a situation where you could be killed. It shouldn’t be judged as a stealth game, but as a puzzle game.

Unfortunately, I said all that when I was still early in the game. I’d just finished a section that had you defusing a hostage situation in a locked room. I had tried it once and failed, but then instantly realized where I’d made a mistake. I’d rushed in and tried the most obvious solution, instead of checking around for a better one. For me, it was one of those adventure game moments: I didn’t get the right answer on the first try, but I realized that the right answer was something that I should have been able to figure out, so I was encouraged to jump back in and try again.

The problem is that this situation gets more severe the farther you progress through the game. I still say that it’s a puzzle game, not a stealth game, because you’re never given adequate feedback as to how “stealthy” you’re being (like Thief’s shadow gauge or the Metal Gear Solid series’s radar and exclamation points). You’re not maneuvering through a combat situation, but trying to figure out the one correct solution to a puzzle. And Arkham Asylum shows just how clumsy and limiting puzzles feel in open-world, free-movement games.

The puzzles here aren’t quite as pre-scripted as they are in an adventure game, since there’s still an underlying system that gives you a little bit of leeway in how you tackle a problem. But that leeway actually makes things worse, here, since it just makes it more glaring when the solution to a problem is use item A on character B. There is exactly one thing you do to take down Bane, just as there is one way to get past the Scarecrow, just as there is one thing that works against Poison Ivy, and so on. This creeps into the melee combat as you get into tougher battles, too: there’s one move that works against guys with knives, and one move that works against guys with tasers.

I’ve spent a good bit of time on this blog defending the concept of “puzzles with exactly one right answer” in games, but there are two aspects of Arkham Asylum that keep it from working well. First is that so much of the game is built on the interaction of different systems, so arbitrary puzzle solutions feel artificial and out of place. If I’m playing a traditional adventure game, my entire interaction with the world is limited to using one object on another object, so it’s implicit that I simply have to find the one key that fits this one lock. But in a game where you can freely roam the environment, and where you’re fighting guys with health bars that gradually get depleted, you’re encouraged to think in terms of systems and influences. It’s more jarring when I’m told that I can easily disarm this guy, but I have to use my “stun” move on this one, and my “backflip” move on this other one; why don’t they all work equally well? And why do I have to use a batarang here, when it seems like this grappling hook gun you just gave me should work just as well? Arkham Asylum does have situations where it sets up a clear cause and effect and leaves the player to make the right deduction: when a wall explodes, it has this effect on bad guys in this range, and here are two ways to take down walls. But it’s also got plenty of “you must use the grappling hook here” moments.

The more pervasive problem is that I hardly ever felt as if I’d made a clever deduction. Whenever I’ve made a defense of puzzles in games, it’s been based on the idea that a well-designed puzzle can feel like a collaboration between the player and the developer. There may be only one right answer, but the point isn’t to enable the player to do whatever he feels like (as in, for example, Scribblenauts); the point is to guide the player to discovering the most clever (or funniest, or most horrific, or most “meaningful”) solution. A system-based game would say: “This is Bane, this is what he does, these are all the tools you have at your disposal, this is the effect of each tool. Have at it; we’ll leave you guys alone for a few minutes and check back in when we notice his HP has dropped to zero.” A puzzle-based game would say: “This is Bane, and you know the absolute coolest way to get rid of him would be to jump on his back and pull out all those tubes. Let’s think of a sequence of arbitrary events that’ll result in a pretty bad-ass cutscene.” (And incidentally, a really cool game would say: “Bane was kind of a lame character, in retrospect. How about you fight Two-Face or the Penguin instead?”)

But the boss fights in Arkham Asylum — and many of the “stealth” sequences, for that matter — try for an uneasy hybrid of the two, and end up having the worst aspects of both with few of the advantages. You get the opening cutscene, you try whatever weapons you’ve been given, you get beaten up, and Batman dies. Over the death cutscene, the game tells you the solution to the puzzle. You hit the retry button, and you try what it told you to do until you get it right. You hardly ever get a chance to try different things (because you’re often in a confined environment and have no way to recharge your health), and even if you do, the most obvious thing might not work. You still get the cool ending cutscene, but you “earned” it not by being clever, but by being persistent enough to keep doing what the game told you to do until you got it right.

Again, Batman: Arkham Asylum is a hell of a lot of fun, even with these problems. I’m even enamored with the game enough to go back in for all the collectibles and “extra” levels, something I’m hardly ever compelled to do. But I couldn’t help thinking how much better it’d be if it’d been able to strike a more comfortable balance between puzzles and systems. I’ve already said that the first Half-Life promised to render the traditional adventure game obsolete, but a decade later, we still don’t have a great example of a game that balances deduction, storytelling, and action. And I’ve said that instead of treating adventure games as an evolutionary dead end, developers should be paying more attention to what adventure game developers have learned about puzzle design, and applying those lessons to games with more sophisticated and complex interfaces. Arkham Asylum shows that there’s still an audience for single-player games that have an emphasis on characterization and cinematic moments, and which don’t fall into any one specific genre like “shooter” or “brawler” or “stealth game.” Even if it doesn’t quite strike that perfect balance, it’s a step in the right direction, and I’ll have a good time just wailing on thugs until somebody manages to make the game that does strike that balance.

There are two good things about conducting a discussion like that on Twitter:

1. It encourages everyone to compress his opinion into a short and simple sound bite, without paragraphs of prevarication meant to sound good but in the end, not really saying anything.
2. The 140-character limit discourages the use of terms like “ludonarrative dissonance.” (A completely sound and relevant concept which has unfortunately been given the most pretentious-sounding name possible).

What’s bad about conducting a discussion like that on Twitter: everything else. While the lack of supporting arguments keeps everything focused, it also reduces everything to a statement of opinion with nothing indicating why anyone should agree with that opinion. No offense intended to the participants, since that’s the nature of Twitter. But it lets anyone come along and take a simplified opinion out of context and start poking holes in it. Let me demonstrate by doing exactly that:

If you put the narrative in front of the gameplay, you are no longer making a game. You’re making a movie.

That’s from Civ 4 designer Soren Johnson, in response to yet another encapsulation of somebody’s opinion, this one from Denis Dyack. There seems to be a lot of over-simplification and over-reaction on both sides; all of Dyack’s quotes don’t suggest turning videogames into movies, but the synthesis of different art forms that go into making a game. The closest he comes to saying “put narrative in front of gameplay” in the supplied quotes (which, again, are cherry-picked from a longer presentation) is “narrative is going to become more and more dominant, possibly superseding gameplay” (italics mine), and he ends that with “narrative is not the be all and end all.” He’s not advocating narrative at the expense of gameplay; he’s advocating a balance.

Which, at this stage of maturity in the videogame industry, means better narratives in games. And I’m all for that. If you insist that “gameplay” is the only important thing, you can end up with a game that has a terrific cover mechanic, clever and well-balanced weapons, great level design, a good multiplayer mode, and a story that makes me feel stupider every time one of the characters opens his mouth. I still don’t understand why, whenever anyone suggests that a game like Gears of War would be improved by having a better story, it’s met with scorn and long arguments about authorial control. And, of course, the often-repeated claim, “if you want to tell stories, you should make movies.”

I’ve seen and heard that claim made over and over again throughout the last fourteen years, coming from everyone from people writing on message boards, to executives at game companies. And I’ve got four big problems with it:

1. It’s polarizing. Which makes it perfect for the internet, where everything has to be turned into an either/or proposition. “If you advocate better storytelling in games, you’re saying that gameplay isn’t important. Go back to Hollywood and stop ruining my videogames!” You can try responding, “Hey, relax; I said it had a lot of great mechanics, but I couldn’t enjoy them because of all the dumb-ass homosexual innuendo and having to listen to the fucking ‘Cole Train’,” but you’ll get drowned out, because “games should have a good balance” isn’t controversial enough to make for good internet arguments.
2. It’s too narrow a definition of what a game is. Basically, it’s whatever type of game the speaker likes. But instead of saying, “I don’t like that type of game,” it’s “That isn’t even a game at all so go back to Hollywood and stop ruining my videogames!“
3. It assumes too much competence on the part of videogame designers. Just because something hasn’t been done well yet doesn’t mean that it can’t be done. It’s true that a game with a great story but lousy gameplay is going to be a lousy game. But it’s every bit as true that no matter how great or novel your gameplay mechanics may be, if you try to incorporate a narrative and don’t appreciate how the narrative and gameplay mechanics work together, you’ll end up with a lousy game. The answer to that isn’t to just throw up your hands and say it can’t be done. The answer is to get better at creating a synthesis of the two.
4. It confuses the potential of a medium with the definition of the medium. Or in other words, it takes a list of what games can do and says that this is the list of things that all games must do.

And for that last one, I’m going to go back to Hollywood and look at Alfred Hitchock’s movie Rope.

It Begins With a Shriek… It Ends With a Shot!

You’ll often see Rope described as “a failed experiment,” even by Hitchcock himself. It’s an adaptation of a stage play; the “experimental” part of it was Hitchcock’s decision to film it as if it were in real-time, a continuous shot playing out over 80 minutes. It’s a series of very long (around 10 minute) takes, with most of the cuts disguised. It tells the story of a pair of students who murder a classmate (in the opening scene) and then throw a dinner party inviting a former teacher and many of the victim’s family and friends, just to see if they can get away with it (they don’t, in the closing scene).

You could make the claim, as Roger Ebert does in this 1984 review, that the movie fails because it’s based on a “gimmick” and it doesn’t use “the usual grammar of camera movement and editing.” Or to translate that into the narrative-in-videogames language, “Hitchcock was no longer making a movie. He was making a stage play.”

I completely disagree with Ebert (and, I suppose, Hitchcock to some degree), because I think the experiment works. It’s unsettling and suspenseful, and it has the sense of cold detachment that’s perfect for a story of a dinner party thrown by Nietzsche-inspired murderers. But most importantly, it’s an adaptation that is completely true to its medium: it could only work as a movie, and it only works as well as it does because it’s a movie.

Although Rope was performed as if it were a stage play, the effect on those of us in the audience is nothing like watching a stage play. Instead, we’re an invisible guest at the party. The camera is far from static; it slowly pans through the room, focusing on certain conversations as if we’re overhearing them, or pieces of set detail as if we’re just noticing them. In a theater, we’d remain detached from the stage, handling the editing work ourselves as we decide what we want to focus on; in the movie, we’re on the stage, and we’re forced to look at what the cinematographer wants us to see. The effect is claustrophobic. We know a murder has been committed, and we’re trapped in the party with the murderers, just waiting for them to be found out.

Ebert says that most of the problems he had with Rope were because it wasn’t filmed like “an ordinary movie.” He says the long takes aren’t necessary, since audiences accept cuts without even thinking about it. He says that alternating between close-ups and medium shots to develop a rhythm of intensity and objectivity. He says that the insistence on continuous takes means that the camera is sometimes focusing on the wrong thing at the wrong time. I say that that misses the point to an astonishing degree, especially astonishing coming from anyone who’d seen The Birds and Psycho.

Hitchcock’s real genius is that he had an innate understanding not only of how movies are made, but of how they’re perceived. He knew all the rules of how to make a horror movie: you use tension-filled music to punctuate terrifying scenes, and you never kill off your lead actress within the first half of a movie. And he knew how and when to break those rules to manipulate the audience’s expectations. The lack of music is a huge part of what makes The Birds so unsettling; we may not notice that the music is missing, but we’re so used to hearing it in movies that we’re put on edge for reasons we can’t quite explain until after the fact. And the lack of edits and “ordinary movie” storytelling is what makes Rope so tense and claustrophobic. Filming it as “an ordinary movie” would’ve put all of the focus on the characters and the plot. And the characters and the plot are macabre but frankly, pretty boring and straightforward.

Playing by the rules

Rope doesn’t take advantage of all the potential of cinema, but it takes the main potential — the ability to move the camera and focus the audience’s attention — and uses the hell out of it. And it builds tension by taking the things audiences expect from cinema — the moments when Ebert wants to be looking over there, or see a close-up of that character — and then denying them. The key is that Hitchcock knew what film can and can’t do well, and used it to his advantage.

Novels have the unique ability to go inside the head of a character and describe his inner thoughts. But books that don’t do that, putting their emphasis on plot or external descriptions instead of internal monologues, are still novels. Stage plays have the unique ability to engage the audience in a way that recorded media can’t. But a play that doesn’t have its characters jump off the stage and talk to audience members is still a play.

Videogames have the unique ability to let the audience take control over the narrative and the cinematography and explore the world at their own pace. But a game doesn’t have to completely relinquish control to the player to still be a game. The question a game developer needs to ask is: does interactivity add something substantial to the experience? If so, then congratulations, you’re making a videogame. If not, then you should make movies.

And some of the greatest moments in games have come about when the game took that control away from the player (BioShock), injected something the player couldn’t have predicted and wouldn’t have caused to happen on his own (Portal), gave the player only an illusion of control (Half-Life 2), or manipulated that sense of control so that the character’s motivations were at odds with the player’s (Shadow of the Colossus). In all of those cases, interactivity was crucial to the experience.

The problem is that we don’t have a perfect example yet. Each one of those games has at least one example of meaningless interactivity, where the story isn’t truly advancing, and the game is just throwing the player a bone to keep him occupied. But instead of focusing on where they fail, it’s more constructive to understand how they succeed: how each one tests the limits of interactivity and linearity and shows what works and doesn’t work. The definition should focus on the potential of interactivity, not the limitations of it.

The whole “games are not movies” argument is particularly silly when you look at what’s going on with every other medium in the context of that “synthesis” that Dyack was trying to talk about. More than ever before, we’re seeing the lines between “high art” and “low art” disappear, replaced with “good art” and “bad art.” We’re surrounded by remixes, mash-ups, adaptations, “re-imaginings,” re-interpretations, both literal and conceptual: one of the most popular television series is a pastiche of philosophy, sci-fi, soap opera, and action; and another popular movie is an adaptation of an attempt to test the literary potential of comic books. Insisting on a narrow definition of a medium is antiquated; we need to stop thinking about what games must do and get back to testing the limits of what they can do.

1. Is there anybody going to listen to my story?
   My justification for writing about the topic in the first place.
2. You’ve unlocked… Rosebud!
   Stop rationalizing the failures of videogames as a medium with “games are still young.” Also, stop assuming that games have nothing to learn from movies.
3. Pro Choice
   Player control of the narrative isn’t as important as player agency.
4. Ready… Be fought against!
   “Activity” in storytelling games is more than just pressing buttons, it’s becoming actively engaged in the storytelling.
5. The Old Man and the Realistically Rendered Water Volume
   (A diversion to make fun of a guy I don’t know). If you want to improve the state of videogame writing, stop setting such miserably low expectations of it from the onset.
6. There’s no second chance to make a first impression
   No matter how open-ended and non-linear you try make your game, the player is going to experience it in a line from start to finish.
7. The Calls Are Coming From Within the Ice Level!
   How horror movies often do a better job of interacting with the audience than ostensibly “interactive entertainment.”
8. Who’s in control here?
   Player narrative and developer narrative are equally important.
9. I’m thinking of a number between 1 and You’re Dumb
   A defense of adventure games, and why action games haven’t yet rendered them obsolete.
10. Back off, man. I’m a scientist.
    Good storytelling in games requires a collaboration between the developer and the player.
11. tl;dr;fu
    A brief recap of everything I’d written up to that point.
12. Resident Evil, But They’re in Space!
    (Another diversion). Why Dead Space was a fine game, but games like it will drag down the entire medium until we start demanding more from the storytelling.
13. Feedback’s a bitch
    We can make games demand more of the player without frustrating the player, as long as we treat the game as an ongoing communication instead of a static presentation.
14. Feedback loop
    More about treating games as ongoing communication, this time in regards to scaling difficulty.
15. On Brevity
    Videogames need to remain aware of how discrete pieces of writing will fit together in the final context of the game. Rhythm and flow are more important than length.

And that’s the last of them. They’re generally too dense to encourage any long-term discussion, even if I had time to keep up with the comments. Plus, I’ve now said everything I could possibly say about Portal, BioShock, and Half-Life 2 (at least until Episode 3 comes out).

Most significantly: they take too long to write, and any time spent writing about videogames would be better spent making videogames. These days, there are just too many tools available and too much great inspiration from the independent game developers for anyone to be content just writing hypothetically about how games should work. There’s no excuse not to put the theories into practice.

Myth 11: Videogame writing should be short.

is bad advice. Because, unsurprisingly, it doesn’t say enough.

The past 18 months have seen a big resurgence in the role of writing in videogame production. What was once seen as a necessary evil has finally earned the acknowledgement of okay, fine, but please please just keep it short. Due in large part to the commercial (and artistic) success of BioShock and Portal, the people writing about videogames have been giving more of a voice to the people who write the games themselves. And the advice is pretty consistent: Keep it short, and keep it simple. Occasionally you’ll get the more charitable “be concise,” a concise word with the clear connotation “don’t write more than you need to.”

Which is fine. After all, we’re not Ernest Hemingway. But length isn’t everything. Remember that the expression is “brevity is the soul of wit,” even though “brevity is wit” would’ve been twice as succinct.

Now, anybody who reads this blog would be justified in thinking I’m the last person qualified to be talking about concise writing. But think about it: if you were trying to overcome a drug addiction, would you ask the person who’s never had a problem, or the person who’s in recovery? And on this blog, I’m ready to expose the seedy underbelly of the glamorous videogame writing career and share the scandalous details of two of my most horrifying word binges.

0xF4240 Little Pieces

The first is from my first job in videogames, The Curse of Monkey Island. There’s a scene in a barber shop run by three pirates, each of whom you have to convince to join your crew. Each of the pirates is connected to a series of puzzles the player has to solve, and each puzzle chain has a theme: strength, music, and treasure-hunting. When I came in to write the dialogue, I put in a section for each pirate where he’d go off on a story about his voyages under a previous captain. Each one was a kind of shaggy dog story with a drawn-out punchline, and each was loosely tied in with the theme of that pirate’s puzzle chain.

Everybody who read the first draft said it was too long — unbearably long. So I went through at least three editing passes, trimming out more and more of the excess words (as well as splitting it up into smaller chunks and giving the player a chance to cancel out). By the end, most of the interesting details had been taken out, and it was drifting into “for sale: baby shoes, never worn” territory, if you can imagine a Bizarro Hemingway that removes the least poignant words from a story. It was recommended to cut the pirate stories completely, but I made an argument to keep them in on the grounds that they gave a subtle clue for the puzzles.

Fast forward about twelve years, to my next job in videogames in a creative capacity, Abe Lincoln Must Die! There’s a scene in the Oval Office where you meet three former child stars, each of whom you have to convince to start a war. Each of the child stars has a theme, and each has a dialogue with the player. Again, each dialogue had to go through quite a few rounds of trimming to keep that section of the game from feeling completely tedious. And again, each round of trimming stripped away a little of the character of the dialogue and pushed it closer to being completely superfluous.

And that’s the part that took me forever to appreciate: “too long” and “superfluous” aren’t the same thing. I’d gotten so fixated on making the dialogue shorter, that I’d stopped asking whether it needed to be there at all. And the reason is that I hadn’t yet had my greatest epiphany as a Professional Videogame Writer: writing for videogames is different from writing for other stuff.

Who can ask for anything more?

None of those dialogues felt too long to me as I was writing them, so trying to trim them down was an extremely frustrating task. I’d try over and over to making it shorter while still keeping the flow and not sounding like exposition or technical writing, and it would still come across as overlong. What I’d neglected to take into account in both cases was that I was editing individual dialogues, and ignoring the overall flow and rhythm of the entire scene. A medium-length joke from Barber Pirate 1 might be funny, and as a self-contained piece of dialogue, it works fine. But if you’re hearing all three pirates tell a story with roughly the same structure, right down to the punchline, it’s lost its charm.

It’s not particularly insightful to point out that writing for interactive media has its own set of challenges. Usually, this is described in terms of volume, or of cause and effect. You have to write more, because you have to account for multiple different actions by the player. And you have to write in self-contained segments, because you have little control over the order in which the lines will be played.

But I haven’t heard much talk about how interactivity affects the rhythm of your storytelling. Ken “Nobody Cares About Your Stupid Story” Levine touched on this during his Game Developers Conference lecture about BioShock in terms of overall plot, to explain that game’s anticlimactic third act. But the difficulties go deeper than that. Plotting a videogame story is the part of the process that’s most analogous to movie and television scriptwriting: in a single-player game, act three is always going to come after act two. What happens when you take the knowledge we’ve all picked up from years of watching and reading linear media, and apply that to a form where you’re not sure if one line of dialogue will be played before or after another?

Most often, you just keep writing linearly, but make it as atomic as possible. For example: the audio logs in the System Shock games and carried through to BioShock. Each taken on its own is a perfectly fine piece of videogame writing: it’s in character, it sets the mood, it often ends on an intriguing note. And spread amongst the levels, they can build up a pretty suspenseful meta-story over the course of the game: the ones you discover in level 4 have implications that only become clear after playing levels 1-3.

But they have little immediate context — you can be hearing a recording of a horrifying attack on a nightclub while you’re wandering through the quiet, spooky remains of that same nightclub; or while you’re in the middle of a full-blown firefight with bad guys in that nightclub; or while you’re wandering down a hallway hundreds of yards away. The effect each time is very different, and only one (the first, I’m guessing) is the intended one.

And the shorter you make your “atoms,” the worse the problem gets. I’ve seen too many platformers and other action-oriented games that have been touted as having strong writing but end up being impossibly annoying within minutes. It reduces to characters spouting sound bites or catch phrases repeatedly. The writing itself isn’t the problem; it’s all in the context.

Your attention please

One of the reasons I started writing about videogame storytelling on here was this article on arstechnica.com about “why writing in games matters.” The author started his series of articles with the reminder that we’re always lamenting the state of writing in videogames, but we never praise it when it’s done well. As his example of outstanding videogame writing, he quotes in full Breen’s public address from the beginning of Half-Life 2.

My first reaction: he couldn’t have picked a worse example. That’s not a criticism of the passage itself. It’s immediately apparent that it’s more intelligent, mature, and thoughtful than the vast majority of what gets written for videogames. And as the author points out, it helps set a tone of maturity and gravity that carries through the rest of the game. By any standard, it’s a solid piece of writing.

By any standard, that is, except the standard of writing for videogames. A monologue, no matter how well-written, is still a monologue, and this one goes on for minutes. (A couple of years ago, I could’ve told you exactly how many minutes, because I did wander around City 17 just to listen to the whole thing). It shouldn’t be put forth as an example of great videogame writing any more than a film of someone reading a chapter from Lolita would be an example of great movie dialogue.

But the most interesting thing about that particular passage is that it does succeed in Half-Life 2. The reason, again, is context. It’s presented in the background, playing constantly over loudspeakers, with a huge videoscreen of the speaker visible from nearly every point in the area. It’s written so that you don’t need to hear the whole passage to get the effect; every paragraph and in fact every phrase that you overhear gives a sense not just of menace and oppression, but of a pompous self-serving lackey at the heart of it all. As it turns out, it is a solid example of videogame writing, although I suspect it’s not in the way that the author of that article intended: the reasons it works within the game are completely separate from the reasons it works as prose.

The soul of wit

Everyone’s going to compare videogame writing to prose, or movie and television scriptwriting, or comic book writing, because that’s what we’re most familiar with. And, frankly, because there’s still too little videogame writing that’s outstanding enough to use as a reference. Still, I can list a few of my own favorite pieces of writing in videogames (from memory, so excuse the paraphrasing):

• “Mind if I drive?” “Not if you don’t mind me clawing at the dash and shrieking like a cheerleader.”: Sam & Max Hit the Road
• “I said CHISHOLM trail!”: You Don’t Know Jack: Movies
• “Life is short… Bury! Steady Sword!”: Final Fantasy Tactics (original translation)
• “‘You can’t beat a Corley.’ Kind of ironic, considering how he died.”: Full Throttle
• “For yoooooouuuu….”: Overlord
• “Kick, punch, chop I got the funky flow! M.I.X. the flour into the bowl!”: PaRappa the Rapper
• “This is the rare Indigo of the Montoya Genus. You have crushed its flowers. Prepare to dye.”: Fable II

What that list demonstrates — other than the fact that I have a corny sense of humor, and that I kind of miss “what’s your favorite?!” lists from message boards — is that even apart from plotting, character development, and overall storytelling, there are many different aspects of videogame writing. Some of those lines are delivered only in text, some become memorable because of the voice delivery. Some are in cutscenes, some are during interactive segments, some are in song lyrics, some in information screens.

And they all convey some piece of information that’s necessary to the player, whether it’s a notification, an item description, or “simply” establishing character. That’s another aspect of writing that’s unique to games: it’s the convergence of creative writing and technical writing.

Even more than in screenwriting, it’s crucial for every line of a videogame script to be packed with information. A good screenwriter must be able to break down a story into acts and beats, and understand how scenes and individual lines of dialogue work towards the goal of the entire script. But videogame writers need to be even more conscious of this, because every spoken line or word printed on screen is assumed to have some purpose — there’s often no telling when a “throwaway line” will send the player off on the completely wrong direction.

Just because a line is functional doesn’t mean it can’t be clever, funny, insightful, or dramatic. The real art of videogame writing is being aware of the context: understanding how, when and where the line is going to be used, and how to compensate for the times you have no control over when the line is played. Sometimes it really is as simple as knowing when to use a well-delivered “For yooooouuuuu…” instead of something longer. Reducing everything simply to brevity or wordiness is equivalent to saying “Too many notes:” it puts too much emphasis on the function and not enough on the artistry.

It’s just a coincidence that those lines are all pretty short.

And, I claim, it’s not because videogame puzzles are inherently cerebral, but because we all like to believe that they are. We emphasize the “a-ha!” moments, where the player suddenly figures out the solution to a problem and all the remaining pieces fall into place, at the expense of all the “but what if…?” moments that build up to that. That leaves developers trying to second-guess what’s going to make sense to the player, and leaves the players trying to second-guess what the developers were thinking when they set up this puzzle. And to me, that’s not a fundamental game design problem, but a communication breakdown.

After I posted that, a friend in the comments interpreted the post as saying “games should have in-game hints.” And for some reason, another blog interpreted it as talking about the Strong Bad games instead of Sam & Max. Those are unintended but convenient examples of what can happen when there’s a communication breakdown. It’s also a convenient excuse to give more concrete examples of what I’m talking about, explain why Half-Life 2: Episode 2 is the most frustrating game in recent memory, curse Minority Report for repeatedly insulting my intelligence, and say that difficulty levels in videogames are bad.

Myth 10: Player-selected difficulty levels are the best way to ensure a videogame is accessible to the widest possible audience.

First, a reminder: so far, every one of these “videogame myths” is an actual thing I’ve read somewhere on the internet. In this case, it was an argument on a message board I used to read, where one side claimed that including difficulty levels was developer laziness, and the other side claiming that not including them is developer arrogance. Yet another reminder that I need to get a hobby outside of work.

The author of that Design Lessons post made a complaint that was fairly common about the Sam & Max games: the first season was too easy, and the second season got too hard. When the games were first released, they got the most attention from fans of the LucasArts game, people who’d been playing adventure games for years. And now that the first season has been released on the Wii (and the second season is coming soon!) you can see a pretty clear shift in the response: more people complaining about “frustration” and “needing patience.”

What’s interesting to me about all of those is how adamant the reviewers are. You’d rarely if ever hear that the game was too easy or too hard “for me,” but that it was clearly, insultingly easy, and what were the developers thinking? (And, it should be mentioned, every single episode of Sam & Max has had people on the forums asking for hints). Or on the other end, it’s not “I got stuck,” but “the genre is broken and deserved to die.” The OMG INTERNET BIAS!!! implications of this are legion, but that’s a topic better left to irate forum-goers. What’s interesting to anybody working on ostensibly “thinking” games is the realization that there simply is no such thing as a universal standard of difficulty.

And if you cater too much to one group, you’re inevitably going to alienate another. The worst thing you could do would be to shoot for some idea of the “lowest common denominator,” which games are starting to do to an increasingly alarming degree, and which movies have been doing for years.

Thought crimes against your intelligence

Case in point: Minority Report. After all the complaints about “the aliens” at the end of AI, I can understand Steven Spielberg’s wanting to make sure that absolutely everyone in the audience understood what happened at the end of his precog murder mystery movie. But I was able to piece together the story as we were shown the clues the first time through. And then I had to watch as the story was explained again, then again, and then a fourth time. Seriously, the last 30 minutes of this movie is all recap.

I’m not claiming to be any type of film savant — just the opposite. There have been movies that I can figure out completely the first time through, but more often I’m taken completely by surprise by whatever they decide to throw at me, no matter how predictable. I’m reminded of David Chase’s quote about seeing The Planet of the Apes for the first time: “When it was over, I said, ‘Wow… so they had a Statue of Liberty, too.’” Even the “smartest” person in the audience is going to process a movie at his own rate, and it varies not only from person to person but movie to movie.

It almost makes you wish for some type of “interactive storytelling,” where the story doesn’t proceed until the audience has understood everything that’s happened so far and can predict what’s going to happen next, because it’s the audience who’s putting the story elements together.

And that’s essentially what an adventure game is. You’ll frequently see the complaint that a game without a twitch component is just like an “interactive storybook,” where the story waits for you to press the A button to advance. There are certainly plenty of games like that. But the ideal is that the story is waiting for you to figure out what’s happened so far, and then understand it enough to perform the next action to make it advance.

Stop me if you’ve heard this one

But even though we’re working in an ostensibly interactive medium, we’re still stuck on the idea of videogame storytelling being a fundamentally static presentation. “Here’s our story, you figure it out. Come back to us when you’re done.” We tell the player a story, turn control back over to him to shoot some guys or jump on some platforms, and then take the story back again to show the next piece of the story. There’s a lot of action going on, but not real interaction. Or to put it another way: a lot of talking, but no listening. And when the player hits a snag, we fix it by talking some more.

For example: the end of Half-Life 2: Episode Two has you driving around a lumber yard in a converted muscle car, tracking giant strider creatures on your radar, hopping out and firing sticky bombs at them with a rocket launcher, all in an attempt to keep them from destroying the resistance headquarters. In other words, pure awesome.

At least, in theory. The reality is that I’ve seldom felt such blind rage towards a game and its developers as I did when playing that section. The problem started with the intro to that segment: your character is given an explanation of what’s happening and what you need to do to stop it. And then, as with Minority Report, you’re given another explanation, then another, then another… It all involves slides and practice areas and elaborate multimedia presentations, in a sequence so prolonged that you begin wondering whether these credits will be transferrable to a four-year college.

After your schooling in Remedial Strider Destruction, you get to hop in the car and actually try it. This begins the second phase of frustration, where everything you try to do ends in shame, death, and exploding buildings. My colleagues kept screaming stuff at me on the radio, but it was all things I already knew: that I suck at driving and am only slightly better at shooting. I kept wishing that they’d tell me some secret, like a hidden way to get to the attackers, or a particularly vulnerable part on the body. But after countless deaths, I started to realize that there just wasn’t a secret.

I suspect, although I have no way of confirming this, that the reason for all the tutorials at the start of the section was because the developers realized that that section of the game was wicked hard. But the problem wasn’t knowing what I was supposed to be doing; the problem was actually doing it. I’ve no doubt that there were players who didn’t get the idea behind the strider battle, so for them, that extra tutorial time was useful. And I’m sure that there are plenty of players who had no problem with the shooting and driving, so for them, more help “in the field” would’ve been annoying. But the game treats us all the same.

Good at Movies

We don’t have a sense of somebody’s being “good at watching movies,” but we have no problem believing that people are “good at games,” or good at certain types of games and bad at others. Of course there’s a level of skill required for the “twitch” component of any action game, and that’s the kind of thing that’s easiest to put on a sliding difficulty scale: just increase damage points or decrease hit points and keep playing until it’s balanced. That’s part of the art of level design.

But even that is unpredictable: what’s “balanced” to a level designer (and definitely to a QA guy) is going to be too difficult for somebody with my poor motor skills. And trying to account for logic and deduction is even worse: you can’t reduce it down to numbers and play through again to see if it’s any easier, so you just have to make educated guesses at what people are going to be able to figure out. (And do as much playtesting with as big an audience as you possibly can).

Adding difficulty levels that the player selects at the beginning of the game is no fix. You’ve just made three to five educated guesses instead of just one. Maybe it’ll hit a wide swath of the audience; it’s just as likely that you’ve underestimated or overestimated your “target” audience and have managed to miss every one. And it’s even more likely that your “normal” difficulty is the one that’s gotten the most attention and play balancing, and the others are either ridiculously easy or ludicrously difficult. Now, add the fact that the player has to choose his level at the very beginning of the game, knowing nothing else except whether he’s “good at shooters” or “good at strategy games.” And even that isn’t consistent from game to game: I can play as a “Noble” in Civ IV, but I’m a King in Civ IV: Revolutions.

Ideally, we wouldn’t be making educated guesses, but keeping an eye on what the player’s doing and scaling the difficulty up or down accordingly. But that’s difficult. So as a result, most games put in tiers of difficulty for the stuff that’s more straightforward to gauge — the action sections — and assume the worst on the stuff that’s more changeable — the “thinking” sections. Which results in games with objectives screens telling you exactly what to do, mini-maps leading you directly to your next target, and interactivity that consists of plugging a power cable into the one empty slot on a wall and then being universally praised as the savior of humanity. (I criticize Half-Life only because I love it so much). That hasn’t made the games easier, since the obstacles between moments of empty interactivity are often maddeningly frustrating. It’s not easy to do, it just doesn’t require any real thought.

Does this bug you? How about now?

Scaling difficulty has been done before; it’s just never been done particularly well in the games I’ve played. (Or maybe it’s been done so well that I never noticed it was happening!)

Morrowind and Oblivion both have enemies that have more health and better equipment based on the player’s level. But this is pretty much the opposite of how it should be done, since it ruins the “dramatic arc” of the game. You can have a titanic battle with Bandit_A_2 that you randomly encountered in the middle of a field, followed by an anti-climactic showdown with the All-Powerful Archenemy Who’s Destroying The Universe. On the flip side, if you have static levels for all enemies, then traveling through the countryside and fighting random enemies is tedious. And the big story-based conflicts are unsatisfying, because you know that no matter what you do, the bad guy’s always just a little bit more powerful than you.

A possible fix for that — bearing in mind that I don’t work on action games, and I’m not a level designer — is keeping enemies in leader/minion groups. Send out a minion against the player, see how hard it is for him to beat, then scale the other enemies up or down accordingly. Or, since a lot of action games have linear sections anyway, just use the random enemies as a representative sample of how “good” the player is — however well or poorly the player does against the bad guys in the hallway determines the difficulty of the mini-boss at the end.

In terms of puzzle-solving, the situation’s not quite as dire as I made it sound earlier. Half-Life 2 in particular does some pretty clever things in terms of player feedback (albeit static). The places where you are confronted with a puzzle are typically self-contained, so you’re unlikely to wander off too far from the solution. And in a game where you spend most of your time alone in a world that’s intended to seem like you can go anywhere and do anything, they came up with an ingenious way to reassure the player that he’s on the right track. You can always look for a lambda symbol painted on a wall or on a sign somewhere, which not only reinforces the story of a planet-wide resistance against the aliens, but as a sign that yes, you are supposed to be here.

In adventure games, the hint system used in Telltale’s games has been universally regarded as a success, at least partly because players can choose how much or how little help they want at any time. But that’s only part of the feedback you get from an adventure game: there’s also the responses the player’s character takes when you try to do something, your conversations with NPCs, and even story events themselves. When we’re doing playtests, we don’t stand over the shoulder of someone who’s stuck and just say “Nope.” “Wrong.” “That won’t work.” every time he tries something. We try to give a clue that pushes him in the right direction without giving the puzzle away. If we can do that in person, then eventually we should be able to do that within the game. And once we’ve proven it in adventure games, then ideally that kind of thing can make its way into more action-oriented games.

And then I’ll never again have to interrupt a round of slaughtering bad guys to have a game treat me like a genius for pushing a square block on top of a square hole in the ground.

I went on to claim that instead of treating traditional adventure games as if they were an evolutionary dead end, we should be looking at how those games work to make the storytelling and the gameplay the same thing. The player’s not doing stuff and then watching a cutscene, and the player’s not doing stuff while listening to conveniently-placed audio logs that provide color commentary tangentially related to what he’s doing. Instead, his role becomes that of collaborative game designer. He’s not just doing what the objectives screen says to do, but figuring out what needs to be done in the first place.

The problem with that, says the internet, is that everybody knows that adventure games aren’t fun. They’re exercises in frustration, where you’re stuck trying random combinations of items until you stumble onto the one completely illogical solution the designers happened to choose. That’s the last thing that action games should be doing, you hear, because that’s the exact reason adventure games died out (and good riddance!). And even if they wanted to, action games couldn’t adopt that type of puzzle-solving, because they’re inherently different:

Myth 9: In an action game, all the activity takes place inside the game, but adventure games are solved in the player’s mind.

That’s a very rough paraphrase from Manveer Heir’s “Design Lesson 101″ article about Sam & Max Season Two. Mr. Heir is a game designer at Raven who’s been writing fairly in-depth analyses of games on his own blog and Gamasutra. Now, since that article is about a game I worked on, anything I write in response is going to come across as reactionary and defensive. So I should make one thing clear up front: everything Mr. Heir says is a filthy lie, and his posts should be immediately stricken from the internet.

No but seriously: his main observation is dead-on accurate. Adventure games suck at giving feedback to the player. That’s true of every adventure game I’ve played, even my favorites. I think it’s the biggest obstacle for the current generation of games to overcome — not just adventure games, but any game that wants to engage the player on a level more interesting than “cross the finish line to get the next scripted event” or “press the button to trigger the next cutscene.”

There’s a lot I don’t agree with in Heir’s article — in particular, the idea that the adventure game model only works in small doses (in the “golden age” of these games, they were designed to last for several weeks); or that the episodes of Sam & Max Season One were far too easy because he was able to finish in two to three hours (that’s just slightly shorter than how long they were intended to last). But most of the criticisms are common to adventure games, and I would’ve probably agreed with them completely just a couple of years ago — in fact, the start-and-stop pacing of adventure games that Heir mentions was my biggest complaint when I started working in adventure games again.

But I think his observation that it all comes down to player feedback is insightful and extremely useful, for two reasons. The first reason is that it’s not just about difficulty — you can’t just say “Season One was way too easy, but Season Two got too hard in places,” because then you’re trying to hit a moving target, and it varies wildly from player to player. Earlier, I made the case that trying to find some objective measure of difficulty for logic-based puzzles is doomed to failure.

The second reason is that player feedback is something that’s common to all types of games, from so-called “cerebral” adventures to so-called “twitch” shooters. In any genre of game, we’ve got the same basic set of tools, but we’ve gotten so locked into our assumptions about certain game genres, that we’ve forgotten how to use them.

I can’t use these things together.

Go back to one of the most common complaint about adventure games: “I don’t like adventure games because I always end up having to use every item with every other item until I stumble on the one ‘right’ answer.”

Whenever I hear that complaint, my first response is: “Well, don’t do that.” The appeal of these games is in figuring out how to solve a problem and predicting what turn the story is going to take. If you don’t have an idea already in mind when you use the magnifying glass on the dynamite fuse, then why would you even try to do it?

And of course, that’s a lousy response. If you were to ask me what are the most memorable lines from adventure games I’ve played, the first ones that would come to mind are: “That doesn’t need to be painted white,” “I’m not putting my mouth on that,” and of course, “I can’t use these things together.” They’re not memorable because they’re particularly clever, but because I heard them over and over and over again. Because that’s how these games — all games — are played: you do stuff and see what happens. It’s the “interactive” part of “interactive fiction.”

We tend to have this silly idea of adventure games as being “thinking man’s games,” where the ideal player is the cliche of the guy who solves the New York Times Crossword Puzzle in pen. We watch a cutscene, then sit back in our easy chairs and mull over possibilities, then shout “Eureka!” and complete the puzzle. Not only is that insufferably pompous, it’s unrealistic and frankly, not very fun. You want to get in there and poke around and explore.

That’s yet another way Super Mario 64 gets it right: the first thing the game does is drop you into a playground and invites you to just run around and play. Climb trees, swim for a little bit, and learn how things work. It’s also one of the best design aspects of The Sims 2: most of the development time and creativity in those games goes into the failure states, the stuff that you wouldn’t see if you played everything the “right” way. Because learning how the game works is one of the most engaging parts of the game.

Type “HELP” for a list of commands.

There are several reasons why adventure games don’t do negative feedback well:

• More stuff: In a shooter or platformer, the list of ways you can interact with the world is deliberately kept small. In adventure games, you tend to have a lot of different items at your disposal. It’s easier to cover every possibility of what happens when you shoot something or jump on something, than it is to keep track of dozens of objects and their interrelated uses.
• Larger “possibility space”: Not only do you have more stuff in an adventure game, you’re usually expected to use it in an unconventional way. And as mentioned earlier, each player has his own idea of “unconventional.” What seems like a perfectly natural solution to a problem to one player might never have occurred to the game designers.
• More dialogue: Gordon Freeman never speaks, so it’s not jarring when he tries to unlock a door and the game just beeps. It’d be really weird if Guybrush Threepwood tried to unlock a door in the game and didn’t say anything when it failed.
• Managing difficulty: How do you respond when someone’s done the wrong thing? Do you just say “No?” Or do you say, “That’s a good idea, but wrong.?” Or do you say, “That won’t work, but using the magnifying glass might?” Or “That won’t work, but I bet I could use this magnifying glass to light that dynamite fuse?”

The thing to notice about those reasons is that none of them are unique to adventure games, and none are insoluble. (The closest to being damning is actually the “more dialogue” issue, since that depends on purely practical concerns like production time, voice recording budgets, and download size).

The one that sounds the most damning is the idea of a larger possibility space: how can a game give intelligent feedback when it’s impossible to gauge what the player’s thinking, how close he is to solving a puzzle? That’s the converse of the player’s frustration with adventure games, that it’s impossible to gauge what the designer was thinking when he came up with this stupid puzzle. To me, that doesn’t sound like the death knell of a game genre, but just a simple communication breakdown.

You can use these things together! Ask me how!

Although the hint system in Telltale’s games is almost universally regarded as A Good Thing — and I should point out here that not only was it not my idea, but I was actually against it at first and was proven wrong — it’s still a first step. It demonstrates that it’s not impossible to tell what the player’s thinking; we know the solutions to the puzzles, we know how people play adventure games because we play them ourselves, and it’s actually relatively straightforward to detect when the player’s stuck and what kind of information he’ll need to get moving again.

The issue with that, again as pointed out in Heir’s article, is that players sometimes stubbornly refuse to listen to hints because they feel like it’s “cheating.” The perception — which is unfortunate, but probably unavoidable — is still that the developers have the one “right” answer, and they’re guiding the player through the game, nudging him in the right direction when he’s too dense to figure it out.

I think a logical next step is to take the relationship with the player away from “we’ve got the answers, now you figure them out” and back to that idea of collaborative game design. In a game design session, nobody’s figured out the right answer yet. So the dialogue is one of “well, no, that won’t work for this reason… but what if we tried this other thing?” It’s less like a tutorial, and more like exploration and experimentation.

And the difference between that and something like a strategy game or The Sims is that there is still one right answer. It remains a conversation, instead of a toy or a playset. The developers go through the effort and frustration of coming up with a game that’s guaranteed to have some sort of satisfying resolution, instead of just giving the player a bunch of tools and then removing themselves from the equation. A big chunk of adventure game development is spent just figuring out valid alternative solutions to puzzles and then either implementing them, or explaining to the player why they won’t work in this case. It’s not that much of a stretch to extend that to an overall design philosophy: remembering that we’re not always trying to funnel players towards the one right answer, but keeping an open dialogue with them, guiding them towards the answer that we happen to have generated cutscenes for.

It’s my hope that this would extend past adventure games. If we can figure out how to engage the player in the actual storytelling without getting hopelessly stuck, then we can have more engaging stories in any type of game. And developers of more action-oriented games can include more significant story moments without being so terrified that they’ll frustrate the player and ruin the pacing of their game. And then I can finally play a game that forces me to think about what I’m doing, instead of just telling me to go here and press this button.

At least from what I’ve seen so far — I’ve finished three of twelve levels — Dead Space is the perfect title for this game, because it’s the only combination of words that could possibly be more generic than SciFi Horror Videogame. It says nothing about the game and leaves no lasting impression, and it has the added benefit of being indistinguishable from a billion other videogame and movie titles, from Freespace to Dead Rising.

In Dead Space, you play as an engineer for some futuristic mega-corporation, separated from your group and making your way through a derelict sci-fi shooter haunted by the memory of past videogames, as you’re attacked by wave after wave of cliches. Bodies of victims are littered about the ship, their last warnings scrawled on the walls in blood, right next to alien, demonic-looking runes. You walk from one darkened room to the next, surrounded by flickering lights, audio and video logs, locked doors that need to be unlocked, health and ammo pick-ups, bodies hanging from hooks, lockers to search, ironically cheerful corporate advertisements, glass-walled rooms that show a survivor being attacked in a gruesome fashion, medical centers containing the zombified remains of the sinister scientists who knowingly took advantage of the situation, and monsters leaping out of air ducts at ostensibly unpredictable moments.

The cliches pile up so high so quickly that I was surprised just how entrenched and downright complex sci-fi horror cliches have gotten. I don’t play that many shooters (mostly because I’m terrible at them) or see that many horror movies, and yet everything I’ve seen in this game is recognizable several times over. At its core, it’s like an attempt to cross System Shock 2 with DOOM 3 (which was itself an attempt to cross System Shock 2 with DOOM). Toss in some Resident Evil and Half-Life 2, along with some smaller elements of Deus Ex, Halo, and Gears of War, and put your main character in a big suit vaguely reminiscent of the Big Daddies in BioShock. Now, Dead Space has been in production for at least two years, probably much longer, so I’m not suggesting at all that they “ripped off” those recent games. That’d be like complaining that the Sci Fi Channel Original Movie Tsetse Fly Rampage rips off the movies Mantis Attack, Night of the Snails, and Koalapocalypse*; it’s not necessarily that they’re stealing from each other, but that they’re all coming from the same source.

The game has outstanding production values: fantastic visuals, perfect sound design, extremely clear and well-thought-out level design, good controls, great balance, and terrific effects work (riding a tram through a cavernous engine compartment surrounded in fog as you hear howls and moans echoing all around you is a particularly cool moment). But it’s all in the service of a setting and story so distractingly uninspired and unoriginal, I have to wonder if the lack of innovation was intentional. I’m reminded of a quote from the EverQuest guys at a CGDC, explaining that the reason they chose such obvious fantasy cliches for that game was because they didn’t want to “confuse” or “overwhelm” players. But even in the rare cases where the game shows true originality and not just polish or attention to detail, the way they’re used just pulls the game back into generic shooter territory.

There are two aspects of Dead Space that are original:

1. There’s no heads-up-display; all of your info is presented as if it were in the world instead of in a separate interface layer.
2. The combat system consistently emphasizes aiming over firepower.

As I understand it, the goal of removing the HUD is immersion: there should be nothing reminding you that you’re playing a videogame. So Dead Space puts your health and other meters on the back of your guy’s suit, pulls the camera out and adjusts the field of view so you’re always able to see the back, and puts a big hologram generator around your guy’s neck to “project” all the UI elements. And this is a perfect example of solving a problem that doesn’t exist. It functions exactly the same as the HUD in every other game, with detailed maps and mission objectives and save points and descriptions of things you can pick up popping up all over the place. This is all stuff that players already accept without question: the game also gives pick-ups a shiny glow without any explanation, and that does nothing to break the immersion. So if the goal is immersion, why devote so much attention to a neat but ultimately irrelevant presentation, instead of taking that idea and applying it to the game as a whole?

Where they do that is with the combat system, and it’s actually pretty ingenious. The basic equation for “survival horror” games is: dark spaces + unpredictable attacks + limited ammo and health = tension. And where most survival horror games have the “shoot zombies in the head to kill them more efficiently” strategy, Dead Space gives you monsters that can only be killed by severing their limbs. The monsters so far are pretty unimaginative and forgettable visually, but designed perfectly for that gameplay mechanic: different numbers of limbs, some can retract and expand their limbs, some move at different speeds, etc. Your weapons are all designed for cutting (which makes perfect sense in the story’s context), their secondary functions are all designed to let you choose how to handle an attack. Your special abilities — variations on the RPG “ice” spell and HL2’s gravity gun — are occasionally used for ludicrously simple puzzle solving, but mostly to help you take out monsters while conserving ammunition. It’s all consistent, it all supports the theme of the game, and all the systems are balanced and work together in interesting combinations, so purely from a game design standpoint, it’s a thing of beauty.

More importantly: from a player’s standpoint, it’s a lot of fun. There’s a tactical element to each encounter, where you’re forced to decide which weapon to use, where to aim, and how best to take down the enemies without wasting your reserves.

But I never really had the opportunity to learn the system for myself. During my first encounter with an enemy, one of my crew mates told me over audio that regular attacks don’t work; you have to sever their limbs. They said this right as I was looking at a dead body slumped on the floor right next to the message “YOU HAVE TO SEVER THEIR LIMBS” scrawled on the wall in blood. I was holding a weapon called a “plasma cutter.” I did not feel particularly clever for figuring out my plan of attack.

And that kind of thing happens throughout the game. A person will come through on the radio telling me that I need to fix the fuel supply, I think “Oh, I’d better start figuring out how to reach the fuel supply,” and before I can finish the thought, he explains exactly what I need to do, and it’s added to my list of objectives, and the path is highlighted on my map. (And the levels are so clearly designed with exit signs and labels over doors, the map is mostly superfluous even for someone with my horrible sense of direction). They do follow the adventure-game standard practice of giving you multiple linear tasks to accomplish at once, but each one is explicitly spelled out for you. Whenever you have to use one of your special powers, it’s marked clearly in the world with an icon and the words “USE KINESIS HERE” (literally). The only thing you ever have to figure out for yourself is which gun to use, and often, there’ll be some reminder nearby that tells you which gun to use.

There’s a very strong and defensible case to be made that I’m missing the point. The story is just there for setting and atmosphere; this is an action game, and it’s all about the gameplay. The game isn’t supposed to be frustrating, it’s supposed to be suspenseful. Being stuck with no clue what to do next would be tedious, not tense. The game is designed to keep you scared and keep you moving, not make you think. Putting in a complicated puzzle would break the immersion and the pacing, just as if you’d put a lengthy monologue into a horror movie.

But I’m skeptical that all those arguments I just made up are valid. And it all comes down to that story vs. gameplay divide that I’m always complaining about. Dead Space could be used as a perfect example of a good game with a lousy and uninspired story. The story is so uninteresting it actually repels intrigue; I actually dread picking up audio logs, because I know I’m going to be disappointed at the next predictable non-twist. But I’m still engaged in the game and want to finish it. So isn’t that proof that “gameplay” is more important than story?

What I’ve learned from Dead Space so far is that gameplay is to videogames (again: story-based, single-player videogames) as cinematography is to movies. It’s absolutely crucial, it can be compelling on its own merits, and doing a lousy job of it will bring everything else down with it. But it’s not the whole experience, and insisting that it is the whole experience means that we’re missing out on the true potential of what games can do. In other words, why should we accept boring and unoriginal stories when we know that they can be better?

I can play armchair game designer and pretty easily come up with a few examples that would improve the game for me, without impacting the mood, pacing, or the game balance. Why not let me discover the monsters’ weaknesses on my own, instead of explicitly telling me to cut off the arms? Since the entire first level is a heavy-handed tutorial, why not let me figure it out in a relatively safe environment?

Since having clear objectives and an easy-to-use map are useful to keep the action moving, why not keep that but find ways to subvert it? Maybe give me a path based on faulty data and let me find an alternate route? What if one of the evil scientists or whoever turns out to be the villain is corrupting my data, or maybe one of my own crew members is giving me bad information? Currently I’ve got two crew members whose rivalry just seems to be backstory; what if they gave me conflicting information and I had to choose for myself which objective to follow?

One of the earliest levels has a section of the ship blocked by a barricade, and forces me to get two parts to make a specific type of single-use bomb. Why not give me the more general objective “get to here,” and let me figure out how to get past the barricade? Why not let me figure out how to get all the explosive tanks that are littered around and use them to blow it up? How about finding an audio log from someone who explains how to take an alternate route to where I’m going, avoiding the barricade altogether?

As I said, I don’t play that many shooters, but I’ve still seen the same things repeated over and over again in every shooter I’ve played. Dead Space is a fine game, and it’s a lot of fun, but I can’t help but think how much more compelling it would be if people weren’t so accepting of mediocre story as long as the gameplay’s good, and even downright hostile to the idea of storytelling’s being important to an action game.

* Not actual Sci Fi Channel Original Movie titles, as far as I’m aware, although I wish they were.

But still: I do tend to go on a bit, especially when I’m making things up as I go along. So here are my thoughts so far on storytelling in videogames, in convenient list form:

1. Videogames can and should tell stories. It’s ridiculous that this is even controversial.
2. Not every game needs to have a story. This should be obvious, but the moment you say “videogames should tell stories,” that’s immediately mis-interpreted as “all videogames should tell stories.”
3. Stop saying “videogames are young.” It’s a cop-out that comes across as defensive, defeatist and lazy. The medium won’t just automatically mature at a certain age, just like videogame players don’t automatically mature at a certain age.
4. Games already have their Citizen Kane. It’s called Super Mario 64. Not if you’re looking for validation from movie critics, but if you’re looking for a work that advances its medium as its own thing, just as Citizen Kane advanced cinema. Games already have their Godfather, Singin’ in the Rain, Pulp Fiction, Star Wars, and about a billion Aliens, as well.
5. Games can learn from movies. Games aren’t movies, but that doesn’t mean they’re completely mutually exclusive. Just because we don’t want super-long cutscenes doesn’t mean we can’t analyze how movies (and comics, and novels, and plays) work and apply that to interactive entertainment. (It also doesn’t mean that Hollywood types who try to get into games are automatically doomed to fail, just that the odds are not in their favor).
6. Games have an implicit narrative. Humans are natural storytellers, so for all but the most abstract of videogames, we impose our own story, with a beginning (“I skipped the opening cutscene”), middle (“I shot some guys”), and end (“I beat the game.”) Because of this, I claim:
7. If your game tells a story, then the story should be as important as the gameplay. Don’t treat it as an afterthought, or even “salt” to the real “meat” of the game. When you do, that creates a conflict between the designer’s story and the player’s story, but:
8. The player’s story is not more important than the designer’s story, and vice versa. As long as there’s a conflict, one of them is going to get diminished in importance. Which just perpetuates the cycle of “videogame stories aren’t important because videogame stories suck because nobody think videogame stories are important.”
9. Agency is the most important part of interactivity. What separates interactive entertainment from other media is simply that the player is the one who’s driving the experience forward. Contrast “agency” with two other aspects of interactivity:
10. “Immersion” is too shallow. Even if the player is completely surrounded by a story, it can feel passive and reactive if the story is happening to him, instead of being driven by him. On the other hand:
11. “Choice” isn’t everything, either. The intention is to give maximum control to the player, but the result means that the player sees a limited part of the available content. So he can choose from several shallow stories instead of experiencing one great story.
12. No seriously, choice isn’t everything. The above is usually described as a limit of current technology. “As games advance, then we’ll eventually be able to give the player complete control.” That is not the holy grail of videogame design. It’d likely be a cool experience and is definitely worth pursuing. But:
13. Entertainment is communication. Neither the developer nor the player wants to be left in a vacuum. And:
14. The communication goes both ways. If the player has complete control, then the developer is squeezed out of the communication, and the player ends up just talking to himself. Therefore:
15. The best videogame stories are a collaboration between the developer and the player. This is the only part of what I’ve been writing that’s at all novel. (And for all I know, it’s already been said lots o’ times elsewhere).

I think that sense of collaboration between the people who made the game and the people who played the game is the most important thing in videogame storytelling. I believe that’s the area where games are truly different from other media, and where games have the most potential to improve.

So far, I’ve only got a few sketchy ideas on how to foster that feeling of collaboration, all pretty specific to certain types of games:

1. Let the player predict what’s going to happen. Horror and suspense movies do this, sometimes without even realizing it. Turn the story over to the player occasionally, so they’re anticipating the story, instead of just reacting to it.
2. Let the player have multiple goals simultaneously. Or, “make the game less linear.” This isn’t branching, or artificial choice-for-the-sake-of-choice. It’s done in adventure games mostly to give the player something to do while he’s stuck. But in any game, it reinforces the player’s involvement, because it encourages him to think about the game on multiple layers (What am I doing right now? What will I need to do later?), instead of just making him wait for his next batch of instructions.
3. Make story events a direct result of the player’s actions. Simply put, the story shouldn’t be “I went to the enemy base and then the front door exploded, trapping me inside” but “In order to enter the enemy base, I had to hack into the front door controls, causing it to explode, trapping me inside.”
4. Overlap the cause and effect loops. This is also “make the game less linear,” more or less. It just means avoid the story “I did this then this then this,” in favor of the story “I did this, which caused that, which caused that, but then this other thing happened because of what I did at the beginning of the game.” This fosters the sense of collaboration, because I’m acting and reacting simultaneously, instead of just doing my thing and triggering a response from the game designer.
5. Give the player a chance to figure things out. Action games have different pacing requirements than adventure games. But the constant handholding in action games is getting ridiculous: “press this button” in the objectives window, with the button highlighted on the minimap, and a big arrow pointing to it in the game world. Tell the player explicitly what his overall goal is, but let him take some time to figure out exactly how to accomplish that goal. If players are getting stuck in playtests, then add some adaptive system to detect when they’ve taken too long, and be more explicit in pointing the player in the right direction.
6. Be concise. Learn from my mistakes.

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:

The Control Group: Monkey Island 2: LeChuck’s Revenge

Early in Monkey Island 2, there’s a part where you have to get a piece of your enemy’s clothing to complete a voodoo spell. The only item you have at your disposal is a bucket, the only people you’ve met are the bad guy, a Voodoo Lady, and some incidental characters who happen to be dry cleaners, and among the only locations you have available are the bad guy’s bedroom, a pirate town, and a swamp. As with any good adventure game puzzle, what you’re trying to accomplish has been made explicit. It’s up to you to figure out how you’re going to accomplish it.

The reason I like this puzzle so much is because I figured it out as soon as I realized what role I was playing in the game. You’re not playing as Guybrush Threepwood, or even as an unspecified “pirate.” The game’s already established itself as a comedy, one that throws in plenty of anachronisms and frequently breaks the fourth wall. So the role you’re playing isn’t a pirate, but a guy sitting in a room in Marin County with a bunch of other people writing jokes for a comedy game. Which means the solution is, more likely than not, a sight gag. Once I made that connection, I could see the whole bit played out before me. For the gag to work, I need to get to here, which means I need two things: and hey look guys, I’ve got those two things in my inventory, remember? And each step had its own little reward of confirmation (yes, you can use the bucket on the mud!) all the way up to the final reward of seeing the punchline play out.

In adventure games, these are usually described as “a-ha moments,” but that’s always struck me as kind of passive. As if the designer is standing there, tapping his foot and checking his watch, waiting for you to stumble on the right answer. I think of it as an “Ah, I see where you’re going with this” moment. It’s a kind of delayed collaboration — I’m recreating the same steps and going through the same leaps of logic you guys went through when you were making the game. And that, along with about 80-90% of Day of the Tentacle, is what I’m talking about when I talk about videogames’ potential as “collaborative storytelling.”

Consider the Heavy: No story, no collaboration

Team Fortress 2 isn’t a story-driven game, at all. It has all the elements of a great story — astounding art direction, memorable characters you can identify with, interesting environments, and an overall tone and sense of humor that sell it as a complete “world.” But it doesn’t want to tell a story, it wants to provide a playground for an action game. So it seems like a lousy game to mention when talking about videogames and story development, but I think there’s a perfect example here:

One of the best tactics in the game (at least when it was first released; the balance may have completely changed by now) was to have a Heavy/Medic combo. One class is pure offense, one is pure support, so when you combine them they offset each other’s weaknesses. Now, discovering that combo is something I would’ve liked to do, and I would’ve felt very proud of myself afterwards. But I never got the chance to discover it; it’s basically built into the game, where each class is clearly labeled as “offense,” “defense,” and “support.” I don’t know enough about the series to know whether it was “discovered” by players in the first game and then carried into the second, but I do know that even before I played my first match of TF2, I already knew to combine a Heavy with a Medic. (And to always shoot the Medic).

It seems odd to claim that there’s “no collaboration” in a game called Team Fortress, but I’m talking about collaboration between the player and the designer. And the game’s focus on balance means that the designers are actively working against any individual player discovering a new twist, a sure-fire way to win. These classes work well together because they’re meant to work well together. This sniper point is vulnerable to fire from here because it’s designed to be. That “secret” passage you “discovered” into the enemy base? It’s supposed to be there, and everybody knows about it. The game doesn’t reward discovery, because it isn’t supposed to be about how clever you as an individual player are. It’s about putting two evenly-matched teams in evenly-matched environments and rewarding the players who are best able to interpret the rules. A story-driven game wants the good guys to win; TF2 is agnostic as to who’s the good guys and who’s the bad guys. It just wants everyone to have fun.

The Sims 2: Infinite stories, no collaboration

The Sims games’ appeal is in letting the player realize any story he can come up with. And just like it is while writing a piece of fiction, you’ll sometimes find the stories in the game gaining a momentum of their own and heading off in unexpected directions. The character you set up to be the villain of the neighborhood turns out to just want to lie on the couch and watch TV. The couple you planned to get together and have lots of kids either turn out to be gay or one of them dies in a fire. Any session of The Sims is filled with dozens of story moments.

But nobody cares. Or more accurately, the game doesn’t care. (Actually, now that I think about it, and after trying to describe my individual Sims stories to other people and seeing their complete lack of interest, I was right the first time). Because the game is intended to be near-infinitely extensible, there’s no one “right answer.” There are dozens of end-goals to achieve — max out skills, max out career paths, make out with n other Sims — but each of those has exactly one solution. The real end-goal is simply whatever you choose to be the end-goal — get this guy into the most expensive house in the neighborhood, make this woman the neighborhood crime lord — and as such, you’re not collaborating with the game’s designers to reach that goal.

The designers’ hand is always visible; there are plenty of clever interactions or inspired pieces of animation that play out in response to certain actions. But the communication in the game is only one way at a time: the player sees something happen, thinks “Hey, that was funny,” and then goes back to telling his own story.

BioShock and Portal: Meta-story, no collaboration

I’m lumping these two games together, only partly because I’ve already written everything of interest I could possibly say about each. Mostly, it’s because as far as this topic is concerned, the key storytelling moment of each game works exactly the same: both involve finding something written on a wall, both do an amazing job of pulling the player into the game while turning the context of the game inside out, both give the feeling that you’ve broken through the surface story and are now experiencing the game on a deeper level, and neither one has a damn thing to do with what the player does for the rest of the game.

If anything, the conceit that I’m “subverting” the game makes it even more apparent that I’m not really subverting anything at all. As far as interactive entertainment goes, these are still huge achievements: they’re storytelling moments that are significant to the player only because of what the player’s been doing up to that point, not simply what the player’s been seeing, as it would be with a big twist in a movie. But they’re still ultimately passive: the big moment happens after I’ve done something, but not because I’ve done something. I couldn’t have predicted either one was going to happen, so obviously there’s no way I could’ve made it happen. I’m involved in the story, but I’m not involved in the storytelling.

Half-Life 2, or, Stop Patronizing Me

But then, I doubt that was the point for either game. They weren’t shooting for “collaborative storytelling,” but immersive storytelling. You’re not supposed to identify with some level designer or scriptwriter, you’re supposed to be that guy, the one doing all the jumping and shooting. And immersive storytelling is what Half-Life 2 and its episodes are all about.

The Half-Life games are the only first-person shooters I’ve played that are 100% first person. You never see the character you’re playing. (Apparently he shows up in “Opposing Force” and “Blue Shift”, and also a photograph, but I never saw those. And yet, Gordon Freeman is one of the most recognizable characters in videogames. Hooray for Valve’s marketing department). They’re getting increasingly cinematic and epic with their storytelling, but the focus isn’t on making the story, but experiencing the story. If there’s any story moment that would require breaking that, it gets cut (and you hear about it later). Anything that happens in the game happens to you. Everything of significance happens around you. If there’s an enemy base to be invaded, you’re the one to do it. If there’s an exploding tanker to jump over, you’re the one driving the boat. And if there’s a button to be pressed, you’re the one who presses it.

Which would imply that you’re taking on the role of Gordon Freeman. But you’re not, exactly. This guy’s ostensibly a theoretical physicist, but he never actually does any science past pushing buttons or plugging things into sockets. Everyone around you calls you the savior of humanity, but it comes across as a little patronizing — all you do is what the game tells you to do. It’s a lot more impressive that you can pick up and move objects with your mind, but nobody seems to notice that.

Of course, all of that’s intentional to some degree; he’s supposed to be an unexpected action hero, as a counter to the lone space marine or special operative of other games. The game never lets him become a transparent stand-in for the player; everyone calls him by name and talks about his history and comments on the great things he’s done. But ultimately, he’s a cipher; you’re not playing a character, but the cameraman.

And most importantly, the game never assumes you know what’s going on. There are frequent sections where you’re on your own, but the tasks are clearly laid out for you, destinations are clearly pointed out on a map, and the way things work is either told to you explicitly by another character or requires a minimum of simple experimentation. These games aren’t stupid at all, but they’re not cerebral either; you’re never required to think too hard about a solution. There are puzzles that require thought instead of action — my favorite is the part in HL2 where you have to get your speedboat over a barrier by forming a ramp — but you solve the puzzles through trial and error, and they’re all self-contained bits of interactivity. They’re included for pacing reasons, not to establish your character or to trigger an event in the larger story.

Again, there’s some terrific storytelling going on, on an epic scale, and it’s done in a way that only games can do — even if you filmed a movie entirely in the first person, it wouldn’t have the same effect — but there’s still no sense that you’re collaborating in the storytelling. You drive the action, but not the story.

Every Good Killing Spree Needs Time to Reflect

So the question is whether it has to be like this, and whether that’s even a bad thing. One of the things you’ll frequently hear about games is the idea of a “mode switch:” it’s jarring for the player to have to go from pure action to pure thinking. And from the other side, a frequent complaint about adventure games is that you’re often stuck with no idea what to do or even what you’re supposed to be doing; the next step of the story doesn’t happen in the game but in your head. So you’re taken out of the game while you try to figure out what to do next.

As much as I like to think of myself as a thoughtful videogame-playing manchild, I’ve found that my patience and tolerance for dead spots in action games is startlingly low. I’ll patiently explore every corner of the environment in an adventure game, but if I have to spend 30 seconds finding the exit door in a shooter, I’m cursing the level designers.

But that’s by no means insurmountable: Portal’s a great example of a game that uses all the trappings of a first-person shooter in a more sedate game. There’s hardly ever any time pressure, and assuming you’re not a time-trial completist, you’re encouraged to take things a little slower while you try to work out the solution to a puzzle. We’re seeing more sophisticated pacing in action games, where level designers put in sections that encourage the player to slow down and explore, or find a hiding place and listen to a voice recording to further the next chunk of story. So I don’t think the clear division between “thinking games” and “action games” is doing anybody good; I think it’s just a holdover from when game genres were more clearly divided.

Dual Class Player/Designer

I believe the bigger problem is figuring out what the player’s role in a game is. I said that for some of the puzzles in Monkey Island 2 or Day of the Tentacle, you’re taking on the role of the game designer, figuring out the next few story beats and then carrying them out. That’s fine for comedy games that are all about breaking the fourth wall, but how does that work when your game is all about immersion?

Since I’ve never really worked on one of those big-budget games, anything I came up with would be pure armchair designer speculation. (I definitely haven’t worked on a game as aggressively playtested and iterated on as Valve’s games, where they pound the hell out of everything to guarantee no one gets stuck). My biggest question is why there’s such an emphasis on self-contained set pieces and scripted events. I’m told to go to the docks, I see a submarine blow up, I get my next mission objective. I’m told to go to a hotel, I’m ambushed by Hunters, I kill them, I get my next mission objective.

I don’t have any problem with linear narratives in game, but I don’t see why they have to be based on such simple objectives like “go here”, or why the cause-and-effect chain has to be so rigidly controlled with no overlap. Why not give me the general goal (“escape the city,” or “get to the rocket,”) and let me figure out the steps in between? Why not set it up so that the cool stuff happens not just because I’m there (“here’s where the sub blows up”, “here’s where these guys ambush you”, “here’s where you’re attacked by a sniper”), but as a direct result of what I’ve done (“the sub blows up when I try to launch it”, “I get ambushed because the sound of my car alerted a sentry,” “the sniper attacks because of that guy I killed in the last level.”) When one event leads naturally to the next, I feel like I’m in control of the story, even though of course I have no actual choice in what happens. And then I feel that the story isn’t happening around me, but because of me.

Don’t tell anybody I said this, but: I’m not particularly in love with point-and-click adventure games. They’re fine, and will always have a place, just like it’s still fun to play a side-scrolling shooter or a 2D platformer. But it’s not as if there’s something inherently perfect about the genre that’s not reproducible in other types of games. I’d love to see all the future-speculation of the “Dark Forces/Half-Life era” come true, and have games that are as engaging and immersive as story-driven shooters, while still giving that same rewarding feel of collaborative storytelling as point-and-click adventures. We’ve already learned that cutscene abuse is bad, and are learning to give interaction back to the player. But we’re still not giving enough control of the storytelling back to the player, treating it like a collaboration. Not throwing up our hands and saying, “do whatever you want and we’ll stay out of the way, we don’t care.” And not treating the story as a sequence of controlled environments the player can run around in, doing stuff that has no bearing on the rest of Our Story.

Apparently, “Yahtzee” Croshaw has a column in the back of PC Gamer now, and the one in the July 2008 issue is about how he’s bored with adventure games. They always devolve into the same old thing; and sure the SCUMM games were excellent, but that was in spite of their gameplay, not because of it; and ever since Half-Life came out and proved that action games don’t need to be mindless and shallow, do we even need adventure games anymore?

Fair enough. A few years ago, I would’ve probably agreed completely. When I first got into videogames, I was only into SCUMM games, because shooters were dumb. And even then, it was rarely because of the puzzles; the puzzles were almost always something you had to slog through to get to the next cool story moment. When Dark Forces proved that DOOM could have a cool story and characters, and then Jedi Knight and Half-Life proved that cinematic storytelling could actually be fun to play, I said, “Well, that about does it for adventure games.” Until I started working for Telltale, I can’t remember playing an adventure game since Zork Grand Inquisitor. (Which is still a fantastic game, by the way, one of the best I’ve ever played).

But that was eight years ago. I tend to like Croshaw’s video reviews, because buried amongst the Britishisms and dildos, there’s frequently some genuine, bullshit-free insight in there. Even when I don’t agree, I like hearing someone cut through conventional wisdom and hype and just get at the heart of whether a game is fun or not, and why.

And that’s why I was disappointed in that PC Gamer column, because it doesn’t say anything new. Basically, he says the exact same thing anyone says whenever the topic of adventure games comes up:

Myth 7: Adventure games suck because they’re artificially complicated and there’s only one correct solution to every puzzle and it’s never what you would do in the real world so you have to READ THE DESIGNER’S MIND!!!!

Whenever this observation gets trotted out on the internet, it’s invariably followed by a link to the Death of Adventure Games article from Old Man Murray. That’s the one from 2000 where a particularly ridiculous puzzle from Gabriel Knight 3 gets ripped apart, and adventure game fans and creators both get exposed for the smug, self-important bastards that they are. And as soon as you link to the OMM article, the crowd scatters like cockroaches, adventure game apologists hanging their heads in shame. The issue was definitively settled, eight years ago: Adventure Games Just Aren’t Cool Anymore.

And then the writer of that article went on to get a job at Valve, working on Portal, which is more like an adventure game than most adventure games I’ve played.

Seriously, how can anyone look at this:

and not recognize it as an artificially complicated puzzle set up by a team of game designers, where there’s only one correct solution, and to solve it, you have to know what the designers want you to do?

I have to provide power to that device in order to be able to flip a switch? Well, obviously, I need to use a crate to bounce a flying energy ball around a corner and into that receptacle. Duh! If you don’t see the correct solution instantly, you have to keep trying combinations of things until you get back on track. Which is, apparently, pure gaming bliss in a first person shooter, but sheer torture in an adventure game.

Assuming that adventure games do in fact suck, then it’s not because they put you in controlled environments with arbitrary and ridiculously complicated solutions to obvious problems. At least, that’s not endemic to adventure games, because any game with puzzles is the same way.

But there must be something specifically broken about adventure games, or else I would play more of them myself. And the conventional wisdom wouldn’t be that they were made obsolete by Half-Life, and with good riddance. And I wouldn’t keep hearing from friends, “Sorry I haven’t played your games, I don’t have time for videogames anymore. By the way, have you played Portal? It’s awesome.” So what’s the problem, exactly?

I find your creation of a monkey wrench to be most illogical, Captain

There’s one key word that I’ve been carefully avoiding so far in order to make a point: “logical.” Wolpaw complains about the “weird dream logic” of Gabriel Knight 3. Croshaw says that adventure games rarely reward logical thinking, instead making you do what the designer intended.

We tend to think of “logical” as being synonymous with “intuitive.” So when we get frustrated with adventure games, we conflate “logic” with “common sense.” If I’ve got a case that’s screwed shut, then I should just be able to use a screwdriver to open it. I shouldn’t have to go through a five-step series of puzzles to trick a guard into dropping his knife, because the knife is the one thing the designer has intended for me to use, because the designer is a smug idiot who’s calling me stupid and you can take your knife and screw your dumb game, I’m going to play Gears of War.

But for a game to be “logical,” it doesn’t have to work like the real world, it just has to be consistent within its own world. All “logic” requires is that if you tell me A and B, I can deduce C. There’s no reason that finding a leaf will turn me into a raccoon and make me able to fly; I just can predict that that’s what will happen, because you’ve told me that’s how the world works. If I want to clear out a room full of people, there’s no reason I would think to trick a cat into painting a white stripe on its back; I can only predict that because you’ve shown me repeatedly that this world has the rules of a Warner Brothers cartoon.

And if I’m on one side of a room with a pit of acid in the middle (for some reason), and the walkway is broken, but I still need to get to the other side of the room, there’s no reason I would think to shoot a gun at a wall to open a trans-dimensional portal. Except that you’ve just spent an hour or two teaching me how that gun works, and I know the name of the game I’m playing, and I know there’s a solution to this puzzle based on the items I have, and when all you have is a portal gun, the whole world looks like a concrete wall.

In videogames, there are three big problems with real-world logic:

1. It’s boring.
Using a screwdriver on a screw just doesn’t make me feel cool or clever. I frequently use screwdrivers to manipulate screws in my daily life, but I hardly ever use a shotgun to mow down packs of zombified alien/human hybrids. In an action-oriented game, you want weapons and items to work like they do in the real world, because the point of the game is using the shotgun, not figuring out what to use it for. But if an adventure game does nothing to subvert the player’s expectations about how objects work, then it’s not really a game as much as a barely interactive storybook.

2. It’s pervasive.
No matter how much time you spend familiarizing your players with the rules of your game world, they’ve spent more time learning the rules of the real world. So the real-world solution is always going to be their first course of action. After two hours of playing with portals in a game called Portal, I came to a hole in a wall that I wasn’t tall enough to climb through. Naturally, I picked up various boxes, chairs, and computer equipment, carried it to the hole, stacked it up, and jumped on top.

That didn’t work, because what the designers wanted me to do was this: Open a portal, walk several rooms back to the rocket-shooting sentry robot that was trying to kill me, open another portal, and lure the robot into shooting at me again, so that a rocket would fly through the portal and take out the message tube that was even higher off the ground than the hole I’d been trying to get through. Of course!

3. It evolves.
Adventure games are old. That OMM article declaring their final death was eight years ago. Ron Gilbert wrote an article lamenting the sorry state of the genre, and that was back in 1989, way before what we now consider “old school”. For one thing, that means that absolutely nothing I’m saying about game logic and puzzles and adventure games is new; it’s been discussed and refuted and re-discussed for at least 20 years.

It also means that adventure game puzzles have become as stylized as kanji: lots of people have an idea what they’re getting at, even though they no longer bear any resemblance to the real-world things they were originally supposed to represent. Adventure games have so thoroughly exhausted the possible uses of screwdrivers, that using one to actually turn a screw is kind of subversive at this point. And most of us know that to get out of a locked room, you slide a piece of paper under the door, poke the key out of the lock, and pull the key back in, even though most of us have never actually seen a lock that works like that.

So every player is going to have a different notion of what’s “intuitive.” That would be true of any random sampling of people, and it just gets worse when you take videogame history into account. For someone who’s played a ton of games, the most intuitive solution to a problem might be the exact opposite of what’s intuitive in the real world. Too much real-world logic, and the solution is too simple and easy; too much videogame logic, and the solution is impossible to predict and frustrates the player. And the definition of “too much” varies wildly from audience member to audience member.

And again, adventure game fans and creators have been going over this problem for over 20 years, suggesting ways to “fix” adventure games by making adventure game puzzles suck less. More often than not, they come to the conclusion that the problem has no solution, other than to stop playing or making adventure games. So they go on to platformers, RPGs, and shooters, which are now sophisticated enough to combine the great storytelling of an adventure, but with gameplay that actually fun to play.

Which means that we’re losing the core of what makes adventure games cool. And instead of replacing the outdated adventure game genre, we’re setting up a situation where platformers, RPGs, and shooters will make all the same mistakes adventure games did. We’re borrowing vague notions of “cinematic storytelling” and cut-scenes and puzzle sections and trying — with varying degrees of success — to fit them into different genres. Because we know that there’s something inherently fun about running around and jumping on monsters or shooting them with guns or leveling up characters. So we can replace the tedium and frustration of adventure games with something that we know is fun.

But adventures don’t necessarily need to be replaced, because adventure games don’t suck. Adventure game puzzles do.

You don’t have to read my mind to tell where I’m going with this.

The biggest problem with adventure games is the same problem as with all storytelling games: there’s still this insistence on a division between “story” and “gameplay.”

There are definitely people out there who are big fans of adventure game puzzles, and who believe that the puzzles are what makes the game. And as the success of Professor Layton proves, it’s not a small, niche group of people, either. I’m not in that group, though, and games like Professor Layton are anathema to me. The “story” in that game, such as it is, is nothing more than a backdrop for a bunch of self-contained puzzles.

One of the things that makes Portal such a great game is that instead of trying to disguise the fact that it’s a sequence of artificial, constrained environments with a pre-designed solution, they accentuated it. That’s also the main reason the game fell apart for me after the “twist.” It became even more linear, controlled, and artificial, but tried to disguise itself as a real-world environment.

There’s been plenty of stuff written on-line, by the game designers and others, about the different narratives going on in Portal. For the first half, it works well, because the story and the puzzles are the same thing: basically, the entire story is about trying to escape from a sequence of artificial puzzles. But later, you’re asked to apply the logic of the test chambers to the world outside the chambers. Your goal is to make your way out of a Half-Life 2 level, but you’re still solving puzzles. When you’re inside the test chambers, it’s clear who put the puzzles there, but out here, it’s jarring. You’re reminded that the game designers must have put them there. (I’m aware that the ending implies the entire game, including post-testchambers, was an elaborate test, but you don’t know that until the end).

That’s the most basic template for an adventure game: take a story, then split up the story moments with puzzles to keep the player occupied. To use another example, I could only make it through an hour of Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune before I got frustrated and turned it off. It would seem to have everything going for it: very high production values, solid writing and characterization, beautiful environments, a shooting interface in a console game that actually works well, and a story that starts out with just enough intrigue to make you interested. But you can’t follow the story without first completing sequence after sequence of Tomb Raider-like puzzles. The fourth time I came into a room where I had to figure out a sequence to set all the torches on fire, I’d stopped caring about what happens next.

Even well-designed puzzles can be annoying, if they feel out of place, they break the flow of the game, or it becomes clear that they’re not part of the story, but an obstacle in the way of the next part of the story. Half-Life 2 is one of the top five greatest videogames ever made, but it still has moments where a puzzle grinds the entire thing to a halt. Would a sci-fi action story involve a thirty-minute sequence where the lead is figuring out how to drop a washing machine off a scaffolding to raise an elevator? And as neat as a puzzle based on buoyancy is, why am I stuck inside this cordoned-off area using barrels to make a ramp for my speedboat, instead of out there saving the Earth?

New Objective: Figure Out Your Next Objective

It’s bad enough with pacing. Add in the problem of real-world logic and intuition mentioned earlier, and it gets even worse. The “boss” sequence at the end of Half-Life 2: Episode Two is both one of the most fun and one of the most frustrating segments I’ve played in a game. It was just plain inspired design, and a great climax to the game, and it had me turning off the machine and cursing Valve and everyone who works there several times before I finished it. But my entire problem with it was skill-based, and not logic-based: I knew exactly what I was supposed to do, I just couldn’t do it. There is only one solution to the “puzzle:” you can’t just use your regular arsenal of weapons to wear the monsters down. You have to use this weapon — and only this weapon — on these creatures and then do this. And to make absolutely sure that you knew what to do, they prefaced it with a long set-up, with graphs, pictures, screenshots, a short tutorial section, repeats of the maps, and then frequent voice-overs once the segment was in progress. I found myself saying, “Yes, I get it, guys, so let me get out there and try to do it.”

As a result, I eventually felt relieved when I was finally able to finish that section. But I never felt clever for figuring out what to do. Games just can’t do that anymore. They have to state the next objective, highlight it with a dot on your minimap, flash a big arrow to it, and explain what to do when you get there. You’re always reacting to story events, never really causing them. In even the best story-based shooters and RPGs I’ve ever played, there are hardly any moments where I felt like I knew where the story was going next, and then I made the next bit happen. Day of the Tentacle had at least a dozen of those moments.

The difference is that in a well-designed adventure game, there is no division between story and gameplay. The game is the story, and vice-versa. Your obstacles aren’t logic puzzles, but plot points. Or at least, scenes that further establish the characters and the way the game’s world works. Figuring out the solution to an arbitrary videogame puzzle is never as satisfying as figuring out how to move a story forward.

And ideally, you don’t have to treat “puzzle logic” as this subjective morass of unpredictability, wondering whether your puzzle is too hard or too easy. Because if you’re telling your story well, that means that events are already logically flowing from one to the next, and the player is less inclined to be thinking in terms of “hard puzzle” or “easy puzzle,” but instead “what happens next?”

I’m definitely not convinced that shooters and RPGs and platformers will never be able to provide these kinds of experiences. Games keep getting better at storytelling, and there’ve been plenty of moments in the last couple of years that I’ve been genuinely shocked and genuinely impressed by a plot development in a game. But with all the advances in production values, and better talent involved in the storytelling, you still don’t see the kinds of “a-ha!” moments that are relatively common in adventure games. A few years ago, I assumed that adventure games had already been made obsolete, but now I see that there’s still plenty of potential in them, as long as we play to their strengths.