Category: Storytelling

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

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

In retrospect, it should’ve been no surprise that I’d be such a sucker for Fable 2. It’s an RPG plus The Sims, which lets you spend equal time beating up on dudes and playing dress-up. All told with the tone (if not depth) of Terry Pratchett. It’s rare enough for me to finish a game these days, but I finished it and kept on playing for as long as I could. It was inevitable that I’d be picking up Fable 3 as soon as it came out.

On the surface, it does exactly what a sequel’s supposed to do: keep the core of what worked from the previous version, streamline or remove what was clunky in the previous version, give it a new story and setting, introduce a couple of new mechanics. And a lot of it works. The transition to an industrial instead of medieval setting is pretty cool, the art direction is as interesting as Fable 2 and the voice work even better, and the change to the main menu and real estate game are great in theory even if they don’t work so well in practice. The idea of having you build up to revolution and then have to rule as king was a very good one (again, in theory). And I did find myself finishing the game, and I kept on playing past the end. But I still can’t help but feel like the series has taken a wrong turn.

To get the typical game review stuff out of the way: Fable 3 is the buggiest game I’ve ever played in release. Quests would break or disappear. The trail to the next target would repeatedly fail to show up. Enemies would get trapped and unable to fight back. I’d open the door to a house and find everyone in town waiting inside, unable to get out. A spouse would ask for something to make them happy, and then get angry and divorce me when I did it (twice). Not to mention all the things that weren’t outright bugs but just kind of sloppy: enemy placement was haphazard, enemy balance was way off (go into an area and fight three clumps of super-powered bad guys all in a row), and the end game was ludicrously anti-climactic. It reduced all your decisions to money, but getting money is so easy to do that there’s absolutely no tension. The entire thing feels like a game that was released too early.

But the decision to release the game too early is one that can be fixed with a patch. The other decisions that went into Fable 3 aren’t so easy to fix.

Everything changed from Fable 2 seems like it was done to make the game easier. One of the new main interactions is that you can go to most characters, press a button to hold their hand, and then take them somewhere. Everybody loved ICO, right? Except in that case, the entire game was built around that mechanic; here it’s duct-taped on top of an existing game, almost as if they wanted to give reviewers a perfect metaphor of how dumbed-down the game has become.

In Fable 2, you had a range of possible interactions with the townspeople. Unlocking new interactions meant more ways to build your personality and reputation a particular way. Here, it just chooses a “good” one and a “bad” one from your repertoire, reducing everything to a binary choice. So when you want to convert followers to your cause (which the game forces you to do at a couple of points), you end up just going around town and dancing with strangers, or farting on their heads.

The relationship game in Fable 2 wasn’t particularly deep and not at all realistic, but at least it gave the illusion you were making choices. Here, you just approach someone and play patty-cake until they fall in love. (Patty-cake as foreplay was something I haven’t seen since Who Framed Roger Rabbit?) And it’s even worse than that — bumping someone past the individual tiers of friendship and romance requires the exact same tasks every damn time. First you have to do them a favor — so you’re the king of the nation, but you’re still sent running errands by servants — and then you have to drag them to a specific location to “take them on a date.” It’s pure tedium.

Most of the quests in Fable 2 weren’t all that complex, either. You’d follow the glowing trail to a specific location and then, occasionally, kill some guys. But the story was strong enough that it made the linearity tolerable. Welcome, even. I still can’t tell you what the villain’s master plan was, but I appreciated the fact that there was one. And I appreciated the fact that it was structured as a Hero’s journey, with twists and turns and new allies and dramatic changes in tone. The story, such as it is, in Fable 3 is a lot more comprehensible, but also completely predictable.

Fable 2 had tons of in-jokes and meta-humor, which Fable 3 makes painfully explicit. John Cleese’s commentary is pretty amusing, albeit repetitious, but apart from that, all the character is loaded into one quest. Your character gets recruited by a gang of village nerds to act out a Dungeons & Dragons-type campaign they’ve organized. Throughout, the game developers make self-deprecating comments that just make everything worse. They comment that nobody reads item text, when the item text was one of the best things in Fable 2. They point out that players don’t like having to solve puzzles, drawing attention to the fact that there is absolutely nothing in the entirety of Fable 3 which requires the player to make any sort of deduction, strategizing, or any thought whatsoever. I’m as big a fan of self-referential and self-deprecating humor as anyone, but only when there’s at least some token attempt to fix the problem you’re making fun of.

Seriously, guys, this kind of thing has to stop. Over the past year or so, I’ve been getting a little softer on my hard-line Videogames Treat us Like Idiots stance. After all, there’s two sides to the argument, right? Nobody likes to be frustrated. Games are so time-consuming as it is, why artificially drag it out for some mythical dollar-to-playtime ratio? It’s not as if solving arbitrary puzzles from some game designer is genuinely productive. Isn’t there value in pure interactive storytelling, without feeling the need to stretch it out with stupid puzzles?

After playing Fable 3, though, I realized that’s bunk. Game developers — myself included — are chasing after some imaginary mainstream audience by repeating the worst mistakes of the television industry. They’re going after the Lowest Common Denominator. That’d be bad enough if they were good at it, but they’re terrible at accurately estimating the audience’s intelligence. It’s always done in the name of looking out for the player — removing confusion, not being so obtuse, not weighing a game down with stuff that people aren’t interested in. But it’s ultimately insulting, and it’s bad for games. I’ve always been able to justify my hobby as not being a complete waste of time, but lately I spend hours on a game and then realize I’ve done nothing but spend the whole time blindly mashing buttons like a monkey.

I could always count on games like the Civilization series to put me in my place, but with Civ 5 it’s just annoying how little resistance there is. The last game that made me feel like I was having to think at all was Limbo.

So: let’s all cut it out with the dumbed-down games, folks. And stop making excuses to justify it. There’s just too much potential to keep wasting it.

Batman: Arkham Asylum deserves every bit of the praise it’s been getting. It’s a terrific game that gets so much right in the first thirty minutes, I was willing to take whatever it threw at me for the rest of the game. And I was compelled to keep playing until I’d finished the story mode, which is a rarity for me these days. Even after I’d been shouting “no fair!” and wanting to break my controller in frustration, I had to keep hitting the “retry” button.

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.

Yesterday a discussion about narrative vs. gameplay in videogames broke out on Twitter, and Telltaler Mike Watson consolidated much of it onto a webpage. (Although I’d recommend including the first level of comments that are @replied to, even if the speaker isn’t in the list of “game design notables”).

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.

About a year and a half ago, I started writing a series of posts on here about “myths of videogame storytelling.” The idea was to take some claim I’d found on the internet about the role of stories in games, and explain why it was hopelessly, incontrovertibly wrong. Here they are, in chronological order for your convenience and protection:

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.

Brevity is good. But

Myth 11: Videogame writing should be short.

is bad advice. Because, unsurprisingly, it doesn’t say enough.
Continue reading “On Brevity”

Previously on Spectre Collie, I snapped my tether and responded to a critique of games I worked on. The claim was that adventure games are bad at giving feedback to the player, partly because it’s impossible for the game to know what the player’s thinking. I agreed that adventure games are usually lousy at giving feedback, but disagree that it’s a problem unique to adventure games. It’s a problem for any game that requires the player to make deductions more sophisticated than “put the red key in the red door.”

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.
Continue reading “Feedback Loop”

Previously on Spectre Collie, I made the claim that the “state of the art” in story-driven games still treat storytelling and gameplay as two completely separate things. In even the best games, the player’s role is that of the guy who pushes buttons and/or shoots guys in the way; the key story moments happen in between my actions, not as a result of my actions. As a result, storytelling becomes increasingly superfluous and marginalized. Worse than that, because my actions don’t really have any bearing on the story, they lose any overall context, which is the whole purpose of having a framing story in the first place.

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.

Over the past few nights I’ve been playing Dead Space, the new sci-fi horror shooter from EA. It’s an extremely well-made and entertaining game, and I’m enjoying it a lot. I want to make that clear up front, because I spend the rest of this post complaining about it. And I’m even going to go so far as to unfairly single it out as an example of everything that’s wrong with the current state of storytelling in games.

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.
Continue reading “Resident Evil, But They’re in Space!”

More proof that ignorance is bliss: I’d been happily reading the internet for at least a year before I knew what “tl;dr” meant. Apparently, it means “too long, didn’t read,” and now it’s got my vote for the absolute worst internet acronym. Ruder than STFU, more arrogant than RTFM, stupider than ROFL, more vapid than ^__^, all combined in five attention-deprived characters. Plus, that should be a comma, not a semicolon.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Since I’m usually long on theory but short on actual practical examples, here are some examples from my favorite games to explain what I’m talking about:
Continue reading “Back off, man. I’m a scientist.”