And I know we’ve had this discussion before, so it’s probably a mistake for me to post. If you’re discounting puzzles and hoping for something else to appear, then I have to agree with Mr. Koster.

You want multiple solutions, it’s gotta be procedural if you want a plurality of solutions.

Otherwise you’ve still got the player trying to guess the mind of the designer, only the designer came up with 10 different things to try.

It’s the same damn adventure/puzzle game as before, if you’re looking to still maintain artistic authorship. You just had to write more stuff.

I know you, and I’m sure the solution you’re looking for is out there. You’ll find it, but it’s not here yet.

Per turning the hints off, that one’s pretty easy to see. If your target demo is adventure game grognards, the hints are going off. Mass market, they’ll leave them on, but you’ll have to come up with a different nomenclature than “hints,” or they’ll turn them off too. Nobody wants to feel dumb.

I’m still a little wary of thinking of game mechanics and narrative as separate layers, even in terms of “skeleton and flesh.” It’s for the same reason that I don’t like thinking of narrative and game mechanics as parallel media. Even if you acknowledge that you need both to make a complete experience, it reinforces the idea that they’re separate disciplines that don’t feed off of and feed into each other except at the surface level.

I definitely agree that the core of the gameplay in the LEC adventure games was figuring out how the storyteller’s mind works, and figuring out the context and logic (or lack of logic) of the game world. Day of the Tentacle in particular had puzzles that only made sense once you completely embraced the logic of Warner Brothers cartoons. I like the description of that as the core gameplay of those games, and the recognition that that’s a system in itself.

But I don’t think that’s quite what I was trying to get at. For all I know, it might be impossible. I’ve only “seen” it happen when helping in the design of puzzle-heavy SCUMM style games, so it’s entirely possible my perception of the design process was just perceived as “figure out what the designer is thinking” to players.

But the kind of narrative-as-gameplay that I’m trying to describe is different from a metagame of figuring out what the designer had in mind, because it ideally wouldn’t require that constant mode-switching between what the player’s character is doing and what the player himself is doing (trying to get into the mindset of a writer’s room somewhere in California).

That’s essentially why I say Portal comes closest to what I’m talking about, because it seamlessly combined the story with the game — Chell is stuck in a series of puzzle rooms trying to find a way out, and so is the player. You quickly forget that you’re interacting in a layer “above” the story, and you drop down into the world of the game. It didn’t take long before I stopped thinking of the puzzles as designed by Valve and actually started to accept Aperture Science as the creator of everything around me. So of course, when the game opened up to let me peek behind the walls and see actual story development in a puzzle game, it was one of those transcendent completely-immersive moments.

It never really asked you to do anything with the narrative, though, and that’s the area that has a ton of potential.

I haven’t explained it well, but when I talk about the developer walking through the game and then encouraging the player to duplicate his steps, I’m not looking to turn that process into a metagame. It’s more a concession to the fact that games can’t — and shouldn’t! — allow the player to take a story in any direction she wants. Both because it’d be prohibitively expensive if not impossible, and because it will inevitably result in some non-interesting directions. It’s more a process of editing the experience down to the most interesting parts, obviously similar to how a film editor chooses shots and scenes, but also similar to how a game designer constrains choices to prevent AP.

Ideally, the player doesn’t identify that as the gameplay at all, since the process is so seamless and reactive that the player isn’t even aware he’s being guided. Instead, the gameplay is that of creating a narrative, just as if I were writing a story from scratch and simultaneously seeing that story come to life around me. If there’s any mode-switching, it’s between higher-level strategy and lower-level interaction. Games get the lower-level interaction right all the time (kill a bunch of bad guys), but almost always keep the higher-level strategy (go to the top of the cathedral in Arkham City) to themselves.

At the moment, though, the idea might still be too vague to be useful. I think I’d need to come up with a concrete example to make it clearer what I’m talking about, and to see if it’s actually as novel a concept as I believe it is.

Finally, I was really happy to read your description of “systemic problems” above; I couldn’t agree more with what you wrote. (And it’s awesome to see it described where an FPS and Tetris are the same phenomenon, differing only in scale!) Assuming I’ve understood you correctly, it’s exactly the thing I was hoping to accomplish with season 3 of the Sam & Max games. Introducing Max’s psychic powers was intended to give you a finite set of predictable tools to apply to an indefinite series of narrative-driven problems. Basically, to combine the “powers” of a platformer with the higher-level storytelling of an adventure game. I think it ended up working to varying degrees of success (and didn’t come into play at all in the last episode, unfortunately), but the intent was sound!

I’m skeptical that DLC and other content drops in “service-based” games will be that great for more complex and interesting narrative development, because they tend to be so self-contained. On the other hand, since it’s so hard to come up with examples of games that use narrative as gameplay really well, maybe it’s better to start out small.

@Jonathan: In case I didn’t make it clear, one of the things I liked about Koster’s essays is that he didn’t put a value judgment on game narrative. It was more an attempt to define it, even if I don’t agree with the definition.

I’ve never been a big fan of puzzles, either, and as time has gone on I’ve had a harder and harder time getting enthusiastic about them. I guess they satisfy a lot of what I’m calling a “game”: they’ve got rules and a win condition, and you can experiment until you find the right solution. But I don’t like the sense of “there is one correct solution, I know it, and you have to find it.” I prefer “There’s a range of possible solutions, but we all agree that this is the most interesting one.” It’s a subtle distinction, I guess, but it’s all in how you think about it.

And you can call what I’m talking about “hints,” but that’s another place where the connotation of the term makes a significant difference in how you think about it. Calling it a “hint” has a connotation of “I know the right answer, aren’t you getting it?” But I’d like to see more attention paid to the context and the setup. So the solution just seems natural.

At Telltale, Dave spent a LOT of time thinking about making a subtle hint system and making the distinction between context and hints. A significant number of players immediately turned off hints just on principle, even though the games were intended to be played with the hints on. Because we tried to make them integral to the system, gradually giving information to guide the player in a direction. Giving clues instead of giving exasperated “I know and you don’t” answers.

- I *don’t* actually draw a clear line between the game system and the experience, *except* when I am looking at things formally, as in this article. In other places I have argued quite strongly for the importance of the experience layer (narrative included). But even when I am lookin at things formally, it’s like drawing a line between the skeleton and the flesh. We need both to make a body.

- On replayability… To quote myself (rude, I know): “the definition of a good game is one that teaches the player everything it has to teach before they stop playing.” I dive into replayability in great detail in places other than this essay. I define it *cognitively*, not systemically, in “A Theory of Fun.” Your digression on replayability actually lines up perfectly with this.

Rather, what I was getting at was that a rich system, layered with rich experience, is going to be the richest game overall. A very poor system may well have a good experience layer, and indeed be fun, but it’s going to be more readily consumable. A truly GREAT experience layer is reapproachable because it has great depths to it and you also discover new things as you revisit it. (There’s also “comfort re-reads” which are a different beastie, triggering completely different emotional pathways).

- On service games, btw, the “release more content for a mastered system” is generally not a great model over time. Players see through it and leave; that’s why service games tend to need to introduce new mechanics over time.

- I agree with everything in your section on agency! I don’t define “a rich set of systemic problems” as being about finding alternate avenues to solve the same problem. I see it as being about a rich problem *type* that constantly refreshes with new *specific problems.* On the extreme end, think of Tetris: simple ruleset, large large array of “actual problems.” As a result, it feels fresh very deep into the experience. First-person shooter play is the same, at a radically different level of complexity in terms of ruleset. Poker, the same, and so on.

- I think your final paragraph actually perfectly describes the sort of cognitive puzzle I assert lies at the heart of gameplay. (I also think that narrative games these days are almost never the way you describe, alas). Basically, you are saying that the puzzle is figuring out how the storyteller’s mind works — and I would argue that *especially* in the case of the LucasArts adventure games, that was precisely the exercise… in fact, it was in the Sam and max case, figuring out the sense of *humor* of the authors. That’s a significant cognitive challenge (and one I consider completely valid in the game grammar). It’s a complex system, admits of many variable scenarios (analogous to the varying situations in Tetris, Poker, or an FPS), and yet users can arrive at a heuristic to deal with it.

Basically, I am not sure we’re actually in disagreement. :)

The point about service-based games being perfectly suited to supply more content and profit by that, and the recognition that this content is often focused around narrative, is a really good one. I think about adventure games like Blade Runner which had a very rich narrative graph, when it was way too expensive to do such a thing and expect to be profitable enough to make another game. “Service-based” games *do* make that possible, and the space of “narrative elements that might plausibly fit the world and complement or support expansion of the game mechanics in place” is largely determined by good world-building done up front. I would expand on that but I’m already making a hash of it.

(PS: You do have an “ever, ever” where I think you meant “never, ever”.)

I wasn’t fully with you on story as mechanic, and maybe I’m still not completely, but I thought your closing paragraph was strong.
In that paragraph, the narrative takes the role of a “hint” system and I think it’s likely you could describe a hint system as a mechanic.

I am annoyed at people defining “games” as replayable, and systematically driven.

Puzzles are not replayable. You figure out a Rubik’s Cube and, well, there you go, game over. Finish a crossword, you’re done. Put all the pieces of a puzzle together, why break it apart and do it again?

It’s easy to define a game as the the thing that best supports the argument that you’re making and then say, “Look! I’m right.”
However, except for your hint system example, I would say that most often narrative isn’t a game mechanic. This is not to say that it isn’t important. It is often the main reason for playing.

The game mechanic that I find critics most often overlook is “exploration.”
Finding stuff. It’s a powerful mechanic, because its pretty easy to program and it gets to our cave-man brains. Click around and get a reward.
Click in one spot and get a joke.

Solve a puzzle in another and you move the story forward. Release the happy hormones. Look how smart I am! It’s your reason to play.

Exploration isn’t “replayable” as such, but it isn’t bad game design. It’s just the nature of that game mechanic. Add enough stuff to an exploration game and it becomes replayable. The player might miss something. Over the course of a 30 hour game, the player might forget something. Then, it’s fun to go back and see it again.

Is Myst, the best-selling computer game of all time, not a game, because it isn’t “replayable” in the “Baseball is replayable” sense of the word?

But critics need to actually understand why genres use different mechanics and how they differ from each other. Saying “Doom” is better game design than “Myst” is tinged with more than just a bit of academic posturing.

In certain genres, story is a must-have.

It’s one of the advantages the series has over Fables: the comic takes fairy tale characters and gets its intrigue out of trying to predict out what’s going to happen to them when they’re slammed into the modern day. Once Upon a Time can milk a lot of intrigue out of showing you characters in the modern day and letting you figure out who they are in the fairy tales.

The moment that really sold the show to me was the introduction of the small town’s version of the magic mirror: Mr. Glass, the Editor of The Daily Mirror. His first line on the show included “…fresh from The Mirror” and that was one of those smart, knowing laughs that proved to me that the writers are having at least some fun.

I hadn’t expected the Sheriff to be the wolf, mainly because we’ve seen glimpses of “The Wolf”, or at least “A Wolf”, but also I felt like he seemed so much in early episodes like a Sheriff Nottingham ploy and was curious if we’d see a Robin Hood type thing… Obviously things turned out more interesting than that.

The Wolf: Red has a (presumable) boyfriend with a muscle car that we only see glimpses of (so far) in cutaways between diner scenes. He tends to wear jewelry with a wolf symbol and IIRC his muscle car has at least one wolf symbol on it as well. Red will sometimes have a piece of jewelry with a wolf on it that she will fidget with in that sort of way that’s long been a soap opera staple to denote an on-again/off-again/back-on-again misery relationship. I’m hoping these symbols/glimpses pay off in an interesting way.

And Emily, it’s got to be true love’s kiss! Which means she’d have to seduce everyone in town first. I think she could probably do it, though.