In The Hobbit, Bilbo Baggins wins a magic ring in a riddle contest. The ring allows the wearer to become invisible, and Bilbo uses that ability to escape from some goblins and later to protect himself during a battle.

In The Lord of the Rings, Frodo Baggins inherits the ring and is tasked with taking it to be destroyed. Along the way, he’s compelled to use it to escape a bar fight, and he uses it again to protect himself from an attack by the Nazgul, alerting them to his presence and causing him to be near-fatally injured in the process.

I’ve played tons of games that do the former — Bilbo completes a quest to win a Ring of Invisibility. I can’t think of a single game I’ve played that did a good job of the latter — the player gets a new ability, but using that ability actually works to advance the narrative.

Even my trusty examples of good storytelling through game mechanics are no help to me here: there are games that use the mechanics to develop the mood or meaning of the story (like Ico, Shadow of the Colossus, and segments of BioShock), and there are games that use side effects of the player’s actions to advance the plot (like Portal and Portal 2, and The Secret of Monkey Island). But I’m coming up short trying to think of examples that take advantage of the rules — the player’s established abilities — to alter the plot.

I’m going to describe why I think that is, and how it may be possible to do it.

With 5 Power Comes 5 Responsibility

A couple of disclaimers: First, the title for this section is a quote from Doug Tabacco during a game of Ascension, and it’s one of those cases where I immediately started trying to think of a way to appropriate it as if I’d come up with it. Second: I’m not an authority on role-playing games. My only experience with tabletop RPGs is a couple of standalone sessions over the years, and my first exposure to computer RPGs didn’t come until Diablo was released. So any claims I make about the history of RPGs is pure outsider’s speculation based on a glance at Wikipedia.

But my very high-level guess at how fantasy RPGs developed goes like this: Dungeons & Dragons came out of a miniatures-based tabletop war game combined with a Lord of the Rings-inspired fantasy setting. The tactical combat portion of the game is still heavily rooted in the rules of the war game, and those rules bled into the storytelling aspect of the game. Dice rolls were now used to represent more abstracted narrative events like being able to unlock treasure chests or to persuade characters to do something.

Presumably, without all the rules, systems, and dice rolls in effect, a session of “pure” role-playing could quickly deteriorate into either Calvinball or Axe Cop. I still hear complaints, from people far more versed in tabletop RPGs than I am, that one system descends too far into dice-rolling and tactical combat at the expense of actual role-playing, or that another system is too free-form to have any direction.

As the tabletop RPGs got translated into computer games, they understandably took better advantage of the number-crunching than they did of the free-form storytelling. Some concepts were already entrenched as staples of RPGs just from years of the tabletop games, while others got more emphasized because computers are simply better at handling them.

By the time someone like me gets exposed to the “rules” of magic in fiction, it’s after it’s been represented by dozens of game systems, and it’s already been codified into a rigid system of numbers. Spells cost x amount of mana to cost (or they can only be cast x times per day), and each does y amount of damage of type z. Those are the rules, and the rules are what make it a game.

It’s become so codified, in fact, that the times I’ve been exposed to other descriptions of magic in fiction — even when they haven’t been done that well — have been revelatory. Magical, even. Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell by Susanna Clarke presents it in a way that makes it sound wondrous even after I’d played dozens of games that let me cast fireballs and summon magical creatures. It describes magic as weird, dangerous, and exotic.

Even Buffy the Vampire Slayer’s clumsy magic-as-drug-addiction storyline was filled with moments unlike anything that I’d seen in a game — magic battles where the witches don’t have to ready spells into assigned slots, or wait the requisite cooldown time to maximize damage per second. For that matter, even the silly magic battle in The Sword in the Stone was based more on wit than on rules.

Obviously, the difference is that a narrative has built-in limitations on what the characters can and can’t do. An open-ended gaming system needs to enforce those limitations because we’re trying to build a society here.

But when a game is introducing a developer-designed narrative anyway, why not use narrative-based limitations instead of (or in addition to) abstracted, system-based ones? Narratives have to have rules to be satisfying as stories; a novel can no more make its protagonist infallible and invincible than a game can.

Buffy’s magic “rules” were based both on familiar systems — magicians had to be powerful enough to cast certain spells, and certain spells required reagents and rituals — and on narrative limitations — each use of magic was addictive, and using it too much would consume the caster and turn her evil. The “rules” in Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell were even more complex and narrative-based. Strange’s use of magic attracted the attention of the faeries and put his family in danger. There’s a real since that using magic is simultaneously wonderful and awful.

Meanwhile, Underneath Monkey Island…

I’ve said it before, but if I could choose one moment that made me want to work in video games, it was the first “Meanwhile” cut-scene in The Secret of Monkey Island. After Guybrush accomplishes one of his three trials, the game cuts to a distant scene of LeChuck reacting to the news. It was the moment that made me realize that it is possible to do storytelling with a video game, and here was an example of a game that was combining the “language” of cinematic presentation with the rules of a puzzle game. I was being given new narrative information based on my actions within the game.

For whatever reason, instead of building on that as video game storytelling got more sophisticated, the technique became an evolutionary dead end. Showing me what was happening elsewhere in the world gave the sense that I was only seeing a part of a much bigger story, but in most games I’ve played since, the action never once leaves the vicinity of my player character.

More significantly, the scenes in Monkey Island had a rudimentary sense of cause and effect. My actions were making LeChuck nervous, and my actions were raising the tension towards the inevitable showdown. But over time, games dropped that cause and effect in order to tell only tangentially related stories. Completing objectives trigger a cut-scene which is at best a “reward” for finishing a section of the game, or more often just an excuse for the developer to impose more passive storytelling on me.

When a game inserts narrative in unexpected places, it can be powerful. Obviously, peeking behind the walls of the test chambers in Portal is one of the best examples. And one of the best moments in Portal 2 comes when the player steps on an aerial faith plate to start solving a puzzle, and she unexpectedly re-encounters Wheatley. Each is satisfying because it advances the narrative not with a disconnected cut-scene, but as a direct result of something the player is doing.

But neither of those moments, or for that matter the “Meanwhile” cut-scenes in Monkey Island, actually affect the player’s narrative. The player can’t really do anything about them, and the player doesn’t leave with any immediately useful information. They’re terrific at setting tone and mood and at giving context, but aren’t really using the narrative as a gameplay mechanic.

One of my favorite moments in Sam and Max: The Penal Zone is a short scene that plays out the first time (chronologically) you use Max’s teleportation power. It was there mainly as an homage to the opening of Rod Serling’s Night Gallery, and to make good on one of Steve Purcell’s ideas from an early brainstorming session: “Sam & Max teleport to another dimension where they’re surrounded by skeletons with scythes.” It also did a little bit of narrative development, of course: to reinforce the idea that Max’s powers were creepy and dangerous, and abusing them could end badly; and to foreshadow the flaming Max heads from the end of the game. I like it a lot, but it would’ve been even better if it had actually done something to advance the story: giving some significant clue for a later puzzle, or replacing some of the tons of expository dialogue that Superball and the alien brain have to deliver.

I Want You To Think About What You Just Did

So how about developing a game where the player’s abilities affect and advance the narrative? It could exploit the thrill of those moments of discovery — I did something that caused this real change to the story — as well as provide a more interesting and less abstracted limiting factor to keep the player’s abilities in check.

I can use this magic ring to make myself invisible. Each time I wear it, I can see what the villain is plotting. But each time I wear it, am I alerting powerful villains to my presence? And each time I wear it, what is the cost to my soul or my sanity?

I can cast this magic spell without worrying about its mana cost, but I have to be concerned about its narrative cost. Will using it too often cause me to go insane? Is it worth the risk, because I’ll get a vision of something happening elsewhere in the world, a danger that I’m going to encounter later? Does it make the villain aware of where I am and what I’m doing, even though I’m nowhere near powerful enough to fight him yet? Does it make the villain jealous of my power and cause him to put innocents at risk? Does it frighten the townspeople, to the point where they don’t simply respond with a canned “hey, cut it out!” response, but actually stop dealing with me? Does casting the spell somehow drain the life of the person who taught the spell to me, forcing me to consider the consequences of using it?

I can inject myself with this DNA-altering cocktail that, somehow, allows me to conjure a swarm of bees to attack my enemies. But is using it actually turning me into one of the demented former humans that I’m fighting? Does it do anything to help me understand them? Does it inadvertently reveal a secret passage that I hadn’t seen before? Does it wound me every time I use it? Does it make the lumbering, unstoppable guards of the city attack me immediately?

More simply: what if the “cake is a lie” room in Portal had been accessible only by creating a portal? What if Wheatley’s reappearance in Portal 2 had him shouting out a piece of information that was necessary to solve the subsequent puzzle? What if destroying the security cameras in both games actually made a difference in how the story played out, instead of just providing an achievement?

The thing I’m most looking forward to in Bioshock Infinite is seeing how the “tears” play out. The preview video shows them being used as a game mechanic, and also as a bit of world-building spectacle (with the glimpse of the alternate universe movie theater). I’m curious how far, if at all, they’ll be used to affect the narrative. It seems to have so many of the qualities I’m thinking of — a powerful “magic” with unpredictable side effects and a definite cost/risk associated with it. Will it be systemized to the point of taking all the wonder out of it, or will it be reduced to a simple “press A button here to trigger cut-scene”?

Or can it finally break the game out of the first-person shooter mold as significantly as the original BioShock tried to, and present a story where the player’s actions have genuine consequences and genuinely advance the story?

My rambling essay in response to “Narrative is Not a Game Mechanic” gave the impression of being strictly about adventure games. Plus, I spent so much time talking about how to clue players in to what the game developer’s thinking, it could be read as “puzzle games should have good hints.”

But what I’m talking about is much broader. What I’m really trying to get at is a philosophy of treating narrative and game mechanic as so closely intertwined that it no longer makes sense to try and separate the two. It’s cheesy to quote myself — and put it in bold, no less! — but I finally found a pretty good way to describe what I’m talking about in the comments to the other post:

The goal is to make the player feel as if he’s writing a story and simultaneously watching it come to life around him.

A player-controlled narrative is one obvious way to accomplish that. But it’s not the only way, or even necessarily the best. My problem with that is still the Truman Show effect: Even if a developer could build a system with perfect feedback, where the world and its characters infallibly respond to the player’s actions in a satisfying way, what happens at the end of it, when the player pokes his head back into the real world? He’s just spent hours talking to himself, instead of meaningfully communicating with another person.

Of course, the problem with a pre-defined narrative is more obvious: how do you guarantee the player a feeling of agency and participation in meaningful choices, if all the meaningful choices have already been made?

I believe it sounds worse than it is, and it’s totally possible if more developers would just consistently commit to it. I’ve played plenty of games that get most of the way there without even trying. The key, as always, is to treat the story as a collaboration between the developer and the player.

Be forewarned: this post completely ruins the ending of Portal 2, so if you haven’t played that to completion yet, then 1) what the hell is wrong with you? and 2) don’t read it until you have, or unless you never plan to (see 1).

“Ludonarrative Resonance”

It doesn’t do any good to pontificate about “game stories as interactive collaboration between developer and player” without giving some concrete examples. The problem is that there aren’t a lot of good, concrete examples. I don’t believe that’s because it’s impossible, but simply because it’s never been a priority. The conventional wisdom is that story is at best a thematic layer on top of gameplay.

That’s why I really enjoyed this essay by Mattie Brice, called Narrative is a Game Mechanic. It was also written in response to Raph Koster’s Narrative is not a game mechanic, and it makes the case that

Ludology and narratology aren’t mutually exclusive studies. In fact, their combined perspectives will improve how video games influence players.

I’ve said before that I hate the term “ludonarrative dissonance,” since I think it’s a needlessly pretentious attempt to put an academic veneer on a simple and easily-understood concept: a game’s story shouldn’t be at odds with the player’s story. Completely hypocritically, I love Brice’s use of the term “ludonarrative resonance,” to describe moments when the game’s story and the player’s story aren’t just aligned, but they actually build on each other to provide a depth of experience that’s only possible in a game.

She uses the example of Ico. The player begins to feel empathy for the princess Yorda and anxiety over her vulnerability, not just because he was told to in a cut-scene, but because the central mechanic of the game reinforces it. It’s not an escort mission shoehorned into a different style of gameplay, but a game designed to evoke emotion through the player’s actions. There’s a dedicated “hold hands” button!

My usual go-to example is Portal, for putting story and characterization into a game where it wasn’t technically necessary. The story isn’t just context for the game; the story and the game are perfectly aligned. The game puts the player through a series of contrived puzzles, so the game is about a character trying to escape from a series of contrived puzzles. It’s impossible to lose the suspension of disbelief, because the game is in on the joke. Later, when the game starts to pull back the fourth wall and assert a more layered story, it resonates because of the feeling of genuine discovery, and it generates a completely unkillable internet meme.

But Portal is, deliberately, fun-sized. Expanding that to feature length meant filling in more of the game world and introducing a couple of new characters. What resulted was one great example of narrative as gameplay — “ludonarrative resonance” — but a lot more examples of story as nothing more than context and “feedback.”

The Audacity of Puzzling

First, the great example: the very last puzzle of the game. (Hence the repeated spoiler warning). The player’s got a portal gun with no portal-able surface. The game has spent the last several hours teaching the player the rules of the game by teaching the limitations of portal guns. You can only create a portal on certain white walls. The farther you get from the test chambers, the fewer white walls you’ll have available without creating them yourself.

But where Portal had one story, Portal 2 has three: the player character’s attempts to escape the testing facility, Wheatley’s attempts to take over the facility, and Cave Johnson’s creation of the facility and recruitment of testing subjects. One of the things you learn from the story of Aperture’s history is that ground moon rocks were used to create the paint for portal target surfaces. During the climax of the game, the sky is visible, revealing the largest portal target surface possible. Aim the gun, shoot the moon, then watch the conclusion.

Now, “make a deduction based on something you heard earlier” might seem a little flimsy to be basing a game design philosophy on. More than anything else, the fact that it’s such a novelty demonstrates how little emphasis is placed on integrating story with game mechanics. Even in games that do an outstanding job of storytelling, such as Portal 2. But that type of interaction is essential to integrating game and narrative — allowing the player to make strategic gameplay decisions based not on an external, explicit set of game rules, but by the rules established within the narrative.

One of the problems with putting too much emphasis on the “final puzzle” in Portal 2 is that it veers too far into adventure game territory. Any time the game’s narrative re-asserts itself, the player’s forced into a narrow corridor of interactivity. There’s clearly only one correct solution. That’s true of most of the other puzzles, actually, but unlike the other puzzles, the player doesn’t have the opportunity to experiment until she discovers the correct solution.

When the Player’s Story is the Least Interesting

My bigger problem with it, however, is that it’s such a narrow point of intersection between the player’s story and the Aperture Science story. Over the course of the game, you’ll spend hours learning the history of the facility and the events that led up to the beginning of the first game. But the vast majority of it has absolutely no bearing on the actions you’re taking in the present. Until you need to remember a bit of info at the game’s end, the story is doing nothing but provide context for the game.

And Cave Johnson is one of the most interesting characters in the game! But he’s been relegated to a separate “presentation layer.” It’s all very well presented, and it undoubtedly adds to the overall experience, but it doesn’t do anything for the actual gameplay.

The storytelling gimmick used in Portal 2 is pretty common, from System Shock through BioShock and Skyrim: as you’re playing, you discover recordings, letters, books, or computer terminals that deliver some chunk of background narrative. Occasionally, it’ll feed into your narrative — you’ll hear a pass code for a lock, or learn about a secret entrance to a room.

It actually works pretty well. I like it in the Elder Scrolls games, for its ability to convey a novel series’ worth of world-building in a method that’s completely opt-in. At worst, it’s ignorable. And it actually solves a lot of problems: it allows the story to be doled out at the player’s own pace, it can give context to the player’s immediate surroundings, and it’s more manageable to develop as a linear narrative.

The last bit is also the biggest problem with it: it’s more manageable for the developers because it exists in a separate timeline, one that the player can’t interfere with. The player never has the opportunity for an actual conversation with Cave Johnson, so he can just have several well-written monologues. The player can’t change what happened to Aperture Science, so Valve had total control over the timeline, allowing them to go backwards through time at exactly the pace they wanted.

Meanwhile, the player’s just going from one level to the next, solving test chamber puzzles (and thinly disguised test chamber puzzles) as she goes. Portal 2 has more sophisticated storytelling than Portal, but at the cost of that tight integration between the player’s story and the game’s story.

The other story in Portal 2 — Wheatley’s taking over the facility from GlaDOS — is taking place in the present, but the player has no real agency in that story, either. But Valve does such a good job of establishing these characters, without rewarding us for understanding the characters. We can tell pretty early on that Wheatley’s an unreliable narrator, but we can’t do anything with that information. We know that when Wheatley asks us to flip a switch, it’s going to end badly, even if we can’t predict exactly that it’s going to inadvertently flip the hundreds of switches that end up re-activating GlaDOS. Our only agency is to deliver the punchline.

Granted, it’s a great punchline! But there has to be room to use that character development for genuine narrative development. Let the player make deductions based on his understanding of the character, and let her make some type of decision based on the narrative. That’s the story that I want to be involved in.

I’ve said before that I started to lose interest in Portal once I’d left the test chambers and had to apply the portal gun to “real world” environments — which, it was revealed later, was originally intended to be the entire game. My problem with the post-test chamber section was that it reintroduced the feeling of artifice that the rest of the game had so deftly avoided. When the game is acknowledging that I’m in a contrived puzzle, I’ll run with it. When the game presents a situation that’s just as clearly a contrived puzzle, but it’s disguised to look as if I’d broken into the “real world,” I’m jolted back into the state of second-guessing the game. My story’s diverged from my character’s story.

Portal 2 alleviated a lot of that by making the environments so interesting. Portal‘s sections looked like repurposed Half-Life 2 levels, while Portal 2 maintained a genuine feeling of exploration. I’m using that exploration to further my own simple “narrative:” find what looks like it will help me escape, and then use it to escape. There has to be room to integrate the Aperture Science narrative with my own narrative of escape. Instead of just navigating the level, couldn’t I be making deductions based on what I’m learning about the facility’s history?

It’s easy to tell when a game is doing nothing more than throwing the player a bone. That can break the suspension of disbelief even more than leaving it out altogether. When BioShock introduced characters still alive in the player’s present, it was abundantly clear how much they’d been relegated to a zone safe from player interaction: phone calls from someone on the other side of the city. The closest you come to a living human (who doesn’t want to kill you) is seeing a numeric pass code scrawled on the other side of a glass wall. It’s a story moment, but not so much a game moment, since no deduction is required. In terms of game mechanics, it’s just a fancy way of presenting the next rule.

I’ll accept that it’s difficult if not impossible to achieve the perfect integration between gameplay and story that Portal achieved, when expanded to a feature-length story. But I can’t believe that it’d be impossible to bring together Portal 2‘s three main stories — the past, Wheatley & GlaDOS’s story in the present, Chell’s story in the present — in more significant ways. Learn something from Cave Johnson’s recordings that give us the solution to a test chamber. Learn something about the formation of GlaDOS that helps us defeat GlaDOS. Take advantage of our knowledge of Wheatley’s incompetence in order to defeat him, instead of just ending with a boss fight (no matter how clever the boss fight).

When you can tell two stories as well as Portal 2 does, and simultaneously deliver some great gameplay, it seems like there’s little incentive to treat the stories as anything more than background and context for the story. But consider the satisfaction that comes from figuring out the perfect solution to one of those test chamber puzzles, and think about how great it would be to use that same kind of clever problem-solving to put story moments together.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A digression about replayability

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Weapon of Choice

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Press B Button to Ruin Game

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sharing the Role of Storyteller

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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