The Deaths Of Game Narrative

[Thomas]

http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/5952/the_deaths_of_game_narrative.php

To the ear of an outsider, this might sound like a pretty diverse scrapbook of experiences, and I'd say this was half right. But there's one element that draws all these titles together under a cozy umbrella. In each game, the protagonist -- my avatar -- is a mass murderer.

Imagine Shakespeare finishing every single scene of all of his plays with a swordfight or chase and you'll get the idea. The dialog might be good, but the story arc is a staccato of identical beats.

Some nice stuff in this article and makes a few good points.

[Andrew Tremblay]

This is sort of embarrassing, but this article reminds me of an idea I had back in high school for a video game version of Macbeth. Shakespeare spoilers, but after the part when Duncan remarks "It will rain tonight." upon which one of his assassins replies "Let it come down." I then imagined an epic battle; huge weapons drawn, magical attacks, people dying everywhere, after which Duncan is slain in a cutscene and his son escapes. This was many years ago and much, I hope, has changed.

I agree with McDevitt, though. The current video game duality between story and gameplay is tailored perfectly for lovers of action movies. Anything more narratively complex and I'm afraid you're out of luck.

[Utforska]

Good article. I wonder how a "sandbox" game with focus on emotion and social interaction could be made.

I was so impressed with what Scribblenauts did, their ambitious library of almost any imaginable object with rudimentary functionality and context. I wonder if some similar system could be created for personality, dialog and social interaction? Would it be possible to create a world of NPCs that interact socially with each other? They could do kind or evil things to each other, have different personalities, different ambitions, opinions, secrets and problems, fall in love or dislike each other, lie or feel embarrassed, etc. It could all be displayed through text, in simple dialog trees.

If you managed to get that right you could tell all kinds of storys simply by setting up a certain combinations of characters and letting them interact with each other.

[Michaël Samyn]

You should look into Chris Crawford's Storytron, Utforska!

I personally don't think we need to approach a "sandbox" game with focus on emotion as a scientific problem. It's an artistic problem that we should solve in an artistic way! We always need to remember that our true canvas is the imagination of the player. All we need to do is make him believe something. Or even want to believe something. It's not necessary to build something if you can get the player to believe it already exists.

We are landscape painters, not city builders!

[Michaël Samyn]

The author of the article analyses the problem very well. But when he tries to solve it, he does so from a writer's point of view. Which is equally silly as creating a narrative game from a gameplay point of view. I guess this explains why he can't really come up with any useful solutions.

The way out of this trap is, of course, the notion of notgames.

You shouldn't write a story to accommodate game mechanics.
But neither should you try to figure out game mechanics to express your story.

This is a new medium! It requires a new type of creator, a different attitude.

[Michaël Samyn]

By relying on such a narrow set of game mechanics, developers have limited the sort of experiences players can create for themselves.

Sounds like Chris Crawford!

I don't necessarily agree, though. I don't think increasing the number of verbs (as Mr. Crawford refers to them) is the only solution to this problem. I think increasing the amount of adjectives and subjects can go a long way too. It's not only about what you do in a game, but also about how you do it, and who you are or whom you are doing it to. In other words: context.

I don't necessarily need to do a lot in a game. Not physically, not mechanically. But I want to experience emotions and be inspired to think -just like I enjoy in any other medium. And I believe the sort of active involvement we can design with interactive media can really push this sort of experience. But it's far more important to feel present in the virtual world, to become a part of it, be immersed in it, than it is to do a wide variety of activities.

As is illustrated by the fact that, currently, game mechanics usually stand in the way of such experiences. I don't believe that simply increasing the variety of game mechanics will automatically fix the problem. Maybe it will even worsen it.

[Michaël Samyn]

I don't believe we will fully discover the potential of storytelling through games until designers and writers wean themselves off the standard dramatic forms of past centuries and start finding ways to allow better stories to be told through game mechanics themselves, and not pre-scripted sequences built around the gameplay. In the near term following this route will probably result in stories with a much smaller scope and a much tighter focus than we are accustomed to. But what we lose in breadth, we will gain in intimacy.

I like the thought of smaller scope, tighter focus and increased intimacy!

[Michaël Samyn]

This is a real-time medium. Both games and stories are sequential forms.
But I believe we should start from a situation, not a sequence.
Start from a moment, a "now", without any sequence in mind. And then let the videogame grow from that point, preferably during gameplay (but possibly also during design).

We're creating computer applications. That means contexts for an event. We can set things up in order to increase the likelihood of a certain type of event happening (a pretty drawing in Photoshop, a well written text in Word, etc). But we shouldn't expect this as designers. In fact, we should probably design in such a way to allow for multiple different events to happen, depending on the player, their mood of the moment, or chance. Ideally some of these events would go beyond our own wildest expectations as designers.

We're making paintings that open up for people to step into. Not carefully constructed narrative flows in which it is difficult to find a place for the unpredictable player.
And the essence of a painting is to capture a moment. Let's start there! With videogames. Let's capture a moment with the myriad of elements that videogame technology consists of. Let's make hyper-paintings!