"Against Linearity" now on Gamasutra

[Michaël Samyn]

My article "Against Linearity" has been reprinted on Gamasutra as "The Contradiction of Linearity". Have a look.

I argue in favour of the removal of both narrative and competition from real-time media production, because they are both linear forms, strings of cause and consequence, that are not compatible with the interactive medium. Or at least, they are forms that stop the medium from realizing its great potential. Which I feel lies in designing the moment, designing the now, designing a situation. More like painting than film. More like a building than a book.

[Thomas]

Just curious: How did it end up on Gamasutra? Where you contacted or did you suggest it yourself.

I read the article when you posted it here before and (as I said) I found it really inspiring.

I am actually influenced by this kind of thinking in our upcoming game. The main thing that I take away from it is the "creating a world" bit. A feedback from Amnesia that stuck in my mind was that some people got so into the game, that they felt cheated when certain actions where not possible. So a big goal is to make a coherent world where the interaction options makes sense. While I have much of the high level goals ready, we are going start from the bottom and build up the interaction space first, before designing levels etc. The idea is that every interaction should take the player closer to the world and for it to feel proper. The story will then not be a specific string of events, but guiding the player through a specific set of situations.

It is interesting in comments that people seem a bit stuck into the story = what films/books do, kind of thinking. Unless your story is about a real-life event (and not always then eve), the sequence of events is not what is its heart. A story is about themes, locations, feelings, etc, but judging from most of the comments, people think that the exact arrangement of events is what is important. I am seeing this too, and when I say I want more open games, I get suggestions like Sim City, Fall Out 3, etc, but that is not really what it needs to be. Like you say, a game can be very open and still be very author controlled, luring the player into a certain experience, a certain story.

[axcho]

Unless your story is about a real-life event (and not always then eve), the sequence of events is not what is its heart. A story is about themes, locations, feelings, etc, but judging from most of the comments, people think that the exact arrangement of events is what is important. I am seeing this too, and when I say I want more open games, I get suggestions like Sim City, Fall Out 3, etc, but that is not really what it needs to be. Like you say, a game can be very open and still be very author controlled, luring the player into a certain experience, a certain story.

Yes! This is exactly what I was trying to get at in my thread What is story?

[Michaël Samyn]

Just curious: How did it end up on Gamasutra? Where you contacted or did you suggest it yourself.

I had been contacted by Christian Nutt before. After publishing the postmortems of The Graveyard and The Path (which they asked to do), he said that if I had any article I wanted them to publish, I could suggest it to him. So I did. And they decided to print it.

[Michaël Samyn]

Really like the sound and design method of your new project, Thomas! I wish you the best of luck!

I'm not surprised that people don't quite get it and quickly fall into stereotypes. I actually think it's been relatively mild. Most people seem to want to understand.

This is difficult stuff. It's all new. And if you're not excited by the idea of exploring all this new stuff, like we are here, and if you're happy with videogames as they are, there's not a lot of motivation to attempt to understand what I'm try to say with these inadequate words of ours. All I'm hoping for, really, by publishing the article, is to encourage people who are already thinking along these lines. The rest will be convinced by actions, not words.

[Michaël Samyn]

It's funny how many people quickly think of "open worlds", and only of open worlds, when you suggest abandoning linearity.
And it's also funny that the next response is always exhaustion and attempts to discourage everyone because creating open worlds is too difficult and too expensive. They think this because they think that they need to implement each and every possible thing that a player might want to do in their world. In other words, they are trying to solve an artistic problem with an engineer's logic.

The core of non-linear design, in my view, is the author. The author needs to figure out which elements will help the player enjoy/understand the mood/effect/message. This is as much a job of removing unwanted elements as it is of implementing desired ones. This is very much an artistic process.

The player must understand and accept that certain things are left out. Much like he accepts that an author of a poem might not describe the color of the shirt his main character is wearing: because it doesn't matter. The task of the "designer of the moment" is to remove the things that do not matter. This is a far cry from the "open world" concept. In fact, whether your piece is such an open world or not, actually depends on your content, on your "story".

[Thomas]

Wrote a kind of related blog post:
http://frictionalgames.blogspot.com/2010/10/story-what-is-it-really-about.html

It is mostly about the essence of stories (that axcho mentions), but also touch upon non-linearity. Some inspiration for writing it came from your article Michaël.