Get your gameplay out of my story!
Lately I have been playing Neverwinter Nights 2, hoarding notes on various subjects for the dissertation and grudgingly enjoying my time. This is one of my favourite games... or I should rather say stories. The game itself is excruciatingly clunky. The camera is all over the place, party members have the intelligence of a comic book villain, and AI fireballs always manage to hit the smallest number of enemies.
The first few times I played it I was able to enjoy its gameplay without celebrating it. It was a distraction which later became a nuisance as the game difficulty increased to a ridiculous level, with a finale that nobody in his right mind would attempt to overcome without cheats or a dosage of something illegal. At some point in my multiple playthroughs the gameplay had to be flung aside because it detracted me from experiencing what I was there to experience in the first place.
In 1997, the first wave of IF (interactive fiction) theorists were still dealing with key concepts of narratology and other fields that could be useful in the gaming scene. Espen Aarseth, considering hypertexts as well as games, coined the term "ergodic literature", which he defines as "open, dynamic texts where the reader must perform specific actions to generate a literary sequence, which may vary for every reading." In essence, it is a type of literature that demands input from the reader/player. An amused theorist whose name I cannot remember baptised it as "constipated literature," and files all adventure games under this tag. It is true. They ask you to fight waves of anodyne mobs so that you can get to the next cutscene/dialogue/map. Imagine if you had to do the same while reading. Every fifty pages your book disappears and you're asked to punch the next person that shows up. The book deems your heroism worthy and lets you continue, only to discover that you've been reading Fifty Shades of Grey all along.
A clarification is required before I proceed any further. Under "gameplay" I coalesce the rules and mechanics of the game, not the experience of playing it. The story or narrative is in most games that which gives the gameplay a context, a casing; while in RPGs the story is the integral part of it.
And yet gameplay and story are rarely conjoined. They seem to work against one another most of the time. In order to identify when gameplay does not work, I would like to call your attention to when it does. And by working I mean when it creates a feedback loop between the story and itself, when your experience of the game mechanics affect your experience of the story.
So when did gameplay work for me in NWN2? For instance, when I tried to rob a giant red dragon of its treasure. In the safe environment of a combat-less game, a confrontation with a dragon only has two outcomes: victory by using your wits or insta-death. There can be no physical engagement with your enemy, you are never out of your comfort zone. When you are thrown into a deadly match against a dragon, your mastery of the game rules is put to test, and there is an actual physical reaction in your body, which pumps adrenaline as you are trying to force a particular outcome. Games take place in the present, where everything is uncertain and has to be driven forward by your will. In forming that illusion, gameplay can be very successful. I do not think there is any other medium at the moment which can tell stories in that particular way, thus games ought not be so easily dismissed.
It works when it forces me to stand by my decisions: killing a companion is not an abstract thing when you carry and execute the in-game commands to crush him. In Bastion, [SPOILERS] when I relinquished the hammer so that I could carry my friend, and pressed on, defenseless, through that corridor, and I was filled with arrows with every step I took, I was physically in pain, and cursing, hand-on-heart. [END OF SPOILERS] No comfortable cutscenes for you. The gameplay can have a very powerful effect, and it is a pity that game developers would see it as separate from the story, or rather the story as a necessary coating for a game about shooting stuff. Shooting stuff is perfectly fine, but why should it need a story at all, if it is invariably hackneyed and adds nothing to your game about shooting stuff?
In NWN2, I found the gameplay faulty. By gameplay I mean mostly combat, its most common manifestation. It threw too many enemies at me in brainless encounters. There is a reason for this: RPGs are pesky little hybrids, game-stories or story-games, as the critics call them, which combine two different drives without actually mixing them: the drive to play a game about advancing levels, acquiring gear and overcoming challenges; and the hero's journey, the story layout for 99% of the RPGs out there and most fantasy literature. The player enjoys those encounters from the perspective of gameplay, if said gameplay is enjoyable, but they add very little to the story experience.
My problem is there is way too much meaningless combat, mostly poorly done because these games are stories before they are games. We have games about advancing levels and gaining bigger numbers, and those are called ARPGs, and have been quite successful. They do not need much of a story, they can do fine with a few lines and some spatial narrative (game world). It actually detracts from the dungeon crawling if the story is enforced on the player (Diablo 3).
In story-games, the ideal state would be that the gameplay reciprocates with the story. Those hell ponies are not just there for you to gain a few levels before the boss; they are part of a plot which takes you back to painful memories of devoid-of-ponies childhood. A more relatable example: Amnesia: The Dark Descent works as an interactive fiction of horror because it relies on the player's actions to tell its story: what you did against the monster coming down that corridor (where you ran to, where you hid) is gameplay and story, as is your heart pumping wildly along with your avatar's. The example of the dragon is my favourite: a real challenge for a decision that cannot be made lightly. Also the little encounters along the road, like that with Zevran in Dragon Age: Origins, or any random bandit encounter, can signify in the story level as well, contextually giving out that the world is dangerous.
Hugely successful games with very little tacked-on gameplay features have been made in the past: Planescape Torment. It is not that it lacked combat, but that it was meaningful and in many cases optional. It was not entirely skippable, a decision which I laud; after all, not all conflicts can be solved with words.
PD: On Myst, one of the first commercially successful adventure games, one of its creators, Robyn Miller, said that artistically Myst was a frustrating project. He later stopped making games because he felt that the game format was too much in conflict with storytelling and character development (Aarseth 2004). What do you think about this?
Click to share thisClick to share this
I loved the storytelling in the Myst series (through the journals and studying the details of various Ages), though perhaps Miller wanted a more cinematic style?
I think some devs want to be in movies and don’t know it, the way they seem to resent gameplay ‘getting in the way’ in their games.
Pai recently posted..[Do MMOs Really Need to Be Saved?]
Yet it was not much of a game. You did not influence any outcomes, your role was that of an external observer that peeled off the story-onion by solving puzzles.
I believe that its developer felt this way because what he wanted was to tell a story, but found out that the pesky players would be in the way trying to influence the outcome, and thus ended up with a very directed experience. What do you think would have changed if he had done a film instead? Perhaps how you felt about the story, since embodying an avatar is always more intimate than identifying with a character in a movie. You could also mention the feeling of triumph of solving a puzzle, but that is, again, an issue of gameplay vs. story, when you are required to do tasks in order to unlock more story, instead of doing them for their own sake (as arguably does Portal 1 and 2). I am not sure much more would have changed if it were a movie. And it would have made a brilliant book as well.
Oh I couldn’t agree more with this! This is one of the reasons why I’m so nostalgic about the good old RPGs… gameplay wasn’t the point of the game since the game was story-driven. It felt so natural. Planescape Torment really hit the nail on the head, as your character is immortal, and the ‘game over’ screen is triggered by your decisions, not the outcome of your fights. The point of fighting was building up the plot, proceeding in the story rather than accessing the story. It mattered why you killed that villain, rather than the act of killing that villain.
I’ve recently played The Witcher 2, highly praised for its narrative, and I was badly let down by the… what are they called? Time-something events. You have to push buttons at the right time to win. Oh boy.
Gameplay felt so brutally forced into the flow of the story and plunged into some kind of uncanny valley of narrative. It wanted to be part of the story so badly but didn’t quite manage to succeed, and the result was awkward to say the least. I couldn’t really get myself to keep playing the game because of it…. I would have rather preferred to keep the story and the hack & slash separate so my mind could close the gap on its own.
Quick-Time Events are terrible, I agree. They’re the worst excuse for ‘gameplay’, imo. Mindless button tapping is not gameplay.
Pai recently posted..[Do MMOs Really Need to Be Saved?]
I hated The Witcher 2′s combat as well, despite having enjoyed the first instalment. For one who has read the books this emphasis on blood-drawing makes no sense. There was much more intrigue in the original story, and the encounters with monsters and humans were more dramatic because Geralt took his time to prepare and was then tested to his full potential. The games, on the contrary, were crammed with creatures, bandits and jerks like Geralt himself, and the combat felt inconsequential from the sheer number of mobs you had to plod away.
At least one thing was done well regarding combat in The Witcher 2: It was realistically unforgiving. Which led to my switching to Easy Mode because I could not be bothered with so much of it. But as a concept, and regarding the story, it makes sense that you are no more than a human with a few special abilities and heightened reflexes: four well-placed soldiers can down you, as a volley of arrows could. If there had been fewer trash-mobs and more story-related encounters, I would have condoned the gameplay, clunkiness notwithstanding. But alas, RPGs without 70% combat time must fall in the category of visual novels to some developers.
The issue with storytelling in games is that there are basically two different, related stories in a game: the story the writer/developer is trying to tell and the story that unfolds through player actions. Even if the game has no official narrative, you can still have a story from player actions; a common example is from Tetris, where “the blocks were stacked pretty high, then I got lucky and two straight blocks appeared one right after another and I scored a massive amount of points” is an interesting story to the right audience.
One problem is that we don’t understand how to tell non-linear, interactive stories very well. We have centuries of history with linear, passive stories, starting from the printed word through plays, novels, movies, television, graphic novels, etc. The closest historical example to interactive storytelling we have is oral storytelling traditions, where a storyteller would often adjust a story based on reading the audience. A more modern example is tabletop RPGs, where there is a lot of debate about how much gameplay (usually meaning dice rolling) should be part of the experience; some people like the game elements, others want to tell a collaborative story.
I think a lot of the problems with storytelling in computer games is when the developer’s idea of a story and how the player story works out conflicts. This is probably Robyn Miller’s issue with games, in that telling the story as the writer/developer envisions it is nigh impossible. There’s nothing that says the player has to go along with your narrative! There’s also the problem that poor gameplay (or gameplay that the player simply doesn’t like) can interfere with the story itself.
As a developer, I’m of the mindset that game design and storytelling must work together, but at some point the developer has to cede control to the player and let them be the ultimate storyteller. I think this creates a much more meaningful experience tailored to the medium of games. So, my job is to make great gameplay with the skeleton of a story, and let the player be the one that puts it all together.
Brian ‘Psychochild’ Green recently posted..A look at Guild Wars 2
That is one way of designing games, for sure. Are not sandbox MMOs basically an environment for player-generated stories? In that respect, they work wonderfully. And there is no better field for co-authorship than multiplayer games. But NWN and all singleplayer RPGs are of a different kind – they try to tell a story while allowing some degree of choice. Here’s a graphic that shows quite accurately the interplay between linearity and choice within most of these games.
So you say that the issue that I have with NWN2 is due to a conflict between how the developer believes the game should be played and how I want to play it. Maybe. I was being more specific here and addressing the fact that RPGs are not very successful hybrids of story-game and story-gameplay. Monetarily successful, perhaps; artistically, not so much, since they promise to deliver interactivity and often fail, and since they feel the need to dress, or stuff themselves with meaningless gameplay. This meaninglessness is not absolute, but I pronounce it in relation to the story. Gameplay, combat being its most common manifestation, usually serves a metanarrative purpose: winding down, adrenaline-pumping, puzzle-solving. But it rarely adds anything to the story. That is why I resent games with poor gameplay that, on top of that, works like padding.
Sandbox MMOs tend to be the ultimate example of where players are allowed to tell their own stories with a minimum of story injected from the developers. These types of games tend to have a lot of different gameplay elements on top of the variety of people playing them, so you get interesting combinations all the time. The downside is that there’s no guide, you have to forge your own path or hope that you’re in the right place at the right time to see something epic happen.
I think your specific problem with NWN2 is that it’s trying to tell a story in the wrong medium. Games are interactive, whereas most structured stories tend to be linear. As you can see in that image you linked above, the linear nature of existing types of stories means that you need a linear structure, even if you have slightly different ways to go from touchstone to touchstone in the story. The story and gameplay were probably developed independently from each other, with one (likely the story) being simply layered on top of the other.
Why does this happen? I think the main reason is that the stories usually associated with games aren’t popular, or at least popular enough with the mainstream bookbuying audience. So, the best place to tell these types of stories are games. (As an aside, sometimes snobby people take the lesser popularity of these stories as being an indicator of lower quality. I think that the better stories told within games also rely much more on the gameplay, and trying to separate them out to analyze the story without the game makes it seem diminished.)
I’d like to think we’re still learning a lot about how to tell interactive stories, and that sometimes we take baby steps because we’re too afraid of abandoning what has worked before rather than blazing new trails. :)
Brian ‘Psychochild’ Green recently posted..A look at Guild Wars 2, continued