Video Games: The Highly Visible Art — Part 2
by phill
photo credit: Rob Sheridan
Introduction:
In my first post, I wrote that I considered a meaningful interaction with a video game as one in which the person that walks away from the game is not the same person that sat down to play the game. This definition is crucial, as it highlights the importance of fictional immersion in video games. While sensory immersion provides visual cues and can help you get into ‘the zone’ (a phenomenon that I’m sure will arise in later discussions), and systemic immersion can drive the interaction between player and machine, only fictional immersion has the ability to give that interaction a meaningful context, and therefore provide an experience that can potentially alter the player in the process. Alter how? Well, say you are playing a game that offers a re-enactment of a World War 2 battle (a first-person-shooter trope that is fast approaching its expiration date); the right kind of fictional immersion would allow you to gain a greater appreciation for the sacrifices made, and the terror experienced by soldiers around the world. In today’s post, I want to explore the similarities between the devices used to achieve this alteration in traditional written stories and those used in games, and reveal the single biggest hurdle in constructing a meaningful story through a video game.
Analogue Versus Digital:
Have you ever been so involved in reading a book that when you finally look up, it’s 2:30 in the morning and you’re wondering where those five hours went? Or perhaps while watching a movie in a darkened cinema you’ve been able to completely ignore the amorous going-ons in the back row, and not even the occasional thunk of a Jaffa off the back of your head can distract you? If you have, then you don’t need me to tell you what being immersed in a story feels like. With video games it’s no different; hours can pass where you are so embroiled in the world the game offers that you are, to all intents and purposes, deaf and blind to anything not within the screen’s borders*. While this can be as a result of a particularly effective reaction-based game (perhaps Rez, or Audiosurf), most of the time it is because the player is so thoroughly engaged with the world that is being presented. And I would argue that the majority of that engagement is down to the fictional immersion of the game. So how is fictional immersion constructed?
To begin with, let’s take a very familiar form of storytelling as a base: a short story. There are myriad elements that need to come together for a short story to be successful: characterisation, narrative, pacing, imagery, dialogue, language, and so on. If any one of these aspects is out of whack, it’s very obvious to the reader. These components translate essentially unmodified to the video game medium. A plot still has to have to right balance of drama, characters still need to act and speak believably, and the world presented needs to be self-consistent and well-realised. The trick with video games is that all these elements need to be parsed through the systemic and sensory filters of video game production in order to be fully realised in-game. I’ve created a graphic (sorry it’s not fancy, I’ve only got the Linux equivalent of MS Paint to work with Edit: My best friend Cian has provided me with her professional take on my ratty image, huzzah! Thanks, Cian!) to explain what I mean.
So here we see that the plot of a story translates through the sensory and systemic (S&S) filter into such familiar territory as cut-scenes, in-game objects such as books that can be interacted with to provide relevant back story. The environment that the story takes place within transforms into the audio and visual representation of that environment, along with the physics of the world and passage of time. And finally the characters are provided for by in-game text, voice acting, artificial intelligence, and some response mechanisms. You can also see that some aspects are shared such as in the case of dialogue which can be used to both advance the plot and provide characterisation, or emergent information such as a change in environment can contribute to the plot (for example, a game that might deal with the before and after of a nuclear attack).
So there we have it, a nice, neat way of considering stories told in video games using those told on paper. With this, we can easily go ahead and write stories for games, parse them through the filter by way of programmers, and–bam!– storytelling media established. Well, kind of. Unfortunately, while this seems fairly straight forward, it all gets a little bit more complicated when we consider the fact that you have a player sitting on the other side of the screen who can, at will, change the course of the action in a game. Imagine if, when writing a pulp crime novel, you had to account for your reader possibly taking the gun from the protagonists hand and shooting the dame he has finally allowed himself to be seduced by. It is the very nature of games–their interactivity–that provides the most hurdles in delivering a comprehensive storytelling experience.
Equal and Opposite Reaction:
Players of interactive storytelling such as the simultaneously celebrated and maligned ‘Dungeons and Dragons’ paper and pencil gaming system will recognise the challenges faced by game developers in allowing players freedom. No matter how carefully you might plan a situation to account for a player’s actions, they will find a way to screw up your plans. In the case of Dungeons and Dragons, the Dungeon Master (read: storyteller) is present and can act as a kind of suspension system between the player and the game world so that they don’t break the whole thing. Video game developers don’t have that option (with the notable exception of games like Sleep is Death). Once their game is out in the wild world of retail, they can’t go back and make adjustments to the story based on player interactions they didn’t expect**. Many companies try and account for this by subjecting their games to long ‘beta testing’ cycles, whereby a team of players are charged with trying their hardest to break a game. While I can’t find the link to the anecdote at present, one of my favourite bugs reported for a game was one in which the player ran to a very specific location, turned in a circle three times, pressed a button and the game crashed. While this is more of a technical issue than a storytelling one, it highlights the lengths to which players might go to in order to explore the limits of the world that game developers present. So how exactly can developers account for this propensity to tug and push at the boundaries, while also managing to tell a story that can accomplish the goal of fictional immersion? That’s the topic I’ll be tackling in the next instalment. Hope to see you then!
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*An interesting experiment for partners of gamers to perform: go ahead and ask a gamer to do some meaningless task for you while they’re playing a game. If they feel like giving an excuse for doing it in five minutes, it’ll probably be along the lines of “Yeap, I just need to save my game/reach a checkpoint.” If, however, the game truly has a hold of them, it’ll be more in the vein of “Yeap, I just need to save this princess/kill this monster/rescue this soldier.”
**The post-release application of patches that fix problems with games is a long-held tradition of PCs, and now an occasional requirement of consoles, but the majority of these are released for technology issues, rather than core story or gameplay aspects.
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Comments
Jaffas are made for throwing.
I had actually been considering this, not just making offhand comments about the excellent velocity of confectionery. I can’t think of a better set of games that actually keep the storyline at the forefront than Final Fantasy. You’re playing in order to continue a story, at some points, are even surprised by the twists in plot.
As for immersion – I’ve just seen the trailer for a Studio Ghibli PS3 game (maybe not the most adult plot, but I find that doesn’t need to be the case in order to be immersed in it, especially when it comes to Ghibli). http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M36YHOPKlJU
It’s making me want to re-do FF7. Like returning to the Belgariad year after year.
Another superb post Phill. Last night as Mon tried to drag me from Red Dead Redemption she was meant with my lament: “But I’m hunting my last cougar! Its really important that I skin this one and haul it off to Armadillo before I head off through the mountains”.
As good as Red Dead is though, the fictional elements are still way behind a game like Mass Effect 2. So much complexity going on behind the scenes in ME2 to make things feel like you’re shaping the story (even if the finale is pretty much set). I’ve heard they are making a movie of ME, which seems strange to me as ME2 feels like more than a movie already.
I haven’t played Heavy Rain yet, but there is definitely a convergence trend going on between cinema and games. It’s like much of the time the two are shyly courting, calling out to each other from opposite balconies, when instead they could be heading straight for the slap and tickle.
I’m hoping with the convergence comes a bit more maturity. I hate the fact that most games are shipped with little to no social presence. As a maturing gamer, graphics and thumb reflexes don’t interest me as much anymore. More and more I’m left with a feeling of pointlessness as the experience rarely taps below the surface of my psyche. I’m not interested in doing Yoga in front of my TV, but on the whole, games just don’t feel as relevant in the social and political world I inhabit. Sure, I am getting old. But so is the game industry.
All other artistic mediums help explain and provide context for our existence. But games, even with their high potential for immersion, rarely explain much more than the size of an exit wound from an M4 Carbine Assault Rifle. When that changes, I’ll start buying more often again.
Hear that Gates?
I think it’s worth drilling down into the statement that “the majority of that engagement is down to the fictional immersion of the game”
The job of fictional immersion is to provide some sort of context for the systemic actions the player undertakes. In some cases, the fiction can inform those systemic actions (hunting animals in Red Dead is a good example), or in others systemic actions inform the fiction (Rez is a good example here), but in order for the fiction to exist, it needs to be connected in some way to those actions. As Mark points out, it’s about context – fiction provides context and meaning to a player’s actions. What’s important though is that what a player does moment to moment in a game is dominated by those systemic actions. There are elements of the fiction that are omnipresent – the environment or enemies mostly, or the goals constructed by the game’s story – but without a strong systemic process, that allows the player to make meaningful choices moment to moment, all the fictional tricks in the world amount to nothing.
It’s curious, but in this, and in a lot of other writing about narrative and video games from what might be considered more traditional writers, they tend to focus on these elements of branching narrative, with huge amounts of player choice to shape the structure of the story, but frequently leave out the fact that in experiencing a game, the player makes meaningful choices all the time that dictate their unique experience. These might take place between the boundaries of a linear story, but how the player moves between those boundaries is what’s important – and where a game’s systemic nature is paramount.
I think it’s also worth drilling down into your mapping of short stories to video game constructions. They’re both quite separate mediums, with different storytelling strengths. Granted, there are some overlaps, but there are enough key differences that I think it’s worth pointing out here.
The two main things I’d consider are, I think, the shifting of the protagonist to being the player, and the clear creation of goals for the player-protagonist to achieve.
I discussed the first one during my meanland talk, but this is one of the key strengths of games – even ones with linear stories / experiences – because the player is encouraged to do what’s known in learning circles as ‘identity adoption’ – to effectively take on the character’s abilities and goals. This happens in systemic games (Osmos, Rez) just as much as it does in narrative games (Bioshock, GTA4). The second one is largely an extension of this. By encouraging the player to take on this identity, we can encourage them to achieve the game’s goals – as long as they’re in line with the characters.
So, what we do as games writers is, rather than construct traditional plots, we figure out what goals we can give the player-protagonist, and how they can achieve those within the systemic structure of the game. Bioshock is a good example of this – investigate the mysterious Rapture is your clear goal, which is built of a number of smaller goals – find Atlas’ family, meet Ryan, etc – but how you achieve those goals systemically is largely up to you.
The important thing in constructing these identities and goals (just as it is in traditional fiction) is the notion of ‘agency’ – how much influence can this character exert on the world to create change. This is why game characters tend to be very action-oriented, with lots of external conflict (and where they do have internal conflict, it’s reflected by external forces – see the Silent Hill series). One of the limitations of games is the necessity of player’s needing some sort of agency, some way of affecting the state of the world. This limitation, however, can be used incredibly effectively as it is in Bioshock – which explores the extents of agency as one if its key themes – or in some sequences of Fahrenheit, where the amount of player agency is deliberately restricted or limited to achieve some sort of emotional response.
This limitation is also not fundamentally a bad thing. All mediums have storytelling strenghts and weaknesses, and I think the fun of being a creative in any of them is pushing against the edges and doing things you can only do in particular forms…
@Cian: Yeah, all this talk of FF is giving me the urge as well. Perhaps Chrono Trigger first, FF if I get through it :)
@Mark: I have got to stop misreading ‘Mon’ as ‘Mom’. :/
‘More and more I’m left with a feeling of pointlessness as the experience rarely taps below the surface of my psyche.’
I can absolutely identify with this. There aren’t too many games these days that offer truly different experiences for the experienced gamer. My attention span for games has been shortening rapidly over the past year (even resulting in some games I have bought and not finished!), and I think that while that could also be down to my lifestyle changes, it’s also a lot to do with how similar most games are these days. The systemic challenges faced aren’t likely to be new to me any more, and if they aren’t compelling, then the fiction really must be or I’ll tune out.
@Paul: To my mind, systemic immersion is the engine that drives the whole thing forward. As you say in your Meanland talk, even in an on-rails shooter the player has choices which they are able to make from moment to moment that can contribute to a narrative. And that can keep a player engaged and immersed no matter how flimsy the premise.
I guess what I’m trying to say is that without some attempt at fictional immersion, the engagement with the game would be superficial. Even the slightest bit of context can provide the player with the opportunity to invent their own narratives.
I would argue that the reader of a well-crafted short story is capable of taking on the identity of the protagonist, without a doubt. The systemic immersion in the case of books is the use of metaphor and simile; the evocation of images in the mind of the reader that contribute to a shared memory between the reader and the protagonist. The protag has goals, and by being involved in the story, we understand and share those goals. Then again, the ‘player’ in this case cannot affect the actions of the protag. And that lack of agency is, as you say, the main difference between video games and stories.
And to add one other example of exploiting the player’s sense of agency to yours: Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare, where the player is forced to watch through the eyes of a soldier as he dies from (what I suppose is) injuries and extreme nuclear poisoning. All the player can do is move very slowly as the soldier’s heartbeat falters and stops. This, after just having been able to leap through enemy fire and launch grenades! Very effective.