photo credit: ?-WQ-?

Last night, I

did two things that I’m proud of. One was to get up in front of a whole bunch of people for the February Cottonmouth meeting at the 459 Bar and read out my short/flash story ‘Network Connection‘. A daunting task made a lot easier by the awesome attitude of the crowd*, and the reassurances of both Simon and Zoe telling me I’d be fine**. So I’ve now officially popped my public reading cherry.

The other thing that I did–and I’m still as-yet uncertain which is a more proud moment for me–is to unlock The Kid in the awesomely difficult platformer Super Meat Boy. Proof, taken on my phone after I’d run around the room like an idiot:

(I’m also really close to getting the next band-aid character unlock)

For the uninitiated, SMB is a really, really hard game. It’s like Mario, if Mario was made of meat, took one hit to die, and was antagonised by a phoetus in a suit who constructed levels of pure death for him to run around in. Look, it’s easier if I show you. Here’s a video sequence of what I had to go through to get The Kid. The cuts made for that video make it look easy, but trust me, it ain’t. I’m not actually certain how many times I died, but it was a lot. Like, genocide a lot. And that’s not even the hardest bit of the game: I still have to work my way through Cotton Alley.

—

*Who genuinely wanted to hear fiction. They told a bunch of guys at the back to shut the fuck up while Tiffany Ha was reading her intriguing sci-fi short story. Kudos to that kind of dedication.

**Two pints of beer on an empty stomach also didn’t hurt.

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few weeks ago, my Mum asked me to get some photos off an old beige box of ours that had been sitting in a cupboard for the better part of two years. It was a fun experience, hooking everything up and remembering the technologies that came before the ones I’m used to (e.g. “What the fuck, this only has IDE?”). While I was at it, I plugged in some hard drives that I’d had in storage and poked around in their cavernous 1Gb and 5Gb interiors for anything interesting that past-me might have thought worth saving.

Boy, was I in for a treat.

Behold, in all their two-dimensional, pixellated glory, the screenshots of Baldur’s Gate II: Shadows of Amn that my former self decided to keep. There’s some pretty epic shit in there: me slaying a dragon, me starting to fight the end boss (I beat him), me finding awesome secret underground temples in one of the main cities that none of my friends did. I have no idea how many hours I poured into that game, but it was a lot. So thank you, past me, for providing me with a great moment of gaming nostalgia.

[Show as slideshow]

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photo credit: mediafury

I’d like to use the final part of this video game series to get excited about indie games and the important role they have to play in encouraging the next wave of immersive storytelling experiences. As this is the last post, I’ll also be wrapping up with the answer to the question I had in mind when I first started this series: are games a valid medium for storytelling?

Video games started out as the creative hobby of many programmers before ballooning into the massive industry it is today. And it is really massive: the UK games industry netted $5.3 billion in games and console sales; the US hit $10.5 billion (with roughly $5b more if you include downloaded sales, on-sales and trade-ins [2]); and Australia’s own local industry is going from strength to strength, as shown in a recent ABS release. Throughout this period of exponential growth, the big players in the games industry have been busy snapping up any and all talented programmers and artists who have wanted to join them. This has contributed to the expanse of truly extraordinary games that we gamers have had the privilege to play. Of course, for every Pixar animation of the gaming world, there are the requisite number of Uwe Boll shockers (ironically mostly based on games themselves), but this is to be expected in an entertainment industry.

But that’s not what makes me excited. The thing that gets me really revved up is that over the past few years there’s been a growing trend towards the development of home-grown, or ‘indie’ games. These games are created with small teams of gifted programmers, or by solo artists, and then released into the gaming populace for free and for the enjoyment of all. Whether this trend is due to the supply of educated games programmers having outstripped the demand from the industry, a result of the slightly volatile nature of games development (job security in the industry is an oft-highlighted issue), or some other reason is unclear. But I’d like to think that in addition to the market effects contributing to this new way of creating games, there is a subset of programmers wanting to express themselves in ways that a larger publishing house may not allow them. They want to make the art house films, the risque narratives of the gaming world. They want to experiment and play and create. By remaining outside the mainstream, they retain the ability to explore ideas that they may have been unable to when limited within the margins of a traditional development house. This is a trend that has been seen in many other creative media: self-published novels are gaining credit, as are teams that produce and release movies through services such asYouTube. The artist that is able to ply his or her trade without the help of gateways or promoters has attained an air of plausibility, if not guaranteed eventuality.

But we don’t need to completely disengage indie game developers and huge publishing houses entirely. The results when big games marketing reaches out to the indie community can be incredible. Take the example of Portal, beloved by many for its innovative* gameplay mechanics and astute use of humour. Portal is essentially a much prettier sequel to the indie game Vernacular Drop, developed by students of the DigiPen Institute of Technology. While theirs might be an extraordinary case (I think I saw somewhere that all the students are now employed at Valve–a massive win for them), it does show that with the right approach, larger companies can take on smaller projects and have them be huge successes. The risks that might once have been involved in the form of marketing dollars and printing costs for CDs, cases, product placement, etc., have been mitigated by the online delivery systems that are fast becoming the method of choice for gamers everywhere. To cite a recent personal example, I don’t know a single one of my gamer friends that didn’t drop a couple of dollars on an indie game in the recent Steam sale. I bought half-a-dozen myself, and I’ve enjoyed what I’ve played of them so far (Ben There, Dan That, for example, is a brilliant throw-back to old-school adventure games). But it’s not just larger companies that are making the most of digital delivery. With some web-site savvy, a PayPal account, word of mouth, and a bit of luck, indie developers can and have made passable amounts of cash for themselves by selling directly to gamers. And of course, there are somewhat more open platforms than Steam such as the iPhone/Pad App Store that have seen the successes of a few enterprising titles such as Trism, Canabalt, and Steambirds.

The current environment is highly exciting for games and game developers. We have content delivery systems such as Steam and Xbox Live that have allowed indie publishers to get picked up and placed into the living rooms and computer dens of players all over the globe. While the big players are mostly still all about establishing franchise lines and trying to land the big blockbuster sales with the hype machine that has been the engine behind sales for years, indie developers are busy pushing the envelope of what is and isn’t a game. An example of this that has stuck in my mind for quite some time after playing it is Terry Cavanagh’s Don’t Look Back, which you can play here. Ostensibly a platform game, the game mechanic of the player’s avatar not being able to turn around is incorporated into its thematic content**. And while it doesn’t have the reams of dialogue or expansive world that other games might, it sticks in the back of your head as a powerful message. The fact that gamers are able to recognise this and appreciate it speaks to the intelligence of a group of people that are often maligned by the media and treated with kid gloves (intellectually speaking) by the major games manufacturers. Gamers seem to want games that speak to their ability to discern and appreciate narratives–or at least, the recent embrace of more conceptual games seems to suggest this. This may be due to the ageing gamer population; the average age of a gamer in Australia is approximately 30 years old and they’ve played the standard gaming tropes a million times before. They’ve sliced a guy in half on systems from 8-bit to HD resolution and, let’s face it, it doesn’t get much more compelling with the extra pixels. It may not be the beginnings of an about face in terms of content, but the embrace of indie developers by gamers that are seeking more than just the standard entertainment will fuel the development of more boundary-breaking, storytelling games, and I can’t help but think that’s a good thing.

So now to return to the initial motivation of this series of essays: do video games effectively tell stories and create compelling fictional immersions? To my mind, they absolutely do, and the ways in which they accomplish this are varied and fascinating. I’m sure that anyone who has played and loved video games would agree with me without a second of hesitation. The majority of them may not be works of ultra-high artistic merit, but really, how much of what people appreciate in other mediums is? Generally speaking, even the bigger franchises are getting the hint that gamers want a little more than mindless, autonomous interaction in their games. And they’ll continue to provide the base-level stories (and the occasional superb example), while the ever-present fringe do what they have done in countless other media and ensure that there are a variety of more meaningful interactions available when gamers want to take their entertainment to a deeper level. The games we play, and the ways we play them, will not cease to continue evolving, and I can’t wait to see what the creative minds who adopt video games as their canvas will come up with for us humble gamers next.

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photo credit: Diodoro

Replay:

Before I go into some examples of the use of freedom, I’d like to quickly recap on a few key points:

• Immersion in games can be broken down into three subtypes–sensory, systemic, and fictional immersion.
• Fictional immersion, while almost always present in some way, is often overlooked as a method of providing a more meaningful playing experience.
• While traditional stories and videogames are analogous in many ways, the interactivity of video games–also the ‘agency’ of players taking on the role of protagonists (thanks Paul!)–is quite unique of video games, providing an edge to the fictional immersion not available in other media.
• Gamers that metagame are lost to fictional immersion, unless said immersion is truly exceptional.
• Linearity of story is not necessarily a linearity of experience (thanks again, Paul!)

While writing these posts and discussing them in the comments, it’s become obvious that the classification of fictional immersion as being completely separate from that of systemic immersion is a misguided one. This may have come about through a misreading of Arsenault’s paper, or perhaps it is a symptom of the scientific method of trying to break down the elements of a game into their constituent parts and analyse them. Whatever the case, on closer inspection it is has become quite difficult for me to pin down exactly where systemic immersion ends and fictional immersion begins. But in the first part of this post I’ll try, and then we can get on with the examples of games where freedom to affect a storyline has been used to good effect, as promised in the previous post.

Living in the moment:

Systemic immersion is absolutely dependant on the moment to moment interaction of a gamer with a game. As Paul pointed out in the comments for the last post, systemic immersion contributes to the feeling of agency that the player has over the character they control. You interact with an object, you shoot a bullet, you cast a spell; a gamer that has agency is a gamer that can potentially inhabit the character, moving from player to protagonist. And when this transformation is complete, the moment to moment interactions with the game can be almost as compelling, in terms of a fictional immersion, as the overall story that the game is telling.

Take, for example, the FlatOut series of racing games (a perennial favourite of mine). On the surface, there isn’t much that game developers can really do with a racing game in terms of story, and the developers of FlatOut haven’t exactly gone out of their way; you’re a new driver looking to make your mark and earn some cash in a series of daredevil race circuits. But in this case, the game has a few tricks up its sleeve to provide fictional immersion in a moment to moment fashion, rather than relying on a grand overarching story. In between races, players are given loading screens that provide background information on the static line up of drivers behind the wheels of each of your rival cars. There’s Ray Carter, a relaxed driver capable of winning if he tries; Lei Bing, an aggressive chick who comes from an underground street racing background; or Katie Jackson, an erratic, stressed out car club president. The presentation of each of these personas and their corresponding driving styles allows the player to construct his or her own personal narratives while doing something as seemingly far away from quality fiction as Stephanie Meyer (sorry, couldn’t help myself). I thought it was cute, a little bit of flavour that the developers had thought to include in the game. It wouldn’t really affect the way I played, would it? Nah.

By the end of the first race, I hated Lei Bing’s guts–she’d cut me off and ram me, forcing my car to go swerving into the side of a building or a truck. So my character’s goal became to get revenge on Bing and her irritatingly cutesy Lancer-like chassis. I imagined her increasing dismay and chagrin as I smashed her repeatedly into trees, railings, and once hitting her car so hard it launched her out her front window and over a cliff. This personal narrative of slight and revenge is just one example of how, even in something as basic as a car racing game, systemic immersion and fictional immersion come together in the moment to moment play of the game. Other examples of this kind of narrative creation is in the levelling up of characters in RPGs through battles with monsters, or the style of combat (does he flank, or just run in guns blazing?) employed in a first person shooter.

Should we be calling those moment to moment narratives a combination of systemic immersion combined with imagination, or is it another aspect of fictional immersion? I’m not sure, personally. I’ll leave it up to the reader to determine which side of the semantics they want to sit. But is without doubt that they contribute to the overall fictional immersion of the game. This is never more apparent than when developers choose to exploit them more thoroughly than in my example of FlatOut. Two examples have already been mentioned in the comments; Final Fantasy 7 with its heart-wrenching twist that derails the player’s visions of the playing out of the game, and Bioshock with its mid-way reveal that throws any illusion of agency out the window. These kinds of moments obviously fit into an overall storyline, and yet also directly draw upon the player’s moment to moment systemic immersion and self-realised narratives in order to deliver the kind of emotional punch that is rare in other media.

A third example, and one that deliberately ties a gameplay mechanic into this idea of moment to moment narrative, is that of the Mass Effect series. In Mass Effect, the developers introduce a conversation system that can be used by the player to present a more self-serving, rogue-like persona, or a more just, morally upright persona, depending on the player’s tastes. The combination of all these moment to moment decisions can dramatically change the way the game plays out. Obviously there must remain the major storyline being fulfilled by the player–a story, even an interactive one, must still have a beginning, a middle, and an end–but the way that story plays out is directly, overtly, and engagingly influenced by the player’s decisions using this gameplay mechanic. For example, a character with whom the player has built an exceedingly evil persona may not be able to have a civil conversation with a peace corps trooper, resulting in the loss of a side-mission (but the gaining of one when speaking to a similarly dastardly space pirate, for example). Rather than limiting the player, this naturally encourages even more inhabiting of the character by the player, and therefore a greater sense of agency. The fact that these myriad small actions actually have the potential to change the overall storyline of the game is icing on the cake from the developers.

So moment to moment systemic immersion and the personally imagined or guided narratives that they can produce are not to be overlooked. Now I’d like to take a small step to the left of this topic and talk a bit more about freedom of interaction in games, and how this can also lead to player-created narratives.

Freewheeling:

Freedom is a tricky thing in video games. Give a player too much freedom and they won’t feel like the game has any direction. Give them too little and even the personal narratives mentioned earlier won’t give them the sense of agency they require to full assume their character. Freedom of interaction is a balancing act, and while the dreams of some theorists might extend to video games that have no defined storyline but for the dramatic whim of an artificial intelligence, the reality is that freedom is often implied, rather than delivered.

It might help to start with a game that seeks to deliver on the concept of an ever-accommodating artificial intelligence, sans the artificial bit. Sleep Is Death is a two-player game by Jason Rohrer in which one player takes on the role of the character or characters, while the other takes on the role of the wizard behind the curtain that must respond to the whim of the player as he or she interacts with the world that has been presented to them. Essentially Sleep Is Death replaces the hard and fast rules that a video game must necessarily contain, and replaces them with a human that can make decisions from one second to the next on what to allow the player to do and not do. But even still, the ‘wizard’ of a game of Sleep Is Death still usually has a linear overall story that they have invested time in creating, and while the interaction may be more natural, true freedom is not really granted to the player. This is due to the ultimate freedom of an infinite number of actions leading to an infinite number of overall outcomes not being able to be delivered.

Unfortunately, retail games do not have the option of a dedicated human arbiter for each player, and so must rely on creating the impression of freedom. These impressions can be as comprehensive as the living, breathing worlds presented by Grand Theft Auto IV and The Elder Scrolls: Oblivion, to the more simplistic destructive backdrop of Just Cause 2. But what all these games have in common is their dedication to a genre of game known as ‘sandbox’. These types of games encourage the player to to express themselves, and therefore take on the player character as their own, by allowing them to move freely throughout a pre-made world. While the world might have some dos and don’ts based on its particular virtual reality (for example, TES:Oblivion does not allow you to run around and kill everyone in a town, while GTA IV practically encourages it), ultimately the player can do what they want within the bounds of these rules, while occasionally completing the objectives that contribute to a greater storyline and provide a linear plot for the player to engage in. It’s easy to see how, given an open world to what they want within, a player might easily be immersed in the narratives that they are able to create. For example, in GTA IV, it’s entirely possible to eschew a life of crime (between missions) and become a fire-fighter, or a pizza-boy, creating the personal narrative of a guy that wants to do the right thing but is forced into his circumstances. Or perhaps the player wants to become a mad, rampaging whirlwind of violence that fully embraces the shift towards the life of crime. Both of these are entirely possible within the architecture of the game.

I’m not going to bang on about freedom of interaction, as I’ve already gone on too long in this post, and it has kind of been covered to some extent in previous posts. Instead, I’m going to leave you with some questions:

• Do you think that freedom in games is necessary for a player to truly ‘become’ his or her character?
• Do you agree with the concept of personal narratives developed by moment to moment systemic interactions within a game? If so, have you got any examples to share?
• How far do you think a game would have to go to be considered a good example of complete freedom? Do you think that such a game would even be a game any more, or are overall linear story arcs a necessity for the medium?
• Do you have any other good examples of where developers have exploited the player’s sense of agency to create a memorable experience?

Thanks for reading, and we’ll wrap this up at the end of the week with some speculation on the future of storytelling and immersion in video games!

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Before I start this post, I want to face up to the facts: as much as it might pain me to say it, most gamers don’t need a game to include complex, multi-layered plot, or a fully-realised self-consistent world in order to enjoy themselves. Hell, they usually don’t need a plot at all. This is totally fine, and I’m okay with it. After all, mindlessly blasting away at alien scum with only the barest of context given is a tradition stretching back to Space Invaders. As Farhad Manjoo notes in his Slate article:

“Games ask us to save the princess, save the country, save the world, save ourselves—but no one plays games to achieve those ends. We play for the puzzle, for the physics, for the sense of being embedded in a fully realized world. [...] Thus I can’t really explain why my character is doing what he’s doing. The real answer is he’s doing it because I am making him do it, and I am making him do it only because I am having fun.”

It’s a valid argument, but I did want to ask one question of Farhad: why is he having fun? Why is pressing buttons and seeing a character move on a screen so much fun? Would he be enjoying himself as much if there were no context to his actions? Would a game consisting of abstract graphics and a voice telling you you’ve achieved something be as much fun? As usual, the Internet community is already way ahead of me in satirising such ideas, as you can see by this Penny Arcade comic, ‘The Bar Mitzvah’:

This SMBC Theatre sketch, ‘MMO’:

And to a lesser extent, this demotivational poster:

I’m going to make as broad a statement as I probably ever have here, but I hope you’ll follow along with me as I try and explain what I mean by it: the gamers that these satirists are making fun of will never be able to appreciate video games as a storytelling media. But listen, it’s not their fault. It’s just a mindset that is perpetuated by games companies and gamer communities, and, yes, teenage rivalries around the world. According to these gamers, you don’t play a game, you beat a game. When presented with what is almost a purely story-telling experience such as Heavy Rain, they don’t know what to do. What is the button combination they should press to get through this quicker? How can they manipulate the rules of the game into giving them what they want more effectively? They are meta-gaming, rather than immersing, trying to figure out the structure behind the game in order to more effectively ‘win’. When a player is actively looking for the limitations in the architecture behind the façade, you’ve lost them already. Unless of course the game is produced with such a truly deft touch as to take them in unawares, rather like a great movie is still able to immerse students of film.

So perhaps it is too late to convert these (dare I say it) hardcore gamers. But if video games are ever to be considered more than just a construction to test one’s skill against, as I think they should be, it’s important to understand how that might come to pass. For my money, that understanding is going to come through exploring the potential (and limitations) of fictional immersion in games. Last post I talked about the similarities and one major difference with regards to storytelling in traditional literature versus video games. While most of the devices that stories in other media use can be easily translated to their video game counterparts, the ability of the player to interact with the game is something that other mediums do not offer, and is therefore of primary importance when considering how a story is to be told within a game. However, I do not believe that the relationship of fictional immersion to freedom of interaction is a linear one, and in the following section I’m going to try and show you why.

The Price of Freedom:

Selmer Bringsjord states in his paper ‘Is It Possible to Build Dramatically Compelling Interactive Digital Entertainment’ [1] that one of the biggest challenges in building the titular digital entertainment is artificial intelligence, and the inclusion of some artificial ‘director’ in order to procedurally generate and manipulate the dramatic arc of a story line. Now, to me that sounds a little bit too much like the Roald Dahl tale regarding the story-writing machine. And I don’t think that the day where a machine can adequately reproduce the dramatic twists and turns of a plot penned by a human writer is going to come any time soon. But the paper still raises (or at least, raised in my mind) an interesting question; do we really need the kind of branching storyline and implied infinite freedom of interaction that such an intelligence would achieve–and that current generations of games are trying their best to emulate–in order to be engaged by a story?

The short answer, I believe, is no. The long answer is, well, it depends on what you think video games should be trying to achieve. To explain the short answer, there are plenty of games that offer compelling storylines that offer no freedom whatsoever. From the 2-D, four-button, pixellated story of love versus material gain in Passage, to the vast and complex linear narratives of many Japanese RPGs (The Lufia, Chrono Trigger, Final Fantasy, and Dragon Quest series are all favourites that spring to mind); these are games that offer little freedom in the story to the player, and yet manage to deliver engaging narratives for us to become involved in. To those of you who have played these games, this should come as no surprise. The method of play of such games is akin to reading a book, albeit a book played aside pretty graphics, and broken up by interactive elements that serve to provide thumb exercise before the next tiwst in the plot is revealed. And in fact, there are many ways in which games borrow from other media such as comics to accomplish a good story. JRPGs in particular are notorious for using the ‘aspect to aspect’ establishing shot of every new location that the player encounters.

Of course, there are caveats to this supposed linearity of story. Usually characters are able to be customised, or the path forward is not immediately clear and needs some investigation before being revealed, so the linearity can be somewhat hidden behind these mechanisms. But when all is said and done, the stories cannot be manipulated, and play out exactly as their creators had intended them. There aren’t any surprises, and if fellow gamers were to compare their experiences with the game they would be able to do so very closely, with only a few variations in their journey owing to choices in customisation. And that’s all well and good, these stories are no less potent for their singular nature. But now to explain the long answer, which I said was dependant on what you think video games should be trying to achieve. While video games can indeed provide the kind of memorable stories that traditional media have done for many years by limiting themselves to linearity, the question is whether they should be. I said in part two of this series that I considered the ability to let the player interact with the video game and alter the way events play out to be a unique ability of video games. In order to set video games apart from other media, that uniqueness should be taken advantage of in new and exciting ways. In the next part of this series, I plan to talk about some ways in which the freedom to affect a storyline has been used to great effect in the past, and explore some directions it may take in the future.

References:

[1] ‘Is It Possible to Build Dramatically Compelling Interactive Digital Entertainment?’ by Selmer Bringsjord, accessed at http://www.gamestudies.org/0101/bringsjord/index.html

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