All posts tagged theory

Playing the Player:

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

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.

photo credit: B Tal

Introduction:

A little while ago, Jess Au over at Spike (the Meanjin blog, not the men’s lifestyle channel) took the time to expound on the consideration of video games as a medium of storytelling. It was a great blog post—brought on by Paul Callaghan’s presentation at the second Meanland event—that got me thinking a lot about the way that video games have influenced my life, in particular my creative ability. I became a bit obsessed about the idea, as is the way of things, and did some research into contemporary thought regarding video games. Over the coming weeks I’d like to share the results of some of that research.

But first a bit of background credentials. I couldn’t tell you the very first video game I played, but I’m fairly certain it was on either a Commodore 64 or an Amstrad CPC 464. So we’re talking old-school here. My family wasn’t rich by any means, but we were lucky enough to get technological hand-me-downs from a friend of the family who was constantly upgrading to the bleeding edge of computer hardware. With a devotion verging on fanatical I gamed through the golden ages of text-based adventures, point-and-click quests, and infuriating platformers. When home entertainment units such as Nintendo’s NES/Famicom came onto the market, I stuck with my PC. However, a lucky win on Channel 9’s Wide World of Sports (I’m not making this up) gifted my Dad with a Super Nintendo Entertainment System and a copy of Super Probotector Alien Rebels*. With a desktop PC for the more hardcore titles and a console for the mainstream releases, it was game on, and I’ve never really stopped since.

So I’d like to think I have a bit of a pedigree when it comes to playing games. But while I have played a lot of games, I haven’t really thought about the way I play those games. And up until Jess’ article, I hadn’t really thought about how games play us. What exactly are the mechanics that drive that interaction? How is immersion achieved, and how has the method of immersion changed with technology? How do games engage us as storytellers, and why is it still possible to enjoy a game when they don’t? I really want to shed some light on these questions, and while I don’t have a degree in game theory or psychology, I do have a lot of enthusiasm and a moderate amount of free time with which to explore the vast intertubes for ideas regarding them. In this first instalment of an as-yet-unknown number of posts regarding games, storytelling, immersion, and interaction, I’ll present a few ideas regarding the different kinds of immersion that can be enjoyed while interacting with a game. Wish me luck!

Going under:

In my mind, storytelling via the video game medium is completely dependant on one thing: immersion. This is similar to other media such as films and books, in that if the viewer/reader is not able to be drawn into the world or situation presented, they will not engage with the media in a meaningful way. We could debate the definition of a ‘meaningful way’ until the cows come home, but to me it is the feeling that you have been changed in the viewing. The person that walks away from, say, a fine piece of cinema is not the same person that walked in.

However, video games are quite unique in that there are a multitude of ways in which the gamer can become immersed. Dominic Arsenault proposes three different pathways to immersion within a video game in his paper ‘Dark Waters: Spotlight on Immersion’ [1], and I’ll begin by discussing these pathways and providing my own interpretations of them.

Systemic immersion:

Systemic immersion is a result of the gameplay of the game in question. Gameplay is something of a catch-all phrase, but here I’m going to define it as a combination of the player’s physical interaction with the game (e.g. the game’s controls, and the ease with which the player is able to interact with the game), and the rules and mechanics of the game within which the player must interact (e.g. what options the player has open to them to further their progression, and the winning conditions of the game). Good gameplay is a highly sought after commodity in the gaming world. In fact, out of the three immersions, it would have to be said that gameplay comes a distant first in terms of what companies prioritise in the development of a game. A particularly effective combo system in a third-person action game might be the difference between a gamer becoming completely immersed in the flow of one punch to the other, and throwing their controller across the room in frustration. Or clarity in a menu system might be the difference between becoming enmeshed in the complex web of a strategy-role-playing-game (strat-RPG), and giving it all up for too much effort.

Systemic immersion in games has evolved in leaps and bounds over the years. The usual pattern of evolution is one where a stand-out game offers a unique gameplay mechanic, and a whole range of similar titles (usually referred to as ‘<original game> clones’) try and emulate that mechanic. Take, for example, the first-person shooter gameplay mechanic. When Wolfenstein 3D and Doom were first released, there quickly followed a great number of clones: Hexen, Descent, Marathon, Duke Nukem 3D, Star Wars: Dark Forces, Rise of the Triads, the list goes on. Even nowadays there are games that are released with almost the exact same first-person shooter tropes, but with slight tweaks and small gameplay changes that add inches, not miles, to the systemic immersion that these early games provided. Then along comes a game such as Half Life 2 that sets new standards in systemic immersion and provides a fresh outlook on the trope, perpetuating its own clones, and continuing the cycle.

Sensory immersion:

What I would call the lowest form of immersion, this essentially translates to being wowed by all the pretty colours. It’s rare to find a game that relies purely on this kind of immersion, but the trend over the years has seen sensory immersion become more and more prevalent, echoing the advances in graphical processing power. The pursuit of sensory immersion has appeared to possess a seductive power, leading game developers astray into spending too much time applying an nth degree of polish to a character model rather than working on the core gameplay principles or story of their game. I would argue (and likely will at some point) that the increase in graphical power and polygon counts has actually resulted in a decrease in sensory immersion, but that can wait for some other time.

Fictional immersion:

In my opinion one of the most important, and indisputably most overlooked methods of immersion available. Fictional immersion is involving the player in the game through the use of a narrative (whether linear or branching), characters (whether player controlled or not), dialogue (whether interactive or static), and the implied living, breathing world that the gameplay operates within. Fictional immersion provides the context to the interactions you make with the game via systemic immersion, and allows players to more fully embrace the visual cues provided through sensory immersion. Despite this, fictional immersion is often overlooked, only provided for in a thin manner so that players can get to the action faster. And that’s fine as a marketing strategy, but as a way of telling stories it’s rubbish. As a result, there’s been no clear trend over time with respect to fictional immersion; sometimes it’s notably good, sometimes it’s horrifically bad, the majority of the time it’s present but not in any mind-blowing way. Which is why, in the next part of this series, I want to focus on what it means to be fictionally immersed and the correlations that it enjoys with sensory and systemic immersion.

References:
[1] ‘Dark Waters: Spotlight on Immersion’ by Dominic Aresenault, accessed at http://umontreal.academia.edu/DominicArsenault/Papers/157453/Dark-Waters–Spotlight-on-Immersion

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*I’m also not making that up. I remember the title vividly only because: a) we were supposed to get Super Mario World, an immense, sprawling game that had won a huge amount of recognition as being a truly epic sequel to the Mario series; and b) SPAR was actually really fun, though I learned much later that it was a weird skinned version of another game, Contra 3. Odd, huh?