(A rant about) Video-game Storytelling.

I didn't really expect anything wonderfully interesting to come out of the Game Developer's Conference, but I actually really like this quote which a few people are talking about, or rather were talking about when I started this post a few weeks ago:

“Basically, and I’m speaking to the Blizzard guys in the back: we need to stop writing a fucking book in our game, because nobody wants to read it... We need to deliver our story in a way that is uniquely video game."

– Jeff Kaplan (Former Director of World of Warcraft)

This guy from Stardock has a spiel about this idea which basically amounts to: Game developers need to learn to be concise, just as movie directors need to know what to cut. It's no good putting entire shitty novels in your game as Optional Side Things, or Unnecessary Background Information, as at least some players will feel obligated to read that stuff, and so, if it's no good, that'll just ruin the game experience to some degree.

I'm not too inclined to care that much about this point, personally: Yes, if you can tell the same story in a more natural, entertaining way, without taking the player out of the game, then kudos. But otherwise, I've long since learned to ignore all the crappy optional stories hanging around in these games. I'm thinking here of Morrowind, Baldur's Gate, and even Arcanum, in which there was all these books lying around, containing terribly written stories, about which I couldn't care one iota. In fact, there was even a competion when I hung around the Arcanum Inn forum, where the developers had fans write some stories, and the best one would be put in a book in a library somewhere in the game, and the fan would get a free copy of the game. This just brought home to me that most of these in-game-books are basically just fan-fic quality material that can be safely, and beneficially ignored. If I want a good story, I'll read an actual book. My point here is: I don't care if developers put this crap into the game, because I'm not going to read it anyway.

This guy, who is either called James or Pentadact, has a spiel which I find much more interesting, focusing on the second part of that quote: he talks about the features with which video games can uniquely tell a story, which are roughly Gameplay and Nonlinearity (for a loose enough definition of Uniquely, or a broad enough definition of Video Game). I find the former a pretty interesting topic of thought, but I tend to think a lot more, and more specifically, about the latter.

When I talk about nonlinearity I feel like a total Fallout nerd, but here goes: It seems to me there are two distinct types of nonlinearity that appear in computer games. There is a kinda of macro-nonlinearity where the player has the freedom to go anywhere, see everything, do anything. Morrowind exemplifies this for me. Right from the start of the game, you can travel all over the damn world, talk to everyone, become the leader of all the guilds, check out all the cities, learn all the spells, read all the in-game books. This is a kind of nonlinearity that is potentially great fun for those who love to explore a world. Take the world as given, and you can totally check it out.

Unfortunately for me, I hated Morrowind. This is at least partly because this kind of nonlinearity is actually anathema to good storytelling. Give the player the ability to do anything, and they're liable to lose sight of what they need to do to advance the plot. Let them wander around for game-months, and it makes a nonsense of any sense of urgency in the central plot (as in Oblivion, where Demons were apparently invading the world precisely as slowly as the player was getting around to dealing with it). Now I think of it, this might actually not be a problem if there were other little stories populating the game-world that were equally interesting for the player, but this certainly wasn't the case in Morrowind.

However, my bigger problem with Morrowind was that it doesn't display any of the second kind of nonlinearity, which I will call micro-nonlinearity. This is the ability to make decisions on the level of "should I give this magic sandwich to party A or party B?" and furthermore for such decisions to actually matter in the gameworld.

An obvious game to talk about in reference to this would be Fallout, but first I'd rather mention Deus Ex, as it draws a starker contrast. Deus Ex has absolutely no macro-nonlinearity. You go through the levels in a set order, you always start in the same place, and right up until the last few moments, you're always doomed to end up in roughly the same place. You can't go and check out Hong Kong as soon as the game starts, nor can you choose not to defect to the terrorists. But it does occasionally give you the freedom to make choices that having lasting effects on the story. The most obvious is when you can choose to either stay back and defend your brother from some dudes, or to flee and let him die. Whichever you do, you get shot and captured. But if you leave, your brother dies. If, however, you stay, then he lives. And then, importantly, he proceeds to show up again and again throughout the entire game. This gives you the impression that your choice has had a lasting impact on the gameworld, and on the story that you are being told. I Think This Is Cool.

However, I know a few people who seem to genuinely dislike nonlinearity, in both guises. In the case of macro-nonlinearity, some people apparently get paralysed by the choice. They can go anywhere and do anything, so what the hell should they do? To this I'm just inclined to say: Suck it up and make a damn choice. You're not a friggin' donkey tied between two delicious bales of hay.

I think there's something more interesting to be said in the case of micro-nonlinearity. Another person I know got extremely annoyed when he found out that, by killing a character early in Bioshock, he was then unable to get into that character's bedroom later in the game. Now there was basically nothing exciting in that room, but the problem here was that, due to a choice that he made, he was potentially missing content. (Let's call this kind of attitude Completism... For now). As in, there was Stuff in this game, put there by the developers, which he could no longer see. I find this feature extremely cool, and a necessary result of my character's decisions having meaning within a story. It's tempting to say that this is cool because it promotes replayability: I have to play the game again in order to see the other stuff that I missed. But I'm actually more tempted to say: screw replayability, I like the fact that making a decision closes other options off for me, because were this not the case, I could not possibly feel that my decisions matter, and this is a wonderful feeling for a story to give me.

This truely is a kind of uniqueness to computer games (also tabletop RPGs and Olde Timey Storytelling and Choose You Own Adventure books, and maybe a few other mediums, but you get my point). You may miss content in a novel or a movie because you skip part of it, or because you aren't paying much attention, but it's never going to be the case that a decision that you make necessarily closes other options off to you. But it's worth mentioning that, contrary to the quote that started this spiel, this isn't so much about telling a (set) story in a way that is distinct to the medium, but rather could be about telling a story that is distinct to the medium. As in, interactity gives us the ability to tell a story that no other medium could, one that changes in response to the decisions of its audience. An obvious point, but one that no major game has really made much of. Also, it seems, one that players and critics might not really... Care about?

Think of the greatest story ever told by a computer game... I strongly suspect that many gamers would think immediately of Final Fantasy 7. Now I admit that was probably a pretty good story, with the... Things... Brothers, or something. Okay, I don't really remember it. My point is, that game was utterly linear, in both senses. On the macro-level, there was a tiny bit near the end where you could wander all around the world. On the micro-level, you had pretty much no choices. I think you could influence who Cloud would go on a date with at one point, that's about it. I don't deny the game had a good story, but I would deny that it is a story distinct to the medium, and that it is told in a distinctly game-like way.

My own thought isn't much better. I'd think of Planescape: Torment. That game had some nice micro-nonlinearity, at least near the start, but nonetheless the story unfolded in a fairly set way, and you always ended up in the same place. Perhaps you could say of that game that, because much of the story was about uncovering your character's past, and you character's past is completely set, the bulk of the story was set. But your character's present behavior, and the story that unfolds from your actions in the game, is somewhat more open, unlike in FF7. But either way, my point here is that this, too, was a story that you could pretty much tell in any medium.

So for an example of a game that actually does produce a story that is adaptive to the player's actions, mutable in response to the actions of the controlled character, and so (perhaps) unique to this particular medium, I'd recommend Facade. This game tells a Who's-Afraid-Of-Virginia-Woolfish story, which will always be quite different depending on how the player acts. Certain things will or will not be spoken of, certain results will obtain for the central characters, etc. All of this is under the control of the player, insofar as their choices determines what will happen, but not under the direct control of the player, insofar as it's never entirely clear what exactly the results of your choices will be.

Now in the case of Facade, the developers do encourage multiple playthroughs. But this is not in order to see all of their possible content, there are simple too many ways the action could go for that to be viable. Rather, this is just to experience fully how interactive storytelling can work, and how different your results can be from even minor changes in your behavior. However, at the end of a single playthrough, you are presented with a script of everything that happened in that session. This suggests to me that a single playthrough should be considered a full experience, a single complete story. This is why I am perhaps not entirely happy with the term "completist" for someone who wants to see all of the possible programmed content of a game. To call this Completism suggests that someone without this attitude, someone who is merely happy with a single, straightforward playthrough has somehow failed to get a Complete experience. I would rather want to suggest that a single playthrough of a non-linear game, insofar as it produces and tells a single, coherent story, can be considered a complete experience. But anyway, that's all nomenclature.

This has been a bit of a rant, and so I'd like to end by huuuuugely recommending this game that I just played, which partially convinced me to finally dig up this old post, an Art game called Pathways. I don't want to spoil anything about it, so I'll just say that I love it, and that it works on some of the ideas I've been talking about in this post, though not necessarily in a way that supports or exemplifies what I've been saying, nor one that repudiates it. Whatever else it does, it really delivers a story in a way that is uniquely video game.