One wall, two walls, three walls…
Look, ma ! A new post, OMG, in Engrish too.
Trends 101: hire someone who doesn’t make games to make games.
Games as an entertainment form have taken a serious momentum in the past years. While there were some great games story-wise last century, they were more of a literary kind, as the writing and the form taken to convey it often left ample space for interpretation, mostly due to the limits of the tools of the trade back then, but also because it was meant to be that way. Lunar Lander‘s plot is entirely contained in its title, while Zork is in substance an enhanced CYOA book.
Right now, though, games arguably attained the point where they’re more akin a movie than a book (granted, some people WANT to write a book rather than a movie script, but that’s another topic altogether), and a trend I’ve begun to feel recently is to hire TV scenarist to write for the game. Sure, ok, writing a main plot for whatever is OK for anyone with a hint of talent, but games, like TV serials, have special language, specials tools, special codes, well, a whole new grammar that belong them. Well, that’s a trend in France assuredly, but I reckon, it’s an overall one.
Of course, understanding why a bad French TV scenarist with no game experience (not even as a player) would make a great game scenario is beyond me, but that’s not the point here.
The point being that you don’t write a game scenario like you’d write a TV fiction, no siree. Well, at least I hope you don’t.
There’s a whole bunch of games trying to hammer the opposite on you, most notably, single player campaigns from obvious license games, say, Call of Duty [insert sub-title here] or whatever. Those are mostly narrative corridors where your main story experience is to watch cutscenes (or play them in the most recent trends) unfold the scenario, the main of the gameplay revolving around jumping over the back-to-checkpoint pitfall the nice designers sprinkled all over the way.
Mind you, I’m not saying it’s a bad experience there, sincerely, because frankly it’s great to just walk around shooting things while a manner of plot is thrown at your face with the subtlety of a Ukrainian fist fighter. I mean, watching movie where the main plot revolves around blowing stuff is fun.
What I’m saying, it’s that it is hardly defining games as an entertainment genre. There are good counter examples; examples of what games can be when they speak to the player with their very own voice rather than borrowing one from movies or TV. It’s all about narrative polyphony, deconstructions of the models used, from fairy tales to roman de genre… well, my favorite redhead, Sachka, had already told a lot about it on her blog, but it’s in French, so if you can’t that, well, you’re screwed, ’cause she writes a helluva better than I about all those things, and I’m too much of a scaredy cat to risk the comparison.
Captain Obvious League of Obviousness
To come back to the point, though, I feel that games are meant to say things in a way never-seen-before. Mostly because if I wanted to see a movie I’d watch one, If I wanted to read a book, I’d read one, if I wanted to eat coconut…well, you caught my drift.
Nah instead, I want what everyone is pointing at with their big fingers: interaction. The usual members of the Captain Obvious League of Obviousness are going on and on about it, a game is interactive and as such, it’s different because you’re obviously a part of it, yadda yadda, yadda… To me though, it’s akin to a complete obliteration of the Fourth Wall… or, wait… rather a transliteration of the Fourth Wall. A game constantly speaks to its player, at every single moment, its whole form talks to you directly, you, member of the audience. UI, mission objectives, tutorial elements… EVERYTHING about a game is fourth-wally. And this is where the challenge lies.
When writing a game scenario, you have to constantly consider how the game will talk to the player, and how the player will respond to it. You have to evaluate whether all the fluff you’re putting in that specific sequence will go through, or if the player will simply skip over or miss it. You have to take this interaction in account, and ensure your story still makes runs along without arms. Or legs.
Smart game peoples, like said before, can make use of narrative polyphony as a mean to achieve this end. There are several games employing this skillfully:
Alan Wake‘s tv shows within the story within the story pages within the story, a couple of Valve’s almost-trademark story graffiti (Portal, Left 4 Dead for instance), or System Shock 2 / Doom 3 / Bioshock style audio logs…
It all ties with the immersion feeling we all crave for our creations (ours as a figure of style, can’t really say I’m among the big designers nor have I committed any game worth talking about narratively *cough*). Giving the players different means to connect to the story, be it cutscene, audiolog, ingame text, chatty NPC… it all helps creating bonds to the player in different ways, and conveying your plot in different ways.
The part that’s left behind when a player jets through the game now conveys a meaning as well. Having missed the couple audiologs explaining in-depth the relation between the hero and the antagonist is not so bad anymore : this part of doubt left behind is now part of the storytelling as well, gaps in a non-linear narration are matter for extrapolation, the player’s imagination filling in said gaps as he sees fit. Often, the player’s mind will even occult several parts of the plot he actually witnessed, in order to ease the now-subliminal work of understanding, nah, scratch that, living the story.
Suddenly, all this Fourth Wall talk shines under a new light, I mean, while showing is great (as in “Show, don’t tell“), giving the player the feeling of discovery is immensely more rewarding for both designer and player.
On the other end, considering this narrative elements spawning pool thingy as a flexible mean of conveying your story sounds wise. Yeah, sometimes you’ll want to actually SLAP something in the face of your player, or restrict its choices of narrative means for good reasons (say, for instance, to emphasize the moment where, just after, you’ll open the whole world to him, or when bringing into game some new gameplay element and don’t want the player confused right now).
That’s this very flexibility that gives games a very special place compared to books, movies, songs… it’s all matter of versatility, a subtle blend between the media used (image, sound, text), its univocal storytelling and equivocal (polyphonical) qualities, restraints and freedom of action.
Of course, this all doesn’t make for a good story, but hey, scenario != narration, ey?
TL; DR :
- Implement several means to achieve narration
- Alternate between strict linear storytelling and freedom of action
- Think of game scenarios as a pathfinding map : segments linking nodes together. What you want to show are the nodes, what you want to let the player create are the paths
- Discard this whole post and read more knowledgeable peoples.
