When it comes to videogames as a medium for storytelling, I often find myself at odds with other developers. The prevailing theory in gaming’s indie scene (whose members, by the way, are a fine group of gentlemen) is that videogames and narrative are inherently incompatible; that any attempt to tell a story through a game is antithetical to the medium’s greatest strengths and if you really want to tell a story you should just make a movie instead.

To which I say: bullshit.

Destructoid editor, indie connoisseur and all-around righteous dude Anthony Burch wrote an article for The Escapist detailing how Half-Life 2: Episode 2 creates an emotionally intense climactic battle using a lot of behind-the-scenes trickery, ensuring that if the player wins, it is only by the tiniest margin. The human rebels are always this close to being annihilated by the alien onslaught, and no matter how perfect the player is he will always destroy the last invader mere seconds before it wipes out the entire human enclave. It’s a harrowing fight, and most players are grateful to have a moment’s respite once the dust clears before moving on to the next objective.

BioShock and Mass Effect, two games whose entire purpose was the advancement of videogame narrative, use similar tactics to tell their stories; the former through carefully orchestrated environmental events, like the collapse of a bulkhead in the first chapter, and the latter through subtly confining dialogue choices, which give the player just enough freedom to create a feeling of control, but not enough to disrupt the main story arc. Granted, these are AAA titles with huge amounts of money and manpower behind them, but I still consider them an admirable first step.

And they are only the first step. There are many ways that videogame narrative can develop from here, and the horizon is a broad one indeed. But of course we have this problem of player agency. “If we have a story that we want to tell,” we say, “and we limit the player’s options in order to tell him that story, then that’s not really a game, because the player isn’t fully in control.” Well, first of all: so what? In the worst case scenario, fine, it’s not a game. We can just call it something else. But not being able to safely categorize these things is no reason to abandon an entire avenue of creativity.

Second of all, how exactly is limiting the player a bad thing? The rules of a game are nothing but limits, and somewhere an arbitrary line is being drawn between acceptable gameplay limitations – like ammunition and gravity – and storytelling constraints like dialogue options. The difference is smaller than it may seem. And after all, are we ever fully in control of anything in reality? There will always be limitations to our choices, and as long as the logic is sound there’s no problem at all.

In videogames, or at least in my perception of them, player control and player freedom are not the same thing. We are right to hate quick time events (the infamous “PRESS X TO NOT DIE” moments) because they strip us of mechanical control. The player should always be in control of his character, because that is how we represent him in the world, and he should always have some way of interacting with his surroundings. That does not, however, mean that the player should have complete freedom to do what he wants. If the player needs to leave a building through a particular door in order to find the jeep/boat/camel that will take him to his next objective, I have no problem whatsoever with locking the other door behind him. What would he do if he went through it anyway? Run backwards through his previous mission? Loot the corpses of his fallen enemies? Graffiti the walls?

It concerns me that we have this Iron Curtain that no one talks about. On one side, we have AAA studios that spend staggering amounts of money on lifelike facial animation and professional voice actors, then use these amazing tools to spin meaningless yarns about angry badasses – that no one can actually relate to – saving the entire known universe from an alien/cyborg/zombie menace so one-dimensionally malevolent that it’s a wonder they hadn’t already killed each other by the time they decided to subjugate everything with a pulse. On the other side, we have an indie scene that looks at these gold-plated fluff pieces and decides that games shouldn’t have stories at all, producing some truly innovative and beautiful gameplay experiences but then dancing in the moonlight and burning the entire concept of narrative at the stake.

So it feels weird to fall in between. I came to videogames by way of film, but I am first and foremost a writer. My head creates reams of fiction on a daily basis, and shaping these fabrications into compelling storylines is one of my life’s greatest joys. Above all, I am so inspired by the possibility of making someone else the protagonist of my story, of transporting another human being from sitting on his couch to actually living through the enriching fictional experience I’ve laid out before him, that I am willing to bend, break or rewrite any rule that prevents me from doing so. Right now, the Berlin Wall between gameplay and narrative is causing me significant consternation, and I’m not going to stop until I tear that motherfucker down.

When considering ways to communicate our intent to our players, we recoil at the thought that we are being manipulative, but manipulation has always been crucial to the arts. We strive to evoke a particular emotion with our work, and our success is judged by how well we play with our viewers’ feelings. After all, Schindler’s List is manipulative. So is Citizen Kane, and Lost, and Battlestar Galactica. When other forms of entertainment manipulate our emotions, we enjoy it. Games can do the same thing, even if it means “breaking” the rules of game design. Everything is subordinate to the goal of reaching the player’s heart and mind, and no single guideline is immutable. As the old writer Erasmus Fry in Neil Gaiman’s Sandman put it, “writers are liars, my dear.” Fiction is simply a way of lying to reveal the truth, and the sooner game designers are willing to engage in a little constructive deception, the better off we’ll be as an art form.

Miguel Sternberg of Spooky Squid Games has proposed one solution: the self-narrating game. Night of the Cephalopods is an experimental game featuring a Lovecraftian hero who narrates the player’s actions as though retelling a story. Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time used a similar basis for its narrative, but NotC incorporates the narration into every aspect of gameplay. When I met Miguel at GDC last week, I became so intrigued by this idea that I’ve actually shamelessly stolen it and am now attempting to built a prototype using this mechanic in a different context.

On the execution front, NaturalPoint now sells a facial motion capture kit for $5,000 that may not compete with high-end services like Contour, but still removes a significant barrier to creating convincing virtual actors on a budget. You can bet I’ll be getting one when the time comes.

I’ll be writing more on this topic and building prototypes to prove my point. Until then, give Indigo Prophecy a try!

~ by George on April 2, 2009.