Part 2: Story in Games
I wish to clearly state from the start that although this paper focuses a great deal on story, good game design should never be compromised for the sake of story, and this paper is ultimately about exploring the design problems associated with the mixing of the two. The goal is an effective way to integrate story into games in a successful manner that does not take away from play experience, but instead adds to it. With this goal in mind, a breakdown of the components of games is helpful to determine just where narrative (a term that will be more clearly defined in this paper) belongs in the context of game as its own medium.
The MDA approach is useful in this regard, for it presents a model for a comprehensive framework for understanding and designing games as a three component system: mechanics, dynamics and aesthetics. These three components parallel rules, system game-play, and fun, respectively:
“Mechanics describes the particular components of the game, at the level of data representation and algorithms. Dynamics describes the run time behavior of the mechanics acting on player inputs and each others’ outputs over time. Aesthetics describes the desirable emotional responses evoked in the player, when she interacts with the game system.” This breakdown gives the designer an indirect way to design “fun.” Mechanics define the system rules that when set into motion, interact in dynamic ways to create a general feel when playing a game. If this feeling is generally positive and challenging, we call it fun. There are different types of game-play that create different types of aesthetics, and thus different types of fun, which will appeal to different types of players.
Furthermore, MDA breaks down aesthetics into eight sub-components: sensation, fantasy, narrative, challenge, fellowship, discovery, expression and submission. Each of these sub-components may be emphasized in varying degrees in individual games, thus creating the different experiences players enjoy in games. As one of these is narrative (defined by the MDA authors as “game as drama”) , the model accounts for the design goal of a specific type of fun as one component of games. The MDA authors say,
“From the designer’s perspective, the mechanics give rise to dynamic system behavior, which in turn leads to particular aesthetic experiences. From the player’s perspective, aesthetics set the tone, which is born out in observable dynamics and eventually, operable mechanics.”
Thus the player’s window into the game is the aesthetic experience. The designer usually knows what sort of aesthetic experience they are trying to create, but the route to accomplishing it is a second order design process. Thus designing ‘narrative fun’ requires first designing game mechanics that will in turn produce functioning system dynamics, which will in turn produce a narrative aesthetic experience. Since the goal of StoryGUIDE is this narrative aesthetic experience, the structure of narrative components must first be analyzed in order to discern how to translate them into game mechanics.
Appendix A and B cover some of the main elements of traditional story-telling and narrative structure. My focus is the structure of story that can be abstracted from any specific medium and applied to games—for where there is structure, there can be design and programming. Chatman says, “…transposability of the story is the strongest reason for arguing that narratives are indeed structures independent of any medium.” In order for narrative to be considered a structure, it must be a closed system, and follow its own set of laws. By its nature it cannot accept elements outside the structure. In essence, like all structure, we recognize certain patterns and elements and laws, which if missing will not feel like narrative, game or no game. Thus a game can have a rich world and a detailed set of content, but if there are not solid narrative principles, then it does not contain actual narrative. At the same time, if the structure is present but not aligned with game as its own system and its own form of discourse, we wind up with the story that feels either forced or “tacked on” as a separate piece. If narrative can be examined as its own structure, then such an understanding would be very valuable to drawing parallels and incorporating narrative into the system of a game.
The work of Seymour Chatman is particularly useful, because Chatman is concerned with form and narrative structure over any specific medium. He examines in detail Structuralism, a theoretical framework derived and put into practice by the French academics, specifically Gerard Genette. Chatman tells us, “Structuralist theory argues that each narrative has two parts: a story (histoire), the content or chain of events (actions, happenings), plus what may be called the existents (characters, items of setting); and discourse (discours), that is, the expression, the means by which the content is communicated. In simple terms, the story is the what in a narrative that is depicted, discourse the how.” This very important concept tells us that story is only one part of narrative, and that discourse, the implementation into the specific medium, is the other. This immediately suggests that a game is a different form of discourse than film or literature; it stands to reason then that most of the confusion and failure to integrate story into game has the fundamental problem that designers and writers have had to force story into game with discourse from another popular medium. Game as its own form of discourse needs closer examination and evolution in order for story to be repeatedly added into game without compromising the principles of good game design. Most successes come from designers who intuitively understand this (or got it right through trial and error). One clear point is they achieved a balance by recognizing game is its own form of expression, and that story must be delivered with its own how─ not by tossing in story as it behaves in other forms of discourse like movies and books.
The concept and role of discourse is less familiar to game designers than that of story, and this may offer a clue as to why games are struggling with the implementation of story. Chatman tells us, “The events in a story are turned into a plot by its discourse, the modus of presentation. The discourse can be manifested in various media, but it has an internal structure qualitatively different from any one of its possible manifestations.” One of the problems then with translating story into game is that game must be examined as its own form with its own discourse. Implementing story in the classic way of other mediums such as writing and film has some success, but it’s missing the point that games are a different medium and are not story. I see three major issues of concern regarding this point.
The first point is that discourse concerns itself with narration. Both Plato and Aristotle distinguished between two forms of narration: mimesis and diegesis, or what we commonly know as “showing and telling” respectively. One is direct, and involves communication from a narrator, like an outside voice telling a story. The other is communicated by means of action. “Direct presentation presumes a kind of overhearing by the audience. Mediated narration, on the other hand, presumes a more or less express communication from narrator to audience.” In a video game, both forms have been used, but actual game play throws an interesting twist into the mix; the viewer largely controls the diegesis, whereas the game largely controls the mimesis (although the player can choose not to listen to or look at anything the designer intended). A lot of environment design is based around the concept of directing the attention of the player towards relevant game elements. This is a form of mimetic narration, but the audience (player) might choose to ignore it or miss it altogether, because unlike a film, the player indirectly controls what the camera views. The player takes on both the role of audience and to some degree, the narrator. Therefore traditional narrative forms need re-examination since they assume a narrator that is separate from the audience.
The second issue involves point of view of the audience. Video games use the term to explain the location of the camera, but the terminology does not accurately parallel the narrative use of the term. This is a complex issue that goes beyond the scope of this paper, but what is relevant is that the during the play experience, the player experiences the game from a narrative point of view as if the events happening to the character they are playing are actually happening to them. This distinction is important, because the audience is used to experiencing things indirectly in other types of discourse, and as a result entirely changes the experience. A lot of the problems of mixing story and game come down to the fact that most players really don’t want to experience the tragic and stressful things that happen to characters in many stories. The audience might sympathize—even empathize—with the plight of Frodo and his long arduous journey, but no one really wants to personally experience these things for recreation. In fact a game based around the trials of Frodo would probably be full of drudgery and boredom (“oh, the ring is so heavy—I have such a burden to bear—I am lost in the swamps of Mordor─ golem bit off my finger, this just sucks”.) If this was to be a good game concept, the designer would have to consider how the player would feel in the role of this character if he actually was the character.
In any interactive narrative then, it is unreasonable to ask the player to experience anything even close to what a tragic character himself would go through. What is needed is a milder version, a “hero-lite” version. If the designer makes the error of throwing the audience directly into the role of a character and then trying to have him experience everything the character would, the designer risks creating an experience that is far too intense and stressful, or more importantly not at all fun. Tone down the intensity level of the pain, and turn up the “fun” meter. This is generally understood in game design─ my point is that this is an entirely different form of discourse than film or literature, and needs to be addressed as such. In a game, the player is not only the audience but the character, and certain tragic circumstances cannot easily be translated into successful dynamics and play aesthetics.
The cause and effect relationship in plot offers some insight into the problem. Though the character in the story will not necessarily ever understand the cause and effect relationship in events happening to him in the story, the audience should eventually understand the consequences of the character’s actions as the story progresses to its end. Yet in a game, immediate feedback is required for the player to understand how his actions cause specific effects. This contradiction is best illustrated in the case of a group of people watching a friend play a video game. As the ‘audience’ watches the ‘character’ participate in the ‘plot’, they may accept consequences that the player will reject. Imagine a side-scroller adventure game where the player is trying to get past a chasm that requires swinging on a vine, but each time the player tries to jump for the vine he falls into the chasm. Viewers don’t need to know how to play the game or experience feedback from it to infer a cause and effect relationship. It is obvious the player is doing something wrong, and the result might be an amusing sequence of events where the player’s character keeps falling into the chasm. The player, however, keeps getting frustrated as he tries and tries again but cannot figure out what he is doing wrong. He can’t seem to establish a cause and effect relationship, and isn’t experiencing much of a story. In a game, the player is the character, and he should ultimately be able to establish a cause and effect relationship between his actions and their outcomes if the game is to feel like it has a plot.
The third issue of discourse deals with the contribution of the audience to the story. I am not referring to principles of interactivity here. Chatman explains, “Whether the narrative is experienced through a performance or through a text, the members of the audience must respond with an interpretation: they cannot avoid participating in the transaction. They must fill in gaps with essential or likely events, traits and objects which for various reasons have gone unmentioned.” Good environment designers understand this concept, and often suggest events and story through the appearance of the setting. Scratches on a car might lead one to guess at why and how they came about, for example. We are moving into a time when designers can create photographic textures and super realistic faces. Yet the game designer can sometimes accomplish more by not showing or telling everything. “The audiences capacity to supply plausible details is virtually limitless…” Early text MUDs and pixel games were taking advantage of this, whether intended or not. Chatman writes of the principal feature of selection as,
“…the capacity of any discourse to choose which events and objects actually to state and which to only imply. For example, in the ‘complete’ account, never given in all its detail, the ‘ultimate argument,’ or logos, each character obviously must first be born. But the discourse need not mention his birth, may elect to take up his history at the age of ten or twenty-five or fifty or whenever suits its purpose. Thus story in one sense is the continuum of events presupposing the total set of all conceivable details, that is, those that can be projected by the normal laws of the physical universe. In practice, of course, it is only that continuum and that set actually inferred by a reader, and there is room for difference of interpretation.”
In this case then what is not shown is as important sometimes as what is, and what is not told is often as important as what is. The player will fill in his own blanks. This is why too much exposition is bad, and too many “world details” can be uninteresting where not immediately relevant to the player− and even lead them to create false expectations of game play. There should be enough of these to spark interest and curiosity and spur the player forward to discover or fill in the rest for himself. This explains the response of players and designers who reject the idea of story in game (“I hate reading all that stuff”) and the overuse of text and exposition (“just give me the quest”). In the attempt to bring story into games, screenwriters and traditional storytellers use a form of discourse that has been highly developed in other medium such as film and novels, but is not ideal for a game.
A good example is the classic role-playing game quest text dialogue box. The player interacts with a non-player character and gets a long list of quest text. This is supposed to add flavor, but often the player skips the text and reduces it to the relevant goal. This is so true that most quest games like World of Warcraft and now Pirates of the Burning Sea have gone so far as to list the quest objective alone, since many players just skim over this text. It could be argued that removal of the extra text would remove the flavor and the illusion of the magic circle, thus reducing immersion. However, as of this writing, RPG engines largely rely on quest-based texts, and there are not many other options. Thus when forced to use text boxes, a designer should make sure that the text is meaningful and relevant to game-play, and well integrated into the narrative through plot satellites. By “training” the player that the text is relevant, soon the player might begin to pay extra special attention. Like clues in a mystery story, the little things that the characters say to the detective provide clues to the solving of the mystery. In this way, the dialogue is relevant to the goal.
The three issues involving discourse in games all center on the contradiction that traditional stories assume a narrator who is telling a story to an audience who will be separate from the characters in the story; yet in a game, the players are both the audience and the characters. The key difference here can be summarized by saying that the players have control over the story─ thus, there is both interactivity and plot.
The Plot vs. Interactivity Conundrum
Plot is concerned with the actions and happenings of a story. These events are not simply thrown together haphazardly; care must be taken to see that they are orchestrated in a way that creates an actual plot. Screenwriter Robert McKee? offers this: “…event choices cannot be displayed randomly or indifferently; they must be composed, and “to compose” in story means much the same thing it does to music. What to include? What to exclude? To put before and after what?” This is very much the same principle basic to all good design. Story-telling can be thought of as plot design. And like all design, there must be design goals and creative direction. So where then do we find goals and purpose in narrative design? Chatman emphasizes that events in narrative are not simply sequential and linear, but causative in nature. Rather than just an arranged series of events, plot requires some cause and effect. Even if events do not seem related early on, the audience expects to later understand this relationship. If it is never made clear, story breaks down.
The events in the beginning of a story do not need to have an obvious relationship, but as the story moves along, these events begin to move towards an ending that makes that explains their inclusion in the story. Chatman quotes Paul Goodman, “…in the beginning, anything is possible; in the middle, things become probable; in the end, everything is necessary.” Thus in designing a plot, the designer needs to know where these events are heading, or at least that the audience is expecting them to lead somewhere. “The working out of plot (or at least some plots) is the process of declining or narrowing possibility. The choices become more and more limited, and the final choice seems not a choice at all but an inevitability.” Aristotle called it verisimilitude, “ancient appeal to the probable, rather than the actual.”
The basic idea behind interactive storytelling is that the audience has some ability to alter or write the plot themselves. Designers have been struggling with the apparent contradiction of carefully structured plot and the concept of the viewer having the ability to change the plot. Chris Crawford has examined and thoroughly outlined the nature of this problem, “A plot is a fixed sequence of events that communicates some larger message about the human condition. In interactive storytelling, plot is replaced with a web of possibilities that communicate the same message.” Furthermore, “The plot is the storyteller’s predestined plan for the story’s outcome. Free will is analogous to interaction, for how else can players interact without exercising their free will?”
Crawford uses the interesting analogy of God as a game designer, in total control of the universe, yet who allows his subjects to have free will. The idea is that God sets the rules but doesn't micro-manage every detail. He creates the laws that put the universe in motion, but free will is where the decisions are made. “If you’re a process intensive designer like God…the characters in your universe can have free will within the confines of your laws of physics. …instead of specifying the data of the plotline, you must specify the processes of the dramatic conflict. Instead of defining who does what to whom, you must define how people can do various things to each other.” Thus a game has rules, but a plot specifies events. Therefore he says “plot and interactivity are incompatible. However, there is something higher, more abstract than plot. Call it “metaplot,” if you like. It’s something like a plot, only it’s specified by rules, not events.”
Thus plots are carefully designed so that all the events are heading towards an orchestrated ending by an author, but in an interactive system the audience is given the ability to change that outcome, and thus “ruin” the plot. “The problem is choice,” as Neo says in the Matrix— incorporating narrative structure into an interactive model means finding a way to incorporate user choice and still maintain a plot structure. Herein lies the common error in understanding discourse in games and interactive storytelling. This can be explained in this very simple way— the author is making the decisions for the characters in a traditional narrative. In an interactive story, the ‘audience’ makes the decisions, and thus the audience becomes a narrator. In an interactive story, there are two narrators working together, the player and the storyteller.
In order to resolve the contradictions between plot and interactivity, it is necessary to examine parallels in each of these structures and to and look for common points of overlap that can lead to a merging of the two. Aligning these commonalities with similar concepts in the structure of games can then lead to a single system that brings all three concepts together into one unified form.