… or how I started dreaming a pipe dream

This post is in english due to it’s nature and terminology. It’s a rant about ‘interactive storytelling‘. I’ve had conversations about this thing for ages and from time to time it raises it’s head. It’s most well known advocate is Chris Crawford, the guy behind Balance of Power, for example.
The premise of interactive storytelling is that when the player plays a computer game, instead of having a linear plot and puzzles to follow, the player is free to explore other venues of the game and come up with multiple solutions to whatever he is facing. There’s multitude of examples even from way back; Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade used IQ (Indy Quotient) points to switch the path that the player used to travel to the game end. In Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis the player could choose how he wanted to complete the game, be it fists or just figuring stuff out. Newer examples of the same thing are Fahrenheit and Façade. The problem is that more or less, the player is just following different branches of the game with a game mechanic underneath that is hidden by the ‘fluff’. So instead of having actual free reign of choice to affect to the decisions, the player is still a slave to whatever mechanics the game has to offer.
What is a story?

The definition of a story hasn’t changed for ages. Ask any writer and they tell you the same. You can find this defition from multitude of sources. As Robert McKee writes, “All stories are structure”. In The Secrets of Writing Comics by James D. Hudnall writes about structure:
Aristotle was one of the first to write a treatise on the subject of crafting an effective tale. In “De Poetica” he laid the groundwork for the theory we now know as Story Structure.
Story Structure is the foundation upon which all stories are built. It is the framework which holds a story together. You cannot write a story without employing it. However, if you don’t understand the principles of story structure, you can easily make a mess. This is one reason why so many stories are bad. The authors didn’t effectively employ the principles of structure. It’s like that old biblical parable about the man who built his house on the sand, while another built his house on stony earth. The house built on the beach got destroyed because the foundation was laid on unstable ground. The same thing happens to a story framed with poor structure. It falls apart. The last thing any good writer wants is to spend days, months, or years on something that ends up a mess.
Structure is what encompasses any good story. There is no story without structure. It is as much about the characters in the story as it is about the pacing, setting beats and creating suspense. It’s not all about the hero’s journey, but all good stories include in one form or another the protagonist, antagonist and the object of desire for the protagonist. Be it happiness, money, destruction or anything in-between.
In the end, you can describe stories as being extremely brittle, because even the slightest change can destroy the structure. Stories can be told in a non-linear fashion, but linear or not, the structure is what holds it together. It is no wonder films like The Godfather or Shawshank Redemption are so wildly popular, it’s all in the structure. With poor structure you get another Gigli.
Story isn’t a story until it’s filtered, structured and delivered with the correct pacing. If you and your mates go and watch a soccer game, what is happening on the field is not a story. Only when the game ends and you end up in the pub, having a beer and recounting your experience of game, it becomes a story. How good of a story depends on how good you are at structuring, filtering, pacing and spicing it up. Pace it properly, deliver an exciting midpoint and end it with a surprising climax in the end and you’ll notice everyone in the bar is listening to you.
What is a game?
Games by definition are surrounded by rules and systems. They are structured to a degree, have an wildly interactive element to them and usually challenge the player to beat the other player or come to a conclusion of sorts to define a winner. You can call games interactive experiences if you wish. This is what games do by virtue of delineating rules, playing areas and mechanics. Within a game of tennis, anything can happen which fits inside the possibility space of it’s very simple and abstract rules.
The more abstract a game gets, the more interactive it gets. Exactly the reason why some of the old classics such as Chess or Go have their lasting appeal. Simple on top, indepth once you plunge into them. They are also extremely robust games because within the possibility space of the games, everything is possible and it’s up to the player how to proceed. Same thing with Counter-Strike.
The paradox of interactive storytelling

The problem which arises from these two confronting is the loss of abstraction. Complex interaction with a non-player character is extremely brittle instead of being robust. The more you try to construct it, the more the structures of the story begin to come into play and the more the breaks and cracks in the structure become evident. Unlike a game of tennis, which is very robust, a story is a complete structure where any element that appears out of context sticks out, makes you uncomfortable, spoils the mood. Stories are not robust.
Stories are more than just the classic three acts. Each of those acts also has a structure with the beginning, middle and end. No matter if they’re chronological or not. Each scene and sequence also follows this similar structure. Characters have arcs with beginning, middle and end that define what is revealed to the audience and when. Why stop there? The use of language can be structured as well. Language, symbolism that develops structurally. Look at Alan Moore’s V For Vendetta or Watchmen. Especially the latter is a no brainer why it’s the only graphic novel that has earned a Hugo award.
The component that governs the whole structure is timing. What element is revealed and when? How much? It’s a matter of milli-seconds in some cases. Control of timing is vital for any good story. This is why the film editor’s job, for example, is absolutely crucial. Same with a book editor. But it is interaction which destroys the structure.
With a branching game, it creates situations where every choice branch creates a necessity for a completely different set of structure. Some of the old fighting fantasy books, which I loved when I was a kid, the branch choices are pretty easy to contain, but in a game such as Monkey Island, it’s basically a string of pearls. They are not really interactive stories, but more like stories on rails with small bubbles of structure underneath the events. Even those have serious issues with timing.
The more interactive branches you have, the more structural branches they require. This plays hell with the whole issue of timing and quickly destroys any sense of scene structure. Soon you’ll need a system to govern this interactivity and each step forward undoes another part of timing and structure. System soon develops into a very abstract and robust little machine, goals you had become tasks and hey, what do you know, it’s a game after all with a story as an afterthought.
Stories and games are not just attributes at exact ends of a slider. You don’t have 30% game, 70% story. They are mutually exclusive. Look at any german boardgame out there. Each of them have a working game mechanic and system in place with a theme thrown at them as an afterthought. Instead of playing power politics and scheming in El Grande, the board might as well depict armies moving across Spain.
On the other end of the spectrum, you have games such as King Kong which I chose as an example since it sparked an interest in Hollywood directors to bring better stories into games. *Shudder*
The game of King Kong goes so far into trying to keep the story intact, that the actual game interaction becomes almost secondary. Player moves from room to room, doing incredibly simple tasks to proceed to the next room and the influence that the player has on the possibility space is extremely limited. If you want to get gamerpoints in XBox Live fast, playing through King Kong is one of the easiest ways since it practically plays itself.
Then you have the current trend in WW2 war games which rely on hugely scripted events in order to have any resemblance to Saving Private Ryan or any other WW2 movie. In these scripted events, your actions within the game become increasingly non-important. If the German SS-troops are blowing up that bridge ahead, it doesn’t matter if you run towards it as fast as you can or drive with a bicycle, it’s still going to blow up. Or unless you kill a squad of three german soldiers, your whole squadron will stay put ’til the end of the world ’til you do something, but your options are usually extremely limited due to the game trying to nudge you into taking out those germans in a particular way.
So when you talk about current war game experiences, it becomes this: “did you reach level 2 yet? nice graphics ehh?”. What it should be is this: “So after grabbing the ammo, I ran past the field dodging bullets, jumped into the ditch and dragged my wounded feet which seemed to be like 50 meters until I reached the machine gun, reloaded it and … bugger all, the thing jammed after two shots! So then I command Jimmy over there in the left flank to start chucking grenades at the enemy while I try to fix the jam…” and him responding “huh, when I was playing, Jimmy died in the previous campaign back in ’43 and I had loads of trouble with the same scenario. First of all, the germans were firing so much that they caused my 2nd team to fumble around with the grenades and blow up the machine gun nest!”. Now that’s a robust game. And what I just told you, that’s a story by the way, although not very good one.
…In the end

Games still give extremely nice experiences to the players. I’d go as far to say, that during the past ten years, we’ve seen incredible surge of incredible games and ways of playing. Nintendo DS branched out into segments that were inactive in the gaming front and I’m sure Wii will blow the roof. Which is why Revolution would have been a very appropriate name. Games don’t segregate players and the myth of female gamer is just that, a myth. This was proven by the poor attempt at Barbie etc. games, but do you see female gamers playing these? Nope. What they have going on is whatever wets their appetite. If a game is good, it will be played. Making stereotypical assessments of who likes what is narrow minded and embarassing.
As I said, games give nice experiences to players. I’ve played for 22 years and my highpoints are pretty common ones. System Shocks, Defender of the Crown, Skate or Die, Steel Panthers, Fallout and so on. Planescape: Torment is one of my favourite computer RPGs and it’s writing is one of the best around. I still have very fond memories of Monkey Island series and I’m a huge sucker for board games. But none of those tells a story like a piece of literature, movies, theater or poetry does. As I said, story isn’t a story until it’s structured, paced and in the hands of a master storyteller, delivered with finesse alongside with a cracking end. You could also argue that Monkey Island isn’t even a game, but that’s a topic for other discussion.
1 Kommentti