Monday, March 29, 2010

The Three -Mations

I consider a game's story to be the subset of narrative content authored for that game, which the player interprets to have some coherent meaning. The meaning does not necessarily need to be placed there purposely by the game's creators, it just needs to be perceived by the player through the intuitive pattern-matching we conduct as we go about trying to find meaning in all things. Story is just one of many types of feedback games can employ in response to the player's input. Thinking of story as another form of feedback, I think, is the key to tapping its potential in games -- as well as the key to integrating it into the design process in an appropriate way, while mitigating risk of the story derailing or constraining the design.

Game feedback, in general, provides information, confirmation, and affirmation. Story is no exception; I can draw an analogy between story and user interface design. In God of War III, a big spinning "O" button next to a prone enemy carries a specific, almost Pavlovian connotation: Here lies an enemy that you can savagely murder if you get close to it and press the corresponding button. The UI prompt is a reward, affirming your combat skills; it confirms the availability of a unique set of killing moves; and it informs you of the input required to access those moves. Good interface design in games is contextual and just feels right, in this fashion, because it's closely linked to player input and the affordances of the interface match the aesthetics of the game in general or the input in particular. Think of "You Are Dead", the game-over screen in Resident Evil. It works like a consolation prize, not a punishment. It's a pretty good screen.

Linear noninteractive game narrative tends to be ineffective because it's disconnected from the player's actions. However, there are numerous games with lots of noninteractive cutscenes that are still considered to have outstanding stories in them. These games range from Grim Fandango to Metal Gear Solid to Mass Effect. How is it that these examples break from the popular player-elitist idea that linear story is a bad thing for a game? The answer is that, in addition to having these lengthy story sequences in them, these games do the important small stuff too: inform, confirm, affirm through the story.

In Grim Fandango you can share your balloon animal shaped like Robert Frost with various characters, leading to unexpected comedy. In Metal Gear Solid, a character called Psycho Mantis looks for saved data for Castlevania: Symphony of the Night on your memory card, breaking the fourth wall as he points out your gaming preferences. In Mass Effect, you can shoot one of your party members dead if you don't like the way he's acting. By affirming the player's actions in these types of cases, these games inform the player of a wider-than-expected possibility space of interactions, which the player later confirms (or does not confirm) through additional interactions along the periphery of that space. These are examples of story working at its best. It's supported by a rich linear narrative in all three cases, which cushions these smaller, more-important story moments in deeper meaning. The result is three very different yet rewarding experiences that share in common a story-driven structure, where the player's input is acknowledged via story mechanisms and not just interface prompts as in God of War III. Nor are these games' stories simply playing out without respect for the player's actions, as is the case with many games reviled for their flashy noninteractive stories.

Animal Crossing is another excellent game that uses these types of techniques but does not have story in the traditional sense, because (following my first statement) it has no coherent meaning behind what happens in the story -- except for the thinnest possible premise of "Tom Nook gives you a home loan and eventually you pay him back." The game has the perfect amount of story for something whose underlying meaning concerns the simple pleasures of life. But even though Animal Crossing would never be considered a game story on par with Grim Fandango, or Metal Gear Solid, or Mass Effect, it is just as effective in its application of game-story principles. One of my favorite examples of this is in the game's clothes-making mechanic, where you can "paint" clothing patterns and put them on display in the local clothes store. This type of player expression is very common in games, which routinely let you change your character's hairstyle, paint your car, and so on. However, Animal Crossing takes these types of systems a step further by affirming your efforts, as when you find one of your town's animal residents wearing that shirt you made and complimenting you for your artwork.

Games rarely go to the trouble of confirming, let alone affirming, this type of player expression, as though we're all so confident in our ability to express ourselves that we don't want the world to judge or acknowledge our efforts. But, if you'll forgive another one of my analogies I've been meaning to commit to writing, think for a second about what happens the day after you get a new haircut. Either you're fishing for (or at the very least you're open to) compliments on your new look, or, if by some chance you're someone who knows her hair looks excellent, I figure you at least expect people (even just certain people) to notice the change. Conversely, you'd feel bad if no one noticed or seemed to notice. Doesn't mean you want to be fawned over in the way certain games vomit praise on you for your basest actions, like a mother indulging a spoiled child. You're sharp enough to observe subtle cues, as when someone who never once paid you a second glance does a quick double-take. And what a rush that is. Story in games should serve this end. All it really needs to do is acknowledge the player's input in a way that seems to give meaning to the player's actions, by being personal or specific or both. It also doesn't need to use a lot of words or cutscenes to accomplish this.

Sunday, March 28, 2010

The Gift of Torment

Released with no fanfare in December 1999, Planescape: Torment was one of the best games of the year largely on the strength of its one-of-a-kind story about immortality and human nature. Even though it wasn't a commercial success, I believe it's one of the most influential role-playing games of the last decade and ideas it pioneered have since found their way into much better-known games (mostly from BioWare), such as Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic and Dragon Age: Origins. Apart from the overall quality, size, and depth of the game's ambitious story, on the surface Torment was basically just another Infinity Engine game, a "total conversion" of Baldur's Gate with a weird cast of characters and an awesome voice cast. But even though Torment relied on the conventional mechanics of the time, I believe it introduced a radical idea that's had a profound influence on story in Western RPGs: player dialogue with subtext.

In other words, Torment is the first RPG to introduce player intent into dialogue, which may be contradictory to the substance of the dialogue -- it's a game in which you can say one thing and mean another, and use this to deliberately lie at times, by means of the authored choices presented to you.

In a typical RPG, you might be asked by a character to retrieve an item, and tell that person "Yes, I'll do it" even if you as a player don't really know if you're going to do it or not -- probably you just want the quest logged in case you stumble upon it. You don't think about these types of interactions, and, as evidenced by the completely disposable text content for quests in games like World of Warcraft, they do little to build a meaningful connection between you, your character, or the gameworld. But in this same type of situation, Torment typically would give you at least two options: "Yes, I'll do it" (Truth) and "Yes, I'll do it" (Lie). And it would fully support these choices -- lying would affect your character's moral alignment, leading to other changes in gameplay. But even when it didn't really matter whether you told the truth or not, the game made you stop and think about what you were saying.

I remember encountering this type of choice in the game for the first time and feeling frozen in my seat -- never before had I considered my options so carefully around a straightforward dialogue choice. Some previous RPGs, such as Fallout, might have let me play as a smartass, who might make a sarcastic quip instead of answering a question directly. But no game prior to Torment made me feel like I could, if I so chose, look another person in the eye and lie to him with a straight face.

Plenty of RPGs before and after let you play as morally evil characters, letting you randomly kill people if you want, usually just after saying something terrible to them. But this type of psychopathic villainy, while potentially exciting for a little while, tends to feel hollow because your ability to empathize with your character rapidly breaks down as you start massacring entire towns and looting people's corpses for their boots and gold. It's out-of-character and not the "right" way to play, even if it doesn't outright break the game. On the other hand, in Torment you could do some really deceptive, scheming stuff simply through talking to people -- and it made you feel connected and close to that evil, because everyone knows what it feels like to lie, and in Torment you have reasons not to be up front with everyone you meet. As well, the option of lying made the default act of telling the truth feel more consequential. By letting you get inside your character's head as well as your own head, Torment created such a strong connection with players like me.

It took years for anyone to improve on Torment's basic idea of letting you determine your character's intent and not just the content of his speech, but the Mass Effect games finally took this a step further through their system of subtext-driven dialogue. In those games, it's genuinely exciting to see the protagonist act out your dialogue choices, because you don't know exactly what Shepard is going to say or do -- you tend to just pick the emotion or intent behind the outcome you want, and your reward is seeing Shepard act it out faithfully, in most cases. The basic consequence of this is that dialogue sequences tend to be worth watching and listening to, something that's rather important for a game that's bothering to have tons of story content.

The Story So Far

I have a lot to say about games. But I started bottling it up a few years ago when I left my position as Editor-in-Chief of GameSpot to become a producer at Electronic Arts. At the time, I felt I had given up my right and authority as a critic of the game industry, because I'd accepted a job at one of the biggest publishers in the business, and -- on the surface at least -- that meant I had a vested interest in the success of my new employer. In August 2009, I left Electronic Arts behind, moved back home to the Bay Area, and took a job in the publishing division of 2K Games. For whatever reason, I'm less concerned now than I used to be that my words may be misconstrued. So I've resolved to use this space to write about the subject that interests me most, irrespective of my current job. That subject is the idea of games as stories.

As a producer on the Command & Conquer series, I started keeping a blog under pseudonym, which served as a sort of diary of my journey into game development. I maintained it for about two years but deleted it shortly after finishing my first full project, Command & Conquer Red Alert 3. I'd grown sick of the sound of my own voice in that blog, which threatened to become a list of predictable disappointments -- self-indulgent Internet tripe. The difference this time is that I have the guts to use my own name and have the focus to meditate on a specific topic and its far-reaching implications. This is a topic I like so much that there's no room for complaint.

There are a lot of very smart people writing about game narrative. This made me reluctant to weigh in, especially since many of them have achieved much more than I have. However, I've decided that I have a unique-enough perspective on the subject that my thoughts and views on games-as-story may not be so redundant or unnecessary, that they may be worth writing and sharing. You can be the judge of that, but either way, the act of writing critically on this subject helps me to better understand it on my slow pursuit of mastery over it -- a journey that, thankfully, I'll never get to the end of, for if I did, I'd surely find a great emptiness waiting for me there.

What makes me think I have something worth saying about game storytelling or narrative? This was a scary question. But I decided I have some legitimate qualifications, not the least of which is my background as the chief editor of a popular gaming publication that contributed to collective consciousness about what constitutes a good game story in the first place. There I presided over our reviews of games in general and authored many hundreds of them myself. I reviewed many kinds of games but my specialty was around narrative-driven games, including Western and Japanese role-playing games, action adventure games, certain shooters, and so on. In addition to my background as an editor and game critic, I studied English literature in college while working at GameSpot. And prior to getting into game development, I wrote game stories extracurricularly, while studying story structure and the way narrative works. I've since done uncredited game writing on a number of projects, especially Red Alert 3 where I designed many of the characters and unit personalities in that game, and wrote much of their dialogue. So I've had a chance to apply some of my thinking and the results were encouraging and enlightening.

The name of this blog is a reference to the classic Ultima series of role-playing games, and its three core moral principles, which are central to the stories of the best games in that series. Ultima IV and V are two of the most important games I've ever played, and that series is fundamental to my understanding of the potential of game narrative, so it's only fitting that I refer to it here. Besides, I think those three principles are essential to crafting any game narrative of sufficient quality.

I will always be a student of games. I'm just old enough now to where I feel embarrassed at not trying to share some of what I think I might know. Thanks for reading and I look forward to our conversation.