Narrative in Multiplayer

First of all, I’d like to thank myself for mak­ing that (hopefully) fine dis­tinc­tion between art and enter­tain­ment last week, and tak­ing care of a lot of grunt-work for this week’s column. I couldn’t have planned it bet­ter. And so, fair reader, it may help you to read that post if you haven’t already done so.

Multiplayer is Soulless

This week’s topic is the mul­ti­player phe­nom­e­non, and how it relates to nar­ra­tive. Games almost always involve the con­struc­tion of a nar­ra­tive, even if said nar­ra­tive is merely a paragraph-long excuse for killing num­ber­less crowds of Enemy Type A. However, sim­ple excuses have become blasé in most video games, rel­e­gated to Serious Sam, vicious old-school nostalgia-inducers, some indie games, and most of the puz­zle genre. Even games like Gears of War, which would prob­a­bly have been bet­ter off just telling the player to “kill the Horde while your char­ac­ters quip in man-like fash­ion,” (NSFW) make an attempt at seri­ous nar­ra­tive, even weav­ing theme and dra­matic sequences into its oth­er­wise unin­ter­rupted blood­bath. Why? One can only hope that they assumed that they had to, because if that isn’t the case, then some­body must have thought that the Gears of War story was worth telling. In the attempt at nar­ra­tive, all such game modes become can­di­dates for “art”; they are telling a story, and thus that story is sub­ject to estab­lished meth­ods of judg­ment built for that style of expe­ri­ence.

Constructed nar­ra­tives are much less com­mon in mul­ti­player expe­ri­ence. Multiplayer is more often inter­ested in mulching/beating/shooting/destroying other play­ers and/or the com­puter with or against one’s fel­low player, or in other words, achiev­ing usu­ally arbi­trary and abstract goals with min­i­mal story sig­nif­i­cance, and it typ­i­cally remains only enter­tain­ment, with lit­tle to no artis­tic aspi­ra­tion. It is not uncom­mon to see entire titles released for this pur­pose (Left 4 Dead is the obvi­ous cul­prit here, which is really not much fun to play on your lone­some, but there are plenty of other titles, mostly FPS, in which the sin­gle player cam­paign is there mostly because it helps sell units). Multiplayer modes are almost always devoid of cutsce­nes, mean­ing­ful story pro­gres­sion, char­ac­ter growth, and really any­thing that could be remotely con­sid­ered “sto­ry­telling.” That means that mul­ti­player is bank­rupt in the nar­ra­tive depart­ment, yes?

Maybe not. At this point, how­ever, it becomes nec­es­sary to split up mul­ti­player games into a few cat­e­gories. It’s a really wide net I’m cast­ing here, and a bit of dis­tinc­tion will help. Some games will prob­a­bly fit into mul­ti­ple cat­e­gories, or have a mode that fits into one, and another that fits else­where.

Competitive Multiplayer

 

Street Fighter through Starcraft. These games are designed to be a test of met­tle in which the more pro­fi­cient (or lucky) player emerges vic­to­ri­ous. The goal is to defeat all com­ers and to stand atop the pile of their corpses with ban­ner held high. Team ver­sions of such game­play also exist in this realm, though Deathmatch is really the pure form. These modes are high on enter­tain­ment and low on art, and tend to empha­size the skill of the player over and above all else. Some play­ers approach these titles more casu­ally, seek­ing an expe­ri­ence of fun and not of dom­i­na­tion.

Cooperative Multiplayer

Gears of War 2’s Horde Mode is the iconic coop­er­a­tive model. Generally, the goal is not to be declared the “best,” but rather to work alongside other human beings to accom­plish a shared goal. Most of these tend to be much higher in enter­tain­ment than in art. The dif­fer­ences between com­pet­i­tive and coop­er­a­tive mul­ti­player modes are, per­haps, minor, but I want to make the dis­tinc­tion because I, at least, have a notably dif­fer­ent expe­ri­ence between the two styles. Cooperative styles of play force a player to think of the other mem­bers of his team con­stantly and that state of mind does change the expe­ri­ence of play.

Cooperative Story

Resident Evil 5 and Left 4 Dead 2 are good exam­ples of the coop­er­a­tive story. The player expe­ri­ences a nar­ra­tive alongside other human beings. By virtue of its nar­ra­tive, Cooperative Story games offer an expe­ri­ence of art, even if that isn’t nec­es­sar­ily the “point” of the game. Left 4 Dead is not about the story of the sur­vivors; it is about team­work and shoot­ing zom­bies. If any­thing, the story pro­vides a set­ting for that sub­ject, but by virtue of that set­ting, Left 4 Dead has nar­ra­tive qual­i­ties. What’s more, the char­ac­ters are gen­er­ally inter­est­ing, con­sis­tently por­trayed, and easy to empathize with. In addi­tion, the atmos­phere is appro­pri­ately bleak and moody, with some inter­est­ing (albeit entirely envi­ron­men­tal and optional) asides to the sto­ries of other sur­vivors, giv­ing a slightly wider scope to the apoc­a­lypse story being told. What lit­tle bit of art there is to be found in the nar­ra­tive of Left 4 Dead is qual­ity stuff. And, since it’s not try­ing to be any­thing else, we can’t fault them for amount of con­tent; in fact, the game prob­a­bly works best with the lit­tle traces that we do see, since its pri­mar­ily a sur­vival expe­ri­ence, not a story about the ori­gins of the zom­bie plague.

Where There Is No Story… 

So far, I haven’t exactly cov­ered any­thing new. But this is where things get crazy, folks.

I want to argue that, while no nar­ra­tive is nec­es­sar­ily intended in mul­ti­player modes out­side of the coop­er­a­tive story umbrella, sim­ple nar­ra­tives DO exist for the player. The player cre­ates these nar­ra­tives with the images and sounds that the game pro­vides because it is the nat­u­ral way of inter­act­ing with a series of syn­chro­nous events. Though empa­thy with one’s avatar char­ac­ter is cer­tainly less­ened in most mul­ti­player expe­ri­ences (even in L4D, I rarely feel all that con­nected to Ellis or Zoey), but it’s def­i­nitely still there, even if it’s just a desire to sur­vive and suc­ceed. In mul­ti­player, empa­thy is more sit­u­a­tional than per­sonal.

For exam­ple, one of the rea­sons Gears of War’s Horde mode suc­ceeds so well is because of the sen­sa­tion of hold­ing out against a supe­rior force. That story is firmly planted in our his­tory, and has thus become a story arche­type. Horde mode allows us to expe­ri­ence that arche­type first-hand. We can see the mon­strous hordes advanc­ing on our posi­tion, and we are cer­tain that death has come to claim us. This makes the breath­less com­bat of Horde all the more sat­is­fy­ing. While this is a fan­tas­tic exam­ple, not all mul­ti­player modes con­tain such an arche­typal sit­u­a­tion to empathize with. However, play­ers will STILL cre­ate nar­ra­tive for them, even if the game does lit­tle to rein­force that nar­ra­tive.

For this pur­pose, we will look at Starcraft’s mul­ti­player. On the sur­face, Starcraft is all about the mas­tery of abstract resource man­age­ment and suc­cess­ful micro-management which, essen­tially, aims to get the most dam­age out­put and take the least amount of dam­age for each indi­vid­ual unit, or to uti­lize a unit’s spe­cial abil­i­ties in the most effec­tive way pos­si­ble. That sounds really cold, but the actual expe­ri­ence is a lit­tle more inti­mate than that. This is espe­cially true in games with mul­ti­ple oppo­nents, since shift­ing loy­alties and strate­gies require you to con­stantly re-assess oppo­nents’ stances against you and their force make-up. I argue that the player is build­ing a nar­ra­tive as the game pro­gresses. It is a sim­ple nar­ra­tive, per­haps expressed in some­thing like, “I am win­ning, and I am press­ing the offen­sive, but he is a strong defen­sive player, so I need to be care­ful or I’m going to lose too many of my ground troops.” This is per­haps most obvi­ous post-game, when, in con­ver­sa­tions with one’s oppo­nents, one nat­u­rally grav­i­tates toward the moments in the game when a loser came back to win big. Moments like these also exist in the social con­scious­ness (all the big foot­ball upsets, for instance, ride on this same arche­type). If the game only existed as resource man­age­ment and micro-management to the play­ers, there would be no such thrill. Obvious, per­haps, but hey, who actu­ally thinks about these things?

So What?

Good ques­tion. Just because we build a nar­ra­tive for our mul­ti­player expe­ri­ences doesn’t mean that the modes are art. We do, after all, tend to build nar­ra­tives about lots of things that aren’t art, like foot­ball, as men­tioned above. But that does mean that we have the same basic response to mul­ti­player modes as to story modes; the story modes sim­ply provide addi­tional and more ele­gant tools for the build­ing of nar­ra­tive. This also means that mul­ti­player modes have the poten­tial to become art, if the nar­ra­tive expe­ri­ence evoked by a mul­ti­player mode does allow for reflec­tion and rev­e­la­tion. Such a game would be dif­fi­cult to build, par­tic­u­larly if you want player con­trol to mat­ter, sim­ply because allow­ing the play­ers to have con­trol and also reli­ably cre­at­ing a sat­is­fy­ing and rev­e­la­tory expe­ri­ence is tough as hell to accom­plish. But it is pos­si­ble. Roleplaying games accom­plish it all the time, and with a greater degree of player con­trol.