niedziela, 29 stycznia 2017

Trenched Warfare

War film has been huge­ly pop­u­lar since the begin­nings of the medi­um, and that style has def­i­nite­ly influ­enced the first-person shooter genre in video games. A great deal (half or more, I’d reck­on) of first-person shooter games fea­ture a war of some sort; only the rare shooter, such as the non-side-scrolling Metroid games, fea­ture a story that has a sole pro­tag­o­nist up again­st an unor­ga­nized, non-military foe who isn’t involved in some large cam­paign or plot. Instead, most mod­ern shoot­ers are war tales in some way or anoth­er, and the actions your pro­tag­o­nist takes through­out the game are sit­u­at­ed as part of a larg­er effort. You’re not aim­ing to kill ‘em all or get a MacGuffin for its own sake; instead, you’re hit­ting sup­ply lines, halt­ing offen­sives, watch­ing your allies die hor­ri­bly or hero­ical­ly sac­ri­fice them­selves, shut­ting down (or launch­ing) nuclear strikes, or seek­ing out a MacGuffin to turn the tide of the war. This is admit­ted­ly more real­is­tic than the one-man-army style of story, but it also has its own set of tropes that FPS games (and 3rd-person shoot­ers that focus on war, though they seem less like­ly to focus on the topic) have had lit­tle luck sub­vert­ing or avoid­ing, result­ing in stale and pre­dictable nar­ra­tives and char­ac­ters.
I’ll be piggy-backing off of my ear­lier arti­cle on the hero nar­ra­tive in this dis­cus­sion, because I think the out­li­nes of the hero nar­ra­tive are par­tial­ly what makes the war sto­ries por­trayed in video games so stale and unin­ter­est­ing. If you’d prefer not to re-read the arti­cle, the salient point is this: the hero nar­ra­tive of most video games, fea­tur­ing a pro­tag­o­nist who over­comes all fail­ures and who is the most impor­tant man in the room, has near­ly been exhaust­ed. In fact, such a pro­tag­o­nist rarely suits a war story.

War… War Never Changes

Well, it’s not exact­ly that sim­ple, Mr. Perlman. War sto­ries are fun­da­men­tal­ly inter­est­ing to us and, out­side of video games, they con­tain diverse themes and struc­tures. Compare Schindler’s List, Inglourious Basterds, Saving Private Ryan, Glory, Apocalypse Now, and All Quiet on the Western Front. Each film con­tains rad­i­cal­ly dif­fer­ent themes, char­ac­ters, and tone. They inves­ti­gate dis­parate aspects of war with var­ied amounts of rev­er­ence and black humor, and show us a wide range of who the sol­dier is, and what he (or she) can become.
You would be hard-pressed to find such range in video game por­tray­als of war. The typ­i­cal model ignores the com­plex­i­ties of war for a sur­pris­ing­ly black-and-white por­tray­al that does not lend itself to the explo­ration of mature themes; you are almost always a defend­er of jus­tice and virtue again­st the heart­less (or duped) foes of your nation, and “mas­sacre fatigue” is a well-documented prob­lem in many FPSgames. When you kill a man in most war games, you’re unlike­ly to feel any­thing other than a small sense of vic­to­ry. While I don’t think that this is at all respon­si­ble for any social ills or the actions of unsta­ble indi­vid­u­als, that games inspire only such under­whelm­ing respons­es is unfor­tu­nate.
Few war games actu­al­ly engage with the dif­fi­cul­ties of war; sup­port­ing char­ac­ters are much, much more like­ly to cheer and quip when you blow anoth­er human’s skull open than to express dis­gust, sor­row, or sim­ply not com­ment. Admittedly, I’ve never been in a war, so that may be the way it hap­pens, but I sort of doubt it. In most (qual­i­ty) war films, such behav­ior would qual­i­fy the char­ac­ter as a Jerk Ass, if not a Complete Monster, and is gen­er­al­ly there to illus­trate either how war can change an indi­vid­u­al or how war can let cer­tain peo­ple be just as mis­an­throp­ic as they always were. This does not apply to campy and/or gore-fest films, but I’d hes­i­tate to call them war films since they’re not actu­al­ly inves­ti­gat­ing war as a con­cept but rather using it as a vehi­cle for sim­pler thrills. But in most video games, a squad will more often than not have at least one per­son who dis­plays anti-social and/or psy­cho­pathic behav­ior, per­haps only when viewed out­side the actu­al game nar­ra­tive, since it is excep­tion­al­ly unlike­ly that such a char­ac­ter will be called out for their blood-thirst. It’s actu­al­ly a lit­tle more than not being chal­lenged in that atti­tude, actu­al­ly; the game world doesn’t respond to their behav­ior, thus imply­ing that it is a fine respon­se to war.
A pow­er­ful con­trib­u­tor to this prob­lem is the black-and-white qual­i­ty of the nar­ra­tive; those on the other side are either evil or signed up on evil’s side, so there’s no sense in regard­ing them as human (or sen­tient things with feel­ings, if we’ve got aliens). Personally, I think the pro­lif­er­a­tion of that char­ac­ter arche­type is amaz­ing. War movies have pre­sent­ed that arche­type to great effect before, either as a foil or as a way to show just how dark and ter­ri­fy­ing the world can be, but video games have adopt­ed it for dif­fer­ent rea­sons entire­ly. I think that there is a fun­da­men­tal dif­fer­ence of goals and con­tent in most films about war ver­sus most games about war.
In most games about war, the action is the point: most of the play expe­ri­ence will be made up of run­ning, gun­ning, and tak­ing cover as enemy fire zips over­head. Between eighty (at the very least) to ninety-five per­cent of the play-time will con­sist of heat­ed fire­fights, or mov­ing into a posi­tion to have a heat­ed fire­fight, since that is the part of war that is adrenaline-fueled and is most obvi­ous­ly dra­mat­ic, since the stakes become life-and-death. But it’s a mis­take to assume that those stakes make a game dra­mat­ic, espe­cial­ly when your own character’s repeat­ed deaths and even the deaths of your allies pass­es by with­out a hint of emo­tion­al res­o­nance. Intense bat­tle sce­nes are so engag­ing in films and books par­tial­ly because we don’t know whether the char­ac­ters that we care about will sur­vive them; this is true in any story with seri­ous stakes, but it is espe­cial­ly true of war sto­ries, in which the threat of sud­den death is a very impor­tant theme. That ten­sion, and thus that theme, can­not exist in a war game. Even if an ally becomes cher­ished by the play­er, when that ally dies, it will be in a cut-scene, and will prob­a­bly be slight­ly removed from the core expe­ri­ence. What’s more, all per­son­al respon­si­bil­i­ty on the part of the play­er will be neg­li­gi­ble. The play­er will not think, “I got my friend killed,” or “I wasn’t good enough,”; the play­er will instead think, “Wouldn’t have hap­pened if I was play­ing in that moment.”
Because con­trol of the char­ac­ter is taken from the play­er at the most dra­mat­ic moment, when the sup­port­ing character’s life is in the bal­ance, the play­er is more like­ly to chalk it up to the inep­ti­tude of the main char­ac­ter or sup­port­ing char­ac­ter instead of inter­nal­iz­ing or ratio­nal­iz­ing the death of the ally, which is essen­tial to access­ing the expe­ri­ence of the griev­ing sol­dier. For the most part, though, the “dra­mat­ic” fight sce­nes are devoid of actu­al drama, because named allies are almost always invin­ci­ble, and every ally who might die is a name­less mook, and is utter­ly unim­por­tant to the play­er. This means that, for all the excite­ment that fire­fights bring, they can actu­al­ly get in the way of an engag­ing nar­ra­tive and pre­vent a game from address­ing the themes it oth­er­wise might.
However, I think that an even big­ger prob­lem exists between the con­ceits of the typ­i­cal hero nar­ra­tive and those of most war nar­ra­tives.

Spartans ‘R’ Us

The super-soldier is hard­ly a new idea, but it has never been as pro­lific as it is in war games. It’s achieved a near-100% sat­u­ra­tion rate. This is the notion that the pro­tag­o­nist is the most impor­tant sol­dier on the bat­tle­field.  He (or she, but given the form, “he” is real­ly the safe bet) is wherever impor­tant things are going down; he turns the tides in every major bat­tle; he can­not die; if he is not some sort of lead­er­ship who mixes it up on the front lines any­way, then his mil­i­tary deci­sions turn out to be bet­ter than his own inept sergeant’s deci­sions; he often decides the fate of the war by his time­ly action and his unbe­liev­able defense/capture of the MacGuffin despite over­whelm­ing odds of fail­ure. This should sound like just about every war game you’ve ever played. It should also sound very dis­sim­i­lar to any qual­i­ty war film or book you’ve ever read. There’s a num­ber of rea­sons why the hero nar­ra­tive does not pre­pare a prop­er envi­ron­ment for inves­ti­gat­ing the themes of war.
1.There is a cen­tral pro­tag­o­nist, and he is a bad-ass.
The focus is not on sol­diers, and how the com­mon man deals with war. It’s on the gruff dude with an atti­tude and one-liners to spare. It’s on the vet­er­an who is already awe­some and battle-hardened. It is on the indi­vid­u­al who is the minor­i­ty in most actu­al wars, and who is not active­ly chang­ing before our eyes in respon­se to alarm­ing war stim­uli. Look to the Master Chief, Marcus Fenix, any Call of Duty pro­tag­o­nist, Tomas Sevchenko, or Nathan Hale. They are super-human, either in the way that the uni­verse treats them or because they’re actu­al­ly super-human, in the case of the Chief and Hale. The play­er encoun­ters the war through the eyes of this bad-ass killer.  Fear has no place in the minds of these indi­vid­u­als, and death can­not touch them.  They are immune to all of the things that make war inter­est­ing, on the psy­cho­log­i­cal front.  And if other char­ac­ters behave like a nor­mal per­son might (with fear, trem­bling, and panic), they seem weak or pathet­ic by com­par­ison, and any emo­tion­al link that might trans­mit that “war is hor­ri­ble” to the play­er fails instant­ly.
Quite sim­ply, from a nar­ra­tive stand­point, war is inter­est­ing because of what it does to peo­ple; if the char­ac­ter the play­er is inhab­it­ing is already used to war, and receives no new rev­e­la­tions through the course of the game, then the play­er will have a dif­fi­cult time receiv­ing any sort of expe­ri­ence from the vir­tu­al war. Likewise, this means that the cast of the game isn’t an ensem­ble, which could show us how war affects mul­ti­ple char­ac­ters.  Thus, per­haps war games might be bet­ter off with mul­ti­ple protagonists/main char­ac­ters.
2The hero must be incred­i­bly vital to the war effort.
Which isn’t exact­ly how real war works at all, and the best war films make this clear: war is an insane­ly com­mu­nal effort. Occasionally large events will hap­pen that change the course of a the­ater of war, but these are in the minor­i­ty. Usually, how­ev­er, in video game tales, the hero nar­ra­tive demands that the hero be in exact­ly the most impor­tant place at a given moment, right in place to steal the nuclear codes or some other Item of Essential Value that will allow the allies to win the war for good. This makes the game obvi­ous­ly dra­mat­ic, and obvi­ous­ly inter­est­ing, but it also destroys more sub­tle pos­si­bil­i­ties, like a focus on char­ac­ter rela­tion­ships and issues, while also ignor­ing the pre­dom­i­nant expe­ri­ence of war. What’s more, since near­ly every war game has such a large scope, this means that a large-scope game only has so many inter­est­ing nar­ra­tive devices it can employ with­out feel­ing tired and over-done.
3The ene­mies are never right.
I men­tioned this ear­lier, but it bears repeat­ing. A hero­ic nar­ra­tive can­not invoke sym­pa­thy for the vil­lains, and hon­est­ly, if it human­izes them at all the nar­ra­tive starts to break down. The play­er can­not be won­der­ing whether the sol­dier he just killed had a wife and child, and so the design­ers of war games tend to keep things excep­tion­al­ly black-and-white. This is a poten­tial prob­lem in every story, but it is a griev­ous error in war sto­ries. Addressing this theme is one of the best things that war sto­ries can accom­plish, and it’s unfor­tu­nate that the game will prob­a­bly have no qualms about paint­ing your foes in the broad­est of strokes just to keep your enjoy­ment of the expe­ri­ence as guilt-free as pos­si­ble. Making you think is not the goal of such games; addic­tive shoot­ing game-play is. Obviously, there’s noth­ing inher­ent­ly wrong with that deci­sion… it just tends to gen­er­ate bad art.

It’s A Game, Dude

So what if a game doesn’t actu­al­ly reflect any real war expe­ri­ence? That’s not a prob­lem, right?
Well, it is if we want games that seri­ous­ly deal with the con­cept of war, and if we want games that address the themes of war art­ful­ly and with matu­ri­ty. What’s more, there’s a great deal of expe­ri­ence in war that is intrigu­ing, inter­est­ing, and ripe for gam­ing; it’s just not get­ting any play because of the stub­born­ness of the hero nar­ra­tive and the suc­cess of the high-stakes plot model. There are plen­ty of other sto­ries worth telling.
Have you played any war games that actu­al­ly reveal a more typ­i­cal war expe­ri­ence, or that have made you think about the nature of war, or how war affects indi­vid­u­als? Let me know! I’d love to play them, and I’d love to hear your thoughts on this.

niedziela, 15 stycznia 2017

The Sandbox

I have already writ­ten a post on the mean­ing­ful game, and that might be impor­tant to read before you step into this one, because I’m going to inves­ti­gate two speci­fic traits that I list in that post. The speci­fic traits I am inter­est­ed in dis­cussing are: 1. The Meaningful Game does not allow the player’s choic­es or pos­si­ble actions to derail the game or con­tra­dict its char­ac­ters, and 2. The Meaningful Game does not con­tain side-quests. These two points are most com­mon­ly bun­gled in games that reflect the “sand­box,” “free-roaming,” or “open-world” style of design, and so I’d like to inves­ti­gate the nar­ra­tive chal­lenges that appear when build­ing such a game, and address the appar­ent slid­ing scale between depth and width, or free­dom and con­sis­ten­cy. But I’ll start by defin­ing what I mean by “sand­box” and “open-world,” and address­ing why such mod­els are pop­u­lar.

Absolute Freedom, Mostly

As has been pre­vi­ous­ly noted in var­i­ous posts, one of the dis­tinc­tive qual­i­ties of games (both video and role-playing) is the inter­ac­tiv­i­ty of a game, or the con­trol that the play­er has over a char­ac­ter, coun­try, and/or nar­ra­tive. Games express this free­dom in a vari­ety of ways, but it’s hard to argue that the great­est expres­sion of char­ac­ter free­dom can be found in games that fit the sand­box model.
Now, open-world games are slight­ly dif­fer­ent than sand­box games, but they reflect a sim­i­lar desire and have sim­i­lar aims. Open-world games are an answer to the “lev­els” of early gam­ing, which offered lin­ear envi­ron­ments expe­ri­enced in a pre-determined sequence. These games more close­ly resem­bled the style of art and enter­tain­ment that came before (mim­ic­k­ing nov­els or films), since the only real free­dom that play­ers could exert was often through the phys­i­cal behav­ior of their avatar char­ac­ter, and poten­tial ends were either “Success,” if the play­er best­ed the chal­lenges of the game, or “Failure,” if the play­er did not per­form ade­quate­ly. Even games that did not have a defined order to lev­els, such as Mega Man, placed sim­i­lar struc­ture before the char­ac­ter. An open-world game seeks to break down the arti­fi­cial bar­ri­ers between dis­crete ele­ments of a game’s envi­ron­ment, instead includ­ing it all in one “world.” However, it is impor­tant to note that there are always lim­its to a game world; all of it must be pro­grammed, and there will always be walls enclos­ing the play­er, whether they are invis­i­ble, illu­so­ry, a level-wrap (think Pac-Man), or enforced by a character’s refusal to leave the area of nar­ra­tive impor­tance. So open-world games are defined more explic­it­ly by their refusal to draw bound­aries between sec­tions of the game and the abil­i­ty to freely explore those sec­tions.
Sandbox games are often syn­ony­mous with open-world games because they essen­tial­ly do to nar­ra­tive con­straints what open-world games do to envi­ron­ments, and it’s eas­ier for that nar­ra­tive free­dom to be expressed in an open-world than a level-based game. Sandbox games will occa­sion­al­ly do away with the notion of a main plot, but for the most part the plot is avail­able as one option among many, and some­times the play­er can ignore the main plot (and thus the whole notion of “com­plet­ing” the game) to instead pur­sue other tasks in the game-world. Thus, sand­box games often fea­ture pro­lific and prodi­gious side-quests, if they are not com­posed entire­ly of small mis­sions that avoid a main plot com­plete­ly. Sandbox games encoun­ter the same inter­nal para­dox as open-world games, name­ly that there is a limit to what the game can offer. Just as there must be arti­fi­cial con­straints regard­ing the size of the world, there remain arti­fi­cial con­straints in the nar­ra­tive (or non-narrative) struc­ture of sand­box games, such that even­tu­al­ly the play­er will sim­ply run out of things to do or run into sit­u­a­tions where the world can­not be inter­act­ed with in a speci­fic way. So just as open-world games are defined by their refusal to draw bound­aries between “lev­els,” sand­box games are defined by their refusal to draw bound­aries between “right task” or “plot task” and “other game actions.” In other ways, it does not pro­scribe how the play­er should play the game beyond the nat­u­ral con­straints that pro­gram­ming only a cer­tain num­ber of ways that the player’s avatar can inter­act with the world gen­er­ates.
This style of game is so pop­u­lar pre­cise­ly because it gives a great deal of a cer­tain type of free­dom to the play­er. The play­er may tack­le tasks that the play­er is most invest­ed in, and in the order that the play­er wish­es. It also allows the play­er to set his or her own pace in the game, which could be a good or a bad thing; I’ll address this in a bit. Essentially, these games offer thou­sands of nuggets of expe­ri­ence, and the play­er is allowed to pick and choose which nuggets he or she will “con­sume”, and in which order. The game is a gate­way to a large buf­fet of poten­tial expe­ri­ences. However, I think that this pro­claimed free­dom can be a trap for the play­er as much as a boon, and I also think it’s worth eval­u­at­ing whether the pur­suit of more free­dom in-game is a wor­thy task, and espe­cial­ly whether this pur­suit gen­er­ates bet­ter art, or at least allows the play­er to either bet­ter access good expe­ri­ences in a game, or access bet­ter expe­ri­ences with­in a game. I’d also like to inves­ti­gate whether this model of game bet­ter lends itself to cer­tain sorts of nar­ra­tive; after all, struc­ture and mechan­ics may ben­e­fit one type of story, and ren­der anoth­er less enjoy­able or com­plete­ly inac­ces­si­ble. By the end of the arti­cle, I hope to iden­ti­fy what sorts of sto­ries the sand­box style best serve, and what types of sto­ries sand­box games should avoid.

The Cost of Freedom

In Polishing the Diamond, Enlightening the Mind, Jae Woong Kim writes “Absolute free­dom is lone­li­ness.” I think that this describes my aver­age expe­ri­ence with sand­box games. Take Oblivion as our first exam­ple. In order to give the play­er max­i­mum free­dom in the pro­duc­tion of this char­ac­ter, the play­er starts the game by gen­er­at­ing a char­ac­ter of any race and with any set of favored abil­i­ties (or ways to inter­act with the game), regard­less of whether these choic­es are intel­li­gent deci­sions or not. The choice of race does have some small influ­ence on your abil­i­ties (some­times a big influ­ence), but it has very, very small nar­ra­tive reper­cus­sions. Your abil­i­ties can deter­mine what nar­ra­tives you have access to in-game, but the choice itself has no impact on the nar­ra­tive.
In almost all ways, your char­ac­ter is a blank slate; more­over, the tools that the game give you to flesh out that character’s per­son­al­i­ty are not very diverse, nor does the game as a whole take much notice. In the pur­suit of giv­ing the play­er absolute free­dom in his or her envi­ron­ment, the depth of dis­tinct nar­ra­tives (that con­tain speci­fic main char­ac­ters, a uni­fied theme, and a cohe­sive “plot”) tends to be shal­low, short, and emo­tion­al­ly stunt­ed. It is hard to lay this fail­ure at the feet of the writ­ers; after all, they’re respon­si­ble for thou­sands of non-player char­ac­ters. In an attempt to give as wide an expe­ri­ence as pos­si­ble, and to provide such a diverse range of expe­ri­ences (includ­ing rad­i­cal­ly diver­gent sys­tems of mechan­ics with­in a sin­gle game, such as a stealth sys­tem, magic sys­tem, melee com­bat sys­tem, ranged com­bat sys­tem, lev­eled sys­tems for every­thing from alche­my to armor, and the attempt­ed uni­fi­ca­tion of these sys­tems) and nar­ra­tive sup­port for each expe­ri­ence means that the game is spread thin. If more focus is given to any one por­tion of the game, then whole sys­tems might have got­ten the axe… prob­a­bly includ­ing the “Axe” skill.
The play­er never has a dearth of options in Oblivion, but unfor­tu­nate­ly every option pro­vides a nar­ra­tive about as ful­fill­ing as any other game’s side-quest. Oblivion falls short of being a Meaningful Game sim­ply because the play­er rarely, if ever, feels that any­thing mean­ing­ful is going on, and his play­er char­ac­ter is mean­ing­ful and inter­est­ing only because the play­er inhab­its him or her. This would be less of a prob­lem if inter­est­ing char­ac­ters pop­u­lat­ed the world, but they don’t.
If you’re unfa­mil­iar with Oblivion and games like it, here is an exam­ple of a sin­gle quest. The game is absolute­ly full of sit­u­a­tions like these, and it dis­plays the level of depth that all but a few char­ac­ters in the game dis­play. I am fair­ly cer­tain that the design­ers of Oblivion were more inter­est­ed in cre­at­ing the broad expe­ri­ence of “There is a whole world out there wait­ing for me to inter­act with it in minor ways” than the expe­ri­ence of “I am a per­son doing mean­ing­ful things.” This is gen­er­al­ly true of most sand­box games; the veneer of free­dom and option comes at the sac­ri­fice of depth, emo­tion­al­i­ty and mean­ing.
Oblivion lends cre­dence to the depth vs. width scale, that if a game grows wider in options and con­tent, then that con­tent will be less deep and reac­tive. While this scale isn’t a given, it is use­ful in express­ing why the events of the game are not often com­pelling or engag­ing, at least when assessed as a nar­ra­tive. While play­er free­dom is what makes video games a unique art form, if that free­dom is viewed as an end (high free­dom equals a good game) instead of a means (play­er choice is a vehi­cle through which we can tell a com­pelling story suit­ed to the medi­um), then it will not pro­duce a Meaningful Game.
The fact is that it is dif­fi­cult to cre­ate a video game with a com­pelling nar­ra­tive or, per­haps more accu­rate­ly, few video games suc­ceed at pre­sent­ing a com­pelling nar­ra­tive. I also believe that, for a game to be mean­ing­ful (and qual­i­ty art), its ele­ments must be qual­i­ty. If such a game has a nar­ra­tive, then it must be a qual­i­ty nar­ra­tive. It’s my opin­ion, then, that if a sand­box game presents a sin­gle, “main” nar­ra­tive, then the entire sand­box must exist with­in the nar­ra­tive in order for the game to be mean­ing­ful, and prob­a­bly in order for the game to be qual­i­ty art. There are also alter­na­tives to a sin­gle main nar­ra­tive, which I’ll get to in the next sec­tion.
Oblivion is indica­tive of most sand­box expe­ri­ences in that, while it is the pro­duct of a great deal of work and effort, and is cer­tain­ly admirable in many respects, it fails to be mean­ing­ful due to its shal­low­ness and the deriv­a­tive qual­i­ty of its con­tent. In other words, for all their scope, and arguably because of their scope, sand­box games tend to be bad art.

Paper Beats Rock, Sandbox Beats Story

The sand­box is pop­u­lar for a rea­son: there are a lot of things to like about the sand­box. Player free­dom IS inter­est­ing, and the abil­i­ty to set your own pace and access the con­tent that you find inter­est­ing soon­er rather than later can be a good thing. Moreover, I don’t think that the nar­ra­tive fail­ings of most sand­box­es are a trait of the sand­box, but it does seem to indi­cate that simul­ta­ne­ous­ly cre­at­ing a cen­tral nar­ra­tive and a sand­box is a self-defeating route. The typ­i­cal nar­ra­tive for­mu­la seen in most games clash­es with the notion of absolute play­er free­dom, either gen­er­at­ing mas­sive incon­sis­ten­cies in char­ac­ter or plot, or sim­ply forc­ing the char­ac­ter or plot to be so empty that they mere­ly serve as a rough moti­va­tor for the events of the game (or the plot that’s there because they said we need­ed a plot), which both gen­er­ate bad art.
In some tales, the sand­box style sim­ply does not make sense. In any nar­ra­tive in which there is an impor­tant cen­tral nar­ra­tive and the side-events detract from pur­su­ing a larg­er, more press­ing issue, a sand­box does not suit the nar­ra­tive. The first arti­cle on the mean­ing­ful game spoke on side-quests, and the points that I made regard­ing them holds just as true for the way that sand­box­es inter­act with cen­tral nar­ra­tives, so I won’t tread over that ground again. For the most part, then, I will argue that sand­box games should not attempt to fol­low any sort of lin­ear nar­ra­tive; they sim­ply aren’t suit­ed to that type of story. Infamous, Fallout 3, Grand Theft Auto… these games are all fun, but they all have a cen­tral nar­ra­tive that falls flat because of its loca­tion in a sand­box, and because the devel­op­ers decid­ed that hav­ing a sand­box was more impor­tant than mak­ing the story worth­while and com­pelling.
Assassin’s Creed (the first one; the sec­ond begins to lose this trait) is an exam­ple of a game that suc­cess­ful­ly builds a cen­tral nar­ra­tive into a sand­box style game. This is because the nar­ra­tive is in no way sac­ri­ficed to play­er free­dom, because Altair’s goals are always para­mount and are the source of all his actions, because even “filler” activ­i­ties often use the oppor­tu­ni­ty to fur­ther char­ac­ter­ize Altair and the world he lives in, and because there is very lit­tle in the game that isn’t designed to belong with­in the “cen­tral” expe­ri­ence and nar­ra­tive. Hunting down flags and ran­dom tem­plar begins to feel a lit­tle game-like, but the game pre­dom­i­nant­ly rewards actions that drive the game along, thus main­tain­ing a prop­er pace, and, more impor­tant­ly, never inter­rupt­ing the dis­tance between the play­er and Altair. Most sand­box games do not fea­ture so stel­lar an imple­men­ta­tion; Assassin’s Creed’s focus on story and con­sis­ten­cy is the excep­tion.
Therefore, I argue that in order for the sand­box to be mean­ing­ful, the devel­op­ers must avoid sim­ply slap­ping a typ­i­cal, straight­for­ward, novel- or blockbuster-style nar­ra­tive onto a sand­box and expect­ing it to be suc­cess­ful. Different forms often demand a change in con­ven­tion and struc­ture, and the sand­box rarely receives prop­er treat­ment in this regard; instead, if a nar­ra­tive exists, it is a typ­i­cal, straight­for­ward affair strung like a thin thread through the mid­dle of the sand­box, and its qual­i­ty is usu­al­ly poor or, at best, rough­ly equal to the qual­i­ty of the nar­ra­tive in the rest of the game.

But It Doesn’t Have To Be This Way

Sandbox games could become much more mean­ing­ful if they fol­lowed Assassin’s Creed’s exam­ple, but the truth is that the tra­di­tion­al nar­ra­tive model doesn’t func­tion as well in a sand­box (even AC has reg­u­lar slip-ups, becom­ing deriv­a­tive here and there). Luckily, there are many kinds of story, and many ways to incor­po­rate story into a sand­box.
Right now, the most obvi­ous model of hero­ic story-telling is what we see in nov­els and action/adventure films. These are long-form sto­ries with high stakes, and they typ­i­cal­ly fea­ture a con­sis­tent build in ten­sion and con­flict until the “final con­fronta­tion,” in which the hero van­quish­es the vil­lain that has tor­ment­ed him or her for so long. It is this model, the sin­gle, unin­ter­rupt­ed, build­ing hero nar­ra­tive, that is most com­mon­ly seen in games, and sand­box games often wind up with this sort of nar­ra­tive sim­ply because games today need nar­ra­tives, and stick­ing to the mold is either the obvi­ous choice, the only per­ceived option, or the choice that seems like­ly to sell best, since it has worked so well in near­ly every other game.
But if we step out­side of video games for a moment, we can see that there are many ways to tell a hero nar­ra­tive; heroes don’t just exist in nov­els and feature-length films. The mod­els exhib­it­ed by tele­vi­sion shows (i.e Buffy, Star Trek, Veronica Mars) and col­lec­tions of short sto­ries (i.e Elric and Conan) offer a pow­er­ful alter­na­tive to the feature-length nar­ra­tive, and even con­tain meth­ods of break­ing up a cen­tral nar­ra­tive or doing away with the cen­tral nar­ra­tive alto­geth­er. Conan sto­ries are strung togeth­er by the char­ac­ter, noth­ing more; Star Trek: The Next Generation is a con­tin­u­ous tale because it deals with the same char­ac­ters, but for the most part each episode is a reset. There is some sense of “whole story,” in that the indi­vid­u­al tales are linked, but the tales can be accessed indi­vid­u­al­ly, and there is no design for a grand nar­ra­tive that builds to a huge pay-off.
In my opin­ion, the tropes and mod­els of these short-form sto­ries provide a much bet­ter rubric for sand­box games than do cen­tral nar­ra­tives. Instead of declar­ing one par­tic­u­lar series of events the “main” story and mak­ing every­thing else filler, this model would real­ize that a sand­box game is real­ly try­ing to tell a whole host of sto­ries, but would remove the temp­ta­tion to let the narrative’s qual­i­ty slide. I expect that, in order for the aver­age sand­box game to be a mean­ing­ful game, the devel­op­ers will have to take cues from tele­vi­sion shows and short sto­ries, and so seek to tell tales of lim­it­ed scope and, hope­ful­ly, with a con­sis­tent­ly high value of emo­tion­al con­tent and mean­ing.
I’m curi­ous to know what you think about this idea. I sus­pect that a par­a­digm shift is what’s required for sand­box games to become mean­ing­ful and man­age­able; do you agree? Or do you think that the prob­lem lies else­where?

niedziela, 1 stycznia 2017

A Rose By Any Other Name


What Are We On About Today

What I want to do today is to talk about gen­res and clas­si­fi­ca­tion, and to do so pri­mar­i­ly by eval­u­at­ing two claims: the first, that Portal 2 is a puz­zle game, and the sec­ond, that Dragon Age 2 is not an epic.  I intend to look at what these two sen­tences real­ly mean, why they have been said, and what sort of atti­tudes are revealed in their utter­ance.  Hopefully, by the end of this arti­cle, we’ll have a bet­ter under­stand­ing of what a genre or clas­si­fi­ca­tion is, and how and when it should be used.  Specifically, I hope to try to show why gen­res and clas­si­fi­ca­tions are immense­ly help­ful for describ­ing works to other peo­ple, and can fre­quent­ly offer trea­sure tro­ves of good ideas to draw from in the cre­ation of new works.  Genres and clas­si­fi­ca­tions became dan­ger­ous, how­ev­er, when they became pro­scrip­tive, when a work is crit­i­cized for fail­ing to adhere to estab­lished con­ven­tions.

On Portals and Puzzles

My opin­ion of Valve’s Portal 2 is already a mat­ter of pub­lic record.  I think it’s the best com­plete game I’ve played in years.  Most of the Internet seems to agree with me, but short­ly after I played the game, I found myself con­front­ed by a recur­ring crit­i­cism.  Namely, peo­ple would accuse Portal 2 of not being enough of a puz­zle game, usu­al­ly with a sen­tence some­thing like “Portal 2 is a puz­zle game, there­fore it should/should not have done X.”
In other words, peo­ple would become irri­tat­ed at var­i­ous things the game did or did not do, all because of its genre, the clas­si­fi­ca­tion in which the game was placed.  These var­i­ous things (too many sprawl­ing envi­ron­ments, too much of an empha­sis on nar­ra­tive, too easy, etc.) osten­si­bly con­tra­dict its class, and make it less of a puz­zle game and more about other things.
On one level, this makes some sense.  If I sign up to go see a cello recital, and halfway through the cel­list puts down his cello, picks up an elec­tric gui­tar and starts flail­ing away at a ren­di­tion of Purple Haze, I sup­pose I might have some right to be a bit put out (I mean, I wouldn’t be, but that’s more a func­tion of my love for Jimi Hendrix than any­thing nor­ma­tive).  Even if the Hendrix cover was truly fan­tas­tic, it prob­a­bly didn’t have any place in a cello recital, and if the recital was labeled “cello recital” and not “mis­cel­la­neous music recital,” I might have some right to be irri­tat­ed.  If the musi­cian in ques­tion want­ed to play both the cello and the gui­tar, he should prob­a­bly have said so to begin with.
Similarly, it might make sense that if Portal 2 is fun­da­men­tal­ly a puz­zle game, but fre­quent­ly does non-puzzly things that take away from its effec­tive­ness as a puz­zle game, it might deserve crit­i­cism.
The prob­lem is that I’m not real­ly sure it makes that much sense to strict­ly refer to Portal 2 as a puz­zle game, and, more to the point, I’m not cer­tain that that label exists any­where except in our own heads.
See, rather than sit down and try to ham­mer out what, exact­ly, defines the cat­e­go­ry of “puz­zle game” and whether or not Portal 2 real­ly fits those qual­i­fi­ca­tions, I think it makes more sense to ana­lyze where that cat­e­go­ry came from, and whether or not it actu­al­ly makes any sense to crit­i­cize Portal 2 for fail­ing to live up to its stan­dards.
If you asked me to describe Portal 2 to you, I would prob­a­bly begin by say­ing “It’s a puz­zle game,” or some­thing sim­i­lar, because that cat­e­go­ry is help­ful for com­mu­ni­cat­ing a series of things about the game, and there are few other commonly-used cat­e­gories that fit it bet­ter.  It’s cer­tain­ly more of a puz­zle game than it is a role-playing game or a first per­son shooter (though it is played from the first per­son with a gun that shoots things).  But if I stopped describ­ing either Portal game at “puz­zle game,” I would not be com­mu­ni­cat­ing a very accu­rate pic­ture of the game.
Bejeweled is pure “puz­zle game,” but both Portals, and the sec­ond in par­tic­u­lar, are also strong­ly char­ac­ter­ized by a wicked sense of humor and very, very strong (if sub­tle) nar­ra­tive.  Portal with­out GLaDOS, cake, and the Weighted Companion Cube is not Portal at all, where­as Bejeweled might still be iden­ti­fi­ably itself with just a dif­fer­ent art style or sound­track.  These other, non-puzzle ele­ments make up a sub­stan­tial por­tion of both Portal games’ appeal and aes­thet­ic value.  Even though the first game has less of an empha­sis on nar­ra­tive and char­ac­ter than the sec­ond, it would not be near­ly as inter­est­ing or worth­while if the nar­ra­tive was removed.  The bril­liant humor is a sub­stan­tial por­tion of why the fran­chise caught on in the first place, and the creep­ing feel­ing of dread­ful real­iza­tion that the voice over the loud­speak­er is not mere­ly a quirky record­ing but is, in fact, an unfriend­ly and unpre­dictable con­scious­ness that has it out for you is an impor­tant part of the game.
This is dou­bly true for the sec­ond game.  If one sim­ply removed Wheatley and GLaDOS and Cave Johnson, and, instead, had only a series of intrigu­ing por­tal puz­zles, one would be miss­ing out on a great por­tion of Portal 2.  The game is found in the merg­ing of both the game­play and the nar­ra­tive.
I can think of no more appro­pri­ate part of Portal 2 to illus­trate this point than in the oft-discussed moments in the game when it leads you to believe you are about to solve a puz­zle and then quick­ly shunts you aside for a nar­ra­tive sequence.  Yahtzee’s review makes note of this when he talks about these “two sep­a­rate occa­sions with­in it when a puz­zle is inter­rupt­ed by a story sec­tion.”  Admittedly, he then does go on to state that Portal 2 is not real­ly a puz­zle game, but I think there’s some­thing curi­ous about that sen­ti­ment.
It seems to sug­gest that there did, in fact, exist a puz­zle which the story inter­rupt­ed, as though the two things were sep­a­rate ele­ments, as though if the story would just go away for a few moments, there exist anoth­er two puz­zles in the game that you could solve.
This is not true.  The puz­zle was not inter­rupt­ed by the story, although that’s cer­tain­ly how Chell might feel.  There never was a puz­zle to inter­rupt.  There was the illu­sion of a puz­zle cre­at­ed entire­ly for the pur­pose of inter­rup­tion, so that the story could con­tin­ue.  Further, the story and the puz­zles are not real­ly entire­ly sep­a­rate ele­ments.  The story is fre­quent­ly expressed through the puz­zles, the puz­zles advance the story, and the puz­zles gain value and inter­est from their con­tex­tu­al­iza­tion in the story.  It does not real­ly make sense to talk about the “story” inter­rupt­ing the “puz­zle,” because they aren’t real­ly sep­a­rate ele­ments.  There is just the game, which com­mu­ni­cates with the play­er in a mul­ti­tude of dif­fer­ent ways, includ­ing story ele­ments and puz­zle ele­ments.
In this way, I hope you see why sim­ply describ­ing Portal 2 as a “puz­zle game” doesn’t do it jus­tice, and why it’s real­ly very silly to eval­u­ate it again­st that cat­e­go­ry.  A pure puz­zle game is, indeed, some­thing like Bejeweled, or Plants Vs. Zombies or Tetris.  In this con­text, “puz­zle game” is a use­ful descrip­tor, a use­ful short­hand way of describ­ing sev­er­al of the game’s ele­ments, but it far from tells the whole story.  There is no prob­lem with refer­ring to Portal 2 as a puz­zle game in casu­al con­ver­sa­tion or at the begin­ning of a rec­om­men­da­tion.  The prob­lem comes when one attempts to judge it again­st that cat­e­go­ry rather than on its own mer­its.

The Epic Jar

Dragon Age 2 was a weird thing for a num­ber of rea­sons, many of which I have already dis­cussed at length.  But per­haps the biggest rea­son why it’s inter­est­ing from a soci­o­log­i­cal stand­point is the way the back­lash again­st it tend­ed to focus on its fun­da­men­tal design choic­es, rather than on its fre­quent laps­es in exe­cu­tion.  A dis­cus­sion of these points formed the back­bone of my arti­cle on the Problem of Expectation, but there is one speci­fic sub­set of those crit­i­cisms that I only briefly men­tioned before, and which is par­tic­u­lar­ly rel­e­vant to this dis­cus­sion.
The crit­i­cism is that Dragon Age 2 was not an epic, which is an accu­rate enough state­ment.  It’s not.  I don’t take issue with the fac­tu­al accu­ra­cy of the point.  The prob­lem is that peo­ple will bandy that state­ment about as though it was a crit­i­cism instead of a sim­ple state­ment of fact.
The word “epic,” my friends, is a state­ment of genre.  Some things are epics, and some things are not, and this has absolute­ly noth­ing to do with their respec­tive qual­i­ty.  The Lord of the Rings is an epic, and it is fan­tas­tic.  Lolita is not an epic, and it is also fan­tas­tic.  Conversely, (and switch­ing media), Avatar is an epic, and it is awful, and When in Rome is not an epic, and is also awful.
To describe some­thing as an epic is to make a state­ment about its scope, not its qual­i­ty.  It is a clas­si­fi­ca­tion, a way of point­ing out the dif­fer­ences between a movie like Gone With The Wind and one like The Maltese Falcon.
If this is true, there is no shame in not being an epic.  This hasn’t stopped peo­ple from crit­i­ciz­ing Dragon Age 2 for its reduced scope, how­ev­er.  I couldn’t fig­ure out why this was such a prob­lem until I watched Yahtzee’s review of the game, where­in he states that “The only point any­thing resem­bling a world-threatening fan­ta­sy adven­ture story occurs is right at the end, for the sequel hook.”
That made me under­stand.  Fantasy games are usu­al­ly epics.  Fantasy any­things are usu­al­ly epics, because most authors want to show off the mas­sive world they have cre­at­ed.  They usu­al­ly involve world or at least country-threatening events, mas­sive adven­tures across col­or­ful and exotic places.  Thus, when peo­ple learned that DA2 was a fan­ta­sy game, they auto­mat­i­cal­ly assumed it was an epic, and were thus dis­ap­point­ed by a game which is fun­da­men­tal­ly about one person’s rise to power.
But this kind of mas­sive scope is not nec­es­sary for a good fan­ta­sy story: try Neverwhere for an excel­lent small-scope fan­ta­sy novel, or Planescape: Torment for an excel­lent small-scope fan­ta­sy game.  The fact that The Lord of the Rings was epic in scope does not carry as a corol­lary the fact that all other fan­ta­sy things must be sim­i­lar­ly huge.  DA2 con­tains a myr­i­ad of prob­lems, large and small, but among them is not its scope.

So Why Is This A Problem?

At this point, you may be won­der­ing why this all mat­ters.  Sure, maybe peo­ple were mad at Dragon Age 2 for the wrong rea­sons, or crit­i­cize Portal 2 for silly rea­sons.  So what?  Further, it’s not exact­ly news that peo­ple like to com­part­men­tal­ize things.
I’m bring­ing this up not just because I’m enough of a pedant to get mad at peo­ple for being wrong (though, admit­ted­ly, that’s prob­a­bly part of it.)  There are two big rea­sons why this focus on genre con­ven­tion is bad:
1. By hold­ing an incor­rect pic­ture of what a game is in your head, you can miss its value.  I’ve men­tioned before that the first time I tried to play Assassin’s Creed I insist­ed on try­ing to play it as though it was a straight stealth game.  This wasn’t wrong because of the cat­e­go­ry mis­take alone, or sim­ply because it might hurt some developer’s feel­ings some­where, but because I missed the fun and value of the game by doing so.  Once I quit let­ting my pre­con­cep­tions get in the way of what it was, I enjoyed myself immense­ly.  Similarly, some­one who insists Portal 2 ought to be a pure puz­zle game might miss the value of the won­der­ful nar­ra­tive and char­ac­ters while he or she is grous­ing.  It’s thus impor­tant not to get too hung up on genre because doing so leads to the Problem of Expectation.
2. More impor­tant­ly, using gen­res and clas­si­fi­ca­tions as pre­scrip­tive rather than descrip­tive stag­nates the medi­um.  One should not crit­i­cize a game for devi­at­ing from genre con­ven­tion unless it is explic­it­ly try­ing to be a pure exam­ple of a given genre.  You undoubt­ed­ly remem­ber read­ing about or hear­ing about the sorts of stuffy folks that were mad at Beethoven or Hemingway or Picasso or any of a bil­lion other peo­ple for break­ing the rules, right?  This is no bet­ter.  Whining at Portal 2 for not fit­ting neat­ly into the clas­si­fi­ca­tions we have in mind for “puz­zle games” is the same sort of thing as whin­ing at Beethoven’s Fifth for not fit­ting neat­ly into the pre-existing struc­ture of a sym­pho­ny.
If devel­op­ers are con­tin­u­al­ly stymied by this kind of point­less crit­i­cism, they are like­ly to be more hes­i­tant to try again.  It isn't surprising that Dragon Age 3 is much larg­er in scope than its pre­de­ces­sor, and it may be a while before EA con­sid­ers pub­lish­ing a fan­ta­sy game with small­er stakes than the whole world.  Video games are pre­pos­ter­ous­ly expen­sive to make, and if we keep telling pub­lish­ers that we don’t want to play games that chal­lenge us or push out of our estab­lished gen­res, they will lis­ten.
So remem­ber, folks: gen­res are use­ful as descrip­tors, as ways of telling your friends what kind of game you’re play­ing.  But as soon as they become pro­scrip­tive or nor­ma­tive, they lose their use­ful­ness and instead become active­ly harm­ful.