I’m Batman

I just fin­ished play­ing Arkham Asylum for the first time, and, to my great sur­prise, I think it has helped me to fall back in love with video games.

Axiom VII of the Fundamental Axioms I came up with when I first start­ed this blog (axioms which could prob­a­bly do for some revi­sion right about now) states that “If your writ­ing is bad, I don’t care how fun your mechan­ics are.”  This, I find, is one of the defin­ing fac­tors of how I look at video games.  A game with bad writ­ing tends to be bad art, and, per­haps because I am a writer, I tend to find poor writ­ing and sto­ry­telling very dis­tract­ing.  I used to worry that I didn’t like video games at all.  After all, if what I real­ly want are good sto­ries and well-written dia­logue, maybe I should just stick to films and nov­els?  Nearly all of my favorite games pri­or­i­tize story and dia­logue over flashy graph­ics or game­play mechan­ics, to the extent that some of the ones I value most are actu­al­ly very clum­sy to play.  (I’m look­ing at you, Torment.)

I say all this because Arkham Asylum is not the best-written, best-acted, or best-plotted game I’ve ever played.  It’s prob­a­bly not even in the top ten.  The plot is real­ly very silly, (why would the Joker need super-soldiers?) the dia­logue is ser­vice­able but large­ly unre­mark­able, the voice act­ing is com­pe­tent but large­ly not par­tic­u­lar­ly inspir­ing, (Hamill and Conroy except­ed).  It ends ter­ri­bly.

Imagine my sur­prise when, upon fin­ish­ing the game, I real­ized I absolute­ly did not care.  Sure, the game would have been bet­ter if they had addressed some of these issues, but that absolute­ly doesn’t mat­ter.  So, why do I enjoy this game so much?

Because you get to be Batman.

No, Seriously.  Batman.

That’s not a flip­pant answer.  And I don’t just mean that the game’s avatar is shaped like Batman, or that he’s voiced by Kevin Conroy.  The sim­ple fact that one is play­ing a char­ac­ter named Batman in the game is not what sells it to me.  It works because the game’s mechan­ics, com­bat sys­tem and physics engine allow you to actu­al­ly be Batman.  When you move the analog stick, the char­ac­ter moves like Batman.  When you punch a crim­i­nal, the char­ac­ter punch­es like Batman.  When you grap­ple onto a gar­goyle and then swoop down onto an unsus­pect­ing mani­ac, leav­ing him dan­gling from your perch, scream­ing and soil­ing him­self in ter­ror, you do it like Batman.

It’s the game’s rhythm, the way it allows you to calm­ly walk into a pack of fif­teen felons with crow­bars and know that you’re going to come out vic­to­ri­ous, that makes the game work.  It’s no sur­prise that it may orig­i­nal­ly have been planned as a rhythm game prop­er.

I had heard all of this before, but it’s one thing to hear about how a game real­ly makes you feel like Batman, and anoth­er to actu­al­ly play that game.  (Which may ren­der this whole post moot, come to think of it.)  It wasn’t until I played the game and gig­gled like a first-grader for hours on end that I real­ized how truly unique it is.

See, about the fifth time I entered a room full of armed felons and qui­et­ly dis­patched each of them with­out tak­ing a bul­let, the truth of the mat­ter hit me: Arkham Asylum is exact­ly what a cer­tain kind of video game does well.  What Arkham Asylum does is some­thing that video games may do bet­ter than any other medi­um: it allows you to step into some­one else’s shoes, and learn some­thing about what it is like to be a dif­fer­ent per­son.

Namely, Batman.

And Batman is kind of a big deal.  Who do geeks revere more than Batman?  If, in any argu­ment, you can prove that Batman approves of a par­tic­u­lar point of view, you win.  “Appeal to Batman” is a respect­ed rhetor­i­cal tech­nique.  If you walk up to a geek and say “think about some­thing cool,” he or she will think about Batman.

Comic is Zach Weiner’s at SMBC.

Loss of Self

I wrote an article with the title “Better Storytelling Through Loss of Self,” and while I was pri­mar­i­ly inter­est­ed in the way a good GM can reduce dis­tance between play­er and PC in a table­top RPG, the idea struck a chord with me.  The best works of nar­ra­tive art coerce you into per­fect sym­pa­thy with the pro­tag­o­nist.  They cause you to feel what the char­ac­ter feels, see what he or she sees, and, think how he or she thinks.  A great work can make you inhab­it, if only for the briefest of moments, anoth­er person’s mind– can make you leave your­self behind and tem­porar­i­ly become some­one else.

This is the art that can change lives, the sort of art that alters world­views, and video games might be unique­ly suit­ed to this kind of rad­i­cal shift in per­spec­tive.  It is one thing to read about a person’s life, and quite anoth­er to actu­al­ly live it.  This is not to say that video games will nec­es­sar­i­ly eclipse all other art forms — I am not one of those so fond of video games that he will refer to them as the apoth­e­o­sis of all artis­tic endeav­or.  Even in the realm of “media about Batman,” The Dark Knight and The Killing Joke are bet­ter art than Arkham Asylum.  These other works, in addi­tion to telling great sto­ries, let me imag­ine what it might be like to be the Caped Crusader, give insight into Batman’s psy­chol­o­gy, the myth sur­round­ing him, and the uni­verse in which he oper­ates.  But in Arkham Asylum, I actu­al­ly get to be Batman.  The dif­fer­ence is cru­cial.

So, video games can allow you to expe­ri­ence what life is like through some­one else’s eyes.  That’s neat, but why talk about Arkham Asylum, when I could talk about Torment?  Because Arkham Asylum lets you expe­ri­ence what it’s like to be a very par­tic­u­lar per­son.

Some peo­ple ask “Would it be as good if it wasn’t about Batman?”  Of course not.  Would The Once and Future King be as good if it wasn’t about King Arthur?  Would The Last Temptation of Christ be inter­est­ing if it wasn’t about Jesus?  Like these other works, Arkham Asylum doesn’t just “hap­pen” to be about Batman.  It is entire­ly about what it is like to be Batman.  If it wasn’t about Batman, it wouldn’t exist.

The Dark Knight Rises

So why is this good or impor­tant?  Does it just allow young men and women to act out the ado­les­cent fan­ta­sy of dress­ing up like a bat and punch­ing peo­ple in the face?  Well, sure.  It does that.  Certainly part of the fun of the game is final­ly get­ting to appease the 10-year-old that ran around the back­yard in a blanket-cape and jumped off of trees.  And it’s impor­tant to note that there’s absolute­ly noth­ing wrong with that.

In all seri­ous­ness, Batman is a lot more than an ado­les­cent fan­ta­sy.  Batman is a leg­end.  Tom Bissell put it best when he said “Batman may have come to us through the comic book, but he belongs to American mythol­o­gy now, and it is as hard to imag­ine him hav­ing been cre­at­ed by Bob Kane as it is to imag­ine Jesus hav­ing been cre­at­ed by Mark.”  Batman is a Hero, with a cap­i­tal H– a leg­end, a sym­bol of jus­tice and pro­tec­tion and good­ness in a way that even Superman isn’t.  Batman always has an answer for every sit­u­a­tion, can always tough it out through what­ev­er any­one throws at him.  You can try to write him off as “a dude in a bat­suit,” but you would be wrong to do so, just as if you were to say Robin Hood is “a dude in tights,” or King Arthur is “a dude with a sword.”

Why do we all want to be Batman?  Because he’s bril­liant, tough and strong.  Because Batman always beats the badguy, and he always looks cool when he does it.  Because although he doesn’t play by the rules every­one else does, he is hon­or­able to a fault.  He will never kill the Joker, because he knows it would be wrong to do so.  Batman is self­less when we are self­ish.  Batman is strong when we are weak.  He can sur­vive any­thing and beat any­one, but he is just human and bro­ken enough to be believ­able.  Superman is untouch­able because he’s from anoth­er world.  No one of us could ever be Superman, and so the desire to be Superman is always thwart­ed, but Batman — you almost think you could be Batman.  He’s just bare­ly pos­si­ble.

Why else do we keep com­ing back to him, almost eighty years after his ini­tial debut?  The Dark Knight is a pow­er­ful arche­type, an inspir­ing leg­end, the sort of Hero that res­onates with every per­son.

The Adam West Batman still exists, and so, sadly, does the Clooney one, but Batman as an idea tran­scends all of that silli­ness.  Everyone who ever boot­ed up a copy of Arkham Asylum brought an idea of Batman to the table.  Every sin­gle per­son who plays the game knows who Batman is, and even where they might prefer Nolan to Miller, or dis­agree about the specifics, they agree about the fun­da­men­tals of the Batman mythos, and the fact is that Arkham Asylum sat­is­fies all of those dif­fer­ent pre­con­cep­tions.  When you play the game, you are step­ping into the shoes of a leg­end, and there’s some­thing pow­er­ful and beau­ti­ful about that.

I don’t wish to over­state this: Arkham Asylum, for all I’ve just said, is prob­a­bly not Great Art.  It’s a fun video game, and I rec­om­mend it whole­heart­ed­ly, but it didn’t give me any great epipha­nies about human nature.  But what it did is cause me to remem­ber one of the rea­sons I love video games and find them as utter­ly fas­ci­nat­ing as I do.  The great ones allow you to briefly aban­don your own expe­ri­ences and take up another’s, to re-enter the real world hav­ing lived for a while in a dif­fer­ent one, and to be bet­ter for it.  For a short time, I was Batman, and while I still eager­ly await a game which real­ly exam­i­nes the psy­chol­o­gy of the char­ac­ter in a more mature way, it was beau­ti­ful and fun, and com­plete­ly worth my time.

So, play Arkham Asylum.  It prob­a­bly won’t change your life.  It’s unlike­ly to make you rethink the nature of human­i­ty.  You’ll prob­a­bly spend most of the time gig­gling mani­a­cal­ly at the newest ridicu­lous­ly cool thing you just did.

But you know what?  It’s beau­ti­ful, and spe­cial.

And it lets you be Batman.

Buying In

Over at Grantland​.com, Tom Bissell had put up an inter­est­ing review of L.A. Noire that is worth check­ing out; you can do so here. He also brings up some inter­est­ing ideas that I want to talk about regard­ing the expe­ri­ence of games, specif­i­cal­ly the notion of “buy­ing in” to a game’s struc­ture, nar­ra­tive, and cen­tral con­ceits. I encour­age you to read the arti­cle, but it’s pret­ty lengthy, so I’m going to touch on the most impor­tant points that he brings up on the topic.

His intro­duc­tion to the topic is here:

The story of L.A. Noire con­cerns a psy­cho­pathic cop named Cole Phelps, a man who inap­pro­pri­ate­ly com­man­deers cars from civil­ians, steals out­right any car that is left unat­tend­ed, fre­quent­ly destroys pri­vate prop­er­ty, and enjoys run­ning over civil­ians. Despite his reck­less­ness, Phelps becomes the most speed­i­ly pro­mot­ed police offi­cer in con­stab­u­lary his­to­ry.

At least, that is what L.A. Noire’s story can be about, if the play­er allows it, which nice­ly nut­shells the prob­lem of open-world games that give play­ers a large amount of behav­ioral free­dom while simul­ta­ne­ous­ly try­ing to tell a coher­ent, lin­ear story.

Video games can do a lot of things other sto­ry­telling medi­ums can­not. Their penance, how­ev­er, is to have to deal with things for­eign to other sto­ry­telling medi­ums, one of which is a unique­ly dam­ag­ing form of audi­ence dis­rup­tion. Just about every sto­ry­telling game employs var­i­ous mask­ing sys­tems that attempt to antic­i­pate inter­nal­ly dis­rup­tive play­er behav­ior.

 […]

At first blush, L.A. Noire would have you believe that Phelps is not an anti­hero. He is a cop and a war hero — an all-around “good man.” How good? Phelps can­not shoot his gun out in the open, which is prob­a­bly the most sig­nif­i­cant safe­guard the game’s cre­ators have placed on play­ers deter­mined to let Phelps go psy­cho. It is not much of a safe­guard. But there is some­thing admirable about how lit­tle L.A. Noire’s mak­ers appear to have wor­ried about ass­hole play­ers. A lot of games go to such lengths to antic­i­pate ass­hole play­ers that they some­times feel like a pool that has been pre­emp­tive­ly over­chlo­ri­nat­ed to frus­trate the one kid deter­mined to pee in it. Well-conceived mask­ing sys­tems can be things of real beau­ty, but they also squan­der pre­cious devel­op­ment time that could be spent on other things, such as mak­ing more inter­est­ing games.

I even­tu­al­ly restart­ed the game once I had fooled around enough, but while play­ing through the rest of L.A. Noire the fol­low­ing ques­tion was never far from my mind: How big of a prob­lem is it that play­ers can effec­tive­ly screw up video-game sto­ries? It is a ques­tion that is never far from my mind when I am play­ing any game whose fic­tion works in tandem with my deci­sions to cre­ate some­thing the­mat­i­cal­ly uni­fied and dra­mat­i­cal­ly sat­is­fy­ing. So, how big of a prob­lem is it? One answer to this ques­tion is: There is no answer to this ques­tion. Another answer is: Strong inter­ac­tive fic­tion will com­pel play­ers to behave in ways rough­ly anal­o­gous to how the inter­ac­tive fiction’s author intends them to behave. Another answer is: The whole pur­pose of inter­ac­tive fic­tion is to encour­age this type of cri­sis. Another answer is: This is pre­cise­ly why the video-game medi­um is incom­pat­i­ble with authored forms of sto­ry­telling. In the past few years, I have thought about this ques­tion a lot — maybe more than any other ques­tion, in fact. None of the above answers sat­is­fies me.

Bissell iden­ti­fies the dif­fi­cul­ties that come with try­ing to tell a coher­ent, lin­ear story inside a video game with play­er free­dom, point­ing specif­i­cal­ly to L.A. Noire, where the player’s desires to run folks over with a vin­tage car might hijack the nar­ra­tive. This is an inter­est­ing point. Cole, as the nar­ra­tive presents him, would not go on a mur­der­ous vehic­u­lar ram­page, but the play­er, when he or she has con­trol of Cole’s behav­ior, can choose to do things that Cole would not do, gen­er­at­ing incon­sis­ten­cies and, Bissell thinks, harm­ing the expe­ri­ence.

Is this an actu­al prob­lem? Bissell’s ulti­mate con­clu­sion is that play­er free­dom makes a tra­di­tion­al nar­ra­tive an impos­si­ble choice for good video game art; nar­ra­tive con­sis­ten­cy is too vital to the enter­prise of tra­di­tion­al nar­ra­tives, he seems to argue. But I won­der if Bissell is under­selling the abil­i­ty of play­ers to smooth over such hic­cups on their own.

Game Masters have been deal­ing with this prob­lem since the begin­ning of role-playing games. Most every­body who has run a game has encoun­tered at least one trou­ble maker who fol­lows his or her whims instead of con­tribut­ing to the groups expe­ri­ence. Their Phelps might be a wan­ton mur­der­er of pedes­tri­ans, just as their sor­cer­er is like­ly to burn orphan­ages and steal the magistrate’s hat. And as any GM will tell you, if you’re try­ing to run a com­pelling, mean­ing­ful role-playing game, you kick that play­er out of your group or con­vince him or her to shape up. What you don’t do is spend time wor­ry­ing about their inane actions, and fig­ur­ing out ways to mit­i­gate or ratio­nal­ize their behav­ior. I’m not con­vinced that video games should waste effort on those ends, either, and Bissell does refer to Noire’s assump­tion that the play­er won’t mis­be­have as “admirable.” Masking, as Bissell points out, is used by design­ers to smooth over nar­ra­tive dis­crep­an­cies; you may be able to shoot your essen­tial ally, but you can­not kill her. This is a some­what flip­pant respon­se, though. The fact is that, since there is a think­ing organ­ism in the narrator’s seat, any and all of the player’s behav­iors can be ade­quate­ly respond­ed to, or stopped when the GM asks, “Are you sure you want to do that?”, “Is that what your char­ac­ter would do?”, or “No. Stop it or leave.”

Still, I am not con­vinced that pour­ing time into mask­ing sys­tems makes much sense. Though Bissell seems to think that they are, to some extent, nec­es­sary (and I might agree with him to a short extent), I don’t think that inabil­i­ty to mask a character’s fool­ish behav­ior is a dire prob­lem. And I think this for many rea­sons.

1. It’s a pri­vate encoun­ter with the work in ques­tion, and dis­counts the abil­i­ty to par­ti­tion an expe­ri­ence with a work of art.

In role-playing games, total­ly sub­vert­ing the tone of the game is a prob­lem because it harms the expe­ri­ence for every­body else at the table. In video games, the only expe­ri­ence you’re harm­ing is your own; and once the play­er real­izes that an unsup­port­ed behav­ior is not a part of the expe­ri­ence that the game offers, he or she can get right back to explor­ing the expe­ri­ence that the game is meant to offer.

Moreover, I think that Bissell fails to account for the abil­i­ty of a play­er to gen­er­ate their own inter­ludes with­in a piece of art. Just as some­body read­ing a novel might close the book to day­dream about where the book is head­ed, or imag­ine how a char­ac­ter might deal with a hypo­thet­i­cal sit­u­a­tion, or some­one watch­ing a film might pause it to tell her friend how excel­lent it would be if Captain America were ALSO in this film, and wouldn’t that be hilar­i­ous, I’m not con­vinced that the expe­ri­ence of a video game is nec­es­sar­i­ly harmed by a play­er tak­ing a break from the nar­ra­tive by doing things that the game’s nar­ra­tive might not sup­port. Perhaps the play­er is capa­ble of par­ti­tion­ing the expe­ri­ence of wan­ton mur­der, sep­a­rat­ing it from the story he or she is oth­er­wise quite involved with. In fact, the game’s fail­ure to respond to such behav­ior might even rein­force the notion that the player’s choic­es are out­side the intend­ed bound­aries of the expe­ri­ence the game intends.

2. Not all play­er approach­es need be sup­port­ed.

When a play­er comes to a game like L.A. Noire and imme­di­ate­ly wants to run ram­pant through the streets, then they are doing some­thing wrong. To a greater or lesser extent, L.A. Noire is designed to offer up a speci­fic expe­ri­ence. (That L.A. Noire also tries to offer up a more tra­di­tion­al Rockstar Games expe­ri­ence is a bit of a prob­lem, but that’s out­side the scope of this dis­cus­sion). L.A. Noire should not be fault­ed for fail­ing to ade­quate­ly sup­port expe­ri­ences out­side of what it intends. All pos­si­ble play­er actions need not be antic­i­pat­ed; only viable options. This does cut down on play­er choice in the mid­dle of a nar­ra­tive (specif­i­cal­ly by remov­ing the choice to go insane and start mur­der­ing folks, become a thief or busi­ness­man, etc. etc.), but to some extent these choic­es might not belong to the play­er at all, but rather to the char­ac­ter, both to keep that char­ac­ter con­sis­tent and to keep the nar­ra­tive focused on a par­tic­u­lar sort of expe­ri­ence.

I also think that it’s per­fect­ly alright to declare that there is a “right” way to play a game, so long as the devel­op­ers don’t pre­tend like alter­na­tive meth­ods of play are viable options. Some games are not good at this, and even L.A. Noire has issues in that it makes vague motions toward being an open-world game but offers rel­a­tive­ly lit­tle of inter­est in that mas­sive world. That the game indi­cates to the play­er that it is offer­ing a dif­fer­ent expe­ri­ence than it ought to and does is prob­lem­at­ic, and for that L.A. Noire should be fault­ed, but I’m not con­vinced that a player’s choice to delib­er­ate­ly sab­o­tage the nar­ra­tive should be held again­st a game.

3. Art can demand that a participant/viewer approach and expe­ri­ence it a cer­tain way.

For a bit, I was won­der­ing whether it was okay for a game to demand that its audi­ence approach it in a cer­tain way (with a cer­tain mind­set, for instance) in order to expe­ri­ence it in the way that the design­ers intend­ed. I ini­tial­ly thought that such an approach might demand too much, or at least might be seen as demand­ing too much; a quick com­par­ison with visu­al art, or per­for­mance art, made it seem pre­sump­tu­ous on the part of the artist, to demand that a view­er engage with it in a speci­fic way.

But truly, most art demands a speci­fic sort of engage­ment, espe­cial­ly when art requires par­tic­i­pants, as games do. Paintings in a gallery require that you encoun­ter them from a dis­tance, and pre­dom­i­nant­ly through sight and not, say, touch. Plays offer a much bet­ter exam­ple; the script pro­vides a base-line, but gen­er­al­ly speak­ing the actor who is par­tic­i­pant with the writer of the script does not have com­plete­ly free reign to inter­pret those lines how­ev­er he may like, or deliv­er them how­ev­er he may like. And if he does exer­cise such gross free­dom with the script, then peo­ple will begin to ques­tion his mer­its as an actor and wish that it had been per­formed dif­fer­ent­ly.

Is there value in see­ing the player’s role in gam­ing as sim­i­lar to that of an actor’s in the per­for­mance of a play? Certainly, the work does not exist with­out the play­er giv­ing it life (in both cases). Is there also value, then, in a game pro­vid­ing some sort of direc­tion to play­ers, indi­cat­ing cer­tain tried-and-true meth­ods of inter­act­ing with an expe­ri­ence? Would it be use­ful for L.A. Noire to say, at the begin­ning, “We encour­age you to play Cole as a sane, sym­pa­thet­ic war-hero, as this will give you the best pos­si­ble expe­ri­ence”? That isn’t the best exam­ple, but per­haps in games that get a bit more com­pli­cat­ed, this might be a wor­thy cause. This need not be overt, of course; a game can qui­et­ly point the play­er toward play­ing a game a cer­tain way, of com­ing to it with a par­tic­u­lar mind-set. Especially in cases where a game just works bet­ter if the play­er approach­es it a cer­tain way, or as a cer­tain sort of game, this approach could be valu­able.

What do you think? Is there any value in delin­eat­ing the “prop­er” way to approach a game? Do you think devel­op­ers might ben­e­fit from think­ing of games in such a light? I’m most­ly just throw­ing this con­cept into the light; I’d love to hear your thoughts about it, read­ers.

Tensions in Bastion

About two weeks ago, I finally managed to sit down and play through Bastion, an excellent indie action RPG developed by seven-person studio Supergiant Games that was released in 2011. It's an excellent game, and if you haven't already played it, you should. It's now available on both Xbox Live and Steam for about $15, and is definitely worth the price.  It's certainly not perfect, but nothing ever is, and it is definitely good enough that it can be recommended wholly without disclaimers or qualification.  Fundamentally, it's very good, and you should play it.  It's almost certainly better than what you were going to be playing anyway.

Since I was struck by just how darn good Bastion was, both as an enjoyable game and as an excellent piece of interactive storytelling, I was seized by about a dozen different ideas for blog posts.

What I have settled on to write about today is one of the ways that Bastion manages to be as completely unique as it is.  Much of what makes the game interesting is the way in which it unifies various disparate elements which might, at first glance, seem to be irreconcilable, and then uses that tension to produce a better work of art than they would have made had they chosen more obviously-compatible elements. To help shed some light on how this works, I'm going to draw briefly some from the aesthetic theories of Alfred North Whitehead.

First, in case you're unfamiliar with Bastion, watch this trailer to get some idea what the game is about:

(A Small Part of ) Whitehead's Theory of Aesthetics

I've mentioned Whitehead before on this website, in a discussion of scope, but in case you don't remember that, in Whitehead's schema, aesthetic value is derived from taking disparate elements (concepts, characters, musical tones) and working them into harmony with one another. A given work of art has more value (i.e. is "better") the more harmony it produces, which stands in direct relation to either how many different pieces are harmonized, or how wildly different the pieces in question were.

There is a great deal more to Whitehead's theory than this, but I think it's an excellent starting point for a discussion of Bastion, as I think that much of the game's unique appeal stems from its excellence in doing just this. To help show this, I'm going to look at three separate sets of apparently-contradictory elements which Supergiant Games managed to weave into a harmony.

The Tone

The first and most obvious thing is the contradiction between the game's art style and the maturity of its tone. The art style conveys a sort of childlike, fairy-tale, storybook quality tone. The characters (even the one with the mustache) all manage to look sort of like children, with disproportionately-large heads and rounded features, and the game's color palette consists almost entirely of very bright, warm colors. 

The art is certainly beautiful, but it stands in sharp contrast to the game's tone. It would not be reasonable to refer to Bastion's story as “dark” or “gritty,” but it is certainly very mature. It is, fundamentally, a story about what to do after a great catastrophe, whether one that is literally apocalyptic or, in a metaphorical sense, more personally so.  Further, the game is full of parallels with such weighty real-world themes as colonialism, exploitation of natural resources, and even the use of nuclear weapons.

This is a pretty sharp contrast. If you had only seen screenshots for the game, you would probably assume the game's story to be fairly straightforward good versus evil, relatively black and white, to match its storybook art. Similarly, if I described to you a game which managed to touch on the treatment of indigenous peoples by imperialist powers as well as raise questions about the nature of regret, you would probably assume such a game would have a more traditionally “mature” art style.

It would be very possible to make a game which tried to be both of these things and failed miserably, but something in Bastion makes the contrast between the art style and the tone wonderful and not distracting. Some of it may, of course, be the exceptional quality of both sides.  One might be a lot more willing to put up with cognitive dissonance if all the pieces are at least well-done.

Nevertheless, I would suggest that the real reason these disparate elements come together in harmony is not any individual quality of either element, but rather a third element which bridges the gap between them. I suggest that it is the game's narrator who provides a sense of continuity between the storybook art and the mature themes and plot.

The narrator, an old man named Rucks, is ubiquitous throughout the game.  Hardly 30 seconds go by without Logan Cunningham's wonderfully raspy voice commenting on something the player has done or advancing the story, and it is both the writing behind the narration and Cunningham's excellent performance that bridges the gap between the art style and the themes.

The narrator tells the story, and never shies away from commenting on the serious implications of the city's past, but he does so in a way that fits right in with the art style.  The narrator's friendly, colloquial manner of speech endears him to you and reminds you of listening to your grandfather tell you stories before tucking you in at night, even as he talks of serious things.  His voice hardens and becomes somber at times, but it never loses that storytelling quality, thereby ensuring that the game's apparently contradictory styles are brought into perfect harmony, making the game far more interesting and unique than it would have been otherwise.

Bastion's soundtrack, written by composer Darren Korb, has received a great deal of acclaim, and rightly so.  You can listen to and purchase the soundtrack here, and I strongly encourage you to do both of those things.  Korb rather eccentrically described the soundtrack as "acoustic frontier trip-hop," and if that doesn't sound like fun to you, we probably shouldn't be friends.

It works because Korb knows when to use which elements: when to quietly strum at a banjo, when to raise the stakes with low bass beats and a driving rhythm, when to emphasize Eastern or Middle Eastern harmonies or instruments, and when to do all of the above at the same time.

The soundtrack is fantastic on its own, but it's particularly interesting to look at in the context of the game itself.  A good soundtrack isn't just composed of a bunch of good songs, it actually serves to make the game better by creating the right feel and tone, and it is here that Korb's soundtrack really shines.

Korb creates a unique feel for the game by marrying all the different styles together.  It creates a feeling of both familiarity and foreignness, and flows freely between them, ensuring that the player is never complacent, since he or she is never entirely sure what is going to happen next.  Since this is also what the game itself wants, the soundtrack helps to reinforce the game's overarching themes.

The Kid

The game's protagonist is only ever referred to as "the Kid," a title of affection given him by the narrator, who, despite learning the Kid's name halfway through the game, prefers to keep it secret from the player.

Rucks' reluctance to tell the player the Kid's name indicates that the title is important, and I am sure it partly exists to lessen the distance between player and protagonist by removing the obstacle of a proper name. That said, I think the interplay between Rucks' insistence upon referring to him as “The Kid,”when coupled with the increasingly-weighty and difficult tasks he asks of him, points to another set of contrasting themes.

There are any number of places one could go with this topic. One could talk about the differences between Rucks and the Kid in terms of old age and youth, or of how the Kid can symbolize renewal for lands shattered by the Calamity, but all I want to talk about right now is how the title is, at first glance, fairly inappropriate, and how that apparent tension helps any and all of these possible themes work.

Rucks points out towards the end of the game how strange it is that everyone is waiting on the actions of a kid, and he's right. It is the Kid that pushes forward most of the game's narrative, that has to make the really hard choices towards the end of the game and suffers the most personal trauma throughout. So, why do Rucks and the rest of the characters allow the Kid to do all the heavy lifting?

Because he may be the Kid, but he's not really a child. If the game explicitly states the Kid's age, I missed it, but Rucks mentions at one point that the Kid served five years on the Rippling Walls as a guard, so it's unlikely he's really a child any more. Even if the Caelondian military accepted recruits as young as the British Navy once did, it's unlikely he's less than 18 or so. He may even be older than that -- Jen Zee, the artist, rendered all the characters with round, child-like features and large eyes, so it's difficult to tell simply by looking at him what his age is. But even completely apart from his physical age, the Kid isn't a child because of the way he handles the Calamity. This is the true source of the tension in the protagonist -- he isn't a child, but he looks like a child, and the narrator calls him such.

So, why does this work? Is it simply sloppy writing or the traditional video game trope where the main character happens to be a little kid as a holdover from when games were primarily children's toys?

I don't think so, because that tension allows for a number of beautiful and interesting moments and opportunities for myth and/or symbolism in the game.  It could, for instance, be interpreted as a general comment that old idea-makers (Rucks) can never be anything without the young go-getters at the front of their movements.  It could be interpreted as primarily local and character-driven, and could thus be understood simply as Rucks patronizing (in a pleasant and gentle way, to be sure) the Kid and failing to realize that it is the Kid that is truly the most mature.

But I think the interpretation I like the best is this:  If Bastion can be understood at least partly as being about how to pick oneself up and move along after a horrible personal Calamity, then perhaps each of the characters can serve a metaphorical role in that journey.  Perhaps Bastion ends up showing that after some horrible catastrophe, even if you have an excellent ability to reason (Rucks), a good heart (Zia), and the best intentions in the world (Zulf), it is only if you can summon up enough dogged perseverance and sheer stubbornness, enough desperate, bullheaded will to survive, that you will make it.That infuriating, desperate refusal to give up is the Kid.  He may make mistakes, and certainly does a lot of damage to the world around in him in his push for survival, but he makes it.  He restores the Bastion to safety despite being the Kid, and does more for the survival of those around him than any of the others.

I have no idea what, exactly, Supergiant Games was trying to say when they named the protagonist.  What I do know is that in so doing, they created a good enough work of art to support all, some, or none of the above interpretations.

Conclusion

That's the sort of thing that the tension between Bastion's elements produces: it causes the player to dig down deeper into the game.  It makes him or her want to spend more and more time with the game, thinking about how it works and why the developers might have chosen to construct a game out of so many diverse elements.

Each time the player is confronted by a collection of elements that would sound jumbled and confused out of context, he or she is drawn deeper into Bastion's narrative and atmosphere.  Each element of tension serves to enhance Bastion's unique style and to provide a great deal of food for thought.

Whitehead would have been so very proud.

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.

2. The 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.

3. The 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.

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?