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Narrative’s Creed
By Corvus | March 6, 2008
I’m going to jump back to the topic of narrative consistency for a moment.
The “other” Jason pointed out that as long as videogames continue to follow certain accepted paradigms of measurable life force, invisible area containment walls and InstaCureAll life packs, we’ll never really be able to attain narrative consistency with videogames. I’m not entirely on board with that thought, as I feel that that perspective might be unfairly mapping the expectations of traditional media onto videogame narratives. After all, we accept that a character in a movie doesn’t instantly teleport when the camera cuts from an interior shot of them leaving their apartment to an exterior shot of them leaving the building. I feel it’s a matter of narrative convention and the conventions of videogame narrative allow for such things.
That being said, much of my system design for the Drachurae Cycle revolves around creating in-world rational for accepted game mechanics. For example–my combat system (which is testing really well so far, by the way), works hand in hand with the idea of renown to account for villains’ penchants for leaving heroes to die at the mercy of complicated machinations, as well as heroes tendency to use an elaborate flourish to finish off a foe that’s down.
Ubisoft has taken a similar approach to Assassin’s Creed (which I finally rented and now plan on buying). I’m about to discuss some mild spoilers, so go find something else to do if you don’t want to learn things you’ll find out in the first ten to twenty minutes of gameplay.
The protagonist is a modern bartender (and ex-assassin) who’s DNA contains genetic memories that the Knights Templar (that’s a guess on my part at this point) want to get a hold of. So they strap him to the Animus (nice, that means Spirit and it’s one of the six elements in my system), a machine that can project those genetic memories in real time 3D. They’re looking for a specific memory, from a specific ancestor, but there’s too much emotional of psychological resistance to jump right to it, so they have to start earlier by accessing the memories stored in a different block of DNA. Thus, DNA blocks store particular memories, which explains away the chapter, or levels, approach to the game’s narrative. It’s not an artificial, externally imposed structure, it’s in-game science!
Likewise, you’re kept from exploring locked down areas of a city by a shimmery blue wall. If you approach it, you’re informed by Animus that those areas aren’t available within this particular memory. Not because some game designer arbitrarily decided you couldn’t go there, you’ll note, but because in this particular block of memory, your ancestor didn’t go there!
Your goal in Assassin’s Creed is to retrace your ancestor’s steps as accurately and completely as possible. The more exacting you are in this, the better your synchronization with the ancestral memories becomes. This grants you more insight into the memory and over time, grants you more resilience should things start to go wrong. This synchronization replaces a health bar. When you fall from a tall building, or get attacked by guards, you’re not losing health… you’re falling out of sync with your ancestor’s life. Should you fall to far out of sync, you’re of no use to your captors and Animus gently resets the program to the last point of complete synchronization.
So get hit in combat and you lose synchronization. Run and hide successfully, you’re back in sync. Kill an innocent or fall from a great height… lose synchronization. Eavesdrop on an important conversation or blend in with the crowd… back in sync. It’s brilliant and removes the disconnect… no, scratch that… it explains the disconnect between the videogame and reality.
There’s also a lot to say about Assassin’s Creed and how it uses Altair’s relationships to inform gameplay, but I’ll save that for another post.
Tagged:assassin's creed, narrative consistency, storytelling, videogames. |
March 6th, 2008 at 1:07 pm
I don’t know about Assassin’s Creed.
To me, the cure is worse than disease in that game - the pseudoscience goofiness ended up distracting me even more than a health bar would have. Look at the different assumptions you have to make for each to “work”:
Health/alignment bar:
Assume that someone is aware of his health and can roughly quantify it.
Accept the conceit that it can be visible as a bar across the screen.
Sync bar:
Assume that memories can be stored in DNA.
Assume that there is a way to access these.
Assume that these memories can be interacted with in real time.
Assume that the identity of a random bartender is discovered as the descendant of a particular figure.
Assume that this figure held some information which is of use to some organization.
Assume that this organization is still active in the present day.
Assume that the quality of a memory, or indeed which memories can be unearthed from the DNA, is dependent on the mind(even though it’s buried in the DNA chemically if at all - why need a brain?).
Assume that the level of attachment that a mind interacting with a memory has to the memory itself can be quantified and represented as a bar.
It’s crazy! You -still- need a “health bar”, only now it’s a “bar that tracks synchronization with the genetic memory of a coincidental ancestor thanks to this fancy machine that was invented somehow”; you still need a ’stage select’, only instead of “hey boss, give me this mission” it’s “hey DNA, give us a memory, but not too significant a one or I won’t be able to handle it”.
I would have been enthralled by this game if I could have seen my wounds with blood and fabric tears on the model(or with a health bar, even!), if I could have seen my adherence to the Code with some abstract measure like “How far my hood has slipped off”, if I could have wandered around the headquarters or to the mailbox and picked up information organically. But after the tutorial and its misty sci-fi swooshiness I haven’t been able to pick it up again.
Maybe I’m just incompatible with this particular sci-fi approach - but I found it so off-putting.
It’s too big a pill to swallow for a disease I didn’t find that irksome to begin with.
March 6th, 2008 at 2:38 pm
Hey, it’s the “other” Jason.
I hear what you’re saying, and certainly don’t think that the shorthand of medkits and such should be banished from the realm of game design. That would prove ruinous to many of the forms of gameplay we currently enjoy. But if you want to make games with true human drama, I don’t see how you can do so if you break the player’s expectations of what is reality. And I believe those expectations are forgiving and elastic, but there are limits. BioShock is a shooter, but many of us appreciated it for its dramatic power. As a shooter, the game is fine and you don’t need to change a thing. But as a drama, those conventions diminish the potency. For example, I felt that game’s reality was weakened with every bullet, and there were many, that pierced my body without killing or seriously injuring me. That’s pretty standard fair in a shooter, but each hit reminded me that I was not an actual human being trying to protect his fragile body in a brutal environment. Each hit reminded me I was playing a “game.”
Maybe the issue isn’t changing what games are now, because games now are predominantly about the physical activities that take place in between the story elements. And that’s fine, because we’re still stumbling around trying to get better at this interactive storytelling thing. But if you want to make a game that could be considered a great character piece, well, maybe you have to drop the 30 hours of combat with 15 modifiable weapons. Maybe getting shot or stabbed is the rare, catastrophic event that you hope never happens to you. Like in real life.
Hmm, that would make for nice, dramatic stopping point, but I do still want to comment on Assassin’s Creed.
I like what I’m hearing about the game’s setup. The memory blocks are a good way of controlling where the player can go and when. I also like that you don’t preserve your health so much as your connection with the virtual world. I appreciate when a game’s world is cohesive from top to bottom. That said, I do have concerns about game designers being forced to create “clever” explanations of the realities presented in their game spaces. It feels like they are making consolations for our medium’s limitations. The genetic memories angle works great, but what if you want to make a cohesive game that actually does take place in the past? I guess you can’t because now it doesn’t make sense if you artificially limit where the player can go. Now death should mean the story ends. It’s a difficult problem to tackle if you want to build something that is just that little bit more than a “game” (it strikes me as unfortunate that we don’t have a different but similar term for games with slightly higher aspirations, not unlike the commonly accepted distinction between a “film” and a “movie”).
March 24th, 2008 at 2:40 pm
[...] Elrod, at Man Bites Blog has written a great deal about the narrative consistency of Assassin’s Creed. I can’t argue with that at all. Where I have a problem with Assassin’s Creed is [...]