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Working At Cross Purposes?
By Corvus | July 8, 2008
At first blush, it would seem that game narratives make use of a convention that is found in no other narrative medium. I’m not just talking about the use of ludic elements either–that’s too obvious. After all, as I try and demonstrate quite frequently here at Man Bytes Blog, it’s not that difficult to assess an individual game mechanic, or dynamic, and deconstruct the impact it has on the story experience of the player.
No, I’m talking about the use of the primary narrative element, in the case of video games that’s gameplay, to actually impede the audience’s enjoyment of the narrative. That’s right–difficulty.
Think about that for a second. Not even traditional board and card games, with possible exception of solitaire (which could be argued is more puzzle than game), use game mechanics to impede the players directly. Instead, they use game mechanics to mediate a representational conflict between players. But video games? Video games frequently replace your human opponent with a silicon combatant and suddenly, you find yourself struggling against the very medium you’re consuming in order to complete it.
This is done to varying degrees of course. Some video games make you memorize patterns and hone your hand-eye coordination. Others borrow from the traditional game’s cousin, puzzles, to challenge your reason or memory. Some video games seem intent on breaking you against a steep learning curve, while others allow you to breezily cruise along a shallow incline, well within your comfort zone.
Not only does this appear to be unique to video games, it seems to be at cross purposes to crafting a compelling narrative. Why bother devising a plot, building a narrative and inviting your audience to a storytelling experience, and then actively seek to keep them from completing it? Given that the percentage of people who actually play all the way through a game is staggeringly low, it would seem counter-intuitive to include anything that might discourage completion of your opus.
But is this really unique to video games and is it really working at cross purposes?
Arthur Conan Doyle and Agatha Christie lead an entire genre of fiction that actively challenges the audience to reach the conclusion of the narrative. Not in a literal turn-the-page sense, but in a deductive sense. Good mystery writers drop enough clues, in an obscure enough fashion, throughout their books that when you reach the end and found out the butler didn’t do it after all, you’re surprised, but not incredulous. Mysteries challenge the reader to figure out the ending before they’ve actually reached it. In this way, they are not unlike a video game that challenges the player to become quick enough, or sharp enough, to reach the ending of the game. Unlike a mystery novel, however, there is usually little allowance for the video game player who cannot keep up. A mystery novel, ultimately, reveals its secrets regardless of the deductive prowess of the reader. A video game is not so forgiving.
SIDEBAR: Mystery is the perfect genre with which to explain the concept of fabula (upon which I build my definition of story). With each revelation, each new plot detail provided within the narrative, the audience reassesses their understanding of the storyworld and their emotional connection to the characters within it. This is not something that happens explicitly within the text, but within the audience’s mind in reaction to the details the author chooses to provide. In this way, story can be inspired, or even directed, by a talented author. Or it can even be allowed to thrive unattended by a particularly bad author, but ultimately the care and feeding of story lies with the audience.
To get back to the point of this post–the comparison of mystery novels to video games isn’t exactly apples to apples. The pages of a mystery novel aren’t glued together. The words aren’t literally encrypted on the page. The librarian doesn’t stop by the house and hide the book every few hours. No, this comparison is more… peaches to nectarines. It’s similar, but not really the same. Novels are much more forgiving, by and large, than video games.
But there are novels that seem intentionally structured to thwart the reader, or at least the reader’s comprehension. The surreal and pun-woven Finnegans Wake by James Joyce, is a perfect example. This novel is so rife with layers of metaphor and symbolism that it defies any single interpretation and, for a great many people, provides such a daunting textual edifice to scale that finding the mental space to even begin reading it seems impassible, much less finishing it once started.
Thomas Pynchon’s Crying of Lot 49 is an example of a novel that doesn’t challenge the reader to interpret it, but does challenge the reader to complete it without succumbing to paranoid schizophrenic thought patterns. Pynchon’s use of the text to trip up the reader’s rhythm and confound perception. He does this specifically by placing complex sentence structures into longer passages filled with simply structured sentences. This builds a cadence that pulls the reader along, only to trick the mind into feeling it has lost its place when a sentence doesn’t follow the same pattern. The eye automatically scans to the top of the paragraph and you wind up rereading portions of the text. This, perhaps more than anything else I’ve read, strikes me as the deliberate incorporation of play into a literary form.
There are similar examples from film, most notably perhaps–the work of David Lynch–but in the realms of music and art, I can think of no parallels. So, baring the use of obscure vocabulary or gibberish, no other media so actively resists completion, as does the video game. Never have I wished to throw a book through a window because of the density of its text. Never have I wished ill upon a cinematographer over their placements of a camera.
And while it’s unique t video games–this concept of difficulty, this idea of intentionally providing barriers to continuation–it’s not entirely without precedent in other media. We could even point to genre and how certain audience’s inability to connect emotionally to characters living on space ships, fighting monsters, or sensuously slipping gauzy dresses off the shoulders of heroines, provide some resistance to completion of their respective genres. And as video games seek to challenge us on so many levels–mental acuity, emotional forbearance, physical adroitness–perhaps it’s only appropriate that they provide resistance to completion, weed out the weak, turn aside the casual, and only provide their final rewards to those of us who persevere against the difficulty and work our way to the end.
Tagged:fabula, game difficulty, james joyce, Round Table, thomas pynchon. |
July 8th, 2008 at 10:07 am
I think that because this *is* unique to games, it is where we’ll find the stories we tell the best. (Thus the narratology rises from the ludology;) Since the player is usually the primary actor, the difficulty/the gameplay is the conflict that he strives against, giving shape to the internal narrative.
It’s the method we need to use to give the player the sense of rising tension. Marrying those with techniques from traditional narratives is the challenge we face.
July 8th, 2008 at 10:25 am
I don’t think that’s necessarily true, Joe. Giving the player options as to how they resolve the difficulty is our storytelling strength, but merely placing obstacles in the way isn’t enough.
Take a poorly written mystery for comparison. If the solution is a surprise because it involves a character and motivations never even hinted at in the text, then it’s hardly a well done mystery.
Just because a game contains a difficult section that forces you to hone a series of complicated hand-eye coordination exercises, doesn’t make for a good storytelling experience.
However, as you say, it does allow the author to create some deeply personal dramatic tension. And as long as it’s being used for that purpose (and not out of some twisted “look what a clever game designer I am” motivation), it can be used to very good effect.
July 8th, 2008 at 12:24 pm
Just because a game contains a difficult section that forces you to hone a series of complicated hand-eye coordination exercises, doesn’t make for a good storytelling experience.
Oh, I never meant to imply that at all. I was merely making reference to the gameplay, which needs to be challenging but not demoralizing, and suggesting that it can be a source of dramatic tension.
It’s not going to work for all games, but it’s a force of conflict that the player is going to identify with (as opposed to something innate to the character, which might not resonate with the player). It’s the challenges that, in my experience, inform how I feel about the NPCs, and the story involved, but that’s a blog entry
July 8th, 2008 at 12:31 pm
I certainly agree, and have frequently argued, that game mechanics are among the most potentially powerful narrative devices we can wield.
I think the trick is in how and why we use them. Using them merely to increase difficulty isn’t the best goal, as far as I’m concerned.
I suspect I have follow up posts to this in me. We’ll see.
July 8th, 2008 at 12:38 pm
Taking into account the origins of the video game, the idea of the mechanics impeding the plot’s progression seems backwards. In extremely early games, such as Pong, plot is entirely absent. For games more complex than Pong, however, it becomes important to provide the player with context about *why* they are participating in the mechanics of the game. Even something as simple as SpaceWar! requires the context of fighting satellites for the player to understand and appreciate the game mechanics. If the plot’s purpose is to provide context for the gameplay, the need for its impediment becomes not just understandable, but necessary.
July 8th, 2008 at 12:50 pm
I don’t see the direct correlation there, Matthew. Every element of the narrative could just as easily help the player work toward reaching the conclusion of the plot.
Consider what most people complain about in regards to Psychonauts–the difficulty of the last level. Up until that point, the game does a beautiful job at communicating details about the storyworld via game mechanics. Then, seemingly suddenly, the difficulty level is ratcheted up considerably for the end of the game. This is an old school platformer approach that seems out of touch with the desire to provide a strongly narrative experience.
I’m not saying that all gameplay need to incredibly easy or non-challenging, but that the idea of artificially inflating difficulty seems counter productive to building a quality narrative.
I’m also saying that there’s a precedent for providing some challenge, even in traditional media. The point of my thrust seems to be that difficulty for difficulty’s sake doesn’t make sense. However, difficulty for narrative’s sense might.
July 8th, 2008 at 1:04 pm
Well, what I mean is that the gameplay (at least originally) wasn’t there to provide a narrative experience. Rather the relationship between mechanics and plot was opposite, where the plot was merely the vehicle for the player to understand what to do and appreciate why they were doing it. Although over time hardware became increasingly capable of providing an ever more immersive experience, the legacy of plot as supplicant to mechanics continued to shape how we think of making games. There were attempts to reverse the relationship, but most of the time they really did succeed in creating a plot impeded by game mechanics, rather than a game with mechanics enhanced by the context from plot.
July 8th, 2008 at 1:11 pm
Indeed. And I like to think we’re at a point where we’re trying, as an industry, to turn that around.
July 8th, 2008 at 1:25 pm
I’m not sure how that would happen, since it goes to the very core of why we play games, rather than watch a plot unfold without our input in a film. That’s not to say there’s no room for sophisticated plots in game, but care must be taken that plot creation is approached from the angle of the plot serving to enhance the gameplay, and not that of the gameplay being an obstacle in the way of the plot’s progression.
July 8th, 2008 at 1:31 pm
The point would be more, I feel, to allow the gameplay to reveal plot through giving the player some measure of control over the unfolding of story.
I’m saying that I don’t feel we all play games for that racheted up level of difficulty, for that intense feeling of challenge. Some measure of it, sure, but not controller-throwing, fist pounding, levels of it.
July 8th, 2008 at 1:40 pm
Not even traditional board and card games, with possible exception of solitaire (which could be argued is more puzzle than game), use game mechanics to impede the players directly. Instead, they use game mechanics to mediate a representational conflict between players. But video games? Video games frequently replace your human opponent with a silicon combatant and suddenly, you find yourself struggling against the very medium you’re consuming in order to complete it.
This is kind of fascinating when you consider it in relation to Chris Crawford’s definition of game, and that “if a challenge has no active agent against whom you compete, it is a puzzle,” as opposed to a game.
Does this mean, then, that single-player videogames are actually more accurately referred to as puzzles, not games? He seems to think so, at least with some types of games such as Pac-Man.
The reason I bring this up is that, in the first part of your statement above, you make the point that traditional board and card games do not use game mechanics to impede players directly–although you could argue that this is because these are multi-player games against active agents, and those agents are the primary means of impeding the player. Solitaire, on the other hand, is a single-player game, which interestingly you argue might be better classified as a puzzle. Yet, puzzles typically do use difficulty and game mechanics to impede players, crossword puzzles being one example.
So how do video games fit with this? Do we need to consider single-player and multi-player video games differently? Would single-player video games be better classified as puzzles, the category in which gameplay mechanics are more routinely used to impede player progress? And do multi-player video games really use game mechanics to impede players, or are they better classified in the same way that traditional board and card games are, since the active agents are all working to impede each other?
The concept of difficulty and the intentional use of barriers to continuation is perhaps not really so unique to video games, I think. You could say it’s a hallmark of puzzles. And perhaps Crawford is right in that single-player video games are not all that different than single-player puzzles, where game mechanics are the primary mechanism for impeding (or perhaps better put, challenging) the player.
July 8th, 2008 at 1:46 pm
I wondered who was going to pick up that thread.
But at this point, I’m not ready to chime back in. I’d rather hear what others have to say in response first.
July 8th, 2008 at 3:09 pm
Aw, you’re no fun.