Messages in mechanics
Gamasutra has published an opinion piece by a Christian pop culture critic that is perceptive and cogent. In it, Richard Clark argues that games that place storytelling in a privileged position in the game design need to be judged by the same sort of critical and moral standards as we judge storytelling in any other medium.
I agree, of course as those who have read the book and blog know; that said, Clark seems to give a pass to games whose experience is more centered on mechanics:
Not all games call for these kinds of questions. Games like Tetris, Peggle, Torchlight, and Doodle Jump make a deliberate attempt to place gameplay first. The story and characters truly are intended to be containers for game play elements.
I think there are implicit lessons to be derived from mechanics too. So I am not inclined to give any games a pass on serious critical thought, regardless of whether they are heavy on story or not!
Is Loved less to be analyzed because it lacks cutscenes or detailed characters? Check out the comments on the review over at Casual Gameplay and see what you think (and if you haven’t played the game — be sure to play it with the sound on). Note how the game mechanics and content alter as you play based on mechanical choices. And notice how the fundamental questions the games raises are based on a mechanic: the choice to obey or not.
Times have definitely changed though — the comment thread on the Gamasutra piece is running heavily in favor of the article, which I don’t think would have been the case five years ago. Hopefully, we see the sophistication level of game critiques — and game content! — continue to increase as we think more about what we do.
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That’s why I prefer the term “narrative” to the more restrictive “storytelling”. In Literature, focusing on “storytelling” would leave out huge subsets of poetry & other forms. I’m still not sure “narrative” is the right word – I’ll leave that for smarter, native English speakers. 🙂
In Loved, the gameplay elements are not the goal, but tools to access its narrative elements (which all together form “the message”, or the framework for interpretation of a meaning). I think in that sense, this game is still at the opposite end of the spectrum from games like Peggle or Tetris.
He writes, “It’s a shame, then, that the average consumer must wait days, weeks or months to read analysis at some of the more thoughtful gaming blogs, few of which get prerelease copies of these games as the more mainstream review sites do.”
I’m not sure what world he’s living in, but the average consumer doesn’t wait days, weeks or months to read that kind of analysis. The average consumer doesn’t care one whit and is not waiting for that kind of analysis at all. That applies to movies, music, and books as well.
It certainly sucks for the relative handful of us that DO care to read thoughtful analyses of games, but let’s not pretend that this is a populist thing or that it has any real bearing on the success of a game vis a vis consumer acceptance.
I got bored once and did a cage match critique of Peggle vs. Kubrick’s 2001.
Um, possibly that’s not quite what you meant. But this:
“I am not inclined to give any games a pass on serious critical thought regardless of whether they are heavy on story”
is an opinion I would like to see daubed on walls everywhere.
To critique a game at the level of mechanics sometimes requires transcending cultural presuppositions that are ingrained at a very fundamental level. We have to understand that certain things that “everybody knows” are not universal truths, but are merely useful models within a specific (often very narrow) cultural context.
The suppositions underlying most MMOs are troubling when considered starkly. Most living things in the world are enemies. They will attack and try to kill you as soon as they sense you. You must kill them or flee; they will not listen to reason. You will gain no reward from avoiding, running or hiding from them, only from killing them. You will gain greater rewards from killing other players. The best way to kill other players is to attack a lone player with a group, ambushing and slaughtering him before he has a chance to escape or react. You may craft, but your best rewards from crafting will come from making the tools of combat.
The question is brought home most starkly for me by Star Trek Online. The Star Trek universe has always been riddled by contradictions, but at its best it asks hard questions about conflict and violence and suggests that phasers and photon torpedoes are neither the only nor the best solution.
Star Trek Online dodges those questions. They’ve created a universe at war. You enter a system, Star Fleet sends you a subspace to kill enemy wessels, you either kill the enemy wessels or drop the mission (and get nothing beyond another mission with the same parameters — but at least they don’t throw you in the brig for insubordination).
To be fair, the designers are working on a ‘Diplomatic Corps’ system. And also to be fair, conflict drives story. But too much conflict overwhelms story. After a certain point, you’re not playing Star Trek, you’re playing Galaga 3D. And while I love Galaga… it’s not Trek
Critical thought in Peggle? Indeed, one example comes immediately to mind:
Colorblind mode.
Noting the potential need for (and ability to easily implement) a mode for those with colorblindness shows that serious critical thought was applied to the mechanical elements of the game.
There are counterexamples, too, of unintended consequences of mechanical/design decisions where more critical thought could have illuminated the issue. The ultra-rigid gameplay culture that once emerged in FFXI ultimately boiled down to a single, innocuous-looking design decision to provide a chain bonus to XP earned from killing mobs in rapid succession.
(Not that chain bonuses are inherently bad; this is very much a devil-in-the-details sort of thing. I could explain the FFXI scenario fully but it’d take an hour at least and I’m at work. 😛 )
Peter:
I don’t think that was what Raph meant by critical analysis.
Raph wrote:
See? The point is that there is a narrative to be found in even the most “mechanical” of games — it is found in the interactions, the play.
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I just had a flashback to playing a smelting minigame in SOE’s Free Realms. The quest called for achieving a certain score in the ore smelting process. I was trying time and again to get the substantial bonus for finishing under the time limit, and time and again I failed to make the score necessary to complete the quest. Then something clicked in my brain, I ignored the timer and concentrated on completing each step perfectly, however long it took. I hit the goal on the first try and every time thereafter.
There’s a life lesson in that mechanic… not a profound one, perhaps, but something that needs a bit of reinforcing from time to time.
@Morgan,
Good point. It is hard to fashion something choice in the context of Peggle, but thinking down that line of thought it’s worth noting that Peggle manages to represent an abstractly violent activity (shooting and destroying things with a cannon) as harmless whimsy, in my opinion successfully so. There isn’t an element of choice, but there is an element of critical awareness of how its presentation matters. In this case, it’s arguable that Peggle is explicit in removing the need to psychologically encounter choice or doubt by carefully presenting its activity as fully harmless, repeatedly assuring the player that they don’t need to become uncomfortable within its contexts.
Counter-example in this case would be Eversion, which I’ll strongly recommend if you’ve not played it. It’s short, and the non-high-def flash version is completely free.
Consumers do care, but they go to museums to find that sort of analysis. I don’t think there are any proper museum exhibits of games a la museum science exhibits, complete with information booths, guest speakers, documentaries, etc. I remember a game historian talked about chess at the Museum of Man in San Diego several years ago, but really, if elevating the language of game criticism is the goal, then developers will have to make that happen at an individual level.
Narrative: in the context of the short YouTube video, using slides from topical searches to stripe the lyrics such that there is not one dominant set of objects photographed but samples arranged to create emotional impact to heighten the lyrical content. Here the images like the music have a supporting role in evoking the desired effect of the narrative and are more powerful by the effect of many eyes capturing the original samples.
Of interest to me when I used that technique for a song was a response from a viewer stating that the ‘movie didn’t have a beginning middle and end’ or from their perspective, no narrative despite the fact that the lyrical content is expressly narrative in form. To me that means a narrative may indeed be in the piece but the orientation of the viewer to the compound media (not a hypermedia in this case as is the case for games given choices for sub-component selections) determines the perceptibility of narrative.
A side note is the technique described does create thematic or cognitive non-linearity and this is effective for heightening the emotional stimulus. The same effect works in musical samples recombined artfully.
Narrative can be a distraction to hide the transformative mojo. 🙂
The dialectic isn’t between morality and fun, it’s between immersion and fun.
Richard
That’s a showstopper of an assertion. I have an inkling of what you’re getting at, but I’d like to hear more about this dialectic, and what’s the ideal synthesis?
My (quick, at work) guess: morality is only (perceived as?) relevant when a game is immersive enough to be seen as influential or persuasive.
Morality can be said to be the choice of the choice of choices: when is choosing among choice sets a choice worth making. So yes, if a game is fun it is worth playing. If immersion increases fun, it narrows that choice among games. Morality is concerned with choosing to choose among game choices. Do I choose say a social network (a weak kind of game) vs WoW (a strong game) given resources? Influence and persuasion can play a role in that choice among opportunity costs (economic model).
Some kinds of fun aren’t moral. Some are. Some games have few or no moral implications but that comes down to values other than simply fun in most philosophies. In other words, the opportunities change.
Yukon Sam>I’d like to hear more about this dialectic
Er, OK, here’s the thinking behind it.
All games have mechanics. Abstract games only have mechanics, and the meaning of these games is embodied entirely in those mechanics (although individual play experiences can layer further meanings on top, for example through the behaviour of other players).
Most games have a fiction in addition to mechanics. This fiction adds meaning to the mechanics beyond the purely abstract. No longer are you trying to maximise the sum of a succession of weighted die rolls: now you’re trying to capture Paris.
The richer the fiction, the more context it adds to the mechanics. However, they can interfere with one another. Sometimes, the mechanics submit to the fiction (you can’t walk through walls because that would be fiction-busting) and sometimes the fiction submits to the mechanics (you don’t die from a single arrow wound because that would be mechanics-busting). The meaning of the game is therefore the result of a conversation between the fiction and the mechanics.
Now when I say “fiction” here, what I mean is a set of beliefs that the player must hold as a consistent truth while playing, even though the player knows that this is not necessarily a reflection of reality. However, if the fiction is to imbue further meaning in the mechanics, it must reflect reality at some level; otherwise, the fiction itself would be meaningless, and therefore unable to add meaning. Thus, the more persuasive the fiction is that it is real, the greater its opportunity to inform the meaning of the gameplay.
There are many aspects to the persuasiveness of a fiction. The simplest is at the sensory level: a 3D visual is more persuasive than a 2D visual. There are higher levels, though: physics where you slow down before stopping are more persuasive than physics where you stop dead the moment you take your finger off the W key; a world in which people go indoors when it rains is more persuasive than one in which they stand around outside in their regular clothes; an NPC who is resentful for your treachery is more persuasive than an NPC who treats you the same way every time you converse.
We can go higher still, though. If the symbols of the fiction are strong enough and well-associated enough, then people can have an emotional reaction in response to it. This reaction can be of a visceral, intellectual or moral nature (and probably some others, too).
It’s not morality that’s driving the meaning of a game, though; morality is merely one of many ways that the fiction is interpreted as a coherent entity. It’s the fiction as a whole that is important, or, more precisely, its ability to draw people into the game. We call the ability of a fiction to draw people into a game “immersion”.
As for the meaning of a game, well that can be a multitude of things to a multitude of individuals. People play games for many reasons, of which to be entertained is but the most common. However, the act of unpicking the meaning of a game does elicit the same experience from players: they call it “fun”.
A conversation between mechanics and fiction in one game is therefore part of a larger, never-ending dialogue between fun and immersion. Too much immersion can mean too little fun, but too little immersion can mean too much fun. The nature of the immersion and the fun is nuanced by individual fictions and mechanics, too.
The paradox, of course, is that immersion is itself fun, and fun is itself immersive…
Richard
Invoking the dialectic implies an oppositional relationship between “immersion” and “fun”, and that’s what I found intriguing. In the context of ethics, it makes some sense. The more deeply immersed in a game you are, the more distressing (and less fun) it is to be confronted with ethical dilemmas (particularly if your personal ethics don’t square with those of the designer). Conversely, if you’re not immersed at all, you can play with different choices with no ethical qualms.
That’s my take, at any rate.
Yukon Sam>Invoking the dialectic implies an oppositional relationship between “immersion” and “fun”, and that’s what I found intriguing.
Yes, that’s how I see it. They are opposed to one another: immersion demands authenticity, which can corrupt fun; fun demands gameplay, which can subvert immersion. However, they’re both working towards the same goal; if you can get them to pull together, instead of pulling in opposite directions, you can achieve more than either can achieve alone.
>In the context of ethics, it makes some sense. The more deeply immersed in a game you are, the more distressing (and less fun) it is to be confronted with ethical dilemmas (particularly if your personal ethics don’t square with those of the designer).
I agree, but the same could be said of anything that confounds your expectations. You could be faced with a head-or-heart emotional dilemma, or a distressing aesthetic choice – or a simple “hey, that guy’s feet are moving but he’s staying in the same position” tic. Anything that interrupts the immersive experience can affect fun, and vice versa. It’s an immersion thing, not a morality thing.
>Conversely, if you’re not immersed at all, you can play with different choices with no ethical qualms.
That’s right, but you may not be getting as much fun, either.
Richard
Immersion in play where the immersive features heighten the effect of an immoral or moral choice may be more potent than the failure of legs to move. If immersion intensifies fun, it intensifies un-fun.
Len>Immersion in play where the immersive features heighten the effect of an immoral or moral choice may be more potent than the failure of legs to move.
Yes, but it’s a continuum. Morality is near the high end, but it’s not all there is there. An event can be potent and disturbing for many reasons; a morality conflict is but one of them.
Richard
I find that as social beings, when somebody desires to act inhumanly towards other people, they most often depersonalize the victim. Deliberately cutting off any empathy for a target as a fellow human being might be considered stepping back from “immersion” in real life. Denying the humanity of the victim allows the most horrific acts to be viewed as a game, “fun” in a rulebook where the only thing that matters is the gratification of the “player”.
Perhaps that’s a stetch of what we mean by immersion, but my training is that of an actor. I see parallels to the “god is on my side” principle of acting — characters who are evil rarely see themselves as such, but instead wholly believe their actions to be morally justifiable by the circumstances, often utilizing the rationalization that the opposition is weak and unworthy, not fully human. They’re not immersed in the social order, but instead in a reality of their own design where they are either the sole fully-realized human or part of a small elite corps.
Immersion == willing.
That’s why it is gratifying or disturbing in a game or real life. A question is if it is gratifying or disturbing in a game, is it experienced the same way given the same degree of immersion in real life? We all have Walter Mitty as a shadow.
Dunno. I don’t think stories and games are entirely comparable in an ethical/moral discussion. It isn’t the intent of game makers that worries society the most, it is the intent of the players playing. Games are simulation grounds. Is the army real when you’re not at war? Or is it a game? What is the difference between playing a game and participating in combat training? What is the intent of the player? What is his motivation for participating in the horrible activities he commits his time to?
Games and fun are orthogonal concepts. Engaging does not imply fun.
You don’t die if you are a spectator viewing a war narrative and the interpretation of going to the movies is more one of being in empathy with rather than one longing to participating in. The basis for evaluating moral values of games and movies are fundamentally different. You are less likley to be accused of longing to particpate when you are spectator. Watching a war movie to be informed is different from playing a war game in most people’s minds.
Narrative. Narrative is what you get when you RETELL events, the objective game events do not constitute a narrative in my opinion. If games make players spectators of a narrative then they aren’t proper games in my opinion.
A game may provide a universe of likely narratives, but you cannot have a narrative without the interpretive mind of a player which gives the narrative a particular angle… The game does not provide a narrative unless it is a click-click-click movie… Of course many game makers are trying to make movies, thus trying to hand over a specific “narrative” to the player, but I don´t think that is a defining quality of games. That’s a quality of games that try to be movies.
Because they’re not interactive, the case could be made that movies and television are training the audience to be spectators rather than moral agents. The narrative is set, you’re powerless to change it, all you can do is watch it unfold.
That ties back into the perpetual “sandbox vs. theme park” discussion of MMOs. The more that game quests run on rails without significant player choices, the less the player feels invested in the outcome. You become a passive agent of the narrative rather than an author of it.
That may be the most pernicious message embedded in game mechanics; “Regardless of which way you jump, you can’t really change things”. I think there’s a deep need for games that allow players to change the playfield and the rules, to make a lasting contribution to the world, to get the message that if they can actively change the virtual world, maybe they can make a difference in the real world.
How you do that while maintaining cohesion and balance is another question entirely.