Blog - Games: Life with the boring bits still in it?!
Tuesday, March 18, 2008In most narrative forms, you cut out all that is irrelevant and tedious. 3 Years of a person's life can be cut to 2 sentences in a novel.
Hell, most of my student writing was done for the medium of television which by necessity of only having thirty minutes to an hour to tell a story requires the writer to cut out pretty much everything but the most crucial "spine" elements.
Stories usually jump right in to the important stuff, and cut down on the back story.
Games are often fine at this part of the concept.
Games, however, also let you do fantastic amounts of tedious actions that would never fly in any other story form. Sometimes, I wonder why this is true.
It's one of the huge problems when considering constructing narratives for games: games are paced really oddly.
Now, I can in some sense see why. First of all, we must consider that just because something is tedious relative to plot doesn't mean it's not fun.
As Craig Perko mentions in numerous articles on his site, just moving in a game should be fun.
Okay, yes, a good plot should be active, but although movement is active by definition, a film where people just ran around and jumped and nothing else would have to be considered an "art piece" or be booed out of theaters for an appalling lack of a storyline. Action films have a lot of running around and jumping, but they thread that into at least an attempt at a story, usually. Running around and jumping provides the obstacles and the character's means of overcoming said obstacles, which make them an element of the story, sure, but the story of an action film is never about running and jumping, though. Even films about a famous runner aren't about running, exactly.
In games, however, sometimes just running around and jumping works fine. As every child knows, running around and jumping can be really fun, and fun is generally all we ask of games.
In the GTA series players tend not to give a hoot about the actual story mission mode. The fun of that game is generally in just driving around and blowing things up without consequence. Although in some sense, these moments can be considered story as you can certainly recount, in the form of a story, some of the crazy stuff you've done in this fashion in GTA, like intense car chases, crazy stunts you pulled, etc. When telling people about a play session you had of GTA these are usually the stories you tell.
But on the other hand:
1.) This kind of story is completely hit-or-miss. Sure, you'll occasionally have moments of extreme tension, or something thematically interesting will happen randomly and accidentally, but there's also a lot of dull bits in the meantime.
2.) Being as there are basically no consequences of any importance involved, this kind of "story" doesn't make for any sort of overall narrative. Narratives require character actions to matter, which means consequences.
Is making movement fun a gimmick used to make the game fun, or a gimmick used to just make the act of moving not suck as much?
That, I think, is a valid question.
As one of my favorite books points out: moving sucks. Space sucks. People like to go to and experience new places, but the act of actually traveling from one place to another is something we humans think is a tremendous bother.
That's why those "go here and fetch me this thing" Hub-and-spoke quests suck.
Does making how the player moves into a more fun activity solve the problem, or just hide its odor better?
And that's just physical travel. Pacing is a matter of temporal travel. Admittedly, yes, when you travel through physical space you tend to travel through time as well, so they're nearly the same thing. In any case, temporal pacing is the real root of the overall problem of pacing.
As I see it, the main reason games leave as many moments available to the player - as uninteresting as they may be - is because it's the easiest way to not rob them of potential choice. As game designers we're reluctant to rob a player of choice. Of course, games always inevitably do to some degree anyway. Until we have a game that can procedurally generate any content and can respond to any insane whim of the player, there will always be some limitations of choice for the player. We place barriers for where they can't go, for example. How many games are set on islands, with the player fresh out of boats? A lot. Does that rob the player of, say, the choice to escape the game's setting and go to Australia and start a kangaroo farm? Well, sure, but who cares? It might sadden you a little if that's what you really wanted to do in the game. Most players just accept that that's not possible and move on. Limitation on player choice can be handled elegantly enough that players won't mind, within reason.
But then again, I look at the phenomenal success of The Sims - a game which is life with almost nothing but the dull bits - and it leads me to believe that there's something here I'm missing.
If the best selling game involves you largely making your character sleep, pay her bills, and use the toilet, then maybe there's something to those dull bits after all that I just haven't figured out yet. posted by Brian Shurtleff @ 12:25 PM
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