Blog - Harmonizing Narrative Depth with Episodic Play
Tuesday, March 4, 2008This starts off as almost a tangent, but eventually I ramble my way around to my point:
Thanks to Brenda and Sheri Graner Ray, I've enjoyed being involved with (volunteering for) WIGI at several conferences I've been to. Making our industry more diverse and welcoming has interested me for a while and it's great to work with some people also devoted to those goals.
So, at SIEGE I saw Ernest Adams' presentation on women in games. In his lecture, he mentioned that women, at least generally speaking, prefer more character depth than most games are able to provide. Hollywood can much more easily tie us emotionally into a character, whereas only a good handful of games seem to ever manage that.
In order for the depth of a character to properly manifest, it should follow that they're placed in a narrative of some kind. Ergo, story-heavy games attract deep characters, and deep characters should attract more female players.
I, however, also know that casual games are doing wonders for drawing women into gaming, to the degree where the industry is even targeting them.
So, I asked what was nearly the only question asked at the end of his presentation. I asked how those two forces can be reconciled. Casual games attract women, but by their very nature cannot realistically support a heavy enough narrative to support deep characters. Conversely, games with enough story to support deep characters have trouble being anywhere near "casual".
Adams didn't have an answer that satisfied me, instead merely agreeing that both were great forces at work in the issue.
Sheri's Book Gender Inclusive Game Design, however, addressed this issue at one point, as I discovered.
When discussing puzzles in chapter 8, she says that players -particularly female players- like having an emotional tie to characters, yes. In particular to their avatar.
However, she says this is not true in casual games.
The argument is that people will not want to invest time in a character of a game they already don't want to invest that much time in.
I can see that. I'll agree that that's true in most cases.
I have to wonder if there are exceptions, however.
What about episodic games?
Each particular episode is not much of a time investment, yet you still get the benefit of an overarching narrative and characters. For example, Telltale Games' Sam and Max episodes are great little games that come across to me as fairly casual. They only take about as long to play as watching an episode of your favorite television show, and the game play is pretty accessible I feel. Back to characters: Sam and Max are fantastic characters! Okay, maybe they're not that deep... but I don't see why a similar game couldn't be made that did have more depth to it.
The biggest problem I see as standing in the way is that the player would have to keep the ongoing story in their memory. Craig Perko had a pretty interesting little entry on that problem a while back.
The Sam and Max episodic games might only work because they have little in the way of depth: you don't actually ever have to remember what happened in a previous episode. If you do, great. You'll get more out of what little overarching plot to the series there is. But it's not critical.
Have deeper characters, however, and it might come up. It might be critical for a player to remember that, in an episode they played two months ago, they rejected a character, crushed someone's spirit, offended another, etc, if the lingering emotional aftermath from that erupts back up to the surface. Depth is all about what is bubbling underneath the surface of a character, and players will have to remember and track that, somehow.
However, television dramas manage this well enough. Why can't we?
Of course, on the one hand television has the benefit of being on a schedule, usually a weekly one.
That's much less downtime in between episodes, less time for the audience to forget.
But television dramas also tackle the problem with a "Previously, on..." pre-teaser montage at the start of each episode. This was suggested in Perko's player memory entry; however he used it in the context of a more traditional style of game. The thing about 'Previously on..." segments is that they don't just recap what has happened (or at least, they shouldn't), they recap specifically only what the audience needs to remember for that particular episode.
To put in a "Previously, in your game of Civ..." segment wouldn't be nearly as effective by that logic. There's little way to tell upon loading a player's game what he/she is going to do in that play session, so you can't find the particular elements to say "remember these specific details about the previous play session, as they'll become important during this one."
You can't, because you have no idea how long the player is going to play in that sitting.
But in an episodic game, this kind of "Previously, on..." segment is more possible.
Because it is broken down into episodes, you know exactly what occurs (or rather, can occur) in that particular episode, and thus can point out to the player specific past events in the overarching plot that they'll want to know for this episode.
Add in a system that keeps track of game-to-game data, building ever larger databases of what happened in the player's episodes so they can affect the plot and characters of future episodes, and you might have something really fascinating there.
Labels: design, episodic games, women in games, writing
posted by Brian Shurtleff @ 3:32 PM
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