Blog - Borrowing Structure, Even in Games
Monday, August 11, 2008My best friend was in town for a little while and just before he left we decided to collaborate on another writing project.
I won't spill too much information on this one at the moment, although I will say I'm super excited by the project at the moment.
I'm at the stage of creation where I'm so excited by my own ideas that every time I sit down to write I'm so hyper that I have to get up and walk around or something until I calm down. I'll consider that a good place to be.
In any case, I'm going to talk today about structure.
The current piece I'm writing is a short story (currently taking the form of a one-act play) entirely taking place during a police interrogation of a suspect.
While trying to research a few things on how interrogations are done so I could get my details straight, I ended up finding a list of the steps actual investigators use for conducting interrogations. It's actually a meticulously structured ordeal designed to psychologically weaken the suspect at just the right times.
I'm attempting to use that sequence of stages as the plot structure for my scene.
For one thing, that seems the most natural thing to do. My scene is an interrogation, and so when I discover that interrogations themselves have an internal structure, why not use it?
More than that, I just love playing with structure, using all kinds of unconventional systems as the structure for plot. I guess that's the game designer in me, loving to play with systems. ;)
The first one-act play I wrote (coincidentally, the only serious piece I've written that has actually been produced and shown to an audience) used the stages of death as the base of it's plot structure, for example. For a time my best friend and I were considering writing film of short vignettes using the structure rules for various forms of poetry (villanelles, etc.) but using filmic language (shots, transitions) in place of literary ones. In other words, where you'd normally have a word repeat, we'd have a shot repeat, etc. But like the poetry forms, it'd have to be stitched together in a way that not only followed all the rules, but actually made sense and in fact had it's meaning deepened by the adherence of said rules.
I'm thinking though now that such play with story structure would be much harder to pull off with a video game. Story structure is a tricky matter in games, because the player is this rogue element that you can't control. The player is often the trickster god of chaos working to bring down the neat and tidy order that the story wants to lay down as its structure.
I considered this problem relative to the current use of borrowed structure: my example of the interrogation process as a plot structure.
I've been thinking of ways to make that work in a game.
And it seems to quite well. After all, games are pretty good at representing processes.
Just make interrogation itself as a game. It very nearly is already.
There's two sides with opposing goals. Either get the confession out of the suspect if you're the investigators, or if you're the suspect then your goal is to make it out of the situation the best you can. The psychological weakening techniques used by investigators leads to an intensely strategic game. It's a battle of wits, although an admittedly fairly one-sided battle. You'd have to admit that it is a pretty emotionally intense experience though, to a degree most games would kill to achieve.
Given as there's already a process laid down for what investigators say and at even at what time they say them depending on how psychologically weakened the suspect appears, an interrogation would make for a pretty amazing dialogue-tree puzzle. Especially if the game informs the player in advance of what the process is and how the system works.
For example, playing as police investigators, during some training portion the player is taught the techniques, then later in the game has to use them to say just the right lines at the right time to break down the convict and make him confess.
Or, playing a caught criminal, the player could have been warned by someone of what to expect, and the player has to try and use that information to avoid being psychologically weakened and being lead down the wrong path - the one that leads to you being caught in the trap of confessing.
By structuring the gameplay, you ARE structuring the story. Gameplay is perhaps our medium's most powerful means of conveying story anyway, and as the only medium that can use that means at all I'd say it's one we should continue to explore.
Consider another process easily turned into plot structure: a 12-step program.
The primary character ("player", in the case of a game) certainly has a clear goal: get through all the steps, and end up clean. The twelve steps are the roadblocks on the path, the trials she must prove she can pass. Twelve levels maybe?
This was just an example off the top of my head so I haven't exactly thought through how to make the twelve steps a fun game to play, but I won't say it couldn't be done.
Borrowing structure like I do can inspire and enrich writing, and I wish to both inspire and enrich writing in games.
Labels: game design, structure, writing
posted by Brian Shurtleff @ 3:06 AM
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