Blog - More on Fate, Theme and Games
Tuesday, December 16, 2008Hmm, well, speaking of fate as a theme in games:
I was playing through some old SNES games for nostalgia, and one of them was a game called SOS. It's an adventure game where you try to escape a sinking Titantic-esque ship, often trying to lead other passengers and crew to safety.
There are several characters to choose, each with their own storylines.
As such, there's multiple endings. Not only does each character get their own ending, but the ending changes depending on the other people you manage to lead to safety as well.
Now, one character's story begins with him tending to his sister, who is badly-ill. As he leaves her to rest, he expresses his doubts that he can keep helping her. Over the course of this cutscene, he leaves his room and travels around the ship.
Shortly after that sequence, the ship is capsized by a giant wave and the game starts.
This time I managed to actually trace my way back to the character's room, finding the sister still alive.
I had remembered winning the game several times without her, resulting in an ending where my character is rescued, but lamenting that he couldn't save her.
So, having found her, I was determined to save her. After all, feeling like you couldn't help her was established as a theme.
I painstakingly worked my way through the game with her (collected a few others along the way) and wound up with the following ending:
You get to the end, and there's no way to escape. Tired and weak from the journey, your sister dies in your arms, and you're left waiting to drown.
Because the other two people I had dragged there were mysteriously dead at the start of this cutscene, it leads me to believe that no matter what you do, if you rescue your sister your fate is the same. You can't save her, and dye trying.
Now, admittedly, that works with the theme. Your character was right all along: he isn't able to save her no matter how hard he tries. As an artistic statement, I think that's kind of cool. Another good example of using game mechanics to communicate meaning.
But as a player, good lord is that ever unsatisfying.
Because games are usually about a challenge, and this game is much harder to complete while rescuing people than it is to go it alone, I assumed that the character's initial claims of "I don't think I can save her" was a challenge I was meant to overcome.
I put in a lot of extra effort in trying to save her, and was rewarded a worse ending than if I hadn't bothered! It was thematically more powerful, maybe, but an ending where everyone dies? How fun!
In good game design, the rewards should be proportional to the player effort.
Does this apply to elements of the story? I suppose it depends on the needs of the story.
The ending in question violates the proportional rewards rule, but it was done to make an artistic statement, and create a certain mood. I don't think anyone can say the developers made the wrong call.
It's given me something to think about anyway.
In other news, today is the day that I'm giving my talk.
I'm speaking at my former highschool about the game industry and how to break in. posted by Brian Shurtleff @ 4:26 AM
3 Comments:
dsilvers said...
How interesting that you should post something similar to my post. Hmmmmm.... fancy that.
The main issue I see storytelling having in games is that gamers want to be rewarded positively for their efforts. However, depending on the story, such rewards cannot always exist. To give a story a happy ending just because the player did everything in the game defies all logic of good storytelling. Sometimes the hero DOESN'T win.
However, what would have been a better ending, and still fit within the rules of good game design AND good storytelling, would have been to get the sister on a lifeboat and you die saving her. You still die but at least you were rewarded for your bravery.
The existing ending you got to is not the fault of bad design, just of bad writing.
Brian Shurtleff said...
Well I did read your blog's entry on this in between these two I wrote here on fate, so, eh. ;)
Anyway, no, I wouldn't say it's bad writing.
Your suggestion would have been worse, actually...
This ending worked because it took the earlier stated them of "you can't save her" and made it literally true.
I was hoping that through hard work I'd be able to bypass that, and the game taught me an interesting lesson: no, I can't.
To have YOU die but HER live, is the weakest choice out of the three, because it rides the fence.
It neither is supporting the thesis as true or defying it outright.
I guess that ending would be saying "Only through ultimate heroic sacrifice could I save her" which could work if you set it up right I suppose but that wasn't the direction they were intending, and is more difficult to pull off in a game.
It's hard to make 'only through killing yourself can you achieve salvation' as a decent message in a video game, because it kind of defies the very thing you do in games. =D
So, point is, that would be a bad ending, actually.
The other alternative is if you get to the end and she dies of her illness, but you still managed to get rescued. That's still weak for the above reason. Whether or not you live or die is totally unimportant and has nothing to do with how rewarding the ending is.
That would be no better than if you did die. You've already failed.
The reason I was saying I did like the ending, even if it is admittedly disappointing and frustrating from a game design perspective, is that it was a perfect example of how a game's design can support it's writing.
Note in the above I did NOT say that it was bad game design. I just said it was frustrating and disappointing.
In this case, I think disappointing and frustrating WORKS.
Brian Shurtleff said...
Actually, correction: "Killing yourself" wasn't the right choice of words. "Allowing yourself to die" is more accurate, and better explains why it's not really a great theme for a game.
It's non-active.
It might work if you could pull off a situation where the player really feels like they're sacrificing something when their character sacrifices himself. That'd be tough to do.