I just got done indulging myself and taking a little extra time doing my assignment for game design this week, which was an analysis of heralded narrative game Façade. (Too tired to fix cedilled C. Imagine it’s there.) I then went back to look at an earlier analysis of Zork I did, and realized that even though I thought GDC had marked a huge revolution in my thinking, I was saying pretty much the same thing I was saying then. Nota bene, though, that where I was previously concerned only with the limitations put on the player, I’ve now flipped the script and have started thinking about the limitations on the game producer’s side. Here are both analyses:
Also note: where my prose has been merely fucked up since I entered grad school, it has now been permanently destroyed after a semester reading 180+ pages of theory a week. Thank you, Frank and Robbie. I’m going to need to spend a summer reading Hunter S. and Steinbeck to detox.
anyway. Before GDC and a semester of class with B. and A., on Zork:
Good lord but this was a painful exercise — took me back to some of the worst parts of a childhood marked by my younger sister beating me at every single video game. (DAMN YOU, Hitchhiker’s Guide!)
Zork is, more palpably than some video games, like a sonnet; story expressed within a rigid structure. The story is written out by the designers; your travel must move along their established paths. The player can certainly develop intentions, but they must be communicated to the computer through very limited syntax. This conflicts with the rich description which appears to offer the player the kind of boundless opportunities youâd expect from a narrative. You might think youâd be able to respond to the storytellers in kind, and only your imagination would set the limitations. When I first played these games, I expected to be able to do anything I could write.
But the syntax proved to be limiting. Programmers who were among the first players of these games understood this automatically, knowing you could only communicate with computers in inflexible syntax. To non-technical players like Me-aged-eleven, however, it appeared perceivable consequence had been taken out behind the little white house and shot. Nothing I did seemed to have any effect. No matter what I did, something killed me. Meanwhile, the game kept telling me it didnât understand what I was saying.
One intent my peers developed in our early encounter with these games was black-boxing the syntax until the game’s responses made sense. For example, we might type a line of cuss-words in Spanish. In response to “chinga tu madre, computadora de mocos grandes,” the line “That sentence isn’t one I recognize” is more satisfyingly reasonable than when it responds to the line “go behind the house.” Thinking of text-based games again like sonnets, this kind of player intent can be seen as parody: ignoring the content of the game and making light of the game’s structure. Wall-walking and other sploits in WoW are of this intentâs lineage; they may be unintended behavior and make the game less fun for others, but theyâre often highly entertaining to the players who figure them out and make use of them. I think more games should support this kind of play. The art of supporting a parodylike, black-boxing intent has been perfected by the easter egg masters over at homestarrunner.com in their text game Thy Dungeonman, where attempting to do unreasonable things — and even entering bad syntax â yield more entertaining results than playing through the game straight.
When I type “go south” in instructions for another human, she has a sense that she should continue south regardless of obstacles. However, when I was north of the house and typed “go south” in Zork, it responded “The windows are all boarded,” which makes no sense if I didnât expect to walk through the house. The descriptions in the game donât always make boundaries to movement obvious. You can sometimes see in directions you canât walk, and walk in directions which canât be reversed with the inverse of a command you used to get there.
Barring simple movement, which tends to be frustrating, the designers do make some space for perceivable consequence. The text is written in such a way as to cue the player to interact with salient parts of the environment. Your sword glows blue, for example, when the troll approaches; buttons are there to be pushed, items to be collected, paths to be taken. There are not too many extraneous details to confuse the player about what they should do next. When you perform actions, your environment is indelibly altered. In this sense the gameâs perceivable consequence makes more sense than its descendant, the MMORPG, where if you take a sword you might not be able to pick it up again even if it respawns again while you watch.
More on player intents: the counter of the number of moves enables the player to plot an intent to beat the game in the lowest possible number of moves. The counter also allows for perceivable consequences related to the passage of time, a neat trick for a simple game relying on bits of description; for example, when I pressed the blue button, then dithered for a few moves in the maintenance room, the water I had allowed to rush into the room rose turn by turn and eventually drowned me.
Another player intent could include managing inventory efficiently, which is puzzle-like â you want to be sure you have the right thing on you at the right time, but you have limited space in your inventory. However, consequences here are frustratingly imperceptible. Your inventory size is clearly gauged by weight â the game refers to how you canât carry more things because youâre already burdened with a heavy load — but itâs not immediately clear how much items weigh. Thus the player has to tinker with dropping and picking up items until they have a balance of items they need.
To some extent, the muddiness of perceivable consequence supports the storyline. This quest really is a challenge, and an exploration; you need to think hard about what you take with you, keep track of where youâve been, and be resourceful with your items. However, the barriers to formulating intent and the confusion of perceivable consequence also detract from the story. If I really am a resourceful, questing hero, it should be a piece of cake for me to climb over those fallen trees, right? If this really is a fantasy land bounded by my imagination, why canât I imagine that Iâve kicked in the door to the locked house? Not to say that weâve solved these problems since Zorkâ¦
* * *
After GDC and a semester of class with B. and A., on Façade:
âWeâre actors â weâre the opposite of people!â âPlayer, Rosencranz and Guildenstern are Dead
The idea of an âinteractiveâ story is problematic when seen from a cognitive perspective. Cognitive science does not view reading, viewing, and other forms of audienceship as passive. All of them are interactive; you process stimuli, connect your understanding of the current text to your prior experiences, and formulate responses and hypotheses, even if you never voice them.
As for stories, thereâs a line of thought in cognitive science which says human thought is narrative, I believe because we use language. Speech is linear, so anything we remember and subsequently relate through verbal media is going to be played out over time, as narrative. Gameplay would be included. Unlike many games where play leaves no narrative trace unless you retell your play to someone else, Façade actually produces a narrative artifact for you in the form of a script. It thus further focuses our attention on our narrative tendencies, and its narrative aspirations.
The script added to my feeling that what I was doing was neither playing a video game nor participating in an interactive story (even ignoring cognitive hair-splitting, I still donât think Iâve ever seen an example of an âinteractive story,â so I wouldnât know one if I saw it), but rather acting my way through a Eugene Ionesco play in a dream. Unlike meatspace D&D role-playing games, where worlds and abilities are defined, the characters in Façade have set lines â except the player, of course. When I interrupted Trip or Grace by hitting return a second too late, the story became one of misunderstanding, of talking past one another. They frequently misinterpreted things I said, reducing complex sentences to something that felt like a couple of sliders on the gameâs circuit board (communication, agreement, happiness, ?). Ionesco meant to evoke the alienation of modern society by writing miscommunications like this. Not sure if Mateas and Stern intended a similar effect, but itâs what they got.
The narrative takes on a slightly different cast when played through a few times in succession. Unlike platformers, FPSes, and others where replay is a musical, dancing experience without words or conscious attention to narrative â characters popping up at their orchestrated times, your avatar making her way through intricate footwork, a rhythm ultimately perfectable when practiced â you begin to feel youâre Bill Murray in Groundhog Day, or perhaps Rosencranz and Guildenstern in Tom Stoppardâs play. The effect is not like a script, but like a script gone wrong. Though the order differs, Trip and Grace say the same things over and over. Very little that you say or do matters. Theyâre going to make it through their argument one way or another. On realizing this, I made like Bill Murray in the third or fourth iteration of his day and started to sabotage things, to game the system. This is not a readerâs impulse, but rather that of a heckler watching a particularly awkward standup comic.
In sum, then, I think Façade is more of a surrealist performance piece than a story or a video game — but then, werenât stories originally performed unmediated? Ernest Adams said at GDC that the game designer and the player both spend from a âcredibility budget.â When a playerâs first line to Trip at the door is âHelp me, Iâve been shot,â sheâs blown all the budget at once and, Adams says, âlost the designer.â The problem with these imitations of emotion, conversation, and other human interactions is that the designerâs participation is tightly mediated and temporally curtailed, thus more quickly and thoroughly lost than he would be in conversation or performance. A warm body in the designerâs chair, acting in real time, would be able to keep up the fiction. When it becomes clear there is only a Turing machine, a voice-messaging system, in that chair, the playerâs role must perforce be to turn hacker and pwn the box by whatever means necessary.
Post a Comment