Culture Clash

(January 2007)

Bound Within a Nutshell

Barry Brenesal asked Santa for “an RPG made for someone with more brains, maturity and socially interactive skills than a shuttered 10-year-old” in CPU Magazine's December issue. He's hardly the first to wish for such a thing, but it's unfair to suggest there haven't been any literate games. And bringing more up to snuff wouldn't be hard. Just giving greater attention, care and priority to narrative can buttress game stories.

There's a difference between writing and story, though in games both tend to be pretty bad. Still, they're not one and the same, and rather than rehash last month's game-writing-sucks argument, let's look at stories today, and examine opportunities for improvement by seeking inspiration in other literature. It's wise to look elsewhere than the over-trod paths of popular fiction and the works of Joseph Campbell, neither of which should be gospel in game development. The current model for creating game stories, no matter how well or poorly they're written, is essentially Mad Libs – quests for riches or revenge, and attempts to save the world or undo amnesia, describe about 99% of game fiction. But games can be more literate than “save the girl/village/world” or “get revenge on the person/life form/AI that kidnapped/crippled/subjugated/killed your family/girlfriend/nation.”

Caveat: story isn't everything. Gears of War, the game that sold a million 360s, has a blah story shamelessly pilfered from popular science fiction... woven into amazing shooter gameplay. Gears is the definition of a perfect 10, and Gears 2 is more certain than death or taxes. There is a right way and a wrong way to do the sequel's story, and I guarantee that Epic will go ahead and do it the wrong way – but if they stick to the playbook, that'll be all right. Gameplay comes first, always; a game like Pathologic proves that innovation can't negate broken play. But it also proves there can be more to game fiction than what we've seen so far.

Director Andrei Tarkovsky is a useful inspiration for innovative story ideas thanks to productions like Solaris, a moviefication of pretentious author Stanislas Lem's novel. Western audiences are likely more familiar with the George Clooney remake. I'd love to see a game like Solaris, or Fiasco, another Lem book – essentially mysteries, both reflect on the inherent unknowability of nonterrestrial intelligence, but are still hard sci-fi that as games would theoretically allow you to kill aliens (Hey, I said innovate fiction, not turn games into homework).

Tarkovsky does in fact inspire an upcoming game: his film Stalker – based loosely on the Strugatsky brothers' novel Roadside Picnic – is the inspiration for GSC Gameworld's STALKER: Shadow of Chernobyl. The marriage of science and spirituality, plus Chernobyl which is a fantastic game setting, plus STALKER's open-world concept, seems like best-game-ever fodder. Unfortunately GSC bit off way more than it could chew and STALKER has been so eviscerated of features that the final product will probably be just another shooter, if it ships at all.

Moving west, Tim Schafer (who really doesn't need inspiration, but still) could outdo Voltaire in hilarity with an adventure inspired by the French malcontent's Candide – a laugh-out-loud satire dealing largely with why life sucks, and why that's okay. The crime of unleashing Bad Day L.A. could be redeemed if American McGee applied his luxuriously nihilistic vision to, say, an action-RPG inspired by Paul Auster's In the Country of Last Things, or one set in Centralia, Pennsylvania: a locale nearly as potential-laden as Chernobyl.

When developing inventive stories, simply trying something new is often enough. Create narrative to communicate your theme, then fold a game onto the concept. And “good story” doesn't mean that games become some ponderous literary experience. Warren Spector has said like nine thousand times that Deus Ex is about family, not gunplay or conspiracies. Okami is about restoration of faith. Shadow of the Colossus is about the sort of blind cruelty of which only humans seem capable. None play like a college midterm. So no one can claim that the inclusion of erudite fiction predicates the exclusion of action or enjoyment. For a literate adventure that's nonetheless combat packed and gory as hell, look no farther than Kurosawa's Seven Samurai. In fact, that one even fits into the current mold of game stories (save the village!). I'm not saying make a game out of Seven Samurai, or out of any of these ideas; think of them as conceptual spawn points.

On a macro level, let's see some more tragedies. Who says a game has to end happily? Where is this written? People love tearjerker movies. David Edery's design challenge of a Holocaust-inspired game is a brilliant exercise for budding developers, calling for enormous sensitivity and inspiration. And what about love stories? Why is it so hard to come up with interactive experiences that truly explore complex emotions like love and friendship? It's possible to make great games that enjoy wide thematic opportunity.

Games do make a point to innovate in ways other than fiction. Homeworld is my favorite example of this, in the realm of art direction. Never has anything so powerfully conjured the yawning enormity of space, its dreadful emptiness, its silence; how eerie it would be, how lonely, out in the void. Painkiller's another visual example, with its lest-ye-be-judged vision of Hell as a grim pageant of human atrocities versus the usual tentacles and lava. We can take advantage of the fact that games touch many senses to optimize the experience even further.

In Hamlet, the Prince employs a transparent play called The Mousetrap to catch the conscience of his murdering uncle Claudius. The point is that the play is bad; subtlety would fly in the face of Hamlet's goals. Good game stories are a little too much Mousetrap and, frankly, not enough Shakespeare. The simplicity of early technology is a major culprit. It's easy to communicate the kidnapping of a princess by a dragon even if you only have sixteen colors and football-sized pixels. Though tech is no longer primitive, the concept of primitive story mechanisms has metastasized through the industry to the point where it's now almost a law of design, and violators are viewed as anomalous rather than as examples of what the future should be. If the industry makes a concerted effort to do more with narrative, games could evolve from mere entertainment into something incalculably more meaningful.