Tag Archives: character

Every thing is a play thing: Toy Story and transmedia storytelling

Posted by under narrative

I’ve been enjoying the summer movie blockbusters, more or less, and have been struck by a couple that veer off in a decidedly metaphysical direction. And you won’t be surprised to hear that I’ve spent a while thinking about the last few scenes of one film in particular, which may rewrite or redefine the entire narrative you’ve just seen.

I’m talking, of course, about Toy Story 3.

The Toy Story trilogy is being hailed as one of the great film series of all time, on a par with the Godfather series or the original Star Wars movies. Both of those were weakest in their third acts, while Toy Story 3 is a masterpiece. But it’s also the one that pulls together a number of strings that have run through the three films, and threatens—right at its very end—to drag the whole edifice to the ground. And it’s all done with one line of dialogue, that almost everybody else seems to have missed.

Here we go, and beware massive spoilers on the starboard bow. We’re at the end of the film, the very end of the story. Andy is introducing the toys to Bonnie.

Andy: [opens box, and takes out Jessie] This is Jessie, the roughest, toughest cowgirl in the whole west. She loves critters, but none more than her best pal, Bullseye!

[pulls out Bullseye, and makes a whinnying sound]

Andy: Yee-haw!

How does he know their names?

These are two toys that were in Andy’s room when he returned from camp at the end of Toy Story 2, unmarked and without packaging. He has no way of knowing what they’re called—the product names they were originally marketed under. But he does.

Oh, you say, he could have asked. His mom could have remembered. He could have gone on the internet—in fact Toy Story 3 includes a knowing reference to it:

Hamm the Piggy Bank: C’mon. Let’s go see how much we’re going for on eBay.

but if Andy had checked the net, he’d have discovered that Jessie, Bullseye and Woody himself are very rare, very collectible, very valuable toys. That was the central plot-driver of Toy Story 2, and the theme of sentimental value versus financial value that underpins a lot of that film. In fact it’s fair to say that if anyone in the Toy Story world had been able to identify Jessie and Bulleye, they’d have known that these were no ordinary toys.

Yet Toy Story 3 opens with the toys about to be either thrown away, donated to charity or consigned to the attic. Nobody in Andy’s family has the slightest idea that these three toys have any value at all. They have no clue what the toys are, and they don’t care. Oh, perhaps there was an old book about ‘Woody’s Round-Up’ somewhere in Andy’s house? But in Toy Story 2 Woody has no idea of his past, of the TV show about him, of the existence of a single other artefact about the Round-Up Gang. If such a thing had existed to show Andy what Jessie’s and Bullseye’s names are, Woody would have known about it too. Andy’s mum? Too young.

There is only one other way for Andy to have learned Jessie and Bullseye’s names: for Woody to have told him. We see Woody write a note for Andy to find towards the end of Toy Story 3. This violates all kinds of unspoken rules about what toys can and can’t do; but then so does speaking to Sid in the original Toy Story. Nevertheless, it’s an enormous taboo. Would Woody really have taken such a drastic step just to point out a couple of names? Surely not.

There are only one conclusion we can draw. Andy cannot plausibly have discovered these names, and so this scene cannot have happened. It is an imagining. A figment. A dream.

That’s a pretty big thing to have to swallow in the brightly coloured child-friendly universe of the Toy Story films, but becomes a lot easier in the light of one other crucial point. Woody is the central character in the films. He is our viewpoint, our north star. We navigate the films by him, and see the world and its moral dilemmas through his eyes. And he is badly broken. He has persistent amnesia.

Who’s Woody’s owner? Andy. The energy behind all three films is Woody’s desire to get back to Andy, to do the best for Andy, to be Andy’s toy. That’s his whole identity: he is Andy’s toy. This is what makes the opening scenes of Toy Story 3 so heart-wrenching, as he finally comes to understand that the 17-year-old Andy, about to leave for college, has outgrown him and the other toys.

But Woody is at least fifty years old. ‘Woody’s Round-Up’, the TV series that spawned him, we know from Toy Story 2 ran from 1941–42 and 1946–57. If Andy was six in 1995, the year of the first movie, and had owned Woody from birth, that’s still a minimum of 32 years unaccounted for. What was Woody doing in that time? Where was he? Who did he belong to? Why doesn’t he remember? Why isn’t he troubled that he can’t?

Other toys remember. In Toy Story 2 we get Jessie’s memories of her previous owner Emily—Jessie is the same age as Woody—and in 3 we hear Chuckles’ tragic story of being loved and lost by Daisy. Having a new owner doesn’t erase the memory of the previous one: in Toy Story 3 Jessie can still remember Emily, though she is now Andy’s. But Woody doesn’t remember more than thirty years of his past.

It’s not as if this is hidden away. Toy Story 3 has a whole subplot about how easy it is for toys to have their pasts and memories erased. Admittedly it involves Buzz Lightyear, not Woody, but it says to us: how fickle are toys’ minds, how simply they can be changed. And it asks the unspoken question: if Buzz’s mind can be reset so easily, without him remembering anything about what happened, who else is missing a chunk of their lives? Buzz forgets he was ever Spanish, but still responds to Spanish dance music. What forgotten history is Woody responding to? Even in the first film he’s not the Woody of ‘Woody’s Round-Up’, he’s harder, less naive, more prone to harsh emotions like jealousy. What—who—shaped him that way?

So Woody’s mind is damaged, his history missing. Once again Pixar throws us a hint: his TV series was missing its last episode; just as his life is missing its first. Both stories are incomplete. So can we believe this convenient happy ending that Pixar serves up, or are there indications that this may be as much of a dream as the ending of Inception—

(yes it’s a dream, of course it’s a dream, but it’s Cobb’s dream so the top will fall. The clues are there.)

I don’t know. I have no grand theory, no explanation. Given that Toy Story 3 is part of the Pixar universe, with subtle cross-over elements to their other films in the background, then there may be hints elsewhere, a treasure-hunt through Ratatouille, Up and Monsters Inc. I have an unpolished idea that everything we see after the pit sequence is not real, or that Woody is either playing or daydreaming—we know toys do both—and therefore has escaped, like Cobb and Sam Lowry before him, into an internal world where he cannot be restrained. Maybe.

And there’s something going on with Woody’s repeated exclamation that “There’s a snake in my boot!” There can’t be; Woody’s boots don’t come off. But there is a recurring motif on Woody’s boot—Andy’s handwritten name. Come on. You’re telling me that’s not deliberate, that Andy’s not the snake?

So here’s the real theme of the Toy Story trilogy: who was Woody’s true owner?

…okay, enough. That was fun but let’s step away from the continuity. I’ve got two serious points.

Firstly, the Toy Story films are three fantastic movies. However they are not a great trilogy. With the exception of a glorious deus-ex-machina at the end of TS3 that’s prefigured in the first movie, there’s very little that links the three together in terms of plot or development or themes. The Godfather this ain’t.

The Toy Story trilogy has plot holes thirty years wide, which nobody notices—partly because Pixar has done an excellent job of drawing attention away from them, and partly because it’s a cartoon for kids and we have been taught not to look for narrative sophistication or consistency in things that we are told are for children. What else is traditionally seen as a children’s medium? Games. Exactly. Does story in game suck? Yes, it still does. Gosh, I wonder why.

The second point: Inception is designed as a movie that is left for the audience to untangle on its own, over a nice glass of wine after it’s left the cinema. Christopher Nolan deliberately cheats us of an easy conclusion by cutting the final shot instead of letting the camera run: he makes us do the work. (Compare and contrast to the final shot of Tarkovsky’s Stalker, which doesn’t cut away but has similar whoah-shit implications.) The film demands that we discuss and play with its elements to understand what we’ve just seen. And with the growth of trans-media narrative forms, where it’s up to the viewer to track down the different pieces of the story across different mediums and knit them together for themselves—and if you thought that trying to watch something like Heroes or Defying Gravity with the BBC’s bizarre PVR-defeating scheduling was hard then oh man—this is going to become a lot more common.

The thing is, when you lay out a story like a jigsaw and expect someone else to put it together, you’re making it easy for them to spot the holes in it. Even without that, audiences are becoming more media-literate and more playful, more willing to explore and interact with narratives. Ten years ago they’d have accepted a film as a flat piece of passive storytelling: now they want to play with it. You can blame merchandising, blame tie-in video games, blame fanfic, blame cosplay—and then you’re an idiot, because you shouldn’t be blaming these things, you should be embracing them. These people love what you’ve created so much that they want to be involved with it.

For ages (since 1994, actually) I’ve been trying to explain to people the difference between passive and interactive narrative. And if you encourage people to interact with narratives, they’re not going to stop with the bits of your story you’re happy for them to tweak. Fans have been doing it since the 60s. But today geek culture is mainstream. Comicon gets reported on the evening news. We’re all fans now.

If you’re in the business of telling stories, you have to accept that what you do, no matter how hard you try to lock it down and control it, what you produce is now an interactive medium.

And if that scares you, I’ve got an answer. You may not like it.

It’s the name of this blog.

Bioshocking

Posted by under narrative

So I played the demo of Bioshock a few days ago and I was all like, “huh,” enough to put my money down on a pre-order but not, you know, entirely convinced. Game play, atmosphere, setting and backstory, fantastic, but there was one thing that really jarred. And then I read an internest discussion that said yeah, okay, but that’s just the demo because the demo needs to get you to the meat of the game really fast and the actual retail product will be, you know, less frenetic and bumpy.

Chase-cutting: bollocks. The demo is, okay, not identical to the comparable sequence in the full game. There are some differences. They do not matter.

Here’s what has my hackles up like a hyena’s (and here be spoilers but only for the first ten minutes of the game): the intro to Bioshock is like the entire first season of Lost condensed to fifty seconds, only what’s down the hatch is much, much better: it’s a whole city. You arrive, you beat up the first couple of baddies with a wrench, and then you find a vending machine. Press (A) and a fat glowing syringe about the size of a tube of toothpaste drops out. This is kind of unexpected.

Before you can press another button, your character grabs it and injects the whole thing into his arm.

For fuck’s sake.

I admit I’m only an hour or so into the game and as yet I know nothing about the silent narrator whose actions I’m controlling, except that he has some funky tattoos and probably some backstory to go with them. There may well be an explanation coming at some point in the future. And of course the contents of the syringe and getting them into your avatar’s bloodstream are crucial to what follows. But still, what a great huge fucking narrative discongruity. I spent the next ten minutes—first in the demo and then again in the full game—thrown out of the fantastic sense of immersion that the game had created, and with a feeling of distinct antipathy towards my avatar. I’m not sure I want to play the kind of guy who injects himself with mystery chemicals just because they’re there, know what I mean?

Apart from that the game is fantastic and I want to get a 5:1 audio system just to properly experience the sound-design. But Bioshock is the best-reviewed game of the last five years (on Metacritic it ties at 97% with Halo, Metroid Prime, Perfect Dark, GTA III, NFL 2K1 and, uh, Tony Hawks Pro Skater 2 and 3, and is beaten only by Soul Calibur and Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time—an impressive list.) Are our expectations of game-narrative really so jaded that we can accept glaring pieces of story-telling and character-building idiocy like this in the first ten minutes and still say that it’s one of the best games ever written?

I will report back when I’ve finished the game, for the sake of clarity and completeness. And I don’t want this to stop you from buying and playing what is one of the finest FPS games in years. But at the same time I wasn’t going to let it pass without comment because let’s be honest, if the same thing happened in the first ten minutes of a new TV show you’d groan and change the channel.

Dogs about towns

Posted by under conference, game design, narrative

Over at Extenuating Circumstances Dan Hon has already done an excellent job of liveblogging chunks of GaME 07 (Imperial College, yesterday) so I won’t duplicate his effort. I will say that it was a good day, the talks were of variable quality, and the stand-outs—as you’d expect—were David Braben talking about ‘Creating Games for the Next Generation’, and Peter Molyneux talking about ‘Emotion in AI’.

Braben swiftly junked the idea that better graphics, better sound and more realism are enough to make a next-gen title (as if the success of the Wii and the failure of Motorstorm hadn’t comprehensively proved that they’re not) and talked a great deal about The Outsider. So far as I could tell TO is a free-roaming open-ended urban game in the post-GTA mould, with two important differences:

  1. Game characters react to environment, context and behaviour, not just yours but those of other NPCs. Save a cop’s life, word will spread among cops that you’re okay.
  2. The game starts just after the assassination of the US President, and you may or may not have been the guy behind the rifle.

As we used to say at Bizarre magazine, “Money down.” I’m sold.

Molyneux did a re-run of his much-documented GDC talk about Lionhead’s next game Fable 2, only without the Powerpoint slides because he’d just dropped his laptop and without the game-sound because Imperial College couldn’t make the sound on an Xbox 360 work. Specifically, he talked about the dog. Every player of Fable 2 will acquire a dog. They won’t all be the same dog; they’ll start off looking different, and will grow to resemble their owner as the game goes on. As Molyneux put it: “If you turn out to be an evil bastard, you’ll have an evil bastard’s dog.”

(—Dan had left by this point and I did make a concerted attempt to liveblog the talk, but my laptop died half-way through, despite having been recharged over lunch. Thank you Asus, that’s why I pay an extra £100 for an extended life battery. Honestly, I tried. Sorry.)

The thing is, I went into the talk as a skeptic. We live in a post-Nintendogs world, and putting a cute animal into a plot to elicit player-empathy is a cheap trick. I was expecting to be unimpressed, and twenty minutes in I was a convert. Not an evangelist, mark you. I can see how this can work. I’m not saying it will work, but I think it might.

The dog is more than just a companion and a tool, which were my two fears. (Having said that, it’s a fine companion and tool. It’s been built around the intelligence and training AIs developed for Black & White, plus Molyneux’s Three Laws of Dogotics, and thanks to some nifty graphics work including animating the tongue, ears and tail separately from the main body, looks and behaves like a believable dog. It’s not under the direct control of the player, but of your avatar—this is something I’d been messing with for Frup the day before, in the context of ‘Dei-Ex-Mechanicae‘, which I will describe in a later post—so you make the avatar make the gesture for ‘Bad dog’ and it’ll react and learn from that. And yes, you can issue commands by whistling into the Xbox 360 headset. The dog will also apparently pee on the corpses of your enemies. Like I said, money down.)

But more than that, it’s a lens for the rest of the game-world. The dog is a path-senser, an enemy detector and will fight to protect you, yes, but those are all tool aspects. But game characters won’t just react to you, they’ll react to your dog as well. Even if you’re not a dog person, even if you regard the dog as a game-resource to be optimised, another useful bit of equipment that you don’t suffer encumbrance for… if someone kicks your dog, you’re going to object to that. Because it’s yours. And if Molyneux has got it right and you do feel a sense of emotion towards the dog, then you’re going to feel that kick yourself.

I don’t think this is the solution to the problem of getting players to react emotionally to their experiences in video games, but I do think it’s a start. Like I said a while back, we’re going to spend a long time taking small steps and getting things half-right. (Braben says that, in movie terms, it’s about 1930. I’d say it’s 1925. We’ve found our Keaton and our Chaplin. We’re still waiting for our Welles and our Hitchcock, and talkies.)

For example, I have worries about whether, in a narrative game with a fantasy setting, it’s a wise idea to have the game-element the player cares most about be a dog, and I said as much. Molyneux’s answer was as polished as the rest of his talk but gave me the sense that he’s actively thought about this and built compensating mechanisms into the game. Whether he’s built them into the narrative is another matter.

But… after all, this is a game where the player’s avatar can marry and have children, and we know there will be other dogs in the game too. Can your dog find a mate and have puppies? And dogs have a shorter lifespan than humans… multiple generations of dogs? The whole subject opens up a ton of possibilities, and if there’s one developer who can be relied on to think through the implications and do something interesting with them, it’s Peter Molyneux.

Having said that, if the dog turns out to be a prince who’s been transformed by an evil fairy, I’m going to go down to Guildford and pee on every car in the Lionhead carpark.

The Secret to Evoking Emotional Responses in Interactive Media

Posted by under game design

I have four points:

1. I do not know the secret to designing interactive experiences that evoke emotional responses from their users.

2. Nobody else does either.

3. It’s possible to do it, and it has been done, and it will be done again, and it will be done more and more in the future as we get to grips with how this stuff works on people.

It is not going to happen in a single bound. There is not going to be a leap, a paradigm-shift, one particular game that everyone will point to and go, “There! That one! It is mature, intelligent, and emotionally true! It is the first truly great game!” What was the first great play? The first great novel? The first great film? You may have your opinions but there’s no critical consensus, only a lot of dull and drunken after-dinner discussions.

Instead we will have to spend the next ten years honing the techniques that work and trying some things that might work but probably won’t, and then we’ll spend the ten years after that building on what we’ve learned in the previous ten years, and then the ten years after that we will repeat the process, and so on indefinitely. Artistic development is not a switch waiting for some genius to flip it. Okay, there have been moments where someone did something for the first time and everyone slapped their foreheads and went, “Of course!” and copied it, like Filippo Brunelleschi creating artistic perspective. We’ve had a few of those: Dungeons & Dragons, Populous, Castle Wolfenstein. But they’re rare and unpredictable.

There are certain things that we understand a bit: building character empathy, for example. Current games designers tend to do this by (a) designing a character to be likeable, and then (b) exposing the player to them for a long period of time. (And often then (c) killing them to remind you that you liked them.) But if you want to see how to create an interesting, likeable character for whom you feel an emotional response in just a few lines of dialogue, look at TV adverts. Or you can look at Homer, who did the same thing in a different way for a different art-form almost three thousand years earlier. So clearly there are other ways to go about it.

Yes, as games designers we can learn from other forms. We can pick and borrow elements and techniques of creating character and narrative from movie-making, theatre, prose fiction, reportage, storytelling, even painting and sculpture, and we do. All of those forms have mixed and matched to become what they are today. But—and this is the belter—our medium is fundamentally different to their media. Our medium is interactive. And compared to that, if you thought the invention of cinema or the shift from classical art to impressionism were biggies then man, you have not yet begun to dream.

We are at an incredibly early stage of the evolution of the artform ‘interactive entertainment’—such an early stage that we haven’t even got a decent snappy name for it yet. (No, not ‘games’. Try again.) Movies have been going for a hundred years, and look at how many of them suck. Though that’s not an excuse for our failure to embrace emotion as a tool in designing interactive experiences, merely an advance warning for how many games are going to suck over the next century.

The point is, we’re only as good as the things we learn from, plus whatever we can personally add to the pot. We’re not good at mixing emotional responses and interactivity yet because we are building on what has gone before, and most of what has gone before has involved platforms, guns, absurdly overpowered cars, outer space, sports and/or massive damage. We’re not just learning, we’re still pioneering. It’s not going to be easy. It is going to take a long time, and a lot of work, and we will make a lot of mistakes along the way. But:

4. It will be worth doing. Oh yes, it will be worth it.

A synopsis, a manifesto and a question

Posted by under game design, narrative

To sum up the last two posts:

Will Wright believes that a player’s satisfaction from interacting with a videogame should be on a primarily intellectual level.

I’m not saying he’s wrong. In fact I’d say that this describes 99% of the games currently on the market, including several that I enjoy and recommend.

That does not mean that games should not attempt to engage a player on an emotional level as well. Games that do so successfully have enormous power and often enormous popularity and longevity.

The way to engage a player on an emotional level is through the effective use of characters, setting and story.

It is not until games regularly engage their audience on an emotional level that the “are games art?” debate will be of interest to anyone beyond games designers and a few academics.

You may, if you want, take this as a manifesto.

A question, more of a request really: what games do engage their players emotionally? Post ‘em in the comments, please: let’s make a list. Justify your choices; show working; use both sides of the screen. I’ll start with the four obvious ones: Nintendogs (Nintendo, 2005); Animal Crossing (Nintendo, 2001-2005); Final Fantasy VII (Square Co.,1997) and, of course, Planetfall (Infocom, 1983)

A second question, which I’ll get to when Amazon bothers to deliver the book and I bother to read it: is ‘flow‘ as defined by Mihály Csíkszentmihályi an intellectual or an emotional state?

Good Day Sunshine

Posted by under narrative

Next time someone asks me how to do a driving, exciting character-centric narrative in a video game, I am going to go totally old-media on their ass. Specifically I am going to tell them to go and see Sunshine, the forthcoming film directed by Danny Boyle (28 Days Later) from a script by Alex Garland (28 Days Later), starring Cillian Murphy (28 Days Later). Which is, you might have gathered, not a computer game at all.

I have two points to make about Sunshine. Firstly, it’s better than 28 Days Later. It’s not flawless, but it’s the best science-fiction movie since The Matrix. (Oh better than Serenity, geek-child.) Hard SF, human drama, suspense and horror all in one package. It draws heavily from 2001: A Space Odyssey and Alien but since those are two of the three best SF movies ever made, it’s a good draw. And yet it feels fresh and original, with a dynamic all its own, and… look, take my word for it, it UTTERLY ROCKS. I mean, HOLY DUDE. MAN. YEAH.

Also it’s got Benedict Wong in it, a fantastic and hugely underrated actor who stole Code 46 despite having, I think, five lines and every time I see him on screen my filmgoing heart lifts; plus a magnificent soundtrack by Underworld.

Wong plays Trey, who is…. This is my second point: I have no idea who Trey is. I don’t know his position on the Icarus II crew: something mathematical but that’s all we learn. I don’t know what family he has, where he’s from, his training, his motivations, his hobbies or interests, I don’t even know his second name. All I know about Trey, I learn from his actions through the film, and that’s enough for me to invest my emotions in him, the peril he faces, and the inner turmoils he goes through.

This is also about as much as I know about any of the principals (I lie: I know that Cillian Murphy’s and Chris Evans’s characters have family on Earth. That’s it.) I don’t care that I don’t know it. It’s not relevant to my enjoyment of the film which, as you may have gathered, Istill  enjoyed ONE HUGE MOTHER OF A LOT. Take a lesson from the existentialists: action is what defines character, nothing else.

And there’s more, or rather less. We discover nothing about what made the Sun go out (the hook for the entire movie, the Icarus II being on its way to light the thing back up again) and, like Alien and 2001, there are no shots of what future-Earth is like. Well, okay, there’s one and frankly I thought it was a mistake. We do not need to know any of those things. The film’s setting feels no less credible or deep for their lack, and it gains immeasurably in tightness and focus.

Admittedly Sunshine runs 108 minutes while most computer games and interactive narratives, even web-based ones, will run multiple times that but still: you don’t have to establish character with an opening paragraph of “I’m Jake, I run this crazy crew since my family was gunned down…” or a walk-through of their house with information on places, family and history that is neither interesting nor relevant. That’s not a rounded character, that’s flabby writing. Get over it. Stop trying so hard.

Plus if anyone’s thinking of doing a game based on Sunshine, I have some cracking ideas.