Tag Archives: old media

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.

Cahiers du Cutscene?

Posted by under game design, narrative

Wired has suddenly got a bee under its bonnet about the idea that video games need a critical vocabulary before they can begin to be any good, or at least taken seriously. Annalee Newitz argues that film didn’t flower till the 1940s and it was the publication of French film-crit magazine Cahiers du Cinema in 1951 that allowed audiences to truly understand and discuss how films work.

She’s wrong, for three reasons. First of all an artform that had produced Greed, M, Sunrise, Gone with the Wind, The 39 Steps, Duck Soup, The Wizard of Oz and Snow White is an artform that had clearly already flowered, and certainly didn’t need another ten years and a bunch of French critics to tell it how to do things right. Secondly Cahiers du Cinema has never had any real influence on mainstream American cinema because mainstream American directors have never paid it any attention—not because it’s French but because it’s in French, something that most American film directors believe is a type of mustard or a way of kissing.

And thirdly, narrative games already have a perfectly serviceable critical vocabulary, if they choose to use it. It’s been developed over the last fifteen years or so and is used to describe and discuss those other narrative games, the tabletop roleplay types, notably at places like The Forge. It evolved naturally, is quite developed and I rather like it.

You want Cahiers du Cutscene, go ahead, publish it. Don’t expect to make any money, don’t expect anyone to be grateful, and don’t be surprised when people tell you half the work’s been done before.

Mundus Vult Decipi

Posted by under fiction, mmorpg

Spurred by a note from Gareth Hanrahan, I’ve been thinking about tracking down all the James Branch Cabell novels I’m missing.

Cabell, for the uninitiated, is one of the greatest fantasy writers of the twentieth century. While Lovecraft and Howard were hanging out with Howard and Lovecraft, Cabell was hobnobbing with Mark Twain, Sinclair Lewis and H L Mencken. His prose glistens with originality and knowing verve. His books are mythic and relevant today in the way that myths should be—Manuel, his epic hero who may be a strategic genius or may be a dullard with good fortune, has the motto Mundus Vult Decipi: The World Wishes to Be Deceived, and that’s more relevant today than it’s ever been. Read them today and every fantasy novel you’ve read in the last twenty years appears pale, hollow and derivative in comparison.

And yet he wasn’t alone. Go back before Tolkien and not only have you got Howard and Cabell but the likes of Lord Dunsany, E. R. Eddison, T. H. White and others, all ploughing their own fantastic furrows but all doing it with a shared sensibility. And before that was William Morris, and before him Swift, Spenser, Mallory and all the rest.

Post-Tolkien, we seem to have hit a Moore’s Law of fantasy literature: that each time the genre eats its forebears and spits out their remnants, chewed up and homogenised, it takes half as long as the previous time. So if we say that Tolkien was 1955, and his forebears were about 1920 (Cabell’s Jurgen was 1919; Eddison’s The Worm Ouroboros was 1922), we would be looking to about 1975 for the next wave and lo, there’s Dungeons & Dragons. D&D was and is a hotch-potch of influences with no discernable flavour of its own, which has in a bizarre way become its own genre of knights and clerics, elves and dwarves, orcs, vampires and dragons, good, evil, law and chaos, all nicked from elsewhere but thrown into a melting-pot with no real thought as to why these things should work together.

But they do work together. For most of the 1990s TSR wasn’t only the publisher of the most successful RPG in history, it was also the largest publisher of fantasy novels in the world.

Then we hit Games Workshop, which took D&D’s chaotic melange of stuff and dropped it into Europe in the dying days of the Holy Roman Empire and the birth of the Renaissance and called it Warhammer, and blow me if the thing doesn’t work again. Fantasy archetypes are amazingly resilient and morphable. (Disclaimer: I’ve written three novels for Games Workshop set in this background, and used to publish an RPG using the same world, so I am a tad biased).

And GW’s look-and-feel gets picked up by Blizzard, given a coat of pixels and turned into the look-and-feel for Warcraft—yeah, yeah, I know this is arguable, but nobody had done greenskin orcs before GW, and when Warcraft 3 introduced dwarves flying autogyros, a completely distinctive and original piece of GW’s Warhammer IP, they were hit with a C&D and had to take them out, and are you really going to argue with a straight face that Starcraft isn’t Warhammer 40K without the flavour?

The dominant fantasy IP in the world right now—perhaps not the biggest but definitely the most influential is World of Warcraft. So logically right about now we should be looking for post-WoW fantasy: the distinctive tropes of the game but thrown together by someone who doesn’t really understand how and why they worked together in the last iteration but reasons that hey, it worked for them, it ought to work for us.

I’m under an NDA but yeah, a large company is putting a good deal of money into exactly that.

Mundus Vult Decipi, indeed.

Things to do in game design #1: cheat

Posted by under game design, street games

(This post is a follow-up to “Things not to do in game design #2: cheat“)

Because it’s not about fairness or balance or level playing fields. It’s about the user experience.

Let me tell you about a game you’ve never played. It’s called StarPower.

StarPower was created in 1969 by R. Garry Shirts and published by Simulation Training Systems as an educational game for use in schools, colleges and training situations. It’s a face-to-face turn-based game for 18-35 people that models a simple market-based society. Players draw random counters from a bag and must trade them in order to make combinations that score points. High-scoring players get Square badges, mid-scorers get Circles, low-scorers get Triangles, And from the third turn onwards the Squares can change the rules, altering how the game functions and what players can and can’t do.

What happens, of course, is that the three groups stratify and insularise quickly and the Squares make rules that keep them in the lead and force the other players to continue to lose. The Circles work to consolidate their position in the middle and appease the Squares, and the Triangles begin to feel oppressed, apathetic—or angry.

StarPower is often used to teach historical and sociological principles like class stratification, the abuse of power, and the roots of popular revolutions.

Here’s the big secret-that’s-not-a-secret-at-all: the game is fixed. The draw of the counters is not random. Once the Squares have started to win they will continue to win. Once you’re a Triangle it’s almost impossible to move up a group. StarPower is, by all conventional standards of game design, broken.

In educational-game circles StarPower is a legend.

No matter how liberal the players, the Squares always take advantage of their position, and when the Triangles gets angry, often they get really angry. Though I’ve been unable to confirm it, a senior member of ISAGA once told me about a game of StarPower in an American university where a member of the faculty who’d become a Triangle became so overwrought about the state of play and the abuse of power he was witnessing that he walked up to a member of the Squares and stabbed him.

He didn’t attack the people running the game. He didn’t walk out. He became so involved in the experience that he actually stabbed another player.

How’s that for an emotional response to a game?

I admit that frustration, hatred and homicidal rage are not necessarily the emotions that we as games designers want to create in our players. But still, the designer of StarPower created a game that cheats and managed to focus the players’ resulting feelings not at the game but at the other players. I know I said that two paragraphs up. I’ll keep saying it until the implications sink in1.

Of course games cheat. Computer games have cheated since the original single-player Pong. Of course it’s possible for the computer to play a perfect game of Pong, implacably batting the pill back at you until you falter and miss. But nobody would have played it if it did. So it cheated and missed a few shots on purpose, and voila there’s the games industry.

Because it’s not whether you win or lose, it’s how you experience the game. Good experience means repeated plays, more quarters in the slot, whatever. I mean, if I only bought boardgames that I can win I’d have a much smaller collection than I do.

The most obvious contemporary example of cheating is rubber-banding in racing games: letting the AI opponents exceed their supposed top speed and performance so they can catch up with the player. Because racing on your own around a track isn’t nearly as enjoyable, particularly if your vehicle has forward-mounted weapons. Rubber-banding is occasionally frustrating but crucially the player doesn’t feel that the game is cheating. You may suspect it is, or treat the reappearance of an opponent with momentary disbelief, but did the game cheat or did you over-brake on that last corner?

On Friday I played Journey to the End of Night, an urban chase-game that’s essentially British Bulldogs with checkpoints. Players had to race across London via six checkpoints. If they were caught by a Chaser, they became a Chaser. I was a Chaser. Here’s the thing: we started chasing from the get-go, but we deliberately didn’t catch any players till checkpoint 3. Two reasons: too many chasers early on unbalances the game; and secondly it’s not as fun for the players to be caught. Of course, the players didn’t know they were initially safe: they still ran like rabbits (or in one case froze like rabbits) as we swept down on them, yelling. We were—or rather the game was—cheating, but it was a better game for it.

Back in the day when tabletop RPGs were still fresh one of the first big debates to rage was whether rules should emphasise realism or playability. The argument wasn’t just simplicity vs complexity, though that’s often the way it worked out: the perception was that the more complex the game, the closer to verisimilitude it was. There was even one game, The World of Synnibarr, that was so keen on fairness and transparency it insisted that after a scenario was over the GM should give the players his notes, and if they found any discrepancy between the game as written and the game as played they could claim extra experience points for each deviation.

Twenty years on and the argument’s dead, as is the realistic end of the market and thankfully The World of Synnibarr too. Nobody wants realism or player/GM balance in an RPG any more. They want something that models its genre in an interesting and amusing way, and that’s fun whether to play or to GM.

I’m not going to pretend that the roots of all good game design lie in tabletop RPGs—

Bwah hah hah ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha

oh, I’m sorry…

hah ha ha ha ha ha

heh.

—but every genre of games has lessons to teach and lessons to learn from every other genre. And tabletop RPGs, at least some of them, are very good at using rules to model their genre. So if you’re designing a racing game, what the player wants is racing, and racing needs opponents. If the game has to bend the rules to get them to catch up with you, the good outweighs the bad. Same reason that the player always starts at the back of the grid: it makes for a better game. Not necessarily a more realistic or believable one, but more fun in the long run.

…course, if you’re taking a long run then there’s no need for rubber-banding. Slowcoach.

1 Boardgames, or some of them, draw players in and elicit emotional responses possibly better than any other type of game. Kids kick boards over. I’ve seen a friendship end over a game of Junta. Cat’s parents, diplomats on a foreign posting, once played Diplomacy with the Russian ambassador and his wife: a furious row broke out between the two and they got divorced shortly afterwards. I suspect that the bloom was already off the rose there and the stresses of the game just exacerbated an already damaged relationship, but for the sake of the anecdote I’ll pretend it was down to the ever-tricky problem of controlling the Mediterranean.

 

Wrong and Wright

Posted by under game design, narrative

…hell with it, I will write a reposte.

The problem we have, the huge great mote in Will Wright’s eye and also in the eyes of most of the people who have called him on his appalling SXSW keynote (see previous entry if you’re bewildered and lost), is that frankly the state of the art in CG storytelling sucks. It sucks to a colossal degree. So does what Will Wright considers to be ‘story’ in his games. But just because they’re the state of the art doesn’t mean they’re the zenith of what’s possible in the form. Once upon a time the Bayeux Tapestry was state-of-the-art art. We’ve come a long way since then.

(Why has nobody done a side-scrolling Bayeux Tapestry game?)

On the one hand we have the traditional industry-friendly state of the art: programmed story, ‘programmed’ meaning pre-programmed, inviolable and essentially passive. The only way not to experience the story as the designers envisaged it is not to finish the game. While side-quests, dialogue trees and occasional pieces of cleverness like Bioware’s use of the light side and dark side of the Force in Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic (2003) mean that not every player’s experience of the game is identical, the core elements of the story will be experienced in the same way and in the same order. And this is mostly because they will be explained in cut-scenes, which break the first rule of creating fiction: show, don’t tell.

In traditional media “show, don’t tell” means don’t explain stuff to the audience, let them understand it by seeing it in action—it’s the reason that voice-over is regarded as the last resort of the incompetent, because it’s inherently ‘tell’ and in 99% of cases it’s sloppy, lazy storytelling at its worst. Interactive medias add another level to “show, don’t tell”: play, as in: “don’t tell, don’t show, play”. In other words, don’t do your game’s storytelling in passive media, let the player experience it for themselves by actively participating in it—which incidentally doesn’t mean letting the player see if Gordon Freeman can jump onto a console while three NPCs explain the plot behind his back.

Unfortunately this kind of active participation in the game’s story as well as its action set-pieces will require a whole new set of storytelling paradigms, and as Wright correctly observed the state of the art in commercial games at least is still farting around with cut-scenes, which are inherently “show” with a fair degree of “tell”. Which is not what games are about.

On the other we have Wright saying that (1) stories in games suck because they’re pre-scripted, they’re told to you instead of told by you, stories are about empathy but games are about agency, (2) that games don’t really need story anyway, but if they do then (3) there’s a better way, his brand new paradigm, which he claims is based on the way that Spore will tell stories but which is an extension of the way The Sims told stories, and the way Sim Life told stories, and the way Sim City told stories. That is: by convenient accident.

There is no storytelling engine within any of Will Wright’s games. There is a built-in metastory in each one, a sense of irresistible progress which is more explicit in Spore than in any of his previous games since Sim Earth, which was an ambitious failure, but though I genuinely love the creativity that’s gone into the Spore demos I’ve seen, the vast majority of its gameplay—once your creature develops intelligence and enters the Tribal Phase—doesn’t seem to be much beyond Civilization. You’ll encounter other races and either make peace or make war with them, at various different technology levels.

And yeah, it’ll be different every game, in a kind of different-but-the-same way: the races will change but the progression through evolution and societal development will be essentially the same and unchangeable.

And while this is great and I’m sure will be several kilos of fun (more certainly than the not-dissimilar Sim Earth, which was a dog), it’s not a story. Wright has no interest in that. The metastory in Sim City is the growth of a conurbation, and while there are interesting stories to be told on that theme, profound emotional responses that can be taken away from a well-crafted narrative on that theme—see the works of Peter Ackroyd, Michael Moorcock’s Mother London, and Alan Moore’s Voice of the Fire—Sim City doesn’t try to go anywhere near there. If the game inspires any emotions in its player they are only curiousity, excitement, frustration and satisfaction, and those are the same responses that people have been taking away from every video game since Pong.

I mean, has anyone ever taken a bigger emotional response away from The Sims, other than a sense of loss when a favourite Sim dies? (And while that’s a valid emotion, does it happen for any reason apart from the time and commitment that you’ve invested in that character? Nintendo could just as easily have made children all over the world howl inconsolably by putting a lifespan on the puppies in Nintendogs. Making people cry by taking away something they like isn’t evidence of artistry, it’s a cheap trick.) Do people tell the stories of what their Sims did, their lives and exploits—stories beyond the “And her hair was on fire but all she could think about was how much she needed to pee!” anecdotes that used to clutter up the web? The Sims is no more a story-generator than a hamster colony is. And on the evidence so far Spore is more of the same, with bigger teeth, additional legs, weaponry and evolution.

Yes, there is a level on which the player can project emotions, values and personality onto their characters in The Sims, and doubtless they’ll be able to do the same in Spore. This is a lot of what my own work has been about: arranging elements so that players can build their own stories in their imagination or with a group of friends, and this is what qualifies me to say that Wright’s approach to it is a flawed patchwork.

To create a story—and, I would argue, to make the game-experience more than just fun—you need more than just characters and conflict: you need interesting characters and interesting conflict. Unless you’re prepared to trust to happenstance for your encounters to play out in a satisfactory order, you also need a degree of setup, structure and resolution. To create an enjoyable story with emotional resonance in an interactive medium you need even more than that: you need talent and opportunity. The fact that games can tell stories with the commercial and logistical constraints the storytellers have at the moment is great; that a few of them are emotionally involving, personally resonant and stay with the player long after the game is over is frankly a miracle.

The problem is that at the moment the industry doesn’t prioritise story because it doesn’t see how story sells units (and while games with compelling stories have been some of the biggest hits ever—Half Life, Deus Ex, the Final Fantasy series—they’ve also been some of the biggest failures—Shenmue, Beyond Good and Evil, Psychonauts), and therefore getting story into most games is a compromise. Let’s face it, the story content of the vast majority of games is built entirely around the set pieces, and it’s the set pieces that sell the product—in the trailers and the demos, anyway. It’s a lot like the story conference that Josh Friedman describes having with a major international action star:

INTERNATIONAL STAR: So…we have a bar scene first. Maybe…a bar fight? Six men against me…I’ll balance on a chair like this…take out all six…do my funny International Star thing…maybe drink their drinks…then we have some story bullshit…After that…I rescue this girl from…the whorehouse? Maybe bandits…I’ll do my funny International Star thing…like with this chair here…Then some story bullshit…and I find this other girl tied up…there’s a chair gag…then some story bullshit…

Will Wright’s games don’t have set pieces: they’re all about play. (Many of his games from Sim City onwards are described as ‘software toys’, meaning they don’t have an end-state or ultimate purpose—which unless you’re writing a soap opera is kind of an essential part of a story.) At any given point in a Wright game the player has their current position, and their awareness of the progress that led to that point, and a goal that may be short- or long-term, and a context for all their actions (“I am building a city/ant farm/nuclear family/civilisation”) and for Wright’s games and their players, that’s enough to make the experience enjoyable. They don’t need story. Other types of games do. Games as a form are still waiting for their Shakespeare but to dismiss the whole idea of story as an integral part of most games, as Wright did, is unhelpful at best and wilfully ignorant at worst.

The question is: is there a middle way? And could it lead to a better future?

And if you know me or any aspect of my career in games, or any of the games I’ve worked on, then you know my answer: I’m leaping up and down, tearing my hair out in bunches and screaming, “Yes! Yes! A thousand, thousand times yes!” Because that’s exactly what Once Upon a Time, and Baron Munchausen, and the forthcoming Youdunnit and the never-to-be-released Copshow (currently being cannibalised to create Frup) are all about: using archetypes and archetypal story structures to dynamically build the framework and skeleton of a story—a real one with a beginning, middle and satisfactory end, and characters and mutable plots—in such a way that the human imagination will fill in the blanks almost without the player thinking about it, and to integrate that within the format of any existing game-genre.

And while I’m not alone—Chris Crawford and his Storytron have been howling this same message in the wilderness for some years now—I am available.

Therefore and in summary, give me a job you bastards.

Richard & n00by

Posted by under mmorpg

Richard and Judy, king and queen of the late-afternoon chat-show and freelancer bunk-off hour, did a segment on World of Warcraft today. Richard was enthused, Judy predictably befuddled. I missed it. Fret not: it’ll be on Youtube soon.

The spur for the piece was Caitlin Moran, the tabloid journalist who writes for the Times, who had been lent a copy of WoW by someone at work (with the editor who persuaded her to do a piece on it standing right behind him, and the marketing guy who’d arranged the paper’s free WoW demo disc give-away this Saturday behind the two of them, fiddling with his Blackberry).

Moran’s piece is exactly what you’d expect: she’s amazed by the experience and dismissive of those who enjoyed it before she did. Phrases like “people who are into goblins and wizards are people within the autistic spectrum of behaviour” and “the entire fantasy genre is the domain of the sweaty, white, nonintellectual Herbert, and has very little to offer me” are thrown around with customary glee in the opening paragraphs, and then she finds herself staying up till 2am and flirting with a female gnome—see, she’s chosen a male character and is surprised when a girl comes onto her. Well done for not freaking out, Caitlin, and welcome to the online world of 1993.

In short, it’s exactly the same nonsense that one expects from the Times: the tone is split between “this is brilliant” and “this is strictly for dysfunctional nerds”. In fact the biggest loser she meets online turns out to be her brother, who says “Pwnz” a lot and doesn’t known what it means.

Oh sod it, just read the bloody piece for yourself. You’ll see what I’m saying. Then if you’re a WoW player and you see a ginger dwarf called Scottbaio, please pwn him/her immediately.

But all this, plus the Times‘s offer and the Richard and Judy thing seems to herald WoW‘s assault on the mainstream, or vice versa, and the coming of eternal September to that particular world (the Times sells 650,000 copies: even if only 10% of those demo CDs get used, that’s a lot of n00bs). I sympathise with the inhabitants, though if there was ever a MMORPG game that worked for people with no foreknowledge of computer games, WoW is it. I give it weeks before the first high-profile brand realises that their Second Life island may make for great press releases but isn’t getting traffic, and announces a partnership with Blizzard and a presence in every major community in Azeroth.

Meanwhile I wondered out loud (that is, I mentioned it on Twitter, that being this season’s ‘out loud’ among the e-elite) when Richard and Judy were going to do Second Life and the omniscient or possibly more-freelance-than-me Ian Betteridge informed me that they had, back in January, and that Richard had looked ‘baffled’. A shame: I would have thought that Richard could have been relied upon to stray accidentally into the seamier side of town and get propositioned by a furry.

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.