“Are videogames a storytelling medium?”

As humans, we have a very long history of storytelling. In fact, some have suggested that it our defining feature as a species. Science writers Ian Stewart and Jack Cohen believe that humans should be classified not as homo sapiens, but as pan narrans – the storytelling ape.

In the days of hunter–gatherer societies, the primary storytellers were shamans. Their role was to protect and guide the tribe by communing with the spirits, and one of the ways they did that was to take a whole lot of hallucinogenic substances and go into trances. In the trance state, the shamans believed that they ascended to heaven, via the underworld, and spoke to the gods (or spirits). They would then return to the world of the living, and impart to their people the wisdom that they had received, in the form of stories.

Over the centuries, stories have evolved to cover all kinds of ideas and subject matter, across all human cultures, but what is interesting is what has stayed relatively consistent. In 1949, Joseph Campbell published “The Hero with a Thousand Faces”, which is an attempt to draw together those features of stories that have remained consistent across the world and the centuries. The result is this idea of the “Monomyth”, or “Hero’s Journey”.

At a basic level, the Monomyth goes like this: a hero (or heroine) is pulled out of their everyday existence by some disturbance, and enters a “special world”, where they have to go on a (literal or figurative) journey. With the help of allies, they overcome tests and finally confront some version of death, which they also overcome. They are then rewarded with an “elixir” of some kind (representing wisdom), which they take back and share with their community.

In 1992, Hollywood screenwriter Christopher Vogler published another book that builds onCampbell’s work: “The Writer’s Journey”, a guidebook for applying the Monomyth structure to the writing of fiction. One of the most interesting things that Vogler does in his book is to equate the role of an author with the role of the hero. In this interpretation, the author’s struggles to create his or her novel or screenplay become the “journey” itself, and the finished work is the elixir, through which they are able to share the wisdom they have come to through the creative process.

Almost any film you watch or narrative book you read fits into the “elixir” category. It is a constructed product that has arisen from a much more chaotic process of discovery through overcoming challenges.

The experience of playing a game is far less likely to be the refined, packaged elixir of a novel or film. Instead, it involves the player directly in the rough-and-tumble messiness of the actual journey, the lived experience.

Compared to an author or film director, a game designer gets far less say about what will be profound in the experience of playing their game. Sure, there is a certain amount of interpretation involved in the reading of any artwork, but games place this front and centre. In a game, the player is never primarily having a story told to them – they are constructing their own stories through play.

There are many ways that this can happen. It may involve them getting excited about role-playing a pre-defined character. But it could equally involve them trying to find and exploit glitches in the game’s systems. This is their spirit quest in the special world, and it’s up to them to discover what is important about it for them.

In the standard Hero’s Journey structure, there is a stage called “meeting with theMentor”. This is often an old man or woman who gives advice and training to the hero (think Yoda or Gandalf). In games, the designer takes this role, acting as “Mentor” or spirit guide. The designer gets to construct the world in such a way as to gently guide the player in directions of potential revelation. It is then up to the player to make the connections that produce meaningful experiences. Good designers create lots of these opportunities, without ever forcing anything at the player which says “this is the important bit, because I am the designer and I say so!”

Expensive, so-called “AAA” games often go down this path, in part because they don’t want to “waste” their massive budgets on content that the player may not see. Their budgets are often so high because they insist on trying to make everything look as “realistic” as possible. Playing these games often ends up being a nearly passive experience, where you just press “forward” the whole time, and then “shoot” when you’re told to.

In fact, “realistic” graphics are far from necessary for a strong narrative game experience. More abstract or stylised visual design can actually be much more effective, because it allows the player more room to interpret, and thus to have experiences that feel personal and meaningful.

Of course, there is not a strict divide between traditional linear narrative and game narrative. The differences exist on a continuum between authorial control and audience agency. A game like The Walking Dead is much closer to the authorial model than a game like Minecraft, for example. Both ends of the spectrum have strengths and weaknesses, and one of the most interesting things about any game (to me, at least) is where it falls on this spectrum. But that is a subject for another post.

Should games always be created to be accessible? Or is there something to be said for making something that erects barriers to the “ease of use” of the player?

Watching the Director’s Cut of the film Donnie Darko was a strange experience for me. The original was (and remains) one of my favourite movies of all time. I found it profoundly moving and satisfying despite the fact that I couldn’t really have spelled out what was happening with the rabbit and the drugs and the discussions of time travel. I was excited to see what would be revealed once Richard Kelly had the budget and freedom to express his original vision.

It was fine, I guess. If I hadn’t seen the original, I probably would have loved it. The time travel stuff was much more overt, and it was clear that there was now a “correct” way to interpret the film’s strangeness. But a good chunk of the magic was gone. By adding material and making things “clearer”, he had robbed the film of something important and meaningful. At the same, this was a surprise to me.

I’ve been thinking about how similar phenomena apply in games. This line of thinking was precipitated by two unrelated things I’ve happened across recently.

The first was a complaint about Dark Souls that came up on my Facebook feed recently. The poster was arguing that combined aspects of the game – from the brutal difficulty to the lack of tutorial and clunky interface – amounted to bad game design. Clearly, there are contexts where all of these things could be considered to be bad design, and yet they have in no way blunted the critical and player acclaim for the game. Dark Souls’ Metacritic scores are mostly in the high 80s, with only some aspects of the PC version’s port drawing serious criticism. So have the Souls games succeeded despite their “flaws”, or is there something else going on?

This is where the second thing comes in: while visiting my parents over the holidays, I picked up a copy of New Scientist magazine, and read this article about how the readibility of fonts influences comprehension. For those who don’t want to sign up for an account to read the full article, here’s a key quote:

It would be easy to assume that legibility also makes it easier to remember what you read, but in 2010 we discovered otherwise. Danny Oppenheimer at Princeton University and colleagues asked people to memorise a printed list of 21 features that characterised three species of fictional alien. The team found that although groups presented with the list in an ornate font had a harder time reading it, they remembered far more details about the aliens than groups who read the same information in a plain typeface such as Times New Roman. Oppenheimer later found the same effect among school students – they retained course materials better when it came packaged in a brow-furrowing font.

Having to decode the harder-to-read font switches on the dorsal parietal cortex, a section of the brain linked with attention and memory which is inactive when skim-reading text in Arial or Times. Of course, the extra effort involved is likely to cause some readers to give up in frustration, but the rewards are greater for those who do persist.

The equivalent surface layer in games would be the user interface (UI). Could it be that clunky interface elements that make a game harder to “read” actually serve to increase some people’s engagement with that game? Have dedicated players of Dwarf Fortress, for example, or the original X-Com, actually engaged with those games on a deeper level – at least in part – because they have wrestled with obtuse interfaces (and presumably won)? In a game like Dark Souls, which thrusts the player into a purgatory of repeated punishment and resurrection, does the clunkiness of certain UI elements in fact support the theme and draw those players who are willing to commit to to the experience more fully inside it?

Of course this logic extends beyond surface detail like fonts or UI – creative texts and inaccessibility have a long history. Few would consider font choice an essential aspect of a work (although why not, I now wonder?), but there are other ways to put up barriers to ease of “use”. A novel like Ulysses is not celebrated despite its textual density  - that density is a fundamental aspect of the work. Many will find the book too challenging, and bounce off it (I confess that – so far – I am one of them); but for those who persist, the book’s chaotic construction is undoubtedly a vital part of the experience.

The reader is forced by these kinds of barriers to be more attentive than they otherwise would be. They may then be more thoughtful about their reading, and thus experience insights or feelings that they would otherwise have missed.

Dark Souls seems to be this kind of experience. Those who put in the time and effort to master its quirks speak about it with something approaching religious fervour, while those who bounce off do so quickly and forcefully. I say this as someone who sits somewhere in the middle – I loved the time I spent watching my cousin play the Souls games, scanning wikis and providing him advice and information to assist him on his journey, but that was a masochistic world that I did not want to personally inhabit.

My current conception of art is as a tool for bringing the irrational and the unconscious into the realm of the rational and conscious. It is a dialogue between creator and audience, and by nature a variable, subjective experience. There are many ways that a game designer (or any other creator) can facilitate the player’s leap beyond the rational, and obfuscation is one of those ways. If there are barriers in place, and we have to work hard to overcome them in the process of finding meaning in a work, then the knowledge we find may be less constrained by the limiting factors that can so easily be imposed by “rational thinking” on the part of creator or player, and the understanding we reach is likely to be deeper and more primal.

Inside our virtual metaverse, The Walking Dead delivered a moving and emotionally-responsive narrative, while Day Z, XCOM and FTL gave players plenty of systems from which to spawn their own emergent stories. Text-game tool Twine took off in certain circles, providing a medium for non-programmers to express themselves through interactive fictions. I plan to play as many Twine games as I can over the holiday period, and report back on my favourites, put here’s an initial recommendation: Cyberqueen, from the most recent Ludum Dare competition (it’s entirely text-based, but probably NSFW if your co-workers have good eyesight).

In my personal world, my company – SeeThrough Studios – managed to win “Best Writing in a Game” at Freeplay 2012 for Flatland: Fallen Angle, which was very gratifying, and I made my first solo game: Purgatorio. (And I started this blog, of course.)

But much of my headspace this half of the year was dominated by game-related narratives that took place in the “real world”.

Most notably, these included heated discussions about games journalism’s cosy relationship with publishers and women’s struggles with the status quo of the industry. Feminism was a strong theme throughout the year, although it did unfortunately bring with it a whole load of ugly backlash, and even backlash-backlash. And then there was Kickstarter – Tim Schafer’s little experiment in crowdfunding fundamentally changed the possibility space in which games are  able to be produced, and was potentially responsible for more web copy than any other single subject. (Also, lots of great projects got funded, and a few crashed and burned.)

The meta-story of narrative in games feel like it’s building to something. Even AAA shooters seem to be trying to say something more than “headshots are fun”. Exhibit A is Brendan Keogh’s long-form dissection of Spec Ops: The Line, a game that wants to a be the next chapter in the multi-media lineage that began with Heart of Darkness and Apocalypse Now. And Far Cry 3 is supposedly a reflection on/criticism of the hyper-real nature of videogames, although it is highly debatable as to whether it succeeds (as John Walker’s fascinating interview with the game’s lead writer shows (beware spoilers!)).

Can ultra-violent games like Spec Ops, Far Cry 3 and indie wunderkind Hotline Miami really ask interesting questions about the nature of the medium? Or do they themselves slide too comfortably into the tropes that they claim to be examining? Is the most that we can expect from them that they begin revealing the negative space around what will prove to be far more important and interesting questions about just what games are capable of (beyond glorying in death and destruction)?

If so, then perhaps we can think of 2012 as a cliffhanger in the great narrative of the medium:

Our heroine, Jill Game, peeks through the keyhole set into the Forbidden Door. Her eyes widen in shock. But is that a smile playing at the edge of her lips, or does she have a nervous twitch? Tune in in 2013 for the next exciting installment!

The most appreciative response I got was from Adam Ruch himself, who seemed genuinely devastated by the response his post had received. I was just calling it as I saw it, but he was thankful that someone else was willing to put themselves on the line over this. (For the record Adam and I live in the same city, but haven’t ever met.)

But I wasn’t the only one who was in his corner. Most interesting was seeing his conversation with Leena van Deventer. Leena is probably the most strident, taker-of-no-bullshit feminist games I know in person. Her Facebook and twitter often full of indignation at entitled men. (She also recently co-authored this article on the #1ReasonWhy phenomenon.) If one were to look at the recent gender/privilege conversation in a simplistic way, it would be easy enough to bundle Leena’s opinions in with the opinions of those who were attacking Adam’s article. But people are complicated.

Here’s part of Leena’s conversation with Adam:

@grassisleena
@adamruch I hate this. :/ I hate that it’s happening. I don’t think it’s conducive to any good.

@adamruch
@grassisleena Me too. I keep oscillating between detached curiosity and genuine anger. Its very uncomfortable.

@grassisleena
@adamruch I’d try and detach more, personally. But it’s a total judgement call. I don’t see the conversation progressing anywhere helpful.

Clearly things aren’t as simple as Us vs. Them.

There’s plenty more shades of grey to dig through. While at least one Nightmare Mode contributor all but called for Adam’s head, Patricia Hernandez – the site’s editor, and the person who originally approved both pieces – was fairly level-headed in her response, if erring a bit on the apologetic side.

And now here’s my own mia culpa – this Patricia Hernandez is the very same Patricia Hernandez whose writing I somewhat rudely critiqued in my very first post on this site. Now, after writing a post calling for people not to judge a writer based on a single, short piece of writing, I feel more than a mite hypocritical. I have since read more of Patricia’s work (specifically this incredible retrospective on Fallout 2, and this movingly poetic exploration of Journey), and can confidently state that she’s a far more interesting writer than I am. So I withdraw my criticism and apologise to Patricia unreservedly. And not just because she’s good. I should never have made the comment I did about anyone’s work – it was juvenile.

The other thing I came across during the course of this was a heartbreaking Twine game by Kim Moss, who wrote the original article that unwittingly led to this mess. At least I assume they’re by the same person – she’ seems to be a bit of an Invisible Woman of the Internet. Her game recounts her struggles as a young girl forced to join the boy scouts. I’m not a girl, and I was never in the boyscouts, but somehow I could totally relate to it. That makes it a true piece of art in my book. Go experience.

The last complicated person I want to mention is the one who sent me the only outright negative response I received in response to my post. It was from the same Nightmare Mode contributor I mentioned earlier, and came in the form of a tweet:

“fuck you, you don’t speak for me.”

I don’t remember ever claiming that I did, but maybe I’m just oblivious – all this is subjective, after all. I’m not keen on people talking to me that way – in fact it generally makes me feel really crappy. But I’m not good at confrontation, and in any case I’m a little confused about how to feel here: this particular person also writes for Rock, Paper, Shotgun, which is my absolute favourite site on the internet, and a huge part of the reason that I am now in the games industry.

Like I said: complicated.

As a side note, the Nightmare mode twitter feed has noted that the massive number of comments on the controversy-stirring posts has led them to switch to an easier-to-moderate comments system, in the process deleting all of the passionate reader comments that sat underneath the two stories. Hardly anything has been said since – you can almost hear the wind pushing the tumbleweeds. I’m not sure how to feel about this – on the one hand, it seems to have diffused the conflict. On the other, it does kind of feel like history has been re-written. (Complicated.)

This is a response to the ongoing discussion about in-game relationships, gender and privilege on Nightmare Mode, sparked by Kim Moss’s You Know What’s Gross? We Often Play Nice Guys™ In Games With Romance Options, and Adam Ruch’s counter, Romancing the silicon wafer.

I’m not sure I’m in the best head-space today to write this. Then again, maybe’s my glumness may be the perfect angle to approach this topic from.

Sheri Graner Ray (co-founder of Women in Games International) gave a great talk at GCAP this year about diversity in the games industry. And one of the main things she tried to get across was that continuing to frame these types of arguments in anger ultimately doesn’t get anyone anywhere – it just leads to backlash and further conflict. That’s why #1ReasonWhy and #1ReasonToBe were so great – they were about acknowledgement of a problem and hope for the future, rather than righteous fury.

I’m a thirty-something white, male human. I’m flawed and I know it. I just want to put that out there up front. Anything I ever say is quite likely to be wrong or at least biased, in some respect or other. This is what makes it hard to be a writer – every time I put anything out there, I have to fight the fear that I’m going to upset people, make myself look stupid or like a privileged idiot, or whatever else. And these things will undoubtedly happen, because nothing I write can ever express every nuance of what I want it to.

This is the problem with committing to publishing written words – cast out into the world, they are suddenly given a level of  legitimacy. And there they sit, unable to respond or change as they’re interpreted and picked apart by any passing soul. The only way I will ever get the chance to build on or evolve them is by listening to responses from readers and thus engaging in discussion. (It’s interactive – like a game, or something.)

In this case, Kim wrote a short piece exploring a shortcoming that she  believes exists with in-game romancing options, specifically singling out Bioware’s RPGs (probably because they’re among the few well-known games that actually give any kind of romancing options at all). Adam responded with his own piece, criticising aspects of Moss’s piece, while agreeing with others. I (or anyone else) could easily now write a third article in response, agreeing with some of Kim’s and Adam’s points and counterpoints, and disagreeing with others (as indeed I do).

Instead, he was promptly set upon by a number of commentators, accusing him of sexism and attempting to shut down Kim’s argument with his privileged, patriarchal views.

It could certainly be argued (as some have) that Adam’d analytical approach to the issue missed the point of Kim’s article. It could also be argued that there is some patronising phrasing in there, although the main example cited seems to be a misinterpreted attempt at self-deprecation:

“I have written before about very closely related issues, but it was in an academic conference paper in which I use words like ‘agon’ and ‘autotellic’ so is probably not something many people have actually read, so I will probably have to go back to basics here.”

I picked up on the humour in that, but I can see how people could miss it if they’re reading the piece through a different lens. It may even be a cultural thing, more than a privilege thing – (broad generalisation warning) in my experience, Americans tend not to use this style of humour as often as Australians do.

What’s my point? That perhaps there have been some over-reactions here. I don’t want to diminish anyone’s concerns, but it does seem like they could have (in some cases) been expressed in a calmer and more considered way,  thus allowing Adam to respond in a reasonable fashion, and continuing the conversation that Kim and Adam had begun without making a pariah of someone who (from what I can tell) wasn’t deliberately trying to stomp on anyone else’s point of view, and thus also alienating anyone who might be sympathetic to his perspective.

Equally, I’d implore Adam to try and understand what led to this reaction, and engage with the people who found his article so offensive.

We’re all human. We’re all flawed. And it would be well to remember that nothing anyone writes will ever contain the whole truth about who they are or what they believe.

/privileged opinion

I could use a hug. You?

[Update: I've written a follow-up post.]

A recent Helen Lewis column on New Statesman lamenting the lack of solid games criticism in the mainstream media kicked off a bit of a shitstorm in critical circles. She’s since been good enough to post two responses to her article: the first from developer Ed Stern (“Do we really need more games criticism?”), and the second from critic Brendan Keogh (“Hells yes! But we have a lot already.”). I’d like to offer a few thoughts on Helen’s original question: why is it that despite their ubiquity, games don’t often grace the pages of traditional news/criticism publications (other than in “buying guide”-style reviews)?

As a new(ish) media form, it is natural to seek the approval and endorsement of the establishment (not pictured), even if only so that games can benefit from the kind of social support that is received by other art-forms. It is just as natural for the establishment to resist, proclaiming that what already exists is clearly more valuable than what is new. But is there something special about games that has allowed them to become so widespread in our lives, while remaining so utterly invisible when it comes to any acceptence of their cultural importance? There are no are likely numerous factors, but I’d like to look at a couple that I believe to be central.

One oft-quoted perception in mainstram media dismissals of games is content-based – they are looked down upon as ultraviolent and/or for children. But I have a suspicion that this is something of a smokescreen, an excuse laid down to cover the fear of the unknown. My belief is that what people are actually worried about is engaging with media in a new, more active way.

If you’ve ever watched a live show that involves audience participation, you’ve probably seen the reluctance of the average person to actively engage in the artistic process. In the pre-Internet age, we were trained to think of artists as special individuals, set apart from society, who underwent strange rituals to create works that they then bestowed upon us, complete and unchanging, to be passively consumed. This is  the position Roger Ebert took when he argued that games could never be art, and this is precisely what makes games so unsettling to people on the outer – games require engagement and active participation. They can not be switched on at the end of a day and allowed to wash over us as we drift towards unconsciousness. They require us to step up, take control and participate.

Many people simply don’t have time or energy left in their lives to devote to yet another pastime, which is totally fine – if you prefer to garden or cook, or go on long walks, then that’s great. But others – even those who have devoted their lives to the study or art and cultural artefacts - can be struck by a kind of performence anxiety, which leads them to disparage that which they fear, instead of exploring it with an open mind (“I wouldn’t be any good at games, even if I was interestested. Which I’m not!”). Which makes sense – playing games is different. Unlike the audience of a film, the player must actively become a part of the story-creation process, become in a sense a hybrid of artist and audience, which seems a foreign concept in a world in love with rigid definitions. From this perspective, it can certainly be terrifying for an old dog to learn new tricks.

Which leads nicely to my second point. The mainstream media itself is in the midst of possibly the biggest upheavel it’s faced since it became a thing. Like games, the Internet was to many an alien planet, a frightening place which strips power and revenue from the grasp of the establishment, and allows (*gulp*) ordinary citizens to have their say (totally uncensored by the Editor). The transition from old media to new has been brutal, leaving many established players behind in its wake, and many others still flailing, their futures uncertain. So when we look at the “mainstream”, we are in fact looking at a thing divided – the shrinking business of print and boadcast television, and their new online counterparts, most of which are still struggling to find their msot effective form. Games probably have little relevence to the older, more traditional audiences of the former, while the latter are only just starting to catch on (see the Penny Arcade Report’s links to NBC). But they should, and they gradually will.

If there’s one thing the press knows, it’s that it needs to find content that people want to read. And here in cyberspace, there’s few subjects that can boast as ravenous an audience as games.

[Everyone interested in this topic should also read Sophie Houlden's blog post, Can Art Be Games?. It's brilliant.]

In games, do you feel that you need to be able to let the players decide for themselves what’s meaningful or important?

CA: I think it’s fine to suggest a theme, and suggest a question to the player, but ultimately let them find their own answer in the environment. New Vegas obviously had one critical end point, but at the same time, the overarching goal of the game was just to find out where you stand with all these factions. Do you agree with their philosophies? All of them have good and negative points about them. Or do you feel that you have a better vision for the world? And if so, just go out and create your own story. I think that’s how you have to approach the narrative of games. Sort of like an open world narrative.

Read the entire interview on Gamasutra.

In case you haven’t heard, there’s been something of a protest/solidarity movement happening on Twitter over the last day or so, with women (and supporters) posting under the hashtag #1ReasonWhy (in answer to “why aren’t there more women in the games industry?”). The tweets have been about bringing to light the rampant sexism and abuse that females have had to deal with due to working in our industry (or even just playing games). Go check out the thread – it’s pretty sobering stuff, although it has brought out a fair bit of love and support, as well (and the #1ReasonToBe tag is providing a more hopeful flip-side).

It’s great to see this stuff being brought into the open. But the discussion needs to keep spreading and deepening if anything is to change on a fundamental level.

I started Digital Spirit Guide with two main intentions – to discuss the ways that stories are told in and through games, and to share the stories of people whose lives have been changed (in whatever way) by games. Importantly, I want this sharing to be inclusive – highlighting voices that are lesser-heard in the mainstream. The voices of minorities within a group can often provide insight and wisdom that are lost to the majority, but which can serve as the catalyst for positive change. But these voices have to constantly struggle to be heard above the self-serving noise of the status quo (and are usually shot down even when they manage it).

It is my hope that this site can play a small part in letting those voices be heard. Katherine’s story was the first step in that direction, and it has been by far the most popular post I’ve put up so far. There are definitely people out there who want to read the stories of people outside the mainstream.

So without further ado, I’d like to invite all women whose lives have been affected by games to contact me and share your story. Whether you work as a developer, in the media, or just like playing games, I’d love to hear your unique tale. I want to hear stories that are positive or negative (or just plain fun); about playing games or making them; about in-game experiences and extra-game events. Feel free to use non-text formats if they suit you better, don’t worry if you feel like your writing isn’t up to snuff (we can collaborate on that), and I’m happy to change names to keep you anonymous, if necessary.

I don’t know yet exactly how I’m going to present any submissions I receive – it really depends on how many there are, what they end up being about, and what specific authors want out of this. But I can promise that anything I do publish will be my best attempt to authentically represent each individual story. And comment threads will be a troll-free zone.

(Note that I’m not being exclusive here – if you’re not a woman, and have an interesting game-related story to tell, please feel free to get in touch! I just felt that it was worth making a special point of inviting women to do so, as they are so often marginalised and excluded.)

Frankly, the more women involved in games, the better for players and the industry. In an earlier post, I talked about how Doom and its ilk killed the adventure game. But with that loss of story-focused games, I also believe there was a parallel reduction of female engagement with games as a creative medium. And that was a  loss for all of us. Yes, shooting demons was fun for a while, but I’d much rather make and play deep, interesting games with appeal for both genders. And in order for that to happen on a wide scale, women need to be involved in production to the same degree as men.

Get in touch via the contact page!

This game series adapts to the choices you make. The story is tailored by how you play.

This is the message that greets the player at the beginning of every episode of Telltale’s The Walking Dead game. But is it true?

After finishing the final episode last night, I resisted the call of the pillow and had a bit of a dig around some spoiler-heavy threads on the game’s official forum. Like me, most people had really enjoyed the experience, but there was one recurring negative response. In essence:

“The decisions I make don’t actually change anything! Everything’s the same at the end! Telltale are liars!”

By this stage, I had already read a great deal about how specific elements of the game’s plot were altered based on in-game choices, and it certainly seemed true that most or all of the major plot beats would inevitably occur, regardless of which decisions I’d made. So a part of me wanted to grab a pitchfork and join the accuser brigade. There was only one problem: despite knowing what I knew about the limitations of the game’s plot-branching, I’d still loved the experience of playing, and I still felt as if my decisions had been important.

Thankfully, there were a few forumites rebutting the accusers, and it was through their responses that I realised what was actually going on: The Walking Dead is not a game about branching plot possibilities, it is a game about emotional choices and the relationships that form in response them. It’s just kinda, sorta pretending not to be.

Consider that most videogames are designed to appeal to logical, “left-brain”-style thinkers. Whether based around action, strategy or puzzles, games have always (with a few exceptions) been for the rationalist in us. They give us control, they give us some clear goals, and then they set us on our way. There are some who argue that a game without a defined goal isn’t a game at all, but a toy. These characteristics make sense in the context of the games industry: developers have in the past overwhelmingly been males with an appreciation for logic (that’s what games are built on, after all), and no great reputation for social and emotional skills. When we think of “choice” in games, we tend to think of either unstructured open worlds “sandboxes” or rigid branching story

In games that contain stories, plot is usually treated as one of those rational systems – an A to B journey (with possibly a choice of C) against which the important “gameplay” can happen. Rarely are characters or relationships portrayed with the kind of emotional depth you would find in a film or novel.

In Walking Dead, they are. In fact, the bulk of the gameplay consists of exploring emotional spaces. While the staged “you must decide whether to save character X or character Y!” moments are the most clearly dramatic, and thus get the most attention, the bread and butter of the game is actually the time-limited conversations, where you have to choose what to say on the spur of the moment, often with the result that someone or other thinks less of you. Actions may speak louder than words, but in Walking Dead, the bulk of your actions consist of choosing which words to speak.

Characters remember what you say, and will treat you differently based on how you treat them. And thus – while there obviously aren’t infinite permutations – there are probably at least hundreds of ways this emotional journey can vary from player to player. More than enough to make it feel like this was “your story”, even if everyone is tracing the same basic plot.

In the context of the quote at the top of this story, many are assuming that “story” equals “plot”. Indeed, that was my first instinct. But story has at its core something much more important – producing emotions in its audience. It is about meaning, and plot is merely a narrative shape that helps express that meaning. Branching plot means absolutely nothing on its own, and it is a good way to end up with an unevenly-paced story, and for a developer to spend an awful lot of extra money. On the other hand – if you can focus on varying the emotional journey of your story while maintaining the larger arc of the plot, then that seems to me like a better deal for both developer and audience.

So Telltale have not lied to us. But they have tricked us, by using the word “story” in a way that we are unused to in games. And I believe that they did this for a couple of very good reasons.

The first is marketing. Humans being the conservative beasts that we are, we’re very suspicious of change. We like the things we’re used to, and think they’re the best things that could be. Imagine Telltale had used this line instead:

Your relationships with other characters adapt to the choices you make. Your emotional journey is tailored by how you play.

This could easily have turned off a large portion of the game’s potential audience. Sure, it could also have brought in others (potentially more female players, for example), but the odds are that their original choice was the best way to maximise the appeal to existing “gamers”.

The second reason is that the illusion of a possibly-branching plot helps heighten the emotional impact of the choices that the player makes. But the important thing is that the illusion is just as effective as actual branching would have been. Ben Ebell has already written a great article on this point over on Bitmob, which is worth a read. But I just want to conclude by thinking about this notion of “illusion”.

Some may prefer to call what the Walking Dead does with its plot “cheating”, but in fact all art involves the creation of something out of nothing. And thus all art is – from this perspective – illusion. The trick is in constructing your meaningful story so that the audience can’t see the strings. Or – even better – so that its impact is emotionally powerful enough that they stop caring that there are strings. The Walking Dead is a great game (and in my view a great work of art) because by the time you see the strings, it has you by the throat.

• Developer with Tourette’s explains his syndrome with a game (NBC)
  “If a tic goes off while you’re trying to carefully navigate between a group of dormant goblins, there’s a moment of panic, followed by a frantic race to escape. The game becomes infinitely more interesting when you start to think of the game as a metaphor and not just a dungeon crawler. What if the goblins are just people, and you’re an intruder disrupting their lives?”.
• IGF 2013 adds “Excellence in Narrative” category (IGF blog)
  This is very exciting news for narrative obsessives like myself – the Independent Games Festival awards will this year recognise narrative innovation for the first time. Says chairman Brandon Boyer: “…as judging kicked off in early October, it was clear that there was something special about this year’s lineup of games in particular that made the absence of a Narrative category especially conspicuous. And so, because so many of our judges have said there are so many games in this year’s festival that they specifically want to recognize for their world and their story, we are giving them an avenue to do so.”
• Walking Dead Episode 5 Release Trailer (YouTube)
  The conclusion to Telltale’s super-heavy adventure game series should be out in the next 24 hours. Walking Dead is currently my game of 2012, and I’ll definitely be writing about it in more depth in the future.
• Google’s Augmented Reality game, “Ingress”, nets widespread rapturous praise, pockets of concern about data exploitation (Android Police, Pando Daily)
  The big G sure are really good at recruiting us to collect useful data for them, aren’t they? I’ve put myself on the beta waiting list, and will likely write more about Ingress if/when I get access.

That’s all for this week! If you’re enjoying the blog thus far, then please let your friends know about it. You can keep track of new posts via RSS, or follow me on Twitter @unknownsavage.