[Broco]

So lately I've been watching a great TV show called The Wire. In a nutshell, it's about the war on drugs in the city of Baltimore; it shows both the perspective of the police and the drug dealers as they go about their business. But the show is actually much broader and more ambitious: in later seasons, it expanded to show many other aspects of the city, such as the school system, the political class and in the final, upcoming season, the local media.

What all these groups have in common is that they are large social systems that are irrevocably, self-sustainingly broken. The gangmembers are trapped in a culture of violence that consumes their young. The police and schools are trained to focus entirely on maximizing statistics (of arrests and test scores, respectively) at the expense of actual results. The political class cares only about accumulating money and good press and not a whit about effective policy. The media is focused on sensationalism and pandering to the audience's existing prejudices.

The thing is (and this is arguably the central thing The Wire is about), in all these dysfunctional institutions there are actually intelligent and well-intentioned individuals trying to change things for the better. Invariably, they fail. A gang leader attempts to introduce a more peaceful, cooperative way of doing business, but his actions look like double-dealing to gangsters with a more traditional mindset, and he is brutally murdered. A few police officers attempt to go after top gang members instead of doing endless, futile street-level rips, but their efforts require ignoring orders and going out of the chain of command, and they are demoted to where they can no longer do "harm". A mayor briefly considers a form of drug legalization to reduce gang violence, but is rapidly beaten down by hysterical bad press. These sound like tragic figures but actually they often appear more clownish -- hopelessly quirky and naive and not knowing what's good for them. The entrenched interests, ideology and incentive structure are much larger than any one person -- crucially, even an individual at the top of the hierarchy like a mayor -- and in their struggle against the great beast of their institution's culture, these people amount to nothing and are crushed.


Now the point of all this, if you haven't caught on yet, is to make an analogy with the videogame industry.

The problem, as many of us here at SB agree, is that games, taken as a whole, are hopelessly immature and unsophisticated. They consist largely of teenage power fantasies, movie tie-in merchandise, children's toys, cheap ways of killing time or glorified porn. The problem is not that they are not "Art" -- that is a useless, loaded term that only leads to sterile squabbling about definitions, and please nobody bring it up from now on. The problem is not either that their audience, demographically speaking, isn't wide enough -- I can't see how just getting more middle-aged people and women playing them would help matters (American Idol is watched by plenty of middle-aged people and women). The problem is that so many of them are idiotic, infantile. They can't be taken seriously. Many people of good taste quickly dismiss them as trash without even making the effort to find the nuggets of gold, and who can blame them?

Now what brought me to write this post is the following comment. In the "moe" thread, Toups wrote (after quite a digression):

[100Proof]

I don't have anything particularly noteworthy to add to the discussion, but good show, sir. I've been brainstorming a blog post/thread with a very similar bent and you just articulated the majority of my points.

[Screwtape]

First: I like your post, it was well-written and contained some interesting and juicy ideas. I don't think I can contribute usefully to the discussion as a whole, but I just wanted to comment on this bit:

[Intentionally Wrong]

Hey Broco! That's one hell of a post. I like this trend of industry-critical observations on the way games are failing to improve the status quo. I tried to approach something similar in the moe thread and elsewhere.

I doubt that a single game will be enough to change the industry. I doubt that any game designed with the intention to do so will have any positive effect at all.

Sam Delany quoted another author as saying "Nothing survives in the end, except for brilliant execution." I think this is relevant.

I've got more to say: later.
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JSNLV is frequently and intentionally wrong.

[Kipple]

[Dracko]

The thing my hopes rest upon for this generation of gaming is the concept of emergent gameplay. This goal seems particularly prominent in upcoming games such as Bioshock and The Outsider (Were an overarching storyline isn't written in, but individual motives are simulated). Even Crysis seems to want to offer a more free-form experience than most FPS games. It reminds me of Operation Flashpoint, in fact.

Some may take issue with the idea, because of its implications for expression, but I wouldn't say that's the point. For one, it offers far more expression, and power, to the gamer, which should be crucial. I'm of the belief that the future of gaming lies in that concept, even though, cynical as I am, I don't expect it to be fully delivered on just yet.

[Toups]

I will have to respond to this in greater length later, but here's a quick snippet before I leave for work:

I'd caution against comparing film and games too closely (though, yes, it was me who first introduced the comparison). Videogames have their own set of conventions and language that serve important mechanical functions that we shouldn't necessarily dismiss. All the sorts of abstraction that people often complain about -- icons for powerups, the whole idea of "button input", heads-up-displays, "videogamey" level designs -- these are at once both antiquated conventions and the very language of the medium. This "messiah" game is not one that necessarily needs to abandon these in an effort to more resemble a film. If anything I have lately come to believe that these conventions have just as much expressive power (if used properly) as the juxtaposition of visual images that make film up.

It's worth noting, as well, that film itself has a bunch of strange abstractions and conventions that you just have to accept to enjoy them.

Also, though I used the term "messianic" I wouldn't expect this game to "save" the industry -- I wouldn't expect the schlock to start appearing. I would expect this game to create an avenue for more games like it to come, however. Sort of in the same way that Citizen Kane "legitimized" film by showing that films can be "literary". Before then it was all weird art films, adaptations of musicals, and trains running through tunnels.

(yeah I know not really but you get my point here I think).
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[Gin]

So what you're saying is, in a way, though we need games like godhand, we need games that are the polar opposite of godhand.

That sounds about right.

We need a game that has no numbers or bars or anything. No floating icons or anything. Complete lack of helpful messages like "PRESS A TO OPEN", no HUD of any sort. Controls would be a hyperintuitive design, so you never ever need to be told what to do, or what you can do.

Make the plot something simple and meaningful. No need to be complex, no need to try to make Citizen Kane right off the bat. Just focus on changing the way a game might be percieved.

Maybe your a guy who goes out to meet some friends for pizza one day. On the bus he sees a girl he used to know who he still has feelings for, and maybe you decide to follow her. Or maybe not. There would be no motivation to do anything other than what you as a player decide to do. There would be no rewards. The game would be just this one day in this guy's life, however it turns out, based on what you decide to do. Like Groundhog Day, where you could just go an explore your setting to your heart's content, witnessing some moments that are meaningful to you, some that aren't, until you get bored and stop.

Ideally, it would be utterly organic.

That's the direction games should go in.

Damned if I know how to make them go that way.

[luvcraft]

Toups! Put this article on the front page!

Damn, Broco, I've been working for years to research correlations between games and film and other media to help advance the medium of videogames, and this article is leaps and bounds beyond everything I've come up with so far.

Something I just noticed the other day that ties into this nicely:

In movies, books, and most other storytelling media, the Big Question is "what is the theme?"

In videogames, the Big Question is "who is the target audience?"

Obviously, there are people working in film who are more concerned about the target audience, and people working on videogames who are more concerned with theme, but for the most part movies and books are about theme, and videogames are about demographics.

[Mr. Mechanical]

I think the first step we should take, as people who care enough to take that step, is to find ways to talk about games without comparing them to films or theater or anything else like that. It's just going to lead us down darkened alleys and obscure illumination on the subject.

Videogames are, by and large, a highly malleable, adaptive medium. We have games that come close to resembling these other mediums we are more familiar with, like film or theater, but we also have games that are anything but. If you truly want to "legitimize" gaming then you need to find ways to talk about it without drawing such comparisons.
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[Broco]

Hey, I'm glad most people seem to like this post. I ended up obsessively spending until 3 AM yesterday writing and rewriting bits of it, but at the end, rereading it with a critical eye, I could see powerful counterarguments that could be made and I wasn't sure it was that great after all. I decided to post it anyway because there were at least bits of it that I was happy with, and even if the general thesis is wrong it's at least interesting to consider. Anyway, the above certainly isn't the be-all-end-all of my thinking about games, it's just a particular viewpoint I decided to explore.

I agree with everyone who's saying I focused too much on movie-like aspects of games as opposed to other sides of them. That's a pitfall I am completely aware of, and I went ahead and stepped right in it anyway. Actually I myself sometimes think that maybe story is something games shouldn't even be striving for, that things like Tetris and Ikaruga -- and while we're at it, chess! -- represent the pinnacle of the medium. The thing is that, when discussing the potential of games, movies are pretty much the whole motivator; comparing games with them is what gives us the feeling that games are somehow lacking, that we need to do better. So the tendency to over-compare with movies can be hard to avoid. (And then there's the argument that games are just maybe not so bad after all, and it's only the inappropriate comparison with movies and the cultural ghetto games currently find themselves in that leads people like me to think along these pessimistic lines.)

The second thing that really bothers me about my post is that my armchair sociology about the movement of people and ideas in the industry is, well, armchair sociology, and I'm not sure it really holds. I'm generalizing, very possibly overgeneralizing, about a huge and complex group based on my narrow knowledge and experience, and although I'm pretty sure some sort of process like what I described is happening, it's probably a lot more complicated than what I'm saying, and maybe not as immutable as I portrayed it. And in the end, what I'm implicitly doing is predicting the future, and that's always a risky and dubious enterprise.


Okay, so anyway, I just attacked my own post so you don't have to. I would've tried to synthesize the counterarguments in the original post but it was getting late and I couldn't think of an elegant way to do it.

[SplashBeats]

You know, people keep saying the game industry is going down in a spiral, but then mention a handful of very recent games as "the way things should be." The games I hold up as "progress", at least, were all made in the past couple of years. I can't think of anything from the 8/16-bit era that holds up today as an example of how to express a compelling narrative via gaming. I'm not saying this era isn't influential (I'd be an idiot if I said that) but I don't see anything that really does it better. Compelling action gaming, sure, but not compelling narratives.

Slow progress upward is being made. Just as many people take IGN's opinions about games seriously as People Magazine's opinions about movies seriously.

To further extend the movie metaphor:
We have 1 Citizen Kane for a million Bad Boys II's. It is how popular media tends to work! This is still a young industry anyway. We have many years to go before we see what can really be done with the art form.

The sky isn't falling in two-thousand-seven.

[Koji]

But it was a remarkably well articulated post, Broco.

I agree that the medium is far from what it could be, yet, as Toups and yourself said, you focus too much on the side of the story and in comparisons with the film industry. But the core of what you said is still true. I don't know if there's going to ever be a truly 'messianic' game, but I think that there have been several games in the history of gaming that have been bold departures from the ordinary conventions and archetypes, with a different approach each. You focused on videogames that deliver a film-like experience, but there are much simpler games like the bit Generations, which are much more focused and more designed than most overly complex games that are released nowadays, which are diluted in all the content that's shoved into a preexisting frame: a game genre.

There are simply too few people that actually think critically about games in terms that are more complex than 'sound,' 'graphics' and 'gameplay,' which exhibits the reductionist mind of the industry. The audience is still too condensed; I believe that in a decade we'll start to see more divergent games coming out, simply because the audience will have expanded, and there will be a better chance of making a game not catered to the mainstream, and still sell enough. This will hopefully eliminate most of the preconceptions about what a game should consist of, and only then will the industry have matured enough. Possibly, in the future we'll see actual crossovers between the videogame and the film industries that will give birth to majestic pieces of interactive narrative.

[leroyhacker]

[leroyhacker]

[Broco]

leroyhacker, you make good points and your thinking is actually very much aligned with mine. It's just that the issues you raise didn't come to mind while I was writing all that. It was a sort of outburst in reaction to Toups' comment, quickly molded into a thesis. (Blame the Toups!)

I also often think of games in terms of space and architecture -- I think, in particular, the relationship between overland and levels is frequently crucial. And I would add comic books to your list of mediums to compare to -- another hybrid, ghettoized medium that blossomed into an artistic form only decades after it began to be popular.

I think Bit Generations and Rhythm Tengoku don't get much attention around here mostly because they haven't been released outside of Japan. And actually I really love them: you can see me occasionally raving about Digidrive in the Games You Played Today thread. They didn't occur to me in the context of "great games", though maybe they should've.



SuperWes asked me to consider spending more time fleshing out what I wrote for later publication as an article in the Gamer's Quarter. These would be good topics to address in an expanded version.

[Koji]

I only have one observation to what you're saying, leroyhacker, and it's that narrative is very tightly linked to videogames, in that videogames cannot be without narrative, as time and progression is an essential characteristic of the very medium. Yet you're right in that it's not necessarily the ultimate aspect by which a videogame should be designed around. But don't mistake narrative with story, as even a very abstract game can have a very emotional narrative. Katamari Damacy is not the most abstract game ever, but the progression that's built as your katamari gets bigger is (or was for me) very powerful, with a stupendous climax. This is a very linear kind of narrative, though, and, certainly, non-linear kinds would explore the medium much better, but more abstract ways of achieving narrative can be very stimulating, like abstract forms of visual art are in comparison with figurative art.

[mechanori]

I was thinking about some points Intentionally Wrong said in the Zelda impressions thread, and some points lof made on IRC.

Intentionally Wrong said that Shadow of the Colossus was designed with two choices in mind: defeat the colossi, or don't defeat the colossi. The game accommodates both providing you with a peaceful choice (exploring the landscape) and a violent one (killing the next colossus). On the other hand, Zelda:TP offers a million choices. There are tons of talkative characters in several bustling cities; there are endless amounts of hidden grottoes to entertain endless amounts of new equipment; there's just a lot. But all of these possible diversions are just diversions. They're silly and meaningless.

But that's what video games aspire to be as of yet. People crave meaningless choices, and content to house those choices. Shadow of the Colossus provides the opposite, and yet tells a compelling story through the two choices the player is able to make. Small and focused is the way to go right now, if SotC proved anything.

Hmm. I'm not really making any points.

[Maxson]

Something I got off of Kipple's post reminded me of Pongism- which I think of as the idea that the core of gaming is the constantly shifting interaction between the player and the game. Narrative, as Koji said, is important but secondary.

If so, the unique thing games do is interactivity- and playing with this interactivity produces one of many messianic games. I agree with Koji, there are a series of games that adjust the genre- mainly by showing us new ways to interact with the medium. This new interactivity is instantly aped by your usual uninspired games, but by doing so, the overall interactivity of the genre gets a boost. Like how Mario 64 or Doom changed how we interact with a 3D environment- now everyone does it that way. And we're all a little better off because of it, but we're sick of it and looking for the next messianic game now.

If so, the designer of the next messianic game will redefine interactivity yet again- often by using current hardware boundaries in new ways that will seem obvious in retrospect. It could be something small, like letting you move the camera during cinematics in Half-Life. It could also be hardware, since hardware itself strongly defines gaming- which could explain why everyone's so stoked about the DS/Wii. I'm betting it will be something blindingly obvious in retrospect, like always.

[showka]

[Duckzero]

warning: i didn't proof read this at all.

I don't know if I can add anything particularly useful to the discussion, but the concept of a Messiah game is an interesting one. I don't necessarily know what game could stand as a model or anything near it. I do like SOTC, from what I've played (I still need to beat it), and HL2, i've never touched (I don't have a PC to run it). So my view may be a bit off.

The thing about SOTC as a complete game is the fact that the gameplay is something so Clash of the Titans that everyone can digest the gameplay and story. The reason I use Clash of the Titans is that my roomie's BF will sit there and watch me play games, but one of the few times he actually truly, truly immersed himself in my gameplay was with SOTC. The small hero, the giant monsters, the princess, and the Gods. It's all there, and by "it" it's the stuff that we were forced to read about in high school with the Greek plays. It is truly fantastic stuff. He would have had more fun playing, but again, he believes that video games are still childish. Which brings me to my next point.

Harry Potter does so incredibly well, not because it's well written, nor does it have even that great of a story, not because the characters have a large amount of depth, it's because for most adults (who are the people that provide the reviews), it's the first fantasy novel they have read since 6th grade. Therefore the happy memories of <insert> are reinvigorated, producing a smash hit. Harry Potter is almost the "Messiah" (I guess you could argue the Bible there also, but that's a different story) of books. It can be marketed to children, adults are not afraid to pick it up and enjoy it, and most of all it's profitable for the publisher.

I will end by saying that I believe that Steel Battalion does a great job of linking the gamer to the avatar.
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Keepin' it real like Oatmeal

[BotageL]

[Kipple]

[leroyhacker]

[Koji]

To make myself absolutely clear, I used the term narrative in the broadest possible sense: a series of successive happenings linked in time. These can be intentional or not, can be subjective or not, and can be linear or freeform. They can involve images, sounds, emotions, ideas, intellectual reasonings or whatever.

[klikbeep]

[Intentionally Wrong]

[BotageL]

Your point is fine, IW; I was just responding to mechanori's wording (making it sound like the two were separate, contrary goals).
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http://www.mdgeist.com/

[Intentionally Wrong]

Joe had a very good point, earlier, and it's a point that needs to be reiterated. I'm going to try to expand on it:

Dissatisfaction with the industry is inevitable.

Game creators have different ambitions and different levels of success at achieving those ambitions. Toss a handful of ad hoc scales out--"entertainment value", "artistry", "technical prowess", "absence of flaws", "novelty"... anyone who thinks about games can come up with plenty more. Games can rate high and low on different scales at once; their position on these scales can change as people come to a new understanding of them. By assigning weights to each scale, you can approximate an overall hierarchy.

This seems like a cumbersome process, but we do this subconsciously all the time. The push to establish a pecking order (or canon, if you prefer) is universal. Look at the GameFAQs "Best of" polls or any list thread around here.

You've heard the old phrase, "90% of anything is crap"? That's because people are capable of comparison. When you find a game as focused on evoking an emotional response as Shadow of the Colossus, most games you've played up until now immediately become a little bit worse. For every way a game can be measured, some game does it best. Quality is a social phenomenon.

The quickest way games can improve is for game-makers to focus on doing things better than they have before. For your game, find something no one has done well; then make sure your game does that better than anyone else ever has.
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JSNLV is frequently and intentionally wrong.

[evnvnv]

Wow. I'm pretty impressed by this thread... feels like selectbutton is kind of... getting its sea legs, or something.

Anyway, I pretty much agree with almost everything being said in this thread. For a long time I wanted to believe that videogames and movies could be thought of as completely independent things. For awhile they were, but as videogame technology improves a lot of designers have taken maybe a few too many cues from the film industry, and perhaps this is a bad time to be looking to the film industry for creative inspiration.

Someone said that the sky won't fall in 2007, but in a lot of ways I think this is a crucial year for videogames as a business, platform for social interaction, and (dare I say it) artform.

There are a lot of interesting ideas in videogames, most of which have been around since almost the beginning, that I think have finally been implemented somewhat seamlessly. The question now is how people (audiences) respond to this, and how developers utilize these tools.

To be really convenient and shoehorn these ideas into nice categories, I'm going to make some really broad generalizations that I know are flawed, but... bear with me for the sake of this argument! Here are three things:

1: Network-based interactivity on a broad scale

2: Single-player narrative experience--interactivity/choice, theatricality, etc.

3. Small-scale social interaction--Maybe call it "digital social lubricant" or "pure games" if you want to be kind of pretentious about it.

So, we also have three competing systems--all of which I know incorporate all of these ideas, but again for simplicity's sake... in specific order.

1: xbox360

2: ps3

3: wii.

I think what most people have been talking about in this thread is the second category. A storytelling experience that is independent from other narrative media in that it involves choice. I picked the PS3 to represent this category basically revolving around my concept of what MGS4 is going to be like--standard Kojima hollywood worship/satire/analysis combined with the ability to "choose your own adventure." Also my perhaps misguided impression that it seems to have the most powerful hardware out of the three, but I might be wrong about this. Anyway, it's not that I think there is anything wrong with this style of videogame, and there is definitely a lot of progress that can and will be made in this area this generation, but at the moment it's not really what I'm interested in when I think about videogames.

The other two areas are really exciting though, because they really throw a wrench into the "videogames as art" debate. In a really good way. Providing a way for people to interact with each other over great distances to compete or just do something together. This is pretty much unique to videogames, and xbox live seems to really be doing this well. I don't think it's really anything that hasn't been happening in PC games for ever, but something about it seems more personal, more exciting. I guess its also just a lot of 14 year olds racially slurring each other over broadband connections, but just from reading people's posts about various multiplayer experiences on this forum you can tell that it can also be something a lot cooler than that.

On the other hand you have the Wii, which seems to be all about a ... single room multiplayer experience. It is reuniting videogames with other kinds of games, both by bringing physical movement back into it and by focusing on games that lots of people can play together. It seems like Wii sports is as much about the other people you are playing with as it is about the mechanics and aesthetics of the game itself. Obviously if a game plays like shit it's not going to be popular, but with the right people a deck of cards or a checkerboard can provide hours of entertainment--why can't videogames be the same thing? It becomes a tool or an object, something you use to have even more fun with people you already have fun with. This too has been around in videogames for a long time, but like PC online gaming, in the past it has required more of a commitment to "figuring it out." There had to be some impulse to begin with before you were able to see the benefits of it.

I'm not trying to divert the attention from storytelling in games, in fact my biggest "?" about videogames at this point is how storytelling is going to be incorporated into both varieties of multiplayer game. I think storytelling in multiplayer games is going to be a really big deal sooner or later, and pretty much every ludicrous imaginary videogame I think of involves this concept in some way or another. I figure these ideas are coming not from my own brilliant mind but from some sense of the direction this wave is going in. There is plenty of untapped potential for single-player linear games, and every year there are more games that go further and further into this concept. Of course there is a lot of crap too, but that is the case with everything.

But as much as you want to avoid the 'videogames as art' debate, as long as you keep focusing solely on narrative or drama or storytelling, or hell even aesthetics, you're going to keep falling into the same traps. Interactivity is what makes videogames special, and cooperation/competition in multiplayer games makes this quality exponentially more complicated. Especially considering the current importance of these trends, it's crucial to consider them even when you are just thinking about story and narrative.

Worrying about the "Citizen Kane" of videogames is important. I'm also worried about the Chess of videogames or the Go Fish of videogames. I'm also pretty certain all three of these things exist already. But the use of the term "messiah" is really interesting to me, because when I hear that term it reminds me of another problem single player videogames have that limits them in terms of narrative experience. It's really hard for this kind of game not to focus on the incredible quest of one person. That's a pretty limiting narrative arc. You're telling the story of one person and one person's decisions--no matter how many characters you throw into the mix it's impossible not to identify most closely with the character you are controlling. And because it is the character you're controlling, the whole game world has to revolve around you, and yea, generally you save the world. Often times ("LONELY GAMES") your character is the ONLY "person" in the entire game world. So that is what I thought when the term "messiah game" was used. Because these games are really just messiah simulators, and already puts some pretty big narrative restraints on a game.

Citizen Kane is a perfect example: That's a movie pretty obviously about one person's life. But the story isn't told just by following Kane through every moment of his life the way a videogame would. The whole movie is a series of other people's opinions and stories--proving that no matter how important, "larger than life," or even messianic a person is, the other people in his life end up being the ones who define him, who try to unravel the mystery of who he really is. And this is what makes Citizen Kane such an important movie. Sure, there are tons of books with multiple narrators--its a pretty well-worn device. But one limitation of mainstream film is an approximately 2 hour time limit; another is the complicated art of editing--both content-wise and montage-wise (a product of time limit, in some ways).

Within a relatively brief period of "real" time, the film accomplishes the task of not only summarizing the events of the life of one man, but also the perspectives of the people close to him--both how they looked at Kane and how Kane looked at them, as well as a pretty good picture of how he impacted society at large. And on top of all this it wraps everything up nicely with some pretty good dramatic irony that undercuts all of the complexity of the film itself--they key to Kane's mysterious personality is something so trivial that it is completely overlooked by all of the investigation and analysis (and cinematic temporal trickery). So Citizen Kane "is" Citizen Kane because it not only utilizes the particular quirks of film storytelling, but it also does it extremely well.

For a videogame to do this, it's important to first take inventory of what makes a videogame a videogame, and I think it's becoming increasingly hard to ignore the importance and uniqueness of multiplayer interactivity, especially if you want to make a story that is REALLY about more than one person in a way that has not been done before in other media.

[Laurel Soup]

Does anyone outside of you guys view Kojima in the same light? It seems like the general appeal of the Metal Gear games seems to be the super cinematic presentation, not their celebration of their own video gameiness. That disconnect between being told a story as opposed to driving the action (what ever it may be) seems to be at the heart of a lot of these comments.

Cynically speaking, ain't the point of the current generation of games to do things that look good in high def? Does that mean there's hope? Will the next FantaVision be the next Tetris, or will Master Chief's armor just get progressively more dented?
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[Frequent Pilgrim]

I basicly agree with everything being said in this thread. There are 3 probems with the game industry that need to be fixed before true progress can begin.

1. Instead of a messianic game, there needs to be a messianic game director. Not a developer, but a director. I'm relating to movies again, but work with me here because I'm going to avoid "narrative" comparisons. The industry needs a director who is fully responsible for a game. A director good enough for game titles like " SUDA51 presents: Killer 7". The game industry doesn't have many people worthy of becoming an industry leader in the same way that Alfred Hitchcock redefined the personality that could be put into a film by any one man. I could probably rattle off 20 directors right now without trying, but doing the same for game developers, I can't make it to 6. Miyamoto, Kojima, Suda51, David Jaffe, Sid Meyer, and I'm stumped now. So the question is, who has the ability to become the first game director who has a following based solely on his name alone (and not the name of his series, like Metal Gear) and has enough clout to be able to make whatever game he wants without interference from the publisher? Miyamoto is past his prime and Kojima doesn't seem interested in moving games beyond his high-water mark of MGS1. I might say Suda51 if most of his games weren't described as "intentionally un-fun". So we're waiting for someone new to come along who can basicly tell any publisher "I'm going to make whatever I want to make, and you can't touch it, and it's going to be a masterpiece, and my name on it alone will make it a million seller, so do whatever I say or Ill just find a new publisher."

2. A performance hall. No art-form can exist without a community. Musicians became good musicians because they went to a concert and heart a band that inspired them and they talked about that band with thier friends and eventually their conversations led to these friends making their own band. The same goes for people walking out of a theater talking about a movie. If it moved them enough and inspired them enough, those people will go out and buy a camcorder and start making movies. I can't exactly walk into my next door neighbors house as he's playing half-life in his underwear and say "hey man, what do you think about this narrative? How would you do it if you were making a game?" The big problem here is that, as we all know in America, arcades are dead. I'm not sure that the arcade in it's most recent incarnation would really be what we need anyway. They tend to express a more childish viewpoint of games than even the console market does, the most successful arcade game right now involves stomping on arrows while techno synth-pop plays loudly and red and blue lights flash in your face.

Honestly I don't know what I'm looking for here. I dont know how you could express games in a community setting that has a fundementally different outlook than a bunch of guys trying to get headshots at a LAN party. Maybe 3 hour multiplayer co-op sessions of games for a flat rate? The problem with that is currently all multi-player games have are focused on extreme competion, like counterstrike and streetfighter, or on creating new ways to interact with people, like World of Warcraft where the point of the game is meeting people before actually playing the game. The focus of multiplayer gaming it seems has never been to create an entirely new kind of experience or message, which is something I thing really needs to be done. I might make a thread about this later because I don't want to start up a whole new conversation when theres already so much to discuss in this thread. Can this tie into creating a community or performance hall environment? I don't know.

3. The final problem is the complexity of tools. I personally have a great interest in creating a game, but unlike a book where I can just start writing, for a game I need to use programs that I don't own or know how to get, nor do I have any information on how to use them anyway. Then to make anything I'm going to be spending months working before I see any sort of playable form of my game. At least with music, when you begin to play, you can immediatley see the progress you've made and can start to emulate professional work. Even then, because of the technology demand, my game is going to look pretty underwhelming in terms of both scope and graphics compared to any major release. Once again, I don't know how to fix this problem, I'm just recognizing that it exists.

So thats my feeling on what needs to happen before really creative artistic work can begin. This post ended up being a lot longer than I anticipated it being. I'm sure it's filled with gramatical errors that I don't have time to search for right now. Theres probably even more important things I could discuss given some more time to think about it.

edit: evnvnv pretty much said what I was trying to say about new multiplayer experiences except better.

[guest253]

good stuff! *hugs thread*

i don't believe in games as a narrative medium anymore!

i think the main problem is the age-old enmity between narrative and immersion (immersion as in "being a part of the story", i mean). usually the main character's emotional state is relevant to the narrative. in games we need to choose between a 1st or 3rd person perspective to convey the main character's mental state, and narrative and immersion dictate different choices here. if the narrative for example requires the main character to be sad, we can implement this in 2 ways, both of which suck:

1st person: avatar = player.
stategy: assume.
we try to make player sad, assume that he's sad, and continue our story as if he's sad.
problem: since we don't have any access to the player's actual emotional respons, we're fishing in a black hole, and our assumptions will often be way off (what Kipple said) -> exit narrative quality.

3rd person: avatar =/= player.
stategy: impose.
we rip control of the avatar out of the player's hands and have the avatar explicitly show his sadness.
problem: having your avatar switch in and out of NPC mode totally breaks immersion.

that's a rock and a hard place right there.
either we preserve immersion but lose narrative quality, or we preserve narrative quality but lose immersion.

workaround:
don't assume, don't impose.

if we can't assume or impose an emotional state, we'll have to leave it out of the equation altogether. that's rather awkward in any game with a significant amount of social interaction, and only works in an environment that isn't expected to respond to the avatar's emotional state. i.e. lonely game. SotC's narrative qualities are not the result of a solution but of a workaround. works fine, great game, but i don't think it really brought us closer to solving the problem. i don't think the problem can be solved with our means of interfacing.

[wild fantasy]
it could however work if the player could impose his emotions on the avatar, instead of vice versa. and i don't mean princess peach. maybe once we have the kind of interface to communicate emotion-related data to games, we could give it another try. something like a lie detector, measuring stuff like heart-beat, blood-pressure, shakyness of player's hands, pupil size, whatever. have the game respond to the player's emotions, instead of hoping for the player's emotions to respond to the game.

probably some way off, though i guess a wiimote could notice shaky hands. could be pretty good fun though. supposedly a big part of our emotional experience is a matter of interpretation, and we may interpret the same physical state as different emotional states depending on context. the medium would allow for some all sorts of wicked context-juggling to fuck with people's interpretations of their own physical state. we could have some seriously bizarre mind-rape-games. i would totally be up for this. ^_^
[/wild fantasy]

but yeah i think that until that time narrative games are doomed to be either lonely or wonky. i don't mind, i'd just wish that more developers would choose lonely over wonky. or go back to making videogamey videogames. cinema didn't get big by mimicking theatre or literature. i don't think we'll ever stop hearing the line "the movie is nice but the book is better". as long as we don't drastically change in interface games aren't gonna beat movies or books in terms of narrative quality.

i see a lot more in games that take making music instead of "going on an adventure" as inspiration. games that flow naturally instead of tripping over their own interactivity. interactivity should be the strength of the medium, not it's weakness. so look for systems that are fun to manipulate and build games around those, instead of thinking up a big story and then tacking on some interactivity later on.

speaking of systems, i think game-developers are still mostly thinking in real-world concepts which puts all sorts of useless limits on the kind of systems they can come up with. for example, if you view shmups as games about planes shooting other planes and bombing tanks then you won't come up with anything new. if you take a step back and view them as games about hitboxes and colored blobs, then you can think up bizarre systems like those of Espgaluda and Every Extend. i think we're only just scratching the surface of what amazing stuff we can still come up with if we learn to let go of that real-world grounding. kind of like when people just started using synthesizers to create sounds that didn't sound like any existing instrument. videogamey videogames ftw imho. ^_^

hey speaking of narrative, where IS Guardian?

[klikbeep]

Wow.

The name of my aforementioned and written and queued IC article is "Gaming's Missing Kane".

A lot of this stuff is . . . dancing pretty much on top of it.

Kind of breathless over here.

[falsedan]

Nice post Brock! I want to respond to a heap of unrelated stuff which I'll clump into this one post.

[Intentionally Wrong]

Regarding the perceived rift between narrative and immersion.

My first instinct was to go find similar discussions in the communities for interactive fiction and tabletop roleplaying games and to mine them for quotes which might be relevant. It strikes me now, two hours later, that this is a poor use of time. I would have linked and/or quoted from here, here, and probably here if I didn't found something more interesting in the process.

Responding to Glitch's three approaches:

Immersion is not inherently valuable. To a certain portion of the audience, it is an absolute necessity; other people can do without it. This is true across a variety of media. Some people say never break the fourth wall; others say it's inevitable and must be embraced.

Narrative--that is to say, 'authorial' narrative, of the sort glitch is talking about--is kind of a phantom, anyway. Samuel Delany points out that "story" is not something authors create; they can create a structure and write description and narration and all of the other stuff in books, but the story is what happens in the reader's mind. It only works because of all the associations and resonances the reader has picked up. I say it's the same for games, except with an extra layer of complexity added.

If you decide your game needs immersion, then, you still have some options for controlling the narrative that the player experiences. I think the "assumption" route's probably the best, here--with an understanding of what causes emotions, you can constrain parts of the game to bring those emotions about.

As glitch pointed out, there's always a possibility of failure; this is no less true for less interactive media, though. Interactivity can compound the issue, but that's the whole point: the power of an event is magnified when it's something that might have been avoidable.




Something else: if you want to use videogames to tell compelling stories, this may limit the kinds of stories you can tell. Consider the circumstances of interactive fiction:

An IF game usually starts off with a period of self-examination and reorientation. The player's thrust into a new situation with no idea of who he is supposed to be, nor what he is capable of. Many players, then, start off by examining themselves, checking out everything they're carrying or wearing, looking around the room and generally behaving as if they have no idea who they are or where they came from. It's no coincidence, then, that many works of IF center on unreliable narrators, amnesia, and people who are thrust into an alien environment.

Something similar may be necessary for videogames. Right now, the only real vocabulary for interaction that we've explored is violence. Until we refine the mechanics for more complicated interactions, the only stories games will be good at telling are violent ones.
_________________
JSNLV is frequently and intentionally wrong.

[Toups]

Oh God there's so much stuff to respond to: ;__;

I'll start with glitch for now.

Games are not an inherently narrative medium -- and I would never insist that should become one -- but all games inherently have narrative. All activities form a basic narrative of some sort, in fact. The narrative is sometimes abstract and rarely interesting, but it's there. And in games which are NOT abstract and feature realistic people doing realistic things, there's a hell of a lot potential there. The challenge, as you highlight, is that the traditional idea of a narrative being a static thing with a set beginning and set end and set series of twists and turns is, at best, an awkward fit for the medium.

I guess the point is: while games are not a narrative medium in the same way that film is, they still contain narrative and ideally that narrative can be tuned to complement and enhance gameplay and structure.

I'd elaborate but I suddenly feel like I'm going to barf. (For reasons entirely unrelated to this thread!!)
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[lolipalooza]

This is a wonderful thread.

[Intentionally Wrong]

I think those things would help, yes. But I don't think that's the only way, nor do I think that's necessarily the best way forward.

The player's avatar is a unique actor in the gameworld in that it is controlled by something with goals that often conflict with the game's internal goals. Unless a game can find find a way to resolve that conflict, it will need to at least acknowledge the conflict or otherwise explore it.
_________________
JSNLV is frequently and intentionally wrong.

[guest253]

@ Toups:
i should look into the semantics of the word "narrative" a bit more, my idea of what it means is pretty cloudy...
i guess i used it in a narrow sense, as "the conveying of a story" rather than "a sequence of events".
cause people i still totally believe in games as sequences of events ok. ^_^
also Toups how's the barfing?
you ok?

[Toups]

glitch that was an insightful post.

one quick response: