Interactive Stories

Interactive Stories

"Oh, yeah, I promised three posts, didn't I..."

Sup, mortals!

My final reading post for tonight is Chris Crawford's chapter on Interactive Storytelling from some book I don't know the name of. "New Riders" was written on the page, but I can't tell if that's the title or not.

Anyway, Crawford tells us exactly why the stories in games are poorly created and emotionally crippled, so here we go!

First of all, he discusses the nature of stories; a story, Crawford says, has a complex structure which must meet certain criteria, many of which are hard to specify. However, even a child can tell you what is and isn't a story. For example, Itsy-Bitsy Spider, the nursery rhyme, has a story to it, including a protagonist, a conflict, struggle, and a resolution. A child could identify this as a story. However, something along the lines of "Once upon a time, there was a knight who lived in a castle. One day the knight went out on his horse, but they fell into a hole and died. The end." is not. You tell that to a child and they will tell you that that's not a story.

So, if a child doesn't accept that as a story, then why should a game? I can more or less guarantee that a game somewhere has had that as it's player story, even if not it's complete narrative.

Next, Crawford tells us that stories are not about things; they are about people. For example, The Lord of the Rings isn't about the one ring. It's about Frodo's struggle, among many other things.

Games, however, seem to place much more value on objects, like swords or armour, than on people. To give one of my favourite quotes so far this year,

"The cardboard people in games do for drama what inflatable dolls do for sex."

After this, Crawford tells us a thing or two about conflict, and yes, I am rushing this a little bit, because it's half past two in the morning, and I'm kinda tired. There are two types of conflict, according to Crawford; direct and indirect.

Direct conflict is done very well by video games; fighting and wars are seen in nearly every video game worth remembering. Indirect conflict, however, is more difficult to represent in a game world, or so you'd think. Indirect conflict occurs between two sides which aren't openly fighting, but the struggle for victory is there in the background of the narrative. Think Jurassic Park 2.

Puzzles are next in my list of notes. As should really be fairly simple logic, a puzzle is not a story. Rather, a story forms around the people solving the puzzle; if a puzzle is going to show up in a narrative, it had damn well better be focusing on the choices of the individuals rather than the puzzle itself. Also, a puzzle is not a necessary component of a story, but is a method of helping to develop characters for the audience.

Choices are also very important; a story is, after all, at it's most basic form, about the choices individuals make, which build up characters, which the audience is interested in. This is true to the point that a story can build up to or revolve around a single key decision made by a main character, kinda like the final Matrix film.

Spectacle is an interesting one here. Spectacle is the form of entertainment based of exotic visuals; looking at something just because it's different or exciting. Michael Bay movies are full of spectacle (unless it's Shia LeBeouf, and who really cares about Shia LeBeouf?).

Video games are also filled with this nonsense consistently with more and more realistic-looking graphics, and it makes them sell. However, spectacle is not story, and the new generation of gamers is becoming confused between the two.

This has led to the "Tyranny of the Visual", as Crawford puts it; culture is being dominated by the image, rather than the word, he believes (and, hey, I don't think he's wrong). This can be a good thing, he says; war glorification is harder with films like Saving Private Ryan floating around, showing people being blown up and ripped apart.

However, it can also lead to a lack of enlightened perception of the universe. For example, when we look at a tree, we can know about all of the things that are going on inside the tree, and that alters our perception of it. That knowledge was imparted through word rather than image, and with the word side of things receding, it may become that case that, in stories we don't understand certain narrative points because we're not paying attention to what isn't directly shown to us.

Thus, visual thinking should not dominate storytelling.

Next (we're almost done now, I promise), is spatial thinking.

Okay...

Spatial reasoning is the brain's ability to anticipate and project an object's spatial location based on previous input. I saw the spoon fall behind the fridge, so I know that if I reach back there, I'll be able to find it.

This line of reasoning is out of place in drama, Crawford says, because, simply, it doesn't matter. In Odysseus, no-one questions the location of this mythical (and fictional) island, because that has no effect on the narrative.

Space is comprised of stages with no spatial relation; what happens between those stages is merely transition, it's what happens IN the stages that counts.

And finally, stories have a certain trait called temporal discontinuity; this means that the narrative rarely goes perfectly chronologically, but rather skips large portions of time and goes backwards and forwards and to other places entirely, depending on the requirements of the story. Flashbacks, skipping of transitional or otherwise unimportant periods, "x units of time later"s, these are all necessary in a story to keep it on track and not get filled with completely meaningless nonsense.

Speaking of meaningless nonsense, I'm more or less done here.

Great article, loved reading it, it made a wonderful impression, 10/10, game of the year, whatever, I'm going to bed.

I'm being serious there, the article really was very good. It made me think harder about what makes video game stories so frankly dreadful.

For me, it's the lack of significant characters. There hasn't honestly been a non-player character I've cared about (discounting Katawa Shoujo, cos that game is freaking built around caring about the characters) since Mass Effect. It was borked at the end, but up until that point, I really, honestly gave a damn about Garrus and Tali. And Wrex, I guess, but not so much. I could care less about Miranda and her problems.

Oyasuminasai, mortal-chan. Kotei-Kami-Sama Homeru!