Daniel and I often have discussions about narrative in games or interactive storytelling in general. We do this because we’re very cool people. See, this is our main goal in life: To be cool. That’s why he’s a guy who switched from studying CS to studying English Literature and is working at a game company. We discuss these things because we’re both sort of studying it.
All this may sound nerdy to you but trust me, around age 30 it all becomes cool. Go to any bar and tell any girl you’re a lawyer who, instead of working as an attorney, studies cinema at PhD level and is writing a thesis about video games and she will be interested. That’s probably because she would assume you are rich enough to be able to afford not being a lawyer, of course. But these are details. All that counts is that it gets the job done.
This mentality is problematic. It’s a roadblock on the way towards progress. Things still tend to stay the way they are until they don’t get the job done anymore. Think about movies…
One of the first commercial movies ever made was about a horse. It wasn’t about the life of a horse, or the speculated thoughts of a horse during a race. It wasn’t about a horse whose best friend is a retarded boy or a horse who realizes his brains would be blown out if he breaks his leg. It also wasn’t about an alternative reality in which horses are the dominant life form on the planet and humans are running around race tracks. It was just a horse; a running horse that wasn’t really going anywhere in particular. The movie was very short. As far as movies are concerned it was a smash hit. It wasn’t a particularly interesting narrative, but it got the job done.
Soon people got bored of running horses. Combine that with other people trying some radical, new stuff with movies and you get people like Eisenstein proving that cinema is not just a recording device for theatre, and Welles proving to everyone without a doubt that cinema is a unique medium of narration with entirely different devices at its disposal.
In my MA thesis I essentially claim that video games are also a unique medium of narration. This is a theory. Most of the time, the best way of testing a theory is asking the correct questions at the correct time. Therefore, the best thing when you’re researching something is a friend or colleague who is able to ask these questions. Maybe the reason I’m discussing things with Daniel all the time is this. One day he asked me this question:
“Can you think of a story specifically only possible in interactive form?”
Understand that this is a very important question. If we’re ever able to answer “yes” to this question without a shadow of a doubt then we’ll have proven that video games are also a unique medium of narration with their own unique storytelling devices. Allow me to elaborate…
Patrick Süskind’s “Das Parfum” is a novel about a guy who doesn’t have a smell himself but has a very sharp sense of smell. He becomes a perfumer in order to create the perfect scent. To succeed, our protagonist eventually kills several women and creates a smell which would make everyone perceive him as a perfect being.
As you can see, the novel is basically about the sense of smell. It is possible to describe a smell in a novel because description is the default method in prose. In cinema though, things change. Describing something in cinema means showing that thing. You cannot show smell. The most powerful part of “Das Parfum”’s narrative depended on the reader imagining his own perfect smell or perfect being. You cannot do that in cinema. Clearly this story is only possible in its original form. You can adapt it of course, but it won’t be the same story.
Narrative mediums are really like languages. Most of the time you’ll be able to translate the basic idea of a story. But the origin of a story is also the language itself, for the language is usually shaped by the peculiarities of the society which spawned the language. This society tells its stories in its language, and those will be next to impossible to translate directly with all their intricacies. That’s why they say translations are like women: If they are beautiful, they are not loyal, and if they are loyal, they are not beautiful.
The beauty aspect of the average video game narrative needs a lot of work. As far as stories are concerned, the entire industry is in its infancy. There is progress, but it’s very slow, probably because people get bored of running horses more quickly than basic games. If we want this medium to be accepted as a vessel for stories, we really need to get beyond these “aliens attack, now save the world” or “giant evil person attacks, now save the princess” things. And although things may look grim, I think there is still hope. There are people who try.
In “Final Fantasy VII”, Aerith, a character controlled by the player, is killed on screen by the antagonist. This is unexpected and unprecedented. But this wasn’t the great thing about the game’s story. Cloud, the main protagonist, tells a story about his past. The player even “plays” these flashback scenes to some degree. Then later we realize these things actually never happened. Cloud was basically brain washed and given false memories. The scene is very effective because as a player we project our personality onto the main character more so than in any other medium. After all, we were controlling that character’s choices and actions. It’s incredibly hard to accept what we told other characters was wrong. This effect would have been much weaker in other mediums. Of course, it would have been much better if Cloud wasn’t brain washed but actually lying consciously. Then “Final Fantasy VII” could have been the “Rashomon” of video games.
“Silent Hill” fails as a movie because the game has only one main character. Horror movies usually have at least a few of those. You never know who will die when. You never know who will survive. Thus you feel in trouble all the time. In the video game a single character played by you faces all sorts of terrors. You can die any moment. In a movie you know a single character in a horror movie won’t die until the end of the movie. You can always check your watch and be at ease. Nothing will happen to her.
Still, when the main character dies, the story ends in a non-satisfactory way. It’s traditional in video games that you only control one character. That’s you. But it doesn’t need to be that way. “Siren: Blood Curse” shuffles several characters like a true horror movie and these characters die in unexpected moments. At one point you unwittingly lead a monster to the main characters.
In “Planescape: Torment” the protagonist’s main goal is to die. You’ll see him die an unspecified number of times during the story, depending on how you’re playing it. He will wake up each and every time. Regardless of how bad a gamer you are, it’s a part of the story. For each player the specific incarnation of the protagonist will be different. Your actions and choices change how the events are played out, but they have already played out thousands of times in many other ways. It doesn’t matter at all. The story is about the nature of a man and what can change it.
David Cage promises in his new game “Heavy Rain” characters will be able to die by the actions of the player and the story will still continue taking that into account. There is no wrong choice. Each choice is a journey inside a story composed of many choices.
Most of these productions use the unique devices of the medium. They are not perfect. Some of them only contain small bits of genius. But great things usually start small. These are bold baby steps towards some great awakening, away from running horses. All we need is a “Citizen Kane”. I’m sure he’s growing up somewhere.