Press Fire to Start

The main attraction of telling stories in an interactive medium is allowing the audience to participate in or otherwise effect the structure or the outcome of a story. This is usually achieved through allowing people to make choices, which in turn leads to non-linearity in narrative structure. It’s a fascinating but slightly overrated thing. And it also complicates the actual act of telling a story quite a lot.

Despite what people may think, storytelling is not a free form activity. It has its own rules. That is not to say it has some old, bearded guys in a room smoking pipe, drinking expensive booze and deciding how everyone should tell a story. Indeed who the hell do they think they are? No. These are more like the rules of physics, in that they are more derived from what actually is than made up on the spot to make things into something. The rules are there to make us understand how we can tell a story with the devices we have in our hands. They differ from medium to medium, but one thing is constant: The authority of the artist.

Inject interactivity into this system and everything changes. Suddenly the audience is more than just people who would look, listen and jump up and down in excitement over who kills whom. Suddenly they may decide who kills whom.

This changes everything, turning the story into a game of sorts. Choices effect the structure and the outcome.

As Daniel said (quoting Sid Meier) in his previous article “a game is a series of meaningful choices”.  Therefore it’s imperative to understand the nature of choice when creating a game of an interactive narrative. The storyteller has to understand how people would react when confronted with certain options and what they tend to choose, lest he loses control of his own story.

Therefore every interactive story, just like every game, has to be constructed as a system. Every single quest, every simple task is a micro story in itself. There is a protagonist, a starting point and at least one destination. Between the starting point and the destination there are usually a bunch of obstacles. The player and usually the protagonist has to negotiate these obstacles and reach at least one of the destinations. Understanding the process of decision is important not only for creators of interactive fiction and video games but also for manipulating the expectations of the audience and for creating believable characters who behave correctly.

Let us start with a very simple setup and a therefore a simple problem.

There is a large, cube shaped room with one door built in one of the upright walls. In the initial state of the system (game), the player starts adjacent to the wall opposing the one with the door in it. The objective is leaving the room. What do you do?

The obvious decision would be walking towards the door, following a straight path. Remember that all the elements of this situation are mentioned in the previous paragraph. There are no secret doors, no collectibles and no experience points to be earned from exploration. Our sole objective is leaving the room. The obvious device for doing that is the door at the other end of the room. The correct move is walking towards the door as most people would do.

Now you might say that there wasn’t any process of decision or no real choice involved here. I beg to differ. The player always has the option to choose a less than optimal path. He might just follow a curve towards the door or run in a spiral or in zigzags. There is a reason why we walk directly towards the door.

A simple rule in human decision process is keeping in mind that when we are confronted with a problem we want a solution which causes us to use as few resources as possible and gain as much as possible. What we gain could be reward, knowledge or simply points. The resources we can use could be our hitpoints, stamina, healing potions, bullets or simply our time. The above example is extremely simple because the only thing we can gain is succeeding in the objective of leaving the room. The only resource we have is the time it takes us to do so. Sure, there is no time limit for leaving the room but as a human we want to spend time gaining things rather than not gaining them. Time is a resource for us. Therefore we want to leave the room as soon as possible.

The problem seems stupid because it’s too simple. Anyone who’d do anything other than the proposed solution above would be a moron. So let us complicate matters a bit:

Let us assume we have a wall running along the length of the room effectively creating two paths towards the objective door. There are a few guards on the left side of the wall and nothing on the right side. Both sides lead to the door. The guards are tasked with preventing the player from passing.

Many players would interpret this scene as a stealth sequence; meaning that the expected and most appropriate solution to this problem is taking the path on the right side and thus avoiding the guards altogether. Confronting the guards directly is unlikely to yield any rewards. Furthermore doing so would more than likely cause loss of additional resources. Even if we give the player a gun he’s strategically better off saving the limited ammunition for a future encounter in which direct confrontation is the best solution. Even if the ammunition is unlimited, the player would still risk injury and lose time, gaining nothing more in return compared to what he would have gained if he had taken the path on the right. Had we made a labyrinth on the left side of the room instead of placing guards the correct solution would still be using the path on the right.

People are very much like electricity. We tend to follow the path of least resistance in order to spend as few effort as possible. In other words we want to efficient. Most people possess the amount of intelligence needed to find the most efficient solution when they are confronted with a problem.

Naturally in many games we are presented with much more complex situations than these. What makes problems like these complex is the amount of variables which enter our calculation of efficiency. The more variables enter the equation, potentially, the more complex and therefore difficult our calculations will be. There may be experience points to be gained by confronting and subduing the guards. These experience points may be used to make our character stronger for the following encounters if there are any. Are the experience points worth the risk or the possible loss of resources? What is the acceptable amount of resource to be spent for a reward like this?

The game itself is usually about calculating these things and finding out the best path. It’s more like a riddle or a puzzle. Essentially each riddle is a question. But by their definition they should have a degree of difficulty. If the riddle is too simple we don’t perceive it as a riddle. We do not enjoy it. There is no satisfaction in solving it.

The whole point of having options is the dilemma. The player should think about which option to choose. If the choice is obvious, things will not be perceived as a problem at all. So either the expected values of the options should be fairly close or there must be a sort of deception involved.

In Yasumi Matsuno’s Final Fantasy Tactics the player is tasked with forming a small team of soldiers and leading them through several battle scenarios. You can hire male or female characters. However, uncharacteristically for these kind of games, this is not merely a cosmetic choice. Male characters have a higher Bravery stat which allows them to initiate all the important weapon skills with a much higher probability and efficiency. On the other hand female characters have a higher Faith stat making their magic spells inflict much more damage. The natural reaction from the player would be hiring male characters for warrior jobs and female characters as spellcasters. But there are other variables to consider. High Faith also means that characters will be effected more intensely from any magic spell. This includes the Cure which heals your wounds but also the hostile Fire spell which effectively explodes a fireball on your head. Your character will be able to dish out more damage but she also will be more fragile. There is also a Thief skill called Steal Heart to consider. This is the Final Fantasy version of the good old Charm. For obvious reasons it works best on the opposite sex. Would you like to have lots of female characters in your adventuring party in a male dominated world? Think hard… Complicating matters is also the fact that female characters are cheaper to hire.

This represents a series of very complicated dilemmas. Surely there is an optimal solution to the problem. But will the player ever be able to calculate it even if he has seen the whole system? A series of interacting choices are potentially able to form entirely different optional systems. Even if the expected values of those are close to each other, deep inside the player will know there is an optimal solution and therefore he will keep searching. The effect is similar to the planet creation facility in Douglas Adams’ Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy. The space inside the facility wasn’t infinite, but it was very close to infinity. This was what made it interesting and scary. As Adams puts it: “Infinity itself is flat and uninteresting.”

But, won’t it all be pointless if the player realizes all the options have almost the same expected value. Won’t he realize whatever choices he makes won’t matter.

He would. And this would defeat the whole point. But then again perhaps this is what we want. Perhaps we did not design the dilemma as an obstacle. Perhaps it’s not a riddle.

Sometimes options are used not as part of an obstacle but as a means to determine the next plot development or customizing the experience to fit for the user. Here the player should be presented with a real dilemma; ideally options with identical expected values. In these situations there is no correct choice. The primary goal of the designer is not creating an obstacle for the players but rather obtaining information about them. A simple example would be the first puzzle in Steve Meretzky’s famous Leather Goddesses of Phobos.

This is a text adventure in which you start the game with not much info about the protagonist. Your first problem is your bladder. You have to piss. Of course the player heads towards the toilets first. There are two different doors. Obviously: Ladies and Gents. The player may enter any one of those doors and be able to urinate inside. There is no wrong choice. However the game “decides” the gender of the protagonist according to the player’s choice of toilet. And the entire story is adjusted according to that.

Notice this is a one way option. Once you select it there is no turning back. There is a simple branching path but it works as a one way street. You cannot select both options. This is an x or y dilemma. You can be male or female but not both male and female.

Early in Indiana Jones: Fate of Atlantis, players are presented with an interesting problem. Indy needs to enter a building. However when he knocks on the door a rather unfriendly doorman appears. He doesn’t have any intention of letting our hero inside. He is also pretty rude. So it leads to an action scene involving a fist fight. If Indy beats the doorman he can enter.

There are other options though. It is entirely possible to convince the doorman into letting you inside just by talking to him and being smart about what you say to him. Indy can also ignore the door entirely and try to climb to one of the open windows at the back of the building, navigating through a labyrinth of  boxes.

You can do any one of these things. There is no wrong choice here. It’s not about right or wrong. It’s all about learning about the player. The fighting option will give you a more action oriented adventure. The talking option on the other hand will result in problems which can be solved by clever dialog choices.

As you can see you can present choices to players for two reasons: For creating obstacles or for gathering information about them. A good game would carefully mask the information gathering. But when you want to mask it as an obstacle you have to be very careful.

Peter Molyneux’s action RPG Fable does not have a class system. Instead it determines the player class based on how the player negotiates the previous obstacles. At the start the protagonist can swing his sword and throw basic damaging spells at his enemies. If you are a person who swings his sword a lot the game decides you are a warrior and develops your abilities as such. If you hurl a lot of spells around it naturally deduces you are a wizard type. You get the picture. However many of the first time players who have no idea of this information gathering system end up being a Spellwarrior, a hybrid class, regardless of their natural inclination.

There must be a mistake in the system.

The mistake is in that the options of using sword and/or spells are not mutually exclusive. You are presented with a problem and given two tools as a resource to overcome the problem. Then you are asked which tool you will use.

Remember our first setup? Imagine the empty room you have to cross to reach the door. Now imagine a guy telling you: “You have to walk to that door. You can use your left leg and you can also use your right leg. Which leg will you use?” Now, how do you answer this question? Which leg will you use? It does seem like an information gathering dilemma with options of equal expected value right? The author just wants to determine which leg you’d prefer? What would you answer? What would you do?

The system is set up wrongly because as you also might have guessed, the correct tactical decision here is using both legs. No one in their right mind would hop on one leg to reach the door. The question leads us to believe that we have to use a specific leg, but in truth there is nothing there to prevent us from from using both legs. It’s an x and/or y question, as opposed to an x or y question.

This is why most first time Fable players would use both magic spells and and physical weapons at the same time to overcome the challanges presented to them. This is why in Bioshock players don’t think if they should hack the turret, make opponents fight each other, electrocute mobs or smash their heads with a wrench. The player can do all of these things with the same efficiency. So the correct tactical choice is using all of these options.

Both of these examples display how an invalid dilemma can be built. There is one thing to keep in mind:

Regardless of your intentions as an author, the player will always gravitate towards the correct tactical choice if there is one to be made.

Present them a tactical problem and they will almost always decide rationally, choosing the path of least resistance, smashing through your obstacle following the easiest path. They can’t help it. Each person has an engine for resolving logical problems in their head. It’s built in. Comes with the package.Yet we also know people often tend to make a fool of themselves. How does that happen? In the next chapter we will see how this logic engine actually works and how we can trick it…

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.

I remember pre-ordering “Bioshock” as soon as I could. “System Shock II” was one of my favorite games. It was a rare and weird game adding the RPG sauce into the first person shooter dish. It also used clever ideas to overcome visual shortcomings. The result was one of the most effective survival horror games ever created. “Bioshock, its normal shaded, Unreal 3.0 powered spiritual successor could only be better” I thought, not remembering the fact that whenever I thought, it always got me in trouble.

In theory “Bioshock” is great. Instead of the sci-fi story of “System Shock 2”, it has a story which takes place in the past, in 1960. It features realistic physics simulation, allowing you to exploit the conductivity of water, or to simply throw things at enemies. Unlike “System Shock 2” it has no weapon durability stat or no character classes. The player is able to make use of every single action in the game at any time giving him a much wider palette of choices. And isn’t that the whole point of a non linear story? Hell, the game has three possible endings you can reach depending on the moral choices you make. Like “Silent Hill 2” I thought. In theory it is great.

Silly me. Being the Pisces I am, it is hard to tear myself from the land of dreams and remember the horrifying difference between theory and practice.

In practice the story of Bioshock is–shall we say–patchy.

We follow the exploits of one Jack, a passenger on a non-descript airplane, which suddenly decides to fall into the ocean. Being the sole survivor of the accident, our hero discovers a light house in the middle of the ocean and naturally swims for it. It appears there is a huge underwater city underneath that light house. This underground city was constructed by an idealist maniac called Ryan. In order to create a perfect society Ryan gathered all the most brilliant but misunderstood people in the world and made them part of his project. But as legions of B Movies taught us: “You can’t contain super science.” Things have gone horribly wrong in a horribly short time. Now Jack is trapped in this nightmare and the only way out seems to be through following the instructions of a kindred soul, one Atlas, who also wants to get out.

Of course things are never that simple. There are at least two big plot twists and several homicidal crew members approaching you with murderous intent, not to mention an abundance of fetch quests. The unnerving part for someone who remembers “System Shock 2” is that underneath all the polish very few things have changed.

The template and the general narrative flow of both games are astonishingly similar. Our hero whose body was modified by nanomachines or their 20th century equivalent genetics (frankly, I think for 1960, nuclear radiation would be more appropriate due to its well known Spiderman producing properties) finds himself in an isolated environment in which something has gone horribly wrong. He has only one ally with whom he only has radio contact. Of course it turns out in the end that this ally is the main villain. Everyone else is gone zombie. Those who have not are about to, or else they will attack our hero for no logical reason at all. On top of that, the entire security system (the incredible high tech security of the 60s) is against him and the whole location will soon be destroyed, so he’d better get out quickly.

Besides this template, the method of conveying the story is similar too. We listen to many voice recordings and/or read through endless paragraphs of diaries. It seems both in the future and past everyone loves keeping diaries. Direct interaction between characters is mostly restricted to beating the shit out of crazy inhabitants of the place. Furthermore we see reenactments of previous events in form of ghostly apparitions acting out the event. This does seem a bit too similar for two entirely stories taking place in entirely different settings.

The whole thing may be due to the fact that according to Ken Levine, game play always comes first; story presumably second, or maybe last. He says that during the development, the story of “Bioshock” changed entirely, several times. It is clear that Levine wanted to make a new “System Shock” game. Sadly “System Shock” belongs to Electronic Arts. So he did the next best thing. He made a new “System Shock” which is not really “System Shock”. The result is like trying to fit a star shaped block into a circle shaped hole. It doesn’t work. So Levine takes his hammer and pounds on the story until it fits.

The main difference between the two stories is that in “Bioshock” the already shaky suspension of disbelief goes out of the window. One of the unique elements of “System Shock 2” was that the villain was also the setting. SHODAN, the antagonist, was an AI with a God complex and she controlled every single part of the brightly lit and sterile looking environment you had to walk around. She was everywhere, watching your every move. In “Bioshock”, though, the villain is pretty much human. The environment is still against you, but there is no concrete reason for that.

We also have all the elements from System Shock’s game play, without any rational explanation: Automatic sentry turrets, security cameras, and killer robots, all of which you can hack. Remember it’s still the ‘60s. We know that Ryan hired rather clever people and brilliant scientists for his utopia project, but the audience has no idea as to how these contraptions work. We get a vague explanation about some miracle element and advanced genetics, but that’s about it. Mind you, this is not like “Fallout”, where the microchip is a lamp based circuit. “Fallout” was a story taking place in the future, seen through 1950s style goggles. Conceptually, that was a brilliant idea. But “Bioshock” is still in the ‘60s. Levine expects his audience to accept that in mere 4 or 5 years incredible advances were made in all fields of science but he still doesn’t explain how security cameras using 35mm films ended up with that incredible face recognition software so that they can instantly recognize you as foe and lock onto you. What can I say? As a PhD student in Cinema, I DO want their film development lab.

With the believability of the setting murdered, all you have is the art deco style environments and the story; of which, frankly, there isn’t much. The game assumes that the main hero will either be a power hungry psychopath or an angel clad in human skin.

Even without prior “System Shock 2” knowledge, the twists and turns of the story are rather obvious. There is next to no character development, no conflicts to resolve, nothing. All you have is recountings of previous events and a final twist. And what a twist that is.

The “Would you kindly” twist is, I must admit, a very good one. It reveals that the choices and the actions of our protagonist weren’t really his own. This not only makes sense, but also patches up many holes in the narrative and the irrationality of the protagonist’s actions. However, it could have been much more.

The main plot twist has further implications just like the plot twist in “Haze” does. The protagonist doesn’t really have a choice. He does what he’s been told, much like a character in a video game, which Bioshock happens to be. This could have been a great narrative on the nature of choice and the alternative lives we live in video games. Or it could have been something entirely different. A moderately talented author would have taken this concept and turned it into gold.

What you end up with in “Bioshock”, however, is a classic example of a story consisting only of a nice twist. Even with the twist, there are a hundred holes. How did they send Jack out? How did he live out there? How did Fontaine communicate with him? What kind of stupid plan is crashing the plane? What if Jack didn’t survive (and he almost does drown)?

And why would anyone surviving a plane crash, upon finding a huge syringe filled with a suspicious blue fluid, be instantly overwhelmed by the desire to stick it into his arm? (There is no “would you kindly” dialog there.)

It seems Levine, like most so called intellectual game designers, hates cinematic cut scenes and says the story should be conveyed through game play, without ever taking control from the player. But if this means I’ll have to listen to hours of voice recordings and read endless lines of text, I’d much rather read a proper book or listen to a radio play.

Levine may or may not be right. Game play may or may not be king. But surely the narrative in “Bioshock” doesn’t hold any noble titles, even if it does look quite enlightened compared to other games.

I spent most of last week playing “Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots”. This is because I was bedridden and a game which is accused of having extremely long cinematics by almost all reviewers seemed to be a good game to play (or watch) while I was sick.

There are many things to be said about the game, and many people have already said those things. This is mainly because Metal Gear Solid as a series is quite similar to a train wreck involving a Japanese bullet train, a vintage European steam locomotive, five cars, three helicopters, a truck full of trinitroglycerin, and a bike carrying an unspecified number of ostrich eggs in its front and rear baskets. That is to say it’s most certainly awful, but awful in a very interesting way so that the viewers are usually unable to divert their gaze from the grotesque spectacle. There are many, many things to say.

One of the worst problems with the series, however, is the illness I’d like to call “twist-mania”. Sadly this illness is not unique to Metal Gear series. It’s a horrific disease shared by many video games and by movies made by M. Night Shyamalan.

What is a twist?

A twist is a plot device which usually comes in form of previously unrevealed and unexpected information. This information changes the audience’s understanding of the narrative, the characters or both. A famous example would be Darth Vader’s announcement at the end of Empire Strikes Back. We learn that the antagonist is in fact the protagonist’s father. Therefore our understanding of the narrative changes, our theories about the possible resolution of the story need revising and many things that previously didn’t make sense suddenly do. In short, it is a surprise; something that catches the audience off guard.

When it’s done well, it’s a very nice thing. It can motivate the viewer to go through the narrative once more. It makes the audience go “Wow, I never expected that.” And because it’s usually one of the most memorable parts of a story, people will keep on talking about it. Therefore many inexperienced authors think that the most important part of a story is the twist.

It isn’t. It’s just one of the many devices the author has at his disposal to tell a story.

If we think of the narrative as a multi-layered cake, the twist would be the secret, small, cherry sauce disc hidden in the middle. You will be pleasantly surprised upon reaching it. You will enjoy its taste and tell your friends about it. However if the cake itself tastes awful, no amount of cherry sauce will save it.

The very definition of a story requires that you as a writer have something to say, something to tell. Building a story around a twist is a very risky thing. In the process you might accidentally end up with something good to tell. But more often than not you will make the story a vessel for the twist. And more often than not this results in no story at all, because without the twist, the story becomes meaningless.

A simple method to verify the presence of an interesting story would be to remove the twists from the narrative and reading it again. If the story is still worth reading, then you can rest easy knowing that you have written a good story.

There is a pretty good twist at the end of the movie “Fight Club”. It’s a twist which affects the narrative in far more ways than Luke Skywalker’s parental issues. We learn that one of the main antagonists of the story does not exist at all. But even if you remove this twist, the story remains interesting enough. I have seen people saying that “Fight Club” was like two movies in one and they would have liked both of those movies separately too.

On the other hand, “Sixth Sense” is pretty much written exclusively for the final twist. Bruce Willis is actually dead. If this information is known to you from the start of the movie, the story becomes very boring and not really worth watching, while “Fight Club” would still be an interesting movie with its main twist known.

By now everyone in the gaming community is probably aware of the “Would you kindly?” twist in Bioshock. For everyone who played “System Shock 2” I guess the whole “Bioshock” experience in terms of storytelling was like a prolonged déjà vu. Apart from all the things we expected to happen, does the “would you kindly?” twist really save the horribly patchy storyline? Does anything even remotely make sense? Wouldn’t it be better if the designers focused on the cohesion of the story itself, instead of the -oh so shocking- twist ending?

In the case of “Metal Gear Solid”, things are even worse. If you remove the twists from “Metal Gear” series, you won’t end up with a bad story. Instead you will most probably end up with nothing at all. That’s because Mr. Kojima, like many video game authors, constructed his story entirely out of twists. From the famous “I’m your father!” to the infamous “None of this was actually real!” he uses every single twist in the book. This may sound ingenious to some of you; building an entire story out of twists. But then you’re missing the point.

The point is that the twist is a surprise. Part of the definition of surprise is that you don’t even know it’s coming. When you start bombarding the audience with surprises they will soon start to expect them. And surprising someone who’s expecting a surprise is much like killing a dead person.

So probably the biggest problem of “Metal Gear Solid 4″ is Hideo Kojima, its designer, who happens not to be a writer. Most video game designers naturally don’t know the first thing about writing a story. There is no reason they should.

So the moral of the story is that people should stick to doing things they are good at. When it’s a story you want told, perhaps it would have been a good idea to let it done by a storyteller.