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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.

The drums of doom thunder. Soon the rivers will flow with blood, the moon will turn red, the sun will turn black as night. And by the morning star the four horsemen will ride. Granted, as a non-christian who kind of hopes that God exists, my knowledge of the apocalypse may be limited. This is usually the case if the major part of your knowledge about the bible was acquired from Iron Maiden and Manowar albums. I just know there has to be an antichrist of some sort and possibly a doomsday device manufactured by him. In this case, according to the press, the antichrist is Criterion and the doomsday device is “Burnout: Paradise”.

By now it should be clear that we love “Burnout: Paradise”. Criterion was one of the few racing game developers to realize crashing cars is much more fun than going around in circles with them. It’s a game about cars but not necessarily a racing game in the usual sense. In fact Criterion’s latest online research of player activities reveals that only 10 percent of “Burnout: Paradise” players are racing. This is probably due to the fact that there are a lot of other things to do in “Burnout: Paradise”. It’s a great game with a lot of bold, revolutionary design choices. We truly love “Burnout: Paradise”.

Electronic Arts recently announced that “Burnout: Paradise”, a full featured, retail game, will be available in September on PSN as a downloadable title. The downloadable version will be cheaper than the normal disc based version and will contain every single feature of its older brother. Only now you’ll be able to download it.

This thing is directly against all our preconceptions about downloadable console games. The preconceptions were set by Microsoft when they started this whole downloadable console games thing. Their head start naturally gave them the luxury of creating the rules for the market. According to Microsoft, a downloadable console game has to be small, simple and cheap. Small because they need to fit onto the memory card of an XBOX 360 in case the user has one of those hard drive free consoles. Simple because, well, they are small. And cheap around $10, because they are small and simple.

We are disturbed by anything that moves against the natural order of things. Microsoft’s model was great for many purposes. It allowed them to publish smaller, possibly addictive games through a channel which requires less money to maintain. Consequently the market for small, possibly old school games were reinvigorated, allowing smaller, independent developers to survive. “Geometry Wars” proved there is a huge market for these games.

It also manipulated the press. Normally a game like “Geometry Wars” couldn’t have hoped to achieve the critical success it did had it been released through traditional channels. But for a cheap little downloadable game, expectations are lower.

On top of this, this new market wasn’t a threat for retail publishers either. They still got to sell their disc based big games while Microsoft kept on selling small games through “Live”. There was a sharp and clear line between retail games and downloadable games.

This is why “Burnout: Paradise” is important. What will be released through PSN in September is neither small nor simple. And as far as downloadable games go, it’s very, very expensive. Furthermore it was released before as a disc game and is still on the market in this form. Now there will also be the option to buy the game as a digital download.

You have to understand, if this proves successful, the entire business model of video gaming will be called into question. Retailers, who sell tangible, disc based copies of games, will be pissed off because this model potentially removes them from the equation. Therefore, if from now on games are sold this way, it also means their cut from the profit will be gone. This naturally lowers the costs of publishing a game, which would be fine for publishers and developers. But it has further implications.

See, retailers actually have great power over the market. If you think of the business of selling games as a chain between the developer and the user, retailers are the final link. Normally if you remove that link, the chain will be rendered useless. You cannot touch them. This gives retailers the ability to decide what to sell and therefore to tell the developers indirectly what to make.

Many retailers have set up their business to sell games to male teenagers. This is part of the reason most of them are refusing to put AO rated games on their shelves while there is no real legal reason not to sell AO games. It’s an automatic censoring mechanism forcing the retailers to adjust their games according to the standards of retail partners. This is the reason why “Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas” was removed from the shelves, and why “Fahrenheit” was partly censored in the US.

This also removes the possibility of reselling games, rendering the used game market entirely ineffective. Each and every single game will really be sold and turned into profit for the publisher and developer. No manufacturing costs for printing games on discs. Games will never be sold out. Like in Steam, it will not matter where you live, your speed of getting games will not be dependent on any human transportation systems.

This, for all intents and purposes, is really Armageddon for the retailers.

Now this is not the first time Sony is selling a disc based game on PSN. “Warhawk” and “Siren: Blood Curse” come to mind. But Sony was free to play around with these games. They are Sony’s own games. “Burnout: Paradise”, on the other hand, is the first third part game ever to be published this way.

So is this it? Is this really Armageddon?

No, not really. Sorry. Let me slap you a bit to wake you up from your console dream land. The PC as a platform has had this downloadable games model for quite some time now.  Retailers are still alive. Revolutions don’t happen overnight.

This may not be Armageddon, but it’s a small sin paving the path towards Armageddon. Or so I hope.

If we assume video games are a form of art then “Street Fighter II: The World Warrior” would be one of those rare masterpieces created through the usage of either unparalleled genius or sheer luck, or more probably a mixture of both.

It had many revolutionary features. For the first time, a fighting game had asymmetrical gameplay. There were seven different playable characters, and each of these characters had entirely different move sets. The player characters were gigantic in size. Each of them had a dedicated arena with lots of background animation and parallax scrolling.

But the most unbelievable feature was called “hadooken”. It was unbelievable even for me back in 1992. For the uninitiated, hadooken is a fairly well known strike in karate or kung fu. The practitioner breathes in, pulls his hands towards his body, and channels his chi from the main five chakras towards his palms. When done correctly this should already form a white fireball in the fighter’s hand. It is then possible to shoot this fireball towards the object you desire to annihilate. It’s a very hard maneuver to pull. The training is only given in the Himalayas. Don’t try it at home.

It wasn’t the fact that a kung fu practitioner can shoot a fireball from his hands or the fact that the aforementioned fireball is white which bothered me. The part of my traumatic childhood I had spent in cheap cinemas watching horrible Chinese or Hong Kong action movies taught me that when kung fu is in the equation anything is possible. No, the thing that amazed me was how you were supposed to do the hadooken move in the game.

See, back then there were only eight things you could do with a joystick. The game instantly responded to whatever move you did with the controller. Hadooken, on the other hand, required you do make a quick quarter circle and then push a button. This was entirely illogical and against the very working principle of the device called joystick.

Yet it worked.

This was the beginning of everything. There you had the god of fighting games. Every single fighting game made after Street Fighter II took it as a template and tried to improve on it. Experts would agree that, in the 17 or so years which followed, not even the producers of Street Fighter II itself could make a better game. People tried and failed. That’s probably because the evolutionary tree of fighting games grew towards the wrong sun. It’s a classic example of Socrates’ observation of artists. Even the artists themselves don’t know what makes their creations so marvelous.

No, the switch from 2D to 3D doesn’t help. Most 3D fighting games still play on a 2D plane anyway. The problem is a bit more complicated.

Any game designer worth his salt would say that the ultimate goal when designing a game is making it easy to learn and hard to master. What does this mean?

Every game has an objective and a set of rules defining how the player can legally reach that objective. The rules mostly define the core of the game. The game of soccer may require superior agility, strength and endurance, but without knowing the rules you cannot even start playing the game. With the knowledge of the rules but lack of the required traits, you can still play soccer, even if you’d be playing it very badly.

Every game is a test, but it’s not supposed to be a test of your rules knowledge. Whatever it is that the game is designed to test, rules are not part of the test and therefore not a part of the game. For two reasons it is best to have simple rules which can easily be learned by the players.

A good example of a game with simple rules would be the game of Chess. For the uninitiated, Chess is a turn based, tactics game played on a field made of tiles, much like Final Fantasy Tactics. Yet compared to Final Fantasy Tactics, its rule set is pretty simple. There are only 6 different units and one rather bland map, no resource management, no base building, no unit advancement, no skill points, no spells, no alternative attacks, no reinforcements, no random events, no weather conditions, no terrain obstacles or elevation, no custom mission objectives and no party building. On top of that, the combat resolution is rather minimalistic: Attacker wins.

The obvious advantage of this is the fact that even a 7 year old can learn the rules of Chess in quite a short time and start enjoying the game. So Chess isn’t intimidating people with its 1000 page, 20 kg manual. All the rules of chess can be explained on one page.

This doesn’t mean that chess is a shallow game. In fact, it’s one of the deeper games in the history of humanity. And if you’re playing it with an experienced opponent, the game itself is everything but simple. There is a difference between a game being difficult and a game being difficult to play. Which brings us to our second point.

It is a widely known mathematical fact that complicated rules usually result in simple systems while simple rules counter-intuitively tend to yield complex systems.

In our example, Chess is a game with very simple rules. But the number of possible and viable moves available to a player each turn is huge, and therefore the number of possible games is staggeringly high. This is the reason why people are still playing it. The game has incredible replay value and depth, even with its relatively simple rules.

This is not a coincidental trait. Compared to Chess the game of Wei-Qin (known more widely as Go) is much more simple when it comes to rules. The rules “set” of Go consists of only one main rule and a supplemental rule considering a special circumstance which can occur when using the first rule. And that’s it. Yet the number of possible Go games is so high that Chess by comparison seems like a very shallow game.

Exactly this was the genius behind “Street Fighter II”. Despite its six different attack buttons and one stick, everything was clear and simple for each character. Each button was labeled. There usually were only stick and button combinations and these almost always resulted in an expected action from the fighter on screen. Pulling the stick down and pressing medium kick would do exactly what you expect: A low, medium powered kick. Push the stick up for a medium powered kick in the air.

Virtua Fighter, widely known as the best fighting game today, is also believed to be extremely deep. Each character has an amazing number of moves which can be executed by pressing certain buttons in quick succession. The buttons most of the time have little to no relation to the move executed. The mechanic is called Dial-a-combo. It was popularized by the Tekken series and used by every single fighting game released in this century with different results. Some, like Tekken, used a system which gave the player a false feeling of these button presses being relevant to the moves. Others, like the Mortal Kombat series, simply required you to enter a combination very fast to execute the move.

The move itself, being a part of the game’s rules, becomes a challenge while what should matter is using that move at the correct moment in a correct way. This makes the game complicated to play but not necessarily complicated.

The interface is there to translate the player’s thoughts to the language the game understands so that the game can obey the player. What these developers call “deep combo system” is nothing more than a bad interface. You could bind one hand of the player to his back and I’m sure the combos would be even more complicated.

In “Street Fighter II”, each character only had around 3 special moves. And by special move I mean moves which can be executed by complex controller input. A newcomer could easily start playing the game in a few minutes. These special moves were a bonus, an extra for those who discovered them.

What other fighting games have done wrong is making the special moves the entire focus of the game. Consequently only insane people who read trough pages of moves lists and memorize all the combinations can truly play these games. For the rest the games are made button mash friendly. Poor normal people can press random buttons very quickly and hope their fighter will do something relevant.

It’s a shame that since 1992 there really wasn’t any revolution in the genre. We’re still using the rule set from Street Fighter II, in the right or wrong way.

Long ago I gave up waiting for a new exciting mechanic in fighting games. Now my only hope is Street Fighter IV, which I hope will be going back to the roots of fighting games for normal people, using the rules set by its predecessor, but this time in the right way.