Issue 36 - The Play's the Thing

[The Escapist Staff]

Mark WallaceThere's an academic debate raging about whether story or gameplay reign supreme. Mark Wallace takes a look at this debate, and concludes that it doesn't really matter. "With games, all the answers lie right at your fingertips. All you have to do is play."

 

[The Escapist Staff]

Original Comment by: Nick Twining

I?m glad that Mark dismisses this argument and happy that he did so in such an eloquent way. I?m certainly not an active member of academia although I did go to college and did get a degree in philosophy so I can attest to being mildly educated?and sedated. However, to me, the absurdity of the debate stems from the fact that narrativist developers will probably learn more towards that style while ludoligists will go their route. In the end a game will have to have elements of both narrative and gameplay whether the developer leans one way or the other.
However, my biggest concern is the fictitious need to constrict games and adhere to a strict rule set governed by both of these styles, to hold onto the reigns of constraint we grew up with in television and text. Some recent games have begun to steer clear of these problems and now offer players a more diverse set of options: customization of avatars, optional endings, moral choices, professions, economies. However all of these options are still based in a very restricted world because designers feel they should baby their gamers ? they fail to see the importance of a yang to the ying. If you don?t have horrible outcomes or at least the possibility of them then accomplishment is no longer satisfying. If you want a ficticious world to be more believable then allow mean things to happen ? theft, griefing, murder, and so forth. That?s what happens in the real world.
Right now games narratives are simply a choose your own adventure, a multiple choice exam where you still only get a grade, not a character or story. Why not let characters develop their own narratives. Why not, in an interactive world, let stories beget stories. Perhaps we don?t have the technological capabilities to do this yet but I hope that as we progress developers take the words of naysayers like Roger Ebert to heart. Ebert believes that games are inferior to film and literature because they can never be art ? I agree, to an extent, as I feel that they can be more than art since they are interactive and far more personal. So instead of trying to be artistic for the gamer, in both narrative and game play, allow the gamer to be the artist. To twist Rosseau?s words: games are born free, yet they are everywhere in chains.

 

[The Escapist Staff]

Original Comment by: Patrick
http://www.kingludic.blogspot.com
First of all, great title, I should've thought of that.

I think the greatest testament to the circularity of the argument is that I had pegged Espen as a ludologist back when I wrote "Reimagining Challenge" two months ago, as that was the impression I'd gleaned from his essay in First Person. Its kindof like political parties, you can't help but flip flop.

for years I've been of the opinion that gameplay tells a story interactively, which I guess you could say is a narrativist position, but whatever, its been a useful philosophy for me as a designer of drama games and/or storyworlds.

I think the argument had its place in the history of the medium, and that was largely to set the stage for interactive storytelling or drama games, whatever nomenclature you prefer. We're going to see first generation products along these lines in '06 and '07, and the debate can finally be laid to rest by the power of sweet, concrete play you can hold in your hands.

 

[The Escapist Staff]

Original Comment by: andrew stern
http://grandtextauto.gatech.edu/2006/03/14/overly-escapist/
It?d be one thing to say, ?game-stories where you have rich gameplay combined with deep, real effects on a non-linear story haven?t been built yet, but we don?t care ? we?re having plenty of fun with games in their current form!? But it?s a cop-out to suggest that the relationship between gameplay and narrative is a non-issue. To blow off this challening problem, or pretend it doesn't exist, seems irresponsible and incorrect.

Read a longer reaction at:
http://grandtextauto.gatech.edu/2006/03/14/overly-escapist/

 

[The Escapist Staff]

Original Comment by: Slartibartfast

I had a mixed reaction here. I think it's a good thing to assert that there is no real debate, but at the same time I feel their should be. I would fall straight into the ludologist camp: if a game is not fun, regardless of the story, I'm not going to enjoy it. I have an English degree, and my thinking is that if I want a good story, there's tons of great literature I have yet to read. If a game is enjoyable to me, no matter how innane or ludicrous the story, I'm still going to enjoy playing it. Maybe I'm in the minority here, but I loved Serious Sam for it's hordes and hordes of fodder and ridiculous plot. I had a blast with Gunstar Super Heroes and Castlevania: Dawn of Sorrow, but have yet to bother playing Final Fantasy X. I thought Xenogears, one of the most fanboy-revered games ever, was pretty much complete crap.

Think of it this way: how many board/card/non-video games out there are fun? And how many of them have a story? Or even a setting? One of my all-time favorite games is bridge. Bridge does not even remotely attempt to simulate anything or tell a story. Yet it's one of the greatest games ever devised. Even go, the pinnacle of game design, barely has any setting. Sure it's been described as representing a battle or capturing territory, but if you took out that description nobody would miss it. You could take the mechanics of Settlers of Catan, drop them into a completely different setting and it would still be a compelling experience. Shadow of the Colossus tells a very compelling story, and is brilliant in making the player ashamed of his/her actions, but good lord is it frustrating to play: it's as fluid as a river of bricks.

Storytelling and narrative can certainly make a game more enjoyable, but I think it's important to separate "interactive storytelling" from "games." The art of games is in their design; the art of interactive stories is in the story.

 

[The Escapist Staff]

Original Comment by: Slartibartfast

^d'oh, I assert having an English degree and then write "their" instead of "there" :-/

 

[The Escapist Staff]

Original Comment by: Paul H
http://www.digipopo.org/content/PaulHanlon/index.htm
But I thought the whole point of the 'argument' was to work out a way of better understanding games; a way to read games. Does gaming work on the gamer as a narrative text, or is gaming non-essentially-narrative play? While the answer may still be that play and narrative have a symbiotic relationship in vids, the tone of this article suggests that this in an old issue that may now be dead. It seemed to me that the genesis of the issue in the first place was to arrive at a way of theorizing games that may borrow from other disciplines but treats the medium as a wholly new configuration of narrative and interactive play. This, certainly, has not been accomplished.

 

[The Escapist Staff]

Original Comment by: Patrick
http://www.kingludic.blogspot.com
I'm reiterating Chris Crawford here, so don't think I'm original or anything, at least not on this point:

There is no such thing as an interactive story, as story is what it is, its already set in stone.

Interactive storytelling, on the other hand, is a progressive, verb-oriented process, a story is being told by the interaction of the user and the computer. Interactive storytelling is about design, because the content of such a product is in the local dramatic principles, the overall meta-plot, and the verbs the player has at their disposal. The idea is a well designed storyworld will typically yield intersting stories, both in retrospect and in the act of playing.

I've decided I'm going to use the term "drama game" to describe the kind of game I'll be building in the forseeable future. Its a game, the gameplay of which involves dealing socially with characters, the dynamics of which should be dramatic. Drama games challenge verbal and social reasoning, mental modules largely untapped thus far, but its the same medium, its still all about play and interactivity.

I think a new way of understanding games, as a distinct, culturally important medium, has been achieved, its just that you won't be able to play the fruits of this new wave for at least a few more months. But soon, soon you will see, soon you will play with stories.

 

[The Escapist Staff]

Original Comment by: Mark Wallace
http://www.walkering.com
Slartibartfast > "if a game is not fun, regardless of the story, I'm not going to enjoy it."

That may be true, but the implication of that is that all we need to do is concentrate on the gameplay and that's all there is to it. I think the truth lies somewhere in between: that neither story nor gameplay is the be-all and end-all of game design. There's no story to Tetris, yet millions of people find it un-put-downable. Does that mean gameplay is all? Personally, I don't think so. I think there's a wide range of ways to solve for "fun," and that the ludology-narratology debate often loses sight of that fact by attempting to put too much emphasis on one element or another.