A few days ago, my boss posted an interesting comment on a Game Writing Facebook page we both belong to. His question was this:
“What is the most ‘meaningful game you’ve ever played… and why did you find it meaningful?”
He asked this question because as a fairly well established Narrative Designer, he’s been as of late experiencing a little bit of a career crisis – he can’t for the life of him find any games that he actually feels ‘changed’ by.
We’ve been discussing this off and on for a few weeks now, and the question has gotten me thinking. What is a meaningful game? Are there any out there? If not, how do we as narrative designers need to write them?
Over the past three years, I have completed a Bachelor of Arts in Creative Writing and English and New Media. During that time, a lot of my academic work has been on the idea of video game narrative and advancing it to the heights of literature. What I mean by this is creating games essentially with meaning. Games that have deep thematic backing to them. Games that deal with social issues, political issues, religious and philosophical issues.
In short, when I speak about video games as literature, I am talking about my bosses holy grail – a game that changes you.
Problem is, the majority of games currently out there are only getting bits of this right. Yes, as a whole, the industry does appear to be moving towards more ‘story-driven’gaming, but having a strong plot and good dialogue is only one piece of the puzzle. To construct the whole picture, we need to re-evaluate the way we write and think about how meaning can be brought to the forefront of our games.
In the conversation on my Boss’s post, I discussed three issues I see currently standing in the way of narrative designers wishing to further their craft and gain a bit more literary respect. Thinking about them now, I realize that they are quite important issues to talk about and so this article will develop on them more as well as suggesting potential ways to work around them.
Story Tellers, Not Story Doctors
Issue number one. We are story tellers, not story doctors and often times game designers get this a bit muddled. Asking a writer to come on board after the game has been mostly made already and then ‘patch up the story’ is not generally a great way to get a piece of powerful writing. It immediately hedges a writer in, puts their ideas in a box and tells them what can and can’t be done. While I understand why this is often done, for an industry that revolves around creating entertainment products, we certainly push our writers to the back of the room a lot.
What needs to happen here is writers need to work alongside the designers, or perhaps even prior to the designers coming on board. If you think about the film industry for example, or even the graphic novel industry, pretty much always, it begins with a story pitch. From that pitch, a synopsis is developed, from the synopsis comes a treatment, comes world building, comes screenplay draft 1, draft 2, draft 3, draft 4 and so on.
Games in which the writer or writers are included from the ground level up have much more a chance at developing not only stronger plot, character and conflict, but also allow for conversations and then development of deeper themes, social commentaries and the like.
Writers! The fact that this isn’t happening is partly our fault! This industry is a two way street. We need to begin developing games our way, and then approaching designers with our ideas. We can’t simply rely on them to hire us after the fact. Be proactive. Pitch ideas. Develop treatments. As this begins to happen more and more, in greater frequency, we will be able to take out that old paradigm of ‘story doctor’ and become story tellers once more.
Literary Gameplay
What does gameplay look like in this new model? If we are looking to create works of literary value, how do we gamify them? If you think about the literary greats of both film and prose, the stories told there don’t always translate well into ‘shoot-em-up’ or ‘solve-the-puzzle’ or ‘race the computer’ gameplay. Instead we have stories where the bulk of the narrative takes place around the death of a friend, or the breakup of a marriage, the fall of a character to depravity, the list of possible topics goes on. How can we turn them into games? Think about Chuck Palahniuk’s classic novel Fight Club for example. Turning that into a Tekken style fighting game would totally undermine the satirical and critical commentary it has to tell on modern society.
To be honest, there’s no easy answer to this issue. At least none that I’ve found so far. Folks have tried to figure it out, whether through the highly cinematic approach of Telltale Games or the performing of mundane tasks like Heavy Rain’s taking a shower scene.
Trying to gamify literature almost appears to be impossible, because as many detractors from the video games as literature camp have pointed out – the very act of gameplay causes a discord between immersion and entertainment, we end up with ludo narrative dissonance and situations where players are asked to ‘press the right buttons’ just so we can gamify a love scene.
If we consider for example Ernest Hemingway’s classic war story For Whom The Bell Tolls most of the novel is a build up towards a violent conclusion, but it is the build-up where all the important literary components happen, how do we then gamify a build-up?
I can only hope that with the advancements in Virtual Reality, we might begin to discover new ways to gamify the more literary pieces of writing. If a player can literally become the character like they can in VR, then perhaps mundanity won’t be as big of an issue since the gameplay is more about roleplaying another person’s life than anything else.
Again, a lot of this issue falls to designers as much as it does to the writers. We need to be working together in tangent, figuring out the answers to these questions at the same time, not one before the other, but in unison, that way gameplay and narrative can hopefully complement each other.
Problems With Pacing
Last but not least, if we are wanting to talk about video games as literature we need to talk about the problem with pacing. Video games tend to hit hard and fast. Lots of fighting, lots of explosions, lots of racing. Very rarely do players find a moment to breath because writers and designers are afraid that they will grow bored and switch off. While this is definitely a risk, we need to try move away from thinking in terms of marketability (at least for now) simply so we can consider pacing and how it effects narrative impact in film, in tv and in prose.
Still moments are needed in story to allow not only the characters to become introspective and reflect, but to allow those who are engaging with the story to do the same. On a subconscious level this silence allows for theme to develop in the back of our minds so that when that final moment of Catharsis comes – be it in the story climax or in a dénouement, it moves us.
Stories are mirrors. They reflect back at us ourselves, and therein lies their importance. They show us many things – how the world is, how we are, how the world is meant to be… without proper pacing, we miss seeing these truths, miss feeling the importance of what the story is trying to tell us.
We have to stop being afraid that players will turn our games off. Yes, we want our work to sell and to be enjoyed, we want this to continue of the massive scale it already is. We deserve to earn money from our work, but if we just let go of control a little bit, and allow ourselves to first and foremost seek art, then marketability will come.
In the end, it all comes down to a reshaping of how a lot of games are made. Writers and designers need to come together, and work with one another from the very start. The only way forward is together. Together we can really start to create truly memorable games and future titles no matter their genre or gameplay style can go down in history alongside the works of other literary greats.
The Punk Writer. 