Corvus Elrod has one of those “Oh yeah, makes sense, I agree,” kind of posts, under the notably unflashy title “Verb Restriction vs. Immersion.” But because the underlying ideas unlocked a lot of heavy pondering on my part, I’m compelled to turn this into one of those long-winded thinkposts.

Game developers, he explains, tend to turn off certain actions at key points in the plot. For example, in Half-Life your weapon automatically lowers when you look at an ally. Other games toss the player into a cutscene, ensuring a steady dialog stream and preventing the character from lunging prematurely at the supporting actors.

But the meat of Elrod’s essay is the suggestion that developers should give the player incentive to behave without restricting their actions. He concludes:

If the storyteller provides violent verbs and the audience chooses to kill key characters, then the plot cannot continue. That doesn’t mean the story cannot continue. The storyworld continues to exist, only the protagonist motivation is gone. It won’t be long before the audience realizes that playing within the unstated rules of the storytelling experience will reward them with a compelling story. And then it’s up to the storyteller to make good on that promise.

Two commenters pointed to Morrowind as a good example. I have not played the game, but apparently you can kill plot-essential characters and continue playing with the main quest unavailable (a text box first asks you if you still want to go on).

This reminds me of my last essay for The Escapist on player death, in which I argue that the die-and-respawn model of failure is an outdated convention. If you believe there’s any room for compelling narrative in games, these magic reset buttons, like the invincible supporting casts that Corvus laments, have got to go.

That’s not to say they’ll go quietly. Oddbob ripped me a new one for criticizing death-as-failure without adequately addressing the consequences. He writes:

Me, I prefer to learn from games when designing them. To delve into what worked for me, what didn’t work for me, what worked for other people no matter how dyed in the wool a mechanic it may be rather than frot myself senseless within a fantasy world that condemns entire genres to death because of my own personal inability to understand the medium of games.

It’s a fair counterargument; I didn’t bother to analyze all the scenarios where the removal of life and death obstacles would change the nature of games as we know them, but that doesn’t mean it’s not worth considering in practice. The same could be said for Elrod’s argument. Being able to kill your supporting character, or run away from him during conversation, or cast magic to turn him into a woman would open new narrative avenues that are simply blocked off now because of the status quo. Unfortunately, Oddbob is working from within the existing framework, unable to see the forest from the trees.

A mere tinkering of the rules is never going to get video games to a point where player behavior has lasting consequences.

Theory, Player Choice | No Comments »

Hooray for Google Analytics, reminding me that 3 months without any posts begets no visitors. If you don’t know me, you probably don’t know I am moving to San Diego in a couple of weeks. I already quit my newspaper job and will be heading across the country after a brief respite.

So, the arts department at the paper never got to publishing that GTAIV article I mentioned earlier, because I never got to writing more articles to prove that I was a consistently capable writer. (I guess they saw the blog. Sigh.) So here we are:
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If I worked for a publication that exclusively covered video games, I’d probably be excited to review Grand Theft Auto IV. It’d be a chance to state an opinion that really matters, not just to gamers, but to all the concerned parents, casual players and culture junkies who might be reading.

So it’s not surprising that when reviews finally dropped for the latest installment in the series, which requires players to commit many felonies in the service of organized crime, out came the “games are art” argument and comparisons to Goodfellas and The Godfather. Perfect review scores abound on several gaming Web sites, and one critic for GameZone even called GTAIV “the masterpiece of this gaming generation.”

Look, I’m firmly in the “games aren’t second-class media” camp, but if you believe all the lavish praise, you’re missing half the equation.

Popping in the disc, I found the shimmer of the opening scene, the sweeping score, the dialogue, mesmerizing. When the plot advances, it seems GTA has matured, leaving behind the senseless violence and murder for which the series is known.

But when you’re left to wander the city on your own, it’s the old GTA. I needed to travel, so I stole a car. I’m not a great driver, so I hit a few lampposts — and people — along the way. Just to see what would happen, I shot a homeless person. The main character, Niko Bellic, who seems so likable in cutscenes, can also resemble the nameless, faceless, morally empty character that starred in Grand Theft Auto III.

I thought about criticizing Rockstar, the series’ developer, for giving us two completely different games in the same package before I realized it had to be this way. Without the version where you can blow up cars, shoot innocent people and jump off buildings, you could never sell the one where the characters talk about their feelings and develop relationships.

You wouldn’t have the media hype either. I know this, because my non-gamer friends know nothing of the games that really do have artistic merit. In a way, it works out; the mainstream media frets over the violence, sex and drugs and how your kids will probably do all those things because they played a video game, and the gaming press responds by pulling the “games as art” card.

If I were one of those critics, I’d probably do the same.

Xbox 360, Games as Art, Player Choice, Violence, Late to the Party | No Comments »

Moll and I were just watching a Fox 5 local newscast (don’t ask) that included a story on the release of Grand Theft Auto IV. Ultraviolent, not suitable for kids, yada yada yada — I’ll spare you the rant on television news’ treatment of video games. The industry might as well just accept bad press as the standard and work from there, like Big Tobacco.

But the cross-section of gamers that Fox found on the street today didn’t help. We in our little Internet gamer circle love talking about high-minded theoretical stuff, and it makes me feel better about the medium sometimes, but dude, the Man On The Street is killing us. Check the video, not from the newscast we saw, but they used the same interview reel. Here’s what Noah Eisenberg has to say:

“You can do everything you ever wanted to do in New York City. If you’re driving and you get pissed off, you can take care of them, so to speak, and it’s just what everyone has wanted to do in real life.”

Goddammit. I guess it was too much to expect a pithy quote on the merits of player choice and how it applies to your ability to kill hookers and take their money. Instead I have to look at this kid’s goony face while he paints us all as psychopaths with road rage. For the record, I’ve never felt the impulse to: a) steal a car, b) kill people, c) punch hookers. Why do I play GTA? I dunno, just to see what the fuss is about. Plus, I do like building empires in virtual worlds, albeit criminal ones. What do I really want to do in New York City? Live in a bigger apartment and pay less for rent. Let’s see a video game do that.

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That’s a perfectly good place to end my little outburst, but I do want to give a shout out to “big kid” Owen Long, as Fox calls him, who caps the story with what the reporter bills as a “philosophical approach to the game,” obviously taken out of context considering how little airtime he got.

“Just like real life, you either choose to do it or not. You don’t have to do it,” Long says.

Presumably, he was talking about player choice and hookers. Hookers. Just wanted to make sure I wrote “hookers” five times in this post, ’cause they’re controversial. Good night.

Media, Rants, Player Choice, Violence | 1 Comment »

Well done, Grand Text Auto, turning a blog post into a set of branching paths (isn’t that what blogs already are?).

Here, they’ve linked to three “choose your own adventure”-style cultural artifacts, none of them video games. There’s a play whose plot branches according to the actors’ whims, a 500-page book that plays like an adventure game complete with collectable inventory, and a CD (remember those?) whose liner notes encourage the listener to choose their own track order.

Roger Ebert, noted detractor of player choice as art, is really not going to like this. Funny thing is, video games usually require less choice and branching plots than any of the above, but that’s a whole other issue.

Meanwhile, I might purchase that book…

Games as Art, Player Choice | No Comments »