Let Me Tell You A Story…
For me, the first ripple of the new wave in video game storytelling came in 2005, from an extremely unlikely source; Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory. Unlikely because, much like his so-thick-you-could-beat-a-mugger-to-death-with-them novel’s, Tom Clancy games traditionally have storylines that could generously be described as ’serviceable’.1 Indeed, Chaos Theory itself was, for the most part, pretty standard fare in the plot department. It did, however, manage to provide one perfect, shining moment of storytelling genius.
It’s the second-to-last level, and you confront Shetland, a man who has sold out his country and betrayed Sam Fisher (the player character in the Splinter Cell series, for those who somehow missed it2) personally. Shetland tries to convince Sam of his viewpoint, that a nuclear strike on the US is really the way to go, so they can “tear it all down and start again”. He steps back, raises his hands, and tells Sam to let him go, saying “you’d never shoot an old friend.”
And then you shoot him.
It doesn’t sound all that spectacular, does it? But what makes that moment great is that it’s not a cutscene, it actually you, the player, who raises that gun and pulls the trigger. It puts you right in Sam Fisher’s shoes. Rather than just showing you the character’s sense of betrayal, his anger at this man who’s calmly discussed killing hundreds of thousands of innocents and then dares to talk about friendship, it makes you experience it, and react as the character would. For that brief handful of moments, you are Sam Fisher, and you’re angry.
It’s a form of storytelling that only games can do. An average book or film will tell you about it’s character’s emotion’s and state of mind. A great book or film will show you. But a great game can make you experience those things for yourself, just as the character does.
It’s a trick that I suspect Chaos Theory pulled partly by accident, and it’s something that games are only now coming to use extensively. Bioshock, for example, cleverly uses the structure of an FPS games, where you’re given an objective and carry it out without thinking, simply because you were told to do it, to mirror the experience of the character, who it emerges is in exactly the same situation.
The Darkness did it nicely as well: there are an outstanding couple of minutes at the end of that game where you storm a Mafia mansion. Jackie, the character, has given it to The Darkness, a demonic symbiont that bonds with him at the start of the game3. He can no longer tell who’s in control of his actions, him or The Darkness. As you fight through the mansion, the game cuts between a number of brief scenes. Sometimes, you’re in control, sometimes the game, whilst still being in first person, is on autopilot. The genius part is, it’s hard to tell which is which. In the autopilot sections, the game is doing exactly what you, as an FPS player, want to do, namely waste the baddies. The same is true for the character: The Darkness is doing exactly what Jackie wants to do. For a short while, the game makes you directly experience a little bit of what Jackie is going through.
Perhaps it’s just me, but I find the potential of these techniques, once developers and scriptwriters really start to get their heads round them, to be truly exciting. They’re hard to pull off, of course. The traditional videogame development model sees the developers put together the actual game, with a lose story in mind, and then a freelance scriptwriter and the cinematic team come in to tie everything together with some snappy (or not so snappy) dialogue. But to create those moments when the game thrusts you not only into the character’s shoes, but into his mind, require a close collaboration between games developers and writers. You can’t just tack them on at the last minute.
Of course, it will probably also help when we start to get some big-budget, well written games about something other than large men wielding guns.
Meanwhile, Elsewhere in the City…
If you’ve made it this far through my ramblings, I salute your fortitude. For anyone who hasn’t had their fill of games storytelling theory, this series of blog posts by Professor Roger Travis of the University of Connecticut is thoroughly worthwhile reading, drawing parallels between recent video games and ancient epics. Give it a whirl; it’s entertaining and educational!
2Shame on you!
3It’s a video game, just go with it.
Lost in Space
I was almost resigned to the fact that there was no exciting news on the horizon, and prepared to give up waiting and write a pretentious, pseudo-intellectual article on the art of video game storytelling1, when this video surfaced:
Almost, almost, I wish that I hadn’t seen this video. For one thing, it means that I would have been spared the vicarious embarrassment of listening to the developer use the word ‘cinamaticion’2, especially given that he then has to pretend that giving us a dramatic angle for finishing moves is something that is in any way buzz-word worthy. Because we’ve never seen that before.
Then the coup-de-grace “This is what we like to call ‘Orchestrating Your Ballet of Death”. Do you? Do you really? Do you actually sit in your office and say “Hey Jim, hows work coming on Orchestrating your Ballet of Death?” or “Dude, you totally Orchestrated that Ballet of Death! You Orchestrated the shit out of it!”? I doubt it, and if you do, Mr Developer, I pity you.
But more than the teeth-grinding PR talk, it’s that fact that it’s introduced that traitorous sliver of hope into my life.
War hammer 40,000 holds a special place in my heart. I spent a good chunk of my youth pushing little lead soldiers around a table3, and the idea that someone could make a genuinely great 40K action game makes me go a little wobbly at the knees. Let’s face it, though, the odds are that this is going to suck. It’s going to be horrifyingly easy, too slow paced, and badly acted4. I know this. At best, it’s going to be Viking: Battle for Asgard5 with power armour and chainswords. I know this. But that was an Alpha build being shown in the video. Who knows how much it could change over the next, what, two years? Three? Two or three years that I’m going to have to spend hoping against hope that 40K Space Marine comes good, that it becomes the games I wish it could be, all leading up to inevitable, crushing disappointment when it is finally pushed out of THQ’s door and onto the game shop shelves.
Damn you THQ. Damn you and your cursed inability to frisk your presentation attendees for cameras.
Meanwhile, elsewhere in the city….
I came upon Zounds: Youth Rock Ministry video games review section whilst I was stumbling blindly through the internet the other day. Scroll down to the ‘Secular and Un-Christian Games’ section, it’s comedy gold.
I’m genuinely unsure as to whether or not the whole site is an elaborate spoof. That said, I’m erring towards ‘comic genius’ rather than ‘rabid drivel’, based on lines like “The player controls the Master Chef who in a surprise twist turns out to be more than just a military cook… he’s also a super soldier”(speaking about Halo, if you hadn’t guessed). Other classics include: “Snake is actually a symbolic agent of Satan, sent into the world to finish what he started in the Garden” (Metal Gear Solid 4). and “After one of the boys asked me if I wanted to play ’shirts and skins’, I quickly turned off the Playstation because I didn’t want to see what that was (Pastor Skeet later told me it’s homosexual slang)” (Bully).
In earnest or not, go take a look, have a chuckle: it is easily one of the ten funniest things on the internet.
1Fear not, pretension fans! That article will be coming to you next week.
2Is that how you spell it? Can you spell it? Perhaps the English language, in protest against that horrific abuse, has contorted itself in such a way as to make it impossible to actually put the word down on paper. Maybe spelling it correctly summons Satan.
3Yes, I am a geek. I write a gaming blog in my spare time. You thought I was captain of the football team?
4Oh, and FYI THQ; when the guy doing the demo has to fire his gun so that the muzzle flash gives you enough light to see the environmental detail IT’S TOO BLOODY DARK!
5Actually, I didn’t hate Viking. It was fun, in a shallow, short lived way. But I already own Viking, and it it certainly ‘aint the kind of game you want to own twice, even if the second copy is wearing a shiny new 40K skin.
