PEEG Critique: Lack of Substance Abuse

Got a new, hopefully weekly, feature for you here at PEEG. You've probably notice my experiment with a weekly feature in the form of my commentated news recap, and while that's great for stimulating my thinking and writing about things in brief quips I need to engage more deeply with something on a regular basis. To that end I'm going to put frequent blog reading to good use by highlighting and critiquing a notable blog entry or gaming related article each week.

This week's entry requires has some back story. Edge ran an interview last week titled Death of the Author in which three developers discussed the concept of emergent narrative and its potential to push developer scripted stories into the background in favor of stories authored by the players themselves. It's a concept that's been floating around a while and one I personally find exciting. However not everyone thinks the concept is so groundbreaking. Michael Sylvain accuses "emergent narrative" of being nothing more than an empty industry buzzword in his response to the interview titled Lack of Substance Abuse. Is this an important point? Does anyone really know what an "emergent narrative" is and, if so, is it even very important for the future of the gaming industry?

For most of digital gaming's history "story" was a brief framework under which the player is charged with a task. The only narrative needed in Space Invaders was that aliens were invading from space and you needed to stop them. Narrative was simply a backdrop - and an often unnecessary one - for gameplay. Can you really remember the narrative that drives most fighting game characters to do battle? Do you need to if you wish to play them well?

As storytelling in games has matured and technology expanded to allow more robust input from the player we've begun to find ways to give the player more control over the story beyond simple succeed or fail mechanics. This means developers have learned to be comfortable giving up some authorial control, but certainly not all. If a player can do whatever they what happens if they don't wish to engage in the grand sweeping story the developer has spent years putting together? What if Niko Bellic doesn't care about finding an old enemy, making money, helping his cousin, or exploring Liberty City? You can't give a player total freedom while maintaining any sense of a greater goal or focus. Perhaps you can provide multiple paths for a player to follow, but even so they are still finite and constrained by what the developer envisions - all outcomes are in some way scripted in advance.

Emergent narratives are the most recent proposed solution to this discrepancy between story and player choice. Such stories wouldn't be fully scripted in advance but somehow created as the game progresses based on choices players make or their successes and failures. But Sylvain doesn't think this concept holds water. In the first place there's too much hyperbole involved with the notion that an interactive story becomes a qualitatively new experience. The goal of all this emergent narrative talk seems to be to argue that the landscape of how stories are told is radically changed by interactive media, but this is just too much big talk with little to back it up.

I agree that in an attempt to legitimize gaming as a unique media we tend to scream positive accolades about our medium at every opportunity. Perhaps we shouldn't be quick to think "emergent narratives" or any other new idea will suddenly revolutionize the industry, making the broader culture stand up and take notice of what gaming is capable of. Heck, by the time we get to something like emergent narratives your average person who hasn't spent years learning how games work might not understand the process well enough to appreciate it anyway (like the analogy Chet Faliszek uses in the Death of the Author piece about audiences in the 50's wouldn't understand Memento).

But to give up and think the only thing interactive about games is the gameplay sells our medium short. We may not need to think in terms of creating grand-sweeping interactive narratives, but we need to expand the conversation around how the interactive elements of a game can push narrative in directions it hasn't gone before. It's not too grandiose of us to think there are narrative styles out there that cannot exist in a non-interactive medium, is it?

Sylvain's main claim is that there is a justifiable tension between the narrative of game - its story - and the freedom a player exerts by being an actor and having some control over the direction of the game. At its core the leap to talk about emergent narratives means we avoid a deeper exploration of the discrepancy between narrative and gameplay. I feel this is a very interesting and relevant point. Haven't we already created an interesting narrative in the ways we charge a player with completing a task while the larger story elements are beyond their control? What sort of fatalistic story are we already weaving in games as a result of gameplay and story frequently butting heads?

For example, Aerith dies in Final Fantasy VII regardless of how powerful a party you create. While this may seems like a cheap trick that removes any sense of autonomy from the player, it tells us something about the inevitability of death and its repercussions (especially when you lose all the gear Aerith was carrying!) . Why can't we use this tension to explore meaningful concepts like fatalism a bit more?

Imagine a game about time-travel where the outcome is always the same regardless of the actions a player takes. This would let the player explore the breadth of their autonomy while leaving the ending essentially the same - you can't change the outcome but boy is it fun to try! The static elements of a game's narrative point to things that are most consistent about our experience playing a game. Similarly it is the static elements of human experience regardless of time period or culture that point to something special about the human condition. Authorial intent can play a similar role, but only when we stop avoiding so-called ludonarrative dissonance and look for ways to embrace it.

It's unclear whether Sylvain thinks embracing this tension can co-exist with innovate attempts to circumvent it. His resistance is to the unspoken assumption that emergent narratives will completely supersede any attempts to understand how to work within the limits of the current paradigm. I think both approaches are valid, and in fairness to the industry it's probably a vocal and idealistic minority of idealistic bloggers and developers - of which I include myself - who are calling for a rethinking of how narrative and gameplay interact. I doubt traditional storylines will relinquish their role as meta-game elements anytime soon.