The Failure of First-Person Narrative

I've never been big on first person shooters. However the recent glut of writing about Modern Warfare 2 and its effective (or not so effective) "No Russian" level has got me thinking about many discussions of first person narratives lately. Far Cry 2, Red Faction: Guerrilla, and both Call of Duty 4 and World at War are all games that have garnered much critical discussion yet I've let them slip by me because of their genre.

These have sat in the bottom of my GameFly queue for a while so I was quite surprised yesterday when World at War showed up in my mailbox. I popped it in this morning with an open mind and was immediately impressed by its graphical polish. The interspersing of real footage with a dramatic stylized history lesson of America's involvement in World War II was made for the post-MTV generation. The tension of the opening scene - my character's capture and the graphic execution of a fellow Marine seconds before my rescue - pulled me into the game instantly. Unfortunately that excitement died alongside my fallen comrade the moment I picked up a gun.

Not being a veteran of first person shooters I felt more like a frightened James Sunderland who had never held a gun before than a hardened Marine. What button do I push to shoot? Should I crouch to avoid enemy fire? Who are these people yelling at me - My CO or a random AI grunt? How do I tell the difference between friendlies and hostiles when everyone looks nearly the same? While I realize the panic that grips a soldier during a firefight is a major reality of war, generally you have many months of order and training to fall back on that helps create order out of the chaos of the battlefield.

I had none of that training. Call me spoiled but I like having a tutorial available when I play a new game. World at War has none. Perhaps developers believe anyone who plays and FPS are "hardcore" and wouldn't need such a thing. Yet the game that renewed my interest in the genre, Battlefield 1943, did so largely because of the tutorial that held my hand as it explained the basics combat. Being thrown into a chaotic and dangerous situation where I have no idea how to protect myself creates the perfect atmosphere for a survival-horror game, but not so much for a simulation of war where your training and trust in your squad mates are essential to success.

Assuming the opening experience for veterans of the Call of Duty franchise would be markedly different and knowing I would eventually get the hang of things, I perservered. A few suspension-of-disbelief shattering moments aside (I'm talking about the CO who yelled at me for 5 minutes to kill one glitch-hiding hostile while the rest of my squad stood around doing nothing.) I reach the end of the second mission and a member of my squad is killed before me in a scripted surprise attack. Cut to the set up for the third mission and the aforementioned glitzy graphics lamenting the loss of my fallen comrade. Who was he? I have no idea. But apparently he was important enough to me in those two brief intro missions that I should be choked up about his death.

Two missions into the game and I have no real attachment to characters, or even, to myself. While it's still early in the game I think much of my distance from the game's narrative is that I still feel confused by what's going on around me. This is a problem that could easily be solved by adding a tutorial for nubs like myself and using that time to introduce me to my squad.

Anyone who has seen Full Metal Jacket knows that if you really want to get into the psychology of a soldier you need to start with Basic Training. A game doesn't necessarily need to go that far. A a simple sweep and clean mission punctuated by down time where the player can overhear their squad mates talking - humanizing them - and scripted, hand-holding attack sequences would do wonders for giving a player both the narrative drive to care about their team and the tools to do something meaningful to protect them.

First person shooters do a great job of immersing the player in a world of limited vision and ever-present danger. They don't necessarily need a tutorial to do this if the player perseveres enough to learn the ropes. I imagine this is why many players stick with the genre. The learning curve is small and the gameplay immersion instantly gratifying. But a good narrative, particularly if a game aspires to create an emotional experience for the player, requires more than just placing a player with a pre-existing skill set into the heart battle. They need a reason to care at the micro-level, not just the patriotic thrill of a brief stylized history lesson. In the case of World at War they developers choose to give the player a name but it is really just that. No backstory, nothing to connect him to his squad. Maybe more of that is revealed over the course of the campaign, but they haven't given me a reason to stick with the game so far through either story or gameplay.

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.

Team Silent and the Narrative Me

New column up on PSFanboy. This time the train rolls through Silent Hill (with a slight detour through Liberty City and the Capitol Wasteland) to determine if games with multiple endings can reward consistency in decision making and maybe even tell us a little bit about ourselves along the way. Unfortunately, for the sake of my publisher I decided to replace "handgun felatio" with "HK45 tonsillectomy". Feel free to make the switch back in your head. It's far more poetic that way.