Raph Koster: "Narrative Is Not A Game Mechanic"
Former Ultima Online lead designer Raph Koster has been publishing a number of interesting articles lately (I didn’t link to his post about making games more cheaply, but it was a good read that I would recommend to all of you), and his latest article about narrative is no exception to that trend.
In it, he makes the assertion that narrative isn’t a game mechanic, but rather a form of feedback to the player. Though it sounds controversial, he’s actually correct in saying as much.
Let’s start thinking about this by looking at what a game is. Games can and do exist without narrative. The core of a game is a problem to solve. As game grammar tells us, it’s actually typically a series of nested problems: I need to reach this location, which means I need to defeat enemies, which means I need to traverse space, which means I need to mash a button. Some of these, like “defeat enemies,” are complex problems in their own right. Some of them are trivial problems, such as “mash button.”
If you string these together, you’ll typically find that the problems will alternate between abstract problems and simpler interface problems. For example, most turn-based board games alternate between the complex strategy problem of “what move to make next” and the simple interface problem of “pick up piece and move it here.” Board games, of course, tend to be very forgiving regarding interface problems; if you drop the piece, nobody minds if you pick it up and put it where you meant.
…but the feedback for even a trivial action is very important. It matters that we hear the sound when we click the mouse. And should the designer choose, they can make the feedback be hugely disportionate to the problem solved. Feedback serves the purpose of cuing the user whether or not they are being successful in figuring out the black box. So we provide feedback each time an input is made, and the feedback is intended to help guide the user as to whether they are doing the right thing.
It is easy to see that if you remove any one of these things, you end up without a functioning game.
- Cut the input, and you have a screensaver.
- Cut the problem inside the black box, and you have a slideshow.
- Cut the feedback, and you have something ridiculously confusing that no one will tolerate.
If we haul out the example of my current mobile gaming addiction, Jetpack Joyride, we can easily see Koster’s point illustrated.
This is a game with no narrative to speak of. Your protagonist, Barry Steakfries, just bursts through a wall, grabs a jetpack, and starts flying down the endless corridors of a top-secret research facility until he gets shot down by a missile or zapped by a security laser or force field. You tap the screen to fire the jetpack (moving Barry upward); you let go to stop firing the jetpack (moving Barry toward the ground). Barry keeps moving forward, either flying or running, at a pretty constant pace…until something kills him. He always dies, and the only uncertainty in the game is how far he’ll get before that happens.
Why is Barry stealing the jetpack? Who is he? What is this facility he’s in? Who built the jetpack, and why? None of this matters in the least, and I don’t know of Halfbrick (the game’s developers) even bothered to explain any of these details. Barry has the jetpack; he uses it. That’s the game…and it is addictive like catnip. But then, the game doesn’t need narrative as its feedback mechanic, because it offers other rewards…not the least of which is the hilarity of Barry’s every scorching or exploding demise.
Now, in an Ultima game, things change a bit. Indeed, in an RPG in general, things change a little bit. Narrative isn’t needed in Jetpack Joyride, but it is vital in an Ultima game, and for players like me at least it’s equally vital in games like The Old Republic. We expect games like this to tell us a story. The story advances through various means…but the actual mechanics of its advancement are the things the player and NPCs do, rather than what they say in conversation. There might be some gray area when it comes to things like quest-giving conversations…but even so, the quest doesn’t progress simply because the words describing it were said. The quest advances when the player actually runs off to fight the Foozle or pick up the MacGuffin.
Anyhow…sound off, Dragons and Dragonettes. For my money, Koster is right on the money. What say you all?
Of course he’s correct. I would add that, by modern RPG standards, the Ultima games were not particularly narrative-driven (though the later ones had increasingly larger amounts of background lore, which isn’t the same thing). And IMO, they were better off for it.
Serpent Isle was the closest Ultima ever got to a modern-style narrative-driven RPG plot.
I’d argue narrative CAN be a game mechanic. I mean when you take say a game like Fallout, where dialogue choice have their importance and shape the plot, when specific choices are tied to other gameplay elements and so on – at this point narrative IS a game mechanic as much as combat or anything else. This is true about most RPGs to some extent I think.
I think Ultima got narrative driven with Ultima VII. U7 still its full sandbox aspect but the main plotline mostly followed a linear pattern (and indeed if you strayed away from it, you could break the plot or even the game gah), though this went farther with Serpent Isle.
I think U8 and U9 (debates about plot and dialogue quality aside) are also very close to modern style narrative. U8 tends to get lost in dungeon crawling, but Ultima IX very narrative-driven.
I think one of the obvious difference there when you compare the Ultima games, is the “required” areas to explore.
What I mean is in pre-SI Ultima, you’d have some specific steps to do to finish the game, but quite a lot of area you didn’t necesarilly HAD to go to finish the game. With Serpent Isle though, the plot basically make you go and explore everything in the game, thus leaving little on the side. This is somewhat less true about U8&U9 but they still makes you go everywhere.
U7 had some narrative drivenness but it was very understated. Basically you got dumped in a city, and told to start investigating. The Avatar didn’t actually do much in the world besides investigating.
Compare that to SI where he attends banquests and ceremonies, performs rituals, gets imprisoned, and chases down a villain who is doing nasty things during the actual time of the game rather than as plot background that has already occurred.
I’d argue narrative CAN be a game mechanic. I mean when you take say a game like Fallout, where dialogue choice have their importance and shape the plot, when specific choices are tied to other gameplay elements and so on – at this point narrative IS a game mechanic as much as combat or anything else.
I agree with this, with PS:T as the ultimate example.
It is very hard to make this kind of game convincingly in a way where it really feels like a granular game mechanic and not a mere choose-your-own-adventure branching plot.
Oh of course, things went much farther with Serpent Isle than they did with Ultima VII, but things did begin to get more narrative driven with Ultima VII compared to previouses episodes.
Now I think this was also tied to the fact that U7 was Garriott’s baby (which always was more abotu the virtual world thing) and SI more Spector’s (which always was more about plot and stuff) but there is still some sort of logical evolution in term of narrative with each game
(Altough to be fair if you add non-core Ultima game, Martian Dreams was very narrative driven as well for its time, and prefigured Serpent Isle in many ways).
No love for Warriors of Destiny, then? What of earlier Ultimas and “story”? My story in earlier Ultimas was of lying in green pastures and lilting through stout wood with darkened shade. Finding huts, tunnels, skeletons, villages, and quiet campfires with my compadres drinking ale and playing the lute. Eight-bit narratives of my own imagination! I didn’t need a plot, though I always appreciated the option.
All the Ultima games had a plot, but it wasn’t always intrusive to gameplay. Plot is fine as long as it doesn’t disable one or more of the two analog sticks and ask for some unusual input such as agreeing to a ToS or what the latitude and longitude of Jhelom are. The plot shouldn’t be brow beaten into you other than maybe the intro sequence.
Thus far my understanding of video games is these games are either interactive puzzles with story elements or interactive stories with puzzle elements. The former seems to require that the player achieves some feeling of accomplishment for each puzzle provided while the latter requires the player to achieve the accomplishment of reaching the end of the story. Are they mutually exclusive or am I just splitting hairs?
To me, it seems that Koster is explaining the workings of the interactive puzzle game as well as the cost effectiveness of such a game, perhaps even suggesting a return of focus to such games for developers. Personally, that has never been my motivation for playing video games. I have always played them from the perspective of playing interactive stories as opposed to puzzle games ( eg. Ultima V- VII (SI) vs. the Ultima Underworlds), that is to say, to enjoy a story unfolding rather than feeling good about completing a series of puzzles/ levels. Even with dumbed-down games like the Diablo series, what made those games cool were the cutscenes, not the mechanics. Getting to the next cutscene was more satisfying, in my opinion, than killing the boss monster, because the cutscene was the reward.
This also brings up the question of what is more replayable, interactive puzzle or interactive story. For the former it seems that the best way to achieve this is through offering different player models ( stat changes through class options or through skill options ). The latter could probably use the same elements, but I think the replayability of the interactive story would be more powered through the player’s sense of nostalgia or party choice ( eg. Ultima IV class choices vs. Ultima VII’s class of Avatar).
I suspect that a big reason why there’s kind of a trend amongst the “hipster game designer” set these days towards a return to gameplay-centric games, is that making narrative-centric games has become incredibly expensive.
They’re tired of being forced to saddle their games with multi-million dollar epic cinematic scenes with motion capture and voice acting. The corporate backing required to fund it has a stifling effect on the entire industry’s creativity.
It’s a more pragmatic reason to support gameplay-centrism, but a no less valid one.
So it’s back to Pong then?
Of course not, that’s a strawman. There’s a middle ground between Pong and the “everything results in some sort of scripted cutscene” mentality.
I think the distinction is more readily apparent in the mobile space than on PC or consoles. I mean, on my iPhone, I have everything from the eye-meltingly good-looking Infinity Blade and Dungeon Defenders to the simplistic but addictive Where’s My Water? and the aforementioned Jetpack Joyride. Middle-ground games like Galaxy on Fire 2, Aralon, Sword and Sorcery, and Spy Mouse round out the collection, running the gamut from utterly simplistic to complex, from single-control gameplay to scripted cutscenes and open-world exploration.
I grew up on gameplay and story, which initially were often mutually-exclusive elements. Developers have combined them for better or worse over the decades. One thing I’ve learned is that gameplay and story can be one and the same if executed properly.
A cutscene could be a cleverly-edited series of recordings of your own actions (like a replay in Gran Turismo), including conversation, crafting, killing or whatever you were doing in-game at the time. Music, clip amplitudes and timings, length and “purpose” could be calculated dynamically based on factors like “last time a cutscene was played” and “sudden change of important values”.
A cutscene could spawn from an event that happens regularly, like day changing to night (Castlevania II, NES), interesting astrological events (meteor shower or cosmic alignment like an eclipse) or the changing of the seasons and how people then shift food resources. You could fill an entire game with cutscenes of gameplay-centered recordings with flashier camera angles. Many short ones could be made in advance to show particular failings or rewards to add a sense of Hollywood flair.
For smaller developers, the game they’re making has the story embedded, in an emotional and mechanical sense, because they can’t keep track of so many interdependent branches, loopbacks and iterations of a two-tier gameplay/cutscene hybrid. That would be like making two games in one with the main values of each staying synchronized.
The compromise is players wondering why the same thing happens no matter who they talk to or kill. There may be infinite combinations of a player’s input, but there are limited cutscenes and plot descriptors if they’re developed separately. The gameplay must -be- the cutscene, or it’s always a compromise. If you write a unique sentence, such as “You move north” for every combination of player action you will be writing sentences forever.
@WtF: Yes, the explosion of cheap and nearly universal platforms for gaming has brought us a wide variety of games. Wake me up when they are all universally accessible because they run on a common platform. Web, emulator or virtualized, they should all run with no trouble. Biggest mistake I think is platform exclusivity and software library lock-in and/or extortion (OpenGL/DirectX/RandomPlatformSDK).
Sanctimonia:
That likely won’t happen until either a standardized mobile OS is decided upon (an unlikely and, frankly, unwelcome thought). The best we can hope for is for more developers to adopt the use of engines, like Unity, which offer cross-platform publishing capabilities right out of the box.
The commenter ‘Richard Bartle’ on that thread provides a good defense of the narratological viewpoint:
Narrative is part of the skin of a game. It can become such a rigid skin that it affects the underlying mechanics (ie. you fashion the mechanics so the narrative makes sense) or it can be thin and flimsy (ie. to provide fictional cover for some awkward mechanic). Most times, it’s in between. That’s narrative’s relationship to gameplay.
However, it also has a relationship with why people play the game, which may not be for the gameplay but from something that emerges from the gameplay. Narrative in support of immersion would be an example of this. Narrative as an artistic/political comment on the real world would be another.
Personally, I believe that story is not a game mechanic but is what game mechanics are there to serve, however I don’t mean “story” in the sense of an explicit narrative. When you play a game, you are faced with a series of events at multiple levels (as per Ren’s comment). Some of these are meaningful to you and some are not (but may be meaningful to other people). They may be meaningful to you for different reasons – visceral thrill, nuanced dialogue, post problem-solving elation – there are many reasons. However, you will identify some as important to you. From these, you will construct your own, personal narrative of your play experience. If someone asks you how a game went, you’ll tell them your story of your playing of that game. This is the only story that’s important, and it’s different for every player.
In this sense, games are machines for generating interesting events, the retelling of which by a player constitutes that player’s narrative.
The argument for constructing an explicit, pre-ordained narrative (which is the way the term is being used in this thread) is that most people aren’t as good at constructing stories as are expert story-tellers, therefore you should get an expert story-teller to direct the player’s narrative. The events that the player picks up to construct their own story are placed there deliberately so as to make the story “better” than what the player would have picked up in a story-free, sandbox world. The counter-argument is that stories aren’t one-size-fits-all, so better for some is worse for others.
Either way, narrative isn’t a game mechanic, but game mechanics aren’t all there is to games. Both are reasons to play a game. Both are there so that each player can tell you a different answer when you ask them, after a game session, “how did that go?”.
Richard
@WtF: True all around. What I’m looking for is analogous to the idea of “web based” games, which to me simply means that a game runs under an application which is readily and easily available across all dominant platforms. Whether it’s a web browser or an engine such as Unity is irrelevant if it performs well and is available on most platforms (phones, consoles, Windows/Mac/Linux, whatever).
People talk so much shit about Android being fragmented, but the real fragmentation is in the gaming industry’s distribution models. I don’t have the time or money to buy every system every produced by Atari, NEC, Sega, Sony, Nintendo, Microsoft, etc. and triple-boot a PC with the three dominant OS’s. It would take a small team of nerds to maintain that collection and fund the purchase of future iterations of each. I’m dirt poor, and even if I were a billionaire it would still be a pain in the ass.
@Infinitron: That was a hell of a thoughtful post. While many pan Bartle’s conclusions I think there is a lot that can be taken from his observations. I haven’t read this thoughts on narrative but they sound interesting.
Something I’d like to point out about the nature of sandbox games, in reference to your quote:
“The argument for constructing an explicit, pre-ordained narrative (which is the way the term is being used in this thread) is that most people aren’t as good at constructing stories as are expert story-tellers, therefore you should get an expert story-teller to direct the player’s narrative. The events that the player picks up to construct their own story are placed there deliberately so as to make the story “better” than what the player would have picked up in a story-free, sandbox world. The counter-argument is that stories aren’t one-size-fits-all, so better for some is worse for others.”
is that sandboxing hasn’t been taken anywhere near its fullest potential with regard to storytelling. The real world is a sandbox, so why do so many interesting stories evolve from it? It’s not because of poets and film directors but the interplay of human needs, desires and ambitions. The phrase, “You just can’t make this stuff up” applies to the stories of typical human interaction. For me the ultimate goal of sandboxing is enabling these things to occur naturally through gameplay.
The problem I think is when this idea is applied to a single-player game, as there have been no players previously to create the stories. In that context the stories must either be created by AI or the usual way where some writer makes things up and tries to integrate it with the gameplay.