CHAPTER 14

Video Games

THE GREAT DEBATE

Video games are the granddaddy of all forms of interactive digital entertainment. Pong, the world’s first successful video game, debuted in 1972, almost two full decades before the World Wide Web was even born and long before other types of digital media were introduced. In the intervening years, video games have not only evolved enormously but have also had a profound influence on a great many other forms of interactive digital entertainment. In addition, as we saw in Chapters 11, 12, and 13, games are not just a significant form of entertainment, but they are also being used to teach, promote, and inform. Thus, it would be impossible to write a book about digital storytelling without a deep bow of acknowledgment to this pioneering form of entertainment. Unfortunately, however, to try to cover the vast field of video games in a single chapter and to do it justice is an impossible task. Thus, we will concentrate here on a handful of particularly important game-related topics and keep the focus as close as possible to discussions relating specifically to digital storytelling.

In doing so, the very first thing we need to address is the intense debate that games scholars are conducting about whether or not games can even be regarded as a form of storytelling. Two warring groups have squared off on this issue. On one side, we have the narratology camp. They say, yes, of course, games are a form of storytelling and they can be studied as narratives. (The term “narratology” simply means the theory and study of narrative). Janet Murray, the author of Hamlet on the Holodeck and a professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology, is a leading advocate of the narratology position. On the other side of the battlefield, we have the ludology camp. The term “ludology” comes from the Latin word ludus, for game. The ludologists argue that even though games have elements of narrative like characters and plot, this is incidental to the things that make them a distinct creative form, such as gameplay. Thus, they assert, games should be studied as unique constructs. This debate has an emotional undercurrent to it, because the ludologists suggest that the academics who espouse narratology are elitist and fail to recognize games as worthy of study on their own merits. Espen J. Aarseth, a professor at the University of Bergen, is the most vocal proponent of the ludologists camp.

Interestingly, Janet Murray herself, in a speech at the 2005 conference for the Digital Games Research Association (DiGra), threw up the white flag and asserted that both points of view were valid and nonexclusionary. It should also be noted that many games scholars take a middle position and advance a variety of ways to regard storytelling in games. Nevertheless, the great narratology– ludology debate refuses to go away. Clearly, if sides must be chosen, this book is most closely in allegiance with the narratologists.

CATEGORIES AND GENRES OF GAMES

Video games comprise an enormous universe made up of a diverse array of offerings. In order to get a clearer picture of this universe, it is useful to know the different ways video games are categorized.

Game Platforms

Even though members of the general public often lump together all types of games and refer to them generically as video games, gamers themselves and professionals in the field customarily divide them into several large categories, based on the type of platform (hardware and/or software system) they are designed to run on. The major types of platforms are

Each platform is best suited for a particular type of play experience, and the popularity of the various platforms has shifted over the years.

Arcade machines, designed for public spaces, used to be the only way games could be played. In the early days of the industry, they were found primarily in video game parlors teeming with adolescent boys. Today these once bustling parlors have largely vanished, though arcade machines can still be found in sports bars and in the lobbies of movie theatres.

Computer (PC) games and console games long had an informal rivalry, but currently, console games have a far greater share of the market, with PC games holding onto a shrinking piece of it. The latest consoles now have features that were once exclusive to PCs, such as excellent graphics and the ability to support online gameplay. Many gamers like the fact that they can sprawl on the living room couch and watch the action on the TV set or play on a portable device anywhere they happen to be, as opposed to sitting at a desk playing on a computer. Console games are particularly well suited for fast action. One of the newest consoles on the market, Nintendo’s Wii, comes with a controller much like a TV remote and responds to arm and hand motions, making it an exciting new way to engage in virtual sword fights and sports games, a feature that is enticing both to hard-core gamers and newbies.

Despite the many attractions of game consoles, however, some kinds of games play better on a PC than on a console, such as strategy games. As for mobile devices like cell phones, they are becoming an increasingly popular platform for games and are particularly well suited for short and easy-to-play entertainments.

Game Genres

Films, novels, and other forms of linear narratives are often divided into categories, called genres, and the same is true of games. Works within a specific genre follow the same conventions, almost like a formula. These commonalities include having similar settings, characters, values, subject matter, action, style, and tone. It is extremely useful to be knowledgeable about these genres because it gives us a handy kind of shorthand to refer to different games and to understand their prominent characteristics. Furthermore, an understanding of video game genres is useful for anyone interested in interactive entertainment. By studying the various genres, one gets a sense of the scope and variety of experiences possible within interactive media and begins to see how some of these elements can be ported over to other forms of interactive entertainment.

As important as it is to have an understanding of game genres, however, the process of assigning a particular game to a particular category can be fairly tricky. No two experts will agree to exactly the same definition of a genre, and no ruling body exists to regulate what game belongs where. To further complicate the situation, the dividing lines separating genres are sometimes blurry, with a particular game having characteristics of more than one genre. Nevertheless, here is a list of what most people would consider to be the most common genres of games:

As noted earlier, some genres are more popular on game consoles, while others are more popular on computers. To further underscore this, figures compiled in 2007 by the Entertainment Software Association (ESA) show that the five best-selling genres for game consoles were almost completely different than those for PCs. The favored genres for game consoles were action, sports, racing, shooters, and role-playing, while for PCs, the five top genres were strategy, role-playing, family, shooters, and a tie for children’s and adventure games.

THE RISE OF CASUAL GAMES

In recent years, casual games have been one of the fastest growing sectors of the games market. Such games can be easily learned (though they are often challenging to master) and can be played in brief periods of time—they are little forms of recreation like coffee breaks or recess at school. They are also highly replayable; some would say addicting. They are played online and on game consoles, PCs, cell phones, and other portable devices. The development of the Wii has helped increase their popularity. Casual games have their roots in the oldest types of video games, such as Pong and other arcade games, and include a wide variety of genres, such as abstract puzzle games, shooters, and racing games. Advergames, covered in Chapter 12, are another from of casual game. New kinds of casual games are also being developed to help older individuals retain cognitive functions, serving as a form of exercise for the brain.

Casual games are popular around the world and are enjoyed by young children, senior citizens, and everyone in between. Women are a substantial part of the player base, even outnumbering men, according to many studies. Not only do people find them fun, but players who are not hard-core gamers enjoy them because, unlike traditional video games, they are easy to play and can be satisfying without demanding a large investment of time.

Game developers have a different set of reasons for liking casual games: They are far less expensive to develop than a full-length video game, which can have budgets reaching $25 million, and the development cycle is also considerably shorter. Developing a traditional video game can be big gamble because, while some are big hits, many others are big losers. Casual games, however, with their lower budgets and speedier development cycles, are substantially less risky.

Because casual games are so popular with players, and also so advantageous to developers, we can expect to see this sector of the market continue to grow. However, because casual games can only support a small amount of narrative, at best, they do not appear to be a promising arena for digital storytelling.

WHO PLAYS GAMES AND WHY?

While many people are under the impression that the majority of gamers are teenage boys, the truth is that the average age of gamers has been rising steadily, and by 2007 it was up to 33, according to a survey of the ESA. The same survey found that 71.8% of video game players were over the age of 18. It is still true, however, that women and girls continue to be significantly underrepresented. They comprise 38% of all gamers, as opposed to the 62% of gamers who are male. Males have also been playing longer than females, an average of 14 years as opposed to 11 years.

While it is important to know who is playing games, an even more interesting question, especially to those of us who are interested in creating compelling interactive entertainment, is why people play games—what is it about games that is so appealing to those who play them?

For one thing, as we noted earlier in the book, games are experienced as fun. They satisfy a desire we all have to play, and that desire doesn’t go away even after we’ve left our childhoods far behind. Games offer us a socially acceptable form of play at any age and an enjoyable stimulus to the imagination. To maintain the sense of fun, a good game offers just the right amount of challenge—not too little, or it would be boring, and not too much, or it would be discouraging.

For another thing, they take you out of your ordinary life and give you a chance to do things you’d never be able to do in reality, and all without any actual risk to yourself. You are given plenty to do in these game worlds and can pretty much decide how you want to interact with it. In other words, you control the shots—often literally.

Veteran game producer and designer Darlene Waddington, who worked on the classic game Dragon’s Lair, offered up another reason people get hooked on games: the adrenaline rush. She believes players become caught up in the intense struggle to overcome a challenge, absorbed to the point of tunnel vision, and when they finally do succeed, they are rewarded with a gratifying sense of release. In other words, games can produce an emotion akin to catharsis.

ENHANCING THE PLEASURE OF PLAYING

A well-designed video game has certain characteristics that make it enjoyable to play and that facilitate the experience of playing. The characteristics relate directly or indirectly to the game’s narrative. Let’s take a look at three of these characteristics.

Gameplay

In the broadest of strokes, gameplay is two things: It is what make a game fun, and it is how a person plays the game—the way in which they control it and the way in which it responds. It is what gives a game its energy and makes it exciting. To understand gameplay, you must understand what a game is. Games involve the player in achieving an ultimate goal, but in order to do this, the player must first overcome a series of challenges. If successful, the game is won; if unsuccessful, it is lost. Games also provide a unique kind of instantaneous feedback to the players’ input and choices. If this feedback/response mechanism is satisfying, intuitive, and smooth, then the players’ experience of the gameplay will probably be a positive one. If the game’s response is imbalanced, jerky, slow, or confusing, then the gameplay will probably be perceived negatively.

Gameplay consists of the specific challenges that are presented to the player and the actions the player can take in order to overcome them. Victory and loss conditions are also part of the gameplay, as are the rules of the game. Story enters into this dynamic because it is what puts gameplay in context. The game’s overall goal is established through the story, as are the challenges the player encounters and the victory and loss conditions. Story provides motivation for the player to want to keep playing and makes the experience richer.

Game Structure

Structure is what connects the various parts of the game together. It gives the game shape and helps make the gameplay flow in a satisfying way. Furthermore, structure determines when and how the narrative elements of the game will be presented.

As we saw in Chapter 7, most video games are structured around a series of levels. Each level is like a chapter in a book, and like a chapter in a book, it needs to fulfill a meaningful role in the overall game. In fact, each level is like a miniature game, with its own goals and challenges.

Interface and Navigation

Interface is what connects the player and the game. It enables the player to receive important information and to take actions within the game. Furthermore, it gives the player a way to evaluate how well he or she is doing. Good interfaces can help make a game fun, and poor interfaces can make it frustrating and disappointing.

There are three major forms of interface: manual (hardware such as controllers and keyboards); visual (icons, maps, meters); and auditory (verbal feedback, cues from the environment, music). Interface provides important information about geography, player status, inventory, and whether the player is succeeding or failing. Interface also gives the player the ability to do such things as run, jump, shoot, and use weapons or tools. In addition, a game must have navigational mechanisms so that the player has the ability to move his or her avatars, vehicles, or objects from one point to another in the virtual world.

Serving the Greater Good

Gameplay, structure, interface, and navigation all serve the same overall purpose: to help make a game satisfying to play and to help it make sense. Without any one of these fundamental elements, there simply would be no game.

THE WRITERS’ PERSPECTIVE

The task of integrating the storyline and character development into the gameplay is a writer’s job, or at least it is being increasingly perceived that way. At one time, however, programmers and game designers often filled this role. Even today, many writers are only asked to write dialogue, thus bypassing their abilities to make significant contributions to the projects they work on. Still, as games have become more sophisticated, developers are increasingly turning to professional writers to produce game scripts.

As we saw in Chapter 5, many of these writers are drawn from the ranks of Hollywood scriptwriters, as Anne Collins-Ludwick was, and some adjust quite well, as she did. Others, however, struggle with the complexities of this new arena and quickly bow out. One veteran Hollywood writer who successfully made the transition is Randall Jahnson, who wrote the films Mask of Zorro and The Doors and then crossed over to games in 2005, when he wrote the Western themed adventure game, Gun, for Activision.

“The process of writing for the two mediums is like apples and oranges,” Jahnson told The Hollywood Reporter (November 23, 2005). “Both games and movies strive to tell a narrative story and both mediums are slaves to technology, time, and budget, but after that, things are completely different.” He compared writing for games to writing haiku because the plot points and dialogue had to be far more compressed than in a screenplay, where you don’t have a player itching to jump into the gameplay. On the other hand, he found that games gave him the opportunity to explore subplots and tangents of the story that there would be no time to develop in a screenplay.

The other differences the writers cite most frequently are dealing with nonlinearity and the far longer dialogue scripts (which can be 10 times longer than a screenplay). Marc Laidlaw, who wrote the well-received script for Half-Life 2, a sci-fi first-person shooter, noted to The Hollywood Reporter (January 20, 2006) that even when there isn’t a great deal of narrative in a game, there has to be enough of a dramatic story to move the play along.

Laidlaw also pointed out that a writer’s role on a video game involves a great deal of collaboration with others on the team to ensure that there is an internal logic to the game and that the player is given agency that makes sense in the context of the game. He explained: “I am continually getting input in order to create a big suspension field to hold the gameplay together so that the gamers aren’t doing arbitrary tasks, so that they are doing things that seem meaningful.”

THE CINEMATIC QUALITY OF TODAY’S GAMES

In recent years, a great deal of press has been devoted to discussions of how games are becoming increasingly cinematic—in other words, like movies. These articles cite the fact that games are now utilizing high-quality visual effects, sophisticated sound effects, and original scores. They are also hiring top Hollywood stars to read the voice-over lines of the characters, and the dialogue these actors are reading is becoming more polished and more extensive. Today’s plots are, for the most part, far more compelling than the plots of earlier games and often sound quite movie-like. One often used example of a movie-like plot is the storyline of Tomb Raider: Angel of Darkness. In the game, Lara Croft is accused of the murder of her one-time mentor, Von Croy, and becomes a fugitive on the run. With the police in hot pursuit of her, she tries to find out who murdered Von Croy and why. (See Figure 14.2.)

Figure 14.2 Lara Croft becomes enmeshed in a dark, movie-like plot in Tomb Raider: The Angel of Darkness.

Image courtesy of Eidos Interactive.

While it is true, however, that today’s games look and sound more like movies, and they often have far stronger storylines than in the past, many people within the gaming community are uncomfortable with calling games “cinematic.” They stress, as Randall Jahnson did, that the two forms of entertainment are “apples and oranges.” They point to the fact that despite the rush to adapt games as movies and vice versa, many movie–game adaptations are unsuccessful, underscoring that these forms are not as similar as they appear to be on the surface. They are also troubled by the lavish use of cut scenes, a very cinematic-like aspect of games but one that can stop gameplay cold.

In an article for Wired magazine (April 2006), game designer Jordan Mechner, who wrote and directed the original Prince of Persia game and has worked on many other games as well, noted that newer media often model themselves on older media until they develop as a unique art form. For example, he said, the first movies were filmed like stage plays, with the camera remaining in a static position. Mechner went on to say: “As we gamemakers discover new ways to take storytelling out of cut scenes and bring it into gameplay, we’re taking the first steps toward a true video game storytelling language—just as our filmmaking forebearers did the first time they cut to a close-up. One day soon, calling a game ‘cinematic’ will be a backhanded compliment, like calling a movie ‘stagy.’“

WHAT CAN WE LEARN FROM GAMES?

Possibly more than any other form of entertainment, video games are powerfully effective at actively involving users in a fictional experience. Designer Greg Roach, introduced in Chapter 4, puts it this way: “Novels tell; movies show; games do.” In other words, games are all about doing, about action—things that you, the player, do. Games are performance experiences. But this focus on action has a downside, as well. Game designer Darlene Waddington notes that “games tend to be all about the ‘hows’ and not about the ‘whys.‘” She feels, for instance, that they are good at getting the player into a combat situation but are less good at probing the psychological or human reasons for getting into combat in the first place.

Waddington’s point about the focus being on action while giving scant attention to motivation is a criticism often leveled at games. While games are now offering more fully developed characters and storylines, they generally lack the depth of older forms of entertainment. With few exceptions, they do not look deeply into the human psyche or deal with a full spectrum of emotions. How often, for example, do we encounter or play characters who are motivated by shame, love, compassion, guilt, grief, or the dozens of other emotions we humans feel? Yet such emotions are the underpinnings of dramas we regularly see in the movies or on TV or the stories we read in novels.

Many game developers assert that the nature of nonlinearity makes it too difficult to portray complex emotions or subject matter in games, though others feel that the medium itself is not to blame and that it is indeed possible to build games with deeper psychological shadings or more complex subject matter. The problem, they assert, is that game publishers and their sales and marketing departments are simply uninterested in exploring new territory, preferring to stick with the tried and true. In truth, many of the limitations we place on games may be self-imposed, and we can be almost certain that we have not yet fully explored what games are capable of.

Nevertheless, video games have already proven to be a compelling form of entertainment, and many of the characteristics of games can be applied to other forms of digital storytelling. For example

These guidelines can be applied to virtually any type of interactive story experience just by removing the word “game” and substituting the appropriate interactive medium. Although some interactive entertainments will lean more heavily to the gaming end of the spectrum and others toward the narrative end, the basic principles will still apply.

CONCLUSION

The field of video games, our oldest form of interactive entertainment, is enormously robust and successful, and it has a great deal to teach us about digital storytelling. Yet one has to wonder if games are reaching their full potential as an entertainment medium and what they might be like if market forces and the culture of the game industry did not discourage the development of new kinds of games.

At the 2003 E3 conference, Douglas Lowenstein, then president of the ESA, warned against the dangers of complacency and laziness. Emphasizing the value of innovation, he noted that “games with original content have done the best over the past three decades.” He urged the games community to remember that “innovation is the way to push forward progress.”

Certainly, games have made a light year’s worth of progress since the first games were introduced back in the 1970s. One need only compare Pong to Final Fantasy XII or the Grand Theft Auto series to see how far they have come. What kinds of games might we be playing a few decades from now? And what role will games play in the overall universe of interactive entertainment and entertainment in general? If only we could consult one of the wizards who populate so many role-playing games and learn the answers to these questions!

IDEA-GENERATING EXERCISES