Minor Narrative Interaction

As promised in my last post, here are a few games I recommend to see good use of Minor Narrative Interaction.  Some are obvious, and some less so.  These games make good use of interactivity without making the entire story hinge on the interactive elements and the player's input, and they do a very good job of increasing emotional impact and character empathy through these techniques (though for the sake of spoilers, I won't describe exactly how).  There are more that belong on this list, of course, but these are some particularly good examples.  If you feel there is another game that should have been included, feel free to say why in the comments!

Bioshock
If you're interested in games as a narrative art enough to be reading this blog in the first place, you probably know what I'm talking about.  Bioshock has not only a fantastic twist in the story, but it presents said twist in a unique way that not only emotionally involves the player through excellent use of minor narrative interaction, but hammers the point home like a railway spike straight to your intellect.  A truly brilliant moment in a truly brilliant game that must be experienced.

Beyond Good and Evil
The final boss fight of this game is one of the best examples I've seen of symbolism in actual gameplay.  The controls during the final battle very accurately reflect the struggles of the protagonist and her state of mind at the time in a rather brilliant way.  It's rare to see a game play with the controls to give meaning to even the game's basic control scheme.

Final Fantasy X
I mentioned this in the actual article.  Final Fantasy has a bit of a reputation among some for not involving interactivity at all, for just being long stretches of gameplay punctuated by cutscenes.  For one, that's not true.  Secondly, there's no reason those stretches of gameplay can't be great examples of minor narrative interaction.  This game takes a normal gameplay sequence and, through emotional music and the weight of responsibility on the player, makes the entire process a battle within you between the desire to leave and the need, from both the game and the story, to continue on.

Shadow of the Colossus
The death of a colossus in this game is not a triumphant or exciting experience.  The battle is epic and exhilarating  but once you have killed them, the magnificent beast falls to the ground, life pouring from it, as tragically beautiful music plays.  It's a beautiful moment that evokes more sorrow than triumph.  Seems kind of weird, seeing as killing these colossi are the key to reviving your dead loved one.  But it will all make sense in the emotional ending, in which your efforts certainly make the scene more impacting than yelling at an onscreen character ever could.

Final Fantasy I: An Exercise in Character/Player Connection

I've written before about the idea that, in order for a game to tell its story well, it must do so in the most interactive way possible.  I don't agree with that.  If you want to know why, feel free to read the article.  Essentially, outside of the extreme danger of the idea that a medium must take advantage of its uniqueness in order to be good, there is an inherent connection between the player and their characters in a game that takes place regardless of any special interactive tricks or even story.  And the best example I've seen so far is the first Final Fantasy.

Yes, this Final Fantasy.

Yes, the one that started it all.  I doubt all that many of you have played it, since most of the franchise's attention these days seems to come from how great/overrated VII was or how amazing/boring XIII was (seriously, each game is so polarizing), but it really is an interesting game.  For one, as a big fan of the franchise, it's interesting to see the relatively simple roots of the series; the gameplay is basic, the story is about as simple as it could be while still moving forward regularly, and the four main characters don't have a single line of dialogue.  Yes, not a single line.

The reason for this is because the game lets you choose which classes you have and what they are all named.  You could have a party made of four black mages if you wanted, and name them Harry Potter, Gandalf, Luke Skywalker, and Twilight Sparkle to live out your magic crossover fanfiction fantasies.  That would be stupid and you would die a lot, but you could do it.  Point is, by allowing the player to choose the characters like this, Square gave up the ability to ascribe particular personalities to them, and as a result the characters themselves are simply a vessel for the player's interaction with the game world rather than the fully-realized and complex characters of later Final Fantasy games.

But you know what interested me most about Final Fantasy?  I loved the characters anyway. Those four warriors of light endeared themselves to me in a way that no other game has; perhaps not as intensely as the more fleshed-out characters of other games, but still in a way that none of those characters have.

Especially this one. Freaking Cait Sith.

I didn't care about their personal struggles, because they didn't have any.  I didn't relate to any of them, because there was nothing to relate to.  And to be honest, the story and world were far too cliche at this point for me to really care about them.  I know this game is responsible for most of those cliches, but the elves live in the city of Elfheim?  Really?  The overall narrative and world of the game was the only thing it had going for it outside of the basic gameplay, and thankfully it kept moving at a good pace and was interesting enough to be engaging, but it was still very simple and was obviously little more than a base on which RPGs have been building for decades since.  Really, the story, world, and characters did very little for me in terms of connecting me to a developed and interesting narrative.

And yet I cared about the characters.  Why?  Simply because they were mine.  These were four warriors that I had chosen and named, that I had essentially created.  I chose their identities, and I led them into battle.  My characters succeeded based on my direction and skill, and they failed when I did.  They grew and leveled up, becoming more and more powerful because I led them to.  When they were upgraded to their more powerful forms by Bahamut, my heart lept, and whenever they were killed in battle, it sank.  In other games I cared when the story put the characters in peril, but in this one I cared about my own actions and its effects on my characters in the context of basic gameplay.  It is far from my favorite Final Fantasy game, but to this day it is still the only one in which I level-ground all my characters up to level 99, because I simply cared to see them succeed.

And this guy?  Hardcore
in the higher levels.

So... where did that come from?  How could I care more about these blank slates on a battle-to-battle basis than the characters that captured my imagination in VII, tugged at my heartstrings in X, and enraptured me in VI?  In the absence of actual characters, the bond between me and those four warriors was solidified by my interaction with them.

You can get quite attached to your
family in Fable II, and this man sure
punches you in the gut for it.

This is one of the base unique things about video games; there is an inherent connection between player and protagonist.  It is the only medium in which one can use the word "I" to refer to the main character of a story.  I remember when I was playing Red Dead Redemption, my girlfriend had not yet played many games (which has been fixed since then, to wondrous results), and she got confused because I said something about how my family was in danger until I did what was required of me.  Now after playing Fable II, she understands; the main character of a video game is your character.  Their identity is defined as much by yours as it is by theirs.  And in the case of a game like the first Final Fantasy, the lack of proper character development just increases the extent to which this is true since almost the only defining element of their identity is yours.  The same concept has been used to large extents with the idea of the Silent Protagonist, but more on that later.

The thing to take from this is that, if games like the first Final Fantasy have anything to say about the storytelling power of video games, it's that interactivity doesn't have to be utilized in full to be effective.  The very existence of interactivity in the context of a story connects the player to the characters in a way non-interactive mediums never could.  As much as it is necessary and encouraged for this medium to find new and exciting ways to use this incredible storytelling tool, we must keep in mind that the very presence of it is enough to tell stories in ways we've never even dreamed.

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The Role of Non-Interactive Storytelling in Interactive Media

Cutscenes have recently become, in the minds of many, the "failure-state" of video game storytelling. People complain that a cutscene interrupts the gameplay experience or takes away an opportunity for varied and interesting gameplay moments. It has gone so far that many have claimed that a game fails in its very artistic value as a game if the focus is anywhere else but the interactivity; if it is taken away or belittled for the sake of the story, the game has failed as an interactive artwork.

It’s true that the most memorable moments in gaming are those where interactivity is used or toyed with in the context of a powerful story moment. The epilogue of Halo: Reach, the famous plot twist in Bioshock, the moments leading up to the infamous death scene in Final Fantasy VII… Many interactive artworks have used interactivity to create impacting moments that truly could not exist in any other medium. And that is awesome.

The final mission of Halo: Reach is the pinnacle of
the series' storytelling.  

However, this idea that non-interactive story movement in an interactive medium is inherently bad storytelling has a problem. A huge problem that most people don’t notice unless, again, they take it to its full logical conclusion. Let’s see where it leads.

So the idea here is that the only good way to tell a story in video games is to use interactivity in everything, that everything must be interactive in some way, because interactivity is the storytelling property entirely unique to video games. Applied to art theory as a whole, this is saying that any given artwork must take full advantage of its medium’s unique properties in order to be good.  Any artwork that breaks from its unique properties is not a good artwork.

To illustrate, let’s apply this specifically to animation, as kind of a sub-medium of film. To clarify, animation is not a genre, but a subset of film itself, capable of telling far too many types of stories to be considered a simple genre. Feel free to comment (and good luck) if you want to make the argument that Cowboy Bebop and Disney's Cinderella both belong in the same genre.

Animation is, within the larger medium of film, uniquely capable of wildly over-the-top imagery and very silly slapstick comedy. It is easier for someone to take violence humorously when it is animated because much of the reality is lost, especially if the animation style is exceptionally quirky. It is visually capable of more silly or just plain weird images than live-action.

What would make for a bad animated feature, then? Well for one, animation that tries to look like reality is out; trying to look real abandons the lack of reality animation can deliver, eliminating the entire uniqueness of animation.  For that matter, if the work is expected to take full advantage of its unique properties, the animation had better take full advantage of that fact.  Any frame where characters are standing and talking is wasted, any scene without constant motion and exaggerated movement is doing it wrong.  In simpler terms, Spongebob Squarepants and Ren and Stimpy are objectively better works of art than Death Note, Avatar: The Last Airbender, or The Lion King.

The pinnacle of
animation, everyone.

Let's apply this logic to video games, since that is the whole point of this blog after all.  The unique property of video games as a medium is interactivity.  Thus, applied to this art theory, a good video game is one that uses interactivity in all its facets and never breaks from delivering an interactive experience.  It delivers a constantly interactive and intense experience, and achieves immersion by keeping the player constantly in control, constantly challenged and involved.  Perhaps aesthetics, graphics, story, music, etc. matter, but all are of minimal importance in comparison.  If the game stops with the interactivity to move a story forward, it loses its immersive quality and stops truly being a "video game."

So, according to this, what would a bad video game look like?  Well, like any of these.

To name just a few.

This prioritization of interactivity above all else is not entirely meritless, but I think it's a bit too extreme. The most erroneous aspect is the idea that there's only one way to tell a story well within a given medium, even if that way takes the fullest advantage of the medium's unique capabilities. To say in any artistic venue that one way is the only good way to tell a story is problematic because it discourages creativity and variance, two of the most important things in art. It's essentially telling an entire medium to stick to what it's good at before it even knows what it's really capable of.  The fact is, a good story is a good story.  Sometimes a story in a video game would not have lost much had it been told in a television mini-series, or perhaps a long movie, but that does not make the story bad. Though cutscenes have their benefits, they do not offer anything particularly special to video game storytelling, but that does not mean a good story told by a well-made cutscene is somehow bad.

This idea is really just coming out of the need for video games to claim their spot in the world of artistic media (though some also use it to support the idea that video games should not focus on art and storytelling).  In a previous post, I talked about how, despite the great stories some video games have told, games as a medium are still largely considered to tell worse stories than other mediums, and how this may be in large part due to the fact that video games have explored less of their uniqueness than other, older mediums.  Video games need to explore interactivity and truly come into their own with their ability to effectively wield this unique power, as this is the thing video games can do that no other medium can.  But this is intended to free and empower video games, not to limit them.  As we explore the frontier of this art form, we do not all pack up and move to the newly discovered areas; rather, we expand, settling and exploring the new frontier while still developing what we already know. We do not abandon the older tactics to game development and storytelling as we discover new ones, we use the old knowledge to improve and understand the new, and vice versa.  It is all important.

This is a bit of a heated topic as of late, so feel free to comment or email me with any thoughts, disagreements, or concurrence.  I would like this blog to be discussion-based to an extent, so if you have something to say, please do, and I will make sure to reply, and perhaps bring up your points in a future article.

See you next week, and assuming you don't vehemently disagree with what I've said here, don't forget to Like Binary Narrative on Facebook!