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.

Major and Minor Narrative Interaction

These concepts are hardly new, but much like the Narrative/Gameplay Paradigm, this article is my attempt to label and define these two concepts and explore how they work.

It's important to keep in mind that the dramatic story-altering forms of interactivity employed by developers such as Bethesda and Bioware are not the only way to use interactivity in meaningful ways.  It's great to be able to shape the entirety of the story's protagonist, or determine the course of events as the story progresses, but it would be a mistake to think that is the only way for video games to convey their narrative through the unique lens of interactivity.

I'm going to separate interactive storytelling techniques into two categories; there could be many more, obviously, but as a first step let's keep it simple.

The first is major narrative interaction.  This is interactivity on a major scale, the kind of interactivity that allows the player to have a large impact on the game's characters, story, and world.  When you make a decision in Mass Effect that carries over to its sequel and affects its events, that is an instance of major narrative interaction.  This kind of interactivity focuses on letting the player have control and putting the story and characters in their hands.  The player is allowed to choose the type of experience they want based on the options given them by the developer.

The second category is minor narrative interaction.  This is the more subtle use of interactivity, the one that doesn't have any real effect on the story or characters of a given game.  This is what's used at the end of Shadow of the Colossus, the end of Halo: Reach, the plot twist in Bioshock, the final walk to Zanarkand in Final Fantasy X, and the nuclear bomb in Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare.  Most examples are rather spoileriffic, so I can't describe specific examples without ruining some truly amazing moments, but hopefully you be familiar with at least one of the moments I named.  The basic idea of these is that they put the player in control for an important story point that will not change based on the player's interaction, but the emotional impact and even the story's main points are hammered home in a way that cannot be accomplished without that interactive element.

Major narrative interaction is often the only recognized form of interactive storytelling.  Understandably, the most thrilling potential for interactive narrative is the ability for the player to actively help shape the story and characters, to make important decisions that could take the story in different directions.  The involvement of the player in the artistic experience is an important and exciting development in the arts, and we rightfully have a desire to explore it to its furthest potential.

However, it is important that we not overlook the importance of minor narrative interaction.  This type of interaction does not allow the player to shape the story, at least not in any huge way, but rather endeavors to quite literally put the player in the place of the protagonist, to walk a mile in their shoes so to speak.  In well-crafted uses of minor narrative interaction, the player's actions (or lack of ability to interact in a certain way) reflect the struggle of the protagonist in a way that increases the player's sympathy and emotional connection to the character and events.

It sure added a lot to Crisis Core.  No Final Fantasy VII
fan kept dry eyes at the end of this game.  

A classic example of minor character interaction is at the end of a story, often a prequel starring a different character, when they have their last stand.  Enemies pour in from all sides, and more come no matter how many you kill, until eventually your character is overpowered and falls in battle.  This concept is far from new; it has happened in all sorts of stories.  But there's something different about playing it and actually experiencing that lack of control.  You can fight all you like, kill as many enemies as you want.  You could be the best player in the known world, and you will eventually lose.  Despite all you've been through, all the good your character has done in the game's world and story, it comes to an end here, and you can't do anything about it despite your best efforts.

Some games have also made your character, under the control of some unknown force, do something neither they nor you want them to do, and whatever buttons you press, they only bring the character closer to this action, never stopping them.  Or perhaps rather than putting the death of the final boss after your epic boss fight in a cutscene, the game allows you to deliver the final blow yourself.  Some games have even forced the player to do or watch terrible things, such as the controversial No Russian level in Modern Warfare 2.  These are seemingly small touches, but they really add a lot to the emotional impact; the player feels a sense of responsibility when this interaction is present, and for them to fail when in control, even if the game allows no other course of action, is a far more emotional experience than seeing a character fail in a story.

I've often seen people consider major narrative interaction to be the only type of interaction that truly separates video games from other media.  But as important as major narrative interaction is, it is not the only important or even the most important type of interaction when it comes to interactive storytelling.  Major narrative interaction is great, and very important, but it requires a large financial commitment, a lot of manpower, and the type of story that lends itself to multiple branching paths.  Minor narrative interaction, on the other hand, is not only easier on the workers and the money, but can also apply to every type of narrative imaginable.  This is because it does not demand non-linearity, but instead works to achieve heightened emotional impact regardless of whether the narrative branches.

In short, it's important to consider both major and minor narrative interaction when studying a given work of interactive art.  Too often a game is condemned for having no real interactive value simply because of its lack of major narrative interaction, despite having a strong presence of minor narrative interaction, and recognition of both types is vital to truly understanding how interactivity and story work together in this medium.

On Wednesday I'll post a list of games I recommend checking out to see good examples of minor narrative interaction.  I imagine some people will agree and some will disagree with what I'm saying here, so feel free to comment and let me know!  Until then, remember to like Binary Narrative on Facebook if you like what I have to say!

L.A. Noire and the Narrative/Gameplay Paradigm

I know I just reviewed this game, but it did things that merit some discussion beyond what I could do in a review, so here we go.

L.A. Noire did some very interesting things.  It created a pitch-perfect noir atmosphere to go along with its detailed recreation of 1940s Los Angeles, which is enough to make it worth playing in the first place.  It also made me curious as to when the word "noir" had an "e" on the end of it.  But its greatest accomplishment came by way of its technology for recording the faces of actors.

Nothing against you, Phoenix.  I still
love your games.  

I can imagine the cries of "Graphics whore!" I may get for that statement, but there's more to it than that.  The facial animations of L.A. Noire allowed it to take some of the game-like elements out of the gameplay and replace it with a sort of real activity.  Rather than watching meters or playing a silly minigame, or even cross-referencing Phoenix Wright style, the expressive faces in L.A. Noire allowed the gameplay to work off actual observation.  This required the player to judge the truthfulness of suspects and witnesses based on their visual and verbal cues, something that is much more difficult, complicated, and realistic than comparing notes or pressing the right buttons at the right time.  It allowed the gameplay and story to mesh on a deeper level by removing the game-like elements that normally govern the player's interaction and, to some extent, separate the player from the game world.  It managed to defy the Narrative/Gameplay Paradigm on which I previously wrote.  But it did not do it fully or perfectly.  L.A. Noire did many things right and was groundbreaking on many levels, but what exactly did they do right and what did they do wrong?  What are these breakthroughs truly capable of, and where could they go that this game did not?

First of all, let me preface this discussion by saying I am not suggesting that all games should avoid game-like elements, or even that games must do so to tell a story well.  I've seen many people say that the "games as art" movement wants to see all games become abstract, boring experiences full of meaning but entirely void of entertainment or challenge.  However, I think I've made it clear that I consider many different games, from Shadow of the Colossus to Halo, to be great works of art; the concepts I discuss in this article aren't blanket suggestions to be applied to video games as a whole, but interesting possibilities for the future of what the medium will be able to do.  In this particular case, L.A. Noire offers a new way to eliminate black-and-white gameplay elements and instead present an experience that, while perhaps is not a "game" by traditional definition, it more of an interactive storytelling experience.

The interrogation process in L.A. Noire is, in its basic form, almost entirely devoid of "gamification," if you will excuse the use of the term in this context.  The idea of actually watching and listening for signs of lying or hesitance is exactly how real interrogations go, not an objective-based, formulaic system by which the player solves some sort of puzzle. This was fantastic, as it eliminated the certainty that most games depend on.  The player could not have a simple logical process of elimination or success at a simple challenge, they had to read the character's voice and face and trust their judgement.  Most people I know, myself included, took a while to get used to it.  It is far more abstract and less concrete than most gameplay processes; it was based on the player's judgement, not on quickness, not on coordination, not even fully on observation.  And if you don't get all the information out of the witness, you move on with the clues you have and hope you haven't missed anything too important.  If the investigations and interrogations go poorly, it is even possible to arrest the wrong person.  This process lacks certainty, lacks the sense of absolute victory that we gamers are used to; but so does the real-life process L.A. Noire emulates.

The amount of emotion the human face can convey is
astounding, and L.A. Noire emulates it well enough to
base its main gameplay feature around it.  

At least it would be like this, if not for a simple but important gameplay element; the chime that tells you whether you have chosen the best reaction.

In the interrogations in L.A. Noire, the player immediately knows whether they "won" or "lost," which unfortunately goes a long way toward invalidating the advancements the game makes.  The player should, as the in-story detective does, feel like they've done their best, like they have uncovered all the clues to the best of their ability and gotten as much information through questioning as they could.  The player should blame the suspect, not themselves, if they got no good information, because as far as the detective knows he did his absolute best.  If the police chief gets angry at them for putting the wrong person away, the player should be surprised and frustrated at their failure rather than simply saying, "Yeah, I did really screw up those last few interviews..."  The uncertainty that should mark each answer, each reaction, each question, is negated by the absolute knowledge of the player's success or failure.

The crazy thing is that the game's story is structured in such a way that this can feasibly be done with little extra effort (the only thing that may have to go would be achievements based on correct questions, but even that would only be for difficulty reasons).  Who gets arrested usually either doesn't matter in the long run or happens because they run or something, proving their own guilt enough to warrant the arrest.  In a few particular cases, the story dictates that the convicted person is innocent anyway, regardless of who it is.  It's not like the designers would have had to code in tons of different endings or events based on the player's success or failure; the player is led to an arrest regardless.  This would not negate the role of statistics; the game could give the player their information and statistics at the end of each case, so the player knows how well they did afterwards and how to do things differently if they play it again.

This is not to say I don't understand why they did what they did.  Absolute knowledge of our objectives, victories, and losses is something we, as gamers, are used to.  We were already far out of our element with these interrogations, and this made it a little easier for us, made the interrogations less frustrating (at least in the way gamers traditionally define frustration).  Unfortunately, this positive effect came at the cost of immersion.  Not that L.A. Noire wasn't immersive (I think a game that faithfully recreated 1940s Los Angeles is immersive by default, to some extent), but it could have become much more so if not for the constant reminder that this is a game, and we just totally bombed that question.  We, as gamers, must be willing and excited to get out of our comfort zones and abandon the security of traditional game design in order for video games to move forward in artistic viability and cultural impact.

This is the main thing I meant in my review when I said I hoped for a sequel that refined and expanded the revolutionary gameplay elements L.A. Noire introduced.  I would like to see this potential franchise develop these concepts into more of a storytelling experience than a traditional game; not because it makes for a bad game, but because the impact could be exponentially increased if the security of formulaic gameplay were further removed from the story and investigations.

I'd be incredibly surprised if everyone agreed with me on this, so feel free to post your arguments, agreements, or random observations, and make sure to Like Binary Narrative on Facebook if you don't hate my ideas!

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!