Following Rules in Narratives

Reading this article from Game Studies forced me to think about rules, and the game that I have played recently that seemed most obsessed with rules from a narrative standpoint is The Detail. I won’t go into all the caveats I already discussed about the game sort of sucks (just recall that it wasn’t finished because the developers lost funding), but I hope that one piece of the narrative that definitely would have changed was the ending, which was rushed beyond belief.

Perhaps the biggest impact that The Wire as a series had on me was its willingness to show how everyone is compromised – the police and city government and those who are supposed to be righteous as well as those who are taking advantage of the demand around them in order to improve their own socio-economic standing. The feeling of injustice that happens at the end of the first season when one Barksdale is given a reduced sentence and the police and city council get their pictures in the paper with news of a huge drug bust that we as viewers know was compromised and much less than it could have been felt devastating, as did the union boss’s death at the end of the second season. There is no true justice is an important part of the message of the best of these types of detective fictions.

The Crime Board – know your rules

Rules happen within games, too, and part of the dismay I felt about watching The Detail run off the rails happened when the detectives stumble upon a torture scene. That attempt to make the criminals look less than human was too obvious, too clearly set within a rule set that says that bad guys must do really bad things. This sort of easy moralizing was something that The Wire intentionally avoided.

 

Games and what they do not do

In my recent post about Firewatch, I noted that I liked the last ten minute walk to the evacuation helicopter, as it allowed me to think about what the game had asked me to do, and how the story that unfolded played out. I knew I needed to get my character to the chopper, because I assumed that I needed one more scene to play out, but despite the raging fire and the yellows and oranges of the landscape, the walk felt almost tranquil. It was even as straightforward as any of the other hikes I had been on, with not nearly as much frantic consulting of the map as the mini-canyons pretty much led straight to my destination.

I clearly need a new image

I played a bit of KRZ this morning though, as I work on the chapter I am writing about it, and I started to wonder about that hike, and that straightforward path. Firewatch – a game about spending three months in a fire tower after all, one in which you are surrounded by the books you brought in and the beauty of the natural scene and in which you have very few actual duties – allowed very little downtime. An occasional odd chat with Dee, a chance to look at the wilderness, and that is about it as far as contemplation and this game goes. While you can’t drive the narrative forward in either game without engaging, you also have no real reason to explore the landscape around you.  There are no easter eggs hidden in it…just the occasional turtle (which you violate the ethics of good wilderness management by turning into a pet).

From a gameplay perspective, then, contemplation time would be off-putting and ill-considered. Firewatch, however, directly asks players to perform this contemplation, as despite the fact that you as character are evacuating a firestorm and have just discovered who was harassing you and what drove that person to do that, the game tells you to relax. As noted, the route is obvious; additionally, the calm, contemplative music comes on at a certain point in the walk, and the player-character can walk at their leisure – I am sure that the game will not kill you at this point, since it doesn’t kill you at any other point.

From the narrative perspective, the game is now going to ask you to contemplate Harry’s future: does he return to his rapidly-fading wife?  Does he find Dee and cement the bonds that the two of them have developed via radio?  Does he keep avoiding all entanglements in order to never again have to experience the pain he has suffered watching his wife degenerate? At some point I realized that the entire game is built upon this obsession with observation – your character is being observed in multiple ways, despite the fact that he is out in the middle of a mostly empty-of-people-wilderness area, and his job, after all is to observe the wilderness. The game asks him to participate, to dive in and engage much as games do of players, and the player’s status as observer is directly challenged in this way.

Oh, so we are supposed to look down from on high!

My guess is that this time for contemplation is why I enjoy these kinds of point-and-click, narrative driven games. I always sucked at the types of button-mashing that made players great at first-person shooters, and I could camouflage my weaknesses at these kinds of skilled reactions in MMORPGs because in raids I was part of a much-bigger group. Firewatch, in contrast, deliberately slows the player down in order to immerse them in a different type of dilemma, based not on algorithms but on life.

I know that sounds trite to say, but holy shit Harry’s situation is set up so that we (nerdy, white, middle-class, perennially insecure, male) who stumble into some kind of lucky situation, meeting a partner who understands us (and if you thought I was being trite before then watch out) is brought down by that same person’s – and they are a once-in-a-lifetime find, we are sure of it – tragedy, with a response that seems completely realistic – run!

The power of this type of narrative, I’m guessing, in any medium lies not in its ability to help us figure out what we would do – that’s the Hallmark card ending, and in my value-system that approach is not helpful. Instead, it offers us a moment of examination that perhaps provides a moment of emotional growth as we look at the choices we make and why the matter.

Despite the bugs and weirdnesses and constant lock-ups, Firewatch kept me engaged. I am guessing that the reason why is the way this situation resonated with me emotionally. What the game did not make me do was powerful, and that lack points to an area of contemplation that can help us, I suspect, become more emotionally intelligent as we move into a digital world.

Cormac McCarthy – Child of God

In reading for the essay I’m writing on Kentucky Route Zero I have been trying to pick up everything I can from literary the genres that the developers Cardboard Computer pull from.  That includes Child of God, by Cormac McCarthy, although I cannot imagine two more dissimilar narratives. Thoughts:

• The most straightforward approach to thinking of this novel is to consider it a meditation on living life without love of any sort. That approach works to explain Lester Ballard.
  • It skips, however, the reasons why Lester is like this.  We get a bit of his backstory, but why he is driven out of town is a story that we don’t get.
  • That gap, I think, allows us as readers to fill in our own backstory, and thereby read Lester as we want to read him. Depraved, evil, barely human, either made that way from the womb or gradually transformed into such because of those who raised him – either way, he’s a cipher, someone we can paint our own worldly perspective on.
• The landscape also serves as a sort of cipher. It’s set in Tennessee, and while I think of east Tennessee in particular as beautiful, Smoky Mountain-dominated set of valleys and rivers and ledges and hardwood trees, a reader can clearly view it instead as a harsh landscape that takes a toll on its inhabitants. Again, the approach is yours.
• Thinking of Lester as being on a journey seems ridiculously hippieish (and it is). The journey is one of depravity and anti-socialness to an extreme, showing the gradual breakdown of someone who simply cannot play well with others.
• So, then, why does McCarthy write this shit?  George Saunders in an interview said that he writes in order to show that the world is a cruel place and that he finds worth in understanding how people understand and deal with that cruelty, but I never get the sense that McCarthy gives a shit about that.
  • Is it redemption? Uh, no. No one in this novel, or hell, nearly any novel of his besides maybe The Road gets any sort of redemption. Lester dies as miserably as he lived, and we as readers don’t even get the benefit of learning some sort of moral lesson – treat people right or they become monsters, or something like that.
  • Is it a sociological/ethnographic study? If so, I’m not sure what we can learn, except that some people can only relate to dead people, after they have fucked them. I’m hoping that’s a small demographic.
• And yet the novel made me laugh a couple of times, and I had trouble putting it down. I’m not sure what that says about me…

And of course James Franco made it into a movie…

Firewatch

Firewatch, a point-and-click game developed by Campo Santo (and published by him and Panic) seems to part of my trend of playing games on Steam that are narrative based. Some thoughts:

• Games like this make me wonder if Aarseth wasn’t on to something…at times this game did feel a bit like work.
• I won’t reveal any spoilers, but the ending was far less nefarious than it could have been.
• The Shoshone National Forest location looked great, and although I saw at least one reviewer complain about having no animals, I can only imagine how much additional work adding ground squirrels and birds would have been, let alone the occasional appearance of larger herbivores (or even a predator).
  

  Doom or Firewatch?  You be the judge

• That said, the transition from beautiful forest that is rarely visited to a raging hellstorm of a fire site was really cool. Being forced to walk through it, rather than just experiencing it in a movie, with constant framing shots on the stars’ faces, felt meditative. I didn’t feel at risk after discovering the big secret, perhaps because I couldn’t talk with Dee.
• The handheld camera feel of the point of view from the character’s perspective was a bit hard to get used to, and I kept over-adjusting. I wonder if the thought was to try to recreate actual sight, rather than having that perfect video game sight that I guess I expected. I am not sure how many other games do that, but it was clearly an intended effect, as even the splash screen had it.
  • My guess is that the game deliberately plays with the contrast between gameplay perspectives – the player-character is locked into the imperfections of actual vision, all the while living in a firetower and observing all that goes on around them. This splash page speaks to that contrast…
• While I got frustrated with some of the ways to move the narrative forward, and even resorted to a cheat sheet or two (thank you Steam community!), I did appreciate the long walk to Dee’s tower. I had a chance to reflect upon the denouement in ways that I sometimes don’t in a book or film, and that reflection helped me think about the story from a couple of different perspectives.
• Having just read Skonick’s book on videogame storytelling, it was hard not to notice that Firewatch follows many of the rules he identified for concise and interesting storytelling. Not sure how it does for ludonarrative harmony, though…

Evan Skolnick – Videogame Storytelling

Skolnick’s Videogame Storytelling:  What Every Developer Needs to Know about Narrative Techniques was a fun, useful read. Thoughts:

• Skolnick is an industry pro, and in a lot of ways this book is a call for empathetic *and* rational project management in game development. The book has individual chapters on how to build teams by including everyone’s input. He also, though, is aware of industry realities, and so talked about how game writers and other narrative experts are brought in late or let go early…
• I don’t know if Skolnick invented this term, but he talks about ludonarrative harmony and dissonance. He might be a bit too eager to claim that this is possible, or that the ludology-narratology wars are over, but his attempts to see the virtues of both (and to argue that they should be in harmony) are useful.
• Although it’s not a mainstream game, Skolnick would probably love the intro to KRZ – it tells the player a ton of information very quickly, and even uses a game-within-a-game to help set the environment…
  • plus, we get “weird things happen underground” as a theme…
• his checklists are useful, and would help in a game writing class – 133
• I also liked this distinction, between player motives and player character motives
  • he identifies two scenes that are examples of pitfalls and well-done contrasts…
    • No Russia scene in COD: MW2, in which an undercover player is asked to kill innocents at an airport..the assumption that players will simply think of these as pixels is an interesting one, since it seems to be contrary to what games do…
    • The second is from Portal, and it involves the player wanting to not kill the companion cube,
• He gave me another way to think about my game – it upfronts the environmental sounds – voiceovers (VOs for the cool kids), barks (systematically-generated audio), and so on – 183
• And, as Bob noted, he routinely emphasizes emotional involvement, even showing a chart that maps what writers want players to feel…183

 

Saunders – CivilWarLand in Bad Decline

I have been wanting to read Saunders for a long time, and CivilWarLand in Bad Decline made me wonder what I had been waiting for.  Some thoughts:

• A colleague at another university made a joke about Pynchon novels, something about no one ever finishing them. The joke confused me – this person is a fellow academic (and someone who I assume reads a lot), and I couldn’t help but think, well, shit, I have finished several Pynchon novels. I guess the desire for clear moral lessons and the ability to determine who is the great American novelist wins out?
• His chapter about his career was fascinating, because he talks about how trying to write like Hemingway crushed him.  He sucked as a writer, couldn’t get anything published, and the process felt miserable. When he turned to the style of writing in this collection, he said he felt liberated, and that writing was fun, and that he had ideas. These are all good things.
• The fascination with theme parks as a representation of American culture is inspired, and the types of theme parks he creates, in which working class heroes barely hang on by performing increasingly degrading labor in these insane places.
• His protagonists know that increasingly things are going bad, but they have enough innate goodness and belief in the American dream that they keep blaming themselves for the problems in their lives.
  • Outside, the larger culture blames others – the novella features a character who has mutated and is labelled as Flawed, and he is constantly persecuted, put into slavery, and made to realize that he is not the master of his own destiny.
• I thoroughly enjoyed this collection…

Emma Cline – The Girls

Emma Cline’s The Girls veers from hippie-punching to anxiety about Others to the desire of bystanders to consider themselves capable (and culpable) in an interesting, quick read. Some thoughts:

• As much as hippie punching can be, I get tired of the constant need to write out anything good that happened in the sixties and focus on the evils…of course, that’s not exactly what this novel does, but it is the context that I often read rewrites of the sixties in…
• That said, Cline does several things that are particularly interesting in here…
  • From a sheer craft perspective, Cline has a knack for odd verbs (or descriptors) that disrupted my attempts to read this novel in a generic fashion. Just when I would begin thinking, oh, here we go, we get the standard alienated teen hates the world but learns something in the end novel, Cline would use a verb that gave a glimpse of a whole different world lurking beyond the edge of the Helter-Skelterish approach to this Manson look-alike family.
  • The perspective provided by the older woman looking back on her teenage self took an interesting twist because it comes from the bystander who is caught up in a teenage obsession with someone beside the charismatic Manson wannabe.  While the narrator feels his charisma and ability to be a savior for the others on the Farm (or the Ranch?), she is in love with one of his women.
    • Some of the passages that felt most effective to me were the ones in which she looks back on her younger self and realizes some of the ways in which girls are forced to define themselves through their attractiveness (and attempts to attract) boys. The Goodreads entry for the novel has a bunch of great cited passages, but this effect builds in ways that the novel reads as much as a warning to young girls as it does a look at the identity-build of Evie (and the girls on the Farm).
• The bystander approach enables Cline to do some interesting things from a narrative point of view.  Rather than be clued in to how broken the object of the narrator’s affection is, we get this gradually revealed to us as the narrator (Evie) tells the story.
  • I think that what I found really useful is the way that this sort of approach made me think about the process of being a reader. I kept finding myself leaving behind chunks of my assumptions as I proceeded – at first I was sort of off-put because this felt like another of the deranged lesbian genre, but I gradually saw that Evie’s obsession with Susan was just that, a teenage girl’s obsession with someone who at first looks cooler than Jesus.