Stories and games

‘Awright, awright. So I killed an old couple for a can of beans. Still tucking in, though, right? Remorse didn’t spoil your appetite.’

My friend’s wife, passing the room, stepped back and looked in with an expression of maternal concern. ‘Everything okay?’

‘Sure, except that we’re now having to give away the last of our medicine to a beggar to stop these whiners from moping. Other than that, everything’s great.’

It was This War of Mine, a game in which you look after a household of refugees in the middle of a war zone. No death-or-glory shoot-‘em-up, this is a game where victory is keeping a tomato plant alive long enough to get a meal off it. Survival means hard choices. Selfishness. Robbery. Even murder.

Videogames, of course, are full of mayhem and murder. Many portray a mean world in which the enemies you blow away are so othered as to be mere objects. But tie the possibility of bloodshed to a life-or-death situation and things become interesting. It’s no longer the violence of the true sociopath or the zombie killer, so dreadfully boring, but the choice of ordinary human beings in extremis.

Injustice is a ripe subject for storytelling, and the most potent weapon to that end in traditional fiction’s arsenal is empathy. It’s hard not to feel a red fury of outrage at Lady Catherine de Bourgh’s full-sail arrogance, or choke with shame at Siegfried Sassoon’s contemptuous treatment of his aged semi-fictional aunt. On the other side of the coin, we can be made complicit in mankind’s least savoury urges and thereby feel a twinge of guilt at having rooted for a bad egg like Vic Mackey or Richard III. Yet it is only the guilt of having been their cheerleader. We don’t personally pull the trigger.

That’s one of many areas where interactivity can prove a useful storytelling tool. Interactivity opens up the possibility of taking and abusing power, the sort of thing that’s guaranteed to bring out the very worst in a person – my example at the head of this piece when playing This War of Mine, for instance. More generally, feelings are sharper at first hand. Literature uses as its paintbrush the human capacity for empathy, whereas interactive stories put your hand on the gun – or on the bandage, or the baby’s bottle. Being a player rather than a reader means no longer having to be content with the role of a Boswell.

In The Talos Principle, the player is an android who awakens to find its task in life is solving a series of logic problems. Too dry to try? You’d rather do your tax returns? Think again: we’re not talking about algebra or which shape fits in which hole. These are challenging environmental puzzles that call for ingenuity, reasoning and lateral thinking. Such things, along with a warm cave, a haunch of mammoth, and a mate, put the biggest grin on the face of our Palaeolithic forebears. And to give it all a narrative drive, we’re continually chivvied along by an entity calling himself Elohim who informs us that he has created this world for us, and these puzzles to test us, for we are his most favoured children who will inherit creation. Just so long as we don’t step outside the boundaries he has prescribed, that is.

In between Elohim’s puzzles, we come across antique computer terminals and graffiti through which we’re able to access messages left by other androids and even human antecedents. This has the nature of what is often called ergodic storytelling (and by the way it’s rare to come across a term that offends both the physicist and classicist in me) in that we are given the fragments and left to fit them together for ourselves.

That’s not what’s special. Twentieth century literature abounds in such narratives. Most game stories come in jigsaw form, too, from Dear Esther to Her Story. The Talos Principle is notable because the central story hook – that pompously nannying Elohim – informs every problem we solve. At the same time as experiencing the drive towards ‘Man’s first disobedience’ we are indulging our pride, trying to impress the creator who is already beginning to royally tick us off. Or maybe he isn’t. My own knee-jerk to moralizing deities is to plan rebellion. Others may be moved to reverence, and that’s interesting too. And so our actions even while playing the most logic- and plot-driven parts of the game are still all about the illumination of character.

You see that what we are talking about here are not those games where the story is all loaded into non-interactive cutscenes in between the running and the shooting. As Chris Crawford, the Captain Cook of the game/story littoral, says, ‘Merely to glue story onto game and then alternate between the two, that’s just a trick.’ For this fusion of media to be interesting, the story needs to arise out of and drive the gameplay. It is easy to force a reader or viewer to interact. The trick is in making them want to interact, and in letting the story unfold hand-in-hand with that. For a guideline from the non-interactive media, notice how narrative and action in Fury Road happen at the same time. The best game stories follow that principle.

“As more and more stories, IPs and universes are expressed through the means of interactivity and by playing, the new mantra for this era of storytelling could become ‘Play, don’t show’.”  -- Thomas Vigild

You may ask what has all this to do with books. The founders of Inkle, whose text engine I used to create my interactive re-envisioning of Frankenstein, have pointed out that when people are interacting they typically have little tolerance for prose. If forced to read, they skim. This is very different from the experience of reading a work of literature, where the mind is tuned to see the landscape and characters via the text as surely as Cypher in The Matrix reads a world of blondes, brunettes, and redheads in the fleeting strings of numbers on his screen. Then we don’t even see the prose. But when we’re invited to sit forward and actively engage, words become a forest through which we must machete our way impatiently to the next significant choice.

For that reason, and in spite of working as both a writer and a game designer with a particular interest in interactive storytelling, I tend to think that grafting game-like interactivity into novels is a dead end. I wrote Frankenstein to explore the possibility creating a fictional two-way relationship with a character (the reader acts as Victor’s confidant and advisor) but believe me I would much rather have used animation or live action video or even just audio if the publisher’s budget had stretched to it. Prose in this context simply has the virtue of being cheap enough for a publisher to afford.

That’s not to say we should be aiming for a future in which novels come with animations and sound effects. Other media already deploy those tools to much better effect, and in any case there is no storytelling medium more immersive than pure prose. Have confidence in your strengths, dear writer, or give it all up now and create apps instead.

What, then, can novelists learn from games? Perhaps more from the way games are consumed than from the content itself. Consider how the narrative structure of the popular novel was shaped by magazine publication through the 19th and early 20th century. Games often take the form of a parallel reality into which the player can drop at any time. The story, as in life, is not necessarily on hold when you’re not there. Naturally, as with any other narrative technique, there are good and bad ways to tell a persistent story. Tamagotchi is much less irritating – or at any rate, its irritant value contrasts more interestingly with its emotional engagement – than something like the hectoring Majestic, a dead-end experiment in persistent narrative from the turn of the millennium that the games industry keeps reinventing like a lab rat that’s too dumb to learn from an electric shock. Give it a year or two, you’ll see what I mean.

Think instead of reality soaps, or theatre sports like TV wrestling, or even the drama of politics. The story runs alongside your daily life. You have the option when to drop in and how committed to be. The difference in gaming is that the community can feed back directly and immediately into the narrative that everybody else experiences. Might there be a takeaway here for novelists? Perhaps. Only bear in mind, I beg you: first do no harm. But with that caveat feel free to indulge in fleeting opportunity and perilous experiment, for the long evolution of literature is surely not over yet.

Stepping into the story

With my book app of Frankenstein out next week, I’ve had several reviewers asking about the first-person interactivity. Unlike a traditional choose-your-own gamebook, where “YOU are the hero”, in Frankenstein the main character narrates the story and turns to you for advice. You’re his Tyler Durden – or maybe I mean his “Jack”.

This form of interactivity is new to gamebooks, as far as I know, but certainly didn’t leap into being just for Frankenstein. It’s an idea prototyped in various interactive drama projects that I’ve developed over the last ten years. I’ll talk some more about some of those projects next time, but first, by way of introduction, here’s a piece I wrote in Game Architecture & Design (1999) that started me thinking along these lines:

Most of the time when you’re playing a game, what you’re doing is just that – play. You’re exploring, running, jumping, or thumb-twitching furiously to unleash a barrage of bullets. Which can be lots of fun, but a game that only had that going for it wouldn’t be fun for long. Gameplay enriches the experience. It’s the difference between idly kicking a football about in the back yard, or setting up a pitch with goals and having a match.

But gameplay is only one way of interacting. Consider a sandbox-style driving game like GTA or The Getaway. If it consisted of only city streets for you to drive around in, that kind of game would soon pall. The first thing you want to do is be able to interact with your environment. Bump another vehicle off the road, smash the doors off a police car, run somebody down. It’s violent fun – but it’s still fun. Kids play the same way, building bricks and knocking them down. So you need to have enough opportunities to interact that the setting becomes more than a backdrop; it becomes an environment.

A game like that will be better still if you can, for instance, knock over a fire hydrant and leave it spouting water. Then that pool of water makes the road slippery so that a passing car skids onto the sidewalk. A pedestrian has to dive out of the way. He hauls the driver out of the car and punches him. Now, what if the driver identifies you, the player, as the source of the trouble? He points, the pedestrian looks your way, and then both characters start yelling at you. That way, the interaction has created a story with tension, the promise of action, and emotions running high.

As an aside, this cascade-of-events kind of story emergence may seem an ambitious goal, but it was part of the Dreams game I worked on at Elixir Studios. More on that later.

When you are playing a game like Black & White or The Sims, most of what you are doing hardly involves gameplay, by which I mean strategic choices. You might just be routinely uprooting trees or steering characters out of the door in time to catch their bus. You don't mind (you probably don't even notice the lack of gameplay in those activities) because you are having fun. But if these products weren't interactive, you would certainly notice that. Then you might start wondering if your time wouldn't be better spent reading a book, watching TV, or throwing a frisbee around in the park.

Consider the ways that a player could potentially interact with a game:

• Affecting the game world, either by changing the difficulty settings or (in simulations and god games, for example) as part of the game itself
• Directly controlling the actions of a character or group of characters
• Influencing a character's actions at one remove (for example, by giving the character advice, clues or items, like Zeus aiding a favoured hero)
• Influencing a character at two removes (for example, by leading him somewhere or pointing something out for him to look at, like a Muse providing inspiration)
• Deciding who to follow, rather than what happens – an invisible observer flitting between narrative strands
• Selecting what is interesting to you personally and making the game give more time to those elements - as any child will, when told a story at bedtime

How many of those kinds of interactivity do you commonly see implemented? The first, certainly, but only insofar as I can make the game easier or harder, or change the speed. Why shouldn't I also be able to say to a computer opponent, as I can to a human player, "Hey, let's build up a big army before we start fighting," or, "Don't attack me because I just want to have fun building a city"?

The second kind of interactivity in that list – direct control of the characters – accounts for pretty much everything else. But interactivity doesn't have to be about what happens. It is often more interesting to think about why something happens, or how it caused other things to happen.

"If you are a process-intensive designer [...] then the characters in your universe can have free will within the confines of your laws of physics. To accomplish this, however, you must abandon the self-indulgence of direct control and instead rely on indirect control. That is, instead of specifying the data of the plotline, you must specify the processes of the dramatic conflict. Instead of defining who does what to whom, you must define how people can do various things to each other."

Chris Crawford, writing in Interactive Entertainment Design, April 1995

Games guru Chris Crawford talks about process (the laws of the game world) as opposed to data (the details of what happens in the game world). To illustrate this, think back to some of the early discussions of interactivity using broadband TV. Systems were proposed in which the viewer could decide what the characters did. Essentially, they were talking about that unlamented genre the interactive movie.

Would that work? Imagine an interactive version of the television series ER. You get to choose. Does George Clooney obey the hospital rules, does he give the experimental drugs to the sick kid, or does he just go outside and play basketball? Is that a rewarding way to experience interactive drama?

No. It assumes that the point of all drama is simply to find out what happens next. If it's good drama there ought to be a whole lot more to it than that. In the hypothetical example, is the point of the player's choice to guess what George Clooney’s character would really do? Then the interactivity reduces merely to an empathy test. Is it to make him do things he wouldn't normally? Then the interactivity is just a nerdy way to test the storyline to destruction. In neither case is characterization explored in any detail, and the only theme we are apt to uncover in this story is that it's kind of weird when people behave inconsistently.

Now consider a different way we could have played our interactive ER. This time we don't get to choose what the characters do or say. Now all we can do is choose which character to follow around the hospital. Dr Carter quarrels with Dr Pratt over a diagnosis - both storm off. We follow Carter, who gives his version of events to a third character. Later we switch back to Pratt, who by now has spoken to various other characters and is pursuing another agenda. It is only later, if ever, that we may stumble upon the resolution or aftermath of the quarrel that we witnessed at the start.

This example in itself isn’t a sufficient condition for interesting interactive drama. But it illustrates an important point. All drama, whether interactive or not, derives momentum from the viewer’s relationship with the characters. A rule often quoted in writing classes is that a character has to change and develop – hence the ubiquity in screenwriting of the redemptive story arc. In fact, characters don’t necessarily have to change to be interesting, but our understanding of the character has to change. We need to see things that will build on our first impressions and, ideally, that will surprise us and force us to reassess those impressions. That’s because the viewer is part of the system – and if that’s true of non-interactive media, you can bet it’s even more so in the case of games.

The aim of all storytelling is to make the audience care. Interactivity is a new(ish) and powerful technique in the writer’s repertoire for achieving that goal. The ER example is only arms-length involvement, in that you are still interacting as an external observer. It’s better than pressing a button every time you see a white rabbit, or brushing virtual dust off text so you can read the story – but it’s only just better. However, it is also possible to offer interactivity that draws the reader or viewer into the story, by developing a direct relationship with the protagonist. That’s what I used in Frankenstein and, ten years earlier, in a teen drama for Flextech called Dilemmas, which I’ll talk about next time.

Victorian halls, medieval knights & elves in mithril swimwear

I've played a little World of Warcraft, though I have to confess I never really got into it. I think I reached 6th level, which devotees of the game will know you can manage in about an hour's play. I chatted with other adventurers in textese. I may have killed some orcs.

Those fantasy CRPGs and MMOs all seem too much the same to me - a vaguely medieval/gothic world, dwarves (often Scottish), elves (often dressed for Venice Beach), clanking armor, rangers and "magic-users". If it's medieval, it's the themepark version: medieval America. It's like a bunch of writers copied Tolkien, and then the Dungeons & Dragons designers took their cue from those guys, and then a dozen other role-playing games copied D&D, and then CRPGs like WoW drew their inspiration from there. Result: all too far from an original concept to avoid tasting stale.

Look at orcs. Tolkien's concept was interesting, a dark mirror held up to humanity's undercurrent of xenophobic hatred. Whereas all these green-skinned tuskers are a vague sort of mash-up with Edgar Rice Burroughs. Specifically, ERB meets Aurora monster kits by way of some cheap 1980s straight-to-video adventure.

When did orcs turn green? I think it was in grimy Brit hack-n-slay RPG Warhammer. But it could have been any one of a dozen games - once these tropes come in, they often spread like wildfire. It's like the selective sweep that proliferates a useful new gene - except that, in creative work, you aren't trying to evolve towards a perfect fit, you're hoping to create something a little bit different. Rather than look at what somebody did last week, it's often worth tracing right back before the new gene came in and taking a different path. That's how the designers of Ico came up with such a cool and coherent vision.

But that's just me. With upwards of 11 million subscribers, Blizzard needn't lose any sleep. Those orcs are making them some serious green!

Anyway, that's all just preamble to this interview with Sam Raimi on Collider. After Spider-Man 1 & 2 (let's try and forget 3) any new project of Raimi's commands serious attention and should get the benefit of the doubt. So it'll be interesting to see how he turns a D&Dish computer game into a story we can really relate to. All the same, when I hear him enthusing about the cinematic landscapes in WoW, I'm thinking how cool it would be if somebody showed him Outcast. Now that would make some movie!

Camerawork

It was only on reading Peter Richardson’s fascinating posts about Jim Steranko that I remembered Jaunty Jim’s artwork for Nick Fury Agent of S.H.I.E.L.D. was what first made me aware of the potential of comics to tell a story cinematically. I don’t know why it took me so long, because I had been reading comic books avidly by then for several years and I was a total movie nut almost from infancy. (At the age of six I was telling my bewildered teacher how there was this scene of Lawrence striding along the top of a train and it was really brilliant because David Lean had only shot Peter O’Toole’s feet. I really was quite a scary little boy.)

Comparisons are not only invidious, they don’t really work. To say that comics are like cinema is to miss all the ways that they can do things differently. Alan Moore has something to say about that:

“The use of cinematic techniques can advance the standards of comic art and writing, but if those techniques are seen as the highest point to which comic art can aspire, then the medium is condemned forever to be a poor relative of the motion picture industry.”

And this from the man who wrote the opening page of Watchmen, remember. I get the point Mr Moore is making. However, many of the techniques we think of as cinematic actually predate the moving image by many years. There’s a sequence in Great Expectations where Magwitch is about to reappear on the scene. Dickens describes a storm rolling in over the rooftops of London and then he swoops down into Pip’s lodgings in Middle Temple. I can just see a director like Fincher or Burton having fun with that. But even much earlier, in Pickwick Papers, Dickens had scenes that were set up (as we would see it now) cinematically. I’m not just talking about his very evocative visual descriptions, but his use of spatial relationships in a scene, the sense that he always knows exactly where “the camera” is.

What I like is the way a camera can pick out a detail for emphasis – like running feet in a Lean or Kurosawa movie, the cage of shadows in film noir, the hiss of steam from a pipe in Roeg’s Bad Timing, or bamboo swaying in the moonlight in King Hu’s Touch of Zen. The “camera” in this context could equally well be our viewpoint in a comic, a videogame or even a novel.

But what I really love is when the camera/viewpoint explores the 3D-ness of a scene. Maybe it has something to do with our hunter-gatherer past that makes spatial relationships so fascinating and pleasurable? The three panels above are from fairly late on in the Mirabilis story and come right after a sequence of several pages that has taken us from the streets of Constantinople to the rooftops and right across the bay, and there from the mast of a ship to its deck. Breathtaking comics work from Leo there, and I hope we get the chance to show it all to you soon. (Update: it's here in Book Two.)

Games, of course, excel at this particular “cinematic” trick, and one of the best examples is in the classic game Outcast. Watch from 4 minutes in:



- though for the full effect you really need to play the whole game. Ten years old and still the best - trust me.

Play time

This is kind of cool until you realize that the book doesn’t add a whole lot apart from size. If you’re at home, you might as well use a laptop or the TV screen and then the characters could be part of the interactivity. If you’re on a train, lugging the book negates all the convenience of the iPhone. Doh.

Of course, the book would serve to make the whole interactive experience more comforting if young children were conservative creatures afraid to embrace new media. But no, that’s their parents. Children are continually engaged in forming a model of the world from scratch and will take on board anything that’s put in front of them. To them, iPhones are no less familiar than books. And there you have the USP of the human race in a nutshell.

Seeing this after reminiscing so recently about interactive stories set me to thinking about Figments, a "story world" game for young children that Leo and I dreamt up in the late ‘90s. We couldn’t sell it to games publishers nor to TV networks either, though not for want of trying. (The games execs only had eyes for twentysomething boys, the TV execs were dazzled by reality TV and thought interactivity meant choosing from multiple endings. As they still do, in fact.)

Figments used a “cascade of events” concept to create narrative strings that the user could influence by pointing things out to the characters. Think The Sims only the characters are like little playmates rather than lab rats to be tormented and studied. When I have a day to spare, I’ll tell you all about it.

Interesting choices

This is from a project Leo and I worked on in about 2001 called Dilemmas. It was an interactive animated TV show about a teenager called Cathy who would often break the fourth wall by turning to ask the viewer for advice.

Dilemmas arose out of adventure games, but it always annoyed me the way those would focus on things like whether you could stack up the crates in the right order to reach the rope that you could tie to the hook... and so on. Those are the least interesting elements of any story! The interesting choices are the personal ones: white lies, temptations, keeping your promises, etc.

Not that Dilemmas was about picking the right moral path. That's just another kind of puzzle set by the designer: "You score 5 Niceness Points". Bah. Rather, you had to build a relationship with Cathy. She would almost always take your advice (unless it was really dumb) but the outcome often depended on judging the course of action that suited her character best. She was actually quite an effective liar, for example - though she didn't always feel good about it, and that would have an effect too.

Some of the outcomes might appear better or worse, but whatever you suggested for Cathy to do, you'd get a story. There was no fail-and-start-again stuff. And she remembered the advice you gave her, and whether it got her into trouble, so there was that sense of advising a friend rather than steering a puppet-like character around.

Trouble is, Dilemmas was targeted at 9-12 year old girls - not, in 2001, considered a very big potential games market. And it suited a style of play where a bunch of viewers would sit watching on the sofa, calling out suggestions or letting Cathy get increasingly impatient till she did something off her own bat.

Back then, not a chance. But in the post-Wii era, who knows?

Adopt a robot

Here's something I found over on John Welding's blog. It's a good ol' point-n-click adventure game called Machinarium developed by Czech studio Amanita Design. You guide a cute little robot through a strange junkheap world of urban decay in his quest for love and a nice place to live.

The story is told in occasional fragments of memory and the puzzles are all logical (not always the case in point-&-click adventures, it must be said). There's a brilliant, wobbly, handmade sort of look to things which evokes Jan Švankmajer - and after all, if Czechs don't know robots then who does?

You can buy it here. If I have any criticism it's that the price is quite steep at $20. If it were half that I'd be recommending it without reservation. Anyway, you get to play a decent chunk of the game for free before you have to decide, so next time you need a bit of creative distraction, pop over and give it a whirl.

Dead or just resting?

LucasArts' Grim Fandango was a computer game by the legendary Tim Schafer that drew its inspiration from el Dia de los Muertos - the Mexican version of Halloween.

The setting is El Marrow, the city where the souls of the recently dead arrive to begin their journey to the afterlife. The land of the dead is depicted as sleepy and full of secrets. It has a sultry, dreamlike quality and yet things happen there.

By contrast, just over that border from which no traveller returns, the land of living is composed of brashly hued snapshots, styled on the 1950s work of Pop Artists like Richard Hamilton. It's a garish, glossy world which is full of bustling action, the sound and fury of life which strikes us as superficial now that we’ve strolled through El Marrow and had a glimpse of eternity.

Day of the Dead imagery juxtaposes life and death. In an inspired inversion, characters in the Grim Fandango world are despatched with guns that sprout flowers through their skulls and ribcages. The effect is beautiful and eerie, and at the same time more effectively shocking than the desensitizing carnage found in (yawn) so many videogames.

Because the plot involves mystery and danger, and the hero never knows who he can trust, Grim Fandango's film noir styling works perfectly. The guides of the dead are depicted like private eyes (though they are in fact travel agents) and their offices are located in an art deco building typical of the 1930s. Except that there's a subtle twist. Where art deco drew from ancient Egyptian design, the Grim Fandango version uses a restyled art deco substituting motifs from the Pre-Columbian civilizations.

Grim Fandango is far and away the most original game setting ever devised. It stands a million miles above the tedious floodwaters of super-soldiers, zombies, cloned hitmen, big guns, and monsters that always look exactly like Alien. Unlike just about every other videogame in existence, this actually would make a first-rate movie, TV series or graphic novel. Or all three.

So why have you never heard of it? Because it was an adventure game, in the days that adventure gaming meant stuff like tying a coat-hanger to a balloon to hook a message off a tree. And no, I don’t know why anybody ever thought that was fun either. It was like watching an animated movie where somebody keeps hitting pause and making you solve a Sudoku before you can see another few minutes.

But I’m thinking that old-style adventure gaming might turn out, with a very slight spin, to be just what those families around the entertainment hearth are looking for. Suppose that our hero (the very likeable Manny Calavera) wasn’t a damnable brainless puppet that you had to steer around while cursing at his inability to line up with objects. Suppose that he turned and asked you what he should do. Maybe all you have to do is give him the hint by pointing to something, so he's more like a character you can have a pretend relationship with. Suppose that, if you couldn’t be bothered to work it out, you could just give up and he’d figure it out for himself.

Or you could even say you don’t want to play it as a game, you just want to sit back and let Manny solve his own problems. Then it could be an animated movie that would be a darn sight more inventive than Shrek.

Just using the art, writing and audio assets that are already there, Grim Fandango could be turned into a graphic novel and an iPhone comic with just a few weeks’ work. Ay, caramba! I’d do it myself – right now, for nothing, out of sheer love of Tim Schafer’s brilliant creation. Hear that, LucasArts? Please do something with this great, great property! Make lots of money using the material you already have! Trust me on this. You don’t want to leave Manny in limbo.

The future of gaming?

This weekend I came across a feature in the paper headlined “The future of gaming is here”. You get inured to claims like that in the game industry press, but this was in the Telegraph. The “future of gaming”, judging by the examples given, is exactly like last year and the year before: same old same old, but with better technology and sweeter eye candy.

The game industry’s problem over the last decade has been its success. To clarify: the industry has done perfectly well by selling to a narrow, deep market so there hasn’t been much incentive to go looking outside the box. As home entertainment, you could compare it to porn – a big money-spinner, but relegated to the den rather than the living room, and always borrowing its ideas and imagery from TV and movies. (Usually the same movies, at that.)

Now games are finally changing. Thanks largely to Nintendo, games over the last year or two have been poking a wary snout out of the den. As a result, publishers are having to do more than pay lip service to the huge family/”casual” market. It’s like they’re having to throw away their porn collection and get to grips with a real live girlfriend instead. Take a look at Microsoft’s long-cherished idea of the entertainment hearth:



I’m all for it, though I am dubious about some of the content. Will mom, dad and the kids really all sit there while one person drives a racing car and occasionally somebody else gets to change the tyres? Even if they were racing each other, that’s still a “den” game; it doesn’t look like the interactive entertainment hearth of the future.

Among the games at E3 is Heavy Rain, a successor to Quantic Dream’s earlier Fahrenheit. This is an adventure game, really, though no doubt tricked up with a whole lot of shooting and running and stabbing to disguise the fact. A “truly interactive story” is promised, the “revolutionary” feature being that there are four main characters, and if one dies you get to play on with one of the others.

Is that better than a regular story? Of course not. It’s a feature for the sake of being able to say something to journos and marketing dudes. Having four interchangeable heroes is not actually enhancing either the story or the gameplay. They’re blundering in the dark.

You could have interactive stories. Narratives where the interactivity actually enhances the experience rather than creating just a broken movie or a plot-overburdened game. Movie director Gore Verbinski shows that he understands this more than most game developers when he said last week:

"Hollywood made a mistake to think it can enter the video game space and somehow provide better storytelling. Not only is that arrogant, but it hasn't worked. We start on a game with the way controlling it feels in your hands. Narrative has to be a byproduct of that in the same way story is a byproduct of character in films."

Come back another time and I’ll show you in detail how interactive stories could really work. But for now, I got to thinking how maybe you can steer a ship by looking at its wake. Because adventuring gaming, in the old Monkey Island sense, has been regarded for the last ten years as pretty much a moribund genre. And rightly so, in a way, because 9 out of 10 published adventure games were only enjoyable if you’re mildly autistic. You’d be in the middle of the story and suddenly there’d be some ridiculous puzzle to do with stacking crates or navigating a maze. It was entertainment by aliens for aliens.

And yet… if Microsoft and others really want to capture the family around that entertainment hearth, adventure games could be one way to do it. Not adventure games like they used to be, but a reboot of the whole genre. A lead character who asks for our help. Interaction by reaching “into the screen” to save him from a hidden assailant. Puzzles based on personality not logic. The ability to jump into the hero’s shoes at critical moments. You could really engage a sofa full of guardian angels with the life-or-death predicaments the hero is facing.

Sometimes, in ecosystems, evolution returns to a feature that had almost become obsolete - a dead end - but, as environmental conditions change, yesterday’s dead end can turn out to be today’s eight-lane freeway. One way to engage the broad market with games could be to look back at the kinds of games that never really got traction with the geek market. Not simply to resurrect those gaming genres, but to do a full reboot.

It’s not the really exciting future of gaming - we’ll talk about that another time. But it’s a start.