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57
I arrived at my usual dream appointment, to find the giant telepathic therapist spider gone, and where the web used to be a giant hole with a golden rope extending from the abyss to the floor.
“Well this is just great,” I said. “She better not charge me for this session.”
I tugged on the golden rope until it became taut. Someone in the abyss above, with a deep and echoing voice, a calm, flat kind of voice, called to me.
“I wouldn’t do that if I were you.”
“Why not?” I asked, and tugged on the rope again.
Black ichor spilled down and filled the room. I released the golden rope, sputtering, and began to drown. The voice continued on its same calm down.
“When you dream of a library, you are under the impression that each book has weight to it. That if only you could look at each individual book in the span of the dream, you would find content in each one of them. But does the dream generate writing for each individual book, or does it only need to give you the impression of such?”
Underwater, drowning, I still managed to speak.
“What in god’s name does that have to do with anything that’s going on right now?”
“How about this,” the voice continued. “The gravitational constant is 9.8m/s2. You should find out the rate at which it takes your heart to fall into your chest, and whether or not it’s the same. It’s something I’ve been wondering about for a while”
I climbed up onto my floating mattress, staining it with black. The golden rope became a snake in the water, live-wire, generating an electrical force. The abyss above stretched its mouth, growing wider than the ceiling.
“Still not following you,” I said.
“The best gift you can give a daughter is a knife to cut the umbilical cord from you to her.”
The mattress sunk down into the water. As I resumed drowning, the voice continued.
“I was with you when you travelled up the mountain and found the last living part of you. It was a golden plant, a sharp-edged hardy little thing that managed to break the ice, clinging to tough ground with its roots. It shared its space with the corpses of lesser creatures, those that died in the cold you were forced to grow up in. And when you fell asleep I kissed the permafrost on your lips.”
I stopped drowning long ago. I walked along the bottom of my new underwater apartment, breathing through straws attached to the veins in my wrists.
“I blew my breath through you, and the breath became a cord from your throat to your intestines. If you ever think you’ll fall apart, sink under, be crushed under the ice - I will be there to hold you together.”
58
I just kicked someone down a flight of stairs because they told me “art fags were ruining videogames.”
The definition of an art game: A game in which the gameplay mechanics are ignored in favor of “literary” “writing” and “characters” and “themes.”
I love art games, because I love art and games, but I think we’ve made a grave mistake in assuming that they need to be separated somehow, or that art or good writing (I.E, good dialog usually) is a replacement for good systems, mechanics, or user interface. Or even that one, being non-interactive or thoughtful in its provocation of emotion, has somehow a higher place in the hierarchy of worthwhile human experience, than a game that builds its foundations on solid mechanics and social interaction. I.E, your classic MMO. To use an archaic example, in the MMO World of Warcraft, the player creates their own story and generates emotions via experience using the thin, weblike framework of the raiding and quest system. When a player is griefed and killed, they experience anger, frustration, and loss. Are these lesser emotions than if the player were to be moved to tears by an NPC whose poetic dialog was written by Robert Frost? If, so why? If pain is only worthy if it’s attributed to a noble cause, one with great value, such as turning into a sobbing, hysteric wreck at the sight of a cathedral glass pane window ala Stendhal Syndrome (footnote), and not, for example, your car breaking down or your garden withering in the summer heat, then the whole foundation of art - which is life - isn’t worthy of being transformed into art.
I don’t think anyone would argue that World of Warcraft is in the upper echelon of literature, but it doesn’t need to be. In an interactive medium, the story is always created by an intersection of player input and game structure.
Gamers like to espouse that the art game is “ruining” video games, reducing it down from its lofty position where mechanics are the most important part of the game. Of course, we like to call those gamers whiny man babies, because creating more inclusive gameplay experiences doesn’t automatically reduce the number of games available, but I think their complaints are based in a real fear - that those attempting to make the video game into an “art game” attempts to reduce the input by the player. This isn’t always true, but often enough that it’s an issue. There are a number of reasons for this:
Budget
The gamer neophyte often assumes the game developer has a limited amount of time, budget, and resources to create a video game. When in reality, game development is a huge process of cutting out non-essential features and prioritizing issues so that the fucking thing ships on time. Developers often like to sit around dreamy-eyed and talk about the possible features that they could create for a game, options, player customization, etc, and oftentimes the players complaining on the forums about features that didn’t ship or options they should have in the game have already been brought up multiple times by the developers of the game. However oftentimes they have to crash back into reality, figure out that a new system would require ten weeks of development time with minimal cost return, and have to toss it no matter how cool they think it is. Because unless you have unlimited funds making video games is a business.
Interactivity
With an art game, oftentimes the interactivity is reduced so that the game appears to have a broader range of options and choices. For example, in a haunted house simulator, creating a flashlight mechanic makes sense - complete with a battery that drains, and the ability to turn the flashlight on and off, point it at objects in the environment and illuminate them, etc. This makes sense because the flashlight mechanic will be used repeatedly throughout the game to multiple different effects. Suppose in the same haunted house simulator you also, for whatever reason, have to make a sandwich. Maybe the ghost got hungry, I don’t know. Now suppose you have to make one sandwich in the entire game - could this effect be achieved with a cut-scene, or a simple animation with minimal input from the player, or does making a sandwich create a system that involves resource management of mayonnaise, bread, and meat, with precise spreading and cutting technique?
Maybe in the future such systems will be easier to create, but I almost don’t see the point, except for immersion. Does forcing the player to display skill with the sandwich making mechanic, or any 1-off type mechanic, radically improve the gameplay? Or does it only appeal to the developer’s ego? Would a good developer waste budget time making a sandwich mechanic in a haunted house simulator?
And when the game tries to create a deeper narrative experience, they often have to rely less on player interactivity and varied mechanics. This is necessary in order to create the greater range A game with deep systems relies more on player input and less on developer input in regards to storytelling and the variance of emotions, because of the amount of variance within
Developer Ignorance
I was at a company in Seattle, reading an article about narrative in fiction one morning. One of the lines was “storytelling is not necessarily dialog.” I snorted. Well, that’s ridiculously obvious. Of course it isn’t - storytelling and good writing encompass the entire game experience, from the aesthetics to the mechanics to the way the animations are built. The designer lends to the narrative through atmosphere and choice, even the way ammunition is distributed can radically change the feelings invoked by the game environment. Fucking duh.
Then my lead sent me an email with the attached document, “Writing for [Our Game].” Around the second paragraph he’d written “Storytelling is not dialog.” After reading through the article, I headed to his desk.
“I thought that was obvious,” I said.
“You would be surprised.”
“Are you serious? People think narrative is dialog? And not the entire game experience?”
He sighed in agreement, nodding sadly.
“I hate people,” I said. “I’m going to go kill myself.”
He was used to hearing this.
“Have fun, see you tomorrow,” he said as I left the building.
You can find me on Twitter, Facebook, and my website. You can also buy one of my books here.
Other Posts You May Be Interested In:
Sunny Outside, Storm Inside [Writer's Journal]
The Writer Writes the Same Damn Thing [Psycho-Surreal Memoirs]
I Like Watching You Learn How to Be Alive [PTSD Series: Part 5]
The Importance of Narrative Design in Video Games
Carry The Glowing Seed, Plant Reality from the Dream [PTSD Series: Part 4]
Art Therapy at the Space Station [Psycho-Surreal Memoirs]
The Symptoms of PTSD, and my symptoms [PTSD Series: Part 3]