WP2: Framed and Emergent Game Stories
Part 1
Anderson, Joseph. "Little Nightmares, and the Importance of the Experience." YouTube, 1 June 2017, www.youtube.com/watch?v=nhQ66CozrgY. Accessed 18 Feb. 2024.
Joseph Anderson reflects on his prior negative review of Inside, explaining why that game failed to connect with him. Then, he provides a glowing review of Little Nightmares, which is surprising considering the game's exceptional similarity to Inside. Through a contrast between the two games, he reveals how minor differences led to a dramatically different experience. This serves as a great platform for discussing the nuance and subjectivity of game design.
Beachum, Alex. Outer Wilds: A Game of Curiosity-Driven Space Exploration. 2013. University of Southern California, MA thesis. USC Digital Library, doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-c3-248860. Accessed 21 Feb. 2024.
Bissell, Tom. Extra Lives: Why Video Games Matter. Pantheon Books, 2010.
Extra Lives is eight essays, each of which discusses a particular game that impacted Bissell. He entertainingly unpacks his subject matter, using anecdotes from his own life to express the deep impact that games had upon him. Yet, he remains thoroughly critical of games' habitually poor writing and childlike tendencies. To that end, Bissell attempts to reconcile his own uncertain relationship with video games. On one hand, he recognizes their artistic potential, yet he maintains a heavy skepticism towards the industry and its repeated failures.
Blow, Jonathan. Conflicts in Game Design. Montreal International Game Summit, 2008, Montreal. YouTube, 7 Apr. 2011, www.youtube.com/watch?v=mGTV8qLbBWE. Accessed 18 Feb. 2024.
In this talk, indie game developer Jonathan Blow argues that games' interactivity detracts from their ability to tell stories. He then claims that designers must use the rules and behaviors of their games to create meaning – he uses the term "dynamical meaning" to describe this. Through an analysis of two experimental games, Blow gives compelling examples of how dynamical meaning can create impactful artistic experiences. Ultimately, he claims that games must abandon scripted narratives altogether to achieve artistic relevance. Despite its cynical tone, this talk is deeply insightful and predicted the next decade of independent game development.
---. Truth in Game Design. Game Developers Conference Europe, 2011, Cologne. YouTube, 15 Aug. 2017, www.youtube.com/watch?v=C5FUtrmO7gI. Accessed 18 Feb. 2024.
In this talk, Jonathan Blow discusses his design methodology, which seeks to explore the universe's fundamental truths. He begins by demonstrating that systems with a few simple parts, such as the Mandelbrot Set and John Conway's Game of Life, can display immense complexity. He argues that such systems demonstrate truths about the universe that are more meaningful than anything he could create from scratch. As a result, Blow describes himself more as a curator than an author. This talk is fascinating, and its claims are backed up by Blow's commercial and critical success. Although his design methodology seems to lend itself exceptionally well to puzzle games, it is not universally applicable.
Fox, Toby. Undertale. Steam, 15 Sept. 2015, store.steampowered.com/app/391540/Undertale/. Accessed 19 Feb. 2024.
Fullerton, Tracy. Game Design Workshop: A Playcentric Approach to Creating Innovative Games. 4th ed., Taylor and Francis Group, 2018.
Geller, Jacob. "Games That Aren't Games." YouTube, 9 June 2023, www.youtube.com/watch?v=DliX_YFiSX4&t=1639s. Accessed 18 Feb. 2024.
In this video essay, Geller discusses LSD Dream Emulator, Slave of God, Mountain, and Monuments to Guilt, all of which afford the player no explicit goals and no way to interact with the world. Through a thorough analysis of these works, he shows that their lack of interactivity is a tool in their artistic arsenal. Geller cleverly identifies that these so-called games use that label to set the player's expectations, and subvert those expectations to create their desired experiences.
Green, Amy. Storytelling in Video Games: The Art of Digital Narratives. McFarland, 2018.
Millard, Adam. "Why Wildermyth's Best Story Wasn't Written by Anyone." YouTube, 11 July 2021, www.youtube.com/watch?v=VxL7GsKE_Bs. Accessed 21 Feb. 2024.
In this video essay, Millard discusses the notion of "permanence" – the degree to which a player's actions have lasting consequences. He argues that permanence gives games a greater sense of consequence and connectivity, leading to improved emergent storytelling. He discusses Wildermyth at length, demonstrating how it reincorporates narrative events from players' past sessions. Millard astutely observes that these stories were not exactly written by anyone, but rather grew out of the game's systems.
Myers, David. Games Are Not: The Difficult and Definitive Guide to What Video Games Are. Manchester UP, 2017.
This book is a series of essays, most of which make arguments about the nature of games. One repeated topic is the paradox between a player's desire to win and their willingness to abide by arbitrary rules. Myers also identifies ways in which player interaction distorts the artistic intent of game designers. Furthermore, he argues that audiences have distinct "lusory" and "narrativity" modes which dilute narrative experiences in games. Myers pulls on semiotics and narratology to justify his arguments, which makes his reasoning feel detached from the reality of game design.
Olson, Dan. "Ludonarrative Dissonance." YouTube, 19 July 2017, www.youtube.com/watch?v=04zaTjuV60A. Accessed 18 Feb. 2024.
Olson begins with a careful explanation of ludonarrative dissonance. He describes the origin of the term (a 2007 article by Clint Hocking), as well as discourse surrounding its usefulness. Olson deftly defends the term, arguing that games, much like works in other mediums, succeed the most when all their components work in harmony.
---. "The Morality of Shadow of the Colossus." YouTube, 27 Feb. 2017, www.youtube.com/watch?v=jhJ_qTU61g4. Accessed 18 Feb. 2024.
---. "The Stanley Parable, Dark Souls, and Intended Play." YouTube, 26 July 2017, www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZHmivGmkjJw. Accessed 18 Feb. 2024.
In this video, Olson explores disobedience in video games. He discusses The Stanley Parable and Dark Souls, games in which the player can choose to disobey commands. Olson prudently identifies that, although the player may feel like a misfit, these opportunities for defiance are authored by the games' designers. Olson points out that a player's behavior is only truly unintended if the game does not react to it at all.
Playdead. Inside. Steam, 7 July 2016, store.steampowered.com/app/304430/INSIDE/. Accessed 21 Feb. 2024.
Remo, Chris. Interactive Story without Challenge Mechanics: The Design of Firewatch. Game Developers Conference, 2019, San Francisco. YouTube, 23 Mar. 2021, www.youtube.com/watch?v=RVFyRV43Ei8&t=1755s. Accessed 19 Feb. 2024. Conference session.
Remo, a game designer on Firewatch, discusses the philosophies they used to create an engaging narrative experience without typical action or puzzle gameplay. Remo argues that so-called "challenge elements" can detract from the intimacy and intensity of a game's narrative. He explains the design choices that kept the game engaging in lieu of conventional gameplay. Although Firewatch's content was entirely hand-authored, Remo claims that the team's systemic way of thinking made it feel like a deep and interconnected video game.
Romero, Brenda. Are Games Art? TEDxGalway, 2016, Galway. YouTube, 16 Feb. 2016, www.youtube.com/watch?v=L5sBdR4-GGM. Accessed 19 Feb. 2024.
Schell, Jesse. The Nature of Order in Game Narrative. Game Developers Conference, 2018, San Francisco. YouTube, 4 Dec. 2018, www.youtube.com/watch?v=E-qnXNUSUMA. Accessed 18 Feb. 2024. Conference workshop.
In this talk delivered at the Game Developers Conference, Schell discusses the work of architect Christopher Alexander. He focuses on Alexander's notion of "the quality that has no name," which describes places that simply feel right. Schell covers the fifteen properties that Alexander used to describe such places, and applies each to the realm of game design. Alexander's work is fascinating, and Schell effectively shows how it can apply to all mediums, including video games.
Tarsier Studios. Little Nightmares. Steam, 27 Apr. 2017, store.steampowered.com/app/424840/Little_Nightmares/. Accessed 19 Feb. 2024.
Thabet, Tamer. Video Game Narrative and Criticism. Palgrave Macmillan, 2015.
Thabet brings an academic perspective to the topic of video game narratives. In particular, he is interested in the "narrator," which is a key element in written fiction and cinema. He argues that a video game is narrated simultaneously by the game world and the player, since both have an impact on the game's tone and message. He uses that viewpoint to argue that designers have a limited authorial voice within their own games. Unfortunately, Thabet fails to rationalize his arguments with evidence from real video games, so his arguments aren't terribly compelling.
Part 2
A couple of weeks ago, I was sitting around with a friend of mine, when I went on a bit of a rant about two of my favorite games: Uncharted 4 and Minecraft. I posed an unusual question: which game tells a better story? The straightforward pick is Uncharted 4, which has a phenomenal script that takes the player for a solid action-adventure ride. Let's call that a framed story, since it was set in stone before the player ever picked up the controller. Minecraft, on the other hand, lacks a conventional story. Despite this, it is the perfect stage for the player to go on their own wholly unique adventures – let's call these emergent stories. My friend and I decided that this was a worthless comparison, since both games produce independently great stories. Yet, I wasn't quite satisfied. I wanted to more clearly understand the nuances of framed and emergent stories, and I wanted to explore the massive gray area between them.
As I searched for literature on this subject, I ran into Extra Lives by Tom Bissell. Throughout this book, Bissell recounts many powerful experiences he has had while playing games. He writes about the weeks that he spent exploring the nuclear wasteland of Fallout 3 and the nights he spent fighting off zombie hordes in Left 4 Dead. These stories occurred within gameplay, and yet they were compelling enough to fill chapters of Bissell's book. Despite the love Bissell shows for games, he constantly berates their writing. As a writer himself, Bissell is embarrassed by the childlike subjects and incompetent quality of most writing in games. In other words, Bissell hates framed stories and absolutely loves emergent stories.
Bissell's thoughts are reinforced by the troves of literature on "ludonarrative dissonance" – the discrepancy between a game's interactive systems and its framed story. For example, in Uncharted 4, the protagonist is a charismatic adventurer with marital problems. Yet, the gameplay is about shooting bad guys with a machine gun. Ludonarrative dissonance describes the gap between those two parts of the game. Under this lens, all games have both a framed narrative and an emergent narrative. The designer can de-emphasize one of these stories, but they can also put them in concert with one another.
Emergent stories have plenty of issues on their own. Tamer Thabet and David Myers argue that a player's agency over a story degrades the authorial mark of the designer. That's a huge problem for the best emergent stories, which often strive to give the player as much control as possible. Jonathan Blow, one of my favorite game designers, claims that emergent stories cannot rival other forms of fiction. After all, he argues, great writers have incredible foresight and control over the stories they create, which simply cannot be mimicked by a dynamic game system.
I also delved into the gray area between framed and emergent stories. In particular, I thought about so-called "walking simulators," such as Abzǔ, Inside, and Little Nightmares. These games don't provide remotely enough freedom to generate a compelling emergent story. At the same time, they forgo any written dialogue that would constitute the usual framed narrative. Instead, they use their environments and scenarios to create a purely impressionistic experience. As I did my research, I formed a theory about these walking simulators: they are framed stories disguised as emergent stories. These stories were set in stone during the game's development, just like any other framed story. However, these games go to great pains to make the player feel like they're always in control. As a result, they capture some of the feeling of an emergent story while maintaining the authorial control of a framed story.
In my next paper, I'd like to further explore these different kinds of stories. I have a lot to say about their strengths and weaknesses, and I can imagine countless genres and subgenres that combine them in unique ways. I imagine this analysis would be useful to many game designers who would want to think more clearly about the way their game can produce stories. To that end, I'd like to write an opinion article targeted at my fellow game designers. I intend to use images and videos to help explain the games that I discuss. After all, games are intensely visual, and it feels wrong compressing them into little tidbits of prose. Most importantly, the casual setting of an article will allow me to express my opinions in the first person, hopefully enabling a swift and useful analysis of many titles.