Super Nerd Sundays Presents: Building a Mystery!

I’m a book nerd as well as a video game nerd, in case this website hasn’t given it away. I like stories, and I like mediums that allow for them to be told. I like to think about stories a lot. I like the way stories reflect their medium, the way they progress and flow, and the way they’re constructed. What I’m getting at is that I spend a lot of time reading and I spend a lot of time thinking about how the stories, in general, work.

Mysteries are specifically interesting in this context. During the 1920s, when the hard-boiled genre of mysteries began to emerge, they took on some pretty well known characteristics. Saturation with imminent sex and danger, compared to older books and stories, was certainly a part of that. But what’s always interested me more was the importance they placed, as a genre, on movement through various locales.

See, Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett, two key figures in the burgeoning hard genre of hard boiled mysteries, also focused heavily on the way their characters could move between spaces, through both hostile and friendly environments, and interact with them in different ways. The way they could fluidly move through these various physical and social locations is what made them exceptional in the context of the story – they could survive anywhere.

Hammett’s Sam Spade and The Op could use their knowledge of and talent for violence to solve nearly any problem, regardless of their location. By being an unflappable paragon of manhood they could deal with whatever came their way.

But Chandler’s protagonists, specifically Phillip Marlowe, were a little different. Chandler’s characters could act in a fashion appropriate to whatever situation they were in. They didn’t survive by relying on violence (although they certainly never shied away from it; Marlowe racks up an impressive body count, if nowhere near as impressive as The Op’s) but instead by being able to adapt to places, to move through them and take what they needed away in order to complete their mission.

This should sound pretty familiar to anyone who plays a lot of video games. Certain styles of play are largely defined by this sort of movement. Think about first person shooters, for example. In a first person shooter you, by nature, move from locale to locale, usually doling out violence with great efficiency and glee, until you move on to the next way station on your bloody road, confident that you’re heading towards the proper conclusion of the story.

I’d be interested to see what Hammett would think of first person shooters. I doubt he’d like them, but they’re illustrative of the same sort of theme and storytelling he brought to his stories. The acumen required of players is almost always the ability to kill and avoid being killed. Occasionally you’ll have to assess situations in order to best acquire supplies and, sometimes, you might have to figure out who doesn’t need to be killed.

This is, of course, only at the most basic level of the genre, but still, it does bear a striking resemblance to, oh say the way that The Op solves the troubles in Corkscrew. He fights effectively and determines who needs to be fought effectively. He also proves he’s manly and tough in there. My point is that most of what I’ve said above to could applied equally well to Painkiller and Hammett’s stories.

Of course, Hammett’s stories are kind of dull as far as mysteries go. Not in terms of action, they’re great there. But when they’re done the stories don’t tend to leave you with a whole lot. Sometimes there will be a vaguely racist message, or a statement about what it means to be a man, but it is rarely resonant. What’s more interesting is when a story break this mold and offers alternative solutions and ideas. Enter Chandler, Walter Mosley, James Crumley, and plenty of others since. And, in the video games corner enter the more complicated FPSes, the RPGs and the action/adventure games.

Most of these games, when reduced to their component parts, consist of moving from location to location solving small problems in order to solve a bigger problem. In Far Cry 2 these problems vary vastly, as do the solutions. There is a briefcase in a village. How do you get it? You can sneak up and grab it, then stealth off into the night. Or you can murder everyone in the village and walk right up, soaked in blood, and grab it. Hell, maybe you’ll pull of some sort of crazy driving stunt and grab it that way, then toss a Molotov to cover your tail and take off.

The point is that you are interacting, briefly, with this place in the context of this objective. And the way you do so reflects on your character, on the story that is being made with your character at its heart. Similar statements can be made about action/adventure games. Your approach to tasks in Assassin’s Creed reflects on you and the legend you’re carving out for Altair in the same way. And, just to hammer the parallels home, Assassin’s Creed is at times all about blending in to social situations and hiding in plain sight. The game won’t shut up about it until you’ve almost beaten the god damn thing.

Then there are puzzle games. World of Goo centers on moving from set to set, then understanding the rules and context of each puzzle in these sets. World of Goo demands that you adapt to your surroundings, understand them and the rules that operate them and then figure out how to use or exploit these rules to solve your problem. This is going to make me sound like a bit of a douchebag, but I think Raymond Chandler would really like World of Goo.

And of course, RPGs are detective stories taken to the highest possible level. In RPGs you have to move from place to place in order to progress as a character and progress the story, and you very rarely look back. You usually strip mine your environment for everything useful, in most cases anything that isn't nailed down, you learn how to deal with whatever problems are facing the place you’re in, and as a result you move closer to the end game.

There are certainly exceptions, but even in Fallout 3, what is debatably the broadest and most progressive treatment of the genre, you are moving from place to place, discovering what the problems that trouble these places are and how best to solve them so that you can grow, understand the world around you and better prepare yourself for the violence pervading the world you live in.

So it’s fair to say that games, in their present state, borrow heavily from the tropes of mystery novels, intentionally or unintentionally, and rightly so. They’re great templates for telling stories and they present a really engaging format for telling stories. They’re also incredibly versatile. Compare Farewell My Lovely and Mumbo Jumbo just to see how versatile mystery can be as a genre, then compare Final Fantasy VII and Fallout 3 for proof of the same in videogames.

But why does this relationship matter? Why should anyone care that video games use the same topos of story as mysteries? I mean most of them are already mysteries in one way or another. Why should people look at video games with an eye towards classic mysteries? Why should they think about what they have in common with a genre frequently referred to as a subset of “shit lit” until recently?

Well, perceptive readers, for one thing it matters because it allows us to reconsider how stories are told in these games and what progression in a story means. Think about Half-Life 2 for a moment. The game itself is pretty linear and easily falls into a Hammett archetype, at least on its surface. But dig a little and you’ll find layer upon layer.

As you move through the game your ability to explore and interact with environments does more than offer you supplies, which are usually readily available anyway. It also gives you a better understanding of the world around you. It makes you more away of the people you’re fighting with, against, and the rules that govern this world. And the Half-Life series is famous for including environmental puzzles, which often involve no violence at all. Portal is sort of the embodiment of this framing technique, where exploring the world, understanding your whereabouts and considering your interactions with them add depth to the experience. Well done, Half-Life 2 and all its whack-ass children, for moving the genre forward.

And that’s the second reason I’m writing this thing. By looking at games in this light and considering them in the same fashion we consider books and films we elevate games as medium. We treat them like grown-ups and, as a result, what they say becomes a lot more interesting, and they have more of it to say.

The quality of discourse improves and even something aggressively bad or childish can be interesting, edifying and/or engaging when we look at it with the same attentiveness we’d bring to other mediums. Painkiller goes from being an exercise in our kill muscles to being a commentary on how games function when they are distilled to their lowest common denominators when we hold it under a microscope. It might not be pretty, but it is interesting to consider.

And the final reason I’m writing this? Because story structure in inherently interesting to me, and doubly so in an interactive medium. So the next time you find yourself in the burned out streets of a new city fighting off a screaming horde of whatevers or solving a puzzle using a gun that makes pizza and cats just remember: the solutions you find to your problems are always products of the environments you move through. And the way these make you feel, the way you assess them, doesn't just reflect on the game. It reflects on you as a player.