Super Nerd Sundays Presents: Keeping It Rolling!

Good books, good movies, good poems, and good games all have something in common: they’re all well paced. Not to say that the only good works are fast paced non-stop action rides. It’s just that good stories tend to be aware of how they function as works of art, of their own movement from idea to idea and event to event. They’ve got a sense of pacing and moreover a sense of flow. Events come to a natural conclusion not because the story must end, but because that’s where the book was heading. To use a grasping analogy it’s the river’s delta to the canal’s lock. Their narratives just move.

It’s an ethereal quality, one difficult to lock down. The non-literary example I’d like to use is Daft Punk. Daft Punk’s songs, in their own way, have beautiful stories, but they almost totally lack lyrics. Instead they form quaint sonic narratives, moving fluidly from theme to theme until they stop. When something suddenly stops it does so for a reason which makes sense within the context of the song, and you’re never left feeling like the music you just listened to was cobbled together haphazardly at the last minute.

In the same way, games don’t necessarily rely on good writing to tell good stories, nor do books or films. These things help by merit of normally accompanying good flow and emerging as the product of a talented writer or writers but they don’t form the foundation of a great story. This remains rooted in a story’s ability to engage its readers, usually through its internal motion.

The example I’d give here is Assassin’s Creed. That game had, for the most part, atrocious writing. The dialogue seemed forced and arbitrary, characters moods and tones would shift inexplicably over the course of conversations. And the game had problems with how it told its story, but these didn’t emerge directly from its writing. They emerged from the mechanism used to convey this writing, the mechanism which broke the game’s flow.

We’re conditioned to expect shitty writing in games. We welcome it with open arms, giggling at or along with the oft unnamed writers. As a result people who play games, much like people who critique paintings or music, are accustomed to finding their own narrative contained within their experience. The artistry of a game emerges not from the writing of it necessarily (which can be a huge plus, of course) but through the course of play.

Assassin’s Creed was great for the moments where it allowed me to run uninterrupted across medieval rooftops, the way it engrossed me and made me look at buildings with an eye for theoretical hand and foot holds. In these moments the true story and message of Assassin’s Creed emerge: you can be free, if only briefly and with great effort on your part. And there is beauty in that freedom, purpose in it, and it is worth fighting and enduring in order to experience more. The message is undermined, however, by the game’s writing.

Each time you stab someone important in the neck fatally, the Assassin’s Creed equivalent of a quick shalom, you’re treated to a painful discussion about the nature of evil plots, man, god, free will, and a laundry list of other topics better left to the subtext of the beautifully rendered cities and invigorating roof running. This dialogue frames the experience and gives it context, but the content is what makes the game shine, and the dialogue, or rather its coitus interruptus delivery method, fights the content tooth and nail. But in the end it can't win, or at least it couldn't for me.

With its relaxed and laissez faire approach to game flow, Assassin’s Creed gives players more of a narrative playground than a true sandbox. There are relatively few things to see and do in the world of Assassin’s Creed, but there are so many ways to do them at so many different paces that it’s hard not to fall in love with the simple act of motion and construct your own story with these tools.

Of course, this focus on motion isn’t a sure fire thing. Look at Mirror’s Edge, a game which failed on nearly every level while trying to borrow heavily from the lessons which Assassin’s Creed taught. With painfully linear “free” running, Mirror’s Edge was more an exercise in frustration than anything else. The game stops and starts with noticeable clunks and while movement in Mirror’s Edge can be incredibly fun the erratic and completely inexplicable context of the motion ruins the entire experience.

Every three or four minutes we are once again treated to a flow-breaking, immersion breaking experience, but unlike Assassin’s Creed’s soliloquies, which reinforce the idea that you are pinned by both the narrative and the framing technique presented by the game and must escape them, Mirror’s Edge’s breaks are there to show us about our own desire for rebellion, to show us how cool or tough our character is.

And they inevitably fail at this purpose. All they do is show us how we’re a slave, not only to the story in this case but to the varied and numerous clichés of video games. Arbitrary, poorly explained betrayal that makes no sense in the context of the story? Check! Random villain who appears as a final boss? Check! Unresolved plot points? Big check!

Mirror’s Edge could be forgiven, perhaps, if the game play didn’t cripple itself by guiding us slavishly down a predetermined path. It could be forgiven if its touted focus on velocity was maintained and applied in interesting original ways. But it doesn’t execute on either of these promises. The generic setting, the personality-less protagonist; these tropes could’ve been used far more effectively, and the innovation the game sought to bring to bear failed thoroughly because they were not. Mirror’s Edge has accomplished one important thing, however, in showing us just how bad a game can be when you set out with a vision and stick to it blindly.

On the other side of the not-so-awful spectrum, we have Mass Effect. Mass Effect had excellent writing, and lots of it. Overwhelming amounts of it, actually. The characters were rendered in such loving detail, the world so carefully considered. And so much of the story was left up to the players.

Bioware did an astounding job of giving the player some real say in just how the game ended. Sure, their moral choices were still fairly black and white (although, to be fair, more gray than they were in the better received Knights of the Old Republic games) but the characters and creatures were fresh, the world was original and the story was well crafted and well told.

But there were also some serious problems in how the game played. Beyond the crippling technical issues assailing anyone who played on a console, ranging from un-rendered character models to random crashes during regular play, the game also has no idea of how to pace itself. It moves from a nice, even segment introducing you to the game world and game play concepts to an absurdly large open world, a literal galaxy of places to explore, all of them worthwhile and containing their own stories, all of them requiring a flow breaking set of activities to reach them that cater more to people with OCD than people who want to be immersed in new world.

Bioware took an amazing story and made experiencing it a chore. Rather than embracing their medium they seemed to hold it arm’s length, losing themselves in loading screens and map locations. Maybe I’m being unfair to them, though. Perhaps some of the blame belongs with the Unreal Engine which, while commendably diverse, is also exceptionally glitchy and mediocre at conveying certain types of game play.

In the end the game engine in Mass Effect along with its lack of any sense of flow or pacing took what could’ve been one of the best games I’d ever played and knocked it down to a very good game with some very serious problems.

So, what, then is the ideal balance between writing and flow? Does one exist? Can you read the writing on your cake and eat it too, to make another terrible analogy? I’d say yes. And I’d like to direct anyone still reading to the Prince of Persia series.

Specifically Prince of Persia: Sands of Time. While the current franchise iteration has interesting ideas about game flow and some middling writing, which seems like gold after playing Mirror’s Edge, it actually suffers from the same problem as Mass Effect; too much world too soon, not enough direction.

The original Prince of Persia reboot (can I legally write that? It feels wrong) didn’t have this problem though. While the game did have a few flaws, such as its infamously repetitive combat system, it did almost everything it set out to do incredibly well.

Sure, it was a linear game, but it was a carefully crafted linear game that gave you just enough hints to make you feel like you were figuring it out for yourself as it lead you by the hand. Anyhow, linearity isn’t all bad. It allows people to expertly craft and pace experiences that resonate with players.

And while it was a relatively short game (I’ve played through the entire thing in around two hours, although it can reasonably take up to 10 if you’re a normal person and haven’t committed every single puzzle to memory) its brevity is a strength here. It doesn’t try to lengthen itself, or draw out its narrative. It delvers its payload and gets out, allowing players to digest its quaint love story.

And the narrative has some excellent teeth. It’s lean, largely devoid of the excessive detail and context which all too often plague writing in games. In their place is a rich, strangely familiar world populated with intriguing and relatable characters, established largely through visual cues and brief snips of snarky dialogue. The Prince is an immense dick, but he’s the kind of dick we can relate to, and he grows on us. His dickishness is just a defense mechanism, and you’d have to have a heart of stone not to feel for him when it finally collapses at the end of the game and we see his heart laid bare. Hell, I love him so much I like to pretend the second and third games never happened.

This strength of character and minimalist writing could’ve made Prince of Persia an excellent game by their lonesome but what really pushed it from being greatness into immortality was its pacing. Experience flow in to one another and combine to make one great big tableau of play. And there’s a reason I eventually got my exploit-free time on this game down to around two hours: this play is incredible and never really loses its edge.

Your character’s natural, unrestricted flow, completely unenforced but at the same time encouraged, is something few games have managed to duplicate. Despite a strict linearity Prince of Persia never feels like it’s stuck on a rail. Instead it makes me feel the way I do when I’m reading a good book, like I’m losing myself in its words, or in this case the game play. The mechanism by which the story is told is so well utilized that it becomes a part of the story, part of its grace.

Even the combat, plodding and methodical as it is, didn’t damage this flow for me. Instead grinned and bore it and just kept playing more and more until the game was over and I found myself wanting to start anew to see how close to 100% completion I could get this time.

It’s this twining of great writing and character development with highly refined well thought out game play that makes Prince of Persia a game which I’d, with some trepidation, call the greatest game of the last ten years. Any segment of it can be taken apart, carefully considered, and investigated as an element of what can make a game great. And then, better yet, it can be reinserted into the game’s context without losing any of its pizazz.

Sure, there have been other games that match PoP’s amazing synergy of mean, lean storytelling and just-right play. Half-Life 2 and Portal come immediately to mind, even if their game play models can get a little repetitive. And Bioshock did a pretty nifty job itself, even if it sometimes slowed down. Call of Duty 4 did the same, even if it was character light and had more in common with summer blockbusters than modernist fiction, unlike the other titles mentioned here.

But Prince of Persia remains a shining example of how flow can work on every level of a game’s design, and create a wonderful, artist product that be deconstructed at any number of levels to be better understood or, if you’re not a pretentious dick like me, just enjoyed. Because it’s a hell of a lot of fun, and it doesn’t cram its sass down your throat.