Super Nerd Sundays Presents: Left4Dead 2 and Narrative in Games!

Lately I’ve been shying away from the reason I began Super Nerd Sundays, from writing about narrative in games. Partly it’s the fault of the games I’ve been playing. Most of them, aside from X-Com, have had pretty conventional narratives, narratives ill suited to video games. Modern Warfare 2 would’ve been a better movie (and indeed may have been more coherent if it had been) and Borderlands, for all the things it does right, tells a story that illuminates everything wrong with the way games are written and executed. The only interesting game I’ve played recently was Dragon Age, and even with the amazing things Dragon Age did with character and choice it ran on incredibly rigid rails. It meshed the strengths of video games with the strengths of other narrative mediums to great effect, but it didn’t really do what games like Far Cry 2 and Bioshock did: it didn’t tell a story which could only function in the context of a video game.

Lately, while working my way through the remarkable slough of quality sequels I wrote about last week, I’ve stumbled on a game which tells a story as only a game could. It is, surprise surprise, Left4Dead 2.

Very little in the formula that made Left4Dead such a great medium for interactive storytelling has changed in Left4Dead 2. In fact it’s all almost identical. But the fan service Left4Dead 2 offers up is a collective set of references near and gamers can immediately tap into. The AK-47, the chainsaw, these are symbols of games and zombie media respectively. The image of their combination is capable of evoking an entire evolving narrative of the history of both shooter games and zombie films, and their ability to elicit this response is a huge part of what makes Left4Dead 2 so successful at telling a story.

I should mention that I’m not claming the overarching story of Left4Dead 2, the tale of survivors who are rescued again and again only to find themselves forced back into the zombie-filled wastes of civilization, is one of the greatest stories ever told. Instead the moment to moment narrative of Left4Dead 2, its combination of up close and personal, panic driven combat and cool, collected, distant combat, the teamwork and the rivalry over supplies which emerges as part of playing the game, is fantastic. It’s fantastic because it is perennial, even when it is all too familiar, fresh and new even when we’ve played through it a dozen times before.

The sort of collective storytelling it nigh enforces is key to telling stories within games, themselves nakedly collaborative efforts of dozens of people who spend years locked in windowless rooms, designing games. It illuminates a tacit collaboration present in every game between developer and player, a knowing nod that the player is indeed a part of telling the story, even when they are receiving information passively from cutscenes or text files. It is the collaboration between readers and authors taken to its reasonable conclusion, the interpretation of language and information and the synthesis of these disparate elements into a story which can utilize and even rely on the reader’s ability to interpret that story’s elements.

I’ll try to slow that down with an example. In Joyce’s Ulysses language is purposefully obtuse, so much so that sections of the book become largely incoherent when taken on their own. However readers can interpret that language, synthesize it with information taken from outside of the text, from both historical knowledge and personal knowledge, and generate a coherent narrative from these disparate elements. The end result is that no two readers really have the same interpretation of the book, even if certain elements of general consensus can be reached. It’s one of the more interesting ways of looking at storytelling in a post-modern world, and video games rely on it all the time, a fact critics are usually all too happy to ignore.

A developer places a crate in the beginning of the level. They expect me to smash that crate for the supplies within. But I’m a crowbar enthusiast – I don’t need supplies. Ergo I ignore the crate, moving on. The developer places debris in my path, expecting me to use my beloved crowbar to smash it. Instead I find a hole in the debris and slip through it. The story the developers are attempting to tell is interpreted by me and synthesized with my own experiences into a cohesive, interpreted narrative.

All books, and indeed all games, rely on this collaboration to one extent or another. Games like Left4Dead embrace it wholeheartedly with their spare writing and dialogue inserted in based on context. Games like Left4Dead 2 try to refine that admission by adding in more of the shorthand language used to tell the story. By giving us new elements like melee weapons, adrenaline shots and defibrillator paddles, they give us new elements which establish both the world and our own narrative in greater detail. These new tools allow us to tell a new story by interpreting both the actions and back stories of characters and take them through new devastated stretches of landscape.

The story of me slicing that jockey’s head off so that he lets go of my friend, his twitching form coming to rest on the ground, is a part of the story of our friendship and our survival against impossible odds. The moment I watch him buried under waves of zombies as I yell for him to jump on the boat is the tragic end to our friendship, to his journey.

His reappearance next level is a quantum event, of course, too complicated to explain here.

All of these set pieces are traditionally laid out to happen before hand, scripted by developers so that we are forced to see them. But Left4Dead2 instead simply gives players the tools to generate these scenarios on their own through play. It is the ultimate example of trust to give players such power over narrative, and the response to this trust by the community at large is quite telling.

The manner in which people either embrace or reject the nakedly collaborative storytelling effort of Left4Dead illuminates their own level of comfort with the stories that permeate the games they play. The fact that people might call it story light is a misnomer – we as gamers, in the same fashion as readers, are largely slow creatures who need our hands held. When our hands are not held we complain, since we are forced to think and act on our own, and many people complain that these things are “bad” when what they mean is “difficult” or “requiring personal investment.” We then assign them a label based on our experience with them and our willingness to meet them halfway. Gravity’s Rainbow, for example, requires more of me than I am comfortable giving. It wants me to understand things about life in World War II and things about human psychology, sexuality and history that just don’t interest me. It isn’t made for me. In that sense it is a bad book. Left4Dead 2, however, wants me to invest myself in the fiction of zombies. It wants me to do so in a way which observes the entirety of zombie narrative and synthesizes it into a collaborative story which requires me to place myself in a character’s situation just as much as Gravity’s Rainbow does. However, since I am interested in zombie apocalypses and not interested in the psychosexual implications of the V2 rocket Left4Dead 2 is an amazing game.

This article could very easily have been about the first Left4Dead, and perhaps it is to some extent. But what Left4Dead 2 does with its collective fiction, the way it attempts to design a more collected narrative and the elements of the zombie-torn world at large that it illustrates all come together to make it a game all its own. Left4Dead 2 goes beyond showing us what it means to be the last group of people on the planet – it demands that we consider what would happen if we were but a handful left over in an incredibly dangerous place battling against all odds only to be thwarted by the people we believed would rescue us.

The military’s bombing runs, their interest in immune individuals and the furtive nature of life survivors in Left4Dead 2’s world enjoy all speak volumes about what society has become. Because it is very much present in the game and its varied set pieces in a way that it wasn’t in Left4Dead. It moves past Left4Dead’s focus on bare bones survival and introduces the impression that society itself has become a greater threat than the zombies, a key part of any zombie horror story.

It is far from totally present, but the military bombing, the knowledge that certain people were in fact evacuated and the infrastructure and personality of each place in Left4Dead 2’s newly abandoned world recognizes the presence and danger of humanity in a way that Left4Dead did not. The chained up tank corpse in the swamp village is less a symbol of defiance against a horrible enemy and more a grim statement about the violence of the players. This is what we are capable of. This is why we fear Versus more than Expert. This is why you should worry about what you’ll find in the manor house.

Its this use of shorthand, the fact that these interpretations can be drawn from the game and completely dismissed by other players, that makes Left4Dead 2 such a great benchmark for storytelling in games. Because no other medium can really support this sort of diverse narrative interpretation. Books can become bogged down when they grow too obtuse (Donald Bartholme’s The Dead Father comes to mind) but games can be as weird as they like and we’ll keep playing if we enjoy the way they involve us. Games like Left4Dead 2 realize this power and do their best to make more people see it and accept it. Here’s hoping 2010 has some more titles that give us the same sort of opportunities.