Super Nerd Sundays Presents: Upside Down Story World!

It’s ironic, I guess, if you misuse the term irony: I’ve been going to Star Wars: The Old Republic for my daily dose of digital storytelling of late, and I’ve been leaning heavily towards single player narrative experiences to get away from coherent and structured storytelling. It’s a backwards world, but it’s the one that SWTOR has essentially built for me, with its impressively intricate set of plots, all of them interlocking in a grand series of late-game flashpoints that, to be understood, require an impressive level of investigation and investment on the part of players.

But it’s the way games are functioning as texts now: they’re reflexive creations that insist on a collective or collaborative construction of meaning. So what does it say about me that I’m mostly just returning to old games, to games I played long ago, and re-considering my approach to stories long since experienced?

It means the experience of the game is sometimes much, much more important than the narrative itself.

Red Faction: Guerilla is possibly the best example of this ever. I mean EVER. When I first encountered the game I decided that it’d be best to write about it at length in a series of time-lapse style fake journals that endeavored to capture the total irrelevance of the plot while expressing the fucking amazing experience of tearing down every single god damn structure in the game itself. I spent most of the journal lamenting the game’s writing and expounding on its play, even (especially) when it was at its most frustrating. The focus was on the experience, because, fuck, Red Faction: Guerilla just doesn’t work any other way. And the designers knew it: the story bits are occasional, tongue in cheek, and they’re over quickly. They’re just bits of dialogue and cutscenes that rapidly contextualize the next destructo-puzzle that the game wants you to work your way through.

It’s the rare title that realizes just how central game play is to the experience of a game, and how story can stand in the way of the game itself, and Red Faction: Guerilla’s deft utilize of framing is right on par with Far Cry 2: it sets up the action and gets out of the way as fast as it can, and it’s much, much better for it. Compare Red Faction: Guerilla’s deft dancing in and out of story (and its wonderfully open, break-able world) to Red Faction: Armageddon. The same gameplay and mechanics paired with a totally different approach resulted in a very, very different, and I’d contend considerably shittier, game. Armageddon is, at best, a game where fun things sometimes happen by accident and, at worst, a muddled design document of how to adapt an open world game into a corridor shooter. I lean towards the latter myself: Armageddon was all about imposing context, while Guerilla simply gave players ample opportunity to explore their own destructive tendencies.

I’m not trying to say that a compelling narrative isn’t good, or that it isn’t a viable way to make a game interesting or engaging. There are plenty of games that use narrative to great effect. In fact, the shared narrative that The Old Republic uses to guide players through its areas is possibly one of the best that I’ve encountered. It’s a story that encourages storytelling between players, inviting passive and active collaboration in its very construction. I mean, players vote on how flashpoints, some of the central storytelling modules in the game, unfold. And then players whine at each other following each unfolding moment. They bitch and moan and find common ground and move on. But even in this instance, the story is part of a bigger experience, not just something left on its own: it’s a means by which players are invited to participate in their world, not a means by which the world is structured and limited.

What prompted this, really prompted this, is that in my old school gaming haze I picked up a copy of Legend of Grimrock, a delightfully old school RPG that has absolutely zero fucking story. You’re literally shoved into a pit by some dudes in an introductory cutscene and that’s it. From then on it’s all dungeon wandering and monster killing. There’s absolutely nothing driving it. There aren’t even any characters in the dungeon, or currency, or anything. It’s just a bunch of enemies, some scattered resources, and your party, constantly advancing in power.

It’s actually more stripped down than the games that inspired it (such as the venerable, and even more punishing, Eye of the Beholder, which intellectually battered me on Super Nintendo when I was just a boy) and it’s better for it. There’s no bullshit plot, no characters to uncover. Just dungeon to explore and monsters to beat on and sweet sweet loot to collect. It is dungeon crawler gameplay with marvelous aesthetic attached, boiled down to its barest and most delightful essentials. Sure, there’s a bullshit framing tale attached, but it’s primarily a means of providing players hints to especially annoying puzzles, puzzles even the sunniest, most forgiving player in the world would at best refer to as vague.

There’s a lot to be said for removing any but the barest of necessary narrative from games, and I get the irony of someone who writes stories most of the time saying that. But damnit, it’s true. Games aren’t like other storytelling mediums: they don’t need to tell a tale or evoke a specific set of emotions, they just need to provide players with a framework by which to generate their own experiences. Sometimes, this can be a tightly formed framework that does the job deftly and guides players through a closed environment to great effect, developing a conventional narrative that utilizes play as its mode of advancing the story, simultaneously conveying information and engaging the player as it all comes together. That’s pretty awesome. Sometimes this can be a framework designed around a principle of social interaction and collective storytelling and engagement. That’s pretty cool too.

But what I’ve been coming back to again and again of late is that games often work best when they barely try at all, when they just give you a premise and let you run loose, deigning to insert the hand of a narrator into your play only when designers worry that players lack direction or might’ve missed something important. These are the games that I can sit down and lose myself in, the games that give me a chance to really knit myself into an experience. And while they’re rarely literary masterpieces they are, in truth, better than many better written games, simply because they have the good sense to shut up and let me play. Which is, more often than it probably should be, exactly what I want out of my games.