Super Nerd Sundays Presents: Framing Narratives Within Existing Continuities!

I recently finished the final act of The Wolf Among Us, a task that took, according to Steam, a mere 12 hours, which actually occupied roughly a year of my life.  This was my second engagement with Telltale's unique hybrid breed of puzzle-conversation gameplay/collaborative narrative development, and the emotional residue from my first engagement with that style of play, in Telltale's The Walking Dead, carried over in force to The Wolf Among Us, which is at least part of why I spent so much more time dreading what would come next in Wolf than I did actually playing it.  In that regard, it did not disappoint: the twists and turns of the final bars of the game were in equal turn satisfying and surprising, and the complex morality of the choices made both by me, through gruff cipher Bigby Wolf and other characters, most notably Nerissa (who may or may not actually be Nerissa) resonated in a way that few stories, let alone game-based stories, do for me nowadays.  While The Wolf Among Us was nowhere near as emotionally taxing for me as The Walking Dead, the stories it told, and the underlying ideas behind those stories, will stick with me for a while.  I'm still unpacking its interpretation of moral absolutism, and its distinctive illustration of how right and wrong can shift dramatically depending on perspective, and how personal morality functions.

But foremost in my mind is how The Wolf Among Us fits into the existing continuity of the Fables comic books, or perhaps, more to the point, how it manages to fit the continuity of the Fables series into the various potential paths that players can take during the game.  The Walking Dead video game manages to fit into the continuity of the comics by setting itself adjacent to the comics themselves, asking players to generate a story that occurs largely in parallel with the other, more familiar narrative that they've had some experience with already.  The Wolf Among Us, on the other hand, is asking players to re-author the history of two characters who already have a complex relationship that, over the course of the narrative frame they already "exist" in, evolves considerably into something quite different from what it begins as.  That this relationship is at the center of The Wolf Among Us is something of a risky choice, at least in the context of The Walking Dead game's relationship with its own fictional progenitor and related context.  After all, there are few nerd sub-groups more effusive and opinionated than comic book nerds, and Fables' internal continuity is already convoluted and fractured, not by authorship but by an evolution which has marked the progress of the series from conceptual framework to fully realized setting.

There are two major potential problems that come to mind with asking players to make significant narrative choices in a prequel attached to an established setting.  The first is that the choices the players will be asked to make may, by necessity, feel insignificant or forced, so as to prevent the narrative players are generating from conflicting with existing canon.  After all, the easiest way to keep players from breaking something is to bolt it down and keep them from messing with it at all.  Bigby can't kill Colin.  Whatever his relationship might be with Colin in your game, by the end of your time together the narrative demands that Colin survive to appear anew in the comics.  Which brings up the second major problem: that player choices conflict directly with the characters they engage within the comics, in explicit or subtextual ways.  The Bigby Wolf of The Wolf Among Us that I crafted was nowhere near the sort of master detective that the Bigby of the first issue of Fables was, and a Fables purist might take issue with such license, or the potential for such license to emerge in the first place.  They might, that is, if The Wolf Among Us didn't do quite such a clever job of working around that problem by selecting its setting so carefully.

See, while the world of Fables is elaborate and wrought, it presents a great deal of wiggle room for both its initial creators, and fan-creators like Telltale, allowing them to uncover new and previously unused mythological figures from fairy tales famed and obscure.  By establishing a pre-comics history spanning decades, or perhaps even centuries depending on the issue and who you ask, there's quite a bit of room for players to operate within an established history while simultaneously building in a buffer that permits characters ample time to adjust to or establish a supporting frame for the actions that occur in The Wolf Among Us.  By setting the game at a turning point in the history of Fabletown, one of many at best referenced in passing in the comics, The Wolf Among Us gives players a great deal of leeway for establishing their own narrative and making their own major choices (like how to resolve the game's climax) without necessarily undermining the future continuity in which these conflicts are not only resolved, but wholly eclipsed in importance by the invasion of the Fable Homeland, and the resolution thereof.  It even lets your actions become a sort of framework for the growth of your character in the future, as even actions and choices that conflict with or countermand the development of the Bigby Wolf seen in the Fables comics.  Your Bigby constitutes a sort of starting point for the Bigby that will appear in narratives to come.  My Bigby's bumbling, humiliating, bloody investigation might've prompted him to blossom into the master detective he would later become.

It's a clever set of narrative tricks, similar to the ones employed by Bioware when they created the Knights of the Old Republic series: players need to feel like they're having a meaningful impact on their world, but, at least in most cases, they don't want to dirty their hands dismantling the narrative framework of a setting they're inhabiting.  In theory, your player base probably loves that narrative framework.  So you're left trying to carve out a space for players to exist in the world of the characters they love without necessarily making them come into conflict with those very entities.  That Wolf does so with a setting far closer to its antecedent texts, and does so with a great deal more narrative choice featured than KOTOR ever did, is what makes it so impressive.

Telltale had already proven to me that they were worth trusting with complex, involved narratives that I wanted to be a part of.  They already showed me that in The Walking Dead.  Most players learned that in Sam and Max.  What they proved here is that they can contribute meaningfully to the history of the worlds they ask players to inhabit, and give players room to make those contributions as well, without destroying the continuity that follows them, indeed while reinforcing that continuity and permitting players to carve it into something simultaneously their own and not their own.  Telltale does more than merely fit their stories into the empty spaces in their narrative worlds: they carve out entirely new spaces, etching into the narratives we've seen already, making them more than they were, something we've had a hand in shaping, something that simultaneously accommodates and ignores the choices we made without making those choices feel insignificant.  If Barthes was alive, he'd likely be writing about this kind of storytelling now, and the manner in which it rewrites the relationship between reader and author.  In these new narrative frames the author is no longer the primary figure of importance, without losing any of the power they have held for generations already, nor is the reader still relegated to the passive reconceptualizer of the ideas the author posits that they have been since the dawn of narrative texts.  Instead their collaboration is something that expands the boundaries of texts beyond convention and time-frame, into a kind of experiential mélange that imbues texts with meaning expanding not only into future narratives, but into narratives that have already occurs, not merely by commenting on them, but by writing the history that surrounds them without altering their actions, recontextualizating texts without retconning them into oblivion.

I recently finished the final act of The Wolf Among Us, a task that took, according to Steam, a mere 12 hours, which actually occupied roughly a year of my life.  This was my second engagement with Telltale's unique hybrid breed of puzzle-conversation gameplay/collaborative narrative development, and the emotional residue from my first engagement with that style of play, in Telltale's The Walking Dead, carried over in force to The Wolf Among Us, which is at least part of why I spent so much more time dreading what would come next in Wolf than I did actually playing it.  In that regard, it did not disappoint: the twists and turns of the final bars of the game were in equal turn satisfying and surprising, and the complex morality of the choices made both by me, through gruff cipher Bigby Wolf and other characters, most notably Nerissa (who may or may not actually be Nerissa) resonated in a way that few stories, let alone game-based stories, do for me nowadays.  While The Wolf Among Us was nowhere near as emotionally taxing for me as The Walking Dead, the stories it told, and the underlying ideas behind those stories, will stick with me for a while.  I'm still unpacking its interpretation of moral absolutism, and its distinctive illustration of how right and wrong can shift dramatically depending on perspective, and how personal morality functions.

But foremost in my mind is how The Wolf Among Us fits into the existing continuity of the Fables comic books, or perhaps, more to the point, how it manages to fit the continuity of the Fables series into the various potential paths that players can take during the game.  The Walking Dead video game manages to fit into the continuity of the comics by setting itself adjacent to the comics themselves, asking players to generate a story that occurs largely in parallel with the other, more familiar narrative that they've had some experience with already.  The Wolf Among Us, on the other hand, is asking players to re-author the history of two characters who already have a complex relationship that, over the course of the narrative frame they already "exist" in, evolves considerably into something quite different from what it begins as.  That this relationship is at the center of The Wolf Among Us is something of a risky choice, at least in the context of The Walking Dead game's relationship with its own fictional progenitor and related context.  After all, there are few nerd sub-groups more effusive and opinionated than comic book nerds, and Fables' internal continuity is already convoluted and fractured, not by authorship but by an evolution which has marked the progress of the series from conceptual framework to fully realized setting.

There are two major potential problems that come to mind with asking players to make significant narrative choices in a prequel attached to an established setting.  The first is that the choices the players will be asked to make may, by necessity, feel insignificant or forced, so as to prevent the narrative players are generating from conflicting with existing canon.  After all, the easiest way to keep players from breaking something is to bolt it down and keep them from messing with it at all.  Bigby can't kill Colin.  Whatever his relationship might be with Colin in your game, by the end of your time together the narrative demands that Colin survive to appear anew in the comics.  Which brings up the second major problem: that player choices conflict directly with the characters they engage within the comics, in explicit or subtextual ways.  The Bigby Wolf of The Wolf Among Us that I crafted was nowhere near the sort of master detective that the Bigby of the first issue of Fables was, and a Fables purist might take issue with such license, or the potential for such license to emerge in the first place.  They might, that is, if The Wolf Among Us didn't do quite such a clever job of working around that problem by selecting its setting so carefully.

See, while the world of Fables is elaborate and wrought, it presents a great deal of wiggle room for both its initial creators, and fan-creators like Telltale, allowing them to uncover new and previously unused mythological figures from fairy tales famed and obscure.  By establishing a pre-comics history spanning decades, or perhaps even centuries depending on the issue and who you ask, there's quite a bit of room for players to operate within an established history while simultaneously building in a buffer that permits characters ample time to adjust to or establish a supporting frame for the actions that occur in The Wolf Among Us.  By setting the game at a turning point in the history of Fabletown, one of many at best referenced in passing in the comics, The Wolf Among Us gives players a great deal of leeway for establishing their own narrative and making their own major choices (like how to resolve the game's climax) without necessarily undermining the future continuity in which these conflicts are not only resolved, but wholly eclipsed in importance by the invasion of the Fable Homeland, and the resolution thereof.  It even lets your actions become a sort of framework for the growth of your character in the future, as even actions and choices that conflict with or countermand the development of the Bigby Wolf seen in the Fables comics.  Your Bigby constitutes a sort of starting point for the Bigby that will appear in narratives to come.  My Bigby's bumbling, humiliating, bloody investigation might've prompted him to blossom into the master detective he would later become.

It's a clever set of narrative tricks, similar to the ones employed by Bioware when they created the Knights of the Old Republic series: players need to feel like they're having a meaningful impact on their world, but, at least in most cases, they don't want to dirty their hands dismantling the narrative framework of a setting they're inhabiting.  In theory, your player base probably loves that narrative framework.  So you're left trying to carve out a space for players to exist in the world of the characters they love without necessarily making them come into conflict with those very entities.  That Wolf does so with a setting far closer to its antecedent texts, and does so with a great deal more narrative choice featured than KOTOR ever did, is what makes it so impressive.

Telltale had already proven to me that they were worth trusting with complex, involved narratives that I wanted to be a part of.  They already showed me that in The Walking Dead.  Most players learned that in Sam and Max.  What they proved here is that they can contribute meaningfully to the history of the worlds they ask players to inhabit, and give players room to make those contributions as well, without destroying the continuity that follows them, indeed while reinforcing that continuity and permitting players to carve it into something simultaneously their own and not their own.  Telltale does more than merely fit their stories into the empty spaces in their narrative worlds: they carve out entirely new spaces, etching into the narratives we've seen already, making them more than they were, something we've had a hand in shaping, something that simultaneously accommodates and ignores the choices we made without making those choices feel insignificant.  If Barthes was alive, he'd likely be writing about this kind of storytelling now, and the manner in which it rewrites the relationship between reader and author.  In these new narrative frames the author is no longer the primary figure of importance, without losing any of the power they have held for generations already, nor is the reader still relegated to the passive reconceptualizer of the ideas the author posits that they have been since the dawn of narrative texts.  Instead their collaboration is something that expands the boundaries of texts beyond convention and time-frame, into a kind of experiential mélange that imbues texts with meaning expanding not only into future narratives, but into narratives that have already occurs, not merely by commenting on them, but by writing the history that surrounds them without altering their actions, recontextualizating texts without retconning them into oblivion.