Super Nerd Sundays Presents: Where Little Stories Come From!

I’m not a fan of Ulysses. I took a course while I was studying in Ireland that focused on Joyce’s prose and Ulysses formed the centerpiece of the class. The professor loved the book with all the fervor and reason of an abused spouse: gushing of its victories, ignoring its shortcomings and betrayals and beginning most conversations in class with abject praise for Joyce without consideration for the very serious problems that Ulysses had as a book, the very problems which make it so very worthy of discussion today.

So it’s fair to say that I didn’t really like Ulysses when I first read it, with good reason. It’s one thing to hear vague praise from academics about a text when they reference it offhand, or to see the text referred to again and again in abstraction on lists, but when you’re analyzing a text and your guide does nothing but gush it’s as if you’re on a guided tour: you miss out on the real experience of the book and you’re instead forced to endure someone else’s interpretation of it. You lose the personal context critical to reading any book, especially one like Ulysses and receive, instead a set of talking points about the book.

Which is sort of funny, given the nature of Ulysses as a text. Drawing from a diverse set of textual influences and personally obtuse, the only real value the book has is as a document about personal experience and the unintelligible nature of our own minds to one another. Joyce wrote it with the frank objective of not being understood, and succeeded admirably, making a book about one day in the city of Dublin which took place in the minds of its characters, rambling, chaotic places where readers can never feel at home. As such anything you really get out of the book, anything more than the most basic plot points, comes from the interpretation of this text, your personal experience reading it.

It might be frustrating, it might be enlightening, it might be boring, but it is an experience, and that is primarily what Ulysses has on offer. Its plot is thin and well tread ground, its language oscillating between poetic and irritatingly forceful attempts to be poetic, and the style can only be decoded by people who have read the specific influences Joyce drew each section of the book from. The experience is the text, the text the experience.

The same thing goes for reading poetry. While people like to spout on about personal meaning and depth in poetry I’ve found that good poetry, really good poetry, presents and interesting experience to the person reading it, regardless of their background or knowledge of the text. The test of a good poem is in handing it to a complete stranger and seeing how they respond. If you can elicit the intended response, or any sort of response, you’ve got something there. But the poem itself, the setting, its plot, where it comes from: these details are all inconsequential. What matters is the act of reading, of making the poem your own.

All books rely on this sort of tacit contract between reader and author to some extent, but these specific examples call attention to their demand for attention and the necessity of generating an experience while reading a book. They’re largely unpopular and widely misunderstood as a result, but they’re still important cultural documents that tell us stories, even if these stories are often about ourselves. This same case of incidental narrative shaping an experience is something we see reflected time and time again in video games.

There are plenty of games without interpretive narratives. Last week I mentioned Jericho, whose cardinal sin isn’t necessarily its poor game play, opaque puzzles or repetitive action, but a manner of telling a story which literally forces players to do everything in one very specific way in order to move the ball ahead. Most games provide some room for improvisation in their plots, but Jericho will take control away from you to make sure that you’re doing the right thing at a given time. The actions you carry out during the various fights in Jericho are either too constrained or mundane to really make them worth mentioning, as well. It’s a game that has a movie’s tenor while telling a story, occasionally asking that we help out in splicing together some of the action scenes.

Other titles guilty of this crime are most RTSes (Remember that time your zealots bravely charged through Kerrigan’s defense and won the day? Nope? Didn’t think so.) most brawler games (Although given the stories that they do present it probably shouldn’t matter – and the button pressing experiences are engaging enough that it’s hard to really consider this a detracting factor.) and, somewhat ironically, an entire subsection of console RPGs imported from Japan, where many mainstream developers still discount the importance of player input in games (Use your summon during the scripted cutscene and forget about it until you’re in a really hard fight again!). There are plenty of games that have set stories, that don’t want players to participate in their narratives, but the by excising player input the quality of a given narrative tends to decrease exponentially.

People frequently discount storytelling in games, saying that if they wanted a great story they’d watch a movie or read a book. These are the games that allow them to say that, games that want players to do very specific things at very specific moments, that want to tell stories that could just as easily be told in other mediums. They’re not always terrible at telling their little stories, although because they’re game stories they do tend to drag a good bit longer than most stories told in visual media do, and they’re often drawn from insubstantial or inconsistent material because games don’t really have the same draw as other narrative mediums.

But the people who criticize games because of the shortcomings of games that fail at telling a story in their own medium and people who make these abortive, misplaced stories are both making games as a medium less than it could be. Because games, the best games, take the contract between reader and author and twist it in unprecedented ways. They make players more than just a passive interpretive figure who can only impact the text as it is written: they give them agency as both a reader and writer figure.

Some games do this by providing players with lots of options during the interstitials between exposition. For example, Half-Life’s much vaunted story was really something that emerged during player, something that came as a result of well constructed levels and well built enemy AI. There were some bits they forced you to experience, sure, like making you do manual labor and forcing you to launch an awesome rocket, but for the most part Half-Life was all about letting events develop on their own. That vortegaunt that spawned in that corridor might always spawn in the same spot, but his responses to your actions, your approach to him and the resolution to the situation is what made Half-Life a game worth playing. That and some of the keenest writing and development in the industry which came as much from the efforts of Valve’s team as their knowledge of the community for which they made games.

Valve has been quite good at maintaining this attention to their audience, even if they do sometimes draw back the curtain to expose the moving parts behind their games and how they still attempt to shape player experience without being explicit about it. It’s telling of their finished products that even when the very people who made the game spend their time casting light on the seams Valve’s experiences never feel artificial or overly engineered. Instead the end project just feels polished, like it can accept any input from the player without breaking or, most of the time, even tearing. In a game so dedicated to breaking rules that’s quite impressive.

And Valve’s “improvisational interstitial” method isn’t the only way to tell a viable story in interactive media. Bethesda has all but perfected open world game play, offering up resilient little playgrounds that players can put through some impressive paces without breaking. While Open World play is far from easy to do, and some games, such as the Grand Theft Auto series, fail completely at adapting a story to it, instead using a hybrid of interstitial play and Open World setting, when executed properly a good Open World game is, more or less, the pinnacle of what games are capable of in storytelling.

By presenting players with a system which can be circumvented, a system which is more intended to shape interactions rather than dictate their pace and pitch, a good Open World game offers unprecedented narrative control to players and, as a result, requires a good deal more care in its design than traditional games. Games like Fallout, Oblivion and (to a far lesser extent) Far Cry 2 have to account for the player wandering into unexpected areas at unexpected times. They have to make their worlds interesting and full without making them too over the top. It’s a fine balance, and a difficult one to strike. The pantheon of open world games is littered with games that attempted to be too much and failed as a result.

And it’s here that the most important relationship between texts and games becomes apparent. Games generally don’t look to other media, except perhaps films, in how they tell their stories. The result in an unfortunate mish-mash of structural storytelling techniques in a medium which abhors such efforts, games that attempt or force cinematic moments on players who would much rather actually be playing the game. You can see this in manner in which bad cutscenes are made, the way that poorly constructed quicktime events just feel wrong, or the way that games sometimes remove control to make sure you see inconsequential things that the writer felt illustrated the setting. Games as they are written now want to be other things, things like books and movies. They don’t accept that they are games and, almost universally, fail as a result. Occasionally a game with an especially strong sense of character or a particularly good story will emerge and endure this process, but there are few games with stories that can be described without eliciting gales of laughter from listeners.

But by including texts, especially postmodern texts, in the narrative diet of the people who both consume and create games we can move forward faster than ever before. The same way that Levine’s experiences with Rand shaped Bioshock other developers could potentially take their leads from novels and poems rather than films in writing the stories of their games. While it might not happen any time soon, and may indeed never happen, it’s something to hope for, and a simple shift like this towards drawing real authors to the medium of games that could change the shape of our stories forever.