So I recently watched this video by Extra Credits talking about an old arcade game and how you can tell a story through game mechanics. It has some pretty good concepts. You should probably watch it if you haven’t.
But this got me to think, can modern games narrate the story thought mechanics?
I mean we have a lot of detail to throw at players, so it’s easy to miss the relevant stuff.
Plus I don’t remember any new games that do this, especially not multiplayer games.
This made me think of Canabalt, which tells a story through its mechanics in a way that other endless runners don’t, although I guess Temple Run sort of does. It is a pretty simple game though.
In a way, I think DayZ also does a good job of telling a story through mechanics. Although a lot of it is also told by the environment (expansive, barren, lonely, dangerous).
Plenty of games today have no explicit story. Crossy Road comes to mind. Most games in the mobile space.
This particular Extra Credits video was a lot like studying literature in high school English. They read a lot into the mechanics, much of which probably went beyond the designers conscious intention, and was missed by most players.
This is the problem with game narratives (that’s the narrative experienced through play, rather than the narrative just told in a game). Most players dehumanize everything down to pure systems, to the point where it’s just pixels hitting other pixels. It doesn’t matter what the set dressings are, because those aren’t important to efficient play.
Unless a person recounts the experience and re-injects the symbolism, the meaning of what the player does is purely systems drive.
This is why never have anything nice. Most does not mean all. And maybe it is most because those are the kinds of games out there. I remember when adventure games with stories were the most popular games out there and MOST games were adventure games. But today, most games are action, very little story.
Case in point, my kids, 17 and 25, prefer the old games, even the action ones because they have a cool setting and story. They don’t even ask for the new ones.
I donno man. I bet that all of that was in the game and intentional. Some of his delivery on the subject might have been a little heavy handed, “your men all trust you…” etc, but the core premise: defend the cities, you can’t win, limited ammo, strategic tradeoffs… I would bet that all of that is very deliberate.
He’s also right that the end of game sequence is actually pretty dark. The End, with the flashing lights is surprisingly heavy for a friggin arcade game in the 80s.
I think modern games do narrate the story through mechanics all the time. It’s just that there are usually multiple layers of mechanics working in tandem.
This is true. Let’s grab assassins creed. You learn about Altiar’s and Ezio’s character based on pure game mechanics. You know he has no complications killing combatants, because the game rewards you for sneaky kills. You know he doesn’t kill innocents because the game boots you for that. You know his thoughts about theft, art, women ect all though the games core mechanics. This is placed in contrast to Desmond who is almost powerless, again providing insights.
The missions you can choose provide a second layer of story. The tasks that have to be done provide insight into the world.
Finally there are the plain cut scenes. These provide the real high level narrative stuff.
Without all of these layers working together a modern game will suffer. Sure there are plenty of games that skip out in one of these levels. But they tend to suffer in purely narrative terms.
This isn’t correct. Only min-maxers do this, and they are a very small percentage of players, especially on mobile. On PC it might be slightly higher but in a game with mass appeal like WoW or League of Legends, it is still a small fraction of players who reverse engineer mechanics and are thinking purely about underlying systems. To most players, “efficient play” is a completely unknown concept, they are just there to have fun.
Character mechanics, especially in RPGs and stuff have always been connected to their personality.
You take LoL for instance, each character has it’s own story, and their abilities, animations, voice overs, particle effects, art and even their resource systems help tell that story.
Diablo 3 did similar things through their resource systems. The Demon Hunter being a good example, they had 2 resource bars “hatred” and “discipline” - hatred increased when you attack, you use it for offensive abilities. Discipline on the other hand, gets purely consumed through ability usage and only regenerates through time. Discipline is used mostly for tactical and movement abilities.
The story of the demon hunters background is that their families were killed by undead hordes and they went off to train to be demon hunters.
The two resources and the way they regenerate and the abilities you use them on work together to tell you a story about the conflicted character of the demon hunter and their background. The hatred bar evokes the idea of their hatred for the undead from their family being killed, the discipline represents their elite undead hunting training.
And yet I’ve never seen anyone stop and be mortified over the fact that they killed someone. Few if any people take in fully what these symbols are supposed to represent. Chess is a game with a piece that is usually shaped like a horse, yet how many people do you think see it as three hundred cavalrymen under their banner who they are accountable for?
Relating the symbol back to its real-world counterpart and taking time to reflect on its meaning is different than ignoring the symbol and only thinking about underlying systems. I’m just saying most people don’t ignore the symbols. The chess example got me thinking though, probably the more abstract your symbols are the more likely they are to be ignored, just because you’re making the underlying systems all that much more accessible.
But there you are using narrative to give meaning to mechanics, which would otherwise be interpreted by players much differently or just be seen as simple mechanics.
In the arcade game Missile Attack it is easy to start thinking of the bases as military and of cities as civilians and eventually you have to decide who to sacrifice and then it becomes kinda serious, even thought the game didn’t have to tell you anything.
I’ve just thought about games that use amnesia and how you can give that character some items and change his stats in order to hint what was he in the past.
It’s a pretty practical way of getting the player in the action part of the game, but still telling him the story.
Maybe you’re right. Maybe not. Did they design the background of the demon hunter first and find the mechanics which best described his/her background, or did they pick the mechanics first and work the background around him/her? Who knows, maybe it was an iterative blending of both.
It’s still a great example of the mechanics and narrative working together.
I think you are vastly underestimating what symbols actually are. They are abstractions, and by that very nature are dehumanizing. That is not a flesh and blood human being with a beating heart. That is a soldier, an enemy. It takes work to turn that symbol back into something human, Thomas was alone being a good example.
All I was saying is that “window dressing” as you put it, does matter, because most players are playing just for entertainment, and don’t concern themselves with underlying systems or optimal play. They also don’t concern themselves with the deeper meaning of the symbols in the game. They just take the symbols at face value and play the game for fun.
The only reason I posted is because saying something like, “most players reduce everything to pure systems and are only concerned with efficient play” is a misconception and you’re giving other designers who read your post bad data.
“Efficient play” didn’t mean min maxing. It meant playing the game as it was intended to be played. Even people who are not serious about a game are still trying to not suck at it.