Four Types of Videogame Tragedy

In my last post on tragedy, The Wrong Ending, I presented what I saw as an essential problem of tragedy in videogames: an ending where things go badly is often seen by players as wrong, and therefore in need of fixing. This makes it hard for a tragic ending to seem like a valid choice for players. I also promised that I’d be back to discuss some questions I raised at the end of that post:

So how do you get a player to pick the wrong ending? More importantly, how do you get her to do that and still care?

In this post, I’ll be discussing some games that pull off tragic storylines, with varying degrees of success, and how they fit into strategies for addressing the wrong ending problem. These strategies all boil down to addressing the problem of how to keep a player from trying to fix what they did wrong. The games I discuss are ones I’m familiar with, and by no means an exhaustive set, so please do comment with other examples and strategies that don’t fit these four types. Spoilers for both Mass Effect and both Dragon Age games, Fallout 3, and the indie horror Downfall follow after the jump, although I’ll keep them as ambiguous as possible. Dan.

The Wrong Ending

So the blog’s been a bit on the sporadic side lately and, in all honesty, it probably will be until after Thanksgiving. My apologies! On the upside, something pretty grand has been happening while I was away. Dan Cox of Digital Ephemera, with the help of commenter Ari, has taken some rough ideas in my post on Moral Incentives and Story Structure and made something terrific out of them. In a series of posts  at his blog, Dan and Ari have been seriously tackling a question that I raised sort of tangentially: can a videogame be a tragedy? If so, how would you design such a game?

Some highlights from this rich discussion include What Happens Next, in which Dan takes on the issue of asymmetrical knowledge in tragedies, game-based or otherwise; Tragedy Drivers, which discusses some of the design constraints on a tragic game; and Flaws in Virtual Tragedy, which directly applies concepts from Aristotle’s Poetics to the debate. It’s all awesome stuff, go read it. A lot of what we’ve been talking about so far, both at Digital Ephemera and here, boils down to how interactivity philosophically clashes with the basic assumptions of tragedy as Aristotle saw them. I’d like to jump off Dan’s thoughts on asymmetrical knowledge and talk about some of the practical issues with designing tragic games.

Moral Incentives and Story Structure

There are a lot of ways you can classify the structure of a story, and many of them have been applied to games in one way or another. One that caused some discussion recently is based on a lecture by Kurt Vonnegut in which he describes stories in terms of the fortune of the protagonist over time:

Inspired by this lecture, Paul Sztajer at Throw the Looking Glass wrote a post arguing that game narratives have a tendency to cut the Cinderella story in half by never inflicting ill fortune on the protagonist. By not letting bad things happen to the player, games limit the kinds of stories they can tell.

 So why is this? Part of the answer, perhaps, is that players like to feel powerful, and get angry when power is taken away from them. As Sztajer writes:

Both these problems are symptomatic of a larger issue: that designers don’t like to punish the player. Games are centred around the idea of rewarding the player for playing well, and there is therefore a feeling that if you make the player character worse, you’re punishing the player and they’ll stop playing.

It’s not really an answer I buy, however. Some of the most emotionally engaging moments I’ve ever experienced in games have been moments where power was taken away from me. Based on what I keep hearing about this Aeris character, I’m not the only one. That said, I think there’s something to this idea of people being concerned about punishment and rewards for playing well.

Weekly Update: Blocks World

After two weeks of nose-to-the-grindstone paper writing, I am delighted to return to writing that no one will pay me for with Players Are Planners, a new feature up at Robot Geek. This was inspired by a volley of blog posts that went down while I was away, starting with Michael Abbot’s Games Aren’t Clocks and followed by Dennis Scimeca’s Games ARE Clocks and Kate Cox’s Win, Lose, Or Fail. As is frequently the case, this post came together over beers in a loud bar with my boyfriend, and I must credit him for part of the argument here. Also, I apologize in advance if I haven’t quite shaken off the academic tone. Or should I say: under hypothetical circumstances in which a somewhat academic tone has been employed in relation to writing, the current work argues that apologies are a potentially appropriate solution [32].

So here’s what I’ve been reading this week, other than that kind of thing.

On process intensity and procedural narrative. Procedural narrative is hard. Robert Yang does a rundown of the workarounds people have come up with to make stories feel procedural without digging into the ugly stuff, with advantages and disadvantages of each approach. A valuable resource for anyone concerned with procedural stories.

Guessing Games. An interview at Kill Screen with the developer of a game in which you guess the race of a person in a photograph. This actually strikes me as a good idea for a political game (most political games do not strike me this way).

How Can We Understand Code as a “Critical Artifact”? Also via Kill Screen, an interview by Henry Jenkins with an academic at USC who is studying the aesthetics of code. This is something I heard about a while ago at the day job, so it’s interesting to check in on it again. Ultimately I think it would be hard to develop an aesthetics of games without including something about aesthetic qualities of code.

5 Film-School Violations in Videogame Cut-Scenes. Makin’ fun of cutscenes, by Jason Schreier. This kind of thing is entertaining, but I don’t think it’s a great idea to start applying rules of thumb from filmmaking to scenes in a game. I think cutscenes are an awkward hack as it is, but if they are to be used, I doubt it makes sense to measure them by the same criteria as movie scenes. Movies and games have different needs. Information doesn’t need to be fast in a game; it needs to be useful. And movie-style pacing is a ridiculous metric to apply when players go through a game at their own pace.

Weekly Update: This Ends Nothing!

This week at Robot Geek, I discuss the recent fake findings about how rarely players finish games in the context of narrative theory in Ending vs. Resolution. (Sorry about the video ads. We’re working on it.)  Some of this is inspired by some weird behavior I’ve noticed in my own play style. With a lot of the games I most love, I get right up to the very ending, the very last boss, and close up the game and never touch it again. I’ve always wondered what the deal is with that, and this post has a theory about it.

So here’s what I’m reading this week.

Everybody’s Doing It. Jon Irwin writes in Kill Screen about losing his Ocarina of Time virginity years after all the other kids.

Eric Swain’s excellent review of p0nd made me see the game in a new light.

Fraser Elliot has in interesting historical perspective on the development of the third-person shooter genre at Robot Geek.

Argument Maps for Unscripted Conversation. Over at Gamasutra, Ron Newcomb has an approach to game arguments that contrasts sharply with the one I described last week. Interesting stuff, but I maintain that true knowledge representations like this don’t scale! Via Mattie Brice.

A great, wide-ranging interview with Ken Rolston at AusGamers, which I tweeted earlier this week. I’ve clipped my favorite part below, but the entire thing is pretty awesome.

Let me draw you a graph on the video of interactivity in a dialogue [gesturing] there’s the graph and time passes; and you input; and time passes; and you input. Even if you’re moving, you’re constantly doing inputs and choices. It is probably the worst part of gaming in any role-playing game. And at the same time, not only is it bad for interactivity, it’s bad in modelling the complexity of this relationship.

You and I are talking; we’re in a dialogue; there are a lot of different ways it can go. It’s only a branching tree in a computer game; you bring a lot to the experience. When you become attached to characters, you are a willing suspension of disbelief. And I blame you for not being filled with rage, screaming “this isn’t good enough”. And at the same time, I promise you I’m not going to give you one, because it would not — in a triple-A game — be possible for me to build a compelling model of a human being that you could interact with.

Weekly Update: Slow Lives and Nagging Wives

What’s up, travelers from Gamasutra! This week at Robot Geek, I talk about an emerging cliché in art games, where it comes from, and what it’s good for. I call them Leaning Games, and they’re multiplying like rabbits. (If that phrasing just grossed out a few people who follow me on Twitter, bonus!) I don’t really have a problem with clichés, mind you. I just think they usually reveal something interesting about the creative culture that produces them.

As an aside, I think there’s a lot of room for a gender-based critique of these types of games, which keep circling back to the story of a guy who either neglects his wife or his job. That’s not my area of specialty, but it’s a weird trend worth noting.

So here’s what I’ve been reading this week.

Rampant Coyote asks whether subtlety is possible or desirable in games. This is a question I initially scoffed at, until I realized how hard it is to come up with examples where subtlety does work, even in the wild world of experimentals. Can anyone else think of something?

Via Mattie Brice, Altug Isigan applies classical narrative theory to games in Game Narrativity and Interaction.

Indiana Jones and the Video Game Imagination. Over at Robot Geek, Fraser Elliott writes about how children approach games and what it says about how we approach them as adults.

Weekly Update: Dying Is Easy

This week at Robot Geek, I talk about comedy in games in Dying Is Easy. It’s an extension of an offhand remark from this post, and a topic I’ll probably revisit at some point. Comedy is fascinating!

So here’s what I’m reading this week.

Art restoration… er, game modification? Chris Johnson tries to figure out where game mods fit between the restoration of an existing work and the creation of something entirely new, especially in the era of rampant DLC.

With Great Power Comes Greater Expectations. Rampant Coyote extends the concept of the Uncanny Valley to realism in game design, for a thoughtful discussion of how the demands of players shift with a game’s presentation.

Videogame Criticism, Videogame Journalism, Journalism about Videogames, Videogame Criticism: More a Rant than a Manifesto.  Brendan Keogh on a recent scandalous panel on game criticism at the Freeplay Independent Games Festival. Keogh pivots off the panel’s shortcomings to address what game criticism should and should not be.

Weekly Update: The Wheel of Fortune

This week at Robot Geek, I discuss my failure to get laid in Persona 3 and what it says about narrative design in Game Stories and Fortunetelling. This was a fun one that I’ve been meaning to write for a while. I’m kind of a huge Tarot card nerd, and I’ve always been fascinated with how and why fortunetelling works. (In the entirely down-to-earth sense of how it works as a social behavior, not, y’know, the wacky stuff.)

Here’s what I’ve been reading this week!

I Won’t Do What You Tell Me. My Robot Geek colleague Fraser Elliott deals with the pitfalls of quota systems over at his new personal blog, The Vibrant Popular.

Games: Hacking the Hardware. Corvus Elrod gets all metaphorical in response to more rabble-rousing by Daniel Cook (writer of A Blunt Critique of Game Criticism).

One last eviscerating review of Duke Nukem: Forever, courtesy of Kill Screen. What can I say, I’m weak.

Belated Weekly Roundup

This week at Robot Geek, I hash out some of my thoughts on how to analyze storytelling style in games: Pieces of Story. It’s my little contribution towards a world where we never have to hear to terms “linear” and “nonlinear” in reference to games again.  Here’s some of what I’ve been reading this week:

Where’s your God now, Mario?  John Markley’s fun historical piece on religious censorship in early Japanese imports.  That “Pearl” thing always confused the hell out of me.

Killing Call of Duty: Jordan Magnuson’s “The Killer.”  Fraser Elliot on the impact of killing in an art game.  (Incidentally, another word I’d like to eradicate from the universe is “notgame.” C’mon, Magnuson. Have some dignity.)

L. A. Non-Noire.  K. Cox finds L. A. Noire lacking in the structural elements of film noir.

Dark Past (part 1): On the immersive sim, mechanics, and mod communities. This is the first part in a recently concluded (?) 4-part series on the mechanics and level design of Thief-like games, by Radiator developer Robert Yang. That makes it sound much too dry, though – it’s a big, sprawly, freewheeling discussion on the meaning and craft of complex level design, and it’s fantastic.

Weekly Roundup

This week at Robot Geek, I came up with an odd mashup of the SCOTUS videogame decision and virtual reality in Sense of Presence. Since I didn’t have a post up last week (in defiance of my British overlords at Robot Geek, or just my Independence Day hangover) my link dump covers two weeks’ worth this time.  Anyhow, here’s what I’ve been reading:

Toy View and Doll View in Videogames. Chris Bateman takes an interesting approach to the difference between first person and third person cameras.

Game On, a short interview with Tom Bissell about the Supreme Court decision.  “It’s a concession you have to make in a free society—if you want a legitimately fascinating, dark, violent game to be available, you have to let Duke Nukem throw his feces around.”

You Can’t Fight Sexism with Sexism. The Border House on the fine distinction between sexism and crudeness.

Interview: Operation Rainfall. Robot Geek’s Logan Kraus talks to Chris Ward about the effort to get more JRPGs localized for the Wii.

12 Ways to Improve Turn-Based Combat Systems. Nice discussion of turn-based combat mechanics from Sinister Design’s Craig Stern.