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Stories in State-of-the-Art Commercial Games
If there was ever a doubt about the importance of story in gameplay environments, that was solidly put to rest with the emergence of the Tomb Raider series. Although the accessible and entertaining gameplay had much to do with the success of the series, there is no doubt that Lara Croft’s Indiana Jones-like adventures placed the series head and shoulders above its competitors.
Even the Tony Hawk skateboarding series, a classic example of “pure” game, has moved increasingly in a story-based direction. Story elements inevitably draw in players who won’t normally feel compelled to explore pure gameplay. Consequently, story-driven games can reach an even wider range of players.
Two first-person shooter series hailed for their rich storylines are Halo and Half-Life.
HALO
The Halo series centers on the user/character Master Chief, who must battle forces of The Covenant (dedicated to destroying humanity), along with a parasitic alien race known as The Flood. Here, cut scenes are used to advance story. The game also has a significant amount of backstory, regarding Master Chief, The Covenant, and The Flood.
Master Chief, the hero/user avatar of the Halo games, spent an idyllic early childhood until he was kidnapped as part of a military training project because of his “perfect genetic match” with the project’s desired profile. Raised in sort of an Ender’s Game environment, Master Chief is cybernetically augmented and sent on a series of military training missions. He forges deep friendships with some of his cybernetically augmented comrades, who were also kidnapped from their childhood homes. Finally, he begins to combat the aliens of The Covenant.
Halo 2 reveals more about The Covenant and The Flood, and continues to evolve the Halo mythology. Although Halo has been hailed for its gameplay and graphics, its Orson Scott Card meets Robert Heinlein storyline is part of the reason for its success. The world is well thought out, with pathos and paranoia part of its emotional pull.
HALF-LIFE
The Half-Life series centers around user avatar/character Gordon Freeman, a research scientist who is part of a team that unwittingly opens up a portal to an alien world, releasing a plethora of deadly creatures that Freeman must combat just to survive. In the second iteration, set some years later, another alien race known as the Combine has conquered Earth. Freeman joins up with the resistance and investigates all that has happened, and also wins some battles against the alien forces.
Half-Life is written by science fiction writer Marc Laidlaw; the backstory is rich, and the story is full of intriguing characters and ambiguities. Interestingly, Freeman (the user character) never speaks, and all action is seen solely through his eyes, a remarkable adherence to a first-person point of view.
MEDAL OF HONOR
The Medal of Honor series is in the single-player game genre dedicated to historical combat, specifically revolving around famous World War II battles. As the series has evolved, a coherent storyline has become increasingly important. In the most recent iteration (at the time of this writing), the story centers on OSS operative Lt. William Holt, who is sent on a secret mission by President Franklin Roosevelt. Mission success unfurls further layers of the story, as Holt eventually uncovers Nazi work on a prototype atom bomb and must eliminate the Nazi scientist racing to deploy the bomb.
Significantly, legendary screenwriter John (Apocalypse Now) Milius wrote the story for this iteration, yet another indicator of how important story has become to classic game genres.
METAL GEAR SOLID
The Metal Gear Solid (MGS) series, a classic in the single-player stealth action genre, has long boasted some of the most complex storylines and cinematic approaches in gaming. MGS1, set in an alternate history 1995, has the user searching for a weapon of mass destruction, only to discover that the leader of his special forces unit is actually the mastermind behind a rogue state planning to use weapons of mass destruction. MGS2 is generally considered to have the most complicated plot in the series, and again has the user trying to shut down a WMD and rogue forces attempting to use it. Cut scenes and user avatar dialogue were added to MGS2 to better advance the sometimes convoluted plot twists. MGS3 is something of a prequel, narrating events in a slightly alternate 1964 which will reveal the genesis of the special forces boss who later becomes the double-crossing rogue mastermind mentioned above. Cut scenes are used even more extensively.
SPLINTER CELL
Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell series is another example from the stealth action genre, and as we might expect from Tom Clancy, is very strong in its application of story. This game allows for single players, cooperative players, and combatant or tournament play (indeed, the game is based on the Unreal engine).
The story revolves around user character Sam Fisher, a black-ops secret agent working for the National Security Agency. In the latest iteration, Chaos Theory, Fisher must pursue the Masse algorithms, the WMDs of information theory. This is a classic example of the story device called the McGuffin, an object of desire (like the Maltese Falcon) that eventually becomes irrelevant, but drives all the action of the story.
Chaos Theory is a good example of author-imposed plot twists within the confines of the story; despite the user’s gaming skill, Fisher will actually fail in stopping the algorithms’ release. Fisher must later make the moral decision about whether to kill an old friend, and finds out that supposed allies are actually on the other side.
GUITAR HERO
Perhaps the finest commercial example of the use of object simulation, Guitar Hero provides a simulated guitar that allows participants to play along with popular rock tracks by watching a video of streaming notes that move forward along paths representing the strings of the guitar. Hit the notes on the right strings as they go flying by and you are an integrated member of a rock band. (In actuality Guitar Hero follows in the footsteps of a well-known musical notation method called tablature.) Play the piece over and over until you get it right and you are not only playing a game, you are playing music at the same time.
Interestingly enough, Guitar Hero does employ some story elements, presented as newspaper reports of your success as a rock star moving up from humble beginnings to superstar status. The story surrounds you with cheering groupies and fans and encourages you to move forward through the game, rather than rest on your laurels at the easiest levels. It is a very limited use of story and the story element is noninteractive, but it suggests that even in the most visceral of games, story elements do provide a benefit.—It is also a reminder that story narrative can be achieved through creative use of limited media assets.
STORY AND GAME COMPLEMENT EACH OTHER
Despite the wide-spread belief (especially from nongamers) that users can truly alter the narrative lines of games, the reality is that the user can intervene very little in the actual story. Users may bring out more of the backstory and the deeper textures of the story by their skills and explorations, but an antagonist cannot suddenly be converted into an ally, unless the game designer has embedded this possibility into the story world. The user cannot suddenly determine that another quest is more important than the story’s primary quest.
This suggests that users, even hard-core gamers, are actually quite willing to tolerate the constraints of a story world with a well-defined narrative line. The tradeoff this involves is seen as a positive one. Story values will impart greater meaning and higher stakes to gameplay, and users will surrender some of their cherished control in order to play a game that matters.
For designers of simulations who wish to incorporate meaningful stories, this is good news: the attempt to create infinitely flexible and malleable storylines, guided solely by the user, may be a misstep.
MULTIPLAYER GAMES
Arguably, strong storylines benefit single-user games the most. As we look at multiplayer and massively multi-player games, we find that the need for a strong storyline can often diminish. However, this varies depending on what type of multiplayer experience is deployed. For competitive, one-on-one gameplay, story is often unnecessary, except for the post-hoc narratives combatants create for themselves. Examples of this include basketball, football, and racing games.
This is generally also the case for multicombatant (or tournament) play such as that found in Doom or Unreal. These are really the virtual equivalent of playing paintball, where combatants need only a team and some geography to give them ample motivation for completing gameplay and defeating the opponent side.
However, when we begin to look at games relying on cooperative gameplay, for example, Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six series, we see a strong narrative line reemerging. Again, users have more reason to enjoy and exploit cooperation when missions are invested with meaning and emotional stakes are high. (The enemy kills a trusted ally, or massacres women and children, or threatens a city with weapons of mass destruction.)
Massively multiplayer games, which combine cooperative with combatant play, often oscillate between a strong storyline and a relatively weak storyline. Unrelated quests and resource economies unconnected to larger story elements create an increasingly entropic state in a massively multiplayer environment; but inevitably, users chafe against a very strong story hand, seduced by the freedoms the massively multiplayer online game (MMOG) offers. This tension has still not been satisfactorily resolved, possibly contributing to the relatively slow growth in MMOG subscription rates.
MMOGs offer an additional challenge in the open-endedness of their games: closure and conclusion are not goals of the experience. This is similar to the experience that daytime soap opera viewers have. Interestingly, these viewers experience tremendous immersion in the soap opera experience, despite the lack of closure in the narrative arc, which is usually a desired goal in storytelling. However, mini-story arcs do exist within the soap opera experience, providing a sense of progression and transformation necessary for a satisfying story experience. When MMOGs achieve similar mini-story arcs, users find their immersion in the MMOG increases, as they build a sense of history and backstory, which helps propel them forward and makes them want to stay with the game.
ALTERNATE REALITY GAMES
Alternate reality games (ARGs) have recently come to prominence, and from the beginning, have been intensely story driven. ARGs will use multiple websites, faxes, live telephone calls, e-mails, newspaper ads or clippings, and real world events to advance story and initiate gameplay. In addition, users may have to physically show up at a location or event to interact with the alternate reality. Arguably, this expands the “verb set” of user input, adding new possibilities for deeper, more nuanced stories. ARGs attempt to blur the line between in-game and out-of-game experiences. Successfully executed, this creates the potential for even greater immersion into a simulation experience. Titles to date include The Beast, I Love Bees, Street Wars, and Last Draw Poker.
Interestingly, the gameplay in ARGs is usually more cerebral than that of MMOGs (involving puzzle solving, code breaking, and Internet research), more collaborative, and at the same time, often more low-tech and yet more personally involving for a user.
While most contemporary videogames aim for movie-like immersion to convey story, ARGs create a different kind of immersion, something more akin to live theater crossed with fiction reading. The gameplay is much more asynchronous and turn based, with far less emphasis on real-time experiences. However, knocking down the wall between “game” and “reality” may make the experience even more real-time, since the game never ends. (David Fincher’s 1997 film, The Game, illustrates an ARG taken to extremes, years before the ARG concept arose.) With the passage of time (the experience of which is probably the most immersive factor of our lives) typically built into ARGs, the line between simulation and reality blurs further.
ARG storylines tend to postulate vast hidden conspiracies, the gradual revelation of which encourages users to research, share information, collaborate on strategies, and get out of their seats to further pursue the goals of the game. Clearly, “conspiracy” stories can be refitted to understanding global systems (economic, environmental, political). The ARG story/gameplay model offers a different way of looking at simulations, where delivery is more appropriately based on networked and Internet resources (discussed in Chapters Twenty-one and—Twenty-two) and where the simulation might last for weeks and months, rather than a few hours or days.
The recent ARG, Last Call Poker (www.lastcallpoker.com), works with a different sort of story premise, substituting mystery, history, and a touch of the supernatural for the usual conspiracy stories, suggesting that ARGs have only begun to explore the types of stories that might work within the ARG framework.
The siren song of ARGs is: “This is not a game.” Naturally, this is a feeling we’d like to inculcate in the middle of a training simulation, that the environment, emotions, and stakes have become so real that the notion of “game” has been left behind.
SUMMARY
Commercial games are worth examining for their various approaches to integrating story into game environments. The primacy of story partially depends on the pedagogical goals we have, and the type of interactivity we think will advance those goals. Single-player and cooperative multiplayer environments seem to be particularly friendly to strong storyline content. For simulations that are primarily tournament or combatant experiences, strong storylines may be less necessary, although a different kind of story, the post-hoc story (where the gameplay creates a narrative line for players), should be expected and used. Alternate reality games suggest a new way of thinking about story-driven simulations, drawing inspiration from theater and print fiction, as well as from movies and videogames.