I stumbled today on a new project called IdentiFiction, an upcoming online channel for episodic, browser-based games. After checking out the site, I definitely agree with the Rampant Coyote’s assessment. IdentiFiction’s vision is totally in line with the direction I want games to go: complex characters and stories presented in a way that will appeal to more than our most juvenile instincts.

The weekly episodic format is also appealing to me, since it’s something that makes increasing sense as people get used to paying small fees for downloaded television episodes. It’s also a great way to tell intricate stories without requiring hardcore time committments.

The question, of course, is whether this team of 50 people can deliver something compelling with their first game, Aosphere. The odds are against them, but maybe that’s part of the appeal. In any case, I’ve marked my calendar for October 15th.

As a follow-up to my last post about differences between Japanese and Western-style RPGs, I thought I would point to another article from Gamasutra (what can I say, they publish great articles) that I saw today. It’s an interview with two of the people behind Portal, on which, if you haven’t been reading lately, I have a bit of a fanboy crush.

It’s a great interview (if a smidge rambly in spots), but the part that’s relevant here is the bit about, well, narrative. Here’s a quote from Eric Wolpaw, Portal’s lead writer:

We had this theory that games tell two stories. There’s the “story story” which is the cutscenes and the dialogue, and the “gameplay story” which is the story that’s described by the actions you take in the game world. The theory was that the closer you could bring those two stories together, the more satisfying the game would be.

I spent years and years reviewing games, and that’s something that always bothered me in games, where the delta between the two stories was real high. I promised myself someday that if I ever got the chance, I’d try to make a game where that delta was almost zero. It was a conscious decision that we wanted to try and keep that world.

This to me is a really important insight and helps explain the special sense of immersion and, for me, empowerment that comes from playing a game where your own actions in the game world are tightly aligned with the narrative being “told” in the game.

I’ve only played a few games that gave me this feeling. Portal is one; Myst is another. Both are first-person perspective games (where that perspective is never broken), and both are puzzle games. Both present a profoundly coherent sense of place. Seems like the start of a promising recipe. Even Myst, though, doesn’t completely close the gap between “story story” and “gameplay story.” As the player you wander around creating the “gameplay story.” The “story story” has, for the most part, already happened and is revealed as you play through pages you find on the various islands.

In other words, your goal as the player in Myst is just to supply an ending to the “story story.” In Portal you supply the whole thing, which is pretty special.

Seems like the same idea could be applied to RPGs in their various incarnations. In Japanese-style games a la Final Fantasy, the gap can be pretty wide. The story might be compelling and the characters unforgettable, but the gameplay mode and the story mode are totally distinct. Gameplay stops when narrative starts and vice versa. Western-style games maybe close the gap a bit, but there’s still the sense that your total experience in the game world is much different than the story being told through the main quest line. Sure, I could convert my gameplay experience with Oblivion into a story, but, man, would it be boring.

Gamasutra posted an article a few days ago about the 20 essential Japanese RPGs. It’s pretty long but worth a skim. I’ve spent most of my gaming life (until recently) fairly insulated from reviews and online chatter about the quality of games I played. As a result, I knew what I liked, but I didn’t know if anyone else agreed. It was fun to read someone else’s take on those games.

Turns out I have played quite a few of the ones listed, including:

• Final Fantasy IV
• Final Fantasy VI
• Final Fantasy VII
• Final Fantasy VIII
• Final Fantasy X
• Final Fantasy XII
• Chrono Trigger
• Chrono Cross

Lots of Square games on that list, obviously, but they were only one of two or three outfits creating US-bound RPGs in the 80s and 90s. Plus, I liked all their games, so I tended to go out and buy them.

I’ve never played Xenogears, but I did play the first installment of Xenosaga, and I definitely agree with this article’s take on that game:

Still, once again, the plot [of Xenosaga] was simply far too ambitious for its own good, and the number of planned installments was cut down from six to three, compressing the plot even more. It didn’t help that the first two games were saddled with terrible pacing issues, plodding cutscenes, and boring battle systems.

Japanese vs. “Western” RPGs
This article also intrigued me because I’m still working on Oblivion (which will no doubt be a looong process), and I’ve only just begun to understand the differences between Japanese and Western-style RPGs. This is yet another way in which I’m a little slow, but I have never really spent much time with any Western RPGs before Oblivion.

I tend to like story-based games with interesting characters, and Western RPGs have leaned away from story and more toward gameplay, with their open-ended worlds and emphasis on first-person role-playing.

To avoid launching into a rant about the state of stories in games (which you can find here at Blog of War, and also here and here), I’ll just say that so far I still prefer the Japanese model. Most definitions of narrative require an some act of telling (by an author and/or narrator). It’s this author who interprets events and helps shape their meaning.

Japanese-style RPGs tend to acknowledge the existence of an author/narrator and adopt a more cinematic style — they tell a story. Western RPGs tend to drop you in a world and let you, in a sense, create your own story. The trouble with this model is two-fold for me:

1. Most of us aren’t good story tellers. The things we do in these spaces probably isn’t very interesting. If I choose to spend my time in Oblivion on alchemy, I’ll just run around collecting seeds and roots all the time. Nothing riveting there. Sure, I could play the thief or the wizened wizard, but these are just types; they’re not characters with flaws and emotions. I want characters.
2. There’s no one to tell the story to. If a story needs a teller, it also, out of necessity, needs an audience. If a man tells a story in a forest and no one is there to listen, is it still a story? Sorry… The point is that I can certainly entertain myself in a sandbox-type game — where I’m the story-teller with no audience — but I find it far more compelling to be an active audience member, using the available gameplay to move a story along.

That’s my two cents. What’s your preference?

I spent quite a few hours this weekend playing Oblivion. It’s reasonably entertaining so far; the size of the world and the number of possibilities for gameplay really are impressive.

The thing that continues to amaze me, though, is the amount of dialog in the game. Seriously, they must have had dozens of people writing dialog what must be thousands of virtual inhabitants. Characters’ dialog changes based on what’s going on around them and their disposition toward you. It’s all so well conceived. Unfortunately, it doesn’t work.

Here’s a little exchange illustrating how I often feel while shooting the breeze with denizens of Cyrodiil (paraphrased for your entertainment):

Me: Hello!
Sour-looking lizard man: What do you want?
Me: I’m new in town. What’s with that paranoid elf guy running around town all the time?
Sour-looking lizard man: I don’t know you well enough to talk about that.
Me: [Here I tell jokes and boast about my prowess as an adventurer to get the lizard man to like me. Then...] So, about that paranoid elf guy?
Sour-looking lizard man: Oh him. I think he’s following me. He looks at me strangely sometimes, and often carries on about a conspiracy. I try not to let it bother me, but he really creeps me out.
Me: Tell me about the town. Did I say I was new here?
Sour-looking lizard man: The town is ok, I guess. Hey, can you help me gather a rare root to throw into a magic potion?
Me: Uh, sure.
Sour-looking lizard man: Great! I think there are some roots near the trees outside town.
Me: Right. Roots near trees — got it. I’ll let you know when I find some. Good-bye.
Sour-looking lizard man: Leave me alone.

Open-ended dialog systems are a great idea. In theory they create a real sense of place and give the impression that you’re experiencing a living, breathing world. The trouble is they involve too much filler and not enough coherent conversation. Real conversation is much too complex for games at the moment, so relationships between the player and non-player characters (NPCs) — or even between NPCs — get distilled into grossly simplified numerical values like “disposition” or “reputation.”

For a class once I created a dynamic dialog system designed to address some of these issues by scoring relationships between characters using several attributes instead of just one (for example, trust, loyalty, friendliness, anxiety). The idea what that everything you said to or did for an NPC would affect those attributes. Over time you would actually build a “relationship” by spending time with NPCs, and the quality of that relationship would have a dramatic affect on what kind of information they would share.

Aside from the obvious practical issue of writing all that dialog, my grand system and others like it face a pretty serious challenge — there’s too much dialog.

The beauty of closed systems (where dialog is delivered through cut-scenes or one-shot statements) is that they can be more carefully crafted. Sure, they may sacrifice “realism,” but let’s face it, 90% of the words we utter are unbelievably mundane. Anyone reading this knows it’s certainly true about me. A truly open-ended, flexible dialog system would be prohibitively expensive to create and populate with content.

I haven’t given up on Oblivions NPCs yet. Right now I find their moodiness kind of endearing, but who knows how long that will last. I’m fickle like that.

The other day I posted some thoughts inspired by the Beowulf movie’s decidedly video game-esque animation and action scenes. Today I turn my attention to Beowulf’s story. Now, I know what you’re thinking: Beowulf’s story is only similar to most video game stories because it sucks. By certain standards, it’s definitely not that interesting. Just a few major plot points. Not many twists and turns. Pretty clear roles for the major characters.

A brief interpretation of Beowulf
On the other hand, I think the movie can be “read” not so much as an epic action movie but as an allegory or cautionary tale. I have to credit Roger Ebert at least partially for leading me to this interpretation. His somewhat disjointed review suggests an element of irony and satire in the film. I didn’t really find either of those, but he did get me looking for a deeper layer of meaning.

Without giving any big spoilers, I think Beowulf is a story about the price of arrogance, greed, and lust. Ok, this isn’t a big stretch — our hero arrives at Hrothgar’s hall boasting of his accomplishments, in search of riches, and not at all hesitant to ogle Hrothgar’s wife in that ridiculous way macho protagonists always seem to do (as if to say, “You will be mine, oh yes, you will be mine”).

The film’s major symbolism, though, can be found in its antagonists. Grendel’s mother, in her golden nude-glory, represents the seductive promise of wealth and power. Grendel himself represents the isolation and violent sensitivity born from a society built on greed (he made me think of the Columbine and Virginia Tech shooters). Beowulf’s final foe is a physical manifestation of Beowulf’s mistakes, a brutal (and large) reminder that leaders’ mistakes beget very destructive forces.

Allegory and games
Ok, now the point. For all the discussion about stories in games (particularly the argument about whether they can ever be good), I find myself thinking that allegory could be a particularly rich device to use in game stories (no doubt it has been used before). There are a couple reasons why allegory seems to have a lot of potential for games.

• First, allegory is well suited for the kinds of stories and worlds that are often found in games. Science fiction and fantasy worlds in particular often deal in larger-than-life situations ripe for symbolism.
• Second, and more importantly, allegory can function even in an open-ended narrative situation. Symbolism can be established through visuals (like color or costumes) and sounds (musical themes) without requiring a particular order of events. Additionally, as Beowulf demonstrates, allegorical tales often work best when stories are simple, since there isn’t as much plot to distract from the underlying meaning.

Should every video game be an allegory? Of course not. But as the debate over game narrative continues, allegory, as a time-honored form, seems like a good option for developers interested in telling stories of some depth without the pressure of coming up with a brand new narrative mechanic for games.

Is my game going to be an allegory? You’ll have to wait and see.