It May Even Be In Our Time

This is in reply to Costikyan’s “I Have No Words & I Must Design”, in particular his assertion that “Stories are linear. Games are not.” I recently was asked to agree or disagree with this statement, and went haywire and wrote this next rail.

I hate hearing the words “Games don’t need story.” It bothers me. It worries me. I worry that people have lost sight of seeking a more exploratory world of games, a more experimental experience. But I can respect their opinion–they’ve chosen Form over Purpose, if you’ve read Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics. They want to find a refined way to create a game that will appeal to the viewer.
However, I’ve long since leapt that fence and raced to the heart of what I consider games: experiences. People developed games through evolution, Will Wright has said. It’s important for our growth and development. It’s a form of *experience*, in which our actions and the “management of our resources” affect our trajectory towards our goal. But our goal could be something far greater, far more profound than simply “Achieving victory”. “Owning all the property.” “Defeating the final boss.” By seeing games in this light, I almost feel like we’re trying to make games more shallow than they are or could be. More dry. More boring. See, if it’s just about capturing the flag, what’s the point? If all you need to do is get to the finish line before everyone else, why do it? There has to be more to designing a game, and I think by exploring the ways we tell stories through gameplay is the key. After all, people create their own stories when playing any game–they don’t just observe the rules of play, they observe the EVENTS of play–the rules simply become the reality, the medium for that story to take place.

Think of a game like the Indigo Prophecy (Farenheit in the UK). It had an amazing story which steadily became a Wachowski Brothers fest as the game continued, thanks to an unfortunate lack of funding for the tale that was supposed to be a sequel. In any case, the way the story was told was entirely through gameplay–through a set of rules that players began to learn and obeyed throughout the experience. The final goal of the game? To uncover the secret behind the murder your main protagonist appears to have committed. It’s a survival game, in a sense–the point is to survive to the end. But even if it’s such a simplistic formula, without that story the game would collapse onto itself. The gameplay is strong and interesting and experimental, but it’s simply not enough to convey the experience–it’s the story that drives that.

On the other hand, let’s take a look at a very story-absent game. Let’s take Pong. Any version–you can go from Pong to Top Spin 2 to Rockstar’s Table Tennis. The game has very little story to it. You rise to the top and all, but, really, the plot can be thrown aside and what would be left is the barebones game mechanic of bouncing a ball back and forth. But what is it that drives the player to invest in that? Is it the cheering fans, the hot asphalt? The original Pong didn’t have that level of realism. Is it the simplistic power of moving a rack and knocking a ball back across the net at the other player? Table Tennis was a great deal more complicated than that, and requires a good bit of hard work to master.
In essence? It’s the spirit of that competition that embodies the challenge and elicits the player’s emotion. We search for so-called “meaningful play” in design, but what many fail to realize is that every time a player is invested, they are alluding to yet another human story.

We shouldn’t be trying to create “meaningful play”. We should be trying to make play players can attach meaning to themselves.

The point I’m trying to make is, games create stories. People create stories–we’re a story-driven race; it’s why we spend such a great deal of time researching and conserving our hi-story. Our memory is comprised of stories and events, and those experiences dictate how and what we have learned over the course of our lives. Humans and stories are inseparable–and games are simply the setup of hypothetical, experimental universes for more stories to be created. Costikian said it himself, and I don’t know why he doesn’t recognize it: “Games provide a set of rules; but the players use them to create their own consequences.” Those consequences are being remembered and learned as stories.

I see ludology as a tool, not an ideal. Creating fun gameplay is essential to a game’s success, yes. But it’s finding a way to capture the spirit of play in the player that I find the true art. It’s why many MMOs fail where World of Warcraft reigns king. It’s why people keep buying Final Fantasy again and again and again. It’s why you keep asking your friends to play Monopoly with you–the universe created by the game is that breeding ground for all players to create their own stories. It doesn’t matter what the mechanics are, as long as they work for that specific event you want to recreate.

It’s why many people disliked Assassin’s Creed. Playing it, you’d want to recreate the story of an assassin. But the gameplay simply doesn’t lend for the creation of that experience. The game isn’t UN-FUN, per se. It just doesn’t lend for someone to believe they’re an assassin in most cases.

Give that some thought before you begin writing numbers down, ludologists.