Multiplatform Games, Part 2
12 Feb
Or: Why Video Games are not the Future
Avatar’s box office during the first week was famously only a fraction of video game contemporary Modern Warfare 2. Grand Theft Auto 4 made headlines when it similarly couped Spiderman 3’s sales. Apocryphal or not, the growth rate of the US video game industry alone is astonishing, and is being seen as competition for Hollywood. The question is: why? Can stories in video games be a substitute for stories in the cinema or on TV?
I just finished playing Dragon Age: Origins. This is a recent role-playing game that was celebrated for its cinematic, accessible approach to something that the company who created it, Bioware, does very well: world-building and storytelling. Advancing the story involves having conversations with other characters, as is often the case in games of this genre. You can guide these conversations by selecting from several responses every once in a while during a conversation. It’s the same branching principle as choosing which page to go to next in an adventure book. Role-playing games have been like this since forever.
Branching games are cursed with the same problem as multiplatform television shows. In order to create even the pretence of free will for video game players, there have to be a number of branches, each with their own consequences, that create branching choices of their own. The amount of extra content one must create for even a handful of branches (there were probably three or four in Dragon Age, and even then they branched out mainly towards the end, and at the beginning) is exponentially more than is required for a single storyline. It also distracts from any sense of single meaning to the story. The solution? Commonly, it’s to create the illusion of choice, by having branches in conversation loop back onto one another. To Bioware’s credit, they do a brilliant job of creating this illusion. Early in the game you have a conversation with someone who wants to recruit you into their army. The dialogue will always end the same way (you have to go with them), but your dialogue options all end there gracefully, even if you resist.
So far so good. Bioware is very experienced making these systems. The problem, however, is the same problem one encounters with multiplatform content. Consumers are smart. They know when they are being tricked into a particular choice, or when they are missing content because of a choice they have made. They want to experience the entire meal. Playing through the game once, making a specific set of choices, I wondered what my experience would have been like (would it have been better?) if I had played it differently. Instead of feeling motivated to play the game again (which would, thanks to Bioware’s masterful “illusion” of free will, involve a lot of repetition), I felt unsatisfied, like I had not in fact ‘finished’ the game. Add on to that Electronic Arts’ plan to sell “downloadable content” that further enriches the story and I find myself in the same situation as a multiplatform consumer: paying with both time and money to ‘collect’ the entire experience. Needless to say I just looked online to find out what I missed.
There are a couple of other reasons why video games will struggle to be meaningful as stories: first is the absence of a protagonist. As the player, you are the main character, yes, but a protagonist is someone who has a concrete goal and takes specific action to achieve it despite adversity. He must be an interesting character in his own right, because his actions and their results reflect the message of the story itself. When Griffin Mill beats up and kills the writer who’s been threatening him in The Player, the twist redefines him and forces us to reflect on his priorities and the priorities of the real-world industry he represents. It’s a meaningful moment that becomes suspenseful as we watch him seduce the writer’s then-lover. Comparatively, a video game character resists all but the most basic definition, and his actions cannot surprise us because they are our actions. The silver lining is that we get to, in some sense, imagine our own story out of the video game. But as graphics become more literal even that ability dissolves into so many repetitive dungeons. More symbolic games, such as those that operate on a map of the world or are otherwise more abstract, retain more of this magic, but that’s besides the point. The point is that branching video games cannot sustain authorial messages beyond the mundane “slavery is evil,” “self-sacrifice is good,” and other polar coordinates. Even Dragon Age, which makes a deliberate effort to foil choices based purely on good and evil, cannot escape single-minded tyrants, and the forces of darkness. Perhaps this is because the nature of the game requires that you kill a lot of people without feeling too bad about yourself. Dragon Age did as well as it could to escape these tropes, I suppose, because the empty nature of a game protagonist does not seem to support characterisations more complex than “exiled from his people,” and the complexity of a story world comes from its relationship to the protagonist.
The second gotcha, I feel, is with the platform. Video games are so transient. There are several games that provide stellar experiences: immersive if not profound. One example, Deus Ex, was made not ten years ago and is now unplayable because of changes in technology. Unlike a book — examples over a century old are within arm’s reach — or even a film, the longevity of anything that requires a fine set of complex and short-lived hardware to reproduce is going to be minute. More effort goes into the development of a AAA video game than a summer blockbuster. What is the return on investment here?
A similar problem surfaces in multiplatform content. The wonderful HBO TV show Big Love produced a trendy set of Webisodes for HBO.com called Big Love: In the Beginning. They premiered after the second series but have since disappeared. This content is gone, pulverised by the relentless tide and churn of the internet. Multiplatform content is, by design, ephemeral.
This isn’t a rant against role-playing games. I’ve tried several times to make a game, and I still love them, but for other reasons. I just think that the impulse to view them as a vehicle for meaningful narrative may be unfounded. I’d like to explore their strengths: symbolic representation, world-building, empowerment, and through those things: an access to the imagination that is more direct than any other media. But to see them, and their multiplatform cousins, as replacements for drama with a single spine ignores their fundamental dissimilarity.
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