Fascinating academia here, complete with Diagrams!

Raph Koster: Narrative in a game is not a mechanic

In which the learned designer thouroughly dismantles what to me had always been a rather opaque medium and lays out the nuts and bolts for all to see. The big coloured shapes help and I think the gist of it is that tripple A games are becoming more and more cinematic experiences laden heavily with blue squares and not nearly enough is being spent on ensuring the black squares are up to par. He then goes on to question whether a square-circle-square experience made up almost entirely of tiny yellow ones, tiny black ones and enourmous and constant blue ones can be rightfully called a ‘game’ at all, in the technical sense. It certainly rings true in my experience and a lot of my more memorable single-player experiences, now I think back on them in these terms, might as well have been me just pushing ‘Next Chapter’ on a DVD remote lots.

An exaggeration of course, but thinking about whether I’d have enjoyed a Mass Effect or Arkham Asylum feature film that didn’t pester me with having to couch behind boxes lots or quicktime some super-psycho into a wall every five minutes just to see what happens next in the story, I think the answer is probably yes. I’m a big PvE player and generally enjoy storyline stuff in MMOs; campaigns, episodes, missions and the like, which is the sort of stuff that doesn’t go down too well with the Sandbox crowd, who rightly believe that in an MMO, other players should be the stories and content. Probably explains my aversion to PvP as well. It all leaves me in an odd place really. I don’t mean to be single handedly destroying the games industry with my fickle purchasing choices, but I really do like a good story well told and forgive way more than I should on the yellow-circle and black-box front. I should probably just go watch more movies instead!

The notes on replayability also ring true and I generally won’t plunge striaght back into these sorts of games for another playthrough until many months or years have passed, once the first-play narrative has been delivered. He doesn’t mention The Old Republic at all in the piece, but it’s not hard to find oneself applying those shapes to the posts and comments one reads about the current big MMO, and the implications they bring. I don’t know, I’ve not played it but do seem to be regarding it as a future purchase in some distant month when I fell like a good story to play through, probably alone. In general though, the whole thing did make me wonder about the Future of Games and I’ve always had a vauge sensation that these things are just costing too much to make and that most of that spiralling excess is going into larger and larger blue squares. I guess gaming has always aspired to be as big as movies; I just wonder if thats necessarily a good thing in the long run. I should probably play more indie games instead!

Perhaps there is room for both sorts of experience. Maybe this is merely a matter of terminology. Lots of back and forth about Themeparks and Sandboxes in the ether lately, quite a lot of it highly charged and this seems a similar distinction. Sandbox fans perrenially cross that studios keep trying to chase the WoW Dream, when I suspect theres probably no real intersection there anyway. Pre-WoW, EQ1′s 300k subscribers was the benchmark and then at it’s hieght WoW showed that 14m was another big number, but I think WoWs big innovation was creating an online single-player game that attracted an entirely different crowd who were never going to like sandboxes anyway. Maybe there was always two seperate industries going on in the same space, confused by an sloppy and casual use of the term ‘MMO’ by all concerned. The success or otherwise of TOR seems to me to have very little to do with EVE Online’s fortunes at the end of the day. A game with small blue squares probably doesn’t need anywhere near the mind boggling amounts of dollars we see on the really high profile Narrative Experiences, so it doesn’t seem to me that games like TOR are stealing anything from potential new sandboxes, which are a different kind of project anyway.

Have I just become lazy? Clearly games with large yellow circles and large black boxes require the player to do a lot more work for their enjoyment, while games with enourmous blue boxes become more passive experiences. It’s entirely possible I’ve become used to being entertained, rather than taking part, and I’d only have myself to blame for it.

Anyway, a fascinating look behind the curtain and quite thought provoking. I’d like to think I probably am a gamer afterall, but with new insights, I’ll have to look carefully at the games I do play and see if any of them are still ‘games’ in the technical sense, and see if I’ve now become irroevocably seduced by the easy life and cinematic spectacle of an entirely different kind of recreational experience. Food for thought!