Lifting things with your mind, game design, and most importantly, Han Solo

I’m a writer, I’m a game designer.  So I’ve done some thinking about narratives within games—how we can improve them, what we can learn from other mediums, what their shortcomings are, etc.  My theorizing’s incomplete, but so is everything.  I'll add to it as we go, refine the ideas, and say incorrect things in public so we can have a conversation and keep moving things forward. 

High-falutin' thoughts complete.  Now for the content:

Modern games with single protagonists are usually power fantasies.  You start as a semi-humble schmuck, you defeat a few goons and gain a few spells/guns/combos, and the game continues on until you’re a semi-uber super-fuck and you defeat the bad guy hiding at the end of the game. 

I’m not entirely complaining about this—power fantasies are great structures for game design.  Players want to be in the zone when playing games.  They want to be challenged, occasionally defeated, but rarely overwhelmed or frustrated.  By giving them a simple challenge, then empowering them and giving them tougher challenges, game designers are able to keep players working at the upper end of their abilities.  This leads to players having fun not despite the difficulties, but because of them. 

Which is great.  From a game design perspective. 

But we all know how this story ends, right?  I mean, I just told you—you gain a bunch of power and crush the baddest motherfucker there ever was beside your bad motherfucking self.  And it feels grrrrrrrreeeeeaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaat in the most Nutrigrain bar way possible, but it’s kind of fucking boring. 

Where’s the surprise?  It’s just a series of challenges that you overcome through playing a game.  There’s nothing compelling about this narrative for gamers because it’s virtually all we’ve seen for the entire history of gaming.  I know why they use it—it makes sense when you’re trying to keep players in the zone, experiencing flow.  It’s the easiest story to make. 

And I haven’t solved what games should do instead. 

However, I’m a fucking nerd.  So here’s some Star Wars shit to school your ass:

“Put some other goddamned protagonists in your story, game writers!”  --Chewbacca

All incorrect citations aside, this is the main issue I’m going to cover right now.  Countless games are about single protagonists beating the shit out of bad guys—God of War, that one about the treasure hunter, and a few about that guy in space, plus anything I can think of in first-person—they’re all about one dude.  You are the one dude who is going to save everything, because only you can.  Therefore, we’re going to focus entirely on you.  A large reason for this is that so many games are structured around power fantasies.  We’re not interested in the intangible ways that characters change throughout a narrative—we’re interested in how high our stats go and what new spells we can cast to abolish foes.  Undoubtedly, this is a great system for creating engaging gameplay—people like to feel that their time is being invested, not wasted—but there’s nothing keeping game companies from designing multiple protagonist story lines, and most importantly, allowing players to play as multiple protagonists. 

Enter Luke Skywalker from The Empire Strikes Back. 

In case you don’t recall, Luke spends the entire movie doing two things: not noticing wampas, and going to school. 

Yeah, good luck making the third movie in your trilogy with that shit-ass plot. 

Enter Han and Leia from The Empire Strikes Back to make my point. 

Multiple protagonists = multiple story arcs = much more depth in your final story.  Star Wars is awesome, but pretty thin if we’re focused only on Luke Skywalker’s journey.  Arguably the best film in the franchise, The Empire Strikes Back is about Luke Skywalker talking to a puppet—and his friends flying through asteroid fields to escape from the Galactic Empire, eventually ending in a city in the clouds where a bounty hunter has planned a trap to capture them—and, and—it involves the treachery of an old friend!  What an awesome story about our other protagonists. 

Games don’t need to forego a central protagonist—Luke still does some awesome shit—but having several characters to bump up the plot and create heightened conflict (and unforeseeable consequences, leading to a surprising conclusion) are one way for games to create much more compelling narratives than they currently create.  Back to Empire—one of the most tense and memorable parts of the film is Luke’s confrontation with Vader, ending with Vader revealing that (spoiler alert!) he is Luke’s father. 

But if Han didn’t know Lando, he wouldn’t have gone to Cloud City, and he wouldn’t have been tortured and frozen in carbonite (all of which is compelling), and if Han didn’t know Luke, Luke never would have gone to Cloud City to confront Vader and appear on Maury.  Luke was sort of near Vader on Hoth, but that happened before his training—so would Vader have even considered offering to take Luke on a Father-Son galaxy-ruling adventure?  Probably not.  Therefore, we would have missed out on the whole choosing-between-good-and-evil bit and the circle-is-now-complete possibility and the realization that our hero is not that strong yet, he should have listened more closely to his master, he’s reckless and young and downright flawed. 

I know!  What a terrible fucking game to play.  You balance some rocks on top of each other while standing upside down while the puppet talks in backwards fucking sentences, and then you “beat the game” by getting your goddamn hand chopped off.  And you don’t even get to bone your sister! 

A couple of responses—first, the gameplay can be framed in such a way that the player still feels like he’s succeeded even when he gets his hand cut off.  If you unsuccessfully fight off Vader, he kills you because you’re not worthy of joining him to overthrow the Emperor.  The Emperor’s a badass too, and Vader isn’t going to try shit against him if Luke’s a pansy—so he’ll kill you if you suck at the game. 

Secondly—Empire would be a terrible movie if the franchise ended there!  Duh.  They knew there was going to be another movie.  That’s the movie where the power fantasy gets fulfilled, the bad guy gets offed, and everything’s super-duper.  I think we can produce narratives that end in relative defeat for our protagonists, especially if this is the second or third game in a franchise (and we don’t have to end on a Hollywood up-note to be deemed “not a bummer” and get a chance at making a sequel). 

Plus, there are narratives in which the protagonists accomplish the goal they set out to accomplish, but it doesn’t solve their problems.  While I haven’t played Gears of War 2, I know you’re on a quest to find Dom’s wife.  (SCHPOILERS!!!)  When you get to her at the end, she’s a monster, a shell of who she once was.  So why not set up that game as a “we have to go the big bad guy’s house and kill him so I get my wife back” narrative, let people kill the big bad guy, and find a let-down of a wife at the end?  Power fantasy fulfilled—but for what purpose?  All this power… doesn’t change everything?  What a revelation. 

And then burn down the big bad guy’s house for shits and giggles. 

And set up how you need to… kill bigger bad guy?  Find cure for wife?  Keep this from happening to other people?  …in the sequel, then start work on the sequel. 

Now, I’ll grant you that this blog was essentially stitched together from some ramblings I had, and that I wish it were better.  However, now you have something to comment on!  So have at. 

(and in case you still don’t get it, watch here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y6rE0EakhG8)