Or: “It Was Like The Monolith In 2001…And I Was The Monkey. Except I Wasn’t Naked. Also, I Didn’t Smash In Another Monkey’s Head With A Femur.”
I was talking with a traditional RPG-designer friend of mine who was extolling the virtues of the RPG as a storytelling device. In many ways, in talking to me, he was preaching to the choir.
Every now and again, here at GPW, we’ll feature articles by guest writers, sharing their thoughts on games, stories, and anything in between. This is our first guest-written article. What do you think?He told the story of a friend of his who’d never played an RPG before and what happened when an NPC betrayed her character, literally stabbing her in the back. The player said, “I felt like I had been stabbed!”
Certainly, for her, this was a revelatory experience. She didn’t expect to have that kind of experience while playing a game, and this is all well and good.
My friend said, “That is the kind of thing RPGs can do that movies cannot do!”
This was where we parted company.
Because I felt like movies do that all the time. It’s the reason film is so successful at communicating emotionally. When Ripley is running, confused and terrified, through the corridors of the Nostromo, I am confused and terrified. When I watch Rick drinking his sorrows away over Ilsa, I experience longing and loss and unrequited love.
The starkest example I can think of, and the one I use when talking about this stuff at work, is Heath Ledger in Monster’s Ball. Spoiler Alert! Very early on in the movie, in the middle of confessing something to his father, Ledger’s character very abruptly pulls out a revolver, points it to his chest, and pulls the trigger. It happens so quickly. Ledger is going through with something he can only do by rushing through it and so we are rushed through it with him and when he shoots himself, I felt like I’d been shot. If I’d been sitting on a stool, I’d have fallen over. Without thinking, the instant the gun went off, I put my hand to my chest.
Certainly not everyone reacts that way, but that’s how I reacted and probably if you’re reading this you’ve had similar experiences in other movies. Else why do we cry at movies? Because we feel what the characters are feeling.
(This quote gets around a lot. Can a video game make you cry? Click here for one person’s answer: “Yes.” — Will)Steven Spielberg once, famously, said that games will reach the same level of storytelling as film when the player cries at the end of level 11. This caused something of an uproar, mostly, I feel, by people who simply didn’t want to entertain criticism of a medium they’d grown up with and whose legitimacy they took for granted…or always felt defensive of. To me, a storyteller in video games, I agreed with him. I felt we had a long way to go.
I don’t feel particularly motivated to make anyone cry, so I reject his example, but his point is taken. I was scared and curious and spooked-out when playing through the original Unreal (and, as far as I can tell, I was the only one!) and I’ve thrilled to various video game characters’ adventures, but these are simple reactions, I think. Spielberg was talking about a higher-level reaction. Something more than jumping when someone shouts “Boo!” Something like grabbing your chest and feeling like you’ve been shot because you’ve seen another character shoot himself.
And so we come to Mass Effect.
Mass Effect was produced by Bioware, one of the two great giants of American CRPGs. These are guys who have their shit together, know their audience, and have honed their style nearly to perfection. There’s a lot to say about Mass Effect, most of it positive, but here I’m focusing on the story. On one particular moment of the story that I feel marks a small leap forward, at least to my own personal experience of story in games.
Like the other big American CRPG that’s come out recently, Oblivion, the player in Mass Effect can custom create his own human character. Male or female. Oblivion essentially exposes the XSI front-end that animators and character modelers use to create faces in games and this is all well and good…if you’re an animator. If you’re not, then the ability to control the ratio between the width of your nose and the angle at which the nose projects from the plane of your face is not super-useful because…what?
Whereas Mass Effect takes essentially the same thing and simplifies it so the player is only monkeying with things that make an obvious difference and as a result you’re much less likely to end up with a dude who can see through his own nostrils, and be unable to put it back the way it was.
Because of this, I was able to create a dude who looked exactly the way I wanted. I’ve been working on an outline for an SF novel and I decided I was going to use my first playthrough of Mass Effect to see if I could model the main character of my outline. I was able to make exactly the dude I imagined and this may be why I later had the reaction that prompted this post.
I decided not only was my character going to look like the guy I imagined in my outline, he was going to behave like him. Very straight-arrow, by the book, no bullshit. And, like the character creation system, the dialog options permitted me to play my mans the way I wanted. It was a fantastic synergy between my imagination and the options presented me in-game.
Most of our guest writers will come to the site by invitation, but that’s not like a rule or anything. Got an article you want to share with our readers? Maybe we’ll find a home for it. Write will (at) gameplaywright (dot) com and let us know.As a result I was having an unusually high degree of character-identification as I played Mass Effect. When my friends at work asked me what I thought of the game I said, “It’s hard to tell. It’s like when you’re playing a traditional RPG. The GM might be shit, and the campaign might be boring, but if you really like playing your mans, that can make the game a lot of fun.” I really liked my character and as a result I was probably overlooking some flaws.
Early on in the playthrough, at the end of the first level/mission, gameplay transitioned into a cutscene and something extraordinary happened. My party came across an alien artifact and one party member walked up to it. She was pulled toward it against her will and seemed to be in danger. My character, and I was not in control at this point, recognized the danger and pulled her away. As a result, my character was pulled toward the artifact.
The whole level had built up to this and suddenly my character was telekinetically jerked into the air, funky lights started flashing, and the camera cut to a close-up reaction of my character as fear and pain and wonder fought for control over his face. Images flashed across the screen, representing what he was seeing as the Artifact probed his mind.
When it was over, I realized I had not taken a breath in several moments and my heart was racing. I had experienced all the same things my character experienced. It felt like it happened to me. Fear, wonder, pain. This wasn’t a simple “Boo!” Or the dread of wondering what was around the corner. It wasn’t tears, but it was as complex, maybe more complex, than what I experienced watching Monster’s Ball.
And I thought “holy shit.” Because it was that kind of moment. It wasn’t until afterward, hours later, that I realized something amazing had happened. It’s reinforced throughout the game as that experience becomes critical to the plot. The Artifact is some sort of Uplift Device and it changes you.
Now, some of the options you’re presented with when your character talks about the experience later kinda undermine the whole thing (“I saw war.” What? You saw a bunch of weird shit that didn’t make any sense. Where’s the, “I saw a bunch of weird shit that didn’t make any sense” dialog option? I shouldn’t complain though, because what my character would say, “What I saw wasn’t important,” was there) but this is a small point.
The game didn’t just create an emotional reaction in me, I felt like I was experiencing what the character was experiencing. And I wasn’t even in control of my dude when it happened!
At least for me, and at least in this game, and maybe because of the way I was able to customize my character, in that one moment the story in a video game became as effective as any movie I’d seen. There’s still a long way to go, but I felt as though we’d taken one small leap forward.
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Matt Colville is the Story Editor on the Mercenaries team at Pandemic Studios. As far as he knows, this is a unique position in the industry and may be the coolest job out there.
Bioware knows exactly how to make an immersive CRPG, for all the reasons you go into. I’ve never did the “evil” KOTOR ending because my character would never have turned to the darkside. My only disappointment with that game was that I was unable to sacrifice my character rather than let an NPC be captured. That’s what my character would’ve done!
Damn cutscenes…
Mike-
The differences between immersion, verisimilitude, suspension of disbelief, and…the thing I’m talking about, are fine. They all mix together and may sometimes each be another word for the other.
I’m not even sure what the name of what I’m talking about is. Character identification maybe. Sympathy, in its literal meaning of “feeling the same thing someone else is feeling.”
I think personally I draw a line, a fine one, between immersion and experiencing the feelings my character is experiencing.
I think perhaps the difference is that I feel immersed when *I* am the direct target of the experience. When I, the player, am wondering at everything I see around me, when I feel like I’m in the world of the game.
Whereas with Mass Effect, my *character* was the target. The writers made him feel something, conveyed that to me, and then I felt it.
I feel like motivation is the easiest thing to project onto the character, so it gets to the player.
That’s something I told the people here at Pandemic. “All we have to do is get the player to care about the character. Then he’ll care about whatever the character cares about.” I don’t think this requires immersion, per se. It’s my hope that the player in Mercs2 will want to get the bad guy because he likes his character and therefore wants what his character wants, but I don’t for a moment think the player will actually forget he’s playing a video game during act one.
The next hardest thing to do is a simple emotional reaction. Like scaring the player, which does require immersion. I’ve seen lots of games do this. F.E.A.R. does a great job of actually using the basic assumptions of how a video game works, things like the view frustum, and exploit them to scare the player.
The hardest thing, at least from where I sit, is not getting the player to experience wonder, that’s hard but well-known territory. It’s getting the player to feel wonder *because his character is feeling it*. That’s freakin’ hard.
I think you’re right to draw the line between “I feel this” and “My character feels this.” That’s the line that games are still trying to cross, and that novels, movies, etc have bridged.
I think in some ways, games like KOTOR (and presumably Mass Effect, though I have yet to play it) can approach that line. With KOTOR, I really through myself into my approach for character-as-paladin, and it paid off repeatedly. I got to redeem a fallen Jedi, refuse to lie even when it was convenient, and so on. There’s a two sided approach there, in that the writers saw that there was a natural tendency to play in a couple different modes (light side, dark side) and then built the game’s story line to speak to that pick a team mentality.
I wonder if the road to sympathy lies along some weird fusion of an Animal Crossing style game and a first person shooter. If you start out in one mode, building a community, tending to it, watching it grow, and then some NPC comes along and stomps on it, I think we end up with a player as enraged and vengeful as his character. That initial investment is what a lot of games are missing. I’m pretty excited to hear about how you’re handling the opening to Mercs 2. It’s a brilliant idea, and I hope more games do stuff like that.
Mike, did you ever have a problem with a dialog choice you made have a very different meaning to the designers than the one you intended? That happened to me all the time and I often wondered whether they were doing it on purpose.
I don’t think that has happened, though I have to admit that playing a dialogue-rich game like KOTOR goes against my typical gaming tastes. It’d annoy me if it did happen, since I’m the type of person who gets supremely frustrated with poor controls in a game. I want my guy to do what I want him to do, when I want him to do it.