Yesterday’s issue of The Escapist included “A Videogame, in Three Acts,” an article I wrote about using the Hollywood three-act structure to add emotional impact to videogames.
Parts of my argument there may sound familiar; I’ve been beating this drum for a while. I articulated part of the argument at Electronic Book Review a while back, for example. Finding bits of the same thesis and line of argument laying around the floor here at Gameplaywright, and in Things We Think About Games, is left as an exercise for the interested reader.
At the risk of being that defensive guy, I want to say a (very) little bit here about a thread running through some of the comments on the article over at The Escapist. To summarize it:
Films ≠ Games
It is a true fact. I don’t disagree, but I do have two broad observations:
(a) Although that particular article focuses on the three-act structure of Hollywood films, the emotional fruits of a three-act, dramatic question–based approach to storytelling ripen in all dramatic stories, not just movies. Three-act structure is as old as Aristotle.
(b) A game doesn’t have to be a film, or even a story, for the root principles to apply. A bridge isn’t a skyscraper, but they’ve got some common strategies for resisting the pull of gravity and the forces of entropy.
Read the comments over there, though; there’s some good, insightful stuff. I hope I have time to respond to some of it, especially KDR_11k’s thoughts on the difficulty of player agency where game and story intersect. (It’s comment #6. Sorry, there are no apparent permalinks to individual comments).
Here’s a comment I made on Jeff’s article at The Escapist. It’s practically a post of its own:
The three-act structure has been attempted and bungled in some games, but that’s not the same as it not being a viable option for game design. It’s a tool, it has its uses.
For example, the structure as represented in one of my favorite games ever, THIEF: THE DARK PROJECT (with spoilers):
ACT I: We are introduced to Garrett the thief, the medieval-industrial game world, and the core components of stealth, detection, and action that define its gameplay. The game riffs on this core model with a few largely self-contained levels that build the character and atmosphere. We rob Bafford, free Cutty, and plunder the Bonehoard.
ACT II: Victoria shows up and hires Garrett (i.e. we the player) to obtain The Eye, which it turns out will require more than one mission to accomplish. We even get within site of the prize in one level and have to leave and prepare, over the course of 2 or more levels (depending on the edition of the game you’ve got), to come back and complete that mission. This confounds our expectations of how game levels typically interact, and feels a little non-linear, even though it’s completely linear. Eventually we gather the necessary MacGuffins and capture the prize: The Eye. But when we turn it into our patron, he turns on us, reveals himself as an evil god, steals our eyeball (!) and leaves us to die. Setback and reversal.
ACT III: Garrett spends a level escaping, continues shifting and altering loyalties established in the first two Acts, and embarks on climactic revenge missions against the revealed arch-villain. It’s more than a boss fight, and establishes a new tone for these final missions that wasn’t present before.
We get three acts divided over something like a dozen levels, drawing on classic and filmic narrative structure and traditional level-based game design at the same time to create an experience that allows a ton of player freedom within the individual story beats of an otherwise fixed tale of crime, betrayal, and revenge. THIEF didn’t surrender game for story or vice versa.
So I don’t think it’s accurate to say the structure *doesn’t* translate to games. It’s more accurate to say it often hasn’t or that it doesn’t translate well to all genres of games. It’s absolutely accurate to say that the formula is fallible — confounding expectations can be vital to good game design and good storytelling. Some great games tell terribly tired stories and are none the worse for it, while others tell enjoyable stories through solid but not groundbreaking gameplay. These are both fine outcomes, provided they are not the *only* kinds of games we’re making.
It’s probably fair to say that a lot more work went into storytelling in Thief than in most other games on the market, but it makes a really solid test case for how those elements can be tied together and made to work.
You could probably make a similar comparison/breakdown for other games that are renowned for storytelling. StarCraft springs to mind; in fact, the game is -explicitly- broken into three acts, each one corresponding to one of the playable factions, and then each faction campaign is -further- subdivided into rising and falling action. A perfect trilogy in one game.
At the same time, a game like Civilization will never suit itself to that kind of storytelling, because there’s no story to speak of.
Games that feature sandbox-style play can go either way. GTA IV -has- a campaign, but it’s arguably the weakest part of the game, not because it fails to follow the three-act structure (I’d say it does), but because what the player really enjoys is just the random mayhem of the game and the impressiveness of the setting.
One last comparison I’ll make is to the MMO genre. I think that gameplay in an MMO tends to be a “first act and first-half-of-second-act” structure, always trying to rise towards a peak, but never allowing the player to crest it.
I was pondering the three act issue after a board game night and had difficulty applying it. In a story there is supposed to be a dramatic reversal, but in a competitive multi-agent game, this would reward the player who is doing the worst destroying the incentive to succeed.