What do we wish for in the perfect game?
Do we wish for Our Team to take the field and thrash the opposition from the First Moment, rolling up a walkover score at the final gun?
No. We wish for a closely fought match that contains many satisfying reversals, but which can be seen, retroactively, to have always tended toward a satisfying and inevitable conclusion.
We wish, in effect, for a three-act structure.
–David Mamet
Three Uses of the Knife:
On the Nature and Purpose of Drama
I generally wish for the spontaneous inclusion of story-telling tropes. You can set out to build some into your plot, but when the players invoke them out of the blue it implies the story is compelling enough to be treated as a non-interactive form of fiction.
Yesterday, the characters decided it would be a bad idea to say the Big Bad’s name out loud at the place they were casing out. If I’d introduced that as the GM, it would have seemed cliché and weak, and been gently mocked by the players by dancing around the forbidden act without touching it. Because it was their invention, it worked exactly as it was supposed to.
Pretending to write something down whenever one of them slipped up and said the name was just gravy.
That thing about reversals and inevitability has haunted me since I first read it.
Somewhere, I think it got either riffed or misquoted into a statement about how the outcome should be satisfying and inevitable based on the trailers, not the story. That is, an audience is satisfied when a movie end the way its genre or video-store shelving dictates. “You can jerk me around for the next 90 minutes or so,” says this hypothetical audience, “as long as I laugh and that motherfucking Dean gets pushed in the pool at the end.”
Dunno if that’s true or not.
The question of inevitability is interesting. I suspect the feeling of inevitability with regards to a story is only worthwhile in retrospect. When you can predict the inevitable end, the story is flat. When it seems in retrospect to have been inevitable, I think that makes it feel tight and correct.
But the question of meta-knowledge, such as comes with a particular genre, or when parts of the story have been exposed in a trailer, explodes this, a little bit.
I think this is also interesting as it might relate to board games. “Of course Rob won; he wins everything.” “Of course Jason was victorious in the end; he won the critical battle.”
Maybe inevitability and surprise are just things an audience cites when a story displeases them for other reasons. But either people demand their CGI armies to clash and their stolid principals to get slimed, or studios believe they do.
Romantic comedies are built on the promise of reversals and inevitability, yes? They are made of dramatic irony.
Franchises complicate the issue, though, since I’ve just gone through a handful of examples of inevitability in my head and they were all franchise installments or builders. We don’t get so many action movies that aren’t, it seems.
Anyway, I know Mamet’s talking about the appearance of inevitability in hindsight — because the story is so tight — but I’ve seen the quote abused. (I wish I could find that variation of it again, which suggests that audiences want the ending they paid for.)
Unexpected reversals on the way to an inevitable conclusion also describes most most games with boss fights, don’t it?
Thinking about it this morning, I think that a sense of inevitability is the thing you have to strike from Mamet’s passage in order to make it true for games.
I think that the sense of inevitability (from an after-the-fact viewpoint) is important for a story, but if the game felt like it could not have turned out any other way, you’d feel cheated of your victory. (Or, if you lost, feel like you’d wasted your time.)
As a perhaps-interesting designer’s side note, a sense of inevitability (before the game ends) is something you really have to try to manage, unless you want all but one players to give up (either literally, or in a descent into surliness) at some point before the game is actually over. In some games, it’s possible to mathematically eliminate the possibility that you can win before the end of the game, and that’s almost always a big problem in and of itself. It’s worse when it leads to a kingmaker impulse.
Perhaps games have the half-way house of the ‘point of no return’- once one particular decision was made the eventual outcome was inevitable. Until that point, there were still myriad possibilities, but that single choice sealed the deal.
There’s a similarity with linear works in that the such a decision should itself be ‘inevitable’, but you can’t have that in games without removing the ‘game’ part.
I think this is more obvious in board games- “You won it when you grabbed Family Growth”- but can still be applied to RPGs. Although in simulationist games the tipping point might be the last die roll (whether that’s a good thing or a bad thing is up to you).
Unless king-making is part of the design a la Diplomacy. In Diplomacy, it’s rapidly apparent who the leaders are and who is not. Kingmaking (or managing other players’ kingmaking) becomes a key to success in the game.