First of all, I’d like to thank Bill for making that fine distinction between art and entertainment yesterday, and taking care of a lot of grunt-work for this week’s column. I couldn’t have planned it better. And so, fair reader, it may help you to read that post if you haven’t already done so.
Multiplayer is Soulless
This week’s topic is the multiplayer phenomenon, and how it relates to narrative. Games almost always involve the construction of a narrative, even if said narrative is merely a paragraph-long excuse for killing numberless crowds of Enemy Type A. However, simple excuses have become blasé in most video games, relegated to Serious Sam, vicious old-school nostalgia-inducers, some indie games, and most of the puzzle genre. Even games like Gears of War, which would probably have been better off just telling the player to “kill the Horde while your characters quip in man-like fashion,” (NSFW) make an attempt at serious narrative, even weaving theme and dramatic sequences into its otherwise uninterrupted bloodbath. Why? One can only hope that they assumed that they had to, because if that isn’t the case, then somebody must have thought that the Gears of War story was worth telling. In the attempt at narrative, all such game modes become candidates for “art”; they are telling a story, and thus that story is subject to established methods of judgment built for that style of experience.
Constructed narratives are much less common in multiplayer experience. Multiplayer is more often interested in mulching/beating/shooting/destroying other players and/or the computer with or against one’s fellow player, or in other words, achieving usually arbitrary and abstract goals with minimal story significance, and it typically remains only entertainment, with little to no artistic aspiration. It is not uncommon to see entire titles released for this purpose (Left 4 Dead is the obvious culprit here, which is really not much fun to play on your lonesome, but there are plenty of other titles, mostly FPS, in which the single player campaign is there mostly because it helps sell units). Multiplayer modes are almost always devoid of cutscenes, meaningful story progression, character growth, and really anything that could be remotely considered “storytelling.” That means that multiplayer is bankrupt in the narrative department, yes?
Maybe not. At this point, however, it becomes necessary to split up multiplayer games into a few categories. It’s a really wide net I’m casting here, and a bit of distinction will help. Some games will probably fit into multiple categories, or have a mode that fits into one, and another that fits elsewhere.
Competitive Multiplayer
Street Fighter through Starcraft. These games are designed to be a test of mettle in which the more proficient (or lucky) player emerges victorious. The goal is to defeat all comers and to stand atop the pile of their corpses with banner held high. Team versions of such gameplay also exist in this realm, though Deathmatch is really the pure form. These modes are high on entertainment and low on art, and tend to emphasize the skill of the player over and above all else. Some players approach these titles more casually, seeking an experience of fun and not of domination.
Cooperative Multiplayer
Gears of War 2’s Horde Mode is the iconic cooperative model. Generally, the goal is not to be declared the “best,” but rather to work alongside other human beings to accomplish a shared goal. Most of these tend to be much higher in entertainment than in art. The differences between competitive and cooperative multiplayer modes are, perhaps, minor, but I want to make the distinction because I, at least, have a notably different experience between the two styles. Cooperative styles of play force a player to think of the other members of his team constantly and that state of mind does change the experience of play.
Cooperative Story
Resident Evil 5 and Left 4 Dead 2 are good examples of the cooperative story. The player experiences a narrative alongside other human beings. By virtue of its narrative, Cooperative Story games offer an experience of art, even if that isn’t necessarily the “point” of the game. Left 4 Dead is not about the story of the survivors; it is about teamwork and shooting zombies. If anything, the story provides a setting for that subject, but by virtue of that setting, Left 4 Dead has narrative qualities. What’s more, the characters are generally interesting, consistently portrayed, and easy to empathize with. In addition, the atmosphere is appropriately bleak and moody, with some interesting (albeit entirely environmental and optional) asides to the stories of other survivors, giving a slightly wider scope to the apocalypse story being told. What little bit of art there is to be found in the narrative of Left 4 Dead is quality stuff. And, since it’s not trying to be anything else, we can’t fault them for amount of content; in fact, the game probably works best with the little traces that we do see, since its primarily a survival experience, not a story about the origins of the zombie plague.
Where There Is No Story…
So far, I haven’t exactly covered anything new. But this is where things get crazy, folks.
I want to argue that, while no narrative is necessarily intended in multiplayer modes outside of the cooperative story umbrella, simple narratives DO exist for the player. The player creates these narratives with the images and sounds that the game provides because it is the natural way of interacting with a series of synchronous events. Though empathy with one’s avatar character is certainly lessened in most multiplayer experiences (even in L4D, I rarely feel all that connected to Ellis or Zoey), but it’s definitely still there, even if it’s just a desire to survive and succeed. In multiplayer, empathy is more situational than personal.
For example, one of the reasons Gears of War’s Horde mode succeeds so well is because of the sensation of holding out against a superior force. That story is firmly planted in our history, and has thus become a story archetype. Horde mode allows us to experience that archetype first-hand. We can see the monstrous hordes advancing on our position, and we are certain that death has come to claim us. This makes the breathless combat of Horde all the more satisfying. While this is a fantastic example, not all multiplayer modes contain such an archetypal situation to empathize with. However, players will STILL create narrative for them, even if the game does little to reinforce that narrative.
For this purpose, we will look at Starcraft’s multiplayer. On the surface, Starcraft is all about the mastery of abstract resource management and successful micro-management which, essentially, aims to get the most damage output and take the least amount of damage for each individual unit, or to utilize a unit’s special abilities in the most effective way possible. That sounds really cold, but the actual experience is a little more intimate than that. This is especially true in games with multiple opponents, since shifting loyalties and strategies require you to constantly re-assess opponents’ stances against you and their force make-up. I argue that the player is building a narrative as the game progresses. It is a simple narrative, perhaps expressed in something like, “I am winning, and I am pressing the offensive, but he is a strong defensive player, so I need to be careful or I’m going to lose too many of my ground troops.” This is perhaps most obvious post-game, when, in conversations with one’s opponents, one naturally gravitates toward the moments in the game when a loser came back to win big. Moments like these also exist in the social consciousness (all the big football upsets, for instance, ride on this same archetype). If the game only existed as resource management and micro-management to the players, there would be no such thrill. Obvious, perhaps, but hey, who actually thinks about these things?
So What?
Good question. Just because we build a narrative for our multiplayer experiences doesn’t mean that the modes are art. We do, after all, tend to build narratives about lots of things that aren’t art, like football, as mentioned above. But that does mean that we have the same basic response to multiplayer modes as to story modes; the story modes simply provide additional and more elegant tools for the building of narrative. This also means that multiplayer modes have the potential to become art, if the narrative experience evoked by a multiplayer mode does allow for reflection and revelation. Such a game would be difficult to build, particularly if you want player control to matter, simply because allowing the players to have control and also reliably creating a satisfying and revelatory experience is tough as hell to accomplish. But it is possible. Roleplaying games accomplish it all the time, and with a greater degree of player control.
Brink attempted to merge story with multiplayer and failed on almost every level. To begin with, the story is presented in roughly minute long cut scenes between each map. With each map serving as a different day on the progression of the story. Each side has their perspective on the set up of the map. But in the end, a total of 8 minutes of cut scene with dialogue coming from an unseen commander or some random unnamed character is not compelling. Additionally, the map design centers around choke points which essentially turn into meat grinders. It’s hard to build any empathy with other people because they aren’t people, they are classes with roles. I find it difficult to care that the medic who failed to revive me charged into the enemy and got himself killed. I don’t think multiplayer in FPS lends itself to story simply because of the stupidity of the online masses.
On the other hand, I’m very much looking forward to Star Wars: The Old Republic. The promise of fully developed and voiced story lines for each class is very alluring. BioWare has even promised that the larger instances called Operations (Raids) will fit into each class’s narrative. I admire the fact that they aspire to more than “Come heroes, the ultimate evil of this expansion needs slaying.”
Whether or not BioWare will succeed remains to be proven. But I applaud them for trying to break some of the mold of MMOs.
- Kevin