Matt’s essay on the sandbox touches on many of the points I wanted to address when I originally talked about Plot vs. Fun. I don’t want to contradict Matt, as I basically agree with the points he made, but I do want to explore my original distinction of Plot vs. Fun as it relates to sandbox games, meaningful games, and what analyzing games as art means. Phrasing it the way that I do implies that somehow plot is, at best, independent of fun, or, at worst, in direct opposition to it. I’m going to ask more questions than I answer, but I’d rather start a conversation than pontificate.
Stated succinctly, composing a coherent narrative with fixed events inherently requires seizing or suspending the player’s control, disrupting our sense of agency. Every cutscene robs us of an opportunity to do something cool ourselves, but giving us total freedom to wander over every meaningless rock in a hundred-mile radius of Cyrodil means that long stretches of time pass without enhancing the narrative. This is the problem of Plot vs. Fun. The critical components of video games that make them games are moments of action and decision, while watching a story unfold and listening to dialogue is a passive activity. Giving us too much dialogue to listen to while trying to leap from platform to platform causes us to miss our jump, but having us stand around watching scripted events happen strips us of our sense of agency, the immersive aspect unique to games as art.
Many of the articles here discuss the importance of narrative and plot as it pertains to a game being good art. Bill makes a strong case that meaningful games need good cohesive narratives, and that “side quests” detract from that meaningfulness as a matter of definition; the fact that we distinguish in-game activities that reinforce the narrative from the optional ones that, to put it kindly, do not, is indicative that these things are antithetical to a high-quality experience. In Matt’s sandbox article, he points out that striving to have huge amounts of options, as a practical matter, limits the depth of those options, leaving you with a world full of barely distinguishable mediocrities, none of which leave a lasting impression that you’ve done something meaningful to the game world.
Games can be fun and artistically interesting without narrative, as has already been explored in Bill’s article on the Meaningful Game. Titles like Beat Trip Hazard create visually enthralling experiences with challenging gameplay that provide you with new ways to experience and explore your favorite music, but trying to force a plot on it would be futile and pointless. Minecraft is famously successful for being an enjoyable and artistically challenging game without the faintest pretense of narrative. Yet even games like this require either a one-line justification (“Avoid obstacles to raise your score, and you win!”) or thrive because they enable the creation of narratives with the tools they provide.
Narratives are the strongest artistic component available for critique in games. Strong visual aesthetics can lend tremendous atmosphere to a game, as with titles like Limbo and Team Fortress 2, but the component that ultimately leaves us pondering the significance of our consumed experience is the narrative. As brilliantly executed as I find the colorful stylings of Torchlight, their style hasn’t left me pondering the way that I understand the world. Similarly, good music is essential to an ideal gaming experience, but usually isn’t enough to leave one re-evaluating their understanding of the world. If there isn’t a narrative justifying what I’m doing, I won’t be able to find the game fun.
The problem I wanted to consider when I introduced the Plot vs. Fun distinction is tied directly with the idea of interactivity. Video games thrive on the player’s ability to make choices and to act at their own pace. Because of how computers work, however, all events and possibilities must be planned and programmed in explicit detail before they can even be experienced by players. This means that all possible experiences that a player can have must be explicitly planned, designed, and created.
Writing a good story is hard. Writing the same story 37 different times to cover the permutations of interest is harder. Narratives require continuity. A bit of narrative that is merely compatible with the greater whole without being necessary does not necessarily improve the whole. Similarly, a component which strongly enhances the narrative can scarcely be cut without detracting from the whole. After all, if a storyline reinforces the themes of the larger work and provides entertaining content, why would you make it possible to ignore it? Can the final product really be considered whole if high-quality components of it have been excised?
Contrariwise, video games contain many aspects that make gameplay fun but do not necessarily require any narrative significance. There are strong thrills to be gained from completely an especially difficult stage in a platformer, solving a complex block-movement puzzle that could never stand up to narrative justification, getting a strategically novel kill in Team Fortress, or executing a clever strategy in an RTS which has a pace of construction and action that would be positively nonsensical if narrated in real time. These sorts of events are distinctly fun, but must either be heavily abstracted to make narrative sense, as is true for games like Warcraft 3, or take place in a setting devoid of plot, as with Team Fortress.
In video games, these complex events form the bulk of a player’s activity, and weaving narrative components into gameplay frequently requires seizing control from the player, leaving you staring at several inert sets of polygons playing sound files at each other, periodically pausing to let the player trigger the next few minutes of MP3 playback. Games that leave the player with control of nearly every event and which imbue every character action with player interaction contain many moments of awkwardly walking around a room waiting for the next quicktime event, reducing the overall impact of each of those choices. To use Heavy Rain as an example, I sincerely doubt that Norman Jayden could casually walk into a wall for 25 seconds while pleading desperately with Agent Blake to stop casually beating the hell out of Ethan’s psychiatrist. These moments are great as narrative, but they are dreadfully boring as play and reduce the narrative quality by giving the player that form of control.
Finding a compromise between keeping us busy and providing us narrative is a challenge unique to game design. It is often possible to experience the pieces of a work in arbitrary order, something almost unique to the medium of games. This is chiefly addressed in one of two ways: either your decisions are of limited significance in most of the game world, as with Elder Scrolls games like Morrowind and Oblivion, or the dev team spends staggering amounts of time writing and programming complex chains of interwoven events and dialogue branches like BioWare does, which often leads to having fewer choices.
I’ve stated a problem: games face a unique challenge in plot development because directed narrative has the potential to disrupt our sense of agency, accomplishment, and immersion. The challenge is not insurmountable, as evidenced by the fact that we have games with plots. What I would like to do is describe the responses as a continuum of design possibilities, and explore them a bit to have a better hermeneutic for game analysis.
Option One: All Fun, No Plot
Games in this category are easy to come by. Team Fortress 2 is my favored example; as much media as there is outside the game, it may as well all be elaborate fanfic. There is no story in the game itself, and it doesn’t need one. This is not to say that games in this category truly have zero narrative, but that they have the least amount of explanation to justify themselves. Puzzle games, for example, have no plot, but they are also not generally striving to be art that makes statements about the world.
These can be great games, but I question their ability to be art. I would expect them to contain good art, like beautiful imagery and good music, but I am uncertain that the game as such would be art. As much as I love the character design and dialogue in Team Fortress 2, calling it art as such seems to be shoehorning it into a category where it doesn’t belong. But if a game with exquisite characterization, stylization, and nuance can’t be called art, what can?
Option Two: All Plot, No Fun
A favorite title at this site is Planescape: Torment. As far as I care, no game has a more interesting conceit, better dialogue, or stronger characters. While quite a lot of characters are straightforward inversions of D&D tropes (e.g. the chaste succubus) they are all executed with such attention to nuance and carefully crafted dialogue that nothing feels forced. Torment is the Planescape setting taken seriously, and forces every D&D concept to its craziest extreme. I loved reading every dialogue branch, savored every character, and marveled at the beautiful design of every single spot in the game.
It’s one of my absolute favorite titles, but as much as I love Torment, I’m not sure it’s actually a lot of fun. Combat is unnecessary and boring, and most of the game consists of moving slowly between areas hunting for dialogue options. The joy of the game is in the reading, and it’s certainly more immersive for the beautiful art and animations that accompany the events of the story, but the gameplay is rather tedious. Playing through the game again for the sake of reading my favorite parts is almost a chore.
I want to call Torment art, and good art. But is it fair to call a game art when its story is phenomenal and its gameplay is tedious? Heavy Rain has a pretty good story, but it’s not actually very interesting to play. It would seem to be an iconic choice for a game to call art, but does that come at the expense of it being a game? A good narrative is art, but is the game art too?
Option Three: The Balancing Act
Most games strike their balance between player agency and pre-determined events. Video games are, at the most fundamental level, instruments whereby human motions trigger animations and sounds. I may press a button to cause a character to jump, or that same button press may trigger a three-minute cutscene. The amount of material I receive back may or may not be correlative to the frequency and complexity of the input I deliver. This, at the most naked level, is the problem. How much response should I expect for my actions? Is a long animation a better prize for a harder, more complex series of inputs? Is a game better for offering lots of good narrative, animation, voice acting, and music for comparatively little input? Or are these rewards only meaningful when careful thought and work is necessary from the player to achieve them?
What Have I Gotten Myself Into?
I’ve asked some hard questions. There are answers to most of them, and some of them can be written off as making bad assumptions. Some of them are extreme positions that no one holds, but still deserve to be addressed. I’d like to explore some of these later, but I don’t have all the answers. This blog is about dialogue about how video games can be analyzed and appreciated as art, so I’d like to hear what you have to say about some of the topics I’ve brought up here.
Interesting article, Jarrod! Thanks for giving it to us.
I’m going to let other folks engage with the brunt of these questions, but I would like to point out another game that I thought was exceptionally interesting and exists outside of the spectrum presented here, more along the lines of Beat Trip Hazard and Minecraft, but it exists more as a short meditation on death wrapped in a bullet hell game. I’d love to hear your opinions on it; I found it’s suggestions powerful, intriguing, and even moving, and yet the only narrative was strung between a quote at the beginning of each level… five levels, one for each stage of grief. It only takes about twenty minutes to play through; it’s called Solace. You can download it for free here: http://solacegame.com/