Plot vs. Fun 1


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.


About Jarrod Hammond

Jarrod Hammond doesn't always blog, but when he does, he does it for the Ontological Geek. He spends the rest of his time gaming on his PC, or apologizing to his wife for spending too much time on his PC. He lives in Kansas City, MO.


One thought on “Plot vs. Fun

  • Matthew Schanuel

    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/

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