WHAT’S IN A STORY? Part 2

Nov 05

WHAT’S IN A STORY? Part 2

, by Rory Fellowes | Miscstory

When we say story, most of us if not all surely would mean a tale, with a beginning, a middle and an end. We think of plot, of characters, dialogue, events, resolutions, conclusions and so on. Drama. Or comedy for that matter. What we look for, what we expect is a narrative flow that we can follow. Our role is passive. We are the audience, be it watcher, reader, or listener. This is what fiction, theatre and film have provided for the audience in the past, and for centuries.

But now, since the late 20th century, games have developed an entirely new genre of narrative, providing stories that are full of alternatives, what can be described as player choices, with a variety of outcomes, of potential endings, in which the player is active. The whole ethos of games is player involvement, and elsewhere we shall consider what some might think is an ideal game, the one that is effectively the product of the player’s gameplay; the game that responds to the player and challenges him as he or she wants to be challenged and entertained.

Games developers working on multi-player narrative games undertake to provide a narrative structure on which the player can improvise, influencing the narrative flow but basically being carried along by it. At present and in their past incarnations, this is the fundamental difference between games and traditional forms of drama.

Only then do they turn their attention to the story, the format, what kind of tale they want to tell. What kind of story is it? What are the narrative structures?

I asked Cevat Yerli, CEO of Crytek, how they get a narrative structure into a game if players expect their avatar to have a say in their destiny. A compromise is involved.

“We call them story moments. So what happens in our games, we have so-called bubbles, and those bubbles are directing and diverging moments, so when they diverge they open up. After a [story] moment something happens, then the play space is opening up, and when it opens up, that’s where the player has freedom and options and creates his story style emerged by his actions, but eventually he gets funnelled into a story moment again, and we keep chaining these bubbles together like that, to form a united structure.”

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“Now, this is a structure, one way of playing it. There are other ways to do it, but that is how we did it for “Far Cry” and “Crysis”, for example. In “Ryse” we took an even more straight up approach, because the drama and the characterisation was even more in the forefront, less options, more the personalities. So we took a more linear approach.

“And now for some of our newer games we try a whole different structure again, just to see if there is a different way for telling a story and giving more options to the players. That’s the exciting part of playing games, to learn from movies and their emotional dimensions of stories & characters, to create worlds, but eventually still to be a game. There are many ways to approach this, and that’s the beauty of being in games, there are always new ways to discover how to let players experience stories!

“Our IP [Intellectual Property] starts with the world. First we think about the world we want to create. What is the world where we want to play this game. Is it the Roman Empire, is it the world of “Crysis”? What setting, where are we, which planet and etcetera etcetera.”

Ryse: Son of Rome

“It’s from that we create our foundation, and/or the physical rules and then the characters that play in this. And then we think about what kind of story format or journey we want to tell, is it a redemption story, is it a whatever, what are the narrative structures? It’s our approach and we know most companies start with story, though in Hollywood we hear that more and more movie productions start as well with the world and its ingredients.”

Ryse: Son of Rome

Games are Realtime, in which players are faced with spontaneous possibilities. Films, on the other hand, are to be watched and appreciated as given, readymade, the final cut. Both are the result of a lengthy production process. In games the player’s attitude when playing must be fundamentally different to his attitude when he or she is watching a film. In other words, the audience can enjoy both, in different ways, and presumably we can go on catering to both markets, separate and discreet.

Well, yes, but only insofar as we can still go to the theatre, for instance, or watch live music in a bar or on the street, or read books or listen to the radio. But the fact is, the leading edge of entertainment is the high tech stuff, big vision movies, VFX heavy (hopefully with a good script), 3D and all of that, delivering to the largest audiences ever assembled in the whole of human history (think of that. I love the 21st Century!) and that’s what I’m following here.

Games build over years, version after version. Games have been working with the online audience for years, and now film is learning to deliver to them too. Attending a silver screen presentation is going to be as esoteric (and expensive) as going to the theatre in the not too distant future, and even cinemas will have their screenings streamed via digital delivery systems.

The convergence of games and movies is not only in the visuals and delivery, but in narrative conception as well. In fact, something is happening to the way we think.

GAMES NARRATIVE

I talked to Louise O’Connor at Rare Ltd. Louise is now their Incubation Director, a marvellous job to have, by the sound of it. As I understand it, she and her team spend their time dreaming up new games and working on the design and gameplay. Before this, however, Louise was the Art Director for Rare’s first game for Xbox 1, and using the latest Kinect technology, called Kinect Sports Rivals. On the face of it, a sports game is a simple structure of event based gameplay. There is not narrative direction, or so it would seem.

“There always has to be a story. That is the basis for any part of the creative process. When we did the Art Direction for Kinect Sports Rivals, the first thing I did was come up with a narrative for why this game would exist. We wanted to create this world where you would always go to compete. For Kinect Sports Rivals we wanted to build an island and on this island people have been coming for hundreds and hundreds of years in order to take part in all these sports. [The game] is built around competition, so everything on the island has been re-purposed to make competition happen.

“Even something like a sports game or any of the games we’ve ever made always has some type of narrative to start it off. There has to be some kind of Hook, as we call it.

“So for instance, the people on the island have re-purposed big ships to make them bowling boats, so you’re actually out in the middle of the sea when you’re bowling. And there’s a ship that we had pulled up on a crane, so it is hanging sideways and we use that as a climbing rockface. We wanted it to be a little bit different.”

Kinect Sports Rivals Avatar Creator

The boats in the game world are the ones the original inhabitants of the island arrived on. That’s the idea. Quite how this affects the gameplay I’m not sure, but clearly, the need for a narrative, a base from which to enter the game is paramount. Rare started with the narrative, with the idea that it used to be possible to go to the island using traditional ways of getting there, by boat, as it were, and now you have a new way of travelling to the island through your Xbox 1. The idea, the hope, based on their experience working with gamers, is that the player is engaged in the game even before they start to play.

Add to this the intriguing technology of Kinect, where each player is scanned into the game engine and recreated as an avatar of themselves (a rather fit, good looking if cartoony version of themselves, to be precise), and finally, after all this introductory processing, I imagine actually getting to the game must be quite exciting, not to mention a relief.

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Kinect Sports Rivals

“I’ve spent so long referencing Pixar and Avatar and all these great movies that are out there,” Louise told me, “delivering amazing digital content, and I’m a huge movie fan anyway, and it’s the emotions I get when I’m watching a film that I want to replicate in games. So we spend a long time in the games industry looking at the film industry and being inspired by it. What you’re talking about is almost the opposite. Now the film industry is looking at the games industry and they’re being inspired by what we do, which I think is awesome.”

TELLTALE GAMES

I also spoke with Dennis Lenart at the appropriately named, and well renowned Telltale Games. Telltale are known particularly for their narrative games, such as The Walking Dead and The Wolf Among Us.

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The Wolf Among Us

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The Walking Dead

Telltale produce continuing stories, at the amazing rate of about three hours of performance every six weeks. The teams at Telltale are tasked with providing new storylines every six weeks or so, complete with any new assets required, all the animation options the engine needs and so on. They can only do this because it is a closely controlled process of narrative development, however broad and ultimately, at least in concept, open-ended. The intriguing possibilities, the irresistible attractions of open-ended immersive narrative cannot be denied. Data storage and distribution, as well as asset gathering make it all seem a long way off, it’s true, but it could happen sooner than we think, not least because the audience will demand it.

Dennis spoke about what he called Emergent Narrative, and one can see the parallel with Alex’s ideas of narrative development. Dennis used as an example DayZ, a game developed originally for the Arma Game Engine, originally developed for Arma 2, a tactical shooter game.

DayZ puts the player in a very realistic and highly detailed world. The game procedurally populates the world of DayZ, a world sixty miles wide, and as many deep. “And it does all sorts of things that mean you can play for hours and see no-one else, although you may see someone. And the result of this is, when you do see, say, a silhouette on the far horizon, you have an immediate feeling of terror, of uncertainty, that this other person may be dangerous, or may equally be an ally.”

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In a game like this there are any number of possible and unanticipated events, unintended by the designer, unscripted in any way. In fact, as it says in the video trailer, the whole game is unscripted, which is to say, the script, the storyline, is created by the player.

Dennis went on. “A friend of mine was playing through [DayZ] and ended up finding a bike, and coming across something like that, that can be used for mobility, is pretty rare in that world. He’d been on foot for so long that coming across a bike like that really meant something to him.”

Sad to say, not long afterwards a gang of other avatars came along and stole the bike off him, and he was “devastated by this, because he knew how hard it would be to find another bike.” Devastated? If you are not a player it is difficult to comprehend the level of personal engagement players have in games, the emotional intensity of the experience, but film makers might be envious of such an engaged audience. For the players, games are a visceral experience, as affective as reality, in their own virtual way. This as much as anything explains the exponential growth of the games market over the last twenty years.

DayZ, released in 2012, is another step forward, in that it offers a huge variety of experience, almost though not yet limitless in scope. The problem, as Dennis pointed out, is that if you make certain choices, follow certain routes through the game world, it is possible to end up spending hours with nothing happening, just wandering around. Could be dull, like life on a wet Sunday.

NEW TECHNOLOGY, OLD PROBLEMS

As I said last week, the elephant in the room in all this is the hardware, the internet, all the practical issues of the new technology.

Cevat Yerli of Crytek told me “in games lag and response times are paramount and that’s something we can’t overcome with current bandwidths or Data Centres. Data Centres are usually at least 1000 or 2000 kilometres away and playing times and light up speed doesn’t allow you to be responsive. What needs to happen is that bandwidths have to increase, lag times have to be shortened and the next generation of Data Centres have to be only two or three hundred kilometres away from you. Then you could have a global cloud gaming experience. And that will cost maybe 100 million dollars to do.” Or a lot more than that, surely, if all the world is to be included.

Dennis Lenart of Telltale Games pointed out a practical problem with procedurally generated narrative development, getting the voice performances. “Voice performance, unless you have some amazing voice simulation software, like Siri in about a hundred years from now, would be impossible to generate. Say you have 25 characters, each with a thousand story development possibilities… To produce the voice performances for that would cost millions and millions of dollars, to have [the actors] in a studio, to record every possible iteration of every line they say, it’s virtually impossible.”

All I would add to Dennis’ comment is that Siri probably won’t take anything like as long as a hundred years to manage this. Bet you dollars to doughnuts, as the Americans say!

Hasta La Motion!