Narrative weaknesses in videogame endings

Writing about intrinsic and extrinsic ludus rules as they relate to the ending of Prince of Persia, has caused me to think about how the typical structure of videogames weakens some aspects of storytelling.  Ludus games typically present clear cut ending conditions to the player at or near the beginning of the game.  This is of course a fair way to structure non-narrative games, particularly between two opposing players.  Imagine how difficult it would be to play Chess if you didn't know that the objective is to achieve checkmate.  However, in a narrative videogame, these explicitly stated extrinsic ludus rules have a tendency to give away the ending.

I'm sure absolutely no one is shocked to learn that at the end of just about every game, the big bad is defeated and peace returns to the place where the game is set.  Some of the details may vary, but generally speaking the player sets out to defeat something, and they do.  Game designer and philosopher Chris Bateman tweeted recently:

"the essence of both games and stories is not conflict but uncertainty.  Conflict is only one kind of uncertainty, albeit a powerful one."

Although videogames are rife with conflict, we have mostly managed to remove the uncertainty from that conflict.   Typical non-digital games involve conflict between two or more players of which only one can win.  The heart of that experience, the thing that keeps us interested in the game, is the uncertainty of who will win.  However when we create a single player narrative videogame, that uncertainty is diminished by the fact that game designers do not make impossible games, and player failure is generally understood to not count in any meaningful sense.  The videogame may be very hard, and it may take many tries for the player to win, but the player can be reasonably certain that it is possible to win.  This may be one reason why the player vs. player modes in First Person Shooters tend to be more popular than the campaign story modes.  The PvP gameplay reintroduces the possibility of actual permanent failure, which means the game now has uncertainty.

It may be fair to ask at this point if games just aren't a good medium for story-telling.  Stories need to have endings, and games with endings need to have extrinsic ludus rules.  Stories are considered predictable and poorly told if the ending is too obvious ahead of time, while games are unfair if players don't know what the end-goal is.  This may be one of the reasons why some of the best games tend to tell fairy-tale-like stories.  We all know how fairy-tales end, but after hundreds of years we're still telling them.  It is possible for a story to have an appeal beyond uncertainty.

Amanita Design's Machinarium

Having said that, there are some ways in which games can navigate the conflict between narrative's need for uncertainty and the ludic need for clear objectives.  One method is to not explicitly state end goals.  Typically this works well with 2D games where players generally understand that a major intrinsic ludus rule is to move from one screen to the next. Curiosity about where the game is going can lead the player to take each next step, even when they don't know the overall trajectory of the game.  However there is a danger that too little reveal will cause the ending to feel abrupt.  Machinarium unfortunately runs into this problem (although is well worth playing).  Superbrothers Sword & Sworcery: EP manages to strike a better balance between alluding to the end goal and avoiding explicit statements regarding it.

Another way game designers can deal with this conflict is to have a clear and obvious end goal, but to obscure the narrative meaning of that goal.  Both Dear Esther and Journey start by visually defining the end goal as a spatial location, but neither videogame explains up front why the player is going there or what it means to get there.  It is only by playing through the game that the player will unravel the meaning of the clearly defined end goal.

Ludus Rules in Prince of Persia

I've recently read a paper titled Rules, gameplay, and narratives in video games* by Chee Sian Ang that breaks down the types of rules that a game can have into two categories: ludus and paidea.  Ludus rules establish winners and losers in a game, whereas paidea rules establish game actions.  Games themselves are also divided into two categories with the same names; ludus games define winners and losers while paidea games do not.  As I have written about before, I'm not terribly fond of the thinking that a videogame must be winnable in order to be a videogame, but that actually doesn't mean I'm only or even primarily interested in paidea games.  If we shift our definition of ludus games from a game that has winners and/or losers to one that has an ending (a point past which the game cannot be played), we can expand our view of ludus games while still making a meaningful distinction between ludus and paidea games.  The Sims is a well known paidea game because there are no ending scenarios imposed by the game designers.  This makes it fundamentally different from Dear Esther, which has an ending, but doesn't have win conditions.

In the paper, Ang further breaks down ludus rules into intrinsic ludus rules which indirectly relate to winning the game, and extrinsic ludus rules which establish the win conditions.  Again, this still works if we replace win conditions with ending conditions.  The 2008 reboot of Prince of Persia (confusingly titled simply Prince of Persia) uses intrinsic and extrinsic ludus rules to create an interesting and unexpected ending.  There will be spoilers ahead, if you care about that sort of thing.  Although really, I'm talking about a game that came out five years ago; if you were going to play it, you should have done so by now.

Concept art from Ubisoft's 2008 Prince of Persia

The majority of Prince of Persia's story is pretty standard 3D platformer fare.  The story is loosely based off Zoroastrianism's mythos.  The god of darkness, Ahriman, has been sealed in a tree by his brother, the god of light, Ormazd.  At the start of the game, the seal on Ahriman has been weakened, and Elika, the last guardian of the tree, sets out to heal sacred spaces in order to fix the seal on Ahriman.  The player takes the role of the Prince, who does not actually seem to be a prince in this version.  The Prince happens across the tree and decides to help Elika in her quest.  A darkness has fallen over the land, and we must bring it back to life.  We have seen this story many, many times before.

Generally speaking, a game of this type has as it's extrinsic ludus rule: defeat (sometimes seal) the evil force.  This is pretty much always the overall end goal for the game, quite often this end goal is explicitly stated.  True to form, the player is explicitly told that they must assist in sealing Ahriman back in his tree, and the game progresses pretty much as expected.  However, an interesting thing happens after the final boss battle. Ahriman is safely sealed away, and the player has won, but the game doesn't seem to be over.  "Seal Ahriman" turns out to be an intrinsic ludus rule; it's something the player needs to do in order to create the conditions needed to make fulfilling the extrinisic ludus rule possible.  The game actually ends when the player releases the seals on the temple.  This ending does not feel like a win.  Releasing the seal involves betraying Elika, the character whom you've been assisting.  It also means undoing the work you have just spent most of the game doing.

Screenshot of the Prince fighting one of Ahriman's servants

When Prince of Persia was released, there was some debate over whether or not the game designers were giving players a choice of endings.  The part of the game immediately after the final boss battle does have the feel of an ending.  Credits roll while the player walks out of the temple, and there's nothing obvious to do.  This acts as a kind of Snicket warning.  The player can turn off the game and pretend the story ended with Ahriman sealed safely away, just as the reader can put down The Bad Beginning when it looks like the Series of Unfortunate Events isn't going to end all that poorly after all.  The audience's rejection of a story's ending and refusal to participate further in the story telling is not the same thing as the audience taking control of the authored story, even when the audience has the author's encouragement.

*Published in Simulation & Gaming, 37, no. 3 (2006).

Teri Rueb - Artist Visit

Teri Rueb gave a presentation here at ACCAD last week.  Rueb creates interactive soundscapes using GPS headsets.  In her work the landscape becomes the interface for the interactivity.

In order to experience Rueb's work, participants must visit particular sites, and wander while wearing headphones.  While wandering, the participant will encounter a sound zone.  In Drift, the sounds played are randomly generated and the triggering zones drift in and out with the tides along the site.

During the talk something about the role of the headphones bothered me.  Wearing headphones in public is a common occurrence these days, however it is typically a way for people to cut themselves off from their surroundings, particularly the surrounding people.  Rueb's work seems to be about trying to heighten the experience of place and culture, but it is doing so by using technology which cuts the individual off from their surroundings.  Perhaps for this reason I felt Rueb's Elsewhere : Anderswo was the most interesting.  Because the piece itself is about alienation, the meaning of wearing headphones in public does not conflict with the meaning of the work.

Rueb's work and the technology used have evolved together over the years.  In earlier projects, Rueb had control over the hardware (GPS/computer and headphones), but as GPS devices have become more ubiquitous, the work has shifted to apps which participants can download and use with their own various devices.  This shift has meant Rueb faces a loss of control over how participants experience her work.  She expressed ambivalence regarding how participants interact with apps as opposed to the earlier devices.  She was particularly concerned about participant's fickle attentions when using an app on a multi-function device.

In game design we have an idea called the magic circle, which denotes the in-game world as distinct from the rest of the world.  The magic circle is more of a mindset than an actual space.  It can be identified in aspects of life other than games, particularly within rituals.  When Rueb talked about the mindset she wants to inspire in her participants, I believe she was referring to a form of the magic circle.  While it's true that taking phone calls and such does mean leaving the magic circle, people tend to leave and re-enter the magic circle easily.  I can't help but to think of how easily players move between in-character and out-of-character dialogue when playing games like Dungeons and Dragons.

One of the problems with discussing Rueb's work here, is that I have no first-hand experience with it.  In her talk, she was somewhat apologetic that we could only see her documentation and not experience the work itself.  This is a problem that I have been struggling with quite a lot lately.  The documentation of an interactive work is always a pale shadow of the work itself, and yet we often need to advocate for our work with only the documentation.  In the videogame community a system has been worked out where designers release a trailer to get people interested, then a free demo to allow them to experience a bit of the game without too much commitment, and that will hopefully allow your audience to find your game.  This, however, does not necessarily work well with the academic structure.  Unfortunately, the more typical method of documentation for installations doesn't particularly make sense for documenting videogames.

Columbus Moving Image Art Review

On Friday I attended the 14th Columbus Moving Image Art Review. The review showcases moving image works created by local filmmakers. The works ranged from abstract to narrative. The artists and work were as follows:

Matt Swift -- City Lights 
Lindsay LaPointe -- Rainboxes 
Vita Berezina-Blackburn -- Walker in the Field 
Nikki Swift -- City Walks -- 22 -- Boston 
Sean McHenry -- My Quiet Day 
Eric Homan -- Life-Lapse 2013 
Kevin Harkness -- Self Portrait Liz Roberts -- Flesh Suitcase 
Shannon McLoon - Bodyscape 
Franz Ross & Chris Wittum -- Spaceman 
Eric Hanson -- Writer & Red 
Andrew Ina -- Pastime 

The first two pieces featured hypnotic visuals set to music. City Lights wove together abstracted footage of the city to create patterns of light. Rainboxes explored the rhythm of falling rain.

Vita Berezina-Blackburn's piece, Walker in the Field, was especially interesting to me because I am currently taking a motion capture class taught by the artist.  Walker in the Field shows a ghostly figure walking among plant-like forms that represent places the walker has been and will be.  It is an interesting and thoughtful visualization of how the body moves through space.  

Several of the short pieces explored the rhythms and beauty in mundane life.  Life-Lapse 2013 by Eric Homan (who, incidentally, was my first 3D animation teacher) consists of time-lapse footage of every-day scenes from his life, including domestic scenes and his working life as a filmmaker and a teacher.  By compressing the day to day experience of life into a few minutes, we are invited to contemplate the actions we take over and over again in our own lives.  

Flesh Suitcase and Bodyscape were both meditations on the human body as object.  Flesh Suitcase offered many uncomfortable images.  As a vegetarian, I found the ending scene, which focused on human feet stepping on raw ground meat, to be particularly disquieting.  Bodyscape took a more glorifying stance to the human body.  This imagery in this film depicted the human body as an object for aesthetic contemplation.

Eric Hanson's Writer & Red explored the creative impulses that drive storytellers and the distractions which hinder them.  The Writer finds himself haunted by a story character he has created in his mind, but has not given form to in his writing.  Although the Writer is working towards his goal of being a creator, he has allowed the work he feels he should be doing to distract him from the work he wants to be doing.  The story is about the Writer reconnecting with his original reasons for being a writer and beginning the work he truly believes in.  

Tale Type 510A

Tale Type 510A from Sheri Larrimer on Vimeo.

The title of my animation refers to the Aarne-Thompson-Uther folktale type associated with Cinderella.  Some of the dialogue is quoted from D.L. Ashliman's translation of the Cinderella variation collected by the brothers Grimm.  Much of my retelling of Cinderella is based on the German version.  This means that my audience may be unfamiliar with some aspects of the story due to the fact that most American audiences are more familiar with Charles Perrault's French variation and Cinderella stories based off that version.  In the battle sequence, I reference the French version by showing two possible summons Cinderella can use, the pigeons and the more familiar Fairy-Godmother.  However, the Fairy-Godmother is grayed out, and a negative sound plays to show the "player" is trying to select it but cannot.  Including the grayed out Fairy-Godmother option serves as a nod to both the multiple variations of folktales and the potential for variations in a single videogame narrative.

In my animation I make many references to videogames from the 1990s.  The character name screen is modeled off of the Final Fantasy games, and most of the third person scenes are referencing the Final Fantasy games, Dragon Warrior, and The Legend of Zelda.  Even the odd text break in the step-mother's dialogue is an intentional nod to 1990s videogames which were often translated from Japanese to English by people who were either not paying attention to text breaks or could do nothing about awkward text breaks due to technical limitations.  The lentil sorting scene is designed to directly reference the battle sequences in Dragon Warrior.  I am interested in how game mechanics can mapped to unusual meanings, and here I have mapped the heavily text based battle mechanics from Dragon Warrior onto a dull domestic task from the Cinderella story.

The design of my characters has a decidedly more contemporary influence.  The character style is inspired by the 8-bit work of the artist known as Superbrothers.  While I was contemplating the use of gradients in Superbrothers: Sword and Sworcery EP to denote the supernatural, I decided to break the illusion of a true 8-bit game by depicting Cinderella's mother as ghost which fades smoothly into and out of existence (an impossibility with 1990s videogame technology).

The style of the simulated gameplay changes for the ball sequence.  At this point the "game" becomes a side-scroller with a timer which counts up to Midnight.  With this re-imagining, the prince becomes an obstacle for the imagined player.  The prince slows the player down thus potentially causing her to run out of time.  In this animation, the imagined player also makes the mistake of picking up the dropped shoe, which disrupts the typical Cinderella narrative.  One of the issues we frequently confront when dealing with narrative in videogames is the problem of what to do when the player does something that ruins the sequence of events in the story.  One option is to simply give the player a game over screen and make them try again, which is the point at which I end this animation.  Careful viewers may notice that the cursor in the game over screen lingers on quit before going back to save and quit.  I wanted that action to show that the imagined player is considering leaving the game and never coming back (which would make saving the game unimportant), but ultimately decides that she will return to the saved game.  Although the animation does not end well for Cinderella, the actions on the menu screen indicate that the player intends return and bring about the happily ever after we all expect.

For the music I used three songs off of the 8-bit album Risistor Anthems created by Eric Skiff.  The album has been released under the creative commons attribution license.  The three songs are Digital Native, Arpanauts, and Come and Find Me.  I generated the sound effects using as3sfxr, an online 8-bit and 16-bit sound generator.