When you're born in the Bayou...

1927 - The Animals and Children took to the Streets from British Council on Vimeo.

I was initially interested in 1927's The Animals and Children took to the Streets because the animated portions have a visual style that is similar to Machinarium.  The environments are all rendered with shaky line-work, muted colors that almost look like stains, and beautifully incorrect perspective.  So, when two of my professors, and my dad and step-mom recommended I go see this play, I figured I probably should take the time to do so.  I was most certainly not disappointed.

The Animals and Children took to the Streets uses a mix of live theatrical performances and projected animation.  Mixing live theater performances with animation is not a new idea.  It is in fact a very old idea.  Many of the early animators were popular Vaudeville performers, and it was not unusual for them to include their animations with their acts.  Winsor McKay's early animation Gertie the Dinosaur was specifically animated to be part of a theatrical performance.  From what I understand, stand alone animations won out as Vaudeville began to disappear and animators realized it was more financially sound to make a film they could copy and sell rather than to do repeated live performances.  The use of projection and animation is of course, much more sophisticated now.  The mixture of performance and animation had the interesting effect of making the play seem to be somewhere between theater and narrative dance.  The actor's movements needed to be precisely timed in order to match up with the animated projections; thus the movements became dance-like.

The Animals and Children took to the Streets focuses on poverty and the systemic structures that prevent people from improving their lot in life.  The children who terrify the adults are reacting to legitimate injustices. The children know there is something wrong with their living situation, but they don't fully understand what it is or why it is.  So they do the only thing they can think of to do; they act out aggressively.  The adults in the slum known as the Bayou understand the problems that keep them in their miserable conditions, but they also understand their own powerlessness.  Agnes Eaves is the one exception.  She naively thinks that she can change the Bayou for the better, but she is not from there and does not truly understand the problems and doesn't have the power to facilitate improvement.  The Mayor arguably does have the power needed to help the people of the Bayou.  However from his point of view, the only real problem is that the children in the Bayou have yet to learn their place.  The problem with the society in The Animals and Children took to the Streets is that the people who have the power to create positive change don't care to do so, and those who do care, lack the ability to cause change. 

Near the ending of the play, the lone male protagonist stands at a cross roads.  To one side is an idealistic ending, and the other is a realistic ending.  Audience participation is called for as the protagonist contemplates his paths.  In the performance I attended, the audience cheered most loudly for the idealistic ending, but the actor took a perfect 'why bother' posture just before walking down the idealistic path then ran down the realistic path.  I suspect there is only one ending to the play.  The moment is about asking the audience to consider what they want and expect out of the story rather than actually offering a choice to the audience. 

I mentioned at the beginning of this post that the visual style of The Animals and Children Took to the Streets reminded me of the game Machinarium.  It may seem surprising, but the stories are actually quite thematically similar as well.  The main character in Machinarium is so far down on the social ladder that he is literally treated like trash (and I do mean literally - the game starts with him being thrown in the town dump).  The game itself is a find-the-object puzzle game.  The player spend the entire game scrounging around for any discarded object that can help the protagonist get the better of the three bullies who personify the social forces keeping him powerless.  However the endings differ between Machinarium and The Animals and Children Took to the Streets. Machinarium has a happy and unsatisfying ending.  It feels as though Amanita Design didn't really know how to end the game, and as a result the ending was unrealistic.  As much as I may have preferred an idealistic ending in The Animals and Children Took to the Streets, the realistic ending was obviously, and unfortunately, more realistic.

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.