Cosmic Friends Forever

I'm trying to work something out in my head, and this seemed like as a good a place as any to explore it.  For my thesis I have been contemplating the role of game mechanics in narrative.  It seems obvious that any event that takes place in a videogame should impact the story within the game.  However, quite often, even in well-crafted videogames, gameplay elements are either completely irrelevant to or in open conflict with the narrative.  I've been struggling to grasp the causes of this problem, and I think perhaps the use of hit points (HP) and player character deaths in videogames can help to illuminate the issue.  Spoilers ahead for Superbrother's Sword & Sworcery EP.

The general idea with HP is that a character starts off with a particular amount of HP, and taking damage reduces their HP, when zero HP is reached, the player must start over.  In most games the characters gain more HP throughout the game.  This mechanic predates videogames, and is commonly used in videogames to provide the player with feedback.  Sometimes the HP is explicitly displayed to the player, such as in the Final Fantasy games' character statistics, and sometimes it is hidden, such as in the Uncharted games where the player's view is obscured by red vignetting when Nathan Drake loses health.  HP can also be illustrated with icons, such as The Legend of Zelda's heart containers or Sword & Sworcery's stars.

In the Legend of Zelda games HP does not conflict with the narrative, but neither does HP serve any narrative purpose.  When Link is hit, part of a heart container is emptied.  When a boss battle is completed, the player is rewarded with a new heart container which adds to the overall number of hits Link can take.  The story is actually about Link's quest to find the Triforce, so why is the collection of heart containers even included?  The heart containers serve two gameplay purposes.  One, increasing the number of hearts makes the low level enemies seem easier and allows the game designers to make later enemies harder.  This helps the player maintain a flow state.  Two, this provides the player with important feedback.  The more heart containers the player has collected, the better they are doing, and the closer to the end of the game they are.

Sword & Sworcery uses an inverted HP system in order to communicate to the player what the Scythian is going through.  The Scythian's HP is illustrated with star containers which empty when she is hit.  When all the containers are emptied, she is knocked out and the player must wake her up and start the battle over.  After each boss battle, the Scythian loses one star container.  At the end of the third session of Sword & Sworcery, I realized that there was only one more boss battle, and the Scythian had only one more star container.  Other characters had noted that the Scythian wasn't looking so good, and the Scythian herself referred to her quest as a woeful errand, but it was the game rules that made me realize what was happening to the Scythian.  If 0/1 stars is alive but damaged, then 0/0 stars must be dead.

I look back at my argument here, and it seems solid.  The rules of the game world communicate information (narrative or not) to the player.  But my writing is hollow and cold.  I've written about how I read the games, not what those readings meant.

When I saw what was happening to the Scythian, I was devastated.  Like many other players, I was inconsolable.  I walked away from the game for a month or two.  I wasn't sure that I would go back to finish it.  I wasn't sure that I wanted to finish it, if it ended the way I now expected.  When I did go back to finish the game, it was because I felt I owed it to the Scythian to see her through her woeful errand.  I felt a responsibility to a collection pixels.  That is the power of a strong narrative supported by the language videogames.

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.

Supernatural Pixels

Superbrother's Sword and Sworcery EP

Superbrother's Sword and Sworcery EP deals heavily with the supernatural. We are introduced to the game world by a Jungian Archetype who explains that we are entering a mythopoetic experiment. We guide the Scythian on her woeful errand through a strange land. The game makes it very clear that the player is not the Scythian, but rather a divine influence over her. We accept that we are to the Scythian as the Fates are to us. The jagged pixelated graphics come to indicate all that is Earthly and natural.

One of my classes this semester is focused on legends. A concept we have been discussing is that of center/periphery. The center is your home, and the farther into the periphery you go the more likely you are to encounter the supernatural, and the stranger things get. Sword and Sworcery uses this idea of center/periphery in two ways. The fact that the Scythian is referred to by where she is from (Scythia) and not her name (which we never learn) indicates that she has already journeyed far away from her center. Within the game itself there is also a center/periphery relationship between where the Caucus mountain people live, and Mingi Taw where the Scythian must venture to complete her errand.

In Mingi Taw the Scythian encounters a deathless spectre known as the Gogolithic Mass. The Gogolithic Mass is drawn as a smooth black gradient with blocky pixel hands and horned skull. The smooth gradient looks out of place in the otherwise 8-bit world, but it is hardly the only high resolution graphic in the game. The sky, and especially the moon are rendered with gradients, as are the Sylvan Sprites that the Scythian releases.  Even the shine on the Scythian's sword (shown above) uses a gradient. At first I did not much care for this mix of pixel graphics and gradients, but as I played the game I came to realize that just as the pixel graphics represent the natural, the gradients represent the supernatural. Let us then consider the Gogolithic Mass.  The deathless spectre is a liminal being, neither completely natural nor fully supernatural. The Gogolithic Mass haunts the Scythian throughout her errand, and serves as a constant reminder of the threshold between the Earthly and the supernatural through which she travels.

I've been reassessing my relationship to the supernatural lately. I was brought up in a secular household and have always held scientific reasoning as a value. I generally don't believe in ghosts or Bigfoot (then again, who am I to contradict Jane Goodall), but I am beginning to think that the literal existence of the supernatural is entirely beside the point. Believing in supernatural beings has an importance beyond objective scientifically provable reality. There is a truth to Bigfoot, even if he's not coming to a zoo near you.