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.

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.

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).

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.

The Problem of the Combat Metaphor

It would be a bit odd to talk about reading books or watching films in terms of combat.  For example, at least in our society, we never use phrases like "I finally beat that book" or "I just won that new movie" unless we are being literal (perhaps we won a book in a contest).  However it is not especially odd to describe our experiences with videogames in these terms.  To prove this claim, I did a quick experiment   A google search for "I beat the Legend of Zelda" returns 105,000 results, whereas a search for "I beat Life of Pi" returns zero results.  In case that was simply too high brow of a film, I also did a search for "I beat Taken 2", which also returned nothing.

So, why does it matter that we talk about videogames as though they are combat?  For my thesis research I've been reading Metaphors We Live By.  In this book, Lakoff discusses how our every-day metaphors shape our perceptions by emphasizing certain aspects of a concept and deemphasizing others.  When we consider videogames in terms of combat we emphasize the competitive aspects of gaming, and privilege difficulty over artistry and mechanical challenge over emotional or intellectual stimulation.  This limits our imaginations in regards to what videogames are and can be.

What's more, there are a growing number of games that do not fit the combat metaphor.  Dear Esther is an especially good example of a game where the combat metaphor fails us, and as a result we don't know what to make of it.  Both supporters and detractors are unsure if Dear Esther is a game or not.  There is no challenge of any kind, and the end does not evoke the feelings of triumph we associate with winning.

If we can manage to put aside our VIDEOGAMES ARE COMBAT metaphor for a moment and look at Dear Esther with fresh eyes we may see that the style of interaction in Dear Esther is the same as interactions in first person shooter videogames.  First person shooter interactions typically consist of the following: 1. first person viewpoint (looking through the player character's eyes), 2. an inability to directly manipulate the environment, 3. inability to climb in the environment except for possibly ladders, 4. small and largely unimportant jumping, 5. narration from either disembodied recordings or nearby nonplayer characters, and of course 6. Shooting.  There are occasionally other mechanics such as taking cover or crouching, but many first person shooters do not include those.  Dear Esther contains the majority of these interactions.  I contend that Dear Esther is in fact a videogame in the tradition of first person shooters.  If we weren't so hung up on the fact that players do not shoot anything over the course of the game, more of us would see the parallels and understand that a videogame can be more than our combat metaphor suggests.

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.