It's a Book! It's a Game! It's a... Chore?
At times, playing a mission-driven video game, particularly a bad one, can feel like a chore. And essentially, it is — or rather, it’s a sequence of chores that you must finish in order to reveal the next plot segment. Want to find out what happens next? First perform a pointless task: Tromp across the world and pick up some glowing graphical doohicky (killing some mutants/zombie/aliens/gangsters along the way), take it to someplace else, kill a boss, and then, and only then, will the game dole out a little bit more of the story. This is why the real fun of games, typically, is in exploring the world rather than in following the story. The best games succeed on the strength of their environments; the narrative experiences they provide are, often enough, rather like being forced by a book to run laps around your house in order to read the next chapter. It’s a promising, often pleasantly engaging form of entertainment, but, given that it’s essentially designed around putting up barriers between the player and the narrative, it’s probably not really the way you’d really want to tell a story. Leave that to the books, right?
Or perhaps you would. J.C. Hutchins and Jordan Weisman have just released Personal Effects: Dark Art, the first in a series of “interactive thrillers” — novels which seem to borrow from the quest structure of video games. Reports Vulture:
Dark Art, out this week, is the first book in a possible series of interactive thrillers by J.C. Hutchins and Jordan Weisman. With a pocket full of “evidence” enfolded into the front cover and a plot riddled with phone numbers and URLs to visit along the way to the big reveal, it is itself a marketing trick, a would-be Blair Witch Project for the Twitter age.
Not surprisingly, one of the authors (Weisman) is a game designer. Somehow this doesn’t seem too appealing: Maybe I’m a technological curmudgeon, but a big part of the reason I read books is to get away from my computer. The last thing I wast is to have to fire up Safari in order to find out what happens next.
My wife and I did (played? solved?) Myst in one 12 hour all nighter. We loved it. Totally sucked in. Waited for the follow-up with tremendous anticipation, bought it, then slammed it into the CD drive and experienced exactly what you’re describing. Though more richly rendered than it’s predecessor, it wasn’t fun, it was a chore. After a couple of nights we quit. I can’t even remember it’s name.
— Tony Comstock · Jun 11, 11:45 AM · #
“Plot coupons” is the word you’re looking for, and it’s an issue (if not quite a problem) since Dave Arneson and Gary Gygax first combined narrative and game mechanics.
But, you know, good narrative is a reward, and if the mechanics of a game are fun or at least unobjectionable, then I don’t have a huge problem with having to kill 8 space-boars before I can start to find out what’s going on inside Hellfire Citadel. It’s adequate, if not stellar, game design.
But the plot-coupon phenomenon is probably the greatest obstacle to games-as-art.
— Chet · Jun 11, 05:28 PM · #
You said it best in the middle: the best games are the ones with the best worlds. And narratives might not be the easiest way to explore said world.
I might flip the premise around, and state that the tromping about after doohickeys merely services the exploration of the world, rather than narrative. Most of the sandbox games (Grand Theft Auto, Fable, Mercenaries, etc.) work off this premise. Very little of what you do is in service to the narrative. Far more of the experience comes from testing out the rules of the game, seeing how far the sandbox will let you go and solving bs side quests that serve to lead you towards every nook and cranny.
I know a bunch of people who play till the world is explored, while never finishing the narrative. Most of them are poorly laid out narratives anyway.
— Geoff · Jun 11, 10:10 PM · #
I probably would have loved the plot coupon approach to literature when I was a kid. Ellen Raskin’s books come to mind.
— Matt Frost · Jun 12, 12:53 AM · #
The idea of “plot coupons” in video games and D&D doesn’t describe my experience with them. My main motivation in both was not to find out what happens next but to get a headrush of power when acquiring new weapons and abilities. Sure, a few games had compelling story elements, but that was just a nice bonus.
For me, the “plot coupon” more accurately describes the experience of the better-quality text adventures (or “interactive fiction”) — in the Infocom era and beyond, IF authors/programmers strove for good writing and interesting narratives, but the more they succeeded in that, the more frustrating the game obstacles became (for a good example of this, try “A Change in the Weather” by Andrew Plotkin). This was a frequent subject of discussion on the rec.games.interactive-fiction USENET group.
— kenb · Jun 12, 03:16 AM · #
I wonder to what extent the success of the final fantasy games is a slight counterexample to your point. While you might question whether the narrative structures are “good”, they’re a big selling point to fans of the series, and I think the worlds often end up being a bit constricting, as far as open-ended exploration goes. But maybe I’m wrong about the appeal of the series.
— Justin · Jun 12, 06:06 AM · #
Sounds like a text-based version of an ARG.
The game developed as a marketing platform for Spielberg’s AI (aka ‘The Beast’) is still the single greatest gaming experience I’ve ever had, but I can’t imagine this would come close simply because by moving it to book format from a purely online format you remove, or at least hinder, the community aspect of the problem-solving that made The Beast so engrossing.
— Erik Siegrist · Jun 12, 01:20 PM · #
Mur Lafferty did a post on the book/project for Tor.com in which she anticipates the unease you express in your last sentence. She says the book works fine by itself. Presumably the extra stuff is just kinda cool, but not vital. I haven’t actually read the book myself however so I can’t vouch for it personally.
— Xelgaex · Jun 12, 01:40 PM · #