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In today’s Game Set Watch, movie and screenwriter Justin Marks takes the game industry to task for calling the story in Grand Theft Auto IV “Oscar-worthy” and wonders if gameplay as narrative is the answer:
The adventure of Niko Bellic, complete with its comic assortment of ethnic cliches, is pretty much on par with the rest of the franchise’s self-conscious worship of movie archetypes and genre tropes. And there’s nothing wrong with that. Rockstar has made clear that’s all they’ve ever wanted to do, and they’ve done a damn fine job at that (although I do miss some of that charming humor from Vice City and San Andreas).
The problem here is not the quality of the story, but the manner in which it is incorporated into the gameplay. After skipping over countless cut scenes so I could get to the action, I slowly began to regard plot in GTA IV as being something akin to the Clinton marriage: why do they bother with the charade? Is there anyone in this country who honestly thinks these two people still sleep in the same bed?
After all the incredible advances in their game engine, why does Rockstar insist on making its story an accessory — a needless, comparatively inferior element? More to the point, how did narrative become such a side bar to the real point of gaming, i.e. our ability to play out our deepest fantasies in a virtual world?
I found myself nodding in agreement at the start, but then wincing at some old, overworn ideas as his essay continues. By the time the essay starts to near the end, Marks is returning to the same old obvious claims that many game writers wind up making:
We need to stop thinking about story as a device to make us care about the gameplay (it doesn’t), and start thinking about the gameplay as the narrative itself (thus, making us care). Now that the technology has finally reached a breaking point, a place where we can genuinely craft sophisticated worlds, we have to understand that plot is not forced upon those worlds artificially, but grown from our interactions within their environments.
Story design needs to be less checkpoint-focused and more focused on implementing a meta structure that makes us believe we are shaping events with our choices, even if these choices have already been made for us.
The “story on rails” has now been exposed. Game engines are strong enough that we can see the seams in the narrative fabric. It’s no longer acceptable that we can take our girlfriend on a date and never once have her mention the fact that we’re carrying a missile launcher by our side. We need to believe our actions have consequences within the virtual universe and that the experiences we are living are wholly unique, even if they aren’t.
This is all very, very old news. His assertions and observations are fair enough, except that like all generalizations, when extended out to encompass everything it falters and fails. The truth of the matter is that in some games, having the interactive bits lead to stories on rails works very well. His timing for this assertion is especially unfortunate given the relatively recent rumors that Metal Gear Solid 4 will have 90-minute cutscenes. I’d be willing to bet that the people who have stuck by Hideo Kojima so far are more than happy to sit back and watch as his “story on rails” unfolds – which illustrates my contention that the issue isn’t with stories on rails, it’s with bad stories on rails.
I for one love a great story on rails, as evidenced by the number of Final Fantasy games on my shelf, but I have little to no patience with bad stories on rails, which is why after playing Lost Odyssey for a couple of hours I flatly lost interest. The game had some interesting premises, to be sure, but it squandered them way too quickly. Lately I’ve been anxiously awaiting MGS4 even though I haven’t played through the first three, opting instead to catch up through the excellent video retrospective series being offered up by GameTrailers. It’s cheaper, sure, but more to the point it takes up much less time – although I never use Cliffs Notes for books and still largely resist using hintbooks for games, when presented with the option to get caught up on the Meta Gear story through these summaries instead of playing through 100-plus hours of gameplay, the decision was an unfortunate no-brainer. I don’t know about you guys, but I don’t have that kind of time.
I still think that the best way to handle interactive narrative in games is to treat it like a series of rubber bands strung between nails – the key plot points are fixed (what Marks refers to as ‘checkpoints’) but the manner by which you arrive at those points is flexible. This is the philosophy you often find deployed in games with lots of side quests or mini games – they improve the quality and the duration of the game, but they still remain optional. I’m not a big fan of sandbox games for many of the same reasons cited by Marks, but I remain skeptical that the Crawfordesque, Holodeck-esque model that he’s wishing for will ever be a realistic scenario.
What I want is the opposite of Marks’ prescription: I think game writers should write better stories and work with the game designers to develop better game mechanics to mesh with the narratives. Despite the frequent claim (that Marks himself makes near the end) that “the game industry is not the interactive little brother of cinema”, I still kind myself marveling at how easily these types of claims map onto criticisms of film. People that claim that narratives in games should take a backseat to gameplay strike me as characters that claim that narratives in film should take a backseat to cinematography. It’s a short-sighted, tunnel-vision type of claim – because X is what media form Y does uniquely and independently, then all instances of media form Y should focus almost exclusively on X. It’s a bad model and a rotten philosophy: many films do okay with an iffy story and spectacular cinematography, and many films do okay with an amazing story and mediocre cinematography. It’s the ones that do both brilliantly that truly prove themselves memorable.
I think that the proper first step is to determine what kind of experience you’re trying to produce when everything is said and done. This will allow you to start deciding what type of narrative experience or gameplay experience is best for what you’re trying to create, and then to develop an appropriately matching narrative or gameplay right along with it in an organic, intelligent fashion. Let the ratio of gameplay to narrative – and the ratio of interactivity to ‘rails’ – be determined not by your media type but by the type of experience you’re trying to create. Just like with narrative and cinematography in films, an ideal blend of gameplay and narrative is the holy grail – but what that ideal blend happens to be depends wholly on what your desired end experience happens to be. There’s room enough in an entire media type for a wide range of experiences and ratios. Just because you don’t happen to like games with stories on rails doesn’t mean that they shouldn’t exist. I think that to assert, as Marks does, that we should “stop writing high-minded stories. Start writing games. And let the stories grow from them”, is way too one-sided and, frankly, way too simple-minded.
(Update: Kojima Productions has since issued a correction to the rumors, stating that there are no 90-minute cutscenes in Metal Gear Solid 4. Still, I think my original argument stands – MGS is a solid (no pun intended) example of a linear story that unfolds through interactions with the player, and since it has enough fans to bring Amazon.com crashing to its knees when it goes on presale, well, then, I still say Marks’ insistence on Western-style nonlinear narratives is overreaching at best.)
My friend and fellow media scholar Jonathan Gray has an interesting post up on his blog, The Extratextuals, about the idea of paperless conferences:
ICA is at a good time of the year to make sure that lots of people can attend, but at an awful time for facilitating the process of actually paying attention to papers. By the end of May, I’m simply burnt out. So this year I went in with a new strategy. I had signed up for the pre-conference on Production Studies, which tied me down to a day of panels. And I was on another four – one paper, one workshop, one chair, one respondent. So I decided that that was it. The rest of the conference would be social.
Such is the oddity of conference paper presentations that I’m convinced I learnt more, discussed more, and was asked to think about more as a result of adopting this strategy. The pre-conference was excellent, if a little paper heavy and discussion light. And my panels had good material – Melissa Click, Nina Huntemann, and Cornel Sandvoss provided a strong, really interesting panel on flow and overflow; Megan Boler, Andrea Schmidt, Catherine Burwell, and Alessandra Renzi had a good panel on digital dissent; reliably, Avi Santo and Jeffrey Jones presented good papers on animated satire, and the Unboxing Television workshop with Amanda Lotz, Joshua Green, Laurie Ouellette, Aswin Punathambekar, John McMurria, Vicki Mayer, and myself worked very well, I thought, providing plenty of smart commentary on the state of television and television studies.
But many of the better interactions with ideas happened over meals, drinks, coffee, or simply sitting outside conference rooms.
I haven’t made it to ICA yet, but it sounds like it should be on my calendar. As I noted in the comments:
I think this is also a practice adopted by people once they’ve attended a given conference a certain number of times. I know my friends at South by Southwest and the Game Developers’ Conference all attend a small handful of panels and then disappear the rest of the time to reconnect with old friends, bounce ideas back and forth and take the temperature of the rest of the industry. Folks who are attending the conference for the first time hit panel after panel, meeting people afterwards and making some connections, but I think that first year or two are panel-centric as a form of orientation.
I suspect my ITRA experience in Greece will be a panel-heavy one, unless Laura and I decide to sneak out for part of it to go sightseeing. What can I say? There’s a downside of having your conference in such interesting places.
The last week has been an absolute blur. There are many, many things I should be posting about, but much of it is simply too big to fully report, so I’ll take a stab at some of the general stuff here.
First of all, the Julius Schwartz lecture was an amazing success. We sold out a 1200-seat lecture hall (minus some seats for cameras and so on), the evening went off more or less without a hitch, and we think we’ll have made enough revenue back to do it again next year. (We’ll know for sure after we get the DVDs mastered and up on the site for sale. I’ll post here when it happens — please order one!) I spent an amazing day with one of my heroes, got to hold an advance reader’s copy of his next book (he offered me the chance to read it, but alas, I was running around working all day) and even made the opening and closing speeches for the event. It was, in every sense of the word, fantastic. I can’t wait for next year.
In addition to the awesomeness that was the event itself, my friends Nick and Aaron (and Aaron’s new [to me] girlfriend Kara) flew into town to help with the event. That was just as big a kick to me as the event itself. I only got to hang out with Aaron and Kara briefly, but having them in town was incredibly fun. We played Rock Band and Mario Kart Wii for hours, visited many of my favorite bookstores and restaurants in town, and had a chance to catch up in general. I love these guys. I wish they could be around all the time.
The day after the lecture, Laura and Nick and I flew back to Ohio so Laura and I could visit with our families. Laura’s mom underwent hip replacement surgery earlier in the month, so we wanted to see how she was doing, and I had some personal research I wanted to conduct as well. My mom and I took a day trip down to Columbus, where we went to catch the new exhibit at the Wexner Center, Jeff Smith: Bone and Beyond, which was a treat for both of us since Bone was something we’d both enjoyed while it was being published. We also paid visits to several of my regular haunts, where I loaded up on a number of really great books, including a copy of the anthology of Russian folktales that is constantly referenced in Vladimir Propp’s Morphology of the Folktale, which was a great find. Over the next couple of days, I hung out in Wooster, checked out Nick’s new library (covet covet) sketched out some ideas and generally caught up on my sleep.
Once we were back in Boston, the rest of the week was spent prepping for the GAMBIT summer program and postmortem’ing the Julius Schwartz lecture. And then, the next thing I knew, it was time for another weekend. This weekend I finished recharging my batteries, which was a godsend. We did a quick grocery run to Whole Foods on Friday, where we picked up food for the weekend, and then bunkered down. On Saturday I caught up on the contents of my DVR, including the season finale of Lost and the last two episodes of Doctor Who, then watched a double feature of Appleseed: Ex Machina and Ghost Rider, which wasn’t great but also wasn’t anywhere near as bad as I’d been led to expect. Today, I spent the day doing laundry, hanging the last of our newly-framed prints from Japan, plotting out next month’s trip to Greece for the ITRA conference and reading, primarily a few of the stories in Kelly Link’s brilliant Magic for Beginners and the first little bit of Pollard and Reid’s The Rise and Fall of Alexandria. Link’s work, which was recommended to me by my friend Shannon a long time ago, is leading me on to explore a handful of anthologies in which her work appears, as well as the work of a network of her peers. I’m thoroughly enjoying reading up on Jeff VanderMeer, Jeffrey Ford, Kim Newman, Delia Sherman, and Ekaterina Sedia, all of whom I’d seen mentioned on Neil Gaiman’s blog but had not previously had the time to experience myself. Getting to do so now is like getting handed the keys to a clubhouse, or at the very least being shown where the cool kids’ table happens to be, if not being invited to join them. One of the biggest joys of the last year or so has been finding my way to this point, rediscovering the kinds of writing I like to read and now finding that there are more people writing in this vein than I’d ever hoped.
The only down points of this last little whlie was getting snaked out of the very last copy of Wii Fit at Best Buy this morning, but that’s okay – I’m still catching up on tons of other stuff anyway, and on my way to the store I caught the tail end of an interview on NPR with my mentor Henry Jenkins, which was a very cool thing to stumble across on the radio. More depressing this week were the passing of Sydney Pollack (whom, although I’d never met him, I liked immensely from his 2005 Sketches of Frank Gehry), the closure of GameTap’s editorial sections, the unexpected (and horribly untimely) passing of Erlene Zierke, and, although it can’t compare in scope to the passing of two wonderful people, the intensely painful closure of the Journal of Mythic Arts. Some great things happened as well this week too, including the launch of Delicious Library 2.0, a multi-part interview between Henry Jenkins and transmedia creator Jeff Gomez (part one, part two, and a follow-up); the announcement of Steven Moffat’s succession to Russell Davies’ throne on Doctor Who and Derek blogged about one of my usual areas of concern (okay, those last two were last week, but I was busy).
All in all, a very, very solid week and I’m heading into next week recharged and refreshed, which is good since we still have a bunch to do before the Singaporean students show up a week from today. Wish us luck!
No, not my wedding. This evening is the inaugural Julius Schwartz Lecture, an event I’ve been helping to plan, produce and otherwise bring into existence for the last year. As a result, and as a reward, today I am the personal handler for Neil Gaiman, a man who’s been a role model for me since I was in junior high. To say that I’m excited (and not a little nervous) would be a major understatement.
For the event I’ve written articles and designed posters, websites, badges, programs, and, a personal first, the MIT homepage. I’ve been the major point of contact for Neil, helped coordinate efforts on the back-end, run tons of errands, and otherwise put my fingerprints all over this baby. And now that it’s all happening, I’m more or less sitting back, going by my extremely granular schedule, and praying that the wheels don’t come off this thing at any point (or that the skies don’t elect to open up and start pouring rain on us all).
Pictures and other accounts of this evening’s chaos to follow. Details at http://cms.mit.edu/juliusschwartz for the interested. Wish us luck!
This morning one of my small side projects was born onto the Internet: a quasi-experimental redesign of a voiceover client’s website. The new site, Bill Cochran’s http://www.cochranaudio.com/, stands in sharp contrast to the usual one-pagers I do for my voiceover clients in that, one, it has more than one page, and two, the MP3s are embedded on the individual pages instead of in pop-up windows. It’s an interesting experiment and I’m pleased with how it turned out.
And yes, I still keep my design consulting business running on the side in addition to all the research and writing and communications directing and lecturing and creative writing and everything else. I suspect that any well-fed academic who tells you they don’t do any kind of consulting or other projects on the side is lying. 🙂
Check it out: my “Pros of Cons” piece got a shout-out in Game Set Watch!
I currently have an essay up at the GAMBIT blog called The Pros of Cons, wherein I discuss the philosophical issues plaguing the Game Developers’ Conference, Wondercon, Comic-con, SXSW and so on. Â In it you’ll get to hear me liken conferences and conventions to libraries and amusement parks. Â I even have a somewhat witty closing line, as is always good to have in such essays.
My laptop today is being sluggish and unresponsive, and I blame Safari and its umpty-zillion open tabs. Hence another Links List post. Enjoy.
Earlier today Thom Patterson’s story “Is the Future of TV on the Web?” went online at CNN.com. I had a one-line quote in it, but actually the conversation between Thom and I gave me the opportunity to write up some thoughts that I’d been kicking around for a while on the online video front. Below is a roughly-edited transcript of our email interview, which Thom graciously agreed to let me share with you here.
How does video consumption online compare with traditional TV? Is online traffic miniscule compared with the average time most homes watch traditional television?
I don’t know the answer to this off the top of my head. My guess is that yes, the consumption of online video remains small compared to the amount of time spent watching traditional TV, but the key factor is the increasing ease with which it is possible to get online video onto your living room TV using simple, common devices such as the Apple TV or Microsoft’s Xbox 360. The common assumption in tech circles is that the whole HD-DVD/Blu-Ray debacle was really a losing war on both sides, with the real expected winner being online video services like those currently being built into the Xbox. The idea of a specialized Media Center PC sounds laughable to most folks, but that’s really what game systems like the Xbox 360 and the PlayStation 3 already are.
Where might we as a technological society be five or ten years from now? Will TV still be the place where the family gathers? Or will Internet technology change us to a more fractured, individual society?
We’re already seeing this change occur thanks to the one-two punch of extremely specialized niche entertainment and our mobile media culture. In his lectures about ubiquitous computing and ambient informatics, Adam Greenfield calls our attention to something he calls ambivalent adjacency — how many people walk around with their ears plugged with iPod earbuds and how they are using these portable media devices in order to cut themselves off from society even when they’re out walking around in it. This isn’t a new practice — the same thing was seen when the Sony Walkman first appeared in 1979 and the Nintendo Game Boy a decade later — but with the expansion of portable personal media into online video it’s only becoming more and more pronounced. This isn’t to say it’s a bad thing — I love being able to watch video lectures from the TED conference on my iPhone on the way home from campus — but it is certainly a use of technology to create a deliberately isolated space in definitely non-isolated surroundings.
As for whether or not TV will still be the place where the family gathers, I’d argue that television should never have been the place where the family gathers. When you have a family all sitting together watching TV, they’re very rarely looking at each other or even communicating with each other while the show is on. There are some exceptions, of course – shouting out answers while watching Jeopardy or collectively heckling American Idol – but for the most part the consumption of most media is still a singular experience, even while watching it in the company of others. In my household, more often than not we’re dead silent while we’re watching Lost or House, M.D. except for when we’re laughing at something on-screen, and even then that’s less an interaction with each other than a reaction to what we’re watching. The family interactions happen during commercial breaks, or after the show’s over. Even in the days when you could safely assume everyone you know had watched last night’s episode of I Love Lucy, and you could all talk about it, the discussion was still being held separately from the consumption of the media. I think that the transformation of television into these post-broadcast models will simply make these discussions into more like our conversations about movies. People don’t watch movies at the same time, in the same place, or under the same conditions, but we still talk about them in more or less the same way. The biggest change now is that many of these conversations aren’t being held around water coolers but on Internet forums. The trade-off is that you may be less likely to ask your co-worker if they’d seen the episode of Homestar Runner that was posted online last night, but you can have the same conversation with friends on the other side of the planet. It comes down to how you define a fractured, individual society.
It seems like younger pop culture today places a higher value on art and entertainment created by individuals – including indie-produced films. If you believe this is true, does that make the YouTube juggernaut a tougher competitor against Web sites whose programs are mostly studio-produced TV shows and movies?
I’m not entirely sure that’s true. There’s been a strong undercurrent supporting the development of ‘indie’ productions for decades, sp the big studios just learn to create their own sub-brands that capture the ‘indie’ aesthetic. I think we’re seeing the same thing happening now — big corporations trying to hide themselves in hipster’s clothing.
Where I think the studios may be in serious trouble is in their potentially misguided belief that people have any loyalty to the studios or to the channels. You certainly can’t blame them — it’s arguably all they’ve got — but in this day and age, I think the audience has a much greater loyalty to the creators than the studios who release their work. There’s a widespread belief among Whedon fans that Firefly failed due to mismanagement of its airing by FOX. Do those fans associate the show with FOX or with Joss Whedon? If new episodes of Firefly were to be created, would fans first look for them at FOX.com or at Joss Whedon’s personal website? Arguably the most logical place to get that content would be from an official site created for the show, but if any place is going to aggregate the episodes it’d probably be on Whedon’s website. Of course, in our current age of ‘spreadable’ media, there’s no reason why new episodes wouldn’t appear in all three places. In a hierarchy of brands, it’s the show first, then the creator, and then the network, and that’s if they’re lucky.
I seriously believe that the idea of competing video portals is wrongheaded from the get-go. Instead of using the TV stations as a model, I think online video producers should look more to RSS feeds. People can subscribe to multiple weblogs as RSS feeds that are then collected and delivered to them in an application called an RSS aggregator. TiVo is essentially an RSS aggregator for television shows, and its ‘Your Recordings’ screen is the aggregator. I think this is the current audience mentality in a nutshell – we don’t care what channel the content came from, we only care that we receive the new episodes whenever they’re released. Channels now only serve as coolfinders — I’ll pay more attention to new content coming from the Sci-Fi Channel because they’ve brought me shows I enjoyed before, but I’m just as likely to find new content from friends, from websites, from magazines, or from creators I follow. In the post-broadcast model, I don’t want to have to go to a dozen different websites and use a dozen different proprietary viewing applications, I want to be able to subscribe to every show I enjoy and have it show up automatically. That’s the beauty of an aggregator like the iTunes Store. When NBC pulled out of iTunes, I wasn’t angry at Apple, I was angry at NBC. I’ve never gone hunting for an episode of Heroes on NBC’s website, but I had happily downloaded episodes of it from iTunes and I would again the second it returned. I want my content when I want it, where I want it, how I want it, and I don’t want to go hunting for it. That’s the real advantage that networks have to offer over something like BitTorrent – and currently they’re squandering it.
What do you think of the totally ad-supported business model of Web sites such as Hulu.com, ABC.com, CBS.com and others that offer free studio TV and movies? Can it work? How viable is it? How long will it take for such a model to turn a profit?
When the idea of online advertising first came along, advertisers were ecstatic over the idea of measurable impressions, but it wasn’t long before their obsession with click-through rates torpedoed a massive number of perfectly fine websites. The flaw in the model is simple: when was the last time you ordered a pizza the second a Pizza Hut ad came on TV? Click-through rates failed to take into consideration the value of building up a brand in the mind of an audience, so that when they actually wanted a pizza they’d think of Pizza Hut, not just while that ad was blinking on and off at the top of the New York Times.
Since then, independent content providers have gotten a lot more savvy about their business models. Simply put, relying completely on ad revenue is a recipe for disaster. If you want a profitable model, look to the webcomics crowd. Some popular online cartoonists are now pulling down six figures a year through a combination of ad rates and the sales of merchandise related to their creations. Other recent success stories can be found in novelists. Cory Doctorow has proven repeatedly that you can post novels as freely downloadable PDFs and people will still buy the dead-tree versions. In March HarperCollins posted a free online reading copy of Neil Gaiman’s novel American Gods as an experiment, and as a result the weekly book sales went up by 300%. That’s where the money lies — not in relying solely upon advertising to support your online creations, but by deploying a mixture of free content, purchasable merchandise and ways to take that free content home with you. Now, obviously, getting this model to scale for productions that require much larger budgets is a challenge, which is probably why we haven’t seen a free online version of Joss Whedon’s Firefly yet, but the Jim Henson Company and the Sci-Fi Channel are currently developing webisodes of their defunct fan-favorite Farscape, so that’s definitely going to be a canary in the coal mine.
Long story short, I think that if you make a good product and give it away for free online, people will happily buy it in other, more permanent forms – and often a t-shirt besides, to identify other fans of the same niche media. Advertising, if involved at all, should be gravy.
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