Observant readers – assuming I’ve got readers; please, don’t divest me of the illusion – may have noticed that even though a lot of my reviews focus on games as storytelling, few of them cover role-playing games, the archetypal game-as-story.
Of course, part of it is there aren’t as many big-name console RPGs on the market as there once were. These days, shooters are the unquestioned kings of the dedicated gaming market, and the levy they demand from the groaning masses is dedicated online multiplayer. Even outside of the shooter market, multiplayer’s so requisite that formerly single-player exclusives like Assassin’s Creed and Mass Effect 3 have had significant resources poured into adding multiplayer modes.
But there are still role-playing games being released, even if they remain a smaller niche than the stereotypical fratboy crowd playing the latest Call of Duty, Battlefield. So why have I concentrated on action-adventure and story titles as examples of games as narrative? Why am I trying to plumb the depths of what is an acknowledged Excuse Plot?
Like any form of human media, games, both video and traditional, work by evoking feelings – joy at a victory, frustration at difficulty, admiration of another player’s skill or exhilaration at an exciting moment. Dedicated enthusiasts might find these in pure mechanics, but the components of any given game more complicated than poker or jacks need some sort of context for actions to have meaning, even if it’s just flashing lights and pretty colors.
It’s a simple matter of presentation. Why do we have so many modern military shooters these days? Because it places us into a scenario we recognize, featuring character types we already know, with fairly clear conditions for victory. Our imagination does the rest.
Consciously or unconsciously, we write a story in our heads every time we play a game, our own personal saga of victory or defeat.
So, it’s impossible to remove storytelling from the equation. Storytelling, whether player- or developer-dictated, is the heart of the game experience. With that in mind, saying a game “doesn’t bother to have a story” is really about as shortsighted and damning as saying a game doesn’t bother with good gameplay. The latter has no relevance without the former.
Since it’s not unfair to attack a game for a lack of storytelling quality – however we define that – it’s worth discussing the exact nature of how games tell stories. Most incorporate two core narrative arcs. The first is what I’d call dictated narratives; that is, they narrate, and you explore and enable the narration to continue while watching development build towards a climax and denouement much as you’d do in a book or movie. A dictated narrative is thus to some extent linear; sure, branching paths may occur, but the basic structure’s been set in stone and you’re exploring it. Predictably, most campaigns in non-sandbox titles are dictated narrative.
The other aspect of game narrative is emergent narrative. Emergent narrative relies on the player’s interactions with the environment. It’s an exercise in immersion, not dictation. If dictated narrative is following a path; emergent narrative is being handed a pack full of building blocks. Quite naturally, most multiplayer experiences are emergent narrative, as are games like The Sims and Dwarf Fortress.
What’s the point of this distinction? Surprisingly enough, many traditional role-playing games currently on or scheduled to enter the market – titles like Fallout: New Vegas, the Elder Scrolls series, and so on – are stronger emergent narratives than they are dictated ones. Sure, there are plots to experience, but much of their power comes from wandering around the open world, shaping its policies and fate rather than watching the development of any individual character.
Something about the sandbox nature of role-playing titles sabotages their dictated narrative. Perhaps it’s the very open-endedness that prevents such details of cinematographic trickery conventional stories, especially movies, depend upon to pace the story. Perhaps it’s the typical lack of an active, participatory character as the protagonist; such games tend to talk and interact directly with the player without the filter of the protagonist.
Whatever the reason, those games currently testing the limits in the directed-narrative half of the narrative spectrum are usually not role-playing games. They’re action-adventure titles like the Uncharted series, or faux-RPG shooters like Bioshock, or even sandbox action titles like infamous. Sure, Mass Effect and Dragon Age 2 are marvelous games with well-written, tight storylines, but they’re actually a little unusual in this day and age of open-ended, open-world, cipher-protagonist RPGs.
And really, while some modern RPGs are filled with lots of intrigue, plot twists, and often well-written, likable characters, few of them can be said to have a theme, or to delve into moral quandaries and philosophy – these things are choices given the player, but whether they’re explored or simply offered as options the player’s emergent narrative then imparts with meaning varies.
Is it possible that role-playing games have been dethroned as the intellectual crown of the gaming world? It’s hard to say. But it’s certainly true that far more “mainstream” titles have an intellectual backing than they have in the past.
And more than ever, they’re worth exploring.