Openings
I had the great pleasure of seeing a talk by Jim Sheridan last weekend at the Catalyst Project on the subject of film openings. I've met Jim a few times and I'm always struck by how instinctual and insightful he is, he's an emotional filmmaker who sees a lot when he looks at someone, and is capable of thinking abstractly yet still honestly about emotion. While his approach is entirely filmic, I think the tenets also apply to designing and writing games, at least story-based ones.
Defining the story
Going back to the process of trying to make his first film My Left Foot, he was fighting to keep the flashbacks in the script. He felt strongly that we the audience need to see Christy Brown as a grown man first, and then flash back to him as a child.
He got his way at the script stage and was in the US after shooting the film, but before editing it, when someone told him about a new film, Gaby: A True Story, about a Mexican woman who was born only able to move her left foot, but then grew up to be an award-winning poet. If you haven't seen My Left Foot (and I pity you, it's brilliant) they sound exactly alike, only the subject is Mexican and female.
When he went to see the film, it opens in a hospital, a woman is giving birth, the doctors take the baby away and then come back to the parents with her and say "I'm sorry, your baby can only move her left foot." When he saw that he realised that the only ending he wanted to see, the only ending the audience wanted to see, was her walking some day. He didn't want to see that she was disabled and then find out later that she was a poet. That was a poor consolation given the context.
This is a devastating mistake. A film is like a date, and it's hard to claw back from a bad impression.
Empathy
By contrast, My Left Foot opens with a protracted sequence featuring the sound of forced breathing in which a left foot deftly takes a record from a sleeve, puts it on a turntable, moves the arm of the stylus, switches it on and then basks in the opera music. We track up the leg to Christy Brown's face, which suddenly wheels on the camera and stares defiantly into the lens.
Jim explained that he wanted to show Christy first as an adult to make sure nobody expected him to overcome his disability. He took the time to show Christy putting the record on to play, without cuts, to engender empathy, evoking the patience of a mother with a disabled child. Like almost any protagonist in a film, Christy had problems to overcome, but they were emotional problems, not physical ones.
As he said, most people when they go to a film put themselves in the shoes of the person they identify with on screen. Even if it's fantastic and cartoonish, they will still wonder what it feels like to be Peter Parker, Tyler Durden or Frodo. A quick note: in my opinion it's this guiding force of empathy that makes the gender imbalance in films so heinous a disservice to their audiences.
Jim also made a point of mentioning the opening of Intermission. If you haven't seen it, you can watch it below:
I always quite liked the opening scene, I thought it was clever, provocative and genuinely engaging. It made me sit up and pay attention when most mid-budget character-driven domestic films would struggle a little to grab your interest quite so hard. While Jim was effusive about the film as a whole, his objection to the opening scene gave me pause for thought. He said it was too tough, too hard, to let the audience empathise with other characters through the rest of the story. The thing is, on reflection, he's right. Once that happened, I was sitting up in my seat through the rest of the film, but I didn't care about other characters like I should have, it didn't seem like the film would accommodate any heart. Anybody could get sucker punched at any moment, and while that gave the film a bit of zip, it came at an emotional cost. Characters you don't feel for make for a forgettable experience.
Yeah ok, but what about games?
I've said it before, fundamentals never stop being important, and I think that the principle of establishing empathy is always going to make a project better. Games have a strange relationship with empathy since, for first-person games at least, we are literally in the protagonist's shoes. There are differing schools of thought on this subject.
I think the Valve approach in the Half-Life and Portal games of making your character a mute cypher with a shell of a persona works quite well, though it seems a little limited. Instead of the subject of the story, you become an agent of plot progression and are expected to empathise with the characters you interact with. It works for me, I care about Alyx & Eli Vance, Cave Johnson, Dr. Kleiner and Barney. As a solution, it feels more like an elegant hack than a real answer to the question of what interactivity brings to narrative.
While a little problematic, I think the more directed approach, like in Deus Ex: Human Revolution, Bioshock: Infinite or The Witcher allows for some richer interactions to be written, the problem being that as an experience, it asks a lot of you as a player. Booker DeWitt, Alex Jensen and Geralt are all characters with histories, agendas and personalities. If your actions deviate from that personality as a player you have broken the experience. Essentially, no matter the genre of gameplay, narratively they are inescapably role-playing stories. Going back to the tenet of empathy in storytelling, it becomes a little difficult to know who to empathise with. If you are playing a badass bio-mechanically augmented security agent with a cool voice and shades that clip on over your eyes like you're some kind of terrifying insect, what does your persona mean if you get stuck trying to jump up onto crates, or if you keep rummaging in bins for spare change? Or if you get scared by combat? We make peace with it for the most part, I really liked the Deus Ex games, all of them, and the incongruity didn't truly break the experience, but it definitely introduced a level of dissonance.
Yeah ok, ok, but what do we do about it?
I think there are some promising approaches. Honesty is definitely important. Writing something that has an element of truth to it will give it a resonance it is almost impossible to manufacture. I recently wrote a fun little game in Twine that repackaged my anxieties, but I found a way to be truthful. A much clearer and better example would be the evocative and simple story by John O'Kane written in the same game jam.
My game is an example of truth by obfuscation. I am not the main character, but I called on my experiences and used my own face to tell the story, and I think I managed to say something that rings true, despite the flippant tone and the gaming artifice around it (and the bugs – let's not forget the bugs).
John's story uses interaction far more sparingly, it really is a story, but the choices boil down to those moments that we relive over and over again as something we either grin back on or regret forever. It centres around pivot points that anybody who has lived a life can relate to.
Abstraction can also be a valuable tool, though in my experience it is underused, showing up more often as a method of evocation rather than full engagement. I don't mind experimental efforts that ask to met halfway, but nor do I think it's too much to ask as a player that I find something worth the effort when I get there. I'd offer Braid or Kentucky Route Zero as examples; I love them both, but I miss a clearer feeling of narrative and characters coalescing. I felt much more satisfied by the stark yet moving LIMBO.
Finally there are the tried and tested examples of interactive stories like the adventure games of old and the more recent incarnations like The Walking Dead from Telltale Games. They definitely work, and work well, but in my opinion they haven't furthered the mechanics of interactive narrative, just the standard*.
There are plenty of games that don't really have a narrative, where narrative isn't part of the focus, like puzzle games, strategy games, some action games etc. I would argue that when those genres to experiment with characters and narrative, like in Portal 2 (a puzzle game), XCOM: Enemy Unknown (strategy) or Thomas Was Alone (action), they can be much more engaging, at least on the first play through!
* Confession: I haven't finished The Walking Dead: Season One yet, so I may be wrong.