Quest to Nowhere

The Character in My Head vs. the Character in the Game: Objective Storytelling in Videogames

Upon finishing Batman: Arkham City I found myself wondering how it was that I felt like Batman when playing the game, which further led me to wondering how it was that in other games with objective storytelling I often didn’t feel like the character I was playing as.

To quickly explain what I’m talking about storytelling in games is generally either subjective or objective. Subjective storytelling is when the player is the character, which usually means that the player is creating the character and the actions and choices they make are dictated by the player. For example Fallout 3, what your character does and says during the game are determined by what the player chooses to do, and as such they tend to put themselves in the shoes of their character which makes them feel that the story is about them.

Objective storytelling is when the player is not the character. So in Arkham City you aren’t Batman, well you are in so far as you control him at certain times and in certain ways, but what he does in regards to the story is not at all effected by your actions. You can’t make Batman kill the Joker in a cut scene, for example.

So what is it about objective storytelling games like the Arkham games and the Uncharted games that make me engaged and immersed in the story, and feel like the character, even though I’m not, whilst other games like Resistance 3 or Deus Ex: Human Revolution don’t?

It seems to come down to two things:

1. The player needs to understand the character they are playing as.
2. The character has to always feel like the character especially in the game mechanics.

Using Arkham City or even Arkham Asylum as an example, the player is probably coming into the game with a basic understanding of who Batman is, even if they are not the introductory sequences of both games help to establish this understanding for the player. This covers criteria number one.

In regards to criteria number two, you as the player are never able to make Batman do anything that Batman wouldn’t be able to do or do something that would go against your understanding of who Batman is. For example you can’t kill anyone in either game, because Batman would never kill anyone. Additionally you can’t use a gun, even though they are plentiful at times, because Batman would never use a gun.

The gameplay mechanisms of the game reinforce your understanding of who the character is, so that there is never an instance where the Batman character you have an understanding of in your head is different from the one being presented to you either through a cut scene or through the gameplay.

An example of where these two criteria weren’t followed was in Red Dead Redemption. Here the trouble was that the player was presented with John Marston, and they gave you an understanding of who he was and what he was like. And so if you played the game sticking to how the character was presented to you, you never had a problem since the character in your head was the same as the one on the screen.

When I played I understood Marston as a guy who had a checkered past, which he was trying to get away from, but now had caught up with him so he was going to need to deal with it without falling back too much into his old ways. This worked with the sort of narrative that the game was trying to tell, but if you played the game as someone who killed everyone they saw you were presented with a John Marston in those cut scenes that was not reflective of your actions through the game’s gameplay. This breaks the story for the player, and their immersion while playing.

There are some other things I want to touch on in regards to this topic of objective storytelling in games, but I think I’ll handle them in another post so as to keep this one concise.