Quest to Nowhere

A Missed Opportunity with the Last of Us?

By the time I had finished watching the first trailer for Naughty Dog’s the Last of Us back in December, I was really interested in the game. Not because it was a new Naughty Dog game, but rather because from the way the trailer was put together it seemed you were going to be playing as Ellie, not as Joel. Thinking about what that would mean, not only for how the game’s narrative would be presented, but also how it would affect the game’s gameplay is what got me interested.

Narratively speaking Ellie seemed to be a perfect foil for the player since she is doesn’t seem to know much about the world, let alone the way it was before the apocalypse. While Joel seemed like he would be a great fit as a mentor, not only to Ellie but also to the player. To help you not only get an understanding of the world you are in, but also to teach you the skills you will need to survive.

Gameplay wise Ellie, as a 14 year old girl, obviously isn’t able to physically go toe-to-toe with a zombie (something even Joel seemed to have some trouble with.) Never mind her being able to use firearms, which she might be able to, but probably not super effectively. Which would mean that the game play would be less focused on you, as Ellie, engaging in combat, and more focused on things Ellie would actually be able to do (ie: platforming and puzzle solving.)

This isn’t to say that you still couldn’t have gameplay related to combat, but rather that it would be more of a support role then one of direct confrontation. So whilst Joel is fighting with some zombies or humans in one place, the player as Ellie could sneak or platform around to a place where she would be able to cause some rubble to fall onto an enemy, or do something to destroy an enemy’s cover. Basically things that maybe wouldn’t take out an enemy directly, but would make it easier for Joel to.

Not that you couldn’t give Ellie a rifle and have her snipe at enemies, which could potentially lead to some interesting moment to moment choices as the player. Where the player has to choose to shoot at an enemy, thus using some of the little ammo they have, or spend time maneuvering to a place to cause something that will help Joel fight the enemies.

Now unfortunately recent information about the game has indicated that in fact you will be playing as Joel, with Ellie being controlled by the game’s artificial intelligence. And after reading a bit about how the game is going to play I can understand why they’ve chosen to go with Joel.

From the sounds of it they want to have very physical close quarters combat between the player and the zombies, which is obviously only something Joel can do given the choice between him and Ellie. There also seems to be some sort of mystery to Ellie, since she has hired Joel to smuggler her out of the safe zone which has apparently caused the military to pursue them. And having that sort of major plot thread is pretty difficult to do if you are playing as Ellie since her history plays an important role, and not knowing that as the player can cause some immersion and congruency problems. Since if you are supposed to be her, but then you don’t know something about yourself that you should know.

Now obviously the game is a long way from getting released and we still don’t really know all that much about it, I still can’t help but feel disappointed in what I think is a missed opportunity. In that is was a missed opportunity to really try something new in terms of gameplay, and in terms of the player’s experience in the game. Simply by moving the player from being in the role of the most powerful character, to the role of a supporting where they are essentially playing what is normally the role of the game’s AI. Now I don’t know if what I was thinking would have been a better game, but it at least would have had some new gameplay experiences for the player which I think would have made it a lot more interesting.

Good Writing is not the Future of Gaming

To say that good writing is the future of video games is, I think, a bit sort sighted. Video games have generally had relatively good writing, which has really gotten only better over the years. There has been a jump recently in the quality of writing, but it’s not because of game studios hiring good writers.

The problem with writing in video games has generally been that writers have traditionally been brought on board to work on a game toward the end of its development. And are tasked with writing a story that ties together everything the game designers and developers have made. Only in the past few years have studios begun to have writers on the team from the beginning, so that the story of the game is developed alongside the game’s development.

This has of course greatly improved the quality of writing in the games where this happens (ie: Portal 1 and 2, the Mass Effect series, and Skyrim.) And this is something other studios are going to take notice of, especially as the games that handle writing this way sell very well.

But the future of games is not in good writing, but in good storytelling. This may sound like splitting hairs, but it’s an important subtlety. Writing is very important in traditional mediums like books, movies, TV, comics, etc., because these are generally passive mediums where you as the consumer of it have not effect on what is going to happen, while video games are an interactive medium, and require constant input from the player for something to happen.

And so whilst video games are being used now to tell the story a writer came up with, the real potential of the medium is in the player creating their own story while they are playing. For example, maybe you built an amazing structure in Minecraft only to see it destroyed by some creepers. Or maybe you had a really great run in Call of Duty where you managed to sneak into the enemy’s base, steal their flag, and then capture it at your base without being seen by anyone to win the match. Or perhaps whilst wandering the land of Skyrim you encountered some thugs battling a dragon, and after fighting off the dragon with them they turn on you and kill you. These are all examples of stories created not by a writer, but by the player’s interactions with the game itself.

Now this is not to say that video games don’t need writers, but rather that the art of writing for a video game will for the most part move away from creating a narrative for the player to follow, but will instead become more about writing to support the interactions the player has during the game. So things like writing the history of the game’s world up until the point the game starts, writing the dialogue of non-player characters to respond to players differently based on the actions the player undertakes while playing, and things like that.

There will still be a place for games with a set narrative like Portal, Mass Effect and Uncharted, but the real potential of this interactive medium is to make the player an active participant in creating the story they are playing. This is because these stories are much more powerful and more meaningful to a player, since it was their unique experience and their unique story not just something everyone also experienced.

Creating Our Own Story through Interaction and Abstraction

To What End is a game made for the 2012 Global Game Jam by Michael Molinari and Chelsea Howe. You should probably go play it before you continue reading; it should take you less than five minutes.

Finished?

Ok.

The thing that is most notable about this game is not how it manages to convey a story through the actions you make as the player, but rather how the game tricks you into creating a story based on your actions through the use of abstraction. There are scripted events of a sort as you lose NPCs, but the significance of that loss and any sort of personality or humanity you place on these shapes is merely of your own creation.

Now the reason this happens is because of something comic book artist/writer Scott McCloud talks about in his book Understanding Comics. Essentially the human brain is designed to look for faces, which is why when we look at : ) we can see a smiling face and not just a colon and a right parenthesize.  Now in comics they take advantage of this through the style the comic is depicted in.

Which is to say that the more realistic the character appears the more we think of them as another person, but when we see a more simplistic looking face we are able to see our own selves reflected in the character. Like the smiley faced emoticon we want to assign some sort of personality to it, basically to anthropomorphize it, so as to give it meaning and make it more real to us. This then in turn makes our connection to that character more personal, as you are to some extent creating aspects of the character.

Now when playing To What End this is what you do with the object you control, and with the other objects. They have no personalities, nothing remotely human about them, but in your mind as you play you construct a narrative through the patterns you see and experience (ie: the way they each hope a little differently, or how the cutout at the bottom of an object is the shape protruding from the top of the object to its left.) So you start to see them not as five shapes moving through a space, but as five friends on an adventure, or five people trying to get through life, or something else entirely but not just shapes.

Then as you begin to progress through the game world you create meaning to explain what you are doing, or what is occurring. Perhaps you chose not to leave one of the shapes behind, because you wished not to abandon it. Or maybe you made it all the way to the end with your one shape, and feel accomplished for doing so even though you left those other shapes behind.

And this is perhaps the true brilliance of this game, is that there is no one meaning to your experience playing the game. In fact the game itself really has no meaning to it at all, but instead the meaning of the game is created by you playing and experiencing it. This makes the meaning you come to at the end something very personal, and perhaps reflective of your personality, or how you see the world.  And this was all done not by giving the player a lot of choices, but rather because of the game’s its abstract presentation.