Staying with the idea of players using games in unintended ways, there’s been a lot of interest in Far Cry 2 recently surrounding some gamers’ attempts to impose permanence on all their decisions. Is that a valid way of making story meaningful? Does it clash with game structures like reloading?
CH: To summarise, if you guys aren’t aware, I was having a discussion online about the reliance on traditional narrative techniques, trying to impose notions of irreversibility and stuff like that on players in order to make their actions more meaningful. And I was saying I don’t think we should do that, I think we should actually embrace the idea that games are reversible and malleable and fragmented and parallel and all of these sorts of things that other media aren’t. And out of that discussion, a blogger, Ben Abraham, decided to start replaying my last game, Far Cry 2, with permanent death. Basically, if he dies he’ll stop playing a game. And not just if he died, but he wouldn’t reload the game to undo any decisions or undo any choices that he made – classic iron-man stuff. But he started talking about how that was changing the way he played the game and changing the way he felt about the buddy characters who can die based on your decisions. I feel the reason people were interested in what he was doing wasn’t because it was making him feel more stronger connections to the buddies; I think the game design already tries to do that [with the save system]. It was interesting because he was manipulating the game itself. It’s kind of a fine hair to try and split and maybe I’m being a bit pedantic, but should we be trying to find ways to impose irreversibility – which, by the way, players are known to hate – or should we find ways to let them become more fragmented and more parallel and more reversible? That’s what Braid maybe is in some sense; it’s a game about different kinds of reversibility and parallelism. Maybe we should be looking for ways to make games’ structure really embrace those things instead of trying to stick our heads in the sand and cling to classic narrative techniques.
RT: The idea of permanence is interesting. I think with online games, with MMOGs, every decision is irreversible. There’s no way to back-up to a savegame; everything is controlled server-side. We are exploring that with The Secret World: actually having situations in the world where the player’s actions will mean life or death for particular characters. And that means total permanence. That means those characters will always be gone from the world and never, ever appear again. That location might disappear from the world. You always have the hardcore old gamers going on about permanence and how that makes the ultimate challenge because you play as you would live – but that’s not what people are looking for in a game. I think it’s important that games don’t punish you for playing them. Games can have permanence but in a way that allows for experimentation. I think you can address that sort of thing in a narrative, to have a world where your actions matter but you can’t really do anything wrong. You put the mechanics in place to make sure that whatever you do there’s a response to it.
CH: I agree – that’s kind of like what I felt about this permanent experiment. There’s this group of people who want to make players feel the classical emotions that they feel in film when someone dies and the only way to do it is to make it permanent. If you can just reload your saved game and have that person live then you won’t feel the same emotion. But this is sort of foolhardy when you think that all you’re really talking about is finding some way to make it inconvenient for people to avoid something they don’t want. And if you want to subvert it, you can do it. You can have duplicate installs of the game and copy your files manually over and every time before you save or something like that. You can hack the system in order to get around it if you have a savegame. So it’s kind of pointless to try and force it because it’s digital: it’s flexible. So we might as well embrace the impermanence, the malleable part of play, and explore the kind of feelings that we get from that rather than trying to rely on these old notions of ‘Polonius is dead and now we have to deal with the consequences’. Maybe Polonius can be dead and alive. Maybe there are different ways of looking at that problem.


_{^{Chet Faliszek, writer (among other duties) on Valve's Left 4 Dead}}

So if the future of videogame narrative tends towards socially created storylines – narrative constructed by the players themselves – is the traditional role of the author a thing of the past?
CH: For me it feels fairly inevitable. The importance of the author is diminishing and the importance of the collaborator in the story, the social framework in which it’s happening and the simulation of the world in which it takes place are increasingly important. The question is, do we ever reach a threshold where the author becomes zero? In the immediate short-term future, I see improving the ‘movie games’ we have. Telling better stories in our scripted events is very marketable. But in the mid-term, in the next decade, I don’t see how the lone author can stand up against this wave – an increasingly massive player-base that’s able to participate in a story. I think that’s going to overwhelm the importance of the author. Maybe I’m wrong.
CF: If you go online and watch how people play the games in the multiplayer world you see some surprising and weird things happen. There’s a server for Team Fortress 2, a game which has no story in it, where players read books to each other or do karaoke. It’s a weird social thing – how can we help that? Then you see something like Milo And Kate and it’s so rigid. Milo’s only ever going say what’s in the author’s mind; he’s never going to be a real boy. Worrying about if Milo did his homework or not is not something that’s really interesting to me as a gamer. It’s kind of an oppressive narrative, I think.
RT: The author’s role is never going to be diminished completely. Yes, players create their own stories and they chat and they get married in the games and they create their own guilds and their own organisations and groups, but I think people gravitate towards worlds that feel like places and spaces where it’s worth getting emotionally invested. I think the iPhone and DS are revitalising old genres that have been dormant for a long time – you see adventure gaming rising again because these people haven’t really played games before and those are games that are very classical in structure and can be experienced by people who are not really gamers. There’s a huge shift in the way games are made and experienced now, and that’s fantastic.