A biosuit augmented physicist, a medieval assassin brought to life by virtual reality, and a telekinetic commando… these are all protagonists from games (rightly) championed for their narratives – so why does it read like a list of fantasy careers by Tom, Age 6?
One week ago, I was brought in to discuss an Xbox 360 action adventure IP. It’s early doors – things are at the stage where plots and characters are being drawn up, tonal references agreed, target audiences researched… and a contract Narrative Designer put in place.
The development team had some fantastic reference material – media that either nailed the themes, or the atmosphere, or the gameplay they were looking to achieve. Pouring over it, I had just one question: why aren’t there any games here?
The short answer was they just felt more powerfully drawn to filmic conceits. It’s common enough – game narratives are in their infancy, so there’s often more mileage in cinematic comparisons than interactive ones.
The long answer, I think, is that they’d identified a gaping black hole in video game narratives (of which many there may be, but few quite so fundamental). The game was to revolve around a group of twenty-somethings fighting for survival, but was to focus heavily on themes close to that audience – social interactions and stresses, relationships and break ups, co-operation and co-habitation… in short, subjects any adult should be familiar with.
Now, there are plenty of broadly believable games set in the real world – Pro Evo, The Sims, OpFlash… And there are plenty of games which focus on (or at least include) social interaction – the boisterous to and fro of Gears’ protagonists, the playful wit of Sam & Max, not to mention many an RPG.
But how many combine the two?
When it comes to boxed games that feature real, everyday conversations between normal people, I genuinely struggle to count the examples on more than one hand. The Sims certainly doesn’t qualify (in so far as its interactions are so simplistic as to be effectively abstract). GTA comes close, if not for its focus on larger than life gangland personalities we’d rarely expect to meet down Sainsbury’s.
Having scanned the Top 500 on Metacritic, something like Fahrenheit is just about the closest I can come up with. Things like The Longest Journey, and certain film licences probably get a nose in as well – but the point I’m sure we can agree on is that it’s rare to experience real, everyday dialogue in a game. Ultimately – as we well know – 99% of our games revolve around Mutant Nazis and Elves. Even when they feature more down to earth protagonists it’s still, somehow, the earth that needs saving.
Perhaps that doesn’t sound like such a huge revelation. We already know that sci-fi and fantasy are big sellers, so what’s the real news here?
For one thing, faced with writing realistic interactive dialogue that will resonate for a group of young adults – not in itself an outrageous proposition – I realise I have next to no point of reference within the medium for which I’m writing.
When we consider film – which, granted, follows different rules – without real life subjects we’d lose many of the greatest achievements the medium has to offer. The point is that for consumers across all other media, a believable experience which they can identify with and relate to is a very core tenet of storytelling.
There are natural enough reasons that games haven’t (yet) followed suit – beyond the issue of the medium’s maturity. For one thing, we might argue that the immersion inherent in interactivity – with audience as protagonist rather than voyeur – just fits better to the escapism and wish fulfilment of fantasy: who wants to make believe they’re doing the dishes? This, of course, seems somewhat of a tough sell in light of The Sims’ success. What’s more, I feel the value in stories of everyday life is not to simply ape the familiar reality, but to explore that reality in a way that sheds new light on it, or reconfirms what we think we know. What better way to give an audience a new outlook on life than to let them live someone else’s for a day?
A more pragmatic explanation is the question of budget. One reason filmmakers can afford to screen 90 minutes of the everyday up against the balls to the wall extravagance of super hero blockbusters is the difference in budget – they don’t need to sell as many seats to turn a profit. This is a genre advantage that’s academic in games: it costs just as much to model a toaster as it does an explosion. With that in mind, who would willingly green light a AAA project about dog walking, office politics and emotional rejection when it’s directly competing with games where you play a telekinetic marine who saves the day from toxic racoons? On Mars?
All this raises some sticky issues. First, are games suited to exploring the sort of mundane normalcy that consumers crave of other entertainment forms, or must they be inherently exaggerated and fantastic? Second, if this is a thread we want to pursue, exactly what shape might this new narrative take?
Ultimately, if identification with real scenarios is such an intrinsic element of so many essential narratives, how can games avoid falling into the black hole that reality has left behind?
This project’s first answer is to combine ‘social reality’ with the sort of explosive scenarios gamers (and publishers) are accustomed to. It aims to deliver on the kicks and familiar back-of-the-box buzz words that make a project viable, but to do so in a way that’s tempered and transformed by the down to earth characters who inhabit the game.
The rest of those questions we’re going to have to answer over the course of development. If any exciting conclusions arise, I’ll be sure to let you know.