The ‘Facade’ Of Game Narrative Interactivity
So, as I mentioned a while ago, before disappearing in a flurry of having to do actual work at work and writer’s block, I’ve been playing Facade recently. I would compare the experience to hanging out with a baby genius (that is to say, a normal baby that will later grow up to be a genius, rather than a Baby Genius of the super-intelligent talking baby variety). There are little flashes of embryonic brilliance embedded in the game and in the design philosophy behind it, but right now, it mostly sits there being sometimes cute, often boring or nonsensical, and it occasionally poops all over itself.
The plot of the game is very simple. Your old buddy from college, Trip, invites you over to his apartment. You approach the door, and you can overhear him and his wife Grace arguing. Over the course of the evening, it only gets worse, as their relationship disintegrates and they keep trying to use you as a prop to win argument points or get you to take their side. All in all, it’s a game exploring a really awkward evening.
As you can tell by the lack of words such as “gun”, and use of words “relationship”, this is a fairly non-standard framing for a video game. To quote the developers:
Instead of providing the player with 40 to 60 hours of episodic action and endless wandering in a huge world, we’re interested in shorter experiences that provide emotionally intense, tightly unified, dramatic action.
Their problem with achieving this goal lies mainly with one issue; Trip and Grace are completely insufferable yuppie scum, with whom I think most people would rather shoot with a gun than actually involve themselves with in any significant emotional capacity. This makes the game feel generally unrewarding, since drama and emotional involvement are pretty much all the game is trying to offer.
There are also some simple mechanical problems with the game. To give the player more options in dialog, the game lets you type in anything you want. This works pretty well in terms of giving the player freedom, but is an issue with the fact that the game works in real time. I am not a fast typist, and as such, I would often run into the problem of getting halfway through inputting a sentence, only to have that smarmy bastard Trip cut me off with more of his inane blather, giving me no chance to actually speak. This may be an accurate depiction of the way that character would act, but it’s kind of crappy as interface. Also, with AI being still in the embryonic state that it is in with dynamically portraying conversations and changing emotions, chatting with Trip and Grace can occasionally devolve into ELIZA-esque non-sequitur or conversation jumps.
So, at this point you might be asking “Where does the ‘genius’ part of your ‘baby genius’ analogy come into play?” Honestly, as happens in many experimental projects, the genius lies more in the ideas behind the game, rather than the implementation. To further quote from the developers’ manifesto:
Videogames excel at giving players high-agency experiences — that is, providing ample opportunities for the player to take action and receive immediate feedback. With Façade we wanted to create an interactive drama that provides the level of immediate, moment-by-moment agency found in games, but unlike games, also provides longer-term player influence over the plot itself.
In addition to the very local, in-the-moment agency of games, we want the player to experience global agency, that is, real influence on the overall story arc, over which topics get brought up, how the characters feel about the player over time, and how the story ends.
Additionally, the story-level choices in Façade shouldn’t feel like obvious branch points. We believe that when a player is faced with obvious choice points consisting of a small number of choices (for example, being given a menu of three different things to say to choose from), it detracts from the sense of agency; the player feels railroaded into doing what the designer has dictated. Instead, in Façade, the story progression changes in response to many small actions performed by the player throughout the experience.
I think that the ideas in these paragraphs are vital to advancing the idea of videogame narrative. Games largely started with no explicit narrative (Why am I in this Asteroid field? Why are these guys from Space Invading me? What the fuck is a Pac-Man?) or had a few dinky paragraphs in the instruction manual. As they evolved from just infinite levels and increasing high scores more towards discrete experiences with beginnings, middles and ends, linear narrative followed.
As linear gameplay has exploded into open worlds that one is free to wander and explore, however, the complexity of game narrative hasn’t really kept pace. Open world games that I’ve played generally have a large linear narrative thread central to the game, and the player pretty much just picks it up or drops it at leisure to wander around and do other things, possibly even picking up the strands of smaller narratives. Essentially, narrative has advanced from being an express train from start of plot to the finish to a train that you can stop any time and hop off of, to roam the landscape. It still takes you to about the same place in about the same way though, an ultimately linear ride with maybe a few big and obvious switches in the track (hmm, do I want to ride the ‘Good’ rail or the ‘Evil’ rail?).
What the Facade folks seem to be saying is that players need more of the same kind of freedom in dictating the plot direction that they have in dictating the movements and actions of their avatars. The player’s actions should affect the plot subtly but markedly, and do so while the player is playing the game, giving that player a distinctly different plot experience that shifts not with big obvious branches, but with the smaller ways that the character affects the world and NPCs around them, whether physically or emotionally. Game worlds have already largely shifted from linear collections of levels to open environments, the narrative structure of these worlds also deserves to break free from linearity and subtly sculpt narrative experiences non-linearly.
This may happen through adaptive AI techniques as the Facade team attempted and sorta kinda half succeeded, or simply through new approaches to game writing (a new and young craft which I believe has yet to see vital and necessary stylistic revolutions), or more likely a combination of both of those things. Much like it took film decades after its inception to fully unlock the narrative power of montage, I feel that video games are barely scratching the surface of what non-linearity and continuous change can do for narrative, and ideas like those of the Facade developers point to an exciting future.