Interactivity and storytelling. Some thoughts.

I have long thought about game design concepts like narrative and interaction.

Some have said there is a great divide between story-driven games and game play driven experiences. I'd postulate that there is a nuance that is often missed though. I believe story-based games are also gameplay-based. Just in a different way.

Some thoughts of my own; most people would like a game that is interesting and enjoyable to interact with. There are many subsets of this though. Or to put it another way, a ton of different ways to be engaged by interactivity. Complex difficulty can be exhilarating. That's a large part of why Dark Souls succeeds. It requires an investment from the player that makes the losses feel real and the victories hard earned. It may not be winning a presidential election but the scale isn't important, it's what the achievement feels like when it happens.

But there are many other ways interaction can be interesting. Super Mario 3D World was fascinating because it was inventive and asked you to come visit it's outside-the-box-ideas. Portal is great because it's clever and asks you to be clever right back. Street Fighter is fantastic because each character has a finite pool of abilities but fights can still go a near infinite number of ways.

Story games are a bit different however. In trying to focus so much on the story telling they very rarely present the player with any systems that feel so interesting.

The Last of Us, in my opinion, does nothing in terms of gameplay, that's inventive or even very interesting. It's split up into shooter sections, stealth sections, and exploration sections. But not a single one of these is terribly good on it's own. The action is basically Gears of War but not as good, the stealth isn't doing much more than Metal Gear solid did in 1998, and the exploration sections only offer very limited places to go. The one other thing the game does provide, crafting and expanding weapons, offers very little to encourage a diverse play style.

So why did it just win the game of the year from BAFTA (to use its most recent accolade)? You might think the answer is the storytelling. It is but it's deeper than that.

Think of it this way. I create a game where there is a large, hollow rectangle. In that rectangle, at one end, is a floating sphere. At the other end is an opening. I tell you that you are the sphere and that your objective is to move that sphere to the end of the rectangle and through the opening. You push the Analogue stick and the sphere moves on down the space towards that opening. You enter and the game finishes. You won.

Now that sounds boring, right?

Well now let's suppose I show you another game. In this one you are shown a long hallway. There is warm, dim lighting from an old looking lamp placed on a small table. There is a creeky-looking hard-wood floor covering the length of the halway interrupted only by a dusty afghan in the center. The walls are covered in a floral patterned paper that implies an elderly design touch. There are a couple of doors and the visible top of a staircase that suggest other rooms outside this space. That this in't just a rectangle but a hallway in a home. At the end of the hall where the sphere had been, we see a boy in his early teens. At the other end there is an old-looking door open and a dark void beyond it. I tell you that the boy is you and that you should simply pick up the controller and see what happens. You nudge the stick slightly and are greeted with a painful-sounding thud and a terrified scream. As you move towards the open door a voice comes out saying "Tommy, Tommy, I fell! Help!" You move to the end (possibly feeling some narrative-driven pressure) and see the boy vanish through the doorway. The game finishes.

Ok, so that was pretty melodramatic, I know. But I hope you can see what I'm getting at; the reason story in games is powerful is because, by way of interactivity, you are not given secondhand experiences, you are given them firsthand. Put it another way, these things aren't happening to someone else, they are happening to you.

At the end of The Last of Us, we see and exchange between Ellie and Joel. But they aren't the only people in the scene. There are three of us. The two of them and ourselves. WE got through this. We didn't just root for THEM.

It's different than a movie too. A movie we are only watching what someone else thinks and wants and does. We are voyeurs. As close as we may feel, we aren't there, only observing someone else who is.

This is why The Last of Us works so well. Not because it gives us systems that are in themselves interesting (it doesn't) but because it proves, even in all it's tired Zombie story-telling, that framed narrative in interactivity can make gameplay very compelling. It's MORE compelling when you are struggling through the snow to get to Ellie. It's MORE compelling when you're walking with her and shes telling you about herself, and it's MORE compelling when she's lying on a cold table.

This kind of framed interactivity can be vastly powerful. So powerful it makes up for a game that otherwise wouldn't have been considered, in my opinion, very strong.

So what's my point? Well I suppose I have two. The first is that story-driven games offer in themselves a kind of game play genre. The play is totally informed by it and wonderfully so.

But the second is that games really shouldn't have to choose between the two. One can inform the other. One can be compelling and varied in addition to powerful by way of interaction.