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Brice New World

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Darf ich vorstellen, Internet: Mattie Brice.

Mattie schreibt über Spiele. So weit wenig erwähnenswert, wäre sie nicht so gut darin, wüsste sie nicht die Analyse und Kritik mit ihrem eigenen reichhaltigen Erfahrungsschatz zu verbinden. Denn als schwarze Transfrau widerspricht sie quasi allen Adjektiven, mit denen sich die Autorenschaft des Spielejournalismus beschreiben lässt, und ist aufgrund ihrer außergewöhnlichen Lage natürlich besonders bemüht, mit dessen Rückschrittlichkeiten aufzuräumen.

Ich will an dieser Stelle gar nicht so tun, als könnte ich hier neutral oder gelassen bleiben: Ich halte Mattie Brice für genial. Sie hält der mal latent und mal weniger latent feindseligen Spielerkultur gekonnt den Spiegel vor, betrachtet bekannte Problematiken aus interessanten Richtungen, findet neue Ansätze in diesem festgefahrenen Feld. Kurz, sie ist das Beispiel für gelungene Meinungsvielfalt durch echte, gelebte Vielfalt. Wenn es Brice nicht gäbe, man müsste sie glatt erfinden.

Warum singe ich diese Arie ausgerechnet jetzt? Weil Frau Brice sich neben Artikeln, GDC Talks, Twine- und Videoexperimenten gerade etwas neues ausgedacht hat. Reactionzine heißt das Wunderding, ein Magazinprojekt, das genau die Art persönlicher Geschichten und experimenteller Artikel fördern soll, die auf größeren Seiten oft nur schwer unterkommen. Nach Abschluss der derzeitigen Testphase soll jeder der vielfältigen Beiträge mit 200 Dollar honoriert werden, finanziert über eine für Juni angekündigte Crowdfundingkampagne. Bei Erfolg wird die Spendensammlung im Jahresrhythmus wiederholt.

Ziel ist zwar noch keines bekannt, bei 200 Dollar pro Artikel, schätzungsweise acht Artikeln pro Monat und 12 Monaten bis zur nächsten Finanzspritze, dazu Gehälter für die Chefredaktion, Server- und Domainkosten sowie sonstigen Ausgaben, darf man wohl mit einer Summe um oder jenseits der 30.000 Dollar rechnen, und das auch nur, wenn keine teuren Anreize oder Belohnungen geplant sind.

Das ist ein Problem. Oder sagen wir lieber, das könnte zum Problem werden, denn anspruchsvolle Kritik und Kulturjournalismus verkaufen sich in der Regel nicht besonders gut. Die Finanzierung von Onlineinhalten ist ja seit Nate Thayers und Alexis Madrigals Beiträgen wieder mal Gesprächsthema. Destructoid denkt etwa gerade über Alternativen nach, Videogames Interactive hingegen stellt den Versuch, einzelne Kritiken als Ebooks zu verkaufen, wegen Misserfolg postwendend wieder ein (den verschiedenen Modellen widme ich bei Gelegenheit mal einen eigenen Artikel). Reactionzine wäre auch nicht das erste Magazin, das sich Starthilfe von Kickstarter und Konsorten erhofft.

Kill Screen etwa hat sein Glück ursprünglich dort gesucht, auch wenn die Kampagne schon so lange zurückliegt, dass sie mittlerweile vor lauter Konferenzen und Parties vergessen haben dürften, was sie ursprünglich mal vorhatten. In jüngerer Vergangenheit fand Sneaky Bastards dort mit einem sehr spezifischen Vorschlag Erfolg. Auf anderen Plattformen laufen auch publikumsfinanzierte Bücher zu Spielen ganz gut. Was diese Projekte aber alle gemeinsam haben, sind die recht bescheidenen Ziele: 3.500 Dollar für den Kill Screen-Erstling, 1.500 Pfund für Sneaky Bastards, 1.000 Pfund für Groping The Map, 2.500 Dollar für Possibility Space.

Wer nicht auf dem Rücken einer starken Marke einreitet, macht sich mit einem hohen Ziel das Leben schwer und das eigene Scheitern zur selbsterfüllenden Prophezeiung. So gesehen etwa bei Continue, eigentlich ein interessantes Projekt voller kluger Menschen, drei schöne Ausgaben haben sie sogar schon vorgelegt, aber ach, 50.000 Pfund sind eine Menge Geld und der Markt für anspruchsvollen Spielejournalismus ist recht klein, und noch dazu voller Zyniker.

Das Einzige, was sich noch schlechter verkaufen dürfte als anspruchsvolle Analyse, ist unbequeme

anspruchsvolle Analyse.

Das Einzige, was sich noch schlechter verkaufen dürfte als anspruchsvolle Analyse, ist unbequeme anspruchsvolle Analyse. Deswegen fürchte ich, dass Reactionzine mit ihrem Einjahresplan auf der Nase landen könnten, und deswegen rühre ich hier jetzt schon die Werbetrommel. Weil ich der Seite den Erfolg wirklich gönnen würde.

Nicht jeder mag da meinen Enthusiasmus teilen. Brice’ persönlicher Stil ist durchaus umstritten, wir erinnern uns alle an die Kontroverse um sie, Jonas Kyratzes und Electron Dance. Mehr noch, sie gehört wohl auch zu den zurzeit so umstrittenen Zinestern, in verquerer Binärlogik das Gegenteil zu Formalisten. (Auch diese grundfalsche Debatte verdient einen eigenen Veriss - versucht es alternativ mit diesem hier.)

Schon jetzt scheint die Seite den entsprechenden Klischees gerecht zu werden und die ersten Skandälchen abzuliefern. Porpentine etwa revidiert ihren Artikel eigenmächtig, um Kritik von Emily Short zu entsprechen, die Änderungen werden von der Führung aber zurückgenommen, kurz darauf verschwindet der entsprechende Beitrag völlig aus dem Magazin und ist seitdem nur auf Porpentines eigener Seite verfügbar. Daraus muss man nicht unbedingt einen Kleinkrieg konstruieren, aber hinter den Kulissen scheint es doch zu bröckeln. Neben dem Artikel sind auch einige Namen aus der ursprünglichen Startaufstellung verschwunden und außer kryptischen Tweets gibt es dazu keinerlei Stellungnahme.

Unprofessionelle Streitereien und Gezwitscher - sieht so also die Revolution aus? Nun ja, irgendwie schon. Mit Regeln und Konventionen nehmen es Brice und Kameraden aus offensichtlichen Gründen nicht so genau: Wenn gesellschaftliche Sitten und Moralvorstellungen den eigenen Lebenswandel, ja schon die eigene Existenz abnormal heißen, bleibt kaum eine Wahl als sie zu ignorieren. Auch legitime Kritik mag diesem Schutzmechanismus zum Opfer fallen und Widersprecher werden teils vorschnell Feinde gebrandmarkt.

Solange Mainstream-journalismus so unsensibel sein darf, brauchen wir auch noch mehr Feminismus und mehr Gesellschaftskritik.

Das macht Geschriebenes subjektiv, anfällig für Fehler und Ungenauigkeiten. Das macht es auch menschlich, und damit für mich tausendmal interessanter als die reingewaschene, weichgespülte, dutzendfach redigierte Berichterstattung größerer Seiten. Wie “professionell” die hingegen mit Diskriminierungs- und Geschlechterthematiken umzugehen wissen, zeigte sich erst vor kurzem, als der (ehemalige) Destructoid-Autor Allistair Pinsof sich entschloss, sich im Namen der Wahrheit über Chloe Sagal auszulassen.

Solange sich Mainstreamjournalismus so unsensibel gibt und geben kann, brauchen wir auch noch mehr Feminismus, mehr Transthemen, mehr Gesellschaftskritik, egal wie unbequem sie ausfallen mag.

Erst vor einem Monat auf Twitter gefordert, bietet sich nun tatsächlich die Gelegenheit neue Stimmen im Diskurs um Spiele zu fördern. Tut mir den Gefallen und gebt reichlich - wenn sich das nämlich schlechter verkauft als der Penny Arcade Podcast, werd ich böse.

Verfasst von Joe Köller am 22. Mai 2013 - 15:06

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Xbox Prime

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Spiele

Hendrik Mans - May 22, 2013

Xbox Prime

Microsoft hat am vergangenen Abend nach monatelangen Spekulationen und unzähligen Gerüchten im Rahmen eines einstündigen und weltweit gestreamten Presse-Events d̢en ̕N͡achf̨o̧l͡ger ͢d̢er͏ ̷Xbo̶x 3̧60̨ ́v̵o͝r͡ǵe̵śt͡ęļl͢t́.̴ ́D̨įe W̨͜͠Ì͡Ŗ͞͝ M̧̨Ü͘҉̧S̸̡S̨EN̶ ŃO҉́C̢̡͠H҉͡ ̴NĄC̀H̶͠Ķ͏A̢͟L̵͡IB̶̡͝R͜Į̷̵E̕D̶̡ͪ̅͋͋̐͒ͬͯ̄̇̀ͯ͊͐̏̐̂͘͠D̔̓͊͛͗ͥ̈ͭ҉́͟D̴ͤͩͧ̓ͣ̏̓̃͌ͤ҉͜D̐̍̇̌ͯ̈́͌ͪ̅ͨ̇ͪ͌ͫ̂́̐͆͏̸̡͝ neu͟e ̨Ko̶nśoļę ist auf den Namen “Xbox Prime” getauft und bietet die eine oder andere Überraschung.

Während sich die Experten im Vorfeld einig waren, dass die neue Xbox neben Spielen auch die Themen Fernsehen und Integration mit sozialen Netzwerken in den Vordergrund stellen würde, entpuppt die Xbox Prime sich nun als sehr Spiele-zentrisches Gerät, das sich deutlich auf die Stärken des Vorgängermodells konzentriert und diese weiter ausbaut.

Die Technik

Die bisher angekündigten technischen Daten überraschen wenig: die Xbox Prime wird eine x86-basierte CPU mit 8 Kernen, 8 GB RAM sowie eine großzügige 2 TB-Festplatte enthalten. Darüber hinaus verfügt die Konsole über einen HDMI 1.4- und zwei USB 3.0-Ports.

Der Controller bleibt überwiegend dem bewährten Xbox 360-Controller-Design treu; der größte und möglicherweise einzige nennenswerte Unterschied ist der fest verbaute Akku, der laut Microsoft innerhalb von einer Stunde per USB-Kabel vollständig aufgeladen sein soll.

Kinect 2.0

Microsoft stellte außerdem einen generalüberholten Kinect-Sensor vor, der über eine stark erhöhte Genauigkeit verfügen soll. Er wird weiterhin separat erhältlich bleiben und nicht der Xbox Prime beiliegen; zum Launch der neuen Konsole soll jedoch ein Bundle namens Xbox Family auf den Markt kommen, das die Konsole, den Kinect-Sensor und eine Auswahl von vorinstallierten Kinect-Spielen enthält.

Die im Family-Bundle enthaltene Konsole ist außerdem auf den neu eingerichteten Xbox Family-Store konfiguriert, in dem ausschließlich familienfreundliche, überwiegend Kinect-gesteuerte Spiele erhältlich sein werden. Dies ist aber lediglich eine softwareseitige Voreinstellung; man wird auch auf der Bundle-Konsole jederzeit den “normalen” Store aktivieren können.

Streaming statt Laufwerk

Die wohl bedeutendste technische Neuerung ist wohl, dass das schlichte, dünne, in schwarz gehaltene Gehäuse kein optisches Laufwerk mehr enthält. Ähnlich wie bei Apple soll in Zukunft auf Inhalte aus der Cloud gesetzt werden. Spiele werden auf der Xbox Prime im generalüberholten Xbox Live Store gekauft und dann über die Internetverbindung auf die integrierte Festplatte geladen.

Um dabei lange Wartezeiten zu verhindern, ermöglicht das Betriebssystem der Xbox Prime das sukzessive Streamen von Spieldaten; sobald ein für das Spielen nötiges Minimum an Daten übertragen wurde, kann der Nutzer mit dem Spielen beginnen, die restlichen Daten werden dann im Hintergrund übertragen. So kann der Nutzer zum Beispiel schon die ersten Levels eines Spiels spielen, während die späteren noch übertragen werden. Die selbe Technologie soll den Herstellern außerdem erlauben, Patches und neue Spielinhalte auf die Konsole zu übertragen, während das Spiel gespielt wird.

Selbstverständlich wird man Spiele auch weiterhin in Ladengeschäften und bei Amazon kaufen können; die Verpackungen enthalten in Zukunft einen Download-Code sowie einen USB-Stick, von dem die Erstinstallation der Spieldaten gestartet werden kann, um dem Käufer die Übertragung aus dem Internet zu ersparen.

Ein Herz für Indies: Steam und Unity3D

Microsoft überraschte außerdem mit zwei Ankündigungen rund um das Thema Indie-Games. So wird die Xbox Prime zum Marktstart Valves Steam-Plattform enthalten, die in Zukunft einen dedizierten Channel mit für Konsolen angepassten Spielen bereit stellen wird; wer Tastatur und Maus an seine Xbox Prime anschließen möchte, kann darüber hinaus auch auf den restlichen Katalog der Plattform zurück greifen. Entwickler sollen für die Kompatibilität mit der Xbox Prime laut Microsoft dank des neuen Windows-Kernels nur minimale Codeänderungen vornehmen müssen.

Noch interessanter für angehende Spiele-Entwickler mag die Ankündigung sein, dass mit Unity3D ein offizieller Middleware-Partner gewonnen wurde; so wird es mit dem mittlerweile frei erhältlichen Tool jedermann möglich sein, Spiele für die Xbox Prime zu entwickeln und auf dem ebenfalls generalüberholten Xbox Live Indie-Store (oder alternativ Steam Greenlight) zu vertreiben. Ähnlich wie bei Apples AppStore können Indie-Entwickler den Preis ihrer Spiele selber festlegen und bekommen 70% davon ausgezahlt. Unity3D, welches schon ein paar Jahre auf dem Markt ist und sich großer Beliebtheit erfreut, erlaubt darüber hinaus die Entwicklung von Spielen für Windows, OS X, iOS und Android.

Fazit

Bis kurz vor der Präsentation am gestrigen Abend wurde noch spekuliert: würde Microsoft eine ähnlich befremdliche Show abliefern wie bei der offiziellen Vorstellung des Kinect-Sensors, oder würde es sich seiner Stärken besinnen, auf diese konzentrieren und die Welt mit einer starken und trotz des großen Erfolgs von iOS & Co auch in Zukunft noch relevanten Spielekonsole überraschen?

Es sieht ganz danach aus, als sei Microsoft letzteres gelungen. Die neue Xbox Prime wirkt durchdacht und zukunftsweisend, und die neugewonnene Liebe gegenüber Indie-Games inklusive eines sehr starken und kostenlos verfügbaren Entwicklungs-Tools in Form von Unity3D sollte jedes Spielerherz höher schlagen lassen. Für manch einen mag der Wegfall des optischen Laufwerks und der neue Fokus auf Online-Dienste möglicher Weise etwas krass erscheinen, aber man sollte hier nicht vergessen, dass die Xbox Prime uns sicherlich den Großteil der nächsten zehn Jahre über begleiten wird.

Hendrik Mans · @hmans

Developer dude from Hamburg, Germany. Among other things, runs sloblog.io. Not good with descriptions. Don’t follow me on Twitter. ★

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Brainy Gamer: Notes on Genre

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The term ‘genre’ eventually becomes pejorative because you’re referring to something that’s so codified and ritualized it ceases to have the power and meaning it had when it first started. —Christopher Nolan

Here’s what we think we know about genre: it limits creativity. It binds artists to tried-and-true formulas and encourages derivative work. A creator must be free to follow her muse, unhindered by prescriptive rules. An artist working on a genre-bound project is like a caged bird. She can sing pretty songs, but don’t expect her to go anywhere interesting.

Genres are agents of ideological closure; they limit the meaning-potential of a given text. —John Hartley, A Short History of Cultural Studies, 2003.

Artists aren’t the only victims. As Hartley notes, genre may even limit our ability to interpret and respond as readers and viewers. We’re constricted by formal conventions we’re conditioned to ignore. When you can’t see the walls anymore, you forget how small the room you’re in actually is.

Some artists try hard to avoid genre influences on their work. Filmmaker and 5-time Oscar nominee Paul Mazursky once noted, “One thing I know is that I don’t want to be a director for hire, making genre films. That would be death.” Mazursky believed genre implied servitude, limiting personal vision and fomenting homogenized, focus-grouped entertainment.

So it’s worth asking: what artist worth his salt would self-impose such constraints? Well, lots of artists, actually. Great ones.

My name is John Ford, and I make Westerns. —John Ford, 1950

Lots of gifted artists have been drawn to genre because of its formulaic nature, and many of our greatest artistic treasures are clear expressions of genre inspiration. In fact, many artists routinely hailed as pioneers in their fields - Shakespeare, Cézanne, Virginia Woolf, Miles Davis, Akira Kurosawa - each demonstrated a keen awareness of genre and produced extraordinary work situated well within genre or other formal boundaries. These artists didn’t steer clear of genre “limits.” They embraced them.

Artists crave freedom, but most quickly learn that limits, even apparently harsh ones, can be more friend than enemy. In 1922, the great Russian director Stanislavski was invited to stage a production in America. He was asked how much rehearsal time he would require. “Six months,” was Stanislavski’s reply. Startled, the American producer informed him that it would be impossible to host (and pay) a visiting theater company to rehearse for that length of time. “Not a problem,” replied Stanislavski, “Give me three weeks.” The production was a triumph.

Sometimes a blank slate can be less inviting than a rough outline, especially to an artist who sees opportunity in an apparently moribund genre. When John Ford made Stagecoach in 1939, the Western was seen as a lifeless form mostly aimed at juvenile audiences. The lineage of post-Ford writers and directors drawn to the Western as a template for self-expression - Anthony Mann, Sam Peckinpah, Sergio Leone, Clint Eastwood, David Milch - suggests the “dead” Western springs back to life every decade or so whenever an artist comes along to imprint the form with his own personal vision.

Film Noir? I don’t know. When I make a picture, I never classify it. I say ‘this is a comedy’ and I wait until the preview. If they laugh a lot, I say this is comedy … A ‘serious picture’ or ‘film noir,’ I never heard that expression in those days. I just made pictures that I would have liked to see. —Billy Wilder

Sometimes an artist operates within the framework of genre without purposefully doing so. In the case of film noir - a genre with easily recognizable stylistic traits - it’s worth noting that the term “film noir” was coined by critics years after these films were made. Noir progenitors like John Huston, Otto Preminger, and Raoul Walsh never arrived on a movie set to “make a noir picture.” Rather, their work was inspired by a moral ambiguity brought on by a post-war malaise that found expression in noir form. Genre born from collective artistry, rather than a framework to contain it.

You put funny people in funny costumes and paint them green and we could talk about anything we wanted to, because that was the only thing that fascinated Gene (Roddenberry) about this particular genre. —Majel Barrett, actress/producer, Star Trek

A great paradox of creativity is that a wide-open possibility space can feel paralyzing, while a fixed set of constraints can liberate an artist to make inspired choices. Creative projects that succeed ask the right questions at their formative stages, and often these questions pertain to genre.

That’s where video games come in. We read and hear a lot of talk lately about “broken” or “worn-out” genres. At this year’s GDC, speaker after speaker bemoaned the state of an industry mired in me-too shooters devoid of new ideas. I don’t disagree with that assessment, but the solution often proposed (stop making so many shooters) strikes me as similar to asking an impressionist to stop painting so many blurry trees. The problem isn’t the form, but a lack of vision infusing the form with energy and life.

Portal is a landmark game for several important reasons, but perhaps the most overlooked is that it repurposed FPS tropes and mechanics in service of its own cunning aesthetic. The player’s “weapon” is a puzzle-solving tool essential for survival, but incapable of killing. Portal redefines the shooter while preserving most of its familiar attributes. Players with FPS skills will feel instantly at home playing Portal, but they will be reoriented to consider their experience differently than previous shooters. That’s precisely what great artists do with genre. We see something familiar, but with a new set of eyes.

So why should we care about genre? Because it’s a way for creators to communally explore an idea and a shorthand for the audience to help make sense of those new ideas. It’s something that stretches across all matter of art forms, from impressionism in painting, to art deco in architecture to neoclassicism in sculpture. Simply, genre is one way design can explore and evolve ideas/styles rapidly. I’m certainly not going to prescribe that it’s the only way, but it can be a tremendously effective one. —Nels Anderson, Lead Designer, Mark of the Ninja.

One recent game beautifully illustrates the power of genre to provoke shrewd thinking and artful design: Mark of the Ninja. Better than any game I can think of, MotN distilled the essence of its core genre (stealth), refined its best elements, jettisoned the superficials, and built a devilishly stylish player-centric world.

One (among many) seemingly simple design choice - limiting the consequences for failure - opened possibilities for the designers to be more playful with difficulty and offered players more enticements for experimentation…which led to greater replay value…which provoked more discussion among players…which added a competitive dimension to a solo-play game (especially in my house!). Big results from a deceptively small decision.

I suppose the best thing we can say about Mark of the Ninja is that it’s perfectly situated in a tried-and-true game genre, AND that there is no game at all like Mark of the Ninja. Proof, it seems to me, of genre’s best nature: boundaries that contain inspiration.

Note: If you’d like to know more about the story behind Mark of the Ninja’s design, Nels has graciously shared the transcript and slides from his recent GDC talk. Chris Plante also wrote a feature piece on Klei Games (the studio behind MotN) for Polygon this week, and I highly recommend it.

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On Consuming Media Responsibly — Play Time — Medium

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Jenn Frank
Memoirist and tech culture critic

Published
May 29, 2013

Thanks to

- Stu Horvath

Battle royale (2000)

On Consuming Media Responsibly

Video Games, Horror Movies, and Anita Sarkeesian

I’m a huge fan of the horror genre. I’m also a longtime video game critic and a self-identified feminist.

Not everyone seems to understand what I get out of horror movies—here I mean slashers in particular, although contemplative ghost stories and B-movie pulpiness also get my vote. In fact, I’d say ultraviolent movies most hold my interest, so it follows that I’m a massive Quentin Tarantino fan, a fan of “arterial spray,” and a student of all those early special effects pioneered by Dick Smith. And I’m really smitten with the genre Takeshi Kitano has termed “crisis cinema.”

In the right context I’m not even slightly offended by gross-out stuff, tits-and-ass, or sexualized violence. I tend to accept these things as classic horror staples, staples that—especially in the case of the best North American slasher ever made, Black Christmas (1974)—can be used to chilling, humorous, and otherwise surprising effect.
Antichrist (2009)
One of my favorite movies in the last five years, which I recommend more as an intellectual exercise than I do a date movie, is Lars von Trier’s Antichrist. It’s a tough watch—its last third is as grippingly gruesome as anything I’ve ever seen—but it’s also a self-professed horror movie and, as such, it’s profoundly striking.

Also, Antichrist is often dismissed as nonsensical, misogynistic, and vile, which I feel is a willfully simplistic read. Horror movies are ordinarily titillating because they’re transgressive in some way; Antichrist almost never titillates. Rather, it’s a nasty little parable about a woman (Charlotte Gainsbourg) who resents her husband (Willem Dafoe) for his overbearing and paternalistic need to infantilize her (he is a psychotherapist who is trying to “fix” his wife by isolating her in a cabin in the woods, whereby he can study her further).

By film’s end, the woman reveals that she has so internalized her ongoing study of sexist religious texts, she is finally convinced she is exactly as evil as centuries of dogma have made her out to be. Then she carries her personal revelation to its organic conclusion, and it is a complete nightmare. It’s… well, the movie is definitely not something you would show your mother.
Only God Forgives (2013)
I’m similarly obsessed with negative reactions to Nicolas Winding Refn’s Only God Forgives, which debuted at Cannes last week to boos and walk-outs. Critics have repeatedly compared it, unfavorably, to Antichrist. (Incidentally, my late mother once asked me if she should watch Winding Refn’s Drive and, instead of offering a cogent argument one way or the other, I just started shrieking on the telephone unintelligibly.) Lately I’ve been jotting some thoughts about movies, and specifically about Winding Refn, at Pinboard. Even more recently—prompted by Winding Refn’s fascinating but weirdly sexist, self-effacingly gynophobic interview with New York magazine—I scribbled down some more thoughts about horror:

With horror, themes I’ll ordinarily shy from—gore, misogyny, sexual objectification, darker things like incest, torture, murder, cannibalism, voyeurism—have carved out a safe space. Horror is a sandbox for exploring every taboo we avoid contemplating and discussing as moral, decent, civilized people. And because horror is “lowbrow” we give it a pass, we’ll chalk naked screaming women up to “cheesecake,” and we’ll too happily allow (with a sigh of relief) otherwise well-adjusted people to enjoy horror for what it’s worth, which is nothing.

I still don’t know when I’ll watch Nicolas Winding Refn’s ‘Only God Forgives’ but anyway, this interview is a knockout. He refers to his latest outing as a type of “pornography,” but here I think he means “horror movie.” He talks about violent impulses as something we repress as members of polite society. […]

I was especially fascinated by his comments about, as a man, being unable to “control” his pregnant wife’s body, which he nimbly connected to his own fear of women being “in charge of the universe.” He also mentions castration. (Earlier reviews were especially derisive about ‘Only God Forgives’, complaining that it is hours spent in Winding Refn’s psychosexual subconscious or whatever.)

I was especially moved when Winding Refn stated his interest in casting a horror movie with only women. The interview kind of throws away Winding Refn’s response, but he says something really briefly about his “male gaze” (in not those exact words), about always intending to focus his lens on female characters but his movies end up being about men anyway. I think people can make really good work especially when we identify certain prejudices and then account for those with self-correction.

I think what I’m getting at is, especially with the horror genre, it’s less important what a movie says and more important that you, the viewer, understand why you’re enjoying it. I believe in judicious self-awareness; a director like Nicolas Winding Refn knows exactly why he makes the directorial choices he makes, and he works those kinks right out onscreen.

Or, if you aren’t enjoying a piece of work—if ultraviolence isn’t your thing, or if you’re suffering a visceral reaction—it’s every bit as important that you identify what about the piece is making you uncomfortable.
Hotline Miami (2012)
I bring this up because video games—thanks in no small part to a popular interpretation of “video game” as “lowbrow”—should absolutely be a safe space to investigate taboos like sex and violence, gender, racism. To varying degrees games already do. Manhunt contains a complicated narrative about violence and voyeurism and the nature of video games themselves: who is the actor, who is really only watching, and what is the ethical line there? Games like BioShock Infinite and Far Cry 3 are way more interesting than the average title, even when by some critics’ accounts they fail at what they attempt. Still, these video games do work on multiple levels, as dialogue-starters and as pieces of entertainment.

But for better or worse, video games and their themes consistently alienate broad swathes of game players—and often for the very reasons other demographics of player enjoy them. As critics, players, and creators, it becomes important to identify and acknowledge both what is happening and why.

At the very beginning of her latest video, Feminist Frequency’s Anita Sarkeesian stresses that it is “both possible, and even necessary, to simultaneously enjoy a piece of media while also being critical of its more problematic or pernicious aspects.” This is exactly how I feel about horror cinema.

This video is the second in Sarkeesian’s “Tropes vs. Women in Video Games” series. In it, Sarkeesian underscores a power imbalance drawn along gender lines, an imbalance that is romanticized, not only in cinema and literature and video games, but glorified even in our own everyday, heteronormative relationships.

And while there isn’t anything wrong with rescuing a disempowered romantic interest, nothing wrong with being prompted to revenge by a wife’s untimely death, at some point these themes become so pervasive that it’s worthwhile to investigate what exactly they may signify and why they recur as archetypically as they do. Sarkeesian’s videos seek to illuminate a dangerous cultural pattern. When men and women are barraged with a narrative arc wherein the man is “the rescuer”—and, make no mistake, chick lit relies on this trope too—it reinforces a normative power dynamic that, in practice, can be devastatingly unhealthy.
Audition (1999)
Again, I often catch myself feeling about video games the way I feel about ultraviolent horror movies and “extreme” cinema: all is permitted, but all is especially permitted when a work’s creator demonstrates any self-awareness at all. I also strive for self-awareness as a consumer. I like to finish playing a game or watching a movie and, afterward, immediately seek out commentary, criticism, and analysis. Really good criticism is fun to read when it puts into words what I cannot for myself, when it can explain to me why I felt the way I felt.

Identifying the status quo is also necessary so we can talk about other pieces of media that subvert these tropes in meaningful ways—something Sarkeesian pledges to do in the third video in her Tropes vs. Women series. Really good video games do this, same as really good pieces of horror film do this. Or, even when these pieces aren’t successful in all they attempt, we can at least acknowledge their ambition at elevating the typical narrative.

Since Sarkeesian’s video is just over twenty-five minutes long, I do encourage anyone pressed for time to skip to the twenty-two-minute mark for her conclusions.
“The Bishop of Battle,” Nightmares (1983)
But this isn’t the first twenty-minute YouTube video I’ve watched today. This morning I watched Slacktory’s fantastic supercut of video games in movies. This video is a veritable survey course on how other popular media represent video games and their players—making it far, far more damning an indictment on games than Sarkeesian’s Women vs. Tropes video could ever be.

Immediately after watching Slacktory’s video, I found myself reading—and then contributing to—a collaborative Google doc that served as inspiration for this lecture, which hones in on games invented for fictional works of film and literature. Many of my contributions were actually derived from a list of horror movies I made in 2008. Almost all the movies I cite are a laugh because they’re invariably technophobic and fear-mongering: they’re the result of a sort of video game moral panic, and they’re certainly out of touch with reality. The scripts for these horror movies are lazy and clichéd, usually interested only in reiterating an outdated, strangely conservative or traditional valueset.

Which is exactly what Anita Sarkeesian’s videos rally against.

And Sarkeesian’s Feminist Frequency videos aren’t fearful or phobic; instead, they extend hope that video games and other media live up to their promise. But that hasn’t stopped some video game fans and men’s rights advocacy collectives from repeatedly decrying (and possibly even sabotaging) Sarkeesian’s work.

Tellingly, Sarkeesian’s game videos themselves go into little depth at all. Their arguments are radically nonconfrontational, and also limited by time constraints. They’re basically “supercuts” themselves, demonstrating a medium’s laziest trait—this is the humor and value in any good supercut, really—so there is barely anything about Sarkeesian’s takeaway message to cause real affront to anybody.

The disproportionately angry reaction to the Feminist Frequency videos, however, is due cause for alarm. If people, especially female people, can literally say nothing in criticism of lazy game narratives, what hope do we have?

Nobody should become absolute arbiter of what we consume; that’s a private responsibility for adults or parents. We ourselves are our own gatekeepers.

But is it good for the spirit? That’s what my sweet, kindly mother used to ask me, no matter what movie I was watching, no matter what book I was reading.

There’s a lot of value in that motherly question, and I often found myself critically defending works for my mom’s own edification and confidence. As I grew older, though, I started having these exact same arguments with myself. Because, when we become adults—when Mom is no longer around to ask those important questions—we have to learn to “parent” ourselves. We become responsible: we have to prove to our own minds why the media we consume is, not just all right, but culturally significant.

In the end the best hope we have, as advocates of a medium, is to welcome and encourage critical analysis, even when it hurts. Becoming responsible consumers is our last best chance at imbuing our chosen, beloved art form—video games—with the meaning it deserves.

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Jenn Frank
Memoirist and tech culture critic

Published
May 29, 2013

Thanks to

- Stu Horvath

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Susan O’Connor, game writer - Interview

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Interview

Susan O’Connor, game writer

The industry veteran and writers’ advocate has looked into the future of video games, and her frustrations are at a breaking point.

By Steve Heisler • May 28, 2013

Susan O’Connor has been a games writer for almost 10 years, working on high-profile projects such as BioShock, Far Cry 2, and the recent Tomb Raider reboot. She is also a tireless advocate for all games writers, having launched the Games Writers Conference, now a staple of the annual Games Developers Conference. O’Connor has produced numerous talks and articles about the process of writing for games—including a piece that walks a hypothetical studio through adapting Breaking Bad into a console game—making her one of the leading thinkers in the field. As it turns out, her thinking had reached critical mass when I spoke to her, and she was sensing roadblocks that kept her from doing her best work within the industry. O’Connor spoke candidly to The Gameological Society about her desire to integrate writers more deeply into development teams, the upsides and downsides of working on games with primarily male audiences, and her frustrations with a profession where writing is often a side concern.

The Gameological Society: You posted a link on your website to an article about comedian Amy Schumer’s new show, Inside Amy Schumer. You effusively praised the piece because it highlighted her writing staff. What in particular struck a chord?

Susan O’Connor: I loved it because it was about a group of writers working together. I was having lunch with a friend of mine who’s a game designer. I was talking about this very issue, and he was like, “Yeah, I understand you want to work with people who are interested in more than just answering the question of ‘What am I shooting?’” Which is true. I think games are all for good story, but they really have to justify “Why am I shooting everything?” I was really excited that [Schumer] had this luxury of the back and forth with these crazy ideas. The conversations they were having were just as violent as the ones we have in games, but it had a different set of priorities. It really was more about the story. A lot of times when it comes to writing for games, unless you’re the studio head, you’re really hemmed in by a lot of different peoples’ needs. It feels like a bigger playground that [Schumer’s] guys get, and I guess I’m jealous. [Laughs.] I was just reading something like, “Every game starts with the story and the script,” and I just laughed and laughed and laughed. Like, “Ahhhh, wrong, wrong, wrong.

Gameological: What do you mean? What specifically about it do you find to be the most frustrating?

O’Connor: I feel like I’m a little bit like that chick in Minority Report. People project the future of games, and I’m the one who’s got the other version of it, like, “It could go like this!” The part that’s most frustrating for me as a creative is that the industry tends to attract people who are really interested in technology, because you need a ton of programmers to make a game. You don’t need a lot of writers to make a game, or animators, even. The percentage of the creative in the game versus the percentage of technologists you need is totally out of whack. A lot of times, what ends up happening when you have a room of primarily tech-oriented [staff], it becomes like a software development environment.

I don’t know if games are the right kind of place for the stories I want to tell.

For me, I always want to focus on the entertainment side of it. This is supposed to make people feel something. It’s supposed to be fun, or be scary. But when I look at conversations that creatives are having, like in television or film or theater or freaking mimes, everyone else, the conversations they’re having are totally different. You listen the director’s commentary on the DVD, and they’ve got the actor and the director there, and they take the character seriously, they take the reaction the audience is having emotionally very seriously. It can be hard to bring that stuff up in a game studio. Talk about being the weirdo in the room—like, “What is this chick talking about?”

Gameological: How much of that pushback are you willing to chalk up to a need to market the game? Or, I guess another aspect of this is, how comfortable are you being a writer on a team you don’t get credit for—like with BioShock and how everyone thinks of Ken Levine?

O’Connor: I think it depends on the career arc that people are choosing. In a way, I’m excited to see that people’s names are getting attached to projects because I think that has shifted from that software development mindset to the entertainment mindset. That’s not a bad thing. I think the key is where a person’s passion lies. Like, “Do I want to head up a studio like Ken Levine?” No. I totally don’t. For me, it’s always been writing first. That’s where my passion lies in storytelling. I don’t know. I’m at this point in my career where I’m looking around and asking myself where I can do my best work. I’ve been working in games for a long time, and I’m grateful for the success, and it’s been great, but I really want to tell different kinds of stories, and I don’t know if games are the right kind of place for the stories I want to tell.

BioShock

Gameological: When you’re talking about story in games, what do you mean?

O’Connor: When I think about my job as the writer, I think about it not in terms of being in charge of the dialogue and the words per se, but really an advocate for the player’s emotional journey. I see it encompassing both gameplay and cutscene or whatever you want to call story elements. It’s not always that way, but I try to think about it that way. I try to interact with other people on the team that way. The people who are the biggest storytellers in games are level designers. Those are the people who really have control over what the player is going to feel. The way to really make the story meaningful is to collaborate with them, and to make sure the stuff you’re thinking and what they’re thinking is at least aligning or resonating on some level. They have to talk to each other, but when they don’t, it’s just random shit followed by random cutscene followed by random shit.

Gameological: Given all the talks you’ve held, at various gaming conferences, you seem to be an outspoken member of the community who pushes for better writing. Do you feel like those concerns are heard?

O’Connor: I think the industry is extremely passionate about a lot of things. I don’t know if I share a lot of those passions. I definitely have a perspective on this, but I also think it’s a minority opinion. It’s not that I feel ignored. Writing in general has been a little bit slow to the plate. It’s been a lot things that are shinier and more interesting as the game industry has evolved, but there’s a real passion for stories in games. Small but vocal minorities I guess, but people really respond well to stories. I was talking about this at one of my talks, but Spike TV and Entertainment Weekly did their top 10 games of the decade, and I think of the 10, eight had really good stories. Story really connects to the players when it works. It really has to leverage the medium. If you were to say, “Books are a great way to go inside a character’s mind for pages and pages, and movies are a great place to see larger-than-life movie stars and phenomenal explosions that are 40-feet tall,” games are a really kinetic medium. The story is what the player does.

We’re kind of faking it now, but eventually we’re going to be much more responsive to the player.

Jesse Schell gave this incredible talk at Game Developers Conference, and he talked about games and compared them to movies. He talked about how movies came into their own when they learned how to talk, for the talkies. Games have been talking for a long time, but he argues they’re going to come into their own as storytelling when they learn to listen and respond to the player in a really meaningful way. We’re kind of faking it now, but eventually we’re going to be able to be much more responsive to the player. That’s when the player’s going to feel like he’s playing with the game. That’s going to be really exciting. The way it is now, it’s like an antagonistic relationship between the player and the game, like, “I’m going to beat this game!” [Laughs.]

Gameological: Are there moments in your games career that you feel like you’ve really captured that in a way you’re really proud of? The part of not creating this antagonistic relationship. A symbiotic relationship.

O’Connor: I worked on a game—and it’s really easy to say because the game never came out—but I was really happy with this game. I can’t say what it is, but I was really proud of it because it was an open-world game about this guy building his empire. I got really interested in the idea that this character is an immigrant, and he was choosing what kind of man he was going to be in the world. I played with a lot of male archetypes. When you moved through the world, you saw firemen, policemen, and boxers. The whole storyline emphasized it, so the game design and the story design gave those seminal experiences that we all have to do to move from one phase of our life to another.

Gameological: So you were seeing these tropes of masculinity and they were changing the person, evolving them?

O’Connor: Exactly. And the challenges that these characters had to go through was antagonistic, but on the other hand it was also necessarily. So it wasn’t, “Fuck you, game,” it was more like, “I’m going to do this, yes!” The other characters were really designed to play their part in that character growth, which I felt really happy with. Part of the reason I was happy with the project was the team was so easy to work with. You’re able to have a great conversation with them for the same reason that Schumer article spoke to me. Having good collaborators is the key to doing good work.

Gameological: How do you personally maintain that kind of relationship with people when you’re working with humongous teams on AAA games?

O’Connor: The trick is to find the people you connect with. There’s usually the animators, who are always thinking in the same way. Often times, there’s a narrative designer or creative director. There’s always those people whose interests might not be the exact same, but if you put that Venn diagram up, there’d be a lot of overlap. I think it’s very important to have people you can bounce ideas off of. Especially narrative designers can be so helpful because you say, “Okay, I want to do this thing,” and the guy with one foot in story and one foot in gameplay says, “That sounds really good, but the game works this way,” so he can build the bridge to explain why the idea doesn’t work, but helps to modify it.

Being a really good communicator and having a good advocate for story is really important as well. When I first started out, I was like, “I’ll write a good story, and they’ll love it!” But no, not at all. It’s more about communicating and more about making the rest of the team feel like they’ve got a part to play in making that story come to life. I can’t just dork out about character and theme and plot, and explain it like that. I have to figure out where what I’m doing voids what they’re doing. Whenever I’m thinking about how to talk to the game team, I think about the overlap of player experience.

Far Cry 2

Gameological: When you’re talking about the player, you’ve used “he” a lot, and you’ve also mentioned that you were really proud of the moment when you were able to use male archetypes to tell a story. What about the female perspective? When do you consider that audience?

O’Connor: Of course there’s this huge issue in gaming, and women have their place in it, but for whatever reason I’ve worked on games catered to an audience of primarily males, and you can see it in our user testing. I’ve never seen a woman in a playtesting room, ever. I don’t think that means there aren’t women who are interested, but for whatever reason they’re not getting invited or signing up.

I try to connect with the player who’s interested in story, and character and people. I remember reading this awesome quote from The New York Times, and this is back when The Sopranos was still on the air, and they were like, “The Sopranos is the best women’s programming on television,” and I was like, “Fuck yes, dude, it is.” Because that show is totally about characters and relationships. If you just put it down on a piece of paper, it could sound like a soap opera.

Gameological: Friday Night Lights, too.

I’m definitely a stranger in a strange land when it comes to games. I’m really fed up.

O’Connor: Exactly! But the fact is, everyone is interested in other people. Even monkeys. Monkeys are interested in other monkeys. For me, it’s gender-neutral. I don’t want to be a salmon swimming upstream. I get hired by these games, and I look at who they’re targeting. Whenever you talk to them, I’m like, “Who’s this game for?” and they say, “It’ll be mostly dudes.” And once I know who the target audience is, I try to think about their inner life. The stories we make are only going to work if it’s something the player is already emotionally invested in. I think that I would love to see more games that are talking more about the interior life of female characters, but for whatever reason, that doesn’t happen very often. That’ll change when more women get into the gaming industry, and become creative directors and EPs.

Gameological: It must still be a struggle to keep things gender-neutral. I got a weird email right before we spoke, about a Leisure Suit Larry reboot. They were talking about a new female character being introduced to the franchise. She had an entire past, interests, hobbies, everything. But the weird part was that in the back of my mind, I was thinking, “This is all well and good, but the point of the game is to have the main character fuck her.”

O’Connor: I try to choose projects for the likelihood of not having to have an argument. There’s lots of really thoughtful game developers out there. I’m definitely a stranger in a strange land when it comes to games. I’m really fed up. I don’t have the deep-seated passion for games that is strong enough to overlook all these things you’re talking about. Whereas, I feel a lot more passionate about what’s possible pretty much anywhere else. That’s why when I look at Ken Levine or Rhianna Pratchett, I’m like, “Go with God.” I don’t want to put up with this shit anymore. I’m grateful for the success I’ve had, but I’m never going to be able to do work that can come anywhere close to the kind of emotional impact that stories in other media have, at least not in the next five to 10 years. I love stories, and I just happened to fall into games. I’ve learned who I am as a writer, and I think my talents and skills are much better used in other places.

Gameological: You’ve been in the industry for a number of years. What was the moment that crystallized this revelation for you?

O’Connor: It’s been an ongoing dissatisfaction that’s always been there. But the more savvy I got—and I’ve been working on these great projects that are arguably the best ever made—it’s like, “This is the mountaintop, and this still isn’t cutting it.”

Gameological: I gotta say, I feel weird asking some of the other questions I had planned. It sounds like I caught you at a pivotal moment.

O’Connor: I know. I’m in the process of making this decision. I’ve got the angel and the devil on my shoulder. On the one hand, part of me is like, “Oh my God, you have to keep going. This is how you pay the bills,” and the other part is like, “Agh, who cares? Take a leap of faith, come on.”

Gameological: What is it you would like to be doing?

O’Connor: I’m way more interested in telling stories about different kinds of characters. I don’t want to tell stories that involve shooting or being shot at. I’m all for violence at some points, but I think game stories can be black and white, because of the way the stories are told. You don’t have a lot of time to get a lot of stuff across. It’s a lot easier to be like, “Here’s a guy. Go shoot him.”

What really gets me excited as a consumer of stories is something [like Breaking Bad]. That’s some phenomenal shit, and that show’s got more than its fair share of violence. But that doesn’t bother me because it’s very rounded in these characters, and you really understand their dilemma. In the second episode of the first season, he’s got that one guy chained up to the basement, and he’s like, “Oh my God, what am I going to do? I can’t let him go because he’s going to kill my family, but I can’t kill him because killing is wrong.” That’s a genuine fucking dilemma. I want to see how that’s going to resolve, and I guess that’s what frustrates me about games. I want to tell more thoughtful and complex stories than games really allow us to do.

BioShock 2

Gameological: If you were going to work on another game right now, what is a scenario where the stars align? You’re offered a job working on a game, it has X, it has Y, it has Z, you’re definitely going to take it. What are those variables?

O’Connor: One of the things I find interesting is what’s happening with Defiance, where the TV show and the game are being developed simultaneously. It’s an experiment, so I’m sure there are going to be rough spots, but I don’t care. Good! I would be interested in something that’s really ambitious with storytelling. Even though we have all this talk of stories in games of agency and immersion, we could also combine that with something more authored, that creates a serious experience for the player. Someone swinging for the fences, that’s what I’m really interested in doing.

I don’t think that’s as hard as people think it is. The reason that people shy away from being ballsy about storytelling is that it’s a black box mystery to them. Other elements of game production make more sense to them. And it’s a safer bet, and if you can point to it and say, “It’s going to be just like Call Of Duty, but with apes,” that’s one way to make a game. Again, someone’s going to do it. BioShock’s a perfect example. If you had talked to someone the year before BioShock came out, they would go, “Myah myah, that wouldn’t work,” and then it came out and everyone said, “Oh, this totally works!” I want to see more paradigm-busting stuff.

Gameological: You mentioned firefighting on your website as one of your skills—mitigating disasters during development. How often does that happen? If you created this separate section for it, I assume it has to happen all the time.

A lot of people think, “Oh, writing is dialogue.”

O’Connor: It happens enough, for sure. A lot of time, I’ll see gameplay getting integrated with story late, and then by the time it’s all together, there’s these huge problems, but you’re so far along in production, it’s like, “How am I going to fix this?” And that’s when the firefighting part comes in. You’ve sent your game out, and you’ve gotten early reviews that are like, “Your story’s your worst part of your game! It’s going to cost you 10 points of Metacritic for sure!” There are craftsman-like stuff you can do late in the game to at least have it make more sense, and maybe make it more meaningful. You can’t start from scratch, but there are always things you can do. Having worked in games as long as I have, it’s a useful skillset. I know not to come in and be like, “All we need to do is blow up half the city and move this to Mars.” That’s not a very helpful solution when you’re trying to get the game out the door.

Gameological: Especially not a week before launch.

O’Connor: Sometimes it’s one of those things where they don’t realize until it’s really late what they really need. That can be a really painful learning experience, and some of what I do with some of the articles I write is demystifying the writing experience. I think a lot of people think, “Oh, writing is dialogue.” I would argue that the heavy lifting for story development in games happens in pre-production well before anyone starts building levels. I try to explain it by saying like whatever point you have a game designer brought in, that’s when you want to bring in a game writer as well.

Gameological: When you write these articles and give these talks, who are you trying to demystify your process for?

O’Connor: For studios who are stacking up to figure out how to build out a new series, or a new game. I really want it to make sense to them, because so much of what writers do is invisible. In the same way I think what a lot of designers do is invisible, but they’ve done a really good job advocating what they do. I think it’s writers who tend to be shy.

Gameological: Considering you’ve spoken about your personal grievances with the industry and your desire to work on other things, why do you still feel the need to educate the game studios and push forth game writers?

O’Connor: It’s a good question. I’ve been doing this for a long time, and I have this stuff in my head. I feel like I could just walk away and not share it with anybody, and that’s an option. Or maybe no one wants to hear this, and that’s totally fine. But part of me really wants to see games grow, evolve and change. And I still do work in games, at least at the moment, and as long as I’m here, I want to be a good advocate for doing better work. Not just for me, but for all the other great people that I know, that really want to do thoughtful, awesome, groundbreaking work.

Gameological: You mentioned in your TED Talk that when you were growing up, your father wasn’t around much, so you created an imaginary version of your dad to hang out with. I thought that was a touching way to relate to games and the notion of escapism. How important does this remain to your work?

O’Connor: That’s one of the best things about games: that way of making the impossible possible. There’s nothing you can’t do in a game. I wish we were more playful with it. I’ve got such a soft spot for that totally insane Katamari Damacy game. It’s the kind of concept you could only come up with—and make, and publish—high. It’s a fucking Onion article in and of itself, right? It’s funny, because graphics got so phenomenally good in games that hyperrealism got kicked into play, and I feel like games are just like dreams. If we treated them like dreams, we would do a lot more interesting things with them.

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In The Games Of Madness: Nailing Down Terminology

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One thing lacking in game design, especially when it comes to interactive storytelling, is a proper set of terms. While I do not think having a precise terminology will directly aid in making games better, it will help us communicate better. As proper communication is crucial for progress, proper terms are indirectly an important part of making better storytelling games. Because of this, I am going to go over some terminology that I find essential, what I mean by them and why I define them in a certain manner. This is not meant to be a list of terms that I want everybody to adopt. Instead I want it to start a discussion so that we can come a bit closer at agreeing on the terms we use to discuss these matters. I have changed my terms quite a bit over the past few years and I am prepared to do so again. I need to go over a few things before I start. When choosing a term and its definition I think that, if possible, one should use an existing word and to use a definition that is close to the word’s common usage. Making up new words often just adds to the confusion, making it harder to communicate. In some cases it is needed, e.g. I find “affordance” to be a very practical term, but in the case of interactive storytelling we have so much existing terminology to derive from that I do not find it necessary  By choosing a definition that is close to the common usage it also makes it possible for uninitiated people to follow a discussion; it makes misunderstandings much less likely. What constitutes “common” is of course a bit vague (to game developers? people in general?), but it at least set up some guidelines which is better than none at all. With that out of the way, let’s start.

- Story - Story is arguably the most important word and probably one with the fractured meaning. I see “story” as a container word that encompass a lot of different parts. The most significant are: Theme, Setting, Characters, Plot and Narration. I will get to each of these in a bit, but before that I need to discuss why I chose this definition. First of all, the reason why someone enjoys a story does not need to be a the exact way that the events unfold. It can be the beautiful environments, the snappy dialog, the dense atmosphere and so forth that makes the story engaging. There is never any specific criteria that makes one say “this story is good”, instead there is a wide range of elements that can make a story great. Second, the definition reflects how stories are created. A story always starts out as some seed idea; a specific person, situation, plot twist, etc, and is then built around that. A setting is determined, characters are created and other elements are fleshed out. These added elements are not the core of the story, they are there in order make the initial idea come to live in the best way possible. Third, it makes for a very inclusive definition that suit videogames. Games often have a lot story elements, yet often lack some of the more common elements like dialog or plot. If a story is only a carefully planned sequence of events then many games, some vital for understanding interactive storytelling, are left out. At the same time the definition is not so broad as to become meaningless; Tetris is still not a game with much (or any) story, while Limbo contain tons.

- Storytelling -
Given the above way of seeing story, “storytelling” is pretty straightforward to define. It is simply a way to communicate the elements of a story to an audience. They way we are most used to doing this is in the form of a linear sequence of events, but this is not the only way to go about. When doing interactive storytelling, the story is communicated as the player interacts with systems, each representing a part of the story. Now onto the elements of story:

- Theme - This is sort of the holistic intent of a story. It can be things like: premise, message, subject, an intended experience; anything that deals with a core idea that permeates through the story. Despite not being a concrete part of a story, like an environment or a character, it is still something that has to be taken into account. Just like a character needs to fit with the environment, all elements of a story need to fit with the theme.

- Setting - “Where does the story take place” is the question this term answers. It is not just the physical place, but also the time period, history, weather conditions and so on. It describes all the background conditions for the story. This is probably the story element that is most common in a game. Even games that lack all other elements can still have a very strong setting.

- Characters - Anytime some intentional action is performed, a character is there to perform it. This term simply applies to any sentient agent that takes place in the story. It is trivial to point out characters in a book or movie, but for a game it seems like is a bit harder. For instance, are the enemy ships in Space Invader characters? How about the turtles in Super Mario Bros? In both of these examples, I think one might just as well lump them into the character element. Both of these games both have very thin stories and are not really any attempts at interactive storytelling. As far as I can tell, the vague character cases come solely from these sort of games. They never arise when there is stronger focus on the story. In Uncharted, for example, all the cannon fodder enemies are pretty clear cases of character story elements. Also important to mention is that this term, like all the others, come with sub terms. Inside the term character are things like dialog, relationships and destinies.

- Plot - A plot is a sequence of events, each event occurring in a specific fashion. This sequence can be a branching one; the important factor is that all is set and known beforehand. It may seem a bit strange to set this as its own separate element of a story; after all, any book or film is composed out of events laid out in a preset fashion. This notion is also why it is so common to see plot and story as pretty much the same thing. When you deal with books or movies, there is not a big problem with this view, but for games it is disastrous  If a story is something that is laid out in an exact unchangeable manner, then an interactive game is unable, by definition, to tell a story. (A line of thinking which I have seen academic papers written about). So it seems obvious why one wants plot to be different from story; interactive storytelling other than Choose-Your-Own-Adventure would be an oxymoron. There is however a deeper, and more important, reason for this separation and it lies in how stories are created. When a writer starts a story, most of the events are unknown. Instead it starts with some seed (as discussed above) and is then fleshed out from that point. It is constantly revised and polished. During this process, the exact events, either the planned or already written, are in constant flux. Most of the time other things are much more important than a precise happening. Only a subset of events need to happen in an definite fashion; the rest are just there to realize other elements. Together, all the crucial events make up the plot. If a person A needs to be at location B at time C, then this is part of the plot. The way in which person A accomplishes this is of less importance, and thus the manner of transportation is not a plot point. Thinking in this way makes it a lot easier to think about interactive stories.

- Narration - The final story element is the way in which the story is told. At the highest level this deals with things like chronology, how cuts are made, the voice of the teller (e.g. first person) and the subjectivity of the telling (e.g. unreliable narrator). All these concern the basic framework for how the story is put together. It is a basic definition of narration that most agree to. Narration can be thought of having lower levels as well. In a book or movie, most of the story can come from the protagonist simply making certain actions, but in a game the interaction makes this a lot harder and other tricks are needed. Examples of this is using audio logs or spoken narration (as heard in Bastion). Therefore I find it best if the term narration also includes very specific devices that help communicate the story. Now that we are done with the constituents of a story, I will discuss a few connected terms:

- Narrative - My proposed definition for this term will probably be a little harder to get a across, but I think it is a very important one. In common language “narrative” is pretty much a synonym to “story”. My definition, however, is the subjective experience of the player; the personal sequence of events and emotions that the player has when playing through the game. It can be said to be a player’s account of her experience, but that would not be entirely accurate since what I am after is the raw direct experience of actually playing the game. What follows are my three main reason for using this term and definition: First of all is that we need a word for the personal experience; story does not sum it up as it does in other media. However, this definition still applies to other media too. As explained in for the term “plot”, every last detail of the final work is not a part in the story, thus it can be said the final version a book or movie is not a story, but a narrative of a story. Second, it allows us to talk about intended narrative; the experience that we want the player to have. This can be in pretty rough terms, but it is a very helpful way to talk about it. Third and final, why not just use the word “experience”? Because it is too broad. When we talk about narrative, we mean the story focused experience. For instance, a shoot-em-up game give rise to a very complex experience, but the story material that is communicated is very thin and simplistic. A game that is focused on a providing an engaging narrative is a game where every part of the experience is directly connected to the story. Important to note is that a good story does not mean a good narrative. The elements in the story can be very compelling, but if they fail to be communicated in an engaging fashion, the narrative ends up a bad one.

- Gameplay - This term is really hard to pin down as it easily becomes too wide or too narrow. One could simply say that gameplay happens anytime the player interacts with a system in the game, but that does not really hold up how most of us use it. Mostly it is only a subset of possibly interactions that serves as gameplay. For instance , if a bushes waves a bit when the player walks past, few call this gameplay. Having this wide definition also makes it so close to simply “interactions” that it becomes meaningless. On the other hand, one could say gameplay is any interaction that is framed as a goal oriented challenge. This is seems accurate as it agrees with many common forms of  gameplay (puzzle solving, shooting bad guys, matching blocks, etc). However, it becomes problematic in terms of storytelling. If the aim of a game is to provide the most powerful narrative possible, then that goal often clashes with that of creating challenges.  When creating a game about storytelling, characters should be perceived as proper elements of the story (with emotions, motives, etc) and not just an obstacle or power-up. Because of this, a game with heavy focus on narrative might have to cut down a lot on the challenge. However, it does not seem right to say that means the game must do away with gameplay as well. If a game offers non-challenging interactions with character or other parts of a story it becomes very restrictive, and unhelpful, to instantly claim none of this can be called “gameplay”. Thus, there needs some other way to define it. My conclusion is that gameplay occurs whenever “the mental game space of the player contains a horizon of potential actions that allow for planning”. This may sound a bit cryptic, so let me break it down a bit. First of, the “mental game space” is the player’s subjective perception of the current state of the game. Important to note is that this does not have to match up with the actual computer state of the game. The player might imagine there is a monster behind the corner when in fact there is none and so forth. The “horizon of potential actions” are actions that the player can see themselves doing in the future. There might be potential actions that are too far away for the player to directly imagine a path to, and these are not part of the horizon. Also, there might be actions that are possible to do, but does not seem meaningful to the player (e.g. jumping off a cliff) or are hidden (e.g. an alternative path to a location). Neither of these are part of the action horizon. Finally, “allow for planning”, means that there is some sort of end goal for the player and that the actions on the horizon can help in getting there. This definition cast a pretty wide net on what gameplay can be, but at the same time also excludes a bunch of interactions. Anything that just happens by chance is not gameplay, neither are actions that lack some sort of goal. A caveat is that this definition can apply to just about any 3D editor, word processor or similar software. But when used in the context of interactive storytelling, there is no real issue. What is good about this definition is that “gameplay” is not just a binary term. Instead, one can talk about the frequency, action width and narrative relation of the gameplay. All of these shape how the game is played. The higher the frequency of the gameplay, the quicker the action horizon change. A large action width means that the player always have a lot of options on what to do next. Finally, narrative relation means how much the gameplay connects with the underlying story. Important to note is that this term is not a value judgement. Of course, in a storytelling game we want the player to be inside a narrative, but that does not mean that gameplay always have to have narrative relationship.

- Immersion - Normally this word is used for describing how “real” a game feels, but I think that is the wrong usage. Immersion is simply the state of being very focused on an activity. This can happen for instance when reading a book, watching TV, playing chess and of course playing a videogame. Whenever the rest of the world fades away, and your sole attention lies on a single thing, that is being immersed into something. I think this is the way the term is commonly used, and it is also the most useful for storytelling. Immersion does not rely on crafting something believable; it is simply a measurement on how much attention a game gets from the player. However, I think it is possible to use “immersed” when talking about believability, but then one has to precise and say, for instance,  ”immersed in the game’s world”. Now it is clear that we are not talking about any kind of focus, but very specifically about feeling strongly connected to the game’s virtual world. I think it is important be very clear in this manner as discussions can otherwise become really fuzzy. For example, if I suggest that replaying breaks the immersion, then somebody might counter that they sure as hell were immersed when playing Super Meat Boy. In my statement I meant the specific usage world-immersion, but the response meant the more basic focus-immersion. Further debate becomes pointless as me and my interlocutor are talking about different things.

- Presence - Closely related to immersion is “the sense of presence”. I think this is a great term for talking about the feeling of being inside a game’s world, as it basically means being present somewhere. Even though someone has never hear the term before, they can easily guess what it means, and it is harder to make false connections. This makes it a lot better to talk about presence than immersion when discussing the sense of being somewhere else.. So how to define “presence”? If we simply take it as “the feeling of present in a fictional place”, then it becomes hard to know exactly what to strive for. What does it really mean to feel more “present”? With immersion, we only talked about the focus; in that case it was just a matter of how much of the player’s attention is directed at the game. But “being more/less present” is either awfully close to the definition “immersion” or very fuzzy.
My suggestion for a definition is this:

- How much how of the mental model (ie, what we use to predict and make plans) for the game overlap the with the game’s story. If we treat characters like real people then presence is strong; if we treat them like robots then presence is weak.

- How much involuntary reflexes are triggered in accordance to the story aspects of an event. If the player makes a quick jerk when an objects is coming right at their face, then presence is strong. If the player does not shiver a bit when entering a cold environment, presence is low.

The stronger the game achieve the above criteria, the stronger sense of presence it has. By thinking about the relationship between the actual story and what is going on in the player’s head, we get a very clear idea of what presence really is. This makes discussions on this subject a lot easier and also makes it easier to set up goals for oneself.

These are all the terms that I wanted to bring up. There are a few more, some of which I will cover in the notes, but I think the above are the mostly commonly used and the most important ones. Keep in mind that these definitions are not meant to be something set in stone. It is the first step in a conversation and I am interested in hearing what everyone thinks of them.

Links:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super_Meat_Boy Super Meat Boy is a game where the player dies A LOT. It is a very good example of when a game can be very repetitive, but remain immersive.

http://unbirthgame.com/GDC2013_PresenceSelfAndStoryTelling_Script.pdf Script for a lecture in which I go over how challenge can be damaging to games with storytelling.

http://frictionalgames.blogspot.se/2010/10/story-what-is-it-really-about.html An older post that explains more of the reason for the above definition of storytelling.

Notes:

- Related to setting and characters are the words “fiction” and “lore” as well. I do not want to give any clear definitions on these, mainly because I do not use them very often, other than saying they are subsets of “story”. They share a lot of the the elements in a story, but I never think one use the word as meaning exactly the same as story. Most often they are used with the meaning of something very similar to “setting”.

- Another word that can be worth touching upon is “mechanic”. Normally this is just a shorter version of “gameplay mechanic”, thus it is any system that helps gives rise to gameplay as defined above. This is not limited to pure code and logic, but it can also be text, graphics and sound.

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Minimalism in Game Narrative: Can we say more by talking less?

Friday, May 17, 2013 at 1:48PM

Cross-posted to Gamasutra.

This was written, a bit more formally than presented here, last year during my Master’s at Abertay University, Dundee. I thought with Ludum Dare 26 coming to a close this was an apt time to repost and would love to hear any thoughts.

Suibokuga - Shek Ho (2007)
Abstract
Writing in computer games is often criticised; the narrative of most contemporary mainstream titles is expositional, obvious and largely redundant. I argue that we shouldn’t worry about ensuring every player knows perfectly what is happening at every moment. Instead that by leaving purposeful but known gaps and ambiguity we can give a player’s imagination room to breathe and engage with the material as they do with the game itself, and thus create stronger experiences.

First we will look at art movements and theories in other media, such as Hemingway’s ‘Iceberg Theory’ and ‘Pure Cinema’, to demonstrate the power minimalist techniques can have. Secondly we apply these minimalist concepts to the allure of ‘retro’ games and explain why many contemporary games such as ‘A Slow Year’ have come to draw on those aesthetics again. Thirdly we look at minimalist techniques which are already pervasive in many modern titles such as the fragmented delivery of ‘Dear Esther’ or the embedded narrative of ‘Amnesia: The Dark Descent’. Finally to conclude the author looks at why such techniques may not always appeal, and why experimental games and fostering audiences for them are vital for the health of the industry.

1. Introduction The human mind is a pattern finding machine. We live to join the dots between things, intentional connections or not. All media interacts with the human imagination in this way at some level, and great authors in many disciplines have learned to leverage this cognitive interaction. The less they do or tell and the more the imagination of the audience unconsciously engages then the more powerful the experience. ‘Less is more’ as architect Mies van der Rohe might have said. However we live in an age where the imagination is undervalued and underused. It is being increasingly side-lined and subsumed under a sea of constant media barrage, easy entertainment, familiar franchise exploitation and over explanation. In an environment where game design as extensive play-testing and analytics is de rigueur, respecting the audience’s ability to think, not worrying about losing their complete attention for a second and ultimately giving more power back to them, is a brave move. Can it also be an effective and emotive one?

What do we mean by minimalism with respect to game writing? This essentially means expressing as much through as little as possible, and potentially being truer and more evocative in the process. For example this may be as simple the removal of any superfluous storytelling that can be understood implicitly or explicitly by the player through playing the game itself. Minimalist game writing subverts traditional exposition, engages the player’s mind, and most importantly respects and challenges their ability to understand narrative and meaning as it is presented.

2. Minimalism throughout media
There is much for contemporary game designers to learn from older mediums, outside of solely the bombast of Hollywood, and in particular for this paper how to do a lot with very little. ‘Pure Cinema’ is interesting for its attempt to try and convey meaning and emotion without use of character or plot and instead only pure cinematic techniques. Dziga Vertov’s 1929 film ‘Man with a movie camera’ [18] is a great example of this. In ‘The Language of New Media’ [12] Lev Manovich investigates digital media through the lens of this seminal film and one important point he makes which bears examination in the context of this paper is how the film turns “special effects” into meaningful expression. By imposing each specific technique in each specific new context or scene Vertov raises these otherwise mechanical actions to a level of implicit meaning.

Vertov, Dziga. ‘Man With a Movie Camera’ (1929)Interestingly throughout the film he refuses to rest or settle on a limited set of actions which could be framed and learned as a static expressive language. An example of a shorthand language from another medium may be a minor chord evoking melancholy: a relationship which is not an innate universal truth and rather a learned association in Western culture [17]. The film’s continuous restlessness speaks to both unending possibilities for evocative cinematic metaphors but also the need for an audience to actively engage with and contemplate material rather than relying on trained expectations. Another film which attempts to minimalize narrative as much as possible and speak directly to the viewer implicitly through intuited experiences of the cinematic is ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’ [7]. Kubrick consciously rejected the, by that time, well-defined cinematic language in favour of a more ambiguous approach. However it also eschewed the exuberant experimentation of Vertov and instead concentrates on the singular power of the image and how it can be heightened by sound and careful editing. The slow takes and deliberate scenes were an intentional act by Kubrick in order to provide space for the audience’s mind to think and become absorbed in the film.

“…it’s essentially a non-verbal experience. It attempts to communicate more to the subconscious and to the feelings than it does to the intellect… Those who won’t believe their eyes won’t be able to appreciate this film.” – Stanley Kubrick [10]

Indeed there is a long history of minimalist movements, such as the Japanese tradition of Ma which emphasizes what you perceive from the gaps and spaces. Often a period of minimalism and stripping back will come from artists consciously or unconsciously revolting against an extravagant status quo. For example Serialist composed shunned any traces of the Romantic era before Minimalism developed shunning Serialism and the highly theoretical music of the preceding decades [15]. In the art world representational painting reached its peak in the 19th century before first Expressionism and then subsequent increasingly abstract art styles developed and in the 1960’s Minimalism, a reaction against abstract expressionism. One of the key drives of Modernism across the art world was a rejection of realism in favour of these more abstracted forms. This left much more to the viewer to interpret whether consciously, or on an unconscious level such as with the immediate and visceral works of Rothko.

Such art movements are far from reserved to the past century however. Vanitas, associated with Northern Europe during the 16th and 17th centuries, is an example of another art movement which tried to express as much meaning with as little as possible [14]. These were typical still-life paintings that, in the fashion of a Memento Mori, hid elements and symbols which illustrate the transience and decay of life: from the obvious such as hidden skulls to the more subtle such as rotting fruit or dying plants. To most these symbols wouldn’t be explicit and the image would remain an innocent painting, but to others who knew what they were looking for the macabre commentary was stark. As such what may be an innocent picture to many may in fact include many symbols of death and decay. This movement directly inspired a mobile interactive application by Tale of Tales of the same name. It explored these themes through a matchbox which when opened and shut would reveal different objects and give room for contemplation, these would include macabre objects such as bird skulls and the objects would continue to become decayed the more you used the app. Minimalist ideals and works can be created with multimedia and interactive technologies.

“Hemingway called it the Iceberg Theory. The art of implication. Just give people the little pieces they need to imagine up the other half of the game. It makes [the player] more invested and it makes your work more adaptable and more rich.” - Adam Saltsman [19]

William BradfordIn contemporary game design one developer who can be seen to be at the forefront of a new minimalism is Adam Saltsman. This quote from an interview is one explanation he offers to the popularity of Minecraft and his own hit game, Canabalt. Ernest Hemingway was famed for his minimalist approach to narrative and his stories thrived through conscious omission of important details. In his essay ‘The Art of the Short Story’ he talks about his ‘Iceberg Theory’ [20], that the more you can omit, but still know, about your story then the stronger and more evocative it will become. As such his stories contain no exposition and often a character’s thoughts can only be read through his words and actions as they exist in the reader’s mind. The characters often have a long history and past but the narrative is only ever concerned with what is happening in the present, often beginning and ending abruptly. All other details inform the dialog and story naturally or do not appear at all.

For example the short story “Hills like White Elephants” [21] can be simply seen as a harmless conversation between two people at a train station. However, just beneath the surface they are obliquely discussing an abortion and parting ways.  It is up to the reader to read into the unstated tension, their thoughts about the subject at hand and their thoughts about each other. In this way the storytelling can be much natural and evocative. This minimalism extends to his writing style as well which features few poetic flourishes and consists largely of dialog, anything else in his eyes is simply unnecessary to telling the story. Echoing the earlier quote by Stanley Kubrick, Hemingway believed words only confused the meaning of what he was trying to express and that subtext could always communicate a truer picture.

3. Minimalist narrative structure and ‘retro’ games: Videogames have always been dependent on the technology they were built for and in the very early days of the medium these constraints were particularly self-evident, whether through limited colour palettes, low resolutions or crude sound. Due to both the limited memory available to the developer and the arcade roots of the industry plot was kept to a bare minimum if there at all and narrative cues primarily existed to give context. Often this narrative would be passed onto the game materials such as the manual, box-art or arcade cabinets and usually consisted of little more than a premise in which the gameplay existed. This meant that often only in the player’s mind were the events of the game contextualised within a grander story structure. This made the experience a personal one: discussions about games would be dominated by first person accounts.

Tennis - Atari (1983)The highly abstract visuals communicated the core gameplay ideas and served as a seed to the player’s vision of the game. It’s interesting to examine how pieces of art inspired by these games predominantly reimagines the pixelated sprites as vivid characters in vivid worlds. For example the box art for Atari 2600 games were famed for their gross exaggeration of what players will find when they play. Yet, in fact, the realism of these painted box covers helps players mentally cross the gap between the real world and the representational imagery of the game. [22] Just as a cartoon drawing of a face may engender more empathy  because of its abstract universality when compared to a photo of a stranger [28], so can low resolution pixel art and a minimalist narrative provide seeds to the player to fill the gaps and create whole imaginary worlds.

“A book read by a thousand different people is a thousand different books” – Andrei Tarkovsky [23]
Most games today have moved far away from this overt minimalist narrative structure. It is interesting to compare the freedom the original Legend of Zelda provided, empowering the players as storytellers, with the latest entry in the franchise, Skyward Sword [24]. I believe these two games which bookend a long running franchise can provide a microcosm of the medium’s mainstream development. The NES title featured little exposition besides an opening text crawl introducing the key elements of the story, an antagonist, Ganon, and a princess to be rescued, Zelda. The main character of this game is a blank slate for the player to embody, characterise and name as they see fit, an ‘avatar’, and they would simply and unceremoniously start in the middle of a field. It is largely up to the player to make this experience personal and powerful and full of event. As we are naturally drawn to storytelling, it is easy to do so.

By the time the series reached the latest installment, Skyward Sword, a lot had changed. The single world to be explored as the player saw fit has been replaced by separate, disconnected areas, just as player storytelling was replaced with a meticulously plotted narrative that players must follow explicitly in order to beat the game. Instead of sparse text and openess players now found innumerable dialog boxes. Nintendo own this story not the player and if they try to add any personal spice they stand to be corrected at any moment or at least face the cognitive dissonance intimately familiar to players of GTA IV. Online debate raising these concerns following Skyward Sword’s launch demonstrate the growing dissatisfaction with mainstream game narratives [25]. However one should be careful to consider both games in context of their respective times, the problems of Skyward Sword arguably being the result of an unthinking slide with the technological evolution of the medium through the 90’s and a dearth of new influences. The original game’s minimalist qualities, like most of its contemporaries, are partly due to the level of computing power available and partly because games at the time were still evolving from their recent arcade ancestors. This brings us to a key distinction between the minimal narrative of most retro videogames and the minimalist works found in other mediums, intention. While the Legend of Zelda was inspired by and evokes experiences many can relate to, that is Miyamoto’s childhood spent exploring the woods and countryside around his home, the minimalist qualities weren’t chosen to specifically express this. Instead like the form of its contemporaries it was a result of form following function, that being to give simple context to the gameplay.  So is there a reason to make a ‘retro’ games today?

Over the last five years there has been a resurgence of interest in computer games which emulate the minimalist even crude aesthetic of past videogame consoles. Initially this started with indie developers, such as the title ‘L’Abbaye Des Morts’ [11] which re-envisions 13th century French history in the style of a ZX Spectrum platformer, but soon expanded to large companies such as Capcom who released Megaman 9 in 2008. In this vein it is largely a nostalgiac element. For example Braid leveraged the tropes of platforming games such as Donkey Kond and the original Super Marios Bros. as meta-textual expressions of the game’s main themes: memory and regret.

A Slow Year - Ian Bogost (2010)The resurgence of this aesthetic isn’t solely for nostalgia related purposes however. Few games from the late 70’s can claim to be thematic progenitors to Rod Humble’s experimental game ‘The Marriage’ [26], which maximises coherent expression by eschewing all non-functional aesthetics, or Ian Bogost’s experimental collection of game poems ‘A Slow Year’ [3] developed for the Atari 2600, a console originally released in 1977. Bogost uses the medium of the Atari 2600 as a distinct form of communication, and creates an experience moulded by its limitations and peculiarities. ‘A Slow Year’ is a series of four meditative games representing each season which feature minimal gameplay and no explicit narrative. The games are intended as poems which let the player interpret as they like with few crucial aural, visual and sensual stimuli to encourage a specific line of thought and contemplation in the player. The minimalist approach both reinforces the themes of the game and gives the mind a chance to engage with the material on its own terms.

4. Minimalist storytelling devices:
One narrative technique conducive to minimalist narratives and that already has a strong history in game writing, particularly amongst games of a Looking Glass lineage such as ‘System Shock’, is the embedded narrative. For example the story of ‘Amnesia: The Dark Descent’ [4] is predominantly communicated through an embedded narrative found in notes and diaries throughout the castle and dungeons as well as the environment design itself. Henry Jenkins creates a strong analogy to detective novels wherein from hints and clues the reader slowly pieces together what has actually happened [6]. In interactive media however the reader is given another dimension to their investigations in their ability to directly interact, explore and discover within the scenes themselves. Amnesia is worth noting for the ambiguities and conflicting information introduced in its ‘found’ text. It should be noted that it is precisely the fractured nature of the embedded narrative in these games Amnesia which makes it both minimalist and stimulating to the player. Again the more work the player does mentally the more invested they become. On the other hand while ‘Skyrim’ is full of books on the history of the game’s world these most often take the form of exhaustive encyclopaedia which spell out exactly what happened one event after another, with, a few exceptions, little grey area. You could get a complete picture of all historic minutiae if you simply read enough. Dry historical accounts leave little to imagine and with no space for the player to join the dots there is no space for the player to engage.

Dennis Severs’ House, 18 Folgate St, LondonOne highly successful example of embedded narrative is that of Denis Severs’ House in central London. Created by Dennis Severs over two decades this unassuming building on Folgate Street is self-described as a “Still-Life Drama” set in the 18th and 19th centuries. What prevents this from being simply a museum reproduction is the attention to detail gone into creating a rich, fictional world for the family that lived there. Notably one of the first things you will notice as you walk around by candelight as that it is as if the occupants just left minutes prior: hot food is on the table, chairs hanging, and even in one instance the calamitous result of a recent skuffle. Each room tells a hundred stories about the inhabitants through every detail such as the letters, paintings or even a broken wine glass on the floor, and each room is generally tailored around one fictional individual. Where it starts to get really interesting is how each floor of the building moves forward a generation and so tells this intricate story of a family through time. This is embedded narrative at its best. Every person who experiences the house it will discover and notice different details and every person will piece together a slightly different story. As it is uniquely theirs, it will be more meaningful than a prescribed text.

The story-telling of Amnesia is interesting to look at the micro-scale as well. Being a very small developer Frictional Games have needed to master the ability to make as little as possible as effective as possible. As a horror title this game thrives on scaring the player with what they imagine rather than what they are actually looking at. In Sweet Anticipation’ David Huron [8] discusses the psychology of how the mind deals with stimuli. Two are of particular note: first the mind’s imagination response which is the ability of the mind to perceive a diluted emotional feeling with regard to what they imagine they might feel if an event were to occur. Secondly the mind also has a tension response which prepares the body for an anticipated event, but, through natural selection, always over compensates and prepares for the worst. However, when the mind doesn’t know what the anticipated event is or when it will occur these emotions can be maintained for long periods of time. This is done through clever sound design as well as narrative and visual cues which convince the player ‘something’ is imminent. This speaks to the power of the imagination in enriching experiences. A game developer can just as powerfully create a feeling with an imagined event as an actual one.

Many experimental games have also experimented with how the player receives the story, prodding the player to both consider the context, how, when, where, but also piece together disparate and fragmented chunks as they see fit. In this way they closely resemble films such as Rashomon or Mulholland Drive in which the audience must wrestle with what they’re shown and reconcile often conflicting or ambiguous material [2]. In Dear Esther the player explores a Hebridean Island and at certain points, in what has in the years since 2008 become an ‘Art-Game’ trope, hears random pieces of cryptic voice overs that bear little relation to what is happening in-game. [13] The loose thematic connections between the dialog and what the player experiences as he moves through the game world create an interesting tension in which to understand the text and what the game is communicating. Thus if the player is engaged their own thoughts and experiences can complete the picture uniquely. Although this is a linear game, it creates a non-linear and polysemic narrative by leveraging the properties of the medium.

Dear Esther - Dan Pinchbeck (2008)
5. The climate for minimalist games:
Another aspect of Dear Esther which makes it unusual for the contemporary video game landscape is the deliberately slow pace which flies in the face of traditional game design. This pointedly gives the players time to contemplate what is happening with little distraction. One argument against games that might require time and investment from the player to digest is that they are often, bluntly, called ‘slow’ and ‘boring’. However, provided that there is an audience that remains invested in the holistic experience. Dargis and A. O. Scott do not think it is a problem for an audience’s attention to wander from time to time if the artist is stimulating contemplation [16]. Entertainment that seeks to keep everyone’s attention constantly and never let up runs the risk of by always focusing on the immediate being, besides exhausting or one-note, an entirely transient and disposable experience.

We must however recognise there is an element cultural capital, learned and often inherited societal or cultural knowledge [5], which often stands between audiences engaging with ‘difficult’ artistic material. In not only being able to read meaning in minimalist works but more to the matter giving them time and trying to engage. The motto of Denis Sever’s House is “Aut Visum Aut Non”, you either see or you don’t. Just as the works of the Vanitas movement can be dismissed or misunderstood by those not literate in reading them, minimalist games can be as well. That’s not to denigrate their importance, in fact the opposite, they are more essential. For example ‘The Path’ [27] gave Richard Lemarchand the courage that the platforming, combat and essentially ’gameplay’ free Tibetan village of Uncharted 2 could work [9]. It is through creating experimental games developers increase the vocabulary of the medium and foster audiences that can grasp and demand more difficult works, improving the medium as a whole.

The New World - Directed by Terrence Malick (2005)Great games should endeavour to be thought about when they are not being played. Indeed interactive experiences are particularly adept at doing this: often people relate playing games like Tetris while daydreaming. However games should endeavour to more than lingering muscle memories of mechanical processes. This paper, through looking at the power minimalism can have in other media and through a taste of game specific applications of minimalism whether embedded narratives, abstract art, or fragmented storytelling, proposes that these techniques are one such powerful way to stimulate such thoughts. By giving the player space to think, and interesting material to think about, we can create more mature and more engaging games. Interactive experiences can leave an audience with the lasting questions and ideas any great work can.

REFERENCES:
[1]   Baker, Carlos, ‘Hemingway: The Writer as Artist’. (1972) Princeton University Press
[2]   Bizzocchi, Jim. ‘Run, Lola, Run - Film as Narrative Database’ (2005) Simon Fraser University
[3]   Bogost, Ian. ‘A Slow Year’ (2010), Open Texture
[4]   Frictional Games, ‘Amnesia: The Dark Descent’ (2010) Frictional Games
[5]   Guillory, John. ‘Cultural Capital: The Problem of Literary Canon Formation’ (1995) University Of Chicago Press
[6]   Jenkins, Henry. ‘Game Design as Narrative Architecture’ (2004) Cambridge: MIT Press
[7]   Kubrick, Stanley. ‘2001: A Space Odyssey. (1968) MGM
[8]   Huron, David, ‘Sweet Anticipation: Music and the Psychology of Expectation’ (2008),  Bradford Books
[9]   Lemarchand, Richard. ‘Beauty and Risk: Why I Love Indie Games’ (2011). Indiecade
[10]   Lobrutto, Vincent, ‘Stanley Kubrick’, Faber and Faber (1998) pg. 277
[11]  Locomalito. ‘L’Abbaye Des Morts’ (2010)
[12] Manovich, Lev, ‘The Language of New Media’ (2001) Cambridge: MIT Press
[13]  Pinchbeck, Dan. ‘Dear Esther’ (2008)
[14] Ravenal, John B., ‘Vanitas: Meditations on Life and Death        in Contemporary Art’ (2004), University of Virginia Press
[15] Ross, Alex. ‘The Rest is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century’. (2007)  New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
[16] Scott, A. O. ,Dargis. ‘In Defence of the Slow and the Boring’ (2011) The New York Times
[17] Undurraga, Eduardo, Emlem, Nicholas, Gueze, Maximilien, et al. ‘Musical Chord Preference: Cultural or Universal? Data From a Native Amazonian Society’. Tsimane’ Amazonian Panel Study Working Paper # 64
[18] Vertov, Dziga. ‘Man With a Movie Camera’ (1929) Soviet Union
[19] Boisvenue, Travis. ‘Of course you have five lives’ (2011) The Happy Medium
[20] Ernest Hemingway ‘The Art of the Short Story’. (1990)  Benson, Jackson. New Critical Approaches to the Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway. Duke University Press.
[21] Ernest Hemingway ‘Men Without Women’ (1927) Charles Scribner’s Sons
[22] McCollough, Aarom. ‘4k Formalism: An Interview with Ian Bogost’ (2011) JEP, Volume 14, Issue 2
[23] Andrei Tarkovsky, ‘Sculpting In Time’ (1989) University of Texas Press, pg. 177
[24] Nintendo EAD, The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword (2011), Nintendo
[25] Thompson, Tevis. ‘Saving Zelda’ (2012) Creative Commons
[26] Rod Humble, ‘The Marraige’ (2007) GDC
[27] Harvey, Auriea & Samyn, Michaël. ‘The Path’ (2009) Tale of Tales
[28] Scott McCloud, ‘Understanding Comics’ (1993)

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