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Video Games: The Highly Visible Art — Part 4

Guest Post by Phill English July 15

Replay:

Before I go into some examples of the use of freedom, I’d like to quickly recap on a few key points:

Immersion in games can be broken down into three subtypes–sensory, systemic, and fictional immersion.
Fictional immersion, while almost always present in some way, is often overlooked as a method of providing a more meaningful playing experience.
While traditional stories and videogames are analogous in many ways, the interactivity of video games–also the ‘agency’ of players taking on the role of protagonists (thanks Paul!)–is quite unique of video games, providing an edge to the fictional immersion not available in other media.
Gamers that metagame are lost to fictional immersion, unless said immersion is truly exceptional.
Linearity of story is not necessarily a linearity of experience (thanks again, Paul!)

While writing these posts and discussing them in the comments, it’s become obvious that the classification of fictional immersion as being completely separate from that of systemic immersion is a misguided one. This may have come about through a misreading of Arsenault’s paper, or perhaps it is a symptom of the scientific method of trying to break down the elements of a game into their constituent parts and analyse them. Whatever the case, on closer inspection it is has become quite difficult for me to pin down exactly where systemic immersion ends and fictional immersion begins. But in the first part of this post I’ll try, and then we can get on with the examples of games where freedom to affect a storyline has been used to good effect, as promised in the previous post.

Living in the moment:

Systemic immersion is absolutely dependant on the moment to moment interaction of a gamer with a game. As Paul pointed out in the comments for the last post, systemic immersion contributes to the feeling of agency that the player has over the character they control. You interact with an object, you shoot a bullet, you cast a spell; a gamer that has agency is a gamer that can potentially inhabit the character, moving from player to protagonist. And when this transformation is complete, the moment to moment interactions with the game can be almost as compelling, in terms of a fictional immersion, as the overall story that the game is telling.

Take, for example, the FlatOut series of racing games (a perennial favourite of mine). On the surface, there isn’t much that game developers can really do with a racing game in terms of story, and the developers of FlatOut haven’t exactly gone out of their way; you’re a new driver looking to make your mark and earn some cash in a series of daredevil race circuits. But in this case, the game has a few tricks up its sleeve to provide fictional immersion in a moment to moment fashion, rather than relying on a grand overarching story. In between races, players are given loading screens that provide background information on the static line up of drivers behind the wheels of each of your rival cars. There’s Ray Carter, a relaxed driver capable of winning if he tries; Lei Bing, an aggressive chick who comes from an underground street racing background; or Katie Jackson, an erratic, stressed out car club president. The presentation of each of these personas and their corresponding driving styles allows the player to construct his or her own personal narratives while doing something as seemingly far away from quality fiction as Stephanie Meyer (sorry, couldn’t help myself). I thought it was cute, a little bit of flavour that the developers had thought to include in the game. It wouldn’t really affect the way I played, would it? Nah.

By the end of the first race, I hated Lei Bing’s guts – she’d cut me off and ram me, forcing my car to go swerving into the side of a building or a truck. So my character’s goal became to get revenge on Bing and her irritatingly cutesy Lancer-like chassis. I imagined her increasing dismay and chagrin as I smashed her repeatedly into trees, railings, and once hitting her car so hard it launched her out her front window and over a cliff. This personal narrative of slight and revenge is just one example of how, even in something as basic as a car racing game, systemic immersion and fictional immersion come together in the moment to moment play of the game. Other examples of this kind of narrative creation is in the levelling up of characters in RPGs through battles with monsters, or the style of combat (does he flank, or just run in guns blazing?) employed in a first person shooter.

Should we be calling those moment to moment narratives a combination of systemic immersion combined with imagination, or is it another aspect of fictional immersion? I’m not sure, personally. I’ll leave it up to the reader to determine which side of the semantics they want to sit. But is without doubt that they contribute to the overall fictional immersion of the game. This is never more apparent than when developers choose to exploit them more thoroughly than in my example of FlatOut. Two examples have already been mentioned in the comments; Final Fantasy 7 with its heart-wrenching twist that derails the player’s visions of the playing out of the game, and Bioshock with its mid-way reveal that throws any illusion of agency out the window. These kinds of moments obviously fit into an overall storyline, and yet also directly draw upon the player’s moment to moment systemic immersion and self-realised narratives in order to deliver the kind of emotional punch that is rare in other media.

A third example, and one that deliberately ties a gameplay mechanic into this idea of moment to moment narrative, is that of the Mass Effect series. In Mass Effect, the developers introduce a conversation system that can be used by the player to present a more self-serving, rogue-like persona, or a more just, morally upright persona, depending on the player’s tastes. The combination of all these moment to moment decisions can dramatically change the way the game plays out. Obviously there must remain the major storyline being fulfilled by the player–a story, even an interactive one, must still have a beginning, a middle, and an end–but the way that story plays out is directly, overtly, and engagingly influenced by the player’s decisions using this gameplay mechanic. For example, a character with whom the player has built an exceedingly evil persona may not be able to have a civil conversation with a peace corps trooper, resulting in the loss of a side-mission (but the gaining of one when speaking to a similarly dastardly space pirate, for example). Rather than limiting the player, this naturally encourages even more inhabiting of the character by the player, and therefore a greater sense of agency. The fact that these myriad small actions actually have the potential to change the overall storyline of the game is icing on the cake from the developers.

So moment to moment systemic immersion and the personally imagined or guided narratives that they can produce are not to be overlooked. Now I’d like to take a small step to the left of this topic and talk a bit more about freedom of interaction in games, and how this can also lead to player-created narratives.

Freewheeling:

Freedom is a tricky thing in video games. Give a player too much freedom and they won’t feel like the game has any direction. Give them too little and even the personal narratives mentioned earlier won’t give them the sense of agency they require to full assume their character. Freedom of interaction is a balancing act, and while the dreams of some theorists might extend to video games that have no defined storyline but for the dramatic whim of an artificial intelligence, the reality is that freedom is often implied, rather than delivered.

It might help to start with a game that seeks to deliver on the concept of an ever-accommodating artificial intelligence, sans the artificial bit. Sleep Is Death is a two-player game by Jason Rohrer in which one player takes on the role of the character or characters, while the other takes on the role of the wizard behind the curtain that must respond to the whim of the player as he or she interacts with the world that has been presented to them. Essentially Sleep Is Death replaces the hard and fast rules that a video game must necessarily contain, and replaces them with a human that can make decisions from one second to the next on what to allow the player to do and not do. But even still, the ‘wizard’ of a game of Sleep Is Death still usually has a linear overall story that they have invested time in creating, and while the interaction may be more natural, true freedom is not really granted to the player. This is due to the ultimate freedom of an infinite number of actions leading to an infinite number of overall outcomes not being able to be delivered.

Unfortunately, retail games do not have the option of a dedicated human arbiter for each player, and so must rely on creating the impression of freedom. These impressions can be as comprehensive as the living, breathing worlds presented by Grand Theft Auto IV and The Elder Scrolls: Oblivion, to the more simplistic destructive backdrop of Just Cause 2. But what all these games have in common is their dedication to a genre of game known as ‘sandbox’. These types of games encourage the player to to express themselves, and therefore take on the player character as their own, by allowing them to move freely throughout a pre-made world. While the world might have some dos and don’ts based on its particular virtual reality (for example, TES:Oblivion does not allow you to run around and kill everyone in a town, while GTA IV practically encourages it), ultimately the player can do what they want within the bounds of these rules, while occasionally completing the objectives that contribute to a greater storyline and provide a linear plot for the player to engage in. It’s easy to see how, given an open world to what they want within, a player might easily be immersed in the narratives that they are able to create. For example, in GTA IV, it’s entirely possible to eschew a life of crime (between missions) and become a fire-fighter, or a pizza-boy, creating the personal narrative of a guy that wants to do the right thing but is forced into his circumstances. Or perhaps the player wants to become a mad, rampaging whirlwind of violence that fully embraces the shift towards the life of crime. Both of these are entirely possible within the architecture of the game.

I’m not going to bang on about freedom of interaction, as I’ve already gone on too long in this post, and it has kind of been covered to some extent in previous posts. Instead, I’m going to leave you with some questions:

Do you think that freedom in games is necessary for a player to truly ‘become’ his or her character?
Do you agree with the concept of personal narratives developed by moment to moment systemic interactions within a game? If so, have you got any examples to share?
How far do you think a game would have to go to be considered a good example of complete freedom? Do you think that such a game would even be a game any more, or are overall linear story arcs a necessity for the medium?
Do you have any other good examples of where developers have exploited the player’s sense of agency to create a memorable experience?

Thanks for reading, and we’ll wrap this up at the end of the week with some speculation on the future of storytelling and immersion in video games!

Cross-posted from Tooth Soup

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