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First up is context.  Film provides a broad range of experience – from the non-narrative work of Koyaanisqatsi, through the short film made of still images La Jetee, to the massive blockbusters of Iron Man.  Novels are the same – from the epic poetry of Sharp Teeth, through the metatextual work of House of Leaves, to mainstream work like the Da Vinci Code.  Comics take us from the 4-colour world of Superman, through the stark, washed out textures of Jimmy Corrigan, to the allegorical Maus.

And games are the same, stretching from the purely mechanical experience of Tetris through games where the fiction is a backdrop for the mechanics, like Gears of War, to heavily narrative experiences like Dragon Age or Mass Effect.

These are all games though, and what I want to look at is the storytelling strengths of games compared to those other mediums.

When I was younger, I used to go on these caravan holidays with my family, and one of the small pleasures I had then was when I got my daily allowance and disappeared to the park’s grubby little arcade with the hope that they’d have a Star Wars arcade cabinet – and that nobody was using it.

It was my escape.   For as long as I could survive, I got to play at being Luke Skywalker flying through space, shooting down Tie Fighters, destroying the Death Star.

But, I grew up, I stopped going on those holidays, and that arcade game slipped into memory.

Until I went to the opening of the Game On Exhibition at ACMI, where they had a pristine cabinet just sitting there, bleeping out John William’s score, spilling green and red vector light out onto the floor, reminding me of the time I’d spent with it years ago.

So, why am I talking about this?  It’s because the personal experience I had with that game – through play, through identity, and through the moment to moment choices I made, are fundamental to how games deliver narrative, and to their unique storytelling strengths.

One useful way of thinking about story & narrative experiences (for game writers at least) is as a space, with the form you experience that space being a guided navigation of that.  The job of the individual form is to encourage you to explore – to find out what happens next, to dig into the subtext & themes, to empathise with the characters, to raise questions and push forward for them to be answered.

And in a lot of ways, this is the same process that we go through when we learn & play – we form a hypothesis about the rules of the world, we probe the world with that in mind, and then we integrate or reject our initial idea.

Which is mirrored in how we read and internalise narrative.  Stories, good stories, should surprise & engage you, putting you in free-fall, leading you along a trail of breadcrumbs that you can follow and integrate.  Every word you read, every panel you read, every frame of a film causes you to evaluate & re-evaluate the shape of the story you’re experiencing, and form the shape of the story out of that questioning, that learning, that playing.

What games do though, is make that process of play more overt.

One of the ways they do that is by encouraging the player to adopt identities.

Going back to Star Wars, everything in that game was designed to make you feel like you were Luke Skywalker destroying the Death Star.  It’s a game that kids had been playing for years before the game was available, but sitting in the arcade, you could immerse yourself in the feedback loop of the moment to moment choices of flying the X-Wing, shooting down Tie-Fighters, and shutting your computer down in the middle of the trench run.

In that cockpit, the player becomes the protagonist, with the same goals and the same level of freedom of choice as Luke in the movie.

If you speak to people about their experience playing games and what they did, it’s always of the form ‘I did this…’, never ‘The character did this…’

Choice is one of the fundamental forces in narrative.  Character want things and make choices to get them, and in doing so they exhibit agency in the world.  By having the player adopt the identity of an in-game character, games shift that sense of agency onto the player, having them make moment to moment choices within the rules of the game.   These choices manifest in different ways depending on the game, with some having limited effect on the narrative, and others causing grand changes in the shape of the story arcs.

The Star Wars arcade game has limited choices in narrative terms – fail or succeed – but moment to moment, you’re constantly reacting to incoming fire, the swarms of fighters, avoiding towers, all in a feedback loop of figuring out the rules of the world and how it works.

A game like Mass Effect by contrast has much larger choice.  Decisions you make in conversation, how you approach combat, and how you’ve chosen to roleplay your character, all affect the steps you take through the larger narrative, crafting a unique, personal, experience.

Different games use these fundamental components of play, identity, and choice in wildly different ways.

Osmos

Osmos is a game where the entirety of the mechanics are embedded in the fiction, and which encourages you to adopt the simpler identity of a cell floating in some space or liquid along with other cells.  You expel some of your mass to move, absorb things smaller than you, and can be absorbed by things larger than you.  Beyond that fiction, the game has no narrative elements at all.

Flower

Flower is a game that, at first glance, appears to be in the same vein as Osmos, but the way that the game’s goals have been constructed, and the presentation of the dull grey city during the game’s brief introductory cutscenes paint a story about the balance between nature and man-made technology, how they can live in harmony, but also how one can overpower the other.  In the simple shots of zooming in on the flower, the suggestion is made that the game is the flower’s dream, and in the taking on of that identity, the player follows the goals of opening up the other flowers and restoring colour to the world.

Batman: Arkham Asylum

A much clearer example of identity and how that shapes narrative and choices is the game Batman: Arkham Asylum, in which you play as Batman (which is cool!). Everything in the game, from the moment to moment gameplay choices, through how you move through the space, to what Batman wants as a protagonist, and to how the linear narrative plays out, is reflected in the player adopting that identity, while still allowing space for the player to express themselves and make choices.

Machinarium

Machinarium is another example of a game that encourages identity adoption of a narrative rather than a character. The player is encouraged to empathise with the character, but the game’s presentation distances the player from him, making control of him indirect.   Its narrative is also doled out piece by piece as you move through the world and solve puzzles. Failing to solve these puzzles stalls the narrative, and it’s only the desire to see what’s next in the story, and to help the little robot out, that keeps the player going.

Uncharted 2

Uncharted 2 (and it’s predecessor) is a narrative best described as a roller-coaster.  The narrative is linear, and the player moves through it at a proscribed pace, performing the necessary actions along the designed path.  While choice is non-existent in the story, and also limited in the mechanical elements, it succeeds in drawing the player through a challenging, surprising set of puzzles and a story full of interesting twists and turns populated with well drawn and acted characters.

Grand Theft Auto 4

Grand Theft Auto 4 is an example of a game where the player is put into a thematic space and allowed to explore the extents of that, both through the linear, twining plots of the multiple narratives, but also in the side-quests & open-world.  The game is an exploration of the immigrant experience, and everything is designed to support that – from watching the absurd shows on the television, to the hyper-bright lights of the entertainment district, to the missions where the character’s past catches up with him.

Grand Theft Auto is at its most interesting when the internal conflicts of the character are played out, putting what the game’s story & mechanics ask you to do – which is to steal & kill & run drugs – in conflict with Niko’s desire to build a better life for himself away from that.  To complete the game, the player has to undertake those missions, just as Niko has to in order to survive, but his questioning of them bleeds out into the player’s experience, causing them to question them too.

Mass Effect

Mass Effect, and its sequel, are examples of games where the player has much greater control over the shape of the story, both in terms of the moment to moment mechanics and the narrative choices. Players control conversations, choose how to approach situations, choose which missions to take in particular orders, and to craft a unique personal experience. However, while some of the details of the story are unique for each player, the key goals remain the same – destroy the Geth race, save the Citadel station. Within that space though, the amount of player choice & impact on the world is considerable – Mass Effect 2 has over 700 hooks into the choices made in the original story, from characters who died, to adverts for movies made of your exploits.

These concept of play, of identity, and choice are part of the fundamental strengths of games as a storytelling medium, one which we’re only just working out how to properly exploit.  All of these games encourage you to take on the identity of the protagonist, with varying degrees of agency, but an interesting question is raised when that sense of agency is questioned in the game itself.

Bioshock

Bioshock is a game that, at its core, is about agency, about a man’s ability to act in their own intersests & change the world.  Based on Ayn Rand’s philosophy, the player enters the underwater city of Rapture, built by the industrialist Andrew Ryan as a place, in his words, ‘where the artist would not fear the censor, where the scientist would not be bound by petty morality, where the great would not be constrained by the small.’

But it falls apart, because not everybody can be a captain of industry, or a great scientist, or a famous artist – somebody still needs to scrub the toilets.

It’s into this crumbling world that the player is dropped and from its earliest moments, encouraged to approach the city as they see fit, to choose how to move through the space, what weapons to use, which abilities (from pyrokinesis to controlling swarms of bugs) to focus on.  Everything the game does is to give the player a sense of agency for the first 3 or 4 hours of play.

And then it changes that.

It’s revealed that you were grown in a vat and hypnotically conditioned so that every time someone says anything with the phrase ‘would you kindly…’, you do what they tell you.  Suddenly, in flashbacks presented in the game, but also in the feelings of the player, you’re forced to reevaluate everything you’ve done in-game up to that point, and realise that the agency you felt had been a lie.

And that feeling is something you can only get from having spend that time in the game, making choices, feeling in control, piecing together the narrative and the mystery as you did.

This is the unique strength of video games because rather than empathising with a character in a novel or on a screen, you take on their goals and actions, and in response feel some of their successes and failures.  The experience of the game is a personal one, and so when games raise questions and choices, the responses reflect the player and, at their best, reveal something about you.

This’ll be different, and way more in-depth, than the 2-hour Express Media workshop later in the month.

And if you didn’t hear – we announced this year’s Freeplay festival too.

World Congress of Science and Factual Producers

On Friday December 4th, I took part in a speed-networking event at the World Congress of Science and Factual Producers.  What was interesting about this was being able to step away from the traditional pc/console space and think about new opportunities to use games and games technology.

In talking to the directors and producers, I had the thought that perhaps games were closer to documentary features than to narrative features.  The topics explored – happiness as a contagion that can be tracked using network theory, or a man who built his own 300-million search-and rescue empire – were built on the film-maker exploring the world, creating theories, and constructing the narrative as they go, which is a clear analogue for what players do in games.

Not to say that there isn’t room for narrative in games, but modelling gameplay & the reveal of narrative in more of a documentary style might prove to be a useful template.

Game Connect Asia Pacific

Or GCAP as it’s less mouthfully known, took place at Crown from December 6th – 8th.  I gave two presentations – one on games and games literacy (which was attended by only 5 people due to a last minute room change) and one on the creative process of writing and how that applies to games.  Due to meetings and general schmoozing (and also pulling together my writing presentation), I saw almost none of the conference itself (other than Tim Stellmach’s keynote & the indie games that I was judging), but came away with the overall impression that from an art & design perspective, the content was unfocused and weak – which is reflected in a single stream that contained all of the art, design, and audio talks.  As design is one of our local industry’s challenges, it would be nice to see an increased focus on it next year.

Details on the presentations after the fold.

Games and Games Literacy

This is a slightly modified version of a talk I gave at the VITTA conference last year on models of interacting with games in terms of their components as well as traditional literacy and numeracy skills.

“Today’s students have never seen a world without video games.  They’re an integral part of life now, becoming a new cultural artifact, a new entertainment medium, and bringing with them a whole slew of new employment opportunities.

But how do they work?  And what are the parameters for having a meaningful dialog about them with our students?

In this session, Paul Callaghan, a veteran game developer, will explore the elements that contribute to games literacy and how that can be applied to traditional literacy and numeracy skills.”

Presentation – GCAP – Games and Games Literacy

What does a writer do anyway?

Standing room only for this session, which was incredibly flattering.  Also set a new record for me – 60 slides in just under 50 minutes!

“Telling stories is an essential part of our cultural fabric, but in the face of a new medium, one in which mechanics, rules, and play are at the heart of the audience experience, we’re still learning how to work the thousands of years of accumulated knowledge in writing and storytelling to our best advantage.

An often-neglected discipline in video games, this session will look at the skills and craft that writers use when approaching storytelling, dialogue, structure, and characterisation, and how to apply those to video games without losing the particular strengths of the medium.  By dissecting the craft of writing, it will demonstrate the thought processes behind story creation, what does and doesn’t work within the medium of games, and why some of those boundaries exist.  It will also show how some of those core concepts are applicable to games without stories, informing mechanic, level, and systems design.

Looking to the future, the session will lastly speculate on the marriage of traditional narrative and mechanics, and the sorts of stories that can only be told in the medium of games by exploiting the fundamental gameplay forces of agency, choice, rules, and goals.”

To gather the numbers, I used metacritic‘s advanced search restricted to developers (here‘s an example using Torus) and hand-copied the results straight into a spreadsheet.

In some cases, where data wasn’t available on metacritic and there was more than one sku for the game, I used gamerankings.com for a representative value.

To select by ‘unique’ title versus ‘port’ in cases where there was more than one version (both Heroes of the Pacific and Heroes over Europe are good examples) I treated the highest rated version as the ‘unique’ and the other versions as ‘ports’ of that. All versions of Heroes of the Pacific rated 76% so it’s just a function of a sorting algorithm that I took the Xbox version as the original. In the case of Heroes over Europe, the PC version rated 66% compared to 64% on PS3 and 62% on Xbox 360 so that’s treated as the lead platform and the others as ports.

Because of the way metacritic gathers reviews & collates data, there are omissions, so if anyone has additional data, feel free to email it to me or post it in the comments and I’ll update it.

For more information on the second half – opportunities for independent developers – check out Simon Carless’ and David Edery’s presentations from Film Victoria‘s Digital Distribution Summit:

Simon Carless (from here)

Indie Game Metrics  – October 2009

Western Indie Game Trends

Digital Distribution Summit Video

David Edery

Digital Distribution Summit keynote

A more detailed breakdown of the numbers is below the fold…

The data was gathered from Metacritic for companies based in Melbourne.  There were 107 games released between 2000 & 2009, with an average rating of 62.82%, a minimum of 27% and a maximum of 93%

Since 2000, the number of SKUs released has increased from 3 in 2000 & 2001 to 18 in 2009, with a peak of 20 in 2007.

The nature of these titles has changed too, with most of the growth coming in the area of porting games across multiple platforms.  This has jumped from 2 titles in 2003 – 2005 to 13 in 2007 and 11 in 2009.

Broken down by platform, most of the titles shipped have been for the GBA (18), the Playstation 2 (20),and the Wii (16).  Next-gen consoles are poorly represented, with only 6 titles available on Xbox 360 and 2 on Playstation 3.

Looking at the breakdown by rating shows an almost bell-curve skewing slightly to the right.

Breaking down the ratings by year, reveals a downward trend of average ratings.  In 2000, the average rating was 81% with a minimum of 68%, a max of 93%, and a spread of 25.  In 2009, the average rating is 63%, with a minimum of 46%, a maximum of 76%, and a spread of 30.

The minimum rating is the one that has dropped most dramatically – from 68% in 2000 to 46% in 2009, with a minimum of 27% in 2007.  The maximum rating overall has dropped far less, but still tends slightly downwards – from 93% in 2000 to 76% in 2009.

Taking a look at just licensed titles, the overall trend is mirrored by the global average.  In 2000, the average rating for a licensed title was 81% and in 2009 is  58%.

Splitting this into minimum and maximum ratings, both are trending downwards.  In 2000, the minimum rating for a licensed title was 68% and in 2009 is 50%, with a minumum value of 35% in 2008.   in 2000, the maximum rating was 93% – also the global maximum – and is 70% in 2009.

Original titles, by comparison, have fared better.  The overall trend is fairly flat, although there are far fewer original titles – with none being released at all in 2000, 2001, 2002, and 2006.

Looking at the minimum and maximum, the lower values trend downwards slightly, but are also more erratic than for licensed titles.  In 2003, the minimum for an original title was 75% and in 2009 is 69, with a minimum of 38 in 2008.  The maximum rating for original titles has trended slightly upwards, with a maximum of 78% in 2003 and 76% in 2009, but with an overall maximum of 84% in 2007.

Looking at these values in aggregate, it can be seen that in years when original titles are released, they rate the same or higher than licensed titles.

So, what does all of this mean?

In the absence of other data (unit sales, profit, chart positions), it shows that in the core console & PC market, local developers have been producing more titles, but those titles have overall seen a drop in their critical reception.  There are any number of factors that are contributing to this and I’m not in a position to speculate on those.  What it does suggest though is that, as developers, we need to start thinking about alternatives to the current development model across all of the areas covered in my presentation – team structure, financial models, audience engagement, and creativity and innovation.

• I’m going to be talking at the Computer Games Boot Camp taking place at Monash in July.  The program should be up soon, but it’ll likely be a general ramble about my job as a writer with a little bit of workshopping thrown in to keep things interesting.
• I’ll also be talking at the ICT & Careers Expo on August 1st as part of VITTA’s ICT Week.  Looks like it’ll be an updated version of my talk from last year discussing my winding career path to where I am now – and the importance of playing games if you’re going to make them.
• Lastly, I’ll be doing a presentation at CAE‘s Writing for the Web class on August 4th about mechanics and expression, games on the web, and ARGs.