Save the Robot – Chris Dahlen

This weekend, I took part in Michael Abbott’s post-GDC Brainy Gamer podcast, taping a session with Michael and the inimitable, endlessly fascinating Corvus Elrod. I’m honestly still recovering from the conference, and still digesting my notes. Most of my GDC coverage is at the Onion AV Club, where John Teti and I posted daily write-ups. There’s not a lot of spit and polish – we were filing these late every night – but I’m proud of all the stuff we covered and impressed by the interviews and other gets that John pulled in. But looking back over all of this, I see I don’t have a lot of “nutshell” conclusions on what I learned at GDC. So here’s one.

I predict 2009’s GDC will be a watershed moment in how we tell stories in games. And the biggest change will be the death of lengthy, pointless cutscenes.

In our part of the podcast, Corvus, Michael and I talk a great deal about Hideo Kojima and the notoriously long cutscenes in Metal Gear Solid 4. Those scenes, which run half an hour to an hour and a half, have become a running joke ever since the launch of the game; as Michael notes, during his keynote, Kojima almost seemed to anticipate sighs and grumbles from the audience every time he mentioned them. I’ll admit I still haven’t played this game and can’t attest to whether the cutscenes work. But as the jokes about this tactic grow and more and more pointed, I’m starting to feel like the industry has hit its breaking point.

- Cutscenes are boring, and many players skip them.

- Cutscenes are the antithesis of the interactive experience that games promise.

- Cutscenes cost time and money to produce. They may be an obligatory checklist item for AAA-games like Fracture, Vampire Rain, or Dark Sector, but nobody has ever explained to me why those games had to tell their thin stories in such an elaborate way.

- While games are often compared to movies, it’s an awkward fit: games are unlike movies in so many fundamental ways (and are really, so much more like music) that we should be questioning any attempt to jam “cinematic” or “movie-like” elements in games.

Margaret Robertson also made this point at her excellent talk (my write-up is in here; her PowerPoints are here), where she argued that games should learn to tell stories that are tinier, more cost-effective, and yet more engaging than the ones we’re getting now. For example, Space Invaders puts its entire story right in the title. Those two words tell you everything you need to know. And the story to Space Invaders beats the one in Fracture like a rented mule.

But plotting’s not the only issue. I also heard several great insights about characters. Robertson raised the old F. Scott Fitzgerald chestnut, “character = action”: your characters are defined by what they do (or in games, by what they can do). They’re not defined, or not best defined, by having other characters stand around for an hour talking about them. The history, the troubles, the ambiguous motives and the virtues of a character can all be expressed by what they do in the game. Half-Life 2 – which of course, has no cutscenes – nailed this with the character Alyx: one of the most affecting moments I’ve ever experienced in a game came in HL 2: Episode One, where she briefly broke down and lost control of her emotions, and then pulled herself back together and went back to fighting, and cracking bad jokes. The life she has spent on the run, fighting an overwhelming enemy, and watching her friends and family die, came across in a few seconds, and the fact that we didn’t linger on it – in fact, that we don’t see this side of her again for a while – makes it more powerful.

Even more importantly, however, characters aren’t there because we like them or relate to them. They should fill a need in the game’s mechanics. Clint Hocking and Ben Mattes spoke to this at a small Ubisoft presser/cocktail party Monday night, when they explained the thinking behind the buddy system in Far Cry 2 and Elika in Prince of Persia. In both cases, these non-player characters grew out of a specific gameplay need. In Far Cry 2, they were a resource to manage and to risk as you saw fit. They also had dramatic value – as you’ve seen if you reached the end of the game – but first and foremost, they were useful. The Prince of Persia had a similar reason to create Elika: she’s a save mechanism in the guise of a character, and the attachment players feel to her is a side benefit.

I liked the idea that these crucial story elements, and the emotional attachments they trigger, could stem completely from game mechanics. And it dovetails with my final takeaway on this topic: stories should be tiny. The plot of a game should not exceed the game’s mechanics, and those mechanics probably don’t call for much. Has any recent game told an interactive story better than Portal? There’s not much to it, but it fits the game perfectly. And the elements they don’t have time to explain are left intriguingly ambiguous.

When you think about it, games don’t even need the however-many plots that Shakespeare identified. Videogames really only have three stories:

- The player saves something
- The player survives something
- The player loses something (which is just the denial of success)

That’s it. Many deep, sophisticated emotions can emerge from those three plots. But they should emerge in the experience, in the actions the players take, in the reactions they receive, in gestures and decisions and deaths and tasks and achieving or failing to achieve a goal. They should not emerge from people sitting around talking to each other in a cartoon.