Wednesday, June 16, 2010

Tell Me a Story

When discussing games as an art form one of the most common critique is that games do not have the authorial control necessary for artistic expression. How can something tell a meaningful story when the reader gets to draw all over the pages in crayon? This idea strikes at the core of gaming as an art and more importantly at storytelling in general.

There are two main camps as far as authorial control goes. The first camp is the “Author Is Always Right” camp. This camp is built on thousands of years of storytelling in which authors tell stories to listeners. Books, Movies, Painting, Photography, Poetry, and all other art forms that predate the twentieth century work in this way and it works great. This form allows viewers to experience aesthetic pleasure and derive thoughtful lessons from authors. Its easy flexible and allows for smoother predictable creation and consumption. The second camp is the “Anyone Can Be An Artist” camp. This camp is based on the assumption that authors are not uniquely qualified to deliver meaning, that meanings are based on interpretation and personal reaction. Some Modern and Post-Modern art falls into this category, pieces that don’t have a distinct meaning and must be interpreted by viewers to have any merit.

Video Games come in both of these flavors, although they are seem fundamentally suited for the latter. Games usually have very guided authorships, they have writers and levels are constructed in a way to guide players where they need to go. These principles seem almost too obvious to be considered, but they are not necessary for a game. Some games discard these principles to varying degrees. Noby Noby Boy is a dramatic example in which the game contains very little authorial guidance. The player is a worm that is able to jump, stretch itself, and devour people and objects. There are no objectives or goals and nothing leads to a victory screen. This game is in a sense without an author. Now Noby Noby Boy won’t win any awards for inspiring grand revelations, but it does do something that only video games can do, it presents a space without guidance in which a player can create something. This is something that the ‘Author Camp’ does not believe has any value. But player involvement in content creation can actually have profound consequences and imbue stories that would be less meaningful with one author.

Recently Jason Rohrer released the game Sleep is Death (I’ll refer to it as Sid), a story telling game that required two players. One of the players is the director who controls objects, characters and backdrops; and the other is the player who moves his own character and chooses what to say. With a good director both players have a similar amount of control. Stories that are created in Sid are practically never as good as stories written by individual authors when read afterwards. Despite this fact though Sid stories have something that normal stories do not. During their creation the player is both receiving and creating the story, two people act as both creators and receivers. This results in a story that does not have one meaning for one person, but is rather a conglomeration of multiple meanings. Sid combines the two players prespectives into one strange storyteller after its all over, but other games allow the player to remain independent in their experience. Games like Left 4 Dead survive on stories that players tell their friends, the story is the player experience in the game. And that is a way of creating hundreds of thousands of stories without doing the grunt work. Gaming can create numerous artists in hundreds of genres, easily.

1 comment:

  1. I'm sure we will argue about this forever, but I can tell you're developing your theories pretty well.

    ReplyDelete