Flawless Victory (And How to Avoid It)

Some Thoughts on Dramatic Narratives in Linear Action-Adventure Games

The following was written for The Game Narrative Kaleidoscope, an excellent anthology of essays on video game narrative design, collated by Jon Ingold of Inkle Studios.

Compelling drama requires loss – loss of identity, loss of faith, loss of hope, loss of love, direction, power, humanity. I could go on but you’ll have fun adding your own examples. The point is, drama works best when it’s about people losing what sustains them, yet enduring nonetheless. I can’t go on, I’ll go on.

By contrast, traditional game-playing requires gain in pursuit of success. This is obvious in tabletop games – Chess, Go, Backgammon, Poker, Monopoly – where every decision is judged on its efficacy towards a final triumph. Though complicated, this largely holds true in today’s more nuanced action-adventure games: we defeat bosses, we solve puzzles, we clear dungeons, we assassinate targets. And we do these things by mastering a narrow set of affordances in pursuit of an explicit goal.

The tension between the needs of drama and the needs of game-playing – between winning and losing – is fraught with hazards and possibilities that don’t often surface in other storytelling modes. In a work of prose, I can be quite aimless, sketching a character, positioning her in a setting, imbuing her with specific desires, and like a Deist god, winding her up and letting her go. We’ll see where her behavior takes her and delight in her evolution. She will struggle in pursuit of something, but winning is rarely the point.

Writing dramatic narratives for linear action-adventure games adds a prickly element to this process: the need to manage winning and losing simultaneously. If personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures, writes F. Scott Fitzgerald, what must we say of characters whose dominant gestures are running, jumping, shooting, stealthing, and healing their way to victory? That they are diligent? Vigorous? Motivated? How trite. When the intercessionist God says Jump or Shoot, our intrepid hero will do so, always on a velocity towards success. The drama that emerges is sportive, as if we were watching a basketball game or a boxing match. But when we are the only player in the game, then we are the only possible winner, and dramatic outcomes are limited.

In my early days as a game writer, I assumed that the ludic expressions of a hero’s personality must also be the source of her strength as a character. But this quickly leads to boredom. Drama demands unpredictable outcomes, wrung from the clash of motivated personalities. When I watch Succession, I have no guarantee that my favorite characters’ behavior will guide them to their desired outcome. Perversely, I hope it won’t! Dramatic interest comes from observing the friction of needy characters in conflict. But when the outcome of a game’s narrative is equivalent to the outcome of its gameplay objective, the possibility of true drama – of losing yet enduring – is vastly reduced.

Link must kill Ganon. Mario must rescue Princess Peach. (I’ll stick with easy examples to avoid picking on more narratively ambitious games.) In these titles, the mechanical objective is identical to the core narrative conflict. What kind of drama is possible in such cases? For these protagonists there is no opportunity for true loss on a direct path to their goal. Friends may die and innocents may suffer along the way, but their progression as a character is unidirectional, in service of winning. Some games attempt to correct this weakness by giving the hero petulant character traits. But this does not solve the underlying fact that they will succeed at their objective. Link will eventually kill Ganon because this was the promised gameplay victory. If he does not, we’ll have been cheated, an arbitrary theft of the final challenge.

So how do we make space for authentic drama in these linear, mechanically heavy experiences? One approach is to work against our instincts and treat our characters’ abilities as their most selfish traits, not their best. Give them narrative goals they cannot achieve directly through gameplay, yet let them try. Amplify their flaws through interactivity. Revel in their abilities, even as they get in the way of what the character truly needs. How easy it would be to write a game about a gambler ruining his social life by excelling at poker. Playing the game must ignite the drama, not resolve it.

Wander in Shadow of the Colossus is singularly determined to kill sixteen colossi in order to resurrect a mysterious woman, in spite of mounting evidence that doing so will unleash an unstoppable evil. As players, we pursue the goal as a matter of plotting, ever mindful that the drama may get out of hand. Success in gameplay may cause bigger problems.

Jesper Juul calls this tragic complicity. A good observation, but tragedy is not required. The drama of Red Dead Redemption’s story does not derive from its tragic ending, but lies in the constant understanding that John Marston’s actions as a bounty-hunting cowboy cannot directly earn him the finale he desires – to settle down with his family. Here the gameplay is perpendicular to the dramatic development, not parallel to it. The same applies to games like Papers Please and The Last of Us, in which the player-character’s abilities are a complicating factor in the drama, not the antidote to it.

In Assassin’s Creed 4: Black Flag, a story I wrote, Edward Kenway is a lowly Welshman, who takes to the sea with the hope of proving to his wife that he is a man of quality, capable of being a good husband and perhaps father. The pirate fantasy that undergirds the game – the very reason for playing it – is Edward’s crutch, his distraction. So long as he enjoys the pirate’s life, he will not achieve what he needs. But this is not a matter of “not playing is the only way to win” because not being a pirate would only send him back to Swansea with nothing, a diminished man. Growth is required. A friction between what is possible and what is necessary. The lure of Edward’s piracy loop, the promise of treasure, the call of the open sea, is where Edward’s adventure begins. But his home is elsewhere, and it must be earned.