So I feel I’m at a good point to
start in on that “Explanation” portion of my blog’s banner (although I think "rambling" would be more accurate for this first post). A bunch of people
have been coming to me asking questions about video games and how they’re
approached. I’m starting up my project for next year, and it’s going to be a
video game rather than a film, and since I’m starting up on that and doing a
ton of research on game design, I thought I would share some thoughts.
CalArts isn’t exactly known for its
video games, but it IS known very well for its stories. CalArts students are
well known for our clever approaches to story, and having been around the
school for a couple of years I’ve seen a lot of those being told. Those have
all been films, however. I will be attempting to focus that CalArts creative
energy into a slightly different direction.
The Process
As I’m easing into production of my
game, I’m realizing quickly just how different films and video games are at
very fundamental levels. In a film you tell a story based on cinematic angles
chosen to best convey specific thoughts, feelings, or ideas. You draw a series
of images based on a vast array of rules and such that have been proven to work
over years and years of trial and error. Video games have only really been
around since the 80s (yes, I know that games started more in the 50s and 60s,
but things didn’t get really serious until the 80s), so there aren’t a whole
heck of a lot of firm rules about their creation, and even fewer about telling
stories in games since so few people have really gotten that right.
Beyond that, the fundamental building
blocks of story in a game are very different from in a film. In a film you see
the main character and the story that unfolds around them all taking place in choreographed
scenes. The camera tags along with the protagonist or whatever combination of
cohorts best suit the telling of the story, and you get a very linear narrative
played out in front of you. In games, the approach is entirely different, the
main character isn’t someone you will ever meet or know anything about and yet
you somehow have to manage to convince them to play out your story exactly the
way you think is best.
The way you do that is with clever
design tricks and gameplay mechanics. When you’re telling a story in a film,
particularly an animated film, you start off the process with a series of drawings
called story boards. These story boards convey the camera angles you want to
use to best showcase the actions and reactions taking place on the screen. The
problem is that video games don’t always use cameras that show anything other
than the back or top of a character’s head. In fact, the few times that games
do try to be cinematic, they end up being watered down crap. There are
exceptions, of course, games like Dishonored, Shadow of the Colossus, Half
Life2, and many many others all use cinematic staging to make particularly
notable scenes really pop out at the player, but they do so in extreme
moderation. The point is, you can’t just set up a series of camera placements
and expect a game to be playable from those angles, so you have to approach
things a little differently.
Telling the Story
The key concept you have to
understand in telling a video game story, to my mind, is the level design. Good
level design is like good cinematic staging in that it will present the
information most important to your game in the most efficient possible way. Legend
of Zelda: Ocarina of Time is a particular favorite of mine when it comes to
story-telling, because its level design conveys everything you need to know
about what the character is feeling without that character ever once having to
open his mouth to speak. When you’re first placed in a dungeon as a child, the
environment is frightening. The walls are covered with spiders and there are
many barriers you have to break down in order to find the strength to keep
going. Once you DO make it through that dungeon you’re thrust out into the
world, and it’s HUGE! An enormous expanse of open field awaits you outside of
Kokiri Forest. Eventually you go through a few dungeons and you’re confronted
with the master sword. Picking it up, you awake as an adult into a confusing
world that seems to have fallen apart in the blink of an eye. The first thing
you see is horrifying group of walking, screeching corpses shambling through
castle town, further reinforcing that horror. The first dungeon you experience
as an adult is a twisted mockery of the tranquil forest it resides within, a
building filled with disorienting passageways, confusing block puzzles, and the
literal ghosts of the past haunting you. The final boss of that dungeon is even
a twisted memory of the person who did all of this to you!
What Ocarina of Time does best is
telling you the story by allowing you to experience it. Rather than trying to
convey the main character’s feelings by stating them in words, as a book would
do, or with acting as a film would do, Nintendo decides to cause the player to
feel those emotions instead, effectively making the player at home an avatar of
Link rather than the other way around. This is a type of story-telling that is
distinctly video game from the ground up, and it’s something I've been trying
to keep in mind as I go through the process of writing my game.
As I worked on my film this year,
my teachers were very adamant about making “beat boards” or drawings that represented
the major plot points that happen within the story. These don’t need to be the
exact shots you want to eventually use, but they should convey the same sorts
of information, just in a much more condensed way. Well in video games you don’t
go through the process of story boarding at all, so you have to approach the “beat
boards” with even more emphasis (though drawing them is entirely optional in
this case). What are the major events that happen to your character? How do
they react to these events on an emotional level? Why? These questions will
help you tie these things into your level design and will cause your player to
feel more attached to your character.
Pacing
Another difference is the pacing of
the story being told. In a film your story moves in a slow arc progressing from
the initial stages of laying out the plot of the film, and eventually leading
to a climax as those events all come to a boiling point. This is the same story
structure as is found in books or plays, so it’s a formula known very well. In games
you have a similar overall pacing arc to deal with, but you have another set of
arcs you have to include as well. In a game your player is going to be involved
for a very long time. Most movies are 2 hours long, most games approach closer
to 40. In order to keep attention for that long, you have to set up a series of
smaller climactic events that lead up to the major conflict of the story. In
many games, these arcs take the form of dungeons and boss battles. In a lot of
recent games, people have been questioning the need for boss battles. In Deus
Ex: Human Revolution, you are given the ability to craft a character whose
talents are suited to whatever among a series of skills you feel is most
important. Personally, I made my character excellent at sneaking around undetected
and setting off explosives when things fell apart. Unfortunately, the makers of
this game didn’t take that into account and they forced us into boss battles
against foes balanced to take down combat-oriented characters. For squishy
characters like the one I built, we had a very difficult time of things indeed.
In this game, the bosses felt unnecessary to the overall flow, and it would
have been better served by another form of climax. Because of games like this,
players have started to question those boss battles and demand other approaches
to pacing. Games like Dark Souls solve this problem by putting bosses
intermittently throughout a level. In some levels you find the boss at the very
end, in a very traditional place for a boss to pop up and slaughter you. In
other places, however, you’ll turn a random corner and be confronted with a
demonic knight glowing with red energy. Games like Mercenary Kings solve the
pacing issue by giving the player a series of tasks instead of specific levels.
As you go through the game, you revisit the same level many times, but each
time you’re approaching it for a very different reason. Some times that reason
is a boss battle, but other times it’s just to collect some materials you need,
or shut down a power station, or any number of other tasks.
Each of these approaches places a different sort of arc inside of the larger one defining the story as a whole. They act sort of like the chapters in a book, but usually with a more distinct rising action, climax, and resolution. There are as many ways of
approaching pacing in a game as there are stories to tell, and so long as it
works out in the end you’re free to do as you wish. You cling loosely to the
arc you find in a film or book, but the extended time investment required to
play a game requires that you shake things up a bit.
The End
Basically, what I’m discovering
through the process of writing my story and generally thinking through the
first parts of making a game is that while there are a lot of similarities between
video games and film, the approaches you take towards those similar processes
are worlds different. It’ll be interesting to see if I manage to pull this off
despite a complete lack of formal education directly related to game design.
