I was working on today’s essay when I discovered that I couldn’t link to an older article that expounded slightly on some of the ideas that I want to develop. The article is only two years old, but has already disappeared off the internet. Thankfully, I was the one who posted it, and it still sits on the lovely SarahBellum in a database we never deleted. (It seems that the original content of CoTT was wiped by a later WordPress install. There are some good posts there, and they will be migrated over as time allows.)

We here at Cult of the Turtle come from a long line of packrats, and we’re particularly packratish about data. As we are also down one in the posting game, failing to write on Friday, we decided to post it here, unedited and without comment.

Story, Conflict, and Gaming

Oringally postest July 31, 2006

John Sutherland at Gamasutra writes an interesting piece entitled What Every Game Developer Needs to Know about Story. While he makes some valid points about story equaling conflict, I think he focuses his examples to clearly on movies which lack decent story and games which have the same problem. This really hurts his analysis, and weakens his article significantly.

A lot of what he says is basic information about story which you will find in any good book about structure (be it for short stories, novels, or screenplays): There are three kinds of conflict: Internal, Interpersonal, and External. Those terms are a little misleading, which is probably why my English teachers all called them Man vs Himself, Man vs Man, and Man vs Nature. Any good story will focus on one these, and some forms of media do better at one kind or another.

He talks about four main types of media: Novels, Plays, Movies, and Games, in an effort to see where games fit into the mix. Novels, he says, are best when they focus on internal (Man vs Himself) conflict; Plays when they focus on Interpersonal (Man vs Man) conflict; and Movies — and Games — when focused on External (Man vs Nature) conflict.

I understand his point, while thinking it is very oversimplified. Novels, especially the ones written in what is called the “limited omniscient” point-of-view, are excellent ant showing internal struggle. Internal struggle, though, has to happen for a story to proceed: the hero must grow through his conflict, and this is accomplished through internal struggle. However, Internal struggle is hard to do in plays — but it is done — Hamlet’s soliloquy being one classic example. Movie goers won’t really settle for this though, so it plays out in action and dialog with other people — in other words, we see through the other forms of conflict the change that happens in the character.

While movies are excellent at showing external conflict — no genre is better than this than the action movie — the quality movies, the ones that drive people emotionally know that it is Interpersonal conflict that is the most important. It’s why the Love Interest is so important in an action movie, and why there are plenty of movies out there that have little or no conflict against the environment (like a large chunk of the Romantic Comedy genre.

The issue here is stakes. It’s what the Hero is fighting for, and must be important enough for the audience to care about. Too many people — and way too many games — think that the bigger the stakes, the more important. Bigness isn’t the key here. Too many games are about saving the world (and how many action movies?) Someone told me once that the most important thing I needed to know about the Alien movie was that the kitten survives. Not that the alien is stopped, or that anyone in the crew makes it — it was the helpless, innocent kitten that mattered.

This is vitally important to the design of games. Most of us aren’t Italian Plumbers, Fanatical Hitmen, or Swashbuckling Persian Princes. We don’t really understand their concerns as what they are — what we care about are the real human commonalities that these heroes (or anti-heroes) face. Will they be reunited/find love? Will they be able to clear their good name? Will they be able to reconnect with their loved ones, or at least save them before the end?

The key go good story then, is engaging the reader/viewer/player’s emotions in the conflict that is going on. They have to care about the stakes of the hero. In terms of games, it means that the player has to care enough about the stakes to play through the game and live through the story of how the Hero (played by the player) succeeds at overcoming the conflict.

Prince of Persia : The Sands of Time is one of the best examples of this in recent memory. Especially recent for me, since I finished it two nights ago. The initial stakes are earth-shattering for our hero: he has been tricked into unleashing a horror which destroyed his father, and everything he held dear. Only three people survived it — the Prince himself, the Vizier who tricked him, and a mysterious girl we know only as the daughter of a defeated king. He follows her and a new, important stake is added — do we trust the girl with whom the Prince is in love, or not? Will she fall in love with the prince? Suddenly it isn’t a question of whether the Prince will succeed — but whether the two of them can find a way to succeed together.

Prince of Persia is a fairly canonical platform game at a time when few are being produced. It has lots of traditional jumping puzzles, special moves which the Prince has, and the Dagger of Time which has the interesting mechanic of allowing you to say “Oops! I need a do-over!” It’s a fairly forgiving platform game — rarely stuck completely and even then given hints to solutions via visions the Prince has when you reach a savepoint. Fara, the female love interest, is an uncontrollable character who helps you solve puzzles, and aids in combat (although she needs to be protected, she’s fairly good at doing it herself).

As a player, you value her presence: there are terrain features that only she can traverse (which she usually does as soon as you see one); her help in fights is considerable, especially against monsters which are particularly hard to deal with in sword play (Many times she would shoot a monster before they’d do an unblockable attack, letting me dispatch them); and occasionally she gives you advice about solving a puzzle — because she can “see” something you cannot.

Most of the story between them is played out through dialog, and very short almost non-existent cut-scenes. The dialog just happens while you are working your way through the environment, she calls out to you at one point to read a love poem while the player/Prince is busy solving a light and mirrors puzzle. The Prince reacts disdainfully to this, but when he is alone and the two are separated he talks to himself. “Does she really love me? Could it be true?” all while jumping back and forth between two walls.

Then the prince starts getting some disturbing visions of her betraying him. I found that there was an emotional gulf between the Prince and myself: as he grew to distrust her, I grew to trust her more. She finally earns his trust and then, seemingly, betrays him. He is steadfast, but I the old gamer, have lost my trust — the Prince and I have both had emotional reversals. I cared about what happened at the end, and the last 20% of the game pushed me through it as quickly as I could over come the External conflicts.

I didn’t care about the external conflicts, though. The terrain and monsters were just obstacles to overcome so I could resolve the interpersonal conflict: did she love me/the prince, had she betrayed us? How did it all come out?

It was that conflict that drove me to the game’s end, that made the story engaging and satisfying. Any video game is going to have external conflict — it’s the meat of the genre, where you, or your avatar, are overcoming obstacles in the game world. A game with a strong story needs to give players a reason to continue, a reason to fight and overcome those obstacles — an emotional reason with stakes that are important to the character, and which resonate with the player on a human level.