I’ve been working for a while to identify components of games that make them great. By that, I mean that they are fun to play (or otherwise engaging for the player). I wrote about a year ago about verisimilitude, the feeling that you are actually doing the action that are occurring on the screen, whether through excellent simulation or through a special control, etc. Rock Band and Guitar Hero do this through specialized controllers; Wii Sport and Wii Play through specialized movements of the controller; other games achieve it through interesting (yet accessible) controls.
Today, I want to talk about a similar idea, which I’m calling congruency. The first thing to understand is that in the viewing of any media, there are two stories being crafted in the mind of the viewer: the first is the story that the media conveys, the second is the story of the viewer viewing the media.
In more concrete terms, Girl and I watched Being There this weekend, which is the story of a simple, television-obsessed gardener who becomes much more (or perhaps always was). During the movie, my wife got interested, walked away from her work and sat and watched it with us. We talked a little through the movie, mainly me describing the context of some of the events — among other things pointing out how pervasive television is in the movie, which is important because today tv’s are that pervasive (but weren’t then, or how rare it was — at the time — to have a television remote.)
And there you have it: two stories. The movie’s story (which I’ve only touched on briefly), and the story of how we watched it. Neither are very developed here, but there’s enough to recognize as story. Often in real life, the “story of how you watched it” isn’t very compelling, althought sometimes it can be much more compelling than the movies’ story. This isn’t a new idea, of course, we bring context in the form of who we are and what we’re doing to any piece of art that we interact with. What I’m saying is that experience forms for us a unique story, separate from but involved with the media itself.
This is incredibly important with games. The relative values of the game narrative and the player’s story are vastly different than the relation between those, say, of a novel and the reader, or of a movie and the viewer. While verisimilitude often has the player’s and avatar’s actions being in sync, congruency is about synchronizing the story paths. Congruency isn’t necessarily about matching motivations, but on matching the actions that fulfill those motivations. My personal feeling about this (as I consider this topic) is that the closer the player’s motivation is to that of the character, the more involved the player is with the narrative.
For instance, I was playing a game, one of the many similar console RPGs, where a loud noise is heard off-screen. The character wanted to explore because he knew his sister/father/brother was inside, and possibly hurt. I wanted to explore because I wondered what had happened. I wasn’t really concerned about the character’s family, just what had happened. In a similar, but contrary, example, the first time I finished Ico, I never considered not going back in to save Yordla. It might have been a choice to walk away from the game at that point — now that I was safely outside the castle. But neither I nor Ico wanted that — we had to go in and save her.
One advantage of incorporating congruency is that it serves to clue the player into what needs to happen next, without forcing them down a particular path. If the motivation is strong enough, they might work through the story with an intensity proportional to the in game narrative. Many, many, many games get this wrong. How many times have you been deep in the evil lord’s lair, about ready to go take on him (or his series of bosses), and you think, “Well it was hard to fight our way in here, but now that we’re here, we need some more healing gear, and maybe a few levels, oh, and there’s that mini game we never quite completed, let’s go do that now. I mean, I need it to get the Uber-sword of Badguy Slaying (the one that’s bigger than I am), anyway.” So you leave the midst of the huge ongoing battle, and spend a few days or weeks or whatever it takes, catching butterflies, or racing Chocobos or grinding monsters until you’re finally ready to face down that boss.
Yes, finishing the final fight ends the game, but in this case the problem isn’t that the players want to play your game more, but that the rewards the player gets by playing the game are completely out of sync with the narrative of the game. You can see this in just about every console RPG : the gameplay of fighting, and — more importantly — micromanaging your heroes level acquisition, gear, and collections has nothing to do with the characters motivations of saving the world, stopping the badguy, and generally being all heroic and stuff.
One of the reasons I mentioned Ico earlier is that it manages to get me into the narrative — the story of the lost boy who must escape or die and the girl who is his companion — without there being very much narrative at all. I have to had Yordla to save my game, and to progress through the first half of the game (you eventually get a sword that mimics her door opening powers), yet you spent the better part of the game saving her from enemies that appear whenever she is alone, or we first step into an area. In a lesser game she would be annoying, but here you — the player — want to save her.
Congruency is interesting to me, because it’s the carrot method of the game designers’ toolkit. It’s the way of making the player make the choices you want him to make by making him want to go that way. I’ve used it in my pen and paper games (where it is much easier to implement, of course) and it works really well.
I once told a friend the old saw about herding developers being like trying to herd cats. He just said that cats were easy to herd: all you need was a can of cat food. Developers, gamers, and cats don’t like to be told where to go, but they will go right where you want them to, if you put something there they think they want. This already happens with games, but in those with a strong narrative, congruency can offer a method to make for a deeper, more satisfying experience that is less dissonant for the player.
I don’t remember where I read it. In one of several (or perhaps in several of several) novel writing books that I’ve read over the past year. There’s lots of advice out there, but one of the oft repeated bits is that you have to make the hero’s quest personal. Several games do this, but most don’t even bother. It’s important, though, in getting the player to care about what is happening.
I want to talk about two games today that probably no one else will compare directly. The only things they have in common are that they are both XBox 360 games, that I rented both from GameFly, and I played one immediately after the other. This, and expectations of the quality games, has strongly impacted how I feel about the games. And here, if there’s one thing we really care about, it’s about how we feel about things. There can be little doubt that games engender emotions in us, just as story does, which is what makes them both powerful to the human psyche.