Story Machines: Games

Charlie Fletcher was part of the story creation for a car-driving game. When he walked into the design team's ideas room, he was startled to see the flowchart for gameplay written on sticky notes spread across a wall, and shocked further to find that intervals of gameplay (the two or three hours in which designers assume a player will be engaged in the game) were denoted with black stripes, indicating when designers believed the kiddies would shut off their consoles to do things like consume food, do homework, and converse with their givers of life. This was simply too much for Fletcher – that designers would speculate how long a child might be actively playing, and that it would potentially be a long enough chunk of their day to cut into time they could be using to develop their narrative self through the written word.

Thankfully, Fletcher has the self-awareness to acknowledge that his bias as a parent could be tainting his idea of video-games within the human narrative experience. That is where Steven Poole, Trevor Byrne and Naomi Fletcher come in: we are invited to watch as three gaming/tech writers, and video-game players themselves, argue the benefits and detriments of video-games being a regular part of young adult life, and how games may or may not fulfill the same function as, say, novels or film.

However promising a set-up, there is still something nagging about what Fletcher explained in his introduction. Luckily, Poole, author of Trigger Happy and Unspeak, is quick to address it: “There is no way to narrativise driving round a track,” and while sadly neglecting to ask just what type of studio would lay out their game-flow in any kind of meaningful way with sticky notes, he continues with a praise of the communal game-playing experience -- for example, when Modern Warfare 2 is played with friends, either over Xbox Live or on the same sofa, the experience becomes something similar to any game which requires analytic thinking, and resembles almost nothing to the idea we may have of some solitary figure in their room gleefully shooting Russians while trying to avoid choking on Jaffa Cakes.

Alderman, a Guardian contributor and games writer, seems thoroughly convinced that games have every potential of providing meaningful stories, explaining: “I've never seen a game that's moved me as much as a novel, but I don't think it's impossible.” An area of focus for Alderman is Shadow of the Colossus, a game with an ethical calibration utterly different from the 'hero vs villain' model that perhaps gives game narrative its reputation for laziness; we are given virtually no background story in Shadow, but our hero must kill a series of magnificent god-like creatures in order to restore life to a mysterious girl. The innocence of the colossi and the player's own ethical ambiguity become increasingly pronounced, and, most unusual for an action-adventure game, a surmounting dread makes clear to the player that theirs will be neither a heroic nor happy ending.

Alderman is quick to illustrate games' limitless potential further by positing a world in which video-games came about decades before the medium of film. "We'd find film-watching atrociously passive," she explains. Indeed, it seems all too real to imagine parents decrying the act of sitting and watching figures on a screen, without the intellectual activity of taking part in any of it.

When Fletcher returns to his fears about a story-less society permanently 'plugged into' their virtual worlds (to his credit, he cites Larry Niven  rather than the Wachowski brothers as inspiring his fears) our discussion of video-games disintegrates into one of cognition, literature, and religion. If we've gone off-topic, no one seems to mind. It seems fear of technology is intrinsically linked to fear of loss of art. But for our panel, the distinction between the technology in question and art is ambiguous at best.

It is the circularity of our ideas of entertainment, narration, activity and passivity that make the discussion in Charlotte Square of immense value -- rather than the draw to nerd-on-nerd bickering that may have brought in the substantial crowd. “Stories and narrative pre-existed literature,” Ghosts and Lightning author Trevor Byrne states -- something quiet, perhaps profound, that we are certainly relieved to be reminded of.