todd

Tale wagging the Dog...

This may sound at first like a gamer rant, and perhaps it might be, but I think there's something to say about how story and plot can and should fit into interactive media such as electronic games. I may sound like a 16-year old at some points, but hey, it's summer.

A lot of the games I've played recently, mostly falling under the "Action/Adventure" category, have had a lot of things in common. I'm talking about games like Devil May Cry, Eternal Darkness, and a number of single player games of that sort.

The rhythm goes as such: Fight a bunch of guys for a few minutes, then spend the better part of an hour running, backtracking, and solving a "puzzle" that mostly involves finding a key and the door it goes to. You may also be treated to a cinematic or other sort of delaying mechanism that slows or halts actual gameplay.

My favorite part is when is asks you if you want to use a certain item ("Do you want to use the dresser key on the dresser? A = Yes, B = No)...I've never found a reason to say "no" in such circumstances. No, never.

Well, hardly ever.

So here I was one weekend, listening to loud music and playing Devil May Cry, when I wondered why I was forced to find some gem ("gems" are console game language for "keys", in that they can open doors, somehow) instead of fighting monsters and doing backflips all Matrix style as the DVD-rom switched from its ambient baroque music to rock/techno.

Then it hit me.

It may have been the changes in music that led to the epiphany, but here goes:

Games (good games, anyway) are not movies that are held hostage by gameplay, as some would assert. In fact, many are quite the opposite (my emphasis).

Games, specifically modern adventure games, are held hostage by their own story, as well as "lulls" that come from doing rote scavenger hunts between combats and boss encounters. This is not just a sick joke, it's probably, at some level, necessary.

Think about it. Your typical Best Buy off-the-shelf RPG/Adventure game is supposed to last 40 hours. Very few people could play a zombie/alien/nazi/zombie-alien-nazi combat non-stop for that length of time with no rest whatsoever. Even if they could, they'd be numb to it by the end.

The idea is that the action heavy sequences are not diminished, but enhanced by the breaks in gameplay. Your typical movie plot requires similar breaks. You can't really have a 90 minute climax (though heaven knows people have tried).

If you want to sound cynical about it: The boring parts make you appreciate the good parts even more.

Or for those you you who took a certain Saturday course: The Law of Contrast and Affinity.

In video games there are exceptions to this phenomenon, although it tends to apply most to plot-heavy games. Genres like shooters, for instance, which do require near-non stop attention, usually find the inclusion of a plot almost insulting. You're really more worried about things like scores and survival at a basic fight-or-flight level.

There are, of course, exceptions to all of these. But the idea of regulating gameplay intensity, to better the experience of both plot and gameplay itself, seems interesting and I wonder if these were the actual motivations behind the designers of the games I mentioned.

Either that or they may find wandering around every square inch of a 3D enviornment looking for a missing door handle as exciting as executing a series of kung-fu moves in a room full of acrobatic zombies.

People are like that sometimes.