I've been playing the facebook app game "Packrat" (copyright Alamofire Digital Collectibles) for over a year now. It's an addicting little sucker - a collectible card game wherein you use in-game credits to purchase cards from stores, or use cards you already have to steal new ones from other people. The cards belong to various themed sets, and each card has a point value. Low-level cards from the same set can be combined to form higher-level cards from that set (which, most of the time, cannot be gotten in any other way), and the object is to collect all the cards from a given set and "vault" them so that they can no longer be stolen from you. It can be played with or without active friends playing the game, although as with most facebook apps, there is a bonus for getting friends to join.
I didn't start thinking about Packrat as a form of narrative until recently - perhaps because they've only just started using it as such in a more blatant fashion. It's not direct, obvious narrative like you'd find in a novel or a movie, but much more subtle. It arises from the nature of the card sets, and how they're designed. Allow me to explain via example. The following is one of the current sets of cards, "The Razor's Plunder," and the cards required to make each card:
Base Cards:
Pickaxe
Shovel
Treasure Map Fragment
Metal Detector
Trail of Treasure
Iron Heart (a sort of steampunk engine)
Stone of Fortune
Marked Palm Tree
Unfortunate Treasure Hunter (a skeleton)
Built Cards:
Captain's Gig: Iron Heart x3
Treasure Cave: Metal Detector, Marked Palm, Unfortunate Treasure Hunter
Captain Auger Confrontation (a fearsome-looking pirate with a sword): Treasure Map Fragment, Trail of Treasure, Stone of Fortune
Converted Cutlass Arm: Pickaxe, Shovel, Iron Heart
Swashbuckling!: Treasure Cave, Captain Augur Confrontation, Converted Cutlass Arm
The Razor Triumphant (the Captain with a handful of gold): Swashbuckling! x2, Captain's Gig
Consider the direction in which these card combinations leads the mind. Like a connect-the-dot drawing, the makers of Packrat lay out a few key points along the way to allow the player to construct a narrative of swashbuckling pirates, hastily assembled mechanical limbs, and a struggle over hidden treasure. The details of the narrative may differ from player to player as they construct it in their minds, but the essential plotted course is there.
"The Razor's Plunder" is not the only Packrat set with an implicit narrative. Recently released sets include an "Independence Day" set wherein you make Ben Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, and John Hancock, and combine them to form the Declaration of Independence. "Ink Wars" told the story of two rival tattoo parlors, one upscale and one rundown and sketchy, and the tattoos produced by each. Currently in progress is an "Ants & Grasshoppers" set, which seems to be a slightly revised version of the classic tale about work and procrastination. (The high card in that set is called "Bug Summit," and seems to be a meeting between the emperor of the grasshoppers and the queen of the ants.)
Packrat is an interesting example of a non-traditional narrative - but one nonetheless clearly intended by the game's creators. The combinations within each set are clearly intended to evoke some very specific images and causal relations. But the narrative itself - including its timeline - must be literally constructed by the player from these building blocks. It's a good reminder that our current models of narrative are not all-inclusive, and that it is still possible to think of storytelling in new, and entirely radical ways.
Showing posts with label narrative structure. Show all posts
Showing posts with label narrative structure. Show all posts
Saturday, August 22, 2009
Thursday, March 12, 2009
Required Playing: Eternal Darkness
Silicon Knights. 2002. Eternal Darkness: Sanity's Requiem. Nintendo GameCube. Nintendo.
Reading a description of the plot of Eternal Darkness might not give you the greatest confidence about the game's innovation; the plot reads more or less like a cheap Lovecraft ripoff. When I played it the first time, I was looking specifically at its "fourth wall"-breaking elements. I was not expecting to be completely blown away by the narrative structure. Since I played it, it has become my opinion that this game should be required playing for anyone discussing narrative in video games - its narrative structure is one of the most unique and well-designed that I have ever seen in a video game.
Eternal Darkness goes like this: a young girl named Alexandra is told that her grandfather has been murdered, and goes to his house to find out what happened. There she discovers a mysterious book - the Tome of Eternal Darkness - containing a legend about the Elder Gods, each of whom is trying to come into our world and take it over. The legend also tells of one of the God's undead servants, a former Roman soldier called Pious Augustus. While reading, Alex notices that most of the book is missing - it seems to have been removed. She inspects the house to find the other chapters.
The first chapter features a young woman in an ancient temple, bearing the very same book. At this point, however, the legend is all the book contains. As the young woman progresses through her journey, she writes down her experiences within the book. At the end of her life, she finds herself trapped within the temple.
As she has finished reading, we return to Alex in her grandfather's study. We now have all the information that the young woman in the chapter learned, including any spells she discovered. Alex can use these spells to uncover the next chapter of the book in the house. This chapter features a new character, and his autobiographical segment. Because he has inherited the book after the young woman of the first chapter, he too has access to all her information and spells. He adds his own as he discovers them, thus giving these same powers to Alex.
This goes on for 10 characters, each giving the next piece of the story of the Elder Gods, and providing further clues about what happened to Alex's grandfather. Each character has his or her own strengths and weakness, different items, and different fighting style. The controls, however, are similar enough across characters that the player can easily adjust to a new character within moments. By the time she has completely reconstructed the book, Alex has all the information she needs to defeat Pious Augustus and his Elder God.
The structuring here is brilliant. The multiple flashback system allows for a fascinating nonlinear narrative, while at the same time the inheritance feature of the book allows for completely plausible linear character ascension - the player continues to gain more and more powers, never losing ones she had previously, but without any sort of artificial feeling of "leveling up." Each character is entirely unique, and gives a refreshing change to gameplay (younger characters might have more strength, religious characters have greater sanity, older characters tire more easily, etc.), without being so different as to require the player to learn a new control scheme every time.
The flashbacks are even played with in the narrative in other ways; certain levels will take place in the same maps as previous levels, but with gaps of often hundreds of years. Therefore, things the player does in previous levels, as previous characters, can affect what the player can and cannot do in subsequent levels. (For instance, if you retrieve the longsword the first time you are in the monks' abbey, you can find it again on that character's corpse when your new character returns there years later.) All the stories interweave effortlessly with each other and with Alex's frame story.
As if this astoundingly well-crafted narrative wasn't enough, the game also provides some really interesting breaking of the fourth wall. The game features a "sanity meter" (it is not the only game to do so, but as far as I know, it's the only game to handle it quite like this), where the character you are currently playing has a limited amount of sanity, measured by a green vial on the screen. Witnessing strange and unbelievable horrors will drain your sanity meter, as will falling under the gaze of the game's monsters.
As your sanity drops, you begin to experience some strange effects. Blood might drip from the walls, the floor turns to quicksand, statues turn to watch you as you go past, etc. This is all your standard horror-genre sort of fare, but the game doesn't stop there. It also tries to mess with the player directly. When sanity gets low, the game might throw up a message that the controller has been disconnected, just as you enter a room with a huge crowd of enemies. It might tell you that the TV has been muted, or that the console has been restarted. All these effects are completely outside the context of the game, and aimed specifically at you the player, meant to make you doubt your own sanity. I will admit to being caught in at least one or two of them, and I knew they were coming! This clever little gimmick might be worth checking out on its own, even if the game wasn't a must-play for narrative structure.
I think games like this are a must-play before anyone argues that games can't have innovative or unique narrative structures. True, most games are linear or tree-style narratives, but just because many are, doesn't mean they have to be. I have never been as pleasantly surprised with a game as I was with Eternal Darkness, and while it may not be the most popular game in a commercial sense, I do believe it should be required for all Game Studies academics.
Reading a description of the plot of Eternal Darkness might not give you the greatest confidence about the game's innovation; the plot reads more or less like a cheap Lovecraft ripoff. When I played it the first time, I was looking specifically at its "fourth wall"-breaking elements. I was not expecting to be completely blown away by the narrative structure. Since I played it, it has become my opinion that this game should be required playing for anyone discussing narrative in video games - its narrative structure is one of the most unique and well-designed that I have ever seen in a video game.
Eternal Darkness goes like this: a young girl named Alexandra is told that her grandfather has been murdered, and goes to his house to find out what happened. There she discovers a mysterious book - the Tome of Eternal Darkness - containing a legend about the Elder Gods, each of whom is trying to come into our world and take it over. The legend also tells of one of the God's undead servants, a former Roman soldier called Pious Augustus. While reading, Alex notices that most of the book is missing - it seems to have been removed. She inspects the house to find the other chapters.
The first chapter features a young woman in an ancient temple, bearing the very same book. At this point, however, the legend is all the book contains. As the young woman progresses through her journey, she writes down her experiences within the book. At the end of her life, she finds herself trapped within the temple.
As she has finished reading, we return to Alex in her grandfather's study. We now have all the information that the young woman in the chapter learned, including any spells she discovered. Alex can use these spells to uncover the next chapter of the book in the house. This chapter features a new character, and his autobiographical segment. Because he has inherited the book after the young woman of the first chapter, he too has access to all her information and spells. He adds his own as he discovers them, thus giving these same powers to Alex.
This goes on for 10 characters, each giving the next piece of the story of the Elder Gods, and providing further clues about what happened to Alex's grandfather. Each character has his or her own strengths and weakness, different items, and different fighting style. The controls, however, are similar enough across characters that the player can easily adjust to a new character within moments. By the time she has completely reconstructed the book, Alex has all the information she needs to defeat Pious Augustus and his Elder God.
The structuring here is brilliant. The multiple flashback system allows for a fascinating nonlinear narrative, while at the same time the inheritance feature of the book allows for completely plausible linear character ascension - the player continues to gain more and more powers, never losing ones she had previously, but without any sort of artificial feeling of "leveling up." Each character is entirely unique, and gives a refreshing change to gameplay (younger characters might have more strength, religious characters have greater sanity, older characters tire more easily, etc.), without being so different as to require the player to learn a new control scheme every time.
The flashbacks are even played with in the narrative in other ways; certain levels will take place in the same maps as previous levels, but with gaps of often hundreds of years. Therefore, things the player does in previous levels, as previous characters, can affect what the player can and cannot do in subsequent levels. (For instance, if you retrieve the longsword the first time you are in the monks' abbey, you can find it again on that character's corpse when your new character returns there years later.) All the stories interweave effortlessly with each other and with Alex's frame story.
As if this astoundingly well-crafted narrative wasn't enough, the game also provides some really interesting breaking of the fourth wall. The game features a "sanity meter" (it is not the only game to do so, but as far as I know, it's the only game to handle it quite like this), where the character you are currently playing has a limited amount of sanity, measured by a green vial on the screen. Witnessing strange and unbelievable horrors will drain your sanity meter, as will falling under the gaze of the game's monsters.
As your sanity drops, you begin to experience some strange effects. Blood might drip from the walls, the floor turns to quicksand, statues turn to watch you as you go past, etc. This is all your standard horror-genre sort of fare, but the game doesn't stop there. It also tries to mess with the player directly. When sanity gets low, the game might throw up a message that the controller has been disconnected, just as you enter a room with a huge crowd of enemies. It might tell you that the TV has been muted, or that the console has been restarted. All these effects are completely outside the context of the game, and aimed specifically at you the player, meant to make you doubt your own sanity. I will admit to being caught in at least one or two of them, and I knew they were coming! This clever little gimmick might be worth checking out on its own, even if the game wasn't a must-play for narrative structure.
I think games like this are a must-play before anyone argues that games can't have innovative or unique narrative structures. True, most games are linear or tree-style narratives, but just because many are, doesn't mean they have to be. I have never been as pleasantly surprised with a game as I was with Eternal Darkness, and while it may not be the most popular game in a commercial sense, I do believe it should be required for all Game Studies academics.
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