Last month in this space, I published
"Bad Game Designer,
No Twinkie! V". Among the Twinkie Denial Conditions I listed
was the practice of making references in in-game conversations to
out-of-game objects. My example (as suggested by Gregg Tavares)
was Metal Gear Solid (MGS).
After the column came out, a number of people wrote
to me complaining that it was unfair to deny a Twinkie
to Hideo Kojima, the designer of MGS, on this
basis, because MGS is full of things like that;
it is "postmodern" and intentionally self-referential.
I see their point in one respect: it was a deliberate
decision, not laziness or sloppiness on the part of
the designer, as many Twinkie Denial Conditions are.
But that doesn't mean I have to like it.
It has become popular in recent years (by which I mean
the last 20 or so) to include winking references in
books and movies to the fact that the thing you're
watching or reading is only a book or a movie. This
is the product of a certain flavor of modern literary
theory, which holds that perfect communication is
impossible, so there's no point in trying to put across
a serious message. Instead, let's just have some fun.
You can tell that "fun" is their aim because
many definitions of postmodernism tend to include
the word "playful" to describe this business
of self-reference and winking at the audience.
I don't have any patience for this kind of self-indulgence. One
of the worst annoyances of video gaming is the designers who want
to show off how clever they are. Interrupting the players' immersion
in order to remind them "Don't forget, it's only a game!"
may be the designers being playful, but the game is supposed to
provide gameplay for the players, not for the designers. Such cute
gimmicks don't improve the players' experience; they harm it. It's
a direct slap in the face. Imagine if Ridley Scott, for example,
had done that right in the middle of the most suspenseful parts
of Alien, or if Tom Clancy did it in the middle of Patriot
Games. As the audience, we would be rightfully infuriated.
I'm not saying that it's bad in every single instance; sometimes,
works can contain homage to other works that are genuinely amusing
to see. At one point in LucasArts' The Secret of Monkey Island,
Guybrush Threepwood, our hero, is asked his name. One of his options
is to say, "My name is Bobbin Threadbare," the name of
the hero of a completely different LucasArts game, Loom.
If you choose this option, the person you're talking to retorts,
"Oh yeah? Well, your mother was a duck!" (Bobbin's mother
in Loom turned into a swan.) I laughed out loud. This was
an inside joke, but a good one.
But there's a distinct difference between The Secret of Monkey
Island and MGS. Monkey Island was a light comedy
throughout; almost nothing about it was serious. Ron Gilbert, its
designer, could afford to be "playful" if he wanted, because
the player was not deeply immersed in a life-or-death struggle.
MGS, on the other hand, was about preventing a catastrophe.
How are we supposed to care if the game is interrupting us all the
time to tell us that it doesn't really matter?
I don't know enough about Japanese culture to say whether MGS's
self-referential nature was an attempt to be postmodern. But I do
stand by my original assertion that it's out of place in a story
of adventure. Satire is one thing-if MGS were a send-up like,
say, No One Lives Forever, then I could see it. But it wasn't;
it claimed to be serious.
Thinking through all this suddenly brought me to the realization
that there are different forms of immersion. We talk a lot about
immersion and suspension of disbelief in the game industry, but
we seldom actually try to define it or to understand how it works.
I think there are at least three kinds, and they are created and
destroyed by different means.
Tactical Immersion
Tactical immersion is immersion in the moment-by-moment act of
playing the game, and is typically found in fast action games. It's
what people call being "in the zone" or "in the groove."
It's physical and immediate. When you're tactically immersed in
a game, your higher brain functions are largely shut down and you
become a pair of eyes directly communicating with your fingers.
It's an almost meditation-like state-the Tetris Trance.
Tactical immersion is produced by challenges simple enough to allow
the player to solve them in a fraction of a second. Ask him to think
for any longer than that, and you risk destroying the trance. Players
who are deeply immersed in the tactics of a game aren't much concerned
with its larger strategy (it seldom has any besides survival), and
couldn't care less about its story. Sometimes a game has a larger
strategy that you come to be aware of through repeated playing,
and you can change your approach the next time you play, but for
the most part the tactical nature of your immersion remains the
same.
To create tactical immersion, you must offer your players a flawless
user interface, one that responds rapidly, intuitively, and above
all reliably. Players won't get into the groove if they're struggling
with slow, awkward controls. Tactical immersion is usually destroyed
by abrupt changes in the nature of the gameplay, a shift in the
user interface, or a boss character who can't be defeated the same
way that other enemies are.
Strategic Immersion
Strategic immersion, on the other hand, is a cerebral kind of involvement
with the game. It's about seeking a path to victory, or at least
to optimize a situation. The highest, most abstract form of strategic
immersion is experienced by chess masters, who concentrate on finding
the right move among a vast number of possibilities. When you're
strategically immersed, you're observing, calculating, deducing.
However, this doesn't have to mean that the game is turn-based,
nor does it even have to be about conflict. The player who intently
studies patterns of traffic in Sim City in order to decide
where to build a new road is strategically immersed in the game.
In order to achieve strategic immersion, a game must offer enjoyable
mental challenges. What destroys strategic immersion is awkward
or illogical gameplay. Units with bad path-finding, for example,
break the player's sense of immersion, because they don't obey orders
the way the player thinks they should. Too much randomness tends
to destroy strategic immersion as well; if a game is heavily dependent
on chance, the player will find it hard to formulate an effective
strategy.
Players who are deeply involved in the strategy of the game are
seldom that interested in the story. Chess players couldn't care
less that the pieces are named for the members of a medieval court;
the only thing that matters is where they are and how they move.
Deeply strategic players often ignore the story entirely, thinking
of it only as a distraction.
(One of my designer friends is a game master in a very long-running
pencil-and-paper RPG. She constructs deep and rich stories for her
players, but they don't care, which she finds frustrating. They're
all, as she puts it, "a bunch of min-max-ing rules lawyers,"
intent on wringing the last ounce of mathematical advantage out
of any situation, regardless of the storyline. She creates narratives
to immerse them in; they immerse themselves in the strategy instead.)
Narrative
Immersion
Narrative immersion in games is much the same as it is in books
or movies. A player gets immersed in a narrative when he or she
starts to care about the characters and wants to know how the story
is going to end. The player who is immersed in the narrative can
tolerate a certain amount of bad strategic and tactical gameplay.
Few games have stories good enough to excuse really bad play, but
people who are hooked and want to know how it ends will usually
overlook, say, a slightly awkward interface or a feeble AI.
What creates narrative immersion is good storytelling, and what
destroys it is bad storytelling: clumsy dialog, stupid characters,
unrealistic plots. The skills needed to create narrative immersion
are quite different from those needed to create strategic and tactical
immersion, which is why smart studios hire professional writers
to create their storylines rather than leaving them to the designers.
So here's what I think was going on with MGS. Kojima was
assuming that the player had a strong desire to beat the game, regardless
of whether he or she liked the story or not. Kojima thought he could
afford to play postmodernist tricks because the player would be
strategically or tactically immersed in the game, and destroying
his or her narrative immersion wouldn't really do any harm-supposedly.
Unfortunately, not all players are motivated by a desire to win
for its own sake. Some play in order to find out how the story comes
out, so to them, the self-referential nature of MGS could
only be irritating. Different players prefer different kinds of
immersion.
As far as I'm concerned, the bottom line on this kind of stuff
is, don't do it unless you know you can get away with it, and the
joke is really worth the cost. As Brian Moriarty put it, "[suspension
of disbelief] is hard to achieve and hard to maintain... One reference
to anything outside the imaginary world you've created is enough
to destroy that world." Part of what sold MGS was its
strong storyline, so there was a good chance that these gimmicks
would annoy some of the audience-as indeed they did.
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