on action storygames

I released a new game last week, referred to on the itch page as an “action storygame”. Here’s what I wrote about it on my mailing list (which I’ve forgotten to mention anywhere for a while, but which is full of great word games and puzzles to delight young and old):

By the way, I’ve lifted that term “Action Storygame” from Melos Han-Tani who uses it somewhere. It’s a good fit with some of the games I like most… to me it describes games where the “action” and “story” parts aren’t quite knitted together, where each feels like it mysteriously omits a key aspect of the other… like how the action game elements in Kero Blaster seem at a remove from the oblique emotional tone, or the feeling of fighting a weird monster guy in Mischief Makers and having them give an unexpectedly dramatic speech that makes you wonder if you’ve really followed what’s meant to be happening… I like games (and music, comics) where you can get swept up in the flow of things, where everything seems to make sense, and it’s only afterwards where you think wait, what was I doing? That one part, what was that about?

What other games am I thinking about? No One Lives Forever, Goldeneye (maybe most “licensed games” in general?), Mystical Ninja 64, Klonoa, Judero, Sephonie, uh… maybe Secret of Mana although any “rpg” is to me a different thing… Bootleg movie games like the beloved “Titenic”. It’s clear that for me at least this is a totally invented genre made of dissimilar titles. But here are some recurring tendencies it makes me think about.

1. Levels are discontinuous: for a level to start it means something is not carried over, that something starts afresh. Game state, position, camera view, level geometry, player character. You can put a lot of effort and craft into creating some sense of linkage across levels, which maybe just makes it more mysterious that they still feel so deeply separate – the “runway” level in goldeneye 64 starts just after the “facility” level in narrative time, continuing the action, you start off in a room meant to evoke the other side of the one you just escaped… but they feel like vastly different locations, universes apart, spaces nothing else can enter or leave...

   A lot of game design feels aimed at overthrowing the structural tyranny of the level: the way the framework of “level” seems to overpower whatever other frames we might want to project across a wider game experience. We blend it back into a cohesive whole through meta-structural elements (carried-over player state and levelling – one reason I’m not talking about RPGs here is because their approach to “story” is so tied to the sense of cohesion that comes with these continuous, game-wide systems) and art design. But I think there can be exciting qualities too to the abruptness of levels, their capacity for sudden changes of scene and emphasis, a capacity for the quick turn that we don’t really associate with videogames more generally. Mischief Makers, again, makes great use of the “level” as a kind of empty structural container: a level could be a fight scene with some mooks, a miniboss, a maze, a gauntlet, a short scene-setting level, a cutscene.. Levels that start you next to the exit but that you can go the other direction in and explore… to the question what are the levels about, it answers some are about two minutes long, and some are even about ten minutes.

   The difficulty of this modular approach is that keeping track of the narrative starts to feel like trying to follow the story across a series of stained-glass windows: vivid, dense, formally self-contained scenes that are a challenge to imagine as moments of a connected whole. The advantage is also that it could be like telling a story as a set of stained glass windows. The very sense of distance turns narrative into something mysterious, glimpsed, discombobulated – moments we struggle in memory to connect, and that reveal new aspects in the effort. The way that each level, equally disconnected from all the others, is equally capable of being imaginatively re-connected to them, forming new sequences and arrangements, constellations…

I guess this connects to:

2. Separation of powers. To me the phrase “action-storygame” suggests a sharp divide between the two realms – that is, something other than the now traditional “do something while someone on a radio talks to you” workaround used to have them both at once. I’d even go further and say that ideally, to me, in this kind of game the action and story are mutually unintelligible – the story can’t really adapt to all the time you spend bopping dudes and eating chicken off the floor in the game parts, the game cannot mechanically express whatever the story’s trying to talk about except through strange symbolic contrivances.

   In an odd way I feel like this is why many of the games I think of that have this structure feel like they’re about having a job. There’s the thing you do that you don’t really care about but that somehow exists at the same time, or alternately, with the thing you do care about: there’s the formal irony that comes from having these two irreconcilable perspectives, neither of which can be committed to totally without losing sight of the other. In Kero Blaster the plot plays out in the oddly melancholy office moments between the peppy, bite-size away missions. In No One Lives Forever you’re usually silent and alone in the levels, and only report back to your bosses to hear how the main plot is going as cutscenes: there’s a peculiar feeling to being dressed down for the actual disastrous results of the various missions you’re sent on, even as you’re feeling pretty good about having just survived 500 guys and a helicopter coming at you (plus that one guy we were meant to rescue dies in a cutscene, which means it wasn’t my fault U__U).

   Maybe there’s a danger of all games made in this way seeming kinda muted and oblique – sometimes we crave the big emotions too, after all. But I have to admit I’m entranced by the feeling that a game can have two different logics, neither of which can be expressed by the other in more than circumspect or gestural ways, but neither of which is complete without the other either… games where I crawl around as a teardrop on a face as the closest the mechanics can come to representing an intense conversation, games whose flapping-free narrative frame can swerve around as crazily as the ending to Fantasy Zone II: The Tears of Opa-Opa… Two parts that don’t add back up to a whole.

Which maybe leads us to:

3. Levels are “unfree”. A terrifying thing about videogames is the feeling sometimes that if you pick certain starting points, the rest of the game will seem to decide itself what it “needs” – if you add an enemy and a gun then all of a sudden you’ll have a fast weak enemy and a slow strong one and a fast weak gun and a slow strong one and will be deep in the weeds of permutating encounter designs, two fast one slow, or one fast and two slow, etcetera... Not necessarily because anyone wants another variation of these things, or feels excited by them, but because without them that starting premise would feel incomplete. Millions of hours sacrificed on the bleak altar of systems debt. Game design as car loan repayment.

   Sometimes a videogame will seem to just keep going until someone forces it to stop, and the appeal of combining gameplay with narrative is partly that of finding reasons to force it to a stop. What the game “wants” and what the story “wants” are different; perhaps equally stupid, but have the advantage of running interference on each other all the same… Different senses of momentum, pacing, different imaginations of what’s interesting. To make a level be about something else is to subordinate its own inner sense of direction to an alien thing it doesn’t really understand; and I guess my basic argument is, I think that this is funny. I am tired of gesamtkunstwerks; it feels like we finally figured out how to make them and it just became another machine with a handle to crank, “narrative videogame” next to “gacha” and “slot machine” as solved, streamlined content delivery system. A narrative videogame should first and foremost be a bad idea, a terrible idea, a Survival Research Laboratories machine always on the cusp of annihilating itself and scattering parts and perhaps fingers across the landscape. The long struggle to become competent has ended; we all lost. What else could be worth doing, after that?

What else is a videogame but a set of bizarrely circuitous workarounds for telling stories nobody needs to hear. In conclusion: