The importance of reversals
As
you can see in the brief summary of classical story structure, each act
is driven by a reversal. When the hero accomplishes the ordeal before
him, the reversal is what keeps him going forward instead of resting on
his haunches.
A
reversal can happen through action (somebody shoots a cop's partner,
and that changes everything) or by a revelation (Luke Skywalker finds
out that Darth Vader is really his father). The revelation is much more
powerful. The important thing is not to cheat. When Danny Glover's
character pulls the trigger at the end of Lethal Weapon 2, he's
causing a reversal through action. He "revokes" the bad guy's
diplomatic immunity. But it's a bad reversal, because he could have
done the same thing ten minutes into the movie. Don't do that. Your
audience can smell cheating.
What
a good reversal does is expand the story's universe. Everything you
knew was true, but now there's more, so the world is flipped on its
head with this new knowledge. The important thing is to make this
convincing within the world of the story. If you can pull this off
well, twice, and everything else goes well, you're going to have a
great game.
Story forms before games
This
classical story form is universal, but many of the practical details of
storytelling work very differently in plays, in novels, and in movies.
You can be sure there will also be differences in games. To find out
how games are different, it pays us to look at the ways in which other
forms are different from one another. Looking over these, we see a
couple of trends.
Types of conflict and types of story
There are different types of conflict in story. There's internal conflict, which is what goes on inside your head. There's interpersonal conflict, which is between people. And there's external conflict,
which is conflict with society in general or the physical world. So if
you're shooting at an oncoming space ship, it's external conflict; if
you're shooting at your ex-husband, it's interpersonal conflict.
Here's
why this is important: While it's possible to have any kind of conflict
in any form of story, certain story forms to certain forms of conflict
more naturally than others.
- Internal conflict happens most naturally in novels.
- Interpersonal conflict happens most naturally in plays, and in soap operas.
- External conflict happens most naturally in movies, and in games.
Now
all this is theory until you look at another relevant fact: these
different levels of conflict are expressed with different levels of
visual and auditory storytelling. This directly affects how you handle
dialog in your game.
We see movies, but we hear plays. Movies are 80% visual and 20% auditory. Plays are 80% auditory and 20% visual.
Movies
with talking heads are boring. But at a play, we listen to the pleasant
music of the dialog while our eye is free to wander across the static
box of the set.
How
does this work in games? Like movies, they are primarily visual. Gamers
don't tolerate a lot of dialog, with one exception, which I'll get to
in a moment.
So,
the evidence is mounting to throw out our original premise, that games
aren't movies. In fact, they have a lot in common with movies. They're
the closest cousin we have among the story forms. But they're not at
all the same.
Empathy, and the big protagonist flip
Here's
where games get revolutionary. Through all forms of story, writers have
been trying to create heroes that the audience can feel empathy for.
We, as viewers, may not always like the protagonists, but we have to be
able to relate to them, to feel their pain, to cheer them on.
Now, for the first time, the viewer is
the protagonist. What does that do to the empathy problem? And what
effects does it have on other story elements, such as dialog and
pacing?
Well,
in a sense, the empathy problem is now solved, but it has been replaced
by a more difficult problem: the storyteller has lost direct control of
the hero. How do you define character if you're not making the choices?
The answer is open-ended: writers and designers need to find new Zen,
passive-aggressive ways to think about this, and to create webs of
choice that are still channeled into compelling stories. We've done a
little of this with branching outcomes, but that's nothing compared to
what's possible. Even with a linear story structure, we can create a
world in which there are several interesting ways to make the one
correct choice.
Pacing stretches, dialog shrinks
One
of the biggest consequences of the protagonist flip is that pacing can
be drawn out in ways we've never seen in a story before.
Let's
say you're playing a trench warfare game set in World War II. You are
the hero, stuck in a foxhole with bullets whizzing over your head. In a
movie, you would watch a three-minute scene of this, and then get
bored. In a game, it's your ass in there, and the bullets are flying at
you. If you're pinned down in there for twenty minutes, so be it. The
adrenaline is pumping. This is life or death.
But
the dialog? The dialog generally shrinks, even from the level of our
very visual cousins, the movies. Players who are wrapped up in action
don't have a lot of patience for talking.
There is an exception: when dialog acts as a game mechanic, as in RPGs like Jade Empire or Knights of the Old Republic, players will embrace huge amounts of text. It's part of the flow of the action then. That works.
Looking at a game story that works
How does all this work in practice? Let's look at a little game called Halo through the lens of classical story structure.
Good stories have good bones. Even a fairly thin story like Halo
is structurally sound at the act level. Is the character deep? Not
very. He's a witty badass. It's thanks to Cortana that we see even that
much of him. But it's got real reversals that drive interest in the
game, and here's how they work.
Once upon a time, there was a genetically enhanced super-soldier.
Act I:
Halo is a computer that the Covenant want to use as a weapon, so the
humans, led by you, the Master Chief, have to get there first and
activate its defense functions. There's a clear conflict: You versus the Covenant. And it's spurred by an inciting incident:
The Covenant have attacked your ship, and you've had to take off in the
equivalent of a minivan before the ship explodes. You have no idea what
happened to Captain Keyes.
Act II:
As you fight the Covenant along side the Marines, you walk into a room
wher e a freaked-out Marine shoots you, and you have to kill him.
That's a great moment of choice, even in a linear plot.
You also see Covenant corpses that you didn't kill.
|
|
 |
 |
 |
The Flood presents an interesting reversal in Halo and again in Halo 2.
|
Then you meet The Flood, which try to eat both you and the Covenant. Reversal:
The conflict isn't as clear as you thought. It has expanded, and caused
your world to change. Some of your friends are now your enemies, and
there are new enemies.
Act III: You are "assisted" by a hovering machine Librarian in turning on Halo's defense system, so you can use it against the Flood.
Then
you find out from Cortana that you've been tricked: Halo is a machine
that wanted to kill the Flood, yes, but also all othe r life forms. Now
you have to destroy Halo itself. Reversal: The conflict has expanded again.
The ending
You
have to destroy Halo. That's an important point for all stories, and it
just got even more important. Aristotle complained about the Deus Ex Machina, the machine that swept the hero away so the writer didn't have to think of a way out of the predicament.
Your
hero has to cause the ending. He can't just watch it happen. If that's
always been true, it's true in spades when the hero is the player.
Do, Show, and Tell
The old adage for writers in every previous form of story has been: Show, don't tell.
Now there's a new rule: Do, don't show.
We
want our players to experience as much of the story first-hand, as the
main actor in it. If there's ever an opportunity to create the story
through the player's action, make that choice. If there's a part of the
story that must be out of the player's control, then show it. Just
telling part of the story is always your last choice, even when you're
doing exposition. The priority, then, is Do, Show, and Tell, in that
order.
Story and the Writer
Here's an obvious statement that people still miss: Writers are essential to game story. Now
lots of folks will agree with that statement. What they miss is the
nature of game story; they fall for the old "story is dialog"
confusion, and they wait to bring in the writer after the story
structure concrete has set. "Paste on some dialog, buddy, and make it
clever!"
No, no, no. Don't do this.
If
the writer's job is not just about pasted-on dialog, but also the deep
construction of the story, that means the writer needs to be involved
with the beginning of the project.
Common sense, right? Well, only after you know what story really is.
Story and the Whole Development Team
Here's the other half of the game story riddle: The writer isn't everything.
If we understand the story-conflict connection, we need to also
understand that the principle of antagonism might be planned by the
writer, but it's created by the designers, and implemented by the
programmers.
The
designers will always be the most direct allies of game writers in
their craft. It's the designers who are in charge of the forces of
antagonism, which are the essential elements of character development
and plot advancement.
Of
course, it's the art and audio people who control the most perceptible
parts of the story's setting. Creating a world that players believe is
a critical part of good story. If you had the script to Casablanca,
but it was cast with bad actors and badly filmed, you would no longer
have a great story. You'd have a well-written story that had brilliant
structure and dialog, but one that was screwed before it was completely
born.
Programmers
work with everybody to keep the story alive in what the novelist John
Gardner would call "the vivid, continuous dream." Sloppy NIS
programming or awkward animations or inconsistent world behavior just
breaks the dream. Creating this world so no one notices the code is the
hardest job of all.
It's
not news that games are a collaborative effort. What I think
development teams need to learn, though, is that even the story part is
a collaborative effort.
The
writer's job is to know all the details that I don't include here.
Everyone else on the team, though, needs to know at least the basics
I've outlined in this article. The development team has to speak a
common language about story. If we all do, we stand an excellent chance
of making games that will leave the last generation in the dust.
_____________________________________________________