Gaming Language

There is a concept in film known as "the language of cinema", essentially all of the elements films can use to tell a story unique to their medium. It's how the camera moves, it's how the actors perform, its how sound connects to the picture, it's the framing of the shot. Non-expository elements that can very quickly get a large amount of information to the audience and convince them of realities within the plot.

Searching a similar concept for games leads to people talking about programming languages or real languages like Japanese. Go figure. Maybe I'm just not sure of a term pretentious enough to make people feel smart for knowing it, maybe I could call it The Language of Ludo or some nonsense like that. I'll just call it 'gaming language' for right now and we can work out the kinks on that later.

Similarly to cinematic language, gaming language is all the little elements unique to the medium of videogames that can tell story. If the story of cinema is made up of its visual elements as well as its script, then the story in video games is also very clearly made of its interactive, visual, and script elements.

If a film relied too much on just its words to tell the story, it makes for a bad film. Conversely, a film can elevate an otherwise fairly mediocre script through its cinematic language alone. Videogames have never worked much differently, how often have you heard the term 'gameplay over story?' However, what people really mean by this is that gameplay holds a much higher priority over simply the quality of the written script, much as visual elements do in film.

This isn't to say that a written script must or should always be mediocre, but that its quality will mean nothing in a dull film, or a dull game, that does not properly utilize the language of its medium. In another way, you could say that I am saying the gameplay is the story. The story of Doom, the game famous for being 'gameplay over story', isn't merely the short text-filled interludes between chapters but also a matter of what the player does second to second every level.

It's a concept that can be easily forgot, because playing into a game's language is also playing into an audience's wishes in a way. Games aren't just a series of things that dull brained morons look at on a TV, it's a matter of communication between the player and the game. If the game stops talking then the player doesn't know what the hell's going on or can't do anything, if the player stops talking then the game never sees its plot develop. It's not something you just leave on in the other room.

There are concessions made to an audience's enjoyment, and this very much displeases an artsy crowd that wishes to be the only voice in their own work, so they irreverently try to subvert it by avoiding speaking the language of games as much as possible. This is the primary reason moviegames aren't terribly enjoyable and why I enjoy seeing their mockery.

Without proper definition the philosophical backbone that destroys these bastardizations of the medium, they will continue to thrive. I don't believe the language of gaming is anything new, many people have already explored the idea that even games of similar premises can end up telling much different stories based purely on what is and isn't a gameplay mechanic. It's such things like Far Cry 2 (cold, desolate, deadly, precarious) compared to Far Cry 3 (more freeform, silly, experimental, forgiving).

The only issue is that such things haven't been put into words or laid out as ideas. Of course, the only rule in any creative work is that there are no rules, so similarly to any 'guiding principles', including the language of cinema itself, they are to only be used as a guide and to treat anything as canon is simply limiting your creative potential.

What I consider apart of the 'gaming language' involves anything that isn't properly displayed through just watching someone play a game. Even the most knowledgeable players could never 100% sympathize with someone going through something on their own. It's entirely elements that apply to the one holding the controller.

With the lengthy preamble out of the way, here's what I consider to be the language of games.

Interactivity

I place this first because it is the single most important element. Games are inherently interactive, and the more interactive your gaming framework is the better your game will tend to be.

This is not to say that everything should be an action game, but rather that player inputs being given proper responses is essential. On a very, very basic level, it's the reason why menus tend to make noises when you press options on them. The menu making a noise talks to the player subconsciously, letting them know that an input has been made and that an action has been taken.

On a more advanced level, it's the idea that the decisions and inputs the player makes create unique output on the game. For action games, it's why shooting guns makes bullet holes in the wall. For more strategic games like RPGs, it's changing out your equipment and seeing how this affects your play.

These are just small examples, the reality is that such things are so large in number for games that to list out that it would eat up the entire article to mention them all.

It's a matter of every micro and macro decision players make, and how this changes the flow of the game. Even a game that's linear narratively can have wildly different stories between two different players, and how their own unique personalities and decisions leads them to the discovery of different elements first.

Why are walking simulators so dull? Interactivity. You cannot make any serious decisions or influence any outcomes on the world. Instead, it is a series of events that the only player control over is, at best, seeing which order they come into. Your inputs are little more than that of a camera reading off pretentious dialogue from film students.

A proper loop of action to reaction is what keeps a player engaged in a game. An action leading to no reaction is not one that will be taken very often. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, lacking a reaction can be an unconscious sign to the player of the game's rules. Some games let you open doors, others do not. In the games that do let you open doors, some can be opened and others cannot. A lack of reaction, or an unpleasant reaction, can be a sign to the player to go elsewhere.

Difficulty

If conflict is a ubiquitous element in storytelling, even to the smallest degree, then difficulty must similarly be a ubiquitos element in games, even to the smallest degree.

Another reason why walking simulators are so dull, there is no difficulty, and therefore there is no conflict. The only difficulty is staying awake, if you can call that part of the game. When you wish to take an action in a walking simulator, there is either nothing preventing you from doing so or such an action is inherently impossible due to game limitations.

Games must have the courage to stand up to the player and not make every action as simple as just doing it. A natural example is combat. If two people are trying to kill eachother, the one that doesn't do it properly is the one that dies. If the player is trying to kill an enemy, and the enemy is trying to kill a player, the player must naturally be better at killing the enemy.

Pushback engages the player. How much pushback there should be is dependent on the design of your game, you shouldn't feel the need to make your game extremely difficult for the sake of player engagement nor should you feel the need to dumb it down for the sake of supposed player accessibility. The difficulty does, however, need to be tuned to match the conflict that you're presenting to the player.

Narratively, a boss can be set up as much as possible to be a threat and be a huge let down if it was a cakewalk. Inversely, a boss can become infamous if it just shows up out of nowhere with 0 setup and kicks the players ass so hard that they're forced to git gud.

Actions can have meaning simply from the fact that not everyone can do them. It's the reason why Evo Moment 37 has over 8.6 million views on Youtube. It's the reason why conquering a challenge is as satisfying as it is.

Difficulty is what engages players with mechanics. If a single action surpasses everything, the player will have no reason to explore any other mechanics for any other reason than shits and giggles. Players knowing that a game won't accept this will explore every asset, and come to experiment and connect themselves more with the game in order to overcome these challenges.

It's an area where videogames meet game theory proper. Aren't games and mathematics just tied together like two peas in a pod? Understand players, understand what tactics they would take, and understand how to make them take on an evolutionary journey, and this will greatly impact the story your game ends up telling to them.

Visual and Audio Elements

This has been touched upon a little bit before, but a game cannot just be a blank screen with mathematical equations going on in the background. What elevates algorithims from simply being input to output is what's done with them, and what's done to convey them in a more direct, human way to a player. Visual and audio are brought together because the purpose they serve within the context of games is very similar.

Players can become further immersed in worlds through proper use of the visual and audio, said elements can also immediately convey gameplay ideas across to a player, or greatly assist said gameplay ideas by allowing the player to properly take actions within their limited time frame.

Truly good games do not have truly bad graphics and sound. People tend to confuse 'simple' for 'bad', often in the case of games such as Dwarf Fortress where simplicitly is present to allow for a wide variety of micro mechanics without having to necessarily create graphics for each and every one. But, the graphics still get ideas across, and fast.

Sound is similar. One thing to note is that in general, people react much faster to sound than they do visuals, so aside from sound design reinforcing player input it can also be used to assist players in deciding their next inputs. The sound differences between attacks being deflected and connecting are essential to the microstrategy of players.

Due to a former obsession with the increasing amount of realism in games, it was once parroted by many that graphics > gameplay. This is an impossibility, because the gameplay is directly decided by graphics. Fuzzy illegible nonsense cannot be reacted to, and can only be sort of confusingly and unengagingly interacted with.

How players see and hear the world must be carefully thought out. It's what they see and also what they don't see, the danger rapidly approaching them and those secrets hiding just around the corner.

It's here where games can really take a page from films without it coming across as horribly shallow and embarassing. You can adapt those subconscious techniques films use to get ideas across, and utilize them within games. Left 4 Dead was well noted for how they engaged in cinematically inspired level design to quickly put players on the right track and highlight important areas, a necessity when 4 players all need to be on the same page for where to go next.

Mechanics

Something that people can usually immediately agree on as being important, what mechanics you implement into the game and how you implement them set games apart more than anything else. Mechanics needn't be justified as part of the langauge, but it does need to be expounded upon how this connects to the overall story a game is telling.

If you're going to set up the player character in a certain fashion narratively, the mechanics should similarly fit what that player character is. A basic concept of this is that a 'good guy' wouldn't go around slaughtering civillians. Perhaps you can still slaughter civillians, but often it'll be little more than a net negative for the player.

What'll make players want to save civillians, and thus play into the character, is being given useful resources for doing so that can be later utilized by the player. This may seem pavlovian, perhaps it is, but the reality is that the player will always have motivations different from the narrative and this needs to be considered.

Another element to think about is how characters are interacted with in the game. MG:R is a fantastic example of this, being one of the first Metal Gear games since Solid where nobody gave a single shit about the codec companions (aside from Sunny and her knockers) because they just weren't terribly useful in an action game where players very quickly understood strategy and constant codec calls did little other than interrupt the flow.

They did, however, care a lot about all the bosses. Every single character talked about in MG:R is a boss character. Mistral, Monsoon, Sundowner, Sam, Armstrong. It's not just that they have bombastic personalities, so do the codec companions and some cutscene characters, but it's that they're directly interacted with and large parts of their personalities are supplemented by these fights.

Armstrong is considered one of the most memorable final boss fights in the series. It's not just a matter of the cutscene beforehand, but the fact that he's layered within the gameplay itself and the player tears off his masquerade between two different fights. We know Armstrong is capable and dedicated because he's not just passively talking to us about bullshit, but actively trying to kick our asses.

Armstrong could be the same shit but if it was all just cutscenes nobody would care. The dialogue would go in one ear and right out the other, no matter how well they were made. Players want to engage, not just see.

This is all just direct character examples of course. Time limits or aggression can put pressure on a player, creativity being rewarded can have players come up with unique and intuitive solutions to problems, as a negative lame brute force methods being allowed will simply lead to people making lame brute force methods for everything.

Games where choices have impact will have players more engaged with the choices they make, games where choices do little will simply have players randomly selecting a bunch of shit. I think you get the idea. What mechanics there are and aren't decides the direction of the game as a whole, and the story that it tells to the player.

Conclusion

The idea of Gaming Langauge could fill out an entire essay, one that I might visit one day if I give myself the time. This is short for the sake of it being a simple, single draft blog post and is hardly refined to the extent that it could be. What I hope to get across it that there is a communication between player and game, in an unspoken language both understand, that is essential to getting across a story in games.

There is also the idea of "film grammar", where shots and scenes become analogous to words and sentences forming into paragraphs, and one could come up with similar analogies for games, except here an important distinction is made that these sentences are a cooperative effort being written together by the player and game.

While gaming language and grammar continue to be misunderstood, games that decide player input is horrible for their stories will continue to be made. These games are also usually postmdoern in nature. I wonder if there's a connection, perhaps video games along with the internet has rapidly made postmodernism irrelevant and outdated simply because the watcher can no longer be disconnected from the work.

These need to be as much defined and understood because its only then that concepts begin to flourish. Perhaps this could be a first step beyond incredibly basic overviews of how gameplay makes you FEEL like Batman or some other vague shit, and also dispell the notion that one must either lean into the gameplay OR the story.

It probably didn't help that many developers dismissed the notion of story in their games, Carmack especially famously saying that "a story in games is like a story in porn", which he'd later caveat, but I would go farther into saying it's completely wrong and has always been wrong. What Carmack says is 'story' isn't story, but rather written narrative, a series of words describing things about the game world. This is an element that the original Doom used very little for good reason.

The story, the experience of video games is the single most important factor elevating them from traditional ones. That there can be a story told, and there can be experiences of the author that are conveyed, and that these can be much more raw than other mediums simply because instead of being conveyed, it is something that the player can directly be made to contend with.

It's no longer just a series of markers and raw mechanics but how that's utilized and merged together with every other asset to create something more than the sum of its parts. It's this feeling why players of video games advocate to consider their medium a form of art where players of traditional games might not.

Story is the play, and that story, that play, is conveyed via the gaming language. If games aught to be considered art, such things should become more well defined and more well appreciated by the people who play them. Whether or not games should or shouldn't be considered art, I'll leave up to you. I've seen art, a lot of it looks like shit so I'm not terribly eager either way. Perhaps we shouldn't even think of it in that lens, and look beyond the definition of art as a whole.