Story vs Experience

You know I’ve been thinking through some of my older posts talking about videogames and story and what not, I realize I focus a lot on something that really isn’t the most important thing ever in hindsight which is how “videogames tell story”. That’s great and all, but not all videogames really have a story and I’m basically saying that they should. It might sound silly to say that videogames can’t have a story, but a lot of mediums don’t necessarily tell stories, like painting, music, dance… they tell experiences. Emotions.

I’ll keep this short since I’ve already talked about it a bit but really stuff like this is important to think about for game development. A story implies something like an arc, character development, dialogue, and that’s not something every game is necessarily going to have. Some games just are, and obviously in the majority of the ways you design a game it’ll be played in ways you could’ve never expected, and in the minority of ways you can design a game where you can expect everything the game will simply end up as garbage.

So what’s the difference between story and experience? It’s as simple as Tetris. Tetris has no story in its most basic iterations, it’s simply blocks that fall. In spite of this, it’s an incredibly powerful and popular game because its experience is so great.

There’s a satisfaction to the blocks falling, a sort of peace people can find in it. People can get into a flow state, or inversely find themselves quickly becoming overwhelmed by the pressure. There’s thoughtful care put into stacking for tetrises that’s rewarding, but also stress that can be applied trying to desperately clear line after line to recover from a mistake.

There’s so many emotions that can be felt from Tetris: calm, anger, sadness, joy, superiority… It all really depends on your skill level, what your own goals are (high score, survival, winning in VS, adventure modes) what mechanics are available in your version of Tetris. The aesthetics in some of the games are great and all, I loved Tetris Effect, but this plays a fairly insignificant factor in how the player is actually going to be responding to the game.

I use Tetris as an example, but this applies to every game that isn’t bogged down by incredibly lame player-last game design. This is the core art of games, the experiences and what they make you feel. Even if there is no story there is still an emotional connection between the player and the game. As mentioned before, there is obvious equivalancies you can make with other mediums. You can probably think of many beautiful tracks that were designed for no other purpose than to evoke a feeling.

What makes the medium of videogames such a great conductor for this is interactivity. There is an inherent separation between the viewer and author in most mediums but videogames allow a very direct connection to be made which can create the most powerful emotional responses of all. It is one thing to see a main character fall into despair after failure, it’s another thing to fail yourself and fall into despair… or perhaps contemplation, amusement at the specific way you failed, shrugging it off and trying again, raw anger.

The response is as dictated by the viewer as much as it is the author, and this is without the ironic detachment so many other mediums suffer from. What the moment is ‘meant’ to be can be entirely up to the player, both from intentional decisions and unintentional.

These powerful experiences and emotions are the core of what holds up a story in a game. It’s criminal that more developers do not realize this extreme emotional crux that interactivity has and consider the ‘artistic’ approach to be to limit it as much as possible, or else people will simply joke and shit on the game. The reason they do this is a mix of fear and a weird attempt at being accessible (more difficult game = less people winning).

Feelings in gameplay need to be understood and capitalized on. This is what people truly remember and are left with after all is said and done. Every piece of dialogue will be much more fainter in memory than that time you had to spend 8 hours on a really hard ass boss.

This is a big reason why I dislike movie games, there’s no emotion to be had when there’s no gameplay. If you want to inspire sadness, consider making the player lose something important to them. If you want to inspire joy, try rewards or new mechanics that add power, and so on and so forth.

Dunno if I’ll keep writing about this, starting to feel like I’m repeating myself a bit.