Super 8 and Portal 2: A train wreck and a media collision

I just had to throw up a quick post on the inclusion of the “Super 8″ film trailer as a playable level in the new game “Portal 2″. You can check out the game player trailer here.  You can then compare that to the actual film trailer here. Having the trailer as an interactive, playable level is an interesting twist on moving a story between mediums. I can only think that J.J. Abrams and crew thought that getting the trailer is a heavily marketed game is going to increase the profile of their brand. It seems to be a typical approach of transplanting the strengths of film into a game engine, but I’m not seeing something different that is playing to the actual strengths of the game media itself. I’ll have to see how this plays out, perhaps there is more coming that is going to make this an interesting approach to interactivity and storytelling.

Interactive fiction: Trends in how we read it

The website One Book, Many Readings is an analysis of trends in interactive, hypertextual fiction. These were the Choose Your Own Adventure books that began to flourish in the 80s. The design models for quests, side-quests and narrative are used in the game design of a number of adventure based and role-playing video games currently available. The demise of the books seems to coincide with the rise of many of these kinds of video games.

Visual map of a branching story

The analysis pointed out some interesting aspects of the evolution of the books over time. As the books were published, certain approaches seemed to work better than o

thers. These books become more popular, had more sales and helped to direct the next round of publications. It would seem that anyone who enjoyed a narrative that gave them choices would prefer a large range of choices and endings. Although that make sense intuitively, it seems that the opposite happened.

Rather than becoming more complex they began to decrease in branching and increase in linearity. The reason for the change isn’t really clear, perhaps an increased demand for simpler stories or may the genre starting to settle into an equilibrium. A place where it the ability to branch a story doesn’t affect the quality of the story itself. It still remains a solid narrative that resonates with the reader rather than giving them a complex, muddled experience.

The other interesting aspect of the research is the idea that some of the books rewarded the “creative interpretation of the rules”. In one story in particular, Inside UFO 54-40, you could actually get to a special ending by not following the constraints of the system but thinking outside of them. What makes this interesting is that the Choose Your Own Adventure books started to evolve to a place where creative thinking would allow the reader to experience them in a much different way. It is something I don’t see evolving in video game design, an affordance built into the game play that can take you to a completely different outcome if you decide to think outside the constraints of the system. Cheats and exploits aren’t really the same, the help a player gain an unfair advantage. Although they are creative, they aren’t built in as part of the narrative around the game itself.

IFC Short Film Challenge and UbiSoft’s Assassin’s Creed 2

“Men ought either to be well treated or crushed… If an injury has to be done to a man it should be so severe that one does not fear revenge”

-Niccolo Machiavelli (1469 – 1527)

And that sets the tone for the world of Assassin’s Creed 2, based in late 15th century Italy. It was an amazing time when things were changing very quickly and new ideas were shaking up Europe.

The IFC and UbiSoft put together a filmmaking challenge to see what kind of short film their film-making community could create based on the game world and characters from the first-person shooter.

The winner, A Father Avenged, was a pretty impressive piece of short film that explored the theme of revenge and the toll it takes when you decide to embark down that road. It also gets at some of the truths of that time period, the Renaissance was as much about brutal measures to achieve security and unity in Italy as it was about enlightenment. The kinds of ruthless tactics needed to achieve that security are pretty well documented in Machiavelli’s how-to guide The Prince. This short film by Frank Thomas was an interpretation of a time period that would have had a heavy toll on many of the people who lived through it. It is still focused on those revenge fantasies that are typical in the first-person shooter genre but it tries to explore some of the humanity in actually being a character in that type of game. For that, I’d have to say it was a great step forward in adding depth to what is generally a pretty shallow game-play experience. I’m not sure it would have worked as a cut scene in the game, or even if anyone would have watched it between levels, but it was an appreciated piece of work from someone looking for games to be more than the usual twitchfest. I’m looking forward to more of these kind of ideas from Ubisoft, they definitely seem to be more creative about how their games live in the media world than many other game designers.

Break the Fourth Wall

and this is what you get:

“a clichéd, kitsch and largely nonsensical story with more plot holes than a field in Cambodia”

Dan Cheer’s Review, Game Planet

Call of Duty Screenshot

In a recent review of the new Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, Dan Cheer finds a well-modeled, visually stunning game…with a plot that seems to have been cut and pasted from whatever action genre b-movie that happened to be in the blu-ray player of the game designer when he sat down to build the narrative. The story revolves around several challenges involving shooting evil Russians and blowing stuff up. As I write critiques on the use of narrative in various gaming contexts I wonder why they are making it so easy? These multi-million dollar creative properties aren’t converging as much as co-opting the worst of the film genre in an attempt to engage their audience in an immersive experience. They aren’t drawing their audience through the fourth wall and allowing them to engage in the narrative. They are providing such bad storytelling that the players are just trying to avoid paying attention to it so it doesn’t disrupt their game play.

Ubisoft’s Convergence of Film and Video Game

UbiSoft has released a new short film, Assassin’s Creed: Lineage,  in preparation for the release of their game Assassin’s Creed 2 on November 17. It is the first part of a three part trilogy.

The short film is part of an ongoing effort on the part of UbiSoft to bring creative properties to multiple platforms. The goal is to engage gamers in as many entertainment mediums as possible. They have been strategic in their approach, acquiring Canadian special effects firm Hybride in order to produce quality films. Hybride was the company responsible for green screen epics such as 300.

After watching the film I would have to say it is the first Italian Renaissance ninja film I’ve ever seen. I think Italian ninjas are better dressed than their Japanese counterparts but their acting range seems to be about the same. The film itself has beautiful cinematography but I think they missed an opportunity to really create a different kind of narrative for the game.

Ubisoft has stated that they are doing these films as part of a campaign to create a more immersive experience for the gamers who are playing Assassin’s Creed. Games, especially first person shooters, or in this case, first person stabbers, aren’t very good at narrative. The cut scenes are limited in the depth and scope and most are quickly skipped by the players so they can move onto the next challenge in the game. Here was a chance to build on the strengths of film and work on mood, atmosphere, exposition and character. Perhaps they were just creating an action genre film for the demographic they had identified for the game. I’m not really sure how much interest those kinds of hardcore gamers have in film, even this one.  I had just hoped that when game and film started to converge, they would have let each approach the story from a completely different direction. Instead of playing to the strengths of each medium, Lineage becomes a great looking film that looks like gameplay. Everything I’ve seen in this first film could have been achieved by cut-scenes and voice-overs within the game itself. I’ll withhold final judgment until I see the final two installments of the trilogy, perhaps this is all going someplace even I don’t expect.

“Movies are doomed, there’s two more years left of them and they’re over”

A pretty bold prediction, the kind of statement that might come from someone who is trying to get our attention. In this case, it is Canadian artist and author Douglas Coupland and getting us to pay attention is one of his talents. He has a string of novels, starting from Generation X in 1991 and leading up to his most recent book, Generation A, that has just been published.  The novel is a dystopian story of the near future when all bees are extinct until five unconnected individuals are stung one autumn. Their conditions gets them all abducted by an unknown organization and transported to an island together.

As part of his promotion of the book, Coupland just did an interesting interview on CBC radio where he talked about the book and his perspectives on the world. You can listen to it in the Podcast. The interview runs about 22 minutes and if you want to skip the story about his houses and bird feeders you can fast forward to about the 12 minute mark.

During the next 10 minutes of the conversation he discusses a central theme in his book about the future of storytelling and unending flood of information we’re experiencing in the world. Although I can’t agree that movies are doomed I do understand that movies, as they currently exist, are doomed. They aren’t going to disappear but they will continue to shrink in their current form as other media approaches to storytelling capture the attention and imagination of the public. In fact, that doom holds true for all forms of narrative. It shouldn’t surprise anyone, things are changing far too quickly in the technological world to believe that any form of storytelling is going to survive untouched.

Yet a lot of us resist the change. He makes a few good points about why we resist it. Most of us who are interested in storytelling had a youth immersed in reading books. It was a solitary activity where we would disappear for hours, alone, into a story. Those hours spent have given us deep belief in the value of our lives as a reflection of those book-bound stories. It wouldn’t be any different if you were raised on film, like the lead character, Toto, in Cinema Paradiso who’s youth became defined by film. We’ve invested a lot of time into those stories and our preferred medium.

So, what is going to happen to a generation who is raised in a world of technology that is focused on immediacy and short burst of information? It is a generation raised on Facebook, MySpace and Twitter.  Coupland’s perspective is that they are still going to try to understand that massive confusion in terms of a story, it is just going to be something different. He believes that these new stories will be a serialization that doesn’t have an ending. They don’t need to be long, they just need to engage the audience for a short amount of time. Once they’ve done that, the audience will come back for an unending soap opera. His example was George Lucas, who hasn’t made a film in years and has said he is going to television because of its opportunity for endless serialization. I think serialization is a likely trend, I don’t agree that television is going to be the main distribution channel for those stories though. I think it is in as much trouble as film at the moment.

One of the key points that Coupland made is that all this new technology is flooding our lives and we don’t even have the vocabulary to talk about it. Each new wave of change puts us in a very different place. This is perhaps the most challenging element in discussing storytelling for research, filmmaking or television. Things are changing very quickly and we’re not keeping up with our vocabulary enough so that we can even have those conversations about what is happening in our disciplines, where things are going and even if our discipline will even exist in a few years.

My own research looks at another experience that has filled up the lives of a lot of young people out there, video games. I’ve taken a look at the kinds of meaning those hours of game playing have for the players and what they mean to their worldview. Whenever I talk to them about learning or worldview within those game environments, it is often a new perspective to that experience. The statement “I hadn’t thought of it that way” happens consistently throughout those conversations. It is becoming apparent that the meaning behind those technology experiences receives many different definitions depending on the individual. Will it form part of their own perspective on narrative and meaning in their life? Perhaps, but the meaning of those experiences is not something that is easy to generalize, to a culture yet alone an entire generation. Coupland talks about the only people who jump on that idea, the marketers and politicians who see a definable personality for a generation as something they can use to their own advantage. I think the answer is going to be a lot more complicated, I just hope I can figure out the vocabulary to talk about it before it changes again.

Halo, the complete story in 5 minutes

Just to put things in context, Halo might be an epic space opera but the entire story can be summed up in about 5 minutes (6 to be exact). Enjoy.

Halo 3 ODST: The Return of the Narrative

So I finally sat down and worked through Halo 3: ODST on friday night in co-op mode. The ODST stands for Orbital Drop Shock Troops and it is the latest in the Halo series of games. I’ve been playing the Halo series since Halo: Combat evolved came out for the xBox in 2001. Bungie Studios created the game and they had always been one of my favourite studios before they were purchased by Microsoft. I was eager to see what they had created. I wasn’t disappointed with the original game but I’ve been less than impressed with the sequels. ODST tried to do a few things a bit differently though. There was an attempt to weave a side-story into the gameplay in  a way that hasn’t been done in previous games. It seemed to be an attempt to bring in outside narratives that were developed through the Halo book series and the ARG ilovebees, done for the release of Halo 2.

Anyone not familiar with the ad campaign or the ODST game itself can see the live action promotion that builds the back story for one of the main characters in the game.

Using real characters and a cinematic styles similar to Saving Private Ryan was perhaps an attempt to move towards a more realistic game that was less like the Hollywood-style science fiction of the first games in the series. It was certainly a departure from the previous marketing done for the Halo franchise.

The gameplay begins in the year 2552, in the Kenyan city of New Mombasa. The main goal is to fight your way through the city which is full of The Covenant, an alien race who have invaded Earth. You play the role of a rookie soldier who moves through the city, finding fragments of the story of his squad-mates left behind in their equipment. He has become separated from them during the drop from orbit and the flashes of video he finds tells their story in the now deserted landscape of the city.

Another character in the game is the AI that controls the entire city. This AI has been damaged in the attack but still attempts to help the character in two ways. It provides clues and hints that are communicated through traffic signals and signs. It also provides pieces of a side story about a young woman, named Sadie, who is trying to get out of the city before the attack begins. These segments of story come through telephone booths around the city. They contain voice clips, traffic camera and security camera footage. The AI is trying to tell the story so it can explain why The Covenant have come to earth, specifically the Rift Valley part of eastern Africa. This clip shows the AI going through the attack and coming back to life as the ODST drop into the city.

It might seem that a side story within a game is nothing special but ODST has some interesting DNA. There were six novels written in the Halo universe that provide a greater level of depth to the universe and the characters in the game. These novels have received enough critical acclaim and sales that they continue to be published. The other interesting bit of history is the Alternate Reality Game (ARG) ilovebees that was created to promote Halo 2 before its release. The story in ilovebees revolved around a shipboard AI that had been damaged and was trying to re-integrate itself. It communicated through hacked websites and telephone lines as it tried to figure out why it had been damaged and why The Covenant was headed to earth. The ilovebees story begins to identify an artifact, buried on Earth, that The Covenant is trying to recover. The story ends with the realization that the artifact is designed to activate the Halo ring worlds located throughout the galaxy. If these are activated they will kill every sentient creature within the galaxy. The end of this story is where the game Halo 2 begins.

This apparently was no accident as Curtis Creamer, the executive producer on Halo 3: ODST tells that they were on a very tight development schedule (article). They were looking for story elements and they thought they could scavenge their earlier efforts in ilovebees to provide a vehicle for that story.

What is interesting is the tension between a game like Halo trying to be an epic and complex science fiction narrative and a fast moving first person shooter/ twitch game at the same time. The reviews so far would indicate that the side story has been received as an hour long distraction that slowed down players from moving through the game even faster. Most regard it as weak story that doesn’t add much to the game play. I think it is likely that most players really haven’t engaged in the Halo franchise for the story. The first copy of Halo sold over 10 million copies while only 100,000 copies of the first novel were sold. The ARG ilovebees was a complex and challenging game that involved solving very difficult puzzles and figuring out the sequence of hundreds of fragments of a radio play before the real story could be put together. It would seem that neither the novel or the ilovebees ARG really appealed to the hardcore gamers that were just looking to engage in another first person shooter that they could dominate and finish as quickly as possible.

This recent attempt by ODST to add in ARG-like elements into the game and build on the larger narrative on the novels was a great idea. I think what was missing was some way to allow those elements to remain separate from actual game play. They essentially forced the game player to deal with those elements even if they weren’t interested. It was critical to actually get through to the end of the game. Perhaps with the time and effort to build these side stories it was considered necessary to force the players to actually consume them. The design decisions may some day come out with a postmortem from the Microsoft development team. Regardless, I hope this will be the start of some consideration to allowing a more in-depth kind of experience to come out of a first-person shooter. If book sales are any indication, that might appeal to only 1% of the players of this kind of game. This might seem like a good argument to never even attempt this kind of design. It might also be a argument that the kinds of players who are interested in more in-depth narrative might actually be attracted to first person shooters rather than just dismissing them as linear, shallow experiences that quickly grow boring.

Whatever does happen next in the Halo franchise it will be interesting to see how much experimentation they are willing to allow. They are driven by profit like any other company but hopefully there will be some room to allow for some of the interactive elements of narrative to grow. The advances in physics engines and graphics rendering have overshadowed most game development so it is time for some of that creative energy to be channeled into creating an interactive narrative that goes beyond the typical cut scenes. Halo 3: ODST has tried and I’d like to see these kinds of attempts at new design approaches continue. Having a full ARG integrated into a first person shooter would be be one of those experiments. Obviously some people at Microsoft are thinking this way or ODST would have been the same disappointing re-mix of Halo that showed up in Halo 2 and Halo 3. A creative approach might take games like Halo 3:ODST to a memorable place where the story holds the player beyond the four hours it apparently takes them to blast through the entire experience.

Alternate Reality Games as “Games”

One of the issues of confusion with ARGs is the use of the word “game” in their title. For many people, they associated those types of experiences with video games that are commercially available on the market. Most video games involve a game player taking on an identity and immersing himself or herself in an artificial world. The experience is mediated through a technology platform. Often this occurs explicitly through a computer or a gaming console. The experience often takes a considerable commitment on the part of the player. They take hours to get through the game and the experience explicitly occurs through the artificial controls of a keyboard or a game controller.

ARGs do not require the player to interact with the narrative as anyting other than themselves. They are not required to take on a role of a character that must be developed over time. The product ends up being both an active experience as well as an authentic narrative event.

Game design resources

game design