This I believe...except when I don't.

The pending release of Metal Gear Solid 4 has me thinking about fundamental tenets of game design and a growing awareness of my own hypocrisy. If I sat down and thought about it - which I guess is what I'm doing right now - I could make a list of the basic design principles I believe in and have advocated on this blog. So here goes:

1. Video games must develop their own language of meaning. While narrative games can borrow useful tools from film, novels, comic books, etc., ultimately the medium must communicate its distinctive interactive properties in its own ways.


2. I believe in Auriea Harvey and Michaël Samyn's notion of "inescapable narrative":
   

   It's the perfect non-linear narrative environment. You walk through it and there are all these stories around you, and in general they're part of your culture. Our favorite games have strong emotion...where you're really there and you never stop being curious about the things around you...It's about being, rather than seeing, and that's why games are more closely related to architecture than film. [1]

3. "Show, don't tell" makes sense in every other visual medium, but I believe Corvus Elrod's revised version of that dictum should apply to video games.

It is not enough to “show, don’t tell,” when showing takes the play out of the experience. So, perhaps, the rule for video games ought to be, “Let me do, don’t show, don’t tell.” [2] 

4. Strict linearity unnecessarily limits the player's autonomy and engagement with the world. When a game limits my interactivity to pre-scripted linear goals and missions, I'm little more than a pawn, and my experience ceases to feel personal or unique to me.


5. Cutscenes are narrative crutches that reduce the player's engagement from active participant to passive observer.


6. Video games must learn to tell stories that go beyond killing and violence as the core gameplay experience. First-person-shooters featuring conflicted heroes and thematic meditations on the meaninglessness of war will not do the trick. We need new stories that address other aspects of the human condition.

So that does it for "this I believe." I'm sure I could come up with a few others if I tried, but I'm distracted by this pesky little man on my shoulder bearing an unsettling resemblance to Hideo Kojima. He whispers in my ear:

"You're a hypocrite, Abbott. You pontificate like you've got it all figured out, but I know the truth about you. You want my game bad, don't you? Admit it. You're way more excited than you were for that silly sandbox Gotham, aren't you? You want my game, and you want it now. Well I've got news for you, smart guy. My game breaks every one of your stupid little rules. That's right. Every single one. How do you like that? Hmm? What do you say now? Yeah, I thought so. Still want it. Can't wait to play it. You're a very silly man, Abbott. A very silly man."

And I have no defense. I'm a hypocrite indeed. MGS4 will likely defy most of my hopes for the future of video games and, oddly enough, I don't care. My enthusiasm for the game remains undiminished, largely because I believe in Kojima's vision and his signature grip on the series. Linear missions? Bring 'em. 90-minute cutscenes? I'm there.

Maybe he won't pull it off this time. Maybe the game will finally succumb to that self-indulgent streak that has threatened all the Solid titles. But I feel confident about one thing: the game will be full of ideas. Big, political, eccentric, ambitious, goofy, inspired ideas. And artists with big ideas can sometimes make us forget about what we expected. We'll soon see, won't we?

Comments

[Dan Bruno]

Man, that Kojima guy sounds like a jerk. :)

I'm conflicted about that list. While I largely agree with the specific points, I have trouble with the idea that games need to rigidly adhere to a set of design principles to be good. There are plenty of games that violate some of those tenets, but they are not necessarily any worse off for it.

I'm not sure if it's entirely appropriate here, but I would make an allusion to literature: there are rules, but they can be broken if you know what you're doing. That's why James Joyce can get away with Ulysses, but I can't. Similarly, that's why Hideo Kojima can get away with MGS4, but other developers can't.

Okay, maybe it's a stretch.

[Ben Abraham]

Great set of ideals, Michael, but I do have one question I would like to hear your view on. I guess what I'd like to know is where you draw the line in regards to strict linearity.

Would you call Half-Life 2 linear? It's certainly a very narrative driven game, and barring any back-tracking, you always visit the same places in the same order. But on another level, the way you traverse *through* the level is never going to be exactly identical. The enemy AI is going to react differently, and (I guess I'm invoking chaos theory here) it's at the very least highly unlikely that anything behaves exactly the same. Lightning striking twice and all that.

So, is that enough non-linearity to satisfy what you are describing here, or are you looking for more open world type games, a.la Oblivion or STALKER where you can choose more like the order of the narrative? It sounds like it could be heading into 'Interactuve Storyetelling' territory that Chris Crawford is currently working on. Interestingly though he doesn't see that as 'games'...

Just curious because it seems to me that 'linearity' is such a broad catch-all term, at the moment.

[steve]

If this game seriously features 90-minute cutscenes, I'll never play it. The 45-minute cutscenes in 2 drove me away (along with the laughable, self-indulgent characters and story.) Cutscenes twice as long? I just couldn't take it. I loved 3, precisely because it was more grounded (relatively speaking) and didn't tell me to put my controller down for so long at a stretch. If 4 reverses that trend, I'll be disappointed.

[Julian]

Michael, that's definitely a good list of design principles, but I can't help thinking that it isn't about requiring those in every game. Obviously some of them CANNOT apply to certain genres (sports games come to mind). It's just that those are the areas where games have huge potential for expansion and are currently underutilized. I'm as excited as you to see the unique possibilities for novel narrative styles video games alone can achieve come to life. But that doesn't mean that we need to leave behind the rich narrative tradition that has been built for us.

What I'm trying to say is don't feel bad for appreciating old modes of narrative. But let's keep striving to realize new narrative methods as well.

Dan, I would actually go so far as to say that this manifesto of game design philosophy is actually the exception to the existing rules. The traditional rules say you design a game, and the player plays your game, experiencing your story, perhaps influencing it in various ways. If we follow these new "rules," we're going to get a game that closer to a simulation really. It gives you an a world to experience, and helps you create your own story within that framework. Obviously I can't speak for Michael, but I do not feel that even games like Oblivion achieve this, they merely give you several very linear stories to choose from which you can jump back and forth between at will, and few of them have any effect on one another. We've had truly nonlinear gameplay (in the sense that your actions actually determine how things progress organically and not through branching scripts) for a long time now (I think 4X games are the perfect example but there are others), but what I'm looking forward to is storytelling methods that have those same types of self-generating properties.

[Nathaniel Edwards]

I was actually excited about 90 minute cutscenes, because they're always so entertaining in MGS. It is odd though, because I certainly wouldn't tolerate cutscenes so long (even though one guy said none of them were any more than 45 minutes) in any other game, because I wouldn't care enough about their storyline. I'm just a fanboy of the series, though.

[L.B. Jeffries]

I think Julian said it very well. For me and for my own work...it's just too early in the medium's existence to lay out guidelines or rules.

All things in moderation, including moderation itself.

[Michael Clarkson]

I think some of these principles are too restrictive and take too limiting and literal a view of the gameplay experience. I would agree that many cutscenes are narrative crutches, but they're not just crutches for the creator, they are also crutches for the audience. Not everyone can follow or be engaged by a game that doesn't present certain aspects of the plot. Moreover, I don't feel it's at all necessary to put the player in charge of the story in order to make a great game. What *is* necessary is to tune the mechanics so that they, and not just the cutscenes, contribute to the emotional trajectory of the story. I agree that a game is pretty much an artistic failure (though it still may be fun) if it's just using gameplay to retain a player's interest in a sub-par story, but I don't think linearity, escapability, or showing *necessarily* diminish the quality of a design.

I am on board 100% for 5 and 6, and pretty much in agreement with 1, but I have serious reservations about about the proper scope of 2-4.

[Michael Abbott]

Thanks for all the insightful comments. I hope I didn't convey the impression that I consider the list I proposed a series of inviolable "rules" that must be followed by all games. My real intention was to suggest a kind of ironic self-awareness that certain games I love go their own ways regardless of what anybody (including me) thinks about linearity, choice, cutscenes, or any other "limiting" design goal we often hear designers say they are striving to move beyond.

My list is really meant to suggest a series of ways I hope games will continue to evolve. In general, I think less linear is better than more linear. Active is usually better than passive. Et cetera. Obviously, great games have ignored these and succeeded. Bioshock is an apt example - though I think the ways it was limited by its own mechanics also serves to prove my point.

I do think, however, (again, in general) that designers who convey narrative by showing, rather than allowing the player to do something, unnecessarily restrict what video games do better than other media. Of course, as Dan and Julian suggest, playing with the "rules" is what great designers often do best. And thank goodness for that.

[George Dudas]

I think Ken Levine stated, that he tried not to push a story, but to give the player the opportunity to pull the story. This could fit into 3: don't show, don't tell, let me explore a story... I like that better, then I have a choice which parts of a story I want to follow and which I am not interested in.

[KingMob]

Games are still a young medium, and while in principle 1 sounds great in theory, in practice I would imagine that's quite a difficult proposition. I think some recent games have made some strides in this direction, particularly Portal, but obviously there is still a long way to go.

Principles 2 and 4 are much more problematic. I disagree that games have more in common with architecture; the audio-visual capabilities of games give them certain similarities to both film and television, and the interactive and rule elements add simulation characteristics that are unique to games of all sorts, not just video games. Principle 4 rebukes "roller-coaster" games like Bioshock or Call of Duty 4 merely for their linearity without examining the value of the player having a common narrative to discuss with other players.

As for the others, I have very mixed feelings about 3, and agree wholeheartedly with 5 and 6.

I too have been unable to finish Metal Gear Solid 2 because of the cutscenes. It was hard enough getting through the Sniper Wolf sequence in the original; the pathos in MGS 2 was just too much.

[George Dudas]

Hi Michael, one more thing. I think cutscenes in a videogame could be compared to voiceover in film , a cheap way to push a story down your ears or eyes. (this I was reminded again when I watched Blade Runner yesterday without the voiceover... the voiceover is taking you really by the hand like a cutscene ). Without the voiceover you have way more freedom as a viewer of the movie... similar to a cutscene. Without the cutscene, you have more freedom as a player to explore a story. I think this is what some developers/designers need to learn.

regards,
George

[George Dudas]

p.s. also cutscenes are way too heavy on dialog. I do not want to have a dialog in every cutscenes. do it more subtle, please.

/George

[Etchasketchist]

Your list reads like some vegan hardcore punk rock manifesto from 1982. Maybe in your mind, the game that follows all those rules you made up is totally awesome, but my guess is it's probably gonna be kinda lame. Freedom is over-rated, linearity is under-rated and cut scenes are just as awesome as they were back when they were the awesomest thing a video game could do. You just gotta do them well. And making up rules for art is fun and all, but don't take them too seriously. Whoever said "If this game has 90 minute cut scenes, I'll never play it" is a dummy. What if they're the dopest 90 minute cut scenes ever? Ya ever think about that?

[namekuseijin]

Currently, the only games I play are interactive-fiction games which, like most videogames, are mostly linear with a few branches and slightly different endings. This don't annoy me at all, as the ability of the author to put me in the shoes of the character, the richness of the environment and that feeling that I am empowered to truly drive the story, rather than being driven by it, more than make up for little replay value and linearity.

This is something you only get in videogames: even being every bit as linear as in a book or movie, the fact that in videogames you "are" the protagonist and actively participates of the events narrated don't make you feel the hand of the author guiding you as strongly. At least, not the first time around.

I'm salivating over MGS4 and willing to buy a PS3 just for it. Hope it lives up to the hype.

[J.]

Although I applaud the fact that these guidelines are even being discussed and thought about, I disagree that they should be followed in any rigid way. I don't think that most games can/would benefit from applying all of these rules (or even some of them). In fact, games like MGS4 are all the better for breaking every single one of them in a grand fashion.

In my mind there should be absolutely no rules for what games can be; let them be whatever their creators feel they should be and then let the consumers decide.

I prefer to think of this medium more as interactive entertainment and less as video games. That description leaves the field so much more open than describing them as games does.

It's the very idea that these are games which leads to coming up with confining lists like these that in many cases don't make sense.

On the other hand, interactive entertainment describes a very broad medium, one better suited to products that both adhere to and break these kinds of often limiting guidelines.

[Michael Abbott]

I agree with your take on this, J. I didn't intend to suggest my list should be taken as an inviolable set of rules to be followed. They really just reflect a series of ways I hope to see game design evolve. Artists will always break rules to serve their own ends, and this is an entirely good thing.

The title of my post (and the imaginary Kojima response) was meant to express my ambivalence about my own proposed "rules."