Story and Challenge at the service of each other
After reading this Gamasutra interview with Jonathan Blow, designer of Braid among other things, I found myself immediately disagreeing with some of the things he states.
I agree with him when he describes that two of the driving forces behind games are Challenge and Story and that they usually conflict in such a way that when one tries to advance, the other acts as opposition – meaning that when playing a game it is the Challenge what keeps us from advancing the Story, until the point when the Challenge is beaten and so the Story can go on.
But he also makes it sound as if Challenge is being sacrificed to tell stories that are “typically not good”, which makes for weak games that resemble, from his point of view, “bad movies”.
My belief is that a trade-off between these two elements must not necessarily be made, for it is definitely possible to make games where Challenge and Story are at the service of each other. If a game is structured in a modular way so that the player feels he must complete a level to be rewarded with the next movie clip, then of course we will see the seams to its construction and the division line between Challenge and Story. But Story can also be integrated into Challenge, or Challenge into Story, so that the experience feels whole in that sense, and less like a series of cut-scenes separated by levels.
It definitely helps to keep Story as your central design element, and ask yourself if every other element of design is consistent with the Story – it doesn’t have to work perfectly for it, but an inconsistency can break the whole spell. It comes back to Theming but at the same time goes beyond it. Because designers must make sure that every aspect of their game is a gear in a perfectly tuned machine, with no weird pieces jutting out, or even useless pieces lying around.
When Story is kept at the center of the design process, it is possible to create games that implement Challenge in a way that it advances Story, rather than playing against it. The Metal Gear Solid games, for example, usually do a good job of placing the player at the center of the story and making his actions meaningful and consistent with what is going on around him, so that when Challenge rises, it feels like it is a consequence of Story demanding it to.
Games are usually not given much credit as serious storytelling devices, but that is more the designer’s fault than the medium’s. Compelling storytelling is hard to achieve in any medium, and games are not the exception.
Tags: Challenge, Jonathan Blow, Story, Theme
