Mechanics and Tone - How Does Gameplay Relate to Story? - Extra Credits

A while ago, we released a video in conjunction with the folks at Idea Channel. And for the last 2 months, their video has just been stewing in my brain. If you haven't seen it yet, I'll put a link down there somewhere. You should go watch it. The basic thrust though is that mechanics in games get in the way of our ability to tell a story. And in a lot of cases, this is true. Very often, we're so possessed by the need to grind through the next quest or so interested in the loot that it'll give us that we don't even read the story text along with it. When the time comes to turn in the quest, sometimes we can't even remember why we were collecting rat pelts for that guy in the first place. Sometimes we find ourselves wanting to skip the cutscenes entirely just to get back to the action or becoming impatient when character dialogue delays our ability to dive into the gameplay. But I would argue that this is often the fault of the narrative itself rather than the mechanics. And that more importantly, there are many games whose story couldn't possibly hold up if you change their mechanics. The cases where we want to skip the story because the story is, well, bad is

certainly something we all encounter in games often. But that case isn't the interesting one. That's not what's had this buzzing around in my head for weeks on end. The interesting question is what role mechanics inherently have in game narrative. And the most interesting cases are those where we see games who tell a tale they couldn't possibly deliver on if you used a different mechanic set. Imagine Shadow of the Colossus with God of War's mechanics. Or how about Dark Souls with Legend of Zelda gameplay and the difficulty of Kirby's Epic Yarn. Imagine Silent Hill 2 with Bayonetta combat. And I don't mean change the story at all for any of those games, just swap out the mechanics. It's silly, right? The mere thought sounds like a joke, but why? It's because none of the stories told by those games would hold up with different mechanics. Shadow of the Colossus would lose its quiet grandeur. Silent Hill would lose its looming fear. And Dark Souls, for all the work they do to establish a bleak world, would lose its sense of despair. In games, mechanics help to set the tone. They serve sort of like writing style in literature or palette choice in

painting. While they don't always directly tell the story, they always impact how we understand it. This is why everything Mike said in his video is true, and it's also why it doesn't necessarily have to be. Mechanics don't have to be a distraction from the story. In fact, they can reinforce it. You'll notice that these mechanics distract us from the narrative discussions rarely come up when the narrative and mechanics are working in tandem to tell a great story. In many, many games, even games with reasonably solid stories in the traditional sense, the mechanics conflict with the tone of the narrative that's being portrayed, which leaves us unable to invest in the world or the narrative of the game. When that happens, we completely lose interest in the story and instead just want to play the game, and we get annoyed when the game keeps interrupting us with that dumb story it loves so much. Traditional MMORPGs are perhaps the clearest example of this. In most of these games, the narrative attempts to be heroic and epic and grand, while the actions you're taking within the game tend to be fairly pedestrian and actually kind of banal. Not only is collecting 20 rat pelts not epic, but the actual way you go about it

isn't epic either. You're usually using a fairly slow-paced combat system, which involves nothing more than pushing buttons in a sequence when your abilities are off cool down, and then scouring the land for the next rat, and repeating exactly the same process over and over and over. In fact, the only place that traditional MMORPG narrative seems to come together, the only place where it tends to really work, is in difficult raids. In those cases, the tone of the mechanics finally lives up to the tone of the narrative. You're stretching your skill to the limit, improvising, sometimes heroically sacrificing yourself for the greater good. The game finally feels like that story they've been trying to tell you. This idea of mechanics as tonal underpinning is actually something I think most designers sense on an intuitive level, but it's something I've rarely seen discussed as the initial design of a game is being done. We actually can and should ask the questions, what do our mechanics feel like, and do they feel like the story we're trying to tell? The mechanics we use still have to be engaging, but sometimes simply looking at what's engaging isn't enough. We have to think about how it syncs up with the rest of

our experience. Remember way back when we were comparing the narrative effectiveness of BioShock and BioShock Infinite? This is exactly what we were talking about. If you look at the differences between BioShock and BioShock Infinite, one of the big things you'll notice is that with BioShock, the mechanics completely set the tone for the piece and fit the narrative incredibly well, except perhaps for the binary choice around the little sisters. When we look at Infinite, though, we see that they simply took the same mechanic set without considering if it was really appropriate for the narrative they were trying to tell. And so, while Infinite had some brilliant moments, it still left the strange disjoint between the mechanical tone of the game and the tone of the story they were trying to tell, often leaving the play to feel out of place and at odds with the voice-overs or the cutscenes. So, while it's absolutely true that mechanics can get in the way of our paying attention to the story, I think this is often because the mechanics and the narrative are out of sync, like a pop song playing over a tragedy. But, when they are aligned, they reinforce our sense of the world, and they lay the emotional groundwork for how we experience it. Catch you all

next week.