What I should be doing today is creating the structured interview questions for my research on Cultural Institutions and Tech SMEs. But I’m distracted by this series of articles on gaming from playwright Lucy Prebble. Lucy is most famous for her play ENRON about the stocks and shares scandal surrounding the eponymous US energy company. More recently, her The Effect has had positive reviews. But she is also a gamer, and writes a monthly column on games for the Observer.
Her column tends towards narratively driven “authored” games, such as Gone Home, which as she is a professional narrativist shouldn’t be surprising, though she also discusses and appreciates more procedural games like The Sims and Farming Simulator. In her conversation with Bioshock’s Ken Levine, they discuss a possible future project which he is considering, which has all the procedural narrative of games like the Sims or Rimworld, but “this would still be authored, it would still tell a story. It would end. And actually, that makes it more true to life, not less.” which reminds me how powerful “the end” is to to storytelling, and why Red Dead Redemption is more emotionally involving for me than unending Skyrim.
Her most recent article praises Device 6 (enough to make me download it after considering it for months) and the Novelist among others, while making the claim that charity shops are starting to turn away books, unable to sell them because “Everyone has Kindles”. I’m not convinced that she, or rather the charity shop workers she spoke to are correct to prophesise the death of the book yet – the second-hand bookshops at National Trust places seem to be thriving and turning over stock at a reasonable pace. But she does make the point that adventurous writers are looking to games as a when to tell stories differently. And the truly adventurous are playing with the conventions of what a game is too:
Depression Quest is a simple interactive fiction game that guides you through the experience of someone with depression. Its creator, Zoe Quinn, reveals a powerful understanding of how to affect through gameplay. Some options are visible, eg “Open up a little, hoping she’ll understand” but you are unable to select them. This basic but intelligent design expresses so much about a mental reality where the sufferer knows what they “should” do but is literally unable to. Your own frustration with the choice is mirrored by the protagonist’s and eventually a peek into self-loathing and stagnation is achieved, as well as a glimpse into how to move forward.
A game she has persuaded me to buy and try is Gone Home, which describes as though it is a near-perfect cultural heritage interpretation experience.
You piece together a sense of who everyone is and what happened through seemingly disconnected items and evidence hidden around the house. And those connections are intentionally weak. It allows the plot and conclusions to take place in the mind of the player and not in the action of the game… By withholding its story so fully and wisely, Gone Home insists we join the dots ourselves. It takes the gaming element away from the screen, and into your head.
Prebble is very interested in games and emotion, and makes and important point about how words alone fail can fail to trigger an emotional response:
As a playwright, I have long been disappointed by the weakness of words. An audience is rarely moved by words themselves, but by the gaps between words. In theatre sometimes we reference irritation with actors who act “off the line”, meaning they put in breaths and little sounds around what’s written, slowing pace and drawing attention. But that’s because they know the writing is just a scaffold… I think games have an unrealised potential to be even more emotionally involving than other forms, because they can make room for the player/audience directly. And because they are alive to flexibility of choice and narrative. I believe the more you nail down a plot point or a line, the more it dies. When you catch words like butterflies and pin them behind glass, it feels like an achievement, but something seals as you press down the pane. And so, now more than ever, we need games like Gone Home that withhold and reinvent and leave space for thought and feeling.
Of course this can be incendiary stuff, for gamers and non-gamers alike. Ludologiest would argue (as one commenter did) “The problem with Gone Home is that people refer to it as a game, which ultimately it isn’t. Any piece of entertainment software that focuses solely on story is by definition not a game,” while traditionalists will say that a game narrative can not possibly be compared with the emotional resonance of a half-decent novel. But Prebble isn’t looked only at what either games or storytelling are, but what they might be…
I’ll finish this piece with a quote within a quote from Prebble’s most recent article, which illustrates the reactionary fears expressed when new technology encroaches on something we love:
Maybe it’s best to close with this warning from an 1815 publication bemoaning the demise of the chalkboard in schools: “Students today depend on paper too much. They don’t know how to write on slate without getting chalk dust all over themselves. They can’t clean a slate properly. What will they do when they run out of paper?” (fromRethinking Education in the Age of Technology by Allan Collins and Richard Halverson)
I suppose we’re finding out.
The Interpretation Game 
A story can be viewed as one possible path out of many through a game. A game can be viewed as a means to develop stories. Ever since Myst (and Riven), probably even in the days of Zork for that matter, the difference has been somewhat fuzzy. What matters is not what they are, but what you, as the reader / player take away from the experience.
And as for the demise of the book, Kindle is but one of the more recent attempts to bring us kicking and screaming into the digital age. Some of us remember the same furore over Adobe Acrobat and Microsoft Reader ; the fact remains that a book does not need charging, does not have issues with strong sunlight, and while it may be bulky and inconvenient to carry, it is also somewhat more resilient to dropping onto a hard surface. Oh, and less desirable to thieves, as well. There’s just something better about a book. It’s almost an indefinable quality, a satisfying feeling born from the smell of newly printed or dusty pages, the feel of the paper, the sound of turning a page or slamming it shut with authority.
That said, I am a hypocrite of sorts, as I naturally have a Kindle. Except that my Kindle is an app, and runs on a superior device, an iPad Mini.
Hi Andy. I agree, a Kindle app (on a superior device of course) is a great way of reading books you don’t care about or want cluttering up your life. While a lovely hardback first edition is something I buy to keep and treasure, knowing the book means something special to me (Grant Morrison’s Supergods being the last, previewed it on Kindle, then rushed out to buy and read the hardback).
What I’m particularly interested in though is the game mechanic’s power to drive emotion, even if it is isn’t a very ludic game. (Although every game is essential point and click *weg*)