The Real Problem

Despite many interesting developments, storytelling and games are still far apart, and I am pessimistic about the likelihood of the two ever merging. This is not to say that interactive storytelling has little future; my point is that we are unlikely to see anything impressive emerge from the games industry in the matter of storytelling. The real problem lies in the heart and soul of the industry. The games industry is a bastion of techie-geek triumphalism; it has no truck with those soft-headed artsie-fartsie people. In their hearts, games people believe that any problem can be solved with sufficient attention to technical detail.

When in the summer of 2001 two movies, Shrek and Final Fantasy, competed for ticket sales, and Shrek outsold Final Fantasy by ten to one, the computer games people were nonplussed. How could a graphically inferior product like Shrek have more appeal than a state-of-the-art work like Final Fantasy? The notion that Shrek had a better story and more interesting characters simply never caught on with these people. They just didn't Get It. Their worldview is literalist in a logical, physical, and spatial sense. When they sit down to create a game universe in their computer, their first act is to set up the spatial coordinate system and the map of their world. Then they populate it with physical objects and endow those physical objects with physical properties obeying physical laws programmed into the virtual universe. All very neat and tidy.

A storyteller setting out to build a virtual world would use a completely different approach. Her first task would most likely be to create a set of characters. Then she would endow those characters with dramatic traits. I doubt that she would ever get around to worrying about the spatial relationships among the various stages on which her dramatic action would take place.

This is the essential difference between game designers and storytellers: The game designers see the universe everything! as a gigantic physical system that need only be simulated with sufficient fidelity to achieve any goal. The notion that you can define the universe in human terms seems utter nonsense to them.

This mental fixation leads directly to the current idiocy gripping the imagination of the game design world: that stories can be tucked into games like any other components. To them, drama is just one more physical system to be simulated, like ballistics or optics. A game is a collection of interacting subsystems: a 3D engine, a physics engine, and, oh yes, a drama engine, too. We'll just start with the same old shoot-em-up, puzzle-solving, resource management game and stuff a little drama in there as well. Hire some Hollywood expert to write up something pretty and mash it into the pile, right?

Of course this cannot work; it's trying to pose a question in the wrong frame of reference. Figuring the dramatic content of a bullet ripping through a monster's flesh is as futile as calculating the distance from MacBeth's castle to the witch's cave using the lines of dialog in the play and just as silly. In order to understand story, you have to be a Romantic with a capital R. And let's face it: There are no romantics, even with lowercase r's, in this business. Games people will never, ever Get It, because they are stuck in a worldview that sees human emotions as mere "parameters," rather than the fundamental drivers of human experience.