Death Rewinds the Time
Imagine that you are reading a book. You are a few dozen pages into the story when suddenly the book flips back a couple of pages and you are forced to re-read the last chapter.
Imagine watching a movie in a theatre. It is a tense thriller and you are totally immersed in the story. Suddenly the movie stops, rewinds and you have to see the last fifteen minutes again.
Rewinding Stories
Now imagine this happening all the time, with all the books you read and films you see. A couple of times an hour, the story rewinds by itself and you will have to get through that part again. A bummer, right? Bigtime. When you sit down to enjoy a story, you are expecting it to be presented continuously. Sure, there is a difference between books and films. I sometimes have to step back in a book and re-read passages that I kind of “slumped” through. So book reading is perhaps not that a continuous process. Still, we would probably be extremely annoyed if we tied the “rewinding” of books and films to a set of rules which caused them to happen at somewhat regular intervals. Say, for example, that someone installed a loudspeaker in your home. Whenever that loudspeaker sounded (with a beep, for instance), you would have to clap your hands ten times before the next sound beeps three seconds later. The beep may go off at anytime when you are reading or watching a movie, and the penalty for not clapping your hands ten times within that three second timeframe is a rewind of the current story. Five pages if it’s a book, ten minutes if it is a film you are enjoying.
Does it sound like much fun? Nah, not really. But now let’s look at how “rewinding storylines” relates to dying in videogames.
Dying in Videogames
Games that tell stories come in many different flavors and I have previously written (here and here) about different approaches to game storytelling. So, let’s look at how dying in a game affects the storytelling. The extreme book and film analogy given in the beginning of this article may be contrived, but it shows an interesting property of stories: When we experience a story, we internally fit that story to a timeline; and whatever drives the narrative (a game or a DVD for instance) cannot tamper with that timeline without consequences. For example, we expect movies to tell the events that will fit our internal timeline sequencially (in some cases we get it in pieces that we along the way fit together in our heads. “Memento” is a good example). If we push rewind on the DVD remote control, the timeline is instantly disrupted and the experience is ruined. Try for yourself. You will most certainly lose immersion and it will take some time to get back into the story.
Dying in many games disrupts the timeline in just this way. The reason for having the player character vulnerable and lethal is obvious – it makes the game challenging which is a good thing. However, when designing a game that kills players that are not good enough, you have to realize that the storyline is in danger. One common design is that upon death, the player is thrown back a bit on the timeline and he/she has to progress through the same part of the story timeline again. This has effect on the immersion and the experience of the story content. Suddenly an in-game event, a dialog with an NPC or cinematic becomes a mechanical obstacle, something you most probably want to get past as soon as possible. Personally, I tend to ignore the content of the storytelling if I am exposed to it a second, third or fourth time.
A game that follows this design is “Tomb Raider: Legends”. Before some of the boss fights there is a cinematic sequence that is part of the story. However, if you die during the battle, you have to watch that sequence again. In that particular game, it would probably be possible to make those cinematics cleanly separated from the gameplay and add checkpoints around them to prevent the problem. However, many games suffer from this problem.
Another approach is to alter the save system so that instead of rewinding the story timeline, the game sends the player back to a previous location, but the story progress is still intact. “Jak & Daxter” is such a game. This solution is not without problems though. The player is sent back physically, but the timeline is still moving on so the player has to run through a level that is “cleaned” up to the point of the latest death. This is confusing since it says two different things at the same time. First, the timeline is intact, secondly it cannot be since you are moved back in the world instantly.
Checkpoint-wrapping the Story
It might seem that the optimal solution is to do the “Tomb Raider: Legends” thing and just add checkpoints that solves the repeating cinematics problem. But I strongly believe that games should try to tell the story in-game. Without cinematics you tend to resolve to in-game events, scenarios and NPC conversations for storytelling. One can wrap all such elements in checkpoints, but the problem is still there – at least partially. In a well designed in-game event or scenario, the player can die in the middle of the event. You can of course bring back the player after a death to the very spot and time where he died (to prevent repeating story), but that is in effect the same as saying that the player is unable to die. The challenge of staying alive is removed since there is no penalty for dying. To solve that, you could introduce another kind of penalty. You could, for example, remove pieces of the inventory or revive the player with limited health, but that is a truly horrifying way to go. Suddenly you will run into a scenario where players can get truly stuck. The QA department will kill you for it and real life is not wrapped in checkpoints, remember?
So, do we have any other options?
You cannot Die!
The most drastic solution is to prevent the player from dying altogether. This was done very successfully in “Myst” and there are other games that take a similar approach. However, the true “you cannot die” solution seems to be limited to adventure games where the challenge is not to stay alive, but to solve the next puzzle. So if we are making an action game, we have to come up with something better.
“Grand Theft Auto” has a semi “cannot die” solution where the player respawns outside the hospital. You lose some of your progress and have to start over again with current mission, which means that time is turned back nevertheless and story elements are repeated.
Damage Control
“Prince of Persia” provides an interesting take on the problem. Whenever the player dies, a narrator voice says “But this is not how it happened…” and time is rewound to a previous location. So that game makes the problem part of the narrative which is quite clever. They even go as far as making the rewinding of time a gameplay element. However, the narrator voice quickly becomes tiresome and the storyline is equally disrupted and immersion breaks nevertheless.
There are most certainly other ways of doing damage control to cover the problems and I wouldn’t be surprised if there are examples of games that does it with better results than “Prince of Persia”, but I believe that the problem is rooted deep in a discrepancy between gameplay (interactivity) and how we experience and relate to stories. Perhaps the optimal solution is not to design gameplay mechanics that serves the storyline, but to alter the way the game narrates.
The Game World as the Story
One game with a fundamentally different approach to story is “Metroid Prime”. The game features cinematics that provide the setup for the game, and that provides presentation and closure at certain points in the game (before a boss-battle, for example). But those cinematics have little to do with the narrative. Instead, it is the game world that provides the story.
In “Metroid Prime”, the player can dig deep into the story of the planet the game is set on by investigating the environments and by “scanning” certain objects to collect pieces of story information. This part of the game is purely optional, but it deepens the world and the interested player can use those pieces of information and build a story timeline for him- or herself.
There are other games that take a similar approach (“ICO” shares some of those traits, but has more of a storyline than “Metroid Prime”) and to me, those games make a more profound story experience since I, as a player, is unfolding the story from within the world. But while those games can avoid the rewinding timeline altogether they have problems telling the same kinds of stories as games like “Tomb Raider: Legends”. Whereas most games that contain a story tries hard to be a movie, games such as “Metroid” makes no such effort. In effect, this means that the cinematic game uses the language of the cinema to convey story. Cinematic events and dramatic conflict pile up in the player’s face and it works – sort of. But shifting the perspective and allowing the player to unfold, experience and build the story for him- or herself has profound effects on how the story can be presented. The story of “Metroid Prime”, for example, is “passive” in the sence that you experience the story elements second hand – through the pieces of information you gather. Very little “active” storytelling goes of in that game, whereas in “Tomb Raider: Legends”, almost all the storytelling is active, and told through cinematics.
The Essence of the Medium
So, which is the technique most true to the medium? The question is largely irrelevant since the storytelling potential of games makes anything that people enjoy and get rewarded by true and worthwhile. There are innumerable ways of telling a story – just look at the many ways books and movies tell theirs. Still, I believe that we need to understand our medium in order to be able to go further and evolve. Cinema was nothing more than “filmed theatre” in the beginning and one might argue that most games today are little more than “pieces of cinema stitched together by passages of gameplay”. But as cinema has moved way beyond filmed theatre, I believe that game storytelling will move way beyond cinema
An interesting thought experiment is to look at various media and search for story-containing works that could not ever work in another medium. In literature, a candidate might be “Finnegan’s Wake”, by James Joyce and in cinema “Koyaanisqatsi”, by Godfrey Reggio. (One could argue that the same “essential story” can be told in another medium, but the effect on the audience will probably be very different.)
Now, do you know a game that tells a story that cannot be told in another medium?
— sicher