WANTED: A GOOD PROTAGONIST
One of the great, holy grails of video games is immersion. Designers ponder how to achieve it, reviewers deduct rating points from games that lack it, players look up bleary-eyed as the sun lights the morning sky to discover they’ve once more fallen under its spell.
But the idea of an audience losing itself in an artificially created experience is something that artists have been aware of, and have discussed, for centuries. Aristotle advises us in his Poetics, ca. 335 BC, that a good play will draw the audience in by arousing feelings of pity and fear in the spectator, and by doing so it will free the audience from those feelings. He goes on to discuss different techniques for achieving a feeling of “wonder and awe” in the audience through the effective construction of plot and character.
Nowadays playwrights and other theatre professionals talk about ways to achieve what they call “audience involvement.” Screenwriters and movie directors want the audience to be “lost” in the movie, or as Stephen Spielberg famously said, the audience should “ride the movie.” But back in the 1st Century AD, the Roman philosopher Horace pointed out that what we all crave – playwrights, filmmakers and video game designers alike – is “an approving hearer, one who waits for the curtain, and will stay in his seat until the singer cries, ‘Give your applause!’”
Probably no one expressed it more intensely than the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche when he wrote that “we demand above all, in every genre and range of art, a triumph over subjectivity, deliverance from the self, and the silencing of personal will and desire.”
Now there’s a definition of immersion!
But every good game designer knows that declaring absolute immersion, or “deliverance from the self,” as the goal of his or her efforts is quite a different thing from accomplishing it. To be honest, there is a broad range of strategies that are employed in the effort to achieve immersion in a gaming experience. The great body of those strategies involve complex new technologies that require significant capital investment. Photo-realism, massive maps, rag doll physics, destructible terrain, and a wide range of 3D effects are among the bells and whistles that have been developed in an effort to make video games an unforgettable experience. But a drawback to the race for ever-more-realistic graphics is that the new technologies can push a game beyond the reach of players who do not have sufficiently powerful systems to run them. A recent victim of this trend was Crysis, the second game from the makers of Far Cry. An expensive game to produce, Crysis suffered a shortfall of sales and struggled to break even simply because many pc owners felt it would not play well on their systems.
A far less expensive but more elusive technique for drawing in players and creating an unforgettable experience is the art of story telling.
In fact a good story can be one of the most powerful tools available to achieve that “deliverance from the self” so hungrily sought by game designers. It is a great irony that a good story only costs the price of the paper you write it on, yet it is the hardest to accomplish, and the one most readily avoided by developers. How much better to spend tens of millions of dollars on breakthrough visual, audio, and physics rendering technologies that require us to upgrade our video cards every 18 months!
Why is creating a good story for a video game so hard?
One possible answer is that the people who set out to create video game stories have no formal training in story telling as a discreet craft. The great American screenwriter, William Goldman (The Sting, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, A Bridge Too Far, Misery, to name only a few) once declared that the only reason people admit they can’t compose music because they haven’t learned musical notation. But the same people will turn around and declare they know how to write a story because they know the alphabet. The fact is that a good sonata requires more skill than merely knowing musical notation. And a good story requires more skill than knowing the alphabet.
But like a sonata, the form can be learned.
One of the first elements of every good story is an effective protagonist, or hero. We tend to use those two words interchangeably, but it’s worth noting that they mean different things. Traditional narrative theory tells us that a story requires conflict. In Greek, the word for conflict is “agon.” And the person who first starts the conflict going is the proto agonist – the protagonist. Thus, in Half-Life 2, Gordon Freeman starts the conflict going by defying the totalitarian state of Dr. Breen and the Combine. And he keeps the conflict going through his continuous “anti-social” actions. He is a true protagonist. But he’s also a hero, that is to say, he’s a protagonist committed to virtuous action — the highest of all virtuous actions being dedicating yourself to helping others.
I recently returned to Half Life 2 to study its narrative technique and I was struck by something I’m not sure I had recognized before. I’m referring to HL2’s strong similarity to the first person POV dynamic of Myst. The HL games in many ways are nothing less than Myst with guns. And headcrabs. Or, if you will, HL2 is Myst taken to the next level of evolution. One key area in which this evolution occurred (other than adding weapons and making you fight for your life) is in the development of that critically important, central character, the protagonist. In Myst, you yourself are ostensibly the protagonist. You are a cipher about which nothing substantial is revealed. The role you assume is that of the Stranger, an anonymous person who has stumbled onto a high-tech link that has transported you to a world of islands created by the brilliant scientist, Atrus. You uncover a great deal about Atrus, his sons, and the rift between them that lead to Atrus’ imprisonment. But the protagonist himself never actually acquires any defining qualities.
Myst, of course, was phenomenally successful, the initial game selling over 6 million copies. It has been described as a truly immersive game, and I have a clear memory of being sucked into its compelling visuals, its haunting use of sound design, and its devilish puzzles. In fact, Myst is one of the first games that drove us all to upgrade our computers just so we could play it. All of those rich visuals could only be stored and accessed from a compact disc and computer owners rushed to have cd-rom drives installed in their systems as a result. But it’s also true that the Myst franchise lost its appeal over the years, with subsequent iterations selling fewer and fewer copies until finally the Myst online version, Uru Live, was unveiled in 2007 and was then deactivated a year later.
Now, you can attribute the declining interest in the Myst series to a natural sort of jaded response by the consumer public. But other game series that have similar longevity are still going strong, including the Age of Empires series, the Civilization series, and the WarCraft series.
So if the loss of interest in Myst is not a natural consequence of the passing years, what else could explain it?
Players had come to expect more from their game experiences.
Between 1993 when Myst was first released and its sad demise in 2008, much had happened in the game world. And one game in particular which had sharply increased our expectations was the original Half Life, released in 1998. Now, in 1998, when compared to Myst, it’s clear the visuals of HL1 were fairly utilitarian. Still, like Myst, it relied heavily on the immersive experience of a first person POV, a world we were free to move through more or less at will — what game designer Richard Boon calls a “continuous structure.” But even more significantly, both games are heavily reliant on intriguing physics puzzles and it may be in this area that the actual gameplay of the Half-Life series owes its greatest debt to Myst.
One of the most significant advances Half Life had made, however, was in its approach to the protagonist. You, the player, were no longer a blank slate, the “Stranger.” You were Gordon Freeman. As you moved through the HL world you were recognized by other characters. And your reputation grew as you successfully completed the challenges presented by the game.
You were also given a crowbar, a wide range of weapons, a HAZMAT suit, and all those medkits.
And you were told to fight for your life.
By refusing to succumb to the chaos that had overtaken the Black Mesa Research Facility, by defying the government forces arrayed against you, you caused the conflict to continue and intensify. To put it simply, you were truly a “proto agonist”. Starting and sustaining the conflict is functionally what a protagonist is supposed to do. By actually creating a functioning protagonist, the designers of Half-Life achieved a level of immersion that Myst could not.
And although Myst still held the edge in sumptuous graphics, that would change, too. With the rich, graphic improvements that were unveiled by Half-Life 2 in 2004, the last nail was driven into the coffin of the Myst series.
There’s an important lesson to be learned here: traditional narrative techniques can be an essential component of the blockbuster video game. Narrative technique is one of the most effective ways to achieve immersion.
A protagonist who actually has the components of a protagonist – starting and sustaining the conflict in your game – is a powerful tool in the hands of designers and writers who understand its function. A protagonist who simply serves as a pair of eyes through which the player views the events of the game fails to tap into the power of this character to draw the player into the game world and create an unforgettable experience.