That funny man-animal who uses my character sheets as insulation between soda and desk, Alvan, hit some excellent points on storytelling and then casually threw the awfully hot ball to me.

Cutscenes, he said. Why on earth do games rely on cutscenes, he asked. Bloody good question, and while I have no literal facts as such, I can only speculate and rant – but since speculation and rant makes better entertainment than mere facts, nobody loses. Also, the subject matter itself is based on things that are difficult to quantify unless you’re Dr. Phil, and even then you might get into arguments.

Exhibit A:

You make a game, say, FPS action wonderfest of sort. It’s basically based on you shooting things. A conclave is formed, features written into stone, weapons of war decided and armies constructed on little patches of paper. But — what now! someone is suddenly startled, points to the sky and calls out – “It’s well advisable to know why you’re shooting!”. You present this groundbreaking epiphany to the masters. From behind the curtains of management a loud “Oh, a backstory is needed, then!” sounds and echoes down the hallways. “A world with a reason, with personae our hero can feel at ease with!”

Klaxons wail, loudspeakers shout go-words! Trained monkeys scurry to their tasks, attending meetings and pushing tasklists and making schedules, everyone with a glowing sense of importance inside their hot and bothered hearts. We are creators of worlds, rulers of immersion, masters of gameplay!

Amidst the scurrying and goal-oriented teamwork, sudden plea is heard behind numerous concept art sketches and level design ideaboards: “How do we progress the story, how do we, pray, tell the player what happened, what his character feels beneath his forged iron carapace, what will happen now? Please, masters, tell us!”

Masters flinch, designers are summoned, and hidden under the shadows of their hoods they confer.

-This iss the best way. Trusst me. A movie within the game. Many moviess. Moving picturres carry worrds. We giev our art to massters of moving picturss and they do us moviess. We put moviess between levelss! Where loadingbarr goes!

Masters stand proud, a path has been found and it is golden, and it will bring them numerous coins of gold.

Designers go on about their business, designing core gameplay, weapon balancing, character perks, progress curves, everything their soon-to-be laid golden egg is made of.  A writer is hired, a professional master of words and worlds. He waves his hand over the vistas they have created and behold, a world is born! He writes it down, and he sees it is all good. He collects his coins and goes home to breed and procrastinate some more.

The golden words are spread out to all who make the game.

“This is our world, this is how it must feel like! It is .. Quite blue!”

Trained monkeys nod and add some blue, anxious to see what their world will be like in the moving pictures that bring their gameworld to life. What will it tell them? They concentrate on getting the best mesh topology for their characters, most cleverly blended IK animations and making sure there are no otherworldly invisible collision objects laying around. Reset XForm buttons are pressed, with sweat on forehead and no hands that dare swipe it off. Production is at full blast, and everything depends on this game. It must be the new benchmark in its genre! Hands clench in fists, manhours crunched.

“You have to have the best shaders! You have to tighten up graphics! Wait – that looks good, give it a name! Now, have our swiftest courier to take it to our marketing department!”

The big wheel rolls on.

Movies arrive from the golden lands far across the distant waters. Everyone is gathered in the big hall adorned with fantastical mechanic devices that illuminate the great wall with moving images and fill their eager ears with sound. The movies are good. They watch them all – twentyone of them – at one go. It is a beautiful, war-torn story of lost cause hovering above a brotherhood of men, who only wish to be brothers regardless of color or stature – to bear the burden with your mates in their chipped armours.

Lights flicker back, audience is thrown onto their feet, cheering and applauding. Their Game now has a story, a movie within their play, and movies tell stories! It all makes sense and it all feels so very good.

Game becomes gold, and is shipped to far-flung countries and coins change hands.

Reviews come in.

“Graphics are ace, and DOF and Shaders and Lens Flares are amazing feats of technology! Other than those and nice cutscenes, it’s a basic shooter. 6/10″

Wail, gnashing of teeth. Does not the acclaimed critics understand their words, their story? Are they blind?

No, they are not. You are blind, you wacky bats. You just made a point of having neatly structured levels, clever AI and gave places the same names as your precious and expensive cutscenes have. How did you treat the cutscenes? Are they movies of their own? Connected to gameplay moments player just experienced? Probably somewhat, but it is my humblest of opinions that cutscenes serve no storytelling value from the games point of view if A) the gameplay itself is not treated as part of the same story arc present in cutscenes, and B) the player experience is forgotten.

“No, the experience is there! We made sure the gun recoils realistically and walls topple majestically! Our end bosses are bigger than the end of universe! Surely the player experiences it all!”

You silly clown. Did you prepare the player for the cutscene? Did you stop and think about players role in game, and in cutscene? Yes, his role in cutscene. You strip his soul with gunplay, drive him mental with interactivity, make his eyes sore from effects and his mind dented with immersion, and then there’s AI that’s more natural than your grandmother and WHACKBANG you snatch it all from his hands. You force him into invalid cripple with no limbs. Passive audience, away from all that action and control and hoohaa. Did you consider the gameplay levels as storyarcs? Did you build up the tension, introduce twists, give the player a resolution, a wind-down moment, did you design the gameplay cool-off to force him to bloody stop and relax, leaning back on his seat with his hands off the goddamn gamepad so you can present him a pre-chewed bit of storytelling, fit for the state you just left him in?

No, of course you did not, you monkey.

Cutscenes suffer from their own history. When they were new and snazzy, they were selling points themselves. Remember Diablo 2? I remember more people talking fervently about the CG intro than the game itself, before it was on the shelves.

These days, awesome graphics are  a baselevel expectation. You don’t sell the game with cutscenes alone. Yes, people want stories and immersion. Yes, cutscenes can work in conjunction with the progressing game world, but more often than not, they are more or less slapped between levels with some shared graphical assets to tie them into the level you just played or will play anysecondnow. Your AI buddies that couldn’t find their way out of doorway suddenly become lipsynched and motion captured marvels that put Hollywood to shame.

Now that I got to the whole damn point, I’ll take a cool break and write more tomorrow when I’m awake again. How does it feel, to get cut off just when it got interesting? Hoping for a comfortable arc here? A coherently constructed story? Hahaha.

So, second season of Moving Wallpaper has started and with it, thoughts of play-within-a-play type of storytelling. There are a wonderful lot of takes on this, varying from Shakespeare to Tropic Thunder, from Simpsons to Slumdog Millionaire. It increases the complexity of the story somewhat, but with that complexity comes the freedom of exploring things from a different view.

If I had to make a guess, I’d say the most typical story-within-a-story in role-playing games is the exposition story. While they’re not really independent stories, they still fit the profile enough to be mentioned. The more common type is when the Game Master tells the players a story of what has happened before, through the tales of a non-player character. This is, for example, used to frame the quest the characters will set on. Sort of a mission briefing, one might say. The mirrored version of this is the player-character-back-story-revealed, where the player tells the dark history of his character to the rest of the characters (and thus the players). This is most common in games where the players keep their character histories secret from the rest of the group (because of some creative GM agenda, usually). Usually it is done at a moment of dramatic revelation, even Now, usually both of these are quite short “stories”, more valued by the amount of information it reveals than any artistic merits.

Another quite common thing that gets done in RPGs is things like book-within-a-game or play-withing-a-game. Sadly, these are again more likely to be just brief references to what happens “The story on the stage is a doomed love story.” Period. That’s it. “The book tells the tragic history of the castle’s owner’s cat and how it died by eating a poisoned mouse.” Period. Maybe if someone asks a question about it, there is some more details revealed, like “The cat was brown” or “There is some singing in the play”, but more likely than not, it’s just a few or two to provide a backdrop, not really a story. Sometimes they get interwoven with the story if the GM can be evocative enough, GM bouncing the stage action with combat action, for example. But these are very rare situations.

And frankly, it’s usually just great that they’re not explored in more depth than the very surface. While every GM dreams of a game that is a story told by his great imagination and every player wishes their character could be on the center stage all the time, the time it takes to monologue out a proper story is pretty long. And in a game that’s supposed to be interactive fiction, there just isn’t room for that sort of stuff. Also, neither is fully a story-within-a-story, by the standards usually presented.

xkcd's take on this

While playing a game where players are playing people who are playing a role-playing game might be quite interesting (for example, having players play player stereotypes playing a game could provide an interesting commentary on your gaming culture, or at least your view of how you see typical gaming), it might be surprisingly hard not letting the game slide into a friendly parody as you’re bound to be comment on what you’re doing while playing a guy doing the same thing. And parody tends to distract. But things like playing a game where the players are playing characters who are, for example actors, trying to get a play working, could work a bit better, as the play-withing-the-game comments on things that happen on the game (actor) level.

But, coming a full circle back to the Moving Wallpaper thing, the best experience so-far has been on our BtVS-RPG (Buffy the Vampire Slayer) campaign “Apocalypse, Cleveland”, where the game worked on the level of the production crew and then on the actual game/series level. Looking back, I would have wanted to work on that aspect a bit more in the game. There were production meetings pre-game where things got discussed and the audience’s opinions (decided by random dice rolls) and the creative crew’s responses to that explored. There were also some meta-level things planned, like falling out between actors and surprise pregnancies. Sadly, the game ended when the main character’s player left for Sweden and we (read: me) didn’t feel like going the X-Files last seasons route or recast the character, even if that could have been fruitful, viewed from hindsight. This is one of the things I probably miss most about Primetime Adventures RPG – some sort of commentary on how creating that perfect television series isn’t as easy as it might sound, how there are many things that need to be considered beyond the basic story.

But what else could be done as a story within a story, or at least with the lesser techniques present there. Flashbacks have been mentioned and of course lead to flash-forwards. But how about alternate scenarios. Short glimpses of how things could have ended if they had made another choice. Maybe the next time the characters participate in the wedding of a group of NPCs, you give each player a written role in the “main cast” of the wedding, and have a look at how the oh-so-beautiful wedding isn’t really all that beautiful at all. Or the next time the military commanders do another decision that the players find stupid, you have the players fill in for the roles of the generals, maybe even change the outcome from what you had planned. Or if you had last left one of the characters reading a pirate-love-story comic on a street corner, you spend the beginning of the next game playing out that romance, have players create the main characters for it and let the chips fall as they may. Maybe even have some other player GM the game about the pirates and you play there with the rest.

Including the players somehow where normally there is just a moment of stopping and the GM explaining things. That’s where the beauty might be found.

As a quick dodge at the end, from the computer games point of view, I just have to mention a couple of things currently happening in the game world – the Shakespeare plays on Second Life, where people are using their avatars to bring plays to life. While technically it might be more easily compared to puppet shows or something like that, the way the avatars that people are playing differ from who they are in real life makes me want to give out a shout to them at this point. The second thing is the City of Heroes Mission Architect that’s coming up in a few weeks time, where players are allowed to create their own content to the game, that also might result in some “people role-playing heroes in a virtual world, creating stories for a virtual realm inside the game” action. The closed beta is already on its way and some lucky people could be already doing it as the rest of us are just blogging about it.

I’ll leave spikey to expand on the topic of “why on earth do games rely on cutscenes to convey stories” when he gets back online and writing. I know he has much more to say about it than I do.

Well, BBC website has the latest episode up again in the blogpost, linked in the player so that a Finnish person like me can watch it, so open up a browser window and a soda and see how the first series ends, here. (edit: It took them longer than usual, but the BBC webmonkeys fixed the blog entry so that the episode can’t be viewed outside of Britain anymore. But it was there for long enough for quite many people to see it, so it’s good.) I’ll comment on it after getting a good night’s sleep.

Addendum, Monday, 2nd March:

Well, getting a good night’s sleep took quite long thanks to migranes and other stuff. The season finale was very solid and my fears of it being about asskickery were unfounded. A very solid, human view of everything that has been building up.

The tension in the episode was built perfectly, and I can’t remember where I had been stuck on the edge of my seat and wonder how things work out in the end. The thing about Brit shows I love compared to the ones perfectly thought out by the Hollywood machine, is that sometimes, the way things turn out aren’t the obvious ones. So the tension is there. Also, awesome dialogue everywhere, favorite being the line “Well, congratulations on mastering the whole speaking-like-a-tw_t thing” that conjured whole stacks Buffy flashbacks. Also enjoyed how, when the series had mostly focused on exploring humanity by giving us human characters, really reveled in the supernatural aspect, comparing one monster against another. Trying to find where the lines of being human lied when there aren’t that many real humans around.

I’ll probably be writing at least one more piece on Being Human once the DVD set arrives in late April and I’ve had a chance to rewatch the series, which means somewhere around May.

Just a quick addendum or example or derivate or something to this. How is audio used in Left 4 Dead?

The video game Left 4 Dead is begging to be mentioned when one talks about creative ways of using diegetic and extra-diegetic sound in games. The survivor side of the game plays with high reliance to soundscapes, sound cues and music. So much in fact that you could say beyond the very basics of survival, everything in the game boils down to listening to what’s happening in the game.

L4D uses both character level and player level audio to support the game play. The very basic soundscape of L4D is made of player level music (well, more like long synth chords, most prominent at start of levels, to open up the level) and character level ambiance sounds of the environment like crows and sounds of thunder. This creates a very strong base mood for the game.

The second way sound happens is through the sounds of the player characters. First of all, they produce the sounds that you’d expect – when you shoot a shotgun, you hear a shotgun sound. When you move around muck, you hear squishy footstep sounds. But beyond these, the characters comment on the environment actively, even without the player telling them to. When they get attacked, they scream for help. When they notice one of them is low on health, they tell the other character to heal up, etc. This is fully happening on the character level. The player can intrude on the character level and command his character to say some of the pre-scripted things, for example to call out that there is a boomer ahead, around the corner even if the character is unaware of it. There is a player level audio bit to some of the character actions as well – getting attacked by a special infected will cause a dramatic song (again, mostly synth chords) to boom out from the loudspeakers. Also, worth mentioning that the characters’ dialogue sometimes dips into the metadiegetic level of story-within-a-story when they reveal things of their past or when their comments tell the story of the infection, as well as telling the player what the character-level story is (in the “We have to follow these tracks to an abandoned military base” style). (thanks Kham for pointing that last one out)

One of the ways people grief when playing Left 4 Dead is to make their character repeat some stupid line of their repertoire like “PILLS HERE” every second or so, causing the other players lose their ability to keep the character level separate from the player level, falling into disbelief of the whole character level of the game in the progress. Not to mention it’s annoying as hell when someone keeps shouting “PILLS HERE” in your ear.

The third way, of course, is the other actors of the game besides the player characters. The helicopter flies above you and use a megaphone to tell you to head to Mercy Hospital. A gas station explodes with a thundering roar. Infected people whimper and moan. And then there are the special infected. Each of them having a distinct sound following them. The smoker coughs, the boomer gurgles, the hunter snarls and then screams when he’s moving. The witch cries and sobs, and the tank roars. And when you hear the multitude of gnarls a horde of normal infected generate, you know there’s a lot of nasty heading your way. These are all character level sounds. When you turn your head in the first person mode, you notice the sounds move left to right and right to left, allowing you to pinpoint a boomer hiding behind the corner a long time before you see it, or hear the witch getting closer as her sobs grow louder. And spotting the specials before they are upon you is really the only way to survive on the higher difficulty levels, when things get tough in the game. On top of those, the witches, tanks and hordes also have a player-level musical theme, that emphasizes the mood of the situation – with the witch it’s a surreal melody that gets piano hits when the witch is almost agitated and turns into a panicing cacophony when she’s out to get you. With the horde, you get a couple of creepy chords a moment before the screeching starts and the masses start flowing. And with the tank, it’s a very doom-inspiring track that makes the player scared enough when the big bad things is coming.

There is a fourth level of audio in the game, if you happen to get into a team that is doing it. The game supports voice communication between the players via microphones. As any conversation between real people, this sometimes is just silly chatter to lighten up the mood. Sometimes it’s completely unrelated to the game, and sometimes it’s a repetition or extrapolation of something the characters could have communicated on their level. For example, a player might say “a hunter got me” to the microphone, even if the audio cues of the character level in the game could have given the same information to the other players (the characters shouting “A hunter got Francis” and Francis screaming “Get it off me”). Thus, there is a player level communication going on about the game as well as the communication that happens via the detour of the character level. And then there is singing. There always needs to be singing to the microphone. I have no idea why.

As Alvan just seemed to dive off the deep end with his post on audio in games, I should include a few words before the next barrage is launched. The ambient soundscape I thought about when including tabletop playing in the mix, wasn’t about communicating individual situations and character moments – it’s way too hard to fashion such mechanics and control them sufficiently. More in the lines of “what sounds tell your mind you’re in a very old forest, even if you don’t pay attention to them?”. Setting the baseline mood. No sounds shoveled in your face, just a carpet of aural information quietly humming to you what’s between you and the horizon. What one does on top of that, is different matter and could either add depth or break things.

Once the players – as characters or audience, whichever works here – are used to the soundscape in the background (read: doesn’t pay active attention to it anymore), a sudden GM-introduced threatening in-game plot moment with sounds suddenly off could be a big impact on how the moment is driven into the lizard parts of players brain. Internally, when we get threatened or get thrown off the normality due to a sudden, completely unexpected event in real situation, we stop paying attention to normal things. Survival mode, attention focus and all that. When the same thing is played on us externally in a situation that’s inherently not real, it’s a good curveball that tips things out of balance. And of course, it’s used in just about any production that’s narrative and has audio in it. And of course, it’s so simple there has to be people using it already in RPG’s, too.