The How And Why Of Story-Based Gaming

Warning: Major spoilers for TellTale's Walking Dead Season 1 and The Wolf Among Us in this piece.

As would be evident to anyone who's read this blog for a decent amount of time, I'm a huge fan of story-based games. I don't even mean the RPG brand of story-based here, where the story is just one of the two main draws of the game, the other being a solid mechanical base, but something a lot less gamey: think Ace Attorney, Katawa Shoujo (Even if I don't think of it as a game per say) or the latest TellTale adventure games.

I was talking to a "layman" (someone who doesn't really play any games beyond the latest Call of Duty and FIFA) about that last specific example, namely the first season of their Walking Dead games.  As you know, I'm a big fan of that particular game, seeing as to this day I still consider it my second favourite game of all time. After a fairly in-depth description, including how despite the huge amount of choices in these games there's actually practically no branching, they came up with a point that really stumped me for a while:

"Why not just make it a movie then?"

They have a point. After playing a TellTale game twice, you'll know there's no real changes that you can instigate in the story, and you'd be rather foolish to expect this to have massively changed in future games. Why would you write four dialogue choices that make no difference when you could write just one? Furthermore, wouldn't just having to write the one mean that the time spent writing three redundant exchanges could instead be spent on making the one exchange more compelling? At a first glance, it definitely seems so. Yet even after playing Walking Dead Season 1 twice, I found the choices in Wolf Among Us massively compelling, despite knowing full well that I was likely not changing anything past the next few minutes.

One explanation for this is simply getting caught up in the moment. Despite me having my share of complaints with it, I can't deny that Wolf Among Us is an enthralling story, even without the choices. Perhaps I just got so into it that I forgot to think about how unimportant my choices really were? This would basically be the same as successfully maintaining that illusion of choice. It's certainly a possibility, and not one that I can easily refute, but I like to believe that I'm enough of a sourpuss that I wouldn't fall into this. So, let's ignore it for the sake of argument.

The second explanation, this being both the one I find more likely and more interesting, is simply context. There's a moment in Walking Dead that's used as an example of "how badly" TellTale games handle this that I believe to be exactly the opposite: Lily, a member of your motley crew of survivors, kills another member of the crew. You get to make a decision: you can leave Lily on the roadside to get killed by the approaching horde, or take her with you on your caravan. Doing the second results in her soon stealing the caravan and driving off, at a moment in the story where the party wasn't going to use it anymore anyway due to it being practically out of gas. The result for both is ultimately the same: Lily's out of the story, likely dead, and the party is stuck at a train depot without any real means of transportation.

The most obvious point to make is "Well, you killed Lily in one outcome, and in the other she betrayed you and went off into her death through lack of knowledge of the situation". That's true, but it's a very small piece of the relationship of your relationship with Lily.

You see, you originally meet Lily with her father Larry, and absolutely massive man, and both of them are really confrontational. You soon come into Larry's bad books, and at one point he leaves you to die, being saved by Kenny, another survivor who's at odds with the two. Later on, when Kenny and Lily are butting heads over how to lead the survivor colony, you can support either of the two, resulting in you gaining or loosing approval from both parties. The entire time, Larry's still being confrontational, which you can choose to ignore as an old man's ramblings, further gaining Lily's approval. Eventually, you're trapped in an enclosed space with Lily, Kenny, your child protege Clementine, and an apparently dead Larry. It's clear that if Larry raises up as a zombie, you're all dead. Kenny encourages you to destroy Larry's head to prevent him from rising up, whereas Lily begs you to try and revive him. Depending on your previous choices, you can further gain her gratitude by trying (and failing) to protect him, shock her by betraying her trust, earn her hatred by killing her father in what she sees as revenge, or further instigate the feud between the two of you by killing him in what she acknowledges you thought was self-defence. The way her killing of the member of your party happens also depends on a choice you made much earlier, where it's either an intentional killing  of your implied love interest in the heat of the moment born of unjustified paranoia, or an unfortunate but lethal accident.

None of the choices you've made along the way matter. Ultimately, you end up being leader of the colony despite not vying for the place, Larry ends up getting his head smashed in whilst unconscious in front of Lily, Lily kills whichever of the two people you saved much earlier on and ends up dying for it. However, the story you've navigated through ends up being radically different. On my first playthrough, I butted heads with Lily and Larry until, by mistake, I smashed Larry's head in when he was alive. Lily saw this as me taking revenge, and held a grudge against me, making my life difficult at every turn. Eventually, she shot someone dear to me, and I left her to die on the roadside.

On my second playthrough, whilst I disagreed with Lily's leadership, I saw her doing her best and tried to stay as friendly as possible with Larry, even trying to forgive his leaving me to die. I eventually unsuccessfully tried to prevent Kenny from smashing his head in before attempts at recuperation, which led to Lily and me being friendly. Through a complete accident, she shot a close friend of mine. I did my best to keep her alive, but she betrayed my trust by stealing our only means of transport, simultaneously accidentally dooming herself to the very fate I'd convinced the group not to leave her to a few hours prior.

I was still leader of the colony. Larry still died at our hands because he was unconscious. A friend still ended up dead. Lily still wound up MIA, with practically zero chances of survival. But don't tell me those aren't two completely different stories. The first is fraught with anger, resentment, and mistrust, whereas the second is a tale of what appears to be an unlikely friendship blossoming ending with a foolish and painful betrayal. It's not what happens in the story, but the choices you made and how that affected how you and the people around you understood the events that made this sub-plot of Walking Dead enthralling.

However, this isn't the only thing that choice does. It's not just a choice to write out branching paths and storylines, but also a tool to put the weight of them on your shoulders, be it the case that it's your fault or not. At several points in The Wolf Among Us, you encounter a ring of prostitutes who physically cannot disclose certain information. Eventually, you discover that this is due to a ribbon tied around their neck that contains a charm, tied to one of them. For all the girls, removing the ribbon results in the head being severed. You end up talking with the "key", the girl whose ribbon the enchantments on all the other girls is tied to. There's practically no history between you two, you've met once or twice before, fairly briefly. However, you get the option to force her to untie the ribbon: This will sever her head, but release the enchantment from the rest of the girls. This is the option I chose. However, at a later point it becomes important that the enchantment has been released. Unless this game changes more than I give it credit for, I can only assume that the other option is she elects to untie it herself, committing suicide for the good of her coworkers.

This alone is a huge emotional change. I felt really conflicted about forcing her ribbon undone, but I justified it in my head by arguing that this enchantment had already cost several lives, and was likely to cost more if it wasn't undone. Furthermore, she'd willingly and knowingly tricked her friends into having the charm placed on them, which made her liable to suffer the fate she'd put others to in order to spare them from it. At several later points in the game, whenever the consequences of the charm being broken became important, I felt pangs of guilt about it, and changed my behaviour accordingly. If she'd chosen to take her own life in my version of the game, I'm not sure it would've made my heart any lighter, but it certainly would've alleviated most of the guilt, as well as made me less resentful of her in the long run. Even though the outcome would have been the same, my emotional reaction to it would have been completely different because the guilt wouldn't have lay on me.

That's an emotion that I think games can bring out to its fullest extent, better than any other story-telling medium, and that's why I think story-based gaming works well with stories as dark Walking Dead or Wolf Among Us. Context, in both the long and short run, can make a story feel radically different, even if the overall structure of it is the same. Whilst TellTale has repeatedly fallen flat on its promises of hugely diverging stories depending on player choice, I believe the company has mastered the art of contextualizing the same story event through choices that don't change anything.

Persona 4: Arena And The Untapped Potential Of Fighting Games

I've been recently playing a hell of a lot of Persona 4: Arena, having gained access to a PS3. I'll review the game in full when I finish all of the story stuff, which I'm about 65% through, according to the game itself, but there's an interesting point that I feel it brings up.

A lot of people (myself included) thought that the continuation of Persona 4's story being a fighting game seemed mighty odd. Indeed, the fighting game genre is a one that's not very well regarded when it comes to story. I struggle to think of a fighting game that's had a story more in-depth than "Big fight tournament happen. Strong men, women, gods, mutants and other beat crap out of each other for reason", present company excluded.

This is understandable. There just isn't much place for story in a fighting game: matches are generally really quick (the maximum they can possibly last is just under three-hundred seconds on default settings), which means story will either be very minimalistic or take over completely. Even in Arena, the story mode is more a visual novel with occasional fights than a fighting game. As such, it's understandable that you'd shy away from putting money into story when you already have the delicate task of crafting a fighting game, arguably the game genre that requires the most finely-tuned mechanics.

But let's examine what a fighting game entails: Two characters with a series of moves and abilities, fighting in single combat. There's no doubt that there's a high degree of skill involved, but mechanically every match is an exploration of how the two systems that these characters represent interact and interlock. Traditionally, the character is secondary to the system, and is visually a representation of the system itself: We've got a character who moves around and jumps a lot, and specializes in fast, long strikes before moving away, so let's make it the "nimble Chinese fighter woman" stereotype and call it Chun-Li, because that kind of fits. You then build a stage around the character, and give them a tune that fits with the stereotype you've molded them into.

This is perfectly fine, and is the more practical way of designing a fighter. I'm sure if you work this way you'll end up with a deeper and more rewarding fighting game. But there's an alternative, and I'm sure you already know where I'm going but I'm going to spell it out anyway: You can explore characters by abstracting them into systems rather than viceversa. This works great if these characters come from another game, say, where there's already pre-established moves from them to have.

If you didn't see this coming you must be blind, but this is exactly what Persona 4: Arena does in a really interesting way. Every character feels like they were built to play the way that character would play, over systemic interaction with other characters in mind. Yu is very straight-forward and versatile, Yosuke is fast but somewhat unreliable, Teddie very much feels like you're kind of doing random shit and it happens to be working... Every character's representation within the game feels like an abstraction of their personality in a very direct sense. A fight between two characters can go drastically different between the players, but one gets an impression that, in a way, it's still very much an interaction between characters rather than systems. Play the game and tell me you don't pale in front of Akihiko's bulldog-like persistence, or that Naoto's unrelentingly logical playstyle doesn't overwhelm you. A match between Teddie and Kanji will result in either Teddie outspeeding Kanji and exhausting his resources, or Kanji's anger blowing Teddie completely out of the water, two scenarios very familiar to anyone who's journeyed through Persona 4.

In a way, fighting games are the most in-depth exploration of character that videogames can offer. Literature and film have long explored characters in the traditional sense. Much like in other areas, videogames offer a completely new way of thinking about character interaction, and I believe that fighting games are an absolutely phenomenal way of doing so. As ridiculous as it sounds, the time spent fooling around in fights in Persona 4: Arena gave me a very different but just as valid understanding of the characters I'd grown to love so much during Persona 4. As such, I do something that I didn't think I would when I was sneering at the idea of Arena and picking it up almost out of pity: I throw my vote in for more fighting-game spin-offs for mostly character-driven stories. I understand that it's never going to become common practice, and that few companies get the resources or freedom that ATLUS had in order to make Arena, but I believe the fighting game as an exploration of pre-established characters has much potential.

(Of course, creating complex, in the literary sense, characters and putting a story mode in your brand-new IP of a fighting game is also an option, though one that seems even more unlikely and quite difficult to pull off).

Why Some Games Are "Weird"

If you're a fan of games, then you've either heard it or said it, probably multiple times. Game X is "weird", or system Y within said game is "weird". I mean this on a strictly mechanical level. Something like Jade Empire is weird because of its setting and story, yet the game is fairly familiar at the level of play.

So why then? Why do we think of some games as unusual? Stuff like Ace Attorney, or Jazzpunk. On a very basic level, one could say that it's because they like combat, but that's easily debunked: A game like Amnesia: The Dark Descent is pretty much combat-free, yet it comes across as quite traditional. We've debunked two possibilities at this point: The setting and the lack of combat. I believe that the "weirdness" of a game, at a mechanical level, comes when the designer chooses to ignore something that's at the core of the great majority of games: The conservation of resources.

You see, games are deeply entrenched in the use of conservation of resources to provide failstates, or at least some measure of challenge. Think about it: In a first person shooter, you expend a resource (bullets) to prevent your other resources from draining (usually health, armor and the such). There's obviously more to it than that: Your skill allows you to expend both less bullets, and stop your other resources from draining. It's similar in RPGs, be they action based or not, strategy games, open world sandboxes, fighting games, beat'em'ups... you name any traditional genre of game, and it can eventually be boiled down to you making a less valuable number go down in order to prevent a more valuable number from going down.

This is understandable on both a coding and design levels: Making numbers go up and down is easy, and it's a simple, easily understandable and abstracted way of providing challenge. There's an absolutely off-the-chart number of ways this can provide entertainment: Most games created have used it, it still hasn't gotten old, and I firmly believe there's even more ways of taking advantage of this system we haven't come up with. I applaud its use, and want it to be used for many more years if not decades to come.

However, we may have become too entrenched in this system. It seems we've kind of forgotten that other kind of systems of providing challenge exists. Occasionally, a game comes out that doesn't adhere to this system, and it's widely seen as "strange", "unusual", or, indeed, "weird". Examples of such games include the previously mentioned Ace Attorney series (which, yes, does include a very mild element of resource preservation, though this is very much set aside), Jazzpunk, and things like The Stanley Parable or Journey. These are all very much games that feel strange to play. We've become so accustomed to the resource conservation system that its sole absence marks a game aside.

Now, note what all these games have in common: They're all story-based. It seems that, for some reason, only story-based games have really explored the possibilities that casting aside this sort of system brings with it. I like a lot of the games that have done so, but, unfortunately, story-based gaming isn't the best place to explore mechanics because... well, it's not really focused on mechanics. Mechanically, Ace Attorney or Jazzpunk  are very, very simple, and that's a shame, because I really want to see a fully-fleshed out experience that isn't about bringing a number up or down. How? Hell if I know! Surprise me, game developers! Just imagine all of the absolutely fantastic things we've achieved inside this box. Now imagine all the things gaming as a medium could achieve if it moves out further.

It might be a pipe-dream, and, in fact, it probably is. It's still entertaining to think about. A man can dream.

Animu Review: No.6 "And then the cow jumped over the cuckoo's nest whilst singing about plastic banana peels"

No.6 is an anime, with some light yaoi elements. It's about a dystopian society in the near future. It also has some supernatural elements.

That's pretty much all I know about No.6, because the rest of the plot makes no fucking sense. Having just watched the entire 11 episode series in one sitting, I can tell you what happens in it. I can't tell you why or how one thing causes the next to happen. Nor can I tell you what the motivations of most of the characters were, or what they actually thought about each other.

Before I get into proper reviewy stuff, a few notes. I watched a rather strange sub of the series, meaning some characters names were changed. In particular, I know that the character who goes by the name of Nezumi was called Rat in the sub, and the character who is usually called Dog Keeper was instead Dogloan. I'll be referring to these characters by the name that was in the sub I watched, because I'm too lazy to adapt to other people.

No.6 follows the life of main character Shion in the titular city No.6. As it starts, he's a child prodigy enrolled in a very advanced program where children of age 12 appear to learn the equivalent of several university-level degrees at school, along with his childhood friend Safu. One night, a boy calling himself Rat sneaks into his house, who was recently on the news as an escaped convict. Despite this, Shion gives Rat food and shelter, and doesn't report him to the police. They, however, magically know that this has happened (how they do this is never explained), and take away his child prodigy privilege, instead demoting him to working as a park guardian.

Four years later, he comes across two mysterious deaths where victims appear to rapidly shrivel into old age and die in seconds, which appears to be caused by bees nesting in their necks (because of course it is). The police again magically catch wind of this and begin to march him off to a "correctional facility" as a murder suspect before he is rescued by Rat and taken to outside the city walls, where a cut-throat society of people who aren't in No.6 (why are these people not in No.6? It's made clear that escapees like Rat and Shion are extremely rare. As per usual, never explained) has formed.

These first few episodes are what I found to be the strongest part of the series. Society within No.6 is portrayed very well: It feels appropriately utopian, yet there's a lot of things that are subtly disturbing. As events evolve, it becomes more and more clear that No.6 isn't as good a place as it seems, culminating in Shion being taken in. I really like the relationships he's shown to be in at this point, as well. His relationship with Safu feels very genuine and warm, as does the relationship with his mother. Safu's an entertaining character, being quite weird in an endearing way.

However, once Shion's taken out of the city, a lot of this stops. The focus switches to his relationship with Rat. The main problem is that Rat is a character that I have particular trouble liking, especially early on. He's constantly angry for no appropriate reason, and belittles Shion without break for not knowing things about this society that had been HIDDEN FROM HIM FOR 16 YEARS. As though this didn't make him irritating enough, he's gleeful about the idea of thousands of innocents inside No.6 dying to the evil bees because of a personal vendetta he has against the city's government.

The secondary characters fare a bit better. Dogloan doesn't really get much to do, but is shown to be a lot more of an interesting character than Rat. She's (or he? It's intentionally kept ambiguous) snarky and selfish, but also shows huge amounts of loyalty and a surprising amount of frailty later on in the story. The character of Rikiga works well as comic relief, and also has a few moments of surprising emotional weight.

The main issue here is the plot, which, as I oh-so-subtly implied, is downright incomprehensible. It's not like I didn't know what was happening, or why, at any given time. The problem is that the chain of cause and effect didn't seem to follow the laws of logic. I'm talking "I have a tube of Pringles, therefore Bohemian Rhapsody will blare at full volume out of my nostrils" levels of nonsensical. I understand that the second event is supposed to be caused by the first, but there doesn't seem to be a logical way of getting from one to the other. The same is true for a lot of character motivations, especially with Dogloan and Rat, who seem to have set their goals to be produced by a random number generator. Every half episode.

Admittedly, the motivation problem settles down during the final few episodes, where Rat is suddenly in love with Shion for no apparent reason. Shion wants to rescue Safu, who for some unexplained reason is a perfect genetic McGuffin for the Big Evil Experiment that the government of No.6 is running, and Rat is now OK with doing whatever Shion wants because THE POWER OF LOVE I guess.

The best part of the series post leaving No.6 is the finale, which has some decent (if not at all visually impressive) action and a few touching character moments. It's still riddled with nothing making any sense, but by this point we've been with the characters enough to feel for them when this stuff goes down. There's even a fairly powerful moment with Rat, banking on the one thing that seems to be stable about him at this point: His out-of-nowhere love of Shion.

Two final mentions are the visuals and the sound. The visuals are actually extremely impressive, reminding me a lot of Sword Art Online in their crispness and even style. They're similar enough to make me wonder whether some of the same people worked on these two projects. This is extreme praise: I believe SAO to be the best-looking animated series I've seen. The design is also actually surprisingly great inside No.6, where it does a great job of portraying the utopian society fuelled by ignorance of the atrocities being committed that No.6 is revealed to be. Outside it's a bit less interesting, though still fairly charming in its own way. The sound is really impressive: The soundtrack is subtle, but effective, and the original voice-acting actually conveys a lot more emotion than I'm used to for anime voice-acting.

Character and World Building: 7.5/10
Some really great examples of both in the first few episodes: the city of No.6 is really well conveyed, and I really liked the portrayal of Shion's relationships. In particular, his relationship with Safu feels extremely believable. However, it gets a lot less impressive later on, and, as I said, characters tend to not really have a consistent goal or even personality. There's a few interesting characters on the sidelines, like Dogloan or Rikiga, but the absolute failure to make Rat likeable or interesting in any way hugely undercuts that.

Story: 2/10
Jesus fucking Christ it's awful. It makes next to zero sense most of the time, and the stuff I did understand mainly consisted of overused plot beats. It's saved from the shameful 1 rating by the slight sense of momentum it manages to build up in the very last episode, and the pretty good pacing that episodes one and two have.

Visuals: 5/5
It does really look gorgeous. They did everything about as well as they could, and the interior of No.6 is particularly well done, managing to convey that "utopia with a dark secret" feel very well.

Sound: 4.5/5
As well as looking great, it sounds great. The only real issue I have is the god-awful opening and ending themes, which detract the .5 that's been lost from the perfect score.

Enjoyment: 5/10
There's a few things here to really like, but I spent most of my time either too bamboozled by the nonsense the plot was throwing at me or annoyed at Rat to really be able to enjoy it. If only we'd gotten more time to develop No.6 before jumping into the action the series may have been a bit more enjoyable (Maybe use those 2 episodes that the series fall short of the traditional 13t).

Overall: (7.5+2+5+4.5+5)/40
               24/40
               Simplifies to 6/10
It's not awful by any means, but there's just enough here to justify a recommendation. The visuals and audio are outstanding, but these are minor things that aren't as important as the things it gets wrong. I just wish the series had stayed with the tone it took during the first few episodes: It was a lot more effective and, most importantly, it mostly made sense. In a way, No.6 is the opposite case to Sword Art Online. Where SAO's many small flaws were covered up by a really well-made core, No.6's solid base idea is completely obstructed by its two colossal mistakes: Nonsensical story, and how awful Rat is.