Gamernode: Features - Emergent Gameplay Versus the Linear Narrative

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Logically, the ultimate promise of video games would be the potential for an epic interactive narrative, one in which the player is the main character in a vast, rich universe of their choosing. Unfortunately, this is generally not the case, as many of the games offering sandbox play are limited to more rudimentary interactions. For instance, you will never get to read a touching poem one of your characters in The Sims has written about their recently departed family member that you caused to starve to death by luring them into the bathroom and removing the door. Conversely, those games with the most well-developed narratives, including voice acting, clever writing, and plot twists, are generally the most heavily scripted by the game developer. The path to completion in a game such as Final Fantasy 12 is so heavily directed that the actual freedoms the player experiences are of almost no consequence to the story whatsoever.

Inevitably, games are compared to movies and other less interactive forms of entertainment, and the argument is commonly made that the freedom and interaction games allow are what set them apart, but, as this Thinking Games blog post has argued, the scripted nature of many epic games makes them essentially the same. The gameworld is not a vast, functional universe. Instead, it is often a well-crafted facade, set up to appear open to the direction of the player. However, the actual opportunity to alter the experience is limited. Instead, many game developers are content to decide the entirety of the story and merely implement portions of the sandbox. Mario is a good example of this: the way you play out the given scenario onscreen is your own choice, but overall, you will progress in a linear fashion. Role playing games, by virtue of their very title, face an intrinsic conflict in design as they are, at their most basic, not meant to allow the player to deviate in their role in any way. The player serves as little more than a tool to implement the game state.

When examining trends in RPG development, the movement towards ever more comprehensive gameworlds illustrates the inherent conflict. Oblivion, for instance, strives to create the feel of the sandbox, the utterly open world with which the player can do as they see fit, while also populating the world with a wide range of characters that interact in realistic ways. Unlike a movie, the goal of a game like Oblivion is to give the player the power to be the star, but the reality of the game falls short. In fact, infinite play-throughs of Oblivion will not yield infinite outcomes. To satisfy the feeling of choice, the characters are given a wider range of scripted responses, allowing some variability, but the player is still ultimately limited to the paths the developer has chosen. The outcomes will rarely deviate from this path, except where the player has managed to break the game.

So will video games ever manage to successfully create a complete world for the player to retreat to, while still maintaining a level of complexity that will allow the interactions to deliver the sort of dramatic impact we demand? That would be the holy grail of game development. It is my belief that sandbox games are a step in the right direction. As they develop in sophistication, the lexicon of meaningful interactions increase. The range of actions and responses that the self-motivated characters within a given sandbox game can make will continue to grow until they are very close to approximating the scripted actions of a linear narrative game. In the meantime, we have plenty of MMOs in which the other characters are actual humans. It is unfortunate that the quest direction, over-arcing story, and enemies are generally computer-controlled, but that is, alas, a topic for another column.

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