Hi, Architect here.
I like to keep a pretty positive outlook when I do these videos, but there's one area
of videogames that's kind of been bugging me recently, and that's the issue of pacing.
Especially in the last few years there's been a big focus on squeezing as much content
out of games as possible and this happens at the expense of that content being delivered
in an effective way.
Obviously the biggest guilty party here is open world collect 'em ups like shadow of
mordor and literally every ubisoft game.
In order to explain myself here, I've got to go into a bit of literary theory, so allow
me to quiiickly explain the concept of story graphs and narrative arcs.
In any good story, the plot hooks you in, then explains itself before gradually upping
the tension and action until it peaks near the end, ready for a resolution.
This is what we in the biz call a narrative arc, and whilst there are absolutely exceptions,
like the anitclimax used to great effect in War of the Worlds It is, though, a pretty
good rule of thumb for telling a story.
There are a lot of ways to show this information- I'm a fan of Kurt Vonnegut's model myself,
he does this whole positive and negative space thing on the Y-axis where he shows positive
action and negative action it's really cool!
But for ease's sake we'll stick to the simple graph.
Let's explain this with Star Wars
The early part, the hook, needs to get the viewer's attention, this is the bit on Leia's
ship, it poses a lot of cool questions we'll wonder about as the film goes on.
The exposition portion needs to set the stage for the story and explain what's going on
this is where we're introduced to Luke, Obi Wan, Han and Chewie.
From there we're led across a variety of ups and downs all contributing towards the
final battle to destroy the death star.
After that the action drops right back down as we get a nice wrapup.
Particularly observant people might've noticed that we can apply these same graphs to not
just the stories of videogames, but also their mechanics.
Think about the opening to, say, portal, it hooks your right in with the central gimmick
of the game and all the possibilities it offers, then gradually you learn how it works until
you've mastered it, by which time the stage is set for an awesome finale and a nice conclusion.
The narrative arc guides the player forward by promising greater action, tougher challenges
and satisfying story beats.
These arcs needn't take a whole game to resolve either, each Mario level is a little
self contained narrative arc.
Koichi Hayashida explains that each of the levels in a mario game are based on a structure
in chinese poetry called… oh god… kishōtenketsu, a four part poem which just so happens to
follow the structure of the narrative arc.
Each mario level starts out by introducing a core concept, the hook or ki.
Then it's expanded upon as you begin to master it through successively more challenging
iterations, Sho.
Next comes the rising action to climax as the level tests your understanding of the
level mechanic with a twist which is called Ten, and finally the level is brought to a
satisfying conclusion with a nice little flourish of the mechanic to end the level, Ketsu.
Of course, it doesn't end there, the mario game as a whole also has arcs that span worlds,
and an overall arc of mechanical mastery that spans the whole game.
Arcs within arcs within arcs within arcs, it's brilliant!
But, let's not forget, I was here to complain, so what are some examples of videogames that
do this stuff badly?
The first thing that comes to mind is Gunpoint.
It starts off strong,introducing a really interesting core mechanic in the form of the
ability to rewire all of these electric circuits.
It's great fun pulling off a bunch of cool heists by manipulating guards into opening
rewired doors and sneaking through the shadows you created by disabling all of the light
switches.
The problem is, as interesting as the rewiring mechanic, is, it falls short of really letting
you master it, the game never lets you off the leash and all the levels feel like they're
trying to teach you something, to the point that there's no way to really be creative.
Gunpoint's graph totally falls flat during the rising action portion meaning that when
it tries to bring things all together with this building-scaling finale it misses the
mark.
Besides a cute little joke with a door that slams in your face, this feels like just another
level because Gunpoint's narrative arc never reaches the heights required for a good conclusion
and just leaves you wishing for another hour or two of gameplay.
This is made up for by the wealth of great user made levels, but I feel like that doesn't
really redeem the shoddy midsection.
Tom Francis, the guy who made gunpoint kind of has an annoying habit of making really
interesting systems and then just not doing enough with them, his newest game, Heat signature,
like gunpoint, also flubs the third act by not letting you ever feel like you've mastered
the game and are ready for a big conclusion.
You might think that more open-ended games are exempt from the lessons of narrative arcs,
and you'd be kind of right in fairness, it's certainly less of a tight structure,
but even in strategy games, which typically have variable lengths and are pretty light
on directorial vision, the narrative arc makes itself known, usually not for the better.
Northgard is a fun little light 4x that's in early access right now and it has the same
problem as a lot of other 4xes do, they've got no real conclusion.
Things are great on the arc front as you explore the world, build up your resources and then
forge ahead to your chosen victory condition but… that's where things just kind of
end.
At a certain point, building up your infrastructure any more than it already has been becomes
impractical, and the game becomes an exercise in waiting for your inevitable victory.
Sometimes, there might be some sort of competition between two players, but owing to the nature
of strategy games, committing resources towards disrupting your opponent's victory is committing
to something other than winning the game.
The optimal plan in Northgard, as well as in other strategy games is to turtle up and
grind out your victory, interacting with other players as little as possible and denying
yourself a satisfying end to the game.
Warhammer Total War has an interesting take on this with the lategame events.
Once alliances are formed, power-blocs are established and the main players are moving
in for the kill, in comes a huge chaos army that, to not put too fine of a point on it,
fucks everyone's shit up.
The chaos invasion or the big endgame rituals in warhammer total war 2 work to varying degrees
of success but they're exactly the kind of thing strategy games need, a way to break
up the status quo that emerges towards the lategame.
Another way to keep players engaged is to pull the same trick as mario and turn each
individual encounter into its own mini story.
XCOM is fantastic at this.
Oh?
What's that, you thought I'd finally decided to stop going on about this franchise?
Think again!
Xcom missions hook you in with the mystery of what's waiting just around the corner,
set the scene as you explore the map looking for a fight, ratchet up the tension as you
and the aliens duke it out and offers some cathartic payoff by giving you a shiny new
toy to play with- or sometimes a horrible new alien to get shot by- once the mission
is over.
So, we've had a look at games that can benefit from some mechanical narrative arcs, but let's
address the elephant in the room.
How would we use narrative arcs to fit the games that really need it, generic open world
explorey, tower climby games.
Has this ever happened to you?
Once you realise that this big open world with a lot of things to do is actually just
five or six different things over and over again, you quickly lose enthusiasm for the
game.
With our knowledge of the narrative arc in hand, it's easy to realise why this happens,
basically, none of the conditions are being met.
There's nothing new to be hooked into, we already know what everything is and how it
works, we've likely already mastered these pretty simple tasks long before the end of
the game and worst of all, they never really get any harder or do anything to challenge
us.
To make matters worse, we can't even rely on good old fashioned storytelling to get
the job done.
By the nature of these games there's no way for developers to control when you encounter
story beats, throwing the pacing off.
Towards the beginning of Farcry 3 I should be doing everything I can to save my friends
who've been kidnapped by bad guys.
But you know?
It's really hard to fit that in between my busy schedule of climbing towers and collecting
pretty leaves.
So how do we take these games and give them some nice, clean arcs?
Well, making the games not lazy copy-paste jobs with zero passion behind them would be
a start but hey, we can't have everything.
My first thought would be to lean into the nonlinear nature of these games by giving
players a plot that isn't time sensitive.
For ideas on how to do that, we need look no further than Legend of Zelda: breath of
the wild, where once you've done the tutorial, you can challenge ganon whenever you like.
The rest of the game is framed as you powering up to face him before the big fight.
The ganon boss itself has its fair share of issues but the idea of just letting the player
skip most of the game is genius!
Rather than force the player to start wading through reams of story content they've been
avoiding in order to get to the final fight, players have the freedom to choose when they're
ready to be done with the game and then just beat it!
Once the player feels like that crucial third stage of the arc has reached a point where
they're ready for a satisfying payoff, all they have to do is make their way to hyrule
castle to get it.
This doesn't fix the issue of completionist players doing things that aren't fun any
more simply because the game tells them to, it's part of a larger problem with padding
in games.
Normally I'd have a go at publishers or game devs for missteps like these but really
players are to blame for this.
By demanding games with better playtime to money ratios, we sacrifice good storytelling.
Take most of the games with great narrative arcs that you can think of, they're probably
all short, tightly design games like subsurface circular which is perfectly paced at just
about two hours or longer games that contain a series of small arcs like HITMAN, where
every 20 minute mission is its own little story.
The problem is, that certain games just don't have the story or the mechanics to to be stretched
over tens of hours.
The longer an arc is, the harder it's going to be to support the tension that's crucial
to making stages 2 and 3, the meat of the story, work.
Unfortunately, what's happening is that games that would otherwise be efficient, well
oiled storytelling vehicles are becoming bloated and sluggish because people don't want to
pay for a short game.
This can be seen very clearly in the gutting of Dragon Age Inquisition.
The first game, dragon age: origins runs about thirty to forty hours and I felt that it was
a bit long for the content on display but the story and combat are complex enough to
warrant a game of that length so I was pretty okay with it.
Dragonage Inquisition on the other hand is at least double that, with the combat dumbed
down to MMO levels and the quests getting the same treatment.
Whilst you can debate the relative merits of both games, there's no denying that Inquisition
more than outstays its welcome.
Slowing the pace of the actually quite good story to a crawl with boring fetchquests and
zero-strategy combat lessens the impact of the impact of the big plot and character beats.
The choice to make the combat cap out in complexity about five hours into the game quickly turns
encounters from an interesting challenge into a bothersome chore that makes playing the
game even harder.
If I were to remake dragon age inquisition, my first move would be to delete about 2/3rds
of the game.
If a part of the game is not contributing to the game's narrative worth or to its
mechanics then it shouldn't be in the game in the first place, it's the only way you're
going to be able to construct a good narrative arc that'll keep people enjoying your game.
The Narrative Arc is a great technique for driving player engagement and is an awesome
template for developers to use, but it isn't a silver bullet.
Just like in any other medium it's no substitute for, you know, actually making a good game.
Nier Automata is, objectively speaking, pretty terribly paced, the first 30 hours is all
exposition and settup for a whirlwind finale that takes about 8 to ten hours.
Despite that, it's easily my favourite game narrative of this year.
This is because that even though it has a rubbish arc, it's loaded with cool ideas.
Even if you've got no intention of becoming a game designer, keep an eye out for games
that use arcs well, and support them when they do- and seriously, try to stop thinking
about games in terms of a price to content ratio.
I guarantee you that if you give a shorter, more densely packed game a go over a bloated
AAA mess, you'll find a much richer experience, and a much better narrative arc waiting for
you inside.
What's up?
Been a while since I've done one of these but I've got a few announcements.
First up, sorry this video is a bit late, I was working on another one that I had to
ditch because it wasn't really coming together which was about a week wasted.
I'm going to try and get another video out before the end of the year, probably a wrapup
2017 games you should have played thingy, who knows though.
Secondly, err, there's now 250-ish subscribers on the channel!
Wooooo!
So err.
Should I start a patreon?
Maybe get sponsored by loot crate or squarespace because those guys will give anyone money.
But seriously, thanks a lot for subscribing- I'm happy so many people like the videos
in spite of how opinionated I am.
If you've not subscribed already.
Um. do that please.uuuuuh, yeah, and obviously sharing these videos and stuff is a big help
so that'd be fantastic too if you could do that.
That is about it so.
Err. ho ho ho happy holidays aaaaaannnnddd… bye!
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