Game Ramble: Tomb Raider

In a way it seems unfair to pick on Tomb Raider - by which, let's clarify up front, I mean the 2013 reboot and not the 1996 original - as an illustration of the particular video game narrative failing I'd like to talk about here.  It's a fault, after all, that a great number of games manage to commit, and have been getting wrong almost since the birth of the medium, and Tomb Raider is far from being the worst of the bunch.

Still, not all of them have put that failing so front and centre, or emphasized it quite so pointedly in their marketing campaigns, and for me that alone has been enough to make Tomb Raider something of an exemplar.  Because Tomb Raider the story, as conveyed in cut scenes and dialogue, is an entirely different beast to Tomb Raider the play experience, and not only do those two things not line up one damn bit, they actually spend fifteen hours working largely at odds with each other.

Well, I say fifteen hours; it's in the first five that Tomb Raider most egregiously insists on saying one thing and doing another.  Because this Tomb Raider is an origin story, or perhaps rather a coming of age story, but either way its role is to show us just how Lara Croft became the peculiarly cold-hearted raider of tombs and taker of lives that we know she will become.  As such, Tomb Raider the story makes a big deal of the moment when Lara Croft, youthful grave-robber-to-be, first takes the life of another human being.  I mean, a huge big deal; it's built up for a good ten minutes, if not the entirety of the game's opening, and the act itself is as bloody and traumatic as you could ever hope the sight of a teenage girl committing a shocking act of violence could be.  We're made to understand that this is something that will stay with Lara until her dying days, that will cast its shadow over her every waking hour...

...right up until the moment a few minutes later when Tomb Raider the game forgets it ever mattered.

Empathize, damn you!

An hour or two of game time later and you'll be merrily machine-gunning your enemies in the face, not to mention sniping them, shotgunning them, stabbing them in the back with an improvised climbing tool and setting them on fire.  And though that violence isn't exactly pleasant, it's also every bit as frequent and fundamentally dismissive as the violence in a great many other similar games.  On the one hand we're expected to sympathize with Lara's dehumanising struggle to survive and the fact that by implication there was a time when she didn't murder someone every five minutes.  On the other, we're required to help her gun down literally hundreds of people.  Frankly, even the finest plotting in the world might have difficulty making that one stick.

It seems to me that, of all the problems that video games have to overcome before they make the shift from 'medium of pure entertainment' to 'entertainment medium that everyone is also happy to acknowledge as art form' is this particular disconnect, where story and game refuse to overlap.  And this issue is fundamentally connected to other deep-rooted problems in the medium, in that most games still revolve around the act of killing, and it's hard beyond a certain point - increasingly so given current levels of visual fidelity - to portray that act, even when performed in self-defense, as sympathetic.  I mean, I like Lara Croft, I do; we've raided a ton of tombs together over the years.  But there are only so many times you can watch a teenager jab an arrow into another person's neck and still feel comfortable in their presence.

What's the answer?  Is there one?  When these games sell by the kerzillion, does anyone actually care?  Well, if nothing else, I'm confident that the answer to that last is a resounding yes; just look how many shooting-based games go to great lengths to disguise the nature of their cannon-fodder with masks, helmets, bandannas, sunglasses, or as essentially faceless robots or aliens.  Or - as both example and one possible solution - consider how the colossally successful The Last of Us frames its narrative specifically around the self-corroding nature of violence, and along the way admits that there's something horribly wrong with its protagonist for continuing to commit the acts he does. 

That, though, is a trick you can only pull so many times - and therein, I suppose, lies my point.  As long as gameplay is designed primarily around acts of violence, so video games will be obliged to tell stories primarily about violence, and so limit themselves to one shallow end of a very large narrative swimming pool.  Even then, as Tomb Raider illustrates, to tell such stories convincingly requires a relatable human protagonist, and we're basically hard-wired not to relate to people who spend an overwhelming proportion of their time killing.  Tomb Raider tries simultaneously to ignore that fact and to embrace it, and perhaps it's no wonder that it ends up fumbling both.

Game Ramble: Limbo

It seems to me that one of the things that hampers the ability of video games to tell good stories is their length: a modern game is likely to offer somewhere between eight and eighty hours of gameplay, and it's difficult to drag out a single compelling story arc to that kind of length, at least within such a predominantly visual medium.

One solution, the one generally favoured by Rockstar for example, is to pad out your plot with subplots and shorter arcs, and this can work to a degree, though I can't think of a single game where I've found it absolutely satisfactory*.  The other, more common answer - perhaps the classic one - is to devolve the story into a series of quests, doling out plot advances as rewards.  But while this fits more comfortably with the strictures of a game, it takes an awful lot of set dressing to make it feel like a genuine narrative.  (I'd argue that the most recent Tomb Raider pulled it off, though barely.)

I think it's fair to say that the vast majority of games that put any serious effort into storytelling favour one or the other of those approaches.  But not Limbo, of no.

And before I try and justify or explain that claim, it's worth pointing out that, as a game that can potentially be completed in under an hour, Limbo is of a length that actually could sustain a conventional narrative structure.  Yet in fact the plot it has is so slender that, were this a film, it would struggle to fill ten minutes: a boy wakes in a strange world, comes across other boys who react to him with fear and hostility, eventually encounters a girl who may or may not be his sister, and continues onward, apparently looking for her.**

Not much plot at all, then, by the standards of any other medium ... and yet I'd argue that Limbo, in its own way, is a masterpiece of storytelling, and one of the most involving games I played last year.  And the reason for that, I think, is that what it does with amazing subtlety is to tell many little - well, I guess we can't call them stories, as such, so let's go instead for the purposefully vague and made-up "narrative incidents" - that add up to something with the feel of a much bigger story.  Which I suppose is a long way around saying it's all about the atmosphere, something Limbo is positively dripping with, and yet this is a game that does such a great impression of combining its every element - music, sound effects, design, gameplay - into something with the convincing feel of a story that it feels petty indeed to call it anything else.


An example: Having survived a thoroughly nightmarish encounter with a giant spider, you - as Limbo's lost-child protagonist - stumble upon what at first glance appears to be another giant spider.  But there's something not quite right about it, and as you draw near, it becomes apparent what: this isn't a real monster arachnid but a dummy made from metal and rope.  And as you slip past its groping leg, the truth becomes clear: a boy of about your age is working a lever to control the contraption, and as he sees you he runs away in panic.

Within the world of Limbo, that small first encounter tells so much: that you're not alone in this world, that others have had to contend with the same horrors that you have and learned to compete with them, that, yes, the traps you've come across were set by someone and that that someone is afraid of you, afraid enough to try and hurt you...

My point here - and I think I do have a point in mind for these Game Ramble articles, though I'm not quite there with working out what it is yet - is that video games are a new narrative medium, with new narrative rules that are still being figured out, and that perhaps Limbo points at a third way that can, in the right hands, be as or more successful than the two storytelling modes I started this article talking about.  Because one of the things I love about video games is that they are absolutely not beholden to reality, or really to anything that's gone before; yet, even to this day they spend so much time imitating films, and to a lesser extent books, and to an even lesser extent paintings and sculpture and every damn art form that's come before.  And really, why do that?

But Limbo is an example, and an intriguing one, of a narrative that could only possibly work in the medium it was created in.  It's unapologetically a game; it tells its story through the player's interaction, and has almost no narrative outside that interaction. What it has, instead, is something that currently only gaming can offer: the ability to provide an alien space with its own logic and history - a space that's basically one big story - and let the player inhabit it, exploring, teasing out its secrets and, if you're up for it, ultimately trying to figure out its meaning.




* Red Dead Redemption probably coming the closest, but even that spun its wheels for a long time on some decidedly odd tangents.

** Not that even this much is stated, but - at the risk of *SPOILERS* - we can assume that's what's been happening from the ending.

Game Ramble: Journey

I've been getting interested recently in what seem to be known as Art Games, a loose genre of video
games that are trying to break out from some of the form's traditional limitations and achieve the kind of thing that you'd expect of an art form more than a work designed solely to entertain.  It's a fine line of course, and you'd have to be blind to miss the artistry that goes into almost any game these days, but I still find the whole thing intriguing.  The facet that's really caught my attention, though, is what this might mean for video game narrative, an area in which the burgeoning medium has undeniably often tended to let itself down.

The story of Journey, stripped to its bare bones, is actually no great shakes.  It is in fact, as the title hints, the traditional hero's journey; that is, it draws on the concept of an archetypal hero and narrative structure that mythologist Joseph Campbell famously identified as underlying much of world mythology.  The game's director, Jenova Chen, states this explicitly in the "making of" documentary included on the collector's edition, and there's even a diagram mapping Campbell's hypothetical stages to the game's levels.

So as core narratives go, Journey's isn't particularly interesting of in and of itself, especially considering that a great many video game plots conform to Campbell's model.  What is interesting is that Journey chooses to flesh out this skeleton by abandoning so many of the traditional tools of storytelling.  Nothing is spoken in any recognisable language.  The player character's design allows for only the simplest expressions.  There are other humanoid characters, but they never speak.  There are non-humanoid creatures, but they communicate, as the player character does, through tonal, whale-like noises.  You encounter glyph-like, symbolic drawings and it's possible to piece together continuity and history from these, but there's no actual text anywhere in the game besides the title and credits.

In the place of spoken or written language, then, Journey exploits some familiar alternatives - visual design, music, design cues - and uses them exceptionally well.  But it also does some things that are more subtle and hard to define.  It achieves much by offering small hints and leaving the rest to the player's imagination, a technique more common to books than gaming or its closest cousin cinema.  And it achieves even more by tapping into subconscious desires and fears: the heart-stopping feeling of flying, a section lit and decorated as though it were underwater and frequent moments of sliding almost helplessly down banks of sand are uncanny and powerfully dreamlike.

In fact, those words pretty much sum up what Journey's about.  It's impossible to describe quite how it all comes together in practice, except to say that the experience is much like trying to make sense of an extraordinarily vivid dream.  Most of your brain just sort of goes along with it intuitively, experiencing things in simple, emotional terms, while a small part throws up wild theories to try and make wider sense of what's going on.  And all of this relies on being experienced, on the act and the very notion of play.  Because so many of its narrative beats are emotional and because that emotion relies on player interaction, Journey creates a narrative that you can only intuit full meaning from by physically and intellectually engaging with it.

That, in my experience, is something new to storytelling, at least on this scale and with this level of success.  And it's not often that any medium offers a genuinely novel experience, or discovers new ways of telling stories, so I should surely finish by recommending that if you have a PS3 and haven't yet played Journey, you really should.  That said, it isn't perfect and, to my mind, it doesn't entirely succeed; there's a tension between the need to tell a story and the need to be a game that leaves some of the most interesting, and also some of the most basic, aspects of the narrative left flailing.  The very end, for me, was particularly disappointing from a story point of view.  But since I can't go into that without spoilers, I'll settle for saying instead that the fact that I'm still annoyed by it days afterwards is almost a recommendation in itself; I struggle to think of any other game that's frustrated me so much on narrative merit alone.  And the fact that I know I'll play through again, even knowing what's waiting, is testament to what a powerful, fascinating experience Journey delivers.