How Can A Game Be Subversive?

What makes for a subversive game? Borut Pfeifer tackles the question with aplomb over at GameSetWatch, looking at games from Portal to Blacksite: Area 51 to establish the various ways in which games currently convey 'subversive' messages of many stripes:

Is the "insincere choice" (telling the player they have no choice while they actually do) the best means we have to present a subversive message? If we are locked into a rule system by the nature of the game's code we can never change the system, what would be the ultimate extent in this regard? Making a game that allows the players to create their own rules, would almost seem to devolve very quickly into art-piece.

The resulting experience might have something profound to say about the abstract notions of games as a subversive medium, but would it lack enough direction/focus to be captivating in the slightest, and therefore possibly unable to be profound or meaningful to an individual?

I don't really look towards my games for 'subversive' material (having plenty of daring literature bumping around my shelves, sometimes I just want to get away), but Pfeifer provides some food for thought on how a variety games get their point across.

How Can A Game Be Subversive? [GameSetWatch]

Ken Levine on 'Narrative Drive'

While I remain unimpressed with much of the discussion surrounding BioShock, Gamasutra has a reasonably interesting interview up with Ken Levine on 'narrative drive' and some aspects of telling stories in games. On the unreliable narrator, he's got this to say:

It's about... I didn't mention this in my presentation, I keep forgetting to... it's about damaging not the character, but damaging the player. I think insulting the player is something... to put the knife in his back, not just the character's back. Because every game has the knife go in the character's back.

But if your perception of reality is screwed with, and you're basically played for a sucker, people have an emotional response to that. It's like when you read people saying, "I just put down the controller and walked away from the game for a minute." That doesn't happen when your character gets thrown off a roof and knocked unconscious, or gets shot at and wounded.

Even if you're tired of BioShock, it's an interesting interview that hits on a number of issues.

Ken Levine on BioShock's Narrative Drive

Video Game Tropes Wiki

We all know and love (or hate) the expansive list of video game tropes; the TV Tropes wiki has put together a shockingly extensive list (also home of a wiki version ofthe grand list of RPG clichés), spanning all sorts of genres and with plenty of examples. My favorite is "Malevolent Architecture":

Castles aren't large walled structures where people live and work, they're intricate mazes. Temples aren't places where people go to worship their various deities, they're where the ancients practiced their Booby Trap- and Death Course-making skills (and they were so good at it that they are still functional after hundreds of years without maintenance). Even places like warehouses and sewers, where the design should be fairly straightforward, are designed solely to deter intruders, even if there is no earthly reason why it should be so, and even if it utterly inconveniences non-intruders. One wonders what the regular people do.

Videogame Tropes [TV Tropes via Joystick Division]

Portal's Power: A Narrative Critique

Emily Short, the interactive fiction designer/author, has an interesting look at Portal's story from the perspective of someone who does IF. I always like reading critiques from people who are engaged in the 'gaming' world, though perhaps not in the way we're expecting. It's a thoughtful look at what went right, what went wrong, and maybe why people were so excited about it:

... What we get is maybe a story that's not so much the standard cliché about an AI that gets out of control, but instead about the idea that any AI created would necessarily be emotionally broken, because it would be constructed with killswitches, designed to be disposable, or at least crippled so that it could not threaten the more important human life. If the AI had any urge towards friendship or companionship, that urge would be stifled and perverted by the fact that those around it have absolved themselves ("ethicists agree...") in advance for killing it if necessary.

That's a sad and interesting story, but Portal stops short of completely telling it

She also critiques some aspects of gameplay. It's another take on a game we all know about from a different perspective.

Still Alive [Emily Short's Interactive Fiction]

Quests: Design, Theory, and History in Games and Narrative

I've got a couple of game related books on my 'someday, someday I'll have time to read these' book list, and I've just added a new one after seeing a post on Grand Text Auto: Jeff Howard's Quests: Design, Theory, and History in Games and Narratives. While "each theoretical section is followed by a practical section that contains exercises using the Neverwinter Nights Aurora Toolset," something I'll never be using, the meat of the text sounds really interesting, blending literature and game design. Says Nick Montfort, an assistant professor at MIT:

Jeff Howard's Quests is an incisive and highly accessible book that leads the reader on an exploration of literature, computer games, and a connection between them .... The book offers useful discussion of the history of adventure games and detailed analysis of quest elements using concepts from narrative theory, poetics, game studies, and other fields. Quests equips students and scholars as they journey onward to read, play, and fashion games and narratives.

Sounds like a delightful diversion from modernization theory. The book is being published by A K Peters and the hardback is retailing for $45.

Jeff Howard's Quests [Grand Text Auto]

'Are Games Going To Grow Up?': A Debate

'A Word Is Worth A Thousand Pictures': Graphics Vs Narrative

David Braben on The Outsider and 'Next-Gen' Design

David Braben, who developed Elite and has recently been talking up his latest, the espionage-themed The Outsider (and giving backhanded compliments to games like Bioshock in the process). Gamasutra has an interesting interview up with Braben, talking about new paths for narrative design, what he and Frontier Developments are hoping to do with The Outsider, and what everyone in the industry is doing wrong:

We really need to move forward on story — as one of the fronts. That's not the only front left ....

I had an argument with somebody that there were only four types of gameplay, and then out comes Populous. Okay, there are five, then. And usually, it's an excuse to plagiarize. We all take inspiration from other games, and that's fine. It's when we take inspiration and don't do any more. That's the sad thing. When you don't move it forward. And there's a danger. Some of the games that fortunately don't get much airtime don't necessarily do that. That's a missed opportunity. Especially these days, where we're making fewer games than we used to. We're essentially being trusted to use the opportunity to do something fantastic, and if we don't we should get slapped around — which I'm sure we will do.

Well, now I'm curious to see if Braben and his team can actually deliver - talking about grand plans is one thing, putting them into practice (in a manner that actually works) is another. I'm all for improved narrative design, but plenty of developers have gone down the 'revolutionary' path only to fall flat on their face with a disappointed audience who was expecting more.

Next-Gen Narrative: The David Braben Interview [Gamasutra]

MMOs Following An Ancient Epic Tradition

Telling Stories: Improving Story Telling In Games

Constructing Artificial Emotions: Game Design

Grand Text Auto Exhibit Opens

Games Are A 'Backward-Looking Medium'

'The Mechanics of Choice' - BioShock, Little Sisters, and Gameplay

On Mixing Narrative and Violence in Company of Heroes