When everyone left the E3 conference floor last month after watching and playing dozens of new sure-fire mega-blockbuster hits that had people literally hyperventilating with anticipation, when all that was over and everyone was back in their little offices hammering out what they remembered on their keyboards, remember what they were talking about?
Was it about the plethora of brown, dusty apocalyptic shooter-sequels to game that had been bought multiple times per second on their release dates? Was it about the various revivals of successful last-gen games that are by now beginning to transfer themselves into the “nostalgia” sectors of our memories? Was it the latest rendition in a series stretching back nearly 2 decades that we all can remember playing as children and not understanding (which was really fine because there wasn’t much to understand) but still loved playing anyway?
No, not really. It was Scribblenauts, this dinky little DS game about a dude with a chicken comb on the top of his head who looks like he’s shoddily made out of nailing cardboard cutouts together, running around with–not a big-ass sword, not a huge fucking gun–but essentially a crayon. A game that with once glance you can tell is not targeted towards quite the same audience as the next Gears/God of (Modern)War(fare)–the audience that would be devoted enough to fly out to California to stand in a large convention hall with thousands of other like-minded sweaty conventioneers in order to look at little clips of games that will come out more than 6 months from now, and cheer at them.
I suspect that it won’t take much to convince you that Scribblenauts is aesthetically the antipode of what’s causing hype in this industry. Let us briefly compare:
versus:
Right. So why is everyone so hyped up about this? The reason why it’s causing so much stir is obviously not because of its art direction–which, while fine in its own right, is certainly not pushing the “epic mega awesome holy shit” factor quite like most popular games do. The game has little concern with inspiring those sorts of reactions. Instead, what’s enticing is the promise, tested out by many on the convention floor, that you can create anything you want in the game to help you.
This game is not truly non-linear in the purist’s sense of the term; you still have a goal (the star piece things, whatever they’re called), there’s probably still a story, etc etc. But how you want to achieve the preset goal is more or less up to you. In other words, the designers have, like in all games, created a challenge; but, unlike most other games, they didn’t plan how exactly to overcome it. There are puzzles, but they are open-ended.
In games like Zelda, you’ll go into a temple and you’ll see a switch that doesn’t stay shut, so you look around for a block to put on it. By now, after 20 years of this kind of thing, encountering it hardly surprising or challenging anymore. With a non-linear(esque) game like Scribblenauts, “the possibilities,” as the game’s PR would say, “are endless.” The player chooses what to do and how to do it, even if the “doing it” is pushed on them.
Scribblenauts isn’t the first game touting non-linearity by any means; that’s been going on for a very long time, from GTA 3 up to games like Red Faction or basically any sandbox games. In fact, looking over this generation’s biggest hits, you’ll generally find two major types of games: first person shooters (Bioshock, Resistance, Killzone, blah blah blah), so-called sandbox-type games (GTA IV, inFAMOUS, Prototype, Assassin’s Creed), with some games choosing third-person view for their shooters/adventure/horror games (Uncharted, Gears of War, Dead Space, Resident Evil), and some combining two or more of these types (Fallout 3, Red Faction:G, Far Cry 2). Sandbox games have actually become much more prevalent this generation than they were last generation.
So what is it about Scribblenauts that makes it different from all these other “open-ended games,” and sound great enough to earn “Game of E3″ from so many publications?Well, enabled by the dictionaries and encyclopedias’ worth of objects contained in the game, we’ll be able to do anything we want. Going into a time machine to grab a dinosaur so that you can go back to your own time and defeat the zombies has a certain appeal that few other games can offer. It’s not truly non-linear–a title I would try to use to describe Noby Noby Boy, which is certainly one of the most non-linear games I’ve played–but what’s most important is that it eschews top-down narrative in favor of user-generated “stories,” (which, by the way, is also a much better way to promote viral, “word-of-mouth” advertising).
What’s amazing to me is how strong this appeal is, and how quickly it made an otherwise mostly ignorable game whose aesthetic is rather obviously targeted towards children an enormous sensation. What’s so cool about the game is not the game itself, at all. It has absolutely nothing in common with most games people play. It’s what the player can imagine himself doing in the world created by the game.
This is what we’ve been working towards, and doing a pretty poor job of lately. In recent games, the fad is to include more “moral choices,” more freedom, that sort of thing. Attempts at making gamers feel like they have more say in the world they’re exploring. But because our games are so dominated by the narrative structures of other media, most of these attempts have been gimmicky and deceptive. You may have an option to choose between being good or evil, but the games, with their imposed narratives, aren’t really structured to allow for any grey areas that were unintended by the creators. And there’s the real problem.
Games have always been about making your own story as you go through the game, experiencing it in your own way. “Like, dude, there was one time, in Mario, I was running at full speed with my cape and I jumped up but then I was hit by a koopa shell that I had kicked like 10 minutes before that had somehow followed me. I was like what the fuck man.” When you’re remembering the times you played a game, you probably won’t be remembering the time the bad guy stole the princess, you’ll be remembering that crazy time you were insanely lucky and just barely missed getting hit by whatever. This is the major draw and fundamental element that separates the medium of games from other media. So why don’t more games allow for those kinds of experiences more often?
Well, they’re trying. The tension between traditional narratives and these new, more completely user-generated “narratives” is in full swing right now, and has been since GTA3 created its huge stir. With the popularity of Scribblenauts (and other games that are somewhat like it, for example LittleBigPlanet, where you can create and share your own content, or World of Warcraft, where what you do is based more on community), and the emphasis on “make your own stories,” hopefully we’ll get less burly guys with shaved heads running around saving people we don’t really care about all that much while trying to offer us black-and-white choices that affect the game in one of two or a few more ways, and more genuine, unique experiences unexpected and unanticipated by the creators.
Not that there can’t be narrative-driven games, too; they will always have a place in the medium, just like narratives will probably always survive in some form, even if it goes back to being in the manual only. In fact, maybe if more games start going for open-world style games, we can have less generic stories shoved down our throats, and games that go for narratives will have actual, interesting reasons for doing so, instead of just being boring excuses for having something to do. Let us justify our own experiences by having fun if you don’t have a better reason for it. By keeping narratives “traditional” (ie, cinematic) while trying to innovate, we’re only stifling them from really coming into their own, and instead making hackneyed gimmicks forced into structures that were not built around allowing them to occur organically.
-Egmont
