2077: Narrative Media

Since I’ve become particularly interested in Japanese popular media, I’ve often found myself pondering which particular aspect is my favourite — in other words, what do I feel is the “best” means of enjoying a story that, in many cases, spreads its tendrils across a number of different forms of media with varying degrees of success?

There’s not really an easy answer to that, but I feel my own personal attitude towards it is inclined towards whatever the original version of the work was composed in, where available. This isn’t a hard and fast rule, by any means — on balance, I think I slightly prefer the anime of High School DxD to the manga, for example, and there are a number of interesting spin-off games that tell a completely different story to an anime or manga series, making them worthwhile in their own right — but I do tend to find myself preferring to experience a story as originally intended.

Part of the reason for this is enjoying a story in its original medium means that you don’t “miss out” on anything. In theory, anyway; that theory runs that a creative work is composed for a specific medium, and then adapted to other media at a later date. The adaptation process often involves editing, changing and even cutting content from the original, usually as a means of ensuring that the important beats of the story fit into what may be a more restrictive format. Consider an indefinitely running manga series that is adapted into 20-minute anime episodes, for example; you’re going to lose some detail, like it or not, unless you want the pace of the show to slow to a crawl. (Some long-running shows do indeed take this rather leisurely pace to their ongoing storyline, but for the most part, manga-to-anime adaptations tend to try and get through a significant amount of printed content over the course of 12-13 episodes.)

That said, different media are more or less appropriate for different ways of exploring material. Anime, as the most visually flexible of these media, allows you to outright depict things happening without having a narrator explain things (as in a visual novel, manga or light novel) and take a more subtle approach, implying things rather than making them explicit. At the other end of the spectrum, a novel relies almost entirely on the reader’s imagination, perhaps stimulated a little by illustrations here and there. The nature of text means that the inner thoughts and feelings of characters can be explored in much more detail than in an anime, and even from multiple perspectives.

Visual novels, meanwhile, tend to unfold from a single first-person narrative perspective. This allows for in-depth exploration of a specific character and their responses, feelings and attitudes towards various situations — as if you “were” that character. It’s not quite the same as a full-on game where you take full control of a character, mind; most visual novels give you relatively limited choices as to how they proceed, and the protagonist otherwise has a mind of their own: you’re just along for the ride. Some visual novels do experiment with multiple perspectives — The Fruit of Grisaia’s various routes each feature a sequence where the main heroine of that route narrates an important event in their lives, be it to the reader or to protagonist Yuuji; Deus Machina Demonbane, meanwhile, features a first-person protagonist narrator, but occasionally slips into third-person to depict things happening elsewhere when appropriate. For the most part, though, when you come to the end of a visual novel, the character you almost certainly understand the best is the protagonist.

Video game adaptations — i.e. those that aren’t visual novels — present their own challenges by allowing the player to control iconic characters and perhaps make them behave in ways that aren’t necessarily in keeping with their character as depicted in other media. This is partly a matter of attitude, though; someone who is already particularly engaged with a series and comes to a video game adaptation after reading the manga/visual novel/light novel or watching the anime may well find themselves “method acting” as the character they find themselves in full control of, even if the game mechanics do provide the opportunity for them to do unexpected and strange things.

In other words, I don’t really have a concrete answer for the question. At the moment, I’m particularly enjoying reading The Fruit of Grisaia’s visual novel, and after hearing how the anime adaptation packs the VN’s many hours of narrative and interesting happenings into just a single season, I feel that the VN is probably the best means of experiencing this story in full detail. At the same time, I’m enjoying the video game of Sword Art Online, the manga of Monster Musume, the anime of Himouto! Umaru-chan — there really isn’t a straightforward answer as to which one is “best”.

It sometimes pays to explore a single work in different media, though; the unwritten rules that “the book is usually better than the film” and “video game adaptations are universally terrible” don’t always apply!

#oneaday Day 744: Being a Sidebar to That Interminable Games and Art Discussion, Regarding Visual Novels

Games are art, games aren’t art, games can never be art. Who gives a toss? Actually, judging by the amount of discussion this topic has been generating over the years, quite a few people. For me and my friends, it was Final Fantasy VII that first made us even consider it. Nowadays, of course, Final Fantasy VII and the JRPG genre in general is regarded as something of a cliche, but that’s not what I’m going to get into here.

Instead, inspired by finally getting around to downloading, installing and starting Katawa Shoujo, I wanted to say a few words about the visual novel genre of interactive entertainment, and its tangential relevance to the “games as art” issue.

For the uninitiated (and those too lazy to click on the link above), Katawa Shoujo, which apparently literally translates to Cripple Girls, is a visual novel-cum-dating sim developed by members of notorious Internet cesspit 4Chan. It casts the players in the role of a teenage boy struggling to come to terms with his own condition — arrhythmia. As part of his rehabilitation and treatment, he’s transferred to a special school that specifically caters to students with disabilities, and from here he comes to know a variety of strange and wonderful characters, most of whom each have some sort of disability. After the first act, the game then proceeds down one of several paths depending on which girl in the cast the player decides our protagonist is going to pursue.

I shan’t talk any more about Katawa Shoujo specifically at this time, as I’m still partway through my first playthrough and don’t want to draw any conclusions just yet. But what playing it is reminding me is that visual novels are one of my favourite styles of games — and yet, ironically, they’re barely games at all by the traditional definition.

I know I said I wouldn’t talk any more about Katawa Shoujo yet, but in Katawa Shoujo so far, I have pressed the “continue” button a whole lot and made approximately four choices in about two and a half hours of gameplay. I do not feel short-changed by this, as the stuff for which I am pressing “continue” is interesting, compelling and utterly addictive in exactly the same way that a good book is.

The situation is pretty much the same with titles like the Ace Attorney series, arguably my favourite series of all time. The vast majority of your time in these games is spent pressing a large “continue” button, with the occasional choice of where to go next, what to examine and, in the series’ iconic courtroom scenes, using what you have discovered at the appropriate time to prove your case. In these games, there’s one set solution and no deviating from it — but again, I don’t feel short-changed at all.

Why? Well, the technical limitations of the genre mean that you find yourself filling in the blanks with your imagination a lot more than you might if the game were fully-voiced, fully-animated and provided complete freedom of interactivity. Instead, you’re presented with static backdrops; character stills overlaid with maybe three or four different frames of animation to represent different emotions; and text. Lots of text.

The latter part is what puts a lot of people off visual novel titles — the “it’s too much reading” argument — but it’s from all the text that these titles gain all their power. Typically involving the player getting inside the head of the protagonist and playing things from a first-person narrative perspective, the use of text throughout allows for a far more in-depth exploration of the character than we get in even the lengthiest of RPG. We know what the protagonist is feeling; how he reacts to events; what his attitudes towards the other characters are; and any conflicts he might be feeling. It’s a curiously intimate relationship that the player of a visual novel has with the character they’re ostensibly “controlling”, but this intimacy is oddly often amplified by how infrequently you get to make choices or speak for the protagonist. The choices you make, in many cases, are extremely important, and in some cases can cause the entire plot to veer off in a completely different direction. Their relative infrequence makes them powerful moments to mull over.

But what of the relevance to the “games and art” debate? Well, visual novels present an interesting medium for a variety of artists to express themselves. A novel is typically the work of one person — the writer, perhaps with an illustrator in tow depending on what type of book it is. A painting is the work of a visual artist. A piece of music is the work of a composer. But a visual novel requires all of these things — art, music, sound, writing and in some cases, animation and acting — making it a distinctively collaborative, cross-disciplinary medium. Alongside this, it’s one of the most accessible forms of game there is — if you can read, you can play, understand and enjoy a visual novel even if you’ve never, ever picked up a controller before — meaning it has an inherently larger potential audience than the relatively specialised “gamey games” markets. It distinguishes itself from movies, animation and TV shows by providing a middle ground between the “show, don’t tell” of moving pictures and the pure imaginative effort required when reading a novel.

In short, it allows for stories to be told in a way that is unique to its own medium. These stories, while often following similar patterns and very often involving big-eyed anime girls, are no less valid and worthy of study, interpretation and criticism than those presented in more “traditional” media. In fact, if anything, the fact that the visual novel is a relatively new and emergent art form merits more attention than it actually gets.

And sure, while many visual novels descend into Japanese absurdity, titles like Katawa Shoujo; Digital: A Love Story; Don’t Take It Personally, Babe, It Just Ain’t Your Story; and numerous others all push the boundaries of what it’s possible to make interesting interactive entertainment from, along with taking on subject matter I can’t recall ever being dealt with (tastefully, anyway) in other types of game.

Consider how simple early movies were and how sophisticated they are now in comparison. Given visual novels’ relative infancy compared to other media, imagine what the possibilities might hold in the future. Will we ever see a title like this regarded as “interactive literature” or equivalent?

Who knows. All I know right now is this: if your primary motivation for playing interactive entertainment is to be told a story that draws you into its world and characters, you’d do well to check out titles like those that I’ve mentioned above.

#oneaday, Day 344: Bullshit Filters

One of the biggest challenges in creative writing is overcoming your own personal bullshit filters—those parts of your brain that point out what you’re writing is complete worthless nonsense and garbage that no-one in their right mind would ever want to read.

My own tolerance for nonsense is pretty high, as my enjoyment of JRPGs and love of Bayonetta will attest. But even when I’m writing creative stuff myself, I end up picturing some variant on Comic Book Guy reading what I’ve written and saying “BUT THAT WOULD NEVER HAPPEN!” I guess I have bullshit filters by proxy, as if I were writing stuff purely for myself, it could make as little sense as I please.

One simple way to overcome your own bullshit filters (whether or not they’re proxies like mine), though, is to watch some movies or read some books. When you see how much nonsense other people—published people who actually get paid for their bullshit—put out, you’ll feel a lot better.

Let’s take Tron: Legacy for a moment, which I went to see the other night. This is a movie built almost entirely on nonsensical premises. Why are the programs in the computer personified as humans? Why do they behave in a human way? Why do they need vehicles? And given that the main distinguishing feature of one group in the movie is that they act “more human”, what, in fact, is the difference between them and those who are already acting pretty human? How does a virtual projection of an aircraft stall at altitude in a virtual environment which presumably has no air? THAT WOULD NEVER HA—

Stop. Tron: Legacy isn’t a bad movie despite the fact that all of the above issues are clearly nonsensical plot holes which spectacularly fail to be resolved by the end of the movie. I enjoyed it very much and intend going to see it again. In fact, Tron: Legacy is a movie which actually benefits from you specifically not trying to read too much into it. The reason the programs act human? Because it’s relatable. The reason they drive vehicles? So there can be awesome action sequences. The reason a virtual aircraft stalls at altitude? Because it’s exciting. Nothing more than that.

So it is when you’re writing. Not everything has to be laced with hidden meanings, metaphors and commentary on the human condition. In fact, some of the best “hidden meanings” come about completely unintentionally, as an unconscious communication on the part of the author, an unconscious expression of something deep-seated in their mind that comes out in the things that they are writing. A window onto their soul, if you will.

Of course, some people can transcend that kind of writing and deliberately do clever things. But then they probably get labelled as “pretentious” and don’t get appreciated in their own lifetime. And everyone wants to be appreciated in their own lifetime, right?

So, the next time you’re writing something, take care that it makes sense, sure. But if you want to write something which initially appears to be “stupid”, think about the rest of what you’re writing too. Does it make sense in context, however “unrealistic” it might be when compared to reality? If so, then there absolutely is no reason that the Blood Sausage of Agamemnon can’t turn into a semi truck at the push of a button when combined with the Amulet of Lindor under a full moon.

And if you still feel what you’re writing is ridiculous, go watch Tron: Legacy.

#oneaday, Day 325: Interactive Fiction

There’s a lot to be said for interactivity (or at least the illusion of interactivity) in storytelling. It allows things to be done that are simply impossible with non-interactive media such as books, TV and film.

I spent a couple of hours this afternoon playing Digital: A Love Story, a wonderful game set on the desktop of an Amiga “five minutes into the future of 1988”. If you haven’t played it yet and are intrigued by the premise, I suggest you play it before reading on, because I’m probably going to spoil some things about it. I’ll try not to be too explicit.

At the outset of the game, the player is the proud recipient of a brand-new “Amie” computer with a built-in modem. Your benefactor also provides you with a phone number of a BBS that you might want to check out. And so the story begins with the player dialing into the BBS, complete with terrifyingly authentic-sounding dial and modem tones screeching from your computer’s speakers. The player quickly gets friendly with a person named Emilia and things develop quickly in a manner that will be immediately familiar to anyone who has ever had an online relationship.

All is not as it seems, however, and the player, through a bit of investigation, discovers that there are strange things at work. The BBS crashes, and there is no way of getting in contact with Emilia. Just prior to the crash, she said she was “leaving home” and “getting out”. Thus begins a quest across several BBSes, ARPANet and Sprint’s long-distance calling-card system to track down Emilia and discover what happened.

The game is completely linear. Things happen in a set order, right up to the ending, when the player is faced with an inevitable conclusion that there really is no way around. At this point, we reach one of the most powerful things that gaming can do, and ironically one of the least interactive things about narrative games.

Offer the player the opportunity to do two things: do something, or walk away. Walking away is usually not an option, though Heavy Rain managed to convincingly offer this as an alternative at several points throughout its narrative. Digital: A Love Story, however, makes it abundantly clear that there is only one course of action open to you, and it’s an unpleasant one. Given the great pains that the game has taken up until this point to make you “feel” for the characters involved, despite being based around screens of text, it is difficult to make that final mouse click.

This is something you just can’t do with a book. Stopping halfway down the page and printing “Turn the page to see what happens next” is not an established literary convention, nor should it be. Same with TV and film; with those media, we’re just along for the ride. It’s the reason very few books save the Fighting Fantasy and Choose Your Own Adventure series are written in second-person perspective.

But with a game, the player has been driving the story all along, even if there is only really ever one thing they can do at a time to advance the plot to the next “event”. That illusion of interactivity allows the player to be all the more invested in the story, as if they’re part of the game world. This is further aided in titles such as Digital: A Love Story, which don’t break “character” for a moment. As far as the player is concerned, they’re using an Amiga… sorry, “Amie”. They’re not playing a game, they’ve been transported back in time to 1988, a land of 320×200 graphics, questionable multitasking capabilities and scanlines.

The ending of Digital: A Love Story is bittersweet and if you’ve engaged with the game up until that point in the way it is intended to be engaged with, you’ll find it genuinely emotionally affecting. It’s always interesting when a title which looks so unassuming can actually end up being more powerful than self-consciously “epic” CG cutscenes and over-the-top orchestral music with people singing in Latin.

So, if you remember 1988, if you ever had an Amiga or you remember the golden age of the BBS, check out Digital: A Love Story. It’s free, and well worth your time.

Dear Esther

dearesther

I remember first hearing about Dear Esther a while back, during one of those interminable “games as art” discussions. It was held up as an example of using one particular genre of gaming (the first-person shooter, in this case Half-Life 2) as an interesting means of storytelling. Half-Life 2 itself is, of course, well-known for integrating storytelling and gameplay together, but Dear Esther set out to be something altogether different. Designer Dan Pinchbeck describes it as a “multimodal, environmental storytelling experiment” which “presents a sparse environment with no embedded agents, relying purely on the player’s engagement with and interpretation of a narrative delivered through semi-randomised audio fragments”. (source)

That’s a very dry description of what this mod is doing, but it’s an accurate one.

Dear Esther places the unnamed player on a seemingly-deserted island, starting on a jetty facing an abandoned house. The beautifully-delivered narration begins immediately, reading from a letter to the titular Esther and gradually developing as the player passes around the island.

The interesting thing about the story is that there are several threads running at once, and the randomised delivery of the audio cues throughout means that after a while, they all begin to blur together until it’s not clear where one story ends and the other begins. Pinchbeck notes that “two plots develop simultaneously: the avatar’s visit to the island following the historical record of a 17th century cartographer, and repressed memories of a car accident”. The way these plots intertwine and seem to share themes and ideas in common, as well as wildly disparate elements too, mean that, in Pinchbeck’s words, “a closed reading, or understanding, of the events is impossible to ever reach.”

In this sense, Dear Esther is a dream come true for people who enjoy finding their own interpretations of games. The mod reminded me a lot of Flower, if not in execution then certainly in atmosphere. Flower makes very little of its story (if indeed there is one) explicit and is very open to wildly different interpretations. One could take it literally or metaphorically – and it is the same with Dear Esther. The game raises unspoken questions about whether or not the island you are walking around is actually real, who the mysterious characters the narrator refers to really are and, of course, who Esther actually is.

Pinchbeck himself was surprised at the positive response to his deliberately open narrative, noting that “the notion of an unfolding mystery that is never solved actually appeals to [players]” and that “the atmosphere and drive to find out more about the story is enough of a pull to get them all the way through the experience”.

It’s true. Dear Esther presents an intriguing mystery that makes it clear from the outset that there are no specific answers, yet there is a clear “goal” for the player to attain. This was achieved through use of the environment combined with the spoken narrative. Although the environment of the game is very “open-plan”, being based on an island, at no point did it become difficult to determine where to go next, as there was always something that “looked interesting” over the next ridge. As the narrative progresses, a huge aerial in the middle of the island becomes visible with a large flashing red light, and the fact that this is almost constantly visible gives the player some indication of 1) where they are going and 2) how much longer they have to go.

Music is also used very effectively throughout. Haunting piano and string themes drift eerily over the speakers as the narrator slowly speaks his lines. As the story builds to something of a climax towards its “conclusion” (for want of a better word) the music becomes thicker, more intense, and with more mysterious, unidentifiable noises creeping into it. It gives a sense of progression in a game which leaves more questions unanswered than answered at the end.

There’s certainly no denying that Dear Esther, like Flower, is an experience that will make you feel something. That “something” will be different to different people, as Pinchbeck notes that:

“…we have been surprised how many players report being scared. Several others describe the experience as eerie, moving and very sad. These last two are emotions that normally fall beyond the affective range of games, especially first-person games.”

Lewis Denby, writing on Rock, Paper, Shotgun, had plenty to say on this subject, and it’s well worth reading his excellent article. One particularly interesting point he had to mention was:

“I love my Marios and what-have-you as much as the next person, but I still feel games have an incredible untapped potential for negative emotions. Some have tried – Braid stands out for having a bloody good go – but we’re still a little too comfortable with enjoying everything we play. Any stretches of sadness in this medium tend to be restricted to self-indulgence or vapid tearjerker fare, and even they invariably make way for happy endings and bunny fluff.”

Dear Esther, he says, is noteworthy for taking players into uncomfortable emotional territory and refusing to give in throughout. The whole experience is infused with a kind of melancholy throughout, and the final moments of the story as it comes to a close without any real “resolution” are heartbreaking.

All this in a barren, empty landscape with no human interaction, no speech besides that of the anonymous narrator, no guns, no white-haired pretty boys, no anime cutscenes – and yet somehow, deprived of all that exterior fluff, Dear Esther manages to present an intriguing story which has compelled more than a few people to play it through several times and develop their own interpretations further – and all this using an engine which is renowned for its fast-action run-and-gun FPS gameplay. It just goes to show what a little bit of creativity can achieve.

Dear Esther can be downloaded here.

Pinchbeck’s notes on the mod can be read here.