Linear Versus Non-linear storylines within Game Design

Warren Spector, the designer behind Deus Ex says “I want to create the narrative with the players and not for them”. ¹ I am going to talk about linear versus non-linear narratives in this essay and discuss the pros and cons of each. I shall be referring to Deus Ex as my primary example of a non-linear digital game.

 

“Discussions of games as ‘interactive narratives’ predictably fall into polarizing debates about linear versus non-linear storytelling.” ²

 

Within the game Deus Ex we take control of JC Denton, a nano-augmented agent for UNATCO. As the player we are able to customise JC’s skills and augmentations as we see fit. Deus Ex offers the player multiple routes to complete each mission and ontological interactivity, however, the game world never becomes fully available to ‘free roam’, like in games such as Oblivion or Grand Theft Auto. Torben Grodal in the essay ‘Stories for Eye, Ear and Muscles’ tells us “Ryan (2001) provides a distinction between four kinds of interactivity, made up of two pairs internal/ external and exploratory/ ontological…the last pair distinguishes between those games in which the player moves around the database, but is unable to alter the plot and the virtual world, and those games in which the player can influence that world and consequently influence the possible stories.” ³

In Deus Ex, an example of one of the choices in the first mission is whether or not to give Gunther your pistol, so that he can help clean out the statue of remaining terrorists. This choice does not affect the overall story or gameplay experience. However, this choice may in-fact, on this occasion hinder the short-term ‘fun’, because by allowing Gunther to have the gun you are giving away one of your weapons and allowing an NPC to do much of the killing for you. However, by allowing you to make this decision the game makes you feel as if your actions are having a valid effect on the game world. Torben Grodal in the same essay ‘Stories for Eye, Ear and Muscles’ also tells us “The only necessary condition for experiencing ‘agency’ and interactivity is that our actions make a difference…seeing interactivity as the creation of experiences that appears to flow from one’s own actions.” 4

Deus Ex’s Warren Spector says in Gamasutra interview, “As a developer I want to control the overall narrative arc. Using Deus Ex as an example, JC Denton has a brother, he works for this agency…the terrorists are the good guys and so on. All that stuff provides context and meaning for all the minute-to-minute player choices…it’s possible to own why you do things and leave how you do them in the player’s hands.” 5 Essentially, Warren tells us that while every player will go through the exact same levels and overall plot arc, it is up to them as to what routes to take and what choices to make within them. The overall details of the plot have been set, however, the smaller aspects of plot are up to the individual. Many complained that Mass Effect sacrificed in-depth story and linearity for excessive choice and several shallow stories.

In the film, The Matrix Reloaded, one of the central themes is choice. The Merovingian remarks “Choice is just an illusion between those with power and those without.”6 The question is: do players benefit from the illusion of choice or not? The Pokémon series, essentially the most commercially successful games of all time sacrificed in-depth story for player choice and player exploration. When playing these games myself, I have found my own imagination narrates the gaps in the plot for me, as one’s might when you play other games void of plot, such as The Sims. Another example of a highly popular game with more choice than solid storyline is the MMO: World of Warcraft, where players carry out quests or fight player versus player as they see fit. This begs the question; do digital games need detailed narratives? In the essay ‘Video Games and Configurative Performances’, by Markku Eskelinen and Ragnhild Tronstad, they tell us “In the early 1970s those rare individuals who took games and games studies seriously understood very clearly they were focusing on activities and structures that were at least as medium-independent as stories.” 7

Pre-digital games, according to Gonzalo Frasca in the essay ‘Simulation Versus Narrative’ may be described as either paidia or ludus. “Paidia refers to the form of play present in early children (construction kits, games or make-believe, kinetic play) while ludus represents games with social rules (chess, soccer, poker)…structurally, ludus follows the same three-act rule behind Aristotelian stories…rules are acknowledged…players perform…concludes the game and draws the line between victors and losers.” 8 Currently most digital games follow the Aristotlian ludus formula, because it has a simple ‘win’ or ‘lose’ mechanic, however, Frasca tells us “Only Paidia, with its fuzzier logic and its scope beyond winners and losers, can provide an environment for games to grow in their scope and artistry.”9

I believe that Frasca suggests that we create games based on the pre-digital child-like make-believe games, which are more about ‘play’ than narrative and thus we ourselves assign narrative to our play (like I mentioned that I did when I played the original plot-light Pokémon games). In Janet H. Murray’s book ‘Hamlet On the Holodeck’, she eloquently suggests, “In electronic narrative the procedural author is like a choreographer who supplies the rhythms, the context, and the set of steps that will be performed. The interactor, whether as navigator, protagonist, explorer, or builder, makes use of this repertoire of possible steps and rhythms to improvise a particular dance among the many, many possible dances the author has enabled.” 10

The pros of non-linear narratives are that the player is able to explore the area and the various narrative choices, even more so through re-playing the games or saving the game, and then experimenting with the different outcomes. I believe player’s enjoy the sense or illusion of freedom provided to them. However, non-linear narratives can sometimes confuse game play with excessive choice (such as in Oblivion). Also, non-linear narratives are often disliked by players that prefer games with strong narratives, because non-linear narratives often offer shallow narrative in exchange for excessive choice. Examples of games with shallow narratives include Mass Effect and Deus Ex: Invisible War.

The question remains, would games benefit from less narrative…and thus being produced as digital toys or even tools for being ‘used’ or as linear semi-interactive texts or ludus narratives (the latter two being the main form of narratives for perhaps the entirety of digital game history)?

I shall now look more in-depth at what linear games offer and compare the linear narrative style to that of the non-linear narrative Deus Ex. The linear text follows a single straight line through from beginning to end. In Final Fantasy X the plot is generally expressed through breaks in interactivity via cut scenes. The player’s control of the avatar generally involves the roles of walking around towns and along roads, sometimes solving puzzles in the cloisters of trials, until a random battle occurs. Wherein the player must ‘win’ or ‘retreat’ from battle. However, the player has no option but to complete every trial and ‘win’ or successfully ‘retreat’ from every battle in this game, in-order to successfully ‘complete’ it.

If Deus Ex were linear it would probably feel more like a Halo game. For example the first choice with Gunther that I mentioned earlier wouldn’t exist, so you would just have to kill everyone in the statue yourself. In a later level, you have to choose between killing an unarmed man that you have been sent to assassinate, or leaving him alive, because he is a friend of your, now rogue, brother. If you choose not to assassinate him then your boss is unhappy with you and docks your pay. If this were a linear narrative you would either just shoot this character, or have the outcome given to you via cut scene.

Games such as Final Fantasy X and Halo do not offer multiple paths to complete each level either; there is generally only one route. Whereas in Deus Ex there can be as many as three or four different routes to complete a mission. If Deus Ex were to be reduced to linear routes through the game, then half of the game would have to be cut out. Instead of, in the first mission, being able to choose between the front route past the guards and the robot up to a locked door which needs a password, and the rear entrance where there are significantly less enemies and you can stealthily enter the statue, you would probably only be able to enter via the front entrance in a linear game, by killing everything, like in Halo. But why do we often prefer to have this option to choose? Torben Grodal tells us “The reason for wanting multiple possible storylines is the desire to simulate the feeling of a (relative) freedom of choice that we may have in real life, or an utopian-romantic wish for a virtual world that liberates from the restrictions of the real world. Seen from this point of view the simulation of several alternative routes simulates freedom.” 11

In the original Final Fantasy game the plot was explained with an opening dialogue given to the player in text format and then, from thereon in the narrative seemed almost entirely under the player’s control. After the initial quest from the king to go and rescue his daughter, the player is given very little direction and there is a whole world to explore. It is only by exploring that the player discovers where to go or what to do to get further in the game. Modern game-players might belittle the lack of narrative within this game, because they are used to being bombarded with cut scenes, however, the fact remains that at the time, the original Final Fantasy was so popular that it saved Square from going bankrupt.

The pros of linear narratives are that they offer a straight-forward narrative, understandable by any games player and when done well, like in the Final Fantasy series or Metal Gear Solid series, can often stir our emotions and provide us with compelling narratives. However, these ‘interactive narratives’ do not give the player the sense of interactivity or freedom to ‘play’ that they may prefer.

Gonzola Frasco says “The biggest fallacy of ‘intercative narrative’ is that it pretends to give freedom to the player while maintaining narrative coherence.” 12

In conclusion, from what I have discussed it seems evident that the linear narratives that digital games have grown up with are no longer as ‘fun’ or as fresh as they were. Non-linear narratives appear to be the digital games that people want, as the sales for Spore, Pokémon, Oblivion, The Sims and World of Warcraft can account for. Maybe the next step forwards for digital games is to focus on the pre-digital imaginative games that we played as children and to create digital ‘toys’, ‘tools’ or ‘experiences’ that we can ‘play’ with rather than spend more of our time watching than interacting with, as was the case with linear narratives. I feel that the Wii and its use of motion within games is a step in the right direction: adding more physicality to games increases the player’s interactivity and thus increases the ‘fun’ factor. Most pre-digital games worked because of the physicality of the games. For example in Monopoly you have the detailed playing pieces and in football you are kicking the football yourself. A great deal of playing many board games is about the action of rolling the dice and moving the pieces, because this interactivity somehow increases the ‘fun’ factor with these arbitrary actions. The pipedream distant possibility of full-immersion virtual reality would certainly be the ultimate realisation of this idea and would very much be a haven for social fantasy games such as World of Warcraft.

 

 

1. Sheffield, Brandon ‘An Interview with Warren Spector’ March 5^th 2007, can be found online at <http://www.gamasutra.com/features/20070305/sheffield_01.shtml&gt;
2. Salen, Katie and Zimmerman, Eric. Rules of Play, page 379. Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 2004
3. Grodal, Torban. Stories for Eye, Ear, and Muscles in The Video Game Theory Reader page 142, Edited by Wolf, Mark J.P. and Perron, Bernard. New York: Routledge, 2003.
4. Grodal, Torban. Stories for Eye, Ear, and Muscles in The Video Game Theory Reader pages 142-143, Edited by Wolf, Mark J.P. and Perron, Bernard. New York: Routledge, 2003.
5. Sheffield, Brandon ‘An Interview with Warren Spector’ March 5^th 2007, can be found online at <http://www.gamasutra.com/features/20070305/sheffield_01.shtml&gt;
6. Watchowski, Andy and Larry. The Matrix Reloaded, Warner Bros. 2000
7. Eskelinen, Markku and Tronstad, Ragnhild. Video Games and Configurative Performances in The Video Game Theory Reader page 195, Edited by Wolf, Mark J.P. and Perron, Bernard. New York: Routledge, 2003.
8. Frasca, Gonzalo. Simulation Versus Narrative in The Video Game Theory Reader pages 229-230, Edited by Wolf, Mark J.P. and Perron, Bernard. New York: Routledge, 2003.
9. Frasca, Gonzalo. Simulation Versus Narrative in The Video Game Theory Reader page 230, Edited by Wolf, Mark J.P. and Perron, Bernard. New York: Routledge, 2003.

10.  Murray, Janet H. Hamlet on the Holodeck, page 153. New York: The Free Press, 1997.

11.  Grodal, Torban. Stories for Eye, Ear, and Muscles in The Video Game Theory Reader page 146, Edited by Wolf, Mark J.P. and Perron, Bernard. New York: Routledge, 2003.

12.  Frasca, Gonzalo. Simulation Versus Narrative in The Video Game Theory Reader pages 229, Edited by Wolf, Mark J.P. and Perron, Bernard. New York: Routledge, 2003.