Will Tarry – Interactive Digital Narratives

A Driving Habit: Cultural Context and Familiarity in Race the Sun

In his chapter on Habituation in How to Do Things with Videogames, Ian Bogost argues that making a game familiar is more important than making it learnable – he specifically claims that games are most easily learnable if we’ve become habituated to their conventions. According to Bogost, successful casual or coin-op games aren’t “easy to […]

In his chapter on Habituation in How to Do Things with Videogames, Ian Bogost argues that making a game familiar is more important than making it learnable – he specifically claims that games are most easily learnable if we’ve become habituated to their conventions. According to Bogost, successful casual or coin-op games aren’t “easy to learn, hard to master,” but rather culturally familiar and easy to habituate to.

Playing Race the Sun kind of makes me wonder if the developers read Bogost. Well, some of Bogost, at any rate.

Starting a game of Race the Sun most immediately evokes classic racing games, which makes a lot of sense when you consider the title. We take control of a fast-moving vehicle after a rolling start. The camera is placed in the traditional racing position, over and behind the craft (though it can be changed to the front, as in most racing games) and we navigate the gameplay space as though it were a racetrack, rather than moving through a side scrolling level. So we head into a run with the habituated context of a racing game, and we already know what our objectives are – move as quickly as possible through the track and don’t hit anything, because you’ll crash and burn.

A crossover between racing game and endless runner is not exactly a new idea – most endless runners give you something that you need to race against or escape so that you don’t go through the courses too slowly. In Race the Sun it’s, well, the sun, but in Temple Run (an earlier and more well-known endless runner) your character is fleeing from a group of mysterious temple guardians that you foolishly awakened, and in Canabalt your character is fleeing the destruction of his city. Race the Sun, however, borrows the most explicitly from the genre, with regular trick jumps and obstacles forming safe tracks that require careful maneuvering. These combine with item collecting and high scores from endless running games to create an experience that is surprisingly intuitive, for a game about a completely nonsensical scenario.

Bogost seems to think that the best “habitual” games on the market build on previously established ideas. Tetris, he claims, succeeded because it combined several successful elements from old-school domino games – tiling and assembly, to be precise. In this regard, Race the Sun succeeds admirably – the fusion of two popular genres creates a gameplay experience no other game can replicate exactly, and ties into our own cultural knowledge of driving cars. So how come the game hasn’t been successful?

Race the Sun doesn’t carry the name recognition of Tetris or even Temple Run despite occupying similar genre with a unique style of gameplay. Perhaps it’s just that the game was simply published too late. Or perhaps it costs too much – Race the Sun costs under $5 on iphone, but given the trend that mobile games are heading in, any cost may be too much to ask. Temple Run is free, as are some versions of Tetris, and in a world where a free game can deliver a habitable experience as well as Tetris does, it takes something truly extraordinary to succeed as a paid product. Race the Sun might simply not have what it takes to do so.

In for the Long Haul: Keeping Player Interest in Race the Sun

Race the Sun is at its core an endless runner with a bunch of gimmicks attached. You control a solar-powered craft that must remain in sunlight in order to stay flying. Stay in the shadow for too long, and you’ll run out of solar energy and crash. Run into an obstacle (of which there are […]

Race the Sun is at its core an endless runner with a bunch of gimmicks attached. You control a solar-powered craft that must remain in sunlight in order to stay flying. Stay in the shadow for too long, and you’ll run out of solar energy and crash. Run into an obstacle (of which there are many) and you’ll crash. Don’t pick up enough boosters on the track, and the sun will go down, causing you to run out of energy and crash. There are enough ways to crash in the game that you’ll get hit with one of them sooner or later.

I’ve played a number of endless runners, but none of them have managed to hold my interest for very long. Most of them have barely any variation in terms of gameplay – one mode that’s basically a score attack is all you get. And one thing I’m learned about myself as a gamer is that the lure of beating my high score over and over isn’t enough to keep me interested in a game by itself. Race the Sun, however, has stayed on my phone for a longer time than most, and I find myself returning to it fairly regularly. I attribute the fact that it’s kept my interest to a number of factors – chief among them a leveling system and a variety of modes.

Race the Sun has four modes – the classic, baseline mode, a much faster and more lethal apocalypse mode, a slower-paced labyrinth mode that ditches the sundown mechanic and adds an endpoint but requires the player to precisely navigate a maze of tight corridors, and an “endless” sunrise mode, with reduced difficulty and no sundown or end. Only the base mode and sunrise are unlocked at the start – the rest must be unlocked by leveling up. One levels up in Race the Sun by completing in-game challenges. Some challenges (travel 10,000 meters) are fairly straightforward; others (do a barrel roll ten times in one region) are less so. Leveling up also unlocks new attachments and decals for the ship (which change how it controls and looks, respectively).

The leveling system, in my mind, gives Race the Sun what other endless runners I’ve played have been lacking – a system of goals outside of the effort to improve my highscore. Trying to complete one of the challenges would often give me something to aim for after a series of bad runs, and that would convince me to keep playing for longer or for more often than I otherwise would have. The larger variety of game modes and modifications to my ship helped as well. I spent a good amount of time changing the modifications on my ship, either for different challenges or to see which setup would let me go the farthest, and trying to increase my score that way added a lot of time to my sessions. As for the game modes, I found that each one not only offered a different experience, but usually took a different amount of time as well (Apocalypse mode sessions were usually over the most quickly, because it’s easier to crash in that mode). This not only increased the variety of gameplay features, it gave me more settings to play the game in – I could play a reliably shorter mode if I was only taking a short break to play, or I could start a longer game mode if I had a lot of time.

And all that is on top of the main effect of having multiple modes, which is to break up the monotony of endless runs of an endless runner. If that was the plan, it worked well enough to get me hooked – and expanding an audience is good for any game, casual or no.

Genre vs. Story: Ludonarrative Dissonance in Bastion

MAJOR BASTION SPOILERS BELOW. You’ve been warned. Bastion as a story is about a group of people trying to put their world back together after a terrible calamity destroys nearly everything they know. The plot gradually becomes more complicated, forcing the characters to confront the sinister underpinnings of the past world, causing many of them […]

MAJOR BASTION SPOILERS BELOW. You’ve been warned.

Bastion as a story is about a group of people trying to put their world back together after a terrible calamity destroys nearly everything they know. The plot gradually becomes more complicated, forcing the characters to confront the sinister underpinnings of the past world, causing many of them to question whether or not it’s worth saving. Ultimately, the game seems to ask whether it’s a better idea to try to restore a flawed but familiar past or abandon it and look forward towards an unfamiliar but possibly better future.

Bastion as a game is about killing monsters. A lot of monsters. Some people too, towards the end.

I mentioned back in my first Bastion log that the gameplay was extremely simplistic – basic action RPG stuff. While the story of the game gets deeper as you move through the levels, you learn everything you’re going to learn about the gameplay by the time you reach the Bastion (barring a few poorly-placed last-level gimmicks). Bastion’s moment-to-moment gameplay never adds anything to the story and in some cases even detracts from it (it’s hard to feel like you’re doing anything to fix the world when every level in the game is worse off after your visit than it was before).

Bastion is hardly the only game to exemplify this phenomenon, which developer Clint Hocking calls Ludonarrative Dissonance (Ludonarrative dissonance in Bioshock: The problem of what the game is about). It’s not even the most egregious – Hocking invented the term to describe Bioshock, and the Uncharted series is famous for portraying its protagonist Nathan Drake as a snarky, lovable rogue-type character in the cutscenes between the parts where he murders large numbers of enemy soldiers. But Bastion doesn’t get a pass simply because one of its major flaws is so widespread.

If the mechanical genre of the game was the only thing causing this dissonance in Bastion, I would probably have been fine with it. I’m okay with killing a lot of things in an action game or shooter even if that doesn’t necessarily gel with the game’s story, because that’s how action games and shooters work (not sure what thinking that says about me). But what really bothers me is that the game didn’t offer me many choices until it’s very last acts. I noted in my first post on Bastion that the game gives you reasons to be suspicious of Rucks early and often, but in-game you’re never able to challenge him or go against his wishes until the very end, when he recommends using the bastion’s power to restore Caelondia at the cost of erasing the survivors’ memories of the calamity.

Bastion does, however, offer you the choice, if only at the very end, and it’s one of the game’s most memorable moments. For all its faults in this regard, Bastion actually manages to leverage the pull of gameplay concerns versus story concerns once or twice in the game, and the results are incredibly compelling. For me, one of the most powerful moments in the game comes when you find Zulf bleeding out in the final level, betrayed by his countrymen for giving you cause to go to war. Here you are offered a choice – follow the ludic instincts the game has been drilling into you, abandon Zulf (who’s already betrayed you once) and try to fight your way out, or follow the ideals of the narrative and try to carry Zulf out at the cost of your ability to attack. Admittedly, I didn’t spend too long on the choice (I’ve saved Zulf every time) but it was an incredible moment, and it made me kind of disappointed that the developers hadn’t given me more chances to defy the mechanics.

But all things considered, I’m glad they threw a few in. The glimpses of what the game could have been with more gameplay and story integration were well worth it.

They’ll be Here Before too long: Racial Conflict in Bastion

The world that Bastion sets up is defined in large part by the conflict between the Caels, the builders of the Bastion, and the Ura, a people native to the continent that live beyond Caelondia’s walls. That conflict broke out into open war fifty years before the events of the game, when the Caels built […]

The world that Bastion sets up is defined in large part by the conflict between the Caels, the builders of the Bastion, and the Ura, a people native to the continent that live beyond Caelondia’s walls. That conflict broke out into open war fifty years before the events of the game, when the Caels built a railroad to haul ore and spices out of the “wild unknown,” unwittingly treading onto Ura territory in the process. The animosity between the two peoples runs deep – the Caels built the rippling walls around their home city to keep the Ura out. Ura that move to Caelondia or are born within it are not allowed to leave, as the city’s leaders believe they will leak Cael secrets to the Ura military. And a major part of the Ura character Zia’s backstory is the suspicion and mistrust she received at the hands of her Cael classmates.

Bastion’s setting is fantastical, but the Ura/Caelondian conflict is very reflective of historical colonial narratives and other games that seek to exploit them. To some degree, it even shares the problems that games like Colonization have in limiting the performativity of native peoples (in this case, the Ura). Rucks’ narration details a significant effort by the people of Caelondia to “tame” the wilds, and use walls to keep the parts that could not be tamed (like the Ura) at bay. In fact, our main character, the Kid, had a job maintaining the walls that kept the Ura out. The first named Ura we meet is othered almost immediately – his clothing and complexion are wildly different from the Kid and Rucks – and he later becomes the game’s main antagonist. And we learn less about Ura culture than about Cael culture, mostly because Rucks knows much less about the Ura than he does about Caelondia.

This last bit of knowledge, however, is more of an indictment of Rucks and Caelondia than any reflection on the Ura. In fact, very little of what we learn in the game paints the Caels in a more positive light than their neighbors. This is the primary point of difference between the colonial narrative in Bastion and similar ones in Colonization and Civilization – Bastion features a fairly heavy-handed critique of the imperialist paradigm. Nearly all of the setting’s conflicts were caused by the Caels – the Ura/Caelondian war began when a railway built by Caelondia disturbed several underground Ura cities, and Zulf’s attacks on the Bastion in the game’s present are his reaction to the game’s major plot twist. The twist in this case being that the Calamity was the result of a Caelondian doomsday weapon invented to wipe the Ura off the map backfiring on its creators. The nameless Caelondians who unleashed the calamity are the only characters in the story presented with no sympathy at all – the only one we even learn the name of was the man who attempted to sabotage the weapon to prevent its activation. Zulf is eventually revealed to be a tragic villain trying to get revenge on the people who took everything from him.

Bastion is, of course, a fantasy game. But that doesn’t mean the parallels it draws with the real world can be ignored. In this year especially, a story about a bunch of colonists who built a wall between themselves and their neighbors, and how badly things went for everyone involved, deserves some attention, even if the ideas it presents have been explored in other media.

Storytelling in Bastion: Narrative Immersion via the Narrator

Bastion is a fairly unique indie game set in a world recently ravaged by an undefined calamity that tore the ground itself apart beneath the characters’ feet. Its central conceit, and the one that separates it from other games of its type, is that an in-game narrator relates the events of the story as you […]

Bastion is a fairly unique indie game set in a world recently ravaged by an undefined calamity that tore the ground itself apart beneath the characters’ feet. Its central conceit, and the one that separates it from other games of its type, is that an in-game narrator relates the events of the story as you play through it. This narrator provides insight into the history of the environments and enemies the player encounters and comments on almost anything they do.

The inclusion of the omnipresent and seemingly omniscient narrator is an interesting choice, one that to my knowledge few other games have attempted. It certainly fits with the story-centric focus of Bastion, though. The gameplay is fairly uncomplicated, rarely deviating from the basic tropes common to isometric action RPGs. The player can carry two weapons and one special skill at a time, each of which is mapped to a different button, and must use their weapons to defeat foes in the environment. There are some more involved character building aspects – players rapidly gain more weapons than they can carry and must chose which to upgrade and take with them, for example – but most of these building opportunities occur in the game’s central hub, fittingly called The Bastion.

The fairly uncomplicated nature of the gameplay actually works well when combined with the narrator, as it allows the player to focus on what he is saying even in the most difficult encounters. The narrator really likes to talk, and most of his lines that aren’t about the protagonist’s actions reveal facts about the world and its previous inhabitants (he describes an early arena, a bar called the Sole Regret, as “One of Caelondia’s most famous watering holes”). His anecdotes are folksy and clearly opinionated, but they keep the player constantly engaged in the story and, together with the game’s excellent music and vibrant art style, add a surprising amount of life to this dead world.

But having a narrator also sets up a certain distance between the player and the game, especially so when he begins to talk about the motivations of the Kid, Bastion’s silent protagonist. I had just destroyed the petrified form of the Sole Regret’s bartender, Rondy, when he made the above comment, suggesting that the Kid destroyed the statue out of respect for the dead bartender. The first time I ran through the Sole Regret, I destroyed the statue of Rondy primarily to see what the narrator would say about it. The Kid apparently has his own motivations for what he does in game, and the narrator knows more about them than we do.

The fact that the narrator possesses knowledge that we don’t gets a little more disturbing when you realize that he doesn’t seem to want to reveal all of it. This becomes very apparent the first time the player meets the narrator, who is a character residing at the Bastion. The narrator does not reveal what exactly was discussed during his first conversation with the Kid or even what the Kid says – players have to read the descriptions of the items the Kid brings to the narrator for this information. The narrator seemingly managed to get through this and several other conversations without revealing his name – he remains “the Stranger” past completion of the fourth level. But the most ominous instance of his reluctance to reveal information is that he still has not revealed the higher purpose of the Bastion despite implying that there is one. Supposedly, it’s capable of “fixing” calamity. But the idea of fixing something that caused as much damage as the calamity did defies logic, and the Stranger has not revealed how it will do so.

Admittedly, the Stranger is a storyteller – the game’s framing device is that he’s telling the story of the Kid’s exploits to another party, who is presumably also in-game. And you don’t want to reveal everything about a story right away, or there’ll be no suspense. But its hard to view his reticence as anything but ominous given the nature of the setting, and the way Bastion’s framing device works it can’t be just us he’s hiding things from.

Now we’re Thinking with Portals

Portal, in some ways, is an answer to last week’s unit on simulation and narrative in videogames. Specifically, Portal’s narrative works because it’s set in a video game – an adaptation of Portal in any other medium would make the story significantly less affecting. The reason for that is that a large portion of Portal’s […]

The reason for that is that a large portion of Portal’s narrative is encoded in its environment. As I wrote in my last game lab, the player has to discover the story of the game by finding clues in the game’s levels. For example, while GLaDOS acts crazy for pretty much the whole game, I only realized that she had killed everyone else in the facility when I stumbled across a hidey-hole used by one of the survivors. The survivor had scrawled notes as to the true nature of GLaDOS’ experiments on the wall; this was the first time I figured out that GLaDOS was the game’s villain.

The moment of discovery I described above is unique to videogames – while film and novels could have replicated the moment of a character discovering GLaDOS’ insanity, it would have lacked the impact it did in Portal since I, not the character, “discovered” it. The moment of discovery, in short, requires an interactive environment and directly ties the narrative to the game space.

Portal, therefore, questions the conclusions we discussed in our study of narrative and simulation – specifically, the idea that videogames are games primarily, that play space and narrative space are separate, and thus it’s foolish to study videogames as narrative spaces. When the narrative of a game is tied so closely to the play space, as it is in Portal, I think a new paradigm is necessary to study it.