The Graveyard is both beautiful and incredibly irritating -- and it's worth playing, both because it is beautiful, and because the reasons why it's irritating are worth thinking about.
First, the beauty: In The Graveyard, a very old woman with a cane walks painfully down a path in a graveyard; about her, the graveyard is portrayed in finely detailed greyscale CGI, with an entirely believable soundscape of birdsong, barking dogs, and distant emergency vehicles -- clearly, a graveyard in an urban setting. She comes to the end of the path, and awkwardly turns to sit on a park bench. After a moment, a song begins to play -- a bleak, Brechtian tune, with minimal instrumentation, sung in Dutch by the Belgian recording artist Gerry De Mol. (There are English subtitles.) While the music plays, an image of the old woman appears at right (as in the image above), and superimposed on the foreground are images of graves and other aspects of the graveyard. At the end of the song, the old woman rises, and walks painfully back through the garden to the gate.
Emotionally effective, and beautiful both for its imagery and its music.
Why, then, is this incredibly irritating? For this reason: Supposedly this is -- well, don't call it a game, but an interactive application. The old lady does not simply walk down the path; you press the W key to make her walk. She turns with A or D, moves backward with S -- this is a WASD interface. She sits spontaneously when properly positioned over the bench, however.
At the beginning of the graveyard path, there are paths to left and right -- but if you turn and take one, the old lady may walk down it, but your camera does not follow. Indeed, it smoothly slides back to a more distant view, and the old lady quickly disappears behind the wall surrounding the graveyard -- you can no longer see her. Indeed, extricating her from this position is difficult, because she has to turn back to return to the main path, but you can't see her to see how she is positioned. Moreover, if you become frustrated at your inability to rectify the situation, and try to quit, you find that you cannot; there is no way to quit from the application, except by returning to and exiting the graveyard gate. (Or Alt-Tabbing out and forcing an external quit, of course.)
As you approach the park bench, which is situated in front of what appears to be a chapel, there are visible paths to the left and right around the chapel; if you take one, there comes a point where the old lady begins to "skate," still attempting to walk, but visibly making no progress.
Now here's the thing; by giving the player (if we may call him such) the illusion of agency, by placing control of the character's motions in his hands, an application makes an implicit promise: That your choice of actions matters. Since this is essentially an art project, perhaps it need not matter much -- but it should matter to some degree. The implicit promise is that we can turn down that path to the left or right, or skirt around the chapel; perhaps doing so takes us no where in particular, perhaps the only point at which something interesting happens is that park bench -- but for the application simply to not let you see to left or right, to bar you from moving past the chapel, breaks the illusion of presence, and denies your control of the character.
The character is not in your control, in any meaningful sense. The character exists simply to move to the park bench and trigger the music.
This should not be an application; this should be a video. It would lose nothing if it were; it would still be beautiful and moving -- without the frustration.
Does it gain anything at all through its illusion of agency? Perhaps one little thing: we have been trained to identify more closely with the game avatars we control than with external characters in a linear film. Perhaps the act of pressing down the W key to move the old lady forces us to identify with her more closely, and perhaps that reinforces the pathos of the scenario.
And perhaps not. If you're going to let me turn left and right, I want to do so. And if your -- game, if that's the word -- doesn't let me, then you're simply playing the age-old, tedious game of the linear arts: You are telling me a story, you are completely in control of the message, anything I do affects it not the least; it's artist-to-accolyte, broadcaster-to-audience, lord-to-peon, it utterly defies the single thing that makes games unique and valuable: that they democratize the experience by making the players willing participants in its creation.
The Graveyard is worth playing -- but it is "playing" in the sense that you play a movie, not playing in the sense that you play a game. It is beautiful -- and also a clear demonstration of why no one should ever make such a thing.
Sounds familiar...
We made things like this all the time first semester at the Entertainment Technology Center.
The class was called "Building Virtual Worlds" and we were graded on how entertaining the things were to watch, rather than play. The last round of projects for the class were all short films with a moving camera controlled in real-time.
it's a metaphor, eh?
you know... death? graveyard? can't avoid it even if we want to... maybe especially if we want to. we have an illusion of control in life, because we can move up/down/left/right... we can walk, talk, etc... we can have wine with dinner, or not... but in the end, we die. we always move to the end of the game, regardless of input.
this is "more art" as a game, because the point about the illusion of control is made more strongly when you (the player/viewer) are given that illusionary control. if it were a film, the illusion of control is impossible; the audience knows it has no control.
I find it strangely wonderful.
No, it's co-authorship made dishonest
When your given control in a game, it's to make you a co-author. This game gives you controls, then dishonestly says 'Oh, by the way, you do everything just as I say - I'm the only author here, I just humoured your idea that you'd get to author in order to get you to listen to MY story'
If your not interested in authorship and just want to drink in what is there, then I compare that to drinking alchohol. Doing it a bit is okay, but if you binge on this, your just an alchoholic looking to wash away this world with someone elses brew.
Co-authorship is an illusion
If you had any idea, Callan S., how hard it was to make a video game, you would reduce your claim to co-authorship immediately. I feel silly for having to say this but playing games is not the same as making them. However hard a game may feel to play, it's a million times harder to make it. Any feeling of co-authorship that you might get from a game is always going to be an illusion.
That being said, The Graveyard offers a very powerful environment, if not for co-authorship, then at least for imagining your own story. But as becomes clear from the article, gamers are completely helpless in an environment that does not lock down their experience with rules and goals. In the absence of strict rules, apparently gamers simply go crazy and start bumping into invisible walls like chickens without heads.
Tale of Tales create games that invite you to make up your own rules, your own goals, your own meaning. In terms of co-authorship, that's pretty decent. Some people can deal with such freedom. Others, clearly, cannot.
"Playing"
The Graveyard is worth playing -- but it is "playing" in the sense that you play a movie, not playing in the sense that you play a game.
No: it's playing in the sense of taking part in a theater peformance.
What Freedom?
One linear path is not freedom in any meaningful sense.
And if co-authorship isn't an illusion, how will you feel then?
I don't accept a 'if you had any idea...' line of thought. It's premise is that don't have to provide evidence for a claim your making, then you can base whatever conclusions you want upon that as yet unproved claim.
Co-authorship is relatively simple - in terms of the story making, the author works under the same or similar rules and goals the player will in terms of making story. Player and game designer having to work with the same rules to author the story makes them...co-authors.
Making up your own rules and goals is illusion. Working under roughly the same set of rules the games designer is using, mid play, to tell the story...that's co-authoring.
If that's a blow against all the story imagining you've done in the past, it's not being done at a personal level. In terms of the evidence I have, that isn't story making, and I will say so. But it's no personal attack or anything, even though the imagining was probably important to you.
Authorship is more than what story you can manage to fit inside the hoops the game designer sets. When he has to jump through the same hoops as you, then it starts to get down to something important.
Hard question: If co-authoring isn't an illusion, how will you feel about all the 'story imagining' you've done? Would it lose all the importance it had to you when you imagined it?
RE: Callan
Callan, I think the important distinction that you are missing is that the designer *chooses* the rules and goals. The player is not a co-author; she merely jumps the hoops created by the designer. It is true though, that the players interpretation does matter.
Dustin
re: What Freedom?
One linear path is not freedom in any meaningful sense.
Neither is being forced to make a choice.
re: And if co-authorship isn't an illusion, how will you feel th
I just wanted to make a practical comment.
I actually totally agree with you on a deeper level. The feeling of creating your own story in a game is very powerful. And I love doing it.
I guess I was a bit frustrated when I wrote my comment, by all the work we're doing on our current game. For any 5 or 6 hours that a player spends on any game, the developers spend hundreds if not thousands of hours building it!
I'm just as fond of thinking of games as something player and maker do together. But suddenly the discrepancy between the actual development effort and the play activity struck me. Guess i was tired.
re: Dustin
It is true though, that the players interpretation does matter.
The viewer's interpretation is crucial in any form of art consumption. Without it, there is no art. But that doesn't mean that the game designer cannot be an author and should not make decisions.
I want games to contain wisdom, like books and movies can. I want to learn something other from them than the skill to launch a grappling hook. I want games to be about life. Not about project management and spreadsheet editing.
Dustin, I noted the game
Dustin, I noted the game designer abiding by the same rules the player will have, in story making.
Just because you decide the rules, doesn't mean you are by default, free from them. A game author can decide to only tell story by the very same rules and goals he sets for the player. In other words, he makes the rules, then he makes himself just another player. That's how he/you become a co-author, by the game designer just becoming another player.
JohnyZuper, ultimately
JohnyZuper, ultimately storytelling at its basic level takes no more effort than me writing this to you. It's just conversation. It can get more complicated. It doesn't have to. If you can hear my point, that proves my point - at a basic level, it's just talking.
Consider what has actually demanded that games run for 40 hours or so, and whether that thing that demands is actually part of the process of artistic communication, or a leech attached to it? Do the players really demand you work hundreds of hours per hour of game time?
Oh...can't resist saying it....
Or are they trained to expect that?
Storytelling is just conversation?
Storytelling is just conversation?
Might as well say that any good painting is just dabs of colour pigment accidentally looking good together.
RE: Callan
Again, the designer is free in the sense in that they construct the world, while the player only is an aspect of it. I've been designing a card/board game hybrid for the past year, and I can attest that merely working within a system and creating them are entirely different. Again, the fact that the player has a small degree of agency does mean that they have more control than they would in a passive media source (hence, in part, why I love games,)but in the end they are still recipients of the designers ideas.
Game Length
Consider what has actually demanded that games run for 40 hours or so, and whether that thing that demands is actually part of the process of artistic communication, or a leech attached to it? Do the players really demand you work hundreds of hours per hour of game time?
Oh...can't resist saying it....
Or are they trained to expect that?
Actually, it's a consequence of market conditions at conventional retail. If you're charging $50 for a title, you pretty much have to supply dozens of hours of play for the price. People often feel cheated when a retail game is "too short."
What's interesting is that the spread of freeware (and lower priced) games has created a surge of much shorter titles. The conventional market has no room for the game equivalent of short stories, but the Internet does.
That's rather self
That's rather self referential though - we have to charge $50 to make a game long enough, and we have to make it long enough, because otherwise people will complain it's too short for a $50 game.
I'm suggesting there is no real reason - it's just that individuals who influence that market decided to make it a 40 hour/$50 market. Sure now that market expects it, but it's like deciding to train a dog to eat it's dinner while a bell rings. Sure, now it expects food whenever a bell rings, but that doesn't mean its just a consequence of a bell ringing and that's how a dogs hunger works.
Britterly,
Jeez, that's pretty derisive of conversation? Was your post/conversation to me just words dabbed together that happened, by chance, to try and make a point? Hardly. There was clear, articulate thought in your post/conversation with me. So why so down on conversation that its bad to say storytelling is conversation?
TheDustin,
If the villain of the piece works by the same rules as the players character, and instead of escaping a scene cops a dagger in the back of the skull thrown by the PC, then no, the player isn't just a recipient of the authors ideas. He just threw a dagger in the back of the skull of this idea, and it wont be making a further impact on play. The player authored a significant change and was able to, because the game author stayed within the same mechanics as the player has to.
If however the villain has absolute immunity with which to escape...yeah, your just sitting there listening to the game authors ideas.
Self-referential
No, the conventional retail market for games has always been overpriced, and always geared toward longer content. Disc replication is cheap -- no reason a prior you couldn't release a series of $5 games, in terms of cost-of-goods -- but good luck getting Gamestop to stock them. The constraints of the marketplace does impact the nature of the content that appears in that marketplace -- which is, of course, one reason why I'm disenchanted with the conventional industry, and pleased to see the rise of alternative distribution channels for games.
To Callan S
I would call this conversation, not a story. Conversation is about communication, story and storytelling is art. If this conversation would become a story, it would more likely be an accident than intentional. I've found that real storytelling takes effort.
If "clear, articulate thoughts" were stories, then any company quarter report powerpoint would be a story. I believe you could make a clever story out of a powerpoint, but that is an entirely different matter :)
I got this off the Wikipedia, but I think any book on screenwriting or on the history of writing, the theory of writing, or on storywriting would agree that "Crucial elements of stories and storytelling include plot and characters, as well as the narrative point of view."
By adding a plot and characters, and narrative point of view to our quarter report powerpoint presentation, we could make it a story, but it is not a story on the virtue of being clear and articulate communication.
I have nothing against communication, and I'm not trying to put it down. I was emotionally impacted when I read that "stories are just conversation", because it is a phrase which misunderstands and even puts down storytelling.
And I'm not so entirely sure if your day-to-day conversation is really about being clear and concise either. Conversation doesn't even have to relate concise messages. I talk nonsense about nothing often with my friends, just because talking is a way of bonding and getting in touch.
What I may be then saying is one thing, but what I'm communicating inaudibly is "I want to talk to you and listen to you", which is never said, and is the ultimate purpose and message of the conversation.
*sigh* Callan, the villian,
*sigh* Callan, the villian, scene, and dagger which you reference are all design choices of the 'designer'. The designer chooses whether or not throwing said dagger impacts gameplay or not. The only agency a player has in a game is what is given to her by the game designer. By creating the mechanics, setting, etc. the designer isn't restrained by her choices, because she could have easily changed them on her whim.
Hi Costik, Fair enough. But
Hi Costik,
Fair enough. But I would say what is called the alternative is actually the default mode of selling in practice (like farmers selling their crops themselves) - one might even call it the conventional. While what is called the conventional is a very specific, specialised version that is an alternative to the default - so could be called the alternative. Somehow they got swapped around >:)
Britterly,
Maybe I use a different defintion of storytelling, but in mine it is not purely and utterly art, it is communication as well. For example, the matrix movies communicated the idea 'is the freedom you think you have, real?' and that's a question for us in the real world, in terms of how laws are made and how politicians break deals in backrooms. I can't imagine seeing the matrix any different - without that communication, it'd just be an excercise in colour and movement - surely no one went to see it purely for colour and movement?
I don't see storytelling as pure art, and I don't see conversation as pure communication - conversation always carries a narrative point of view (were doing that in our posts right now). Perhaps storytelling leans towards the art side of the spectrum, and conversation leans toward the communication side. But I just see one spectrum involved, in either case. So I see them as the same thing.
TheDustin,
The author isn't continually creating mechanics and settings, though. He writes the dagger throwing code - and then the program just uses it again and again, with no further creative input from the author.
All it takes from there is the designer saying to himself 'okay, whatever the outcome, I'm not going to mess with the dagger code'. There - he stays within the same rules he's set for the player.
I guess the author could be writing new dagger code for each scene, and thus its utterly on his whim whether the dagger works in a scene. But I don't see anything that says he has to do it this way - so no, it's not forced to always be an act of his whim.
I think I get what your saying and I've said it myself. I once described it like this - some guys are in a boat, and a guys at the rudder, but with his arms folded. The guys in the boat use their cupped hands to guide the boat in various directions while the guy at the rudder proudly proclaims he has his arms folded the whole time - who controls the boats direction?
The answer is the guy at the rudder. Because if any direction the others took the boat in displeased him he could just reach for the rudder. Folding his arms doesn't mean anything in terms of accessing the rudder.
But what I'm saying is the game designer sets the code, then he cuts himself off entirely from the rudder, by making a promise to himself. He doesn't just fold his arms.
Or did I miss the point with my boat story? Anyway, I like it - it's my little story :)
Freedom of goals?
I just made a blog post that made me think of a question for Costik and Callan:
How do you feel about the freedom of the player to define their own goals?
In The Graveyard, for instance, the player could decide that the goal is to walk to the bench without limping once. Which means that you need to rest once in a while. The game would not reward the player for this explicitly, but perhaps the fact that he or she made up their own goal could contribute to the meaning of the piece for them.
If a goal falls in the woods, who hears it?
I commented on the blog (though it thinks I'm spam. Heh, it makes me question myself)
I'm not sure I get the connection between the blog post and your question here. I'll just answer the question here.
I think it's a question of whether their goals could contribute to the meaning of the piece for the game designer.
Maybe the no limp play could affect the meaning for the game maker once he/she hears it, without any further programming effort. Okay, I can see that, though I think it's a little raw or rough.
But if the game designer isn't interested, it's like talking to someone who talks to you, but isn't interested in listening to what you say. Sure the player might think of something that adds meaning to what's said, but who's listening?
re: goals and meaning
Callan,
I restored your comment on the blog. Sorry about that.
Why should the meaning of a game to the designer be more important than the meaning to the player? In my experience, I find it very amusing to find meaning in my own work that I didn't put in consciously. But then again, I think I believe in a sort of "shamanistic" status of the artist, where we act more as unconscious mediums or antennas than conscious creators.
In any case, with Marcel Duchamp, I believe that art happens in the interplay between viewer and piece. I think it's perfectly valid for a player to invent a way of playing a game that the designer hadn't thought of. I guess my opinion on this is influenced by observing the community around The Endless Forest and really appreciating how the players just make up their own games within that environment. Interestingly hardly any of these games conflict with our intentions as designers, simply because we did not include elements in the game that could do so (like guns or chat e.g.). That's where authoring is important in a more open ended "game".
Interactive Machinima
Here's what I put on the blog: (which, along with the majority of the posts, was deleted) "I believe the best terminology for The Graveyard is interactive machinima. Greg Costikyan best describes what a game is here- http://www.costik.com/nowords.html "
Callan, we both have presented our original idea in various ways, and still haven't gotten anything close to a conclusion. I still believe that because the game designer *constructs* the world, rules, restraints, etc. he is the author of the work. Perhaps using a director and actor analogy would be appropriate. The director decides what the scene, lighting, camera angle, and so on are. The actor merely works within the constraints of the director's vision. The actor does not tell the director what location the scene will be on. The only instance where I find your viewpoint valid is if the player exploits a glitch in the game. Nevertheless, I feel that we are just repeating ourselves and that neither of us is going to convince the other person otherwise.
The director can't stop being a director?
To simplify it, what if there is only one actor? And the director slips off his director hat and put on his actor hat, forfilling that one role? As the actor, he'd be working within the constraints set up. Yes, he set them up, but as an actor he can't fiddle with them now. He can only act. This is something you can do yourself as a designer - you make the game, then you play it (without access to any console commands or anything). Weve all done this.
I don't know why you assume the director is always stuck with complete and utter power and can't at a certain point, discard that forever? I said it before and I'll grant it here, if the director is always stuck with power, your right, he is the only author of the work. If he's stuck with it.
I think you missed the point.
"This should not be an application; this should be a video. It would lose nothing if it were."
There is a huge difference between this and a "video". You are not required to go to the bench. You can spend hours staring at the birds, if you like.
To me, the message is that fate cannot be altered. You will not see what happens to the right or the left or behind the church because it is irrelevant. The restrictions are the point. You can resist (or make the old lady resist), but not much will happen if you do. If you want to progress, you must go down the path laid out for you. If not, you are welcome to stare at the sky and listen to the emergency sirens.