Here is another excerpt from Game Architecture and Design. This one isn't really a might-have-been game, it was just intended as an example of a one-page pitch. Years later, I extended it into a full outline for a book-plus-game project I was trying to get off the ground at Dorling Kindersley. But that's a whole other story...
A old man in a tunic is being guided by a boy. The old man’s eyes are closed. We’re in extreme close-up: we see the boy’s fingers holding the man’s gnarled hand, a close-up on scuffed sandals, the old man’s cane tapping the packed earth floor as he goes. The background is in darkness but we get the sense of a huge interior space, perhaps a hall.
They reach the centre of the hall. The old man steadies himself, leans on his stick. The boy scurries off. The man stands there, head bowed, gathering his energy. His back straightens. He lifts his head.
We’re close on his face. Think of Richard Harris. The old man takes a breath and starts to speak. He has a voice of surprising power:
“Fury.”
He opens his eyes. They are milky white, clouded over. Blind. But he sees with his mind’s eye.
“Goddess, fill my lungs with breath. Give me the words to tell of Achilles’ fury. Murderous and doomed, it was a fury that cost the Achaeans so many men, and sent brave souls into the underworld leaving bloody limbs for dogs and birds to pick apart. Thus was the will of Zeus…”
As the old man speaks, our view switches behind him in a wider shot and as the camera rises up we see a hundreds of men seated at long wooden tables, lamplight picking out details in the gloom of this huge hall. They listen in utter silence as we cut to –
A beach in dazzling sunlight. In close-up as crystal-clear water gently laps the shore and then the prow of a longboat drives into the sand. Shouts and a clamor of jangling war-gear. A sandaled foot jumps down from the boat, leaving a strong imprint as the warrior strides ashore and we pan up to see –
Achilles, greatest of the Greek heroes, standing tall against the brilliant blue sky. There is a proud smile on his face as he surveys the hinterland. He has no need of armor; the gods have made him invulnerable to harm. He has just arrived and already he is eager for battle.
* * *
The game is
Troy. It’s a wargame - but not like any wargame that has gone before. Players will take the role of various legendary heroes like Achilles, Odysseus and Ajax. Each hero is accompanied by a war-band of non-player characters whose morale and fighting ability will reflect how well the player is doing.
This is an epic story. It’s also elegiac. The world is never again going to see heroes of this caliber. They are favored by the gods, are almost gods themselves. Men like the blind poet, Homer, will sing of their exploits for thousands of years. But the war is destined to end in the deaths of most of the heroes and the destruction and pillaging of the beautiful city of Troy. It is a tragic time. The end of an era.
We intend that the game will reflect this. Just as the original Iliad poem interweaves themes of rage and melancholy, glory and waste, this is the first videogame that will convey both the excitement and the tragedy of war.
How to achieve this? We said before that the actions of the player heroes affect the rank-&-file non-player soldiers. (Think of
Dynasty Warriors, for example, but with more varied AI among the soldiers.) A war-band that has lost its hero will start to degenerate into a rabble. They will lose their tight formations and rigid discipline. They will start to skulk away from the hard fighting. When an enemy is struck down, instead of moving onto the next foe, they’ll wait around to loot the body. After the death of honor, these men will become the carrion dogs that Homer spoke of in the intro.
Hence, as the game progresses and heroes fall on both sides, the war moves from being a glorious adventure to a dirty, desperate, vicious struggle for survival. The gods, who are initially willing to provide aid, advice and magical weapons, withdraw from involvement as more heroes die. Even the graphics depict the dying of the light. To begin with, bright colors evoke a time of glory. As the heroes are whittled down, the images become more gritty, the colors flatter and desaturated. It is as if a Technicolor epic like
Spartacus were gradually turning into
Saving Private Ryan.
You can read the original piece ("Where is publishing's jetpack?") here. The points I want to address are, first, by Hugh Howey in The Future of Books:
I like and admire Howey, but that multimedia monster isn't the future of anything. You breed from the unhappy pairing of book and movie and you're only going to get a mule.
And secondly I'm responding here to this comment by by Patrick Soderlund in This is War (for a Game Industry's Soul):
Okay, let's start with that. “Storytelling does not come naturally to the Swedes..." Utter nonsense. You will find game developers in the UK saying that storytelling does not come naturally to the British. America likewise. The fact is, storytelling often doesn’t come naturally to the kind of person who gets interested in videogame development. Software engineers may not as a rule read widely, and may not grasp how broad and flexible is our remit when we talk of storytelling. That, fortunately, is changing.
What Mr Soderlund is missing is that, when we talk of storytelling in games, that doesn’t mean a writer using the game as a stage from which to declare a pre-defined story. A game is a world: an environment populated by characters and objects with rules to govern the interactions between them. The most interesting possibilities for story in such a context are not the sequences I might write in advance for the player to watch. That’s just using the game environment as a kind of movie, albeit one you can walk around inside. The really interesting evolution of storytelling in an interactive framework is when the story emerges from what the player does. Like, if I place a limpet mine on a wall that I couldn’t otherwise scale and use that to rocket-jump over it, there I have a story to tell my friends. It’s a very simple story in that example, but it’s special because I made it happen. It wasn’t a story fragment left there for me to experience “from the stalls”. It was always supposed to be - paraphrasing Patrick Soderlund now - a system designed to enable stories to happen.
So here’s how game developers ought to be thinking about interactive stories. Once a fortnight, I run a face-to-face roleplaying game. My players are mostly writers themselves. I see myself as the moderator. I present them with the germ of incidents, non-player characters to interact with, the constraints such as legality and status. I don’t know in advance what the story will be. The story only happens when the actors – that is, my players – come on stage. Our stories are not polished the way a novel or movie ought to be, but they’re not intended to be a spectator sport. Nobody authors them. There's no talking of ourselves in third person. None of us stands back outside the narrative and tries to engineer where it's going. To allow these stories to occur, we let go of being authors and step into the world as participants.
Experienced from within, a genuinely emergent story is new and unique and thrilling. It isn’t “tell me a story” any more. More videogame developers like Soderlund should roleplay so they get to see why the rest of us are so excited by the possibilities here.
Having said all this in praise of what videogames can deliver, I have to add that prose is still the most powerful medium for telling stories. That’s been true since long before Homer first banged his stick on the ground and said, “Sing, goddess!” – and you bet you could hear a pin drop. Words are more powerful because they create a more personal conduit into the imagination of each reader or each listener. (And to think I say this as a writer of comic books and a designer of videogames.) That’s why, if a discerning fellow in the year 2034 really wants to appreciate Gulliver’s Travels, he’ll do without the sloshing surf sound FX and all that art installation gimcrackery and just go back to the words as Swift wrote them.