Games, Design, Culture, Politics...

The Game Story Series, Part IV

Part One: The Plan | Part Two: Central Conflicts | Part Three: Up A Tree | Part Four: Verisimilitude | Part Five: Meaningful Choice

“This is no fantasy – no careless product of wild imagination.”

Richard Donner deliberately opens Superman, for my money the best Superhero movie made thusfar…at least until the moment where Lex Luthor shows up and brings the whole thing down a few notches, with these words, spoken by Marlon Brando. Casting Brando, the most naturalistic actor of his century, in the role of Superman’s Dad and God-surrogate to Superman’s Jesus Analog, and giving him these words to open the movie, grounds the film in reality. A reality the movie desperately needs because it is the height of fantasy. It doesn’t merely concern a man who can fly and shoot laser beams from his eyes, it starts on another planet.

That’s a hell of a trick: taking this subject, The Man of Steel, and making people believe in it. Accept it as real. The slug line for the movie was; you will believe a man can fly and that was the thesis statement of the whole production. Take these fantastic ideas and treat them as though they were real. It was also Peter Jackson’s modus operandi for The Lord of the Rings. He told the crew and his production staff to imagine that the novels described real events, and they were going to interpret them to film. In other words; pretend all this really happened.

This quality, the thing both Donner and Jackson were trying to achieve, is verisimilitude. The appearance of reality. It is critical because it is the quality that stimulates suspension of disbelief in your audience…and your players.

Video game designers fight this constantly. It is very easy for an enemy AI to run into a wall, or take cover behind…nothing, or otherwise do something that’s completely absurd, that no human being would ever do. And now the player is reminded it’s a video game. These obstacles to verisimilitude are mostly technological. We must have a load screen here. We can’t put two armies of 300 mans in the world at once. No, you can’t go into the water. There’s nothing we can do when we reach these limits except hope the audience is forgiving and, by and large, it is. Video game players are not, in my experience, terribly critical of the narrative. When verisimilitude leads to suspension of disbelief in a movie, it just means the movie is doing it’s job. When it leads to the same thing in a video game, it’s a remarkable experience and people talk about the “immersion” in the reviews.

The layperson, or even the lay designer, might think verisimilitude is achieved through rigorous application of logic. But mathematical logic does not serve us here. Nor formal logic, or even the accepted logic of the video game. Here we must depend on narrative logic, which has its own rules.

My friend and fellow designer Chad would regularly rail against the plot points in Mercenaries 2 because, he would say “they make no sense.” I would disagree. “It does make sense,” I would argue, “just not for very long.” Chad was being critical. He was reading and analyzing the plot in treatments and design specs and he is, Chad will forgive me for saying this, a hater. He wasn’t experiencing the story, he was reading an outline. The two are very different. Much like baking a cake, it can be literally impossible for someone to read the recipe and from that alone, no pictures, imagine what the cake will taste like.

Narrative logic follows its own rules. They’re largely emotional. And it’s important to remember that a lot of storytelling is illusion. Alfred Hitchcock had what he called “The Refrigerator Test.” He put something in his movie and you the viewer see it and accept it in that moment. Later that evening, in the middle of the night, you get up for a snack, open the refrigerator door and, light spilling out into the darkness, stand there looking in to see what there is to eat. After a few moments you say “Hang on. That thing in the movie didn’t make sense.”

Hitchcock’s attitude was; “If that happens, I win. It only has to make sense in the moment. If you question it in the theater, when it happens, then I lose.” One of the things about storytelling you can only learn by doing is detecting which things in your plot will pass the Refrigerator test. That was one of our big challenges on the Mercs 2 project; educating the people in charge so they could tell which was which. For a very intelligent person, a very analytical person, it can be a pain in the ass to put all your intellectual tools down, and think purely as a viewer. It’s especially difficult when you’re talking about something like this, which is an art, and not a science. I can’t give you the rules so you can do it yourself, I can only show by example until you get it.

At the end of the movie, Superman flies backwards so fast, it alters the course of the Earth. Time goes backwards, and he is able to save Lois Lane before the disaster even begins.

This makes no literal sense. On some level, the audience understands this, but that’s not the point. It makes narrative sense. Superman is a mythological, a Biblical figure in this movie, and the notion of altering the course of the Earth, stopping time, is right out of the Bible. His father warned him not to interfere with time, that using his powers to alter the course of the future could have devastating effects. And here we see him, motivated by rage and loss, doing exactly that. Defying his father, defying the natural order of things. We understand this. We know why he’s doing what he’s doing, we know what it will achieve, and we believe there will be consequences.

We know, in other words, everything we need to. The fact that it doesn’t make literal sense is ok. Indiana Jones knows you must avert your eyes when the Ark is opened. How does he know this? Well, he’s read the Bible. But we never hear anything about this plot point in the movie. That’s ok, because we believe Indy knows it. We don’t need to understand it, we only need to believe that he does. There was an explanation in an early draft of the script, but it was cut. They didn’t need it.

You see that all the time. There was some absurdly literal explanation for something, and eventually it got cut because the authors realized that the audience gets it. We don’t have to be spoon fed everything. We don’t need our movies to be like early ’80s music videos with everything spelled out in the most absurdly literal manner.

Narrative logic helps us understand whether something will break suspension of disbelief but it doesn’t tell us how to achieve it in the first place. That’s the domain of verisimilitude and something I just spent a few hundred words tiptoeing around. Avoiding the issue.

That’s because, for my money, it’s the hardest thing to do in your game story, and there’s no easy solution for it. I can’t give you any tools to get the job done. The deck is stacked against you. You don’t have Marlon Brando on your side.

I recently started working out and getting healthy and I made a lot of progress very quickly. A friend of mine at work asked “What’s your secret?” I responded; “eat healthy and bust your ass.”

There is no secret. There never is. You already know the answer. Hard work. Bust your ass. If you watch the making of Superman, you see that Donner had the word verisimilitude put on a big poster and mounted over his desk. He constantly had to remind himself that this was the only way he’d get his audience to believe. Relentless attention to detail. Pretending the thing is real.

Probably the filmic master of this stuff is Ridley Scott. Watch the opening of Alien again. The entire thing is an exercise in verisimilitude and it’s a colossal effort! He takes no shortcuts, there is no easy way out. He built those sets from scratch. There is no Fourth Wall, the camera is right in there with the rest of them. This place is not the sterile corridors of 2001, or the smooth, matte black corridors of the Death Star. People live in the Nostromo. It looks real because, to the extent it was possible, it was real. Calling it a set is just a technicality. It’s really an environment.

By the time we hear the characters in Alien talk, we already identify with them. One of the most inspiring achievements in film, for me. This is a future we’ve never seen, characters we know nothing about, the beginning of a story we cannot guess at. But we feel like we know these folks. They’re like us. They’re common, they’re blue collar. They’re…space truckers. They’re real people. They’re not heroes, like in most future stories, they’re not astronauts or swashbucklers. They’re average joes. Scott achieved this through set direction, casting, costuming, and packing the environment with cigarettes and coffee cups and cereal. Details. Little ones. The actors don’t look like movie stars (with the possible exception of Sigourney Weaver who could be MUCH more beautiful when the part called for it), they bitch and grouse as soon as they open their mouths. They are not clean. Sometimes I think I can smell the dry, stale sweat from being cooped up in that environment.

It’s easy to fuck this up. Ridley Scott does not compromise. It’s why he succeeds.

My friend Jim is one of the best GM’s I’ve ever played with. He’s a tactical genius and can do things with 7 Orcs that would cause the Fellowship of the Ring to shit their pants. I love Jim’s games and look forward to his 4E game.

But one thing he often shirks is detail. When we’re young, our imaginations work overtime and fill in the details. As we get older, this becomes harder and harder to do. We need the details filled in for us, or we don’t believe. When a guard would stop our party and ask us our business in Greyhawk , my character would ask his name. Jim would shrug and frown dismissively and say “who cares? Gary the Guard.” At which point, I sink back in my chair, disappointed. This isn’t a world, full of people, it’s an adventure Jim wrote down and nothing that’s not in the adventure matters. The guard’s name doesn’t help us figure out who’s poisoning the King, so why bother coming up with a name beforehand? Why bother coming up with one now? Why bother asking in the first place, Matt?

Some of the players don’t mind this. They like the fact that the evening’s fun is the process of pitting our minds and skills against Jim’s plot, and there are times with this is fun for me, too. But one of the reasons I come to D&D instead of Descent or Heroquest is for the experience of being in a world, imaginary, but at the same time, real. I want to believe in the world and the only way I know of to achieve that is relentless attention to detail.

What are the guards’ names? Ok, so you don’t know, that’s fine. You can’t know everything. But make it look like you do. Spend a few seconds pretending to look it up, while you invent the name. Then write it down. Make a note of it. Pretending to look it up makes it feel objective. Tricks the players into thinking of it as a true thing, not something you merely invented. Writing it down means we, the players, now believe the guy is permanent. He exists in the world, we can come back to him and he’ll still be Captain Gerard, instead of Gary the Guard. Giving him a name and writing it down helps you the GM remember why this guard was special.

I mentioned that we need this detail less when we’re younger, and I think age has something else to do with it. As we get older, it becomes hard to remember why Captain Gerard is better than Gary the Guard. When you’ve invented 500 Captain Gerards over the last 30+ years of gaming, you don’t see the point in Captain Gerard 501, so he becomes Gary the Guard.

Because Jim didn’t care about this, he was a better GM than me. I did care about it and I tried to achieve it in all my adventures. But D&D 3.x just took too damned long to prep for. As a result of trying to prep a complex adventure with interesting and unique bad guys that were legal and followed all the rules AND create a detailed map and NPCs, I got neither job done well. Jim punted on the latter, and as a result his adventures were great. The players engaged with his campaign more than mine because mine failed on two fronts, Jim’s only on one. It’s my hope that D&D4 will be easier to prep for, and have more robust tools. Freeing me up to flesh out the world, make it feel real. Not a fantasyland.

I knew the content of this post, but I didn’t look forward to writing it because I have no real tricks. No tools. No shots in my locker. For you, the GM at the table, the only way to do it is hours of hard work fleshing out details no one may ever see. This is why people buy Campaign Settings. They pay money so someone else will create the detail for them. Most people can’t justify spending hours on details the players may never see. You must let Captain Gerard sit there, silently, until someone comes and talks to him. You can’t decide “shit, well I gave him a name and I know his personality, I better use the guy.” That undermines verisimilitude. You must allow your details to remain unseen. Just like you can’t read the magazine covers on the newsstands in Blade Runner. But they’re there. Not only titles, but articles. Your players may never talk to Captain Gerard, but under no circumstance can you feel as though the time it took beforehand to make up his name was wasted. It’s the necessary groundwork so when the players do talk to someone non-critical to the plot, you’re ready. Once you start thinking it was a waste to invent Captain Gerard, you’re on the short road to Gary the Guard, and the players stop believing. Journey cannot save them.

For video game designers, they only way to do it is volumes of meticulously crafted detail. Custom content. For this same reason, I think the GTA series will remain on top of the heap. Rockstar doesn’t put a whole lot of work into their gameplay. I’d pit Mercs run-and-gun against theirs any day of the week and twice on Sunday. But Rockstar understands the need to create verisimilitude. Uncompromising detail. In a Tabletop RPG, this means maps and detailed NPCs. In an Open World video game, this means an explosion of content, most of it custom, one-off stuff, that few companies are willing to spend the money on. That kind of content takes large teams of people working with robust tools for 18 months. It’s not sexy. You can’t show it off in a commercial. You can’t advertise it. You cannot do it on the cheap. There are no shortcuts.

Rockstar has more writers than some teams have designers. They hire people like Axl Rose and then make him a DJ on only one of over a dozen stations. That’s a lot of money to spend on a little detail. Any other company…except Valve or Blizzard…would say “no way we’re spending that much money on this dude and put him on the fucking radio.” They’d create a character for him, feature him in the ads, put him on the box. And they’d only have that one celebrity voice. What point hiring more? You can’t put them all on the box or in the commercial. Rockstar hires rappers to come in and listen to the dialog, help the writers make it authentic. It’s not authentic, you understand. It’s still a video game, it’s still over the top, “heightened reality.” But it feels real. It’s the illusion of reality.

Verisimilitude.

No Fantasy.

End of Line

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