Why are linear games so difficult to get right?
There seems to be a constant industry push
to delegitimize the linear, narrative focused game of course—
which we're gonna just keep ignoring because it's really dumb.
That said, they are tricky
and it's true they often end up being a version of something most of us recognize:
Gameplay.
Cutscene.
Gameplay.
Cutscene.
And so on—
with the relationship between the two ending up kind of awkward.
It absolutely doesn't need to end up like this.
Sometimes it doesn't, and we'll get to that a bit later.
But first let's talk about why the relationship between the two often does ends up awkward.
Welcome to Ludocriticism.
My name is Oskar, and this is Mini-Read.
Today we'll be looking at Time in Fiction as it pertains to games.
Let me start by saying this: there's nothing inherently wrong with this structure.
In fact, it's can be a good way of rewarding a player after a test of their skills.
Think about fifth- and sixth generation Final Fantasy
and how the stark difference between the polygonal gameplay segments
and the beautiful pre-rendered cutscenes typifies this effect.
The reason the relationship between the two often turns out awkward
is both straight-forward and well-understood:
the key is the relationship between something called "story time" and "discourse time".
Story time is the amount of time it takes for an event to take place
within the fiction itself.
A day takes a day, having dinner takes about 30 minutes to an hour—whatever.
Discourse time, on the other hand
is the amount of time it takes for the fiction to represent that event.
A day can happen in a sentence, a chapter, or take up the entirety of a text.
Or as Suzanne Keen puts it in her book Narrative Form:
Any fiction can play around with how these two relate to each other
for different effects.
For instance, you can consider how Mafia II and Mafia III
deal with the classic Gangster Movie montage.
The first one does a classic, Martin Scorsese-style montage, while the second
while the second has the player actually perform the many activities
that constitute a gangster moving up in the world of crime.
The effect of Mafia III as opposed to Mafia II
—as Noah Gervais noted in his video on the entire franchise—
is that maybe all those many activities aren't significant on their own
but instead when taken together—as they are in Mafia II's montage.
In other words, maybe the lengthy time it takes the characters in the story to perform these activities
is best represented in a short amount of discourse time.
In narratological terms, this is called a summary, which is surprisingly sensible.
The relationship between story time elapsed and discourse time expended is called duration,
and here's the whole gamut of durations:
As you can probably guess from the table
what Mafia III is doing can be considered scene
or even Expansion.
What the game is going for is likely scene
—where story time and discourse time are the same—
but I'd argue that because of the gamplay construction of the player's activities
the discourse time is more than the story time.
After all, things like flicking through menus
and repeating the same activity several times has to be taken into account.
A famous example of expansion
is this passage from Marcel Proust's "The Search for Lost Time"
where a character is describing eating a piece of cake:
That's one bite outta one moistened piece of cake.
The point here is that the short amount of story time of eating a bit of cake
gets contrasted with the lengthy discourse time it takes to describe
what eating it meant to the character.
It takes a single moment, and expands it to absurd proportions.
In doing so, it comments on the nature of memory itself.
While games aren't literature, and shouldn't be treated as such, they are at the end of
they are at the end of the day narratives
beholden to some of the same rules as narrative in other mediums.
the relationship between how long something takes in the story
and how long it takes to convey that event is one of those things.
Alright, so now that we have a solid understanding of time in narrative
let's get back to the linear game.
The Mafia games are, after all, open-world.
The problem for linear games specifically is that they most closely resemble traditional fiction—
—which is a double-edged sword.
Whereas an open-world game usually allows some player agency
concerning the order of things
or whether some events will take place at all—
the linear game has the player shackled to a predetermined trajectory.
That can be a really good thing, or a really bad thing
because it gives the game's creator control over the relationship
between story time on the one hand, and discourse time on the other.
Let's go back to the simple structure of narrative games.
Take this cutscene, or story beat
and say for the sake of argument that it conveys urgency in the plot.
After that, in the gameplay section, the player is tasked with going through
a whole slew of genuinely interesting and fun gameplay concepts.
Now, so far there's not necessarily a problem—
—the long gameplay sequence might be trying to subvert the urgency of the preceeding story beat
in order to convey something—
—we don't really know.
But say that the story beat right after the long gameplay sequence
has a character say something to the effect of
"We made it here as fast as we could!"
or are shown arriving in an obvious hurry.
That's when you have a problem.
The story beats and gameplay beats are at odds with one another:
the story time is meant to be short
but the discourse time (the time spent playing it) was really long.
Now, this example is extreme in order to illustrate the problem
but it's much easier to make these sorts of mistakes than you might think.
Have you ever walked casually into a room
only to have a cutscene triggered showing you character rushing into that very same room?
That's a less consequential version of the same thing.
It's also a type of ludonarrative dissonance, but that's not what we're talking about today.
The point is that linear games are more difficult to put together
because they take on the full brunt of the responsibility for the relationship
between story time and discourse time.
This is most clear when compared with the open-world genre
where part of that responsibility is left to the player
Understand this, and you've understood a large part of why it's become so pervasive:
it's just less pressure for the creator.
But wait.
Although I understand the instinct to think it's less pressure
I'd argue that it's actually another piece of evidence
pointing to the fact that game developers—
—on the whole—
—don't understand time in fiction very well.
And here's where it gets complicated.
Let's look at two last examples
—polar opposites in terms of linearity and open-world...ness?—
which have surprisingly similar approaches:
Half-Life
and Breath of the Wild.
Half-Life is a completely linear game.
I won't spend time explaining why it's so effective at what it does
because it's fairly common knowledge by now.
I'll just say that it puts you in the shoes of Gordon Freeman
and tasks you with simply putting one foot in front of the other until the end of the game.
It's about performing the actions of one character in real time.
As Gabe Newell put it:
What Newell is saying, in an almost comically condensed way
is that the interesting thing about video games isn't what you're doing
but rather the fact that you're the one doing it.
That's how Half-Life operates, but it's also how Breath of the Wild operates.
The game puts you in Link's boots, and says "it's all you!"
and the game isn't over until you move your little elf butt over to the castle
and beat the big bad.
The game never takes you to the castle.
Like Half-Life, it's less about what happens
and more about the simple joy of being the one who experiences the events.
What's key here is that both games are told in mostly scene duration.
The amount of time it takes to depict events is the same amount of time those events take
in the fiction of the story.
It's probably not a 1:1 relationship
—especially not in Breath of the Wild—
but it's pretty darn close.
Of course, a large part of why time works so well in these games is because
what you're choosing to do is what constitutes the story.
Control is seldom taken away from the player.
But there are also a lot of games that do take control away from you while handling time well
and they're not any more immune to the rules of fictional time.
What connects Breath of the Wild to Half-Life, after all is said and done
is that they understand the relationship between story time and discourse time.
Giving all the control to the player is just a way to keep that control in one place
rather than in many.
Of course, this suggest that while the open-world genre might give the game a bit more leeway
it's in reality even more difficult to manage time well in an open-ended narrative.
But that's a topic for another day.
In the current climate, the industry seems reluctant to bet on linear games.
Why?
Because making a linear game, just like any other narrative
requires a solid understanding of fictional time—
—of the relationship between the time of the thing being told
and the time of telling it.
There are many games that get it right, but honestly probably more that get it wrong.
I'd like to thank Micah Edmonds and Drew from Select Screen for reading the quotes.
You'll find their channels in the description, so go check 'em out.
Let me finally ask you this:
how would you feel about a game taking a very, very
VERY
long time to convey a pretty simple message?
I'm interested in knowing your thoughts.
As always: thanks for watching, and keep taking games way too seriously.
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