February 7, 2012

Which narrative media last? And could video games join them?

If we judge success over the long term, it doesn't look like video games will last. But why not?

First it's useful to look at other media that tried but have ultimately failed to thrive as narrative forms. TV shows have been mostly a bust, again judged long-term. Aside from the serial dramas Twin Peaks and Mad Men (safe call for long-term recognition), hardly any of it holds up, in the sense of people will still want to watch the episodes in re-runs or for the first time decades later. I would add sit-coms like The Simpsons and Seinfeld, but comedies generally don't last very long. Give them another 10 years, and they could be as faintly remembered as All in the Family, another great sit-com.

Narrative radio programs have not lasted either. No one goes back and listens to the originals, or bothers re-interpreting them with contemporary actors. Judging from the ratings estimates, as well as children of radio's heyday telling their stories, the death of radio narratives was almost instantaneous once TV came along.

Also gone are serial short films that you'd see as part of an afternoon of movie-going. They didn't even last through the 1960s. George Lucas may have been inspired by some of the adventure serials when he thought up Star Wars and Indiana Jones, but now we're talking feature films. The first Star Wars movie is nearly 35 years old and continues to absorb audiences, whereas the Flash Gordon serial from 1936 was not still captivating viewers in 1971.

Last, and probably most relevant to video games, are comic books, intended more for a younger audience. As with serial films, some of the characters and related stories have achieved lasting fame when they were turned into movies. Still, few read comic books anymore, let alone the classic ones.

There are a bunch of others -- dime novels, penny dreadfuls, etc. -- but you get the idea.

Which narrative forms have worked? Epics, sagas, tale cycles, folktales (including urban legends and fairy tales), plays, frame tales (harder to pull off), novels, movies... maybe a few others that I'm forgetting.

Right away we see it has nothing to do with ancient vs. modern. Novels and movies are both very new, yet they've caught on for good.

The main difference is how interruptible the narrative is. We want to get absorbed in the story, shut off our self-consciousness, lose track of time, and enter a dreamlike state. Every interruption that jars us awake from the dream ruins the experience. We might give a new medium the benefit of the doubt for awhile, or ride the fashion wave while it lasts. Ultimately, though, if it is too easily interrupted, future generations won't put up with it.

The most successful media offer you an experience that you can take in during one sitting, probably not more than a few hours, like plays, movies, and oral folklore. Even the longer forms can usually be broken up into several coherent chunks without feeling like the dream has been interrupted. You might read a novel in a few sittings, or watch the Star Wars trilogy on separate occasions (as you had to when they first came out).

The chunks of an epic or novel are coherent and nourishing enough that you don't feel like you were just about to get to something good and then -- oh no, tune in next week to see how it all turns out! No one appreciates a culture-maker who keeps on giving the audience blue balls, some cold lab scientist who keeps them running tired on a treadmill for weeks on end. Imagine if you had to wake up and fall back asleep 10 times in a night just to finish a single dream! The chunks of a larger successful medium are more like several fluid, completed dreams over the course of several nights.

Watching TV shows when they air is the worst because there's two fractal layers of interruptions -- the week between episodes, but then even within an episode, all the fucking commercials.

With that big picture in mind, what does the fate look like for video games? They'll probably go the way of comic books and thriller dramas on radio. I never got into narrative video games, but I do keep in touch with what direction the video game world is going. By now you're lucky if a narrative video game only takes 15 hours to complete, and it's easy for them to last 20, 40, or 60 hours. This new Skyrim game that everyone is crazy for can provide them with more than 100 hours of gameplay before the story is over.

At that large of a scale, kiss the narrative good night. Even a long novel, say an 800-page Gothic novel, with 250 words per page, would have about 200,000 words. At the slowest typical reading rate (for comprehension), or 200 words per minute, it would only take 16-17 hours to read. A 300-page novel read by someone on the faster side, at 400 words per minute, would go even faster at just over 3 hours.

Once you get to 20, 40, 60 hours to complete the narrative, now you're into TV and comic book territory. It's not just a handful of chunks that hang together in a gestalt, and experienced over a few days. Now we're talking dozens of chunks experienced over a week or more (aside from real weirdos who would finish a 40-hour game in two 20-hour marathons).

I liked video games best when they didn't have any narrative pretensions at all -- you're some good guy, a bad guy is causing some kind of trouble, now go stop him. Who cares beyond that, we just wanted to have some pointless fun for an hour or so. Now everyone is so obsessed with the story, no matter how lame. Even the not-so-story-driven games like the first-person-shooters: googling "call of duty" "spoiler alert" gets over a million results.

To end with, I know some video game addicts are going to geek out in the comments about how the narrative games have only gotten more and more popular, how they're here to stay, etc. But just remember that people said that about penny dreadfuls, comic books, serial films, radio dramas, and the rest. They kept getting more and more popular, until they evaporated. Given that narrative video games are much closer to the serial media than to the more concentrated, digestible media, their long-term fate looks pretty bleak.

10 comments:

  1. Video games keep on getting shorter. In the PS1/N64 era, video games were about 15-20 hours long, with 15 hours on the shorter side. In the PS2/Xbox era, a 15 hours was a respectable length for a game, with 10 hours being acceptable but too short. Now, a 10 hour game is considered to be a generous helping, with many other single player campaigns being considered little more than tutorials for online play. I rented the Force Unleashed II yesterday, and was glad I only rented it, because I beat it in one sitting.

    There are a few games which you can play for tens of hours, but they're almost always RPGs, which have always been unusually long compared to action games.

    I think storylines are becoming less and less respected in gaming. In the PS1 era, Japanese RPGs were considered cream of the crop on consoles. That swiftly changed in the PS2 era, when American RPGs really took off on consoles. Japanese RPGs have linear, thick stories, whereas American RPGs tend to focus more on exploring, performing random quests before getting rid of the ultimate evil in the end.

    Read #2, for example: http://www.cracked.com/blog/5-crucial-lessons-learned-by-watching-kids-play-video-games_p2/

    Video games, if they're about 15 hours long, can actually have pretty good storylines. The major advantage is that you get to play as the protagonist, so it's easier to identify with him and get caught up with his struggles. Whatever the case, the market for good storytelling continues to go down. I think video game plots peaked from around 1998-2004, and after that have become ever simpler. Once the novelty of cool cutscenes wore off, most gamers concluded that if they wanted a plot, they'd watch a movie. Compare Halo 2, which has a stupid but fleshed out plot, with Halo 3, which just transitions from one battle sequence to the next.

    ReplyDelete
  2. If "narrative video games" is what I suppose it is (the adventure and action/adventure genres), a problem with them is that most of the point of the game only make sense for the first time you play the game (making difficult the pleasure of playing the game some decades after the first time).

    About comic books - in the time when people read comic books, some stories where a kind of "classics" that where republished several times (at least, was that with Disney comics). However, can be argued that this kind of stories was simply a subtype of novel.

    About TV shows - series like Star Treek, Hitchkok Presents and Twiligth Zone are been constantly re-aired is TV stations style "Memory TV" (this kind of stations counts as "sucess over the long term", or only if they were aired at generalist TV?). However, all this series have stand-alone episodes (in HP and TZ, totally independent episodes), then perhaps are bad examples.

    ReplyDelete
  3. "To end with, I know some video game addicts are going to geek out in the comments"

    You've beat me to the punch. That being said, I haven't played a videogame in over 15 years, but I do remember liking games with narratives such as the Final Fantasy series.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Great thoughts. You're the web's best writer when it comes to popular culture as far as I'm concerned.

    Do you think the passive/interactive distinction needs to be made when considering the future prospects of video games as narrative media?

    TV shows, movies, comics, plays, sagas, and the others listed are all passive forms of media. This fly-on-the-wall vantage point is inherently different from the interactive nature of VGs. In single player games (which are shrinking as a proportion of all gaming), there is usually some general narrative frame that exists, especially in Japanese games, but it is somewhat malleable and increasingly contingent upon what the player(s) do(es).

    Also, the rapidity of technological enhancements in video games relative to the other media listed makes the future a little hazy too, I'd think. Video games have changed enormously in three decades, changes that dwarf anything any of the other media have undergone in such a short period of time, or even through the entirety of their life cycles.

    ReplyDelete
  5. One problem with long narrative formats is that the payout at the end is never worth it. For instance, I can't think of single television series whose final episode satisfied all of the built up suspense over the life of the series. Video games are the same way. I finally got bored with the stories because the plot resolution was always underwhelming for having pissed away dozens of hours of your life.

    ReplyDelete
  6. "About TV shows - series like Star Treek, Hitchkok Presents and Twiligth Zone are been constantly re-aired"

    Right, but like you said those are more self-contained episodes. There usually is not a narrative thread running through the series.

    They're like short stories rather than serial fiction.

    "TV shows, movies, comics, plays, sagas, and the others listed are all passive forms of media. This fly-on-the-wall vantage point is inherently different from the interactive nature of VGs."

    Somewhere I wrote a post about how video games aren't really art experiences because they require too much conscious interaction from the audience.

    Interaction like keeping your eyes on the movie screen, walking through the halls of a museum, etc., can be done without self-awareness. So it doesn't prevent you from really getting lost in the experience.

    The amount of conscious attention needed to make it through video games makes them more interruptible, I think. You have to think, plan, and execute, which keeps the logical and self-aware part of your mind too engaged. It's hard to just let go and get lost.

    ReplyDelete
  7. "One problem with long narrative formats is that the payout at the end is never worth it."

    Good point. Longer formats are more for continually or periodically dipping your mind into their atmosphere over a long time, not really to follow a plotline.

    You don't really need to consume the whole thing. I confess I only got about 500 or so pages into Melmoth the Wanderer. Most of the way, but I didn't feel like it was necessary to finish it.

    Same with Twin Peaks. You don't have to see all the episodes to enjoy the atmosphere (and it's probably better, since a lot of the 2nd season isn't very good).

    Those still need some good storytelling, though, and I have yet to see that in video games that are more atmospheric or immersive and less narrative. They're more like simulations, not enough storytelling.

    I think it's because the atmospheric games try to drive you all over the place geographically. A Gothic type long narrative may occasionally change setting, but it's more settled and even claustrophobic.

    It allows you to really get familiar -- maybe uncomfortably so -- with that atmosphere. The storytelling is more in pieces, each one to help you get to know a different part of that environment. An over-arching narrative isn't so important.

    With video games that try to be both atmospheric and narrative, they do it backwards. The narrative is of the over-arching kind, not a series of pieces that gets you to know this and that aspect of the atmosphere. And the atmosphere is so wide-ranging that you never feel bound up in any part of it.

    ReplyDelete
  8. The two counterexamples that immediately come to mind are Portal and Braid. They come in very digestible chunks. I don't know whether they'll still be played years from now, but if any current games will be played later, these will be among them. Also, as others have mentioned, Final Fantasy games get replayed for their narrative. There have been several re-releases that have updated graphics for the originals and are now played on the iPhone/iPad.

    TV shows in other cultures might not suffer the same fate as shows in the US. In particular, I'm thinking of TV dramas in Asia which have a limited number of episodes, and therefore a thoroughly defined story arc. Each episode ends on a dramatic moment which makes viewers want to start the next episode immediately if they're watching a completed series. If you watch these online as I did, there's no blue balls feeling because the next episode is right at your fingertips. The conclusions are also more satisfying than US shows as the writers knew exactly how it would end before they started filming.

    ReplyDelete
  9. I hate to dork out, but I remember the earlier Final Fantasys having some pretty sophisticated narratives, such as absentee fathers, war trauma, losing one's family/girlfriend, suicide, teen pregancy, etc. As I remember, in one of them the heros actually fail to save the world from some kind of cataclysmic event, and the second half of the game is spent rebuilding what's left. Pretty obvious the game was made in Japan...

    ReplyDelete
  10. I think "The longer the form, the less chance of surviving as a work is fundamentally valid" - The Shakespearian plots and their themes survive better as a vehicle of mass consumption than actual whole structure of Shakespearian plays with dialogue and character.

    But just remember that people said that about penny dreadfuls, comic books, serial films, radio dramas, and the rest. They kept getting more and more popular, until they evaporated.

    OK, but those either plateaued or were eaten by a successor serial form that incorporated pretty much all their strengths while being more engaging. TV is still around. Videogames might be killed off by a successor, but it will probably be an interactive successor. I don't think the retreat from interactivity is really that likely.

    Somewhere I wrote a post about how video games aren't really art experiences because they require too much conscious interaction from the audience.

    I'm pretty sure I commented the same thing on another thread of yours, but I don't think dancing is less art or less engaging and immersive when you're doing it rather than watching it. I don't think music is less art or less engaging and immersive when you're doing it rather than watching it. I don't even think painting is less art or less engaging and immersive when you're doing it rather than watching it. Do actors in plays get less immersed or more in the play than the audience - would a play be less immersive if everyone in the theatre were acting in it and none were in the audience, and would it stop being art?

    Of course, I don't even play videogames personally though.

    ReplyDelete

You MUST enter a nickname with the "Name/URL" option if you're not signed in. We can't follow who is saying what if everyone is "Anonymous."