Unreliable Narrator

Sam Barlow on the line between exploration and explanation

Our entertainment masters have identified the enemy in their efforts to connect us to a smooth-flowing, never-ending pipeline of content. That enemy is: friction. The roughage in our gaming diet is bad because it might cause us to turn off or tune out. At first glance, this sounds reasonable. I tell stories and don’t I want to tell the whole story? Developers are painfully aware of the statistics that show that only the minority of players ever complete a given game – and many of the new system-level initiatives are aimed at the frustrations that apparently cause this. Sony’s Activities feature neatly breaks its games into convenient chunks of fun, packaging up the objectives and tasks available and teleporting you right into the action. In Spider-Man, this cuts out the effort of navigating an open world to find a mission trigger and lets you quickly hoover up side-objectives. But what does this say about the experience? The game already goes out of its way to streamline things with easy-to-access fast travel and map markers which lay out a red carpet to each of its snack-sized missions. Streamlining further is like giving diners at a buffet a hoover. Side-objectives were originally added to open worlds to encourage players to engage with their spaces – now the side objectives themselves are the point?

Playing another recent blockbuster story game, I was shepherded from beat to beat, each moment between cutscenes a linear tunnel where the action required of me was highlighted amid the rich set dressing that gave the impression of a realistic world. Look at that broken piece of wall: the light falls on it so neatly and the scuff marks on the ground near it lead your eye! Step over there and press X to mantle! Follow the winding path through this dense jungle because it will lead you to the next tumble and slide that will deposit you where the game wants you to go. I was put in mind of what Peter Watkins calls the ‘monoform’ – the shape that modern TV and movies share, a style of editing that is designed to bombard the viewer with stimulation to keep them engaged and entertained without ever giving them room to think. By reducing games to a constant sense of progression, by streamlining the experience so I don’t have to think too hard outside of focusing on the very next objective, we seem to be creating the ultimate monoform.

Videogames are a form of communication, stories told by a game and its player together. If we eliminate the friction and spoon-feed the player, we have a one-way conversation – which isn’t really a conversation. The marvellous Zelda: Breath Of The Wild avoids filling its map with quest icons because it values your presence in its world above your progression through it. Climbing its mountains is hard, not to pad out its content but because it’s a game about climbing mountains. The game’s reward for finding 100% of its Koroks was a golden piece of poop. It’s your journey, not the checklist that matters.

Friction, in the best games, focuses the player’s imagination. The labyrinthine design and backtracking of a Metroid game encourages the player to create a mental map of the world to proceed. To best it, players have to make it real. The Dark Souls games have won players’ hearts by elevating the friction and asking players to pay attention and engage deeply. In my games I have pushed a level of opacity and resistance up front, primarily because that works as an invitation or provocation to players to assert themselves. It is healthy for a game to push back against its players.

It is also healthy to sometimes put a game down, or to find space to think inside the game. The walk from a save point to a boss is one I cherish because it gives me time to process – whereas the instant-restart version flings me right back into things, mushing my face against the asphalt until I push or am pushed through. A good book is one I put down from time to time to think – a pageturner feels good as it goes down, but I struggle to remember what I just read. The convenience of anti-friction guides favours page-turning over stopping and thinking.

A big-name platform holder once suggested having a boss trip and fall on its own sword if players failed too many times. As a solution to the problem, “Players put this game down if they die too often,” this seems reasonable. But it also asks you to question the fundamental point of a game. Why let me fight if you don’t want me to lose? Why let me choose where to climb, if you only want me to climb there? Why have a conversation with me if you don’t want me to talk back?

In my games I have pushed a level of opacity up front, primarily because that works as an invitation to players

Sam Barlow is the founder of NYC-based Half Mermaid Productions. He can be found on Twitter at @mrsambarlow