You're In Control
It's been a while since I've been really pretentious about videogames, so let's change that!!
I. I state the obvious
So, I really like videogames. I mean, really like them. I like them enough that I've actually written more than three paragraphs of analysis about Locke Cole's hair. I love reading people's crazy opinions about Harmonian politics or the theology of Lea Monde. My princess will always be in another castle. All of that.
I read a lot of fan analysis of videogames, both here at livejournal and on character shrines and the like, and one thing I've noticed is that we don't always go about it like they're analyzing a videogame. We pretend it's literature or something, a novel: here are the characters, here is the plot structure, here is a quote from the script. Leviathan is a reference to a biblical sea monster, Shiva is a Hindu god. Well that's fine, but guess what? Games aren't literature.
II. Literature destroyed my beloved peasant village!
I don't mean that as an offense. It isn't my way of saying that games aren't art-- though I'm not going down any road that'll force me to define "art"-- but, rather, video games are fundamentally not books. They have aural and visual components: they move, they blink, their pauses are structured differently. You can take the world's best-written game script verbatim and it would fail as a play, or a novel. Try searching the adaptations on fanfiction.net as proof.
Okay, Alex, so there are things to consider, like color and design and music. So what? If we're going to analyze games, we should look at them. Like movies, games have directors. But the kicker is, games aren't film either, no matter how hard Xenosaga is trying to be.
What separates games from any other form of storytelling is that they are interactive. The player has some control of how the story goes, at the very least they decide when to turn the damn thing off. One of the side effects is characters are more immersed in a game than they would be in a play or a novel. That's why he's called Link; he's a Link between both our worlds. (But you can name him after yourself, if you want.) The party is "your" party, the main character becomes "you", or at least, that's what we say when we talk. Another effect of the player-game interaction is narrative instability. The player who gets the best ending will have a different experience than the player who gets the worst. The entire narrative tone can be affected by a single player decision. A Tale of Two Cities always has the same words, The Dark Knight is the same movie in every theater near you, but you can't ever play Ocarina of Time the same way twice. There's always going to be that one random encounter you barely escaped from with your life, that one time the boss was defeated on the first turn by a one-in-a-million critical hit. But in some games, it goes further than that, and the choices the player makes have an obvious effect on the outcome of the story.
III. The East/West RPG divide and a bit of a history lesson: or, I blame Nomura.
I should say I'm really writing about plot driven videogames here, especially RPGs, because that's what I'm familiar with. I'm sure there are a lot of interesting observations to make about the nuances of Ms. Pac Man, I just can't be the one to make them.
There's always been a tension between the narrative and player control. The more linear a game is, the clearer the narrative, the more concise the canon. The more freedom a player has, the less plot. Generally this is described as "linear" versus "non-linear"-- are you calling the shots or are you moving along thinly disguised rails. In RPGs the Japanese console games-- Final Fantasy, Suikoden, Tales of, Dragon Quest-- are generally linear. Western-style RPGs-- Fallout, Planescape: Torment, Baldur's Gate, Fable, Elder Scrolls-- are more non-linear. You at least get to decide your main character's traits and class; most of the time you can choose to be good or evil. If you play Golden Sun, Issac gets asked yes or no questions on a frequent basis, but the game continues on the same no matter what the player responds. If you play Baldur's Gate II, the answers you give NPCs can cause them to act favorably or unfavorably towards you. Kill a few too many innocents, and you'll be kicked out of the inn.
It wasn't always like this. Fallout was released in 1997 and became the prototypical western RPG. Final Fantasy VII came out the same year and no matter how you cut it, Final Fantasy VII was a significant game. Squaresoft changed the face of Japanese RPGs for pretty much ever when it moved its flagship series from Nintendo to Sony.
Looking at Square's major SNES releases in terms of linearity there's a definite trend. Final Fantasy IV is so linear that you can't even decide who will be in your party at any given time. Rosa always gains the same spells at the same level, there's no customization in the battle system either. Final Fantasy VI is still the most non-linear of the mainline Final Fantasy titles (barring XI). It's not generally considered a multiple-ending game, but the final sequence will change depending on which characters you rescue from the World of Ruin, which is basically a sandbox. Shadow will live or die depending on the player's decision. There was a huge effort to provide unity between battles and storyline scenes. (This was a major difference between Western and Japanese RPGs, too.) When Locke and Edgar balk at Terra's use of magic, that's revolutionary for the series: the characters bounce around, emotive and vibrant, with their ATB bars still on display.
M-M-M-Magic! Or: were you so thick as to not notice on the way over, Locke?
And then you come to Chrono Trigger, which took everything Final Fantasy VI did and pushed it further. You could play the game again and again and try to get all the different endings. Did Frog ever regain his true form? Why did Magus forget all his awesome attacks as soon as he joined your party? These questions had varying answers.
Then came Final Fantasy VII, where the final battle is an inescapable one-on-one, mano a mano swordfest between the main character and his silver-haired nemesis. It doesn't matter if you never taught Cloud Omnislash, he's going to do it anyway. You've got no choice. Squaresoft made the jump from Nintendo to Sony because the N64 didn't have FMV capability. All storyline scenes had to be rendered using the game's engine. FMV stands for full-motion video, they are basically pre-rendered game portions outside of the player's control. You might as well be watching a film. Hell, Final Fantasy VII's official sequel is a film.
FMVs force linearity, because they always happen the same no matter what. Final Fantasy VII has two optional characters, Vincent and Yuffie. It has one ending FMV, in which Vincent and Yuffie don't appear, because the FMV has no way of knowing whether or not you ever recruited them. Vincent and Yuffie couldn't have much of an impact on the plot because all of the major scenes were rendered in full-stop FMV, in which they could never appear. So twenty different endings was kind of out of the question.
If you were wondering, Final Fantasy VIII didn't have any optional characters. But the FMVs were a lot prettier.
IV. "Beacause you are a puppet!"
But just because some of the pieces of Final Fantasy VII are basically a film doesn't mean the whole thing is a film. The illusion of player control is just as important, and something only a videogame can really offer. Aerith is never coming back. She's always going to die at the end of disc one. But the game works to trick you into thinking otherwise. She's presented as a possible love interest for Cloud-- the player might wind up with her or Tifa, depending on how you play your card. If you're really a stud, you can land that big, beautiful Barret. All of this makes the death more surprising: sorry bucko! All those choices we presented to you were a lie, there's no getting off this train you're on.
Really, Cloud is an interesting case. For the first part of the game Cloud is almost a blank slate. (And dressmaker's mannequin, but who are we to judge?) He's trying to act a part, and that part is in part whatever personality the player imagines for him.
I actually think the central moment in Final Fantasy VII isn't Aerith's death, but the moment when Sephiroth takes the Black Materia. Up until that point, you are Cloud. Cloud walks where you walk, he talks to the people you want to talk with, he flirts with the polygons you find the most attractive. But then he goes and does the exact opposite of what you want him to do, and no amount of button mashing will change it. Cloud's always been a puppet, but you're not the only one pulling his strings.
REUNION. Because I bet Cloud dropped out of high school.
As it turns out Cloud's nuttier than anyone would have guessed, and the personality you were enacting wasn't really him at all. It was all his interpretation of Zack, his sometime company in a great glass tube. As the game progresses Cloud's real personality surfaces and the player has less and less input. He even leaves the party for a while, another total loss of control. Like I mentioned before, the final battle is scripted. Cloud will use Omnislash even if the player selects defend. But only the smartalecks select defend-- the game has you exactly where it wants you.
Control is a major theme in Final Fantasy VII, and it's not conveyed strictly through the game's script. I mean, yes, Shin-Ra is a power company, and the dingy post-apocalyptic setting says something about power and its misuses. But the parable of control extends way down to how you play the game, and how much Cloud's his own man, or yours.
V. "A man chooses, a slave obeys."
For a more modern example of player control and lack thereof being used as a narrative device, you can try last year's Bioshock. Bioshock takes place in an undersea tribute to Ayn Rand, a deserted colony of post war self-starters. In Rapture the citizens have developed easy-to-consume gene therapy, bottled superpowers that form the backbone of the game's combat system.
The player character is just an unfortunate outworlder thrown into Rapture via an opening scene plane crash. You're aided by a helpful Irishman called Atlas, who is trying to avenge the death of his wife, killed by the villainous Andrew Ryan, Rapture's architect. Eventually the you confront Ryan and beats him to death viciously with a crowbar. But it's not you who's really doing the beating.
Look what you did!
As he dies, Ryan reveals that the player is really the product of Rapture's twisted sciences. You're being manipulated by Atlas, actually the crimelord Frank Fontaine in disguise, and as long as a request is predicated by the words "would you kindly" the you've got no choice but to obey. "Would you kindly kill me?" Ryan repeats, over and over again. You don't need to push any buttons: the game has done it for you. By now you might not even want to kill Ryan. Too bad for you.
Besides the excellent voice acting, appropriately creepy aesthetic, and generally A+ scripting, this scene works so well because it manipulates the illusion of player control. It's not breaking the fourth wall, except in the way that all videogames break the fourth wall. By necessity, by definition, we are always going to be reaching through it. That's the element that games provide us that make them work in spite of technological limitations or shoddy translations. That's the place where they sing.
VI. My conclusion.
Damn, I love videogames.
In other Final Fantasy IV DS news, does the Lair of the Father exist for the sole purpose of kicking my ass? Thank gosh for Kain ++ Phoenix.
I. I state the obvious
So, I really like videogames. I mean, really like them. I like them enough that I've actually written more than three paragraphs of analysis about Locke Cole's hair. I love reading people's crazy opinions about Harmonian politics or the theology of Lea Monde. My princess will always be in another castle. All of that.
I read a lot of fan analysis of videogames, both here at livejournal and on character shrines and the like, and one thing I've noticed is that we don't always go about it like they're analyzing a videogame. We pretend it's literature or something, a novel: here are the characters, here is the plot structure, here is a quote from the script. Leviathan is a reference to a biblical sea monster, Shiva is a Hindu god. Well that's fine, but guess what? Games aren't literature.
II. Literature destroyed my beloved peasant village!
I don't mean that as an offense. It isn't my way of saying that games aren't art-- though I'm not going down any road that'll force me to define "art"-- but, rather, video games are fundamentally not books. They have aural and visual components: they move, they blink, their pauses are structured differently. You can take the world's best-written game script verbatim and it would fail as a play, or a novel. Try searching the adaptations on fanfiction.net as proof.
Okay, Alex, so there are things to consider, like color and design and music. So what? If we're going to analyze games, we should look at them. Like movies, games have directors. But the kicker is, games aren't film either, no matter how hard Xenosaga is trying to be.
What separates games from any other form of storytelling is that they are interactive. The player has some control of how the story goes, at the very least they decide when to turn the damn thing off. One of the side effects is characters are more immersed in a game than they would be in a play or a novel. That's why he's called Link; he's a Link between both our worlds. (But you can name him after yourself, if you want.) The party is "your" party, the main character becomes "you", or at least, that's what we say when we talk. Another effect of the player-game interaction is narrative instability. The player who gets the best ending will have a different experience than the player who gets the worst. The entire narrative tone can be affected by a single player decision. A Tale of Two Cities always has the same words, The Dark Knight is the same movie in every theater near you, but you can't ever play Ocarina of Time the same way twice. There's always going to be that one random encounter you barely escaped from with your life, that one time the boss was defeated on the first turn by a one-in-a-million critical hit. But in some games, it goes further than that, and the choices the player makes have an obvious effect on the outcome of the story.
III. The East/West RPG divide and a bit of a history lesson: or, I blame Nomura.
I should say I'm really writing about plot driven videogames here, especially RPGs, because that's what I'm familiar with. I'm sure there are a lot of interesting observations to make about the nuances of Ms. Pac Man, I just can't be the one to make them.
There's always been a tension between the narrative and player control. The more linear a game is, the clearer the narrative, the more concise the canon. The more freedom a player has, the less plot. Generally this is described as "linear" versus "non-linear"-- are you calling the shots or are you moving along thinly disguised rails. In RPGs the Japanese console games-- Final Fantasy, Suikoden, Tales of, Dragon Quest-- are generally linear. Western-style RPGs-- Fallout, Planescape: Torment, Baldur's Gate, Fable, Elder Scrolls-- are more non-linear. You at least get to decide your main character's traits and class; most of the time you can choose to be good or evil. If you play Golden Sun, Issac gets asked yes or no questions on a frequent basis, but the game continues on the same no matter what the player responds. If you play Baldur's Gate II, the answers you give NPCs can cause them to act favorably or unfavorably towards you. Kill a few too many innocents, and you'll be kicked out of the inn.
It wasn't always like this. Fallout was released in 1997 and became the prototypical western RPG. Final Fantasy VII came out the same year and no matter how you cut it, Final Fantasy VII was a significant game. Squaresoft changed the face of Japanese RPGs for pretty much ever when it moved its flagship series from Nintendo to Sony.
Looking at Square's major SNES releases in terms of linearity there's a definite trend. Final Fantasy IV is so linear that you can't even decide who will be in your party at any given time. Rosa always gains the same spells at the same level, there's no customization in the battle system either. Final Fantasy VI is still the most non-linear of the mainline Final Fantasy titles (barring XI). It's not generally considered a multiple-ending game, but the final sequence will change depending on which characters you rescue from the World of Ruin, which is basically a sandbox. Shadow will live or die depending on the player's decision. There was a huge effort to provide unity between battles and storyline scenes. (This was a major difference between Western and Japanese RPGs, too.) When Locke and Edgar balk at Terra's use of magic, that's revolutionary for the series: the characters bounce around, emotive and vibrant, with their ATB bars still on display.
M-M-M-Magic! Or: were you so thick as to not notice on the way over, Locke?
And then you come to Chrono Trigger, which took everything Final Fantasy VI did and pushed it further. You could play the game again and again and try to get all the different endings. Did Frog ever regain his true form? Why did Magus forget all his awesome attacks as soon as he joined your party? These questions had varying answers.
Then came Final Fantasy VII, where the final battle is an inescapable one-on-one, mano a mano swordfest between the main character and his silver-haired nemesis. It doesn't matter if you never taught Cloud Omnislash, he's going to do it anyway. You've got no choice. Squaresoft made the jump from Nintendo to Sony because the N64 didn't have FMV capability. All storyline scenes had to be rendered using the game's engine. FMV stands for full-motion video, they are basically pre-rendered game portions outside of the player's control. You might as well be watching a film. Hell, Final Fantasy VII's official sequel is a film.
FMVs force linearity, because they always happen the same no matter what. Final Fantasy VII has two optional characters, Vincent and Yuffie. It has one ending FMV, in which Vincent and Yuffie don't appear, because the FMV has no way of knowing whether or not you ever recruited them. Vincent and Yuffie couldn't have much of an impact on the plot because all of the major scenes were rendered in full-stop FMV, in which they could never appear. So twenty different endings was kind of out of the question.
If you were wondering, Final Fantasy VIII didn't have any optional characters. But the FMVs were a lot prettier.
IV. "Beacause you are a puppet!"
But just because some of the pieces of Final Fantasy VII are basically a film doesn't mean the whole thing is a film. The illusion of player control is just as important, and something only a videogame can really offer. Aerith is never coming back. She's always going to die at the end of disc one. But the game works to trick you into thinking otherwise. She's presented as a possible love interest for Cloud-- the player might wind up with her or Tifa, depending on how you play your card. If you're really a stud, you can land that big, beautiful Barret. All of this makes the death more surprising: sorry bucko! All those choices we presented to you were a lie, there's no getting off this train you're on.
Really, Cloud is an interesting case. For the first part of the game Cloud is almost a blank slate. (And dressmaker's mannequin, but who are we to judge?) He's trying to act a part, and that part is in part whatever personality the player imagines for him.
I actually think the central moment in Final Fantasy VII isn't Aerith's death, but the moment when Sephiroth takes the Black Materia. Up until that point, you are Cloud. Cloud walks where you walk, he talks to the people you want to talk with, he flirts with the polygons you find the most attractive. But then he goes and does the exact opposite of what you want him to do, and no amount of button mashing will change it. Cloud's always been a puppet, but you're not the only one pulling his strings.
REUNION. Because I bet Cloud dropped out of high school.
As it turns out Cloud's nuttier than anyone would have guessed, and the personality you were enacting wasn't really him at all. It was all his interpretation of Zack, his sometime company in a great glass tube. As the game progresses Cloud's real personality surfaces and the player has less and less input. He even leaves the party for a while, another total loss of control. Like I mentioned before, the final battle is scripted. Cloud will use Omnislash even if the player selects defend. But only the smartalecks select defend-- the game has you exactly where it wants you.
Control is a major theme in Final Fantasy VII, and it's not conveyed strictly through the game's script. I mean, yes, Shin-Ra is a power company, and the dingy post-apocalyptic setting says something about power and its misuses. But the parable of control extends way down to how you play the game, and how much Cloud's his own man, or yours.
V. "A man chooses, a slave obeys."
For a more modern example of player control and lack thereof being used as a narrative device, you can try last year's Bioshock. Bioshock takes place in an undersea tribute to Ayn Rand, a deserted colony of post war self-starters. In Rapture the citizens have developed easy-to-consume gene therapy, bottled superpowers that form the backbone of the game's combat system.
The player character is just an unfortunate outworlder thrown into Rapture via an opening scene plane crash. You're aided by a helpful Irishman called Atlas, who is trying to avenge the death of his wife, killed by the villainous Andrew Ryan, Rapture's architect. Eventually the you confront Ryan and beats him to death viciously with a crowbar. But it's not you who's really doing the beating.
Look what you did!
As he dies, Ryan reveals that the player is really the product of Rapture's twisted sciences. You're being manipulated by Atlas, actually the crimelord Frank Fontaine in disguise, and as long as a request is predicated by the words "would you kindly" the you've got no choice but to obey. "Would you kindly kill me?" Ryan repeats, over and over again. You don't need to push any buttons: the game has done it for you. By now you might not even want to kill Ryan. Too bad for you.
Besides the excellent voice acting, appropriately creepy aesthetic, and generally A+ scripting, this scene works so well because it manipulates the illusion of player control. It's not breaking the fourth wall, except in the way that all videogames break the fourth wall. By necessity, by definition, we are always going to be reaching through it. That's the element that games provide us that make them work in spite of technological limitations or shoddy translations. That's the place where they sing.
VI. My conclusion.
Damn, I love videogames.
In other Final Fantasy IV DS news, does the Lair of the Father exist for the sole purpose of kicking my ass? Thank gosh for Kain ++ Phoenix.