The Vanishing of Ethan Carter - ludonarrative dissonance begone

[Adrian Chmielarz]

Adrian Chmielarz why is Dear Esther more important than Loom? A game which came out 22 years before hand, features solid story telling, no killing from the main character, and actually lets the player do things in the gameworld instead of just walk from place to place? Or what about the reams of text adventures made in the 80s?

This a great question. Let me elaborate.

Dear Esther is more important to me possibly because I have not played Loom. Now, I did play every other LucasArts adventure. Multiple times. Finished Atlantis about five times, Monkey Islands about ten times, etc. However, for a reason that escapes me now (it was 23 years ago...) I didn't get into Loom. Or hell, maybe I played it and just don't remember.

But still, even though I am about to hunt the game down today, Loom was, I assume, a game. Dear Esther was the second notgame I've encountered (the first was The Freedom Bridge), but the first to open the entire notgame movement to me, with their manifesto at http://notgames.org/blog/2010/03/19/not-a-manifesto/

Research that Dear Esther triggered made me realize that the questions I had in the back of my head for years, and always kind of ignored, maybe very well be valid and worth attention.

Now, to be 100% clear: Ethan Carter is *not* a notgame. I have nothing against notgames or linear almost-notgames like To the Moon or challenge-less games like Journey or interactive movies like The Walking Dead - there is a place for everyone. But Ethan Carter *is* a game, it's just that it focuses on maximizing immersion, engagement and sense of presence (or, to be more precise, tries to minimize the damage to the aforementioned) through various techniques, some of which owe a lot to the notgames movement.

As for Interactive Fiction, yes, I use a lot of what they have to offer as well. I think that text adventures have zillions of problems, but they have, at the very least, this one amazing thing that I'm - to a certain extend - trying to emulate. That motherfucking blinking text cursor, waiting for your input. It's a promise like no other: DO WHATEVER. You are free, you can do anything, just tell me what you want. Now, we all know that this promise and the actual experience are two very different things ("TELL THE GNOME TO FUCK OFF", "I do not understand TELL"), but the *idea* is powerful.

That was my quote. To try and drag this on a subjective level doesn't work, sorry. You said: "[...] to me, that's one of the most important games in the history of gaming". The "history of gaming" is a general concept, something you find on Wikipdedia, not a personal one. Only your specific placement of the game there is subjective. You put it on a pedestal. That's what I pointed out. Perhaps you meant something different, like your own gaming history, but that's not what you said.

No, you're right. It is *my* opinion, and the game is important *to me*, but I still believe it *objectively* is an important milestone. I mean, you can hate it all you want (and trust me, right after I finished it, I was ready to use words that would make even the most hardcore of you blush), but it is a fact that this game is now an important part of gaming history.

Why is it important? It is an extremely successful shortgame. It is the first notgame to offer AAA-quality audio-visual skin. It is a point of reference is myriads of talks, both designers and gamers. The paradox is that even those who hate is use it as the point of reference. No many say "bullshit like Proteus" or "the idiots who loved The Path". These games are important, but it is Dear Esther which made more of an impact. That's why a lot of people keep bringing it up.

But, one more time - please note I say "important". I never say it's "one of the best games in history".

An excellent story usually makes for bad RPGs, as it's more or less a railroad to get the story across. A good RPG has more or less an incidental story that's written by the actions of the "hero(es)", but this is often enough mediocre at best. Planescape Torment is revered for its story, not for its gameplay. Fallout 1 is cherished for its gameplay, not for its story. It's most of the time a trade-off.

Most of the time it is, indeed, like this. But that's what the entire drama is about. Some people believe we'll never marry the two. I believe we can. But it's damn fucking hard, because not many were really trying these last 30 years (including me) and there's a shitload we still don't know about games. So, as I said, it is kind of terra icognita. We know we can have amazing story experiences when we reduce gameplay (Journey, TWD, To the Moon) or we can have amazing gameplay experiences when we get our mechanics right and put them on a pedestal (Doom, Diablo 1/2). Now let's keep trying to fuse the two. And we see glimpses of what's possible in games like Shadow of the Colossus, but still something's off. I am not saying Ethan Carter will solve this (it will not), but we are in fact trying to add *something* to the discussion.

Since most people in this thread are apparently unable to read, let me point out that Adrian Chmielarz did not say that the game would have qte's, or that it would be a movie. In fact, considering that he and Thomas Grip think so alike when it comes to gaming, you can be pretty sure that the game will not have cutscenes. What he is trying to do is make a game where the player plays the story, instead of watches it. If you actually disagree with him on that, and you would prefer games that use cutscenes rather than gameplay to tell the story, then you are an idiot.

This ...is ...actually quite accurate. It won't be perfect. We won't have the entire story told exclusively through player's interaction with the world, but we are indeed (at least that's the status for today) trying to never use a cut-scene and tell the story with full player's engagement. Sorry to sound vague atm.

Again, I don't think cutscenes are inherently bad - gief second season of TWD right now - but we're trying something else here.

Chmielarz extolls the virtues of To The Moon, which is a good story, but a very bad game

See, here is where we differ. I could not care less whether I have experienced an old school game, a cyberdrama, an interactive drama, a notgame, or whatever the fuck. I only care whether I had "fun" (enjoyed it, was engaged, was moved, etc. etc.) or not. I don't give a rat's ass what to label this experience. HOWEVER...

The player can walk around the world and click on items to initiate scripted events?

...while this can be awesome, I do believe it's NOT effective in getting the MOST out of the medium. So yeah, I agree with you. We know this can be good, but I suspect this is just scratching the surface. It offers immersion, but not engagement, and rarely sense of presence. I'm looking for ways to combo the three. One more time: we're just trying. It's our own first step. I'm sure that with Ethan Carter we will *not* arrive at the destination, where the story is indistinguishable from the gameplay. But I do think it's worth knocking at that door.

 

[Kirtai]

Videogames are a poor media to tell a story, but they're a fantastic way to create one between designer and player. RPGs are the epitome of this, and to see people think that they're instead the best genre to suffocate and stifle a player's choices rather than provide for them is painful. Pitiful, even (Not saying this is you, mind, I haven't checked - simply my view on Bioware/Bethesda/MostanyRPGtoday). A player should be experiencing the creation of a story through the skills, attributes and general abilities of their character(s) in reaction to the framework set out by a designer, not be watching them squandered, instead, to a designer deciding: "No, you cannot lockpick this door. It's an important, plot central door. No using that door bashing, either. Oh, and you can't scale the wall. No. Just go and find the special key. GO, THE PLOT DEMANDS IT.". If a player can sequence break because of their skills, let them!

Important to keep that distinction, I think. It's less about telling in this medium, and more about crafting. Not only less QTE sequences and cutscenes, plz, but also less 'Essential NPCs' and the aforementioned plot doors / quest item bollocks. A player that shoots every NPC in the head would have as much of their own tale to tell about the game as someone agonising over reading every piece of text, and that's how games should work!

I'd brofist this if I could.

 

[Cowboy Moment]

Allright, fair enough. You'll release your game, and that will demonstrate your ideas in practice (hopefully Grip will release something eventually as well and not live forever on monthly Amnesia sales while writing blog posts about how games should be).

Actually, while we're on that topic, would you describe Ethan Carter as an adventure game first and foremost? Are the likes of Penumbra/Amnesia a good approximation of the gameplay you have in mind, a combination of exploration and relatively simple puzzles?

By the way, I don't mind Dear Esther or To The Moon; it's when people point to them as THE FUTURE OF GAMING is when I start to get annoyed. I don't much look forward to a future where games become interactive movies because that's what's "artistic" and "mature". Even if they're good interactive movies like TWD.

 

[Haba]

Hotline Miami was pretty brilliant game in many ways. One thing that really struck me was that one level where you meet the biker for the first time.

How many of you killed all the civilians on it?

You didn't have to, the game didn't tell you to. That you did out of your own free will.

That is some smart game design. Non-obtrusive, not obnoxious, not in-your-face. A violent game about violence, using the player's desensitization to make a point.

 

[Adrian Chmielarz]

hopefully Grip will release something eventually as well and not live forever on monthly Amnesia sales while writing blog posts about how games should be

This guy spends countless hours researching ways to make better games, and shares that knowledge with the public. How is that wrong? He can make his next game for as long as he wants for all I care (fingers crossed he won't Chris Crawford himself, though ). It's not easy, you know. He could make Amnesia 2 (Machine is not Amnesia 2) and make tons of money and I could Kickstart the hell out of Painkiller and make tons of money, but we both - along with some others - chose not to take the easy road. I honestly don't see a reason to diss the fact that we're sharing our findings with everyone else (whether these findings are right or wrong is a different story).

Anyway...

would you describe Ethan Carter as an adventure game first and foremost?

Yeah, it's weird, because you say "adventure" and most people either think point and click or Myst-like puzzle shenanigans. But yeah, it's this kind of game where the only reason to use a savegame is because it's time to be afk, not because you died or fucked something up. There is neither combat nor stealth in our game (at least atm).

So I don't know what to call it. Can be "adventure". Can be "explorer". Can be "mystery". Can be "interactive horror". Honestly, no idea, but I know we'll have to call it something one of these days

Are the likes of Penumbra/Amnesia a good approximation of the gameplay you have in mind, a combination of exploration and relatively simple puzzles?

No. I mean, there are common elements, but there's a lot of differences too, including some core gameplay loops/elements (e.g., as mentioned, the lack of "monsters" to be killed by/hide from). But it's not "Amnesia minus monsters" either. Again, sorry to be so vague, we'll start releasing more info in a couple of months. Not that I have no idea, but we're still designing this thing, and I wouldn't want to talk about a feature only to find it dead next week.

 

[chestburster]

^ Yeah, I feel STALKER was the natural evolution of what Half-Life did, but with a sandbox level design approach.

AND Stalker successfully evokes the feeling of a REAL place (namely, an ex-USSR town). As someone from an ex-Commie country, I can't tell you how many times in my dreams, the locations from STALKER blended into my childhood hometown. The environment in STALKER (minus the mutants and anomalies) looks so real it's almost like a trip down memory lane for me.

AND it has the best fucking unscripted sandbox experience in an FPS, ever.

STALKER is a milestone game that will be remembered by history.

 

[Damned Registrations]

Videogames are a poor media to tell a story, but they're a fantastic way to create one between designer and player. RPGs are the epitome of this, and to see people think that they're instead the best genre to suffocate and stifle a player's choices rather than provide for them is painful. Pitiful, even (Not saying this is you, mind, I haven't checked - simply my view on Bioware/Bethesda/MostanyRPGtoday). A player should be experiencing the creation of a story through the skills, attributes and general abilities of their character(s) in reaction to the framework set out by a designer, not be watching them squandered, instead, to a designer deciding: "No, you cannot lockpick this door. It's an important, plot central door. No using that door bashing, either. Oh, and you can't scale the wall. No. Just go and find the special key. GO, THE PLOT DEMANDS IT.". If a player can sequence break because of their skills, let them!

Important to keep that distinction, I think. It's less about telling in this medium, and more about crafting. Not only less QTE sequences and cutscenes, plz, but also less 'Essential NPCs' and the aforementioned plot doors / quest item bollocks. A player that shoots every NPC in the head would have as much of their own tale to tell about the game as someone agonising over reading every piece of text, and that's how games should work!

While I can agree with the majority of the post, I don't think games are by any means a poor media to tell a story. The best outcome is reached through a combination of the two. If you tell nothing, you get Minecraft or Tetris. Which is all fine and dandy, but hardly the best that can be offered. If you tell everything, you get a railroaded jrpg. Which again, can be fine and dandy for those who are into that, but has massive wasted potential.

But where it really excels is when you combine the two approaches, and use the player's contributions to reinforce an existing story you are telling the player. A story in which you choose which of your party members to sacrifice to save the rest can be a better story than one where it is chosen for you, but it's still a story you are being told through the setting, the pre existing characters and their motivations and the plot that surrounds them. In order for that choice to appear, the story of them being in danger had to be told. And a game that never forces things upon you to create those choices would be a bad one.

 

[chestburster]

Dear Esther doesn't have cutscenes, but it's still less interactive than the likes of Heavy Rain.

No, Dear Esther has way MORE interactivity than Heavy Rain.

You can't confine "interactivity" to "pressing a button to get some arbitrary response."

Think about this: which is more "interactive": walking around in a museum, vs. watching a documentary for said museum with a TV controller in hand?

 

[Damned Registrations]

Interactivity isn't the be all end all of gaming though. If it was we'd be fiddling with rubber bouncy balls instead of playing computer games.

 

[chestburster]

Interactivity isn't the be all end all of gaming though. If it was we'd be fiddling with rubber bouncy balls instead of playing computer games.

No it's not. But I think the consensus is that "interactivity" is what separates games from movies. To that end, Dear Esther is the polar opposite of a movie while Heavy Rain is a (bad) movie with little more than DVD-menu level "interactivity."

 

[Infinitron]

Interactivity isn't the be all end all of gaming though. If it was we'd be fiddling with rubber bouncy balls instead of playing computer games.

No it's not. But I think the consensus is that "interactivity" is what separates games from movies. To that end, Dear Esther is the polar opposite of a movie while Heavy Rain is a (bad) movie with little more than DVD-menu level "interactivity."

Relevant: http://www.rpgcodex.net/forums/index.php?threads/the-instig8ivejournalism-thread.82851/

 

[Wirdschowerdn]

Wow, all this serious and highly academic talk about the future of games. I bet some publishers/developers think certain game designs and ideas ought to be higher classified than the Hydrogen bomb back on the 50s.

This is exactly why creators rarely talk on forums, and this is exactly why I have been warned against engaging.

Video games: Serious business, dude.

 

[Cowboy Moment]

hopefully Grip will release something eventually as well and not live forever on monthly Amnesia sales while writing blog posts about how games should be

This guy spends countless hours researching ways to make better games, and shares that knowledge with the public. How is that wrong? He can make his next game for as long as he wants for all I care (fingers crossed he won't Chris Crawford himself, though ). It's not easy, you know. He could make Amnesia 2 (Machine is not Amnesia 2) and make tons of money and I could Kickstart the hell out of Painkiller and make tons of money, but we both - along with some others - chose not to take the easy road. I honestly don't see a reason to diss the fact that we're sharing our findings with everyone else (whether these findings are right or wrong is a different story).

Anyway...

Hey, I like those blog posts, and am a big fan of Frictional in general (Black Plague is pretty close to being my favourite horror game of all time). And that's why, I want to actually see what they're currently working on. As is, their new project doesn't even have an official name. I bet they're just spending all their money on hookers and blow while Grip writes a blog post every now and then to give off the impression that they're actually doing shit.

Dear Esther doesn't have cutscenes, but it's still less interactive than the likes of Heavy Rain.

No, Dear Esther has way MORE interactivity than Heavy Rain.

You can't confine "interactivity" to "pressing a button to get some arbitrary response."

Think about this: which is more "interactive": walking around in a museum, vs. watching a documentary for said museum with a TV controller in hand?

Sigh, this is the same as people claiming that HL2 doesn't have cutscenes. Yes, it fucking does. Being able to jump around a room, or walk around an island, is not interactivity. A cathedral is no more interactive than a painting is. Heavy Rain actually lets you make decisions that affect the plot occasionally. That's way more than Dear Esther does. The extent of your choice in the latter is in which order you want to sightsee through the game's discrete locations.

 

[villain of the story]

I'm still stuck on the part about Kentucky Route Zero being pixel art.

 

[tuluse]

Adrian Chmielarz why is Dear Esther more important than Loom? A game which came out 22 years before hand, features solid story telling, no killing from the main character, and actually lets the player do things in the gameworld instead of just walk from place to place? Or what about the reams of text adventures made in the 80s?

This a great question. Let me elaborate.

Dear Esther is more important to me possibly because I have not played Loom. Now, I did play every other LucasArts adventure. Multiple times. Finished Atlantis about five times, Monkey Islands about ten times, etc. However, for a reason that escapes me now (it was 23 years ago...) I didn't get into Loom. Or hell, maybe I played it and just don't remember.

But still, even though I am about to hunt the game down today, Loom was, I assume, a game. Dear Esther was the second notgame I've encountered (the first was The Freedom Bridge), but the first to open the entire notgame movement to me, with their manifesto at http://notgames.org/blog/2010/03/19/not-a-manifesto/

Research that Dear Esther triggered made me realize that the questions I had in the back of my head for years, and always kind of ignored, maybe very well be valid and worth attention.

Now, to be 100% clear: Ethan Carter is *not* a notgame. I have nothing against notgames or linear almost-notgames like To the Moon or challenge-less games like Journey or interactive movies like The Walking Dead - there is a place for everyone. But Ethan Carter *is* a game, it's just that it focuses on maximizing immersion, engagement and sense of presence (or, to be more precise, tries to minimize the damage to the aforementioned) through various techniques, some of which owe a lot to the notgames movement.

As for Interactive Fiction, yes, I use a lot of what they have to offer as well. I think that text adventures have zillions of problems, but they have, at the very least, this one amazing thing that I'm - to a certain extend - trying to emulate. That motherfucking blinking text cursor, waiting for your input. It's a promise like no other: DO WHATEVER. You are free, you can do anything, just tell me what you want. Now, we all know that this promise and the actual experience are two very different things ("TELL THE GNOME TO FUCK OFF", "I do not understand TELL"), but the *idea* is powerful.

This actually helps me to understand, thanks for your response.

I choose Loom because it differs from other adventure games at the time. There is no inventory. You learn spells as you advance through the game and you can use those spells whenever you want. So it feels very different. You have a generic set of tools that you can use to interact with the game world. Now the puzzles still have very specific solutions, so it's still just a matter of finding the right spell (or sometimes short sequence of spells) to continue. So you'll find it's not a notgame.

I'm still not convinced of what the value of a notgame is, if it ends up like Dear Esther where the player can't really interact with anything and can't change anything. To me the thing that makes a video game immersive if the amount of things you can do and how the game world reacts to them. I don't know how closely you have been following kickstarter, but Brian Fargo keeps repeating "reactivity" as his manta for the games he's making (Wasteland 2 and Torment: Tides of Numenera). That really speaks to what I want from a video game.

Ethan Carter sounds interesting, I'll be keeping an eye on it.

Oh, and you're encountering a lot of anger about your experience with Dear Esther for a lot of reasons. Not the least of which is the current state of video game journalism. As fans of games like the original Fallout, we're squeezed between two types, one is the IGN style where every year we hear them yelling as loudly as they can about how awesome the new Call of Duty is, and the other is the rock paper shotgun style, where we can read really pretentious articles about how games with no gameplay are moving the medium forward. It tends to make us very cranky.

 

[Adrian Chmielarz]

I'm still not convinced of what the value of a notgame is, if it ends up like Dear Esther where the player can't really interact with anything and can't change anything..

Think of it this way: a book and a movie can be about the exact same story, but your experience is different, right? Now imagine a ...software (a notgame, in this case), where the entire thing almost as interactivity-free as in a movie/book, but with added sense of presence (http://www.theastronauts.com/2013/03/nine-amazing-things-unique-to-video-games/). You consume the same story again, and yet the experience is as different from a book or a movie.

Of course it's not *that* simple, but all I'm trying to explain here is the value of of a notgame. "Freedom Bridge" - http://www.necessarygames.com/my-games/freedom-bridge - could be a great short story, or a great short movie - but when done in a notgame form, it's also extremely powerful.

To me the thing that makes a video game immersive if the amount of things you can do and how the game world reacts to them.

Technically, what you talk about here is engagement, not immersion. But of course I know what you mean. But that's why I keep saying that the golden combo for me is to marry engagement and immersion, possibly with the addition of the sense of presence.

Also, I hear you on the IGN/RPS thing.

 

[Kirtai]

You consume the same story again

A minor note but I really don't like the word consume for games, it has a very passive, take-what-you're-given-and-like-it feel. I want to direct the game, not have it fed to me.


Come to think of it, maybe "direct" is exactly the right word for non-games. The player takes the same sort of role as the director of a film, so while the events play out per the script, how they play out, the style and feel are player driven. I'll have to think about this one.

 

[villain of the story]

and the other is the rock paper shotgun style, where we can read really pretentious articles about how games with no gameplay are moving the medium forward. It tends to make us very cranky.

Honestly, I don't remember any such claim from RPS. They have a healthy appreciation for a diverse spectrum of games, including nongames ("notgame" sounds like shit), weird little experimental games and everything inbetween. At no point do they make a claim about those ones moving the medium forward. They do make the claim that the medium will move forward as a result of all of them coexisting together, balancing and influencing each other out.

 

[tuluse]

Honestly, I don't remember any such claim from RPS. They have a healthy appreciation for a diverse spectrum of games, including nongames ("notgame" sounds like shit), weird little experimental games and everything inbetween. At no point do they make a claim about those ones moving the medium forward. They do make the claim that the medium will move forward as a result of all of them coexisting together, balancing and influencing each other out.

Well it might be unfair to use RPS as a collective noun, but Nathan Grayson thinks the Walking Dead is the greatest video to have ever existed and every game should try to copy it.

 

[Papa Môlé]

Games are just having a mid-life crisis as the average age of the gamer goes up and he starts to feel embarrassed having to say to his friends, spouse, co-workers, etc. that he still plays video games. Turning video games into movies deals with the this unpleasant social reality by forcibly mainstreaming them via imitation of the already familiar and accepted.

 

[agentorange]

My biggest issue with Dear Estcher was that at the end of the day the story was just not interesting, and the way they chose to tell it was awful. The one strong point of the game was the quality of the level design, but rather than taking advantage of it by, say, having you explore the environment (non-linearly, drop you somewhere in the middle of the island for example and you have to explore off the path, I mean if you want to be an immersive nongame then why would you have a clear START point and a straight line to the END, that is what bad games do) searching for means to piece the story together (the obvious choice being journal entries, and letters, but who says you need to rely on text, you could have found a picture or some document relating to the accident; considering how the story is told through fragmented memories and recollections it would have been a great way to tie the gameplay and story together) - the interaction element would have given the story an element that can not be found in any other medium, and made the story more interesting than the sum of the writing - they instead have you just listen to the story being told in audio-book format. Ignoring the advantages of the medium is just a waste.

 

[Dexter]

Any truth to the rumors that this is going to support VR/Oculus Rift @Adrian Chmielarz ?

 

[Trash]

Well, ludonarrative dissonance or not, that looks amazing.

 

[Dexter]

Well, ludonarrative dissonance or not, that looks amazing.

Yeah, that was kind of my approach to Dear Esther too, I would be the first to deny calling it a game but more of an "experience" or whatever and I'd shout obscenities at people that want to argue that "more games should be like that", but as a sort-of Tech demo and avowing graphics whore I could appreciate it and its incredible environments the same way I enjoy putting my new PC through the paces with 3DMark or Unigine Heaven.

Now "To The Moon" on the other hand I thought was pretentious teen-drama hipster trash with boring and near no-existent gameplay that I ended up hating till it was over and I didn't really see any redeeming qualities.

 

[Awor Szurkrarz]

Games are just having a mid-life crisis as the average age of the gamer goes up and he starts to feel embarrassed having to say to his friends, spouse, co-workers, etc. that he still plays video games. Turning video games into movies deals with the this unpleasant social reality by forcibly mainstreaming them via imitation of the already familiar and accepted.

Wait, so there are people who stop playing video games ?