Conflict, Resolution
"For a story to occur, it has to keep proceeding... challenge is about preventing you from continuing in the game... Story and challenge work against each other. No matter how hard you work on a game, if you've got a story in the traditional way, and you've got challenge elements like we traditionally use them, they work against each other."
-- Jonathan Blow
"All right: so what if the player's challenge and the protagonist's challenge are not the same thing? Or what if the function of the challenge is something other than doling out quantities of story? Is there a way in which challenge can make a story more powerful or more significant rather than less?"
35 comments:
Taking Jonathan's definition of how story "has" to occur as fact, I find that he underestimates the power of good design. Can the challenge not define the story? Can the story not, in fact, hinge on how a user completes a challenge?
Is the user stealthy or brutal, beguiling, nimble, chaotic, haphazard? If you've got a story in the traditional manner, and you're holding onto it with such passion that it is somehow detracting from your gameplay, you're not being dynamic enough in your design.
This is all, however, beside the point. I think Mr Blow is just wrong in his base assumptions.
Challenge isn't about preventing you continuing the game in the same way as distance isn't something preventing you from getting to another place. It's all just part of an overall journey and thinking about it as a negative point is just wrong. Shall we just skip this part in your character's growth? Take away the battles that season Master Chief, take away the assassinations that define Number 47, let Lara seem .... oh, I could go on, I really could.
Emily Short brings up merely one argument among many.
What he said. And isn't that what makes a compelling story - conflict? A challenge the protagonist faces? If Mr. Blow's statement is the philosophy he lives by, then he must have arrived at it after making "Braid" or he radically compromised himself 'cuz "Braid" can be a real...bear sometimes and that's what makes it fun.
Unless of course he's talking about an entirely different genre of video game.
@ Del
The purpose of distance isn't necessarily to prevent you from getting to another place, but to someone unable to walk properly it still works that way; similarly, the game designers don't put challenges into a game hoping that people will be prevented from accessing the rest of the game, but the fact is that there are those among us that will have trouble with those challenges and be unable to proceed. That's what Blow is talking about.
He's also definitely talking about the bulk of games with stories, which as you mentioned are the more traditional ones. He points out a significant problem in game development, one that I don't think has been solved yet, and Emily Short, like yourself, has an interesting proposition for a potential solution.
That said, I can't think of any games off the top of my head that have overcome this challenge. Can anyone list a few?
@ Cliff
I don't think he's really talking philosophy (how to design a game) as much as just stating that the fact that traditional method of story-telling and traditional gaming challenges exist at opposite ends of the same continuum.
I understand what they are saying... but how to convey the hero's hardships without a challenge?
The firts time I beat up Mario I really felt like I had rescued the princess. I was proud of me...
And now... Maybe we have to think on how to not make all the games about hardships. Since in a RPG you only fight and then watch your characters talk. There should be more ways of interaction.... I think.
Essentially, both Blow and Short are correct. A game's narrative in the most traditional sense follows this adversarial paradigm. At the same time, not all stories have to play out in the traditional way, and Short does well in showing us that in her article. Really, there's no conflict here.
I think in the time of Playstation 1 RPGs, story and challenge worked well together. The only way you could see the next CGI cutscene that showed impressive graphics of a higher calibre than the gameplay was capable of, was if you completed enough of the challenge to move to the next story point.
There is a tricky balance here though. If the story is too good, the gameplay feels boring and repetitive. If the gameplay is too good, the story feels like it gets in the way. It seems like the story and gameplay elements need to be equally good to avoid the type of problem J-blo is talking about.
@Branden
I get what you're saying but I am opposed to it! ;) Using the distance analogy again, if you cater for someone with difficulty walking, you can make it too simple for the people who can run. Challenge is necessary for fun and if you are not capable of overcoming the physical challenge involved, possibly you're playing the wrong game.
I am 100% behind the idea of the hero's journey. Games need to be tailored for a particular target market and, if your target is people who can't walk, you shouldn't be telling them to overcome distance. You should be asking them to move a chess piece or spell a word, roll a ball or press the right button.
I understand what he's saying I just think that his idea is... closeted?
Branden, Blow's statement is sort of manifested in the story of Braid, though, isn't it? Gameplay and story kept separate, bits of one only given out after navigating the other? Granted the game he was making was one which simply could not accomodate a more contemporary mode of storytelling, but still. His actions seem to echo his words here.
Also, what does a "traditional way?" mean here? Not to get too deep into pretention, but have games existed so long as to have a "traditional" means of telling a story? Should we consider the Half-Life sea-change of minimalist storytelling to be the new norm, or are we still rooted in the cut and dry lather-rinse-repeat stories of golden age RPG territory? Is it useful to use a term like traditional in a medium still finding its legs? And moreover, what kind of stories are we trying to compare our experiences to? The collaborative stories told in conventional narrative formats like books and short stories, the passive stories told in films or the emergent stories told in poetry?
I find that games with resonant stories tend to fall in between these narrative influences, offering up a loose framework for people to experience a painstakingly constructed world with highly structured framing techniques. I wouldn't say I never enjoy the stories that frame these games, but the more powerful pieces of narrative, IMHO, come from unscripted, emergent events resulting from, more often than not, challenges. It's where a lot of the pull of storytelling in games lies, in allowing the "reader" power previously denied to them, and it's one of those things that makes games a unique, artistically relevant means of telling a story instead of the "me too" medium they're all too often criticized as.
It seems to me that when narrative and challenge are properly integrated, it will go unnoticed. It will all be one big experience to you. You would only take notice when there's a kind of divide between the "story" parts of games and the "game" parts of games, and they start to seem unrelated. Games can have great stories that must be advanced by completing tedious challenges, or games can have great gameplay with boring cutscenes you don't really care about breaking up the action.
Although actually, you can have great gameplay and story parts that still seem oddly separate, so the divide isn't caused by poor one or the other. Still, I think the real sign of success is simply if we don't notice anything strange
Theres a lovely term I picked up from Clint Hocking's blog: "ludo-narrative resonance". It refers to when the story and gameplay come together as one. It happens almost never in games today.
Conflict is intrinsic to a story, yes. The aim of conflict is NOT to PREVENT the player from moving on, however. The conflict simply IS your game.
Games have a story of their own that is based in the rules that form the game. A game of football (soccer) is a story. Oftentimes its a dull one, sometimes a tale of triumph and tragedy, but until you create that story, its just a bunch of guys in shorts kicking a ball around for no reason. You add teams and rules to make it a game - your gameplay IS your story.
In some ways Blow, like many other narrative-heavy games, uses story as a mechanic to explain the interaction. Its a trope/machina, like a character on a TV show that happens to be an expert frisbee player, and - would you know it - she saves the day by throwing a paper plate or something. There's nothing intrinsic to Blow's story about jumping over things. There WAS a ludo-narrative resonance in the time distortion mechanic - but I'll be buggered if I can explain it, because the brunt of Braid's core story was so abstract and text-heavy that it flew over my tiny head. Something to do with an ex-girlfriend, and you were stalking her when you thought you were re-seducing her. Not sure, but I think Mr Blow has had a hard time with women.
I don't have a clue how to better achieve ludo-narrative resonance, but in my blog I recently mentioned that Fishing Girl did a really good job. What I took from it is that, until we achieve a better understanding of gameplay, ludo-narrative resonance and the psychology therein, we'd be better off sticking to conceptually basic stories.
@Jake Seib
Good point - like pretty much all great techniques in filmmaking, storytelling, painting, sculpture and every other art you think of, game design works best when you don't stop to think about what a well-designed game you just played.
I'd like to think ludo-narrative resonance is one of those things. When you look at the Mona Lisa, you see the beauty of the image, not the careful choice of pallet.
@Michael Grove
I guess by "traditional" I mean what I have come to expect from your typical game with a story to tell, which is similar to what some others here have said. The story is delivered in chunks:
Introduction, beat a challenge, story, beat a challenge, story, beat a challenge, ending.
Perhaps it was the wrong word to use; I meant to convey that it is the "norm", not that it is the correct way of doing things. And I think that that's why we have so much appreciate for titles that deviate from this pattern.
@Alan Jack
Fishing Girl is god.
I don't think there's too much wrong with using the word traditional--after all, most early games with a "story" (Zelda, Mario, etc.) were taking their cues from "traditional storytelling." Zelda in particular follows the charted fairy-tale formula pretty precisely, really, and how old are those?
I bring this up not to defend use of the word "traditional" in video game talk, but because as a medium (with storytelling intentions) that's still "finding it's legs" its had no choice but to try and take its cues from "traditional storytelling." Being so young, is it any wonder most games have tried to emulate the kind of storytelling used in action movies? And it's good that Blow and Short are trying to break past that, but I also, am not sure I agree with them.
I don't think "challenge is about preventing you from continuing in the game" but more about enriching the experience. Journalist Heather Ann Campbell has argued that video game journalism should be like travel journalism--"the journey's the thing." As such, I don't see challenges as being contradictory to storytelling. Storytelling requires challenge; there is no story without conflict.
What I do concede, however, is that the balance between over challenging the player into quitting or under-challenging the player into subverting the experience is difficult to say the least.
That soccer example is great, and I was thinking along the lines of a similar one. Civilization, Sim City, The Sims series, World of Warcraft and other open world MMORPGs, have embraced this kind of subjective storytelling--allowing the gamer to decide the story. The games themselves simply provide the setting and the conflict (whether it be conquering the world, building a city, or surviving the day to day grind). One could argue that--for a medium that is user driven to a higher degree than any other--this is storytelling in video games at it's most pure.
Just some thoughts from a non-expert in the field--sounds like I might be the only one. Who are you people ;-)
Hey Leigh!!
When will you grace us with another of your long posts??!!
Boy I miss those!!!!
Branden: I sort of guessed as much, but I still don't think that's true. There's a subsection of games that traditionally use that sort of a narrative framework but there are plenty which don't, good and bad. There are plenty of games, and there have been for over a decade now, which refuse to interrupt the action for the sake of telling a story and as time progresses these games are starting to grow outside of their genre. I just don't think establishing the idea of a "norm" is particularly useful to discussing the way they tell stories. It's like discussing plays and films in terms of their adherence to the five-act format or an essay in its adherence to the five-paragraph format. It has nothing to do with the potential for a medium or what someone is doing with a medium.
Ben brought up a great example of this in 4X games. People would contend that these games don't "have" stories to tell, since we haven't been given a set of preset narrative events, but their stories are simply interpretive, based on a system's response to the manner in which the player plays. If you don't start to apply some sort of internal story, however embarrassing or ridiculous, 4X games get really boring really fast. I'm not sure I agree with him putting MMOs in the same category, since they almost always have an existing set of canonical lore (I say this with a deferential nod to exception that was the ambitious, atrocious Shadowbane for those old enough to remember) but it'd be an interesting concept to discuss.
I can give you a two-word solution to your problem.
Dialogue Tree.
It worked in Planescape Torment, didn't it?
In this discussion, I think we need to be careful and avoid making the mistake of confusing the concept of conflict in narrative fiction with the element known as challenge in game design. They are not intrinsically similar things.
Conflict can be most basically described as what a protagonist wants but doesn't have, and in a broader sense, as the "problem" in a piece of fictional literature. You can divide conflict up into different categories, such as Man vs. Self, Man vs. Man, Man vs. Fate, and so on. With respect to that second one, challenge can be very conducive to a good story if used correctly. However, when you consider how different types of conflict can often overlap and interweave in narrative fiction, as well as the heavily internal & nonphysical nature of most conflicts, you have to go back and admit the truth about what challenge really is in videogames:
Challenge was the core aspect that built the gaming medium back when the gaming medium was largely the arcade business.
To earn revenue, games needed the customer to keep pumping in quarters; the best way to ensure that was to make the challenge of overcoming opposition great enough to motivate players into investing a lot of time, patience, and dedication which would be rewarded by sheer satisfaction in addition to the overall enjoyment of the experience. Due to the advent of home consoles, user desires have slowly changed among a growing portion of the consumer base.
Today, with our save-enabled PS3s, PS2s, and 360s at home, our games for those systems easily available to us at any time after a single purchase, there is no longer any economic incentive for many players to trudge through enemies or obstacles if they simply want to play a great story (granted, stories back in the arcade and cartridge eras were usually window dressing). Challenge has now become a strange relic from another age that can no longer be universally applied to games on a one size-fits-all basis or even at all.
If we're serious about incorporating conflicts into game stories effectively & perhaps elevating their impact and complexity to levels unattainable in novels or film, we may need to begin reevaluating established notions of what constitutes challenge for the purpose of creating undisrupted flow in our narratives.
One thing's for sure; we won't be seeing such products hit market and satisfying the increasing demand for them anytime soon if development continues with this "Try>Lose>Try Again>Win>Lose Again>Try Harder>Win Game" dogma.
@IvanM
In the concept of ludo-narrative resonance that I discussed, wouldn't the search for that be about bringing the challenge of gameplay into line with the conflict of story until they were one and the same?
I hadn't considered those categories of conflict. Has there ever been a game that was NOT Man vs Man? I'm wondering if some adventure games might be considered Man vs Fate (Fate being the designer's preordained solutions to the game). The only game I know of that took a stab at presenting a conflict of Man vs. Self was Far Cry 2, which only managed it if you paused during gameplay to read between the lines of what was happening.
I haven't got tons to say right now, but when I do, you'll know!
@ Alan Jack
Just to throw a few titles out there, I would say that the conflicts in Braid and Silent Hill 2 are Man vs Self.
Games like Disaster Report and Left 4 Dead would be the most obvious examples of Man vs Fate.
I definitely agree with Ivan M that there is no single solution to these problems. We talk about creating more connections between the story and the gameplay, and this is a great idea, but I think it clearly can't be applied to all games; there is still room for the Halos, Zeldas, and GTA's, and they don't necessarily need to change.
I'd say thats a rather shallow view of those games.
Braid's STORY is Man vs Self. To some degree, the time-twisting mechanics are man vs self (albeit in a really silly technical way). But jumping on animals is clearly a case of one man dominating another.
Far Cry 2, for those of us who "got it" (and I'll admit, I had to have it explained to me before I could) was a clever deceptive piece of game writing. The gameplay led us down a path that eventually forced us into a situation of Man vs Self - the game pushed us into violence, then showed us the horrific consequences of it. I'll admit it wasn't perfect, but there was a noble aim there, at least.
GTA Vice City is a good example of ludo-narrative resonance. You play a psychotic, coked-up madman as he dominates and destroys a city. The narrative drive to dominate others perfectly leads into the violent gameplay. GTA IV, on the other hand, sent you out on dates and made you go bowling with your brother.
Of course, both sold well, and both received plenty of praise, so the argument doesn't hold much merit. :(
I'm not saying we should discard the old games - but with better, more cohesive story elements, they could be improved upon.
@Michael Grove
You're probably right about the MMORPGs not really belonging in that category since specific tasks create narrative not generated by the player. But I'm curious, where does that term 4X come from? Maybe it's just early, but I don't get it.
@Ivan M.
I don't necessarily disagree with your assertion that narrative conflict and gaming challenge are different. But I think this is sort of a "square is a rectangle but a rectangle isn't a square" kind of statement. No they aren't the same thing, but a challenge in game design is a conflict in the narrative, even if it's just the basic Man vs. Man/Alien/Dark Knight/whatever.
Also, I don't really think it's analogous to argue that the difference between narrative conflict and challenge in game design stems from the arcade business established on getting the player to spend as much money to finish as possible. Early prose fiction was exactly the same. Most early novels were first published chapter by chapter in a monthly periodical. As such, the stories had to be told in such a way as to hook the reader into buying the next issue. If a story wasn't interesting, the publisher would drop it (the comics industry still operates this way).
However, you're right. The modern novel has moved past this, and video games need to start doing so as well. In this respect, needless narrative conflict and needless challenge in game design are the same--too much muddles up the story. And it is perhaps here where early games got it right. Early Mega Man games are an excellent example. There's virtually no story save what the player makes himself battling enemy after enemy, boss after boss, then boss after boss again before taking on the final boss. As such, the story isn't gobbed down. But take the same formula and plug it into story-laden game like Okami (it's on my mind because I finally got around to playing and beating it) and even the best attempt to explain why I have to fight every boss over again is tedious (for me, anyway--but we could even go with Twilight Princess if you're more comfortable with that analogy).
And @Alan Jack
I agree, we shouldn't discard these "old" games anymore than we should discard fairy tales. And there's nothing wrong with tinkering with their basic concepts. But we should accept that we might not be able to improve on them--Twilight is basically Romeo and Juliet with vampires, but that doesn't make it better.
To sum up, I think what Blow and Short are really trying to get at here is that video games have a narrative capability all their own. We just haven't really discovered it yet. As such, we're stuck trying to rely on the conventions of older mediums of storytelling.
Just more thoughts.
@Alan Jack
Man vs Fate in videogames dates back before most adventure games even, and a prime example of this stadventure gameis one where the game mechanics themselves told the story. I'm talking about Missile Command.
It's a pretty much standard cold war story about the futility of nuclear war and how once the game has begun it has become impossible to win.
It is a very strong example of challenge equalling story in an arcade context, and it resonated well enough to cause plenty of nightmares in the children of the early 1980s.
I was thinking along similar lines recently - Space Invaders, Missile Command, all those old arcade games have a mechanic that flows with the setting rather than alongside it.
Makes me wonder why we abandoned "tragedy" in gaming and un-win-able games.
@ Alan Jack
Ludo-narrative resonance is of great interest to me as well. I probably would've mentioned it if you hadn't beaten me to the punch.
Depending on the game, "bringing the challenge of gameplay into line with the conflict of story until they were one and the same", as you pointed out, might require a rethinking of what it means to be challenged in a videogame. As it stands now, challenge is still wedded to a conventional practice of obstructing your advancement if you can't do something right or quickly enough. We like to crow endlessly about how games have the potential to tell stories in a different structure than other mediums, but I don't buy into this idea that games (in general) are somehow immune to the fundamental condition that a story move forward in order for it to be called a "story."
My primary contention is that game design will not be able to service the varying needs for conflict-implementation in different games if we continue to uniformly labor under this restrictive view of challenge.
As an aside, one oldie that I interpret as a wonderful example of ludo-narrative resonance is the first Tomb Raider. Even if the immediate importance of the Scion & Jacqueline Natla's ambitions was lost on you, the exploratory and collection-oriented gameplay melded perfectly with the premise of Lara Croft being an extremely capable archaeologist in search of ancient treasures.
@ Ben Villarreal
The big difference between conflict and challenge that we should be mindful of here is that conflict is not a barrier to narrative progression whereas challenge, by current definition and especially under poor use, IS such a barrier by its very nature. Clint Eastwood's struggle with the opposing forces of his loneliness and stubborn pride in Gran Torino do not prevent or even slow my full consumption of the film's story. In contrast, the relatively simple solutions for making your way through "The Milkman Conspiracy" in Psychonauts stop you dead in your tracks if you just can't figure it out at the moment.
I stand by my point that the economic roots of the videogame industry as we know it today are the source of the difference between conflict in narrative fiction & challenge in game design. Yes, early prose was published in a periodical format. However, that did not induce the same consumer spending patterns unique to arcade games. With arcades, those players who had more time and improved in skill more quickly spent less money because they were able to achieve more progress on fewer credits. Back in the days of periodical prose, the degree of literacy among the reading population may have been much more uneven than it is now, but however literate you were at the time did not change the fact that in order to continue a story, what you mainly had to do was spend the same amounts of money at the same intervals.
I fully agree with you that nascent Mega Man did an excellent job of allowing the challenge to carry the story. As a corollary, I also agree that this doesn't work in Okami.
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On a more humorous note, I couldn't help but think about this given everything we're discussing. XD
You know, there are a bunch of things that happen in the story of videogames that are ridiculous.
While people are trying to talk to me in Half Life 2 about how to create an uprising in City 17 to take down the Citadel and crush the evil Combine, I'm usually busy running around like some child with ADHD hopped up on methamphetimines: jumping up and down on tables, smashing boxes with my gravity gun, and running around the room looking at all the pretty computers and people or raiding the place for any loose ammo.
In just about every RPG, I have some grand quest to save the world, but I get easily distracted by running simple errands for the town villagers. That or I waste time by building up my strength and magic to defeat an army of dragons just so I can steal their key to open a door that I probably could have just kicked down with the strength I had to kill those dragons. And as much as I love Persona 4, I still think it's ridiculous that much of the story flows as follows:
"OMG! Yukiko was kidnapped!"
"OMG! We need to save her!"
"You're so cool. Hey, wanna go eat some Yakisoba?"
"OK!"
...meanwhile, Yukiko is still in trouble.
Ultimately, I think Blow makes a really good point. He may not be spot on, but it is true that telling a videogame story that blends seemlessly with the gameplay is rather difficult. I like the challenge of thinking up unique ways to tell stories in videogames that differ from traditional linear narratives. I think a lot of games that get praised for their stories often don't have very good plot, but they do have great atmosphere and memorable characters. I'm interested to see what else Blow comes up with in the future. I liked Braid quite a bit.
@ JT
I bet you and everyone else here would enjoy this extensive library of Videogame Tropes (I highly recommend The Grand List of Console Role Playing Game Cliches). Some of my favorite absurdities include "Adam Smith Hates Your Guts" & "Money Spider."
For anyone who's never been to that site before, be warned: It will make you laugh intensely and might consume hours of your time.
@ beylita
My compliments on your citing Missile Command in the conversation. It's a game (an arcade title, no less) where the story actually makes sense since it can only logically end upon the inevitable destruction of everything. Brilliant.
@Ivan M.
Ah! The Gran Turino example sunk it in for me. I was missing your point. And I agree with your example of economic origins with arcade game. But I still see traditional prose narrative as having some similar moments in the past. I was merely using it as an example of how one medium was able to transcend this trip, and that I think video games are capable of it, as well.
Also, I really like this discussion of game design embracing Man vs. Fate in a game which can only end in defeat like Missile Command (Anyone see that episode of Chuck? Awesome.) On another blog, I argued that an excellent survival horror game would only end in defeat, forcing you to continue playing using the only characters still alive. I'm excited to see that this is basically the design behind Dead Space: Extraction (which is getting excellent reviews), and I really want to play it to see how it works for the story.
@JT
Haha! I felt the same way playing Half-Life 2 :-)
The term "4X" stands for "explore, expand, exploit, and exterminate".
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The Harvest Moon games manage to be different than the usual "go kill stuff" video game... how much "story" they have is debatable, but it's definitely a different kind of experience than, say, Super Mario Bros. or Halo.
@Doug S.
Ah! I'm playing Little King's Story at the moment. Sounds like it fits the bill nicely. Thanks!
@ Alan Jack
Ah, I misread what you wrote; thought you meant the story aspect rather than the merger of story AND gameplay.
I wonder how all of you think this discussion applies to Fallout 3, a game I have been heavily enjoying lately. While there is a main plot that you can follow from point A to B to C, the world is open with a sickening amount of optional content.
Since the protagonist in this game is you, as opposed to some predefined character, it seems that if you decide to ignore searching for your father and simply explore the world with whatever goals you may have in mind, you end up with a very dynamic story.
For example, I have been traveling around trying to help good people while ridding the world of bad people while they sleep. When I enter a new area, there is no NEED for me to go through that area to progress my tale; if I am overwhelmed, I can leave, and my story travels with me. Is this not a good marriage of story and gameplay?
Additionally, might this be a good example of gameplay with characteristics of both Man vs Self and Man vs Fate? While at times you fight against specific men and factions in Fallout 3, in general you are fighting against the post-apocalyptic world that has been spawned from nuclear war. And, though it may be a bit of a stretch, since you are forced to make difficult decisions in this world, and a great deal of the game focuses on determining what manner of person you are, perhaps this could be your Man vs Self?
Branden: I'd contend that that sort of emergent story through self-actualization of character is sort of how stories have been told in games since Asteroids. Fallout just makes it more clear and doesn't try to hem it in the way say, Final Fantasy 7 did (Not to knock FF7 - it was a great game, but it was a game with two stories, one the player was writing and one that the developers were writing. To its credit, they were both pretty powerful). I'd suggest trying to think of conflict and story in a broader concept. Man vs. Man, Man vs. Self and Man vs. Fate are all "reader" imparted qualities given to struggles a character engages in. They're less things which define aspects of the story and more qualifiers that you're applying in order to categorize those aspects. The character is experiencing events simultaneously without considering where their conflict lies (Russian moderns aside) and in a good game you become the character. You're losing yourself in the narrative and making a story as you play.
Try thinking of each game you play in the context of a poem. If you read Byron you're going to get a poem with a "narrative" focus, but your experience with Tenneson is going to differ from anyone else's. If you read Simic or Mayhew there's still going to be a narrative there, but it won't be quite as overt as Byron's and as a result your experience as a reader is going to increase in importance in determining whether or not Simic is discussing a fork in his kitchen or in a National Geographic magazine spread. By interpretting a work you're creating a story - you just become more aware of the way you do it the less structure you're given, the less obvious a "correct" answer is. In The Path, for example, you're inserting your own story into a game world without an overt structure holding it together. You're doing the same thing in Fallout 3, but with additional structure and goals to make the experience less overwhelming. I'd suggest moving past the idea of codifying conflicts and taking a cue from most of the lit-crit which followed structuralism - consider the stories games tell as a cooperative effort between "readers" and "writers" and not as proscribed stories with right and wrong answers. Every conflict reflects both inward and outward: you can't draw a line between self and other and expect it to stick.
Jonathan Blow is a smart man.
Re: Emily's comment, I'm a little surprised that no one has brought up James Clinton Howell's analysis of Metal Gear Solid 2, "Driving off the Map" (http://www.deltaheadtranslation.com/MGS2/DOTM_TOC.htm). In it he illustrates the separation between "narrative" and "formal" measures of success, and how the way these match up (or fail to) can help to define and support the themes of a work.
Also, the whole thing is great, and every time I read it I feel a little bit more like a fraud for calling myself a critic even though I haven't done anything close to this.
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