Women running

I’m being naïve and disorganized, but at least I posted something this week.

Call me slow, but recently I realised how similar DICE’s Mirror’s Edge is to the 1998 German film “Lola Rennt” (“Run Lola Run” for English folks). Not only do they both feature running female leads, but the way the narrative is handled in Lola Rennt is somewhat similar to how gameplay is handled (or supposed to be handled) in Mirror’s Edge.

<!– @page { size: 21cm 29.7cm; margin: 2cm } P { margin-bottom: 0.21cm } –>First, an introduction of the two is perhaps required. Mirror’s Edge is a recently released game for the XBox 360 and the PlayStation 3. The game has attracted quite a bit attention for its simplistic art direction and the unconventional use of the first person perspective for a platformer game (Replace platformer with puzzle and it sounds an awful lot like Portal). The game only takes around six hours to complete, intending the player will replay the game to improve their level times (akin to a racing game).

Lola Rennt is a German movie about a woman who has to get her hands on a large sum of money and get it to her boyfriend who owes money to the mod. She only has about half an hour to get to her boyfriend with the money. The twist of the film is that this story is played three times, with the same starting scenario, but with wildly different outcomes depending on seemingly insignificant events such as Lola getting hindered or helped by various people.

So both Mirror’s Edge and Lola Rennt features an “iterative” sort of view on game play and story, respectively. Replaying a level over and over in order to beat it is of course no strange thing for a seasoned gamer, but how often is a level replayed so that later levels will be different (or compete in a meta-game such as the Mirror’s Edge leaderboards)? There are of course examples of this. The first two Thief games allowed you to steal valuables in one level, and use the money earned to buy better equipment for the next. Many role playing games, such as Baldur’s Gate, limits the ability to perform all quests based on what characters were killed or refused to speak with the character because of previous actions. Interactive stories that are popular in Japan, often focusing on wooing attractive ladies, allow for quite many endings compared to their playthrough length.

The problem with many games that offer at least some replayability is that the impacts of the choices a player makes are often rigid or binary. A huge commercial game that touts multiple endings turns out to base the ending movie clip shown on choices performed the last minutes of the game; choices that are obviously “good” or “bad”, and loading a save game a few minutes back allows the player to see all possible endings. There are few games that truly run their own little “worlds”, where most action prompt apparently non-scripted reactions. The reason is of course that it takes a lot of time to make a 20+ hour game with an engine that allows for myriads of emergent behaviours. Another problem is of course making the game so varied that the player actually wants to play through it all once more, and not being able to see all possible endings a couple of minutes away from a certain save point. But why do games really need to be more than 20 hours long? What about a game that can be “completed” in a few hours on a Friday evening?

In Valve’s Left4Dead, each game (presented as a film) only takes around an hour and a half, and each playthrough is different because of the AI Director randomizing things. Still, the ending is binary: Survival or Death, with the game allowing restarts if the survivors did not make it. This is very similar to the single player aspect of Mirror’s Edge: if you made it to the end of a level, the next level starts. A player who does not care for online leaderboards will only get the six hours out of the game. Almost all games are only concerned with whether you beat it or not, if you were not in time to save the princess, you have failed and will never see the drama unfold in a different way.

Some games are more about encouraging replayability over content than others. The genre that allows for the most open story-telling is in fact strategy and management games such as SimCity or Sid Meier’s Civilization. On a randomized map, with differing rival factions and multiple victory conditions, each game becomes a different story told to the player. Each Civilization player is sure to have their own stories of triumphs and failures. Another game worth mentioning is Façade, an interactive story where the player has to mediate between a husband and a wife having a fight, where them breaking up really is not a failure in itself.

The Interactive Story "Façade"

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The question I would like to ask is: “Will we ever see (commercial) video games, that are short, highly replayable, featuring a world where each choice is important and triggers a response?” Perhaps the technical hurdle will be too high for some, but there already are some crude precursors. If game developers can sacrifice game length for open-ended choices, it is more than possible. A video game where the goal is playing the game and interacting with a world, not beating it to see the ending clip, would be more than welcomed by me.