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God of War - The Gaming Equivalent Of 'Twilight'?
Emotional pandering, or heartfelt exploration of the human condition? I examine the power of emotion-driven narrative, alongside other forms of engagement, and how to maximize your hordes of dogmatic fans while keeping the haters to a minimum.
What?!?!
The fantasy of little girls meets the fantasy of little boys. Sure, they are widely praised for their respective media, but both have seen their share of criticism for shoddy storytelling and excessive pandering to our base emotions (ie love and... the love for violence). From a classical academic perspective, one might scoff at such entertainment as a thing for fools and brigands. But are we the fools for underestimating their power?
Having completed GoW 3 recently, I finally took a look at the criticisms Extra Credits has of God of War 2 and 3, claiming they have no redeeming value. Seemed a bit harsh, and as I thought about it further it reminded me of the many scathing critiques of the Twilight series. Perhaps they are not so different as they appear.
So in the interest of furthering our narrative and designing skills, and to challenge conventional wisdom, let us delve further into the many ways our entertainment media push our buttons and pick our pockets.
Guilty Pleasures
Both series are works of fantasy in the purest sense of the word. They are all about telling a story through which the audience can vicariously experience an emotionally-charged adventure. In particular, they deal with the theme of giving in to temptation and primal urges, with stories structured around embracing and acting upon one's innermost desires.
Each story revolves around a central object of intense emotional weight.
For Twilight, it is Edward, the ultimate object of attraction for Bella and the most perfect man she could imagine. She is drawn to him so much that she is willing to give up everything and do anything to be with him. For Kratos, it was his betrayers - first Ares, and later the rest of the Olypian Gods and even the Titans. As each one used him for their own ends, his rage only grew, to the point where he ended up all but destroying the world in the pursuit of his vengeance. While Twilight didn't get quite as epic in scope, the focus on a single, intense emotion was a cornerstone of both stories.
As powerful as this kind of story can be in stimulating audiences, often it ends up being a double edged sword. On one hand, it creates a story that lends itself to great theatrics and spectacle, as the protagonist displays extraordinary ambition driven by intense feelings. It satisfies a certain fundamental need of every person to be able to express their emotions freely, without having to hold back, without fear of judgement or consequences. At the same time, however, it also creates a sense of momentum to the work that can be to the detriment of more thoughtful moments of exposition.
The challenge, therefore, is in weighing the merits of committing to one technique of engagement, to create a perhaps small but enthusiastic following, or balance several in the hopes of attracting a larger audience.
Dimensions of Engagement
When it comes down to it, the real reason Twilight has so many haters is because it lacks intellectual depth. There just isn't a good enough reason given why a 100 year old vampire would fall for a plain, ordinary young girl. It is the same thing that makes people scoff at movies like Transformers, which feature amazing special effects but not such an amazing plot. These are cases of where the creators of these works have heavily committed, and perhaps over committed, to a specific dimension of engagement.
To really understand the strengths and pitfalls of different approaches to engagement, I have come up with three basic categories, or dimensions of engagement that roughly encompass different approaches to attracting audiences, both in interactive and non-interactive media.
Reptilian
The simplest and most basic form of engagement from which all others arise. It's the simple joy of watching explosions, pressing buttons, or popping bubblewrap. It is our innate reaction to intrinsically amusing things. In films and other visual media, this is typically what Plato referred to as Spectacle, or the audio-visual experience of the work.dy.
This guy is not fooling anybody.
The equivalent in games is often the mechanics. Every game has mechanics, though the degree to which these mechanics take center stage varies from one title to the next. On one end of the spectrum you have games like Heavy Rain with only rudimentary mechanics, all the way to Farmville, where the experience is almost entirely about interacting with the mechanics, with no real narrative in the traditional sense.
At its heart, Reptilian engagement is about the simple manipulation of expectations. For noninteractive visual media this often came in the form of subversion of those expectations, or surprises. But interactive media, or even interactive experiences, hold their own intrinsic joys. Whether you are turning a key to turn on a car, or hitting a button to attack an enemy, the core enjoyment of the experience is the same.
Every game has Reptilian engagement at varying levels, some more than others. Those that leverage this dimension the most tend to be casual/facebook games and MMOs. People do not go to Cityville to be brought to tears, or to expand their mind, but to scratch an itch to see their dream city come to fruition. Likewise, plenty of MMO players all but ignore the narrative of their game to do quests and get increasingly better rewards. Both are motivated by very simple desires, to watch the call and response between themselves and the game, and to cherish each small magic purple cow reward they get.needs their fix.
Every junkie needs their fix.
Cranial
Once patterns start becoming complex, we enter into the realm of Cranial engagement. While reptilian engagement is about observing cause and effect, Cranial engagement is about going under the hood and understanding the system that governs what we observe. Whether that means picking up on subtle hints and clues in a murder mystery, lateral thinking to solve a puzzle, or predicting an opponent's intentions and crafting a clever counter-strategy, it is all about analyzing and deconstructing patterns in our mind.
It is typically the dimension that most readily allows us to suspend disbelief and become immersed in a work of fiction. Once we understand the social, political, or perhaps even physical rules that help govern the world and circumstances of the plot, we are better able to make predictions about what might happen and what is possible. If characters act in a way that is contrary to these "rules" laid out at the outset, we are more likely to be pulled out of the experience and question it.
In terms of gameplay, Cranial engagement is about balancing predictability with probability. It should be predictable enough so one could confidently say "my Immortals will totally wreck his Mech army" in Starcraft 2, for instance, but with just enough unpredictability (such as the choices of another human being) as to not make the predicted outcome inevitable.