Pulling back the curtain

Michael Douglas as Nicholas van Orton in The Game by David Fincher

“I don't care about the money. I'm pulling back the curtain. I want to meet the wizard.” -  Nicholas van Orton

Jesse Schell at the Game Development Conference (GDC)

After I saw Jesse Schell's lecture at GDC on The Nature of Order in Game Narrative I was intrigued. Intrigued because Schell gives the viewer a guideline of what kind of patterns they can use in the creation for their game when it comes to narrative. I believe that these patterns can also be used to analyze narrative in video games and in so doing as an analyst or tester you can "pull back the curtain". Unlike Nicholas van Orton though, I am not a millionaire and I do care about the money. There is business to be made and I will tell you why.

I believe narrative is an often overlooked part of video games for creators and critics alike and that it, just like any other feature of software, can be subjected to thorough analysis and measurements of quality. Through analogy, one of language's great tools, the techniques and methods used for software testing and quality assurance can also be applied to narrative in software. 

Probably, video games are not the only place where narrative can be found in software, but for the sake of this case study I limit myself to video games. Having said that, the video game industry is no small player in the entertainment market and has easily surpassed the movie- and sportindustry. No small feat for an industry that is barely fifty years old and. In other words, there is still plenty material to choose from and analyze. 

The gaming industry is not stalling in its growth either. More and more people turn to games for entertainment and corona and its ramifications have only exacerbated this development. Knowing this, it makes all the more sense for quality assurance and its affiliated business and activities to turn its gaze towards the gaming industry. But why try and build a framework and toolkit to "test" narrative? 

Need I say more?

Story-driven games are big. The greatest hits of the last decade all feature narrative as one of their most appealing, if not key, components. The Grand Theft Auto series, The Witcher series, the Uncharted series, the God of War series and so on are all build around a plot that lures the player into coming back for more. As a player you want to know what happens next. Mere gameplay cannot accomplish this, or at least not for everyone.

The gaming audience is becoming more diverse and those who would have turned to Netflix a few years back may be expected to pick up a controller from time to time nowadays. Even though the medium may have changed, the desire to engage in a different world is still prevalent albeit that there is now a heightened sense of control. 

So why test narrative in video games and not in movies or series? The answer is simple yet non-conclusive: there is interaction in video games and there is not in movies or series (with the very rare exception like Black Mirror's Bandersnatch). However, that does not mean that the patterns that Schell uses cannot also be applied to narrative in other media than video games. And it also doesn't mean that the theoretical framework and toolkit that I describe in the following posts cannot be adapted to fit the needs of say a movie critic.

Black Mirror's Bandersnatch advert

Again, I wish to limit myself to a particular scope in order to be able to connect the framework to practical applications. Otherwise, this exercise wouldn't go much further than lingering in theorizations and pipe dream philosophies. As Nicholas van Orton in David Fincher's The Game I too want to pull back the curtain to unveil the mechanics of story telling. I don't suspect to meet a wizard of any kind, but let's see what we run into.

As a case study I will use Guerrilla Games' Horizon Zero Dawn and as mentioned before I will sketch a theoretical framework using Jesse Schell's patterns which I will further elaborate on in the following post. For now the key points of this post are:

• the video game industry is big and growing
• the audience for video games is becoming more diverse
• successful video games are increasingly more often story-driven
• testing narrative in video games makes sense