BioShock has, for the past two years, been the benchmark by which I measure player narrative in video games. The reason is that it, unlike any other title I’ve played, was aware of and comfortable with commenting on the fact that it is a video game with a definite sequence of objectives that must be completed to progress through and ultimately finish the game. This is where the famous “Would you kindly?” reveal comes from. You are eventually told that this is a control trigger, which forces you to do the thing that a person tells you if they preface their request with “would you kindly?” For example, the first instance of this come in the games opening scenes, in which the bathosphere in which you arrive in Rapture (the underwater dystopia that serves as the game’s setting) is attacked by splicers. A voice comes over the com and says, “Would you kindly pick up that short-wave radio?” The radio is highlighted on the walls of the vessel, and there is no way to progress past this point without picking up that radio, which enables you to communicate with various characters over the course of the game. The “would you kindly” is a trigger, forcing you to execute this specific action. You can, of course, refuse to do this, but there is no way to continue the game if you do not.

In this way, BioShock implicitly acknowledges that, in the confines in the game’s system of objectives, and it’s moral choice element notwithstanding, there really is no free will in games beyond the initial decision to play the game or not. In order to progress, you must work through the scripted sequence of events the game has laid out. BioShock was, I’m sure, not the first game to play with this idea, but it was first one I played. If “a master chooses; a slave obeys” then the implication is that everyone who plays a video game is, in effect, a slave to the narrative parameters of that game.

And then last week I played Modern Warfare 2. While conceptually and philosophically the games are very dissimilar, it shows the same attention to the idea of player agency and objective. The most interesting scene is question is titled “No Russian.” You play as an undercover CIA operative tasked with infiltrating a ring of Russian extremists. You are told to do whatever it necessary to gain their trust. The scene opens on an ascending elevator, and you witness four other armored men preparing large, fully automatic machine guns. When the elevator finally opens, it does so onto a crowded Russian airport. The men you’re with proceed to massacre unarmed civilians. You have the option to either join in or to hang back and not fire a bullet at all. But whether or not you decide to engage in the violence yourself at this point, you are required to walk along with the men as they are murdering, witness to the carnage. There is an illusion of player agency here. You can elect to shoot or not, but you are still culpable in the deaths of these people, as the events at the end of this scene detail.

Activision, who published the game, claims that it is possible to get through the level without firing a single shot. Once you get outside the airport, they send in SWAT-style teams to take down your team. It is at this point that the game prompts you, the player, to switch to your grenade launcher to take out the heavily-shielded police. So, whether or not its technically possible to complete the level without firing a shot, the game seems to nevertheless anticipate or expect you to engage with the enemies here. I waited for several minutes to see if my teammates would take care of the advancing policemen, but I had the distinct impression that I was not doing what the game had designed for me to do. Animations repeated, the other characters failed to gain ground. Moreover, even that term ‘enemies’ has little impact here. Because of the heroic inversion the scene places on you, you become the antagonist, and the police, who assume the heroic role, are against you. And the game expects you to shoot them. It’s an intensely foreign and uncomfortable game experience.

So, in this way, Modern Warfare 2 rejects the expectations of an action shooter. Instead of a hero, you, in effect, become a villain. And, what’s more, you are a villain who does not have the option to not be villainous. Like in BioShock, you are a slave to the objectives of the game. It’s an incredibly smart scene, especially coming from an American developer who is making a game about America’s potential role in global conflicts. Instead of a jingoistic, American-centric piece of propaganda, Infinity Ward, the game’s developer, literally forces players to engage with the actions and ideologies of the purported enemy faction.

I think the scene could have actually gone much further with this idea, but a scene of this power coming in a game with as much market penetration as this game will have signals to me that there is a shifting paradigm in game design philosophy.

The next logical step for me seems to be embodied by next year’s Heavy Rain, which will actually take into account the consequences of minute player actions in a branching narrative that evolves as you play it according to the way that you play it. In essence, you could progress through the eight to ten hours the game takes to complete and only see a fraction of all of the narrative actually produced for the game because individual actions close off other options to the player.

Of course, the idea of a fully organic narrative experience in a game is likely never going to be realized. There will always be parameters and limits as the directions a story can take. Games like BioShock and Modern Warfare 2 have played with ideas of player agency and control, and Heavy Rain seems to be taking into account the role of consequence and causality.

This changeable, player-affected narrative is to place that I think video games will truly differentiate themselves from the more traditional storytelling mediums of books and films. We came face to face with our narrative enslavement in BioShock, were confronted with our actions in Modern Warfare 2, and Heavy Rain seems set to show us there the limits and parameters of game narrative can and should be variable.

Games are starting to get interesting. Despite some recent criticism (the bad kind, not the argumentative kind) on behalf of writers such as Steven Johnson (whose book Everything Bad is Good for You gets games just completely wrong, despite arguing that they may not be, after all, completely bad for you), video games are beginning to find ways to tell singular narratives that only function effectively in a video game. Hideo Kojima wants his Metal Gear Solid series to be a cinematic experiences, but in trying to make his games filmic, he sacrifices some of their, to use a pretty clumsy noun, gameness.

I have an unabashed love for BioShock. Even though the final boss was completely lame, and even though I felt like the narrative peaked about three-quarters through the game, what that game did with narrative and player agency is better than anything I’ve ever seen in a video game. The story plays with the core concept of a video game–meaning, that the player, more or less, must do a series of tasks in a sequence to accomplish the ultimate goal of the game. Meaning that, to accomplish to goal, to progress in the game, the player really has no choice but to play the game. A man chooses, a slave obeys, as goes Andrew Ryan’s Randian dogma. But, in games, as much as current developers proselytize about the necessity of player choice, really, the player has already chosen to act through the events of the game. BioShock plays with that very foundational concept, and the narrative payoff is incredible.

Other games are finding different ways of telling stories. I’ve been playing this nifty little iPhone game called Spider: The Secret of Bryce Manor. In summary, you play as a spider who can construct webs across various domestic levels to trap insects of various kinds that have infested an abandoned house. And on that level, the game is perfectly serviceable and enjoyable. But the backgrounds themselves, the levels across which the player is guiding the spider, tell the macabre story of what happened to the Bryce family, and why this house now stands empty. For instance, the spider may crawl over a wicker basket, only to fall in and discover a bloody chisel resting hidden at the bottom. What happened with that chisel? Those questions and the environmental answers make up the passive narrative of the game. It’s really well done.

Consumable narratives have long been the purview of films and books; games are just now beginning to catch up, evolving past the kill-fest point-a-thons of early gaming, and evolving into a discreet vessel for the delivery of narrative, narratives that can affect players in ways that conventional narrative types cannot.

This post could go on for pages and pages, discussing the emotional investment in Ico, the character drama of Final Fantasy VII, the sprawling story-driven worlds of Oblivion and Fallout 3, the allegorical masterpiece of Braid. But, in the interest of space and the author’s wrists, I’ll stop here and proclaim, loudly across the internets, that it’s a good time to be a gamer. We’re seeing a renaissance of narrative execution. And it’s only going to get better from here.

Presenting the Minnesota Colleges & Universities English and Writing (MnCUEW) conference tomorrow. My presentation is called “Talking Across Our Boundaries: A Case for Creative Nonfiction.” It seems that the conference committe is just as frazzled and disorganized as I feel, so perhaps my nerves are unjustified. Still, nerves aside, I’m going with three good friends, so if nothing else the night day will end with good company and Malaysian food. The presentation is about the importance of the personal essay in the undergraduate English curriculm as an impetus for students to examine their lives as texts in progress that are worthy of interpretation. It’s all very cool, and, weirdly, reading over the paper for the millionth time today got me thinking about Twitter. I just recently started using it. If you like, you can find me here.

I avoided it for awhile, partly because it seemed to me to be a rather arrogant way of telling the world what you’re doing all the time, and I thought that all of twitter was just millions of people speaking their lives into an empty vacuum. But, as usual, I was wrong.

I like to think of Twitter as micro-blogging. It’s not so much a soapbox from which to spew the minutia of your life (although some certainly do use it in that way) but it is also at once an exercise in writing efficiently–posts are limited strictly to 140 characters–and a way to network quickly in a way that more traditional application like facebook can’t accomodate.

Booting up my own page, I see a professor commenting about the jazz concert on campus this evening, a student responding to that professor to ask about homework help, a woman I’ve never met in need of writing encouragement, comic writer Brian Michael Bendis pimping David Mack’s art gallery in Portland, a friend annoucing to the campus that the school newspaper will be printed a little later than normal, and another friend asking for a ride home for easter.

Of course, I haven’t learned all of the various ins and outs of it, but I like the fact that at once I can see news from friends far away, posts about the town I live in, tweets from artists whose work I respect, a geek tour of Jon Favreau’s house, and a link to an article about the two Truman Scholars we have on campus.

On a writerly level, I love the idea of tweets as micro-narratives. Consider this post:

My dad has put me in a bad mood by telling me I’m in a bad mood. Because, shocker, he’s in a bad mood. Stony silence at the Green Mill.

I love that the constraints of the space force writers to construct very precise prose like this. In less than 140 characters, this writer has told us a complete story. We have characters, setting, conflict–all of the ingredients of narrative. It’s this kind of post that I enjoy reading the most–we get a story of what’s going on in the life of that person, told with brevity, subtlty, and force. I love that possibility. Jonathan Carroll uses his page as a miniature version of his fantastic blog to great effect this way.

I don’t mean to suggest that the internet has ruined our appetite for long-form narrative (like, you know, books and stuff), but I think there is something to be said for tight, concise representations of life. Each tweet is a personal essay in miniature, and if we examine them rhetorically, those 140 characters can tell us volumes about the person writing them.

If you’re looking for more micro-narratives, I would recommend fmylife.com and grouphug.us. Both sites functional similarly in that each post attempts to tell a story in as small of a space as possible, but the content on each site is drastically different in terms of rhetorical agenda and craft. Both are worth your time.

The internet is changing the way that we tell our own personal narratives–each new social networking site is a blank slate onto which we can create alternate identities by the ways in which we frame our own narrative.

That gets me really excited.

Happy tweeting! See you in the tubes.

It was K’s birthday today, so we took the night off.  No homework, no research.  I spent the afternoon reading Bone and napping, and we ate in Alexandria with friends, one of whom who had traveled from the coast.  Then we had to hop across the street to get in line for Quantum of Solace.

I hate movie theaters.

Seriously, if there is a hell, it’s a movie theater like the one we were in tonight.  The thing about theaters is, they’d be great if it weren’t for all of the people.  It was packed, and we had to sit way off to the side and way in front, with a bunch of loud kids in the front row, someone with a laser pointer in the back, and, I swear, the couple behind may as well have bought one ticket because they were in the same seat the whole time.  Come on, kids.  Why do you pay eight dollars to sit in the dark with strangers and make-out?

Oh.

But still.

Go see Madagascar 2 or something, and leave me and Bond in peace, or at least quit pressing against the back of my fucking chair.  I would have been a lot more upset had the movie been worth a crap, but after Casino Royale, this new movie was disappointing.  I might do a review of it soon, but for now it’s late and I didn’t like it.  It felt empty.  Bond has been reduced to a generic action hero, and yes, I understand that it’s a revenge picture, the logical product of the events of the last film, but does that mean it has to be bland?  It needed to be both shorter and longer, for different reasons.

Drove home in the dark and the snow behind cars going slower than they needed to, talking about our friend who invents people, and the things we had done.  Rock Band until one in the morning while the owners of the house slept upstairs, and now I’m home and tired.  Right.  Bed now.