ELL EEE UTT
and the Diagetes
Newsletter #222
With it being the summer and the season for all things distracting, from minor holidays to our sons’ extra-curricular pursuits, we’d had a busy couple month leading into July, but things slowed down this week, and for that I’m grateful. We got to relax and catch up on some of our entertainment backlog(s) this week, had the time and energy to jump around and sample a lot of the things we’d missed or been missing.
Y’all know gaming is a big part of my leisure time, and we’ve finally entered a nice, wide release window that should carry through the New Year. I have a lot of thoughts about the predatory pricing of Grand Theft Auto VI, Sony’s move away from physical media, and other gaming-related bombs that hit the industry over the last few weeks, but those all feel like they need their own space to breathe, so I’ll grapple with those later. For now, there are a handful of forthcoming games that I’m excited about, and the first of those was The Adventures of Elliot: The Millenium Tales. It’s a narratively simple game that’s nonetheless mechanically complex in plot execution, but that’s not really the draw for this game, anyway, which is that it’s a charming Zelda-like adventure that hearkens in particular to the 16-bit Super Nintendo adventure A Link to the Past (1991) in narrative, presentation, and play. It’s a game for the kid in you, a refreshing thing in an increasingly dour video game landscape of space marines, firearms, and gnashing digital teeth. The only minor complaint I have against it is really one shared amongst gaming at large: it takes a little bit longer than it should to get going.
Most of the AAA games I play tend to come from longer form or open-ended genres - RPGs, open-world action, survival - with play times in the dozens (if not hundreds) of hours. A tutorial or early-game training area that takes up an hour or two of game time is not all that notable relative to the volume of material it forewords. At the same time, the frequent incongruity of the video game tutorial in relation to the rest of the game (and narrative as a whole) is notable and damaging. Elliot’s slow intro isn’t entirely a tutorial issue as it does a pretty good job of striking a balance between having the player do things and telling the player how to do those things; most of its pacing is slowed by exposition. As with all things, though, there is a demonstrable balance amongst all elements of media in the best examples of that media. In gaming, that balance must be struck amongst various lingual systems competing for the player’s attention: narrative, mechanics, and instruction.
Star Wars:Squadrons is the best recent example of this systemic balance that I can conjure. The game’s narrative, which flip flops between the Empire, Rebellion, and the very different literal mechanics of their various starfighters. The game has a lot of heavy lifting to do in terms of teaching the player all of the various tools and how to use them in approaching the gaming loop’s many challenges. Squadrons chooses to do this diagetically and organically; it doesn’t even relay some of its mechanics to the player until deep into the single-player campaign, and always in the form of another character teaching the player the mechanic within the context of the need to use that mechanic. “Drifting” ie hitting top speed and then killing your engines on a hard turn becomes a fairly important defensive measure in the Squadrons late game, but you don’t learn it until it makes sense in the narrative for you to do so. It’s not bundled up in a tutorial at the front end of the game where you’ll likely forget it exists before you ever actually need it, it worked into the game in such a way that feels organic and even serves the narrative in the sense that it creates an emotional connection to the other characters in squadron.
Games have a few more hurdles to clear when it comes to getting a narrative off the ground than a novel or movie, and the biggest of those are setting their worlds and teaching players how to occupy those world. Doing so in a diagetic manner seems like the only way to go.
Y’all have a good week; be kind to yourself and others, and maybe go watch Jurassic Park. I already miss Sam Neill.
Wado!