Transcript "Are Videogames About Their Mechanics (Idea Channel)"
Okay, so you're playing Fable2 and you're just working your butt off at the black smith so you can finally afford that master Katana and Mage's Cloak. You're ready to hit Vengence road looking for baddies. When you find them, you expertly shift between surround and targetted attacks, you fire a few shots from your flintlock pistol and end the whole thing with a masterful Katana-fulled chain attack. You collect experience, drink a potion and reward your dog Bonehead with a treat for all of his hard work. Each action and it's results in this scenario - from laboring and spell casting, to experience gathering and potion drinking - is connected to a mechanic within the game.
Mechanics are a vague, but important concept in game design. On Gamestudies.org, Miguel Sicart offers one definition of mechanics as: "methods invoked by agents designed for interaction with the game state". In other words, a mechanic is a part of the design of a game that lets you do a thing. And they are in all games. Chess mechanics let knights move a certain way and describe how pieces are captured. Threes mechanics dictate that cards slide and value are added. Magic the Gathering mechanics say that casting costs are paid by tapping lands, which are then unusable until the start of your next turn. When you add all of the mechanics up, put them in a context and give the whole thing an experience, that is gameplay.
For someone to feel effective and therefore engaged in the gameplay, they have to learn the mechanics. They don't have to be great at them, they just have to know what they are. What I'm wondering is: how learning the mechanics of the game and getting better at it can possibly work against the storytelling of that game?
True, certain games, like Threes, chess, checkers and GO are almost pure mechanic... unless you read the game as a metaphor for something else, which maybe you do. There isn't much beyond the way the pieces relate to one another. In other words, chess doesn't tell a story as such. However, lots of games do tell stories. They have characters and scripts and themes and plots, and when do have those things, they necessarily - no and/ifs/or/buts - also deliver messages. Sometimes even morals. But especially big-budget AAA games with huge worlds, massive casts, and the skills trees, abilities and menu levels to match, I wonder if having to play by its rules can obfuscate story aspects?
Now, I'm not saying that all mechanics work against all story elements in every game all the time, but rather that as players of games, I think there is a common habit of focusing on mechanics. There are certain games that encourage that habit, but it is not nearly a fact of gaming. There's a big and weird tension between what we do as gamers and what is happening to the characters in the game world. My reflex as a player of games ihas always been to consider more closely what I must do in order to progress the dramatic action rather than the dramatic action itself.
[introduction Dan from Extra Credits]
Hello, my name is Dan. I'm from a show called Extra Credits. And earlier today actually, we were talking about a study that our writer James did, delving into why we might remember more of the mechanics moments in our games than the story. It goes along with a lot of what you were talking about here, although I think this problem maybe as much about how we've been trained to understand narrative both as players and designers, as it is about the distracting nature of the mechanics themselves. It's about this idea of game literacy. We're still thinking of games in the way we've been trained to think through television and film, rather than seeing that unique language that games have. It happened with films and comics to. It took a while for us as an audience to really internalize the new ways these media can express things. For example, we all intantly understand when a cut in film or TV signals a transition in thime or place, but even that was once a new technique the first time someone did it. And it probably confused quite a few people in the audience at first. That's sort of where we're at with games now.
[promotion for Extra Credits' episode on the Value of Games]
Going back to what we were discussing before: considering why we might think more about what we do, as opposed to what happens... like I remember that in WATCH_DOGES it's about revenge, that there's the double crossing guy at the beginning in the bank, and that Aiden has to lead hacks for him because of reasons. But I remember exactly what I did in so many missions: sneak - take out this guy - sneak - distract this other guy - climb - sneak - sniper rifle shoot the propane tank to scare this other other guy - why scare the other other guy? I have no idea! Because the menu item told me to.
In this all-too-familiar scenario I did so many more things, engaged with so many more of the game's mechanics than I did with its story elements. In playing them, we sometimes make games more about their mechanics than about their story elements, and therefore messages. [Clip from portal: "That's the proper reaction to being told that you've got braindamage."] This isn't always a bad thing and is true to a certain degree of pretty much every creative medium - dance, movies, music, painting, sculpture. They're all just as much about how their audience interacts with them as they are about the ideas that inspired their creation.
But, the audience isn't an active participant in those other things, at least, not nearly in the same way as they are with games, video games especially. Turning pages to read Ancillary Sword and going to a gallery to see Dan Flavin are important aspects of experiencing those things... but are different from navigating the menu to cast a spell on a Finaly Fantasy game or effectively gathering and managing resources in Starcraft. For some people, myself included, the process of getting good at those things can make Final Fantasy 8 less about how one is in control of their future, only insofar as they are capable of learning from the past and not strong-arming the future; and Starcraft less about the blurry line between right and wrong during combat, not only between warring sides but also within those sides themselves.
When games become more about what players do and less about what happens, talk about story, theme and message can start to feel secondary, even unnecessary. But world building, character defining, action driving, narrative elements fuel video games as an art form, experience giver and vehicle for meaning. And equally provide a document of the historical and cultural moment in which they were created. Media always reflect the conditions of its creation. The situations and dramatic action in games contribute to our understanding of the world, not just games.
Purposefully or not, when we privilege mechanics, we dismiss the capacity of games to contain mening beyond what is found in our practical interaction with them. Thinking of games as a collection of tasks is like thinking of a book as a collection of page turns. I think it also minimizes our role as players in the important critical process of the games industry. Once we've learned a game, feel expert at it, it's easy to forget what's beyond menu items and achievements and side quests. This, I think, is one source of the "it's just a game"-attitude that occurs in response to tons of games criticism. When games are viewed as a collection of actions, talking about the many other elements seems like a waste of breath.
In games, just like in life, it's only once we've learned to sufficiently perform the action that we are empowered to act out our values and goals. To be as Sicart said: "agents interacting with the game state". Those actions might have their own importance. Sure. But that importance is set inside a much more monstrous structure of meaning, intention and ideology. And that's just as true for Fable and Starcraft, as it is for Mario and Katamari.
What do you guys think? Is there this habit of privileging mechanics? And if there is, does it stop you from becoming engrossed in or critical of other aspects of video games? Let us know in the comments.
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