ARGs aren’t just for pirates

If I learned anything from Chris Crawford, it’s that I need to start referencing my own name in my writing on a more frequent basis. Classy.

Anyway, there were some interesting, if not jarring, juxtapositions in this week’s reading. I was cruising along, enjoying my time with Robert McKee’s dissection of the various elements of drama, followed by Crawford’s thoughts on storytelling, thinking, “Yeah. I can get behind what these guys are saying. Of course the fundamentals of dramatic storytelling are rooted in a character’s life story, a carefully crafted plot and a consistent sense of reality. Yup, beats flowing into scenes into sequences into acts into stories which bring about irreversible change – that sounds about right when it comes to structuring a narrative. And sure, spatial concerns have little place in classical storytelling, I can buy that.”

Then I played Facade.

First off, everything about the narrative experience in Facade (crude as it is) is rooted in spatial relationships. While playing, I was constantly aware of my proximity to the other two characters; at times, just a few steps towards one character or another resulted in a completely different emotional beat and, hence, a different scene. Walking up to the bar or kitchen or wall hanging each triggered distinct exchanges, all resulting in new character cues.

Facade 1, Crawford 0.

That said, while I may have been a bit skeptical of Crawford’s words as I played Facade, I was much more willing to accept the majority of McKee’s assertions as I fired it up for the first time. Specifically, McKee’s initial point — that story design is intricately tied to the unraveling fate of one’s protagonist — led me to assume that the character I’d be playing would be the game’s ‘hero,’ that the designers had built a narrative experience around me.

In actuality, I ended up the character actor — that guy who wanders in from off-camera, intruding on someone else’s story, who then leaves (I got kicked out a lot) before the scene’s up. It wasn’t my story, which was actually a pretty cool realization and not necessarily inconsistent with McKee’s breakdown of story design.

Thinking about the Facade experience further, and reflecting on it against the ARGs we’ve been looking at, it seems that most ARG experiences are of a similar ilk. They all appear to be based on players entering other peoples’ (i.e. non-player characters’) stories as ‘character actors,’ not as the protagonists themselves (e.g. The Beast, I Love Bees, Lost).  Is that really the case?   Anyone have any counter examples?

While I think I agree with McKee’s definitions of plotting and general storytelling, I’d be interested to see how they hold up against an interactive narrative that positions the player him or herself as protagonist, when a rich backstory is impossible (or at least more difficult) to fabricate for said character.

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