Aristotle was not a Game Designer

This week gamesindustry.biz published an interesting article by legendary game designer Warren Spector, in which he talks about universal rules for game design. Even though the text doesn’t contain completely new findings or revolutionary statements, he addresses one problem that I find is worth some more attention. In his last point Spector writes about the issue of “time” in narrative games:

First off: I don’t think that Aristotle took games into consideration when he wrote about the structure of ancient Greek plays. Doesn’t it make a huge difference, whether the audience watches a play or movie or reads a book passively or if they actively take part in the story? This, for me, is still one of the biggest problems when it comes to story in games. We try to impose established story structures on games without properly adapting them to our medium.

Three-Act Structure

Are we really good at this? And if so, why? Because we rely on techniques of another medium, namely movies, to present a stunning cutscene? From my head I can remember exactly one really good beginning and one really good ending that were not just cutscenes: The beginning of The Last of Us and the ending of Red Dead Redemption. Of course there are some more beginnings and endings that are quite ok, but to me it feels like cheating when most games don’t even try to bring some interactivity to these particular parts. So in my humble opinion we as an industry still have a lot to improve to create intros and endings that embrace the key strengths of our medium.
But the main problem, and that’s where I totally agree with Spector, is the part in between:

This could be one of the reasons why so many players never see the end of a game. We lose their interest in this never-ending second act. Personally, I hate it to not finish a game that I started. But I get so bored by games like Assassin’s Creed – that stretch their narrative over dozens of hours without letting the plot make relevant progress – that I did not finish any of the series’ last installments.

While I fully agree with Spector, I think it’s kind of funny that he doesn’t see an answer for the problem, even though he mentions one briefly. He compares the scope of games with seasons in television. And this comparison hits the nail on the head! Due to their expected length games are much closer to TV series than to the average 90 minutes Hollywood movie or a typical stage play. Which brings us back to the three act structure and Aristotle: It simply isn’t made for stories of this length! Television has found much better structures for this purpose over the last decades. Daily soaps and prime time serials like Lost, Breaking Bad and many others are using them with great success. So, what’s the difference to the three act structure?

Tiered story structure

Image sources:

Originally posted on my blog: http://designing-games.com/