Inviting the Imagination: The Power of Words

Pictured above: ‘Sigil View’ by Fuflon, courtesy of deviantART.

A few weeks ago, Michael over at the Brainy Gamer wrote some final thoughts on his play-through of Planescape: Torment, a cRPG that many consider to be one of the best role-playing games to ever hit the PC. The beginning of his post caught my attention right away:

Planescape: Torment is a text-based RPG. True, it manages to squeeze every bit of isometric splendor out of Bioware’s Infinity Engine. And yes, the game occasionally treats you to a pre-rendered cutscene. But these are merely window dressing. Planescape: Torment places all its narrative eggs in one giant 800,000 word basket.

In this article I begin to explore the idea that photorealism in games ultimately detracts from immersion and gives players the feeling that the story and characters are contrived and un-real. I suggest that immersion and dramatic investment aren’t a product of good technologies, they are a product of good artisanship.

There can be no doubt that Michael is right here: Torment is predominantly a text-based RPG. And while I think the art and sound direction play a major role in the way the story is experienced (and should be talked about at some point), the game so heavily relies upon words alone. In major dialogue sequences (note, I didn’t say ‘action sequences’ or ‘cutscenes’), I’ve spent up to 20 minutes exploring the various facets of my character and the NPC I’m talking to through various dialogue choices. This was possibly the first cRPG I’ve played where many NPCs had a greater role than the average bulletin board. Rather than starting the conversation with ‘Hey X, I’m Y - could you retrieve Z for me and I’ll give you N gold?’, many NPCs begin their pleadings with a story. Some NPCs even tell stories (here I refer to the character “Reekwind”) for their own sake: simply to share something to a sympathetic ear. And while it’s obvious that listening to their stories will have some future gameplay benefit (such as gaining experience, or unlocking certain quests), there is something special in Chris Avellone’s writing that captures the imagination and makes us desire more of the stories-within-stories-within-stories.

So how does Torment manage to invite us to the extraordinary world of Planescape? One of the answers (and there are many of course) lies in details of the medium itself. Michael’s later comment, “Imagine a game with the narrative and thematic richness of PST…inside a Mass Effect or Oblivion engine…” caught my interest in that respect. Is that true? Would my experience of Torment have been the same (or better?) through the flashy cinematics and hyper-realism of a new 3D engine? Or - thinking in terms of film - why is Orson Welles’ War of the Worlds original radio drama still superior to the hundreds of millions spent on the modern remake by Steven Spielburg? Was the remake simply a botched job by an acclaimed director, or was there something more endemic to the radio drama itself that grabbed our imaginations by the cojones/ovarios and gave them a good shake?

Here are some of my thoughts in response to Michael’s:

Pictured above: Jim Henson puppet from children’s television series Fraggle Rock.

When I play Mass Effect and Oblivion, I often find myself paying more attention to the technical feats of the 3D engines than the story itself. The first time I experienced this kind of technical distraction was when I watched one of the new Star Wars films. Gone were the Jim Henson puppets and scaled miniatures, and in their place were high-poly renderings of space ships and Jabba the Hutt. The 3D “photorealism” that George Lucas attempted failed miserably for me, and I spent most of my time distracted by imperfections in the animation and the rather stilted ways in which living and non-living characters interacted.

When I play Mass Effect, as say compared to the old Wing Commander computer games, the experience is almost identical. In Wing Commander: Privateer, you spend much of the game exploring and satisfying quest requirements, just as you do in Mass Effect. However, being almost 15 years older, Privateer’s technical feats are humble at best. Instead of the cinematic and high resolution dialogue sequences we see in ME, the dialogues in Privateer consist of random mouth movements and duplicated character art - the bartenders on each planet are physically identical, only wearing different wigs for instance. Despite that (and later I will say ‘because of that’), when my character in Privateer speaks there is something unmistakably *human* about his speech. My expectations of Privateer are lower in terms of realism of course, but as such I become free to focus on what the character means or is feeling and not what s/he is doing, or looks like as s/he is doing it. And similarly, my imagination is freed in the original Star Wars films when I see muppets talking with humans. The muppet is a real character to me - a larger than life human being in its own right, and not just a low budget stand-in for something better. A sock puppet, properly dramatized, is infinitely more ‘human’ than the high-res renders of Aki in Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within.

Why though? That seems totally counterintuitive. Shouldn’t a photorealistic rendering of Jabba the Hutt be more satisfying than a rubber and plastic puppet?

Pictured above: Screenshot of Zork I in the text interpreter. Pictured below: the same scene depicted in Return to Zork.

Here’s where I’d like to speculate a bit: I think part of the reason is due to the complexity of film animations and 3d video games. First, when we look at the first line from the original Zork, “You are standing in an open field west of a white house, with a boarded front door”, we can immediately imagine the scene depicted. When we take that same line and transform it into a 3d representation (as was done in the 3d adventure Return to Zork) little things begin to nag at us because it’s not how we might have imagined it for ourselves. This problem becomes doubly obvious when a director refuses to interpret a text through her/his own imagination, and instead takes a literal reading of the text and transports it to the screen. In my experience, the best interpretations of text rely upon the director’s imagination, and are often quite unlike the original piece.

The second part of the problem comes from the complexity of the medium itself: when a designer chooses translates text from a different medium, they must make some interpretive decisions - the colors in the scene, the character voices, the character models, the lip syncing, etc. If any of those elements draw away from the central focus of the scene we immediately notice because they just don’t fit together well. For instance, take a line of dialogue from Mass Effect - “I don’t care what you want to do. We have to save her!” We can imagine that this scene depicts a fellow comrade requiring our assistance and one of the NPC’s won’t cooperate with us. Take that same line of dialogue and try to design a 3D simulation of it: the lip syncing has to be exact, the voiceover has to be expressive and powerful, and the model’s face has to frown at the exact times as s/he shrieks at the disagreeable NPC. If one little thing is ‘off’ or discordant with the performance (ie. if the character’s arms lay dead at his/her side as s/he tries to express anger), the scene deflates and we feel like we’re watching computers generated models interact, and not riveting drama. In Torment and other text-based games, problems of expression are less focal because our focus is purely on the text itself. Text adventurers must simply use their imaginations to ’see through’ the text to a story, drama, or puzzle, instead of analyzing a thousand different elements interact simultaneously. Therefore, as a text-based RPG Torment predominantly relies upon the imagination of the reader-player and, in my opinion, is a better game for it. If Torment were remade with the Mass Effect 3D engine, we’d have a completely different gaming experience: subtlety is so hard to express when you’re trying to control everything in a scene like a puppet master with a thousand fingers. Computer games, especially those using 3D engines, present the artistic director with an inherently complicated system to express his/her ideas.

Pictured above: What happens when you take a good movie, and mix it with bad photorealistic CG models.

But that’s only half of the story. If the artistic difficulties associated with photorealism were just about handling technical complexity the solution would be easy: just make computers faster and integrate more AI routines. But that’s missing the point. The real problem with photorealism is photorealism itself. As I alluded to earlier, there is something inherent in a dramatic performance, a good piece of art, a piece of well-written dialogue, that draws an emotional response from us. Like in live theatre and radio drama, the exaggerated drama of a muppet can somehow draw me into the character far more than the ‘realism’ of a computer-generated model. But what is that artistic process, and how might it be adapted for video games? Those are questions I don’t have answers to yet, but I suspect that part of the answer lies in allowing players to focus on what matters (the story, the gameplay, the environment, etc) and allowing the rest of the game to be filled in by the player’s imagination.