Games are fundamentally about creating experiences.
They are carefully crafted and tuned to put forward the proper concepts and themes with the proper spin so they land right in the minds of the players; every aspect contributes to those ends.
Entire worlds with their own inhabitants and rules are created for this purpose, everything orchestrated just so.
We are like unto gods.
Except we’re laying down tracks as the train is chugging along and dressing up the set so no one realizes it’s plywood and house paint until after the tickets are paid for and the show’s over. Some gods, huh?
We do still create everything necessary (theoretically) for a satisfactory experience: the plot, the players (not the folks playing the game, presumably somebody else made them), the world, the whys and hows of engaging all of that, and the bits and bobs that fill out all of the gaps and make this fiction come to digitally-rendered life.
In that sense, we’re cousins with filmmakers and theater troupes and others of our professional fabulist kin.
We create scenes; we shape their lighting, their sound, what information they give the audience, what context and manner in which that information is given; but here’s something we do that our brothers-in-bullshit don’t: we dictate how our players can engage with those scenes.
Not only that, we determine all aspects of that engagement, what impact the player’s actions can and will have and what impact the world can and will have on them. They may walk softly in the world and the world may come thundering down on them (look at any given horror game as an example), or the opposite may be true instead, with the world quaking before the player’s mighty footsteps (examples here range from Doom to Civilization, both granting the player immense impact both in the mechanics and the fiction).
So, what point am I making here? The idea that people who make fiction are, by necessity, the ones who dictate every aspect is not exactly revelatory—these creations do not exist without a creator after all.
I’m actually here to bitch about heavy-handed storytelling and the fact everyone seems to forget how to get a point across without twisting arms into pretzels.
*EXTREMELY LOUD BOOING*
Okay, okay!
Seriously now, I want to talk about how important framing is in games and how many tools we have to do so, but I also do want to talk about the fact that since we have so many of those tools, we need to be FAR more delicate with them than we often are. I will also be bitching about The Last Of Us Part II because this is my blog and I can do that. (It’s actually a good example of what I’m talking about, so naturally Spoilers Ahead).
Hooks, Lines, and Sinkers.
Before I get to my TLOU 2 spoiler-tacular, I want to go over how media and especially games influence/manipulate the audience and their expectations.
I do want to make something clear though: I do not mean manipulation as a bad thing here. The whole experience of media is the audience agreeing to be manipulated and directed by the work, that’s just how this… well, works.
This is called Framing, it’s an essential concept in media studies that refers to how the audience’s understanding of the information put in front of them is modified by the context it’s placed in.
To show what I mean, let’s look at an example: say you’re watching a fight scene in a movie, just super simple visuals and no audio. Seems a little stark right? You’d have a hard time getting a full sense of what the scene is going for outside of two guys whacking each other off.
Let’s add in some more visual flair, moodier lighting and camera angles that really center the impact of the hits. Now you’ve got a better sense of weight, it’s not just two guys bopping each other, you’re starting to get a vibe that these hits hurt, muscles are bruising, bones are cracking.
Next up, let’s add audio, we’ll go with the dramatic approach and leave the SFX out and just have an orchestral soundtrack over the fight, something percussion-heavy to give a sense of primal danger (and also slightly riff off the fact the cast are beating each other like drums). Now we got the blood pumping, the hits have weight, the whole scene feels like a life-or-death struggle. But who should we be rooting for? Let’s get our actors dressed and directed:
Fighter A will be played as unwilling but determined, like they wish it hadn’t come to blows. They’ll be dressed in street clothes in warm colors as well.
Fighter B will be played as manic and reckless, like they can’t restrain themselves and wouldn’t want to if they could. They’ll be dressed in beat up biker gear in cold colors, like muddied jeans and a worn leather jacket.
Which of these do you think is the “Good Guy” here? Which of them would you want to root for?
Ah, but now we need an environment where this fight takes place! Let’s go with on top of a scaffolding, a few stories high. Adds some good stakes but what’s the mood here? Let’s set it at night during a thunderstorm. Not a driving one though, just enough rain and thunder to set the stage and occasionally illuminate our fighters’s faces, no one’s getting blown off by the wind.
Alright, now we’ve got a pretty flavorful scene! But more importantly, we’ve got our audience primed for what kind of scene this is: a climatic fight to the death between the hero as a reluctant participant and the villain as an eager one.
Not too bad given we have not actually given any story or dialog at all. If it turns out Fighter A Isn’t the hero, well now we’ve used the setting of the scene to play with the audience’s expectations. If the scene following shows that this was a movie scene being shot within the movie itself, we will have also played with expectations.
So, we’ve used the setting of the scene to guide the audience into making certain assumptions that may or may not prove to be correct, pretty straightforward right?
But that was for film, games have another dimension to them, namely how the player themselves interacts. Let’s say our scene above was a cutscene leading into a boss fight with Fighter A being the player character and Fighter B being the boss. How does Fighter A handle? Are they snappy and responsive? Or are they slow and ponderous, maybe dragging a bit from sprains and bruises sustained earlier?
How are their hits landing? Are their swings tight in and quick like a boxer testing defenses? Or are they putting their whole body into each hit, maximizing impact at the cost of protection?
Which of those possibilities aligns with the desperate fight for survival the cutscene implied this was?
Bone-shattering impacts make the characters seem superhuman and heighten the drama, but more realistic impacts of meat and bone on meat and bone may sell the humanity, and as such the desperation better.
The framing changes the expectations and also the takeaway from the scene. If that fight is a one-sided roflstomp, it’ll kill the desperate life-and-death struggle vibes but maybe you want to do that? Maybe that adds to the story/vibe you want the overall game to have.
Now, normally all of these elements have a certain natural ‘equilibrium‘ where everything feels right for the vibe you’re going for, but these are all still the knobs that you can turn to adjust your audience/player’s experience and interpretation of what you’re presenting to them.
You control the filters they see the work through but you are not the final arbiter of their interpretation. If you want them to have a particular takeaway from the work, you need to make that takeaway make sense. And on that note, we move onto TLOU 2 and how badly we can fuck that up.
C’mon Guys, The Strong Do What They Will And The Weak Suffer What They Must, Ya Gotta Believe Me.
So in order for the rundown of Part 2 to make sense, I have to cliffnotes Part 1: in the beginning of a zombie apocalypse, a father (Joel) has his daughter (Sarah) murdered by a soldier, we fast-forward a decade and Joel has become a jaded Grumpy Bastard™️ who’s been hired to escort a young teen (Ellie) into the care of a revolutionary group (The Fireflies). Hijinks ensue. Over the course of the journey, Joel begins warming up to Ellie and they slowly drift into a father-daughter relationship. However when Joel brings Ellie to the Fireflies’ hospital HQ, he learns that they plan to kill Ellie and refine a zombie vaccine from her brain, as she is immune to the infection. Joel then fights his way through the hospital to save Ellie, who he finds under anesthesia as the doctor is about to begin the lethal surgery. The doctor attacks Joel as he goes to get Ellie and Joel kills him in self-defense, taking Ellie away to safety and possibly dooming humanity in the process.
Ok, so with that out of the way, let’s get to Part 2 (Here Be Spoilers…for like a 3 year old game).
So the plot for 2 centers around a now-grown Ellie and a new character Abby. They’re set on a collision course because Abby’s father was the surgeon Joel killed and now she wants revenge, whereas Ellie found out that her death possibly could’ve saved humanity and cut Joel out of her life until right about the beginning of the game. Abby kills Joel while Ellie is forced to watch and then leaves. This leads Ellie to embark on her own campaign of revenge, hunting down Abby and her allies one by one.
Now, the core themes in the game are about the cycle of violence and not letting the past ruin the present, which both Abby and Ellie do during the course of the game. Except Abby barely does it and is portrayed as justified in doing so and Ellie is given no option but to do it and has her life thoroughly ruined because of it.
See, we get to follow both Ellie and Abby’s respective quests for vengeance and they’re put forward (note I do not say ‘portrayed’ here) as being equivalent to the point of even having equivalent events happen in both, albeit in different orders, to show how they are fundamentally similar to each other. However the context and details of each event and the overall quests do not prove that to be the case, and the game knows it, but it still wants you to believe it anyway:
Ellie and Abby both had their ‘fathers’ killed (ignore the fact Abby’s dad was killed in self defense and Abby only found his body later whereas Ellie’s father figure was beaten to death in front of her by Abby after Joel had saved Abby’s life earlier).
Both of them put their friends at risk for their quests (ignore the fact that Abby’s friends were a Firefly strike team who volunteered for a mission planned years in advance whereas Ellie’s friends were reacting to having their community blown apart by Joel’s murder).
They both showed each other mercy when they clashed (ignore the fact Abby needs to be pulled off of Ellie and acts like she was merciful by not murdering Ellie at the same time she murdered Joel whereas Ellie stops herself from going through with drowning Abby without outside intervention).
The reason why is that it has a premise that it does not want to fully acknowledge but wants the player to accept: that Ellie should’ve died on the operating table and the fact that Joel saved her was a cardinal sin marking and demanding atonement from both of them.
We know this is the case by how Abby and Ellie are both portrayed in each of their quests: Abby is never shown to be wrong about basically anything. She’s framed in a heroic light in gameplay via grand soundtracks and muscular animations and her goals are supposed to be about saving the world from the doom Joel ostensibly wrought.
Ellie by contrast is portrayed as mentally unstable and erratic, as well as underhanded and vermin-like with animations that make her look like a desperate animal. Her goals are portrayed as selfish and self-destructive as well as being wracked with doubt.
Abby is supposed to be the Good Guy and Ellie is supposed to be the Bad Guy.
That’s kind of a tough pill to swallow when Abby murdered Ellie’s father figure in front of her because he didn’t let her die.
Which is why the framing is so aggressive.
By having every element push that desired interpretation, the game doesn’t have to explicitly get the player to agree with a premise that the morality of the rest of the game hinges on while being something few would accept (saying a 14-year old “should’ve been butchered for parts and that not doing so makes her wretched and undeserving of the life she wrongfully lived” is not what most would consider good morals).
“There Are No Strings On Me”
As I’ve talked about before, having elements of your game at odds with each other is something to be handled carefully and having your story and your desired interpretation at loggerheads is going to leave your players feeling very confused at best and feeling jerked around at worst. Having all of the elements that build the player’s own impressions and interpretations telling them that their conclusions drawn from the plot itself are incorrect will do that.
The work has to be able to speak for itself.
Worrying about how the player is going to interpret things is normal, (that’s what crafting experiences is all about!) but that has to be based in the assumption that your player is thinking about your game too. They’re a full participant! In the same way they’re figuring out more efficient strategies and new ways to approach mechanical situations, they are also thinking about the narrative and the vibes of the whole experience. While that’s a fairly obvious point, it’s also one that is easily forgotten when trying to frame elements of the game. This is why trying to use framing as a way to manufacture interpretations that directly oppose observable fact is a bad move: on top of just simply not working, it’s engaging with the player in bad faith.
They’re engaging seriously with you, you have to engage seriously with them.