Early Access: Story Beats Part 4

I really wasn't expecting to have a "take" on Bastion, as I'd already played it like three times and mostly just wanted to talk about the sequence with carrying Zulf. But while I was capturing footage I was suddenly like, "Oh, hey, this is interesting." That's basically happened with all four parts of Story Beats and it keeps making the videos longer than I'd expect!

Ian Danskin

This is something I started thinking about towards the end of the edit. A lot of the "games should not tell stories" crowd advocate for games to address heady topics more through metaphor than narrative, and, well, that frees you up somewhat, maybe, but it's just kind of kicking the can down the road. Because, in the end, a system is a system, not a metaphor, and if you *truly* explore that system, parts of the metaphor are going to break down. A system can only tell you about a system. If you want the system to be a metaphor, you'll have to cut out stuff that doesn't fit, same as you do with a story. It's just that stories have to be somewhat stricter than metaphors.

Ian Danskin

Hi hi! To my understanding, empathy is when you feel what someone else feels, so I said "sympathy" because I was making the point that, in a movie, you are categorically *not* feeling what the character feels, you're feeling something different in reaction to what they feel. Not 100% sure that "sympathy" is the perfect word for that, but I think it's accurate enough that people get what I'm saying. As for "purity of cinema," I'm referring to films that are interested in exploring the full potential of films as a medium, which *usually* means not telling a story. That's not just images and sound, but full cinematic language - editing, juxtaposition, sound effects, staging, framing, etc. I use clips from Maya Deren's Meshes of the Afternoon, but you could also point to Un Chien Andalou or the Cremaster Cycle. Hope that clears things up!

Ian Danskin

I really love the way you tied all 4 videos in this series together in a cohesive way. I still think that you make the best analysis videos on youtube, no comparison.However I think there are two things I'm not so sure about. First: when you say movies inspire emotion through sympathy, do you mean empathy? Sympathy seems more focused on pity towards someone who is sad, while empathy is more focused on the concept of "feeling for someone", no matter what emotions they experience. Second, I'm still a tad confused by what you mean by "pure" in terms of movies and books. Do you mean that they are what the medium is purely (e.g. image and sound in movie w/out any story)?

MrFlaco

That was the perfect wrap up, so you were right, it is brought together pretty well. The only thing that I would add to that is some explorations of pure mechanics and pure dynamics to add to the debate of how this things tie with the narrative to try and take a stab at the monster that is "game design grammar". See I think there is something to be said for player expression as a storytelling tool, like skillshots and rendez-zook express something about the player *because* they are orthogonal to the seriousness of the game they happen in. And on the "pure mechanics" I'd say passage or gravitation from Roher or The Marriage by Rod Humble which is the seminal games in that category I feel. Or maybe it's another video, a Story beats 2.0 to examine, much like you did in the Bastion example, the way some stories are projected onto games, or the opposite like you did with "blood is compulsory": that sometimes games are just tacked on a story :) I'm putting my patronage where my mouth is and uping it by 1$ if that happens :D

Oscar Barda

The problems of diegetic dissonance go beyond just being a problem with narrative games, they really extend to any sort of game that is in any way *representative*. This is mostly (okay largely) tangential to the throughline of this video, but also something I've been thinking heavily about lately (mostly with relation to Undertale): something like Mario Kart may not be a narrative experience, but by possessing a diegetic reality it still ultimately faces that immersion breaking problem. Why can't Mario drive off into the horizon, if this is a Go Kart, and that is a landscape, and all of these things roughly symbolize their real world counterparts?

Alex Hambrock

I'm always two parts delighted one part ashamed when people point out interesting reads on narrative that I totally missed. I played Bastion again a few years ago and mostly spent the game wondering if having Zulf's people look distinctly Japanese was cultural appropriation and also racist (since they are all the 'villains') and pretty much completely missed the fact the story of the kid destroying everything so it can be recreated. I guess because, frankly, when you are so used to wrecking shit being the way you navigate most games you stop seeing it as an action with consequence, even within the world you're supposedly immersed in. Also while the game has a lot of good points I think I perhaps wrote off the narrative as 'not that clever' on my first playthrough, when perhaps the one who was not that clever was me. lol. Anyway, I always found the ending of Bastion sort of confusing. I'm not really into that sort of ending mechanic. But framing a lot of it as the question of whether or not the destroyed civilization was worth rebuilding is quite interesting, and makes a lot of sense. I'll need to replay it again some time.

AV

That brought all the episodes together and rapped them up in a really nice way, and I think it eloquently made you're point about the importance of video games as a story telling median. The discussion on the purity of a median was really interesting. It's really nice work. Always nice to see a new video.