Barriers to a Dramatic Entry

Explosions are erupting all around. There is confusion, gore. Your vision is wrenched towards where your supposed aggressor lies, but it’s unclear. Searching your focus glides across the horizon. Searching. It’s blurry, indistinct. Catching occasionally on a distant feature you eyes slip over it like Teflon, unable or unwilling to acknowledge the scene. Huddled in terror, you realise your only choice is to move from your cover is you want to make it out of this alive.

The power of a novel or movie is that there is nothing to learn. Placed in any situation you can be immersed instantaneously. The author or director leads you, hands you the emotions and can choose to throw you screaming like a baby into any situation. They take control of every action. You will not be forced to endure the protagonist stumbling blindly around or repeatedly dying. Instantly the rules and consequences of the world are understood. Difficulties and challenges arise from subject matter, not your interaction.

Games are lacking these trappings. When a game chooses to tell a story its hands are tied at the start. It is unable drop you into the action in the same way as its celluloid or literary cousins. A few do attempt to harness this technique. One of my strongest gaming memories is Resident Evil 2. Immediately coming out of a cut scene you are surrounded by flaming zombies with only a handgun for defense and no tutorial. I had played the original years before so I knew the language of the game. I could navigate, knew how to shoot and run, it was an exhilarating experience. If I hadn’t previously experienced Resident Evil would it have been different? Would the experience have irritating instead of thrilling?

In some ways early games had the advantage over modern games. Lacking the complexity of today’s games they didn’t need to teach new players interfaces rooted in three decades of iteration. People could pick up a joystick and understand up, down, left, right and fire. Players even used to read the manuals. Now developers are faced with the challenge of always teaching players how to interact with their games. The interface, the world rules all need to be established because they have to assume that it will always be somebody’s first experience.

We are reaching a difficult point even for the hardcore. New gamers have a great degree of complexity to learn, but those familiar with games often have to unlearn habits and acquire subtle unintuitive nuances. Cognitively it’s a small miracle that we are able to break so much of our habitual behavior each time we play. But when placed in ‘stressful’ situations we fall back on innate responses and muscle memory. So a reversed button configuration or an additional ability will always prove barrier, even to the most experienced player.

So games need to cater to the broader audience. But will we ever reach a point where games and their language becomes so ingrained in the public consciousness’ that developers will no longer have to worry about the user being able to understand how to interact with their games? We can hope that one day everyone will have a basic fluency in games which means they won’t be intimidated by the hardware. However it seems unlikely that games themselves will ever agree on a consistent language within themselves to allow this fluency to be consistently applied to every game (which is probably a good thing, creatively and artistically). Writers of game stories will thus always have these opening restrictions. Of course there are many compensating factors with game narrative, so we shouldn’t be too upset. We have interaction, multiple endings, exploration and personal narrative. But I doubt we will see many games manage to recreate the opening impact that other media can choose to utilise.