Framing Devices in Videogames
Let's talk about framing devices in videogames.
Ever since the first Assassin's Creed I've been in love with
them. When done well they can ameliorate ludonarrative dissonance by couching
the contrivances and tropes of video game mechanics in a frame that is already
understood as being an artificial construct. Hopefully a few clear examples
will make that sentence less gobbledygookish.
In Assassin's Creed, you primarily play a character in the
middle east from a thousand years ago. But because it's a videogame there are
things that you can and can't do that a real person from a thousand years ago
in the middle east would not have to deal with. For instance, you can't walk
off into the sunset. At some point there's a wall that will always stop you,
because we don't have the technology to build an entire planet simulation yet.
(No Man's Sky and Spore are great baby steps, but the detail is so crude that I
don't count them) As designers we have a couple different ways to deal with the
artificial boundaries we have to put around the playspaces we build. We can
make "natural" boundaries like cliffs, impassable mountains,
unswimable water, etc. Or we can just
bluntly put a “glass wall” around the area that the player smacks into if they
stray too far off our beaten paths. Usually
it’s a mix. In Assassin’s Creed they do
the glass walls, but because of the framing device, these actually contribute
to -rather than diminish- the overarching narrative. That framing device is the
idea that the player is using sci-fi tech that lets you enter a re-creation of
the past in a virtual environment. So it’s
set up as a game within a game. The
glass walls you encounter are explained as the limits of the file you are
inhabiting, and the art they use reinforces that. The same framing device makes death and restarting
(another major trope in videogames) coherent within the meta-narrative. Sadly, they end up ruining the framing device
by having small sections of the game where you play as the guy outside of the
sci-fi machine in the “real world”, running around and doing a lot of the same
things (and thus experiencing the same tech limitations and design tropes)
WITHOUT the benefit of a framing device to explain them That’s the ludonarrative dissonance. The IDEA of being in the real world crashing
into the reality of the mechanical constraints that games have. There is no
dissonance when you are playing a simulation of the real world, because the
framing device has explicitly told you that it’s NOT the real world, so the
mechanical constraints are perceived as PART of the story, not an abrogation of
them.
Hand of Fate presents an action/RPG through the framing device
of a collectable card game. The
set-piece battles you participate in are framed as an event simulated by the
meta-rule-set of a card game. And again, this allows the gamey tropes to add
charm to the experience rather than break immersion.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n4krLv1ll-E
Steve Jackson’s
Sorcery! Is a digitial
Choose Your Own Adventure book that has a simple-but-effective combat
system. The metagame has you moving a token
over a map, RPG or strategy board game style.
The text describing your battles reinforces the bookish nature of the
experience and keeps things unified.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R25p1u_ggzo
Ancient Trader is a stripped down 4X strategy game inspired by
old maps, and is carried in large part by the aesthetic of its inspiration. The way old makes were simplified and embellished
by the cartographer’s ignorance informs and reinforces the strategy game tropes
it uses. Games are by necessity
over-simplifications of reality, and so the more realistic the framing device
is, the more out-of-sync the gameplay will be with simulation. Ancient Trader
succeeds in large part because it matches the over-simplification of the
mechanics with the framing device of old charts that reflected an
over-simplified knowledge of the world.
Puppeteer uses the framing device of a puppet show at a theater. Being a straight-up platformer, this device
does not address all the game mechanic tropes such as death and restarting, but
goes a long way in bringing the mechanics and narrative together.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4qlEhkhDxKg
This are five games I can think of that use framing devices effectively. I’d like to know if there are more I’ve forgotten or am not aware of.
This are five games I can think of that use framing devices effectively. I’d like to know if there are more I’ve forgotten or am not aware of.
Comments
In Old World Blues in Fallout: New Vegas, the Big MT was ringed with pylons. As you approached them, your vision went fuzzy, and if you passed them you fell unconscious and ended up back in your room. They explained it as a way to keep test subjects from escaping or something, but it fit pretty will with the whole mad scientist theme.
In American McGee's Alice and Alice: Madness Returns, the majority of events take place in Alice's broken mind, so the narrative and mechanics can literally go crazy.
I think your own Super Adventure Box /subminalmessagepleaseohpleasebringitback has this in Moto's story and motivations.
I'm not quite sure how Bioshock fits this paradigm. I know the twist is a great play on freewill and how systems manipulate... but they don't really explain how you can get shot and stabbed hundreds of times and those sorts of gamey things.
Taking bullets/hooks/drills to the face, unfortunately, is going to be problematic for all FPSes, simply because it's no fun for the player to die in 1 or 2 hits without a good way to avoid it (Ninja Gaiden on the NES says hi). I think some games, like Infinite, try to address this by adding personal shields or body armor, but those generally end up being cop-outs and feeling like extended health bars.