What if narrative is not an aesthetic of play?

[packbat]

(Feel free to skip this first section if you're already familiar with the MDA framework - it's mostly just recapping the concept.)

Let's start with Sensation as an example.

As a game designer, I do not build the player's emotional reactions to my game. What I can create is raw material, assets and code - say, a huge vista of a background, a rocky hilltop of a foreground, and the code to move the character around and change what they see based on where they are. That said, if I'm succeeding at my goal, what I will have created is a specific way for this to play out - a sweeping view revealed when the player moves in their role as the character to the crest of this hilltop - and that might in turn result in a kind of experience the player might value - a moment of awe, seeing what's before them.

As a game designer, I create mechanics, use those to create dynamics, and use those to create aesthetics of play. Mechanics, Dynamics, Aesthetics. That's what the MDA framework is about.

There are a lot of aesthetics on the list, and a lot of ways to achieve any given one. This same idea of sensory joy, this aesthetic of Sensation, can come from a super strong visual aesthetic (glowing lines! stark blacks! geometric shapes floating in a void!), from great sound design (the tap of metal boots on stone echoing off the great arching walls of the castle hall, the subterranean breathing of the dragon deep below filling and emptying even this space far above with noise), high-end graphics (a giant woods full of trees creating a profusion of dappled sunlight and shadow? I don't know, we don't play those games), or, y'know, a lot of things. In all of these cases, though, serving the aesthetic helps inform the rest of the decisions: does this visual aesthetic come through clearly? can the player actually hear the sounds you want to envelop them with? does this super expensive AAA graphics bonanza show off an effect that will be unfamiliar and exciting to AAA game fans? Making these choices intentionally results in a stronger sense of the aesthetics most important to the game.

The point here is: if you remember that you want the player's sensations to be delightful, it changes how you do the low-level work. Likewise, if you want the player's attempts to overcome a challenge to be rewarding, it changes how you do the low-level work; if you want the player's efforts to discover what's in the world to be satisfying, it changes how you do the low-level work; if you want the player's experience of the game's fantasy to be engrossing, it changes how you do the low-level work. And so on for the other four aesthetics on the list in the original MDA framework paper: Fellowship, Expression, Submission (i.e. zoning out), and...

...and actually, I'm not sure Narrative fits in here.

Like, Robin Hunicke, Marc LeBlanc, and Robert Zubek's original paper described "Narrative" pretty simply: "Game as drama". But back in January, we tried to think about what aesthetics would make sense for works of fiction, rather than games - for those works of drama that the authors' words allude to - and honestly, even with zero 'gameplay', a lot of the same goals line up. An evocative paragraph describing a nature scene is a satisfying Sensation. A collection of scientists trying to crack the mystery of a planetoid are providing Discovery. A rad as hell setting is a wonderful Fantasy to get absorbed into. These are not one solitary aesthetic. Writing doesn't serve only one aesthetic. Narrative doesn't serve only one aesthetic. Narrative is a dynamic, like that moment of reveal on the rocky hilltop, not an aesthetic.

And if we try to expand the MDA list from our own, it seems to work. The original criticism of ludonarrative dissonance in a game was that the thing we'd call an Allegory - political, moral, or similar implications of the fiction for the world outside the fiction - created by one element of the game (this is a story Clint Hocking progressed through by making a choice to empower himself in disregard of its impact on others - the Little Sisters) flatly contradicted the Allegory created by another (this is a story Hocking progressed through by making a choice to risk his own life to help someone else - Atlas). Many players of the 2012 third-person shooter "Spec Ops: The Line" expected (as people do who play other military shooters like, oh, the earlier Spec Ops games) a satisfaction of their Identification with the protagonist by the success of that character ... and this was specifically denied to them, in a move some players adored and others absolutely hated. The latter part of "Celeste" uses the Interplay - dynamics formed between characters who interact within the story - of two of its characters as a literal game mechanic: when they work together, they are capable of feats they weren't before. You could definitely argue with our list - I'm not sure Simulation is really separate from Allegory and Setting - but I think something like it works.

It's not controversial to say that writing in games is better when it's not treated as separate from everything else, but I think that goes deeper than just saying that. It's not just that the game mechanics and the writing both tell stories, it is that the game mechanics and its story both create aesthetics of play. And that changes how you do the low-level work.