Linearity vs. Spoilability: Part 2

This is a continuation of last week's linearity post.

2. Some games are much more spoilable than others

Last year, one of the recurring topics in the circle of game blogs I read is that of spoilers. Michael Abbott (who you should read, by the way) started it going with a post in which he complained that the community was being stifled by the fear of giving away plot details, even rather mundane ones, when discussing a game. Essentially, he said that this shouldn't be a big deal; indeed, most movie or book reviews assume that it's impossible to evaluate something without, well, talking about it.

A flurry of comments ensued. One of the more interesting ones was from Clint Hocking, lead designer of Far Cry 2 and a good game theorist to boot. He said that while it was possible to spoil a game's story, that's not really spoiling the game itself, which consists of a set of mechanics. Hocking questioned whether you could ever really spoil the mechanics of a game, which are generally assumed to be open knowledge.

As a designer, Hocking is interested in replaced fixed stories told through cutscenes with stories told through the player's point of view, so there's a motive behind his question. Setting all that aside though, it's not quite correct to say that game mechanics are never spoilable. I'm going to go through a few examples of this, many of which were brought up by commenters responding to Hocking.

Many games have mechanics that evolve in ways that surprise the player. The first, although probably not the best, thing that comes to mind is the grav gun in Half-Life 2. You probably won't find anyone who hadn't heard about the grav gun before playing the game, but nonetheless it is a mildly spoilable fact. Experimenting with it and finding new ways to use the grav gun is a fun experience, and if someone had listed all these ways out to me beforehand, I would've missed out on that.

One could argue that the basic mechanic of Half-Life 2 is that of a fairly conventional first-person shooter, the particular guns you use are simply variations on this mechanic, which is in itself not spoilable. But that's like saying that the story of Half-Life 2 is really just your basic tale of good vs. evil, or one man versus a vast government conspiracy, and thus it's not really spoilable either. Besides, some games really do change the fundamental mechanic. Imagine if someone had not told you that you will become a Jedi after the first couple levels of Jedi Knight 2. That would completely change your experience of that game. I think one of the reasons that Hocking doesn't consider mechanics spoilable is because it's conventional to spoil them anyway. (I'm not saying that's wrong; I take Abbott's position that there shouldn't be restrictions on the way we talk about games. But it is fair to say that knowing certain things about a game does change the way you experience it.)

Once I started thinking about this, it became clear that spoilability (by which I mean mechanic-spoilability, not story-spoilability) is already a criterion we use for games, though a bit subconsciously. Think about what defines a strategy game, for instance. One of the key characteristics of a strategy game in my mind is that it has little to no spoilability. Like chess, we know what the rules are; the game consists of applying them with skill. Similarly, certain puzzle games like Tetris are in no way spoilable. (It is important to specify the type of spoilability. For instance, one of the key rewards of playing Command and Conquer, at least for me, is watching the FMV cutscenes after each level, and I wouldn't want those spoiled. Obviously, that has nothing to do with the game mechanics.)

These types of games occupy one end of a spectrum. Slightly more spoilable are the types of games I mentioned earlier, in which the mechanics undergo small (HL2) to big (JK2) changes. How do we tell just how spoilable these games are? Pretty simple, really. Pick a game, and make up a story about what you did in this game. Not what your character did (your character is involved in the narrative), but how you as the player interacted with this game. Be as specific as you need to be to give someone a good impression of what you did; don't be abstract. Then think about whether this information would affect someone who knew nothing about the game yet.

You'll find that story-spoilability and mechanic-spoilability are usually correlated, but not always. The Xenosaga series (along with most modern RPGs) is highly story-spoilable but not very mechanic-spoilable.

What games are the most spoilable in terms of mechanics? Adventure games, almost by definition. In fact, I think the decline in adventure games has a lot less to do with linearity and a lot more to do with spoilability, and this is a connection I want to explore in Part 3.

Linearity vs. Spoilability: Part 1

In the last post, I talked a bit about why linearity and replayability are not well-correlated. Since I wrote that, I've been rethinking the whole notion of linearity in games, and concluded that it's not very useful. Much more useful in my opinion is the notion of 'spoilability', which I came up with last week.

My original intention was just to summarize my whole argument in one post, since it's fairly easy to explain. But I got a little sidetracked after getting part of it done a few days ago. So it's become a series. Here's part 1:

1. Linearity isn't a very useful concept.

This shouldn't come as a surprise, since I think the use of the word 'linear' in game reviews and criticism has dropped quite a bit over the past few years. Despite this, I think there's still a perception that nonlinearity is important, because it's the key characteristic that differentiates games as a form of storytelling from movies or books. And in an obvious sense, that's true. After all, those forms generally have a beginning, an end, and one conventional means by which to pass from the former to the latter. But what does it mean to call a game linear?

Usually, we use the term when we find a game too restrictive in one way or another. Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time is a good example. The main character has a wide range of fun acrobatic moves, yet in each room there's usually only one path that will not lead him to his death. This makes PoP more of a puzzle game than some players would have liked. So when we call the game 'too linear', we might be referring to this fact. Or we might be referring to the game's overarching narrative. After all, the game never gives us any choice in releasing the Sands of Time and causing all hell to break loose; I believe that takes place in a cutscene.

So we might differentiate between story-linearity and game-linearity. Still, there is no easy way to quantify these concepts, even in the most clear-cut examples. For instance, Knights of the Old Republic constantly offers you dialogue options that directly affect various character stats. Yet like many RPGs, there are only two viable paths for your character: the transcendent, inscrutable light Jedi or the greedy, asshole dark Jedi. As soon as you decide who you want to be, it's painfully obvious (except in interesting ambiguous cases which are far too rare) which lines to select in every single dialogue tree. This makes the game all too linear and even boring, which is the main reason I've never finished it.

Lots of games offer choices, but some choices aren't really choices at all. Some choices are explicit, and some, like Silent Hill 2's, aren't. There are games like Morrowind, where the main narrative can be avoided, but never really diverges once you decide to continue with it. What about free-form games like Civilization? Some would say they are completely non-linear given the range of possibilities. However, in narrative terms, Civ is really quite simple. You start with a society, it grows, and then either it dies or everyone else's does.

Again, I think a lot of game writers have figured out that 'linear' is an outdated term. But here's my idea, which DOES get at the real issue that people usually refer to when they use that word:

NEXT TIME: Spoilability!