Mixing dynamic narrative with dynamite

When dealing with sensitive subjects in video games, the reflexive course of action for developers may be to reach for control over the experience, to lock everything down and make sure it is experienced by players one way and one way only. With The Church in the Darkness, Paranoid Productions is taking a different approach.

The game is set in the South American jungle compound of an extremist religious cult with some unconventional views. As a relative of one of the cult members, players will attempt to infiltrate the compound and make contact with their kin to see just how dangerous the group really is. While the subject matter demands careful handling, The Church in the Darkness is actually incorporating narrative dynamic design so the story will be different on each playthrough. Sort of like the way Clue has a different culprit, murder weapon, and location, the facts of the story in The Church in the Darkness will be similarly in flux. So in some playthroughs, the sinister-seeming cult may just be some relatively harmless weirdos who want to be left alone. In others, darker secrets will come to light as the player investigates the compound.

"There was a case where a sort of bad group of quasi-terrorists, I guess you'd say, found the game and had interpreted the meaning of what we put out there about the game like 180 from what we thought about it"

Director, designer, and writer Richard Rouse III will be delivering a presentation on narrative dynamic design at the Montreal International Game Summit next month, and spoke with GamesIndustry.biz recently about the difficulties of combining touchy subject matter with a relative lack of authorial control.

"I definitely like to make games that leave a lot of figuring out what the point is to the audience so they can bring their own life views and experience to it, and interact with the game," Rouse said. "That isn't going to teach them one exact point, but it's going to teach them to look at the world a little differently, which I think is all art can really do. Usually, except in rare cases, art isn't going to convert you completely to some different way of thinking. But it might help inform your thinking and evolve your views in some way."

Rouse said he's interested in seeing what audiences take away from the game, as one of his favorite things about making games has been looking on message boards to see players debating the meaning and putting forth competing theories about his work. Sometimes the message board posters are near the mark when it comes to the designers' intent. Other times, not so much.

"There was a case where a sort of bad group of quasi-terrorists, I guess you'd say, found the game and had interpreted the meaning of what we put out there about the game like 180 from what we thought about it," Rouse said, while declining to name which project it was. "But that was a group that was coming with their own preconceived notions of the world and how they viewed things. And when they plugged us into it, they ended up seeing it like this, but really it was just reinforcing the views they already had in a lot of ways, and they were choosing to see what part of it they wanted to see. I imagine that thing will happen again with The Church in the Darkness, but I think that's just inevitable if you're making something that is open enough to allow interpretation. Some people are going to get it 'wrong,' but I don't really think any interpretation is wrong."

While the game is a fiction that Rouse said was inspired by a variety of incidents, it immediately calls to mind the Jonestown Massacre, in which more than 900 people were murdered or committed suicide at the Peoples Temple compound at the behest of Jim Jones. That happened in 1978, so there are still plenty of people who were directly affected and might take exception to someone mining their tragedy as a premise for an entertainment product. Rouse said dealing with the subject matter without giving it an exploitative or sensationalist edge has been the biggest challenge, but there are some guidelines he's settled upon.

"For me, it comes down to trying to look at the world through the perspective of all the characters you meet and thinking, 'Everybody is trying to do the right thing in their own mind. What is that thing they're trying to do and why is it going wrong or right?' It's being sympathetic to all the characters and not just turning them into stereotypes," Rouse said. "There's a lot of stereotypes about people in cult groups that they're all weak-minded, or all been led astray, or just had bad intentions or are all zombies or whatever. And when you look at these groups, they're actually filled with really strong willed people who are trying to do something different, trying to change the world or at least their own life, maybe be an example to the world as a different way to live, or something to do better than all the problems they're seeing back wherever they came from.

"As soon as you just think of them as crazy, that sort of dehumanizes them. So I'm strongly trying to make sure these people aren't just crazy"

"As soon as you just think of them as crazy, that sort of dehumanizes them. So I'm strongly trying to make sure these people aren't just crazy. They're actually motivated and when you understand their motivations, you can see why they see the world that way. For me, when I'm trying to be respectful of material that's dark and tragic, it's looking at how it how it got that way not in a black-and-white way, but really in shades of gray and understanding the various good motives that led to a bad outcome."

Of course, given the dynamic narrative, not all outcomes will be bad. As Rouse said, it's not so much about good endings or bad endings as much as it is, "There's your ending. What do you think of it?" And he conceded that having a dynamic narrative undermine the dramatic tension of at least some endings is probably inevitable.

"I think that's made up for by the fact that you as a player know you're getting an experience that you know is different every time, that you want to replay it to try to explore these different spaces and that you are getting to make these choices about how you play the game and how you interact with the narrative in the game as well," Rouse said. "For me, when I look at games, I think we've got to do things that are unique to games, to try to explore the space of what we can do that other media can't, versus saying, 'Well there's an optimal way to tell a story from linear media. Let's just do that again in a game.' I think that can be great in certain projects, but I don't think we should only make those types of games."

Rouse said his talk will go over six different techniques for a dynamic narrative, only three of which are used in The Church in the Darkness.

Disclosure: MIGS has a media partnership with GamesIndustry.biz, and is paying for our accommodation during the event.