Lately, all I’ve been doing in my mulling time is comparing non-linear narratives to linear ones – that is, games to other forms of entertainment, like books or movies.

The difference between these forms that I’ve been focusing on has been pacing, or “cadence” – the rhythm of the story and the way it is told.

I’ve been watching Extras recently, and particularly with Ricky Gervais’s stuff, so much of the comedic execution is in the time that the viewer is given to absorb a particular idea or the current person’s line before the show moves on to the next sentence or idea. And not only on a micro scale; throughout the 28 or so minutes that the show runs you’re not expected to, for instance, pause so that things can settle in or have much of a breather – except for in between scenes, where they purposefully either give you something big to think about, or want what just happened to brew quietly in your head.

This is an area where games, at least in their current form, simply can (or maybe I should say, do) not compete.

Other than in non-interactive cutscenes and occasional “chase” sequences, it is virtually impossible to know what a player will be doing at a particular time – where he will be spending more time, where he will be spending less.

A setup that would have worked fine in a linear medium – a small joke that’s only meant to be in the back of your mind, or a little tidbit of info that you’re not really meant to process – can completely fail in a non-linear setting, as the player stops and chooses to focus on that element that was not meant to have the limelight.

Similarly, a complex narrative structure with the right punctuation and cadence is simply impossible to guarantee with the way games are currently made; unless the player does exactly everything the designer sets up for them in the exact order and at the exact speed required, the experience will not live up to its potential.

What can we as designers do to combat this? How can a player’s linear narrative through our non-linear world even come close to the quality of narrative that you expect (and demand) from other forms of storytelling?

Well, what are our options?

1. Game World Impetus (or, The Helicopter)

We all love chase sequences right? Right? Well, we’d better hope so, with Mirror’s Edge coming out, where the entire game is a bunch of chase sequences.

One of the biggest reasons I’m interested in playing Mirror’s Edge is because I want to see what they do with these chase sequences; when they are integrated throughout the entire game, I’m sure that they will attempt to polish them to an appropriate degree^[1], but what I’m more interested in is seeing whether they attempt to instill some timing based narrative elements into the game.

For instance – you’re racing through a corridor, and there is a window to either side of you – your pursuers are closing in fast, so you don’t have time to stop – therefore, you have to choose which window you look into as you race past. Having an extremely different thing in each window could have a huge impact on the overall narrative of the game depending on which thing you see, but more importantly, you’re only given a set, minutely variable amount of time to deconstruct and examine what you saw, before you’re forced to focus on the next challenge.

You’ll notice that this idea of not allowing the player to choose the speed at which they experience the game opposes almost every single narrative-focused game out there – most RPGs – hell, even many shooters – will let you choose to play at whichever pace you want, and those that don’t are often branded “rollercoasters” and seen as less of a game, despite the fact that a game requiring you to keep at a certain speed and its non-linearity are two discrete things.

Anyway, lets leave Helicopters for now.

2. Emergence (or, The Melting Pot)

A second option, which is what I believe many game developers are working toward at the moment, is building an environment and plot which lend themselves to emergent narratives.

Games like Far Cry 2, Fallout 3 and so on are designed so that, while there may still be a main story arc, you are free to roam wherever you choose and do whatever you want, and the world is created so that there will always be something to find when you set off to explore, and where ever you go, there is always inexplicably a situation so precarious balanced that all it needs is you as its catalyst take it from its current state to its resolution.

These games are, admittedly, pretty awesome, as long as you can ignore the fact that there are all of these people out there sitting on a knife’s edge in a dangerous situation, waiting indefinitely for someone to come along and put them into motion.

A major problem with this style of narrative is that you have to make an exponential amount of content for a narrative to emerge from whatever the player happens to choose to do, and even so, you cannot ensure that every player will have a cohesive narrative emerge, much less one which has a cadence and flow that rivals any other medium.

Still, this style does serve a particular type of story, and the game industry is getting better and better at understanding what type that is. But what I’m worried about is that the plodding, explorative pace of these epics are not the formula which the game industry needs to build upon, to tell the myriad of stories that we want to tell.

3. Simultaneous Linearity (or, The Wild Bunny)

Ala Bioshock. Lets face it – this is kinda cheating. Having delicious audio drama snippets scattered throughout the game worked brilliantly, but again, is ultimately not the way that games as a medium should go – mainly because the brilliance of those audio diaries are by and large discrete from the game itself.

Still, it’s definitely a lesson that can be taken into account – audio can overlay gameplay rather than interrupt it, and with timing between voice over and gameplay sequences you may be able to effect some of that subtlety of expression that is possible through other media.

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So what is the way forward? Don’t look at me, this was meant to be unresolved!

Although, I think a combination of all of the above could make for a pretty intense experience. If you took the go-at-your-own-pace exploration and puzzle-solving, and peppered in major sections of gameplay where the pace was set and time was relevant, while using voice over as the major narrative cue – in the flow of the game as opposed to interrupting it – you could have a pretty damn fine experience on your hands.

Whether that formula could be the core of enough genres and types of stories to be the mainstay of the games medium is unclear. However, I do believe that always allowing the player to “go at their own pace”, often touted as a feature in a story-driven game, is a limitation on story variability and quality, and that it needs to be re-examined by the industry as a whole.

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^[1] The reason chase sequences in the past have often been annoying and crap is, I believe, due to the fact that they are not given nearly enough focus during development when they’re just an “added gameplay feature”.