Lightboy

In the leadup to our current project, A Noir Tale, I've been tossing around some ideas on how to approach creating a 'Noir' video game. Obviously, a nice moody setting is essential. Preferably at night, with copious amounts of rain. And we will need a good plot. But one key thing that Noir films have is context. Most of-the-era Noir films are given their context through the time period in which they were made, and sometimes limited setup in-film.

But a critical decision we made early on in the planning stages, was that we wouldn't make a Noir Film Game. We would make a Noir Game. This is an important distinction; we did not set out to create a Noir Film in the UDK, not an endless reel of cinematics punctuated by the occasional player-controlled movement. We wanted to create the experience of a Noir Film, but as a Game. So how do we approach delivering the narrative of the game? How do we set up the context, the characters, without sacrificing that which makes the game, a Game? How do you communicate narrative in a game without shoving reams of prose down the player's throat?

One answer could be in the Diegesis itself. Non-didactic storytelling. "The story without words". This is something that games have incredible potential to explore. The 'living, breathing world' mantra repeated by so many marketing campaigns now rings hollow, but in a way it still holds relevance. The Game is a world, the player's world. In a film, and almost any other medium, the world is the director's own; and you are the recipient, being given a one-way stream of information. In the Game, the world is active, responsive; the Game's "world" is a collaboration between the creator and the player. So keeping this in mind, this gives us some interesting possibilities.

We can let the world tell its own story, in its own time. More than just 'push button to view story prose', the interactive nature of a game world can be used to provide information to the player. Rather than forcing a story on the player, the world can hold the bounty of story in its branches; waiting to be plucked by the curious player. The didactic text reel can be forgone for this, the passive detail; propaganda posters, omnipresent police, grimy walls, all these things tell us more about the world than their text-based equivalents, and in a much more subtle manner. More to the point, they do so subjectively; your interpretation of an array of these details may, and probably will be different to mine. And so it should be.

This 'passive' mode of storytelling is of great interest to me, not in the least because of my love of level design. It was a fascinating experience to see members of the public playing the game at Freeplay, and having them understand so much about the game world just from the hallway and apartment that we had set up. So much information about the game world, and even the characters, is contained in the architecture of the world. The detail of the world. The world tells you its own story.

I wouldn't have it any other way.