Something About Starcraft

Original Post: August 2, 2010

To jump on a hyped-up bandwagon: StarCraft.  That long-awaited sequel to a game I did actually play, rather religiously, back when it was current.  I can’t say that I was among those eagerly awaiting its return, but it is a bit like an old friend you haven’t seen in a long time, and he’s aged rather well. That said, SC2 is a wonderful example for any of those theorists still in the games-aren’t-stories camp, because SC2, despite its substantial overhaul of narrative delivery technique, still doesn’t do it very well.  The “game” bit of StarCraft really, really does not want to tell a story, while the story bits aren’t game-like at all.

I will keep the recap very very brief as I’m sure most of us are familiar with the narratology vs. ludology ‘debate’ that took place–and if you aren’t, look up First Person: New Media as Story, Performance and Game, and you’ll get the gist.  Essentially the argument is that because narratives are constructed by an author to be accessed by a reader in a particular order and at a particular pace, they deliver story in a very precise, author-controlled way.  Games on the other hand are rule-bound systems which are by their nature very unpredictable and largely place control in the hands of the player.  While neither of these statements are unequivocally true, StarCraft would be a great example of how stories-in-videogames simply doesn’t work.  (I have maintained for a while now that videogames are not just games, so we can’t judge them purely on their game-like qualities.  Keep that in mind.)

What is the game of StarCraft?  Mostly when we ask this question we can refer to rules, as in basketball or poker.  We can say that the former is a sport played by two teams of 5 players, on a court with a ball and two hoops.  You put the ball in the hoop and stop the opposition from doing the same etc.  The rules of the game are spelled out pretty clearly in handbooks and such.  The ‘game’ of StarCraft is really problematic to define.  Usually, one would describe it as a real-time strategy game about base construction, resource management and large-scale combat tactics.  The Terran, Protoss and Zerg factions are defined in certain ways by their units and building possibilities.  Yet throughout the campaign portion of the game, the rules change quite dramatically.  Where is the resource management or base-building in the missions revolving around Zeratul?  Several of those involve controlling him, and only him, throughout much of the mission.

The Prophecy missions focusing on Zeratul are probably the most plot-heavy in the game, where Jim Raynor is actually reliving the memory of the Protoss Templar.  So essentially, Raynor and the player are ‘hearing a story’ in so far as the events have already happened and are being relayed as a narrative.  To do this, Blizzard remove all the player’s capacity to strategize–a fairly large chunk of the game–and we are left with a crappy third-person action-adventure sequence that I’d much rather play the way I play Assassin’s Creed (for example) and not in a top-down click-click-click format.  Through these missions, we proceed through a very narrow set of objectives, moving from Point A to Point B mostly.  We, as Zeratul, are really just moving across a number of different planets to consult with various important NPCs, from the Immortal Protoss historians to the dying Zerg Overmind.  These tasks are reminiscent of the story-filling quests in any number of RPG-styled videogames.

The other major storytelling device is the ever-popular cinematic.  Admittedly these 2010 cinematics are quite a bit more pleasant to sit through than the between-mission briefing screen conversations throughout the first game, but they leave something to be desired.  They fall far behind in terms of aesthetic competence in comparison to contemporary videogames, like Uncharted 2 or even Assassin’s Creed (I have yet to see anything that compares to Uncharted 2, just quietly).

The sum of these two elements is the ‘proof’ that an RTS can’t actually tell a story, because to do the story-telling stuff you have to remove all the RTS.  First pare back all the in-game abilities that typify the genre, by eliminating the base, the construction, and the resources and bind the player to one character.  Then just take out the game altogether and use the trusty cinematic.

This kind of talk would come as a surprise to anyone familiar with my general stance that videogames can be quite capable story-telling media.  I still believe that to be the case, only that the kind of story they tell needs to agree with the kind of game they are.  Videogames are a communicative medium, no doubt, but they rely on a systematic, functional logic that will inevitably govern how the aesthetic content is experienced.  Novels have a systematic rule also, they just happen to (almost) all be the same rule: read from page one to the last page, top to bottom left to right.  Those are rules that govern how the narrative is experience.  Videogames can change those rules, play with them, activate them and make them part of the experience.  StarCraft has those rules, but chooses to tell a story that runs across the grain rather than with it.

The game of StarCraft is about war–the story is about individuals.  The game of StarCraft teaches the player not to care much for the individuals, the story asks us to identify with their personalities, or empathise with their desires, fears and ambitions.  The videogame asks something rather difficult when we are meant to empathise with Raynor, or even Tychus, immediately following a battle in which we ‘build’ then send hundreds marines charging into the open maw of doom in the middle of a Zerg base.  The gameplay experience, during the missions, is largely detached from the ‘humanity’ of warfare, as we are suspended as an omniscient non-presence above the battlefield.  There is no suggestion that we are occupying Raynor himself while controlling the flow of battle, as he himself turns up (as a Marine, rather than a Vulture, perhaps trying to humanise him from vehicle into identifiable man?) on the battlefield early on.

The tentative questions I ask here are what else do we do?  Narratives about war are almost inevitably about the individuals.  Especially modern war films, such as Blackhawk Down or Saving Private Ryan are all about the individual humans caught up in a larger-than-them conflict.  Television series like M*A*S*H were shot almost entirely on the hospital site, and never depicted actual battle–it was about the people there, not about the war.  The game of StarCraft is absolutely about the war, in a more engaging way than a film or novel probably can be.  A forty-minute long battle scene in a movie would be pretty excruciating, where a forty-minute StarCraft battle can be gripping.  Especially given the medium’s ability to suspend us over the battlefield, and put us in control, we are able to experience what a large-scale battle is, in and of itself, as opposed to the individual’s experience of that chaos.  The player of an RTS is not experiencing an individual’s perspective on warfare, because no individual, not even the commanding general, can have the kind of perfect perspective over everything, in real time, that the computer-chair general can.

The key is to communicate through that experience, not the supposed introspection of Raynor as portrayed in the cinematics.  There was one point in which I felt this was executed: in Zeratul’s final mission, the Fall of Aiur.  This mission puts the player in command over the last of the Protoss forces–a considerable army, with considerable resources–to defend their home planet from the Zerg onslaught.  The mission is designed to fail, and so the player simply does not have enough time/resources to actually overcome the Zerg army.  Nothing in the system changes, the player doesn’t lose abilities, or through some other deus ex machina lose half their base, they are simply overrun.  The mineral deposits finally run out, and the player can’t build reinforcements.  They lose the mission naturally, as it were, and instead of being told: “The Zerg attack was relentless, it seemed as though for every one that fell, two more would take its place,” this experience is actually shown to the player, on a large scale.

The question I have is how do we position the player?  Could the player become a Commander who through some technological conceit (I’m thinking Ender’s Game here) can be aware and in control of the whole battlefield?  Is that where we could place Raynor, and then the player inside his head?  If so, could we tell story through some introspective audio ‘thoughts’ in a similar way that Bioshock et al. use the audio logs?  Or do we continue to develop along the disembodied presence above-it-all logic and attempt to transcend the human character with which the player will identify and empathise with?

Kerrigan, Queen of Blades

Kerrigan, Queen of Blades

Final note is that when many people speak of StarCraft, they speak of the multiplayer aspect of the game, which is, to me, another wholly different experience.  The rules change again, down to the available machines of war.  There are quite a few more in the campaign than there are in the ranked matches I’ve played, to ensure a balanced play experience one assumes–or simplifying the experience for those in the lower leagues.  I honestly do not know at this point.

There simply must be a more nuanced use of the word ‘game’ when talking about videogames.  Videogames are not only games, and may in fact contain several ‘games’ in the traditional sense, within the software.  StarCraft is indeed a great game–its more than one great game in fact–but it is also going to be a poster boy for critics (such as myself) explaining why story doesn’t work in videogames.