My folks got me Assassin's Creed II for Christmas. In addition to being the best game of the year to squeeze the word "ass" into its name twice, it's also pretty fun to play. What really separates it from the original, however, is the story. In the first game the "story" was more like an interruption that took place in the present time between the action sequences in the past. It felt disconnected and not very immediate to the action at hand, and as a result, the gameplay got boring after a while and I gave up. But Assassin's Creed II has a rich story that takes place within the Animus, based around the character the player actually plays for most of the game. It's fun, involved, and has just enough historical connection (though plenty of bastardization) to feel important.
For those who haven't played or even seen the game, it's a basic revenge tale. The player takes on the role of Ezio, whose father and brothers are betrayed and hung for crimes they did not commit. Ezio is a pro free-runner and renaissance building climber, but the death of his family transforms him into a super bad-ass assassin who carves his way through Florence and Venice in a quest for revenge. It's a compelling, very movie-like tale, and Ezio is your basic revenge movie hero. He's likable (since the audience has to feel bad for him), clearly in the right (murder is bad, the hero murders very bad people, so it's cool), a super bad-ass (well, obviously), and a ladies man (again, obviously). But this is where the problem starts. Assassin's Creed II is not a movie.
In the imaginary Assassin's Creed movie, a typical action scene would work something like this: The hero knows Evil Man is inside the castle. He quietly climbs a building, surveying the rooftops between him and the castle walls, shining in the moonlight. He nimbly jumps across roofs, slips unnoticed past guards, almost gets spotted, almost falls, etc. Once he's at the castle he climbs the walls and locates Evil Man, who is conveniently talking about his Evil Plan, instead of reading or eating or something. Evil Plan made clear, the hero delivers a well-deserved quip about justice and slays him.
Here's how a typical play session of the game works: I climb up to the roof to survey the path to the castle. A stupid guard shouts at me, so I stab him in the throat with my hidden blade. Then I loot the money from his body because its fun, even though he only gives me 4 florins and I have 9000 florins coming in every 20 minutes from my huge estate in the country. Then I pickup his body and fling it from the roof down to the street, where I watch the pedestrians freak out a little bit. I do some running and jumping. I miss, fall to the street but don't die, where I disturb a guard. He pushes me, so when he turns around I kidney shot him with my hidden blade. His friends get pissed, so I pull out my sword and eventually kill eight guards by running them through, slicing their throats, or stabbing my dagger down into their heads. Then I poison a civilian for fun. Finally I make it to the castle, where I kill Evil Man. I say what I have to stay and put him to rest. Then I get a cut scene about how great I'm doing and what to do next to revenge my poor father and brothers.
I'm sure you can see there are a few discrepancies between version one and two. Describing the game's story makes me sound like a hero, describing the actual gameplay makes me sound like a villain. This discrepancy between the story the game's authors wish to tell and the story told by the gameplay (what I have called the narrative of play) is present everywhere now, and maybe it's a problem. One of the ways games are interesting as a medium is in the way they push controlled, authored narrative up against the uncontrollable actions of the player. This juxtaposition could one day be for games what the theory of montage was for movies. But to be more than their separate pieces, the authored narrative and the player narrative have to work for or against each other in a way that means something.
In the case of Assassin's Creed II, the gap between the necessary violence of the player and the more "noble" image of the hero in the cut scenes is a problem. It breaks a wall and it makes the story feel inauthentic. I had the same problem with Grand Theft Auto 4, and it hurt the experience. All the reviews for GTA4 expounded on how gritty the story was, how it was a tale of redemption and a quest for a better life, an opportunity for the Niko, the hero, to leave behind the violence of his past. In a grand sense that was the goal of the story perhaps, but it was hard to believe when the meat and potatoes of the game was stealing cars and shooting police.
This story problem seems to be, in large part, an issue with sandbox games. The more freedom you give the player the more careful you have to be if you have a narrative goal as a creator. Some games take the unpredictability of player action in stride, however. Fable and Fable II allow players to be either evil or good, going so far as to change the appearance of the character based on his behavior. Role-playing games like Fallout III allow players similar good vs. evil choices, and in the downloadable content, even a few ambiguous ones. Unfortunately the attempts these games make to account for varying player choice ultimately limit the options, rather than open them up. It means that players who take the "wrong" path know they are still essentially on-rails narratively. This becomes a narrative weakness too.
So what are designers and writers to do? Too much control and the player resents it, but not enough control creates this gap where player's actions don't match narrative. But I only said that that disconnect might be a problem. While it certainly weakens some current games, within that space (or maybe it's a lack of space) between player narrative and author narrative is where games really have their chance to be different. How does it change the meaning if the actions of the player are intentionally contrast against the story told by the game? Ezio's tale of just revenge turns into a man's decent into murderous insanity, seen as noble only by him. And how can designers and game writers weave author narrative and player narrative into a single experience that allows freedom and allows defiance of expectations and yet still works narratively? The short answer is I don't know. When someone figures it out, the games-as-art debate just might tip in our favor.
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