Dispatches, Part Seven; Or: It’s an Apparatus For Trapping Lions In the Scottish Highlands
Didn’t get that much further today in an errant afternoon’s decision to play for about 90 minutes, but I happened to make enough headway in the game that sitting down to write about it doesn’t seem like that absurd an idea. This time I’ve had a few hours between the game and the documentation, though, having taken the train back home for the weekend. At the moment, there’s not much new that I can say about GoW, except for one thing I’ve been discovering in the Pandora’s temple chapter–
There’s too many goddamn MacGuffins.
Now, for those of you who aren’t well versed in the cinema of Alfred Hitchcock, or at least what cinematic critics have written about him, the MacGuffin, quite plainly, is the blanket term used to describe a plot device which is employed in a story to create suspense, character motivations and narrative drive without being particularly important in and of itself. MacGuffins take all shapes and forms, such as the titular ones of “The Maltese Falcon” and “Raiders of the Lost Ark,” or the glowing mystery briefcases of “Kiss Me Deadly” and “Pulp Fiction.” Rosebud was a MacGuffin. The stolen Death Star plans were a MacGuffin. Even the Declaration of Independence has been a MacGuffin.
Hitchcock became notorious at times for employing this device in a somewhat cynically shallow manner, as it’s rare that his MacGuffins are ever grounded in any more reality than needs be for the plot to be moved onward. In his mind, it didn’t matter what all the spies and criminals were running around and murdering themselves over, be it uranium winebottles, jewelry or the all-purpose “government secrets,” just as long as it gave the spies and criminals something to run around and murder each other over. This isn’t the case of most of the examples I’ve provided above– either the MacGuffin is given a concrete, real-world backstory of some considerable significance and interest, or the MacGuffin is masked so self-consciously that its very lack of an identity is used for post-modern commentary. The way that Hitchcock, and most admirers of the MacGuffin formula can best be summed up in a story he once told Francois Truffaut about where the term came from:
“It might be a Scottish name, taken from a story about two men in a train. One man says, ‘What’s that package up there in the baggage rack?’ And the other answers, ‘Oh that’s a MacGuffin.’ The first one asks ‘What’s a MacGuffin?’ ‘Well’ the other man says, ‘It’s an apparatus for trapping lions in the Scottish Highlands.’ The first man says, ‘But there are no lions in the Scottish Highlands,’ and the other one answers ‘Well, then that’s no MacGuffin!’ So you see, a MacGuffin is nothing at all.”
Right now, God of War could trap a whole lot of lions in the Scottish Highlands if it wanted to.
Now, I realize that in these puzzle-driven scavenger hunt type segments in adventure games there’s bound to be MacGuffins. Zelda games are built not only on getting the Tri-Force and the Master Sword, but also on any number of keys, maps, compases, boomerangs, bows-and-arrows, bottles and just about anything that villagers ask you to go on a chain-quest for. Everything in the Metal Gear series counts as a MacGuffin after a whle, from obvious stuff like Metal Gear itself, to slightly spookier stuff like the Philosopher’s Legacy, all the way to Big Boss’ frozen corpse itself. Therefore, I can understand that in GoW there’s going to be a lot of collecting shit so the player can advance, it’s just that I wish Jaffe didn’t take the Hitchcockian example of MacGuffinery, here, because his plot devices are seldom explained or justified.
Pandora’s Box? All we know is that it can kill Ares, that the gods built a huge-ass temple on the back of a titan to protect it, and that countless adventurers have lost their lives trying to get it, but we don’t have any deeper explanation as to how it works. In Pandora’s Temple there are countless little items that must be collected and put in proper places to make the machinery click and open pathways. It’s not so bad when you find a bas relief that’s missing a pair of shields, which tells the player implicitly that they need to actually go and find those shields. It’s quite another thing when you discover a big coffin out in the open air, which the player must then open and climb on top of in order to rip off the skull inside, which doesn’t quite make sense until later, when you find a skull-shaped opening. Granted, this amounts to finding keys before locked doors, and that’s no big deal– it’s just gratting when these intriguing objects are given such short shrift that the designers obviously only think of them as mechanic devices. If Pandora’s Box is such an almighty weapon, I’d like to hear an explanation justifying that claim, and validating my spending all this time going after it.
Zelda doesn’t do this. MGS doesn’t do this. Miyamoto always does a pretty good job of setting up the mythology of Hyrule, giving the quests for whatever-Link-is-in-the-dungeon-for a sense of purpose, both a longstanding, historic level and in an immediate, save-the-princess way. Kojima’s practically obsessive compulsive with the way he conjures eerily plausible excuses for often patently absurd plot twists and absolutely impossible doomsday machines– we might not live in a a world where stuff like Metal Gear, cyborg ninjas or FoxDie are anything except the products of overactive imaginations, but damn if we don’t believe that they can exist in the world MGS’s characters inhabit. Miyamoto and Kojima can afford to build worlds which work according to their own rules, partly because they take the time to make those rules known to the player. All Jaffe’s done so far is let as know that the rules exist, but not allow us to read them. He ought to let us in a bit more, at least to make his elaborate storyline a bit more realistic on its own terms– those are, after all, the only terms anybody ever knows. Their own.
Still, the puzzle structure and knotted pathways all work wonderfully so far. The Atlas bit and running on the rolling pin are both entertaining set-pieces, the latter especially so since we’re really actively engaged in it. I suppose that the idea of getting keys before we’re given locks is an extension of the trusting the game, an idea I learned from Ico— whenever you’re in the middle of a castle, pulling switches and levers whose machinations aren’t readily apparent, all a player can do is trust the game and hold on to the faith that it’ll all build up to something worthwhile sooner or later.
At this point, though, I’d prefer sooner.
You know, there’s an old gaming saw about the ‘Law of Miyamoto’, that goes: ‘you always show the player some thing he/she can’t do, and then you show them how to do it’, or something like that. The point is that what you’re saying is that Jaffe is showing you how to do something before you know you can’t. In other words, he’s showing you the key before he’s showing you the door. I have to disagree. While I can’t say that I noticed this in any of my play-throughs, I think I can giving you an explanation as to why it might be the case. The most important thing to remember about God of War, and why it’s unfair to compare it to Metal Gear or Zelda, is that the game is first and foremost about momentum.
While I admit that Jaffe didn’t do a perfect job, for the most part he keeps the player always moving forward, with very little back-tracking. The times that you do find yourself somewhere that you’ve already been, notably in the temple you’re exploring now, it’s pretty clear what you need to do and you’re moving on to the next brand new area fairly quickly. This could, in fact, be the reason that you’re finding keys to doors you haven’t seen. You probably walked right past them because you already knew where you needed to go.
This is very different from Zelda or Metal Gear or Metroid, where you’re going to find yourself walking through the same corridor, or tunnel, or field, a lot. That’s alright for those games, because they’re about exploration, rather than killing things. Back-tracking is okay for Shadow of the Colossus, which is about wandering, as well a commentary on Zelda. Backtracking would not have worked in Ico, which is about running for your life, as well as abandonment. God of War is about killing things, with the occasional block puzzle. I think that Jaffe does an admirable job in making sure that the player usually knows where to go while still making them feel like they have a lot of room to maneuver. This might be why you’re missing the back-story to the skulls, which I actually think is kind of brilliant.
Anyway, I’ve gone on too long. Just to let you know, I’ve started Metal Gear. I already have a few interesting thoughts bouncing around in my head, I should have something up by this weekend.
That’s a very good point about backtracking– which is actually one of my favorite parts of gaming, in general, and something which I find myself missing a bit in GoW. Backtracking feels very good to me because, when it’s done well, it forces creators to design their levels with much more attention and imagination. If you’re going to be traveling through an area more than once, it behooves the designers to make sure it poses enough challanges and demands to warrant having to traverse the territory multiple times. Backtracking allows for a single setting to be reused from different angles and points of view, turning what might’ve been a simple one-time-only set-piece into a really involving, significant piece of the story’s environment. One of the things I’ve always disliked about the innumerable Zelda games is how after you’ve defeated a dungeon you never return to it– think of all the time and effort that went into crafting those mazes, puzzles and surroundings, and how disposable they become after you’ve picked up the piece of Tri-Force or whatever that was stashed in there for you to find. This is why I like ALTTP quite a bit, because you get to see the whole over-world itself recycled in a fairly imaginative way.
I’ll admit that backtracking can often be the sign of lazy design, but it can also occasionally inspire the kind of creativity that mere inventiveness can’t quite measure up to.
Now, I don’t think that “mere inventiveness” is what GoW is doing with these key-before-door antics– frankly, it probably was a little unfair of me to group that design element along with my whole gripe about Pandora’s-Box-as-a-Hitchcockianly-shallow-MacGuffin. Instead, after reading your passage, it seems to me that the game’s temple-quest is making use of something I’d discovered while playing Ico, and while I touched on it briefly before it wasn’t until I read your connection of the two in regards to backtracking that I realized that in fact what they’re doing represents its opposite– pretracking. I have to admit, it is an interesting experience to find the key before you find the door, or pull the switch/cut the rope before you find out what it does. This is an element which can help drive procedural design into new places, because it fosters something much different than the traditional elements of logic, reason and mathematic rationality that are encouraged by traditional Zelda/Metal Gear-style puzzles. Instead, I’m finding that Ico and GoW encourage intution– following instincts and gut feelings rather than facts. In the end, this is what is supported by the philosophy of “Trusting the Game,” and I’m glad you brought it up.
Also, happy to hear you’ve started up on the MSX titles. I’m anxious to see what you think of MG, especially in how it relates to the second one. I think you’ll find the boss battles in that one are eerily similar to the ones found in MGS3…
Haha, man, it took me forever to figure out what ‘ALTTP’ meant. You’re right, that sort of design can be really compelling when it’s done well. I just think that if you added it to GoW, it wouldn’t really be GoW anymore. I like the idea of ‘pre-tracking’, though I prefer the plain old name, ‘foreshadowing’. What I’m trying to think of is whether or not it’s a particular aesthetic of action games, the inversion of the ‘back-tracking’ found in adventure games. Hmmm. Well, I like the little moniker you’ve given it: ‘Chekov’s Crossbow’. It’s up there with ‘Block Puzzle’ and ‘Duck-roll’.
Well, foreshadowing is present in both backtracking and pretracking– it’s just a difference of what’s being foreshadowed. Just as easily as a key can precede a door, a door can precede a key, each one implicitly acknowledging the other’s existence elsewhere in the game. Puzzles that involve combinations like these– even simple ones– can sort of be seen as foreshadowing put into practice of gameplay as part of the title’s mechanical content, and not just narrative. I think that this inversion, however, isn’t isolated just to action games, but instead can be found in pretty much any game whose content is dictated by constant forward progress– always moving ahead on the game’s singular path, even when that path can knot and pretzel upon itself. It’s entirely possible those are the games that involve more pretracking– finding a useful item before you know that you need it– while games more motivated by exploring multiple territories over and over again are driven more by backtracking– finding out you need a useful item and then going out to look for it.
Frankly, it feels like there’s two ends of the spectrum– Mario and Zelda. Mario games, even the more open-ended ones, involve much more pretracking and forward movement, grabbing fire-flowers, mushrooms and raccoon-leaves and then figuring out how to use them, the powers themselves effectively becoming a challenge in terms of their learning curve. Zelda games are all about backtracking, in which you’ll find lots of areas you can’t reach without a tool– the boomerang, the hookshot, the bow-and-arrow– and upon finding them you’ll be given a few scenes in order to get acquainted with their controls. Mario games don’t give you time to adjust to new abilities before throwing koopas and goombas in your way– Zelda games do.
GoW, oddly, is more of a Mario game, in that respect. Just as there’s a constant momentum of moving forward in the game’s spaces of levels and combat, there’s also a constant momentum of learning new skills, be it with the different magic powers, new weapons or power-up skills gained upon leveling-up. Moreover, the game’s levels and combat are both designed to constantly demand more and more of the player’s knowledge of these systems, making it impossible to make progress through levels unless the player is also making progress through the new skills. If momentum is what GoW is principally about, then maybe that’s what Mario is about, as well, except for the whole platforming thing.
Oh, by the way– “Block Puzzle” is your moniker, or at least it is as far as this blog is concerned. Thanks for reminding me of the crossbow centerpieces, as it really does stand as a precedent to what’s going on now. If nothing else, at least GoW is consistent.
Mario games are absolutely about forward momentum. Case in point:
http://youtube.com/watch?v=PYP8k7uQnTU
The fact that you can’t really do this with the more recent Mario games (64 and Sunshine) is the primary reason I think that they’re inferior games. Let’s hope that Galaxy, with all that warping through space, will recapture the spirit.
I won’t argue with you on Sunshine, but 64, to me at least, is the game that pretty much invented, or at the very least defined and refined, how 3D gameplay would work for the next-gen platformers of that time. All subsequent games of that sort, like Rachet & Clank and Jak & Daxter, owe a great deal to what 64 accomplished. I’ll definitely agree that when you get right down to it Mario 64 is an entirely different game from the others in the Mario series, but part of that discrepency is kind of impressive, to me. I always wonder if a sequel in a series really qualifies as a new game, or just the same old rule-set with new maps and a different narrative. 64 certainly doesn’t contain the same polish of its ancestors, and admitedly it doesn’t have that much in common with the 2D games, but it’s probably the best game of its type.
At the very least it doesn’t deserve to be lumped together with the sheer boredom which was Sunshine. Besides, I’m not as enamored of the speed-run culture as you are, so I don’t quite see its lack of absolute, overwhelming momentum as a negative thing, necesarily. Mario 64 is probably the best example of a game series changing and adapting to fit the current era, though I will admit that I too often feel nostalgic for the old days.