The Crossroads: Linearity vs. Freedom
By Greg Giddens
Linear and free-roaming game styles have been at war for years, a brutal battle of betterment and dominance. But why? Game developers would have you believe that games have come to a crossroads of storytelling devices vs. experiences of player imagination and free will – but why can’t we have both?
The current trend is to dismiss linear games for being too restrictive and praise free-roaming ones for their innovation and impressive wealth of choice. It’s the age of the sandbox experience. Games like Grand Theft Auto and Oblivion have made us look at the possibilities, potential new ways to experience games and their stories. The problem is, stories are – at least traditionally – inherently linear. They have a beginning, a middle and an end. So to experience a story you need that linear path, and dismissing games for travelling it is obnoxious and narrow-minded.
//Page by page
Free-roaming games are a fantastic example of programming and design brilliance. There is no doubt that the act of creating an environment with so much choice is a monumental task, and developers should be praised for pulling it off, but the linear games we used to hold so dear are still as relevant today as they were a years ago. The majority of modern games, regardless of style or genre, provide the player with a story to be experienced and enjoyed, much like books, films and plays. What linear games allow is for the player to read these stories at the correct pace, experiencing
the joy, excitement and horror at the right moments to induce emotional response and intellectual satisfaction; this is something free-roaming games often struggle to achieve.
When the player has the choice to experience a story on their own terms, the creator no longer has control, and most stories don’t read so well if you shuffle the pages. What free-roaming games depend on instead is emergent gameplay, a form that allows the player to create his or her own experiences within a game world, regardless of the intended narrative. The main story arc is protected by a form of control method: games like Oblivion use this to prevent the player from destabilising the main story by making key characters immortal, and with this control Oblivion achieves a fantastic free-roaming experience whilst maintaining the integrity of the core linear plot. It’s impressive how a free-roaming title can maintain a strong story when everything else about the experience is down to choice.
//The path well trodden
Other than the storytelling aspects of games, there is, of course, the action of actually playing. Regardless of whether or not you would agree that games are becoming primarily a storytelling medium, they are still, and probably always will be, a form of enjoyment and entertainment. While strictly linear games excel in storytelling, free-roaming games often excel in the possibilities of their game mechanics. GTA allows the player to steal cars and drive around a huge open city, performing one simple act: having fun. With free-roaming games, the player has the choice to do what they want when they want, making the experience more personal and quite often achieving something linear games can’t guarantee to deliver. It’s only restricted by the player’s imagination, therefore each person can play the same game and experience an entirely different set of outcomes; the main story may still be scripted, but the options of approaching each challenge and time spent between each mission will be different for each individual.
But the restriction of linearity means that a player has to play the game the way the developers intended it to be played, with no or little room for compromise. Linear games therefore target a more specific audience, each game appealing to different kinds of players.
Metal Gear Solid is an entirely linear title, with a linear story to match. Regardless of the high scores from reviewers, it’s not something that appeals to everyone, and if you don’t like the characters or the story, you won’t enjoy the game at all. Splinter Cell is the same but even more uncompromising. In Splinter Cell you can’t choose how to complete each mission; instead you must do as the developer intended in order to proceed. But this isn’t a bad thing: like with the story element, this allows the developer to maintain control and give you the experience the game was designed to provide.
//The best of both worlds
A good way to enjoy the benefits of both styles is to create the illusion of a free-roaming environment in a linear game; Final Fantasy 7 achieves just that. RPGs as a genre are nearly always dependent on their story. FF7 has the linear story and progression through the game, but hides it by allowing the player an element of freedom when on the world map. It controls the player’s freedom with vehicles that can’t access everywhere, but makes it seem like the choice is still there. By including the large areas available to explore and the numerous optional places to visit and things to do, the game feel a lot less linear, yet maintains the focus of a specific narrative.
Taking the story out of a game almost entirely eliminates linearity, and no game supports that more than The Sims. What The Sims does is create a game where freedom is absolute: for all intents and purposes you are a god when playing The Sims or any other games like it. As a result of the deifying from such games, the term ‘God Game’ was coined, a genre that is the pinnacle of free-roaming, providing players with the power to shape the game experience to their own preference. It’s interesting that the medium of games, having evolved into storytelling device where players and developers want to tell stories in a much less restrictive way, can only achieve true freedom by removing the story, proving the point that both styles should always be present in games. To choose one over the other means denying yourself part of what gaming has become.
The future of games and gaming is not in linear or free-roaming styles, emergence or storytelling. It’s in both. Both styles still have relevance in the gaming world and we would miss them if they disappeared. Linear games are not obsolete forms of gaming that have been surpassed; and free-roaming to the point of emergent gameplay is not, ironically, the one and only way forward. The war needs to end. Each side needs to rebuild and allow the people to enjoy the fruits of peace.
Agreed; I miss my linear single player epics as much as I yearn for the next open-world sandbox. It’s interesting that you can see how open-ended play sprang from that trick linear devs use; taking the Mario level timer off, putting in side-quests, letting you play around a little more.
I think it’s ultimately diverged in both directions as differing answers to the problem of immersion, of believablity. Look at a black and white movie and not only is it a different colour from real life, but any special effects (like the original Jekyll and Hyde transformation sequence) break immersion. You can bust out better effects, or change the story.
Maps in Half Life 2 are sets; no-clipping to the other side of that impassable wall, you can see there aren’t any textures there, and it might as well be made of cardboard like the fake town in blazing saddles. Early games frustrated with the impassable knee-high wall; modern linear shooters terrify with armed soldiers photographing a corpse, interrogating a crying witness. Open world games let you sneak past them, or shoot them at least; two utterly different approaches to the same dillema, both infinitely better than knee-high walls.
A linear game is still trying to sell you on its solidity; an open-world game is still trying to hook you with its story. So I agree utterly; they are different sides to the same limited edition Tamrielic Drake.
This is a great article. I am very fond of my sandbox games but have noticed a signifcant lack of linear single player story driven games on my ‘to play’ list. I think Uncharted 2 is the next one. I sincerely enjoy both kinds of game, but you have to have a very strong lead character if you want to pull of either kind of game well. There are certain factors that translate across mediums and without a strong plot, good characters, strong acting and clever well thought out cinematography it is difficult to produce any kind of successful product in this modern climate, especially working for gamers who tend to be just a little more demanding than the rest of the general public.
Some of the best games I have are linear but let you play how you want, basically the Crysis effect. You have to go through each base linear but you can choose how to get into each base and how to kill the people there. I actually think its the best of Both worlds that makes a great game. Since you still have choices and you still have a great story.
“What linear games allow is for the player to read these stories at the correct pace, experiencingoblivion the joy, excitement and horror at the right moments to induce emotional response and intellectual satisfaction”
Roger Ebert would agree. Probably.
First I must take a deep breath and resist the temptation to rant, liearity being one of my pet hates in gaming. Oddly this does not mean I hate linear story telling. Allow me to explain. I perceive two, clearly different, levels of linearity; linear story telling and linear level design. I am okay with the former, and loathe the latter.
There is a good reason for linearity. It ensure each player will have a very similar experience, and so more resources can be focussed on the one and only path. This means better graphics, cut-scenes etc. It also allows designers to avoid awkward pauses in the pace of the game and generally control the experience. But within a level, or map, I really don’t want linearity. I don’t want knee high fences (Brothers in Arms) or enemy immune to long range sniping (BiA again). I hate tightly scripted game triggers, with enemy appearing as if from thin air at deliberately inconvenient locations (CoD), and infinite spawning forcing you to advance from perfectly decent cover into open ground (CoD). I could go on.
This is not to say that I like the current crop of sand-box games. They are, let’s face it, often quite boring and repetitive (Far Cry) for large periods. They pretend to offer non-linearity but don’t, as your actions have no long term consequences (GTA). It is these consequences that non-linearity is all about. Wihout them it is a sham, and that is where we currently are. We have a choice between flawed open games and over-linear cinematic experiences. Just for the record I do not consider bi-linear (or multi-linear) games to be non-linear. Simply scripting mutliple story arcs does not make the game complex. It just offers multiple, linear, sub-games.
Personally I think, given current processing restrictions, the two best compromises are MMO’s and open levels in linear stories. I don’t like MMO’s but they are truly open, and your actions do have consequences in terms of relationships with other people. The other option is a linear game in which the individual levels are open to many different approaches (or at least play differently each time). The best example of this I can think of is Operation Flashpoint, although Ghost Recon is making decent strides in this direction. Surprisingly this is also something I have always liked about Halo, which although highly linear, plays differently each time due to the mobile nature of the enemy and the (sometimes) open maps.
DrEru: I don’t think you dislike linearity in games. I think you dislike lazy level design. Big difference.
Lewis: You might be right, but if you follow your logic that makes many of the most popular games guilty of lazy level design. Take COD 4 for instance. I am quite happy to admit it is a great game (although not entirely my hot beverage because it fails to provide any mental challenge whatsoever). I don’t usually think of it as lazy design because I don’t think they ever intended it to be remotely tactical.
Hmm, yeah. But what you seemed to be getting at is you don’t like level design which artifically blocks your path in a way that doesn’t make sense in the context of the environment it’s mimicking. So: if there was a knee-high wall in real life, you’d be able to climb over it. Why can’t you here?
But that’s a far cry for, say, Valve’s masterful design, where although you’re guided down a very specific path, the construction of the world means you’d never want to venture anywhere else, because it provides a *reason* you’re going the way you’re going, and a *reason* to not even try going anywhere else. I mean, you really don’t wanna get shot by the Combine, do you?