Remember Choose Your Own Adventure? It was an 80’s novelty that got kids to read: a story that offered readers different outcomes based upon the choices they made. You could wind up with a different ending each time you picked it up, something that made educators happy since it got kids to read.
But as stories go, a read-through of a Choose Your Own Adventure could be really crappy. You’d choose to walk down the cliff stairs rather than wander into a dark cave without a light (you could be eaten by a grue), a sensible choice until you’re informed that by making this decision, you slip and fall down the chasm to your death. That may seem like a cheap ending, but it’s the choice you made—these are narratives that exclusively used the secondary pronoun “you”, after all.
Far beyond this starting point of interactive fiction, modern video games have evolved to the point where they can offer realistic conclusions for the moral decisions a player makes. It’s a great empowerment of the player to allow them to choose their own fate, just as it is liberating to allow a player to roam free in an open-ended world, allowing them to progress in whichever fashion they please.
Of course, this means that the diary of the guy from Grand Theft Auto III would likely have multiple entries that read: “Today, I stole a car, drove around aimlessly, and fought some cops before I got killed.” Gameplay wise, this sounds like a blast, but it’s rather dull fiction that ends up being irrelevant all the same. The point of interactive fiction is not the story, but the choices–your choices.
They got it right the first time when it was called Choose Your Own Adventure, the operative word being “Your” and “Own”.
As awesome as interactive fiction has become, the advancement of storytelling techniques through user choices in video games is still premature to call an “artistic breakthrough” because what’s important to a player is not the quality of the story itself, but the satisfaction of making the “right” choices to continue a playthrough of the game.
It’s weird to hear gamers’ paying complements to a video game’s story when what they actually means is the adventure of their own choosing was good.
When it comes to video games, storytelling is dead. Story-owning is in. And here to prove this to us is KISS Pinball (2001).
If you still think that the point of pinball is to just keep the steel ball from disappearing through your flippers, get thee to a funnery (called an arcade in modern parlance). Pinball machines feature arching narratives that completely depend upon the players choices, which are made by whichever way the ball bounces.
If a player wants to progress to the next story segment, they’ll need to shoot the ball to a certain place to activate it. Upon accomplishing that, players will need to then shoot the ball to another designated area to completing that objective.
It may not seem like much of a way to tell an engaging story, but playing KISS Pinball will fulfill the dreams of any KISS fan: being able to cut a hit single with the group, get backstage with the band, perform a face-melting guitar and drum solo. We can see these stories animated on the pinball machine’s tiny LED screen, but we all know where the real story is because it’s where all the action is taking place: on the table of the pinball machine itself.
For video games, the story it tells is never as engaging as our own accomplishments to keep the game going by our skill and talent to solve all the puzzle, kill all the enemies, or in this case, always keeping the ball in play.
KISS Pinball demonstrates the importance of story-owning over storytelling in video games by being a literal manifestation of the process of decision making for a player and the end ramification they face: respectively, flipper banging and gutter balling.
The artistry of the pinball machine deserves a better description than that, but hey, this is a KISS Pinball we’re talking about.
How far I got in 20 minutes: tried out both tables, and can only say in response, “Lick it Up”
The good: if KISS the rock band doesn’t rock hard, well at least this table is hard
The bad: no KISS soundtrack? But how else will I rock and roll every night, and party each and every day?
Will I play this once this year is over: Zen Pinball games are so much better
Days so far in the Year of the Play-a-DayStation: 24
Play-a-Daystation 