Unreliable Narrators

I love a good plot twist.  Unfortunately, most of the plot twists used incessantly in media today are not what one would call good.

The best plot twist is one that is implemented by leaving dangling threads in the plot and tying them into the twist later on.  The condition on this is that if the reader/player/viewer can guess the plot twist in advance – or is even aware that a plot twist exists – it can substantially dampen the plot experience.  The fun in the plot twist is in having all your assumptions shaken apart, being completely blind-sided.  If the individual suspects foul, they will begin concentrating on trying to detect the problem instead of experiencing your work.  Additionally, the twist needs to make sense and provide an eventual resolution to the plot.  This is where many ongoing TV shows fail – plot twists should exist by providing a plausible and coherent chain events that change in perspective because of new knowledge imparted to the audience.  Well designed twists occur by torquing the perspective of the audience, not the events of the plot.  This is where shows like LOST fail.  It’s difficult to construct an elaborate plot and continually shift the perspective of the viewer around in a way that provides a coherent narrative the entire time.  While it’s fine to answer questions with more questions, and some point you need to indicate to your audience that you know where you’re going with this and that it will all be resolved eventually.  Heroes does a much better job at this by keeping the arcs manageable – and writing out the entire outline ahead of time.

There is a powerful technique for creating an effective plot twist called “Unreliable narration”.  While it has been in use in books and film for decades, it has made very little traction in the realm of video games.  The underlying premise of the technique is that the player assumes what the narrator is telling him to be true and correct.  At some point in the plot, you can force the twist in plot perspective by revealing that the narrator (who is often the protagonist) has not been giving an accurate depiction of events, for whatever reason.  I can think of only three games that have used the technique in this way (one of which is the metal gear solid series, which is so convoluted I’ll avoid it entirely).  Out of respect for people who may not have played these games, if you want to avoid spoilers you’ll stop reading here.  The first game is Final Fantasy VII, one of the most successful RPGs of all time.  Cloud Strife appears initially as former member of an elite group of military called SOLDIER.  Much of the plot in the first half of the game contains flashbacks to Cloud’s past, but these stories are dotted with memory gaps that make the story inconsistent.  Later in the game Cloud regains his memory and much of the earlier story is shown to be false.  A second and more recent example would by Bioshock.  In an extremely brilliant move by Ken Levine’s team, the narrator, a gentleman named Atlas who guides the character through the first two thirds of the game is shown to be using mind control on the player based on the keyword “Would you kindly”.  The reason it’s clever is because the player has to perform these actions to progress in the game anyway, and the keyword is very well masked in the dialog.  The ‘big reveal’ in the middle of the game shows that many of the events leading up to that point, comments left in audio diaries and such, completely turn about the assumptions the player has made about himself up to that point.  Atlas is shown to be con-artist who has been using the player via the above mechanism for his own ends.  In true con-artist fashion, Atlas uses social engineering techniques to establish a bond with the player, thus allowing the delivery of foreshadowing while at the same time minimizing the likelihood that he will be suspected as being an unreliable narrator.

If anything is clear from the above assessment, it should be that writing an unreliable narrator well is extremely difficult.  Even in literature, it’s not a technique that is well-executed often.  Nevertheless, some of my favorite movies use this technique to great effect – The Usual Suspects, Lucky Number Slevin, and Memento.  I’d like a more coherant breakdown of the tools for making effective use of the technique, and to see those tools used to improve the generally dismal state of Videogame plots.  Suprises are cool.

As a more wonky alternative, I think it would be interesting to play a game where the player was made aware that the avatar was actively lying to them and had to work around it as an obstacle by forcing them into logical contradictions or social situations where the truth would come out.  There’s a mechanic, would it be possible to build a game around that?