XCOMmentary

So this is, hopefully, going to be a blog about story-telling, gaming, and story-telling in games. I don’t know how long it will last (probably not very long), how often it will update (probably not very often), or how good it will be (:::cough:::), but I think writing it will be a useful exercise and distraction for me and there’s a tiny chance that someone will read it and find it to be an amusing insight into a rarely seen side of my personality.

We’re going to kick things off with the idea of emergent narrative and a relatively new video game called XCOM: Enemy Unknown which I’ll be playing on the PC.

XCOM: Enemy Unknown is a remake of the 1994 game XCOM: UFO Defense, a strategic, turn-based tactics game about defending the world from an alien invasion. The premise is that you, the player, are in charge of an elite, secretive, international organization (“XCOM”) charged with thwarting ET’s sinister schemes. Gameplay is half turn-based combat with a squad of 4-6 soldiers and half strategic base-building.

Our interest in the game is based on the concept of “emergent” or “internal” narrative. To quote one of the game producers, this is “the story that emerges in the player's head over the course of a game. It's not explicitly written by a professional, so it isn't told to the player in a traditional sense.” XCOM does have a plot, a scripted story about defeating an extraterrestrial assault, but its main draw is that it encourages players to insert character motivations, plot elements, and emotional themes that aren’t actually in the code of the game at all.

It does this primarily by allowing for extensive customization of your XCOM squad. You can, and are encouraged to, personalize the soldiers that fight for you by customizing their names, appearance, voice…etc. You can make them all copy of co-workers, or celebrities, or historic characters or whatever. As they go on more missions and gain more experience they specialize in one of four areas of expertise (heavy weapons, assault, support, sniper) and learn new skills and associated with their new roles on the team. You can control which skills they learn, deciding whether Sergeant Danny Devito is the sort of sniper who would hang out in the back and rely on targeting information from his squadmates (and thus get the ‘Squad Sight’ skill) or stay on the move and see the bad guys for himself (and thus get the ‘Snapshot’ skill which would let him move and fire on the same turn).

A key factor to consider here is that, as with its 1994 predecessor, XCOM: Enemy Unknown isn’t a terribly easy game. You’re going to create these soldier-characters, customize them, send them off to do battle, and then (either because of a mistake on your part or random chance) watch them die. Death in the game is permanent; it’s possible for a soldier to be wounded and, after many days in the infirmary, eventually recover, but when they do die they don’t ever come back. You can always hire new soldiers, of course, but they come in without any skills. This gives you good reasons, strategic and emotional, not to play too casually. Strategically, if you recklessly let your veterans die too often, you’ll be left facing the hardest part of the game with inexperienced rookies. Emotionally…well, let me just point out that in your base there’s a memorial wall of the fallen, complete with pictures, mementos, and background bagpipe music.

Since I really want to investigate and play with this emergent narrative thing, I’m going to try and record some of it here. The process of writing it out should not only make me take the time to savor the game play a little more, but also let me develop some of the more intriguing narratives a little more fully than I would if they were just in my head. This won’t be a traditional XCOM AAR (“After Action Report”) that gives the details of every game decision; that would be very long and probably very boring. But I’ll try to hit the highlights, keep up with some core characters that emerge, and provide a general sense of the overall story. I’ll be playing on the “Normal” difficulty setting (the options are Easy, Normal, Classic, and Impossible), since I don’t want it to be hard enough to be tense but don’t want my people dying all the time before they can develop any real personality. Also, if I’m going to have them behave in ways that are in character rather than in ways that are, from a game-winning point of view, strategically optimal, I might need a little bit of forgiveness from the AI.

One more thing: XCOM has an optional mode called “Ironman.” This mode disables the “save game” option which would normally let you save your progress at various points and, if things go badly, reload and try again. As the game puts it, "In an Ironman game your choices, and their consequences, are permanent." We’ll be playing with Ironman mode turned ON. I'm sure there's no chance of that coming back to haunt me later.

Ok. Let’s end this post. In the next one we meet the team.


Further reading:
You can read up some more on the idea of XCOM and emergent narrative HERE, HERE and also HERE.