The Difference Between Good Narrative and Great Narrative
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Folks, I want to talk about the difference between a good narrative and a great narrative.
Using a few different examples.
And I think I'm going to pull from video games for the most part, because video games, especially the older video games, the narrative is such a challenge.
You know, it's on the surface, video games are about the mechanics.
Is the game fun to play?
And yet, the difference between a good game that's fun and a great game that you remember 10 years later is whether they embraced the principles of narrative.
Specifically, there was a game I played recently, and I'm not going to specify because, well, quite frankly, the guy has produced, the group, I should say, the group has produced a ton of games.
They're not about to listen to me, and this would just come across as mean-spirited criticism.
So I'm not going to name names with this.
But it's a point-and-click adventure game, which, you know, when I'm hungover, I absolutely love those things.
And this particular game, well, let me tell you about the setting.
As a game, though, as a game, as a point-and-click adventure game, it is an excellent game.
Most of the things in it make perfect sense.
You know, they don't have the bizarre moon logic that is sadly omnipresent in many of these things.
The game makes sense.
You can intuit what the puzzles are.
It's fun to play in and of itself.
But where it really falls apart is in the overarching narrative of the thing.
Now, you might say this is just a video game, it's about the mechanics.
It needs to have good mechanics.
And if mechanics are good, then we can forget the narrative.
But again, that's the difference between a great game and a good game.
The setting of this game is that you are a kid wandering through the woods who ate some berries that made you shrink until you were like an inch or so tall, and you have to go do a bunch of adventures for these weird, fuzzy smurf-type people, and then they'll give you the potion to get back to regular size again.
Yeah, it's very artificial construct, very cheesy.
I don't know if I call it a trope exactly because it's not that common, but it basically is a trope.
Now, here's the problem.
Here are some of the problems with that narrative.
First of all, you're introducing this weird magical kingdom of furry smurf people without explaining what these people are exactly or where they came from or why we don't know about them.
You know, whereas the smurfs, the actual smurfs, it's kind of implicitly understood that they hide out from humans and Gargamel is the only person that knows about them.
Everybody else thinks he's crazy for believing in them.
So you've got that issue right off the bat.
Then you've got another issue.
One of the things you have to do is climb up a tree by nailing boards to it so that you have a sort of makeshift ladder.
Well, first of all, how are you climbing up a tree if you're one inch tall?
Second of all, where are they getting the nails?
Okay, did they have minds going on?
Like, they're only an inch tall.
To dig down to the point where they could find iron would be pretty difficult.
And oh, so many problems with that.
It assumes a normal macrospective of reality.
And then, what really stood out to me was that one of the furry Smurfs, they have a fire in their little Smurf home.
A fire of wood built off of matchsticks.
Now, in a game like this, you obviously don't expect perfect realism, but you do expect consistency, coherency.
Yet you need a believable world.
And matches, like these are logs, logs, roughly the size of matches.
These are not going to burn a sustainable campfire for hours on end.
You know, I'm not saying that you need to do all the physics of this world, but you need to think about this world.
You need to actually create a believable, consistent reality.
And so, although the game is fun figuring out these puzzles, it's ultimately quite disappointing because you don't believe in the world.
The whole time that you're playing the game, you are aware of the fact that you're playing the game.
Now, let's contrast, let's contrast that game to Super Mario Bros. 1.
You know, you might not have noticed it, but every third world in Super Mario Bros. was happening at night.
This is a this is a it's a significant feat of programming, but not a huge one.
You just change a few values.
You know, the greens become blues, the blue sky becomes black.
You know, every third world you apply this variable to it.
It's not that hard.
But coming up with this idea, that is genius.
That is showing that you care about the narrative, about the world that you're describing.
Because what this implies, and you know, as Red Letter Media says, you didn't notice it, but your brain did.
What you are doing is going on a three-day journey to rescue the princess.
And there's other subtle variations you get.
For instance, the second time that you do the foothills, it's either the second or third time, the foothills are no longer made out of grass, they're giant mushrooms.
Now that took a fair bit of programming to put into this tiny cartridge with almost zero memory, and yet they did it.
They added this element to enhance the world, to make this world more three-dimensional, to give it greater depth.
And so, Super Mario Bros. like the mechanics of the game aren't that amazing.
Not that amazing nowadays.
They were revolutionary at the time.
But that's not why the game is so incredibly memorable.
That's not why Mario became the character that he is today.
The reason that the game was so memorable is because on the subconscious level, they created a fleshed-out three-dimensional universe using only two dimensions and absolutely a side, like the only text in the game is that your princess is in another castle.
And yet they managed to create this fleshed-out physical world.
And it's all these little tiny details they put into it.
The first seven Koopas you kill are actually fakers.
You know, it's a goomba pretending to be Koopa, etc., etc.
They thought about this world, even though they're just making a platformer.
A simple basic platformer supposed to be sold to kids, and yet they came up with this world with so much depth to it that it demanded sequels.
It demanded an exploration.
They made cartoon shows about this ridiculous video game because they spent the time thinking about it.
You know, a good movie that thought about its plot was that Pixar filmed WALL-E.
It thought about what it was doing.
Because there's this one scene in WALL-E, and I'm going to have to credit SF Debris for noticing this.
But it's such a small, small little thing that matters so much to the movie.
When Wally, he's the dirty trash robot that's trying to clean up Earth, and the humans have all flown away on their spaceships, and they don't care anymore.
Wally shows up on the spaceship, and everything's regimented, everything is iPod clean, and Wally is just this dirty weirdo.
They get to the decontamination center, and there's this obsessive compulsive robot that cleans everything before it comes onto the ship.
And he runs into Wally, and Wally is just a giant mess because he's a garbage compactor robot.
Now, on the surface, this is just a silly little scene where the obsessive compulsive robot keeps trying to clean the garbage robot, and the obsessive compulsive robot is freaking out, he's having a panic attack.
Just a silly little one-joke slapstick scene, right?
Except those jokers at Pixar did a little bit more with this.
See, even though it's just a slapstick scene, they introduced an element where the cleaner robot always traveled down specific paths, these lines in the ground that were his official domain.
And Wally, because he doesn't understand, because he's, you know, he doesn't care, he thinks for himself, he thinks the whole cleaning robot's ridiculous, and he just goes off in his own direction.
He doesn't even notice that there are lines on the floor that he's supposed to follow.
And after he leaves, the cleaning robot has this little moment where he's having a panic attack.
There's these dirty footprint, like tracks going at a 45-degree angle.
He's like, I'm not supposed to leave the line, and yet I'm supposed to clean.
What do I do with this dilemma?
And he cuts the Gordian knot.
He jumps off his line and starts cleaning up the 45-degree dirty tracks that Wally left.
And as SF Debris pointed out in his analysis of the film, this is the effect Wally has on everybody, that Wally seems to break people out of their preconceived programming.
And that's what makes him into a hero.
It's not that he has superpowers, it's that he thinks for himself.
And by thinking for himself, he makes others think for themselves.
And they communicated all of that in this tiny little scene.
This slapstick, throwaway scene of Wally being dirty and the other robots not liking dirty.
They turned that into this broad, like this character-driven this tiny piece of the narrative.
It's building the universe.
It's the exact same thing as Super Mario Bros.
Nothing but a platformer game, you know, get some mushrooms, jump on koopa troopas.
And yet this silly, simple game aimed at children, they gave a shit.
They added elements to make it even more.
And you didn't notice, but your brain did.
That's the difference between a great narrative and simply a good narrative.
You know, Transformers is a good narrative.
It has plenty of explosions, it has characters you can relate to, it has these arcs, you know, friends become friends, then they break out of friendship, but they become friends again.
It's got all of those basic building blocks, those basic tropes that make up a story.
And yet there's no greatness in it.
There's no profundity.
When they made Transformers, it was nothing but a vehicle for explosions and excitements and basic narrative.
They didn't think about these things.
They didn't take, like, yes, yes, Transformers should have just been a simple movie.
That's all we were asking for.
But they treated it as simple.
Contrast the movie Independence Day.
It is absolutely simple, absolutely a popcorn flick.
And yet, and yet, that movie stands out to me because there's one scene where the vice president, he's the villain, he's the bad guy that doesn't believe that the protagonist, oh, this new fangled plan of yours will never defeat the aliens.
He's the antagonist amongst the humans.
And eventually he gets his comeuppance.
He's proven wrong.
The heroes show that they have the thing.
And I believe I'm quoting confused Matthew here.
Let's give him credit where credit's due.
But this guy, this vice president who was the nayer, who was negative, he was the bad guy, it would have been so easy to turn this guy, he could have found, oh, now I'm going to side with the aliens.
You know, to give them one more play.
But no, no, he realized he was wrong.
He admitted that they were right.
Instead of going for that cheap, you know, villain gets their comeuppance, they could have gone the cheap route and turned him into a bad guy that sabotaged the mission because of because a human would sabotage the mission against aliens that were going to kill everybody.
But no, they went the mature route.
And they said, you know what?
Even though he was the antagonist, he's not really a bad guy.
He's actually a pretty good guy.
And now that you've convinced him, he supports your plan.
See, that's courage.
That's thinking about it.
Even though you're just making bubblegum, you're just making candy, you can still make really good candy if you think about it and if you care about it.
Caring about something.
Doing something that's worth it.
You know, like even if it's bubblegum, it doesn't matter.
Approaching everything you do like it matters.
You know, even if you're making a Ford focus.
It's not exactly Lamborghini, but somebody's going to be driving that car.
So why not give a rat's ass and make something good?
It might just be a Ford focus, it might just be a silly video game.
It might just be a popcorn summer blockbuster flick, but it's going to wind up being something beautiful in its own right.
Hurry me out, folks.
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So, if you could spend a minute of your time, click the link below, and go vote for it, I'd be much obliged.
