Sword of Mana: Do, don't show

In Game Design Review, Krystian Majewski takes a common creative writing mantra and rips it a new one in a way that I haven’t been able to get out of my head for some time.

It seems counter-intuitive but actually, LESS emphasis on some parts of the story create MORE emotional response. This is something which goes well with Rowan Kaiser’s recent article in The Escapist. He suggests applying the admonition “Show, don’t tell”. I would go even further and change it into “Do, don’t show” to avoid any misunderstandings. The problem is, as always, that games aren’t movies.


Nooo! Look behind you! Turn around! .. Gaaah! Give me that controller, you incompetent idiot!

When we watch a thriller, and we see Janet Leigh take a shower and the killer waiting outside it creates suspense because we foresee what will happen but we have no means to change the course of events. We are doomed to watch the murder happen and thus can do nothing but feel sorry for the victim.
Games are different. In games we CAN do something. The player IS Janet Leigh and the only way she would make the decision to take that shower is if she didn’t knew that there is a killer outside. In games the emotional connection does not happen through emphaty but through responsibility. As soon a the player realizes a decision was made by somebody else in advance, he disconnects emotionally: “Oh, ok, it is is not my fault, it was meant to happen”.

The phrasing’s a little off… “do” is a command for the player, while “don’t show” is a warning to the designer.  So to make sense, the catchphrase should be “Don’t show, make the player do” or “Don’t show me, let me do,” but I admit that’s not as catchy as “Do, don’t show.”  

It’s times like this that the world needs Latin. I’m a bit rusty, there, but with a little help let’s see… “[something] to enact, not [something] to be shown” would probably be “agere, non manifestandum.” (See my recent blog which included an aside praising obscure terminology.)

2 thoughts on “Sword of Mana: Do, don't show

  1. Yes, that’s a good point, and I think whether the game has a first-person or third-person perspective has an influence on the subject, too. When I can see my PC on the screen, whether it be April Ryan (who has her own backstory, revealed along with the main story in The Longest Journey) or an orc named Blogg whom I created to inhabit a sandbox game like the Elder Scrolls, I’ve got a different set of expectations then if I play Half-Life 2, where I can never see the PC and the whole experience is designed to be immersive.
    But I don’t wonder at all about Gordon Freeman’s motives — he can be a savior or some schmuck who’s just trying to survive, but either way “his” motives perfectly match my own motives of getting the next thing to happen in the game world.
    I’m not entirely sure that responsibility is the gaming equivalent of cinematic empathy with the protagonist, but if you do approach game studies from a cinematic prospective (not something I do), then it might be important to name a concept that fills the role of emphathy/gaze/perspective that informs so much of cinematic theory. Nevertheless, the tell/show/do friction points are very useful if you want to get a discussion going.
    Interactive fiction has long been a place where individual authors can experiment with those sorts of boundaries. Adam Cadre plays with the distance between the player and the PC in both 9:05 and Photopia, and though those aren’t his most recent experiments or even his best, I keep returning to them because each one focuses on exactly one, easily graspable concept, and does it well.

  2. I’ve always found it funny that the control that a player gets over a story in a game is the very thing that prevents Ebert and his ilk from allowing the genre to be art. I suppose it’s because it introduces the scary concept of multiple authorship, a big no-no for the supposed auteur with his or her giant and necessary production team.
    Can’t empathy and responsibility exist simultaneously, though, in a game? That is, I can recognize I’m not the character I’m playing, and emphasize with them from a distance, but also feel responsible for my portrayal of that character, as I am them and myself at the same time.

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