I LOVE to say “I told you so."

Extra Credits posted a follow-up video to that earlier collaboration where I thought some of their observations were getting things backwards. Here, EC covers a lot of the same ideas (and explores some other ones), and I feel tremendously vindicated.

Alright, so, I said most of what I wanted to about this back then, so I’ll try not to just repeat myself. Instead, I’d like to point out that designers can aspire above and beyond just having the mechanics and story be tonally congruent – as I was describing in my comments on the original video, you can aspire for your mechanics to communicate the story and it’s themes much more directly.

I’m not intimately familiar with the examples from this video, so I’ll grab one of my own: Limbo. A simple 2D puzzle-platformer, glued to a somewhat abstract narrative about a little boy’s coming of age or loss of innocence in a dark, uncaring world. The puzzles in Limbo fit the narrative. Interactions with the puzzle elements are often laborious, accidental death is around every corner, and, as the game stretches on, they become demanding, even punishing in nature.

If you swapped for Mario’s high jumping, block-smashing, enemy stomping mechanics, it wouldn’t jive. But at the same time, while the mechanics evoke the feelings that the little boy seems to be having through the narrative, and thus reinforce the themes of the story, what about a game where the mechanic serves up the core thematic metaphor for the story?

I recently played Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons, a game that is narratively about the struggle of the titular brothers to work together on a quest to save their father’s life. The brothers are united in their cause, and accordingly, most of the obstacles they face are fairly trivial to solve; but they have to work as a coordinated team to execute those solutions, a challenge that is mechanically symbolized by the fact that the player has to separately control the brothers with two analog sticks – a task not unlike trying to pat your head while rubbing your belly.

Compared to Limbo, Brothers goes above and beyond just a tonal relationship, it creates a mechanical metaphor that is integral to the story, requiring the player to experience the brothers’ struggle in order to succeed. That is how to unite a story with gameplay.