Balancing ‘real life’ through games

Hamburg / DPA

Many bookworms baulked when singer-songwriter Bob Dylan was recently awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature.
But the highbrow position traditionally occupied by authors is now also being encroached upon by computer games designers, who are challenging traditional forms of
storytelling and breaking the boundaries of
narrative.
One of these is Jan Mueller-Michalis, also known as Poki, the Hamburg-based creative director of a computer games company. His team has just been tasked with designing a computer game around Ken Follet’s historical novel The Pillars of the Earth.
Poki initially looks a bit sleepy, but that soon changes once he’s quizzed about the virtual worlds which he conjures up for a living. He effuses anecdotes and examples, laughing, flailing his arms and drawing invisible sketches in the air with his finger.
For Poki, the connection between games design and literature is clear.
“For me personally, it’s about telling stories through the medium of computer games,” he says. “And computer games offer simply endless ways of doing this.”
Poki eschews frivolous entertainment in his games, which centre on the “really big questions.”
These include environmental pollution, the balance between “real” life and its enactment in social networks, and, in almost every case, the issue of individual freedom and moral decisions. One of Poki’s early efforts is titled Edna bricht aus (Edna Escapes), which he developed as a student in 2008. Its premise is that protagonist Edna suddenly awakes imprisoned in a padded cell. Her memory has been erased. Her talking toy bunny Harvey advises her to push the head of the psychiatric institution down the stairs in order to make her escape.
The player is aware at that point that Edna already has a person’s death on her conscience.
“My stories always revolve around conflicts that I consider insoluble,” says the 39-year-old.
In the case of Edna, it’s the question of “the wicked,” the compulsive, he says. “Sigmund Freud called this the id.”
A key difference between Poki’s computer games and traditional stories is that the outcome is left up to the players. Will morality or Edna’s id win out? Will Edna be let loose on the world once more? You decide.
“They can always decide for themselves where they go and who they talk to. That’s the fundamental principle,” says Poki.
“I find myself a conflict, and then I dig until I think I’ve found the core. And then I wait until crazy things occur to me, which later appear in the games.”
This process can produce talking toy bunnies, planets full of trash, or platypuses which have gone wild.
“The best ideas come at night, when you’re in the shower, at a traffic light or in the car,” says Poki.
But, he says, because creative work has no beginning and no end, he never really sleeps.
“It was especially extreme with the first games. I’m working on it.”
Pretty much every possible dialogue and every imaginable movement of a game’s character have to be planned for.
Simone Gruenwald, who is designing the characters for the Pillars of the Earth game, says: “Ultimately, you should be able to not just re-experience the book, but also to influence the story.”
This element of player decision making brings an added dimension to the narrative experience, which is absent from traditional storytelling media. Even a Bob Dylan song might struggle to compete with completely interactive literature.
So could a computer games designer be in the running for a major literary award in the not-too-distant future?
Poki certainly thinks so.
“Why shouldn’t a games developer win the Nobel Prize one day? We also create culture.”