Ian here—
The seventh episode of the ongoing Shape Up! series is posted. This one is about moments in a few games—2064: Read Only Memories, Unpacking, and Signs of the Sojourner are my main case studies—that have always stuck out to me in how they deliver narrative beats through somewhat unfair gameplay mechanics. I suppose you could describe all of them as moments of “forced failure,” but there’s a range of tactics on display here of varying subtlety, and I thought it best to coin a new, more inclusive term to describe all of these moments: a beat bottleneck.
Full script below the jump.
Hello everyone, and welcome to another episode of Shape Up!—an ongoing series about form, structure, and pacing in games.
So, there’s moment in the cyberpunk adventure game 2064: Read Only Memories where your character, a journalist investigating your friend’s disappearance, has to rendezvous with an unknown person who goes by the handle TOMCAT. The bartender at the club where you’re supposed to meet TOMCAT can’t help identify them—he just suggests you check the dance floor (which is the very next screen to the right). On this very next screen there are three people, and if you’re going from left to right the first of these people is a woman with big, catlike ears. If you talk to her, the top dialogue option, selected by default is, “Are you TOMCAT?” Click it … and she really lays into you. [“Oh, wait. I get it. You headed right up to the chick with the ears ’cause of course she’d be the one with the cat name! Un-freakin’-believable. Find them yourself, jerk!”]
When I first encountered this moment, I thought, “what a wonderful piece of worldbuilding!” Human-animal hybrids are a minority population in this cyberpunk future. This particular club caters to them, but they face animosity within the general population. And right here in this moment, our player-character has just committed an act of implicit bias. It wasn’t particularly fair the way the game set this up—we had no way of knowing the norms and tensions of this society—but nevertheless I like the way it involves you as a player. You’ve just been called out for a faux pas—now how do you react? Do you immediately apologize? Or are you more defensive? Or do you lash out? Whichever response you choose, the accusation invests us emotionally in this moment, which makes it more memorable than just, say, reading a codex entry on human-animal hybrids.
I was so impressed by the way the game had manipulated my behavior to deliver this beat that of course the first thing I did was re-load an earlier save, to see how the conversation played out if I hadn’t taken the bait. In my re-play, I only clicked on this woman after I had exhausted the dialogue of every other character in the club, and I carefully chose the second dialogue option, where we only neutrally ask if she knows where TOMCAT is, not if she is TOMCAT. This kicks off a dialogue tree where the game hands us plenty of more opportunities to comment on her appearance, clearly baiting us into making the connection between the name and her cat ears. But if we avoid all of those options, and are instead unceasingly polite … she’s still kind of mean to us. [“Yeah, all right, whatever. Just get moving.”]
Why? Why is her character written to be hostile, even when we carefully avoid the etiquette traps the game sets for us?
Well, it’s because she’s a significant character later in the game. Her name is Jess, and we’re going to need a favor from her in Chapter Two. From a story perspective, we’re supposed to get off on the wrong foot with her, so that later it makes sense that she’d refuse to help us unless we do a standard adventure-game favor for her. The second time we run into her, she accuses us of having interrogated her earlier, and having hid the fact that we’re a journalist. Which is technically true—we didn’t mention it, because the dialogue tree never gave us the option to. She also says we stuck our foot in our mouth during the earlier encounter, regardless of what we actually said.
This is an example of what I’m going to call a beat bottleneck. Constructing a long-form narrative comes down to writing and arranging shorter story beats. Experienced writers can be very opinionated when it comes to this process. In his screenwriting guide Save the Cat, Blake Snyder insists that every movie screenplay should have exactly fifteen beats, each occurring within a narrow page range, sometimes down to an individual page—for instance Act I’s “Catalyst” should occur on page 12 (which will be roughly equivalent to the 12th minute of a finished feature film), whereas the “All Is Lost” beat near the end of Act II should occur on page (or minute) 75.
But of course delivering story beats through narrative design in a game is a trickier business than delivering story beats as a screenwriter for a movie. You can’t usually say that something specific is going to happen in minute 75 of a game, because the pacing of games relies on player input. There are ways of clamping down your narrative, and precisely controlling its delivery. You could for instance simply deliver every single story beat in the form of a cutscene. Maybe a cutscene plays in between every mission, and significant story developments are always communicated to us that way. But that can lead to a feeling that the story is a meaningless wrapper, and most developers in this day and age are more ambitious. They want to integrate the story with gameplay at least a little bit.
So: how do you deliver the narrative beat you want to, at the moment you want to, even when the player has their hands on the controller? Well, you leverage the game’s mechanics to create a bottleneck of some sort. A beat bottleneck is when gameplay funnels players into a situation for the purposes of delivering a carefully-planned story beat.
This may be something as straightforward as an architectural or geographical bottleneck. In this level from the original Half-Life, if I walk forward into that doorway area, I’m going to get assaulted by a couple of enemies I can’t fight off. Gordon Freeman will be knocked out and apprehended.
Of course, you could make the case that Half-Life is just one long architectural bottleneck. It’s a very linear first-person shooter, and you’re often just running down a narrow corridor, so these sorts of scripted sequences are easy to pull off. But you still see these sort of architectural (or geographical) bottlenecks even in contemporary open-world game design. Rescuing your uncle is a major story beat in Ghost of Tsushima, one that reverberates in lots of different ways, so the game very clearly blocks off those parts of the map available after this plot moment from those parts of the map available before. You can only geographically move on to the rest of the island after you have narratively moved into Act II, by passing through the narrative-cum-geographical bottleneck that is Castle Kaneda.
This sort of geographical bottlenecking weaves narrative beats into level design. It’s more elegant that keeping gameplay and narrative entirely separate, but in the grand scheme of things it’s still a pretty crude approach. You can find deeper places to construct your bottlenecks, in less-obvious areas of your game’s mechanics.
Subnautica, for instance, is fond of using timers: narrative beats will occur because you’ve been playing for a certain amount of time. Sometimes these are obvious because they throw them onscreen (for instance, the timer indicating the Sunbeam’s arrival). But the game also makes good use of hidden timers. For the longest time I didn’t know what triggered the first instance of telepathic contact by the Sea Emperor Leviathan—I had played the game multiple times, and it still surprised me each time it happened. Was it triggered by picking up a certain number of items? Venturing out beyond a specific radius? No—I looked it up, and someone figured out that whenever you first attempt to shut down the quarantine enforcement platform, the game sets a one-hour timer, and the Leviathan will reach out to you then. That delay hides the cause and effect involved, and makes this moment more mysterious—which is fitting, for a narrative beat that’s about being observed from afar by an unknown intelligence.
Or, if you want to avoid geography, but also avoid timers, you can instead find ways to subtly socially engineer your players’ behavior. And, getting back to our first example, that’s what we have in 2064. This first interaction with Jess is a trap: it’s been put there as a delivery system, not just for the bit of world-building about hybrids, but also for a specific story beat that will inform our later interaction with this character.
Your relationship with Jess can evolve quite a bit over the course of the game. There’s that moment I already mentioned where ask for her help in Chapter Two, and it’s also possible—though far from guaranteed—that she’ll agree to help you again, at the game’s climax. These moments when we secure her help us are supposed to feel like victories, and in order for that to be the case, the game needs to ensure that she starts out antagonistic toward us.
The implicit bias story beat serves this function really well. It leaves you feeling at least slightly at fault for getting off on the wrong foot. This makes for an especially satisfying payoff when Jess decides to be the bigger cat-person, putting aside our differences to help with a greater cause. The game manipulates us into that initial etiquette mistake as a way of making Jess’s antagonism feel organic. And I’m willing to bet that the majority of players will see Jess’ arc play out in this highly organic way. But for those players who choose the other dialogue option … well, then they see how much their choices don’t matter. Which sucks, but: in the game’s defense, fewer people will see the worse version, because the designers have cleverly set us up for failure in that initial exchange.
So I started this video off with an example of a beat bottleneck I think is impressive … only if you don’t look at it too closely. If you do spot the false choice, it feels in retrospect like the writers are hedging their bets in a way that’s a bit too domineering. I started this way because I want to ramp up to bottlenecks that use gameplay to deliver story beats in even better ways. I have two more major case studies in this video, the first of which is Witch Beam’s 2021 cozy simulation game Unpacking, which follows a character as she unpacks her belongings in eight different living spaces over a period of 21 years in her life, from 1997 to 2018.
Unpacking has no spoken dialogue, and it doesn’t even have in-game models or illustrations for any of its characters. Instead, it revels in using objects as environmental storytelling, from small-scale to large-scale. The progression from level to level is filled with little micro-narratives—maybe a red colander was already at a house before you arrived, and clearly belonged to a roommate, but in the next level it’s part of your stuff—just small things like that about how we accumulate the objects in our lives.
But then alongside that, there are much stronger and sustained narrative threads.
Over the 2000s-era levels there’s an indication of our protagonist’s growing interest in art. In the 2004 college dorm level, she unpacks a drawing mannequin, as well as some colored pencils, markers, and drawing books. By 2007, her collection includes more markers, a growing set of spiral-bound notebooks, and now a stylus pad for computer-based sketching. It’s hard not to feel a sort of vicarious pride in the 2007 level, putting together a nice neat little workstation for a growing interest that might turn into a professional pursuit. And the roommate situation our character has found is pretty much an ideal scenario: there’s meaningful overlap and complimenting of interests, with one roommate pursing fashion design, and evidence that they all enjoy tabletop role-playing games.
The 2010 level is a completely new living situation: our protagonist has moved in with a boyfriend. This isn’t delivered in dialogue or journal entries, it’s just obvious from the masculine-encoded living space we find ourselves in.
At the risk of over-praising it, I’m just going to say it: the 2010 level of Unpacking very well may be the best example of embedded environmental storytelling I have ever seen in a video game. As it’s usually conceived, environmental storytelling almost always operates in the past tense. You enter into a space, and you see what happened there. Whether it’s in the context of a horror game or a detective game, we’re typically talking about gleaning clues about past events.
By contrast, Unpacking’s 2010 level is all about the present, and anxiety about the future. There’s a foreboding sense that this relationship is off, that these two aren’t a good match. This level grants us an ability we didn’t have in the 2007 level: we can now move existing objects around as we find a place for our stuff. Theoretically, that should make this space feel more welcoming. But the marvelous trick the game pulls is that it doesn’t. The tight space and rigid decorative logic of this apartment robs us of the sense of an open canvas the previous levels had. Our boyfriend has a specific life, and a specific style, and as we’re moving his stuff around to make room for our character’s, it makes us ponder how much their two styles don’t mesh. We have a cheap plastic terrarium; he has a Zen garden. He has fancy copper cookware that probably cost thousands of dollars in total, we have that red plastic colander. Our barbells look ridiculous in his weights rack. Even details like his Xbox 360 vs. our Gamecube start to feel meaningful. This is a guy with very clear ideas about how he wants to live, down to his fussy ways of making coffee, and our pastel plastic measuring spoons fit awkwardly into it. God, look—look at the fancy way those drawers close! The first time I played through the game I distinctly remember wondering how our character met this guy, and what their shared interests were. This is how I imagine the apartment of someone who went straight out of undergrad into finance or something looking, not the more nerdy and artsy people our character had previously associated with.
What I’m saying is: there’s clearly going to be a breakup. That’s clearly going to be the next life milestone that the game is going to explore. And the foreshadowing of that story beat is done not through dialogue or journal entries but just through the design of the space, and the way the rules are enforced. In other living spaces, we’ve been able to hang framed pictures on the walls, but the one thing we can’t move in this apartment are the guy’s framed pictures, which means there is no wall space for us to hang our diploma. We have to stick it off in a corner somewhere.
And then, the final and most incontrovertible bit of evidence that this relationship is headed for disaster: Every level in the game has a little “check” at the end, where it refuses to move on if any object is in the “wrong” space. Usually, this is just a reminder when you’ve left something on the floor. But sometimes it’s finicky in interesting ways, that indicate something about the game’s unseen characters. Like for instance I wasn’t allowed to put my brush in this drawer, because each roommate has their own drawer, and this one wasn’t mine, so although there was empty space, that space didn’t belong to me. This is the game’s way of simulating the objections other unseen characters might voice about your organizational schema.
What the “check” at the end of 2010 reveals is that there is no one place you can consolidate your laptop, stylus, and art supplies. Your laptop and markers can go on your bedside table, but your drawing stylus isn’t allowed on it, or under it. Your laptop and your stylus can be on the main coffee table in the TV room, but your markers aren’t allowed anywhere in that room. So there isn’t a designated space anywhere in the apartment to hold all of your art-making supplies together. They have to be separate, which means you can’t actually use them. You have no place to pursue your artistic work in this apartment. All of this could be solved if you just had a desk, as you did in your 2007 place—but you don’t. I don’t think you need to have read Virginia Woolf’s essay on the subject to get the point the game is making here, that this act of heterosexual coupling has left our protagonist without a room of her own. You don’t need to read anything to get this point, not Woolf’s essay, not any in-game text, because the entire point is made through the layout of the game’s space and the implementation of its rules.
And so the next story beat arrives, which has been adequately foreshadowed: in 2012, we break up with the boyfriend, and end up moving back into our childhood home. It’s kind of humiliating—there’s still a tattered Lisa Frank poster in our cupboard that we can put up as decor if we really want to give up on the dream of adulthood. And there’s an interesting beat where the game won’t consider the room “done” until we take down the photo of our character and her ex and put it out of view in the cupboard. But: even in this childhood bedroom, we have a desk where we can fit our laptop and stylus together. And despite the obvious setback, that feels like a win.
Now you might be thinking: so far we’ve looked at two games that are overall highly linear, telling a single, pre-authored story for the majority of their duration. Do I have an example of a beat bottleneck in a game that gives players more freedom?
Well, of course I do. (It’d be pretty dumb of me to set things up that way that if I didn’t.)
Signs of the Sojourner is a collectable card game in which the mechanics of card-playing serve as a metaphor for conversation. Your player-character just inherited a shop after your mother died. Your friend Elias will be manning the register, and meanwhile you’ll be traveling with a trading caravan, meeting vendors and procuring stock. Your dealmaking with these vendors takes the form of card games. You want them to like you, to trust you as a business partner, basically to vibe with you. You do this by playing cards that match the symbols on their cards. The symbols stand for vibes, more or less: empathetic communication, direct communication, logical, creative. Chain your symbols together with them successfully, and you’ll make a deal. Fail to match their vibe, and they’ll blow you off.
As is usual for the collectable card genre, success in any individual game comes down to a mix of luck-of-the-draw and long-term deck-building strategy. You’ll undoubtedly lose some … but you’ll also win some. And if you do win, your conversation partner might reveal a new location you can explore, off of the caravan’s route. But exploring that off-route location comes with an opportunity cost, because the caravan will move on without you, and maybe by the time you catch up, a vendor will be out of stock. And maybe if you had successfully gotten that item, you could have sold it in exchange for a future shortcut on the map. But you don’t know any of this ahead of time. All you know is that there are various options, including the option to head home early, because the longer you spend on the road the more you pick up fatigue cards, filling up your hand with unplayable junk and making it significantly harder to vibe with vendors.
All of this is to say: Signs of the Sojourner’s storytelling is highly systemic. Rather than a single predetermined story with particular beats in a particular order, players can follow their own path, kaleidoscoping outward from the outcomes of individual encounters.
Which is not to say the game is narratively directionless. It is, at base, a Bildungsroman—a coming-of-age story. And one of a specific mold, about a young person who leaves their provincial home and becomes more worldly as they grow into adulthood. The game’s systems are designed to tell a range of possible stories all within this genre. So for example: when you stay out on the road you get fatigued, but you also you acquire new cards. Each time you return home you have a conversation with your hometown friend Elias, and the more you’ve explored the world, the more likely you are to fail these conversations—partly because of those pesky fatigue cards, but also because Elias only has the old symbols you started the game with, not the wider range of new vocabulary you’ve picked up. The two of you are drifting apart because he’s stuck in a small town, whereas you’re increasingly cosmopolitan. The only way to prevent this is to stop venturing out as far, prioritize his friendship over exploration, and even over the economic viability of the store. You’re free to make your own choices—the game’s rules just ensure that the consequences of those choices fit the expected character dynamics of this genre.
Most of this is done with a light hand, but occasionally there’s more obvious bottlenecking. If you venture out to new far-flung locations the instant they show up on your map, you’re likely to face card encounters that are either legitimately unwinnable or that you’re at least highly unlikely to win, because you didn’t give yourself an opportunity to build your deck up ahead of time. Narratively, these encounters lightly punish your player-character for recklessness. But mechanically, they’re not a total loss, because even failed deals can net you a new card, setting you up for future success.
But sometimes the punishment is more severe, and delivers an especially memorable narrative beat. Let’s turn to the game’s second caravan trip. This trip starts off with Elias asking you to find him an instrument to play at a performance he’ll be giving at the end of the chapter. There are two ways to do this. You can pick up viola in the town of Aldhurst, or you can get a synthesizer in Anka—which is much more exciting, because it’s the final reward for a series of difficult card games. Aside from Elias’ instrument request, there’s a whole bunch of other side adventures in this caravan outing. A vendor in Clifton was robbed, and you can track down the thief in the Desert Oasis and convince her to return the goods—then give a guy there a ride to Anka. There’s a plot-line with two feuding brothers and a missing shipment of vinegar that you can resolve by bouncing back and forth between two towns and winning multiple card games. Of course, all of these things take time, which comes with an associated opportunity cost. In fact, you may want to ignore them all and stick strictly with the caravan, because its leader Nadine has explicitly said she expects you to accompany her for the full route this time around.
Unfortunately, if you do stay on the caravan’s route all the way to a town called Old Marae, you will probably regret it. You get stopped at a customs checkpoint at the town’s entrance, and this encounter is extremely difficult: the guard’s communication style doesn’t match any symbols from your starting deck, so you have to have picked up enough new cards on the road while also not acquiring too many fatigue cards. Through repeat tries, I can confirm that this encounter is winnable under the right circumstances, but it requires a tremendous amount of luck, both in the hands you’re dealt during it, and in all prior encounters where you had the opportunity to collect cards. This customs checkpoint is set up to be an almost-guaranteed defeat for your character, a narrative choke point where you confront the limits of your ability to sweet-talk everyone in this world. And, to make matters much worse, if you did manage to snag that synthesizer in Anka, the guard will confiscate it here—even if you win this encounter. If you venture into Old Marae with the synth in your inventory, you will lose it, full stop. Elias will end up humiliating himself by playing a plastic recorder in front of a live audience. The only way to avoid this scenario is to avoid Old Marae altogether, and turn back earlier.
Now, you might complain that this customs checkpoint, with its near-guarantied loss of the encounter and actual guarantied loss of the synth, is unfair. And you’d be right! The game hasn’t prepared you for a card game with this severe of a consequence. Looking back, unfairness has actually been a common thread throughout all the major case studies in this video. It’s unfair of 2064 to bait players into committing a faux pas, and unfair Jess always passes the same judgement on us in the second encounter no matter what we said in the first. It’s unfair and arbitrary that our character can’t keep her stylus under her bedside table in Unpacking. In fact, out of all of these examples, this moment in Signs of the Sojourner is probably the most fair. You can turn back and avoid Old Marae. Or, if you go into it carrying the viola, you won’t disappoint Elias, even if you do lose the card encounter. The bottlenecking isn’t as rigid here: there are ways to avoid this story beat.
But it still feels unfair. And that’s just the nature of the beat bottleneck. In these moments, the games’ rules don’t function in a way that preserves fairness. Instead, the rules enforce a story beat. As a player of a game, you have every right to be furious if your synth is confiscated at the gates of Old Marae. But as someone who’s simultaneously experiencing an interactive story … this moment, though unfair, can still be compelling. Even satisfying, in its own way. This is actually a very appropriate story beat for a Bildungsroman: our protagonist experienced some early success, got over-confident about their own worldliness, and now in comeuppance they fail their friend. Our protagonist’s motivation going forward is going to be more complex, tinged with aspects of an inferiority complex. And maybe so will our motivation as players.
Beat bottlenecking is something I’ve already actually examined throughout this series, although without using that name. In my immediately previous video, I discussed how Doki Doki Literature Club! makes it somewhat harder to date Sayori, thereby ensuring that most first-time players will end up in either the Yuri or Natsuki routes. I think this is deliberate: it makes the, um, thing that happens to Sayori at the end of Act I feel like it’s your fault for neglecting your friendship with her. That thing still happens if you do date Sayori, and it still makes narrative sense, but the beat definitely hits harder if you date one of the other girls. That subtle funneling of your romantic attentions away from Sayori leverages the game’s mechanics to ensure that a narrative beat arrives with the maximum emotional weight, and it doesn’t at all feel at all like obvious manipulation while it’s happening. It just feels like you’re playing a dating sim, with some characters being easier and others being harder to date.
And all the way back in this series’ second video, I talked about how Else Heart.Break() motivates your initial arrival in game’s setting with a soda-selling job, but it actually wants you to ignore that job and start stalking a manic pixie dream girl … and if you don’t pursue her forcefully enough, the game just sort of breaks. In that video, I characterized this as a failure of ironic communication: the game expects you to defy authority, without providing a clear enough signal of what you should be pursuing instead. But we can also accurately characterize it as a failure of bottlenecking: the possibility space of the game’s setting is large, and events happen in real-time, so there really needed to be some gameplay excuse to trap you at a certain place and time to make sure certain story beats were delivered. But its design is too open and anarchic. This anarchism is in keeping with its narrative themes, but unfortunately it disrupts the game’s ability to tell its story.
Now, despite the problems of Else Heart.Break(), I’m not saying that all narrative games need strict bottlenecks. Signs of the Sojourner is highly system-based, allowing for a lot of player agency, with only some very light bottlenecking. And there are games that take the system-driven approach even further, offering purely chance-driven encounters that interact in strictly procedural ways. Wildermyth stands one step further down this path from Signs of the Sojourner, and then at the far end of the path you have things like Dwarf Fortress or AI Dungeon.
Games that use beat bottlenecks aren’t, as a general rule, “better” than this less writer-driven alternative. We’ve seen how the bottleneck in 2064 is sort of kludgy. But I will defend the well-executed bottleneck as a writer’s prerogative. And writers … well, I’m worried about them. To take a quick peek outside our formal analysis box at the actual state of the industry: Game writers aren’t unionized, and so aren’t protected against being replaced by AI in the way that Writers Guild of America members are in the wake of their 2023 strike. Nvidia and some of the major AAA publishers are pushing hard for a future in which NPC dialogue and even entire games will be generated in real-time by AI rather than designed by humans, trying their best to make that future seem inevitable. Nvidia’s CEO has claimed that using ChatGPT instead of writers for games is not only more practical from a business standpoint, but also produces better-quality results. Now, maybe the tech will plateau and all this will be vaporware … but maybe not. If you haven’t noticed, the industry is shedding jobs for actual humans at a rather alarming rate right now. We’re being promised a future of endless content, generated without any need to employ human writers. But will that content have any shape? Any dramatic arc? Will it be able to surprise you? Will it ever frustrate you in a way that’s ultimately memorable? For me, a human writer putting their thumb on the scales a bit, taking away a game’s fairness for a moment, is a small price to pay for delivering a meaningful and emotionally salient storytelling beat through gameplay. Those types of beats are something that strictly procedural-based story games can only accomplish on rare occasions. And they’re not something I trust an Nvidia GPU to do. Not yet, anyway.
Whoa, what? Oh, come on! I take it back! I take it back!
Huh? Oh no. NO!!!!
Intermittent Mechanism 