What Melodrama Could Teach Us About Great Game Design

Henry Jenkins III and Matt Weise

Introduction
Melodrama may seem to be an odd topic to discuss within a video game workshop – but it could serve as one of the spaces where games can begin to explore and learn things from other media and apply these to solve some problems that they are facing as an industry and as a creative mode of expression. In this lecture we will first talk generically about melodrama and then follow that up with examples of melodrama as evinced in some video games.

Isn't Melodrama for Girls?
In our culture, we generally tend to bracket melodrama as something meant for girls. But there are actually two answers to this question: yes and no.

Answer 1
Yes, and it's precisely by combining melodrama with the action elements found in traditional games that you can expand the game market to include women, casual players, and older players. An example of another media where melodrama is included to attract women is comics. Vertigo comics, for example, attract a large female readership for their offerings because the stories in their comics rely heavily on melodrama, interpersonal relationships, gothic romance, etc. The Western in the 1950s, in order to compete with television, turned heavily to melodramatic elements and became rebranded as the Adult Western. This basically included the standard shoot up plus elements like a father-son relationship, mother-daughter relationship, or other family drama integrated in the Western, in order to attract more viewers, especially female viewers.

Answer 2
No, not historically. Melodrama referred originally to drama with music and included a broad range of different kinds of stories which were designed to provoke strong emotion. Many of the basic genre traditions which feed into game iconography and plots were themselves shaped by melodrama. So, if you can reclaim those melodramatic roots, you can reclaim more of the emotional impact of those borrowed materials. So whether you talk about the Western, the detective story or the sports story – these are all genres that have historically drawn on melodrama. The baseball picture, for example is extremely melodramatic. Whether you take Field of Dreams, The Naturals or any other baseball movie, they are framed as the ultimate guy pictures. But what guys are going in to see are extremely melodramatic stories involving partnerships between two men that involve intense bonding, men dying in each others arms, old players coming back to play one final game, young rookie pitchers pitching against their childhood heroes, etc. Field of Dreams is ultimately about a guy's desire to play catch with his dad. That is taken as the melodramatic crux around which all the action of the film revolves.

So if you think of something like a sports game, which one would imagine would be the furthest away from melodrama, and start layering in some of the generic plots that we associate with the baseball movie, you begin to produce more emotions and more opportunities for meaning in the video game. All of these can be easily integrated into the mechanism of a sports game. Adding an element of melodrama behind the genre traditions of a video game is one way of enhancing its emotional impact.

Directors like John Woo and James Cameron are masters of melodrama. Although their work is traditionally associated with the action film genre and usually invites a male dominated audience, a lot of what they do within their films draws heavily on melodrama.

Characteristics of Melodrama (Or how do you design a game to "make you cry"?)
1. Melodrama is an emotion machine; each element contributes to the overall emotional impact.

"All elements in melodrama – its themes, technical principles, construction, and style – are subordinate to one overriding aesthetic goal: the calling forth of the 'pure,' 'vivid' emotions. Plot, character, and dialogue, working in unison, serve to elicit from the spectator the greatest possible intensity of feeling."

"Melodrama expresses feelings which are comprehensible to all, universal and primitive."

"Actions and deeds in melodrama are justified…solely by the very nature and force of the emotion itself. "

2. Melodrama builds upon stock "foolproof" plots, which depend on "violation of innocence" and "reversal of fortune". By foolproof plots – we mean plots that tap core human emotions such as the intricacies of basic familiar relationships and it is these that become the building blocks of the plot. If you look at Hollywood action films – particularly those that appeal to broader rather than exclusively male audiences, you will see over and over again – divorce, broken families, estranged father-son or mother-daughter relationships, all of which during the course of the plot play themselves out according to familiar patterns. Be it Indiana Jones and his Dad, or the Jurassic Park films, they all have the same plot elements that involve touching a chord in the hearts of the audiences by connecting to these foolproof emotional mechanics.

3. Melodrama plays itself out both on the global and micro-narrative level. While the entire film may be melodramatic, the melodramatic elements work on a local level as well. Thus every unit of a melodramatic film will have an emotional dynamism that will lead to the audience feeling some emotional impact.

4. Melodrama defines clear goals for the protagonists and sets obstacles/opposition to those goals. The more obstacles, the greater the emotional content of the film. The more the tasks seem overwhelming, the greater will be the emotional payoff for the audience. One sees this in professional wrestling. We have Hulk Hogan who is completely bashed up and bleeding all over his head – lying in the rink. His hand when lifted up, collapses back on the ground the first two times it is lifted. But then the audience starts stomping and cheering him on, and the third time his hand is lifted, it forms a fist. He begins to shake it, his entire body starts quivering and he rises, as if from the dead, to fight again. It is an incredible melodramatic cycle. The more limp Hulk is on the first two lifts, the more powerful it is for the audience when they are able to resurrect him. If games can study these dynamics of melodrama, they can get further in terms of an emotional arc than they are doing currently. However one has to note that melodrama walks a very thin line – it depends on excess, however if it gets too excessive, the audience loses interest. This is something that game designers struggle with a lot too – there is already resistance to melodrama from the players who like to think of themselves as tough guys and don't like to think that melodrama affects them. So if melodramatic devices are introduced in the games in crude forms or in primitive ways, they are going to be labeled as "cheesy". When melodrama overcomes this resistance is when it really has an impact.

"The characters are perpetually confronted with obstacles on their way to achieving their goals; temporary successes and recognitions prove inadequate or false, giving rise to new consequences leading to further struggle...The endings of the individual acts fall at moments when new plot developments are first introduced and not yet fully disclosed. "

5. Melodrama restores moral order through the use of systems of rewards and punishments. This is why it is difficult to apply to video games. The end of melodrama is central to the structure of the whole; i.e. we know at the end, that the characters who transgress will be punished, and balance will be restored, and a movie that ends otherwise is not a melodrama but a tragedy. Melodrama entails having a sense of reassurance that there will be order once more, at the end.

"Melodrama teaches, consoles, punishes and rewards; it submits the phenomena of life and human conduct to the immutable laws of justice and offers reflections upon men's actions and feelings. "

6. Melodrama depends on establishing contrasting emotional tones between scenes.

"Everything moves forward by sharply isolating the crucial, striking moments in the dramatic action, rather than by coordinating them with the surrounding moments. melodrama maintains itself on the heights of intensity, thereby obtaining maximum force from each episode."

"Each phase is followed by what appears to be an entirely new phase in relation to what went before…In this way the spectator's emotions are constantly held at a high point of tension."

7. Melodrama depends on flat characters, defined through their emotions, moral goals, relationships, oppositions, and functions. One doesn't have the same level of novelistic depth in a melodrama that one would have in a more serious work. This is a broad generalization, but it would be safe to say that melodramatic characters are not as rounded as those in real life – their emotions are defined in very sharp ways so that we can feel them unambiguously. The degree of flatness is of course, an aesthetic judgment and depends on a variety of factors; including how much roundedness the makers want to have and how much experience the audience has had with similar characters previously. As a genre develops, it often demands new layers of complexity in its characters so that they don't become threadbare and predictable. We can use the Western as an example of this again – Westerns made today, like The Unforgiven have characters that are a lot more complex than those made in earlier years, like say, The Stagecoach. Thus melodrama is a balancing act – how far can you go in terms of both streamlining as well as adding complexity in order to have the maximum impact for the audience?

"The melodramatic character displays oneness of feeling as competitor, crusader, aggressor; as defender, counter-attacker, fighter for survival; he may be assertive or compelled, questing or resistant, obsessed or desperate; he may triumph or lose, be a victor or victim, exert pressure or be pressed. Always he is undivided, unperplexed by alternatives, untorn by divergent impulses; all of his strength or weakness in one direction. " – Robert Heilman

"Characters are assigned the simplest and clearest function (victim, villain, insidious enemy, dedicated friend or servant.)"

"Characters in melodrama do not carry the full weight of life…The dramatic spring is not the character, but the plot with its emotional bases; the characters are only the "tools" and are defined in their character traits only as much as is necessary for motivating the progression of the plot…One-dimensional and stationary, the characters in melodrama are cast in 'masks'."

The protagonists/victims embody honor, valor, selfless love, generosity.

The villain serves as stimulus for testing the positive values.

The secondary characters share the suffering or function as tools for the positive and negative characters or supply comic and picturesque elements.

"Evil in the world of melodrama does not need justification; it exists, simply…and the less it is adequately motivated, the more this evil appears simply volitional, the product of pure will. " – Peter Brooks

"Innocence and villainy construct each other: while the villain is necessary to the production and revelation of innocence, innocence defines the boundaries of the forbidden which the villain breaks." – Christine Gledhill

8. Melodrama depends on outward physical and verbal expression of emotion. It is constantly telling us what the emotions experienced by the characters are. This is a really important function and one that the games lose all the time. For example, in the Sims, if the mom and dad are having a huge fight and there is a girl sitting in the room, we don't see her react emotionally to what is going on. We can contrast this to a TV soap, where we would almost certainly cut to the girl's face, quivering below the stairs and the emotional response would be expressly stated and displayed physically. The reaction on the child's face is what provides the real emotional impact of the scene – the fact that she is being ripped apart by her parents' bickering can be conveyed by showing the audience her expressions as a third party that witnesses their fight.

"Nothing is spared because nothing is left unsaid; the characters stand on the stage and utter the unspeakable, give voice to their deepest feelings, dramatize through their heightened and polarized words and gestures the whole lesson of their relationship…Emotions are given a full acting-out, a full representation before our eyes…Nothing is understated, all is overstated. – Peter Brooks

9. Melodrama depends on music to shape our emotional response to scenes. Melodrama literally means "drama with music". The use of music dramatically is a defining point of melodrama across other kinds of genres.

10. Melodrama externalizes emotion through the creation of atmospheric spaces. To use a cliché, if characters are upset, the setting is "a dark and stormy night". During a recent episode of American Idol, there was a really bad singer singing while a storm began to form over Houston and lightening was flashing outside. At the end of the performance the judge told her that she was so bad that she sang like a ghost. The combination of the storm and her singing created a sense of melodrama, although in this case, unintentionally. It seemed like the atmosphere was reacting to the emotions of the moment.

11. Melodrama depends on scenic contrasts between the action and its context. so you can have something very painful take place in a very beautiful location. These are classic melodramatic contrasts.

12. Melodrama invites the audience to participate in moral debates about the characters and their actions. In other words, after watching the scene, the audience comes out debating: "Was that the right thing to do?" or "Would you have done that?" or "Was the ending right?" It is designed historically, to serve as a democratic tool. It provokes emotions and asks us to dig within ourselves and analyze what we would do in a given situation. For games, this would be an interesting challenge. As a game designer, instead of arguing over whether to incorporate formulaic violence into the game or not, one could try and incorporate melodramatic elements that would cause the players to pull back and debate over the human consequences of violence. Thus the initial experience would be emotional but the long-term experience would be dialogical.

Examples of "Emotion" in Games
In the game industry, the generic term for melodrama is considered to be "emotion" and so the rest of this article will use this term while dealing with the issue. Before we address the question of if games have emotions or not, one has to define what the concept of emotion means in the game world. For one person, it could mean games that make you cry, for others, it could be games that make you feel fear, anger and other emotions. Since we are dealing with the concept of melodrama, we will consider emotion in video games as something that makes you cry.

Games resemble the visual immediacy of cinema, and people often react enthusiastically to cut scenes that convey emotion in a cinematic way. However it is misleading to think that only cut scenes provide emotional content in video games. Games have many different ways of showing emotions and the visual side of games is just one aspect of how this can be achieved. Games could possibly have the emotional texture and pacing of a novel; however what this means is that just taking one section of the game in isolation may not result in one feeling strong emotions. But if one plays the game at length, one might reach a point or a level that has dramatic emotional impact. It is important to note that the concepts of emotions in games is not something that is fixed – it is something that is ever-changing as a result of dialogues that people within the game industry and players have among themselves.

Final Fantasy
The Final Fantasy series is a historical example – it is what lots of people serve up as the magic example of emotion in games. The game comes from the concept of having iconic character design – since this is more abstract, the player can transfer more of his/her personality on the game characters. The characters express emotions physically – it is almost like pantomime or silent cinema, where their actions are very exaggerated and emotional expression is encoded in their gestures. Unusually for a video game, the lead character is a morally ambiguous, angst filled, confused, almost psychotic person who is not goal oriented – in fact he doesn't know what he wants at all. This makes the game more melodramatic as the emotional tension springs from his anxiety. The game uses a number of "universal" concepts – that are essential elements of melodrama – such as family, love, hatred, moral ambiguity, indecision and identity confusion. The cut scenes are very film-inspired, with sweeping music et al.

Ico
But the important question is not whether cut scenes can be made emotional or not. Rather how can melodramatic structures be embodied or otherwise explored via the mechanics of the game itself? It would be wrong to think that this is not happening. Because of the intense nature that games can have, and the subtle emotional involvement needed by the player to play the entire game, a lot of the instances of emotional involvement are missed by a lot of people as they are more subtle than they are in film in some ways. A good example to cite here would be Ico, which is popular for being a very emotional game, and a non-cheesy one at that. Ico fuses the already melodramatic content of the game with the gameplay. Melodrama in the cut-scenes is reinforced and given context by what the player does in the game. This is similar in some way to games like Final Fantasy VII, but works on a much broader level. The two characters in the game don't speak the same language and hence have to communicate entirely through body language, which fits into the idea of controlling the characters through the game play. The physical interaction your character has with the other character simply by your playing the game becomes a relational model for both the characters.

Suikoden
There are in fact a lot of systems in place in traditional game genres that can very easily handle emotional content - there are so many wasted opportunities where this is not realized because game designers don't think outside the box and take advantage of it. Games have a series of goals - if the goal of a game was simply to get from point A to point B, and then nothing happens, it would become boring. To make it more interesting, what designers often do to make their games interesting is to have physical obstacles to get past. It would be very easy to give the immediate goals some kind of character driven psychological and emotional aspect to them. It is surprising how few games actually do this. Suikodaen, a Japanese Final Fantasy type of game is one that attempts this. Like Final Fantasy, it has characters that get together to do battle against monsters, etc., however in Suikodaen, there is more subtlety imbued in the gameplay. Unlike other games in its genre, the family relationships or social relationships between the characters actually mean something in the battle. So if there is a husband wife team battling with you, and the husband is close to death, the wife will always jump in front of him and protect him even to the point where she loses all her power and dies. This in turn makes the husband go into a rage. Likewise, because of their social relationships in the narrative, certain characters are able to get together and fight as a team.

Majora's Mask
In Majora's Mask, there is a complicated symbiosis of melodramatic structures, nearly all "embedded" in gameplay, such as repetition, reversal of fortune, emotional consequences, family dynamics, etc. The story is a Groundhog Day type of tale, where the main character has to save a parallel world from destruction within 3 days, and if he can't then the game clock resets to day one, and the entire action of the game is repeated. There are some items that can be retained for this next cycle of 3 days, and there are some that are lost. The goal of the game is to collect a series of "masks" that represent different characters and character types (for example, a lovers' mask). These masks allow you to intervene in the lives of the characters you encounter in the game, but only through trial and error. Thus there are serious consequences in terms of the people you may decide to help along the way – if you decide to help a certain set of people, it may mean that it would be impossible for you to help another group. So the game constantly asks you as a player to be reflexive about the consequences of your actions.

The Sims
The Sims is another interesting example. The entire gameplay in The Sims is built around relationships, so it is highly emotional. It's emotional content however seems to alternate between a genuine affection for the characters and a Jerry Springer Show kind of feeling – where the characters become a kind of performance for the players to watch and enjoy. The game incorporates several elements of melodrama in its structure and it will be interesting to watch the evolution of the game to see where it goes from here on.

Recommended Readings

1. Judy Bratton, Jim Cook, and Christine Gledhill (Eds.) Melodrama: Stage, Picture, Screen (London: British Film Institute, 1994)
2. Peter Brooks, The Melodramatic Imagination (Hartford: Yale University Press, 1995)
3. David Friedman, Creating Emotion In Games (Denver: New Riders, 2003)
4. Henry Jenkins and Kurt Squire, "Sensory Overload," Computer Games Magazine
5. Henry Jenkins, Games, the New Lively Art
6. Ben Singer, Melodrama and Modernity (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001)