The Sins of Machinarium

From the moment the little robotic hero reassembles himself at the start of Machinarium, I knew his adventure would mean something special. And as much as I enjoyed its emotion, story, and adventure-style gameplay, I still can’t give Machinarium a pass for its sins against game narration.

My favorite moment in the game felt fulfilling, though not in a game narrative fashion.

Don’t get me wrong, I definitely agree with Chris’s emotional attachment with the little guy while I guided him through his whimsical adventure; every one of his somber, lonesome animated gestures cried out to my sympathies.

And Keenan accurately observed the experience’s remarkable artistic style, story, and gameplay. The setting illustrates an overbearing tone of industrial corruption and isolation, and an ingenious use of animated bubbles subtly reveals our hero’s small, yet significant story of hope in the bleak world. The adventure style gameplay, meanwhile, offers brilliant challenges and puzzles that hearken back to the height of the adventure game era in the ‘90s.

Such analyses, however, don’t go far enough. Appreciation for Machinarium flourishes on the levels of both story and gameplay. Since the whole experience fundamentally relies on story to motivate the player to solve puzzles, I’d also expect its storytelling, or narration, to shine. On the level of narrative, however, the game couldn’t possibly disappoint me more.

Animated bubbles work great, so long as you look and don’t touch.

In his work, Story and Discourse: Narrative Structure in Fiction and Film, narrative theorist Stuart Chatman affirms that the final outcome of a narrative depends on the interdependence between story and discourse. As mentioned, the story of Machinarium—in essence, the cause and effect relationship between events—works beautifully. Its discourse, or the way it tells the story, uses both the ingenious adventure gameplay and the charming animated thought bubbles to great effect. The disconnect for Machinarium lies within the interdependence between the story and discourse, and I’ll explain why soon.

Another approach to narrative comes from Bordwell and Thompson in Film Art: An Introduction, which explains the importance of content and form. For Machinarium, the content comprises both the excellent story and gameplay. The form of the two content elements, meanwhile, doesn’t make an effective use of the videogame medium towards a game narrative.

In the post-Half-Life videogame landscape, a game cannot reflect narrative mastery without interactive storytelling. Games prior to the late ‘90s generally kept narrative in a rigid, separated form: narrative techniques from other media, such as non-interactive cutscenes and text, often exposed story, which then motivated the interactive actions taken within the gameplay. Half-Life then released in 1998 and showed that game narration didn’t need to borrow non-interactive narration from other media. Its story and discourse, its content and form combined together in ways unique to the medium; its narrative told the entirety of its story without sacrificing the interaction that defined it as a game. For the game medium after Half-Life’s release, both the aforementioned elements of form and the interdependence between story and discourse must hinge on interactivity.

Warning – Minor Spoilers Ahead: Batman: Arkham Asylum, Braid, Half-Life 2, Tales of Monkey Island, and, of course, Machinarium.

“Feel free to look around.” Better words could not have been said.

In Half-Life 2, which obviously follows the precedent set by its predecessor, you, the player, retain complete control over protagonist Gordon Freeman in scenes of narrative salience. When you first meet Dr. Kleiner in his secret lab, you can pay attention as Kleiner talks with other characters Alyx and Barney about the resistance against the Combine, you can keep your ears listening while you explore the lab and tinker with the interesting objects, or you can pay them no heed while you do your own thing. Even moments that don’t “box you in” a room for story still use interactive storytelling: as Dr. Breen broadcasts his propaganda, you’re in Nova Prospekt shooting Combine, commanding ant lions, and choosing whether to listen to Breen’s piece of the story. In all cases, the game grants you the rights of interactivity and agency, the ability to make decisions during narrative and see the results.

Help Tim help her. This time you both will reach the last star.

I can think of few recent titles that purely use interactive storytelling throughout their experiences like the Half-Life series—namely, Assassin’s Creed, BioShock, Braid, and Dead Space—and even some of them contain minor non-interactive exceptions. Braid, for example, largely uses text, a typical style of narration for games, yet still lets you control the character of Tim so you can decide to read or skip at your own will. Narration culminates in the complex final level that lets you enact events, platform, and control time through Tim’s attempt to reach his love, and ends differently depending on whether you found all the stars in the previous levels. In this case, not only do you retain interactivity throughout the game narrative, but your choices also directly impact the narrative.

Games like Batman: Arkham Asylum, meanwhile, prefer a mix of both interactive and non-interactive narration. It still clings to traditional cutscenes to tell story in its poorest use of the medium, but that doesn’t mean it can’t narrate in powerful game-centric ways. When the Joker speaks over Arkham’s video intercom system, when Batman thinks to himself, or when Batman speaks to Oracle through the cowl, the game tells story while still letting you explore Arkham Island. The most dramatic interactive narrative moments truly reflect a mastery of the medium: in a hallucination caused by Scarecrow’s poison, the setting of Arkham breaks apart and you have Batman walk down a hall of Wayne Manor as it slowly changes to the fateful dark alley; you walk to the haunting memory, the murder that defined the Dark Knight. You’re just walking—manipulating “Forward” via the keyboard, one of the subtlest forms of control—yet even from your small sliver of interactivity comes a visceral unity with Batman that could only be done in a videogame.

Walk with Batman. Remember as he remembers.

After experiencing the ways games combine interactivity and narrative towards the most effective use of the medium, I thus can’t help but feel disappointed by Machinarium. While its content is fantastic, its form uses little, if any, interactive storytelling, which should be unacceptable in a post-Half-Life world. Solving its puzzles triggers non-interactive narrative events that progress the story; thus the story does not mesh with the gameplay discourse, and instead remains separate.

While I agree with Chris when he points out the emotionally evocative style of “imaginative expressionism,” I’d argue that narration through non-interactive thought bubbles, however effective they may function towards narration, is a fundamentally poor use of an interactive medium. Machinarium’s narration might convey interpretive themes and motifs better than the “clunky” dialogue trees of Tales of Monkey Island ever could, but Tales’s interactive narration will still always be superior within the videogame medium. I don’t want to sit back and watch the story unfold, I want to lean forward and interact with story while it’s told.

It may be “clunky,” but at least I can clicky.

That being said, I could only find a sparse few interactive narrative moments in the game. Moments like diffusing the bomb at the end could, arguably, represent the narrative description of the way the character diffuses the bomb through the puzzle solving of the player, but events like these number a disappointing sum in a sea of non-interactive narration. Maybe I would’ve appreciated the animated thought bubbles more if I could somehow manipulate their figures with my cursor; in the end, however, the game’s developers chose a method best suited for a different medium.

While I can certainly appreciate the entertainment value of games like Machinarium, I mostly tolerate them in moderation. I not only can’t consider the game for game of the year, but I’d go so far as to say if more games like it went back to old-fashioned storytelling methods, I’d probably stop playing story-based games altogether. I definitely enjoyed the game, but I hope Machinarium comes as a swan song for the traditional, pre-Half-Life story-based game.