What’s being discussed here is a game where you can’t lose at all. The closest you come to “losing” would be when you regret an action in the past; although the game would never actually end through the player’s actions, you can’t die or lose in that sense.

“Dying” in this situation is just a gameplay mechanic, and you don’t replay scenes barring reloading the last save. You’ve just gotta figure out a way to carry on regardless of failures. No failure ever “stops” the narrative, but it does have consequences.

That’s my 2 cents.

Narrative = the method a storyteller adopts to present the diegesis to the viewer. Basically everything you said was part of the narrative of those games.

EDIT: It’s meant to say ‘narrative or information giving’ in above post.

@Gorgeras: Mate, you definately have the concept of story/ narrative (or plot) the wrong way round. I refer to plot seeing as the two elements of narrative of information giving are story and plot.

Story = everything contained in the canon of the fictional world, i.e. A man sitting at a desk talking about his life.

Plot = the cause and effect sequence of events that lead from the beginning and end of what the viewer is shown, i.e. A woman entering the room and telling the man she wants to have an affair with him. From then on the plot is just the cause and effect of choices and events we see, the story something seperate entirely.

Now, most RTSes, you’re a godlike, incorporeal entity, so obviously you can’t be killed, although some may give you semi-avatars, like Total War’s generals, who have stats that can affect battles and can be killed. And in the tradition of C&C and Blizzard, each scenario has to be completed with certain limited resources and is a fixed stepping stone on the road of some scripted military campaign in which success is the only option.

But even within that limited framework, players typically have a lot more wriggle room between success and failure, because they can create secondary bases and other forms of insurance that help keep them in the game. Sometimes you can build yourself into a corner or mine all the resources from the map and squander them on a war of attrition, but even a crushing military defeat is typically more of a setback than it is a failure. You can gather more resouces, train more troops, rebuild your base.

This is taken even further by games such as the Total War series, where each battle takes place within a larger strategic context. I would never reload a failed battle, even if it swung the game against me, mostly because it was quite hard to fail battles where you weren’t horribly outnumbered or did sometimes foolish, and because loosing a battle was again a setback, not a failure. Lose and you’re back in the campaign map, and there’s armies to raise and provinces to be re-taken. Even if I knew I hadn’t a hope in winning a battle, I would still try and do my utmost to inflict the maximum amount of damage on my enemy’s army so they would be weakened for my counter-attack.

Darwinia really embraced the idea of the player being unable to fail in an RTS, in a game-over sense. You can reset levels if you get stuck with an out-of-control viral infection, but even that’s not a failure state, because it’s the player choosing to restart and take a different approach, rather than being forced to try again. Within the game, your units cost nothing to build and are only limited by your command slots, and are completely expendable. You have no base to assault, so you can never be destroyed permanently, even if all your units are wiped out. The closest it comes to failure states are the missions where you have to harvest souls released by the viruses, where it’s possible to get a bit carried away destroying the virus and not gathering souls.

The point is, there is a critical difference between the setbacks offered in Darwinia, even when it comes to the loss of units, and dying in an action game. (Incidentally, comparing the frustration of dying in an action game to being stuck in an adventure game as like-and-like is nonsense, as anyone who’s played hybrid games like the latest Broken Swords will know. Dying repeatedly is a far more annoying situation than being stuck.)

Back-story is just the story in a past-pretense. Stories are told, narrative is shown; merely put on display. You have to listen to a story, but narrative is optional and happens regardless of any observer. The thing about the Vorts is that there isn’t any story to their history or their present: only narrative. We are shown them as they were in the past and how they are now and are allowed to come to our own opinions of what might of happened. We are not burdened with the responsibility of knowing what happened in order to be allowed to understand what happened.

Assassin’s Creed is completely the opposite to Half-Life and Bioshock: we have little choice, we are not shown what happens but forced to learn and know it. What little narrative there is gets seperated completely from the gameplay and confined to Desmond’s timeline: a gameplay-free enviroment.

Examples of narrative:

1. Completing a mission in GTA and having a random news announcement on the radio talking about it from the non-player perspective.
2. Gordan Freeman becoming an exalted messiah to the Vortigaunt race in between Half-Life 1 and 2 while he’s in stasis.

What is not narrative, but story:

1. A cutscene at the beginning, middle or end of a mission in GTA.
2. Gordan Freeman being told he has met Alyx Vance before at Black Mesa but he probably doesn’t remember her. This is complicated because Freeman is the avatar of the player and Valve cleverly manage to have Freeman’s knowledge line-up with the player: neither of them know who Alyx is when they meet them. In one narrative video-cast Dr Breen berates Combine soldiers for not capturing Freeman who is ‘not trained as a soldier’ as most players won’t be and is described as an over-paid under-achiever that hadn’t put in the work appropriate to his pHD. Freeman is a mish-mash of what demographic archtypes a player is: a slightly-lazy nerd with a love of puzzle-solving, pragmatic thinking and above average fitness.

Such a complicated avatar is genius narrative in itself. He’s either a lucky idiot, depressed tough-guy or mute prodigy with a crowbar. A protagonist we can impose our personality on not because he’s bland, but because other people are reacting to him as if he has their unquestioning respect, which we all want. No one gets angry with him, no one is intimidated by him and they want him to like them. JC Denton can’t make the same claim.

“In Black Shades you control a psychic [and INVINCIBLE] bodyguard , and try to protect the VIP (dressed in white) from a horde of zombies, snipers and other assorted would-be assassins.

Unique Features
Infinite randomly generated city
Rag-doll skeletal animation
Soul release mode
Fluid aiming system
Stop assassins by shooting them, knocking them unconscious, disarming them, tackling the VIP out of the line of fire, or any combination of the above.”

Actually, I think you could be exploded by grenades. But you were never under attack yourself. It’s all about escorting the blissfully ignorant vip amongst a dynamically generated crowd where anyone could suddenly draw a gun or a knife. Another fun unrelated feature was the Action Half-Life-esque bleed-kill. With the smaller handgun, unless you scored a headshot, your target would only die within a second of getting shot. This allows the possibility for them to still stab your target to death. Hence, you have to either realistically double-tap them in the torso or drop them with a headshot.

Anyhow, highly reccomended. A game I carry on my USB stick: Check it out.