On Battlefield 1's Storytelling Method

I've slowly (very slowly) been working my way through Battlefield 1's campaign over the past couple weeks after having exclusively playing its multiplayer mode in the past, and I have to say that I'm both puzzled by how the game tells its story and how reviewers of the game viewed that storytelling method.

Battlefield 1 goes for the anthology format across the various theaters of a vaguely-historical World War 1. You spend a little time as an Italian, some more as a woman fighting against the Ottoman Empire, and so on in a grand tour of places that we know The Great War happened in.

[This doesn't fit in the piece, really, so let me make an aside here: I think Battlefield 1's approach to history might be irresponsible in that the game gives us a hyperpowered steampunky Giant Zeppelins and Battleships version of the war but doesn't give us any sense of what is fictional license and what is pulled from life. One could play Battlefield 1 and think that the unthinkable number of dead was actually caused by these giant weapons rather than by machine guns, terrible living conditions, the god damn flu, and a million other banalities that ended up being extremely lethal. Battlefield 1 repeatedly claims to honor the dead and the living, but it reduces the war to a spectacle and it suggests that it is that spectacle which made the whole thing honorable. In reality, a lot of people died in the mud of preventable diseases, stab wounds, and all of other things that have killed people for a long time, and the crushing weight of modernity (with its machines and gas weapons) accelerated and amplified that mass death.]

With that aside out of the way, what I think is so strange about the anthology format is that it reduces the story arcs of each of the game's protagonists to just a few motion-captured cutscenes that bookend the running, sneaking, and shooting gameplay that makes up every Battlefield game.

While story beats certainly happen while you're gunning your way through enemies, it is almost always in the form of either commentary, like the Italian soldier telling his daughter about the mission dozens of years later, or in internal monologue, like many of the protagonists narrating "and then I had to go over there."

That means that the burden of telling you how to feel is almost always done through the writing and acting that's happening in the cutscenes, and Battlefield 1 might be the first game that I've played where the motion capture is good enough that the actors can actually deliver the emotional load when they need to. There are emotional beats, and the beats work. Or, rather, they work as much as they can, because they don't have time to breathe.

The contemporary war film (say, post Saving Private Ryan and The Thin Red Line as a duo) has a pretty recognizable pattern. There are characters, and like the classic war film, they are easily typed. There's a joker, a serious guy, some corn-fed dude who just wants to make it home to mama, the Brooklyn kid, and whatever else on down the line. Each of those characters have their own story beats, and those beats happen in the wax and wane of combat and down time. As the film goes on, the characters's exteriors break down, and we start to see some kind of universal and shared vulnerable humanity within them (or we see the absolute void of nothingness, a simple reversal on the expected warmth in the heart of all men).

Battlefield 1, by virtue of its gameplay-to-cutscene-to-gameplay structure, just doesn't have the time for its characters to develop. They don't get the down time, because what is "down time" in film (say, when they're camping out at night) isn't in a game cutscene because a cutscene needs to have action and move the plot forward. It's a weird moment where how games are forced to work is sort of stutter-stepped with what films can do.

That doesn't stop the game, though, so instead it just barrels on and takes the peak moments from war films and plops them into the cutscenes. An Australian sniper is introduced to a young soldier who valorizes him. He hates this kid! Then, ten minutes later in the next cutscene, he has a moral responsibility to save this young man's life. We can see how this might happen in a film--a memory of himself as a kid here, watching another soldier die there, etc--but none of that development happens in the game. Emotional developments in the narrative happen by fiat because it's a war story and, well, emotional developments happen in war stories.

Honestly, it's almost surreal in how it works, and I can't think of any other game that so confidently performs a narrative while so clearly not giving a damn about the steps involved with making a narrative work. And, to be clear, it does work. The actors carry it in the moments that they have, and the unrelenting pace means that you don't have a whole hell of a lot of time to think about things being incongruent.

Battlefield 1's story is like driving a car across the country, popping the hood, and then realizing that there isn't an engine in there. You still drove across the country, and the car still works, but you're mystified by how you accomplished your journey with so many missing pieces.