Framing the Prince (2)

Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time leverages a sense of momentum on all of its distinct levels: in its action-oriented plot development which fuses traditional fantasy folk narratives with plot points lifted from Hollywoodesque blockbuster tropes; in its essentially repetitive but contextually compelling platforming-and-fighting gameplay; and thematically with questions of life, death, free will and destiny all arising with every choice the characters make independently of the player.   This focus on movement on all these levels works at distinguishing between the concept of 'game' as a textual process defined by mechanical manipulations  and a new kind of digital 'game' as an authored multimedia artifact, bringing together various aspects not necessarily interactive, into one story-based experience. 

In Sands of Time on-interactive moments do not merely provide context to seemingly mundane and often repetitive gameworld interactions but allow the configurative and interpretative aspects of games to be brought together into one cohesive experience. They can have several different functions, acting as a reward, as a justification, as a reaction or as a means of creating meaningful context. Non-playable scenes form the crux of the game's audiovisual media experience: they form and give meaning to the “game” in which the external actors - the players – only have limited control. The role of the player, in this sense, is one of guidance: pushing the Prince deeper into the labyrinth of the vast Azad castle and forward towards the unraveling of the plot. These non-playable scenes take the place of the extradiegetic narrator; a framing, a structural order used to place coherence to the player's actions in the world, actions which are intentionally limited in variations to specific platforming and combat related actions. The "onlooking" nature of the player is even highlighted with the inclusion of the Prince's narration, present throughout the entire game, as he reflects on his past or his current situations, sometimes even oblique references to yet unspecified events: “Trust not a man who has betrayed his master, nor take him into your own service, lest he betray you too. I learned the truth of this, to my sorrow, the day we arrived in Azad as the Sultan's honoured guests.” Here, the Prince narrating clearly has the benefit of hindsight, highlighting that the events on the screen already happened. 

Another consideration to how this game manages to intricately entwine its game and story elements is the concept of meta-textuality in The Sands of Time. The game constantly showcases awareness of itself and it layers this self-recognition into the core of the whole experience without being overt about it until the final plot resolution has played out. In an acute awareness of the limitations of the medium in telling fully-authored stories, the game's design chooses to boldly pronounce that the game is a story and equates the experience of playing with the experience of listening a story being recounted. By the time the plot unfolds and the evil Vizier is confronted, it becomes clear that the short initial scene at the beginning of the game/story was not coincidental: the Prince approaching and climbing into a terrace at night, from which light spills through the curtains from the room within. To start the game the player has to guide the prince to the only exit: into the room. Once this is accomplished the scene changes completely to one of warfare, and we hear the Prince's narration telling his listener to suspend their disbelief and listen to his story:  

 “You might wonder who I am and why I say this.  Sit down and I will tell you a tale like none you have ever heard.”    

The structure of telling narrative is harnessed into the game as the playing audience inherently assumes that the narration is addressed to them, as external beings to the fantasy world. By the end of the game, however, it is revealed that everything the Prince (compelled by the Player) has done in the game happened in the past tense: it was a story, and the device employed to narrate it (unknown to the audience) was the flashback:

This reveal plays upon the nature of storytelling and shows that the audience had been none other than another character within the game all along.  Davidson explains this moment as a post structuralist manifestation of narrative in games:

This moment illustrates how the interactive experience of a videogame can make manifest a theory  of reading in which the reader is just as active a creator in the meaning of the text as the  author. You are  both the “author” of the story (the Prince) and the “reader” of it (Farah). Your actions as the Prince are  also your imagining of the story being told to you as Farah. It is an elegant twining of story  and gameplay together in this interactive experience. 2

At the end of it all the Princess Farah's reactions to the tale also highlight the fairy-tale quality of the game and its thematic concern with illusion, magic and reality: “Why did you invent such a fantastic story? Do you think me a child, that I would believe such nonsense?”. Throughout the entire game the storytelling element is again brought to the foreground when The Prince, during the game, directly addresses the player (or so it would seem). Whenever the player chooses to leave the game, the voice of the narrating Prince poses questions to his audience: “shall I continue my story from here the next time we’re interrupted?” or  “do you wish me to leave before finishing my story?” With the reveal that those questions had been directed at Farah and not the player the terrace scenes book-ending the entire plot take on a new significance, wrenching the player's understanding of the textual relationship they had previously engaged with the game into another plain of understanding based on the compulsion of the narrative. 

This narrative technique is clearly influenced by similar meta-textual reveals in film and literature, and highlights the deep connections The Sands of Time has with other forms and media. Story and interaction become ultimately inseparable for most of the game, each part a core centre of the experience. The story's development reflects and contrasts the rhythm developed in the gameplay , actively engaging and creating immersion. Far more than any gameplay objectives, The Sands of Time ingeniously employs plot development to encourage the forward movement of the player within itself, essentially creating both engagement and immersion. The development of the plot is reflected in the nature of the gameplay, and while it is apparent that most of the narrative in the game is told non-interactively, understanding how the story frames and interpellates itself  the action, allows us to understand how the two can overlap in order to create an aesthetically cohesive game experience. 

 2 Drew Davidson, Plotting the Story and Interactivity in Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time, Media in Transition Conference 4: The Work of Stories, Cambridge 2005.