RE: “Story-Driven” Games
Adam writes in the comments to my last post:
I’ve heard that RPGs are usually extremely story-driven and tend to be really engaging. Speaking for myself, I can’t get past the gameplay mechanics to get into the stories. I think you raise an interesting point about games being ‘young’. Only the very, very early movies (and Michael Bay movies to this day) served as ‘tech demos’. They have always been story-driven.
I wonder if the interactivity of games is what makes the story aspects so difficult. If the story’s not on rails, following through the player’s decisions becomes complicated in a hurry. In HL2 for example, you’re pretty much bound to where the game takes you (it’s a good story and the characters are engaging, but the player choices are limited to “die or don’t die”), making it a much more cinematic sort of experience.
I plan on looking at specific examples in future posts, and RPGs are certainly going to be covered. I was just going to reply in the comments, but it got long enough to warrant a new post.
“Story-driven” is a term used to describe games that have heavy and deep narratives, but the games themselves are hardly “driven” by the narrative portions. Compared to shooters, maybe the action is more closely bound to the story, but almost all games follow the same template, which is that a narrative portion happens, usually with minimal or no interaction from the player, and then gameplay happens for a while. Take your standard Bioware or Baldur’s Gate-style RPG. You talk to a ton of people, getting a lot of information to flesh out the setting, which is gameplay of a sort, and then you go kill monsters in a dungeon for a while. Once you finish that task, you get another narrative burst, in many cases, just more dialog.
That’s the standard. Long stretches of the core gameplay bookended by exposition. This is why the narrative is secondary to other aspects, because the meat of the play is taken up by running around shooting zombie nazis or slaying the dragon. This means that if you just want to be involved in a good story, you have to be willing to sacrifice a lot of time into doing the other portions to get to it.
When we were kids, we played make-believe all the time. Hell, I still do. I have some friends who love to dress up as their favorite characters and go to conventions and pretend to be in other worlds. One of the things I miss the most about my life in Milwaukee was the fantastic role-playing games I was involved with. The reason we love it and continue to find ways to do it is because we want to be put into a fantasy world to make our own adventures. If it’s just a little self-insertion while watching Iron Man (guilty) or pretending as a kid that the floor is made of lava. What video games give us is the opportunity to make those worlds more real. Will Wright has talked about the desire to turn the literal sandbox of our youth into a gameplay mechanic, and I think we can do the same thing with playing cops and robbers or spacemen.
When a game is “on-rails” like HL2 (by far the best example), the story is completely locked in stone. It is 100% the artist vision of the writer and in no way influenced by the decisions or desires of the player. When they insert you into a blank slate character like Freeman, all you are really giving the player is a slightly more immersive movie screen to watch cinema on. And then they break up that movie with hours of shooter gameplay. What’s really amazing is how well it works. We get to watch a fun movie and play a fun game at the same time, but this is remarkably far from the “imagineering” we did as children, or even in pen and paper RPG groups today. It’s only by the fact that both elements of HL2 were produced so well that the game succeeds as much as it did.
One way around the issue of the separation of narrative and gameplay is to reduce the story aspect to its simplest form. When Valve produced Portal, breaking the mechanics of everything down to the barest components seems to be the core of their design process. The play in Portal was complex and challenging and dynamic throughout the puzzles, but never in the way you played. The game was remarkably simple in that respect: Create an entry portal, create and exit portal, go through the portal. The depth of the game was what they were able to do with that mechanic in a very short amount of time. They follow a similar format with the story. There are deep threads throughout it, especially if you know the rest of the Half-Life story, but these are not played out directly, they exist in the details and are implied by the setting. The actual story of the game is one person’s, the player’s, interaction with a brilliant antagonist. It is the perfect one-act play to HL2′s Hollywood Blockbuster. While the story is no more affected by your actions than in Half-Life, because it is distilled to such a fine and potent aspect, it dominates the game and drives it forward. While it has become an internet meme, when has a game tortured the player and pushed them to do something they didn’t want to do as much as the Companion Cube segment of Portal? It is the most mentioned part of that game because the game is really about the psychological torture GlaDOS wants to put the protagonist through, and that is some great storytelling. When you ask someone what Portal is about, they tell you the story first, and then talk about the puzzle game that allows you to progress through the amazing character study.
On the polar opposite of that spectrum is Metal Gear Solid 4. Full Disclosure: I have never played it, I only recently got a PS3 and was never terribly interested in the game anyways. So this is coming from all the reviews and comments I’ve read online about it. This game had hours of cutscenes. In the course of making it through this series-ending (?) epic, you essentially stop playing and watch several full length movies. I’ve always wondered – do people just put their controllers down? How is it still a game at that point? Some people have told me that the story was engrossing and deep, and wrapped up many lines of narrative in very satisfactory ways. If that was the goal, couldn’t the movie have been released separately? Or at least found a better way to present the story that didn’t take the controller out of the player’s hands. The worst thing I think a game designer can do is to stop the interactivity with the player and then have the character they are portraying do something really cool. Isn’t that why we are playing the game? So that we can do those things, at least in a mildly connected way? How destructive to the immersion of a story, where you have vested yourself in being that character, when he or she (or it) performs an incredible feat that it would have done if you weren’t even watching?
Obviously, I have some strong views on the nature of the cut-scene in video games.
Also, I really dislike Michael Bay’s work. But that’s a different topic.
I hope this helps expand on some of the topics I brought up in earlier posts.
-Brian
The Role of Narrative in Modern Games
I could say that I don’t think there’s anything wrong with video games these days the same way that you could posit that there’s really nothing wrong with family vehicles. They might serve some purpose and maybe they even do something really well, but at the same time, they don’t have the horsepower to really excite you the way a sports car might. Are games exciting? Sure. Video games are nested in immediacy granted to them by the very fact that they are interactive. Your input drives them in an exciting way and the big budget productions and the (often) head-to-head matchups lead to high-adrenaline moments that compare with the best roller coasters and Hollywood summer blockbusters.
So what is missing? Obviously the answer I’m reaching for here is story. There have been exhilarating moments in some of my favorite games, and some truly memorable characters. Even though my wife didn’t play a second of Mass Effect, she felt a bond to Wrex just by being around when I was playing. The action and sometimes the characters aren’t lacking, but it takes more than that to create an effective narrative. We need to see the characters being dynamic, we need insight into their complex motivations through their actions and interactions with supporting characters designed to highlight those aspects of them and most of all, we need to see the consequences of their choices. I feel it is the last part there, consequence, that separates the great narratives we’ve experienced in books and movies from the mediocre fare that has waddled out of video games.
Why is there such a discrepancy? The first and most obvious reason is because games are young. This is something I hear all the time to explain any shortcoming in the industry – video games simply haven’t been around to mature as long as our cousins on the screen or between the pages of a book. While this might excuse some level of developmental immaturity in technology or how games are made, the lack of focus on such a core element of all other forms of storytelling entertainment must come from something else.
The truth is, story just isn’t considered important. The bulk of content in games is the gameplay, not surprising at all, which is considered to be a wholly separate entity from the delivery of the plot. Games are expected to have stories and it is accepted that a mildly compelling narrative will add quite a bit to most games, but the mechanism for giving us that is mostly underwhelming and seldom provided in a way that really connects us to the actions taking place.
The question becomes, to me, how do we make the story part of the game? Not just something that happens in parallel to the gameplay, but an integral part of the experience. Is it just a question of writing better stories? I think there’s more there than that. Gaming allows us the ability to take on major roles in the worlds we play in. We can have drastic impacts and experience the full consequences of our actions in the context of the events that will play out during the course of a narrative. With the right design, the story can be made into the core gameplay experience.
The plan here is to explore this and flesh it out and experiment with it. I have plenty more in the way of thoughts, so look for that to appear, and some design tests using the Unreal Developers Kit.
Happy Storytelling,
Brian
Dates of Distinction
Today, I am significantly old.
Looking at what I accomplished in my 20s and what I have planned out ahead of me, I don’t think I’ve done half bad so far.
Let’s all gather back here on April 9th, 2020 and see how I feel about turning 40, and if I’ve made any progress in changing the way narratives are presented in games.
Inter-blog Choose Your Own Adventure Storytime Super Narrative
I thought this would be a fine way to inaugurate the new blog, however unfinished it is.
The way this works is that Barry started a Choose Your Own Adventure story on his blog. At the end of his story, he provided the reader two options, just like in the books you used to read, the ones where you’d try to jump away from the pirate only to fall in a pit and die in a fire. In this case, each option links to another blog where another writer has continued the story from that option. In the end, this story promises to snake you across the internet on a wonderful journey until you fall in a pit and die in a fire.
If you are moving along, you would have come from Valerie’s magnificent writing blog (http://candleinsunshine.com/asthemoonclimbs/challenge/choose-your-own-adventure) , having chosen option 1.
Your story continues below:
1) Go to the grocery store for supplies.
******
Loose gravel crunched under Michael’s foot and the expanse of the parking lot echoed his nervous steps. Latoya gulped next to him and her voice trembled.
“You see that too, right?” she asked.
“Uh-huh” Michael replied.
Emerging from the top of the Save-On-Food was a giant pickle. Michael blinked at it twice, hoping it would go away, but it was still there. Green tentacles slithered out from the sides of the disgusting alien gherkin, across the demolished roof of the grocery store and down to the cars parked below.
Toby scratched at his wild beard.
“Well don’t that just beat all.”
From the far end of the parking lot, hiding behind a parked car, Michael tried to imagine what the function of this horrible green monolith could be, but before he could ask, one of the tentacles feeling about on the ground wrapped around grey minivan. It lifted the vehicle straight up into the air like it was weightless and tossed it towards the giant pickle’s mouth like a piece of popcorn.
To Michael, the fact that the huge silo had a mouth was not the weirdest thing about his day.
“Is it eating…cars?” asked Latoya.
“Sure looks that way,” said Toby. “I bet that’s how it powers its mind control rays. Or its death ray.”
Michael and Latoya looked over at Toby. “They have a death ray?” Michael asked him, wide-eyed.
“I don’t know. But if they do, they’d probably power it with minivans!”
The pickle swallowed the chewed up van and started to expand, curling the roof back and sprouting more tentacles.
Latoya pointed and said “Look, it’s growing!”
Toby grunted. “I guess we won’t get any supplies after all.”
Looking around the parking lot, Michael spotted a group of Mendigans stacking groceries and cleaning supplies in a pile. More aliens came out with full shopping carts and brought them over to be added to the growing mound.
“Over there! There are the supplies we’re looking for!” Michael said.
Toby watched more microwave dinners and paper towels added to the heap. The Mendigans didn’t seem to be sorting the goods, or even worrying about damaging anything. Michael thought it was just like when he cleaned his room by pushing the mess someplace out of the way. Yes! That must be it! They are just clearing space inside for the giant pickle to grow. They probably didn’t even eat cereal, with those weird mouthslits.
Toby crawled to the edge of the car and peeked out at the aliens. “We could probably get over there and get the supplies we need from that pile.”
Latoya looked at the Mendigans and asked “How are we supposed to get past those guys?”
“We’ll have to distract them or wait until they leave,” Toby replied.
Michael was transfixed by the giant pickle monster again. “Shouldn’t we try to figure out what that is? It might be the key to the whole thing! We can sneak around the cars and get into the store that way.”
Toby grunted and considered the monster. Michael knew that they came for supplies, but this thing looked important.
“I’ll leave it up to you,” Toby finally said.
“Ok then. Let’s do this…”
1) Sneak into the store to investigate the giant tentacled pickle
or
2) Distract the Mendigans and search the pile for supplies
(Links to the next parts coming soon)
What will be here?
Good evening.
I say this even though it’s 12:45am and I should be asleep. But I felt the default Hello World was too lame.
This blog will be to discuss the concept of compelling interactive narratives in Video Games and how we can tell stories in new ways. I might even talk about some personal stuff like baseball or work, or even plug a game I’m working on.
That’s all.
