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Video Games Are Better Without Stories

R

RedlineRonin

Member
Article

The approach raises many questions. Are the resulting interactive stories really interactive, when all the player does is assemble something from parts? Are they really stories, when they are really environments? And most of all, are they better stories than the more popular and proven ones in the cinema, on television, and in books?
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Left less explored were the other aspects of realistic, physical environments. The inner thoughts and outward behavior of simulated people, for example, beyond the fact of their collision with other objects. The problem becomes increasingly intractable over time. Incremental improvements in visual fidelity make 3-D worlds seem more and more real. But those worlds feel even more incongruous when the people that inhabit them behave like animatronics and the environments work like Potemkin villages.
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To dream of the Holodeck is just to dream a complicated dream of the novel. If there is a future of games, let alone a future in which they discover their potential as a defining medium of an era, it will be one in which games abandon the dream of becoming narrative media and pursue the one they are already so good at: taking the tidy, ordinary world apart and putting it back together again in surprising, ghastly new ways.
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A lot more article at the link. A decent chunk references Edith Finch, a game I haven't yet played.

I'd strongly encourage reading the article before posting. I disagree with a lot of points, but that last quote I believe is directionally correct.

What really sets games apart are their ability to create unique stories for everyone who plays them. Emergent gameplay, as a term, is kind of beaten to death, but it's probably the easiest one to use to identify what makes games special.

Thoughts?

Did a quick search and didn't see this posted. Lock if old.
 
A

Alex_Mexico

Member
Whynotboth.gif

No, really. We can have great videogames with or without a story. I wouldnt want to live in a world where games like The Last of Us didn't exist.
 
A

A-V-B

Member
Except video games with stories told in ways only video games can tell them are probably the best games I've ever played.
 
V

vivekTO

Member
7Z0bLZ6.png

He is on point.
 
P

PSqueak

Banned
my 70+ hours in persona 5 say otherwise.

Lack of story works for some games, but to say one approach is objectively better or that one should be eliminated is wrong.
 
B

boiled goose

good with gravy
A-V-B said:
Except video games with stories told in ways only video games can tell them are probably the best games I've ever played.
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This.

Bad video game story telling is cutscenes constantly breaking up gameplay.

Good stories told through interaction and mechanics like sotc or mm are amazing.

Even the very limited narrative of games like smg makes them better.

Story and narrative are important. Story does not mean cutscenes.
 
A

Auctopus

Member
Think we've already had a thread on this. Also, this writer has done previous articles about Video Games omitting other popular components.
 
TriAceJP

TriAceJP

Member
I'd rather have great gameplay and no story than the reverse, any day.

No reason they cannot coexist, but make a game first and foremost.
 
B

benicillin

Banned
There are about a billion really great responses to this on various Twitter threads and articles. Patrick Klepek wrote a great one. Danielle Riendeau's thread on Twitter was good.

It's an article that makes a handful of decent points in between being lazy and smug, and was more or less a retread of an article the author wrote prior.
 
K

Kart94

Banned
Some are, some aren't, but if you don't bring the gameplay, which is the most important part then what is the point. You may as well be something like That Dragon's Cancer where you can see everything there is to see on Markiplier's youtube channel.

Bad stories don't harm Great gameplay.

bad gameplay doesn't save good stories.
 
P

Phrozenflame500

Member
The clickbait title kinda defeats the author's actual point about how attaching a Hollywood action B-movie script to a game is pretty safe and unambitious use of the medium.
 
R

RedlineRonin

Member
Yeah, he goes into defining "mediums" in the article, and how the stories come after the fact. I'm not sure I entirely agree, or even understand, how when you read a book/story/poetry or whatever, the story comes "after the fact"

I also whole heartedly agree with the point on TLoU. The opening was gut wrenching in a way that I never would have felt, simply reading it in a book and imagining it.

Small wonder that Druckmann disagrees...
 
Deft Beck

Deft Beck

Member
There is plenty of room for games with minimal to no story context and games which focus on a cinematic story.

It's not a binary issue. There are plenty of games across this spectrum, and also games that allow you to jump right to the game part (Freedom Planet).
 
F

FinalAres

Member
What makes interactive stories so great is that you become more emotionally invested in your character because you are controlling them, making decisions. They become an avatar for yourself. Not whether the game is 20% interactive of 80% interactive.

Gaming has the potential to be a much better story telling medium than books or movies, if the writing was better.

Trying to work against this so every game is Tetris is dumb.
 
J

John Kowalski

Banned
I'm so weary of text that's about what makes games "good" or "better" that i can't help but read the title of the article and fearing to myself that this is going to finally end my will to live.

A better way to put it would be to say, for example, that games limit themselves when using traditional narrative structures.
 
A

[Agent]ZeroNine

Member
When a story is good, it adds to a product, though some people (mostly those with short attention spans) do not appreciate a good story. You can't appease these people, unless you make a game that has nothing but mechanics instead of both.

My hypothesis is that these are the same people who cannot sit down and watch a show without looking at their phones/internet enabled device and/or books.

Story have many ways of being told (Castlevania, Mario, Uncharted, Mass Effect, Heavy Rain). Learn to appreciate when it's good.
 
TissueBox

TissueBox

Member
Read this yesterday and I disagree. I see the point he's coming from and making, but the conclusion surely only represents a slice of the picture and not the full one. Both in terms of what a story can constitute in a game and what games can provide as a unique medium to the form.

Games can tell stories and provide fun mechanics, in some cases together, in others alone -- I don't think it'll only be detrimental to pursue either.
 
P

POTUS 2016

Banned
I look at something like Nier Automata and think "Nah."

And, even if the story is shit, it's better that it's there than to not be there at all.

It's funny to think that I had a friend who thought exactly like this until I shilled Nier to him. He literally said after beating it "I never thought I'd give a shit about stories in games until I played Nier Automata."
 
L

Lord of Ostia

Member
There is no point to artificially limiting oneself just because of the medium one works in. To say "games cannot tell good narratives" is simply an excuse for games to not attempt telling good narratives. There are already games in which the narrative and gameplay work in tandem, and are all the better for it, they are not mutually exclusive.

If the premise was "games don't have to tell a narrative to be good games" then I would agree with that, but I will never accept the argument that "games can't do X thing because other mediums do X thing". That is a lazy argument.
 
B

brandonh83

Banned
Videogames are an expression and different mediums all contain different forms of expression.

Is Mario better off without a ton of storytelling? Sure, it's a platformer.
Is Silent Hill better off without a story? No, it's a story-driven, atmospheric series.

Not sure why this is even a thing.
 
R

RedlineRonin

Member
Jackstin said:
What makes interactive stories so great is that you become more emotionally invested in your character because you are controlling them, making decisions. They become an avatar for yourself. Not whether the game is 20% interactive of 80% interactive.

Gaming has the potential to be a much better story telling medium than books or movies, if the writing was better.

Trying to work against this so every game is Tetris is dumb.
Click to expand...

I think this is key. In general, modern gaming is still "young." There simply hasn't been the length of time, like movies/books etc., to explore all the different facets and complex subject matter that those mediums have had.

I think it's easy to forget we've gotten from pong to TLoU in 30 years. It's wild to imagine what another 30 years will bring....
 
B

benicillin

Banned
The best Austin Walker also bringing it in a good response piece:

Tomorrow there will be more games in the world than there are today. Some of them won't have any stories at all, and that's okay. But others will tell tales about dragons, teenage drama, and cave diving. Maybe there will be a game about a girl with a missing memory, or about a struggling colony on a distant ice planet. There will definitely, absolutely be one about a space marine. Many of these stories will be very bad. Some will even be cruel. But if we give up on them altogether, we will never get the ones that stick with us, that urge us into immediate action or sway us into hushed melancholy, that blossom in ways we could never expect. These are the potentials that I care about, not whether or not games will "be the defining medium of an era."
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Basically what I'm saying is Waypoint is pretty great.
 
M

Mael

Member
any RPGs are better with stories than without.
Shitty B-movie stories like "Press F to pay respect" will never be good regardless of medium.
They don't enhance movies or books, they're not going to make games better anyway.
 
C

charlequin

Banned
Ian got pretty thoroughly savaged for this take pretty much all the way up and down games twitter yesterday, so I think it's safe to say he doesn't have a lot of people agreeing with him on it.

As for the article itself, the thing that struck me the most was how narrowly it was evoking the world of video game stories -- like, there's a huge range of narrative structures in games outside of Bioshock and Non-Violent Bioshock.
 
L

Linkstrikesback

Member
Ha, no. There are so many examples of games with good stories that elevate them vs if the stories didn't exist.

Portal for example, wouldn't be nearly as good if it was just a puzzle game, and Glados didn't exist. It wouldn't be bad, because all the mechanics are still solid, but there is no way any sane person would be claiming it would a better game without it.
 
F

finley83

Banned
Stories in games are much like stories in porn: sure we can have some fun now, but sooner or later someone's going to have to fix that fridge
 
J

jdstorm

Banned
No.

Gaming as an interactive medium provides one of the best and most interesting platforms for storytelling in the modern world.
 
B

brotkasten

Member
Frostman said:
No definitely not for me. Stories are one of the most important aspects of games to me.
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It's the same for me. Sandbox/open-world games aside, I have no interest in games that only offer pure gameplay anymore. It's the same reason I don't play MP games at all anymore.

I'd take any game with a well-presented and developed story over yet another sidescroller, for explame.

So yeah, I don't see why both shouldn't exist. If a lot of the stories told in games are bad, it doesn't mean it can't work, it means the stories are bad. If a developer cares about the story they want to tell and put some good amount of work into the writing and presentation, it can clearly work.
 
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