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[Vinci]

@Vinci:

Yeah, I can agree with that. But there´s a lot of games that do that, then. I think that touches on the matter of procedural story-telling, actually. An "experience of feelings that become part of the story" that differs for everyone, depending on the way someone plays a game. But it really is something very personal that imo doesn´t work on a tightly defined basis.

A quick aside: People love to talk about EVE Online. They don't want to play it, but they enjoy talking about it. Because of the drama that takes place, the stories that come out of its universe of players killing and backstabbing one another. But here's the thing: Those people in EVE don't think of what's happening as stories but as experiences. And maybe that's where the issue comes from: When something is happening to you, it's an 'experience.' When it happens to someone else, it's a 'story.'

What Ueda is doing is making the things that happen in his games happen to the player. And maybe you're right, maybe it is subjective to a large extent, but what isn't? Take the best you can think of in the film and book media, and I guarantee you there will be a large number of people who don't get or like some of the titles considered the best. One thing that's clear is, it isn't dumb luck. The guy has successfully done this two games in a row. People report the same experience from ICO and SotC. He's doing this on purpose, but whether everyone is going to 'get it' or like it? Not everyone will.

 

[whatevermort]

Worse yet, my first drafts were considered final and I was rarely given an opportunity to revisit previous dialogues (I was told that there'd be multiple passes at the beginning, so I was assuming at least a second draft up until the end). They were also edited without my involvement, removing lines and entire sections. I write too much, but so much of comedy is timing and the edits I saw definitely affected the quality of the work. When possible, I cleaned up the edits to work better, but I never saw most of the dialogues again after I submitted them.

Ugh, this is the absolute worst part of the job. I have never written anything else - short stories, my novel, articles, teaching resources - that haven't been through two drafts, usually after I've got some idea of how they work. With games, I can draft as much as I like, but I'd love the chance to take another pass when the game is actually forming, rather than when it's in the ether. And clunky edits made by people who don't understand writing (or editing) can be just as damning to a work of fiction as a bad writer. One of the reasons that writing can be so inconsistent in games is that whilst a writer might have written the bulk, bits have been cut or edited or added after the writer is off the project, and they get written or edited by people with little to no actual idea of what they're doing.

 

[Amir0x]

The largest problem with these "story based interactive games" is that the stories are bunk. It's telling when the director of Heavy Rain said the game is meant to be played once because otherwise "you'll nitpick the story".

That's absolutely asinine.

Do people only read an Agatha Christie murder mystery once? No. Even though the "murderer" and "plot" are known, it's her absolutely amazing talent for elegant prose that makes them so readable and popular in the first place.

Until the industry actually seeks out the talent of excellent writers, games like Heavy Rain, Shattered Memories and their ilk will be forever mired in the depths of mediocrity or worse.

There have been exceptionally few game stories written with any finesse, and they have all tended to be comedy-oriented adventure games. The plots may have been fluff for the most part, but dialogue was a strength, so that they were worth playing over and over, just like re-reading a favourite book or re-watching a classic film.

Coming in this thread to nod sagely in agreement.

That's the problem when you want to assert game stories/interactive movies as the future of any part of gaming... your stories have to be GOOD.

Heavy Rain is a fucking bloated mess of a story, filled with tentacles that go every which way and are frequently never resolved. Plot strands that are so terrible I've sat in the Heavy Rain spoiler thread watching the fanboys fabricate ever more elaborate bullshit around it to try to explain it away, as if trying feverishly to sever any part that could poison their idealized image of what the game was trying to do.

Silent Hill Shattered Memories would be a good point IF it wasn't filled with so much shit too. The chase sequences are abysmal. The art direction is boring and completely uninvolving. The psychological profiling is hilariously shallow, immediately showing the cracks on any successive play through. It had plenty of gameplay, it was just all shitty gameplay.

I think it's a problem of course because unlike what some probably think, I don't believe it's impossible to ever tell a story using gaming. On the contrary, I think games are uniquely suited to create a level of involvement that movies simply cannot offer. But when they do it as GAMES, not fucking C grade movies with little QTE segments in between.

Some people were saying Uncharted 2 was a good story with good writing, but I think that's pretty wrong. The writing and overall plot is pretty bad actually. The reason why Uncharted 2 tells a better story than Heavy Rain is because it leverages the power of gaming to do what games do best - allow players to use their skills to PARTICIPATE in the scenes.

And I mean really participate... not lazily selecting obvious dialogue choices while fiddling with a series of neverending simon says mini-games. It puts you in the heart of the action, and in that action the actual events became more involving to the player because they were doing it. Their actions were the catalyst between failure and victory. And even though there was not multiple endings, this simple fact allows a level of participation other mediums cannot enjoy.

In Heavy Rain, there is no gameplay.

Games are about gameplay. When you have no gameplay, then we have to rely on the quality of your plot. And when your plot is horrendous, there's nothing left. You have objectively failed and should try some other time.

I think this is going to continue to be true until the industry gets some true writing talent.

 

[HK-47]

C&C?

I mean, I wasn't really saying that combat was the only gameplay in Torment, but it was the majority of gameplay in the Infinity Engine games. There were also traps and puzzles and attribute based success / failure rolls for different events.

While there's a great deal of mystery and interactivity and choice, the game does have quite a hefty amount of prose to dump on you. It's good prose! But that's not so much gameplay. More like a reward for discovery of another hidden memory... which is tied to your in-game actions.

And the other thing I'm thinking, in response to this, is that... well, D&D tabletop does a lot of things well, but D&D videogames don't have a creative arbitrator on hand to reward and guide the other elements. Like someone else said - you'd need something approximating the Enterprise's computer running a holodeck. So D&D video games do focus their gameplay around a more limited portion of the skill and combat systems.

Choice and consequence. The well written Avellone RPGs actually use this to define your character and how people react to you, which is why I hope AP turns out all right. What you say is part of your in game actions. Its just most of the time thats done with pointless fighting/cutscene/simple puzzle that doesnt really make much sense/repeat. Games are still very much shackled into mindsets from the arcade/NES days.

If you want complete freedom with little creator input, you are looking at the wrong medium though. I guess I that we agree. VGs are a give and take between creator and player. Player is just gonna be disappointed if he wants everything his way, which is a lame way to tell a story anyways. Though thats why DMs exist I guess, so the player it always constricted in someways, no matter the medium.

 

[ShockingAlberto]

In one of the SH:SM threads, someone recalled a term that Drinky Crow once used to describe Silent Hill 2: a "museum game," where the level designs seemed more like art galleries than shooting galleries.

While I actually enjoy that kind of game, there's a major problem. If you distill the game until it's pure story and no gameplay, then what do you have left? A 3D visual novel with less words and more graphics. Given this, what does the player do? Simply walking around staring at a character's back while observing environments gets old after a few hours. But if you take out "gamey" elements like combat, then you're left with the bane of adventure games: puzzles, which tend to be either illogically obtuse and out-of-place, or pointlessly easy pittances of interactivity thrown to the player. And with games like Shattered Memories and Heavy Rain, we're seeing the increased usage of QTEs to provide a catch-all "gameplay system" for any events that might occur; when something happens, just press X or waggle to proceed.

So, do developers... develop elements like puzzles and QTEs into more natural forms, or do they abandon them to focus purely on conveying fiction? Given what I said before, if they simply abandon gameplay then the player is left with an art gallery, a moving picture book. Walk forward and look at things to proceed, pressing buttons at doors and switches to "turn the page." To be blunt, that's boring. Atmosphere and excellent storytelling help mitigate that boredom but also mandate that the story must be dramatic. A dramatic and atmospheric story and setting can hold the player's attention longer, though still a relatively short period of time. Consider how short Heavy Rain and Shattered Memories are. Now think about how much shorter a similarly-playing game would be if it lacked HR and SM's dramatic, horror, psychological, and thriller elements. Outside of any kind of genre fanbase, the average player's attention probably wouldn't last much longer than the length of a feature film.


So I don't believe that these types of games should abandon things like combat or chase sequences. In fiction more things happen than character dialogue, descriptions, and exposition. If a story calls for some kind of action to take place, then let the player perform the action in a traditional way, not just selecting the option and watching it happen, or performing a QTE. Use it sparingly enough that it feels logical - if the story calls for realism, that is. Why can't one of these games take place in a fantastic setting? That, I believe, is a solution that developers should pursue for now. Instead of focusing on "realistic modern" settings and characters, have stories in fantastic settings where the player has a legitimate reason to routinely engage in "traditional" gameplay and have it be a natural extension of the story.

Well, one of the things Shattered Memories did is take things that could have been cutscenes and made them playable. Those playable things are not always necessary, but they add to the game (and in Silent Hill contribute to the overall profiling the game does).

For example, in Shattered Memories, when you

Spoiler

fall from the bridge inside an SUV. Dahlia is turned to ice and you struggle to escape, but nothing is working. You're just left to slowly drown until the nightmare world "activates" and, in your panic, you eventually find your way out (or drown). The game could have easily kept it a cutscene and just showed Harry escaping from different dramatic angles, struggling with the door, and watching him get out. But because it was a game, it added a dose of fear that only an interactive medium could evoke.

 

[charlequin]

But the way you describe it, it´s just nothing special.

What's relatively unique* about SotC is that it's built very specifically to create a certain set of emotions in the player based on their actions, rather than to display the emotions of the characters in the story and hope the player feels empathy towards them.

When I first experienced SotC, it was in a room of five people who took turns trading off the controller and tackling the first eight bosses of the game. The emotional response produced by playing the game -- not by any cutscenes, which I don't think we even paid attention to if they were there -- was quite spectacular: the admiration of each colossus from a distance as we trekked towards it, the terror as we were stomped to death by it on our first attempts, the exhilaration as we learned the weakness or crested the topmost reaches of each and the triumphant Kow Otani score kicked in, the growing sense of unease as we started to think about how docile and harmless many of the creatures were and how dedicatedly monstrous the protagonist avatar seemed to be getting in pursuit of his goal.

This wasn't a spontaneous reaction we had all on our own to playing the game; this was a planned emotional response cultivated by the game's creators, which can easily be seen by paying attention to the use of the music cues in the game. What's interesting about it is that you wouldn't get the same feeling from five people watching a film of these escapades, because the personal investment would be gone -- you'd just be watching a silent character you can't identify with dispatching monsters at a distance. By letting us play that experience, to feel like we were the ones hanging tight to a flying beast's back or scaling a mountain to leap onto its head, the game drew out those feelings of excitement and triumph -- all for the purpose of contrasting them to feelings of regret and unease over the course of the game.

I really do think it's a pretty remarkable effort at storytelling without having to use words or explicitly tell the audience what to feel, and it expresses something by using the interactivity of the medium. That's an example I'd really like to see more people follow.

Ico actually does the same exact thing -- it tries to makes you feel protective and caring towards Yorda by putting her in your character's charge. Like SotC, it doesn't work for everyone -- for me, it just made me hate and resent her so much that I quit playing. :lol But the intent is still there in a way that it isn't in many games -- to express story and meaning through what the player does rather than what they see.



*Several other games use variants of the same technique, to greater or lesser effect -- Baten Kaitos, Bioshock 1, and Prince of Persia '08 are the three I've personally played that immediately come to mind -- but none of the others are built from top to bottom around the idea to the same degree SotC is.

I wonder if there's anything to be learned from TT games, particularly the more modern post-'GNS' sort. Not a direct lesson, but rather the idea of stepping back and somewhat formally developing/applying mechanics directly to narrative.

There's a lot to be learned from TT games, IMO (see, uh, my post earlier as just one example :lol.) With all due respect to my friends and neighbors (quite literally) who are writing all those wacky post-GNS indie TT games, I think a lot of them wind up being way too reductionist in a way I wouldn't want videogames to look to as some kind of panacea, but I think a lot of the ways they simulate and gameplay-ize the process of interpersonal interaction could bring a lot to videogaming in terms of moving beyond the pretty boring types of interpersonal-interaction "gameplay" we have these days.

I know that White Wolf/CPP have been tallking to TT-game writers I know about consulting on the personality interaction systems in the upcoming WoD MMO; I'm definitely very curious how that works out.

 

[Twig]

Neither Ico nor SOTC elicited any emotional response from me at all.

In fact, I liked Ico's puzzles enough to keep me playing, but found SOTC inanely boring and quit after the third colossus, I think. Which sucked, 'cause on paper, SOTC sounds like the kind of game I should love.

I can't really think of any games that elicited emotional responses from me, though. Maybe I have none.

Bioshock maybe... dialogue helps me a lot, I think. Adventure games (especially funny ones) I can get pretty into, but they rarely do more than make me laugh. Which I guess is technically an emotional response, so there's that.

 

[poppabk]

Honestly, I've heard this notion before: 'Stories and experiences are not the same.' But you know what? Maybe they are. Maybe that's how a true, unique gaming narrative should work. Because all other attempts to shoehorn storytelling from another medium into gaming have either felt extremely lackluster, mitigated gaming's core component (interactivity), or simply been an interactive movie with some game elements tacked on. The latter does more to differentiate from the other medium than it evolves gaming.

Perhaps the interactivity of gaming makes traditional storytelling impossible - and what we're referring to as 'experiences' are really the building blocks of what a gaming storytelling style should encompass. Interaction might make 'experiences' a more appropriate standard than 'cutscenes.'

I think that experience based story telling has a much bigger role to play in games than it does in films or books. Games like Deadspace, Bioshock, System Shock 2, Portal tell their most important stories through their environments and through the fragments of the past that you find laying around. They remind me in a way of films like 'Children of Men' or '28 Weeks Later' which tell their stories as much through the environment as they do the actual narrative thread. The difference is that all the game versions involve a lone protagonist whereas the movies always involve the protagonist forming a personal connection.

 

[ShockingAlberto]

One of the things about SotC that always bothered me, especially as a story telling vehicle, is that the narrative is linear (you're always going to end up having killed all of Colossi and the same thing will happen to the Wanderer at the end), which is fine if you're playing the game in the way the narrative intends. It's a somber, serious game. It's less impactful, however, when you walk up the ramps to the third or fourth Colossus five times but keep falling off because you missed the jump. It takes something somber and serious and makes it borderline comical.

Don't get me wrong, I loved the game and the story. But I think ultimately that same "It's in your hands" mentality that SotC buddies with but never fully embraces also gives you the chance to ruin the tone that is a fundamental part of the game.

 

[charlequin]

Silent Hill Shattered Memories would be a good point IF it wasn't filled with so much shit too. The chase sequences are abysmal.

This raises another good point, IMO.

Some people seem to be suggesting that the way to solve this is to cut these gameplay sequences out because they aren't that good, but that seems ultimately defeatist to me.

The Godfather and Blade Runner and Apocalypse Now aren't only triumphs of storytelling; they're also triumphs of direction, and of acting, and of set and visual design, and of music composition, and of editing, and of a thousand other tiny pieces of craft that add together to form the je ne sais quoi of a masterpiece.

Yes, getting the story right and the gameplay right and the visual design right and so on and so forth and getting them all to blend together in just the right way is hard. Making masterpieces is supposed to be hard. But if games run away from the full-bore commitment to getting every single one of these parts right, they're never going to produce a masterpiece like that.

 

[charlequin]

It's less impactful, however, when you walk up the ramps to the third or fourth Colossus five times but keep falling off because you missed the jump.

One of the biggest problems with SotC is that it doesn't really respect the player control-wise, and it's not perfectly built to work smoothly with the controls it does give you in every circumstance.

 

[HK-47]

Neither Ico nor SOTC elicited any emotional response from me at all.

In fact, I liked Ico's puzzles enough to keep me playing, but found SOTC inanely boring and quit after the third colossus, I think. Which sucked, 'cause on paper, SOTC sounds like the kind of game I should love.

I can't really think of any games that elicited emotional responses from me, though. Maybe I have none.

Bioshock maybe... dialogue helps me a lot, I think. Adventure games (especially funny ones) I can get pretty into, but they rarely do more than make me laugh. Which I guess is technically an emotional response, so there's that.

lol technically an emotional response. What are you? A robot?

People probably react emotionally to games more then they realize, it just that a lot of its internal. Or maybe because they arent dramatic "I cried my eyes out/I jumped for joy" obvious. Or maybe cause you go into to them predisposed to turn off your brain and not care.

At the very least everyone has experienced angry/frustration in a game before, though in a meta way - I keep dying.

 

[Amir0x]

This raises another good point, IMO.

Some people seem to be suggesting that the way to solve this is to cut these gameplay sequences out because they aren't that good, but that seems ultimately defeatist to me.

The Godfather and Blade Runner and Apocalypse Now aren't only triumphs of storytelling; they're also triumphs of direction, and of acting, and of set and visual design, and of music composition, and of editing, and of a thousand other tiny pieces of craft that add together to form the je ne sais quoi of a masterpiece.

Yes, getting the story right and the gameplay right and the visual design right and so on and so forth and getting them all to blend together in just the right way is hard. Making masterpieces is supposed to be hard. But if games run away from the full-bore commitment to getting every single one of these parts right, they're never going to produce a masterpiece like that.

The real secret to getting good stories in games is that, other than hiring decent writers obviously, stories have to be designed in harmony with the gameplay.

In other words, you can't have a story where you're supposed to make a difficult choice about killing someone, when the rest of the time you're killing everyone like a one man army.

You can't have a game where people are acting like you're perfectly normal, when you're flying about like you have superpowers.

You have to have synchronicity between the gameplay and the story, so that they compliment each other.

This is why that infamous scene in Heavy Rain with Shelby late on is so absurd - even if the game HAD gameplay it would have made no sense. It was completely out of tone with the rest of the game. It's why nobody really cared when you had to kill that person in GTA4.

This doesn't mean you have to throw out the baby with the bathwater... you should still have gameplay. That's what games are about. You just need to think of new ways to approach the gameplay when you want to tell a story that pulls emotional heart strings or whatever.

 

[Vinci]

One of the things about SotC that always bothered me, especially as a story telling vehicle, is that the narrative is linear (you're always going to end up having killed all of Colossi and the same thing will happen to the Wanderer at the end), which is fine if you're playing the game in the way the narrative intends. It's a somber, serious game. It's less impactful, however, when you walk up the ramps to the third or fourth Colossus five times but keep falling off because you missed the jump. It takes something somber and serious and makes it borderline comical.

Don't get me wrong, I loved the game and the story. But I think ultimately that same "It's in your hands" mentality that SotC buddies with but never fully embraces also gives you the chance to ruin the tone that is a fundamental part of the game.

But that's the inherent burden to trying to tell a story in an interactive medium, and the two schools of thought presently at play in the industry seem to be: (a) mitigate the gameplay aspects to such an extent that you can control the direction and tone of the title, even those this runs contrary to the core appeal of the medium and doesn't do anything unique beyond how stories are told in other media; and (b) fully embrace interactivity and allow people to feel that they themselves are participating in the events, rather than being provide visual cues (the character's face, etc.) as to how they should relate to this character. SotC does the latter: I related to Wander immensely and the game hardly ever showed me his face and never really told me anything about him. I felt the way I imagine he felt in the game. I just wanted to save the girl even if what I was doing to accomplish that wasn't the right thing.

 

[HK-47]

The real secret to getting good stories in games is that, other than hiring decent writers obviously, stories have to be designed in harmony with the gameplay.

In other words, you can't have a story where you're supposed to make a difficult choice about killing someone, when the rest of the time you're killing everyone like a one man army.

You can't have a game where people are acting like you're perfectly normal, when you're flying about like you have superpowers.

You have to have synchronicity between the gameplay and the story, so that they compliment each other.

This is why that infamous scene in Heavy Rain with Shelby late on is so absurd - even if the game HAD gameplay it would have made no sense. It was completely out of tone with the rest of the game. It's why nobody really cared when you had to kill that person in GTA4.

This doesn't mean you have to throw out the baby with the bathwater... you should still have gameplay. That's what games are about. You just need to think of new ways to approach the gameplay when you want to tell a story that pulls emotional heart strings or whatever.

Another problem is balance between choice and the reality of the game world. Like in Heavy Rain you were allowed to make choices so at odds with the established character's development, including development you took part in, that it broke the character and suspension of disbelief.

 

[Cow Mengde]

Chapter 6 Sunflower Field

Lucas.

That's was all there is to chapter 6. Probably one of the most emotion and heart wrenching scenes in the game. Mother 3 is suppose to be a comedy, too.

I think you guys are jumping way ahead of yourselves with stuff like non-linear writing and stuff. Video games need to deliver a good story first before even worrying about branching paths and cinematics. Very few stories come close to Mother 3, but that's no surprise considering it was written by a professional. When games can start delivering stories of this caliber, then move on to the next step.

 

[Sqorgar]

With games, I can draft as much as I like, but I'd love the chance to take another pass when the game is actually forming, rather than when it's in the ether.

Yeah, all my writing was over before I even saw what the game looked like. They showed it at a show with voiced dialogue and I was like, woah, if I knew he was going to sound like that, I would've written it COMPLETELY differently.

But you know, it's not my game. It's not my vision. I have enough faith in the guy in charge that if something wasn't working, he'd at least fix it so that it worked within his vision, regardless whether it met with my vision of a character or event.

And clunky edits made by people who don't understand writing (or editing) can be just as damning to a work of fiction as a bad writer. One of the reasons that writing can be so inconsistent in games is that whilst a writer might have written the bulk, bits have been cut or edited or added after the writer is off the project, and they get written or edited by people with little to no actual idea of what they're doing.

This is probably my only real peeve with my work. For this project, I payed a lot of attention to the delivery of each and every line. In some cases, I counted syllables to make sure that the payoff happened at precisely the right rhythm. To have giant parts cut out destroys the comedic timing completely. And unlike the project's vision, that sentence's vision is all mine.

 

[Twig]

lol technically an emotional response. What are you? A robot?

People probably react emotionally to games more then they realize, it just that a lot of its internal. Or maybe because they arent dramatic "I cried my eyes out/I jumped for joy" obvious. Or maybe cause you go into to them predisposed to turn off your brain and not care.

At the very least everyone has experienced angry/frustration in a game before, though in a meta way - I keep dying.

Yes. Yes I am a robot.

And yes, yes, I obviously meant in terms of the story. I can say with full confidence that 95% of video game stories are completely meaningless to me. They're terrible, predictable, incoherent, inconsistent... any wild number of things that just turn me off. I do not consider "I keep dying" frustration to be a valid counterargument to that.

Though I have been playing Prince of Persia: Warrior Within the past two days and I'm convinced the art style of that game was designed to infuriate the players. It fits with the theme of the story perfectly, but it is so jarringly painful that sometimes I want to gouge my eyes out. The colors, the colors.

EDIT: I forgot about the Mother series. They're good. Yeah, they're good. Mother 3 especially. They're in the 1% of the 5% that is very excellent in ways that they are very excellent.

 

[Amir0x]

That's was all there is to chapter 6. Probably one of the most emotion and heart wrenching scenes in the game. Mother 3 is suppose to be a comedy, too.

I think you guys are jumping way ahead of yourselves with stuff like non-linear writing and stuff. Video games need to deliver a good story first before even worrying about branching paths and cinematics. Very few stories come close to Mother 3, but that's no surprise considering it was written by a professional. When games can start delivering stories of this caliber, then move on to the next step.

Mother 3 is filled with poignant little moments. That's one of the reasons it's so much better than other jRPGs, because it tells so much with next to no dialogue and simply brilliant sprite animation.

More games in general need to do more with less. They're so busy thinking everyone who plays a game is like five years old or something that they forget not to insult out intelligence.

In Mother 3, that scene where you wake up from bed...

Spoiler

and look in the mirror with your bed head and see your mother combing your hair

was genuinely emotional, and it did it with zero dialogue.

 

[More Fun To Compute]

I also don't see how pulp fiction about serial killers is in any way innately more "mature" than pulp fiction about speculative worlds. To pick just a random example off the top of my head, Ridley Scott's Alien and Blade Runner are far more mature works than his Hannibal, despite being both science fiction and much earlier works.

I could be flippant and say that the fact that people who are into video games can't understand why some people would take thrillers more seriously than sci-fi is a sign that games are well down the track to being ghettoized.

Actually, I don't think video games often reach or try for Blade Runner or Alien level. They often try for Aliens or Star Wars. They would like to do Black Hawk Down. They don't try for Numb3rs.

This isn't even about what I think of terms like maturity personally. I am just trying to put myself into the head of someone who is buying Heavy Rain but maybe isn't buying some other game. I can't see them saying, wow, this Heavy Rain game looks like it doesn't have any gameplay like that Phoenix Wright game that I also wanted for the story so I'll buy this instead.

 

[Cow Mengde]

Mother 3 is filled with poignant little moments. That's one of the reasons it's so much better than other jRPGs, because it tells so much with next to no dialogue and simply brilliant sprite animation.

More games in general need to do more with less. They're so busy thinking everyone who plays a game is like five years old or something that they forget not to insult out intelligence.

In Mother 3, that scene where you wake up from bed...

Spoiler

and look in the mirror with your bed head and see your mother combing your hair

was genuinely emotional, and it did it with zero dialogue.

Yes, doing more with less seems to be something most stories don't do very well either. Chapter 6 is so powerful and is completely burned into my mind. Ditto on the mirror scene. Mother 3 did so much with so little. The most powerful parts are told with little to no text.

 

[HK-47]

But that's the inherent burden to trying to tell a story in an interactive medium, and the two schools of thought presently at play in the industry seem to be: (a) mitigate the gameplay aspects to such an extent that you can control the direction and tone of the title, even those this runs contrary to the core appeal of the medium and doesn't do anything unique beyond how stories are told in other media; and (b) fully embrace interactivity and allow people to feel that they themselves are participating in the events, rather than being provide visual cues (the character's face, etc.) as to how they should relate to this character. SotC does the latter: I related to Wander immensely and the game hardly ever showed me his face and never really told me anything about him. I felt the way I imagine he felt in the game. I just wanted to save the girl even if what I was doing to accomplish that wasn't the right thing.

But see SotC didnt do that. Wanderer was the one who wanted to save the girl and sets out to kill these beasts even though he really shouldnt. It didnt have any build up to why I the player would want to do this outside of the gamey aspect of the killing the boss. I even realized this shit shouldnt be happening, but I have no other course of action. Wanderer's path is my path, but not by my choice. Its still a linear experience. I eventually disassociated myself from Wanderer and just played his story.

Which I'm fine with. I've often championed linear storytelling as completely valid.

 

[Vinci]

But see SotC didnt do that. Wanderer was the one who wanted to save the girl and sets out to kill these beasts even though he really shouldnt. It didnt have any build up to why I the player would want to do this outside of the gamey aspect of the killing the boss. I even realized this shit shouldnt be happening, but I have no other course of action. Wanderer's path is my path, but not by my choice. Its still a linear experience. I eventually disassociated myself from Wanderer and just played his story.

Interesting. My experience was different: As I went along with Wanderer's goal, I began to... I don't know... relate to his purpose so keenly that I felt it was my purpose without the game ever telling me that. And many others have experienced the same sort of connection, many friends and folks here. In this sense, I didn't care if the game was linear (it undoubtedly was) because that connection to Wanderer had taken place. I guess what I'm saying is, yes I didn't have a choice; this was all Wanderer's decision - but that didn't matter because I shortly felt guilt for what I was doing, knew it was the wrong thing, but felt compulsion to continue trying to save the girl.

And no, the game doesn't directly communicate that, at least not in words, but I believe it's implied through the gameplay otherwise not so many people would have had the same experience.

 

[Filldough]

Also Ueda games work because they are minimalist.

I was going to bring up this point as well. SoC I don't even remember what happened in the story, I couldn't tell you a single character's name except ironically enough the horse Argo. How is your character even related to the woman you're trying to save?

You also bring up a good point that we've not really been told a good story from the creators' standpoint, and while I understand some people thinking that using film techniques to tell a story might be a red herring of sorts in terms of progressing the medium, I think its also a visual language that we all understand pretty well at this point so it makes sense to use it to progress our ability to tell a story.

 

[The Technomancer]

In one of the SH:SM threads, someone recalled a term that Drinky Crow once used to describe Silent Hill 2: a "museum game," where the level designs seemed more like art galleries than shooting galleries.

While I actually enjoy that kind of game, there's a major problem. If you distill the game until it's pure story and no gameplay, then what do you have left? A 3D visual novel with less words and more graphics. Given this, what does the player do? Simply walking around staring at a character's back while observing environments gets old after a few hours. But if you take out "gamey" elements like combat, then you're left with the bane of adventure games: puzzles, which tend to be either illogically obtuse and out-of-place, or pointlessly easy pittances of interactivity thrown to the player. And with games like Shattered Memories and Heavy Rain, we're seeing the increased usage of QTEs to provide a catch-all "gameplay system" for any events that might occur; when something happens, just press X or waggle to proceed.

Once again I'm going to point to the Myst games here, which combined fantastic visual direction and good ambient storytelling with engaging puzzles. And they pulled it off, really well in fact, by integrating the puzzles into the environment, and by eliminating any form of inventory, turning them into logical games. (Well, except for the third game, but they had an "excuse" for that one). I think that Myst-style puzzles are still the best way to go with something like this, without an inventory system and mostly self contained. It allows for engaging gameplay that isn't intrusive to the overall story as a whole, and most importantly, it eliminates a lot of logical fallacies that destroy immersion, e.g the old "why can't I just break the door down with my crowbar" problem.

Now Myst obviously focused heavily on mechanical devices such for its puzzle focus, which naturally led to them being self contained, but there's no reason more "realistic" puzzles can't be constructed in a similar way, spanning a few locations with a handful of key items and interactions that make sense.

....this has gotten off topic about the nature of storytelling, I think, so coming back to that, the point I'm trying to make is that, depending on how well you handle it, it is possible to integrate storytelling and gameplay in a non-intrusive and immersive way.

 

[selig]

A quick aside: People love to talk about EVE Online. They don't want to play it, but they enjoy talking about it. Because of the drama that takes place, the stories that come out of its universe of players killing and backstabbing one another. But here's the thing: Those people in EVE don't think of what's happening as stories but as experiences. And maybe that's where the issue comes from: When something is happening to you, it's an 'experience.' When it happens to someone else, it's a 'story.'

What Ueda is doing is making the things that happen in his games happen to the player. And maybe you're right, maybe it is subjective to a large extent, but what isn't? Take the best you can think of in the film and book media, and I guarantee you there will be a large number of people who don't get or like some of the titles considered the best. One thing that's clear is, it isn't dumb luck. The guy has successfully done this two games in a row. People report the same experience from ICO and SotC. He's doing this on purpose, but whether everyone is going to 'get it' or like it? Not everyone will.

I think that´s the best thing that has beend said in this thread so far. And I would paraphrase it into a more devloper-related sentence: "When something happens on your own account, it´s an experience. When it happens on someone else´s account, it´s a story."

I fnd that interesting, because it points out the strength of the medium of video games. What video games are capable of is telling a story through your own actions. This medium doesn´t need professional writers that construct convoluted crap, Hollywood-like cutscenes and drama. Something as simple as riding on a field, searching for something and then fighting a monster can become "a story", if done right.

So, I give you that view that Ueda is good at creating the surroundings for such "experience stories". And I think the Zelda-games also are good at this kind of story-telling. I remember (as I wrote before) when you had to chase after that Moblin to rescue Colin, when you where fighting his lots and him riding on a field, then arriving at the bridge and dueling it out, THAT become "story", not due to some cutscene, but by playing it.

Though, it really is something very personal. It´s so hard to convey such "experience stories", because, imo, they depend on the willingness of the player. The willing to put yourself into the game. I guess there´s a lot of gamers that have problems with such story-telling, because the majority of gamers play games as an entertaining time waster, whereas the people that can appreciate such "experience stories" are gamers the want to immerse themselves into a game, that put a lot of feelings into it from the very beginning.

So, again, even if perfectly set up, such kinds of games have a very exclusive audience.

 

[HK-47]

And to answer (sorta) JayDubya's question, I believe Avellone was a TT scenario writer before joining Interplay.

 

[kinoki]

I think the problem is that both the video game buying audience and developers look toward movies for primary inspiration when they should be looking to poems. From a structural stand point it makes far more sense. Look at both Ico and Shadow of the Colossus where the plot more or less is the gameplay, where nothing is forced on you. While their stories would fit the poem and game structure any tries to adept it as a movie or book would diminish it.

 

[Scribble]

What is TT?

 

[HK-47]

What is TT?

tabletop RPG writer

lol acronyms

 

[Scribble]

Oh. *slaps forehead* should have guessed that one.

 

[HK-47]

I think the problem is that both the video game buying audience and developers look toward movies for primary inspiration when they should be looking to poems. From a structural stand point it makes far more sense. Look at both Ico and Shadow of the Colossus where the plot more or less is the gameplay, where nothing is forced on you. While their stories would fit the poem and game structure any tries to adept it as a movie or book would diminish it.

Or maybe it should look at all the mediums...like any other medium

Video games are an audio visual interactive medium. Consider movies are the first two, its no wonder why video games look to them for inspiration. Plenty of film techniques are applicable to game design.

 

[blame space]

atmosphere; immersion: good for gaming. i'm not against these elements of "story" in games. in fact, they can add quite a lot to a gaming experience.

but i never forget my definition of a game in favor of a "narrative". never. at that point i should be enjoying a passive form of entertainment; something i can't (and wouldn't want to) manipulate.

so, my definition of gaming: directly manipulating a computer program in a way that i deem fun, interesting, or otherwise worthwhile.

cutscenes: movies

QTE: simon says with a movie on top of it

fuck i'm tired, this might not make sense. i made a thread about some of my feelings on the subject a few months ago titled "is film gaming's crutch?"

 

[ConcealedBlaze]

i personally think game stories are flat-out dumb and forgettable.

and while i do enjoy video game universes such as the metal gear universe and its characters, playing a game and watching a story unfold (usually via cutscenes or in-game banter) is silly. it's akin to receiving a treat for doing a trick.

the older i get, the more i realize games have way more in common with comic books than the movies they so want to aspire to and more often than not emulate. so just deal with it, people.

what was last yerar's story-telling pinnacle? uncharted 2, perhaps? i played that game and i dont even remember what the story is about, and i'm not being facetious or trying to reinforce my point with a lie. i honestly do not remember the story. that's because i didnt care, because it was pretty dumb when i was playing. at best, video game's finest stories are on par with a shitty b movie's. sorry, ladies and germs.

i understand games need a glue to hold the characters and dialogue together, which is why i love, as i said, video game universes and character designs.

but fucka video game story. you're there to play a game. that is the nature of "video-games". not to say games can't make a player feel emotions, however.

the last game to move me emotionally was shadow of the colossus. and that game had, like, zero story. instead, i felt remorse for taking down these huge monsters who were pretty much minding their own business. you, as the player, were killing for selfish reasons. the way the game conveyed that was powerful and -- shit, son -- poetic.

uncharted 2 had GREAT voice acting, however. thats what i took away with that game aside from the graphics was how well it was acted. but the story? heh...if that's the best we are up to, well, we have a far distance to go.

As a whole, I'd say video game stories are fairly weak, but there are some that absolutely stand out in terms of world-building, themes, dialog, voice acting, plot, pacing, atmosphere, etc.

If you want to see examples of this, look at:

Grim Fandango
Bioshock
Half-life 1 & 2
Portal
Silent Hill 2
Deus Ex
Oddworld: Stranger's Wrath
Shadow of the Colossus
Ico
Grand Theft Auto IV
Mother 3
The Longest Journey

Yes, the list is short, but video games are still an evolving medium and you can't expect many truly great stories yet. I'd put any of the above up there with my favorite movies and books in terms of memorability and emotional impact, however.

I think the interactive fiction path the OP is discussing is fairly limited in scope, mainly because A) The writing up to this point in such games is fairly weak B) The act of pushing context sensitive buttons tends not to directly correlate to actions on the screen C) The ability to appreciate such works multiple times (as one could a movie or book) is severely hampered by "gameplay" that tends to be boring and disconnected from the plot

I currently have high hopes for L.A. Noire, however; as it seems like Rockstar is focusing mainly on story/atmosphere/worldbuilding. They started this trend with GTA IV and if Team Bondi can pull off half of what they're claiming, they may push virtual storytelling forward a few notches.

 

[timetokill]

To me, a game should never force you to do unnecessary actions. This is where Heavy Rain fails the hardest (and it fails in many areas) -- so much of the game play is completely meaningless. Gameplay is about making choices, it's not about the act of pressing the button. This is what Cage doesn't realize and it's what makes Heavy Rain so stupid as a game.

Using an example from the demo, so that I don't spoil anybody on the full game -- If they want me to walk down a hallway, that is fine, I am choosing where to go. If the guy has an asthma attack, and Cage decides this person MUST recover no matter what for the game to go on, then there is no reason for me to give any input. My input is therefore completely meaningless, because the outcome has already been decided.

In my playthrough I let my guy stand there, breathing heavily, for upwards of 10 minutes. As a person who has dealt with asthma, it's completely unrealistic for that to occur, especially when your inhaler is in your pocket. Why did I do it? Because the developers wanted to give me the illusion of a choice -- do I bring out the inhaler? Do I fish in my empty pockets? Trying to present this illusion is insulting, I believe, to the player.

Shattered Memories does much better. Yes, what gameplay is there could be polished a lot to make it more enjoyable. But the gameplay has purpose, and that is what makes Shattered Memories a much more important and compelling game than Heavy Rain, which could be (and has been) done better in other mediums.


Thanks for making this post, Alberto. I'd been wanting to do something similar but hadn't gotten around to it.

 

[Dabanton]

I think this is going to continue to be true until the industry gets some true writing talent.

It's the one thing that has always struck me about these games you have a multi million dollar budget and one of the most important factors in your game imo is overlooked, your storytelling.

Who do they hire to write these things or is it a situation where everyone has to have a say in the storyline?

 

[JayDubya]

And to answer (sorta) JayDubya's question, I believe Avellone was a TT scenario writer before joining Interplay.

Now I'm curious to see his output in that medium.

I'm really unimpressed with the modules Wizards is churning out nowadays - why? Crappy story, uninteresting, cookie-cutter villains. So, same sort of thing, basically. :lol

And yeah, like charlequin said, the concerns you're talking about have gone through the wringer in the TT world. D&D started out as a combat miniatures board game, it's looped back into being a combat miniatures game played on a battle mat with optional amateur drama between rolls (and this is coming from someone that likes both aspects about equally)

Combat isn't synonymous with gameplay, but it does have some elements that make it nigh-universally appealing (as charlequin said) for these purposes... particularly for video games, which can't handle the other elements as well by the very nature of pre-set, scripted scenarios.

Bioware games have gotten pretty good at presenting RPG combat games that maximize the illusion of freedom and choice (and sometimes have some reasonably good variant choices, especially towards the end of their games). You have to do adventures a through d, but you get to pick the order, while loot and monsters will scale.

They also have at least serviceable writing.

 

[HK-47]

Now I'm curious to see his output in that medium.

I'm really, strongly unimpressed with the modules Wizards is churning out nowadays. I'm thinking we're going to skip H3 in our GAF game.

And yeah, like charlequin said, the concerns you're talking about have gone through the wringer in the TT world. D&D started out as a combat miniatures board game, it's looped back into being a combat miniatures game played on a battle mat with optional amateur acting between skill checks.

Combat isn't synonymous with gameplay, but it does have some elements that make it nigh-universally appealing (as charlequin said) for these purposes... particularly for video games, which can't handle the other elements as well by the very nature of pre-set, scripted scenarios.

Well lets just say I prefer WoD, Paranoia and Planescape, Ravenloft and Dark Sun for their role playing over their combat. Its the same reason I despise 4E so far and think Wizard has done a poop job. I care more for the mythology and the character.

Games seem to fall more towards Munchkin and Real Men tendencies, at the expense of the Role Player and the Loony.

Also I didnt find DAO's combat that great. Especially since you do so damn much of it.

 

[timetokill]

Bioware games have gotten pretty good at presenting RPG combat games that maximize the illusion of freedom and choice (and sometimes have some reasonably good variant choices, especially towards the end of their games). You have to do adventures a through d, but you get to pick the order, while loot and monsters will scale.

I firmly believe that Bioware's recent games have been good because they started out stating that you don't have a choice as to whether you will be a hero or a villain. You are always going to be the hero of the story. Instead, you have a choice as to what kind of hero you will be -- compassionate, ruthless, etc.

It's a good way to scope down the problem for their purposes and it allows them to concentrate on telling a good "hero" story rather than trying to create some huge branching structure.

 

[HK-47]

I firmly believe that Bioware's recent games have been good because they started out stating that you don't have a choice as to whether you will be a hero or a villain. You are always going to be the hero of the story. Instead, you have a choice as to what kind of hero you will be -- compassionate, ruthless, etc.

It's a good way to scope down the problem for their purposes and it allows them to concentrate on telling a good "hero" story rather than trying to create some huge branching structure.

Nah thats just their inability to write villians. As shown by all their recent antagonists.

 

[JayDubya]

Kind of goes to what I'm saying, though.

Story is story, gameplay is gameplay. They ought, ideally, build off each other, and be in harmony, but ultimately, the quality level of each is distinct, in the same way that the music and graphics are distinct.

I suppose, sure, 4E's approach sort of reflects the character optimizer's perspective, because every character has similar basic gameplay mechanics, and every character is competent in combat with a clear role. But then again... that's just the mechanics, and you don't need really mechanics for storytelling or roleplaying - you need a story and you need choice.

The expectation is that while story and background and mood and all that are important, they're not so much an element of gameplay design, they're the responsibility of the game's referee / storyteller to set.

Of course, videogames don't have that person, so you need a writer.

I do wish more MMORPGs would provide that sort of thing, but I could see how that could be exponentially more expensive than pre-scripted story events, even when compared to the costs of voice-acted dialogue.

 

[Crash Station]

I think another important thing to consider is that atmosphere is also a deciding factor in how effective the story is. As it's been said, this is a visual medium and the story needs to reflect that. I see a lot of people in here mentioning Ico and SOTC, both of which rely heavily on atmosphere to tell their story. I personally couldn't get into either one due to the art style and controls but I can acknowledge it as something that got atmosphere down completely.

 

[ConcealedBlaze]

I firmly believe that Bioware's recent games have been good because they started out stating that you don't have a choice as to whether you will be a hero or a villain. You are always going to be the hero of the story. Instead, you have a choice as to what kind of hero you will be -- compassionate, ruthless, etc.

It's a good way to scope down the problem for their purposes and it allows them to concentrate on telling a good "hero" story rather than trying to create some huge branching structure.

An even better example of this is Deus Ex. No matter what, the story will follow the same general progression and you will always be the hero. The choices you make, however, effect the small details and how the plot plays out. The one area that Deus Ex has a leg up on ME and DAO, however, is that not all of your choices are spawned from a dialog tree. How you react in situations and the way you decided to go about things also heavily impact the story. In addition, most of the choices don't really seem like choices so much as just how you decided to act, and the game never splits the choices into "good" and "bad" like Bioware loves to do.

 

[JayDubya]

Nah thats just their inability to write villians. As shown by all their recent antagonists.

I dunno... I liked Loghain; his ability to do the antagonist role was undermined by the option to have him pull a Sarevok flip within the same game, with a big damn silent monster as the real boss.

Harbinger was interesting but there wasn't much there, I guess. Tentatively, I consider the Illusive Man a stealth antagonist, but that's based on my expectations for next game... he was interesting, though.

 

[charlequin]

I could be flippant and say that the fact that people who are into video games can't understand why some people would take thrillers more seriously than sci-fi is a sign that games are well down the track to being ghettoized.

I question the idea that pulp serial-killer thrillers are taken more seriously in "the real world" than science fiction. They're both treated (probably somewhat unfairly) as trashy pulp fiction of low quality in comparison to more "legitimate" fiction. As a semi-arbitrary example, you had two SF movies nominated for Best Picture Oscars this year, with five or six historical or modern fantasy films nominated in the last decade -- whereas I don't think a serial killer film has done so since 1992's win for Silence of the Lambs. If you ask someone to name a recent film about a serial killer, you're going to get trash like Saw XIV or Along Came A Spider (or on TV you're going to get people talking about ridiculous stuff like CSI and Numb3rs), not anything anyone is going to take particularly seriously.

If a game like Heavy Rain wants to get credit from me for moving outside of the pulpy genres that gaming usually inhabits, it's gonna have to try a little harder than that. Let's see a game address political historical drama or the story of a scandal or something.

 

[HK-47]

Kind of goes to what I'm saying, though.

Story is story, gameplay is gameplay. They ought, ideally, build off each other, and be in harmony, but ultimately, the quality level of each is distinct, in the same way that the music and graphics are distinct.

I suppose, sure, 4E's approach sort of reflects the character optimizer's perspective, because every character has similar basic gameplay mechanics, and every character is competent in combat with a clear role. But then again... that's just the mechanics, and you don't need really mechanics for storytelling or roleplaying - you need a story and you need choice.

The expectation is that while story and background and mood and all that are important, they're not so much an element of gameplay design, they're the responsibility of the game's referee / storyteller to set.

Of course, videogames don't have that person, so you need a writer.

I do wish more MMORPGs would provide that sort of thing, but I could see how that could be exponentially more expensive than pre-scripted story events, even when compared to the costs of voice-acted dialogue.

Yes, except having a good mythology means you give the storyteller something to work with, rather than just writing it all himself. Planescape was a setting with a ton of mythology to it but do to its structure allowed nearly any type of story to be possible. And they used to have a diverse bunch of universes to takes advantage of different types of stories. Now it all seems bland and homogenized.

 

[JayDubya]

If a game like Heavy Rain wants to get credit from me for moving outside of the pulpy genres that gaming usually inhabits, it's gonna have to try a little harder than that. Let's see a game address political historical drama or the story of a scandal or something.

Why my dear friend, clearly you forgot about Doubt for the Sega Genesis.

 

[L00P]

I can't take serious stories seriously. They're just so SERIOUS

 

[Filldough]

To me, a game should never force you to do unnecessary actions. This is where Heavy Rain fails the hardest (and it fails in many areas) -- so much of the game play is completely meaningless. Gameplay is about making choices, it's not about the act of pressing the button. This is what Cage doesn't realize and it's what makes Heavy Rain so stupid as a game.

Using an example from the demo, so that I don't spoil anybody on the full game -- If they want me to walk down a hallway, that is fine, I am choosing where to go. If the guy has an asthma attack, and Cage decides this person MUST recover no matter what for the game to go on, then there is no reason for me to give any input. My input is therefore completely meaningless, because the outcome has already been decided.

In my playthrough I let my guy stand there, breathing heavily, for upwards of 10 minutes. As a person who has dealt with asthma, it's completely unrealistic for that to occur, especially when your inhaler is in your pocket. Why did I do it? Because the developers wanted to give me the illusion of a choice -- do I bring out the inhaler? Do I fish in my empty pockets? Trying to present this illusion is insulting, I believe, to the player.

Shattered Memories does much better. Yes, what gameplay is there could be polished a lot to make it more enjoyable. But the gameplay has purpose, and that is what makes Shattered Memories a much more important and compelling game than Heavy Rain, which could be (and has been) done better in other mediums.


Thanks for making this post, Alberto. I'd been wanting to do something similar but hadn't gotten around to it.

Doesn't almost every game force you to do unnecessary things? Star collecting in Mario Gallaxy, Stunt Jumps in GTA, drinking Orange Juice in Heavy Rain, they've all got those menial tasks that are there to connect you to that particular experience or world.

The inhaler sequence to me isnt about putting you thru repetitive or pointless tasks, its an attempt to tie you to the character by putting you thru the motions of their experience. If you had asthma you're not going to sit there and not use your inhaler to see what happens, you're going to frantically try to use it so you dont die. Its a little ridiculous to claim that not allowing you the option of suicide by inaction to be insulting to the player when any normal person is going to attempt to save their in game character unless they're bored or trying to break the game.

Again, I think these things are done to build a relationship to the character, to understand that while Shelby might be a hero, he's flawed, he's not a super hero, he is both fallible and fragile. If anything it shows the player that the characters are more real this time around, they will die, they're not immortal good guys with infinite lives. I felt like it added to the story, but you are right that ultimately the action is pointless in that you have no choice in performing it. However, I think it works as it was intended.

 

[Twig]

I can't take serious stories seriously. They're just so SERIOUS

There's that, too. The best stories have some element of humor, something to lighten the mood, no matter how subtle or dark it might be.