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What Every Dev Needs To Know About Story
Gamasutra has a feature up discussing important lessons that game developers should know about storytelling. From the article: "The first attempts to make movies into real stories failed. They failed because they were conceived as filmed plays. A camera would be set up about where an audience member would sit in the middle of a theater, and the play would ensue. It didn't work. Early film makers didn't take into account that the human eye wanders all over the fixed box of the stage during a play, and a camera that does any less will bore the film audience to tears. They also hand discovered the rich tool set of camera angles, close-ups, far shots, and all the language of film we now take for granted. Generally speaking, they hadn't discovered what this particular story form was good at. And frankly, neither have we in games. "
I think most people still don't consider the great film achievements the same thing as a Leonardo or a Michaelangelo. Film has a lot more legitimacy than it did but the inherently commercial nature of it could prevent it from ever being accepted the way the Classic Masters are.
Video games right now seem to be begging for the kind of legitimacy film has, but I think they should be aiming higher. A wise man once advised me that I would do much better to copy the same things my idols copied, rather than to just copy my idols!
Why not give us an older mature character who already understands love, death, sacrifice, and other emotions and parts of life so I don't have to be drug through horribly written plot. I've gotten really sick of the main character in almost every RPG having some love interest that they're too afraid to approach.
Give the characters good voice acting if you're going to give them voices. Granted with a weak script not even a good voice actor can do much with it, but at least make an effort. Bad voice acting leaves me hating the characters and wishing they would die. Good voice acting can really make a game though.
Lunar:SSSC despite the simple graphics and the simple cliche story that has been done a thousand times over, had interesting characters with real personalities and excellent voice acting. To date, I think it's the best execution of a video game I've seen even though the graphics are sprites and the cutscene animation is hand drawn.
I think most people still don't consider the great film achievements the same thing as a Leonardo or a Michaelangelo. Film has a lot more legitimacy than it did but the inherently commercial nature of it could prevent it from ever being accepted the way the Classic Masters are.
Masterpieces of any art form, be it painting, music, sculpture, or theater, all were inherently commercial ventures. Great paintings and sculptures were commissioned. Plays (even in ancient Greece) were funded by some benevolent patron and usually charged admission. Great classical composers wrote the music to operas and again charged admission.
Even in their times, the Classic Masters still had to eat.
With so many ppl on
Gamers don't like long drawn out storytelling in most of the popular games like Halo or Unreal, they just want to shoot em up and ask questions later. I do prefer games like HL2 that combining inline storytelling with real time action, but then again, games are not really intended to be innovative forms of storytelling.
Perhaps the only genre that this article applies to is the RPG genre, which fights to combine 80+ hours of gameplay with a story that remains fresh from start to end. Most RPG's get stale by about hour 10, and by hour 40 they start to repeat themselves. The problem is that nobody can really generate 80 hours of storytelling, even novels don't take 80 hours to read.
Its fun to critise developers for failing to offer really good stories in games, but they are not novelists or movie makers and for the most part, gamers really don't want long drawn out cut-scenes or read pages of text in order for the game to progress. If anything, developers should stop forcing a story into a game, and let the game unfold like real life, where events happen at random and people create their own adventures.
I haven't thought of anything clever to put here, but then again most of you haven't either.
Most big budget games have writers, and most of them still have crap storytelling/writing/voiceacting. Just as author's are rarely good for screenplays and screenwriters rarely are able to write books, neither will be able, in general, to fully leverage the pen of the video game. We need a new genre of writer to write for the new medium we have created.
If you haven't, here's a brief synopsis of what made it so very, very good (and thus, unfortunately, unusual):
- The game had an engrossing story, which was revealed in steps. In the beginning, you simply wake up in a mortuary, with that somewhat hackneyed device of amnesia. However, instead of hearing your character's entire background five minutes into the game, or never understanding why the character would forget himself at all, the game instead uses an admittedly overused device to slowly reveal the nature of the character and allow you to define that character.
- It allowed you to define the character. First, as a Dungeons and Dragons based game, it had a built-in alignment system. However, unlike most D&D games, it allowed you to choose your alignment naturally. You started out completely neutral, and your alignment shifted according to your actions. Furthermore, the game, which in large part centered around the question, "What can change the nature of a man?" actually allowed you to play the character such that almost any answer to that question was viable.
- Finally, it allowed for great freedom. While the main plotline was mostly linear, the ways to accomplish the various tasks allowed the gamer to play almost any character. Have a character with high wisdom? Talk your way out of a fight by showing the uselessness of fighting. High charisma? Convince people that you're incredibly powerful and will mow right through them. Have high strength? Just bash your way through obstacles.
While the game was certainly not without its flaws (lots of text-based exposition, which was read in a small dialog box and some of which might have been done better if movies were worked in, a mediocre interface, and somewhat dated technology) it still stands as a shining example of what storytelling in a game should be.That's it. I'm no longer part of Team Sanity.
I don't know that the Wizard of Oz is very analagous to Doom from a storytelling standpoint. The story of the Wizard of Oz was originally a book, and very likely a political-economic allegory.
The story of Doom, on the other hand, is not only without a literary basis, but virtually non-existant in its own right.
The "repetitive asian crpgs" is right on the money though. They're like a combination of Spagetti Western and Soap Operas with all sorts of freudian hardware (e.g. an angsty teenage boy with a 10 ft. sword...) and Disney-esque talking animals.
It's a mistake to capitalize Television as if it were some single tremendous, amoeba-like object. There are indeed artistic television shows -- The Prisoner jumps most readily to mind.
But my point is, there are glimmers of art in most things if you're looking for them. And, even the "traditional" artistic media (painting, sculpture, music, dance) have their icky, mindlessly populist sides (Elvis on velvet + dogs playing poker, Precious Moments, Brittany Spears, Macarana).
There are also artistic things that don't work - in fact, some of the worst things are of this category. I regretfully point the interested viewer in the direction of a recent movie called Immortel (Ad Vitam), aka "Immortal" on US DVD. Oh, if only Mike and the bots were still up in space....
The article evokes my English 101 course freshman year at college. We read The Bridge of San Luis Rey, and when it came to discussion this one guy (named, of all things, Blue) burst out, "Where's the antagonism?"
Basically, the article's author is trying to convince game industry types why writers and story are necessary, but he shoots himself in the foot by limiting the industry to one genre and deploying a notion of "classical narrative" from literature that really doesn't work outside of epics and sitcoms.
Reading his article, his focus is on long, narrative-driven games. But this focus limits the utility. When he argues at the end that writers are necessary, I ask: why? Okay, for some pompous over-the-top thing like Deus Ex, sure. But the whole Mario Brothers franchise? Antagonism and Reversal are reduced to mere stubs to drive the platform-based fun. And the last game Maxis produced with antagonism in it was Robosport, and I don't see that mentioned as their greatest achievement.
The article starts out with a comparison to the early days of cinema. The inherent problem is that, well, viewing cinema as a teleological march, isolated from other genres presents a distorted picture of the medium. You know why? They're still showing moving pictures of stage plays, and travelogues, and all those other genres that the article wants to imply "failed" because of a lack of narrative. They're just showing them on TV, not in the movie theaters. And, incidently, the way movies were socially experienced 75 years ago is entirely different from today. So the genre doesn't evolve in a vacuum. The same could be said for videogames. They're still making games like Snake, and little puzzle games, but they're on telephones and portable game machines.
So I object to the 80/20 rules too. Plays are not 80-20 audio-visual any more than movies are 80-20 visual-audio: it varies from piece to piece. Go into a godawful European nineteenth-century opera house, imagine it full of people (heaven forfend going to an opera--I wouldn't ask that of anyone), and tell me it's 80% about the singing. If that's so, why all the visual distractions that bombard us?
But if you're going to characterize videogames or any other bit of entertainment, look at how they're experienced. The cognitive experience is the target, not what goes to the screen or the speakers, or the overglorified adult novelty device they call a controller.
So, you want to say dialog sucks. Well, having just tried facade, I'd be inclined to agree with you. But then again, I've had some excellent experiences of in-game dialog, but they all involved communications with other humans. Robo-Dialog also works for setting the context: radio chatter, conversations at a party, a domestic squabble in an abandoned building, some surreal nonsense blasted from huge loudspeakers. But sure, dialog central to the narrative is problematic because the player can't (yet) interact with the characters on the same level (if anyone wants some facade scripts where I yell repeatedly for a goddamned martini only to get quizzical looks from the warring couple, let me know).
I guess that brings us back to the novel, and the issue of fiction. If the game has a linear structure, then someone has to write that linear structure, and a Joseph Campbellesque High School writing class approach will work just fine for most cases. But don't think that all great literature is written that way, nor even that most games have such a structure. There are plenty of other structures out there:
Sports: the game provides regulated social interaction. It doesn't matter whether it is a "sports game" (Madden), a simulation (CS), MMORPG, or something completely abstract: the value people derive from it is social contact with others. Narrative, writers and all that are not necessary for the sports element to work: people create their own narratives.
Drugs: many, many games work on the princ