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. "

Comments

Better characters

[alvinrod]

I think a lot of stories would be better if the games had better characters in them. I can't count the number of games that have turned me off because the protaginist acted like a whiny, angst-filled teen, or was in fact designed to act like this. RPGs seem to be most guilty of this.

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.

Re:Better characters

[EnronHaliburton2004]

It's simpler then that.

The games are developed to attract their core audience: Teenage men and young adult men-- many of whom are whiny and filled with angst-- a bit like MTV.

Hard to put a story into 3D frag fests

[TheSkepticalOptimist]

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.

Planescape: Torment.

[PurpleFloyd]

If I ruled the game-development world, I would quite simply place the world's game scriptwriters in front of the RPG Planescape: Torment. If you've played it, you probably know why.

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.