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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 give you 30 years. 30 years from now people will consider video games (at least some of them) fine artwork. It took a long time for people to accept movies as legitimate. Same with television, photography, etc. The same thing happens with every new medium. Eventually videogames will be adopted by the art world as a legitimate medium. It is really just a matter of time.
Personally, I'm looking forward to experiencing the places that games take this ancient tradition.
If brevity is the soul of wit, then how does one explain Twitter?
The art of interactive design by Chris Crawfod
I enjoy plays because I can concentrate on what I want in a scene instead of being dragged there through cinematography and the same can be said with games where I control the view. If you begin forcing people to view things in a certain way you will distance those who like more control.
An Education is the Font of All Liberty
One problem that plagues the film industry is that every movie is a cookiecutter film. New ideas and new techniques are hard to come by.
Why?
Because it takes so much time, money, and effort to create one of these things. Same goes for games.
MTV was a driving force in the creation of stylized films. It wasn't until the music video, where you had these independent directors and writers and film students creating these "small films" who were willing to experiment with new camera angles and new shooting techniques that you really got some interesting things going on with filmography. It cost so little $ (relative to feature films) that everyone was willing to experiment.
The same goes for minigames. Sometimes, it's the minigames that make a game so good. It's the experimentation involved. You can sneak a couple of really risky gameplay elements (not risky like hot-coffee, risky like new game-mechanics!) into a couple of minigames and not affect the entire game.
That's why games like warioware are so good. And that's why games that you can just pick up and play (like that kirby:CC game and a lot of the other DS games) have such great replay value.
When more people experiment more with new types of gameplay in larger games, you'll have much better games.
as an asside, a great, innovative (buzzword!) fighting game is Narutimet Hero for PS2; a japanese title. The best PS2 game I've ever played. The sequal is better because it has more characters, but the original has a cooler special-move style. You gotta play it to know what I mean.
...spike
Ewwwwww, coconut...
Amen. I've seen what happens when you have well-written games - you get FF8. The game had perfectly decent dialogue and a compelling story that was incredibly annoying and slow to crawl through. The game tried to tell a nice story, and in the end it felt like you were just clicking through a nice story, instead of playing.
You sir, are the one putting words in MY mouth. I never said that they need someone to put words in the characters mouth. In fact, I didn't say much at all.
What I was saying, AAA (as an author), is that drafting out a decent storyline isn't really that hard to do if you put some effort into it (i.e. have ever read a good novel). What was covered in the article is nothing beyond what is covered in an intro-level fiction writing class in a university. You don't need to have a 300 page book written for the game, you need a flow chart of basic events. But like the other respondants said, it needs to flow, not get caught up in the story like FF8.
PS. you don't rate flamebait, you don't know enough about what you're talking about to be able to actually flame. Though you did a great job of totally making misplaced assumptions. Have a cookie.
Games are more an extension of playing make-believe. Certainly story can have a significant component in that, but it's more like setting plot points while the player fills in the blanks with their own story.
Once we can exploit that fully, we'll be set.
sig fault
I remember enjoying the Betrayal at Krondor game a few years ago, I think Raymond Feist wrote the script for that.
Perhaps he just had a better understanding of the medium he was using.
all you need to do is set up the initial conflict. how the player or players seek to resolve that conflict contains all the drama, action, and story that anyone needs.
if the conflict is as simple as "I'm trying to kill you and you're trying to kill me" that life-or-death struggle contains as much drama as anything you could try to manufacture.
Such is the infinite Grace of Popeye.