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

I give you 30 years.

[jolande]

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.

An Ancient Tradition

[Shadow Wrought]

It is somewhat interesting to think about how deeply imbedded within us the concept of storytelling is. First, it was doen orally, came performances and the written word. From there we moved into movies (first silently and then with "talkies") and television. Now we are entering the genre of storytelling in which different people can play the same game and be told different stories. That's pretty amazing when you think of it. It is also kind of amazing that through all of these different iterations, it the fulfilliment of the basic human need of absorbing stories.

Personally, I'm looking forward to experiencing the places that games take this ancient tradition.

Re:An Ancient Tradition

[Pxtl]

In that veign, today's mindless-but-story-driven action games will be looked back upon with the same twisted mix of disgust and amusement that black-and-white Ed Wood shlock and pulp horror films are today. Prior generations will be viewed as the experimental phase of the field - like when moving pictures were all tricks of optical illusions and video cameras were experimental toys, and silent films relied on bizarre creative tricks to convey meaning.

Doom is the modern Wizard of Oz - an impressive technical achievement, and kinda fun - but kinda campy and stupid in hindsight. Perhaps Zork is the modern Metropolis? Idunno. Repetative Asian CRPGs are the modern Spaghetti Westerns?

And MMOs. MMOs are a revolutionary destruction of the art into the lowest-common-denominator. MMOs are the modern sitcoms. WoW is the Cosby show.

hit the nail right on the head

[MyDixieWrecked]

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.

Games aren't stories either...

[kreyg]

Movies are a logical extension of the play, which is a logical extension of the storyteller.

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.