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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
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
What every dev needs to know about story?
I develop database apps you insensitive clod!
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.
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.
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