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Once Upon A Game
Technopulp writes "In William Vitka's column on CBSNews.com, Henry Jenkins of MIT, author Warren Ellis and GDC Director Jamil Moledina wax philosophical about storytelling in video games and discuss whether or not gaming will ever have its own kind of great literature. 'Could a game be as good a work as War and Peace?'"
You don't remember Super Mario Brothers because of story do you? "Oh my god, the princess is in ANOTHER castle? What a plot twist!"
:)
No. You remember it because of the gameplay. I'm not saying that a game with story is impossible, I'm definitely not. Half Life, System Shock, Elder Scrolls, Final Fantasy... All games with great stories... but they are mostly remembered for their gameplay, right?
A game is great becuase it plays well and is fun. Story is just the icing on the cake, and does not alone make a great game make.
I got more enjoyment out of FFVII than War and Peace. Actually, I can remember the plot line and recognize characters from FFVII, but I am hard pressed to remember what War and Peace was about other than it was written by a Russian guy.
How strange... I just the oddest senation of thousands of World Lit 101 teachers spinning in their graves.
"I am the king of the Romans, and am superior to rules of grammar!"
-Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor (1368-1437)
War and Peace isn't really that interesting. In fact, of all the "great literature" that english majors like to rave about, I find that less than 10% of it even makes the level of decent, much less good.
Thats the problem with people who talk about art and wether games are art- art doesn't exist. People tag some items as "art" and others as "not art" as pure snob appeal- a way to say this is what I like and others who like this are better than other people. Its nothing intrinsic in the item. There's no magical quality of an object that catapults it to the level or art or fine art. Its wether it appeals to a small group of snobs.
Hell, the set of what's included as art doesn't even stay the same. Remberandt and Van Gogh were starving artists. Shakespear was considered lewd and crude in his day and lambasted for appealing to the masses.
Forget about striving to become art or creating something for the ages. Make a game thats fun. In the end, thats all that matters.
I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
Duke Nukem Forever
Disgaea for starters. Isn't War and Peace more memorable for its length than its quality (sounds like a porn star in that respect)?
... We need real emotional and intellectual experiences." Really? Maybe if the game is trying to tell a story. But not all games try. Not all games need to. Should families stop playing charades at Christmas until Grandad comes up with a better plot as justification for playing? What a load of rubbish. We should enjoy games for what they are. I still want a game that is fun for 30 minutes. If I want to read a book, then guess what ... I'll actually read one.
I do get fed up with the "games as storytellers" topic. I don't quite understand where it comes from. Just because games are played on TV, doesn't mean they *have* to be compared with movies. Football (soccer) is played on grass, but has nothing to do with tending one's lawn. In fact, quite the opposite!
Some games have stories, great. Not all games do. Games generate their own stories. Consider the storyline of the last game of chess you played or the last basketball match you watched. *If* a game sets out to tell a story (eg RPG), then fine, compare it with stories. If it doesn't, then stop bothering.
From the article: "Creating powerful narratives is the next step
And, most of all, STOP LUMPING ALL GAMES INTO THE SAME POT.
X-Com I think falls in that category of a great or classic. The funny thing (and it looks like other posters have said it as well) is that there really wasn't a story in the conventional sense. But it did have mood and setting and conflict.
I think this might be more of a case of apples and oranges. Think about TV and movies... a great TV show doesn't always make for a good movie and vice versa. Similar to that a TV show can be regarded as a great work and not necessarily have the best written story (ie: "Cheers" great dialogue/characters/acting, mediocre story).
Something else to consider, considering how games can have a user driven story (The Sims for example) how can video games even be rated equally based on their stories?
Oops, how did this get here?
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"Jenkins elaborates, "The last hundred pages [of "War and Peace"] is this essay that Tolstoy wrote, saying 'if the Russians had done this differently, then this would have been the result and if the French had done this differently then this would have been the result.' "It's not hard to look at 'War and Peace' and say that this wanted to be a video game."
Absurd. The last hundred pages of War and Peace describe the way in which events necessarily turned out as they did, and that those in power were so constrained by their roles that they had no more choice than the cannons that fired at Borodino. The true power, Tolstoy claims, lies with the people--but not in any concrete choices they make. In their mass action they constitute the integral of history, that which drives and shapes it. Tolstoy would never, ever, ever have said "if X had done Y differently, Z would have happened." He viciously attacked those who said precisely that--they were looking only at the manifestations of history, not its causes.
And for all of you who appreciate [insert videogame here] more than Tolstoy: it's your perogative, and there's no accounting for taste. But I've played a lot of videogames, and I've read a lot of Tolstoy (Anna Karenina, Resurrection, War and Peace, The Devil, The Forged Coupon, The Death of Ivan Illyich, Family Happiness, Sevastopol in May, Sevastopol in December, The Kreutzer Sonata, and countless other short stories). And as someone who met and appreciated video games (and I can think of several games I would classify as 'brilliant') before I encountered Tolstoy, I'll say this: I have never played a game that posessed anything like the fierce invention, modal clarity and deep insight of Tolstoy's works. It may be fashionable to bash literature on Slashdot--there was a discussion on Shakespeare vs. Video Games the other day on which I barely restrained myself from commenting--but the insight of War and Peace will never grow old or die.
But who really reads the plot behind the yellow exclamation mark?
If we want well written stories, game companies need to start accepting scripts written by honest-to-god authors, and realise that to get a gripping storyline they need to design the gameplay around the story, not the story around the gameplay. Yeah, in Hollywood they occasionally design the script around the special effects, but I'm so damn tired of every game having all the emotional content of a cheesy action movie - even some of the games in genres where it can be so much better, like RPGs. Yes, there are some good stories out there, but usually it seems more like coincidence (and skilled writers managing to stuff content into a container that was never designed for it). We can do better, dammit, but it is definitely going to need a shift in thinking.
Need I say more? Well, maybe Duck Hunt....
You have obviously never played games like Betrayal at Krondor. Definitely great storywork there, and was intermingled with gameplay. The description of even common things like items and "flavor" characters were very rich and detailed.
I'll stop with the pump up, but imagine a political game with descriptions and narrative from Jon Stewart, or maybe an economics/finance game with narrative from other popstars (Jim Cramer, etc).
The fact is that there is a lot of real potenital for BOTH gameplay and narrative, each feeding on the other to produce something that is greater than either.
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literature typically excells in sharing in the human experience. what makes literature compelling is how the author relates the reader to the characters or the situation. the human abilities to empathize/sympathize allow for an experience that transcends the mere action of a plot. video games have never given me such an experience. i have enjoyed the storylines of videogames much like i would the writings of a pulp novelist: exciting and swift. however, they, of course, have never moved me quite like a great novel. i don't see why videogames can't accomplish the same feat. the question is: are users interested in making their games more than the light fantasy they are?
An example of a game that was designed around the story that was written for it is Clive Barker's Undying. Although I had some gripes with the mechanics of the game, it really felt like an interactive horror story. And I don't just mean that it was shocking or scary. I mean that the family was genuinely gruesome.
Virtue finds and chooses the mean.
Aristotle, Ethica Nichomachea
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I hope they don't make a game like War and Piece. It would be thirty times longer than necessary, have two hundred main characters all of whom are named Alexei or Anna, and have a barely discernable plot.
And also great story can't overcome a bad game interface. I don't think any game could overcome a flaw like: "The auto-aiming on the dual-gun system was so bad, it was as if I was watching a homicidal semaphore session."
Unless, I guess, there was a way you could have a great story in a game named Homicidal Semaphore.
And then what would be next, a FPS with an aldis lamp? Oh right, they already did that and called it Doom 3.
Oh, say does that Star-Spangled Banner entwine / The myrtle of Venus with Bacchus's vine?
If we want well written stories, game companies need to start accepting scripts written by honest-to-god authors, and realise that to get a gripping storyline they need to design the gameplay around the story, not the story around the gameplay.
But we're not talking about merely good stories here. There are plenty of great stories that are the furtherest thing from "gripping." Many authors could care less about providing you with viceral thrills. There are good adventure tales that have stood out over time, but there's always something there other than just being an adventure.
Most game developers want a gripping story, but most good authors, if they're really good, have their own ideas, and publishers usually don't want that. They just want a script they can plug assets into and make a pile of cash. The last thing they want is a soul.
We can do better, dammit, but it is definitely going to need a shift in thinking.
I agree, but who's thinking is it that must be shifted?
So, can the game developers make it all the way to "great literature"? Well, let's let the tools mature a bit before we decide. AFAIK, "Oblivion" may have already shown the way, at least technically. Alas, my current rig can't run it! :)
Generally, bash is superior to python in those environments where python is not installed.
a good RPG game is more akin to a good 'choose your own adventure book' than anything currently considered literature. the problem is not story in games it is the perception of english literature professors that needs broadening to include the cultural and literary impact of the electronic medium.
Yes, Cris Crawford is right (at least mostly right - see GDC Rant): Games need to become interactive storytelling. Why? Because if you can control your character in shooting, swinging a sword, or buying something, then WHY can't you decide what to say to them (and have them react accordingly). Now, I don't think that this needs to happen to all games but it probably needs to happen (at least to a degree) with all games that include major bits of story (eg. cutscenes, etc.).
A previous poster in a previous thread mentioned that having AI able to generate text in real time (an emotion/information driven AI), coupled with text-to-voice synthesizers would drive interactive storytelling. That combined with voice recognition software (voice to text) would be the holy grail of storytelling. Big time developers and publishers really should be investing in these technologies right now!!!
In the meantime, the Fallout/Deus Ex/Knights of the Old Republic/Oblivion method of giving you multiple choices of dialogue and actions ought to become the de facto standard for story games. Yes that requires more recorded/written dialogue, but those games really stand out because of it. If people just stopped buying games with non-interactive stories, developers would stop making them. Likewise if enough fans complained.
Now I know you are going to say, "But I like the linear Final Fantasy story because it is so well crafted, etc. and you can't do that with branching dialogue." And let me just say that I like Final Fantasy stories as well, but it is not impossible to make a non-linear story that is also good. Yes, it is more difficult, but if stage actors can improvise moving drama on the fly then game developers should be able to do it when they have it planned out.
Also, little things like constant and dynamic animations for characters make a big difference in making a character seem alive. No one stands still when you are talking to them. People yawn, breath, shift their weight, and gesture when talking. And when people are walking they speed up, slow down, change the gate of their walk, step over or around obstacles, and trip occasionally. If you think these are trivial just remember back to Sonic the Hedgehog. When you stop using the controller Sonic starts blinking, yawning, and eventually gets out his yo-yo. That was cool!
Indeed, the grue does lives long....
One of the cleverest bits of Infocom's classic (extremely cool) sci-fi adventure Starcross is that, although it takes place a couple of centuries from now in an alien space probe carved out of an asteroid, when you walk into a dark place, you can still get eaten by a grue!
I always wondered, in that game, when you manage to finally turn on the lights in the dark area, what happened to the grues? They vanish entirely from the game.
If I want a convoluted plot with deep storylines and lengthy descriptions, I'll play Xenogears again ;)
Acutally, you will never find this. If we do get games with the above description, you'll be looking at a big waste of money. First off, most generes of games don't need this. Fighting no, racing, no, puzzle, no, H-games^H^H^H^H^H^H^H other games, no.
Only ones that matter are adventure, RTS, RPG.
RTS can benefit a little, but most of the reknown ones come down to skilled planning and quickness, which sounds like the exact opposite reason I'd read a book.
An RPG needs to be customiable, and the best ones (I think) (FFT, FFIII, FF8, XenoG, DQVII, Phant star (all), Star Ocean) were mostly because of the gameplay (and the few moments where I did feel for that characters).
Adventure, well... I don't know if this even exists anymore (alone in the dark, the ol' Willams's Sierra games, Infocom text advetures). Good book-like qualities might help, but I think developers have moved on and tried to make stuff like GTA which is mostly open ended... which is what a book is not. A book allows for free interpretation, not exploration.
Games that are neat are because of the gameplay. GAME-PLAY. Look at the Spore GDC vid. That is going to be an unbelievable game. The possibliities are endless, plus the melding of genres is pretty crazy. At the same time I see about an abstract's worth of a plot there.
So yeah. Don't see it happening sometime. But then again, I'd like to see it happen.
0- Eamonman Proud member of DNRC
The problem with the whole "videogames should be exploiting their storytelling potential!!!" thing is that narrative and interactivity are basically like oil and water.
Either the game makers are telling a story (through an intro, cut-scene, pre-scripted in-game event, etc), or the gamer is making his own story (by interacting with his environment, seeing how items and entities and the environment interact). Either the gamer is sitting passively watching the plot unfold, or he is doing his own thing. The kind of story in the cut-scenes (stories of personalities interacting, people going through emotions, etc) is fundamentally different from the kind of actions the gamer is responsible for, from the "story" the gamer makes (figuring out the rules of a simple system so that he can out-trick a computer).
So "telling a story" happens at times when interactivity does NOT happen, and vice versa. If the story-telling in the narrative cut-scenes is actually good, then the gameplay just gets in the way. If the gameplay is good, then the cut-scenes don't really add much to it. They're nice, and I like them, but they're not what makes the game good, just as interactivity can not make a narrative good. That's why I said that narrative and gameplay are like oil and water. You can have a game with both, but one does not really help the other much.
For example, the article says "With videogames, the audience takes the teller's baton and continues to tell the story... This way, the game player enjoys the storyteller's thrill, adapting the narrative to his or her satisfaction, while also being the audience for the narrative elements that the game developer provides... We have never had a storytelling medium like video games... Game playing represents the hybrid of both aspects of storytelling, where the audience is empowered to self-propagate the storytelling creation and enjoyment. This stimulates their own creativity and gives them the experience of controlling their destiny... But where does that take us? Video games, as narratives, are not getting better". Right, that's because a narrative is not enhanced by interactivity, it is only paused by it. Either the game makers are telling a story with the gamer watching, or the gamer is trying to complete a challenge while the story is paused.
The exception to this are games that have no real "story", but where the system one masters inside the game is rich enough, interesting enough, complex enough, and similar enough to a real-world system (rather than to a computer simulation of a few entities and a few parameters in a simple environment), where the gamer-generated story IS the story. All that the game-makers want to communicate is stuff that can be "learned" from figuring out the "system" where the game is set. This is the case with Sim City, The Sims, The Movies, and all the Sim Something / Something Tycoon games. These games don't tell a story, they don't narrate, they just illustrate. THAT is the potential that video games ought to explore. Not TELLING stories, but SHOWING stories. Not narrating, not going from beginning to end, but teaching/showing/expressing/illustrating something just through the challenge the gamer must complete, just through the world/system/environment/entities the gamer must learn to influence. This is very different from telling a story. It is almost the opposite of narrative. This is not something a writer can help you with. This kind of art - expressing something about the world and human nature by illustrating it through an open-ended interactive experience - is a whole new kind of art.
It is like a teacher that gives his students an assignment where the assignment does not lay out the things to be learned, but the teacher knows that, while completing the assignment, the students will need to expose themselves to certain ideas, skills, techniques, or bits of knowledge. It's open ended and simple but contains, hidden in it, the requirement to see / learn / realize / think about something. THAT is the future of videogames. And it is NOT telling a story or trying to be a book or movie.
I don't think this guy has ever looked at Planescape: Torment... It's about the best game writing I've seen. A lot of the old SSI gold box games were pretty well written a well. If the gameplay sucks though, no one is going to give a second thought to how well written the plot might be.
I really wish I were a game designer, making some game with some brilliant story, so I could say the following:
"Fine. If I say I agree with you that video games can't be art, will you show up, go away, and let me finish making my story?"
Property is theft.
realise that to get a gripping storyline they need to design the gameplay around the story, not the story around the gameplay.
But then you are creating a book or movie with a few game elements, not a game. You are trying to shoehorn the paradigms of a traditional medium into a different one. That approach will not net us any good "literature" for games unless by accident. To create a truly great work you must use your medium to your advantage, not fight it. Instead of thinking up a static storyline and making a game for the player to play while listening to it you need to ask yourself "What can the interactive medium do for me?". Trying to shoehorn one type of literature into another one gives us the many book-to-movie conversions that lack 90% of the story because the movie format is not suited for gigantic storylines.
The interactive medium can explore how changing variables can affect the system as a whole. Take the movie Lola Runs: It shows three different stories effected by changing one variable, the time at which Lola leaves the house. Now expand upon that. In the interactive medium you do not write down scenarios and how they would play out under your guidance, you create a scenario and teach the machine to play them out for you. The user makes choices within the game and the game reacts. Instead of leading the user along a path to show predetermined events you'd put the user in there, guide the user but don't force him, let him change the world through his actions and see the outcome.
The sandbox is the real point of the interactive medium but it could be improved yet. If you wanted to convey a morality you could let the player play around with the things you want him to learn about, showing the outcomes of his interaction in a dynamic way that makes the player understand the logic you are using. Of course, that has to be subtle or the user will brand it as propaganda (e.g. open the window while the heating is on "the world dies of global warming", as seen in some pro-environment educational game). If you wanted to show the way our politicians make decisions, make a political simulation that puts the player into similar situations and let him see what his proposed actions would cause, if you wanted to talk about the value of life you could let the player perform actions that could hurt or kill others and see the suffering, etc.
Writing a storyline and calling it a game is like drawing a graph and calling it a function.
Justice is the sheep getting arrested while an impartial judge declares the vote void.
but there is not one game where you can say the majority of the educated populace has played.
Tetris?
Justice is the sheep getting arrested while an impartial judge declares the vote void.
Chewie does not get a medal. Come on, George. Can a Wookie get a medal?
Games allow the player to tell their own story as they play. For instance, no two people will play an RPG the same way so every character has its own tale of success or failure. Or, two friends play Virtua Tennis every day for a year and the underdog, after losing 80% of games, has a huge upset victory in a championship. How about, in Vice City you assassinate the Hatian gang leaders at their comerade's funeral, his thugs give chase and blast your car until it's a careening fireball, so you steer it around toward the gang and bail out seconds before it explodes, killing your attackers in one fell swoop!
The interactivity of games is what makes them oranges to movies' apples. A good game is one that YOU tell stories about, and your story is like no one else's.
Case in point, my coworker just told me a great story about an experience in Oblivion.
The theif's guild sent him and 2 other thieves on a race to steal someone's diary. He followed one of the thieves to the location and watched as she stole the diary. It was too late at night to return the diary so he followed her all the way home, sticking to the shadows, and waited behind her house until she fell asleep. He then picked the door lock, snuck into her bedroom, and stole the diary off her table. The next night he gave the diary to the guildmaster.
Games aren't a narrative art form they are a visual art form. Is narrative unimportant? Well, no, it's not entirely unimportant, much as it wasn't unimportant in Watchmen or Da Vinci's Last Supper. (There's actually a better Last Supper to reference by a less well known Rennaissance artist, but I can't think of his name right now. Partly because it's a better example of Rennaisance "pop art," and partly because it doesn't carry the baggage that Da Vinci's name carries. )
Obviously, if you are playing IF, that's an exception, but it's also a tiny niche now (though it used to be a major form).
"MIT betrayed all of its basic principles."