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Jaffe Ditches Games With Stories
1up reports on David Jaffe's latest post to his blog, where he rails against games with stories, claiming that moving forward he'll be all about play for the sake of play. From the article: "Jaffe goes onto explain his thesis, believing many modern cinematic games don't properly play upon the raw 'real' emotions videogames can elicit: tension and release, fear and anxiety, triumph and defeat, and confusion and joy over challenges. We're wondering how Jaffe intends to make us cry without playing up the story elements, but we're interested in seeing him try. Maybe Project HL will simply feature an extended Path of Hades sequence ripped from God of War. I simply loved climbing those spiked poles for over an hour."
I'm just exactly the opposite of him. I ONLY play games for the 'story'. (I call it an adventure, cuz generally the plot is a little lame.)
When I get a new game, I want it to be new. New characters, lands, weapons, magic, story, and yes, new challenges. A 'perfect' game for me has all of these. A game with only 1 or 2 is nearly useless to me and I'll quit in minutes. (Tao's Adventure for DS.)
This guy is exactly the opposite. He just wants challenge for its own sake, apparently even if its been done a million times.
Wow.
"If you make people think they're thinking, they'll love you; But if you really make them think, they'll hate you." - DM
Anyone who has GMed a RL RPG should know about the 36 plots, and anyone familiar with drama should know about Aristotle's Poetics , which outlines the science of drama: plot, tension, characterization, all the way down to things like color, shape, harmony, and rhythm. We understand all that is necessary to dynamically generate interesting story lines which raise and release dramatic tension. Done by a computer, this could be customized to create stories the individual player finds interesting. Brenda Laurel did some intersting work in this field with her game company, Purple Moon. Although it was a commercial flop, the time may now be right for her approach. She also wrote a great book on computer-human interaction, analyzing it throught the lens of Aristotalian Poetics.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
Story is what carries you through the game? How many FPS's is there out there now adays? How many more can u create...there is only so much you can with the game play? I dont buy a new FPS because it has an awsome new Particle Cannon or something like that, i buy it for the Story.
The way that you play the game isnt the most important aspect, its weather it draws you in, and keeps you interested.
I dont know who here has played the game Farenheit for the Xbox, but its probobly one of the BEST games ive played to date. And the complexity of the game play is pretty much, move the thumb sticks back and forth....w00t! Not hard, but the story in the game made it like a movie, you were excited to see what happened next, and it was cool because it was like your part of a movie. The game was completely story based, and i enjoyed it more then most games i have played in the past few years.
Story line is 1 of the only ways remaining to make your game original. Sometimes people figure out a good new type of game, but mostly its the same old rehashed ideas, with new stories....that is what makes the half life serice so much better then Quake...and so on...game play can draw u in for a few hours..but eventually it will just repeat. If you have a Story that playes out over 30-40 hours, then then is always something new, and you want to see what will happen next. If all your doing it killing your way through a level, just to get to the next 1, and kill some more things, whats the point?
-EL
You make a good point, but I think in terms of game development, it's so much easier to ditch story. It is costly and you've gotta find some poor bloke to do the story. (I've written stories for games, and well... even when I tried to leave a certain franchise, I got pulled back in at the last minute, because the guy that thought he could do it just stopped returning emails, etc...) Story is a pain, because you have to have all these extra features through which to communicate it, and because stories are sequential they they tend not to loan themselves to games... because if the choices you make in a game "matter" they will inherently change the ending of the story.
So either you make a story and the actions in each "level" have no real impact. Or you provide a limited number of choices. Or you try to leave the game open-ended and the story often doesn't make sense... It's a balancing act between the game choices and a scripted "meaningfulness" provided by players.
Some games allow players to make their own stories. They tend to be open environments with lots of features, and the players create their own worlds and craft their own stories. Or they provide level editors so that if players want a story they can create it themselves, thus absolving the developers the need of creating such things.
Finally, RPGs tend to have no story, save a few catastrophic events that players are expected to "show up at" and stop and fight, and if you're strong enough you succeed, and they play the beautifully rendered siliconized barbiedoll cut-scenes... and well... with the success of games like Final Fantasy, I can't see this type of game disappearing anytime soon... but for smaller developers, such extravagant graphical eyecandy is still too expensive.
Best to stick to tight and fast games... until folks get tired of those, and ressurrect Space Quest IV
--Ray
PS. What makes you think a game developers WANTS you to finish their game? They just want you to buy it, and few gamers actually finish games to the end, even with story...
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How about some Faulkner, or Gabriel Garcia Marquez, or Dickens, or Fitzgerald, or Melville, or Mo Yan?
Or even some poetry? e.e. cummings, Robert Frost, William Carlos Williams, T.S. Elliot?
You know, real reading? Goodkind and others have their place, but hardly qualifies one as an 'avid' reader. Otherwise why not say, "Yeah I'm an avid reader, I read TV Guide every week!"
Why yes! I am a book snob, why do you ask?
The division between gameplay and story is a false one. You can have great games with great story, and great games with no story. Why do people feel the need to argue about this? It's not like Jaffe is suddenly going to banish all bad games forever just based on his next non-story project. More than likely he's just out researching something public domain that he can decorate in spikes and blood anyway.
"Story games suck! My guy has tribal tattoos and bitchin' attack chains!" Yeah. I'll pay attention to Jaffe when he stops being mediocre.
Instead of Slashdot "word vomiting" about what some other blog said about what David Jaffe said, why not just read what David Jaffe said? He does have some good things to say -- particularly that he doesn't think that single-player adventure games are dead, a bad medium, a bad idea, or anything like that -- he just doesn't want to work on them anymore.
Think about it -- you finish tweaking Tetris, Pong, Street Fighter, etc, you can still enjoy playing them, but by the time you finish Zelda, God of War, or Final Fantasy, not so much, because you already know every surprise, plot twist, minigame, everything the game throws at you is something you've already seen so many times. I imagine it's a bit like writing a book -- after you're finished writing it, you probably can't read it through once, that's what you need editors for -- after all, how many books do you read through more than once or twice? After you finish writing one, you've read through and written and rewritten most of it so many times that you can't stand it.
This isn't always true, and certainly not for everyone. I write differently, for instance -- when I finish writing a story, I certainly can read it again, because I only write once, straight through, only ever editing a sentence or two back from where I am. I almost never do second drafts.
But I can understand why he would be getting sick of doing that, and why it would lead him to say those things. After all, at least part of it is what we've all been thinking. On some level, most of the games we're playing are really still subject to the same complaints people have about Street Fighter -- sure, it has plot, but the plot and gameplay are completely separate. If you're lucky, you get a cinematic after defeating a particular opponent. But this is true of so many games it's not funny -- Halo (and Halo 2), GTA, Doom 3, Quake 4, Final Fantasy, Beyond Good & Evil... Very few games tell any story with the game world and the gameplay. Most just cut to cinematics -- or worse, text or voice (Doom 3's PDAs).
Every now and then, we get games that tell a significant part of the story in the gameplay and environment -- and even then, much of it is the environment. Examples would be Zelda, Half-Life (and Half-Life 2), Quake 4. Yeah, Quake 4 is both, because it does cut to cinematic in a lot of places I wish it wouldn't, but the cinematics, voiceovers (radio), text, and gameplay are woven together so well that it mostly feels like a story is being told, but you don't have to pull too far out of the gameplay and game world to tell it. And I don't mean the gimmicks like still being barely in control on the Strogg operating table. I guess being a long game helps...
And of course, there are also the games with little or no story, or where the stories you live are so much more interesting. Natural Selection, Counter-Strike, UT2004, and the few MMOs that have completely unobtrusive stories, but play well enough to justify it. Nexus TK is an example -- the only reason it's got such a great story is that it's built up over seven or eight years. MMOs are also interesting in that if they do actually advance the story (most seem too afraid to), it's like real life in that it impacts everyone differently; everyone has their own story to tell.
But then, MMOs often get accused of having little or no story, or of simply providing the forum and letting their players do everything themselves. You don't play World of Warcraft because it's a good game, you play it because that's where your friends are, that's where your guild is...
Kind of like MySpace, actually...
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