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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."
Good luck. I normally lose interest and never finish games if they have no story.
disclaimer: I've been known to store numbers in my ass for which to dig out when quantities are required.
http://www.davidjaffe.typepad.com/
;^)
Why someone would put up a news post with a link to a news post about a blog post is beyond me - unless they just wanted to drive traffic to 1up
I know what you mean. I mean, I simply couldn't get into Pac-Man. Why was he eating those dots? What was the backstory with the ghosts? Who could play a game like that which had no plot whatsoever...
*** Where are we going? And what's with this handbasket?
After all, without a story you can do "sequels" (read: Count up the release year and sell it as a new game) more easily.
Games with a harebrained story are a thing of the 80s. Where you could come up with some lame excuse for a story that's not even thin enough for a B-movie and have the player pretend that his block is some kind of soldier shooting some other blocks that represent enemies with smaller blocks pretending to be bullets to free a block that's supposedly the prince... whoops, sorry Mario.
But seriously. What do you want to sell a game with if not story? Graphics? We're already past super realistic 100% accurate graphics. If anything, story is a seller. A good story that keeps you on your toes, making you demand to see what's next, even hard enough that you overcome the most annoying obstacle just to see how it will continue, who that stranger was, who fired that shot in the dark, who is Luke's father...
You can't even sell a beat-em-up anymore without a decent story. Simply because all the rest is, essentially, the same as every other game. What's the huge difference between Half Life and Doom if not the story?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
My favorite types of games lately are dungeon crawlers (Grandia Xtreme, Diablo 2, Dynasty Warriors sorta). I've tried Oblivion but the payoffs are simply too few and far between -- I can only finish maybe one quest a sitting for a grand total of like 43 gold and some rat meat.
For me, FF7 was a good blend of story and action (I've read several references to it being the first "boss rush" game). If only they'd let you skip cutscenes entirely (not just fast-read through 5 or 10 minutes worth) I'd be a happy camper.
Wouldn't a better response to the situation be "People aren't doing a good job with cinematic style games, so I'm going to write good ones?" It seems kind of non-intuitive to say "You guys suck at this type of game, so I'm going to focus on making the kind of game that you get right."
I'm glad I'm not the only one that got fed up on the Path to Hades. It just seemed to take the least fun part of the game and stretch it out for ages, just when my interest in the game was already waning. Especially annoying combined with God of War's crappy camera.
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
Luminosity.
I never spellcheck and I freely admit it. Save your karma for more worthwhile "lol erorrs" replies
Personally, I don't think I would miss narrative being removed from games, as much of the time the stories in games just aren't very good. Maybe it's simply that I'm getting older (dangerously close to 30), but I have much greater expectations from the sorts of stories that games present now. However, much of what is released comes across as something intended for a gamer in their late teens or early 20s. That's all well and good, and if gamers in that age bracket are enjoying these narratives, kudos to them.
Nonetheless, with all of this talk about "graying gamers" I have to wonder how much of it is just lip service from publishers' spin doctors. If we're such an integral part of the future plans of the industry, as some pundits claim, why aren't there more stories that older gamers can get into? It seems that for every Planescape Torment that is released, there are a dozen games that feature banal, emo tales revolving around angsty teeny boppers.
Considering the state of most stories in games, I for one wouldn't necessarily miss them if they went away, as I have little faith that we're going to see a noticeable shift to better crafted stories in the foreseeable future. Sex and violence does not a mature story make, and I really wish people would abandon this 15-year-old, high school kid mentality on the matter.
I'm not sure I'm understanding him clearly... it sounds to me like he's not just making one game without a story, but sticking to an ideal that he's going to be different by making no games with stories. The way I see it, stories CAN be an integral part to a game -- it depends on the type of game though. Let's say you're playing DDR... it's not the type of game that would go well with a story ("Okay... uhm... street-toughs took your girl and you have to dance to free her!"). Now, take that same "story = bad" mentality and apply it to a game like Half-Life ("I have a gun... uh... I guess I'll go shoot some people. ...'nah, I'll just sit here at my desk and sip coffee -- a resonance cascade is only theoretical anyways"). Story can make or break a game, but it whole-heartedly falls on the game type.
I personally enjoy story games, particularly open-ended or multi-pathed ones where there is a good base story but your character doesn't stick to a script.
Stories in games are like stories in movies -- if the cinematography is a certain type, it's fine to not have a story... but it is not possible to apply a blanket policy of story/no story to every piece of film.
A computer once beat me at chess, but it was no match for me at kick boxing.
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.
There isn't. Games that claim (or are claimed by others) to be cinematic consist of two parts, the cinematic and the game, and ne'er shall the twain meet. Yet anyways. I suppose the game that has gotten closest to this is Half-Life 2 (or just HL if your going to get pissy about HL2), but while they admirably did away with cut scenes, they still had to find artificial ways to lock the player into cinematics, effectively cutting the game into the two previously stated parts. They also had to make your character a mute, but that's neither here nor there.
http://www.cafepress.com/hikarudesigns/ http://www.bricklink.com/store.asp?p=hikaru
I think everyone is missing the point here. Jaffe is not talking specifically about just playing games with stories, but more so working on them. There is a difference between working on a long story driven game like God of War which could take years (3 years) to develop and lots of energy spent on fit the game play around a plot line. It could be fun to dream up a complex storyline for a game, but grafting numerous scripted sequences and event driven mechanics can be a real chore. Working on something more pure, more focused on game play can be quicker and the design, more spontaneous. Thus more fun for the developer. Sort of the difference between developing Quake and Halflife.
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...
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!