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Stories in Games Matter, Right?
1up has a piece looking at what exactly David Jaffe meant when he said he was 'no longer doing story'. They examine how this ties into the Lester Bangs discussion, and hear from some other designers on where they think story falls within the realm of game design. From the article: "Warren Spector: Games are all about the player experience -- about DOING things, not about watching things or hearing about things. And that means that a narrative game has to put the player experience first and the narrative second. However, left to their own devices, most players aren't very GOOD at crafting compelling experiences -- just as most readers aren't good writers, and most moviegoers aren't great directors. And that's where story comes in."
Good gameplay can save a game with a terrible story. But a good story can't save a game with terrible gameplay.
An object at rest cannot be stopped.
Like what mash said, you need good gameplay. Without it, you have nothing. I would much rather play a 2 hour game with great gameplay and no story, than a 5 hour game with piss-poor gameplay and an amazing story. Half the time I end up skipping the story anyways. I want to play, not watch a damn movie or read a book.
Cynical Idealist
The Forge is a website dedicated to trying to create indy, table-top RPG games. It was created by the author of the indy RPG Sorceror who wrote an essay that defined three broad different player agendas for playing a game: Simulationism, Narrativsim, and Gamism.
Roughly defined:
Simulationism is about experiencing or exploring a setting, situation, character, etc.
Narrativism is about story.
Gamism is about defeating challenges.
Most good games contain elements of all three, but the best focus on one or two areas to deeply satisfy a kind of gamer.
All this guy is doing is what many game snobs have done time and time again before -- stating that one of these three play style is The One True Style and demanding that everyone else create games that satisfy his gaming goals. I personally enjoy the very kinds of games that he is bashing the most and find the open-ended exploration RPG to be boring and pointless. That doesn't mean that I think they shouldn't be made, though -- unlike him.
In other words, let's just leave this guy to his own elitist irrelevance, move on, and create games that satisfy different players.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
Games have the disadvantage in that a poorly designed system constantly undoes any sense of immersion. If I wrote: "The heroes fought against the supreme evil, and it was a hard battle but they won", you can at least believe that this thing I wrote about is supposed to be hard. If you act it out in a movie, even with pretty bad acting it's not hard to make a reasonable pass that this is supposed to be a hard battle. But how can you possibly take something seriously if you demolish the supreme evil in 3 hits? It's a lost art to balance game remotely as difficult as what your story claims to be. In theory, the final battle in any game is supposed to be the climatic one, and the most difficult one which is why victory has meaning. But there are plenty of games where the last battle isn't remotely the hardest one, not even counting super extra hard gimmick bosses.
"Wouldn't they hire great known writers to create game-friendly stories..."
Call me crazy, but I doubt that too many great known writers would want to write for video games. Maybe game companies could get people who churn out pulp gaming fiction or horror novels to come on board, but that would likely churn out the same derivative crap we get now, although the dialogue might be a little better.
There are two kinds of games i like to play, Story based and Skill based.
Story based ones are like a good book or a movie, games like Fallout, Homeworld, The Dig, Half Life 2 to a lesser extent.
I don't really mind that the gameplay is pretty linear.
Skill based ones are games like HL2DM or Warcraft 3 on battlenet.
The fun i get out of those is that i learn how to beat other people.
Now if you look at a game like Oblivion, which i think was rather boring, you have a huge world with lots of side quests, lots of eyecandy, but when you get down to every element it's rather simple and uninspired.
I think that game makers shouldn't try too hard to make games seem nonlinear because they eventually will be anyway, only crappier.
And what do they all have in commin? They have a story.
Everything these days - down to the deep-engrossing plot of Farenheit/Indigo Prophecy to the spiritual journey of Prey - has a story. Sports games have a story; see the "career mode" that most have. Open-ended games like GTA3 and Oblivion have a story, though it's skippable. Heck, even the "gameplay-based" games released for major consoles these days have one; they may be forgettable - who really remembers the premise for Katamari Damacy? - but they're at least there to give the character, and by extension the player, some motivation. They keep us playing, to an extent, because we have a reason for playing beyond beating our high score or getting the next uber weapon.
And while some may consider them an artificial or contrived way of doing so, they aren't any more than the plot to your favorite concept album is a contrived way of keeping you listening. Sure, "Operation: Mindcrime" is good music, but would people love it as much if the music wasn't framed around a story of the dangers of fanatical devotion to an ideology? Just so, would Half-Life, Warcraft 3, or Diablo II be the same if you removed the story behind them? Sure, they'd still be fun, but there would just be something missing.
So, yes, stories are important in modern games. (Note that I added the qualifier "modern" to pre-empt the usual reply of, "but games from 1982 didn't need stories!" Yeah, and they also didn't need more than four bits per scanline.)
Many Bothans died to bring you this sig.
More important than the overall story is the main character. When you play a game you take control of the character and if that character has no purpose, no meaning and no motivation, what do you have? Do you have a plane that simply shoots down other fighters with mega weapons or are you a rogue fighter on a philosophical task (with mega weapons)? Are you driven to play because you want to see what this character can do, or what the plane can do?
If you're going to develop a character you're already on your way to a story and I just can't say that I don't want to know what my character is thinking. I want to be able to agree or disagree. I want to be able to take risks that I may or may not think my character is capable of doing, not just what I think I can do by controlling the character.
Then a small company called Bungie Software(now Bungie Studios, owned by Microsoft) came out with Marathon. It didn't look all that different (at a glance) to Doom (well, IMHO it looked better, and you actually had to aim your weapons with no reticle). You could still shoot anything that moved, even civilians with no consequences (it wasn't until Marathon 2 that the NPCs started shooting back if you killed too many of them). However, suddenly you were immersed in this incredibly awesome, intricate story. IMnsHO, it had one of the best balances of gameplay and story and actually made the game really worth playing and replaying(the Doom games were great for stress relief, but not much more).
I wasn't much of a gamer then, and still am not one (being a Mac user has its drawbacks), but that set the standard for gaming for me. Give me a good story AND good gameplay and I will buy your game. I have and still do follow Bungie, even after Microsoft bought them, becuase they have always focused on excellent gameplay combined with an interesting story, and usually excellent replayability. The Marathon series had both, the Myth series had both, Oni (though it was finished by...RockStar?) had it, Halo had it, Halo 2 had it (though not quite the replayability of Halo).
Anyway, like I said I am not much of a gamer, but, with the exception of the Dead or Alive series, story does matter (DoA is strictly for stress relief). And Bungie has done admirably in these respects.
"Empathise with stupidity, and you're halfway to thinking like an idiot." - Iain M. Banks
There's a game series in which the story came first, with an entire universe created in board games and a sci-fi novel series. The story and timeline in the Mechwarrior games are a vital part of the game IMO.
In the Mechwarrior4: Mercenaries game, the player actually interacts with the story, in that choosing different mercenary "contracts" affects future contract/mission availability, as well as factional relationships with "employers".
Overall, I suppose the importance of the story in a game depends on the game, and what a particular player wants from a game. Someone that wants 20 minutes of FPS or arcade-type non-stop action isn't too worried about a backstory. Others that want a more involved experience will place more importance on the backstory.
Cheers!
Strat
Progressivism (aka US 'Liberalism'): Ideas so good they need a police/surveillance-state to enforce.
Amen to that.
Marathon set the standard for me, too, and that is one of the reasons for which I'm not playing much, these days. Yes, I played a few interesing story-driven games after that, Half-Life probably being the best. But none would have me struggling in order to reach a terminal an actually read the rest of the story, which was in my opinion of SF litterature-grade.
(OK I was a teenager when I was playing Marathon, maybe I just didn't know much about SF litterature at that age; but then again, the Marathon and Halo stories are heavily influenced by SF bestsellers from Iain M. Banks, William Gibson, etc. The Marathon ship itself is very close to a Culture ship, while the struggle between the Leela and Durandal AI are not that far from the one between Wintermute and Necromancer.)
At the same time, the game introduced the grenade jump ("Frog Blast the Vent Core!"), two-triggered weapons, vertical aiming and much more, so it wasn't only story-driven: the action was incredible too.
So... why similar games aren't on the shelf these days? They're not economically feasible anymore? I can enjoy deathmatches alright, it's an entirely different game type, but I'm really longing for a compelling story.
I've never played FFVIII, but I thought FFVII was an involving story spoiled by endless random monster attacks and boss battles...
I never actually finished it, because I got stuck on one particular boss battle, and just couldn't face drudging back from the save point and sitting through the same dialogue over and over again only to be killed because I hadn't built up the character's spells or stats or whatever the 'right' way.
If a game's selling itself on its story, why can't it have a 'just pretend I won this tedious battle, give me the minimum XP, and let me find out what happens next' option? I don't have to beat a challenge to watch the next chapter on a DVD!
You must think in Russian.
"Douglas Adams comes to mind. But his sort of game is kind of anachronistic."
:( I shudder to think about the game we could get if Mistwalker studios teamed up with Gaiman for a big multi-national uber-RPG, but that probably won't happen...
Not to mention that his games were custom-written for his fanbase. Not that that's necessarily a bad thing - it made a lot of sense in the 1980s when his books were explosively popular in english-speaking nations - but at the same time, neither of his games really had any appeal to anyone who wasn't already into his work.
"Supposing some day a great writer, like a Neil Gaiman, wrote a story centric game that (a) demonstrated that there is serious creative potential in the medium..."
It could happen, and I would like to see it happen, but I don't think the industry has been in a position to do so for a long time. I think that stories in games died after Planescape:Torment and System Shock 2 both flopped commercially, despite being two of the most critically acclaimed games ever. Now publishers are just too damned risk averse to try and do a great game by a great writer.
Maybe it could happen in Japan, but the rest of the world would just get a bad translation
There are many games which don't need a story. Tetris, Checkers, and so on. But there are many games for which a story helps make it memorable.
Anyone remember "The 7th Guest" or "The 11th Hour"? These were clue based games where each clue you found or each puzzle you solved revealed a little more of the story and helped to refresh the player's desire to continue. And for me, made them unforgettable, clasic games.
Then there was "Grim Fandango". A major departure from the rest of the gaming industry at the time, with a unique approach to an older style of gameplay. The graphics weren't that good, and the gameplay had a bit of occasional awquardness, but the story (and the humor) kept me going back for more. Another great gaming memory that would not be if not for a great story holding it all together.
And more recently, "Hitman: Blood Money". Arguably one of the best of the 'Hitman' series of games. Here's a game where the story has always been somewhat minimal, yet still very important in the developement of the main character. In this newest incarnation, the story gets molded by your style of play and is presented in very interesting newspaper articles between levels of the game. A very good use of a minimal storyline.
How about "Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas". Sure this is a great game with a wide-open style of play, but would it really be the same without a story to help compell the flow of the game. I loved the way the story kept me going in this wide-open game.
Now we're not talking about pulitzer prize calibler novels here, but game stories do share a common thread with those in books and movies. The story, however it is presented, provides the character developement, mystery, twists, and even much of the environmental ambiance which feed the player's interest in the game.
- James