Games Need More Artfully Story-Entwined Gameplay

Movie and Game writer Justin Marks has written an impassioned plea for the industry to concentrate more on artfully story-entwined gameplay, exploring what he thinks major titles are missing these days. "But for the most part, we as an industry are stuck in the same trap that GTA exemplifies. We value narratives in games, we understand their purpose and their necessity, and yet we have no idea how to parse them effectively into the game's interactive structure. As technology gets better, the weaknesses of poor story integration are more exposed."

Comments

How about artfully Gameplay-entwined stories?

[Anonymous Coward]

How about artfully Gameplay-entwined stories?

Think: Deus Ex, System Shock 2, Grim Fandango.

Re:How about artfully Gameplay-entwined stories?

[moderatorrater]

That's what he's referring to, that the story needs to come from the gameplay. Having a machete out in GTA while on a date should, by all rights, change the way that the date plays out. Cut scenes, etc, just remove us from the game and make the story and the game separate entities. TFA is saying that the two need to be the same thing.

In my opinion, the biggest problem is that there needs to be a reward for staying with the main story. In an open world (I'm thinking morrowing, oblivion, and GTA here), the main story doesn't add significantly to the game play. What benefit do I get from hunting down the heir as opposed to breaking into random dungeons and killing everything there? The storyline typically involves challenges and roadblocks without much reward, making it more satisfying for me and my character building if I just go do my own thing.

In contrast, in playing Might and Magic 6/7, I've found that the main storyline is very rewarding. The characters level faster on the main storyline, they get objects and areas open up that otherwise wouldn't, and the main story's just a lot of fun. Instead of the main storyline pushing me off into the world, the world pushes me to the main storyline. I wish more games would learn to balance the open world with a satisfying campaign.

Re:How about artfully Gameplay-entwined stories?

[Hatta]

Or better yet, think Monkey Island, Kings Quest, or even Planetfall. Adventure games and Interactive Fiction have been around for decades. They pretty much disappeared in the late 90s, and now they're complaining that the game industry doesn't know how to work a good story into a game? They had the expertise, but they squandered it. Sierra was bought and killed. Lucasarts became the Star Wars studio.

It's a real shame, and it bothers me that people are spinning this like a need for a story in a game is a new thing. It's not. The industry dug themselves this hole. If they want to get out of it, they need to go give Ken and Roberta Williams a few millions dollars and bring back the adventure game.

Re:How about artfully Gameplay-entwined stories?

[KillerBob]

Loved the King's Quest and Space Quest games. Liked Police quest as well... but those games were very linear. More recently, there's games like The Longest Journey and its sequel, Dreamfall: The Longest Journey, and also Advent Rising. There's also the NWN games, and the KOTOR series, just to name a few.

But all of those games have exactly the same problem with them: they're linear. Stories are, by definition, linear (unless you count Choose Your Own Adventure). If you're going to tell a great story through a game, you either limit yourself to one or two possible plotlines/endings, making for a *very* linear game, or you take on the enormous task of plotting out every option in the multiverse that gets determined by every choice you can make in game.

Re:How about artfully Gameplay-entwined stories?

[cyberon22]

There are a lot of us out here. I figure you just support the companies and individuals who make the stuff you like, and try to spread the word about games you think are undervalued.

Also - Tim Schafer is a rock star. I really enjoyed Psychonauts and highly, highly recommend it. Best story-driven game I've played in ages, which is strange since it's technically a platformer.

Re:How about artfully Gameplay-entwined stories?

[KillerBob]

Indeed. I absolutely loved every game I added to your list, in spite of some very badly designed game engines in two of the cases (Dreamfall, and Advent Rising). They're all games I still play.

Put that into perspective a moment... I still play The Longest Journey. TLJ is a linear storyline, with zero branching at all, and its engine was already dated when it originally came out, in 1999. But the story it tells is so good, and so enthralling, that I can easily overlook those aspects and just enjoy myself.

I'm not faulting storytelling. I'm just saying that you have to sacrifice some elements that gamers have come to expect in order to allow for it.

Re:How about artfully Gameplay-entwined stories?

[Anarke_Incarnate]

the NWN games themselves sucked. The Baldur's Gate predecessors were far more involving from a storyline standpoint. The good thing about NWN, however, was that you could use the engine and build tools to create your own games. I HIGHLY recommend the Adam & Jamie games (No, nothing about Mythbusters)

http://adamandjamie.com/nwn/

Re:How about artfully Gameplay-entwined stories?

[SanityInAnarchy]

That's what he's referring to, that the story needs to come from the gameplay.... Cut scenes, etc, just remove us from the game and make the story and the game separate entities. TFA is saying that the two need to be the same thing. I'm not convinced yet that they can be "the same thing" -- after all, physics is very different than textures and artwork. There are, and will always be, different aspects of the game that are not the same thing.

The trick is, weaving the story into the game, rather than making it a completely separate entity. Take Half-Life 2 -- there were no cutscenes, but occasionally you'd be forced to sit around and watch characters interact -- the simple fact that you could still walk around and explore made it that much more immersive.

But I think it goes farther than that, and I've pretty much only seen Valve get it right, though I suspect others have come close: Tell the story without ever stopping the game. Being trapped in a room while Barney, Alyx, and Dr. Kleiner talk to each other is pretty much a cutscene -- it may not stop the gameplay, but it does stop the game.

A good example: The original Half-Life. A few scripted sequences, and a few items left lying around the environment, but after the initial experiment gone wrong, the story was pretty much told within the actual gameplay. I'm talking about things like finding the Houndeye kennels, and the shark tank, thus showing you that this isn't the first time we've seen these aliens. Or the Barney who wanted to tell you something (and was then shot by a ninja). Or the Marines who you think are coming to rescue you, and then they start shooting scientists.

Or the final boss battle -- nobody told you that was a boss battle, and there was pretty much no dialog at that point, but you knew. And the headcrab boss -- just looking at the thing, you understand that this is where headcrabs come from -- again, no dialog.

There are other neat tricks -- in Portal, many of the same things above are used, as well as the constant voice of GlaDOS -- which never really stops you from moving through the game. Narration is fine, but this isn't a cutscene.

There was even some custom Half-Life (1) map which told an interesting story using nothing but the computer in the HUD. Not as developed a plot, but scolding the player for moving through the normal storyline...

Note: All of the above games are pretty much linear. It's not that I don't want games to be on rails. It's that either way, the story can be told without pulling you out of the game. Cutscenes are movies, and Half-Life 2 "cutscenes" are basically 3D movies. Half-Life (original) and Portal are games with actual plots.

Please, no more errands to run

[Jafafa Hots]

In games like WOW, "missions" devolve into endless errand running. Traveling vast distances to get a blueberry to give to someone who then wants dough, then firewood, then kindling, all to bake a pie that you have to take to Peter Piper.

That's why I quit WOW after a month. Endless running of errands interfered with by getting ganked by maxed out campers.

Re:Please, no more errands to run

[poot_rootbeer]

Then you either need to organize your quests better as to group all the traveling together, or simply skip those quests.

Because if there's one thing I like doing better with a game than solving a Traveling Salesman problem within it, it's not playing the game at all.

Re:Please, no more errands to run

[SatanicPuppy]

Silly, the Traveling Salesman is only the first part of the game.

The second part is the Coupon Collectors Problem. How many mobs with drop rate i must I kill to get set of items A?

Rinse and repeat for the dangling carrots of A1, A2, A3...Ax.

it's an interesting idea

[Nursie]

A lot of games will give you a long narrative about how important something is, how it must be achieved stealthily, how you need to go in, get something and get out again or spin a complex tail around which you play your mission.

then it finishes and you turn to your buddy and say "so it's 'wade in and kill everything' like last time then?"

OTOH, i like 'wade in and kill everything'. 'wade in and kill everything' is great.

Oh please

[oodaloop]

If I wanted artful stories, I'd read a book. All I want to do is chainsaw zombies, preferably on a Wii.

Games need more... Gameplay

[EricR86]

Title fixed.

Seriously, I'm all up for well told stories in a game, but when it interferes with the game and game mechanics it has the potential to make the gameplay seriously suffer. And if the story is only so-so, then the entire game sucks that much more (and why have the story in the first place?)

If you have a story to tell that needs to be told interactively, a game is a great medium to do it in. If you have a story to tell where the audience is supposed to mainly watch and listen, make a movie. If you have an indepth story with deep characters, a huge plotline, where no interaction is really necessary - write a novel. And if you have NONE of the above, reconsider what you're making story-wise. Your medium is your message after all.

There really seems to be some sort of confusion about what medium a story should be told in.

"We, as an industry,"

[SetupWeasel]

Yes, they, as an industry, might value narrative and believe it is necessary, but I'm not so sure we, as the players, are all that sold on it. Sure, you have your die hard JRPG fans darting from cutscene to cutscene, but I think most of us playing a game like to write our own stories.

Most gamers like to talk about what they did in the game. Narrative fucks that up to some extent, and is nearly always at odds with the player's goals for the game thereby breaking the illusion they hope to set up.

Re:"We, as an industry,"

[Zelos]

I think that was kind of the point of the article. If you mention narrative to gamers they generally think of cutscenes, but cutscenes are separate from the game so you end up with this split between "doing stuff" and the story.

A better approach is to mix the two together such that what you do in game *is* the story.

A little would go a long way.

[sherriw]

I would be easy for games to start small in this direction. If you even take very linear story driven games like the HalfLife series, you could still throw in more game driven narrative. Suppose, you have a tendency to throw things at Alex (a female NPC who joins you for some of the game), she should become less friendly because you're being 'a jerk' to her. Or if you fail to keep the enemies away from her, maybe she should become too injured or shaken-up to be much help for the next little while.

Even games like Zelda where you get a visual of time passing (day and night) and weather make a big difference. In HL, I can stand outside for ever and the sun never moves in the sky. Wasting time crow-bar-ing boxes should mean... oh crap, now I have to fight the zombies in the dark!

In GTA, you can be the biggest crime boss/bad-ass but the NPCs never react differently to you (I haven't played the more recent GTA games, if this has changed). If I have a rocket launcher in my hands, or a reputation for evil... the NPC should react to me- flee, faint, turn away, refuse to serve me, etc.

Little things like this would go a long way.

Non Issue

[DreadPiratePizz]

I don't think this is a problem. Story doesn't have to be entwined with gameplay at all.

As a developer, what do you want to do with a game? If your first and foremost goal is to tell a story, then do just that. Use cutscenes or other non interactive elements. Use interactive elements. Use whatever. If it best tells your story, do it. It's a fallacy to think that the story must be interactive. Interactive story presentations and non interactive ones both have strengths and weaknesses. A game that really wants to tell a story will not be afraid to use both where appropriate.

Re:Good comment

[nuzak]

When you boil it right down, Frodo's quest in The Lord of the Rings was a fedex quest. Grendel was a boss, and Gilgamesh was largely an exploration mission after Enkidu died. Heck, the Iliad even had a stealth mission (not counting the horse).

It's all in the presentation -- and WoW really tends to skimp on it. There's a "main quest" for most of the races, and some of the quest chains like Duskwood have real potential to be interesting, but when it's all told entirely in text popups and a few canned emotes, there's something lacking in the dramatic presentation department.

Re:We Need Better Characters First

[vertinox]

Most videogame characters are so one-dimensional it's not funny

Eh. I think the best argument against this is Portal. You the player... Are mute, uknown, and have no backstory.

In fact the only identifiable character throughout the entire game is GladOS (which I suppose counts as a character), the gun droids, and the unseen other player leaving clues about the situation. Oh and the companion cube could count as a character...

But anyways... Portal's story wasn't about the character. You hardly really knew much about what was going on which was one of the major points of the plot line and made the story interesting as it gave you subtle clues to what really was going on.

Games need more game play

[kellyb9]

Maybe, I like these games for their nostalgic value, Mario, Punch-Out, etc, but they did happen to hit the nail on the head. They did't have elaborate stories with 20 minute cut scenes, and if I played them today, I'd still find them highly enjoyable (infact I sometimes do). Regardless, what I want as gamer is more gameplay and less stories. Especially less cut scenes.

Narrative Vs Emerging Gameplay

[Phrogman]

What the original article and many people seem to be discussing mostly here is Narrative gameplay - where a storyline is created and more or less followed by the player one step at a time. It may be branching so that decisions made by the player - or failure to achieve specific goals - result in different outcomes, but at its core its still a railroad. You still follow one of the paths chosen by the developer who wrote the storyline in the end

Emerging Gameplay is where the game sets conditions and possible actions, but leaves the path up to the player, and what happens emerges from the results of those actions. Most people don't see this as a "storyline" per se, but really what your character does becomes their story in the end. This style of game design is immensely complex to implement but is the only one that will result in truly dynamic and evolving gameplay. In most modern MMOs, the character is free to do whatever they want (subject to level restrictions for access to a zone etc) and thats all emerging gameplay, but when they take a quest or a mission, its essentially a mini-narrative in a lot of cases (say City of Heroes/Villains). As such the quests all start to look alike pretty quickly.

Narrative gameplay will always be limited by the time and imagination of the developer/level designer/whatever and thus players will always be able to burn through the content pretty quickly, certainly far far faster than it can be developed

Emerging gameplay has more potential. If a game could be developed with sufficient AI on the part of the NPC characters in the game such that they react to the conditions of the world, then we can see the potential for Emerging gameplay come into its own. If for instance in some fantasy world, kiling off all the mobs around a town made it easier for the NPC Bandit King to invade and conquer the town, and the AI for that entity was sufficient for it to recognize the condiditions under which that would be an advantageous action, then player actions collectively might result in a change to the game environment, even if its the unintentional result of many players individually hunting the mobs around that town because the pelts are worth selling. If each NPC could be imbued with defining characteristics to their character then perhaps the timid Bandit King might act less aggressively than the Driven Bandit King and killing the latter off might result in the former inheriting and not being able to keep control of the village etc. Then the quest to free the town is open to whichever group discovers the problem and decides they must fight their way to the Bandit Camp and defeat the leader there to break his hold on the bandits and thus their hold on the town etc. None of this would be scripted, it would all emerge from the conditions and characteristics inherent in the game design. This would happen when the conditions made it the viable choice for the NPCs involved. Beefing up the guard at the township might mean the whole bandit camp moves to some other area entirely etc.

Thats what the next generation of MMOs needs to offer - or at least treat as their Holy Grail I think.

Re:Good comment

[Rui del-Negro]

Bethesda are great at trying to avoid this While they might be great at trying, they suck at actually achieving it.

Oblivion and Morrowind feel dead, like worlds populated by robots, all saying exactly the same sentences (how hard would it have been to change the sentences slighty for each of the different voices...??) and all doing the same 3 or 4 meaningless actions over and over again.

Then there are the hundreds of scripting bugs and inconsistencies (Oblivion was never actually play-tested before release - extensive playtesting is what made Half-Life great), a nonsensical game world (shared by NWN), where random crates and barrels spread all over the game world each contain half a dozen gold coins (sometimes with a beggar sitting right by the crate - why doesn't he grab the coins, and why are the crates and coins there anyway?), monsters that drop random objects (in Oblivion sometimes a wolf will drop a gold coin or a fork - WTF?), and so on. Baldur's Gate, despite a more consistent and interesting story, has an even more static world (NPCs standing on the exact same spot 24/7, etc.).

It's really depressing that games made so recently, by huge teams, with several gigabytes of art and code, are so far behind a game like Ultima VII, in terms of immersion and game world consistency. You made more use of your brain just navigating the dialogues in Ultima VII than playing through Oblivion ("follow the arrow, click here, kill that monster, repeat"). The only bearable part of Oblivion was the Thieves' Guild quest line; the rest is just a good-looking (but clearly rushed) hack'n'slash game completely ruined by a bad story, bad scripting, and designed for 8-year-old Xbox players.

Valve needs to bring toghether the people who made Ultima VII and System Shock 2 and show the industry what a real RPG / free-form adventure / world simulator looks like.

Re:Good comment

[HiVizDiver]

Well, you can distill it right down even further (and I promise I'm not trying to be funny), but life itself is basically an endless series of Fedex quests. You are, in general, tasked with doing a series of things that someone else can't/won't do, that's what you get paid for. Even things you DON'T get paid for, like taking the kids to/from school, etc. The trick with games is, the programming/hardware/A.I. hasn't gotten powerful enough yet to mimic all the subtleties of a "real life" that make our everyday routines not SEEM like Fedex quests.

Re:We Need Better Characters First

[7Prime]

True, however be carefull about putting cliches down. Many wonderful characters have been created out of architypes and cliches. Most everyone you will meet in the world falls into one of about 5 different character architypes. Really, what's lacking is SUBTLETY in characters, not originality.

The very best, most memorable characters throughout history, are ones that are built off of traditional architypes, but which the creators then used to mould a very complex persona. Games that strive for completely ORIGINAL character personalities usually lack subtlety and elloquance. Think about it, most of the greatest litterary minds of all times create very simple stories with relatively architypical characters, but then spend all their time on really making those characters come to life in ways that really make us think and feel.

Hamlet, at his core, is simply just another angsty broken young man like a thousand others that have appearned in litterature, film, and games... but through him, Shakespear makes us think and feel about our world and our lives, and about his life, more vividly than hardly any other. Game makers could learn a lot from the great bard.

Re:The Japanese have it down...

[7Prime]

Try Ico or Shadow of the Colossus. Not a single cut scene in Ico, very few in SoC, two of the most powerful games ever made, both Japanese... and there are more examples like them. I think you're knowledge of Japanese games is extremely limited. I found that Portal had more in common with Japanese games than american ones, actually.

Ya know, I'm gonna start hatin' on films because they include music and drama. They aren't "pure", we should go back to silent films. It's just like video games that may include include bits of the *gasp* "cinematic medium" in the mix in order for the creators to express themselves. God forbid we combine media in varying degrees.

Seriously, all of these are different story telling devices. The fact that Portal is able to let you still move your character around while GladOS is talking is stupendously superficial. Portal isn't unique in the slightest in its narrative strategy, it's very similar to many games both American and foreign. What made it wonderful is that the content of the narrative was well written. People seem to point to Portal as some kind of breakthrough in a new style of narrative, when it's really no different from the kinds of things game develoeprs have been doing for decades... it's just better at it. I, personally, don't mind putting down the controller for a few bits of time here and there in order to hear what the creator(s) have to say. I love Metal Gear Solid, even though it has lots of cut scenes, because its narrative is (commonly) fairly strong and I love to hear what is being talked about... sure it gets a little pretentious here and there, but for the most part, it's wonderfully done.

Re:Nice idea, but the devil is in the details

[7Prime]

In some sense, in a video game, the player is the performer and the author is the composer.

But I don't have any interest in being the "performer" in a video game. I lead a very creative life as it is. I'm a video producer by profession, I have a band and am a composer. I play games along side reading books, watching movies, and listening to other peoples' music.

It's not that I want to be lazy, but I want to be intellectually and emotionally stimulated. I want to take on the roll of "explorer" not "performer". When I go out driving, Biking, or walking in the country side, I don't complain that I can't recreate the countryside by my own will... what attracts me is slowly gaining an understanding of what's there, and figuring out all the relationships between various landmarks. When I meet an interesting person, I want to hear what they think and feel, and let that effect me.

I feel like I'm a fairly controlling person, but I'm always striving to become less so, to open myself up to just experiencing the world around me. I think that, often times, a strong desire to control things comes from the inability to fully open oneself up to the world. It's often a symptom of larger emotional issues. Video games have a wonderful ability to let us explore vast physical and emotional frameworks, and to think about the world differently. It can be a Zen-like experience where we fully open ourselves up and give in to what we are faced with.

Maybe there is room for both kinds of games out there. But I think that modern western society is distinctly lacking in openness and empathy as a whole, so I generally feel like sandboxy games are unhealthy because they promote even more disconnection an unempathetic thinking.