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?

[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?

[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.

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.

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: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.