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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."
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.
If I wanted artful stories, I'd read a book. All I want to do is chainsaw zombies, preferably on a Wii.
Tic-Tac-Toe, Global Thermonuclear War, and relationships all have the same winning move.
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.
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.
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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.
Done with slashdot, done with nerds, getting a life.
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.
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.
If you believe everything you read, you'd better not read. - Japanese proverb
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