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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.
It's hard enough for a human game master to keep up with his players' creativity and keep the story flowing. To truly integrate good story with open ended game play is hard. I'm not saying it will require true AI, but it will require rethinking the way stories are written.
The key, I believe, is to write generic stories, and fill in the blanks with details generated during game play. For instance, instead of specifying a specific location where a scene takes place, specify what type of location and other elements necessary to trigger the scene, then when the players meet the criteria, the scene is triggered with the specific details coming from the environment, not the author.
Same goes for characters, write them generically, and use appropriate game-generated character that meet the plot criteria instead of saying it has to be a certain person.
As for plot, multi branching plot structures aren't really that hard, people have been doing it since the 50s in romance novels. The big publishers had a flowchart outlining the accepted plot possibilities and stables full of mediocre writers to fill in the details.
The key is in understanding dramatic tension. You raise tension by posing meaningful questions and you lower it by answering them. In some sense, it doesn't matter what the questions are or how they are answered, only that they are meaningful to the reader. By using game generated specifics to ask the questions, and player choices to answer them, it becomes more likely the player will find the questions meaningful.
So in a basic sense, one can look at a plot element as consisting of entry conditions, scene, props, characters, questions, and exit conditions. You specify what has to be true for the element to become active, what types of scene, characters and props are involved, what questions are asked, and what the possible outcomes are.
But this is much harder than simply dictating what will happen in a story. And it guarantees that every player is going to miss some content. No writer likes to think they are writing something that might not even get read, but for dynamic stories to work, that is what has to happen.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
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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Unfortunately, for most games and programming structures, the "fedex quest" mindset is a result of the structure of the programming.
Bethesda are great at trying to avoid this, and they spent a ton of time on it (compare the Morrowind to Oblivion engines, and see the designer commentary on all the work they had to do just to get the "watch a guy hide something" quest early in Morrowind to work right). But they still sometimes fall back on the trap.
The basic problem is, for a quest/story mechanic to work, you need triggers. Somewhere in the game, there's a bit or routine that checks for X, Y, Z completion requirements. "Is X in inventory and talking to Bob selecting Dialog Option 3" make for a really easy set of variables to code for, and then the game flips the bit so that X is removed from inventory. Even quests that are "Go talk to person X" are really fedex quests - you're "carrying" a bit that signifies that you're on the quest and person X is who you need to talk to, thus when you talk to them, the appropriate dialog box (which probably wasn't available before) is opened up... you've just handed in the "plot coupon" as it were.
The better a programmer hides the triggers - making you hide somewhere (in-game) and spy on someone, or specifically avoid encounters to get a really good item or piece of info - the better and more seamless the story will seem. The underlying programming still needs those triggers, though.
My suggestion? Stop buying crappy games like GTA, and go with games where the programmers put some thought into the storyline and making it fit better. The industry could survive just fine with a few less programmers making crappy movie-tie-in games (*coughIronmancough*) and a few more making really GOOD games like Thief or Oblivion.
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
Why would game developers bother with any sort of meaningful or halfway decent stories? Their core audience believes Naruto is masterful storytelling, and they've never read a book in their entire lives. With an audience like that you just need to give them the ability to call people noobs during gameplay, and they're happy as pigs in shit. Just look at the whole Halo series.
I have nothing compelling to say
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