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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.
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.
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