Storytelling In Games and the Use of Narration

MarkN writes "The use of story in video games has come a long way, from being shoehorned into a manual written for a completed game to being told through expensive half-hour cut scenes that put gameplay on hold. To me, the interesting thing about story in games is how it relates the player to the game; in communicating their goals, motivating them to continue, and representing their role as a character in the world. This article talks about some of the storytelling techniques games have employed, and in particular the different styles of narration that have been used to directly communicate information about a story, and how that affects the player's relation to their character and the degree of freedom they're given to shape the story themselves."

Comments

Ultima II, Karateka and Questron!

[Phizzle]

I still remember the first games with "cut scenes" - Ultima II the grand finale, Karateka and Questron on Commodore 64. Questron was the most elaborate one - the celebration parade at the end of the game was epic, almost StarWars like. I remember to this day how it blew my mind.

P.S. Welcome back Slashdot
Not sure what this was about but it didnt sound healthy:
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Service Unavailable
Guru Meditation:

XID: 275099066
Varnish

Freemanic Paracusia

[psicop]

http://xkcd.com/462//

Re:Freemanic Paracusia

[Sensible Clod]

My favorite style of narration involves phrases like "What you say!!" and "You have no chance to survive make your time".

For great justice.

Yes, I RTFA

[hezekiah957]

Many games spread out their chunks of story like breadcrumbs for the player to follow, in between somewhat repetitive sessions of gameplay; the continuation of the story serves almost as a reward for getting through more of the game.

When I read this, all I could think was "Assassin's Creed". Don't get me wrong, I thoroughly enjoyed the game and are eagerly the release of its sequel, but it was ridiculously repetitive.

Re:Yes, I RTFA

[montyzooooma]

Some games require story, RPGs in particular. Most other games I just want to PLAY THE GAME. If I want a story I'll read a book or watch a movie. 99% of in game story-telling is a waste of my time, and so uninspired it's an insult not a reward. Unskippable cut-scenes are a crime which should have been outlawed by the Geneva Convention.

Re:Yes, I RTFA

[mcvos]

Cut scenes don't belong in RPGs either. They should tell the story through the game rather than tacking it on for passive consumption.

Games are not a passive medium. You need to get players involved in the story, rather than making them a passive audience to a crappy movie.

Cut scenes need to die.

Re:Yes, I RTFA

[commodore64_love]

You hit the nail on the head. For games like Final Fantasy, Parasite Eve, or Eternal Darkness (gamecube), the story is the reason you play. It's like an interactive movie. But for games like shooters, the story is often so lame and pathetic you just want to get back to the game.

And oftentimes the game itself is lame too. I miss the 80s and early 90s when games had to be good to hold your attention - graphics were too poor to serve as a substitute, so the play was the thing that mattered the most.

Basically I'm looking for personality in my games, not shallow T&A.

Re:Yes, I RTFA

[Keill]

RPG's require story?

Yes and no. What they REALLY require, like many other games, are setting and background. Anything beyond that is simply an opinion, depending on the individual game.

The problem I have with a lot of games these days, is that some developers seem to forget that the story the player WRITES, is actually more important than the story the game has to TELL.

Just because a lot of RPG's focus on telling a story, does NOT mean that they have to do so.

What makes an RPG what it is, is NOT the story being told, but the options and power it gives the player in writing their OWN story. Whether it has a straight-jacket of a story to follow or is completely open for the player makes NO difference to it's genre.

Games, are about story WRITING, not story TELLING - even RPG's. Just because you can interleave a story being told with one being written doesn't mean it HAS to be that way. Most games, in fact, don't involve a story being told at all - (chess/draughts/tag/hopscotch etc.) - ALL they are concerned about is the player(s) creating his/her/their OWN.

The problem some people have in the computer games industry atm, is that, coming from the other media companies and industry, (film/tv etc.), which is BUILT around story TELLING, they want to do the same thing in computer games.

I am NOT saying that using a computer game to tell a story is BAD, though, since, in itself, it's not - it's just different. What DOES make it bad, though, is when the story the players can write gets overshadowed by the story being told. At that moment, it ceases to become a GAME, and moves towards becoming inter-active fiction...

What I want is the opposite - I want MORE power over the stories I can write, but the industry seems to be moving in the opposite direction atm :(

Narrative rules in games

[Anenome]

Games need to be 'told' like a story, and follow similar rules of development, plot structure, and the like. One problem developers face is that while changing a few lines in a written story are easy, changing a scene in a game can be quite an undertaking. So, the narrative of a game needs to be fairly mature before you start building scenes from it.

Game can 'jump the shark'.

Probably the most famous jump-the-shark moment in gaming (for me at least) was when we rented a copy of Daikatana to laugh at ._. for the N64. The opening has the main character jumping up and balancing on an out held sword. *shakes head* Romero, wtf were you thinking? It's cheesy every time they do it in anime too.

One of the biggest strengths of games is the ability for choices to mean something, and for alternate endings to bloom. Chrono Trigger is a big one for me, to go back and play it through all over again, the story is rich and wonderful, and experience a few different endings here and there.

Re:Narrative rules in games

[mathx314]

Actually, Left 4 Dead does have a story of sorts. It's never explicitly spelled out to the player or told in glamorous cutscenes. But sometime, sit down and play through the game looking around.

In the safe rooms, you'll find graffiti messages from people looking for loved ones or giving advice to the travelers behind them. There's posters from some organization called CEDA that give advice on what to do if you've been infected.

Outside, you'll find things like single bodies covered with a sheet. Why would a zombie be covered in a sheet? Easy. It's not a zombie, it was a survivor whose buddies covered him up after he was killed. There are cars with lights still on in the road scenes. Obviously the zombies hit hard and fast, or else people would not have left their cars running and went dashing to the hills.

So play through and look for stuff like that, then compare to 28 Days Later and see them do the same things there. Stories don't need to be explicitly told to exist.

PhD Thesis on a Similar Subject

[gringer]

If you want to have a read of something a bit more meaty, try this thesis (title: VIDEO GAME VALUES:
PLAY AS HUMAN-COMPUTER INTERACTION):

http://www.pippinbarr.com/academic/phd.php

Not quite the same subject, but it does deal with narrative a tiny bit (e.g. section 5.3.3).

p.s. this guy managed to score an Xbox and PS2 for "research purposes", which were (and probably still are) enjoyed by many in the graduate lab.

challenge: storyline for donkey kong

[panthroman]

TFA makes it sound like nobody thought storylines were important initially; but in the days of Donkey Kong, were non-superficial storylines even possible? With such repetitive gameplay, could good storyline exist?

Maybe the more creative out there could enlighten me. Can you make a good storyline for Donkey Kong?

(Oh no! Kong found more barrels! Again!)

Re:challenge: storyline for donkey kong

[DNS-and-BIND]

You know, it's funny you bring up Donkey Kong because that game actually had more story than 1000s of its contemporaries. An Italian plumber climbs a construction site to save his girlfriend who was kidnapped by a giant monkey? Much more than the "shoot the ships", "shoot the rocks", or "racecar" which made up most of the other games at the time. Japanese-made games always struck me as having overly complex and convoluted plots, even when they weren't necessary. Even generic, copycat 90s shoot-em-ups had these long stories of how the spaceship pilot got there. I mean, who cares? It's a shooting game, it's mental pachinko.

Re:challenge: storyline for donkey kong

[jollyreaper]

TFA makes it sound like nobody thought storylines were important initially; but in the days of Donkey Kong, were non-superficial storylines even possible? With such repetitive gameplay, could good storyline exist?

Maybe the more creative out there could enlighten me. Can you make a good storyline for Donkey Kong?

(Oh no! Kong found more barrels! Again!)

You really have to make a distinction between simplistic arcade games and what we're able to do now. But as I recall, they did do a Donkey Kong Jr. game with a storyline and there's all the Mario incarnations.

If we compare it to cinema, Donkey Kong would be the early nickelodeons playing silent, extremely short shorts. NES games would be the equivalent of the silent film era and then we move right in to today. Just as story became more and more important in making a good movie, same goes with games. But we also see movies and games where that is completely ignored. With certain movies, it doesn't seem to hurt. Transformers is probably one of the worst movies I have ever seen, and when factoring in the massive budget involved in making such a shitburger, it's even less excusable. It was an insult to thinking men and women everywhere. But thinking people weren't the intended audience. That sucker did business like crazy. There's a sequel coming out promising to be even worse than the first. It'll do well, I'm sure. Still, it would have been better with a script.

Re:challenge: storyline for donkey kong

[Aceticon]

How could you have missed the psychological depth of Manic Miner, a man driven to go ever further surmounting ever harder and ever more dangerous obstacles, the tragic drama of Pac Man, a caricature of a man, forever trapped in a maze pursued by unrelenting foes.

Did you not saw the deep sociological implications of the hive-like mind of the aliens in Space Invaders having unbounded persistence and yet never faltering and never deviating from their group dance.

Did your hearty not skip a beat at the drama of the ball in Pong, unable to follow a path other than that which was set by others it's destiny in the hands of two conflicting personalities.

Planescape:Torment

[Mhtsos]

I found the most enjoyable game storytelling technique in Torment. The hero is himself unaware of the story (has amnesia), and the player discovers along with him clues to his own past and the story behind the game setting. I loved how I got a first glimpse of what's going on and then the plot was progressively clarified.

Re:Planescape:Torment

[mcvos]

Torment does right what so many other games do wrong when it comes to story. Cutscenes (or its precursor, story in a seperate manual) don't do it for me, because it seperates story from gameplay. I want story to be the game.

Perhaps what I'm looking for is not storytelling, which implies a passive audience, but storyexperiencing. I want to be part of it, and only a few games (including Torment and Star Control 2) got that right. With most other games, the story is just too much removed from the gameplay that I just don't care.

Re:Planescape:Torment

[mcvos]

That's exactly not what Torment is. It's a mostly dialogue-driven game that delivers the story through its main mechanism: dialogue. That's the problem with story in many other games: the story is kept outside the actual game, and that makes the story irrelevant. Torment is all about story.

"Homeworld"

[ralphbecket]

That is all.

Portal

[Myria]

Portal had what I felt was an interesting way of telling the story. The "narrator" was mostly there to explain the rather quirky gameplay. Only in the later levels did she become part of the story.

Much of Portal's story is in objects you find in optional areas of the game world - secret rooms you find behind walls. You only see the objects in the 3D world and have to read them yourself to understand their storywise meaning; nothing with them is directly narrated.

In the end, your knowledge of the story is entirely inferred from vague clues and events you find throughout the game.

Re:Welcome back.

[N3Roaster]

Well what did they expect, trying to host it on an Amiga?

The Ballad of Jumping Jack

[TuringTest]

but in the days of Donkey Kong, were non-superficial storylines even possible? With such repetitive gameplay, could good storyline exist?

In the early days of the Sinclair ZX Spectrum, Jumping Jack had a narrative delivered in a non trivial way. You would unfold a poem, line by line after completing each level. This is how it was delivered through gameplay, and this is the whole poem. (I'd never seen it complete before today! Thanks for making me remember).

Is a limmerick a non-superficial story? The only thing I know, it did get you wanting to know which was the next line...

Marathon

[Macman408]

When I hear "story" and "video game" in the same sentence, I always think of Marathon. It didn't have anything fancy like cut scenes, or three dimensions... But it had an evolving plot. Beyond the "you're human, they're alien, go kill them before they kill you" that most FPSs use. It's certainly not the best, but for a game released in 1994, it was pretty unusual.

Re:Marathon

[CraftyJack]

Marathon's storytelling was also very unobtrusive. You could get through the game with only a little bit of the story, or you could hunt for terminals and try to piece together the background.

We all know that

[B1oodAnge1]

the best ever Game Story started like this:

You're a marine, one of Earth's toughest, hardened in combat and trained for action. Three years ago, you assaulted a superior officer for ordering his soldiers to fire upon civilians. He and his body cast were shipped to Pearl Harbor, while you were transferred to Mars, home of the Union Aerospace Corporation.

*Not* telling the story can work too

[davet2001]

Although it was not mentioned in the original article, some games have been very successful by *not* telling the story, and leaving the player-protagonist to work it out. In Half Life 2, the player wakes up on a train, arriving at 'City 17'. There is very little information about what this is or why he is there. All you know in the first stages is that the environment is very hostile, and there are very few people who help you. You explore a town that has clearly been retrofitted with advanced security beyond it's original architecture, but no-one explains why or by whom. Civilians you meet are mostly in despair or injured, and there are clear signs of recent conflict (ruined homes, destroyed buildings). Most of the time, you can see a huge structure towering in the distance, which seems like a focal point but whether and how you'll get there is a mystery. The result is that you feel (or at least I felt) lost, confused, and quite alone at the start of the game, and intrigued to find out more. This builds up a bond with the character you are playing, and makes the arrival of friendlies (Barney, etc) much more significant. Providing the full setting of the story can detract from the realism, as it provides a perspective on the situation that a real person in the equivalent real-life situation would not have. I can only speculate about the armed forces having never served, but I suspect that in a real life battle, a front line soldier will probably not be aware of the full context of the setting, or it's strategic importance. They just carry out their duties such as a patrol, and all of a sudden one day, there's an explosion and someone starts shooting at them. They then have to figure out what's going on, survive a battle, and most likely only later think about why it all happened. I think there exists a balance between telling the story and not. Give too much information, and the story can become boring. Give too little information, and the player does not feel intrigued to play, and interest can only be sustained with gameplay. When done well, game designers will strike this balance well, and provide a good compromise between narrative, confusion, chaos, and action, all of which can be compelling.

Oblig...

[Argumentator]

Famous quote attributed to John Carmack: "The plot in a video game is just like the plot in a porn movie -- merely an excuse to get to the action."

Re:Oblig...

[EnsilZah]

Yeah, and he makes his games accordingly, but some people enjoy games with more depth.

I always thought of games as being divided into two categories:
The skill based ones which most online games fall into, where you get your reward by beating an opponent, proving that you are more capable.
And there's the story-based ones when, like a good movie or a book, and sometimes the gameplay is just something you do to get farther along in the story.
Some games use singleplayer as one aspect and multiplayer as the other, some have a good balance of both aspects, but a lot are either in one category or the other.

I enjoy both on occasion and I think that quote is a pretty narrow way to think of it.
I enjoyed the original doom games and they were pretty good for the time, I also enjoyed Quake 3 Arena as a skill game, but I think id has been making pretty boring games since then with terrible storylines.

And you should stop assuming you're the standard

[Moraelin]

Like, lets say, Left 4 Dead? Yeah, great story: "Here is your gun, there are zombies, guess what". And it is one of funnier games I've played recently. We should abandon the idea of games being a form of art, and retake them as a funny way to spend time.

Each time I read something like that... I can't help getting the picture of someone with his head so far up his rear end that he assumes that he's not just a representative sample of 1 for the whole gamer population, and indeed world, but verily _the_ prototype from which all others were moulded. And if, god forbid, they happen to like something else, they must be deluded in some way.

Guess what? We all play games "as a funny way to spend time." You're not revealing some great wisdom to anyone, you just reveal your own disconnect from the real world. The idea that someone actually tries to play games as some form of art _as_ _opposed_ to actually having fun, and to the exclusion of actually having fun, is a delusion that exists only in the imagination of fanboys. Again: we _all_ play games "as a funny way to spend time."

We just find different things fun. Some like to read a book, some like to watch a movie, and some like their stories in a more interactive form. And then some others seem to genuinely like mindlessly mowing down gazillions of NPCs just for score/level/whatever. (And who am I to say there's anything wrong with it?) Different things for different people. That's all.

Re:Narrative != Gameplay

[mcvos]

Heck, I'd even put the venerable halflife on the side of "good gameplay, bad story." Seriously - the story was just 'oops, we made a teleporter and now aliens are coming out.' That's basically the same story as DOOM... The only reason it was so awesome story-wise is because they TOLD their crappy story in an extremely well-done way.

That's actually what good story is about: telling it well. Lots of really great classic stories would have been lame if told by an idiot. A good storyteller can make the lamest story exciting.

Of course a truly original and innovative plot would be nice, but those are rare in Hollywood and even in books. Most are about telling some lame cliche in a new, exciting and/or interesting way.