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Twisted Metal Designer Rails Against Storytelling Games
eldavojohn writes "Twisted Metal designer David Jaffe gave a DICE Summit presentation in which he argued against 'games that have been intentionally made from the ground up with the intent and purpose of telling a story or expressing a philosophy or giving a designer's narrative.' He went on to say essentially that it's a waste of time and resources when the focus should be on gameplay, not story. While some parts of his presentation are warmly welcomed by the gaming community (like his instructions for game execs to get a BS filter), this particular point has some unsurprising opponents. His argument against a 'cinematic narrative' was probably strongest with his comparison to the movie Saving Private Ryan, where Spielberg made the Normandy Beach invasion scene as close to a documentary as possible. The audience could sit back and appreciate that. But if you made a game where the player is in that position of the soldier then that historically accurate imagery and top shelf voice acting doesn't really matter, the only thing the player should be thinking is 'How the **** do I get to that rock? How do I get to the exit?' Is Jaffe right? Have game makers been 'seduced by the power and language of film' at the expense of gameplay?"
Most of what he's railing against seems to be the heavily cutscene-driven stories in games like the Final Fantasy's and Metal Gear Solid's. He says he actually likes games like Skyrim, by contrast, where the player becomes the story. I personally sympathize with him on that. There have been a few games I've liked that were more cutscene dependent (like the Mass Effect series), but mostly I like to feel that *I'm* the one driving the game, not that I'm just taking occasional control to set up the next long cutscene.
But this love of cutscenes seems to have gotten crazy-prevalent among Japanese developers in particular since the 90's. Maybe that's just a cultural thing (everything out of Japan seems to be more on-the-rails than their Western counterparts, even the non-cutscene stuff). But those developers are also incredibly stubborn about changing their style. Good luck if you can get through to them. Maybe they'll be more inclined to listen to a guy who mainly develops for Sony. I will say that a few, like Capcom, do seem to have gotten a little more "modern" of late.
Someone had to say it, though. The cutscenes have gotten way out of hand on a lot of games. At some point you need to decide if you're making a videogame or a movie.
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Story is good, but it has to be worked into the game appropriately. It's very hard to have a game ride on its gameplay alone; you need to give the player a reason to keep playing, a reason to care about the characters involved, a reason to be interested in the world they're playing in. And this can be done well regardless of the ratio of story to gameplay in a game.
On one extreme, you have a game like Nine Hours, Nine Persons, Nine Doors: being a visual novel/puzzle game, it's 95% story. But it received rave reviews and was loved by gamers of all sorts, even those who hadn't really played adventure games before. On the other extreme you have games like Portal, which have no cutscenes, few characters, and tell their story entirely through the game as you play it -- and they work too. What doesn't work is shoehorning the story in, as if it was some kind of thing the designers reluctantly had to check off on the list of required features.
I would say that his advice applies in some circumstances, and not in others.
For instance, I refuse to play a "serious" game that doesn't have a compelling story. I avoid FPS for that reason, for the most part.
Better suggestion: don't overspecialize. Don't overexert one part of the game's development to permit somebody on the team to produce "their opus".
A good game is engrossing, and a good story helps with that. A good game is enjoyable, and good gameplay helps with that. Sacrificing one for the other does not improve the final product. If you focus too much on story, and your gameplay sucks, people will hate it. If you focus on gameplay and ship a terrible story, people will only play the multiplayer or freeplay modes.
Balance the work, and make a "good" story with "good" gameplay. Don't fixate on "epic story" or "rivetting gameplay", at the expense of the other. Similarly, don't forcefeed the player wasteful eyecandy. If you do, you end up making "the phantom menace: the game!", and people will hate it.
"Good" and "balanced" is the key.
He's railing aginst what, in the industry, is called a "track ride". The player does A, then B, then C, with obstacles along the way. At one time, that was due to technical limitations; building a big free-play world was out of reach. That hasn't been the case for a long time now. Good large-scale free-play worlds like the GTA series have been very successful even as single user games. MMORPG games are big open worlds by necessity.
To some extent track rides are coming back, because of the tiny screens on mobile. Angry Birds is a track ride.
Big, open worlds are expensive to build, because a big, interesting world has to be built and populated. Track rides can be cheaper, because there's no need to build the parts of the world that aren't on the track. This may be more about economics than story.
Jaffee is wrong. Some of the bet games in the past two year have been emotionally engaging narrative-driven. If you ignore the arc of characters and plot, and only focus on gameplay, then you end up in the same box as angry birds. And that box is worth $.99.
Yeah, that's what was missing from SimCity... 20 minute cut scenes and plot development of the citizens.
Jaffee is wrong. Some of the bet games in the past two year have been emotionally engaging narrative-driven. If you ignore the arc of characters and plot, and only focus on gameplay, then you end up in the same box as angry birds. And that box is worth $.99.
Disclaimer: I submitted the story and I am 100% in disagreement with Jaffe and I hope I did his argument some justice in my summarizing. However, nor do I entirely agree with your assertion. Angry birds has turned out much more money (probably) than one of my favorite long running RPG series "Tales of (Symphonia|Vesperia|Xilia|etc)" So by that measure, he's giving sound advice. Angry Birds didn't need cinematic or great voice acting (which he cites to be high budget features of games) so it didn't need to cost more than 99 cents.
... huh, it really could have done without "the story."
And I can easily cite counter examples to your rule. Every so often a really novel gameplay mechanic comes out. I remember the advent (or at least the advent to me) of real time strategy games like Age of Empires and Warcraft I & II. These were amazing and the plots were pretty much phoned in (hell, one was just history). And if you implement an old gameplay mechanic really well or come out with a novel new gameplay mechanic, you sort of get a free pass on story and cosmetics. Hell, look at Minecraft. Where's the story there? Or even amazing graphics? I beat a dragon at the end and was like
I sympathize with Jaffe but I don't think we should just have gameplay mechanics. In the end, there's probably a healthy balance and as a former Tetris addict turned RPG enthusiast, I see the benefits of both sides. When a game blends these two things together, that's when you get magic. Currently I'm obsessed with Star Wars: The Old Republic but I can see how that's just not for everybody. I think Jaffe was just pushing back after seeing a focus on gameplay taking a back seat to Hollywood for too long. But either extreme is bad for gaming.
I haven't written any games but if I had, I would be completely fine with being condemned to "the same box as angry birds."
My work here is dung.
Remember the old Sierra adventure games like King's Quest and Space Quest? Most of what made those games fun was the fact that you were being told a story. The puzzles were fun in their own right, but hardly ever had any deep relation to the plot at hand. The only real reason for completing them was to advance the storyline. Those games could have easily been published as printed stories, but they were more fun with the animated characters, beautiful scenery, and (in later games) voice acting.
and civilization, and every hex based military strategy (my specialty) and every board and puzzle game (words w friends etc) Also every driving and flying game ever invented.
Imagine how simply awful Mario Kart would be if you had to sit thru 15 minute cutscenes full of plumber's helper jokes. super mario galaxy was ... pushing the limit a bit of what I can tolerate. Or the awfulness of trying to turn any of the Gran Turismo series into a really poor cinematic reinterpretation of "the fast and the furious"
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
I'm not a gamer, but as a comics reader and creator, I often see this sort of issue raised in terms of comics, which is another medium that sometimes tries to emulate other media (especially film). Gaming is its own thing. It's fine for it to borrow from other media (including film and comics), but it shouldn't try to be the same thing. Just as comics draws from the visual language of film, the narrative language of prose, the expressive language of art, and so on, so can games. But they should always be free to do things that other media cannot, because... that's the point of it being its own medium.
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Some games are interactive cinema, some are interactive worlds, some are freeform (i.e. sandbox), some are on rails.
You can't rail on super mario for being too linear. The whole point is that it's a linear experience. You can argue, correctly I think, that some games can be a bit too story, or a bit too open, or at least in some ways.
In Star wars, the old republic MMO you have this very concrete story line that runs *you* through all these planets and so on. That works well until the point where you hit level cap, and every other sith/jedi you see is a member of the small elite dark/jedi council, and you are into the actual business of an MMO which is the hampster wheel of gear progression and finding stuff to do every day. It's so linear to start, the entire thing, that when you get to level cap it's a jaring experience to not having 4 quests in your log for the next hub and somewhere to go.
Skyrim is an example of a bit too open. There *is* a plot there. But you can almost completely miss major portions of it, and you can't realistically see major plot differences without multiple play throughs of an easily 80 hour game. That *can* be good, but it's so big and vast that you have almost no sense of how alternate versions would play out (think the civil war story line that runs along with the rest of the game). And there's huge parts of the world you can easily miss (the giant underground area for example) even if you are spending a lot of time exploring. You might just find these little elevator you can't get into, which unlocks a whole other world, or just a room with a free sword, and you don't know differently, and you just move on, never knowing what you missed or what you could have done to find it.
Both of those are very nitpicky examples to try and be illustrative with current games. I think as an industry we have discovered that most of the time people want a compelling story or plot that they can play through, and that sort of sits on top of their playing in big open worlds. For every Skyrim or WoW or SWTOR that people have they also want some CoD's, some Uncharteds,and some Mass Effect's. There's room in the market for everything, and when you're competing for gamers time more than money you don't really want to sell them a game they can't play. You can bet big, and win, like skyrim, which is also the 5th in a series, but you could also bet big and have no one know who you are (Divinity II: Ego Draconis).
Games are meant to be played. Watching a cutscene is not playing a game. As one of several metrics, I judge the quality of a game by its level of interactivity. If I am not controlling the story, even if it is as simple as making story decisions like in the Mass Effect and Witcher games, then I am only an observer of the story. In that case, movies and books are much more effective mediums for telling a story. The whole point of automated games is that the level of interactivity can be increased without the player needing to worry about the implementation (such as you would need to do in pen-and-paper RPGs like DnD or GURPS). This is precisely the reason why I don't enjoy JRPGs - to me they simply feel like a very tedious and drawn-out way to watch an anime.
Apparently wizard is not a legitimate career path, so I chose programmer instead.
Medal of Honor was created by Steven Spielburg, who directed Saving Private Ryan. Accordingly, the assault on Omaha Beach in MoH:Allied Assault is the closest thing I've seen to Saving Private Ryan in game form. And you know what? It works extremely well. That is still one of the most compelling game sequences I've ever played, some 10 years after the fact.
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Yeah, it's just one developer (who has had success at his limited model) opinion.
Jaffe's most famous game, God of War, was pretty much the definition of near perfect gameplay for its genre, but had almost no plot to speak of beyond "let's get some revenge!" I got bored and stopped playing about half way though.
On the other hand, Uncharted 2 (which had a lot of gameplay mechanics borrowed from GoW) had brilliant voice acting and a solid plot, and I couldn't put it down until I finished it.
In the end video games basically involve starting at a screen and mashing buttons. If they don't give you a decent reason to mash those buttons, you might as well be starting at a wall...
Had to speak up here. Games that don't focus on plot become repetitive and thin. I like Gears of War, I like Vanquish, but at the end of the day you're repeating the same challenges that just increase the difficulty and put a spin or twist on the next level's boss.
I bought an Xbox the day Halo came out, played it all night and beat it by noon the next day. I was CONSUMED by the whole experience. There was a reason WHY I was there killing all those aliens, I felt I understood my character, but most of all, I felt like the days of repeating boring levels that just get a little harder and a little different were over.
The first game I ever beat was Zaxxon, flipped the score back when I was wearing wooden underwear and riding around on dinosaurs. It was fun, when I was 8 or 10. Then I grew up. And funny thing, the games that consumed me in junior high were the games that were all plot. Bards Tale, Wizardry, games that dropped me into a world of fantasy and told me a (good) story along the way.
Today, I have a family, job, other obligations and I only get to play games occasionally. What I choose to do with that time isn't about killing the next boss, it's about the journey through the whole world.
Right now, the few precious moments I spend on video games is in Fallout New Vegas. And while I'm sitting there in my comfy couch with my giant screen and my awesome sound system, the only thing I'm thinking is "What happens next?"
.... is hardware power allowed computers to create graphics that allowed cinematic elements to take over and because we as gamers love both cinema and games we are now highly confused consumer base when it comes to games. I admit to being spoiled by the likes of Call of duty 4 and mass effect but even I know that the awesome hollywood cinematic aspects do detract and take away resources from the game. Where we are just playing the same games with different stories and the gameplay isn't going anwyhere.
I still look at high watermarks for gameplay in Quake 3 and UT2004 and see that gameplay has frozen in time, instead of explore new game modes. Gamers have become satisfied with a basic level of gameplay and just swapping out models and narrative. Lets be honest we are all guilty here to some extent. No one really escapes and Jaffe is correct that story should serve gameplay.
Just because computers now have the hardware power to render cinematics and hollywood special fx doesn't mean they should dominate. Let us remember games like civilization 1 for instance. A game you can come back to and play many times. Most modern games completely lack the replayability element anymore because they are so cinematic focused. We've come to substitute gaming with a cinematic experience and it has had negative effects on games since there are not enough resources to go around so publishers and developers have to pick what they think will get them the most sales (hollywood or gameplay?) most go for shoving story into the game and cutting back on gameplay since most gamers are now older and don't really like gameplay anymore (it's true lets face it, whenever you hear and old codger complain about 'grinding' in an RPG or repetitiveness in battle systems, that's you decrying gameplay).
Another real issue is many modern gamers don't want to be challenged. It's too easy for all of us (and we've all done it) to be passively awed by the audiovisuals for that brief moment of stimulation but then you never pick up the game again. How many modern games have you actually replayed or gone back to? After the cinematic experience and rush is over you rarely go back. I still go back to older retro games from time to time.
I remember when replayability used to be front and center. Older gamers prefer more story driven games and less gameplay because they have 1) less energy and 2) are time constrained so they perceive marathon sessions as a 'waste of time' and 'grinding' because now they are part of the rat race. But there is still an element of them having 'grown out of' gameplay.
I am one of those people for who the last 10 years of gaming has been complete creative loss. I'm gameplay guy first and I positively hate the dumbing down of games to insert story and narrative and "the awesome button" where challenge and interactivity has been stripped away. You can especially see this in Deus Ex human revolution. I went and replayed Deus Ex the original before playing HR and I really do miss the gameplay first approach. The world in the original DX was just so much more compelling as a game despite it's aged graphics.
Modern games try to cater to all audiences and the easiest way to do this is just copy/paste from hollywood given the expensive nature of modern game development.
I think most people misunderstand Jaffe's argument, he's not saying story can't be done well or that games shouldn't have stories. But the story of a game should be in service to the gameplay. What a player is doing 90% of the game should take precedence over passive elements that are one time only (story/cinematics). There are only so many times you can watch a cinematic, but you can always replay a game like Civilization or alpha centauri and be sucked right back in and that's totally missing from our modern AAA hollywood infested games.
They are entertaining no doubt about it, people get emotionally attached the properties and characters. But lets' be honest shall we? We won't be saying "just one more t
Disney has unskippable cutscenes before their movies. They call them "commercials".
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You are correct. For the most part gamers don't give a shit about cut scenes or story -- they just want to play the dam game.
You, however, are absolutely wrong. *some* gamers just want gameplay. Some gamers want story. Some gamers want a combination of the two. My game collection, for example, has a few arcade games (Wii Sports Resort, Wii Sports, Mario Kart, and a couple of things on the VC), it has a few strategy games (every version of Civilization that's ever come out for the PC, and a few ancient versions of SimCity), and everything else is story-driven RPG's. The closest thing to a shooter you'll find in my house is American McGee's Alice, and the sequel, Alice: Madness Returns. While those both do have shooter elements, they're both mainly story-driven platformer puzzle games, with the occasional fight to break up the gameplay.
The problem is, you can't generalize gamers like that. You've got the folks who like games like Halo, and Call of Duty, and you've got folks like me, who won't actually buy a game that doesn't have a story, and you have everything in between. Studios make story-driven games that are essentially interactive movies specifically because people buy them. If they didn't find them enjoyable, they wouldn't buy them. And there is replay value in these games, if you want to enjoy the story again, or if you want to see if there's different ways to solve the puzzles. Heck, I still play through The Longest Journey, even though that game came out in 1999 and had an embarrassingly dated engine even back then. How many shooters do people still pick up 13 years later to play? Isn't the fact that I can look beyond the flaws, many of which have not aged well, and still enjoy the game a testimony to the quality of the product?