Story in games,thoughts.

[archangelmorph]

Games mirror life whether I like it or not.

I don't know what kind of life a game like locoroco is mirroring...

But that wasn't my point. My point was that it is possible to create extremely open world and keep player focused on the game at the same time. And once again I have to add something obvious: I don't claim to have a formula for the best gaming experience ever. It won't fit tastes of many gamers just like recent FPSes don't fit my taste. I'm just trying to point out that there are unexplored territories in storytelling which can and should be discovered.

But if that's what your saying then it's basically exactly the same as what I've been saying so far...

I merely object to the fact that a "pure" sandbox experience which provides no story, plot or narrative & thus presents the player with no specific sense of purpose, has no beginning, middle or end (aside from when you turn it on and subsequently turn it off) and requires the user to creaste their own adventure, is a broken game design which provides no sense of challenge or reward system which acts as the fundamental basis for "fun" in practically every solid game mechanic to date..

 

[choinkees]

For me, this is where the idea of games having strong stories breaks down:

It's ridiculous when the story says 'Quick, we have to get to Windale before the Orcs attack!' and the player's response is 'okay, but I'm just going to spend 3 hours wandering the wood in the hopes of racking up kills, gaining XP, and looking for treasure. The Orcs won't attack until I cross a checkpoint'. The story is always ignored in the game mechanics.

I really enjoyed Final Fantasy VII, and when you put all the little non-game bits together you get a pretty decent story and good characters. Problem is, Meteor has been summoned and is hurtling towards the planet and everybody will die in a couple of hours if I don't do something to save the world. ...so, I do a few side quests, travel the world, raise a golden chocobo (which takes a few nights sleep for the breeding).. I've spent a couple of weeks of game time doing extra things and eventually in my own time I casually wander over to the northern crater and save the world.

One game I really enjoyed both as a game and a story was Fahrenheit (or Indigo Prophecy). Time in that game felt real - after escaping the murder scene and getting Lucas back home.. I thought "great, I'm home now.. home is always a safe place in games and I've got time to experiment with stuff". I wandered around for a couple of minutes and suddenly there's a policeman knocking on my door and I realise that all that time I just spent playing the guitar and drinking milk should really have been used getting out of my blood soaked clothing and hiding any other evidence linking me to the murder.

It was a scripted story (with a small variation allowed), much like Final Fantasy.. but in FF (and most games) I was given time to do everything I ever wanted to do before proceeding... where even now I can think things I wanted to do in parts of Fahrenheit but didn't have time to do in the game as the story had moved on.

I think that kind of approach could work really well for games that need to be tightly scripted - offer a variety of things to do on the side (that can add to the characters and story), but don't give the player time to do absolutely everything.. or if you do some optional things, it closes off the opportunity to do other things.
That way you can play the game a few times and the story could feel a bit different each time.

 

[Danalys]

reading the above post got me thinking. in indigo prophesy you were saying that if you didn't do certain things in a time frame you'd get arrested. now i don't see why the game has to end there, since many stories could start with a murder and then an imprisionment. a game could be the equivalent of a book of short stories. each story branching from aprevious one.

the story style of true crimes was quite intresting in that you could continue but would miss out on other parts of the story.

mostly i was thinking of a story stemming from events that can happen at any time or place in a game world. say a betrayal could be a plot point but the betrayer and when they betray you could change from play through to play through. your actions weight the probabilites of certain events. with such a game it would be better for it to be shorter so that multiple play throughs are more feasible.

 

[_xxx_]

I don't know what kind of life a game like locoroco is mirroring...

Oh, you just need some, errrm, "special" substances to see life the loco-roco way

 

[ninzel]

Maybe episodic content is the answer to caring about the story and characters. Time..it's so simple I never thought of it before,but watching Dexter today and feeling such hope that him and Rita work out made me reliaze that it took time for me to develop these feelings for these characters. Along with other things mentioned,maybe we as viewers simply need time.
Edit: And keeping the technological barrier low and more constant for game developers could help them pump out episodes more often. Time but also frequency of episodes is important.

 

[XniteMan]

Very good discussion..
I think the biggest issue here is the "mood" thing, as mentioned many times.
When playing a game, you are just not in the mood of absorbing a story, especially when it's useless for the gameplay.

There are games like the Gyakuten Saiban series, where story telling is an integral part of the game, and you need to read the dialogues carefully to achieve your game goals. In these games I could enjoy the stories very well. And you guess what, Gyakuten Saiban indeed has a great story, which is no less impressive than any movie or novel for me.

For other types of games, I think the key is not to seprarate story-telling from gameplay. Currently what we have are two independant parts, the 3d game environment and the story-telling cut-scene. I think the better way is to tell the story when you are playing the game. For this purpose the designers may have to design certain scenes, which are not too intensive, so that you can concentrate more on the story-telling, yet still interesting and suits well to the "story-absorbing" mood you are expected to be in.

For example, in a typical FPS game, there might be a scene where you need to find your commander in a large base, for your next mission. This could be the time the story is being told, and if certain degrees of interation is included, say if you go to the wrong zone the voice tells you to stop, this way it's quite natural and much better than a boring cut-scene I think.

The technique above is quite naive and games like Halo are already doing this, but I believe more research can be made here to find better interactions between story-telling and gameplay.

 

[archangelmorph]

Very good discussion..
I think the biggest issue here is the "mood" thing, as mentioned many times.
When playing a game, you are just not in the mood of absorbing a story, especially when it's useless for the gameplay.
There are games like the Gyakuten Saiban series, where story telling is an integral part of the game, and you need to read the dialogues carefully to achieve your game goals. In these game I could enjoy the stories very well. And you guess what, Gyakuten Saiban indeed has a great story, which is no less impressive than any movie or novel for me.

Speak for yourself mate..

Different people have different tastes and game for different reasons..

You can't just make one big sweeping statement for everyone based on your own affinities..

Yours doesn't represent the world-view of gamer's preferences with respect to story, plot and narrative in games..

EDIT: I do agree withg the rest of your post though (personally..)..

 

[XniteMan]

Speak for yourself mate..

Different people have different tastes and game for different reasons..

You can't just make one big sweeping statement for everyone based on your own affinities..

Yours doesn't represent the world-view of gamer's preferences with respect to story, plot and narrative in games..

EDIT: I do agree withg the rest of your post though (personally..)..

Well, actually I said "I think the biggest issue here", I said "biggest", not "only", and it was just what I "think".

The sentence you highlighted was describing the "issue"...

 

[Arwin]

I can really enjoy all sorts of games. I guess that in this discussion, I've come to realise and many people forget, often the gameplay is the story. I think in general games that are the most engrossing find a good balance between the story and the gameplay, but the two can affect each other greatly. Mediocre gameplay can be made more involving if the presentation around it draws you into a fantasy world more effectively and make you more emotionally interested in achieving the gameplay goals. Similarly, some really good gameplay is enough of a story in itself.

It's probably in that respect and in regards to games, a bad idea altogether to consider the gameplay and story as separate entities. Rather, you need to look at different story telling devices in the games environment and consider which are used, what their respective qualities are, how they work together and so on. CoD4 is a great example of how you could do that kind of discussion on a decent level. As I understand it, the opening level gives you the perspective of a deposed official, and you cannot control him (he's held captive), but you can control where he looks. I'm sure that there are also parts of the game that are only story, and obviously there are a lot of parts where you do all the work, though then again the game is also filled with scripted events, and you are basically forced to experience the game linearly. If you'd tape a play-through of the game, and you would then show it to someone else, it would have become a fully non-interactive 'movie' in which you yourself have contributed parts of the action.

It's important to realise that this is not in principle different from, say, Pac-man, Fl0w, or Tetris. You can record all of these, and watch them non-interactively, and you'll quickly see that all of them are stories with plots, climaxes, characters, view-points, etc. Just not as traditionally presented as some people may expect.

 

[archangelmorph]

I can really enjoy all sorts of games. I guess that in this discussion, I've come to realise and many people forget, often the gameplay is the story. I think in general games that are the most engrossing find a good balance between the story and the gameplay, but the two can affect each other greatly. Mediocre gameplay can be made more involving if the presentation around it draws you into a fantasy world more effectively and make you more emotionally interested in achieving the gameplay goals. Similarly, some really good gameplay is enough of a story in itself.

It's probably in that respect and in regards to games, a bad idea altogether to consider the gameplay and story as separate entities. Rather, you need to look at different story telling devices in the games environment and consider which are used, what their respective qualities are, how they work together and so on. CoD4 is a great example of how you could do that kind of discussion on a decent level. As I understand it, the opening level gives you the perspective of a deposed official, and you cannot control him (he's held captive), but you can control where he looks. I'm sure that there are also parts of the game that are only story, and obviously there are a lot of parts where you do all the work, though then again the game is also filled with scripted events, and you are basically forced to experience the game linearly. If you'd tape a play-through of the game, and you would then show it to someone else, it would have become a fully non-interactive 'movie' in which you yourself have contributed parts of the action.

It's important to realise that this is not in principle different from, say, Pac-man, Fl0w, or Tetris. You can record all of these, and watch them non-interactively, and you'll quickly see that all of them are stories with plots, climaxes, characters, view-points, etc. Just not as traditionally presented as some people may expect.

Very nice post..

 

[PARANOiA]

Good post, Arwin.

My quick thoughts: stories in games tend to suffer from existing as a means to provide a game, rather than providing a game as a means to tell a story. There are a few exceptions which actually tend to tell a story in itself quite well - Prince of Persia: Sands of Time was a good example for me.

Mass Effect has a great story, but to me it certainly feels like a game wrapped in a story rather than the other w ay around. Having the universe coming to an end around you while you, say, stop to help a gangster get rid of some competition, or halt a rogue AI as an optional pit-stop, breaks the feeling of the over-arching story. It's certainly a brilliant universe, but the narrative is what suffers.