quote:I think that story telling is important, and that good stories make a difference for good in our lives. Stories help us understand ourselves and others better. We explore what is right and wrong, what is good and bad, what is helpful and unhelpful through stories.
One could even make the case that the essence of who we are is determined by the stories we choose to tell ourselves.
I will grant that, as a new medium whose primary focus is rightly on the gameplay, rather than the story, the gaming industry has a ways to go. But to speak of it as though it is inherently incapable of achieving the same level of awesomeness as other media is nothing more than prejudice.
My prime example of this is Deus Ex — the original, not the sequel. That game required you several times to make moral choices about other people's lives, in which all the options available to you were bad. That game really made you think about what mattered most to you, and what kind of world you wanted to live in.
Other games have gone to similar lengths to explore the same kinds of questions and dilemmas that other media have excelled at portraying.
The problem is that this IS an emerging medium. While theater has been around forever, novels have been around for centuries, movies for one century, and television for decades, video games (as we know them today) have only really been around for about 25 years. Just as moviemakers had to learn, over time, to use the camera as a storytelling tool, rather than simply filming stage plays or slices of life, so also are video game designers still in the process of figuring out how to change their means of storytelling to account for the unique features of their medium.
Stories in other media get a lot of mileage out of the fact that the writer decides, in advance, what choices the characters will make, what consequences those choices will have, and how they will affect the meaning of the overall story. They take this power for granted, and have learned to use it well.
In a video game, in which the actions of the main character are not under the designer's direct control, you suddenly face a new set of challenges. How do you give that character's actions meaning in the story, when you don't know what they will be? We have settled, so far, into several different methods:
0. Nonexistent Storylines. Not really part of the list, but this should be mentioned. Some games are simply mind puzzles or dexterity challenges, and have no need of a story. EXAMPLES: Tetris, many puzzle and strategy games
1. Window-dressing Storylines. In some games, the story and the gameplay bear almost no relation to one another. You play through a series of challenges that have very little story to them, and then (sometimes) are rewarded with the next piece in an ongoing movie or novel that is only tangentially related to what you are actually doing. EXAMPLES: Most Real-time Strategy games fall into this category, as does the Diablo series.
2. The Player as an Actor. In some games, the designers decide in advance who the main character is, what choices he would make in any given situation, and write out a linear storyline for the game to follow. In such games, the player does not determine the flow of the story, but is more like an actor in a play. He takes the script, and does his best to hit all the marks and get his lines right. If he does something catastrophically wrong, he has to restart the story again. Such stories can be entertaining and rewarding in the same way that movies and television can be, and offer the immediacy and variability of theater ... but they take advantage of very few of the new possibilities available to the medium. EXAMPLES: the Halo series, the Half-life series, Monkey Island, Grim Fandango, Full Throttle, the Final Fantasy series ... basically, high-end shooters, adventure games, and eastern RPGs
3. Sandbox Storytelling. Certain games and genres offer no storyline at all, and instead give the player the tools to tell his own stories. These games do not directly cast the game designer as a storytelling artist, but the responsiveness and behavior of their simulated world can impact the value and meaning of the stories told by their players. If the best way to excel in a sandbox game is to ruthlessly abuse other people, for instance, then the designer is still making a point, albeit a subtle one. EXAMPLES: the Sims series, the Civilization series
4. Alternate Realities. In some games, the artistry is not poured into a single storyline, but rather into the creation of a rich world that may or may not incorporate hundreds of smaller stories. In such games, the purpose is beauty, the feeling of inhabiting another place, and the ability to have experiences that you cannot have in the real world, rather than storytelling, though some storytelling does go on in the background, as a necessary part of fleshing out the world and providing loose structure to the experience. In such games, the artists and designers take a role that is more like that of a painter or an architect than that of a novelist. EXAMPLES: the MMORPG genre (World of Warcraft, City of Heroes, Everquest), the Grand Theft Auto series, the Elder Scrolls series
5. Character-definition Games. In some games, the player is given the tools to develop one or more characters. In such games, the story is often just as linear as those in category 2, with the difference being that while the game is being developed, the main character is a cipher, whose identity is later filled in by the player. Such games often have optional subplots and language that vary according to the player's character choices, but in the main plotline, the player character is necessarily treated with a kind of distance that is necessary for any character that is not defined in advance. EXAMPLES: Fable, the Baldur's Gate series, Arcanum, most western RPGs
6. Controlled Decision-making. This category is the one which, in my mind, takes the most advantage of the medium, and has the most potential for greatness as its techniques are developed and improved. In a game like this, the story is specifically crafted to include branches that depend on the player's behavior, particularly his value-based choices. Unlike Sandbox and Alternate Reality games, in which virtually anything is possible, these games limit the large-scale choices to those which can be given meaningful consequences in the story. Often, choices are presented in terms of factions — there are different parties in this world that are vying for control, and the player chooses which party to support, with all of its virtues and faults. Some such games cast these decisions explicitly in terms of good and evil, but I personally find more meaning in the ones in which the choices are complex, and every possible decision has a realistic downside. EXAMPLES: the Deus Ex series, the Fallout series, the Knights of the Old Republic series
Granted, some games blur the lines between these types. But by and large, these are the general storytelling techniques that I've noticed being used in the industry.
Our problem is not one of some inherent weakness in the medium, but simply one of inexperience. I think that time and trial-and-error will give us many opportunities to advance the state of our art and bring it up to par, in general, with that of our ancestor media. For now, certain games already rise above the rest as examples of what may be possible on a large scale in the future.
quote:Our problem is not one of some inherent weakness in the medium
I think right now it is. Computers are not currently complex enough to generate completely new storylines. We are at the point where a game's story can have enough branches to stay interesting for a long time, but all of those branches had to be created by a human.
Posts: 1364 | Registered: Feb 2003
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Geoff, you failed to mention Planescape: Torment. It is a rule that any time someone mentions open-ended storylines done right in a game that PS:T has to be mentioned, perhaps alongside KOTOR. It's a rule.
But you mentioned Grim Fandango correctly in the "player as actor" list, so that gets you some leeway. *grin*
quote:Computers are not currently complex enough to generate completely new storylines. We are at the point where a game's story can have enough branches to stay interesting for a long time, but all of those branches had to be created by a human.
Movies and TV shows also do not make themselves, and are similarly limited by what the creators can generate with available resources, and what the investors and the audiences will pay for.
If you really want to take it this far, then I suppose that all media are severely hobbled by the fact that humans have to make them. However, I thought this discussion was about whether or not video games are inherently MORE hobbled, as a medium, than the older media.
Personally, I doubt I would WANT to play through a storyline that wasn't generated by a person.
quote:My prime example of this is Deus Ex — the original, not the sequel. That game required you several times to make moral choices about other people's lives, in which all the options available to you were bad. That game really made you think about what mattered most to you, and what kind of world you wanted to live in.
I completely agree. Out of all the video games that I've played, Deus Ex is the one that did the best at telling a story with the medium of the game.
OK, you guys have me interested now. If I were to play one other game in order to try to be convinced of the storytelling potential of video games, what would it be?
Unfortunately, it probably needs to be a PC game. The only console that we have is a PlayStation.
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Morb, I'm Dog at home and Puppy at work Which says something really sad about how my week is going right now Posts: 1539 | Registered: Jul 2004
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A play and a movie and a TV show all have one thing in common. The viewer doesn't have any control over what is going on. I suppose the ideal video game would give the player the same satisfaction that a director of performance media gets from a production. The script belongs to the writer, the performances belong to the actors, but the director has a critical creative role.
The games I have played (and the only ones I have played extensively are the Tomb Raider and the Halo series) maybe approach allowing one to be like a co-producer. "Solve this problem". "Fire these people." "Rent a trailer". Maybe I don't really understand what a co-producer does.
Or maybe the trouble is they want you to be an actor. From what people tell me, maybe KOTOR is like that, or possibly Fable. Haven't heard much about that since the launch. Do folks still like it? What about Simming?
Posts: 2010 | Registered: Apr 2003
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Geoff, I sent you an email btw at the aol account. Not sure if you prefer notice that you've gotten email or not... Posts: 720 | Registered: Oct 2004
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Let me explain some more why, in my view, no video game storytelling has ever been as effective as that from books, TV shows, or movies.
To me, one of the important functions of stories is to create new "vocabulary stories" for me. When examining or disccusing a situation, person, etc., I have been known draw parallels with Ender's Game, Luke Skywalker, Han Solo, ST:TNG episodes, ST:TOS episodes, Hamlet, Romeo and Juliet, Henry V, Homebody, Pastwatch, Enchantment, Starship Troopers, Lord of the Rings, Have Space Suit Will Travel, Treasure Box, Alvin Maker, Inconstant Moon, Even the Queen, Babylon 5, Smallville, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, The Book of Mormon, The Old Testament, The New Testament, LDS Church History, my personal family history, The Matrix, Robin Hood (disney version), Rendesvous with Rama, 2001, A Song of Fire and Ice, Harry Potter, Red Mars, Lost Boys, Babel-17, The Great Divorce, Screwtape Letters, The Chronicles of Narnia, The Worthing Saga, The Foundation Trilogy, some of Asimov's Robot stories, Sandkings, The Forever War, Riverworld, Ringworld, Dune Series, A Canticle for Leibowitz, Flowers for Algernon, Cheers, Double Star, Farenheit 451, 1984, That Hideous Strength, The Demolished Man, To Serve Man, Brave New World, Ferris Bueller's Day Off, Princess Bride, and many, many others.
It's like the way they communicated in the ST:TNG episode "Darmok and Jilad at Tanagra". Shared stories become shorthand or "vocabulary stories" that we can use to communicate. When I say that something is like how Kirk and MacKoy were always confident of human's superiority over other races despite Spock's seeming superiority over both of them, it communicates a lot with very little.
In fact, when I read a really good book, that is part of why I always try to get my wife to read it -- so that we will have a greater shared vocabulary of stories.
I don't know how many times I said something like "It's like Paul Mua'Dib in Dune -- oh. I forget. You haven't read that yet. " before she finally read it.
But I almost never say anything akin to "it's like that situation in Half-Life...". It might have happened a couple of times with Deus Ex, but that would be it.
So, as I think about it, there are a few reasons why this might be:
Like I've been saying, maybe it's because the stories I've gotten from video games just aren't at the same level as the stories I get from books, TV, and movies.
Maybe it's because I read so much more than I play video games, and therefore have a much smaller pool of video game stories to draw from
As has been said to me, perhaps it is because I have been playing the wrong games.
There are many books, TV shows and movies, such as Zelazny's Amber series, that I've loved but that didn't make it into my above list of vocabulary stories. That doesn't mean that they weren't good stories -- it just means that they didn't resonate with my soul in such a way to become part of my vocaulary. Some of the games I've played have had interesting and engaging storylines. But that's not enough to make it stick to my psyche, which is what I'm talking about. Posts: 1002 | Registered: Feb 2005
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The Jak trilogy is good for plot and fun. And its not extremely easy either. Jak and Daxter(the first one) wasn't too good, but Jak II and Jak III really shone through. Jak II and Jak III are good games to get addiceted to.
Posts: 6026 | Registered: Dec 2004
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quote: I don't know how many times I said something like "It's like Paul Mua'Dib in Dune -- oh. I forget. You haven't read that yet. " before she finally read it.
Wow, that reminds me of a friend of mine who probably hasn't seen any movie that I have. I would say "you know, like in Gattaca", and she'd say "Gattaca? What's that?!". After a while I just assumed that she hasn't seen any of the movies I could think of. I made her a list of movies worth seeing to put her back on track...
Posts: 4519 | Registered: Sep 2003
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Anti, part of the phenomenon you're noticing may be the fact that non-interactive stories supply moral meaning by deciding what the characters do and assigning meaning to those choices. You don't recall JC Denton making some critical choice that affected you in the same way because when you played Deus Ex, it was YOU making the choice, not JC. It has a different impact, I think, when it works that way.
Doesn't mean that the stories are intrinsically worse. Only that the medium functions differently.
[ February 21, 2005, 06:02 AM: Message edited by: A Rat Named Dog ]
Posts: 1907 | Registered: Feb 2000
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Good point, Dog. While one may not be intrinsicly superior to the other, it is still very possible that [/i]I[i] get more out of one type of storytelling than the other.
That said, I'm going to try out some of these games. I'm playing through Grim Fandango right now, just bought Planescape: Torment, and I'm going to play through Deus Ex again. I'll let you know how it turns out.
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" before she finally read it.
