Oddly enough, I think you’ve touched on one of the reasons that so many people loved Final Fantasy 6, and why Final Fantasy 9 had a certain je ne sais quoi: they both have a play-within-a-play. While Final Fantasy characters are often, and fairly, criticized for being cardboard archetypes, this gave players a backdrop off of which the player could feel out the contours of their party. I don’t know, maybe there’s something more there, but maybe I’m off the mark.
There are a lot of mentions of Kentucky Route Zero above, and rightly so, but I think an enormous part of why it’s successful as a game is the atmosphere it cultivates. From the first scene in the game, you learn that there is something odd, something strange, about your surroundings. Good writing can only accomplish so much without the rest of the team bringing the ideas to life through creating that atmosphere. I agree, however, that if you don’t have the writing to build on, it becomes much harder to produce a story that captivates in the way that, say, Kentucky Route Zero does.
I agree that the premise here is false and annoying, but I don’t know if “clicks and comment rage” is all that came out of it. It focused my thinking about videogame storytelling to try to formulate a response to this trollicle and I’ve really enjoued what y’all have written too. No doubt the suthor thought they were being very clever and culture-y with the original piece, which i would disagree with. However, to call the comments here just ephemeral “rage” I thinknis unnecessarily dismissive…
Great topic. The games I enjoy most tend to be ones with a good story and a well-written setting. I loved the world-building in games like Beyond Good and Evil, Half-Life 2, and Dragon Age: Origins, and the final scene in Half-Life 2: Episode 2 is probably the single most emotional scene I’ve ever seen in a game. The “acting” (constructed from excellent face modeling and excellent voice acting) is just top-notch.
Favorite storylines in games? I always cite Heavy Rain. The game certainly had its issues, but it was a well-written murder mystery, and it surprised me with its twists. So many movies and TV shows are so predictable, but this game was not. Also Telltale’s The Walking Dead. Funny that the theme of parenting is common to both of those games.
You could make the same points about atmosphere for plays as well. Personally I’d rather eat gatbage than read a play on the page, but when actors bring it to life, with a set, music, etc…I’ll happily lose myself for a couple hours.
I agree, this has been a good discussion so far…but it could all go south in a blink of an eye. Just one troll or self righteous editor or admin can bring this all down. I would also like to bring up how awesome the Super Nintendo was during its day with story driven games. The limitations of technology really drove narrative in ways we dont see today. Example: Chrono Trigger, Final Fantasy 6, Secret of Evermore, and so many more.
I wasn’t saying that the comments here are nothing but “rage”, I was saying that a provocative title like this seems designed to elicit a flamewar or angry responses. I’m glad to see that, so far, people aren’t going down that road.
Totally totally utterly! Except that, even when you’re writing simple stories or mass-digestible stories, there’s still a good way and a bad way to do it.
The reason Peter Dinklage’s “That Wizard came from the moon!” line is so bad isn’t the hammy overacting, but the fact that it’s such an obvious statement. It’s not going to make people go “wow!” or “huh.” or “wha?” – at least, not “wha?” in the “I want to know more” sense. It’s corny and obvious and fake-sounding. There’s no emotional charge to it. Ghost obviously already knows it. You obviously don’t. This information doesn’t do either of you any good.
And now that I’ve psychoanalyzed THAT all the way to hell and back…
There’s a way to write war games with few plot twists in a really good and compelling way. It’s all about thinking about what you – as a player, in the game – are experiencing in the moment, and not what the designers want to tell you that you should be experiencing.
Can I be extremely retro for a moment? Half-Life 2 has one of the best stories of any game. Almost no dialogue, almost no explained plot.
But there IS. It’s just told in the levels you’re playing through,the architecture of the broken buildings, the head crabs and the strung-up cars you’re jumping on. You get such a good picture of a world crumbling, and you don’t need monologues to do it.
I was going to poke at the time they showcased Mercedes Lackey using City of Heroes’s user-created mission interface, but I think this reflects on third-party writers unfamiliar with writing for games in general.
CoH mission text was, for most of its life, written in a short and punchy comic style. You’d have a couple of sentences of scene setting when you walked in (‘You follow your quarry to an abandoned tech startup. Dot-com era IPO forms rustle underfoot.’), occasional bits of dialogue or exposition to observe, and sometimes you’d find short bits of flavour text attached to in-mission clues or as part of a multi-mission story arc. The public gameplay zones had location-based unlocks that granted titles and bits of setting history, but until late in the game’s life these were short and dry rather than emotionally evocative.
Player and non-player characters both had a field for biographical information. Importantly, there was no easy way to access this information by default: you could make a keybind to do it at a stroke, but otherwise it was hidden behind a barely mentioned console command or an unassuming bit of the UI. The roleplaying community took to this like gangbusters, filling their characters’ fields with biographical data, descriptive bits that the graphics engine didn’t support, roleplay preferences and links to off-game sites. CoH capped this at a thousand characters, but later games removed this limitation… which became an issue when some players would dump literally thousands of words into these spaces, expecting others to put their gameplay on hold in order to pore over them as you might a wiki entry. User-generated missions could take this to an extreme, and sometimes still do in the case of the CoH developers’ later projects.
At one point they had a few popular, professional authors write mission arcs with these tools and the results were abysmal. Walls of text at virtually every turn, stuffed into spaces that many players never bothered engaging with in the first place, that were necessary to understand the ten pounds of plot being stuffed into a five pound polybag. They were writing long-form prose for a game that was literally designed to emulate the punchy, visual storytelling of traditional comic books, and it simply didn’t work.
I think this kind of thing remains a problem, both for devs who need writing for ‘Press F to emote’ scenes and for whom ‘kill your darlings’ might mean the loss of tens of thousands of dollars worth of effort, and writers who may not realize that they’re writing for something closer to TV, complete with hovering oversight and weird requirements, than it is traditional prose.
I think that video games carry a lot of baggage from other narrative media, such as movies and television, and this has been used over the years to provide them with a false sense of scale and legitimacy. Unfortunately, even those prior media tend to themselves suffer from a literal lack of imagination, popularly being little more than filmed plays. People do not need to be spoon-fed a linear, dialog-driven narrative in order to experience a story. Games main strengths are often that of providing virtual environments, and are as such perfectly suited to visual storytelling and/or worldbuilding. There is still a lot of room for written narrative in these structures, but it tends to work best IMO when it is implemented non-linearly, so that it can be adapted to different gameplay scenarios. This involves thinking in terms of an “exploded” narrative in four dimensions, which is a writing style unique to interactive media.
For Christsakes, Brenda Laurel wrote Computers as Theatre 20 years ago and it’s still in print. It’s like Design of Everyday Things, finding out that someone who is actually working on games or interactive products HASN’T read the damn thing (even if they disagreed with the entire premise) should be like finding out that someone working in film hasn’t seen Citizen Kane.
I think the core problem with Leigh’s argument is not that it’s wrong, but that it’s too broad for the idea she’s putting forth.
Are there many games with subjectively poor story-telling? Certainly. Quite a few, in fact. Whether that is a weakness or not varies considerably from game to game. If there were no story of value in “Gone Home”, for example, it would be a total failure. That game is masterful in its ability to tell a story through an interactive experience. But how do we determine when a game needs story, how to deliver it in the best way and how to judge its quality? Is the storyline of the Halo series good or bad? IMHO the core problem there is not that it’s a bad story, but that it’s delivery in-game is fairly obtuse to many players (many of whom miss salient points of the plot because of the style).
How do you script a game like Skyrim? A game where individual players can have radically different experiences depending on their playstyle and choices, but ultimately the game is more about mechanics than story. Does Super Smash Brothers requires the same burden of narrative that Bayonetta does and do either of them need the same kind of narrative as The Vanishing of Ethan Carter or Life is Strange? Does Marvel Puzzle Quest or Candy Crush Saga become a much better game due to their stories? Is Warframe’s story of warring factions in the future (but with precious few actual characters) a good story or a bad story? Is the Long Dark’s almost non-existent narrative a good thing or bad thing? Where does authorial intent come into play, for that matter?
I don’t think anyone is dismissing story or writers, but I think people’s tolerance and expectations differ within such games. Some are just systems or board-games, while others are almost pure narratives. I don’t find them bad, overall…in fact I find some more engaging and involving that many tv shows/movies I could name. I was more concerned with the fate of some characters in the Mass Effect series than some characters on TV shows or movies I could name. Uncharted and Tomb Raider featured pretty darned fine stories, for all that they were fairly derivative of action movie tropes and thrillers. I think a good story enhances a game 10-fold, but the lack of one doesn’t necessarily mean the game isn’t good. The game may not NEED a good one.
If I want a game, I get a game.
If I want a story, I get a book.
Granted, you can have a game with a good story but getting a story into the game without it getting into the way of the game can be rather challenging.
You know video game stories suck when The Last of Us is heralded as a great example of good storytelling. It was only excellent in the context of recent video games.
IMHO, it was a fun game to watch but wasn’t much of an advance overall. Frankly, I think Infocom occasionally did a better job with storytelling 30 years ago.
