Storytelling in Games

[womblingfree]

Videogames are not a storytelling medium

I've enjoyed plenty of games as a storytelling medium more than a great many films. At their peak though they're as different as a book is from a movie, a completely different medium where diffrent things are possible.

The very fact that you can have 20 to 100 hours to play with the storytelling in a game, which is also interactive, means that straight comparisons are rather redundant.

At least three games have almost reduced me to tears, and not because they were a pile of doo-doo either.

[SM47]

In that way it easily out Bioshock's Bioshock's twist by at least ten years.

But then it spoils it all by having some blonde twat talking to his missus about their relationship on the phone for about twenty minutes.

[womblingfree]

If anything, I'd rather if they left it up to your imagination.

That's the direction Western games go down mostly isn't it? You're usually free to project whatever personality you want onto a rather faceless hero. Even GTA with its fleshed out characters leaves you to make choices as to what kind of character you're actually playing.

[womblingfree]

But then it spoils it all by having some blonde twat talking to his missus about their relationship on the phone for about twenty minutes.

I'm not a big fan of the codec at all while I'm playing and tend to skip past it as quickly as possible. If I replay some of it can be quite interesting though, like whats-er-faces comments on films when you save a game in 3.

Life's too short to fetishise over static talky-bits unless you're an obsessive otaku with limitless time on their hands. Plenty of them around though it seems.

[SM47]

I dunno, the codec can be good. It wasn't a problem in MGS. I actually enjoyed using it. And it really came into its own during the 'Master Miller isn't really Master Miller!' scene. I remember that twist with fondness.

Looking back, there were a fair amount of cutscenes in MGS. But they weren't as intrusive as MGS2. MGS2 was literally 'walk ten paces, cutscene, walk another ten paces, kill some guards, cut scene, walk into room, massive codec conversation with characters you couldn't give two shits about, walk into another room, massive boring, pretentious cutscene...'.

[Number 28]

90 minutes each??

Can someone confirm that.

Joking.

[womblingfree]

I dunno, the codec can be good. It wasn't a problem in MGS. I actually enjoyed using it.

The first Metal Gear's still the best one so far for me, a complete package with just the right amount of everything. I loved the tanker in 2, found Big Shell a bit limiting and just got annoyed with 3's archaic controls having just finished Resi4.

[InsideOutBoy]

Books should tell stories with words, movies with pictures, and games with interaction. At least that's the idea.

The much lauded BioShock or Half Life 2 still feature moments where you character is rooted to the spot and can only move his head as some carefully plotted dramatic event occurs. They cheat.

Film, books and TV are still the masters of telling a conventional story. Videogame stories haven't come close yet. The much lauded stories in BioShock and Half Life 2 aren't anything beyond what you'd get in an average episode of Star Trek.

The real strength of videogame story telling lies in their interaction, in what you do. Exploring the sunken world of BioShock or the ravaged houses of Half Life tell a far greater story than any of the scripted moments do.

Metal Gear Solid 4 might have an amazing story, but you can't call it a videogame. It you can't interact all you're getting is a movie on a game disc. Let's not mix up the two.

My favourite videogame stories, the ones I can talk about for hours and share with my friends actually come from a game without a storyline at all - CounterStrike. Some of those my old clan matches featured more surprise twists, human drama, and daring events than every single RPG rolled into one.

[Super Craig]

The problem with Valve's approach is during those parts where everyone's discussing the story I'm usually getting bored and running around hitting everything/ messing shit up with a gravity gun. But that's because Gordon Freeman is completely nothing as a character, a blank slate for us to view the other characters with, a camera with a gun essentially, meaning that there's no reason to show him in a cutscene given he'd just stand there like a lemon. They're cutscenes with a controllable camera in this case.

I've not finished the game yet, but this mirrors how I feel about it.

I dunno, the codec can be good. It wasn't a problem in MGS. I actually enjoyed using it. And it really came into its own during the 'Master Miller isn't really Master Miller!' scene. I remember that twist with fondness.

Looking back, there were a fair amount of cutscenes in MGS. But they weren't as intrusive as MGS2. MGS2 was literally 'walk ten paces, cutscene, walk another ten paces, kill some guards, cut scene, walk into room, massive codec conversation with characters you couldn't give two shits about, walk into another room, massive boring, pretentious cutscene...'.

Ditto.

[El Stevo]

I think it's important that in any game, no matter how linear, you get a bit of freedom to write your own story as long as it ties in with the cut scenes. You know, my Halo story had a Master Chief overwrought with fear, riddled with self doubt hiding behind rocks 50% of the time. I bet yours didn't. And all the other stuff, vehicles and elites flying around - each instance is unique to each player. That's all story. If "The Warthog fell off the cliff" was written in a book you'd call it part of the story.

That freedom - to create as you go - is a real strength unique to games and it's why the best games are as immersive as any book or film.

IMO etc.

[Preacher]

i would only be wrong if videogames are anywhere close to achieving what novels and movies do in regards to storytelling. But videogames are not there, so how can i be wrong?

So let me get this straight: you're suggesting video games are an indeterminate point from achieving the same ability to tell stories as movies and novels?

Videogames are not a storytelling medium

You just said they were, but that they weren't there yet.

it is simply interactive entertainment, why do videogames feel they must compete with movies? They're completely two different mediums videogames should stick to what they do best, which isn't storytelling

It's already been said, but you've clearly not played many games.

[Rudi von Starnberg]

Gwynster's right, you know. Troll.

No-one else is agreeing with him, we're not going to convince him otherwise... let's just ignore him?

[Hambury]

I'm struggling to think of a game that tells a really good story. There are plenty that have had good ideas, but been let down by either a poor script, naff voiceover work, or just a lack of direction.

If you're after a real good story, I think books and film beat games hands down at the moment, and rightly so, as they invest far more money and time in it.

If you want a great experience, the games are certainly up there with books and film.

So story telling is certainly something games will and should get better at, but chucking in lengthy cutscenes that require no user input, seems to be missing the point, and going in the wrong direction in my view.

The Half-Life games do it well, but at least keeping you in the charcter, and normally letting you walk and long around as the story unfolds.

[Rudi von Starnberg]

Grim Fan-fucking-dango.

Tbh.

[Molloy]

I tend to subscribe to Ron Gilberts criticism that most games just have plots, and little or no story.

I'd say the best way for most games to tell stories is through gameplay and environment rather than dialogue. Ico absolutely blew me away because you build a relationship with the characters through the game mechanics and music. It doesn't really need any elaborate enemies or bosses because the castle has so much character and that's really what you're up against.

[MK-1601]

As someone mentioned, communicating the story by letting the player poke around the environment is a better method than dropping a series of non-interactive plot points between goals.

Metroid Prime (particularly the first one) and Deus Ex did this amazingly, as did many of the vintage PC RPGs. Bioshock did it quite well, although there was an artificiality to it, like you were being shown the clues to a murder mystery weekend or being led through a particularly grim Crystal Maze episode rather than a lived-in place.

The places to focus on to make games tell stories:

1) The game world. It should be more than just interchangeable scenery. Again MP1 was amazing at this, filling the world with details to an obsessive degree such as having frozen fish in glaciers, showing that Chozo buildings were stone facades over sci-fi metal hulls, and having Space Pirate facilities jury-rigged to the landscape with cables.

2) Characters. You can communicate volumes about a character through their appearance and posture, as much as their actions and dialogue. If this is clear and consistent then the player will project their own feelings on the character, be able to guess how they'll react in different circumstances, and ascribe motivations to their actions. The 'mercy killings' in STALKER spring to mind - just an AI activity playing out, but one that provokes a reaction especially the first time you see it. Fighting games, particularly SF2, are another good example of characters having their own mythos.

Basically, if the developers care enough about the fiction in takes on a life of its own.

[Vin]

If there's a plot, I only acknowledge its existence inasmuch as it provides a context for the art direction -- for example, a location is called a "desert temple" and looks like ruins. That's about it. Why the obligatory dude in a tunic is at said temple outside of his need to solve puzzles and whack the boss is something I really don't care about, and would prefer they didn't tell me.

[Gwynster]

The Japanese prefer a good story

Sorry.

...

[Mogster]

They're never necessary, it's always a choice. It's the difference between a game that leaves something to your imagination and one that doesn't.

I didn't say there wasn't a choice, just that sometimes it's better to choose cutscenes when they'd be more effective. To go back to the example of Mass Effect, think of the whole final battle sequence. There are major events taking place all over the place, with your antics inside the station coinciding with a great big space battle. Without the help of snappy cutscenes, you'd be limited to radio updates on the battle outside, or maybe the odd glimpse through a window. Obviously the plot could have been changed to accomodate the lack of cutscenes, but I can't see the story being improved as a result.

Don't get me wrong though, I'm a huge advocate of games telling storys in ways only games can do. Ico is still the pinacle of this, as far as I'm concerned, as it manages to tell an emotional story almost entirely through gameplay. It has a very small amount of short cutscenes to help it along, but it's really through guiding Yorda through the castle that an emotional bond is formed. Ico also highlights the strength of games as a narrative medium, oddly enough. TV, movies and novels might be able to tell better stories, but games can tell weaker stories in stronger ways, if you get what I mean.

[SM47]

The Japanese also prefer tentacle porn, rape simulators and forced death marches.

[Preacher]

A recent trip to the seaside availed me to the existence of Silent Hill Arcade. It's a lightgun game that does just about everything in its power not to deserve the "arcade" suffix, because for the 15 minutes or so I spent playing it, about a third of my time was spent removed from the game, being ushered around foggy exteriors, rusty, dank interiors and generally just having my participation put into context.

It's just a weird instance of role-reversal between home and arcade, and it got me to thinking about how the death (or perpetual decline, seemingly) of the arcade affects my perception of narrative in games. Arcade games, by and large, had a way of telling stories that left something to the imagination. It wasn't necessarily by design, of course - arcade games were meant to be immediate and accessible - but without a strong arcade market to affect the balance of narrative output on home consoles, it just feels like we're drowning in storytelling these days.

Sure, services like XBLA and PSN go some way to filling the void left by an active arcade scene, but its in a purely subserviant capacity. Besides that, a lot of their output is recycled or enhanced originals, and what is original is seemingly more affected by retail output than anything its predecessors did.

Whatever, I'm just thinking out loud.

[divine visitor]

I've found that the games in which I care most about the story are the ones where I shape my own story through my chosen actions, the places I explore and and through the characters I talk to and build relationships with, but just as importantly the things I chose not to do, the areas I don't explore and characters I don't interact with.

Thinking about it, Super Metriod, Zelda: Majora's Mask, Zelda: Link's Awakening, and Bioshock are a few games in which I cared a lot the story, because I was in the action and experiencing the it as an unedited series of events, rather than through a carefully controlled, well-directed story told primarily through cuts-scenes where I had no choice in what information I wanted to form my story from.

In Majora's Mask for example, I understood the urgency of the scenario I was placed in (the fact that the moon was coming crashing down in 3 days and that it would be a terrible disaster) from talking to the people in the town and seeing or being told how scared they were and it's going to affect them personally. Not just by being fed a cinematic cut-scene of the moon from a worm's eye view, looking all mean and evil with some scary music in the background.

And the fact that some of these characters don't ever speak, they may as well not even be there. As far as I'm concerned, the NPCs are speaking to me.

I enjoy the games that use a more cinematic approach, but I'm aware that the kind of connection I feel towards the story in these games are the much more similar to that of a film. It's more of an overall interest, in the scenario as a whole. And I reckon it's to down to the use of cut-scenes as the primary method of storytelling in these games that I feel a lot less connected to my character. Cut-scenes can whisk me away from my character to another time or place where I'm able to learn information that he/she doesn't know. It strengthens my involvement with the story, but disconnects me somewhat from my avatar or any other character since we're all reading the story from different pages, if you know what I mean. And so I remain a spectator rather than a participant. It's still cool, and it's something that games can do very well, but it's a different kind of connection.

Metal Gear is kinda cool because although its use of cut-scenes to narate keeps me at a distance from being fully involved as a participant in the story, its constant 4th-wall breaking craziness and acknowledgment of me as a player totally involves me as a participant of the game. It's the fact that all the Metal Gear games are so aware of themselves as games makes it unfair to criticize them for being mere interactive movies in my opinion, but at the same time it's bizzare that the game and story elements are kept so seperate.

[therearerules]

I dunno, the codec can be good. It wasn't a problem in MGS. I actually enjoyed using it. And it really came into its own during the 'Master Miller isn't really Master Miller!' scene. I remember that twist with fondness.

Looking back, there were a fair amount of cutscenes in MGS. But they weren't as intrusive as MGS2. MGS2 was literally 'walk ten paces, cutscene, walk another ten paces, kill some guards, cut scene, walk into room, massive codec conversation with characters you couldn't give two shits about, walk into another room, massive boring, pretentious cutscene...'.

Have you seen the first 10 minutes of MGS4 gameplay?

http://kotaku.com/390011/the-first-10-minu...al-gear-solid-4

Loads of amazing cool stuff, but only during the cutscenes.

[macosx]

For me the best example of story exposition in anything recently is the Darkness, where you naturally in gameplay walk up to someone, they address you and deliver plot points. You can walk away at any moment and remain in complete control rather than just passively holding the controller in your hand as 90 mins (!) of bloated convoluted exposition. I've bought and played all the Metal Gears games and loved the feel and overall OTT milieu of them but the spaghetti style of narrative is just indulgent wank. Kojima really needed an editor to hone down the excess to a more focused script. I know some people love him for the bloated convolution but its very marmite. I thought Snake Eater was good as it had a very clear 'these are a list of bad guys' I'm going to take them down and felt more Western/focused in it's approach.

Story in games should be present to augment the gameplay not to detract attention away from it. When I started to play GTA4 I felt that the way the story was integrated with the missions really was the best way of approaching a filmic approach to a gameplay experience, however after a few more hours the actual gameplay mechanic of cutscene eposition leading to actual game interaction become quite wearing.

I'm with Mogster in his statement about ICO in that less is more: set the scene with limited cutscenes then let the player flesh out the story through the actual play. If you leave enough information in the levels or play then your mind will fill in the rest. I remember playing Elite and piloting my ship into a rotating vector hexagon, yet so good was the actual play, coupled with a great choice in music that those limited vectors became a space station. You don't have to hit players over the head to make something meaningful.

[Jamie John]

The real strength of videogame story telling lies in their interaction, in what you do. Exploring the sunken world of BioShock or the ravaged houses of Half Life tell a far greater story than any of the scripted moments do.

Very good point.

I think this and character development are what videogames are all about in terms of what's outside of the gameplay and anything that could vaguely be labelled as a 'story'. In ICO, where's the 'story' there? A young boy attempts to rescue a pale woman from a castle and an evil queen. Neither party says much. ... Yet when Yorda

falls

, a huge emotional response is evoked within the player, not because of the game's narrative (it still hasn't changed from 'rescue woman from castle'), but because we've had to drag her ignorant behind around for the entire game up until this point - we care about her because we're Ico and because Ico cares about her. The same thing happens with Argo in SotC, and I'd gladly bow down to the man who tells me that that horse has got anything whatsoever to do with the game's narrative.

My favourite videogame stories, the ones I can talk about for hours and share with my friends actually come from a game without a storyline at all - CounterStrike. Some of those my old clan matches featured more surprise twists, human drama, and daring events than every single RPG rolled into one.

Surely they're just anecdotes, incidents instigated by the player? I don't see how a competitive multiplayer game could have any allusions to a constructed narrative at all.

[Rudi von Starnberg]

For me the best example of story exposition in anything recently is the Darkness, where you naturally in gameplay walk up to someone, they address you and deliver plot points. You can walk away at any moment and remain in complete control rather than just passively holding the controller in your hand as 90 mins (!) of bloated convoluted exposition.

I haven't played The Darkness so maybe it's a bit different, but... is what you're describing here exactly the sort of thing that was in Half-Life 2 and its ilk?

[El Stevo]

It's also important that games capture your imagination so that you can use your imagination to augment the experience. That's why Elite was so successful and it's why GRAW wasn't terribly. If you've got enough of an imagination you can create a story out of nothing at all, but if everything is explicitly spelled out for you there are fewer gaps to fill in yourself.

[macosx]

Sure but I've never really been taken with HL2 narrative

[will2097]

...90 Minutes? 90 fuckin' minutes!?!.... It wants to be Martin Scorsese, Michael Mann, Spielberg all rolled into one thrill ride of a 90 minutes. It wants to be 90 minutes but seem like 10. It wants to be that good.

...it's not going to be is it?

[Gabe]

I always want cutscenes to show big, epic moments, big battles and such that can't be played-out within the game for whatever reason, but so few are these days. Interesting thoughts in here though, and I'm surprised at the number of people (here and in the press) that think Half Life 2 had a great story and way of presenting it. Now my thoughts on HL2 in general are in the relevant thread, but I can't say I found it to have either a good story (it was dull, full of cliches both in the characterisation and plot), or an interesting way of presenting it (as has been mentioned, it's a cutscene with a moveable camera). And to any that don't think they are cutscenes, consider that the characters will continue saying their bit and you can't actually progress until they have done so. The fact you don't necessarily have to listen is irrelevant.

MGS4 really has a couple of films in it (although it seems there is some dispute on the actual length of said movies) - I don't think you can class it as a cutscene, as they really are only meant to be short 'breaks' to link plot-points, IMO.

It's interesting that Ico is often held aloft as a storytelling masterpiece though, and whilst I haven't played it, I'm inclined to think that it really isn't. It seems to have bugger-all story really; the fact that many people feel a connection and will project stuff onto it and hail as genius makes me think of people who love to talk of the story behind much modern art. It says more about the individual's ability to craft something from very little, rather than the work of the original creator.