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What Too Many Game Developers Know About Story
by Chris Remo, Jul 27, 2005 5:40pm PDTGamasutra has an article up entitled What Every Game Developer Needs to Know About Story. It's by Microsoft Game Studios' John Sutherland, who has written for such games as Dungeon Siege II, MechAssault 2, and Jade Empire. He begins with the point that stories in games have yet to fully take advantage of their medium, just as in its early days the storytelling in film was typically just borrowing from theatre. I agree wholeheartedly that the full form of games, and of storytelling in games, has yet to be defined or even explored. However, the author's following points seem to lapse into the sort of often-overstated narrative dogma so often preached by those who have taken Film Scripting 101: "story is conflict", "classical story structure works", three act-structure, the necessity of reversals in story, and so on. Certainly most game stories have a long way to go when it comes to craftsmanship, but Aristotelian conventions and Campbell's Hero's Journey are by no means underrepresented in games. As video game designer and theorist Ernest Adams has noted, "Campbell's work is descriptive and not prescriptive." While writers like Sutherland have the right idea for a certain kind of storytelling, I don't believe it is the only one of which games are capable of portraying, nor should it be. (Gamasutra claims that unlike most of their content, free registration is not required for this article, so don't blame me if you end up having to fill out forms.)
Comments
I'm hoping the upcoming Fahrenheit/Indigo Prophecy will again show us what can be done with stories in games.
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1. Start as a Student/Prisoner/Amnesiac/Looser
2. Oh no! Your attacked!
3. Reveal
4. Underpants
5. ...
6. Profit?
7. The Expected 'Unexpected Big Twist'
8. Combat that got old 20 hours ago
9. Happily Ever After?
Yawn...
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Offhand we have a decent short fantasy/steampunk story in Planescape Torment and a rather ordinary cyberpunk thriller in Deus Ex. That's just of the top of my head, they're not, necessarily, the two most worthy examples (I'm not the most familiar with storytelling as it is presented on the consoles, so I can't really talk about that) but they are significant in and of themselves for at least the PC platform. Now, if that's the best we can show for ourselves then we have truly a long way to go.
Oh, and I think we should be looking to popular fiction (books) as much as film when shaping in our minds the way storytelling should be executed in games. Our medium is capable of much more depth then a short two/three hour presentation, capable of taking place in as many locales, having as many characters of the kind of depth and relevance, as can be found in an epic like Lord Of The Rings (lets be reasonable, I don't think we'll see an "Anna Karenjina" for a while) - so I hope that developers keep that in mind, though I fear nobody will think of this for the longest time and will most likely only attempt a replication of the standard action movie type forms of story.
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One of the sidekick characters was a girl who had tech-powers,who lived with her father,who once was a famous inventor,but not a hopeless drunk.During the course of the game,which involves Time Travelling as a plot mechanic to help various people,the characters go back in time to help this girl.The father was working on a robot and due to some accident in design,it goes bezerk and murders the kid's mother.Even though these were absurd abstractions of people,there was enough character development for each of these characters that I enjoyed their interactions and banter,and when this plucky little tech girl was forced to relive this horror she experienced as a 5 year old(and repressed the memmory),I felt truely sad for her.
That's what is missing from the storytelling equation: giving enough life to these polygonal constructs that you actually care about what happens to them.
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"‘interactivity’ is [a] neologism ... but the reason we suddenly need such a word is that during this century we have for the first time been dominated by non-interactive forms of entertainment: cinema, radio, recorded music and television. Before they came along all entertainment was interactive: theatre, music, sport – the performers and audience were there together, and even a respectfully silent audience exerted a powerful shaping presence on the unfolding of whatever drama they were there for. We didn’t need a special word for interactivity in the same way that we don’t (yet) need a special word for people with only one head.
I expect that history will show ‘normal’ mainstream twentieth century media to be the aberration in all this. ‘Please, miss, you mean they could only just sit there and watch? They couldn’t do anything? Didn’t everybody feel terribly isolated or alienated or ignored?’ " http://www.douglasadams.com/dna/19990901-00-a.html
Games are about storymaking, not storytelling, as a collaborative act between developer and player.
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The other good aspect of "The Dig" was you could get what's-his-face that played the T-1000 in "Terminator 2" to repeated say over and over, "I'm not sticking my hand in there!"
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Now, the only game that I've played that I can honestly say impressed me and actually brought a true story-telling experience was Homeworld. For starters, that sucker was packaged with a manual bigger than most magazines and small books. In it were clan anthromologies, backstory related to Kahrak, the planet's culture, detailed unit description, the works. (Unfortunately, I'd think this aspect of the game has been cut with the move to smaller-sized boxes) I have never seen a manual that had such a great impact on the game, and I doubt I will see another like it.
Then, when I actually started playing the game (having not read a morsel about the story in reviews), I actually got misty eyes upon returning to a Kahrak being firebombed.
It's just, for me at least, that every aspect of Homeworld's atmosphere (story, delivery of story, ambient music) was synchronized perfectly to present it's story in addition to a challenging game experience.
Agree/Disagree? Comments?
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Yeah, I'm sure his superiors would love that he executed an unarmed foreign diplomat with no evidence.
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I have two reactions to this piece:
1) Not all games need stories.
2) Not all stories need to follow a conventional structure, nor should they.
A great story-driven game is one where the plot is tied directly to the gameplay (see: Half-Life). I love adventure games to death, but ultimately they aren't as satisfying to me as something where I feel like I have more of an immediate affect on the way the story plays out. Even if the game's storyline is totally linear, if there's an illusion of non-linearity, it's more satisfying. The story can go from point A to B to C, but if I feel like it's *my* path to get from A to B, that's more desirable from a gameplay perspective.
...but that's not an absolute rule either. Adventure games have their place in the world, and those have (most of the time) a 100% linear plotline.
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http://www.shacknews.com/ja.zz?id=9968569
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At its core, gaming has much more in common with sports then it has with movies or books. If a game takes too much control out of the player or gives him too little to do, it becames a bad interactive movie or a simple roleplaying emule.