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Comments
I disagree. Unless you are interested in an excessively cinematic game, you will automatically have the player advancing the story. This gives the player a much greater emotional investment than a movie watcher.
In my eyes, for most games it's not so much that the player advances the story that the story advances the player.
For what it's worth, a lot of movies these days don't really bother with the story.
Except that's stupid.
The difficulty inherent in making a good story doesn't mean that it's impossible to make a story like that; it just means that we haven't, and likely never will.
It does not mean that movies are inherently better at storytelling.
In fact, here you go. Answer me this: What makes a story good? Are plays better at storytelling than movies?
^Even if video games are just as good at storytelling in theory, they still won't be in practice.
^I'm going to have to disagree there, because...well, it's kind of a reductio ad because I said so.
And?
The argument is that movies are better at storytelling than games. This isn't an inherent trait, though, which means that, yes, it (meaning a game with a very good player-defined story) very well could actually happen in the future.
Not necessarily, but this could be an element of it. The basic idea is that the measurements and the ways in which choices are made are invisible. Some things might be tracked, others might be purely binary choices. But the idea is to have the player make choices based on gameplay choices that fall within general game mechanics, and to not always know that they're making a choice.
When it comes to storytelling in games, I think a good approach is to characterise the secondary characters very heavily while leaving the PC reasonably threadbare. Because games work best as second-person narratives, the emphasis should be on the player building a game identity based on a well-developed game world rather than having one thrust on them.
I think it's more fair to same gaming has more obstacles to telling a story. I don't think that means they're inferior necessarily but it is something developers need to overcome.
I can agree with that.
Yeah, no argument there.
I think we should also ask ourselves what we mean by a "good" story. One of you might value complexity of plot very highly, while I think that emotional appeal is much more important, for example.
Damn, that is one bitch of a question, Glenn. Scholars could write duelling essays on that for years on end and never reach a conclusion.
I did.
I don't think movies are better than games at telling stories. Not by themselves, as it is not an inherent property of either of them to be stories. People often forget that film started as simple shots of people walking down the street and moving. Film's not an inherent storytelling medium, insofar as it's not obligatory to tell stories with it, neither with video games.
What film is, though, is incredibly developed in the story telling area. And this is because of history, development of ideas and constant innovation caused by visionaires who dared to do things with film that most people thought were unfeasible or just economically unsuccesful. It also helps that countries such as the USSR financed the furtherance of film as an art, mostly for propaganda reasons.
I think that part of the problem here is that emotional appeal is highly biased. For some, a story might hold a very dear place on their heart because, say, it was a relative's favourite story before they passed away. For others, it's just something they find very relatable to their situation.
Basically, a good story shouldn't just be consistent. It should be able to present the core concepts and themes it wants to communicate without causing immediate reaction from the audience. What this means, in shorter sentences, is that it should strike a balance between subtlety and clearness, which would make the audience more receptive, as they feel they're not being preached at, but spoken to.
I think if we're talking about things in terms of development of a medium, it might be worth considering the question of whether games' stories' reliance on using text and cutscenes is stunting it in terms of what we know we can do with the artform. We can already have text in stories and animation and audio in movies. It might be worth thinking more about what games can do that other mediums can't rather than making everything a turducken of media.
Or maybe we're just not as aware of what games do differently already that might be worth paying attention to.
I think we're aware. The main advantage gaming offers above all, or most mediums, anyway, is that gaming is one hundred per cent interactive. Or it could be one hundred per cent interactive with the right design. AS it is, gaming isn't one hundred per cent interactive, as we use relatively cheap and basic storytelling techniques like cutscenes and text in order to convey a story.
I think the only true way of getting over this is being temptative and innovative. Trying new things and seeing how well they work in order to convey a message in a clear yet subtle fashion, which is the main problem I see. When games are not utterly unsubtle about what they want to say, they're too subtle about the ideas and messages they want to convey and instead let the player figure it out through background information rather than on the spot or in a relevant point where the desired emotional response is triggered.
So, the main question is that, as a developer, or better yet, as a writer and communicator, how would you use the advantages that gaming offers without using the disadvantages that it possesses now as a medium that has to imitate other mediums in order to communicate? Full interactivity would be nice, but how would you convey dialogue without having to leave it entirely to the player? After all, not all stories in video games have to be written/chosen by the player.
I mentioned this briefly before, but I'd like to see a system where there are dialogue trees without dialogue box choices. The characters could communicate naturally, but have player actions during the dialogue influence its outcome. This could be as subtle as the way you point your character perspective, or the distance at which you stand or sit from someone. On the other hand, what if the player punched someone during an argument? This doesn't necessarily mean there'll be a fight, but it could alter the social relationship and therefore dialogue. It could result in the NPC walking away, angry, and the PC having accomplished nothing. Or it could express the PC's passion for the matter at hand and be a contributing factor to realigning the NPC's views.
There's a wealth of options here. Do you sit down to talk to someone, with all of its casual and relaxed implication? Or do you stand while they sit to show respect? Do you give in to distractions, or do you maintain focus on them? If there's multiple NPCs in a social interaction, you could easily and invisibly select which one to respond to simply by having them closer to the central point of your camera alignment.
Using this kind of invisible system, you could allow the regular gameplay mechanics to be the driving force of social interaction.
Those are some interesting ideas.
I guess it always kind of hurts the immersion for me on some level when I figure out something socially inappropriate I can do repeatedly during an interaction that doesn't have any consequences. Like, never making eye-contact or running around during a Half-Life 2 conversation.
^That's why I think Portal works better than Half-Life in that aspect. It makes sense for you to be running around and doing stuff during talky bits.
Oh yeah, and there's that part where Wheatley has you turn around before he opens the passage. That was cool.
But there was also the part where he asks you to catch him and jumps even if you run away to the other corner of the room.
I like that approach, mostly because as Gelzo pointed out, a lot of times, things in videogames such as running around like a fucktard, punching things while not giving a shit about what people say should be noted, if only because it'd help to create a more immersive experience.
Running with this, I think that one of the main aspects that should be addressed with videogame development is not the full development of interaction to the point where you = PC, but where you can create a character you can identify with without it having completely player created and without the writing/dialogue being the main factor towards said sense of familiarity, but instead the idea of engaging on actions that help you understand his mindset and the way he is. I think Heavy Rain did a rather meager first step towards such a thing, but it's still a first step.
Because I totally haven't plugged Bastion enough today, I'll mention that it manages to do that.
--slaps INUH for being an spambot in disguise--
Aw, shit, they figured it out.
One other thing about the system I presented is that it could allow social interactions to exist in action scenarios as well. The way you treat your allies on a mission and the way you behave during combat could easily fall under the purview of such things.
I have this idea for a game set in Renaissance Vienna (because swordswordsswordsswords) where there's certainly potential for a lot of fighting, but where you're punished for "death" with a lasting injury, and people will take note of how you fight and how merciful you are to your adversaries. During the Renaissance, cities had no lack of young men who would go out at night just to pick sword fights, often with lethal results. But then again, that doesn't mean that you have to kill people by default in such scenarios -- fighting them to submission and then sparing their lives, or fighting them in such a way as to impart a non-lethal wound should be legitimate options as well and have social results.
I know a lot of people have an issue with "realistic" games, but realism can ready help immersion and drama. The above idea could easily be a game about social interactions or sword combat depending on how you played it. Or both. But by punishing combat failure and providing a natural system of social interactions, you can reward more reasonable behaviour instead of number-crunching munchkinism. Obviously there need to be breaks from reality, but I'd really love it if there was a game that made the player pay for their mistakes properly while also being part of an interesting game experience. TES games do this reasonably okay with the prison systems, I guess, but there's more that can be done.
> would make the audience more receptive, as they feel they're not being preached at, but spoken to.
I think the best storytelling is accomplished not by preaching to the audience, not even by just speaking to the audience, but making the audience feel/experience what your story is about.
That's why those stories that make us laugh/cry/rage/etc. with the characters, the ones that we feel emotionally connected to, are the ones that tend to have the most impact and that are most fondly remembered.
I still think that there's greater potential for videogames as a storytelling medium--even if the story is completely linear--because through their interactivity they can become far more immersive to the audience than any big-screen movie theater can. Not to mention that they can also contain far more content--typical full-scale JRPGs these days, for example, run 30 to 50 hours at the least, not counting replay value; even a trilogy of movies can barely top 9 hours, and you'd need a whole TV show in order to convey the story length of a full-size game.
> Bastion
Bastion's a funny case. Instead of becoming immersed in the action (which is admittedly not an easy thing to do, and which many games fail at), it seems that the creators opted to go a slightly easier route--to immerse the player in the storytelling itself. It seems to work out well, for what it's worth.
-pimps fable-
Always good to pimp Fable.