Good storytelling and truly, emotionally envolving the player is the greatest aspect missing in all games. Yes, I said it and I''ll stick to it, ALL games lack good story telling and emotional envolvement of the player. The player is always interacting indirectly with the story flow, through there character. The computer generated world reacts soley to the NPC''s AI and the player''s character''s stats. It looks at where the character is at, emotionally and gives the players a set of option to progress the story line. The players only control is the actions of their character, which the player may take for emotional or logical resonsm the computer doesnt care which. Heres an example, "Eternal Darkness" for the NGC. The character in the game has a "sanity meter"(SM). When the SM get in to the red, the character begins to holucinate from fear. This happens wheather or not the player is truely scared, which seems stupid and can be quite frustrating to the player. Heres how that could be better implimented, if the player exhibits game play behavior that can be associated with fear, then and only then would the sanity meter start to drop into the red. Reguardless of the characters +2 courage or special skill of "knowledge of the undead". These kinds of things are too abstract and only work to further emotionally detatch the player from the story. This becomes difficult to impliment, because it is very hard to measure the true mental state of the player. If you have any thoughts on the validity of my aurgument or ideas on how to guage a players mental state, please respond, I would love to hear from you.

As a writer myself, it pains me to say this, but... I think we''re trying to run before we''ve learned how to breathe properly.

The birth-year of the movie industry is considered to be 1895. (search "The Lumiére brothers"). It took _decades_ before people really started looking at movies as anything more than a glorified "What The Butler Saw" machine. Even George Meliés'' "From the Earth to The Moon" (1905) wasn''t considered a classic in its day: it wasn''t until many years later that its true value was understood by the film-making industry. Hell, even during Charlie Chaplin''s era, screenplays were usually being written by the directors.

Games are still in their infancy. The very fact that so much effort continues to be poured into technical, rather than gameplay, research and development is a symptom of this. We haven''t come close to our ''Talkies'' phase yet, let alone colour and wide-screen.

Computer games are still played using ancient (certainly by IT standards) user interfaces, such as keyboards (19th Century), TVs/monitors (CRTs were invented in the 19th Century), joysticks (19th Century, they were invented for use in cranes) and mice (1960s). LCDs haven''t really changed the experience; it''s still a flat 2D surface.

So-called "3D" engines are nothing of the sort: they are merely the normal progression of 2D engines. There''s NOTHING even remotely "3D" about the image on a TV set, no matter how much programmers want to convince us otherwise.

In short: the reason so little effort is expended in making great stories and game writing is purely because we can''t even _play_ the games properly yet. Once we can remove the glass wall between the player and our game worlds, _then_ we can finally expect to see the industry focussing on the gameplay and stories.

--
Sean Timarco Baggaley

A beautiful analogy, and quite true.

And, just to infuriate those pixel pushers, look at those modern films made with obsolete media (ie black and white), such as "the man who wasn''t there" (Coen Bros) that people still enjoy.

"If you go into enough detail, everything becomes circular reasoning." - Captain Insanity

Euhm, bad news dudes, but those 3d games... they are really 3d

As 3d as the scenes that are filmed with movie cameras.

Unfortunatly, normal computer screens convert them to 2d. But that doesn''t mean that it *is* 2d. The "data" is 3d. With two screens, one for each eye, it can actually become 3d as well

And as for the story problems: well, only one game did it okay. Really okay.

System Shock 2.

They looked at the limitations of computer games, and found one: direct interaction as a human.

Thus, they scrapped that. The only interaction with other life sentient bings goes through comm. stuff. And that is one way traffic. All the other humans you encounter are dead.

Thus, what is left, is an immensely creepy scenery, with a person that needs your help, and knows that it can only talk one way... Couple that with another bunch ''o chattery AI''s, that you can''t talk back to *either* (same limitation), it makes for one hell of a scary ride...!

Best game ever ^_^

I think that the reason because of which games today aren''t too emotional involving for the player is that computers can''t think.
That is, computers are just executing what the programmers told them, displaying what the artists created and taking the player through the game the way the designer wanted. Of course, a bit of randomness is added, otherwise no one would play. No matter how good is the AI, the player will find a way to beat it, unless the AI cheats. That''s why playing against other human players is much more compelling that playing single. They can surprise you, they are intelligent. Even real world games are more interesting than their computer cousins because you are 100% involved. I played yesterday some hide and seek with my friends are I remembered how it feels to be a child once again. I felt the thrill of the game. When I play Quake single player, I feel strange because I am the only human in a world of computer generated monsters.

When the computers will be able to make smart decisions, to learn from experience and perform creative thinking, then we will have BEAUTIFUL games to play on.

quote: Original post by Zamolxis
I think that the reason because of which games today aren''t too emotional involving for the player is that computers can''t think.
...
When the computers will be able to make smart decisions, to learn from experience and perform creative thinking, then we will have BEAUTIFUL games to play on.

Which is a technical problem, that Sean already stated.



[ MSVC Fixes | STL | SDL | Game AI | Sockets | C++ Faq Lite | Boost | Asking Questions | Organising code files ]

quote: Original post by PouyaCat it makes for one hell of a scary ride...!

yeah I must agree. I''d heard ppl say that SS2 is scary and I thought it meant startling. But somehow it''s scary on some deeper level. It''s just plain freaky and incredibly immersive. They didn''t rely on immersing you through just your physical senses. They used psychological fear too (as in your description on how you''re totally alone). How brilliant.



A CRPG in development...

Need help? Well, go FAQ yourself.

I think one of the major barriers to emotionally engagine stories beyond the technical aspect is simply that computer game development companies are programmers first, storytellers second. The major emphasis is on eye-candy, gimmicky game features, and other technical "prowess" features. Many games are also just clones of popular games, and lack any substance and feel. Another major problem is that if you are an aspiring writer or screenwriter, you simply write down your story. With games, going from concept to reality takes an entirely different set of skills.

In other words, what the writer or storyteller may envision in his head is simply technically impossible for the technical personnel to implement. It''s sort of the conundrum facing businesses today. On one hand you have business degree managers who don''t know how to copy and paste files, but they are running organizations that rely on hitech IT infrastructure to run. And then you have the very technical IT staff that has little concept of accounting, sales or other financing. So the IT world came up with a middleman....the MIS degree people as a bridge between the two worlds. I still don''t think the MIS people quite know what they are doing but it''s a step in the right direction.

I truly think that the creative side of storytelling must be married with enough technical expertise to at least have an idea of what is required. But sometimes I wonder....is the target audience really ready for heavily engaging stories?

I find that the major problem with games as storytelling is that the storytelling gets lost somewhere along the way, as whatever your character(s) are doing turns into a fairly blunt, cliche-ridden and oftentimes predictable escapade. Or you don''t really know what you''re doing exactly, just that it''ll get you farther "into" the game, and by the end you aren''t sure exactly what happened, just that you saved the world.

With many old games with fairly simple designs, losing often produced chilling messages like "You have died. The world is doomed." And that was it. You kept living and you saved the world, you didn''t and it was doomed. And this worked, because it didn''t feel corny or have "plot twists" or "character development" to worry about. You knew exactly what the story was, and the telling was almost 100% found in what you did as the player.

This is, perhaps, why many people like old games better. The game might be simple and ultimately shallow because of its age, but it didn''t clutter things up with unnecessary cut-scenes or satisfying the turns of the plot as envisioned. A movie with plot twists is more enjoyable because it surprises you, yet the same doesn''t seem to hold true for a game.

Making the world furry one post at a time

There have been two statements made in the posts that I find particularly intersting. The first, suggesting the lack of emotional envovlment on the part of the players of computer games stend from the fact that computers cant think. The second suggests the same stends from the poor interface technology offered to operate the interaction between the player and the computer. Together, these statements are true. If we want the computer to THINK about and react to the players emotional state then there must be some way to both guage the players emotional state and to alter it.

Knowing full well that anything is possible. I would say that you CAN create an emotionaly envolving game with current technology. But it would be much easier with an empathic nuro-net computer that operated with a wet-ware vr interface.

Another reply suggested that the modern audiance is not ready for a game that truely, motionally envolves the player. I would definatly agree with that. Most people dont recognize computer games as art. Those that enjoy them, EXPECT the same old shallow crap. It will take serveral ground breaking games over a long period of time to ever change this. And with what I see coming out of silicone vally, this wont happen for a long long time.

Then again are we taking our selves to seriously. These are GAMES after all. Are ther any other games of any type, that emotionaly envolve us. Maybe sports but solely on a viseral level. Or maybe those of us with a story to tell should call it something else. If cringe at the thought of using NOVEL in the title, like digital novel or interactive novel. Because novel implies liniear and any such creation would not be truly liniear. Perhaps the term digital experiance would better fit.

Well thats all for now, I could write for hours on this but I must stop and get back to work.