Violence is conflict. Conflict is story. Good story makes good game. Pointless violence is pointless conflict. Pointless conflict is bad story. Bad story is bad game.

*an old argument rises, fresh and moldy, from the grave*

Can someone tell me what the story is in:

Pente?

Go?

Checkers?

Tetris?

Nethack?

Master of Orion?

Quake III?

If by story, LF, you mean no more than "an account of events" then I can see the story in these games. But it''s an awfully bad story.

How can it be true that "bad story is bad game" if some of the most popular games in existence have VERY BAD stories?

BTW, I think it''s generally agreeable that this is a bad story: "I placed a bead. You placed a bead. I placed a bead near your bead. You placed a bead near my bead. But then I captured two of your beads; now I only need 4 more to win. But you blocked my next capture. I didn''t see that you had placed five in a row. Darn it, you won!"

Yet Pente is a great game.

And who, btw, defines "pointless?" When I fire up a game of Swarm, collect minerals and blast aliens, it''s only pointless in the grand, cosmic scheme of things. But then, in that case, so is every single human activity, from the depraved to the devine. (After all, in 10 billion years do you think anything you have done will be regarded as important? )




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Just waiting for the mothership...

Ok, I agree with you that some games are just click-click-click-kill-kill-kill but in other games where goblins are heavily relied on as an enemy then it usually has something to do with the story, otherwise, as long as it''s not killing 5 goblins with one arrow, then another hoard arrives, why not attack a goblin that has come and hit you with a club ?

Wav, remember my arguement way back that story and game were seperate entirely? That there was a very clear line between the two, even in RPGs?

Well, it may be kindof confusing, but when I say "game" I really mean "that medium that is a merging of game and story." My justification is this:

Most media are actually NAMED for abstract concepts out of which they arose. A Film is a thin, transluscent substance; we call the medium film because the content was once stored on this physical thing. Actors would PLAY out a theatre piece, and hence they became known as plays. Comic books can sometimes be very far from comical, but this medium also is named for it''s origins.

I don''t want to have to come up with some new pretentious name for divergent narratives. They are games, they will be games for a long time, even though they are really game-stories.

(plus, many of the games that you mention have both conflict and context, and hence, a story... even if I don''t think they have a very GOOD story, that''s just an opinion of mine, which doesn''t make my first statement any less true, contradictory as it might be...)

To paraphrase Warren Spector on Crpg design

- """We must make sure that they are able to complete a goal, but how they do it is up to the player.

Ie. There is a key behind a door, do you break open the door risking guard-attention, do you lockpick the door, do you try to find another way in (airvent?), do you try to charm the bank clerk, do you try to bluff your way in ... etc."""

Ketchaval,
So really what we have to be asking is what gameplay+scenario goals the player has to be doing, and what variety of diverse gameplay can be built around it.

Ie. When the player is goblin slaying, why are they doing this ? Because the built in gameplay goals are

Get Sword of Samoan Vengeance (long term)

survive = kill goblins because playe has no other options ,

survive long term = get XP to level up so that they can survive tougher creatures which is unfortunately only possible in this system if they = kill more goblins.
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The non-built in Player goal = have fun/ be entertained they do this with the most fun aspects of the system ie. the combat as there is nothing else.



So what should the goals (and supporting rulesystems) be to make it more interesting ?

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There is a guy in the South village called Tony, he's a Ninja.

Edited by - Ketchaval on September 29, 2000 12:49:52 PM

Landfish:

You cannot presume to use the term "game" as "the merging of game and story" when there are so many games that have no story, or at least no use for one. Would it not have been better to say "interactive story?" I''m not trying to scorn you, but I think the clarification should have been made in the first place.

In most cases, I would tend to agree with your assessment, but as a generalization you could not be more wrong. There are a good many examples of games that had excellent stories but failed in their gameplay, and vice versa. (Just about every Final Fantasy, for starters.)

Here''s a question: what does good story/bad story have to do with goblin genocide? I thought your original rant was against the extraneous role bestial races played in games. They have most often been portrayed as mindless wastes of skin, hellbent on destroying humanity without cause. Most of the time, they aren''t even that dynamic. They only exist to satisfy the player''s need to kill something weak and insignificant.

I totally agree that this is a very silly thing to put in a game. It makes for a bad story, and while that won''t necessarily make a bad game, it certainly doesn''t score any extra points. The best portrayal of beast races I''ve seen thus far was in Stonekeep. The throgs and sharga actually had backgrounds and personalities. It made you feel guilty about killing them.

Well, sometimes. And sometimes is better than no times, right?

Still, your comments should be revised to be accurate. Looking at what you''ve said, I can assume you mean violence is the only conflict, because you did not take into account any other form of conflict that most often makes for a much better story than violence. Conflict does make a story, and a good story is potentially a good game. The reverse is also true.

I believe potentially is the key word here.

Games without any story are bad if their gameplay is not perfect.

Games most of the time have poor story and gameplay that''s why they are so bad.

Quake3Arena is not a good game IMO.

-* So many things to do, so little time to spend. *-

What is this all about?

Dark

certain genres don''t need good stories (or stories at all) to be good games. for instance, look at mario, how many times do you have to save the princess? they''re still good games.
besides, some people just like to blast things.
i remember one game a long time ago called niteraid, it had hundreds of little guys parachuting down to your base, you had to kill them as the fell with a big gun, either by blasting them, shooting out their parachutes, blowing up the planes above them to create shrapnel.
that game was probably the most fun i could imagine on a 1 screen, wave based game. no real story, it was just great fun.
so, i find it hard to throw out a game for lack of story. but i do hate games that are cliche with bad stories (ie. rpg). if an rpg doesn''t have something unique about it, it better have a damn good story for me to play it.
ttfn

crazy166
some people think i'm crazy, some people know i am

I think if there''s one conclusion that can be drawn from all the arguments that have come before, its this:
RPGs have an enormous potential to be a bad game.

The story is central to these games, and yet we have not found very good ways to PUT that story central in the GAME. That''s the "gameplay" sense of game. The story is rarely more than the candy you get for killing the right bad guy.
And yet, RPGs are all about creating stories, being a part of those stories.



People might not remember what you said, or what you did, but they will always remember how you made them feel.
~ (V)^|) |<é!t|-| ~