It has been awful quiet in here lately so I thought I would start a new topic to discuss. So you’ve toiled away for countless hours creating the greatest game story ever told. You have resources of biblical proportions at your disposable, an army of programmers waiting to leap into action, and a design team waiting in breathless anticipation to turn your vision in to reality. You are descending from your mountain retreat ready to give on to the people the greatest game story ever told. When you stop and realize you never gave a single thought as to how to deliver the story to the audience. So for you all intrepid writers out there how do you portray and deliver your story to player? How do you go have story being a series of cut scenes connection each segment of play to a situation where the game becomes a living breathing embodiment of its story?

Well my first instinct is to say that if you've spent countless hours creating the story without thinking in terms of the unique advantages and limitations of the medium, you are doing things in the wrong order. To some extent you have to make choices about what you write based on what will work best in the form you have chosen. _The Grapes of Wrath_, for example, would never have worked as a computer game because players don't generally like being assigned a PC with an IQ of 80. The reason heroic warriors and mages are incredibly cliche main charcters in games is that these types of characters are good at solving physical problems with strategic use of force, which is probably the easiest exciting type of gameplay to design and implement - these types of characters are naturally suited to carry out the type of activities given to a player within a game. So basically, if you are going to write the story for a game, from the very beginning you should be thinking of it as the story for a game, imagining it being told in cut-scenes and dialogue interspersed with gameplay.

So, let's rephrase your question a bit Technogoth: "When outlining a game story and creating a storyboard describing how the story will be presented to your audience, what are your design goals? (immersiveness? atmosphere? teaching a moral?) What principles and methods of design will get you to these goals?" Is that what you want to know?

The prompt
Paraphrasing TechnoGoth's original post:

Given an existing story, how do you use game as the medium to deliver the story? Do you just use cutscenes? How do you use the gameplay itself to tell the story? What other methods do you use? How do you make the story 'alive'?

This was the question, right?

The short answer is to have the player play it.


Playing the story

Quote: Well my first instinct is to say that if you've spent countless hours creating the story without thinking in terms of the unique advantages and limitations of the medium, you are doing things in the wrong order.

This is not necessarily true. But I agree that the gameplay should go first in the creation of the story.

When you look at the campaigns in RTS (such as starcraft), I am pretty sure that the story is created with a very good idea of what the gameplay is. Take the story in starcraft for example, the story can be divided into chapters that feature missions and battles. The story is designed to have the playable part and the 'cutscene' parts.

In starcraft, there is an additional property of gameplay consistency, where the story is designed for fixed gameplay and interface. In every 'chapter', the player will command units, to attack, defense, etc, as part of the story. This property is not always present. In some games, the player is required to do different things for different chapters. For example, in one chapter the player needs to fight arcade style, and in another chapter the player needs to race like in a racing game. Games that are derived from movies tend to exhibit more gameplay inconsistency because the designer is trying to use the game to tell a fixed story with diverse situations.


The remaining question
When you divide a story into the Why, What, and How parts, it becomes obvious that the How parts can be done in gameplay, as long as the How's are interesting to play. The remain question, therefore, is how to 'animate' the What and Why parts.

Examples of ways to animate the What and Whys: instead of telling the player directly the situation, have the player observe the and piece the situation together; instead of simply showing Why the player needs to do certain thing, give the player options and let the player reserve the intention.

[Edited by - Estok on March 6, 2005 5:14:06 PM]

Quote: Original post by sunandshadow
how the story will be presented to your audience

This is exactly the topic I wanted to discuss. How do you present the story to the audience? Movies and books don't confine the story telling to just dialog and dramatic scenes so why should we do this in games? What ideas to people have to bring a games story into the game instead of keeping it locked up into cut scenes and dialog at key points.

Imprecise story carriers

Quote: What ideas to people have to bring a games story into the game instead of keeping it locked up into cut scenes and dialog at key points?

For this part of the question, the bottleneck is not on sending end but the receiving end. Cutscenes and dialogues are the most accurate carriers of the story. When you deviate from using these carriers, the transmission of the story becomes more prone to misinterpretations. This is a debate about delivering the intended story, or to allow the player to construct his own version at the receiving end.

In addition, the player is not always perceptive enough to recognize that a story is being told if the carrier deviates from cutscenes and dialogues. For example, when the story is carried by gameplay AI in an RTS, not all people would recognize that the story (personalities, motivations, thoughts) is being told in the conduction of in-game events. While gameplay as a carrier allows the player to experience the story, the player may not perceive the existence of such transmission, and even if the player is able to perceive the carrier, it might be misinterpreted. In this perspective, for delivering the intended story, the cutscenes and dialagues are not the only carriers (may not even be the main carrier), but serve to scynchronize the transmission of the story among the channels at key points to eliminate the disturbances.

Other carriers includes terrain, sound, events, actions, etc... For example, when you come across some strange monuments in an MMORPG, there is not cutscene or dialogue popping up saying, "wow, I wonder what these monuments are for". The transmission relies on the motivation and curiosity at the receiving end. It is up to the player to fill in the gap: "I want to know more about them", "I don't give a damn about them", "There is probably some rare items hidden behind these monuments."


The non-cutscene and non-dialogue carriers are there already. While the effects of the alternative carriers are evident, is the player consciously aware of them? Does the player need to be conscious of them?

Hmm, let's see if we can list all the ways of conveying info to a player during a game:

- Words
- - Narration (Written on the screen, in a dialogue box, even painted or inscribed on an object in the game. Think of the intro to Star Wars.)
- - Dialogue (Anything spoken, thought, or written by a character.)

- Icons (In-between words and images, icons include pictorial signs, images in thought bubbles, and other symbolic pictures such as runes and tattoos.)

- Images
- - Design (Many of the elements of character design have symbolic meaning and should be chosen to communicate that character's personality. The same goes for location design, item design, etc.)
- - Animation (Whether you are using FMVs or scripted-scenes, characters body language, facial expression, setting, and prop objects can all be animated to communicate what is currently happening and what emotional significance these events should have.

- Music (Character and location theme songs, songs for particular events, and sound effects are good at communicating emotional tone.)



So, in trying to present your story to your audience, you can use all of these elements. How should you use them? Well, it depends on what you're trying to do. Personally I like the approach of making the world itself communicate interactively with the player - e.g. information-containing sound effects, written materials the player can read, NPCs who speak to the player, and little FMVs or music that get triggered when the player enters an area, accomplishes an in-game objective, etc.

To demonstrate what I meant by imprecise story carriers, here is a story with no cutscenes, no dialogues, and no written words:


You were a young pilgrim in feudual japan, the game itself is about your life in the setting. You were on your pilgrimage across the land. As part of your training, you were not allowed to speak. At one point in the game, you arrived at the ruin of a village that was overrun by a warlord. In the burning wreckage, you found the bodies of the peaceful villagers that you had seen in during your previous visit. As part of the game options, you decided to inceinerate the bodies and pray for them. While doing so, you found an artifact, that was being protected under the corpse of a woman. There was the gift you have previously delivered to her in behave of her husband. As the bells of the staff whistled in prayer before the incineration, you wondered whether you should return the gift. You wondered whether there was something you could do about the war. You wondered whether the true meaning of your training was to remain silent, or to understand when to break the silence.


This delivery is imprecise, because the player is not explicitly led to think about the issues. For instant, some players would not have helped the delivery in the first place, some might not have thought that they could bury the bodies. It all depends on what the player interpret out of the events and the options. This implementation is appropriate because the message of the story is not about the exact events during the pilgrimage, but the meaning of the pilgrimage itself. The story is open ended in the sense that it allows the player to be content with whatever meaning the player can make out of it.

[Edited by - Estok on March 7, 2005 10:15:18 PM]

Quote: Original post by sunandshadow
Hmm, let's see if we can list all the ways of conveying info to a player during a game:

- Words
- - Narration (Written on the screen, in a dialogue box, even painted or inscribed on an object in the game. Think of the intro to Star Wars.)
- - Dialogue (Anything spoken, thought, or written by a character.)

- Icons (In-between words and images, icons include pictorial signs, images in thought bubbles, and other symbolic pictures such as runes and tattoos.)

- Images
- - Design (Many of the elements of character design have symbolic meaning and should be chosen to communicate that character's personality. The same goes for location design, item design, etc.)
- - Animation (Whether you are using FMVs or scripted-scenes, characters body language, facial expression, setting, and prop objects can all be animated to communicate what is currently happening and what emotional significance these events should have.

- Music (Character and location theme songs, songs for particular events, and sound effects are good at communicating emotional tone.)


So, in trying to present your story to your audience, you can use all of these elements. How should you use them? Well, it depends on what you're trying to do. Personally I like the approach of making the world itself communicate interactively with the player - e.g. information-containing sound effects, written materials the player can read, NPCs who speak to the player, and little FMVs or music that get triggered when the player enters an area, accomplishes an in-game objective, etc.

Looks like a good list sunandshadow the only one I would add is:

Atmosphere - Includes lighting, special effects, sound effects, and placement of other elements within a scene. These all serve to establish and maintain the mood for the current scene.

Now that we have a list of base categories why don't we subdivide them in to different elements, so that we can better define and explore each particular delivery method. Perhaps, people could include a couple of examples of how emotion and message can be delivered to the player through that element.

Atmosphere:
Lighting - The lighting for a scene as well as the source of that lighting. Methods for portraying this include flashes of lightning, sunlight shining through a stain glass window, or a flicking halogen lamp. Lighting can be used to alter a player’s perspective on a scene without changing the other elements within the scene.

A hallway the player passes along many times peacefully can be transformed into an area of fear by making it completely dark except for a solitary halogen light flicking in the distance. A sudden moment of tension can be enhanced by shutting off this light just before hand.

Special effects - Special Effects includes a large number of effects these may by weather effects such as wind and rain, or they could be tangible representations of other elements.

You come across the burnout remnants of your former home town, a few embers still remain in the burnout frames of your childhood home. A top a pile of corpses of your former friends a solitary torn banner flickers in the wind, and as you draw closer it begins to rain. The special effects can be used in this scene to increase the players feeling of loss, and tragedy.

Sound effects - Like music and lighting, sound effects can be used to alter a player’s perspective on a scene. The power of sound effects can only increase as the popularity of 3d sound increases.

Consider the hallway again. The sense of tension can be further increased by making the scene completely silent except for the echoing footsteps of the player. The tension is temporally decreased by the hum of the halogen light as they draw closer to it and then increases again when the light goes out and the sound stops.

Placement of Objects - These is not just the type of objects which is a separate category but where they are placed within a scene. Where you place objects can go a long way into determining how the player will perceive that scene and their interpretation of the message you are trying to convey. Placing objects near related objects establishes a relationship in the players mind while separating them implies separation and space.

If the player comes across a town where everyone is dead then placement of bodies can be used to lead the player to particular assumptions as to what happened. If bodies are found around tables and other instance of people going about their daily life then a sinister means of death can be inferred they might have been poised or suffered a similar fate. While bodies laid out in definite patterns could imply a form of ritualistic massacre.


I’d like to further define and discuss the other elements perhaps we can hash out a guide to portraying story in games that members of gameDev.net could use.

Say you need to convey the fact that Tom is estranged from his family.

It could be stated - through dialogue, a letter, etc.
Character X: "Did you hear? Tom's parents have disowned him."

It could be shown in the background while the player is doing something else.
Have Tom's parents throw him out while the player is passing his house. Because it's happening on the sidelines, it might not seem very important, but they'll still notice it.

It could be shown when the player has nothing else to do but watch, ie, a cutscene or cutsequence.
Have Tom's parents throw him out after you remove control from the player. Because the player isn't distracted, this could have more of an effect.

It could be played through.
Involve the player in the quarrel - maybe he has to try to get the family back together.


We have all the tools available to film makers, but we have more considerations. In games, those tools are used for delivering the story and for playing the game.

Say I have to jump from rock to rock across a raging river, while my friend waits anxiously on the other side. A close up of his face would drive home the precariousness of my situation - but the effect would be lost on me if it caused me to get a game over because I couldn't see what I was doing.

Zennith seems to have a better grasp of the advantage of game as a medium. TechnoGoth and SS had only reiterated the list of techniques common to other media. I would have assumed that those are common knowledge, because these techniques are commonly used in cutscenes and level designs.

The edges that are unique to games are interaction, self-expression, and choices. And these can be the carriers of a story.

On the other hand:


How would you make the player feel brave about certain action, through dialogues, cutscenes, atmosphere, and gameplay?

In general, movies and books cannot create this emotion in the audience directly. The audience might feel, "wow, the main character is brave," or "I can feel the courage presented in the situation," but not, "wow, I am brave." It is because courage requires initiation, risk, and decision, which do not exist in media such as books and movies. Games, on the other hand, provides those channels through gameplay.

[Edited by - Estok on March 8, 2005 12:50:32 PM]