http://www.ffwdweekly.com/Issues/2004/0401/game.htm

Quote: "Yet Hollywood-backed games best illustrate the primary difference between the two mediums. Whereas movies are a visual depiction of a story, video games are the physics and environment of one. The Lord of the Rings games, for instance, recreate scenes from the films to minute detail, but have only a superficial semblance of their camaraderie and character development. Without the movies or books, the games come across as a series of unconnected battles. The story is just an arbitrary framework for the action."

Actually, the last line is true of almost ALL games. The story is little more than bookends for the action, ie. many wargames > briefing, fight the battle > results. The story is just a way to make the battle more meaningful to the player ie. it isn't just another mission, but you are motivated to fight and protect the village. However, the end result doesn't often reflect (ie. incorporate) anything that you've done in the course of the battle. Story is just additional "interest" for the action. (That said I think that Doom 3 was less good than it could have been due to repetitive boring gameplay, cheap scares, and a lack of well written / logs - unlike System Shock 2's audio logs. . However, Super Mario World on GBA is still one of my favourite games ever due to the audio content, the graphics and the sheer FUN of playing it.) If a game is FUN does it matter that it is very abstract? Or based on a very flimsy justification ie. the princess has been captured rescue her. Do stories matter? However, if you want to incorporate a human element (ie. represent other characters and make a convincing and moving experience, maybe a type of story is important). EDIT: So how can we change the structure of games so that the story is tied into the action, and the action tied into the story? In either a linear game or a non-linear game. [Edited by - Ketchaval on April 17, 2005 2:37:59 PM]

Warren Spector points out what I'm trying to say rather more eloquently, which is that in most games story exists as an attempt to fluff out the gameplay and make it seem more grounded. Problem is that many games have stories that kind of pointless and seen it all before IE. the aliens are invading kill them all!, they don't suggest anything beyond themselves.

http://www.gamespy.com/articles/596/596223p2.html

Quote:
Spector jumped back into the conversation here and said that one of the biggest things that good stories do is that they give the participant "a feeling that the story is about more than just the story." Spector wants gameplay to have some meaning. If you read the Lord of the Rings books, they're not about the big battles. They're about people, trust, fear and hope. He says that the industry needs to strive for more. "A subtext once in a while!" he grumbles.

So can games be about more than just battle sequences, and eye candy?
Does the Lord of the Rings provide a good template for making a marketable and subtle game, ie. by having both character and meaning, but cool battles and adventure.

[Edited by - Ketchaval on April 20, 2005 4:42:57 PM]

Let's look beyond the framework of a video-game for a moment and analyze what 'story' is and how it relates to action.

In life we have actions - these actions can be self defining, can affect people, and can change the course of the world. Everything we do is an action - but you don't need to be told that, you do them because you're driven by the events in your life.

We all understand causality and the concept that all actions are reactions of more original reactions - and while I'm not here to make a philosophical debate concerning the existence of choice - the idea is that our reactions to other reactions are driven by our personal individuality - essentially who we are.

The idea of 'who' is not action based. The concept of 'why' is not action based. Not on the scope that we're analyzing action.

Who and Why are substance. The 'what' that which we are doing the action upon, is relevant only in the framework of the who and why.

Story gives the who and the why and the what. Story gives substance.

You play Mario because you've already generated your own why. Because you like playing it - and that can work if the game is good.

Super space monkey invaders where alien apes stage a coup at the white house and it's your job to play through side scroll level after side scroll level to defeat all the green primates does not provide us with profound substance. The substance or story is simple for the fact that some people expect a story - no matter what. Even Mario has a flimsy little foo story - I must save the princess in another castle. That's not YOUR why - you've made up your own why.

But, I think as writers, we have an opportunity to provide real substance. To create profound whys - and this profundity is not going to be found in a basic intro story - the profundity is going to be found when we as writers generate within our audience a NEW why. When we MAKE our players choose to continue the game a certain way because they're driven by our SUBSTANCE - we will have done our jobs.

But, on a larger scale, that's what writing is supposed to be about - it's supposed to be an art of substance that affects on a deeper level our audience - our readers - our players.

If a game has a simple intro 'foo' story - and that's it, then everything else WILL rely on the gameplay - because that's the only part generating the WHY in our players.

If you can't provide this profound experience for your player through the substance of your writing, then you've failed.

- Dan

Yeah, it depends on your content. Ie. adding an (irrelevant) story to a simple linear platform game where you jump on enemies heads won't work very well.

But if the game itself is providing an "experience" consider the non-linearity and atmosphere of the Metroid games, or the feeling of Another World / Flashback / Prince-of-Persia. These are nominally platform games, but they are also a kind of quest.

And Half-Life is praised for its story, no one says that stories are irrelevant to FPS games anymore. Likewise a story can work in a platform game.

Imagine a game where you crash-land on an alien planet, and have to negotiate the environment to try and get the necessary things to repair your ship. If this was semi-non-linear it could give the feeling of being stranded on an alien planet. The environment itself could seem to be against you. Ie. Think of the fun environmental puzzles in Half-Life, where things collapsed, things flooded etc. The same could be done in a 2d game.

050305

I'm not entirely certain how (though I have been working on it for awhile) stories are tied into the structure of action when some paradox is involved as the game you design become more and more sophisticated.

Story is often the basis for action (because conflict is story [the funny thing here is that many will also say character is story; showing the interchangeability of plot structuralization. All are valid with me when it comes to the goals of storytelling]), whereas in some game (many games in fact) the story is grounding fill in like Spector said, helps with engagement and continuation of gameplay when utilized in cut scenes and intro animatics/cinematics, or most of the time, just a concept that can be gotten easily ("Aliens invade and save the world please") and not a lot of dimensionalization of character or plot is required. The story is clear, bring on the bosses, I've got my frag mentality loaded.

An the Stanford game lecture series on "Do Games need stories?" The overall expert symposium concluded that they don't. This must include the 'surrender authorial control to the player' notion, and there are several cases in especially online games where the player, and players, do create their own stories and quests and adventures to explore, discover and play with in the sandbox the game designers have created, and that is that, no further storytelling needed, or, subtle changes at the gameworld level in terms of expanding the design logically suggest several possible stories to be extrapolated and explored by the player or players because the architecting of the design permits this kind of broad leeway.

I also believe that the type of game you are designing is a factor. Adventure games like mine are story dependent in some senses because without reference to the original conflict and mystery design within the plot, advancement to the victory condition would be much harder, and fun leaves the play experience, boredome enters, and there goes the game loop init impulsive choice upon the part of the consumer. I think because it is true games don't need stories, some degree of dependency, whether greater or lesser, may not need to exist at all. I do suggest that while games do not need stories, people often do.

Other types of games don't need this at all, so in some cases, there's no need for a discussion pro or con even to exist.

I believe there is an economic factor buried here, in that since culture and the populations within it who consume entertainment, have been weaned, raised and staunchly standing by their linear entertainment consumption choices (books, film, TV) for generations now, and that these formats are or can be quite story dependent, this 'tried and true' formula for consumption is a helpful bridge in brining greater and greater numbers of consumers to games. I see it as both a trasitional device and an anchor for the type of consumer that may not feel comfortable with yet, or, does not possess the active mind necessary for continous authoring (which, speaking as a professional writer, requires a lot of mental work to create, refine and sustain) in a truly interactive environment.

Read: consumers don't want to work, they want to have fun, at least in our business's product environment. The opposite of this is of course, the serious game, and that is another field and thread altogether.

I suggest maybe some of the answer to this question lies in the difference between true interactivity and designed response, of which a lot of games are comprised of the latter and not the former, and in a designed response, a story is perhaps (I'm not sure but I think so) an essential or if not essential, important structural element.

Stories also possess an amazing power. Over history, doctrine, method, approach and technique from medicine, art, architecture, religion and you practically name it has been attached to story, parable, poem and oratorical tradition. It used to be pen and paper, carbon copy, and FTP. It's hard to give up that tool again that is so entrenched culturall and civilizationally, is so widely used and facilitated by all levels of society, and, frankly, helps sell whatever you are selling, whether religion or snake oil. Hard to abandon loyalty to a communication method that has worked so well for so long to a medium where it's not always required.

All of a sudden, mythic stories, and their power to persuade, teach, sell, control and entertain are absent. The player is now responsible for the faculty to enable these things, and they find out quickly how that is quite a workload if you want a reasonable quality.

Designers can help this workload with setting, oppositional force (a primary component of conflict, if you subscribe to the notion that story is conflict), characterization choice selection upon the part of the player (are you a paladin, cleric, wizard, soldier, pilot, scientist, etc.), again, all tools of dramaturgy, but the work is still upon the player's part with this medium in a lot of cases. This was easy to author when the scenario was pong, missile command, and FPS's.

There is another factor here, a human factor, I suggest. Stories are mythic. They tell us an array of things from the story of jesus, bhudda, siddartha, willy lohman, spongebob squarepants, on and on and on. Humans crave the myth factor because exploration and discovery of the unknown (or more precisely that which is beyond our normality, which is mundane and pendantic a lot of the time) allows us escape from the mundane while simultaneously safely letting us explore deeper questions philosophically and vicariously through the actions of the hero or antihero. People are not going to let go of their cultural anchors so easily, and perhaps I have just touched on an aspect of progressivism itself.

In games, or at least the games to come where more moral activity is explored (and the question remains still would that be fun, or would it be a serious game? The latter I think. And you will see, fun and serious are going to separate this business even further than it already has. Anybody at the Serious Games Summit at GDC this year at least got a whiff of the writing on the wall - no pun intended to those who were there and saw the paper at the back of the hall where game designers scratched out ideas to send to Washington) you will see stories spawning all over the place, with description being substituted with situational interaction.

Remember a duologue with an NPC is an interaction just as solving the final victory condition for a long, huge gameworld is an interaction just as the decision process an individual player undergoes mentally to make an action mechanic decision within a level is an interaction (the last one goes on inside the head of the player, and is part of the engagement process of interactivity), so what I am driving at here is that when you surrender authorial control to a player individually, the degree of fun they will have is reciprocal to the amount of work they are willing to do, have the ability to do (trust me, after fourty years of writing experience, there is not a story inside of everyone, there is an excellent storytelling skill set which when personalized, is often mistaken for a personal story, and given our natural predelection for self aggrandizement, we can sure make a good convincing telling of the tale out of it.) and this condition is effected as well by whether it is an individual experience or a multiplayer experience where story decision choices can be argued back and forth as a function of action choice amongst a group of peers, that group having it's own heirarchy of individuals within a group.

I think all the time about the 'player as archetype' area, ever since I read a gama article about how there were no mirrors in HL2, and the player never saw themselves. There are a lot of dimensions to this suggestion to be explored, and it sure is a lot of artistic and philosophical fun doing so, for my part.

So in the end, whether a non linear or linear game that you design, what you are designing will ultimately determine how much, or how little story you put into the design. In my game, there is a lot of it, but I have tried to make it fun, not a bunch of stuff to have to remember. It's been quite a design challenge.

IMHO,
Adventuredesign