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Storytelling In Games and the Use of Narration
Posted by
Soulskill
on Thu May 07, 2009 11:36 PM
from the first-game-to-use-morgan-freeman-will-make-a-mint dept.
from the first-game-to-use-morgan-freeman-will-make-a-mint dept.
MarkN writes "The use of story in video games has come a long way, from being shoehorned into a manual written for a completed game to being told through expensive half-hour cut scenes that put gameplay on hold. To me, the interesting thing about story in games is how it relates the player to the game; in communicating their goals, motivating them to continue, and representing their role as a character in the world. This article talks about some of the storytelling techniques games have employed, and in particular the different styles of narration that have been used to directly communicate information about a story, and how that affects the player's relation to their character and the degree of freedom they're given to shape the story themselves."
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Welcome back. (Score:2, Informative)
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Welcome back to Slashdot. ;)
Glad to see somebody was quick on the "universal fixit button".
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Wait, did we just 'slashdot' Slashdot?
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Well what did they expect, trying to host it on an Amiga?
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Could be worse. They could have hosted in on a Vista machine. An Amiga 4000 with 800 megahertz PowerPC is still faster than that. (ducking and running)
Ultima II, Karateka and Questron! (Score:2, Interesting)
P.S. Welcome back Slashdot
Not sure what this was about but it didnt sound healthy:
Error 503 Service Unavailable
Service Unavailable
Guru Meditation:
XID: 275099066
Varnish
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Freemanic Paracusia (Score:3, Funny)
http://xkcd.com/462// [xkcd.com]
Re:Freemanic Paracusia (Score:5, Funny)
For great justice.
Parent
Yes, I RTFA (Score:5, Insightful)
Many games spread out their chunks of story like breadcrumbs for the player to follow, in between somewhat repetitive sessions of gameplay; the continuation of the story serves almost as a reward for getting through more of the game.
When I read this, all I could think was "Assassin's Creed". Don't get me wrong, I thoroughly enjoyed the game and are eagerly the release of its sequel, but it was ridiculously repetitive.
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Re:Yes, I RTFA (Score:5, Insightful)
Cut scenes don't belong in RPGs either. They should tell the story through the game rather than tacking it on for passive consumption.
Games are not a passive medium. You need to get players involved in the story, rather than making them a passive audience to a crappy movie.
Cut scenes need to die.
Parent
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You mean like the classic Pirates game? There's not much story there, but the outcomes such as whether you court a beautiful daughter and retire as a governor, or end-up single and penniless, are determined by how much success you see in your treasure-hunting and ship-to-ship battles.
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You hit the nail on the head. For games like Final Fantasy, Parasite Eve, or Eternal Darkness (gamecube), the story is the reason you play. It's like an interactive movie. But for games like shooters, the story is often so lame and pathetic you just want to get back to the game.
And oftentimes the game itself is lame too. I miss the 80s and early 90s when games had to be good to hold your attention - graphics were too poor to serve as a substitute, so the play was the thing that mattered the most.
Basica
Narrative rules in games (Score:5, Insightful)
Games need to be 'told' like a story, and follow similar rules of development, plot structure, and the like. One problem developers face is that while changing a few lines in a written story are easy, changing a scene in a game can be quite an undertaking. So, the narrative of a game needs to be fairly mature before you start building scenes from it.
Game can 'jump the shark'.
Probably the most famous jump-the-shark moment in gaming (for me at least) was when we rented a copy of Daikatana to laugh at ._. for the N64. The opening has the main character jumping up and balancing on an out held sword. *shakes head* Romero, wtf were you thinking? It's cheesy every time they do it in anime too.
One of the biggest strengths of games is the ability for choices to mean something, and for alternate endings to bloom. Chrono Trigger is a big one for me, to go back and play it through all over again, the story is rich and wonderful, and experience a few different endings here and there.
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Games need to be 'told' like a story
Like, lets say, Left 4 Dead? Yeah, great story: "Here is your gun, there are zombies, guess what". And it is one of funnier games I've played recently. We should abandon the idea of games being a form of art, and retake them as a funny way to spend time.
And you should stop assuming you're the standard (Score:5, Interesting)
Each time I read something like that... I can't help getting the picture of someone with his head so far up his rear end that he assumes that he's not just a representative sample of 1 for the whole gamer population, and indeed world, but verily _the_ prototype from which all others were moulded. And if, god forbid, they happen to like something else, they must be deluded in some way.
Guess what? We all play games "as a funny way to spend time." You're not revealing some great wisdom to anyone, you just reveal your own disconnect from the real world. The idea that someone actually tries to play games as some form of art _as_ _opposed_ to actually having fun, and to the exclusion of actually having fun, is a delusion that exists only in the imagination of fanboys. Again: we _all_ play games "as a funny way to spend time."
We just find different things fun. Some like to read a book, some like to watch a movie, and some like their stories in a more interactive form. And then some others seem to genuinely like mindlessly mowing down gazillions of NPCs just for score/level/whatever. (And who am I to say there's anything wrong with it?) Different things for different people. That's all.
Parent
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Zoey: "Hey, I wonder what's over here."
Francis: "Damnit, I was beginning to like Louis."
Bill: "Dammit Zoey, get out of my way!"
Francis: "What's this then?"
Zoey: "Oh god, Francis!"
Bill: "Quiet, witch!"
Louis: "Stay with me you guys!"
Louis: "What's that?"
*gurgling noises as Louis is killed by the Witch*
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Actually, Left 4 Dead does have a story of sorts. It's never explicitly spelled out to the player or told in glamorous cutscenes. But sometime, sit down and play through the game looking around.
In the safe rooms, you'll find graffiti messages from people looking for loved ones or giving advice to the travelers behind them. There's posters from some organization called CEDA that give advice on what to do if you've been infected.
Outside, you'll find things like single bodies covered with a sheet. Why woul
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Huh...I never considered all of that.
L4D is going to have a very new appeal for me the next time I play. Thank you!
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One of the biggest strengths of games is the ability for choices to mean something, and for alternate endings to bloom. Chrono Trigger is a big one for me, to go back and play it through all over again, the story is rich and wonderful, and experience a few different endings here and there.
And that is why making good stories with games is rather difficult.
We either find a few scenarios for completing the story, however even with a few scenarios it falls down to the following issues.
The Old Sierra Game/Infoco
PhD Thesis on a Similar Subject (Score:5, Interesting)
If you want to have a read of something a bit more meaty, try this thesis (title: VIDEO GAME VALUES:
PLAY AS HUMAN-COMPUTER INTERACTION):
http://www.pippinbarr.com/academic/phd.php [pippinbarr.com]
Not quite the same subject, but it does deal with narrative a tiny bit (e.g. section 5.3.3).
p.s. this guy managed to score an Xbox and PS2 for "research purposes", which were (and probably still are) enjoyed by many in the graduate lab.
challenge: storyline for donkey kong (Score:5, Insightful)
TFA makes it sound like nobody thought storylines were important initially; but in the days of Donkey Kong, were non-superficial storylines even possible? With such repetitive gameplay, could good storyline exist?
Maybe the more creative out there could enlighten me. Can you make a good storyline for Donkey Kong?
(Oh no! Kong found more barrels! Again!)
The Ballad of Jumping Jack (Score:4, Interesting)
In the early days of the Sinclair ZX Spectrum, Jumping Jack had a narrative delivered in a non trivial way. You would unfold a poem, line by line after completing each level. This [youtube.com] is how it was delivered through gameplay, and this [everything2.com] is the whole poem. (I'd never seen it complete before today! Thanks for making me remember).
Is a limmerick a non-superficial story? The only thing I know, it did get you wanting to know which was the next line...
Parent
Re:challenge: storyline for donkey kong (Score:4, Interesting)
TFA makes it sound like nobody thought storylines were important initially; but in the days of Donkey Kong, were non-superficial storylines even possible? With such repetitive gameplay, could good storyline exist?
Maybe the more creative out there could enlighten me. Can you make a good storyline for Donkey Kong?
(Oh no! Kong found more barrels! Again!)
You really have to make a distinction between simplistic arcade games and what we're able to do now. But as I recall, they did do a Donkey Kong Jr. game with a storyline and there's all the Mario incarnations.
If we compare it to cinema, Donkey Kong would be the early nickelodeons playing silent, extremely short shorts. NES games would be the equivalent of the silent film era and then we move right in to today. Just as story became more and more important in making a good movie, same goes with games. But we also see movies and games where that is completely ignored. With certain movies, it doesn't seem to hurt. Transformers is probably one of the worst movies I have ever seen, and when factoring in the massive budget involved in making such a shitburger, it's even less excusable. It was an insult to thinking men and women everywhere. But thinking people weren't the intended audience. That sucker did business like crazy. There's a sequel coming out promising to be even worse than the first. It'll do well, I'm sure. Still, it would have been better with a script.
Parent
Re:challenge: storyline for donkey kong (Score:5, Insightful)
How could you have missed the psychological depth of Manic Miner, a man driven to go ever further surmounting ever harder and ever more dangerous obstacles, the tragic drama of Pac Man, a caricature of a man, forever trapped in a maze pursued by unrelenting foes.
Did you not saw the deep sociological implications of the hive-like mind of the aliens in Space Invaders having unbounded persistence and yet never faltering and never deviating from their group dance.
Did your hearty not skip a beat at the drama of the ball in Pong, unable to follow a path other than that which was set by others it's destiny in the hands of two conflicting personalities.
Parent
Has this guy played a game since 2000? (Score:2)
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The reason games pre-1985 rarely came with stories was due to the memory limitations. Most games didn't have more than one repeating screen so the purpose, like darts, was simply to see how many points you could get. Donkey Kong's great "innovation" was that it had 4 different screens. Seriously, the magazines at the time made a big deal about it - and of course other games like Ms. Pacman quickly copied the innovation.
That doesn't mean games were entirely story-free. In the 1970s Atari developed Superm
Planescape:Torment (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Planescape:Torment (Score:4, Insightful)
Torment does right what so many other games do wrong when it comes to story. Cutscenes (or its precursor, story in a seperate manual) don't do it for me, because it seperates story from gameplay. I want story to be the game.
Perhaps what I'm looking for is not storytelling, which implies a passive audience, but storyexperiencing. I want to be part of it, and only a few games (including Torment and Star Control 2) got that right. With most other games, the story is just too much removed from the gameplay that I just don't care.
Parent
Re:Planescape:Torment (Score:4, Informative)
That's exactly not what Torment is. It's a mostly dialogue-driven game that delivers the story through its main mechanism: dialogue. That's the problem with story in many other games: the story is kept outside the actual game, and that makes the story irrelevant. Torment is all about story.
Parent
"Homeworld" (Score:4, Interesting)
That is all.
Portal (Score:5, Insightful)
Portal had what I felt was an interesting way of telling the story. The "narrator" was mostly there to explain the rather quirky gameplay. Only in the later levels did she become part of the story.
Much of Portal's story is in objects you find in optional areas of the game world - secret rooms you find behind walls. You only see the objects in the 3D world and have to read them yourself to understand their storywise meaning; nothing with them is directly narrated.
In the end, your knowledge of the story is entirely inferred from vague clues and events you find throughout the game.
Linear, but well done (Score:2)
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Came a long way, has a long way to go (Score:2)
Storytelling in games is one thing, GOOD storytelling games is still another one. Now, considering what we now get in movies, game stories get closer and closer to movie stories, but sadly not because the game stories get better.
There's also still the problem of replay value. Cutscenes are expensive to make. And you watch it ONCE. Maybe a few times if it's good and/or funny. But then, you skip.
Marathon (Score:3, Informative)
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http://marathon.bungie.org/temp/cmullins.html [bungie.org]
We all know that (Score:3, Informative)
the best ever Game Story started like this:
You're a marine, one of Earth's toughest, hardened in combat and trained for action. Three years ago, you assaulted a superior officer for ordering his soldiers to fire upon civilians. He and his body cast were shipped to Pearl Harbor, while you were transferred to Mars, home of the Union Aerospace Corporation.
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What about the game story of "Go rescue the princess who has been captured by King Koopa?" That one was pretty good too.
*Not* telling the story can work too (Score:4, Interesting)
Oblig... (Score:5, Interesting)
Famous quote attributed to John Carmack: "The plot in a video game is just like the plot in a porn movie -- merely an excuse to get to the action."
Re:Oblig... (Score:5, Insightful)
Yeah, and he makes his games accordingly, but some people enjoy games with more depth.
I always thought of games as being divided into two categories:
The skill based ones which most online games fall into, where you get your reward by beating an opponent, proving that you are more capable.
And there's the story-based ones when, like a good movie or a book, and sometimes the gameplay is just something you do to get farther along in the story.
Some games use singleplayer as one aspect and multiplayer as the other, some have a good balance of both aspects, but a lot are either in one category or the other.
I enjoy both on occasion and I think that quote is a pretty narrow way to think of it.
I enjoyed the original doom games and they were pretty good for the time, I also enjoyed Quake 3 Arena as a skill game, but I think id has been making pretty boring games since then with terrible storylines.
Parent
It's all about dropping juicy details (Score:2)
Why do we stay up way too late reading a gripping book? Because the author is dropping little tidbits we really want to know. We keep reading because we just know the answer is no the next page.
The worst games I've played dole out the storyline like it cost a million bucks and most of it is filler or, a real sin in RPG's, stupid goblin nose quests. They could have just as easily had the quest tied into a major part of the plot but they didn't.
The best games tie that story in there tight and everything keeps
Good storytelling in (fairly) recent games (Score:2)
I've seen quite a few games over the last couple of years that have really impressed me through the way they tell their story. In particular:
Lost Odyssey - not the fairly standard Japanese RPG fare that makes up most of the game, but rather the text narrative used for the dreams. Very minimalist - just animated text on an almost static abstract background with a few ambient sounds, but they covered an impressive range of scenarios and even genres. A few were genuinely well-written, even by the standards of
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Is this really the problem? Are there too many games that have good story and bad gameplay? It seems to me that (even among 'top ranked games') bad stories seem to outnumber the good stories by a pretty absurd margin.
Heck, I'd even put the venerable halflife on the side of "good gameplay, bad story." Seriously - the story was just 'oops, we made a teleporter and now aliens are coming out.' That's basically the same story as DOOM... The only reason it was so awesome story-wise is because they TOLD their
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Heck, I'd even put the venerable halflife on the side of "good gameplay, bad story." Seriously - the story was just 'oops, we made a teleporter and now aliens are coming out.' That's basically the same story as DOOM... The only reason it was so awesome story-wise is because they TOLD their crappy story in an extremely well-done way.
That's actually what good story is about: telling it well. Lots of really great classic stories would have been lame if told by an idiot. A good storyteller can make the lamest story exciting.
Of course a truly original and innovative plot would be nice, but those are rare in Hollywood and even in books. Most are about telling some lame cliche in a new, exciting and/or interesting way.