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Games Entertainment

What Every Dev Needs To Know About Story 75

Posted by Zonk from the don't-tell-a-boring-one dept.
Gamasutra has a feature up discussing important lessons that game developers should know about storytelling. From the article: "The first attempts to make movies into real stories failed. They failed because they were conceived as filmed plays. A camera would be set up about where an audience member would sit in the middle of a theater, and the play would ensue. It didn't work. Early film makers didn't take into account that the human eye wanders all over the fixed box of the stage during a play, and a camera that does any less will bore the film audience to tears. They also hand discovered the rich tool set of camera angles, close-ups, far shots, and all the language of film we now take for granted. Generally speaking, they hadn't discovered what this particular story form was good at. And frankly, neither have we in games. "
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What Every Dev Needs To Know About Story

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  • I give you 30 years. (Score:3, Interesting)

    by jolande ( 852630 ) on Thursday July 28, 2005 @04:29PM (#13189547)
    I give you 30 years. 30 years from now people will consider video games (at least some of them) fine artwork. It took a long time for people to accept movies as legitimate. Same with television, photography, etc. The same thing happens with every new medium. Eventually videogames will be adopted by the art world as a legitimate medium. It is really just a matter of time.

    • Re:I give you 30 years. (Score:1, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward
      I think most people still don't consider the great film achievements the same thing as a Leonardo or a Michaelangelo. Film has a lot more legitimacy than it did but the inherently commercial nature of it could prevent it from ever being accepted the way the Classic Masters are.

      Video games right now seem to be begging for the kind of legitimacy film has, but I think they should be aiming higher. A wise man once advised me that I would do much better to copy the same things my idols copied, rather than to
      • I think most people still don't consider the great film achievements the same thing as a Leonardo or a Michaelangelo. Film has a lot more legitimacy than it did but the inherently commercial nature of it could prevent it from ever being accepted the way the Classic Masters are.

        Masterpieces of any art form, be it painting, music, sculpture, or theater, all were inherently commercial ventures. Great paintings and sculptures were commissioned. Plays (even in ancient Greece) were funded by some benevolent
        • Masterpieces of any art form, be it painting, music, sculpture, or theater, all were inherently commercial ventures.

          Absolutely. Shakespeare wrote for the commoners, crude jokes and all. But great art, whether it's literary, visual, musical, etc. has depth. Let me know when video games merit the equivalent of literary criticism.

          • You're assuming literary criticism is valid. Remember Shakespear was panned by the critics of his time. So were Van Gogh and Rembrandt. Artistic criticism is taking what becomes popular and rationalizing it, it has no value in and of itself. If anything, the lack of literary criticism is a point in gamings favor.
            • While it's true that Shakespeare, Van Gogh and other great masters were panned by the critics at the time, there is still criticism of their works that takes place today. The criticism of the present may have more bias and more deconstructive ego, but the critical analysis of past works is what helps them endure for future generations and encourages the creation of new masterpieces.

              That's what is meant by "constructive criticism".
            • Add J.S. Bach to that list. While living he was considered an excellent organ player, but his compositions weren't recognized until after his death.

              (Waiting for some joke about the phrase "organ player")
          • They'll merit the equivalent of literary criticism when academics are allowed to write theses on videogames themselves, not just on videogames and psychological effects.
    • Television has existed for 70 years or whatever, and I still don't think it's art. Television has never asked for acceptance as art, nor has it ever given us any reason to view it as such.

      I expect something more like genres of music for which the "pinnacle" of the genre will be considered to be pretty early-on (I'm thinking 1986-1994 or so for video games, but that may be colored by my age). Video games will become art at some interval after which video game creators view themselves as artists and resp
      • Television is perfectly good art when people want it to be. See HBO for good examples of artful TV (eg. first season of Six Feet Under). Alternately, for the anime freaks, consider Neon Genesis Evangelion.

        Consider Simpsons, back in it's prime. Simpsons was the definition of TV that was both art and pop (like Shakespeare) - formulaic, yet creative; tasteless, yet deep; nostalgic, yet current; etc.
      • It's a mistake to capitalize Television as if it were some single tremendous, amoeba-like object. There are indeed artistic television shows -- The Prisoner jumps most readily to mind.

        But my point is, there are glimmers of art in most things if you're looking for them. And, even the "traditional" artistic media (painting, sculpture, music, dance) have their icky, mindlessly populist sides (Elvis on velvet + dogs playing poker, Precious Moments, Brittany Spears, Macarana).

        There are also artistic things tha
    • it kind of is like that now. I mean, my wife and I started playing Warcraft 3...and got so caught up in the story we just used the cheat codes to hurry through the levels to continue on with the story.

      Yeah, I know, this isn't quite what it should be. Should be a good story and good gameplay together. And Warcraft certainly has the good gameplay...as I went back afterwards and played it normally.
    • 30 more than they've already had?

      (Pong had the best story. Good vs. Evil. This line vs. That line!)
      • Let's be fair. Movies would've needed extra time too, if they had started off in black and white, with crappy sound and fuzzy graphics.

        Oh, wait. They did. Movies and video games are both falling into the same hole: the race for modern computer graphics. Just as we're attaining the possiblity of telling beautiful _and_ compelling stories, we're giving up and settling for flash and show.
    • We have videogames that are fine artwork now. Katamari Damacy arguably fits. Ico, likely. Warioware, probably. Parappa too (especially for the creative aspects to the game).

      There are others too, but it isn't often that games truly deserving of the adjective "artistic" become good sellers, for the same reasons that truly original games often don't become good sellers.

      Come to think of it, for exactly the same reason.

  • An Ancient Tradition (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Shadow Wrought ( 586631 ) <shadow.wrought@g ... minus herbivore> on Thursday July 28, 2005 @04:36PM (#13189614) Homepage Journal
    It is somewhat interesting to think about how deeply imbedded within us the concept of storytelling is. First, it was doen orally, came performances and the written word. From there we moved into movies (first silently and then with "talkies") and television. Now we are entering the genre of storytelling in which different people can play the same game and be told different stories. That's pretty amazing when you think of it. It is also kind of amazing that through all of these different iterations, it the fulfilliment of the basic human need of absorbing stories.

    Personally, I'm looking forward to experiencing the places that games take this ancient tradition.

    • Personally, I'm looking forward to experiencing the places that games take this ancient tradition.

      Straight to the gutter. But it'll be a bump-mapped gutter with photorealistic 1024x1024 textures! They'll be able to beautifully illustrate what're becoming the standard video game stories: "some famous guys play football," "a scantily clad woman shoots things," "a blonde man has angst and a big sword," etc.
      • Let's see... "some famous guys play football." Well, people have been able to watch that with the live or telvised mediums, so why not.

        "A scantily clad woman shoots things." Nope. Haven't seen that in the movies ever. And wouldn't pay to see it again.

        "A blonde man has angst and a big sword." Man, that sounds like a terrible premise for a story. Now where's my Conan books?

    • Re:An Ancient Tradition (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Pxtl ( 151020 ) on Thursday July 28, 2005 @05:26PM (#13190100) Homepage
      In that veign, today's mindless-but-story-driven action games will be looked back upon with the same twisted mix of disgust and amusement that black-and-white Ed Wood shlock and pulp horror films are today. Prior generations will be viewed as the experimental phase of the field - like when moving pictures were all tricks of optical illusions and video cameras were experimental toys, and silent films relied on bizarre creative tricks to convey meaning.

      Doom is the modern Wizard of Oz - an impressive technical achievement, and kinda fun - but kinda campy and stupid in hindsight. Perhaps Zork is the modern Metropolis? Idunno. Repetative Asian CRPGs are the modern Spaghetti Westerns?

      And MMOs. MMOs are a revolutionary destruction of the art into the lowest-common-denominator. MMOs are the modern sitcoms. WoW is the Cosby show.
      • Repetative Asian CRPGs are the modern Spaghetti Westerns?

        Somehow I don't think the phrase "Chow Mein Fantasies" will ever catch on.

      • Wizard of Oz (Score:3, Insightful)

        by DoctaWatson ( 38667 )
        I don't know that the Wizard of Oz is very analagous to Doom from a storytelling standpoint. The story of the Wizard of Oz was originally a book, and very likely a political-economic allegory.

        The story of Doom, on the other hand, is not only without a literary basis, but virtually non-existant in its own right.

        The "repetitive asian crpgs" is right on the money though. They're like a combination of Spagetti Western and Soap Operas with all sorts of freudian hardware (e.g. an angsty teenage boy with a 10 ft

  • The art of interactive design (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward
    The art of interactive design by Chris Crawfod [erasmatazz.com]
  • I enjoy plays because I can concentrate on what I want in a scene instead of being dragged there through cinematography and the same can be said with games where I control the view. If you begin forcing people to view things in a certain way you will distance those who like more control.
    • I don't think that the author is trying to say that games should be like movies. I think instead when he makes the comparison he is showing that games need to come into their own, much as movies had to do when they first came out.

      The author's point was that games, like movies, are a form of storytelling. What people need to do is to figure out what elements of cinematic storytelling work, what elements do not work, and what new elements exist that have not existed before. He uses movies simply because they

  • Better characters (Score:5, Insightful)

    by alvinrod ( 889928 ) on Thursday July 28, 2005 @04:39PM (#13189653)
    I think a lot of stories would be better if the games had better characters in them. I can't count the number of games that have turned me off because the protaginist acted like a whiny, angst-filled teen, or was in fact designed to act like this. RPGs seem to be most guilty of this.

    Why not give us an older mature character who already understands love, death, sacrifice, and other emotions and parts of life so I don't have to be drug through horribly written plot. I've gotten really sick of the main character in almost every RPG having some love interest that they're too afraid to approach.

    Give the characters good voice acting if you're going to give them voices. Granted with a weak script not even a good voice actor can do much with it, but at least make an effort. Bad voice acting leaves me hating the characters and wishing they would die. Good voice acting can really make a game though.

    Lunar:SSSC despite the simple graphics and the simple cliche story that has been done a thousand times over, had interesting characters with real personalities and excellent voice acting. To date, I think it's the best execution of a video game I've seen even though the graphics are sprites and the cutscene animation is hand drawn.

    • The whiny, angst-filled teen as central character in a video game actually makes sense as viewed through the paradigm of the Hero's Journey Joseph Campbell [jcf.org] in his most famouse work The Hero with a Thousand Faces [amazon.com]. After having to read the book and analyze it in high school english way back when, and then use it as the basis for literary analysis on a large number of other books, the basic point he is trying to get across is that every hero story is the same story: the story of coming of age, essentially pub

  • hit the nail right on the head (Score:5, Interesting)

    by MyDixieWrecked ( 548719 ) on Thursday July 28, 2005 @04:39PM (#13189660) Homepage Journal
    One problem that plagues the film industry is that every movie is a cookiecutter film. New ideas and new techniques are hard to come by.

    Why?

    Because it takes so much time, money, and effort to create one of these things. Same goes for games.

    MTV was a driving force in the creation of stylized films. It wasn't until the music video, where you had these independent directors and writers and film students creating these "small films" who were willing to experiment with new camera angles and new shooting techniques that you really got some interesting things going on with filmography. It cost so little $ (relative to feature films) that everyone was willing to experiment.

    The same goes for minigames. Sometimes, it's the minigames that make a game so good. It's the experimentation involved. You can sneak a couple of really risky gameplay elements (not risky like hot-coffee, risky like new game-mechanics!) into a couple of minigames and not affect the entire game.

    That's why games like warioware are so good. And that's why games that you can just pick up and play (like that kirby:CC game and a lot of the other DS games) have such great replay value.

    When more people experiment more with new types of gameplay in larger games, you'll have much better games.

    as an asside, a great, innovative (buzzword!) fighting game is Narutimet Hero for PS2; a japanese title. The best PS2 game I've ever played. The sequal is better because it has more characters, but the original has a cooler special-move style. You gotta play it to know what I mean.
    • Why is everyone praising that Warioware game? I played it at a DS display at Bestbuy and thought it was the most stupid game I had ever played.
      • Maybe you're just not into that type of game? Did that occur to you? Also, the DS is a piece of crap when played on the stand in the store. Especially for that game.

        Maybe you just couldn't figure it out? ;)

        Have you played the original one for GBA or for gamecube? They're equally as awesome. As are the sequals.

        Then again, maybe the game just isn't for you.

        but, no need to insult the game's intelect.
        • And then there's playing Warioware with friends. I've even seen it done as a drinking game. Ends up being about the right pacing. And less dangerous that making Dance Dance Revolution into a drinking game.

  • Hard to put a story into 3D frag fests (Score:3, Insightful)

    by TheSkepticalOptimist ( 898384 ) on Thursday July 28, 2005 @04:56PM (#13189803)

    Gamers don't like long drawn out storytelling in most of the popular games like Halo or Unreal, they just want to shoot em up and ask questions later. I do prefer games like HL2 that combining inline storytelling with real time action, but then again, games are not really intended to be innovative forms of storytelling.

    Perhaps the only genre that this article applies to is the RPG genre, which fights to combine 80+ hours of gameplay with a story that remains fresh from start to end. Most RPG's get stale by about hour 10, and by hour 40 they start to repeat themselves. The problem is that nobody can really generate 80 hours of storytelling, even novels don't take 80 hours to read.

    Its fun to critise developers for failing to offer really good stories in games, but they are not novelists or movie makers and for the most part, gamers really don't want long drawn out cut-scenes or read pages of text in order for the game to progress. If anything, developers should stop forcing a story into a game, and let the game unfold like real life, where events happen at random and people create their own adventures.

    • I disagree.

      The story for Marathon and Halo are much more deep and complex than many other shooter-type games, and were a significant factor in the games' popularity. Hell, people are STILL working to understand all the nuances of the overall story.

      Granted, many people bought Halo (and Halo2) forthe multiplayer -- which IS awesome. However, don't discount the popularity impact of the games' stories.

  • Planescape: Torment. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by PurpleFloyd ( 149812 ) <`zeno20' `at' `attbi.com'> on Thursday July 28, 2005 @05:13PM (#13189971) Homepage
    If I ruled the game-development world, I would quite simply place the world's game scriptwriters in front of the RPG Planescape: Torment. If you've played it, you probably know why.

    If you haven't, here's a brief synopsis of what made it so very, very good (and thus, unfortunately, unusual):

    • The game had an engrossing story, which was revealed in steps. In the beginning, you simply wake up in a mortuary, with that somewhat hackneyed device of amnesia. However, instead of hearing your character's entire background five minutes into the game, or never understanding why the character would forget himself at all, the game instead uses an admittedly overused device to slowly reveal the nature of the character and allow you to define that character.
    • It allowed you to define the character. First, as a Dungeons and Dragons based game, it had a built-in alignment system. However, unlike most D&D games, it allowed you to choose your alignment naturally. You started out completely neutral, and your alignment shifted according to your actions. Furthermore, the game, which in large part centered around the question, "What can change the nature of a man?" actually allowed you to play the character such that almost any answer to that question was viable.
    • Finally, it allowed for great freedom. While the main plotline was mostly linear, the ways to accomplish the various tasks allowed the gamer to play almost any character. Have a character with high wisdom? Talk your way out of a fight by showing the uselessness of fighting. High charisma? Convince people that you're incredibly powerful and will mow right through them. Have high strength? Just bash your way through obstacles.
    While the game was certainly not without its flaws (lots of text-based exposition, which was read in a small dialog box and some of which might have been done better if movies were worked in, a mediocre interface, and somewhat dated technology) it still stands as a shining example of what storytelling in a game should be.

    • This is the only game I've ever played that I considered "literature". It had a central theme that flowed throughout the story and gave the player lots to think about. Tremendously well written with passages I think about to this day.

      A man stands in a path. There is nothing to the left or the right but an old crone stands in front of him. He can't remember anything, not even his own name. "You have used two wishes." the old crone says, "Now give me your last one."

      "Tell me who I am!" the man cries.

      • This is the only game I've ever played that I considered "literature". It had a central theme that flowed throughout the story and gave the player lots to think about. Tremendously well written with passages I think about to this day.

        When Mort's backstory opened up, I spent about an hour sitting in front of my computer, just working through the dialogues, completely engrossed. There's some good writing in there.

        Admittedly, there's also some bad writing --- the Godsmen subplot is clumsy and doesn't work

        • i had the same problem as you. the answer to this problem is fairly simple: save your best buff items for the endgame.

          I agree, this game is certainly literature. its also one of those games that two people can play and end up taking something completely different from it. when my friend was describing it to me after i referred him to it, he described whole portions of the game that i missed (I played chaotic good, he played chaotic evil... I never met the lady of pain, never got mazed, played a thoughtful
  • rss.gamasutra | games.slashdot

    End of story.

  • Every dev? (Score:4, Funny)

    by jasonwea ( 598696 ) on Thursday July 28, 2005 @07:57PM (#13191113) Homepage

    What every dev needs to know about story?

    I develop database apps you insensitive clod!

  • Games aren't stories either... (Score:4, Interesting)

    by kreyg ( 103130 ) <kreyg AT shaw DOT ca> on Thursday July 28, 2005 @11:25PM (#13192070) Homepage
    Movies are a logical extension of the play, which is a logical extension of the storyteller.

    Games are more an extension of playing make-believe. Certainly story can have a significant component in that, but it's more like setting plot points while the player fills in the blanks with their own story.

    Once we can exploit that fully, we'll be set.

    • Yeah, I'm not sure where we ran into the premise that the point of a video game is to tell a story. Esssentially, this article is "how to tell a story using a video game;" and while that's not bad as far as it goes, it still ignores the game nature of the game.

      To me, a video game is primarly a new medium in which to play a game--something we have been doing as long as we have been telling stories--and not primarily a new medium to tell stories.

      Games can certainly be enhanced by story, and you can certai

  • gamers write their own stories (Score:3, Interesting)

    by CrazyJoel ( 146417 ) on Friday July 29, 2005 @02:12AM (#13192670)
    all you need to do is set up the initial conflict. how the player or players seek to resolve that conflict contains all the drama, action, and story that anyone needs.

    if the conflict is as simple as "I'm trying to kill you and you're trying to kill me" that life-or-death struggle contains as much drama as anything you could try to manufacture.

  • Is the industry that narrow? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by DingerX ( 847589 ) on Friday July 29, 2005 @07:32AM (#13193512) Journal
    The article evokes my English 101 course freshman year at college. We read The Bridge of San Luis Rey, and when it came to discussion this one guy (named, of all things, Blue) burst out, "Where's the antagonism?"

    Basically, the article's author is trying to convince game industry types why writers and story are necessary, but he shoots himself in the foot by limiting the industry to one genre and deploying a notion of "classical narrative" from literature that really doesn't work outside of epics and sitcoms.

    Reading his article, his focus is on long, narrative-driven games. But this focus limits the utility. When he argues at the end that writers are necessary, I ask: why? Okay, for some pompous over-the-top thing like Deus Ex, sure. But the whole Mario Brothers franchise? Antagonism and Reversal are reduced to mere stubs to drive the platform-based fun. And the last game Maxis produced with antagonism in it was Robosport, and I don't see that mentioned as their greatest achievement.

    The article starts out with a comparison to the early days of cinema. The inherent problem is that, well, viewing cinema as a teleological march, isolated from other genres presents a distorted picture of the medium. You know why? They're still showing moving pictures of stage plays, and travelogues, and all those other genres that the article wants to imply "failed" because of a lack of narrative. They're just showing them on TV, not in the movie theaters. And, incidently, the way movies were socially experienced 75 years ago is entirely different from today. So the genre doesn't evolve in a vacuum. The same could be said for videogames. They're still making games like Snake, and little puzzle games, but they're on telephones and portable game machines.

    So I object to the 80/20 rules too. Plays are not 80-20 audio-visual any more than movies are 80-20 visual-audio: it varies from piece to piece. Go into a godawful European nineteenth-century opera house, imagine it full of people (heaven forfend going to an opera--I wouldn't ask that of anyone), and tell me it's 80% about the singing. If that's so, why all the visual distractions that bombard us?

    But if you're going to characterize videogames or any other bit of entertainment, look at how they're experienced. The cognitive experience is the target, not what goes to the screen or the speakers, or the overglorified adult novelty device they call a controller.

    So, you want to say dialog sucks. Well, having just tried facade, I'd be inclined to agree with you. But then again, I've had some excellent experiences of in-game dialog, but they all involved communications with other humans. Robo-Dialog also works for setting the context: radio chatter, conversations at a party, a domestic squabble in an abandoned building, some surreal nonsense blasted from huge loudspeakers. But sure, dialog central to the narrative is problematic because the player can't (yet) interact with the characters on the same level (if anyone wants some facade scripts where I yell repeatedly for a goddamned martini only to get quizzical looks from the warring couple, let me know).

    I guess that brings us back to the novel, and the issue of fiction. If the game has a linear structure, then someone has to write that linear structure, and a Joseph Campbellesque High School writing class approach will work just fine for most cases. But don't think that all great literature is written that way, nor even that most games have such a structure. There are plenty of other structures out there:

    Sports: the game provides regulated social interaction. It doesn't matter whether it is a "sports game" (Madden), a simulation (CS), MMORPG, or something completely abstract: the value people derive from it is social contact with others. Narrative, writers and all that are not necessary for the sports element to work: people create their own narratives.

    Drugs: many, many games work on the princ
    • Antagonism and Reversal are reduced to mere stubs to drive the platform-based fun.

      Dude, every big boss or new type of enemy in a platformer is a reversal

      And the last game Maxis produced with antagonism in it was Robosport, and I don't see that mentioned as their greatest achievement.

      Maxis games are "Hero vs. Environment" at their most literal. In Sim City, the hero is the city. The antagonists are all those forces that like to see cities fail. Each disaster is a ( potential ) reversal, so is each unexpe

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