> Good story isn't what gamers are after. Which is good, because they ain't gettin' it.
I emphatically disagree. Good story is what I'm after. Good story is what I've gotten. (Undertale, the Nier games, even Ocarina of Time has a very unique story-telling experience).
A game can tell a different type of story than a book or a movie - these stories are interactive, and involve an element of meta-narrative story-telling. What was that fight like? What was that choice like? Did the choice _feel_ meaningful? The story is told through these mechanisms rather than simply words on a page.
I very much agree that many players come to games for a carnal feeling. A release that comes from the ticking of boxes or completion of objectives, or the satisfaction from a skilled execution.
But these elements as well can contribute to a narrative experience (ex Undertale).
Really disagree with this article. Reminds me of those historical articles about movies being a worse version of the theatre and opera (which they were).
It's gotten to the point that I just don't buy or play new games from American or Japanese studios. It's too disappointing to pick up new releases of series that I've played for more than half my life (such as the Tales series) and find everything that made them great ripped out and replaced with consumerist trash that panders to the lowest common denominator.
China seems to be the only country that still has some original and compelling new games and stories being produced.
I feel the opposite there are good story games coming from Japan still. Yakuza Like a Dragon, DQXI, Death Stranding. And FFXIV of course going stronger and stronger. Just a few from the recent years.
I own Nier, but never beat it. I enjoyed the aesthetic and gameplay, but often end up going back to old favorites when I sit down to relax. I should take a weekend or two and get back into it.
Bright Memory Infinite is a new game from China that's coming out in November, the demo is incredible and I'm excited. Gujian3 is an open-world action rpg, similar to Nier but with a xianxia theme, it's pretty good. Amazing Cultivation Simulator is a Rimworld clone with a lot of fun features. Path of Wuxia is a very original and fun martial-arts-school/dating-sim/srpg with a lot of replayability (only fan-translated for now, but an official english translation is slated for when it comes out of early access).
That's really interesting, I remember trying to get my hands on Gujian 2 when it first came out, which was impossible at that time. Glad to see it's now on Steam!
I think at first I played Nier Automata mainly for the mechanics. The worldbuilding and backstory take a while to pick up steam. But once it gets going, it has some unique and interesting ideas. I still feel they could have gone a lot deeper with a lot of things though. For example, the idea that robots would start their own religion seemed intriguing, but in the end they didn't really do much with it. Still very enjoyable and surprisingly a lot of food for thought.
I actually found nier automatas story beats so cringey that I was turned off on the playing of it, honestly. Pretty early on a pile of robots start an orgy that creates a human-looking clearly-not-a-human villain. It felt totally directionless and random at the time. I didn’t really want to continue if I was just going to get weird shit happening with an overlay of philosophical hand waving.
Yeah I get that, for me there were enough interesting things to offset the cringy bits.
Just off the top of my head, I remember being intrigued by the robots-trying-to-be-human thing, and how consistent they were with the fact that you're an android. For example, removing your OS chip actually killed you, which is one of the 26 possible endings iirk. That and the dynamic combat and the smooth mix of different genres were enough to keep me going.
You got 2 hours into the game and dropped it because you felt the themes were surface level?
You were unironically filtered. The game does name drop a lot philosophers, but it's meant to contextualize, not as part of the game's themes. Hell, the game doesn't even care about the "humans and robots aren't actually so different" question. I don't want to write a whole essay, so I'll just say that Automata is probably the best existentialist story written this decade, with a lot of subtle details, some _great_ acting, and melding of story and gameplay that has not even been attempted elsewhere. It is unique, and uniquely excellent, beyond the point where it can just be described as "a fantastic game". Doom 2016 is a fantastic game. Nier Automata is a game I've had as much fun thinking and writing about as I had playing it.
If a game wastes two hours of my time without being able to appear like it has any direction I truly question the quality of its storytelling. If I want existentialism I can get it in a 10 minute long flash fiction piece from Fireside Fiction.
Yeah: while there certainly exist people who don't care about the narrative elements of a game, that largely becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy more than anything else, as the audience and market for your products evolves to be the subset of people who like the things you build, which is not the same thing as "people in general like the things I build", and certainly the same as "everyone likes the thing I build". (A lot of software developers--and I think particularly designers--fall into this analysis trap of ignoring selection bias.)
The games that had the biggest impact on me were adventure games and role playing games that had deep stories written by people who knew how to blend intrigue and humor into an enjoyable experience of you living in the shoes of the main character. I play games without good narratives, but they have to be much better games to compensate, as a good story can make me ignore some pretty horrible mechanics. (I also play certain classes of puzzle and rhythm games where story is irrelevant, but those are a totally differently head space and don't compete for my time with other games.)
> This is quite an incredibly toxic and negative piece
The author might have a negative take on things and you might not like the article but to brand the article as "incredibly toxic" is a bit of a hyperbole.
Well to me it's toxic when it opens with the achievements (being successful in the business for 27 years) then shits on the whole industry and their own customers (treat your own players as idiots) in a holier than thou attitude. Just very bitter.
It’s not bitter at all. It’s self-deprecating and funny. The author, Jeff, has been making games that I’ve been playing for their story and gameplay alone (the graphics are truly terrible) since the 90’s.
Jeff is irreverent and highly opinionated but absolutely not “holier than thou.” He knows his games are ugly and played only by a tiny niche. The only thing he can remotely claim to be better at than most people is running a video game studio that manages to support his small household.
Well I am also from the game industry and that is how we actually treat players.
Most important players are are called "whales". They have money and no self control. The industry is always targeting them. We spend sometimes months looking at numbers just to increase the spending margin of those players, usually 90% of players are "idiots" because they don't spent more than necessary.
And we focus on the other 10% that have diminished mental capacity for self control or other issues that would hinder their self control. If they are not addicted to our product, they will get addicted to a competitors product anyway.
The title is "Sx truths", meaning there's no room for argument, interpretation or nuance. It's not his opinion, they're not observations, they are truths. That sets the tone for a strongly opinionated point of view, that ultimately failed to provide suficient proof for most of its examples, making it a rant.
And rants are fine, but trying to present it as the profound observations of a veteran with 20 something years of wisdom that shits on everyone's favourites without many arguments ("The Last of Us [...] having a story as good as a medium-quality zombie movie" is not an argument) comes of as toxic.
I remember all the press praising the original Half Life for its story. I was really surprised - it was the same story as all first person shooters going back to Doom:
Bad guys spawn across an inter-dimensional portal and start wreaking havoc. Protagonist has to kill them all, crossing the portal in the process to go destroy the alien leader.
There were some cool extra details - the G Man, the marines entering as a third force, the diversions to do things like launch a missile into space - but all of those things were additional to that same, basic story.
This author has it spot on: our standards for story telling in video games are really low.
While I think the bassic narrative skeleton of the story is important, what is equally important is the world building that comes with it.
If your game feels like traveling to an alternate dimension with vivid details and differences a lot about the story can be excused, because the player will eventually find their own story within your game.
If your story is great and the freefloating passages are dull and lifeless the story can be great but it will never a good game.
Why not both? A great gripping story in a believeable world.
Yeah this is my point, if the thing a part of the game conveys is interesting, it doesn't matter all that mutch if is technically very simple in other regards.
What I hate however is when games have the most inspiring world and fail to tell unique stories in it. E.g. the game plays in South America, yet I learn nothing about the reginal culture when I play it, because all Characters are very generic.
This is something that made Witcher 3 great: nearly every quest managed to convey some feeling about how it must have been to live in the medival ages (or some fantasy version of it).
I like it when games take their own world seriously and root every character, story and object deeply within the history of that world. And yes, sometimes that means telling the player things they can't understand immidiately, because they come from a different culture and world.
If you could exchange the world just like that without changing a lot about the quests, you are doing it wrong.
I think the praise for Half Life was the story telling. The story itself is pretty generic scifi action, but the fact that you discovered it through the player rather than a paragraph of exposition or a cutscene was pretty novel for that genre
Absolutely this. In half-life you were exposed to a world and left to figure out what was going on from that. You were rarely directly told to do anything.
For the first hour or two you were implored to, "Get to the surface" because it was your and your fellow scientists hope of being rescued.
When you run into the marines you aren't told they're bad, they just start trying to kill you and you figure out that you're not getting a rescue.
World-building wise it was leaps ahead of anything that came before it and the in-game (rather than FMV) dialogue was fantastic and immersive.
It didn't have "level screens", the level transitions were natural rather than forced with loading screen hints and title cards.
While that's all completely standard now, the other competitor titles at the time were games like Quake 2 and half-life's predecessors were games like Duke Nukem 3D and Quake, which while both ground-breaking in their own way weren't a touch on the visceral world of half-life.
The only other FPS games that came close to lore was rainbow six, but that was the "set pieces" style of choosing levels and going through rehearsed action rather than what felt like an emergent world in half-life.
While replaying half-life now it feels far more linear and scripted, that's because we have nearly 15 years of gameplay improvements built on top of where it lay the foundations.
For players at the time, going from games like quake to half-life it really did feel like it was genre defining.
Let's be a bit more specific here: The first scene where the player encounters the marines is one where a scientist runs up to one of them, and gets gunned down by the marine.
That kind of scripted event, and environmental story-telling, was extremely novel in a FPS game back then.
It's easy to nowadays handwave that away as merely "Marines shoot player, player realizes Marines are enemy" like that kind of heavy scripting is just something mundane. But back then it wasn't mundane, it was quite revolutionary.
Before that the norm in the genre was mostly maze shooters with very limited NPC interactions, like certain Doom enemies fighting each other or some wall or another blowing up in Quake, Half-Life took all of that and brought it to a whole new level.
To be clear, I did played the game back then. I did not perceived it as subtle or indirect or needing to figure out. Back then years ago, that in the moment game moment was "ah, OK, soldiers are supposed to be bad guys and I am supposed to kill them".
Back then, half life was one of the games that made me think about how linear games are evolving to be. At one place, you could decide to go left or right and it joined back together quickly. It was straightforwardly prescripted, which is something we discussed with friends a lot.
I did not needed hindsight of years and my current experience. If anything now I have less experience as I spend significantly less time playing games like this.
Games have always been pretty linear, though. The ones that had a notable degree of "freedom" found that freedom in
a) Choosing which enemies to go and kill with your chosen color of pixel burst.
or
b) Choosing which set of text and vaguely representational spritework the game would expose to you.
Many "linear" games offer tactical rather than strategic freedom. There is a sort of conservation of experiential depth, limited by the players' ability/inclination to absorb new interaction concepts, and the availability of developer resources to build them.
> Many "linear" games offer tactical rather than strategic freedom.
This is a good way to put it IMO. Command and Conquer is an interesting exception in the action genre because it had some meta strategy in branching missions of the over world.
> Many "linear" games offer tactical rather than strategic freedom
Half life was not one of them. At the time, they were games that allows more strategizing and more tactic and more micro choices. Half life was as prescribed as it gets.
That sounds like it’s still a cut-scene, just one done in-engine. Does the player have any control over the encounter, like shooting the marine or the scientist, before the scene begins?
Games were showing rather then telling long before half life. That was not something special. I don't know whether people here did not played games other then half life back then or half life is only thing they remember.
And the difference between full cit scene and what happened in half life was really really minor.
The castle of wolfestein or doom are both significantly older and allow more freedom. System shock was a year later and allowed actual tactical choices and somewhat strategical o es.
Half life was part of pattern of moving towards extremely linear. It had better graphics than normal at the time. It had attempt at actual story. It was not move toward more agency to the player nor toward subtlety.
It had less choices than normal at the time, not even in terms of whether to hide on left or right, less options for tactical decisions, less of anything like that.
Wolfestein or doom. The thing is, half life allowed exactly zero choice. So anything where you can go back or have a choice between opening left or right door is better in terms of player agency.
In terms of showing rather then telling via text, almost anything has that aspect.
Half life had very good graphics for the time. That is where it shined.
Half-Life has a bunch of player/story choices. Most of them small and inconsequential, I'll grant you, like the microwave incident, but Half-Life even ends on a meaningul story player choice - whether to accept the job proposal.
Wolfenstein and Doom have literally zero story choices of any kind. Not even inconsequential ones!
Clearly, Half-Life has superior story telling to Wolfenstein or Doom. Not by much, can be argued, but it clearly does. And at the time, the little bit felt like a whole lot compared to literally nothing.
Half life is going through exactly determined road with no option to turn left or right. There were token decisions, but that is it, they were just covers.
In wolfesrwin, you could at least go back and had choice between left or right doors. Half life had only way to go - forward. It was like sitting on train moving on railroad.
I think you are remembering things unfavorably. Half-Life has many dead ends that do not advance the game, but contain nuggets of story activated by player interaction.
Maybe you just missed them all!
Just off the top of my head from the start of the game: Activating the alarm from the button on the reception desk, getting the guard into trouble. Going into the kitchen and playing with the microwave cassarole (referenced from later sequel!). Opening lockers in the locker room (looking at people's stuff), getting the hazard suit and heading back (if you try to proceed without suit, guard will tell you to go get it - nonlinear maps!). Pressing the broken elevator button, sending people plummeting. Opening the dumpster to find the hiding scientist. Operating vending machines.
Did Wolfenstein or Doom have anything like this? In Wolfenstein you can optionally open cells and find hidden doors behind walls. In Doom you can push buttons, and you are always required to do so to proceed.
Half-life opening tram ride and test chamber were revolutionary. Nobody else had done something quite like that.
Other games gave you the backstory in the manual and dropped you straight into the action.
Its low because MOST the chimp troupe is incapable of doing harder cognitive work or for longer periods of time no matter what reward is dangled in front of them.
It doesnt matter which writer, author, musician, artist, game designer, movie maker you pick they all hit an upper bound of how many chimps in the the whole troupe they can connect with.
But if we are targeting specific niches rather than the whole population its a great time to be a story teller. The kind of engagement you can get is historically of the charts.
> This author has it spot on: our standards for story telling in video games are really low.
Are they? I would say that they are, but not for video games, but for all things in general.
Sturgeon's law [0] states that "ninety percent of everything is crap." And it was supposedly originally about sci-fi novels! “Fifty Shades of Grey” was completely criticized on all fronts by reviewers, but still became one of the top bestsellers.
If you look at ancient myths, we have things like a series of myths with a central plot resolving around a god raping humans of all genders (significant chunk of Zeus-related mythology), Loki changing into a mare and getting impregnated, because gods wanted to prevent a builder from getting rightfully earned reward [1].
Most of the stories created today are low-quality ones. And that was always so. Only when we look at the past creations, we can only experience those that were good enough to be preserved. The same will probably happen with video games if various DRMs will not prevent that.
> “Fifty Shades of Grey” was completely criticized on all fronts by reviewers, but still became one of the top bestsellers.
> [...]
> Most of the stories created today are low-quality ones. And that was always so. Only when we look at the past creations, we can only experience those that were good enough to be preserved.
I'm pretty sure that Fifty Shades of Grey wasn't successful for its story, but for discussing sex and specifically BDSM in a more open way than what was previously seen in "mainstream" movies.
Overall, a lot of works that, on the surface, aren't very impressive by current standards, but still managed to stand out in a novel way. Fifty shades and Half Life are two examples, but you could say exactly the same thing about Minecraft, DOOM, most of the classical movies, most of the old "legendary" cars and a lot more. Things don't become classics by standing the test of time - if you discount nostalgia, a lot of "classical" stuff is crap by todays standard -, but by founding the genre they're later beaten in.
> I'm pretty sure that Fifty Shades of Grey wasn't successful for its story, but for discussing sex and specifically BDSM in a more open way than what was previously seen in "mainstream" movies.
And because it feeded from the Twilight-Hype, on which it was a juicy twist. For itself it probably would never have become such a success.
> but you could say exactly the same thing about Minecraft, DOOM
Can we? Minecraft feeds mainly on its powerful sandboxing and modability, which other games still can't really match today, while also still getting regular updates. And doom as a franchise continued to move forward and created new games. They don't remain successful just because their first versions were awesome at the time, but because they continued to output awesome successors.
This is very different from classics which are usually frozen in time and stay classics despite getting no updates at all.
> our standards for story telling in video games are really low.
Nah, the standards are just different because of the medium. Just like you wouldn't write a book where people sing for 10 minutes every time they talk, and you wouldn't write opera that lasts for 40 hours and has realistic acting and dialogs - you can't compare stories between different media ignoring the differences. And the difference that interactivity makes is bigger than the different constrains between novels and opera.
The more detailed and intricate a story of a game is - the less freedom of choice the player has. In the extreme case you have so called "visual novels" which let you make 10-20 choices the whole game at predefined places. They barely qualify as games and they are very niche genre in gaming because they don't play to the strengths of the medium. At that point you might as well read a "choose your own adventure" book. The most common emotion they cause in players is frustration because they wanted the protagonist to do something else, but they can't influence the story in any way at the moment.
On another end of the spectrum you have games like minecraft - where the story is your struggle vs the mechanics of the game, and there's no need for any pre-defined plot because you create the plot with every keyboard input you do every second. Freedom of choice = 100%, plot = 0%. Most gamers prefer these kinds of games because they can only be realized as games.
The plot in minecraft can be "night was coming and I forgot the close the doors to the mines, then a creeper came and blew up my bed and pushed me into a chasm near a river of lava - I had 5% hitpoints left and if I died then I would get respawned in random place on the map cause no bed - I would maybe have to spend hours trying to find my base again so I had to think hard how to get out of there alive". It's a great story that forces the player to feel strong emotions. And it won't happen to any other player the exact same way which makes it even better. If you add traditional plot to Minecraft you make it worse.
No matter if a story in art is detailed and intricate, or barely there - what matters is how it makes people feel. Novels have 100s of pages, poems might have 4 lines, but you won't say "stories in poetry suck".
In Opera the main point is music, so the story is designed around that (and the time and place constraints). In games the tradeoffs are different, but it doesn't mean that it's somehow "low standards".
Most games tend to prefer less plot and more freedom because it plays to the strengths of the medium. It's a trade-off.
> it was the same story as all first person shooters going back to Doom: Bad guys spawn across an inter-dimensional portal and start wreaking havoc
almost every book is Hero's Journey if we look from high enough. Details matter. You can take the same central conflict and write 1000 books that make you feel 1000 different emotions.
I think there’s a bit where stories can be extremely complex but still have interactivity from the player. Bioware produces games like this where decisions made from previous games can be inherited to affect future games, and the overall storylines are complex and nuanced, albeit mostly in what BioWare can control (world building, npcs making decisions and having their own agendas, etc.)
- visual novel mode for dialogues and plot choices where player freedom is very restricted by story can be detailed
- game mode for mechanics and combat that have barely any influence on the story (besides "survive this challenge to continue") but players have freedom to express themselves
It is very formulaic in structure, I'd argue more formulaic than ancient theater, and it limits the possible plots a lot (for example you won't find any RPG where the hero gets weaker with time). But all these conventions are accepted as necessary evil by the intended audience, so that's fine.
Not sure quite how much is required for something to count as an an rpg, but I have seen a couple experimental games where the way the difficulty ramps up is that after each level, the player has to choose which skill to lose / level down.
Didn’t have much of a plot though.
Just “you are fleeing a deep cavern or something after stealing a great deal of arcane power (more than you have the mental capacity to hold onto)”.
Never saw how it ended. I imagine it is either meant to inevitably end in defeat, or it ends with the character having lost all the power they stole , escaping with only their life, or perhaps, having lost all of it, being unable to continue to evade capture.
> The more detailed and intricate a story of a game is - the less freedom of choice the player has.
That's merely an economic decision by the industry. You can make a game with detailed and intricate stories while simultaneously allowing full player freedom. It's just difficult and expensive to do so!
Consider something like Dwarf Fortress. It's detailed down to the alcohol content of the dirt under the cat's third left front paw nail. And the cat has its own will and you are permitted to do pretty much anything to the cat. But it's taken two people years to make it without much/any profit.
The state of affairs is simply that we are limited only by our imaginations and our economic utilities. We carry supercomputers in our pockets. Few have any idea what to do with them.
As opposed to what? The average superhero story that Hollywood has been milking for 20 years now?
Compare videogames not to great literature but to popular culture.
We have a new generation of script writers shaped by computer games rather than books, radio or cinema. We will look back in fondness once we get script writers shaped by social media.
I find it really weird to judge a story on what it boils down to instead of on how it's delivered. Imagine you have two versions of a game. The first delivers its story by long cutscenes and a omniscient narrator. The second delivers its story with the environement and dialogues with the characters, with the playing having to piece everything together. Even if the "story" is the same, the second game has a better story. Storytelling is a essential part of the quality of a story.
What the story is, and how it's told, are both important aspects to varying degrees to different people. This is the case with novels, too. For example, I love a good mindbending plot, and barely care how it's told. I can tolerate / enjoy hard scifi or fantasy with detailed magic systems, even if the writing is considered not great. To me, the Ciuxin Liu Three Body Problem series is one of the greatest of all time because it has some absolutely wild ideas, even though it was translated from Chinese by different translators, and some people say not well.
On the other hand, a lot of people enjoy the art of literary composition. Grand scenes with precisely chosen words, "show don't tell" (which has little bearing on the underlying plot ideas, to me), and lots of rich description. I don't care for that sort of stuff, probably because I don't visualize things in my head much while reading, but I know a lot of people who judge books and authors on it.
Thanks for that perspective! I think about this all the time, and though my tastes are different I think you're exactly right.
I think of narrative as a combination of several elements: character, plot, world-building, execution (word choice, visual choices and performance for film or games), concepts and ideas. I tend to be drawn to strong characters first, but not always. Some examples off the top of my head:
Clerks: strong characters, mediocre almost everything else
Reservoir Dogs: strong characters, strong execution, minimal plot and world-building
Portal: strong characters, plot, world building, concepts, and execution
Brazil (the Terry Gilliam movie): strong world-building and execution, weak characters and plot
Lolita (the book): strong execution and characters
Harry Potter: strong characters, world-building, and concepts, goofy plot and execution
Primer: mind-bending concepts, good execution, weak characters and plot
Don’t know why, but I could go on and on thinking about it.
Edit: this list would imply I have pretty narrow tastes but really I like a little bit of everything; these are just some notable examples that came to mind as being particularly strong or weak in certain areas.
I agree with you, what I was opposing was more the reductivist view of things like "Half life is just ...". You could do the same with the Three Body Problem series and it would absolutely fail to explain what's great about the series. First book: detective story mixed with historical events. Second book: smart guy vs other smart guy. Third book: history through the eyes of one person that was here at pivotal events.
The comment I replied to mentionned:
> There were some cool extra details - the G Man, the marines entering as a third force, the diversions to do things like launch a missile into space - but all of those things were additional to that same, basic story.
I think it's wrong to separate a story between "a story" and "the details", all stories are the same if you boils them down enough.
> I find it interesting that there are a lot of articles bashing videogame stories yet nobody is making these points about the movie industry.
What do you mean? People complain about movies all the time. Even Blockbusters, or especially braindead blockbusters, are being trashed everywhere. Marvel-Movies, as beloved as they are, are often bashed for how bad and generic they are. Hollywood for many people is synonymous for bad storytelling.
> The fact that the movie studios are now looking at videogames for inspiration is very telling IMO.
Because that's where the customers are. Gaming is primary a thing of younger people, and to bait them you need stuff that they know and love.
I think it's the other way around. Lame cinema bleeding into video games. How many games are just glorified movies? With more cutscenes than gameplay?
Print bleeds into video games and movies as well. How many movies start with a text blurb? How many games literally just tell you what happened, instead of showing, instead of doing.
Somewhat related: I remember watching a segment on the Computer Chronicles in the mid to late 1990's where a developer was boasting about the puzzles in some sort of space themed shooter. He then proceeded to show an example. It involved toggling a switch in a control room to open a door in an adjacent room. Ever since then, I have taken claims about the sophistication of video games (may that be in puzzles or story telling) with a grain of salt since the standards are remarkably low. The only way to assess those claims is to play it yourself or, these days, to watch a walk-through.
Even then, I tend to gravitate towards open world games without stories since it is easier to imagine your own than dealing with expository interjections. The Long Dark is a good example of this. The developers are trying to make a narrative driven game with their Wintermute story mode, yet the reality is that survival mode is far more fun. Rather than dealing with criminals in an otherwise inexplicable desolate wasteland[1] while trying to find my ex (their story), I am trying to figure out what happened to the once sleepy community that I last visited in my childhood while trying to survive long enough to be rescued (my story).
(1) Technically, there is an explanation, but it is weak and not always consistent.
Nah it was actually a big deal, Doom was basically: Get to the exit, in some illogically defined alien maze designed to maximize fun for the player. In Half-Life simply having the game take place in a logical location was a big deal even. I remember people praising Half-life for stuff as simple as weapons drops were in places that made sense, instead of floating in the middle of a corridor. The story wasn't the main selling point for sure, but the fact that it took place in reality, and had some sort of logical progression of events was a big deal.
You can marginalize all stories this way because that’s the core of story writing.
There is always a villain , a protagonist and he goes through challenges to eventually defeat the villain. Finally he is a transformed man and returns home with the riches for society.
Sure there are some that deviate from the traditional plot but only very few of them succeed because to pull that off you have to be a master in story writing.
What makes a story great isn’t its uniqueness regarding the plot but having great character development, dialogue, depth and breadth of the environment, the correct use of things like midpoint, flashbacks, rising action and other devices to keep the audience engaged.
Making sure secondary characters contribute equally and help the protagonist grow is also important.
The truth is that making a great video game is an incredible effort as there needs to be a balance of everything such as great AI, graphics, etc and as I described above good story telling is already a massive undertaking.
Given the above , I’m not surprised many publishers cut corners because they are limited by time and budget
Parents play video games as well as their kids. This never used to happen if we roll back to when Space Invaders was the latest and greatest.
Nowadays you can have the 50 year old dad spending his quality time in bed next to his wife blasting enemies with the teenage/student kids doing the same.
With another generation it will be the folks in retirement homes too.
With music you get stuck on the stuff you discovered and made your own. Into punk? Probably born way back in the 60s. Techno? 70s.
Will it be the same with games? The guy in the retirement home still playing World of Warcraft? Or that copy of Diablo that came out in 2003?
Story in video games therefore has to be good enough to not just last a week or a summer, but a lifetime.
>With music you get stuck on the stuff you discovered and made your own. Into punk? Probably born way back in the 60s. Techno? 70s.
I don't listen to particular genres of music or music from a particular period of time.
As for gaming, I would rather watch a film, read a book, go outside, watch a play, meet people, do something else, because I don't have much free time and gaming is not a priority.
I would probably play some games if I would have more free time.
As a matter of fact I worked for 7 years as a game programmer and during that period I never played other games than our own stuff and some stuff from the competition where we wanted to understand some mechanics.
Space Invaders and arcades in general seemed more popular with adults than with children in 1980. I’m not sure when or why video games came to be regarded as a juvenile pastime. Possibly coincided with the kid-friendly characters and home consoles promoted by Sega and Nintendo around 1990.
Or maybe games have always appealed to nerds of all ages, but what happened in the 90s is they began to appeal to normie children too, and as you point out those normie kids continued to play them when they became normie adults.
Nothing beats The Last of Us story for me (it’s why it became PlayStation game of the decade).
The Last of Us Part II spoils you even further, there isn’t anything else close to the level of detail and story telling that Naugthy Dog has done here.
“It’s a rollercoaster thrill ride which lasts like 20 hours and leaves you scarred for the rest of your days. 10/10”
FYI HBO and creators of Chernobyl have picked up The Last of Us and are filming 10 episode series right now with a bigger budget than Game of Thrones.
I remembered enjoying the first TLOU, but when I played the second one last year it didn't click with me. It felt like a rather long and brutal rage trip. There was story to it and very nicely produced settings, but it all felt like minor elements on this rage trip than any big changes and surprises. Actually wondering if anyone else felt that way, or whether my taste of games just changed over the last years.
Imho that quote says more about what parts of games John Carmack has mostly worked on during his life than it actually says anything about storytelling in games.
The guy is so deep in code engineering that sometimes other, more nuanced, details can be seemingly totally lost on him.
Yeah, I have a lot of respect for Carmack as a developer/engineer but I doubt you’d want him in charge of actually designing your game. I’m sure he’d admit as much.
The problem is that "games" is one word, but we really have two core types of game.
Some games focus on mechanical skills or rules akin to a sport or boardgame, others are an interactive narrative experience. This interactive experience can further be broken down into games that tell you what is happening (cinema), and games that let you make your own story (tabletop RPG).
So while there is a lot of crossover and blurred lines, of these types of game, only one type really needs a well written or scripted story to achieve its goals. We have many successful games with no story due to this, but other games wouldn't have succeeded without one.
I wanna know what quality of zombie movie this guy is watching that The Last of Us is somehow beneath them. The only zombie movie worth a damn this century is 28 Days Later. The Last of Us Part II was an even more amazing story, I literally was saying NO at the penultimate scene on the beach. The franchise is so well done HBO is adapting it.
Comedies just aren't the same thing though, I mean where do you really start comparing Shaun of the Dead, which is hilarious don't get me wrong, with The Last Of Us?
I'm one of those weirdos who thinks 28 Weeks Later was artistic genius, and that's a hill I'm willing to die on - all those people dying to save an asymptomatic carrier because he's a kid?
Weeks, which is the sequel to the original film, Days. Weeks revolves around the asymptomatic carriers, while Days is mostly about the outbreak developing.
We've had theatre and literature as narrative art for centuries. Film has been around for a tiny bit over 100 years, and it took them decades to find their own voices distinct from their predecessors.
By comparison, video games are in their infancy. We've been at it for only a few short decades, and having the audience directly involved with the narrative is a radical shift from what we had before. We're looking at a new art form finding its identity.
Right now the industry is drowing in AAA games that stick to the cinematic style of storytelling (and "cinematic" is still used as praise for storytelling in games), but there's also lots of (mostly indie) games out there that are trying to push the boundaries. You have games like Braid, Brothers and Hades exploring how to strongly bind narrative and game mechanics together. You have games like the first Bioshock, which abuse your understanding of genre conventions. You have games like Return of the Obra Dinn doing amazing work with non-linear storytelling.
It's a good time to be into video game storytelling.
Journey and Abzü are great examples of what video games can do with just exploration of the environment telling you a story with zero dialogue/exposition that by definition can't be done in other mediums
I would argue that what you're describing is close to an interactive version of the sort of storytelling you can achieve in a painting (also - you piqued my interest, installing Journey!).
It's a really great game and I think by the end you'll be awestruck by what it successfully evokes in you, but a painting, or a silent movie for that matter, are by definition not interactive environments unless using your imagination/interpretation is equivalent to a video game. In the games I describe you can miss things by not exploring. I won't miss anything in watching a silent movie or the opening sequence to Up because there's a definite set of frames and they run one way. A painting is even more limited.
I haven’t played either game but any sort of visual medium is capable of story telling without dialogue or exposition: visuals can tell a story at least as effectively, if not more so, than words can. For a somewhat recent, very well regarded example, see the opening prologue of Up.
All other visual mediums lack interactivity which changes things. I can't press something in a painting and unlock another experience, in Up the camera is controlled by the creators. You can play the games I mentioned and miss things by not exploring with your camera and interacting with the environment.
I think the medium is still in such infancy that even the cinematic style games are still pushing the boundaries. Naughty Dog is making incredible experiences in that format.
Video games have existed for over 50 years now. Video games have had as much time to mature as film had had by the early 1940s. And by the early 1940s film had produced numerous mature works of art displaying mastery of the medium that are still avidly watched and viewed as masterpieces today. The excuse that video games are a young medium may have held 20 years ago in the PS2 era, but it does not hold any longer.
How many movies does your avg movie goer know or can name movies from the 40s? Maybe, maybe half a dozen (it's a wonderful life, casablanca, citizen kane, Disney Fantasia and Pinocchio, and his girl Friday. I'm pretty sure your average person can name an order of magnitude more video games from pong to mario to sonic to modern day AAA games. And over time, some will have staying power, like I hope Breath of the Wild will.
I’m not sure the recency bias of a contemporary average person is a good proxy for the artistic achievement of a time now three generations past. If we were to enumerate the list of major, artistically significant films released in the 30s and 40s, we would produce dozens of titles that even the average person has heard of, if perhaps not seen themselves. In the same vein, the average person would struggle to identify Plato or Cicero, let alone have read any of their work, but the names would at least ring a bell.
Video games are in a weird place because they arguably reached maturity of design with 1985’s Super Mario Bros. But as wonderful as SMB is, it doesn’t mean anything or have anything to say: it is just the first game to truly nail 2d platformer mechanics to a transcendent degree. Indeed, as the OP mentioned, the best video games seem to be able to do as of yet with respect to depth of meaning is the equivalent of a mid-grade zombie film (The Last of Us), and the industry is such a grind that the writers burn out before really developing their craft. Maybe video games will eventually bring a depth of meaning and insight equivalent to their refinement of play mechanics, but they’re not there yet.
I wonder how long it will take for someone to pull off what Chris Crawford been trying to do, that is find games own style of telling stories.
His own attempt was to make AI that writes the story as it interacts with the player, but lastest blog entries of his suggest he is unsure if that path that took him many years (he started the attempt in 1992 I think?) was the right one.
I’d like to submit the Marathon series of video games on how to integrate story into a game without needing to change virtually any gameplay or include cutscenes. That the story is incredibly intelligent is just bonus. For those unfamiliar, it includes AI mental illness, AIs getting molested, subjugated alien races, infinite alternative timelines, and Lovecraftian beings. It might have been recognized as a better Doom if it wasn’t doomed to be a Mac-exclusive game series in the early 90s.
I have not played any computer game in over more than a decade, but I played a lot earlier.
Anyway, what I did for a while - not recently due to a lack of good targets - is watch Youtube "playthrough no commentary" videos (and with story-less gameplay parts heavily cut out). That's usually 4-6 hours of game movie.
The Last of Us was good, but the very top #1 for me as far as story goes - ignoring the game play completely - was Horizon Zero Dawn. One of many such game movies for this game: https://youtu.be/W6jbYfmQAG4
That story seemed to be good but kind of stupid and the same as always, completely predictable, you already know what happened when you see the start and it's a bit stupid and too far-fetched - that kind. Until it wasn't. Turned out it wasn't just well-made, when you find out what was really going on it was THE BEST.
Not only does it have two very different stories layered (three, if you count the present time story): One about what happened to earth and its people and one layered inside of two people, the MC and a woman in the past, with seemingly no connection, until we find out the opposite is the case.
Both story-parts actually had me crying. When I found out after about four hours what had actually happened on earth, it was a great emotional shock. Same with the ending, that used the connection between the MC and that person from the past.
Even the machines and their (animal) forms make sense, there is a good and IMO satisfying explanation.
The stories in this game and in a handful of others are much better than most movies.
If you are in the mood for something really dark, watch a game movie of "SOMA". Underwater survival. Earth is gone - a giant meteor made the surface into a fiery hell, the only survivors are some researchers in a deep ocean facility. Best small detail: They get the "uploading your brain into a computer simulation" right, see the very ending of that game which shows it one last time (TL;DW: As someone who knows neuroscience, the idea makes no sense anyway, but let's forget that and assume it makes sense. What will happen is you still stand there in front of the computer, wandering what happened, after the "upload". Because you still exist, and the copy is not you. It's a copy. You still die, there is no magical connection between you and your copy.)
I couldn't agree more with you! I played through the game and Horizon Dawn story was so rewarding! I kept playing for it even though the gameplay part had long run its course in keeping my interest. The expansion also expanded a little bit on the lore, broadening a little bit the world outside of the main arc, which was nice.
This game surprised me so much, because I just picked it on a whim a short while ago. It is so much more than what the cover suggests.
A very emotional and impactful story, really looking forward what they do for the next chapter of her story.
On the one hand, I like that this much story telling effort goes into video games. On the other hand, I'm a bit sad that from a narrative standpoint, you can generally cut out all the actual game-playing parts and get a stronger experience for it.
There are some exceptions to this (Spec Ops: The Line comes to mind as a case where the gameplay actually fuels the story, and I also think I've heard good things about Two Brothers in this respect too) but these are the exception, not the rule.
> top #1 for me as far as story goes - ignoring the game play completely - was Horizon Zero Dawn
I watched people play it to the end - mostly. I played it when it came out on PC - never completed it; the combat didn’t work for me.
Personally I think it has a cool sci-fi premise but that’s it. I found the characters … stiff, shallow, and pretty cliché. Aloy is yet another messianic player character that we have seen a billion times. Apart from the enigmatic main villain - which is yet another well worn trope - all the side characters feel pretty 2 dimensional.
I’m going to get skewered for saying this … but the story feels like it’s pandering to current social political trends - i.e. the obsession with diversity.
I don’t know why exactly the “diversity” in modern stories bug me so much but I never had a problem with Star Trek. Maybe it’s the egalitarian in me, modern stories seem to have an emphasis on differentiating people by their ethnicity and background while Star Trek promoted the view that all people regardless of ethnicity or background be treated as peers - where you stand on your own merits as an individual.
>I’m going to get skewered for saying this … but the story feels like it’s pandering to current social political trends - i.e. the obsession with diversity
How so? I didn't get that feeling at all from Horizon Zero Dawn.
If someone told me HZD had an obsession with diversity I'd react with a standard "wat?". I do agree that some of the forced diversity in modern stories is annoying, mind you. I just didn't get that vibe from that one story.
> I’m going to get skewered for saying this … but the story feels like it’s pandering to current social political trends - i.e. the obsession with diversity.
How do you think HZD pandered to diversity? The main point that I have heard brought up is the wide variety of ethnicities in secondary/background characters, but IMO that is completely consistent with the game's setting and story. The game takes place in a world where human society has literally been reset and rebuilt from scratch, so you'd need to have the full variety of human kind for genetic diversity while at the same time all of the racial and ethnic prejudices that exist today would cease to exist unless the AI was trained to preserve them (it wasn't). Naturally the new world would see new prejudices arise (people are still people after all), and the game does attempt to portray this.
I had no idea that "game movies" existed. I'm going to have to watch a few. I was obsessed with playing games as a kid. I'm now 40 and every so often get excited about playing a game I see (most recently Deathloop) but when I actually play it I am underwhelmed by the experience and never play again after the first sitting. The only exceptions are arcade games that I don't need to invest heavily in and are a mindless escape. On the other hand I still enjoy watching the reviews and gameplay videos. I think what is lacking for me in the playing experience is that the actual gameplay never feels novel or interesting to me and usually feels like a huge amount of drudgery to extract the core ideas and highlight experiences. Open world games are overwhelming to me as I can't stop thinking about the real-life opportunity cost of the time I'm spending meandering around (strangely I don't worry about the opportunity cost when reading books...). What I enjoy from just watching is experiencing the ideas and aesthetics in a more streamlined fashion. You might say that I should just stick to movies and books, but I honestly believe games are a unique art form with great promise, so I'll keep revisiting!
Should be noted that for Portal it didn't even have a narrative really, just a games long monologue. It was closer to Notes from the Underground than most game narratives.
This author seems to have never played a game with an actual good story. You can tell from his comparison of game stories to movies.
How can you compare a 2 hour narrative with a 10-100 hour narrative?
This article grossly overgeneralizes stories in games and ignores the unique storytelling device that is a "game".
A good book doesn't necessarily make for a good movie and a good movie doesn't necessarily make for a good game (and the other way around, as we've seen over and over again).
This article seems like a self-congratulating piece by an indie developer for being an indie developer.
Good for you. That doesn't mean AAA studios can't make a good game story, same as big budget movies can have a compelling story.
> How can you compare a 2 hour narrative with a 10-100 hour narrative?
Not only the length makes video game stories different. Another huge difference is that in video games you actually get to be the character(s). You don’t just passively experience the story like in a movie or a book, you’re an active part of it. Even better: you can have the player make meaningful choices that affect the plot, which is something unique to games as a medium.
Exactly. And even if you don't have any real choices to make, you still get to experience the story as your story, not a tale.
The author would probably think I'm a lunatic for it, but I consider the original Call of Duty: Modern Warfare trilogy to have a good story. I thoroughly enjoyed it, and unlike with other shooters, and even though it followed multiple characters simultaneously, I was able to suspend disbelief enough to experience it as if it was my story, my world.
The writing of CoD: MW 1-3 would probably be considered a passable military fiction by most critic, if even that. But I bring this particular example up, instead of say Mass Effect trilogy, to highlight the unique aspect of videogames: it can make you live through a story, which neither books nor movies can. It's a distinct kind of experience.
> it can make you live through a story, which neither books nor movies can. It's a distinct kind of experience.
SOMA is a great example of this; It could maybe also work as a movie or book, but the FPS perspective fits the story and narrative so good that it elevates the whole thing to its own unique experience.
A VR version could turn this to 11, but sadly any work on that seems to have fizzled out.
Mass Effect storyline is really nice but if it was put into a movie format it would be a generic scifi flick without emotion. A lot of time is needed to develop the characters and the details possible more than what TV viewers would have patience for but because its a video game it means you get breaks from the narrative because yuou live the story.
In SSX, they broke that wall by referring to the characters as riders we identify with, explicitly challenging the idea of them being characters we pretend to become.
Other titles do that, but that was the first one I noticed the distinction made in an overt way.
I didn't get the same impression as you about the author. Especially later points sound like they played games with good writing and most points are just "many games" points.
Personally, I have seen and played games with 100 hours of playtime - none had a story/narrative of 100 hours (edit: most of it was "filler" aka gameplay without much narrative/story).
I also agree with many parts of the article regarding bad stories overall, despite playing some games with good stories - or stories I felt were good when I had little exposure to video game stories.
I've played many of the author's games and consider them to have better stories than most. I’d have to reach for the likes of Planescape or Disco Elysium to find something I’d consider more compelling.
As you imply, there are many games whose brief summary might sound weird, cheesy or cliche but are actually very well crafted story experiences when played. For me, some would be: Life is Strange, Soma, Deus Ex, Human Revolution, Alpha Centauri, Alan Wake, Control, Quantum Break and Detroit Become Human.
Then there are the Soul Reaver games with middling stories but whose written dialogue and delivery easily put them at the level of great literature for me.
Storywise, some of the author's games would not be out of place if ranked highly amongst such a list. It's like Berkson's paradox, his studio has had staying power but you certainly couldn't point to graphics or unique game mechanics as explanations for why.
>This article seems like a self-congratulating piece
I'd go as far as to argue the author undersells his abilities. His RPG world building and stories are a great deal more entertaining if compared to many fantasy books.
> That doesn't mean AAA studios can't make a good game story,
They could but rarely do. Meanwhile, the majority of those few attempts get workshopped to death (it's easy to tell when a game with potential got derailed in this way). The author isn't saying good game stories don't exist, only that they're rare and most often from smaller studios.
> How can you compare a 2 hour narrative with a 10-100 hour narrative?
Larger numbers are better? Let's take as an example the criticaly acclaimed Ghost of Tsushima. If you ask me, it could have been half as long and exactly as good if not better. There was too much identical padding to reach your 100 hour "narrative".
FPS? All the story I need is the 'end condition' (basically what do I have to do to win this level), and I can play. "reach point X", "detonate bomb", "kill everyone".... sure.
Reading this article makes me realize how little I know about games. I've never heard of any game the writer used as examples, except World of Warcraft (which I never played, however).
The author made a lot of pithy statements, but the article feels strangely lack of substance. There's little evidence or elaboration. Just statement after statement, with a lot of repetitiveness.
And the writing. Paragraphs like these:
> Now let's be clear. I'm not a great fantasy writer. If I was, I'd be writing books nobody buys because nobody buys books anymore. Still, as a writer I'm simply competent. Which, by video games standards, makes me awesome. Overall, I'm good enough that people give me money, and that is sufficient.
...... are just strange, and made me grimace. He's quite plainly saying, that he's mediocre, but because everyone else is bad, he's great.
And what's with the "nobody buys books anymore"? Plenty of people do.
> Good story isn't what gamers are after. Which is good, because they ain't gettin' it.
While not having played many games, I remember some GBA games having decent stories. They are not Charles Dickens level literature, but comparable to good short stories, definitely worthy of "good writing".
---
I had expected much more---more substance, better writing---from a "successful" story writer of a game company.
> He's quite plainly saying, that he's mediocre, but because everyone else is bad, he's great.
Why is this bad thing to say? If he thinks this is true, then it is OK to say it. And earning money making games is actual achievement - most indie game makers are in financial loss and that is it.
Someone who make small profit is exactly people who can say the above.
Because not everyone else is bad? It's not like he's the only one writing stories for games that make a profit.
I mean it's fine to like your own achievement. Nothing wrong with that.
But he's certainly not successful enough to be so cocky as to detract everyone else's work (and again, he did so without much evidence or elaboration).
Yes he is successful enough to definitely have right to voice opinion on industry state or criticise it. We are talking about notoriously difficult market to succeed in.It would be absurd to expect him to be only one who ever earned profit in order to comment on quality of stories - both his own and other peoples.
And frankly, playing a game once is enough to give you right to criticism that game story. Playing a couple of popular games gives you right to comment on popular games stories.
"I am not too good and I am still succeeding because bar in this aspect is low" is incredibly fair thing to say. It might be too self depreciating for some people's taste, but we should not require everyone to brag and exaggerate own skills each time they want to comment on something.
I’m not sure what you mean by taking offense. I don’t feel offended; I’m not a game story writer, so whatever he writes cannot possibly offend me.
I also am not criticizing the first part of that single sentence (“I’m not great”). I find the paragraph in its entirety distasteful, when he said others are so bad that he was awesome.
I think the author is right that games generally have poor, or poorly executed stories, and even great stories need to be squeezed into the game play box (e.g. his "ends with bang"-trope.)
But I also feel like the author misunderstands how the medium can elevate a story:
"Old mans Journey" was critized for having too simple puzzles, but it is not a puzzle game. It's a story, where a few simple puzzles gives you time to interact with the landscape and soak up the atmosphere, which enhances the impact of the worldless storytelling between levels.
It's a simple, nothing new story, made extremely impactful through the medium.
I also felt the story in Celeste was very impactful, even though it probably would make for a boring movie. But I struggled as Madelein as she conquered the mountain and her fears, and that struggle primed me to feel her struggle through the sparse dialogue.
Yes. It's like saying stories in opera are worse than in novels because dialogues in opera aren't realistic and the story is too short :)
You have to play to the strengths of the medium. The less defined the story is the more freedom players have. It's a design tradeoff that makes stories in games different, and they should be judged based on these different media constraints.
Stories in opera are worse than in novels. Good opera is usually paired with woefully poor story. The whole point of the story is to provide basic context to the songs.
Consider Turandot. The story is bad to the point of being objectionable, and whatever is left verges on gibber. And yet, without it, a song like Ho una casa nell'Honan is lessened because there has to be at least some reason to care about why this guy has a house in what sounds like a badly corrupted pronunciation of Yunnan.
But that's the point. What makes a story good for one medium makes it bad for other. So it's not fair to compare them abstracting from the medium.
You can still have better and worse stories withing given medium, and you can compare them between media if you insist, but you have to separate the inherent trade-offs from real quality differences.
Exactly. Sure, Last of Us has the story of a generic zombie movie. But in a way, that was my twelve year old daughter I watched die. I don't think it's fair to criticize games for not having as good a story as a novel when you'd never imagine criticizing a music album for not having as good a story as a novel.
I agree that it can, but many (especially AAA) video games try to imitate film, rather than using the strengths of the medium.
This is why I hate cutscenes. I'm sitting here with a controller in my hands, ready to do something fun, and you're going to make me sit and watch some expository dialog instead? Where the voice acting, animation and writing are all below movie standards?
Another game in the "I can't imagine this working well in other media"-category is Senua's Sacrifice. Like, sure, the story could be critically subsumized as "generic identity struggle", but the way it's written and and delivered only works in a game. Perhaps that's a decent first cut for a story in a videogame: If you made this a movie instead, would it still work? If you make a movie out of e.g. any of the Call of Duty games, you'd mostly end up with a generic action movie without having to change the script.
This question hints at how well gameplay and story interact which each other. In most action games, they barely interact at all.
(Also, as interactive experiences, games just are not necessarily dependent on having a story, as the article points out. If the experience is good enough, a story isn't really necessary. Alien Isolation doesn't have much of a story, but visceral, devastating gameplay. Bethesda games generally have poor stories, but it doesn't really matter because the gameplay is open ended enough that everyone can just make their own story inside the game. Online games don't have a story, or some thin veneer to put on a loading screen; they don't need that, because the people are here solely for the gameplay experience.)
> If you make a movie out of e.g. any of the Call of Duty games, you'd mostly end up with a generic action movie without having to change the script.
This is kind of a funny comparison, because the first Call of Duty game was practically a string of set-piece action scenes, and sometimes plot lines, that were very obviously lifted from popular WWII war movies from the prior few years. IMO—and I doubt this is an uncommon sentiment among people who played it—those were also easily the best parts of the game.
No. One of the six things article complains about is repeating the same trick to death. Lord of the rings did not repeated the trick from other books, it created own.
It does not fit other points either. It does not uses meme humor. It does not allow you to ignore the story. It has individual human voice.
It does not fit the thing article is complaining about at all.
Can't remeber where I read it or if it's an original thought but reading lotr was like reading the main story, okay, but also sitting at the campfire and hearing about stories from before.
The whole book is as much about the fellowship's quest than the backstory of the whole world and that's what got me in when reading it. It's not about what's happening to our heroes but what happened to others before.
The Talos Principle is an interesting example of the weird relationship between a game and its story. The gameplay is just a ton of small, repetitive, Portal-like puzzles, and I don't say that as a criticism; it's just reality. The story is presented almost completely passively through notes and computer terminals. You could easily believe the game was developed first and then the story was written afterwards. But somehow they combine to make a very engrossing experience.
How exactly are Raiders of the Lost Ark or Breaking Bad storylines better than those of the first Mafia, The Witcher 3, Uncharted 4, Metro Exodus, Kingdom Come: Deliverance or Half-Life 2 + episodes? And I'm not even mentioning artistic pieces like What Remains of Edith Finch or Life is Strange. There are quests in The Witcher 3 you could make a movie from (Bloody Baron).
Edit: to explain a touch more - I liked the story and its characters more, and even though I played it over 2 years ago I still remember the story pretty well. Breaking bad had a couple interesting points but I couldn't tell you what happened between seasons or really much outside of the main points.
Well Breaking Bad is a series and Uncharted 4 is a pretty short, intense ride, so it's a little apples to oranges comparison, but if I compare the first season of Breaking Bad (the only one I've seen) to Uncharted 4, which are both a few hours worth of entertainment, I don't remember the storyline of Breaking Bad being any more intricate or innovative, I mean, terminal patient does questionable things with an unlikely sidekick with expected results.
Of course I may be entirely wrong, it's been some time, but I remember both leaving a similar impression on me.
>the first season of Breaking Bad (the only one I've seen)
Breaking Bad is one of those shows that gets better with every season (the Metacritic score goes 73 → 84 → 89 → 96 → 99 from season 1 to season 5). The first season wasn't really anything special but it's gangbusters by the end.
Pacing and editing. In video games the director can't control the pace and (to a degree) sequence of events to achieve maximum emotional impact, as it is possible in movies.
There was a story to Kingdom Come: Deliverance that went beyond "my parents were killed by baddies, and luckily I was recognised as a badass because of the plot, now I'm going to become more of a badass, and kill all the Cumans?"
Yes. My parents (and almost everyone in our village) were killed by baddies hired by someone for some political reason, I was recognized as a lame illiterate nobody and was only reluctantly accepted to serve under a master of regional importance, who is pursuing his own political goals (and has a special connection to me through something) and making the most of the difficult situation of the kingdom. I was sent on several wildly different missions to investigate, bribe or fight my way through several interesting events and situations, all totally believable and anchored in the context of the story and actual history, meeting dozens of different characters, some of them real historical figures, each with their own carefully written backstory.
Is it just me or it really sound completely standard plus backstories for side characters? I mean, the story can be well executed without it being super original. But what you described here is one of super standard fantasy plots.
To me the witcher 3 had the feature of collectible women cards from sex as a game mechanic, which really takes away from the notion of a deep or compelling story.
That was only in The Witcher 1. They didn't have them in 2 or 3.
And it wasn't really well received at the time either, but it was a way of handling romance without the awkward cut-scenes that existed at the time. They only briefly showed on screen and IIRC weren't accessible later. It wasn't really collectable in the sense of collect-a-thon games like Mario Odyssey, either. Out of context it sounds horrible, in context it's a bit of a nonsensical addition.
They were going after a "french postcard" feel and it just didn't work that way. Possibly because people aren't as familiar with what they were referencing.
If it's the Gwent mini game you are talking about afaik you have to defeat certain NPCs in a card game to get the cards that you are talking about. Also there are a lot of charecter cards not just women. Not to mention the fact that playing Gwent is completely optional in the game
Human actors - Breaking Bad is about the process of a man changing into a monster. It takes great acting to make that story work
Video games will never do drama as well as theatre or film, because we can't see into the actors souls - video game stories are puppet theatre
Edit: thinking about this some more, I think I might be wrong - there are many animated films that I've found emotionally moving and involving that don't have human actors (Ratatouille for example!)
There are several games I’ve played where I remember playing racing through the action to get further into the story, or games that put storytelling at the center. In no particular order:
- Bastion
- The Stanley Parable
- Bioshock Infinite
- The Elder Scrolls series
- GTA: V
- Control
- Sam and Max
Sure this isn’t high art, but often is deeply compelling regardless. The possibilities of the medium are still yet to be fully explored.
Planescape: Torment, of course, in which combat is rare, often optional, and doesn’t net you much XP compared to story milestones and noncombat quests. Also, probably the only D&D based computer game where it’s a better idea to max Cha/Int/Wis than Str/Con/Dex. (Although unfortunately the third act devolves into a much more linear dungeon crawl, probably due to the devs running out of time.)
Vampire: the Masquerade – Bloodlines, with its infamously janky combat but incredibly memorable characters and some superb storytelling moments. Unfortunately, the third-act degeneration is very much a thing here as well.
The original Deus Ex, again with rather janky combat and emphasis on stealth and nonviolent problem-solving. Exploration and finding out more about the world is much more rewarding than killing enemies. But the third act… Uh, I think I’m starting to repeat myself here :(
> You can kill the bad jerk, but then his chest opens up and a God flies out and the God is the new bad jerk and you beat it up too. (Also known as the JRPG option.)
336 comments
[ 4.9 ms ] story [ 307 ms ] threadI emphatically disagree. Good story is what I'm after. Good story is what I've gotten. (Undertale, the Nier games, even Ocarina of Time has a very unique story-telling experience).
A game can tell a different type of story than a book or a movie - these stories are interactive, and involve an element of meta-narrative story-telling. What was that fight like? What was that choice like? Did the choice _feel_ meaningful? The story is told through these mechanisms rather than simply words on a page.
I very much agree that many players come to games for a carnal feeling. A release that comes from the ticking of boxes or completion of objectives, or the satisfaction from a skilled execution.
But these elements as well can contribute to a narrative experience (ex Undertale).
Really disagree with this article. Reminds me of those historical articles about movies being a worse version of the theatre and opera (which they were).
China seems to be the only country that still has some original and compelling new games and stories being produced.
As a counterexample to the first part, check out Nier Automata. One of the most original and compelling games I've played in recent years.
Bright Memory Infinite is a new game from China that's coming out in November, the demo is incredible and I'm excited. Gujian3 is an open-world action rpg, similar to Nier but with a xianxia theme, it's pretty good. Amazing Cultivation Simulator is a Rimworld clone with a lot of fun features. Path of Wuxia is a very original and fun martial-arts-school/dating-sim/srpg with a lot of replayability (only fan-translated for now, but an official english translation is slated for when it comes out of early access).
I think at first I played Nier Automata mainly for the mechanics. The worldbuilding and backstory take a while to pick up steam. But once it gets going, it has some unique and interesting ideas. I still feel they could have gone a lot deeper with a lot of things though. For example, the idea that robots would start their own religion seemed intriguing, but in the end they didn't really do much with it. Still very enjoyable and surprisingly a lot of food for thought.
Thanks for the suggestions, I'll check them out!
Just off the top of my head, I remember being intrigued by the robots-trying-to-be-human thing, and how consistent they were with the fact that you're an android. For example, removing your OS chip actually killed you, which is one of the 26 possible endings iirk. That and the dynamic combat and the smooth mix of different genres were enough to keep me going.
You were unironically filtered. The game does name drop a lot philosophers, but it's meant to contextualize, not as part of the game's themes. Hell, the game doesn't even care about the "humans and robots aren't actually so different" question. I don't want to write a whole essay, so I'll just say that Automata is probably the best existentialist story written this decade, with a lot of subtle details, some _great_ acting, and melding of story and gameplay that has not even been attempted elsewhere. It is unique, and uniquely excellent, beyond the point where it can just be described as "a fantastic game". Doom 2016 is a fantastic game. Nier Automata is a game I've had as much fun thinking and writing about as I had playing it.
It is just absurd to waste more then 2 hours on something like that.
The games that had the biggest impact on me were adventure games and role playing games that had deep stories written by people who knew how to blend intrigue and humor into an enjoyable experience of you living in the shoes of the main character. I play games without good narratives, but they have to be much better games to compensate, as a good story can make me ignore some pretty horrible mechanics. (I also play certain classes of puzzle and rhythm games where story is irrelevant, but those are a totally differently head space and don't compete for my time with other games.)
The whole article feels like OP is upset about something behind the scenes and just had to rumble about it
Maybe it's even sarcasm, you never know nowdays
The author might have a negative take on things and you might not like the article but to brand the article as "incredibly toxic" is a bit of a hyperbole.
Jeff is irreverent and highly opinionated but absolutely not “holier than thou.” He knows his games are ugly and played only by a tiny niche. The only thing he can remotely claim to be better at than most people is running a video game studio that manages to support his small household.
Also the title ("truths") implies there is no room for negotiation
And we focus on the other 10% that have diminished mental capacity for self control or other issues that would hinder their self control. If they are not addicted to our product, they will get addicted to a competitors product anyway.
And rants are fine, but trying to present it as the profound observations of a veteran with 20 something years of wisdom that shits on everyone's favourites without many arguments ("The Last of Us [...] having a story as good as a medium-quality zombie movie" is not an argument) comes of as toxic.
Bad guys spawn across an inter-dimensional portal and start wreaking havoc. Protagonist has to kill them all, crossing the portal in the process to go destroy the alien leader.
There were some cool extra details - the G Man, the marines entering as a third force, the diversions to do things like launch a missile into space - but all of those things were additional to that same, basic story.
This author has it spot on: our standards for story telling in video games are really low.
If your game feels like traveling to an alternate dimension with vivid details and differences a lot about the story can be excused, because the player will eventually find their own story within your game.
If your story is great and the freefloating passages are dull and lifeless the story can be great but it will never a good game.
Why not both? A great gripping story in a believeable world.
Case in point: Children of Men is basically a two hour-long escort quest. It's also an absolutely amazing film with amazing storytelling.
What I hate however is when games have the most inspiring world and fail to tell unique stories in it. E.g. the game plays in South America, yet I learn nothing about the reginal culture when I play it, because all Characters are very generic.
This is something that made Witcher 3 great: nearly every quest managed to convey some feeling about how it must have been to live in the medival ages (or some fantasy version of it).
I like it when games take their own world seriously and root every character, story and object deeply within the history of that world. And yes, sometimes that means telling the player things they can't understand immidiately, because they come from a different culture and world.
If you could exchange the world just like that without changing a lot about the quests, you are doing it wrong.
For the first hour or two you were implored to, "Get to the surface" because it was your and your fellow scientists hope of being rescued.
When you run into the marines you aren't told they're bad, they just start trying to kill you and you figure out that you're not getting a rescue.
World-building wise it was leaps ahead of anything that came before it and the in-game (rather than FMV) dialogue was fantastic and immersive.
It didn't have "level screens", the level transitions were natural rather than forced with loading screen hints and title cards.
While that's all completely standard now, the other competitor titles at the time were games like Quake 2 and half-life's predecessors were games like Duke Nukem 3D and Quake, which while both ground-breaking in their own way weren't a touch on the visceral world of half-life.
The only other FPS games that came close to lore was rainbow six, but that was the "set pieces" style of choosing levels and going through rehearsed action rather than what felt like an emergent world in half-life.
While replaying half-life now it feels far more linear and scripted, that's because we have nearly 15 years of gameplay improvements built on top of where it lay the foundations.
For players at the time, going from games like quake to half-life it really did feel like it was genre defining.
That is not exactly subtle nor needs much figuring. Them trying to kill you is game telling you they are bad in very straightforward way.
That kind of scripted event, and environmental story-telling, was extremely novel in a FPS game back then.
It's easy to nowadays handwave that away as merely "Marines shoot player, player realizes Marines are enemy" like that kind of heavy scripting is just something mundane. But back then it wasn't mundane, it was quite revolutionary.
Before that the norm in the genre was mostly maze shooters with very limited NPC interactions, like certain Doom enemies fighting each other or some wall or another blowing up in Quake, Half-Life took all of that and brought it to a whole new level.
Back then, half life was one of the games that made me think about how linear games are evolving to be. At one place, you could decide to go left or right and it joined back together quickly. It was straightforwardly prescripted, which is something we discussed with friends a lot.
I did not needed hindsight of years and my current experience. If anything now I have less experience as I spend significantly less time playing games like this.
a) Choosing which enemies to go and kill with your chosen color of pixel burst.
or
b) Choosing which set of text and vaguely representational spritework the game would expose to you.
Many "linear" games offer tactical rather than strategic freedom. There is a sort of conservation of experiential depth, limited by the players' ability/inclination to absorb new interaction concepts, and the availability of developer resources to build them.
This is a good way to put it IMO. Command and Conquer is an interesting exception in the action genre because it had some meta strategy in branching missions of the over world.
Half life was not one of them. At the time, they were games that allows more strategizing and more tactic and more micro choices. Half life was as prescribed as it gets.
yes here's a clip of someone saving the scientist: https://youtu.be/e_l84_7jDoU?t=163
And the difference between full cit scene and what happened in half life was really really minor.
The difference between a cut scene and embodying a character while things happen around you isn't a minor thing for many of us.
Half life was part of pattern of moving towards extremely linear. It had better graphics than normal at the time. It had attempt at actual story. It was not move toward more agency to the player nor toward subtlety.
It had less choices than normal at the time, not even in terms of whether to hide on left or right, less options for tactical decisions, less of anything like that.
In terms of showing rather then telling via text, almost anything has that aspect.
Half life had very good graphics for the time. That is where it shined.
Wolfenstein and Doom have literally zero story choices of any kind. Not even inconsequential ones!
Clearly, Half-Life has superior story telling to Wolfenstein or Doom. Not by much, can be argued, but it clearly does. And at the time, the little bit felt like a whole lot compared to literally nothing.
In wolfesrwin, you could at least go back and had choice between left or right doors. Half life had only way to go - forward. It was like sitting on train moving on railroad.
Maybe you just missed them all!
Just off the top of my head from the start of the game: Activating the alarm from the button on the reception desk, getting the guard into trouble. Going into the kitchen and playing with the microwave cassarole (referenced from later sequel!). Opening lockers in the locker room (looking at people's stuff), getting the hazard suit and heading back (if you try to proceed without suit, guard will tell you to go get it - nonlinear maps!). Pressing the broken elevator button, sending people plummeting. Opening the dumpster to find the hiding scientist. Operating vending machines.
Did Wolfenstein or Doom have anything like this? In Wolfenstein you can optionally open cells and find hidden doors behind walls. In Doom you can push buttons, and you are always required to do so to proceed.
It doesnt matter which writer, author, musician, artist, game designer, movie maker you pick they all hit an upper bound of how many chimps in the the whole troupe they can connect with.
But if we are targeting specific niches rather than the whole population its a great time to be a story teller. The kind of engagement you can get is historically of the charts.
Are they? I would say that they are, but not for video games, but for all things in general.
Sturgeon's law [0] states that "ninety percent of everything is crap." And it was supposedly originally about sci-fi novels! “Fifty Shades of Grey” was completely criticized on all fronts by reviewers, but still became one of the top bestsellers.
If you look at ancient myths, we have things like a series of myths with a central plot resolving around a god raping humans of all genders (significant chunk of Zeus-related mythology), Loki changing into a mare and getting impregnated, because gods wanted to prevent a builder from getting rightfully earned reward [1].
Most of the stories created today are low-quality ones. And that was always so. Only when we look at the past creations, we can only experience those that were good enough to be preserved. The same will probably happen with video games if various DRMs will not prevent that.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturgeon's_law [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sva%C3%B0ilfari
I'm pretty sure that Fifty Shades of Grey wasn't successful for its story, but for discussing sex and specifically BDSM in a more open way than what was previously seen in "mainstream" movies.
Overall, a lot of works that, on the surface, aren't very impressive by current standards, but still managed to stand out in a novel way. Fifty shades and Half Life are two examples, but you could say exactly the same thing about Minecraft, DOOM, most of the classical movies, most of the old "legendary" cars and a lot more. Things don't become classics by standing the test of time - if you discount nostalgia, a lot of "classical" stuff is crap by todays standard -, but by founding the genre they're later beaten in.
And because it feeded from the Twilight-Hype, on which it was a juicy twist. For itself it probably would never have become such a success.
> but you could say exactly the same thing about Minecraft, DOOM
Can we? Minecraft feeds mainly on its powerful sandboxing and modability, which other games still can't really match today, while also still getting regular updates. And doom as a franchise continued to move forward and created new games. They don't remain successful just because their first versions were awesome at the time, but because they continued to output awesome successors.
This is very different from classics which are usually frozen in time and stay classics despite getting no updates at all.
Nah, the standards are just different because of the medium. Just like you wouldn't write a book where people sing for 10 minutes every time they talk, and you wouldn't write opera that lasts for 40 hours and has realistic acting and dialogs - you can't compare stories between different media ignoring the differences. And the difference that interactivity makes is bigger than the different constrains between novels and opera.
The more detailed and intricate a story of a game is - the less freedom of choice the player has. In the extreme case you have so called "visual novels" which let you make 10-20 choices the whole game at predefined places. They barely qualify as games and they are very niche genre in gaming because they don't play to the strengths of the medium. At that point you might as well read a "choose your own adventure" book. The most common emotion they cause in players is frustration because they wanted the protagonist to do something else, but they can't influence the story in any way at the moment.
On another end of the spectrum you have games like minecraft - where the story is your struggle vs the mechanics of the game, and there's no need for any pre-defined plot because you create the plot with every keyboard input you do every second. Freedom of choice = 100%, plot = 0%. Most gamers prefer these kinds of games because they can only be realized as games.
The plot in minecraft can be "night was coming and I forgot the close the doors to the mines, then a creeper came and blew up my bed and pushed me into a chasm near a river of lava - I had 5% hitpoints left and if I died then I would get respawned in random place on the map cause no bed - I would maybe have to spend hours trying to find my base again so I had to think hard how to get out of there alive". It's a great story that forces the player to feel strong emotions. And it won't happen to any other player the exact same way which makes it even better. If you add traditional plot to Minecraft you make it worse.
No matter if a story in art is detailed and intricate, or barely there - what matters is how it makes people feel. Novels have 100s of pages, poems might have 4 lines, but you won't say "stories in poetry suck".
In Opera the main point is music, so the story is designed around that (and the time and place constraints). In games the tradeoffs are different, but it doesn't mean that it's somehow "low standards".
Most games tend to prefer less plot and more freedom because it plays to the strengths of the medium. It's a trade-off.
> it was the same story as all first person shooters going back to Doom: Bad guys spawn across an inter-dimensional portal and start wreaking havoc
almost every book is Hero's Journey if we look from high enough. Details matter. You can take the same central conflict and write 1000 books that make you feel 1000 different emotions.
- visual novel mode for dialogues and plot choices where player freedom is very restricted by story can be detailed
- game mode for mechanics and combat that have barely any influence on the story (besides "survive this challenge to continue") but players have freedom to express themselves
It is very formulaic in structure, I'd argue more formulaic than ancient theater, and it limits the possible plots a lot (for example you won't find any RPG where the hero gets weaker with time). But all these conventions are accepted as necessary evil by the intended audience, so that's fine.
Didn’t have much of a plot though.
Just “you are fleeing a deep cavern or something after stealing a great deal of arcane power (more than you have the mental capacity to hold onto)”. Never saw how it ended. I imagine it is either meant to inevitably end in defeat, or it ends with the character having lost all the power they stole , escaping with only their life, or perhaps, having lost all of it, being unable to continue to evade capture.
That's merely an economic decision by the industry. You can make a game with detailed and intricate stories while simultaneously allowing full player freedom. It's just difficult and expensive to do so!
Consider something like Dwarf Fortress. It's detailed down to the alcohol content of the dirt under the cat's third left front paw nail. And the cat has its own will and you are permitted to do pretty much anything to the cat. But it's taken two people years to make it without much/any profit.
The state of affairs is simply that we are limited only by our imaginations and our economic utilities. We carry supercomputers in our pockets. Few have any idea what to do with them.
On the other hand, a lot of people enjoy the art of literary composition. Grand scenes with precisely chosen words, "show don't tell" (which has little bearing on the underlying plot ideas, to me), and lots of rich description. I don't care for that sort of stuff, probably because I don't visualize things in my head much while reading, but I know a lot of people who judge books and authors on it.
I think of narrative as a combination of several elements: character, plot, world-building, execution (word choice, visual choices and performance for film or games), concepts and ideas. I tend to be drawn to strong characters first, but not always. Some examples off the top of my head:
Clerks: strong characters, mediocre almost everything else
Reservoir Dogs: strong characters, strong execution, minimal plot and world-building
Portal: strong characters, plot, world building, concepts, and execution
Brazil (the Terry Gilliam movie): strong world-building and execution, weak characters and plot
Lolita (the book): strong execution and characters
Harry Potter: strong characters, world-building, and concepts, goofy plot and execution
Primer: mind-bending concepts, good execution, weak characters and plot
Don’t know why, but I could go on and on thinking about it.
Edit: this list would imply I have pretty narrow tastes but really I like a little bit of everything; these are just some notable examples that came to mind as being particularly strong or weak in certain areas.
The comment I replied to mentionned:
> There were some cool extra details - the G Man, the marines entering as a third force, the diversions to do things like launch a missile into space - but all of those things were additional to that same, basic story.
I think it's wrong to separate a story between "a story" and "the details", all stories are the same if you boils them down enough.
At the same time, the upcoming Uncharted movie is looking to be substantially less interesting than Uncharted 4.
The fact that the movie studios are now looking at videogames for inspiration is very telling IMO.
What do you mean? People complain about movies all the time. Even Blockbusters, or especially braindead blockbusters, are being trashed everywhere. Marvel-Movies, as beloved as they are, are often bashed for how bad and generic they are. Hollywood for many people is synonymous for bad storytelling.
> The fact that the movie studios are now looking at videogames for inspiration is very telling IMO.
Because that's where the customers are. Gaming is primary a thing of younger people, and to bait them you need stuff that they know and love.
Print bleeds into video games and movies as well. How many movies start with a text blurb? How many games literally just tell you what happened, instead of showing, instead of doing.
Even then, I tend to gravitate towards open world games without stories since it is easier to imagine your own than dealing with expository interjections. The Long Dark is a good example of this. The developers are trying to make a narrative driven game with their Wintermute story mode, yet the reality is that survival mode is far more fun. Rather than dealing with criminals in an otherwise inexplicable desolate wasteland[1] while trying to find my ex (their story), I am trying to figure out what happened to the once sleepy community that I last visited in my childhood while trying to survive long enough to be rescued (my story).
(1) Technically, there is an explanation, but it is weak and not always consistent.
There is always a villain , a protagonist and he goes through challenges to eventually defeat the villain. Finally he is a transformed man and returns home with the riches for society.
Sure there are some that deviate from the traditional plot but only very few of them succeed because to pull that off you have to be a master in story writing.
What makes a story great isn’t its uniqueness regarding the plot but having great character development, dialogue, depth and breadth of the environment, the correct use of things like midpoint, flashbacks, rising action and other devices to keep the audience engaged.
Making sure secondary characters contribute equally and help the protagonist grow is also important.
The truth is that making a great video game is an incredible effort as there needs to be a balance of everything such as great AI, graphics, etc and as I described above good story telling is already a massive undertaking.
Given the above , I’m not surprised many publishers cut corners because they are limited by time and budget
Nowadays you can have the 50 year old dad spending his quality time in bed next to his wife blasting enemies with the teenage/student kids doing the same.
With another generation it will be the folks in retirement homes too.
With music you get stuck on the stuff you discovered and made your own. Into punk? Probably born way back in the 60s. Techno? 70s.
Will it be the same with games? The guy in the retirement home still playing World of Warcraft? Or that copy of Diablo that came out in 2003?
Story in video games therefore has to be good enough to not just last a week or a summer, but a lifetime.
I don't listen to particular genres of music or music from a particular period of time.
As for gaming, I would rather watch a film, read a book, go outside, watch a play, meet people, do something else, because I don't have much free time and gaming is not a priority.
I would probably play some games if I would have more free time.
As a matter of fact I worked for 7 years as a game programmer and during that period I never played other games than our own stuff and some stuff from the competition where we wanted to understand some mechanics.
Or maybe games have always appealed to nerds of all ages, but what happened in the 90s is they began to appeal to normie children too, and as you point out those normie kids continued to play them when they became normie adults.
Master of Magic gets a new life with bugfix/balance patches and addons. It's from 1993.
It's not a bang-bang-shooty game though.
The Last of Us Part II spoils you even further, there isn’t anything else close to the level of detail and story telling that Naugthy Dog has done here.
“It’s a rollercoaster thrill ride which lasts like 20 hours and leaves you scarred for the rest of your days. 10/10”
FYI HBO and creators of Chernobyl have picked up The Last of Us and are filming 10 episode series right now with a bigger budget than Game of Thrones.
But the game never starts. Your basically navigating cut scenes on rails.
Same can be said for cod campaigns and Titanfall. Hell titanfall 1 was multi-player only and it still has a story spawning Apex Legends
Space Invaders, Pacman, Mario, Tetris are games that single-handedly defined an entire generation of games. No story to be found.
I think the OP is perfectly on point. A good story demands an authorial voice, and most games can't have (or won't bother with) that.
Of course, it can fail too, but in my humble opinion it is one of the best approach to game design.
"Story in a game is like a story in a porn movie. It's expected to be there, but it's not that important."
The guy is so deep in code engineering that sometimes other, more nuanced, details can be seemingly totally lost on him.
Some games focus on mechanical skills or rules akin to a sport or boardgame, others are an interactive narrative experience. This interactive experience can further be broken down into games that tell you what is happening (cinema), and games that let you make your own story (tabletop RPG).
So while there is a lot of crossover and blurred lines, of these types of game, only one type really needs a well written or scripted story to achieve its goals. We have many successful games with no story due to this, but other games wouldn't have succeeded without one.
Entirely plausible and tragic.
By comparison, video games are in their infancy. We've been at it for only a few short decades, and having the audience directly involved with the narrative is a radical shift from what we had before. We're looking at a new art form finding its identity.
Right now the industry is drowing in AAA games that stick to the cinematic style of storytelling (and "cinematic" is still used as praise for storytelling in games), but there's also lots of (mostly indie) games out there that are trying to push the boundaries. You have games like Braid, Brothers and Hades exploring how to strongly bind narrative and game mechanics together. You have games like the first Bioshock, which abuse your understanding of genre conventions. You have games like Return of the Obra Dinn doing amazing work with non-linear storytelling.
It's a good time to be into video game storytelling.
Video games are in a weird place because they arguably reached maturity of design with 1985’s Super Mario Bros. But as wonderful as SMB is, it doesn’t mean anything or have anything to say: it is just the first game to truly nail 2d platformer mechanics to a transcendent degree. Indeed, as the OP mentioned, the best video games seem to be able to do as of yet with respect to depth of meaning is the equivalent of a mid-grade zombie film (The Last of Us), and the industry is such a grind that the writers burn out before really developing their craft. Maybe video games will eventually bring a depth of meaning and insight equivalent to their refinement of play mechanics, but they’re not there yet.
His own attempt was to make AI that writes the story as it interacts with the player, but lastest blog entries of his suggest he is unsure if that path that took him many years (he started the attempt in 1992 I think?) was the right one.
I’d like to submit the Marathon series of video games on how to integrate story into a game without needing to change virtually any gameplay or include cutscenes. That the story is incredibly intelligent is just bonus. For those unfamiliar, it includes AI mental illness, AIs getting molested, subjugated alien races, infinite alternative timelines, and Lovecraftian beings. It might have been recognized as a better Doom if it wasn’t doomed to be a Mac-exclusive game series in the early 90s.
Anyway, what I did for a while - not recently due to a lack of good targets - is watch Youtube "playthrough no commentary" videos (and with story-less gameplay parts heavily cut out). That's usually 4-6 hours of game movie.
The Last of Us was good, but the very top #1 for me as far as story goes - ignoring the game play completely - was Horizon Zero Dawn. One of many such game movies for this game: https://youtu.be/W6jbYfmQAG4
That story seemed to be good but kind of stupid and the same as always, completely predictable, you already know what happened when you see the start and it's a bit stupid and too far-fetched - that kind. Until it wasn't. Turned out it wasn't just well-made, when you find out what was really going on it was THE BEST.
Not only does it have two very different stories layered (three, if you count the present time story): One about what happened to earth and its people and one layered inside of two people, the MC and a woman in the past, with seemingly no connection, until we find out the opposite is the case.
Both story-parts actually had me crying. When I found out after about four hours what had actually happened on earth, it was a great emotional shock. Same with the ending, that used the connection between the MC and that person from the past.
Even the machines and their (animal) forms make sense, there is a good and IMO satisfying explanation.
The stories in this game and in a handful of others are much better than most movies.
If you are in the mood for something really dark, watch a game movie of "SOMA". Underwater survival. Earth is gone - a giant meteor made the surface into a fiery hell, the only survivors are some researchers in a deep ocean facility. Best small detail: They get the "uploading your brain into a computer simulation" right, see the very ending of that game which shows it one last time (TL;DW: As someone who knows neuroscience, the idea makes no sense anyway, but let's forget that and assume it makes sense. What will happen is you still stand there in front of the computer, wandering what happened, after the "upload". Because you still exist, and the copy is not you. It's a copy. You still die, there is no magical connection between you and your copy.)
This game surprised me so much, because I just picked it on a whim a short while ago. It is so much more than what the cover suggests.
A very emotional and impactful story, really looking forward what they do for the next chapter of her story.
There are some exceptions to this (Spec Ops: The Line comes to mind as a case where the gameplay actually fuels the story, and I also think I've heard good things about Two Brothers in this respect too) but these are the exception, not the rule.
I watched people play it to the end - mostly. I played it when it came out on PC - never completed it; the combat didn’t work for me.
Personally I think it has a cool sci-fi premise but that’s it. I found the characters … stiff, shallow, and pretty cliché. Aloy is yet another messianic player character that we have seen a billion times. Apart from the enigmatic main villain - which is yet another well worn trope - all the side characters feel pretty 2 dimensional.
I’m going to get skewered for saying this … but the story feels like it’s pandering to current social political trends - i.e. the obsession with diversity.
I don’t know why exactly the “diversity” in modern stories bug me so much but I never had a problem with Star Trek. Maybe it’s the egalitarian in me, modern stories seem to have an emphasis on differentiating people by their ethnicity and background while Star Trek promoted the view that all people regardless of ethnicity or background be treated as peers - where you stand on your own merits as an individual.
How so? I didn't get that feeling at all from Horizon Zero Dawn.
If someone told me HZD had an obsession with diversity I'd react with a standard "wat?". I do agree that some of the forced diversity in modern stories is annoying, mind you. I just didn't get that vibe from that one story.
How do you think HZD pandered to diversity? The main point that I have heard brought up is the wide variety of ethnicities in secondary/background characters, but IMO that is completely consistent with the game's setting and story. The game takes place in a world where human society has literally been reset and rebuilt from scratch, so you'd need to have the full variety of human kind for genetic diversity while at the same time all of the racial and ethnic prejudices that exist today would cease to exist unless the AI was trained to preserve them (it wasn't). Naturally the new world would see new prejudices arise (people are still people after all), and the game does attempt to portray this.
That’s true but I can’t help but feel it’s deliberately written this way to score points.
How can you compare a 2 hour narrative with a 10-100 hour narrative?
This article grossly overgeneralizes stories in games and ignores the unique storytelling device that is a "game".
A good book doesn't necessarily make for a good movie and a good movie doesn't necessarily make for a good game (and the other way around, as we've seen over and over again).
This article seems like a self-congratulating piece by an indie developer for being an indie developer.
Good for you. That doesn't mean AAA studios can't make a good game story, same as big budget movies can have a compelling story.
> How can you compare a 2 hour narrative with a 10-100 hour narrative?
Not only the length makes video game stories different. Another huge difference is that in video games you actually get to be the character(s). You don’t just passively experience the story like in a movie or a book, you’re an active part of it. Even better: you can have the player make meaningful choices that affect the plot, which is something unique to games as a medium.
The author would probably think I'm a lunatic for it, but I consider the original Call of Duty: Modern Warfare trilogy to have a good story. I thoroughly enjoyed it, and unlike with other shooters, and even though it followed multiple characters simultaneously, I was able to suspend disbelief enough to experience it as if it was my story, my world.
The writing of CoD: MW 1-3 would probably be considered a passable military fiction by most critic, if even that. But I bring this particular example up, instead of say Mass Effect trilogy, to highlight the unique aspect of videogames: it can make you live through a story, which neither books nor movies can. It's a distinct kind of experience.
SOMA is a great example of this; It could maybe also work as a movie or book, but the FPS perspective fits the story and narrative so good that it elevates the whole thing to its own unique experience.
A VR version could turn this to 11, but sadly any work on that seems to have fizzled out.
Its act dont show in games.
Alot of the traditional writers never grasp, that the game mechanics are the plot and story.
In SSX, they broke that wall by referring to the characters as riders we identify with, explicitly challenging the idea of them being characters we pretend to become.
Other titles do that, but that was the first one I noticed the distinction made in an overt way.
People are all over the place on this too.
Personally, I have seen and played games with 100 hours of playtime - none had a story/narrative of 100 hours (edit: most of it was "filler" aka gameplay without much narrative/story).
I also agree with many parts of the article regarding bad stories overall, despite playing some games with good stories - or stories I felt were good when I had little exposure to video game stories.
As you imply, there are many games whose brief summary might sound weird, cheesy or cliche but are actually very well crafted story experiences when played. For me, some would be: Life is Strange, Soma, Deus Ex, Human Revolution, Alpha Centauri, Alan Wake, Control, Quantum Break and Detroit Become Human.
Then there are the Soul Reaver games with middling stories but whose written dialogue and delivery easily put them at the level of great literature for me.
Storywise, some of the author's games would not be out of place if ranked highly amongst such a list. It's like Berkson's paradox, his studio has had staying power but you certainly couldn't point to graphics or unique game mechanics as explanations for why.
>This article seems like a self-congratulating piece
I'd go as far as to argue the author undersells his abilities. His RPG world building and stories are a great deal more entertaining if compared to many fantasy books.
> That doesn't mean AAA studios can't make a good game story,
They could but rarely do. Meanwhile, the majority of those few attempts get workshopped to death (it's easy to tell when a game with potential got derailed in this way). The author isn't saying good game stories don't exist, only that they're rare and most often from smaller studios.
Larger numbers are better? Let's take as an example the criticaly acclaimed Ghost of Tsushima. If you ask me, it could have been half as long and exactly as good if not better. There was too much identical padding to reach your 100 hour "narrative".
FPS? All the story I need is the 'end condition' (basically what do I have to do to win this level), and I can play. "reach point X", "detonate bomb", "kill everyone".... sure.
Strategy games? Same... kill everyone, destroy base, done.
But for example, point and click adventures with a shitty story? Totally unplayable for me.
The author made a lot of pithy statements, but the article feels strangely lack of substance. There's little evidence or elaboration. Just statement after statement, with a lot of repetitiveness.
And the writing. Paragraphs like these:
> Now let's be clear. I'm not a great fantasy writer. If I was, I'd be writing books nobody buys because nobody buys books anymore. Still, as a writer I'm simply competent. Which, by video games standards, makes me awesome. Overall, I'm good enough that people give me money, and that is sufficient.
...... are just strange, and made me grimace. He's quite plainly saying, that he's mediocre, but because everyone else is bad, he's great.
And what's with the "nobody buys books anymore"? Plenty of people do.
> Good story isn't what gamers are after. Which is good, because they ain't gettin' it.
While not having played many games, I remember some GBA games having decent stories. They are not Charles Dickens level literature, but comparable to good short stories, definitely worthy of "good writing".
---
I had expected much more---more substance, better writing---from a "successful" story writer of a game company.
Why is this bad thing to say? If he thinks this is true, then it is OK to say it. And earning money making games is actual achievement - most indie game makers are in financial loss and that is it.
Someone who make small profit is exactly people who can say the above.
I mean it's fine to like your own achievement. Nothing wrong with that.
But he's certainly not successful enough to be so cocky as to detract everyone else's work (and again, he did so without much evidence or elaboration).
And frankly, playing a game once is enough to give you right to criticism that game story. Playing a couple of popular games gives you right to comment on popular games stories.
"I am not too good and I am still succeeding because bar in this aspect is low" is incredibly fair thing to say. It might be too self depreciating for some people's taste, but we should not require everyone to brag and exaggerate own skills each time they want to comment on something.
Of course he has the right to comment on whatever he likes to. I’m not suggesting that anyone should take away his freedom of speech.
I was merely criticizing the quality of his criticism.
I also am not criticizing the first part of that single sentence (“I’m not great”). I find the paragraph in its entirety distasteful, when he said others are so bad that he was awesome.
But I also feel like the author misunderstands how the medium can elevate a story:
"Old mans Journey" was critized for having too simple puzzles, but it is not a puzzle game. It's a story, where a few simple puzzles gives you time to interact with the landscape and soak up the atmosphere, which enhances the impact of the worldless storytelling between levels.
It's a simple, nothing new story, made extremely impactful through the medium.
I also felt the story in Celeste was very impactful, even though it probably would make for a boring movie. But I struggled as Madelein as she conquered the mountain and her fears, and that struggle primed me to feel her struggle through the sparse dialogue.
You have to play to the strengths of the medium. The less defined the story is the more freedom players have. It's a design tradeoff that makes stories in games different, and they should be judged based on these different media constraints.
Consider Turandot. The story is bad to the point of being objectionable, and whatever is left verges on gibber. And yet, without it, a song like Ho una casa nell'Honan is lessened because there has to be at least some reason to care about why this guy has a house in what sounds like a badly corrupted pronunciation of Yunnan.
You can still have better and worse stories withing given medium, and you can compare them between media if you insist, but you have to separate the inherent trade-offs from real quality differences.
I agree that it can, but many (especially AAA) video games try to imitate film, rather than using the strengths of the medium.
This is why I hate cutscenes. I'm sitting here with a controller in my hands, ready to do something fun, and you're going to make me sit and watch some expository dialog instead? Where the voice acting, animation and writing are all below movie standards?
This question hints at how well gameplay and story interact which each other. In most action games, they barely interact at all.
(Also, as interactive experiences, games just are not necessarily dependent on having a story, as the article points out. If the experience is good enough, a story isn't really necessary. Alien Isolation doesn't have much of a story, but visceral, devastating gameplay. Bethesda games generally have poor stories, but it doesn't really matter because the gameplay is open ended enough that everyone can just make their own story inside the game. Online games don't have a story, or some thin veneer to put on a loading screen; they don't need that, because the people are here solely for the gameplay experience.)
This is kind of a funny comparison, because the first Call of Duty game was practically a string of set-piece action scenes, and sometimes plot lines, that were very obviously lifted from popular WWII war movies from the prior few years. IMO—and I doubt this is an uncommon sentiment among people who played it—those were also easily the best parts of the game.
If it was created today, it’d be a generic high fantasy work.
Blame everyone else who came after Tolkien.
There's a borges fake essay on exactly this topic: Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote
It does not fit other points either. It does not uses meme humor. It does not allow you to ignore the story. It has individual human voice.
It does not fit the thing article is complaining about at all.
The whole book is as much about the fellowship's quest than the backstory of the whole world and that's what got me in when reading it. It's not about what's happening to our heroes but what happened to others before.
Edit: to explain a touch more - I liked the story and its characters more, and even though I played it over 2 years ago I still remember the story pretty well. Breaking bad had a couple interesting points but I couldn't tell you what happened between seasons or really much outside of the main points.
Of course I may be entirely wrong, it's been some time, but I remember both leaving a similar impression on me.
Breaking Bad is one of those shows that gets better with every season (the Metacritic score goes 73 → 84 → 89 → 96 → 99 from season 1 to season 5). The first season wasn't really anything special but it's gangbusters by the end.
And it wasn't really well received at the time either, but it was a way of handling romance without the awkward cut-scenes that existed at the time. They only briefly showed on screen and IIRC weren't accessible later. It wasn't really collectable in the sense of collect-a-thon games like Mario Odyssey, either. Out of context it sounds horrible, in context it's a bit of a nonsensical addition.
They were going after a "french postcard" feel and it just didn't work that way. Possibly because people aren't as familiar with what they were referencing.
Video games will never do drama as well as theatre or film, because we can't see into the actors souls - video game stories are puppet theatre
Edit: thinking about this some more, I think I might be wrong - there are many animated films that I've found emotionally moving and involving that don't have human actors (Ratatouille for example!)
Seems like the writer is just hating AAA games
But I'm also curious what zombie movies does this guy watch that have a so so much better story than TLoU
He's not alone. But I don't hate them, they bore me to tears. Same goes for the current Hollywood blockbusters.
> But I'm also curious what zombie movies does this guy watch that have a so so much better story than TLoU
Zombieland :)
- Bastion
- The Stanley Parable
- Bioshock Infinite
- The Elder Scrolls series
- GTA: V
- Control
- Sam and Max
Sure this isn’t high art, but often is deeply compelling regardless. The possibilities of the medium are still yet to be fully explored.
Are there other titles I should look into?
Vampire: the Masquerade – Bloodlines, with its infamously janky combat but incredibly memorable characters and some superb storytelling moments. Unfortunately, the third-act degeneration is very much a thing here as well.
The original Deus Ex, again with rather janky combat and emphasis on stealth and nonviolent problem-solving. Exploration and finding out more about the world is much more rewarding than killing enemies. But the third act… Uh, I think I’m starting to repeat myself here :(
Looks like they covered FF7.
In literature you have to do two things: tell a story and do it in a pleasant way. If you fail at telling the story, you fail at it.
Games have much more to them than just telling a story. You have mechanics, you have visuals. It is interactive and it has outcomes.
To not fail a game you have to give player satisfaction.
It would be nice to think of all of the things that might appeal to players, the story being just one thing among lots of others.
If story would be the only important thing then people would play lots of text based games but they do not.
The bad thing is that most of the times players get what designers think is a good game, not what they actually think it is a good game.