The Gamer's Quarter

[Alc]

[DaleNixon]

I look forward to the cutscenes in Silent Hill games.

[Ketch]

I still think that it is possible to tell a kind of story through well chosen imagery, but the problem with 'stories' in games is that they tend to limit the potential of the game element. Ie. Instead of having very dynamic gameplay they tend to turn into thinly veiled puzzle games where you have to work out the trick to get past each section, ie. use the rail gun and bounce it off the mirrors to kill the boss. Whereas older games had many alternative ways through the same level with differing risk /rewards(ie. Super Mario Bros), there is usually a critical path in games like Tomb Raider etc.


Back to the idea of the imagery, I'd love to see a game with an 'enemy' like the expanding nothingness in The Neverending Story. It would push you in the right direction (ie. towards the Princess). I think that story needs to be seen as a mixture of pushing the player and pulling the player, most games tend to pull the player through with Carrots. Can you imagine the visceral impact of playing a game like Shadow of Colossus with a deadly fog-of-war following you? and seeing the landscape wither as it approaches.

[Dracko]

[ApM]

[Tablesaw]

[kuzdu]

I've often thought that cut-scenes were analogous to waiting for another player to finish her turn in a board game. It's a time when control and input is taken away from you and you can pay attention or not, but it provides context and motivation for you when you resume playing. It's an imperfect analogy, but I feel like there's something to it.

[GilloD]

[Swimmy]

GilloD's got it. FFVII is a game for 12 year olds, just like early Weezer is rock for 12 year olds.

Mind, I still love early Weezer. Which explains a few things.
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"Ayn Rand fans are the old school version of Xenogears fanboys."
-seryogin

[dark steve]

[ryan]

[GilloD]

[Alc]

[kuzdu]

[SuperWes]

[Lestrade]

Sorry, haven't read the whole thread here; on my way to an awards show. But I wanted to throw a monkey wrench in the FFVII debate:

I didn't play FFVII back in '97 because I didn't like RPGs then. I picked it up only a couple of years ago at a used CD store (yeah) and over the next few months played it through. Despite the usual genre quirks that I've never liked (fuck you save points), I really, truly enjoyed the game.

And guess what? I started a new quest a couple of months ago, that I pick up every now and then, and I still enjoy it!

OMG I GUESS I'M NOT COOL ANYMORE

The kicker is, as anyone who's read my posts here could guess, I actually don't like RPGs very much! But for many reasons, which I won't get into here, I do honestly, earnestly even, enjoy FFVII. And as a 27-year-old man, I'm not embarassed to say that I enjoy its convoluted, meant-for-grade-eighters plot, either. Because at the end of the day the game is a weird take on a love story, and I'll play anything with a love story (it seems). Call it a guilty pleasure.

So, yeah. Try to figure that one out!

I'm off to watch my friend present an awards show in a chipmunk suit!

[macdonaldez]

I like your balanced view Wes- you're more articulate than i, so it was nice to read a concept that was in my mind now put into actual, readable words!

Speaking of cutscenes as a tool to show information that couldn't easily be expressed through play, i'm once again brought back to Warrior Within-

*minor spoiler for those late in coming to the Persian Party. i.e. me*
there was a bit where you've just finished fighting Shahdee at the sacrificial altar, and have saved Kaileena, as Shahdee disappears, she says "you cannot change your fate"
*end of spoiler, lameass miserables as it is*

and this left me intrigued as to who she was actually speaking to- Kaileena or the prince? This provoked me to keep playing further into the story.

Not sure how that could have been expressed through play, unless it was some sort of abstract minigame, reminiscent of that Greek legend where Sysiphus had to push a boulder up a hill, except in this case it would be 2D, on a single wrapping screen, with a crudely drawn 8-bit sprite representing you (or Sysiphus, if you must- are you the character, or is he/she/it merely a representation of your presence in the gameworld, or do you, David Cage- style, empathise with the character, yet remain an individual looking in?) and another, larger, chunkier collection of pixels representing the boulder. Every time you pushed the boulder up to the top of the hill, it would roll back down past you, and every time you left the screen, you'd wrap over to the other side, and the boulder would teleport to the space in front of you, ready to be pushed again.
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"You spoony bard!"

[dhex]

[Scratchmonkey]

Half-Life 2 strikes me as one of the best games in this regard, because you remain active during the "plot" portions of the game. Breen's pronouncements are that much more effective (and chilling) because they're not force-fed to "you" the player, they're just being broadcast constantly throughout the first area of the game that you traverse.

That said, there are still cutscenes in the game where you're out of control; yet they don't beggar belief as to why control has been taken away -- the beginning and end of the game are excellent examples of this and are generally areas of games where the use of cutscenes and expository text seem reasonable.

Yeah, "do, don't show" works for me.

[helicopterp]

I've been considering the discussion of pure cinema and pure games and trying to think of examples of a fusion of each. If Dziga Vertov's Man with a Movie Camera is pure cinema, I'd like to think that Hitchcock's Rear Window (starting with an extended, dialogue-less first shot that introduces the entire backstory and deriving most of its power from the basically fixed camera perspective throughout the film, that and me wanting to get with Grace Kelly) works as a talkie built on pure cinema's foundations. If we all can agree that Tetris represents a fairly pure game, then which game(s) best construct a narrative on top of the purity? Half-Life 2 is being talked about a lot here, but I haven't played it, so I won't try to put in my opinion yet.
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Like you thought you'd seen copter perverts before. They were nothing compared to this one.

[dark steve]

Okay, I probably misspoke when I said "pure," when I really just meant "very close to pure" (Melville, Leone, etc).

dhex, Scratch: Yes!

[DaleNixon]

I only brought up FFVII because it pretty much cemented the use of CG cutscenes to <strike>sell a game</strike> tell a story.

[SuperWes]

[rf]

I'm willing to go with the general sentiment here, but it seems a little artificial to insist that, if any element of your idea can't be depicted without the player's control, then your entire idea shouldn't end up as a game. Is that what we're saying?

I just don't want to see artistic games forced into being A) small-scale, somewhat linear "short stories done well" or B) sandboxes that let you do whatever you want in a world of faceless robots. I'm sure there are good possibilities in mixed styles (like mixed economies), which can have plenty of or non-interactive sequences, or whatever, while still having an overall effect that couldn't have been achieved without gameplay.

I'm NOT saying that cutscenes, or anything else, are utterly necessary for telling certain kinds of stories, just that I don't see the rationale for any set of cinéma vérité-like strictures.

P.S. I think people underestimate the effects of having gameplay at all, even when it's as ineptly used as in the average jRPG. The gameplay may be boring, and it may poorly reflect the story, but it still creates a sense of being the entity that's progressing through the story, an effect that's impossible in novels or movies.

[Dracko]

[kuzdu]

[Dracko]

Yeah, but that's pretty much recognised by everyone. There's also the matter of how well it achieves this. My character being driven by seemingly nothing at all save level-grinding and dei ex machina does little to assist this goal. It generally helps if it feels like you, the player, are advancing the story and by extension the game.

This is obviously achieved better with small-scale tales (Freeform is far too easy to mess up, but when done right, works), or games lacking a plot entirely or only as a tenuous excuse (Like say an arcade beat 'em up or a puzzle game).

One easy pit-fall of attempting a complex tale is not allowing the player to enjoy this sense of development. You can't force him along, expecting him to arrive at such and such location to get a story going, and only as a witness. jRPGs suffer from this continuously. I've yet to see a single example against this. It's always running around the global or labyrinth map, colliding with drone-like enemies, until you figure where the plot is supposedly happening.

Laura Bow, as trite a murder story as it was, and as little you did to push it along, at least allowed you to uncover extra information and clues by exploring the mansion and its grounds. jRPGs won't leave you even that, because God forbid you dare ask for actual action and adventure in the vision of some artistically bankrupt developer who insists on telling you a preteniously overblown Saint Seya over again.
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"This is the most fun I've ever had without being drenched in the blood of my enemies!"

[rf]

Yes, I agree. I guess what I mean is, people at this kind of site tend to spend so much effort emphasizing that stuff that they forget the effects interactivity confers on anything. This is particularly easy to do becuase those effects are, by definition, the ones that don't depend on smart design decisions, so even something as backward and paradoxical as a jRPG gets to have them.

[dark steve]

Okay. Well. When I say gameplay, I'm not referring necessarily to building a game where the story has to be dynamic and directly affected by the player's actions. So I guess in that sense, "do, don't show" might not be exactly what I'm referring to. What's most important though, and I stand by this, is that "play" isn't broken up. Don't cut away to the aliens invading, show it out a window while the game is still running. I don't think the distinction there is trivial. I'm even going to go out on a limb here and say that this is still interactivity, even if it's essentially forced.

I'm pretty sure it was Cliff Blezinski, talking about Gears of War, who said "Never underestimate the player's ability to undermine the story you're trying to tell," or something very close to that, which seems to be the prevailing attitude. Total bullshit. Again, I want to reference the opening of Half Life 2, which is actually as limiting and restrictive as a Flashback screen, but is so well put together that you don't even realize how it's funneling you.

[Harveyjames]

I agree, Half-Life is a good example of how to prevent the player from undermining the story. The G-Man (the one story-important character) is nearly always in a spot where it's impossible to kill him- usually behind unbreakable glass. The player's only ability is to destroy things, so he (usually) only ever comes into contact with things it's ok to destroy.

Sometimes, if you're lucky you can actually hit him and the bullets ping off, which is annoying. (It's funny, but when playing eastern games we think nothing of NPC's being indestructable, like in Zelda, but when it happens in western games it's irritating.)

A bad way of stopping the player from undermining the story is by just having the screen fade to black whenever someone important dies, with a message to the effect of 'OMG GAME OVER YOU WERENT SUPPOSED TO SHOOT TAHT GUY'. This happened a lot in Half-Life:Opposing Forces, actually.

I haven't played Half-Life 2, though. Can you just shoot Alyx in the face and carry on like nothing happened?

[Dracko]

In Half-Life 2, it's sort of jarring, because whenver you encounter a character you're not supposed to shoot, you'll lower your weapon, but you can do it regardless. And it has no effect whatsoever. None at all. They don't even bleed, and continue on with whatever it wa sthey were doing.
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"This is the most fun I've ever had without being drenched in the blood of my enemies!"

[Harveyjames]

So it's as if they came up with a good solution but didn't fully implement it. Weird.

[Swimmy]

[SuperWes]

[dark steve]

That sounds pretty good.

Now I don't know exactly why he said that.

[Dracko]

[Alc]

[Harveyjames]

Well... it bugs me because they give you the option to do something, but if you do it you "die". You're rewarded for your curiosity by instant death. It reminds me of those old Sierra adventure games:

>eat burger

"There was a hairpin in the burger, and you choked on it and died! Better luck next time, Larry!

Restore / Restart / Order A Hint Book"

I remember reading how the Lucasarts SCUMM system of games were designed partly as a reaction to the Sierra games- no trying to guess the words the game recognises, no unfair deaths. In a Lucasarts adventure, it would be more like

[use] [burger]

'Ow, there's a hairpin in this burger! I'll pick it out.'

Then Bernard (or whoever) will have the hairpin in his inventory. So the player's character is given a degree of intelligence. This is a bit like Gordon Freeman lowering his weapon when he sees friendly characters. It's just a much better way of dealing with it.

If a game's going to let me kill the wrong people, I want to have to deal with the consequences myself, like in Deus Ex when you have to try and shoot your way out of the base after you kill your own boss. Having the game just fade to black is like being back at school, getting told off because you got the answer wrong.

[Dracko]

[Alc]

[rf]

[dark steve]

The "Good Ending" has ruined an entire generation of gamers, I figure.

[Scratchmonkey]

The Good Ending and The Completion Percentage are bogeymen of this generation of gaming.

[kuzdu]

Here here!

[Harveyjames]

[Dracko]

[Six]

[Dracko]

Too many games advertising multiple endings do that, actually. I don't really know why it is, but the developers probably figure it's too difficult to code in.

But on the other hand, well, it's not really the endings that I look forward to in games. I'd prefer a lot more variety in how to achieve one central, specific goal, last minute decision multiple ending or not, than have to go down a set path with a few variables here and there that affect the conclusion.

I think one of the things these sort of games should set up to do is give the player the illusion of freedom, of potentially different manners of getting what you need to get. I say this because, of course, you can't give limitless freedom in a game, but if you build the world well enough, you can create an inner coherence, from which the player can then devise his own plans which you ensured could be pulled off. It's part of the immersion factor to me.
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"This is the most fun I've ever had without being drenched in the blood of my enemies!"

[dhex]

you know what else gets lost sometimes? the play it where it lands scenario. especially with rpgs (i.e. reloading to get better stats upon leveling up, etc).
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[rf]

Re: good ending.

The only reason I used the phrase was to emphasize when a choice that seems to go against the game's general, uh, paradigm can be the "right" choice, using Alc's word. I'm not sure any choice should be "right," rather than more or less desirable, but I wanted to clearly note that a "trangressive" choice can sometimes be a "right" one.

Re: The simplest effects of gameplay.

When I said you feel like the entity moving through the game, I didn't mean the characters. I'm talking about these kind of effects:

-In a movie or novel, any specific place is just the setting for some number of scenes, in which specific events happen. In a game, even if there's nothing to do in an area, if you can walk around it, then you're familiar with it in a much more real-world sense. It is a place with definite boundaries and features, not just a set that purports to extend beyond whatever the camera sees.
-When a blockbuster-like RPG plot sends the characters into the villain's stronghold or the depths of some uncharted zone, this also presents challenges to the player, however abstractly they are related to the characters' challenges. There's a sense of going into a hostile environment that isn't evoked by other media.
-New-school convoluted jRPG stories are based around keeping mysteries around, and the feeling of friction that gameplay provides enhances the player's experience of these. In a novel, you can always flip to the final pages, but gameplay creates at least the illusion that to you, the route to understanding everything is as uncertain and intimidating as it is to the characters.

Now, these are all enhancements to simplistic pulp aspects of stories, but that's just fine, because jRPG stories aren't reliably good on any level higher than that.