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Scratchmonkey
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Joined: 02 Mar 2005
Posts: 1439
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 Posted: Sun Jun 10, 2007 12:21 pm Post subject: Narrative and Games |
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Alright, I know that the title alone is going to make people throw up their hands and walk away -- and that's probably fine, since this is something that many of us have been over a hundred times and plenty of other people find excruciating because games are "just to be enjoyed", etc.
I'm not selling this very well. Ahem.
I was struck by Dess' post in the Ico/SotC thread in which she said that she appreciated that the story of Ico/SotC is vague enough that it's open to interpretation. Now, I like that kind of narrative as well because it seems to be fairly representative of how things "actually happen" and I like Rashomon a lot, etc.
That said, it seems like that kind of approach is specifically well-structured for use in videogames, that since each individual game-session is going to be different and sometimes wildly so, that it makes sense for the exposition in the game to have some flexibility and vagueness to match the room for manuvering in the game itself. Or, to put it another way, that too many games have ridiculous exposition because it doesn't match the experience of playing the game or is specifically constructed to be so separate from the player's actions such that it no longer has any relevance or resonance.
So, this is a general topic to talk about how stories work in games, how games should use stories and whether games really need "stories" at all. We've had this thread before, let's have it again. |
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dessgeega
loves your favorite videogame
Joined: 16 Jun 2005
Posts: 6563
Location: bohan
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| Posted: Sun Jun 10, 2007 8:01 pm Post subject: |
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faithless's "doubting heroes" piece in issue 4 should probably be required reading for this thread.
as far as i'm concerned, most attempts at telling stories in videogames through heavy exposition fail because they're relying on the tools of other mediums - text dumps, passive movies - rather than using the strengths of the interactive medium (and hence making the player an implicit part of the telling of the story).
i think that often attempts at discussing narrative in videogames fail because we do not acknowledge that game mechanics are themselves characters. if i'm feeling ambitious i'll type up something about rayforce later.
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seryogin
JRPG Kommissar
Joined: 14 Oct 2004
Posts: 886
Location: Occupied Stalingrad
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| Posted: Sun Jun 10, 2007 9:59 pm Post subject: |
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I've always been struck by how little videogames rely on good writing...
I know that we've established long ago that telling rather than showing should games' mantra, but I have always thought that good writing would make games that are story-based (jrpgs) that much better. As it stands, most writing in games (console games at least) is bearable, thought just that.
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Scratchmonkey
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Joined: 02 Mar 2005
Posts: 1439
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| Posted: Sun Jun 10, 2007 10:30 pm Post subject: |
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From all I've heard, Planescape is a example of at least decent writing being the best part of a story-based game. Though I haven't played it yet.
I just read Heather's piece. It's good! And I think God of War is a good example of how modern games are having problems with story -- we've taken a genre, or style of play, the action game and because of modern game design sensibilities, we feel like we need to add exposition to go with the high production values. Compare the original Castlevania to the 3D versions to the continuing DS titles. The first has minimal exposition, the second has horribly clunky and awkward cutscenes and the third has fairly trivial text-box dialogues. There's something about modern, high-budget games that seems to obligate designers to shoehorn in "story" whether it's appropriate or not. |
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seryogin
JRPG Kommissar
Joined: 14 Oct 2004
Posts: 886
Location: Occupied Stalingrad
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| Posted: Sun Jun 10, 2007 10:41 pm Post subject: |
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| Scratchmonkey wrote: | From all I've heard, Planescape is a example of at least decent writing being the best part of a story-based game. Though I haven't played it yet.
I just read Heather's piece. It's good! And I think God of War is a good example of how modern games are having problems with story -- we've taken a genre, or style of play, the action game and because of modern game design sensibilities, we feel like we need to add exposition to go with the high production values. Compare the original Castlevania to the 3D versions to the continuing DS titles. The first has minimal exposition, the second has horribly clunky and awkward cutscenes and the third has fairly trivial text-box dialogues. There's something about modern, high-budget games that seems to obligate designers to shoehorn in "story" whether it's appropriate or not. |
Well, on a whole, I find that writing in PC games tends to be much better than the stuff that's thrown at us console gamers ( Fallout, Lucasarts adventure series come to find here). Though I enjoy console RPGs that much more, nevertheless (cue dhex's annoying "pc rpg players are 15-year olds that want to be 25, while jrpgers are 25-year olds that want to be 15", which is proving to be much too accurate in my case, alas).
I do think that you've brought up something very important here: we still haven't really figured out what the fuck to do with these modern production values. So far, what a good amount of people seem to be doing is emulating shitty H-wood movies. I think that modern games just can't get away with being as threadbare as their 8-bit predecessors, because those games could get away with having no stories, because they relied heavily on one's imagination to flesh them out in the first place. Modern games are just too good-looking and shiny to allow for much room for one's own imagination to fill in the gaps. Though perhaps this is my nostalgia speaking.
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Mister Toups
Hates your favorite videogame
Joined: 26 Jan 2005
Posts: 1693
Location: Lafayette, LA
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| Posted: Sun Jun 10, 2007 10:47 pm Post subject: |
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posting in a guardian threa--
wait what.
seiklus must be discussed ITT. quick! someone discuss it!
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Scratchmonkey
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Joined: 02 Mar 2005
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| Posted: Sun Jun 10, 2007 11:42 pm Post subject: |
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You discuss it, jerk.
Also, you can tell that this is not a Guardian thread because the OP has short paragraphs and only four of them. Oh snap!
| seryogin wrote: | | I do think that you've brought up something very important here: we still haven't really figured out what the fuck to do with these modern production values. So far, what a good amount of people seem to be doing is emulating shitty H-wood movies. I think that modern games just can't get away with being as threadbare as their 8-bit predecessors, because those games could get away with having no stories, because they relied heavily on one's imagination to flesh them out in the first place. Modern games are just too good-looking and shiny to allow for much room for one's own imagination to fill in the gaps. Though perhaps this is my nostalgia speaking. |
It is interesting that it seems like developers need to expand the exposition in the same way that graphics have become de-abstracted. It's hard to tell whether a game would work without because I can't really think of too many major recent releases that largely eschew story unless they're conciously retro like Gradius V. Perhaps Katamari Damacy would be a good example here, although it's certainly not a high-production value game.
It's been horribly beaten into the ground; still, Shadow of the Colossus, which is part of the reason why the thread was started, kept the story to a bare minimum, giving you an opening cutscene, a short cutscene on the death of a colossus and a couple medium cutscenes near the end of the game. Aside from the first cutscene, which exists soley to provide a frame for the game, there isn't much overt exposition.
And perhaps this is part of the problem, in that traditional expository methods work well as framing devices -- this is how it starts, this is what people are doing, this is how it concludes -- and suffer as anything in the middle, where they serve only to interrupt and contradict the actions of the player that bracket them. |
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Bulkor
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Joined: 22 Dec 2006
Posts: 55
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| Posted: Mon Jun 11, 2007 12:37 am Post subject: |
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That sounds right. I remember there was a PC RPG called Betrayal at Krondor that had some decent fantasy writing in it, only that meant you had to skip past a page of prose every time somebody got poisoned or what have you. I do think well-written exposition can be used as a reward, though, kind of like using a bit of story as a heart container.
Also, let me throw in that even fighting games have constant talking and occasionally even little dramatic scenes in the middle of the punching and kicking now, despite theoretically not being a story-based genre. |
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dessgeega
loves your favorite videogame
Joined: 16 Jun 2005
Posts: 6563
Location: bohan
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| Posted: Mon Jun 11, 2007 1:43 am Post subject: |
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you can tell it's not a guardian thread because it's not written like a nineteenth-century pamphleteer. (sorry inty we love you, honest.)
| Scratchmonkey wrote: | | And perhaps this is part of the problem, in that traditional expository methods work well as framing devices -- this is how it starts, this is what people are doing, this is how it concludes -- and suffer as anything in the middle, where they serve only to interrupt and contradict the actions of the player that bracket them. |
i think the problem with exposition (if we define exposition as text dumps, cutscenes - information that the player is explicity told rather than allowed to discover) as a means of telling stories in game is that the more logical and compelling way to tell a story in a videogame is through the play.
take - for a totally unprecedented example - rayforce. rayforce (aka layer section, galactic attack, gunlock) is a 1993 taito shooter. there is no exposition (information that the player engages with passively rather than actively) save for a short scene and credit roll at the end, once the final boss has been slain (it's an arcade game, and to have "dead air" would be uneconomic), but at the same time, because of the on-rails nature of the game, the developers have total control over what the player sees.
rayforce is about one woman's quest to reach the center of the earth - now hollowed and consumed by a deranged supercomputer - and destroy it. the first act is about the journey to the earth - the player has to pass through orbital security platforms, through the shell of the hollow moon, and into the earth's atmosphere. her goal is always below her, always deeper (the game isn't broken into stages, but into "areas", with no transitions between them - reinforcing the sense of a continuous world into which we are gradually sliding, deeper and deeper) - her ability, in parallel, is to target and destroy targets which are below her.
the first two stages are spent attacking enemies who come from below - where they can be locked on - to attack the player on her own plane. once she slays the second boss - who sits between the player and the planet earth, and must be destroyed by firing downwards using the lock-on attack - she descends into earth's atmosphere. streaking down through the clouds, enemies appear to engage her - attacking, for the first time, from above, out of reach of her lock-on laser. the player recognizes that she is moving deeper, closer to her destiny, that she a new act has begun - and then the clouds part to reveal the ragged surface of earth.
or consider r-type, in which one of the major themes is the mother-child relationship between humanity and the bydo - the player's tool, the force, is made from the bydo (who in turn are made from humanity), and the player's final action in many of the r-type games is to return the force to the bydo. actions like these are thematically resonant because they are actions the player undertakes rather than merely observes, and also because they develop the game's mechanics while simultaneously advancing the narrative, hand-in-hand.
we could also bring up another world - where the relationship between the protagonist and his friend is developed not in cutscenes but in player actions, culminating in a choice that forces the player to recognize the protagonist's friend and thus the reality of their relationship - or even super mario bros. - where, as the game approaches its climax, the staircases the player is accustomed to climbing at the end of each stage become more and more broken, until the path to the final castle is simply a set of blocks hanging over a pit. similiarly, doom's phobos anomaly - the end of the first episode - where the player's suspicions of the true nature of her "alien" foes is confirmed when she picks up an auto-map device and tabs to the map, only to find that the stage is a giant pentagram. with trepedation she advances into the pentagram, where she is confronted by two bellowing, flame-handed creatures that are unmistakably of hellish origin.
this post is all over the place - sorry! - but what i'm trying to suggest is that compelling stories can be told in videogames without resorting to the tropes of other mediums. you can develop a relationship without a single line of written dialogue, you can induce a growing sense of fear without interrupting a game with ominous cutscenes, you can tell a story in a videogame by using the tools and elements of that videogame without having to borrow from more established - and passive - mediums.
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Harveyjames
the meteor kid
Joined: 06 Jul 2006
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| Posted: Mon Jun 11, 2007 4:59 am Post subject: |
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Exactly, this is why I love Shadow of the Colossus. I'll never forget the dawning realization that there is nothing to discover in the vast landscape you're allowed to explore, and the only course of action is to follow orders. The game let me discover that purely through my own actions. For a moment, I was feeling the same emotions the main character was- I was the main character! That's something that happens in no other medium. Actually, I think the closest neighbour to videogames in terms of what they can do as a medium is installation art, since it's all about how moving and interacting with a space can change the way you feel etc.
I was talking about this with someone the other day and he said unsarcastically 'yeah and I like how SOTC is so awe-inspiring. And lonely. And it's genius how there's no backstory.' Then he started talking about Hitman. |
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helicopterp
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Joined: 13 May 2006
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Location: Philadelphia
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| Posted: Mon Jun 11, 2007 8:23 am Post subject: |
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| dessgeega wrote: | | you can tell a story in a videogame by using the tools and elements of that videogame without having to borrow from more established - and passive - mediums. |
Yes.
But there are also ways to work the tools from more established media into a videogame in a compelling way without feeling out of place with the rest of the game's narrative (read: play).
The example I'm thinking most of is Pikmin. (Pikmin is a wonderful example of how to do narrative in videogames right for a number of reasons more in line with what dessgeega talked about with those other games, and I wrote a piece on it that I might post here later.) At the end of each day in Pikmin, Captain Olimar receives a letter from home--his mom, his boss, his wife, or his son. They're never more than a couple sentences long, but by the end of the thirty days (or however long it takes you to complete the game) they create a background that details Olimar's human relationships, which, so detached from his situation on Planet Hocotate(?) and his warm, symbiotic relationship to the Pikmin, seems more and more strange as he works with the Pikmin increasingly effectively. The humans seem almost parasitically obsessed with Olimar: the game has a resonating shade of meaning that deals with the perversion of social ecologies. And it develops that through the inclusion of an epistolary format that has been widespread in novels for the last 250 or so years.
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dhex
Breeder
Joined: 13 Dec 2004
Posts: 6319
Location: brooklyn, Nev Yiork
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| Posted: Mon Jun 11, 2007 9:05 am Post subject: |
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| Quote: | | There's something about modern, high-budget games that seems to obligate designers to shoehorn in "story" whether it's appropriate or not. |
because it goes well with the demos they have to put together to sell VC and publishers on their idea?
one thing which might actually help mitigate the "trying to be a movie" issue is subtlety. as mentioned with shadow, one of the things that grabs someone about the game is that you have no real friggin' idea why you're doing what you're doing. that's compelling in the way that mysteries are compelling. but subtlety is a really hard sell.
even though it relies on the whole "WHO AM I AMNESIA AMNESIA WHOAAAAHA" thing, planescape makes excellent use of a largely text-based interface by varying the kinds of reactions, clues and information one gets based on how the player plays the game.
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Lackey
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Joined: 11 Jul 2005
Posts: 1107
Location: Canada
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| Posted: Mon Jun 11, 2007 4:50 pm Post subject: |
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| Harveyjames wrote: | | I was talking about this with someone the other day and he said unsarcastically 'yeah and I like how SOTC is so awe-inspiring. And lonely. And it's genius how there's no backstory.' Then he started talking about Hitman. |
Well, what did he say?
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dessgeega
loves your favorite videogame
Joined: 16 Jun 2005
Posts: 6563
Location: bohan
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| Posted: Mon Jun 11, 2007 8:33 pm Post subject: |
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| helicopterp wrote: | | But there are also ways to work the tools from more established media into a videogame in a compelling way without feeling out of place with the rest of the game's narrative (read: play). |
actually, i had this conversation with cycle right after posting that. specifically we talked about marathon, and the way it using text dumps to give the game context. i feel like they work because they're a seperate part of the game - complementing the player's actions rather than replacing them - and the player only gets out of them what she puts in. which means she's free to ignore them entirely. a screen of text is static, but seeking out and engaging with the screen is active - it's a kind of way of navigating a text that is unique to the videogame medium. and that's even before the story blossoms into the surreal time travel play-story-poetry of marathon infinity.
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Scratchmonkey
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| Posted: Mon Jun 11, 2007 10:08 pm Post subject: |
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| Heck, I thought that was the best thing about Metroid Prime -- the embedded information that you could access through your scanner. Requiring it for 100% completion was pretty lame, it should have remained a method that fleshed out the game world if the player felt like it. |
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helicopterp
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Location: Philadelphia
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| Posted: Mon Jun 11, 2007 10:26 pm Post subject: |
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Dessgeega: I absolutely agree. Now we need to figure out where Typing of the Dead fits into it all.
Scratchmonkey: Yes yes yes yes yes yes.
Also: Super Metroid's text dump introduction might be one of the most effective non-playable expositions I can think of.
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dhex
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Location: brooklyn, Nev Yiork
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| Posted: Tue Jun 12, 2007 7:20 am Post subject: |
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a question related to the metroid prime thing: why is there such a heavy emphasis on completion percentages (in terms of collecting or events) in console games? you see it with the early id games (as i am finding i remember very little from my doom days as i replay) but it doesn't really show up that much after that period.
is it a hook for the OCD crowd or something that replaces points as a way of measuring one's accomplishments above and beyond "beating" a game?
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Isfet
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Joined: 27 Oct 2006
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Location: A New York
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| Posted: Tue Jun 12, 2007 8:37 am Post subject: |
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i think it's a mixture of a few of the things you've mentioned, but i also think it has something to do with that wonderful old archetype "replay value."
a few interviews i've read with Japanese developers have talked about how sometimes games that come to the US will be made harder or will have difficulty levels, or some extra crap thrown in. this has a lot to do with game rentals, which doesn't happen in Japan...or at least, didn't used to (not sure if that's changed now). |
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Harveyjames
the meteor kid
Joined: 06 Jul 2006
Posts: 3636
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| Posted: Wed Jun 13, 2007 8:39 am Post subject: |
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| Lackey wrote: | | Harveyjames wrote: | | I was talking about this with someone the other day and he said unsarcastically 'yeah and I like how SOTC is so awe-inspiring. And lonely. And it's genius how there's no backstory.' Then he started talking about Hitman. |
Well, what did he say? |
He liked it because you can sneak around or you can go in guns blazing and that's genius.
I'd forgotten how much the text adds to Pikmin 1. You really feel for Captain Olimar slowly running out of life on that planet. |
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