Storytelling in Gaming: A Gamespot Feature

[schild]

Featuring a raging douchebag, a very far from master storyteller, a guy who's degraded in the past years, The Longest Journey Guy, and Ken Levine. It's a goddamn farce to put the Planescape: Torment guy (Chris Avellone) and the System Shock 2 guy (Ken Levine) in the same category as Tim Schafer (the douchebag, after you read the answers, you'll understand why), Ragnar Tørnquist (Far from master storyteller), and Hideo Kojima (love his games, can't touch the shit that's been written for Splinter Cell if you want a comparison).

Basically, I'm just pissy when they clump truly epic heroes of gaming storytelling with cop out answers and people who simply aren't.

Here's the link.

Things I noticed:
1. Tim Schafer does indeed write good shit. But it's inconsistant. The folks at Squaresoft were more consistant near Tim's peak (arguably Day of the Tentacle - OR - Grim Fandango). This bothers me. That and his answers are some of the worst examples of "blow off" trite I've read in a long time. I swear he has a ghost writer.

2. Hideo Kojima is clever. His stories never impressed me. Oh, and he's _very_ Japanese.

3. Does anyone care about Ragnar Tørnquist?

4. As much as I love Freedom Force, Ken needs to do more dystopian/sci-fi System Shock shit.

5. Chris Avellone really did peak with Planescape: Torment. That makes me sad.

[Flashman]

Did they interrupt Tim Schafer's lunch or something? His answers are throw away responses that are shorter than the questions.

[Lum]

3. Does anyone care about Ragnar Tørnquist?

Only people who've played Longest Journey. (Hint: you should)

5. Chris Avellone really did peak with Planescape: Torment. That makes me sad.

Sure, but that's like saying Orson Welles peaked with Citizen Kane. KOTOR 2 had some good writing.

[schild]

3. Does anyone care about Ragnar Tørnquist?

Only people who've played Longest Journey. (Hint: you should)

I keep planning to. Doesn't mean I should care about him. One great piece of writing doesn't make you teh master. Unless that piece of writing is Planescape Torment.

Also: Features:

Point-and-click adventure through the twin worlds of Stark and Arcadia

I haven't been able to get excited by an adventure game since, well, since Grim Fandango And now that I know what an asstard Tim Schafer is, I'm no longer even remotely interested in Psychonauts.

Sure, but that's like saying Orson Welles peaked with Citizen Kane.

It's nothing like saying that. Chris Avellone on Moby Games. Orson Welles on IMDB.

The only person you can even remotely compare to Orson is Miyamoto. If only because he brought forth realizations in gaming technology just like Orson brought forth mechanics of cinema in the 30s and 40s. When Chris Avellone does his Touch of Evil, Magnificent Ambersons, The Stranger, and Othello go ahead and let me know.

[Lum]

I didn't say Avellone was Orson Welles, I said bemoaning his "peaking" with the best writing in any CRPG is kind of silly.

(Almost as silly as blowing off Schafer and Tornquist because you don't like adventure games, actually. Or including Hideo Kojima in that panel - the Metal Gear series had many virtues, but their writing was about 9438th on the list.)

[Evangolis]

Begin at the beginning.

From the article:

Q: If you were trapped on a desert island and could bring only one game with you, which one would you bring?

A: It doesn't matter.

You don't need games. As much as they may seem like an integral part of your everyday life or even your thought process at this point, you could give them up if you really had to.

Horseshit.  If you were on a desert island, you would freaking invent games to keep from going batshit.  It has been suggested that hunter-gatherers in early human history spent a lot of time sitting around, because once you’ve hunted and/or gathered enough to last awhile, you are going to waste energy getting more.  Primitive or not, humans need to fill their minds with something or they will go bugfuck.  Games are that, and as I think Raph pointed out in Theory of Fun, games are a good, safe, way to prepare for risky endeavors later. I didn’t understand the fog of war until my ROTC buddy got me into the campus maneuvers, and I crested the hill by the objective and realized I couldn’t tell who I should be shooting until the damn thing was over.  Better to Hunt the Lion after you have played Hunt the Lion a few times.  Games have always been useful; they aren’t something we thought up after the industrial revolution.  Damn, I’m not even out of the first paragraph yet.  Brace yourself, folks.

I’m ignoring a bunch more things I don’t agree with, since they just flow from the initial, wrong, assumption.

From the article:

Of all the games I've played, nearly all the ones that gave me an eye-opening, virtually life-changing experience did so through their stories, and other game players I've heard from or spoken to suggest to me that I'm not alone in this.

I don’t share his experience of any life changing games, but maybe that is just I.  But I don’t agree with him on the important part of games being their stories.  That makes games into a complicated sort of book.  Games need stories, yes, but the story must be a part of the game, told as much by gameplay and game design as by any script.  Books are an experience of revelation; games are an experience of exploration.

Ken Levine gets it right on page 2:

But as a designer, it's hard to give up that control. We want to craft moments of gameplay. I've done it myself---hey, I've written my share of cutscenes. But what we conceive as designers is never going to be as good as what the partnership of gamer and game creates.

I’ve heard this idea he expresses in the last sentence a lot in the last six months.  Maybe that idea has always been there and I wasn’t listening, maybe it’s one of those cultural commonalities bubbling out like they do from time to time, or maybe somebody finally found the words everyone has been looking for.  I don’t know the origin, but I agree with the thought.  The most powerful stories are the ones the players create in partnership with the games.  This has been the greatest single failing of every MMO I’ve played, not like that is news to anyone.  It was why we sat in the basement with our friends rolling dice until three in the morning.

From Ragnar Tørnquist:

Pong! Good God, the festering bitterness between the left paddle and the right paddle tore my heart in two. Where was the love?

Okay, I’m writing this as I read the article, and if Ragnar commits no gross stupidities further on, he gets my approval for making me laugh out loud.  I’m easy like that.

More Ragnar:

It's an obvious answer, perhaps, but the ones that have really stuck with me are the old-school adventure games: Loom, Day of the Tentacle, Monkey Island, the first Gabriel Knight. There were stories before that--good ones, too--but they didn't have the emotional resonance of those early-'90s graphic adventures. They weren't just great game stories; they were great stories, period.

In my review of Rouse’s game design book, I didn’t mention a major sidebar of his, regarding the question of what happened to the adventure genre.  It threaded through several chapters.  He didn’t have an answer, and I’m not sure I have one either, except that, while they could be interesting and effective, in retrospect I’m not sure they were more than books with puzzles you had to solve to turn the page.  They could be made to work, but I think they were a difficult compromise, and died out for that reason.  But that is a weak answer.

Ken Levine again says what I think:

The story should serve to unify the game experience and the narrative, not to exist on a separate track.

As usual, everybody else says it with fewer words than me.  Sigh.

Ragnar:

There are racing and sports games that have no need for story, of course, because they exist within a cultural framework that we automatically relate to.

Oh boy, something I can argue with.  (I can’t argue with Tim Schafer, he is just mailing it in.)  I think using the cultural framework to supply the game story is failing of greatness.  GTA III could have been just a racing game, but they supplied story elements within that cultural framework that made the driving a vehicle to the story.  God, I love it when the metaphors start to scream for mercy.  Sorry, gotta focus.

Chris Avellone gets to summarize what I think this time:

I find writing for games interesting because I think games are the next untapped ground for storytelling.

I really do think that there are ways of telling a story that will be unique to games, but not if we try to do story as novel or as film does.  Games are going to tell story by giving up authorial control to the player, by enabling the player’s story.  And that is very dangerous, because players have some very unacceptable stories to tell.

Okay, nothing in the rest of the article made me scream with the need to respond.  I did think Tim Schafer sounded like a man on the edge of burnout.  Hideo Kojima did seem a bit out of his element.  The other three made my head nod up and down a lot.  The interviews weren’t as bad as schild’s post led me to expect, although I am very glad the Greg Kasavin pretty much shut up after the first page, or my head would have exploded.

I’m going to return to one point.  Games aren’t books, and they aren’t movies.  Games need storytelling, but not in the traditional narrative sense.  The bit of the article about technology missed the point, I think.  The writers all answered in here and now terms, which makes sense for them, but I think what is needed is to take a step back.  I think that better AI and clever scripting options (so much of what you are going to have an NPC do or say is at the mercy of your scripting tools) are going to enable a greater range of responses to player actions.  In Myst, as with the adventure genre, players ‘discovered’ the story.  When games really start to reach their potential, players will create it.

[schild]

I didn't say Avellone was Orson Welles, I said bemoaning his "peaking" with the best writing in any CRPG is kind of silly.

And I'm saying Welles didn't peak with Citizen Kane. It was, however, his biggest contribution. Just not his best story.

(Almost as silly as blowing off Schafer and Tornquist because you don't like adventure games, actually. Or including Hideo Kojima in that panel - the Metal Gear series had many virtues, but their writing was about 9438th on the list.)

I didn't say I don't like adventure games. I was just saying I haven't really liked them SINCE Schafer's old stuff. Knowing that Psychonauts was a platformer, I was already hesitant, now I out and out don't care. I still plan on playing Longest Journey one day. I'm somewhat excited about the release of Still Life next month. Either way, Some of these people are not like the others. One or two good stories does not a master make.

[SirBruce]

I'll never forget the first story I wrote in gaming. It was for a (eventually canceled) Star Trek: Voyager game. I wrote the opening cutscene, which included this gem:

THE CAMERA ZOOMS IN ON JANEWAY...WE SEE A LOOK OF TERROR IN HER EYES AS IT REFLECTS THE INCOMING MISSILE

The lead programmer pretty much laughed in my face. First of all, our characters were low-resolution bitmaps, with one fixed expression on their face. Their eyes were maybe 4x4 pixels each. The camera zooming in on that wouldn't have shown a performance; they would have shown a scattered mess of random pixels.

I had the lead programmer fired that afternoon we hired someone who understood what multiple LoD was.  We contracted an artist specifically for the zoom-in -- we wouldn't need this for all of our characters -- and when it was done, it looked pretty kick-ass.  Alternatively, we could have done it as a higher-resolution render rather than use the in-game engine (with higher-resolution bitmaps). and play it via Bink/Smacker, but I felt it was worth doing it in-game just to show what an idiot that guy was.

Bruce

[doubleplus]

I keep planning to. Doesn't mean I should care about him. One great piece of writing doesn't make you teh master.

JD Salinger would like a word with you.

[Lanei]

JD Salinger would like a word with you.

My baseball bat would like a word with JD Salinger.

[doubleplus]

JD Salinger was emo before emo was emo.

I heard he cut himself with his typwriter.

[stray]

JD Salinger was emo before emo was emo.

I heard he cut himself with his typwriter.

I always thought he was punk. Or was that Rimbaud?

[Kail]

That intro is the biggest pile of crap I've read in the last... well, since I hit that "Board Thread of the Day" thread in the Warcraft forum a half hour ago, actually, but still... gah.  I mean, come on!

If you were trapped on a desert island and could bring only one game with you, which one would you bring?

It doesn't matter.  You don't need games.

Holy shit.  Hey, if you were going to the theatre, which movie would you go see?  It doesn't matter!  You don't need movies!  ZING!  Wow, I'd better show everyone how clever I am by posting that on my movie review site!

Aaagh.

Of all the games I've played, nearly all the ones that gave me an eye-opening, virtually life-changing experience did so through their stories, and other game players I've heard from or spoken to suggest to me that I'm not alone in this. The games I'm referring to have stories to rival all the greatest stories I've ever seen or read. The chance of experiencing such stories is probably the main reason I love games.

Wow, let me see that list of titles, huh?  I mean, what games are we talking about here, with this "life changing experience" stuff?  You can't write games off as "a medium that's unnecessary and therefore all about excess" in the first paragraph and then go on to explain about how transcendental and life-affirming they are.  Well, you can, obviously, but not if you're trying to make some kind of point...

After all, games without any real plot development must be easier to make--the developers set up a situation and then run with it.

What games are we talking about here?  The only games I can really think of that don't have any "real plot development" would be free-form games like Morrowind and Star Wars Galaxies, which aren't (as far as I've been told) noticeably easier to write than your average "Some villain is after some crystals or something" plot-driven RPG.

Well, whatever.  Fortunately, after that, they let the game developers talk.  Probably the quote I liked most was from Ken Levine:

Check out Grand Theft Auto III. What's great about that game? The cutscenes? Sure, they're well written, but is that what you remember? Or are they really the context for the unique action that each player experiences? Like the time you were being pursued by the Haitian gang and took your motorcycle off a ramp, crossing the river and watching the other bangers crash into the river behind you? That moment was never specifically scripted, but it was enabled by the story, which set it up and gave it context.

This seemed interesting to me; something I hadn't really thought of before.  Whenever I get into arguments about this kind of thing, I generally hover around the "Video Games aren't just Choose-Your-Own-Adventure Movies" argument, but I hadn't really seen it put like this before.  I think he's saying that the role of a story in a lot of games is mostly just to give some context to the player's actions, so that the guy on screen isn't just "some guy with a gun" shooting at "some other guys with guns."  The story helps you ascribe meaning and context to your character's actions. 

Previously, I'd mostly been going with the whole "you include a plot because it makes the game good," without really thinking about why, so I found this article really interesting.  Thanks for pointing it out.

[Paelos]

All these new opinionated people are coming out of the woodwork. I'm scared. Are you just delurking?

Anyway writing is pivotal for me in games. It's what elevated KOTOR from a mediocre game into the best game of the year in my view. It's what made games Myst exciting and best sellers. It is the handmaiden of graphical immersion in any gaming environment. Granted, it can't stand alone without any kind of gameplay, because then all you have is an interactive novel. However, I believe that it should be emphasized more than it is in the current industry.

[SirBruce]

All these new opinionated people are coming out of the woodwork. I'm scared. Are you just delurking?

There are 877 registered users on the board and over 500 have 5 posts or less.  That's a lot of lurkers, and that's not even counting those who haven't bothered to register.

Bruce

[stray]

Granted, it can't stand alone without any kind of gameplay, because then all you have is an interactive novel. However, I believe that it should be emphasized more than it is in the current industry.

Y'know, if it came down to it, I'd probably take the interactive novel over gameplay. At least that still serves a purpose to me on it's own.

I bet that I could still enjoy many of the old Sierra and Lucas Arts games without the puzzles (at least in some capacity). But puzzles by themselves? I could do without them. "Innovative" gameplay? The more I think about, I don't think I've ever really appreciated it that much.

When I'm playing a game, I usually rush past those type of things, or take them for granted --- I'm just interested in progressing the story, and adapt however I can to accomplish that. But if it turns out that the story sucks, none of those other elements will keep me there, no matter how great.

On the other hand, I've played lots of games with fairly sparse gameplay, but good stories, and I enjoyed the hell out of them (KoToR would be a recent example...Heck, even that X-Men RPG was pretty damn good).

I play games to get lost in another world. Not really to figure out "patterns" (as Raph would put it). It's nice to have both though, and it's great when some types of gameplay create a whole new aspect to the storytelling (Thief, Splinter Cell, MGS for example), but I never get bored of mindless button mashing either -- just as long as the story is good.

[Paelos]

One of the first puzzle games I played was a game called 7th Guest I believe. It was like a semi-horror/puzzle game in the style of Myst. Solve the puzzles, advance the story. I thought it was a really cool concept at the time since it was the first type I'd ever played. The story kept me moving, trying to figure out why all these people were dead even when the puzzles were sometimes just really awful. There was one puzzle with a chess board and all bishops. Winning was just about impossible. I hated that one.

Anyway, I'm trying to think of games with awesome gameplay but a shitty story. Adventure games anyway. I would say the majority of early shooters fell into that category. Doom was a great example. Now, when both sides fall flat and the gameplay and story sucks, you get the first release of NWN. God that original module sucked.

[Ironwood]

Now, when both sides fall flat and the gameplay and story sucks, you get the first release of NWN. God that original module sucked.

Yes, yes it did.

People should have been shot for it.  Up against the wall, last cigarette and blindfold shot for it.

Shadows and Hordes, however, more than made up for it and, I thought, had a kickass story the whole way through.  They were almost BG.

[HaemishM]

Goddamn, could Tim Schaefer be anymore of a pus-oozing prick? Why even bother including his comments in that story, since he obviously jack and shit about what he sounded like? Total cockgobbling jizzlobber.

As for the others, Kojima has a lot to answer for after fucking Metal Gear Solid 2. I have never wanted to stab characters in the face through the television like I wanted to stab Raiden and his fucking annoying ass girlfriend. And of course, the whole segway of you are a catass gamer and you should be ashamed for playing this hallucination was fun too. Fun like kidney stones.

I like that Levine puts more importance on emergent gameplay as storytelling device than story writing. That's what made Thief, Deus Ex, GTA 3, and lots of other games better games.