Story in games

[Azazel]

I think because game stories are mostly blatant nowadays to keep people on rails and present a cinematic experience, hitting all the beats regardless of what the player does, and don't take the time to immerse you in the world. Action games in particular have an immediacy to them that forces a certain pacing, thereby making exposition or discovery counter-productive to the point: fast-paced action. Gears of War comes to mind.

That's the thing with those kinds of games - Gears, Call of Duty, etc. Linear shooters. I think they should be pretty much on rails and keep non-interactive cutscenes to a minimum. Even the Uncharted series. You play through the story, but you don't make meaningful choices that affect the story. If it's well done, and fits the genre however, this is completely fine.

Some games offer multiple paths through a big area to the next checkpoint, or even a semi-sandbox experience and so it's not so bad - stuff like Far Cry 1/2 (Crisis as well?). Some games try to straddle the line, offering the illusion of choice and a semi-open world, but unless you're following the next objective, you're just wasting time - The Darkness which I had a play around with is an example of that - and one game where the story, despite the WTF elements was more compelling than the actual gameplay.

[Velorath]

2) The emphasis on "choice" has made stories worse, not better.  I've yet to see this done well, and most of the time it just makes feel like the game is made for people who have a sense of morality suitable for a 7 year old.  Before at least I could sort of imagine a justification for my character doing something or another, now I'm told its one of 2 or 3 reasons, each of which is often shit.

This is really the fucking truth.  Generally you get two real choices:  1.  saving the kitten or 2.  poking the grandma in the eye with the ice pick.  I think some of the older games, like Shadow Hearts, did the same thing a little better with no actual choices.  

Also, I think a little bit of your problem may be due to the fact that you may have seen many of these same stories before:  there are only so many basic plot lines available.  It's all Star Wars when you get down to it. 

Yeah, I've been on to the idea that its probably more me changing than the games.  I've noticed that I have a really hard time letting myself get immersed regardless of anything else these days.  The Bethesda games I mentioned earlier are about as close as I can get, but no matter what I do I have a really REALLY hard time no "seeing the man behind the curtain" as it were.  No matter what the story is trying to tell me, my brain sees game mechanics and developer intent, not characters or plot.  That would also explain why I prefer a robust set of game mechanics, because thats what I'm seeing anyway, so they may as well be solid.

Out of curiosity, what are some games you thought had good stories, and around when did you start to not care about story in games?  Anything that you recently played that you thought had a good story, or had what you'd consider to be the right ratio of story to gameplay?

[Sheepherder]

I asked specifically about Planescape, and didn't get an answer.

[ghost]

I can only speak for myself of course, but maybe you're older and a bit more money-rich and time poor. I feel I have less time to fuck around with subpar plots and uncovering every nook of the story, and the awareness of this, along with having a ton more games to play before I die or they get relegated to the "Last-Gen" pile makes you more crotchety and impatient. I really enjoyed KOTOR a few years back - fuck, 5 or 6 years ago. I'd love to play Mass Effect 1, 2, Witcher, Dragon Age, etc but one major thing that puts me off starting is the fact that I'm much more time poor (and sporadic MMO Gaming doesn't help either), so I don't know if I have the time to invest in a long term and deep RPG that can take a normal person 2 weeks, since I tend to play in smaller chunks (unless it's a MMO, for soem reason) and so games take even longer to finish for me than for normal people. - result - less care for and tolerance for shitty story.

I fired up Crysis for the first time earlier this evening. The 2-3 mins of exposition really started to piss me off. Why? Because in the intro to the game it's the same-old, same-old story, and I'm playing Crysis because I want to shoot people in the face. So stop talking and let me do that. Of course I'm also tired and grumpy, but years ago I may have been all excited to watch the non-interactive cutscenes of a plane flying through the night sky?

I dunno. Compare it to the opening of Uncharted 2. That hooked me in.

This is probably the crux of the problem in a nutshell.

Also, there is a theory that there are really only seven main plots in all of literature, just rehashed over and over again.  Obviously, some of these plots may not be acceptable for game fabrication, so you're going to see some rehash, no matter what you do.  I'm going through this right now with Mass Effect.  It's my first time through and I feel like I've played the damned thing a thousand times (then again, maybe it's the Mako).

[Malakili]

Been traveling so not much forum time the last couple days.  I liked neverwinter nights back in 2002 or 03 I didn't play planescape but it was during the time I would've probably liked it.  I think the last game I really enjoyed for its story content was portal.  Posting from phone so gonna be done for now.

[Lantyssa]

The original NWN story wasn't very good.  You really should try Planescape.  There's still nothing that touches its quality.

[Vision]

IMO, Story is THE MOST important factor when deciding whether I just passively like or absolutely LOVE a game. For instance, Uncharted 2 is a great game, yet the story is basically cookie cutter with those awful lines of dialogue at the end. Gameplay, atmosphere, graphics, etc were all excellent, but the fact that I knew where I was going, who was going to stab me in the back, and how I would eventually face off against the final boss left it pretty shallow, and after completing on Hard mode the first time through, felt no need to replay the single player, obviously killing replay value for me. So I guess I just liked it.

Yet it's worth pointing out that a story doesn't have to be a brand new Cormac Mccarthy novel to twist a classic storyline into something fresh. Zelda OOT is no pulitzer prize winning story, but it added just the right amount of "what I'm doing has some actual in-game significance" to matter. MGS4 to me is the pinnacle of video-game perfectness, and I still think that even though I'm in the minority. The gameplay mechanics mixed with a narrative I actually cared about immersed me to the point that I spent the time to get the emblems, something I never do.

[Velorath]

Been traveling so not much forum time the last couple days.  I liked neverwinter nights back in 2002 or 03 I didn't play planescape but it was during the time I would've probably liked it.  I think the last game I really enjoyed for its story content was portal.  Posting from phone so gonna be done for now.

I mostly ask, because back in the old days, stories in games were fairly rare for the most part.  I'm sure there's probably some early PC stuff I'm forgetting, but the first time I remember a game where the focus was on story as much as gameplay, it was Final Fantasy II (IV) on the SNES back in '92 I think.  Even after that, it was still fairly rare console-wise until the PS1 era at which point it started to become a lot more common.  The transition on the PC probably happened a few years earlier when games started to be released on CD's.  Story went from something that was a bit of a novelty to something that these days just about every non-sports game has to have.  With that in mind, I can see how for some people who have been playing games for a long time, story has gone from being a cool feature in a game to becoming tiresome.

[Ice Cream Emperor]

This is a separate issue, but I think related to the mechanics v. story argument.  What keeps me playing most times, even in single player, is improving at some mechanic.  And it can get pretty abstract, like in Diablo you aren't getting drastically better as a player, but I feel like even there understanding builds and loot and how to "play" that meta game properly is really the thing that kept me going in terms of "being good" or at least getting better at it.

This is interesting to me because I feel like the moment I become good enough at a game to start contemplating a) a meta-game or b) any kind of mastery then it becomes nearly impossible to take any sort of game-integrated narrative seriously.

The best illustration of this I can think of was the first time I played Call of Duty on an Xbox 360. I had never played an FPS with a console controller before, and I had barely played any 360 games -- as a result, I was very bad at the game. Being very bad at shooting and very bad at controlling movement and consequently being often disoriented was a perfect match for the 'story' being told by the first several missions of the game. I felt like I had been thrown into a war with almost no training, where bullets were constantly flying at me from out of nowhere, things exploding, shaking, loud noises...  and this feeling of complete incompetence combined with a fear of immediate death. And when I actually ended up killing some German in a frantic button-mashing frenzy of bayonetting and adrenaline, there was a quality to the silence that followed that was really quite unexpected.

Then after about four missions I figured out the controller and, more importantly, noticed that on the basic settings I was nearly unkillable by anything short of a hand grenade -- and there goes the game. No more immersion in the experience, and whatever passed for the usual top-down storytelling was now undermined, rather than enhanced, by the gameplay.

So maybe I am suggesting, if only to be provocative, that stories in games are better when you are bad at the game -- or, less controversially, that the balance between competence in the gameplay and empowerment in the narrative is pretty crucial.

System Shock 2 delivered something like the Call-of-Duty experience I described above, but actually managed to maintain it over most of the game thanks to some very good writing and actually taking resource-managing mechanics seriously -- but it suffered from the same problem, where mastering the game tended to drain the tension out of the story as well. It's a lot more exciting running one of those awesome ghost-flashback-voiceovers while simultaneously freaking out and hiding in a closet from zombies you cannot afford the ammo to kill than listening to the same thing (same good writing, same good voice acting) while casually toasting enemies with your psi-blast.

I feel like while people look to RPGs for stories, it has generally been FPSes that have delivered the best, I dunno, 'narrative experiences' -- a feeling of immersion in an actual story that seems to proceed outward from your in-game actions; that is assembled out of things that actually happen to you, instead of things that are related to you from the distance of a cutscene or expository 'conversation'.

Edit: Looks like I replied too soon and most of this was already covered, but oh well. Consider this an affirmation. And also, Planescape: Torment was pretty great; it boggles the mind that the same person who headed up that game later made KOTOR, which was a morally juvenile atrocity of storytelling.

[Malakili]

Been traveling so not much forum time the last couple days.  I liked neverwinter nights back in 2002 or 03 I didn't play planescape but it was during the time I would've probably liked it.  I think the last game I really enjoyed for its story content was portal.  Posting from phone so gonna be done for now.

I mostly ask, because back in the old days, stories in games were fairly rare for the most part.  I'm sure there's probably some early PC stuff I'm forgetting, but the first time I remember a game where the focus was on story as much as gameplay, it was Final Fantasy II (IV) on the SNES back in '92 I think.  Even after that, it was still fairly rare console-wise until the PS1 era at which point it started to become a lot more common.  The transition on the PC probably happened a few years earlier when games started to be released on CD's.  Story went from something that was a bit of a novelty to something that these days just about every non-sports game has to have.  With that in mind, I can see how for some people who have been playing games for a long time, story has gone from being a cool feature in a game to becoming tiresome.

Hmm, true.  I recall loving the hell out of Myst (which I associate with the tradition to CD), I liked the kings quest games.  For some reason I associate the early 2000s with the height of my liking story and the post Half Life 2 era with that declining, and probably not realizing fully until Dragon Age (that I couldn't even finish) that I was simply done with it for the most part. 

I think I hate just feeling like a passive recipient of story through the medium of a game at this point.

[Musashi]

[image]

I'm not sure what Ludwig Mies van der Rohe has to do with anything, but Planescape is a good litmus test for if you're capable of liking story.  It also pretty much telegraphs the way it's going to be as soon as you start playing, it starts telegraphing how it's going end as soon as you hit Ravel halfway through, and focuses the plot on how much of an irredeemable cockfag you are.

Story in games.  Less is more.  I was going to go with Browning, but figured that would never fly.  At least you know your architects.

[pxib]

Absolutely. Simplicity is key. When game mechanics match storyline -- when the player and the character are doing the same things for the same reasons -- additional plot is almost completely unnecessary. Words that the player is thinking suddenly come out of the character's mouth. Natural actions take on visceral significance. I understand that such synergy is difficult to maintain, but it's more likely to be killed by too much plotting than by too little. Humans are natural tale spinners. Provided with even the barest of narrative frames, we'll create a story of our own.

On choice, I'd argue that mythic heroes are almost exclusively reactive rather than proactive. They are creatures of destiny and chance rather than plotting and planning. In game terms this should be a good thing. Relying on the player to craft a cunning plot requires exactly the synergy I mentioned before. Besides, villains are the proactive ones, and villains' stories are so vastly different than heroes' that creating a plot that can as satisfactorily handle either is almost impossible. It's not that modern RPGs offer the "illusion" of choice, it's that they offer the choice between hero and anti-hero. The day is still saved in the end. Anti-heroes who want to be genuine villains are left with the illusion that they might be given that opportunity, but fate (a limited dialogue tree, say, or an unkillable NPC) always snatches it away.

So less is more. Less pre-written choice, more personal heroism. Less pre-written plot, more personal stories. Less pre-written action, more personal reaction.

[Quinton]

I also have come to appreciated more understated stuff, rather than "judge the story by the thousands of lines of dialogue" rpg style approach.  Two games I feel have some of the best storytelling I've experienced are Portal and Ico -- not necessarily huge and complex and epic, but there's plenty of story going on in both.

[Sheepherder]

Story in games.  Less is more.  I was going to go with Browning, but figured that would never fly.  At least you know your architects.

The name being in the Dropbox link was a good hint.

His buildings look like glass boxes, which tells me fuck all.  He's a modernist, like Wright, which tells me that he believes form follows function.  However, while most people take this as a criticism of earlier architecture, it isn't.  The function of an office building is business, hence simplicity and efficiency.  The function of a Gothic cathedral is religious awe, hence the overbearing and menacing nature of their construction with subtle touches of light and colour.  If you want to get neckbeardy, the cathedral is to the world as the stained glass windows are to heaven, casting beautiful light into the darkness.  Form coincides with function, at least at at primeval level.

The mind that appreciates mechanics does not necessarily appreciate story.  Trying to force story at the mechanical level or vice versa doesn't necessarily work, the mechanics guys will choose easy, and the story guys will choose dramatic, always.  Unless they quicksave, reload, and choose the other because it's more to their liking or ability to accomplish.  Which breaks story anyways.

[Margalis]

Video games are much better at creating worlds, environments and atmosphere than conveying a single specific narrative.

The narrative of something like Ico or Portal is not some sort of twisty page-turning potboiler like the typical bestselling dreck paperback.

In a book all you have is words. In a game you have words, mechanics, graphics, level design, etc etc, and out of all of those words are the least important part. Many of the things the words in a novel evoke are the things you actually build (model, draw, whatever) when creating a game.

[Lucas]

Video games are much better at creating worlds, environments and atmosphere than conveying a single specific narrative.

The narrative of something like Ico or Portal is not some sort of twisty page-turning potboiler like the typical bestselling dreck paperback.

In a book all you have is words. In a game you have words, mechanics, graphics, level design, etc etc, and out of all of those words are the least important part. Many of the things the words in a novel evoke are the things you actually build (model, draw, whatever) when creating a game.

Well said. Infact, to this day, I think the Britannia of Ultima VII (and Serpent Isle in part 2) is probably still the best "world", at least as far as CRPGs go. Main plot was so and so, but the inter-connections even between mundane NPC is still unbeaten.

Yes, maybe it's also due to a technology factor, but in U7 you really felt you were experiencing a world (from environment to social layers), while in DA:O, for example, you proceed from "block" to "block", like total different modules.

[Typhon]

I agree.  I don't really want story in my games.  I want characters and motivations.  Let me generate the story based upon that.  The 'end' is when my character achieves a certain victory condition - something like Alpha Centauri, but modified to fit within an RPG context.

I liked the first two Fallout's.  There were characters and plots to be uncovered in each town/area.  I didn't really need there to be an over-arching plot line, but there was enough stuff that didn't matter to the major plot line that you had the illusion of non-linearity.

[Musashi]

Story in games.  Less is more.  I was going to go with Browning, but figured that would never fly.  At least you know your architects.

The name being in the Dropbox link was a good hint.

His buildings look like glass boxes, which tells me fuck all.  He's a modernist, like Wright, which tells me that he believes form follows function.  However, while most people take this as a criticism of earlier architecture, it isn't.  The function of an office building is business, hence simplicity and efficiency.  The function of a Gothic cathedral is religious awe, hence the overbearing and menacing nature of their construction with subtle touches of light and colour.  If you want to get neckbeardy, the cathedral is to the world as the stained glass windows are to heaven, casting beautiful light into the darkness.  Form coincides with function, at least at at primeval level.

The mind that appreciates mechanics does not necessarily appreciate story.  Trying to force story at the mechanical level or vice versa doesn't necessarily work, the mechanics guys will choose easy, and the story guys will choose dramatic, always.  Unless they quicksave, reload, and choose the other because it's more to their liking or ability to accomplish.  Which breaks story anyways.

Err.  Mies van der Rohe is famous for his belief in the "Less is more."  The function of cathedrals is religious awe, among other things.  The thing that makes them Gothic is flying buttresses which allow them greater height.  Aside from that, I don't know what the fuck a primeval level is.  So if you do want to get all neck-beardy, we can do that.

The point, however, has nothing to do with Planescape or the function of architecture, and everything to do with the philosophy of not fucking up games with story.  They're games.  All you need is a pissed off donkey/gorilla and a princess.  And holy shit presto, more people know that story than there are people who have even heard of Planescape times one hundred.  Less is More.

If I'm being a dick, and you're just ignoring that and talking past it, I apologize in advance.  Kinda.

[Ingmar]

I like story. The more the better, although long cut scenes are something that should be used only rarely. My tolerance for lack of story varies by genre, I can obviously accept no story at all in a puzzle game but an RPG where the story is lacking, forget it. Especially if a bunch of the dialog consists of "...".

Point being "angry ape + princess" is not nearly sufficient for me to care about a game, quite often. Maybe even most of the time, at least for the types of games I tend to favor.

[Musashi]

Dude.  Because there are sooo many RPG's out there with good story, right?  Come on.  The story in 98.5% of games is balls. 

The reason is that for that is manyfold, as evidence - the length of this thread.  For the most part, you don't like story in games, despite what you think.  You might be able to laugh at the angry ape now.  But I can tell you that if you were a 4th grader in 1984, the story of that ape and stupid princess was very serious business.  Things like 'the names of the ghosts' spawned children's cartoons.  Funny thing is that when they tried to add more story to it for something like a serial cartoon, it sucked.  No shit.  Less is more.  Video games are not a platform for Raph Koster's great american novel.  Nobody wants to read it.  Nobody wants it read to them.  Nobody wants to endure its clever turns of phrase and intellectual ending.  Leave the god damn story for story time.

[Ingmar]

Dude.  Because there are sooo many RPG's out there with good story, right?  Come on.  The story in 98.5% of games is balls. 

The reason is that for that is manyfold, as evidence - the length of this thread.  For the most part, you don't like story in games, despite what you think.  You might be able to laugh at the angry ape now.  But I can tell you that if you were a 4th grader in 1984, the story of that ape and stupid princess was very serious business.  Things like 'the names of the ghosts' spawned children's cartoons.  Funny thing is that when they tried to add more story to it for something like a serial cartoon, it sucked.  No shit.  Less is more.  Video games are not a platform for Raph Koster's great american novel.  Nobody wants to read it.  Nobody wants it read to them.  Nobody wants to endure its clever turns of phrase and intellectual ending.  Leave the god damn story for story time.

I was 10 years old in 1984, and I thought Ultima III blew away that ape/princess stuff by a mile.

You're mistaking the problems people have with executing stories in video games to be a problem with the medium instead of a problem with the execution. People said the same thing about those new-fangled moving pictures too.

[Sjofn]

I'm with the person who said they need a good story to launch the game from "likes just fine" to "omg loooooove." The problem is a lot of games don't tell that story well, or have a story pulled completely out of, say, Chris Metzen's ass. Usually a combination of the two.

[Malakili]

People said the same thing about those new-fangled moving pictures too.

The difference is that games give control of (usually) the protagonist to the character.  When I have control of a character and I'm forced down a story AND thats the big show stopper for that game, it just makes me feel annoyed that I don't REALLY have control of the character.

The number one difference in games is that a person is IN that world, not just observing it.  To me, thats the strength, and thats when game stories are the best, when things are happening around me, but I'm still in control of my character.  In single player thats often achieved by giving me one path and forcing me down it - but not explicitly.  Think Half Life 2 or Portal.  Fantastic settings and stories, absolutely no character choice, and yet its really something to experience.  So thats one good side of story.

That is entirely separate from the create your own story stuff that I think is perhaps an entirely different discussion now that I think about it more.  Any game where your actions might rightly be considered part of the game world's "history" (emphasizing contingency) instead of a pre-written story is quite different.  I could rightly talk about the "history" of some of my Fallout 3 characters, and they barely ever did any quests.  I could EASILY talk about the history of EVE Online, but thats multiplayer and a different beast all together.   Its those games in which a set of mechanics are in place and allow me to create my own history in that world that are most compelling to me at this point.

[Kail]

Think Half Life 2 or Portal.  Fantastic settings and stories, absolutely no character choice, and yet its really something to experience.  So thats one good side of story.

The only good side of the story, one could argue.  I mean, if you want to say 99% of all stories in video games are crap, ok, fine, they're not exactly literature or anything.  But to then hold up HL2 as "fantastic" seems to contradict that.  It's the same generic "aliens invade, only one dude with a gun has the quick save/quick load skills to defeat them" scenario that's in every FPS, except rather than having skippable cutscenes, you have to stand around scratching your ass while Barney and Alex trade jibes.  It's not particularly well told ("Hi, Gordon, there's monsters on the other side of this gate, I'll open it now") , the characters are decent but only on-screen for like five minutes, and the actual plot is completely opaque (Where are we, what is going on, who are we fighting?  No idea, never explained.). And the story for Portal is worse: you're stuck in a room controlled by an evil computer, go kill evil computer.  The only thing remotely interesting about it is that some of the monologue is funny, and there are plenty of games with funny dialogue.

I have no problem with saying that stories in Fallout or The Elder Scrolls are radically different from the story in Halo, but saying that the story from HL2 is somehow on a higher plane makes me scratch my head a bit.

[Margalis]

Plot is often the least interesting part of a good story.

What's the plot of The Iliad? "People fight each other." Or the plot of your favorite movie? The high-level description probably sounds completely generic and lame.

Way too many people think that plot is the be all and end all of storytelling when it's really a minor component.

And the story for Portal is worse: you're stuck in a room controlled by an evil computer, go kill evil computer.

Isn't that the plot of 2001, more or less?

[Kail]

The high-level description probably sounds completely generic and lame.

Sure, the problem is that most video games don't get more detailed than the high level description because there's maybe ten or twenty minutes of story development mixed in with fifteen or twenty hours of machinegunning aliens. 

Unless you're including the actual running around and shooting as components of the story, in which case things get real muddled up real fast.  Things like pacing and tension are all handled completely differently in video games than in other media, and all bound up in the gameplay, so how do you untangle it to criticise the story by itself?

[Musashi]

Dude.  Because there are sooo many RPG's out there with good story, right?  Come on.  The story in 98.5% of games is balls. 

The reason is that for that is manyfold, as evidence - the length of this thread.  For the most part, you don't like story in games, despite what you think.  You might be able to laugh at the angry ape now.  But I can tell you that if you were a 4th grader in 1984, the story of that ape and stupid princess was very serious business.  Things like 'the names of the ghosts' spawned children's cartoons.  Funny thing is that when they tried to add more story to it for something like a serial cartoon, it sucked.  No shit.  Less is more.  Video games are not a platform for Raph Koster's great american novel.  Nobody wants to read it.  Nobody wants it read to them.  Nobody wants to endure its clever turns of phrase and intellectual ending.  Leave the god damn story for story time.

I was 10 years old in 1984, and I thought Ultima III blew away that ape/princess stuff by a mile.

You're mistaking the problems people have with executing stories in video games to be a problem with the medium instead of a problem with the execution. People said the same thing about those new-fangled moving pictures too.

Come on man.  It's 1984 and we're at Chuck E Cheese.  To your left is a full day's worth of quarters and Donkey Kong.  To your right is a broke ass Apple II and Ultima 3.  If you choose left, you can play with your friends all day, talk shit, and go for high scores.  To your right is Ultima 3.  It's not a hard call.  If you choose Ultima, the kids playing Donkey Kong are going to throw shitty pizza crust at you.

When was the last time YOU killed a hooker in a movie.  When was the last time YOU killed the dragon in a movie?  EVERYONE knows the damn princess needs to be saved.  Nobody but you knows what happened in Ultima 3.  Fuck you dude who's about to chime in that he knows it too.  I'm talking to you too.  There's like a hundred of you people left alive on earth, and guess what?  Nobody cares.  But show them the princess in peril.  We could probably prove scientifically that there's an emotional response in at least 80% of people.  You sure you want to put Garriott's diatribe up against that? 

It is the medium, man.  You can't just wipe that fact away by stating otherwise.  The comparison to movies is misleading.  That medium is designed to tell stories.  This medium is designed to save fucking princesses.  And it shouldn't be surprising that games with figurative princesses to save do demonstrably better in every measurable category when compared with games with forced stories.  Of course there have been games that have gotten off a good story, and you're more than welcome to take them into a dark corner and make love to their faces.  But I'd be willing to bet that even in those cases that story was only part of the reason they succeeded or even that you enjoyed them as much as you did. 

As soon as somebody launches a story driven game franchise wherein the narrative literally impacts our culture on the scale of mother fucking Ms. Pac Man, then we can revisit this discussion.  Until then, I say again, story in video games is overrated.  Less is more.

[Sjofn]

And the story for Portal is worse: you're stuck in a room controlled by an evil computer, go kill evil computer.  The only thing remotely interesting about it is that some of the monologue is funny, and there are plenty of games with funny dialogue.

I ... I don't even know that we played the same game. Did someone spell the game out to you before you played it? Because what made Portal awesome was not just the plot, but the way it was told. GLaDoS did not politely inform you that you were a captive running through tests for her amusement, no one told you that you were going to have to kill her to get out, nearly the entire story is told through manic scribbles on the wall that you might not even see. Yes, you start to suspect shit is weird before it spells out HELLO SHIT IS GETTING REAL NOW, but the whole experience is way more satisfying because of the story. It's a prime example of sending a game from "fun diversion" to "holy shit this game is awesome and everyone should play it" for me.


EDIT: It's entirely possible you were being sarcastic and that was your point, in which case ... uh ... 

Way too many people think that plot is the be all and end all of storytelling when it's really a minor component.

Yep.

[Sheepherder]

Err.  Mies van der Rohe is famous for his belief in the "Less is more."  The function of cathedrals is religious awe, among other things.  The thing that makes them Gothic is flying buttresses which allow them greater height.  Aside from that, I don't know what the fuck a primeval level is.  So if you do want to get all neck-beardy, we can do that.

The point, however, has nothing to do with Planescape or the function of architecture, and everything to do with the philosophy of not fucking up games with story.  They're games.  All you need is a pissed off donkey/gorilla and a princess.  And holy shit presto, more people know that story than there are people who have even heard of Planescape times one hundred.  Less is More.

If I'm being a dick, and you're just ignoring that and talking past it, I apologize in advance.  Kinda.

Gothic architecture is often built for psychological impact of the not subtle kind.  That's what I meant by primeval.

Both Morrowind and Diablo II sold four million copies, as far as I can tell.  Obviously Diablo II had too much story.

[Tebonas]

I couldn't give a shit about those fucking kids in the arcade, not even as a kid. And yes, I preferred Ultima 4 at home to spending my time with dipshits that threw pizza crust at other people.

But maybe thats just little old antisocial me.

[Ingmar]

Dude.  Because there are sooo many RPG's out there with good story, right?  Come on.  The story in 98.5% of games is balls. 

The reason is that for that is manyfold, as evidence - the length of this thread.  For the most part, you don't like story in games, despite what you think.  You might be able to laugh at the angry ape now.  But I can tell you that if you were a 4th grader in 1984, the story of that ape and stupid princess was very serious business.  Things like 'the names of the ghosts' spawned children's cartoons.  Funny thing is that when they tried to add more story to it for something like a serial cartoon, it sucked.  No shit.  Less is more.  Video games are not a platform for Raph Koster's great american novel.  Nobody wants to read it.  Nobody wants it read to them.  Nobody wants to endure its clever turns of phrase and intellectual ending.  Leave the god damn story for story time.

I was 10 years old in 1984, and I thought Ultima III blew away that ape/princess stuff by a mile.

You're mistaking the problems people have with executing stories in video games to be a problem with the medium instead of a problem with the execution. People said the same thing about those new-fangled moving pictures too.

Come on man.  It's 1984 and we're at Chuck E Cheese.  To your left is a full day's worth of quarters and Donkey Kong.  To your right is a broke ass Apple II and Ultima 3.  If you choose left, you can play with your friends all day, talk shit, and go for high scores.  To your right is Ultima 3.  It's not a hard call.  If you choose Ultima, the kids playing Donkey Kong are going to throw shitty pizza crust at you.

When was the last time YOU killed a hooker in a movie.  When was the last time YOU killed the dragon in a movie?  EVERYONE knows the damn princess needs to be saved.  Nobody but you knows what happened in Ultima 3.  Fuck you dude who's about to chime in that he knows it too.  I'm talking to you too.  There's like a hundred of you people left alive on earth, and guess what?  Nobody cares.  But show them the princess in peril.  We could probably prove scientifically that there's an emotional response in at least 80% of people.  You sure you want to put Garriott's diatribe up against that? 

It is the medium, man.  You can't just wipe that fact away by stating otherwise.  The comparison to movies is misleading.  That medium is designed to tell stories.  This medium is designed to save fucking princesses.  And it shouldn't be surprising that games with figurative princesses to save do demonstrably better in every measurable category when compared with games with forced stories.  Of course there have been games that have gotten off a good story, and you're more than welcome to take them into a dark corner and make love to their faces.  But I'd be willing to bet that even in those cases that story was only part of the reason they succeeded or even that you enjoyed them as much as you did. 

As soon as somebody launches a story driven game franchise wherein the narrative literally impacts our culture on the scale of mother fucking Ms. Pac Man, then we can revisit this discussion.  Until then, I say again, story in video games is overrated.  Less is more.

I'd almost certainly be spending all my quarters playing skee-ball. I never liked Donkey Kong, no matter how many times you try to tell me I did.  

As for "do demonstrably better in every measurable category" I'm going to have to ask for some Actual Research to be cited there. If you're just saying games like Madden and Mario Party are more popular than games like Mass Effect or the like, while that is absolutely true, it has nothing to do with the idea that having a story is actively bad, which seems to be the argument here. I like the movie comparison, frankly, so I'll go back to it. Would you argue that the fact that Transformers 2 made $400 million while The Hurt Locker made $16 million means that story in movies is a bad thing?

[Kail]

I ... I don't even know that we played the same game.

I'm starting to wonder myself.  The Portal I played was a fun puzzle FPS with some dark humor, what you're describing is some kind of psychological horror thing.  I never got this "OMG SHIT IS GETTING REAL" feeling you describe, I was too busy making turrets cry and laughing at the companion cube jokes to really feel any of the urgency that you're describing.

I think maybe I'm getting caught up in differences of definition.  What are you guys thinking of when you say that Portal (or HL2 or whatever) is a good story?  I'm looking at traditional stuff like characters, pacing, tension, and so on, and in those areas, Portal doesn't do well as a narrative.  But I'm starting to think (so maybe I'm a bit slot to catch on, shut up) that people are seeing some games (like Portal, or HL2) as something other than a traditional narrative, but other games (like, say, Halo, maybe) remain narratives.  And so Halo fails as a narrative, while Portal succeeds as a whatever-it-is.  So what is it you guys are seeing in Portal or HL2 or whatever that makes them "good" but which is absent in something like Unreal or Doom?  What are the qualifications for a "good" story in such an environment?  What is it you like about Portal, what does it succeed at that Crysis doesn't?

[Lantyssa]

Come on man.  It's 1984 and we're at Chuck E Cheese.  To your left is a full day's worth of quarters and Donkey Kong.  To your right is a broke ass Apple II and Ultima 3.  If you choose left, you can play with your friends all day, talk shit, and go for high scores.  To your right is Ultima 3.  It's not a hard call.  If you choose Ultima, the kids playing Donkey Kong are going to throw shitty pizza crust at you.

Popular is not good.

Popular is a story about a boy wizard which rips off every fantasy story imaginable written at a third grade level, or a story about blue felines on a distant planet.  That doesn't mean either are amazing literary works that I should devote my every waking moment to adoring.  No one will remember either a few years out from release.

Those kids that would rather waste money on Donkey Kong?  Yeah, they'll be spending it on hookers and blow in a few years.  They can stick it.

[Hawkbit]

wut 

Is the boy wizard comment pointed at Harry Potter?  Because that's not something that is going away any time soon.  Avatar, sure - already forgotten.  But HP is attacking a whole new generation now. 

[Malakili]

I have no problem with saying that stories in Fallout or The Elder Scrolls are radically different from the story in Halo, but saying that the story from HL2 is somehow on a higher plane makes me scratch my head a bit.

Its not the story, its how its told.  If you think most of the HL2 story is told by Alyx and Barney's chats, you aren't paying very close attention.

Edit: nevermind, Sjofn already made this point.