Game story?
polycounter lvl 18
http://kotaku.com/5130882/hey-game-developers-learn-how-to-use-your-game-writers
This article, though short, really touches a nerve with me. It's a trend I've noticed for the past few years: Games that lack story. Or more specifically the story is there only to make the disjointed bits of gameplay seem cohesive. Even generic stories can be good if they are told in the right fashion. Not everything has to be epic. (That's another trend lately, everyone wants to be EPIC but through all the epicness everything falls flat.)
Not every game has to have a Final Fantasy length story or 90 minute cut-scenes musing on global social-political climates and the increasing influx of technology into the military (thanks Metal Gear!). It doesn't have to be cut scenes or narration, story can be told through environments, animations, sounds and the like. I just need something to feel justified as to why I'm spending 8-12 hours trying to rescue someone or destroy something. (Side note: STOP with the 15hrs of gameplay leading to the 30 second ending. You wine me and dine me for that long, I expect some rape in the bed not a 'Your a good friend' line.
)
Have companies really put the writers off to the side? To me this is bypassing the very foundation of a video game, building your parking garage without drilling support beams, so to speak.
Storytelling is the very basic element of every form of our entertainment systems and yet as evidenced by this article and my own observations, this is being ignored or push off to the side as unimportant.
When your games are getting budgets in the upper tens of millions, your graphics are pushing the current gen to the limit, your gameplay is winning awards, don't you want your story to be awesome as well? Seems the wrong place to skimp out.
It's something that really irritates me.
It's very sad when it comes to: "Ive been on projects where I havent seen the game!"
[/rant]
This article, though short, really touches a nerve with me. It's a trend I've noticed for the past few years: Games that lack story. Or more specifically the story is there only to make the disjointed bits of gameplay seem cohesive. Even generic stories can be good if they are told in the right fashion. Not everything has to be epic. (That's another trend lately, everyone wants to be EPIC but through all the epicness everything falls flat.)
Not every game has to have a Final Fantasy length story or 90 minute cut-scenes musing on global social-political climates and the increasing influx of technology into the military (thanks Metal Gear!). It doesn't have to be cut scenes or narration, story can be told through environments, animations, sounds and the like. I just need something to feel justified as to why I'm spending 8-12 hours trying to rescue someone or destroy something. (Side note: STOP with the 15hrs of gameplay leading to the 30 second ending. You wine me and dine me for that long, I expect some rape in the bed not a 'Your a good friend' line.
)Have companies really put the writers off to the side? To me this is bypassing the very foundation of a video game, building your parking garage without drilling support beams, so to speak.
Storytelling is the very basic element of every form of our entertainment systems and yet as evidenced by this article and my own observations, this is being ignored or push off to the side as unimportant.
When your games are getting budgets in the upper tens of millions, your graphics are pushing the current gen to the limit, your gameplay is winning awards, don't you want your story to be awesome as well? Seems the wrong place to skimp out.
It's something that really irritates me.
It's very sad when it comes to: "Ive been on projects where I havent seen the game!"
[/rant]
Replies
examples?
This lady has a lot bigger problems than not seeing the game-- like not being able to write at a highschool level.
also, while on the topic of Mirror's Edge. Half the cinematics are cartoons without explanation? Seriously? Like, if the cartoons were flashback, sure that would be fine, but this-- wtf.
Very few good writers want to work on games. Very few people who understand games are even okay writers. Hardly any producer would know good writing from pre-teen poetry. There are a lot of problems, but I think that not working closely with the design team is actually pretty low on the list.
Indie devs hate it because cutsenes and characters are expensive and time-consuming to do, so we talk about innovative mechanics or clever art styles instead. Publishers hate it because it messes with their clockwork franchise pump-out cycle, so they invest more in sequels and don't let new IP pursue it. Developers hate it because they're already crunching to complete more essential priorities, so they shoe-horn it on the end or won't commit to actually working it into the project in any meaningful way. Japanese developers pretend to care and then just recycle their template of mix n' match cliches for the millionth time because their fan base eats it up.
And at the end of the day the market loves a catchy title and gritty box art and most people don't pay any attention to the story of what they play. So, in the end I guess games don't really need stories. Stories are a niche market.
I still like em, though.
Look at the release lists for 360, ps3, wii and DS... I'd say a good 80% of all RPGs has gone to the DS because which games do most oldschool gamers enjoy most? FF6 or FF12? Let's leave remakes out of this equation.
The JP game market doesn't care about poly crunching, they care about storytelling. They all have a narrative and a story they want to tell, maybe not so much in an immersive, lush, well rounded world environment, but in the conflict of the characters, between each other and with themselves. I've always liked playing JRPGs because you follow along and get swept away with the narrative. They offer a window into their lives, not so much 'hey here's a world full of stuff, but stagnant of life and character (oblivion)'
The flipside, I have to say the most powerful story in a game I've played recently had to have been CoD4, I almost cried at the end of Act1 I was so shocked. And when the game ended, I almost cried again cause I wanted to see more and was sad it was over.
As opposed to oblivion, where I felt nothing for anyone in the world, it was just like walking around downtown and talking to random people.
I love story driven games, but it's more of a horizontal shift in design philosophy than a necessary bit of foundation.
Also, don't start preaching how Grand JRPG stories are, they suffer from their own set of cliches and bad elements, they are no different from western games. Pretty much every game has the same story, with the same set of characters, and the setting only changes sometimes. And as far as character development goes, well sometimes that's all they focus on. And the worse thing is, the development is never anything too interesting, it's just other cliches. It's much like a soap opera now that I think about it. Oh, and some of the most popular games in Japan are ones without any real story. Yeah there are a couple, but most are the ones that you can pick up and play for a couple minutes on the bus ride to work or school.
You can have the same arguments about cliche in every entertainment industry, let's face it you can boil it all down to 'character vs character/self/thing/place/time' I bet you almost every type of these basic character interactions have been told from dozens and dozens of angles from print novels to games to movies to tv shows. It's how the entire package is presented.
Personally I like being entertained and taken for a ride and at the end of it, feel I helped those characters in the world accomplish their task, whether it be burning a rope or saving all of humanity from a giant race of robots bent on destroying the galaxy. I just get bored of looking at pretty things. I get more out of a game with a story than I do playing multiplayer CoD... at the end of 20 hours, you were taken through an emotional rollercoaster (depending on how well it was written, cliche included) or you just spent 20 hours running around shooting pixels at pixels and claiming supremacy over a bunch of other people and came out the same after that as you did going in.
Then again, everyone is different, you may find that more entertaining or emotionally/mentally satisfying than a virtual opera. I personally believe the relationship has to be symbiotic, more so than a lot of people would admit.
chronotrigger came out how long ago, and people still play the original snes version on their old snes or emulators, even before they remade it for ds. I probably played FF4 through about 20 times, but I guarantee you I'll probably never play crysis SP or even MP through again, or GTA <insert number here> aside from dicking around for about 20 minutes at a time. That's not mentally fullfilling, that's killing time.
I have more fun playing pixel art games with a good story (sometimes nomatter how cliche) because I feel more in tune with the trials and tribulations of the characters involved, through story you develop more emotional attachment to it, not just running around causing mayhem.
I think its possible to integrate them both more effectively, and games will be better for it, but I don't think story is more important than gameplay. Story in games is like story in porn - it can help, but its secondary at best. Building a game around a story seems backwards to me.
Having said that, reading the article, I think integrating the writer into the team is important, and the disconnection/lack of communication she's talking about hurts games, but I don't think its limited just to a divide between writers and design. Bad communication or no communication between different parts of the team are going to hurt a game.
To be clear, I like well integrated stories, but I think story development is the least important part of a game, coming after art and sound design.
I personally prefer an experience like Half Life 2, Call of Duty 4, FEAR or Portal.
It seems to do away with any kind of Story, but relies a LOT more heavily on a narrative.
The big problem I have with Story Based games, is how they force characteristics on me, when I don't associate with. They want me to be a big burly badass, or some scantily clad annoying chick, and expect me to empathize with them when problems occur.
I also think story writers cram emotions down our throats, when we don't necessarily feel them. They'll will kill off a main character we're supposed to be 'attached to', and expect us to feel sad, when we dont in the slightest.
Stories are just too contrived in 99% of the games I've played.
seriously, those games had friggin immensely satisfying plots, and were fun to play at the same time. i felt so sad at the end of Defiance, when Raziel was absorbed
I like good gameplay, but I see games as being not that different to books and movies. Rather I should say, I play games for the same reason I watch too many movies and occasionally pick up a book; great characters, great new worlds to dissapear into, great story. Oh and a brilliant soundtrack really helps. Those games I listed have amazing soundtracks that I still listen to to this day.
Gameplay comes second for me (for the really amazing gaming experiences).
Look at some of the classics of gaming. Half-Life's story is about being stranded in a complex full of aliens and lo and behold, the gameplay deals with escaping and the aliens are require alien strategies, like attacking when they're charging up, whereas the Grunts, being elite soldiers, story-wise, work as a tactical team in the gameplay.
Deus Ex's story is about tinkering with the human body and deciding who you can trust. The gameplay revolves around picking and using your Augmentations and completing missions for people you chose to trust.
Portal is about being a test subject and the gameplay is about thinking in experimental and clever ways.
It's why I think Fallout3's atmosphere sucks. The story is about a desperate and harsh living in a fallen world, the gameplay is about being a gloriously heroic/dastardly killing machine with a robot butler and a fortune in bottle caps.
I just think story and gameplay are part of the same game coin. As long as it's as disjointed as it is in Final Fantasy games, I'll never get into it, even if it's really clever (and FFXII's story was pretty neat at times).
So I wouldn't so much say that integrating writers is the way to create a good story, because if it is to be implemented as deeply as the gameplay, it should spring from the same minds. Integrating them into the team is important, for writing purposes obviously, but game designers lack eloquence more than creativity.
Now, back to art.
Um... a narrative is a story. They're the exact same thing.
I think it's pretty obvious he's talking about telling a story versus creating a player-narrative.
In a jrpg, for example, much of the story is told to the player, whereas in the shooters he's listing, the player is put along a path where the world-story is kept in the background while the player's story is experienced in a first-hand narrative.
You all see where my thoughts on the subject are. Almost all of the supposedly great game stories that I've played through ended up seeming like really bad comic book stories to me.
Give me a vague overall goal, and give me good gameplay. I'll be happy.
"OMG aliens!"
PEW-PEW-PEW..... kkkrrr pppffffttt.....
Best game ever
Games where the character is created in the players mind as they play along are awesome. If you're being told how to feel at a particular moment, it may break the story and the overall feel of the game if the player is feeling a different emotion because of gameplay.
Stories can be great, but most of the time used in a counter-productive way in relation to the game that's being played.
Indigo Prophecy has a good story, in the sense that you are making the story as you go (to an extent). And it's the reason why I can't wait for the next game from that studio.
you get a high adventure tale across epic landscapes with slices of story/greek mythology inserted at key points to help break it up and keep the gameplay from getting tiring. in this case i would say the story augments and compliments the gameplay. or maybe I just have a god of war boner
For me the best exemples of narrative gameplay still are in half life, when you see falling scientist scince a heartquake or a place full of dead bodies after beating a big monster...
No cutscene, no text, just the player in front of a moment in a story/game, using his imagination to understand waht is happening.
I think writer need to be Gamer to understand that.
because it helped so much with Doom3....:poly121: