demagogue on 11/8/2009 at 21:34
Even acknowledging that -- and I don't disagree with it -- the issue doesn't entirely disappear with (some of) those games, so they're still part of the debate IMO.
The useful distinction I think you'd want to make isn't "story" per se, but games that involve "structured progress" to some kind of "end" vs. games that's are just "endless pure gameplay" like Bejeweled, Space Invaders, or Tower Defense.
Most Shooters still have a "mission" orientation or a destination. Or a game like Civilization still structures events so it feels like you're "managing an empire to a destination" rather than just arbitrarily building and fighting to no comprehensible end. So anytime you do that, you have to consider fitting the gameplay in with the "making progress to a destination" part.
On that, I think Civilization did it very cleverly -- in connecting your empire-growth with city building/capturing, plus things like the tech-tree -- almost so cleverly it's hard to notice they even had that problem to solve. But just because you don't call the "shit that happens in a structured way that lets you know you're making progress to what the whole damn game is supposed to be about" a "story" doesn't mean they didn't have to really sit down and think about how to do it in a similar way that people who are trying to connect gameplay with story have to think.
Main point: I wouldn't get too bogged down in trying to be a definition-hound in a discussion like this (I'm not actually accusing anyone of that, just saying). The issue has a kind of generality where it's useful IMO to see how a lot of different games in a lot of different contexts have this similar kind of problem in fitting pure gameplay in with how it structures how progress is made in it, including but not exclusive to telling a "story". Or another way to put it, while this kind of topic comes up most often when talking about how to fit gameplay in with game story-telling, I think that's just one part of a more general issue that a bigger range of games share that don't have story-telling, and sometimes it's useful to talk about it at that greater level of generality just to get a handle about what we're actually talking about. Anyway, just my 2 cent contribution for this round.
Angel Dust on 12/8/2009 at 07:27
That article was complete nonsense but there has been some good stuff in this thread. :thumb:
Now for my 2 cents:
The first thing is that people need to do is stop thinking that more mature storylines, thematic depth etc are going to be what leads gaming to finding its Citizen Kane. Games need to use what their unique strengths as a medium to really find their Citizen Kane and Aja touched on this when he mentioned LSD. I've said this before but Citizen Kane is not often held to be the greatest film of all time because of its story, characters and themes, although they are a factor. It is because it uses the cinematic language so completely and masterfully in telling that story.
As to what are gamings unique strengths as far as narrative goes, I'm not exactly sure. I do think that Half-Life, with its completely FPP storytelling and way of telling the story via the world rather than only exposition, was an important step. Not every game should use this method of course but it did introduce (or perhaps popularise, I'm no gaming history expert) some unique gaming narrative language. Games can also potentially use almost a variety of in-game methods (newpapers, computers, logs, TV etc) to flesh out the story or gameworld but the problem here is that often the decision is made to use just one of these supplementary storytelling methods, to the point it just gets a bit silly.
When you compare it to film, even at the time of Citizen Kane's release, it is obvious that gaming is very much still in its infant stages and there is, hopefully, much more gaming narrative language to discover.
That all said there is nothing wrong with telling a more structured, film-like story as long as the a suitable type of game, in both mechanics and pacing, is married to it. As much as I love the old adventure games they were pretty awful vehicles for storytelling, the story and world would just completely die when you got stuck, and heavily player-centric stories do not often, in my opinion, gel very well with big open-world games ala Fallout 3 and GTA IV. You need a gameplay model that will keep the plot moving at a reasonable pace and that's not to say you must adhere to a extremely linear Half-Life-esque approach. For more open-world games be prepared to trim down the sand-box aspects a bit (eg The Witcher and Mafia) and having a linear sequence of levels, which themselves are fairly freeform, is great way to immerse the player in the world while still keeping the story moving (eg Thief, which also has the advantage that the setup, a stealthy, cautious thief, means that getting stuck and have to ponder the situation doesn't necessarily pull you out of the gameworld).
Taffer36 on 12/8/2009 at 20:22
I feel like we've already found our Citizen Kane.
There are already amazing ways to tell stories in games, and many of them WORK. Cutscenes, in-game scripted scenes, etc. They all get the job done and people have been stealing the ideas and using them in their games for ages.
We might have our Pulp Fiction, which popularizes different narrative styles to mix things up. There will be cool offshoots and interesting ways to tell stories, but I feel like we've already discovered the core of how to tell narrative in games, and I don't see that core changing (again, possibly forever).
P.S. If I were much more intelligent I would've stated what Demagogue did.
Aja on 12/8/2009 at 22:09
Quote Posted by demagogue
It's true that they were in a sort of fortunate circumstances to work out their ideas and make a living; but with games being so cheap to develop these days I don't think the economics of game-making should be an reason not to have the discussion.
I agree but it's certainly become a hurdle.
One of the problems with game design in its current form is that the final product is not the result of a director's (or directors') vision but of that vision diluted by the amount of diverse input from everyone, programmers to executives. Film seems to be the one artistic medium where great works of art can be created in spite of the fact that large teams of people with different skillsets and possibly different ideas as to the project's direction must collaborate (editors, set and costume designers, lighting, sound, etc). Is the film hierarchy different than the gaming one (i.e. the director has the final say on everything), or are most great films simply the result of amazingly compatible teams under the leadership of brilliant directors?
I'd like to see a publisher give complete creative control to a single, talented individual and let them direct a large-scale project, but the economic climate seems to make that too risky a proposition.
Chade on 12/8/2009 at 22:21
When people talk about Citizen Kane, I always wonder how this will apply to games.
It seems to me that the underlying gaming platform is never really going to settle down. For instance, I had computers during my formative years, but not the social networking revolution. In ten years time we'll have designers entering the industry who have grown up with myspace/twitter/god-knows-what-else. I wonder how that changes things. What sort of technology will they have to work on? What games will they come up with? I wouldn't be at all surprised if they blur the magic circle and tell stories in ways that we would never conceive of.
So I don't think we will ever get a Citizen Kane, because I don't think there will ever be a well understood language of games. There won't be a gaming language because the platform will change faster then the designers can. And that will be a good thing.
In the meantime though, we can still find important milestone's along the way.
Tonamel on 13/8/2009 at 02:37
Quote Posted by Chade
There won't be a gaming language because the platform will change faster then the designers can.
Game design != the platform of delivery.
You can learn a lot about designing video games by studying board/sports/card games. It's about the player interactions, not the tools.
Likewise, the language of television didn't change when widescreen tvs became popular. All the rules of composition, transitions, color story, etc. still apply.
demagogue on 13/8/2009 at 02:43
Suddenly this obsession with Citizen Kane... What's funny, reading about how it actually got produced, it looks like Welles pulled a fast one on the studios; they gave him complete creative control expecting him to make another War of the Worlds and he pulls a metaphysical biopic out of his hat :V
The article I read says it did lackluster at the box-office they never gave him complete control again, lol, so not the most optimistic model on the production end. (I was always more a fan of Kurosawa and French New Wave anyway, where they were in a little more inviting environments for real creativity).
I did want to say another thing about what makes LSD-style "narrative" interesting to me. It's not even really new thinking, but you guys are making me feel good about pontificating.
A classic problem with gameplay+story is thinking about it like it's a decision-tree you have to climb. At every decision-node there are (at least) two choices with their own paths, and then each path has its own nodes and it quickly spreads outwards into countless branches if you want to cover every line. The alternative that the LSD-type gives is that it's not like a tree you climb, but a spiderweb where the nodes all link to each other and you're making your way to the center. The nodes are like alternative worlds somewhere in the narrative-stream (past, future, alt-present, same time-different place, etc) that are all internally hyperlinked to each other, and the gameplay is actually learning the inner logic of the hyperlinking so you can move your way "deeper" into the story.
I need to qualify "deeper" though. What's cool about it is that there's no set linear path you take through the narrative; you can engage with any part of the narrative universe in any order you want, or can find, whatever order you happen to take when you take a path, and each node gives you a part of the whole fragmented story. At any one point it's tricky to say you're "farther" into the story because how do you even measure distance; so maybe "deeper" works better, but you know what I mean. And sooner or later you're going to have to dig your way through the pieces (most but possibly not all of them; it's possible you think you've gotten the whole story but you visit other pieces on a replay, or do them in another order).
The price of this mechanic is you're really dumping linear progression, e.g. linear time, so it spreads your character's actions across time and space (not at any one node, but in crossing them). There are a couple of ways to pull that off ... in a dream or virtual reality world, Memento-style, or for a person whose memories so dominate their present reality that they leak into their present experience, etc. I do think it's important to make the game-universe have an internal consistency and reality, so you feel like you're really going "somewhere" as you get deeper in the web and it's not just arbitrary. I think there's some good potential there.
Edit: Ah, I forgot one of the whole punchlines for this discussion. Another nice thing about a mechanic like this is that it gives an interesting answer to the gameplay+story problem. If the main gameplay is working with the inner logic of how the narrative-pieces fit together, it sort of naturally combines the gameplay situations with the "flow" of the narrative. I mean, the story is literally flowing as a function of how you interact with the world in your gameplay. And actually the greater goal is to get it flowing in a direction you want that will get you to whatever "key" is at the center of the whole story universe. Does that make sense? Playing it differently will (should) actually push you closer to or farther away from that narrative center, not just as a set of scripting gimmicks -- you're only under the illusion you have some control of where the story is going -- but really it puts you at different literal points in the story-world. Anyway, that's the interesting ideal to shoot for. (And I can probably explain it better by just making the damn game myself...)
Chade on 13/8/2009 at 03:09
Quote Posted by Tonamel
It's about the player interactions, not the tools ... Likewise, the language of television didn't change when widescreen tvs became popular.
This is where games are different to television.
Television is a very stable technology. The changes in the medium have been so limited as to be virtually useless. I have a relatively small tv (well, in relation to a lot of people I know anyway!), yet I can still get almost exactly the same experience as my friends when I watch a movie. So movies are a medium which can be mastered.
Games, on the otherhand, make up a set of interacting components. Any system can be part of a game. As technology changes and integrates the systems we live with, our games will change with them and become part of this integrated system.
As you point out, our old knowledge will still be usefull, but your own "board game vs video game" example shows how the introduction of new technology can invigorate game design and raise a whole host of new questions. This process will not certainly not stop anytime soon.
Papy on 13/8/2009 at 03:36
Quote Posted by Chade
Television is a very stable technology.
If you mean films, then no it's not. Technology (mainly CGI) changed not only how movies are made, but also drastically what they can achieve. It's not just a camera and an actor anymore.
Tonamel on 13/8/2009 at 03:40
Quote Posted by Chade
your own "board game vs video game" example shows how the introduction of new technology can invigorate game design and raise a whole host of new questions. This process will not certainly not stop anytime soon.
I'm not quite sure what you're getting at here. I use most, if not all the same basic design principles when I'm making a basic platformer as I do when designing a board game, or DnD module, or even an ARG: "The player should have short-term, mid-term, and long-term goals," "Failure should be as entertaining as possible," "The player should be aware of every action available to them," etc.
Obviously there's more to it than just pithy sayings, just as the Rule of Thirds isn't the end-all of how to frame a shot for the camera, but hopefully that helps show how the basic rules of game design transcend the media that games exist in. As a transmedia game designer, I'd be sunk if game design was constantly reinventing itself the way I think you're saying.
