next »

[Samtagonist]

Picture yourself in a boat on a river with tangerine trees and marmalade skies...

So, what, action-adventure? 

[Gimym TILBERT]

Picture yourself in a boat on a river with tangerine trees and marmalade skies...

So, what, action-adventure? 

Picture AshfordPride in an ART game THREAD

[C.A. Sinner]

I don't need to picture that.

[Samtagonist]

Picture AshfordPride in an ART game THREAD

I think my avatar sums it up nicely. 

[Richard Kain]

You can't really say that emergent gameplay is the same as "story." Stories have characters, protagonists, antagonists, pacing, arcs, dialogue, etc... Stories can be told and re-told. In theory, it IS possible to create a story through emergent gameplay. However, most modern games do not then save the story to be retold. It is a story that is particular to a single experience had by a single person. (or in the case of multiplayer games, a group of people) These kinds of stories are also extremely simple. They normally involve very rudimentary interactions involving the mechanics and rules of the world, and the ways in which the player interacts with them.

So yes, these can be stories. But are they good stories? If you took a video camera into your house and taped your life, would anyone else actually be interested in watching it? Even for people with exciting lives, a running commentary would be poor entertainment for everyone else.

So for the sake of this discussion, I am limiting the term "story" to a pre-defined narrative, under the control of the designer. This is where all of the deepest and most insightful stories in games come from currently. Perhaps in the future sandbox games will be able to incorporate persistent elements that will result in interactive stories that result purely from the player's interactions. For now, AI hasn't reached that point.

[Gimym TILBERT]

So yes, these can be stories. But are they good stories? If you took a video camera into your house and taped your life, would anyone else actually be interested in watching it? Even for people with exciting lives, a running commentary would be poor entertainment for everyone else.

Reality TV and Tabloid beat you on that.

EDIT:
And sport show ...

[C.A. Sinner]

Yeah but even reality TV is often heavily scripted.

[Triplefox]

You can't really say that emergent gameplay is the same as "story." Stories have characters, protagonists, antagonists, pacing, arcs, dialogue, etc... Stories can be told and re-told. In theory, it IS possible to create a story through emergent gameplay. However, most modern games do not then save the story to be retold. It is a story that is particular to a single experience had by a single person. (or in the case of multiplayer games, a group of people) These kinds of stories are also extremely simple. They normally involve very rudimentary interactions involving the mechanics and rules of the world, and the ways in which the player interacts with them.

This is veering away from story in particular, but we work with the building blocks of fiction regardless of how much story is "designed" into the game structure. Characters can be developed through game mechanics alone(example: the Pac-Man ghosts) and the experience of these characters can be shared, even if the specific story is somewhat different. The tendency of games to combine "plausibly exaggerated" experiences(wacky physics, overpowered abilities, etc.) with simplistic motives(beat the bad guys, save the princess) could therefore be construed as a means to help along a player-internal narrative, even if it holds no water as a non-interactive story.

Imposing story-by-design constitutes a shift from the player-internal narrative towards a takeover of all storytelling functions. The main issue presented once you do this is that the internal narrative never goes away in an interactive experience, so you actually have two narratives running in parallel, each one stating "This is why these things are happening." If they clash, they both lose power.

But in such cases, the mechanics are more readily believable, since(as long as a bug doesn't make them break) they are shown to be self-consistent all throughout gameplay, while non-interactive story elements are presented in arbitrary fashion, with no room for player experimentation.

There's an interesting distinction here - a character with an extremely detailed backstory has no contradiction, as long as the backstory resurfaces through mechanics like attributes and powers. But a story layered on top of the mechanics, where scripted events override the rules, is going to be more fragile.

[Gimym TILBERT]

Yeah but even reality TV is often heavily scripted.

They also slap template into the emergent bit, like:

Detecting some kind of relationship then
Triggering a script that pass that relationship as parameters
Slapping a stake with an event (along th line of enemy must work toghether to give immunity to someone they like, forcing them to reveal hidden affection or strategize about social position).
? ? ?
PROFIT!

EDIT:

But a story layered on top of the mechanics, where scripted events override the rules, is going to be more fragile.

What if a story is seen as a serie of state instead of a serie of event.
When the player push a button to fire an animation, it works like the current state override the rules of the previous state. Idle state is not hitting state, idle is vulnerable, hitting may have some invulnerable state + negate gravity while theanimation is playing.
Game like metal gear have the stealth/search/alert state that already override the flow of event (notice they have distinct STAKE too), maybe something from an higher level perspective (story) would work.

[Muz]

I didn't read the whole thread yet

What I do first is identify the kind of players who want to play my game. I write out a bunch of things that they'd like. I make RPGs, so I boil it down to people who want to blow up/kill stuff, people who want to explore, people who want to have a cool character, people who want to change the world. Effectively writing down the kind of gameplay I want.

Then I work on the story. I make sure that the story has all those gameplay elements. There'd be a story path for killers, there'd be a story path for heroes/villains, there'd be one for explorers, there'd be one for a shiny guy.

And I try to merge them around a bit. Someone who's playing a social/killer kind of character might be allowed to duel or assassinate to gain political capital or lead armies against other nations. Someone playing an explorer/social might be allowed to make deals with tribes, or marry a tribal girl and retire in the jungle.

Once I have all the story I want, I build the levels around these stories.

[Nuprahtor]

I think that the most important thing in a game is atmosphere, what you feel during play and after it.
The atmosphere can be created as the gameplay and story.
There is a huge amount of games with greate gameplay, they provide fun.
But there is also games without standart gameplay, but they also provide fun and interesting expirience