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[Chris Whitman]

You see, there's this issue I have with a lot of games, and that is that they simply don't make an effective use of story. Despite fun or innovative gameplay, quality content or user-customization, I find it is story above all else which really pulls one in to a game. It makes sense, right? Stories are how humans interpret the world. Even our memories only make sense when we tell ourselves stories about them, trimming off the excess pieces to create a narrative from a series of jumbled, seemingly random events.

Some people rank story as unimportant in game development: story is tacked on as an afterthought or generally 'excluded.' The thing is, I feel real exclusion of story is impossible: all interactive experiences tell a story. Consider how you might explain the gameplay of even an abstract shooter to a friend who has never seen it, and you will find yourself telling a story about the game. Even retelling your memories of a game to yourself is telling a story.

But not all stories are interesting or captivating. "I pressed the green button when the red light appeared" is hardly a story for the ages. If we're going to tell stories, why not tell good ones? As mentioned previously in an unrelated thread, I thought it would be a good idea to open up a dialogue on story and setting. I've got lots of story ideas, personally, and I'm sure everyone else here does as well. I've also got lots of opinions on what is or is not effective in the relaying of stories, and I'm sure everyone else here has those as well.

I'm going to try to assert some kind of organization over my sprawled mental notes, here, and I'll follow this up with a few posts of ideas I have been working on for the past year or so.

[cgmonkey]

Story is difficult -- on one hand it's there to support the gameplay and not make the gameplay (unless it's an adventure game where it relies on the story to do the puzzles). In platformers for example -- STOP doing 10 minutes of dialog in every 15 minutes of gameplay, I wanna blow up stuff! So if you could fit a story into the actions of the player or give a good story depth with 3 sentances, I'm ALL for it.

On the other hand everyone loves a good story but stories no one can relate to in games cripple the game more than it helps. Games like metal gear solid would be a mediocre attempt at spy game if it weren't for the stories. It serves both ways -- use story if you can elevate the gameplay experience, if not, keep it at a minimum I'd say.

[joshg]

The thing is, I feel real exclusion of story is impossible: all interactive experiences tell a story. Consider how you might explain the gameplay of even an abstract shooter to a friend who has never seen it, and you will find yourself telling a story about the game. Even retelling your memories of a game to yourself is telling a story.

I agree that story is a very valuable part of a game, but I don't think this argument does your point justice.  Trying to argue that Tetris has a story is a classic blunder of a whole range of people who want to analyze games as narrative.

It's kind of like trying to argue that all paintings are attempts at literal visual representation, even though abstract art is really obviously not.  Does abstract art mean that representation isn't a really important aspect of art?  Of course not.  That's as silly as like thinking that the existence of black and white art makes the study of color meaningless.  Which is just as silly as thinking that we need to push "story" into all games whether it's really there or not.

Games don't *need* story.  But they usually have it, and when it's used effectively it can make a game a lot more interesting than it would've been otherwise.

[Smithy]

So if you could fit a story into the actions of the player or give a good story depth with 3 sentances, I'm ALL for it.

I don't really like that stance and I think there are a lot of games that negate it entirely.

Metal Gear Solid, for example. The only thing that really separated it from the pack of action games was the intriguing dialogue sequences every ten minutes. And the boxes.

But the series itself would probably have been forgotten today if it didn't have a strong story element.




Also, I'd like to mention Planescape: Torment before anyone else gets the chance.





That being said, it's not entirely impossible to have an interesting story with minimal dialogue. Anyone who's played Super Metroid knows what I'm talking about.

[Ivan]

I don't think that all games need a story as explicitly defined by the creator of the game. If the gameplay itself is good, it will in itself create a story. In such a context, the complexity of the gameplay defines the complexity of the story. However, the game-generated story is only a story in traditional sense when viewed in retrospect. Like in Tetris, a simple enough game, a story that you tell about your experience might be "Hey, I had like three rows left and I was waiting for the "I" shape to drop because i've been saving this well on the side to clear 4 rows at once and then when I was about to die, like two of them dropped in a row and totally saved my ass". While in a more complex game like Dwarf Fortress or something, you can write up pages about your gameplay story. I guess that it's a clear distinction between author-created story and gameplay-created story and out of the two I think the latter is the more important one; one that is pretty much required for a game to be a game, though the former can add multitudes of depth to the experience.

[Smithy]

But what about games like The Dig or Full Throttle or Grim Fandango?

You can't really make your own unique story like that because the game itself is just solving the puzzles with concrete solutions to see what happens next in the story. And I think they were pretty classic games.

I'd say the author written story is more important than the player created story, to me at least. Maybe that's just because I've never really liked connect-three games/tetris clones very much and have always gone more for story over game mechanics. Unless of course it's a multiplayer game.

[Ivan]

Tetris was just an example, I don't in any way suggest that it's a richer experience than an adventure game like Full Throttle or Grim Fandango. That said, I think that Tetris is closer to my definition of what a game is than an adventure game. Don't get me wrong, adventure games are one of my most favourite genres, and Monkey Island sits well into my top 10 games ever list. But, they are more like interactive movies than games precisely because of the way the story is handled. I think the challenge of a story in a game is the bridge between the author story and the player story, while adventure game don't really face this challenge because they are almost 100% in the realm of the game creator's storyline.

[joshg]

So just to redirect this to the useful question:

What makes a game story good or bad?

[Melly]

Actually, we probably should focus more on our own ideas for unique game settings and storylines before this whole thread becomes out of context.

One idea I've had for a good deal of time (which I plan on actually making in some point in my life so I won't go into great detail) is a game set within a sort of thought-generated alternate dimension. We all know dreamworlds in some games, and while they're bizarre and interesting most of the time, they're still usually linear preset progressions. I'd like to create a 'dreamworld' in which the thoughts and emotions of the characters (especially the player-controlled one)affected their environment in real time. Make a character in that world extremely sad and something like the plants around him withering could occur, the opposite happening if you make him really happy. Change the perception of a large number of the populace and you could do much larger effects, like erasing entire cities and people in them out of existence merely by somehow making everybody else forget about them.

[Smithy]

So... It'd be sort of a sim dreamworld?

That's a pretty nifty idea.

Make it now!

[Melly]

The idea is a little too massive for my skill and willpower, not to mention the storyline I'd put into it. If I can find a team of trained coding monkeys to do the hard work for me in exchange for bananas or encouraging words I would consider it. Plus, it's not fully designed yet, especially many of the characters.

I imagine it'd need a lot of very good procedural world generation coding in it. Maybe.

[joshg]

Actually, we probably should focus more on our own ideas for unique game settings and storylines before this whole thread becomes out of context.

That works too, I just wanted to help avoid this turning into a "games are stories / games are not stories" debate that doesn't really go anywhere.

The dreamworld idea sounds cool, and also creates some awesome potential gameplay hooks.  Make enough people sad and plants wither and die ... including a huge old tree that was blocking your progress somewhere?  Or whatever other sort of thing like that.

Would you really need procedural world generation, or just a set of shifting behaviours for stuff (maybe including world tiles)?

[Melly]

Well, the procedural world generation is potentially awesome for this idea because even small changes to the mentality and behaviour of the inhabitants could lead to large, unpredictable changes to the gameworld in time (the changes would probably be slow, mostly because of processing speed and so the game is not just playable for aliens with supercomputers from space. You know, like Crysys).

Butterfly effect goodness.

Another setting idea I just had based on this was a game set in the real world but with such elements thrown into it. You know, one of those mind-bending storylines. Maybe an investigative story where the main character is a detective looking for a missing person of his aquaintance, but everybody of her town doesn't seem to even know she exists, and that was actually the cause of her disappearance.

[Problem Machine]

Melly, your clue is totally giving me a clue... I'm imagining a game now where you play a character created in the mind of someone who's in a coma. You have to leave on a quest to stop the approaching apocalypse, which of course is when the host of the dreamworld wakes up and forgets everything and everyone in the character's world. So you have to travel deeper into his mind to ensure that he never wakes up. The main character is the coma guy's dream avatar, and so that brings up some interesting conflicts, and as you travel through his dreams and deeper into his mind you grow to understand the mind of the guy even as you quest to screw him over by pushing him into a permanent coma.

Dammit. I guess that's another one to add to the 'someday' stack.

[joshg]

Hrm, most procedural world generation things would probably break down if you tried to make changes during gameplay.  The problem with the Butterfly Effect is that it's hard to make changes happen slowly if one tiny modification causes massive chaotic changes in the game world.  Even worse if suddenly the avatar is suddenly inside a wall, for example.

But, hmmm .... procedural world *modification*, maybe?  Start with a hand-crafted level but cause it to morph and shift in strange ways?  Such stuff has already been done with deformable terrain and whatnot, but maybe something more surreal could be cooked up ....

[Chris Whitman]

I agree that story is a very valuable part of a game, but I don't think this argument does your point justice.  Trying to argue that Tetris has a story is a classic blunder of a whole range of people who want to analyze games as narrative.

I mean story in a fairly vague sense. The story in Tetris involves dropping blocks to make rows. It's a narrative (or is interpreted as a narrative, to be more specific) because it has recognizable events which happen in a sequence in time. If that's not what you, personally, mean by narrative, I'm not here to equivocate. That's what I mean.


To put it more simply:

If the gameplay itself is good, it will in itself create a story.

That is basically what I was talking about, except that I would contend that even terrible gameplay engenders a story. That might not be what you call a story, but I'm really not going to argue which of our personal definitions are better.

Edit: I was intending this as more of a discussion of more explicit narratives, but I figured it was a good introduction. After all, if you're going to make your game about something, why not make it about something interesting?

[Musenik]

There was an interesting example of procedural story telling. King of Dragon Pass used story templates and placed the characters you chose to interact with into the templates. That way your choices made significant changes to the experience, but the little stories ran mostly linearly.

I was thinking this morning about how interlocking story and gameplay can be. 'Dangerous High School Girls in Trouble' interleaves the two in great chunks, but subtle merging would be ideal. I currently believe that, depending upon the story, gameplay should serve story. For simple stories, like Bioshock, core gameplay is king. That story adds atmosphere and purpose. It's a fine product. For more sophisticated narrative, designers should look at how gameplay can accentuate the story. If I could have afforded real-time 3D immersion in my product the flirting game would be much more tactile and verbal. It would have felt like real flirting, without the crush of defeat from real world flirting, but would have enough crush to dare the player to keep trying.

I would never say gameplay is less important than the story. Gameplay must be top notch, or it will ruin a top notch story, just as a mediocre or worse story will drag on awesome gameplay.

[Melly]

I guess gamers can focus on different aspects of a game while playing, and sometimes an aspect they really love (like the story) can give them strength to go through an aspect they hate (like, say, the difficulty curve or the controls).

I felt that way playing Resident Evil 4. The gameplay was awesome overall and the game is heavily addictive, but if you read the script you'll probably groan heavily, even more so if you listen to the 'acting'. The plot is derivative (even if the setting is potentially very good and atmospheric), the characters are bland and stereotypical, the acting is strained, and some of the dialogue lines can make you facepalm.

Though I do agree that if RE4 had a good story it would have enhanced an already great experience. Some games just tend to have one more than the other, and few try to blend both aspects together.

[deadeye]

I'd like to chime in on the fact that I'm a proponent of "the gameplay should support the story" as well.  Well okay, not so much support the story, but fit the story, and vice versa.

In a simple platformer you don't need much more story than "the princess was kidnapped" or "the robots have gone crazy." If you start introducing adventure or rpg elements then you open yourself up for more involved story telling.  I think this works as a general rule: the slower the pace of the game, the more story you can afford to tell.  (Notice I said general rule, I'm sure people can come up with plenty of exceptions.)

I think it's also important to know when to change gears, though.  For instance, a lot of FPS's hang a detailed story on the framework, which seems an odd thing to do if the point of gameplay is fast-paced shooting and dodging.  But for the most part FPS's change gears pretty seamlessly between exploring/storytelling and jumping into the fray.  Suddenly it's not so much about finding out who the creepy dude in the suit is or how the AI mainframe went crazy.  It turns into "THERE WAS A FIREFIGHT" for a minute or two, and for that minute or two that's all the story is about.  Afterwards, you get some downtime that leads you back on the path of the story.  It's like a series of mini dramatic structures... exposition, climax, denouement, exposition, climax, etc.  Wash, rinse, repeat.  Which is a good method for plugging story into a more action-oriented game, I think.

Edit: I was intending this as more of a discussion of more explicit narratives, but I figured it was a good introduction. After all, if you're going to make your game about something, why not make it about something interesting?

Hmm... I dunno if I'm up for sharing my story ideas.  A lot of them are fairly derivative, pulling elements from various genres and plots and mish-mashing them together to come up with something resembling new.  But then again, I'm not a story teller, and I appreciate the rehashing of old themes as long as it's done right.

Resident Evil 4.

Case in point.  I actually enjoyed the story of RE4.  Sure, the acting was bad in parts, and there were a few groaner moments.  And yeah, all the elements of the story were derivative of something else.  But I thought that overall it was a successful story because it melded the various themes together rather solidly to create a story that stood on it's own, however clichéd.  But then, what RE story isn't clichéd?  For that matter, how many games out there have totally unique stories?  A few to be sure, but for the most part themes and plots get recycled again and again, ad nauseam.

[FARTRON]

I mean story in a fairly vague sense. The story in Tetris involves dropping blocks to make rows. It's a narrative (or is interpreted as a narrative, to be more specific) because it has recognizable events which happen in a sequence in time. If that's not what you, personally, mean by narrative, I'm not here to equivocate. That's what I mean.

...

Edit: I was intending this as more of a discussion of more explicit narratives, but I figured it was a good introduction. After all, if you're going to make your game about something, why not make it about something interesting?

I think the reason this immediately turned into a discussion of story vs gameplay is because games as a medium still have a very undeveloped sense of what the story is and how to present it. I personally hate cut-scenes and I hate having to scroll through a lot of text. It seems like too many game designers (or at least the suits running EA et al.) want to be directors.

Take Grand Theft Auto for example. The series has come to simultaneously embody the best and worst in story telling. The later games have long and frequent cut-scenes with top name actors that I can't stand to watch but which often reveal what I have to do in the next mission. Meanwhile every time someone starts a crime spree outside of a mission, the game adapts itself to their actions and starts a narrative that usually leads to an exciting car chase. That narrative usually ends in a spectacular crash, or an arrest, or sometimes even a daring escape. It's a fairly limited dialog, but each one is unique.

It's one thing to write a background narrative to fill in the gaps and provide the avatar with a reason for their actions, but it's entirely another to create an engine for the creation of narrative. Games are capable of both of these, and while I have appreciated games with engaging background stories, I wish games had more of the adaptive kind.