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[Zaphos]

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.

I think there's a world of difference between a story being clichéd and a story being totally unique.  And recycling themes and plots in itself is not a bad thing -- themes and plots are rarely invented in any medium ...

To pick a random example, Shaun of the Dead recycles the traditional zombie plot, but the story still felt quite inventive and entertaining, at least to me.

[joshg]

I think the notion that a game story needs to be "unique" or avoid cliche is overrated.  The story's concept usually isn't nearly as important as the delivery (much like fiction writing or almost any form of storytelling).

Look at Halflife.  Everyone went crazy about how it built an amazing story into a FPS game - but that had nothing to do with the originality of the story.  I mean, he opens a portal into another dimension and alien monsters swarm out and attack.  Think about it, it's practically Doom.

The reason it was a huge success was *how* it told the story.  It gave more detail, it included more characterization, and it used the environment to believably convey the narrative.  It was all in the delivery.

[deadeye]

I think the notion that a game story needs to be "unique" or avoid cliche is overrated.  The story's concept usually isn't nearly as important as the delivery (much like fiction writing or almost any form of storytelling).

Look at Halflife.  ... The reason it was a huge success was *how* it told the story.  It gave more detail, it included more characterization, and it used the environment to believably convey the narrative.  It was all in the delivery.

Exactly.  If you were to give a short synopsis of Halflife and break it down into it's component elements, it would sound like a hundred other games and movies.  But the story is much more than the sum of it's parts.

Which is pretty much the reason why I'm hesitant to share my story ideas... a synopsis just wouldn't do them any justice.  On the surface, they would just sound like a hundred other games or movies.

I also think that the reason there is so much recycling of themes and stories is because it's more easily accessible to people.  They immediately understand the concept.  Plus there's a built-in fanbase for a lot of stuff... this new game or movie has zombies in it?  I'm already interested.

[Musenik]

Which is pretty much the reason why I'm hesitant to share my story ideas...

That's all right, deadeye. Most story ideas don't survive the writing of them. Yours will change when you start implementation.

I've found that iterating between story and gameplay brings out the best of both, but it's incredibly time consuming.

[William Broom]

I think there should be more games with a heist theme. the Sly Cooper series was awesome at that. The story really tied together the missions because they were all part of the plan, culminating in the extra-long heist mission at the end of each level. The heist setting also makes it very easy to include multiple characters and make them feel meaningful, rather than just being 'the high-jump guy' and 'the block-smashing guy'.
In particular, I want to see a cyberpunk heist game in the style of Neuromancer. You could play as the infiltrating cyborg ninja, the chaos-causing Heavy Weapons Guy, and the hacker who supports his team from an internet terminal on the other side of the world.
You did want specific stories in this thread, right?

[Zaphos]

I think there should be more games with a heist theme.

I think I might love a SimHeist game, really.  Some kind of open ended heist-management simulation.  Not sure how that would work, but it sounds quite compelling to me.

[Thorst]

Game mechanics are perfect for allegory.  Why do more games not use their mechanics to express what something about life is like?

[Melly]

One thing I noticed after playing Silent Hill 2 to completion yesterday is that very, very few games attempt to use symbolysm and psychological themes into their games, let alone make the whole games based on that.

I was a bit surprised by SH2. I was sceptic before playing thanks to all the fanboyishnism (that even a word) to it and its iconic character Pyramid Head, but I found it to be a game with far more maturity (and boldness) in it than most of anything I've played in years.

[Terry]

Silent Hill 2 doesn't get nearly enough love. It's one of the best games I've ever played.

[Melly]

I'm guessing all the fanboy/girlishism (love making these up) might drive away some people. But SH2 is one of the few games out there that deserves all the recognition it got, much like Portal.

Even if everybody just fantasizes about a guy with a bloodied butcher's appron and a giant geometrically shaped metal helmet.

[dustin]

I find that usually when I play a game I have a much more advanced narrative of whats going on then the actual story I get.

Case 1: LttP
Upon playing this through again I'm seeing that a lot of the dialogue I thought was actually in the game was in fact just made up in my head.  That doesn't make it worse, I think it's better.  As I'm wandering hyrule I imagine myself out and about.  I try to run away from the soldiers and sometimes try to not kill them.  They are just under the wizards control I don't want to hurt them.  During all the exploration I do in that game in which no story is being told through dialogue I still have a complex narrative set up in my head based on the structure the game gives you.

Case 2: HM 64 and Rogue Likes
These games while allowing large amounts of freedom but giving you small amounts of strict plot really produce a lot of story for me.  Because I can get so much into the character and can make my own decisions I am able to create a really good story in my head.  It's kinda like how with rogue graphics all the "real" graphics are just imaginary and in your head, same with the story it's all just imagined in my head.  I remember playing hm 64 and climbing to the top of the mountain to look out at the view.  It served no game purpose but I liked to do it because it's what I would have done had I actually been my charector.

Case 3: The first level of sonic adventure and RE 4 (as other people have talked about)
These two games I really feel draw you into the world so much that they seem to go from scripted events to game play seamlessly.  I'm mainly thinking of the first level of sonic adventure.  Your running and you come up to that pier.  The camera shifts and your running along it with the whale coming up behind you.  You weren't in direct control but you still felt that it was your decision that mattered.  Theres a lot of that in RE 4

[george]

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. [....] 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've been getting into a few books lately about interactive narrative in an attempt to do some self-study on the subject. The two books I've read lately are Janet Murray's Hamlet on the Holodeck (1997), and the collection edited by Chris Bateman Game Writing: Narrative Skills for Videogames (2007). I recommend reading them in that order as Murray's book is academic and looking at the edges, and Bateman's is about mainstream titles.

I have a lot of notes on both but this is the essence of what they're talking about:

The essential properties of interactive media is that they are:

this is what we mean when we talk about interactivity:

• procedural
• participatory

and this is what we mean when we talk about immersion:

• spatial
• encyclopedic

1. The first thing you should do if you want an effective game narrative is "script the interactor". That is, set up a microcosm of actions the player will take that are coherent and consistent within the game world.

2. The navigation and exploration of space can be a substitute for what we normally call plot in conventional narrative.

3. An important factor of sustaining immersion actually is to prohibit participation by the player. What you want to do is structure the participation of the player very specifically, for example:

• as a visit
• as the active creation of belief
• by the player assuming a mask
• by the player playing a role

Imagine a visit as the structure of an amusement park ride. In many ways your actions and perceptions are circumscribed by the visit, and the illusion of the experience is maintained. Active creation of belief is what we more typically think of as 'doing stuff' in a game. The response of the game creates a little feedback loop that engages the senses and the emotions. Janet Murray mentions this in the context of the 'suspension of disbelief' and counters that what we do actually is 'the active creation of belief', I thought this was a nice touch.

The difference between the mask and the role wasn't immediately obvious at least to me. This is from Murray's book. I think what she's talking about is that a mask can be a very simple icon or avatar, for example the ship in Defender. A role goes one step further, for example Link in Zelda.

4. All games are stories. Obviously as some people up the thread mentioned not all games are stories as we normally talk about them and nor do they have to be. However there are some typical stories a player can enact in a game including:

• figuring out a confusing world
• cohering a fragmented world
• taking a risk
• a competition (the classic agon)
• testing a skill
• acquiring a commodity (or getting rid of one)
• surviving unpredictable challenges

5. The techniques of narrative include immersion, providing rewards, and providing chances for the player to identify with the game world.

6. The means of narrative include dialogue, back story text in introductions, transitions, and manuals, cut scenes and scripted events, and in-game artifacts (diaries, books, emails, etc.).

7. The cycle of play already includes plenty of success/failure, so be careful when deliberately adding frustration to the narrative.

8. The range of characters available to you, if considered as archetypes, include heroes, mentors, threshold guardians, tricksters, heralds, shapeshifters, shadows, etcetera (this is Joseph Campbell stuff).

9. Plan the structure of your game narrative carefully; you can think of it as linear, continuous (where you may backtrack), a domain (freely explorable but with boundaries), contiguous (an open world), or some combination of these (for example, a continuous overworld with underworld domains).

10. Narrative can be tied to location, events and achievements, NPCs, and time, and it's important to consider how and when the player will (or won't) experience each narrative element.


Anyway, I could go on, but Murray's book is worth a read, and the Bateman book is at least worth skimming through.

[joshg]

The essential properties of interactive media is that they are:

this is what we mean when we talk about interactivity:

• procedural
• participatory

and this is what we mean when we talk about immersion:

• spatial
• encyclopedic

It's been a while since I've read Hamlet on the Holodeck, but I kinda remember the immersion thing as she describes it being something I've heard convincing arguments against.  The bit I'm thinking of is something that's been described as the Immersion Fallacy - the idea that increased immersion makes for a better game, and the way to increase immersion is to make a game so realistic that the player can no longer tell the difference between the game and the real world.  The reason it's called a fallacy is that immersion has very little to do with sensory realism, and much more to do with the experience of play.  eg. You can be totally immersed in the experience of playing Bejeweled or Tetris despite the fact that neither of them even attempt to simulate a plausible reality.  They simply facilitate engaging play experiences, and that experience is what we are drawn to.

The big example of this fallacy is the mindset of (for example) FPS developers whose idea of creating the "perfect game" is photorealism.  Once we achieve photorealism, they think, we've created the perfect game world because players won't be able to tell the difference between the game and real life.  The counterpoint to that is the huge mess of us shouting "GAMEPLAY MATTERS" and walking away completely unimpressed by Crysis' shiny jungle renderings.

4. All games are stories. Obviously as some people up the thread mentioned not all games are stories as we normally talk about them and nor do they have to be.

I vaguely remember Murray saying that all games construct stories because we can relate our gameplay experiences afterwards by telling a story.  The problem with this is kind of obvious - that doesn't mean the game itself is a story, it just means you can tell a story *about* a game.  By that definition, pretty much anything in the world is "a story".

6. The means of narrative include dialogue, back story text in introductions, transitions, and manuals, cut scenes and scripted events, and in-game artifacts (diaries, books, emails, etc.).

I read a great essay by Henry Jenkins that went even further on the "in-game artifacts" concept.  Rather than limiting it to textual artifacts like diaries and books, he describes how narrative can be conveyed by the whole game world.  eg. You can walk past a bombed-out building and know that a battle took place here.  Or for that matter, this Retro Sabotage is a great example: http://www.retrosabotage.com/xevious/autopsy.html


Dang, I am so overtalkative when it comes to game studies stuff like this.  You wouldn't believe how much junk I had to delete before hitting Post and this is still friggin' huge.

Quickie recommendations: 'Rules of Play' by Zimmerman and Salen, and 'First Person' which is online here.  The cool essay by Henry Jenkins is over here.
Murray's book is still worth reading, but it's a good idea to follow up with some more recent work that challenge a few of her ideas (while recognizing her excellent contribution).

[Chris Whitman]

I vaguely remember Murray saying that all games construct stories because we can relate our gameplay experiences afterwards by telling a story.  The problem with this is kind of obvious - that doesn't mean the game itself is a story, it just means you can tell a story *about* a game.  By that definition, pretty much anything in the world is "a story".

I said something like that as well, but I didn't mean it quite in that way. The idea is that the process of the game being played generates a story. It isn't just that you can tell yourself a story about the game you are playing, it's that you are forced to rationalize the events of the game linguistically because that is how humans process information.

You may say this is a useless distinction, but the ability to rationalize a play experience as a story is not a necessary feature of the game itself. It's entirely possible to fail in this rationalization and end up with an experience that does not tell a story: something that makes no sense whatsoever. Looking at games in this respect forms a useful model, since we can begin to look at interpretable signifiers present in the game and understand them from a sociolinguistic perspective.

I've seen non-gamers pick up a game which I had absolutely no trouble with and be simply unable to play because they could not rationalize the game's mechanics, feedback and goals into some kind of coherent concept. I think, as people who regularly play games, we are likely to forget about this process, since we are 'well-socialized' and capable of comprehending games in the manner which is standard in game-culture.



When you ask someone to describe the events in Super Mario Bros., you would usually expect to hear the familiar story about Mario stomping on goombas in an attempt to save the princess. This isn't simply a story about the events of the game, it's how the player has rationalized and understood their play experience. To assume that there is some underlying game structure the player understands separately of this is to assume a language-independent process of understanding which is then simply 'translated' into words at a later date. It's the idea of the American hermeneuticists: that we have some kind of pre-linguistic understanding of events which is then simply 'translated' into language in order to be communicated. Unfortunately, it doesn't seem to be the way thought works. It appears that human beings actually think using words. Words are the basic way we represent and understand reality, and so far no researcher has turned up evidence of a pre-linguistic understanding of objects or events.

And this is my beef with a structuralist or formalist interpretation of games. We tend to separate 'story' and 'gameplay,' where story is some actual narrative which is explicitly separate from the button pressing action sequences. The gameplay is then discussed in terms of an interaction of abstract symbols. It does 'make sense,' in a manner of speaking: it is possible to characterize a game using this kind of model, and to make clear the differences between one game and another game. The real problem is that I don't think this is an effective method of analysis because I don't think we really play games like this.

When people describe things that have made a game memorable, they rarely fall into an academic discussion of interrelated symbols. Typically they will talk about events they have understood as comprising a story that was memorable or entertaining. Post-Apocalyptic Unicorn Uprising wasn't just a game about clicking, it was a game about leading a horde of charging unicorns against an unstoppable army of evil robots. This is can actually be an integral part of the gameplay for the many people. This isn't just a story; it's how we understand the games we play. If we change up the graphics and sound and 'story' elements, in our minds we are now playing a different game.


That's why I don't understand the fetishization of gameplay. It's not that I think a symbolic system of analysis is necessarily 'wrong' in some sense. I just don't think it can accurately describes the way games are really played. In the player's mind (except perhaps if the player is a game academic), the story and gameplay elements are not necessarily independent or separable.

[Chris Whitman]

To look at an example, I can separate out 'story' and 'gameplay' arbitrarily and say "I don't care where this game is set, I just want it to be really well balanced and fulfill another set of arbitrary critera," but there's nothing to stop a player from picking up your intricately balanced game about cardboard boxes fighting each other and saying "This is stupid. I don't want to play a game about cardboard boxes." That's a perfectly legitimate statement.

Maybe you've made the perfect gameplay, but all your effort is wasted (in this particular case) if the player does not understand your game on the model you have used. When you make a model that describes how games 'are' interpreted, you are actually changing the way you interpret games to be inline with a set of rules. You cannot compel anyone else to follow the same rules.

[Thorst]

Without saying it is the best model to use, let me throw in the way I most naturally see games.  Basically, I think playing a game means problem solving.

Before people had games, all they had were life’s events and challenges.  First, they made up stories to tell each other and to tell themselves, and that was how they made sense of life.  The stories began with conflict, and ended with resolution.

Sometimes the conflict was so dire, however, that a story would remain unfinished.  In order to make sense of unresolved challenges, something new was needed.  It had to be something like a story, but an unfinished one.  It had to be a challenge.  One person could have a resolution in mind, but they would challenge others to figure it out instead of telling them right away.

[joshg]

I vaguely remember Murray saying that all games construct stories because we can relate our gameplay experiences afterwards by telling a story.  The problem with this is kind of obvious - that doesn't mean the game itself is a story, it just means you can tell a story *about* a game.  By that definition, pretty much anything in the world is "a story".

I said something like that as well, but I didn't mean it quite in that way. The idea is that the process of the game being played generates a story. It isn't just that you can tell yourself a story about the game you are playing, it's that you are forced to rationalize the events of the game linguistically because that is how humans process information.

Okay, I really like that explanation (including all the stuff I didn't quote). 

I still don't know if I'd agree that every game is a Story (in the sense of being a well-formed narrative), but at the very least I totally agree that games use representation of stuff (unicorns, robots, whatever) to convey something as you play them.  Which is totally true and worth thinking about when you're designing a game.  And really the only disagreement is probably just a semantic thing on what to define "story" as. 

Also, I guess the edge cases where the images and sounds are strictly abstract still feel problematic.  Is Bejeweled constructing a story about gems that disappear?  Does that story matter?  (Maybe it does, I guess; maybe people like magical gems more than, say, basic colored rectangles.  Although that seems more like eye candy than story.)



That is my long way of saying, "That is a cool enough argument that I'm not going to fight it even though I suspect I might still disagree with it."
 :D

[Thorst]

I havenn't followed the discussion thus far...

I want to see this discussion continue, so here are the cliff’s notes for anyone who skipped the cut-scenes.  After concerns about stories getting in the way of gameplay, things culminated with a weighty assertion from I Like Cake.  He said the best way to look at a game is as a story or narrative that the player’s mind assembles in order to comprehend the game.

I find this bizarre, yet difficult to refute.

A viable alternative may be to say that we use the problem-solving part of our brains to comprehend a game, as opposed to the narrating part of the brain.  So, games are about challenges, i.e. gameplay, not stories.  Yes? No? Other contenders?

[joshg]

I guess I Like Cake's psychological / linguistic twist on things is a cool way to think of a player's experience, but I'm still not sure it delineates games as being "story" compared to any other sequence of actions we take, for example making a sandwich.

But since no one gives a crap how to craft an interesting narrative via sandwich-making, I'm happy if we put that concern aside and instead use what I Like Cake is saying to jump into some good analysis of how to make our games awesomer.

[mewse]

Alternate point of view. 

I can go along with games being assembled in the player's mind as a narrative.. although it seems like it'd probably be a rather "fan fiction"-esque one ("He ran further to the right for a while, and then he spotted a line of Goombas behind a Koopa Troopa!  Mario boldly de-shelled the turtle and sent the shell smashing through the mobile fungi, and our mustachioed hero bellowed with laughter.  '1-Up, Yes!'..")

Okay, I can go along with that.  Gameplay as story, sure.

But you know, if we were going to write a real book about the game, or a film about the game..  that stuff would be condensed way down.  Certainly it wouldn't be 99.5% of the movie's duration, the way it is in the game. 

The important stuff in a story is the character-defining choices, the relationship-defining choices, things of that sort.  Sure, you'll always get the boss fights..  the "one guy on 10% health needs to Punch The Asteroid To Save The Earth" moments at the end of your summer blockbusters, but there's always human interest underlying that.  Willis didn't punch the asteroid to save the Earth;  he punched the asteroid to save his daughter and her new husband.  And as a game player, I don't ever get to make that choice, because games always choose it for me;  they yank control away at the critical moment and show me a mini-movie or a wall of text, and then tells me to go and kill some more Koopas until it's time for the next mini-movie.


So I'd argue that if many people think of story as being separate from gameplay, it's probably because virtually all meaningful game plot actually is presented to the player outside of gameplay.  Plot always arrives either as a non-interactive book or as a non-interactive movie, and makes the end-user a member of the audience, instead of the main character.

And I don't know how to fix it.