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[jamesprimate]

Like everybody else, I love the use of the phrase "skulls in toilets" as a critique for seemingly lazy or too obvious environmental storytelling. Its good and funny. Original tweet: https://twitter.com/torahhorse/status/709458086524682241

Its become a neologism and I see it used around as a general criticism about games that do the thing. But does anyone actually *dislike* skulls in toilets?

[swordofkings128]

I would like it if you awaken in a bathroom with amnesia and the skull in the toilet can talk and acts like your best friend and gives you lots of exposition! Actually that would be pretty sweet...

[s0]

But does anyone actually *dislike* skulls in toilets?

yes. using shit like graffiti on walls for storytelling is corny and extremely overused, particularly in first person 3d games.

[Raptor85]

i like subtle environmental storytelling, where you really have to think about what you're seeing and piece clues together.  Probably the best two examples being the "Souls" series of games (dark souls, demon's souls, etc.." and one of my favorite games this past year, the Talos Principle.

[ｂ∀ ｋｋｕｓａ]

I would like it if you awaken in a bathroom with amnesia and the skull in the toilet can talk and acts like your best friend and gives you lots of exposition! Actually that would be pretty sweet...

I'd love to play a game where this is the hub

[jamesprimate]

I would like it if you awaken in a bathroom with amnesia and the skull in the toilet can talk and acts like your best friend and gives you lots of exposition! Actually that would be pretty sweet...

hell yes

[Quicksand-T]

skulls & toilets game jam

[Armageddon]

I'm partial to graffiti painted with blood myself. I'm glad that's going out of fashion, I think it's partly due to localization in big AAA games; Replacing textures for each language is a b/

[valrus]

I want to go through the game with all the graffiti in the local language, and then in NewGame+ mode it's all translated and it's all just variations on "Skulls in Toilets".  (Like "Homeland is watermelon", but as an in-game bonus feature.)

[swordofkings128]

In all seriousness, I think the problem with environmental story telling(especially in AAA games) is when developers kind of phone it in. Or dumb it down. Like the graffiti thing or whatever, that just has generic "KILL OUR ALIEN OVERLORDS!" but I certainly think that a subtle graffiti tag of a character you can meet(optionally) would be cool if there were weird symbols or clues that related to land marks around the city. Then you go to each landmark and get clues onto this mysterious person's location...

A good example of great environmental story telling in my book is Emily's apartment in Deadly Premonition. You hear in the game that she's a bad cook, she admits it herself, other characters comment on it, and at one point York(the main char) says the coffee she made him was disgusting. But inside her apartment, there's burnt food on the stove and knifes stuck in the wall if I recall correctly. The dev's didn't have to go that far into detail, but they went the extra mile and put all these neat details in her apartment that relate to her character. Gosh I need to replay that game again...!

Same with every other character's place you can enter in that game. But some of that might be spoilers! Basically houses of characters have their own flavor, like the characters ACTUALLY occupy that space, you know? As if actual families live in these places. The whole town of Greenvale has that feeling, though.

[Capntastic]

The core idea of "setting information the player does not have to think to engage with" is interesting but when it's just "ah, a dead guy in a phonebooth, he must have been calling someone when the disaster struck!!" it's just lazy.

That doesn't mean it's bad, if there are other mechanisms in play to convey the texture of the world.  But if all you've got going on is graffiti of "can't believe the world is over lol" then, well, you're not really doing anyone a great service.

A lot of the fawning over this sort of stuff is from people thrilled that it's simultaneously "lore" that does not require paying much attention to "get", while also being like a little treat for people who think they are cleverly piecing stuff together when they see two skeletons in the backseat of a car, one's head in the other's lap.

It's super blunt and obvious, they can be fun little pops, but they are not (on their own) an amazing storytelling mechanism.

[s0]

The core idea of "setting information the player does not have to think to engage with" is interesting

Come to think of it, "environmental storytelling" is basically just a fancier term for "atmosphere" or "creating a sense of place". I don't think it's very important to convey a concrete "plot" to the player via the environment (and attempts to do this often result in the skulls in toilets problem). It's enough if they get a sense that the level has a history and things exist in it for other reasons than just "this is a fun challenge in a videogame".

[Superb Joe]

skulls & toilets game jam

strongly agree

[Nillo]

I loved the way Dishonored has its environment react to what you are doing in different ways. Off the top of my head:

1. Early in the game you see someone painting a portrait of Overseer Campbell with a bottle of cider in the foreground. You can take the bottle and the painter will act annoyed about it, saying he needed it to draw attention away from Campbell's face. Later in the game, you can find the painting on a wall and there's no bottle in the picture.
2. After you've completed your first mission, there are posters in the town calling for your arrest, describing you as a "masked felon" together with a sketch of your appearance. However, if you finished the mission without alerting anyone, the poster instead says the crime was carried out by an "unknown assailant" and nothing is sketched on it.

It's pretty hard to pull it off right, but this type of storytelling is definitely my favorite thing.

[jamesprimate]

In all seriousness, I think the problem with environmental story telling(especially in AAA games) is when developers kind of phone it in.

It's enough if they get a sense that the level has a history and things exist in it for other reasons than just "this is a fun challenge in a videogame".

its all about degrees, right? there are a limited number of tools that can be used to convey narrative to the player, and unless you want to lean heavily on exposition or dialogue (which similarly suffers from its own version of skulls on toilets: "Gordon Freeman Syndrome"), the environment is too huge and convenient of a thing *not* to use.

this joak thread was posted after skulls in toilets came up in the hyper light drifter thread. for me, hyper light is peak skulls in toilets: i mean, the environment is literally skulls (and giant skeletons) placed all over the place. but imho it succeeds really well in this! it tells its story completely without text or dialogue, creates a great mood from that sense of ambiguity and discovery, and looks fantastic. but clearly this is a special case where clearly the whole game was designed specifically around environmental storytelling.

i think that, like Gordon Freeman Syndrome, the problem is when the focus becomes too narrowly shaped on using all means to convey plot or narrative related information. if every conversation talks about what a hero you are and every toilet has a skull it collapses any suspension of disbelief that you arent just in some overly designed mousetrap. but the alternate is to "waste" time and space on creating material that "doesnt serve a purpose" and potentially leads the player in the wrong direction, either from a narrative perspective or literally!

anyway, interesting stuff

[0stasis]

The graffiti works but now feels sorta cliche today. If you're trying to display something horrific , look at horror films in bathrooms. Saw is one. The film starts with a corpse who blow his head off. Maybe use something like that. Notes, tapes, I mean it's the same as graffiti on the wall. It just so happens that we see that a lot. It can still work.

"I would like it if you awaken in a bathroom with amnesia and the skull in the toilet can talk and acts like your best friend and gives you lots of exposition! Actually that would be pretty sweet..."

That would be hilarious.

[ProgramGamer]

I would like it if you awaken in a bathroom with amnesia and the skull in the toilet can talk and acts like your best friend and gives you lots of exposition! Actually that would be pretty sweet...

I think there was a game like that for the PS3, except the skull was on a staff and it had this weird afterlife setting. You were trying to get your girlfriend back or something, I don't remember. My friend had the game.

[s0]

shadows of the damned

[s0]

this joak thread was posted after skulls in toilets came up in the hyper light drifter thread. for me, hyper light is peak skulls in toilets: i mean, the environment is literally skulls (and giant skeletons) placed all over the place. but imho it succeeds really well in this! it tells its story completely without text or dialogue, creates a great mood from that sense of ambiguity and discovery, and looks fantastic. but clearly this is a special case where clearly the whole game was designed specifically around environmental storytelling.

woops, i think i may have misunderstood the toilet skull joke lol (never heard of it before this thread). i thought it was making fun of using goofy pictograms and grafitti on walls and shit like that for storytelling.

i mean for example: think of pretty much any vaguely horror themed first person game released in the last 10 or so years. chances are somewhere in that game (usually near the beginning), you'll find a hastily scrawled grafitti on a dilapidated wall saying "they are coming" or something similar. extra cheese points if it was scrawled in BLOOD. that seems to be a perfect example of skulls in toilets the way i understand it.

i haven't played HLD so can't comment on it specifically, but putting narratively relevant objects in an environment where appropriate seems like an example of what i talked about in my other post: creating a sense of place. if you want your game to be "immersive" in any capacity, you'll probably wanna do something like that anyway.

[valrus]

I don't mind environmental storytelling so much as being told the same two or three stories again and again.  Tell me a new story and it's enjoyable again.