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[Montoli]

er, actually, no I didn't.  The "have you looked into Phoenix Wright" question was directed at the original poster, not at you in particular.  (Although I would question if the Fedora Spade games had as much of an emphasis on analyzing testimony as Phoenix Wright.  By genre, do you mean "dramatic genre", as in, "Crime Drama"?  or Game Genre?  (I would have put them in the same dramatic genre, but different game genres, due to differences in how the games play.  But that's probably a different discussion.)

Anyway, sorry for the mixup!

[ஒழுக்கின்மை (Paul Eres)]

ah, thought you meant me. by genre, i meant adventure games where you gather clues and try to prove someone guilty.

still, if you meant the original poster, it's strange that you'd ask that, because phoenix wright is mentioned in the first post in the thread, so he's probably heard of it.

[Montoli]

It's mentioned, but I felt that it wasn't adequately explored or examined yet.

You're right though, after rereading, I realize I could have phrased that a lot better.  So here, I'll try again:  I think Phoenix Wright is the best example I've seen of this, but not (only) because of the reasons the original poster mentions. (text effects and sound)  At least as important, I think, are the psychological games it plays with the player.  Namely:

• reading isn't just required for gameplay - it is the core gameplay.
• You know in advance that there is something to "find" by rereading, if you search long enough
• it's personified, so you're not just reading a description from a faceless narrator, or even a speech from a friend - you're reading the testimony of someone who is, in the context of the game, your opponent.  And he looks shifty, and he's probably hiding something, but hmm, how can I get it out of him?

[ஒழுக்கின்மை (Paul Eres)]

that's true, but is that really any different, than, say, reading in puzzle-based adventure games, such as interactive fiction, where little things said and the wording of things can help you solve puzzles? i think it's fairly common in games which have text to require close reading of that text in order to solve puzzles. even in final fantasy 12, for instance, reading NPC text closely helps you figure out how to find the monster bounties you're looking for

[Montoli]

[this one IS directed towards Paul Eres]

I would say yes, it is different.  Certainly from the final fantasy system, where you can frankly play most of the game without reading any text except for the words that they highlight for you.  (specifically, I suspect, to make it easier to tell what you need to pay attention to and not skip, if you're skimming the text.)  So yeah, I'm going to claim it's a lot different from the FF model, since you don't have to search the text for descriptions.  The FF model's idea of hiding clues in text is generally equivalent to a "Where's Waldo" book where he's standing off to the side, taking up 1/2 the page, and circled in red.

As for interactive fiction, yes, that's quite a bit closer to what I'm thinking of here I think.  Certainly it has the same sort of "somewhere in this block of text is the clue that tells you what you need to do next" feel.

One thing that I think Phoenix Wright did that made the game a bit more accessible was bounding it.  Instead of, say "somewhere in the description of one of the rooms or items I've seen so far is the clue I need", they're saying "somewhere in these 6-10 sentences is the clue I need".  It leads to a different sort of focus.  A more directed search, I would say.  I would argue that the average word in a Phoenix Wright testimony is read and reread more carefully than the average word in most IF descriptions.  (Difficult to prove or measure really, but certainly true based on my own experiences playing IF and Phoenix Wright.)

Also, I do think that the adversarial feel, the fact that you're not reading some random narrator's words, but the words of a person who is usually some kind of larger-than-life charactature,  helps a lot.  It makes it more fun because you have a straw man to outwit.  It's somehow more fun (for me at least) when you're outwitting a character than outwitting the game in general.


My $0.02 anyway.

-Montoli

[ஒழுக்கின்மை (Paul Eres)]

i agree, except that i don't think the ff games highlight text for you -- at least i can't remember any that did. there's still a lot of reading between the lines involved though.

also, i don't think there's anything necessarily wrong with decorative text that doesn't have anything to do with the gameplay, sometimes you're just playing a game for the richness of the world, and would pay just as much attention to text that you aren't required to understand in order to finish the game. as an example, the dialogue in kartia is just fun to read, even though there are no hidden clues in it. at least more fun for me to read than the phoenix wright dialogue. and there are other non-gameplay ways of making reading text interesting. for instance, well-drawn portraits. example:

-- look at how the portrait emotions add to the fun of reading the text

[poorwill]

Now you got me curious Paul:  which games do you think have good stories?  I can think of, like, five games with stories I'd compare favourably with good stories from dedicated story mediums.  And none of them is Planescape Torment.

EDIT:

i think jrpgs are probably one of the best genres -- i enjoy other games too, and jrpgs have problems with being too formulaic, but i've enjoyed jrpgs far more than any other genre

oh okay

[Bree]

I can think of four, off the top of my head- two of them are by Team ICO, and the other two are by Tim Schafer.

[poorwill]

Only one of mine was a Tim Schafer one.  You have to guess which one!  The rest were:  Mr Do vs Unicorns, Kirby's Dreamland 3, Killer 7 and the microgame in Warioware with the crying dog.

[Montoli]

Side note:  re: FF12 and text decorations.

I have nothing against text decorations in general.  I think they make text awesome, actually.  (Check out Paper Mario games for some great examples of things to do with text decorations.  My favorite:  wiggly text to indicate the person is talking with a quavering voice.)

No, my beef is with what a friend of mine has dubbed "idiot text".  Text where they just highlight something because they don't trust you'll read it carefully and want to make sure you know that this thing is important.  It's an ok idea in general, but some games go way overboard.  (And it has the implicit assumption that even THEY know that there is a solid chance you're not going to bother reading their text carefully...)

Some examples from Final Fantasy:


Old School:




New school:




-Montoli

[Seth]

Yeah, Zelda has been doing that since OoT.  Not very subtle...

[ஒழுக்கின்மை (Paul Eres)]

Now you got me curious Paul:  which games do you think have good stories?  I can think of, like, five games with stories I'd compare favourably with good stories from dedicated story mediums.  And none of them is Planescape Torment.

i already explained this in another thread a few months ago, but i don't think stories have to be "good" by literary standards to be enjoyable. i mean, i enjoy the story of voltron. i enjoy the story of sailor moon. i enjoy the story of stephen king's the stand. i enjoy the story of harry potter. they're not great literature. but they're enjoyable stories.

so what you are saying here assumes something which shouldn't be assumed: that the only way you can enjoy a story is if it's excellent. but that's false, it's perfectly reasonable to enjoy stories even when they have bad writing, even when they're stupid. i think the idea that we should only partake in the cream of the crop and ignore everything that isn't superlative can get in the way of enjoying many things we'd otherwise enjoy.

more subtly, i think the idea that some stories are better than others is itself suspect. it depends on frame of mind, audience, and various other factors. for instance, little red riding hood isn't a good story for an adult, but it's a great story for a child. death note's story isn't a great story for an old maid librarian, but it's a great story for an angsty teen. dosteovsky's brothers karamazov isn't a great story for a teeny bopper, but it's a great story for a 30-something college grad. what people like is mostly context, there's not much objective 'this is a great story, this is a bad story' measurable reality. knowing that, this fetish of telling people they should not enjoy the stories that they enjoy because they're not good stories compared to other stories that are better is really just a variant of edmund mcmillen's youtube character (aka snobbery: disliking someone because of what they like).

[Montoli]

I disagree at least a little with this, actually.

I think we're mixing two different sentiments.

#1:  "You shouldn't be enjoying that, there are other, better things!"
This is pretty hard to defend.  If someone IS enjoying something, then clearly it has something in it that resonates with the person.  There's no "should" or "shouldn't", it just "is".  They enjoy it.  Telling someone it's bad if they enjoy it is clearly silly, and I don't think anyone is trying to defend that point.  (I don't think I've ever seen someone try to defend it, really.)

#2:  "Some stories are better than others."
This one seems a bit more defensible?  Like most things, I believe stories are something that you get better at making with practice.  I think stories are something that can be actively improved upon, and actively studied, analyzed, deconstructed, practiced, and theorized about.  I think if you do all this, you might even get a better story out of it.  (Or you might get heavyhanded crap, who knows?)  But I do think that if you asked most authors "do you think you write better books now than when you started?" most would say "heck yeah."  (I know Neil Gaiman, for example, has occasionally talked about his "journeyman days", and making stories full of "journeyman mistakes"...)

So if authors can improve and write better stories with practice, then doesn't that imply that some stories can be better than others?  Sure, you can use the "its all relative, maybe someone loves it like that", but that doesn't mean it can't still be better or worse than another story.

Thought experiment time!
Imagine a story A.  100 people love it.
Now imagine story B.  The same 100 people love it just as much as story A, but now one more person "gets" it and loves it also.  Is A a better story now than B?

Or if you prefer a less populist rating,

Story A:  Makes John Doe (and only John Doe) cry when he reads it.
Story B:  Everyone likes it just as much (or as little) as story B, except it not only makes John Doe cry, but also resolve to be a better person and make peace with his estranged father after he reads it.

Is story B better than story A?

I realize that most stories are harder to compare than the overly simple examples I'm giving here.  But even if it's not usually practical to compare them, I think it at least demonstrates the possibility that some story might actually just be better than another.  This doesn't diminish or invalidate the enjoyment of someone who is reading story A.  It just means that we, as people who create stories, should at least consider looking in to how to make B more consistently.  (And I would wager that most people who actively make stories DO constantly try to figure out how to improve.)  I think part of the pushback for the idea of "some stories are better" is just that we seldom have a good way of telling what is "better", and it often DOES turn into a "woah, you liked THAT?  but THIS is such a better version..."  That doesn't mean though that we need to throw out the idea of critiquing stories.  Just that we need more qualified definitions of what we mean when we say one is "better".

-Montoli


[...you can replace "story" with "gameplay mechanic" or "game design" in all of this, and I think everything is still true.]

[ஒழுக்கின்மை (Paul Eres)]

i think that it's possible to get better at creating stories, but that doesn't necessarily mean that the stories created are measurably better than one another, it just means that the person is getting better at determining which audiences enjoy which elements, and getting better at delivering those elements to that audience.

regardless, i think that anyone who thinks there are only about five stories that can keep up with other storytelling mediums in all of the hundreds of thousands of games that have been made has high standards. at the very least, most modern jrpgs and visual novels have stories on about the same level as most modern japanese anime and manga. persona 3 and 4 for example have at least as sophisticated stories as, say, evangelion.

[Montoli]

i think that it's possible to get better at creating stories, but that doesn't necessarily mean that the stories created are measurably better than one another, it just means that the person is getting better at determining which audiences enjoy which elements, and getting better at delivering those elements to that audience.

Ahh, see I would have argued that as part of getting better at telling stories, not only would the author get better at targeting an audience, but in addition, would get better at targeting more audiences with the same story, leading to more people enjoying it.

But anyway, yeah, I see your point.  Those are high standards indeed.  But, on the other hand I guess, just as I firmly believe that telling someone "you shouldn't enjoy that" is silly, I feel about the same way about the inverse:  "silly, you should be enjoying more things!"  So to Theo and Poorwill:  I hope you find more game stories that you enjoy!  Since I agree with Paul, there's a lot more than 5 out there!

[poorwill]

i already explained this in another thread a few months ago, but i don't think stories have to be "good" by literary standards to be enjoyable.

And I'm saying you're WRONG, Paul.  Why else would I give unimpeachably excellent examples of storytelling brilliance like Mr Do vs Unicorns, Kirby's Dreamland 3 and the microgame in Warioware with the crying dog?

so what you are saying here assumes something which shouldn't be assumed: that the only way you can enjoy a story is if it's excellent. but that's false, it's perfectly reasonable to enjoy stories even when they have bad writing, even when they're stupid. i think the idea that we should only partake in the cream of the crop and ignore everything that isn't superlative can get in the way of enjoying many things we'd otherwise enjoy.

Yeah, someone is assuming something here.

I'm not going to go too deep into this discussion, so I'll just say that I agree with some kind of formulation of your general premise, but I pretty wildly diverge from your conclusions.

[Lucaz]

If a story is better than other, it depends on context. If two stories don't have a certain context in common you can't compare them fairly. You can compare two books aimed at an adult audience and say that one is better than the other, it is complicated but you may compare an adult book and a childrens book. But you can't compare the story of those to the story of a childrens show, or a NES platformer, 'cause all of them work on different levels, they don't have enough common points to make a comparison. So game stories that are at the same level of literature is way too vague and subjective of a concept to be applied criticaly.

For th OP, I have no issue at all with reading in games. Actually, lately it's the thing I'm doing the most while playing. As long as the writer is half-decent, and it isn't out of place in the middle of the game, it's all okay.

[William Broom]

i already explained this in another thread a few months ago, but i don't think stories have to be "good" by literary standards to be enjoyable.

And I'm saying you're WRONG, Paul.  Why else would I give unimpeachably excellent examples of storytelling brilliance like Mr Do vs Unicorns, Kirby's Dreamland 3 and the microgame in Warioware with the crying dog?

OK, smartass, why did you choose that set of LOL SO RANDOM games as examples of storytelling brilliance? Do you actually have a point or are you just trying to be a troll?

[poorwill]

No troll, just a stupid joke, that I later decided to turn into a point when Paul charged past and accused me of having presumptuous literary standards, which is obviously absurd (though maybe that's fair play after I gave such a dickish list, I dunno). I mean, my real list of games-with-good-stories is way longer, but I think those games all have pretty interesting storytelling techniques.  Mr Do vs Unicorns' story, for example, is all told in the stupid title - it's totally a mystery why this clown hates unicorns so much.  The gameplay not only doesn't say why, it just makes it weirder - apparently the unicorns are minions of Satan or something.  It's an interesting example of the kinds of interesting stories that can be created when you totally don't give a shit about story.  Kirby's Dreamland 3's story is really a bunch of stories in the form of puzzles in each level - I sort of found them sort of moving.  I honestly think Wario Ware microgames have great stories too.  They are kind of like crazy little poems, though the crying dog one probably isn't actually my favourite.  So I was being half serious.  Sorry.

[resistor]

By adding platforming?

Wow.  That's actually really cool.