Story Telling in Video Games

Found this Newsweek article in my feeds today: Why Video Games Matter and found it a really interesting read. The interviewee, Tom Bissell (a video game critic and author of Extra Lives: Why Video Games Matter), argues that some of the best games are from smaller companies, are not as well known, and don't try to emulate motion pictures as story telling devices.

For me, personally, I kept waiting for him to refer to City of Heroes, but I'm not sure that's the kind of game he plays. But his opinions seemed fairly spot-on to me, and made me think deeply about how stories are told in video games, and how often it comes out as a clumsy, clunky mishmash of mouse clicks, cut scenes, and travel time.

The article isn't enough to plumb the depth of the issues, but I was hoping it's enough to start a discussion of the story telling mechanics in COH and how we might like to see it improved. As I'm not a professional game developer, I can't be anything more than an Armchair Expert™, but I thought a general discussion of the subject might be interesting. (You guys always have something interesting to say.)

(The link to the book on Amazon is provided because you can actually peek inside that one [as opposed to some].)

I honestly think that story-telling of any sort in video games still have some way to go. This is driven home especially by gamers who say "if you want a story, go read a book or watch a movie". The implication, from these gamers, is that telling a story somehow gets in the way of a game.

Personally I think one of the barriers in a game telling a story is, in fact, the gameplay. Or rather, the need to have skill in gameplay. Too easy or obtuse, and the gameplay is trivialized, making the "game" aspect of it suspect. Too difficult, and the story is gated: we can't see how the story arc ends unless we defeat that AV.

And with different skills and circumstances, what is easy to one may be difficult to another; this may not only include skills related to the game itself, but perhaps social skills, in being able to pull together a competent team to take down that AV.

EDIT: I'm not including meta-game activities such as checking Paragonwiki or using the mission autocomplete. That, to me, is akin to skipping to the end of the book; it's possible, but it's probably not how the story is meant to be read, even if you now know the conclusion of the mystery or something. Obviously you can still do it (spoiler-lover that I am, I do it often), but it's still not intended usually.

A story in a video game means everything to me. It doesn't have to be a good story but it has to be engaging. And if the gameplay and graphics complete that than I'm sold.

It bothers me greatly that many gamers are saying: "if you want a story, go read a book or watch a movie". It also is the main reason why I am not a big fan of multiplayer games(except MMO's). Because often the singleplayer(and the story) take a backseat to get multiplayer done right.

That's why I fear for the new Assassin's Creed(Brotherhood) and why I haven't even played Modern Warfare 1 or 2.

Anyway, this is more a singleplayer vs multiplayer rant and not one about stories.

I do think that story wise games could get better but telling a story in a game is different then it is for a movie or book. Gamers expect at least 8 till 10 hours of game so lots of padding has to be done to fill that gap.

What I find interesting is we're talking about storytelling, and yet looking through and interview that praises Braid, a game with such BAD storytelling that even after reading plot analysis guides for it, I'm STILL not sure there actually is a plot in it. Yahtze postulates that in a good game, gameplay and storytelling go hand in hand, while in Braid, they're locked on both sides of a brick wall made of tigers, or something of that nature. And he's right. I don't expect high-society literature that requires years of analysis and deconstruction to glean what meaning it has, ESPECIALLY plopped on top of a game that appears to have about as much to do with that story as a Tiger Shark has with a Tiger Uppercut.

By and large, I believe what sinks modern gaming more than anything else is its absurd cost. Anyone who's been gaming for at least the past 10 years will have seen games become shorter and shorter as they became better looking and more intricate. A level in the original Half-Life is simple enough to where even a fan with imagination can pull off something decent in fairly short order. A level in Half-Life 2 is complicated enough to require a dedicated level designer and quite a chunk of time. A level in any UT3 game is so complex I can't imagine who has the patience to put in all those little curves and pipes and cables and ledges and UGH! As game production costs increase, game substance gets cut, and games become more shallow.

The problem with storytelling in games is the segregation between gameplay and storytelling. Amusingly, the Call of Duty games have always been pretty good about telling a simple but engaging story in such a way as it flows WITH the gameplay. I still have such fond memories of the siege of Stalingrad from Call of Duty 2 (was it?). And yet Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 has got to be one of the WORST games about storytelling, not just because it turns what used to be a series about mostly realistic war scenarios into a Michael Bay film, but does so at a steep degradation of its actual story. There's just nothing INTERESTING there.

I enjoy Half-Life's way of telling a story by, largely, NOT telling a story but rather letting the player experience it. Even when there IS exposition, it consists of random clues thrown about by characters before they're interrupted, shot, eaten or abducted. The game DOES pause to deliver plot from time to time, but even then, it's never a case of the game basically sitting you down to tell you the plot to your face. It feels natural and it happens without taking you out of the experience.

Another game I feel does storytelling well is Mass Effect. Now, many have accused the game of being too wordy, but let's be honest here - Mass Effect, and especially Mass Effect 2 is as much a "point-and-click" adventure as it is an action RPG. In fact, more so. Many of the game's problems are solved by talking, and every important plot point is taken with a conversation decision. The conversations don't take you out of the game because they ARE the game. Even the cutscenes don't take you out of the game because, thanks to Paragon and Renegade interrupts, they ARE the game.

Basically, though, the worst thing games suffer from is crappy quality. Stupid games with no soul in them sell like hot cakes, I guess because there's always room for one more mediocre shooter, yet creative games lie in obscurity because... Well, they're not what everyone else is playing, and it probably doesn't have 4 at the end. Ugh...

Quote:

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.

I can't really tell what the gamer stance on graphics is.

On the one hand, there's the standard call that Now All The New Games Care About Is Graphics, which implies a possibly unspoken Games Were Better Back Then.

On the other hand, I've also seen plenty of comments here about how CoH/V needs to upgrade its graphics because they look "dated", and Ultra Mode was met with appreciation, apart from the hardware requirements. What criticism of Ultra Mode I've seen appears to be based on the technical implementation and hardware requirements of it, rather than whether it should have been implemented at all.

I don't know how to reconcile this.

I suspect that this:

Quote:

Originally Posted by Slashman Presently, I think that advanced graphics are on a game publisher's must-have checklist. When you demo a new game, it's not as easy to show how great the gameplay and story aspects are in a short period of time. But you can totally show off your hot, new graphics engine.

May be a consequence of this:

Quote:

But that same guy will then scoff at a new game that comes out and has graphics that 'look 5 years old'.

I know I've heard a lot of talk among people I've tried to get to try CoH that it has "dated graphics". To be fair, they don't then turn around and say that "graphics are killing games", possibly because they're not so... fire-and-brimstone passionate, I suppose.

Text adventure games (presumably Zork needs no introduction) prove that it is possible for games to tell a story without good graphics, but it doesn't prove that such a game can tell a good story, and still be considered a game. Besides, adventure games have their own problems.

On that article: Dead Space didn't have cut scenes, but it certainly had the locked areas where another character vomited exposition at you.

Yeah, well, Dead Space wasn't trying to win oscars for its writing - it was about making you feel vulnerable and clumsy aboard a ship full of face-eating freaks.

On that note I used to love Mass Effect's approach to story telling, unfortunately since getting addicted to Alpha Protocol the former just feels quite underwhelming. The actual scope and plot is incredibly engaging, but its execution just feels limp to me - choices are often very binary, you have to actively try to get failure in something, etc. By comparison Alpha Protocol isn't afraid to have its characters mock you for failing, call you out for being a hypocrite, the choices aren't simply binary ethics, etc.

AP has a very intense, very personal storyline simply because of how many different things change depending on your actions. It's very possible to completely eliminate whole plotlines simply because you may have slain a person someone else spared, or pissed off a character another got cosy with. I don't get that in other games and it's sad.

These responses have all been extremely interesting. Thank you all for taking the time to reply, and doing so in such thoughtful, insightful, and eloquent ways.

Based on what everyone is saying, it seems like COH has managed to avoid many of the storytelling pitfalls that plague other games.

Our storytelling system largely revolves around contacts, dialog, and clues. You obtain a new contact, complete a mission. During the the mission, you gather clues.

My only peeve with the storytelling mechanism is that clues are easily overlooked because they're buried in the Clue window, and not overly obvious. And they don't seem to be sorted/grouped in any meaningful way. "Clue Found" is your notification that you've found something, but it's rather vague, and when you're racing through a mission on a team, you don't have time to stop and check the Clue window to see what it is. It has to wait until afterwards (if even then).

I'd like to think there was a better way to emphasize the story, the plot, but I'm not sure how to do it. Thankfully, cutscenes are few and far between. Though they might be useful as a storytelling device, there are a few instances where they might get someone inadvertently killed (unintentional aggro during Frostfire, for example).

Again, my thinking is that the story needs to be emphasized more in COH. It's a comic book sotry, after all. Not just a series of random adventures. (At least, this is the case in story arcs.) I'd like to imagine a way to bring the story/plot to the forefront during those arcs, but how to do so escapes me.