Actions Speak Louder Than Words

The headline this past week was: nobody cares about your stupid story. When Ken Levine wrote down these words for his GDC discussion on telling stories in video game, I wonder if he was already picturing the headlines and aftermath. Certainly we can expect that he knew such a statement would be, for those with short attention spans, the penny on the rails that causes the trainwreck, and any attempt at justifying and clarifying the position would be the background noise after the bump that nobody ever actually gets around to reading. After all, you have the name behind Bioshock, arguably the most literary infused action game with its Objectivist overtones – and how many of us actually even know what the hell that means? – telling us all apparently that story telling in video games is an exercise in futility, which is, of course, a dramatic over-simplification on what proved to be a more complicated talk. But, Levine Describes Complicated Layered Approach to In-Game Storytelling, doesn't exactly make for good headline material.

It is interesting that in the roiling wake of 2007, which offered up some of the best video game storytelling done since the hey-days of Sierra and Infocom, that I so strongly believe that the story in games is secondary or even tertiary to the mechanics of the game itself. It was not Levine's "nobody cares about your stupid story" statement that got my head nodding like a Brett Favre bobblehead in an earthquake, but rather when he talked about a development style that allowed the evolving game to inform the story rather than trying to force a square peg into another square peg. Don't start with the story, start with a framework, then a game and find a story that works into it. Simple. Revolutionary.

And, at the end of the day, he's right. It is always story that should be sacrificed for the sake of gameplay.

There are a lot of ways that I'm not necessarily like other graduates sporting a fancy English degree from a state university. I've never served coffee professionally. I've never smoked clove cigarettes. I don't like The Great Gatsby or anything by Hemingway. I'm not a voracious reader, and I am far more likely to be playing video games than absorbing James Joyce or even Stephen King. I don't even particularly care for deep reading and literary analysis, even though it's the sort of thing that I can do in my sleep. And now, of course, I espouse a not-necessarily-popular point of view that storytelling in video games is the sort of thing that is disposable.

Don't get me wrong, I loved the story and endless interpretation available in a game like Bioshock or Portal. I think they are both ground breaking games establishing in very firm ways that good storytelling is possible even in action games, but on the flip side the fact that Halo 3's story was obtuse, confusing and clumsy didn't really come up as much of a strike against Bungie's epic in my book. I am perfectly happy swimming in the warm surface water of my games rather than plumbing the depths of the Mariana Trench that is the subtext and complicated backstory, particularly when we have to face the fact that most people who make games don't make good stories. Maybe this is why I was able to like Max Payne so much.

It's reassuring to see Levine get it so right, particularly while being revered at the same time for his storytelling accomplishments. The truth is, even if I was just stuck in Rapture and told nothing more than, "hey, there's a bad guy here and you should kill him" the fact of the matter is that the gameplay stands on its own while the story is really just some nice window dressing. I like the fabric and patterns well enough, but having the curtains up or down isn't going to make a difference for the view through the window. Bioshock isn't a worse game if you never listen to a single one of the tape recordings left from its dead citizens, in the same way the Mass Effect is just as good if you never explore its Encyclopedia Galactica.

It's easy enough to say that these elements enhance the game, give it depth and texture, and for some people that will be true. But Ken's big idea seems to be that the world itself should tell the story, that being a participant in the elements of the story and playing them out is far more powerful a method for our unique medium than being any kind of passive observer. It's not that he's saying there's no room for storytelling, but that we need to think of it in a different way. In fact, at times, I am taken out of Bioshock because I feel compelled to listen to too many tapes, and while they are elegantly written, what I really want to do is load up some ammo and shoot some splicers. Even the largely praised short stories in the recent Xbox 360 hit, Lost Odyssey, while translating fairly well into English and occasionally moving, also tend to drive me out of the actual game, like suddenly hitting the pause button and flipping through the chapter of a vaguely related book. It's one of the better implementations of the annoying trend in these games of too often subjecting me to ten minutes of overt info dumping.

This brings us to the standard argument; that storytelling may not be particularly critical to action games, but in a genre like role playing games they are crucial. Well, that's somewhat true, though I can't remember for the life of me what the actual details of the story were in Baldur's Gate or even Ultima VII was to any meaninglful degree. What I remember is the set pieces, the game, the combat, the artwork, the visuals and the sense of place. I don't remember being moved by the story, which is most often a fairly short framework counter-pointed by a lot of fighting between the occasional story chunk and side quests. I don't remember being compelled forward so much because of the awesomeness of the narrative, which in most cases is just the standard fantasy fare, but by the gameplay.

That's to say nothing of games like Diablo or even Mass Effect where the game mechanics take even more of a center stage. While it's nice to have some purpose, and I'm not suggesting that there need to RPGs with no storytelling elements, if the story is good but the game isn't fun I'm not going to play. I'm not so sure the reverse is true.

The truth is that if I'm looking for complicated narratives with strong plotting and character development I have far better places to turn. It's just not what drives me to play video games. That some people take the care to add a story to an already excellent game is a gift that I can certainly appreciate, but it is almost academic to do so. Ostensibly I suppose World of WarCraft has a deep and rich backstory that elevates play for some people, but I think I'm firmly in the class of players that just likes shooting fireballs at dragons. Like I need a reason to do that!

Comments

Nyles wrote:

I don't agree with that statement at all. I just thought you should know that, because I bet you really, really care. I can't imagine why people re-read books if they only care about story, unless everyone has Alzheimer's and I just never noticed. Or forgot.

The funny thing is I based that reasoning on the complaints my friends make when they don't like the books I recommend. My favorite authors are folks like Kundera, Borges, and David Foster Wallace, so I'm not terribly hung up on plot, but I've pissed off a lot of people by suggesting they read those kind of books. Perhaps I should clarify: the point of popular novels seems to be the story. Or I guess this is where some arbitrary distinction between "fiction" and "literature" would be drawn by the sort of people who like to make those distinctions.

Perhaps this is what folks are getting at when they complain that games are not a mature medium yet. There are precious few "games of ideas" or analogues to the "novel of ideas". Gaming has the equivalent of Stephen Kings, Danielle Steele, and John Grisham. Perhaps we even have equivalents to folks like John Irving or Barbara Kingsolver, but we've yet to see a game challenge the way we think about things like a Joyce a Kafka or a Borges. I'm sure there are other attempts to extend what designers can do with the gaming medium, but the best example of an attempt at this that comes to mind is The Longest Journey.

Oso wrote:

Perhaps this is what folks are getting at when they complain that games are not a mature medium yet. There are precious few "games of ideas" or analogues to the "novel of ideas". Gaming has the equivalent of Stephen Kings, Danielle Steele, and John Grisham. Perhaps we even have equivalents to folks like John Irving or Barbara Kingsolver, but we've yet to see a game challenge the way we think about things like a Joyce a Kafka or a Borges. I'm sure there are other attempts to extend what designers can do with the gaming medium, but the best example of an attempt at this that comes to mind is The Longest Journey.

The Longest Journey? That's an interesting choice. Indigo Prophecy also comes to mind as a recent experiment. This brings up the point that even if an RPG's gameplay survives without a story, adventure games almost always need one. Being designed "story first" doesn't hurt an adventure game. That was the old LucasArts philosophy, to let the gameplay evolve from the story and characters.

Speaking of Borges, wouldn't The Library of Babel make a great game? I remember thinking that the first time I read it. It could be a very paranoiac cat-and-mouse story.

What keeps me coming back to games obstinately is the story.

If the story is complelling to me, then the incentive to keep playing is there more often than not, I remember that because it was the fate of Gordon Freeman that I wanted to see what happens, Blizzard's games all have fantastic sotry which keeps me wanting to comeback for more, the Max Payne games are another fantastic example. Although the gameplay mechanics never really change and become the same after a little while in all these games, just with more bad guys for example, it was the gripping story told in such a fashion with Max Payne including the comic cut-scenes that made it for myself. It may have been quicktime events which don't seem to go down well here like telling your mum you've had a operation to become a giraffe, but you must admit, if done right, they are excellent.

Games like Portal and Bioshock didn't force feed really any story, but it was there in the background and you could look for it, thus giving you ideas as to what happened before, activating that old imagination to a point as to why events happened, why the situation had played out the way it did, if you can make the player imagine something about the game world you've constructed, you're onto a winner.

It also hails to replay value. If I enjoy the story from the game, there is a great chance I will replay again, just to see those moments which made my jaw drop.

shihonage wrote:

Relevance of story is dependent on game type and designer's ability to implement the said story well. If the game type is a CRPG and the story is implemented well, then its better to have it there than not.

Easier said than done. But nonetheless, I agree completely.

Sean, what would you say about games like Monkey Island and Grim Fandango?

Hmm what if BioShock was a point-click adventure...

First of all, here here!

Secondly, I think plots and stories are increasingly becoming integral to video games. However, video games need to come up with a native language with which to tell these stories. And as Mr. Levine stated, the environment can tell that story. Not only that, it can tell the same story with as little or as great detail as the audience desires. I think at the moment, video games rely too heavily on traditional storytelling methods, e.g. cut scenes (movies) and text (books). I believe one of the factors for this trend is that developers are trying to make video games that are as rich as these other mediums. But as we develop the medium, we may find that video games won't be as rich as movies, just like movies aren't as rich as books. And I ask, what's wrong with that? Why must video games be all things to all people? I think this is when games become limiting, when they are trying to be movies AND books, instead of just being video games. We have to let this ugly duckling develop organically...unless we want see a swan with a collagen injected bill and fake boobies.

I particularly give a lot of importance to story in games. I'm one of those persons that prefer a not so good gameplay side as long as story, setting and characters are top notch. That is not to say that I don't care about gameplay. Sure, I want a game that delivers awsome shooting gameplay or whatever. But in the end what will make the game click with me is the plot and everything that goes with it.

Some people here are talking about how the format of games do not adapt well to storytelling. I disagree. I think that most PRESENT DAY game genres do tend not to adapt well, but there was a time in whitch they did. For those of you who have played PC games in the old days (including the Commodore Amiga and Atari ST) you must remember that at that time point&click adventure games were what First Person Shooters are today. And those games were ALL ABOUT setting, plot, storyline and characters. The gameplay didn't vary much. The most fond memories I have from playing The Secret of Monkey Island, or Indiana Jones and The fate of Atlantis or The Last Crusade or Rex Nebular and The Cosmic Gender Bender are not the puzzles or some particulars of gameplay: the things I remember the best were the play locations, the settings, the storyline, the top notch dialogues and the memorable characters.

So basically, I think that nowadays the genres in vogue are not so adequate for storytelling as in the old adventure games, but that is a specific problem that has not mutch to do with the videogames medium itself. One of the things that are driving me away from one of my favourite genres, CRPGs, is precisely the fact that the settings and plots all feel the same. I can't stand dwarves and elves and dragons and orcs any more. Even The Witcher, one of the most interesting CRPGs to surface in recent years ended up boring me to death. Mass Effect is nice, but it feels like a Star Trek clone to me. So, for me, I really need the wonderfull settings, the great plot, the memorable characters, the great dialogue, etc, that games can offer.

One of the problems, I think, is that players are not really that interested in those aspects anymore. Look at the success of stuff like Halo or gears of War. Those are games that completely fail to grab even a little bit of my attention. On the other hand, STALKER made may day with its great ambience, even if it was a bit rough around the edges. But this isn't really a problem of games only. If you look at most movies, they are crap. But still people will flock to see some half-assed hollywood action movie and it will sell more tickets than Apocalypse Now ever did. And what was so great about movies like Apocalypse Now, Bladerunner, etc? Setting, characters, plot. Some movies, like The Thing, are among my favourites and honestly the acting is not that good, but still it had a great setting and ambience.

I think that one of the problems is that game devs can be great at making the gameplay but that doesn't mean that they can be good at writting up storylines, plots, creating characters and integrating all that in games. And honestly, as long as people fall for Halo or GoW there simply isn't any NEED to do do. If it keeps selling as they sell today, than why the hell spend more money, time and resources to implement all those story elements in a really eficient way? Much better to just keep making RPG clones over and over again, with elves and dwarves and say "Hey, our game is really original! Our Elves do not have pointy ears! And we have 20 playable races, including the Mushroom Man! And we have great multiplayer! And on top of that we have 1000 different achievements in the Xbox!"

I think games can indeed have much better features regarding storyline, plot, characters, ambience, etc, and still keep great gameply. Its a matter of players actually demanding it. But games cost tons of money to develop and its a very risky business, so developers are only going to invest in that if players demand it.

souldaddy wrote:
Poetry is generally a pretty crappy medium for an extended narrative. Most epic poems could tell their story more easily and powerfully if they were freed of their verse, though a random quote pulled of its context might not seem quite as eloquent. Poetry, like games, is much better suited for individual experiences or moments (though of course both can add context to experiences by juxtaposing them with other experiences).

Yes, then why have the Iliad and Odyssey survived thousands of years and not Homer's Tone Poems on Greek Life? I see a difference between a medium's strengths and the audience's desire.

Hypotheses:
- The Iliad and the Odyssey were simply better works, regardless.
- The epics are valued for historical and anthropological reasons instead of purely literary worth. (The Homeric epics mark the shift from oral traditions to written epics, which is in large part why they are in verse in the first place and not in prose.)
- Sappho was both better and sexier than Homer. (I.e., there was more good poetry at the time than there were good, transcribed stories.)

Zen Mutty wrote:

Did you ever try to screw up your GM with some random ploy to see if he/she could deal with expanding their own tale?

Was there any other reason to play? I must have skimmed that part of the handbook.

Chicano_Marco wrote:

But as we develop the medium, we may find that video games won't be as rich as movies, just like movies aren't as rich as books.

Maybe this is an avenue worth investigating (as if FPSes haven't trained me to flick my view down every hallway and street as I pass).

I don't believe that movies are less rich than books due to some inherent quality of the medium. Via the picture = 1,000 words postulate, we see that every flower petal, every wrinkle, every nuance in shadow, every title on the shelf in the background adds depth and meaning to a film. The limiting factor -- the difference between a quick pan of the camera and four pages of text describing a bookshelf -- is in the mind of the audience. The reader individually processes each one of those words, titles, colors, and even the order in which they are listed. The viewer might notice one or two spines and smile a little in recognition.

Attention to detail in creating a film suffers from diminishing returns to a far greater extent than in novel writing. At a certain point, the human eye, ear, and brain just aren't fast enough to catch everything. This is compounded by the "popcorn flick" notion that lowers the expected attention on the part of the viewer, just as pulp fiction and internet comments tend to lower the expectations of reader attention.

The question is whether this same lack of attention is justified in video games. Ultimately, it probably has been justified within the core demographic. However, with an expanded gamer base and a (hopefully) more civilized average gamer palette than in previous years, we may be seeing more of a market for slower, more thoughtful games -- the kind where it pays to at least note the titles of books, and maybe even the kind where the worth of a book to an NPC vendor is not a function of the book's weight, size, or attribute bonuses.

wordsmythe wrote:

- Sappho was both better and sexier than Homer. (I.e., there was more good poetry at the time than there were good, transcribed stories.)

Lioness atop a cheese grater? Woops, I'm thinking of Aristophanes.

I have been a heavy reader many years ago. I like the good story. Story makes me want to read the book. If story sucks i drop the book. Easy.

Exactly the same happens with the games i play. Gameplay and game mechanics are all good, but if i dont care to use the game mechanics due to sucky story - i drop the game. Simple really.

I put story in a game before everything else. If there is no some sort of narative it becomes a sport. If its a sport, then i'd rather be out with my chums shooting their asses off with a paintball gun in some woods. Or play a round of basketball, or do something OUT of the computers that has some sort of REAL benefit. Games like BF(2), UT, TF(2), WOW, L2 and anything that is supposed to be played only online as a sport is utter waste of time in my (very strong in this case) opinion. Story is everything.

How i see online games...
"There was this hero named , he had a gun and liked shooting. So he went to tournament and shot lots of other people with guns. Then shot some more, and then some more. Then he went to another tournament and shot some other guys with guns, then shot again, and then some more. And after there was some other tournament, where guys with guns were shooting a lot at each other. So our hero shot some more guys with guns." et cetera, et cetera. How does book like that read ? Extend this tripe for couple of hundred pages and you get the idea how boring those games are. No story beyond of act of "virtual duck'n'dodge'n'shoot sh!t"...

Btw, i liked system/bioshock, HL1-2-Eps those are great games, including stories even if not so verbal and direct in presentation. But i also do like direct naration like later FF(VI-XII) games. Lots of reading ? Yes, but exactly stories make me want to play the game on.

Dudes! Ryan North (via T-Rex) has come up with both the solution to this problem as well as the answer to any and all career questions I have ever had. Behold.

threedee wrote:

"There was this hero named , he had a gun and liked shooting. So he went to tournament and shot lots of other people with guns. Then shot some more, and then some more. Then he went to another tournament and shot some other guys with guns, then shot again, and then some more. And after there was some other tournament, where guys with guns were shooting a lot at each other. So our hero shot some more guys with guns."

I see a movie spin-off.

The truth is that if I'm looking for complicated narratives with strong plotting and character development I have far better places to turn.

This sounds like a description of what makes "A Game of Thrones" good, not what makes for good storytelling. A good story teller, pulls you into the world and gets you to feel something, and there are a lot of ways to do that.

This brings us to the standard argument; that storytelling may not be particularly critical to action games, but in a genre like role playing games they are crucial.

Story is important for some action games. Story is important for some role playing games. Story is important for some puzzle games (Portal, Ico). I think dividing it by genre that way is a really bad way to look at it.

I espouse a not-necessarily-popular point of view that storytelling in video games is the sort of thing that is disposable.

Maybe this is a semantic argument, but by "story" I mean "premise", and to me, "premise" is not disposable. Many of the best storytelling games, simply move through one or a few premises, or acts. See Portal, Ico, Fallout, Doom Episode One, Halo 1.

wordsmythe wrote:

I don't believe that movies are less rich than books due to some inherent quality of the medium. Via the picture = 1,000 words postulate, we see that every flower petal, every wrinkle, every nuance in shadow, every title on the shelf in the background adds depth and meaning to a film. The limiting factor -- the difference between a quick pan of the camera and four pages of text describing a bookshelf -- is in the mind of the audience. The reader individually processes each one of those words, titles, colors, and even the order in which they are listed. The viewer might notice one or two spines and smile a little in recognition.

Attention to detail in creating a film suffers from diminishing returns to a far greater extent than in novel writing. At a certain point, the human eye, ear, and brain just aren't fast enough to catch everything. This is compounded by the "popcorn flick" notion that lowers the expected attention on the part of the viewer, just as pulp fiction and internet comments tend to lower the expectations of reader attention.

The question is whether this same lack of attention is justified in video games. Ultimately, it probably has been justified within the core demographic. However, with an expanded gamer base and a (hopefully) more civilized average gamer palette than in previous years, we may be seeing more of a market for slower, more thoughtful games -- the kind where it pays to at least note the titles of books, and maybe even the kind where the worth of a book to an NPC vendor is not a function of the book's weight, size, or attribute bonuses.

By richness, you meant "the amount of detail"?

Why not measure richness in terms of perspective, power, beauty, self knowledge, ideas, information, lasting impact, titilation, and in the case of some games first hand experience?

The mind is the best graphics generator in the world. Play a text-based MUD sometime and give it a few days. It kills WOW and most other expanded world games because your ideas of it are detailed according to yourself. Course' killing thousands of highlighted little midgets is fun too- but only for a while.

blackboxme wrote:
wordsmythe wrote:

The reader individually processes each one of those words, titles, colors, and even the order in which they are listed. The viewer might notice one or two spines and smile a little in recognition.

By richness, you meant "the amount of detail"?

Why not measure richness in terms of perspective, power, beauty, self knowledge, ideas, information, lasting impact, titilation, and in the case of some games first hand experience?

(I left in the bit of my quote that I think is more pertinent here.)

Maybe it's the filthy postmodernist in me that values subtlety over sweeping power in a message. There's a stereotype of alums of my university that when we walk into someone else's home, one of the first things we do is walk over and asses the person's book collection. We see what kinds of things s/he likes to read, how s/he likes to sort the books (by genre? all by author? by title?), whether the books are new, old, hardcover, worn, etc.

This isn't just an estimation of the host's academic phallus, and it isn't just a way to spark conversation about books we've also read. It's a catalogue of the person's interests and intellectual pursuits. You can tell a lot about a person by the ideas that person cohabitates with.

Take V for Vendetta, for example. V loves watching an older film adaptation of The Count of Monte Cristo, which is a story of someone so consumed with and blinded by the lust for vengeance that he destroys everything he used to love. Yet V insists the story has a happy ending. There's all sorts of meaning there without even having to delve into the differences between the motivations and outcomes of the original Gunpowder Plot and V's plan.

See what I mean there? It's not detail generally, but deliberate details that deepen a story. When an author or designer takes it upon his or herself to create a room, character, or anything else, every choice is a chance to deepen the meaning of the creation. A video game certainly needs to have a sort of superficial appeal in order to sell to the public server crowd (i.e., the unwashed masses), but the "litwank" elements are what make the difference between Serious Sam and Bioshock.

So by richness, you meant detail that can provide subtext. I just misread your post.

Sorry for the "attack" post. I think I just found the picture = 1000 words line offensive, so I didn't really pay attention to the rest of your post (because I'm a jerk).

You were talking about whether, attention to detail and subtext matters. I do think that a lot of the most enduring games do pay attention to this, so there's no need to talk about whether we need it in the future, or if we can grow into it. It's already been proven to be a powerful ingredient. Even if "the masses" can't articulate why they liked it, I think they do appreciate it.

You're certainly forgiven. I didn't realize you were trying to attack me anyway.

The tragic story of Lemmings trying to walk somewhere brings me to tears to this very day. They never found their home...I just kept blowing them up out of love.

I have to say I would probably be the odd one out in this one. Storyline is very important to me in anything, books, manga, as well as video games. Part of why I became such a huge Kingdom Hearts fanatic is because I was drawn to the storyline of the game. I will seriously pause the game and glare at people if they're talking during a cut scene. In my honest opinion, some of the storyline in games are more original and probably alot better then most of the storyline in some movies. I don't really think about things like game controls and all that until I start playing the game itself, so stuff like that is really second to me.

LLJade wrote:

I have to say I would probably be the odd one out in this one. Storyline is very important to me in anything, books, manga, as well as video games. Part of why I became such a huge Kingdom Hearts fanatic is because I was drawn to the storyline of the game. I will seriously pause the game and glare at people if they're talking during a cut scene. In my honest opinion, some of the storyline in games are more original and probably alot better then most of the storyline in some movies. I don't really think about things like game controls and all that until I start playing the game itself, so stuff like that is really second to me.

Just look at how lacking in original content the movie industry seems to be well before and after the writers strike. I think you are positively correct in your enjoyment.