Creative Issues: Story applied to games

#1 NOPE! In fact, I'd be willin' to bet that, without a good storyline, role-play and even some RTS's would sell very few. However, I'm also willin' to bet that there ain't a indie out there thats gonna discuss his/her idea for a new and original game with anybody 'cept teammates 'till its in production. Would you?

#2 Actually, I'm very interesting in games that work more like interactive fiction, and there is absolutely no good reason not to discuss one's ideas. That doesn't mean that you have to reveal source code, but it would be a mistake to not discuss it with others, because then you miss out on the benefits of fresh eyes having looked at the idea and put their 2 cents in. There is simply no risk to it. Don't believe me? Go look at the blogs I've written on my NPC chat system for the last year-plus, and then look at how many people have tried to steal that idea.

But as for story, I think the main thing is that we need to find ways of interacting with story, instead of just keeping it in the background (not that background story is bad- but we can do so much more with it). For my part, I've been working with AI and artificial emotions for NPCs in the direction of the old pen and paper RPGs, in which you roll for an effect to take hold on an NPC. The basis behind that is that the AI doesn't need to be super-complex as long as it does what you need it to do, and in the realm of NPCs acting as a literary character would, you can probably get away with more smoke and less mirrors.

The Vespers 3D project is also doing good stuff with getting Interactive Fiction into the 3rd dimension...

#3 @Ted:

Quote:...but it would be a mistake to not discuss it with others, because then you miss out on the benefits of fresh eyes having looked at the idea and put their 2 cents in

agreed...AFTER you've started production. Just think, you've got this fresh and original storyline for a new game and you decide to discuss the idea with others before you begin production. Six months later you see a game with the exact same storyline being featured as a new Torque game release, created by a 4-6 person team that knocked it out faster than you could. Are ya willin' to risk it?

I do feel that this topic could create a very effect means of generating some good storylines though. 6 - 7 good storyline ideas pieced together to create 1 excellent storyline doesn't sound bad. All sorts of good things can materialize when there's more than 1 head at work.

#4

Quote:Are ya willin' to risk it?

Yes, I am. And the reason is that the other side of the argument assumes that there are people waiting in the wings to steal your story idea because they don't have one of their own.

The reality of the situation is that just about everyone in this community (and other game dev communities as well) has about 10 ideas floating around in their head that they want to do for themselves- and that's why we're all here. Those who don't have those ideas are the ones that you see pop up on these boards talking about making the best game there ever was, and then disappear once they figure out how hard it is.

I've been hanging out here since 2001 and I've never seen it happen. That's not to say that it hasn't occurred once or twice, just because of the law of numbers, but thousands of projects have passed through here (99% not making it).

But you know where I do see it? I see it when people post on the boards that they want to make a sequel to Sonic or Halo or Dragon Ball Z, or whatever the coolest thing out now is. That is where that occurs, and that is when you need to worry about people stealing your IP: When everyone's a fan, and someone wants to make a clone just so they can attach their name to it for their own ego's purposes.

Now the second part of this is that stories are not necessarily what makes a game great. Fun is. Ms Pac Man has the barest of storylines, yet is still being played in arcades today. Sonic wasn't great for its story, and neither was Myst. They were good because they had fun game mechanics. If you stripped the story out, they would be less interesting and not as fun, but they would still be great games.

And that's not saying that story isn't important, because I believe that it really is. But what is more important than your story or your game idea is the way that you execute it. Implementation is paramount. What do you think the odds are of someone so uncreative that they need to steal your story actually being able to make that game better than you? The truth is that even two equally-talented designers given the same story will come up with two different games!

And the statement of withholding your information until you begin production is misleading. The problem there is that if someone steals your idea- well, what if they have more resources than you? Maybe they have a faster-working team with more hours to spend on it? What if you need to halt development? What if? What if? What if?

You can't be scared of what-if's. I stood on the floor of GDC and showed off my game's features with programmer art to people with all of the capabilities to rip me off, but that's not going to happen. And if they try, then they'll probably screw it up because they aren't smart enough to think it up on their own- but the likely story is that they're too busy making either what they want, or what the marketing team from their publisher wants them to.

So yes, I'm more than willing to risk it, and everyone else should be too :)

#5 Unfortunately, most devs - and I'm squarely looking at the "Big Boys" - prefer to give more attention to Bloom than story. But then story is rather more intangible than bloom - you can't just boot up the game and visually see story, it has to be experienced.

CoD4 won the Bafta (I think that's a British version of the Oscars for film, TV and now gaming too) for "Story and/or Character", kinda suprising considering it was up against Mass Effect and other RPGs, storytelling's "natural home in gaming". The "plot" of CoD4 was in all honesty somewhat thin, and the manner it was told utterly linear ... however, in it's style it was excellently told. They had put a lot of effort into the way the story was told, if not the actual story itself (evil Middle Eastern types conspire with evil Commie types to cause dastardly dastardness against the U, S, of flippin' A .... and the Brits, cos our accent is awesome!).

But gaming is kinda awkward in storytelling, ignoring the "Under Siege 2" mentality of most (3A) games.

I saw/read an interview (probably on Gamasutra) where the guy/s from HL2 argued in favour of the linear experience, and against the "open-world" or "sandbox".

Quote:To paraphrase - making a gameplay event costs time and money, and if the player isn't going to experience that event then the dev is wasting time and money, and the player is losing the experience. Also if the event is story-based, the player could miss out on a key part of the plot.

So, here's the real problem with the "open game world" meeting "the awesome story" (something I must say, that I like); if your player needs crucial info from level 1 to complete level 20 and can bypass that event, then said player ain't gonna be too chuffed for spending 30 hours of game play when his final fate was decided after he missed something in the first 10 minutes.

So (and I really need to be less lazy to keep starting sentences with that word ;P ) that's just highlighting some of the problems - or perceived problems - with games and story. "Technically" games are in a strange place, they don't need story/plot - Space Invaders (yay for retro!) wasn't an "alien invasion story" it was a Shmup, shoot at things that are shooting at you. Fiction and movies do need story (not neccessarily a good one, see my "Under Seige 2" jibe). Games may or may not require story, or maybe it would be better to say that you "can have" story. Story can be an addition to the "experience of gameplay", and if handled carefully and told well, something which becomes the difinitive experience of that game - not because the other elements of the game were inferior, but because they all gelled (jelled?) together as one.

So (that word again) excellent storyline is a rather individual concept, but it's how the story is experienced is what the player will remember.

But I'm all for story, but I think it is something which has to handled exceptionally carefully due to the fact there are so many things that could go wrong in the telling of it, and spoil the gameplay experience.

I'm happy to tell you "my story": It's .... wait for it .... an ... alien invasion! Oh, hang on ... that's Space Invaders ... but it isn't, because it's how the story is told that will be part of the experience, and not just shooting the crap out of everything with two heads that has arrive from DimensionX.

In the end, all ideas, derive from something older, even games themselves, used to be on a board and not on a screen, and before that it was like Live Action RPGs as a training tool for warfare. Games used to be about challenge, now, maybe, they are about the experience of that challenge, as "art" is the Latin word for "skill". and I might just have gone off on a tangent

I'll apologize if that was a bit incoherent, I'm full of gumbo, shiraz, licourice, cake, Smirnoff and passion. Passion or melodrama, sometimes it ain't easy to tell which!

#6 Awwww, Ted, it took me an hour+ to write the above and as soon as I post I see the word "implementation" clearly highlighted in your next one - which was basically my point.

I need to type faster!

#7 Story to me is the way you get your gameplay. The Myst series had a great story, but if you read the books, then play the games, the story actually dictated the game. Only parts of it was revieled during the game itself.
As for posting game ideas and stories here, It has been done many many times in the past. I've never heard of anyone stealing the idea. The author did however, get some great insight from other people on the forum as to how their game may be more fun to play. Most here (I'd wager 99.999999999%) are not theives and wouldn't even think about taking someone elses story.

#8 After firing up Chrono Trigger on the DS, I have come to realize that I have really missed playing a good old fashioned story.

I can't believe I missed this when it first came out *facepalm*

#9 Going back to what I was rambling on about above:

Having an open - or at least fairly open - world and having to have plot/story events which the player could miss, I thought of copying the old Doom game. At the end of a Doom level, when you reach the exit, you get a screen telling you your percentage kills and secrets found.

Now I thought that when the player got to an "exit" at the end of level you could have a GUI pop-up to say what percent of plot/story events the player had found, and the choice to go back and search for the others or just to quit the level and continue the game.

The problems I thought this might have is that it's a little "4th wall", a little too jarring and may well break the player's immersion in the game (but doesn't loading levels do that anyway?).

Also it still would not alter the fact that the player (in an open world) could still bypass important story info (eg. in level 1, does not find the code to unlock the safe in level 20). So you'd have to make a part of the open gameworld which became linear, or have multiple events copying each other at different parts of the level to make sure that the player blundered into one, and then a trigger disabled the others to prevent the player from experiencing the same info twice.

The problem with this would be that it is a little bit of a "scattergun" effect and each duplication of the event could lose it's uniqueness in the effort to make certain that the event/info was experienced.

hmmm... anyhow, just a couple of thoughts of how to handle an open game world with a "masterplan" style plot/story.

#10 @Ted:

Quote:Implementation is paramount

Agreed.

Quote:What do you think the odds are of someone so uncreative that they need to steal your story actually being able to make that game better than you?

The person that would do that may not necessarily be uncreative, just not AS creative as you and if they can produce the game before you can, who in the industry is gonna ask "which came first, the chicken or the egg"?

Quote:I stood on the floor of GDC and showed off my game's features with programmer art to people with all of the capabilities to rip me off...

Your games features...NOT an idea for a great new game. Game features imply production already started. I hear ya knockin' Ted but I don't think so.

Can anybody name any role-play games that, for their time, had a horrible storyline and became a hit?

@Steve:

Quote:Space Invaders (yay for retro!) wasn't an "alien invasion story" it was a Shmup, shoot at things that are shooting at you

I agree, the games-of-old were great! Donkey Kong, Popeye, Spaced Invaders, Pitfall Harry, etc. None of these were role-play games (except for maybe Pitfall Harry...if you think about it). Even Zelda, one of the first big-hit adventure/role-play games, had an interesting plot, for it's time. No doubt there are certain genres that don't need a storyline such as sport games, fighting games (though plot makes them more interesting if done right) but I don't feel that the role-play genre is one of them.

Quote:I'm happy to tell you "my story...

What?! No details?!
We should remember that 2 very huge OS's were not built from scratch but from the foundation of another's idea. I would image the original creators are thinking "damn, why didn't I think of that" and I doubt the one's that turned something into something huge were quick to spread the idea before they knew the idea was safe from prying minds with an abundance of resources.

#11

Quote:We should remember that 2 very huge OS's were not built from scratch but from the foundation of another's idea

So that's why my copy of Vista needs so much patching ... ;D

#12

Quote:Your games features...NOT an idea for a great new game

Honestly, I like my story, but I can change it all and still have a good game. Features and implementation are more important than the story.

The reason why that is? Well, because in an interactive medium such as games, you want to experience the story as much as possible, and to do that, you need features. Who gives a crap if you have Shakespear writing your story for you if the player is only peripherally aware of it while they're blowing away his aliens-with-a-great-backstory-that-noone-reads.

You want to talk about people stealing a story, which is a dubious proposition at best, but what I showed you was ideas for a feature that are able to be patented put out for everyone without it being stolen, and that's a lot more tangible. It's honestly not worth discussing unless you can show where people have had stories stolen from them in a provable manner (in which case my response is: Why didn't you throw a cease and desist at them?).

Quote:Story to me is the way you get your gameplay

Mike is exactly correct here. Story isn't the end-all be-all of a game, because it can be reasonably swapped out, but the story is what you want to interact with, so you design your features to open up parts of the story to use by the player.

If you want to interact with a combat story, you use methods like an FPS or other features that allow you to experience the combat. If it's a drama, then you need to be more subtle and figure out how to make dialog and emotion available. But all of that is interchangeable as well, because interaction is such a broad field, and we're just scratching the surface. You can successfully make a completely different game out of the story of Call of Duty 2 by replacing the combat mechanics with that of a kid that is trying to get away from these battles, or looking for their parents, and have the exact same things happening from CoD2 in that game, but as a background element, and have it be a better story. And again, you can take those mechanics and throw them at a horror or sci-fi setting, and get just as deep a level of interaction and attachment from the gamer using that.

So in terms of story: It provides background and fills out what you are interacting with, but it does not satisfy the interaction itself, which is what creates the attachment that the player feels which makes the game popular. But when you place two games with equal interactivity next to each other, then story matters. And if that is also equal, then things like graphics and whatnot will win out.

Implementation is paramount. Over story, over graphics, over everything.

Story just does not matter so much that it's a trade secret, but it should not be an after-thought either.

#13 Wow, hot topic!

Two points to consider: 1 By readin the posts I see much comparison of the story in games to a story in a novel. I say cancel that connection! To me, games aren't suited for that type of story. Some games that even try to push story fall flat and its because each medium/ movies, books, comics, theatre,/ have a particular strength in story that is better suited to those mediums. Game story is what the player is doing/thinking/caring about.

2 Best story for games, think of how things shape out for the character that you are spending so much time with. In Halo, everyone went giddy when the FLOOD appeared halfway through the game, unannounced. Great story moment in a total action game. No dialogue needed (though it was there as counterpoint) but memorable for all time. In Phantasy Star II, a character 'Nei' was killed halfway through the game (it still makes me cry) and she was a major part of your team. I really liked Nei because we had been through so much together.

So...Here is a great exercise to explain: Pick a horror genre game (this is fun) and take a Big Hulking Samurai with magic fireballs weilding blades of death, is stuck in a room full of slow zombies. Are you afraid? OR...A character...a petite young lady, in her Catholic school outfit, is trapped in a room full of zombies with no weapon. Which strikes the right balance....? See! Theme of vulnerability against impossible odds, maximized by the young helpless girl against the horde of undead while being trapped in a room. The characters you pick to play your game tell the story. Are you a David vs Goliath, or a Goliath vs Goliath. One has vulnerability and keeps the player at risk (ie interesting) and one has no risk.

I study story design as a whole for film and novel, there isn't much cemented about it for games accademically speaking. Games can be the most powerful platform for story experiences, but people keep trying to do it through movies or book style story telling.

Anyone interested in free consulting, related to what we are discussing here? Get a fresh look at your protagonists compared to their obstacles?

#14 @Ted

Quote:Features and implementation are more important than the story.[/qote]
Agreed. Just as gameplay is more important than graphics, or should be.

[quote]You want to talk about people stealing a story, which is a dubious proposition at best...

Personally I wish it wasn't an issue at all. An industry full of people with too much respect for their fellow designers to steal an idea, "pimp it out", and make it their own. I also wish that the people of the world would all work together to solve the problems of mankind instead of worrying about getting credit for inventing this or finding the cure for that but...

Quote:1 By readin the posts I see much comparison of the story in games to a story in a novel. I say cancel that connection! To me, games aren't suited for that type of story

Too many games have been made into movies/cartoons and visa-versa to do this.

As we discuss this I am noticing that not one person has posted an idea for a storyline....I wonder why?

Storyline can not be down-played as it is suggested that a storyboard should be created in the early stages of designing a game and can, in some cases, provide insight into what features the game should have. RPG-er are not so easily entertained now-a-days that a game full of great effects and features will hold their attention. They need a storyline with a good foundation, great twists, and an unexpected climax. I stress RPG's because this is where storyline counts most. Yes, it can enhance FPS's, RTS's, and so on but an RPG with a weak story isn't worth producing.

Quote:Implementation is paramount. Over story, over graphics, over everything.

Agreed.

However I'd love to know how many games were purchased because they looked cool with horrific gameplay.

#15 The moral of this story is that the game should be fun. The end-user (some of them anyway) can evoke more story from a few visual cues than any amount of novelization you may add.

On a side note: I've probably read more than anyone in this room -- or any room for that matter -- and there are very few original stories no matter how absorbing or interesting or outlandish the plot, mostly only variations of a theme.

#16

Quote:...and there are very few original stories no matter how absorbing or interesting or outlandish the plot, mostly only variations of a theme.

Agreed.

#17

Quote:I am noticing that not one person has posted an idea for a storyline....I wonder why?

Don't worry, I got you covered ;) Click here for my thread with a storyline I have kicking around. True to form, you can use that storyline if you wish, though my main character and the title are under copyright. Stories are a dime a dozen, and good story is a function of the writer's talent, not the plot.

Quote:Too many games have been made into movies/cartoons and visa-versa to do this.

That's an interesting observation, because there have been complaints from both camps that the stories used in these movies/cartoons are better suited for the kind of story you would find in games rather than in the other forms of media. But then the story found in games is consistently derided as not yet being "there" for games either, so it seems like story as it relates to video games (with some exceptions) is at sort of a point of transition, where it can be hit with criticism from both sides.

A really good read on story architecture is a book or three I have on the subject:

Story Structure Architect: This book covers the kinds of plot structures that are seen in most literature and how those plots are paced.

45 Master Characters: This deals with the 45 character archetypes found in classical and popular literature, and explains the literary aspects and functions of these characters (if you want to make NPC templates, there are good ideas here).

Writer's Guide to Character Traits: I'm using this one to help me with AI for my game, but it's great for everything from stories to just understanding personality types. It's based on behavioral psychology, and so is firmly rooted in science, but is written in a way that it guides you in sculpting the inner workings of your character's brains.

Anyway, I don't think that we can have much discussion on story in games without have discussions about the gameplay surrounding the story, because games lend themselves to non-linear interaction.

Maybe the problem with story in games is that it is still treated as a "story"- which implies a fixed, linear chain of events, where it should be treated as a "situation"- which implies a dynamic setting that can be interacted with and influenced by someone (the gamer, in this case).

Would that be a fair assessment?