Is it important?
Is it necessary?
I've been thinking about this a lot lately.
Let's take the single most common method games use to portray story in video games, the cut-scene.
The game literally stops being a game for however long it takes to tell you what it's trying to say.
Why is this okay?
It's the same thing with text screens, or walkie-talkie segments.
Even on the opposite end of the spectrum, in games like Dark Souls, which have virtually no cutscenes at all, the story is so divorced from the core experience of the game, you can miss it entirely, and many people have.
Taking all evidence as a whole, it's very easy to come to the conclusion that playing a video game and telling a story are diametrically opposed, and they mix exactly as well as oil and water. So why do they keep doing it?
Story is important, but not necessary.
In story heavy games like The Witcher or Mass Effect it's like you're the director of a movie in a pre-built world, you can choose to do this side quest or take a break doing a mini-game or even decide how the story unfolds and I think that really adds to the fun and immersion of some games.
That being said though, in a game, gameplay is most important.
Story in a videogame is like ketchup on a steak. It is never necessary, but it enhances the experience.
>>339130161
Violence Fight is still and will always be the pinnacle of writing in video games.
>>339131146
It can be a useful tool to motivate the player and keep things interesting as the gameplay becomes more and more repetitive.
It just seems that the attitude with a lot of games is that the story is the primary concern and that the gameplay facilitates the story instead of vice-versa. I honestly get the impression that some developers actually hate in-depth game segments and would gladly make the whole thing one big cutscene with QTEs if they had the option.
There. This is all the story you need.
From a poll I started yesterday.
story and gameplay should go hand in hand
Works for some types of games.
I prefer a well-thought out, interesting and consistent world.
>>339130161
I'm writing an essay about this argument (really).
To keep it simple, story in a videogame is a plus, it's not a bad thing or cancerous by any means. BUT it's not necessary either, you can have a great videogame with a shitty story or no story at all.
The problem lies when a developer puts more focus on the story than on gameplay: no matter how good the story is, if the gameplay is bad or mediocre, it's not a good videogame.
>>339130161
>Why do they keep doing it?
Ok, this is something I've been kicking around for a while:
We do not have the language to criticize a game outside of its story right now. Most of the in depth game writing that gets passed around right now is absolutely obsessed with taking video games and couching it in analysis that has already been done and is well understood, IE analysis of movies or books.
And what is the analytical mode of movies and books? Look at the narrative and the narrative only. A writer doesn't write a book so that the weight of the book is right. Films are not made (at least, not often) so that the experience of the film gels with the content of the film.
In games, we've been stuck in the goddamn dark with critics who cannot even describe what it is that makes a game good. That's how you get these nebulous ideas like "game feel". What the fuck is that? "Game feel".
These people lack the tools to actually explain the games that they cover, and they often have massive, angry diatribes trying to cast out what they don't understand. A while ago, it became trendy to say that fun is not a real thing. That being fun is not what makes a good game. The reason why the war on fun became a thing is that the critics CANNOT explain fun.
How many times have you seen some critic scratch their head about how well CoD keeps selling (granted, this is starting to fall off a bit)? They lack the language to explain the actual "game feel" of something like CoD or Hotline Miami (a game which actively mocks you for looking for meaning), etc etc.
This becomes a dark loop for the developers. Good review scores are part of an advertising campaign. So, we can't skip out on the story. In fact, lets spend all of our time on story.
Low G Man was best.
>>339133716
I think people born with videogames in their hands, namely 90s and millenial kids, will be the first real videogame critics. They will have the tools of understanding what makes a videogame an actual videogame, as opposed to current critics and journalists that can't help but comparing videogames to books or movies.
>>339133716
I don't know if you've heard of a critic called Campster/Errant Signal, but he just put up a video about Dark Souls 3 where he got into a rant about "Git gud". Basically, he's super mad about the phrase. But the way he put it is that its not about a "dudebro, masculine idea of systems mastery". There's a couple of things going on in that statement that are relevant. Errant Signal may not really matter in the grand scheme of things, but I use him sort of as a hipster-crit weather vane a lot of the time.
First, he's fundamentally throwing away the idea that systems mastery is a component of fun. This is a sort of old definition of why someone would find something fun (Huizinga? I think?), but the thing is that its not easy to talk about. Its sort of a shallow subject at the minute, because no one has really put together a good explanation of what, exactly, systems mastery means, because its not part of the narrative of a game. By belittling it, calling it "dudebro", he's trying to minimize its importance away so that he can try to look at Dark Souls either as a narrative or as his experience of playing Dark Souls as a narrative, but so that he doesn't have to deal with the moment to moment action of the game.
Some of what came along with Spec Ops: The Line also reinforces this thinking. People went from (rightfully, I think) dismissing Spec Ops as a failed game to some sort of gem, but it was based entirely on the narrative. So, people would say things like "Oh, no, play it on easy so that you don't have to interact with it too much, its not fun, but you HAVE to see this story." No. Write the story in a book, and give me that. Cut out all of the gameplay and give me a movie, and call it a movie. (By the way, they already did both, its called Heart of Darkness and Apocalypse Now) But don't say, oh, this GAME is worth playing because the playing part is garbage, but OH MAN THAT STORY.
>>339130161
>it's very easy to come to the conclusion that playing a video game and telling a story are diametrically opposed
I don't see how you would come to this conclusion.
While cutscenes are a rather poor form of storytelling in games, both cutscenes and text show of the strengths of the medium, to include various elements of other to form a cohesive whole. If you can't see the vast potential of storytelling in video games, a medium that's seemingly perfect for emotional investment, I don't know what to say. Not just that, but having some justification for your actions in the game is hardly detracting.
In my opinion, the problem with a lot of video game stories is that they can't keep themselves contained. They try to make the player so extraordinary you begin to wonder what kind of person you're playing. Always setting massive goals like saving humanity or whatever. That's fine enough, but it gets bothersome after a while. I would rather have smaller and less "grand" plots that focus more on the characters. To name one example, I think Xenoblade X would do better without the lifehold quest. It should have focused on the struggle of survival in my opinion, would have had much more potential.
>>339134489
I think you're right, except that a lot of the critics today could have grown up with their hands on controllers. I'm not saying that they haven't, just that the language still hasn't been figured out. Look how long it took films to get their legs underneath them, for people to stop viewing movies as just another way to tell and to become a way to show.
>>339133716
>>339134656
(BTW, I'm both of these posts)
Hotline Miami is sort of similar, having come out around the same time. But Spec Ops had a slow burn in the media, and HM blew the fuck up immediately, but then very quickly cooled off. Some of this has to do, I think, with left overs from 90s video game violence hysteria (nobody wants to write the story that murdering ALL OF THESE PEOPLE is fun), but the other reason is that the critics realized that there actually is NOTHING there for them. There is no story, there is no meaning. Its a game, and that's it, with a little bit of an inciting incident, and then murder murder, death death death. But HM stays uppercase, bright colors FUN the whole time. The moment to moment of it feels good. I can still feel how that game moves and plays, and I haven't sat down with it for a while now.
The thing is, the story is SO nothing that eventually the narrativists turned their backs on it. They started to think about the only thing that the game gives you as a mode of communication, the violence, and realized that it didn't try to be repellent about its killing in the same way that Spec Ops did. It doesn't actually comment on its own violence in any meaningful way, it just presents it as THE one true mode of interaction. So they started to murmur about how, oh, its fun, but its not meaningful. You can't get anything out of it, because what it makes you do is repugnant, AND it doesn't then comment on it.
But I view Hotline Miami as the more honest response to the same point that Spec Ops brings up.
>>339135432
At the end of Spec Ops, an old army dude recounts how many people you've killed to get where you are, and then asks you if you're satisfied. And, of course, your reaction, and a !viewing! audience's reaction, should be horror and disgust. How could you do such a thing, you monster. Truly a moving tale of the corruption of a human.
Hotline Miami, on the other hand, asks you, RIGHT off the bat, if you enjoy hurting other people. And the answer should be an enthusiastic HELL YES, because the ride you're going on is fucking NUTS. After that, it really doesn't comment on the violence too terribly much, it just sort of fades into the background. But the game doesn't force you into hating violence, or even reflecting on it at all. It just makes you do it, and makes the game engaging. But then it sort of eats at you. I think one of their masterstrokes in that game is making you kill everyone in a building, and then having you walk out, stepping over all of the corpses. But it never actually points that out. It just happens, and you have to perform the action, and that's what you should be reflecting on. You just performed these actions.
But yeah, video games are broken.
>>339135375
The real challenge is trying to fuse narrative and gameplay. Why a story needs cutscenes or dialogues to be told? Can't we find a way to tell a story with the top tier interactive mechanics videogames own?
It's not easy, of course, but in my opinion all this focus on writing dialogues and cutscenes is slowing down the efforts to make the interaction more refined.
>>339132397
Music > graphics (style) > story > graphics (technology)
Gameplay at #1 goes without saying, anyone who disputes that doesn't get a vote.
>>339130161
I think at the very least you might want some story to give context to the players actions and the goal of the game. The player needs atleast some jist of what's going on.
But writing isn't really important or necessary. Especially considering this is a visual medium, really you should be able to tell it visually like pic related.
>>339136071
I don't know about music. I mean, music is very important and I love it.
But imagine a videogame without music. Sure, it's sad, but it's still a perfectly playable videogame, same goes with story.
Now imagine a videogame without graphics, without "video". There's no game to play at all. Not saying graphics is more important than gameplay, that's stupid, but maybe graphics is more important than music.
The problem is, storytelling and gameplay ARE diametrically opposed. Not just mechanically, but On a really basic fundamental level as well.
Just as a basic example, the lynchpin of any good story is the fall from grace. The point where it looks like the hero is about to win, only to get it all taken away to reclaim again. In a traditional story, this happens towards the end of the second third.
Games, on the other hand, are usually designed so the player gets gradually more powerful from beginning to end.
It just doesn't work.
The best stories in games come from the kind of games that give you a basic framework with which to tell your own story. A perfect example would be something like The Sims. That's all you. Or the open-world, non-main-story related bits of Grand Theft Auto, or any open-world game of that nature, including things like the Elder Scrolls games. There's a reason nobody recounts the thrilling adventure of killing the Elder Dragon in Skyrim, but will tell and retell the story of the time they kicked a chicken and pissed off a giant, for example.
>>339134656
Someone already theorised that video games' uniqueness as a medium comes from "depth" (in the dimensional/perceptional sense) first and foremost and secondly from interactivity. It makes a lot of sense to me - it is through interaction with the world that we explore and push its boundaries but the act of shaping, delving into something is, I think, more important than the world itself.
My point is: even if the story presented by SO:TL isn't original, you still can't say it's been done better in other medium. There is a significant difference in your reception of the story when you're reduced to a passive viewer and being an active agent. SO:TL also had a benefit through its historical context, as it was released during the massive surge of CoD rehashes. Being conditioned so much by the latter the impact SO left on me was that much impressive. Sure, it wasn't the first game that questioned player's agency and willingness to follow the procedures but it was the first game to do so in the TPS/war shooter "genre".
You could also bring up its massive attention to detail which, while useless from a gameplay perspective, had one hell of an impact in helping the created something I'd call depth (in a more traditional sense this time). It makes the world captured within the frame more... "realistic", probable maybe? It gives an impression it has its own rules and nuances, helps me forget I'm playing a game. There's even an in-game explanation of the various phenomena that take place (Walker getting crazy/hallucinating/being dead) that ties in with the narrative.
>>339136493
>But imagine a videogame without music.
Can be okay. But imagine a game with BAD music. There's plenty and it really hurts the game. Far more than graphics, if you ask me.
>Now imagine a videogame without graphics
Got you covered, m8! You're correct that the game has to output something (though blind people can play games like pic related) but that was never really in question. My point was always that bad music is worse to put up with than bad graphics and that good music helps a game more than good graphics.
>>339130161
>So why do they keep doing it?
because: immersion.
anything that will help you to feel like playing the game over and over again will keep you commercially connected to the game and the company that developed the game.
>>339131146
>ketchup
>steak
>enhances the experience.
>>339136856
>My point was always that bad music is worse to put up with than bad graphics and that good music helps a game more than good graphics
Oh, then I agree. Neat example, thanks for bringing it up.
Depends on the game.
>>339136712
>The point where it looks like the hero is about to win, only to get it all taken away to reclaim again. In a traditional story, this happens towards the end of the second third.
Ghost 'n' Ghoblins did it.
>>339131146
>putting ketcup on a steak
This is disgusting ameriburger.
>>339136712
Replace "gameplay" with "visuals" and you got what people thought of film in the 1920's.
You can tell story directly through gameplay, games have done it for years.
In addition to that, as a creator, you have the inherent choice of making the player weak as a form of GAMEPLAY STORYTELLING, you don't HAVE to do the thing you described, it's just that many don't because of the direction of their game.
Also, all of the games you mentioned are some of the worst in their class when it comes to storytelling in videogames. Many of the best stories in videogames don't give much of a choice to the player in which the direction of the story goes.
