Story In Video Games.

Because the Things You Hate In Video Game Stories thread was locked despite for being a complaint thread I'm making this one. Hopefully this time around we can actually be constructive about it. Feel free to bring over whatever discussion you had there. And by discussion I mean the discussions.

I find that story in video games has the most effect, when it's told through the gameplay. It leaves much more of an impact that way.

The way I prefer it is mainly through dialogue without animated cutscenes. Pressing a button is interactive, even if loosely.

Some good examples are Golden Sun(minus Dark Dawn's long intro), Quest 64, and Paper Mario.

Something I don't really get:

Whats the point of checking game's story and then deciding "Nah, I don't want to buy it"? Stories are usually best experienced first time when you don't know anything about them...

A major reason is that players only play for the story. Which is understandable.

If the general story(and by default, its premise) is basically "trash", the rest of the game won't appeal to them.(or it may be, but wouldn't be it worth it for them)

I think it's silly to judge a game before playing it, but hey, if a game has something you know you won't like, it's probably not worth spending the cash to play it, respectively.(borrowing from a friend, eh, different story)

Yeah, but you don't read spoilers about books and movies before you go to watch them, so if you play games for story then doing that is kind of... Weird

(And yeah, doing that just leads to complaining about shows you don't watch problem..)

edited 14th May '13 2:56:29 AM by SpookyMask

I think a major difference is that video games let you interact with the story or cause it to happen specifically.

This means that you can see the cutscenes, read the dialogue, etc. while being immersed into it, and the fact you have to earn the story makes it worth it entirely.

On another note, I can't help but love Sonic Battle's crazy storyline. From the ridiculous narm to the tough battles and great characterization... plus, the voice clips are hilarious~

Well, its still rather disrespectful if you ask me. Even if its issue of movies being like 8 whatever currency per ticket while games are 60 so its bigger risk if you don't end up liking it.

And before anyone says anything about this, reading the whole plot of a movie is different than reading a review of the movie before deciding whether to watch it or not :P So no, they aren't the same thing.

edited 14th May '13 3:07:29 AM by SpookyMask

Again, it's a matter of "reading the details" vs "actual immersion". No amount of reading it will make it the same thing.

Even watching a playthrough is a different experience from playing the game.

Anyway, this is starting to sound more like a complaintfest. So let's move onto another tangent, please.

What was your favorite story in a game and why?

I really loved Sonic 2006's storyline. It was pretty much insane, with various plot twists, many alternate variations on the storyline(depending which character's story), and actually had a hilariously bad villain in Mephiles.(bad as in narmy and hammy)

I wasn't really complaining though. At least I thought I wasn't

Anyway, I agree with that video game plots are usually the best when game mechanics add to them or if story is told through them.

I don't really remember any particular plot I would have espicially liked, but I think The World Ends With You was only game were I learned something from the aesop

@Spooky: Well, tone and setting influences what kind of game people wants, and I don't see anything wrong in anyone choosing to find out more about the tone of the story before choosing to buy it. For example, Hitman Absolution's story and story elements were too dark for me to want to buy the game.

For me, I love all kinds of storytelling in games, with no preference towards one or the other. Though, I've gotta say I prefer cutscenes when they are done in third person with more dynamic camera-angles, and not when it locks down my first-person player character so that I've got no choice but to stand there and wait (looking at you, Skyrim).

The World Ends With You had a great story, but I'm not sure if you can call it an example of a great video game story. If it were written as a comic or animated series instead, it would have been pretty much the same. But maybe that in itself is something video game writers should learn from.

I dislike Bioware-style protagonists, as seen in Neverwinter Nights and Knights Of The Old Republic. The idea of these kinds of characters is that you are allowed to create your own, and act the character out in Dialogue Trees. The problem with that is that such trees never allow for characters that are actually interesting. You are either an all-round "nice dude" or cackling psychopath. This stands in stark contrast with the party members you gain during the game, all of which have extensive backstories and reasoning to justify their worldview and actions. The end result is that the supposed "main character", who every other character sees the "super special one", is the single most boring character in the game.

When it comes to dialogue trees, I much prefer the Visual Novel approach: the main character does have a personality of sorts, and acts it out outside of player input. This way you don't have a narrative black hole for the other characters to dance around, while keeping the player input in the story.

edited 14th May '13 3:49:38 AM by Kayeka

A lot of people say that they want fully integrated story and gameplay, so that the story is unique to videogames, eg, it wouldn't work in anither format. But personally I like regular plots in videogame form just as well. A great example of the former is Journey, of the latter is Uncharted 2.

That is what I want for the future of gaming.

I like these as well.

Good stories are good stories, no matter the medium in which they are presented. If writers can make Story And Gameplay Integration work, all the better, but they shouldn't be forced into it.

I'd disagree. Each medium has its own strength and weaknesses, and each medium also has tropes, themes, and concepts that don't always fit well within those limitations.

Scenery Porn is a good example. In visual works like video games and movies, it's beautiful and majestic. If you try to translate it to the written equivalent, you are likely pushing into Purple Prose territory. I should not have to mention the most famous case of this. (Oh wait, I just did. Darn.)

In the case of video games, they are basically the pinnacle of Audience Participation, where the player has the potential to make all kinds of interesting choices. You can do things there with player input, Multiple Endings, and such that you cannot replicate in any other medium. On the weakness side, there are also graphical and processing limitations that limit the size and scope of the world that can be shown. Epic continent-spanning conflicts, which High Fantasy and the like thrive on, tend to come off as rather weak by comparison. (Most of you probably know my views on Space Compression, which still stand.)

I've never been sure how people can say they specifically play video games for the stories (note the emphasis) without specifically preferring the ones that indulge in those elements of Audience Participation. That's what makes them distinct from stories in other mediums, after all.

Well, I play video games for the story, and I'll admit that I prefer the medium partly because it requires my input.

But that does not mean that I demand that the input is present in the storytelling. I'm perfectly capable of sitting through long cutscenes (MGS 4 is one of my favourite games) without thinking "man, if I wanted to see cool stuff happen without me making it happen, I would buy a movie". While the video game medium is one of my favourite for storytelling, that does not mean that I demand interactivity in the storytelling itself.

I suppose it's case of "I play video games for the stories" versus "I play video games for the stories". I'd just prefer it if everyone used the latter meaning, since the former is somewhat misleading. (As in it amounts to you being willing to watch a movie with an identical story if it came out, and probably enjoy it just as much.)

Well, a movie with an identical story to a video game could end up being more like a tetralogy of movies. As a medium whose stories are generally not meant to be finished in a single sitting, video game stories gravitate to totally different pacing than movies.

Whenever I come up with any sort of story concept, I always envision it specifically as occurring within a particular medium, because there are certain kinds of presentation best suited to any particular story. Is the primary strength of the story the incredibly powerful, epic moments it builds up to, which make your hair stand on end? Then it's probably better off in a medium with visual and musical accompaniment. Is it also a long-form story which requires you to become highly familiar with the characters and nature of the conflict and such? Better not to make it something like a movie which has to be presented in a single sitting. Then there are other considerations which come into play, like whether you want to trade the extra investment in the characters that comes from having input in their actions against the focus that comes from an inviolable script, or whether you want the audience to be able to choose between exploring the setting, hearing what everyone has to say, and engaging in various sideplots, or just drive straight through the main plot.

No story idea I've ever come up with for a video game would make for a good movie, nor would any story I've come up with for a movie make for a good video game, but they're not meant to be interchangeable.

Videogames have several inherent virtues when compared to, say, movies, even not counting the interactivity. Off the top of my head, you can do stuff that'd cost you a fortune in special effects (God of War comes to mind), and make it look better, too. Also, you can make them way longer, and the existence of unlockables and replayability mean that you can add in hidden layers to the plot and characters that couldn't be done at that level in a movie.

There is one downside to video games having all those potential elements though, and that's getting them to line up neatly. That's why Gameplay and Story Segregation exists: a lot of the old technology was so primitive that developers had no choice but to depict things in contradictory manners, such as making a "giant city" of 30 people.

I can excuse it with older games because of both the old tech, and that the medium was young and the limitations (and strengths) weren't yet clear. Now, they are, and video games are ready to be judged by the same standards of consistency as works of fiction in other mediums. Meaning, that unless you're going for an Unreliable Narrator / "Rashomon"-Style / related idea, you can't have direct contradictions in any aspects of a video game. (I don't think it's unreasonable to call an unjustified contradiction in different story elements objectively Bad Writing.)

edited 15th May '13 6:32:48 PM by TotemicHero

It's improvable writing, but I think that whether it's actually bad depends a lot on how much it intrudes on the audience's attention.

Well, as I said, this is the medium defined most heavily by Audience Participation. Any time what you can do there doesn't mesh up logically with what's going on story-wise, it's pretty jarring to anyone paying close attention to the story. (This is another sign that not that many people play video games with the story as the primary focus, or there would be a lot more complaints about this if that were true.)

The thing is, if it's a long cutscene with zero interaction from the player(this can include moving text boxes around), outside pausing it by going to the Hub Menu of the Console, you can't do zip, which bores quite a lot of people. Movies are pauseable, after all. Video Games Cutscenes often aren't. Thus, it wouldn't hurt to have a Rewind, Play, and Pause button on each one just in case something comes up.

Many of the oldest cutscenes required player interaction by pressing A or B to move the text box along(with or without voices). I prefer this, as I know I'm 100% in control, which is generally a good thing for a video game. The video part needs less emphasis these days when it comes to excellent gaming. Good gameplay with a controllable cutscene(as in stoppable in some way), and you got more or less the perfect game, or an excellent one that won't cause issues for players.(whether or not the story is good to a person is kind of not the point I'm making. Same with gameplay. Generally, non-broken gameplay with a story that works and immerses you into the game)

Movies are only pausable when you're watching them on video. You can't pause them in a theater, and if you could, you'd piss a lot of people off.

I think non-interactive cutscenes have their uses, but it's better if they're used sparingly. The interactive part of the game shouldn't just feel like it's connecting the dots between the cutscenes, but I don't think it should hurt to use them in the right places. If the content of a cutscene is interesting (and if it's not interesting, you shouldn't be making a cutscene out of it,) then it would take a pretty remarkable temperament for a person to get bored by just a couple minutes of non-interactivity.