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It's all about the story- or is it? (I'm trying to keep this one SPOILER-FREE, or at least WITH WARNINGS)

  
 
STOATIE LIEKS CHOCOLATE MILK
08:16 / 14.07.05
Now, I love games, and I love a good story. I love Deus Ex, with its allowance of the player to, to a certain extent, influence the direction the story takes. I also love the Max Payne games, due to their exceelent construction and atmosphere, and despite their rigidity.

Now, I also love the GTA games, whose freeform structure tends to detract from the storytelling, but which are so damn fun it's not really an issue.

My question is- is it really always a good thing to allow the player more freedom? If you could go about doing things differently in Max Payne, would the story suffer? Great movies could be ruined by allowing we, the audience, to decide on what happened. If I've paid to be told a story, I want it to work as a story.

The way I see it there's a tension between the desire to tell an story and the desire to enhance that immersion by increasing the amount of decisions a player can make. For example, I'm really looking forward to Stalker, with its promised AI and dynamic environment. But I'm a little concerned that it may not work as a story, everything wandering around reacting to each other. I mean, sure, that's how the real world works, but how many times does your day actually throw up a well-enough constructed story that you could imagine people paying to see it?

For me, the aforementioned Deus Ex is the closest game yet to achieving that perfect balance- and a large part of this is due to decpeption. Yeah, you do have an awful lot of freedom, but it makes it appear as if you have MORE. You're left with a sense that anything could happen, even though really the story's been worked out long in advance and you'll always have to play those levels in that order.

What are anyone else's thought on this?
 
 
Axolotl
10:48 / 14.07.05
I love a game where the story sucks you in. The last game that pulled this off was "Beyond Good & Evil" where I ended up caring about the characters and playing on to find out how the story ends.
But while the story is important to me there's nothing worse than being railroaded. I hate games where you feel constrained - though games are much better at not doing this than they used to be. "Destroy all Humans" is a game that gives you little choice as to your next move in mission (though it does have a "sandbox" mode that lets you play around)
There's a definite balance to be made between the two demands, dependent on game genre, obviously. However I would have to come down on the side of freedom over coherent story telling, mainly as there's nothing that kills my suspension of disbelief faster than coming across an artificial limit imposed by the designers. You know the kind of thing - wooden doors that cannot be breached by rocket launchers, invisible walls, invincible NPCs. At the very least, as Stoatie said, you need the illusion of freedom to keep you going. An easy way to get round this is through the use of setpieces, changing camera positions and cutscenes, though too many of the last and you loose that feeling of control.
 
 
*
17:15 / 14.07.05
So, Morrowind. (I know people will get sick of me talking about this game. Please be gentle; I've only played about three games in my adult life and this is one of them.)

Morrowind is an interesting game to me in that while it has a storyline, you can just ditch it and go off and do your own thing, and it doesn't harm the enjoyment of the game at all. The main storyline is somewhat linear if that's all you're following, but the game encourages you to become a member of a noble house and/or join one or more of the guilds, and their quests interact with the main storyline quests slightly. You meet a god or two in the course of the main plot, and if you are annoyed with them you can kill them. It's not easy, and it's not always a good idea particularly if you want to finish the game, but you can do it. And yet the storyline still makes sense, all the way to the end.

Arcanum: Of Steamworks and Magick Obscura (besides being a really fun setting) is another interesting one. The plot responds to how good or evil your character gets and their resulting actions, to your race, and to where your allegiances lie-- with technology or magic. The way the game turns out actually is different depending on what you do, unlike in Morrowind where you can either succeed or fail; in Arcanum there are different outcomes depending on how you succeed. However, it's not as free-form seeming as Morrowind-- I have heard people say they didn't like Morrowind because they felt at loose ends and there were too many options, and I think the very structured beginning of Arcanum prevents that feeling early on.

In fact, come to think of it, the two games have very different structures. In Morrowind, in the very beginning of the game, anything is possible. You can choose not to follow the main quest at all, become an alchemist, and just travel from town to town selling potions and herbs to people, living out the rest of your days in peace and anonymity, if you want. You can build up XP and go raze a random town and be an outlaw the rest of your life. However, if you do follow the main quest you get instructions, which start out very open to your interpretation ("Establish yourself with a cover identity") and progress to fairly tight ("Talk to someone without these other people seeing you; ask about these things and return to me with the answers"). There are circumstances that have to happen no matter what you do (in fulfillment of prophecy, natch) and a limited number of options for dealing with them. In the end there is only one way to win the game.

Arcanum, however, starts out very tight. You've been in a mysterious zeppelin crash. A strange person insists on following you, acclaiming you some chosen one. There is only one way out of the mountains and it happens to take you by the mysterious stone with the inscription on it. Then there is only one way to get across the river and you can't do that until you have the key to the gate (at least there's a valid story reason for not being able to get past the gate until you do something; it's guarded by thugs). But from there the story begins to open up. The main quest is still pretty linear, but there are at least two outcomes to every quest and I think four or more to the ending of the main quest, if you choose to see it through. Trivial choices affect things like how good and evil you are and how magical or technological your bent, what allies you pick up and what enemies you make, what stories people hear about you, etc. One thing that is difficult is that it's hard to play a redemption story, with your character doing some horrifically evil things and then still getting the "good" ending in the main quest. There's a certain point beyond which you're stuck being evil with no hope of rescue.
 
 
Spatula Clarke
19:37 / 14.07.05
Funnily enough, I was going to suggest Morrowind as a game that supports what Stoatie's saying about increased freedom in games often leading a decrease in effective storytelling. I just found its tale and backstory baffling - within three minutes of starting a new game, you're assaulted with names, places, politics, personal vendettas, and that's before you even think about picking up one of the books scattered around the world. It's just too much information to take in all at once, a situation not helped by the arcane names it employs for people and places.

Actually, I consider Morrowind to be a bit of a failure in terms of structure generally, not just narrative structure, again because of the emphasis on the freedom to go where you want and do what you want whenevr you want above all else. That may be best saved for another thread, though.

Beyond Good & Evil did have an affecting story and group of characters, but the freedom provided was an illusion, and a broken one at that. As soon as the main plot threads started to take hold, all pretence at non-linearity was thrown out of the window in such a sudden and indecent manner that it detracted from the game.

I suppose you could propose KotOR as being an example of a game that combines the illusion of freedom with a strong narrative, and does it well, but again there's no *real* freedom - when it comes down to the crunch, your choices are limited toi a binary either/or thing. That's not freedom.

The problem is that there's no human mind running things behind the scenes, and so an enormous number of limits have to be set on teh player in order for the game to cope with their actions and know what to do. Adaptive AI can only go so far - it can only react to a player's immediate actions, not spread the consequences of those actions out over the entire gameworld and write a new story from scratch that takes account of them. For that, you need a human mind - maybe something like an online RPG is a good fit, something that's got human GMs working behind the scenes to take notice of events in the world and alter it accordingly?
 
 
Digital Hermes
20:45 / 14.07.05
I think the 'story' of Morrowind essentially devolves into being a postal service. Delivering items or messages from one person to another, and running across the island. The implied freedom IS a good thing, but it would have been nice if the story quests were somehow more involving, more personal, then the guild quests.

My enjoyment in Morrowind is character development, which you might consider to be a self-created story. Nobody plays the exact same character, so MY story of the fed-ex world of Morrowind involves a frustrated Paladin-like character, wanting to do more, but having to do these little side things to get people to trust him. Someone else may play a power-hungry mage, who takes the quests, muttering, 'you'll get your yours, one day, oh yes...'

There was a few space-based games that were entirely open-ended, with no end-game to speak of. One of them was a sequel to the Elite series of space flight games, the otherone was Battlecruiser 3000, or somesuch. Again, the freedom has the benefit of hours of gameplay and exploration, but the story must be invented by the player. Which is interesting.
 
 
Spatula Clarke
21:18 / 14.07.05
On that, there's a superb Elite clone called X: Beyond the Frontier, released five or six years ago, which did attempt to provide a story for the player to follow, should they have wished to do so. It wasn't exactly groundbreakingly original - you were a test pilot for a new form of spacecraft, the engines went wonky, you went through a wormhole and ended up on the other side of the galaxy, searching for your way home - but it was there. Alternatively, you could leave it alone and just concentrate on building an empire. There was also a planet-bound title in the Elite genre called Hardwar, which did much the same thing.

The idea of the player creating their own narrative is an interesting one. As far as RPGs are concerned, the old cliche has it that Western-developed ones tend to provide the player with the freedom to create their own avatar and drive the story in a direction of their choosing, whereas Japanese RPGs more often give the player a pre-defined character and ask them to take that character through a pre-defined tale. I'm fairly sure that it's not as simple as that - the distinction exists, but you'd have to ignore a great many games for the cliche to be true - but I think it is accurate to say that sandbox gaming (where the player is given tools and a world, and just told to go out and do whatever they want with them, without the constraints of a storyline to hold them back) in general is much more popular amongst American and British developers than it is Japanese ones.

That may, of course, simply be because the GTA series originated in the West and attracted a massive number of Western me-too developers before it had even been released in Japan.
 
 
Spatula Clarke
13:01 / 19.07.05
There's a small interview with Ron Gilbert - he of Monkey Island fame - in this month's Edge where he touches on some of this stuff.

Edge: Is there a difference between 'interactive storytelling' and the notion of letting players identify with a linear story?

RG: Yeah, I have really strong views about this, and a lot of people do not agree with me [laughs]. But I don't believe stories should be interactive. I believe stories should be participatory. This whole notion that you can go into a story and make it anything you want it to be, or that there's ten different endings, I think is just crap. A really good 'interactive story' is like taking a trip down the rapids: we're going to get into this raft, and we're starting here and we're ending here, but how you navigate the rapids - that's the participatory part. You're participating in my story, but you're not going to change it, because it's my story. I have a story to tell you.

E: Multiple endings seem to have become a required feature for current narrative-driven games.

RG: It's a bulletpoint on a box: at the end of the day, what you get is one good story with nine crappy endings. What I'd rather have is one really, really good ending and let's forget about the others, because they're not going to be as satisfying.

At its core, a story is a depiction of some human experience, about teaching us something, and to let the computer pick the ending based on what's happened - well, I'm sure my PC could tell my Mac interesting stories, but it can't tell me interesting stories. I mean, even look at [World of] WarCraft - you can come out of WarCraft with great little stories, but how many hours did you play it for when nothing happened? It's like going to a sporting event - they play 170 games of baseball a year, and two or three of those games are brilliant stories, but the other 167 are just a sequence of events. And I think interactive storytelling can end up being that - there's some gems that you can talk about for years, but a story isn't just a series of events. It's a series of events with a purpose.

I don't agree with a lot of what he says there - his definition of story is horribly limited, for example - but the general point is one that I currently believe is accurate. Choice dilutes the quality of storytelling, while storytelling necessarily imposes rigid limits on choice.
 
 
Baz Auckland
13:53 / 19.07.05
I really liked Deus Ex for the choices and whatnot, even though they had limits (the afore-mentioned unkillable NPCs, eventually you were forced to one side, etc.)

Sort of a different type of game, but I've played the Civilization games for years, and I think part of the ongoing thrill of them is the fact that you basically write the history and story. It's limited to the one planet and the set tech limits and whatnot, but with thousands of fans making scenarios, the game being customizable to a huge extent (well Civ2 was, Civ3 not so much) and with random maps, it seems to have huge amounts of freedom in a good way...
 
 
Axolotl
14:41 / 19.07.05
But there's no real story inherent in the Civilisation games themselves (assuming you aren't playing one of the scenarios, which in order to tell a story drastically reduce your freedom). You can construct a narrative around the events that occur but the game itself isn't trying to tell a story.
I suppose you could draw a (poor) analogy with history itself: while we construct narratives out of the events, the events themselves are neutral. I could however be talking cobblers with that last bit, though I think my first point has some validity.
 
 
All Acting Regiment
15:38 / 19.07.05
I think this comes down to what you want from a game. Some people seem to want a story that they can take part in; others seem to want to create their own story. Sounds like two very different games to me.

I personally think a game that provides a powerful sandbox is more interesting than a linear game- it just takes effort. It's a bit more creatively stimulating than the linear kind, no?
 
 
Spatula Clarke
16:13 / 19.07.05
I don't think that's true. If we take Gilbert's rafting analogy (just because I'm lazy and can't be bothered to come up with my own), creativity on the player's part can come from deciding how you're going to get the thing moving. Do you use paddles, do you use your hands, do you sit back and let the course of the water carry you on your way? You're still going down the same rapids, you're still starting and ending at the same points, and going past the same scenery, but you'll be personalising the experience depending on your choice of action.

Take Metal Gear Solid 3. The basic storyline never really changes - you can avoid one particular main boss encounter, but that's the only moment in the plot that your actions can have any effect on - but the game still allows plenty of room for self-expression and creativity. You have absolute freedom (within the usual game rules, natch) over how you approach the situations within the game that will lead you to the next major bit of exposition. That can be just as creatively stimulating as, say, deciding how you're going to approach a mission in GTA, in my opinion.
 
 
iamus
21:28 / 13.08.05
How do we define what constitutes "narrative" in a game? GTA is both an expansive sandbox and a strictly linear game, and both these facets of the game (as Stoatie said at the beginning) sit at odds with each other. The story and character in the playable sections is pretty far divorced from the cutscenes. They both exist in seperate bubbles of continuity.

In the cutscenes, CJ is a decent, likeable guy. There is a logical progression from one cutscene to the next as characters build on their relationships and the story moves on logically.

In the playable sections, CJ, as defined by the players actions (and I defy anybody to tell me it's different for them) is an arrogant, mass-murdering fuckhead. The playable sections progress directly from the previous cutscenes (so there is at least some continuity within the narrative whole), but characters can be abused or killed and it won't make any difference in the grand scheme of it, the story can be continually reset until the right boxes are ticked for progression.

Both sections have their own types of continuity (and I'm going to use that word about a million times) that are internally-consistent, but don't gel with each other too well. Cutscenes are consistent because they move the narrative on in steps and develop character, as mentioned above. Playable sections are consistent in a different way. Their continuity is nothing to do with characters or plot, but with the actions of the player and the consequences in the world around hir.

If the player fails a mission, the story-narrative is discarded in a second, but the world-narrative continues. That car you crashed will blow up and the nearby pedestrians will still be running screaming. It doesn't matter that your best friend happened to be in the car at the time. The days will keep ticking on, but those things important to the plot will wait in stasis for you.

But the problem in reconciling the two is precisely the player's amount of freedom. Officer Tenpenny is not a very credible threat. In the cutscenes, CJ is totally subservient to him and will take on any dangerous mission that his better judgement would warn against, simply because Tenpenny has pinned evidence on him that could have him accused of being a cop-killer.

So what? Go outside and you can kill millions of police officers. You can go mental with a flamethrower right in front of the whole of the national guard and the most you'll get is sent to the hospital and let off the hook. So outside of missions, all characters involved in the story are unavailable. They vanish from the world.

The game ignores this discrepancy for the simple fact that if the playable sections adhered to the logic of the cutscenes, then it wouldn't be any fun at all. If the cutscenes adhered to the logic of the playable sections, there would be no story. Both of these elements are needed (to a degree) for the game to work. The player needs missions and missions need justification. It doesn't even matter that they don't slot together. Both sections are satisfying enough on their own terms to make the gap between them irrelevant. But the fact remains that there are two distinct types of narrative there.

One is a more traditional story-based one. The other has nothing to do with plot, but everything to do with how the player engages themselves in the whole experience. GTA is just one example. All games have these two seperate forms of narrative, but they will be integrated differently or one will take precedence over the other depending on the type of game or the skill of the developer.
 
  
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