Storytelling in Games: Part 1

[deus101]

My rampaging narcissism is gonna get me in trouble.

 

[Clockwork Knight]

Main thing that's different is that storylines used to be the backdrop in RPGs and they unfolded as you played. Now they are the centerpiece, and they get shoved down your throat. I think the old way was more interactive, because even though the plotlines were skimpier and the technology was cruder, the player usually at least had the ability to make his own decisions about what he wanted to do and when he wanted to do it. The new interactive movie format is so set-in-stone that nothing the player does is an expression of his own free will. The player does what the story requires him to do, and there's no other option. Chinese menu style dialog trees don't change that. I think game RPG designers have become entirely too dependent on storyboarding their games as if they're doing a movie, and then adding in the actual GAMEPLAY as the glue that connects their prefab storyline events. It's an inherently wrong-headed approach to an interactive media.

I was a harsh critic of Bethesda with their vague "kill foozle" plots with a bunch of random stuff you could sandbox your way through on the way there back in the days of Arena and up through Morrowind, and I was a big fan of Bioware's storytelling in the days of BG1 & BG2. But Bioware has become too invested in their sub B-grade movie footage that nobody would bother watching if it was in TV show format, and they've forgotten that gameplay trumps all in a GAME. Bethesda on the other hand has added quite a bit of depth to the stories in their games to the point where Fallout 3 (and even moreso, New Vegas) are much closer to what I want in an RPG than any of the shit Bioware has cranked out lately. It's a shame, because Bioware has been so close to getting it right but they end up so very far away by the time they are done. A game assembled mostly from mini-miodules like the ones they did for the "origins" stories in DA would be pretty damn good. Instead it's all "cutscene->(dialog)help_me_obi_wan_you're_my_only_hope->trash mobs->scripted encounter->cutscene->(dialog)you-re_so_special_move_along_now" in chapter/verse format.

Fuck em. They don't get it. They never will get it. Why do people worship at the altar of the clueless so much in this industry? All the people who knew how to make great games and who actually had the talent and the drive to do so left the industry a long time ago. All that's left now is corporate hacks and useful idiots, lording it over some keyboard monkeys who'd just as soon be coding SQL and Java for an insurance company.

In other words, westerners want to make jrpgs, just when japs started to see wrpgs as more than gaijin-tainted filth

 

[Coyote]

It looks like Casey Hudson's answer has been changed.

Original:

I think at this point, the medium is capable of the same sophistication in storytelling as other mediums. In some ways though, the interactive nature of a videogame story adds an extra dimension that makes much greater demands on the creators. For Mass Effect 3 for example, we've got a story that will have to start from a variety of different positions based on either a new game or decisions left over from playing the previous games. It will then need to continue branching multidimensionally as players shape the story with moment to moment decisions. But as technically complex as this is, we still need the end result to feel as artfully crafted as a memorable novel or motion picture.

New:

Storytelling in video games has definitely matured a lot in the last decade. One way to look at the maturity of a medium is to look at how well the content makes use of the unique aspects of the experience. Just like early movies had not yet developed the sophisticated language of cinematic storytelling, early games had neither the features nor the content to really weave the emotional impact of great storytelling with the interactivity of the medium. And with games, interactivity is the core of the experience. The best contemporary videogames are doing really interesting things to bring storytelling subtleties and emotion into the interactivity.

 

[Gord]

Honi soit qui mal y pense

 

[CraigCWB]

Deus101, my entry into the world of computer programming wasn't pretty either though I never really had any aspirations about gaming besides playing them. I used to be hooked on the hardware and worked as a PC tech until that stopped being a lucrative career. I mostly got into programming because it kept me close to the computers I loved and it paid a hell of a lot better than soldering circuitboards

Messy as it was, I wouldn't have it any other way. Over the years I've seen a lot of 20 something college grads come and go with their no-sweat master's degrees and their purely academic knowledge of computers and most of them don't last very long. They usually end up running into something that has them just sitting there at their desks staring at their computer screens looking confused, sooner or later. I've never had that problem. I always find the solution. Might be because I did everything the hard way, coming up. And they didn't.