Developer Dave Ellis sees a bright future for storytelling in gaming, he said in a Joystiq interview.
“Game writing is only going to get better as time goes on. Players are getting used to good writing, and soon they won’t settle for less,” said Ellis, the 2008 recipient of the WGA award for video game writing.
Ellis is a designer with Vicious Cycle, and his most recent project, Dead Head Fred for the PSP, earned him the Writer’s Guild of America award. He will be the keynote speaker at a Writer’s Guild Foundation workshop on game writing next month.
“Today, we’re looking at a couple of exciting developments. First, story-driven games are becoming more popular. Developers are realizing that writing needs just as much attention as the graphics and other gameplay elements, especially when the story and characters play a key role in the game,” Ellis said.
“Second, technology has reached the point where truly interactive storytelling is emerging. The story can evolve through the gameplay, and it can be affected by the player’s actions — at least to a certain extent.”
Ellis recognized the limitations of current storytelling techniques, which limit the player to established choices even in open world games.
Continue reading ‘Award-Winning Developer Says Storytelling On the Rise’
Heavy Rain: The Origami Killer promises a non-linear and cinematic which is intended to be play without any reloading according director David Cage, who spoke with CVG this week.
“There will be the opportunity for players to reply as much as they want from where they want, but we would really like to encourage them not to do so — to continue to play with one story bearing with the consequences of their actions,” Cage told CVG.
The story can even survive the deaths of its multiple player-controlled characters, accommodating all player choices, even fatal ones. Is this the end of the Game Over screen?
“This is what’s exciting about it,” said Cage. “This is a story that you told. It’s pretty unique. So why would you want to do everything perfect and change what you’ve done. You will be able to redo what you like but we recommend not to.”
Cage is the founder, CEO and auteur of French studio Quantic Dreams. His last effort was 2005’s Fahrenheit (aka Indigo Prophecy), which also featured a non-linear story, told through bare-bones controls and heavily scripted quick time events.
Judging from these early previews, Heavy Rain is a definite improvement over Fahrenheit and may establish new conventions for interactivity in storytelling when it comes out for the Playstation 3 last next year.
Mistakes and pitfalls always break the mood in games. They pressure or outright force the player to flip back a few pages and rewrite the story correctly. Some recent games have broken from the trend of checkpoints and quick-save/quick-load. BioShock allowed players to continue after dying by restoring the hero at the nearest Vita-Chamber — a kind of in-character checkpoint.
Heavy Rain will liberate players from the constraints of failure by offering in-game consequences rather than a forced reboot and maintaining immersion in the plot rather than ending it.
Characters are the heart of any story, and twenty years of computer and console gaming have yielded plenty of memorable ones.
Last month Ian and Reid at ConfuseReviews.com compiled a list of their fifteen favorite RPG characters, with barely five slots going to BioWare’s ilk.
Part of [the depth of RPGs] comes through in the characters you meet in any adventurous stat-building type game; sometimes cheery, sometimes spooky, often dreadfully bland but occasionally intriguing characters who make the grunt work of RPGs and the fight after fight after fight seem worth it. The characters are what make the stories work — they’re the role part of role-playing.
It’s not bad as Top # lists go, including a good mix of nostalgia-inspiring heroes like Frog from Chrono Trigger, barely remembered niche weirdos like Cassius Curio of Morrowind, and a few unknowns like Stan the titular king from Okage Shadow King.
The game’s main character, a ludicrously trodden-upon boy with the worst parents in the world, ends up with evil king Stan possessing his shadow as part of a bargain to “save” his sister. The rest of the game unfolds as a quest to smite the lesser demons that have arisen since Stan’s banishment and taken sections of his former power, so in essence he becomes a whiny has-been of a demon lord trying desperately to be taken seriously as he slowly regains his former glory.
I’ll definitely have to play that one.
In a presentation at the Austin Game Developers Conference, Eric Lindstrom, creative director of Tomb Raider: Underworld, pushed for new storytelling techniques and more emphasis on story during development, reports Gamasutra.
Lindstrom doesn’t mean to tackle the problem of innovative interactive storytelling — because others are working on that. He’s talking about using the basic tools that have been used in other media, which “are not being used at all, or not being used effectively, and there’s no reason why they can’t.”
Here’s his mini-manifesto:
Stop saying that storytelling is less important than game mechanics. “There are lots of people who say this, but they don’t really mean it.”
Start putting storytelling on par with other pillars of game creation. “There are plenty of people out there who say this is true, but when push comes to shove, it’s not true.”
Stop hiding behind the word “interactive”. “If there’s really one thing to take away today — it’s that ‘oh, but it’s interactive’ is used as an excuse for bad storytelling all the time, and it just doesn’t wash.”
Start training and employing storytelling experts. “Hollywood knows how to write dialogue more than anybody in the industry on average. The last 10 movies I saw, seven of them had pretty crappy dialogue — so it’s not going to be perfect on average. But you’re going to find more people who understand storytelling.”
These points are good ones, but, as Lindstrom admits, these goals are really only ways of perfecting current storytelling techniques rather, which have not advanced much since the big games of the 1990s, and they don’t progress new strategies. A good Hollywood writer could work out the plot holes and cliches and help put together a satisfying climax, but only someone with writing and game development experience can integrate story into gameplay, so the two work together rather than being seperated into the game and the ensuing cut scenes.
Continue reading ‘AGDC: ‘Tomb Raider: Underworld’ Developer Pushes Refined Storytelling’
The Austin Game Developer’s Conference kicked off today with a future-thinking keynote address by author Bruce Sterling that urged creative, iconoclastic approaches to game design.
Sterling’s credentials as a writer of science fiction and one of the prime movers behind the cyberpunk genre lent themselves to his unusual speech, where he posed as a student of his 89-year-old self who had traveled back in time from 2043 to tell us where gaming was headed.
After showing off his nanotechnology and General Electric Pocket Mediator, Sterling described an intensely dystopian future for the video gaming industry, run by money, for money, and with no potential for risky ingenuity or real creative development among the factories of nameless developers. Games in 2043 are trite and consumer friendly with simple, boring gameplay lodged in the real world.
To prevent this future, said Sterling, the industry needs “creative disruption, radical innovations, provocative cultural change.”
Sterling called for visionaries, revolutionaries and auteurs from among the developers gathered in Austin. “This is your great struggle, and that is what you face,” he said. “That is what you owe to your predecessors and those who will come after you. You’ve got your place in the great parade and it’s all yours.”
Look forward to more news from the Austin GDC as it pertains to creative storytelling in games.
All of human literature, fiction and myth can be reduced to two archetypal plots: a man goes on a journey and a stranger comes to town. These basic formula are even more true of role-playing games, where the story must leave room for a main character who is controlled and sometimes even created by an unpredictable player.
The interactive aspect is what set video games apart from other media. In a traditional story, authorial control over a character’s disposition and history is absolute. Games follow the same structures and conventions of plot.
The most significant impact of these binary plots on gameplay is a reduction in the degree of creativity the player can exert over the protagonist, especially that character’s past. The man who goes on a journey must come from somewhere defined by the game’s creator; the stranger who comes to town is liberated from an established history, transferring responsibility for creating history from author to player.
Man goes on a journey
Scholar Joseph Campbell wrote extensively on the hero’s journey, that fateful series of events that drew mythic and modern heroes like Odysseus, Conan the Barbarian, Harry Potter and Luke Skywalker to epic adventure. The journey begins with the hero’s call, sometimes refused, and the crossing of the threshold. Guided by mentors like Obi-Wan and Merlin, he overcomes a series of trials, receives a boon, and returns home with boon in hand.
Because they must have a home from which they set out, these characters often have pre-established backgrounds that fit into the plot. Link starts The Ocarina of Time as a normal kid in Kokiri Forest, and Crono’s mom wakes him up so he can cruise the Millennial Fair in Chrono Trigger. In games where the player can choose the hero’s race, gender, and appearance, he becomes an orphan (Jade Empire) or an amnesiac (Knights of the Old Republic).
Continue reading ‘The Archetypal Hero in Video Games’
A supremely accurate expansionary mod for Rome: Total War may seem like a strange thing to highlight on a blog about game narratives, but Europa Barbarorum builds on the historical premise of the game it modifies and develops it into a more immersive experience.
The mod extends the campaign map into Saharan Africa, the Arabian Peninsula, India, and the steppes of central Asia, hosting kingdoms like the Mali, Saka, and Bactria absent from the vanilla Rome Total War campaign. All factions have been bolstered with historically accurate towns, buildings, governmental systems, family members, and military units, with names and voices in the appropriate language.
It’s a stunningly complete package that turns Rome: Total War into a history lesson. A massive volunteer team of modders, artists and historians organized even before the game’s 2004 release and have worked steadily ever since to make their mod as accurate as possible, from place names to lengthy building and unit descriptions and “this year in history” reports.
But the point of Europa Barbarorum is not education. All these complex changes to gameplay make the empire-building campaign much more immersive. They allow players to invest themselves in the historical persona of a third century BC superpower, to adopt their culture, utilize their heroes, and fight their enemies.
Conquer a new city and chose whether to make it an ally, a subjugated state, or a fully incorporated province of full citizens. Each choice has economic and military consequences, accurately reflecting the true complexity of state building. Invest yourself in the role of an evil overlord or benevolent republic and all the while feel like you’re playing a part in a very real historical narrative.
Continue reading ‘MOD HIGHLIGHT: ‘Europa Barbarorum’ Puts You In Ancient World’
In a Joystiq interview from last weekend’s PAX, Bethesda executive producer Todd Howard confirmed that Fallout 3 will not include support for player modifications when it launches on October 28.
“We don’t [have MOD support at launch], we want to but we have our hands so full with getting the game out and getting tools out there that work well for people and with the game is a pretty big undertaking,” Howard said. “We definitely want to do it, but we can’t yet commit to doing it or when it will happen.”
Howard did promise DLC content for Fallout 3 on both the PC and Xbox 360. He also comments on the current console generation and the Fallout legacy in the Joystiq interview.
Bethesda’s last game, Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, included a level editing program that enabled a big community of modders who are still expanding on the game’s scope. Player made content such — dungeons, items, characters and quests — has kept Oblivion, and its predecessor Morrowind, alive and kicking long after their release.
Cut scenes establish story at the expense of interactivity. Is it worth it? Denis Dyack, creator of Too Human, says yes.
In a column for Edge Online, Dyack says that developers need to rethink the ways they use cut scenes. The article needs some editing, but there are several useful insights from an industry veteran who values good storytelling.
“Over the last five to ten years, so many games have been released where cut scenes are absolutely meaningless,” writes Dyack. “They don’t contribute to the content and don’t contribute to the characters. They’re almost like some kind of reward for completing the level, and that makes absolutely no sense.”
Dyack goes on to say that his recently released RPG epic Too Human blurs the line between cut scenes and gameplay by allowing the player to move through them a la the Half-Life games.
These are regular episodes of dialogue and action — sometimes overlapping gameplay like BioShock’s recorded tapes and sometimes allowing you to play through them like the fallout scene of Call of Duty 4. They are not fully interactive.
Fully interactive means something that does not simply add a free camera to a scripted event. To have interactive storytelling and not just an interactive lense, we need dynamic scenes that include player choice and input in more than just viewpoint.
Dyack concluded his column, “I’d still say that we’re taking baby steps in the area of bringing cinematics in games, but we’re moving in the right direction. The industry is pushing the medium, elevating it so people really get more unique experiences out of videogames than they would from any other entertainment medium.”
I hope he’s right, and I hope that more people are willing to experiment.