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.
Early run-throughs of Silicon Knights’ upcoming game Too Human have drawn interesting responses from critics.
Creator Denis Dyack has already promised that story will be essential to his upcoming opus, following the tradition of past Silicon Knights games such as cult classic Eternal Darkness.
Chris Kohler at Wired enjoyed Too Human’s story, a cyberpunk retelling of Norse mythology, but saw combat gameplay, not story, as the game’s main drive.
“Too Human is not the story-driven Silicon Knights title that we, the long-suffering fans of Eternal Darkness, have been waiting for these last five years,” says Kohler.
“Just as I came to grips with the gameplay,” Kohler adds, “and just as the story seemed as if it was starting to ramp up into overdrive — the game ended.” He took ten hours to finish Too Human’s campaign, which ends in a cliffhanger.
Tycho at Penny-Arcade took a more leisured fourteen hours to finish the game and was more satisfied with his experience.
Continue reading ‘Previews of ‘Too Human’ Enjoy Story But Not Shortness’
“Auto Assault” creator Adam Maxwell said that game writers are irrelevant next to designers in an editorial on Gamasutra.
“Writers do not dictate the way players interact with the world, nor do they dictate the way the player experiences the content that they themselves may create. These are the responsibilities of the game designer,” he wrote.
“Even when the writer has written the dialogue, decided the plot, created every character and conceptualized every setting,” it’s the designer who puts the world together, said Maxwell. “When it comes to playing the game, to interacting with the world presented within, a writer has no real power.”
This is in stark contrast to Denis Dyack’s opinions. Dyack devotes a while section of his “Too Human” team to content. Rather than releasing writers after the plot is set, as Maxwell proposes, Dyack has them work closely with the designers to ensure that their concept of the world is implemented and that art and gameplay supplement the plot.
Maxwell is ignoring the spirit of cooperative enterprise that makes games great.
He compares games to Hollywood, and agrees with Roger Ebert that “authorial control is not something native to video games.” Do directors have absolute authorial control? Absolutely not. Films are a team effort, produced with the work of hundreds of people on and off the screen. The director doesn’t turn actors and lighting engineers into puppets, but allows their creative input to become a part of the final piece.
Continue reading ‘Designer Adam Maxwell Sees ‘No Places For Writers In Our Industry’’
Silicon Knights’ Denis Dyack discussed the importance of story in making games in part one of an interview with 1UP’s wunderkind Philip Kollar.
Dyack founded Silicon Knights and is currently working on “Too Human.” He participated in a “Future of Story in Game Design” panel at the Game Developer’s Conference last month.
In the 1UP interview, Dyack adds to the issues raised at the panel, commenting on the future of story in specific genres of games, but the most interesting part of the discussion has to do with Dyack’s own studio.
Silicon Knights has a dedicated story, or content, department rather than a few writers. “It’s all based around this thing we call engagement theory, which is written like a formula: ‘engagement = story + technology + gameplay + artwork + audio.’” Each of those five components has its own director and department.
“We’re always evolving the content. Don’t think the content department does just story, either,” said Dyack, adding that the content team also works on in-game cinematography and on building tension through level design. “Whatever it takes to tell the story in the game, that group concentrates on, and they are busy from beginning to end just like all the other departments.”
Dyack is involving story in every aspect of game design for “Too Human.” I can’t wait to see what this approach yields when the game is finally released (still TBA).
Edit, March 18, 2008: Part two of the 1UP interview with Dyack is up. Dyack and Kollar talk about how games compare to other mediums. “When it comes to our fiction and the types of content we create, there’s no reason we can’t aspire to Shakespeare,” said Dyack.
Two panels discussed the importance and state of storytelling in video games at this week’s Game Developers Conference in San Francisco. The first covered the place of story in the developing medium of games, and the second looked at examples of good storytelling in games.
The Future of Story in Game Design
A panel Thursday discussed the future of story in video game development, reported Gamasutra. Deborah Todd led the panel, which included Denis Dyack of Silicon Knights and Saber 3D’s Matthew Karch, as well as Tim Willits from iD Software and Matt Costello from Polar Productions.
“I think story should serve the gameplay, and not the other way,” said Karch. “In the shooter genre, which I’m in, I don’t think anyone really cares about the story. I don’t think in some genres it’s especially important.” Karch’s team recently released “Timeshift.”
“In 5 to 10 years I don’t think there’s going to be a shooter genre. It’s going to be more literary,” argued Dyack. “A shooter would just be ‘action’.”
Dyack said story will become the dominant element in game design. “Games are the eighth art form: the glue is interactivity, and that aspect is something that makes our industry unique and there’s a huge misconception at this industry is that gameplay is everything. These people are going to be mistaken,” he said. “And as this industry matures content and story, as it did in the 30s and 40s with cinema, will become dominant.”
Continue reading ‘GDC: Panels Discuss Story in Game Design’