Tag Archive for 'Gameplay and story'

‘Left 4 Dead’ and the Cinematic Tutorial

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on December 16, 2008
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Last month’s zombie apocalypse game Left 4 Dead offers one of the best co-op experiences of the year in one complete and functional package that the team at Valve has gained a reputation for.

Unlike most Valve games, however, this one includes a very cinematic cutscene at the beginning of the game. An article by John Brownlee on the Offworld gaming blog explains how this cinematic is actually a tutorial which combines storytelling with the utilitarian function.

Left 4 Dead’s opening cinematic is a shockingly complete primer to the rest of the game. With only a few exceptions, almost any player going into Left 4 Dead for the first time will know exactly how to play the game: they already know the gameplay, the weapons, the enemies, the win scenario and the strategies they need to get through the game alive… the only thing not covered in the opening movie is the specifics of the interface.

It is one of the most useful tutorials ever put together: both broad in scope and minute in detail, with no strategy or major gameplay element overlooked. And as much as I love Left 4 Dead, I think the opening movie is probably the most brilliant thing about the game. While other developers put together opening cinematics that ignore the elements of the gameplay to tell a story, Valve made theirs a tutorial… one so subliminal that almost no one realizes they’ve sat through one.

In the article, Brownlee says point-by-point how Valve demonstrates game mechanics — like special infected behaviors and the use of pipe bombs — unintrusively through the opening cinematic, and how gamers naturally understand all these mechanics when they start the game.

One thing I liked about the cinematic is that it leaves the four characters on top of the building where they start the “No Mercy” campaign. It has a context within the story of the game, establishes the characters, and shows how the gameplay works. This is how game stories should be told, and it’s not surprising that the move came from Valve.

Braid Developer Criticizes Interactive Plots

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on November 21, 2008
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In his closing address at the 2008 Montreal Games Summit, philosophizing Braid developer Jonathan Blow summarized the obstacles that keep games from telling meaningful, profound stories, reported Gamasutra.

Blow described the dynamic stories of games as “pretend stories, poorly structured, poorly delivered and they will always be an awkward second fiddle to linear medium.”

For the keynote lecture, available in full on Blow’s blog, the independent developer reduced his argument to three conflicts of design and storytelling: story meaning vs dynamic meaning, challenge vs progress, and interactivity vs a pre-baked delivery.

Industry conventions such as interactivity and the necessity for fun and challenging gameplay, said Blow, prevent games from telling a touching story, which is necessarily linear.

“Pac-Man is about taking drugs and going on a rampage,” Blow jokes. “But that’s a completely valid interpretation… In games, interpretation extends past the visual art — the dynamic system communicates something to the player, whether that is intentional or not.”

Even serious games must make things fun, distorting the themes with complex gameplay that offers alternate interpretations.

Blow cited BioShock’s Little Sisters as a “supposed moral quandary” undone by game balance, since you end up with the same amount of ADAM power-ups whether you save or slay the girls.

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Make Your Own ‘Humble Origins’

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on November 5, 2008
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Joseph Campbell’s Hero’s Journey can frame an epic tale or be a fallback for bad storytelling, says game writer Corvus on his blog.

“While good writers can use the monomyth structure to great effect and weave a compelling tale that is both familiar and new,” writes Corvus, “lazy writers stick so closely to the formula that they actually highlight the formula within the text itself.”

Corvus looks at how the “monomyth” was implemented in the first two Fallout games, Fable and its recent sequel, and Dungeon Siege, “the most obvious and transparent monomyth setup of them all.”

In the opening cinematic, the narrator states that a humble farmer is all that stands between the kingdom and encroaching chaos. Then you pick up your hoe and start smacking goblins — an activity that continues until Burt Reynolds becomes king.

I’ve written about the Hero’s Journey before, and about the “humble origins” of player-created heroes in games. Nearly always these characters start as orphans or amnesiacs, with no interesting past but what the player decides to give them.

The original Fallout, as Corvus points out, left it up to the player to decide why the protagonist was selected to leave the vault and why he chose to save the world. The Vault Dweller could be the strongest and most noble, or a cunning snake who broke free to enrich himself.

Fable, on the other hand, called the protagonist Hero, and made him weepingly seek vengeance for his family’s murder. The game’s climax is his fate, not something chosen as it is with the Vault Dweller.

Developers need to create new ways to set the player on the Hero’s Journey without feeling dominated by it. Mass Effect allowed the player to chose Commander Shepard’s birthplace and military background, which I think is a good start.

Game Writers Need Recognition and Gaming Skills

Published
on October 18, 2008
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Game writer Lee Sheldon demands more respect for his profession, in a column for GameCareerGuide.com. He says that writers are currently misused in the production process, and that their role and the skills necessary are misunderstood by developers.

“Game studios still have a very limited idea of what writing a game means, or how writers can be used in games, and as a result rarely hire writers on staff or utilize contract writers to their fullest potential,” wrote Sheldon. “Many programs professing to train students for careers in game development share this mindset; therefore they provide limited to no training in writing for games.”

Sheldon has been involved in the industry for 15 years as a designer and writer, and for the last two years he has taught game writing at Indiana University. In his op-ed piece he addresses 10 points on why we have yet to see a prominent place for storytelling and writing in games, including the argument that games cannot balance interactivity and classical, linear storytelling.

“Non-linear stories can be found everywhere. Linear games are everywhere (and are often accused of being linear because they tell stories),” he wrote. “And boy do we need to get beyond the archaic notion that the only solution to game writing is branching.”

To succeed as a medium, games need dedicated and involved writers who understand gaming and are willing to try new things. “While writers from other media may be able to acquire it and do good work in games,” Sheldon said, “they must first understand there is a fundamental difference in writing for our medium.”

Writer James Parker adds to Sheldon’s discussion in a reply on his own blog. While a deeply involved writer can elevate a game to art, says Parker, “it isn’t the be-all and end-all of game writing.”

“There are still plenty of games that would benefit hugely from having a talented writer on board that aren’t setting out to appeal to the always vocal ‘games as art’ crowd,” he continues. “The commentary for EA’s Euro 2008 is excellent — it’s a great piece of writing, and more than that, it’s a tremendous piece of design, but what it clearly isn’t is a piece of story telling.”

“More games needs writers just to make their characters less one-dimensional, to add humor… to flesh out experiences for the player and to add realism in how the game communicates with the player.”

Award-Winning Developer Says Storytelling On the Rise

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on September 28, 2008
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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.

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‘Heavy Rain’ Has Persistant Story, So Don’t Reload

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on September 24, 2008
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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.

AGDC: Sterling’s Keynote Address Calls For Creativity

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on September 16, 2008
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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.

The Archetypal Hero in Video Games

Published
on September 13, 2008
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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).

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Dyack Says Cut-Scenes Need More Interactivity

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on September 1, 2008
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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.

‘BioShock 2′ Creative Director Sees Demand For ‘Challenging Material’

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on August 23, 2008
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Gameplayer has a great interview with BioShock 2’s creative director Jordan Thomas that covers the storytelling strengths of one of last year’s best games.

With BioShock, “2K Boston and 2K Australia wanted to build an action-narrative epic that would show respect for the player’s intelligence without forcing them to think exactly like the design team in order to ‘win,’” said Thomas.

“BioShock plays well, I think, to some of the strengths of games as a medium. Most of the first game’s story is unmitigated, meaning you get to live through or discover it directly, in the manner of a forensic anthropologist, as opposed to ‘visiting storyland’ from time to time and then returning to the entirely unrelated game experience.” added Thomas.

“If anything, we’d like to deliver an even more consistently integrated experience with any future games in the series. We hope to maintain a rich narrative atmosphere while allowing for the player to author key aspects of his or her identity with a large degree of expressive freedom. To me, that’s what BioShock is all about.”

Thomas is heading production of BioShock 2 at 2k Marin, which took up the franchise from their sister studios 2k Boston/2k Australia. Some of the original BioShock team is working with Thomas on the sequel, but the first game’s creative director Ken Levine is notably absent from the helm.

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