I’m discussing LA Noire with an industry friend. I say I find it simplistic, unfair and like playing Deal Or No Deal. There’s no strategy. My companion says he thinks it represents a step forward for storytelling, and that my cynicism perhaps indicates that it’s so good that it’s beyond most players.
This makes me pause for a moment. I ask what he means and he says it plainly: gamers are not good enough for a game such as this. They don’t get it.
LA Noire is the latest in the ‘Games Are the Future of Stories’ conversation, a marketing story which encompasses much flaky conventional wisdom about the extension of narrative. The story supposes that the player is a hero, that he is engaged in a tale of his own making, and that because the experience is interactive it is better than linear stories (which are characterised as passive).
Watching previews, you would think LA Noire had crossed a gulf, that the grand synergy of elements had created something transformational. Then you actually come to play the game, and what do you find?
Quite clearly it’s a Grand Theft Auto driving simulator without the cop chases. It has a conversation engine that closely mimics the movements of real TV actors (which begs the question: why not use the actual footage and save a ton of time and money?). You also find yourself vacuuming. You ‘investigate’ crime scenes by walking back and forth over the floor in the hope that the controller will vibrate.
In short, it’s a very expensive nudging engine. It’s actually about the story that Team Bondi wants to tell, and which occasionally pauses to, you know, let the player do some stuff to nudge the story along.
Is there really anything to ‘get’? Is it my fault that I find myself driving around LA causing crash after crash (with no consequence), hoping that side missions that involve doing stuff will appear? That I use Intuition as frequently as possible to skip the vacuuming? That interviewing is a giant version of Guess Who, and is very easily mastered (Press ‘Lie’, ‘Back’ and then ‘Doubt’ over and over.) That the supposed ‘noir’ of the game seems at odds with the very brightly lit game environment and the CSI levels of gore?
Or is it like the moment from Sex And The City when Miranda realises the secret to understanding men: he’s just not that into to you? It’s not your fault. LA Noire is just not that interesting.
What is that interesting is Portal 2. Why? What games like Portal 2 realise that LA Noire (and many a cutscene-laden game also) doesn’t is that games are not a storytelling medium. Portal 2 is all about the player.
Games don’t do storytelling well because they can’t deliver the four key components of story. There is no hero. Time is in the control of the player, not the creator. There is no inevitability or sense of being powerless. And the story cannot have the player’s full attention. So a videogame Hamlet is just a guy running around a castle flipping switches and collecting items to kill his uncle, the big boss at the end. All those speeches just get in the way.
The player is not treading the boards at the Old Vic. He’s solving problems, taking action, creating and winning. Sometimes designers think this is just a matter of technique or technology. But it’s not, it’s a fundamental constraint borne of the psychology of play. It will always be so, and is why in 40 years there have never been any good game stories.
But there are many great games that give the sense of a story. Games like Portal 2, Ico and Uncharted 2 give the impression that stuff’s going on, that you’re a part of it, and that it’s urgent. They have great storysense. Characters may talk while you’re doing stuff; things may happen; but the details, the structure, the drama?
They don’t matter. Not really.
The act of playing a game is like astral projection. You go somewhere else where the rules are different and things are afoot. You push a doll around to act as your agent in the world and this empowers little old you to do stuff.
Whether simulation, abstract, real or fantastical, that’s the basis of the art of games. It’s a visual, animated and pressure-oriented art. Players get to be a part of a world in motion. So it is the world that is artistic. Game designers are worldmakers.
Interactive stories, by contrast, are bombastic and ridiculous. Are we really at that point where we have to blame our customers for not being the right sort? Is it the players that are inadequate? Or is it our internalised sense of inferiority in the face of Hollywood?
Players are just players. It is unrealistic to expect their intrinsic psychology to change just to fit our own fantasy of what the art of games should be rather than what it actually is. That’s just about us and our difficulty accepting that we already are artists changing the world. You’re making places where people go to do amazing things. Why get in the way of that?
Comments
21I think the article raises some valid points. In regards to LA Noir, it was hyped as a game that would draw the player into a story of crime, you become the detective, you solve the murder mystery, you are the hero. Unfortunately, the game did not quite deliver the goods. Sure, you "solve" crimes. You do that by vibrating your way through levels until you find all the evidence, you lie-back-doubt your way through interogations and eventually you'll get that promotion. I didn't find anything within LA Noir that really made me feel like I'm making the story, nor did I really feel like I was being told a story. All in all, it came across as a linear, slow-motion-button-bashing. There was no sense of the story urging the player along. If I wanted to, I could keep my PS3 running for a week, standing in the same alley way and absolutely nothing would happen to the story.
I think the only way we will ever really engage in story-games, is if the game has no real story and instead only a large number of building blocks affected by events caused by other players or the AI. In a way, that is what I liked about the original Operation Flashpoint, there were missions that simply gave you an objective at the other end of the island. How you get there and how you complete the objective was entirely up to you. You could either go straight from A to B, kill X, and head for Evac, or alternatively, you could go the scenic route, happen upon a patrol or caravan, ambush them, save your buddies from a fire fight and then complete the objective. Of course, given the technology available at that time, those random events were somewhat limited - and to a certain extent, not that random, as it was expected you would venture off the beaten path. None the less, I think OF started down the right path, unfortunately it never really got the credit it, in my opinion, deserved.
Fine. So long as you accept an incredibly egocentric view of what a story is.
Stories as far as I can tell, are a cognitive function that we use to make sense of a series of circumstances, events and the actors within them. A story exists in the mind of the audience, it is created there.
The story is not what the author puts down on paper (or in code) but the successful arrangement of elements in the mind of an audience. The art of the storytelling is to create stimuli that invoke that reaction - the stimuli available to the story teller are limited by their imagination and the strengths of the media they are working within.
Any and all media can tell a story - almost by definition that is what they do.
Failures in game storytelling are only ever the result of a lazy reliance on the tropes and conventions of other media. Of ignorance of the audience and their expectations and needs.
Saying that games can't tell stories - and using Hollywood as a benchmark - is only submitting to their definition of what a story is and can be.
Is it possible we haven't entirely figured out how to do it yet? Cinema had a 50+ year head start, the written work about 1000 and the spoken word tens of thousands.
I wouldn't be quite so ready to throw in the towel.
While I'm always keen to read anything on the subject of narrative in vdieogames, this articles really does read like the work of a hardline ludologist circa 1999. What it's arguing has already been beaten to death and driven into the ground, to the point that its content - in academic circles at least - appears as a critical dinosaur.
Part of the problem is the aim; the whole 'what games are' approach is iffy at best. It's trying to pigeonhole an entire medium, trying to reduce and essentialise it (as the ludologists did) into a group of easily tackled elements. Games are more than this, they're a heterogeneous mix of expressive and functional components, the exact perameters of which cannot be quantified through essentialist statements.
First off, the claim that 'games are not a storytelling medium' is based on a shockingly narrow definition of what a story is. Even the most conservative of narratologists wouldn't be able to work with what you've given us here. The four arbitrary component of what makes a story (which are hardly applicable as defining markers of any story I've seen anyway) aren't conducive to any analytical schema.
I'll take them one by one:
'There is no hero': This is vague; is it saying that characters such as Nathan Drake are not heroes - or implying that videogames preclude a heroic figure due to intervention by the player?
'Time is in control of the player': Pick up a book, linger on a page for an hour. There you go, you're in control. The discussion of time in narratology is complex, but it's already been established by Seymour Chatman. The distinction between 'discourse-time' and 'story-time' applies here, where discourse-time is the 'reading' or 'viewing time' and story-time is the actual time expressed within the narrative context. Games are unique because their discourse time is dynamic; the game slips between discourse and story time depending on the player. This has no impact on the storytelling ability of games, it's merely another use of existing narrative mechanics.
'There is no inevitability or sense of being powerless': I would argue the opposite. Play Heavy Rain; mistakes made in that game are permanent, they strip you of power and force you to face the consequences of your actions. If anything, this 'implication' in story makes the narrative even more powerful.
'The story cannot have the player's full attention': Again, I have no idea where these 'key components' are coming from. This one seems entirely personal. It does, of course, depend on the game in question, but I think it's safe to assume both story and character were at the forefront of everyone's mind during the Suicide Mission in Mass Effect 2.
The idea that a Hamlet game would be 'a guy running around a castle flipping switches and collecting items to kill his uncle, the big boss at the end' also shows a narrow view of videogames in general. Have we not moved beyond generic tropes like this by now?
Furthermore, this seems to be a case of trying to have your cake and eat it through the creation of this 'storysense'. I think what the article is getting at here is an 'implied story' (it includes Uncharted 2 here, oddly, which is an unusually explicit and linear game narrative). But an implied story is still a story, and it's only one of many ways in which games can and do tell stories well.
Basically, as the commentor above me said, this piece is rooted in outdated ideas of a Hollywood narrative. If anything, it's this thinking that has held game narratives back and only recently are we seeing more thematically complex games (Heavy Rain, Deus Ex, Silent Hill:Shattered Memories).
I enjoy your work, however, I do believe it tends to retread old ground - particularly narrowly focused ludologist ground. Some games are good at telling stories, some games are good at other stuff, just like any other expressive medium.
Hi guys,
EpsilonMonkey:
On the subject of story creation, I wrote a piece a few weeks ago about the difference between participation and interaction. Many narrativists try to place interaction within the mind as a justification that games stories could work (but of course, where's the proof?) through ideas like the creation of fabula.
I draw a distinction between participation and interaction. Interaction is not merely how you interpret what you see or hear. It's what you physically do about it. For more, see here: http://whatgamesare.com/2011/10/interactivity-means-doing-stuff-narrativism.html
Hero: There is no hero in the sense of a central character who is woven into and a part of the story. The player is not an actor, he only ever plays as himself, and while he may be controlling Nathan Drake he certainly does not become Nathan Drake.
Time: That's a nonsense answer, sorry. It's plainly apparent that I don't mean pace or the ability to pause and rewind. You're also wrong about the effects. Most games are never finished, story or otherwise, because the player gets bored and stops playing. Even some of the most lauded story-games of all time like Mass Effect have completion rates under 50%.
That means that the story is not that interesting, not captivating players and - dare it be said - the theoretical interaction of player-as-hero is not actually what most players are feeling. Gaps in games very much do have an effect on flow, just as advertising breaks have an effect on concentration for a great TV show. It is literally the story getting in the way of what the player wants to do, which is play.
Inevitability: Inevitability in the dramatic sense means understanding who characters are and why they are is what leads them to their conclusion. It is more apparent on the second reading of a story, but also why we often rewatch or reread great stories. Hamlet is considered a great story of failure, for example, to be consumed many times before it is fully understood, because it is fascinating in the telling.
Replay of games can also be fascinating, but for a different reason. Games are fascinating as challenges and puzzles, so robustness is imperative.
Does Heavy Rain have that? Not that I can see. I haven't played much of it, but I did play more of Indigo Prophecy and it jumped around trying to decide which it wanted to be. Since the experience is one of play, the fascination of games is what takes control, and it's just not that interesting (much like LA Noire) on that level. The story is like excessive set dressing around very simple activities, and that's the ball game.
Powerlessness: Powerlessness means you as an audience have to sit and take whatever the story gives you. Empowering players is what games do.
---
Is there a danger in saying what games are? Not at all. The reluctance to do so, and to cling onto circular arguments of what one might wish games would be, is far more of a problem. As long as makers keep justifying their work on other peoples' terms and using borrowed concepts and language, games will always remain stuck.
There are some constants that apply to all games and there are many conventions of play that always produce poor results, no matter how often they are tried. Even some of the greatest games like Deus Ex and Mass Effect have bad rambling, unfocused and boring story bits that trundle along, getting no closer to their goal than ever.
Saying 'what games are' is acknowledging, without descending into purism, that maybe that way of conveying just doesn't work and we should move on.
Thanks for taking the time to reply. I know there's a lot to tackle here, so I'll be as brief as possible for all concerned!
I am wary of such terms as 'narrativists', primarily because the ludology vs. narratology debate that (sort of) took place a decade ago only harmed games studies. The thing is, terms such as 'narrativist' don't really hold up these days anyway. It's been commented that such 'narrativists' never even existed; (Gonzola Frasca, 2003) they are a straw-man created for ludologists to bounce their ideas off of. Nobody is saying we can understand games through the lense of narrative. But the vast, vast proliferation of narrative elements within games suggests that there is something story-related deeply rooted within the core game design ethos.
Clint Hocking put forward 'ludonarrative dissonance', a wonderful term which - I think - encapsulates much of what you're arguing. But does this not suggest a 'ludonarrative interdependency' too?
Hero: I think this depends on both the game and the player. The fact that Nathan Drake is regarded as a character - with a personality and history - is a vital sign that he is what you would term a hero. His behaviours are limited in-game by his personality. He does not kill innocent characters or behave in ways beyond what we could reasonably expect from his personality. Sure, a player can mess around, jump of cliffs etc. but they are restricted into behaving a certain way - as with most games - in order to maintain the game's fiction and progress. The player does not become Nathan Drake, but he experiences the game through Nathan Drake. He clearly exists independent of the game.
Time: It's the same thing; the time spent collecting items exists in a different frame from the time seen within cutscenes, or areas where a player is forced to progress. It's 'playing-time' vs 'story-time'. Some games (like Portal 2) integrate the two time frames almost perfectly, but even there the player is pushed forward at a time conducive to the narrative's stability and fiction. Think of characters who constantly spout 'shouldn't we get going?' during gaps in action. In Modern Warfare, you often fail if you fall behind within the game's story-time.
As for completion; games are a time investment. Mass Effect 2 can take 80 hours to finish, that's akin to reading War and Peace. How many people do you know who have finished War and Peace? But using your argument, it may be down to the gameplay just as much as the story that people don't finish such games. Most people who play through Deadly Premonition do it for the plot and characters, despite the awful gameplay. Again, each example must be taken as a specific case.
Inevitability: Something like Portal 2 would fit in well to such a category but it also inverts such claims; the subtelties and secrets of its narrative demand multiple playthroughs, even though the puzzles aren't as much fun the second time through. Suddenly gameplay becomes subordinate in motivation to narrative. Again, specific examples can often subvert all-encompassing claims about videogames. Every game is different.
Powerlessness: I would argue that games give the illusion of empowerment. Mass Effect gives the illusion of a large galaxy to explore, with an entirely non-linear narrative, but underneath it's strictly authored. It covers up the seams between narrative segments; you might think you're in control, but you are really 'taking whatever the story gives you.' Also consider Demon's Souls - a game that is enjoyable precisely because of the way it makes you feel powerless through a combination of gameplay elements and its world.
In regard to the idea of 'borrowed concepts and language', every medium utilises a shared dialogue. It's vital that they do - games don't exist in a vacuum, and it aids us in our understanding of both games themselves and other media if we acknowledge this fact.
Finally, I see no issue in talking about the overall nature of the videogame medium, but such discussion tends to take precedence over close readings of specific game examples. This problem has persisted for years; people love to talk about talking about games (excuse the clumsy wording), rather than just discussing specific examples and allowing games to reveal their own traits. Instead they constantly tie themselves in knots about what games SHOULD be. It's an easy trap to fall into - I do it constantly!
As a consumer, onlooker and a lifelong fan of videogames in his early 30’s, this academically flavoured debate makes moderately interesting reading, and I have to agree with the authors’ view.
Never in my life has any piece of interactive entertainment compelled me to play because of its narrative, and his statement about non-completion rates rings deeply true. The driving compulsion to pick up any controller is to play, explore and interact. Games are replayed for their experience, and that experience is always play driven. If games have an interesting narrative that’s a plus, but it is always a bi-product of a compelling interactive experience. Heavy Rain and LA Noire are novelty products, experiments in technology that deliver a shallow user experience and nothing more. I’m not questioning the validity of their existence, but I doubt very many people will be picking them up for a re-run 5 years from now, rendering both as artefacts to be kept in a storage cupboard attracting the attention of merely historians and the permanently curious. This cannot be said about the likes of Super Mario World or Tetris, which can be revisited countlessly and live on in the heart and mind forever.
This academic obsession with promoting video games’ narrative qualities seems borne more out of paranoia and the need for industry commentators’ acceptance from their peers in film/TV etc, the rabid desire to ‘ungeek’ the medium. The majority of regular people like myself who play games (across the full range of age groups) couldn’t care a less about such piffling, unimportant nonsense. We want to see technology creating new play experiences, not watered-down hybrid passive/active socially acceptable ‘entertainment’. If this is what you wish for then watch the X Factor.
We already have our gaming equivalents of Citizen Kane and Casablanca, and in the future we desire to see our gaming equivalents of 2001: A Space Odyssey and The Godfather, rather than compromised pieces of ‘art’ designed to titulate many and satisfy none.
I'm not so sure that when it comes to play, Modern Warfare 2 was any worse than Call of Duty 4. However, I think that Modern Warfae 2 is an awful game, and Call of Duty 4 is a brilliant one. Why?
The story is a key part of the experience for some games. It's vital for this particular series, and Modern Warfare 2 fumbles it so amazingly, that despite the point and shoot bits and level design being on par with it's forebear, it comes out as such a vastly inferior product.
Not to sound like a jerk or too simplistic, but it really sounds like you've never played Silent Hill 2.
(If you haven't, go play it. Now. It might end up changing your somewhat outdated thoughts on storytelling in games."
I presume you're addressing me and not the author :-)
I haven't played Silent Hill 2, so I might give it a crack.
I have however played Silent Hill: Shattered Memories, a game that was cited earlier as having a strong compelling narrative. I think the story in it was pretty decent with a nice twist, but my driving motivations to play had nothing to do with the narrative, they were borne out of the visual design (influenced by player profiling), the setting, the fantastic audio (including the Wiimote telephone excerpts gimmick) and the feeling of vulnerability from being largely powerless against a disturbing supernatural enemy. Climax studios also made the smart choice of not making the game too long as these qualities started to wane toward the end of what is a pretty simple but atmospheric adventure game.
Alan Wake is another modern game I've invested time in which is praised for its story, and I found my interest waning after about 5-6 hours in the face of endlessly repetitive and simple action sequences, unimaginative puzzles and boring driving sections designed to force consumption of Wake's internal monologue. The game has a strong atmosphere and considered narrative, but that simply wasn't enough to cushion the pain of trudging through further hours of tedious gameplay.
I'm not dismissing narrative in games, I just don't think it's ever one of the more important facets that a genuinely good game uses to keep the player engaged. A good gaming experience with a good narrative is always so for many other reasons above the narrative, be it the setting, challenge, player feedback and audio/visual accomplishments which create atmosphere and immersion. I'm prepared to bet this applies to Silent Hill 2 also.
Any other suggestions?
Hey EpsilonMonkey,
I know what you mean about the old associations. There are also many ludologists who argue that they were never 'against' story in the first place. I also think the old L-v-N axis proved somewhat limited, in that there were also simulationist and (more recently) behaviourist interpretations which fell outside that debate.
However narrativist bears out if you think of it as people who believe games and stories are deeply linked. Ludo-ist not so much (because it really is so broad) so I tend to write in terms of 'tetrist' (fundamental the-mechanics-are-everything types) instead.
One of the planks of a talk I gave a few months ago has it that 'what games are' is none of these extreme positions, but rather that each is like a corner of a pyramid. Some narrativist thinking, some tetrist thinking, some simulationist and some behaviourist thinking all mixed together. Some games tending toward one or the other, but none ever achieving the perfect state that each aspires to.
The some narrativist thinking that works is storysense. It's during the play of Uncharted or wandering through Half Life 2. It's the backing track of radio to the whole of GTA and so on. Storysense hints, holds back and infers. It's the discoverable books in Deus Ex, the info library in Mass Effect, the fog in Silent Hill and so forth.
I have no problem with any of that. It all works really well and is a key part of what games are. What doesn't work and is kludgy and difficult is the imposition of telling, of being caught in a room while Alyx Vance talks at you for five minutes.
I think ludonarrative interdependency and dissonance are great terms, but I tend to use synergy and dysnergy (its opposite) instead because they are easier to say and to explain to outsiders (well synergy is, and dysnergy is then easy to explain off the back of that). Left 4 Dead, for example, has great synergy because the falling-down rules of the game require cooperation among players and that works well with the storysense. On the other hand I recently wrote an article faulting roleplaying games for attempting to be high art but fighting with their own looting and self expression (see here: http://bit.ly/tUc8xz ), which is dysnergy.
----
Hero: You can say the same about Max Payne or any other number of characters up until the moment the player takes control of them. That's when they become a doll. It really doeesn't matter how much the game has told the player about who they are suppsoed to be up to that point. One of the key strengths of storysense over storytelling is that it dispenses with backstory entirely. Many of the greatest remembered dolls are complete blank slates (Mario, the Master Chief, etc) because development of the player is really beside the point of play.
Indeed, a game character is not the same as a film or novel character. Their function is as a part of the environment, more like caricature than character really, and great storysense focuses on establishing that quickly rather than developing it as such. Some players like Aeris from Final Fantasy, but it's more to do with how she's established in the present (movements, look, things she says, gameplay advantages) than exposition and backstory.
Time: I neglected to fully comment on this last time and talked mostly about players finishing games. What I mean by control of time is this: In a story, the storyteller controls time through editing, flashback and forward and other tricks that allow a dramatic arc to build even though it might notbe in chronological time. In a game, the designer does not have this control. The game proceeds forward in game time at the control of the player, to do with as he pleases.
So it's not about urgency or pressure. It's about the fact that the game can't skip past the boring parts with a cut, a later-that-day and so on. It has to wait for the player. In the Flash game Dino Run, for example, there's a lot of pressure from the oncoming wall of extinction. But there are also parts where you do well, get caught on a tree, bounce around a bit and so on. Some games, as you mentioned, try to solve this with nudging. Think about how annoying those nudging characters become, and how peevish the whole experience seems and so on. Nagging breaks flow and is bad design.
Inevitability: Portal 2 lacks the 'character' part of that. Yes, you know that Steve Merchant's robot will probably turn out to be bad, and GladOS will turn out helpful. But that's entirely simplistic and obvious. By character inevitability I mean watching Howard Beale's decline in Network every step of the way and seeing how it builds. Dramatic inveitability builds through every moment of every scene (or at least, it should, in bad writing it tends to go astray).
Powerlessness: I would argue that games actually empower. You get to drive a fast car. Leap a tall building in a single bound. Command a star ship. Save the world. Solve a puzzle. These are clear attractive fantasies that the game lays out to the player, almost saying 'forget your frustrating real life, come in to my world and shoot some aliens'. Even survival horror games empower in the sense that you get to face down and defeat something horrible. So empowerment is more about doing than scenario. The scenario is how the game challenges that power, makes you work to get the best out of it. It's not much fun to get the fastest car or the most powerful spell straight away, but it will be when you get it.
---
Sure. I'm having a crack at it anyway :)
Just to join in with this one, as Epsilon is raising some vital points, there's a couple of claims I want to refute.
Hero:
Your definition of hero or character seems to rely on simply spoken dialogue or backstory. Is character not expressed through action? The two example you give of blanks slates, mario and masterchief, are clearly not "blank". Mario's exuberant movement, sound means you could easily describe his character having never seen a cutscene or exposition. Equally Masterchief is expressed through his abilities. I'd say his floaty jump and recharging shield are more characterful than any cutscene of him. The player cant make Mario behave like masterchief, or the reverse, they are restricted to a set of character specific actions. Neither is blank, and I'm pretty sure most players would consider mario a character separate from themselves. By applying the rules of cinematic or literary narrative to videogames you are making the claim that videogames cannot tell stories. Perhaps you should be claiming that videogames can't tell filmic/literate stories. But then, its not so simple as that...
Powerlessness/inevitability:
The effect your describing here could otherwise be known as dramatic irony, as you've mentioned Hamlet, which is the textbook for the effect. Your view that this cannot exist in games appears to be based in a fairly flat reading of many videogames, I would argue that limited actions and the finite nature of games means that even Donkey Kong expresses these ideas, but i'll give an example that requires less of a leap of the imagination:
In Kane and Lynch, a game with its fair share of problems, you play Kane, a criminal heading to death row and putting up little resistance. Kane is happy to die knowing that at least, you can no longer do any damage to your family. But Kane is forced into a situation where failing to act will result in the death of his family, at the hands of men he had betrayed. Throughout the game Kane struggles to save his daughter, only able to use violence and aggression to do so. Yet we know this escalating violence and aggression is only leading him further from his daughter, further from reality and further from controlling the situation. Despite his best attempts, things just get more fucked up, and the player knows it is Kane that is doing this to himself. At the end of you are given the choice to abandon your teammates and save your daughter (thereby proving to all around you that you are as treacherous as you have been told) or attempt to save them and risk her life. Its an impossible choice. One option leads to a complete lack of character resolution as Kane flies away in a helicopter with the daughter than hates him, unchanged and morally compromised. The other leads you into a dangerous battle that results in Kane's daughter getting injured, and having to be carried for the rest of the mission. Of course, we as players know she is dead, but Kane struggles on, shouting her name, and it is us that push him on, out of sympathy or morbid curiosity. The scene ends with Kane reading the letter he wrote in prison to his dead daughter, as they float together in a dark lake.
The powerlessness experienced by the player, and the dramatic irony throughout the game functions beautifully here. Games cast player in a variety of roles, from hero, to audience, to tormentor. From close friend to distant observer. And games most certainly can tell stories.
Oh come on. Certain types of games tell certain types of stories very badly. I agree with you on LA Noire. But to say they can't is ridiculous, and perhaps just a strawman against the strong opposing view.
25 years later I still remember the story of Below the Root. I remember Ultima IV, V, and VI. Planescape: Torment is still a better story than most books I've read. Silent Hill (1) had a fantastic story that wasn't given to you, you had to tease it out. In fact in most of favorite game stories, the story is something that needs to be teased out, rather than just delivered to you on a plate. This 'authorship' by the player, even if constructed by the game's authors, seems to be a strong part of it.
I submit video games can tell stories just fine, but you have to be very careful about what kind of story you're telling and how you're delivering it. Just cramming a movie or book into a game (Uncharted) doesn't do the trick because then you run into all the problems you enumerate. Killer 7 had the best video game story outside of Torment, but the horrible game mechanics destroyed it, so there's a problem with the 'how'.
best page ever.
rly, rly brilliant epsilon. i'll be reading that rest of the week
I have a problem with this, because the article clearly claims that 'games can't tell stories', but what this suggests is that they can, but not in a particular way, i.e with large amounts of exposition through dialogue. Another conclusion from this is that games can tell stories precisely through this thing you call storysense, or through the structuring and framing of play - that's their way of doing it. Storysense to me sounds like one way of telling a story by integrating it with play, which is exactly the kind of storytelling you would expect videogames to be good at, just like films have different storytelling techniques to novels, and so on.
I think of something like No More Heroes, where the tasks the player is charged with (the play) in their content and structure add layers to the central character, provide motivation, even offer social commentary. The way Travis's ultimate escapist fantasy when realised simply exacerbates the mundane repetition of everyday life, and by extension reflects on our life in the game, is a superb piece of meta-narrative, and it's mostly done through 'storysense' and interaction. The fairly short cutscenes are still necessary to link things together, however - it is not a story simply comprising a document of player actions, as a ludologist might have it.
What I'm getting at is that this is storytelling, and more than that it's a uniquely videogame form of storytelling - no other medium could do it because it relies on participation in the tasks to make it work (just like Don Quixote needs a complicit reader). Rather than reaching a negative conclusion that games can't tell stories by some narrow definition then, I'd rather focus on the exciting and never before possible ways they can do it, and examine that further.
Braid
/thread
If a game cast you yourself as a character would that fulfill your need for a hero?
For example if I popped a game in my xbox and before booting sent me a message on the dashboard asking for help I then boot the game and a character talks to me directly asking for help he/she/whatever then lets me remotely control a vehicle or whatever to help them in there war against alien/disc virus? I am not playing as a character within the game I am me, operating a virtual avatar within the game world and my actions and the reactions of the AI would form a story would it not? I could not act out of character because I am the character.
Of course games can't tell stories - if you choose to define 'story' as 'everything a game can't do'. You seem to have picked a handful of narrative methods and placed them within the circle of 'story' while filing all other methods under 'storysense'. Without any elaboration of the difference you see between 'story' and 'story-sense', it's all rather murky.
This would be problematic enough, but I don't think your claim that games can't 'do' these elements has much merit. Your arguments boil down to the idea that since games cannot COMPLETELY control certain areas of player experience, they cannot be said to use these methods as storytelling. It is the Ebert fallacy - that storytelling is impossible without total control - and it ignores the idea that, in establishing the conditions of the player's story, the game can condition its final shape.
(and while we're at it, the idea that games can't do stories because players don't pay much attention to them is really silly - would games 'not do' multiplayer if a significant number of people didn't bother with it? do games 'not do' endings because few people reach them? This is exactly the kind of thing Ian Bogost talked about in 'From Aberrance to Aesthetics')
In your article on the difference between interaction and participation, you define the former as "making, changing, breaking or otherwise manipulating what you see so it becomes something else." But a player acting within the bounds of a game's ruleset does not actually change the game - she capitalises on options the game has provided (whether by developer intention or not). How can you place emphasis on the rules of play and then claim games 'empower' purely with reference to the fantasies they simulate? Modern Warfare lets you kill a lot of people but it would be hard to argue it 'empowers' the player on a ludic level. It may legitimately empower them on a psychological one, though this depends on whether the verb 'empower' is used to refer to the creation of a feeling or the proposition of a particular kind of relationship.
By your definition, only modders, hackers and speedrunners actually interact rather than participate. And in the latter case there's no clear distinction between changing the 'text' and simply exploiting opportunities that were present in the system but were not seen.
Ultimately I think you're mistaking a problem of competence for a fundamental what-games-are issue. 'Game developers sometimes choose to deliver stories in boring or shitty ways and therefore games can't tell stories'. In fact, I agree that Heavy Rain and LA Noire are not the way forward, that they don't make significant steps. And I share your irritation with the spurious dead end of reaching after capital-A-Art by trying, badly, to mirror other media. But I don't see how any of that leads to this expansive fractal snowflake of no-true-scotsman fallacies.
If you think Portal 2 was not a story I disagree with you 100%. Not only was it a story it set the bar of storytelling in games up to a higher standard IMO. Emotionally it runs the gamut of eliciting the responses the storyteller wishes us to go through to tell this story of hopelessness vs hope.
As the stories protagonist, you are a hopeful character seeking 'escape' from a hopeless world of 'entrapment'. The antagonist in this story are the forces that seek to perpetuate that entrapment. Their arcs through this journey follow a plot that leads both parties to understanding that the existence of this place was never its original intent but a combination of ambition overriding caution, which in turn planted the seeds of error, as seen in the deterioration of the complex, culminating currently in the corruption of Wheatley.
The pairing of GLaDOS and Chell is as classic a hero/villain handcuff story as any. Through that handcuff we see GLaDOS grow, begin to help us and through that direct experience have our perspective of her change from one note Villain, to a cautious hope of friendship and desire to believe she's on our side. Scars of what she's done to us before will never disappear (adding a fantastic touch of tragedy), but we also don't have to fear her. A more satisfying 'defeating of the boss' than other games without even knowing why. Physically we defeat Wheatley, but Emotionally we overcome obstacles of insignificance, hopelessness, and hate with GLaDOS.
The very nature of the world suggests a classic 'dystopian view with a ray of hope'. The world is not fair, but it is not impossible if you are able beat it at its own game. Each level containing you by its very nature is an exemplification of this ideal. Puzzles of entrapment accented with a voice track of belittlement. The inescapable nature of 'game level' barriers and puzzles are used to not limit the story, or to arbitrarily make it a game. If it did - then indeed the Hamlet example would apply. But this is the story of Chell proving to this world that she is not as stupid and hopeless as GLaDOS would have her believe. GLaDOS presents her with obstacles that challenge her intellect and upon failure only confirm her doubts about us, and in turn us about ourselves. Perhaps she's right. I can't figure out this puzzle - maybe I am a moron. Our human nature to seek our freedom and fight any who would tear us down kicks in, pushing us forward to defeat each puzzle and in doing so triggers that hard-wired response we all share as humans, while furthering the message of the game's story. "The game of life is only as impossible as you are willing to figure it out". Each puzzle solved is another proverbial 'finger' in the face of that world, and in the end - really - who doesn't like flipping the bird in the face of a would be oppressor?
So to say this game is not a story? I disagree and there are plenty of books and films out there with FAR more inferior narratives to them. I'll say that most of the best stories are still in books, and that many of the best storyTELLERS are still in Film, but that's a trend that will not change overnight. Nor will there ever be a moment where the best stories are in one medium over another. It's never been that way and never will be. There's always that 10% of great work, and the other 90% of garbage it's been built upon. Nor does being a good storyteller in one medium mean you will be the same in another. Michael Jordan being great at Basketball doesn't mean that will translate to baseball. In the end though my thoughts as are yours - are only the opinions of one person. No less, no more. I think you raised some great points in the article but I have to disagree with your bold, 28pt title:
OPINION: Games CAN tell stories.
I like reading these ideas!
Narrativist vs. Ludologist is briefly mentioned in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ludologist if anyone else is wondering what this is about.
Like some dissenters, I don't agree with whatever definition of story the editor used.
Myself, I think if a game did nothing to integrate the gameplay and story, it could simply display text from a novel directly on the screen with the game level in-between. This would be no less than a book, so it can do anything a book can do in the story direction. Some games really don't do much more than this.
Games like the Witcher II, Catherine, and Braid have really drawn me in with their stories, so I definitely think that a game is more than just the gameplay mechanics. A good game has interesting (and addictive maybe) mechanics as well as an engrossing story. Simple stat and loot-based games are often devoid of interesting backstory but keep me hooked, showing, conversely, that story can be overlooked entirely.
I also liked the comment that being classified as a story-telling medium is more a symbol of respect and support from longer-established media. I think that that's really what this question is about.
I used to feel story was important. Read this, and the comments, and I've changed my position. Well, kind of.
I think what is important is that games vary a whole lot more than most other art forms. For example Command and Conquer and Tetris are far more different than say Transformers and Shirin, or Festen. SO there fore I'd suggest story in games is far more wildly applicable.
I'd also add that while a linear story perhaps isn't best told in games (though It can be done well, I've found Halo, Alan Wake and MSG all pretty compelling from a story view, and have enjoyed replays for narrative satisfaction) there are ways. I think its most obvious in games potential of world building. Stuff like Skyrim, love it or hate it, provides a mix of action and agency with more traditional things narrative techniques like dialogue, or written word to allow players to construct stories. It provides information and then allows players to discover as much information as they want.
I think the consumption of diagetic information in a game allows players to construct stories. Three playthroughs of Deus Ex: Human Revolution led to the same basic story being played, flavoured with the changable sections. However it was all the things I read or heard that helped to make it different enough for me to playthrough and discover a different narrative. I'd also add, preemptively, that the stuff I discovered were relevant to plot and story and enviroment, and thus I think can be characterised as more than just cerebral collectibles (and thus ludological?).
In some ways I think I'm also talking about storysense, than story telling. But I think it shouldn't dismissed so easily, Its important, and the reason I've played many games.
The reason story is important is more often seen though when its terrible. I appreciate that Gears of War is popular, and I've played through the first two, but I've no desire to again, not just because I found repetitive but because I can't stand the characters or story and i find a lot of the subtext disgusting.
Then again some games shouldnt have a story. tetris, for example. But more recently I'd say the singleplayer (and thus story?) part of BF3 was just a distraction.
A thing games do well is setting. Take Half Life 1's mono rail ride through the laboratory or Bioshocks Rapture. This part of the story also seems to not conflict so much with gameplay as do dialogue or plot (cut scenes). In many ways it even is the gameplay, giving you a place to explore or travel through all the while silently telling you a story.