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Started by Mister Six, February 15, 2011, 07:27:51 PM

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Mister Six

A while back I went on a - probably ill-advised - rant about the quality of storytelling in Half Life 2. In the back-and-forth that followed, a couple of interesting things were said:

Quote from: Famous Mortimer on January 17, 2011, 12:16:27 PMBut, you don't play a game to watch the story, though. You play a game to play a game. There's not much plot in driving round, attaching limpet mines to those long-legged fellas then detonating them; but it's loads of fun! Also, in films, they don't have conveniently-placed stashes of ammo and health packs which only help the main character, deep in the heart of the enemy base.

Quote from: Still Not George on January 17, 2011, 12:38:02 PM
Exactly. You can tell epic and involving stories in games, but those who want deep, involving plots are probably missing the point a little.

Now I read these remarks with some surprise, because I've always stood very much on the other side of the divide. For me a strong narrative and story are almost always at the core of the best gaming experiences. Planescape, for example, is almost all plot with a few perfunctory battles on the side and it kept me glued to my screen for hour after hour - unlike Baldur's Gate, with its 2D characters, silent NPCs and drip-fed nothing of a story. Likewise Mass Effect 2: I find the actual combat incredibly repetitive and the anaemic equipment and level-up systems disappointing, but I've sunk 60 hours into that game and its DLC, and will do again with another character, simply because the story (and multiple sub-stories) were so involving, the characters so well-developed and the universe featured in it so elaborate and intriguing.

There are exceptions to this, of course - Just Cause 2's story is absolute gash (and the acting even worse) but has enough ludicrous action to keep me entertained for ages. Likewise Borderlands, which contains only trace elements of plot but is simply an enormous amount of fun to play. And yes, sometimes people go too far in the other direction, like when FFXIII turned out to be hundreds of hours of cutscenes linked by corridors filled with monsters.

But for me, story can absolutely make or break a game and I don't feel that I'm 'missing the point' in hoping for 'deep and involving' stories. If anything, the likes of Mass Effect and Dragon Age show that video games are second only to novels in terms of long-form, epic storytelling.

Am I right? Am I wrong? TELL ME.

pk1yen

Personally, I like the Halo story - replaying the game after reading the novels was a treat, if only for the tiny details (aided perhaps by the fact I was a teenager and easily obsessed). But I know I'm in the vast minority here, so I won't push it.

Mass Effect is a fantastic universe, too. Maybe I just have a fetish for Forerunner/Protean type things.

There's something about a game's ability to craft a whole universe that's special, with as much or as little backstory and mythology as the player wants to find. I tend to love the universes of games, rather than the plot. But I think plot is overrated in general anyway.

The overarching stories/universes of Fallout and Zelda are also some of my favourites.

mobias

Weirdly I was actually just about to start a new discussion thread along similar lines. I watched Charlie Brooker's Gameswipe again on youtube last night and it was interesting hear him talk about how emotive and intellectually stimulating games can be. However, whilst I agree with him I'd be hard pushed to think of many real examples. I think there's definitely potential out there for games to be as emotive as movies or books and to have stories that are just as engrossing as any movie or book I don't believe anyone is coming that close to doing so, at least in mainstream gaming. I guess some designers like Rockstar are, I found the end of Red Dead Redemption genuinely moving. Its a bit on its own though, there's not many contenders coming up behind it.   

I've been thinking about this a lot recently because I'm playing through Just Cause 2 to the end just now and it is just a horribly vacuous experience yet because there's something undeniably fun about blowing things and shooting people it keeps on drawing me back to it. It is so soul-destroyingly empty though. I feel like I'm induced in myself a slight vegetative state of mind after playing it.

I think some games designers have their work cut out for them when it comes to how games are perceived and what gamers ultimately want out of them. GTAIV proved how difficult it is walking that line between making a game fun but also trying to take it in a more serious direction. I think ultimately people don't really want that from games or come to them for that experience. 

From my point of view I want games to be fun, that's the bottom line. I'd rather actually just watch a movie than play a game that's desperately trying to be a movie. That's why I'm not so much into highly linear plot driven games. When they're done well as with Uncharted 2 then its great fun playing through all these brilliantly devised gaming set pieces but ultimately the whole experience is a slave to bland and hugely derivative story and there's so many of this type of game out there. There's very little replay value in them for me.

In many ways Red Dead Redemption is as close as I've found to my perfect game, and that says a lot considering I'm really not that into cowboy movies. Its got so much of what should be done well in games.

Still Not George

Not really in the mindset for a real post on this subject atm (I'm havng the tail-end of my day off) but I did want to mention one thing - my personal liking of Mass Effect and Mass Effect 2 has very little to do with the storyline itself, which is really just cheesy space opera crap. Most of what I like about Mass Effect is the interaction, and in particular the amount of effort that's gone into detailing the universe. The salarians, krogan, turians, asari, hanar, etc are really excellent inventions, vastly superior to most space opera alien fare. In fact I'm having trouble thinking of ANY space opera-type media that's gotten multiple alien races better.

HappyTree

I like throwaway games like Mashed and Katamari, driving games like GRID and Burnout, messing about games like GTA, Crackdown and Spiderman 3. I'd say that's the gaming bit that I like.

But my favourite type of game is the adventure game with a good story. I like Mass Effect for the story; I like Oblivion for the story; I like Advent Rising for the story; I like Fable and Prince of Persia and Kameo and KotOR and Assassin's Creed and Breakdown and Fahrenheit, all for the story. Not only the story but the feeling of being immersed in a different world. I want it to be like reading a Sci-Fi or Fantasy novel with a bit of interaction. That's why I don't like FPSes that much, I couldn't care less about performing well, honing my skills and being a good shot, being the best, surviving. I usually play games with the difficulty at the easiest level.

The best game for that I ever played was The Longest Journey. Dreamfall was ok, but not as good. I hope they make a 3rd instalment.

Big Jack McBastard

With regards Mass Effect I agree with SNG that the races are nicely fleshed out but it suffers elsewhere, not so much with the story it's self but the freedom of movement on world and off, there's a restrictiveness to it which irks me a bit, stuff is handed to you on a plate for the most part, little in the way of hidden gems or even secured stashes of supplies and interesting shit, in contrast to RPGS like Fallout and Oblivion which are both open massive and packed with interesting little nuggets. It's true ME2 did step it up a bit but many of the same (admittedly not titanic) problems with it remain.

I think Morrowind was one of the first to grip me with it's lore and storytelling, just reading the books in that game took a bloody age, but then reading the examinations of those books written by another author in the game for a realist 'modern' view on some of the fantastical elements presented as fact in the propagandaish tales about Vivec and co was a nice touch. The fact that they'd gone to that depth was really impressive and gave the whole idea of their world a more cohesive narrative in my noggin. Hope they pull their finger out for Skyrim and don't do another rehash on 70% of them.

I am pro dense storylines, but it's not a definite requirement for a good game.

madhair60

All stories in games are hamstrung by the form itself, and they're all shit as a result.

Big Jack McBastard

That's a bit harsh, Myst was at least an interesting concept and spawned 3 books that were passable.

I've not the energy to go through more modern game+book franchises so I can't comment on any recent ones though.

Claude the Racecar Driving Rockstar Super Sleuth

I played the Silent Hill games more for the story than the gameplay, but that's the exception rather than the rule.

Maybe it's a generational thing. I've never been into text/point and click adventures, I tend to favour games that are a test of skill ('coz I'm fick) so, for many years after I first started playing games, this was pretty much the standard of storytelling.

It wasn't until the Playstation/N64 generation that more sophisticated cutscenes became the norm.

madhair60

S'possible to enjoy a game's storyline, in the same way you can enjoy trash TV.  The very fact you can, if you choose, stand still and face a wall for 100 consecutive hours with no impact on the plot is what makes game storytelling false, at best.

Still Not George

Having had a bit of a think about this. What I think is the core of the problem is that 30 years of development of games as a physical emulation of drama - the emulation and immersion of physicality within a scene within a largr dramatic framework - have coincided with the latter phases of the overwhelming shift in visual media towards non-physical drama. Critics in particular, the gatekeepers of the ascription of the term "art", have been going through a nearly 50 year long shift from a period which considered physical and quasi-physical action as the essence of good visual drama, through to a period where having physical action at all can be seen by some of the more "serious" critics as a fallback.

Games don't really lend themselves to non-physical drama, do they? It's an inherent problem of the course of development they've taken. It's as if the film industry had adopted a specific film format early in its history which made gaseous-petroleum-ignition special effects look absolutely terrible instead of completely awesome. Would we still have countless blazing explosions - unreal but totally awesome in look - in films if this had been the case? No, the medium adapts to what it can portray well. A medium can waste its capability for a given manifestation of development; a Mike Leigh talking shop is filmed using the same techniques that blow up countless everythings in Die Hard movies with no trouble. But it can't develop contrary to what feels good to its audience.

So if games have evolved away from a position where non-physical drama is practical, and if non-physical drama is the only generationally acceptable form at the moment, why the hell do studios still hire writers at big salaries to produce cheesy dirge like the plot to the Mass Effect series?  My suggestion is the same as the reason for us supposedly lacking a Citizen Kane (quick note - we're not lacking a Citizen Kane, it's called ICO). It's because games are only 30 years old as a medium.
It was the mostly-awful sim game "The Movies" that brought it home to me. Moving pictures, for many years after their inception, were completely and utterly in thrall to the theatre. Films were ultimately filmed plays, stage actors standing and taking cues, sometimes even with an actual curtain falling across the picture (especially in the silent era). The things were often filmed on an actual stage. Ultimately, it took film anywhere up to 30 years or so to define its own identity as an artform, and games are just now beginning to scrape that point. And as a result, we're fpr the most part either dispensing with story except as a mild pretence for the sake of familiarity (a la Call Of Duty et al), or utilising standard story elements like magic words, or alternatively trying but failing to present movie storyline principles in a gaming context. Which doesn't work for two reasons  - one, the forms are inherently different in a way film and TV never were, and two, as I already mentioned, games tend strongly towards physical drama, while film with the same pretensions avoids it like the plague.

I remember having a lengthy conversation with the level designer I brought in last year while he was working on the description of a game for a pitch document. He is a film graduate and very much a film culture person. I had to explain to him that using the term "slapstick" was a bad idea in a game pitch, as it has associations in the gaming world with things like The Simpsons Game and other terrible knock-offs. It's a term most commonly used by the non-gaming press when they're hyping total and utter shit. So in the gaming world, it's a big fat negative.
He couldn't understand it one bit. To him, "slapstick" meant classic physical humour, meant Charlie Chaplin, meant Buster Keaton. Meant an association with a long history of very high-quality physical humour, and he instinctively understood that physical emulation is the core of games. What he didn't understand is that the two worlds only vaguely share qualities, and that virtually ALL games contain some elements that could be described as "slapstick," but they're shorn of their humour by the realities of the medium. It's not a deliberate thing, it's a natural side-effect of the attempts at physical emulation made by games. A good example is the classic view of a third-person character, running up against a wall, still running at full speed, head bowed down. It's an amusing scene in and of itself, but because it's such a common side-effect of animation meeting collision systems, it's simply ignored. It's not part of the set of elements that physical humour in a game would have to follow.

And ultimately, story is the same. Story in games means non-physical-emulation sequences by default. Even in Half Life and its successors, the story is played out in scenes that cannot be prevented, only evaded. Decision making and emotional impact is handled using incredibly crude (if easy to use) mechanics like the conversation wheel in Mass Effect. Nearly everything that happens inside a game serves to remind you that the game is not the story and the story is not the game. The game is the experience, and the story is the sugar on that experience.

Is there a way around the problem? Probably, but I would suggest it needs someone from outside the twin worlds of visual media writing and game production. We need a savant, basically.

Mister Six

Quote from: madhair60 on February 15, 2011, 10:59:34 PM
S'possible to enjoy a game's storyline, in the same way you can enjoy trash TV.  The very fact you can, if you choose, stand still and face a wall for 100 consecutive hours with no impact on the plot is what makes game storytelling false, at best.

You can pause a DVD for 100 hours. You can stop reading a book for 100 hours. Complaining that the story stops when you refuse to engage with it is a ludicrous argument. It certainly has no bearing on the quality of the stories being told, which is the argument you appear to be trying to make.

Mister Six

#12
Quote from: Still Not George on February 15, 2011, 09:09:21 PM
Not really in the mindset for a real post on this subject atm (I'm havng the tail-end of my day off) but I did want to mention one thing - my personal liking of Mass Effect and Mass Effect 2 has very little to do with the storyline itself, which is really just cheesy space opera crap. Most of what I like about Mass Effect is the interaction, and in particular the amount of effort that's gone into detailing the universe. The salarians, krogan, turians, asari, hanar, etc are really excellent inventions, vastly superior to most space opera alien fare. In fact I'm having trouble thinking of ANY space opera-type media that's gotten multiple alien races better.

Your other post requires an amount of concentration and time that I probably won't be able to muster tonight, but I just wanted to say that I agree broadly with your comments about Mass Effect's over-arcing story being cheesy and (I'd say a bit) crap, especially the rather convenient appearance of the hitherto unmentioned Collectors in ME2 (although I'd add that the story is still predicated on some rather excellent ideas like
Spoiler alert
The Citadel turning out to be a weaponised version of 2001's monoliths - the idea of a hyper-intelligent lifeform elevating lesser species not out of a sense of egalitarianism but just so it can cull them is a splendid one
[close]
).

However, I'd say that many of the sub-stories, from Mordin being forced to confront his past as an alien Josef Mengele to the overheard conversation between a long-lived Asari and her short-lived Salarian husband trying to find something for their daughter to remember him by, are easily on a par with equivalent fiction in other media (if you can look past the sci-fi trappings).

HappyTree

I don't find the stories cheesy dirge at all. I like sci-fi and fantasy. My brother hates it, he finds fantasy books ludicrous and so finds games based on that world silly too.

I find them exciting and uplifting. I don't find the themes cheesy at all as I believe in true, beautiful love and don't need to be reminded of gritty realism all the time. I wish the world were exactly like a fantasy book, with all the earnest soul searching contained therein.

People just like different things. I cried at the end of The Longest Journey, for the length of the game I was in it and believed every word.

Still Not George

Quote from: Mister Six on February 15, 2011, 11:33:49 PMHowever, I'd say that many of the sub-stories, from Mordin being forced to confront his past as an alien Josef Mengele to the overheard conversation between a long-lived Asari and her short-lived Salarian husband trying to find something for their daughter to remember him by, are easily on a par with equivalent fiction in other media (if you can look past the sci-fi trappings).
I completely agree, and I probably failed to get that across in my earlier post. The degree of realisation of the world they're creating is nothing short of draw-dropping, and the game is chock-full of clever allusions to things; the holographic billboards on the Citadel in the second game are a particularly beautiful swipe at Google-esque data-mining for advertising purposes and so on.
Spoiler alert
Mordin's recovery from his emotional trauma, and the explanation thereof, is another magnificent moment.
[close]
One of my favourite throwaway bits in the second game is a radio news broadcast which mentions the establishment of the Shepard Scholarship Fund on Earth, intended to help kids escape the same mean streets my Shepard emerged from. It's all excellent stuff, very involving.

But the overall storyline is revealing itself to be pretty much painting-by-numbers space opera, which is kind of disappointing. Even the snippets of ME3 we've seen so far aren't very promising. I understand they're aiming at a myth arc (the underworld descent represented by
Spoiler alert
joining Cerberus
[close]
in the second game was jarring but on balance sensible) but as it stands, it's not going to hold up with the likes of Babylon 5 or even Deep Space 9. There's too much tropery, too many weird foibles (why does everyone in the galaxy want to screw Shepard? Why is every single politician evil, and why are all non-retired military personnell either evil or dying?).

So ultimately the MEs are demonstrating my theory. Because of the needs of a physical action storyline, the twists are restricted to the trite and predictable. So what's left is the careful management of experience rather than story. Shepard Scholarships are experience elements; so is the discovery that krogan have three testicles and that they buy other males' testicles and have them implanted in the hope it'll make them more fertile. None of those things add to the story, they add to the joy that can be had in pushing forward with the experience.

Claude the Racecar Driving Rockstar Super Sleuth

Quote from: Still Not George on February 15, 2011, 11:00:12 PMMoving pictures, for many years after their inception, were completely and utterly in thrall to the theatre. Films were ultimately filmed plays, stage actors standing and taking cues, sometimes even with an actual curtain falling across the picture (especially in the silent era). The things were often filmed on an actual stage. Ultimately, it took film anywhere up to 30 years or so to define its own identity as an artform, and games are just now beginning to scrape that point.
It's sort of gone the opposite way with games. Technological advances allowed cinema to transcend theatre, but games started out looking nothing like cinema and have ended up resembling it more as graphics improve.

Desi Rascal

Quote from: madhair60 on February 15, 2011, 10:59:34 PM
S'possible to enjoy a game's storyline, in the same way you can enjoy trash TV.  The very fact you can, if you choose, stand still and face a wall for 100 consecutive hours with no impact on the plot is what makes game storytelling false, at best.

^ I think it boils down to Immersion V Storytelling. A good novel or movie strips away all the extraneous parts.


Take Morrowind, the cliff racers actually hindered the narrative,distracting from the elements that deserved the focus.





Zetetic

I'm just trying to clarify your point, SNG -
Are you saying that the issue is that:
Games require the storyline to provide the player with fun ('physical') actions?
Games only allow decision-making, or simply plot advancement, by broadly 'physical' actions on the part of the player or else utterly crude mechanisms such as the ME speech wheel?

(Or, both?)

(Where 'physical' doesn't include speech, etc.)

madhair60

Quote from: Mister Six on February 15, 2011, 11:19:58 PM
You can pause a DVD for 100 hours. You can stop reading a book for 100 hours. Complaining that the story stops when you refuse to engage with it is a ludicrous argument. It certainly has no bearing on the quality of the stories being told, which is the argument you appear to be trying to make.

Storytelling, not storyline.  It's not ludicrous at all.  You can go off and collect coins, or pick up arbitrary laptops of enemy intel, or turn around and leave the front line to bunny hop around, or shoot your AI mates in the face with no ill effect.  If you pause a movie you will come back where it left off.  If you save and quit a game, you'll often come back with full health or something.  Games don't have consistency in their presentation of a story.

Famous Mortimer

I think the debate begins and ends here:

QuoteI've sunk 60 hours into that game and its DLC, and will do again with another character, simply because the story (and multiple sub-stories) were so involving, the characters so well-developed and the universe featured in it so elaborate and intriguing.

I just couldn't do this. Picking a random novel off my shelf – "Cryptonomicon" by Neal Stephenson – it has a story many, many times better, cleverer and more involving than any computer game ever. I just can't see a time when I'd rather play 60 hours of something I wasn't enjoying, than just turn the damn thing off and pick up a book for my fix of compelling stories.

An example from the other side. I adore "Tomb Raider: Legend". I've played it to the point where I've got 1000/1000 Xbox achievement points, and still occasionally pop it in for a time trial run. I appreciate that it has a story, and that story advances the game. But if the game was rubbish, there's no amount of plot that would have made me carry on playing it.

I'll forgive any amount of lazy-ass plotting if the game is fun to play, but it just doesn't work the other way round.

So really, maybe there's just no "answer". The way we play games and the things we get out of them are just different.

Mister Six

I'll reply to SNG's larger post after he's elaborated on Zetec's questions (because I'm not quite sure myself what he intended to say and don't want to argue/agree with something that's only in my head. However:

Quote from: madhair60 on February 16, 2011, 10:00:48 AM
Storytelling, not storyline. 

But you started off saying 'You can enjoy a game's storyline in the same way you can enjoy trash TV'. What exactly is your argument?

QuoteIt's not ludicrous at all.  You can go off and collect coins, or pick up arbitrary laptops of enemy intel, or turn around and leave the front line to bunny hop around, or shoot your AI mates in the face with no ill effect.  If you pause a movie you will come back where it left off.  If you save and quit a game, you'll often come back with full health or something.  Games don't have consistency in their presentation of a story.

Saying that sometimes games do X or Y is a criticism of those games, not of the storytelling powers of the medium itself. Especially when your examples are drawn from FPS games and platformers, two genres that are traditionally not story-heavy at all. And one of them is so vague as to include the qualifiers 'often' and 'something'.

As for bunny-hopping and shooting your friends, well that comes back to engagement with the text. You can rip the piss out of a film as you watch it, MST3K style, or rewind the sex scene for a quick wank - going outside the agreed rules of engagement for the medium doesn't invalidate the medium itself (this argument also ignores games like KGB, The Last Express and the like where things will continue if you leave the machine alone for several hours, to the point of causing you to fail the game).

Still Not George

Quote from: Zetetic on February 16, 2011, 09:27:21 AM
I'm just trying to clarify your point, SNG -
Are you saying that the issue is that:
Games require the storyline to provide the player with fun ('physical') actions?
Games only allow decision-making, or simply plot advancement, by broadly 'physical' actions on the part of the player or else utterly crude mechanisms such as the ME speech wheel?
Both. And by "physical", I don't mean "fun" - I mean the term quasi-literally. The process of games design is centred on physical emulation, even in the simplest of games - Tetris, for example. That emphasis doesn't lend itself to non-physical storytelling, which is to say any degree of inside, if you see what I mean. Someone mentioned Cryptonomicon. The real difference between that book and Mass Effect is not that its storyline is more convoluted; it is, but that's a factor of the specific book we've chosen. The difference is that Mass Effect can only tell us about the motivations, feelings and experiences of the characters within it via second-hand, while Cryptonomicon can come right out and describe the autistic character's confusion while discovering the existence of sex, as an example, or his utter puzzlement at Pearl Harbour.

This is a problem which has been dealt with in film via dialogue, but outside of crude mechanics like the wheel, it's not something that makes for a game which fits the mode that games have sought to accentuate for their entire 30-year history, which is to say an emphasis on physical emulation. So games are permanently missing emotional and experiential elements (as well as cues, but that's a technological limitation, not one inherent to the medium). Without a way to bypass that problem games will never reach any kind of heights of storytelling, and as such it wouldn't matter if they had the best storyline ever - it won't be communicated well.

(Incidentally, if you want a solid example of what madhair's talking about with his "brick wall" analogy, consider FFVII. It's quite possible to perform over a dozen sidequests and wander around fighting monsters AFTER Meteor, the world-ending threat, appears in the sky. How the hell does that even make sense? Because the storyline is considered secondary to the physical gamist elements of the game. And yet that game is considered a landmark in game storytelling.)

Mister Six

#22
Quote from: Still Not George on February 16, 2011, 11:13:39 AMThis is a problem which has been dealt with in film via dialogue, but outside of crude mechanics like the wheel, it's not something that makes for a game which fits the mode that games have sought to accentuate for their entire 30-year history, which is to say an emphasis on physical emulation. So games are permanently missing emotional and experiential elements (as well as cues, but that's a technological limitation, not one inherent to the medium).

That sort of thing isn't impossible to put into games, though. Look at, say, Fahrenheit, which has a sequence in which one of the protagonists has to go down into a basement and dig out a file. This wouldn't be a problem, except that the character suffers from claustrophobia and the player must regular her breathing by clicking mouse buttons rhythmically while still walking around the basement and interacting with objects. It simulates her own conscious effort to maintain her heart rate and in doing so replicates in the player her extraordinary levels of concentration and tension.

And there's no reason why you couldn't replicate to some extent an autistic person's outlook on life, especially in a first person RPG, by - say - having all the characters have unreadable, blank faces or having all dialogue sound exactly neutral (even replacing incomprehensible words like 'love' or 'happy' with white noise), or by restricting interactive objects to things that the autistic character would be interested in/capable of interacting with.

Or how's about telling the same story through the eyes of several different characters, but using exaggerated, stylised models to replicate their perception of the world? One person might see someone as a glowering, misanthropic bastard (with line delivery to suit, and eyes framed by dark rings and a furrowed brow) while another might see him as a melancholy soul, with a grey pallor and wistful speech.

Obviously there are questions about mass appeal and the cost of implementing several different models/voice files of the same character, but this is all hypothetical for now isn't it?

And there's always the likes of Silent Hill 2, in which the monsters are all externalisations of the protagonist's
Spoiler alert
guilt at murdering his wife/
[close]

Quote(Incidentally, if you want a solid example of what madhair's talking about with his "brick wall" analogy, consider FFVII. It's quite possible to perform over a dozen sidequests and wander around fighting monsters AFTER Meteor, the world-ending threat, appears in the sky. How the hell does that even make sense? Because the storyline is considered secondary to the physical gamist elements of the game. And yet that game is considered a landmark in game storytelling.)

That's a case of implementation rather than an inherent problem with the medium though. There's no reason why they couldn't have forced the player to tackle Sephiroth once the meteor appeared in the sky, or forced a time limit on them, or limited them to three subquests before the meteor hits. And he was still conflating the idea of storytelling with the quality of storylines (the remark about trash TV).

I actually have to go to Belgium for three days or so, but I look forward to continuing all this conversation when I get back.

HappyTree

I would say that games are a mixture of story-telling and wish-fulfilment. I would wish in my life that I could put threats on pause and go of on a series of fun or even grinding side quests until I'm ready to deal with it. So I get a unique hybrid of a narrative that I enjoy, interaction to engage me and a way to set the pace to my own choosing.

I actually don't like time-dependent challenges in games, they make me feel stressed out. I don't want to have the same feeling of panic I get with real life deadlines, being forced to do things when I don't feel like it or having a ticking clock. I want to experience a more pleasant world that I can explore, have fun in, relax, take my time, muck about, engage with an interesting and exciting escapist story and make choices I couldn't make otherwise.

So books, films and games each have different characteristics and levels of engagement. I happen to like the way games restructure this process of narration. I could steam on and complete the story in record time if I wanted, and quite a few gamers do this. I don't enjoy that, I want to wander because it's a wish-fulfilment of making my real life stretch out and be less time-dependent.

Zetetic

#24
Quote from: Still Not George on February 16, 2011, 11:13:39 AM
Both. And by "physical", I don't mean "fun" - I mean the term quasi-literally. The process of games design is centred on physical emulation, even in the simplest of games - Tetris, for example.
Ok. That is a very good point, and I suspect that you're right that it's the heart of the problems that there are.

QuoteThe difference is that Mass Effect can only tell us about the motivations, feelings and experiences of the characters within it via second-hand, while Cryptonomicon can come right out and describe the autistic character's confusion while discovering the existence of sex, as an example, or his utter puzzlement at Pearl Harbour.
It's interesting that you think that Cryptonomicon is effective or good in 'coming right out and describing' (using sentences and the like). Not that you're wrong, but it's worth noting that it's far from the only approach.

QuoteThis is a problem which has been dealt with in film via dialogue
I'm not sure that's how most film's deal with it. I'd imagine most films that rely on dialogue to express such things aren't very good films, certainly aren't the best films. Even if we take plays, I'm not sure that this is true.

(Well, simply it's not, the soliloquy being the most simple counterexample, but one that obviously plays into your argument that the film or play is suffering relative to the novel or somesuch. But I'm more trying to bring out the fact that there are plenty of ways of communicating character's experiences rather than simply having them say it to another character. Silent film (whilst not dialogue-free by any means) found plenty of ways to communicate motive, feeling and experience without literal dialogue, or indeed dialogue at all.

German Expressionism's a nice era to pick on here, before sound comes along and the subsequent. depressing tendency towards pseudo-realism, and yes, having characters tell each other how they feel (which, of course, is rarely realistic in itself).)

(Indeed, while I think I believe in the communicability of any human experience, I'm fairly sure that lots of experiences can't be communicated by talking, or indeed by words. )

To return to the Cryptonomicon example, wouldn't there be plenty of ways in a film or play of simply showing the character's confusion in his actions, rather than in any attempt to capture his mental state in verbal description? Does this make the film less capable than the novel? I'd be far more sure of saying that it makes it capable of quite different things, in the same way that you can't capture a piece of music in a poem, nor a poem in a piece of music.

However, I think that you're quite right that, far the most part, games, because of their insistence on 'physical emulation' (and the very limited spectrum of actions offered as part of that emulation) as you put it and pseudo-realism in the cases of those where they've wanted to tell a story have very, very limited capabilities. I think that the comparison with film is much more apt than novel's here - games with stories have largely been games with movies spattered upon them. As SNG points out - this disconnect between story and game sucks.

I think Mister Six is very much on the ball that, at the very least, games have capabilities beyond other media - whilst they may well be largely stuck with 'physical emulation' of some kind, the possibility of making that 'physical emulation' symbolic rather than literal opens such vast realms of possible communication. Edit: Despite this claim, I suppose it really does remain open whether it's suitable for communicating a story, just as perhaps some might argue that music alone isn't capable of doing so. Bugger. I suppose my intuition is that it should be able to. I find it interesting to note that many people here don't seem to be saying that ME's somehow failing to communicate effectively its many stories, but simply that it's primary story arc was, well, a bit underwhelming.

Not that it's easy of course - this reminds me of a discussion, here and/or elsewhere, I had on the difficulties crafting a game that conveyed depression entirely via its mechanics but that anyone might actually want to play, for example. (N.B. I'm increasingly convinced that Far Cry 2 is a learned helplessness simulator, punctuated (alas), by a storyline that fits this theory.)

Zetetic

Quote from: HappyTree on February 16, 2011, 11:38:55 AM
I actually don't like time-dependent challenges in games, they make me feel stressed out.
Which might, of course, be the point. But of course this raises one of the wider problems...

HappyTree

Yes, doing something to a timer can be fun in a challenging way, if one likes to feel challenged like that. I don't. I bought Katamari so I could have fun tooling around picking stuff up and just experiencing the surreal world of the game but when I played it I found everything was set to a timer. Consequently I have only played it about 3 times. How can I have fun experiencing the joy of mindlessly rolling around a virtual world when I have to do it as quickly as possible? Lots of people derive pleasure from this kind of challenge, I'm just not one of them. So my kind of game is an adventure with a story that allows me to slow it down and savour everything.

glitch


HappyTree

Other kinds of challenge are fine, I just don't like timed ones. YMMV :)

Claude the Racecar Driving Rockstar Super Sleuth

#29
Makes sense to me. It's not so different to just driving around aimlessly in GTA, and who doesn't enjoy that from time to time?