Tip jar

If you like CaB and wish to support it, you can use PayPal or KoFi. Thank you, and I hope you continue to enjoy the site - Neil.

Buy Me a Coffee at ko-fi.com

Support CaB

Recent

Welcome to Cook'd and Bomb'd. Please login or sign up.

March 28, 2024, 09:01:25 PM

Login with username, password and session length

Narrative Driven Games Aren't Games

Started by The Boston Crab, May 25, 2018, 08:13:17 AM

Previous topic - Next topic
Platformers
Shmups

Fighting games
FPS
'character action ganes'
Puzzle games
Musou
Sport game


These are the only games we really have. Everything else is trying to sell televisions or a failure to break into storytelling in any other more respected medium.


Has any game ever told a story in a way that another medium couldn't do better?


Brothers
Dark Souls


That's it.


Any thoughts? I realise I mostly can't bear story games with crowbarred crap simple gameplay, that's what's prompted the thread.


Stuff like The Witcher is a bad game. It feels awful but the characters and stories are great and the world looks nice. Bioshock Infinite, bad game, badly told story, would never get greenlit as a film. God of War, quite boring fighting interspersed with walk and talk. Uncharted, bad all round. Mario RPG stuff, no, thanks. Lore comics for ARMS. Please, no.


I'm saying games are mechanics and environments for me. The rest is chaff.


Any thoughts?

Zetetic

What are "character action" games?

QuoteI realise I mostly can't bear story games with crowbarred crap simple gameplay,
I've come round to interactive-fiction choice-based stuff in the last few years and I hope there's a distinction between that and what you describe there, but it's probably not a completely clear one. But I think they're mostly doing something else other than trying to use 'gameplay' as part of the medium, as I'm not sure that choosing-your-own-adventure is quite the same sort of thing. Which sets them apart from what you like about Dark Souls, I guess.

Interestingly nothing about games that focus more explicitly on systematisation in your list - your strategy games, your civilisation-simulators and so on. I think they tell something in a way that other things can't, but perhaps they don't tell 'a story'.

Zetetic

Hidden Agenda (1985) did something for me that I don't think something non-interactive could, and that felt like it was a mix of genuine 'mechanics' and a branching story. Aptly enough, that's partly due to obfuscation (and that breaks downs a bit after a few playthroughs where you can see more clearly how the cogs turn and how the writer was trying to express what they wanted to express).

garbed_attic

I potentially agree with your title premise, but your actual post suggests that narrative can't be more effectively expressed through an interactive system.

My friend Hamish (who would absolutely agree with you - we've had many arguments in the past about it!) argues that choose-your-own-adventure style games (which is at heart what most adventure games and traditional IF are) are effectively facades of interactivity because the system isn't meaningfully responding to your choices. That is to say, you can work your way through all the possible binary choices presented ("kill dog - go to p.34; pet dog - go to p.21") at which point the work is now revealed as not a game but a static story.

Objectively, yes - however, this doesn't alter the fact that feeling like you have control over your character's destiny, are able to explore your environment, that a story's events are happening to "you", offer a radically different experience to, say, reading a book that doesn't offer those things - even if they're effectively a ruse, trick or simulation of interactivity.

Quote from: Zetetic on May 25, 2018, 08:29:09 AM
What are "character action" games?
I've come round to interactive-fiction choice-based stuff in the last few years and I hope there's a distinction between that and what you describe there, but it's probably not a completely clear one. But I think they're mostly doing something else other than trying to use 'gameplay' as part of the medium, as I'm not sure that choosing-your-own-adventure is quite the same sort of thing. Which sets them apart from what you like about Dark Souls, I guess.

Interestingly nothing about games that focus more explicitly on systematisation in your list - your strategy games, your civilisation-simulators and so on. I think they tell something in a way that other things can't, but perhaps they don't tell 'a story'.

Character action is stuff like Bayonetta. Stupid genre name but it generally means mechanics uber alles.

I'd shove Dark Souls halfway in there and halfway in crap RPG.

Good point about strategy stuff, they're like boardgames. Pure games, I agree.

Shoulders?-Stomach!

Alter Ego is a game that forces you to reflect on your own values and existence, perhaps it doesn't have a linear narrative in that you are living one of a series of possible lives the game allows, but it could not be done in another  medium, I don't think.


Beagle 2

I agree with you BC, although on this point:

Quote from: The Boston Crab on May 25, 2018, 08:13:17 AM
Has any game ever told a story in a way that another medium couldn't do better?

I have to say that I finished The Walking Dead Telltale games and enjoyed every minute, so invested in a huge compendium of Walking Dead comic books, and I didnae like it. It seemed repetitive and badly written and I gave up halfway through. I also lasted about five minutes with the TV show. So in that case, the interactive story was the best way of telling it, for me.

Lemming

You're right but it's a semantics thing - I love adventure games (both the old Sierra ones and the new ones which are basically movies where you sometimes get to intervene, like the Telltale games, Life is Strange etc) and text adventure games and even though I agree they probably shouldn't be called "video games", I don't think the distinction really matters - I don't care if they're classed as videogames or as something else like "interactive fiction", as long as they're good. I also liked Gone Home, the ultimate example of "NOT A GAME", because I think it's an interesting proof-of-concept of something that can only work as a videogame. Walking around the house of your own accord, putting the pieces together yourself and each player finding different snippets of information in different orders as they play is something that can only be done in this medium.

You also left simulation, whatever-the-hell-FTL-is, RPGs, jRPGs, ports of TCGs like Magic: The Gathering, racing games and so on from your list. Taking RPGs, the classic blobbers like Wizardry and Might & Magic are videogames, surely? As are the more recent narrative driven ones - Fallout (1, 2 and New Vegas) could only work as videogames (or the pnp tabletop rpgs they're trying to emulate).

I think the main problem with some of these narrative-driven games currently is - other than that a lot of videogame writers are mega-hacks who are only doing this because they don't even have the skill to write the trashiest of novels -  that developers just aren't brave enough to cast off the trappings of videogames and go all-out into making something that stands alone. Uncharted is the perfect example - interactive movie that gets broken up every five fucking seconds for some janky, badly designed combat, clearly only there because they feel like they have to justify it as a videogame. A lot of RPGs share the same problem - Planescape Torment is an incredible choose-your-own-adventure style thing where the game mechanics really do work with the story through the form of skill checks in dialogue, alternate solutions to quests based on your skills, and so on, but the game is utterly sabotaged by the developers feeling the need to put fucking hundreds of trash mobs in every single map, because this is a videogame and therefore MUST have combat.

New Vegas works as an example too - fantastic quest design, engaging setting, marriage of game mechanics and narrative, insane amounts of player choice, but it's all trapped inside a piece of shit engine inherited from Bethesda and HAS to be a "videogame", which means most of the game is spent awkwardly clipping sideways up hills and unloading 500 shotgun rounds into some dickhead's face because the level scaling has made all raiders into demigods.

Quote from: The Boston Crab on May 25, 2018, 08:13:17 AM
Has any game ever told a story in a way that another medium couldn't do better?

No, but there are a few that could only otherwise be done in tabletop RPG form. Fallout (1, 2, NV), Deus Ex (the first one mainly), Planescape: Torment, adventure games, etc.

While videogame narratives are mostly fucking awful, I think there's an argument to be made that videogames are the best medium for worldbuilding. Take The Elder Scrolls games - every single one of them is a shitty mess mechanics-wise, but people can still spend hundreds of hours walking around the Iliac Bay in Daggerfall, Vvardenfell in Morrowind, or Skyrim in, uh, Skyrim, because the medium of videogames allows the player to really just exist in a fictional world in a way that no other medium does. Granted most of the actual worldbuilding in TES is done through in-game literature rather than actually showing you things or using the game mechanics to show you the setting, but something like Morrowind could still only exist as a videogame.

Lemming

I just remembered Papers, Please which is awesome because it illustrates what I'm talking about - rather than feel the need to try and force the experience awkwardly into an existing genre, the developers set about designing the mechanics to service the story. There's no other medium that forces you to decide whether or not to turn asylum seekers away from a border to die. Other than, again, tabletop rpgs I guess, if you've got a really really weird DM.

bgmnts

I don't really understand the term 'narrative driven' because most games have stories that drive the game forward but whilst I consider them video games I do lament that they strive towards being 'cinematic'. The whole notion that video games should be cinematic or high art or some shit drives me nuts.

That's why you have to love and respect someone like Miyamoto, he knew what video games were and what they could do that other forms of entertainment could not.

The worst thing is, video game creators aren't as good storytellers as novelists or directors or screenwriters so trying to emulate them almost always comes up short and makes it look worse.

I guess maybe video games are more video than game now and that depresses me a tad.

Kelvin

In fairness, I think the genre is broad enough to encompass all number of different types of gaming "experience", from the purity of tetris, via the simple "dragon steals princess" of Mario, and through to high minded walking sims and the more linear cinematic experiences of triple AAA gaming. I don't think there is a "right" way to make games, nor do I think games which tell crap stories should he held up as evidence that games shouldn't try.

Personally, I don't consider story important, beyond a very loose framework, but I do appreciate games with more in-depth stories if the gameplay is still the priority, and where you can skip that story on subsequent playthroughs. I'd much rather the story was conveyed while I played, or in cutscenes I can skip through, over games which keep wrenching control away from you to witness the next setpiece, or worse, games which occasionally make you walk through an area while a character drones on about the plot, and I have no choice but to follow behind them, slowly.

For me, it's less about stories being a bad thing in games, and more about how you tell them, without it being intrusive to the gameplay. I didn't read the text to more than a handful of sidequests in Xenoblade 2, because outside of the main plot, the stories they were telling were almost uniformly terrible. I just skipped the cutscenes, and got on with the game. Whereas, in contrast, the main story cutscenes are among my favourite things in the game, and I wouldn't have enjoyed the experience anywhere near as much without them.         

Zetetic

I think the problem I have with Dark Souls is that I think I can appreciate what it's trying to convey and the skill at which delivers the approach it uses to do this (not that the two are orthogonal, of course) but that really I don't give a shit.

It doesn't say anything of interest to me, not right now anyway and I suppose I do need to separate that out from appraising it as a creative work that affects others.

What is it trying to convey/say? Interested in where you're coming from.

marquis_de_sad

I also dislike games with cinematic pretentious (cutscenes are especially hard to do well) but I'm not sure the distinction is so black and white. Doom, for example — one of the classic 'mechanics and environments' games as you put it, BC — came out of a D&D session. Granted it also came out of that same D&D dungeon master writing a cutting-edge game engine, but I don't see why it needs to be one or the other.



Another example: Resident Evil. Dire character control in the early versions, but the overall game is heavily based on level design. And the atmosphere of those levels would arguably be weaker without the story. In RE you know there was a team who were sent to the mansion and are now MIA and the narrative develops from there. At one point you come across the body of a member of the first team who has evidently been attacked by crows. Later, you find yourself in a long corridor lined with crows. It's tense. You have to press buttons below some paintings in a certain oder. If you get it wrong the crows attack you. The tension and fear just wouldn't be there without the story.

Zetetic

Quote from: The Boston Crab on May 30, 2018, 06:16:36 PM
What is it trying to convey/say? Interested in where you're coming from.
In fairness to the game, I think it's hard to put into words - which gets reduced to stuff about the sense of hopelessness and the ability to transcend that, after a fashion,  which I don't think is quite right (but I'm not terribly motivated to try to correct it).

This ties into your feeling that it's doing something that it could only do as a game - as ever, see that Tarkovsky quote about saying what his films were about. Edit: Well, I thought it was Tarkovsky; about not needing to make the films if you could just say what they meant.

It doesn't appeal to me emotionally, at this point. That always leaves open the possibility that I've not grasped as I should, or at least could.




Increasingly a tangent: Mostly what this reminds me of is trying to convince my partner to read The Golden Notebook. They read the introduction where Lessing says that she's fed up with people being made to read her books at the wrong time - and so hating them for at least a period - which she liked a lot and then decided she didn't want to read the actual book right now.

I experience the gameplay in Dark Souls as a bit like that introduction, somehow, but noting that I don't find Doris Lessing extremely irritating in practice. It's possible that irritation inevitably distracts me from the (intended? ideal?) experience of the game.

Thanks for the reply. I'm still composing my 'What Is Dark Souls?' post and that you engage with it on that level, or rather don't engage with it (!) exemplifies exactly how it's such different things to different people. There will be some who adore it purely on the Monster Hunter mechanical level and others for whom the game is merely in service to its elegant metanarrative of what it is to play a computer game.

I'd say that what it says about transcendence subverts the usual finding hope through overcoming obstacles, which I find very refreshing and truthful. It's got a much more zesty Taoist or Absurdist touch to it for me. It's about transcendence through the act of seeing through hope and despair, and knowing that they're different sides to the same reality, and just getting your hands dirty with the obstacles, anyway. It speaks to me because I see the universe and existence as it's presented in Dark Souls. There's a pretty well known Taoist story which I think is reflected in the whole Age of Dark/Age of Fire thing.

"There was an old farmer who had worked his crops for many years. One day his horse ran away. Upon hearing the news, his neighbors came to visit. "Such bad luck," they said sympathetically. "May be," the farmer replied.

The next morning the horse returned, bringing with it three other wild horses. "How wonderful," the neighbors exclaimed. "May be," replied the old man.

The following day, his son tried to ride one of the untamed horses, was thrown, and broke his leg. The neighbors again came to offer their sympathy on his misfortune. "May be," answered the farmer.

The day after, military officials came to the village to draft young men into the army. Seeing that the son's leg was broken, they passed him by. The neighbors congratulated the farmer on how well things had turned out. "May be," said the farmer."

Space ghost

dude not trying to insult you or anything but its just a fucking video game not a work of art or some shit


Space ghost


bgmnts


Junglist

What Remains of Edith Finch is a masterpiece of a game and I will fight anyone to the death over it.

Mister Six

Quote from: The Boston Crab on May 25, 2018, 08:13:17 AM
These are the only games we really have. Everything else is trying to sell televisions or a failure to break into storytelling in any other more respected medium.

I think it's a bollocks distinction, as meaningless as saying the Cremaster films aren't films because they're not Iron Man (or vice versa). They're doing different things but they still fall under the same umbrella.

I could see maybe those ultra linear "click to progress the story" Flash animation things being arguably just fancy picture books rather than games - but again, is that a distinction that has to be made?

madhair60

Replace "game" with "person" and "shmup" with "aryan" and we can see the true endgame of this line of thinking.

Madhair60, I'm glad someone has finally picked up on Ikaruga's subtext of racial disharmony.

I love Firewatch and Edith Finch and The Unfinished Swan and EGTTR and so on more than the next guy. I actually love those experiences. Call em what you fuckin like. Call em games. They're not, but call them what you like. They're great. Gorgeous environments, music, some superb characterisation, moral grey areas, redemption, hope, heartache. They're singular in approach and they achieve their goal, albeit in a very limited framework. Being primarily concerned with immersion, they have to tell their stories in quite a similar way. Edith Finch is the most interesting, to me, for showing you multiple perspectives. I'd personally like MORE third person story games, where they just cut out the shitty combat and skill trees and crafting gear and all of that utter crap. The Last Of Us is a great little story with engaging characters in a fantastic world. Going back, it's spoiled by the shitty combat and stealth sections, concessions to a norm, to the lowest common denominator.

Quote from: Mister Six on May 31, 2018, 01:57:38 AM
I think it's a bollocks distinction, as meaningless as saying the Cremaster films aren't films because they're not Iron Man (or vice versa). They're doing different things but they still fall under the same umbrella.

I could see maybe those ultra linear "click to progress the story" Flash animation things being arguably just fancy picture books rather than games - but again, is that a distinction that has to be made?

I don't consider superhero films 'cinema', they're adverts. They contribute nothing to the cinematic canon. They're extended children's TV. Believe me, I have no problem with anyone enjoying them and they have their place, in the same way that I find Ramsay's Kitchen Nightmares very entertaining but they're dreck, the flagging participants of a desperate race to the bottom. They're Billy Bear sausage slices.

In terms of gaming, I feel that some of the major players, and Sony in particular, have taken a massive step backwards towards Dragon's Lair. Dazzle the shit munchers and gaming dads with production values over agency. I'm bored senseless of walking for five minutes, listening to dull drip-fed exposition, clicking to pick up some tat and then entering another round of simplistic combat, before unlocking a 2% crafting speed perk, and then being asked to give a shit about the character because SOMEONE DIED.

Strip out the cinematic pretension and emphasise the mechanics and we've got a deal. Strip out the shit mechanics and go full narrative, I'm right with you.

The Last of Us would be better without the combat.
Bioshock Infinite would be better without the combat.
Assassin's Creed Origins would be better without the story and combat.
Witcher 3 would be better without the combat.
Tomb Raider would be better without the story and combat.
God of War would be better without the story.

It's a theory.

madhair60

Is this just another "only Mario counts" thread?

I've always leaned towards "the simpler the better" with videogames. Nintendo tend to cater for that very well. Increasingly I'm disinterested in AAA for many of the reasons you describe, though mainly what Stuart Campbell used to refer to as The PFB Factor. I was hugely excited for God of War and when I got it I stopped playing very quickly indeed. I didn't think it was bad - I liked it a lot - but I knew every time I booted it I'd be wondering how much actual "game" I'd be getting. My "installed games" list of PS4 is nearly all throwbacks now - Sega Mega Drive Classics, Mega Man Legacy Collection 1 and 2, Rez Infinite, etc. Games I can throw on and be playing in seconds.

It's another 'I got ripped off by God of War' thread.

madhair60

Edited above post to make it less shite.

Zetetic

#27
Quote
The Last of Us would be better without the combat.
Witcher 3 would be better without the combat.

I do think each of these reflect a certain cowardice in their gameplay, but that it wouldn't have taken much to have significantly improved on the integration with how the player was meant to feel about themselves and the world. (Edit: And not just resolving the dissonance so that you're just not doing harm, but having the two more properly support each other.)

(TLoU needs a massive reduction in human-on-human combat and fiddling about with lethality. Witcher 3 needs the levelling of the world reworking, and mostly in a very straightforward way.)

I'm not the person to sell you on it, but there's plenty of interactive fiction out there by people who don't tend to make these mistakes (even if they make others, and are constrained in different ways) and don't have the incentives to do so. The use of mechanics and choice are varied.

Edit: There's probably something to be written about recent role-playing games like Tyranny and the new Torment and how successfully they are at integrating different aspects of gameplay and story. And Bethesda vacating that space with their own (shooting-things-orientated) idea of what 'living another life' entails.

I think the Witcher 3 combat is absolutely awful, I'd even prefer it as a turn-based throwback probably. Wouldn't fit with the rest of the game but it's so bad as it is now, as well as the basic movement controls, that the game is a chore.

I'm not really into pure RPGs or PC gaming but I do appreciate the suggestions.

bgmnts

Quote from: The Boston Crab on June 01, 2018, 08:25:00 AM
I think the Witcher 3 combat is absolutely awful, I'd even prefer it as a turn-based throwback probably. Wouldn't fit with the rest of the game but it's so bad as it is now, as well as the basic movement controls, that the game is a chore.

I'm not really into pure RPGs or PC gaming but I do appreciate the suggestions.

Its Dark Souls though.

Roll, hit, roll, hit, roll, hit. Ad infinitum.