Here’s a question: How non-linear/branching/interactive can a story be and still be a really good story?

My current thinking is that you have to take a step back and re-think what it means to say “story.” From what little I’ve seen of movie/TV production, they use “story” as a catch-all that includes scenario, world-building, dialogue, theme, message, set design, etc. and the actual script is only part of that.

In theory, in a game you could still convey every element of the best story MINUS the narrative. In other words — I’d agree that most of the really wicked awesomely good stories are linear, but the question is how much of their wicked awesomeness DEPENDS on their linearity? How much of it depends on “this stuff happens IN THIS ORDER” and not just “this stuff happens”? I suspect that it’s not that much.

Player-driven story games and designer-driven story games are very different, but I don’t think they’re two completely separate schools, or a major fork in game design that will result in two parallel paths. I think that they’re just coming at the same problem from two polar opposite ends. In the center, you’ve got this ideal and imaginary game that perfectly balances control over the experience (or the narrative) between the designers and the player.

Nothing’s achieved that yet, and it’s going to be YEARS before anyone does. But the two different approaches can help each other — story-based games can learn more about player control from games like The Sims and Civilization. Sandbox games, or games that are all about a central mechanic, can learn more about giving players depth, purpose, and context from games like Grim Fandango and the Final Fantasy games.

It seems to me like MOST of the really wicked awesomely good stories are pretty darn linear, told/written/crafted by a good story teller. I keep hitting my head against that when trying to design “interactive” stories. Do we really want to give the player control over the story (like Willy Wright says), or just make them feel “immersed” and part of the story (and not really give them much control over the plot except for moving it ahead).

And I think a game that let’s players make up their own stories is a very different beast than one that tells a story made up by the game designers. Willy seems to lean heavily towards the prior.

Hanford: Excellent point about story vs. storytelling. I know I always conflate the two when it comes to videogames, because most games I can think of either succeed or fail at both.

It’s hard to think of an example of a great game story marred by bad storytelling. Maybe Grim Fandango? I don’t feel qualified to comment on that one, since I never really played it, because I already knew the answers to all the puzzles. But I did get the sense that it was an awesome story that was shoehorned into an average adventure game.

It may help explain Gears of War, though, which you could say is a lousy story told spectacularly. But is that really storytelling or just presentation? A lot of the cutscenes feel like they’re ripping control away from you at weird moments, and some of them which didn’t take over soon enough (like the one that was supposed to explain the birds that only attack in darkness, which didn’t trigger for me until after I’d already been killed like five times and had to re-watch the setup cutscene each time).

I do think that cutscenes are a crutch, even for adventure games.

I think the cutscene is the least innovative way to convey a story in game. It is the opposite of everything a video game is about. Yes, it gets the point across, and yes it uses a method that is very Hollywood-like, but in the end it’s a non-interactive bit you feel obligated to sit through lest you miss the one line that actually tells you how to solve the next level; paranoid to touch the controller for fear you might abort it.

Prince of Persia: Sands of Time had voice-over narration that happened while you were still free to roam and explore the world, and to me that was a really innovative way to further a story without making me antsy for interaction. It’s story AND game at the same time. They were delivering important context without wrestling control away from me. I’m sure that’s been done in other games, but I thought the execution of it in Sands of Time was genius. What makes it great has nothing to do with the story itself, just that they had hit on a great way to pace out the storytelling without bogging down the gameplay.

And I think this stems from the fact that the only thing that video games has over movies as far as storytelling goes is interactivity. It’s about control and freedom. And the cutscene has none of that. It often isn’t even in the same format at the rest of the game.

Just as early cinema developed new ways of communicating story to the viewer outside of sheer exposition, I think video games need to try harder at integrating storytelling into gameplay without the binary switch of “Now you’re playing/now you’re watching”. I think this is actually *why* the story-in-games debate is as common as it is — because too many developers lean on the least-interactive ways to deliver their story, as if story and game were not to be mixed. I know LucasArts designers of the 90s tossed them around like footballs.

So, the full mea culpa on this is that the very “Meanwhile…” scene in Monkey Island in which Chuck speaks of was the very moment I got hooked on adventure games and where I discovered how engrossing games could be. SCUMM games were all about those moments for me and I think the cutscene works best in Adventure games.

But seriously, folks: I agree with you that it basically comes down to balancing activity with passivity. And that Half-Life 2 was one of the most successful games at it ever made.

I must’ve spent too much time browsing the web while working from home, because I think I crossed some kind of point in Web Acceptance. A while ago, I would’ve said the 99%/1% estimate was being way too generous, that the internets is just a relentless torrent of crap.

But there really is great stuff being done out there by random people who don’t make a big production out of it.

I mean, it’s not like games have to be 100% interactive, all the time. There’s a huge variety in how much games engage people. Some really successful games are quite passive and movie-like, while some games are really heavily interactive.

To me, my *favorite* blend of the two is Half Life 2 - it’s not the most interesting *story*, but the presentation of it is so phenomenal that it’s basically completely unique. The way Valve integrates story and interactivity just blows my mind. But the story itself isn’t very interactive, so there’s room for improvement.

Thing is, I think most people fundamentally are talentless and stupid - that’s the exaggerated version of it. I don’t want to hear most idiots rambling about some pointless bullshit in their user-generated schlock. Give me a talented storyteller who understands interactivity, with good tools and a talented team to back them up. I’ll pay for that. I won’t pay for say, 99% of the garbage on Youtube, even if that remaining 1% is absolute genius.