A great designer works within the constraints of the technology and the budget. It’s too easy to just blame middle management that the “creatives” haven’t created the perfect blend of story and gameplay. Let’s look to ourselves first (yes, I include myself too).

What I was responding to was the suggestion that one of the constraints of storytelling in games is the budget. That you need to choose whether you put your money into the game, or the story. And I’m still not buying that.

If the only way to achieve “story” were to make Square-style multi-million dollar cutscenes, I could see it. But one of my primary arguments is going to be that the way to get storytelling in games is to integrate it from the start, and not treat it as a separate “cinematics team.”

What you describe is noble, for sure. I’m not sure it’s necessary, is all.

Well, I think it’s absolutely necessary to keep videogames from stagnating. So there’s more in the market besides yearly releases of Madden and UT, and games like Gears of War, which are slick and very fun, but ultimately pointless. It’d be as if there were NO movies made other than Die Hard and Pirates of the Caribbean sequels, all because people said, “Why bother making a deeper movie? These make more money, and they’re fun to watch, and they’re the state of the art in visual effects. What’s the problem?”

I’m sure you’re clever enough to parse the sentence, even though I admit it was badly and hastily written. A great designer works within the constraints of the technology and the budget. It’s too easy to just blame middle management that the “creatives” haven’t created the perfect blend of story and gameplay. Let’s look to ourselves first (yes, I include myself too).

What you describe is noble, for sure. I’m not sure it’s necessary, is all.

Let’s be real for a second. This is a bit like saying, “Radio and TV are very close to each other. They’re both broadcast mediums, they both tell stories. Surely the artistic techniques used to create both must be very similar.”

Dude, I said be argumentative, not be high. I hope you’re not trying to say that movies & videogames have no more in common than radio & TV. Are you really trying to say that games have nothing to learn from the past 100+ years of cinematography, lighting, staging, camera placement, use of music, editing, and general cinematic technique?

Just wanted to mention of your comment that how you spend your budget has nothing to do with the final outcome of the product, provided creative ingenuity is applied isn’t really defensible. I think more analysis may be called for on that point.

I’m still trying to parse that sentence. Are you saying that “we didn’t have the budget to have better writing and story” is a defensible position, and not just a lazy middle-management excuse? Because if so, I think a lot more analysis is called for at that point.

Let’s be real for a second. This is a bit like saying, “Radio and TV are very close to each other. They’re both broadcast mediums, they both tell stories. Surely the artistic techniques used to create both must be very similar.”

Just wanted to mention of your comment that how you spend your budget has nothing to do with the final outcome of the product, provided creative ingenuity is applied isn’t really defensible. I think more analysis may be called for on that point.

You wouldn’t have played any of the adventure games if they didn’t have puzzles.
You wouldn’t have played half-life if the shooting wasn’t fun.

There are adventure games that I’d watch as cartoons or movies if they didn’t have puzzles, but that’s not the point. The point is that it doesn’t have to be either/or; in fact the problem is when you put all your effort into one at the expense of the other.

The Imagineering definition of “story” is really loose. It’s difficult to argue with your statements above if you don’t have a more concrete definition.

Which is why I said it was a loose definition of “story”, and I gave a concrete definition towards the top: “It’s not just the narrative, or the premise, but everything that’s not purely the game mechanic: setting, characters, dialogue, narrative, and theme.”

I believe that Half Life not only attempted to, but succeeded at a greater level of integration of story and gameplay. To be sure it’s a great game, with a good story. They did a great job, but if the game sucked no one would care.

Probably. But my point is that if the story sucked no one would care, either. It would’ve just been yet another version of Quake. DOOM and Quake had very weak premises, but they were hits because of their novelty and their gameplay. But you can only iterate on that so many times without bringing anything new to the table.

And I’m not defeatist. At what point in Myst did you stop reading the pages and pages of stories from the books? When do you hit the escape key in a cutscene? When do you select the default answer to get out of an interactive dialog?

If Myst were the pinnacle of storytelling in games, then that would be a good point. But Myst is way off-balance, IMO — fascinating setting and “story,” interrupted by puzzles that are at worst annoying, at best interesting but disconnected from everything else.

For that matter, I’m not saying that the Sam & Max games are the perfect end-goal either; they’re catering to the old-school point-and-click audience, with (what I hope is) really funny dialogue on top.

I’m saying it hasn’t been perfected yet; others are saying it can never be perfected, so don’t bother trying. You hear “Books and movies are better at telling stories.” I want to hear why and come up with my rebuttal. Because even though storytelling in games hasn’t been perfected yet, I’ve already played games with stories that were more engaging than any book I’ve read or movie I’ve seen, specifically because of the interactivity of a game.

And games are dissimilar from movies. Real different.

If you can come up with a reason why movies — apart from the linear narrative — are so fundamentally different from games that we can’t apply what we know from cinema studies to game production, then I’d like to hear it.

But take a game like Indigo Prophecy, where the prime “puzzle” (before it devolved into QTE’s) was figuring out what the heck was going on. The puzzles are actually part of the narrative, and your decisions change how the story unfolds.

Of course I wouldn’t have played a game if it wasn’t good. But that doesn’t mean I won’t play a game that isn’t *fun*. Shadow of the Colossus is a perfect example. I didn’t find it “fun”. Epic, maybe. Troubling? Pensive? Sure. Fun? Not really. I stopped playing it because it was a moral conundrum. I didn’t feel like my actions were justified, and the consequence of the actions I was taking in game was more than I thought it was worth. I put the game away entirely, and haven’t played it since. I believe that was actually *part of the game*, and it was something that couldn’t have been done in any other medium, simply because that decision was driven by the fact that *I* had to choose either to take action I felt was not right, or not.

The point of “story” is that interactive narrative is *not* the same as linear narrative, and comparing the two is quite difficult. It’d be like comparing a movie to a book, and saying that the prose isn’t as good in the movie, and ending it at that. Of course the prose in the movie isn’t as good as it is in the novel. The novel’s sole means of conveying a story is through the prose - with a movie, there are other channels to communicate information to the viewer. With a game, there are still more channels to communicate. Behaviour *matters*. How you present the player with a decision point is part of the story you’re constructing. These aren’t considerations in linear media.

I love reading. I love movies. I love comic books, and music. But I don’t compare the story in something like Rush’s “The Trees” to “Memento” or “Ender’s Game.” I certainly don’t say one is better than the other because Ender’s Game doesn’t have music.

I believe that Half Life not only attempted to, but succeeded at a greater level of integration of story and gameplay. To be sure it’s a great game, with a good story. They did a great job, but if the game sucked no one would care.

And I’m not defeatist. At what point in Myst did you stop reading the pages and pages of stories from the books? When do you hit the escape key in a cutscene? When do you select the default answer to get out of an interactive dialog?

The answer isn’t never. The question is, “WHEN do you tire of sitting passively and start playing?”

And games are dissimilar from movies. Real different.

If I’m ignoring what games can be, I’d like to see a single example of a game where the story took a mediocre game and made it great. In other words, people bought the product for the story and not for what the player does.

Looking for just one.

I can only name one? Cause I was going to say “every adventure game ever made, except for Day of the Tentacle.” I don’t like adventure game puzzles in general, but for years they were all I played. Just because they told stories more interesting than “get the red key.” (DoTT’s puzzles are good on their own).

Or Seppo’s example, Half-Life 2. Except for the gravity gun, it’s a pretty straightforward shooter. It stands out because it tells its story exceptionally well.

The real problem is your insistence on one or the other:

Context is good, environment is good, player empowerment is good, but narrative is by far the least important of the design additions.

For starters, I tried to make it clear in the sea of words up there, that “story” in the sense I’m using it is not the same as “narrative.” The narrative is just part of it; there are ways to tell stories that aren’t just a set sequence of events.

When developers say that story isn’t important (or on the flip side, “we’ll add the puzzles later”), that’s exactly what’s caused the sorry state of games that we have now. It’s been shown over and over again that the only way to make it work is to have the story and the interactivity work together. Too much story, and it’s an interactive movie. Too little story, and it’s a fun but pointless game.

Feel free to add story, but put the budget on what’s really important.

I don’t see how “budget” has anything to do with it. Unless it’s prohibitively expensive to hire game designers who have a broader base of experience than just having played a lot of Quake and thinking that Aliens and/or Lord of the RIngs are “wicked awesome.” It doesn’t take money to decide to go in from the start and say that you’re going to avoid cutting corners and instead make something that holds together as a game and as a meaningful experience. It just takes talent.

But a game where the story IS the game mechanic is wrong-headed. Nobody wants to play someone elses story. Books and movies are better at that.

Nonsense. I want to play someone else’s story. Other people’s stories tell me stuff I don’t already know, or show me stuff I wouldn’t have thought of.

“Books and movies are better at that” doesn’t make sense, either. A novel is a story in its purest form, and it can tell a story with more depth and detail than any other medium. So why would we even bother with movies? Just because we’re too lazy to read? No, because movies can tell stories in ways that novels can’t. There are aspects unique to the medium that can be used to tell the story in a different way.

And it’s the exact same thing with games. Interactivity adds a layer to storytelling that you just simply can’t get in a book or a movie. The only reason Shadow of the Colossus is so significant is because you’re the one making the decisions of the main character.

That’s why most games include story as a skippable element. If you really care about the half-life story, you can dig deeper. If you just want to kill aliens, well, then that’s fine too. Largely, it’s a benefit for designers trying to keep the repetitive game mechanic from becoming dull.

That’s definitely not the case in Half-Life, at least according to Gabe Newell’s et. al. estimation. They’re deliberately attempting to expand on the quality of storytelling in games.

And including it as a skippable element, or saying that it’s only to keep “a repetitive game mechanic from becoming dull” is just lazy, defeatist, and just plain wrong. Players are savvy enough to be able to tell when the story in a game is just filler. If as a designer, you mean your story to be just filler, then you’re better off just not bothering. There are plenty of great games with no story — Guitar Hero, Civilization, Catan, etc.

But to look at all the cases of filler stories (or filler gameplay) and assume that that’s the only way to make a game, is just lazy and unambitious.

I really think a comparison of video games to films is off base. Roger Ebert was wrong, and I don’t think you’ve done your arguments good service by taking it that direction.

No, movies are not games. But they’re not so dissimilar that you can’t learn anything applicable by deconstructing them. Games have so many of the same elements as movies, minus defined narrative, plus interactivity. Designers have failed by trying to make games too much like movies, but it’d be just as big a mistake to assume that because of those failures, there’s nothing left to learn from movies.

Not to be argumentative,

Being argumentative is kind of the whole point. Otherwise I’m just rehashing the same points that have already been covered elsewhere, ad nauseam.