Game 'Narrative'. Let's get this boxed off.
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Yossarian wrote:JonB wrote:
Well maybe you're just not appreciating the way games tell stories then. I dunno. But things like this make perfect sense to me:Yossarian wrote:I wouldn't describe anything I saw in Brothers as something as grand as a story. There was a (massively cliched) setup followed by a game.IanHamlett wrote:Even the controls play a part in telling the story.
As Brooks said earlier, the issue here may well come down to the word 'telling'. Games might be good at letting you discover, explore, create, affect or even feel personal responsibility in stories, but they're fucking awful at telling them.
Are they though? The Skyrim example of 5 things spread across the map, all forming parts of a story that you discover. That's them presenting their story. 'Telling' isn't useful here but whatever the videogame equivalent is, that's what they're doing. -
Why exactly are we still of the opinion that games should tell their stories like films or books? The whole point of the interactivity of gaming should mean that games tell their stories in a way that's unique to the medium. -
JonB wrote:
No, they tell stories. They just do it in a different way.Yossarian wrote:
As Brooks said earlier, the issue here may well come down to the word 'telling'. Games might be good at letting you discover, explore, create, affect or even feel personal responsibility in stories, but they're fucking awful at telling them.JonB wrote:
Well maybe you're just not appreciating the way games tell stories then. I dunno. But things like this make perfect sense to me:Yossarian wrote:I wouldn't describe anything I saw in Brothers as something as grand as a story. There was a (massively cliched) setup followed by a game.IanHamlett wrote:Even the controls play a part in telling the story.
Games aren't very good at telling stories the way films, TV shows, books or whatever tell them. If that's what you mean then fine. But I'd still say they are good at telling stories in their own gamey ways.
This probably all just boils down to semantics, but the fact is that videogames keep trying to tell stories in the way other media does, and they're shit at doing that. I'd argue that it's better not to refer to whatever it is games do as storytelling as that gets too easily confused with things that games are shit at, and it encourages people to continue doing that shittily instead of doing something more appropriate for the medium well. -
I guess the end game would be to make the player feel like they are telling/writing the story.
The devs give you the tools and you forge something unique. -
There was a crappy story in brothers about a dying man and his sons travelling to find the ingredient needed to save him. All bullshit and all told in cut scenes.
The real deal was the younger brother overcoming his fears and weaknesses and that being told by what buttons you press when you want to do shit.
Problem was, the controls were terrible 99% of the time and each puzzle was repeated to stretch the game out to double the length it needed to be."..the pseudo-Left new style.." -
You mean give the player a good/evil bar and make them clock it twice to see the content they paid for? I'll get on it.Liveinadive wrote:I guess the end game would be to make the player feel like they are telling/writing the story.
The devs give you the tools and you forge something unique.
"..the pseudo-Left new style.." -
How does Dungeons and Dragons work?
As in the physical board game?
My understanding is that is like the Lego of games. -
Good God.
Life .... actually not changed at all.
Most of my DnD knowledge comes from the last episode of Freaks and Geeks. -
I think that's just one route. The one I prefer is telling predetermined stories but using gameplay to do it. I'm not all that interested in emergent stories or masses of choice leading to different outcomes.Liveinadive wrote:I guess the end game would be to make the player feel like they are telling/writing the story. The devs give you the tools and you forge something unique. -
Yeah sure, but forging your own story is actually only possible on a very limited level. Tends to be the reason Molyneux games don't live up to their concepts. It'll take huge steps forward in AI before that path really gets going.
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Definitely. Let's not limit ourselves to what Moly can achieve though.
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IanHamlett wrote:I haven't played much of Oddworld : Stranger's Wrath, but did maybe the first hour of it round at a friend's house when it came first came out on Oldbox. Looked like it was trying something interesting with the protagonist being as thick as pigshit.
The protagonist in Stranger isn't thick; he's just focussed on one thing only (early on).
The game has a relatively simplistic story that never interferes with the gameplay, and the only time the two meet, it has fantastic results.
I highly recommend it as an excellent fps/action game hybrid."Sometimes it's better to light a flamethrower than curse the darkness." ― Terry Pratchett -
Just finished a game called The Yawhg. Essentially a hand drawn choose your own adventure where you decide what four different characters will do with their lives in the 6 weeks until The Yawhg arrives and causes biblical devastation. Thing is that no one has any idea The Yawhg is coming so you'l be deciding if the characters go to a ball, help the sick and elderly, bet on arena fights or fight crime in the slums as some examples. Characters's earn or lose stat points depending on what random events are thrown at them depending on your choices which decide several outcomes by the end of the game.
It's short as fuck. Really short. Taken me a little over an hour for three playthroughs and I'm pretty chuffed with it. Compact enjoyable affair made by a very small team that makes you really depressed bigger budgets won't get thrown at this kind of thing. -
I wish more games were short. Fucker is, it costs shitloads to get a game working and relatively little to plonk a few more enemies behind a few more crates."..the pseudo-Left new style.."
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Part of the reason I enjoy iPad gaming so much at the moment is because of the brevity. Except Threes!
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I broke 10k on threes today.
Tbf I'm normally hungover on the tube. -
Can a basically crap game be considered to have a good story? I'm thinking strictly, no, insofar as in this medium the 'telling' amounts to the process of doing and discovering.
(Plot is a distinct component of 'story', should say - plotting quality can be determined by just reading a synopsis.) -
Dragons Lair? -
Ace Combat 4 was a pretty meh game."..the pseudo-Left new style.."
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Spec Ops was flawed and, at best, totally unoriginal."..the pseudo-Left new style.."
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Good enough for me to play to the end. And that's something...
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The narrative's best in gaming when it'a aware it's a game. Braid did this well and there's plenty of other indie stuff that's smart. It's probably better in gaming to talk more about experience and how it makes you feel than straight story.
TLOU excelled at a thing a film or book never could. Spending 16hrs on a journey in the company of a little girl that feels to a certain extent realistic. Yes it jars when you have to apply a medikit, but overall the experience is good and unique to gaming. VR is going to offer something new again that was previously impossible. I was playing this recently (there's a free link) and was thinking about how much better these types of thing are going to be when the goggles are on. -
Spending 16hrs on a journey in the company of a little girl that feels to a certain extent realistic.
Books do this pretty well. In a sense better than a game where assets available for conveying a prescribed sequence are necessarily limited; the human mind's ability to render those same things in a variety of nuanced ways isn't.
Then again, I suppose negotiating that sequence in a virtual space, requiring some degree of skill with operating a machine, is non-trivial and so can feel 'real' in a way that written prose only does when the writer's style is hard-going for whatever reason. -
Is "boxed off" business talk? -
Brooks wrote:
Books do this pretty well. In a sense better than a game where assets available for conveying a prescribed sequence are necessarily limited; the human mind's ability to render those same things in a variety of nuanced ways isn't.Spending 16hrs on a journey in the company of a little girl that feels to a certain extent realistic.
They do, but the experience is very different. Just walking through a deserted town in silence with Ellie watching a pretty sunset can be strangely affecting. -
Like I say, give Glitchhikers a go. It'd make an awful film and even worse book, but as an experience (play it late at night) it's not bad.
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Actually, the dialogue would be fucking awful on its own. In the context of the "thing" it works dreamily well. In VR it'd be better, and we'll see this kind of thing all the time in a couple of years. 15 minute experiences that we'll think about not for the dialogue but because of the oddness.
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