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Friday Rant
By Corvus | February 1, 2008
We had a last minute entry to the January Round Table, so be sure to swing by and welcome Chris of The Artful Gamer to our *hguoc* hallowed halls *hguoc*. February’s topic will be posted this afternoon.
Someone whom I respect said something in a mailing list that I felt compelled to reply to at some length this morning. Here’s the statement that leaped out at me:
Games and game development just aren’t mature enough yet to be the framework underneath a truly complex, deep story.
I figured that many of you seem to enjoy it when I get my rant on, so here’s my reply:
The problem lies, not with the technology or the medium, but with the industry. We’ve rather leaped from watching the train coming toward the screen to full out CGI extravaganzas with shallow plots and two dimensional characters. This is the direct result of the fact that the industry is, by and large, populated by young men who think Star Wars is the pinnacle of storytelling.
There are plenty of examples of games which have come close to telling more complex stories and even more which had the technology in place to do so. But the aesthetic of the designers did not encompass that sort of storytelling, so we continue to run FedEx quests, rescue princesses, fight robots, etc. Now, to further complicate the issue, we have huge publisher who are locked into a mindset which precludes spending quality money on intangibles like “story” and when they do open their wallets in that direction, they hire a name to generate text which is stapled onto an existing game design.
Storytelling is about more than devising a plot. Storytelling is about more than writing compelling dialog. Storytelling is about the characters’ performances. Storytelling is about getting the audiences involved and emotionally invested. And until every member of the videogame studio considers themselves to be a part of the storytelling process, you’re right–we won’t be there.
Imagine if Ultima VII had been set in the inner city. Imagine if Fallout had been set in Darfur. Imagine if Oblivion had 1/10th of Psychonauts character’s expressiveness and visual design. Imagine using the Steam engine to interactively recreate Brecht’s works. The problem with these ideas is that videogames are considered entertainment, not art. It’s not just the critics perception that’s holding us back here either. It’s the publishers and it’s the designers.
I think we are developing a set of videogame conventions. The audience knows that red is life and blue is mana. They aren’t confused by cutscenes and they don’t wonder why an NPC will sometimes disappear when they walk up to a door. Unfortunately what we’re not doing very frequently is to use these conventions as a part of the storytelling process.
Okay, I didn’t mean to go on, sorry. I’m writing a series of posts about Ultima Underworld and I’m in the midst of discussing how the ludic elements of the game were designed to draw you further into the story. We have dramatically backslid in our willingness to experiment since then and the quality of our videogame narratives suffer from it.
And speaking of the UW posts, I might just get one of those posted today too!
Tagged:storytelling, videogames. | 9 Comments »
February 1st, 2008 at 7:49 am
Not just the industry, but also much of the *audience*.
February 1st, 2008 at 8:15 am
Yeah, but I don’t like attacking the audience nearly as much as I do the industry. Plus, the industry chose their target audience. If games were developed to a different standard and marketed to a different audience, then the situation would be markedly different. Not better necessarily, but different.
February 1st, 2008 at 8:56 am
“…who think Star Wars is the pinnacle of storytelling”
Actually, I think the first two Star Wars movies *are* the pinnacle of a particular kind of storytelling – namely space opera. Combining themes and content from some of the best instances of space opera in books (EE Doc Smith’s Lensman series) with the understanding of mythology that came from Campbell really was an impressive narrative achievement. That space opera is very low on the “ladder of prestige” shouldn’t necessarily be a mark against Star Wars, per se.
But, frankly, I’m just fumbling for counterpoint here because of course I largely agree with what you say – the problem is embedded in the industry.
Psu links this back the audience, quite fairly. The industry and the gamer hobbyist audience are locked in a closed circle of self-fulfilment. But any assessment of the games industry must surely recognise that by being so slow to break out beyond the hobbyist core, it has been quite naive – the audience, in this regard, is blameless. Who can blame people for wanting what they want? But we *can* blame companies for artificially narrowing their beliefs as to how the audience is comprised.
Best wishes!
February 1st, 2008 at 9:26 am
Corvus and some other blogs I read are done from the perspective of designers or contributors on games. My blog is done from the perspective of a hobbyist, I just happen to work in technology. So when I talk about game design I am talking about making a game that people like me will want to play. I’m a hobbyist railing at an industry because I have dollars to spend and often find myself with a dearth of quality choices.
In short, I am the audience, or at least part of it.
I don’t demand good storytelling, but I wouldn’t mind better storytelling. I liked Fable’s approach of telling a grown-up fairy tale, it was novel. Unfortunately, the people working on the game simply did not have the storytelling chops to really make it all come together. However, the fact they were willing to try was enough to pull me in.
Every review I read these days focuses on game length and graphics, like these are the only two things that are important. However, a short game with a great story would probably still be hailed as a great game. If I spent $50 on a game I finished in 4 hours but I loved the experience (and may consider doing it again) then I don’t mind the loss of money. What publishers don’t seem to get is that the gap they need to bridge here is on story. Not just plopping in more levels or introducing more bad guys. That takes a game that may have been really great to downright tedious. I sometimes wonder if a lot of the people who proclaim the original Halo as being so great actually bothered to play to the end. Outstanding game, until the grind began.
The audience is already there and we’re starving to death.
February 1st, 2008 at 9:30 am
Sure, SW may be a pinnacle of a certain type of storytelling. Nachos may be the pinnacle of stadium food, but that doesn’t make stadium food a fine cuisine (or necessarily good for you).
If all we’re shooting for with videogames is Star Wars, we’re selling ourselves short. Let’s shoot for Murakami, Dickens, Lem, Bulgakov, Brecht, Butler, Orton, Atwood, Dahl, Carroll, Nabokov, O’Connor, Schulz or Burroughs. Let’s shoot for Jarmusch, Wenders, Cronenberg, Jeunet, Bergman or Taymor. Let’s shoot for Dali, Monet, van Eyck, Bosch or Holzer. Let’s shoot for Moore, DeMatties or Moebius.
Anyway, I’m pleased that you continue to find counterpoints even when we’re mostly in agreement!
February 1st, 2008 at 9:33 am
Jason, I think Fable may have achieved what it set out to do had they been given as long as they needed. Of course, once MS signed them and wanted Fable as an Xbox exclusive, that meant a) hurrying and b) focusing more on ‘teh pretty.’
February 1st, 2008 at 4:08 pm
“Anyway, I’m pleased that you continue to find counterpoints even when we’re mostly in agreement!”
Gets hard, sometimes.
February 1st, 2008 at 6:36 pm
Here Here! I still believe that one of the biggest shames in the entire industry is the self-implosion of Infocom. Infocom had so many of the right ideas, and so much talent, that they could have proven that games are art decades ago. Infocom thought their games, in many cases, were very much literature and belonged just as much in a bookstore as a software store, and that the games should be collected in Libraries for people to play and experience years down the road…
I certainly don’t think there is a question of maturity or technology for why we don’t see more storytelling in games… If it is, how can we account for how much “maturity” has already been lost to market forces and bad business decisions?
We need more diversity in interests in gaming. We need more ways to get good money to good talent. We need to recognize story telling as a talent, particularly when we all wear our hats as audience members and consumers.
February 16th, 2008 at 1:07 am
I think the loss of Infocom, the loss of Origin, and Sierra’s decision to fetishize the puzzle-adventure genre.
I’ve recently been studying the Ultima games and I’m struck by this observation: Between 1980 and 1992 we went from ULTIMA I to ULTIMA VII. And, yes, there was a huge shift in technology between those games. But there was an equally large growth in the storytelling that Garriott was doing.
That’s a gap of 12 years. It’s been 16 years since ULTIMA VII and, in that time, we have failed miserably at what Origin once promised: “We Create Worlds”. We have failed even worse when it comes to telling stories: The stories we’re telling now are not nearly as complex or as interactive as the story that ULTIMA VII told.
And the sad thing, for me, is how needless this is.
Take a look at WORLD OF WARCRAFT, for example. The lore of the Warcraft universe has been developed to a remarkable degree: There’s a rich mythology that has been developed by Blizzard.
But that mythology, by and large, doesn’t make the leap into the game itself. You can go to websites and read the most amazing details… but when you’re in the game, all of that detail is effectively nonexistent.
(Of course, WOW is the source of another rant for me, as well: In the early part of the game there is a rich, evolving plot that runs concurrently though multiple quest lines. And most of those quests still boil down to FedEx runs, but the story being told within that structure is relatively rich… And then, beyond about level 20, that disappears entirely. There are no stories to follow. No mythology to revel in.)