Good drama, compelling drama, meaningful drama, is made from character relationships.

Corvus. Fantastic post. Just found your blog this morning via Rampant Coyote (Jay).

I agree with all my relationship-driven heart with your statement above.

Listening to some of my favourite authors, it seems they have an organic writing style where the plot is sketched out but the characters themselves, the writing of them, of their experiences, bend and mould the plot accordingly.

Kudos!

That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t or can’t strive for more, of course!

Have a great weekend!

I, of course, go on and on about how games ought to be about character. I often feel that AD&D, with it’s +10 swords of spending and magical mitts of consumerism, is one of the worst things to ever happen to games.

I’m hoping that being repeatedly quoted out of context is going to balance out my rather blatant self-promotion here…

http://gropingtheelephant.wordpress.com/2008/07/28/a-matter-of-character/

That’s a rather high level, quick and dirty, musing on how you could approach such a system, it also goes someway towards merging my comflicting passions of storytelling, game design and AI.

I’ve settled on a path of course work that I hope to start next year and the initial stages are going to involve a lot of CS and advanced math classes. Hopefully I’ll start working on fun prototypes and proof-of-concept gamelets shortly thereafter.

@Chris I don’t know how much money you’d make from selling it, but you could probably make a fortune in speakers fees talking about having done so.

What would *really* prove me wrong would be if I could make my oft-hankered for game adaptation of Pride & Prejudice, and also make money selling it.

I guess what I’m describing is a character-heavy sandbox game where you can actually affect the world around you and its people outside of just blowing things up or doing fetch quests. I think this is an area where games could really tell unique stories–by focusing on making very detailed characters and setting them loose on a world, rather than creating a linear plot to be followed.

I have an example in mind but it’s too long for a blog comment and I want to flesh it out more; maybe this will get me back to writing…

The problem comes in when dull rehashed plots get dressed up in fancy new clothes and their socks don’t match their hair ties. As it were.

I hope you’re wrong about the future of storytelling in video games. Designing from the perspective of a character’s abilities and motivations and moving out into plot from their would make for an excellent game.

This is an even bigger problem for games because the same bias naturally seeps into the audience – and I’m increasingly doubtful that this issue can be resolved by expanding the audience, as it seems that games that hit wide in the mass market move further and further away from stories. (But I’m open to the idea that there is a new opportunity here that has simply not been exploited).

But the issue of whether plot should trump character and vice versa also looks at this from an overly reductive angle. You want to make the claim that plot should derive from character (I think) but when I look at Shakespeare and Dickens etc. what I find is character and plot fitting together neatly (with some exceptions) with no obvious bias for either. (Although both become more interested in character and less in formal plot as their careers progress).

Then you come to the problem of applying this to games, and it all gets trickier, because as a matter of structure, plot is more important to the game design process than character. Note that I don’t say that plot is more important to the *game* than character, because this would be a fallacy.

I think this inevitably creates a push in favour of plot, especially when the people working on the game narrative don’t have much experience in story construction.

Ah, here’s my next meeting. Must fly!

The problem with strict stereotypes is what you see is what you get. They are boring characters because there’s little about them you don’t understand already.

@Krystian:
When it comes to game storytelling you can either look at games and say “This is really like anything before, so we can’t really do anything with it.” Or you say: “This isn’t really like anything before, so we can do anything with it.”

I’m in the latter camp.

Jonathan and I feel exactly the opposite on this topic. Games as storytelling platforms will become nearly limitless precisely because they have that most dynamic and participatory element–the player.

What do I mean by optimal? I’ll try and answer that clearly in tomorrow’s post.

@Alan I’m all for using stereotypes if you can turn them into archetypes by the end of the story. What do I mean by that? I mean you need to breath life into them–make them into living, breathing characters with strong relationships. Then, as a storyteller, you’re doing your job.

I too often enjoy subverting a game’s intended design. How much more exciting will that become when your actions have immediate and direct consequences? When the targets of your inanity say, “Well if you’re going to hit me with a bicycle, I’m not going to tell you where the meeting is being held!”

@Alex You mean you all realize that it’s a means of trying to spark more conversation and make this blog less of a one-way diatribe? Dag-nabbit! And here I thought I was being cagey.

krystian i think you hit the nail on the head. games have the potential to tell different stories in unique ways, not the typical (insert generic framework for story here, i.e. campbell, hollywood, ) story. i’d say games are less limited than other medium. if you want to tell a story like a movie make a metal gear solid-type game, if you want to tell a story like a choose-your-own-adventure make a bioware-type game. ok enough hyphens from me.

corvus i like the post but everybody sees through your using-other-people’s-quotes-as-your-muse routine

As for games, they’re still about smoke and mirrors. I think I’ve finally reached that jaded state where I derive joy from suverting the intended design. Like playing Half-Life 2 while drunk, and accosting NPCs by whacking them with a bicycle during cutscenes. Or playing Thief 2 as a sword-fighting simulation.

Btw, Jonathan Blow said in a recent presentation that the kind of stories games can tell are extremely limited exactly because of this – because there will always be a dynamic factor (aka the Player) that need to be considered. My reaction was that he is right on the one hand but the conclusion would be not that games can’t tell stories really well but that games should tell stories DIFFERENTLY.. or tell different kinds of stories. In the recent book “Space Time Play” there was a great example called “Environmental Storytelling.”

But apart from the game mechanics vs. story issue: what exactly do you mean by “optimal”?

Until such time as player actions, all player actions, are directly interpreted as components of the story… it’s not going to be solved, either.

“…and so we have to get you to the… Gordon? Gordon, why are you jumping on that table? We’re talking about your life, here. Okay, that’s better. You’re going to have to follow the tunnels until… what do you mean, no? Why are you shaking your head? You don’t want to follow the tunnels? Okay, look. Now your just being unreasonable and… okay Gordan you have to go now. Sorry I didn’t get to debrief you. Go out this door or any second the guards will break in and kill us both.”

Though I’ve described the concept in more detail on my own blog I’m not sure that I’m entirely sold on the idea myself.