Week 10 Reading - What Every Game Developer Needs to Know About Story

The quality bar is rising for stories in games.

To approach story in game, it’s vital to look at what has worked in other story forms, and what is unique story in games.

‘Games aren’t movies’ and ‘Movies aren’t plays’.

Moving pictures didn’t take off straight away, it took refinement to grow to the size of the film industry it is today.

They had to learn two things:

1. They are a form of story, not just a new toy.
2. Their particular form of story differs from all previous forms of story, and has other things in common with all forms of story.

Generally speaking, they hadn't discovered what this particular story form was good at. The same goes for games as well.

Common misperceptions:

• Story is dialog.
• Story doesn't matter.

But story is CONFLICT

The idea that story doesn’t matter is mainly with the industry old-timers, which is okay for a small audience of addicted gamers.

Modern games appeal to a much wider audience, some of whom have never tried a game before, so we need games to rise to the level of universal cultural experiences, just like movies have.

A starting place:

If we are to develop games into the fairly advanced story form that movies have become, we need to start by learning everything movies had to learn.

CONFLICT, CONFLICT, CONFLICT!

This has huge implications for how we plan our productions cycles, and how story is best presented in the game.

Conflict is part of the structure, which means it needs to be planned from the beginning of the development process.

How classical stories move:

It’s important for game developers to know about classical story structure because it’s simple, and it works.

This structure has been tested by story tellers of all kinds for thousands of years:

• First, there's a protagonist, a hero.
• His or her world is thrown out of order by an inciting incident. (Look at the sabotaged dope deal in Grand Theft Auto: Vice City for a good example of this.)
• A gap opens up between the hero and an orderly life.
• The hero tries the normal, conservative action to overcome the gap. It fails. The world pushes back too hard.
• The hero then has to take a risk to overcome the obstacles that are pushing back.
• Then there is a reversal. Something new happens, or the hero learns something she didn't know before, and the world is out of whack again. A second gap has opened up.
• The hero has to take a greater risk to overcome the second gap.
• After overcoming the second gap, there is another reversal, opening a third gap.
• The hero has to take the greatest risk of all to overcome this gap and get to that object of desire, which is usually an orderly life.

In a three-act classical story this is what happens, and with more acts than this, you have to add more obstacles. Three is a minimum, and a good goal for a game.

In a comic structure the last gap is overcome, and in a tragic structure one final gap opens up, and stays there. Games are comic by nature, so it’s usually possible to get to the end.

Character and why it matters to games

What a character wears, eats, and drives are all important, but they are characterization: the superficial stuff.

Character means the choices made, and any good story has pressures on hero to bring out these choices.

Rest of cast of character should be designed around protagonist, as they conflict with her to define character.

The game world should be designed to oppose the player at every turn.

Importance of reversals

Once the story arc is decided upon, some game developers work backward to determine individual plot points, much like puzzle designers sometimes start with the solution and work backwards from that point.

My Comments:

I agree with this article in that story is quite often important for games, but I also agree that we certainly haven't refined it enough for this new medium.

 Looking at modern games which are renowned for having a 'great, immersion story', we find ones such as 'Uncharted', which is a very well-made, high-budget game which received awards at VGA (Video Game Awards). Even with this game, however, the designers are merely treating it like a film; you will see a large cut-scene where the protagonist tries to uncover part of the plot line, and then you get thrown into gameplay at a completely different instance. There is not a clear link between the story and the gameplay.

Going to the other end of the spectrum, however, we find unique games such as the 'Half Life' series. In these games, there are absolutely no cutscenes, instead you control as PART of the cut-scenes. You could be walking around randomly and there will be an NPC acting right in front of you, but you still have control over it. My problem with this, however, is that you could be focusing less on the story of the game and more on the surroundings. One of the main characters could be explaining something very important to you, but you're too busy shooting barrels in the corner to notice. What's the point in writing a gripping story if the player won't listen to it?

Finally, a game which I think has a good balance between the two, is 'Heavy Rain'. I feel that this game is actually on the right path to understanding storytelling in games. Heavy Rain is a very story-based game, but it isn't all cutscenes. You will find, after just seconds of playing, that every decision the character makes, is made by you. Though you are eventually drawn towards the end of the game by different objectives, it runs on a branching storyline, where you control all of the micro-actions. These actions could be things such as brushing your teeth, taking a shower, or killing a man. It has an extremely touching and immersive storyline as well, which I think anybody could appreciate.