Story Telling vs Game Playing

I just read an article by David Braben on the Develop Magazine. Kudos to the Magazine to get an industry’s veteran on board. I’m sure Braben has a lot to teach us all.

His first article is called ” What’s the Story?” which is a reference to pitch sessions when you present to your publisher what your game is going to be. In the article he approaches the current state of storytelling in games. I agree with most of what Braben said. But mainly the finishing sentence of the article. “Let’s do our best to avoid having ‘story’ games or ‘gameplay’ games almost as different genres” .

Let me start by adding here a bit of evidence.

Story Telling vs Game Playing

This picture was taken from one of the white walls in the meeting rooms of the Fable development floor, and pretty much sums up my feelings of what the current state of interactive narratives is in; A constant battle between Gameplay and Interactivity. Even in games like the Fable* series that rely heavily on story, as RPGs usually do, there is still this uncertainty about how to sew gameplay and storytelling together. Thus we end up with a patch work of voice overs, in-game “interactive” cutscenes, in-game “non-interactive cutscenes”  and FMVs. It’s an everyday effort to fit all of this together as seamlessly as possible.

Half-life, and specially Half-Life 2, made the whole “interactive cutscene” work very well, though they did have the first person paradigm on their side, which immediately places the player in the “head” of the main character, in this case Gordon Freeman who is undeniably a blank slate. It was a brilliant first stab at a truly interactive narrative albeit linear. But the industry as a whole has evolved very little since then. Fable II tried the “Gordon Freeman” approach with it’s hero, with an added layer of flexibility so the player could “paint” the character the way they wanted, and it certainly added a layer of fun to the process, but the third person does not enjoy of the same immediate identification that first person does, creating a bigger challenge when it comes to trying to create drama; specially because the player has the control of not only the camera, but the protagonist as well.

On Fable II we tried very hard to steer away of non-interactive cutscenes, but there were points where we simply had to trap the player and take his control to be able to convey some important information or a more dramatic piece of the story. We did our best to justify all those moments, but we are still left with an overall feeling that we are trying to trick the player into believing on the interactivity. There is an excellent virtual shackles comic that illustrates somewhat I am talking about, If you haven’t played Fable II and are planning to, you might want to avoid clicking the link below, as it contains a key moment of Fable II’s story: The Power of Cutscenes

The main problem I witness every day is the fact that story design and gameplay design are two processes that are incredibly disconnected, yet intrinsically interdependent. The fact that the game playing and interaction paradigms are not taken into account when the story and dialogue are written leaves us with sometimes unwieldy large sessions of story exposition, where the player has just to sit there and watch. On Fable II the decision to eliminate cutscenes and allow the player to still have control of the character and camera at virtually all times backfired a bit, because although the player had the control, there was little or nothing to do other than sit and listen, which added an extra level of frustration, and a lot of negative reaction even from people from the team, who understandably begged for the return of normal cutscenes. It’s like we waved the key to the ultimate release from cutscenes in front of the player, but never actually handed them.

Personally, the most successful interactive cutscene on Fable II, wasn’t even classed as an important interactive cutscene  and it wasn’t even done by the interactive cutscene team. The scene I’m referring to, *SPOILER ALERT*, happens after the hero is shot down by Lucien and wakes up as a child. The whole section after waking up, and leaving that dream world, plays as a very well executed interactive cutscene, you can barely distinguish gameplay moments from the story. Your sister Rose is always with you, talking with you, hinting at what to do, and once you decide to leave the dream and she screams at you not to, that, to me,  was the single most impactful dramatic sequence of Fable II. Everything connected seamlessly, there was no sitting and waiting for anything to happen in front of you, and all the narrative just happened in consequence of your actions. Genius, and yet, inexpensive.

If we want gameplay and story to go hand in hand, we need to start thinking about them not as separate pieces, but as one single entity. Much the way we accidentally did with that session of Fable II.

*Before anyone asks, I will refrain from talking about anything related to the development of Fable III, as the game isn’t out yet, but I can shed some light with some of the process we had on Fable II.

An interactive story precursor.

I am playing Fahrenheit (or Indigo Prophecy in the USA), which apparently was the most successful commercial attempt to break the linearity of in-game storytelling. I am yet to prove that your actions have real “consequences” in game, or if the feeling of urgency and real decision making is just created by the “constant” tick of the clock sensation. I still am in the first round but something tells me that the sequence, order, content of the scenes is not affected by what you do in game. Elements of theses scenes are, I already noticed that, but the world doesn’t seem as persistent as it is supposed to be.

Failing (Game Over) is a big part of this game, this goes against what I believe would be a rewarding complete story. Having the story to end abruptly when you fail to complete a sequence of action still leaves the story unfinished. In the first scene, if you fail to leave the bathroom in time, you go to jail, and game over is upon you. The character says something like, “This is how my story end, the police found blood on my clothes and I was send to jail for life, boo-hoo”.

In my opinion, this is not a satisfactory complete story. Of course, you could could say that “guy kills another guy, goes to jail, end of story”. It is complete, but its not satisfactory. You want to know why you want to go forward, you want this to be a complete story, not some news headlines.

In this sense, game over should be completely banned from the game. No matter what you do, you will get the whole of your story, no matter where the story leads you.

Maybe, Crawford is right. Maybe a game is a game, end of story, he says and I quote “computer games are about winning, while Interactive Storytelling is about dramatic resolution”.

But I still believe we can use consoles’ hardware to create an “interactive storytelling” and ship it in a disc, and sell it as a game. Fahrenheit is almost there. but not quite.

So I’m on David Cage’s side “Interactivity is still in its infancy. There is still everything to invent”.

So let’s get to work

Interactive Drama

I am not going to be presumptuous, and I am not going to assemble a list of the best films of all times, and I am not going to do this with books as well..

And I’m not the one to say what the magic formula for making a great game is, but I am trying to figure out what would make a game a “classic” in all senses.

I’m going to try to find an answer gathering any information I can from industry, scholars, articles.

Gamasutra is a good place to start. But I will also check with some industry veterans like Tim Schafer, Chris Crawford, Ernest Adams…. I’ll see what they wrote, and maybe I’ll try to get in touch with them if I have further questions.

I was talking to a friend of mine and that made the whole game designing idea a little clearer to me. I like adventures, I loved all the LucasArts adventures, and I like the “action/adventure” genre, however I always thought that most of them lack a more solid storyline, something more serious, more deep, and yet fun to play.

I thought that Tim Schafer was going in the right direction with Grim Fandango but I never saw development on that, and Grim Fandango is still a single plot narrative.

Whenever you put interaction and narrative in the same sentence you make scholars shiver in their chairs. Because those things are supposed to be nearly opposite. There are people that I mentioned before that are trying to come up with a solution for that.

Michael Mateas and Andrew Stern came up with an interactive Drama called “Façade“. It was a bold move in the direction I am trying to go. I still think that there are some problems with “Façade” because it’s a limited set, and the “game” can “end” within a short period if you start swearing at the characters and you kinda can’t avoid that, because they’re both wankers to begin with. And as the characters throw you out of the door you can’t help but linger with the feeling that you have “failed” to accomplish you “mission” whatever that was, and no, you didn’t fail, you just led the story to an ending because of your behaviour.

The big clash here is due to the fact that games have winners, and narratives not necessarily do. But I think that is more than that. A narrative has a certain dynamic, like music with it’s crescendos and diminuendos. It has a climax, and a closure. I think this feeling has to be translated into the “game”.

Mateas tries to encapsulate this in the Façade but there is still a long way to go.

You can check GrandTextAuto for updates on the ideas floating around.