EL405: "Story deserves better treatment than that."
It's as if we are requiring the player to solve a crossword puzzle in order to turn the page to get more of the novel.By and large, people don't play games because of the stories. The stories that wrap the games are usually side dishes for the brain. For one thing, it's damn rare to see a game story written by an actual writer. As a result, they are usually around the high-school level of literary sophistication at best.
... my background is as a writer, so this actually pisses me off. Story deserves better treatment than that. (Raph Koster, A Theory of Fun for Game Design)
I guess I'm an oddball, because I'm one of those people who plays games for the stories.
I'm a huge fan of roleplaying games, especially console RPGs like the Final Fantasy series, the Grandia series, the Star Ocean series, etc. I was surprised by Koster's suggestion that games require players to solve puzzles to "turn the page," because that's actually exactly how I feel when I play one of these types of games. Whenever I run into a difficult section in a roleplaying game--a rare occasion for me now, since I've "chunked" roleplaying games so much (to the point of "grokking," I suppose)--I can't stand to put the controller down, and I get really frustrated because I want to see what happens next in the story, but I have to complete the task to earn that.
I can agree that most game stories are pretty "juvenile," as Koster says, but I have encountered a few exceptions. Final Fantasy X, for instance, has an absolutely incredible story that has a theme, just like any novel. It's a game about a gang of close-knit friends trying to defeat a creature called Sin (ah, irony), a beast that terrorizes the entire planet. However, as the player progresses through the game, he slowly starts to unravel a tapestry of deception that cloaks the game world, one as intricate as any plot from a popular mystery novel.
Still, most games can only dream of achieving that level of depth. It's a shame, too, because games with excellent stories like FFX provide players with most of the benefits of reading a great book and playing a great game at the same time.
Comments
I've been doing a lot of deep reading into the conventions of writing for the science fiction and fantasy genres lately, and the role of rules in such stories is always mentioned as an important concept.
In a novel in which the writer creates his own world, he has the freedom to choose and set rules as he sees fit--but he must also be willing to work within those boundaries as he crafts his story.
I imagine it's much the same for games. A game programmer can create a set of rules for her imaginary world, but must then be willing to abide by those rules while developing the gameplay. For instance, if she creates a world in which there is abnormally high gravity, then she'd better make sure the player has a sense of the presence of that rule by limiting the player's ability to jump and run at high speeds. And the gravity shouldn't just affect the player... It should affect the player's enemies, too. Unless, of course, the programmer comes up with some sort of excuse for why certain characters or enemies aren't affected; maybe a certain type of enemy wears a special device that lessens the intensity of the gravitational force.
These sorts of things can make for some interesting gameplay, but as is the case in any game or story with rules, there must be a sense of balance: the hero of the story might not be as physically strong as the villain, but if not, then the hero should have some other way of dealing with the villain; the player might be vastly outnumbered by enemies in a particular stage, but he'd better have a special skill of some sort or something that gives him a chance to win, anyways.
Posted by: ChrisU | October 19, 2006 10:23 AM
If you're really intersted in the interplay between stories and rules, you should read Juul's Half Real (which was the more scholarly book that was part of the videogamig course I taught last January).
Posted by: Dennis G. Jerz | August 31, 2006 1:02 PM