storytelling, plots, and narratives + videogames

I think a lot of “gamers” like the illusion of branching narratives and agency over the outcome, but most games that do this have like, what, three endings, with essentially cosmetic differences, and one of them is always the “real” ending. So guess what, you still played a linear game with a bunch of cutscenes. The climax probably consisted of a battle with the big bad.

The interest in compelling, memorable and twisty stories is also a trend that comes and goes, I think. Does anyone find the various narratives of the Dragon Quest series particularly memorable? I highly doubt it. Does almost everyone fondly remember the hours and hours they spent playing them? Yes.

Narratives in games basically have to be about discovery, survival and conquest, or dogged detective work, because there can only really be one satisfying set of choices for you, the protagonist, to make.

Games where the prime movers are NPCs, like some MMORPGs, can do interesting things like have the queen of the horde go off her shit and kill the world tree or whatever, but this is mostly window dressing.

I think the Witcher II had an instance where a decision in Act I meant you got one of two completely different Act IIs. The reviews were mostly 'Huh'.

Adventure games can get around this via a wealth of non-essential 'colour' - you can speed-run your way through Grim Fandango fairly quickly, but stopping to talk to everyone paints in the details.

I don't know that anyone's explicitly mentioned it, but the other end of the spectrum are roguelikes, where you can get a unique story, but very little of it is provided by the game creators.

the other end of the spectrum are roguelikes, where you can get a unique story, but very little of it is provided by the game creator

yeah, i keep thinking of something along those lines, which is the conceptual idea of a gameworld that is so complex and elaborately modeled that the player could pretty much do anything they wanted to and the environment and other characters would react accordingly. by itself that would just be a simulation, albeit an incredibly lifelike one. what would make it a game would be imposing a set of rules upon it.

the name of this concept is...the matrix 4: third life, presented by baudrilliard

procedurally generated "narrative" is just asking the player to find different ways to solve a problem - see also open-world games where you have the option to do things in a slightly different order and with different tools - but the story is often the same. You can do tons of different stuff in a game like Rimworld or Dwarf Fortress, for example, but the arc is still "try and keep these idiots from dying for as long as possible" i.e. everything is Galaga.

i don't do well with plot-given games, mostly because, well, the plots tend not to be very good, but also because even when the plot is good i can't bridge the gap between "playing" and "watching" very well (don't get me started on those fucking quick time events, damn you shenmue).

the thing i liked best about games was _exploring_. i love "walking simulators". i was always too stupid to solve most of the puzzles in zork, so i reached a point where i was just wandering around aimlessly. plus i think puzzles in most games are artificial and stupid. i don't want to take your stupid mensa entrance exam, thanks. if there's a plot, i'd like to see it done the way something like gone home is done - no real "puzzles" of any difficulty, you walk around and find stuff out. (also, that game has a good plot.)

boy i sure used the word "stupid" a lot in that last post.

oh and by the way my pick for "attack of the clones" edits is a fake super-8 fan edit cut down to two reels, it's utterly absurd and trashy and a lot of fun to watch.

I'm not a fan of mostly-on-rails storyline quests tbh (eg Uncharted, Tomb Raider, Horizon Zero Dawn). I mean they do them well, and I admire the acting and writing that goes into those things but I dunno, I might as well watch a movie?

(that said, the last cutscene in the most recent Uncharted was gorgeous and I was all I WANT TO GO THERE about that beach house... damn.)

I want to be in a world, not observe it. Elder Scrolls has massive back stories and dishes them up in the form of NPCs andbooks all over the place and you dont even *have* to know it all but can if you want, and I much rather that. Ditto BOTW, though the "storyline" in that is delivered a bit limply thanks to poor voice acting!

yeah, the voice acting for Zelda (the character) was incredibly bad. investigative reporting will reveal that they compiled a list of ten thousand possible voice actors, ranked them by ability, and then accidentally sorted in reverse order before selecting the final candidate. holy shit, literally i could do better than that, while running and ironing at the same time, somehow.

nintendo sometimes likes to dip into some pool of unknown british VAs instead of the normal anime dub circuit (see also xenoblade games)

well it makes sense for xenoblade because that was originally dubbed for the british market! the breath of the wild dub was really bad and i button-mashed to skip those terrible cut-scenes as soon as possible. at least it graciously let me do that. games that don't let you skip the cut scenes are terrible.

BotW vo was fine

silby you know i've always got your back, except i don't on this one, sorry. actually i thought all of the voiceovers in BotW were fine...except for Zelda

Zelda’s character in BotW was interesting enough that her vo (which I feel was more badly directed than bad) didn’t really cause me any great anguish. Ergo it was fine.

Anyway BotW is a great (perhaps the best available?) example of storyfulness in an action RPG. The story of the gameplay is…whatever you do in pursuit of your primary goal, with various random characters and sidequests having their own small stories you get to be part of. The cinematic story in BotW is the backstory, a fait accompli you can do nothing to alter, and it’s more moving in its way imo by working that way. You don’t play to “advance the plot”, as far as story goes you play to (1) enact the story of your adventure (you know this plot as a foregone conclusion of playing a Zelda game. This is fine.) and (2) encounter/at times contribute to other people’s stories. Even though link is in a sense the most important person on earth during BotW, plenty of people don’t know that, and are just trying to flirt with you, or find their chickens, or look at some flowers.

agreed, silby

TBF yeah the actual back story in botw was quite moving I thought, but... as the 10 year old in the house said after watching all the memory cutscenes in a row "geez... I'd just let ganon kill Zelda, she's a bit whiney".

Games that don't let you skip the cut scenes the second time you see them are terrible. The first time, eat your fucking greens, people worked hard to make that.

the thing i liked best about games was _exploring_.

I'm not a fan of mostly-on-rails storyline quests tbh (eg Uncharted, Tomb Raider, Horizon Zero Dawn). I mean they do them well, and I admire the acting and writing that goes into those things but I dunno, I might as well watch a movie?... I want to be in a world, not observe it.

the thing that repels me about cutscenes is that they are violations. including them immediately creates a schism: there are the parts of the game where you are playing a game and the parts of the game where you are watching a movie. it is a full medium switch. this is a extremely peculiar habit for the nonexperimental practitioners of an artform to get into. (obv there are plenty of postmodern effects you can produce via a melange like this, but this is usually not what video games are trying to do. kojima aside.) yet even when technical ways are found around the actual switch-- games following the HALF-LIFE model, where "cutscenes" are scripted in-engine events that do not interrupt player control but are placed diagetically beyond player agency (bulletproof glass, paralytic serum, powerful hypnosis etc.)-- the fundamental act of restraining the player from affecting the narrative is still corrosive to your sense of actual presence. modern "cinematic" AAA games (i have not played THE LAST OF US but found two UNCHARTEDs numbing and pointless) seal the narrative off from the player completely while simultaneously centering it to the point where it takes up most of the time you spend looking at the screen. imo this is degenerate: it makes the medium less like itself.

the craft of game writing ought to be the craft of intertwining a designed narrative ("the story") w a procedural one ("the gameplay") in a way that is interesting. the friction between inevitability and possibility should be made aesthetic. the easiest way to do this is to cheat by turning the player's very lack of agency into your story's subject, as in the first BIOSHOCK game-- to explain why the whole narrative is behind bulletproof glass. the harder way is to do the same thing with the player's limited agency-- to provide them w narrative choice, but choice restrained in a way that is dramatically convincing and thematically relevant. this is difficult, but it is to be eagerly pursued imo because the experience of being simultaneously free and unfree is of course the experience of life and history. the exploration trayce describes in elder scrolls games can be extended into the narrative field: you can explore the permutations of a story, feel out its boundaries, the same way you do a castle or continent. (ES games themselves don't really do this-- MORROWIND comes closest-- tho imo the matrix of potential political positions for your avatar in SKYRIM has somehow wound up underrated.)

many of the games that explore the freedom/constraint tension w any success have been CRPGs-- PLANESCAPE: TORMENT for instance is wholly about the player/avatar's restricted agency and what kind of identities it allows for them; it's a deliberate game-length "character generator". FALLOUT: NEW VEGAS is a sandbox for the creation of experiences that will give your character complicated motivation to behave ideologically in one way or another. both CRPG designers and gamers tend to imagine that allowing such character exploration requires intricately constructed choice-and-consequence systems-- narratives structured as flowcharts-- and while there have been limited successes of this kind (the story in THE WITCHER 2, mentioned upthread, is dense, political, and branchy) the problem with it is that the more responsive the narrative, the more conspicuous its ultimate unresponsiveness.

but there are other ways. [cut out a long graf praising DEUS EX.] in particular i think strategy games (including plotty roguelikes) are capable of unique and game-native approaches to narrative. obv in some basic sense any game of chess has "a story" (often an intense+gripping one!) but using such a story as the procedural half of a scripted-procedural hybrid can produce v interesting results: in ALPHA CENTAURI the generated drama of your struggle with the other leaders is wrapped around a terse hard-sf storyline any given playthru may or may not actually “finish”; peak tactical games like JAGGED ALLIANCE 2 use a vividly written set of characters to intensify the unwritten drama of who gets shot when. i am interested in the potential of these kinds of narrative erector sets, which lend themselves, imo, to engagement w history and politics.

I've never experienced, or even sought, a sense of actual presence* - what sort of games would you be talking about there?

*or in the game

(if I was feeling a bit more impish: "Oh yeah no, I do hear some good stuff about VR these days")

I really thought the point of plot in a videogame was just to provide some explanation for whatever cool stuff the devs had created for me to walk and jump around and shoot or punch or squish while collecting other cool stuff that allows me to shoot or squish more cool stuff. bring on the nazi robot space dinosaurs and give me a rocket launcher. if I want to be a grown up I will read Russian novels.

Games that don't let you skip the cut scenes the second time you see them are terrible. The first time, eat your fucking greens, people worked hard to make that.

― Andrew Farrell

there are children in africa who don't get to watch any cut scenes at all

I really thought the point of plot in a videogame was just to provide some explanation for whatever cool stuff the devs had created for me to walk and jump around and shoot or punch or squish while collecting other cool stuff that allows me to shoot or squish more cool stuff. bring on the nazi robot space dinosaurs and give me a rocket launcher. if I want to be a grown up I will read Russian novels.

― thomasintrouble

nah man i'll be a grown-up, sure. "katamari damacy" has a surprisingly poignant plot that i can and do skip every time i just want to roll shit up.

games for me are based around the illusion of agency. it is ultimately an illusion because i'm just going around whacking buttons or keys, but a good game makes me feel like i can do something cool. that can be puzzle solving - i actually do like a lot of the physics puzzle shrines in breath of the wild - but anything after the first act that closes off the narrative without putting one in endgame isn't something i enjoy. so for instance i didn't enjoy the divine beasts as much and actually resorted to walkthroughs for two of them. i also don't like things that artificially slow down the game - the goron escort mission was fairly painful.

"the _____ escort mission was fairly painful" - a truism since at least Goldeneye, surely

Speaking as someone who has a borderline obsessive love of narrative media, I honestly think story might be dead last in the list of things I'm looking for from a videogame. Which may just be because I haven't really encountered a videogame narrative that I've found particularly compelling. I do appreciate worldbuilding, though, as mentioned by Tracye re: Elder Scrolls. I appreciate that people put so much work into that world and that I can dig deeper if I so choose but that the story is largely my own to create (eg that time when I realized long after the fact that I'd actually finished the main campaign in Skyrim because I was more focused on all of the other side stuff I was doing).

Wow I only just saw this thread and there are some massive walls of posts, but to address the original question and to echo the little bits and pieces of the posts I've skimmed, there's definitely a distinct difference between games that pull you into their world, allow you to explore & tell you a story at key moments vs. games that basically are more like faux-choose your own adventure blockbusters where you are moving hot chicks and/or guys with stubble and/or brooding children through various set pieces. I like the former. Nintendo excels at creating this immersive experience where you live in that reality and are rewarded for revealing more of it.

xpost yeah, i buy all that. i have many fond memories of videogame worlds/atmospheres/milieus, and even of certain characters and events, but there are very very few 'stories' i'd look back on or cite as meaningful or explanatory or symbolically potent to me. but maybe i'm judging by the wrong standard: the games with the best "stories" might actually be the ones where you forget the story shortly after it's over, as in a game of civilization say, where there's certainly a vague narrative in my mind when i'm playing, our civilization came from X and we overcame the terrible greek threat shortly after the invention of gunpowder, etc., and that lends the game a lot of its weight and fun factor, without being something i would retell or even remember a week later. here again i think there is an important distinction between games having "story" and games having "a story," where the latter is usually what's getting evaluated if a magazine has a "story" line its rating system.

Not to draw too much attention again to my dorkiest ambitious project, but converting The Legend of Zelda to a 3D experience (and expand on the story) without changing anything about the original layout was a perfect exercise for building a more immersive framework without relying on cinematic tricks. Having those guardrails forces a more creative workaround.

dang, it's wonderful waking up to pile of excellent posts, ty

I like dlh's post a lot but I am distracted by trying to think of what style guide requires ALL CAPS for TITLES OF VIDEOGAMES but leaves chess in lowercase.

I wreck noobs in CHESS

forgot to mention the charming kaleidoscopic narrative of TIDDLYWINKS

The slow build to the final act twist in SMEAR THE QUEER was something to behold.

It seems silly at first, but I actually find the ALL CAPS TITLES a boon to readability in a long-ish post. Anyway, this thread is great. A lot of y'all have ably articulated thoughts that I have shared. I generally find that game narrative works better the less it interrupts gameplay itself--a scene that the player has agency in is always preferable to a cutscene, though I understand the problems that can pose for storytelling.

I don't like the trend of games trying to mimic film. It strikes me as kind of weird and sad and boring that so many people apparently just want games to be interactive movies, when the beauty and strength of games is in their game-ish-ness. For me at least, games are primarily interesting possibility generators. I could go to the mountain, or I could go to the desert. I could kill this zombie, or save my ammo. I could spend my time digging into the lore or world-building of this game, or I can spend my time playing fishing minigames. This doesn't mean that the ideal game is one where the player has the leeway to make every possible decision--that's another mistake. Rather, the space of possibilities, however limited, should feel fertile. Writing is much more game-like than reading (or watching) is.

oooo great way of putting it.

Going back to Skyrim, after having played the game for 8,547 hours using one character, I've since gone back into it with a handful of other characters and tried to approach it in different ways. Currently, I'm trying to play as someone who eschews violence as much as possible and just aspires to make a living as a farmer. Same game, same world, same general rules for how things work, but taking this new approach (vs. the untouchable berserker of my initial character) is altering my entire perspective of the game. Like, how do I reach this peaceable goal in a world where progression is often predicated on violence? Am I any less culpable if I sic a magical familiar on someone rather than bisecting them with a giant sword?

It's boring to talk about Dark Souls now, but I just can't deal with most scripted game narratives anymore. The Souls games let you investigate the world if you want to (piecing things together from talking to NPCs, item descriptions, etc), and even then things are left vague enough for you to fill in the gaps in your imagination. Or you can ignore it entirely (to the point of walking away mid-conversation or killing any npc you run into).

Limbo & Inside work similarly, create a world that's mysterious and evocative and let the player develop an idea of what might be going on.

I am definitely in the minority here in that I prize a good narrative over other game aspects! I hate not knowing where to go, exploration is at best a tedious necessity, etc. -- I just want to feel the momentum of narrative progression.

the fundamental act of restraining the player from affecting the narrative is still corrosive to your sense of actual presence. modern "cinematic" AAA games (i have not played THE LAST OF US but found two UNCHARTEDs numbing and pointless) seal the narrative off from the player completely while simultaneously centering it to the point where it takes up most of the time you spend looking at the screen.

Being a TLOU apologist, I have to disagree! There's an interesting youtube that argues the importance of limiting player agency to underscore certain personality traits in the main character to ideally prompt the user to think about morality.

As for "Why cutscenes I'm basically watching a movie" -- the tension of a good setpiece is (can be?) more intense and protracted than what you can get in a film. A lot of levels in TLOU and also MGS games (I guess stealth games generally?) take a LONG time to get past, which would feel numbing and dull in a cinematic context. But when you're down to your last bit of health or ammo with enemies still hunting you, that's a feeling that you can't replicate with films.

i also dislike the trend of games trying to mimic film though at the same time i love jrpgs, which have more or less the same linear narrative style, just without any cinematic aspirations.

i do much prefer games where story sequences are 'in-engine' rather than doing a hard cut to something with a higher level of detail or production value than what you're actually doing and seeing during gameplay - that's the only thing that really feels like a "violation" to me in the words of dlh. i forgot until it was mentioned here that half life 2 doesn't even have 'cutscenes' definitionally as it never cuts from gameplay, but thinking about it now, it's only a tiny minority of modern games that actually pull that off.

https://i.imgur.com/HItUGWp.png

It strikes me as kind of weird and sad and boring that so many people apparently just want games to be interactive movies

I think this is because gaming became more of an activity for general demographics and not just "gamers", so the best way to reach a broad demo is to give them a safer, successful blockbuster formula as a game.

I disagree with that - dabblers and casuals tend to prefer games without big cinematic story arcs, in addition to not caring about E3 trailers

i don't necessarily want games to be interactive movies, but I am thrilled when they effectively use the visual language of cinema/animation/comic books

agree with tombot on this

To clarify I'm saying they're making games to appeal to broader demos for the same reasons Marvel movies or The Walking Dead do. And when the writers are being more ambitious it'll be more like Breaking Bad or Game of Thrones etc. Nintendo however still prioritizes gameplay innovation as their focus for ambition. Other AAA titles rely on the cinematic to drive excitement and the gameplay supplements that type of escape. It should be the other way around imo

yeah, one of many ways the E3-watcher can't grok the changes in the landscape - candy crush and angry birds and 2048 are so, so, so huge. i don't know the financial facts but surely at some point the cost-benefit of doing AAA epics will collapse? i'm thinking of like, PC adventure games being the big, expensive, flagship titles in the late 80s/early 90s until suddenly they weren't. however i am also in a bubble of city-dwelling 30something bohemians, for whom the archetypal player of a "gamer's game" is like the obnoxious headset-wearing roommate on broad city, who nobody wants to be or even know. i imagine that teenagers and the dorm-room set are just as stoked as ever for the shooter/saga mega-titles.

I like the idea of more non-violent games, but have no interest in the ones that take out gameplay entirely in favor of story (wandering around talking to people, reading things, listening to records). And "gameplay" doesn't have to be action-oriented if there's some sort of engaging puzzle to solve.

there's plenty of good nonviolent genres - puzzle, simulation, sports, racing, but most of these don't attempt any grand narrative since they assume people are there for the gameplay

I think the teenagers and dorm-room set just want to play fortnite. they are also stoked for the new super smash brothers.

if the 20somethings on Twitch are any representative sample, kids these days really aren't into big narratives at all, they prefer esports fodder, battle royales, mmorpgs and procedurally generated stuff.

I've been playing through FF6 recently, and I'd strenuously disagree - though that's probably better in another thread.

i like the cast in 6 and the visuals have aged well because its 2d but the story is not as good as you might remember, it just was the first game to really pull the huge midgame jrpg twist so it's memorable for that

the big, not-in-engine cutscene always fits weirder in RPGs than in other games imho, because it's like, you're always talking to people, witnessing events, interfacing with the "plot" - what makes these five or six scenes so special? especially when there'd be one that felt like kind of an unimportant scene or just showing one awkwardly-rendered wordless car crash or something... you could really the seams both between the gameplay and scene, and between experience that's supposed to be there, and something some other team came and added later.

one thread-relevant thing FF6 has over 7, imho, is that even its most indulgent and, as far as the "story" goes, irrelevant cutscene (the opera) is continuous with the rest of the world and the way its npcs act and talk. it's also a really thin minigame which also counted for novelty back then. and yet fans loved iirc? i want to say it was a popular subject for idk fanfic and fan lauding back then. so people were invested in it, just in *parallel* to the way they were invested in the "story" of terra and the espers and magic/nature being exploited by a technological military state, and redemptions for a whole cast of broken or fallen characters.

I remember there being a TON of that in FFVII though, endless wrought scenes with \[...\] - there’s a flashback that you get the opportunity to save at the start AND end of - the CGI cutscenes that I recall were all “and now for something awesome”.

oh yeah i'm not saying in-engine "acting" went away, just that the addition of non-engine scenes was awesome at the time but kinda distracting and weird also.

FF7 really self-consciously mixed the chibi + "realistic" styles. since this happens in manga a lot I think they just rolled with it

actually i might have found the in-engine scenes more compelling, since they were actually drip-feeding the story through dialogue, while the cutscenes were all silent-movie stuff.

i understand ff 7-10 were influential and popular, but do we need to take them any more seriously, ludically, then we take the work of roberta williams? gaming as spectacle has always been around.

Hah, I think Al Lowe might be a better touchstone.

I take Robert Williams very seriously! The Coles and Al Lowe too.
Also FF7 and onward probably reached like, millions more people around the world than all of Sierra Online's games. You can kinda painfully see their influence, for better or worse, in AAA and indie adventure games alike.

Roberta! pff

The Colonels Bequest is GOAT

a friend of mine was at a game jam recently where the theme was ‘ludonarrative dissonance’ (he made a turn-based platformer)

i have been playing hyper light drifter and the wordlessnessness of it has just been the most massive relief to me

uncharted sucks last of us is ok i guess

shadow of the colossus is another interesting edge case

i have so much to say on this but i should read the whole dang thread first! this shit is literally uhh my job

will say this tho -- line up the scenes in raiders of the lost ark and they align almost exactly with uncharted 2, the most lauded of the series. seriously it doesn't take a lot of work to beat-for-beat align them. (i did this for a research project). the only part that it misses is the denouement, because the game basically goes climax -> 2m cutscene -> credits

you want an edge case? Killer7
(man i love that unholy mess of a game)

has storytelling in mainstream videogames ossified? have the bounds of the acceptable become, uh, delimited? i was at an indie gaming thing in busan and i was surprised that both keita takahashi and swery have games coming out which are like, way indie, way small budget. and those two made some of the biggest narrative successes of previous generations.

also like ... the amount of fucking talking in super mario odyssey (a not very good game)

didn't really finish a thought there: by 'biggest successes' i mean, that succeeded most interestingly in doing narrative in a way that was 'video game-y' and not just borrowing the conventions of the cinematic

in retrospect the fact that the most popular ps2 "launch title" was a dvd of the matrix really set the tone for what's followed

xp those guys are making games on indie budgets because publisher support for mid budget games without service models has eroded significantly this decade

consumer support too, all the deep sales of steam and ps4 games less than a year after release have created a market where people will only pay full price for the fanciest, shiniest, most hyped things, and narrative quality doesn't really factor in to that

How about this: narrative is a way to get players to form emotional attachments to characters, both playable and not.

yeah i'd buy that as a baseline position. connects up with what i was saying here:

when i wanted games with more "story," some of that was standing in for, i want to identify with the character and feel like i'm in the world, feel a sense of drama and tension. i gravitated towards games where the "oh shit" tension and "aha!" payoffs of the challenges and puzzles sort of mapped onto things that the characters would be going through and experiencing, and i called that "story" because the games that had it also tended to have more characters, more dialogue, more revealing-of-the-world-as-you-go-along. as discussed way back on one of the adventure game or Sierra threads, back then a few new pixels appearing when a door opens or you move a rock could be a huge thing in terms of gameplay and breaking through a "stuck" point, and if that coincided with new information about the world, a revelations about the character, a change in your protagonist's status quo, even better.

im not sure it's one of the more effective ways in practice, many of the games that generate a lot of character fandom do that purely through character designs and bits of dialogue without an actual in-game narrative or story mode e.g. fighting games, mobas, overwatch, some mobile gacha games

maybe gacha games aren't the best example since the most popular ones like fate grand order do have insane labyrinthine stories

Playing through the Banner Saga now via the Switch port, this feels like an excellent example of ludonarrative integration. The story bits almost always involve the player directly, and the stakes of all player decisions feel very real & weighty. It is stressful and beautiful.