storytelling, plots, and narratives + videogames

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.

hmmm, it would be interesting to explore "story" in more pick-up-and-play things like racing games. obviously most have a ghostly whisper of my version of "story" in a game of Civilization. "ahh, it's been quite a season for this driver...." but it's not one of the main reasons you're drawn to play again. there are things with more of a "campaign" feel, like upgrading your car with laser guns using the proceeds from the last race - is this "story"?

i'm sure there must even be racing games with cutscenes between levels although it sounds like a terrible idea. branching paths within levels are common - are there racers with branching paths through the game based on how you play? (as, say, starfox 64 does for the rail shooter?) is that more story-like? or do you have to have cutscenes and dialogue going with the branching paths, and conscious player choice of what path you're taking, for it to count?

xp yep, god of war, uncharted, witcher etc are all Dad Games. it's not kids buying these in huge numbers

i don't know the financial facts but surely at some point the cost-benefit of doing AAA epics will collapse?

I've been playing 2016 Doom on the Switch, and while it is barely plot driven, I find the occasional cut scene kind of rewarding, not least as a respite from all the action.

I tried to play MARIO TENNIS: POWER TOUR (this is how we're doing this itt right?) for GBA on emulator recently and that thing is jammed with story. It takes forever to get to a tennis match. I just wanted to play tennis. It seems there was a handful of years after OCARINA OF TIME where story and handholding were the focus. But I think younger demographics were the target there. There's a post-Minecraft push now to take out story and at the very least imply lore instead as world building.

But for dads and bros etc. that distinctly cinematic AAA big budget realism action story game genre is still a popular thing and would be interesting to see fall out of style.

xp AAA games still do fine, the thing that collapsed is mid-budget games that aren't made by small enough indie crews to sell at $20 instead of $50. Nintendo still operates on magic dust here while everyone else is running super thin margins or moved to service games and mobile games

xp the game boy era Mario tennis and golf games are all presented as rpgs with stories like that, i really liked them! but i guess most people had your reaction since they stopped it

I just wasn't expecting it at all! I'm sure it's great though. Came to mind reading DC's post about story applied to otherwise pick up and play game formats.

"respite from the action" is something worth thinking about... how much things that in other media are primarily in service of "story" are here because the player really would be exhausted without them. i suppose you could compare to perfunctory plots in schlocky low-grade action films where the talky stuff is something like filler between the action. in games though these scenes can be both respite and reward. and maybe to fully feel like a reward they need to feel like they're "advancing the story."

Well that's getting into narratology and the eternal tension between narrative (advancing the story, duh) and spectacle (pause/cessation of story advancement).

like even just thinking about DOOM, i turn my mind back to the original DOOM and DOOM II which each had like what, three screens of text at certain key points making clear what's going on ("After fighting through miles of Hell, you've finally reached the...."). and god, I loved getting those screens. Sorta repeating myself re: Ninja Gaiden but their rarity, and the fact that you couldn't just view them at will, made them so special, and then having read them you retrospectively organized the level-beating you'd been doing anyway into some kind of larger narrative. I wonder if those games would be better or worse if you got one of those screens after every level. that might fit the "respite" model a bit better but I wonder if it would enlarge or enfeeble the imagined narrative I was bringing to the game.

Or something like Tekken, where the fighting is both its own goal and the means to unlock the amazing CGI nuggets of story about the characters and what happened afterwards.

I mean, the real elephant in the room here is possibly FFVII, which was a complex game centered largely around materia management iirc, but drew you onwards towards more emotional plot delivered through cutscenes (but only if you ground enough to beat the bosses).

.. is it grinded?

yeah - essentially the skeleton of FF6 i'd argue, but the way heightened dazzle/separateness/rarity of the cutscenes is probably relevant here.

of course - FF7 was definitely THE game for a whole generation that got people into cutscenes (though like you mentioned - FF6 was better on both gameplay and narrative!)

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.