Are games a good platform for narratives(storytelling)?
I've been playing games since an early age and one thing I've encountered( which I only realized recently) is that most of the games I can remember playing didn't have an ongoing narrative (story) during gameplay.
Obviously there are parts of the game that tell the story bit by bit for example cut-scenes etc. Yet, how many games these days have a running narrative whilst you actually play?
How much of the story do you get back for playing the game, whilst you are playing, engaged in a level?
I think games are a good platform for narratives when the writer has the ability to make whatever is written accessible for the developers.
To take this a bit further, if the concept artist knows how to convey more of the story in his/her designs then the rest of the development team will have little trouble in solving the game-narrative issue.
Thinking about it, this raises another idea:
The player is the receiver of the narrative and gameplay of the game, in his/her mind the game as a whole makes sense. The player pieces the game together as an experience and remembers certain parts of the game for different reasons. What then makes the game playing experience memorable?
I believe it has a lot to do with the story, maybe because I like writing.
The player is part of the story, engaging it, interactively.
There obviously may be many viewpoints on a subject like stated here and that is why I made this post.
Kind regards
Jurgen
Obviously there are parts of the game that tell the story bit by bit for example cut-scenes etc. Yet, how many games these days have a running narrative whilst you actually play?
How much of the story do you get back for playing the game, whilst you are playing, engaged in a level?
I think games are a good platform for narratives when the writer has the ability to make whatever is written accessible for the developers.
To take this a bit further, if the concept artist knows how to convey more of the story in his/her designs then the rest of the development team will have little trouble in solving the game-narrative issue.
Thinking about it, this raises another idea:
The player is the receiver of the narrative and gameplay of the game, in his/her mind the game as a whole makes sense. The player pieces the game together as an experience and remembers certain parts of the game for different reasons. What then makes the game playing experience memorable?
I believe it has a lot to do with the story, maybe because I like writing.
The player is part of the story, engaging it, interactively.
There obviously may be many viewpoints on a subject like stated here and that is why I made this post.
Kind regards
Jurgen
Comments
Also, you'll get a tummy-ache. Or diabetes. Or end up overelaborating on bad cake metaphors for fun.
Abstractly, I pretty much feel that games are a good platform for just about any creative venture, including storytelling. Unfortunately, I think logistics, budgets and complexity are currently barriers that can prevent you from conveying your particular creative ideas successfully in a game. It's much easier to "write" a massive, complicated world than it is to build it. It's much easier to write lore than it is to create the rules within which your living creation interacts with itself. It's much easier to have a person observe your work than it is for them to step inside it and do everything that you didn't expect them to do. But if you get it right? I think you create an experience that mere words, pictures and sounds can't convey.
(As a side note, this post was made based on the thread title. I re-read the OP a good few times, and kept getting frustrated because of things I perceived as contradictions or bits where I couldn't follow the thought process, so I had difficulty understanding the questions and it's totally possible that I haven't even addressed what was asked. :P )
@Gazza_N: I dunno hey. I think a cake is made up of many ingredients, and people might choose different cake based on what kind of tastes they prefer. I think it's smart to pursue "gameplay is king", because it's gameplay that is unique to games; it's the thing that no other medium has, so you might as well focus on making that really strong. But I don't think that's the only path to providing enjoyment to a player, and I really don't like the idea of denigrating things as being glorified e-readers or movies. I feel sad when people say "that was a great story, but it wasn't really much of a game". If I enjoyed the experience, does it really matter whether it was a game or not? The purpose of a cake is to be eaten, and to taste good. If gameplay is to a game what flour is to a cake, does it really matter how much flour you use, or how great the quality of the flour was, if it's still super tasty at the end of the day?
There's a lot of great stuff going on in game narrative. It's just not all happening in AAA games. Have fun playing these, they're great :)
But hey. It's a glorious, rapidly-evolving medium, and soon some prodigy is likely going to come along and redefine the whole thing again. Point is - games are very capable of narrative, but they need to convey it on their terms, with their unique tools.
So fundamentally, yes, mediums have strengths. But we can't really say one thing is "better" than the other without defining what it's "better" at. Games are better at (or indeed has at all) engagement (unless you're talking about Lone Wolf books :P) but they're not (edit - somehow this important word "not" got left out x_x) "bad" at story/narrative.
In short, games should tell stories AS GAMES, because that's what they are. They CAN tell stories through text (visual novels). They CAN tell stories through movies (every FMV or in-engine cutscene ever). However, they are MOST EFFECTIVE at playing to their unique strength, and telling stories through their interactivity and dynamism, or in symbiosis with their interactivity and dynamism. ALLCAPS.
@Elyaradine's right to play fence-sitter, frankly. I don't want to get into the tiresome "wot iz a gaem" debate, but the problem with a medium that crams a bunch of media and engineering disciplines under its umbrella is that everything gets mixed up, and it gets hard to tell where each one starts and ends in terms of narrative significance. :P One thing is for sure, though. I appreciate game narratives most when they play to their strengths as a dynamic, reactive, interactive medium rather than as a linear, passive one. Your mileage may vary. :)
I agree with @Gazza_N as far as: If you are using gameplay to serve narrative (or visuals or audio) then the resulting game might be weaker as a game. But I think using interactivity to tell a story is a perfectly valid path and has produced brilliant experiences in the past.
But to me this is the most boring/uninspiring way to use narrative in games. A more interesting method is environmental storytelling: best example that comes to mind would be Fallout. My recollection of details may be off, but in new vegas, there is one scene where you come across a skeleton slumped over a table. If you look closely, you can see playing cards near the skeleton with two of the same Ace in his had. So this guy was obviously cheating at a poker game and was then executed for it, it may be a small story, but discovering this little tidbit is so much more rewarding than watching a cutscene.
Dark souls uses this to even greater effect (though perhaps without the same nuance), the story is never spelled out in the game world, instead it is left to the player to connect the dots and make their own conclusions. While this perhaps muddies the authors original intent, it has the great added benefit of leaving things for players to discuss (for example, look at this excellent discussion on dark souls 2 lore). Note how the top comment even refers to a type of attack that a boss uses and involves it in a lore discussion - "he ripped his arm off, he must have been REALLY pissed at the player, what implications does this have on the motivations of the boss?".
IMO the best kind of game narrative is one that has no set narrative whatsoever but instead gives the player tools to experience and tell their own story. This is what roguelikes do best, games that come to mind are X-Com, FTL, Desktop Dungeons etc. That's when, after your game, you have to message your friend to tell them about the crazy run you just had, and how that one shitty sniper with 80 still managed to miss 3 shots in a row but my A-team assault came through and saved the day. I guess this doesn't really count as narrative at all, but you are still creating a story that a) sticks with the player and b) encourages them to discuss the game with friends.
Are there actual terms with the different kinds of narrative? How do you design a game that makes for interesting player-inferred stories?
Good story doesn't mean a good narrative, usually good stories are delivered than experienced, like Mass Effect series, Final Fantasy series, where the gameplay is divorced from the story.
Good narrative doesn't mean a good story either - Paper's Please, Journey, even Netrunner, has a good narrative which is driven by the gameplay. But it's hard to tell a story of the same nature/complexity/whatever via gameplay.
"Environmental Storytelling" is a widely accepted term in game writing (as far as I am aware) with quite a specific meaning.
Here's an example of the term being used:
http://www.gdcvault.com/play/1012647/What-Happened-Here-Environmental
So I'm not sure what your post was about. You seemed to agree with @Raithza , but use the terms in a different way such that it looks at first glance like you are disagreeing.
What I think of as story telling is "this is the story, and this is how it played out" - in a verbatim, linear way. I understand storytelling as things like cutscenes, dialogues, set-pieces. They can be good, but they're scripted and are divorced from gameplay.
When I talk about narrative it's the experience of a player forming a story - like Paper's Please isn't strictly this cutscene or that piece of story, but the player feels part of experience through action and choice and then they can tell their own story through the narrative opportunities in the game. Same as Netrunner when the facing off of the Runner and the Corp results in extraordinary and memorable moments acted out through game mechanics and interaction.
Does that make sense?
And thanks, now I know that there's a term for Environmental Storytelling :)
But I hesitate... because I was at the Andrew Walsh workshop and Andrew explicitly said that "story" is one of the most poorly used words in the English language...
And so I'm not sure if I can use the word "story" properly in a way a writer uses the term. It sounded like Andrew would agree with you however.
Here is a 'fundamentals' reading list for anyone interested in this topic. These cover the basics of the theoretical positions. There is much more if you want :P
READ THE JENKINS :D
Bizzochi, J., 2007. Games and narrative: An analytical framework. Loading..., 1(1).
Calleja, G., Narrative Involvement in Digital Games. Available at: http://www.fdg2013.org/program/papers/paper02_calleja.pdf [Accessed August 14, 2013].
Chaouli, M., 2005. How interactive can fiction be? Critical Inquiry, 31(3), pp.599–617.
Jenkins, H., Game design as Narrative Architecture. Available at: http://web.mit.edu/cms/People/henry3/games&narrative.html [Accessed March 10, 2011].
Lindley, E., 2005. Story and narrative structures in computer games. Bushoff, Brunhild. ed. Available at: http://www.few.vu.nl/~eliens/create/local/story/sagasnetLindleyReprint.pdf [Accessed August 14, 2013].
Mateas, M. & Stern, A., 2006. Interaction and narrative. The game design reader: A rules of play anthology, 1, pp.642–669.
Murray, J.H., 1997. Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace First Edition., Free Press.
Ryan, M.-L., 2002. Beyond Myth and Metaphor: Narrative in Digital Media. Poetics Today, 23(4), pp.581–609.
Ryan, M.-L., 2003. On Defining Narrative Media. Image [&] Narrative, (6), pp.1–5.
Simons, J., 2006. Narrative, games, and theory. Game Studies, 7(1).